Blood Men

by Paul Cleave

  Kingsly’s face is in a tight grimace, his lips are pulled back and his teeth have clenched tight on his protruded tongue. The tip of it, a slug-sized piece, sticks out between them. His body keeps shaking, harder now, spasms rolling up and down his tall frame, blood splashing up onto his nose and face and down his chin. The tip of his tongue comes away, the bloody side of it hits the wall and grips a little, sliding down the wall like a pickle on a window at McDonald’s. It hits the floor. The front of his pants darken. I can smell shit. I can smell barbecue. His eyes bulge from his face. No smoke anywhere.

  A small flame jets out from the wall and equally as fast goes out. The humming comes to a stop. The light goes out. The flashlight hits the ground and stays going. Slowly, Kingsly slides down the wall, following his tongue. He slides as far as his pinned hand will allow, which is enough for his knees to bend and his face to press up against the doorjamb, his upper lip snagging on the latch and stretching out before tearing on the way. His head lolls over his shoulder, his eyes staring at me, no smoke coming from them. Other than the torn lip and bloody stump of a tongue, he’s not in too bad a shape. Of course one look into his now-empty eyes is an immediate giveaway that things aren’t good for the guy.

  Something in his hand gives. I’m not sure what, exactly, but his hand forks open in a V as his body weight pulls it down past the blade, and then the rest of him slides down the wall and he tips onto the floor, covering the flashlight and blanketing me in darkness.

  I can hear my own breathing. Ragged-sounding. Painful-sounding. Panicked.

  I can’t hear Kingsly. Can’t see him. My arm hurts and so does my chest. There’s a sharp pain right down in the base of my throat. My heart is thumping. I count off the seconds. One. Two. My entire body has broken out in a sweat. Three. I push myself further away from him, backing into the corner of the bed. Four. I can’t figure out why the fuses didn’t pop and cut the power. Five.

  I take my cell phone out of my pocket and learn another lesson. Bringing a cell phone is a mistake unless it’s turned off. If somebody had called while I was hiding behind the hedge, or in the bedroom, things would have gone very differently. I point the display away from me and it lights up the meter or so ahead. I can’t see much except my own feet and the floor. I get to my knees and move closer to Kingsly. The power is out but I don’t touch him. I kick him to roll him off the flashlight so I can see better.

  I’ve killed a man.

  And you liked it.

  There’s a long cut in the palm of my right hand; it’s not too deep but it’s very ragged. The knife has ripped right through the glove when I slid forward after stabbing him. It’s also why I got electrocuted. If he hadn’t hit me with the flashlight I could be lying right beside him now. I touch the side of his face and poke him. His head lolls to the side and doesn’t loll back. His face is puffy and his lips pulled back and pieces of flesh from the bloody stump of his tongue are threaded through the small gaps in his teeth. The fuses should have popped. A circuit breaker should have kicked in somehow. The voltage shouldn’t have done this to him.

  I grab the flashlight. There is blood on the wall, on the floor, all over the knife and his arm, and some of his blood has mixed with the wound in my hand. I scoot myself back against the bed, roll onto my side, gag, open my mouth, and. .

  And nothing. Nothing happens. I stop gagging. I can taste vomit but none appears. I move off the floor and onto the bed, trailing blood with me. I put my own hands on the bed, bleeding into it, and I realize there is no way I can ever get away with any of this.

  “You did this to me,” I say.

  You? I am you!

  I keep staring at him, waiting for him to do something. He doesn’t. I wait for somebody to appear. Nobody does. And nobody will.

  I head into the hallway and find the fuse box almost immediately-the ropes I was stepping on earlier turn out to be power cables coming out of it and snaking across the floor. They’re pinned up to the fuse box with alligator clips. The fuse box is one of those old ones that requires wire to be wound between the terminals, except in this case there is no wire between any of them, instead there are five-centimeter nails, wedged in where the fuses would slot. One of them has melted in the middle. A wire fuse would have broken in a tenth of a second. The nail took thirty seconds. I try the hallway lights and they come on. The only fuse to have blown is the one for the bedroom.

