Текст книги "Blood Men "

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

chapter twenty-one

“What the hell are you doing here, Edward?” he asks, and part of him, a small part, already knows. Or suspects. The warning Benson Barlow gave him has been stuck in his head all day, a warning that hasn’t been easy to dismiss—especially since Edward visited his father today and now he’s parked only two houses away from the security guard injured during the robbery.

“Who . . . who’s that?” Edward asks, and he lifts his hand up to shield his eyes even though there’s no real light.

“Come on, I’m giving you a lift home.”

“What?”

“Get out and move into the passenger seat,” he says, and opens the door for him. “And hurry up. I’m getting drenched out here.”

Edward gets out. He gasps in a lungful of air which pains him, he doubles over, then he gets onto his hands and starts gagging. A puddle of vomit appears. The rain is coming down hard and from nowhere—certainly nobody in the weather forecasting world predicted it. The back of Edward’s shirt is already soaked through. He waits a bit while Edward coughs, and when it seems like the man is never going to get back up, he reaches down and grabs his shoulder. “Come on, we have to go.”

He helps Edward to his feet, careful not to step in any vomit. Edward twists his body so he can see up the street. There is a patrol car parked about twenty meters away. Schroder leads him around to the passenger side where there are more rain-washed puddles of vomit.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Schroder asks.

“I was sleeping.”

“Are they the same clothes you were wearing at the bank?”

“Maybe.”

“They’re covered in your wife’s blood.”

“Are they?”

“Get in,” Schroder says, unamused. Edward gets in the passenger side and Schroder races around and gets in behind the wheel. An hour ago all he had to do was move and he broke out in a sweat. Now he’s shivering. The inside of the car fogs up and he turns on the air-conditioning to clear the windscreen. The car that brought him here follows. He turns on the wipers. Already the rain is easing up, and by the time he’s driven a couple of blocks it’s almost completely stopped.

“Look, Edward,” he says, his tone softer now, “I know you want answers, but coming here isn’t the place where you’ll find them.”

“I know.”

“Then why’d you come?”

“I don’t know.”

“Uh-huh. Gerald Painter had nothing to do with the robbery. He’s a victim as much as anybody.”

“Not as much as Jodie,” Edward answers, and Schroder knows it’s a good point.

“Look, I know it’s hard, and the situation is shit, but you gotta man up. You’ve got a little girl that’s depending on you.”

“I know that,” Edward says. “People don’t need to remind me. You think my wife getting killed makes me forget about Sam?”

“Of course not. Problem is you do need reminding. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here right now. You wouldn’t be drunk and one step away from killing yourself in a car accident.”

“Why’d you come here?” Edward asks.

“Gerald Painter’s wife called us. She said you came to visit him tonight, and according to her it wasn’t exactly a social call. Why’d you show up?”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“She doesn’t know, and Gerald Painter isn’t saying much, but I have to tell you, Edward, I don’t like your being here. And you’re drunk and you’re wearing the clothes with your wife’s blood on them. Mrs. Painter isn’t the only one who called you in—another neighbor saw you stumbling to your car and pissing on the lawn. The constables in the patrol car back there, they came here to take you away. Me being here, this is a favor, Edward. I’m here to take you home and keep you out of jail for the night. I’m here to stop you from making any further mistakes.”

“You want my thanks now? How about you earn it by finding the men who killed Jodie?”

“Why did you come here?” Schroder asks.

“I don’t know.”

“I think you know.”

Edward shrugs.

“I think you blame Painter for not doing enough to save your wife. I think you wanted to make him hurt for what happened, and then you got here and found he already was hurting and that none of this was his fault. I think if you hadn’t made that realization then right now I wouldn’t be doing you any favors. We’d be having a very different conversation.”

Edward says nothing, just stares out the window at the night. Schroder stays quiet for a bit, thinking about Benson Barlow and the shrink’s warning.

