Killing Ground Read Free Page B

as his mouth with the gaps in his teeth flapped in silence, silence because of the noise of the goddam heater. Beside him, the hand was reaching for the gear stick.
    'Where the hell are you going?'
    'I'm going to back up.'
    'How many miles are you going to back up? Stay put.'
    'He's telling me to back up.'
    'Then tell him to go eat his own shit.'
    'You're kind of edgy, aren't you?'

    The face of the man driving the cattle was close to the windscreen. The mouth still flapped. There were three teeth missing, he reckoned, and he reckoned that there was a denture set back home at the farm for inserting when the day was done and the evening meal was on the kitchen table. He spited himself, turned the Cherokee Jeep's heater higher so that the blast of dry warm air and the roar of the motor drowned the man's protest. The perspiration ran on his forehead and in his groin and down the small of his back but he could not hear the protest of the man driving the cattle. The man was peering at them through the windscreen, squinting through narrow eyes at them.
    'Like we're out of the zoo,' Axel said.
    And he should not have said that, no. Should not have said that because Dwight, the driver, was Afro-American. At Quantico, in an Ethics class, they would have gone ape.
    A remark such as his last might just have been enough to get a guy busted out of the Training Academy. Axel did not apologize, he seldom made apologies.
    The man driving the cattle stared hard at them, at two guys in an American Cherokee Jeep, wrong-side drive, peculiar number- plate, one white with a goddam pony-tail of hair, one black as a dark night.
    'I get the feeling we're noticed/ Axel said in bitterness.
    Daniel Bent, farmer, sixty-nine years of age, working the land of his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, who had maintained the development of the twin Friesian and Holstein herds
    10 to championship status, cursed Axel Moen and Dwight Smythe. He cursed them richly, obscenities and blasphemies, because he saw the risk of one of his cows falling from the bank between the road and the hedge, plunging under the body of the four-wheel-drive and breaking a leg. He noticed, too fucking right, the bastards and recognised them for Americans, and wondered what was their business late in the day on the lane to the coast.
    When the big vehicle, too big for these roads for sure, going at speed and ignoring the 30 mph limit, came past her, Fanny Carthew saw them.. Mrs Carthew, artist of sea views in oils, eighty-one years old, muttered the protest that in the moment afterwards gave her a tremor of shame and would have shocked her fellow worshippers 11 at the Baptist Hall in Kingsbridge if they had heard her utter such words. The cause of her protest - she had to heave at the leash on which she walked her venerable Pekinese dog right off the lane and into the nettles of the verge. She knew them to be Americans, the scowling white one with his hair ridiculously pulled back
    .... and the coloured one who drove. She noticed them and wondered
    ...... I the business that brought them down the lane that led no wh e r e .
    Because the Jeep was slowing, moving as if with hesitation past the houses, Zachary Jones saw them. Zachary Jones, disabled building worker, fifty-three years old, short of a leg, amputated below the knee from a construction-site fall, sat at the window of his cottage. He saw everything that moved in the collection of homes at the end of the lane that was too small to be called a village. With his binoculars he noted every coming and going, every visitor, .every stranger. The binoculars' magnification flitted from the face of the white one to the face of the black one, and he thought they were arguing and thought they disputed their directions, and then down to the tail-end registration plate.
    Zachary Jones had worked the building game in London, knew diplomatic plates, before coming home as an amputee to live with his spinster sister. He wondered