The Killing Hour

by Paul Cleave

  We lie there surrounded by the sounds of the night. I can hear Jo shifting her body, trying to get comfortable. I don’t talk to her and she doesn’t mumble through her gag. I’m unable to switch off my mind. I can’t stop thinking about Kathy and Luciana and Cyris. I can’t stop thinking how the shape in the body bag on TV was more than just a shape back when this day started. I can’t stop thinking about Jo. Things are bad. And as Monday sets about turning to Tuesday I have a feeling they’re only going to get worse.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Landry repeats the procedure from before. He parks outside the house and leans against his car, only this time he doesn’t give in to the temptation of another cigarette.

  The night seems to have cooled off as far as it’s going to get-somewhere around ten degrees he guesses. This same time last year the evenings were half that. He can hear the waves in the distance. The house is a few blocks from the beach. The moon is hanging out over the water and he imagines the view out there must be pretty good. He can’t remember the last time he walked on a beach at night. Maybe he never has.

  The house is a similar age to Feldman’s, only instead of brick it’s wood. Similar gardens, only more trees, and with a driveway that snakes up around the side of the house in a way that you can’t see the front door. He’s halfway up there when his phone rings. It’s Hutton.

  “I think I have what you’re looking for,” Hutton says.

  “Shoot.”

  “Guy by the name of Francis Booth was found unconscious in the bathroom at a bar by the name of Popular Consensus. Hey, doesn’t your brother own that bar?”

  “Yeah,” he says, and the story is starting to ring a bell. “So what happened?”

  “The guy was taken to a hospital. Had a broken nose, broken cheekbones, a dislocated jaw. Says some guy went into the bathroom and beat the shit out of him.”

  “Mugging?”

  “No. Guy still had his wallet on him. Said he didn’t know the guy. Never seen him before. Nobody saw anything. Case is still open. You got something?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Thanks for the info,” he says, and before Hutton can ask any more questions, he hangs up.

  So Feldman beat somebody up at a bar. Why? Something to do with his wife? Something to do with being jealous?

  He walks the rest of the way up the driveway. Some of the cobblestones are loose beneath his feet, some of the branches from the shrubs and trees tug at his jacket. He peers through the garage window and can make out a car, but can’t tell what kind. He gets the same feeling he got from the last place, that it’s empty in here. He puts the theory to the test by knocking on the front door, waiting, then knocking again. Nothing.

  At Feldman’s house he was happy to break in, but not here. This woman is not guilty, which makes breaking into her house something quite different. And he has no reason to think Feldman has come here.

  Just for the hell of it, he turns the handle to see if the door is locked. It isn’t, which sets off a whole lot of warning bells. Houses have a feel when they are empty, sure, but they also have the same feel if the person inside is dead. He’s not sure why his mind jumps to that conclusion, but it does-that’s what twenty years of seeing bad stuff will do to you. He’s suddenly feeling convinced there’s a dead woman in here. The door swings open. He gets out his flashlight.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing. He steps inside. “Hello?”

  Still nothing. He flicks on the flashlight. He’s in a dining room. Nothing looks out of place. He moves further in. The headset to the phone is sitting on the floor, the cable torn from it. That same cable is a few feet away near the oven. He crouches down over it. There’s a knot in the middle, and the ends have been cut by a knife or by scissors. At some point this cable was used to tie something up. Or somebody. He goes through the house, searching it room by room, feeling relief with every room that doesn’t have a dead body in it. There are no signs of a struggle. The bedroom is a mess, clothes have been pulled out from the wardrobe, probably packed away into a suitcase. Did Jo run, or was she taken? The cut cable suggests the latter. But why take her and pack stuff for her?

  He walks back into the dining room. Technically, he doesn’t know anything bad happened here. It looks that way-but it may not be. Feldman may not be responsible for any of this. Could just be she packed some stuff and left. But the phone cord? Maybe the phone is faulty. No matter how he looks at that, the only explanation is a bad one. There’s no handbag. No car keys. No purse. But there’s a cell phone on the kitchen table. There’s the piece of cable, and the car in the garage, and an unlocked front door. He picks up the cell phone. He goes through and finds Charlie Feldman’s number. He calls it. He gets a message saying the number is no longer in service.

  He walks back down to his car. He pulls his cell phone out of his pocket. He needs to call this in. As much as he wants to get his hands on Feldman by himself, this case has now also become about Jo Feldman, and he needs the police looking for her. Only he can’t do that without explaining why he was here. And anyway, he doesn’t know something has happened to her.

  And, if it has, then whatever has happened has happened.

  He puts his phone back into his pocket. This might be about to get a lot more complicated than it should have been. He pulls away from the curb. Holding on to the evidence the way he did, well, he’s already too deep now. He can’t tell anybody what’s happened, and he can’t back away. He has to stay committed.

