by Paul Cleave
“I’ve tried. I’ve been leaving messages but he won’t return them.”
Schroder doesn’t blame him. He wouldn’t return the messages either. “So what do you want?”
Barlow shrugs. “Ideally, I want Edward to get help. There are medications that can keep him under control.”
“You’re assuming he has what his dad has-and even that’s assuming his dad had anything other than a taste for blood.”
“Even so,” Barlow says, dismissing him and standing up as Schroder’s office phone starts ringing. “I’ve done my professional duty. Ethically and legally I have to warn the police if I have a patient who I believe to be a danger to others or themselves, and that’s what this is-it’s a warning.”
chapter sixteen
I listen to the lunchtime news on the way home. The guy who shoved and killed the woman in the parking lot is claiming he was on “P,” the fashionable drug with the fashionable defense for murder-meaning he’ll either get six months in jail or nine months in rehab since it really wasn’t his fault, but the drug’s fault, or the addiction’s fault, or everybody else’s fault for not reaching out and helping him sooner. Most of the sheep have been caught but four are still on the run. Maybe they’ll team up and make more sheep between them and go about robbing farms. There is more news: a security guard was killed last night and found naked in town, a primary school was burned down but nobody was hurt, then there’s sport and weather and nobody mentions the bank robbery anymore.
I get caught behind a slow-moving truck, adding about twenty minutes to my drive, the amount of exhaust fumes coming from the back of it bringing global warming twenty minutes closer to a final conclusion. I’m still angry when I get home. Angry at the news, at the police, at the monster inside me, at the world for moving on when it should be pausing, when it should be taking a time-out to mourn my wife and to ask the big question, “Why?” over and over, why did this have to happen, why is society the way it is, why isn’t anybody doing anything about it?
I’m still angry at my dad. With twenty years between the last time I saw him and this time there should have been more to say. And why did he get me out there only to tell me it’s a good thing that the police haven’t caught the men who did this?
Don’t kid yourself, you know exactly why.
“No,” I say, and I grab a beer from the fridge.
Mostly I’m angry at myself. I didn’t go out there to share anything with him. I don’t really know why I went-certainly it wasn’t to tell him about the monster, but those words came out as if they had a life of their own. And in a way I guess that’s exactly what the monster is-a life of its own. I’ve kept hearing it over the last twenty years, small suggestions whispered to me that I’ve ignored, ideas on how to get rid of animals or people that I don’t like.
My wife has been dead four days and in the ground for less than twenty-four hours and I’m losing my mind. I sit outside and let the sun burn my face and eyes before turning away, the bright shadows and shapes moving across my vision. I go through my wallet for the business card I slid in there on Friday, and when I find it I can’t read the number on it and have to wait for a minute for my vision to settle.
“Detective Schroder,” the detective says, answering his phone.
“Hi. It’s, ah, Edward Hunter. I’m, ah, ringing to see-”
“I was just about to call you,” he says.
“Yeah? You have something?” I ask, walking outside with the phone. “You’ve caught the men who killed Jodie?”
“No. Not yet, but trust me, Edward, we’re following up some strong leads,” he says, but he doesn’t even sound like he could convince himself. “You have to be patient.”
“I have been patient.”
“I promise you, it’s still my top priority.”
“In three days it will have been a week,” I point out.
“I understand your frustration,” he says.
“I’m not so sure you do. How much did they get?”
“What?”
“How much money did they take from the bank?”
“I can’t discuss that with you.”
“Jodie was killed because of that money. Give me a break, Detective, I think I have more than a right to know how much my wife’s life was worth.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, because two people died,” I say, and the accountant in me is doing the arithmetic, “so divide that number by two and that’s how much she was worth. I want to know if she died for more or less than the price of a new car, more or less than the price of a house? Of course it depends on the house, on the car, but-”
“Look, Edward, I promise you we’re doing our best. We really are. We have everybody we can spare searching for those men.”
“Searching, not chasing,” I say. “Maybe I should do your job for you,” I say, and the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them, having come from nowhere, certainly not from me, and I realize they’re not my words at all, but somebody else’s. No, not somebody-something.
“What does that mean?” Schroder asks.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “I’m angry, that’s all.”
“I hear you went to visit your father today.”
“What?”
“First time since he got put away. Why’d you do that?”
I slow down and think about his question, aware he’s talking to me now in a different capacity-he’s talking to me the way a cop talks to a suspect. He’s fishing for information. “He rang me. Told me he wanted to see me.”
“And you dropped everything to go.”
“He’s my father. He wanted to share his condolences. He wanted to know what the police were doing to get the men who killed my wife.”
“Is that all?”
“Of course that’s all. My wife got murdered, Detective. What father wouldn’t want to try to console his son?”
“Have you been seeing anybody since the shooting? For help? A counselor, or a psychiatrist?”
“Why would I do that?” One of my neighbors starts up a lawn mower and I head back inside so I can hear Schroder clearly.
“To help you come to terms with what happened.”
“I can come to terms in my own way.”
