The Killing Hour (20 page)

By the time I make it home my chest and throat are burning. I take the time to strip off my clothes outside. I smear the mud off my skin and flick it onto the concrete.

I make my way stiffly into the bathroom and turn on the shower. I don’t need to wait for it to warm up because the cold water is still warmer than me. I climb in and grit my teeth as my skin stings. I reach up and grab onto the showerhead. It’s all I can do to force myself to stay. All my nerve endings are tingling. I keep my head down and my eyes closed and the pain starts to fade. Five minutes later it’s gone. I turn the shower dial up and make it hotter. The pain returns but I deserve it.

I step out of the shower after maybe an hour, dry myself down, fill up a hot water bottle and make my way to bed. Before climbing beneath the covers I head to the back door and wedge a chair beneath the handle so it can’t be opened.

The killing hour is gone now, but there will be another arriving tomorrow. I try going to sleep. I keep asking myself how this happened even though I know the answer. My eyes close and the events of the night catch up with me before I can answer why Cyris took Kathy and Luciana to a clump of trees within the city and not to a similar place to where Landry took me. I want to answer it because I feel it’s important, but at the moment I can’t see how. Falling asleep with near hypothermia isn’t probably the best thing I could do right now but I figure it isn’t exactly the worst. I let it happen.

35

The smell makes Jo think of ground-up moths. It’s an earthy smell, certainly nothing like life. Tied up and gagged, locked down here in this basement, thinking of life is hard to do. Shaking, her mind racing, she fights uselessly with the ropes. The rag in her mouth tastes of vanilla and she wonders what it was last used on. Or who.

Cyris had said little on the ride here. In the end, either he had forgotten the way to his house or he had enjoyed driving in large out-of-the-way circles for over an hour. She had considered speeding into a lamppost because surely death was better than letting Cyris do what he wanted to her, but she was too pissed off with Cyris to let herself die because of him. Pissed off with Charlie too.

Sometimes Cyris makes sense, but it’s the random comments that frighten her most. When he asked if she knew how his hedgehog was feeling she had sat silently, confident that any reply would be the wrong one. Occasionally he would clutch at his stomach, and she wondered if there was a chance of grabbing the gun off him, but if she tried and failed then failure around a guy like this was certainly going to be unpleasant. He is sick, wounded – Charlie was sure he’d stabbed him, and the way Cyris has been clutching himself is evidence of that. Is he doped up? His eyes are bloodshot and his hands have been shaking a lot. If he’s on medication it might mean he’s ready to snap at any moment, but it might also mean he could forget he has her locked up in his basement.

The house she’s tied up in, the house she could die in, isn’t the run-down hellhole she’d thought it would be. She’d conjured up images of a Unabomber shack, a dilapidated slum property with flaking paint, holes in the plaster and the windows boarded up. There would be the smell of death and decay and of countless others who had breathed hard with fear near the end. That’s what the house would be like – and she’s frightened that it isn’t. Frightened to find normality in a home that’s five years old at the most. Coming through the house looking at the carpets and the walls and the general décor she could see it had a woman’s touch. A few nice paintings. Small knick-knacks. And everything was tidy, like a show home. Is it possible Cyris doesn’t live alone? It would explain why he wanted her to be so quiet. Or maybe he has women tied up in all of the rooms. Or perhaps this isn’t even his house.

The basement is cold – the concrete floor is uncarpeted. She’s resting in the corner with her hands tied behind her and her feet tied ahead of her. There’s a coil of rope wrapped around her body. It holds her against a large drum that she prays isn’t full of human body parts or the acid to dissolve them. Maybe that’s the smell she can’t identify. Tossed over her is a blanket from which she can draw no warmth.

The ropes bite into her wrists. She can feel blood. Are there any rats down here with her? The scent of her blood will have them creeping along, creeping along, their noses twitching and their tiny paws scratching at the concrete. Any second now whiskers are going to brush against her hands, little claws will dig into her legs, small teeth will chew at her fingers, gnawing away skin, tearing through flesh …

She squeezes her eyes shut, she forces herself to think of Charlie, to forget about the rats, to forget about Cyris.

To forget about what might happen over the next few hours.

