Текст книги "Blood Men "

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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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.

“Are you the son of a bitch who shot my wife?”

“No.”

“Who, then? Give me a name. Is this the person who has my daughter?”

He doesn’t answer. The pool of blood is still spreading, but not as quickly now.

“Answer me, damn it. How do I get her back?”

“Help me,” he says, his voice low. His eyes focus on something above me before rolling into the back of his head. I slap his face and they roll back down and stare right at me.

“My daughter,” I say.

“My daughter,” he repeats, almost whispering now.

“Where’s Sam?”

“Sam,” he says, then he closes his eyes. I slap him but they don’t open back up. I check him for a pulse but there’s nothing.

“Wake up!” I slap him harder. “Please,” I say, grabbing his shoulders, “tell me where she is.”

The dead man doesn’t answer. I look over at Schroder before sitting on the floor and resting my head in my hands with no idea at all what to do next. I think about what Dad said, about having to learn to control the monster otherwise it would make me do things I didn’t want to do. Did the monster do this?

No. Of course not.

You knew she wanted to hurt him. Why leave her alone with him and a large knife? You knew it’d play out this way.

No. I didn’t.

Yeah? How else you think it was going to go?

I lean forward and remove Schroder’s gag.

“Listen to me, Edward,” he says. “I know how it must have gone down. You snapped, and you certainly didn’t mean to kill him. You were trying to get information, and you were right about Bracken, he knew where your daughter was. Let me help you.”

“I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me that cut him.”

“Then who? Who was that woman?”

“She was nobody.”

“Come on, Edward, it’s time to stop all of this. Too many people are getting hurt.”

I put the gag back into his mouth. He doesn’t struggle—he’s resigned to the fact there’s nothing he can do except wait things out. I get up and pace the living room, covering a few hundred meters over the same piece of carpet while I try and work it all out.

Bracken has two cell phones, it turns out. He has a normal one, with what appear to be work and family contacts. Then he has the second one, the one that rang earlier. There are only two numbers in the memory, with no name attached to either of them. One is for the phone I’ve been using. I scroll down to the other number and press CALL. It rings three times and then it’s picked up.

“I’m still waiting,” a man says.

“I have the money.”

“Money?”

“Please, I can . . .”

The line goes dead. I call the number again but he’s switched off the phone.

I keep pacing. Thinking about it.

“I know how it happened,” I say to Schroder. “Bracken planned the whole thing, and when they split the money up they gave Kingsly his share. When Bracken found him this morning he took the money. Instead of breaking it evenly among his partners, he told them whoever killed Kingsly must have taken it. That way he could keep it all. There never was any plan to pay to get my daughter back. It was a charade. He stashed Sam somewhere with no intention of me paying to get her back, but as an act so the others would think I had the money. Bracken only guessed I’d killed Kingsly because the media kept speculating that I was capable of it. I don’t even know if Sam’s alive anymore. I have all this but nobody to trade it with,” I say, and I open up the bag I found under the floor. It’s full of identical bricks of cash that I found but didn’t take last night. I don’t even know the exact amount. It’s all blood money that I don’t want, but it may still be my only chance of finding Sam. Schroder doesn’t nod or shake his head or offer anything useful. He’s watching a man falling apart. “I bet Bracken was going to kill the guy who has Sam. It would tie up a loose end and give him more money. They were going to kill me too.”

I go through the house. There’s a bedroom that’s been converted into an office, and I switch on the computer. While waiting for it to boot up, I go through the rest of the house. I check under the floor in the wardrobe where the money was hidden but there’s nothing else down there. I check other wardrobes but find nothing. Every time I walk past Bracken’s body I resist the urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake him.

I sit down in front of Bracken’s computer and navigate around the desktop. It’s a clean desktop with only a few icons, and I click one open to find a folder full of porn, maybe a hundred or so video clips. I don’t watch any of them. I close the folder and go into his documents folder. Turns out Bracken is—or was—an aspiring novelist. There are a couple of manuscripts here that he’s working on. I don’t read any of them. There is a games folder, and a music folder, and then I go through the folders on the hard drive, looking for something, for anything related either to work or to robbing a bank. I go through his emails—and it turns out that Bracken doesn’t have many friends. Even his address book is barren except for a half dozen people, half of whom share the same last name as him. I scan through the emails; mostly they’re all bad jokes that have been circulated around the world millions of times already. There are no emails at all relating to work or to robbing a bank. There aren’t any emails to or from Shane Kingsly. I spend fifteen minutes going through his computer—which is a long time when there’s a corpse leaking blood all over the living-room floor—and in the end the only thing I’ve accomplished is to waste precious time.

