Paul Cleave - The Killing Hour

It helps.

It makes him feel once again he’s on the right path. Only problem is this path is pretty close to another path, one in which he thinks he should have just taken Feldman in to the station.

All he can do now is move forward. If he shows up at the station with Feldman now he’ll have to explain this little outing, and it’s going to look as though he withheld evidence just in case he felt like killing the suspect. Which is exactly what happened. And exactly what he’s going to have to do. Now. He could blame the pills and the cancer, but he’ll still be disgraced. He’ll lose his job. They’ll send him home and they’ll wonder how many other people he brought out here, or took to similar places. He’ll pass from this world to the next under a cloud of suspicion.

He pictures the two dead women. He pictures the contents of the cardboard box. He pictures the other cases he’s never been able to let go even long after they were solved. The fuel is coming back. He remembers the young woman floating facedown in the bathtub in this very cabin, her gray, wrinkled skin, her milky eyes. He thinks of other young women face down in alleyways and hallways and ditches and other bathtubs. Feldman’s as guilty as they come-he’s doing the world a favor by taking him out of it.

He hates Feldman. Hates his sarcasm. In the end it’ll be the smugness that’ll make his transition from judge to executioner easier to bear. As soon as Feldman admits what he did then he can happily. .

Happily?

That’s the wrong word. There’s nothing happy about this. This is the last place he wants to be. In six months when his sins are weighed up in whatever magical afterlife landscape he goes to, a large piece of him will still be back here.

He needs Feldman to confess, then he can get this over with. He needs that confession because it will come with a feeling of justice. With it, dying from the cancer will be easier to do.

Without it, he’s just one more bad man doing bad deeds.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” I reply, choosing to answer his question about who I killed first with the honest truth. I don’t know what it is, but nobody these days is prepared to believe anything I say, and I haven’t lied yet.

I try to think about things logically. Like a mathematician. Or one of those thinking-outside-of-the-box riddles: two people are in a room, one has a gun, the other is handcuffed. No wonder I never liked riddles.

“Kathy and Luciana were staked through the heart,” he says.

“I didn’t do it.”

“I saw the bodies. And I found a stake on your bedroom floor.”

“I can explain that.”

“Okay. Go ahead and explain.”

So I do. I go ahead and tell him how my Sunday night to Monday morning unfolded. I tell him about driving home. About Luciana stepping out in front of the car. My trip through the woods. Finding Kathy tied up. Killing Cyris. I tell him we didn’t go to the police because of what happened to Benjamin Hyatt, and how we wanted to get a lawyer first. The ghosts stay away as I tell him, but as I get closer to the end of the story, I can feel them nearby, and eventually they appear as I’m telling him about my conversation with Kathy in the lounge while Luciana was in the shower.

“Kathy was asleep when he first attacked her,” I tell him, and in the front of my mind the lounge we sat in while she told me this starts to form, slowly at first, and soon I can smell the blood on my clothes and taste the last mouthful of beer. Kathy brought me into a world where evil happened and I had loaded my hands full of its treasures. I can see Landry sitting opposite me, but standing just over his left shoulder is Kathy. She’s so real I could touch her. But of course she’s not real. She’s a figment of my imagination. Guilt manifesting itself into a form in which it can haunt me. My head is hurting from the blows it’s taken lately, and I reach slowly up and to the bump from Sunday night, and Kathy fades a little as I rub it, but then comes back when I stop. A real ghost wouldn’t do that. One projected by my guilt would.

“I never heard anyone come in,” she says.

“I know you didn’t. It wasn’t your fault,” I say to my guilt, hoping in a way it could be more than that, hoping it really could be Kathy I’m talking to.

“Jesus, Feldman, you’ve lost me,” Landry says.

“I didn’t know what time it was, Charlie, maybe ten thirty, and I woke up as his hand pressed down against my mouth. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. He held the tip of a knife next to my eye.”

“I killed him with that knife,” I say.

“Him? I’m not talking about this Cyris you’re going on about. I’m talking about the women. Which one did you kill first, Feldman?”

“I didn’t kill them,” I say. “I really didn’t kill them.”

Kathy is ignoring Landry because in her world he never existed and that’s the fundamental problem with homicide cops-it’s already too late when you need them. Kathy stares at me with remorse and pity. She has a drink in her hand. It’s the one she had before I showered to wash away the blood. She seems uninterested in the cabin. The cold doesn’t affect her. The back of my neck is alive with goose bumps. She isn’t a ghost. Isn’t my guilt. She’s a memory. Her words are the same words she told me.

“I could smell his skin. So vile. Like he hadn’t bathed in days. Strange, huh? I was choking on his odor. I was sure he had plans for me, but right at that moment the smell was all I could think about.”

“He broke into Kathy’s bedroom and abducted her,” I say.

“You killed her first?”

“He moved his knife to my throat. It trapped the smell and the taste in there. I was desperate for air and was starting to black out. Then he was promising me if I made a sound he would kill me. His eyes were so dark. So intense. I knew then that this man was pure evil. Have you ever seen pure evil, Charlie?”

“I once saw an episode of Melrose Place. ” Kathy’s ghost smiles, and Landry looks at me as if I’ve completely lost it. Maybe I have.

“He told me his name was Cyris and I should remember it because I’d be calling it out over and over in the night. He told me to nod if I could remember that, so I nodded. I was so afraid and I thought he was going to kill me right there, but instead he backed away and tossed me some clothes. He ordered me to dress and I was happy to.”

“Answer the Goddamn question,” Landry says. “Who’d you kill first?”

“Cyris. He was the first one to die.”

“Tell me about the women. Tell me why you killed them.”

“Yes, Charlie, tell us why,” Kathy says, surprising me because it means she knows about Landry, and this is turning from a memory of a conversation into an actual conversation.

I close my eyes to try and hide from her and what I see is Cyris in the trees, Cyris with the metal stake and the knife, Cyris asking me if I wanted to join him. When I open my eyes I’m expecting to see Kathy has gone, but she hasn’t. She pours herself another invisible drink, then leans against a doorway that is nearly two days ago and at least sixty or so miles away.

“They weren’t meant to die,” I say. “Don’t you see? I saved them. I saved them.”

“From Cyris. Tell me what they did to make you kill them. Tell me.”

“I didn’t kill them.”

Kathy looks down at her ghostly feet. They are bare and I wonder if she can see the floor through them like I can. “I didn’t know he was going to take me away to hear me scream. I would have fought more had I known what my fate was going to be.”

“He took them from their houses to torture them,” I tell Landry. “He tied them to trees.”