Blood Men

chapter thirty-nine

What are you doing?

I’m trying to save him.

Why?

I need him alive.

Why?

Shut up.

Only thing you should be doing right now is to enjoying the rush. God, that was a thing of beauty! Come on, Eddie, the way you drove that pencil home-sweet Jesus, that’s a real winner of a memory-a real keeper-much better than Fido. Bet you a hundred to one that’s the way your father felt when he took his knife and. .

“I said shut up,” I say, then breathe more air into Schroder. His chest rises when I breathe in and drops when I take my mouth away. There is no pulse. His body is limp and heavy. I figure he’s been in the water three minutes tops.

I push at his chest. I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing. The last first-aid course I took was ten years ago and Schroder sure as hell feels a lot different from a dummy made of rubber and steel. I could be saving him, or I could be cracking his ribs and driving them into his lungs.

I breathe into him. Compress his chest ten times. Should it be ten? Twelve? Breathe into him again. How long do I give this? He’s been dead close to four minutes. What’s the cutoff before there’s a serious risk of brain damage? Isn’t it around four minutes? Only thing I can remember about the first-aid course was the instructor. She kept looking at me as though I were the reason the dummy wasn’t breathing anymore.

Schroder convulses under me and a low roaring comes from his lungs. He begins coughing, his body almost doubling up. I roll him onto his side and he coughs out mouthful after mouthful of bathwater. Then he collapses onto his front, his forehead on his arm, breathing heavily into the floor, his body rising and falling seemingly more than need be as though he’s putting on a show. Other than the show, he doesn’t do anything else. Doesn’t jump up to see if he’s still in danger. Nothing. I’ve removed the handcuffs from one wrist, but they’re still dangling from the other.

“Hessus,” he mutters, but can’t add anything else.

“I’m-”

“Hessus woo. .,” he says, and raises a hand up to his face and cups his eyes. He coughs again, then tries to sit himself up and lean against the bath but can’t make it.

“Come on,” I say, and help him. He pulls his knees up against his chest and rests his head on them. The bandage on my hand is loose. I pull it off and dump it on the floor.

“Wash,” he says, and doesn’t elaborate for a few seconds, until “Wash hash,” and then he begins coughing again.

“Wait here,” I say, and I leave him.

I check the bedrooms. It’s a three-bedroom house, built in the peak of the townhouse era and painted in showroom colors that are as boring as hell but managed to stay in style longer because of it. The first bedroom, the smallest of the three, has been set up for Sam. There’s a single bed and kit-set furniture and toys and posters and nobody fought for their life in there. The next bedroom has been turned into an office, with a desk and computer against one wall and a treadmill adjacent to the other.

It leaves one room unchecked, and I walk into it praying that it’ll be empty. I open the door. The air is warm and stale and feels like the room has been unearthed from the back of a very deep cave. Nat and Diana are both lying on the floor, their eyes wide open, staring right at me. I move over to them and crouch down and Nat lifts his head but can’t do much more because he’s been hog-tied, and so has Diana. I rush back down to the kitchen and grab a knife and a moment later they’re free and rubbing their wrists.

“Jesus, Eddie, what’s going on?” Nat asks. “Where’s Sam?”

“I don’t know. I think they have her.”

“They have her? Who? Who has her?”

“I don’t know. The men from the bank, I think.”

“The ones who killed Jodie? Why the hell would they take Sam?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” he repeats, getting louder now. “You don’t know? What the hell does that mean? You must know! You have to know!”

“I’m going to get her back.”

“Oh, I know you will. For your sake. I’m pretty convinced you brought these men into our house. What have you done, Eddie?”

“I haven’t done a goddamn thing,” I say.

“They think you did,” Diana is sobbing now. “And now they’ve taken our little Sam.”

“If you’ve caused this, Eddie, if something happens to her,” Nat says, “I swear I’ll kill you. I will goddamn kill you.”

I go back into the bathroom. Schroder doesn’t have the strength to be angry or thankful. “You drowned me,” he says.

“I saved you.”

“You drowned me.”

“I had no choice. If I hadn’t, he’d have shot you. We’d both be dead. Now, listen, you-”

“You drowned me,” he repeats.

With Nat’s help, we get him to his feet, lead him into the dining room, and sit him down. My leg is bleeding and I try taking the weight off it as we walk. “You need to focus here,” I say on the way. “This isn’t about you. It’s about my daughter.”

“What?”

“You owe me, okay? You owe me your goddamn life. Tell me you understand that. Don’t make me throw you back in the water. You owe me because if you’d done your job and caught the people responsible none of this would have happened. If you’d put more than one goddamn man on duty my daughter would still be here.”

“Where is he? The man with the gun?”

“I took care of him.”

“Same way you’ve been taking care of everybody else?”

“Not quite,” I say. “The guy I ran over, that was an accident.”

“Jesus, Eddie, what’s going on?” Nat asks. “Do you know where Sam is?”

“And Kingsly?” Schroder asks. “Was he an accident too?”

