by Vanda Symon
I approached the first pulled-over car. The occupants looked panicked and I realised they weren’t comforted by the presence of a chick with a firearm. Wearing civvies didn’t help there. I’d just grabbed what was on the floor when I got the call – a red top from the night before and jeans. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my warrant card, holding it up for them to see as I got to the driver’s window. He was on his cellphone, and I could guess to whom.
‘You talking to the police?’ I asked.
He nodded.
‘Please, I need to talk to them.’ He dutifully opened the window and handed the phone over. ‘Detective Constable Samantha Shephard, Dunedin CIB.’
‘Central despatch. What’s the situation?’
‘I’m tracking an escaped elephant from the visiting circus. The circus has been set alight and the animal is injured and panicked. It has killed people already and I am armed with a rifle and intend to destroy the animal.’ I heard the driver of the car utter an expletive.
‘Do you need an Armed Offenders call-out?’ Could I do this by myself? I didn’t want to, but I could see Cassie had turned and was moving in this direction. I was going to have to act now.
‘I’ll need back-up, but the situation is urgent and I’m going to have to do this now.’ I handed the phone back to the bewildered-looking man. ‘Tell them exactly where we are and get the hell out of here.’
A nerve-shattering screech erupted from Cassie, sending my heart rate into the stratosphere. She was on the move and in my direction. Did she recognise my voice? Something had sparked her interest enough to get her headed this way. I’d been kind to her, given her some company and attention. Surely that would work in my favour. But something about her body language suggested otherwise.
I didn’t want to have to do this in full view of the cars that had pulled up for the spectacle. They had no idea how real the danger was, but I didn’t have the time to trot backwards and forwards across the road to tell them to bugger off. I wondered if I could get her into a side street, or even the warehouse car park, but I didn’t have enough ammunition to fire into the air to get her moving and anyway, it looked like time was running out.
She was a hundred metres away and picking up pace. Shit she could move fast.
Head shot, Terry had said. Easier said than done when she was thundering straight for me. Stand or kneel? Stand, in case I missed and had to run and reload. I thanked my lucky stars for a misspent youth having shooting competitions with my brothers. But even though I rated my skills as a marksman, the fact I only had one back-up round made me more than a little nervous. Okay, she was fifty metres now, and whatever was happening in her head, it was very apparent she’d decided I was the one she wanted to see, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t for a pat and a rub. Her head was up, her ears out and she meant business. A dark stain that must have been blood was spreading down the front of her head. How close did I let her get? Forty metres. I could hear her footsteps and her exaggerated huffing. All other noise disappeared as I honed my attention in on the centre of her head, tracking her movements. My brain registered her speed, made the calculation and estimate of seconds before she was on me.
I pulled the shotgun up to a shooting position, heard the loud click as I cocked the hammer, sighted over the top of the barrel. She was so close.
Her footsteps vibrated through the ground and up my legs.
My heartbeat pulsed through my ears.
I sighted down the barrel.
Finger on the trigger.
My heart beat.
Cassie’s face.
Heartbeat.
Footsteps, closer.
Heartbeat.
I breathed out.
Sighted
Squeezed.
30
The report shattered the vacuum of silence that had encompassed my world. In a seeming pinprick of time everything happened.
The kickback of the shotgun as the recoil pad slammed into my shoulder.
My gasp as my body recognised the need to breathe again.
The jarring of the earth as the elephant collapsed to the ground, a colossal wreck, her forward momentum leaving her only ten metres from where I stood.
The sharp smell of gunpowder.
Then stillness.
Then sound. My rasping breath, the pulsing of blood in my head, sirens in the distance. Whirring, jangling noise.
