The Killing Hour

by Paul Cleave

  The moment I saw Luciana I tugged on the wheel and jumped on the brake, swerving my car around her. In my rearview mirror I saw a woman drowning in the glow of my brake lights. All that red skin, red clothes. . if I ever see that sight again I’ll understand it for what it really is-a premonition.

  “No, I didn’t hit her, but I pulled over. It was obvious something was wrong. She climbed into the car. She was panicked. I wanted to go to the police. You would have too if you’d seen her. If you’d heard her.”

  “Then why didn’t you? This isn’t making any sense, Charlie.”

  “We didn’t go to the police because her friend was in danger.”

  “Kathy,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  Luciana’s dress was shredded above her chest as if she’d been repeatedly clawed by a big cat. There were several cuts over her chest that looked like tiny canals, and a red sea was welling up over the edges. Her face was smeared with dirt and her eyes were full of desperation. She had to be desperate to jump into the first car that came along. Her blond hair was matted with twigs and leaves, stained with soil and blood that in the weak light of my car looked like oil. There was a line of blood on her leg. She wore a bandanna necklace that had been a gag. When she closed the door the interior light blinked off and we were plunged into darkness. Monday’s darkness.

  “You’ve. .” was all she could say before breaking into loud sobs. She collapsed with her forehead pressed to my arm. Her skin felt like wet clay. She was shuddering, choking on her sobs and the beginnings of small words. I was half out of my seat belt when she pulled away and doubled her efforts to speak.

  “You’ve. . got. .”

  I put my hands on her shoulders and told her to take a deep breath. It worked. I kept staring at the blood on her that was becoming more real by the second. This was actual blood. Like that B negative or O positive stuff that drips out of dead people. It gave her credibility, so when she pointed out my side window with hands that were bleeding and shaking and told me her friend Kathy was out there being held by a crazed lunatic I had no reason not to believe her.

  I tell this to Jo.

  Jo shakes her head. “Why didn’t you call them on your cell phone?”

  “Because I still don’t have one.”

  “What? You never replaced it? You’re kidding.”

  I shake my head. I’m not kidding. When that guy in the bathroom got his second punch in six months ago into my chest, it actually connected with my cell phone. It didn’t survive the impact, and I didn’t replace it. I was sick of being tied down to a phone. Sick of seeing people everywhere I go spending any free second they have to send a text or check an email.

  “There was no time to get the police. I moved the car so I was out of sight of the trees,” I tell Jo. I twisted my body and pocketed my keys then told Luciana to stay where she was. She asked if I had a weapon. All I had was whatever was in the trunk. That turned out to be a car jack, a spare wheel, a bike rack, a tire iron, and no shotgun. I settled for the tire iron. It was cold and heavy and boosted my confidence.

  The night was twenty degrees, but each of them cold as I strode from the car. I wanted to be Action Man, but I felt more like the actor nobody recognized in an old Star Trek episode-Crewman Random who went away with Captain Kirk, but never came back. I actually thought about that guy in the bathroom as I strode into that field. I thought about it because that was the first and only time I’d ever hit anybody. I thought about it because it was his fault I didn’t have a cell phone and, by association, anything bad to follow by me not being able to call for help would be his fault too.

  Monday was twelve minutes old when I stepped into that field. It was about to become longer. Elastic hours. Even now, sitting opposite Jo, they’re still stretching.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Landry doesn’t even get half a block before he has to bring the car almost to a stop. The first barrier to get past is police cars and tape that’s been put up to cordon off the scene. The next barrier is the hundred or so reporters beyond it. With all the killings over the last year, he’s surprised journalists are still taking an interest. He has the windows down and can smell sausages and steak on a barbecue from a nearby yard. Music is booming from a neighbor’s house, the sort of generic pop every teenager is recording these days for every other teenager. He remembers a time when he used to love suburbia, but now it’s just another body count. The neighbors have gathered on their front lawns to watch the show. They’re thinking the circus has just come to town. And it’s free. They’re inviting family and friends over. With neighbors like this, murder will always stay in fashion.

