Valuable time? Valuable time? You can’t do this.
I wondered vaguely how they’d gotten here. Was there a car somewhere? It certainly wasn’t outside in the courtyard. I could follow him to try and get the plates, but I knew Klaus would do something about that. I heard the front door open and close. The kitchen was then silent.
I didn’t want to look at Klaus. I could feel his eyes drilling bloody holes in the back of my head. I thought about the Chris of an hour ago, lying in bed blissfully unaware. I wanted to be that guy so much that I hated him.
You have a job to do. The CLOCK. Is TICKING.
I knew it. I looked at the particular clock in my kitchen. To my surprise, it was already after nine thirty. The test must have taken longer than I thought. Klaus began to pull some cables out of his other jacket pocket, as well as a small microphone, two tiny battery packs, and something that looked like a pin badge. My wire and camera, by the looks of it.
“Can that wait a second? I need to do something first. I’m not going anywhere yet, so I won’t need it, will I?” Klaus stopped moving, but continued staring at me. I took this as confirmation. Feeling like I would fall apart if I moved too quickly, I went to the drawer to get a pen and paper. I had to make a list. I needed criteria. This wasn’t plain stalling, either; the last thing in the world I wanted to do was stall. I had just over five hours to choose, find, and kill another human being before Olivia lost the rest of her arm to go with her two already-missing fingers. If I could do that—save all five of them with only two fingers lost—then I would feel… I thought I would feel as if I could live with my actions. And if I was going to do that, then I needed to choose my target perfectly. The list was important. I needed to narrow this down from everyone to someone.
A list?! Are you cra—
I had to make a list.
“Sit down,” I said to Klaus, without looking up. “You’re making me uncomfortable.”
As I stared at the sheet in front of me, I heard a scrape as the chair on the opposite side of the table was pulled out.
***
Half an hour later, I had barely written anything at all. I’d clarified nothing. Trying to disconnect my mind—to become as purely objective as possible, to remove emotion so that I could function—had helped a little but not enough. You might be thinking the police, why didn’t you try and call the police? If you’re thinking that, then you haven’t been listening. At one point I got up to go for a piss, and Klaus followed me into the bathroom, standing behind me while I went. I wasn’t getting away from him. I knew that the girls died if I really tried. And any more fucking around meant pissing away time as well as urine. There was only one way to go.
My “list” was useless. Must deserve to die wasn’t very helpful, as that was obvious, but finding someone like that within the timescale I had? Not likely. The question was, I realized to my seemingly levelling-out horror, one of balance. Look at it this way:
Olivia and the girls were humanitarians. In my eyes, this made them “worth” more than, say, a rapist, or even just a straight-up asshole you might come across in the street. And let’s say I took four Time Blocks (that was the way I thought about those 6 am to 3 pm and 3 pm to 12 am periods then, and the way I’ve thought about them ever since. I had to be scientific about it or I’d go insane) to really really drill it down and choose carefully. For example, say I used up all the time—the time it took for her to lose all of her limbs—making sure I was picking a total asshole, and then killed that someone before the fifth and final Block was up. The one that would mean her head and her life.
That would mean I’d have one dead asshole, but one humanitarian girl who was rendered a quadriplegic for the rest of her life. To me, that was not balance. But… then say I didn’t choose quite as carefully, killed someone I thought was probably enough of an asshole within the current Time Block that I was in—i.e., I killed someone before 3 pm that first day—and Olivia lost no limbs at all. Could I live with knowing I rushed it? That maybe I wrong? That wouldn’t work either. My decision, therefore, was this:
I could afford to go into the third Time Block. Olivia could afford to lose two arms, if that was the cost of making sure I had chosen correctly. That meant I had until 2:59 pm tomorrow to kill someone. That, to me, was fair.
Think differently? You would have planned something else? Hey, maybe your plan would have been better. But you weren’t there, you weren’t me, and that was the decision I made. If it makes you feel any better, I think about it constantly. All the time. All. The. Time. So you’re probably right.
Here was the list I had:
Must deserve to die.
Must be an adult.
Must have committed a violent crime against another human being: rape, assault, murder, GBH, manslaughter.
That was it. That was all I had. I was trying to narrow it down so much, but I could think of nothing else and the clock was ticking. And number “1” up there was just fucking useless. It was so vague and arbitrary and open to interpretation that I decided to cross it off the list. I could have just gone for the “dickhead enough to die” option, sure, but I wanted to go bigger, have stronger reasons than that.
Must be an adult. Well, that was just fucking obvious.
Must have committed a violent crime against another human being.
Adult. Violent crime.
A penny dropped, and it was so obvious that I cried out and banged my fist on the table for not thinking of it sooner. Klaus didn’t jump, of course, remaining as inexpressive as ever, but I realized his gaze hadn’t moved from me the entire time that I’d been working on my list.
Child abusers. Child rapists. People that I could kill with a lot less doubt.
Statistics prove conclusively that most child abusers are victims of abuse themselves, a voice whispered in my head. I knew it was true, but if I let myself look for excuses, I could find one to avoid killing anyone, and the girls died. These guys were now top of the list.
