On New Year’s Eve eve in not particularly big town, a 39-year-old wannabe bank robber makes the beginner’s mistake of targeting a cashless bank for robbery. Failing to pull off the heist because a cashless bank has no cash to steal, the robber attempts to evade police by unwisely running into the nearest door in a building outside the bank. Presented with the option of running back out to certain arrest or taking the stairs upward since no other exit from the building was immediately apparent, the robber began running up the steps as and far as a 39-year-old with a fondness for cheese can go. And then, suddenly, an opportunity present itself in the form of an apartment in the building holding an open house for prospective tenants.
The real estate agent conducting the open house and seven prospective clients who happen to be there at the moment are taken hostage by the bank robber and held captive for several hours. When police finally storm the apartment, it is uninhabited. When one of the cops questions the real estate agent, he is told that the robber had released the hostages, but curiously enough the robber never left the apartment. In addition, the agent suggest that the robber’s gun might not have been a real weapon, but the officer dismisses this opinion in the fact of the fact that once the police did make their entrance, evidence of violence was clear enough from the amount of blood that was shed by somebody.
As it turns out, the two cops who are questioning the hostages are a father and son and tension is increased with the conflict arising over the son’s belief that the father isn’t fully confident in his abilities. The father cop tells the real estate agent that the gun must’ve been real because after everybody had been released the robber had obviously used the gun in a failed suicide attempt. In a flashback, the reader learns that the younger cop, Jack, had ten years earlier come across a man on a nearby bridge contemplating suicide over recent financial downturns. Jack tries to talk the man down off the bridge and it traumatized when the man actually leaps from the bridge.
Both cops begin to suspect that the witnesses are not being totally forthcoming and that something strange happened in the apartment they aren’t telling. As the narrative moves forward, the cops begin to question workers in the bank as well as the other hostages and it becomes apparent that the lives of man on the bridge who jumped, a woman on the bridge whom Jack does successfully keep from jumping, bank workers, all the various people who were inside the apartment at the time the robber arrived and even Jack’s dead mother (the wife of the older cop) are all inextricably intertwined in the events which either lead to or spring from the decision by a despondent 39-year-old woman who has lost her job and her home and children to divorce to attempt the robbery of a cashless bank and the aftermath of the consequences of the failure of that attempt.
