The Killing Lessons (20 page)

Valerie, with shuddering determination, got to her feet without taking Galbraith’s hand. Carla, she noted, was observing, standing staring at her with patent excitement in her face and limbs.

‘You need to take ten,’ she said.

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re not fine.’

‘Listen—’ Valerie began – but her phone rang.

It was Will Fraser.

‘OK,’ Will said. ‘We’re in business.’

‘Go,’ Valerie said.

Will filled her in on the trip to URS, and from there to Lester Jacobs’s apartment in the Castro. Lester, a sixty-two-year-old widower with only one functioning lung, was sick with a chest infection, and hadn’t bothered answering the phone. By the time Will got to his apartment Lester’s daughter had arrived to check on him, and after a few minutes’ persuasion had let Will in.

‘Leon Ghast,’ Valerie said.

‘What?’

‘His name’s Leon Ghast.’

‘Not the name I got. I got Xander King. ID’d from the zoo photo.’

Xander.

Zan
.

Valerie had imagined it beginning with a ‘Z’. I don’t even know if that’s his first name or his last, the kid had said.

‘He’s using an alias,’ Valerie said. ‘Fine. Go on.’

‘Long story short,’ Will said, ‘it’s not like him and Lester were buddies, but about six months after King quit the URS job they ran into each other. Our guy told Lester he’d bought a place in Utah.’

‘Address?’

‘No. But it’s a
state
, at least.’

‘OK. That it?’

‘That’s not enough?’

‘You’re the shit, Will.’

‘I’ll see you back at the shop.’

Carla was looking at her, waiting to be filled in.

Waiting for something, at any rate.

The child in Claudia reached out repeatedly to the idea that some force must intervene on her behalf. God. The Spirit of Justice. A strand of benign intelligence in the universe. But the reaching out found only silence and emptiness. God did not exist. There was no Spirit of Justice. The universe had no intelligence, benign or otherwise. If she’d doubted it in the past, she knew it for certain now.

She had to give herself things to do. If she did nothing there was nothing but fear. She’d spent a long time scanning every inch of the basement as far as the bare bulbs’ light allowed. If there was anything she could use as a weapon she had to know exactly where it was for when they next opened the cage. She had to be ready. Her eyes tried to force the recesses to yield yard tools, a rusted hatchet, a broken broom, anything. But there was nothing. There was no telling what the half-dozen cardboard boxes contained, but if she got past them she wouldn’t have longer than a couple of seconds. Maybe not even that.
If she got past them
. The thought of it, the two men with their hands on her and their breath on her face brought all the horror back. The horror was like a second person in the cage with her she mustn’t look at. Because when she did she saw the woman from the video, her utter helplessness, her body straining against the ropes, the veins in her throat bulging as the gag buried her scream, Xander’s rapt concentration and the knife going in, the flesh opening. The simplicity of the flesh just opening like that. The woman’s pale belly a widening gory grin. The same body that had been born, and had its umbilical cord cut, and been swaddled and rocked and loved. She saw all this and it was impossible to do anything except huddle against the furnace with her arms wrapped around herself, sick and shaking and alone.

So she gave herself things to do.

Right now, she’d given herself the task of searching beneath the furnace.

There was a four- or five-inch gap. Enough to get her arm in up to just below her elbow. She lay on her belly and walked her fingers around the entire area she could reach. It was thick with dust and fluff.

And nothing else.

The effort and pointlessness exhausted her.

She pulled her arm out. Scraped a graze on the baseplate’s rusted edge. A few pricks of blood welled.

Blood.

She got back onto her knees.

You’re lucky. You’re so lucky. He’s sick. It’s the flu.

Which meant that for a short time she might have one of them to deal with instead of two.

Which meant – the logic was delighted and awful – she should act sooner rather than later.

Act?

What could she do?

The logic was there again:
You have to get him to open the cage.

How?

How do you think?

It stilled her.

It stilled her because she knew the answer.

She knew the only thing she could conceivably use.

And everything in her said she couldn’t.

Except the small part of her that said:
If it’s that or what happened to the woman in the video, you can.

The logic had a coda:
And it’s going to happen to you anyway.