36

I wake up in the afternoon into a dark world full of sunshine and without the aid of ghosts. My room is stuffy with stale air and my head is full of bad dreams. I climb from beneath the blankets. The cold hot water bottle is on the floor. I have slept on a bed that less than a day ago held a body part. The storm has passed and when I look out my window, it’s as though it never happened. I wish I could say the same thing about everything else in my life. I stare out at the warm day and wonder how much longer summer is going to hang around. It’s a question nobody can ever answer.

My body feels okay until I try to walk. When I do, my jaw starts throbbing. I can barely turn my head, my neck is so stiff. Every muscle in my arms, legs and chest is tender. I turn on the radio and tune into a news bulletin. Some woman talks about the police investigation but she says nothing new. The same old guy who gave yesterday’s weather report comes on and says it will be fine all day. I wonder what he means.

I stagger through the house and head for the bathroom. I stand in the shower for twenty minutes trying to loosen up. I’ve been spending way too much time lately showering. Too much time in the woods. Too much time bitching about why life can’t be better, why the Real World must be so goddamn real. I study myself in the mirror when I get out. My jaw is puffed up and swollen. My neck is dark blue on the left. My eyes are bloodshot. The bump on my forehead isn’t looking any smaller. I have dozens of tiny stone chips on my face from the boulder that Cyris shot. I study the back of my head with my fingers. Several valleys and mountains there from my journey down Cold River. It’s like following a map to hell.

I’m looking at a man who has been both beaten up and beaten, but suddenly it doesn’t seem to worry me. It’s as if somewhere deep inside I’ve just pulled a giant lever, not so much an on/off switch as a one-armed-bandit and five bars with the word ‘hate’ have all landed in a row. I hate that I can never be the same Charlie I was a week ago, and that saddens and scares me. I hate Cyris, and I wonder what I’m capable of doing about that. Murder? I close my eyes and pull the giant lever inside my mind. Bells and whistles and alarms all start going off inside of me. Yeah, murder is now within my capabilities. I sense other things are within my ability now too but I’m too scared to keep pulling on that lever to find out.

The beaten man stares back at me and what seems like pity fills his eyes. The man looks like he isn’t sure what I’m going to do. He looks concerned for me as though he’s worried I might start screaming and take my rage out on the world. Am I insane for not going to the police? Do I not go to the police because I genuinely fear their involvement will jeopardise Jo’s life? Do I not go because I want to kill Cyris? Or do I not go because I was responsible for Kathy and Luciana dying? Could be any of those, could be all of them. Could be that the last policeman I dealt with tried to kill me. Could just be that my reflection is looking at somebody who really doesn’t know.

The man in the mirror offers no answers but he looks ready to start laying blame. I get dressed and for the next hour I wander aimlessly through my house, opening up the rooms and staring out windows as if all the answers lie outside in the fresh air and warm sun. Ideas of what to do next start firing at me from dark corners of my mind but they all seem to lead nowhere. I keep following them, though, in the hope that one seems less insane than any of the others. I can’t just hang around and wait. I hate waiting. Each minute that goes by is a minute Jo has to spend with Cyris. Each minute that goes by is another one in which she could be dying.

The obvious thing happens and I start thinking of things I should have thought of last night. The trek to the cabin after our swim. The chances of coming out of that alive had been so remote I had been ready to curl up and die. We survived and we had hibernated inside the cabin until we thawed out but we had waited too long. How could I have been so foolish to believe we were safe? How? Maybe I was too cold or maybe I was just too damn stupid.

I move into the room Cyris trashed. Beneath my computer desk is a small set of drawers, three in total, all still intact. The bottom is a filing drawer. I pull it open and start flicking through the partitions. It takes some time to find the one for my bank. They’re all out of order. Cyris has gone through them as I figured he had: this is where he got the idea of the forty thousand dollars from.

The whole concept of a revolving mortgage is simple. It’s basically an overdraft where you can draw out the money you’ve paid in. I’ve paid forty thousand dollars off my mortgage and that’s how much I can now access. I push the statements aside. It doesn’t matter how much money I have. Money can’t buy you happiness. It can’t buy life. And no amount will stop me from killing the son of a bitch.

