Paul Cleave - The Killing Hour

“Look, Bill, you really do look like shit. Are you sure you shouldn’t be home?”

“Maybe you’re right,” he says, coughing into his hand to press home the point.

“We’ll search this guy’s house,” Schroder says, pointing toward Desmond Person’s house. “But, to be honest, burglary and car theft is a big step away from what happened to those two women. At the most you’ll find he probably stole the car and drove it here.”

“His file says that’s what he used to do? Steal cars and bring them home?” Landry asks.

“Well, no. But somebody brought it here.”

From there Landry drives from suburb to suburb, doing what he can to avoid traffic along the way, until finally he’s back at Charlie Feldman’s house. It’s been years since he was last on a stakeout. It was with. . hell, it was with a guy by the name of Theodore Tate, a guy who used to be a cop, but then became a private investigator and then became a real pain in the ass before ending up in jail. For the last year Landry has been convinced Tate is the kind of guy who’s done bad things for what he thinks may have been good reasons, only. .

Only shit. That’s exactly what he himself is becoming. Tate has killed people-more people than he’s let on, Landry is sure of it. Maybe Tate has cancer too.

The idea of becoming Theodore Tate is a miserable one, but one he only has to deal with for six months. Maybe less. That stakeout they went on together was at least ten years ago. Normally stakeouts were boring. They were watching a clown. Quite literally. The circus had come to town, and some poor teenager had become brain dead after buying drugs from somebody that his buddy said worked at the circus. Suspect was a guy by the name of Mortimer Dicky, also known as Beeboop the clown.

He spends a few seconds wondering if this is the right path. The Theodore Tate path. He could find and arrest Feldman and bring him into the station by himself, end his career with the people in this country loving him. And why the hell not? He deserves something other than the cancer for all his years of protecting the innocent, doesn’t he? Or he sticks with the Tate path. Make Charlie Feldman simply disappear. Magic.

He’s always been a fan of magic.

He reaches Feldman’s house. He knocks on the front door. No answer. He goes through the back gate and to the back door, which is open exactly how he left it. He goes inside. He puts on a pair of latex gloves. The living room looks the same. So does the kitchen.

But things are different when he gets down to the other end of the house.

Very different.

The kind of different that makes him clench his fists and makes him angry. The kind of different that answers the question of what he’s going to do once he finds Charlie Feldman, while at the same time dismissing the question as to whether there was any chance Feldman was innocent.

He spends ten minutes writing down every contact he can find that Feldman has. He walks back out of the house. His hands are shaking. He could probably wait inside hoping Feldman will return, but the way he can tell if a house is empty before approaching it, well, he’s not the only guy on the force with that skill. Same might go for Feldman. He doesn’t need any reason to scare the guy off. And if Feldman drives past and freaks, then he’s going to drive on, and Landry will never even know. So he decides to wait in his car.

He’s not sure if Feldman is going to come back. He must have come back during the night and he must have noticed his house had been broken into. Damn it, he should have staked the house out last night. This could have been over by now.

The day will be dark soon. He yawns again. He can’t help it. He adjusts his seat, opens a packet of peanuts, and begins calling the names on his list, starting with Feldman’s parents. He gets hold of the mother. No, their son isn’t in trouble. Yes, they’re just hoping he can assist in an investigation. No, it’s not important-something to do with one of his students who’s gotten into trouble. It turns out Feldman doesn’t even own a cell phone. The mother has no idea where Charlie may be-normally either at school or at home. Landry thanks her for her time. He can tell she’s worried. Then he hangs up.

He carries on through the address book. If he’s lucky, Feldman might just return home, or somebody might have an idea where he can start looking.

The ghosts are back. They’re telling me this is no dream. I find it hard to believe.

I’m with Kathy and Luciana and they’re alive again, but in this dream I don’t even know they’re supposed to be dead. Do they know? I try to ask, but the words don’t come out. Kathy is leaning into me, my arm around her as I help her leave the pasture the same way we arrived-alive and in one piece. Her other arm is around my shoulders, her hand digging into my upper arm hard enough to make a line of bruises. We leave Cyris and his tools and my tire iron behind. Kathy knows Luciana is alive because I’ve told her, and she smiles at me knowingly and without words tells me this is soon to be a lie. I don’t tell her she’s wrong.

Luciana jumps from the car the moment she sees her friend and the two lock themselves in an embrace. It’s the embrace of close friends and even though I don’t know either of these women, I wish I was part of it. They hold each other tight and I look away, choosing to stare at my car instead, this car that I’m sick of seeing, this car that I want to trade in, but at the moment is the best damn car in the world.

The two women break their embrace to include me in it, and no, they’re not ghosts, not yet-that’s still to come. For now they’re very much alive, alive and grateful and warm to touch, and when I open my mouth to warn them the words don’t come out. I try to tell them they mustn’t go back home, they mustn’t take me with them, but the dream is a memory and is deciding to stick to what is true, and therefore has only one path it can take.

We pile into the car, Luciana in the back and Kathy next to me. I start driving to the police station. I make it a few hundred yards before Luciana says she’d like to go home first. Kathy agrees. They want to go home. They want to clean up. Put on some fresh clothes.

“You can’t do that,” I tell them. “You can’t wash away the evidence.”

Kathy nods. “That’s true,” she says. “Let’s at least go back to Luciana’s house and make a plan.”

“A plan?”

“We need a lawyer,” Kathy says.

I don’t understand. “What for?”

“Her husband, Frank, is a lawyer,” Luciana says.

I feel jealous at this piece of information. It’s stupid. “I still don’t know why we need one,” I say.

“Benjamin Hyatt,” Kathy says.

The name sounds familiar. It takes a few seconds for it to filter through layers of memory. “The lawyer from the news?” I say.

“Exactly.”

I tell them it’s not the same thing. They agree, they tell me it’s different, but they also tell me the result is the same. The circumstances don’t matter as much as they should when it comes to the law. We still killed somebody, but of course it was more I than we. We debate the merits of going. We debate it for only a minute when Luciana points out we can discuss it back at her house instead. She tells me she needs a drink.

She gives me directions to her house. I try to steer us toward the police station, but the world the dream is set in is set in stone, as much as I try to save their lives now, there can be no changing it. I manage to find the words to tell them they are going to die if we stay on this course. I know this because their deaths were front-page news, and what you read in the papers is true, the dream is real, the memory is real, because we are in the Real World. Even though the words come out, neither Kathy nor Luciana can hear me. It’s like one of those movies where somebody takes you on a journey into the past to see what a dick you’ve been, and nobody can see or hear you.