The Killing Lessons

by Saul Black

  He rang the doorbell.

  No answer.

  Tried a second time.

  Ditto.

  He drew his gun and switched on his flashlight. Sweep. Check all the downstairs windows. It wasn’t a car wreck. Fuck. Don’t panic. Procedure. You don’t know anything.

  But of course he did know.

  The first window he checked was the living room’s bay. The curtains were open. Christmas tree lights blinking on and off.

  Illuminating the half-naked body of Rowena Cooper, twisted on the blood-darkened floor.

  When did you last speak with Rowena? he’d asked Meredith Trent. Four days ago.

  She looked at least four days dead. Christ. Shit. Shit. His professional machine whirred – the kids, get in and check, they could be alive, bleeding, you might have minutes, seconds – while his human self, father, ex-husband, person, fractured with sadness: he’d seen Rowena a couple of weeks ago in town. Hey, Sheriff. Hey, Rowena. She’d been coming out of the post office. Late Christmas cards. Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! She’d been heading to the diner across the street where the kids were waiting for her in a booth. All that life. The rich history and the glimmering future. All the conversations she’d had. Kisses, laughs, quiet moments watching the weather, reading a book, all the thoughts and the wondering. The big events of her heart. Her husband’s death. The kids. The love. The loss. A person. Gone. A sudden, obscene subtraction from the world. Mrs Trent, I’m sorry, I have bad news… The mother would never recover, not properly. She’d be deformed inside for the rest of her life.

  All this went through his head while he made his way back to the front door, slipped the flashlight into his belt, tried the handle, found it unlocked, pushed it open, quietly with his left hand, the gun held tight and not nearly steady enough in his right.

  The smell hit him immediately. Like nothing else on earth. Death’s unique stink. He fought back vomit. His legs drained.

  He wanted both hands on the gun, but he had to see. He reached for the hall light switch – stopped. Prints. Don’t touch anything. Basic. Fuck. Calm down. He took the flashlight in his left hand. Call for back-up. But the time. Minutes, seconds. The kids. The kids first. Jesus let them be alive. Please God let them be alive.

  Four downstairs rooms: living room, dining room, kitchen, utility.

  Rowena had something protruding from a gash in her abdomen. It took him a few seconds to unscramble it in his head, and even then he wasn’t sure. It looked like the top half of a kite. One of those crappy little things you knew wouldn’t work properly. Half the cellophane wrapper was still twisted around it.

  Why? Never mind why.

  Dining room, kitchen, utility.

  Clear.

  Halfway back down the hall he saw them: wet bootprints.

  Jesus Christ – was he still here?

  It played out, mentally, quick and grotesque: the killer moving in with the dead family. Making coffee. Watching TV. Revisiting the corpses. Talking to them. Fucking them. It seemed the most natural thing in the world. The world contained individuals for whom that would be the most natural thing in the world. Once you knew the possibilities you couldn’t but consider them. You couldn’t but expect them. All the things you knew that you wished you didn’t.

  He went up the stairs.

  Front bedroom clear.

  The wind dropped. He heard the crackle of electricity when he was just outside the second bedroom. It gave him a rush of hope.

  Then he looked inside.

  Oh dear God.

  Josh.

  Oh. Dear. God.

  The turgid guts sprawled. Something… A soft toy jammed… Fuck.

  He swayed, fought off sickness a second time, managed to get his back against the doorframe. The flies on the corpse lifted, irritated, traced urgent figure eights, resettled. Even in the midst of his nausea a small part of his mind was thinking: Flies? Winter? But the heating maybe. The disgust. The Lord of the Flies was the Devil. This was why. It took him a moment.

  You don’t have a moment. Move. Move.

  The room across the hall was in the process of being decorated. Furniture removed.

  She could only be in the bathroom. He had an image of her small body, naked and bloated in the tub’s long-cold dark red water, hair floating, insides bobbing at the surface.

  He backed out of the room and turned.

