The Killing Hour (4 page)

Of course I’m enough of a realist to know I only wounded him, but I wonder what the outcome would have been if that knife had gone a few millimetres higher or lower. Would I be sitting here with cold coffee on my hand? Would I be sitting with Kathy and Luciana instead? Must life and death rest on seconds, on millimetres?

‘Stop being so …’

‘Repeat after me, Charlie. There are no such things as monsters.’

‘You weren’t there.’

‘I’m calling the police.’

‘You can’t.’

‘Just watch me.’ She heads towards the phone.

I stand up. ‘Don’t, Jo. At least just let me walk out of here.’

She turns around. Puts her hands on her hips. ‘Okay, Charlie, you win. Just don’t involve me any further.’

‘Come with me.’

‘Leave, Charlie.’

‘Coming here could have put you in danger. Cyris will find me, and if he finds you he’ll kill you. No matter what you think, he’s a monster, Jo.’

‘Then I’m no safer with you, am I?’

‘Are you going to call the police?’

‘You’re a mess. You’ve taken a beating, your hands are shaking, you keep shouting.’

‘I’m not shouting!’

‘You are. Look, why don’t you go home and we can discuss it tomorrow, okay?’

‘I’m not shouting.’

‘Okay, okay. Please, I want you to leave.’

‘I’ll leave, but you have to promise me you won’t call the police.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Won’t promise or won’t call them?’

She tilts her head and stares at me, tightening her lips into a thin line.

I hold my hands out in front of me, this time trying to ward off her anger. ‘Okay. Look, I’m sorry, I really am. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m going to leave.’

‘I think that’s best.’

Not knowing what else to say, I end up thanking her for the coffee. She walks me to the door and looks at me as I stand on the doorstep. Maybe she’s right. Maybe the police would understand. But I’m picking they wouldn’t. I’m picking if I walk in there and tell them what I told Jo I’ll never walk back out. Only running away isn’t the solution either.

‘Charlie?’

What I need to do is find Cyris. That’s the solution.

‘Charlie?’

But how in the hell am I going to do that? Put an ad in the paper?

‘Charlie!’

‘Yeah?’

‘If you’re not going to go to the police at least get checked out by a doctor, okay?’

I rub the huge bump on my forehead and instantly regret it. I nod slowly, then walk down the driveway to my car.

6

I’ve known Jo eight years. We were married for six. She’d never betray me. She’d never turn me in. But we’re in the Real World now and trust isn’t a quality I can hope for. Yet it’s one I cling to when I step back inside and find Jo hanging up the phone. She tells me she was talking to her friend. I want to believe her, I really do.

‘You promised you’d leave,’ she says.

‘How much did you tell the police?’ I ask.

‘I was calling a friend,’ she repeats. ‘First of all you come here and …’

‘How much, Jo? Are they on their way?’

‘Stop shouting, Charlie.’

‘I’m not shouting! How much did you tell them?’

‘I haven’t said a word. I told you nobody answered …’

The phone rings and we both reach for it. If you call the emergency 111 number then hang up, you’ll be phoned back. It’s standard procedure. Just for this kind of problem. Jo grabs at the phone but before she can snatch it up I push her away. She stumbles into the kitchen bench and falls. When she looks up at me her eyes flash with tears and anger.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, moving towards her. The phone is still ringing. ‘I didn’t mean …’

‘Get out, you bastard. Get the hell out and don’t come back!’

‘I’m sorry, Jo. I was just trying …’

‘Get! Out!’

No, no, this is wrong. All wrong. ‘I’m sorry, Jo, I’m stressed, that’s all, I’m stressed.’

‘Get the hell out, Charlie.’

If nobody answers the phone a police car will show up within minutes. I can’t let that happen. ‘I’m going to answer the phone, okay? I don’t want you to say anything.’

‘Go to hell.’

‘Jo …’

‘You heard me.’

The phone must have rung twenty times by now – the monotonous shrill seems more urgent each time. I pick it up and hear a woman saying she’s from the police. I want to tell her to go away, to tell her this is none of her concern, that I can take care of things. I want to tell her to leave me alone, I want to ask for her help, I want to confess to what I have done. I suck in a deep breath and try to calm my nerves, then tell her she has the wrong number. I hang up before Jo can start screaming.

‘I want you to leave,’ she says.

