Free World of Trouble (9786167611136) by Jake Needham

bloodhound. He
stumbled around for nearly an hour, doubling back and turning
around so many times he figured he had to be going in circles. He
was about to give up on the whole idea and find a taxi to take him
back to the hotel when a sign over a shop house caught his eye:
SALEM ALI BAKERY.
    At first he couldn’t work out why the sign
seemed so familiar, but then all in a rush it came back to him. He
was poking his head above the wall of bales where he and Charlie
had taken cover. The first shooter was holding the big handgun in
front of him in a perfect Weaver stance. The shooter was lifting
the gun’s muzzle and swinging it toward him. And just as Shepherd
ducked back behind the bags, he caught sight of that sign on a
building behind the shooter.
    Shepherd looked around. He was standing in an
open courtyard formed by two rows of shop houses and now he
realized it was the same one in which the ambush had taken place
yesterday. He hadn’t recognized it at first because nothing about
it looked the same. The two pallets of burlap bales behind which he
and Charlie had taken cover were gone, leaving the front of the
building through which they had made their escape appearing
curiously denuded. Everything else was different as well.
    There had been several big wooden crates
where Charlie’s driver had taken cover, and Shepherd clearly
remembered seeing on CNN a pile of red and blue cement bags against
which the second gunman had died. Neither of those were there
anymore either. Instead, one side of the courtyard was now littered
with haphazard piles of yellow, red, and blue plastic crates, most
of which appeared to be filled with women’s clothing. The other
side of the courtyard was empty.
    Near the place where the CNN cameraman must
have stood, several dozen long bolts of dark-colored cloth were
propped on end against the wall and six or eight small metal chairs
with black vinyl seats were pushed into a tight clump. They were
the kind of chairs people used to call stenographers’ chairs back
when there were still such things as stenographers. A man dressed
in a white dishdasha and wearing a red and white checked ghutra wrapped around his head was sitting quietly in one of
the chairs at the front of the clump. Shepherd couldn’t see the
man’s face clearly at that distance, but he was old and weathered
and his jaw was working as if he were chewing something.
    This did not look like the place where a
political assassination attempt had occurred only twenty-four hours
earlier, a place where two men and a woman had died.
    And yet, it was.
    Shepherd walked over to the building through
which he and Charlie had escaped. A metal shutter was pulled down
over the front window and the door was locked. He ran his eyes
slowly over the pitted concrete surface of the building’s facade,
but saw no signs of bullet marks. The shots the gunman fired in
their direction must have gone into the bales, and someone had
taken the bales away.
    He turned and walked slowly toward the old
man sitting in the stenographer’s chair. The surface of the
courtyard was paved with concrete stones mortared into neat rows,
and his eyes scanned back and forth over them as he walked. He saw
no shell casings, but no doubt those would have all been picked up
by now anyway. He saw no bloodstains either, and yet three people
had bled to death right here.
    When he reached the place where the old man
was, he rolled out one of the stenographer’s chairs and sat down.
The man remained silent, not even turning his head. If he cared one
way or another that Shepherd was there, he gave no sign. Looking up
the courtyard, Shepherd saw he was viewing the area at roughly the
same angle from which the CNN cameraman had been filming. The
perspective was right. The facades of the buildings were right.
Only the goods stored in front of the buildings were different.
    Still, there was no sign at all this was a
crime scene or that an investigation had been conducted here. No
tape,