The Killing Hour

by Paul Cleave

  The Killing Hour

  Paul Cleave

  Paul Cleave

  The Killing Hour

  CHAPTER ONE

  They come for me as I sleep. Their pale faces stare at me, their soft voices tell me to wake, to wake. They come dressed in the clothes they were in before they died, though there is no blood on them. I know what they want, because when it comes to people who are ghosts because of you, there really is just the one thing. They cannot touch me because they have no real form. I cannot touch them either, cannot push them aside. I feel the guilt they want me to feel-I feel very little else. When I wake it is with a scream lodged so tight in my throat I start gagging until I can swallow it back down. It is five o’clock in the afternoon and I am bathed in sweat. The ghosts disappear, but their It’s all your fault message doesn’t disappear along with them.

  It’s Monday. I roll over and see my clothes lying on the floor and wonder if anything good in this world ever came about on a Monday. My shorts are covered in blood. My muscles ache as I sit up. When I touch the bump on my forehead my world sways and the headache grows. The stains on my shorts are made up of red droplets in various shapes and sizes and I wonder what my answer would be if a psychiatrist asked me what I saw in those patterns. I shiver in my hot bedroom. It feels as though a thousand spiders are weaving up and down my spine. Their furry legs and tiny fangs clutch and prod and bite me.

  I walk to the bathroom. The house has been closed up since yesterday. The air is tainted. I open the bathroom window, strip off the clothes a dead woman gave me, and climb into the shower. A breeze enters the room. Occasionally it pushes the cold shower curtain against my body. I embrace the water, letting it wash over me but unable to be washed clean by it. I feel nauseated, foul, and a moment later I drop to my knees, vomit burning my throat and splashing on the floor. The water falls around my head and rinses my lips, but the taste of death remains.

  I turn off the shower. Climb out. There are lots of little cuts over my body but nothing that needs stitching. In the mirror the dark blue skin on my forehead looks like a golf ball has been stitched beneath it. Seeing it invites the headache deeper into my brain. It builds a residence in there, hangs up a sign, and settles in for a long stay.

  I wrap the towel around my waist and trudge through the house. Water rolls off my hair and down my body. I leave wet footprints on the carpet. The stuffy air feels like a damp overcoat. It feels like I’m walking through a tomb. Perhaps that’s exactly what this is. I close my eyes and the two dead women waiting in my thoughts agree. In the kitchen I knock back two painkillers. How well the two words, pain and killer, go together. Is that what I am?

  The answering machine has a light flashing. There are three messages. I press play and I listen to one of the secretaries at school asking me where I am, telling me I have a classroom full of students waiting for me to show up. Then she calls back two hours later and says a similar thing, and an hour after that the headmaster, a guy by the name of Declan Burrows, asks where the hell I am. I don’t return the calls.

  I settle down in front of the TV in the lounge and use the remote. There’s a show on that involves one women caked in makeup screaming at another woman caked in similar makeup, something important enough to involve the word skank getting used four times in the ten seconds I watch the show for. I change channels. The news has already started and the deaths are the lead story. The reporters and presenters are good-looking people full of smiles and bad news. I wonder if their salaries are on a sliding scale-the bigger the tragedy the more they make. They use phrases like mega-murder because they lack the real vocabulary to sensationalize human tragedy. They’re talking about a community in shock. Not just one homicide, but two-the God-loving, taxpaying citizens of Christchurch are getting their money’s worth. Senseless crimes, they say. A brutal frenzy, they say. Just how brutal they can’t say, but they sure as hell like to guess. No motive, no clues, no leads. It’s their favorite kind of story because it’s equally as full of mystery as it is tragedy. They say ritualistic killings so often it’s easy to imagine some soap company sponsoring them to do so, because nothing cleans up a satanic massacre like their product will.

