It stopped me having to think. I leant down and rubbed the sweatshirt wrapped round my now very painful leg.
'Oh, why's that?'
It's one of the most important stretches of rain forest still left in the Americas. If there are no roads, that means no loggers and farmers, and it's kind of like a buffer zone with Colombia. Folks call it Bosnia West down there'
The headlights were sweeping across each side of the road, illuminating nothing.
'Is that where we're going, to the Gap?'
He shook his head.
'Even if we were, this eventually becomes not much more than a track, and with this rain it's just darned impassable. We're heading off the road at Chepo, maybe another ten minutes or so.'
First light was starring to edge its way past the corners of the sky. We bounced along for a while in silence. My headache was killing me. The headlights exposed nothing but tufts of grass and pools of mud and water. This place was as barren as a moonscape. Not much good for hiding a body.
'There's not a whole lot of forest here, mate, is there?'
'Hey, what can I say? Where there's a road, there's loggers.
They keep on going until everything's levelled. And it's not just about money:
the folk round here believe it's manly to cut down trees. I reckon less than twenty per cent of Panama's forest will survive the next five years. That's including the Zone.'
I thought of Charlie and his new estate. It wasn't just the loggers who were tearing chunks out of Aaron's jungle.
We drove on as daylight spread its way gloomily across the sky. A primeval mist blanketed the ground. A flock of maybe a hundred big black birds with long necks took off ahead of us; they looked suspiciously like pterodactyls.
Ahead and to our left I could see the dark shadows of trees, and I pointed.
'What about there?'
Aaron thought for a few seconds as we got closer, clearly disturbed again, as if he'd managed for a moment to forget what we had in the boot.
'I guess so, but it's not that far to where I could do it properly.'
'No, mate, no. Let's do it now.' I tried to keep my voice level.
We pulled into the side of the road and under the trees. There wasn't going to be time for ceremony.
'Want to help?' I asked, as I retrieved the gollock from under my feet.
He thought hard.
'I just don't want the picture of him in there, you know, in my head. Can you understand that?'
I could: there were a whole lot of pictures in my own head I wished weren't there. The most recent was a blood-soaked child staring open-mouthed at the sky.
As I climbed out the birds were in full song: daylight was nearly here. I held my breath, opened the back, and pulled Diego out by his armpits, dragging him into the treeline. I concentrated on not looking at his face and keeping his blood off me.
About ten metres inside the gloom of the canopy I rolled both him and the wiped clean gollock under a rotted deadfall, covering the gaps with leaves and debris.
I only needed to hide him until Saturday. When I'd gone, maybe Aaron would come back and do what he'd wanted to in the first place. It shouldn't be hard to find him; by then there'd be so many flies they'd sound like a radio signal.
Having closed down the tailgate I got back into the cab and slammed the door. I waited for him to move off, but instead he turned.
'You know what? I think maybe Carrie shouldn't know about this, Nick. Don't you think? I mean-' 'Mate,' I said, 'you took the words right out of my mouth.' I tried to give him a smile, but the muscles in my cheek weren't working.
He nodded and steered back on to the road as I tried to curl up once more, closing my eyes, trying to kill the headache, but not daring to sleep.
Maybe fifteen minutes later we hit a cluster of huts. An oil lamp swung in one of them, splashing light across a roomful of faded, multicoloured clothes hung up to dry. The huts were made of breeze block with doors of rough planks nailed to a frame and wriggly tin thrown over the top. There was no glass in the windows, nothing to hold back the smoke from small fires that smouldered near the entrances. Scrawny chickens ran for cover as the Mazda approached. It wasn't at all the sort of thing I'd been shown in the inflight magazine.
Aaron jerked his thumb over his shoulder as we drove past.
'When the loggers leave, these guys turn up subsistence farmers, thousands of them, just poor people trying to grow themselves something to eat. The only problem is, with the trees gone, the topsoil gets washed away, and inside two years they can't grow anything except grass. So guess who comes in next -the ranchers.'
I could see a few minging-looking cows with their heads down, grazing. He jerked his thumb again.
'Next week's burger.'
Without warning, Aaron spun the wheel to the right, and that was us quitting the Pan-American Highway. There were no signs on the gravel slip-road, just like in the city. Maybe they liked to keep the population confused.
I saw a huddle of corrugated roofs.
'Chepo?'
'Yep, the bad and sad side.'
The compacted-gravel road took us past a scattering of more basic farmers' huts on stilts. Beneath them, chickens and a few old cats mooched around rusty lumps of metal and piles of old tin cans. Some of the shacks had smoke spilling from a clay or rusty metal chimney-pot. One was made out of six or seven catering-size cans, opened both ends and knocked together. Apart from that there was no sign of human life. The bad and sad side of Chepo was in no hurry to greet the dawn. I couldn't say I blamed them.
The odd rooster did its early-morning bit as the huts gradually gave way to larger one-storey buildings, which also seemed to have been plonked randomly on any available patch of ground. Duckboards, instead of pavements, led here and there, supported on rocks that were half submerged in mud. Rubbish had been collected in piles that had then collapsed, the contents strewn. A terrible stink wafted through the Mazda's cab. This place made the doss house in Camden look like Claridge's.
Eventually we passed a gas station, which was closed. The pumps were old and rusty, 1970s vintage, with an oval top. So much diesel had been spilled on the ground over the years that it looked like a layer of slippery tar. Water lay in dark, oil-stained puddles. The Pepsi logo and some faded bunting hung from the roof of the gas station itself, along with a sign advertising Firestones.
We passed a rectangular building made from more unpainted breeze blocks. The mortar that oozed between the blocks hadn't been pointed, and the builder certainly hadn't believed in plumb-lines. A sinewy old Indian guy wearing green football shorts, a string vest and rubber flip-flops was crouched down by the door, with a roll-up the size of a Rastafarian Old Holborn hanging from his mouth. Through the windows I could see shelves of tinned food.
Further up the road was a large wooden shack, up on stilts like some of the huts. It had been painted blue at one stage in its life, and a sign said that it was a restaurant. As we drew level I saw four leopard skins stretched out and nailed to the wall of the veranda. Below them, chained up in a cage, was the scrawniest big cat I'd ever seen. There was only enough space for it to turn round, and it just stood, looking incredibly pissed off as I would be, if I had to stare at my best mates pinned to the wall all day. I'd never felt so sorry for an animal in all my life.
Aaron shook his head. There was obviously some history to this.
'Shit, they're still got her in there!' For the first time I was hearing anger in his voice.
'I know for a fact that they sell turtle too, and r?s protected. They can't do that. You're not even allowed to have a parrot in a cage, man, it's the law ... But the police? Shit, they just spend their whole time worrying about narcos.'
He pointed a little ahead of us and up to the left. We were driving towards what reminded me of an army security base in Northern Ireland. High, corrugated-iron fencing protected whatever buildings were inside. Sandbags were piled on top of each other to make bunkers, and the barrel and high-profile sight of an American M-60
