Cross Country

12:00
on the bedside table next to my face.
    It was morning, and the power at the hotel was obviously back on.
    When I rolled over to answer the phone, my whole body resisted with an aching stiffness and the pain of severe bruising. It brought everything back into focus. Jail, the beatings, the murder of Ellie and her family, the investigation.
    “Alex Cross,” I said.
    “Don’t do that.”
    “Who is this?”
    “It’s Flaherty. Don’t answer the phone with your name. You never know who —”
    “What time is it?” I asked Flaherty. Too early for a lecture anyway.
    I stared up at the ceiling, then down the length of my body. I was still in my clothes, and my mouth felt like paste. My busted nose was throbbing again too. There were bloodstains all over the pillow, both dark and bright red.
    “Eleven o’clock. I’ve been calling all morning. Listen. I can give you a couple of hours if you make it soon, and then I’m out on assignment till next Monday.”
    “What have you got? Anything at all?”
    “Besides the eczema on my ass? I’ve got the closest thing to a cooperative contact you’re going to find in Lagos. You been to the bank yet?”
    “I haven’t been to the john yet.”
    “Yeah, well, sleep when you’re dead, right? Get yourself a driver. The front desk’ll set it up, but tell them you want it for the day, not by the hour. You’re welcome for the travel tip.
    “Go to the Citibank on Broad Street. And tell the guy to take the causeway so it’ll sound like you know what the hell you’re talking about. If you get going, you can make it by one. I’ll meet you there. And don’t be late.
Citibank on Broad
.”
    “Yeah, I got it the first time.”
    “I could tell you were a quick study. Get going!”

Chapter 50
    BY THE TIME I pulled away from the Superior with a steaming and delicious cup of dark Nigerian coffee in one hand, I felt like someone had hit my “reset” button.
    Not counting the way my face looked or half my muscles felt, it was as though I were getting a first day in Africa all over again. I thought about Ellie’s being here just a few weeks ago and wondered what had happened to her. Had she come into contact with the Tiger? If so, how?
    There was no case file or intelligence to go over — my clothes and passport and empty wallet had been the only things returned to me — so I spent the slow crawl over to Lagos Island just taking in the sights.
    “You know they call Lagos the ‘go-slow city,’ ” my driver told me with a friendly smile. All the many abandoned cars on the side of the road, he said, came from people running out of gas in perpetual jams, or “go-slows,” as they called them.
    Our pace picked up somewhat on the mainland bridge, where I saw downtown Lagos for the first time. From a distance, its cityscape was typical of large cities, all concrete, glass, and steel.
    As we got closer, though, it started to look more like something out of an Escher painting, with one impossible cluster of buildings tucked in and around the next, and the next, and the next. The density here — the crowds, the traffic, the infrastructure — was startling to me, and I had been to New York many times and even to Mexico City.
    When we finally got to the Citibank on Broad Street, Flaherty was standing out front, smoking. The first thing he said to me was, “Jack Nicholson in
Chinatown
.” He grinned at his little joke, then said, “You squeamish?”
    “Not so much. Why?”
    He pointed at my nose. “We can make a quick stop after this. Fix you right up.”
    Meanwhile, he said, I should go in and get my replacement cards and also the cash I owed him. Plus whatever I needed for myself and at least two hundred American, in small bills if I could get them.
    “What for?” I asked.
    “Grease.”
    I took him at his word and did what he said.
    From there, my driver took us across Five Cowrie Creek to the more upscale of the city’s major islands — Victoria — and to a private medical practice on the fifth floor of an office building.
Very
private.
    The doctor saw me right away. He examined my face and then gave me one quick, and excruciating, adjustment. It was the strangest doctor visit I’ve ever had, hands down. There were no questions about my injury and no request for payment. I was in and out in less than ten minutes.
    Back in the car, I asked Flaherty how long he’d been based in Lagos. He had obvious juice here, and plenty of it. He also knew enough not to