[2010] The Violet Hour

by Daniel Judson

  Back downstairs, he placed the pillowcase with Heather’s things in the office, then hurried back into the first work bay, heading this time straight for his tool chest. He removed a roll of duct tape and pulled off several foot-long strips of it, hanging each strip in a row from the edge of his workbench. Sitting on a stool, he made a splint of the two pieces of wood, securing it to his wrist as best he could with the tape. A crappy job of it, but it would have to do for now. As he did this—no easy feat, indeed—he looked at the Russian’s bloodstain just a few feet away, and the hammer resting not far from that.

  It was too big a stain to simply wash away, and throughout this place were the Russian’s footprints—as well as those left by whoever had taken his body from here. Too many footprints to account for. Anyway, it was the presence of his own fingerprints—on every tool, every part of this place—that he was concerned about now.

  When the splint was done, he removed a large screwdriver from his tool chest and stepped to the rear of the Benz, got down onto his knees, and, with one thrust, punched a hole in the gas tank, letting the fuel pour out onto the already oil-saturated floor.

  In the next stall he did the same to the Citroën’s gas tank, then picked up his helmet and emptied it of the torn clothing, dropping each piece to the floor. Tearing the liner from the helmet—it contained, no doubt, strands of hair, flakes of skin—he dropped the helmet, too.

  He paused to be certain that he had covered everything, thought immediately of the Lexus parked out back. There was, though, nothing he could do about that—beyond the wiping down he’d already done. The presence of that vehicle here was a connection between this place and Angelica Pulaski, but it was one that could be explained. She was from Southampton, Carver was from Southampton, and this little side business of his catered exclusively to the wealthy and their luxury cars.

  Anyway, really, what did that matter? Angelica no longer needed Cal’s protection. He had already failed to keep that promise.

  He looked around quickly. Not an easy thing to do, setting fire to one’s home, even a home as makeshift as this. Barely, really, a home at all, but the only one he’d known for four years.

  A long time, for a kid like him.

  Cal kicked the ball peen hammer across the floor till it landed in the growing puddle under the Benz, then returned to the office and opened the top drawer of Carver’s desk, grabbing a book of matches.

  Back in the doorway—the garage already reeked overwhelmingly of gasoline fumes—he lit the liner and threw it toward the puddle.

  The fire, of course, was instant; it rose to the height of a man in seconds and began to spread with a menacing speed that made it seem no less than alive.

  Cal didn’t look back as he burst through the door and ran for the Ford parked a few hundred feet down Scuttlehole Road, in the shadow of a tree. It wouldn’t take long at all, he knew, for that place, and everything it in, to burn to ash or melt to scrap.

  A fire trap, indeed.

  So there was no need for him to look.

  Still, as he drove away, he glanced once into the rearview mirror, saw behind him the tree-lined horizon glowing deep red, a broad rim of sky lit as if by a sunset.

  He parked the Ford at the Bridgehampton train station, on the dark edge of the lot, and retrieved Heather’s new cell phone number from her old one, making a point this time to commit it to memory.

  Breaking the roll of quarters open, he selected six and, as he walked toward the platform, wiped them down on his thermal shirt, placing each coin, once it was clean of his prints, onto the palm of his taped-up hand.

  At the station pay phone—the platform was empty at that moment, not a soul anywhere in sight, which was why he had chosen to come here and use this phone—he grabbed a scrap of paper from a nearby trash can and covered the tip of his finger with it as he punched in Heather’s number. Then he used the paper as a glove as he deposited the number of coins requested by the prerecorded voice.

  Back at the Ford, he waited behind the wheel, watching as the 7:30 eastbound eventually arrived and its passengers disembarked and headed toward their cars. When the last vehicle had left the parking lot and was gone from sight, stillness and silence resumed.