  A man with a bandaged hand was standing in the bathroom doorway, holding a gun.

  NINETY-ONE

  Xander lost more time, sitting in the woman’s Cherokee with the shopping bags on the passenger seat. The smell of the pineapple pincered the back of his throat. The wind made a high-pitched sound in the evergreens. He was on the trail through the woods, barely the width of the vehicle. The trees met overhead. He didn’t remember stopping. When he thought back over the last hours and days the pieces of his past came apart. They had been in a sly conspiracy to leave him like this, with nowhere to go, no knowledge of what to do, no control. Things had come at him too quickly, one after another. All the things he’d relied on had betrayed him. Paulie. Fucking Paulie. He needed to get far away. He was aware of that. But he was so tired. The pain from his hand had stopped being confined to his hand. It had spread through his whole body. Every breath took a little more of his draining strength.

  Ran all the way through the woods.

  He kept thinking he saw her, moving between the trees in the red quilted jacket.

  But of course not. That was days ago. She couldn’t still be here. She’d be dead of cold. It seemed to him not like days but minutes. He had to keep bringing the fact of the days back to himself. There wasn’t room to turn the Cherokee around. The thought of reversing all the way back to the road made him want to close his eyes again, to sleep. It seemed so long since he’d slept, though he remembered the motel, the girlish half-black kid, the little charge of anger and sadness as he’d watched him type the letters for Ellinson into the GPS, smiling, effortless. Simplest thing in the world, unless you’re dumb as a rock.

  He put the car into drive and eased forward. There would be a place to turn around, somewhere. There would be a gap in the trees. The locked branches overhead had partly screened the trail from the snow. He would drive a little further. It was better to be moving forward, though he had a vision of the trees gathering closer and closer like a crowd of people, until the way was completely blocked.

  Three or four minutes crawling. The banked drifts still and white and smooth. Then the trees on either side thinned and he found himself back in the open. There was a car parked a few yards away, all but buried in the snow. It was the last thing he’d expected to see. And now whatever unexpected thing came his way stirred his fear. More shifting scenery, more betrayal.

  He took the gun and got out.

  There was no one in the vehicle. For no real reason he was aware of he tried the doors. All locked. He didn’t know what it meant, but he didn’t like it. It was wrong, how long the car must have been sitting here for the snow to have built up so high.

  He walked a few paces beyond it and saw the bridge head. There was a sign on it he daren’t do more than glance at – and even the glance set the objects buzzing. The flies agitated around her body. A ravine, stretching as far as he could see in either direction. No lights on the opposite side, just more packed evergreens climbing the white hill. He went to the edge (every step took him knee-deep) and looked down. Black water twisted and winked a long way below. The bridge hung against the rock, bent where it had struck an outcrop. Xander had never seen anything like that, a whole bridge just hanging there. Was this how it was going to be now? Everything not what he expected? Every day another shift in the scenery?

  Maybe she fell in.

  She fell in. She ran through the woods and fell into the ravine.

  He didn’t know whether that was good or not. He thought of himself down there, searching. It was impossible.

  You think you’ve fixed this? You haven�
��t fixed it. You haven’t fixed anything.

  He stood there for a long time, looking down into the icy chasm, waiting to know what to do.

  But the air bit his face and his stomach hurt and the pain that had spread out from his hand through the rest of his body kept time in a steady, agonising throb.

  In the end he turned and went back to the Cherokee. He had to get far away. He had to get far away and find somewhere quiet where he could lie down and sleep for days. But the vision of this kept dissolving, until his mind gave up trying to hold it.

  NINETY-TWO

  Thirty minutes from Ellinson Carla got a radio call from FBI Field Agent Dane Forester. They’d found the Dodge registered to Paulie Stokes near a house three miles from town.

  That wasn’t all they’d found.

  ‘So?’ Valerie said. The snow was falling faster now and the windspeed was manifestly bothering the pilot. It was just after eleven a.m.

