Blood Men (6 page)

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.”

“So how much?”

“About five million.”

“And how much was taken?”

“We still have to add up what’s here—but if you want a quick estimate, we think we’re talking somewhere around three million dollars.”

“And the procedure in a bank robbery?”

“It’s simple. Do what the robbers tell you to do. Press the silent alarm, and if you have to come out to the vault, make sure you load in the dye packs.”

“And they loaded them?”

“Yes. They would have gone off by now.”

“How do they work?”

“They’re magnetic. We store them next to a magnetic plate that controls them. You take them away from that, and it activates a timer. They explode five minutes after they’ve been moved. It ruins
all the money, covers it all in red ink. Covers the robbers in ink too.”

“How long until you can get an amount?”

“An hour. Two at the most.”

The blocks of remaining cash vary between orange, blue, green, and purple—fives, tens, twenties, and fifties. Schroder wonders exactly what three million in cash would look like physically. He wonders how heavy the bags would have been.

“So the tellers loaded the bags,” he says, thinking out loud.

“Yeah. Nobody else came back here.”

“The robbers never examined the bags, right? According to witnesses, and looking at the footage, they grabbed the bags and another victim and left.”

“So?”

“So why load the bags with hundreds?”

“What?”

“I don’t see any red blocks of cash—the hundreds. The bank tellers could have loaded the bags with any amount. The bags would have weighed the same. Why not load them up with five- or ten-dollar notes?”

“Maybe they thought the robbers would check.”

“Even so, they could have loaded the smaller amounts on the bottom. The robbers would never have known unless they tipped it all out.”

“Maybe they were scared and thought that was the way to go.”

“Maybe,” Schroder says.

“It’s a good point though,” Wellington says, “and something we might consider implementing in case, god forbid, this ever happens again.”

“You do that,” Schroder says. “And get me some amounts,” he says, and turns his back on the vault and heads upstairs.

I was eight years old when I had the urge to kill my first animal. I was nine before I finally did it. It was about a month before my dad got taken away. I don’t know what created the urge. I think it’d been there all along, sleeping deep inside me, hidden—then one day woken.

The police showed up at the house on a cold July day. The sun was out but had lost the battle to winter; the air was so icy cold, the mist that formed in front of your face when you exhaled could almost be snatched up and broken in two. It was the kind of day you didn’t want to get out of bed for. The trees were bare and the leaves had turned to slush on the ground, slush that would stick to your shoes, then get left behind on the carpet inside. It was a Wednesday morning. Usually the most exciting thing about Wednesdays was that they weren’t Mondays. Of course this Wednesday started out a whole lot different. It began with me standing at the window in my school uniform watching the police cars pull up, sure they were
there for me, that somehow, in some way, somebody had found out it’d been me who’d killed the neighbor’s dog. I watched the cars come to a stop and men spill into the driveway, and I thought about running, just heading out the back door and jumping the fence, only I didn’t know where I’d go. No, rather than run, I would lie.

The police surrounded the house. They came up to the front door. I was crying when my mother answered it. I had moved into my bedroom and was standing behind the door, listening, shaking. The men came inside and spoke to my dad. I didn’t understand what was going on, why the police were coming to take my dad away for something I had done, and as hard as I tried to tell them the truth, I was too scared to say the words.

I came out from the bedroom in time to see them put handcuffs on my dad. I cried harder. I wanted to confess but didn’t. I didn’t understand at the time, but the police had come for an entirely different reason—a reason that involved the niche my father had carved out for himself, one that included a list of prostitutes and a very specific hobby.

I didn’t go to school that day. Instead my mum’s sister came to sit with me and Belinda while Mum went to the police station to learn what was going on. She was gone all day. A year later, after she was dead, her sister didn’t want anything to do with me or Belinda ever again.

I don’t know what kind of dog it was I killed in that month before Dad got taken away. It was certainly big enough, and dark enough, and most of the time angry enough. All it ever seemed to do was make noise. It’d howl at the moon and bark at the sun and growl at the breeze. The barks were high-pitched yaps that kept on coming, one after the other, scratching into my head like nails. The growls were low and threatening, scary, and the howls were long and painful. My neighbor never did anything to shut it up. Most times my neighbor wasn’t there. He’d leave this dog of his chained to a rusty old stake hammered deep into the backyard. If the dog was lucky he’d sometimes get food and if he was extra lucky then sometimes he’d get water for company. Neighbors would open windows and doors and yell at the dog to shut up, but the frequency
dropped off over the years as they gave up. In the summer the yard was hard-baked dirt, cracked into jigsaw patterns, and in the winter it was dark with mud and cold with frost. The dog was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter and one or the other during the months between. I didn’t know who to hate more, the dog or the owner, and in the end I hated them pretty much equally. The dog was hardwired to bark at things, and my neighbor was hardwired to treat the dog badly.