  I follow the cables along the floor into another bedroom. The door is heavy to open and warm to touch. When it opens a thick piece of foam attached to the base of the door slides across the floor, and immediately orange light comes out, warming my face. The bedroom has been converted into a marijuana greenhouse. There are tables running from one wall to the other, full of beds of plants. There are heat lamps hanging from the ceiling over each of them. The room is more humid than it is bright. All the curtains are drawn, and in front of the curtains are large pieces of plywood, blocking any view from the outside world. I take a step inside; the air gets thicker. There are watering cans, bags of fertilizer, all the little knickknacks that old ladies with green fingers have. All of the plants stand about thirty centimeters high. I wonder how long they take to grow, how much money is invested here. I wonder what will happen to them now Kingsly is dead. I push some of them off the tables, they hit the floor and fall out of their trays, the roots exposed, the dirt exploding outward in every direction. I stomp on them, crushing the spines and leaves, destroying the drugs, hoping that I’m creating a reason for Kingsly to have been killed. The police aren’t going to look beyond a drug connection.

  I step back out of the room and close the door.

  There’s enough hallway light to see into the bedroom, and I use the flashlight for the rest. A brick of money is poking out from beneath the edge of the mattress I knocked out of place when I fell down and pushed myself back earlier. I tip it up the rest of the way. Bricks of cash, fresh, virgin money, all of the bricks made up from hundred dollar notes. Could be between a quarter and half a million dollars here. I reach out to touch it, wanting a tactile experience as to how that money feels, but pull my hand back. This is the reason my wife died. Or at least one-sixth of the reason. In some ways I’m owed this money. But in a much bigger way I can’t even touch it, let alone take it. This is blood money. I drop the mattress back onto it.

  A pile of porn magazines are stacked on an old wooden chair by the bed. The clock radio sits on top of them, it’s big and ugly and could be worth a lot of money since it’s probably the first one ever built. The bed is a double with sheets balled up, white and grey and covered in hair, the mattress sagging in the middle. I get the idea that if I pulled the top sheet away and exposed the surface of that mattress, I wouldn’t eat for two weeks. The stereo that added to the glow of the room is brand new, the cardboard box right next to it, big brand letters stamped across it. It’s the only thing in this room built in the last decade.

  There’s an old school desk with a shaving mirror on top of it, it has thin sprinkles of white powder and a razor blade on it. A supermarket cart next to the window is full of plastic bags packed with dried-out marijuana. A shelf hammered into the wall on a slight angle has tobacco papers, tobacco, scissors, and tinfoil all looking ready to slide onto the floor. Posters of muscle cars and naked women hang on the walls, along with a mirror with writing stenciled over it, telling me what alcohol Kingsly loves to drink.

  Tying it all together is a dead man on the floor with his eyes wide open and his teeth clenched tightly on a bloody stump of tongue. The carpet is threadbare and has what might be grease stains on it, as if somebody rolled a hundred-piece KFC meal back and forth picking up the dust instead of a vacuum cleaner.

  I find the bathroom and take off the ruined glove and run my hand under the tap and try to wash my blood away and Kingsly’s blood away but more blood keeps appearing. I pull the glove back on and wrap a pillowcase from the bedroom around it, knowing the infection from this house, this neighborhood, is inside me now.
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  In the kitchen I go through the cupboards, finding bleach in the laundry. I twist off the top and head through the house, splashing bleach over all the places where I’ve dripped blood, ruining the DNA-at least that’s what I hope is happening. It smells awful, a sharp acrid smell that burns my nostrils. I tug the knife out of the wall. It no longer has a serrated edge near the top, the metal has blackened and melted there. A gargling air bubble appears on Kingsly’s lips. I watch it, waiting for it to pop, but it doesn’t, it slowly deflates, as if he’s sucking the air back in. I pour bleach over the knife and carry it into the kitchen, then wrap it in a dish towel. My daughter’s bag is by the front door. It’s been turned upside down and the contents spilled out. Did Kingsly know he was looking at a killing kit?

