Blood Men (32 page)

“Tell me about him,” I say.

“There isn’t much to tell.”

“There has to be something.”

“What do you want to hear, son? That he’s a bad person who has whatever is coming to him coming to him?”

“Something like that.”

“Let’s go inside.”

I follow Dad up to the front doorstep. We’re only a couple of
hours away until the dawn lights up this part of the world. It’s becoming routine to me now. I knock on the door a couple of times and wait a minute before knocking again, and when the guy comes to the door I jam the shotgun into his face—and the rest is so familiar now I don’t even need the monster.

Tyler Layton is exactly like the kind of person you’d expect to hold up a service station or a bank with a shotgun—except maybe a bit older than I’d expected. A shaved head with tattoos adorning his scalp, prison tear tattoos raining down his face, he’s around ten years shy of Dad’s age. He doesn’t say a single word from the moment he sees the shotgun to the moment my dad finishes tying him up with cord he cuts from the venetian blinds. We don’t get into any semantics about right and wrong and the ends justifying the means.

“Start talking,” I say.

“About what?”

“About my daughter. Where is she?”

“This your son, Jack?” Tyler asks, watching my father.

“Answer the damn question,” I say to Tyler.

“I don’t know anything about your daughter,” he says, keeping his eyes on Dad. “Been a long time, Jack. The security guard uniform doesn’t suit you.”

“Not that long,” my dad says. “Not for me. Seems like it was only yesterday.”

“It’s been four years,” Tyler says.

“Where’s my daughter?” I ask.

“What’s he talking about, Jack?” he asks my father.

“What the hell is going on here?” I ask.

“I knew your father real well,” Tyler says, “if you catch my drift. Quite a few times if I remember correctly—though after the first few times I stopped remembering. Was it the same for you, Jack?”

“Tyler here was kind enough to introduce me to one of the darker elements of prison,” my father says, but there is nothing kind-sounding about his voice at all. “He was there when I first got thrown in jail. My first night there and he broke four of my fingers and cracked two molars and shredded my asshole so hard I couldn’t sit down for a month. I was barely fixed up before he went at it again. He was in
and out of jail over the years, but he always came looking for me.”

“And now you’ve come looking for me,” he says.

“What the hell, Dad? Does he have anything to do with Jodie or Sam?”

“No,” Dad says.

“Then why are we here?”

“If we had more time,” Dad says, talking to Tyler, “I’d cut you apart piece by piece.”

Tyler doesn’t answer him. For all his attempts to act as if he doesn’t care, like this is just one more day in the life of one really tough bastard, there is a fear in his eyes identical to the look in that dog’s eyes twenty years ago when it was chomping on a steak full of nails. He tightens the muscles in his arms.

“I always knew prison was going to be tough,” Dad says. “I always knew it was going to be one of those places that turns out exactly as awful as you figured it would be before you ever set foot in the place. Thing is—” he says, and then I interrupt him.

“Dad, we don’t have time for this. Sam is out there, we have to find her.”

He looks at me, his eyes sharp, cutting into me. After a few seconds, he nods.

“You’re right, son,” he says. He puts his hands out. “The shotgun?”

“No,” I say. “I didn’t free you so you could kill people.”

“Yes you did.”

“Not people who have nothing to do with what happened.”

“Give me the gun, son.”

“Don’t give it to him,” Tyler says.

Give it to him. Let him take control for a bit. We’ll get over this speed bump and find Sam.

“He’s a bad man, son. If we turn our back on him other people will suffer for it.”

Give him the shotgun.

“Do you want to know how many people he’s hurt? How many women he’s raped? Women like Jodie? Teenagers like the kind of girl Sam will become?”

I hand him the shotgun.

It’s all happening so fast. The night is becoming absolute chaos. Jack Hunter has escaped—helped by Edward—and Schroder has to push that fact to the back of his mind right at this moment and deal with it soon. At this rate he’s doubting he’ll make it home on Christmas Day for even five minutes. His wife will hate him, his daughter might too. Thankfully his son is only a few months old so at least somebody won’t be pissed at him.

