The Killing Hour

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

There’s no blood on my chair or on any of the walls or on the pine-needle stained glass door, so maybe Landry was telling the truth when he said he hasn’t been out here since finding the dead girl in the bathtub. Or maybe he’s lying and isn’t in the habit of shooting people indoors. Things would be easier for him if he took me for a walk in the woods.

“You’re going to feel empty when Cyris is found,” I say, looking up at him. “You’ll never be able to forgive yourself for killing an innocent man. Will you turn yourself in when that happens?”

He doesn’t answer me, just stands next to the door with both hands on the shotgun. The look on his face suggests he doesn’t want to be out here either. The gun reminds me that I’m just a homicide in progress, tomorrow’s statistic, I’ll be a story in the news. Read all about me. My heart is pumping so loudly I can barely hear the rain. My stomach is so weak the fluids inside have created a cesspool of fear that makes me want to throw up and soil myself at the same time.

I’m going to die.

It’s the worst knowledge anybody can ever have, even though we know it all our lives. We just don’t know when-but when you do know when it’s a lot worse. Especially when that time is only a few minutes away.

“Come on, Feldman. It’s time to go,” he says, and he’s the one who sounds as if he’s been defeated.

I try to get to my feet, but the angle of the chair and the way I’m buried in it makes things difficult, as do the handcuffs. The springs in the chair cut into me as I wiggle forward. I fall back into the chair on the first attempt, and I look up at Landry expecting him to either be laughing, or be mad, but he’s neither. He’s just staring at me the way people stare at movie credits they’re not really reading. When I finally get to my feet I’m puffing, but it’s too cold in here to sweat. He gestures me toward the door where I pause looking out at what Mother Nature has to offer me on my final night, which isn’t much. The wind is racing in and gripping us both tightly. My legs are shaking from fear and cold and my teeth are starting to chatter.

“No jacket?” I ask.

“I’m sure you can survive without one.”

“I thought I was supposed to be the funny one.”

He thinks about what he’s just said, then shakes his head. “I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

“Can I at least make an appeal?”

“Yes.”

“Then I want to say-”

“Appeal denied,” he says. He reaches into his pocket for his cigarettes. He offers me one.

I didn’t say it before, but I say it now. “Those things will kill you.”

He smirks at my comment, then slowly shakes his head. “Goddamn it, Feldman, don’t you ever shut up?”

“I can’t help it,” I hear myself saying, and I really can’t. “But I guess now’s as good a time as any to try one.”

He tosses me a cigarette and I hurt my wrists plucking it from the air. I’ll smoke the whole lot if it will buy me some time. “Light?”

He throws the lighter. This guy is taking no chances. He’s not going to get anywhere near me. Early in the evening I was intimidated by his authority. Now it’s the gun that demands my respect. I hold the cigarette tightly between my lips, raise the blue lighter, fumble with the catch, then light the end. The flame works, but the cigarette doesn’t.

“You need to breathe in,” he says, and he almost sounds compassionate, as if teaching a five-year-old how to ride a bike. Or a five-year-old how to smoke.

I don’t know exactly what to expect, but my mouth is quickly filled with thick smoke. It catches in my throat as if I’ve just swallowed a wad of tissues. I start gagging. Smoke is drawn into my lungs where it burns them, and smoke and snot gush from my nose. The cigarette falls from my mouth, but clings to my lower lip. I brush it onto the ground. A small tentacle of smoke whispers from the end.

Landry is motionless, watching me with that same credit-rolling emptiness in his eyes that suggests nobody is home. Nothing here, it seems, amuses or angers him. He looks lost.

“You don’t have to do this,” I tell him.

“I’m almost sorry I have to kill you.”

“You’re sorry?”

Suddenly he seems to snap out of whatever daze he’s in. “I was right about you, Feldman. You’re a real smart-ass.” He waves the gun at me. “Now tidy up that mess.”

I pick up the cigarette and flick it toward the fireplace. I pause, trying to think of an action or a word that will help me, but he pushes me onto the small porch by jabbing me with the shotgun. I put one foot forward and start walking. When I step down onto the mud it feels like I’m being acupunctured with needles that have been kept in the freezer overnight. The cold wind drives those needles deep into my flesh. My wet clothes flap against my skin. It’s the coldest I’ve ever been in my life, and the realization I will never be warm again makes me want to cry, but I hang on to those tears. I don’t want Landry to see them. Fuck him.

