The Killing Hour (28 page)

What hasn’t changed is that I’m not the right person to be doing this. And, like last time, there’s nobody else.

I head towards Dali’s trees. The paddock doesn’t look the same as it did when I drove past with Jo earlier in the week. The trees look like they’ve been dragged from the set of some B-grade sci-fi movie, perhaps the same one I seem to be caught in. Everything is eerily silent, as if the sound guy came along earlier and packed the bugs and insects into containers and took them away.

My grip is tight on the shotgun and sweat keeps sliding into the corners of my eyes. There’s a beam of light cutting through the same clearing I stood in nearly one hundred hours earlier. Jo is tied to a tree. Her head is tilted upwards, her neck exposed to me. There’s a piece of wire wrapped around her throat and the trunk. Her eyes are bulging and her face is turning purple. Her lips are pulled back and her teeth are clenched in a grimace as she tries to pull in air.

I know it’s a trap even as I run towards her, but the alternative is watching her die. I sweep the shotgun in all directions as I approach.

‘Hold on,’ I say to her, and when I reach her I try pulling forward on the wire but it doesn’t give. I have to move out of the light and into the darkness, following the wire with my hands, knowing that any moment Cyris is going to attack me. I find where it’s twisted off, and I have to put down the shotgun to loosen it.

Something hard crashes into the back of my head.

My body has taken so much of a beating I don’t even know what the hell is going on any more as I fall to the ground. Cyris drags me back into the light, away from the shotgun, away from Jo. The wire has gone from her neck. On the ground ahead of her is his burnt black satchel, bulging in the middle. The material has taken on a plastic look and the zip has been gummed open. I try to kick him away as he secures the rope around my ankles. He claps the handcuffs back onto my wrists. I try to sit up as he pulls the rope dragging me across the ground. I try to do lots of things but I keep on failing. Roots dig into the small of my back, tearing open the skin. He throws the rope over one of the branches. He grabs it and pulls down. My feet lift into the air.

My world turns upside down. I claw at the roots and the leaves and the dirt, my fingers desperately trying to find purchase, but the ground is hard and offers no help. He keeps pulling on the rope. Soon I’m swinging back and forth in a small arc. My jacket falls over my head and hangs from my arms. The handcuffs stop it from coming off. My T-shirt bunches up around my chest. Now I’m the one swinging, I’m upside down. At least the noose is around my ankles and not my neck. Cyris moves to his satchel and a moment later a can of lighter fluid comes into view.

Oh, Jesus.

The new disjointed grin the fire gave him flashes at me in the moonlight as he points the nozzle at me. Monster or merely a man, nothing human is there for me to lock my eyes onto.

‘How does it feel?’ he asks.

Cyris is holding the ten-thousand-dollar Glock. He throws me another fragile grin. There’s blood on his teeth, and flecks of sand and dirt. His damp hair has been swept back, combed dry by the wind. It’s shorter than before because some has been singed away. His rough beard has melted: the shorter hairs have burned into his skin, the longer ones have formed waxy clumps. The skin on his face has blistered, red in most areas, white in others. His eyes are dark with violence. His eyebrows have gone, leaving two slug-sized patches of rawness. His cracked lips look puffy and charred. His clothes are stained by the fire and by seawater. They are covered in leaves and dirt and sand. Cotton patches that look like medical gauze have been badly sutured to his skin. The handcuffs are gone: he must have a collection of keys somewhere.

I don’t answer. He begins dousing me. I reach out but can’t manage to knock the nozzle away. The fumes make my eyes water. When I look over to Jo she’s just a blur. I bring my hands up and use my hanging jacket to wipe away some of the tears. When the world comes into focus, all I can see is Cyris, and all I can focus on is the joy in his eyes at what is coming.

51

Yeah, he likes it out here, yeah, he likes it out here a lot. That’s why he’s come back, to the home of his failure, the home of his nightmare — to right the wrongs and, this time, this time, there will be no wrongs. He likes it out here, yet he hates it too, because it represents all that’s bad in his life: the wound to his stomach, the headaches, the money that he lost. His mind isn’t operating the way it ought to be; his thoughts aren’t balanced — or are they? Hate and like balance each other out, don’t they? He isn’t sure, and this ought to really scare him, but the night is warm, the wind has died down, the paddock is silent and revenge is at hand. Life is good.

