He could flip a switch in his brain like that. It kept him alone, no question, but it also kept him alive.
Court climbed out of the car, no attempt to do it quietly so that Ellen would not wake. Her beauty rest was not his goddamned problem. He crawled out of the brush hiding the sedan, stood in the gully, then he ripped off the local tunic that he’d taken from the rickshaw driver the evening before, revealing his brown undershirt.
He pulled the gun he’d taken from the NSS commander the evening before, looked it over carefully in the morning light. It was a Bul Cherokee. He found it somewhat ironic that an Arabic-speaking secret policemen should be carrying an Israeli pistol, maybe more ironic that the gun had been used to kill him. It wasn’t in Court’s top-ten pistol choices, but it sure as shit had done the job on the two NSS goons last night.
He scrambled out of the gully, looked out to the road a quarter mile distant, past dry scrubland, windblown and sand-strewn. He saw no cars on the road. It ran flat and straight to the west, but to the east, back towards Al Fashir, the highway turned into a winding track and disappeared down a gentle slope.
The landscape wasn’t barren in the strictest sense. This wasn’t a Sahara-like desert of sand dunes; there were sporadic tufts of trees, acacia and baobab, and on-again, off-again grasses and shrubs as far as the eye could see atop the brown earthen crust, a surface that looked as hard as stone and somehow even less inviting.
He heard her climb out of the car below and behind him. It took her a minute to get her bearings and find him there on the crest of the gulley. Wordlessly she appeared next to him, closer than he would have liked, and followed his gaze out on the vast expanse to the east.
“Don’t suppose you spy a Waffle House that I’m missing out there in the distance.”
Court shook his head.
“Did you get some rest?”
“A little.”
“I had some hellacious dreams. But I feel okay. Thanks for talking to me last night.”
Court said nothing.
“I got the impression you don’t do a lot of that. That you were chatting to help me relax.”
Still nothing.
“Anyway . . . I appreciate it.”
Court just kept looking out at the vast expanse of land in front of him, willing her to take a couple of steps back.
He was scanning the road, searching for vehicles in the hazy distance.
“Did someone get up on the wrong side of the stolen car this morning?”
He realized he was being an ass, was turning his anger at his openness last night into poor manners today. He felt even more childish now than when he woke up. He softened, turned towards her, but did not make eye contact. “I’m fine. Just thinking about today.”
“Where are we, exactly? Do we even know?”
“We’re about twenty-five klicks from the outskirts of Al Fashir. That’s really all I can tell you.”
“Where are we going?”
Court looked past Ellen’s shoulder and saw it in the distance. A hazy, smoky apparition on the false horizon a few miles to the west. It rose from the desert track, what passed for a road out here in the Darfuri landscape, and from the size of the dust cloud he knew it was some sort of a convoy of large trucks. It took a while to be sure, but after a time he recognized the white paint on the vehicles. They were not government of Sudan; they were not private cargo transports. No, they belonged to some sort of nongovernmental relief organization.
He pointed to the dust rising in the distance. “We’re going where they are going.”
Ellen and Court moved quickly together down towards the road. The Canadian woman began running her fingers through her hair, trying to fix herself up a bit. Gentry looked at her with confusion.
“It never hurts to make a good first impression.” She said it with a smile, continuing to do what she could to knock dust off her clothes now. “I’d ask you if you had a mirror, but I imagine I’d have better luck finding that Waffle House.”
Court was fascinated by the odd behavior of womanhood.
“Listen,” Ellen said to him. He could tell before she spoke again that she was a little uncomfortable. “Would it be okay if you stood back, maybe behind one of those little trees or something,