Paul Cleave - Blood Men

“Yes, but why? Let me think. . are you sure Jack Hunter knew about this woman?”

“I never said I was sure. Could be either way.”

“Interesting,” he says, then doesn’t follow it up. Schroder can almost hear his thinking process. “This woman, he may have taken her for a different reason.”

“What other reason is there?”

“It all started with her. This is the woman Edward called out to save. Don’t you see? When he saved her, he condemned his wife to death. That in turn condemned his daughter to death. He blames her, Detective, and if he’s in as fragile a state as I believe him to be, then he sees her as the catalyst for everything he’s lost. Maybe. . yes, yes, maybe he thinks he can right the wrongs that have happened since then.”

“Right the wrongs? You mean he thinks that by killing her he can turn back the clock and save his family?”

“It’s possible. And if this is the case, then you’ll find he’s taken her to-”

“The bank,” Schroder finishes, already running toward his car now.

“Exactly.”

“Jesus,” Schroder whispers, and he turns on the sirens and races back into town.

I get out and move around the car. I open the door and drag the woman out. She’s confused. She’s scared. This is nothing new for her-she’s been confused and scared before, in fact she’s been confused and scared in this very place.

She stumbles and falls down and cuts her knees on the glass. She tries talking to me but I can’t hear her over the alarm. I can hear a few of the words and can fill in the rest of them myself. She’s telling me over and over that she’s sorry, but it doesn’t matter, not now. Her being sorry isn’t going to fix things. I pick her up and drag her to where she almost died last time. The bank alarm keeps going off, and I wonder if things would have worked out different last week if the alarm had gone off like this when the men came into the bank. I get her standing in the same place but when I let her go she collapses back into a heap. Everything is the same as the last time I saw it, only the people are missing. Same posters advertising low interest rates, pictures of happy people paying off twenty-five-year mortgages or borrowing money to buy a boat. The hole in the ceiling has been repaired, the broken office window replaced, the bullet holes in the wall plastered over and repainted, and all the blood cleaned up. No security guard, no front windows now, nobody with a shotgun. Nobody else to call out wait, to stop this woman getting killed, putting his own family in the firing line, nobody with cell phones to capture footage for the news.

“Try to stand up,” I say, but she doesn’t. I guess it’s okay. I can’t reenact everything. It’s not like I have a shotgun. Just a knife. It’ll all work out the same way. This woman for Jodie. For Sam. The woman is crying, sobbing hard now.

“It’s the only way,” I say.

Do it. Feel it. Feed the urge.

I lean down over her. I hold the knife tightly.

Come on, get it done.

There are footsteps on the broken glass, loud enough to be heard over the alarm. Detective Schroder comes to within a few meters of us, his palms raised to me. He studies the woman before focusing on the knife in my hand.

“Put the knife down, Edward.” He has to yell to be heard.

I move behind her and hold it against her throat. She’s shaking and she’s warm and it’ll be over soon, it’ll be the way it was meant to be.

“I can’t,” I yell back.

“Please, please, help me,” the woman says, but her voice is low and I don’t think Schroder can hear her over the alarm.

“Edward, put down the knife.”

“Why are you even here? You weren’t here last time.”

“I’m here because I don’t want anybody else to die.”

“How come you got here so fast? Last week nobody showed up for five minutes, this week you’re here within seconds. It’s not fair.”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Schroder says. “And it won’t work. You can’t fix the past, Edward. I know you called out to save this woman and she lived and Jodie died and then Sam died, but you can’t bring them back.”

“All I have to do is make sure it never happened,” I say. “All I have to do is never call out.”

“There aren’t any takebacks in this world, Edward. No resets.”

“Doing this will make everything the way it was supposed to be.”

“I wish it were that easy, Eddie, I really do. Life would be so much easier. But it isn’t. It is what it is, and killing her won’t bring Jodie or Sam back.”

“I know it won’t. It will stop them from ever being hurt.”

“Listen to yourself.”

Listen to me. Kill her. It’s in your nature. It’s who you are.

“Is this what you want?” he carries on. “To become your dad?”

Daddy’s a ghost.

“I’m nothing like him.”

“You keep telling me you hate what he is, that you hate the rest of us for thinking that you’ll become him.”

“I’m nothing like him,” I repeat.

“Take a look at yourself.”

“This isn’t about any of that. It’s not about what my dad was.”

“You’re right, Edward, you’re absolutely right. This here-this is about you. It’s about what you’re doing, about what you’ve already done. You think you’re nothing like your father, but look at what you’ve done tonight. The man who killed Jodie, you got him, Edward. You really, really got him.”

“I’m glad I killed him,” I say, and it’s true. I’m a trader in death.

“And your father? Are you glad you killed him too?”

“He betrayed me,” I say of this man who was never my father either way, certainly not for the last twenty years, and certainly not now. “He used me. He used Jodie. All of my suffering was a tool to him. So yeah, he deserved it too.” I can still feel the knife going into his chest, can still see the look on his face. I can still feel Belinda’s arm around me as we sat on the bathroom floor staring at my mother in the bathtub all those years ago. Blood bubbled up out of my father’s mouth instead of words and I thought I could hear air hissing out of the wound in his chest as he stumbled back from the front door of my house into the hallway, he stumbled and fell, and the darkness my father spent his life with finally claimed him. The man he brought to me looked up, and there was hope in his eyes, keen hope that sparkled as bright as a diamond and then just as quickly faded to coal when I put the same knife that had been inside my father into him as well. I put that knife in over and over and when I wanted to stop I couldn’t, not right away.

“It’s over, Edward. You need to let her go and come with us.”

“I can fix this,” I say, and Schroder goes blurry and I realize I’m crying. “I can fix this.”

“No. You can’t.”

Yes you can, Eddie. Drag that knife back quick and deep and things will be better, much better.

“Don’t be your father,” he says. “Put down the knife. Let her go. She didn’t do anything to hurt you. You saved her life, you did what nobody else had the courage to do, and the rest of it, none of it is your fault. You didn’t kill Jodie, you didn’t kill Kingsly, you didn’t get Sam killed. You’re a good man trying to do the best he can in a world that’s taken everything away from him. Don’t take everything away from her,” he says, nodding toward the bank teller. “Is this what Jodie would want of you?” he asks.

My body tightens and I squeeze my eyes shut, only for a second, only long enough to picture my wife falling forward out on the street. In that same second I picture the rest of our lives together, before and after, the life we lived and the life we were supposed to live. I picture Sam.