He orders me forward by prodding me again then turns on the flashlight and tosses it to me. I miss the catch, and have to stoop down to pick it up. I think of it as a weapon. A useless one, but a weapon all the same. He directs me into the belt of trees. Damn trees. I’ve seen more trees this week than in my entire life. I can’t see exactly where I’m supposed to be heading.

“Stop stalling, Feldman, I’m sure you can find a path in there.”

I point the flashlight into the inky blackness, spotlighting branches and leaves, but not a whole lot more-certainly no dirt path. I head forward anyway, figuring Landry will stop me if I’m too far off the track. I step between a couple of birch trees, struggling to cover my face from the branches that claw at me like dirty fingers. I manage two steps before becoming lost. Can’t see the forest for the trees. Well, in this case I can’t see the forest for the dark. The ground turns from mud to hard-packed dirt and roots. I move the flashlight around and start to walk slower, not to preserve time, but in order to concentrate on each footstep.

“You’ve got the wrong man, Landry.”

“I doubt that.”

“Shouldn’t you at least hold off killing me?”

“I’m a busy man.”

“You could just tie me up. At least until you have a few more facts.”

“I’ve all the facts I need.”

“You’re wrong. Tie me up and when you find you’re wrong I promise not to tell anybody.” I really do promise it. The river nearby is getting louder. “Think about what you’re doing.”

“I am thinking. I’m thinking about your next victim.”

I don’t know how far we’ve come. Obviously Landry doesn’t want my body found near the cabin. I’m thinking he has a nice location out here for me. Maybe a big hole. The colder I get the more I lose any comprehension of time. It could have been ten minutes now. Or fifteen. We could have walked a couple of miles. Kathy told me that time and distance slip away when you’re being marched through a bunch of trees toward your death. Well, she was right.

“I was right about a lot of things, wasn’t I, Charlie?” Kathy asks, and she’s walking along with me now, gliding easily through the trees. She’s wearing shoes that stay clean. It’s a neat trick.

“You were right,” I admit, keeping my voice low so Landry doesn’t hear me. She starts to nod.

“Do you remember what I told you?” she asks.

I remember. “You told me you owed me everything. We were heading away from Luciana’s house. It couldn’t have been long before she died.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that quick, Charlie. You dropped me off home before she died. Do you remember what we were discussing?”

“We were heading toward your house, we were talking about going to the police. I remember driving past the pasture and you pointing out the black van parked opposite. Seeing it gave me the creeps. We both looked toward the trees as we went by.”

“Dalí’s trees,” she says.

“Dalí’s trees.”

“What the hell are you on about?” Landry asks, but I don’t answer. I keep walking, scraping my hands and arms on the branches, shivering hard.

My mind tries drifting to a time where the world was safe and we didn’t know that Evil was a time bomb waiting for us. Then it drifts far enough so I’m no longer walking through the trees, but turning left into Tranquility Drive and Kathy is no longer a ghost, but flesh and blood that was warm to touch. Flesh and blood that wore the same clothes she was attacked in, flesh and blood that hadn’t showered. All I knew about Tranquility Drive was I couldn’t afford to live there.

Looking at her house, I knew Kathy was rich. That was fine by me. The house was a two-storey place, a tad more mansion than town house. Maybe ten years old. Dozens of shrubs dotted the front section and because of the lingering summer there were still lots of flowers in bloom. At that time of night they were black flowers. The trees were black too. Like the birds sitting in them.

This is the house I wanted to live in, with Kathy. All my life I had imagined backing out of my driveway into a neighborhood where Mercedes cars littered the street like cheap Toyotas. Kathy was the woman I wanted to be kissing goodbye as I left for work in the morning on my way to being a brain surgeon or an astronaut instead of an underpaid high school teacher who is the enemy of dysfunctional teenagers. Only it wasn’t really Kathy I wanted to be kissing goodbye to, it was Jo, but Jo was no longer around.

I walked her inside. She never did get hold of her husband.

