Read Troubleshooters (Jackson Chase Novella Book 2) for Free Online Page B

bakery for delivery to the station.
    “We will see if Miss Chen can find anything out about the phone,” he explained. “Now, let us see if we can find these young men.”
    Our approach was as before, with Sterba and Mwanga taking the back, while Kahembe and I headed for the front door. Again we were cautious, approaching through the dirt and grasses at an oblique angle. I checked the lone window for movement, and had the sense that the building was empty. As I looked at the door, however, I noticed that the wood around the knob had splintered, and it was an inch or two ajar.
    I crouched slightly and withdrew my sidearm from its holster. Seeing this, Kahembe adjusted as well. My hands signaled him to look at the door. He nodded and drew his weapon.
    We arrived at the side of the building and I took position closest to the door, Kahembe behind me. I moved my SIG to my left hand, and used my right foot to push the door open. Bursting quickly into the doorway with my weapon leading the way, I was immediately hit by a terrible smell and a waft of flies.
    I took in the interior space, scanning from right to left. Empty. I stepped forward, looking for hidden spaces where someone might hide. Nothing.
    “Clear,” I said and holstered my weapon. Kahembe joined me inside, followed by Sterba and Mwanga.
    “This doesn’t look good,” observed Sterba.
    “No,” I said, “it doesn’t.”
    The inside of the tiny house was simple. There were two beds, one on each side of the single room, both tidy and made. A small bench top with a sink looked old and precarious, but the dishes appeared to be clean and were stacked in an orderly way. It looked like the home of two young men that had little, but took pride in their meager belongings.
    But the center of the room was what drew our attention. A table and two chairs, one plastic and one of wood, had been knocked over and were resting in a pool of blood. It had coagulated, merging with spilled coffee, milk, and bread to form a sickly almost gelatinous goo. The surface swarmed with flies and insects.
    “So much blood,” Kahembe said, transfixed by the horrible scene.
    “No one could survive this much blood loss,” said Sterba.
    “But where are the bodies?” I asked.
    Kahembe looked up from the mess. “We will look, but to be honest it is very easy to dispose of a body in Africa. Leave it in the bush at night, and it’s gone by morning.”
    While delivered as a simple fact of life in Tanzania, this statement created a vision that was both vivid and horrific. But it also brought with it the firming of our resolve to find those responsible.

7
    W e made our way back to the police station, where Kahembe briefed his officers on the status of the young men. Chen had made her way there as well, and was working on her laptop at a battered old desk. We found two chairs, took a seat, and updated her on the bakery and the grisly scene at the delivery boys’ home.
    “I hope you have better news,” I said, pointing to the phone we had found at the bakery. It sat next to her computer in a new plastic bag with a few illegible grease pencil markings.
    “I’ve made some progress,” she said. “We received access to the carrier’s switches, which, to be honest, I wasn’t expecting.” She gestured for us to take a look round the police station, and we immediately knew what she meant. Not a single desk bore a computer. A few had typewriters, but for the most part pencil and paper were the go-to data entry tools.
    “One of the officers has what they call a ‘computer driver’s license’, meaning the basic skills to operate email and the few applications they have. He’d never done anything like this, and explained that they typically use manually-typed records for looking up phone owners.”
    “Oh, no! You mean actual paper?” Sterba said in a mocking tone.
    Chen fixed him with a look, and continued. “Since we have a precise time for the detonation, and considering the early hour,