Out in the living room, Schroder has disappeared. He’s rolled himself out or got to his feet. I check the front door and it’s open. I step outside but there’s no sign of him. He could have jumped out fifteen minutes ago or only two, but either way the result is the same for me—the police are on their way.

I grab Bracken’s pants and find his wallet, then head out to my car. I wonder what the statistics are now for Schroder—what percentage chance he has of bouncing along to a neighbor who will help him, or one that will try to cannibalize him.

I don’t have the time to care.

chapter forty-five

It’s no longer Christmas Eve—Christmas kicked in about two minutes ago and town is full of people celebrating. The homeless and the party animals mingle and mix and I can’t help but hate all of them as they move through this world, ignorant to what some of us are going through to save our families.

The center of Christchurch is mapped around a bull’s-eye of tourist markets and street performers and of course the Cathedral, a giant church over a hundred years old that’s popular with tourists and God and graffiti artists—although these days the popular consensus is that God moved out of Christchurch, meaning that God is everywhere except here. It’s all crammed into a location known as Cathedral Square. The Cathedral is packed with people celebrating Christmas Mass. The markets are gone, and the drunk, the homeless, and the glue sniffers have to share the Square with churchgoers as they sit on steps and huddle on park benches, living in perfect harmony.

The probation offices are only a few blocks away, in a part of town where the only clubs are strip joints, where the bouncers are bigger and the tattoos take up more real estate on their arms and necks than their counterparts at regular clubs. The building is six storeys, and probably houses other things too, maybe some law or accountancy firms. I got the address from a business card inside Bracken’s wallet. The only windows on the ground floor are the automatic doors, which at this time of night are automatically impossible to open, unless I drive right into them. The rest of the building is tile and brick and has graffiti scrawled across it, showing off the creative talents of the city’s youth.

There’s an alleyway heading up the side of the building, and I pull the car in and swing around the back. My headlights wash over a guy leaning against a Dumpster with a woman kneeling in front of him. They both look at me. The guy has vomit down the front of his shirt and the woman doesn’t look any better. They wave at my car as if trying to swat away a fly, before straightening their clothes and leaving.

At the back of the building, there are two doors about ten meters apart from each other. The accountant inside me works the numbers. The police are busy. It’s been a long day for them, and even now they’re at Bracken’s house and at my in-laws’ house and they’re dealing with dead bodies, and Schroder is trying to round up the rest of the men who robbed the bank and find my daughter while the rest of the force are at home, taking the night off. That means if an alarm goes off I probably have a minute or two longer than usual. A place like this, it’s more likely a patrol car will show up than a security firm. And in a city like this, maybe nobody will show up for an hour. Of course there’s only one statistic that matters—my daughter. I will do whatever it takes to get her back.

Bracken’s keys have a keycard hanging from them. One of the doors is the good old-fashioned lock and key, but the other door has a pad on the side of it. I swipe the card and there’s a click; I try the door and it opens. I step inside and a fluorescent light blinks on overhead, blinding at first. There’s a second door; this one with a numeric keypad. I lean back and kick near the handle. It takes five strong kicks because I have to use my left leg, and even then it jars through to my right, the door breaking at the same time as some of the stitches in my leg. An alarm beeps somewhere.

I’m in a corridor that has every fourth light going, which is enough to see by. It winds around to the front entrance where there’s a foyer and two elevators and a flight of stairs. There’s a directory by the lift: it turns out the probation offices are on the ground floor. I’ve left bloody footprints between the door I kicked down and the elevators. I press the elevator button and wait for the doors to open and step inside. I take off my shirt and wrap it over my foot while the elevator goes nowhere. Then I open the doors and step out. I press the button and send the elevator, empty, to the top floor.