Worst of all, I could hear her, hear her sucking in huge, lurching gasps of air. I hadn’t killed her. It wasn’t over. I approached with caution, feeling the ball of hot acid rising in my stomach, not knowing how incapacitated she was or how fast a prone elephant could rise to its feet. She had slid onto her knees then over onto her side, her vast rib cage rising with every shuddering breath. The bullet wound in her head swelled with blood that ran to co-mingle with that I’d seen earlier. She could see me, she watched me approach. I could not break away from her gaze. That eye that seconds ago had been so crazed now carried its melancholy cast, the same sadness I’d witnessed when I first saw her. That sadness stabbed me in the heart. I had one round left and knew what I had to do. Would she let me?
‘Oh, Cassie,’ I said, my voice cracked and laden. ‘You’ll be alright, I’ll take care of you and everything will be alright.’
I walked around her and stood behind her head, still talking to her softly, trying to keep us both calm. I leaned forward and touched her, she lifted her trunk slightly in acknowledgement but there would be no resistance, no fight.
She didn’t even flinch at the sound of my breaking the shotgun, ejecting the spent cartridge and clicking it shut with the next round.
Once again, I pulled back the hammer.
I pressed the barrel flush against her flesh. My vision blurred as the tears flowed down my cheeks.
Another shot rent the night.
31
‘Lay down your weapon.’
‘Huh?’ The intrusion of the voice snapped me back to the now. How long had I been sitting here, leaning back to back against the now lifeless form of what I considered one of God’s most magnificent creations? A creation I had just killed.
‘Sam, we need you to lay down the weapon.’ A different voice, softer, and one I recognised.
I looked up through tear-hazed vision and saw Smithy standing nearby, accompanied by another two officers with weapons drawn and pointed in my direction. Why the hell would they need to do that? I was an officer. Then I realised I was a non-uniformed officer with a non-issue weapon. I shoved at the shotgun that lay across my lap and it skittered across the asphalt, spinning a slow arc as it scraped to a halt.
The officers immediately dropped their stance and holstered their Glocks.
While one of them attended to the shotgun, Smithy came over and crouched down on his haunches next to me, placing a hand on my knee. ‘Sam, are you hurt? Are you okay?’
I couldn’t bring myself to speak, so just shook my head slowly, side to side. I wasn’t hurt, but I sure as hell wasn’t okay. The shaking in my hands had started the moment I fired that second shot, and it hadn’t abated. In fact, I felt chilled – chilled in so many ways.
‘Jesus, if this isn’t the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’ he said, shaking his head. He reached out and ran his hand across Cassie’s spine. ‘First a burning bloody circus and now this. Are you sure you’re okay? The guy over there said the elephant was running straight for you, said it was mad. You’re lucky you killed the thing.’
Yeah, real lucky.
‘Come on, let’s get you up from here and out of the spotlight.’
Spotlight? I looked around me for the first time and realised I’d attracted a bit of a crowd. Well, not me, I supposed. Then there was the stage lighting from above. The noise of an overhead helicopter registered to my addled senses. Police, I assumed. I accepted the proffered hand and got to my feet, swaying a bit with the resultant head rush. For the first time, I got to fully take in the scene around me. Cassie’s life had ended in the m
iddle of an intersection. This creature, which to my mind should have been living out her days in the lush jungles and wetlands of India, had instead ended them on a sea of asphalt, in the heart of the commercial sector. The irony of that wasn’t lost on me. The continuing cycle of glowing green, orange and red of the traffic lights seemed incongruous with the sight of this enormous mammal strewn across the carriageway. The effort required for me to hold it all together was immense.
‘Here, you’re shaking.’ Smithy pulled off his jacket and draped it across my shoulders. My eyes were drawn back to Cassie and were trapped.
There was so little blood. Surely there should be more blood? Instead, Cassie looked deceptively peaceful, as though she hadn’t spent the last moments of her life in blind panic and rage. I had done that. I’d done that to her.
Smithy’s arm went across my shoulder and gently moved me in the direction of a squad car. My eyes stayed on Cassie as long as they physically could before pain forced them to the front. In the far distance, beyond the police car, I could see an ambulance.