“He was off screwing some bimbo,” her ghost says, “and I told you he would be back at some point for some fresh clothes before work. You were glad to hear I was having marital difficulties.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I say, but something about it bugs me. The same something that bugged me when I read the newspaper this morning.

“It wasn’t your fault. You helped me check the house and it was nearly five o’clock when I walked you outside. I wrote your name and number down. You left then, and I was dead.”

“You weren’t dead.”

“And you’re splitting hairs.”

I walked backward down the driveway to my car, watching her watching me. We waved then she stepped inside. I heard the door lock and I would never again see her alive. I climbed into my car. I was yawning and dozing, just driving along with the windows down and the breeze coming through, and I had this feeling of normality that made me feel ill. When I drove past the pasture I already had an expectation of what I would see-Cyris stalking through the grass toward the road.

What I saw was worse. When I drove past the pasture. .

“The van was gone,” Kathy finishes, and then she’s gone too.

I break between two trees and see the flashing movement of the river flowing quickly over and around large round boulders, the water white and violent. The rain is hard here, unsheltered by the trees. Huge drops pluck the dirt next to the river, sending out small splashes of mud. It hammers on my head and shoulders and drives those angry needles of ice deeper into my soul. Landry’s footsteps are loud behind me, and each time I wonder if I will hear another. It would have been warmer had he just shot me back at the cabin. All this would be over and I wouldn’t have to be scared or talk to ghosts.

“Hold it there,” Landry says. I stop walking and study the landscape. Black trees, black ground, black water, black sky. This is what color the end must be. “Turn around slowly.”

I turn. The rain lands on his Kiss the Cook cap and runs off the brim. Does he have the apron to match? I can’t stop shaking. Water runs down my face. I don’t bother wiping it from my eyes. “Nice place,” I say, quietly. Too cold to be loud. Too scared to be funny.

He comes forward. “We’re nearly there, you know?”

“Where?”

“The end of the line. You want to know how I know about this place? Not about the cabin, you already know that, but about this place right here.”

“You walked the crime scene?”

“Yeah, but we wouldn’t have come this far. Only we had to. Because the girl in the bathtub wasn’t our man’s first victim. She was his second. He’d killed his first years ago. This land had been in his family for generations. He led us here. We found his first in the caves behind you.”

I don’t like the idea of taking my eyes off the weapon, but I follow his gaze and aim the flashlight where he’s pointing. The beam is swallowed up by the mouth of a cave that’s been there forever.

“Holes in there are so deep you can drop a stone and never hear it land.”

“And a body?” I ask.

“It took us two days to find her and that was only because we were looking. Nobody will ever look for you. Not out here. Right now you have a choice. Do you want to meet your maker with a clear conscience or a guilty one?”

He takes aim. I can hear my heart beating, my stomach rumbling. My jaw throbs. My neck aches. I can hear the river and the rain. My bowels are clenching. My bladder is trying to let itself go. I feel like I want to yawn, scream, run, do a thousand push-ups. I suddenly have all this energy that deserves to have a chance of release. I deserve the chance to be a better person, to be somebody who will be missed.

And even though I knew he was bringing me out here to die, I never knew it, not really, I always thought something would happen. Some kind of intervention, divine or otherwise. I picture my cold, dead body lying on this cold, dead ground, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen in five or ten seconds. Jo will go to the police and maybe they’ll figure out what happened to me, or maybe they won’t. In which case I’ll have a funeral with an empty coffin. I want people to say they miss me. I want a community in shock. I want the kids I teach to be disappointed I can teach them no more.

I think about my parents. About my friends. This is going to be hard on them.

I think of Jo and wish I could tell her how I feel about her. I wish I could say I regret what happened last night, that I regret what happened six months ago.

I’m standing in the rain beneath a storm-clouded sky, among the trees and the mud and the rocks, and this is no place to die.

I point the flashlight at his face, but the bright light doesn’t blind him.

“Goddamn you, Feldman. And God forgive me.”

I close my eyes. “Go to hell,” I tell him. I can feel my legs giving way. It’ll be a race between me collapsing and him shooting me.

He pulls the trigger and the gunshot is like thunder and I start to scream.