The Killing Lessons (13 page)

‘Hey,’ Valerie said. ‘You OK?’

Carla smiled. As at the minor nature of whatever had upset her. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. Just one of those days.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Really, it’s nothing. I’m just…’ She didn’t finish. Instead shook her head and forced a laugh. She shifted her purse from her lap to the passenger seat, where her overcoat was slung over a slew of papers, a
Chronicle
, a couple of envelopes. The rest of the Cherokee’s interior was immaculate. ‘I’m fine.’ Then, as a shorthand token dismissal Valerie knew she wasn’t meant to take seriously: ‘Time of the month.’

As in, whatever it is, I’m not discussing it.

‘OK,’ Valerie said.

Carla sniffed, shook herself, sat up straight and put her left hand on the wheel. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘that was a great job with the zoo footage. I meant to say so earlier. I know everyone else had given up on it.’

‘I’d given up on it myself. It was just an alternative to counting sheep.’

Carla nodded. ‘I get it,’ she said. ‘But still.’

A few moments of neither of them knowing what to say. Long enough for Valerie to be slightly fascinated by the part of herself that still couldn’t quite like Carla. Even now, having seen her vulnerable, something in her refused.

‘Well, if you’re sure you’re OK,’ she said.

Carla reached for her seat belt. ‘I’m fine. And thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Back in her car Valerie made an effort not to look towards Carla’s. But Carla was still parked when she drove out of the lot. She was on her cell phone. She raised her hand to Valerie without a pause in her conversation.

Xander wasn’t feeling well. The truth was he’d been feeling rough since they’d crossed into California. There was the need to correct the fuck-up in Colorado (the dead woman without the jug pressed on his brain like a tumour; why, why,
why
in God’s name had he let Paulie talk him into that?) but now it was as if his
body
were rebelling against the mistake as well, in spite of the little bitch he’d just grabbed. She’d just been
there
. A gift. The seconds it had taken him had been clean and quick and full of certainty. Sometimes it came together like that, in a kind of sweet rush, as if he weren’t doing something new but recognising something he’d done before, in a previous life or vivid dream. The empty road and the trees and her bare throat with the sunlight on it. It all gathered in his hands and face and then he was doing it and every movement was perfect and everything happened exactly as he knew it would. The exact opposite, in fact, of the mess in Colorado.
He lay on the RV’s bed-couch, shivering a little. His head was warm. His limbs were starting to ache. He’d heard if you crossed too many time zones or changed climates too often you got sick, but he’d never really believed it. Maybe there was something to it after all. Snow in Colorado. Sun in California. All the weather he’d passed through over the days and weeks and months was busy in his body, trying to sort itself out. He knew Paulie wanted to trade places with him because of his busted knee. Tough shit. Paulie would just have to grin and fucking bear it.

He should sleep. How long since he’d slept? He didn’t know. Too long. There were the other times, when it didn’t feel like sleep, but he never felt rested afterwards anyway, those times when he went back to being Leon and Mama Jean’s house formed dense and electric around him. Those times were more exhausting than being awake in the regular world. When he’d finished doing what he had to do all of that would stop. Imagine that! A time when the world just stayed the world, and Mama Jean’s house never crammed up around him and Mama Jean herself would have nothing left to say. He’d be able to do anything, uninterrupted: watch TV, lie around drinking beer, swim in the ocean, eat his dinner.

Shivering, he turned onto his side and drew his knees up.

Back at the computer forensics lab Nick Blaskovitch worked for an hour on the latest material from the Lawson case, but he knew he wasn’t concentrating.

Valerie.

He hadn’t lied. It
had
felt inevitable. When it had become obvious that his father wasn’t going to recover and the future’s options had begun vaguely stacking up, he’d lived a double inner life. On the surface a range of schemes and alternatives. Underneath, the certainty that he would go back to San Francisco and Valerie would still be there and there would be no stopping himself. There was barely even a concession to the possibility that she would have found someone else. And when he did make the concession his response to it was simple: he would take her away from whoever she’d found. Because whoever the poor bastard was and whatever she had with him it wouldn’t be what
they
had had.