Brutal to have let the thought in. But since she had there was no unthinking it. It was like having swallowed something that was now quietly alive inside her. It was part of her, yes, it had been admitted – but it was too terrifying to confront properly. She wasn’t ready. She couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand the truth of it.

She turned her attention to the back of the furnace.

A similar gap, perhaps a little broader than the one beneath its base. The whole unit was bolted to the wall on four hefty metal brackets. Heavy enough so that if she smashed one against his skull it would buy her some time. The two on the far side were out of reach. She wrapped her fingers around the lower one nearest to her and tested how firmly it held.

It was solid. Completely immovable. The notion of her budging it with her bare hands was risible. She tried the upper one. The same. It was hopeless.

Her arm dropped in defeat.

Her fingers caught on the edge of something.

It was a thin metal placard, stamped, she assumed (braille-reading, breath held) with the unit’s serial number or technical specifications. It was supposed to be held by four screws, one at each corner. But only the top right and the bottom left were in. The bottom left was very slightly loose.

Claudia felt the thickness of the metal. Thicker than a tin can, but thinner than a car number plate.

Bendable?

She pulled at the unscrewed bottom right. There was give. Just. She could shape it with her foot if not with her hands.

If she could get it off. If she could get it off she could bend it –
fold
it, effectively – make a tough edge… something… Use it to prise up a floorboard?

It was a pitiful thing to clutch at, but it was all she had. It was a piece of metal. It would be something to hold. Something between her and him. Something other than her own flesh and blood.

Fingertips dreaming, she felt for the screw heads. They were rounded, with a cross groove. Phillips screws. Her dad’s toolbox with its odour of grease and steel. The novelty of helping him that day he’d built the birdhouse. Right, pass me the drill bit, Claudie. She’d been six or seven years old. The awe of initiation into this paternal mystery: DIY. These birds better appreciate this, he’d said. We’re giving them five-star accommodation here. We’re giving them the sparrow Ritz. She’d loved it, the idea of the birds discovering a wonderful cosy house, moving in, taking shelter from the elements.

She extracted her arm and dug in her pocket for the change. Two quarters and a dime.

Stop shaking. Don’t drop them. Do this properly.

A quarter was too big. No purchase on the cross groove. She thought:
The dime will be too small. A nickel would be (à la Goldilocks) just right. And I don’t have one of those.

The dime wasn’t just right – but it was close enough.

Manoeuvring was awkward. There wasn’t sufficient room to turn the coin without scraping the graze on her arm. Each twist inflicted a mean, precise burn. She didn’t mind. It proved she was doing something. It was a relief.

The first screw – the top right – was out. She had to be careful. The placard was now hanging by a single screw. If it dropped and slipped away from her it might end up out of reach. She adjusted, stretched, pressed as much of her arm against it as she could without making the unscrewing action impossible.

A thirty-degree turn.

Another.

It was working. It was coming loose.

Her hand was sweaty, fingers rich with nerves. The position she had to maintain made her shoulder ache. The absurdity of her hope – a thin metal plate – was available, but she ignored it, since there was no other hope.

The screw wobbled. Rattled. Dropped.

She crept her fingers around the edge of the plate and slid it towards her – worrying too late that the metal’s rasp would be heard. In spite of her efforts the movement scored the graze on her arm. But even that was an enhancement of the feeling of small triumph.

It was perhaps ten by six inches, less than an eighth of an inch thick. Manufacturer’s logo: HeatRite. Model name: XS200.5. Then a string of embossed numbers that meant nothing to her.

Don’t fuck this up. Think. Maximise.

Not strong enough to lever up a floorboard. And in any case the notion of digging herself out from under the grille was ridiculous, a feeble, long-term project which would depend on them not killing her any time soon.

When she’d pictured the plate’s potential as a weapon she’d imagined bending it lengthways – some deep grammar of defence telling her the longer the implement, the less close you’d have to get to strike. But she saw now that wouldn’t work. The metal was, if anything,
too
pliable. Folded lengthways in half – and even in half again – it wouldn’t be strong enough not to buckle on impact. And she’d only get one chance. The alternative (the pain this was going to cost her was there in her hands already) was to fold or roll it
widthways
. She’d end up with something only six inches long, but significantly stronger, a short, irregular cigar of metal.

