Paul Cleave - The Killing Hour

“Hello?”

Nothing. He steps inside. “Hello?”

Still nothing. He flicks on the flashlight. He’s in a dining room. Nothing looks out of place. He moves further in. The headset to the phone is sitting on the floor, the cable torn from it. That same cable is a few feet away near the oven. He crouches down over it. There’s a knot in the middle, and the ends have been cut by a knife or by scissors. At some point this cable was used to tie something up. Or somebody. He goes through the house, searching it room by room, feeling relief with every room that doesn’t have a dead body in it. There are no signs of a struggle. The bedroom is a mess, clothes have been pulled out from the wardrobe, probably packed away into a suitcase. Did Jo run, or was she taken? The cut cable suggests the latter. But why take her and pack stuff for her?

He walks back into the dining room. Technically, he doesn’t know anything bad happened here. It looks that way-but it may not be. Feldman may not be responsible for any of this. Could just be she packed some stuff and left. But the phone cord? Maybe the phone is faulty. No matter how he looks at that, the only explanation is a bad one. There’s no handbag. No car keys. No purse. But there’s a cell phone on the kitchen table. There’s the piece of cable, and the car in the garage, and an unlocked front door. He picks up the cell phone. He goes through and finds Charlie Feldman’s number. He calls it. He gets a message saying the number is no longer in service.

He walks back down to his car. He pulls his cell phone out of his pocket. He needs to call this in. As much as he wants to get his hands on Feldman by himself, this case has now also become about Jo Feldman, and he needs the police looking for her. Only he can’t do that without explaining why he was here. And anyway, he doesn’t know something has happened to her.

And, if it has, then whatever has happened has happened.

He puts his phone back into his pocket. This might be about to get a lot more complicated than it should have been. He pulls away from the curb. Holding on to the evidence the way he did, well, he’s already too deep now. He can’t tell anybody what’s happened, and he can’t back away. He has to stay committed.

He’ll find Feldman, he’s sure of it, and if Feldman is the one who took Jo, then he’ll find her too, and everything is going to be okay. That’s what he tries to tell himself, but the same twenty years he’s had of seeing bad stuff are now telling him that may not be the case at all.

Tuesday morning and we wake up to rain. Warm rain. The type you get in summer and love to walk in. I turn on the radio and listen to a weather report. An old guy tells us to expect twenty-eight degrees. Tells us to expect more rain tonight. Tells us the twenty-eight degrees is going to drop to around ten. Tells us it’s one of the warmest autumns on record. He doesn’t tell us what we should do if some guy is trying to kill us. I figure he’s just looking out the window and telling it like it is.

I have woken with a small headache, a dry mouth, and the flavorless dregs of a dream. There’s no difficulty in separating the dream from reality-I only have to look over at Jo to know what’s really going on. I have abducted her. I have stolen her away from her life and in that action Action Man is starting to become the monster Cyris is. Though my dreams were full of death and murder I was a hero, yet from the moment I stepped out of my car I was a hero doomed to fail. I don’t even know what I am now.

There was a point where I thought I was going to succeed. Cyris was on top of me, the hard ground was digging into my back, the night air was still, and there were no signs of life outside of our small trio. I managed to throw my head up and crack my forehead into his nose and I used that momentum to push him backward. I got to my feet and raced for the flashlight. He knocked me off balance before I made it and my tangling legs had me back on the ground within seconds. When Cyris brought his knife down toward me his intentions were clear, and in the weak edges of the flashlight beam I knew death wasn’t giving me up as a lost cause.

All I did then was react. I got my hands up and onto his wrists before he could bring the knife all the way down. I was lucky to have gotten my hands into the position without having my fingers scattered over my chest. I pushed my arms to the side to redirect his balance. The moment he began to topple I used my right palm as a hammer and nailed it into the base of his broken nose. He let go of the knife. There was no room for hesitation. I picked the blade up and plunged it ahead. The blade hit something hard before slowing down and it felt like I was pushing it through wet cement. I kept pushing until it came to a complete stop. For one moment we were frozen and then his mouth dropped open and the air that rolled out smelled like spoiled meat. He collapsed on top of me, a dead weight that I thought would get deader by the second, only I was wrong. I dragged myself from beneath him and listened as his fingers slowly tapped out a death march against the handle, and then the tapping stopped.

The silence then was complete, heavy and thick, an emptiness of sound that pushed into my ears and into my mind, crushing my thoughts. I had killed a man and it felt good. Okay-maybe good is the wrong word. I think what I felt in that moment was more about what I didn’t feel-I didn’t feel bad. I didn’t feel any sense of guilt. If I had to choose one thing to sum it up, I would say what I felt was relief.

Of course that relief quickly changed to fear. Out of nowhere the story of what had happened to Benjamin Hyatt came to me. I had just killed a man to save two women, and for that I could go to jail. Would I? No. I couldn’t see how a jury would convict me. I couldn’t really see how I would be facing jail time. But of course Hyatt would have thought the same thing. Would have kept thinking it right up to the moment he got beaten so badly in jail he died.

I look over at Jo. She’s staring silently at me, looking me up and down. My clothes look like I’ve ironed wrinkles into them. The cuts on my face are slowly starting to heal. I get up and use the bathroom then head into the kitchen. I start making coffee, hoping it will help dilute the weird feeling of waking up in a strange room and worrying about kidnapping and death. I untie Jo and take out the gag. She sits up and stares at me and continues her silence. I don’t know what to say to her. I fight the urge to say sorry over and over as she uses the bathroom. She takes her suitcase in with her. I wait by the door in case she starts screaming, only she doesn’t. When she comes out she’s changed into a T-shirt and a pair of cargo pants.

“I’ll make you some coffee,” I say. She doesn’t bother to thank me as I do just that. I put it in front of her then sit well back in case she throws it in my face. “Look, I know that this must seem pretty weird-”

“Weird? Jesus, Charlie, it’s gone way past weird.”

“Sure, maybe you’re right, but-”

“Maybe? You use the word maybe ? But what? But it’s going to be okay? Is that it? You tied me up and now you want me to be your friend?”

“I wasn’t going to put it like that.”

“Whatever. I’m hungry. Are you going to make me starve too?”

“There isn’t any food here.”

“Then let’s go get some.”

“Why? So you can ditch me the first chance you get?”

She doesn’t answer. Instead she just stares at me. Whatever she’s about to say, she’s given it some serious thought. I’ve seen the process many times over the years. She even did it when I proposed to her, which turned the whole proposal thing into a really awkward moment, but as she pointed out back then, it was better to put more thought into it than decide on the emotion of the moment. That’s what she’s doing now.