The Killing Lessons

by Saul Black

  ‘Keep me in the loop? We’re one address away. Sir, I’m begging you not to do this.’

  ‘It’s either this or an actual suspension,’ Deerholt said. ‘Gun and badge. You don’t want that.’

  ‘She’s going to ask to see those anyway.’

  ‘Let her try. What’s she got against you?’

  ‘I have no clue.’

  ‘Well I don’t like her any more than you do. But listen, Valerie, this is as good a deal as you’re going to get right now. If it’s any comfort I got the baggie dusted for prints, but it’s clean.’

  As would be the envelope Carla had left on Blasko’s desk.

  ‘We were wearing gloves,’ Valerie said. ‘She’s not stupid.’

  ‘You have my word you’ll know whatever we do as soon as we know it.’

  Valerie had stood holding her elbows, staring at the floor. She had an image of herself punching Carla York in the mouth. Seeing the infuriating composure blasted.

  ‘And listen,’ Deerholt said. ‘Go see a fucking doctor, will you? You’re walking dead. Get some goddamned antibiotics. You need them.’

  When Carla’s Jeep emerged from the lot, Valerie followed.

  East on Vallejo, south on Stockholm, west on Broadway.

  At Van Ness Carla went south. Valerie had no concrete plan. Just a rage that demanded some kind of action. Deerholt’s last words to her had been: Don’t make this any worse than it is. Don’t do anything stupid. She’d pictured herself tailing Carla all the way to wherever she lived. (Valerie visualised a spartan apartment, pictureless walls, a crisply made bed. The same plain functionality that resided in Carla’s face. In her understated pantsuit and low-heeled boots. She knew nothing about her. Knowledge was power, as someone had said, and so far Carla had it all. That had to change.) But at Golden Gate Avenue (just a few blocks west of the FBI building) Carla took a right and pulled into the lot of a minimart, and before she’d really thought it through Valerie found herself out of the Taurus and hurrying to catch up.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, a yard behind Carla, halfway to the store’s automatic doors, in front of which a young mother was very carefully unwrapping a popsicle for her waiting toddler. Kids didn’t care if it was cold.

  Carla turned. For once, Valerie noticed, she looked bright with tiredness.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why are you fucking with me?’

  ‘Because you’re no good.’

  The directness surprised Valerie in spite of herself. She was thrown off balance.

  ‘You’re making a mistake,’ she said, scrambling to recover.

  ‘No, I’m not. You’re a degenerate drunk. You’ve lost your hold on this. You’re not fit. It’s time someone did something about it. Before more women die because of your incompetence.’

  It was appalling. Valerie remembered the heat of shame in her hands and face when the blood alcohol results had come back earlier that day. Deerholt’s not quite looking her in the eye. Now, having followed Carla to attack her, she found herself shifting, inwardly, into defence.

  ‘You think you’re going to get away with hacking the clinic?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t care whether I get away with it. I just care about getting a degenerate drunk baby-killing slut off the case.’

  The consensus was that when you lost your temper it was a blaze, a blindness, a seeing red. But in that moment Valerie felt instead a deep, fleeting relaxation, as if all her muscles had exhaled and the days and months and years of tension drained, in a second, away. It was a drop of pure bliss, because for the first time in such a long time, absolutely nothing mattered.

  Then she hit Carla in the face.

  She was surprised, in the blur that followed, that Carla fought back so feebly. She would have been trained in hand-to-hand, but her resistance felt token. There were perhaps three or four seconds of sweet release for Valerie before her smarter self struggled back in with its dull bulletin: She doesn’t want to fight back. She wants you to beat her up. Don’t make this any worse than it is. Don’t do anything stupid.

  Too late.

  The two women were halfway to the ground. An overweight store security guard in a brown uniform was jogging towards them, shouting, ‘Hey… Hey!’ Peripherally Valerie was aware of the young mother gawping, though the toddler was wholly engaged with his popsicle.