  I’m given the chance to learn what I couldn’t last night as photographs from Kathy’s and Luciana’s lives flash across the screen. I didn’t know the two women for long. Just hours, really, but sometimes that’s all you need. Sometimes it’s all you get. The photographs seem to be taken a few years ago. In Kathy’s photo there’s an arm around her, probably her husband’s. Her teeth are showing, she has an uncontrolled smile, a full genuine smile that comes about when somebody is trying to make you laugh and doing a great job of it. She has the blue eyes and blond hair of a surfer, and the tanned body to go along with it. Or it could just seem that way because the photo has been taken on a beach-you can see sand and water in the background and somebody wrestling a stick out of a dog’s mouth.

  Luciana’s photo is a wedding photo, one snapped of her where she’s staring into space. She looks beautiful but also a little lost. She is alone in the photo. Her dark hair is pinned up, her slender body hidden by the heavy white dress.

  The reporter lists their personal achievements and ambitions as the photos are on display, the same way a salesman would list the best features of a car. Luciana was thirty-two, married, she was studying creative writing, and she taught piano. I had no idea. Last night was the realest night of my life, but thinking of that piano, thinking of the lesson she will have missed today makes it even more. . what’s the word? Realer? Kathy’s the same age. She was a real estate agent. The two women had known each other since primary school. They grew up together. They hung out together. They died together. Family members and friends come on and share their anecdotes and pain. It’s a smorgasbord of details I’d know had I kept them alive. But I didn’t. Because I fucked up. Soon I’ll be on the TV too. They’ll thrust a microphone in my face looking for a sound bite. They’ll ask the same questions the ghosts are asking-Why?

  I switch off the TV. I get dressed. I drag a backpack from the bottom of my wardrobe and dump it on my bed and start packing. It takes me five minutes. I grab the bloody shorts from the floor and throw them in the laundry on the way out of the house.

  It’s nearly seven o’clock by the time I climb into my car. The evening is still light, but won’t be for much longer. It’s that time of the year where summer has disappeared, but its reach still remains. The air is warm and sticky and smells like freshly mowed lawn. A young boy with a baseball cap pulled on backward is biking along the footpath stuffing mailboxes with leaflets that might be advertisements for toasters or pleas for help to find his puppy. A few doors down an elderly woman is on her knees pulling weeds from her garden. She waves at me. I wave back. The boy puts a leaflet in my mailbox. I drive down my street and watch them both get smaller in my mirror.

  A few minutes later I drive past the pasture where the early hours of Monday introduced me to this world, the Real World, where old women with green fingers are replaced by madmen with red ones, where no children play, where fresh pies don’t sit on the windowsills of happy-go-lucky life. Jesus, I don’t even know what life’s about anymore. It certainly isn’t about routine; it isn’t about paying your mortgage and buying groceries; it isn’t about singing “Happy Birthday,” licking stamps, and changing flat tires. I used to think it was. I used to think there was justice in this world, balance. You want to think it’s about living, about surviving, but no matter how hard you try it gets to be about dying.

  As I look out at the long grass and trees, the soil and scrub, it seems obvious it takes only a couple of shovelfuls of dirt to form a shallow grave. There could be a dozen people out there in the ground-lost loves, lost lives, just lost.
The trees at the far end look nowhere near as imposing as they did in the early hours of the morning. The killing hour is over, that’s why. In the dying sunlight, during the day, these trees are a strip of nature in the city, they’re a place that hasn’t been bulldozed and developed, but at night those trees are dark and foreboding, the kind of trees that in a fairy tale would come alive and rip children limb from limb. There are no police cars, no tape cordoning off the scene, no clatter and squawking of radios. There are only ghosts. I can’t see them, but I know they’re there.

  The Real World isn’t about destiny and it certainly isn’t about luck. If it is, Luciana and Kathy ran out of theirs around the same time I ran out of mine. I push my foot down, not caring about the speed limit. Before I can escape I have one more thing I need to take care of-one more woman I need to see.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Detective Inspector Bill Landry is an angry man. He’s been angry for the last five days, angry at the life-changing news. Though thinking about it, it was more life ending than it was life changing. Too many cigarettes. That’s what it was. The doctor had warned him years ago. He told him it was like putting a gun to your head with a single bullet in it and pulling the trigger over and over. Eventually it was going to go off.

