Blood Men: A Thriller

The machine beeps. I’ll never change that outgoing message.

“Ah, hi, Edward, it’s John Morgan here, umm . . . I’m calling because we heard about what happened, and, um . . . all of us here at the firm are feeling for you, we really are, and, and, ah, we wanted to cancel the Christmas party tonight out of respect—I mean, none of us want to celebrate anything at the moment now—but the place is already booked and paid for and most of us were already here when the news came in. Okay, I guess that’s it . . . well, there is one more thing, and I hate to ask, but this McClintoch file you’re working on, it really needs to be wrapped up before the break, you know what it’s like, and nobody else can really step in and take over because you’ve invested so much work in it, and we’d end up chasing our tails for the week, so, umm, what I’m saying is I need you to . . . no, wait, I mean I’m asking if you can make it in next week to get it completed? After the funeral, of course, I mean, there’s no way I’d expect you to come in before then—unless of course you really wanted to, say, if you needed work to distract you or something. Thanks, Edward. Well . . . ah, see you later.”

He hangs up and the line beeps a couple of times and I delete the message. I hate my job. Sometimes I can sense the people there wondering about me, trying to figure how many people I’ve killed, or how many I’ll one day kill, accountants inside all of them crunching the numbers.

I slump in front of the TV. I have to wait until 10:30 for the news to come on. It opens with the bank robbery. The anchorwoman looks like she’s just come from modeling at a car show. She has only two expressions—the one she has for bad news, and the one for happy human interest stories. She composes herself with her bad-news face and recaps the highlight of the day, then says, “Some of these scenes may disturb.”

There are images from the security cameras. There is footage of the “after” by the camera crews that arrived. And there’s cell phone video footage from people too panicked to act but courageous enough to film what they could. The angle it’s shot from reminds me of the teenagers in the hoodies, and I’m pretty sure this is their footage, and I wonder how much they got paid for it, how excited they were about it all. It shows Jodie being dragged out of the bank, and even though I know what’s coming up, I still pray for it to go differently. Then it shows me coming out, chasing the men, five of them in the van, the sixth one with the gun, and late-night news being what it is these days where standards have relaxed enough where you can say “fuck” without being bleeped out; you can also see your wife getting shot too, because the footage doesn’t stop, it carries on as ratings are more important than and certainly more profitable than ethics, so the country gets to watch the blood spray from Jodie just as I got to watch it today, they get to see her knocked down, they get to put themselves in my shoes and see what I saw without feeling what I felt, and then they get to see it again in slow motion, the cell phone capturing everything in cell phone detail—not high quality, but high enough.

It goes back to the anchorwoman who, to her credit, appears momentarily uncomfortable by what the network aired. When she goes to speak she stutters over the first word. Thankfully for her career she recovers, and she’s able to offer up other details before segueing back to footage from the bank. There are sweeping shots of people in the street staring at the scene, shots of the police scouring the area, a nice, tight-cropped shot of me holding my wife, and no shots anywhere of the men who did this.