Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

“Don’t do it,” I yell out to Stanton.

“Keep your hands in the air,” Schroder says to Cole, and Schroder is moving forward now. So are the news crews, they’re providing the lights and the cameras and the rest of us are providing the action.

“Your children are alive,” I tell Stanton, and there’s only about ten feet between us now.

Cole throws me a look, frowns at me, then looks back at the cameras.

“I killed them,” Cole says, loud enough for Stanton and me but not for the media, “and one of them I raped.”

“He hisent shirt them,” I say, hearing the wrong words coming out. Fuck.

“You killed my children,” Stanton says, not hearing me, only looking at Cole.

“And I enjoyed it.”

Stanton takes the final step. I try to cover the distance, but I can’t, not in the time it takes for Stanton to bring the knife down. If it’s the middle of Cole’s back he’s aiming for, then it’s almost a bull’s-eye. If he’s trying to put enough force into the blade that it sinks right down to the hilt, then that isn’t quite as good-because it snags on a bone somewhere and only goes halfway. He pulls the knife out as Cole drops to his knees, giving Schroder a clear view of Stanton and of what’s going on.

“Drop the knife,” Schroder shouts, changing his aim from Cole to Stanton, back to Cole, then back to Stanton again.

I get within two steps of Stanton. I shout, really focusing on the words to tell him his children are fine, and I hold my arms out, palms up, and he turns toward me, this wild man with wild hair and eyes bugging out of his skull. “Shure susshen are thine,” I tell him.

He looks at me with absolutely no comprehension of what I’m trying to say.

He raises the blade and this time his aim is the back of Cole’s neck. I cover the final step, I get my left hand around Stanton’s wrist, and I pull him forward and we both crash to the ground. I feel the stitches in my leg popping. I feel the pressure inside my skull building, the doctor’s warning floating around in there on a sea of pain. Stanton pushes me off him and I roll to my side. He half sits up and sees the knife is still in his hand. He looks at Cole, then at me, then crawls toward Cole again. I get onto my feet and try to grab hold of him. He looks at me, then slashes the knife in my direction. I don’t see it in time and there’s no way to avoid it.

Schroder shoots him.

The gunshot sets off a whole lot of chain reactions in my head. The first one is that for a few seconds the nerves between my eyes and my brain stop working. I’m standing in the dark with no idea what’s happening. Then a switch is thrown and my vision comes back, and with it a whole lot of pain. I stumble sideways, clutching my head as if I’m the one who’s been shot. The lights from the news crews all point in different directions as everybody ducks and reacts. I lean against the side of the house.

Cole twists toward us. “No,” he cries out, still on his knees. “No,” he repeats, and this time a blood bubble grows and pops between his lips. He loses balance and falls forward. The back of his shirt is soaking with blood. He tilts down the porch steps and comes to a stop with his face on the path and his legs still on the porch.

Stanton, however, is trying to get to his feet, only he’s not having such a great time of it. The front of his pajamas over his right shoulder have turned red. I’ve got one hand over my eye because somehow it eases the pain from whatever the fuck my brain is doing. He tries to lift the knife again, but his arm won’t work. I can see in his face that he can’t figure out the mechanics of it all. He keeps trying, and then he uses his good arm to take the knife out of the good hand attached to the bad arm. He looks around and starts swinging the knife, pointing it in the direction of the media, at Schroder, and then at me. He can’t seem to spot Cole. He swings it toward me and Schroder takes a second shot. I can’t see where this one hits Stanton, but it stops him in his tracks. He looks down at his body, then at me, and his eyes start to clear.

I try to talk to him, to tell him his children are okay, but the words just don’t come out, they’re all too heavy and the ones that do finally come out just don’t make sense. The lights are getting brighter as the news crews come forward. Schroder reaches us. He kicks the knife further, then helps me out from beneath Stanton.

“You okay?” he asks me.

I nod.

He grabs his cell phone and calls for an ambulance. Two of them. He doesn’t let go of the gun. There are lights on him, lights on me, lights on Cole and Stanton. There is blood everywhere, all of it making for good TV footage.

“He was never going to hurt them,” Schroder says, talking to Stanton once he’s hung up.

“I don’t. . don’t understand,” he says, and he looks like a man waking from a dream.

“They’re fine,” Schroder tells him.

“And Katy?”

“I’m sure Katy is fine too.”

“He. . he cut off her finger.”

“I know, but that’s all he did,” Schroder says, saying it as though cutting her finger off is nothing.

“He. . he didn’t kill them?” Stanton asks.

“No,” I say, and it’s the first word to have come out clear.

“I should have. .” he says, and then he starts to cough. He keeps coughing, and when he finally stops he starts to smile. “Should have known,” he says, and then he doesn’t say anything else, just stares up at us with that smile on his face, and it’s still there when the ambulance arrives five minutes later.

“You sure you’re okay?” Schroder asks.

“I’m fine,” I tell him, knowing that if he’d heard me speak earlier he’d know I wasn’t.

“Okay,” he says, and climbs into the back of the ambulance with Caleb Cole.

I drive Schroder’s car. I asked one of the paramedics for the strongest painkillers they had and he handed me two tablets but the headache isn’t going. My ears are still ringing from the gunshots. Some of the media stay at the house, some follow, more media vans show up as the story gathers momentum. We get to the hospital. I pull in behind the ambulance with Cole in it and see it unloaded in the opposite order I saw it loaded. They rush him into an emergency room. The second ambulance pulls up and they do the same for Dr. Stanton. His daughter is carried out and rushed in too.

Seeing Katy I remember I have her finger at home. I pull out of the parking lot and head back to the house. All the boy-racers seem to have gone home. The only traffic now is made up from people finishing the graveyard shift, or those with an early start. I see a fluffy tail, two back legs, and not much else of the cat as it races away from the back door of my house. I grab the finger from the fridge. It’s cold and feels solid and I tuck it into my pocket before deciding that’s a bad idea, that the body heat may only damage it. I grab a drink of water and stand by the sink with my eyes closed willing the headache to disappear, but it’s not listening to me, the thing living in there no longer willing to be ignored. My ears are still ringing. I head back to the hospital with the finger on the passenger seat, the same sights as before only in the opposite order and lighter too.

I can’t find a parking space when I get back to the hospital. Cop cars and media vans are everywhere, and I have to park on the other side of the road by Hagley Park, the huge park in the middle of the city that even at this time has a few people jogging slowly around it. I get buzzed in by the same nurse I spoke to when I came here to see my wife. I hold up the finger and show the first doctor I come across and tell him who it belongs to. He takes it and rushes off. I find the waiting room I was in earlier. Schroder is sitting down in it. So are a bunch of other cops. I sit next to Schroder. We don’t talk to each other. Others are chatting away. Schroder stares ahead and I can tell he’s replaying the shootings over and over, first Mrs. Whitby, then Dr. Stanton, and I’m replaying them too, wondering if there was anything different we could have done. An hour goes by. Nobody comes, nobody goes. The replays don’t get any prettier but the headache fades. I don’t come up with any other scenarios that might have worked. Schroder just keeps looking at the wall. Eventually I check my cell phone for missed calls, and there are a few, most of them from the police station, one of them from Dr. Forster. My heart sinks seeing that one. The way the week has gone, I don’t see it being good news. I don’t call him back. I can’t. Whatever he has to say, no matter how bad, if I don’t hear him say it then it doesn’t need to have happened.