12 Hours

by L I Owugah

  Finally, after each of them had hit the pavement three times in a row, their faces beginning to swell from the pummeling, the boys took off running, yelling abuse at both Jonah and me. At the time I remembered having mixed emotions about the incident. Relief that for the umpteenth time, Jonah had saved the day along with undeniable feelings of jealousy and envy. Jealousy that my brother had a talent I would never possess, and envy that he could somehow do what he did without even trying.

  As I sat in Juku's basement with the violent commotion echoing from upstairs, my instincts told me Jonah had come to the rescue once again. My head continued to pound from the searing pain pulsating through all four corners of my mouth, and I felt something I had never experienced before.

  A feeling of deep appreciation. Appreciation for who Jonah truly was, which, contrary to the words of an over-enthusiastic P.E teacher, was more than just a naturally gifted pugilist. He was a natural born saviour. A unique individual who was born to do what he did. And a man who would never walk away until he had been given the last word.

  30

  JONAH

  CLOSING ARGUMENTS

  Having had first blood drawn by Emenike, I tucked my face behind a tight guard, and darted to my left, using foot speed to reposition myself, to deliver a counter-attack. But the giant's reflexes were blinding. In a flash, he was upon me once again, launching a crippling, two-fisted, nonstop assault. His punches came from all angles and connected to both head and body, each blow feeling like I'd been hit by a high powered taser. Tysonesque, to reference a term often used to describe the concussive front foot forward style of boxing's historic destroyer. A Tysonesque assault, which rendered every strategy I employed to create some distance between us virtually ineffective. To further compound the crisis, my line of sight was now blurred and revealed two people, rather than just the one, before me.

  A sudden case of double vision. A classic indicator that the first shot had left me with a fractured eye socket. Still on the back foot, a vicious right hook to the temple rocked my equilibrium and momentarily turned my legs to jelly. Fighting on instinct, I maintained my retreat, determined to create the space required to return fire. But I was facing a master in timing and a genius in spacing, making it near impossible to be effective, as he stayed in the pocket, refusing to concede an inch. A living breathing Pacman.

  A naturally gifted pugilist, I had once been called. A naturally gifted pugilist who was currently on the wrong end of a royal ass kicking. Then, as another punch split my lower lip, and Emenike paused to appreciate his artistry, a wave of bitter defiance swept over me. Defiance, because be it unadulterated confidence, blatant arrogance or plain old hubris, at six foot five and two hundred and fifty pounds, I was yet to be convinced that there was a man alive I couldn't beat in a fist fight. Armed with this solid conviction, I feinted with a left, weaved to the right, and released an earth-shattering punch, which crashed into his jaw and sent his head swivelling. A spray of blood and a couple of teeth flew from his mouth. It was a momentous punch, one of the best I'd ever thrown.

  It was also the one shot I was banking on to reverse the tide. But like a Zombie in a low budget horror flick, Emenike's head just snapped back around. Staring directly at me, his face split into a menacing smile, revealing a toothless gap. An unhinged smile that also told me something else. Something I hated to believe but, instinctively knew was real. The punch I'd connected with was a gift. A free shot which he had permitted, so as to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of what I had in my arsenal.

  Another way of saying there was no way I could win, and no way I was walking out of there alive. Undeterred, I attempted to fire another right hand, but before I was able to release a clenched fist, I was under siege once again. This time, a blitz of an attack that seemed to have doubled in its menace. Smashing his right fist into the side of my head with the momentum of a baseball bat, the giant sunk a murderous body shot into my kidney. Twisting the same punch into a vicious uppercut, he snapped back my head with a blow that scrambled my senses and sent me staggering. He paused to appreciate his work, convinced he was on a home stretch. But to quote Bogie from Casablanca, he was misinformed.

  Rising swiftly to the occasion, I took a single bound towards him, leapt into the air, and delivered a jaw-shattering uppercut of my own. Driving all of my two hundred and fifty pounds into a single punch, it tore back his head with the visceral brutality of a decapitation, and sent him reeling across the room. Having finally turned the tables, I closed the gap and repeated the shot.

  Same shot, same mode of application. Another spray of blood, spittle, and several more teeth dislodged from Emenike's mouth. I swept in for the kill, only to have the trajectory of the fight disrupted once again. Skillfully leaning away from another uppercut in the making, the giant dipped down, grabbed me from beneath the waist with both arms, and picked me off the floor. Like a man possessed, he launched himself into the air. For a split second, time stood still. Then we plummeted back down to earth and crashed into the pricey-looking coffee table. It exploded. Shattered glass, the cash and cocaine spraying into the air like a ton of talcum powdered confetti. Instinctively, I attempted to stand up, but with a single, crushing headbutt, Emenike sent me crashing back down to the floor. He paused for a moment, took a couple of deep breaths, and threw another punch. A single blow which had the appearance of what I had expected from the start. A slow punch. Slow, cumbersome and predictable.