  Five days ago he got the news that that gun would be going off within the next six months.

  He’s trying hard not to think about it, but it’s always there, if not in the forefront of his thoughts, then at least lurking around the sidelines. Right now he’s standing in the bedroom of a dead woman, having just come from a different house across town that had an equally gruesome scene. It’s all he should be thinking about, but those cancer thoughts keep creeping in.

  He looks at his watch, then at the red numerals on the alarm clock, then back at his watch. The two are disagreeing by two minutes. Either that, or there’s a slight rift in the bedroom and he’s two minutes into the future. He figures that would be a better superpower than the one seeming to dog the police everywhere they go-which is to be two minutes in the past. You can’t save people in the past. He watches the last number change from an eight to a nine on his watch. The woman he’s come to see has now been dead a minute longer than she should have been, and he’s one minute closer to his grave. For that matter, everybody is.

  He’s struggling to stay focused. He’s hungry and tired and it’s been a long day in what is no doubt going to be a very long week. He badly wants a cigarette. Life isn’t the same unless you’re slowly ending it. He follows the shape of the dead woman’s face and locks his gaze on her milky eyes. She would agree. She would agree he needed coffee too.

  There is a jingle caught in his head. Music from somewhere and he can’t figure out from where. It’s been stuck with him for the last few hours and he can’t shake it free. The kind of music you’d hear in an elevator or on a child’s toy, only he hasn’t been in any elevators today or hanging around any kids. Even if he could identify it, it wouldn’t help the music disappear. Probably he’d just get more of it stuck in there. He looks down at the woman’s hands, at her fingernails, wondering if any skin from her killer is trapped under them, wondering what she would have done differently the last time she had a manicure if she’d known how many people would be looking at them. He wonders just how much that manicure would have cost, whether she often had them, whether she was into small talk or whether she’d have held a magazine in the hand not being worked on. Life and death and the details in between all have price tags. The cost of death starts out small. Like a fifty-dollar visit to the doctor. You begin throwing good money after bad. You try to chase away the cancer or one of a hundred other diseases that riddle your body and ride it down. Sometimes it isn’t even fifty dollars. Sometimes it’s only five. Or ten. A ten-dollar investment. A knife, for example. Or a pair of garden shears. They slice through skin and flesh quicker than any disease. There are expenses no matter what savages you. New clothes to replace the bloody ones. Smaller clothes to replace the ones that no longer fit your wasting body. Booze to calm the nerves. The family of the victim shops through glossy catalogs for coffins, choosing color and craftsmanship and style, what’s in at the moment, what was so last year. The graveyard plot, prime real estate these days, adds to the bill, along with a new suit or a dress for the corpse. New clothes for the mourners. When the bad news comes from a cop rather than a doctor the expenses add up faster. One murder and the cash is flying around. Man hours. Court cases. Lawyers. News stories. People charging and making money from evil. People. . people. .

  He holds a hand up to his face and pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes for a few seconds. He needs to get ahold of himself. He has to get ahold of these dark thoughts. Has to rein them in. But on the grief scale, he never made it through to acceptance. He’s stuck on anger. He doesn’t see that changing anytime soon.

  The day is cooling off. It certainly needs to. The air inside the house is thick-it tastes and smells like aging fruit. He can’t turn on the air-conditioning, can’t open any windows-not allowed to do anything that will alter the temperature. The medical examiner and the forensic guys would all have fits. He moves over to the window, looks out at the slowly ebbing day and wonders if it will ever actually end. The neat backyard with its golden pebbles and expensive plants has been surrounded by yellow plastic evidence markers. With their black numbers they’re larger versions of the order disks he’s been given at pizza restaurants. He wonders if the same people make them or if they’re made to order, then that thought leads him back to an earlier one about being hungry. A pizza would be good. And a beer. And since he’s in the wishing mood, he’d like to sit on a beach somewhere and watch the sun dip into the horizon, have a few women in bikinis taking up his field of vision too.