  ‘He’s been and gone,’ Carla said. ‘Three homicides at a private residence on the edge of Ellinson. Adult female, teenaged boy. And the town sheriff. The woman and the boy have been dead for days. The sheriff a matter of hours.’

  ‘Fuck. He’s switched vehicles? He can’t be on foot.’

  ‘The woman’s car is gone. He’s got at least an hour on them, probably more.’

  ‘He went back for the girl.’

  ‘Nell Cooper. Aged ten. Her body hasn’t been found.’

  ‘If Stokes’s story is true she’s been missing since her mother and brother were killed. Days. If she got away she’d have got help. She’s either hiding or injured or dead.’

  They set down on the open ground between the back of the house and the tree line. The scene was busy. Five federal agents and two Ellinson deputies, both with the look of delicate trauma. A forensics team was en route from Denver. Valerie imagined the deputies’ Christmas morning at home with their families, the warmth and security ripped into by the call from the Bureau. One moment the tinkle of breakfast and the rich scents of the food and the ordinary wealth of domesticity, the next this: the blunt reality of three people, including their boss, dead. Murdered. They’d talk about it on Christmases to come. It would most likely be the only murder they’d ever see. Valerie wondered how many she’d seen, how many she’d forgotten.

  ‘What’s the soft toy?’ Carla asked. They were in Josh’s bedroom. The Feds had issued nose-paste and latex.

  Valerie (hands visibly shaking; she couldn’t still them) lifted what she guessed was the toy’s head with a pair of tweezers. Sticking out ears. A tail, barely discernible among the toughened entrails. Big, surprised eyes.

  ‘A monkey,’ she said. ‘M for monkey. K for kite downstairs.’

  The sheriff’s body was, as far as a cursory examination could reveal, object-free.

  ‘L must be for the girl,’ Valerie said. Try as she might she couldn’t see how Nell Cooper could be alive. Hiding? In this weather? She’d have frozen to death. ‘We’re going to need a full search team,’ she said to Carla. ‘Stokes said she ran into the woods. Leave a deputy here for CSI. The rest of your guys should start a sweep. There’s a photo of the girl, presumably.’

  ‘Thank goodness you’re here,’ Carla said. ‘I wouldn’t have thought of that.’

  ‘I’m getting back in the air,’ Valerie said. ‘You can do whatever you want.’

  Over an hour, the weather worsened. Snow drove hard. To Valerie it felt not as if the chopper was fighting its way through air but through a bulk of roiling water. The physics revealed the aircraft’s absurdity: a tin gnat in a bad-tempered ocean. The pilot’s tolerance was palpably finite. He was flying with silent determination to get to the end of it. Once he had, Valerie knew, his will would set and short of putting the gun to his head there would be nothing she could do about it. A detached part of her admired him, his willingness to take it to the limit of manageable danger – but no further. Her own hands were wet, gripping the edge of her seat. She was aware of her body, trembling, the panicked crowd of her symptoms and the web of adrenalin holding them down.

  ‘This is pointless,’ Carla said. ‘Five minutes and we’re not going to be able to see anything at all. We’re wasting time and— Jesus!’

  A slab of wind hit them and the chopper dipped and canted left. Briefly, Valerie’s window view filled with a mass of snow-heaped trees. Her guts turned over.

  ‘This is fucking crazy,’ the pilot said over the headset. ‘I’m in molasses here.’

  ‘What’s the nearest town on the other side of the river?’ Valerie said.

  ‘Spring,’ the pilot said. ‘Fifteen miles north-east. But we already scoped it. They’ve got a better chance on the ground.’

  ‘Go over it again,’ Valerie said.

  ‘Hey, you want to fly this?’

  ‘He’s long gone,’ Carla said.

  ‘Please,’ Valerie said. ‘Just do it.’

  NINETY-THREE

  Nell had the feeling she had slept for a long time. The light said the morning was going. There was snow coming down fast and the wind sang where it cut the cabin’s edges. Angelo was deeply asleep on the couch. The empty coffee mug lay on its side by his hand. She felt sorry for him, strangely, seeing him asleep like that.