A door opened and closed upstairs.

She froze.

Footsteps crossed the hall above her. Another door opened and closed.

Silence.

She wiped her hands on her jeans.

HeatRite XS200.5. Someone, probably decades ago, had started a company called HeatRite. Someone from the world she’d lost. She pictured a guy in welding goggles and denim dungarees. He’d have a life. People who loved him. Beers with friends. Anxieties about overheads and tax returns. A whole wonderful swirling mass of ordinary details he’d never appreciate unless something like this happened to him.

She began to fold-roll the metal. It wasn’t easy. Her fingers protested. Two nails broke. The action reminded her of the way she and Alison used to fold the purple tinfoil wrappers from Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate bars when they were kids. At the memory of chocolate a little corner of herself complained that she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten in… how long? Nothing since the burrito at the Whole Food Feast, whenever that was. Dehydrated, too. Her head ached. You finish this, she told herself, then you drink some water.

It took what felt like a long time. She had to keep stopping and slotting her hands into her armpits to ease the pain. When she was done, there was no disguising the negligibility of the result – a stunted baton – which would do nothing unless she got it directly into his eye. If she had something to hammer it into any kind of point…

She put it on the floor and flattened one end with her foot. Rotated it forty-five degrees, repeated the action. A third and fourth time would have completed the job, but by now the metal was too tightly packed. An improvement, though. The cigar tapered to a usefully vicious V. She gripped it in her fist. It felt good.

And terrifying. Because now there was nothing to do but wait for an opportunity to use it.

No.

Not wait for an opportunity.

Make one
.

Upstairs in his dull room of thrift store furniture Paulie watched the videos and tried to jerk off. No good. He gave up. Just lay there, staring at the stained ceiling, his Vaselined cock lolling like a dead fish. Outside the silver-blue small-hours sky rolled away over the empty land. The bed smelled of mould. He was simultaneously agitated and adrift. Being with Xander wasn’t good, these days – but being without him, losing the heat of his will, was worse. And he was losing it too often, lately. The nod-outs, the fucking mini-zomboid vacations. Every time it happened, every time he thought Xander was going away for good, the world loomed up giant and unbalanced, filled with visions of himself alone in it – standing in sleet at a bus stop; shambling down a bright supermarket aisle; walking into a bar and seeing people hunched over their drinks – and wanting to walk straight out again.

It’s like I’m carrying you on my goddamned back
.

Xander had always said things like that from time to time. Used to be he’d leave a short pause and stare at you for a few seconds before grinning – so you knew he didn’t really mean it – and turning away. Used to be. But recently (not so recently, if Paulie really thought about it) the grinning – the not meaning it – had stopped.

Meeting Xander five years ago had been a homecoming. Couldn’t even really say how it happened. Not the certainty of it. Not the deep-down knowing. Paulie, who’d been drifting since he was fifteen, had got a minimum-wage job in the refrigeration warehouse in Prescot, Oakland, and had blown off the cafeteria one lunchtime to eat his shitty pastrami on rye down by the water. He’d sat on an empty bench next to one occupied by Xander, who was Leon in those days, and after a strange forty-five minutes’ conversation (he talked a lot, Xander a little) found himself full of a thrilled gravity.

Xander lived alone in a run-down apartment not far from the warehouse and sometime after their first meeting Paulie found himself there. The two men drank beer (again, Paulie a lot, Xander a little) and watched hour after hour of porn in rich silence. It had started with regular shit, but after a short while Xander had said: Check this cunt out – and brought from his bedroom a DVD in a plain black case. An acned Latina who looked about sixteen getting ass-fucked and cattle-branded by three guys. The production values were non-existent. The sound was raw. There was a moist bare brick wall and a wooden floor and the girl’s legs and arms were blotched with bruises. The ball-gag made snot come out of her nose and one of the guys said, Jesus Christ, that’s disgusting – then wiped his dick in it, which had made Paulie laugh. Xander hadn’t laughed. Just sat there in profile not drinking his Coors.

