Blood Men (38 page)

“You’re right, Edward, you’re absolutely right. This here—this is about you. It’s about what you’re doing, about what you’ve already done. You think you’re nothing like your father, but look at what you’ve done tonight. The man who killed Jodie, you got him, Edward. You really, really got him.”

“I’m glad I killed him,” I say, and it’s true. I’m a trader in death.

“And your father? Are you glad you killed him too?”

“He betrayed me,” I say of this man who was never my father either way, certainly not for the last twenty years, and certainly not now. “He used me. He used Jodie. All of my suffering was a tool to him. So yeah, he deserved it too.” I can still feel the knife going into his chest, can still see the look on his face. I can still feel Belinda’s arm around me as we sat on the bathroom floor staring at my mother in the bathtub all those years ago. Blood bubbled up out of my father’s mouth instead of words and I thought I could hear air hissing out of the wound in his chest as he stumbled back from the front door of my house into the hallway, he stumbled and fell,
and the darkness my father spent his life with finally claimed him. The man he brought to me looked up, and there was hope in his eyes, keen hope that sparkled as bright as a diamond and then just as quickly faded to coal when I put the same knife that had been inside my father into him as well. I put that knife in over and over and when I wanted to stop I couldn’t, not right away.

“It’s over, Edward. You need to let her go and come with us.”

“I can fix this,” I say, and Schroder goes blurry and I realize I’m crying. “I can fix this.”

“No. You can’t.”

Yes you can, Eddie. Drag that knife back quick and deep and things will be better, much better.

“Don’t be your father,” he says. “Put down the knife. Let her go. She didn’t do anything to hurt you. You saved her life, you did what nobody else had the courage to do, and the rest of it, none of it is your fault. You didn’t kill Jodie, you didn’t kill Kingsly, you didn’t get Sam killed. You’re a good man trying to do the best he can in a world that’s taken everything away from him. Don’t take everything away from her,” he says, nodding toward the bank teller. “Is this what Jodie would want of you?” he asks.

My body tightens and I squeeze my eyes shut, only for a second, only long enough to picture my wife falling forward out on the street. In that same second I picture the rest of our lives together, before and after, the life we lived and the life we were supposed to live. I picture Sam.

“I really don’t know,” I say.

“I don’t think she would,” Schroder says. “I very much doubt she wants you to kill in her name, especially somebody who never hurt you. I think she wants what she always wanted from you—to be nothing like your father.”

I lower the knife and open my hand.

What are you doing?

I’m not sure what I’m doing. The blade hits the floor, chips the linoleum, and falls on its side. I step back from the woman. She had no strength earlier, but she finds it now to crawl away from me as fast as she can. Two officers come out of nowhere and scoop her up and help her outside. Another two officers move in right behind Schroder, their guns raised and pointing at me. There are patrol cars outside that I didn’t even notice pull up.

There’s another way to be with Sam and Jodie. Pick the knife back up.

“What?”

“Huh?” Schroder asks.

Pick it up and attack them. Make them open fire. You’ll be with Sam and Jodie again. It will all be better. If you’re going to be a pussy for your entire life and ignore everything I want, then put us both out of our misery. Grab that knife.

I look down at the knife. Schroder watches me look down at it and comes forward.

“Ain’t going to happen,” he says, and he kicks it away. “It’s the easy way out,” he says. “You think it’s what Jodie and Sam would want you to do?”

I don’t have an answer. He spins me around and handcuffs me and a minute later I’m in the back of a patrol car heading toward my future. Hell, maybe it was even my destiny. Edward the Hunter. I think of the men who wolf-whistled at me at the prison yesterday, I think of seeing the Christchurch Carver, of meeting Theodore Tate. What’s left of the accountant in me tries to calculate what kind of jail time I’d have to do, but fails. The city should be rewarding my monster for what it did, not locking it away. I watch the bank grow smaller behind me, knowing I’m nothing like my dad, knowing I have a monster of my own, a monster that is growing inside me, making me wonder what it’s going to ask of me when I’m back on the outside again.

ALSO BY PAUL CLEAVE

Cemetery Lake

The Killing Hour

The Cleaner

Paul Cleave The Laughterhouse

The Laughterhouse

Theodore Tate never forgot his first crime scene—ten-year-old Jessica found dead in “the Laughterhouse,” an old abandoned slaughterhouse with the “S” painted over. The killer was found and arrested. Justice was served. Or was it?

Fifteen years later, a new killer arrives in Christchurch, and he has a list of people who were involved in Jessica’s murder case, one of whom is the unfortunate Dr. Stanton, a man with three young girls. If Tate is going to help Stanton, he has to find the connection between the killer, the Laughterhouse, and the city’s suddenly growing murder rate. And he needs to figure it out fast, because Stanton and his daughters have been kidnapped, and the doctor is being forced to make an impossible decision: which one of his daughters is to die first.

Praise for
The Laughterhouse

“Piano wire–taut plotting, Tate’s heart-wrenching losses and forlorn hopes, and Cleave’s unusually perceptive gaze into the maw of a killer’s madness make this a standout chapter in his detective’s rocky road to redemption.” —
Publishers Weekly
(starred)

“An intense adrenaline rush from start to finish, I read
The Laughterhouse
in one sitting. It’ll have you up all night. Fantastic!” —S.J. Watson,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Before I Go to Sleep

“This dark, gripping thriller, the latest in the Tate saga, is as hard-boiled as it gets. The surprise ending suspends all disbelief. Like a TV series that ends its season on a cliffhanger, you won’t want to wait until next year. This will leave the reader clamoring for the next book in the series.” —
Suspense Magazine

“Cleave’s horrific narrative takes no prisoners, with the bloody action relentlessly ricocheting around Christchurch at a pace that leaves the detectives near collapse. . . . An intense and bloody noir thriller, one often descending into a violent abyss reminiscent of Thomas Harris, creator of Hannibal Lecter.” —
Kirkus Reviews

“A wonderful book. . . . The final effect is that tingling in the neck hairs that tells us an artist is at work.” —
Booklist
(starred)

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Paul Cleave

Originally published in New Zealand by Random House New Zealand

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Atria Paperback edition July 2010

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cleave, Paul, date.
  Blood men : a thriller / by Paul Cleave. — 1st Atria paperback ed.
    p. cm.
1. Serial murderers—Fiction. 2. Christchurch (N.Z.)—Fiction.
I. Title.
    PR9639.4.C54B56 2010
    823'.92—dc22

                                                        2009052483

ISBN 978-1-4391-8961-0
ISBN 978-1-4391-8963-4 (ebook)