Death Dealing

by Ian Patrick

  Had they paused for another second they would have seen that they had already wreaked the damage necessary to stop the animal in its tracks.

  Fiona Ryder emitted a sound of deep, anguished despair as she saw her beloved dog look at her with a final check on her safety. Then, as if recognising that she was free of danger and he could now finally let go, his front legs collapsed, their paws bent inward. Then his back legs gave way, and he fell.

  Fiona screamed and fell to her knees. Sugar-Bear lay spread-eagled on the lawn, as still as death.

  14.42.

  Ryder smashed through the garage door and sprinted in the direction of his wife’s piercing scream. As he approached the front corner of the house he could see, at the far end of the driveway, the fleeing Thabethe and Mgwazeni. But his thoughts were only for his wife. As he rounded the corner he was struck instantly by two devastating and conflicting emotions. A wave of horror engulfed him as he saw the deadly spike protruding from his beloved Sugar-Bear, who lay prone on the lawn. Simultaneously, instant relief flooded over him as he saw Fiona, on her knees before the dog, distraught but alive.

  Fiona Ryder’s eyes made contact with those of her husband the instant he appeared. She screamed at him.

  ‘Get them, Jeremy! Get them! We’re OK. Please get them!’

  Ryder needed nothing more. He leaped for his car, right hand searching for the car keys in his pocket.

  As the two men tore up to the top of the road in the Opel Astra, Ryder ripped open the door of the Camry. Within seconds the engine was screaming as he tore up the lawn with a rapid reverse, spun the wheel, and took off down the driveway. He lurched into the road and pulled the wheel hard over to his left. Within seconds he had burned his way to the end of Essex Terrace and over the Rockdale Avenue bridge spanning the King Cetshwayo Highway, up Jan Hofmeyer Road and into Westville, in hot pursuit and gaining rapidly.

  He caught up with the fugitives’ car when they reached the top of the hill. As they crested it and started on the downhill, Thabethe and Mgwazeni, realising they could never outpace the Camry, panicked and swung onto the verge, seeking to abandon the vehicle and escape on foot. It was a fatal error of judgement. Mgwazeni, at the wheel, saw too late the unexpectedly sharp rise on the verge. He tried to swing the wheel back again, but his right wrist was far too weak, the damage wrought by Sugar-Bear having rendered it almost completely useless. There was no strength at all in his right hand as he pulled on the wheel, and the left hand could manage only a fraction of what was needed to swing the steering wheel back. It was too little too late.

  The vehicle struck the verge and somersaulted once, then twice, then a third time, and then with a sickening crunch of metal it came to a shuddering halt, upside-down. Pedestrians screamed and evaporated from the scene to positions of safety some thirty paces away.

  Ryder skidded to a halt on the opposite side of the road, on sand and gravel. He leaped out of the car and saw immediately that Thabethe had crawled from the wreckage and decided to take his chances on foot. He was clambering over a flimsy wooden garden fence as Ryder dashed across the road toward him. Ryder paused fractionally to check on Mgwazeni. He needed no more than two seconds, because he saw at a glance that the man was dead, his neck at a horrific angle to his head and clearly broken. Mgwazeni had died instantly.

  Ryder followed Thabethe over the fence as if it were the last hurdle in the hundred metre hurdles he had run frequently at high school. He found his adversary standing, back against a wall of the house, facing him. He had a garden pick in his hands. It was a lethal-looking device, just short of a metre long with a mattock design and hickory handle, and a heavy duty forged steel head, sharpened to a point at one end.

  Ryder and Thabethe faced each other, each waiting for the other to make the first move. The last time they had done this, each holding a pistol in a clearing on the south coast, Ryder had prevailed. On that occasion he had hoped that Thabethe would raise his weapon. Ryder was not a cop who executed people in cold blood. He had needed the adversary to make the first move, and then he would have had no hesitation in shooting to kill. But Thabethe had known that there was no way he could prevail over Ryder. The detective was sharp, and fast, and clinical. Thabethe knew, on that occasion, the game was up. He would never win in a shootout against Ryder. He had succumbed meekly and Ryder had put the cuffs on him and taken him away.