  Valerie let go of Carla. Stepped back. The evening reasserted itself: the parking lot’s white halogens, the ranks of cars, the cold air slightly damp at her warm throat and wrists, her blood rich and rushing. A kid pushing a train of shopping carts had stopped to watch.

  ‘Thank you,’ Carla said.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Claudia knew the nightmare would kill her unless she accepted it. The only way to stop the nightmare from killing her was to let go of the world before the nightmare. The world before the nightmare was the world in which she was herself, free, complex, ambivalent, filled with ideas and expectations and all the nuances of consciousness. The world before the nightmare was the world in which no one was going to kill her. The longer she held on to that world, the nearer her death would come in this one. In the nightmare world she must reduce herself to a single purpose: to get out of the nightmare world.

  Which meant inverting herself.

  Which meant going further into the nightmare. The nightmare was a black hole. The only way to escape its gravity was to accept its pull and pass through its heart to whatever lay beyond. Perhaps what lay beyond was a world almost exactly like the one she’d lost. Identical to it, in fact, except in one particular: that she herself would be changed for ever.

  But changed or not, she would be alive. And that was all that mattered now.

  ‘Show me,’ she said.

  She stood a couple of feet from the grille. Paulie stood up close on the other side, holding the iPad. He didn’t know what was going on. His face alternated between forced sneers and grins – and long moments in which its features looked stripped of their guiding intelligence. ‘Show me all of them.’

  Her hands were in her jacket pockets, slippery with sweat.

  In the right hand, the rolled-up metal plaque with its wicked V edge that she couldn’t stop running her thumb over. In the last hours it had become everything to her. A rope that could pull her out of hell. But she knew that very soon she’d have to let go of it. Very soon. Minutes. Seconds.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Paulie said. His voice was thick, drugged with uncertainty. His fingernails were filthy. Claudia wondered when he’d last washed. She had an image of him sitting in a tub of greyish scummed water, hands on his skinny white knees, staring at the bathroom tiles.

  She took her hands out of her pockets, thinking, with a flash of panic, what if the metal snagged, got caught on the—

  Shut it down. Don’t think. Don’t be yourself.

  Unable to quite take his eyes off her, Paulie swiped and tapped at the screen. She saw that his face trembled a little. His odour of sweat and stale clothes pounded out of him. Her reflex was to hold her breath. But survival now depended on overriding her reflexes. She inhaled it through her nose. Let it wholly into her reality. Went a degree further into the already deep madness. At the heart of a black hole was a singularity. Where time and space collapsed. Where Einstein and Newton broke down. Where nothing made sense. Except the end of everything known – and the dark possibility of something new beyond.

  Paulie laughed, once, then went silent again, as the screen light shivered on his face.

  He turned it towards her.

  Look and don’t see.

  Look and don’t see.

  They didn’t speak, the two men.

  The only sounds were the jostle of the iPad’s mic and the woman’s gagged misery. What the men were doing brought heavy silence down into them. Apart from very occasionally Paulie’s unsteady snicker, when the camera shook.

  Look and don’t see.

  But there was no not seeing.

  The woman was young, maybe Claudia’s age, with
dark hair and light brown skin.

  The same ropes. The same floor. The same room.

  Claudia felt her jaws jammed together and her legs emptying. Her limbs were strands of chiffon. She couldn’t do this. All her history and every tenderness and her mother’s fine-featured face and her father saying, There, there, Claudie, it’s all right, shshsh, don’t cry after every bump or tumble or scrape or sting, everything she had been up to this point said she couldn’t, couldn’t, could not do this.

  She felt her own misery swelling inside her. Every second said she couldn’t bear this. Every second demanded the scream, pushed it further up her throat.

  Can’t bear.

  Unbearable.

  Somewhere she’d read: The word ‘unbearable’ makes a liar of you unless it’s followed by your death.

  The woman’s body still going through the motions of denial, twisting and wrenching to find an escape, everything other than that impulse gone.

