Blood Men: A Thriller

Painter is a man in his mid to late forties with a shaved head and dark eyes that don’t seem to focus well. He takes a seat at the kitchen bar, sitting slowly, exhaling heavily, and holding on to the bench at the same time. There’s a microwave in view behind him with a clock that doesn’t match my inner perception of time because it’s telling me I’ve already been here five minutes and I’m sure only one has passed.

“Since the . . . robbery, I’ve had problems,” he says. “Something in here,” he says, and he taps his head, and I realize the shaved head is fresh, “got broken. I mean, the doctors had bigger words for it, but if you ground those words up and put them in their simplest form, that’s what they’d say. I can’t walk straight. I reach for something and I miss. I take a piss and it goes all over the floor. I’ve got this ringing in my ears that won’t stop, and sometimes for no good reason I’ll just start to cry. It’s permanent too. They had big words for that also, but it didn’t matter how they tried to tie a goddamn bow on it, the gift was the same either way. Got this for life,” he says. “Can’t ever work again. Can’t drive. Can hardly ever go into public. Don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll lose my house, that’s for sure. I got insurance for what happened to me, but it doesn’t cover shit. But hey, look at me, bitching about what happened to me, what happened to me ain’t worth a damn considering what happened to you. To your wife and the bank manager.”

I put the bag up on the counter.

Open it, open it, open it.

We open it. My bladder is going to explode.

“You gonna say anything?” he asks.

“What do, do you . . . want to hear from us?”

“Us?”

Us? Did I say us? No. I didn’t. “I said me.”

“You said us.”

“It was a, a mistake. Tell me. What do you want to hear?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said you were expecting me,” I say, focusing really hard on the words.

“Not really expecting. Hoping, I guess, is the word.”

“Hoping? Why?”

“I don’t know why, not really.”

“Tell me.”

He spends a few seconds exhaling, grimacing at the same time. He can’t keep his hands still. “I can hardly sleep,” he says, “and when I do, there are always dreams. I didn’t see anybody die, but I know they did. I saw them after, you know, after they were shot. I saw your wife, I mean, I didn’t see her die, and I was still unconscious when they took me away, but I see her dying anyway. The reason I didn’t see it for real was I messed up and let them get me without a fight. I mean, they could have killed me instead, right? I’d rather have died trying than . . . than this. I dream about them, you know. About the men who did this. I dream about the ones who died. Your wife comes to me at night, in my dreams.”

“What does she say?” I ask, genuinely curious. She hasn’t come to see me yet.

“She tells me there was nothing I could have done.”

“You believe her?”

“No.”

“You’re pathetic,” I say, but the words aren’t mine. “Fucking pathetic.”

“I know,” he says, and tries to fight back tears.

“Stop crying.”

“I’m not crying,” he says, choking on the words.

“Jesus,” I say, slowly shaking my head, but I’m sober now, no longer in danger of throwing up. “You could have stopped them,” I say, my words forceful now, clear.

“You think I didn’t want to? Ah shit, it’s not fair, I mean, six of them, all with guns, and what the hell do I have?” he says, wiping at his eyes before the tears can fall. “Certainly no weapon of any sort. The bank gives me a uniform and that’s it. I mean, that’s not exactly a deterrent against professional bank robbers. Shit, I can’t even keep the damn skateboarders off the front sidewalk. I wanted to do more, I wish I could have done more, but . . . ah shit . . . ,” he says. “Are you . . . are you here to kill me?”

“Is that what you want?”

“I . . . I think so.” His hands are clenched and shaking. Tears are running down his face. “I . . . I don’t have the courage to do it myself.”

All those memories earlier today that weren’t memories, but more like reels of film of different scenarios that rolled through my head, they play out again, and in each one there is nothing this man could have done. One unarmed man against six men with shotguns. Each time he tried to protect us, one or more of the guns would put him in his place, his chest and head exploding into a ball of blood. “You could have saved my wife,” I hear myself saying, even though I know it isn’t true.

I reach into the bag and pull out a serrated steak knife. He doesn’t seem as thrilled about dying as he did five seconds ago, but he doesn’t move or try to fight me.

He cries harder. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “It should’ve been me, it should’ve been me who died.”

“You’re right. It should have been.”

“I . . . I wanted to do it myself,” he says, when we stand up and move closer to him. “But I couldn’t. I was too scared. I heard who you are and I wondered if you might come, if you were anything like your dad.”

“Edward the Hunter,” I say. I thought my hand would be shaking, but it isn’t, it’s firm and we hold the knife firmly and our nerves are steady. “I can’t fight my destiny,” I say.

“Please, just make it quick.”