The Killing Hour

by Paul Cleave

“It’s two sixteen,” she says.

  “Late.”

  “My watch says two ten.”

  “It’s a cheap watch.”

  “Exactly. It would have stopped when we dived in the water. We’ve been on the bank for probably four minutes. That means two minutes in the water.”

  Two minutes in the water. The river was close to the cabin, but so what? There was a track we took that was barely a track and we walked it for maybe ten minutes. Easy to find if you know where it is. And when it’s daylight. And dry. I think harder, then realize some of what she’s trying to get at. We’ve come downstream toward the cabin. We’ve crossed the distance much quicker than if we’d walked.

  “How far can you go?” she asks.

  “Further than you.”

  We both doubt it, but say nothing.

  We carry on, but it’s barely a minute before we’re hit with a gradual slope. We struggle against it, often supporting ourselves against trees and each other. Some feeling begins to return to my legs and arms, but not my feet or hands. The slope becomes steeper as we walk further. I’m hoping, when the slope levels out, that we’ll be near the makeshift track. Then all we have to do is turn right and we’ll find the cabin. Or left.

  My feet have gone, but my toes remain-ten individual spears of pain ready to be snapped off. This little piggy went to market. This little piggy drowned. And this little piggy caught pneumonia and died. I remember Landry telling me the cabin was a minute from the river, but I don’t know how much that’s going to help. The trees form a tent that keeps the rain off our faces, but not the wind. If we don’t get out of our wet clothes and find somewhere warm we’re going to die. It’s that simple. With each passing second we’re slowing down. Jo’s wrist tells us time has stopped. My watch suggests differently. I don’t know which one to believe. My jeans are so wet I can hardly bend my legs.

  I quickly explain what Landry told me.

  “Then we follow the river,” she says.

  “Yeah, but which way?”

  “Which way do you think?”

  “I don’t know. If we go left we might end up where we started. We should go right first at least for a bit. We can always turn back.”

  She looks at me long and hard, knowing we don’t have the energy to turn back if we go the wrong way, and in the end decides to follow my advice. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I’ve fucked up everything I’ve done this week so I’m due for some decent luck. We turn right and start moving, doing our best to stay parallel to the water, using only its sound as a guide. The trees get thinner and closer together. I want to turn them into firewood, want to burn down the whole lot. We stumble between them, breaking our way forward. It looks similar to the track we’re looking for. Lots of black. Lots of trees. Lots of roots. We carry on in silence, watched by the night and the small, wet, unhelpful creatures living in it. Kathy and Luciana are watching me too. I can feel them, but that’s all.

  My foot snags on a root, and as in the early minutes of Monday morning I fall onto my hands and knees, only this time I don’t lose hold of a tire iron. I roll onto my back and look up at the trees. Jo kneels down next to me. She rests her head on my chest and I can hear her labored breathing. I want to put my arms around her and think back to better times, but those times have gone, they are gone and the forest is here replacing them and the killing hour has arrived.

  I close my eyes and look for Kathy and Luciana and hope that Landry isn’t there too.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Darkness and death aren’t as scary as I thought. No Heaven, no Hell, just a place with no feeling or time or emotion. A dark place with a soft sound and cool air and, best of all, it doesn’t hurt.

  “Wake up, Charlie.”

  I was wrong to be frightened. Wrong to think that death was going to be an eternity of torture and mayhem. Wrong to think that I wasn’t going to like it. Hell, it isn’t even boring. Had I known this before, I never would have struggled.

  “Charlie.”

  I roll over. Jo is next to me. This isn’t death. I can’t tell if she’s on her knees or not. Pine needles have created a blanket for us to rest on, but not one to crawl under and get warm. Branches rustle and leaves tear from their stems above us. Cones fall to the earth and pine needles fly through the wind.

  “I’m awake.”

  “And shivering,” she says.

  “I can’t stop.”

  “It’s a good thing,” she says. “It means hypothermia hasn’t started.”

