Gun Dealing (The Ryder Quartet Book 2) (14 page)

They also puzzled over the Vektor Z88
used by Sergeant Dlamini from Folweni. Nadine looked through the reports on his
death, and the evidence recovered from the scene, and the
 
drawings she herself had made at the
scene, along with the photographs taken by her assistant. She drew some arrows
on a piece of paper. She pulled out a protractor and jotted down some
measurements.

Something wasn’t hanging together.
She would need to go back and have a closer look.

She looked up at the charts and
photos and drawings on her noticeboard, compared them with the computer-based
drawings, and frowned.

22.45.

Except for the Ryders everyone did
what most people did when an alarm went off. In the first second they wondered
what’s that?
In the next second they
wondered
where
’s that? In the third
and fourth seconds a couple of them considered whether the sound was their own
car alarm outside while others wondered whether the sound was a fire alarm. In
the fifth second Jennifer thought that Fiona had another surprise in the oven
and the alarm was simply informing her that whatever it was, it was now ready.
For the first five seconds none of the guests moved as they thought through
these possibilities.

Except for the Ryders. Instantly, as
the alarm was triggered, their eyes met for a nano-second. Then he was off,
immediately, heading toward the passageway to their bedroom where his Vektor
SP1 lay with its double-stack magazine fully loaded under a T-shirt in his
wardrobe. Fiona turned immediately toward the kitchen to the panic button and
where she also knew her heaviest ribbed cast-iron heavy duty skillet still lay
on the stove, put there earlier to cool down.

They were both too late. Ryder was
stopped in the passageway by one of the three men pointing a SIG Sauer 9mm
SP2022 directly at his face. Fiona was stopped just as she entered the kitchen
by a second man, tall and skinny, with exactly the same make and model of
weapon, pointing at her chest. The third man, obese, smirking, came up from the
garden onto the patio, brandishing a titanium gold Desert Eagle, Mark XIX with
a six-inch barrel. All three of the men advanced slowly, herding them all back
into the sitting room. The man from the patio did the talking.

‘Good evening, my people! Everyone,
now, you must be standing still right there. No move, people. You be good
people, you not die. You stand still and my friend there he will be collecting
the wallets and purses and
jewellery
and watches,
nè
?’

Jennifer fainted. Katherine caught her
before she hit the floor and lowered her the rest of the way. Everyone else
froze.

The telephone rang.

The alarm company, Ryder thought.
They’ll be here in three or four minutes. Then there’ll be mayhem. Danger.
Trigger-happy armed response. Could be disastrous. Better that they stay away.

The man who had stopped Fiona
entering the kitchen had the same thought. He pointed the gun at Fiona’s
forehead. Ryder tensed but held back as the man directed his words at Fiona.

‘You. You answer that telephone. You
tell them no problem. You give them one clue, one time, only one time, and I
shoot you. No secret password,
nè?
If
they come here, then we shoot everybody. Everybody she
die
!’

Ryder’s eyes locked with Fiona’s. He
shook his head almost imperceptibly. They agreed. Play along for now. No
password clues to the alarm company. Too dangerous. She picked up the receiver,
which was just inside the entrance to the kitchen, visible to all of them
diagonally across the passage from the sitting room.

‘Hullo. Yes, no. No, I thought it
would be you. No. No sorry, it was me, my fault.
Mrs
Ryder. Yes. Fiona Ryder. Yes, I forgot I had switched it on. No, no problem.
Yes. OK.’

In answer to a specific careful
question from the control room caller she provided the information
signalling
that all was genuinely fine and that the company
could stand down their armed response team who had already been dispatched to
the scene. Both she and Ryder were computing the situation in exactly the same
way. They knew that on many occasions it was advisable to give the caller the
code word that meant they were actually really in trouble. But there was always
the slimmest of chances that insider collaboration might blow the procedure. As
could a nervous robber. In this particular situation it looked as if the
intruders knew what they were doing, and that they were after wallets and
jewels and nothing else. Not worth endangering the lives of their guests. So
play it cool. No signals to the armed response guys this time.

The Ryders were wrong about the
intentions of at least one of the three men.

Fiona hung up the phone, and her
guard moved around behind her in the kitchen so that he could herd her back
into the living room. Meanwhile the man in the passageway, having moved Ryder
back into the living room with the others, was the one assigned to collecting
wallets and valuables. But even before the collection started it immediately
became apparent that he had other intentions,
focussed
on Busisiwe.

‘You!
Wena
. You show me the more stuff in the bedroom, first,
nè?
Then later we want to talk to the Detective,
Mr
Jeremy Ryder, after we have some fun, you and me.’

He held his weapon in his right hand
and reached for Busisiwe with his left hand. Just at this point Jennifer
started moaning and coming round and Hans moved forward instinctively to
protect Busisiwe. As these three things happened, simultaneously, the rest of
the group shifted slightly on their feet and vocal protests started, along with
the man with the Desert Eagle shouting at his companion.

‘No, Macks! Not now.’

‘
Fokoff
,
Themba,’ came the reply, ‘two minutes, is all!’

The Desert Eagle man was about to
reply when Jennifer, suddenly
realising
the
intentions toward Busisiwe, screamed. Unbelievably loudly.

It was the distraction Ryder needed.
Fiona had been watching her husband like a hawk, and at the precise moment he
made his move she also made hers.