Terry Bennett.
He would have heard the shots. He would have understood their cruel message. He had lost everything tonight.
By now, the noises I had so successfully filtered out were an incessant assault upon my ears. The helicopter rotors, the sirens, the animal shrieks, the shouts, the voices. I closed my eyes against the counter-point flashing of red and blue as every sense went into overload. It was only when I felt the cool vinyl of the seat beneath me and heard the click of the car door closing beside me, shutting out the world, that I found the ability to breathe.
Smithy must have sensed my need to be left alone. He didn’t say a word as he slid into the driver’s seat and drove me away. The police radio crackled rapid-fire orders and updates until he reached over and turned it off. Then there was no siren, no speech, just the murmur of the engine and hum of rubber on tarmac. He slowed down as we passed the point where the ambulance was attending to Terry Bennett. I caught a fleeting glimpse of a form on a gurney, sheet pulled up and over its head before the tears flowed again.
32
The polystyrene cup contained a hit of coffee sweet enough to make my face twitch. Even so, I could only just feel the benefits of the caffeine infusing its way through my system. A gin would have been more helpful. My head was a jumble of flashbacks: ear-shattering gunfire, the metallic smell of blood intermingled with the acrid stench of burning plastic, the mountain of enraged flesh bearing down upon me, the shockwave up my legs as her bulk hit the asphalt, the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles, the thrum of rotor blades. A continuous assault of images strobed through my mind. Closing my eyes to them made it worse, so instead I stared out the window, trying to blot them out with the stream of morning rush-hour traffic and pedestrians swarming like ants below me. Life ground on as normal for so many; most were oblivious to the devastating and downright bizarre start to this day.
Smithy had dropped me off here earlier before returning to the scene. Now I could hear the movement and rustlings of my fellow detectives as they came into the office. Word must have filtered through as thus far they had skirted around and left me be. The enormity of what I’d just done was dawning and a maelstrom of emotions was threatening to explode. I took another large breath and started counting cars again in a futile attempt to blot out the playback.
Four sets of feet had entered the room so far and I could hear another approach, and fast. It was funny how you could recognise someone by the cadence of their walk.
‘Sam? How are you holding up?’ I swung around to see Smithy striding towards me. Before I’d even had the chance to put the coffee down he’d enveloped me in a big hug. I had to gulp hard to stop the tears from bursting out as one-handed I gripped him fiercely around his waist. He stepped back before sitting on top of the desk. ‘You feeling any better now?’
‘Not really, I could do with a stiff drink.’
‘I’m not surprised. That is the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. You must have balls of steel to stand there and take down a charging bloody elephant.’
I didn’t feel like I had anything of steel right now. In fact, my innards had the consistency of underdone custard. And they developed a viscosity more like water when I recognised the next set of footsteps storming towards the room. Oh God, not now.
DI Johns stopped in the doorway, targeted his sights on me, then braced his hands against the doorframe. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’ he bellowed. Every head in the room jolted around and a charged silence descended. His cheeks puffed out several times before he found the words to continue his tirade. ‘Why did you have to kill the frigging elephant? Don’t you realise how bad that makes us look? Jesus, you have got a lot to answer for, young lady.’
I dropped my head and focused on breathing and keeping the bile down that threatened to join an old food stain on the carpet. He couldn’t do this to me, not now.
‘Well, come on, then.’ He banged his fist against the doorjamb, jerking my eyes back up. ‘Answer me. How the hell are we supposed to clean up after this bloody great cock-up? What are you? Fucking stupid or something?’
That was one step too far. The dam that fought to hold back all my anger and grief failed, threatening to overwhelm me and anyone else in the flood path.