“I have a friend,” Schroder says, “that you remind me of in a way. He looked into something he shouldn’t have, and it cost him. Same thing happened to him that’s happening to you. He thought drinking was the answer, but it screwed him up, screwed with his judgment. He went out one night in his car and ran into a woman, almost killed her. That shit will happen to you if you don’t get a grip on things. My friend, he was a cop once who knew better. You’ll end up falling into an abyss right alongside him, and his abyss now has him in jail. He’s locked away for six months for what he did. That what you want? To leave your little girl for six months?”

Edward doesn’t answer him.

“Or it’ll be worse. You’ll head out driving and you’ll have your daughter with you. You’ll drag her into that abyss and get her killed.”

Still nothing.

“Look, Edward, we’ll get the men who did this. These people, they always get caught. Always.”

“And you always let them go,” Edward says. “Isn’t that it? You’ll find these guys and you’ll find you’ve dealt with them before, locked them away before, and let them right out.”

“It’s not like that,” he says.

“Isn’t it? How about you explain it to me.”

“We kept your father locked away.”

“But he’s the only one, right? Everybody else gets tossed back out onto the street to do whatever it is they want to do.”

“You think I don’t know that? You think it’s easy being a cop in this city? What would . . .,” he trails off. “Look, what’s the alternative? That we don’t try? You know how many cops we’re losing every year because nobody wants to try anymore? The last year, Edward, the last year has been damn hard. With all that’s happened—hell, even I have days where I want to give up. It’s what this city does. It produces these people. It catches them, takes them into its prisons, then churns them back out harder and rougher than they were going in. But we’re trying, Edward, and we’re making progress. Things will change. We’re doing the best we can with what we have, and I promise you, we’ll get the men who killed your wife. And I promise you they will pay.”

“People think I’m the same as him,” I say.

“What?”

“My father. They think I’m the same as him. People recognize me from the news and think I’m going to be the next big serial killer.”

“No one recognizes you from the news, Edward,” he says, remembering what Barlow said. “That was twenty years ago. And you weren’t to blame for anything then.”

“People are ready to convict me, they want to send me away for life. They’re frightened of me. But these men, why aren’t we frightened of them enough to keep them locked away forever? When you find them, Detective, and lock them away, what then? How long until you have to find them again for killing somebody else’s wife? Three years? Five?”

“I promise they’ll pay, Edward,” he says.

They reach the house and Schroder pulls into the driveway and they both climb out. The car following pulls up to the curb, its tires scraping against it. The wheels have splashed rain and dirt off the road onto the bottom half of the car.

They walk to the front door and Schroder unlocks it.

“What happened to your friend?” Edward asks.

“Huh?”

“The friend you were telling me about. He was looking into something. He ever sober up and find it?”

“Yeah. He found it, and people died because of it.”

“He lose his family to bank robbers?”

“I’ll keep these tonight,” Schroder says, and he rattles the keys. “You can pick them up from the station in the morning. Where are the spares?”

“I don’t have any.”

“Everybody has spare keys.”

“Not me ’cause I never lose them.”

“Okay, Edward. Go and get some sleep,” he says. “Don’t do anything else stupid tonight. Don’t make me regret helping you out.” He closes the door and heads to the other car and drives away.

chapter twenty-two

I take a leak, find the spare keys, take another leak, grab a beer, grab a jacket, and within ten minutes of being dropped off home I’m back on the road, which is better than jail, which is where I thought Schroder was going to take me for what the monster had wanted me to do tonight. The spare keys have Jodie’s car key too, and for a few seconds I can’t figure out which one to jam into the ignition.

The car is harder to control than normal and there must be something wrong with it. I’m steering straight but the car keeps veering off to the left, and other times off to the right. It’s not the time to have a faulty car—the road ahead of me isn’t exactly laid out clearly because my vision is shot to hell. Everything is blurry, and when I squint I end up seeing double. I lose control of the car and hit the curb and come to a stop. I can see my house in the rear-vision mirror—I’ve only driven about thirty meters.