He’s been lucky, lucky, so lucky, and he knows it, really knows it. He’s never believed in luck before, not really, because life is what
you
make of it, not what
it
makes of you. It’s skill he believes in, skill he’s lived with for all his years. But it feels good to have something go his way, it feels good to know that something was meant to be, because what is luck other than destiny?

Only problem is his headache is back, it’s back and raging out of control and it’s all Charlie Feldman’s fault. Charlie is really going to pay — big time. He’s going to wish he was dead and he’s going to keep on wishing that. Death lasts a long time, yeah, a real long time, but for Charlie the dying itself will last for ever.

His body is fucked up and he doesn’t know what he’ll tell his wife, because she’ll nag him until he comes up with an excuse, so maybe he’ll have to kill her. But he doesn’t want to, he loves her, loves her more than anything – but not more than her nagging.

His trip into the ocean was a painful one. The bulletproof vest got waterlogged and nearly helped him to drown, and probably would have, until a wave picked him up and threw him onto the sand, only metres away from the woman. It was the luck/destiny he’s been thinking about. He doesn’t know, though, how the pain fits into either of those. When he gets back home, he’s going to have to start taking the painkillers again. He can’t recall seeing any at his house so he’ll have to go to a pharmacy, and they’ll look at him funny so he may have to consider killing more people.

The tin of lighter fluid is half empty and he wishes he had brought along more. He wishes he had several litres so he could make Charlie cook for hours, but all he had access to was the last tin in the car. Maybe he ought to just burn a limb at a time. Or maybe he ought to burn the bitch first and make him watch. Setting them alight at the same time would be a waste, and anyway, he doesn’t have enough fluid for both. His hands shake at the prospect of having so many things he can do, and he has plenty of time to decide. He’s experiencing something he hasn’t felt in a long time – excitement.

His mind is throbbing and he raises a hand to the side of his head. When all this is over he will go home and take more painkillers. He doesn’t know where he’ll get them, but he’ll find a way. He’ll take them and he’ll write a note to remind himself that everything has been taken care of, that everything is okay. He can start recovering in a state of bliss. What could be better?

His mind is wandering. He looks at Charlie, then down at the lighter fluid in his hand. It would be a waste of money if he didn’t use the entire tin.

So many options. Life is good.

52

I remember seeing those contraptions on TV where you can hang upside down from a bar, clipped on with special shoes. It’s supposed to be relaxing, to do something positive for your body — maybe realign your spine or soul or consolidate your positive energy. It’s pretty obvious the person who invented it wasn’t soaked in lighter fluid at the time.

Cyris has his eyes fixed on me but he’s not really seeing me. I think he’s gone somewhere, he’s gone to whatever place his mind sometimes takes him. Could be a happy place, but I hate to think what a happy place for a guy like this could be. I wipe at my eyes again and look up at the rope, but no matter how I see things, I’m just as screwed. When I look back at Cyris he smiles at me.

The fluid smells like eroding batteries. It comes at me in sharp little streams, splashing onto my face. My nose begins to burn. It leaks into my sinuses as I cough. The back of my mouth feels like it’s been ripped to shreds. My eyes are burning a hole through to the back of my skull.

The pain spreads like ripples in a pool of gasoline. I cry out and clutch my hands to my nose. I start shaking my head, hard enough to become disorientated. I’m desperate to suck in more air but I can’t. Cyris keeps spraying more fluid at me. I wriggle around on the rope like a worm on a hook, knowing the more I scream, the more fluid he’ll get into my mouth. Then suddenly he stops. He’s either got tired or he’s thought of something else to do. He moves over to his satchel and sits down, cross-legged. He appears calm, as if he’s meditating or waiting for an inner voice to dictate his next move. He picks up a hammer and a metal stake. They appear to be the same ones he used the other night.

‘Hey, arsehole. How does it feel?’

My breath tastes of fire and feels ragged, as if I’m swallowing a well-used chisel.

I start to choke. He starts to laugh.

‘It’ll hurt more once I’ve lit it. You do know that, right?’

I say nothing.

‘They say the true torture is in the anticipation. I’m interested in your opinion.’