“I hope that doesn’t involve doing anything stupid.”
“Like what?”
“Like trying to do my job.”
“One of us has to try,” I say, “because it seems to me nothing is getting done.”
“A word of caution, Edward. Leave everything to us. We know what we’re doing.”
“Then prove it.”
I hang up, finish my beer, grab out another one, but don’t open it. I leave it on the kitchen counter and fire up the computer.
I go online and find all the newspaper reports from the last week that dealt with the robbery. There’s enough of them that by the time I print them out I have a stack of paper a centimeter thick. I take them outside and sit in the sun, reading through them. Surveillance from the bank puts the entry of the six men at 1:13 p.m. They were in the bank for less than four minutes, though it sure felt longer. The police were called by several witnesses outside who saw the men enter, as well as people who first heard the shotgun blast, but they were first alerted by a silent alarm. I close my eyes and try to remember as best I can. The men had been in the bank for almost a minute before the bank manager was killed. The newspaper says it took six minutes for the police to arrive at the scene. The men had been gone for two minutes by that point. The newspaper doesn’t say how much money was taken.
The accountant studies the figures. Four minutes. Six minutes. Six men. Two victims. Two fatal gunshots. An unnamed amount of money. The figures swirl around inside my head, I rest them against everything the newspapers say, try forcing them to fit against what I know, against my memories, but nothing sticks out, nothing shifts into such a focus as to tell me where to look next. The numbers mean nothing.
I pick up the sheaf of papers and throw them out into the yard. Most of them stay together, but the ones on the top and bottom slide away, the small breeze picking them up and pinning them into the corners of the yard. The answers are in the wind too, and though Schroder didn’t say it, I know that the bank robbery is already history, the death of my wife and the bank manager pushed aside as the Christchurch Crime Rate keeps rolling on, gathering momentum, leading to what, God only knows.
I end up drinking the beer and falling asleep, not heavily, but enough for about an hour to slip by mostly unnoticed, and when I wake up the lawn mower has stopped and my face is tight, and when I reach up to touch it, it’s tender from sunburn. When I stand up I realize that the few beers I’ve had, combined with the lack of food, have made me light-headed. I phone Nat and ask if they can take care of Sam tonight, and they tell me they can. In fact they sound more than happy to. I talk to Sam for a bit and she tells me she wants to come home and I tell her that she can’t, not today, that Daddy has some things he has to take care of.
“But you promised,” she says.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She finally accepts things can’t be changed and hands the phone back to Nat, grumpy.
“She’ll be okay,” he says. “You know how kids can be.”
“How’s she doing?”
“You know how it is,” he says, and he’s right. I do know. He means that Sam’s the same since the day we told her about her mum. Part shock and part disbelief and part simply not understanding. I’m the same way. We all are.
“Take care of yourself, Eddie,” he says, and something in the way he says that makes me think that he thinks he won’t be seeing me for a while. It’s the kind of thing you’d say to a friend leaving for jail or war.
I watch the sun peak in the sky. It disappears behind the tip of a giant fir tree next door for ten minutes before coming back into view, and then it slides back down. I drink another beer and then another, then head out front and grab the mail. There’s a letter from my insurance company. Both Jodie and myself have life insurance-but in a letter less than half a page long, our insurance company is holding back any decision to pay out because Jodie was killed in the commission of a crime. Life insurance is specifically there to cover accidents and illness-and does not cover murder, so the letter says, and they apologize for any inconvenience. I wonder why they got onto the case so quick-I hadn’t even contacted them-and I figure they wanted to rush through the bad news before Christmas.
The sun gets lower and evening arrives. I play the “what-if” game, the one where what if we’d gone to the bank ten minutes later, or what if I’d kept my mouth shut, or what if I’d fought the men off. There are a lot of what-ifs. A thousand of them-of course it’s a pointless game to play and I could spend the rest of my life out here under the sun, drinking beer, thinking about the could-have-beens and should-have-beens, the entire time the reality never forgotten-I’m the reason Jodie got killed.
More and more, the what-ifs begin to focus on the bank. I think about the security guard. I think about him a lot, and I imagine him acting.
But he didn’t, did he. He just stood there and did nothing.
Nothing! the monster says, and I guess the first part in the road to recovery, like being an alcoholic, is admitting you have a problem. So yeah, I admit, I have a monster.
And it’s nice to be here, it says, nice to be welcomed again after all this time.
The security guard, trained to help, there to defend, there to stop the innocent from being hurt, he did nothing. Not a goddamn thing.
I open up another beer.
Choosing to do nothing was the same as doing something. Doing nothing is what got everybody killed. You calling out-that didn’t get Jodie all shot up. The security guard-it’s his fault. He didn’t do his job.
“Damn straight,” I say.
I replay that moment over and over, and I’m not sure how it happens, but things shift a little and the truth appears, so obvious now, and it explains a lot. The first time I run things through, the security guard does nothing as the security tapes and history books state. But I slow down the action in my head, and then I notice something the cameras didn’t have the angle or the emotion to notice-this time the security guard smiles as the men come in, he smiles before he is smashed in the face with the butt of a shotgun. Then I slow it down even more, and there is more than a smile, but a wink and a nod of the head.