  The smell of bleach makes me nauseous and I breathe into the crook of my elbow to try and cope. I make a more detailed search of the house, hunting for anything that might give me the other names but come up short. Jesus, I don’t even know if Kingsly was involved. He may have been. I spend little time questioning how bad I feel about the accident, because that’s what it was-him getting killed-it was an accident. I decide that I’m still undecided. That is until I think about his past, the drug convictions, the armed robberies, and the more I think about them the less I care about what happened.

  They all going to be accidents?

  Maybe. I don’t know.

  There is no computer. No address book. I go through every scrap of paper I can find, sure there has to be more names here, and the longer I can’t find anything, the more despondent I become. And angry. This was my link to these men. And I’ve killed it. I also don’t find a balaclava, but if he was one of the six men in the bank, he would have thrown it away by now.

  You’re new at this, but you’re doing great. Think. Think. How would these men communicate with him?

  “A cell phone,” I say.

  Taking care not to step in the blood, I crouch over Kingsly and pat down the sides of his jeans. There’s a lump in his right pocket. I reach inside and find a cell phone and a set of car keys. I splash more bleach over him before heading out the back door, wiping down the handles on the way, my daughter’s bag slung over my shoulder.

  I check Kingsly’s car. It’s an old Holden that’s almost twice as big as any modern sedan. I’m careful not to get blood or fingerprints over the door. There’s a metal strip on the passenger seat, about the same size as a crowbar, but much thinner. It’s one of those tools a thief uses to pop the lock in a car. I go through the glove box but it’s as useful as going through the house. I check the trunk: there are some tools in there but nothing else.

  I get back to my car and I’m all full of surprises-surprised my car is still there, surprised that it’s almost four a.m., surprised that the monster inside me for the moment hasn’t anything else to say. I swing by the cemetery on the way home and have the same amount of luck finding my wife’s grave as I did the night before.

  chapter twenty-six

  It’s their first serious lead.

  Fifteen one-hundred-dollar notes are hanging from a line strung across the back of the laundry. A tray of water and bleach next to them. Most of the notes are stained in red ink, the bleach doing nothing to clean them up, but a few are okay, the serial numbers matching the notes taken from the bank. Others are damaged from the small explosion, perhaps too badly in some cases. These are from the blocks of cash that had the ink packs inserted next to them.

  Shane Kingsly has a rap sheet going back almost twenty years. It began with shoplifting and ended with armed robbery, the years in between littered with burglary charges. In fact the few times Kingsly hasn’t been in trouble were the times he’s spent in jail.

  Schroder already knows none of the neighbors have seen anything. He already knew before any of them were questioned. This isn’t what he’d call a police-friendly neighborhood. Nobody here is opening their doors and offering information and coffee and kind helpful words.

  The house is a death trap, and according to the ME, Kingsly would have survived the attack if not for the overload of electricity. Schroder imagines living in a place like this but doesn’t imagine it for too long-the mere thought of it is enough to make him want to go and take a bath. Cables are running from the fuse box to the marijuana room where they were powering heat and light. The house smells of dirt and in one room the air is so dry he’s worried it’s going to ignite. In another room it’s cold and damp even though it’s over thirty degrees outside. Nearly every wall in the house has mold growing on it, and every light fitting is covered in cobwebs.

  “What do you think?” Landry asks. “A drug thing?”

  Landry looks tired, with dark bags beneath his eyes. He looks in need of this Christmas break more than anybody.

  “Unlikely. They’d have taken the drugs. If Kingsly was part of the robbery, then whoever killed him took his share of the cash, assuming it was here to begin with. So either it’s one of his own crew, or somebody else.”

  “You think Hunter?”

  “I don’t want it to be him, but there’s something else.” He leads Landry down the hall to the back door. Outside, next to the step, is a solid-aluminium box with walls an inch thick, big enough to fit a soccer ball.