  The police cars pull back and make room for him to pass through. The station wagon with the body in it has pulled up behind him. The sun is falling from the sky and nighttime is nearly here. He closes his eyes for a few seconds, and he can see both women. The pictures are exposed perfectly and full of vibrant and violent colors. They’re real Kodak moments.

  He realizes he’s just been asked a question from one of the reporters. Well, not quite asked, more yelled than anything. Then other questions are coming his way. He rolls the window up, but the yelling continues. He can see the street being canvassed. Tranquility Drive. That’s the name of the street where this modern-day-Christchurch drama is unfolding. All the streets in this subdivision have similar names. Serenity Street. Harmony Drive. It’s as if the council sent in a psychiatrist tanked up on Prozac to name them all. He’s been in enough of these situations to know what questions are being asked, and to know it’s a six-to-one ratio. For every question a cop asks, they themselves are asked half a dozen in return.

  Did you see anything suspicious? would be returned with What happened? Do you know who did it? Tell me all the gory details. Was there a lot of blood? Do you suspect her husband? Was she having an affair? Everybody questioned wants a piece of the action. They want a story they can tell at work or on the golf course. Hey, Jimmy, guess what? Those two chicks that were blood-let during the week? Hand me that nine iron. Well, you’re never going to believe this, but I knew one of them. Crazy, huh? Now watch this shot. . It makes them Mr. Popularity for half a week. It makes them the center of attention. Makes them wish their neighbors were getting killed more often.

  Makes Landry angry just thinking about it. It makes him want a cigarette.

  He reaches for his pocket, but of course there are none there. He threw them out five days ago.

  A week ago he was miserable, alone, and without long-term goals, but he still had plenty of time to change that. He had two failed marriages and a mortgage he couldn’t afford. Thirty minutes sitting with the doctor changed everything. Now he’s racing to his grave. The smoking will help him get there quicker, but quitting isn’t going to give him his life back, so why bother? It seems pointless not to enjoy every one he can fit in before his spring funeral. Jesus, forty-two is too young to be sitting in your doctor’s office with your hands gripped tightly against the armrests and your skin itchy from your clothes and damp with sweat. It’s too young to be told you’ve just drawn the short straw in the cancer lottery. Too young to feel your stomach turn upside down with the news that you’re going to die. He listened quietly and he asked all the right questions and got all the wrong answers.

  Chemo wasn’t an option. Landry had had heart problems a few years back. His body wasn’t strong enough to have one poison fighting another poison within him. He had six months tops. That’s what the doctor gave him. And that’s if he gave up the good life of smoking. Once that figure was out there, a calmness came over him, and suddenly the fear and anxiety he’d had disappeared. He was a man who knew his fate. He went through the seven stages of grief all in about sixty seconds, bypassing a bunch of them and coming straight to acceptance, then he stood up, thanked his doctor, and left. It was time to put his affairs in order. He got home and backpeddled somewhat on that grief list, settling on anger.

  He’s angry with himself for smoking for so damn long. Other
people smoke forever and get away with it. He smokes for twenty years and now that gun he’s been holding against his head has gone off. He’s angry at life. Angry all the justice in his world was pissed away so long ago. Angry that the real cancer comes in the form of people like Charlie Feldman. Why the hell can’t God start correcting His mistakes?

  The police finally make a path through the ocean of journalists for him to drive through. Cancer and the media-he hates them both. Suddenly he has the desire to set fire to every camera and microphone within a half-mile radius. Everywhere he looks a reporter is talking to a camera or fixing their hair in front of a mirror. He wonders how attractive they’d look if he took them single file through the bedroom and showed them firsthand what rocked Charlie Feldman’s world.

  When he’s past the journalists he winds the window back down. The air is cool, but his skin still feels hot. He isn’t sure if it’s from the black death running through his veins, or the anger. When he tries to turn his mind to calmer thoughts, he struggles. Everything in his world is darker now.

  They’ve ruled out burglary-cash and jewelry have been found at each scene. Trace evidence has been vacuumed from each of the rooms as well as the road and the driveway-carpet and clothing fibers and hair. There’s plenty of blood to process. It’ll all take time. Every piece will strengthen the case against Feldman. Yet all of it’s irrelevant. Only one piece of evidence really matters-the pad he found beside the victim’s bed with Charlie Feldman’s name on it. The top sheet of the pad was clean. That was impossible, unless it wasn’t really the top sheet, but was in fact the second one down. The original top sheet had been removed after the woman was killed.

