Blood Red

“There are some police officers who would like to talk to you.” The man looked at him with sympathy. “Do you feel up to talking to them?”

No. No, he did not feel up to talking to the fucking police. He felt like crawling under the hospital bed and dying. “Sure.”

Detectives Boyd and Holdstedter came into the room a few minutes later, both of them looking freshly scrubbed and well rested. They introduced themselves and the blond one poured him a Styrofoam cup full of deliciously cold water.

“Can you tell us what happened at your house, Mr. Tripp?” The shorter of the two men asked the question, his face almost masklike.

“My son killed my wife and then ran away with her body.”

Detective Boyd’s voice was doubtful. “Your son Avery?” He recognized the man. It had taken a moment for him to connect the pissed-off detective he’d seen during the search for Avery with the soft-spoken man standing in front of him now.

“Yes. Avery did it. I saw him.”

“Do you have any idea why?”

“I think he was feeding on her.”

Both detectives stared at him in horrified silence for at least half a minute. He understood how they felt.

Finally Holdstedter spoke up. “Feeding on her? He was eating her flesh

?”

“I don’t know. She was dead, her blood was all over her neck and the bed and his mouth and I think he was eating Meghan.” He heard the sound of his voice rising, scaling up in octaves and volume alike, but he didn’t seem to have any control over the words or volume. All of the horror of the previous night crawled back into his mind and left him ready to scream, so he did. “My little boy killed her and started eating her fucking neck, detective! He had blood all over his mouth and down on his shirt and his goddamned teeth were pink with it!”

The whole room went dark red, shading to near black at the edges of his vision. The two detectives looked at him with doubtful expressions and his excitement grew in leaps and bounds. “He wasn’t Avery, but he looked like him! He was too strong! No one is that strong, you hear me? No one in the world is that strong! I tried to choke him to death and he bitch-slapped me! That goddamned freak threw me out a window!”

Somewhere near his left side the heart monitor was beeping erratically, and his vision went darker still, redder, more like the color of his wife’s life as it drained all over the bed.

He was irritated by the sound of the monitor so he reached out and slapped at the thing, doing little more than bruising his fingertips. He grunted and reached for it again, this time pushing the device and the attached IVs to the ground. The needle in his arm pulled free and he barely even noticed. It was just one more pain and it didn’t matter, not anymore . . . nothing mattered except that he find his son and punish him for what he’d done to Meghan. He had to know where her body was and where Avery’s body must surely be, because there was no way that Avery had done what he knew the boy had done.

The nurse reached for him to calm him down and Alan screamed at the man for his efforts. “Get away from me! I want Meghan! I want Avery! You find them goddamn you!”

He looked toward Boyd and reached for the man to shake him to make his case clear. He wanted his family back because something was wrong around these parts.

His hands touched the lapels of the detective’s jacket and were knocked away hard and fast. Before he could grab a second time the other detective was on him, wrenching his hands away from the shorter one and pulling them behind his back.

It didn’t matter. None of it did. Alan laughed, because he couldn’t make the words come out anymore, and he flexed, pulling his arms free from the larger man’s grip. He was still turning to face the blond when Holdstedter’s fist slammed into his face and knocked him off his feet.

He was still screaming and laughing and crying out his frustrations when the two men pinned him to the ground and called for restraints. The blood had soaked through his bandaged hand, and the sight of the dark red oozing through the cotton was enough to send him over the edge. He kicked Holdstedter in the balls, and swung his body around, determined to get out of the room and the building so he could find his family and bring them back together.

He didn’t want any of this, didn’t want to piss off the cops or hurt anyone, but his mind was screaming signals at him that didn’t make sense and he couldn’t stop himself.

Boyd stopped him instead. Alan fought back for several seconds as the detective slipped in behind him and got him into a chokehold. He was still fighting all the way back into unconsciousness.

V

“He’s a mental case. Elementary school kids do not go around eating their mothers.”

“He kicks like a mule.”

“I wouldn’t know. I kept my balls away from him.”

“Love the sympathy, man.” Danny was walking like he’d been horseback riding for the last week.