The Killing Hour (24 page)

‘Are you a cop?’ he asks.

‘No.’

‘If you are,’ he says, ‘this is entrapment.’

I don’t know if it’s entrapment or not. ‘Whatever you say.’

‘Wait here.’

From beneath the counter he pulls out a sign that says ‘Back in 15 mins’ and hangs it on the door, checking that it’s locked. He comes back to the counter, makes his way around it, and disappears though a doorway. Ten grand is a lot of money for a gun. But it guarantees the fact I’m going to get one. If I showed up with forty dollars and a free hamburger voucher I wouldn’t get the same quality of service.

I spin around the newspaper he was reading and study the headline. It’s dedicated to Frank McClory. He was found early this morning by an unnamed woman. It doesn’t mention how he died or whether it’s related to his dead wife, but he must have been found early enough for it to make the paper. The article is small, proof the reporter had little information and even less time to come up with something dramatic. There’s little speculation – that’ll come later with news bulletins and tomorrow’s paper.

So now the police are going to rake a fine-tooth comb through Frank’s affairs. And they’re going to find out he was more involved than they first thought. Does this make it safe for me to go to them?

‘Shame about that lawyer,’ the salesman says, stepping back through the door. He puts a wooden box on the counter. He’s wearing a pair of thin gloves.

‘It’s not often they get put to such good use,’ I say.

Arthur starts laughing, then stops when he sees I’m being serious. I can see him considering if I’m the type of person who should have a gun. He pats his pocket. Reminds himself of why he’s doing this.

‘You’re not going to be shooting somebody, are you, mister?’

‘It’s for self-defence. Home invasions have been in the papers all week.’

‘And you want to be prepared.’

‘Exactly.’

He nods slowly. He knows what I’m getting at.

‘Come on back through here. It’s more private.’

I follow him through the doorway. There are posters of guns and girls, sometimes of both. A calendar from four years back with a naked smiling woman stops me from looking around at the shelves full of stock and the cluttered workbench.

‘This is a Glock 18-C,’ he says, putting the package down on the workbench. ‘It takes a nine-millimetre Parabellum bullet. Nine-millimetre is the most famous and frequently used handgun cartridge in the world. It’s used in semi-automatic pistols and in sub-machine guns. This Glock here,’ he hands it to me by the handle, ‘has a magazine capacity of seventeen rounds. Of course it’s currently unloaded.’

‘Of course.’

‘Naturally it isn’t designed for target shooting. It’s purely a defence weapon. Used in the service industry overseas.’

‘What, like restaurants?’

‘Yeah, good one,’ he says, his face tightening as he frowns at me. ‘Police. Military. Armed security.’

‘Right.’ I’m holding the gun by the handle, bouncing my arm slowly up and down like gun guys do, getting a feel for the weight. Shame there aren’t any tyres to kick.

‘It’s a little over six hundred grams,’ Arthur says. ‘A hundred and eighty-six millimetres long, small enough to slip in your pocket. It has an internal safety …’

‘Meaning?’

He carries on for a few more minutes telling me about the gun. I’m already sold, was from the moment I saw it had a trigger and a handle and a barrel.

‘The Glock 18-C is fully automatic,’ he continues, and it seems he could talk for ever about the pistol. ‘There’s a switch here,’ he touches it with his gloved finger, ‘that selects between semi or fully automatic. Highly illegal if owned by a civilian in any country.’

I imagine firing off seventeen shots with one pull of the trigger. Yeah, it doesn’t sound too legal. He shows me how to use the gun, how to load the magazine, how to slip the magazine into the handle and tells me a few more facts. Then he takes it off me and puts it into the box. Puts the box into a bag. Keeps his hands on the bag until I hand him the rest of the money. Then he hands it over to me and we step back into the shop.

‘I need some ammunition.’

He slowly nods. I don’t know if the ammunition is illegal, but he has to go out the back to get some. He includes it in the price. I figure he’s a generous guy. Ten thousand dollars. The world’s most expensive handgun. I reach out and grab the box of ammo but he doesn’t let it go.

‘This conversation never happened, buddy, you got that? I’ve never seen you, and never want to see you again.’

