The sun gets lower and evening arrives. I play the “what-if” game, the one where what if we’d gone to the bank ten minutes later, or what if I’d kept my mouth shut, or what if I’d fought the men off. There are a lot of what-ifs. A thousand of them—of course it’s a pointless game to play and I could spend the rest of my life out here under the sun, drinking beer, thinking about the could-have-beens and should-have-beens, the entire time the reality never forgotten—I’m the reason Jodie got killed.

More and more, the what-ifs begin to focus on the bank. I think about the security guard. I think about him a lot, and I imagine him acting.

But he didn’t, did he. He just stood there and did nothing.

Nothing! the monster says, and I guess the first part in the road to recovery, like being an alcoholic, is admitting you have a problem. So yeah, I admit, I have a monster.

And it’s nice to be here, it says, nice to be welcomed again after all this time.

The security guard, trained to help, there to defend, there to stop the innocent from being hurt, he did nothing. Not a goddamn thing.

I open up another beer.

Choosing to do nothing was the same as doing something. Doing nothing is what got everybody killed. You calling out—that didn’t get Jodie all shot up. The security guard—it’s his fault. He didn’t do his job.

“Damn straight,” I say.

I replay that moment over and over, and I’m not sure how it happens, but things shift a little and the truth appears, so obvious now, and it explains a lot. The first time I run things through, the security guard does nothing as the security tapes and history books state. But I slow down the action in my head, and then I notice something the cameras didn’t have the angle or the emotion to notice—this time the security guard smiles as the men come in, he smiles before he is smashed in the face with the butt of a shotgun. Then I slow it down even more, and there is more than a smile, but a wink and a nod of the head.

The security guard was in on it!

I slow it down again, the men rush in, the first one approaches the guard, and this time there’s the smile, the wink, the nod, and this time the guard puts his hand out and the bad guy takes it, they shake hands, there’s another nod, and bang, the guard is smashed in the head.

Once more. The men come in. One approaches the guard. The wink. The nod. The grin. The handshake. They embrace. They part and then they share a small joke. The bad guy pushes his gun forward but this time the stock doesn’t connect with the guard’s jaw, but he falls anyway, he falls in a heap and when he lies on the ground the smile is still there.

Another grin. Another wink. Another shared joke, and the men spill deeper into the bank and steal and kill; the entire time the guard watches them.

I go through one last time. This time when they take my wife, the security guard sits up and begins to clap.

I put down the empty beer bottle. There’s a row of them now, and thank God my friends, the ones with the platitude of “things will get better,” the ones who don’t know what to say, thank God they had the decency to bring lots of beer. Sure—they didn’t have the decency to be there to save my wife, and they can’t really help now, and since bringing beer is the best they can do then thank God for beer, thank God for people who think beer can heal the world.

I grab another one. It’s cold and doesn’t taste great but it goes down pretty quick. I head out into the backyard, stumbling—stupid yard—and go through the pages I threw out here earlier. I find some of the articles about the security guard. He was rushed to hospital with a serious concussion, which is a load of shit. The journalists—bless whatever it is they have that passes for hearts—have listed first and last names of everybody involved on the day—except, of course, for the six men who were more involved than anybody. I carry one of the stories about the guard back inside and fire up the computer. I search for the guard. Everybody in first-world countries these days is online somewhere, a member of some online community somewhere or whatever the hell is in fashion these days—people sharing their lives with strangers and credit-card thieves and . . .

Monsters . . .

. . . identity stealers and serial killers. The computer takes too long to load, which annoys me, but I kill time by grabbing another beer. The beer is calming me, I’m so full of serenity right now I could write a fucking musical.

I get online and Google the bastard and it’s hard to type because the keyboard seems smaller. When I get his name entered plenty of stories from the last four days pop up. I don’t bother reading them. Instead I go straight to the White Pages and let my fingers do the walking. Within twenty seconds I have his address. Telecom is my friend.

Our accomplice.

“I think it’s time we go visit him,” I say.

I can’t wait, the monster says.

“One more beer for the road,” I suggest.

Hell, have two—you deserve it, the monster says, and I get changed and then we go for a drive.

chapter seventeen

My car is a four-door sedan family vehicle, but I guess I can get rid of two of the doors since I won’t be using them anymore. Maybe trade it in for a sports car—maybe let Sam choose the color. We walk out to it, my monster and me, stumbling down the driveway, almost—but thank-God-not-quite—dropping my beer. I can’t get the door open but then figure out it’s still locked, so I unlock it and things work out great. I get behind the wheel and at first I think somebody has shifted the ignition, so I have to play around with the key, but it gets there in the end, scraping over the edges in the beginning before slotting home.

The mailbox almost becomes the first casualty of the evening, and then the neighbor’s cat, but things straighten out and the road points ahead and we follow it. Between us one of us reads the map while the other drives, the roads and intersections and other cars passing by in a blur of color and sound.

Christchurch is a better-looking city the later it gets in the day because the darkness helps hide the infection. I see it all around now—I was ignorant of it until four days ago. In the morning the sun will come up and tear that scab right off, the criminals will spew forth from their hovels, holes, and dens, merrily stealing and raping and killing their way through the twelve days of Christmas. The evening is still warm, and there are a few people out enjoying it, some of them walking hand in hand, or towing a dog on a leash, others on mountain bikes. It’s after nine o’clock, the sun has gone but it’s still light, the time of day approaching when it can go from light to dark in a matter of minutes. I drive past a park where a father and son are pointing up at a kite caught in a tall tree, stranded and pierced by branches. In the same park a group of teenagers are kicking a rugby ball back and forth, spiraling it high into the air before it gets too dark. There’s a fort and a merry-go-round and it reminds me of the story Dad told me earlier.

The Security Guard—one Mr. “let me laugh my ass off while your wife is getting gunned down” Gerald Painter, lives in a quiet street with lots of trees and gardens and homes that all seem the same, and I figure Mr. Gerald Painter should have become a painter and not a guard and if he’d done that, taken that one little path his destiny and last name were trying to point him toward, then this Tuesday night three days from Christmas would be a very different Tuesday night than it will be for him now. It’s darker by the time I get there and I have my headlights burning. Painter’s white-trash car with the big-block million-decibel engine and fiery paint job he must surely own isn’t parked out on the street or up the driveway. Instead there’s a four-door sedan, a Toyota I think, a white one, with a FOR SALE sign in the window.