White Death. Daniel Blake

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       11

      Since Patrese needed some cash, he pulled up at the nearest bank. The ATM in the wall was out of order, so he went inside, where there were three more machines: all working fine, but all with queues. That wasn’t surprising: it was the start of the lunch hour. Patrese scanned the queues, trying to work out from the kind of customers there which queue would move fastest. Businessmen in suits would be in a hurry; little old ladies would take their time.

      A bark of laughter came from the tellers’ counter. Patrese looked over. One of the tellers, a young guy with the kind of hair-and-moustache combo that hadn’t been in fashion since East Germany had ceased to exist, was holding up a piece of paper. A black man in a hooded sweatshirt stood in front of his position.

      ‘You demand money?’ the teller scoffed. ‘This is a practical joke, right?’

      No, Patrese thought. No, never say that. What the fuck was the teller playing at? The police tell every bank, and every bank tells its employees, not to stand up to bank robbers. Just give them the money and get them out of there. Hell, most banks use some kind of dye pack that makes the notes unusable, or they hand over bait money, whose serial numbers are recorded and the police alerted when the notes are back in circulation. But even if they don’t do either of those, it’s still only money. Better that someone gets away with a couple of grand than that someone gets shot because of some fool teller who thinks he’s Dirty Harry.

      All this went through Patrese’s head in a split second. In that same split second, Hoodie Man had pulled a gun from his waistband with his right hand and grabbed the nearest customer, a young Asian woman with red eyeglasses and a crimson Harvard top, with his left. He pressed the gun to the woman’s head. Her eyes and mouth made perfect circles of shock and fear.

      ‘Look like a practical joke to you now, motherfucker?’ yelled Hoodie Man.

      Shrieks and screams all around Patrese, people falling to the floor or backing away as far as they could. He had his own gun out now, though he wasn’t aware of having drawn it: that was Bureau training, where in times of danger you armed yourself without conscious thought.

      He drew a bead on Hoodie Man. ‘Let her go!’

      ‘You drop it, man! Drop it, or I smoke the bitch!’

      The man’s face was half hidden beneath his hood. He looked to have smooth skin and regular features, but beyond that Patrese couldn’t see enough to tell for sure whether he was serious about this threat or not, let alone whether he was juiced on crack or meth or whatever else junkies out there liked to hit on nowadays.

      Could take the shot anyway, Patrese thought, but Hoodie Man was moving around, pulling his hostage with him. Hs gun was pressed hard against her temple: the pressure was turning her skin white around the end of the barrel. Even if Patrese got off a clean shot, head or vital organs down the centerline of the trunk, Hoodie Man might still fire his own gun, as a reflex shot if nothing else.

      Patrese remembered Samantha Slinger, a crack addict whom he’d shot dead in some scuzzy Pittsburgh rowhouse because he’d thought she’d been going for a gun. She hadn’t. And her death had helped set in motion a series of murders that had reached five before he’d managed to finish it. That kind of thing stayed with you. It hadn’t stopped him taking shots in difficult situations since then – he’d put a bullet through the head of a wannabe suicide bomber during a Steelers match at Heinz Field, for a start – but it had made him more cautious about weighing up risk and reward.

      And right now there was no contest between the two. Hoodie Man wants to steal some cash rather than work for it? Sure. Let him. Guys who hold up banks in broad daylight aren’t criminal masterminds. They get caught sooner rather than later. Give him the money, get him to let the girl go. That’s what Patrese thought. That’s what the teller should have thought too, before he started to get wiseass.

      ‘OK,’ Patrese said. ‘OK.’ He crouched down and put his gun on the floor.

      Hoodie Man swiveled his eyes toward the teller. ‘Money, now. In a bag, twenty seconds, or I smoke her.’

      Patrese could hear only two sounds: a quiet, breathless sobbing from somewhere behind him, and the panicky rustle of the teller frantically shoving shrink-wrapped packs of notes into a carrier bag.

      Hoodie Man glanced across at the teller again. ‘Enough!’ he said. ‘Give!’

      The teller reached out, bag juddering from the tremors in his arm. Hoodie Man tightened his left arm around Harvard Top’s neck and took the bag with the outstretched fingers of the same hand. The gun in his right hand never left her temple.

      ‘Fool,’ he spat at the teller.

      Patrese rather thought he had a point.

      Hoodie Man began to walk toward the door, still holding his hostage. She looked round in silent supplication. Do the right thing, Patrese thought. Get out of the door and let her go. You’ve got what you came for. You keep a hold of her, and within minutes it’ll be a situation with armed cops and all that, and those things tend to end the hard way.

      And that’s exactly what Hoodie Man did. He got out of the door, pushed Harvard Top away, and took off down the sidewalk like a scalded cat.

      Patrese grabbed his gun from the floor and went after him. No good. By the time he was out of the building, Hoodie Man was halfway down the block and moving fast toward the lunchtime crowds. Chasing him would only risk flaring the whole thing up again. He might take another hostage; even worse, he might start shooting. Letting him go wasn’t the macho thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.

      It didn’t stop Patrese stamping the ground in frustration, though.