What they had had. Recognition. Instant and ridiculous. Attraction, sure – he had the rare gift among men of knowing some women found him very attractive (he wasn’t personally vain, but he had an ease in his own skin he was wise enough to know was a kind of power), and Valerie had the sub-surface sexuality the right guys would know was worth seeking out – but the feeling of inevitability had caught both of them by delicious surprise. Half a dozen conversations. A drink after work. The heat of her standing next to him at the bar. They hadn’t even discussed where the evening was going. Just got into a cab and within twenty minutes were in her apartment, kissing. The first touch – his hands on her waist – was a simple homecoming. After sex they lay on her bed like starfish. The impulse was to laugh. It was hilarious how good it had been. They didn’t even congratulate themselves. Just accepted that they had come into their vast, unearned inheritance.

If some other guy were telling him all this about someone – some (dear God) Love of His Life Story in a bar – Nick knew he’d dismiss it. He’d feel sorry for him, this hypothetical loser. He knew he was, on the face of it, being ridiculous. Nor had quite all the damage she’d done healed. When he’d walked in on her and Carter at the apartment she’d been sitting astride the guy, his hands on her ass, the groove of her lovely back wet with sweat from the dirty work she’d put in. Nick had stood there and stared for what had felt like a long time, feeling the world changing. When you imagined these moments you saw yourself exploding into action – violence, rage, grief, madness. But in fact you just stood there, a spectator at your own crucifixion. The perverse part of you was relieved that the world had been once and for all proved to be a place of emptiness and betrayal and shit. It absolved you of having to hope.

It ought to have finished her for him.

But it hadn’t.

The trouble was he’d understood why she’d done it. She’d turned and looked at him over her bare shoulder and her face had been like a calm scream. Even in that moment he’d known the understanding would eventually let him forgive her. Understanding was a twisted gift love gave you. Understanding had said, even as he was turning and walking out the door:
You’ll find room for this. The hatred will burn out. It’ll still be her.

And three years later, it was still her.

The events and decisions that had brought him back to San Francisco had been a gentle, irresistible choreography. He’d made the arrangements with a feeling of surrender, but with quietly building excitement, too. Now that he’d done it, now that he was here, there was both deflation (the scale of the imaginative lead-up guaranteed it) and a deep vindication: because it hadn’t changed for her, either. He’d seen the recognition in her face the first moment she’d looked up at him from her desk.

He got up, now, from his own cluttered desk, and stretched. It was ten after ten. Another hour’s work then he’d go back to his place, shower, change, drive around to Valerie’s and ring the buzzer for her apartment. If she answered, she answered. If she didn’t…

Fuck that. She’d answer. It was foregone. It was in her when they’d said goodbye in the parking garage. In her hand. In her eyes. In the space between them where the current of life flowed.

He took a bathroom break and returned to his office to find a sealed Manila envelope on his desk.

It was addressed in plain marker in small, neat capitals: NICHOLAS BLASKOVITCH.

He opened it.

A filled-in form. Photocopied. He registered the word ‘clinic’.

But that wasn’t what first caught his eye. What caught his eye was a bright yellow Post-it stuck to the top right corner of the single sheet. The same tidy caps, smaller.

BABY KILLER, it said. NOTE THE DATE.

Cop reflexes were, mutedly, firing. A part of him was thinking:
latex gloves, prints, wait.
Someone had just been in here and left this. Who? But by now he’d noticed the content of one of the filled-in boxes:

PATIENT DETAILS

SURNAME: HART

FIRST NAME: VALERIE

APPOINTMENT DATE: 06.23.10

SURGEON: DR PAIGE

PROCEDURE: MVA

*

The ‘appointment date’ and ‘procedure’ entries had been highlighted in pink. MVA. What the fuck was MVA? Nick groped, mentally, while his eyes scanned, and the phrase ‘baby killer’ carried on detonating.