I give it another go, slower this time, more focused. There is even less traffic on the road now. A few people are out shopping since the malls are still open, Christmas extending the closing hours till midnight. Statistically, some of these people will go bankrupt over the Christmas season. Statistically, many of them will come home to find their homes have been burgled, or they’ll walk out of a mall to find their cars have been stolen. Statistically, one of these people will show up dead on some grass verge in the morning and Schroder’s caseload will become that much heavier for it.

I’m not familiar with the area and get lost on the way to the cemetery. I run a couple of red lights by accident, but I also end up sitting at a few green lights, which I figure balances the equation. I make it there safely and turn into the cemetery driveway. There is no detail in the church, only an absence of light, a dark shape somewhat darker than the night around it. I keep driving ahead and quickly become lost. I haven’t been out here since Jodie was buried, and then I was following everybody else. Now it’s a maze. The church disappears behind the line of trees, then it’s graves and grass everywhere, broken up by more trees. Maybe this is why it’s called the Garden City—the view is fucking fantastic when you’re dead.

I drive around for about five minutes before deciding I can cover more ground on foot. I grab the beer and get out and lean against the car to open it, but slide right off the wet surface. I hit the ground and scrape my knees and drop the beer and it takes me a minute to find it. I walk among the plots searching for Jodie, even calling out to her after a few minutes. In the end I’m too tired to keep going. I sit down and lean against a grave that’s not as old as the others. The grass is very wet and the water leaches into my pants. There are gaps in the cloud cover letting moonlight through but I can’t see any moon. A light breeze pushes my wet clothes against my skin. I pop open the beer and it fizzes up from the earlier fall. What doesn’t froth out keeps me warm as the night continues to cool around me. I talk to Jodie even though the person beneath me isn’t Jodie, but someone who died a few months ago in his early twenties, according to the script on the stone, but it doesn’t say anything else about him—maybe nobody cared enough, or maybe people were glad he died.

“I’m so sorry, Jodie,” I say. “For everything. I’m sorry you died. I’m sorry it was my fault. I’m sorry I smashed the plates against the kitchen wall.”

Jodie and the guy beneath me ignore me. The cemetery is deathly quiet but scenic. The sky is clearing, the veil of cloud is pulled back revealing thousands of stars. They light up the night, silhouetting the trees, shining down on the grounds where Death and a few of the friends he’s made over the years are buried all around me. The breeze becomes warm again and strong too, coming from the northwest over the Port Hills, which are lit up with street– and house lights, whipping across acres of tussock and grass and rock before sweeping down into the city. By the time it reaches the cemetery it’s picking up leaves and petals and throwing them about, it blows dirt into my eyes and I have to turn my back to it. Pretty soon the stars dim and I can no longer taste beer. I wake up what ought to be only a few minutes later, but must be several hours since the moon has been replaced by the sun. The bright light hits my eyes so hard it almost knocks a hole in the back of my head. I roll onto my side to bury my head into my pillow but there’s only grass and a cement marker. I rub my eyes and have no idea where I am for about two seconds, then it all rushes back to me. The breeze has died back down. I figure I’m one of many who have fallen asleep with a bottle of something out here with their loved ones cold in the ground. My clothes smell of sweat and vomit and Jodie’s blood.

My body is aching as I stand up, the muscles stiff and sore. I’m not sure where my car is so I pick a direction and walk. Nothing is familiar as everything looks the same. I walk for twenty minutes in an expanding circle before finding it. The keys are still in the ignition. There are already a couple of mourners who throw me suspicious glances, probably because I look like I just crawled out of one of the graves here. The cemetery is in need of a caretaker—the lawns are too long and the gardens are being overrun by a crime wave of weeds. One side of the car is in bright sun, the other has wet leaves stuck to it.

I take the backstreets home instead of the main ones, figuring they’ll be quicker, and figuring wrong. I pass a couple of people building fences, others mowing lawns, summertime activities that seem a world away from the world I live in now. When I finally make it, I race into the bathroom and take a leak doing my best to hit the bowl and not the floor and my feet. I’m pretty sure I’m draining off the only fluids I have in my body.

