With his hands cuffed behind him, Tom fiddled with the trunk’s lock but without a lever it was pointless. He managed to lift the thin felt lining but all he found were a couple of metal cavities that had probably once held the car’s jack and toolkit. These guys were thorough. Or had lost their jack and toolkit. Either way it was bad news for Tom.

But the lights … In modern cars, the tail-light housings were sealed modular units but in older cars … Maybe there was something there.

In complete darkness, rolled and rocked by the vehicle’s movement, Tom’s fingers found the catch that released the left tail-light access hatch. He prised it off, and was faintly illuminated by the daylight filtering through the coloured plastic of the brake-light and indicator covers. The light was filtered again through the bulb surrounds, but he had enough to work by.

He could see now that the Thunderbird was a pretty rudimentary piece of assembly with gaping holes and flimsy wires. Even his shitty Buick had a more solid-looking back end. Thank God for low-tech cars.

Tom curled himself round so that his feet were against the brake-light assembly and his shoulders braced against the back of the rear seat. For the first time in his life, he wished he wasn’t six two.

With a sharp movement, he kicked hard into the brake light, crunching the connectors and bulbs, and buckling the thin metal plate against the coloured plastic. His head was pressed up and against the seat as the car stopped. Tom prayed they weren’t at their destination yet – prayed he’d get another chance at kicking out the light. He made a hurried pact with a God he didn’t believe in … He heard a couple of muffled voices inside the car, but couldn’t make out the words.

Lights changed or the road cleared, and the car lurched forward again, making Tom’s knees bend as his feet pressed back against the rear of the trunk.

He uncrossed the mental fingers that had kept him vaguely honest in the eyes of non-God, and went back to work.

He shuffled away from the lights to get the maximum leverage and kicked again. This time the plate broke and cracked the glass. It sounded cacophonous to him and he held his breath. But the car didn’t slow, and he didn’t hear any surprised tones from the men up front.

He kicked again and yelped in pain. His foot had gone right through this time, smashing the brake light out, but the sharp edges of the plate – curved outwards by his assault – tore into his ankle and shin like a bear trap. Trying to pull his leg back only made the metal dig more deeply into his flesh.

A new wave of nausea washed over him and he swallowed. The last thing he needed in this trunk was a puddle of nice hot vomit.

Tom breathed hard. He peered down and saw that his All Stars sneaker was now protruding from where the brake light used to be. If they were in traffic, surely someone would see it. Surely – having seen it – they’d report it. He hoped and hoped and tried to wiggle his foot around so that it might attract attention, but only his foot was outside the car. If his leg up to the knee was hanging out there, the chances of it being seen increased exponentially …

Gritting his teeth against the pain, Tom braced himself and shoved his leg further out of the car. The jagged metal sliced a red-hot groove up his shin almost to the knee, and the shattered plastic of the brake light ripped into his calf. Tom’s head and back went cold and prickly with the pain, and he felt a clammy sweat break out on his forehead.

He lay there on his hands in the dark, one leg crooked against the back of the trunk, the other dangling bloodily out of the taillight, his jaw aching and his ribs heaving. He felt pathetically small and weak, and wished someone would make all this go away. What a fucking baby.

He made a poor – and painful – effort to wave his injured leg around.

Nobody saw.

Nobody reported it.

Nobody came to his rescue.

*

‘What the fuck is this?’ The man’s voice was bemused, angry – and unnervingly familiar. Tom blinked back to consciousness in gushing sunlight as the trunk lid rose. At first, he could see the men only as silhouettes, blinded as he was by the brilliance of daylight.

He remembered what he’d done and the nerves kicked in. The taller man leaned down into the trunk to look at how he had kicked through the tail-light. As he did, he shielded the sun so Tom could see him.

Mr Stanley. The Honolulu leg-shaker.

Fear gripped Tom like something physical, holding his throat shut in an iron fist, and clutching his chest.

‘Fucking little shit! Look what he did to my car!’

Stanley punched him. Tom saw it coming and turned, but it still connected with his ear, making it ring like a fire bell. Then Stanley started to drag him out of the trunk, careless of the metal and plastic biting into his flesh.