The sex offender registry online. Finding someone would be easier than I thought. And then I could—
My stomach lurched as I thought of what “then I could” meant. I thought I had it, but blackness was creeping in at the edges of my vision and then the room was falling sideways. I remember Klaus’ face, inexpressive behind his sunglasses, turning without alarm as his gaze followed me all the way to the floor.
My head hurt a bit when I came around. I must have hit it when I fell, but more annoying was the light stinging sensation on my cheek. As I opened my eyes, I cried out once more, this time in shock. Klaus’ rock-like visage filled my vision, and the stinging sensation came again as he slapped my face.
“I’m awake!” I squeaked, and then I realized that I was in the living room, seated in one of the armchairs. Klaus must have moved me into a more supportive seat to bring me around. His meaty wrist came into view, poking out of the end of his sleeve, and I wondered what he was showing me. Klaus was communicating something? His gloved finger then came up, and moved the sleeve back further, revealing his gold watch. The finger then tapped the watch dial twice - sharply.
I was taken aback. He had, in a way, just done the girls a favour; if I’d stayed unconscious, that was more time wasted.
“Uh… thank you,” I said, surprising myself. Klaus actually nodded in return and moved to the other side of the room to sit on the sofa. It creaked under his bulk as he sat, and his gaze once again settled on me from across the room. I felt my head where the pain seemed strongest. There was a small bump.
You fainted. Just thinking about the prospect of actually doing it made you faint. What makes you think you can do this?
My laptop—not this one, of course, this was bought solely for the purpose of writing this—was on the coffee table, the plumb centre of the living room. The low and slightly curved ceiling hung above ancient, thinning carpet. Mum thought it gave the place character.
Your parents—
I stood to retrieve the laptop, and that’
s when I realized something was taped to my chest. I looked down and saw a tiny microphone protruding from a thick strip of tape that wrapped around me twice. I felt a slight weight in my bathrobe pocket and plunged my hand into it. As I had thought, the microphone’s battery pack was in there, along with another pack that presumably was connected to the pin-badge-looking camera that was stuck to the robe’s lapel. Upon closer inspection, it really was disguised as a badge - a round, silver representation of the Union flag.
Klaus had done this while I was unconscious.
“You couldn’t wait? I’m still in the fucking house!” I snapped. I wasn’t scared of him. I wasn’t breaking any rules, and I was pretty sure that he couldn’t do anything to me unless I did something to him. And even then I just had to say that I quit, and he wouldn’t do anything at all.
I assumed.
Klaus shrugged so subtly that I barely even saw it. There was a moment of angry silence, and I swore that I could hear the tape creaking slightly as I breathed rapidly in my impotent fury. Then I saw the clock. It was now past 10:30. The Man in White had left an hour ago! I decided to just fuck thoughts of Klaus off and get on with the task at hand. Still, I realized that he must have done this to my body while I was unconscious. He was as strong as he looked then.
“Don’t do anything like that again,” I muttered, a token resistance, and I didn’t look at him for a response. I snatched my laptop off the table and opened it, sitting back down on the armchair as I did so. Klaus stood quickly and moved to sit on the chair’s arm so that he could observe what was being done onscreen. I had to find some perverts, and quickly.
Easy, right? No.
The sex offender register - in the UK at least - doesn’t work the way you might think. It isn’t like Booking.com for sexual deviants, where you can tap in your location and it tells you how many rapists and child abusers are within a radius of your choosing. (“There are THIRTY-SIX sexual predators nearby RIGHT NOW, and FORTY-TWO angry mob members currently viewing them in YOUR AREA. Hurry before the deviants are ALL KILLED!”)
Unfortunately for me it was, and is, for running background checks on specific individuals near you, and for making sure that they aren’t living near schools, et cetera. This means that you need to have someone in mind before you can make use of it; then you can run a search for that specific person. It makes sense, I suppose. It stops people from getting together on weekends at one of their buddies’ houses with crates of beer, flaming torches, and baseball bats studded with nails before firing up the sex offender database and picking a victim at random for that evening’s lynchin’; however, that meant it was of no use to me. I didn’t know of anyone that I suspected of secretly being a sexual predator. The worst person I knew in that regard was my mate Pete, and he was at worst a bit grabby. Not at all socially acceptable I know, but not worthy of murder.
Try to think of famous cases. People have been in the news; people that got convicted for doing that kind of thing.
It was a nice idea, but a stupid one. Anyone I could think of in the news for being convicted would be in jail.
But what about older cases?
That was a good idea. It’d be easy to Google cases from ten years ago, and then it would just be a matter of finding out how long their sentences were and seeing if the perps were now out, right? No.
