Текст книги "Blood Men "

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

“Shut up.”

“I really am sorry about what happened to her, son. A waste, such a waste. I have some idea what you’re going through, and it’s hard, son, it really is hard, and no matter how hollow it sounds, it’s true when people tell you that time does help. It doesn’t heal, but it helps. You will move on, and you have Sam, and if she’s anything like Jodie then you’ve got a beautiful little girl to look after.”

“I know, I know,” I say. “If it weren’t for her . . .”

I trail off, and neither of us fills the silence for a few more seconds until Dad leans forward and looks me right in the eye. “Have you heard it yet?” he asks.

“What are you talking about?” I ask, leaning back.

My dad leans back too, imitating me, but then he crosses one leg over the other and taps his fingers on his knee.

“When you were a kid I used to take you and Belinda to the park. You remember? There was a fort there you’d always play on. Had a tire with chains on it that had been turned into a swing. There was a pole you could slide down. There was bark everywhere, and bars you could climb, ropes and chains you could hang from.”

“This going anywhere?”

“There was a merry-go-round there too. You two used to play on that thing so fast that when you came to a stop and stood up, you’d fall over, dizzy as hell, clutching onto the ground as if it were moving, trying to keep it still.”

“What is this? Some kind of father–son moment that you saw on TV and are trying to emulate?”

“One day, when you were eight,” he says, “when we were there, there was a man there too, walking his dog. It got off its leash and ran over to the fort where you and Belinda were riding the merry-go-round. You came to a stop and spilled off it, and the dog, it was all excited and tried sniffing Belinda. She got scared and she ran.”

“I don’t remember.”

“It ran after her and tried to bite her, and she kept running and trying to watch the dog all at the same time, and she got off balance. She ran right into a tree and knocked herself out. Got her forehead grazed up. You remember what you said when we were carrying her back to the car?”

“Not really.”

My dad leans forward, and in a lower voice, he tells me. “You said you would kill it.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Six months after that, the dog a few houses down from us that always used to bark, you remember that dog . . . ?”

“Not really.”

“It was the same dog from the park. This big black dog with a lot of bark. That dog got itself killed.”

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s a long time to be angry at an animal,” Dad says.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You don’t think I noticed the steak was missing?” he asks, his voice low now, and I hadn’t noticed but I’ve leaned in close to him. “I told your mother I’d taken it. She never knew it was you who killed that dog. But I knew. Is that when you first heard it?”

“You’re delusional.”

“I think it probably was. You might have heard it earlier but didn’t know what it was. It would have taken a while to build up the courage. I first heard it when I was the same age,” he says. “This voice that was different from me, these thoughts that weren’t mine. They told me to do things that I didn’t want to do. I refused—in the beginning. Then I gave in, hoping it would shut the voice up. Soon the voice was the same as my own, and in the end I couldn’t even tell the difference.”

“You’re sick,” I say.

“I know. That’s what I said twenty years ago. Hell, I’m not so unreasonable that I know hearing a voice isn’t right. But right or wrong, I heard it. I don’t blame you for never coming to ask me about it, but . . .”

“I should never have come here.”

“When you killed that dog, it was because you were hearing a voice of your own.”

“I didn’t kill any dog.”

“What happened after that?” he asks. “Did you keep hearing the voice, or did it disappear? Have you been giving in to it all these years? Are there graves out there waiting to be found?”

“I’m nothing like you.” I begin to stand. He reaches across and grabs me, and before the guard can say anything he lets go. I sit back down.

“The darkness. That’s what I called it,” he says. “I know you’re listening to it, but you also have to control it. If you can’t, it will take you to places before you’re ready. It doesn’t care if you get caught—it just wants to see blood. You have to rein that voice in, need to come to an understanding with it and, if you’re hearing it now, and I’m sure you are, then you have to find a way to stop it from overtaking you.”

“I have no darkness.”

“It never goes away,” he says. “At night I can hear it whispering, but I have no outlet for it here. It’s faded some over the years, sure, but it’s still there, no denying that.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“To protect you,” he says, “from the same thing that happened to me. Please, son, let me help you.”

