Treachery in the Yard Read Online Free

patrol officers to comb the neighborhood with instructions to arrest and detain any stragglers until we verified their identities and what they were doing in the area.
    It was time to go.
    I drove to my apartment. It had two bedrooms, which was good, although I did not really need the second one. It was the best I could afford on my salary of N18,000 per month (without bribes).
    The whole neighborhood was dark.
    The power had gone out again. Most outages lasted around two hours. Old transformers breaking down cause some power outages; those outages can take a day or two to correct.
    Power outages are more than sitting in the dark. The refrigerator stops running and everything starts to thaw and get warm. Not good if you live in a tropical climate. The air becomes stuffy and extremely hot.
    It had been a stinker of a day.

CHAPTER FOUR
    I woke the next morning, got out of bed and into my routine: wash, dress, put on my holster and slip in my piece, put my badge in my pocket, grab the car keys from the side table, finally let myself out of the apartment. But I grumbled all the way through. I was running late because my alarm clock had not turned on: the power was still off. This was common. Often you had to pay a bribe to get electricity initially turned on for your home. When the electricity was on, it was expensive and unreliable.
    When I left, as always I wedged a piece of paper in the door frame. If, when I returned, the paper was no longer crammed in the door frame, but lying on the floor, I knew my apartment had an unexpected visitor. The paper was my little borrowing from an old James Bond movie,
Dr. No.
Bond used a strand of hair, I use paper. Simple, but effective—and necessary. You never know whomight visit you when you are not there. To survive, you must be one step ahead.
    I stepped outside. The morning was fresh and warm. It would get hot before long, and then you would sweat under the sun, but for now, I savored the morning’s freshness as I breathed the warm air.
    I walked over to my car and got into it, pushing the water bottles off the driver’s seat—in this heat, it was a good idea to always have a drink ready, and I kept a supply of water always available. I backed out and made some good progress until I ran into a holdup coming close to the Flyover at the Isaac Boro Park.
    I called Femi to tell him I would be late and he told me Chief wanted to see me as soon as I got there. Traffic began to move again so I eased off the gear, let in the clutch, and continued on my way to work.
    As I approached police headquarters, it looked anything but imposing in the morning sunlight. Once it was indeed magnificent, but that was fifty years ago, at the height of the Colonial Police Force—long, long before the oil money arrived to create a dark polluted slick over Nigeria. Back then, the buildings were new, alive with power, their brick walls the color of dried blood (a color borrowed from some of the prisoners held inside). Since those golden days, the heat, the damp, and the lack of care had relentlessly scrubbed the magnificence away, leaving only a shabby exterior. The former glory, like Ozymandias, the once King of Kings, was a very distant memory.
    Over the years, new offices were added to the original building in the large courtyard, new buildings gradually added to the old, and finally a separate new building was constructed nearby. Naturally, senior police officials grabbed the top floors of the new building, treating themselves far better than the Colonial Policehad, as befitted their greater power. The new building was a one-minute walk from the original building, painted white, looking new, but the distance between the two was longer, deeper, and wider than the open sewers that ran through the Diobu Zone.
    It was no coincidence that the first major construction project started by the military junta when it came to power in the eighties was the State Police Building. Maintaining power,