  But the ropes were the ropes. The knife was the knife. The men were the men. Physics was physics. The world was the world, filled with obedient necessities. If you do x, then y follows. The world was completely innocent. Evil was solely human.

  Claudia couldn’t tell how long it lasted. Time was suspended. There was just what she was seeing. There was just the madness confirming itself in the heat of her face. The woman had lost everything that had made her herself. She’d lost everything except her body and the desperation to lose that as well, since it was nothing now but a vessel for her suffering. Suffering like this did away with the person, the treasures of their life, memories, jokes, ideas, hopes, dreams, everything that made them who they were, and left them only the animal cry for what was happening to them to stop.

  The woman was barely moving now. Her eyes closed. She might have been restlessly asleep. The fingers of her left hand closed and opened, gently. Blood from her right ankle all the way up her shin, like a torn red knee sock. Paulie’s recorded voice said, quietly: Come on. She’s… It’s my turn. Xander getting as if drunkenly to his feet. Staring down at her. Then sidling away like a dazed animal.

  Paulie putting the camera down, unsteadily. Two seconds of it pointing at a mouldy corner of the basement’s ceiling – then the footage stopped, and flicked back to the still of its opening frame.

  So far Claudia had done everything she could to keep her face blank.

  But now she looked directly at Paulie – who was watching her with his small eyes gone bright and his mouth open – and did the thing so much against herself that she didn’t know until the last moment whether it wouldn’t betray her and release the scream that was twisted in her throat. Heat and emptiness and the threat of coming away from her body. The air around her was thick, an insistent claustrophobia.

  She smiled at him.

  ‘Show me another one,’ she said.

  SIXTY

  Valerie drove back to her apartment, fast, with the adrenalin still haywire in her limbs. She wasn’t alone in the car. The dead women, crammed and murmuring. Her grandfather’s ghost, filled with damning pity. Her mother’s voice saying, Your temper, Valerie, your temper… The image of Claudia Grey, screaming, bloomed and faded on the windshield. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  Rage and exhaustion fumbled her keys at the apartment door. She dropped them. Stood for a second with her fists clenched and tears like a tourniquet in her throat. Inside she opened a bottle of Smirnoff. At the kitchen sink dropped the tumbler she was pouring it into. The glass burst with a compressed puff against the worktop tiles. With the last of her fury she flung the bottle against the wall, where, innocently obeying the laws of physics, it smashed, too, and bled its clear contents down the paintwork.

  She lit a Marlboro and called Will Fraser.

  ‘Nothing so far,’ he said. ‘Utah land records are county by county. Worse is York says there’s no bank account for either Xander King or Leon Ghast here or in Utah.’

  ‘The Conways’ bank?’

  ‘York’s dealing with it. A few hours.’

  ‘Keep looking,’ she said. ‘Call me as soon as.’

  She was about to hang up. Checked herself. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘The Zoo Guy sightings. Check the hotline tips for anything from Utah. Do it now. I’ll hold.’

  Less than a Claudia Grey minute.

  ‘There’s one,’ Will said. ‘Came in yesterday. St George. Anonymous female. Said she saw him in the Red Cliffs Mall a week ago.’

  ‘In a store?’

  ‘She wouldn’t give us anything more. Just that. We’re still waiting on CCTV.’

  Valerie grabbed a pen. ‘Give me the address of the mall.’

  ‘Seventeen-seventy Red Cliffs Drive, St George, Utah 84790. We called it back to the SGPD and the Bureau’s field office there. So far zippo.’

  ‘Call them again.’

  ‘Val, he could be two hundred miles from there and still be in Utah.’

  ‘Just call them.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But she did know. And laughed at herself, inwardly.

  She got online. The last direct flight from San Francisco to St George left in an hour. She wouldn’t make it. Everything after that had layovers, time-consuming connections in Los Angeles or Las Vegas or Denver.

  Her phone rang.

  ‘It’s me,’ Nick Blaskovitch said.