The weeks and months that followed were a blurred addiction for Paulie. It was enough for him just to be in Xander’s presence. Xander was the first person he’d met with whom he didn’t feel locked inside himself. With everyone else he was condemned to a claustrophobic privacy, as if he knew that whatever came out of his mouth would sooner or later make them look at him as if he were from another planet. It had been that way his whole life, starting with his mother and father, who could one minute be laughing at something he’d done or said, the next be beating the shit out of him. His father had left when he was small – maybe five or six. His mother had died in a car wreck a couple of years later. It had happened right outside their house in Delaware. She’d been drunk, they said, afterwards, hit a stationary bulldozer in a line of road crew vehicles that had been left there overnight where they were repairing the water mains. His mother’s car had ended up with its nose in the flooded, dug-out trench. Paulie, who’d been sitting just inside the screen door (she left him alone in the house for several hours every day), ran out and looked. Her head was a mess of blood and her arm was bent around the wrong way, like a doll’s you could twist. Her blouse was torn and one bare breast was out.

After that he’d been shuffled around distant relations for a while, then gone to Child Protection Services.

When Xander showed him the first girl – not
Xander’s
first girl, but the first one Paulie got to see – it was as if, in a moment, all Paulie’s muscles and bones came into their right alignment. It was like he was recognising something he’d seen before, something he’d
known
before, in a time before he was born. When Paulie got laid-off and was between jobs, Xander had put in for a chunk of his vacation and the two of them had taken a road trip. They’d gone all over the country, and Paulie had day by day felt Xander’s aura filling with quiet energy. It vivified everything; the big skies; the wheel of a passing truck; an empty McDonald’s carton.

Then one night on the edge of St Louis, Paulie had woken in the Super 8 motel and found Xander gone. His gear was still in the room, so he hadn’t
gone
gone, but still, Paulie surprised himself by feeling not panic but a kind of Christmassy excitement.

Xander returned the following afternoon with no explanation and told Paulie they had to get going. As in right now. A ripple around Xander told Paulie not to ask. They drove hundreds of miles in near silence, until, long after sundown, Xander pulled the car over. They were on a back road somewhere in Utah. Empty fields on one side, a sprawling woods on the other. Xander had sat with his hands on the wheel. Then he’d said: So, you wanna know what’s in the trunk?

Paulie remembered the smell of the trees and soft damp soil. His breath going up in clouds. The land had been rained on. It was heavy and fresh.

Knew as soon as I saw her, Xander said, when the trunk was open.

There was a moment, just after he’d helped Xander tie her to a tree far enough from the road, when Paulie had a vision of himself turning and walking away back to the car. He saw himself in a pink-boothed diner, sitting at the counter with a cup of black coffee, a matronly waitress with a tired smile. He pictured a bright damp morning framed in the big window, the wet road glistening in the sun.

Then Xander tore her shirt open and she screamed behind the gag, and Paulie went down as on a roller-coaster drop into his own future with a sweet feeling of recognition and surrender and relief.

He’d known what to do and what not to do. His every movement was guided by invisible hands. He knew when to watch, when to move away. There was such an understanding between him and Xander. Sometimes the girl looked at Paulie as if she were trying to separate him from Xander because he, Paulie, hadn’t touched her. But his eyes could always slide away when that happened. And when Xander started with the knife she stopped looking anywhere. Just closed her eyes and screamed.

When Xander had finished, he said to Paulie: I’m going to put the stuff away. Don’t touch her mouth. Just don’t touch her mouth.

Paulie had seen him shove something in there, though he hadn’t been able to tell what it was.

I got a spade in the car, Xander said. Don’t be all night.

Don’t be all night
. She wasn’t dead, and Xander had known it was what Paulie had been waiting for. Even Paulie hadn’t truly known it was what he’d been waiting for until Xander had said it.

This was in the days before he’d started filming it all.

The days before the money came to Xander.

That money. Jesus. Why couldn’t it have been him?

He tossed the iPad to one side, zipped up his flies, got up off the bed. He’d been in his room too long. He had to go and check on Xander.
Because he’s sick
, he told himself. But of course it was more than that. Always, now, when Paulie found himself quiet and alone, he’d start to get the feeling of the world coming for him. It was in the blades of grass and the colours of a 7-Eleven and someone’s glance at him from a bus window. It was a creeping conspiracy that could only be held off by Xander. Or at least, being with Xander made it easier not to see it.