  One reason for that would be if the killer didn’t want what was written down to be read.

  Landry had done one of the world’s simplest tricks-he had run the side of a pencil over that sheet and read the impression left behind. That’s where Feldman’s name came from.

  He has to pull over a few minutes later when he suddenly feels nauseous again. He comes close to throwing up, but this time is able to resist it. This is now all part of the cancer merry-go-round. That and the weight loss. He can hear a dozen lawn mowers closing out the day in the distance. He’s far enough away from the crime scene now to pull out his phone and spend a few minutes on the Internet.

  He finds an online phone directory, looks up Charlie Feldman’s name and matches it with the phone number he found on the pad, and a moment later he has Feldman’s address. Best way to find out for sure why Feldman’s name was removed from that pad is to go and ask the man himself. See what he has to say.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Monday is ending and I’m as scared as hell. The air is heavy with hay fever-I can feel it crawling into the back of my nose. I’ve suffered from hay fever ever since I was a kid. In my teens I had to start getting injections to keep it under control. Things have gotten better over the years, but not better enough to travel without pills. So I pop a couple out from my pocket and toss them onto my tongue and work up enough saliva to swallow them. A light breeze is coming through the open window, but nothing is normal on this normal night because I know what’s really out there. I know about the Real World. I’ve seen some of its secrets, some of its pleasures, some of its evils. I glance at my watch and see I’ve been at Jo’s for an hour. My unfinished coffee is cold and its surface has developed a skin. The ghosts are back, and though I cannot see them I know they’re nearby. They always will be. I stand up and close the window.

  Jo’s backyard begins to shimmer. The trees become Dalí’s trees. The grass grows and turns brown. The flowers disappear and become patches of stinging nettle. I’m back in that moment from last night, back to trying to find a woman I didn’t know. I close my eyes and watch it all unfolding, narrating it to Jo along the way. I was halfway to the trees when the woman I was trying to save, Kathy, screamed. I ran forward, the keys in my pocket swinging back and forth. I put my hand down to mute them.

  It’s easy to see where I went wrong. My first mistake was thinking I could help. I was still living in the same world where the tiny forest of trees had been planted, but the world they had grown into was the Real World. There were no flashing bells, lights or whistles to signify my crossing over, only darkness and a small forest where Death waited and Evil waited and where I would soon wait with them.

  The screaming ended and I didn’t know why. I could hardly see a thing. Twigs snapped beneath my feet. Branches scraped my arms and tried to hold me back, tried to save me. My foot wedged beneath a root and I fell. The tire iron bounced into the darkness. The stillness among the trees carried laughter to me. It reminded me of when I was a kid at school, reminded me how everybody would point and laugh at some kid’s misfortune. It took me a few seconds to realize it wasn’t directed at me. Behind the laughter came soft sounds of whimpering. It was coming from a woman. I couldn’t see her, but I knew how she looked. She would be bloody, her clothes torn, and her skin grazed and ripped. It made me angry. I got to my feet and continued on until I came to the small clearing.

  A flashlight leaning on the ground pointed at her. She was fully dressed, bound to a thick tree by thick rope. Her blouse was ripped open, revealing a bra with a broken strap. Her clothes were dirty, like she’d been dragged some of the way here. She wasn’t gagged, but she wasn’t talking either.

  The man had long, black, knotted hair. It covered the side of his face and looked like the kind of haircut you’d see on somebody who spent time chained to the trees they were trying to save. But he didn’t have that tan-this guy’s tan was comparable to a skeleton. He was a solid guy, a good six feet tall, or an extremely good five feet tall as my dad would have said. On the ground was a satchel. He crouched and unzipped it. He pulled out a knife. It scared the absolute shit out of me more than seeing Woman One step out in front of my car and Woman Two tied to a tree. Seeing that knife was like having a good dose of reality filled into a syringe and injected directly into the brain. Even though I knew I didn’t have my cell phone, I still patted down my pockets looking for it. That knife was a message. It was telling me I was out of my depth. It was telling me to turn away. It was telling me as bad as everything was, there was still worse to come.

