Blood Men (7 page)

Sam is asleep in the passenger seat. The school holidays have begun and I don’t know whether it’ll be easier on her not going to school next week, or harder now that her mum is dead. I don’t know if the distraction of the classroom would have been a healthy thing or not. I don’t know how I can look after her during the weekend, during the holidays, during the next ten or more years until she moves out of home and begins her own life.

When I get home I’m hit with the expectation that something will be different. It’s as though all that happened today was a movie that’s rolled to the end, the gunmen only actors, the wounds on my wife manufactured with stage blood. If not that, then at least Jodie will be here somewhere, released from the hospital—on the way to the morgue somebody found her breathing and they saved her. I expect the police to be here, to tell me they’ve caught the men who did this. I expect life to have moved forward.

What I get defies all my expectation—everything is exactly how I left it. Nobody has been; nobody is here, even the poltergeist who visits at night to mess things around hasn’t shown up. I step inside and between the time I left a few hours ago and now, nothing has altered other than the angle of the sun. It’s got lower in the sky, barely coming through the living room windows now, picking out dust floating in the air, and the temperature has cooled—but that’s about it. Mogo is somewhere else, outside somewhere, doing whatever it is that crazy cat does. Sometimes the voice from twenty years ago tells me there is a solution to getting rid of that cat. I wonder if Mogo senses that. I wonder, now that Jodie isn’t here, whether Mogo will ever come back.

Sam wakes up when I carry her inside, but falls back asleep within about a minute. I get her tucked into bed and head out to the living room. I turn on the TV but the next news bulletin is still over an hour away. I tidy up the kitchen, putting the phone
back on the hook, packing everything into the dishwasher, killing time, killing time—rinse a plate and—
bang
—another distraction but only for a split second before my world comes crashing back down. Doing the housework seems the wrong thing to be doing—but what is the right thing? It turns out the right thing is throwing a couple of dinner plates really hard into the wall. They both shatter. A small tooth-sized piece bites into the wall and stays there, the other shards raining down on the floor. I pick up a glass and it follows the same trajectory. Next thing I know half a dozen of them are down there, a cocktail of broken glass and ceramic shards, and I tip out the cutlery drawer and add to it before sitting down and leaning against the fridge.

Sam is standing outside the kitchen. There are tears on her face and her teddy bear is tucked against her chest.

“Did you and mummy have a fight?” she asks, looking at all the broken dishes.

“No, baby.”

“Then why did she go?”

I get to my feet and hug my daughter before taking her back to bed. I sit with her until she falls asleep, and I sit with her for a bit after too. I don’t know how to make it through the weekend. Don’t know how to plan the funeral. Don’t know how to plan my future with Sam. The truth is Sam’s the only reason right now I’m not picking up one of those shards off the kitchen floor and fishing for the veins in my forearm.

I clean the kitchen up, watching my wife reaching out over and over, the man behind her raising the gun, then I go back a few minutes earlier and watch us in the bank, I watch the men coming in behind her, different pairs going in different directions. I stand up and fight them, taking the guns off them, struggling with them, six gunshots and six gunmen all lying dead on the floor. People swarm around me and hug me, they recognize me, but the gene my dad gave me doesn’t scare them, in fact it excites them. The serial killer gene just saved all their lives.

Another time I grab Jodie and pull her back from the action, locking us into a nearby bathroom until they’ve gone. Then I watch
as the men come in and the security guard takes action and he grabs the first guy, twists him toward the others, guns going off, the bad guys all shooting each other as smoke and blood fill the air. Then I picture us at lunch, laughing, planning, the time slipping away and suddenly we’ve missed our appointment at the bank, disappointed but alive.

I picture getting a flat tire on the way to work this morning. I picture work piling up and me unable to get away. I picture a power cut, an earthquake, somebody choking on a piece of chicken at the restaurant, a car accident right outside work. I picture ringing Jodie and telling her I can’t make it, that it’ll have to be next week, and Jodie tells me what a pain in the ass I am and it’s obvious she’ll be pissed at me all weekend. I picture Jodie in the living room right now getting Sam ready for bed. The TV is on. Sam is asking for some cookies. Jodie is saying no, and Sam is getting upset. I picture reading Sam a bedtime story, something about elves and princesses, then Jodie and me sitting up watching TV, my arm around her, holding her, rubbing her shoulder and then she touches my thigh, I kiss her and then . . . she is gone. Dead. Her body bloody and empty lying on the road as the black van speeds away.

The phone rings. I stare at it but don’t want to talk to anybody. After eight rings the machine picks it up. Jodie recorded the outgoing message. Her voice in the silent house does two things simultaneously—it makes me think she’s still alive, and it makes me think her ghost is here. Two completely opposite things—and it does a third thing too—it makes me shiver.