  Spotting the shot from a mile off, I whipped my head to one side, causing his fist to smash into a large piece of the already shattered coffee table. As the punch connected, he roared like a wounded Lion and withdrew his hand, a lengthy shard of glass, trapped beneath his skin. Gritting his teeth in agony, he slowly extracted the glass, giving me the opportunity to bring the most visceral of arguments to a definitive close. Springing upright once more, I grabbed his face with both hands and snapped his head to a 90-degree angle. Then I slammed his neck onto a jagged piece of glass. He screamed and sprung to his feet, his hand searching desperately for the entry wound, which, like a broken faucet, was already hemorrhaging blood. Bright and pink-red. Evidence that I had hit my intended target. The carotid artery.

  He yelled "Chineke!" A term, I would later discover meant "God" in the language of the nation's Igbo tribe. He staggered and continued to scream like a man trapped in a gas chamber. Screams of terror, which told me he knew as well as I did, that he had at best, four minutes before he bled out. Four minutes left of a wasted existence that could have been better spent doing anything other than dying for a cause of which he had no business being a part.

  But the end came even quicker.

  Two minutes later, the Giant stumbled to where I was standing. Pale as a ghost he spoke for the first time.

  "Who are you?"

  "Jonah," I said and smashed my fist into his face, sending him crashing to the floor. Turning away from the expired body, I followed the darkened corridor Juku had retreated down twenty minutes earlier. The hallway was several feet long, a lit room with a closed door facing me at the very end.

  Trusting my instincts, I proceeded with caution, mindful of what was potentially lurking in the shadows ahead. Seconds later, from a hidden corner to my left, Juku lunged at me with a kitchen knife. He was was quick, but not quick enough. Grabbing the wrist of his right hand, I snapped the bone in an instant. He dropped the knife and released an agonizing scream. But there was more to come. Spinning Juku round, I locked him into a rear choke hold. With his neck fixed into the crook of my right arm, I used my left hand to apply the pressure to the back of his head.

  "I'll ask you again."

  He gasped for air.

  "Where's Michael?"

  His left hand slipped into the pocket of his trousers and withdrew what looked like an asthma inhaler. An opportunity for respite which I had no intention of granting him. He raised the pump to his mouth, but with a cruel twist, I broke the wrist of this hand as well. Another blood-curdling scream filled the ai
r.

  "Where is he?" I demanded again.

  Surrendering to the pain, he opened his mouth to say something. But that was as far as he got. Taking a backward step to adjust my balance, the floor seemed to disappear from beneath me. A feeling similar to that of stepping off a cliff. We toppled over backwards. With my arm still locked around Juku's neck, he released another terrifying scream. The fall seemed to go on forever.

  Then we landed.

  The back of my head struck what felt like a row of concrete steps, and we flew into a three hundred and sixty-degree somersault. Coming full circle I took the brunt of the concrete steps to the back of my head once more. Like a spinning windmill, a couple of more summersaults followed. As my head hit the stairs for the umpteenth time, I heard the loud sound of a bone shattering.

  The lights shut out.

  I lay unconscious for what turned out to be several minutes, stirred awake and stared up at the row of steps we had stumbled down just a few minutes earlier. It was a concrete stairwell, like the descent to some kind of underground bunker. Dark and unwelcoming, like the tail end of a rabbit hole. Juku lay on top of me, his neck twisted in an awkward position.

  It was evident he was dead and remembering the loud crack I had heard on our way down, I figured a quick death was much too merciful, a way for a man of such evil to meet his demise. Shoving his body to one side, like a hundred and a twenty-six-pound pile of disposable waste, I pulled myself to my feet and turned to a door which stood close to my left. A door to another lit room.

  Staggering, I yanked the door open and walked inside. Strapped to a chair with his head hung over, was Michael. On the floor before him was an open toolbox. Next to the toolbox, a pair of bloodstained pliers and four dislodged teeth. Michael raised his head and looked at me. His face split into a weak smile.

  "What took you so long?"

  It was a cliche that could come from a million and one Hollywood action flicks. I consulted my watch. It was 8.15pm. I'd given myself twelve hours to locate Michael and had done it in less than eight.

  "Go slow," I replied.

  31

  EVIDENCE OF A MURDERED ASSASSIN

  The man nicknamed after the fictional Vietnam war hero gazed round the office of the woman who was supposed to have been eliminated several hours earlier. It was an impressive looking office, which told Rambo that the private investigator known as Sade Nonso was equipped with a unique eye for detail. Having left the air conditioning unit running, it was clear she had left in a hurry.

  Since receiving the last text message from The Quiet Man, there was still no word from the hired assassin. Rambo was not surprised. The second part of the message was already a dead give away. The term "Go slow" to describe a potential obstacle to what the assassin had been required to do could never have come from a man whose surgical precision and unquestionable efficiency were legendary. Scanning the room, Rambo noticed the severely damaged, glass framed wall sign. Walking over to the sign, he spotted several pieces of shattered glass, next to what he suspected were faded blood stains. Glancing around the room some more, he made his way over to the kitchen and discovered the smoking gun. A mop stuck in a bucket half filled with bloody water.