  It became more and more difficult for Cal to ignore the steady pain of his brutalized hand. No, not just steady, growing. His hand had swollen so much that his flesh strained the makeshift splint. The motor was off, so there was no heat, and he had hoped that the cold gathering around him would help somewhat, but it didn’t. He knew that he needed to apply ice soon and get the swelling under control.

  Finally, though, as his wait continued, the pain got to be too much to bear, so he reached into his pocket and removed the vial of morphine.

  He looked at it for a moment, then twisted the cap and withdrew the eyedropper. A third of the way up the glass tube was a white line. A dosage marker? Probably. He reinserted the dropper, pinched the rubber nipple, then pulled the dropper out again.

  Even in this dark the fluid was clearly visible. It reached just past that white line.

  Close enough.

  Tilting his head back, he put the dropper in his mouth, felt the fluid spill onto his tongue. Surprisingly sweet, this stuff. Swallowing it, he recapped the vial and returned it to his pocket, then resumed watching through the windshield for the cab that would bring him to Heather and Amanda.

  Fourteen

  The numbness began in his lips and spread quickly to his face, and soon enough there was a lightness in his chest that was a powerful mixture of both indifference and bliss.

  He could think only of Aaron’s girlfriend, and the smile on her face whenever she got high. He knew, though, that he wasn’t smiling at all.

  The cab, driven by an old, withered black man with a Jamaican accent, took Cal to a motel on the western edge of Southampton Village, just past the movie theater. A smart choice, he thought—everything they would need was within walking distance, and the police station was only a block away. Heather and Amanda, waiting for him at the door of their room at the far end of the motel, immediately rushed to him and helped him inside, where he lay down on one of the two twin beds and they placed a bath towel filled with ice on his broken hand. Heather, desperate to understand what had happened to him, asked many questions, but then, when it became clear that he had taken morphine—Amanda was the first to realize that—allowed him to rest quietly.

  He could have talked to them, could have made an attempt to answer at least the first few of the many questions that were thrown at him, but there was nothing he could say to them that wouldn’t lead to his having to reveal what had been done to him and what he had done. He wasn’t ready to speak those words yet.

  Anyway, it had to be obvious enough—by his hand, yes, but also by the look in his eyes, the combination of terror and sorrow that even morphine couldn’t mask—that he had been through some kind of hell or another.

  His eyes were closed, but his mind raced. He felt like he was on a train that was moving just a little too fast, on the verge of flying off its rails. All he could do was sit tight and wait.

  He wasn’t aware of his body, only the absence of it. He was simply consciousness now. Active, alert, gushing. He thought of the claims of those who had experienced near-death—the floating, the looking down upon themselves from above, the feeling of euphoria. He could see himself as clear as day stretched out on that motel bed in the dark, could even see Heather and Amanda in the next bed over. The grip that terror had on him was loosening; he could feel himself about to slip away from it, be rid of it for good.

  Then the parade began. Faces moving past. His father, his brother, Lebell, Messing, Angelica—all the dead, all those who had been killed. It wasn’t long, though, before a second parade came along. Tierno, Janssen, Carver—those Cal had killed.

  Then, the face of the woman who had hurt him, tortured him. To gain knowledge he did not possess. What was it Tierno had told him? I feel for the person who has nothing to make them
stop.

  It was some time after this that Cal remembered what Lebell had told him.

  All that matters is that the people I leave behind are safe.

  All the rushing thoughts were gone suddenly, and only this one remained. Cal hung on to it, looked at it and only it with his mind’s eye, wouldn’t let it go away, till the effects of the morphine began at last to fade and the sense of having a body—a body in pain, no less—began to return.

  Sitting up, laying the towel full of ice on the other side of the bed, he moved to the edge of the stiff mattress, lingered there for a moment, adrift, then finally stood. The painkiller had faded but hadn’t left him, not yet. He felt lightheaded, clumsy, but he focused through it and was able to move with a degree of skill.

