Darwin hosted former CEOs of merchant banks and vice-presidents of software companies who now worked as debt collectors, truck drivers in uranium mines, or labourers on the huge government farms out on the Ord River. Like a lot of frontier towns, Darwin was a rude, bruising, crossroads settlement, full of chancers, thieves and standover men. It was a good place to get lost and that, he’d told her, was fine by him. There was nothing back home for Rhino A. Ross, just burnt bridges and enemies. Or one enemy in particular, at least, one worth the effort of losing himself down here with all of the other losers.

Jules squinted into the fierce sun as she left behind the cover of a wide veranda awning that shaded the front of an Irish-themed pub – the thematic verisimilitude provided by a couple of drunken Paddies beating each other to death with bar stools just inside the swinging doors. Above, a pair of Marine Harriers off the Bataan flew over and drowned out all background noise momentarily with the howl of their engines. She searched her shirt pockets for the pair of faux Gucci sunglasses she’d picked up that morning, but seemed to have lost them. She was worried about the Rhino, and not just because of what had happened to her back in Sydney. When they’d gone their separate ways, he’d seemed bleak and beaten down, which was not at all his natural state of being. She had only been in Darwin a few hours, but already she knew it to be the sort of place people went when they thought they’d run out of options.

Six lanes of traffic pulsed and crawled along Perrett Street, although calling the arrangement ‘lanes’ implied more order than was really the case. In effect, two thick, snaking streams of vehicles, each about three cars across, ground past each other, sometimes mingling, even crunching together as horns blared and drivers hurled abuse into the hot, grey sky in a couple of dozen languages. Again she heard American voices everywhere, shouting down or trying to shout down the flat, nasal ‘strine’ of the locals, or the chittering tonal curses of Chinese, Tagalog or Javanese motorists. A siren wailed somewhere, but never seemed to move, and heat shimmered over the bodies of the cars, rolling through her as though she’d stepped in front of an open furnace door.

She used her elbows and shoulders to force a path through the crowds that spilled out into the fringes of the traffic jam, leading to more near misses and abuse. Part of the problem was the lack of any real division between road and kerb; but also there were just too many people attempting to force their way through too small a space.