Paul Cleave - Blood Men

“Killing Kingsly, that was a bad thing, but you helped defend the city by doing it. What you have to do is say he attacked you and you defended yourself. A jury isn’t going to convict you on that, not when they know this son of a bitch helped kill your wife. Some scriptwriter will come along and ask to make a movie about it. And me-if it’d been my family that was hurt, I’d have done the same thing. You can’t keep denying you were there, Edward, the blood will prove it. And these people after you, they’ll keep coming. Let me take you into custody. Let me help you.”

Edward turns his gaze from Schroder to the ceiling and stares at it for a long moment.

“Bring me my daughter first. I want to see her,” Edward answers, “then we’ll talk.”

The curtain opens up and a nurse pushes forward a cart full of bandages and gauze pads. She smiles at Edward. “Looks nasty,” she says, “but we’ll get you up and about in no time. This won’t take long,” she adds.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Schroder says.

“Bring me Sam.”

“I will. I promise,” he answers, hoping it isn’t already too late.

It’s another messy crime scene, the kind of scene where the killers had no real idea what they were doing. The house most of the action took place in belongs to a family with a couple of kids, who were lucky enough to be at the beach instead of at home. Schroder knows it easily could have been a whole lot different-knows the medical examiner could just as easily have been sending more than one station wagon. There’s broken glass out the front and broken glass around the back and a busted-up door inside and blood in various places on the driveway and the sidewalk. There are holes in fences and in the side of a parked car from the shots fired.

The street has been closed off, limiting the view to only the neighbors. Even the reporters are being held back, their cameras in range but not much for them to see. The victim has been covered up, and the shape of the body shielded by patrol cars. It makes for a nice backdrop for the cameras, but nothing more. The car the two men stole and that Hunter escaped in has already been loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck and is on its way to the police station to be examined.

“So the shooter killed his partner,” Schroder says, and Sheldon, the medical examiner, nods slowly, as if scared any quick movement will tear a muscle.

“One shot in the face,” he says. “One shot in each hand.”

“Confirms what witnesses said.”

“Hell of a way to go,” Sheldon says.

“We’ve seen much worse. Would he have survived the injuries from being run over?”

“Left leg completely severed, right leg half severed, half crushed. I’d have rated his chances as somewhere between extremely slim and none.”

Unable to take his partner with him, and worried they could be identified, the shooter had taken steps to try and hide the identity of the dying man by blasting away his face and fingerprints. It didn’t work: the forensics team have already emptied the victim’s pockets, turning up some coins, a cigarette lighter, and a packet of smokes-all of which have clear fingerprints on them. They’ll have a name within the next two hours. Plus they’ve got the car with another whole set of prints to narrow down. He looks over at the bump in the canvas sheet over the body where the severed leg is. The very bottom of it, with a shoe still attached, is sticking out from underneath, the canvas not big enough to hide the blood on the street. It looks like the guy was attacked by a bear.

“Jesus,” Landry says, coming over as Sheldon leaves. “The Hunter family must really be cursed.”

“Where are we on the interviews?”

“Still working on it. Surveillance from the vault doesn’t suggest anything one way or the other. Just shows four panicked people stuffing money into bags,” Landry says.

“Yeah, well, combined with the names we’re going to get from this, I think by the end of the day we’re going to know who all the players are. No sign of the in-laws and daughter?” Schroder asks.

“None. You really think these men have her?”

“Doubtful. I think they’re somewhere completely unaware of the danger they could be in. Anyway, I don’t see any real reason for the robbers to go after Hunter’s daughter. It gets them nothing-all it does is put them at risk.”

“And Hunter?”

“He’s freaked out, but he’s doing okay.”

“He give anything up about Kingsly?”

“Nothing,” Schroder answers.

“You think he did it?”

“The bank robbers sure as hell think so. Both Hunters in one day. We have to find his daughter. Hunter said he’d talk once we got her safe.”

“Every patrol car in the city has a description of them. We’ll have her soon.”

“I hope so,” Schroder says, “for everybody’s sake.”

They wheel me into another room when the stitches are done. Each stitch as it went in made me stronger. There are three other men in here in different states of pain and misery. One has both legs in casts, suspended above him. A man in his seventies is snoring, a bald patch with stitches on the side of his head. The third man is reading a magazine and coughing every fifteen seconds. There are two cops outside the door, either there to protect me or to stop me from fleeing. I think about my dad-he’s in a different ward with cops of his own.

My leg hurts a lot. After an hour, a nurse comes in and holds up a chart with five “happy faces” on it. The first face is yellow and smiling. The last one is purple and has a large frown and an upside-down smile. The three faces between range in color from yellow to purple, their expressions from somewhat happy to pretty much unhappy.

“Point to the one that represents how you feel,” she says.

I look for the happy face of the guy who had his wife murdered last week but he isn’t on there. “Just give me some painkillers,” I say, “and I’ll be fine.”

The nurse, who is overweight with breasts the size of bowling balls, gives me one more chance to get it right. “Point,” she repeats.

I point to the smiley face. “Can I go now?”

“Soon,” she says. “Now take these,” and she hands me a small plastic cup with pills in it. I shake the two pills into my palm and she gives me a cup of water. “Drink,” she says, as if I couldn’t figure out the next step by myself. Then she takes my blood pressure and seems neither pleased nor concerned by the result. I don’t understand the numbers.

“We’ve found your daughter,” Schroder says, coming into the ward, and for the briefest of seconds I’m terrified, absolutely shit-scared because I don’t know how he’s going to finish that sentence. They found her at the park and she was playing on a swing with Mr. Fluff ’n’ Stuff, or they found her covered in blood with her throat cut? Schroder’s pause is so brief, so hardly noticeable, but for me it lasts a lifetime. “They’d gone to the movies. They’re at home now.”

“So. . so they’re okay?”

“They’re okay. But they thought it might scare her too much to bring her down here to the hospital. We’ve got a man at their house to keep an eye on them until we get there.”

“Just the one?”

“It’s Christmas Eve,” he says. “One’s all we can spare, but it will be enough. You’re the target, not them.”

He tosses me a pair of pants that are old but are at least in better shape than mine. He also has a pair of sneakers that aren’t full of blood, so I don’t complain. The nurse with the bowling-ball breasts comes back and unhooks the IV from my arm.

“Ten minutes,” Schroder says. “That’s the deal. I give you ten minutes with your daughter, and then you’re coming to the station to tell me everything.”