  He stepped to the desk, where all his gear lay. He found the Belstaff jacket, removed his cash from its inner pocket. It was too dark to count the bills, so he thumbed through them and divided the stack roughly in half, returned one pile to the jacket and laid the other on the desk.

  Then he dressed, as quietly as he could. Carver’s boots, not his own, and the Belstaff jacket, the revolver in one of its outer pockets.

  He placed his Sidi boots inside the Schott jacket and zipped it closed.

  Standing between the beds, he looked down at the girls, knew by their breathing that they were asleep. He remembered the dream Heather had—what was it, all of two nights ago?—about the unknown man, like a shadow she had to shake but couldn’t, following her through dark city streets and across empty fields, and all the while, cupped in her hands, a candle she could not—she dare not—let go out.

  He wondered if she was dreaming that now, or if maybe she was dreaming something else, something pleasant. Like the dreams he had of her. His daily life, the routine he followed, obeyed like church doctrine, was all about doing what was right, what was expected and, therefore, safe. It was in his dreams that he indulged in the inappropriate, the risky, the downright dangerous.

  That was, at least, till now.

  He thought of leaving without waking them, without a word, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that. He hadn’t known that the night his brother left—to get morphine for his girl, so she would stay with them—would be the last time he’d see Aaron. He had lived in fear of all kinds of abandonment since, big and small. There was no way that he could just disappear on Heather without first telling her why.

  Without knowing they were saying good-bye.

  He sat on the edge of her bed, and this motion alone woke her.

  Cal quickly glanced at the clock on the table between the two beds. It was just past ten.

  “You okay?” Heather whispered.

  Groggy, she reached for him in the dark, her hand finding not skin nor the material of his thermal shirt but leather.

  She propped herself up on her elbows. “What’s going on?”

  “I need to go,” Cal said. He didn’t want to disturb Amanda, whispered even more softly than Heather did.

  “What do you mean? Where?”

  “Away.”

  “What’s going on?”

  He paused, wished he could think of a way around having to say it, but there just wasn’t one.

  He needed her to let him go, for her own good.

  “I killed some men tonight,” he said.

  “What?”

  “One of them was an FBI agent. He was on the take, but I don’t think that matters.”

  “Cal.”

  “He was going to kill me, but I don’t think that matters, either.”

  “Jesus. Is this because of Lebell?”

  He nodded, then said, “He’s gone, too.”

  “What happened?”

  “The cabdriver, he knows to keep his mouth shut, right? You trust him.”

  “Yeah. He’s a friend.”

  “It’s important that no one knows I came here tonight.”

  “Cal, talk to me. What happened?”

  “One minute I was working on a car, and the next thing I know ...” He was still stoned, he realized, his mind not nearly as settled as he’d thought it was prior to getting up and moving around.

  He fought through it, though.

  Heather switched on the bedside lamp. All its light seemed to pour right into Cal’s eyes.

  Sitting up, Heather grabbed the lapel of the Belstaff jacket with her one good hand, hung on to to it, onto him.

  “Cal, you’re not making any sense.”

  On the other side of the bed, Amanda stirred, rolled onto her back. Cal looked at her, saw that she was watching him through squinted eyes.

  Still, Cal maintained his whisper. It felt... safer.

  “I don’t know enough about disappearing yet for all three of us to go. Anyway, if they find me, you guys can’t be with me. They’ll send you to jail, and your son will end up with his father. That can’t happen. None of it can.”

  “They’d send me to jail for what, exactly?”

  From behind her, Amanda said, “Aiding a fugitive.” She was up on one elbow now.

  “We’ll figure this out, Cal,” Heather said. “Amanda knows all about hiding. She does it to me all the time. Between the three of us—”

  “You have to listen to me, Heather. Okay? I need you to listen. No one knows you were staying with me. The few who did are dead now. But you and Amanda will still need to lay low for a while. If what’s about to happen is going to work, you guys need to stay out of sight. Do you understand?”

  “What do you mean, ‘if what’s about to happen is going to work’?”

