Free Life or Death by Michael Robotham

to hear sirens and see a blaze of flashing lights.
    ‘This taken?’ asks a voice.
    Audie doesn’t answer. A fat man manoeuvres a suitcase into the overhead rack and dumps a bag of takeaway food on the tray table.
    ‘Dave Myers,’ he says, extending a big red-freckled hand. He’s sixtyish with sloping shoulders and a roll of flesh instead of a jawline. ‘You got a name?’
    ‘Smith.’
    Dave chuckles. ‘Good as any.’
    He eats noisily, sucking salt and sauce from his fingertips. Then he flicks on the overhead reading light and unfurls a newspaper, snapping the pages.
    ‘I see they’re gonna cut the border patrols again,’ he says. ‘How they gonna keep illegals out of this state? Give them an inch and they’ll take the whole nine yards.’
    Audie doesn’t respond. Dave turns the page and grunts. ‘We’ve forgotten how to fight a war in this country. Look at Iraq.’ (He pronounces it Eye Rack.) ‘If you ask me they should nuke the whole lot of them Muslim countries, know what I’m saying, but that ain’t gonna happen with a black man in the White House, not with a middle name like Hussein.’
    Audie turns his face to the window and looks at the darkened landscape, picking out the dotted lights of ranch houses and navigation beacons on the distant peaks.
    ‘I know what I’m talking about,’ says Dave. ‘I fought in Nam. We should have nuked them slant-eyed gooks. Agent Orange was too good for them. Not the women. Those gook girls could be mighty fine. They might look twelve but they cum like flapping fish.’
    Audie makes a noise. The man pauses. ‘Am I bothering you?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Why’s that?’
    ‘My wife is Vietnamese.’
    ‘No shit? I’m sorry, man, I didn’t mean no disrespect.’
    ‘Yes you did.’
    ‘How was I to know?’
    ‘You just insulted an entire race of people, an entire religion and women in general. You said you wanted to fuck ’em or nuke ’em, which makes you a racist and a scumbag.’
    Dave’s face grows red and his skin tightens as though stretched over a bigger skull. He stands and reaches for his suitcase. For a moment Audie thinks Dave could be looking for a gun, but he moves along the aisle, finding another seat, where he introduces himself to someone new and complains about the ‘intolerant assholes’ you meet on long-distance coaches.
    After stopping at Seguin and Schulenburg, they reach Houston just before midnight. Despite the hour, the concourse is populated by random clusters of people, some sleeping on the floor and others lying across seats. There are buses marked for LA, New York, Chicago and places in between.
    Audie goes to the restroom. He turns on the tap and splashes water on his face, scratching the stubble on his jawline. His beard is growing too slowly to give him a disguise and sunburned skin is starting to peel from his nose and forehead. When he was in prison he used to shave every morning because it filled five minutes of his day and showed that he still cared. Now he sees a man in the mirror instead of a boy: older, skinnier, hard in a way he never was.
    A woman and young girl enter the restroom, both blonde and both dressed in jeans and canvas shoes. The woman is in her mid-twenties with her hair bunched on the back of her head in a high ponytail. She’s wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt that hangs on the points of her breasts. The little girl looks about six or seven, with a missing front tooth and a Barbie backpack looped over her shoulders.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ says the mother, ‘they’ve closed the women’s restroom for cleaning.’
    Setting a bag of toiletries on the edge of the sink, she takes out toothbrushes and toothpaste. She wets paper towels, peels off her daughter’s T-shirt and washes under her arms and behind her ears. Then she leans her over the sink and wets the girl’s scalp with running water, using soap from the dispenser to wash her hair, telling her to keep her eyes closed.
    She turns to Audie. ‘What are you