Текст книги "Blood Men "

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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chapter two

Crime is escalating. Domestic abuse, adolescent street racers running down innocent pedestrians, people stealing and killing—this is the norm in Christchurch, everyday acts happening in an everyday city. Crime escalates like every other statistic, like inflation, cost of living, it ebbs and flows along with gas prices and the real estate market. Same with the murder rate—it can’t be plotted and predicted on a graph, but it stays in line with other crime, a statistic, a percentage.

But this . . .

He’s not even sure what this is.

Detective Inspector Schroder brings the car to a stop. There are two unmarked patrol cars blocking off the entrance to the alleyway but he can still see the body beyond it. Detective Landry is leaning against one of the cars, jotting down notes and pausing occasionally to cough into his hand as the medical examiner conveys the details with as many hand gestures as he does words. Schroder gets out of the car and walks over.

“Hell of a show, Carl,” Landry says.

“And you figured I’d want to come take a look.”

“Well, sure I did. I thought you could use the fresh air.”

“Some air. It must be forty degrees out here.”

“These nor’west winds—don’t know what it is, but they make the crazy even crazier,” Sheldon, the medical examiner, sighs, before taking off his glasses and wiping them with the tail of his shirt. “Don’t discount it,” he adds, “I’ve been doing this long enough to know.”

“So what have we got?” Schroder asks, stepping into the alleyway. The body doesn’t look any better than it did from behind his steering wheel. Landry and the ME follow him.

Blood has puddled around the dead man, creating a perimeter of about a meter that Schroder can’t cross without contaminating the scene; the footprints already in it are from Sheldon. The victim’s limbs are all twisted up, especially the legs—the left one has bent forward and snapped somewhere in the knee joint so the ankle is tucked up against the front of the groin.

The guy has three suction cups attached to him—one strapped on each hand, the third secured around his right knee. The fourth is resting on the ground about half a meter from the body, the strap broken in the fall.

The alleyway is cooler than the street, and in complete shade, but the top nine storeys of the ten-storey building are in direct sunlight. Even in this heat the alleyway smells damp. There are recycling bins lining one of the walls, broken wooden pallets and cardboard boxes lining the other. Christchurch alleyways are always full of something—just normally not bodies. He looks up, shielding his eyes against the bright reflection from the windows, then back down at the dead man’s face. A guy with big Vegas-style Elvis sideburns and busted-up features and head wounds that have leaked all over the cracked tarmac.

“See, told you it was a show,” Landry says. “Ain’t much for us to do except wrap Batman up in a bag and take him to the morgue.”

“I think he was trying to be more like Spiderman,” Schroder says.

“Either way, the fact he’s naked except for a trench coat tells us he’s a piece of crap.”

“Maybe.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? For all we know he was on his way to rape somebody,” Landry says. “Dressed like this—he certainly wasn’t trying to watch cable TV for free. I’m thinking he got what he deserved.”

Schroder nods. Still, if he was planning on peeking into somebody’s apartment—surely there was an easier way.

They all turn as one as the media vans begin their assault on the scene, all pulling up at the same time. The cameramen and reporters climb out and move around the barriers to get closer. Police constables push them back. Cameras are hoisted up onto shoulders and the sun glints off the lenses.

“And the show gets an audience,” Landry says.

“We should cover him up,” Schroder says, glancing up at the other tall buildings surrounding them. Landry is right—this is a hell of a show. People are standing in the windows, all staring down and pointing, their faces full of excitement. The reporters scan the buildings for better vantage points to invade the dead man’s privacy from. A constable comes over and goes about covering the victim, a white sheet of canvas hiding the view away from the public. Not all the blood has dried and some of it seeps into the material.

“Anything in his pockets?” Schroder asks.

“Nothing.”

“I’m all done with him,” Sheldon says. “Pretty obvious what happened, but I’ll know more once we get him back to the morgue. Messed up the way he is, he must have gotten pretty high.”

