Blood Men

by Paul Cleave

  “You weren’t worried she’d talk to the police?”

  “No. Bracken rang her cell phone about ten minutes after the robbery. Told her that if she spoke to the cops he’d kill her and everybody she loves.”

  “Did Bracken shoot Jodie Hunter?”

  “No. Bracken didn’t even say a word in the bank.”

  “Did you shoot her?”

  “No. It was Doyle.”

  “Okay. That’s good, Kelvin. Real good. You can explain that to Hunter when you see him.”

  “What? You said. .”

  “I lied.”

  “You son of a bitch,” he says, but Schroder hardly hears him as he closes the interrogation door behind him. He checks the messages on his phone. The cemetery was canvassed and no sign of Hunter. No sign of him at the security guard’s house. No sign of him at any of the bank tellers’ homes. No sign of him at Marcy Croft’s house.

  He gets in his car and chooses Croft’s house. He calls the detectives who spoke to her earlier today and they say she seemed nervous, but put it down to the events of the last week. There’s a patrol car parked outside her house.

  “Nobody home,” the officers say. “Our orders are to wait till she shows up.”

  Schroder knocks on the door anyway. When he finds her he knows she isn’t likely to put up a fight or any fuss. If anything she’ll break down in tears and beg for a forgiveness that isn’t his to offer. He tries the door. It’s unlocked. He opens it.

  Marcy Croft lives in a small two-bedroom flat with a flat-screen TV and a Christmas tree filling the living room with blood on the carpet and tipped-over furniture.

  “He’s got her,” he says into the phone. “The bank teller.”

  “Explain it to me,” Barlow says, and Schroder does.

  “Does Hunter know the bank teller was in on the robbery?” Barlow asks.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s possible. Jack Hunter may have known. He certainly knew other names.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Barlow says. “If Edward knew she was in on the robbery, he would have killed her already. You said he took her from her home?”

  “There’s sign of a struggle and blood on the carpet. Not much,” he says.

  “Okay. Let’s assume he didn’t kill her. Let’s assume he took her. What for? If he thought this woman was somehow partly responsible for the death of his wife and daughter, he would have killed her already. No reason for him to take her.”

  “Well, he has her. No doubt there.”

  “Yes, but why? Let me think. . are you sure Jack Hunter knew about this woman?”

  “I never said I was sure. Could be either way.”

  “Interesting,” he says, then doesn’t follow it up. Schroder can almost hear his thinking process. “This woman, he may have taken her for a different reason.”

  “What other reason is there?”

  “It all started with her. This is the woman Edward called out to save. Don’t you see? When he saved her, he condemned his wife to death. That in turn condemned his daughter to death. He blames her, Detective, and if he’s in as fragile a state as I believe him to be, then he sees her as the catalyst for everything he’s lost. Maybe. . yes, yes, maybe he thinks he can right the wrongs that have happened since then.”

  “Right the wrongs? You mean he thinks that by killing her he can turn back the clock and save his family?”

  “It’s possible. And if this is the case, then you’ll find he’s taken her to-”

  “The bank,” Schroder finishes, already running toward his car now.

  “Exactly.”

  “Jesus,” Schroder whispers, and he turns on the sirens and races back into town.

  chapter sixty-six

  I get out and move around the car. I open the door and drag the woman out. She’s confused. She’s scared. This is nothing new for her-she’s been confused and scared before, in fact she’s been confused and scared in this very place.

  She stumbles and falls down and cuts her knees on the glass. She tries talking to me but I can’t hear her over the alarm. I can hear a few of the words and can fill in the rest of them myself. She’s telling me over and over that she’s sorry, but it doesn’t matter, not now. Her being sorry isn’t going to fix things. I pick her up and drag her to where she almost died last time. The bank alarm keeps going off, and I wonder if things would have worked out different last week if the alarm had gone off like this when the men came into the bank. I get her standing in the same place but when I let her go she collapses back into a heap. Everything is the same as the last time I saw it, only the people are missing. Same posters advertising low interest rates, pictures of happy people paying off twenty-five-year mortgages or borrowing money to buy a boat. The hole in the ceiling has been repaired, the broken office window replaced, the bullet holes in the wall plastered over and repainted, and all the blood cleaned up. No security guard, no front windows now, nobody with a shotgun. Nobody else to call out wait, to stop this woman getting killed, putting his own family in the firing line, nobody with cell phones to capture footage for the news.

  “Try to stand up,” I say, but she doesn’t. I guess it’s okay. I can’t reenact everything. It’s not like I have a shotgun. Just a knife. It’ll all work out the same way. This woman for Jodie. For Sam. The woman is crying, sobbing hard now.

  “It’s the only way,” I say.

  Do it. Feel it. Feed the urge.

  I lean down over her. I hold the knife tightly.

  Come on, get it done.

  There are footsteps on the broken glass, loud enough to be heard over the alarm. Detective Schroder comes to within a few meters of us, his palms raised to me. He studies the woman before focusing on the knife in my hand.

  “Put the knife down, Edward.” He has to yell to be heard.

  I move behind her and hold it against her throat. She’s shaking and she’s warm and it’ll be over soon, it’ll be the way it was meant to be.

  “I can’t,” I yell back.

  “Please, please, help me,” the woman says, but her voice is low and I don’t think Schroder can hear her over the alarm.

  “Edward, put down the knife.”