I look over to Jo. I blink away the tears but more keep coming. A sharp pain continues to race back and forth from behind my nose to my brain.

I grit my teeth, then spit out a sentence. The words come out cased in lighter fluid. ‘I know why you killed them.’

He shrugs. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Frank McClory paid you to kill his wife.’ If this surprises him he doesn’t let it show. ‘He had a life insurance policy.’ I’m confident this is a good guess, and even if I’m wrong I don’t see how Cyris could know. ‘He wanted to be rid of her. It was financially better for him to kill her than divorce her. It was probably worth half a million or something.’

‘Carry on, Sherlock.’

My head is throbbing. Just how long can a person live hanging upside down? Before being set on fire?

‘Frank knew he’d be the prime suspect so he wanted you to kill Kathy in a unique way. Killing Luciana diverted focus away from Frank because it made the women look like they’d caught the attention of a complete psychopath. He didn’t want them killed at home because he didn’t want to be the first one on the scene. He wanted them found together, but I ruined your plans.’

‘The plans,’ he says, his burnt face contorting so he can fit the words out in one large clump. ‘You-ruined-more-then-just-my-plan, you-ruined-my-fucking-life.’ Then, relaxed all of a sudden, he’s waving his hands like a conductor, as if his small outburst never happened. ‘Go on.’

‘At Kathy’s house you could have killed me, but you knew I couldn’t go to the police because they’d think I had done it. You saw your opportunity to blackmail me.’

‘And?’

‘This sadistic lunatic thing is just a facade to hide what you really are.’

‘And what would that be?’

‘A cold-blooded killer. A paid hitman.’

He puts the hammer and stake onto the ground and starts clapping. A slow patronising round of applause that would make stage actors sick to their stomachs. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he says, ‘the one and only Charlie Feldman.’

‘I just hope my handwriting wasn’t too messy on that hundred-dollar note.’

The clapping stops as if some invisible force has just grabbed his arms and frozen them in the air. His lips become a thin scar. They stay that way for a few more seconds before forming into a grin. It becomes the sort of smile I’d expect to see on a demon.

‘You took my money?’

I nod and my body begins to swing around in a small arc.

‘You took the money.’ He starts to laugh, but I doubt he finds it that funny.

‘You killed Frank for nothing,’ I point out.

He seems to think about this. ‘His bad luck, I suppose.’

I guess it was. Just like it was Kathy and Luciana’s bad luck. Just like it’s Jo’s bad luck, and mine. What can you do against it? Carry a four-leaf clover? A gun?

‘Do you know what I had to go through to earn that?’ he asks.

‘I know.’

‘You think it was easy?’

‘I think you enjoyed it.’

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a cigarette lighter. He runs his thumb over the metal wheel; it strikes the flint, a few sparks appear, then a flame. He seems pleased with himself. The look on his damaged face suggests he’s taking all the credit for inventing fire. He stands up and walks over to Jo. Her eyes widen and she tries to push herself further into the tree. The miracle of camouflage is no kinder to Jo than it was to Kathy.

‘Leave her alone.’

He doesn’t answer.

‘Leave her alone, you piece of shit.’

He lets the flame go out before stroking her down the side of her neck with the lighter. ‘Your boyfriend here said I could have you any way I wanted, and I doubt your boyfriend is in any position to lie to me.’ Cyris turns to me and winks. ‘As a final favour to you, partner, I’ll let you watch.’

‘I’ll fucking kill you.’

‘You think?’

Yeah, I do think. I start twisting my body. I manage small circles through the air while my arms thrash around ahead of me. I bend from my waist and try to reach my feet, but even if I could there’d be nothing I could do. I throw my limbs back and forth, forcing my joints towards dislocation. My head feels as though it’s about to pop.

Cyris puts the hammer and stake down. ‘This is no good. With you wiggling all over the place, partner, you’re gonna distract me.’

He sparks and revives the flame on his way over to me, swaying it from side to side like a drunken teenager at a rock concert. I keep struggling against the rope.

‘You can’t save her,’ he says.

I know. And it hurts like hell.

He raises his shirt, revealing wet padding and duct tape around his stomach. The padding is red in the middle. ‘You ought to be more careful in the future.’