  He’ll find Feldman, he’s sure of it, and if Feldman is the one who took Jo, then he’ll find her too, and everything is going to be okay. That’s what he tries to tell himself, but the same twenty years he’s had of seeing bad stuff are now telling him that may not be the case at all.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Tuesday morning and we wake up to rain. Warm rain. The type you get in summer and love to walk in. I turn on the radio and listen to a weather report. An old guy tells us to expect twenty-eight degrees. Tells us to expect more rain tonight. Tells us the twenty-eight degrees is going to drop to around ten. Tells us it’s one of the warmest autumns on record. He doesn’t tell us what we should do if some guy is trying to kill us. I figure he’s just looking out the window and telling it like it is.

  I have woken with a small headache, a dry mouth, and the flavorless dregs of a dream. There’s no difficulty in separating the dream from reality-I only have to look over at Jo to know what’s really going on. I have abducted her. I have stolen her away from her life and in that action Action Man is starting to become the monster Cyris is. Though my dreams were full of death and murder I was a hero, yet from the moment I stepped out of my car I was a hero doomed to fail. I don’t even know what I am now.

  There was a point where I thought I was going to succeed. Cyris was on top of me, the hard ground was digging into my back, the night air was still, and there were no signs of life outside of our small trio. I managed to throw my head up and crack my forehead into his nose and I used that momentum to push him backward. I got to my feet and raced for the flashlight. He knocked me off balance before I made it and my tangling legs had me back on the ground within seconds. When Cyris brought his knife down toward me his intentions were clear, and in the weak edges of the flashlight beam I knew death wasn’t giving me up as a lost cause.

  All I did then was react. I got my hands up and onto his wrists before he could bring the knife all the way down. I was lucky to have gotten my hands into the position without having my fingers scattered over my chest. I pushed my arms to the side to redirect his balance. The moment he began to topple I used my right palm as a hammer and nailed it into the base of his broken nose. He let go of the knife. There was no room for hesitation. I picked the blade up and plunged it ahead. The blade hit something hard before slowing down and it felt like I was pushing it through wet cement. I kept pushing until it came to a complete stop. For one moment we were frozen and then his mouth dropped open and the air that rolled out smelled like spoiled meat. He collapsed on
top of me, a dead weight that I thought would get deader by the second, only I was wrong. I dragged myself from beneath him and listened as his fingers slowly tapped out a death march against the handle, and then the tapping stopped.

  The silence then was complete, heavy and thick, an emptiness of sound that pushed into my ears and into my mind, crushing my thoughts. I had killed a man and it felt good. Okay-maybe good is the wrong word. I think what I felt in that moment was more about what I didn’t feel-I didn’t feel bad. I didn’t feel any sense of guilt. If I had to choose one thing to sum it up, I would say what I felt was relief.

  Of course that relief quickly changed to fear. Out of nowhere the story of what had happened to Benjamin Hyatt came to me. I had just killed a man to save two women, and for that I could go to jail. Would I? No. I couldn’t see how a jury would convict me. I couldn’t really see how I would be facing jail time. But of course Hyatt would have thought the same thing. Would have kept thinking it right up to the moment he got beaten so badly in jail he died.

  I look over at Jo. She’s staring silently at me, looking me up and down. My clothes look like I’ve ironed wrinkles into them. The cuts on my face are slowly starting to heal. I get up and use the bathroom then head into the kitchen. I start making coffee, hoping it will help dilute the weird feeling of waking up in a strange room and worrying about kidnapping and death. I untie Jo and take out the gag. She sits up and stares at me and continues her silence. I don’t know what to say to her. I fight the urge to say sorry over and over as she uses the bathroom. She takes her suitcase in with her. I wait by the door in case she starts screaming, only she doesn’t. When she comes out she’s changed into a T-shirt and a pair of cargo pants.

  “I’ll make you some coffee,” I say. She doesn’t bother to thank me as I do just that. I put it in front of her then sit well back in case she throws it in my face. “Look, I know that this must seem pretty weird-”

  “Weird? Jesus, Charlie, it’s gone way past weird.”

  “Sure, maybe you’re right, but-”

  “Maybe? You use the word maybe? But what? But it’s going to be okay? Is that it? You tied me up and now you want me to be your friend?”

  “I wasn’t going to put it like that.”

  “Whatever. I’m hungry. Are you going to make me starve too?”

  “There isn’t any food here.”

  “Then let’s go get some.”

  “Why? So you can ditch me the first chance you get?”

  She doesn’t answer. Instead she just stares at me. Whatever she’s about to say, she’s given it some serious thought. I’ve seen the process many times over the years. She even did it when I proposed to her, which turned the whole proposal thing into a really awkward moment, but as she pointed out back then, it was better to put more thought into it than decide on the emotion of the moment. That’s what she’s doing now.

  “I’ve had all night to think about it, Charlie,” she says, “and I’ve decided to help you because I really think you could do with it. Maybe I feel like I owe you something, and maybe I’m remembering the way you used to be, or maybe I’m just as crazy as you are right now. So let’s make a deal. I agree to let you show me what you need to today to convince me to stay with you, and at the end of the day it becomes my decision whether I stay or go.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I mean it, Charlie. I promise I won’t try and get away,” she says, and the thing about Jo is she’s never broken a promise. The other thing about Jo is she’s never been abducted before. “Just don’t tie me up anymore, okay? We’ll go out, get some breakfast, and then I’ll help you. But only for today. At the end you have to let me go. I think you owe me that. In fact I think you owe me that at the very least. I give you my full cooperation but you give me yours when the day’s over. And if I decide to go to the police at that point it’s my decision, not yours. Is it a deal?”

