by Ian Patrick
There was no forlorn crying of birds this evening as the day ticked toward 6.00 pm. There was the frequent growl of traffic and the occasional thud of tyre against pothole. In the distance, on a clearer day, one might have glimpsed the warm waters of the Indian Ocean to the east. On such a day, to the west, one might have seen hill after hill, and beyond and behind the hills, all the way to the starker beauty of the Drakensberg.
On this particular day, as dusk crept in, there was no such view for Jessica and Nobuhle Mkhize, twin sisters aged nineteen, experimenting with the drug about which they had heard so much. A drug they had also once or twice heard their father mention, but which they had never previously seen. Until this day. They giggled as they drew the foul concoction into their lungs. And coughed and wheezed as their senses became numbed.
The sun had given up trying to warm the R74 and hid in shame behind the hills as the sisters saw the red Mazda 323 approach from the west and pull up some eighty metres opposite them, on the sand just off the verge. The two outer wheels were still on the road, requiring any cars travelling in the same direction to slow down and exercise care before passing by. Three men left the vehicle without locking it, and left the hazard lights flashing as they entered the bush close to the Mbozamo, virtually unrecognisable as a stream, let alone the gushing river it once was.
The sisters joked with each other about the looks of the three men. One very plump, the driver, who waddled like a duck, would be just the right kind of guy for Nobuhle, said her teasing sister. He’s got fancy shoes. Must have money. A good husband, perhaps. Nobuhle slapped Jessica lightly on the wrist and retorted that both the very tall skinny one and the furtive one, the one who got out of the back of the car, who definitely looked like a tsotsi, both of them would make fine husbands for her.
The two young women chortled, greatly amused, and drew more fumes into their lungs as they watched from across the road, seated up on the hill facing northward, unseen by the three men. Who appeared to be waiting, concealed in the bush.
*
The preliminary police report spanned no more than a couple of pages. Constable Lindiwe Xana was based at the Folweni police station when she died in the bush near KwaDukuza. The report indicated that she had been struck by seven bullets, all probably 9mm, probably from three different weapons. The bullet that entered just above her left eye had most likely been the one that had been fatal. The report also stated that Lindiwe had been sexually assaulted by two different men. There was a high probability that the blood patterns, body position, clothing and other indicators were suggestive of sexual violation after death, and not before.
Cst. Xana, aged twenty-six, highly regarded at Folweni and winner of two SAPS merit awards, was unmarried at the time of her death. She had been with three friends, all of them women police constables, two of them from Isipingo SAPS and one from Durban Central, all returning from a family celebration in KwaDukuza. They had travelled together in a 4-door cream-coloured VW Velociti 1.4i. When they saw a red Mazda 323 parked dangerously on the side of the road, on the R74 halfway from KwaDukuza to the N2, they had stopped, apparently to see if they could provide assistance.
According to two witnesses, identified as Jessica and Nobuhle Mkhize, twin sisters sitting together on a hill on the opposite side of the road, before the two policewomen in the front of the car could remove their seatbelts three men suddenly rushed forward from the bush on the edge of the road and opened fire on them. The two constables in front, one of them a student constable, were killed instantly, each with three bullets to the head.
The constable next to Lindiwe Xana in the back seat managed to open her door and run six or seven paces into the road before she was gunned down by all three of the assailants firing shots across the road at her. The preliminary report described eleven bullets in her body, six of them in her back and the others in legs and arms. This constable’s action, coupled with the skidding of a passing car travelling west to east, with a loud hooting and squealing of brakes, had given Lindiwe Xana a few seconds during which she managed to open her door and run into the bush. As she did so, the driver of the passing car, trying to avoid the fleeing constable in the middle of the road while at the same time sustaining a fatal bullet wound to the left temple, somersaulted the car which then shuddered to a rest, upside down, off the verge on the opposite side of the road.
All three of the assailants then ran after Lindiwe Xana. The report indicated that they caught her some twenty metres into the bush. The first responders, in their preliminary scene investigation, suggested that that was where they pumped the seven bullets into her.
According to the two witnesses, various cars began pulling up to investigate what appeared to them to be an accident. Meanwhile the three men emerged from the bushes after some three or four minutes, got into the red Mazda, and sped off in the direction of the N2. Whether they had then turned south to Durban or north to Richards Bay or had driven straight on to Blythedale and the Indian Ocean was unknown.
The identity of the deceased driver of the overturned car was unknown.
Along with an attached note stating that formal autopsy, forensics and ballistics reports would follow in due course, this preliminary report would be delivered to the desk of Captain Sibongiseni Nyawula in Durban Central on Monday morning. The reason given in the note was that at the present time there was no available resource in KwaDukuza SAPS nor in any other nearby station to pick up this case. Besides, the student constable in question had been based in Nyawula’s unit. Her name was Sinethemba Ngobeni. She died at age twenty.
The name Sinethemba is translatable as We have hope.
18.15.
The three men in the red Mazda tore down the road toward the sea. They turned neither north nor south onto the N2. They drove straight over it, on toward Blythedale and the ocean. They kept going until the R74 became Umvoti Street. They went as far as Umvoti would allow them, then they turned right around the traffic circle and down the road known simply as The Drive. They travelled as far as they could until the high-security fences and walls and gates of luxury homes converged into a cul de sac and kept them from going any further.
They turned, retraced their route a short distance, then parked the car as far off the road as they could, under dark overhanging foliage. They got out, locked the car, and headed across one of the last remaining underdeveloped plots for the beach, and then into the bush. Luxury homes behind them, and the sea before them. This was where they would stay until the dark enveloped them and the anticipated police sirens finally faded away into the night.
Thirty paces into the thick bush, as they pushed through the foliage they did not notice the man sitting alone, quietly. He sat with his back against a tree, facing a gap in the thick vegetation that allowed him to look at the crashing surf little more than a hundred metres away. The man remained still. Only his eyes moved as he watched them thrust noisily through the bush, passing directly in front of him.
Skhura Thabethe sat, frozen, the nyaope joint clasped lightly between thumb and two fingers as he watched the three men pass by without seeing him. The purple knots of the blood vessels in each of his eyes seemed more inflamed than usual, with the fumes of the joint drifting up across his face.
His pupils were unnaturally large. If any of the three men had turned to look at him they might have deduced that they were in the presence of evil.
They did not see him. They crashed on into the bush.
Tap here to buy the eBook version of Ian Patrick’s Gun Dealing.
line-share-buttons">share
