The dark sky was just beginning to break into patches of grey when Go-Slow stopped in front of a bungalow on King George V Road in the heart of Lagos Island. Knockout got off the scooter and the criminals shook hands, agreeing to meet at Tarzan Jetty later that night.
Knockout held his share of the spoils in a nylon bag that also contained, in wraps of paper and cellophane, the heart of the girl he had butchered. He watched his partner turn round on the whining machine before leaving the way they had come, then he turned to his house.
He had inherited the building from his father who had inherited it from his own father, and so on for four generations. He had once shared it with two other brothers who had since secured the necessary forged papers to fool immigration in Nigeria and in Germany. He liked to think that most of the big families in Lagos still had family homes close to his in the shanties of Lagos Island – even if the once proud homes were now divided into rooms rented to the people the city didn’t care about.
He walked down the side to the backyard where a wire fence stretched from his wall to the wall of the adjacent bungalow, five feet away. He undid the latch lock on the tiny gate and stepped into his back garden.
‘Whisky, Gaddafi.’
Two pure-bred Dobermans ran up to him from their open cage and jostled for his fingers to rub through their black coats. Unlike many such breeds, they still had their tails. He was shocked when he discovered Dobermans aren’t born with stumps; he couldn’t understand how anyone could chop off a puppy’s tail shortly after birth. What kind of person would do that to a dog?
Knockout unwrapped the parcel and tossed the meat at his dogs. He had been excited since the thought first occurred to him to feed his dogs a human heart. He watched the beasts nervously sniff at their meal, nudge it with their wet noses, look up at him unsure, then sniff again. The thrill built in him; he couldn’t wait to watch them feed on it. One dog snatched the meat and growled, clenching it in its jaws. The other fought for it and Knockout chuckled. Then his eyelids retracted as a thought landed in his head. Shit. Why didn’t he think of that before?
He had to get the meat from the dogs. He dived into the tussle and quickly learned that dogs, in the end, would always be dogs.