‘Why? So you can not call the police again?’

‘So what are you going to do, Charlie? Are you going to kill me too?’

Her comment isn’t a physical slap but I react as though it is. I stammer for a few seconds, trying to say something that will convince her that she’s safe, but is she?

‘How can you think I killed them?’

‘What am I supposed to think?’

‘You’re supposed to trust me.’

‘Trust you? You must be pretty far gone if you think I should trust you after this. So what are you going to do now? Kill me, or stay here and monitor who I call?’

‘Come on, Jo, stop overreacting.’

‘Stop shouting. I’m sick of you shouting.’

Well, I’m sick of people dying. I’m sick of seeing blood. I’m sick of being chased by Evil and spoken to by ghosts. I’m sick of guilt resting like a bowling ball in the pit of my stomach. I hate that I no longer have any control in my life. I hate this Real World, the killing hours that make up the days. I think I have the justification to scream and shout until my throat is raw.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shout. All I want is for you to believe me.’ I try to keep my voice low and steady. As if I’m talking to a woman on a ledge, a woman about to make a very important decision.

‘I believe you, Charlie. Is that it? Does that make you happy enough to leave?’

‘You don’t believe me.’

‘Gee, you think? Are you surprised?’

Surprise? I had the element of surprise last night and when I ran from the tree line to confront Cyris the only thing I did successfully was step on the torch and lose my balance. Seconds after I hit the dirt, Cyris started hitting me. Surprise was my ability to tell Cyris to leave Kathy alone even though he was beating on me. Cyris had laughed before telling me she was already dead. He said she was like a baby flying through a windscreen that hadn’t landed yet. He told me surely I could see that, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t see any windscreens. Any babies.

‘I think you might be in danger,’ I tell Jo.

‘You have a talent for seeing the obvious.’

‘Why are you being this way?’

‘Why the hell do you think?’

‘What can I do to convince you?’ I ask.

‘Pushing me wasn’t a good start, Charlie.’

No, and following it up by kidnapping her isn’t the best way to go either but I can’t see any other way of protecting her. I push her to the floor and we struggle but I’m heavier and stronger and more determined to save her than she is to save herself. I bind her hands and feet with the phone cord and gag her with a tea-towel. Action Man has taken the wheel and he’s steering me right past morality and into an abyss. I take a step back and look down at her shaking body. I spend the next thirty seconds almost untying her and the following thirty convincing myself this is for the best. For both of us. She isn’t safe by herself. Not now. I pack a suitcase full of her clothes and dump it in the back seat of the car, hurrying to beat the arriving police.

I try to get Jo to her feet but she refuses to stand. I’ve bound her arms behind her so I pull up on her wrists and the pain in her shoulders forces her up. I cut the cord by her feet, then lead her out to the car.

‘It’ll be easier for us both if you co-operate, Jo, otherwise I’ll put you in the boot. Come on, Jo. Help me out here, okay?’

She doesn’t help me out. I force her into the boot and tie her feet back together. I feel exhausted. I also feel like that stranger is still living in my body. I’m watching my real self in this Real World and not enjoying the ride. With the suitcases in the car it feels like we’re going on holiday.

I wind down the window. The air is cooling down but still has a warm edge to it. It’s hard to imagine being in danger in the tranquillity of this night. I hear banging against the roof of the boot but try to shut it out. I want to be with that tranquillity, I want to feel it inside me, but that’s not possible. It may never be possible again. It was tranquil last night too, up to a point.

I rub my fingers across the bump on my head. It was just after Cyris, his breath on my sweating face, asked me if I wanted a piece of the action that I thrust my head forward and felt his nose explode beneath my forehead.

The windscreen of the car shimmers and I dig my fingers into the tears and wipe them away. From the back of the car Jo beats out a steady rhythm. I head to a nearby empty shopping mall and park next to an ATM. There’s nobody around to hear Jo’s thumping. I draw out my daily limit, disappointed because eight hundred dollars is far from enough to buy myself out of this mess.

We head west and pass through the central city. Monday nights have little traffic and even less foot traffic. Nobody can hear Jo making trunk music.

