Blood Men Read online

  “You know he’s right,” I say, looking away from Nat to Schroder.

  “Okay, okay, fine. Where’s the man who did this?”

  I lead him into the living room. A pool of blood has formed around the guy’s head. He’s ended up lying on top of the bag of pencils and crayons.

  Nat and Diana stand in the doorway. “That’s one of them,” Nat says.

  “And the other?” Schroder asks.

  “The other one took Sam,” Nat says. “Not much more I can tell you. I mean, he looked kind of like this one. Shaved head, tattoos-we can try to describe him. I’m pretty sure, if things had gone differently, he was going to kill us. I don’t know why he hadn’t already.”

  “We’ll get some mug shots for you to go through,” Schroder says. He steps closer to the body and I roll it so he can see it better. For a moment I wonder how many dead bodies this man has seen. Plenty, I guess. Certainly many more than my father ever saw.

  “Oh my God,” Diana says, when she sees the stub of the pencil. “Eddie. . I didn’t think you could, that you were. . capable. .,” her voice tails off.

  “These bastards took my daughter!” I say, glaring at her. “You’d rather I let him shoot me? You’d rather have let him drown Schroder, then come down and shoot you and Nat? Let Sam die too?”

  Nobody answers. Nat nods once, understanding, maybe for the first time seeing I’m doing what I can to get us through this alive. All of us.

  “You recognize him?” I ask Schroder.

  “No, I. . wait.” He crouches down over the body, then reaches for my hand when he wobbles. He coughs again, trace amounts of bathwater spattering on the dead guy. “He doesn’t look familiar,” he says when he’s composed himself.

  “He has to.”

  “He doesn’t. I’ll call it in. The fingerprints, we’ll have a hit on them by now.”

  “Then what? You compile a list of names and spend a week making a case? We need to act tonight.”

  “I know, I know,” he says. “Look, let me think, just give me a minute.”

  “We don’t have time.”

  “Who phoned you?” he asks, “when we were outside?”

  “They did.”

  “And they told you to take my phone off me.”

  “They said they’d hurt Sam if I didn’t.”

  He looks down at the dead man.

  “Call them back. Tell them you’ll give it to them in exchange for Sam.”

  “What?”

  “He was asking you for money you don’t have. The rest of the crew are waiting for him to show up with it. But he’s not going to. What value does your daughter have then?”

  “And tell them what?”

  “Tell them you have it.”

  It doesn’t seem the best of ideas, but it’s the only one. I go through the cell phone menu and find the recent calls. My fingers are shaking as I select the number then press CALL. It rings a couple of times, and then someone picks up.

  chapter forty

  “I have the money,” I say, my grip tight on the phone.

  “Where’s my man?”

  “He had an accident.”

  “So you think now you can buy your daughter back by dealing directly with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s too late,” he says. “Your daughter is about to have an accident too.”

  He hangs up. Nat is standing with his arm around Diana. They’re both looking lost, like they don’t recognize me, don’t recognize the house. Schroder is changing his shirt. “What happened?” he asks.

  I don’t answer him. I stare at the phone as the rage inside me builds. I don’t even know what I just heard.

  “Eddie? What the hell did he say?” Nat asks.

  “He. . he said it was, was too late,” I say.

  Diana gasps and Nat tightens his grip on her. Without even being aware I’m about to do it, I kick the dead guy on the floor, over and over.

  “Edward, calm down, just calm down a moment,” Schroder says, putting his arms out in a consoling gesture, one arm threaded through a sleeve, the other one bare. “These men are professionals. They know what they’re doing. They know if they kill her there’s no money in it for them. Give them a minute. They’ll call back.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “Give it a minute,” he says.

  “A minute, maybe two,” Nat says. “They’ll call back. They always call back,” he says, but Nat has no point of reference other than what he’s seen on TV; he’s trying to convince himself as much as the rest of us.

  I kick the dead guy once more. His head rolls left and right, the pencil wedged in so tight it doesn’t even wobble.

  “I’m going to be sick,” Diana says and rushes off to the bathroom. Nat stays in the living room for about five seconds before following her.

  A minute goes by. Then another.

  “You were wrong,” I say.

  “Give it time.”

  “I’m going to kill these people,” I say, and that’s true too. Schroder doesn’t respond. He’s probably thinking it’s time to try and get some handcuffs on me. But he’s also thinking that these guys tried to kill him, and he knows he owes me one.

  “Look, Edward, you have to stop kidding yourself here. This isn’t something you can deal with.”

  “I’m doing okay so far.”

  “Yeah? Tell that to your in-laws. Tell that to the dead officer outside. After everything you’ve said about being nothing like your father, you’ve got blood on your hands now.”

  We’re blood men-that’s what Dad said.

  “I didn’t do a damn thing,” I say, but he’s right. I got my wife killed by speaking out. The police officer outside is dead because of me. All this blood on my hands, some of it innocent, and I know I’m still not done.

