‘Jesus!’ Heinz yelled.
Bob stared down at what he was no longer quite so sure was a dead body. The chest wasn’t moving, but when Bob held three fingers against the neck he could feel the beat of a slight pulse.
‘First aid,’ said Bob.
‘Eh?’
‘You take the first-aid course, Heinz?’
‘Sure, but—’
‘Then on you go.’
‘OK, OK. Then help me to—’
‘No, no,’ said Bob as he stood up. ‘He’ll help you.’
Bob nodded in the direction of Heinz’s partner who was standing in the doorway with the roll of crime scene tape in his hand.
‘Enjoy the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,’ said Bob as he straightened up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m a homicide detective, so unless this guy dies then my business here is done.’
Bob walked around the bloodstains on the sidewalk. A half-dozen curious onlookers had gathered outside the tape that extended three yards out from each side of the doorway. In the distance he could hear the wailing of the ambulance. He glanced up at the surrounding blocks. Held the appointment card up to his eyes and checked, first along one line, then the other. Let his glance glide down the block on his left. Caught sight of the open window on the sixth floor. The black drapes were slightly parted, and inside that gap was the only place they moved, as though they were attached to the wall. Bob Oz took a few steps back and positioned himself directly behind the pool of blood and once again checked the lines on his card. Then he pulled out his phone and made a call. It was answered before the first ring had died away.
‘SWAT.’
‘Jesus, anyone would think you were expecting the call.’
‘What is it?’
‘You cowboys better get saddled up and ride on out here.’
Bob rubbed his hands together and shivered as he stood in front of Block 1 and watched as the Special Weapons and Tactics team jumped out of the armoured truck. There were twelve of them, wearing green uniforms and helmets, black bulletproof vests and automatic weapons that looked so small and neat they always made Bob think of the toy guns he and his childhood friends used to play with. It was their show now, but the few remaining members of the audience had hidden themselves behind the windows of the blocks. The sidewalks and parking lot were deserted, even the onlookers behind the crime scene tape in front of Block 3 had vanished now that the ambulance had been and gone. A solitary boy, hunched over in a hoodie, hurried by.
‘Excuse me,’ said Bob, ‘is there anywhere around here to get something to eat?’
‘Fuck you.’ The boy neither looked up nor slowed down.
Bob shrugged.
The leader of the SWAT team approached Bob. He was well built, walked like an Iraq vet with landmines on his mind every time his feet hit the ground, and that radar scan of a look that never rested in one place for more than a second. On the name tag above his breast pocket it said ‘Sergeant O’Rourke’. He handed Bob a bulletproof vest with the word POLICE on it in yellow lettering.
‘What would I want with that?’ said Bob, looking blankly at it.
‘You not coming in?’
‘You need help?’
‘No, but—’
‘Then go and do your job.’ Bob waved O’Rourke toward the entrance. ‘Fetch, Bonzo, fetch.’
The SWAT leader stared at Bob in disbelief. Then he turned away, head shaking, and made his way back to his men who had spread out and taken up positions by the front and back entrances to the block. O’Rourke gave a quick command through the microphone in his earpiece. It was as if he’d turned on a vacuum cleaner that sucked his men into the building.
Bob surveyed the area as he stamped his thin brown leather shoes against the asphalt to get the blood circulating through his toes. Tried to understand why he was here. Not just here in Jordan, working for the city police, but here on this earth. Then he thought fuck it. Fuck Alice, for whom he’d sacrificed a life of glorious polyamory just so he could live with her. Fuck the failed attempt to kill someone in this drug- and gang-infested neighbourhood with its murders he’d spent his entire professional career making himself immune to. Because once you’ve had everything and then lost it all you just don’t give a shit. A gravestone with two dates on it, dates too close together — that was all he had left. So yeah, he just said fuck it all.
Bob heard a car stop behind him, turned and saw Kay Myers climb out of a Ford identical to the one he was driving himself. She had her police ID hanging round her neck, identifying her as a detective in the MPD Homicide Unit. Myers was in her late thirties, wore her hair in an afro, which Bob had gathered was back in fashion but which Myers had worn as long as he had known her. She was small and thin and had the best marathon time of anyone in the MPD, male or female. She claimed she never trained, that she must have a runner’s genes — she’d traced her roots back to Kenya. She was one of the at most two people in the Homicide Unit whose company Bob could endure. When that sober face of hers occasionally broke into a smile, Bob could see how some might describe her as attractive. But since Kay Myers didn’t act like she was interested in anything other than a professional relationship with her male colleagues, and didn’t dress that way either, that was how it worked out. It might also have been the case that her tough, self-assured and direct manner scared guys off, at least guys who liked at least a touch of female submissiveness. Which — Bob thought — went for most of them. She wasn’t the type to talk about herself much and Bob assumed her tough exterior had something to do with her being raised in Englewood, Chicago.
‘Victim’s name is Marco Dante,’ Kay Myers called out even before she’d shut the car door behind her. ‘Arrested three times for illegal sale of weapons but they couldn’t hang anything on him, big surprise.’
Bob waited until she came over to him.
‘Gun trafficker?’
‘Yep. Weapons with probably more lives on their conscience in Minneapolis than all the hunting rifles in this state put together so please excuse me for not shedding a tear. Did...?’
‘Yeah, they just went in. Sixth floor — that open window up there.’
‘We’ve got witnesses who say they saw that’s where the shot came from?’
‘Yes, one. Unfortunately they wouldn’t give a name and address and did a runner.’
‘Really?’
Bob saw that Kay was looking aslant at him.
‘So this isn’t just Bob Oz’s famous gut feeling?’
‘Bob Oz’s gut feeling tells me that this witness was telling the truth.’
‘You remember how much trouble there was last time we went in without a search warrant?’
‘No,’ said Bob, with a look that suggested honest astonishment. ‘I really don’t remember that.’
Kay Myers snorted dismissively. ‘Where were you this morning, Bob? Or let me put it like this, whose bed did you oversleep in?’
‘Unclear. She’d already left.’
‘You do realise I can’t keep covering up for you much longer?’
‘Longer? Have I ever asked you to cover up for me at all?’
That was another thing he’d never worked out about Kay Myers, why she backed him the way she did. She was clearly not interested in him as a man; Bob wasn’t often tuned in to the rumours circulating at work but he had gathered that word around the unit was that she was gay. And she wasn’t interested in having him as a friend either, they had never even had a beer together. Some women like bastards, but Kay Myers didn’t seem to belong in that category either. That left only the worst alternative: that she felt sorry for him.