The Armed Offenders Unit is running at about 50 percent, the other half having already left for the holidays or drunk already and not returning Schroder’s calls, giving him a team short on manpower but a team nonetheless, still extremely capable. Schroder has already died once tonight and doesn’t want that to be the start of a pattern. He has a better use for the team than he did half an hour ago, with them driving around looking for Hunter.

When his cell phone rings again, it’s Anthony Watts, a detective who is currently with Edward Hunter’s in-laws.

“They don’t recognize any of the photos from the files,” Watts says. “I mean, the only one they recognize is the victim lying dead on their living-room floor.”

“Okay. Get back down to the probation offices. If Bracken scrambled to put all this together since finding Kingsly’s body, then maybe this other person has a file he accessed today. It could give you a fresh set of mug shots.”

Kelvin Johnson is on the top of the list of six names he printed out, predominantly because three of the other people are dead—including Ryan Hann, who died by pencil. Bracken wasn’t on the list, giving Johnson a one-in-three chance of being the first. Incarcerated nine years ago for the robbery of a jewelry store in which a sales assistant permanently lost the use of one arm after he shot her, Johnson was released four years ago and upon his release had contact with his parole officer once a week for two years, then once a month for the following year. As of a year ago the justice system was satisfied that Kelvin Johnson was a model Christchurch citizen, having undergone the exact amount necessary of jail time and a probation period afterward.

Johnson lives in a government-subsidized house in an area of town that seems to attract violence the same way rotten food attracts flies. At the moment they’re all parked four blocks away, a miniature command post set up.

“Two things,” Schroder says, and the team of men listen intently. “First, we don’t know for a fact Johnson was part of the robbery. Second thing is, even if he was, we don’t know that he has anything to do with Sam Hunter being kidnapped, or if she is here. That means we need to be careful; we need to make sure there are no slipups, and that we get him in one piece. Any questions?”

There are always questions. They spend another ten minutes going over it. When they’re ready, two vans pull in to the street where Johnson lives, one from each side. A drive-by three minutes earlier had confirmed there were no lights on inside the house, and no signs of life. A team of two people are parked on the street behind the house in case Johnson climbs the back fence in an attempt to get away.

The Armed Offenders Unit members move quickly. They’re all dressed in black and they hit the house hard and fast, busting in the door, and then there’s thirty seconds of shouting and no gunfire. Schroder and Landry wait out on the street, and a minute later Johnson is led out in a pair of pajama bottoms and handcuffs.

“There’s nobody else,” Officer Liam Marshall, the man leading the unit, says. “No sign of any girl. The house is secure.”

“Get him in the van,” Landry says. “I’ll try to convince him to talk while you check out the house.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know where she is.”

“Maybe,” Landry says, “but we’ll know soon.”

It takes Schroder three minutes to find the money. It’s hidden above the manhole in the ceiling. Things are always hidden up there; he figures there isn’t a burglar yet who hasn’t considered hiding something in the roof.

He calls Landry and updates him. “He’s definitely one of them, but there’s nothing else in the house to suggest he had the girl here. If he’d taken her, he’d be with her now.”

“Not if he’s already killed her,” Landry says.

“I know. I know,” Schroder answers, and hangs up.

“One down and two to go,” Marshall says, “and we’re set for the next location.”

“Let’s go,” Schroder says, and he gets in his car. He’s about two minutes away from the second name on the list when the call comes in of a gunshot. The address doesn’t match either of the other two addresses he still has to visit, and he wonders if the gunshot is random, or whether it means Hunter has found his daughter, or brought himself one step closer.

Tyler’s screams stop around the same time we reach the car. The gunshot tore through him and the seat of the chair and made it collapse into a splintery heap. His genitals and lower intestines are splashed out all over the floor. The arteries in his thighs are all torn up and coating the room in squirts of blood.

Could be this is the kind of neighborhood where nobody would even call the police, but we’re not hanging about to take a poll. We reach the car and pick a direction and stick with it.

“Holy shit, Dad, you just killed an innocent man.”

