The Killing Hour

by Paul Cleave

  I use my foot to roll him onto his back. There’s blood on his shoulder, but nowhere else. He’s wearing a bulletproof vest. The Glock has stitched a diagonal line from the bottom right up to his top left, then stitched one bullet into him for luck. The same anger that burned through me when I found Frank leaving a briefcase full of money is burning through me now. I snap the handcuffs around his wrists. The moment the second bracelet is in place he seems to snap out of his fugue. He shoots both hands upward, hitting me in the jaw. The gun goes skittering into the darkness. I reach out and the rope wraps around his neck. It pulls him into a sitting position. I move forward and wrap it around his neck once more. He pushes me off him and tries to unwrap himself. I pull hard on the rope and he follows the direction, getting to his feet. He rushes me, crushing me between his body and the lamppost. My head clangs against it, and when I look down I see four of his legs getting tangled in two sets of ropes. He tries to keep balanced, but the rope is wrapped around him and the handcuffs make it that much more difficult. I grab hold of the rope and twist my body aside, pulling him into the lamppost. Then I push my body weight into him, lifting him onto the railing. I hold him at the top and we seem to realize at the same time that he’s balanced to go either way. All of a sudden he stops fighting me and I stop pushing.

  I’m not sure if I meant it to go this way or not.

  “We can be partners,” he says.

  “Go to Hell.”

  His hands reach out and grab the railing as he falls. He hangs there, and I take the time to tie off the end of the rope around the lamppost. He sees what I’m doing and knows he should have let go and taken his chances with the water.

  “I fucked your wife,” he tells me. “And I’m going to fuck her again when this is over.”

  I kick his fingers and then he’s gone.

  He doesn’t make a sound as he falls the fifteen feet. But the rope does. It comes to a sudden snap, then strains against the side of the rail, moving back and forth in small sudden movements. It sounds like grinding teeth. When I look over the edge he’s swinging from side to side. He’s managed to wrap an arm around the rope to take the impact from his neck. Twenty feet below him is the ocean.

  I turn and look back at the pier. Our struggle, from the moment he arrived, has brought us two-thirds of the way toward the end. I make my way over to my gun and spot Cyris’s black satchel just ahead of it. I pick it up, curious to see what he had planned for us tonight, and find a bottle that holds around a liter of gasoline, a lighter, and a knife. I can only imagine.

  Cyris is still swinging, his hands on the rope to keep him from strangling. He’s trying to untangle his neck. I open the bottle of gasoline and pour a quarter of it onto the leather satchel, then I lie down and put my hand through the railing. I’m on automatic now. This path I’m taking is one I don’t even want to consider veering from. I dump the contents of the bottle, getting as much fuel onto Cyris as the wind will allow. I stand back up, then look down so I can see his eyes as I take the lighter from my pocket. I can see little because of the sand swirling around us. I tie the handle of the satchel around the rope so it has enough room to slide, then use the lighter to set fire to it. Even in the strong wind it catches immediately. I let it drop and it spirals down the rope quickly toward Cyris. The wind pushes it around, but doesn’t blow it out. Cyris swings harder as he struggles to untie the rope around his neck with his handcuffed hands. Short, jerky movements. The satchel reaches his hands and he cries out and pulls them away, but then the noose starts choking him so he has to put his hands back.

  His hair catches fire. So does his beard.

  For a few seconds I almost feel sorry for him.

  Almost.

  He struggles as the fire jumps onto his clothes.

  He doesn’t scream. Always the tough guy to the end.

  I lean over the railing and set my sights on my target with the gun.

  Action Man: it is time for all this to end.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Swinging around, swinging around, this is so bad, yeah, yeah, and the pain is intense, and the handcuffs dig into his wrists and he can’t fight his way out of them and he can’t fight the rope around his neck, can’t fight the fire, and if this is what revenge is, it tastes horrible, fucking horrible. His fingers are on fire, his body is on fire, and he swings in the breeze and gravity pulls at his body while there’s nothing, nothing, nothing he can do except burn. Burn to death, burn to ash. The fire evaporates his tears before they fall, and there must be a way, must be, yeah, must be a way he can escape this.

