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straight into him.
    He glanced down at the fuel gauge. Depending on the gradient the needle swung between the red strip indicating things were getting bad and the E indicating they couldn’t get any worse. The
rain eased off and then came pounding back, harder than ever. Here and there the road was flooded and the car plunged through the waiting lakes. He moved his face closer to the windshield as the
road curved left. Immediately beyond the bend a tree was lying half across the road. He veered round the trunk and crashed through flailing branches. Lightning jagged down towards a church or tower
in the distance.
    Later, long after he had given up hoping for such a thing, he drove past a turn-off and signpost. He slid to a halt and backed up. The rain was so heavy he had to wind down the window to make
out the sign, startled by the noise of the storm hammering on the roof, hissing. Seventy miles ahead was the town of Flagstaff; ten miles off to the right was a town called Monroe. He cranked up
the window, turned right. Even ten miles seemed optimistic: for the last twenty minutes the needle had been stretched out horizontally, only momentarily twitching from E. The engine was sounding
worse and worse. By the outskirts of Monroe it was like the last drops of coke being sucked through a straw.
    He drove into town along the main drag, past the water-logged forecourt of a darkened gas station. Black ponds had formed around every drain, sometimes stretching from one side of the street to
the next. A faulty light in a shop blinked off and on. He parked opposite the only place that was open, the Monroe Diner. Killed the engine and listened to the rain, the wind creaking through
signs. He pulled a coat from the back seat and cracked open the door. The rain sounded like fat frying in a pan. He plunged his foot into a puddle and levered himself out of the car. Waded across
the street.
    Every face turned on him as he entered, the glare that passes for welcome in bars all over the world. He felt like a traveller who stops at a tavern in Transylvania and asks if anyone knows the
way to Castle Dracula. Shook his hair and rubbed his feet on the crew-cut mat. Behind the bar a woman was pouring beer into an angled glass.
    She smiled ‘Hi’ as he perched himself on a stool by the bar. ‘What would you like?’
    ‘Hi. Coffee, please.’ Even before he asked for it, coffee was implicit in the idea of shelter offered by the diner.
    Once he was sat at the bar no one took any notice of him. His hair dripped on the counter and into his coffee. 34 He ordered food, looked around. A dozen people, mostly alone or in pairs. Every
now and again the window bleached white by lightning. The barwoman brought his food, asked where he was heading.
    ‘I’m on my way to Nelson,’ he lied reflexively. ‘I got lost in the rain some way back.’
    ‘That’s what it’s like this time of year. Never rains but it pours. Never pours but it floods. And it always rains.’
    ‘And you have rooms here?’ Walker was scooping up his food American-style, using just the fork, talking and chewing.
    ‘For one? For one night?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘That’s no problem. Matter of fact, it wouldn’t be a problem if you wanted rooms for eight people for a week.’
    Walker paid for everything and took a beer upstairs. The room was on the top floor. He spent twenty minutes standing under a shower that was not quite hot enough, then sat on the edge of the
bed, drinking beer and thinking about tomorrow, wrapped in a towel. Clothes drying over a fan-heater.
    He finished the beer and walked over to the window, the town hunkered down under the rain. A car eased along the main street, slowed, pulled into the parking lot beside the diner. Walker flicked
off the light and went back to the window. The car had disappeared from sight but he could see puddles stained red by the tail lights. Then the lights were switched off and there was the slam of
doors opening and