The Killing Lessons (37 page)

Xander dumped the girl on the living room floor and ran to the open door. He was thick with gathered anger. The objects buzzed and clamoured as he passed the shopping bags on the table. Every time he thought he was on top of things… every fucking
time
. All he wanted was to deal with this and then sleep. He couldn’t take much more. It was very hard to think, but with a great haul of himself he paused, forced his brain to do the work. First, find the old man. That would be the lemon. No, the monkey. Goddammit he’d already finished with the monkey. The video images shuffled. That bitch he’d had to get the goose into. He’d broken one of its feet wedging it in. It had snapped off in his hand. Paulie, filming, had said: ‘Ooops,’ and laughed. He’d nearly killed him then. Paulie had spent their time together with no fucking clue how often Xander had nearly killed him. It was a miracle he’d lasted as long as he had. But the memory of Paulie brought back the last girl in the basement. Why hadn’t he done it properly? The fucking jug should have been
inside
her. He’d made so many mistakes. But the bitch cop had ruined everything. The uniformed asshole, too, with his fucking wristwatch the size of his head and his stupid peppermint gum.

W is for Watch.

Did he have the watch? The watch was for later, wasn’t it?

You made a mistake
, Mama Jean said. He had a strange, vivid memory of seeing Mama Jean’s underwear lying on the bathroom floor. He’d been sitting on the toilet taking a shit, his skin still on fire from the mark she’d put on him that morning. Her big white bra and panties had been lying by the wicker laundry hamper. He’d finished his business and flushed it away, though the stink still lingered. He remembered getting down on his hands and knees and smelling her panties, like a dog sniffing its food. A feeling like excitement and complete emptiness he hadn’t understood. It had done something weird to him in his guts and his cock.

He shook himself. Christ, what was wrong with him? The old man. The old
man
, goddammit. He trudged across to the Cherokee and opened the trunk. The shotgun. Why the fuck hadn’t he brought the shotgun to start with? The wind buffeted him. He slammed the trunk shut and turned back to the cabin.

Which was when he heard something coming up from the ravine.

Valerie and Carla saw the collapsed bridge at the same time, and had exactly the same thought. Valerie put her hand on the pilot’s shoulder. ‘We need to check down there,’ she said.

The pilot’s resistance – this was crazy; he was already beyond safe flight protocols – came off him like electricity. She could feel it in his shoulder. He shook his head. ‘Listen,’ he began, but Valerie leaned forward. ‘She’s ten years old,’ she said. ‘You got kids?’ The resistance was still there. He shook his head. The chopper pitched right. ‘She’s
ten years old
,’ Valerie repeated. ‘You want that on your conscience?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘And I don’t want to kill the three of us either.’

But he dropped down into the ravine anyway, adding, ‘Fuck. This is… Goddammit.’

Valerie pressed her face up against the window and cupped her hands around it. The maddening contrast between the searchlight’s wobbling radius and the impenetrable gloom beyond. Black rock veined with snow. White water where stones broke the river’s edges.
She’s ten years old
. Yes, and if this was where she was, she was dead. It was two hundred feet from the bridge to the bottom, and even in the extreme unlikelihood that she’d survived a fall, what then? Cold water carried heat away from the body twenty-five times faster than air of the same temperature. Hypothermia would kill her in minutes.

A gust swung the chopper. The ravine’s west wall loomed, terrible with innocent detail. The pilot climbed, dipped, climbed again. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘This is suicide. We’re heading back.’

‘You can’t,’ Valerie said.

‘I can and I am. As far as this bird goes I’m in charge. Christ, we might not even
make
it back. That’s it.’

Climbing felt to Valerie like tearing an umbilical. She imagined the little girl, concealed in a recess or under an overhang, hearing the helicopter, seeing them, waving her arms, calling for help as her last hope of it drifted up and away into the darkness.

‘We’ll get a team down here,’ Carla said.

‘It’ll be too late,’ Valerie said. ‘It’s already too late.’

The chopper cleared the eastern wall of the ravine.

‘Jesus,’ the pilot said.

Then the windshield exploded and his head snapped back.

Half his face had been blown off.

The chopper swung one complete revolution, pivoted on its nose as if it had been pinned. But a second later it tilted left, losing altitude. As clearly as if it were the scene in a snow globe Valerie saw below her the Cherokee and the cabin and the lone figure with the shotgun still raised. The sound of the chopper’s blades seemed to change pitch. She could hear Carla next to her shouting something. The drop was too big. She couldn’t believe what she was doing. There was no time for belief. There was no time for anything. She opened the door. One image of the bones in her shins slivering; Carla’s hands on her – then she jumped.

