The road ahead went right up into the sky. It was higher than the horizon. It was a take off ramp that would have him air borne for a low orbit. He was due to penetrate the heart of the sky and know its mystery.
Sam Shepherd drummed the fingers of either hand on his steering wheel which was sheathed in an ocelot glove and allowed his free wheeling fancy to speculate on what he might find, given a reshuffle of known fact, on the far side of the familiar hill. But he was brought back by the feel of the fabric under his hand. It was a present from Angela Lisle, snapped in place by her busy fingers as an earnest of bliss and a reminder that even on the highway he was a vassal.
It was a sobering, practical thought bringing along the whole scene of Lisle, Granger and Purbeck and his own role as leg man for the architectural empire they had in Wirral City and environs.
He was over the top. The hill flattened and fell away with a long escarpment of sandstone on the right hand and a stone wall at the left with fields beyond it and a stationary cow to watch him go by.
Give or take the cow, it was all as it had always been. He had to look twice and then again to determine whether the white drape over a five barred gate was an empty sack or a pooped product of human evolution. Then his hands and feet were pulling him to an emergency stop while his brain was telling him that it was none of his business and that he could put in a call from the next box he saw and clear his social debt.
There was a lay-by twenty metres from the gate and he disengaged from the metal ribbon locking strip which was binding him to his traffic lane and slewed across to run in. Maybe it was a decoy. He leaned into the rumble and rummaged for a flat case under a rug. It was locked and he was five seconds finding the key before he could open it and lift out a nicely balanced Luger. On the way he snapped in a clip.
Conscious of safety regs and recognising that it would be a bad place to have it go off, he shoved it in the waist band of his pants and reached the gate feeling ridiculous.
It was human. Small, fair and lightly built. Wearing a white one piece coverall, hair falling straight down like a plumb bob, the colour of the dry grass it was brushing.
He leaned over the gate and looked right and left. Not an assassin in sight.
A car crested the rise and he waved to stop it, wanting to consult with another citizen. The driver waved back and pressed on. It was all his own.
Whoever it was would be better off the rail and Shepherd got an arm under the thighs and lifted his cadaver clear, but still upside down. Tactile clues told him he had a girl by the heels and it was confirmed as another car whipped past with the driver turning in his seat and sticking up his thumb in recognition of a bold piece of improvisation on the verge.
Turned ass over tip, she still wanted to slide in a heap and he leaned on the gate holding her with an arm round her shoulders and feeling the Luger shoved uncomfortably in his groin. He should never have brought it along. If a public security car came by it would sound very thin to say that he was a Captain in the District Militia still working through his stint of voluntary service as Intelligence Officer for the Second Mobile Brigade and happened to have it with him.
Other data was crowding his network. The white coverall was damp as though she had been dipped in a tank and partly dried in the Spring sunshine. Skin was marble cold. Hyaline as alabaster. Ends of hair were dark and still heavy with water. She was giving oil a marine smell and there was a tendril of green weed caught in her zip.
There was the field, a thickset hedge, rough dunes and the estuary. Maybe a kilometre and a half. She could be a dinghy sailor tipped out and just making the shore. But why trek across for the main road? There were houses nearer if she wanted to get to a phone. Why wait to get here to flake out?
A movement through the hedge caught his eye. Two men in black wet suits had pushed through and were looking up at the road. One pointed to the duo at the gate and both set off at a jog trot across the field.
)
Sam Shepherd, minding his own business, with his car locked on the freeway safety strip, was a surprised man when he saw Jean Quale draped like a wet sack over a five barred gate. Stopping to check out what she was up to, put his feet on a path littered with uncertainty. He was hooked to a sequence that had its own inbuilt logic even when it projected him in galactic travel to the neighbourhood of Alpha Centauri. You will never again be sure that your companion on the walkway is not from the dying world of Deinos.
