Blood Men

“Come on, Edward, it’s time to stop all of this. Too many people are getting hurt.”

I put the gag back into his mouth. He doesn’t struggle—he’s resigned to the fact there’s nothing he can do except wait things out. I get up and pace the living room, covering a few hundred meters over the same piece of carpet while I try and work it all out.

Bracken has two cell phones, it turns out. He has a normal one, with what appear to be work and family contacts. Then he has the second one, the one that rang earlier. There are only two numbers in the memory, with no name attached to either of them. One is for the phone I’ve been using. I scroll down to the other number and press CALL. It rings three times and then it’s picked up.

“I’m still waiting,” a man says.

“I have the money.”

“Money?”

“Please, I can . . .”

The line goes dead. I call the number again but he’s switched off the phone.

I keep pacing. Thinking about it.

“I know how it happened,” I say to Schroder. “Bracken pla

I go through the house. There’s a bedroom that’s been converted into an office, and I switch on the computer. While waiting for it to boot up, I go through the rest of the house. I check under the floor in the wardrobe where the money was hidden but there’s nothing else down there. I check other wardrobes but find nothing. Every time I walk past Bracken’s body I resist the urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake him.

I sit down in front of Bracken’s computer and navigate around the desktop. It’s a clean desktop with only a few icons, and I click one open to find a folder full of porn, maybe a hundred or so video clips. I don’t watch any of them. I close the folder and go into his documents folder. Turns out Bracken is—or was—an aspiring novelist. There are a couple of manuscripts here that he’s working on. I don’t read any of them. There is a games folder, and a music folder, and then I go through the folders on the hard drive, looking for something, for anything related either to work or to robbing a bank. I go through his emails—and it turns out that Bracken doesn’t have many friends. Even his address book is barren except for a half dozen people, half of whom share the same last name as him. I scan through the emails; mostly they’re all bad jokes that have been circulated around the world millions of times already. There are no emails at all relating to work or to robbing a bank. There aren’t any emails to or from Shane Kingsly. I spend fifteen minutes going through his computer—which is a long time when there’s a corpse leaking blood all over the living-room floor—and in the end the only thing I’ve accomplished is to waste precious time.

Out in the living room, Schroder has disappeared. He’s rolled himself out or got to his feet. I check the front door and it’s open. I step outside but there’s no sign of him. He could have jumped out fifteen minutes ago or only two, but either way the result is the same for me—the police are on their way.

I grab Bracken’s pants and find his wallet, then head out to my car. I wonder what the statistics are now for Schroder—what percentage chance he has of bouncing along to a neighbor who will help him, or one that will try to ca

I don’t have the time to care.

chapter forty-five

It’s no longer Christmas Eve—Christmas kicked in about two minutes ago and town is full of people celebrating. The homeless and the party animals mingle and mix and I can’t help but hate all of them as they move through this world, ignorant to what some of us are going through to save our families.

The center of Christchurch is mapped around a bull’s-eye of tourist markets and street performers and of course the Cathedral, a giant church over a hundred years old that’s popular with tourists and God and graffiti artists—although these days the popular consensus is that God moved out of Christchurch, meaning that God is everywhere except here. It’s all crammed into a location known as Cathedral Square. The Cathedral is packed with people celebrating Christmas Mass. The markets are gone, and the drunk, the homeless, and the glue sniffers have to share the Square with churchgoers as they sit on steps and huddle on park benches, living in perfect harmony.

The probation offices are only a few blocks away, in a part of town where the only clubs are strip joints, where the bouncers are bigger and the tattoos take up more real estate on their arms and necks than their counterparts at regular clubs. The building is six storeys, and probably houses other things too, maybe some law or accountancy firms. I got the address from a business card inside Bracken’s wallet. The only windows on the ground floor are the automatic doors, which at this time of night are automatically impossible to open, unless I drive right into them. The rest of the building is tile and brick and has graffiti scrawled across it, showing off the creative talents of the city’s youth.

There’s an alleyway heading up the side of the building, and I pull the car in and swing around the back. My headlights wash over a guy leaning against a Dumpster with a woman kneeling in front of him. They both look at me. The guy has vomit down the front of his shirt and the woman doesn’t look any better. They wave at my car as if trying to swat away a fly, before straightening their clothes and leaving.

At the back of the building, there are two doors about ten meters apart from each other. The accountant inside me works the numbers. The police are busy. It’s been a long day for them, and even now they’re at Bracken’s house and at my in-laws’ house and they’re dealing with dead bodies, and Schroder is trying to round up the rest of the men who robbed the bank and find my daughter while the rest of the force are at home, taking the night off. That means if an alarm goes off I probably have a minute or two longer than usual. A place like this, it’s more likely a patrol car will show up than a security firm. And in a city like this, maybe nobody will show up for an hour. Of course there’s only one statistic that matters—my daughter. I will do whatever it takes to get her back.

Bracken’s keys have a keycard hanging from them. One of the doors is the good old-fashioned lock and key, but the other door has a pad on the side of it. I swipe the card and there’s a click; I try the door and it opens. I step inside and a fluorescent light blinks on overhead, blinding at first. There’s a second door; this one with a numeric keypad. I lean back and kick near the handle. It takes five strong kicks because I have to use my left leg, and even then it jars through to my right, the door breaking at the same time as some of the stitches in my leg. An alarm beeps somewhere.