“I call it the monster,” I say, the words out of my mouth before I can stop them, and Dad slowly nods, and for an awful moment I think my dad is going to smile, and say something sickening, perhaps a that’s my boy, but he doesn’t. The warmth goes out of his eyes and he stops nodding.

“That’s a shame, son. It really is.”

“I never knew what else to call it. I figured you had a monster, and when you went to jail, it came to live with me. Came to live inside me.”

“Not my monster,” he says. “You proved that by killing the dog before I went to jail. You have your own darkness. I wish I could help you more, and I would, if I was out there with you. Son, word around here is that the cops have no idea who killed Jodie.”

I stare at him blankly.

“She didn’t like me much, but I could see she was a good person. She was a good wife, I bet, and certainly a great mother, and I owe her for what she did for you. What happened to her—that’s a shitty thing. A real shitty thing. Yet if you ask me, the fact the cops haven’t caught anybody, that’s a good thing.”

“What?”

“It’s a good thing, son. Think about it.”

“What are you on about? How the hell can you say that? What are you? What in the hell are you?”

My dad leans forward in his chair then slowly pushes himself up. Both guards come over. “It was good talking to you, son.” He starts to walk away.

“Fuck you!”

“No yelling,” the guard says, and puts a hand on my shoulder and I shrug it off. The Christchurch Carver looks over and watches.

Dad turns back. “Go home and think about what happened to your wife,” he says. “And take some advice from your old man . . .”

“Save it,” I say.

“It’s okay to listen to the voice,” he says, then he disappears through the doorway.

chapter fifteen

Suction Cup Guy had a real name and Suction Cup Guy was murdered. His name was Arnold Langham and his friends called him Arnie. He was a husband and a dad and his forty-two years on this earth all ended when he was tossed from the apartment building. The suction cups were attached to him, he was stripped and dressed in a trench coat, one of his fingernails found buried in the roof as he tried to fight for survival, the reason for the staging still unknown. Langham no longer lived with his wife—hadn’t lived with her since he’d beaten her up badly enough to spend three years in jail for it. The wife wasn’t a suspect because she’d taken their son and moved north and west enough to hit the next country in line with New Zealand. Other than beating up his wife, Langham doesn’t have any other criminal record—no assaults, no rapes, no breaking and entering. A couple of speeding tickets but that’s all. He worked full time on an assembly line making control boards for motorized wheelchairs. It was an active case, but the urgency had dissipated—it’s the way it was when one case you were working dealt with a wife-beater, and there was another case dealing with a group of bank robbers who killed two people while stealing what turned out to be 2.8 million in cash. It was about priorities—and at the moment the bank robbery was everybody’s priority. Suction Cup Guy would have to wait. It was a shame that for the hundreds of man-hours invested so far, all they had were transcripts of pointless interviews and a burned-out van. They didn’t even have the dye-pack-damaged money. He’d have thought any ruined money would have been dumped with the van and set on fire, but forensics—at least so far—had found no traces of it. No currency—no red ink. All he has are a lot of unanswered questions, two bodies in the ground who deserve to be put to rest, and a wife who was cold to him most of the weekend. The job was interfering with his family life. The last weekend before Christmas and he should have been spending it with his wife and daughter and their new baby boy, and at the rate the investigation is going his son will be in school and his wife will have left him before it’s over. He’s been lucky so far in that he hasn’t missed any Christmases, but he’s certainly missed plenty of other occasions; each one his wife remembers and, in times of arguments, reminds him of. Sometimes she reminds him he’s the reason they’re having children so late, and that he’s the reason they’re going to be in their sixties before the kids are old enough to move out of home.

There are plenty of criminals on the street who occasionally do a favor for the cops in return for some minor charges being overlooked. But this time there’s nothing. The men responsible have involved nobody else. The cash, if not damaged, hasn’t been circulating anywhere. Whoever did this knew what they were doing. They got out of the bank almost two minutes before the police arrived. Reading criminal records has led to hundreds of possibilities, but linking enough names together to form the gang that robbed the bank has been impossible. They’ve conducted almost two hundred interviews already and he wonders if any of the men who actually stormed into the bank have been spoken to. Probably. Hard to know.

