Blood Men: A Thriller

“But he’s the only one, right? Everybody else gets tossed back out onto the street to do whatever it is they want to do.”


“You think I don’t know that? You think it’s easy being a cop in this city? What would . . .,” he trails off. “Look, what’s the alternative? That we don’t try? You know how many cops we’re losing every year because nobody wants to try anymore? The last year, Edward, the last year has been damn hard. With all that’s happened—hell, even I have days where I want to give up. It’s what this city does. It produces these people. It catches them, takes them into its prisons, then churns them back out harder and rougher than they were going in. But we’re trying, Edward, and we’re making progress. Things will change. We’re doing the best we can with what we have, and I promise you, we’ll get the men who killed your wife. And I promise you they will pay.”

“People think I’m the same as him,” I say.

“What?”

“My father. They think I’m the same as him. People recognize me from the news and think I’m going to be the next big serial killer.”

“No one recognizes you from the news, Edward,” he says, remembering what Barlow said. “That was twenty years ago. And you weren’t to blame for anything then.”

“People are ready to convict me, they want to send me away for life. They’re frightened of me. But these men, why aren’t we frightened of them enough to keep them locked away forever? When you find them, Detective, and lock them away, what then? How long until you have to find them again for killing somebody else’s wife? Three years? Five?”

“I promise they’ll pay, Edward,” he says.

They reach the house and Schroder pulls into the driveway and they both climb out. The car following pulls up to the curb, its tires scraping against it. The wheels have splashed rain and dirt off the road onto the bottom half of the car.

They walk to the front door and Schroder unlocks it.

“What happened to your friend?” Edward asks.

“Huh?”

“The friend you were telling me about. He was looking into something. He ever sober up and find it?”

“Yeah. He found it, and people died because of it.”

“He lose his family to bank robbers?”

“I’ll keep these tonight,” Schroder says, and he rattles the keys. “You can pick them up from the station in the morning. Where are the spares?”

“I don’t have any.”

“Everybody has spare keys.”

“Not me ’cause I never lose them.”

“Okay, Edward. Go and get some sleep,” he says. “Don’t do anything else stupid tonight. Don’t make me regret helping you out.” He closes the door and heads to the other car and drives away.





chapter twenty-two


I take a leak, find the spare keys, take another leak, grab a beer, grab a jacket, and within ten minutes of being dropped off home I’m back on the road, which is better than jail, which is where I thought Schroder was going to take me for what the monster had wanted me to do tonight. The spare keys have Jodie’s car key too, and for a few seconds I can’t figure out which one to jam into the ignition.

The car is harder to control than normal and there must be something wrong with it. I’m steering straight but the car keeps veering off to the left, and other times off to the right. It’s not the time to have a faulty car—the road ahead of me isn’t exactly laid out clearly because my vision is shot to hell. Everything is blurry, and when I squint I end up seeing double. I lose control of the car and hit the curb and come to a stop. I can see my house in the rear-vision mirror—I’ve only driven about thirty meters.

I give it another go, slower this time, more focused. There is even less traffic on the road now. A few people are out shopping since the malls are still open, Christmas extending the closing hours till midnight. Statistically, some of these people will go bankrupt over the Christmas season. Statistically, many of them will come home to find their homes have been burgled, or they’ll walk out of a mall to find their cars have been stolen. Statistically, one of these people will show up dead on some grass verge in the morning and Schroder’s caseload will become that much heavier for it.