The Killing Hour (21 page)

After fifteen minutes of signing papers Erica agrees to hand over my money. It takes staff another fifteen minutes to get the cash from their vault, and they count it out in front of me in a timid way that makes me think that they think I might be one bad-hair day away from shooting them all. They pack it into a small linen bag. I look for the huge dollar sign on the side to make it more obvious but don’t see one. I thank Erica, then before leaving, I take out the wads of notes and stuff them inside my jacket and pants pockets. It’s a tight fit.

I walk over to the shopping mall, skirting around a crane and some cement mixers and several workmen who don’t appear to be doing anything. In Christchurch there are always workmen working on malls. All the time. I buy a pre-pay cellphone and an answering machine before driving to a nearby army surplus store. The walls are painted camouflage green, which makes the building stick out more. Mannequins in the window are wearing desert and jungle uniforms. Plastic people off to war. I walk inside. The lighting is dim and the air is warm. Uniforms and outfits are hanging from wire coathangers. Stacked all over the place are army storage containers with yellow and white lettering stencilled on them. Old medals in glass cases. Old gas masks. Old everything. I look at a counter full of knives. I find a hunting knife with a sharp blade and with ridges along the top.

The guy behind the counter stands around two metres and has large flabby arms covered in White Power tattoos. He wears a black leather vest with a black T-shirt beneath it. The T-shirt says
Guns don’t kill people. Grenades do
. His head is shaved and he has a long grey beard. A name badge attached to his vest says ‘Floyd’ and it looks out of place on his huge chest. He tells me the knife is called a K-bar.

I put the knife aside and keep looking. I find some fatigue gear. It’s new, not like most of the stuff in here. I wonder if anybody died in any of these uniforms. I pick up a vest with lots of pockets and a pair of compact 8 x 20 binoculars that can fit in one of them.

I put them with the knife then look through a small display of Swiss Army knives. I point to one that looks like it could do everything from repairing sunglasses to gutting a fish. He pulls it out and puts it next to the K-bar and the binoculars. I pull out my wallet. Floyd says nothing as he looks me up and down. He looks like he could break every bone in my body so I smile at him and make no conversation as I pay for the gear. He gives me my change and I ask him where I can buy a gun without a permit. He laughs at me without any humour at all and tells me that’s illegal. So I hand him five hundred bucks and ask him again. This time he gives me a name, tells me to go and see this guy tomorrow. He puts my purchases into a plastic supermarket bag. I thank him and leave.

I drive out to the airport and pull into medium-term parking. The walls of the rental agency I choose are painted bright orange with blue racing stripes around the middle. The windows and glass sliding doors are covered in stickers and decals. I step inside and an assistant high on caffeine goes through the paperwork with me as I hire a late-model Holden, the same brand but nothing like the Holden I saw outside the bank, which is the whole point. I don’t want to start driving around in my own car because Cyris knows it well. I sign the credit-card form and the guy tells me to keep the pen. I add the car key to my others.

The Holden is a much nicer drive than my Honda but it doesn’t make the situation seem any better. Just more comfortable. I throw my free pen in the glovebox where it sits next to a map and a box of tissues. Back home I charge the cellphone. I plug in the answering machine and leave a message with my new phone number.

Why didn’t Cyris take his two victims into the middle of nowhere? The answer comes when I’m in the kitchen fixing something to eat. He wanted their bodies found. What’s more, he wanted them found quickly. But not at home. He wanted them found side by side in a paddock by a common motorway. He would have left the stolen van there. The cops would have found the missing women’s DNA in it. They would have searched the area. This way the motivation for the abductions and murders looks obvious – it looks like a sick bastard doing what he enjoys most. Had he taken them somewhere more private they might never have been found. He didn’t want that and he didn’t want them discovered at home because then the suspect pool would be narrowed down to the husbands.

Suddenly I realise what didn’t fit well with the newspaper article I read yesterday. It said Kathy’s body was found by her neighbour, but Kathy had told me her cheating husband Frank would be home before the morning to get fresh clothes. If she was right, why didn’t he call the police? Why would he lie?

