James PATTERSON - Cross Country

Maybe the building had been a church once. Now it was an all-purpose sort of place – one large, dingy room with tables and chairs that started to fill up as the sun went down.

Someone turned on a boom box, and the guy who showed up with a keg of Star Beer dispensed it into previously used plastic cups and took money.

Moses and his friends wouldn’t come inside and let me buy them a drink. They said they’d be kicked out if they couldn’t pay for their own beer. Instead, Moses told me, he’d hang out with some other men around an open fire, singing and talking, not far from the hall, and he pointed in the direction where he’d be.

I spent the next few hours casually asking around and mostly getting nowhere. Even the few people who would talk to me about mining shut up as soon as I moved my questions anywhere else… such as to the subject of the illegal diamond trade.

Twice I noticed men in camos and flip-flops licking their palms. Diamonds for sale, they were saying. You need only swallow them to get them out of the country. Both of them stopped and spoke with me, but just long enough to figure out I wasn’t selling or buying.

I was starting to think this night might be a washout, when a teenage kid came over and stood next to me against the wall.

“I hear you lookin’ for someone,” he said, loud enough just for me. Busta Rhymes was doing his thing on the boom box at high volume.

“Who do you hear I’m looking for?”

“He’s already gone, mister. Left the country, but I can’t tell you where he is. The Tiger.”

I looked down at the kid. He was maybe five foot nine, muscled, and cocky-looking. Younger than I’d first thought too – sixteen or seventeen maybe. Barely older than Damon. Like a lot of teenagers I’d seen on the continent, he wore an NBA jersey. His was a Houston Rockets jersey, an American basketball team that had once featured an excellent player from Nigeria named Hakeem Olajuwon.

“And who are you?” I asked the boy.

“You wanna know more ’bout anything, it’s a hundred dollars American. I’ll be outside. It’s dangerous to talk in here. Too many eyes and ears. Outside, mister. We talk out there. One hundred dollars.”

He pushed off from the wall and pimp-strutted toward the front door, which was wide open to the street. I watched him drain his cup of beer, drop it on a table, and leave the hall.

I had no intention of letting him get away, but I wasn’t going to walk outside the way he wanted me to either. It was his accent that told me what I needed to know. Not Sierra Leonean. Yoruban. The boy was from Nigeria.

I counted thirty, then slipped out the back of Modern Serenity.

SURVEILLANCE. I WAS decent at it, always had been good at keeping a step ahead of an opponent. Even, hopefully, some as tricky and dangerous as the Tiger and his gang.

I worked a wide perimeter around to the front. When I got to the corner of the neighboring building, I had a pretty clear view of the town hall entrance.

The kid in the red Houston Rockets jersey was standing off to the side with another, younger boy. They were facing different directions, surveying the street while they talked.

An ambush? I had to wonder.

After a few minutes, the older one went back inside, presumably to look for me. I didn’t wait to make my next move. If he had half a brain, he’d go exactly the way I’d just come.

I skirted the dirt intersection and changed position, moving to a burned-out doorway on the opposite corner of the street. It was attached to the black concrete skeleton of whatever the building had once been, possibly a general store.

I pressed back into the empty door frame and hung there out of sight, watching, doing the surveillance as best I could.

Considering that I was working on Mars.

Sure enough, Houston Rockets came out a minute later, then paused right where I had been standing before.

His partner ran over and they conferred, nervously looking around for me.

I decided that as soon as they made a move, I’d follow them. If they split up, I’d stick with the older one, Rockets.

That’s when a voice came from directly behind me.

“Hey, mister, mister. Want to buy a stone? Want to get your skull crushed in?”

I turned, and before I saw anyone in the dark, something hard and heavy clocked me in the head; a rock or a brick, maybe.

It stunned me and I fell to one knee. My vision whited out, then went black before it started to come back.

Someone grabbed my arm and yanked me away from the street into a building. Then more rough hands – I didn’t know how many – forced me to the ground and flat on my back.

My awareness swam in fast circles. I was working hard to get my bearings. I could feel several people gripping my arms and legs, holding me to the floor with their strong, lithe bodies.

As my vision got a little sharper, it was still hard to make any of them out in the dark. All I saw were vague, small shadows, but lots of them.

All the size of boys.

“YO!” ONE OF the threatening shadows called out with a voice too cocky and young to be anything but a street punk’s. “Over here! We got di bastard good now.”

I was flying blind, almost literally, but I refused to go down for the count so easily. I figured that if I did, I was probably dead.

I shook off whoever was on my right arm and swung at whoever had my left. None of them was stronger than me, but collectively they were like fly paper covering every inch of my body. I fought even harder, fighting for my life, I knew.

I finally struggled to get halfway to my feet, each leg carrying an extra hundred pounds, when the other two bangers from the street came running in.

One of them shined a flashlight on me; the other smashed the butt of a pistol into my face.

I felt my nose snap. Again!

“Sonofabitch!” I yelled.

The blinding pain ran up into my brain and seemed to spread through my whole body. It was worse than the first time, if that was possible. My first thought was, You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

The killer boys swarmed all over me, half as many this time, and brought me down. A sneakered foot came to rest on my forehead.

Then I felt the cold metal of a gun barrel pressed hard into my cheek.

“He da one?” someone asked.

A flashlight’s bright light sent another spike of pain through my eyes.

“He da one, Azi.” I recognized the voice from the town hall. The speaker crouched down next to my head. “Listen, we gonna send you out of here with a message. No one fuck with us, you understand?”

I tried to raise my head and he fired a shot into the ground right next to my temple. “You understand?”

I stopped straining and lay back. I couldn’t hear in one ear. Was I deaf in an ear now too? It was the pistol that kept me where I was. More than anything, I was seething mad.

“Go ahead,” the lead punk said. I saw the silhouette of a long blade in somebody’s hand. A machete, I thought.

Jesus, no!

Houston Rockets leaned in close again, rubbing his pistol up and down my temple. “You move, you die, Captain America. You stay still, most of you goin’ home.”

“THIS GONNA HURT real bad. You gonna scream like baby girl. Starting now!”

They pulled my arm out straighter and held it tight so I couldn’t move. Either they were getting stronger, or I was starting to lose it. I had never been closer to panic in my life.

“At the joint, Azi. Less bone,” said Rocketman in the coolest, calmest tone.

The blade touched the crook of my arm softly once. Then the machete was raised high. They boy called Azi grinned down at me, enjoying this like the psychopath that he was.