Blood Men Read online

  “Can we come in?” Schroder asks.

  “I’m busy.”

  “It’s important.”

  “It’s Christmas Eve,” he says. “I don’t care if it’s important or not.”

  “Actually. .,” Schroder begins, but Edward interrupts him.

  “Shit,” Edward says. Both men look at him. “My phone,” he says, patting down his pockets. “It’s in the car. I know how to solve this.”

  “What?” Bracken says.

  “Edward. .,” Schroder says.

  “Just a second,” Edward says.

  “Edward, wait,” Schroder says.

  “It’s important,” Edward answers, and Schroder watches him walk away for a few seconds before turning back to Bracken. His head is muggy and his thoughts are muddled, and he knows he’s probably making a mistake right now but he can’t seem to focus exactly on what that is. Edward saved his life before; and that aside, Schroder knows if he’d been better at his job, then Edward’s daughter never would have been taken tonight. Whatever happens to her will be on his conscience. So yeah, maybe he does owe Hunter some slack. He knows he does-it’s why he’s here. It’s why he hasn’t turned on Edward and tried to handcuff him.

  Question is, how much slack is he prepared to give him?

  chapter forty-two

  Austin Bracken lives in a neighborhood the virus hasn’t hit yet. The houses are modern and well looked after and don’t have front yards made up from rusting mechanical parts. The dashboard clock on the car says we’re closing in on 10:30; it seems like the day has been about forty hours long. Most of the houses still have lights on inside them, people probably closing in on bedtime, watching the tail end of prime-time TV, waiting for the kids to have been asleep long enough so they can play Santa’s role and put the presents under the tree. It’s what I should be doing with Jodie. It’s such a magical moment and I don’t know if there’ll ever be any more.

  I could tell in two seconds Bracken had the money. I didn’t even need the monster to help me out on that one. But Schroder couldn’t even get his foot in the door. I grab the shotgun because we don’t have time to play nice. We’re meeting the people who have my daughter in about forty minutes and I have nothing to exchange for her. I carry the gun behind my back, nice and easy, the same way I’d hide a bouquet of flowers. I bring it into view and Bracken’s eyes widen and Schroder sees his reaction and turns to face me, but he doesn’t turn quick enough to avoid what happens. I crash the butt of the shotgun into Schroder’s head, not as hard as the security guard got hit, but hard enough to make it count. His head rocks to the side and his eyes roll back and he drops real fast.

  Bracken takes a few steps back as I take a few steps forward. Schroder stays slumped on the ground, doing what Schroder seems to be doing best lately.

  “What do you want?” Bracken asks.

  “The money.”

  “What?”

  “The money you stole. I’m here for it.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  We get into the hallway and I kick back and close the door. It’s a pretty nice house with a wide hall and modern furniture, and the outside looks nice, nice plants, nice paint job, garden gnomes in the garden and a policeman planted on the doorstep, not a Christmas decoration in sight. Bracken keeps moving down the hallway. I keep following.

  “You stole money from Kingsly,” I say. “Probably around four hundred thousand dollars,” I say. “Maybe more, maybe less.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “Yes. You did.”

  “What are you on about? If he had money, why’d you think I’d take it? And how’d you even know what he had unless. .” His expression changes, as if he’s figuring it out, but it changes too much, as if it’s an act. Something here isn’t quite right but I don’t know what.

  “You killed him,” he says, and something in the way he says it makes me think he already knew that. Not just thought it, or suspected it, but actually knew it, like he was there.

  “The money,” I say. “Take me to it.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “The people that money belongs to have my daughter. They’re going to kill her unless I get it back for them.”

  “Like I said, I don’t have any money.”

  Listen to him-he’s lying. If he was truly sorry he’d tell you where that money is. He’d act more sympathetic. He’d tell you that if he could help, he would.

  “I think it’s time you left,” Bracken says.

  “They’re going to kill her.”

