Blood Men: A Thriller

“This could as easily have been you,” he says.

“No. It couldn’t have been. I didn’t do this to him.”

“I thought we were cutting the bullshit,” he says. “Look, Eddie, you have to know you’re messing with the wrong people here. I don’t mean the cops, I mean these people,” he says, and he points down at Kingsly. “This man is lying here today, but tomorrow or the next day, this is going to be you. Is that what you want?”

“Of course not.”

“Then it’s time you were straight and tell us what happened.”

“I didn’t kill him,” I say.

“You sure of that?” Schroder asks.

They lead me back upstairs and out into the sun. We drive about two hundred meters until they turn in the opposite direction to my house. After a few more minutes it becomes pretty evident where we’re heading. I don’t complain. It’s like we’re taking a day trip, just driving around the city. The car ride to the prison is about the same as the ride to the hospital. Same amount of silent conversation, same amount of heat being thrown about by the air-conditioning. About the only thing different is the scenery. Farms with burned-off grass. Large fields full of dull animals burning in the sun, each of them with bad futures, slaughterhouses and dinner tables the only thing on their horizon. I can’t imagine driving a tractor around, plowing fields, milking cows, getting up early and going to bed early, working the land, the soil under your nails, backbreaking work—but maybe if I could have imagined it five years ago I would have lived on a farm with Jodie, away from the city, away from banks and bank robbers.

These are the same sights convicts see if they manage to run free—but people don’t really have to escape from jail when they’re getting released so soon anyway, the big revolving-door policy kicking prisoners back into the public because there’s no room for them, or no real desire to buck the system and say enough is enough.

We pull up further past the visitors’ entrance and walk across the hot asphalt to a back door. The pavement between us and the work crews and cranes shimmers—it looks like a layer of water has pooled across it.

“Hope you don’t mind,” Schroder says.

“Why? You think coming out here is good for me too?”

We’re given an escort through the maze of concrete corridors that have to be almost ten degrees cooler than the outside world. We make our way to general population where the temperature heats back up to hospital temperatures. I can smell the sweat and the hate and the blood and the evil of the inmates as we walk past their cells. The cells mostly have concrete-block fronts with heavy metal doors in the middle, all of them ovens in this heat. There are narrow gaps at head height to look through, and at the moment many of those gaps are full of eyes staring out at me.

From behind the doors prisoners yell at us, some ignore us, others ask for cigarettes; the lucky ones have probably passed out from the heat. We reach my father’s cell. It’s the same as any of the others we’ve passed. It’s kind of surreal to see what my dad has called his home for the last twenty years. A concrete bunker with a metal door, a single metal bed bolted to the floor with an old mattress on top, a couple of posters taped up on the wall to add color, some books piled on the floor, everything neat and tidy, a stainless-steel toilet in the corner. I stand outside with four prison guards as Schroder and Landry begin tossing it over, turning everything upside down and pulling it apart. They take their time about it even though there aren’t many places to search, letting me wait in the corridor, the inmates in my local proximity all talking to me. One of them calls me Eddie, then he tells the others who I am and they all start saying the same thing. They’re all telling me they’re going to be seeing me soon. One of them eventually gets around to wolf-whistling at me, and the others laugh. All I can see are their eyes staring out at me, and occasionally some fingers come out from the gaps too. This is why Schroder brought me here—to give me the other preview of my future. He’s telling me I’m either going to end up in the morgue or in prison. I imagine spending twenty minutes inside one of those cells and the idea isn’t pleasant. I wonder how my dad survived. I wonder what kept him alive, what kept him from tying his bedsheet into a noose.