  Only there isn’t.

  He can feel the knife wound in his stomach stretching open under the weight of his own body. It hurts, but not as much as the fire. The headache, of course, is taking this moment to remind him that the headache is king and won’t be forgotten. His chest and stomach are sore from the gunshots. He doesn’t know what the hell Feldman shot him with, but that pistol was fully automatic. Had to be a dozen shots coming out of that thing. He sure as shit didn’t get to play with anything like that in the army.

  The skin on his fingers and the skin on his face hurts, hurts so much. The sound it makes is horrible, the sizzle-sizzle of meat cooking, of skin cooking, and the smell, the smell is almost as bad as the pain. He’s going to die here. He’s never going to see his wife again, and for what? A hundred grand? Shit.

  He looks up and the night around him is shimmering through the flames. He pulls his hands away from the flames and the rope tugs into his throat, cutting away his chance to breathe in the burning oxygen. The night starts to darken and he can feel himself falling now, falling now, falling into another world where death will be a release from this pain. .

  Yet when he falls he finds only a cold darkness. It surrounds him. A cold darkness that isn’t cold enough to soothe the pain, but it comes close. He opens his eyes and can see nothing. The rope is around his neck, but no longer taut. He kicks out, pulls with his arms, and a moment later he breaks the surface of the water. The remainder of the rope is still swinging in the wind above him.

  He is free.

  He sucks in a deep breath, then dives back beneath the surface. The cold fights the heat, and is now beginning to numb some of the pain. The salt stings the blisters on his face and neck, and his fingers are stinging too, but the pain is good, the pain is bliss, because the pain means he’s alive.

  The wound in his stomach, the knife wound from Monday morning, doesn’t hurt. His shoulder does from the bullet, and his chest and stomach hurt from the impact from the rest of the bullets. The bulletproof vest he put on knowing Charlie had enough time to come up with a plan is weighing him down. It’s becoming waterlogged and he realizes he could drown here.

  He kicks harder, and when he breaks the surface he’s moved further from the pier. The swinging rope is impossible to see. He buries himself beneath the water. He’s struggling to breathe because his upper body is sore from the impact of the bullets, and he’s struggling to breathe because he keeps getting pulled into the darkness beneath him. He kicks toward the beach, treading the waves. When he reaches the shore he falls onto his stomach, his face pressing into the sand. More sand whistles around him and bites into his wounds. He forces himself to his knees. He reaches into his pocket. He prays the vial of morphine hasn’t been broken. It hasn’t. Another pocket and there’s a syringe. He pulls it out of the wrapper. He uses his teeth to pull the cap off the needle.

  The pain is becoming overwhelming.

  The needle plunges into the vial, and then plunges into his arm.

  He tosses the vial aside, but puts the cap back on the syringe and into his pocket. He doesn’t like the idea of some poor kid finding it in the sand tomorrow or stepping on it.

  The pain starts to dull. He closes his eyes. There has to be something, there has to be something he can do, somewhere to go, or somebody to help him. But he’s alone, just as he’s always alone, and he gets to his feet and heads down the beach. It’s dark and he has onl
y a vague idea of where he’s heading, but already his mind is focusing, focusing, focusing on his next move, but not focusing, yeah yeah, things are becoming not so much his thoughts anymore, he wants to make people hurt. He wants to make Charlie Feldman suffer. And there’s that bag full of cash too that is rightfully his.

  He will get to taste revenge after all, he will get to taste it and after this, after all of this, he knows it will taste better than bittersweet.

  He reaches back into his pockets and it only takes him a few seconds to hunt out an extra set of handcuff keys. After last night, he’s decided to always carry a spare set, and this set consists of four different types of keys. One of them fits.

  With a ferocious appetite he drags himself toward the road. And that’s when he sees her, the woman who has been living in his basement the last few days. He heads toward her.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Water and fire. How can I have been so foolish? I look down at the rope and the black water and no Cyris. The rope has burned through and I’m an idiot for not seeing it would happen. As I watch another piece breaks away.

