Blood Men: A Thriller

The back of the car is hot even with the air-conditioning going. The only other sound is the tires traveling over the road, neither detective seemingly in a talkative mood—not like twenty minutes ago. They probably don’t know what to say. It’s an unmarked sedan, so it doesn’t look like I’ve been arrested, but it feels that way, sitting in the backseat, only the handcuffs are missing. I watch the landscape change as we head through different neighborhoods into the city, the sun beating down hard on all of it, nice areas, not-so-nice areas, other areas you’d kill yourself to avoid. We’re delayed in the beginning, a minor car accident outside the Hagley Park golf course in town bringing cars to a crawl, a golf ball sliced out of bounds and into the windscreen of a car, sending the driver into a spiral. Other people are jogging the park circuit, cherry blossom trees lining the route. I think about the cell phone I took from Kingsly last night. It was blank. No records of any incoming or outgoing calls. No text messages. It was a new phone. A disposable phone.

We park around the back of the building next to a patrol car, audience to a family of ducklings on a nearby grass shoulder who seem to have lost their mother. We take a rear entrance and enter a cold corridor with linoleum flooring and plaster walls, a few Christmas decorations hurriedly stuck up on the walls with bits of tape. None of us say anything. We walk in single file, one cop ahead of me, one behind.

A nurse with bright blue eyes greets us and frowns at me before talking to Schroder. She gives him directions to the ward and I tune out the conversation. I can’t stop looking at the patients scattered about the ground floor, people hooked up to IV drips on bags going for walks, some of them heading outside to puff on a cigarette, and I can’t see a single person in this hospital that doesn’t seem bored, this day stretching out into many others. If the hospital has air-conditioning, it must be buried somewhere, maybe in the nurses’ lounge, because it’s about forty degrees in here.

We go up a few flights, taking the elevator. The doors open into a corridor branching into different wards. Two police officers are standing outside one of the rooms. The larger of the two comes over and he must know Schroder because he nods at him and doesn’t ask who any of us are. Landry holds back and makes a phone call. I’m left to stare at my feet.

“In the corner with the curtain drawn around him,” the officer says.

There are six beds in the room, all spaced an equal distance apart, three on each side of the room. Christchurch Hospital isn’t exactly the hub for medical advancement, but it makes do with what it has, even if most of what it has looks like it got ordered from a 1980s “Good Guide to Living” brochure. All the beds are full, but only one of them has a curtain pulled around it. There’s a gap big enough between the curtain and floor to see the feet of a doctor, and as we approach, he pulls the curtain away—ta-da!—revealing my dad. For the briefest second I’m sure he’s not going to be there, but of course he is, held down in his bed by tubes and a set of handcuffs connecting his right arm to the right rail.

Dad’s eyes are closed, all warmth and color gone from his face. His features have sunken, as if the near-death experience triggered an internal collapse in which his body began falling in on itself. This man is a cold-blooded killer, but he’s also my dad, and seeing him this way—well, I don’t know what I feel. He’s in jail because I killed a dog twenty years ago.

“It’s not as bad as it seems at first,” the doctor says, after Schroder tells him who we are. “One wound with a sharp object into the chest from the side. Not real close to puncturing the left lung, but if the weapon had been longer, who knows? Sounds bad—and believe me, it is bad—but it could have been a whole lot worse. The operation went about as well as it could. He’s heavily sedated still, won’t be waking up till this evening.”

“He’ll be okay?” I ask. “He’ll make a full recovery?”

“Should do,” the doctor says, nodding toward my dad. “We’ll keep him for a couple of days, and we’ll check him every few days or so after that, but yes, your dad still has the rest of his life to look forward to. Of course we’ll know more this evening once he’s woken up. The only thing to worry about at this point is infection. We’ll keep you updated,” he says, then walks off to the next patient.

“Who did this?” I ask, turning to Schroder.

“Nobody knows. A fight broke out during lunch. Inmates swarmed each other, and when they were pulled apart the guards found him,” Schroder says. “He was stabbed with a toothbrush, easy to file down, effective to use,” he says, and he sounds like he’s rattling off a sales pitch, like he makes a dollar for every filed-down toothbrush jammed into a convict. “Question is, why would somebody want him dead?”