Aftershocks

by Mark Parragh

  She could hear sounds of panic from below—screams, something heavy falling over. Two men blocked the far end of the corridor. One was Yanis Kamkuma. They started toward her, and then she saw a room door open halfway down on her right. Another gang member looked out.

  “What’s going on?” he asked in confusion.

  “Get her!” Yanis shouted.

  She was going to die here, she thought for an instant. But then she banished that thought. She let everything fall away but the rage that drove her. The one in the doorway looked unsettled. This wasn’t the plan. There was an open door behind him, a way forward.

  She was pure animal instinct, the last shreds of the schoolgirl she’d once been pushed away. Romy clutched the knife in her hand and charged.

  Chapter 46

  Crane didn’t know if Kamkuma’s party would lure Romy Akema, but it had certainly drawn a crowd. The streets around Club Paradis were thronged with people and cars. They parked the Toyota two blocks away and walked. Both sides of the street were lined with low buildings. Crane noted small shops, a restaurant, and a dental office. Club Paradis was at the middle of its block, two stories of poured cement coated in bright lights and neon. Dance music hung in the humid night air, heavy on the bass.

  “Stick close to me inside,” he told Georges. It would be easy to get separated in the crowded club. He would have preferred to leave Georges in the car. There was a slight possibility that Kamkuma or one of his men would recognize him. But if Romy was here, he’d need Georges to get her out. She didn’t know him, and she’d hardly leave with some stranger in a nightclub because he said she was in danger.

  They passed two men at the door who were only watching the women and paid no attention to them. Inside, the club was hot. Music throbbed and colored lights swept the packed dance floor. Crane scanned the floor, getting the layout of the place and looking for the gang members he knew would be here. They weren’t hard to spot. It was in the way they carried themselves.

  But it was more than that, he quickly realized. They were moving through the crowd with purpose, homing in on the bar at the far end of the dance floor. At least one of them had his hand cupped over an earpiece.

  They’d found her. Or at least they thought they had. Georges picked up on it too. Crane saw him tense. Then there was a gunshot, nearly drowned by the music. A moment later, five more shots followed in quick succession. Crane heard screams. Around him, people looked about, startled and unsure what was happening. That wouldn’t last long.

  “Romy!” Georges shouted, and started forward. Crane quickly grabbed him and pulled him back.

  “This way!”

  He could already hear the wave of panic coming toward them. In another moment there would be a stampede for the doors. He dragged Georges back the way they’d come as the screams engulfed them. He elbowed his way through the crowd, trying to stay ahead of the worst of it. Georges followed in his wake. As they neared the door, a young woman stumbled on her high heels and fell in Crane’s path. He swept her up before she was trampled. In her panic she tried to fight him off. Crane kept her moving and managed to push her through the front doors. Then she whirled and was gone.

  Georges was in the doorway, looking back over his shoulder and calling, “Romy! Romy!” Crane pulled him clear as the crowd started to spill out onto the sidewalk.

  “I’ll find her!” he shouted over the screams and cries. “Go! Get the car!”

  It took a moment, but then Georges nodded and hurried away down the street. Crane pushed his way through running bodies to a spot up the sidewalk. He pressed his back against a parked car and watched the crowd streaming out the front doors. If Romy came out, he’d see her. If not, then once the crowd thinned out, he’d head back in and look for her. He kept one hand on the Beretta under his shirt.

  People kept streaming out the doors. Some were hurt now. Crane saw ripped clothing, a man with blood streaming from a wound to his forehead. The crowd had flooded the street. People searched for friends. Cars honked as they tried to move through the throng.

  Crane was just about to try and press his way back toward the doors when he heard glass shattering above him. Something exploded out of a second-floor window, plummeting down in a glittering shower of fragments, and slammed into the hood of a parked car. It was a nightstand, Crane realized. The car’s alarm added its shriek to the din in the street. The crowd looked up, momentarily distracted. Then two figures hurtled from the window, caught briefly in the shaft of light from inside. They pinwheeled toward the sidewalk, clutching each other. Crane saw a woman’s bare legs.

  Then they slammed into the cement, and the screaming started again.

  Einar sat in his car, well back from the chaos, watching as people swarmed out of the club and milled about in confused panic. He knew what he was watching now. The black man was Georges Benly Akema. He didn’t know how he was connected to Crane, but that didn’t matter. They’d come to Cameroon looking for Georges's sister, Romy. Apparently, they expected to find her here at the nightclub.

  Something had clearly gone awry.

  Here came Akema now, hurrying back toward their parked car. He ran right past Einar’s window, and Einar briefly considered getting out and simply killing him in the street. He would be an easy target here, in the confusion and separated from Crane. But no, that would just tell Crane that he was here. Right now, they had no idea he was stalking them. Best to keep it that way until he knew more.

  He spotted Crane, an island of stillness in the swarming crowd. Einar grabbed the camera from the passenger seat and zoomed in on him. He was scanning the people fleeing from the club, no doubt looking for the girl. Which meant it wasn’t Crane who had caused the panic. That was interesting. What else was going on here?

