Blood Men: A Thriller

“I’m doing okay so far.”


“Yeah? Tell that to your in-laws. Tell that to the dead officer outside. After everything you’ve said about being nothing like your father, you’ve got blood on your hands now.”

We’re blood men—that’s what Dad said.

“I didn’t do a damn thing,” I say, but he’s right. I got my wife killed by speaking out. The police officer outside is dead because of me. All this blood on my hands, some of it innocent, and I know I’m still not done.

The cell phone rings. My in-laws appear as if they’d been waiting around the corner. I answer it.

“I killed a cop for you,” I say, before the caller has a chance to say a word. “I’ve killed two of your men already. This can all end. I’ll bring you the money and you give me back my daughter.”

There’s a pause on the line. “She’s still alive. For now,” the man says. “An even trade. One hour. Come alone. If we see anybody else we’ll kill her.”

“Where?”

“I’ll call you at the time. Don’t want you having a chance to set something up.”

He hangs up and I explain it to Schroder, who is about as happy as Nat and Diana—who look like the world has fallen apart around them.

“You can’t do this alone, Edward. We need backup,” Schroder says.

“They’ll kill her if you make that call. I’m playing this safe, and that means paying for her. You owe me.”

“He’s right,” Nat says to Schroder. “Give them the money and we get Sam back. It’s like Eddie said, it’s that simple.”

“Except it’s not that simple,” I say, “because there is no money.”

“What?”

“This money they’re asking about, I don’t have it. If I was there, if I had the money, I’d be using it to get my daughter back. Can the police department raise the cash?” I ask Schroder.

“The department wouldn’t go for it,” he says.

“Even if it meant saving Sam’s life?”

“It doesn’t work that way. If it did, people would be getting kidnapped all the time. We’d be throwing cash at every criminal in the city.”

“What about the damn bank?” Nat asks. “This is all happening because of what happened there. Surely they’d give us the money. They have to! They owe us—they bloody well owe us!”

“I’ll make a couple of calls and see what I can do.”

“If Eddie doesn’t have the money, then who does?” Nat asks.

“Maybe there wasn’t any money,” Schroder says, and I think of the bricks of cash lying on Kingsly’s bed.

“There has to be,” I say. “It’s too much effort for them to go to if there wasn’t.”

“So who took it?” Schroder asks.

“What about the probation officer? You said he found the body, right?” I say.

“Yeah, he found the body, but you’re making a dangerous assumption here. He’s not a suspect in the killing. He has no motive to kill his client.”

“That’s my point. He wasn’t a suspect, but he could have taken the money.”

“No, the killer would have taken the money.”

“Maybe Kingsly was killed for an entirely different reason. Maybe the killer didn’t see the money.”

“Something you want to share, Edward?”

“We can spend the next hour here making guesses,” I say, “but at the moment the probation officer is the only thing we have.” I reach down and pick up the dead man’s shotgun. “Let’s take a drive.”





chapter forty-one


Schroder’s chest is burning and it’s tight and he swears there’s still water in there. Still, all things considered, he’s much better off now than he was twenty minutes ago. When he gets more time he’ll think about those moments between when he stopped breathing and when he started up again. He’s never been a religious person, but that hasn’t stopped him from hoping there’s something when all of this is over, maybe not a heaven in the traditional sense, but something close to it. If there is, he didn’t get to see it, or even glimpse it. For him there was nothing. No memory—not even a memory of darkness. Or a memory of nothing. That’s all there was. Drowning, and then not drowning anymore. Whoever said drowning was a peaceful death had no idea what they were talking about.

He follows Edward to the car. He can’t stop coughing. He walks slightly off balance like a man with an inner-ear infection—or like a man who has been brought back from the dead.