Paul Cleave - Blood Men

I wonder what my dad would do if he were still free and knew he was being followed. This must have happened to him too, near the end, when the noose tightened. He probably wouldn’t even have felt the pressure.

It takes fifteen minutes to get to my in-laws.’ I pull up in the driveway and the sedan drives past. I get out and knock on the front door but nobody answers. I get my cell phone out and try calling again but still no answer. I walk around the house, through the side gate and into the backyard. I look through the windows for turned-over furniture and blood on the carpet, holding my breath as I move from one window to another, Schroder’s warning coming to life in my imagination-but there’s nothing out of place. I try the door. It’s locked. I head to the garage and put my face against the window, and when I pull back I can see the reflection of the grey sedan pulling up. It sits there with the engine running. I turn toward it. The windows are up and the sun reflects off them so I can’t see inside, not until the passenger-side window is wound down. A pale face with a sunburned nose looks at me from behind a pair of dark sunglasses.

“Eddie Hunter?” he says, and the way he asks it makes me nervous. If these were cops, they’d know who I was. They’d know where I’ve just led them. Reporters would know too.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“We know who killed your wife,” he says, and my body instantly freezes. “For the right price we can tell you.”

“What?”

“Nothing in this world is free,” he says. “I got something here to show you, it’ll prove what I’m saying,” he says.

I take another step forward, a voice in my head yelling at me that this is a mistake, that I’m being lured closer. I take a step sideways, away from the car, and the barrel of a shotgun appears in the open window and fires.

It’s a matter of priorities. If one of the bank tellers was an inside man, they’ll know soon enough. Schroder is confident a series of interviews will get them some answers before the day is out. Hell, maybe the whole thing will be over before Christmas Day even begins.

He drives back to Kingsly’s house with Landry and drops him off. The plan is for Landry to get started on the interviews while Schroder goes back out to the prison. The trip there earlier didn’t net them much. They found medication in Hunter’s cell. The warden said he was given two pills to take every day. Adding up the pills they found suggests he stopped taking his meds the day of the robbery. Instead of flushing them, he was saving them. Maybe, Schroder thinks, Hunter was planning on building a stockpile to take the whole lot at once.

When he gets back to the prison, Theodore Tate is already waiting for him. Tate used to be a cop until a few years ago, when he turned private investigator, and after both those things he became a criminal. The visiting room is empty except for Schroder and Tate and one prison guard against the far wall, hardly paying any attention. It’s been a few months since he last saw Tate. He hasn’t changed much, except his hair is shorter and he’s lost a bit of weight.

“Thanks for doing this, Tate,” he says, sitting down opposite him.

“I was surprised you called,” Tate says. “I mean, in the beginning I was. I thought you were calling to check up on me, to see how I was doing. It was a surprise, a nice one even. Then it turns out you wanted something.”

“Look, Tate, I’ve been meaning to come and see you for some time now,” he says, and even though he means it, he knows he would never actually have done it. There’s nothing worse than seeing a fellow cop in jail-even if he isn’t a fellow cop anymore. “I just, you know, didn’t get around to it. You know how it is.”

“Actually I don’t. You could educate me. We could swap places and see how it goes.”

“I understand why you’re bitter, but it’s not my fault you’re in here.”

“I realize that. Only sometimes it’s easier if I can blame somebody else except myself. Hell, maybe it’s even therapeutic,” he says, smiling at that last bit. “So-what’s new? How’s Christchurch? Is it still broken?”

“It’s not broken,” Schroder says, and he really believes that. Really, absolutely, almost believes that.

“Yeah, well, I think it’s broken no matter what side of the bars you’re on. So what is it you want, Carl?”

“Your help. You heard about Hunter, right?”

“Everybody heard,” Tate says.

“You heard anything more than that? Like who stabbed him?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“I think he was stabbed because he got hold of some names.”

“What names?”

“I think he was putting together a list of the men who robbed the bank last week.”

“And that got him stabbed?”

“Giving those names to his son got him stabbed,” Schroder answers.

“And you think the son is going to go after these people?”

“I’m pretty sure he already has. One of the robbers was found dead this morning. The victim drove the van. Timing fits perfectly. Dad gives son a name, that guy shows up dead, the next day Dad gets stabbed. The scene this morning was pretty messy. He got killed by somebody who had no idea what they were doing. Whole thing could have been an accident, or a fluke, the way it played out.”

“You think the son is capable of it?”

“You tell me,” Schroder says. “You think it’s possible for a man to kill in revenge for his family?”

“Depends on the man,” Tate says.

“Well, this man has a father who’s a serial killer. His shrink came to see me yesterday. He thinks Jack Hunter suffers from an illness that could be passed to the son. Paranoid schizophrenia-he says it can be hereditary. Says it’s a medical thing. He told me Edward Hunter has the potential to be a real bad guy. I wasn’t so sure, not then-but now I think so.”

“So arrest him.”

“We will, once we have more evidence. Landry tried to bluff him out saying we had a witness, but he didn’t go for it. We have blood, though. That’ll tell us.”

“So where do I fit into this equation of yours?”

“Two different ways. You can find out who stabbed Hunter. That might lead us back to the bank crew. Or maybe you can get some names for us. Hunter managed it, so maybe you can manage it too.”

“Nobody’s going to talk to me.”

“There’s more of a chance they’ll talk to you than to me.”

“So why am I doing this for you? Why stick my neck out like that?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do.”

“For you, maybe. Not for me. My best chance of survival in here is to keep a low profile, which is damn hard to do when there are others in here I arrested back in the day.”

“There’s a girl in the equation. Edward Hunter has a daughter.”

Tate slowly nods. “And you were waiting to lay that on me, figuring it would work.”

“Did it?”

Tate stands up and Schroder follows suit. “I’ll see what I can find.”

I drop down, the shotgun exploding, and I’m back at the bank all over again, the air-conditioning replaced by real air, the houseplants replaced by bushes and trees, the six men replaced by two men in a car. A hole appears in the garage door about the same time my knees crash into the concrete.

The car door starts to open. I have nowhere to run, I have no idea what to do. But then I realize I’m not alone, I have my monster with me and he knows what to do. We’re already in action. I get up and run forward, the monster leading the way, the monster in full control and now I’m the one along for the ride. We get closer to the car. To me this seems the wrong way to be going, but I’m in no position to argue. A leg comes out of the car and touches the sidewalk: jeans and a black steel-capped boot. I drop down and ram the entire weight of my body into the door, leading with my shoulder, slamming it hard on the leg. The guy inside yells out and the shotgun drops somewhere inside the car, buying me a couple of seconds. I don’t wait around. I run up the street, crossing behind the car, making it difficult for them to fire on me.