20
Alex called Janine Novak’s cell phone and told her to ask her father, quietly so that the police officers couldn’t hear, to call him when he had a chance. He hung up, ran some water in the hotel bathroom’s washbasin and shaved, carefully and painfully, with a disposable razor.
His seat belt had saved his life, though his chest felt as though it had been kicked by a horse and his face was flecked with dried blood from where the windscreen had shattered and sprayed him when the Land Cruiser had landed, nose first, in the bottom of the deep concrete stormwater culvert.
He’d passed out – for how long he didn’t know – and when he came to he was surprised to find himself alive. He guessed that the police had probably been hot on his tail after he’d left the hospital, and the man who had sh
