Ask the Author: Michael Ebner
Answered Questions (3)
Michael Ebner
I was living in the city in an apartment above various stores and businesses.
One night, a little after midnight, I was up writing and listening to music with headphones, when my girlfriend (now my wife) came through and said she couldn’t sleep because of a loud drilling-like noise going on downstairs.
Where we lived, there was occasionally late night road work by the city council, so I brushed it off as that. There was nothing we could do about it. Some time passed, and the drilling persisted, and in a nutshell my girlfriend said to me: “If you are any kind of man you’d go down there and investigate it.”
Our apartment was on the third floor and it fronted onto a major road and backed onto a car park surrounded by a shopping precinct. The entrance to our place was from the rear. It was about 1am by the time when I headed downstairs. From the deserted car park in the back, I took the dark side alley towards the disturbance and the main road. The drilling noise seemed to be coming from a particular store that was always changing hands and brands. There was newspaper plastered all over the store’s glass windows. I tried to peer inside, assuming they were renovating the premises for the next vendor, but the interior was concealed and I couldn’t see anything. Then the drilling noise ceased. I returned upstairs and went to bed.
The next day I was at work and my girlfriend phoned and said: “Turn on the TV. Our home is on the news.” There was live coverage of a bank robbery and hostage situation unfolding with a swat team and helicopters. Our apartment was above a bank. The criminals had broken into the vacant store next door and drilled a hole through the wall to the bank. They had waited for the bank’s employees to enter the building before taking them hostage and demanding they open the safe.
When the masked gunmen dragged in staff members as they reached the bank’s entrance, a passer-by noticed a struggle and he managed to pull a woman away to safety from a gunman. That heroic passer-by just happened to be an off duty soldier. Eventually the police were alerted and they shut down the main road. Later some plain-clothes officers spoke to the robbers with megaphones advising them to surrender and release the hostages.
My girlfriend worked near our place, so she headed home on her lunch break to check it out. The whole area was sectioned off from the public and she had to be escorted by police into our apartment to ensure none of the criminals were hiding out inside. She recalls a member of the swat team observing her on our balcony from afar. After she came back downstairs, a journalist approached her. I really didn’t want her to say anything, or reveal our names, because ‘the writer’ in me was convinced the people who robbed the bank would have been watching the area for weeks before the attempted heist (and maybe our home and us). I didn’t want them to think we may have seen their faces because they knew where we lived.
They were never caught and while the police waited outside before storming the bank that morning, the gang had already slipped away through the same hole in the wall then out the back door of the adjacent store and into the car park – bordered by a bakery, florist, drycleaners, grocery store, cafes, boutiques and a bar. The crooks had already disappeared among the daily shoppers before the surrounding streets were even blocked off.
When I went downstairs to investigate that night, I was pretty much half asleep. I often think that they must have had a lookout watching me, the fool in flip-flops walking down that dark alley. What might have happened if I stumbled across one of them or their plan? And what if that off duty soldier hadn’t been passing by at that exact moment to save that bank employee? Who were the criminals and where are they now?
One night, a little after midnight, I was up writing and listening to music with headphones, when my girlfriend (now my wife) came through and said she couldn’t sleep because of a loud drilling-like noise going on downstairs.
Where we lived, there was occasionally late night road work by the city council, so I brushed it off as that. There was nothing we could do about it. Some time passed, and the drilling persisted, and in a nutshell my girlfriend said to me: “If you are any kind of man you’d go down there and investigate it.”
Our apartment was on the third floor and it fronted onto a major road and backed onto a car park surrounded by a shopping precinct. The entrance to our place was from the rear. It was about 1am by the time when I headed downstairs. From the deserted car park in the back, I took the dark side alley towards the disturbance and the main road. The drilling noise seemed to be coming from a particular store that was always changing hands and brands. There was newspaper plastered all over the store’s glass windows. I tried to peer inside, assuming they were renovating the premises for the next vendor, but the interior was concealed and I couldn’t see anything. Then the drilling noise ceased. I returned upstairs and went to bed.
The next day I was at work and my girlfriend phoned and said: “Turn on the TV. Our home is on the news.” There was live coverage of a bank robbery and hostage situation unfolding with a swat team and helicopters. Our apartment was above a bank. The criminals had broken into the vacant store next door and drilled a hole through the wall to the bank. They had waited for the bank’s employees to enter the building before taking them hostage and demanding they open the safe.
When the masked gunmen dragged in staff members as they reached the bank’s entrance, a passer-by noticed a struggle and he managed to pull a woman away to safety from a gunman. That heroic passer-by just happened to be an off duty soldier. Eventually the police were alerted and they shut down the main road. Later some plain-clothes officers spoke to the robbers with megaphones advising them to surrender and release the hostages.
My girlfriend worked near our place, so she headed home on her lunch break to check it out. The whole area was sectioned off from the public and she had to be escorted by police into our apartment to ensure none of the criminals were hiding out inside. She recalls a member of the swat team observing her on our balcony from afar. After she came back downstairs, a journalist approached her. I really didn’t want her to say anything, or reveal our names, because ‘the writer’ in me was convinced the people who robbed the bank would have been watching the area for weeks before the attempted heist (and maybe our home and us). I didn’t want them to think we may have seen their faces because they knew where we lived.
They were never caught and while the police waited outside before storming the bank that morning, the gang had already slipped away through the same hole in the wall then out the back door of the adjacent store and into the car park – bordered by a bakery, florist, drycleaners, grocery store, cafes, boutiques and a bar. The crooks had already disappeared among the daily shoppers before the surrounding streets were even blocked off.
When I went downstairs to investigate that night, I was pretty much half asleep. I often think that they must have had a lookout watching me, the fool in flip-flops walking down that dark alley. What might have happened if I stumbled across one of them or their plan? And what if that off duty soldier hadn’t been passing by at that exact moment to save that bank employee? Who were the criminals and where are they now?
Michael Ebner
My next novel The New Bad Thing will be released in 2023 by Pen and Picture Publishing. Read more here: www.thenewbadthing.com
Michael Ebner
For my novel Movie Game it was a combination of things. I was interested in writing a story about this character called Joe who consumed so much fiction from movies that he lives his life like he is in a movie; where one door closes and another always seems to open. And I wanted there to be this mystery about his missing father and it would begin in the cinema. I had this scene where he follows a couple of strangers home and confronts them for talking during the film. Why would he do such a thing and not even blink? And what's his journey going to be to wake him up and find his father?
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