Wolf Hour

5 Exit Wound, October 2016

Bob took the Kojak light off the roof as he swung into the open space between the apartment blocks of the Jordan projects. The brown-brick buildings around him towered into the sky on all sides, and as he passed into the shadows a breath of damp, cold air entered through the car window. It made him shiver. The whole Jordan project made him shiver. In other places — and that included even down in Phillips — it could be difficult for the untrained eye to see visible signs of the misery, to hear the creaking of bottled-up hate, to smell the testosterone just waiting for the right bad excuse. But not here. It started with a welcome graffiti drawn down the side of the cement stairway leading to the road below. BLOWJOB it said, in gigantic lettering. Next to it was a badly drawn pistol aimed at the side of a head with what was obviously supposed to be brain mass blowing out on the other side. Bob directed his gaze up at the blocks. They made him think of termite mounds. There was something odd about this concentrated assembly of people in a place where there was so much space. He’d seen photographs from the time when his great-great-grandparents came out here from Norway, driven out by hunger and hard times. They’d come to a wide, open landscape with farms and people distant from each other. They built their simple houses and churches here. They never envisaged a city with a skyline, still less entire high-rise settlements with people on welfare, people on the margins of society who sold everyday escape routes to each other, dug graves for each other and directed their hatred and frustration above all against people who suffered as much as themselves. What would Bob’s ancestors have said about Jordan and Minneapolis? According to his parents they’d been God-fearing, hard-working and thrifty. As well as conservative racists. Bob’s great-great-grandfather had fought in the Civil War, but when the liberated slaves started arriving from the south and settling in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, he’d come to regret it, his grandma said. People of Scandinavian and German heritage were still in the majority, but in the towns especially the ethnic mix of the population was much more varied. Latinos started to arrive after the Second World War, mostly Mexicans but some Puerto Ricans too. By the eighties the Vietnamese had arrived, though God knows why people from a coastal land would choose somewhere as far from the sea as this. The Vietnamese who ran Bob’s local liquor store explained it by saying that once you’d survived being one of the Boat people you kept well away from salt water for the rest of your life. When refugees from the war in Somalia began arriving in the nineties and settled in Phillips and on the south side of the city, a lot of people began predicting trouble. They’d read about traumatised child soldiers with Kalashnikovs in a war financed by the sale of narcotics, and they could see all this baggage making the journey over with them. But things had gone better than the pessimists feared. Naturally some had ended up in drug gangs, but it wasn’t as bad as up on the north side, where for the last six years there had been an average of ten shootings per week. Every time Mayor Kevin Patterson was confronted with a new report on violence he countered by saying that crime per capita in Minneapolis was at an all-time low, which was indeed the case for the other parts of the city. But here it had just gone up and up, especially after Patterson had slashed the police budget and forced them to let people go and start to prioritise. What priorities and which neighbourhoods the mayor — who lived in wealthy Dellwood — wanted the police to concentrate on wasn’t hard to guess.

Bob pulled up beside an MPD police car standing outside the entrance to one of the blocks and climbed out. A bow-legged, slightly overweight policeman in uniform was leaning against the car as his colleague inside spoke on his radio.

‘Detective Oz, Homicide Division,’ said Bob and flashed his badge.

‘That was quick,’ said the uniform.

‘I was just round the corner. What’s the story, Officer...?’

‘Heinz. Ambulance and technicians are on their way.’

‘The body?’

Heinz led the way and opened the door. Oz saw the blood on the sidewalk outside and the trail of blood inside. They walked on till they reached the body, which was lying on its back ten yards inside the hallway, beyond the elevator and the stairs.

‘Why no crime scene tape?’

‘Because we got witnesses that say he was standing outside and the shot came from a long way off, nobody saw anybody shoot. There’s no evidence here to mess up, Detective.’

‘Really?’ Bob looked at the drag-trail of blood leading from the doorway to where they stood, and at the blood on the victim’s shoe. ‘Do we know who dragged him in here?’

‘No.’

‘Right. Get your partner off the radio and get the scene out there and in here taped off and do it now.’

Heinz disappeared. Bob looked down at the body. Noted that he’d been wrong, Bob Oz wasn’t the only man in Minneapolis who walked around in a mustard-yellow cashmere coat, just the only mustard-yellow cashmere coat without a bullet hole in it. The man had narrow lines of facial hair that framed his mouth and followed the line of his jawbone up to his temples. They were so neatly cut and black, probably dyed, that they looked like they’d been painted on. The corpse had piercings on the eyebrows and ears, the rings looked like gold.

Bob squatted down and carefully unbuttoned the coat. Only now did he realise how fat the man was. The body flopped out of the open coat and seemed held in place by no more than a slim-fit white shirt that was drenched in blood. The discreet emblem on the breast pocket announced that it was an exclusive Italian brand.