The urge grew slowly. I’d be at school staring at a math problem then suddenly I’d think about him, that dog, and I’d think about how great it would be if that dog could be divided into two. I’d get that thought a few times at school, and I’d get it plenty more times at home, and the thought never made me sick. At night I’d shake, my hands twitching as the dog barked, wondering why my dad didn’t go and do something. Of course I didn’t know it—but my dad couldn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t draw any attention to himself.

The urge kept growing. It reached a point where it was never far from my thoughts. It affected my schoolwork. My marks were slipping, my homework was suffering—if things didn’t change I’d end up leaving school when I was fifteen and spend my life bouncing between being unemployed and unemployable. It seemed to me that the thing standing between me having the life I wanted and the life of cashing unemployment benefits was that dog. No matter what angle I attacked the problem from, I knew that as long as that dog barked I had no real future. I had to stop thinking about it.

Day and night this desire to see the dog dead grew stronger inside of me, gestating, becoming a deep-seated need that was ruling my life.

I told the urge I didn’t know how to kill a dog.

The urge, one night, found a voice and whispered back. It told me it was easy. It told me everything was going to be okay now. Then it told me how.

My mother was the kind of woman who, when shopping for groceries, would stray from the list she had made and add what was on special, even if we already had plenty of the same thing at home.
We’d have cupboards full of paper towels and flour and tins of food that wouldn’t fit in the pantry. Meat wasn’t excluded from this list—the freezer was always full, the exact quantity within its depths an unknown. I took a piece of meat from the freezer knowing it wouldn’t be missed. I hid it in the garage one morning before school, wrapped in an old rag and stuffed inside an empty paint container with a twisted lid. It thawed out while I studied at school and while the dog went about using up the rest of his barks. When I got home the steak was soft and felt fresh. My dad was at work, my mother was on the phone to her sister, and my own sister didn’t have any intention of shifting from in front of the TV. The dog was barking from two doors down. It was loud and consistent, but painful-sounding too, the barking of a dog who didn’t understand why it was suffering but didn’t know anything else.

It took me only a few minutes to prepare the meat, another twenty seconds to walk to the neighbor’s house. I walked up the driveway and knocked on the door, the piece of steak wrapped in plastic and tucked into my schoolbag. I knew nobody was home, but I had a story planned in case somebody was, one of those “my ball went over your fence” kind of stories people hear every day in every neighborhood all over the world. Nobody answered. The dog was barking like crazy. I went around to the side gate and the dog lurched forward on his chain, lunging forward over and over, the chain snapping tight on his neck, strangling him as it pulled him back. Sometimes it’d pull him off balance and he’d fall over, but he kept on getting up and charging forward again.

I took the steak out of the bag and threw it at the dog and he caught it in midair. He ripped into it immediately. He paused after a few seconds, took a step back, then sniffed at it, his suspicion of this last meal obvious in the way his jaw moved as if searching for what was wrong. It was the dog’s bad luck to be as hungry as he was, his bad luck to have an instinct tell him he needed to eat because he never knew when his next meal would come. He lunged back into the steak and, even as blood dotted the short fur on the side of his mouth, he kept chewing. The steak disappeared in only a few bites. Then the dog started running in circles. He carried on barking, but
the barks weren’t as loud, and soon they turned into yelps. Still he kept running.

I ran too.

The police were called the next day. The dog had died that night. Its owner had come home from a hard day of ignoring his dog only to find it lying in the backyard, quiet, its muzzle bloody—and in death the dog was shown a mercy it was never shown in life: it was taken to a vet. The vet took one look at the blood, opened the dog up, and went searching for answers and found plenty of them in the form of fishhooks and nails and thumbtacks that I’d squeezed deep into the steak. The police went up and down the street, knocking on doors, knowing somebody in our neighborhood had done it—hearing very quickly, I imagine, from the neighbors that everybody in the neighborhood had wanted to do it. It came down to who turned the fantasy into a reality. They came to our door and spoke to my parents, and I was scared then, but not as scared as I was when they came for my dad. They asked to speak to me and my sister, and I stood there with Belinda and told my parents and the police that I’d seen nothing, and the police thanked us all for our time and moved on to the next house.

Nobody ever questioned it. Not ever. Not even my mum. I was sure she’d notice the missing steak and figure it all out. I thought she’d call the police and they’d take me to a room somewhere and leave me alone until I pissed myself and cried and confessed. But she never did. Nobody ever did.

Four weeks later my dad was arrested. A month after that my neighbor got another dog—he probably figured my dad had killed the last one so this one would be safe. And it would have been safe too if it hadn’t barked as much as the first one. He only had it a month before the same thing happened. The police came up and down the street and learned the same amount of nothing they’d learned the first time. My neighbor had had his fill of dead dogs by then and didn’t go about getting another.

I have no idea why this story is in my mind as I drive home, or what it means. My psychiatrist way back then would have gone through entire prescription pads keeping me medicated if he knew.
Seeing the way that dog died—that frightened me. I vowed that day as I ran home that I would never, ever do that kind of thing again. I made the same vow the second time too—and that time the promise stuck. I never told anybody about the urges. Certainly I never told my wife.