Blood Men Read online

  “He’s not in custody.”

  “What do you mean? You said you picked him up with his daughter.”

  “And then we let him go. He lost his daughter, he was betrayed by his father, we couldn’t keep him after all that. None of this is his fault.”

  “You need to pick him up.”

  “Why?”

  “What kind of state was he in when you released him?”

  “He’s a defeated man. We dropped him off at his house. He’s not going anywhere. In fact I’m tempted to put a man on him just to make sure he doesn’t kill himself.”

  “He’s certainly a candidate for that, but he’s also capable of something else. Edward Hunter is a man who holds grudges, Detective, and he’s a man who can justify those grudges in different ways. He may not go after the men who killed his wife, but what about the others?”

  “Others?”

  “From the bank. The bank tellers, the security guard, the media, even the police-anybody who has let him down could be a target.”

  “He went to the security guard’s house.”

  “What? When?”

  “Tuesday night. He got drunk and went there but nothing happened.”

  “And you didn’t think this was important enough to let me know?”

  “I just told you.”

  Barlow takes his hands off his knees and leans forward. “Listen to me very carefully, Detective. You have to go and pick him up. Nothing may have happened when he went to the security guard’s house, but his daughter was alive then. This man is a time bomb. Trust me, Detective, if there’s one thing I know about, it’s time bombs, and this one is about to go off.”

  chapter sixty-two

  It’s evening when I get home. Kids are out playing in the street, riding new bikes and new skateboards, yelling and laughing, all is good in their world, all is right and happy and I envy each one of them.

  Nothing has changed at all in the house. It’s more of a tomb than ever. I walk through the rooms touching things, the walls, the furniture, running my fingers over anything in my path. I sit on Sam’s bed for a while and I sit on my bed for a while and I sit in the living room for a while. It’s like last week all over again only worse. The unbelievable thing that could never happen has happened-again. I can’t even cry. I can’t do anything. I sit in the living room with a can of beer but I don’t open it. I stare at the TV but don’t turn it on. I pick at the stitching on a cushion until it comes apart. The kids outside grow quiet. The day gets darker and they all head inside, some of them bored already with their new gifts. I get up to turn on the light and at the same time somebody knocks on my door. I head over to it, part of me not wanting to answer it, but a bigger part hoping it’s the last bank robber, that he’s come armed and with the ability to help me join my wife and daughter.

  I don’t recognize him. He’s been severely beaten and can hardly stand, but he’s managing to do so by leaning against the wall. My dad is behind him holding the shotgun. He’s still wearing the security guard’s clothes from the hospital, only now there are large bloodstains on them, mostly dry.

  “I got you a Christmas present,” Dad says, and he pushes the man forward.

  I look at my Christmas present, at the blood on it, the torn and bruised wrapping, and I’m sick at the sight of it. I feel no different looking at Dad.

  “Please, Dad, go away. It doesn’t matter anymore. This is all over. I’ve lost everything and they’re going to put me in jail for setting you free and the truth is, the truth is. . I just want this to be over. I want everything to be over.”

  “This is the man who shot Jodie. This is the man who started it all.”

  I close my eyes for a few seconds and exhale heavily, tilting my head back, focusing on the loss of Jodie and Sam. I remember the way Jodie fell forward, her face before the gun exploded, where she thought the worst thing that was going to happen to her was skinned palms and knees. I can still feel the weight of Sam in my arms, lifting her from the floor of the slaughterhouse and carrying her outside.

  Then I focus on the man Dad brought me. An average-looking man I’d never have paid attention to in the past, maybe somebody who works at a gas station or repairs shoes, anything other than the man he truly is. His face has swollen up, his left eye closed, his right eye bloodshot. The edges of the duct tape covering his mouth are stained with blood. Dad pushes him again and he falls onto his knees in my hallway. His hands are tied behind him so tight they’ve turned purple. Dad steps inside and closes the door.

  “I don’t care,” I say.

  “Yes you do.”

  Yes. You do.

  “I know,” I say.

  “I got one of the others,” Dad says. “I made him suffer. I made this guy suffer too. I was going to kill him when, out of nowhere, I realized how selfish that would have been. I’m sorry about what happened to Sam, son, I really am-and Jodie.”

  “And this will make it better? Killing him will bring her back?”

  “It’s not about bringing people back, son.”

  “You think it’s about feeding the monster?”

  “That’s what it’s always about.”

  “For you, maybe. But not for me.”

  “This is the man who shot Jodie! Damn it, son, don’t you get that? This is the man who killed your wife. This is the path he took that got your daughter killed. My granddaughter.” He takes a step back so he’s out of range from the man, reaches into his belt, and drags out a knife about half the length of his forearm and hands it over to me. “Now do something about it!”

  The man on my floor doesn’t even move. There’s a shotgun pointing at him and two sets of eyes and all he has the strength to do is look down.

  Do it! the monster says.

  “No.”

  “It’ll help,” Dad says.

  Listen to him.