The security guard was in on it!
I slow it down again, the men rush in, the first one approaches the guard, and this time there’s the smile, the wink, the nod, and this time the guard puts his hand out and the bad guy takes it, they shake hands, there’s another nod, and bang, the guard is smashed in the head.
Once more. The men come in. One approaches the guard. The wink. The nod. The grin. The handshake. They embrace. They part and then they share a small joke. The bad guy pushes his gun forward but this time the stock doesn’t connect with the guard’s jaw, but he falls anyway, he falls in a heap and when he lies on the ground the smile is still there.
Another grin. Another wink. Another shared joke, and the men spill deeper into the bank and steal and kill; the entire time the guard watches them.
I go through one last time. This time when they take my wife, the security guard sits up and begins to clap.
I put down the empty beer bottle. There’s a row of them now, and thank God my friends, the ones with the platitude of “things will get better,” the ones who don’t know what to say, thank God they had the decency to bring lots of beer. Sure-they didn’t have the decency to be there to save my wife, and they can’t really help now, and since bringing beer is the best they can do then thank God for beer, thank God for people who think beer can heal the world.
I grab another one. It’s cold and doesn’t taste great but it goes down pretty quick. I head out into the backyard, stumbling-stupid yard-and go through the pages I threw out here earlier. I find some of the articles about the security guard. He was rushed to hospital with a serious concussion, which is a load of shit. The journalists-bless whatever it is they have that passes for hearts-have listed first and last names of everybody involved on the day-except, of course, for the six men who were more involved than anybody. I carry one of the stories about the guard back inside and fire up the computer. I search for the guard. Everybody in first-world countries these days is online somewhere, a member of some online community somewhere or whatever the hell is in fashion these days-people sharing their lives with strangers and credit-card thieves and. .
Monsters. .
. . identity stealers and serial killers. The computer takes too long to load, which annoys me, but I kill time by grabbing another beer. The beer is calming me, I’m so full of serenity right now I could write a fucking musical.
I get online and Google the bastard and it’s hard to type because the keyboard seems smaller. When I get his name entered plenty of stories from the last four days pop up. I don’t bother reading them. Instead I go straight to the White Pages and let my fingers do the walking. Within twenty seconds I have his address. Telecom is my friend.
Our accomplice.
“I think it’s time we go visit him,” I say.
I can’t wait, the monster says.
“One more beer for the road,” I suggest.
Hell, have two-you deserve it, the monster says, and I get changed and then we go for a drive.
chapter seventeen
My car is a four-door sedan family vehicle, but I guess I can get rid of two of the doors since I won’t be using them anymore. Maybe trade it in for a sports car-maybe let Sam choose the color. We walk out to it, my monster and me, stumbling down the driveway, almost-but thank-God-not-quite-dropping my beer. I can’t get the door open but then figure out it’s still locked, so I unlock it and things work out great. I get behind the wheel and at first I think somebody has shifted the ignition, so I have to play around with the key, but it gets there in the
end, scraping over the edges in the beginning before slotting home.
The mailbox almost becomes the first casualty of the evening, and then the neighbor’s cat, but things straighten out and the road points ahead and we follow it. Between us one of us reads the map while the other drives, the roads and intersections and other cars passing by in a blur of color and sound.
Christchurch is a better-looking city the later it gets in the day because the darkness helps hide the infection. I see it all around now-I was ignorant of it until four days ago. In the morning the sun will come up and tear that scab right off, the criminals will spew forth from their hovels, holes, and dens, merrily stealing and raping and killing their way through the twelve days of Christmas. The evening is still warm, and there are a few people out enjoying it, some of them walking hand in hand, or towing a dog on a leash, others on mountain bikes. It’s after nine o’clock, the sun has gone but it’s still light, the time of day approaching when it can go from light to dark in a matter of minutes. I drive past a park where a father and son are pointing up at a kite caught in a tall tree, stranded and pierced by branches. In the same park a group of teenagers are kicking a rugby ball back and forth, spiraling it high into the air before it gets too dark. There’s a fort and a merry-go-round and it reminds me of the story Dad told me earlier.
The Security Guard-one Mr. “let me laugh my ass off while your wife is getting gunned down” Gerald Painter, lives in a quiet street with lots of trees and gardens and homes that all seem the same, and I figure Mr. Gerald Painter should have become a painter and not a guard and if he’d done that, taken that one little path his destiny and last name were trying to point him toward, then this Tuesday night three days from Christmas would be a very different Tuesday night than it will be for him now. It’s darker by the time I get there and I have my headlights burning. Painter’s white-trash car with the big-block million-decibel engine and fiery paint job he must surely own isn’t parked out on the street or up the driveway. Instead there’s a four-door sedan, a Toyota I think, a white one, with a FOR SALE sign in the window.