It took her a few moments to lift her head. The snow had received her with shocking cold. She was winded. A pain in her ankles and forearms, but she didn’t think anything was broken. She was less than twenty feet from the parked Cherokee. Carla lay a few feet to her right, face down, not moving. The wind dropped. In the quiet (it was as if the weather had hushed itself for this) the sound of the chopper’s blades receding, dropping back into the ravine. Then what felt like a long complete silence – before an explosion and a swell of dull orange light as the chopper struck the western wall. She heard metal grinding and crashing as the aircraft dropped to the river. The wind, having stilled itself not to miss the spectacle, lifted again. Flying snow drove into Valerie’s face.

The Cherokee was between her and Leon.

He was trudging through the snow towards her.

She pushed herself to her feet and reached into her shoulder holster.

Just in time to see Leon raise the shotgun.

The impact knocked Valerie off her feet. She felt herself falling backwards before she felt the pain.

Then
the pain.

The snow’s embrace a second time, with an odd little noise, a crunch-gasp, as if she’d knocked the wind out of the ground rather than vice versa. She remembered it from making snow-angels as a child. Wet jeans and your face looking up at the low sky.

Her left shoulder. Her lungs emptying. The exhalation slid away from her, a breath that had gone all the way to the bottom of a long, long slope. It was inconceivable that she would ever be able to drag it back up again. She would never breathe in again.

Leon stood over her. Snow clung to his hair. Snow swirled around him. The bandaged hand cradled the shotgun’s barrel. His face was wet, fraught, vivid.

‘You?’ he said. ‘
You?
’

Then he turned the weapon, raised it, brought it down.

She saw the rubber treads on the shotgun’s butt, a curious design to stamp and endorse the end of her life.

Then darkness took her.

Nell opened her eyes to the cabin’s now familiar floor, sweeping away from her. She was lying on her side. One of the oil lamps had been blown out by the wind. The door was open. It had stopped snowing, though the wind still tore through the ravine. The doorway framed her mother’s Jeep. Warmth flooded her. Joy. It was impossible. Her mother was here. But, propped against the Jeep’s flank, like Raggedy Ann dolls, were two women she’d never seen before. One of them, slumped lower than the other, bleeding into the snow. The man in the windbreaker was standing over them with – Nell thought her mind had gone wrong – shopping bags at his feet.

Valerie swam back through the folding weight of dark water to consciousness to see Leon reach into Carla’s shoulder holster, remove the sidearm and stuff it into the back of his jeans. Her own weapon was gone. Carla stirred. Her eyes opened. Her breathing was shallow. The two of them were slumped against the Cherokee. The wheel housing cut into Valerie’s back. A strange little thing to be aware of past the pain in her shattered shoulder. Beyond Leon she could see the open doorway of the cabin filled with yellowy flickering light. A girl’s body lying on the floor. Dead, presumably. The one that got away. Except didn’t, in the end. The snow had stopped falling. It comforted her, for no reason she could fathom. Maybe just because she could see. She could see the world before she said goodbye to it. That was something. Carla looked at her. Opened her mouth to speak, but her eyes closed again.

Leon was going through the shopping bags, lifting items out and setting them in the snow. A pineapple. A doll wearing a crown. A yo-yo. A xylophone. A bag of nails. He had a lemon in his bandaged hand.

‘You were in my house,’ he said, turning on Valerie. ‘You were in my fucking
house
.’

Carla opened her eyes again. ‘He was never the same,’ she said.

‘Shut the fuck up, cunt,’ Leon said.

Carla shook her head, as in mild refusal. She slurred a few quiet words, but Valerie couldn’t make them out. Other cops she knew carried a second gun. In a side holster. In a boot. She wasn’t one of them. When she’d driven to the farmhouse she’d forgotten to put on the bulletproof vest. It had been in the Taurus’s trunk. There had been no time. It hadn’t even occurred to her. And she wasn’t wearing one now. She was a terrible cop. She had a very clear image of herself lying in bed with Nick Blaskovitch, her head on his chest (summer sunlight making softly glowing ingots of the apartment’s window blinds) saying to him: I’m a terrible cop, you know. She had said this to him, once, long ago. He had remained silent for a long time. Their bodies had been warm and sleepy. They’d had so much sex merely summoning the energy to get out of bed seemed implausible. Then he’d said: Not only are you not a terrible cop, but you’ve got the prettiest ass in the Western world. Everyone hates you. Even me. Now look: what about breakfast? The memory was so clear and disinterested – her soul sorting out its hierarchy of things to pack before death – that she smiled. It wasn’t a bad thing to die, as long as you’d had a life full of life. And she had had that. It turned out all you needed to be OK with dying was knowing you’d lived.

Leon, manifestly, was not happy. His face was pouchy. He was a man being hurried against his will. He was a man being forced to compromise the quality of his work just to get the job off his desk. As she watched him, he turned and barked: ‘I’m doing it. For Christ’s sake I’m
doing
it!’ as if to a guardian angel only he could see. Scowling, he unbuttoned Carla’s pants, pulled them and her underwear down around her ankles, then straightened up to look at her. It hurt Valerie to see Carla’s tibia poking through the skin of her shin. Bone. We were skin and blood and nerves and bone. It was a knowledge so terrible that God concealed most of it from view.