  “And I’m sorry about that, I truly am.”

  He truly isn’t.

  “Somebody else must have taken it,” he carries on. “Somebody either before or after, I don’t know, all I know is I don’t have it.”

  He’s lying.

  “You’re lying.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  He’s lying.

  “Okay, then,” I say. “Any ideas who?”

  “What?”

  “You were his probation officer. Who else did he work with?”

  “I don’t know. I’d have to check.”

  “The police didn’t ask you this already?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess so.”

  “And?”

  “And what? I gave them a bunch of names they already knew and it was a waste of time.”

  “Okay. Okay. Who else is here?”

  “What?”

  “In this house. Who else is here?”

  “I don’t know. Just some woman.”

  “Show me.”

  He leads me to a bedroom where a woman with large breasts and very big hair is finishing off getting dressed.

  “I promise you this is the last goddamn time, you son of a bitch,” she says, straightening up her skirt which is torn up the side. When Bracken doesn’t answer, she looks up and sees first me and then the shotgun, and the anger washes out of her face, just like that, in about half a second, and gets replaced with a big amount of fear. Her eyes are puffy and mascara has run down her face, making her look like a Goth.

  “What the. .,” she says, but she runs out of words.

  “Shut up,” Bracken says to her, and then I make him do exactly that by banging him on the head with the gun as hard as I hit Schroder. He goes down about as hard and looks like he’ll be staying down for about as long.

  “Please, don’t hurt me,” the woman begs. “I didn’t even want to be here.”

  She’s wearing a really short skirt and high-heel shoes and must keep her yearly calorie intake at under a thousand. “You wanna earn some cash?” I ask.

  She doesn’t even think about it. “Does it involve hurting him?” she asks, and nods down at Bracken.

  “That a problem for you?”

  “You can save your cash, sugar,” she says, the fear gone now. “This I’ll do for free.”

  “Then we better get started,” I say.

  chapter forty-three

  Torture is all about balance, and more often than not, proves to be an extremely ineffective way of getting information. It comes down to pain thresholds: inflict too much pain and the victim will end up saying anything to make it stop. Problem with that is it makes the information unreliable. Don’t inflict enough pain and they’ll continue to resist. Inflict way too much and the body shuts down. I think it comes down more to fear than pain. I have under thirty minutes to create as much fear in Bracken as I can before it’s too late.

  I don’t know why I suddenly seem to know so much about torture. It’s as if a section of my mind has been unlocked, a hidden vault of knowledge opening its contents up to me. The monster has something to do with it. I think to myself, this entire ordeal could be more Disney-oriented if I gave the monster a name-Mickey. Mickey is telling me how to torture a man. Mickey is begging me to kill him. But Mickey isn’t in control here-not yet anyway.

  Bracken is starting to come to, and he’s noticing that his entire world has changed in the last f
ew minutes. He’s resuming transmission and finding himself naked and tied to a chair. He’s shaking and he’s cold and scared. On the dining table there are two tools: a steak tenderizer from his kitchen drawer that looks like a wooden mallet, and a very large chef’s knife. The knife has a stained handle and is worn, the blade is chipped near the end but still very sharp.

  I feel nothing.

  Good. You’re coming along nicely.

  Detective Inspector Schroder hasn’t resumed transmission yet, so maybe he took a harder knock-or it’s an accumulative thing for him, having been drowned an hour ago. When he wakes up he’ll find he’s been dragged inside and propped up against the living-room wall with a clear view of the show, his hands cuffed behind him and his feet bound in front of him. There’s a gag in his mouth because, truth is, I’m sick of hearing him talk.

  The woman, who may or may not be a prostitute but who probably is, is also in the living room. Bracken blinks a few times, bringing his new world into focus. He sees the steak tenderizer and the knife and his imagination is conjuring up his future.

  “Where’s the money?”