I drag this chain of thought around the kitchen. Is it reasonable to think her husband came home expecting to find her missing, and not dead? Just because he was due home and never called the police? It’s possible, but it’s equally possible he never made it home, that he stayed where he was and cheated some more on Kathy. But combined with the lack of forced entry, the fact Cyris wants money and the original location where the victims were meant to be found, it’s starting to stack up against Frank. I think he knew his wife was going to die that night. I think he came home prepared to call the police that she was missing, and when he found her sliced up in the master bedroom he didn’t know what to do. So he ran.

I think back to what I told Landry about Cyris putting himself into a role to kill the two women. The police come along, they find the hammer and stake, and they think madman. They don’t think cheating husband. They think psychopath.

At six-thirty I dress in my new fatigue gear. What I see in the mirror scares me. I slip the cellular into one of the many pockets, the binoculars and K-bar and Swiss Army knife into others. The sun is low, its casual slide into the night almost complete. It’s now just a bright blurry orange blob. Dressed like I’m about to go to war, and feeling it too, I walk to my car, pull down the sun visor and head towards the battlefield.

37

The sun sinks and my anguish rises.

I stop at a supermarket and ignore the looks. A person dressed in fatigues is a common enough sight. People who have been beaten up are also common enough. It’s not often the two are combined, and normally the guy in the fatigues has given the beating. Stopping at the supermarket has never been so weird. It’s as if I’ve evolved beyond walking up and down aisles looking for pastas and cereals and bread. This kind of mundane day-to-day living is behind me. This isn’t where people go when death is all around them. I grab chips, doughnuts, a packet of cheese slices and two bottles of drink. I roll out a hundred-dollar note and the looks on the faces around me change. The girl working the checkout takes a small step back. She’s thinking I just mugged somebody. Or killed them.

I pull past Kathy’s house at six-fifty in my shiny rented Holden and park six houses further down. There are no police cars. No police tape. Life has moved on. Death hasn’t, though. I can feel it waiting in the street watching me. The Mercedes I saw the other night is still parked in the same place. Maybe it’s broken down. The street is pretty quiet. I start waiting.

I flick through the newspaper I bought with my snacks. The murders are still front-page news. No mention of Landry. I figure it’s too soon. The cops will be concerned. I’m sure Landry kept any information about me to himself. Had to so he could execute me without fear of being caught. At least that’s something in my favour, I guess. I try to think if anything connects me to Landry’s death. My fingerprints are all over the cabin, which will match those at Kathy and Luciana’s houses. What else is there? Oh shit. There’s the piece of paper he showed me with my name and phone number surrounded by rubbed pencil. If Landry’s body is found the note will be discovered. And the copy that was left on my bed. He would have taken that too.

The thought of going back into the forest to look for the two notes makes me ill. I put my hand on the door, ready to open it, ready to throw up on the footpath and put an end to this stakeout, when I remember him slipping the pad into his jacket pocket. The same jacket I threw into the fire with the rest of his clothes. The second note would be in there too.

I’m still shaking with relief when a dark Mercedes pulls into a driveway six houses ahead of me. Into Kathy’s house. I put the binoculars to my eyes and manage only a glimpse of the car before it rolls out of sight. I glance at my watch. It’s seven-forty. I start the car and move up to pull in behind the silver Mercedes. Does everybody in this street own one? I kill the engine. Wait patiently.

I can see the right front of the house and the back of the Mercedes. I can’t see any movement inside the house or the car. The sun is still winking over the horizon. No need for any lights yet.

I wait. Not much more I can do. I came prepared to wait for hours and now it seems I may just be doing that. I have to remain focused. Remain sharp. I have to trust everything is okay. If I believed otherwise I’d be believing there’s no point in carrying on.

I start to grow restless, fidgety. The sun disappears but it’s still light outside. The minutes slip by like lost nights. A few people are out and about. Some are walking dogs. Others are power-walking, thrusting their arms in front of them in self-defence movements to stay fit. Nobody pays any attention to me. I probably look like a reporter. Or a cop. Both would have perfect justification to be sitting here. Both wouldn’t look out of place with cuts and bruises on their faces. I consider reading the newspaper again but it’s too dark. The streetlights come on but they don’t help. I want to get out and stretch a few of my aching muscles. I look into the rear-view mirror. My jaw where Landry hit me is getting darker. The swelling has gone down and the bruise has come up. I run my finger along the line of the bruise. It feels soft, like a small balloon of water is trapped underneath.

