The Killing Hour (15 page)

‘Turn around slowly.’

I turn. The rain lands on his
Kiss the Cook
cap and runs off the brim. Does he have the apron to match? I can’t stop shaking. Water runs down my face. I don’t bother wiping it from my eyes. ‘Nice place,’ I say, quietly. Too cold to be loud. Too scared to be funny.

He comes forward. ‘We’re nearly there, you know?’

‘Where?’

‘The end of the line. You want to know how I know about this place? Not about the cabin, you already know that, but about this place right here.’

‘You walked the crime scene?’

‘Yeah, but we wouldn’t have come this far. Only we had to. Because the girl in the bathtub wasn’t our man’s first victim. She was his second. He led us here. We found his first in the caves behind you.’

I don’t like the idea of taking my eyes off the weapon but I follow his gaze and aim the torch where he’s pointing. The beam is swallowed up by the mouth of a cave that’s been there for ever.

‘Holes in there are so deep you can drop a stone and never hear it land.’

‘And a body?’ I ask.

‘It took us two days to find her and that was only because we were looking. Nobody will ever look for you. Not out here. You’re going to die, Feldman. You get to choose whether you want to meet your maker with a clear conscience.’

He takes aim. I can hear my heart beating, my stomach rumbling. My jaw throbs. My neck aches. I can hear the river and the rain. My bowels are clenching. My bladder is trying to let itself go. I feel like I want to yawn, scream, run, do a thousand push-ups. I suddenly have all this energy that deserves to have a chance of release. I deserve the chance to be a better person, to be somebody who will be missed. I picture my cold dead body lying on this cold dead ground. I’ll never be found. I’ll have a funeral with an empty coffin. I want people to say they miss me. I want a community in shock. I want the kids I teach to be disappointed I can teach them no more.

I think of Jo and wish I could tell her how I feel about her. I wish I could say I regret what happened. I wish I could warn her about people like Cyris. I wish I could protect her. She’ll go to the police and tell them the entire story. Will they know who killed me?

I’m standing in the rain beneath a storm-clouded sky, among the trees and the mud and the rocks, and this is no place to die.

I point the torch at his face but the bright light doesn’t blind him.

‘Goddamn you, Feldman. And God forgive me.’

I close my eyes. ‘Go to hell.’

The sound of the shotgun rips the night apart.

24

I can hear myself screaming.

The wet ground vibrates waves of cold into my spine. Death has chilled me. I continue to scream. I clutch my hands to my chest and can feel the blood soaking upwards, warm blood. It oozes between my fingers like water and slips down the sides of my chest like water, and several seconds later while the screaming continues I realise it actually
is
water, and at the same moment I realise it isn’t me screaming. I sit up and point the torch ahead of me. Landry is swaying back and forth, trying to keep his balance. The shotgun is in his right hand, the barrel pointing to the ground. His left hand is reaching around to the back of his head. Something moves behind him.

I dig my feet and hands into the slippery ground and push upwards. I stand and run as hard as I can at Landry. He sees me, raises the gun and pulls the trigger. My eyes flare red as the blood I’m about to lose surges past my brain, but the gun only clicks because it hasn’t followed the sound of a double crunch. That means even though there’s still ammo in the shotgun there’s no shell in the chamber – I’ve seen enough movies to know this. So nothing happens except this small clicking noise, which is the sweetest sound in the whole world. I hit him at full speed, first lowering my head and shoulder to make the most of the impact. I connect with his chest; the torch pops from my hands as the gun pops from his. My momentum drives him into a tree, his head snapping back into it.

I push myself away. The torch shines in my eyes for a few seconds before moving over to Landry. He looks totally out of it. If he’s really lucky I won’t turn the shotgun onto him.

‘I’ve never been so happy to see you,’ I say, turning towards Jo.

‘Don’t get happy yet,’ she says, crunching the shotgun and pointing it at me. It wobbles in the air as she tries to control it. She’s never held a shotgun before, but the mechanics are simple enough to figure out – pump, point, and shoot. She bends down and picks up the torch, it’s sitting next to the rock she hit Landry with. She moves the beam onto my face, making it difficult for me to see her. I want to hug her but I can’t because of the handcuffs. Anyway she’d probably shoot me.