  He had then spent three months in prison before breaking out with his two companions. Three months of hell in a place to which he swore he would never return. A hell about which the South African public had no accurate knowledge.

  This time the confrontation was going to be different, Thabethe thought. There was no way he was going back. The amaphoyisa could cut him to pieces if they wanted to, but there was no way they were taking him. He would face everything this cop could throw at him and he would never succumb.

  They both heard the police siren in the distance, drawing nearer.

  Thabethe stepped forward one pace. Ryder retreated one pace. Thabethe stepped forward another pace, slightly to the left this time. Ryder mirrored him, taking half a pace backward to his right. Thabethe moved again, also slightly left. And Ryder mirrored him again. Each pace moved them diagonally to Ryder’s right. One more step. Then suddenly there was an audience behind Ryder’s back. The spectators on the road had run from the upended car to the wooden fence over which the two men had clambered, and were peering over the fence at the action.

  With seven or eight faces peering over the fence, and bodies pressed against the thin wooden planks, the structure suddenly gave way, most of the spectators falling with it into the garden. The collapsed fence revealed further spectators beyond. They included two uniformed constables who had run from the nearby Westville Police Station. In the distance was another Westville cop, running toward the scene. She was a detective known to Ryder.

  Two of the fallen spectators screamed as they struck rocks and hard ground in the now-exposed garden. Ryder was distracted for an instant, and Thabethe chose that moment to strike. As he did so, one of the spectators screamed as the lethal point of the pick curved in an arc aimed at Ryder’s head.

  Ryder stepped in toward the incoming blow. He went in much lower than Thabethe expected and much faster, and landed a massive punch to his solar plexus. With the extraordinary power behind the punch, the intended blow from the pick fizzled out and the lethal instrument curved inward to the ground, embedding itself in the hard earth at one end, with the sharpened point projecting directly upward.

  Ryder knew that a punch to the solar plexus was one of the best ways to disable an opponent, because an appropriately aimed blow would paralyse the complex network of nerves there, along with a shock to the diaphragm that would cause instant loss of breath.

  There was also an additional dimension to the punch. As Ryder unleashed it, he had embedded in his memory the sight of his beloved Border Collie lying immobile on the front lawn of his home, a deadly needle protruding from its body, with his distraught wife weeping hysterically over the animal. As Ryder punched, he had psyched himself to a point at which he was landing a blow aimed at the most evil force he had ever encountered in his career in law enforcement. He was dealing death to the devil himself. The power behind the blow was driven by more than mere physical strength. He was striking out at every evil force that had ever loomed in upon him. He was punching through the thin veneer of ethics and justice and law and balance and equilibrium that he had thought, until then, governed his precarious moral being. He was taking out the devil.

  With someone as wiry and as lean as Thabethe the damage was even more profound, because there was virtually no fat or muscle to absorb the blow. Thabethe’s diaphragm went into instant spasm and he buckled. As he did so, his right foot stepped forward into an indentation in the garden that caused him to lose his balance.

  Thabethe fell face first onto the garden pick. The upended point went into his right eye socket and through the back of his head.

  T
he spectators screamed. The police constables gasped, as did the local Westville detective, Warrant Officer Mpho Mphe, who had arrived just in time to see Thabethe swing the weapon. Ryder spun around and addressed the detective.

  ‘I’m leaving, Mpho. More action at home. My wife and family. Get hold of me there.’

  The detective nodded, speechless for a moment, and then she blurted out.

  ‘Yes, of course, Jeremy. Go. Go, man. I’ll take care of this. Go! Go, Jeremy!’