Even expanding my search out of the region and into the surrounding cities (I hadn’t wanted to look too far afield as that meant extra driving time on top of potential locating time, potential lying-in-wait-all-day time… my hands were shaking as I typed), it turned out that, even in the rare instances where a sex offender’s release from prison was reported, the criminals in question didn’t exactly set up a Facebook or Linkedin profile. They moved away quietly and changed their names. Sure, the government and local authorities would keep tabs on them, but for the same friendly-lynch-mob reasons that the registry used, they didn’t make those addresses and locations public. And even in the unlikely event that I could find one, I’d have to know his movements, wait for him to come home, catch him at the right time… all time-consuming and extremely difficult. I looked at the clock and realized that all this wasted searching had taken another half an hour. It was now gone eleven.
Less than four hours. Less than four hours and she loses an arm because an asshole didn’t die.
What’s next on the crime list? Murderers? You won’t find any of them. Child abusers, rapists? You’ve just pretty much written that option off. Okay, so… violent people, drug dealers….
A light bulb went off in my head. Time-wise, it made total sense. It would be much easier for me to find a drug dealer than someone who had committed assault because I knew a few people who at least occasionally took drugs. No one hardcore, but they’d probably know people who were… and those people would know their dealers.
I didn’t really know anyone who hung around with assault-y people, plus, someone who did like getting involved with violence would probably be reasonably good at it, better than me certainly. They might be more difficult to—
The world went grey again for a moment, but I slowed my breathing and brought myself back.
Rick. Rick knows a guy.
You’re gonna kill Rick’s friend?
Not his friend. His dealer.
I pictured the man, dressed in a pimp suit and smoking a crack pipe. Picturing lives that he’d ruined by peddling his poison. I pictured myself killing someone like that.
It can’t just be weed or speed. It’s got to be the harder stuff. Coke. Heroin.
Did Rick’s guy deal heroin? I doubted it, but coke, surely.
But won’t that raise a huge red flag? You get the guy’s number and then he turns up dead? Who do you think is suspect number one?
It wouldn’t matter. As long as I wasn’t on camera, they’d told me, I’d be fine. They’d clean everything up, and I knew from the videos that it was true. It would just be a coincidence. Why would I want to kill him anyway? I could tell Rick I never saw him, and hell, the guy would be in the drug trade. He’d have a list of people more likely to kill him than a total stranger.
I stood up.
“I’m going to get my phone, ok?” I said to Klaus, who held up a hand in a stop gesture. He stood, towering over me, and pointed out of the room. I took his point.
“It’s on charge on the bedside table,” I said. “I need to send a text. Ok, you send the text. Is that what you mean? Look, you can obviously understand me, so just fucking talk.”
Klaus’ hand turned over and became a come hither gesture. I sighed angrily. “This is my fucking house, you know,” I snapped. “I don’t have to do anything you say.” Klaus actually nodded clearly here and held both hands up. I know, the gesture said, it’s all up to you. I can leave anytime. As surprised as I was—this was the most human thing I’d seen him do—I was annoyed by the fact that I didn’t have a response. I felt like a frustrated child as I walked ahead of him, leaving the room and climbing the stairs as the larger man followed.
I unlocked the phone, handed it to Klaus, and then dictated the message to him as I got dressed, transferring the small battery packs to my jeans pocket and choosing a t-shirt that hung low enough to cover the cables connecting to the packs. I guess mob informers wore them inside their underwear, but I didn’t want to do that and Klaus, fortunately, had gone nowhere near my junk. I guess there had been no need.
I hurried back to the living room to look for fairly recent assault stories while I waited for a response on the drug dealer front. People who’d been caught for being violent types weren’t going to change their names or move towns—a lot of them would be proud of it—and wouldn’t have been in jail for that long. I could then look them up. They’d probably still have a Facebook profile, and then it’d just be a question of finding an up-to-date address. It was definitely worth looking.
The drug dealer angle might not work after all; maybe Rick wouldn’t want to give out the number. He was a close enough friend to
trust me—well, only just close enough—but this was someone else’s information we were talking about. We’d been drinking buddies for about a year, making the most of his small staff discount at Barrington’s, but who knew how his dealer friend would feel about Rick passing out his phone number? Did dealers even give out their numbers to strangers? I suddenly felt stupid. They probably didn’t.
Then I heard my phone ping, and Klaus, seated by me once more, turned the phone screen outwards so that I could see it. The conversation was laid out before me:
Rick, do you know anyone who could sort me out something for the weekend? I don’t know what I want, and I need options.
The reply:
ha ha yeah I know a guy he doesn’t give his number out anymore to new people but you can go see him if I tell him you’re coming its fine if I say you’re all good here’s the address
I told Klaus to reply with:
Can you see if he’s in right now?
I went back to my online searches, feeling cold. After a few minutes, the response came back:
yeah hes in for the next hour he says if im vouching for you its all cool to go round hes a good guy
“Tell him… tell him I’m on my way.”
This is happening, I thought. This is actually happening.
I had my target. A drug dealer. I was going to kill a drug dealer. A drug dealer.
That counts. That’s bad enough. It outweighs. It was about the balance, after all.
But how—I wondered this even as I ran to the bathroom to throw up—was I actually going to do it?
***
I had the options laid out on the table in front of me. It was now 11:35 am.
A paring knife.
A hammer.
Kill Someone Page 5
