Free Silencer by Campbell Armstrong

Drumm said. ‘They’re starting to develop personalities. Any time now, one of them’s gonna say you again ?’
    Amanda was hunched forward in her seat. She’d been locked in this position a long time. ‘Give it another twenty minutes, Willie. Then we’ll go.’
    â€˜You think you remember the way back to the road?’
    â€˜We’ll find it.’
    Drumm edged the Bronco between stands of cacti. A jackrabbit ran mazily ahead of them. Once, a cactus wren darted in front of the vehicle, a feathered ball of light. Amanda barely noticed these disturbances. Her mind was elsewhere, probing her own private wasteland.
    The Bronco bumped, thudded, bottomed out in a shallow arroyo Drumm had seen too late to avoid. ‘Shit,’ he said. He backed the vehicle up and the rear tyres span, and dust, thrown up by the wheels, clouded the air.
    Amanda saw something then, metal and glinting. ‘There,’ she said. ‘What’s that?’
    Drumm parked, removed a flashlight from the glove box. He left the headlights on, and they illuminated a late-1970s Datsun with a punctured front tyre. Drumm opened the passenger door and switched on the flash. Inside the car was a clutter of discarded fast-food wrappers and styrofoam coffee cups and empty Camel Light packs and crumpled Kleenex.
    Amanda looked at the debris. ‘Flash the back,’ she said to Drumm.
    Drumm moved the beam. In the back Amanda saw a heap of crushed clothing. Some of it was deadeningly familiar. A candy-striped blouse, a pair of jeans with a designer label, a blue T-shirt with a palm tree and the word Malibu.
    â€˜Hers?’ Drumm asked.
    Amanda nodded. She noticed a small pink thing among the clothing and she reached for it and held it in the palm of her hand.
    â€˜What’s that?’ Drumm asked.
    â€˜A barrette. A hair-clasp.’ Amanda wrapped her fingers round the thin strip of plastic.
    Drumm played the light on the ground around the Datsun. ‘She had a flat and decided to hoof it,’ he said.
    Amanda studied the ground. There were footprints scuffed by paw-marks. Drumm was the first to see the shoe, which he picked up. ‘You don’t run too good in high heels,’ he said.
    Amanda took the shoe and noticed it was missing the heel. She tried to reconstruct the scene, but she didn’t like the pictures she was coming up with. Isabel runs, her heel snaps, the dogs are after her.
    â€˜You want to keep going?’ Drumm asked.
    Amanda didn’t. This was a trail she had no heart for. She felt empty and depressed. ‘Sure,’ she said.
    Drumm trained the flashlight on the scuff of prints, Amanda followed. She didn’t know how far she and Drumm walked: a quarter mile, a half, more. The desert was beyond measurement.
    â€˜She comes this way.’ Drumm stopped suddenly at the foot of an incline. There were indentations, disturbances, and blood.
    Amanda squatted on her heels, picked up a handful of grainy dust and ran it through her fingers. She saw bloodstains in the grains, wet still.
    â€˜This is where it ends,’ Drumm said quietly. He swung the flashlight around the general area. ‘I see some tyre tracks over there.’
    Amanda didn’t look in the direction of the beam. She was thinking of dogs, wondering what it felt like to be hunted by them, trying to gauge hysteria, the sense of doom. This is where it ends. Drumm’s sentence resonated in her head.
    Drumm said, ‘The dogs get her, they bring her down, then it happens. The gunman steps in and calls off the dogs. Boom.’
    â€˜And her body?’ Amanda asked.
    â€˜He removes it.’
    â€˜Why not leave it here? You couldn’t find a more isolated place for dumping a goddam corpse.’
    â€˜You got me,’ Drumm said. ‘What the hell. This whole goddam thing gets me. Two go in, two come out again.’
    Two go in, two come out. Amanda listened to the desert, silent now, and