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Show Flying - 16 the buildings and stay as cool as he can in this awful heat. Wilberforce looks nervous as John Henry skims the sides of parked cars but his panicked screams of an hour before still echo embarrassingly in his ears and this time he just looks away and grits his teeth. Once out of town John Henry joyfully accelerates back up to a screaming seventy and is happy for a few moments until he gets used to it again. The convoy is still somewhere ahead. By the time they roll through Midland, a little northeast of Odessa, the sun is down far enough to shine level into the windshield of the jeep. John Henry, blinded, drives wholly by instinct, and only a fine sense of the relative positions of car and road saves them from repeated disaster. The first hint of Odessa is a blinking red light coming out of the glare ahead. John Henry, thinking of terrible accidents and mangled bodies lying on the road (an air of catastrophe hangs over the jeep) brakes hard and pulls over onto the shoulder. He peers through the glare and sees a parked police cruiser which begins to pull out as soon as John Henry stops. A head leans out and yells. "Convoy's half an hour ahead of you. Follow me," and a gloved hand beckons. The cop speeds away and the jeep follows. They drive like an arrow into the heart of Odessa, the police car flashing red, its siren wailing, the jeep wide open and barely |