“I’m not so sure,” Schroder says. “All of this—something here doesn’t add up.”

Landry and Sheldon glance at the body, at the building, at the body again, then back at Schroder. “You want to elaborate on that, Carl? What exactly are we missing here? A mostly naked dead man with suction cups strapped to him at the base of an apartment building with a couple of hundred windows—what doesn’t add up?”

“I don’t get it,” Schroder says. “I mean, it seems a hell of an effort to go to just to peep through some windows. Problem is, all the effort in the world wouldn’t have helped him out. This whole suction cup thing, it’s a myth. You can’t scale buildings like that. Can’t be done.”

Schroder takes a step back to reduce the glare and gazes up the side of the building. None of the floors have balconies.

“All that means is he started climbing from higher up. Maybe he has an apartment here,” Landry says. “He probably climbed out on the sixth or seventh floor, and fell from the sixth or the seventh floor. Come on, Carl, we didn’t call you down here to try and make us look like idiots—there’s no crime here.”

“If there’s no crime, why did you call me down?”

Landry rolls his shoulders back, and when he talks, a vein pops out in his forehead and starts throbbing. “For once the victim is someone who deserved it. For once the victim isn’t some girl who smiled at the wrong guy and got sliced up for it. Come on, Carl, how many times have we seen that, huh? And this time—well, this time it’s score one for the good guys.”

“How come nobody found him earlier?” Schroder asks.

“There was a car parked at the front of the alley, blocking the view. Belonged to one of the tenants. He normally leaves it parked here overnight. He only came to move it half an hour ago.”

“Time of death is about twelve hours,” Sheldon says.

“Tell me, when he climbed out last night, before he fell, do you think he closed the window?”

“What?” Landry asks.

“None of the windows are open.”

They all study the side of the building. There’s no way the victim climbed out and made the effort to close the window behind him. There’s no way he could have gone more than a meter before the suction cups gave way.

“Shit,” Landry says. He pulls a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and dances one across his fingers.

“Maybe he managed to climb all the way up from the ground,” Sheldon suggests.

“It can’t happen,” Schroder says. “Look it up. Try it out. Do whatever you need to, but it doesn’t work.”

“How do you know for sure?” Landry asks.

“I saw it on the Discovery Channel.”

“Maybe he took the elevator to the roof and climbed down,” Landry says.

“Take another look,” Schroder says. Between the roof and the top apartments is about a two-meter strip of concrete. “This isn’t what it seems. This guy was a victim of something.”

“I still don’t get it,” Landry says, putting the cigarette back. “What you’re saying makes sense, I see that, but there are other alternatives.”

“Like what?” Schroder asks, reaching into his pocket for his ringing cell phone.

“Like maybe the suction cups worked.”

“Or maybe somebody dressed him up,” Schroder points out, “and threw him off the roof.” He takes the call. The woman on the other end of the phone talks quickly, and thirty seconds later he’s back in his car, racing toward the bank, fighting for position with the reporters making their way in the same direction.

chapter three

It’s a moment in a movie. Something so incredibly implausible and so far away from what I’m thinking about that I can’t even comprehend it. I actually look away for a second, just this normal slice of life in this everyday normal bank where abnormal things don’t happen, back to the family-oriented posters and floating interest rates, back to Jodie sitting opposite me—and then, somehow, somehow, it all becomes real.

The doors are two large side-by-side glass doors that open automatically as indiscriminately for these men as they did for me and my wife. The six men enter in three groups of two. The first group goes left, the second, right, and the third, straight ahead. It’s all happening behind Jodie and she has no idea what’s going on. She keeps talking. Most of the people are still talking. Some glance up at the men for a second before returning to what they were doing, then the realization of what they saw kicks in, the disbelief on their faces perhaps comical under other circumstances. Others seem to be noticing immediately, perhaps people who have seen this kind of thing on TV enough times to figure out what happens next. They’re dropping out of sight behind desks. All this and the men haven’t even made a sound.