She turns the torch back to Landry. Blood is running down the side of his neck and down the left side of his forehead.

‘We need to help him,’ she says.

‘Do we?’

‘Who is he?’ she asks.

I wonder. ‘A cop who finally saw too much. And got it all wrong.’

I don’t know how calm I’m sounding but Jo is looking at me as if I’m the one who’s got it all wrong. Perhaps I sound flippant, even dismissive. Yeah, just another trip into the woods. Yeah, just another psycho.

‘He thought you did it.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Did you?’

I turn away from her because she already knows the answer. I look at Landry and lean in towards him. He looks blankly back at me, still trying to hold onto consciousness.

‘Thanks for following,’ I say, looking back to Jo. ‘And thanks for saving my life. How did you get free?’

‘Does it matter? You’re just lucky I got free as he was putting you into the back of his car, and you’re equally lucky I decided to follow you to the police station.’

‘Some police station,’ I say, looking around.

‘Lucky I followed anyway, huh? You’d be dead right now if I didn’t have a spare key in a magnet box under the car, and frankly, I don’t know just how bad a thing that would be. We need to hurry. A concussion in these conditions could be deadly.’

The gun moves around in her hands; she’s either shaking from the cold or from the shock of saving my life. I check Landry’s pocket where I saw him put the keys. When I step away his legs begin to buckle and he slowly slides down and sits on the ground as if the weight of the keys was the only thing keeping him upright. So far he’s had nothing to say since being struck twice in the head. I like him this way.

The lock seems smaller than the key as I try to work the handcuffs. My hands are shaking so much that the tip of the key keeps chattering against the bracelet. Jo isn’t offering to help. I slide the key around until finally it fits into place. Then I go through the same drama with the second bracelet. When I’m free I snap them onto Landry’s wrists. He’s starting to groan. He folds his hands over the top of his head. He seems to have forgotten where he is, either that or he doesn’t care any more. He stares past me at the cave where it took a team of people two days to find a dead girl.

‘We need to get him back to the cabin,’ Jo says.

‘This guy just tried to kill me. I’m not taking him anywhere.’

‘We’re taking him to a hospital, Charlie, and then we’re going to the police.’

I look at her face and then at the gun and I like this combination a hell of a lot better than the last one. ‘I’ll be charged with murder.’

‘If you’re innocent you won’t be. Anyway what sort of murderer would bring a policeman to hospital under these circumstances?’

‘So you believe me.’

‘Let’s just say I’m more open to strange things happening.’

‘Glad you’re on my side,’ I say.

‘I’m not, but if we leave him here he’ll die.’

Then we should leave him here. I start to help him to his feet but his legs are like jelly. He can’t take any of his own weight and I can’t take all of it. I’m weak from the cold and it’s going to be hell carrying him back to the cabin. If he dies on the way I’ll dump him where he lands and hope Jo doesn’t shoot me for it.

‘You’re sure you don’t want to carry him?’ I ask.

Jo doesn’t answer.

‘Jo?’ I hoist Landry onto my shoulders. I stagger at first, trying not to slip across the wet ground. My thighs start to burn. Landry has to be at least ninety kilograms. If lifting him is this hard, carrying him will be impossible.

‘I’m not sure I can do this,’ I say, speaking louder as I turn around.

‘You’ve got that right, partner,’ the tall figure says. He wears black clothing, has dirty skin, long black hair, a scraggly beard, bushy sideburns, and he’s standing next to Jo.

She doesn’t have the gun any more. It’s now pointed at her.

25

Watching, watching, Cyris is waiting and watching, yeah, yeah, things are working out well, really well, and the rain keeps on falling in the forest but he doesn’t mind the rain. He thinks of a time when he went swimming and saw a dog drown, and thinking of the wet fur makes him start to itch. He can’t stop wondering what colour the inside of his soul would be – then wonders if he has one at all. Would it be blue or grey?

He thinks about how that wet dog felt beneath his fingers as he held it down. If the dog could talk it would tell him to look out for other dogs because sometimes they can be rabid, sometimes they can be dead. Thinking of the wet dog reminds him that it’s raining. He hates the rain. He’s wet and he’s hungry but this doesn’t worry him because he’s entertained, yeah, yeah, entertained by this hilarity, because all of this is nothing but funny, and then it becomes nothing but. The shotgun is in his hands and in his fingers and whether he uses it is up to the weatherman. Everything is up to the weatherman and that makes Cyris jealous. It makes him angry because the ability to choose who lives and dies should be up to him.

