Wolf Hour

31 The Great Equaliser, October 2016

Bob had taken off all his clothes and was sitting on the couch holding the Radica 20Q. When he had bought it for Frankie, Alice had said she was too young for a game like that, but Frankie had loved it when Daddy had asked her to think of a question, and only helped her a little bit with the answers. He stared at the TV, an old black-and-white movie on a channel that advertised it only showed classics. English aristocrats hunting a solitary fox across a rolling landscape. Bob had noticed there were messages waiting on his phone but couldn’t face checking them. A police siren somewhere out there mingled with the sounds of the hunting horns in the film, which seemed to be about a man with a list of people he planned to kill. Bob closed his eyes and the questions came.

Did Tomás Gomez have a list like that?

How many names were on it?

Who could be next?

The siren sounds were getting closer. The fox hunt was in full cry out there. He imagined Tomás Gomez limping away to some place where he could hide out. A man driven by grief, by the loss of his family, by hatred of a society in which fifteen-year-olds can buy weapons and shoot a young girl as she sits in her wheelchair. He thought about what Kay had said about the gun under her mother’s pillow. The great equaliser. Freedom. And he thought the same useless thought once again: that if Alice, he and Frankie had moved north of the border, the statistical chances of Frankie being killed were a fraction of the three-figure number of children that die annually in accidental deaths involving guns.

Did it make him angry? Of course it did. It made his head fume just thinking about it. But did he hate, the way Tomás Gomez obviously did?

He didn’t know. He knew only that another question had suddenly arisen:

Just how committed was he to actually putting a stop to Tomás Gomez’s crusade?

On his TV screen the fox raced across a field and into a woodland copse. What was it thinking? Where was it headed? Did it have a plan?

Bob looked down at the Radica 20Q. It was lifeless, silent, the batteries dead.

Olav Hanson lay in bed staring up at the ceiling.

Listened to his wife who lay snoring beside him. Listened out for the phone as though it might start ringing even though he’d turned it off. He’d done that when it rang for a third time after he got back from Track Plaza. Three different phone numbers, all unknown. Didn’t take much to guess they all came from Die Man. He must have seen the news and known that Lobo was still on the loose. Olav hadn’t answered the calls. What could he say? That he’d almost managed to rub Lobo out? That he’d have another try at the next crossroads? Die Man didn’t often give people a second chance, and never a third. In other words, next time he spoke to Die Man it would be best if Lobo was no longer in the land of the living.

Olav was drifting off into sleep when he heard something. The living room was adjacent to the bedroom and the sound seemed to come from there. A slick, oily clicking. He knew instantly what it was. The barrel of a revolver being pushed into place. He knew because he owned a revolver himself, and that sound was unique. Olav reached for the gun under his pillow, slipped out of bed and crept over to the bedroom door.

Listened.

Nothing.

He peered out through the keyhole. He had two options. Push the door carefully and silently open and see what happened. Or kick it open, dive through and deal with whatever happened next. He swallowed. Tried to slow his pulse rate. And went for the first option.

The door glided open and he peered into the room.

No one there.

But he recognised the smell. And in the light of the street lamp outside he saw the smoke spiralling up above the back of the armchair that faced away from him.

‘Sean?’ he said quietly.

A head appeared from around the front of the chair and looked at him. Bushy hair, big grin, a thick, hand-rolled cigarette between its lips. ‘Yes, Father?’

That father. His son somehow always managed to make it sound like a joke.

‘I didn’t hear you come home,’ said Olav, hiding the pistol behind his back at the same time as he closed the bedroom door.

‘Firstly, this isn’t my home. Secondly, I didn’t intend for you to hear me because I was planning on stealing this.’ Sean waved the revolver. He must have known that Olav kept it in a drawer in his desk. ‘What do you think I could get for this down in Phillips, Father?’

‘Keep your voice down, Sean, she’s asleep. What do you want?’

‘What do I want now, or what do I really want?’

‘Sean...’

‘What I really want is to get so stoned I just disappear. I really want to be the opposite of what you are. And what I really want is for you to throw out that bitch in there from what was once my home. But what I want now...’ He took a deep, gurgling drag on the cigarette, held the smoke for three long seconds before releasing it. ‘...is to sell you this revolver for a hundred dollars cash. In my hand.’

Olav Hanson had never seen any reason to regret being born, there really wasn’t much he could do about it anyway. What did cross his mind now and then was that he could have prevented the guy sitting in that armchair from ever having been born.

My breath turned to frosty smoke as I watched the YouTube clip on my phone. It was under the item about the murder of Cody Karlstad. The female KSTP reporter was entering a bar that — unless I’d misread the map I studied — was directly across the skyway from the restroom I’d used. She was explaining to the anchor that the police wouldn’t let them any closer to the ongoing action involving the suspect Tomás Gomez, but that she had just seen someone with an MPD ID card go into this bar. She then turned to a man wearing a striking, almost yellow-ochre coat and asked him what was going on as she lifted his ID card and read ‘...Detective Bob Oz’. Oz was clearly drunk and didn’t realise he was being interviewed. He talked about how he’d been dumped and suspended from duty, how he spent his time screwing around and drinking, and ended by saying: ‘How about you, Divine Blue?’

