SA_06 - The Diamond Tiger - Ann Maxwell by Elizabeth Lowell

Author:Elizabeth Lowell
Language: bg
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-05-07T19:51:52+00:00

21

Cole and Erin found the Great Northern Highway in late afternoon, unsure whether they were ahead of or behind their pursuer. Cole ran the Rover up to its top speed and held it there. After the rough, unpaved spur road, the Great Northern’s sealed surface seemed eerily quiet, almost unreal, no hissing of grit pelting over the frame and spinning away from the tires in red turmoil.

The land was flat again. Pale-barked baoboabs loomed above the much smaller gums like goblins rising from a shallow, dusty, light-green sea. The highway’s single lane had more traffic than the Gibb Road. They met an oncoming vehicle about every twenty minutes. Most of the traffic was cars or small trucks. Occasionally a diesel hauling three freight trailers behind would come howling down on the Rover. The first time Erin saw one coming, she made a sound of disbelief.

“What in God’s name is that?” she demanded.

“A road train.”

“A road train,” Erin repeated, not understanding.

“A truck hauling three trailers,” Cole explained. He lifted his foot on the accelerator, bringing the Rover down to sixty miles an hour.

“How big is it all together?”

“Can’t tell head on. Some of the rigs are a hundred feet long.”

For a minute Erin was silent. The road train hurtled closer and closer, filling the single-lane road to the edges, sending clouds of grit boiling up from the dirt shoulder on both sides. It was going as fast as the Rover.

“There isn’t enough room for both of us,” Erin said.

“No worries, love,” he said, smiling as he used the common Aussie reassurance. “There’s plenty of verge.”

With that Cole whipped the Rover to the left, putting two wheels off the road into the dirt. The road train did the same with its left-hand wheels. The Rover bucked and rattled with the force of the road train’s passage. The road train hurtled past.

Sunset was a swift, slanting cataract of light that turned clouds from cream to crimson to ink with startling suddenness. No sooner had Erin started to admire the colors than they vanished.

Cole flipped on the headlights, then threw a second switch on the dashboard. A powerful spotlight mounted above the windshield cut a wide swath through the darkness ahead, reaching out half again as far as the headlights.

“Cow on the right,” Erin said, catching a flash of light that could only come from the reflective pupil of an animal’s eye.

“Bloody stupid animals,” Cole muttered, braking hard and simultaneously turning off the overhead spotlight. “May they all go to those great Golden Arches in the sky.”

“As in hamburgers?”

Cole grunted, slid the Rover past the cow in a shower of dirt, and drove on, picking up the speed he had lost. He drove hard and fast, but he never outran his lights, for at dusk Kimberley shorthorns began wandering out of the bush’s thin shade to graze along the road’s edge, where water from the blacktop ran off to create relatively lush feed.

As it grew darker, spotting shadows looming at the edges of the

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