Paul Cleave - Blood Men

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.

He can remember the image of Edward hugging his dad on the morning. Since reaching into the bathtub checking for Edward’s mother’s pulse a year later, he hasn’t really thought much about Edward. He remembered him again a few years later when he heard the sister had overdosed on heroin, but not since.

For the last few hours he’s been talking to witnesses and reviewing the security footage from the bank. The footage is video without audio, and it’s clear but not clear enough to zoom in on any of the bank robbers’ features. They can tell height and sometimes weight, but nothing more. However, not just anybody can successfully rob a bank, and certainly there must be some experience in the team that pulled this job off. At a minimum, half of them will have a criminal record for armed assault-and in all likelihood all of them will have a record for something.

The next step is to talk to people in that world. Somebody somewhere has to know something-there’s no way these men won’t answer for what they did.

He watches the smoke spiral into the night for a while longer before getting into his car and driving back to the bank.

The funeral is on Monday. Jodie’s body was rushed through the backlog of bodies that were rolled in on Friday. They didn’t need to do much to her except take a hundred photos and go hunting around inside of her with a pair of tweezers searching for the shotgun pellets. Maybe they got it wrapped up since Christmas was coming. Maybe the funeral director freed up a spot so soon in his schedule because he’s heading to the Gold Coast for the holidays. Whatever the reason for the rush, I’m glad for it. The idea of Jodie lying in the ground isn’t what I’d call warming, but it’s certainly better than having her sliced up and exposed on a cold metal gurney in the bowels of the hospital morgue.

For everybody else, it’s a normal Monday. Others are off to work and the school holidays have kicked in, leaving thousands of unsupervised teenagers to drink beer and break into houses and steal big-screen TVs and game consoles. It’s summer and the world is moving on and Christmas shopping is in full swing with mall parking lots jammed full and parents fighting in line for the next best thing. It’s a stunning, bright sunny day, the kind of day I’m sure Jodie would have enjoyed, and if the choice was hers perhaps even the kind of day she’d like to be buried on. My bruises have faded. It’s been three days since the bank robbery, and all six men are still on the loose. The city is understaffed by police and overstaffed with criminals-the balance is out of whack and nobody seems able to correct it. Wednesday was to be my last day at work for two weeks, the same for Jodie. Instead she’s spending Christmas in a dirt plot and I’ll be spending it God knows where.

I had to choose a dress for Jodie, and a coffin. Coffin shopping is something I never want to have to do again-different models have different specifications, the funeral director doing his best to guilt me into upgrading, as if a cheaper coffin would suggest to the world I hated my wife. Jodie’s parents took care of the flowers, the priest, the music, and the church, and everything else. There are probably a thousand things going on around me to make this happen and I wouldn’t know.

The cemetery is on the outskirts of town in a neighborhood where there are lots of trees and not so many houses and currently a large flock of seagulls circling above. There’s a church off to one side of the graveyard which has been abandoned since the priest was murdered there almost six months ago, but reopened in time for Christmas with the arrival of a new priest, Father Jacob. The church has one of those rare histories that few churches have, the history where nobody died in its construction. Love or hate religion, one thing is sure-it’s certainly leading the way in deaths. Religion takes more lives than cancer and coronaries and car crashes combined. A belt of trees form a barrier between the church and the closest of the graves; a couple of them have been cut down, fresh stumps surrounded by sawdust and bark jutting out of the ground, sun streaming between the gaps and hitting the stained-glass windows. A six-foot fence made up of iron bars with cobwebs and flaky paint stretches the distance between the cemetery and the road. Parked out front are a dozen media vans, nobody in them.

Father Jacob has a deep voice that sounds somber, the acoustics of the church helping him convey the depths of his words-which to me all sound hollow. He stands up at a podium a few meters from my wife, looking more like a wizard than a priest, his white hair in need of a trim, an outfit one might wear to a fancy dress party. He tells us about God, and Heaven, and I’m not real sure where I stand on those concepts right now. My grandparents raised me to believe in God, but these were the same people who raised my dad, and look how he turned out. I want to believe in something; it would mean Jodie is somewhere better than this world-and she is certainly somewhere better than Christchurch. And I want to believe in something to make it easier on Sam. I’ve thought about it a lot over the last few days, and I think it comes down to this-I want to believe in God, but right now I’m too damn angry with Him to do so.