“I was never there.”

“He said you had Kingsly’s cell phone. Plus you knew his name.”

“There was a cell phone in the stolen car,” I say, feeling nothing at how seamless the lies are coming now. “One of the paramedics must have thought it was mine and put it with my stuff. I didn’t even know it was there.”

He nods. “Okay, Edward, fine, we’ll go with that for now.”

“Maybe the man who tried killing us is the one who killed Kingsly.”

“I’m not following any of this,” Nat says. “Where’s Sam?”

“Yeah, maybe. But he’d have taken the money with him, right?” Schroder answers.

“I don’t have any money. If I did I’d have given it to him to get my daughter back.”

“Now that I really do believe.”

Nat helps me check through the rest of the house in case Sam’s hidden here somewhere, in a cupboard or under a bed. He takes one look at the dead guy on the floor and doesn’t say a word. I check the playhouse outside-it’s empty. It’s what the men have been telling me-they have her, and I have to pay to get her back.

In the living room Diana is taking care of Schroder. She’s brought him some dry clothes and probably offered to make him coffee in the way that anybody over sixty always has to offer something, no matter what the situation. Schroder’s taken the other cuff off his wrist.

“We have to go,” I say.

“We need to call for backup.”

“We have to get the hell out of here first.” I grab him by the collar and help him to his feet. “They have Sam. We have to do what it takes to get her back. Come on, you’ve got to help me.”

“You all need to get out of here,” Schroder says to my in-laws.

“To hell with what you want,” Nat says, “we’re helping you find Sam.”

“No, no you’re not,” I say. “You’ll only get in the way.”

“Settle down,” Schroder says. “Nobody is doing anything here except me. I’m calling for backup, and you’re going to let the police take care of it.”

“The same way you’ve taken care of finding the men who killed my daughter?” Diana asks.

“Look, we’re doing-”

“What you can,” Nat finishes. “To hell with that.”

“So what, you and your wife are going to come along, is that what you think?”

“I’d like to,” Nat says, “but I know my limitations. That’s important in a man; and one thing we’ve learned since Jodie got shot is your limitations, Detective. This is why you’re taking Eddie. He got us into this mess, and he knows what it takes to get us out of it. Like it or not, Detective, he’s certainly done more to find these men than you ever have, and if he’s responsible for what happened here, then I’ll deal with him when this is over. But right now I have more faith in him finding my granddaughter than you. Call for backup. We’ll deal with whoever you send here and help in any way we can, but right now you and Eddie need to get your asses out there and find Sam.”

“You know he’s right,” I say, looking away from Nat to Schroder.

“Okay, okay, fine. Where’s the man who did this?”

I lead him into the living room. A pool of blood has formed around the guy’s head. He’s ended up lying on top of the bag of pencils and crayons.

Nat and Diana stand in the doorway. “That’s one of them,” Nat says.

“And the other?” Schroder asks.

“The other one took Sam,” Nat says. “Not much more I can tell you. I mean, he looked kind of like this one. Shaved head, tattoos-we can try to describe him. I’m pretty sure, if things had gone differently, he was going to kill us. I don’t know why he hadn’t already.”

“We’ll get some mug shots for you to go through,” Schroder says. He steps closer to the body and I roll it so he can see it better. For a moment I wonder how many dead bodies this man has seen. Plenty, I guess. Certainly many more than my father ever saw.

“Oh my God,” Diana says, when she sees the stub of the pencil. “Eddie. . I didn’t think you could, that you were. . capable. .,” her voice tails off.

“These bastards took my daughter!” I say, glaring at her. “You’d rather I let him shoot me? You’d rather have let him drown Schroder, then come down and shoot you and Nat? Let Sam die too?”

Nobody answers. Nat nods once, understanding, maybe for the first time seeing I’m doing what I can to get us through this alive. All of us.

“You recognize him?” I ask Schroder.

“No, I. . wait.” He crouches down over the body, then reaches for my hand when he wobbles. He coughs again, trace amounts of bathwater spattering on the dead guy. “He doesn’t look familiar,” he says when he’s composed himself.

“He has to.”

“He doesn’t. I’ll call it in. The fingerprints, we’ll have a hit on them by now.”

“Then what? You compile a list of names and spend a week making a case? We need to act tonight.”

“I know, I know,” he says. “Look, let me think, just give me a minute.”

“We don’t have time.”

“Who phoned you?” he asks, “when we were outside?”

“They did.”

“And they told you to take my phone off me.”

“They said they’d hurt Sam if I didn’t.”

He looks down at the dead man.

“Call them back. Tell them you’ll give it to them in exchange for Sam.”

“What?”

“He was asking you for money you don’t have. The rest of the crew are waiting for him to show up with it. But he’s not going to. What value does your daughter have then?”

“And tell them what?”

“Tell them you have it.”

It doesn’t seem the best of ideas, but it’s the only one. I go through the cell phone menu and find the recent calls. My fingers are shaking as I select the number then press CALL. It rings a couple of times, and then someone picks up.