Unless I come back with another ten grand. ‘Sure.’

‘There’s no proof linking you to me.’

I look at the thin gloves that weren’t on his hands when I arrived but were when he first came back out with the box in his hand. ‘I know.’

‘And I want your word you’re not using it to go on a rampage.’

I promise him. Just like any homicidal maniac would. I tuck the package under my arm, turn to leave, then turn back.

‘For ten grand I want this too.’

I grab the newspaper. He says nothing. Doesn’t think about his fingerprints all over it. I tuck it under my arm and walk back out into the Christchurch heat.

42

Lying in bed, in bed, and it’s comfortable and warm but his stomach hurts and his head hurts, and it’s light outside but he doesn’t want to go into the light because it’ll hurt too. He stays in bed because he’s tired, because he’s been up all night, and his wife is at work so he can stay here without getting annoyed, without being questioned about the duct tape holding his stomach together. He wishes he could put more around his head to keep his thoughts together too. His wife hasn’t seen his wound yet, but she will. She will see it when they sleep together, but at the moment his job is keeping him away at night, and the job he does is not the job she thinks he does. The weekend is coming and the weekend will see them sleeping together and the weekend will show her his wounds and then …

And then he thinks about Frank McClory and how the revenge tasted sweet, tasted sweet, and killing Charlie Feldman will taste even sweeter. It’s a horrible world when you can’t trust anybody, a horrible world when people don’t pay you for the job you have done. McClory probably thought money made the world go around, but he was wrong. It’s revenge that does that, and last night it made the world go around so fast for McClory that he was torn from it. He thinks of the hundred-dollar note he stuffed into the man’s mouth and he can’t remember if McClory was alive at that point. He has no idea what he was thinking when he wrote that note, no idea where a guy like McClory got the balls to try and end their relationship with a threat. He didn’t bother searching the house for the money because there never had been any money. He had just let himself in and then let himself back out.

People are crazy. People are stupid and they are crazy, and he’s neither of these so people must see things differently. He’s a professional, he knows he is – or was, until Monday. He kills for a living, he kills for the money and the enjoyment, and there was no enjoyment in any of this, none at all, and now he has no money either. He must look for compensation in other areas. He doubts Feldman can come up with the money, but he doesn’t doubt the man will try.

He drifts in and out of sleep and the green numbers on the clock radio tick over quicker than they should. He’s sweating, and the room spins, and he wonders if this is the most relaxed he will ever feel. He needs to do something about his wound before it becomes infected, though of course it probably already is. He can feel the badness from the cut slowly seeping through him. Infecting him. Changing the way he acts and feels and thinks.

He throws back the sheets. They’re damp and he contemplates whether he should write a note to remind himself to wash them, but he forgets about the note even as he forgets about the sheets. He heads into the bathroom and draws himself a bath. He doesn’t know if lying in hot water is going to be a good thing because it would soon become hot water full of the dirt and bacteria from his body, so he pulls out the plug and decides to have a shower instead. He stands beneath it for twenty minutes, letting the water soak into the tape. He gently teases the edges as it does so. It’s a battle but one he wins. In the end the tape comes away, and blood, about a quarter of a glass of dark blood, falls onto the floor in one large splash. The bleeding slows to a trickle but doesn’t stop. He uses a flannel to wipe away the flakes of dirt and a few tiny leaves along with the gunk left by the tape.

He can’t see how dark blood can be good. It makes him think that something inside his stomach has been damaged. Isn’t there a kidney there somewhere? Or a liver? What about his actual stomach? He realises he’s eaten very little over the last few days, and when he does his stomach burns. Why is that? He studies the skin with his fingers, pulling and poking. It is black in areas, white in others, hard all over, and he isn’t sure which colour represents the infection. He lets the hot water wash over it.

He gets out of the shower and sits on the bathroom floor with his back against the bathtub and his towel beneath him. He places some medical gauze over the wound, some padding over the gauze, and wraps duct tape around his torso to hold everything in place. When he gets up he doesn’t feel like the new man he was hoping for, but it’s better than seeing dark blood fall out of him.