  Best he can settle for is to watch the sun as it bounces off the roof of the neighboring house. The roof is made from blue steel and the reflecting light makes the lemons on the nearby tree look purple. The people in the townhouse are standing by their windows. They’re staring at him, their eyes wide and their mouths open as they watch in awe. They’re probably thinking this is the next best thing since reality TV. Seeing them isn’t helping with the anger. He wishes he could arrest them. Wishes he could fire the guy who hasn’t got around to hanging large tarpaulins to block their view. He turns away in disgust.

  The music is still stuck in his brain. He picks his way across the room, stepping carefully over and around the dried patches of blood, of which there are many, once again trying to identify where he heard that theme, and at the same time wishing he could forget it. The furniture and layout may be different, but aside from that it all looks very much the same as the crime scene he came from a little over an hour ago. Similar views, similar furniture, similar dead woman covered in blood. The room has a definite woman’s touch-two vases of flowers, dreary paintings of romantic scenes, candles on the dressing table. It’s the sort of mishmash of trinkets his own wife had lying around when she used to be his wife. His second wife was the same. The good thing about wives when they become ex-wives is they take all that crap with them. The sad thing about when they become ex-wives is when you find something under the bed or hidden in a drawer they missed packing, and it reminds you that being married was made up of good times too.

  There’s a collection of makeup and hair products scattered beneath a mirror on the wall with smudges of hairspray on the glass. A hair dryer lies on the floor next to several pairs of shoes. A garbage basket full of tissues and Q-tips. A pair of slippers made to look like cartoon lion heads. A calendar showing vintage movie posters on the wall by the wardrobe. March shows a pissed-off 1933 King Kong on top of the Empire State Building, fighting off planes while holding his damsel in distress. No dates have been circled, no messages jotted down. Nothing to indicate a bad day was coming.

  The medical examiner is currently tying paper bags over the dead woman’s hands and feet to protect any evidence beneath the nails. One of his kits sits nearby, containing a selectio
n of scissors, blades, Q-tips, and needles. Small labeled vials containing specimens of hair and fibers and blood are lined up evenly inside a larger plastic tray. There’s fingerprinting powder covering different surfaces, evidence markers, plastic bags-it wasn’t this messy when he arrived. Now it’s starting to look like a whirlwind came through here. Just inside the bedroom door waiting to take the cause of that whirlwind away is a neatly folded body bag. Aside from the bedroom the house has no other signs of violence-no broken furniture, no bloodstains.

  The other crime scene is the same-similar kind of house, similar neighborhood, similar amount of blood. Just two dead women and no reason why. That’s always the way.

  “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it,” the medical examiner says, standing up, his knees popping in the process as he moves over to stand next to Landry. His name is Sheldon. He’s in his fifties and sounds like he’s in his seventies. To Landry he seems like the kind of guy who’d yell at kids who stepped on his lawn. His dull and depressing personality could drive people to suicide-a neat trick for somebody who works with the dead.

  “It does,” Landry says, knowing what’s coming.

  “What the hell is wrong with people? I’ve been doing this a long time,” Sheldon says, just like Landry has heard him say on other, similar occasions, “and I can tell you this with certainty-as bad as this is, there will still be worse. It’s human nature,” he says. Both men stare at the body. Landry looks into her eyes, and then he looks down at her chest where one of her breasts has been hacked off, wondering what kind of human nature Sheldon is referring to. “A million years ago we were crawling out of the sea,” Sheldon says. “Now we have the ability to fly to the moon. Man is always trying to better himself, and killing is no different. Guys who can do this,” he says, nodding toward the dead woman, “get better and more brutal. A guy like this, well, you can tell killing these woman wasn’t enough. He wanted to put on a show. Probably wanted to put on a better show than the last guy who did something similar.”