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indicating homes back in the foothills of the blue range that stretched all the way to Wilpena Pound.
    And then in the emptiness he saw another car. Black.
    But not the black Chrysler.
    Hirsch thought about it. In terms of timing, geography and logic, it wouldn’t make sense for Pullar and Hanson to make their way down here. Travel two thousand kilometers in a notorious vehicle, away from terrain they knew? Hirsch couldn’t see it. But he could see how the men might hunt in a place such as this, for they preyed on roadhouse waitresses on the empty highways, housewives and teenage daughters on lonely country roads.
    I T HAD STARTED AS a vicious backblocks story, a Queensland story, which quickly went viral when Channel 9 muscled in,giving the killers a voice. Back in August a forty-year-old Mt. Isa speed freak named Clay Pullar and an eighteen-year-old Brisbane cokehead named Brent Hanson raped and murdered three roadhouse waitresses over a two-week period. Police managed to track the men to a caravan park in northern New South Wales, but arrived too late, and found a Canadian hitchhiker roped to a bed. Further sightings placed the men in Cairns, Bourke, Alice Springs, Darwin … Nothing definite until they broke into a farmhouse near Wagga, where they raped a teenager in front of her trussed-up parents and fled north with her to a property across the border and along the river at Dirranbandi.
    Feeling pleased with himself, Pullar phoned Channel 9 on his mobile phone. He’d just managed to prove who he was when the signal failed, so Channel 9 dispatched a reporter and a cameraman by helicopter, which set down on the back lawn long enough to leave a satellite phone, and took off again, circling overhead. Pullar appeared, and even through the long pull of the camera lens he looked tall, gaunt, hard, insane. He grinned and waved, showing stumpy teeth, grabbed the phone, returned to the farmhouse, and began to explain himself. An exclusive, a live interview, you couldn’t ask for better, think of the dollars rolling in, fuck the ethics, the public had a right to know. Fuck sense, too, for Pullar made absolutely no sense but was full of frothing lunacy.
    The police took thirty minutes to arrive. They surrounded the house, jammed the signal, chased the helicopter away—and waited. Night fell. They tried to talk to Pullar and Hanson. After a few hours of silence it occurred to them to rush the house …
    They found an elderly man and woman unconscious and the Wagga teenager naked and traumatized and no sign of Pullar and Hanson, who had fled, on foot, to a neighboring property. Here they stole a beefy black Chrysler 300C station wagon and by daybreak were hundreds of kilometers north, apparently heading for Longreach. An intelligent rape-and-murder teammight have swapped the Chrysler for a less obvious car at the earliest opportunity, but Pullar, staying in touch with Channel 9, had said, “Man, this car has got some serious grunt.”
    H IRSCH SQUINTED. T HE SUN was beating hard and the road shimmered with mirages, and now a collection of tumbledown houses appeared, set two hundred meters off the highway. MUNCOWIE the sign said, an arrow pointing to the little side road that took you there, to a place that seemed to have no function. Rusty rooftops, tired trees, sunlight breaking weakly from a windscreen.
    Then Hirsch lost interest in the town. The Pajero was ahead of him, parked at the side of the highway, a man with his rump against it, dark heads showing inside the vehicle, behind tinted glass. He cruised to a stop, switched off and got out, stretched the kinks in his back. He could see the Pajero occupants more clearly now: a woman in the passenger seat, at least two kids in the back. Roof racks piled with roped-down luggage.
    The driver, coming around to meet him, offered a huge paw.
    “The name’s Nancarrow, I called it in.”
    Powerful forearms, a nuggety chest, sun-damaged skin, sunglasses propped above a high,