  Me. If you were lucky you had someone in your life for whom ‘me’ was always enough of an ID.

  ‘I’m downstairs. Buzz me in.’

  The second he walked in the door the apartment bristled with their history. You didn’t realise how dead an atmosphere had been until it came back to life. Valerie thought: Three years since he was here. Three years since the last thing he saw before he left. Me, fucking another guy. The bedroom was an invitation and a wound.

  ‘Will told me what happened,’ he said.

  She was leaning against the kitchen worktop with her arms wrapped around her midriff. She didn’t trust herself without something solid to anchor her. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s been…’ She didn’t finish. He’d noticed the broken bottle, the liquor stain on the wall. She was aware of him recreating the scene, more or less accurately. He knew her. She knew him. That was all there was to it.

  ‘That must’ve felt good,’ was all he said.

  She hadn’t been, quite, meeting his eye. Now she did. Recognition. Which forced both of them to look away again.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to Utah. There’s a lead in St George. Pointless, probably.’

  He nodded.

  They kept looking away from each other.

  I’m still in love with you, Nick. I’m still in love with you but I don’t deserve you to be in love with me. Say it. Say it.

  She didn’t. He didn’t speak, either. Valerie thought: If I walk over there and kiss him one of two things will happen. Either he’ll kiss me back, or he won’t. If he doesn’t, I don’t think I’ll be able to take it. And if he does I’m going to take him to bed and not leave this place for days.

  She knew he was going through exactly the same thought process. They might as well have said it. There was only the thinnest emotional veil separating them. But it was as if there was a time-lock at work. A time-lock neither of them could quit checking.

  ‘You need to get out of here,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Will you keep me posted from Utah?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Yes. Single words were enough. It meant more than updates on the case. It meant, potentially, everything.

  His look said he understood.

  He went to the door and opened it. Turned back.

  ‘Be careful, Skirt,’ he said.

  ‘I will. I promise.’

  The word ‘promise’ hurt her heart.

  When he’d gone, she stood gathering herself. The apartment’s atmosphere like a cramped fist unclenching by degrees.

  In the bedroom s
he threw a couple of changes of clothes into a bag. Took a fleece from the wardrobe. Laptop, keys, purse, Advil.

  Gun. Badge.

  She had to get out of town anyway, before they came for those.

  At the door, she paused. Took stock of herself, the shape she was in. Pictured her body’s energy indicators flashing red: Empty. Empty. Empty. The hours of lost sleep and whatever virus she was fighting stared at her like a massed army waiting to charge. Ludicrous odds. One woman against thousands.

  Well, she was going, anyway.

  She didn’t have a choice.

  SIXTY-ONE

  Paulie was in a peculiar state. Paulie was, in fact, in a state unlike any other he’d ever been in.

  ‘I told you I knew something you didn’t,’ Claudia said, laughing.

  Claudia. She’d told him her name and now it was a weird thing nestling in his head. His cock ached in his jeans. With the others he’d never known their names until afterwards, helping Xander burn their purses, credit cards, drivers licences.

  She had her left hand down the front of her jeans, working on herself. He was having trouble holding the iPad steady. Everything he thought of to say – You’re crazy, you’re fucking… I don’t believe – died before he could get it out of his mouth. The muscles in his face were useless. But his body was wealthy with heat, his cock the throbbing centre. He kept wanting to say something, but it was impossible. His mind just repeatedly dead-ended, watching the movement of her hand between her legs, the little tendons in her slender wrist tensing and relaxing, tensing and relaxing, her breathing heavy.

  The last video clip had just finished.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said, quietly, and bit her bottom lip. ‘Fuck.’

  Paulie flipped the iPad around and ran the first clip again. He’d done it before being aware that he was going to do it. He kept finding himself doing things.

  ‘Can’t you…’ she said. ‘I mean, Jesus…’

  He watched her eyes close. Her nostrils flared. It was so fucking nuts the way something like her nostrils flaring like that made it even more… made it…