  Cal said nothing.

  “Cal?”

  “I can fix this,” he said. “I have to.”

  “Fix this how?”

  He shook his head. Decisive, authoritative. No time, subject closed.

  “I need to go, Heather. I need to know you guys are safe. You deserve that much, at least. And a son needs his mother. Trust me on that, okay?”

  “We can get a lawyer. If it was self-defense—”

  “It doesn’t matter. Anyway, I don’t have what it takes to sit in jail and hope it all works out. I guess I have too much of my father in me after all. I can’t put my life in the hands of the police, sit still and hope that they do right by me. I can’t do that.”

  Heather said nothing.

  “I left you some money. It should be enough to last a while. You won’t hear from me for a long time. It has to be that way. You’ll understand why. Keep your new number, though. If I ever think it’s okay, I’ll get in touch.”

  She was still hanging on to his jacket. He placed his one good hand over hers, held it for a moment, then gently pulled it away.

  He said to Amanda, “Take care of your sister for me. Do that and we’ll call us even.”

  She nodded, smiled slightly. “You got it, Cal.”

  He stood. It took a moment, then, “I’ll see you guys.”

  He grabbed the Schott jacket, his boots bundled inside, and tucked it under his right arm. He didn’t look back, simply headed for the door, opened it, and moved through.

  He left them then, a man in a hurry.

  Meeting House Lane was just a few blocks east. It took less than five minutes for Cal to make it to Lebell’s apartment. He didn’t pass another soul the entire way there.

  Just down the street from it was the Mustang. Walking to it, Cal took a quick look around, then crouched down and reached under the front bumper. He found the magnetic Hide-a-Key box almost right away. Pulling it free from the frame, he stood, opened the tiny metal container, and removed the spare ignition key.

  Inside, he leaned over the seat and opened the glove compartment. It held a rag for checking the oil and a pair of work gloves. Cal put the work gloves on, and less than a minute after arriving, he was gone, en route to Sag Harbor.

  There was no reason to speed this time. He had hours still before the last ferry of the night departed Shelter Island.

  At the Sag Harbor pier, he paused to look across the dark water. Difficult, st
anding there, not to think of Angelica, not to remember her approaching him, and her comment, strange then but making more sense now, about how young he was.

  Eventually, he removed Heather’s old cell phone, scrolled through the incoming calls. The only number it contained was Angstrom’s. The only remaining concrete connection between her and him. If Angstrom had called from his personal cell phone, then there would be a record of him contacting Heather, but if it had been a prepaid cell—didn’t dealers use those?—then there would be nothing to connect the two of them.

  She would be free and clear.

  As he had with Heather’s new number, Cal memorized Angstrom’s, then shut the phone off and removed the battery. He flung the phone as far as he could out onto the water, heard the distant, gulping splash as it was swallowed by the chop. As he made his way toward a pay phone at the adjoining marina, he wiped down the battery and then dropped it into a trash can.

  He dialed Angstrom’s number, waited to hear the amount required to complete the call, and dropped these coins in with the same precautions he had used back at the train station phone. When this call was done—if Pamona wants his wife so badly, meet me in the parking lot with a thousand dollars and I’ll tell you exactly where she is—Cal returned to the Mustang and drove over the bridge to North Haven. Turning right, he headed down that long, unlit decline to Tyndal Point.

  As he waited for the ferry to make its return crossing, he removed the revolver from the jacket pocket, did what he had seen his tormentor do back in that basement, and what he had seen his father do so often enough all those years ago.

  Release the pin under the barrel, push the cylinder from the frame.

  Inside, three unfired rounds remained.

  Returning the cylinder to the frame, feeling through the cold metal the click of the pin locking into place, he wiped the gun down with Lebell’s rag, then pocketed the weapon again and watched through the windshield as the ferry chugged slowly nearer.

  By the time it reached the dock, Cal had the vial of morphine out and was placing another dose on his tongue.