I tense and hit the brakes, then push the cigarette lighter home in its socket during the second it takes him to match my speed. We come to a halt side by side on the crest of a low hill. The SUV's door opens and the dead guy with the gun gets out and walks over. I sniff: there's a nasty fragrant smoke coming out of the lighter socket.
He marches stiffly round to my side door, keeping the gun in view. I keep my hands on the steering wheel as he opens the door and gets in.
"Who are you?" I ask tensely. "What's going on"
"You ask too many questions," says the dead man. His voice slurs drunkenly, as if he's not used to this larynx, and his breath stinks like rotting meat. "Turn around. Drive back to Anse Marcel." He points the gun at my stomach.
"If you say so." I slowly move one hand to the gearshift, then turn the car around. The SUV sits abandoned and forlorn behind us as I accelerate away. I drive slowly, trying to drag things out. The stink of decaying meat mingles with a weird aroma of burning herbs. The steering wheel has sprouted a halo of fine blue fire and my skin crawls — I glance sideways but there are no green sparks in his eyes, just the filmed-over lusterless glaze of a day-old corpse. It's funny how death changes people: I startle when I recognize him.
"Drive faster." The gun pokes me in the ribs.
"How long have you had Marc?" I ask.
"Shut up."
/ need Ramona. The smell of burning herbs is almost overpowering.
I reach out to her: **Phone me.**
**What's the problem? I'm driving as fast as — **
**Just phone me, damn it! Dial my mobile now!** Fifteen or twenty endless seconds pass, then my Treo begins to ring.
"I need to answer my phone," I tell my passenger. "I have to check in regularly."
"Answer it. Say that everything is normal. If you tell them different I'll shoot you."
I reach out and punch the call-accept button, angling the screen away from him. Then in quick succession I punch the program menu button, and the pretty icon that triggers all the car's countermeasures simultaneously.
I don't know quite what I was expecting. Explosions of sparks, spinning heads, a startling spewage of ectoplasm? I get none of it. But Marc the doorman, who managed to die of one of the effects of terminal cocaine abuse just before Ramona's succubus could suck him dry, sighs and slumps like a dropped puppet. Unfortunately he's not belted in so he falls across my lap, which is deeply inconvenient because we're doing fifty kilometers an hour and he's blocking the steering wheel. Life gets very exciting for a few seconds until I bring the car to rest by the roadside, next to a stand of palm trees.
I wind down the window and stick my head out, taking in deep gasping breaths of blessedly wormwood- and fetor-free ocean air. The fear is just beginning to register: I did it again, I realize, I nearly got myself killed. Sticking my nose into something that isn't strictly any of my business. I shove Marc out of my lap, then stop. What am I going to do with him?
It is generally not a good idea when visiting foreign countries to be found by the cops keeping company with a corpse and a gun. An autopsy will show he had a cardiac arrest about a day ago, but he's in my car and that's the sort of thing that gives them exactly the wrong idea — talk about circumstantial evidence! "Shit," I mutter, looking around.
Ramona's on her way but she's driving a two-seater. Doubleshit.
My eyes fasten on the stand of trees. Hmm.
I restart the engine and reverse up to the trees. I park, then get out and start wrestling with Marc's body. He's surprisingly heavy and inflexible, and the seats are inconveniently form-fitting, but I manage to drag him across to the driver's side with a modicum of sweating and swearing.
He leans against the door as if he's sleeping off a bender.
I retrieve the Treo, blip the door shut, then start doodling schematics in a small application I carry for designing fieldexpedient incantations. There's no need to draw a grid round the car — the Smart's already wired — so as soon as I'm sure I've got it right I hit the upload button and look away. When I look back I know there's something there, but it makes the back of my scalp itch and my vision blur. If I hadn't parked the Car there myself I could drive right past without seeing it.
I shamble back to the roadside and look both ways — there's no pavement — then start walking along the hard shoulder towards Orient Beach.
It's still morning but the day is going to be baking hot.
Trudging along a dusty road beneath a spark-plug sky without a cloud in sight gets old fast. There are beaches and sand off to one side, and on the other a gently rising hillside covered with what passes for a forest hereabouts — but I'm either overdressed (according to my sweating armpits) or underdressed (if I acknowledge the impending sunburn on the back of my neck and arms). I'm also in a foul mood.
De-animating Marc has brought back the sense of guilt from Darmstadt: the conviction that if I'd just been slightly faster off the ball I could have saved Franz and Sophie and the others. It's also confirmed that my dreams of Ramona are the real thing: so much for keeping a fig leaf of deniability. She was right: I'm an idiot. Finally there's Billington, and the activities of his minions. Seeing that long, hungry hull in the distance, recognizing the watcher on the quay, has given me an ugly, small feeling. It's as if I'm an ant chewing away at a scab on an elephant's foot — a foot that can be raised and brought down on my head with crushing force should the pachyderm ever notice my existence.
After I've been walking for about half an hour, a bright red convertible rumbles out of the heat haze and pulls up beside me. I think it's a Ferrari, though I'm not much good at car spotting; anyway, Ramona waves at me from the driver's seat. She's wearing aviator mirrorshades, a bikini, and a see-through silk sarong. If my libido wasn't on the ropes from the events of the past twelve hours my eyes would be halfway out of my head: as it is, the best I can manage is a tired wave.
"Hi, stranger. Looking for a lift?" She grins ironically at me.
"Let's get out of here." I flop into the glove-leather passenger seat and stare at the trees glumly.
She pulls off slowly and we drive in silence for about five minutes. "You could have gotten yourself killed back there,"
she says quietly. "What got into you"
I count the passing palm trees. After I reach fifty I let myself open my mouth. "I wanted to check out a hunch."
Without taking her eyes off the road she reaches over with her right hand and squeezes my left leg. "I don't want you getting yourself killed," she says, her voice toneless and overcontrolled.
I pay attention to her in a way I can't describe, feeling for whatever it is that connects us. It's deep and wide as a river, invisible and fluid and powerful enough to drown in. What I sense through it is more than I bargained for. Her attention's fixed on the road ahead but her emotions are in turmoil. Grief, anger at me for being a damn fool, anxiety, jealousy. Jealousy? "I didn't know you cared," I say aloud. And I'm not sure I want you to care, I think to myself.
"Oh, it's not about you. If you get yourself killed what happens to me"
She wants it to sound like cynical self-interest but there's a taste of worry and confusion in her mind that undermines every word that comes out of her mouth.
"Something big is going down on this island," I say, tacitly changing the subject before we end up in uncharted waters.
"Billington's crew has got watchers out. Seagull monitors controlled from, um, somewhere else. And then I ran into Marc.