Blood Men: A Thriller

“No. She’s nothing like you and she’s nothing to you. Why did Jodie come back?”


“She came to tell me you were a good man and I didn’t deserve to have you as a son. She told me I would be a grandfather and would never meet my grandchildren. She told me I had ruined a lot of lives, but yours wasn’t one of them. She said she was fixing the damage inside of you that I’d done. She wanted me to know you were a good man and were going to make a great father. That was her gift to me, Jack. You were one lucky man meeting her, and you did the right thing by getting a ring on her finger as early as you did.” He leans forward. “But you are different. You’re my son, and she sensed it in you.”

“Shut up.”

“I really am sorry about what happened to her, son. A waste, such a waste. I have some idea what you’re going through, and it’s hard, son, it really is hard, and no matter how hollow it sounds, it’s true when people tell you that time does help. It doesn’t heal, but it helps. You will move on, and you have Sam, and if she’s anything like Jodie then you’ve got a beautiful little girl to look after.”

“I know, I know,” I say. “If it weren’t for her . . .”

I trail off, and neither of us fills the silence for a few more seconds until Dad leans forward and looks me right in the eye. “Have you heard it yet?” he asks.

“What are you talking about?” I ask, leaning back.

My dad leans back too, imitating me, but then he crosses one leg over the other and taps his fingers on his knee.

“When you were a kid I used to take you and Belinda to the park. You remember? There was a fort there you’d always play on. Had a tire with chains on it that had been turned into a swing. There was a pole you could slide down. There was bark everywhere, and bars you could climb, ropes and chains you could hang from.”

“This going anywhere?”

“There was a merry-go-round there too. You two used to play on that thing so fast that when you came to a stop and stood up, you’d fall over, dizzy as hell, clutching onto the ground as if it were moving, trying to keep it still.”

“What is this? Some kind of father–son moment that you saw on TV and are trying to emulate?”

“One day, when you were eight,” he says, “when we were there, there was a man there too, walking his dog. It got off its leash and ran over to the fort where you and Belinda were riding the merry-go-round. You came to a stop and spilled off it, and the dog, it was all excited and tried sniffing Belinda. She got scared and she ran.”

“I don’t remember.”

“It ran after her and tried to bite her, and she kept running and trying to watch the dog all at the same time, and she got off balance. She ran right into a tree and knocked herself out. Got her forehead grazed up. You remember what you said when we were carrying her back to the car?”

“Not really.”

My dad leans forward, and in a lower voice, he tells me. “You said you would kill it.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Six months after that, the dog a few houses down from us that always used to bark, you remember that dog . . . ?”

“Not really.”

“It was the same dog from the park. This big black dog with a lot of bark. That dog got itself killed.”

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s a long time to be angry at an animal,” Dad says.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You don’t think I noticed the steak was missing?” he asks, his voice low now, and I hadn’t noticed but I’ve leaned in close to him. “I told your mother I’d taken it. She never knew it was you who killed that dog. But I knew. Is that when you first heard it?”

“You’re delusional.”

“I think it probably was. You might have heard it earlier but didn’t know what it was. It would have taken a while to build up the courage. I first heard it when I was the same age,” he says. “This voice that was different from me, these thoughts that weren’t mine. They told me to do things that I didn’t want to do. I refused—in the beginning. Then I gave in, hoping it would shut the voice up. Soon the voice was the same as my own, and in the end I couldn’t even tell the difference.”

“You’re sick,” I say.

“I know. That’s what I said twenty years ago. Hell, I’m not so unreasonable that I know hearing a voice isn’t right. But right or wrong, I heard it. I don’t blame you for never coming to ask me about it, but . . .”

“I should never have come here.”

“When you killed that dog, it was because you were hearing a voice of your own.”

“I didn’t kill any dog.”

“What happened after that?” he asks. “Did you keep hearing the voice, or did it disappear? Have you been giving in to it all these years? Are there graves out there waiting to be found?”