Blood Men: A Thriller

I head into the hallway and find the fuse box almost immediately—the ropes I was stepping on earlier turn out to be power cables coming out of it and snaking across the floor. They’re pinned up to the fuse box with alligator clips. The fuse box is one of those old ones that requires wire to be wound between the terminals, except in this case there is no wire between any of them, instead there are five-centimeter nails, wedged in where the fuses would slot. One of them has melted in the middle. A wire fuse would have broken in a tenth of a second. The nail took thirty seconds. I try the hallway lights and they come on. The only fuse to have blown is the one for the bedroom.

I follow the cables along the floor into another bedroom. The door is heavy to open and warm to touch. When it opens a thick piece of foam attached to the base of the door slides across the floor, and immediately orange light comes out, warming my face. The bedroom has been converted into a marijuana greenhouse. There are tables running from one wall to the other, full of beds of plants. There are heat lamps hanging from the ceiling over each of them. The room is more humid than it is bright. All the curtains are drawn, and in front of the curtains are large pieces of plywood, blocking any view from the outside world. I take a step inside; the air gets thicker. There are watering cans, bags of fertilizer, all the little knickknacks that old ladies with green fingers have. All of the plants stand about thirty centimeters high. I wonder how long they take to grow, how much money is invested here. I wonder what will happen to them now Kingsly is dead. I push some of them off the tables, they hit the floor and fall out of their trays, the roots exposed, the dirt exploding outward in every direction. I stomp on them, crushing the spines and leaves, destroying the drugs, hoping that I’m creating a reason for Kingsly to have been killed. The police aren’t going to look beyond a drug connection.

I step back out of the room and close the door.

There’s enough hallway light to see into the bedroom, and I use the flashlight for the rest. A brick of money is poking out from beneath the edge of the mattress I knocked out of place when I fell down and pushed myself back earlier. I tip it up the rest of the way. Bricks of cash, fresh, virgin money, all of the bricks made up from hundred dollar notes. Could be between a quarter and half a million dollars here. I reach out to touch it, wanting a tactile experience as to how that money feels, but pull my hand back. This is the reason my wife died. Or at least one-sixth of the reason. In some ways I’m owed this money. But in a much bigger way I can’t even touch it, let alone take it. This is blood money. I drop the mattress back onto it.

A pile of porn magazines are stacked on an old wooden chair by the bed. The clock radio sits on top of them, it’s big and ugly and could be worth a lot of money since it’s probably the first one ever built. The bed is a double with sheets balled up, white and grey and covered in hair, the mattress sagging in the middle. I get the idea that if I pulled the top sheet away and exposed the surface of that mattress, I wouldn’t eat for two weeks. The stereo that added to the glow of the room is brand new, the cardboard box right next to it, big brand letters stamped across it. It’s the only thing in this room built in the last decade.

There’s an old school desk with a shaving mirror on top of it, it has thin sprinkles of white powder and a razor blade on it. A supermarket cart next to the window is full of plastic bags packed with dried-out marijuana. A shelf hammered into the wall on a slight angle has tobacco papers, tobacco, scissors, and tinfoil all looking ready to slide onto the floor. Posters of muscle cars and naked women hang on the walls, along with a mirror with writing stenciled over it, telling me what alcohol Kingsly loves to drink.

Tying it all together is a dead man on the floor with his eyes wide open and his teeth clenched tightly on a bloody stump of tongue. The carpet is threadbare and has what might be grease stains on it, as if somebody rolled a hundred-piece KFC meal back and forth picking up the dust instead of a vacuum cleaner.

I find the bathroom and take off the ruined glove and run my hand under the tap and try to wash my blood away and Kingsly’s blood away but more blood keeps appearing. I pull the glove back on and wrap a pillowcase from the bedroom around it, knowing the infection from this house, this neighborhood, is inside me now.