“Try to stand up,” I say, but she doesn’t. I guess it’s okay. I can’t reenact everything. It’s not like I have a shotgun. Just a knife. It’ll all work out the same way. This woman for Jodie. For Sam. The woman is crying, sobbing hard now.

“It’s the only way,” I say.

Do it. Feel it. Feed the urge.

I lean down over her. I hold the knife tightly.

Come on, get it done.

There are footsteps on the broken glass, loud enough to be heard over the alarm. Detective Schroder comes to within a few meters of us, his palms raised to me. He studies the woman before focusing on the knife in my hand.

“Put the knife down, Edward.” He has to yell to be heard.

I move behind her and hold it against her throat. She’s shaking and she’s warm and it’ll be over soon, it’ll be the way it was meant to be.

“I can’t,” I yell back.

“Please, please, help me,” the woman says, but her voice is low and I don’t think Schroder can hear her over the alarm.

“Edward, put down the knife.”

“Why are you even here? You weren’t here last time.”

“I’m here because I don’t want anybody else to die.”

“How come you got here so fast? Last week nobody showed up for five minutes, this week you’re here within seconds. It’s not fair.”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Schroder says. “And it won’t work. You can’t fix the past, Edward. I know you called out to save this woman and she lived and Jodie died and then Sam died, but you can’t bring them back.”

“All I have to do is make sure it never happened,” I say. “All I have to do is never call out.”

“There aren’t any takebacks in this world, Edward. No resets.”

“Doing this will make everything the way it was supposed to be.”

“I wish it were that easy, Eddie, I really do. Life would be so much easier. But it isn’t. It is what it is, and killing her won’t bring Jodie or Sam back.”

“I know it won’t. It will stop them from ever being hurt.”

“Listen to yourself.”

Listen to me. Kill her. It’s in your nature. It’s who you are.

“Is this what you want?” he carries on. “To become your dad?”

Daddy’s a ghost.

“I’m nothing like him.”

“You keep telling me you hate what he is, that you hate the rest of us for thinking that you’ll become him.”

“I’m nothing like him,” I repeat.

“Take a look at yourself.”

“This isn’t about any of that. It’s not about what my dad was.”

“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

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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?