The Killing Hour (27 page)

He looks up and the night around him is shimmering through the flames. His hair is on fire and the satchel, his satchel that he’s always taken with him whenever he’s been on the job, is pushing at his fingers. He pulls his hands away 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. A cold darkness where the fire burns without any flames. 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 he’s alive.

The wound in his stomach, the knife wound from Monday morning, doesn’t hurt. His arm does, his arm where he was shot hurts, but not in a bad way —— it’s more of an awareness than anything else. A flesh wound. The other shots have only bruised him. The vest, 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 realises 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 towards 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.

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 only a vague idea of where he’s heading, but already his mind is focusing, focusing, focusing on his next move.

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 bitter sweet.

With a ferocious appetite he drags himself towards the road.

49

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 and hits the water.

I fire a couple of shots into the seascape before turning from the railing and running 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 towards 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 K-bar is tucked into my back pocket so the handle points upwards. 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 petrol 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. So it isn’t Cyris I’m dealing with here, but Rasputin. Or perhaps even Satan.

I sprint towards the ocean and straight into Kathy. She raises her arms in a stopping gesture, and I manage to pull up. I don’t have time to have a conversation with my guilt, and I try to move around her, but she steps across to block me. Her hair doesn’t move in the wind. She’s wearing the same dress I saw her in last night.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and the wind runs my salty tears back into my hair. ‘I wish things could have been different, I really do, but I don’t have time.’

‘Don’t lose yourself, Charlie. Don’t lose your humanity.’

‘What?’

‘Go back to the beginning.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You will.’

Her ghost fades away, and I reach out and run my hands through the air where she just stood, expecting to feel her, or to feel complete coldness, but I feel nothing. The air is full of sand, more so down here, like that in movies set in Egypt or the desert where the hero gets caught in a sandstorm. 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.

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!’

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

‘Jo! Where are you?’

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

Jo’s car is gone. And I understand now what Kathy was telling me.

I run over the road and dump the money in the boot of my car. I could go to the police and it could easily be the best decision I’ve made yet, or the worst. The time for the police was on Monday, not now, not in the dying hours of Thursday. They won’t act on the information I have, not until they sit me down for a few hours and question me over and over. I start the car. The K-bar in my back pocket digs into me. I pull it out and sit it on the passenger seat. My tired mind throws up images of me helping the police to arrest Cyris, just as it throws up images of a policeman taking me out into the middle of nowhere just so he couldn’t bring me back.

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, adrenalin and fear. Not seeing the van parked outside the paddock 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.

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 torch. It was no gun, but my tyre 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, had Fred and Shaggy 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.

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 torch 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. 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, her legs hung over the end of the tub. 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. 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 dialled 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 non-existent number. I reached the end of the driveway and had to use my teeth to pull the aerial up on the phone. This time I got the number right. The only problem was the number was engaged.

I rang the police. I got the phone up to my ear but it slipped from my wet hand. I juggled the torch 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, maybe the same one Jo spoke to at the opposite end of the day. The torch still worked but the phone didn’t.

I didn’t hang around. I thought of going to a neighbour’s house but what neighbour would have let me inside? My tyres screeched as I pulled away from the house. It was still dark but the edges of the sky were fading to the colour 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, and I ignored the toots and the flipping fingers of the drivers as I swerved around them, driving with all the skill of man a who has no skill but only desperation.

My short ragged breaths tasted of vomit. I had to keep wiping my sleeve across my forehead as sweat itched my skin and tickled my eyes. I slammed the car through the gears. The sky kept on lightening, the purple light filling the killing hour and, as night fell away, life was being injected into the new day around me. The trees and the plants and the lampposts; they all looked purple, and where there was light there was life, but where I had been there was only death. Somewhere on the other side of the world people were arriving to Sunday night and the early hours of Monday. Light and dark. Good and evil. The purple hour had brought me into Hell. Everything around me looked like it belonged on some foreign planet, a planet where Evil still lurked and He is a god there, and the world is full of only dark because Evil: He is dark. Then I realised I already was on that planet.

It took just under ten minutes to get to Kathy’s. There was a dark sedan parked there that hadn’t been there before. I ran up the driveway, glancing around the garden. Trees and bushes and if there was a hiding Cyris I didn’t see him.

All the lights were off. I thought about yelling out but that would only make Cyris hurry. I started with the ground floor, succeeding only in turning it into an obstacle course that chewed up more time. I reached the second floor just as the car outside started and revved loudly. I got back to the front door in time to see Cyris pulling away from the house.

I found her in the master bedroom. I found her and my fingers unrolled and the torch thumped into the carpet. I didn’t bother walking inside because I could see what I needed to from the doorway. I stepped back, crying as I stumbled down the stairs. I fell twice, each time catching hold of the banister. I tripped on the driveway and skinned my knees and hands but I felt no pain. I paused at the car, my mind empty. It was as if all thought and all fear had fallen through a trapdoor into my heart. In the passenger seat were my shorts. They were covered in blood.

50

Jo’s car is parked where I thought it would be.

The walk through the paddock is both similar to Monday, and different. The fear is there — the fear of what will happen if I fail, the fear of who will die. Last time I was trying to save a stranger. This time it’s my ex-wife. Last time I had a tyre iron and no shotgun. This time it’s the other way around.