Paul Cleave - Blood Men

“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.

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.