Schroder is sipping at a cup of cooling coffee and has just hung up from a phone call from the prison. Turns out Edward Hunter went to see his father today. He wonders what would prompt him to do that after all these years.

There’s a knock at his office door. “Somebody here to see you,” an officer says.

“Who?”

“He says he has some information about the robbery.”

“Another psychic?” Schroder asks. Whenever there is enough media coverage of a tragic event, the psychics come out of the woodwork. Jonas Jones, an ex-used-car dealer turned “renowned” psychic investigator who appears on TV giving “serious criminal insights” to cases the police have been unable to get a handle on, has already left over a dozen messages and has been banned from going any farther than the foyer in the police station.

“Worse. A shrink.”

“Jesus.”

“You want me to send him in?”

The thing about shrinks is that sometimes they can be worse than psychics. At least the psychics will put on a show. They’ll light a few candles and pretend they’re talking to the spirit world or tuning in to some kind of vision.

“Not really, but go ahead.”

Benson Barlow is mostly bald with a serious comb-over, and Schroder wonders what other psychiatrists would say about it. In his midfifties and with a beard, the only thing missing from the shrink are elbow patches on his jacket and a pipe—but maybe that stuff he leaves in the office. After shaking hands, Schroder offers him a seat.

“The officer said you have some information about the robbery?”

“Well, in a way.”

“What exactly does ‘in a way’ mean?”

“It means I don’t actually know anything about the robbery itself, not in those kind of terms.”

Schroder wonders if everybody who has a first and last name starting with the same letter is going to be a thorn in his side. Benson Barlow. Jonas Jones. Theodore Tate. “Then why are you here? To offer a profile?”

“Not exactly,” Barlow says, leaning forward. “Twenty years ago I was the psychiatrist who examined Jack Hunter.”

“Which one?”

“Well, both, actually.”

“And which one are you here to talk to me about? Jack Jr.?”

“Mostly, though he’s Edward now. It was one of the first things he did when he was eighteen—legally change his name, though since the age of nine he wouldn’t answer to anything other than Edward. Jack Sr. suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. He heard voices and he believed he was being controlled by them. Or it. It was only the one voice, and he called it the darkness.”

“Come on, that was a line of BS they tried feeding to the jury. Nobody bought it.”

“It wasn’t bullshit, Detective. It’s a real mental illness that people genuinely suffer from. It makes them think delusional thoughts. It can make you think you’re being followed, chosen by God for a quest, it can make you think you’re being watched by your neighbor or by the media. It can make you believe you’re being controlled by an external source.”

“And Jack Hunter thought he was on a quest for God?”

“Well, no. He thought there was a real darkness living inside him that needed to see blood to stay happy.”

“Then he thought right. I don’t see what this has to do with the robbery.”

“Paranoid schizophrenia is a hereditary condition, Detective. What Jack Sr. has, there’s a chance that Edward might be struggling with the same illness—perhaps only to a minor degree, something that can be treated with medication. But considering the numerous traumas the boy went through at an early age, his current loss may compound the situation into something more serious. All those years ago when he was my patient, he told me things—things that make me worry about him. I fear for him, and for what he’s capable of.”

“What kind of things?”

“I can’t tell you what he said. Those sessions were private.”

“So you’ve come here to tell me you can’t tell me anything?”

“No. I’ve come here to tell you that Edward Hunter is potentially a danger to himself, possibly to others. Genetically, he’s like his dad. Emotionally, I think they’re the same. Edward stopped being my patient when he turned eighteen and I haven’t seen him since, but from what I’ve learned over the last few days it’s obvious he was living a very stable life in an environment he was comfortable with. But now things have changed. The death of his wife is a trigger, Detective. It’s a huge red flag and I’m telling you, there’s serious potential there for him to be a dangerous man, perhaps even as dangerous as his father.”

Schroder picks up a pencil and rolls it between his fingers. “So what is it you want me to do? I can’t go and lock him up to satisfy your suspicion of him. Why don’t you get him in for some sessions?”

“I’ve tried. I’ve been leaving messages but he won’t return them.”

Schroder doesn’t blame him. He wouldn’t return the messages either. “So what do you want?”