  Evidence of a murdered assassin. Sounded strange, like a massive contradiction of terms. But what he had suspected all along. An organized hit, gone drastically wrong. But that wasn't all. The quiet man's demise was unlikely to have come at the hands of the woman he was hired to eliminate. Whoever was responsible, it was he, and not The Quiet Man Rambo had been in contact with. However, none of that mattered anymore. The assassin was history, and the only thing left of any consequence was the money at stake, and how, in the absence of a photographed corpse, he was going to get it. He gave it a moments thought.

  If the goalposts had to be moved to achieve his objective, then so be it. He would call Juku, tell him the woman was dead, but insist that the evidence would only follow after payment had been made. In the event Juku refused his request, he decided he would remind him of the circumstances that had lead to their initial meeting. How important it was that the blood the ex-Governors son already had on his hands remained a secret. Confident of the effectiveness of this plan, Juku's face split into a broad smile. Pulling out his phone, he selected Juku's number.

  32

  MICHAEL

  DE JA VUE

  Jonah quickly untied me. Looking at him, I could tell his efforts to find me had come at a price. A terribly high price. The damage to his face was significant. A reopened scar beneath his right eye, a swollen bottom lip with a wide split down the middle. Some swelling at the back of his head.

  He looked tired. Dead tired. Knowing Jonah, that was just his body, not his spirit. The look in his eyes told me that even if there were a hundred more Emenike's in his way, there still would have been no compromise, and no retreat, not until victory was his. I glanced over at the handbag lying on the floor by the wall.

  "We have to take that with us, " I said.

  "Whose is it? " he replied.

  "Some girl buried in the garden. Looks like they killed her for the same reason they were about to kill me." I attempted to rise from the chair and screamed in agony.

  "Need to wait a while," Jonah said, referring to the muscles in my legs, which hadn't been used for the last 24 hours. "Get the blood flowing again."

  I nodded, glanced in the direction of the open door, and spotted Juku's body.

  "Should have saved him for me," I said bitterly.

  "Didn't get the pleasure either," Jonah replied, his focus fixed on the body. "He broke his neck on the way down the stairs."

  A mobile device vibrated in one of Juku's pockets. Jonah strolled out of the door, crouched down beside the body, and pulled a smartphone from the right pocket of Juku's jeans. He gazed at the screen for a moment and straightened up. Then he strolled back over and extended the handset to me.

  "Time to give this bastard a piece of your mind," he said.

  I took the phone. Flashing up on the screen, a pair of capitalized initials: R.B It was obvious what they stood for. I answered the phone, punched the speaker icon, and the sound of Rambo's voice filled the room.

  "The woman is dead," he said.

  I paused for a moment.

  "You sure about that?"

  There was another silence on the other end. I pictured Balogun standing there, a shell-shocked expression on his face.

  "Michael?" he said.

  "De Ja Vu," I replied.

  There was another pause. His breathing quickened.

  "Where's Simon?"

  I didn't give him the satisfaction of an answer. "You're a dead man, Balogun," I said and punched out. Jonah and I traded a look. The expression on his face didn't tell me a great deal, but I figured he was probably sorry he had tried to dissuade me. Or maybe, like myself, he was simply appalled that the death of Mr and Mrs. Eko had turned out to be as close to a murder as one could get. Trouble was, with Jonah, you could never really tell. But then there was one thing of which I had no doubt. We were finally in agreement.

  "Finish it," I said.

  33

  JONAH

  BACK TO COOL BREEZE

  Taking another look at the bloodstained pliers used in Michael's torture, the magnitude of the punishment he had been forced to endure became all too clear. A horrendous display of cruelty, which gave your average Joe no more than a snowball's chance in hell of not spilling the beans."Finish it," Michael had said to me. But I was already decided. Rambo was done. I just had to find him. And one thing was for certain.

  I didn't need 12 hours to do it.

  I waited a few minutes before helping Michael up the treacherous Staircase. Leaning on my shoulder, he was holding an old plastic carrier bag, in it, a Louis Vuitton handbag. He said the bag belonged to a dead woman. The woman I suspected was the same person Sade's contact had been worried about.

  "The least we can do is return the item to the family," Michael said. After reaching the top
of the staircase, we made our way back through the dark corridor, past Emenike's blood-soaked corpse, and headed out of the front door. Once outside, I noticed the three men I had laid out earlier were nowhere to be seen. After the sound of mind-numbing violence that had echoed from the house, I wasn't surprised.

  Walking at a snail's pace to accommodate Michael's physical limitations, it took us twice as long to get back to the restaurant, which allowed me time to fill him in on the last eight hours. Information which included a brief rundown on how I had located Moonlight Investigations, the execution of a hired hitman, and my decision to bring Sade along for the ride. After close to an hour we shuffled into Mamma Tasty. Sade, who was still seated in the same spot, sprang to her feet and threw herself into Michael's arms. They held each other in silence. Neither person said a thing. Like the reunion of a couple previously separated by war. I gave them a moment, walked over to the counter, and beckoned to the plump woman who had served us earlier. She stared at my battered face and glanced over at the tearful reunion.