Free Gun Dealing (The Ryder Quartet Book 2) by Ian Patrick Page A

few arrows,
crosses, and other characters and explaining the assumed action. The two
witnesses, twin sisters, had been brought onto the scene yesterday, the officer
said, and she had walked the teenagers through what they had witnessed. She
said that their evidence had been crucial in putting together the charts to
which the officer now referred. The version on the flipchart paper was for the
detectives to take away.
    Both Ryder and Pillay were deeply
affected by the specific evidence on the shooting of Sinethemba Ngobeni, and
were then taken through the details of Lindiwe Xana’s fate by the second
forensics officer who now joined them. Then Nadine Salm came off the hill with
her assistant, and they also joined the detectives and the others, but only
briefly.  
    Pillay had never met Nadine. Knowing
that they would be meeting for the first time this morning, Ryder had already
warned Navi about Nadine’s distinctive pronunciation, especially on diphthongs,
where she tended to use the OO instead of the long O and the long E instead of
the long A, thus show as shoo and table as teeble . He urged
Navi not to register any reaction to the idiosyncrasy, as Nadine had been
teased quite a bit about it in the past and he thought she was a bit sensitive
about it. His own preference was that once Nadine got into the pattern of
conflating vowel sounds the best policy was to pretend that it simply was not
happening.
    Fortunately, though, the encounter
was only brief, Nadine saying that she was not in a position to provide any
analysis, and that the present task was to locate every possible bullet then
track back to the likely weapons and put it all together in a thorough shooting
scene reconstruction. She was able, nevertheless, to confirm that everything
pointed so far to the likelihood that the three weapons used were all 9mm, and
from her experience probably something like SIG Sauer pistols.

 
    12.20
    Just after midday Koekemoer and
Dippenaar met up after their respective investigations on other cases each of
them was handling and they hit the road together shortly thereafter, heading
south on the M4. The traffic was unusually fluid and they moved quickly onto
the M35, passing Isipingo Hills on their right then swung right through Umlazi
on their way to the Mbokodweni River.
    ‘ Yissus .
This is a big place, hey, Koeks.’
    ‘ Ja .
Third biggest township in the country, I hear.’
    ‘Really? What’s first and second?
Soweto and Katlehong? Or Soweto and Soshanguve? What about Khayelitsha?
    ‘ Nooit ,
man. Soweto and Tembisa.’
    ‘Oh. Ja . Tembisa. I ‘spose so. Never been there.’
    ‘I hear Umlazi’s so big it has a
different section for each letter of the alphabet. Umlazi A to Umlazi Z. Also
had its own special number-plate for cars.’
    ‘Really, Koeks? Where you read that?
On a Chappies chewing gum wrapper when you were a laaitie ?’
    ‘ Ag no, Dipps. Somewhere. Who knows? I dunno .’
    ‘I tell you what my ou toppie told me once. He said that the name came from uMlaza . That meant sour milk, you know, for the Zulu okes at that time. Like fermented whatchamacallit . My old man chuned me this story that when old Shaka
came through here once and someone offered him a dop from the river he said fokkof ,
man, I’m not drinking any of that sour uMlaza stuff. So the name Umlazi stuck.
Anyway, who knows?
    They began crossing the Mbokodweni on
the way to Folweni.
    ‘ Jirra ,
Dipps, I remember when I was a laaitie we
called this the Umbogintwini. Why
they have to mess with the names I dunno .’
    ‘ Ja ,
well, Koeks. Maybe because we didn’t pronounce it so well when we were in
charge, hey?’
    ‘ Ag , ‘spose so. Just so blerrie difficult to remember all the
new names. What does it mean, anyway?’
    ‘River of pebbles, or something like
that. River of small stones. Stones rubbing together, I think. No. River of
grinding stones! Daarsy ! River of
grinding stones.’
    ‘Just like the Springbok scrum.’
    ‘ Daarsy