  The man, who I would later learn was named Cyris, tossed the knife in the air, catching it by the blade. Then he dragged it from his fist so it sliced into him. He pumped his hand so that blood ran from the cut. Then he walked his bloody fingers over her face. It was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen; it was like watching an artist toying with his canvas. He cut her remaining bra strap and it fell away, exposing the tops of her breasts. I couldn’t help myself-I spent one, perhaps two seconds staring at them. This, of course, I don’t tell Jo.

  I was about to move forward when he started speaking, scratching at the side of his face. He asked how she wanted it. Instead of telling him she didn’t want it at all, she shook her head and tried pressing herself into the tree, tried to make herself invisible against the trunk. He grunted something that I couldn’t make out, then he bent down and returned the knife to the satchel. For a moment I felt better about things, but in that same moment I was worried that he was going to pull out something even worse. Which is what he did. He pulled out a metal stake and a hammer. Immediately I had visions of the police coming here tomorrow morning, of this woman somehow nailed to a tree, of me nailed to a tree next to her. I focused on Cyris’s flashlight. It looked like it might weigh about the same as the tire iron I’d lost. I could either go for it or I could stand here and watch Kathy die, or I could leave.

  Cyris mumbled again before putting his hands on his hips and thrusting his pelvis forward. I felt an anger I’d never felt before building up inside of me. I wanted to hurt him. A lot. I felt like I was in some bizarre game show and up for grabs were all these prizes: heroism, fame, maybe even a movie. If I failed the fame would be unknown and short-lived, and I wouldn’t even be a dead hero. I would just be dead and the game-show host wouldn’t even pronou
nce my name correctly.

  Then he started laughing. He told her she could scream all she wanted, that he wanted her to scream. He swore constantly. It was then that I heard his name. Cyris. It made me think of country singers and cowboy boots and bad haircuts.

  “You need to go to the police,” Jo says, and Dalí’s trees disappear and Jo’s remain. I look at her reflection in the window. I’ve lost track of how many times she’s told me now. I just wish she could come up with a new angle. “You have no choice,” she adds.

  I think about the way the bodies were found. I think about racing through the streets of Christchurch. I think about Cyris.

  “I can’t,” I say. “They’ll think I did it.”

  “Why didn’t you go last night as soon as you rescued the women?”

  “Because of Benjamin Hyatt,” I tell her.

  She looks at me blankly for a few seconds, and then it comes to her. “But this isn’t anything like that,” she says.

  “Isn’t it?” I say. “He’s the reason we got the hell out of that bar six months ago after I hit that guy.”

  She doesn’t answer because she isn’t sure. Benjamin Hyatt was in the news a year ago. He was a family lawyer. He was fifty-five years old. He had a wife and two children. He was an upstanding guy. A decent guy. People loved him. One night last year he worked late. He was walking through the parking garage close to midnight. In the car next to his a woman was being raped. Her clothes were lying in a heap on the concrete floor and she was crying. Hyatt didn’t even think about it. He reached into that car and pulled the rapist out. They fought. But the guy’s pants were down around his ankles and he didn’t have great balance. Hyatt used that to his advantage. Plus Hyatt used to box a little when he was younger. So he boxed now. He boxed at the guy and knocked him out, only the guy hit his head when he went down and slipped into a coma. The following day the police charged Hyatt. It was their view that Hyatt should have only done his best to contain the rapist, and should not have continually hit him. They said that Hyatt, in a fit of rage, decided to teach the guy a lesson. They said he had created a confrontation, when all he needed to do was call the police. Then the rapist died. The charge was upgraded to murder. Hyatt went to court. The public was on his side, but the law was not. Hyatt had overstepped his boundaries. He had used his fists as weapons, and he had killed a guy. The police wanted to make a point. You couldn’t go around acting like a superhero. Hyatt was sentenced to nine years in jail, and would be up for parole within five. The problem was Hyatt’s boxing skills that got him into jail couldn’t get him out of the many situations jail offered. He was beaten to death two days into his sentence.