Free Place of Bones by Larry Johns Page A

less boring one. The previous Saturday Karen McCann had done several things; she had had her hair done; visited several clothes shops; had coffee with a couple of her buddies in a Wimpy-style bar. She had bought groceries, posted a letter, sat in the park, had an ice cream, then taken the bus home. The highlight of her day had been a date with one of the male students, a boy she called Martin. This hopeful had wined, dined and danced her at the Heaven and Hell disco, getting her back home at the ungodly hour of one-thirty am. He had gone up for a goodnight coffee, had tried it on, had been rejected fairly forcibly - much to Walton’s delight - and had slunk off with his tail between his legs. Walton slept in the car Saturday and Sunday nights, because Clancey refused to work weekends, so he was usually crooned to sleep by “The Voice”  What, he had asked himself many times, had he done to deserve this!
    Today, Karen McCann was again at the hairdresser’s. Which, to Walton’s currently jaundiced mind, was another thorough waste of money. She would spend a full 90 minutes in the place, to emerge looking exactly the same as when she walked in. And today, he managed to persuade himself, was no exception. She stepped back onto the crowded street at 12-45.
    “You could have done that for free, girl,” Walton said aloud, starting his engine, “Five minutes out in a hailstorm...”
    The next stop was the DeGroot Street Wimpy bar and a late lunch. Walton parked well up the street, bought some sandwiches from a nearby baker’s shop, and ate them sitting on a kerbside bench under one of the silver birch trees. He hoped she had something out-of-doors planned for them this afternoon; the weather was too perfect to sit in an oven of a car.
    Karen McCann reappeared from the Wimpy bar at 3-30. She turned left down DeGroot and headed for the bus station. Walton gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Take the one to the park,” he urged her. “Or the zoo. I could use a nice long walk...”
    She took the 790 back to her flat.
     
    *
     
    Dawn on the Congo River.
    A pale and liquid sun rose above the distant, unseen horizon, its warming rays turning the bed of river-mist into a sea of fluffy ice, slowly thinning and revealing the small convoy of ancient river craft passing close to the mud flats that marked the confluence of the Congo and the Zaire rivers; a huge “Y” cut out of the forests. The convoy; three WW2 tugs and a battered, time-ravaged dumb-barge, moved slowly against the stream, the sound of the heavily-silenced diesel engines hardly more than a soft chuntering on the still, acrid-smelling air; barely enough sound to raise echoes from the closest wall of trees that encroached threateningly on the mile-wide, watery meeting place.
     
    *
     
    I was shattered. I needed sleep desperately, but sleep was not possible. I stood in the prow of the lead tug, my grit-filled eyes flicking rapidly between the water ahead; the fast disappearing bed of mist to my right; and the curtain of moss and creeper that hung in a tangle from the trees aback the nearest mud bank. There! Another eddy! I raised my right arm and the bow swung clear of the shoal, then steadied back on its shore-hugging course. The minutes ticked by agonizingly slowly, as the sun began to burn my right cheek.
    Ten minutes later it was almost possible to see the other side of the confluence. But one or two wispy patches of mist remained. Enough, though barely, to confuse an early-riser in the Zaire-side village of Bhomi. I had hoped to have been clear of this, the real danger spot, before sunrise. But some trouble hooking up the dumb-barge had delayed our departure from Loukolela by over an hour - now the chance had to be taken, for there was nowhere within too many miles to conceal the convoy from the fishing craft that would put out from Bhomi as soon as the sun settled in the sky.
    Later, the danger passed, I put aside my AK and, for the first time in days, it