Jodie watches my face. She hears the collective gasp from everybody else. She twists her head to see what’s happening. A woman screams.

The six men are all wearing balaclavas. They’re all wearing black jerseys and black jeans and could all have just come from a heavy metal concert. They move calmly but forcefully forward, surrounded by an air of confidence the six shotguns provide. They look like they own the bank. They look like never in their lives have they been said no to. The police station is a five-minute walk from here, which means the clock is ticking. Jodie reaches out and I take her hand.

“Next person to move gets their head taken off,” one of them yells, and most people come to a dead stop, a few more keep running, others are hiding behind anything that remotely covers their bodies. The security guard’s face turns about as white as his shirt. He’s absolutely motionless. He’s armed with a radio and the knowledge he’s not earning anything more than minimum wage to be here, and he’s trying to figure out what good either of those things are going to do against six men with shotguns. He doesn’t get far in his figuring, unless he was figuring on inaction, which he does down to perfection. He raises his hands in the air but doesn’t manage to do anything else, including duck, before one of the two men that went in his direction turns the stock of the shotgun and smashes it hard into his jaw. The guard’s head snaps back with a sick crack. He hits the floor, his body slumping in a heap, limbs twisted everywhere. All this and only fifteen seconds have passed. A silent alarm may have been tripped, or maybe the bank cut back on a few of those features so they could offer the competitive interest rates the posters are going on about. The bank staff have open mouths and wide eyes and any training they’ve been given is all shot to hell, a snapshot in a moment of time, like somebody pressed the pause button on life.

“It’s going to be okay,” I say, and I squeeze Jodie’s hand tight. She gives me a look that suggests she doesn’t think things are going to be okay. She’s pale and scared and I’m the same way and I wish we’d ordered something for lunch that would have taken longer to prepare.

The same guy who yelled moves closer to the bank tellers. “Everybody on this side of the counter move over there,” he says, and he points to the far left of the line of counters. Nobody moves. “Now! And get down on the ground!”

We all move as one, footsteps shuffling on the floor, everybody hunched over and moving awkwardly, like old folks in a retirement home running from the Reaper. I don’t let go of Jodie’s hand. We sit on the ground, maybe twenty-five of us, all scared, all thinking the same thing—that we should have made more of Christmas last year.

The six men, in three teams of two, spread further out to the sides. One of them turns and points his gun at the door, ready for more customers to wander on in, even though the whole front of the bank is made up of glass and everybody outside is staring at us. The man barking the instructions reaches the counter.

“You,” he yells, and he points his shotgun at a woman behind the counter. All the makeup in the world couldn’t hide the tightening of her features. “Take these back to the vault and fill them.” He throws some bags at her. They hit her counter and she doesn’t move. “Now!” he says.

“What?”

“Fill them or die. The choice is yours.”

She gets it. She picks up the bags.

“Help her,” he says, pointing at another of the bank tellers. “You as well,” he says, glaring at a third. “And you too,” he adds, waving the gun at a fourth. “And if all four of you aren’t back here in two minutes we open fire on everybody else. Get that?”

As soon as the four disappear, an office door opens. We all turn toward it. A man with a pink tie and his shirtsleeves rolled up stands there with his hands raised in the air, and his head tilted and hunched down slightly, as if trying to avoid sniper fire.

“P . . . p . . . please, I’m the manager, please don’t hurt anybody and—”

He doesn’t get to say any more. The shotgun barks and people cry out. The manager isn’t thrown backward like in movies. He just stands where he was shot. His head hangs down so he seems to study the angry wound in his chest, seems to notice his shirt has blossomed red, and gravity pulls at the features on his face, making him appear sad. Then he folds at the waist, his ass going backwards, his feet staying in the same place, so when he hits the ground he’s folded in half, his legs out straight, his face against his knees, and he stays in that position with his arms by his side. The wall behind where he stood is streaked in blood, the window next to the door is shattered, other small pellets are buried into the wall. The manager looks like he’s stretching, warming up for yoga.