The Bryte Clinic. 2303 Fell Street, San Francisco, CA 94118.

He didn’t recognise it.

He Googled ‘MVA procedure’, though the wiser part of him turned what he read into déjà vu.

Up to 15 weeks’ gestation, suction-aspiration or vacuum aspiration are the most common surgical methods of induced abortion. Manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) consists of removing the fetus or embryo, placenta, and membranes by suction using a manual syringe, while electric vacuum aspiration (EVA) uses an electric pump. These techniques differ in the mechanism used to apply suction, in how early in pregnancy they can be used, and in whether cervical dilation is necessary. MVA, also known as ‘mini-suction’ and ‘menstrual extraction’, can be used in very early pregnancy, and does not require cervical dilation.

Note the date.

06.23.10.

Three years ago. Less than two months after he’d left her.

Claudia woke an indeterminate time later lying on her back in what felt like complete blackness.

The first sensation was the desperate need to pee.

Three or four slight movements revealed her situation.

The worst situation.

She’d been bound and gagged.

And put in a box.

And buried alive.

Three, four, five seconds of blank denial. Not even the sound of her own breath, since shock held it.

Then an explosion of panic, her bound limbs trying to flail, knees and elbows and head thumping the flanks of the casket and her bladder emptying and
no no God no please no
and the reality like a demon in there with her saying
yes yes yes, this is it, this is what’s happening, this is what’s happening.

Her mind was nothing, just a scream. Her actual scream was a hot rasp in her throat, since the gag in her mouth locked it in.

Buried alive. Buried alive. Buried—

A jolt.

And what the shock and panic had hidden: the hum of an engine.

She was moving.

She was in a vehicle. The RV.

Which meant she wasn’t underground. Which lifted the mass of dead earth off her. Thank God. Thank—

The relief died. She wasn’t underground
yet
.

Another explosion of panic, another timeless chaos of thrashing, her heart pounding in her throat, her head swollen with blood. She was suffocating.
Suffocation
was a corpse jammed on top of her, covering her, eyes, nose, ears, mouth. No matter what, she had to get out. No matter what ‘out’ would mean. No matter what. She screamed again.

The vehicle slowed. Stopped.

Oh God oh God oh God—

A dozen pencils of light by her feet.

Air holes.

They didn’t want her dead.

Yet.

Someone was moving. His shifting weight registered through the floor. Sound of latches snapping. The coffin lid yawned and the light cut her eyes.

‘You woke me up,’ the dark-haired man (‘Xander’ she remembered) said to her, quietly.

‘I can’t drive any more,’ the other guy’s voice said from up front. ‘Seriously, my fucking leg is killing me.’

Claudia hadn’t been aware that she was sobbing, until now. Snot rattled in her nose. The warmth from where she’d wet herself made itself felt, an absurd little flower of detail.

‘You pissed yourself,’ Xander said. ‘Guess that means we’re too late for a toilet stop.’

Claudia screamed. The gag made it nothing. Her throat burned.

‘OK,’ Xander said. ‘You better listen to me very carefully. Are you listening?’

The gag was sour. Somewhere far under the terror her body was pounding with dehydration. The ties on her wrists and ankles might as well have been cheese wire. Frantic calculations: how long? Ryan would have called. Hours? Days? Missing. They wait twenty-four hours. Forty-eight. The police wait – don’t they? Carlos. Not till Monday. Stephanie. Would assume she’d stayed over. Her phone. Dropped in the struggle? Someone finds it. Someone—

‘You need to do anything else?’ Xander said, indicating the wet patch in her jeans. ‘Nod your head if you need to do anything else. I don’t want you making a mess and stinking up the place.’

You get out and somehow get them to untie your legs and then no matter what you run. You fucking
run
.

She nodded her head.

‘Well, that may or may not be true,’ Xander said. ‘But if you’ve got any ideas about getting away, forget it.’ He reached around into the back of his jeans and pulled out an automatic handgun. Let her see it. Let her eyes track it as he lowered it slowly to her crotch and pressed it against her. Involuntarily her knees came up. She tried to twist away – but of course she couldn’t. He leaned in and held her legs under his forearm. Wedged the gun in harder.

