Blood Men: A Thriller

The new house will have a spare room big enough for me to put a pool table in, and Jodie wants some aerobic equipment. We’ll probably use neither, but the fun part at this stage is the dreaming. A new house will be exciting for Sam too. But before that we still have to get through the excitement of Christmas. Sam is the perfect age for Christmas—she still believes in Santa.

The waitress comes by when both our mouths are full and asks how the meal is and neither of us can answer. She seems to take that as a good sign and moves on to the next table. It’s probably only a couple of degrees away from hitting thirty-five and the waitress is ready to melt into a fleshy puddle when one o’clock rolls around, the umbrellas in danger of catching alight. We pay the bill, and the waitress gives us the smile of the damned.

It’s only a five-minute walk to the bank. One side of the road is warm in the shade, the other almost white hot. The sidewalks are covered in melted chewing gum and teenagers on skateboards wearing loose clothes with hoodies, perfecting the rapist image kids these days love and clothes designers are making millions off. I wonder how hot it has to get before they take their hoodies off. We get stopped every hundred meters or so by people trying to convince us to sign up to save the whales, save the environment, solve world hunger. There’s tinsel hanging from streetlights and building frontages, decorated trees and fake snow on the window-display floors, plastic Santas and reindeer everywhere. People are rushing about on their lunch breaks trying to squeeze in some shopping, some carrying packages and gifts, others wearing lost looks on their faces.

The bank is pretty much slap bang in the middle of town, a tall building with the ground floor for the public and on the other floors—nobody really knows. It has air-conditioning and about fifty potted plants and a security guard who keeps glancing at his watch. We end up arriving early and are led to a group of comfortable chairs to kill time in. Nobody offers us anything to drink. There are racks full of banking brochures on the wall next to us, plenty of posters advertising interest rates; young families with new homes and new kids and big smiles is the image of choice—which is fine with us. But once you’ve seen one poster there isn’t much more to look at: just more floating and fixed interest rate packages and more smiles from people thrilled to be a slave to their mortgage. There are percentage symbols plastered everywhere.

Then, at thirteen minutes past one—two minutes until our appointment with the mortgage consultant—six men carrying shotguns walk calmly through the door.





chapter two


Crime is escalating. Domestic abuse, adolescent street racers running down innocent pedestrians, people stealing and killing—this is the norm in Christchurch, everyday acts happening in an everyday city. Crime escalates like every other statistic, like inflation, cost of living, it ebbs and flows along with gas prices and the real estate market. Same with the murder rate—it can’t be plotted and predicted on a graph, but it stays in line with other crime, a statistic, a percentage.

But this . . .

He’s not even sure what this is.

Detective Inspector Schroder brings the car to a stop. There are two unmarked patrol cars blocking off the entrance to the alleyway but he can still see the body beyond it. Detective Landry is leaning against one of the cars, jotting down notes and pausing occasionally to cough into his hand as the medical examiner conveys the details with as many hand gestures as he does words. Schroder gets out of the car and walks over.

“Hell of a show, Carl,” Landry says.

“And you figured I’d want to come take a look.”

“Well, sure I did. I thought you could use the fresh air.”

“Some air. It must be forty degrees out here.”

“These nor’west winds—don’t know what it is, but they make the crazy even crazier,” Sheldon, the medical examiner, sighs, before taking off his glasses and wiping them with the tail of his shirt. “Don’t discount it,” he adds, “I’ve been doing this long enough to know.”

“So what have we got?” Schroder asks, stepping into the alleyway. The body doesn’t look any better than it did from behind his steering wheel. Landry and the ME follow him.

Blood has puddled around the dead man, creating a perimeter of about a meter that Schroder can’t cross without contaminating the scene; the footprints already in it are from Sheldon. The victim’s limbs are all twisted up, especially the legs—the left one has bent forward and snapped somewhere in the knee joint so the ankle is tucked up against the front of the groin.