The Killing Hour

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 only 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.