Paul Cleave - Blood Men

“You said you were doing this for free.”

“That was before all this. . blood.”

“Please, please, call an ambulance,” Bracken says, quieter now.

“Five thousand,” she says.

“You know who I am?” I ask her.

“What? Yeah, I guess. From the news.”

“You know what my father did, then, right?”

She nods.

“People think that kind of thing is in the blood. You want to test if they’re right?”

“Maybe I did say I’d do this for free.”

“Maybe you did.”

“Can I go now?”

“Make it quick.”

Before she can get out of the room, Schroder makes a low moan. He’s still casually leaning against the wall. He’s had a long day. His eyes half open, nothing fixed in his view yet, and then there I am, holding a dish towel on a dying man. He tries to say something but can’t.

“He did it,” the woman says, pointing at me. “He did it,” she repeats, and then she is gone.

The dish towel has soaked through with blood and I find another. It soaks through immediately too. I look at my watch. The hour is nearly up and I haven’t heard back about the meeting.

“An ambulance,” Bracken says, and his eyes are only half open now.

I take out the cell phone and start to call for help and then end the call. Instead I dial the number of the man who has my daughter. Bracken is suffering but it’s his own fault and my daughter comes first. It begins to ring.

Only it sounds weird, like it’s ringing in both ears, a continuous ringing.

It takes me another second to figure out why. I look at Bracken and he’s got his eyes locked on all the blood. He’s wishing he’d turned his cell phone off. Instead it’s ringing from his pants pocket. I hang up and Bracken’s phone stops. I dial it again and it starts back up. I hang up. Bracken’s phone stops ringing, and I put the phone away, and any chance of calling an ambulance goes with it.

Bracken doesn’t say a thing. Everything that seemed odd the moment I got here doesn’t seem odd anymore. He watches as I take the cell phone out of his pants. There are a thousand things all fighting to be said, but in this moment not one of them can be heard. This man took my daughter and he has her somewhere. His eyes are open all the way again. Blood is still draining out of the wound.

“Please, please,” he says, his words slurring slightly, “call am-ambulance.”

“Where’s my daughter?”

“Please. .”

“Is she here?”

“Help me and I’ll tell you where she is.”

I slap him across his face. Hard. “That’s not how it works. You tell me where she is, then I help you.”

He clenches his eyes shut, his mouth in an open grimace, his teeth tight against each other, revealing an overbite that I’ll take the steak tenderizer to if he doesn’t talk. His entire face has caved in somewhat, as if he’s lost ten kilos in the last two minutes. Blood and now a mixture of urine too is pooling on the floor beneath him. It smells bad.

“Where is she?”

He doesn’t answer, just keeps the grimace and the tight facial features of a man going through something very intense. It’s pain and fear and maybe something spiritual too.

“Hey,” I say, and I slap his face again.

He shakes his head and a moment later he doesn’t seem to know where he is.

“Tell me where she is and I stop the bleeding. Schroder calls for an ambulance and you get fixed up. Quicker you talk, quicker I help you.”

His eyes focus on me. “Take the, take. .”-he sucks in a deep breath-“take the handcuffs off the cop first. You free him then I talk.”

“You think he’ll protect you?”

“He won’t want to. . but he has to.” His face turns into a grimace again as he rides another wave of pain.

“Are you the son of a bitch who shot my wife?”

“No.”

“Who, then? Give me a name. Is this the person who has my daughter?”

He doesn’t answer. The pool of blood is still spreading, but not as quickly now.

“Answer me, damn it. How do I get her back?”

“Help me,” he says, his voice low. His eyes focus on something above me before rolling into the back of his head. I slap his face and they roll back down and stare right at me.

“My daughter,” I say.

“My daughter,” he repeats, almost whispering now.

“Where’s Sam?”

“Sam,” he says, then he closes his eyes. I slap him but they don’t open back up. I check him for a pulse but there’s nothing.

“Wake up!” I slap him harder. “Please,” I say, grabbing his shoulders, “tell me where she is.”

The dead man doesn’t answer. I look over at Schroder before sitting on the floor and resting my head in my hands with no idea at all what to do next. I think about what Dad said, about having to learn to control the monster otherwise it would make me do things I didn’t want to do. Did the monster do this?

No. Of course not.

You knew she wanted to hurt him. Why leave her alone with him and a large knife? You knew it’d play out this way.

No. I didn’t.

Yeah? How else you think it was going to go?

I lean forward and remove Schroder’s gag.

“Listen to me, Edward,” he says. “I know how it must have gone down. You snapped, and you certainly didn’t mean to kill him. You were trying to get information, and you were right about Bracken, he knew where your daughter was. Let me help you.”

“I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me that cut him.”

“Then who? Who was that woman?”

“She was nobody.”

“Come on, Edward, it’s time to stop all of this. Too many people are getting hurt.”

I put the gag back into his mouth. He doesn’t struggle-he’s resigned to the fact there’s nothing he can do except wait things out. I get up and pace the living room, covering a few hundred meters over the same piece of carpet while I try and work it all out.

Bracken has two cell phones, it turns out. He has a normal one, with what appear to be work and family contacts. Then he has the second one, the one that rang earlier. There are only two numbers in the memory, with no name attached to either of them. One is for the phone I’ve been using. I scroll down to the other number and press CALL. It rings three times and then it’s picked up.

“I’m still waiting,” a man says.

“I have the money.”

“Money?”

“Please, I can. .”

The line goes dead. I call the number again but he’s switched off the phone.

I keep pacing. Thinking about it.

“I know how it happened,” I say to Schroder. “Bracken planned the whole thing, and when they split the money up they gave Kingsly his share. When Bracken found him this morning he took the money. Instead of breaking it evenly among his partners, he told them whoever killed Kingsly must have taken it. That way he could keep it all. There never was any plan to pay to get my daughter back. It was a charade. He stashed Sam somewhere with no intention of me paying to get her back, but as an act so the others would think I had the money. Bracken only guessed I’d killed Kingsly because the media kept speculating that I was capable of it. I don’t even know if Sam’s alive anymore. I have all this but nobody to trade it with,” I say, and I open up the bag I found under the floor. It’s full of identical bricks of cash that I found but didn’t take last night. I don’t even know the exact amount. It’s all blood money that I don’t want, but it may still be my only chance of finding Sam. Schroder doesn’t nod or shake his head or offer anything useful. He’s watching a man falling apart. “I bet Bracken was going to kill the guy who has Sam. It would tie up a loose end and give him more money. They were going to kill me too.”