CROWN OF ASH

THE WOLF PACK

The police were not the only ones who thought the Demon was bleeding.

When the Wolf confraternity saw the task force swarming Ikorodu, they sharpened their knives. For years, the Wolves had been the Demon’s closest rivals. They held the Mile 12 market and the Epe road, they wore red bandanas and snarling jaw tattoos, and they believed, with the stubborn certainty of dogs, that Ikorodu belonged to them by right of teeth.

“They smell blood,” Dele said. “That is how animals behave. When a lion is wounded, the hyenas come.”

“Then we show the hyenas that the lion still has claws,” Segun said.

The Wolf war lasted two years. Ola would later remember it not as a story but as a long, grey blur of nights.

He was eighteen when it reached its worst. By then he had his own team of six, young men he had trained with in the yard, Femi among them, and he led them through the back streets of Mile 12 the way a fisherman works a net. They hit Wolf collection points at dawn. They ambushed Wolf cars on the Epe road. They burned Wolf bars and took Wolf boys apart in alleyways with knives and iron rods when bullets would have been too loud.

Ola was good at it. This was the part he could never explain, not even to himself. Mr Osagie’s lessons lived in his body now. He could break a man’s wrist with a twist before the man understood he was being touched. He could drop a bigger opponent with a kick to the knee and a palm to the throat. He moved through violence the way other men moved through traffic: fast, calm, aware of every gap.

The Wolf boys began to call him Shadow. He did not choose the name. It was shouted by a wounded man in a bar near Ketu, who saw a figure in black step out of the dark, and screamed it as his last word.

Segun heard about it, and laughed.

“It suits you,” he said. “Shadow. Nobody sees him until he is already at their throat.”

But the Wolf had teeth of their own. Their leader, Baba Ladipo, was no fool. He recruited cultists from Abeokuta and Ibadan, men who killed for small money and bragged about it afterwards. They hit a Demon market in the middle of the day with automatic rifles, and four Demon men died in front of a crowd. One of them was Obi, one of Ola’s six.

Ola found the body in the market square, covered with an orange tarpaulin, and a woman selling oranges nearby, sobbing, with her leg bandaged in a torn wrapper. He lifted the tarpaulin. Obi’s eyes were open. His mouth was slightly parted, as if he had been about to say something.

“He is at Mile 12,” a young boy said quietly beside him. A hawker, perhaps ten years old, who sold sachet water and knew everything that happened on the street. “The people who did it. They drink at Baba Ladipo’s bar. Three of them. It has a red door.”

Ola gave the boy a five-hundred naira note and put the tarpaulin back.

“Femi,” he said. “Get the car.”

“Ola, the Boss said we should wait…”

“Get the car.”

The bar with the red door sat in a lane behind the market, a low concrete room with cracked plastic chairs and a speaker playing highlife too loudly. It was nine in the evening. Three Wolf boys sat at a corner table with bottles of beer and a plate of grilled fish, laughing, their red bandanas pushed up on their foreheads.

Ola walked in alone.

He wore a plain black shirt and carried nothing in his hands. The barman saw him and froze. The three Wolf boys looked up. One of them, a big man with a scar through his eyebrow, frowned at the stranger, then slowly stopped smiling.

“You,” he said. “You are Shadow.”

“Which of you killed Obi?”

The room went very quiet. The highlife played on. A fly circled the fish.

“It’s war,” the scarred man said. “People die.”

“I ask which one.”

The three men stood, pushing back their chairs. The one on the left reached under his shirt. Ola moved before the hand had finished its journey. He crossed the distance in two steps, caught the wrist, twisted until the bone gave with a crack like dry wood, and drove the man’s own pistol up under his chin.

The shot was lost in the music.

The second man swung a bottle. Ola ducked, drove an elbow into his ribs, and swept his feet out from under him. When the man hit the ground, Ola’s boot came down on his throat. Not hard. Just enough. He looked across at the scarred man, who had not moved, whose eyes were fixed on the thing that had once been his friend on the floor.

“Was it you?” Ola asked.

“No,” the scarred man whispered. “It wasn’t me. It was him.” He pointed at the man under Ola’s boot. “He shot him. I only drove.”

“Thank you.”

Ola pressed his boot down. The man under it kicked, once, twice, and was still.

The scarred man was trembling now, his hands raised. “Please. I have small children. Please.”

Ola studied him for a long moment. He thought of the guard in Magodo, the boy who had begged and been taken from the world by a single flat sound. He thought of Dele’s quiet voice. The day you start to know is the day you will need to run.

“Carry message for Baba Ladipo,” he said. “Tell him Shadow has come for Mile 12. Tell him everybody who touched the Demons will end the same way.”

He walked out through the red door, into the warm night. Femi was waiting by the car with his hand on his gun and a look of mingled awe and horror on his face.

“Ola,” he whispered. “You are going in there alone. You will die.”

“Is that so?” Ola said. And he got into the car, and for the first time in two years, he laughed, a short, low sound with nothing in it.