I head to the probation office, no blood trail behind me, and use Bracken’s swipe card to gain entry. The alarm keeps beeping, but still hasn’t gone off. I enter a large waiting room with a series of offices scattered around the sides and back. None of the office doors have names on them. There’s a giant reception desk in the middle of the room. I have no idea which office belongs to Bracken. The layout of the floor reminds me of my own office, which makes me think of a simple solution: I go into each office and look for family photos and drawings done by children, with the idea of eliminating the offices that do have them since Bracken doesn’t; but the idea is a bust because there aren’t any pictures anywhere. I guess probation offices aren’t the kind of place where employees want to share their personal lives with the public. It’s the type of place where one day they have a photo of their nine-year-old daughter up on the wall, and the next day they’re taking that photo to Missing Persons. I try to think about what else could make Bracken’s office stand out from any other.

Sixty seconds have passed since I entered the offices. A moment later a high-pitched scream shrieks from every corner of the building. I grab some Blu-Tack from the reception desk and ball it into my ears.

I take out Bracken’s business card and the cell phone. There are three numbers on the card, an office line, his direct line, and his cell phone number. I dial the direct line but can’t hear anything over the alarm. I head from office to office and barely manage to hear a phone ringing in the fourth one I try. There is a narrow angle of sight from the desk, past the reception area to a window leading outside. I glance at the view every few seconds, waiting for when it changes from parking meters and bike stands to patrol cars.

I switch on the computer which offers more light, then I go through the drawers. There are too many files to go through so I pile them onto the desk. The computer loads up and by the time a desktop appears I’m too nervous to hang around. I consider tearing the computer apart and taking the hard drive, but the files are probably on a server somewhere. The alarm is still shrieking and the Blu-Tack in my ears doesn’t seem to be helping.

There’s a gym bag behind the desk. I unzip it and dump the clothes on the floor. I’m packing everything I pulled out of the drawers into the bag when a patrol car pulls up outside.

As I reach the door to the foyer and elevators, the alarm goes quiet. The rest of the lights come on and I duck behind a desk. There are footsteps in the foyer, and voices. I can’t quite hear what they’re saying, but the words I’m looking for stick out from the rest—“blood,” “elevator,” and “top floor.” The police out there know they have a lot of ground to cover, but they’ve noticed that the elevator with blood leading up to it has been sent to the top. A radio squawks, and one of them speaks into it. “Backup.” The word is clear.

Another door opens, and then there are footsteps in the stairwell. Thirty seconds later the elevator doors open and close. The accountant and the monster think things through. We figure there are two cops here already and more coming soon, so I need to act now. We figure one of them is probably at the third or fourth floor now. He’s laboring his way to the top floor while his partner rides up in comfort.

Another patrol car pulls up outside.

I untie the shirt from my foot and pull it back on. I open the door and run into the foyer, the gym bag in one hand, a stapler in the other, ready to hurl it hard in case somebody is still down here—but there’s no one. I turn toward the main door. There are two police constables walking toward it, a man and a woman. They stop dead and stare at me and I do the same, me on one side of the door, them on the other, then they race forward and one of them grabs the door.

chapter forty-six

His head has cleared in the hour or so since he died, and he likes to think that the fuckups in that time were brought about by that experience, likes to think they’re not the kind of mistakes he’d make on any other day.

Getting out of the house was easy. All Schroder had to do was caterpillar his way to the front door, get to his feet, twist his body so he could reach the door handle, and run like hell—or in this case bounce. It took him a couple of tiring minutes to reach a house that had lights on. He used his nose to ring the doorbell. It was a young couple whose kids had gone to bed; they were wrapping presents and had shared half a bottle of wine and seemed to look at Schroder with as much suspicion as anything, but he was thankful they took him in and cut the ties that held his feet. Nat’s cell phone was still in his pocket, and he used it to phone the station, and then he phoned his wife. He told her he was running late, told her it was going to be a long night, told her he was sorry, and didn’t tell her that a short time ago she was technically a widow. She told him she was disappointed but she understood, and he should get home when he could. It was the best-case scenario—and her first Christmas present to him.

By the time the first patrol car arrived, Edward was long gone. The responding officers removed Schroder’s handcuffs.

“So where’s he gone now?” Landry asks. They’re standing in Bracken’s living room, a photographer and a couple of other officers hanging out in the corner. Others are out canvassing the neighborhood, hoping to narrow down Hunter’s destination.