I go back to my bedroom and sit on the edge of the bed. It is after three o’clock and the sun has peaked in the sky and is starting its long, slow spiral down towards a new day on the other side of the world. Ideally I’d like to be there to see it, there with Jo.

Okay, Action Man, it’s time to act.

I find my wallet and everything inside it is wet. I take out my credit cards and my driver’s licence. I use a tea-towel to dry them, then leave them on the bench in the sun. I go into the bathroom and do what I can to turn the broken Charlie Feldman into one who will fit back into society. I smile a pained smile then add some cologne and some hair gel. I load my wallet back up and head outside.

The day is even better now that I’m out in it. I think that Landry probably would have liked it. I wonder what he’d be doing right now if he weren’t dead, and then I feel a pang of guilt thinking about his last act, which was to save us. It’s possible he wasn’t such a bad guy. Possible under other circumstances I might have liked him. And probable he’d still be alive if I’d taken care of Cyris on Monday morning. Landry would have liked today. I’m sure of it. The bright sun, the warm wind, the essence of calm. Barely any traces of cloud adorn the sky. Long twin white lines float a few kilometres high above me from a fast-moving jet. It’s a great day, the type you always want to wake up to. At least it would be if I’d stabbed Cyris in the heart and not the stomach.

The duffel bag of cold logs is still on the floor of my car and the handcuffs on the seat. I hide the cuffs in the glovebox. Being in my Honda mingling with other traffic is surreal. I look at drivers and pedestrians and I wonder what they think of me. Can they see who I am? Can they see what I’ve become? What I’m now fighting for? Then those thoughts are reversed as I look at their faces. Who are these people? I don’t know any of them. I don’t know what they’re capable of. Murder? Sure, statistically some of them have to be capable of that. But how do you know which ones?

The trip to the bank takes me past flooded gardens and lawns with new swimming pools that suggest the sun hasn’t been out all day. The streets are bone dry and make for safe driving. There’s no consensus about what to wear – some people are out in shorts and T-shirts, others in raincoats carrying umbrellas. I figure they’re all right. I park next to a beaten-up Holden with half of its hubcaps missing. Looking at it gives me an idea.

The bank is a plain-looking building in a row of other plain-looking buildings behind a box-shaped shopping mall. The glass doors open with a hissing sound. Potted palm trees guarding the entranceway almost reach the ceiling. A whole lot more potted plants are scattered around inside. Maybe it’s supposed to make the fee-paying customers feel more at ease. Me, I feel like I’m back in a forest. I look around for a river but the closest thing is a water cooler in the corner. It has an out-of-order sign because somebody has broken the plastic tap. I wait in line with more people who don’t know that in the early hours of the morning I buried a piece of Kathy in a field, near a creek, behind my house, while she watched me and judged me and begged me from a world her dead self has moved to.

I wait in the queue for five minutes before getting to the counter. I present my withdrawal slip to an old guy named George who will surely die before he retires, and even then still try and show up for work. His wrinkled face takes on a puzzled expression when he reads the amount on the slip, and he adjusts his bifocals to make sure he’s read the amount correctly, and then adjusts them again to make sure he’s seeing me correctly. Indeed he is, and the anguish on his face becomes more evident. He asks me to step aside, then a woman around my age comes from somewhere deep within the bank and leads me down a carpeted corridor into a small office.

Her name is Erica and she’s the sort of woman I would be flirting with if I didn’t appear and feel half dead and think the woman I possibly love might be dead. The small cream office has no window so the only view is the single door we came through, an aerial photo of Christchurch hanging on the wall and a vase filled with plastic roses. I look at the photo and wonder where I was when it was taken. More people were alive then.

A long desk with a computer and stacks of paper and office clutter sits close to the middle of the room with a chair on each side. It feels like an interrogation room, and when she starts asking me questions to prove my identity I look around for two-way mirrors. I wait for her to ask where I was on Sunday night but she doesn’t. I can see her desire to enquire about my bruises and cuts but she can’t bring herself to do so. She keeps brushing her hair back behind her right ear in a nervous way. She knows something isn’t right, but what can she do? She can think and she can suspect. But it’s my money. A small necklace with a silver crucifix hangs around her neck. I feel like letting her in on the big secret.