  The spectators scattered again. Ryder sprinted across the road to his car and took off with the engine screaming and tyres skidding wildly on loose gravel before finding traction and lurching forward onto the tarmac. As he burned his way down Jan Hofmeyer Road he was suddenly overcome by a feeling of the utmost dread. He had seen Sugar-Bear immobile and stretched out on the lawn with the horrendous bicycle spoke protruding from him. Fiona had shouted Get them! We’re OK. What had that meant? Did she mean that she and the boys were OK? Or had she meant that she and the dog were OK? Did this mean that in the heat of the moment she hadn’t stopped to think of the boys? How were the boys? How could she have meant that she and the dog were OK, when the dog was clearly dead, with a grotesque metal spike pinning it to the ground?

  He couldn’t eradicate the image of the devastated parents he had encountered in Glenwood. He thought back on the sight that had greeted him at the Khuzwayo family home. Would he, too, lapse into traumatic immobility like the Khuzwayo parents, following the gruesome discovery of butchered children? Would he finally topple over the edge, like Kwanele Khuzwayo? Like Nadine Salm? Would he find his wife traumatised and his sons murdered by the most evil man he had ever encountered? Would he finally succumb to the crime that permeated the country to which he had committed himself? Would he finally surrender and say that justice was a lost cause in this country, and that it was time to pack and head for the Emerald Isle?

  Ryder’s worst fears were growing into nightmares as the car careened off Rockdale Avenue Bridge and around the bend into Essex Terrace. Seconds later he felt a sob erupting in his throat as he turned the corner at the top of Cochrane Avenue and saw, ahead of him, spilling out of his own driveway, a crowd of people and cars and uniformed police constables. He skidded to a halt in the middle of the road and sprinted up the driveway.

  15.20.

  They came from everywhere. Once the call was sent out it went viral. Tweets, emails, texts, and phone messages. Pagers, cell-phones, landlines and radio calls. People popping into local cafes and shops with have you heard? Do you know anyone who can help? Within minutes it seemed to onlookers that every Westville-resident surgeon or consultant or vet or nurse had rushed over to the Ryder home.

  They came from as far away as Cowie’s Hill. Cars were abandoned in the street up and down from the Ryder driveway. On the front lawn there were a dozen people who knew exactly what they were doing, and for every one of them there was someone who didn’t know what they were doing. Another dozen individuals stood back on the driveway watching, agitated, and deeply concerned. Every face sported moist eyes and many of them cascaded tears.

  All of them had one thought in common. The life of the black and white bundle of fur on the lawn had to be saved.

  Fiona Ryder and her two sons were clinging on to each other as if their own lives depended on it. An enormous German Shepherd from the K9 unit at Durban Central sat obediently next to his handler on the lawn, but he was extremely agitated and was whining in sympathy with the grievously injured Border Collie. His whines were punctuated every now and then with a gentle encouraging bark directed at Sugar-Bear, who could hear nothing.

  Neighbouring children were crying in anguish: Sugar-Bear was well known in the street, and parents were doing their best to provide comfort to their young ones.

  The main veterinary surgeon, from the Westville Veterinary Hospital, who lived only four houses away, had been one of the first to arrive. He was issuing instructions and receiving willing assistance from any number of hands, including those of one of the country’s top vascular surgeons, also a local resident who lived in the very next street, and who was happy to play second fiddle to the vet who knew exactly what he was doing.

  Uniforms started arriving, along with Forensic Services and medics. Respecting the anguish of the crowd, constables nevertheless started ushering them gently back behind cordons. Inside the house, another cordon was being erected around the area containing the body of Wakashe.

  Ryder came running up the driveway. Fiona and the boys rushed over to him, meeting him halfway down. The four of them clung to each other as Fiona blurted out the news. No-one was sure, she said, whether Sugar-Bear would pull through, but the best people were working on him and everyone was willing them on.

  Ryder felt himself caving in, inside. Relieved as he was at the sight of his family, none of them sporting any wounds or physical damage, he couldn’t imagine losing Sugar-Bear. The desperate anguish of his sons and wife made it even harder to bear. The four of them stood, huddled together, desperate.