“I don’t know. But Jesus, Bill, everything that’s happened—everything that Hunter did to Bracken, he was right in the end. Bracken was part of the robbery. He had somebody take Hunter’s daughter, and now we’ve got nothing.”

“Not nothing,” Landry says. “We’ve got a couple of names. That gives us a bunch of known accomplices.”

“Yeah, but in time to save Hunter’s daughter?”

“He shouldn’t have killed Bracken. He could have helped us.”

“He says he didn’t do it. Says the woman did it.”

“You believe him?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not much of an answer, Carl. Sounds more like you want to believe him but don’t.”

“Whether he did it or not, he’s gone somewhere. Something here must have tipped him off.”

“Maybe he found a name or an address.”

“Yeah, and took it with him.”

“Well, if we’re lucky, maybe he’ll succeed. Maybe he’ll get his daughter back and take another couple of bad guys off the street.”

“I don’t see it working out that way,” Schroder says.

“Sure. Would be good, though, right?”

A few more detectives arrive on the scene and join them in searching the house.

“It’s official,” Landry says, finishing up a phone call. “Our two victims today are also Bracken’s cons.”

“Like Kingsly.”

“Yeah. That’s three for three.”

“So Bracken put the crew together,” Schroder says. “I’ll go to his office. Check his files. Maybe it’s even where Hunter is heading.”

“Maybe,” Landry answers, and ten minutes later it turns out he’s right.

chapter forty-seven

“Shit,” the officer says, because the automatic doors are locked and don’t open for him. He fumbles with the keys but I don’t hang around to watch. I limp past the elevators, past the busted door and the footprints of blood toward the back entrance. I burst out behind the building into the alleyway. I reach my car, the shotgun still on the passenger seat. The woman cop is running down the alleyway toward me. I turn the shotgun toward her and she comes to a complete stop. She raises her hands the same way the bank manager did.

Kill her.

There’s no need.

There’s always a need. There always has been.

“Please,” she says. She’s a few years younger than me, and about as scared as I probably looked when six men came bursting through the bank doors. She takes a couple of steps away.

I prime the shotgun. She takes another step backward. Jodie was killed as a distraction and it worked. It commanded a huge police force and effort at the bank while they sped away. A shotgun blast here would do the same thing. It would give me more time to find my daughter.

Do it.

“Please, I have a family,” she says.

“Move over there,” I say, and I point the shotgun toward the door I just came out of. She reaches it and I move around to the driver’s side of the car and climb in. I put the gun standing up from the footwell onto the passenger seat and the cop stays still. I reverse quickly back toward the road. A third patrol car shows up and covers the exit. I push hard on the accelerator and the back of my car hits the side of the patrol car right in the middle of the front wheel. The crash jolts me back and forward and the Blu-Tack falls out of my ears. The patrol car is pushed away from the side of the road. My car stalls and I restart it and jam my foot on the accelerator again and swerve out onto the road. The back of the car produces a rattling sound that gets louder the further I drive. The patrol car comes after me but manages all of five meters before taking a sharp right-hand turn, the axle probably broken. I slow down at the intersection, and when I push my foot back down the engine revs but doesn’t grip and the car rolls without any acceleration. I try changing gears but it doesn’t make a difference.

One of the other patrol cars comes away from the curb. I pull over and jump out, slinging bags over my shoulders, the money much heavier than the files. The patrol car is about a hundred and fifty meters away when I point the shotgun at the tattoo-covered bouncer at the strip club door and make my way inside.

The club is dark and there’s cigarette smoke hanging in the air; it’s like a fog rolled in, bringing with it the dregs of modern man. Girls in nothing but underwear, with breasts of all different sizes, are walking between the tables, some carrying drinks, others leading a patron by the hand toward a three-minute lap dance. The music is loud and aimed at the generation most of these girls seem to be in—one that’s about ten years younger than mine. There are maybe fifteen or twenty patrons in the club, mostly men sitting by themselves, a group of six in front of the stage. I keep the shotgun by my side, pointing down, and nobody seems to notice it. Most of the lighting is aimed at the stage, where a girl in a nurse outfit who looks nothing like the nurse who showed me the happy face chart earlier today is spinning around a pole. The look on her face reminds me of the waitress on the day Jodie died, the look of the damned—it was a lifetime ago now.