“Jesus,” I whisper, and I can see other people mouthing the same word but can’t hear it because my ears are still ringing. People are raising their hands to their faces. Others are crying. A man in his late sixties or early seventies has wet himself. A woman has passed out, her face pressing into the floor, looking far more relaxed than anybody else here.

Jodie’s grip is almost breaking my fingers.

“Stay calm,” I say, “just stay calm.”

“Everybody shut up!” one of the men yells, then he fires another shot, this one into the ceiling. Plaster dust rains down, it settles on his shoulders like dandruff.

The four people return from the vault. The bags are bulging with cash and obviously heavy. They manage to lift them up onto the counter.

“Too slow,” the man says, talking to the bank teller he first singled out. He pumps the shotgun and levels it at her chest. “You’re coming with us,” he says.

“No, no,” she says.

“Wait!”

Everybody turns to the voice. It takes a moment to realize that they’ve all turned toward me, and a longer moment to figure out the reason for that—I’m the one who spoke. The man holding the shotgun on the bank teller turns his head toward me.

“What?” he says.

“Eddie,” Jodie says, “what are you doing?”

I have no idea. People are staring at me like I’m an anomaly, like they haven’t seen a twenty-nine-year-old white guy speaking in a bank before. I get onto my knees, then onto my feet, swaying slightly, with still no idea what I’m doing or why I called out. “I said wait,” I say, and my voice is firm.

“We all heard what you said,” he says, “and I think we’re all curious now as to what you’re planning on doing next.”

“You’ve got what you came for,” I say, and the girl with the gun pointed at her takes the distraction to duck down behind the counter. Everybody back there does.

The man turns back to where she just was. “Hey, get back up here.”

She doesn’t answer.

“Please. You don’t have to hurt anybody else,” I say.

“I didn’t realize you were giving the orders here,” he says, looking over the counter for the woman. He can’t get an angle on her.

“Eddie,” Jodie says.

“It’s okay, Jodie.”

“We have to go,” another of them says, his finger pressed against his ear, listening to something small. “The police are only two minutes away.”

“Shit,” the first guy says, and he’s staring at me now. “Okay, buddy, you’re volunteering.”

“I’ll do what you want as long as you don’t hurt anybody else,” I say.

He offers a short, cold laugh. “No, you got it all wrong. You didn’t volunteer yourself, you went ahead and volunteered that pretty little thing next to you.”

“Don’t,” I say, and I step toward the man coming toward me and put my hand out in a stopping gesture. He doesn’t even slow down. He comes in around my arm and hits me with the gun in the side of my face, hard enough to knock me down.

“Eddie . . .” Jodie is pulled to her feet.

Things are out of focus. I’ve fallen onto my side. I get my hands onto the ground and push up. There are two Jodies. Twelve gunmen. They pick up the bags of cash and head for the door. Nobody else is moving. Nobody else is helping. The twelve men turn back into six, they’re at the door and they have Jodie with them. I figure if the police are only two minutes away they’re probably driving and the Friday lunchtime traffic has brought them to a crawl.

“Eddie,” Jodie screams, reaching toward me, and it takes two of them to drag her through the door. I get to my feet, wobbling left and right somewhat. I stumble over my feet and trip myself up, hitting the floor hard with my palms. They toss the bags of money inside a van and five of them climb in right alongside it. The sixth guy keeps holding my wife.

I get outside. Nobody follows me. There are people on the street, but they’re all ducked down behind parked cars and huddling in shop doorways. Shopwindows painted over with Christmas scenes have faces pressed against the glass. The kids in the hoodies are popping their heads up from behind a row of motorbikes and pointing cell phones at us. I can’t hear any sirens or see any police. Cars have stopped about twenty meters away in both directions. The guy pushes Jodie toward me. She cries out and stumbles. She reaches out for balance and I can tell she’s going down, she’s going to hit the sidewalk.

He raises the shotgun. He points it right at her. He doesn’t even hesitate, just pulls the trigger. Shoot her in the back, Jack.