Killing out here where nobody can see him is the perfect way to end all of this, but it’s also a cheap way. His mind races for another solution, a solution that equals gain, a solution that isn’t so cheap or slippery. He’s aware he’s just stood on a hedgehog but it wasn’t really his fault, not really, not when it’s so dark out here.

He starts to laugh. Stupid hedgehog. Stupid thing deserved to die.

He starts to cry. He can’t help it. The hedgehog was innocent but maybe it died happy, so he starts to laugh again. Maybe it died doing what it loved most – getting stood on. He laughs and starts to think of the two dead women. He thinks back to Monday morning and things were going fine, so fine, and the night was nicer than this, there was no rain and plenty of night, plenty that couldn’t go wrong but seemed to anyway, and Monday came before the drugs could take away the pain of it all. Two pills a day became two an hour, but thank God, yeah, thank God they’re not damaging his mind, but he can’t be sure, not sure at all, and he pictures his mind working like a washing machine, the thoughts tumbling, no,
spinning
— it’s the dryer that tumbles, and then Charlie came along and ruined everything. Things weren’t fine at all and the plan had to change and he isn’t one to enjoy change, but things worked out in the end, oh yes they did. Only he has to take all these painkillers and the headaches come and go but they never really go, but things are working out. Right now things couldn’t really be any better. It would be better if he could remember what star-sign he is and this bothers him more than anything else. His stomach hurts too. Cancer?

No. Gemini.

You are in control
, he tells himself,
you are in control, Cyris, so now what?
He counts one policeman here who needs to die so maybe he ought to start there because there’s no use for the policeman. In fact the exact opposite is true because there are several uses for a dead policeman. He looks at Charlie and he looks at the woman and he smiles his smile of relief. Everything’s under control, everything’s going to work out fine, but he should never have doubted that, and he never will doubt it again, and his stomach is throbbing, and he can feel the duct tape across his skin and the duct tape is grey, but it’s red too because of the blood.

He tightens his grip on the shotgun. He doesn’t know the brand and doesn’t care. It could be Russian or American but they all do the same thing at this range. He doesn’t pull the trigger because he wants to gain something, though he doesn’t know what it is. He has a feeling that he was meant to be given something after killing those two women and he’s forgotten, even though he wrote that reason down and stored it inside his pocket the moment he realised his thoughts weren’t what they ought to be. At least he thinks he wrote down the right thing because he wrote it on Monday afternoon after he started taking the pills. He wants to get it out and read it but the rain will soak it. He needs to think. He needs to remember. Having ink running down his fingers won’t help at all.

He covers the three people with the shotgun and the policeman doesn’t look that healthy. Perhaps the painkillers Cyris has been taking will help the policeman, but Cyris only wants to help himself, and he keeps trying to tell himself to think things through, to think things through, to think about a gain, a goal, and a small voice in his mind suggests this could all be for money.

He opens his mouth to talk and cold air rushes down his throat and for a few seconds his mind starts to focus. He has to concentrate now so he can form the words but maybe he ought to just shoot everybody instead.

26

Cold rain. Cold wind. One psycho with a gun. Then another psycho with a gun.

Is there something here I’m missing?

‘You remember me, part … partner?’

I remember everything while saying nothing.

‘What a show. I would clap but my hands are blue.’

He looks at the package I’m carrying and all I can think about are his blue hands. He must mean they’re cold. I guess.

‘Caught yourself a pig?’

Landry starts to moan.

‘Put, down, put him down, down, down,’ Cyris says.

I get the point. I crouch and hoist Landry over my head so he lands in front of me. I don’t really try to be gentle but I make sure he doesn’t land on his head. I stand up but don’t back away. Instead I slowly move towards Jo. Cyris doesn’t ask me to stop. He seems to be enjoying himself. Why wouldn’t he? I’m the only guy out here tonight who hasn’t actually had any fun. When I’m next to Jo he scampers over to the cop and kneels next to him.