Blood Men: A Thriller

The police surrounded the house. They came up to the front door. I was crying when my mother answered it. I had moved into my bedroom and was standing behind the door, listening, shaking. The men came inside and spoke to my dad. I didn’t understand what was going on, why the police were coming to take my dad away for something I had done, and as hard as I tried to tell them the truth, I was too scared to say the words.

I came out from the bedroom in time to see them put handcuffs on my dad. I cried harder. I wanted to confess but didn’t. I didn’t understand at the time, but the police had come for an entirely different reason—a reason that involved the niche my father had carved out for himself, one that included a list of prostitutes and a very specific hobby.

I didn’t go to school that day. Instead my mum’s sister came to sit with me and Belinda while Mum went to the police station to learn what was going on. She was gone all day. A year later, after she was dead, her sister didn’t want anything to do with me or Belinda ever again.

I don’t know what kind of dog it was I killed in that month before Dad got taken away. It was certainly big enough, and dark enough, and most of the time angry enough. All it ever seemed to do was make noise. It’d howl at the moon and bark at the sun and growl at the breeze. The barks were high-pitched yaps that kept on coming, one after the other, scratching into my head like nails. The growls were low and threatening, scary, and the howls were long and painful. My neighbor never did anything to shut it up. Most times my neighbor wasn’t there. He’d leave this dog of his chained to a rusty old stake hammered deep into the backyard. If the dog was lucky he’d sometimes get food and if he was extra lucky then sometimes he’d get water for company. Neighbors would open windows and doors and yell at the dog to shut up, but the frequency dropped off over the years as they gave up. In the summer the yard was hard-baked dirt, cracked into jigsaw patterns, and in the winter it was dark with mud and cold with frost. The dog was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter and one or the other during the months between. I didn’t know who to hate more, the dog or the owner, and in the end I hated them pretty much equally. The dog was hardwired to bark at things, and my neighbor was hardwired to treat the dog badly.

The urge grew slowly. I’d be at school staring at a math problem then suddenly I’d think about him, that dog, and I’d think about how great it would be if that dog could be divided into two. I’d get that thought a few times at school, and I’d get it plenty more times at home, and the thought never made me sick. At night I’d shake, my hands twitching as the dog barked, wondering why my dad didn’t go and do something. Of course I didn’t know it—but my dad couldn’t do anything about it. He couldn’t draw any attention to himself.

The urge kept growing. It reached a point where it was never far from my thoughts. It affected my schoolwork. My marks were slipping, my homework was suffering—if things didn’t change I’d end up leaving school when I was fifteen and spend my life bouncing between being unemployed and unemployable. It seemed to me that the thing standing between me having the life I wanted and the life of cashing unemployment benefits was that dog. No matter what angle I attacked the problem from, I knew that as long as that dog barked I had no real future. I had to stop thinking about it.

Day and night this desire to see the dog dead grew stronger inside of me, gestating, becoming a deep-seated need that was ruling my life.

I told the urge I didn’t know how to kill a dog.

The urge, one night, found a voice and whispered back. It told me it was easy. It told me everything was going to be okay now. Then it told me how.