  Movement caught his eye, and he shifted his focus up just in time to see two bodies hurtle out of a window and plunge to the street. They slammed into the sidewalk and didn’t move. Crane moved quickly toward them. Another figure appeared in the shattered window. He leaned out, looking down, and Einar saw a gun in his hand. Then there were two more shots, and the gunman staggered back out of view.

  Einar panned down to the street again. It was Crane that had shot the man. He put his pistol away, then he bent down over the two fallen bodies. After a moment he stood up again with one of them—the girl—slung over his shoulders.

  Einar clucked his tongue. That must be the sister. This was turning into much more than just searching for a missing person. What had Mr. Crane gotten himself into now?

  The shattered window, the falling bodies, and the gunshots had set off another wave of panic. Crane checked the window. The man he’d shot had stumbled back into the room, though his gun had fallen nearby. The window was clear. He stuck the Beretta back into his waistband and knelt beside Romy.

  She’d landed on top of the other man, thankfully. She was dazed from the fall but seemed otherwise unhurt. He wasn’t so sure about the man she’d landed on. Blood oozed from the back of his skull onto the sidewalk. A serious concussion at best. He didn’t have time to determine whether the man was dead, and frankly he didn’t care. He was surprised there had been no police presence around the party to begin with. They would certainly launch a heavy response to something like this. He needed to get the girl out of here.

  Crane hauled her up and got her into a fireman’s carry. He looked around for Georges and the car. All around him was a chaos of frightened people and honking horns. A crying girl hurried past, shouting into her cellphone. On the street, a car lurched forward and crunched into the rear of a taxi. A motorcycle roared up onto the sidewalk and swept past him as people dove out of the way. Georges wasn’t going to be able to make it through this. He’d have to meet him halfway.

  Crane oriented himself and headed down the street with Romy slung over his shoulders. She was starting to groan and squirm.

  “It’s okay,” he called over his shoulder. “I’m with Georges. I’ll take you to him.” He had no idea if she understood h
im. Even if she had, in her position Crane wasn’t sure he’d believe it. He was a stranger carrying her off through the streets in the middle of a near-riot.

  He could feel a belt around her thigh as it pressed against his forearm and what felt like a small knife. He couldn’t take it from her at the moment, but at least she couldn’t reach it in this position. The last thing he needed was the girl he was trying to rescue plunging a blade into his spine.

  A horn honked and he looked up to see their rented Toyota twenty yards ahead. Georges was on the wrong side of the street, waving at him from the car window.

  “Unlock the back!” Crane shouted as he carried Romy between two cars. He shoved someone out of the way and hauled the door open. He dumped the girl into the back seat and fell in after her.

  “Go!”

  Romy started to struggle as Crane landed on her. He managed to yank the door closed. Then he reached between her legs to grab the knife she carried there and tossed it into the front.

  “What the hell?” Georges said over the continuous, frantic beeping of the car’s collision sensors.

  “She’s all right! Get us out of here. And talk to her. Let her hear your voice.”

  The car lurched forward a bit and stopped again. Crane saw people pushing past all around.

  “It’s me, Romy,” Georges was saying over and over. “It’s Georges. You’re okay. I found you. You’re okay.”

  She had been flailing and struggling against Crane as he tried to get them both upright in the seat. Gradually she came back to herself. Their eyes met, and Crane saw the terror in them as she cringed back against the door. She scrabbled for the door handle, but the child safety lock was engaged, and the door wouldn’t open. Then her brother’s voice seemed to break through her panic.

  “Georges?” she said weakly.

  “It’s okay, Romy,” he said. “It’s me. You’re okay.”

  “How are you here? Who is this?” she said, looking at Crane.

  “He’s a friend. You’re okay. We’re here to take you home.”

  Then, somehow, Georges found a route out of the chaos, and the car was moving. They sped away into the night as the first sirens started to wail behind them. Crane moved as far from her as he could in the back seat. He kept his arms at his side and tried not to agitate her. They’d found her, alive, and gotten her safely away from the gangsters searching for her.

  Now all they had to do was get her out of Cameroon.

  Chapter 47

  The morning sun filtered through the gap in the curtains and fell across the foot of the bed. Georges sat in the room’s armchair and watched Romy sleep. As the sun rose, the narrow shaft of light angled slowly up toward her face. Soon it would fall across her eyes and wake her.

  Georges wasn’t sure he was looking forward to that.

  They’d gotten her back to the room, cleaned her up, and confirmed she wasn’t badly hurt. She hadn’t wanted to talk then. Georges had given her his bed, and she’d finally gotten to sleep a few hours ago. For Georges, sleep was out of the question. He’d passed the time looking through the phone Romy had strapped under one arm. He dumped its memory to his laptop and sifted through the call records and position data to reconstruct her actions over the last several days. She’d stalked the Ibiza Boys like a hunter, snapping covert photos and taking notes. She’d collected addresses and descriptions of cars. She’d clearly put a lot of thought and planning into her vendetta. Crane had actually said that, for someone without any training, he was impressed by her instinct for fieldcraft.

