Blood Men: A Thriller

My heart quickens as I recall pulling the knife up short of cutting Painter. I want to throw up again. I have no idea why in the hell I even went to Gerald Painter’s house. No idea what the plan was. If I’d killed Gerald Painter, would the monster have kept me sober, or abandoned me when that first splash of blood arced up onto the ceiling? What would have happened to his wife and daughter if they’d walked in on me?

I tidy the kitchen, opening up and draining the remaining beer and wine down the sink. I remember what else Schroder said last night, then more importantly I remember what I said to him, and those memories seem to collide in a nice little way that jumbles everything up, and suddenly what my dad said to me as he walked away makes sense—It’s okay to listen to the voice.

I’m still a bit drunk, and I might be over the limit, but the world doesn’t sway around much as I drive through it. I find a park near the police station. My keys are waiting for me in the foyer behind the reception desk. They don’t ask me any questions about last night. All they do is ask for ID to make sure the keys belong to me. Schroder isn’t around. He’s probably at the beach somewhere or getting the last of his shopping done while Jodie lies cold in the ground. I realize I haven’t got Sam anything yet either for Christmas—me and Jodie always left that kind of thing till the last few days. There’s a guy out in front of the station with a sandwich board over his shoulders, he’s holding up a Bible and preaching his views in an abusive tone and I wonder if he knows Henry the homeless guy.

I drive out to the prison, passing a couple of malls on the way where traffic is spilling out from the parking lot onto the road, Christmas shopping in full bloom now, people pushing carts full of groceries. There’s a billboard twice the size of a bus staked into the ground on the edge of the city advertising a brand-new subdivision, calling it the suburb of the future. I wonder what that means. I wonder if the billboard means Christchurch is stuck in the past, or that the new subdivision will resemble something out of The Jetsons. There is smoke drifting up from the fields, farmers burning off waste. Large irrigation units are watering crops under the hot sun.

Sam’s bag is still packed in the backseat, full of goodies of death that I have to return to their rightful place. If Curious Schroder had taken a peek, things might have turned out very different.

I don’t phone ahead this time. I park the car in the same spot and the same woman I spoke to yesterday is here today, the same smile—a smile that could make beached whales roll back into the water—falters when she recognizes me.

“I’m here to see my father,” I say, as if there could be any one of a hundred reasons.

“He’s been waiting for you,” she says.

“But . . . I didn’t phone ahead.”

“Must be a miracle,” she says, but she’s wrong. I don’t know what to think about my dad figuring that I’d show back up. Mostly it pisses me off that he’s arrogant enough to think it, and I suspect perhaps arrogance is the wrong word since he was right.

“You listened to the voice,” he says, once the guard has escorted me down to the visitors’ room. It was the same guard from yesterday and he gave me the same rules as yesterday, reinforcing the no-yelling one twice. There are fewer people in the visitors’ room, which should make it seem bigger, but somehow it has the opposite effect. Fewer people makes it colder, stagnant, far more depressing, it makes it seem the walls are closing in and I can only imagine what the cells must be like. The Carver isn’t anywhere to be seen. Nobody pays me any interest.

I sit opposite him. He’s different from yesterday. Younger, if that’s possible—as though all this is rejuvenating him.

“Let me ask you something,” he says. “You think being an accountant gives you the credentials to know what the entire sum of a man is?”

“What?”

“See, twenty years in here, I have them. A man is made up of many parts,” he says. “There are things within his core. They are shaped by his family, his friends, shaped by the blood that runs through him. Of course the events shape a man too. Those in the past, and those unfolding in front of him. I am the sum of many things,” he says. “You, your sister, your mother, they were part of me, as well as my own family, growing up. But it wasn’t enough to make me complete. I thought it might be, I mean, when I first met your mother and when our family began, I thought it might be enough. But it wasn’t. You and me, we’re made up from the same components.”

“You’re full of shit,” I say.

“You’re my son,” he says. “You can’t deny much of what is inside me is inside you too.”

“You’re wrong. I can deny that because it isn’t true. You, me, we’re nothing alike.”

“Why’d you become an accountant?” he asks.

I lean back, unsure of his point. “I don’t know,” I say, shrugging.

“Want to know what I think?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re going to hear—after all, it’s why you came out here.”

“Then why ask,” I say, shaking my head. “Just spit it out.”

“It was to make me proud. You wanted to be an accountant like your dad.”

“Wait . . .”

“What for? So you can deny it.”