‘Bit cold for that sort of thing, isn’t it?’ Valerie said. She’d lost all feeling in her left shoulder. A part of her was indulging vague doctorish speculations about how the damage to her clavicle and scapula might be painstakingly repaired. She pictured a surgeon, who would be an arrogant asshole in the consultation room but who, once he was in theatre, would devote every atom of his ego to fixing the thing that shouldn’t, by rights, be fixable. He would wear gold-rimmed spectacles and have Mahler playing in the background. You’d hate him, but you wouldn’t want anyone else on the case.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Leon said, pointing the fish knife at her. ‘Shut. The fuck. Up.’

He grabbed Carla’s blouse and tore it open. Seeing the prettily laced black bra, Valerie felt sad. It occurred to her that she’d thought of Carla as a sexless being.

Carla opened her eyes and tried to turn away. Leon slapped her. Yanked her back into a sitting position by her hair.

It was a great relief, Valerie discovered, to realise you were ready to die. It gave you liberty for all sorts of academic exercises. One of them was to make this as annoying as possible for Leon. She raced back through everything that had happened (while other parts of her speed-read her own life of densely packed childhood and anguished adolescence and fraught adult lust and professional approximation and love and love and love [and loss]) convinced, though she conceded again the academic nature of the exercise, that there was, even now, even
now
…

Who
was never the same?

The rogue question distracted her for a moment.

Carla opened her eyes again. She was back, this time, properly. Just in time for the bad news. The worst news. The only news that mattered.

Leon, still holding the lemon in his right hand, got down on his knees and pressed the fish knife’s point against the bare flesh of Carla’s midriff. A bead of blood sprang up merrily and trickled down the blade. Carla lifted her hand as if it were the slowest, heaviest thing in the world. Leon swatted it away.

‘You dumb fuck,’ Valerie said.

Leon paused. The blade quivered. Went in a little deeper. Carla cried out.

‘Hey,’ Valerie said. ‘Leon. Yes, you. I’m talking to you, you dumb shit.’

He looked at her. He appeared sweetly surprised.

‘You fucked it up,’ Valerie said. ‘You know that, right? I mean, you do know that even now after all these years you still can’t get the simplest thing in the world right? Christ, you’re stupid.’ She laughed, holding her shoulder. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid. You think you’ve got this? You haven’t got this. Want me to spell it out for you? Want me to
spell
it out for you, genius?’

Leon withdrew the knife and got to his feet.

‘It’s the lemon after the kite. It’s the
lemon
after the kite. K is for Kite, L is for Lemon. Jesus Christ, how fucking slow are you? J, K, L. Jug, kite, lemon. Whereas what did you do? Come on, tell me: what did you do?’

Leon frowned, breathing through his nose. His hand was tight around the knife’s white handle.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ Valerie said. ‘I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised you’re embarrassed. You should be. You went jug, kite, monkey. J, K, M.
Monkey.
It’s an insult to monkeys, Einstein. And now you’re standing there like a fucking lemon,
holding
… what? A lemon! It’s priceless, Leon, priceless. Leon the lemon. Can you spell “incompetent”? Can you spell “fuck-up”?’

Leon took a pace to his left to stand directly in front of Valerie.

Behind him, she saw a figure crawling towards them from the cabin.

Angelo was at the end of his strength. His chest ached. L5 and S1 had, if anything, entered a new, intense relationship, a passionate affair to maximise his pain. His head was reduced to the thud of his broken jaw. Memory, liberated and lawless, now that its life work was done, told him that Muhammad Ali fought Ken Norton for two rounds with a broken jaw, getting hit in the head, repeatedly. This forced an amusing concession: he was not, at least, getting hit in the head at the moment, so how bad could it really be? He would crawl.

He pushed the axe ahead of him through the snow. He wanted to look back to see Nell one last time, but he was afraid the movement would paralyse him. The wind roiled and sang, as if delighted with all this human madness.

Nell had inched forward on her elbows and collapsed in the cabin’s open doorway. Everything seemed invaded and broken now, the stove’s warmth and the lamps’ soft light. The wind going through the place like a burglar, at complete liberty to handle whatever it wanted. It seemed a year ago that she had crossed the ravine. The days since her mother told her to run had been longer than all her life before. She felt ancient, as if the old lady she would one day have been were visiting her now, like a ghost from the lost future.

‘And that’s not all,’ Valerie said to Leon. ‘The girl in your basement? She’s alive. You couldn’t even get that right. I got into your shit-hole house and you thought I was dead. But look: here I am. You thought
she
was dead, didn’t you? She’s not. I saved her. She’s very much alive. She’s laughing right now at the mess you’ve made. Her and every cop in the country. Your picture’s all over the news. The dumbest killer in history. Your grandmother must be so proud. Your grandmother must be laughing her dead, fat ass off.’