I stagger through to the kitchen and open the fridge. The milk has expired but it seems to taste okay and I drink half a glass of it before deciding milk is the absolute last thing I want right now. I look at the beer. Strike that—milk ain’t that bad after all.

I lean against the kitchen bench, disoriented and lost, like I don’t belong here, and that makes it harder for me to remember exactly what happened last night. Part of me doesn’t even feel like I’m back home: I’m stuck somewhere, maybe in some purgatory where the milk is always expired and my mouth is dry and my tongue sticks to the roof of it. Even my teeth are sore from grinding them in my sleep. I hang the bloody bank clothes back up before taking a long shower. It revives me a bit, at least physically, but mentally I’m exhausted as the memories of last night trickle back in.

Mostly I’m ashamed by it all.

My heart quickens as I recall pulling the knife up short of cutting Painter. I want to throw up again. I have no idea why in the hell I even went to Gerald Painter’s house. No idea what the plan was. If I’d killed Gerald Painter, would the monster have kept me sober, or abandoned me when that first splash of blood arced up onto the ceiling? What would have happened to his wife and daughter if they’d walked in on me?

I tidy the kitchen, opening up and draining the remaining beer and wine down the sink. I remember what else Schroder said last night, then more importantly I remember what I said to him, and those memories seem to collide in a nice little way that jumbles everything up, and suddenly what my dad said to me as he walked away makes sense—It’s okay to listen to the voice.

I’m still a bit drunk, and I might be over the limit, but the world doesn’t sway around much as I drive through it. I find a park near the police station. My keys are waiting for me in the foyer behind the reception desk. They don’t ask me any questions about last night. All they do is ask for ID to make sure the keys belong to me. Schroder isn’t around. He’s probably at the beach somewhere or getting the last of his shopping done while Jodie lies cold in the ground. I realize I haven’t got Sam anything yet either for Christmas—me and Jodie always left that kind of thing till the last few days. There’s a guy out in front of the station with a sandwich board over his shoulders, he’s holding up a Bible and preaching his views in an abusive tone and I wonder if he knows Henry the homeless guy.

I drive out to the prison, passing a couple of malls on the way where traffic is spilling out from the parking lot onto the road, Christmas shopping in full bloom now, people pushing carts full of groceries. There’s a billboard twice the size of a bus staked into the ground on the edge of the city advertising a brand-new subdivision, calling it the suburb of the future. I wonder what that means. I wonder if the billboard means Christchurch is stuck in the past, or that the new subdivision will resemble something out of The Jetsons. There is smoke drifting up from the fields, farmers burning off waste. Large irrigation units are watering crops under the hot sun.

Sam’s bag is still packed in the backseat, full of goodies of death that I have to return to their rightful place. If Curious Schroder had taken a peek, things might have turned out very different.

I don’t phone ahead this time. I park the car in the same spot and the same woman I spoke to yesterday is here today, the same smile—a smile that could make beached whales roll back into the water—falters when she recognizes me.

“I’m here to see my father,” I say, as if there could be any one of a hundred reasons.

“He’s been waiting for you,” she says.

“But . . . I didn’t phone ahead.”

“Must be a miracle,” she says, but she’s wrong. I don’t know what to think about my dad figuring that I’d show back up. Mostly it pisses me off that he’s arrogant enough to think it, and I suspect perhaps arrogance is the wrong word since he was right.

“You listened to the voice,” he says, once the guard has escorted me down to the visitors’ room. It was the same guard from yesterday and he gave me the same rules as yesterday, reinforcing the no-yelling one twice. There are fewer people in the visitors’ room, which should make it seem bigger, but somehow it has the opposite effect. Fewer people makes it colder, stagnant, far more depressing, it makes it seem the walls are closing in and I can only imagine what the cells must be like. The Carver isn’t anywhere to be seen. Nobody pays me any interest.

