No one seemed to be looking our way. Nor did I recognize anyone.
“Who told you about me?” I asked. “Someone on the plane? Who was it? Show me.”
She shook herself loose. “You figure it out. You are the detective.” Then she walked away and didn’t look back. That angry face of hers and the mystery of her anger toward me followed me all the way home.
Chapter 124
THE NEXT TWELVE hours of the trip passed very slowly, but finally I arrived in Washington. I wasn’t able to reach Nana to tell her I was home. So I just grabbed a taxi waiting at Reagan International and headed to Fifth Street.
It was a little past nine and the nighttime traffic was heavy, but I was glad to be in DC again. Sometimes it feels that way when I come home after a long, hard trip, and this time certainly qualified. I couldn’t wait to be in my own house, my own bed.
Once I was in the cab, I got lost in a kind of jet-lagged reverie.
No one had any idea about the carnage and suffering until they actually visited parts of Nigeria, Sudan, Sierra Leone—and there were no easy answers or solutions either. I didn’t believe that the violence I had seen came from regular people being evil. But those at the top were, at least some of them.
And then there were psychopaths on the loose, like the Tiger and the other killers for hire, the wild boys. The fact that terrible conditions might have made them killers hardly seemed to matter.
The irony that kept jabbing at me was that I’d spent the last dozen years chasing murderers in the States, and it seemed like child’s play now, nothing compared with what I’d seen in the past weeks.
I was shaken out of my reverie when the cab slid over to the side of the road. What was wrong now? I was home, and still misfortune followed me? What—a flat tire?
The driver peered back and nervously announced, “Engine trouble. I am sorry. Very sorry.” Then he pulled a gun and yelled, “Traitor! Die!”
Chapter 125
SOMEBODY WAS STUBBORNLY ringing the front-door bell at the Cross house. Ringing it again and again and again.
Nana was in Ali’s bedroom, putting him down the way he liked her to, lying in bed next to him until the sweet boy drifted off to sleep as she whispered the words of a favorite story.
Tonight the book was Ralph S. Mouse, and Ali wouldn’t stop giggling at every page, often a couple of times on the same page, saying, “Read it again, Nana. Read it again.”
Nana waited patiently for Jannie to get the front door. But it rang again, and then again. Persistent and rude and maddening. Jannie had been making a cake in the kitchen. Where was that girl? Why didn’t she answer the door?
“Now who can it be?” Nana mumbled as she pushed herself up and out of Ali’s bed. “I’ll be right back, Ali. . . . Janelle, you are trying my patience, and that’s not a good idea.”
But when she got to the living room, Nana Mama saw that Janelle was already at the door—which was flung wide open.
A strange boy in a red Houston Rockets basketball shirt was still ringing the bell.
“Are you some kind of a crazy person?” Nana called out as she hobbled quickly across the foyer. “Stop that bell ringing this instant! Just stop it now. What do you want here so late? Do I know you, son?”
The boy in the Rockets jersey finally took his hand off the bell. Then he held up a sawed-off shotgun for Nana to see, but she kept coming forward until she protectively held Jannie.
“I will kill dis stupid girl in a second,” he said. “And I will kill you, ol’ woman. I will not hesitate jus’ ’cause you de detective’s family.”
Chapter 126
IT ALL HAPPENED so fast in the taxi and caught me completely off guard and unprepared, but I saw a chance, and I had to take it.
I didn’t think the cab driver was an experienced killer. He’d hesitated instead of just pulling the trigger and shooting me.
So I lurched forward and grabbed the gun and his hand at the same time.
Then I smashed his wrist against the taxi’s metal partition. I smashed it again as hard as I could.
The man yelped loudly and he let go of the gun. I pulled it away and swung it toward him.
Suddenly he ducked low and then flung himself out the front door.