Heinz returned. ‘My partner’s fixing the tape,’ he said.

‘OK. Help me turn this guy over.’

Heinz bent low with a grunt and took hold of the dead man’s hips. ‘I heard someone from your division say that the reason there’s so many murders here in Jordan is that it’s a food desert, that there’s only one decent food store here.’

‘Is that a fact?’ Bob said without interest as he lifted the corpse’s shoulders.

‘He thought there was a connection between hunger and the level of aggression,’ Heinz grunted. ‘But I don’t buy it. Take the average weight of the people around here and you can see the problem isn’t a lack of food.’

‘You don’t say,’ said Bob as he studied the victim’s back. No exit wound.

‘It’s the fat. Fat makes us bad people. Just look at the folks that live around here.’

‘Right, now lay him down again,’ said Bob.

‘They’re either skin-and-bone meth heads or fat diabetics who are going to die before they make sixty. No one works and they’re all sick. Obamacare means you and me and our children and grandchildren are paying to support these parasites.’ Officer Heinz stood up, wheezing. He tucked his stomach back inside his belt.

‘Got a pen on you, Heinz?’

Heinz handed him one with MPD’s logo on it, hunkered down close by Bob and watched with interest as Bob pushed the pen into the entry wound in the chest, like someone measuring the oil in a car engine. Bob searched his pockets for something square-shaped, rejected the condom and pulled out the appointment card from Guillaume’s clinic for anger management and held it more or less level behind the pen. Closed one eye and looked. First across the body and then along it. Drew a line along each side of the card.

‘What’s that you’re doing?’ asked Heinz.

‘Trying to get some idea of the angle of the shot.’ Bob saw Heinz’s nostrils dilate and guessed the officer was probably smelling the alcohol on his breath. Just then the body on the floor jerked.

‘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.

There was a flash between the black drapes in the open window, followed by a dull thud that echoed around the blocks. Stun grenade.

‘As usual you’re not interested in the fireworks display?’ said Kay.

Bob shook his head.

‘You know word around the unit is that Bob Oz is chicken?’

‘Because I won’t play cops and robbers?’

‘Because you don’t carry a gun, so you always have an excuse not to be part of any life-threatening situations. I’ve tried telling them they’re wrong.’

‘Oh, but they aren’t wrong, Kay. I am chicken.’ Bob nodded in the direction of the leader of the SWAT team as he emerged from the entrance, talking and listening on his headset. ‘A smart and cowardly homicide detective with an estimated life span eight years longer than that overtrained adrenaline junkie there.’

O’Rourke approached, demonstratively ignoring Bob and addressed himself to Kay Myers. ‘It’s clear, but I’m afraid our bird has flown.’

‘Thanks,’ said Myers.

‘It’s nothing. And if any more bad guys show up...’ He turned his gaze on Bob and spat on the ground, just missing Bob’s brown leather shoes. ‘...just call Bonzo again.’

Myers and Bob watched O’Rourke as he stomped over toward the car and his men emerged from the block.

‘Bob, Bob, you make friends wherever you go,’ sighed Myers.

They stopped outside the open door of the sixth-floor apartment. Bob saw that the lock had been broken open, probably using a small battering ram.

‘I’ll go talk to the neighbours,’ said Myers.

‘OK,’ said Bob as he stepped carefully over the threshold. In the first instance he would be looking for things that could be used to put out a BOLO or lead to a quick arrest, but out of habit he kept close to the walls to reduce the risk of contaminating any technical clues. His first thought was that the apartment reminded him of another place that had the same atmosphere of melancholy, maybe the apartment of some lonely woman where one night he and she had tried to make each other feel a little less lonely. This particular apartment was one room with the kitchen area nearest the door, a couch which Bob assumed had originally been over by the window but which had been pulled out further into the room. Of course, it might have been SWAT making sure no one was hiding beneath it, but he doubted that. Water was dripping from the red tablecloth hanging over the table, and that was most definitely SWAT’s work. You throw stun grenades into a room containing people you want to neutralise but not actually harm because the flash of light is so bright that for five seconds that person can’t see a thing, and the noise is so loud they can’t hear either, and that destroys their sense of balance. In the course of those few seconds the perpetrator will probably be immobilised, on the floor and handcuffed. But what sometimes happened — as Bob noted here from the tablecloth — was that the heat developed could easily ignite flammable materials. A few years back an elderly couple had died from smoke inhalation following a narcotics raid in which stun grenades had been used. The whole unit had been disciplined, not least because it turned out the raid had been based on false information. People had lost their jobs.

Bob cursed silently and scanned the room. Myers was right, he didn’t have a lot of friends, especially not in the MPD. So why did he do stuff like this? Why call in SWAT? Why act like he had a search warrant? Did he want to get fired? Was that it?