“No,” I scream, but the word is lost over the explosion. My wife hits the road. The shooter jumps into the back of the van and closes the door. The driver accelerates hard, the engine revs loudly and smoke drifts up off the tires. I reach my wife as the van turns the corner, running a red light and leaving us alone.

chapter four

Keep her alive, Clive.

I have no idea why I keep thinking of the song Jodie sang this morning, perhaps the last song she’ll ever get to sing, steam from the shower thick in the air, the penguin radio launching out classic songs from a classic hits station. The words are in my head but they don’t even feel like mine, as though somebody put them there, an English teacher or a bad comedian having reached out somehow and implanted them.

She’s dead, Fred—and don’t worry, you’ll be hearing from me soon.

I scream for help but the only thing people are brave enough to do is step out from whatever hole they hid in and point cell phone cameras at me while others make calls. I try to hold the blood inside her, but it keeps flowing.

“Jodie, oh God, Jodie, it’s going to be okay,” I say, and I roll her onto her side so I can see her face while keeping pressure on her back. There is so much blood. Way too much blood. It’s seeping between my fingers. It’s like water. I need more hands. More help.

I need a miracle.

Jodie’s eyes are open and she turns them toward me but focuses beyond me, somewhere a thousand miles away.

“It’s going to be okay,” I say. “I promise.”

“My shoes hurt,” she says, and she smiles, and she keeps staring past me and a moment later I realize she’s no longer seeing anything at all.

“Jodie . . .”

There are too many holes in her, I can’t stem them all. Her face is pale, except around her nose which has been broken and flattened when she fell. Blood is smeared there, there’s a deep cut in her upper lip where it’s been sliced by her teeth.

“Please, please, Jodie, don’t do this, don’t do this,” I say. “Don’t leave me alone.”

But Jodie is doing this.

“Jodie, please,” I say, but my words are only whispers now.

People move closer to get a better look, to get a better angle, a clearer photo. Nobody offers to help. Maybe they can see there is no point. Nobody has come out of the bank—either they’re in too much shock or maybe they’re trying to save the manager and the security guard. Sirens appear in the distance and get louder, and soon they appear, police cars and ambulances, all of them too late. The safety they bring with them allows more bystanders to come forward and watch and point and revel in the drama. Two paramedics rush over to Jodie, each of them carrying a case of lifesaving tools.

“Out of the way,” one of them says.

“She’s . . .”

“Move,” he repeats.

I move aside. The two men crouch down over her. One of them slides a pair of scissors up her shirt and exposes the wounds. His expression doesn’t change. He’s seen it all before.

“No pulse,” the other one says. “It doesn’t look . . .”

“I know, I know,” the first one says.

He pulls padding out from his case and jams it against the wound as if trying to pack the hole. They roll her onto her back and while one begins CPR, the other fires up a defibrillator. They hold off on using it, pursuing the CPR which—for the moment—couldn’t be any more useless.

“Shock her,” the first one says.

For a moment the two men stare at each other, the words unspoken, but I can see what they’re saying. They both know there’s no point. Both think it’s too late. One of them figures it’s best to at least put on a show because I’m watching.

They attach large pads to her chest, but they work slowly, methodically, their body language admitting defeat. Jodie’s body arches upward as the volts go through her, putting tension on her spine. The pool of blood on the ground beneath her grows as the holes in her back widen and close like small apertures.

“Again.”

They try it again. Then a third time. Then they go about packing everything away.

“I’m sorry,” one of them says.

“Do something else,” I say.

“There is nothing else.”

“There has to be.”

“There’s too much damage. She’s too far gone. Even if we’d been here sooner there’s nothing we could have done. The gunshot—I’m sorry, mate,” he says, slowly shaking his head.

“She can’t die like this.”

“She’s already dead. She’s been dead from the moment she got hit.”

“No, no, you’re wrong. She’s supposed to die in another fifty years. We’re going to grow old together.”