  She still had on all the clothes from last night, the boots, the red quilted jacket. Angelo had begged her to let him take the boots off and put the splints back on, but she didn’t want the splints any more. They were uncomfortable. The boot actually felt better, though her ankle still throbbed with a rhythmic life of its own. It made her feel sick if she thought about it, so she forced herself not to. She felt very awake, but the effect of the pill had worn off. Her side stabbed her, meanly, every time she breathed in.

  She got to her knees. The little foil packet of Advil was where Angelo had left it, on the corner of the sink. One pill had made the pain less. You could kill yourself with the wrong pills. Or too many. There was such a thing as an overdose. But an overdose would be a whole packet or something, she was sure. Whenever you saw someone taking an overdose on the TV it was handfuls, and even then most of the time they just seemed to end up in hospital, having their stomachs pumped or throwing up. She wanted as much of the pain gone as possible. Her mother took two if she had a headache. Two for a headache. What she had hurt a lot more than a headache. Without thinking about it (or rather, thinking that even if she died it wouldn’t matter now) she popped all three remaining capsules from the foil and swallowed them with a mouthful of water from the pan still sitting by the stove.

  Her hat was on the floor under the table. She would need that. The pills work better on a full stomach, he’d said. It hadn’t sounded like a lie, and she was, suddenly, starving. She crawled to the cupboard. She didn’t want to stand up until she had to. And in any case, surely it would take a little while for the pills to work?

  Everything was cans. She found peaches, with a ring-pull opener. Surprised herself at how quickly and greedily she ate them. Angelo didn’t stir. It occurred to her that this was the first time she’d seen him asleep since she’d got here. She wondered about him, what his life was, why he was here. He looked terrible. She imagined telling her mother and Josh about him – but as soon as she thought that what had happened came up again like the world tilting. It made her dizzy. Her mother. All the blood all this time. Her mother was—

  She had to go back. She’d waited too long. It didn’t matter what happened. All she wanted was to get back to her house. She would phone 911. Medics would come. They would come with equipment and they would know what to do. She remembered a TV show about people who had died and come back to life. One of them had floated up out of his body and looked down from just below the ceiling. He’d watched the doctors working on him. He’d watched the whole thing. Oh yeah, Josh had said, when she’d told him about it, that’s no big deal. People are technically dead all the time and then come back to life. They see a sort of white light and start drifting towards it. But then something pulls them back into their
bodies, like when they get zapped with those electric gizmos that start their hearts beating again. One woman floated up and out of the hospital building and saw someone’s sneaker that they’d lost ages ago sitting on a goddamned window ledge on the third floor, and she told them about it when she woke up, and they went and checked – and there it was! How cool is that?

  She finished the peaches and crawled to collect her hat from under the table.

  I’ll help you, in the morning, Angelo had said. But what help was he going to be? He was in worse shape than she was. There was nothing he could do to help. At the door, clutching his stick, she felt bad, leaving him like this. He needed the stick. But if she didn’t go and get help he’d be stuck here for ever, too. What would he do when the food ran out? It was mean, she knew, to go without saying goodbye, but he would understand. It struck her that he’d taken care of her. He’d saved her life. He looked lonely, asleep on the couch. She wondered who his family was.

  She opened the door, quietly, crawled out onto the porch, closed it as gently as she could, then got the stick under her and pushed herself to her feet.

  The world went white, then black. She thought she was falling again. But she opened her eyes and with a strange liquid softness things swam back into focus. Her teeth felt numb, but with warmth instead of cold. Experimentally, she put a little weight on her damaged foot. There was pain (she pictured fine white lightnings travelling through the bones of her shin and knee and thigh) but it was oddly muted. She knew it, rather than felt it. She tried a little more weight. The lightnings brightened. Too much. Maybe the pills had only just started working? Maybe she’d be able to put more weight on it in a little while?