“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
Check with your eBook retailers for Paul Cleave’s thriller
The Laughterhouse
today.
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
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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)