Death Dealing (11 page)

‘Yes sir.
Is Inspector Koekemoer or Inspector Dippenaar?’

‘I’m Koekemoer, my friend.
Detective, not Inspector.
This is Detective Dippenaar.’

‘Me, I’m Joseph, Inspector. The
guard from this morning, the one you spoke to, she is Henry.’

‘Yes,’ said Dippenaar. ‘Henry told
us that he’s your son and that he works nights mostly and that you work days
mostly, and that you got him the job at Victoria Lodge and that you’ve been the
main security man there for more than fifty years.’

‘Is right, Inspector Dippenaar. Henry,
she is a good boy, that one. Me, on January 14 I’m being there fifty years. The
madam she gave me a birthday cake.’

The detectives exchanged glances
before Koekemoer continued.

‘Henry says he found the burglary
this morning and he doesn’t know how they got inside.’

‘Yes, Inspector Koekemoer, I’m talking
to Henry just now. She calls me on my cell-phone. I came to look for you but
you went the other way so now I’m finding you. I’m wanting to tell you
something.’

‘What’s that, Joseph? What do you
want to tell us?’

‘I’m not the police inspector, you know,
Inspector Koekemoer, but I’m thinking maybe I saw something just now, only ten
minutes.’

‘What did you see, Joseph?’ asked
Dippenaar.

‘Inspector Dippenaar, I see these
two young men. They are black men. Maybe twenty years. Maybe twenty-two. I see
them walking there on Margaret Mncadi Avenue when I am coming to work. And I’m
thinking right away one time that these men are
skabengas
. They are walking and looking up Esplanade Avenue and
laughing and I am thinking that maybe they are the ones who are stealing from
the flat and they are coming back to laugh at the people. You see Henry she is
phoning me on my cell-phone and telling me there is a robbery and the police
are there and they are looking, and I see these two men they are laughing. They
are talking
isiZulu
. I’m hearing them
say bad things about
amaphoyisa
and
then they are saying bad things about some other girl they were hitting early
this morning, and then, when I am passing them in the street, I’m looking at
their arms and I’m seeing scratches on the one man’s arms and the other man’s
face and they are saying bad things like some girl was scratching them and they
have the blood there but they are also laughing. The one man he is biting the
matchstick, and he is playing with the matchstick in his mouth. I don’t like
those men, Inspector Koekemoer. Inspector Dippenaar. I’m thinking these are bad
men.’

Koekemoer and Dippenaar leaped into
action. They bundled Joseph into their car and within minutes they were driving
up and down each side street leading into or away from Margaret Mncadi Avenue.
Then they widened the search area and that’s when Joseph identified the men.

‘There, Inspector
Koekemoer.
Those men. Those
men.’

‘OK. OK, Joseph. You sure?’ said
Dippenaar.

‘I’m sure, Inspector Dippenaar. I’m
sure. You see
,
they are going to Albert Park. Lots of
skabengas
there.’

‘OK. OK, Joseph,’ said Koekemoer.
‘Can we let you out here? Are you happy to walk back to the Lodge from here? We
don’t want people with us when we stop these men.’

‘I’m understanding, Inspector.
Hau!
I’m sorry. Detective. Not
Inspector. But you can come and ask me the questions at Victoria Lodge if you
want me, Inspector.’

The detectives let him alight and
they both thanked him profusely before winding up their windows. The old man
watched them as they drove slowly up the road keeping a safe distance behind
the two men as they turned into Diakonia Avenue.

13.45.

Ryder and Pillay were in Nyawula’s
office, bringing him up to speed with the details of the attack on the Khuzwayo
family.

‘What explains such barbaric action,
Jeremy? So they hacked the children to pieces but left the parents relatively
unscathed. What’s that about?’

‘Navi’s been speaking to Fathima,
Sibo. She counsels most of the stations in the Cluster. Navi? You want to share
what you told me?’

‘That’s right, Captain. I gave
Fathima only the broadest of outlines about what we saw this morning, and she
was at pains to tell me she couldn’t provide anything definitive without much closer
study. But from what I told her she said that although these guys were probably
high on a
whoonga
fix, there must
have been something else at play, too. She thinks that the
nyaope
would have put them in
a frenzy
once they started, but she also says they probably went for the kids because of
sheer envy. They saw the Khuzwayo lads as rich kids with rich toys. They
attacked the home early, before the kids left for school. They saw them dressed
in smart school uniforms, playing computer games on some fancy equipment in
their bedrooms, and something probably snapped. She said the ferocity of the
machete action is probably also explained by...’

The Captain’s phone rang, and
Sergeant Cronje shouted through the inter-leading door.

‘Sorry, Captain. It’s Detective
Koekemoer with an urgent call for Jeremy.’

‘Fine, thanks,
Piet.
You can put it down.
Hullo, Koeks, I’m passing you over to Jeremy.’

Nyawula handed over the receiver and
Ryder took the call.

‘Yes, Koeks?
What’s happening?’

‘Jeremy, sorry.
Your cell-phone is obviously switched off for
your meeting. But Dipps and I thought you should know this right away. We’ve
been busy since we left you to check out the scene on the Esplanade this
morning, and now we’ve got something for you.’

‘What, Koeks?’

‘We checked out the break-in at
Victoria Lodge on Esplanade Avenue. That’s all been sorted out.
Quick break-in and a few goods stolen.
Not big stuff. But
then we followed up on a few things. Questioned a few locals, looked around the
area, then came back eventually to Victoria Lodge. Then we ended up trailing
two young guys, about twenty years old. We had some help from a security guard
who came face to face with these guys earlier and followed them. According to
the guard, he was sure they were up to no good and were checking out more
joints in the area around Victoria Lodge near where he works. We’re now sitting
opposite these two guys. They’re in Albert Park and we’re parked in Diakonia
Avenue at the entrance to the park. They’re under the trees about twenty metres
away having a picnic.’

