The Killing Hour

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

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.

I turn from the railing and run 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 toward 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 KA-BAR is tucked into my back pocket so the handle points upward. 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 gasoline 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. Only stands to reason it’s going to take witchcraft or a nuclear bomb to finish him off.

I get down the stairs. The bag is awkward to carry until I’m able to hook the straps over my shoulders and wear it like a backpack. I have the pistol tucked into my waistband, and I carry the shotgun so it’s pointing down at the ground. If anybody sees me they’ll call the police, and who’s to say at this point that that isn’t such a bad idea.

There’s way more sand blowing around at ground level. 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.

“Jo?”

No answer. I shout out her name louder. The wind is strong, but not strong enough to whip her name away so nobody can hear it.

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!”

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

“Jo! Where are you? Jo?”

Nothing. Did she slip and did the water wash her out? No, because she would have screamed. She would have called for help. The problem is I already think I know what’s happened. I just don’t want it to be true.

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

The car Cyris arrived in has gone. He’s gone, and there’s no reason to believe that he hasn’t taken Jo with him.

I run my hand through my hair. I crouch down, the weight of the money almost enough to pull me back. This is unbelievable. There’s a moment-just a brief flash-where I think everybody would be better off if I just put the shotgun in my mouth and made fractal patterns in the sand.

I run over the road and dump the money in the trunk of my car. I put the shotgun in there too. I keep the pistol on me. I have no choice now but to go to the police. The time for the police was on Monday, not now, not in the dying hours of Thursday, but what else can I do? I’ll go and I’ll pray they can find Jo, and what can I tell them that will help?

Nothing.

I start the car. The KA-BAR in my back pocket digs into me. I pull it out and sit it on the passenger seat. 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, adrenaline, and fear. Not seeing the van parked outside the pasture 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. I was angry at that guy six months ago in the bar-he was the reason I had no cell phone. He was the reason I couldn’t call and warn anybody.

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 flashlight. It was no gun, but my tire 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, those meddling kids 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. Cyris wasn’t going anywhere.

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 flashlight 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, and the worst was what I was about to get. 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. 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, vomit. 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 dialed 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 nonexistent number. I reached the end of the driveway and had to use my teeth to pull the antenna up on the phone. This time I got the number right. The only problem was the number was busy.

I rang the police. I got the phone up to my ear, but it slipped from my wet hand. I juggled the flashlight 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. The flashlight still worked, but the phone didn’t.

I didn’t hang around. I thought of going to a neighbor’s house, but what neighbor would have let me inside? My tires screeched as I pulled away from the house. It was still dark, but the edges of the sky were fading to the color 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. I ignored the toots and the flipping fingers of the drivers as I swerved around them, driving with all the skill of a man 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 realized 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 flashlight thumped onto 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. Cyris had put them there.

If we’d gone to the police. .

But we hadn’t. And it’s a mistake I’m correcting now. Albeit way too late.

The cellphone rings and I’m back in the present. I’d forgotten I had it. I have to pat at my pockets to figure out where it is. When I look at the display I see the number is blocked. I know who it’s going to be.

“Where is she?” I ask, opening the phone.

“She’s with me,” he says.

“I’m going to the police.”

“And I’m going to kill her,” he says. “I want my money.”

“You’ll kill us anyway.”

“I probably will. But right now she’s alive. And in five minutes she won’t be. If I see one cop I’m going to gut your wife like a fish. You’ve got five minutes to get here.”

“Get where?”

“Where it all began,” he says, and he hangs up.

I look at my phone. Not calling the police in the past hasn’t worked. Being arrested by Landry didn’t work either. Maybe now is the time to give them a chance.