The house is still closed up because any light will throw his mind back into spasms of pain. He moves to his bedroom, carrying his bloody towel and bloody flannel with him, and sits on the edge of the bed. He runs his hands over the dressing on his stomach. The wound is clean and patched and the pain seems to be just a shadow of what it was earlier. A packet of aspirin sits on the nightstand along with a packet of sleeping pills. Both are nearly empty. He takes two of each and sets his alarm clock. He rolls the flannel into the towel and tucks them into a plastic bag. He will have to either get rid of them or make an excuse to his wife. He climbs back into bed. The sheets are damp and he thinks about making a note to wash them, but before he can make one and after he forgets what the note would be for anyway, he falls asleep.

43

The temperature is rising and I have the air-conditioning turned to full. In this heat it’s easy to forget I nearly froze to death two nights ago, but easy to remember that hell is waiting around the corner.

I stop at a coffee shop and insert myself inside another slice of normal life, the type of slice where normal people are doing normal things on a day-to-day basis that doesn’t include blood. It’s a more upscale café than the one I sat at two mornings ago. All the furniture is made from shiny metal and shiny wood, and several mirrors and paintings have been jammed up on the wall, each an identical distance from the last. I sit at a window where I can keep an eye on the car because the gun is beneath the front seat. I order some lunch from a waitress who’s obviously psychic because she says things like ‘See you’re reading the paper’ and ‘Nice day outside’. I drink coffee and, in a rare moment of healthy consumption, I have a glass of orange juice. I read my ten-thousand-dollar newspaper. It offers up stories about politics and about companies going broke. There are articles about foreign wars where people kill in the name of God. If He won’t help them then He sure as hell won’t help me. I stare at the crossword I would probably half complete if I had a pen. When my bacon and eggs arrive I nearly inhale them off the plate before the waitress can put them down. When I finish I trap a twenty-dollar note beneath the plate as a tip because I’m awestruck by her psychic abilities. I especially like the one when she told me I looked as though I’ve been through the wars. I want to ask what her thoughts are on tonight but decide I might not like her predictions.

The first thing I see when I step outside is Kathy. She’s standing over the road staring at me. With the sun in my eyes it’s hard to read the expression on her face. My breath catches and my world sways and I have to look down to steady myself, and when I look back up she’s walking away from me. I step onto the road and a passing car toots at me and I’m given the finger. I dash in front of the next car and make it over the road. Kathy is half a block ahead of me and still walking. I call out but she doesn’t stop even though I’m certain she must hear me, must recognise my voice, must want me to follow. I continue to run, closing the distance quickly. I almost reach her when she turns the corner and is gone. Kathy has abandoned me the same way I abandoned her.

I drive home at a casual speed, my heart slowly recovering from seeing Kathy. I’m in no hurry to be anywhere yet I feel as though I’m running at a hectic pace.

The Glock feels better at home than at the store because I don’t have to pretend I know what I’m looking at. Holding it in my hands I feel liberated. I feel like I’ve beaten the system designed to keep people like myself from owning such a weapon. I turn it over in my hand, studying the lines and textures. The cold metal isn’t quite metal, according to Arthur, but a high-impact synthetic material that he didn’t name. He nicknamed the Glock the ‘plastic pistol’, yet it still has a suggestion of violence that makes me feel like things might turn out okay.

I know little about guns but I’ve fired one before. It was a Colt something or other, loud and powerful. I’d gone to a pistol range with a fellow teacher. I remember the sound the gun made, even through the earmuffs. My ears had rung for twenty minutes when he fired off six rounds before I’d pulled the muffs over my ears. I also remember the stance I was shown and the technique. Tight in my right hand. My left hand curved around the base of my right securing the weapon, my thumb low so the slide couldn’t come back and catch the web of skin between my thumb and finger.

I pick up the magazine and check to make sure it’s empty. I slip it into the gun and slap the butt of it, clicking it into place. Then I play. I point it around the kitchen, the dining room, the lounge. Action Man is having fun. For a while I do everything that the safety manual tells me not to do. I point it at things. I pull the trigger. The slide pulls back. It clicks into place. On each pull my face tightens and my eyes half close as I expect to hear thunder when it pulls a bullet from thin air. I feel like a kid playing war. I move around corners, keeping the gun low like they do in movies.