Blood Men: A Thriller

“A word of caution, Edward. Leave everything to us. We know what we’re doing.”


“Then prove it.”

I hang up, finish my beer, grab out another one, but don’t open it. I leave it on the kitchen counter and fire up the computer.

I go online and find all the newspaper reports from the last week that dealt with the robbery. There’s enough of them that by the time I print them out I have a stack of paper a centimeter thick. I take them outside and sit in the sun, reading through them. Surveillance from the bank puts the entry of the six men at 1:13 p.m. They were in the bank for less than four minutes, though it sure felt longer. The police were called by several witnesses outside who saw the men enter, as well as people who first heard the shotgun blast, but they were first alerted by a silent alarm. I close my eyes and try to remember as best I can. The men had been in the bank for almost a minute before the bank manager was killed. The newspaper says it took six minutes for the police to arrive at the scene. The men had been gone for two minutes by that point. The newspaper doesn’t say how much money was taken.

The accountant studies the figures. Four minutes. Six minutes. Six men. Two victims. Two fatal gunshots. An unnamed amount of money. The figures swirl around inside my head, I rest them against everything the newspapers say, try forcing them to fit against what I know, against my memories, but nothing sticks out, nothing shifts into such a focus as to tell me where to look next. The numbers mean nothing.

I pick up the sheaf of papers and throw them out into the yard. Most of them stay together, but the ones on the top and bottom slide away, the small breeze picking them up and pinning them into the corners of the yard. The answers are in the wind too, and though Schroder didn’t say it, I know that the bank robbery is already history, the death of my wife and the bank manager pushed aside as the Christchurch Crime Rate keeps rolling on, gathering momentum, leading to what, God only knows.

I end up drinking the beer and falling asleep, not heavily, but enough for about an hour to slip by mostly unnoticed, and when I wake up the lawn mower has stopped and my face is tight, and when I reach up to touch it, it’s tender from sunburn. When I stand up I realize that the few beers I’ve had, combined with the lack of food, have made me light-headed. I phone Nat and ask if they can take care of Sam tonight, and they tell me they can. In fact they sound more than happy to. I talk to Sam for a bit and she tells me she wants to come home and I tell her that she can’t, not today, that Daddy has some things he has to take care of.

“But you promised,” she says.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She finally accepts things can’t be changed and hands the phone back to Nat, grumpy.

“She’ll be okay,” he says. “You know how kids can be.”

“How’s she doing?”

“You know how it is,” he says, and he’s right. I do know. He means that Sam’s the same since the day we told her about her mum. Part shock and part disbelief and part simply not understanding. I’m the same way. We all are.

“Take care of yourself, Eddie,” he says, and something in the way he says that makes me think that he thinks he won’t be seeing me for a while. It’s the kind of thing you’d say to a friend leaving for jail or war.

I watch the sun peak in the sky. It disappears behind the tip of a giant fir tree next door for ten minutes before coming back into view, and then it slides back down. I drink another beer and then another, then head out front and grab the mail. There’s a letter from my insurance company. Both Jodie and myself have life insurance—but in a letter less than half a page long, our insurance company is holding back any decision to pay out because Jodie was killed in the commission of a crime. Life insurance is specifically there to cover accidents and illness—and does not cover murder, so the letter says, and they apologize for any inconvenience. I wonder why they got onto the case so quick—I hadn’t even contacted them—and I figure they wanted to rush through the bad news before Christmas.

The sun gets lower and evening arrives. I play the “what-if” game, the one where what if we’d gone to the bank ten minutes later, or what if I’d kept my mouth shut, or what if I’d fought the men off. There are a lot of what-ifs. A thousand of them—of course it’s a pointless game to play and I could spend the rest of my life out here under the sun, drinking beer, thinking about the could-have-beens and should-have-beens, the entire time the reality never forgotten—I’m the reason Jodie got killed.

More and more, the what-ifs begin to focus on the bank. I think about the security guard. I think about him a lot, and I imagine him acting.

But he didn’t, did he. He just stood there and did nothing.