I look up at the sky and wonder if it will rain tonight. At one minute past nine my phone rings. I fumble through my vest pockets, forgetting which one I put it in and finding it by sound. I get to it before Cyris hangs up. It stops ringing when I flip it open. I check the display. The number Cyris is calling from is blocked.

‘Why aren’t you at home, partner?’ His voice crackles through the earpiece.

‘Didn’t want you changing your mind and deciding to kill me instead.’

Cyris says nothing as he thinks about it. So I say nothing. A minute goes by in which it seems we’re setting a trend.

‘You got the money?’ he asks.

‘I got it.’

‘Fifty grand.’

‘What?’

‘You’re pissing me off, buddy. It’s fifty grand now. It’s not free to dial a cellphone.’

No, but it doesn’t cost ten thousand dollars either. ‘I only have forty.’

‘Forty will only get you eighty per cent of her, and I decide which eighty.’

At least he’s sharpening up. ‘Fine,’ I finally say. ‘Fifty grand.’ This isn’t going to come down to money. It’s going to come down to me killing him.

‘Meet me back out at the cabin.’

‘No way.’

‘What?’

‘We three go out there and only you come back. Tell me if I’m wrong. It has to be somewhere more public.’ I’ve been giving it some thought. ‘The pier. New Brighton.’

It seems like a good location. Not too many people, but enough so Cyris won’t try anything. He says nothing as he thinks this through. Jo could already be dead and he just wants the money. Or she could be alive and he’s thinking about the location, about how he has to change his plans. He’s thinking that maybe he won’t be getting the chance to kill us tomorrow night after all. So he’s still saying nothing. But now he’s realising he knows my address, my details. He’s figuring he can kill me later on. In his own time. At his own leisure. He can afford to drive on over one night after mowing his lawns, rip me apart and pick up dinner on the way back. So the idea of a public place isn’t looking too bad. In a public place I can’t try anything against him. In a public place we all walk away alive.

‘Midnight,’ he says.

Only he’s wrong. I’m happy to try something in a public place. I have more to lose than him. Everything to gain.

‘Ten o’clock,’ I counter. ‘More people.’

I wince as I wait for a reply or for the phone to hang up.

‘Don’t forget the money, arsehole. I’ll cut her pretty little head off no matter how many people are around.’

‘Let me talk to Jo.’

‘She’s busy.’

‘I need to know she’s okay.’

‘She’s okay, arsehole.’

‘Let me talk to her or there’s no deal.’

‘Then you’ve just signed her death warrant, partner.’

And with that, he hangs up.

38

Agitated. He knows he’s agitated, and the phone call hasn’t helped. His stomach hurts but so does his head and he wants to lash out, wants to strike out at everything and anything. He grips his stomach and wonders why he ever threw away those painkillers. He contemplates smashing the phone against the edge of the desk but that would accomplish nothing.

In the bathroom he soaks his hands in water, then raises them to his face. He wipes at it, wipes and wipes and his skin is sore, yeah, then wipes those same hands at the mirror. The image remains and he can’t get rid of the pain. The headaches are getting worse. He opens the medicine cabinet but nothing lives in there except aspirin, so he grabs hold of a few, even though they will do little to help. Clenching his fists, he sits on the side of the bath and lifts his shirt. The duct tape across his stomach is covered in dried blood. He chews the aspirin and the taste makes his head spin, but at least he’s focused now on the job at hand, and from his back pocket he takes out the piece of paper with his instructions, with his goals, and the piece of paper helps to remind him that tonight he’s going to be a wealthy man. A wealthy man. Oh yeah.

He tugs at the edge of the duct tape but it’s fastened down, and he wishes he had put some padding beneath it first because now the wound will smile open when he pulls the tape away. He squeezes his hands across his ears. Never in his life has he suffered from headaches, not until Monday. Feldman will have to pay. He’s going to pay in more ways than one.