  “What is it?” Landry asks. “Some kind of safe?”

  “There’s no lock on it. Doesn’t even have a door. Just a lid. Open it up.”

  Landry lifts the top. “Jesus, is that blood?” he asks.

  “Dye.”

  “Dye? From the exploding dye pack?”

  “Yep.”

  “So the bank robbers isolated the bundles with the dye packs to protect the rest of the cash,” Landry says.

  “They came prepared. They must have had the box inside the van, and they knew they had only a couple of minutes to transfer the dangerous cash into it.”

  “They really knew their stuff,” Landry says.

  “Only it doesn’t make sense,” Schroder says. “Why not throw the cash out the window? Why go to the effort to keep it, and even then, why not leave the metal box with the van? Why bring it here?”

  “Maybe they’re planning on using it again?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think that’s it,” Schroder answers. “There were hundreds of bricks of cash thrown into those bags, how do you think they knew which ones had the dye unit in it?”

  “Maybe they used some kind of metal detector?”

  “Yeah, and if they did, why hide it?”

  “I’m not following. .”

  “I think they had inside help.”

  “What?”

  “Think about it. When the four people went back to the vault, they all knew the dye packs had to be inserted. If somebody forgot, they’d look suspicious. But what if somebody loaded them into a specific place? Laid them on top, maybe marked them somehow? The bank crew get the bags back into the car and take out the marked notes and contain them immediately in the metal box. They can’t throw them out the window because then we’d wonder how they found the dye packs among all that other cash. They couldn’t leave the box with the van because we’d think the same thing.”

  “Jesus, you think somebody from the bank was in on it?”

  “It makes sense,” Schroder answers.

  “You think this is the person who killed Kingsly?”

  “They’d have taken the box.”

  “Maybe they didn’t see it,” Landry says.

  “Maybe. Other possibility is this person, whoever they are, might be after the others. Next step is to run down Kingsly’s known accomplices. See if we can find a link between somebody and the bank.”

  “So you think Hunter is capable of this?” Landry asks, nodding toward Shane Kingsly as he’s carried from the house in a body bag on a stretcher.

  “I don’t know.” Schroder thinks about Benson Barlow and his warning. “I hope not,” he says, “but let’s go find out.”

  chapter twenty-seven

  The knocking wakes me. I unplugged
the alarm clock last night since time doesn’t really matter much these days. I get to my feet and pull back the curtain and the Christmas Eve sun is high enough to suggest it’s sometime around noon. I knew the knocking would come today, I just didn’t know when. The clothes I wore last night are gone. As is the murder weapon-or accident weapon, to be accurate. I’ve cleaned my hand up, put a fresh bandage on it, it hurts but that’s the price you have to pay, I guess. First thing the monster made me do when I got home last night was drop a glass on the kitchen floor when I was trying to take painkillers.

  I pull on some jeans and a shirt. My shoulder hurts and I rub at it. My body is stiff and sore. The knocking comes again.

  I reach the door in bare feet. The house is closed up and the air is warm and stale. I open the front door and bright light floods in, the windscreen of the car parked out front reflecting a load of it into my eyes. I hold my hand up to shield them, squinting, exposing the bandage to the men standing outside.

  “We have some developments,” Detective Schroder says.

  “What kind of developments?” I ask, and I realize that I haven’t actually spoken out loud since leaving Sam last night at her grandparents.” My voice catches and my mouth is dry and the words are croaky, and I have to repeat the sentence.

  “Mind if we come in? This is Detective Landry,” he says, and Detective Landry looks too small for his clothes and a little too tired to be working. I lead them inside and we sit in the living room. At least I do, and Landry does, but Schroder stays standing near the Christmas tree, which pisses me off. I don’t offer them a drink. It’s not a social call.

  “You’ve found the men who murdered my wife?” I ask.

  “We recovered some of the money at a homicide this morning,” Landry says. “Drug dealer went and got himself murdered.”