Blood Men

chapter forty-four

Bracken doesn’t say a thing. Everything that seemed odd the moment I got here doesn’t seem odd anymore. He watches as I take the cell phone out of his pants. There are a thousand things all fighting to be said, but in this moment not one of them can be heard. This man took my daughter and he has her somewhere. His eyes are open all the way again. Blood is still draining out of the wound.

“Please, please,” he says, his words slurring slightly, “call am-ambulance.”

“Where’s my daughter?”

“Please. .”

“Is she here?”

“Help me and I’ll tell you where she is.”

I slap him across his face. Hard. “That’s not how it works. You tell me where she is, then I help you.”

He clenches his eyes shut, his mouth in an open grimace, his teeth tight against each other, revealing an overbite that I’ll take the steak tenderizer to if he doesn’t talk. His entire face has caved in somewhat, as if he’s lost ten kilos in the last two minutes. Blood and now a mixture of urine too is pooling on the floor beneath him. It smells bad.

“Where is she?”

He doesn’t answer, just keeps the grimace and the tight facial features of a man going through something very intense. It’s pain and fear and maybe something spiritual too.

“Hey,” I say, and I slap his face again.

He shakes his head and a moment later he doesn’t seem to know where he is.

“Tell me where she is and I stop the bleeding. Schroder calls for an ambulance and you get fixed up. Quicker you talk, quicker I help you.”

His eyes focus on me. “Take the, take. .”-he sucks in a deep breath-“take the handcuffs off the cop first. You free him then I talk.”

“You think he’ll protect you?”

“He won’t want to. . but he has to.” His face turns into a grimace again as he rides another wave of pain.

“Are you the son of a bitch who shot my wife?”

“No.”

“Who, then? Give me a name. Is this the person who has my daughter?”

He doesn’t answer. The pool of blood is still spreading, but not as quickly now.

“Answer me, damn it. How do I get her back?”

“Help me,” he says, his voice low. His eyes focus on something above me before rolling into the back of his head. I slap his face and they roll back down and stare right at me.

“My daughter,” I say.

“My daughter,” he repeats, almost whispering now.

“Where’s Sam?”

“Sam,” he says, then he closes his eyes. I slap him but they don’t open back up. I check him for a pulse but there’s nothing.

“Wake up!” I slap him harder. “Please,” I say, grabbing his shoulders, “tell me where she is.”

The dead man doesn’t answer. I look over at Schroder before sitting on the floor and resting my head in my hands with no idea at all what to do next. I think about what Dad said, about having to learn to control the monster otherwise it would make me do things I didn’t want to do. Did the monster do this?

No. Of course not.

You knew she wanted to hurt him. Why leave her alone with him and a large knife? You knew it’d play out this way.

No. I didn’t.

Yeah? How else you think it was going to go?

I lean forward and remove Schroder’s gag.

“Listen to me, Edward,” he says. “I know how it must have gone down. You snapped, and you certainly didn’t mean to kill him. You were trying to get information, and you were right about Bracken, he knew where your daughter was. Let me help you.”

“I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me that cut him.”

“Then who? Who was that woman?”

“She was nobody.”

“Come on, Edward, it’s time to stop all of this. Too many people are getting hurt.”

I put the gag back into his mouth. He doesn’t struggle-he’s resigned to the fact there’s nothing he can do except wait things out. I get up and pace the living room, covering a few hundred meters over the same piece of carpet while I try and work it all out.

Bracken has two cell phones, it turns out. He has a normal one, with what appear to be work and family contacts. Then he has the second one, the one that rang earlier. There are only two numbers in the memory, with no name attached to either of them. One is for the phone I’ve been using. I scroll down to the other number and press CALL. It rings three times and then it’s picked up.

“I’m still waiting,” a man says.

“I have the money.”

“Money?”

“Please, I can. .”

The line goes dead. I call the number again but he’s switched off the phone.

I keep pacing. Thinking about it.

“I know how it happened,” I say to Schroder. “Bracken planned the whole thing, and when they split the money up they gave Kingsly his share. When Bracken found him this morning he took the money. Instead of breaking it evenly among his partners, he told them whoever killed Kingsly must have taken it. That way he could keep it all. There never was any plan to pay to get my daughter back. It was a charade. He stashed Sam somewhere with no intention of me paying to get her back, but as an act so the others would think I had the money. Bracken only guessed I’d killed Kingsly because the media kept speculating that I was capable of it. I don’t even know if Sam’s alive anymore. I have all this but nobody to trade it with,” I say, and I open up the bag I found under the floor. It’s full of identical bricks of cash that I found but didn’t take last night. I don’t even know the exact amount. It’s all blood money that I don’t want, but it may still be my only chance of finding Sam. Schroder doesn’t nod or shake his head or offer anything useful. He’s watching a man falling apart. “I bet Bracken was going to kill the guy who has Sam. It would tie up a loose end and give him more money. They were going to kill me too.”

I go through the house. There’s a bedroom that’s been converted into an office, and I switch on the computer. While waiting for it to boot up, I go through the rest of the house. I check under the floor in the wardrobe where the money was hidden but there’s nothing else down there. I check other wardrobes but find nothing. Every time I walk past Bracken’s body I resist the urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake him.

I sit down in front of Bracken’s computer and navigate around the desktop. It’s a clean desktop with only a few icons, and I click one open to find a folder full of porn, maybe a hundred or so video clips. I don’t watch any of them. I close the folder and go into his documents folder. Turns out Bracken is-or was-an aspiring novelist. There are a couple of manuscripts here that he’s working on. I don’t read any of them. There is a games folder, and a music folder, and then I go through the folders on the hard drive, looking for something, for anything related either to work or to robbing a bank. I go through his emails-and it turns out that Bracken doesn’t have many friends. Even his address book is barren except for a half dozen people, half of whom share the same last name as him. I scan through the emails; mostly they’re all bad jokes that have been circulated around the world millions of times already. There are no emails at all relating to work or to robbing a bank. There aren’t any emails to or from Shane Kingsly. I spend fifteen minutes going through his computer-which is a long time when there’s a corpse leaking blood all over the living-room floor-and in the end the only thing I’ve accomplished is to waste precious time.

Out in the living room, Schroder has disappeared. He’s rolled himself out or got to his feet. I check the front door and it’s open. I step outside but there’s no sign of him. He could have jumped out fifteen minutes ago or only two, but either way the result is the same for me-the police are on their way.

I grab Bracken’s pants and find his wallet, then head out to my car. I wonder what the statistics are now for Schroder-what percentage chance he has of bouncing along to a neighbor who will help him, or one that will try to cannibalize him.

I don’t have the time to care.