I sit opposite him. He’s different from yesterday. Younger, if that’s possible—as though all this is rejuvenating him.

“Let me ask you something,” he says. “You think being an accountant gives you the credentials to know what the entire sum of a man is?”

“What?”

“See, twenty years in here, I have them. A man is made up of many parts,” he says. “There are things within his core. They are shaped by his family, his friends, shaped by the blood that runs through him. Of course the events shape a man too. Those in the past, and those unfolding in front of him. I am the sum of many things,” he says. “You, your sister, your mother, they were part of me, as well as my own family, growing up. But it wasn’t enough to make me complete. I thought it might be, I mean, when I first met your mother and when our family began, I thought it might be enough. But it wasn’t. You and me, we’re made up from the same components.”

“You’re full of shit,” I say.

“You’re my son,” he says. “You can’t deny much of what is inside me is inside you too.”

“You’re wrong. I can deny that because it isn’t true. You, me, we’re nothing alike.”

“Why’d you become an accountant?” he asks.

I lean back, unsure of his point. “I don’t know,” I say, shrugging.

“Want to know what I think?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re going to hear—after all, it’s why you came out here.”

“Then why ask,” I say, shaking my head. “Just spit it out.”

“It was to make me proud. You wanted to be an accountant like your dad.”

“Wait . . .”

“What for? So you can deny it.”

“Wait . . . you were an accountant?”

“You were nine years old when I was taken away. Don’t try pretending you have no idea what I used to do for a living. You’re just like your old man,” he says.

I don’t answer him. I don’t even want to think about it.

“And the voice confirms it. My darkness and your monster—they’re as similar as we are.”

“This is crazy,” I say. “You’re crazy. I don’t know why I came along. I hate myself for showing up yesterday. I’m going to go,” I say, but don’t make any motion.

“You came here to learn,” he says, “not to dismiss everything I say.”

“No. I came here because . . . ,” I trail off, suddenly unsure.

“Because you want answers. Everything that’s happened over the last week . . . You’re hearing the voice, aren’t you, Jack? It’s come back.”

My dad smiles. It’s the same smile I remember when I was a kid, and part of me, one small part of what makes up the whole of who I am—at least according to my dad—wants to hug him, wants to cry against his chest and ask him to make everything better.

“You’re here to ask for my help,” he adds.

I lean forward and the guard seems about to say something, but stops when he sees I’m not leaning forward for a hug or punch. I lower my voice. “You said it was a good thing the cops had no idea who killed Jodie. What did you mean by that?”

My dad glances up at the guard, who is openly staring at us, then my dad leans in too, and suddenly we’re pals, we’re whispering secrets—let the good times roll.

“It means what you think it means.”

“I think it means that you’re insane. That you couldn’t care less about what happened to my family. Or even to your family.”

“No you don’t,” he says. “It means what it means.”

“Which is?”

“It means those men are still out there, awaiting justice, and there isn’t any reason it has to be police justice.”

“Except for the law,” I say.

“Did the law step in to save your wife?” he asks. “Does the law warm up the other side of your bed at night? Does it give your daughter somebody to look up to? Make her school lunches and tuck her in at night and tell her to have sweet dreams? Is the law there to hold your life together, is it there to hold your daughter’s hand and tell her everything is going to be all right? Was it there to stop the blood dripping out of Jodie’s body when she hit the road?”

“Shut up,” I say. “I don’t want you talking about her like that.”

“Twenty years ago, son, you weren’t ready to kill that dog, but the darkness, your monster, made you do it. You killed that dog and the police came sniffing around with their questions. The darkness tries to make you impulsive, son, and twenty years ago your darkness got me arrested.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“It was that damn dog. You killed it, and you invited the police into our neighborhood. Do you remember you wrapped the steak in a plastic bag? You did, and when you gave the steak to the dog you dropped the plastic bag. The bag was from home, son, and it had my fingerprints on it. They matched the prints found with the prostitutes. The police got warrants to search houses in the street because they knew a killer lived there. They came with their questions and then they came back with more. They searched the garage, son. They looked for the mix of sharp things you put into that steak, and they found them. But they found other things too. Other . . . mementos.”