  I wish I could believe she isn’t lying, because life would be a lot easier if she was with me rather than against me. “I don’t know,” I say, and the funny thing is I really don’t. That’s what wanting to believe will do to you.

  “What’s your plan? To keep running? Or are you going to try and find the man that did these horrible things?”

  “I’m not sure,” I tell her, only I am sure. I’m going to find Cyris.

  “Charlie, you’ve been nothing but a bastard since you came around last night, but I know that’s not you, I know that’s not the real you, and I know that sooner or later you’ll have no choice but to let me go. That means you have to start trusting me, right? For God’s sake, Charlie, you might as well start now. What do you think I’m going to do? Write a note on the bill for the waitress to send help?”

  It’s exactly the kind of thing I thought she would do. Or she wouldn’t even have to go to that effort-all she’d need to do is stand up and announce to the people there that she had been kidnapped. I want to trust her. Our lives were entwined-we were lovers, best friends, and I’ve kept the knot in place by kidnapping her. Only the last twelve hours I’ve taken all of those years we’ve known each other and poisoned them with paranoia and fear.

  “Look, I’ll bring you back some breakfast, okay? I promise. Then we’ll talk.”

  I can’t take her with me because if the police showed up at her house last night then her picture may already be circulating in the news. I can’t take her with me because if I was in her situation I’d be doing what I could to escape. She doesn’t resist as I tie her to the bed. I turn on the TV. It hums for a few seconds-the picture comes and goes and then settles. There’s an old black-and-white movie on. It’s about vampires. They’re being chased by bad acting and poor directing. I recognize none of the actors, but all of the lines. I leave the TV on for Jo and hang up the Do Not Disturb sign on my way out.

  It’s eight thirty and the streets are clogged with work traffic. I think about the phone messages on my machine at home, messages which will be added to today unless I call in sick. I decide that’s what I’m going to do because if everything goes well, if I find Cyris and get him to the police, then maybe I can still have a normal life for which I’d need to keep my job. The morning is warm, we’re probably about halfway to what the weatherman guessed we’d get to. I walk to a nearby café. It’s one of those small mom-and-pop places where Mom has put on too much weight and Pop never quite cooks the chicken properly. Most of the business likely comes from the nearby factories. It seats around twenty people inside and another seven or eight out. The smell of coffee and bacon makes the warm atmosphere inside even more appealing. I wish I could stay all morning. The rooms are painted orange and red and there’s enough hardwood from the floors to the furniture to the edging around the ceiling and walls to make an ark. I’m served by a short waitress in her late forties with a haircut that should be in a museum. She smiles as she takes down my order. A name tag on her uniform says her name is Dot, but sometimes name tags lie. She brings me coffee that’s on par with the cup I had at the motel. I realize I’m nervous as hell. Does anybody here know who I am? I order bacon and eggs, then I ask if I can borrow the phone, and then I call the school. I start out by apologizing for not having shown up yesterday, but I tell them I’m sick. I tell them I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but it’s bad, and that today I’m going to a doctor. The secretary tells me to get well soon, and doesn’t complain about yesterday. I return to my table and a minute later the food comes out. The bacon is slightly overcooked just the way I like it. The eggs too. I must look like a competitive food eater as I shovel them into my mouth. I buy some food to go and pick up a newspaper on the way back.

  The first thing I do is untie Jo. While she eats we study the front page. The police have released more details. They mention that Luciana was found by a work colleague, Kathy by a neighbor. Both husbands have been questioned and released. Luciana’s husband was in Auckland with his new partner at the time. The article mentions the pair’s separation, says the husband is gay. Kathy’s husba
nd, Frank, also has a solid alibi.

  The van outside Luciana’s house was found with the key snapped in the ignition. Luciana’s car, a dark blue Ford, hasn’t been found. I read the article twice more, then I go deeper into the paper where a related article has been written by a different journalist. I read this, but don’t learn anything. I go back to the front page and read the headlines again. Something in them doesn’t quite gel, but I can’t put my finger on it. Whatever it is, it starts gnawing at the back of my brain. I close my eyes and try to focus on it, but that only makes it worse. I look through the paper searching for any mention of Jo, but there’s nothing. Then I even read my horoscope. It says forces in my life are conspiring to change my future, but isn’t any more specific. The nagging feeling that I’m missing something doesn’t disappear.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Jo says, “that if this Cyris guy is after you he’s going to come for you at night, right? He does his thing at night, and he wouldn’t risk anything during the day.”

  She’s sitting on her bed and I’m sitting in the kitchenette and we’re both staring at the parking lot and watching the rain. I think about what she has to say. I want to find Cyris, and she’s suggesting the best way to find him is by letting him find me.

  “I guess that makes sense. But how is he going to find me?”

  “Did he see your car?”

  “Yeah. No doubt about it.”

  “First thing we need to do is call in sick.”