‘I did what I had to do.’ I spat out each word. ‘How bad do you think it would have made the police look if it had rolled another van and killed more people? She was going berserk. I had no other choice.’ I made no attempt to modulate my voice. I yelled back and I didn’t give a flying fuck who heard me. ‘It wasn’t like I could just walk up and stick a bloody halter on her. It was a bit beyond leading her away to a nice safe area out of everybody’s way. Of course I had to bloody well shoot her.’
‘Well you didn’t have to kill it there. We’ll have to get a flaming crane in to clear the road. And it wasn’t even an official weapon you used. Where the hell did you get the shotgun? Do you realise how much trouble you’ll be in for that?’
‘I grabbed whatever was to hand. What was I supposed to do? Say, “Oh, Cassie, can you pause your little murderous rampage while I pop back to the station, fill out the paperwork and get a police-issue weapon?” Get fucking real.’ I felt the crack of the polystyrene cup as it crushed in my hand and felt the remaining warm liquid run through my fingers, making its way to the floor. ‘You weren’t there and you didn’t have to make the call. I was there. I had to decide, I had to kill her. Me. Do you have any idea how bloody hard that was? Do you?’ By now, the tears were rolling down my face and my voice was laboured, laden with hurt and emotion. ‘Do you have any idea what it felt like to kill that beautiful, beautiful creature? Her name was Cassie, God damn it. Cassie. She was…’ I groped for words that could convey how I felt about her, but in my rage they proved elusive. ‘Bennett couldn’t do it, he fell, and if I didn’t shoot her, she could have bloody well killed someone else. I had no fucking choice. Get that into your thick head and for God’s sake just leave me alone.’
I threw what was left of the cup to the floor and stormed towards the door. The stupid bugger didn’t move out of the way so I shoved both hands hard into his chest and sent him reeling backwards before I escaped out the door and bolted for the stairs.
‘You come back here right now, you little bitch,’ I heard him bellow and then Smithy’s angry voice yelling, ‘DI Johns, you are out of order…’ before the doors clicked behind me and the only sound was my foot-steps, running.
33
‘Well, you certainly know how to make a scene.’ Smithy had tracked me down to my unlikely place of sanctuary. I’d wondered if anyone would come looking and was almost glad to see him. Half an hour of silence and stillness had calmed some of the physical manifestations of my rage, but had done nothing for my mental health. I wiped away the blood on my hand from the scab I’d been harassing.
‘He started it.’
‘Yeah, he did.’ Smithy leaned agains
t the doorway, head cocked to the side, observing me with a frown wrinkling across his brows. ‘He was way out of line, Sam, and everyone in that room would say so. He had no right to treat you like that.’
No, he didn’t have the right, but it didn’t stop him. He seemed to take great pleasure in singling me out for attention regardless. Reihana was on to it when he said I seemed to be the DI’s punching bag of choice. How on earth could I relinquish that position? No idea. I was powerless, in every way. I recalled the snatch of angry words I’d heard between Smithy and the DI during my bolt for freedom.
‘Thanks for standing up for me, I appreciate that.’
Smithy came over and sat beside me on the bench, elbows on his knees, his dry skin making tin-whistle scales as he rubbed his hands together.
‘It was all I could do not to deck him one. Let’s just say it got a bit ugly in the room after you left and I think our DI is in no doubt as to whose side we’re all on.’ I managed a smile. ‘Interesting choice of bolthole by the way. It took me a bit to find you.’ We were sitting in one of the empty cells in the basement. It had been a quiet night, so there were plenty to spare. I’d craved somewhere small and quiet and dark and my feet had directed me here. There was something cave-like about the room and I needed that security of cool concrete against my back.
‘Not very cosy, but I thought no one would look for me here.’
‘You got that right. Most people like to avoid imprisonment.’
‘I’m not most people.’
His hands stopped. ‘Maybe you should go home for the rest of the day, have a break. You’ve been through a hell of a lot.’
‘But they’ll want a statement and I’m sure I haven’t seen the last of the DI. I’d only get into more trouble if I left now. It’s probably better I stick around for a while.’