BAD NEWS

It was Mr. Potter's face on the front page of the New Standard newspaper that caught my attention. It was the second day of my stay in the hospital, and I read the heading with a skipping heart. Four kidnappers killed, a Briton freed, it heralded. Mr. Potter's pink face covered a quarter of the front page while the picture of four corpses was inserted below his chest. The face of a police man was the fourth picture on the front page. 

'Excuse me sir,' I said to the nurse holding the newspaper. 'Please can I see your paper? I just want to read the heading.'

'Sure,' he said, coming toward my bed. 'But it's stale; keep it if you want to.'

'Thank you, sir,' I said, and stretched my hand to collect the newspaper. The infusion set drew my hand back, but I manage to pull the paper back to me. My heart pounded and my throat felt dry.

'Be careful,' the nurse said.

He came over and pushed the metal pole holding the infusion set back to its legs. Then he dropped the newspaper on my lab. 

'Like I said, it's stale; it's two days old.'

'Thank you,' I said again, and picked the newspaper.

I unfolded it and read the headline. My hands shook as my eyes moved over the inserted pictures beneath Mr. Potter's picture. The bodies of Eric, Dracula, Joseph and Bayo lay on the ground in front of the jeep they had used. The pictures were blurred, but I recognized the clothes on each of the lifeless bodies. They were the clothes they wore the last day I saw them.

'Oh, my God,' I cried. 'This can't be true.'

'What can't be true?'

I raised my head and saw the nurse looking at me. I turned my eyes slowly around the ward and realized that half of the patients in the ward were staring at me, and the ward had gone quiet. I thanked God that mom and Jasper had come that morning to check on me, because I would have had to explain my exclamation.

'Nothing,' I said to the eyes looking at me. 'I must have been daydreaming.'

The nursed chuckled and went away and the other eyes slowly left my direction. I returned my eyes to the newspaper, peering at the pictures. Eric and Dracula lay in a grotesque posture—the posture only the dead can take—and the fronts of their shirts were stained in red. Two guns lay besides the four bodies; the guns Joseph and Bayo had carried about. 

My eyes went back to the heading, and I began to read. The paper reported that a team of anti-robbery policemen lead by Inspector Dangin got a tip from an anonymous caller and stormed an uncompleted house around Epe and found the gang there. There was a shoot-out between the policemen and the gang, and the gang members failed under the superior power of the police. Meanwhile, the team was able to rescue Mr. Potter and he was safe and had been returned to the British Embassy.

My eyes returned to the name of the leader of the police team—Inspector Dangin! It was the name of the inspector who slapped me! 

'Oh, my God,' I screamed. 'He set them up and betrayed them. He killed them.'

I dropped the paper on my laps, leaned back on the pillow and closed my eyes, feeling all the eyes in the room staring at me again. I didn't care; I didn't care one bit. Four more men that could have been productive to the Nigerian struggling economy were gone.

Gone forever.

I thought about Eric for a long time and wondered who would take care of his mother. What would she do if she learns of his death? How will she react when she hears that he died from a criminal activity? In spite of what he did to me, tears dripped down my face in torrents.

I left the hospital three days later and Talatu got engaged two weeks after that day, a week earlier than the proposed date. Why it came earlier I would never know, but I suspected the doctor hurried her up—probably he needed to go back to work or something. By this time my emotions were skewed in many directions for me to give a care if they had done it two months earlier.