The bike veered through a plant bed and onto the path. They took off and bumped down from the curb to the street and away. The derestricted engine’s scream echoed off the buildings until it was a distant noise. Like a mosquito.

After a while the regular sounds came back. Cars, insects, the occasional voice, a dog. I sat on a bench and counted five minutes before heading out.

Les Brosses turned into an area of fenced-off wasteland and junkyards. Stuff you find outside of any town center. There was a railroad crossing. Then residential streets started up again. Houses, one after the other, in a line, dimly lit in the night. French houses don’t have yards, they’re closed in with walls. They plant bushes and trees to block off the view from the road. Once in a while a ground floor window was visible. Sometimes lit. Mostly I got the impression that people turned in early on a Saturday night.

A car turned the corner. The headlights washed over me as it straightened up and then drove past. It was a blue Opel Corsa. There were two silhouettes in the front. Other than that I couldn’t see. The Corsa continued on for a block and then made a left. Red tail lights faded off.

I caught sight of a couple of people out walking. Going from some place to another place. Or maybe just walking in circles. I crossed an intersection. An old guy on a pushbike rode through. I got closer to town. A couple stood watching a small white dog piss against a tree. They had a plastic cone over the dog’s head. Maybe he was a biter. They didn’t speak and I passed them silently.

I walked for about a quarter of an hour more in almost total silence until I got to the hotel. The keycard for the hotel door caught in a pocket fold, so I had to disentangle it. While I was doing that, headlight beams glinted off of a parked car and I looked around.

A blue Opel Corsa came past. Same registration plates as before. Two silhouettes in the front.

I had last seen the car about fifteen minutes earlier. If I walked briskly at around five miles per hour, fifteen minutes of walking would be just over a mile, which was a decent pace for a person. But for a car, five miles per hour is unacceptably slow, which meant that they had either stopped and waited, or had gone somewhere else and come back.