  His first impulse is anger. “Go to hell,” he says, and I jam a dish towel in his mouth and swing the tenderizer as hard as I can into his knee. Something in there gives, and he lurches forward with so much force the chair jumps off the ground and nearly tips over. His leg can’t kick forward because it’s bound to the chair. His face turns red and then almost purple as tears stream from his eyes. He bites down so hard the dish towel is the only thing stopping his teeth from snapping off against each other. I give him two minutes to thrash around uselessly on the chair until he gets himself back under control.

  The woman says nothing, just keeps on watching, all quiet now, maybe not so sure now about helping me out.

  I pull the gag out.

  “I’ve never figured out why they start with this kind of bullshit in the movies,” I say. “All this torture foreplay. I’ve always thought I could do better. Thing is, I’ve always been a simple man with simple pleasures. That’s all. I had the most beautiful woman in the world as my wife, we have an amazing daughter together. . and the things that made my dad who he was never touched me. But in those movies where guys like me torture guys like you, they never cross the line. They break bones and cut skin, and the guys they’re torturing always seem to stand up to it. I figure there are two ways to make a man talk. You either go through his eyes or you go through his dick.” I pick up the knife. “I’m gonna start with the latter, so you can still watch.”

  “Wait,” he says.

  “Too late,” I say.

  I move the knife to his groin. His red face suddenly goes pale. “My bedroom. In the closet,” he says, the knife above his dick. “Under the manhole in the floor in the wardrobe. The money is in there. Take it. It’s yours.”

  I put the gag back into his mouth before handing the knife and tenderizer to the woman, who looks at them as if they contain the Ebola virus. Then she takes them. She hefts them in her hands and gets a feel for the weight. “What am I supposed to do with these?”

  “If he moves, then do what makes you happy.”

  “No problem,” she says.

  I head into Bracken’s bedroom and open the wardrobe door. There aren’t many clothes hanging in there, and most of what is there are all dark pieces, a size too big for me. I push them to one side, the hangers grating across the iron bar. There are shoes on the floor and a couple of cardboard boxes. I kick them out, exposing the floor. I get down on my knees. The stitches pull at the wound in my leg; I feel a couple of them pull through. I drag back the piece of carpet. There’s a manhole cover with a hole drilled into it for me to hook my finger through. It leaves a gap one man could fit through, but not two.

  I reach in and find a strap. I pull the bag up just as a muffled but unmistakable scream comes from the living room. I race out there. The woman has taken a few steps away from Bracken. She turns toward me and there’s a line of blood, not very wide, arcing up her body from her midriff, across her chest and neck and over her face. Bracken’s eyes are wide open and he’s staring down at his body, which is exactly how it ought to be-except for about ten centimeters of steel coming out the bottom of his stomach. The other ten centimeters of the blade is nowhere to be seen, but it’s obvious where it is.

  “Shit,” I whisper.

  “He moved,” she says.

  “You didn’t have to-”

  “Didn’t have to what?” she asks. “You said if he moves, then-”

  “I know what I-”

  “So that’s what I did.”

  “Shit.”

  She reaches forward and grabs the handle.

  “Wait,” I say, dropping the bag, but it’s too late. She pulls the knife out. She gives it a distasteful glance before offering it to me. Blood is overlapping the edges of the wound. Lots of blood.

  She drops the knife on the carpet and moves against the wall. She has that look about her that people get when they think they had a really great idea but it hasn’t turned out how they pictured; the thing she thought would make her happy is making her sick.

  “He deserved it,” she says. “He was a piece of-”

  “I don’t care,” I say. I hunt around for something but I don’t know what, then settle for the dish towel in his mouth.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh Jesus,” he says. “Oh Jesus.”

  I wad the dish towel up and push it against his stomach and he flinches back. I apply as much pressure as I can without jamming the dish towel right through his spine.

  “Ah, ah fuck, ahhh!”

  The blood keeps pouring out. He’s scared and tired all at the same time, and a whole lot paler than when he answered his door earlier.

