Paul Cleave - Blood Men

There’s an old school desk with a shaving mirror on top of it, it has thin sprinkles of white powder and a razor blade on it. A supermarket cart next to the window is full of plastic bags packed with dried-out marijuana. A shelf hammered into the wall on a slight angle has tobacco papers, tobacco, scissors, and tinfoil all looking ready to slide onto the floor. Posters of muscle cars and naked women hang on the walls, along with a mirror with writing stenciled over it, telling me what alcohol Kingsly loves to drink.

Tying it all together is a dead man on the floor with his eyes wide open and his teeth clenched tightly on a bloody stump of tongue. The carpet is threadbare and has what might be grease stains on it, as if somebody rolled a hundred-piece KFC meal back and forth picking up the dust instead of a vacuum cleaner.

I find the bathroom and take off the ruined glove and run my hand under the tap and try to wash my blood away and Kingsly’s blood away but more blood keeps appearing. I pull the glove back on and wrap a pillowcase from the bedroom around it, knowing the infection from this house, this neighborhood, is inside me now.

In the kitchen I go through the cupboards, finding bleach in the laundry. I twist off the top and head through the house, splashing bleach over all the places where I’ve dripped blood, ruining the DNA-at least that’s what I hope is happening. It smells awful, a sharp acrid smell that burns my nostrils. I tug the knife out of the wall. It no longer has a serrated edge near the top, the metal has blackened and melted there. A gargling air bubble appears on Kingsly’s lips. I watch it, waiting for it to pop, but it doesn’t, it slowly deflates, as if he’s sucking the air back in. I pour bleach over the knife and carry it into the kitchen, then wrap it in a dish towel. My daughter’s bag is by the front door. It’s been turned upside down and the contents spilled out. Did Kingsly know he was looking at a killing kit?

The smell of bleach makes me nauseous and I breathe into the crook of my elbow to try and cope. I make a more detailed search of the house, hunting for anything that might give me the other names but come up short. Jesus, I don’t even know if Kingsly was involved. He may have been. I spend little time questioning how bad I feel about the accident, because that’s what it was-him getting killed-it was an accident. I decide that I’m still undecided. That is until I think about his past, the drug convictions, the armed robberies, and the more I think about them the less I care about what happened.

They all going to be accidents?

Maybe. I don’t know.

There is no computer. No address book. I go through every scrap of paper I can find, sure there has to be more names here, and the longer I can’t find anything, the more despondent I become. And angry. This was my link to these men. And I’ve killed it. I also don’t find a balaclava, but if he was one of the six men in the bank, he would have thrown it away by now.

You’re new at this, but you’re doing great. Think. Think. How would these men communicate with him?

“A cell phone,” I say.

Taking care not to step in the blood, I crouch over Kingsly and pat down the sides of his jeans. There’s a lump in his right pocket. I reach inside and find a cell phone and a set of car keys. I splash more bleach over him before heading out the back door, wiping down the handles on the way, my daughter’s bag slung over my shoulder.

I check Kingsly’s car. It’s an old Holden that’s almost twice as big as any modern sedan. I’m careful not to get blood or fingerprints over the door. There’s a metal strip on the passenger seat, about the same size as a crowbar, but much thinner. It’s one of those tools a thief uses to pop the lock in a car. I go through the glove box but it’s as useful as going through the house. I check the trunk: there are some tools in there but nothing else.

I get back to my car and I’m all full of surprises-surprised my car is still there, surprised that it’s almost four a.m., surprised that the monster inside me for the moment hasn’t anything else to say. I swing by the cemetery on the way home and have the same amount of luck finding my wife’s grave as I did the night before.

It’s their first serious lead.

Fifteen one-hundred-dollar notes are hanging from a line strung across the back of the laundry. A tray of water and bleach next to them. Most of the notes are stained in red ink, the bleach doing nothing to clean them up, but a few are okay, the serial numbers matching the notes taken from the bank. Others are damaged from the small explosion, perhaps too badly in some cases. These are from the blocks of cash that had the ink packs inserted next to them.

Shane Kingsly has a rap sheet going back almost twenty years. It began with shoplifting and ended with armed robbery, the years in between littered with burglary charges. In fact the few times Kingsly hasn’t been in trouble were the times he’s spent in jail.

Schroder already knows none of the neighbors have seen anything. He already knew before any of them were questioned. This isn’t what he’d call a police-friendly neighborhood. Nobody here is opening their doors and offering information and coffee and kind helpful words.

The house is a death trap, and according to the ME, Kingsly would have survived the attack if not for the overload of electricity. Schroder imagines living in a place like this but doesn’t imagine it for too long-the mere thought of it is enough to make him want to go and take a bath. Cables are running from the fuse box to the marijuana room where they were powering heat and light. The house smells of dirt and in one room the air is so dry he’s worried it’s going to ignite. In another room it’s cold and damp even though it’s over thirty degrees outside. Nearly every wall in the house has mold growing on it, and every light fitting is covered in cobwebs.

“What do you think?” Landry asks. “A drug thing?”

Landry looks tired, with dark bags beneath his eyes. He looks in need of this Christmas break more than anybody.

“Unlikely. They’d have taken the drugs. If Kingsly was part of the robbery, then whoever killed him took his share of the cash, assuming it was here to begin with. So either it’s one of his own crew, or somebody else.”

“You think Hunter?”

“I don’t want it to be him, but there’s something else.” He leads Landry down the hall to the back door. Outside, next to the step, is a solid-aluminium box with walls an inch thick, big enough to fit a soccer ball.

“What is it?” Landry asks. “Some kind of safe?”

“There’s no lock on it. Doesn’t even have a door. Just a lid. Open it up.”

Landry lifts the top. “Jesus, is that blood?” he asks.

“Dye.”

“Dye? From the exploding dye pack?”

“Yep.”

“So the bank robbers isolated the bundles with the dye packs to protect the rest of the cash,” Landry says.

“They came prepared. They must have had the box inside the van, and they knew they had only a couple of minutes to transfer the dangerous cash into it.”

“They really knew their stuff,” Landry says.

“Only it doesn’t make sense,” Schroder says. “Why not throw the cash out the window? Why go to the effort to keep it, and even then, why not leave the metal box with the van? Why bring it here?”

“Maybe they’re planning on using it again?”

“Maybe, but I don’t think that’s it,” Schroder answers. “There were hundreds of bricks of cash thrown into those bags, how do you think they knew which ones had the dye unit in it?”

“Maybe they used some kind of metal detector?”