Tom screamed as pain shot through his leg, panicked that Stanley might just keep pulling and twisting until the muscle was stripped clean off the bone and left behind in the trunk of the Thunderbird.

‘Hold on.’ That was the other man. Thank God for him, whoever he was.

Stanley let him go and stepped back. The other man leaned over him. He was older than Stanley, but wider in the shoulders. He had a shaven head and wore a dark blue suit with a pale blue tie. He peered at Tom’s leg, then up at his face. ‘What a goddamn mess,’ he said, and grinned. Tom saw he had strange, sharp little yellow teeth that made him think of a weasel.

He stepped away again and Tom’s fear rolled back that Stanley would be left to his own devices. But Stanley stood and glared at him while Tom felt a door of the car open and then shut. The Weasel came back with a tyre iron. So they were thorough, not careless. Somehow, having the answer to his earlier question failed to delight Tom.

The Weasel inserted the iron into the tear in the metal housing, and levered the edges away from Tom’s leg. Tom bit his lip and groaned, but held as still as he could while the sharp metal worked back out of his flesh.

‘You pull it out now?’

Tom nodded enthusiastically. He welcomed any non-interventionist policy now that those tin-can edges were out of the way. He pulled his leg slowly and carefully back inside the trunk, trying not to notice the amount of blood that had soaked his jeans from the knee down. He hissed as an errant movement made a fresh gouge in the top of his ankle, but finally he was free and lay panting with relief.

The Weasel reached in and grabbed his arm, and Stanley helped him pull Tom roughly over the tailgate, his ribs, hips and knees banging hard against the metal. He half fell into pale, sandy dust that immediately took him back to the Karoo, and from there it was only a half-synapse-fire from thinking of Pam and the others, screaming in a blaze that had been ‘bound to happen one day’.

But it had happened that day.

And this was happening now.

And he didn’t believe in coincidences.

The men were obviously waiting for him to get up, so he made the effort, holding onto the back of the Thunderbird, then sagging against it, resting his injured leg, his head hanging over his chest.

‘What do you want?’

The Weasel smiled sharply. ‘You’ll find out.’

Tom wished he hadn’t bothered asking. Wished he’d saved his energy and dignity, what little of both he had left.

Stanley grabbed a handful of his T-shirt and twisted it up and under his chin so Tom had to look him in the eyes. He saw Stanley’s desire to hurt him writ large there and, with his wrists still cuffed behind him, felt the vulnerability of his exposed abdomen and groin. He turned and brought his injured leg up reflexively in a weak gesture of protection. Stanley laughed and jerked him forward, making him walk.

Tom watched the barn approach with spiralling apprehension. This was the place where whatever was going to happen would happen. And he was limping towards it, complicit in his own fate.

He glanced around. Gum trees pressed over the barn, with scratchy yellow grass between them. Rattlesnake grass and low scrub. He could be anywhere between Santa Ana and Mexico. If he ran now they’d catch him before he got ten feet.

Having only just got used to the light, he was stopped dead by the darkness just inside the barn. Before his eyes could adjust, Stanley shoved him forward and he stumbled to his knees.

‘Have a seat, Mr Patrick.’ The Weasel was in control now, it seemed.

Tom saw a lightweight wooden chair, and sat in it. The Weasel slid a plastic tie around one of his wrists and fastened it to a strut at the back of the chair.

In the shadows he made out farm equipment. An old tractor and indeterminate bladed implements to hitch to it, their formerly bright-painted surfaces faded to dirty blues and dull reds. He could smell hay somewhere. How he knew it was hay, he had no idea. He couldn’t remember ever having seen a bale of hay, but somewhere in his brain the smell of hay was stored and recognized.

The floor under his feet was dirt, just the wilderness cleared and built over with no concession to improvement.

Tom was almost embarrassed by the cliché it presented. He’d been kidnapped and was about to be interrogated or killed in a barn. It was so cheap Hollywood. Okay, a warehouse would have been worse, but once you realized a barn was just a warehouse for hicks, all the shame of predictability returned.

‘Mr Patrick,’ said the Weasel.