The Killing Hour

I walked down her hallway and, like the bar Kathy leaned against, it seems long ago and so far, far away. I’m going to die out here at the hands of a lunatic cop. Even so, walking into the steam of her bathroom filled me with excitement. It was full of typical womanly scents – soaps and subtle perfumes that make you think of meadows and flowers. I was in a house with two beautiful women and they were in my debt. Anything could have come from it and, as it turns out, something did.

I dropped my own clothes in a heap. I was smeared in blood and dirt; patches of my hair had been welded together with blood. The only clean parts were where my clothes and watch had been. There were clumps of dirt in my ears and my forehead had the lump it still has now. I was smiling – smiling to be alive, smiling as I thought what my students would say the next day when they saw me walk into the classroom, smiling at the thought of Kathy and Luciana joining me in the shower.



The hot water hit my damaged body and stung like hell. I was in the bathroom Luciana would soon die in. I was dancing from one foot to the other, washing green shampoo through my hair, creating a red lather. Red water ran down my body, moving over sore muscles and torn skin in long stripes. It was blood and I liked the fact that most of it wasn’t mine. When I returned to the lounge Kathy and Luciana were talking on the couch.

‘You certainly looked uncomfortable in those clothes,’ Luciana says to me.

‘I didn’t have any underwear on.’

My headache, as it is now, was thumping along nicely.

‘I’m trying to be serious here, Feldman, and all you can tell me is you weren’t wearing underwear in the shower? Why the hell would you?’

‘Ignore him, Charlie,’ Luciana tells me. ‘We should have gone to the police. That’s what you wanted to do, but at that point it didn’t matter. There was no hurry because Cyris was dead. We were sure we could go in the morning. We were too exhausted, too upset to deal with the questions then. We planned to go first thing. You were going to come with us. What happened?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Exactly,’ Landry says. ‘Why did you shower?’

‘I was a mess,’ I tell him. ‘I was covered with Cyris’s blood.’

‘Your play-acting alter ego.’

‘Think about it,’ I say. ‘Why would I shower before killing two people? Why would I shower if I was going to get covered in blood anyway?’

‘Forget about the damn shower,’ Landry says, ‘and tell me about Jo. Just how many victims are there?’

I look at his Kiss the Cook cap and I wonder what state of mind he was in when he bought it. It’s hard to imagine him out shopping, just cruising the mall and walking into a clothes shop and finding that hat on a shelf. Did he make pleasant conversation with the sales girl while she rang up the sale and put the hat in a bag? Did they flirt? Talk about the weather? Did he wear it out of the store? Did he know then that one day he would wear it while taking another man’s life?

Luciana is starting to fade, following Kathy back to the world where they live now. She’s wearing the robe she died in but the towel she had wrapped around her hair when she woke me is gone.

The night was winding down and since we weren’t going to the police it was time to go home. Since they would end up dead in their own houses the first thing I needed to do was separate them. I sat wearily on the arm of the couch – Monday morning was draining me. It was at that moment I learned Kathy was married.

‘You were jealous, weren’t you?’ Luciana says.

‘How many victims?’ Landry repeats.

‘I wasn’t jealous,’ I say, but I was and Luciana knows it.

Kathy’s husband was a lawyer and he would help us. I had killed a man and I needed representation. That was another reason we were waiting till morning. Maybe it was even the reason. I was distracted at the time. In the end I grabbed my bloodstained clothes and I left, taking Kathy with me.

‘Jealous? Are you on something, Feldman? Is that the problem?’

‘Among other things,’ I say, and Luciana fades away and life, as it is out here at gunpoint, returns to normal.





22


A psychopath. The word doesn’t come close to describing Feldman. He doesn’t know what word does. It would probably take a combination of words. A string of them. Long-lettered terms that only doctors with diplomas would know how to pronounce. Landry has never dealt with anybody so messed up, and in a way this actually helps. It helps that with each sentence that comes out of Feldman’s mouth Landry knows his decision to bring the man out here is the right one. Hell, it’s even cost-effective.

He adjusts the gun across his knees, shrugs his shoulders back to offset the beginning cramp and shifts further into the chair. It’s going to be a long night. ‘You just said you weren’t jealous. Weren’t jealous of who? Jo?’