Bob crossed to the window. The drapes were taped to the walls on each side. In the opening between them he looked down at the cordoned-off area in front of Block 3. He sniffed at one of the drapes. The acrid smell of gun smoke. There was a chair between the couch and the window, and Bob saw that there were scratch marks on top of the chair back. Bob checked the angle, tried to recreate the shooter’s position if he used the chair back as a rest, and concluded he must have been on the couch, possibly on his knees.

He walked to the kitchen cupboard, pulled on the thin latex gloves he always kept in his inside pocket, and opened the cupboard door. The contents didn’t tell him much apart from the fact that the tenant had a preference for food from south of the border. Rice, tortillas, empty bottles of Mexican beer. There was a tin of brown beans in the refrigerator, a dried-up pepper and an onion. He lifted up a trash can with a pedal-operated lid, placed it on the counter and quickly sifted through the contents. Kitchen paper, beer bottle caps, a couple of empty food tins, a carton of apple juice, a blackened banana skin, two empty bottles of chilli sauce. Bob picked up something lying in the bottom of the basket and held it up to the light. It was an open box with a label attached: Insulin. Tomás Gomez. One injection morning and evening. Dr med. Jakob Egeland. Bob looked inside the box. It had evidently contained several injector pens, but now there was only one left in the box, and that had been used. He opened the refrigerator again, checked all the drawers to make sure he hadn’t overlooked anything.

As he was putting the trash can down he noticed, in the spot where it had been standing, something just visible sticking up between the floorboards. He used a knife from the kitchen drawer to flip out what turned out to be a business card from someone called Mike Lunde, Town Taxidermy. For just a moment — as though he’d killed off the last of his brain cells — he couldn’t recall what a taxidermist was. Then he recalled an article he’d read in the Star Tribune, something about a creative new taxidermist group in Minneapolis. They stuffed dead animals. Bob put the business card in his pocket and walked over to the closet. A few shirts and a hoodie hanging inside. Behind them were several flattened cardboard boxes, the type you use when moving. Bob went through the drawers in the closet. Three pairs of underpants, some T-shirts, socks. As he was closing the door he noticed something black behind the cardboard boxes and he moved them to one side. A long, narrow case leaned up against the rear wall. He lifted it out without touching its handle.

It was a rifle case.

He opened it. Empty.

At that moment Kay Myers appeared in the doorway. She nodded in the direction of the rifle case.

‘I hope that means we’ve raided the right place?’

‘I haven’t found any weapon nor any ammunition, but people don’t make a habit of collecting empty rifle cases,’ said Bob.

‘I’m asking because if the neighbours are to be believed then our so-called Tomás Gomez is not regarded as the violent type.’

‘So-called?’ Bob leaned the case against the wall and took a picture of it with his phone.

‘That’s the name he gave to the landlord here, Mr...’ She flipped through her notebook. ‘Gregory Dupont. But we can’t find any reference to any Tomás Gomez with the details he gave Dupont so either it’s a false name or he’s an illegal immigrant.’

‘And, of course, Dupont didn’t check?’

‘He says Gomez paid his three months’ deposit in cash and as far as he was concerned he could be a Martian.’

‘Right.’ Bob peeled the label off the pack of insulin and put it in his coat pocket. ‘Anything else?’

Kay flipped through her notebook. ‘The neighbours on both sides say they know practically nothing about him, other than that he’s quiet and doesn’t say much. No one’s had more than the time of day out of him. The neighbours say he’s never given any cause for complaint, but one thinks he might have had a cat. Pets aren’t allowed.’

Bob gave a short laugh. ‘Job?’

‘If he had one they don’t know what it was. It’s not the kind of thing people ask each other around here. But he went out in the mornings and came back in the afternoon, so maybe. Neighbour on the right side thinks he might have had some contact with a Mrs White, two floors up.’

‘Shall we have a word with her?’

‘Thought we might. But I got a description, so wait while I first give it to the patrol car down there in case he suddenly decides to come back.’

‘He won’t do that,’ said Bob and held up the used insulin pens.

‘What’s that?’

‘Insulin. He’s diabetic. He needs these shots daily and you keep them in the refrigerator, but there are none there now. He’s taken them with him.’

Mrs White stared at them in alarm from behind the security chain. Based on the little they could see Bob guessed her to be at least seventy, height about five three, black, fond of the colour yellow.

‘Tomás? That’s not possible!’

‘May we come in, Mrs White?’ asked Kay.

Mrs White unhooked the security chain and opened the door. Bob and Kay followed the yellow-clad figure into an apartment that was a little larger than Gomez’s. It had at least one extra door which Bob assumed was to a bedroom.

‘Tomás gave me this,’ she said and pointed to the yucca palm standing in a pot in a corner of the room. She shuffled into the kitchen area. ‘Tea?’

‘No thank you, Mrs White, we’d just like to ask you a few questions.’