  “Why are you even here? You weren’t here last time.”

  “I’m here because I don’t want anybody else to die.”

  “How come you got here so fast? Last week nobody showed up for five minutes, this week you’re here within seconds. It’s not fair.”

  “I know what you’re trying to do,” Schroder says. “And it won’t work. You can’t fix the past, Edward. I know you called out to save this woman and she lived and Jodie died and then Sam died, but you can’t bring them back.”

  “All I have to do is make sure it never happened,” I say. “All I have to do is never call out.”

  “There aren’t any takebacks in this world, Edward. No resets.”

  “Doing this will make everything the way it was supposed to be.”

  “I wish it were that easy, Eddie, I really do. Life would be so much easier. But it isn’t. It is what it is, and killing her won’t bring Jodie or Sam back.”

  “I know it won’t. It will stop them from ever being hurt.”

  “Listen to yourself.”

  Listen to me. Kill her. It’s in your nature. It’s who you are.

  “Is this what you want?” he carries on. “To become your dad?”

  Daddy’s a ghost.

  “I’m nothing like him.”

  “You keep telling me you hate what he is, that you hate the rest of us for thinking that you’ll become him.”

  “I’m nothing like him,” I repeat.

  “Take a look at yourself.”

  “This isn’t about any of that. It’s not about what my dad was.”

  “You’re right, Edward, you’re absolutely right. This here-this is about you. It’s about what you’re doing, about what you’ve already done. You think you’re nothing like your father, but look at what you’ve done tonight. The man who killed Jo
die, you got him, Edward. You really, really got him.”

  “I’m glad I killed him,” I say, and it’s true. I’m a trader in death.

  “And your father? Are you glad you killed him too?”

  “He betrayed me,” I say of this man who was never my father either way, certainly not for the last twenty years, and certainly not now. “He used me. He used Jodie. All of my suffering was a tool to him. So yeah, he deserved it too.” I can still feel the knife going into his chest, can still see the look on his face. I can still feel Belinda’s arm around me as we sat on the bathroom floor staring at my mother in the bathtub all those years ago. Blood bubbled up out of my father’s mouth instead of words and I thought I could hear air hissing out of the wound in his chest as he stumbled back from the front door of my house into the hallway, he stumbled and fell, and the darkness my father spent his life with finally claimed him. The man he brought to me looked up, and there was hope in his eyes, keen hope that sparkled as bright as a diamond and then just as quickly faded to coal when I put the same knife that had been inside my father into him as well. I put that knife in over and over and when I wanted to stop I couldn’t, not right away.

  “It’s over, Edward. You need to let her go and come with us.”

  “I can fix this,” I say, and Schroder goes blurry and I realize I’m crying. “I can fix this.”

  “No. You can’t.”

  Yes you can, Eddie. Drag that knife back quick and deep and things will be better, much better.

  “Don’t be your father,” he says. “Put down the knife. Let her go. She didn’t do anything to hurt you. You saved her life, you did what nobody else had the courage to do, and the rest of it, none of it is your fault. You didn’t kill Jodie, you didn’t kill Kingsly, you didn’t get Sam killed. You’re a good man trying to do the best he can in a world that’s taken everything away from him. Don’t take everything away from her,” he says, nodding toward the bank teller. “Is this what Jodie would want of you?” he asks.

  My body tightens and I squeeze my eyes shut, only for a second, only long enough to picture my wife falling forward out on the street. In that same second I picture the rest of our lives together, before and after, the life we lived and the life we were supposed to live. I picture Sam.

  “I really don’t know,” I say.

  “I don’t think she would,” Schroder says. “I very much doubt she wants you to kill in her name, especially somebody who never hurt you. I think she wants what she always wanted from you-to be nothing like your father.”

  I lower the knife and open my hand.

  What are you doing?

  I’m not sure what I’m doing. The blade hits the floor, chips the linoleum, and falls on its side. I step back from the woman. She had no strength earlier, but she finds it now to crawl away from me as fast as she can. Two officers come out of nowhere and scoop her up and help her outside. Another two officers move in right behind Schroder, their guns raised and pointing at me. There are patrol cars outside that I didn’t even notice pull up.

  There’s another way to be with Sam and Jodie. Pick the knife back up.

  “What?”

  “Huh?” Schroder asks.

  Pick it up and attack them. Make them open fire. You’ll be with Sam and Jodie again. It will all be better. If you’re going to be a pussy for your entire life and ignore everything I want, then put us both out of our misery. Grab that knife.

  I look down at the knife. Schroder watches me look down at it and comes forward.

  “Ain’t going to happen,” he says, and he kicks it away. “It’s the easy way out,” he says. “You think it’s what Jodie and Sam would want you to do?”

  I don’t have an answer. He spins me around and handcuffs me and a minute later I’m in the back of a patrol car heading toward my future. Hell, maybe it was even my destiny. Edward the Hunter. I think of the men who wolf-whistled at me at the prison yesterday, I think of seeing the Christchurch Carver, of meeting Theodore Tate. What’s left of the accountant in me tries to calculate what kind of jail time I’d have to do, but fails. The city should be rewarding my monster for what it did, not locking it away. I watch the bank grow smaller behind me, knowing I’m nothing like my dad, knowing I have a monster of my own, a monster that is growing inside me, making me wonder what it’s going to ask of me when I’m back on the outside again.

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