Juba Good by Vicki Delany Page B

“He was with Ella. Find her. Make sure she’s okay.”
    The waitress looked at me for a long time. She gave me a small nod. And then she slipped away.
    â€œWe’ll be back,” I said. “Regularly.”
    A clap of thunder sounded overhead. A drop of rain fell onto my hand.
    Deng held Nigel on the ground. The Englishman’s face was pressed into the dirt. “Get him up,” I said. “And into the truck.”

Chapter Fifteen
    We took Nigel to the police station and charged him with car theft. He made phone calls to the head of the UN mission and the British embassy.
    He didn’t spend any time in jail.
    Once the smirking Nigel had gone, I took Deng back to get his motorbike. We found it where he’d left it. He started up the engine and roared off into the night. Bolts of lightning lit up the dark sky, and the rain poured down.
    I had not asked about the woman he’d been with when I phoned.
    I’ll never know if what I did that night was right.
    Deng said nothing, but I knew I’d disappointed him.
    He’d wanted to let Nigel drive the woman to the river. Wait until he was about to kill her. Then make the arrest. It wouldn’t be so easy to get off a charge of attempted murder. With Nigel in jail, we could have started making the case for the other killings. Same place. Same mo. It should have been easy to prove, even in Juba.
    I couldn’t take that chance. If we’d lost him, Ella would have died.
    I didn’t see Nigel again. He was sent back to England right quick. A slap on the wrist for being so foolish as to be caught swiping a car.
    His story was that he wanted to meet up with a woman and couldn’t get a ride. So he stole a car. He would have returned it the next day. No harm done, eh, mate?
    Nigel denied stealing Sven’s Land Cruiser. I had no proof. It was never found. After using it, Nigel would have abandoned it on the backstreets and walked away. It would be in some remote town by now, being used as a taxi.
    I searched Nigel’s room. Unfortunately, he’d been allowed to pack one suitcase first.
    I found a note among the remains of his things.
    It didn’t have my name on it. But I knew it was for me.
    He’d drawn a smiley face in red ink.
    A scrap of white ribbon lay beside it.
    Serial killers don’t spring up out of nowhere. There would have been incidents involving black women in Nigel’s past. Unlikely, though, that they ended in murder. He took that big step knowing the risk of being caught was far less here.
    A country without the resources to investigate human predators.
    A country with only a few people to stand against the tide.
    People like John Deng. Good people. People who needed help.
    I’d done a lot of thinking while I waited outside the Blue Nile for Deng.
    I thought about all that I miss here. My daughters. But they’re adults and have lives of their own to live. Jenny, my wife, who I still love after all our years together. Lush green grass and towering old trees. Snowtopped mountains and clean air. Foggy mornings and soft rain. Flowers. How I miss flowers!
    This was the heart of Africa. But so dry and dusty. Built up and polluted. There wasn’t much color. A few foreign women planted pots of herbs and flowering shrubs. Some of the better restaurants stuck a couple of bougainvillea bushes outside. The flowers were soon covered in dust. The colors faded.
    I missed working with men and women like me. With the same life experiences. Same dreams and disappointments.
    Domestic disputes and runaway kids. Drunk drivers and car accidents. Bar brawls. Elderly people slipping on the ice.
    Same stuff here. Except for slipping on the ice. But somehow, here, in this troubled land, I felt that I might be able to accomplish something. I wasn’t just going through the motions anymore.
    I sat down at my desk. I opened my email program.
    I stared at the screen and thought for a long time.
    I’d never