  I have no idea if that’s true. All I know is it doesn’t feel good.

  She forces herself up, pressing against my stomach to raise herself. “I think there’s a light in the distance, perhaps only thirty yards away. If we can make it, promise me we’ll go to the police.”

  “I promise.” I don’t want her help in getting up, but I need it. When I’m on my feet we stagger forward.

  Head toward the light.

  If this is the trail we took earlier and the cabin is ahead of us, then that makes Cyris. . where? Anywhere? Lost? Or here? We break through the trees into the clearing. Seeing Landry’s car is awful. It makes me realize that life goes on, no matter who is no longer in it. In ten years the car will still be here. The paint job will have cracked in the heat, the metal will have rusted in the rain, the tires will be flat, the rims of the wheels will have cut through them and made impressions in the ground. The whole thing will be covered in mold. The car is a slice of life waiting for the return of its owner, but it will never happen-its owner is pinned against a fallen tree, its owner will decay over the following weeks and break apart.

  The cabin looks like a palace. Limping forward, I reach the porch. I can’t climb up onto it so I sit on the edge and roll myself on. Jo does the same.

  I can’t clutch the door with my frozen hands, but Jo has more movement so she nudges me aside. The cabin was cold before, but it’s warmer and drier than outside. The wind ushers us inside and we close the door behind us.

  “We can’t stay here,” I say.

  “I know, I know,” she answers. “But I know I can’t drive either. What about you?”

  I want to say I can. But I can’t. Put me behind the wheel of a car and I don’t even know if I’ll have the strength to change gears. And if I do, I’m only going to drive a few feet before hitting any one of a number of trees. “Not yet. What are we going to do?”

  “Stay here,” she says.

  “But we can’t.”

  “Just a bit,” she says, rubbing her hands together in an attempt to get the process started. “Just long enough to warm up.”

  “That could take hours. Let’s just warm up in the car.”

  “This will be quicker,” she says. “I know it’s tough to do, but we have to hold out hope that Cyris is lost.”

  “Yeah, but he may not be. He might be right outside.”

  “If we try driving we’re going to crash. Then what? Start walking back to the city?”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “Two minutes,” she says. “We spend two minutes warming up and then we leave.”

  Two minutes isn’t a lot of time. In two minutes I’m probably going to be colder than I am now. She moves over to one of the lanterns. She picks it up, hooking it as if she has a claw. Plenty of dry kindling has been set in lots of old newspaper in the fireplace. Jo tries removing the glass top of the lantern, but her hands are too cold, then comes up with a more practical way. She throws her lantern into the fireplace. The glass breaks. A flame is released. The brittle paper lights up like an inferno.

  We lower ourselves to the fire. The wood crackles, but gives off little warmth. It doesn’t take long for smoke to start flooding back into the cabin. The chimney must be partially blocked by a bird’s nest or leaves. My lungs are too full of water to make room for the smoke. Jo strips down and starts ringing the water out of her clothes. I can hardly move, but I manage to kick my shoes off. Nothing else.

  Jo takes my shirt a
nd helps me with my jeans. I look down at my body. It’s gray and covered in bruises and lumps and scrapes. We’re both in our underwear. I don’t want to strip any further-not because of Jo, but because if Cyris comes back in I don’t want to die naked. Side by side we sit, clutching each other for warmth though we’re so cold that hugging achieves nothing. Cyris could burst in and kill us, but if we step back outside the cold will do the same thing. Only fire can help us. Jo puts two more logs onto it.

  I glance at my watch. The two minutes have already passed. We’re heading up to three.

  I nod toward the bag in the center of the room. “There are clothes in there.”

  Jo stands and grabs it. It’s difficult opening the bag, but we rescue the clothes Landry had been wearing. Beneath them is a towel. He came prepared to get wet. Or bloody. Either way he was right. Jo towels herself down, then I follow suit. I’m still freezing and my body hasn’t given up shaking. I can feel the heat from the fire, but it is only warming up my skin. It’s my core that’s chilled. I pull on Landry’s shirt. I give the pants and jacket to Jo.