‘Be still,’ he said. ‘Hey. Be still.’

She couldn’t swallow. The gun hurt. She forced herself to stop struggling. Forcing herself to stop was like breaking her own heart.

‘That’s better. Wriggling like that isn’t going to help you. It just
isn’t going to help you
. Understand?’

She was sobbing again, though she was aware of it only as if she were spectating on someone else’s distress. Beyond his head she could see the RV’s snug domestic fittings. An electric kettle. A microwave. The last things you see. There was room in her for precise griefs: that she would never have tea and hot buttered toast with Alison in the family kitchen again. Nor hear her father’s distinctive rattlecrash of the newspaper, as if he were trying to shake the truth out of it.

‘All right,’ Xander said, withdrawing the gun and tucking it back into his jeans. ‘Let’s get you up.’

The manhandling forced intimacy. Every touch – his lifting her, helping her stand, his hands on her hips then transferred to her neck and the waistband of her jeans – stamped him on her body like a brand. The box she’d been in was the base of one of the vehicle’s bed-seats. The bright orange cushions were on the floor behind him.

‘Stand up straight,’ he said.

The blood unpacking itself in her legs made her unsteady. Her limbs were too full of sensation. All the sensation she didn’t want. Death bulged and beat against her. Every second of life now testified to death.

He reached over to one of the kitchen drawers and brought out a large knife. Viciously serrated. Handgrip-moulded black heavy-duty rubber handle. It looked military. Over his shoulder Claudia could see the red-haired guy turned around in the driver’s seat, watching everything. His mouth was open, his thin face damp and tense. Beyond him the windscreen showed a headlit patch of scrub dissolving into darkness. No visible road. No sound of traffic, either. The middle of nowhere. She died in the middle of nowhere. She remembered Alison saying once: I don’t mind how I die as long as it’s not a
lonely
death.

Xander bent and cut the ankle ties. They were the cheap plastic ones the police sometimes used instead of steel cuffs. The blood pushed back into her numb feet.

‘Walk,’ he said.

Four steps to what turned out to be the vehicle’s bathroom. No windows. A round fluorescent light, flickering slightly. In spite of everything it reminded Claudia of the way your eyelid twitched when you were short of sleep. He grabbed her wrists and slashed through the ties.

She had her arms and legs free.

And they were no help.

‘You’ve got two minutes,’ he said. ‘Don’t bother trying to make a racket. There’s no one out there to hear you. You touch that gag and I’ll cut your tongue out.’

It surprised her that he closed the door. There was no lock on it. Of course. She stood in the tiny space, shaking, choked by her own tears. The joy of having her limbs free. The uselessness of it. Her body was crammed with impulses with nowhere to go. Though she scanned every inch the bathroom offered her nothing. White moulded plastic, the sleep-deprived fluorescent, a chemical toilet, a shower head, a sink barely big enough for both hands. No escape. No weapon. Nothing. She just stood there, feeling the moments haemorrhaging away. The need to remove the gag was overwhelming – but she didn’t. I’ll cut your tongue out. He expected her to use the toilet. At the thought of unzipping and pulling down her jeans the touch of his hands came back on her flesh. There was a little mirror over the sink. When she looked in it the sight hurt her. Her face wet with sweat and snot. Her left eye bruised. Blood crusted under each nostril. And the central horror of the gag. Her face –
her
– gagged. The love of her family – her mother and father, Alison – thousands of miles away and her, here, now, with this happening. She thought of them seeing her like this. Her father broken, her mother’s gentle face made ugly by grief, Alison curled up on her bed, groaning like a wounded animal. Never see them again. Never—

The door opened. She realised a part of her had been thinking about breaking the mirror, a shard of glass… But it was reflective plastic, not glass, and he would have heard her do it and by the time those calculations were made she was out of time and there he was.

‘Done or not,’ Xander said. ‘Out. We got a way to go yet.’