I take a corridor that leads past the toilets to a fire-exit door. The police haven’t hit the club yet. The toilets smell of disinfectant and the floor outside is wet. I hit the fire-exit door hard but the damn thing opens only about thirty centimeters, then bounces back, a chain flexing against the handles with a padlock securing it in place. I point the shotgun at the lock and people in the club scream when they hear it go off. The music keeps going and people are no longer watching the stage. The chain falls away and I take it with me outside. I jam the doors closed behind me and wrap the chain around the handles.

The alleyway is similar to the last one I was in, except this one runs at a different angle, along the back of clubs and shops instead of up between them. I turn right, passing more back entrances; from some come loud music, from others nothing. I stick with the direction and run for about sixty seconds, taking most of the weight on my left leg, hobbling more than running. I can hear sirens patrolling the streets. I climb a fence and drop into an open parking lot with bad lighting and about two cars. On the opposite side I take thirty seconds to catch my breath and begin to transfer the files out of the gym bag and stuff them in with the money. I tuck my arms through it and strap it onto my back and leave the empty bag behind and carry on moving.

The parking lot comes out a driveway on Manchester Street. There are cars that don’t have sirens on them driving past, hookers standing on corners, run-of-the-mill people staggering down the street, some wearing Santa hats. I run across Manchester and head further from the central city, down Gloucester Street toward a one-way system where there is less lighting. A patrol car comes into the street and I duck in behind a row of bushes lining a tile shop and the car drives past. I move again, getting further away, the hookers becoming less frequent and harder-looking, like they’ll do far more for far less. I cross Madras Street and keep heading east. The sirens aren’t as loud now. I get another block before turning north, back toward home, slowing down as more blood runs out of my leg. I need somewhere I can read the files. Somewhere I can bandage myself back up.

I’m a good six or seven blocks away when the cell phone I took from Kingsly rings. I flip it open.

“Hello?”

“What the hell, Edward? You’re making this a whole lot worse than it needs to be,” Schroder says.

“I’m finding my daughter.”

“No you’re not. You’re killing her. Look, we have some names, we’re banging on some doors right now. We’re going to find her.”

“You can guarantee that?”

“I can guarantee we’re doing our best.”

“What about the person who visited Roger Harwick in jail?”

“Who?”

“Somebody had to visit Harwick before my dad got stabbed, right? Somebody from the outside.”

“It’s a good thought,” he says, “except nobody came to see Harwick today, or yesterday. In fact nobody has been to see him since the bank robbery.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “Somebody had to talk to him.”

“And somebody did. It means another inmate was visited and got told to pass the message along.”

“Who?”

“We’re looking into it. Problem is there are so many opportunities for Harwick to interact with another inmate. Could be there were other links in the chain. Somebody comes to see Inmate A, who speaks to Inmate B, who talks to Inmate C. Or maybe one of the guards organized it.”

“So it’s a dead end,” I say.

“I’m doing what I can, Eddie.”

“It’s just never enough.”

“Where are you?”

“I have to go.”

“What did you find? Another name? An address? Edward, listen to me, if you know where your daughter is, you have to let me help you.”

“I don’t know where she is. Not yet.”

“You’re armed and running around the city, Edward. The word has come in—you’re a threat. A Armed Offenders Unit unit is coming for you. They see you with that shotgun, they’re going to open fire. There won’t be any dialogue. You hear what I’m saying?”

“I hear it,” I say, and hang up, then I try calling Nat but the phone just rings and rings.

What I need is transport and somewhere to read over the files. I find somewhere secure to hide the shotgun before heading back onto the road to flag down a taxi. The first three go by, passengers already inside them; the fourth pulls over, the driver sees the blood on my leg, shakes his head, and drives off. Another taxi pulls up a few minutes later, and this time I keep the gym bag covering my leg. The blood on my shirt from where I wore it over my foot is all on the back, so the driver doesn’t notice it. He just seems to be happy that I’m not carrying a shotgun, but struggles to express his gratitude in clear English. I tell him to take me back toward town, which doesn’t please him because he was hoping for a bigger fare. There are a dozen patrol cars circling the streets, but their search patterns don’t extend to taxis. They’re out there dressed in black, carrying assault weapons and itching to take down Eddie the Hunter, the man they always knew would turn into a killer.