‘Well, all right. But I can tell you right now you’re mistaken. Tomás would never shoot at anybody.’

‘What makes you say that?’ said Bob as he looked around. It was the apartment of a lonely elderly woman. With old and probably much-loved objects and family photos, to remind her of their existence. Well-looked-after but antiquated furniture. There was a cage with a chirping canary to keep her company.

‘Tomás was the very spirit of neighbourliness. If there was some shopping needed doing, or something in the apartment that needed fixing, he was always there to help.’

‘One and the same person can be helpful at the same time as capable of shooting someone,’ said Bob. He knew he couldn’t stay here long, could feel the anger building up inside him already. It wasn’t so much Mrs White’s naive replies as that yellow bird sitting so stoic and unmoving on its perch and singing that high-pitched monotonous song that was drilling its way inside his head, drilling into an exposed nerve and pretty soon would precipitate an irrational outburst of anger. Damn that Alice!

‘Is there anything else you can tell us about Tomás?’ Kay asked quickly.

‘Anything else?’ Mrs White poured tea into two cups. ‘Hm. Funny when you ask like that, we talk together so much I ought to be able to tell you a whole lot. But the truth is, Tomás doesn’t talk a lot. And never talks about himself.’

‘What work does he do?’ asked Bob.

‘Casual work. Labouring jobs, that’s the impression I get. He’s a real handyman. And an artist as well.’

‘What kind of artist?’ asked Kay.

‘Some kind of sculptor. He made something, I have it in the cupboard here, would you like—’

‘No thanks,’ said Bob. ‘Did he say anything about where and who he worked for?’

Mrs White stuck out her lower lip, shook her head and handed one teacup to Kay.

‘He didn’t talk much, you say; it never occurred to you it was because he might have something to hide?’ Bob ignored Kay’s warning look. She was of the newer school of investigative theory that believed the open question would give a more informative answer. Bob was old school. That meant no theory, just go ahead and ask anything you’re curious about.

‘No,’ said Mrs White. ‘I don’t think Tomás is selling dope, if that’s what you mean. Tomás is silent by nature. I guess you could say I do most of our talking. Don’t get me wrong, when Tomás does open his mouth he speaks like a schoolteacher. He uses so many words I’ve never heard before. Did you know this used to be a nice neighbourhood?’

‘Did it?’ said Kay.

‘Oh indeed. Then came the crack epidemic of the eighties. Because it was an epidemic. A plague, that’s what it was. It swept over the whole country, and overnight we were back in the dirt again.’

‘I know,’ said Kay.

‘Do you?’

‘I grew up between two crack houses.’

‘Yeah, well, then I guess you do know.’

Bob glanced down into the courtyard again. The techs should be here any time now. If not that was just more ammunition for those who claimed the police took their time about things when the neighbourhood involved was black or Latino. A few kids were throwing pebbles at the patrol car down below and the officer stepped out and yelled at them, but the kids just ran off, laughing.

‘Now there’s more shooting, guns and gang wars here than ever before,’ said Mrs White. ‘But what does Mayor Patterson do? Right, he pulls the police out of here because he knows that after Minnesota made private prisons illegal it’s cheaper for the authorities if the folks down here shoot each other than if they have to be responsible for locking them up. Or am I wrong?’

Bob gave Kay a pleading look which she responded to with an imperceptible nod.

‘I don’t know how the mayor’s office thinks about these things, Mrs White,’ said Kay. ‘But back to Tomás Gomez. When was the last time you saw him?’

‘Oh, that wasn’t but a short time ago.’

‘A short time ago?’

‘Yes, right after that crack out there.’

Bob turned toward them. ‘Just now? Did he say anything about—’

‘What did you talk about?’ Kay interrupted. Open questions.

‘As far as I recall he didn’t say a word. But I could see something was wrong.’

‘Wrong?’ asked Kay.

‘Yes. He was wearing sunglasses, and he was so pale. Looking back, I think he’d just been crying. Tomás is a very sensitive man, you know. He doesn’t show it, but you can tell, that’s often the way of it, the sensitive ones protect themselves with silence. But I know for example that he was very upset when his cat died. That’s why I told him to have it stuffed. Same as Pippi here.’

Bob turned to the canary in disbelief. It was still sitting there motionless on that perch, but only now did he notice the tiny speaker below the swing, next to the water dish. Mrs White laughed, and Bob realised that the look on his face had betrayed him.

‘Mr Lunde’s a very skilful taxidermist, though sometimes I think he can be a bit too particular. Anyway, Tomás is still waiting to get his cat back. Have you ever lost anything like a much-loved pet, Miss Myers?’

Kay shook her head.

‘What about you, Mr Oz?’

Bob looked at her. Fingered the condom in his pocket. The drilling started up again. He really had to get out of there.