  “You take the jacket,” she says, handing it back to me.

  “I’m fine,” I tell her.

  “No, really, Charlie, you’re not. Take the jacket.”

  I shake my head, which is a mistake for anybody sporting the kind of headache I’m sporting. I almost pass out. “No,” I tell her.

  She pulls on the pants and puts on the jacket. She does the jacket up. It’s not a great fit. Then she finds the envelope with my account of what happened in one of the pockets. She tosses it onto the fire. “We don’t need it,” she says. “Let’s just go to the police and tell them.”

  “Can we get a lawyer first?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I’m not sure. Anyway, we have to go,” I say, happy I can now feel the words coming from my mouth. She nods. Rags of smoke are hanging lower in the air. I could reach up and my hand would disappear into them.

  “I know,” Jo says. She hooks out the two logs she just put into the fire and puts them into the duffel bag, which smothers the flames. She pushes the bag into my chest.

  “Hug this,” she says. “It isn’t much, but it’s something.”

  The bag feels like a lumpy hot water bottle.

  She picks up her wet pants and hunts through them for the keys.

  “How did you drive my car?” I ask. “I had the keys.”

  “Like this,” she says, and she pulls her own keys out of her pocket. “They were still in my handbag,” she says, “and I never took off the spare for your car.”

  It makes me feel good to know she never got rid of the key, as if by keeping it she was also keeping the chance that somehow we would get back together.

  We scoop up our wet clothes. I carry the duffel bag and Jo carries the clothes and we step outside. Landry’s shoes are too big for me, but they do the job. The ground plucks at them as we run toward the cars. Cyris doesn’t jump out from the trees and shoot at us so I figure things are picking up. The rain hasn’t eased off and perhaps it never will. My arms and legs feel warm, but my stomach and chest are cold. Landry’s car is right out front, but I can’t see my car or Cyris’s.

  “Where’s the car?” I ask.

  “About twenty yards that way,” she says, and I follow.

  I keep hugging the duffel bag even though it has cooled somewhat. We reach my car and dump the clothes into the back. There are still two stakes in the backseat. I take one out for protection.

  Jo climbs into the car. I tell her to wait for me, and I run over to Landry’s car. It’s unlocked, and I pop the hood and grab hold of the cords going to the spark plugs, and I tug on them as hard as I can until two of them snap off. I carry them back to my car and climb in. I’m not sure how much time we’ve wasted. Five minutes, I guess. Ten at the most. I turn the key and the motor kicks into life. So does the heater. I turn it to high and it blasts cold air at us that is warmer than we are. It starts to warm up. So do we.

  “Cyris followed you, right?”

  “Must have,” Jo replies.

  “Where’s his car?”

  “Maybe he parked further away so he could sneak up.”

  Makes perfect sense. A guy like Cyris isn’t going to drive right up to the cabin.

  “Just like you did,” I say.

  She flashes me her first genuine smile since I tied her up and kidnapped her. “Exactly.”

  I gun the engine, put the duffel bag in my lap, and start my three-point turn. It takes me around six or seven points to do it. We head back up the track and come across Cyris’s car. It’s blocking the road and there’s no way around it. Only it’s not his car, it’s Jo’s car. Jo gasps when she sees it. It makes her realize that Cyris has been to her house.

  “If he’d followed you to my place,” she says, “wouldn’t he have just come inside?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “Which means he didn’t follow you there, did he?”

  “No.”

  “Which means he found my address at your house, figured out the connection, and came looking for me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her.

  “So if you hadn’t come around. .”

  “But I did. That’s all that matters.”

  “You saved my life,” she says.

  “No. All I did was put it in danger by not going to the police when I could have.”

  “If you’d gone to the police, they wouldn’t have sent somebody to protect me.”

  “I know. You realize I’ll probably end up in jail,” I tell her.