“You kept things from the victims?”

“Small things. Earrings, mostly. Sometimes a necklace. I couldn’t help myself. They came looking for fishhooks and nails and they found souvenirs of my women.”

“You were . . . wait, you were caught because of me?” I ask.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he says.

“Honestly, I don’t know if I care whether it was my fault or not,” I say. And it’s true. Am I glad my father was caught and could no longer kill? Yes. Am I upset he was taken away? Absolutely. I think about what it means. On one hand I’m a hero. I saved future victims. On the other hand I betrayed my family. If I hadn’t listened to the voice, if I hadn’t killed that dog, my sister, my mother, they’d still be alive. I killed them as surely as I killed that dog. Last week I sacrificed Jodie to save a bank teller. Twenty years ago I sacrificed my family to save other prostitutes. What does that make me? Does it make me a trader in death?

“Son, I’m not blaming you. You couldn’t know, and you were too young to control the darkness. Since that dog you killed, how many times have you heard it?”

“Why are you telling me any of this?”

“The men who did this, they have something inside them too, not a voice like we have, but something that makes them different. Each of them must have some criminal history,” he says. “Think about it, it’s obvious.”

I think about it. I think about what Schroder said last night, our nice friendly chat about people getting locked away and let right back out, our nice friendly chat about what a huge revolving door prison is these days.

“They’ve all spent time in jail,” he carries on. “Had to have. I’m betting some of them, if not all of them, probably met in jail. That’s what jail is, right? For me, it’s my home. I’ll never see outside of these walls again, but for these men it’s a place to learn new skills, make new friends.”

I stay silent, but continue to listen.

“Jail takes people in, it educates them in very, very dangerous ways, then it spits them back out into society. Most if not all of Jodie’s killers have walked in and out of these doors for various crimes.”

“And you know who these people are, right? It’s why you’re telling me. You want me to find these people to satisfy your darkness.”

“I think we can help each other out,” he says.

“No way. This is bullshit,” I say. “I’m not helping you out.”

“Would that be such a bad thing, son? Or would you rather let them go free? The voice can be a bad thing, son, but it can be a good thing too. You can use it to make the men who did this pay for what happened.”

“To satisfy your darkness?”

“No. To keep you sane. If you can’t control it the way I could, you’re going to hurt good people.”

“Hang on a second. Are you saying you controlled it all those years?”

“Of course. I gave in to it as well, in a way, but I controlled it. That’s why I never killed anybody who mattered.”

“You killed eleven prostitutes,” I say. “How can you say they don’t matter?”

“They don’t.”

“They do.”

“Compared to what? Compared to my own family? My friends? Our neighbors? They didn’t matter compared to anybody else I knew. Once you can control it, it’ll keep you from hurting good people. It’ll keep you from going off the rails and losing your daughter. The monster won’t go away now, not if it’s taking the steering wheel and making you do things. If you can’t control it, you’re going to be more like your old man than you ever thought possible. We’re blood men,” he says.

“What?”

“Other people, they’re attracted to looks, or money, nice jobs, all the hollow things in this world. Other men are attracted to tits or ass, women are attracted to smiles and eyes. Your monster, my darkness, they’re attracted to blood. It makes us blood men.”

He stands up, and suddenly I realize that this meeting, if that’s the word for it, is over. I stand up too. Dad reaches over and grabs my hands.

“No touching,” the guard says, and when Dad doesn’t let go, the guard comes over and separates us. “That’s enough for today,” the guard says, stamping his authority on us.

Dad walks away. “I love you, son,” he says, but he doesn’t turn back to say it. “No matter what happens now, remember that.”

I don’t know how to answer him, so I don’t. I walk away too. And it’s not until I’m in the parking lot that I look down at the folded piece of paper in my hand.