Blood Men: A Thriller

“You think he could kill a child deliberately?” I ask Dad.

“Make no mistake, son. That is what he did. He was in custody for three days without giving up the location. He knew that kid was going to die and he did nothing to stop it. That means he can do it again. It should only be about the money, but this guy—shit, look at these stories. The men who robbed the bank, maybe they’re all killers, maybe just one or two of them, but if Bracken hired this guy it means none of that crew are capable of killing a child. Church is.”

“Oh Jesus, Dad, what do we do? What the hell do we do?”

“He’s not going to take Sam somewhere she can figure out how to lead the police back to. He’ll have somewhere else. For now, it’s about the money.”

“But there is no money, don’t you get that? There never was! Bracken knew I never had it, he was just playing the game so the others would believe.”

“Then maybe Oliver Church believes it too,” Dad says. “You better hope like hell that he does.”

“It still doesn’t tell us where she is.”

“Criminals return to what they know best,” Dad says. “That I know for a fact. The slaughterhouse has been abandoned a long time,” he says. “Way back when I was a teenager. We used to call it the Laughterhouse.”

“You think she’s there?”

“At this stage we have nothing else.”

It’s a twenty-five minute drive which I cover in about twelve, at times hitting speeds that Santa would be impressed by. Christmas decorations pass us in a blur, turning into streaks of light. We don’t see a single car on the road. I slow down at red lights before blowing right through them. Suburbia ends and the pastures start again like they do in every direction in this city—except for the east; only way you can keep going east in this city is if your car can float. I try the cell phone number from Bracken’s phone again but there’s no joy, which isn’t fair because Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy.

When we reach the slaughterhouse we pull up short of the road leading up to it. I leave all three cell phones—my one, Kingsly’s, and Bracken’s—in the car, and we get out. The ground is cool and damp, as if the ghosts of thousands of animals have drained into the soil. I stash the bag of money in the boot and grab a flashlight from the emergency breakdown kit.

“This prostitute at the probation officer’s house, you get a name?” Dad asks.

“What? Why?”

“Just curious.”

“No. No name.”

The road is ankle-breaking material, cracked and busted from the weight of trucks that once upon a time used to go up and down it, so we walk off to the side where the dirt is hard packed. We have to walk slower because of our wounds, Dad’s and mine. I figure it’s been a long day for him too.

Christmas doesn’t quite reach out here. No tinsel or lights, just a bleak setting with shadows cast only by the moonlight and stars.

“What’d she look like, then?”

“What?”

“The prostitute. What’d she look like?”

“I don’t know. The way they all look.”

“They all look different, son. Trust me. It’s only on the inside they look the same.”

I don’t ask him what he means by that and thankfully he doesn’t elaborate. We keep walking.

“You’re not really going to take me back after all this, are you, son?” he asks.

I don’t answer him.

The slaughterhouse comes into view. It seems to grow out of the earth the closer we get, looming out of the darkness and bearing down on us. The words NORTH CITY SLAUGHTERHOUSE have been stenciled in letters a meter high, big enough to make out in the dark. The smell is still here, even decades after the place has shut down, hanging in the still air. Or maybe the smell is only in my imagination. There’s certainly something here. I wonder how bad it smelled back then. The slaughterhouse was only up and running for two years or so before it was closed down, a victim of expanding suburbia that never did expand. The building was shut down before the road leading up to it could be repaved in thicker cement, the land sold, and then nothing, until somebody came along with a couple of tins of spray paint and blacked out the “S” on the word Slaughterhouse.

Fifteen years ago this building was the scene of a double homicide, and nine years ago it was used to hide a boy who died from fear while a man tried to shave some years off his sentence. Tonight it possibly holds my daughter.