  I turn from the railing and run down the pier. My lungs hurt and my legs ache. The knowledge I carry is heavy. I wouldn’t put any money on Cyris having drowned.

  I run toward the steps. The air is slightly clearer. It’s still windy as hell, but I can see. The wind has pulled maybe five thousand bucks from the canvas bag, which hadn’t been closed all the way. The money swirls around, spent on the air by invisible fingers. I close the bag and take it downstairs, along with the shotgun. The KA-BAR is tucked into my back pocket so the handle points upward. Sand blows in from the dunes, rolling along like low, grainy storm clouds. Cyris is still alive. I don’t doubt it. I shot him. I hanged him. I doused him in gasoline and set him alight, turning him into a swinging candle. Then I tried to drown him. At the start of the week I stabbed him. Only stands to reason it’s going to take witchcraft or a nuclear bomb to finish him off.

  I get down the stairs. The bag is awkward to carry until I’m able to hook the straps over my shoulders and wear it like a backpack. I have the pistol tucked into my waistband, and I carry the shotgun so it’s pointing down at the ground. If anybody sees me they’ll call the police, and who’s to say at this point that that isn’t such a bad idea.

  There’s way more sand blowing around at ground level. I hold my hand to my face and peer between my fingers to shield my eyes. Even so sand slips through my fingers and I have to keep blinking it away. I can’t see Jo. I reach the waterline. I can’t see Cyris.

  Can’t see a damn thing.

  “Jo?”

  No answer. I shout out her name louder. The wind is strong, but not strong enough to whip her name away so nobody can hear it.

  I head back to the pier. My legs are heavy in the sand. I keep my left hand in front of my face and my gun ahead of me. I reach the back of the pier, which is somewhat sheltered because of the wall of the library and the steps. There’s nobody here. No Jo. No Cyris. No ghosts. I’m making a mess out of this.

  “Jo!”

  I move back toward the water. I point the gun in the direction that Cyris ought to be coming from, only he isn’t.

  “Jo! Where are you? Jo?”

  Nothing. Did she slip and did the water wash her out? No, because she would have screamed. She would have called for help. The problem is I already think I know what’s happened. I just don’t want it to be true.

  I turn from the crashing surf and head back to the road.

  The car Cyris arrived in has gone. He’s gone, and there’s no reason to believe that he hasn’t taken Jo with him.

  I run my hand through my hair. I crouch down, the weight of the money almost enough to pull me back. This is unbelievable. There’s a moment-just a brief flash-where I think everybody would be better off if I just put the shotgun in my mouth and made fractal patterns in the sand.

  I run over the road and dump the money in the trunk of my car. I put the shotgun in there too. I keep the pistol on me. I have no choice now but to go to the police. The time for the police was on Monday, not now, not in the dying hours of Thursday, but what else can I do? I’ll go and I’ll pray they can find Jo, and what can I tell them that will help?

  Nothing.

  I start the car. The KA-BAR in my back pocket digs into me. I pull it out and sit it on the passenger seat. As I pull away from the side of the road with the engine revving loudly, I’m reminded of Monday morning. My heart was pounding so hard it sounded like I was knocking at Heaven’s door. Things weren’t as sharp as they ought to have been, I was seeing the world through a haze of beer, adrenaline, and fear. Not seeing the van parked outside the pasture where there was no longer a dead man was bad enough, but finding it outside Luciana’s house was far worse. It was a sign that I was too late. I pulled in behind it. If I’d left right then things could have turned out differently for Kathy, for all of us. I was angry at that guy six months ago in the bar-he was the reason I had no cell phone. He was the reason I couldn’t call and warn anybody.