  The cell phone rings. My in-laws appear as if they’d been waiting around the corner. I answer it.

  “I killed a cop for you,” I say, before the caller has a chance to say a word. “I’ve killed two of your men already. This can all end. I’ll bring you the money and you give me back my daughter.”

  There’s a pause on the line. “She’s still alive. For now,” the man says. “An even trade. One hour. Come alone. If we see anybody else we’ll kill her.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ll call you at the time. Don’t want you having a chance to set something up.”

  He hangs up and I explain it to Schroder, who is about as happy as Nat and Diana-who look like the world has fallen apart around them.

  “You can’t do this alone, Edward. We need backup,” Schroder says.

  “They’ll kill her if you make that call. I’m playing this safe, and that means paying for her. You owe me.”

  “He’s right,” Nat says to Schroder. “Give them the money and we get Sam back. It’s like Eddie said, it’s that simple.”

  “Except it’s not that simple,” I say, “because there is no money.”

  “What?”

  “This money they’re asking about, I don’t have it. If I was there, if I had the money, I’d be using it to get my daughter back. Can the police department raise the cash?” I ask Schroder.

  “The department wouldn’t go for it,” he says.

  “Even if it meant saving Sam’s life?”

  “It doesn’t work that way. If it did, people would be getting kidnapped all the time. We’d be throwing cash at every criminal in the city.”

  “What about the damn bank?” Nat asks. “This is all happening because of what happened there. Surely they’d give us the money. They have to! They owe us-they bloody well owe us!”

  “I’ll make a couple of calls and see what I can do.”

  “If Eddie doesn’t have the money, then who does?” Nat asks.

  “Maybe there wasn’t any money,” Schroder says, and I think of the bricks of cash lying on Kingsly’s bed.

  “There has to be,” I say. “It’s too much effort for them to go to if there wasn’t.”

>   “So who took it?” Schroder asks.

  “What about the probation officer? You said he found the body, right?” I say.

  “Yeah, he found the body, but you’re making a dangerous assumption here. He’s not a suspect in the killing. He has no motive to kill his client.”

  “That’s my point. He wasn’t a suspect, but he could have taken the money.”

  “No, the killer would have taken the money.”

  “Maybe Kingsly was killed for an entirely different reason. Maybe the killer didn’t see the money.”

  “Something you want to share, Edward?”

  “We can spend the next hour here making guesses,” I say, “but at the moment the probation officer is the only thing we have.” I reach down and pick up the dead man’s shotgun. “Let’s take a drive.”

  chapter forty-one

  Schroder’s chest is burning and it’s tight and he swears there’s still water in there. Still, all things considered, he’s much better off now than he was twenty minutes ago. When he gets more time he’ll think about those moments between when he stopped breathing and when he started up again. He’s never been a religious person, but that hasn’t stopped him from hoping there’s something when all of this is over, maybe not a heaven in the traditional sense, but something close to it. If there is, he didn’t get to see it, or even glimpse it. For him there was nothing. No memory-not even a memory of darkness. Or a memory of nothing. That’s all there was. Drowning, and then not drowning anymore. Whoever said drowning was a peaceful death had no idea what they were talking about.

  He follows Edward to the car. He can’t stop coughing. He walks slightly off balance like a man with an inner-ear infection-or like a man who has been brought back from the dead.

  Edward’s car is still parked outside, and they take it since it doesn’t resemble an unmarked police cruiser. But first Edward grabs the paper bag out of Schroder’s car. Inside it are two sets of car keys and a wallet and another cell phone. They go past the patrol car with the dead officer inside. Partly it’s his fault what happened; Edward was right about that-if he’d pressed those in charge to get more people watching Edward’s daughter, maybe this could have been avoided. His notebook is wet but he’s able to get the probation officer’s name out of it, along with an address.

  Edward drives because Schroder isn’t up to it. The only thing he really wants to do is curl up in the backseat and fall asleep. Nat gave him his cell phone, and he uses it to call Landry. He explains as much of the situation as he feels like explaining-not telling him where they’re heading-and listens as Landry updates him.

  “Theodore Tate has been trying to get hold of you,” Landry says. “Where’s your cell?”

  “Lost it. He leave a number?”

  “He said he’d keep calling back every twenty minutes. Warden gave him permission to use the phone. He can reach you on the number you’re calling from?”

  “Okay. Text me the number for the warden’s office and I’ll call.” He hangs up.

  “You going to call the bank manager?” Edward asks.

  “No.”

  “You said before that-”

  “I know what I said, and that was only to keep your in-laws happy. There’s no point in calling the bank. They won’t play ball. If I thought there was any chance at all that they’d help-no matter how small-I’d call them. Shit, this is a goddamn mess,” he says, more to himself than to Edward. “And I’m doing the wrong thing right now.”

  “You’re doing the right thing,” Edward says. “Anything else and my daughter is dead. We’re doing what it takes to get her back.”

