Paul Cleave - Blood Men

He doesn’t answer.

Five seconds go by. “Shit, I’m sorry, Nat,” I say, and I exhale loudly. “I didn’t mean. . I. . hell, I don’t know.”

“None of us know.”

“I’m going to come and get her.”

“Are you in any state to look after her? Think about what’s best for her, Eddie. Come and stay with us tonight. It’s for the best. Then, then tomorrow you can. . we can, together, we can. .” He doesn’t finish.

“She doesn’t know yet, does she,” I say, my heart sinking even more.

“We wanted to tell her. And we were going to, but. . I don’t know. It’s not that it was too hard, it’s. . well, we thought you’d be the one who’d want to tell her. Diana and me, we thought it was best that way, if we were all together when we told her. For everybody.”

“You did the right thing,” I say, and I can hardly breathe now, it feels like a golf ball is lodged down my throat. “I’m on my way,” I say, and I hang up then take the phone off the hook.

My car isn’t here. Jodie’s isn’t either. I phone a taxi company and a woman with no patience answers the phone and snaps at me, asking where I am and where I want to go.

I can’t seem to get any words out.

“Yes? Yes? You want to go somewhere, don’t you?” she says. “Or are you wasting my time?”

“Umm, I, I. . I don’t know,” I say.

“Weirdo,” she says, then hangs up. I take a moment to gather my thoughts before calling another company, and this time I’m able to put sounds to the names of the places.

“Somebody will be there in ten minutes,” the woman says. “Have a nice day,” she adds, and I almost burst into tears.

The taxi takes me into the city. The traffic is heavy; people are all following each other too closely and trying to change lanes. The driver gives me a funny stare, and I know the one, it’s the one where he’s thinking, Is that the little boy, the one whose dad preyed on this city twenty and thirty and forty years earlier before and during and after he was born? Henry the homeless guy is still outside the parking building, a sandwich instead of a vodka bottle in his hand, the Bible still in the other hand.

“Spare change?” he asks. He’s dressed in clothes made twenty years ago, with a baseball cap made from recycled cardboard, and there’s something about him that suddenly disgusts me even though he never has before. I have the urge to kick him. I look away and move quickly past before I can give in to the temptation. I run up the stairs all the way to where my car is.

I make my way out of the building, almost crippling a couple of other cars, almost clipping a couple of walls, driving perhaps too fast, perhaps even almost clipping a couple of people. I get onto the street and I’m two blocks away from the bank. I head in the opposite direction. Traffic is thick. I don’t see a single police car anywhere. I drive alongside the Avon where the grassy banks are heavy with food wrappers and empty drink cans, broken up by the occasional homeless person sniffing glue in the sun while working on his tan. The breeze is coming from that direction, picking up some cool air off the dark water. Traffic lights have broken down at a few of the bigger intersections, the orange lights flashing, drivers fending for themselves as they don’t know whether to give way or drive through.

It takes me forty minutes to get to my in-laws. They look awful. They look like some creature came around and reached inside of them and ripped out every happy memory they’ve ever had. They give me tight hugs and tell me that we’ll all get through this. I hug them back and tell them nothing.

Jodie’s parents have never approved of me. It’s not that I ever did anything wrong, or treated Jodie badly. It’s because of my father’s past. Her parents have always seen me as a loaded gun. They’ve always feared for their daughter. They tried to be pleasant, but they could never hide the fear that I’ve seen on other faces growing up-the one of suspicion. It’s been twenty years since my father was arrested for murder-that’s twenty years of having people around me always wondering, wondering, when’s Eddie going to become his father’s son? What is Eddie capable of? Jodie’s parents thought I was capable of slicing their daughter and granddaughter into a hundred pieces. Sum it all up, put a bottom line on it, and their fear their daughter would die at my hands came true.

Sam is asleep on the couch in the living room. I’ve seen plenty of photos of Jodie when she was a small girl, and right now Sam looks exactly the same. Her favorite teddy bear is clutched under her chin, her arm folded over it, holding it tight. I stand in the doorway and stare at her and my in-laws stand next to me and stare at her too. Nat has a key to my house-they must have swung by there first to pick up the teddy bear and probably some clothes. The plan all along had been for Sam to stay here anyway, so Jodie and I could go to my work Christmas party tonight.

“Let me make some dinner,” Diana says, and the words seem out of place and she knows it. I have no intention of eating. Probably none of us do. She has to do something, anything but stand still and let the terror get hold of her.

Sam wakes up. It’s slow at first, and then she sees me, and her face lights up. “Daddy!” she says, and she jumps up and has halved the distance between us. She’s six years old and that’s all she needs to be to immediately know something is horribly wrong. She can see it in our faces. “Where’s Mummy?” she asks, and her approach is cautious now.

I break down in tears and we do our best to explain.

The street has cleared somewhat, the onlookers having thinned out from lack of excitement. The media presence is still heavy, reporters desperate to catch more nuggets of gold with their cameras, probably the bodies being loaded onto stretchers. There is blood and glass and pieces of drywall and splinters scattered over the floor of the bank. Detective Schroder steps around them to the other side of the counter; Dean Wellington, the South Island manager for South Pacific Banks, follows him.

“I still can’t believe this has happened,” Wellington says, his face flushed with the disbelief he’s feeling. “I mean, Jesus, what a mess. We’re talking about all that money, we’ve got damage to the building, we’ve got staff members ready to hand in their resignations, and this whole thing is a press nightmare. People aren’t going to want to walk through these doors for some time. James was a good manager, a good man, we won’t be able to replace him until after the holiday season. The timing of all this. .”

“People died,” Schroder says.

Wellington adjusts his tie, pulling down on the knot and tightening it. “I know that, Jesus, don’t you think I know that? But this bank services thousands and thousands of people. We still have a responsibility to them, and you have a responsibility to find the men who did this. The bank wants its money back.”

Schroder stares at him for a few seconds. “Just take me to the vault.”

The vault is near the back of the bank in a downstairs basement, two doors in between requiring swipe cards to enter. The metal door is about half a meter higher and half a meter wider than any normal door and made from solid steel. Inside, the vault is the size of a single bedroom. There are shelves stacked neatly with blocks of cash.

“How much does this vault hold?”

“Well, normally we’ll have a float of around a million dollars,” Wellington answers, “but this time of year, we stock up on more cash. We have to reload the ATM machine four to five times more often and people are always coming in for cash. Christmas is still a cash business,” he says. “Not everybody has a credit card.”