  “I’m. . I’m sorry I took it,” Bracken says.

  “I bet you are.”

  “The guy, the guy was. . was. Dead. I figured. . it wouldn’t. . Ah Jesus, hurt any. . anybody.”

  “It hurt me. It got my daughter kidnapped. It got people killed. Almost got Detective Schroder here killed too. And it got you stuck with a knife.”

  “Oh Jesus, please, please, you have to help me.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Call an ambulance.”

  “I want my money,” the woman says, looking down at the bag.

  “You said you were doing this for free.”

  “That was before all this. . blood.”

  “Please, please, call an ambulance,” Bracken says, quieter now.

  “Five thousand,” she says.

  “You know who I am?” I ask her.

  “What? Yeah, I guess. From the news.”

  “You know what my father did, then, right?”

  She nods.

  “People think that kind of thing is in the blood. You want to test if they’re right?”

  “Maybe I did say I’d do this for free.”

  “Maybe you did.”

  “Can I go now?”

  “Make it quick.”

  Before she can get out of the room, Schroder makes a low moan. He’s still casually leaning against the wall. He’s had a long day. His eyes half open, nothing fixed in his view yet, and then there I am, holding a dish towel on a dying man. He tries to say something but can’t.

  “He did it,” the woman says, pointing at me. “He did it,” she repeats, and then she is gone.

  The dish towel has soaked through with blood and I find another. It soaks through immediately too. I look at my watch. The hour is nearly up and I haven’t heard back about the meeting.

  “An ambulance,” Bracken says, and his eyes are only half open now.

  I take out the cell phone and start to call for help and then end the call. Instead I dial the number of the man who has my daughter. Bracken is suffering but it’s his own fault and my daughter comes first. It begins to ring.

  Only it sounds weird, like it’s ringing in both ears, a continuous ringing.

  It takes me another second to figure out why. I look at
Bracken and he’s got his eyes locked on all the blood. He’s wishing he’d turned his cell phone off. Instead it’s ringing from his pants pocket. I hang up and Bracken’s phone stops. I dial it again and it starts back up. I hang up. Bracken’s phone stops ringing, and I put the phone away, and any chance of calling an ambulance goes with it.

  chapter forty-four

  Bracken doesn’t say a thing. Everything that seemed odd the moment I got here doesn’t seem odd anymore. He watches as I take the cell phone out of his pants. There are a thousand things all fighting to be said, but in this moment not one of them can be heard. This man took my daughter and he has her somewhere. His eyes are open all the way again. Blood is still draining out of the wound.

  “Please, please,” he says, his words slurring slightly, “call am-ambulance.”

  “Where’s my daughter?”

  “Please. .”

  “Is she here?”

  “Help me and I’ll tell you where she is.”

  I slap him across his face. Hard. “That’s not how it works. You tell me where she is, then I help you.”

  He clenches his eyes shut, his mouth in an open grimace, his teeth tight against each other, revealing an overbite that I’ll take the steak tenderizer to if he doesn’t talk. His entire face has caved in somewhat, as if he’s lost ten kilos in the last two minutes. Blood and now a mixture of urine too is pooling on the floor beneath him. It smells bad.

  “Where is she?”

  He doesn’t answer, just keeps the grimace and the tight facial features of a man going through something very intense. It’s pain and fear and maybe something spiritual too.

  “Hey,” I say, and I slap his face again.

  He shakes his head and a moment later he doesn’t seem to know where he is.

  “Tell me where she is and I stop the bleeding. Schroder calls for an ambulance and you get fixed up. Quicker you talk, quicker I help you.”

  His eyes focus on me. “Take the, take. .”-he sucks in a deep breath-“take the handcuffs off the cop first. You free him then I talk.”

  “You think he’ll protect you?”

  “He won’t want to. . but he has to.” His face turns into a grimace again as he rides another wave of pain.