“Sorry, mate, I truly wish there was something we could do.”

I take a step toward him. He steps back. “You can do something,” I say. “You can save her.”

His partner comes over. They’ve been in this situation before.

“I said help her.”

“I’m sorry, mate. We’ve done all we can.”

Armed police officers are filling the street. One of them heads toward us.

“Please,” I say. “There has to be something.”

“I wish there was, I truly do,” he says, and then they walk away and head toward the bank, where two other paramedics are coming out, wheeling a gurney with the security guard on it who at the moment is still alive. The armed officer stops coming over and decides to give another officer a hand to string yellow police tape all over the place, making the street a lot more colorful, blending the crime scene into the Christmas atmosphere of town—tinsel, fake Santas, candy canes, fake snow, and real blood.

I sit on the ground and hold my wife. I cradle her head in my lap and stroke her hair. I close her eyes but they keep opening up about halfway. The ground is blotted in blood and bandaging, there’s a bloody latex glove lying on her leg. A man in a suit comes up to me and crouches down. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he says, and I doubt he really understands the word “sorry” or the word “loss.” Nobody can. “The van, did you see a license plate? Did you see anything?”

“They killed her.”

“Please, sir, this is important. If you . . .”

“They wanted a volunteer. Got to be twenty-five people in that bank. They could have taken anybody but they took Jodie. That’s a four percent chance. Calculate in that one person who was already dead, and that’s what? What?” I look up at him. “What the hell does that make it? Tell me!” I shout. “Tell me!”

“The van. Did you see it?”

“All I could see was Jodie. I wish I saw more. I wish we’d never come here today. I wish . . .” I run out of words.

“Okay, okay, sir. You should step away from her now, you have to let us do our job.”

“Get away from me,” I say, and the words come out evenly and forcefully and he doesn’t argue. He steps away and I don’t watch where he goes. For a while nobody else approaches me. They see my dead wife and they know I didn’t shoot her so they leave me be. Somewhere else in the city they’re chasing the van, maybe they’ve caught it already. There’s been a shoot-out and all six bank robbers are dead. They’re all dying slowly from horrible, horrible gunshot wounds.

I want these people to be dead. I need them to be dead. Media vans speed into the street and brake heavily behind the barriers that have been set up. They jump out of their vans as if they’re on fire. Dozens of lenses and hundreds of eyes all staring at me, I’m sure some of them are making the connection, their synapses firing, thinking, we know that guy, we know that guy, their hunger for the story evident in the way their eyes almost bug out of their skulls as they stare in excitement, evident in the way they try to push past the officers forming a perimeter. I want to walk among them, wipe my wife’s blood on their faces, over their hands, I want to make them part of the story and ask them how it feels, ask how they can thrive on such suffering.

I don’t have the strength, and if I did, it would only add to their frenzy, offer up sound bites and make them more money. All I can do is cradle my wife and watch her become blurry as the anger and despair take their toll and the tears fall freely, dripping onto Jodie’s face.

Police push the barriers further back. They try clearing the street but the show is too good for these people to miss. Arguments turn into shouting matches. Some of the reporters yell questions at me. In the end the police are outnumbered. The police are always outnumbered. Reporters appear at the windows of neighboring buildings, filming us from the floors above.

A woman comes over and touches my shoulder and tells me it’s time to let Jodie go. I don’t want to, but I know I have to.

“Get me something,” I say, “to put over her.”

“Sir . . .”

“Please.”

She comes back with a thick white sheet. I bunch up a corner of it into as good a pillow as I can make and prop it under Jodie’s head. I spread the rest over her. I step back and can’t pull myself away from the shape beneath it. I can still taste the lunch in my mouth, can still feel her hand in my hand as we walked to the bank.

“We’ll take care of her,” the woman says, and she puts her hands on my arm. “Please, it’s time to come inside,” she says, and I let her lead me, my wife left outside, my wife an item now, a piece of evidence, and I crouch over and throw up before stepping back into the bank.