I pull into the carpark of the Skyline Motel. Its design is similar to other motels that have been built where traffic is heavy and land is cheap – just two long rectangles of concrete block running perpendicular to each other. It’s hard to tell in the light whether the paint on the walls has faded in areas from the sun or darkened in the opposite areas from exhaust fumes. In between, strips of brown grass run parallel with the footpath. The footpath is chipped on the edges and patches of grass bleed between the long cracks. The neon ‘K’ in Skyline has blown out. The rooms face away from the road. I count seven cars in the carpark and nobody around. I stop outside the office. It’s lit by harsh fluorescent lights. I leave the engine running and the stereo turned up loud with the window open to help mask Jo’s sounds.

Pamphlets on touristy things to do in Christchurch line one wall. Slipped in among them are leaflets from the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons and medical clinics in the area, all offering to save us from something. A strip of flypaper hangs in the corner covered in a variety of insects, a few of which are still twitching. An electric fan with a bent propeller circulates slowly, the tip of the blade pinging against the grille every half second.

I ring the bell and a man steps out from behind a greasy curtain with a piece of greasy chicken in his hands, and I’m grateful he’s wearing a black T-shirt instead of a fishnet singlet. The T-shirt has
You can never have too much duct tape
written across it. He has tiny pieces of toilet paper stuck to his neck from a recent attempt at shaving. He starts talking in short uncomplicated words either for his benefit or mine. He gives me the hourly charge for the rooms and I surprise him by saying I’m staying the night, and surprise him even more when I ask for a room with two single beds. I give him a false name and real cash because that’s all he’s expecting. He glances out at the car and doesn’t ask where the second person is.

I move the car up to the room and park between an old Toyota and an even older Ford. Both are painted white. The passenger window on the Toyota has a crack running across it, maybe from an accident, maybe from vandalism. I carry my suitcase inside then come back outside for Jo’s. I head back and, making sure nobody is looking, I open the boot. Jo doesn’t make it complicated for me to help get her out. I carry her inside and sit her down on the bed, then lock the door with the cheap deadbolt and slide the chain across.

She muffles something at me. I remove the gag.

‘Think about what you’re doing, Charlie. It’s not too late. You can take me back home and I won’t tell, I promise.’

‘I can’t do that, Jo. You’re in danger.’

‘Only from you.’

‘No, not from me.’

‘Calm down.’

‘I am calm. Listen, I just need you to spend a day with me so I can prove I’m not lying. Just a day. Then you can do what you want, okay?’

‘People don’t come back from the dead, Charlie.’

I picture Cyris. He’s a big guy. Then I think about the knife I stabbed him with. It’s long and sharp. In my mind I see him standing sideways. The blade is next to him. I figure it out like one of those old school science cartoons – ‘This is Joe’s homicide’. The knife goes in. The tip comes out the other side. I stabbed him but I didn’t finish the job. If I had, Kathy and Luciana wouldn’t be haunting me.

I stuff the gag back into Jo’s mouth.

The room is small and cosy and very simple. The walls have been painted cream. There are no paintings, only a calendar from three years ago strung up on a nail bashed into the mortar between two of the concrete blocks. A door closes off a small bathroom with a small window that doesn’t open. The kitchenette has utilities dating back thirty years. There’s a TV, the remote to which is bolted onto the bedside dresser. The dark blue curtains are pulled shut, hiding the lack of view. The carpets are cheap and look like they get waterblasted every other month. The cigarette burns in the bedspread and on the carpet match the ones on the dresser.

Jo doesn’t struggle too much when I tie her to the bed. I don’t tell her that I would do anything to protect her because she won’t believe me. I use towels to bind her arms and legs and wrap the motel’s phone cord around her waist and the bed. Back on my own bed I kill the lights and wonder if I ought to be killing myself. I feel sick to my stomach and my heart is racing. I wipe an arm across my forehead and it comes away sopping wet. I lie down but I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again. The neon from the sign outside flickers around the edges of the curtains and makes the room glow red. I can hear it buzzing. I reach out and roam my fingers over the sticky buttons of the remote control. I stab at them until the TV blinks into life. A menu with a blue backdrop displays a list of movies I can choose from for an extra ten dollars. Most of them are adult. I remember reading a statistic once that the average time an adult movie is on in a motel room is seven minutes. That means they watch the start and get what they need around ten per cent of the way through. They don’t know what happens after that. Don’t know how it ends. Could be the actors all sit around drinking coffee and nobody would ever know.