  “Listen to the monster,” Dad says, struggling to keep the gun pointed ahead while holding the knife. He starts to lower it. “It’s telling you to do what I say, isn’t it.”

  “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. It’s Christmas Day. I’m going to spend it with Sam and Jodie.”

  “Son. .”

  “This is the way it’s supposed to be. You, him, the monster, none of you are supposed to be here.”

  I step past them and out the door. There aren’t any kids in the street now. Nobody to watch. Christmas lights are flashing from behind windows and from on top of roofs, cars are hidden away in garages and parked up driveways and people are tucking themselves away for the night, tired from too much food, too much sun, too much running around visiting family members and chasing after children. Dad turns toward me. I wonder what Nat and Diana are doing tonight, whether their day has been broken up by small pieces of routine where, for one or two seconds out of every thousand, they forget what happened to Jodie and Sam, only to have it crash back down on them.

  “It’s in the blood,” Dad says. “Don’t you feel it? We’re the same, son. We’re blood men!”

  “I keep telling you, Dad, we really are nothing alike. More than you’ll ever know.”

  “You’re wrong,” he says. “Listen to your voice, Edward,” he says, calling me by that name for the first time. “Take the knife. Let the voice guide you,” he says, and I take the knife from him. Killing the man inside, that’s not the way to go about bringing my family back.

  There’s another way.

  chapter sixty-three

  He’s not so sure that taking Edward Hunter into custody is the right way to go, and he’s equally unsure whether leaving him alone is the way to go. Barlow warned him a few days ago and even though Schroder didn’t dismiss the man, he certainly could have paid more attention. He can’t ignore the fact that everything that has happened since that meeting, all the deaths, part of the responsibility for that sits with him. Not this time though-he’ll pick Hunter up and, no matter how bad he feels for him, he won’t let emotion get in the way. It’s Christmas Day and he’s about to pick up a
man who’s lost his wife and daughter because a psychiatrist with a comb-over and an ex-wife and a nice pool told him so.

  “Jesus,” he mutters. There has to be another way. Barlow agreed that if Schroder could get Hunter into custody, he would come and speak to him tonight and try to get a read on his mental condition. As for where Jack Hunter might go, Barlow had no idea.

  “Justify it as not really an arrest,” Barlow had said to him on the way out the door, “but forced therapy. Give me two hours with him and I’ll give you some options. The alternative is to sympathize with him for everything that’s happened and do nothing, and if he kills himself or somebody else tonight then those ghosts are with you.”

  Schroder is passing over the alternative and heading straight to Hunter’s house. Christmas Day isn’t exactly turning out the way he planned. Thankfully his wife has been good about it. She’s the kind of woman who puts things into perspective-and missing Christmas Day with her husband didn’t amount to much when compared to what Edward Hunter was missing.

  There’s not as much traffic on the road as there was last night, but it’s still enough to hold him up as he drives through town. People in their teens and twenties are searching for somewhere to be, the bars and nightclubs catering to them. The streets are lit up with neon and fluorescents, and he can’t imagine anything worse than being nineteen years old again.

  He reaches Edward’s house. There’s nothing peculiar about the way it looks, no cars parked up the driveway or out front, no broken windows, no open doors, but something about it gives him a bad feeling. Thirty seconds later that bad feeling is confirmed when he steps out of his car and sees the blood on the driveway. It leads toward the door. Two trails of it, one heading one way, the other coming back. He calls for backup. He hasn’t had great experiences of late entering people’s houses, but he goes ahead and enters this one.

  chapter sixty-four

  “I first made the newspapers when I was nine years old. I made them in every city across the country, most of them on the first page. I even made them internationally. In them I was black and white, blurred a little, my face turned in to my father’s chest, people surrounding us. From then on I was shown on TV, in magazines, in more and more papers, always the same photo. I never wanted any of it, I tried to avoid it, but the option wasn’t mine.”

  I tell her this but she doesn’t seem interested. I tell her about my mum and my sister but the words go through her. Her eyes are closed and there’s blood all over her. Twenty minutes ago her life was much different, twenty minutes ago she was settling in for the night, a pile of DVDs on the coffee table and a Christmas tree full of blazing lights. I take the car toward town, traffic is thin, everywhere is shut. I’m wearing the clothes from the bank again, the ones with Jodie’s blood on them. I picked them up on the way. This is why I kept them, I realize now. For this moment.

  “I was ten years old when the trial began. It was a circus. My mum was still alive, but my sister and me were struggling. Kids would tease us at school. At home, Mum was always yelling at us when she was sober, and crying when she was drunk, and whatever of those two states she was in, you always wished it was the other. Soon the pills and the booze took their toll, but not as quick as she wanted, and when they couldn’t finish the job she used a razor blade. I don’t know how long it took for her to bleed out. She might still even have been alive when we found her. I held my sister’s hand and we watched her pale body, the yelling and the crying gone now.”