Barlow shrugs. “Ideally, I want Edward to get help. There are medications that can keep him under control.”

“You’re assuming he has what his dad has—and even that’s assuming his dad had anything other than a taste for blood.”

“Even so,” Barlow says, dismissing him and standing up as Schroder’s office phone starts ringing. “I’ve done my professional duty. Ethically and legally I have to warn the police if I have a patient who I believe to be a danger to others or themselves, and that’s what this is—it’s a warning.”

chapter sixteen

I listen to the lunchtime news on the way home. The guy who shoved and killed the woman in the parking lot is claiming he was on “P,” the fashionable drug with the fashionable defense for murder—meaning he’ll either get six months in jail or nine months in rehab since it really wasn’t his fault, but the drug’s fault, or the addiction’s fault, or everybody else’s fault for not reaching out and helping him sooner. Most of the sheep have been caught but four are still on the run. Maybe they’ll team up and make more sheep between them and go about robbing farms. There is more news: a security guard was killed last night and found naked in town, a primary school was burned down but nobody was hurt, then there’s sport and weather and nobody mentions the bank robbery anymore.

I get caught behind a slow-moving truck, adding about twenty minutes to my drive, the amount of exhaust fumes coming from the back of it bringing global warming twenty minutes closer to a final conclusion. I’m still angry when I get home. Angry at the news, at the police, at the monster inside me, at the world for moving on when it should be pausing, when it should be taking a time-out to mourn my wife and to ask the big question, “Why?” over and over, why did this have to happen, why is society the way it is, why isn’t anybody doing anything about it?

I’m still angry at my dad. With twenty years between the last time I saw him and this time there should have been more to say. And why did he get me out there only to tell me it’s a good thing that the police haven’t caught the men who did this?

Don’t kid yourself, you know exactly why.

“No,” I say, and I grab a beer from the fridge.

Mostly I’m angry at myself. I didn’t go out there to share anything with him. I don’t really know why I went—certainly it wasn’t to tell him about the monster, but those words came out as if they had a life of their own. And in a way I guess that’s exactly what the monster is—a life of its own. I’ve kept hearing it over the last twenty years, small suggestions whispered to me that I’ve ignored, ideas on how to get rid of animals or people that I don’t like.

My wife has been dead four days and in the ground for less than twenty-four hours and I’m losing my mind. I sit outside and let the sun burn my face and eyes before turning away, the bright shadows and shapes moving across my vision. I go through my wallet for the business card I slid in there on Friday, and when I find it I can’t read the number on it and have to wait for a minute for my vision to settle.

“Detective Schroder,” the detective says, answering his phone.

“Hi. It’s, ah, Edward Hunter. I’m, ah, ringing to see—”

“I was just about to call you,” he says.

“Yeah? You have something?” I ask, walking outside with the phone. “You’ve caught the men who killed Jodie?”

“No. Not yet, but trust me, Edward, we’re following up some strong leads,” he says, but he doesn’t even sound like he could convince himself. “You have to be patient.”

“I have been patient.”

“I promise you, it’s still my top priority.”

“In three days it will have been a week,” I point out.

“I understand your frustration,” he says.

“I’m not so sure you do. How much did they get?”

“What?”

“How much money did they take from the bank?”

“I can’t discuss that with you.”

“Jodie was killed because of that money. Give me a break, Detective, I think I have more than a right to know how much my wife’s life was worth.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, because two people died,” I say, and the accountant in me is doing the arithmetic, “so divide that number by two and that’s how much she was worth. I want to know if she died for more or less than the price of a new car, more or less than the price of a house? Of course it depends on the house, on the car, but—”

“Look, Edward, I promise you we’re doing our best. We really are. We have everybody we can spare searching for those men.”

“Searching, not chasing,” I say. “Maybe I should do your job for you,” I say, and the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them, having come from nowhere, certainly not from me, and I realize they’re not my words at all, but somebody else’s. No, not somebody—something.

“What does that mean?” Schroder asks.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “I’m angry, that’s all.”

“I hear you went to visit your father today.”

“What?”

“First time since he got put away. Why’d you do that?”

I slow down and think about his question, aware he’s talking to me now in a different capacity—he’s talking to me the way a cop talks to a suspect. He’s fishing for information. “He rang me. Told me he wanted to see me.”

