Lisa Gardner - The killing hour

Her mother’s head was starting to bob now, in that way it did right before sleep. Her father had already called it a night. He had work in the morning and that made him somewhat more normal, in this strange little pattern they called their lives.

Abigail finally succumbed. Her head fell back. Her shoulders sank into the deep comfort of their overstuffed sofa, bought during happier times and meant for happier days.

And Nora Ray finally stepped into the room. She didn’t turn off the TV. She knew better by now; the sudden absence of TV voices awakened her mother faster than any shrieking alarm. Instead, she merely took the remote from the pocket of her mother’s faded bathrobe and slowly turned down the volume.

Her mother started to snore. Soft little wheezes of a woman who hadn’t moved in months, yet remained exhausted beyond her years.

Nora Ray clenched her hands by her sides. She wanted to stroke her mother’s face. She wanted to tell her everything would be all right. She wanted to plead for her real mother to come back to her because sometimes she didn’t want to be the strong one. Sometimes, she wanted to be the one who curled up and cried.

She set the remote on the coffee table. Then she tiptoed back to her room, where the air-conditioning was permanently cranked to a frosty fifty-eight and a full pitcher of water sat by her bed at all times.

Nora Ray buried herself under the thick comfort of her bedcovers, but she still didn’t fall immediately asleep.

She was thinking of Mary Lynn again. She was thinking of their last night, driving back from T.G.I. Friday’s, and Mary Lynn chatting away merrily in the driver’s seat.

“Uh oh,” her sister was saying. “I think we just got a flat. Oh, wait. Good news. Some guy’s pulled in behind us. Isn’t that neat, Nora Ray? The world is just filled with good people.”

The man was tired. Very, very tired. Shortly after two A.M. he completed his last chore and wearily called it a night. He returned the van to where it belonged, and though his muscles truly ached now, he took the time to wash the vehicle, inside and out, by the comforting glow of lantern light. He even crawled under the van and hosed down the undercarriage. Dirt could tell stories. Didn’t he know.

Next he pulled out the dog carrier. He sponged it down with ammonia, the sharp, pungent scent stinging his senses back into hyperalertness, while also destroying any evidence of fingerprints.

Finally, he took inventory. He should wash down the aquarium, too, though what could it prove? That he once had a pet snake? No crime in that. Still, you didn’t want to leave things to chance.

You didn’t want to be one of those dumb fucks his father talked about, who couldn’t find their assholes with a flashlight and their own two hands.

The world was spinning. He felt the gathering storm clouds in the back of his brain. When he got tired, the spells grew worse. The black holes grew to tremendous size, swallowing not just hours and minutes, but sometimes consuming entire days. He couldn’t afford that now. He had to be sharp. He had to be alert.

He thought of his mother again and the sad look she wore every time she watched the sun die in the sky. Did she know the planet was dying? Did she understand even back then that anything that was beautiful could not belong long on this earth?

Or was she simply afraid to go back inside, where his father would be waiting with his quick temper and hamlike fists?

The man did not like these thoughts. He didn’t want to play this game anymore. He jerked the aquarium from the inside of the van. He dumped its grass and twig matting into the woods. Then he dumped in half of a bottle of ammonia and went to work with his bare hands. He could feel the harsh chemical burn his skin.

Later the runoff from this little exercise would seep into a stream, and kill off algae, bacteria, and cute little fishes. Because he was no better, you know. No matter what he did, he was still a man who drove a car and bought a refrigerator and probably once kissed a girl who used a can of aerosol spray on her hair. Because that’s what men did. Men killed. Men destroyed. Men beat their wives, abused their kids, and took a planet and warped it into their own twisted image.

His eyes were running now. Snot poured from his nose and his chest heaved until his breath came out in savage gasps. The harsh scent of ammonia, he thought. But he knew better. He was once again thinking of his mother’s pale, lonely face.

He and his brother should have gone back inside with her. They could’ve walked through the door first, judged the mood, and if it came to it, taken their punishment like M-E-N. They didn’t, though. Their father was home, and they ran away into the woods, where they lived like gods on pokeweed salad, wild raspberries, and tender fiddleheads.

They turned to the land for shelter, and tried not to think about what was happening back in one tiny cabin in the woods. At least that’s what they’d done when they could.

The man turned off the hose. The van was washed, the aquarium cleansed, the whole project sanitized within an inch of its life. Forty-eight hours later, it was over.

He was tired again. Bone-deep weary in a way that people who had never killed could never appreciate. But it was over. Now, at long last, he was done.

He took his kill kit away with him. Later, he tucked it beneath his mattress before finally crawling into bed.

His head touched the pillow. He thought of what he had just done. High heels, blond hair, blue eyes, green dress, bound hands, dark hair, brown eyes, long legs, scratching nails, flashing white teeth.

The man closed his eyes. He slept the best he had in years.

Quantico, Virginia

5:36 A . M .

Temperature: 84 degrees

QUINCY JERKED AWAKE TO THE SOUND of the phone ringing. Instinct bred of so many other calls in the middle of so many other nights led him to reach automatically toward the nightstand. Then the ringing penetrated a second time, shrill and insistent, and he remembered that he was at the FBI Academy, staying in a dorm room, where the lone phone sat on the desk halfway across the room.

He moved quietly and quickly, but it was no longer necessary. Even as he cut off the third ring, Rainie was sitting up sleepily in the bed. Her long chestnut hair was tousled around her pale face, drawing attention to the striking angles of her cheeks and the long, bare column of her neck. God, she was lovely first thing in the morning. For that matter, she was lovely at the end of a long day. All these years later, day in, day out, she never failed to take his breath away.

He looked at her, and then, as happened too often these days, he felt a sharp pain in his chest. He turned away, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear.

“Pierce Quincy.”

And then a moment later, “Are you sure? That’s not what I meant- Kimberly… Well, if that’s what you want to do. Kimberly…” Big sigh again. The beginning of a headache already building in his temples. “You’re a grown adult, Kimberly. I respect that.”

It didn’t do him any good. His last surviving daughter had ended yesterday angry with him and had apparently started today even madder. She slammed down the phone. He returned his own receiver much more gently, trying not to notice how his hands shook. He had been trying to mend the bridge with his mercurial daughter for six years now. He hadn’t made much progress yet.

In the beginning, Quincy had thought Kimberly simply needed time. After the intense episode of what happened to their family, of course she harbored a great deal of rage. He had been an FBI agent, a trained professional, and still he’d done nothing to save Bethie and Amanda. If Kimberly hated him, he couldn’t blame her. For a long time, he had hated himself, too.