Blood Men: A Thriller

I open up the curtains and sunlight pours into the living room and the kitchen, bouncing off every metal surface and making the sun appear to be about as far away as my next-door neighbor. The poplar trees lining the street have been defeated by the heat, the burned leaves drooping, front lawns turning crispy brown as the sun beats down on it all. The air-conditioning is working overtime, separating the outside world from the inside by a dozen degrees. Sam’s holidays kick in in about seven hours and her excitement levels are high and my stress levels are high and Jodie has high levels of both. I’m pretty sure the house has a poltergeist living in it; it comes through at night and does its best to make sure there are no straight lines anywhere.

I get the kitchen smelling of coffee. Our kitchen is full of modern appliances, most of them were in style back in the fifties and are back in style now, lots of stainless steel and curves everywhere. I pour Sam a bowl of cereal and she works her way through it, and I’m on my second piece of toast when Jodie comes down the hallway into the dining room. Her dark hair hanging around her shoulders is still slightly damp and her skin smells of body wash. She leans in, kisses me on the cheek, and steals the rest of my toast.

“Payment for the kiss,” she whispers, and winks at me.

“I should have made you pancakes. They’d have cost you more.”

Our cat, Mogo, gets under Jodie’s feet before jumping up on the table and staring at me. Mogo is a tabby with way too much personality and nowhere near enough patience. I sometimes think he has similar thoughts to what my dad must have had all those years ago. He never eats when I feed him, and he always waits for Jodie to take care of him. He never hangs around me or wants me to pat him either—but cats never approach me—there’s something about me that they don’t like. Dogs too.

We finish up breakfast and get our gear together. Jodie has her briefcase, Sam her backpack, I have a satchel, and it’s time to go. It’s eight thirty and the Paul Simon song is stuck in my head and heading outside is like walking into a wall of heat. It’s Jodie’s turn to drop Sam at school. There are kisses all around and hugs, then car doors closing and engines turning over and we leave in different directions. The inside of my car is an oven. Neighbors wave while getting their own kids off to school, others out walking before the day gets too hot, some working in the garden. The houses in the neighborhood have recycling bins parked out front, the week’s trash all ready to be picked up and emptied, green bins with yellow lids lining the streets. On the way into town I pass vans on the side of the road with trailers—people in collapsible chairs reading magazines while selling Christmas trees and Christmas lilies.

The central city is bordered away from the suburbs by four long avenues creating a giant box, within it a network of parallel streets made up in a checkerboard style, the buildings planted among them blending into one of two types—ugly ones built a hundred years ago, and slightly less ugly ones built in the years since. Most of the scenery could be picked up and spliced into a Sherlock Holmes novel without anybody noticing much difference, except for Holmes himself, who would wonder why Baker Street had suddenly turned from a loitering ground for pickpockets and heroin addicts to one of gang members and glue sniffers.

The drive-time routines are slipping out of whack as the city crawls toward Christmas, the traffic is thicker than yesterday, but not as thick as it will be tomorrow. There are a few early-morning—or perhaps ultra-late-night—hookers on the corners in town; their lifeless eyes follow me as I drive past, fake smiles on their faces, the makeup smudged and worn after a long night, their clothes short and scented with exhaust fumes and spent exhaustion. I’ve never seen anybody pull over and pick one up at this time of the morning—it would be like screwing something out of Dawn of the Dead. I wonder if they take the holidays off, whether Christmas is a merry time for them, whether they go home and slip into Santa hats and listen to carols and put up decorations.