Paul Cleave - Blood Men

“And this will make it better? Killing him will bring her back?”

“It’s not about bringing people back, son.”

“You think it’s about feeding the monster?”

“That’s what it’s always about.”

“For you, maybe. But not for me.”

“This is the man who shot Jodie! Damn it, son, don’t you get that? This is the man who killed your wife. This is the path he took that got your daughter killed. My granddaughter.” He takes a step back so he’s out of range from the man, reaches into his belt, and drags out a knife about half the length of his forearm and hands it over to me. “Now do something about it!”

The man on my floor doesn’t even move. There’s a shotgun pointing at him and two sets of eyes and all he has the strength to do is look down.

Do it! the monster says.

“No.”

“It’ll help,” Dad says.

Listen to him.

“ Listen to the monster,” Dad says, struggling to keep the gun pointed ahead while holding the knife. He starts to lower it. “It’s telling you to do what I say, isn’t it.”

“This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. It’s Christmas Day. I’m going to spend it with Sam and Jodie.”

“Son. .”

“This is the way it’s supposed to be. You, him, the monster, none of you are supposed to be here.”

I step past them and out the door. There aren’t any kids in the street now. Nobody to watch. Christmas lights are flashing from behind windows and from on top of roofs, cars are hidden away in garages and parked up driveways and people are tucking themselves away for the night, tired from too much food, too much sun, too much running around visiting family members and chasing after children. Dad turns toward me. I wonder what Nat and Diana are doing tonight, whether their day has been broken up by small pieces of routine where, for one or two seconds out of every thousand, they forget what happened to Jodie and Sam, only to have it crash back down on them.

“It’s in the blood,” Dad says. “Don’t you feel it? We’re the same, son. We’re blood men!”

“I keep telling you, Dad, we really are nothing alike. More than you’ll ever know.”

“You’re wrong,” he says. “Listen to your voice, Edward,” he says, calling me by that name for the first time. “Take the knife. Let the voice guide you,” he says, and I take the knife from him. Killing the man inside, that’s not the way to go about bringing my family back.

There’s another way.

He’s not so sure that taking Edward Hunter into custody is the right way to go, and he’s equally unsure whether leaving him alone is the way to go. Barlow warned him a few days ago and even though Schroder didn’t dismiss the man, he certainly could have paid more attention. He can’t ignore the fact that everything that has happened since that meeting, all the deaths, part of the responsibility for that sits with him. Not this time though-he’ll pick Hunter up and, no matter how bad he feels for him, he won’t let emotion get in the way. It’s Christmas Day and he’s about to pick up a man who’s lost his wife and daughter because a psychiatrist with a comb-over and an ex-wife and a nice pool told him so.

“Jesus,” he mutters. There has to be another way. Barlow agreed that if Schroder could get Hunter into custody, he would come and speak to him tonight and try to get a read on his mental condition. As for where Jack Hunter might go, Barlow had no idea.

“Justify it as not really an arrest,” Barlow had said to him on the way out the door, “but forced therapy. Give me two hours with him and I’ll give you some options. The alternative is to sympathize with him for everything that’s happened and do nothing, and if he kills himself or somebody else tonight then those ghosts are with you.”

Schroder is passing over the alternative and heading straight to Hunter’s house. Christmas Day isn’t exactly turning out the way he planned. Thankfully his wife has been good about it. She’s the kind of woman who puts things into perspective-and missing Christmas Day with her husband didn’t amount to much when compared to what Edward Hunter was missing.

There’s not as much traffic on the road as there was last night, but it’s still enough to hold him up as he drives through town. People in their teens and twenties are searching for somewhere to be, the bars and nightclubs catering to them. The streets are lit up with neon and fluorescents, and he can’t imagine anything worse than being nineteen years old again.

He reaches Edward’s house. There’s nothing peculiar about the way it looks, no cars parked up the driveway or out front, no broken windows, no open doors, but something about it gives him a bad feeling. Thirty seconds later that bad feeling is confirmed when he steps out of his car and sees the blood on the driveway. It leads toward the door. Two trails of it, one heading one way, the other coming back. He calls for backup. He hasn’t had great experiences of late entering people’s houses, but he goes ahead and enters this one.

“I first made the newspapers when I was nine years old. I made them in every city across the country, most of them on the first page. I even made them internationally. In them I was black and white, blurred a little, my face turned in to my father’s chest, people surrounding us. From then on I was shown on TV, in magazines, in more and more papers, always the same photo. I never wanted any of it, I tried to avoid it, but the option wasn’t mine.”

I tell her this but she doesn’t seem interested. I tell her about my mum and my sister but the words go through her. Her eyes are closed and there’s blood all over her. Twenty minutes ago her life was much different, twenty minutes ago she was settling in for the night, a pile of DVDs on the coffee table and a Christmas tree full of blazing lights. I take the car toward town, traffic is thin, everywhere is shut. I’m wearing the clothes from the bank again, the ones with Jodie’s blood on them. I picked them up on the way. This is why I kept them, I realize now. For this moment.

“I was ten years old when the trial began. It was a circus. My mum was still alive, but my sister and me were struggling. Kids would tease us at school. At home, Mum was always yelling at us when she was sober, and crying when she was drunk, and whatever of those two states she was in, you always wished it was the other. Soon the pills and the booze took their toll, but not as quick as she wanted, and when they couldn’t finish the job she used a razor blade. I don’t know how long it took for her to bleed out. She might still even have been alive when we found her. I held my sister’s hand and we watched her pale body, the yelling and the crying gone now.”

The woman is conscious enough to cry, the tears mingling with the blood. There’s a lot of blood but not a lot of damage. It’s all from a head wound. The thing about head wounds is they bleed. A lot. Blood has soaked into the seat, and the woman has wet herself, making it seem like there is much more blood in the footwell than there really is. I tell her about Belinda, about how my sister became a drug addict and died when she was nineteen.

“I was the last of my family,” I say. “Dad’s monster took them all away.”

I keep the car at a constant speed, obeying the law; Edward Hunter was a law-abiding citizen who never did anything wrong in the past and who is now about to correct his future. We reach the center of town. Last time I was here I was running from the police.

“There are people who think that I’m destined to be a man of blood too,” I say, “that the same blood runs through both of us. They’re wrong,” I say.