“You’ve reached Eddie and Jodie and Sam, but we’re all out or pretending to be out, so please leave a message after the beep.”

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.

Then, when there is nothing left to show, it cuts to the people nearby when it happened—“
we heard gunshots and ran
,” “
we didn’t know what to do
,” “
seemed unbelievable it was happening right here
,” “
we were almost killed
.” Then come the interviews from people who were inside the bank. I recognize some of them. “
They came out of nowhere
,” “
it was so scary
,” “
those poor people, my God, those poor people did nothing and got shot anyway
.” A photo of a man comes up, he was the bank manager, he was fifty-six years old and had worked at that branch for nine years. It shows the bank teller whose life apparently I saved, her name is Marcy Croft and she’s twenty-four years old and has worked at the bank for nine weeks, and she’s shaking as the cameraman zooms in on her, and she says “
He was going to kill me. I know that as sure as I know I’m never working here again. And that man, oh my God, that man distracted him and saved my life, and his wife, his wife . . .,”
she says, and she breaks down in tears and can’t finish but the camera doesn’t break away from her, it focuses on her pain and relief and the country watches her cry for another ten seconds before it goes back to the anchor.

After the interviews a picture of my wife that I have no idea how they got—maybe from her work somewhere—comes up. Both victims have families, pain, and despair filling the spaces these people left. Then there’s me again, covered in blood, being led away from Jodie’s body. Edward Hunter, twenty-nine-year-old son of a serial killer. The anchorwoman mentions it.

The footage turns to a live feed from outside the bank. There’s still yellow crime-scene tape fluttering in the slight breeze. The spot where Jodie was killed has tape around it, and she’s been moved, and I have an image of her lying on a steel slab in a morgue, pale, grey, and blue and broken beyond repair, no longer covered by a sheet. The reporter has his sleeves rolled up, indicating he’s had a long day at work. He speaks for a bit, talking about me.

“And Jack Hunter, of course, was arrested after murdering eleven prostitutes, isn’t that right, Dan?” the anchorwoman asks, the feed going back to her, her serious face on display.

“Sure is, Kim. Of course that’s only eleven prostitutes that he admitted to.”

“Has there been any speculation that Edward Hunter may have been involved?” Anchorwoman Kim says.

“At this stage the police aren’t commenting on that, however from what I’ve learned it does seem unlikely. I think for Edward and Jodie Hunter, and for the rest of these people, it was a case of wrong place at the wrong time. As soon as we know more down here in Christchurch, we’ll let you know.”

Kim flashes her second expression at the screen, and then the image taken twenty years ago appears, of me in my school uniform by my father’s side. I almost throw the remote at the TV. The story gets to the climax—or, in this case, a punch line. The van was found. It had been stolen. No trace of the money. No trace of the people in it. The six men scattered into the city.

I turn off the TV and sit in the darkness, wide awake, angry, hurting, and alone.

A man walking his dog called it in. He saw the smoke and called the fire department who rushed out before the blaze could spread out of control, latching onto trees and then maybe houses in the area, but not before the van could be destroyed. The twisted and charred skeleton is still smoldering, and Schroder knows any evidence inside is gone. There’s still forensic evidence, but that’ll take weeks—and even then it may lead to nothing.

The road is hard-packed dirt leading into a pine forest. The sides of the road are breaking up in areas from tree roots, patches of it blanketed in pine needles. About two kilometers from here in one direction people go mountain biking and jogging and horse riding, and two kilometers in another direction is the ocean, but right here the world is abandoned, and the men who came here knew that. The ground hasn’t given way to any impressions from feet, or from another vehicle. The man with the dog doesn’t remember seeing any other cars coming or leaving, and there isn’t
anybody else to ask. He can smell oil and gas and the branches that have blistered in the heat. Halogen lights have been set up, pointing at the van, lighting up the nearby trees and creating hundreds of shadows among them. There is no breeze at all, and every thirty seconds or so he has to swat away an insect about half the size of a fly.

Schroder can’t stop thinking about Edward Hunter. He thinks about the dad, just your normal everyday average family man. All through the trial Jack Hunter with his smiles, his neat but cheap suits, never once appearing cocky or arrogant and certainly nothing like the insane person his lawyers wanted him to be. The defense told the jury that the dad heard voices, that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, that he could barely control what he was doing, let alone remember it. They said the voices took over, and when they did there was no Jack Hunter, but something else, something inside of him that was sick and twisted and had gone undiagnosed for years. The jury didn’t buy it. The jury liked the prosecution’s story better. That story went like this: Jack Hunter loved to kill prostitutes and he hated to be caught. Jack Hunter wasn’t insane, because he got away with it for too many years. An insane man with no control over his actions would have been caught sooner. An insane man could not have covered up the crimes the way he did and lived the way he lived. The jury bought that story and Jack Hunter got life in jail. End of story.