“And you dropped everything to go.”

“He’s my father. He wanted to share his condolences. He wanted to know what the police were doing to get the men who killed my wife.”

“Is that all?”

“Of course that’s all. My wife got murdered, Detective. What father wouldn’t want to try to console his son?”

“Have you been seeing anybody since the shooting? For help? A counselor, or a psychiatrist?”

“Why would I do that?” One of my neighbors starts up a lawn mower and I head back inside so I can hear Schroder clearly.

“To help you come to terms with what happened.”

“I can come to terms in my own way.”

“I hope that doesn’t involve doing anything stupid.”

“Like what?”

“Like trying to do my job.”

“One of us has to try,” I say, “because it seems to me nothing is getting done.”

“A word of caution, Edward. Leave everything to us. We know what we’re doing.”

“Then prove it.”

I hang up, finish my beer, grab out another one, but don’t open it. I leave it on the kitchen counter and fire up the computer.

I go online and find all the newspaper reports from the last week that dealt with the robbery. There’s enough of them that by the time I print them out I have a stack of paper a centimeter thick. I take them outside and sit in the sun, reading through them. Surveillance from the bank puts the entry of the six men at 1:13 p.m. They were in the bank for less than four minutes, though it sure felt longer. The police were called by several witnesses outside who saw the men enter, as well as people who first heard the shotgun blast, but they were first alerted by a silent alarm. I close my eyes and try to remember as best I can. The men had been in the bank for almost a minute before the bank manager was killed. The newspaper says it took six minutes for the police to arrive at the scene. The men had been gone for two minutes by that point. The newspaper doesn’t say how much money was taken.

The accountant studies the figures. Four minutes. Six minutes. Six men. Two victims. Two fatal gunshots. An unnamed amount of money. The figures swirl around inside my head, I rest them against everything the newspapers say, try forcing them to fit against what I know, against my memories, but nothing sticks out, nothing shifts into such a focus as to tell me where to look next. The numbers mean nothing.

I pick up the sheaf of papers and throw them out into the yard. Most of them stay together, but the ones on the top and bottom slide away, the small breeze picking them up and pinning them into the corners of the yard. The answers are in the wind too, and though Schroder didn’t say it, I know that the bank robbery is already history, the death of my wife and the bank manager pushed aside as the Christchurch Crime Rate keeps rolling on, gathering momentum, leading to what, God only knows.

I end up drinking the beer and falling asleep, not heavily, but enough for about an hour to slip by mostly unnoticed, and when I wake up the lawn mower has stopped and my face is tight, and when I reach up to touch it, it’s tender from sunburn. When I stand up I realize that the few beers I’ve had, combined with the lack of food, have made me light-headed. I phone Nat and ask if they can take care of Sam tonight, and they tell me they can. In fact they sound more than happy to. I talk to Sam for a bit and she tells me she wants to come home and I tell her that she can’t, not today, that Daddy has some things he has to take care of.

“But you promised,” she says.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She finally accepts things can’t be changed and hands the phone back to Nat, grumpy.

“She’ll be okay,” he says. “You know how kids can be.”

“How’s she doing?”

“You know how it is,” he says, and he’s right. I do know. He means that Sam’s the same since the day we told her about her mum. Part shock and part disbelief and part simply not understanding. I’m the same way. We all are.

“Take care of yourself, Eddie,” he says, and something in the way he says that makes me think that he thinks he won’t be seeing me for a while. It’s the kind of thing you’d say to a friend leaving for jail or war.

I watch the sun peak in the sky. It disappears behind the tip of a giant fir tree next door for ten minutes before coming back into view, and then it slides back down. I drink another beer and then another, then head out front and grab the mail. There’s a letter from my insurance company. Both Jodie and myself have life insurance—but in a letter less than half a page long, our insurance company is holding back any decision to pay out because Jodie was killed in the commission of a crime. Life insurance is specifically there to cover accidents and illness—and does not cover murder, so the letter says, and they apologize for any inconvenience. I wonder why they got onto the case so quick—I hadn’t even contacted them—and I figure they wanted to rush through the bad news before Christmas.