  “Let’s hope not.”

  I try to imagine Cyris’s state of mind when he saw me being arrested. Was he happy or pissed off? I don’t know. I don’t even know if Cyris has a state of mind. What I do know is his plans were altered. With nothing else to do he followed.

  “What if he’s in there?” I ask, nodding toward her car.

  “He won’t be in there. If he’d made it back he would have come to the cabin.”

  I separate her keys from mine, so mine stays in the ignition and the car stays running. “I guess,” I tell her. I open my door. “Lock up behind me. And if there’s any problems, get the hell out of here.”

  “Charlie?”

  I lean down and look back in. “Yeah?”

  “Don’t forget what we discussed earlier.”

  “The police. Right. We’ll go right there. I promise. I’ll just move it and be right back.”

  The rain starts to soak me, but I don’t care. I pause and look back to make sure she’s locking her doors. She is. The headlights blind me, leaving colored flashes streaking across my vision. I rub my eyes with my fingers, trying to arrange the colors back into some type of sensible order. There’s a key in the ignition. Not her key, but some kind of generic key that isn’t really a key, but looks more like the handle of a screwdriver.

  I twist it. It works. I turn the lights on, shining them at Jo. Hers are shining right back. I turn my heater on high, aiming the air at my feet and face. I try to get into reverse gear, but my hand is wet and it slips off. I wipe it across the passenger seat, then try again. This time it works. I twist around to look out the back window.

  At the same time Cyris pops the backseat down and crawls out of the trunk.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Money makes the world go round. It makes it, yeah, it makes it, yes it does, but revenge is why he’s out here, not money-he knows because he checked the note in his pocket. Somehow he thought it was about the money, and in thinking that it has become that, because now he can use Feldman and his wife to earn some quick cash. And he loves cash. He loves it about the same as he loves revenge.

  His head hurts, the world spins quicker than he can, and his stomach throbs. The duct tape pulls at the skin and he wonders if he’s infected, yeah, infected, and he needs to take the medication, but the medication is. . The medication is somewhere, but it only help
s to numb the pain. It doesn’t heal the wound, it doesn’t cure him or make last Monday go away. He wants revenge, revenge and money, and it’s hard to know which he wants more.

  “Start driving,” he says, and pushes the gun toward Charlie.

  His head seems to be clearing. Not much, but enough to know this isn’t all about killing people. He knows he’s capable of speech, capable of command, knows that with the shotgun he has the power to get exactly what he wants.

  “I said start driving, asshole.”

  He hid in the back of the car like a bug, out of sight, with the shotgun, and boy, what a good plan, a great plan, and he’s so pleased with himself he’s smiling and starting to laugh, but he must hold back the laughter, must cling to the excitement, but not let it take him over.

  Charlie starts to nod and he wonders what sort of mess he would make inside the car if he were to start shooting people. People? There’s only Charlie. Anyway, the shotgun won’t shoot anything in its current condition. It’s empty.

  Something digs into the side of his hip. He adjusts his position and digs his fingers into his pocket. Bracelets? Metal ones. With a chain running between them. And blood all over them. A key is sitting in one of the locks. A key that was in his satchel that he’d left on the passenger seat.

  He thinks about the money. He wonders what a suitcase full of money would look like if he were to shoot a hole in the middle of it. Would it turn into confetti? Would it turn into loose change? A suitcase of money. Just think. . just think how it would feel to run his fingers through all those loose bills. .

  And then he remembers! Money. He has a suitcase full of money at home! No, no he doesn’t, but he does have a suitcase full of money owing to him. Or maybe a briefcase. All of this was for money. Money is the reason he got stabbed, it’s the reason he wants revenge. In his mind he can picture part of the note he wrote to himself and he remembers that killing Feldman is about revenge, but picking up the money he’s owed is for the job he did the other night. Things may have gotten fucked up along the way, but he still got that woman killed, so really he doesn’t need Charlie at all.