Juba Good Read Free Page A

book. The surface was unmarked. He didn’t bother to flip back through the pages to check. His cell phone rang, and he pulled it out of his shirt pocket. He began to talk.
    I leaned across him and turned the book around. I flipped the page. The latest entry had been at noon yesterday.
    I should have known I was wasting my time. I left the building. I sat in the UN SUV , air-conditioning running hard, and thought. I could try the hospital. If anyone was looking for the dead woman, they’d be more likely to go there than to the cops.
    I decided I couldn’t face it. Let her be. If no one else cared, why should I?

Chapter Four
    But I’ve never been good at letting things go. Instead of heading home, I drove to the bend in the road. Blue water trucks were lined up around the corner, waiting their turn. The drivers squatted by the side of the road or stood in groups, gossiping. I left my vehicle at Notos and walked over. The workers and drivers paid no attention to me.
    Garbage collection is an unknown concept in much of Africa. Scraps of paper blew in the dusty wind. Cardboard floated in the red puddles. Water bottles were stacked against walls where the wind had left them. I reached the spot where we’d found the woman. I squatted and pulled on a pair of latex gloves—to protect me, not the evidence. I poked through trash, leaves and twigs. I found a handle broken off a cooking pot and the leavings of stray dogs.
    Then a flash of color caught my eye. I pulled a glittering red earring out of the rubbish. Glass. I thought back. Yes, the dead woman had been wearing one, and only one, red earring. I slipped it into my pocket. I started to push myself back up. A white square caught my eye. A business card, the sort you’d find anywhere in the world. Reasonably clean with a smudge of red dust in one corner. It hadn’t been there for long.
    The card was for Blue Nile Restaurant. A place on the river, with tent fabric for roof and walls. It serves Middle Eastern food, mostly. I’ve been there once. I didn’t care for the cooking and never went back.
    I tucked the card into my pocket beside the red earring. Then I went home to get ready for work.

Chapter Five
    The main road through Juba features a row of streetlights. Good solid streetlights of the sort you’d see in any western city. Tonight, some drunk had found out just how solid they were.
    By the time we got to the scene, the crowd of onlookers was growing. The car, a battered old Toyota Corolla, was buried headfirst in the base of a lamppost. The driver was buried headfirst in the dashboard. He had not bothered to put on his seat belt. Nor had his female companion. She was now little more than a bloody lump thirty yards farther up the road. The car was about twenty years old and did not come equipped with air bags. It might well have been stolen off a lot in Vancouver.
    I told Deng we were here to do crowd control until the bodies were carted away. We would try to keep the curious from going through the wreck and the pockets of the deceased.
    Shame about that streetlight. It would have cost a lot, in a country that didn’t have much to spend on luxuries.
    A van arrived and the bodies were loaded up. Then everyone drifted away, and Deng and I got back into our truck. An old woman came out of nowhere and began sweeping the road with a homemade broom.
    The rest of the night was quiet.
    The next day, I decided to treat myself to lunch out. Back home, I have a reputation for being quite the good cook. When the kids were growing up and my shifts permitted, I did most of the cooking. Jenny’s a practical cook. Meat and potatoes, lots of pasta and hearty stews. I like to try new and different things. I love nothing more than to have dinner parties. To dress up, put out the good china and make my favorite recipes.
    Here, I soon learned that fresh meat is something you don’t want to buy. It hangs in the market in the sun for hours,