The sun gets lower and evening arrives. I play the “what-if” game, the one where what if we’d gone to the bank ten minutes later, or what if I’d kept my mouth shut, or what if I’d fought the men off. There are a lot of what-ifs. A thousand of them—of course it’s a pointless game to play and I could spend the rest of my life out here under the sun, drinking beer, thinking about the could-have-beens and should-have-beens, the entire time the reality never forgotten—I’m the reason Jodie got killed.

More and more, the what-ifs begin to focus on the bank. I think about the security guard. I think about him a lot, and I imagine him acting.

But he didn’t, did he. He just stood there and did nothing.

Nothing! the monster says, and I guess the first part in the road to recovery, like being an alcoholic, is admitting you have a problem. So yeah, I admit, I have a monster.

And it’s nice to be here, it says, nice to be welcomed again after all this time.

The security guard, trained to help, there to defend, there to stop the innocent from being hurt, he did nothing. Not a goddamn thing.

I open up another beer.

Choosing to do nothing was the same as doing something. Doing nothing is what got everybody killed. You calling out—that didn’t get Jodie all shot up. The security guard—it’s his fault. He didn’t do his job.

“Damn straight,” I say.

I replay that moment over and over, and I’m not sure how it happens, but things shift a little and the truth appears, so obvious now, and it explains a lot. The first time I run things through, the security guard does nothing as the security tapes and history books state. But I slow down the action in my head, and then I notice something the cameras didn’t have the angle or the emotion to notice—this time the security guard smiles as the men come in, he smiles before he is smashed in the face with the butt of a shotgun. Then I slow it down even more, and there is more than a smile, but a wink and a nod of the head.

The security guard was in on it!

I slow it down again, the men rush in, the first one approaches the guard, and this time there’s the smile, the wink, the nod, and this time the guard puts his hand out and the bad guy takes it, they shake hands, there’s another nod, and bang, the guard is smashed in the head.

Once more. The men come in. One approaches the guard. The wink. The nod. The grin. The handshake. They embrace. They part and then they share a small joke. The bad guy pushes his gun forward but this time the stock doesn’t connect with the guard’s jaw, but he falls anyway, he falls in a heap and when he lies on the ground the smile is still there.

Another grin. Another wink. Another shared joke, and the men spill deeper into the bank and steal and kill; the entire time the guard watches them.

I go through one last time. This time when they take my wife, the security guard sits up and begins to clap.

I put down the empty beer bottle. There’s a row of them now, and thank God my friends, the ones with the platitude of “things will get better,” the ones who don’t know what to say, thank God they had the decency to bring lots of beer. Sure—they didn’t have the decency to be there to save my wife, and they can’t really help now, and since bringing beer is the best they can do then thank God for beer, thank God for people who think beer can heal the world.

I grab another one. It’s cold and doesn’t taste great but it goes down pretty quick. I head out into the backyard, stumbling—stupid yard—and go through the pages I threw out here earlier. I find some of the articles about the security guard. He was rushed to hospital with a serious concussion, which is a load of shit. The journalists—bless whatever it is they have that passes for hearts—have listed first and last names of everybody involved on the day—except, of course, for the six men who were more involved than anybody. I carry one of the stories about the guard back inside and fire up the computer. I search for the guard. Everybody in first-world countries these days is online somewhere, a member of some online community somewhere or whatever the hell is in fashion these days—people sharing their lives with strangers and credit-card thieves and . . .

Monsters . . .

. . . identity stealers and serial killers. The computer takes too long to load, which annoys me, but I kill time by grabbing another beer. The beer is calming me, I’m so full of serenity right now I could write a fucking musical.

I get online and Google the bastard and it’s hard to type because the keyboard seems smaller. When I get his name entered plenty of stories from the last four days pop up. I don’t bother reading them. Instead I go straight to the White Pages and let my fingers do the walking. Within twenty seconds I have his address. Telecom is my friend.

Our accomplice.

“I think it’s time we go visit him,” I say.

I can’t wait, the monster says.

“One more beer for the road,” I suggest.

Hell, have two—you deserve it, the monster says, and I get changed and then we go for a drive.