‘And, Koeks?
You’re not just telling me this to suggest we
come and join you for a picnic in Albert Park.’

‘I am, Jeremy.’

‘What?’

‘We think you and Navi would like to
join this picnic.’

‘Tell me more, Koeks.’

‘The security guard told us that one
of the two guys in question has deep furrows on his right arm. The other one
has the same kind of scratches on his forehead.’

Ryder was silent, so Koekemoer
continued.

‘And the two guys are drinking beer in
the park with friends.
With four friends.
Six guys
drinking together.’

‘We’re on our way, Koeks.’

13.55.

Ryder and Pillay conversed
in the car on the way there. Pillay knew the area well and described to Ryder
what she knew about it.
The Qalakabusha intervention project, she said,
aimed to address loitering, vagrancy, and drug abuse in places where the
homeless gathered: under bridges, alongside railway tracks, and in Durban’s
inner-city central spaces like Albert Park. It tried to deal with the problem
positively by addressing the social needs of homeless people, but it faced an
uphill battle with the influx of petty criminals, drug dealers, and the like.
Albert Park, she told her partner, was a good example of the normal mix: some people
trying to get themselves back onto the right path, and others leeching off the
system.

‘I remember the day after my first posting to Durban Central
way back when
. It was my first visit to
Albert Park as a cop, but I used to go there as a
laaitie
.
Remember the
old Tropicale Restaurant?’

‘Double-thick chocolate milkshake,’ replied Ryder, grimly.
His mind was on the action ahead.

‘There’s the one. You too? Tropicale Double-Thick. My
favourite.’

‘Everyone’s favourite. We went there quite often in the old days.’

‘
Ja
. Anyway, the
Tropicale as we knew it closed down long before the
whoonga
moved in. In fact, we only started talking about
whoonga
and
nyaope
around 2010. Before then we talked about
sugars
…’

‘I remember.’

‘So anyway on my second day at Durban Central we picked up a
dealer in the park and he had about a hundred straws on him, selling them at
about fifteen to twenty rands each. As we checked into this particular case we
began to learn a
helluva
lot about
what was really going on down there. Some guys were taking eight to ten straws
for every hit. Their brains were being fried and they just carried on. It was
crazy.’

‘Expensive habit.’

‘You don’t know the half of it, Jeremy. Some of them were
going for three and four hits a day, six to eight straws each hit.
Five hundred rands a day, some of them.
So how do they pay
for that? Simple.
Major escalation in burglaries, muggings,
and armed robberies in the area.
The place became wild.’

‘What were the municipality doing to handle it?’

‘There were so many interventions, but the guys kept on
coming back. I heard there were maybe one to two hundred people sleeping rough
in the park on any given night, but during the day you could find between a
thousand and two thousand people coming in from everywhere for their daily hits.
There were raids on people for loitering, attempts to relocate them, targeting
of dealers, everything was tried. What do you do if they just come back again?
Think of the work involved in charging these guys. No room in the prisons.
All of that.
So we heard stories about some of the really
bad guys, dealers included, being released with no more than a warning or a rap
on the knuckles.’

‘So that they could pop out and pillage people like the
Khuzwayo family,’ added Ryder.

‘You got it… OK, Jeremy, there’s KoeksnDips.’

 
The two
detectives
arrived
quietly and unobtrusively, and joined Koekemoer and Dippenaar in their car at
the entrance to the park. In the course of a two-minute discussion they quickly
took in the situation and agreed on the line of action. They alighted from the
vehicle slowly, and each of them took a bearing on the targets. Then they
sprang into action.

As Ryder sprinted toward the six men
sitting under the tree, Pillay broke to the left to cut off any escape route
down to Lloyd Street, from where she would also take down any of them trying to
get to Margaret Mncadi Avenue. She was the fastest among them and could cover
most ground. Meanwhile KoeksnDips both broke to the right, Dippenaar to cut off
any escape toward Maydon Road and Koekemoer to cover the entrance and also prevent
them scaling the fence on Diakonia Avenue.

More than twenty illegal aliens, homeless
people, vagrants, and those with dubious passports and papers scattered in all
directions as if Home Affairs had finally decided to unleash Armageddon. They
ran in every direction to escape Ryder, who looked like a raging elephant in
full attack mode.

The six targets, well into their
beers, were among the very last to react. One of them managed to pull a pistol:
it was the man known as Loku to his friends, a homeless vagrant would later
testify as a witness.
Too late.
Ryder hit him with an
open hand straight on, against the bottom of his nose, fracturing the nose
instantly and sending the pistol flying. Loku hit the ground flat on his back,
the impact of the ground on the rear of his head snapping his jaws shut. Ryder
finished the job by crushing his
rib-cage
with the
heel of his right foot.

The second man foolishly scrambled
across the ground to grab the downed weapon. Ryder stepped off the
rib-cage
of the first man, took one pace, planted his left
foot in front of the second man as he grabbed the weapon, then with his right
foot unleashed a kick at the man’s head that would have pleased any Kaizer
Chiefs supporter. The man was unconscious before he hit the ground, his skull
fractured in four places, as the medics would later report.

Ryder didn’t pause to consider the
damage. Two of the men backed up against the tree that had provided their
picnic shade. They stared in shock at the damage wrought by the detective on
their two companions, and only then decided to make a break for freedom past
Ryder, one on either side. But his enormously long arms reached out like long
tendrils from a Triffid, grabbing each of the men by the windpipe and then
drawing his hands together in front of him, smashing their heads together with
a sickening crunch that put the lights out in both cases.