Ugo fiddled with his phone as he watched the dark busy street from behind the railing of the second floor of the building where he stood. He debated if it was too early to call the woman to confirm if she’d received the package he sent. It’d been 3 hours since Kolade left him, so the delivery should’ve been done by now.
He would wait one more hour to make the call. Then he would know if Kolade was the honest man he’d thought he was, or merely a boy stupid enough to cross him. He hoped for his sake that it was the former.
He pulled a picture from his chest pocket and stared painfully at the wide smiling face of a girl. His daughter.
‘Don’t worry Ada,’ he said, ‘help is coming shortly.’
***
Kolade walked up to the gate of his house, tired from another day of job hunting. He was thankful at the very least that it’d been an uneventful day, unlike yesterday which had been a nightmare. His conscience still pointed guilty fingers at him for the delivery he’d failed to make, but he shook it off.
The news of his mother’s hospital admission had been the push he’d needed to accept Ugo’s deal yesterday. He’d left Ugo resolved to make the delivery, but after walking to the junction in severe pain, he decided that it was better to do it today, so he’d headed home instead. He’d been in too much pain to risk going to a random address on Lagos Island at night. Upon getting home, his curiosity had pushed him to open the bag. It was only reasonable that he knew what he was carrying right? He’d made the right call and if you’d seen the contents of the bag as well, you couldn’t blame him for not letting himself go on a wild goose chase.
So, this morning, the first thing he did was to head to the bank to send the 20,000 naira he’d received from Ugo to his sister to settle part of his mother’s hospital bill. He’d gone off thereafter to a few companies to drop off his CV, but called it a day by noon so he could go home to rest and give his wounds more time to heal.
He made to unlock the gate, but it opened at his slight push. That was strange, as everyone in the compound knew that the Landlord hated his gates being unlocked.
‘It must’ve been an oversight by one of the neighbours,’ he thought. He locked it behind him when he stepped in. Then made his way to the one-bedroom apartment he was squatting in with his friend. He retrieved his spare key from his bag, and slid it into the lock, but the door gave way before he turned the key.
‘Strange,’ he thought again. His friend was out of the state and wouldn’t be back until next week.
‘Ahmed,’ he shouted as he stepped into the house.
He froze in his tracks at the sight, his eyes slowly registering the chaos in front of him. He stepped out of the house in a panic and slammed the door shut, panting heavily to slow his racing heart. The house had been ransacked. Taking a deep breath, he pushed the door open again and stepped in fully. Carefully stepping around the scattered books, furniture and shattered photo frame on the floor of the living room, he followed the trail of destruction into the room. It had also been ransacked.
‘What could have happened?’ he wondered. Nothing looked stolen. The electronics were intact, but it looked like someone or people had upturned every possible nook of the house in search of something.
‘Ha!’ His heart caught in his throat as realization dawned on him.
‘No, it couldn’t be!’ He ran frightfully back to the living room. That was when he spotted a note sitting on the reading table in the living room. He picked it up.
‘WHERE IS MY BAG?’ it read. He dropped the note suddenly like it scorched him. Heat spread quickly through his body. He looked at the note again and saw that there was a phone number written under the text. He picked his phone from his pocket and started to dial it. But he stopped just before pressing the call button, deciding instead to first check if the bag was still intact.
He hurried over to his Landlord’s house and knocked at the door maniacally. The Landlord’s youngest daughter opened the door. She was barely over 13 years but stood almost as tall as him.
‘Bro Kolade? Se ko si? Se wa okay?’ she asked.
‘Yes, yes, everything is okay.’ He tried to peep around her. ‘Ehm, I came to collect the bag that I gave your cousins yesterday.’
‘Oh, the toys abi. I thought you said you bought it for them as parting gift. They’ve travelled back to the US today. Or you’ve forgotten that they were travelling?’
‘Ha mo gbe!’ his knees gave way under him.
She rushed to him, her eyes wide with concern. ‘What’s wrong.’
‘Nothing’ he shouted. ‘Sorry, I meant nothing.’ He got up and dusted himself, walking back to his apartment shakily.
He shouldn’t have opened the bag yesterday. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have found that it was just toys that were in it. He may have still delivered it even if it was just a test or prank like he’d thought it was. He wouldn’t have decided that it was a farce and Ugo was only toying with him. I mean who would pay 200,000 naira to anyone to deliver children toys? But as he walked back into the scattered apartment, he started to think that maybe there was something else in the bag that he hadn’t seen.
He picked up the note again when he got back to the house, and after some minutes of contemplation decided against calling the number. What was he going to say?
‘Hello Ugo, thanks for the 20,000 naira, but your bag has travelled to USA?’
After seeing the havoc wrought in the house, he hated to think of what could have happened to him if they’d met him in the house. He wouldn’t call the number, he might as well write his death sentence with his own hands. Instead, he rushed around, picked his travelling bag and started flinging his clothes and other essentials into them. He would go to Osogbo today. He was done with this Lagos life.
Once done packing, he looked around the house and thought it was only fair that he cleaned up for his friend. Afterall, this was his fault. So, he dropped the bag and started tidying up. Soon after, a knock sounded at the door. He looked up, and as the knock continued, his heart raced faster with each count.
Next Episode drops on Wednesday 15th April
Simi Joel 
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