Free Blood Men by Paul Cleave

it for too many years. An insane man with no control over his actions would have been caught sooner. An insane man could not have covered up the crimes the way he did and lived the way he lived. The jury bought that story and Jack Hunter got life in jail. End of story.
    He can remember the image of Edward hugging his dad on the morning. Since reaching into the bathtub checking for Edward’s mother’s pulse a year later, he hasn’t really thought much about Edward. He remembered him again a few years later when he heard the sister had overdosed on heroin, but not since.
    For the last few hours he’s been talking to witnesses and reviewing the security footage from the bank. The footage is video without audio, and it’s clear but not clear enough to zoom in on any of the bank robbers’ features. They can tell height and sometimes weight, but nothing more. However, not just anybody can successfully rob a bank, and certainly there must be some experience in the team that pulled this job off. At a minimum, half of them will have a criminalrecord for armed assault—and in all likelihood all of them will have a record for something.
    The next step is to talk to people in that world. Somebody somewhere has to know something—there’s no way these men won’t answer for what they did.
    He watches the smoke spiral into the night for a while longer before getting into his car and driving back to the bank.

chapter ten
    The funeral is on Monday. Jodie’s body was rushed through the backlog of bodies that were rolled in on Friday. They didn’t need to do much to her except take a hundred photos and go hunting around inside of her with a pair of tweezers searching for the shotgun pellets. Maybe they got it wrapped up since Christmas was coming. Maybe the funeral director freed up a spot so soon in his schedule because he’s heading to the Gold Coast for the holidays. Whatever the reason for the rush, I’m glad for it. The idea of Jodie lying in the ground isn’t what I’d call warming, but it’s certainly better than having her sliced up and exposed on a cold metal gurney in the bowels of the hospital morgue.
    For everybody else, it’s a normal Monday. Others are off to work and the school holidays have kicked in, leaving thousands of unsupervised teenagers to drink beer and break into houses and steal big-screen TVs and game consoles. It’s summer and the world is moving on and Christmas shopping is in full swing with mallparking lots jammed full and parents fighting in line for the next best thing. It’s a stunning, bright sunny day, the kind of day I’m sure Jodie would have enjoyed, and if the choice was hers perhaps even the kind of day she’d like to be buried on. My bruises have faded. It’s been three days since the bank robbery, and all six men are still on the loose. The city is understaffed by police and overstaffed with criminals—the balance is out of whack and nobody seems able to correct it. Wednesday was to be my last day at work for two weeks, the same for Jodie. Instead she’s spending Christmas in a dirt plot and I’ll be spending it God knows where.
    I had to choose a dress for Jodie, and a coffin. Coffin shopping is something I never want to have to do again—different models have different specifications, the funeral director doing his best to guilt me into upgrading, as if a cheaper coffin would suggest to the world I hated my wife. Jodie’s parents took care of the flowers, the priest, the music, and the church, and everything else. There are probably a thousand things going on around me to make this happen and I wouldn’t know.
    The cemetery is on the outskirts of town in a neighborhood where there are lots of trees and not so many houses and currently a large flock of seagulls circling above. There’s a church off to one side of the graveyard which has been abandoned since the priest was murdered there almost six months ago, but reopened in time for Christmas with the arrival of a new