I turned off the phone. Watched the fish swimming around the bowl on the bench in front of me. Then I turned my attention to you. You were naked and sitting in a metal chair. You had straps across your chest, round your throat and forehead. Your arms were secured to the armrests and your feet to the legs of the chair. You’d been sitting there for three weeks now and there was a white layer of frost on your skin and your hair. Behind the chest strap I could just make out the tattoo of an Uzi with a heart around it. That was the weapon you used at McDeath. Other bullets had killed Monica and Sam, but it was the bullets from your Uzi that took away Anna in the sixth year of her life. When I lured you in here you still didn’t recognise me, it had been so many years ago. And that evening at McDeath was probably less memorable for you than it was for me. I showed you around in here, showed you what you’d come here for, offered you coffee, and not until the dope in the coffee wore off and you woke to find yourself in that chair did I reveal to you who I was. And the plans I had for you. They say psychopaths have a higher threshold of pain and fear than other people. That may well be true, because it wasn’t until I pulled on the rubber gloves and the earmuffs and took out the ice-spray and the knife that I saw fear enter your eyes. That’s when you wanted to talk about it, explain to me how it was all an accident. That you really wanted to turn yourself in to the police. But that the detective in charge of the case, a tall blond guy they called Milkman, was in Die Man’s pocket, and that he took care to make the whole thing look like the work of another gang. These were just the transparent lies of a desperate man, and I pushed the needle into your ear, most likely puncturing the eardrum, and told you I would do the other ear next if you kept on lying. You swore it wasn’t lies, that Die Man and Milkman threatened to kill you if you talked to the police. I punctured your other ear too, but you kept repeating it, over and over, as though the confession was your lifebelt. I believed you. A tall, blond guy. That would have to be Detective Olav Hanson, the one who consoled me after he’d taken my statement, who promised he’d get the people who had murdered my family. I asked where Die Man was, and when you told me I asked if you were joking, I knew what kind of place that was, but you said it was true, he loved that kind of stuff, was hooked on it the same way his customers were hooked on crack. I was thinking about that as I started to cut into your underarms. You clenched your teeth and didn’t make a sound. It was only after I cut into your throat that you couldn’t hold out any longer. But once you started screaming you only stopped for those brief stretches of time when you were unconscious. In the last minutes of your life all you did was sob. The quiet sobbing of someone who knows it’s too late, that he’s already dead.

You were sitting here in a chair because you owned an Uzi, an automatic killing machine you had purchased quite legally in a state further west of this one, a weapon no one had ever used to defend his family against an intruder, or his girlfriend against a rape attack, or to put a fresh joint of deer on the dining table. Sure, like the gun lobbyists said, it wasn’t the weapons that killed but the people holding them. They think it’s enough if you just make sure the bad guys can’t get hold of them. If the assumption was valid then it had to mean that almost all the bad guys in the world lived in the United States which alone accounts for ninety per cent of all young victims of gun crime among the twenty-two wealthiest countries in the world. What was freedom? To be allowed to own a weapon designed to kill people because the guy standing next to you owned one as well? Or was it not having to own a gun because you could feel reasonably certain the guy next to you didn’t own one either? I could see how fear triumphed over common sense, how — given your socio-economic position, your education and your bad genes — you were only the first mechanical element in the creation of a gun that had already been fired by the time it came into your hands. And how when you — subject as you are to the laws of psychology and economy, just as the parts of a weapon are subject to physical laws — pulled that trigger, then that was just one link in an unstoppable chain of reactions. But it starts with you. The centre, the point at which the stone first hits the water. Now the ripples spread across the still, dark water. The one who sells guns. The weapons activist. The forces behind the killer. The authorities. The executive. The ripples get bigger. And bigger.

I emptied the water from the glass. The little fish flipped and splashed about on the bench and puffed itself up. A protective mechanism. Not to frighten by size but to make itself more difficult to swallow.

When I was done I left, turned the key in the padlock, headed out through the large communal studio, out the door and into the forest that surrounded the low, single-storey house. We’d got it cheap, and we used to hang out here and study each other’s work. Children had loved it, the woods and all the strange exhibits in here. In the evenings we had partied, the whole gang of us. Talked about the future, how we were going to make it big, how we were going to take over the world. Monica and I had spent the night out here once. I think that must have been the night the boy was conceived. But Monica said she’d never been so afraid, because I told her this was wolf country. And now, I had read, they were here. The wolves were here, the artists had gone, the only one left was me.

A narrow track led down to the main road where the car was parked. It was a walk of about a mile, but I didn’t want anyone to see or hear me coming and going. So tonight Monica and I were going to sleep out here, like we did back then.

I crept down inside my sleeping bag on a mattress of pine branches beneath a tree and looked up into the starry sky. Looked for her. Looked for what was written in shimmering letters and symbols, things that couldn’t be seen above the city.