  Forensics had called for photographers, who now arrived and made their way directly inside the house to join the team working around Wakashe’s body. A uniformed police constable was barking a report into her iPhone. Neighbours were dashing back and forth offering help but being ushered back by other constables. Extra cordons were being erected and people were now being pushed more forcefully back behind them.

  The minutes ticked by as the crowd waited for news. More people came and went, asking for information, being briefed by those who knew, and corrected by those who knew better.

  Apparently...

  I heard that...

  It seems that...

  Ja, and apparently...

  The opinions flowed back and forth.

  Suddenly a cheer went up from the crowd on the lawn. It travelled like a ripple of water down the driveway. It burst from there like a flood and bubbled up and down the street and into the houses next door and opposite and further along. The excitement and joy mingled with tears of relief.

  The vet had made a pronouncement. The dog would make it. He would pull through. They had saved his life.

  Children wept with joy and ran off to tell their friends and families. The German Shepherd seemed to pick up the new mood and started barking hysterically. His handler had difficulty restraining him. The Ryders rushed up onto the lawn. The vet and the doctors and nurses had stood up and were slapping one another on the back and pumping away with ecstatic handshakes. The Ryders collapsed on their knees next to their beloved pet. Ryder felt like burying his face into the dog’s neck, but restrained himself to look instead with concern at the grotesque expression on Sugar-Bear’s face.

  ‘He’s still out for the count, sir,’ said the vet’s assistant who was swabbing away the blood and cleaning up around the wound. ‘He’ll come around soon, but he’ll be terribly sick when he does.’

  Sugar-Bear lay there looking anything but peaceful. His tongue protruded, his teeth were bared seemingly in a vicious snarl, and his eyes were slightly open, almost as if he could see and register what was happening. But he couldn’t. No-one knew whether the dog was off somewhere in his imagination chasing criminals or herding sheep or merely imagining delicious chunks of his favourite cheddar cheese.

  But he was alive.

  23.55.

  The last remaining friends were taking their leave on the front patio. The Ryder boys had retreated to their rooms. Sugar-Bear lay resplendent on the thick duvet and blankets that had been laid out especially for him on the floor of the living room. Never previously allowed to spend the night any further indoors than the kitchen area, the dog on this occasion was to be treated like royalty and have a different bed for the night. He yawned, shifted position slightly, and closed his eyes as the last of the guests moved outdoors. But one ear remained up and alert, just in case.

  The medics and photographers and mortuary van and other officials had long since departed. Koekemoer, Dippenaar, Pillay, Cron
je, Tshabalala and Nyawula had all come around during the course of the evening, once they had received the news, and they had remained. Despite arriving at different times during the evening, they had all responded with alacrity to Fiona Ryder’s extraordinary ability to rustle up extra snacks and goodies and nibbles at short notice. So they had stayed on as the wine, beer and whisky flowed. Sugar-Bear had received more gentle pats on the head and careful tweaks of the ear and baby-talk conversations in one day than any dog, anywhere, might be able to bear. Now, finally, they were all preparing to depart.

  ‘Yissus, Jeremy. Take a day off tomorrow, OK? Take the blerrie phone off the hook, man. Sunday’s a day of rest. Give the bad guys in this town a break, OK?’

  ‘Rubbish, man, Dipps,’ Koekemoer interjected. ‘If Jeremy takes his phone off the hook then you and I will have to work overtime.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with Dipps, Koeks. Jeremy delivered Thabethe for me. Not quite on a plate but at least delivered. That’s the biggest prize I could have hoped for. So, as your boss, I’m instructing you. Give the guy a break. And take your phone off the hook as Dipps suggests, Jeremy.’

  ‘Thank you, Sibo,’ said Fiona. ‘It will be nice to have my husband at home tomorrow. With all the unexpected action he missed the Sharks game this afternoon, but luckily it was set on automatic recording, so we can catch up on the game tomorrow.’

  ‘Ag, jirra, Fiona, man.’

  ‘What’s wrong, Piet?’