The Killing Hour

Now there can be no doubt. None at all. No way of shifting all those pieces into different positions and still not getting them to match. It’s undeniable. Irrefutable. It’s like the cancer running through his body – it can’t be forgotten.

Landry changes gear and speeds up. He wishes he could keep his mind off the cancer if only for a moment, but he can’t. The cancer isn’t changing how all those pieces fit into place but it’s changing how he’s looking at them. It’s changing the way he’s looking at everything. He glances at his hands and sees them still shaking. He knows it isn’t nerves. He’s just made his last arrest, and in ten years’ time when Feldman is back on the streets, he’ll be lying in the cold ground, nine and a half years into a sentence he’ll never escape.

Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Feldman will kill again. He’ll get out of jail and carry on exactly where he left off. That’s the way the justice system works. Nobody is saying it’s perfect. They’re just saying it’s the best they’ve got. What else can they do? Execute the guy?

Execute the guy?

If only. If only that was a realistic possibility.

Why can’t it be?

If life was fair Feldman would be the one with a death sentence scheduled to start this winter, not him. Feldman would be the one with lost times and last thoughts flooding his mind. But what can he do about it? Even the scales by putting Feldman in the morgue next to Kathy McClory and Luciana Young?

He knows he’s only a step away from a range of ideas that would surely blacken his soul, yet he lets his mind go there anyway. After a career in the police force and living with cancer for a week he’s come to realise that being a cop is all about correcting God’s mistakes.

Walking through Feldman’s house made his skin crawl – no, it actually felt as if it were slipping off his body. The air was stale and tasted like decay; it made him feel his own mortality. Part of him wanted to run from the house and wash himself; another part wanted to put a bullet between Feldman’s eyes right where he stood.

The letter he found in Feldman’s pocket is a straightforward confession, albeit a somewhat distorted one. What is more convincing than the letter, other than the bloodstained pad with Feldman’s name and number, other than the bloody shorts he found in the laundry, is the cardboard box sitting on the bed and the piece of bloody paper torn from the pad next to it. Those two things were the most damning pieces of evidence.

Slowly he shakes his head. Thinking about the box makes him feel ill. What sort of man would …

Would what? Would do such a thing? It takes a certain kind of human trash to kill innocent women, and he knows from experience that such trash comes in many forms. You can’t pick these guys out of a line-up. The only way is to be alone with one of them. That’s how it was for Kathy McClory. That’s how it was for Luciana Young.

So now the law is here to protect Feldman, who has so many rights it’s sickening. He’ll be given ten years, or worse, a combination of doctors and lawyers will slap an insanity label on him that the jury will buy, he’ll be force-fed Prozac and made to share his feelings while working a job at McDonald’s as he becomes a ‘respected’ part of the community. He’ll fantasise about killing every woman who declines to have their fries upsized. The law. A courtroom. A jury. Justice. A parole board. All just a sick joke, a sick, sick joke, compounding a sick, sick act. And the punch line? The punch line? The punch line is that even if Feldman is given the maximum penalty he’ll still be free by the time he’s forty. He’ll be up and about while Kathy McClory and Luciana Young are cold and decomposing and forgotten. Feldman will still be alive because he isn’t the one who had a metal stake rammed through his heart. He isn’t the one who had to sit and listen to his doctor tell him that the chemo could only do so much and that it was time to go coffin shopping.

Landry presses his foot on the accelerator hoping the speed will make him feel better. Imagine crashing with Feldman in the back seat, and imagine Feldman getting killed. Yeah, that’d be nice. That’d be lovely. That’d be justice. The problem, though, is that he’d die too, and dying in the same car wreck as that sick bastard is so insulting that he eases his foot back off the pedal.

Landry grips the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white. He thinks about taking Feldman into the middle of nowhere and leaving him with nothing but a bullet rattling around the inside of his skull. It wouldn’t be murder, not really, not in the same sense of the word that Feldman is a murderer. It would be more like an exchange. A two for one bargain. He can’t save Kathy or Luciana, but he can save the next girl. That can’t be a bad thing. Not really. It can’t be a bad thing to live with.

Jesus. What a choice. What a responsibility.

Could he do it? Does he have it in him to do this city, this country, this world a favour by ending the life of a murderer? Does he have it in him to correct God’s mistake and delete this man from this world?

He isn’t sure.





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