  It was as if Cyris had come back from the dead. The boundaries of my imagination were limited by the gravity of reality, so all I needed to be scared of was reality. But I was getting way too much reality. That’s what the Real World is all about. I climbed from my car, taking the flashlight. It was no gun, but my tire iron hadn’t been much of one either. I slowly approached the van and slid open the door, jumping aside in case he was in there. But he wasn’t. The van was empty. It wasn’t a moving mortuary with handcuffs and leather straps hanging from the roof and rails, no signs of blood and hair pooled into the corners and caked into the floor. Sort of like the Scooby Doo mystery van, those meddling kids moonlighted as sexual predators. For a second all of that was there and more, and then it vanished. Just faded away as my imagination slowly let it go.

  I moved to the front. There wasn’t any blood on the seat. I couldn’t understand it then and still can’t understand it now. Cyris should have been dead. I felt cheated and I still do.

  The keys to the van were hanging in the ignition. I bent them until they snapped. I left the shaft buried and tossed the remainder beneath the van. Cyris wasn’t going anywhere.

  I headed up the driveway. Every light was on and the door was unlocked. I slipped inside and entered the kitchen. I’d hoped to find a knife block with a selection of serial-killer blades, but there was nothing except empty cups, a spoon, a potato peeler, and a spatula. I didn’t want to start rummaging through drawers in case he heard me, so, keeping the flashlight as my weapon, I started moving around the house. The lounge bisected the hallway at its halfway point. A quick glance to my right showed no movement so I went in that direction. I was sure I’d find Luciana in a bedroom, but I was wrong. I didn’t even need to check. The bloody footprints coming from the bathroom told me where she was. They were the sort of prints that suggested somebody had sloshed around and stomped through a lot of blood. They were the sort of footprints you never want to see. I’d been hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst, and the worst was what I was about to get. Standing outside that bathroom with bloody prints heading to the adjoining garage, I came to understand that there was no hope at all.

  I opened the door and saw things that met my expectations, and others that didn’t. Luciana was in there, but not gagged and tied up and whimpering. She was gagged and tied up, but dead. Her open, lifeless eyes locked onto the guilt I deserved for failing her. The gag in her mouth that held in an eternal scream was a torn strip from my T-shirt. Her recently washed hair was wrapped around the taps, stopping her body from sliding further into the bath. Her wrists were tied together. The dark blood looked like patches of oil. It covered her. It had splashed everywhere. The stake had been driven into her chest.

  The walls. The side of the bath. The floor. Patches of the ceiling. Everywhere there was blood. I made it two steps from the bathroom before doubling over and throwing up. I vomited right on top of the bloody footprints.

/>   The bloody footprints gave me a map and a few seconds later I followed them. I knew the house was covered in evidence of my existence: my clothes, fingerprints, hair and skin, saliva on the beer bottle, footprints, vomit. I’d have needed to spend days there trying to hide it all, and even then I’d just have left more behind. I trusted that because I had no criminal record, the police had no way of tracing me.

  The garage door was open and the handle smeared with blood. Cyris had stolen Luciana’s car. Snapping the keys in the van had been pointless. He was out there driving to Kathy’s house, pursued only by the dawn and his enthusiasm for killing. Both would catch him. I fished Kathy’s number from my pocket. The search for a phone began and ended what felt like an hour later. Each lost second fell heavily on me. Each breath I sucked in was one less for Kathy.

  I dialed while running outside to my car. I nearly lost control because of my sweaty hands, and the result was a beeping that told me I’d called a nonexistent number. I reached the end of the driveway and had to use my teeth to pull the antenna up on the phone. This time I got the number right. The only problem was the number was busy.

  I rang the police. I got the phone up to my ear, but it slipped from my wet hand. I juggled the flashlight trying to save it and ended up losing both. Just before the phone cracked into the driveway I heard the shrill voice of a female dispatcher. The flashlight still worked, but the phone didn’t.

  I didn’t hang around. I thought of going to a neighbor’s house, but what neighbor would have let me inside? My tires screeched as I pulled away from the house. It was still dark, but the edges of the sky were fading to the color of a dark bruise. Dawn was approaching, and the early morning was beginning to wash away the night with a cold light that made everything look bleak. There were more cars on the road. I ignored the toots and the flipping fingers of the drivers as I swerved around them, driving with all the skill of a man who has no skill but only desperation.