Ryder had to choose between the two
men in the living room, knowing that Fiona would try something of her own with
the third man in the kitchen. He decided that there would be a split second in
which the would-be molester of Busisiwe would have his attention still
lingering on her. The danger man was the man from the patio. But he was fat,
and therefore probably slower than he might otherwise have been. Ryder
propelled himself across the room, dancing in two rapid strides like a cartoon
ninja, his massive right fist smashing into Themba’s nose and upper lip just as
he
realised
what was happening and started bringing
up his gun hand. Ryder, fearing that he might still manage to let off a bullet
that would cause damage to someone, a split-second later brought his left arm
swinging down from overhead to smash the fat man’s right arm downward. Just in
time, because as he fell, blinded by the blood from his nose and with teeth
collecting in places where they didn’t belong in his shattered mouth, he let
off a round that was diverted into the lounge floor as Ryder’s blow dislodged
the weapon from the man’s hand.

No time to finish the guy off with a
killer blow to the throat, as Ryder might have preferred, because Busisiwe’s
molester, in what seemed almost slow-motion to the guests, was now turning his
attention one hundred and eighty degrees clockwise around to Ryder. Ryder,
knowing this would be coming his way, was already swinging back
counter-clockwise, calibrating the distance perfectly and smashing his left
elbow into Macks’s
celiac
plexus
. As he doubled over, Ryder, continuing the counter-clockwise
movement, followed through with his right fist from low down near the floor and
hammered him beneath the chin with a blow that would have felled a heavyweight
boxer. It smashed the lower jaw into five pieces and drove its yellow teeth
right through Macks’s tongue. The force of the blow continued through the upper
jaw, fracturing the skull. He dropped like a stone.

Ryder paused only long enough to see
that Fiona had grounded the third man in the kitchen, so he immediately turned
back to the patio man. Who was now crawling to the patio, scrabbling around for
his Desert Eagle, with blood in his eyes and in no fit state to find it. Ryder
made sure by kicking aside the grounded weapon and helped him on his way by
dragging him onto the patio and onto the first of the stairs that led to the
garden. He placed the intruder’s right forearm across the two top steps, and snapped
it with a downward thrust of his right foot. He then did the same to Themba’s
left forearm, the split bones of each half ending up almost at right angles to
each other.

Ivan ran to the edge of the patio and
threw up into the garden. Harry punched the air with a
yes!!
as if his beloved Manchester United had just scored in extra
time. Hans hugged Busisiwe as if he would never let her go. Mongezi and Ntombi
were also clutching each other as if Armageddon was upon them. At a glance
Ryder saw Kate helping Jennifer to her feet, but he was more interested in
Fiona as he ran from the patio toward the kitchen.

Meanwhile Fiona had made good on her
original intention. She would later tell friends that some of her finest meals
had come out of the skillet, but this night proved to be the best use she had
ever made of the heavy ribbed cast-iron frying pan. As Fiona had hung up the
phone on the alarm company, she had calculated the exact distance she needed to
stretch to get the frying pan into her hands. As her husband had started his
action, she had turned instantly around on her guard, with a knee to the groin
that connected perfectly. As Mavuso doubled up and stumbled backward, still
with weapon in hand, she reached across to the stove. She lifted the skillet with
both hands up to the ceiling and from on high brought it crashing down onto the
back of the gangster’s skull. Lights out. She heard the skull-bone fracture,
she would later say.

There was a moment of pure and
complete silence. Throughout the house.

Then Jennifer started screaming
again, hysterically.
  

23.10.

Thabethe was back at a spot he’d
visited on more than one occasion late at night. Just north of the Umgeni
River, in the bushes on the beach near the Beachwood Mangroves Nature Reserve.
No fence could keep him out. Here he found tranquility. Space. Quiet.

He sat in the bush, staring out at
the sea, a
nyaope
joint between thumb
and two
 
fingers. Time to think. A
loaded SIG on the ground next to him. A carton of extra bullets in his pocket.
A car at his disposal, safely parked some distance away.

Trouble is, he thought, this is a
weapon that is being hunted by the cops. That drunken idiot, Themba, has
probably left other clues and traces all over. It won’t take long for a
half-smart cop to get hot on the trail. Then if they take down the three
skollies
, they’ll turn their attention
to the missing weapon.

That Ryder guy. Bad business. With
any luck, the three guys will nail Ryder and get him off the trail.

But if they don’t succeed, what then?

23.55.

The alarm company had been called. So
had the Westville Police. The police had got there before the armed response
team. This was because Fiona had had to spend a minute explaining why this time
it was for real and clarifying why it was that she had been unable to send the
coded alarm signal the first time.

While the police and the medics were
doing their thing, the guests were all back at the dining room table. At
Mongezi’s own suggestion he opened the carefully wrapped gift that he and
Ntombi had brought and had handed to Ryder at the commencement of the evening.
They had spoken lovingly about the gift as they had presented it to him.

‘It’s a Laphroaig PX Cask. One
litre
Travel Retail
Exclusive
, as they call it. Don’t know what the hell it signifies, but they
say that it’s finished in
ex-Pedro
Ximinez Sherry casks
,’ Mongezi had said, ‘whatever that might mean.’

‘You can read on the blurb that it’s
very collectable and difficult to obtain. Hope you enjoy it over many months,
Jeremy,’ Ntombi had said, not knowing how optimistic such a statement was in
relation to the Ryders’ whisky habits.

Fiona now brought out the glasses
with alacrity. Nerves needed to be calmed, she thought.

‘Won’t you get the ice, Jeremy? Thank
you both so much. I can’t think of a better way to come down from all of that.
Thank you, Ntombi. We’ve never heard of a collectable Laphroaig before. We
can’t see how that would be possible in this house. Not with me and Jeremy.
This is going to go down so well.’

Within mere minutes they were well
into the bottle. They all participated, in between various statements being
given to the police and the alarm company, and various bits of the evening’s
action being replayed by each of them from different perspectives. Laughter and
tears came and went. Ryder politely brushed aside Ntombi’s gracious suggestion
that she and Mongezi would replace the gift and buy another bottle sometime
during the week.