  The woman is conscious enough to cry, the tears mingling with the blood. There’s a lot of blood but not a lot of damage. It’s all from a head wound. The thing about head wounds is they bleed. A lot. Blood has soaked into the seat, and the woman has wet herself, making it seem like there is much more blood in the footwell than there really is. I tell her about Belinda, about how my sister became a drug addict and died when she was nineteen.

  “I was the last of my family,” I say. “Dad’s monster took them all away.”

  I keep the car at a constant speed, obeying the law; Edward Hunter was a law-abiding citizen who never did anything wrong in the past and who is now about to correct his future. We reach the center of town. Last time I was here I was running from the police.

  “There are people who think that I’m destined to be a man of blood too,” I say, “that the same blood runs through both of us. They’re wrong,” I say.

  He wasn’t even my father.

  And somehow here I am, your very own monster.

  I speed up the car that used to belong to Oliver Church, a nice trajectory ahead now, and I hit the wall of glass and it showers everywhere, it rakes against the car, the world sounds full of screams and the car bounces up off the framework and bounces back down and I slam on the brakes but not before I’ve wedged two desks hard up against the counter. The alarm is instant. The two front tires burst. The front of the car crumples up and the engine stalls. No air bag goes off, but the seat belts stop us from flying out. I look over at my passenger and there are more tears and more blood and I’m pretty sure both of us know that things for her are about to get worse.

  chapter sixty-five

  “He’s gone,” Schroder says.

  “Maybe. .”

  “And he’s killed,” Schroder adds.

  “Killed who?” Barlow asks.

  Schroder steps back outside. “Do you have an idea where he might go?”

  There’s silence on the other end of the phone for a few seconds. “The cemetery. It makes perfect sense. He’ll want to be with his wife. Who did he kill, Detective?”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  Schroder calls the station. He organizes a patrol car to go to Gerald Painter’s house, to the homes of the bank tellers, to the cemetery, even to Dean Wellington’s house. He calls Landry and fills him in on the situation.

  “You think Jack Hunter knew all along which bank teller was involved?”

  “Maybe,” Schroder says. “We need to find out.”

  The interview Schroder had with the bank teller yesterday was finished off by another detective. Because of all the events last night, nobody had the chance to get around to comparing all the details against each other. Another series of follow-up interviews have taken place over the last six hours, each bank teller difficult to get hold of on Christmas Day, each bank teller reluctant to help out, wanting to spend time with their families instead.

  The problem is none of them can remember who loaded the dye packs.

  Schroder turns on the sirens and speeds back into town, the houses and cars passing by in a blur. Other police cars come toward him on their way to Hunter’s house. When he reaches the station he runs inside to the interrogation room where, ten minutes earlier, Kelvin Johnson was escorted into.

  “You’ve got one chance here to help yourself,” Schroder says, and Johnson, the only crew member of the gang who robbed the bank in custody-and now the only one still alive-doesn’t even look up from the interrogation table.

  “You know everybody else is dead, right? We found Zach Everest a few hours ago, and I just came from looking at Doyle’s butchered corpse,” he says, Lance Doyle being the last name on the list. “There was a lot of rage there, Kelvin, a lot of rage.”

  Kelvin says nothing.

  “And we know somebody inside the bank was involved.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “Actually I do. I know you’re going to jail. I know that you know Jack Hunter has been running around out there killing off your buddies. You know that he’ll be in jail soon too, right alongside you,” Schroder says, which isn’t quite true. “You know Jack Hunter has connections in there-he’s been there twenty years so he knows how the place works. You know his daughter-in-law and granddaughter are dead because of something you did, and you know that makes you a target. I know you’re going to end up in a jail cell real close to him, and I know your days in there are limited. So both you and I know that the only way you’re ever going to live long enough to
see the outside world again is if you talk. You tell me who you had on the inside, and you spend your years in jail somewhere you never have to see Jack or Edward Hunter.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Johnson says.

  “No. What that is is a fact. A one hundred percent fact. So what I’m going to do right now is I’m going to give you thirty seconds to think about it. You’re probably thinking that you’re a tough guy and can handle yourself in jail since you’ve done it before. But what you should be thinking about is the desire of two men in this world who right now want nothing more than to see you dead-men who may not be able to do the job themselves, but at least one of them can afford to pay to have it done. Thirty seconds,” Schroder says. “And counting.”

  “Marcy Croft,” Johnson says, with twenty-eight seconds still remaining. “Bracken paid her off. She was an easy mark. She needed the cash and she was new there and the plan all along was to shoot her anyway. Bracken wanted her taken out onto the street but instead we took that other woman, the wife.”

  “Marcy Croft,” Schroder says, and he gets a mental picture of the bank teller. She’s the one who had the shotgun leveled at her. The one Jodie Hunter died for.

  “Did she know people were going to die?”

  “She thought it was a simple thing. We’d go in and get the money and get back out. We told her nobody had to get hurt, and for what it’s worth that’s what I thought too.”

  “So why didn’t anybody try to kill her after the robbery?”

  “Couldn’t risk it. If we’d touched her after the robbery, you’d have looked into why. You’d have made the connection.”