  She’d tagged a spot near Alice Nydo’s home as “bag.” Georges assumed that was where the rest of her things would be found, presumably including her passport. They’d need that to get her out of Cameroon, and Crane had driven off to retrieve it. Georges kept vigil over her while his thoughts raced, and he tried to come to terms with what he’d learned.

  He hadn’t seen Romy since her eighteenth birthday. What had happened to her since then? How had the sweet little sister he’d known turned into a killer? What would happen when he took her home? Would she stay? Was it even safe to take her home?

  So many questions he’d never imagined needing to ask. The answers could only come from her. But it didn’t matter in the end. He’d found her, and she was safe. He’d promised his parents that he would bring her home, and he would keep that promise. The rest they could work out later.

  In the end, the beam of sunlight didn’t wake Romy. It was still edging over her forearm when she rolled over and looked up at him.

  “Georges.”

  “Hey.”

  “Where am I? No, I remember now. Hotel.”

  Georges nodded.

  “Who’s the other man? Where did he go?”

  “His name’s John. He went to get your stuff. You can trust him, Romy. He’s a friend.”

  Romy sat up on the edge of the bed. She was in her underwear. “Where are my clothes?”

  “Your dress was a wreck. I’ve got something you can put on for now.”

  “I had a knife.”

  “You don’t need it, Romy! You’re safe.” He got up and tossed her a pair of canvas slacks and a shirt. She shook her head at them but pulled on the pants. She took her phone from the nightstand and stuffed it into a pocket.

  “John will be back with your bag soon. Or we can get you something better to wear once we’re out of here,” said Georges. “We’ll have a couple layovers.”

  She paused for a moment, then resumed pulling the navy t-shirt over her shoulders.

  “I got in trouble last night,” she said, “and I appreciate you getting me out. I do. But why are you here, Georges?”

  “Why do you think? You’re my sister! I’ve been looking for you for two years. Private detectives all over America. Running all around Yaoundé lying to your friends. We just needed to know you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “And you can come home.”

  She looked at him like he’d just stepped out of a flying saucer. “You mean America? I’m not going back there,” she said. “This is home.”

  “It’s not like it was before,” he said. “I got a job. A good job. We’re doing all right. Things are better now.”

  She looked across the bed at him, and for a moment her expression softened. “Mom and Dad?”

  “They’re okay. Dad’s tutoring kids in French. It gives him something so he feels worthwhile again. Mom’s in therapy. She’s doing better. I’m working on a prosthetic hand for her. They miss you. They just need you to come back, and we can be a family again. You can’t stay here, Romy. Not after this.”

  The softness was gone as quickly as it had come. She stalked around the bed and confronted him. “You got it all figured out, don’t you? Of course you got a good job. You’re a genius! They can use that. You can do tricks for them. Me, I’m just a black girl with a funny accent. You get that, Georges? I’m black there! With all the shit that comes with it that’s nothing to do with me. You don’t know what I’ve had to do.”

  “I told you, it’s different—”

  “I don’t want that life,” she snarled. “I don’t want to be black anymore. Do you hear? I want to just be Romy again. Like it used to be here. But I don’t have a life here anymore either, do I? I used to. It was a good life here, wasn’t it?”

  “It was.”

  “And those bastards took it away! They took everything. They took away my mama! They took my family, my school, my friends, everything. And they made me run away to a place that never wanted me! I’m glad there’s a life for you there, and for Mom and Dad. But there’s nothing there for me.”

  “That’s not true, Romy!”

  She ignored him. “I want to make a life here, and I can’t do that with those monsters here. Always knowing they’re out there, knowing they could take it away again whenever they want. No. No. They have to die for what they did. They have to die so I can be free of them.”

  “You’re not…you got lucky!” He’d
wanted to say she wasn’t a killer, but God help him, she was. “You took them by surprise, and you got lucky. But they know who you are now. That party last night was all for you. To draw you in and kill you. And how do you think we knew to look for you in Cameroon? The police called me! They know what you’ve done too. But it’s all right. They can’t prove anything. If we get you back to America, we can make all this go away. But you’ve got no future in Cameroon. You made sure of that when you killed those men!”

  “Then I’ve got no future anywhere, have I?” she snapped. “I’ll make a new one. Go back to your home, Georges. Tell them I’m all right.”

  She pushed past him, and he stumbled against the chair and fell backwards to the floor.

  “Romy! What are you—wait!”

  She threw the door open and disappeared into the hallway without another word.

  Shit. Georges scrambled to his feet and ran after her. The hallway was empty. There hadn’t been time for the elevator. He dashed down the hall, turned a corner, and found the door to the fire stairs. He threw it open, and he could hear her footsteps echoing in the stairwell, hurrying down.

  “Romy!” His voice echoed off the cement, but her footsteps never faltered. Then another door creaked open. Georges rushed after her. At the ground floor, he emerged into a back corner of the lobby. He saw Romy running out the front doors, silhouetted against the bright morning sun. She turned right and disappeared.

  By the time Georges reached the street, she was half a block ahead. The street was quiet this time of morning. Romy dodged around a woman heading for market. A few bicycles rolled by. Then a car suddenly lurched across the street, leapt onto the sidewalk, and cut her off.