  “Within reason,” he says.

  Edward doesn’t answer.

  “They matched the prints from the car,” Schroder says. “We got two names-and I’m pretty sure they’ll match the two dead men you’ve left behind.”

  “You know who they work with?”

  “They’ve worked with lots of people. We’re making progress. It’s only a matter of time until we have more names.”

  “A matter of time. How much time? Five minutes? Five hours? Five days?”

  The cell phone beeps. Landry’s text has come through with the number for the warden’s office. “Look, Edward, if I didn’t get your point I wouldn’t be here right now.”

  He dials the number and it rings a couple of times before it’s answered by the warden. The warden doesn’t seem thrilled by the fact he’s still at the prison when he should be at home, but he doesn’t give Schroder too much grief about it.

  “He’s here,” the warden says, and Schroder can hear the phone being put down on the desk and then picked back up.

  “Roger Harwick,” Tate says, getting right to the point.

  “Roger. . Hardwick?”

  “Harwick. No ‘d.’ ”

  “How do I know that name?”

  “Everybody knows that name. You couldn’t have missed it. He was all over the news this year. He was a small-time newspaper columnist convicted of molesting teenage boys.”

  “Oh yeah,” he says, remembering how much joy it gave the media, ripping one of their own apart.

  “He’s served three months of a ten-year stretch. He’s been nothing but a sperm bank for everybody around him since he got his teeth knocked out his first night in the joint. I think he got offered protection to kill Hunter.”

  “Any ideas who ordered the attempt?”

  “I can keep asking around.”

  “Yeah. I appreciate it,” he says, and hangs up.

  “That was the prison you just rang, right?” Edward asks. “That about my father?”

  “Yeah. We got a name.”

  “That Harwick guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you can spare resources to spend time at the jail, but you couldn’t spare them to look after my daughter? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “We’re going to find her,” Schroder says. “And no, we’ve got somebody on the inside working the angles.”

  “What, you mean your friend you were telling me about who got arrested for drinking and driving? The ex-cop?”

  “He’s reliable.”

  “Who is he?”

  “It doesn’t matter who he is,” Schroder says, “what’s important is what he learned.”

  “I heard you talking with the warden this afternoon. I heard you mention a name. Tate. I recognized it. And the detective you spoke to a few minutes ago, I heard him mention it. He’s the guy you’ve been telling me about, right? Your buddy? Theodore Tate? The guy who got drunk and hurt somebody? Got people killed? He was in the news a lot last year. This the guy?”

  “It doesn’t matter who it is,” Schroder says, dismissing the line of questioning.

  “So why’d Harwick do it?”

  “He was offered protection to do it. A murder like that this early on, Harwick would only get time served concurrently, maybe an extra year, but it increased his chances of living.”

  The probation officer’s name is Austin Bracken. When they reach his house Schroder tells Edward to park up the driveway, but instead Edward pulls up two houses past.

  “What the hell?”

  “Just being cautious,” Edward answers, grabbing the shotgun.

  “You won’t need that,” Schroder says, thinking that Edward looks more hopeful than cautious.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “We don’t know if he stole the money, and even if he did, this isn’t somebody looking for you. We question him, see what he knows, and if he has the money we take it. Then we do things both your way and my way-you get to deliver the money, but we call it in and get backup first-it’s safer for both you and your daughter.”

  “He isn’t going to give up the money if he has it. What the hell are you expecting? Knock on the door and he’ll hand it over to you?”

  “Something like that,” Schroder says fully aware that he doesn’t sound convincing. They’ll talk to Bracken, and if he gets a bad vibe he’ll call for backup. He�
�s not taking any more chances tonight.

  “He deals with scumbags every day of his life,” Edward says. “You think you can break a person like that just by talking to him on his doorstep?”

  “And you think pulling a shotgun on an innocent man will help? Let’s get a read on him first and take it from there.”

  When they walk up to the front door, Schroder is still out of it, like he’s walking through a world slightly out of sync. He knocks on the door and there’s movement and voices and Schroder knocks again to hurry them up. A few seconds later a man answers the door, his shirt open and the large belt buckle on his pants hanging loose. He’s around Schroder’s age, but bigger. He has that slab look about him, the not-quite-fat-and-not-quite-muscle look. He has a handlebar mustache that’s about a hundred years out of date.

  “What the hell?” he asks, as soon as he sees them.

  Schroder holds up his ID. The badge has dried out but the wallet is still wet. Bracken doesn’t look at it, just stares at Schroder, and then at Edward, and Schroder is pretty sure he knows who each of them is.

  “We have a couple of questions,” Schroder says.

  “At this time of night?”

  “You’re lucky we didn’t show up at two in the morning.”

  “Questions about what?”

  “Some routine stuff about Shane Kingsly.”

  “Like what?”

  “Background.”

  “And you had to come to my house at this time of the night?”

  “We’re chasing some leads.”

  “With him?” he asks, and nods at Edward.