“No I didn’t.”

“What? You just—”

“You said innocent, Jack. Tyler was far from innocent. You could see that right off, right? It’s why you gave me the gun.”

“I gave you the gun to speed things along, that’s all,” I say. “Sam is out there somewhere, and you’re turning all of this into you. You won’t help me until I get you out of hospital. Then we go and see
somebody who has nothing to do with what we’re trying to do. All you’re doing is proving we are absolutely nothing alike.”

“He had it coming,” Dad says. “And the darkness—it needed to be fed.”

“To be fed? He said he hadn’t seen you in four years. How’d you know where to go? No way you would have been keeping tabs on where he lived, not unless you were planning on making a visit. How’d you know you’d be getting the chance?”

“I didn’t know,” he says. “But before you showed up at the hospital, I was able to find out.”

“How?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Why though? Why’d you want to find out?”

“You just sermonized about me making all of this about myself,” he says, “now you’re the one doing it. I thought you only cared about finding Sam.”

“And it’s obvious that’s not your priority at all,” I answer. “Because it all doesn’t fit properly.”

“You want my help or not?”

“That depends on whether you’re going to actually start helping me, and I’m thinking you have no idea who to speak to next.”

“Okay, okay,” he says. “Bracken was the parole officer, right?”

“Right. But he took the money from Kingsly and didn’t tell the others. Everybody thinks I have it.”

“You do have it.”

“Yeah, I have it now, but I didn’t have it earlier, and now I don’t know how to get hold of any of them.”

“Maybe they know how to get hold of you? You took his phone, right?”

“Yeah—but nobody’s called.”

“He give you anything, anything at all?” Dad asks.

“Bracken? No. Nothing.”

“You search his house?”

“Yeah. And his office. There was a cell number in his phone but it doesn’t connect.”

“You went to his office?”

“I didn’t find much. Just some files that didn’t lead anywhere.”

“Where are they?”

I nod toward the backseat. Dad reaches over for the bag and grunts when he tries to lift it.

“They’re on top,” I say, and a moment later he has them in his hands.

“Who the hell are these people?” he asks, opening the first couple of folders.

“Nobody,” I say. “Just files the probation officer had in his drawer.”

“So they’re clients he has. You went to his office and found his current work and nothing else.”

“I didn’t have time to keep looking.”

“You should have made the time. These are useless,” he says. “Some of these people don’t even have a record for armed robbery. What have we got here,” he says, thumbing through them, “we’ve got half a dozen armed holdups, an arson, a couple of rapists, a couple of drug traffickers, a kidnapper, a compulsive shoplifter—any of them could be part of this thing.”

“I know, Dad, I already know. Two men took Sam tonight, one of them I killed, the other one has her. Nat and Diana, they saw the other guy.”

“Have you showed the folders to them?”

“I can’t. The police are with them. Schroder was going to get them to check out some mug shots.”

“So maybe they have a name already. Maybe the police have already found Sam.”

“And maybe they haven’t.”

“Call them.”

“The police?”

“No, your in-laws. Maybe they’ve made an ID and can give us a name.”

“I’ve been trying.”

“Well, try again.”

I pull over. After ten rings I’m about to hang up when suddenly it’s picked up.

“Hello?”

“Nat?”

“Jesus, Eddie, where the hell are you?”

“I’m looking for Sam. Where the hell else would I be?”

“With your father? The police say you broke him out.”

“He’s helping.”

“He’s a monster.”

“So is the man who took Sam. Were you able to make an ID?”

“Not at first. The cops know who the bank robbers are but none of them took Sam. The detective who showed them to us brought back a new batch of photos. We picked him out right away, Edward. The police know who took Sam.”

“They have the name, but that’s not the same as having Sam, is it?”

“Well, no.”

“Then give me the name of the man who took her.”

“I don’t know, Eddie. I think the police are better equipped.”

“The police, if they find her, will put the man who took her in jail for five or ten years and then let him go. That what you want? Remember when you said you wished you could have time alone with the people who killed Jodie?”

“We only want Sam back safely.”