The Killing Hour

‘It’s a little over six hundred grams,’ Arthur says. ‘A hundred and eighty-six millimetres long, small enough to slip in your pocket. It has an internal safety …’

‘Meaning?’

He carries on for a few more minutes telling me about the gun. I’m already sold, was from the moment I saw it had a trigger and a handle and a barrel.

‘The Glock 18-C is fully automatic,’ he continues, and it seems he could talk for ever about the pistol. ‘There’s a switch here,’ he touches it with his gloved finger, ‘that selects between semi or fully automatic. Highly illegal if owned by a civilian in any country.’

I imagine firing off seventeen shots with one pull of the trigger. Yeah, it doesn’t sound too legal. He shows me how to use the gun, how to load the magazine, how to slip the magazine into the handle and tells me a few more facts. Then he takes it off me and puts it into the box. Puts the box into a bag. Keeps his hands on the bag until I hand him the rest of the money. Then he hands it over to me and we step back into the shop.

‘I need some ammunition.’

He slowly nods. I don’t know if the ammunition is illegal, but he has to go out the back to get some. He includes it in the price. I figure he’s a generous guy. Ten thousand dollars. The world’s most expensive handgun. I reach out and grab the box of ammo but he doesn’t let it go.

‘This conversation never happened, buddy, you got that? I’ve never seen you, and never want to see you again.’

Unless I come back with another ten grand. ‘Sure.’

‘There’s no proof linking you to me.’

I look at the thin gloves that weren’t on his hands when I arrived but were when he first came back out with the box in his hand. ‘I know.’

‘And I want your word you’re not using it to go on a rampage.’

I promise him. Just like any homicidal maniac would. I tuck the package under my arm, turn to leave, then turn back.

‘For ten grand I want this too.’

I grab the newspaper. He says nothing. Doesn’t think about his fingerprints all over it. I tuck it under my arm and walk back out into the Christchurch heat.





42


Lying in bed, in bed, and it’s comfortable and warm but his stomach hurts and his head hurts, and it’s light outside but he doesn’t want to go into the light because it’ll hurt too. He stays in bed because he’s tired, because he’s been up all night, and his wife is at work so he can stay here without getting annoyed, without being questioned about the duct tape holding his stomach together. He wishes he could put more around his head to keep his thoughts together too. His wife hasn’t seen his wound yet, but she will. She will see it when they sleep together, but at the moment his job is keeping him away at night, and the job he does is not the job she thinks he does. The weekend is coming and the weekend will see them sleeping together and the weekend will show her his wounds and then …

And then he thinks about Frank McClory and how the revenge tasted sweet, tasted sweet, and killing Charlie Feldman will taste even sweeter. It’s a horrible world when you can’t trust anybody, a horrible world when people don’t pay you for the job you have done. McClory probably thought money made the world go around, but he was wrong. It’s revenge that does that, and last night it made the world go around so fast for McClory that he was torn from it. He thinks of the hundred-dollar note he stuffed into the man’s mouth and he can’t remember if McClory was alive at that point. He has no idea what he was thinking when he wrote that note, no idea where a guy like McClory got the balls to try and end their relationship with a threat. He didn’t bother searching the house for the money because there never had been any money. He had just let himself in and then let himself back out.

People are crazy. People are stupid and they are crazy, and he’s neither of these so people must see things differently. He’s a professional, he knows he is – or was, until Monday. He kills for a living, he kills for the money and the enjoyment, and there was no enjoyment in any of this, none at all, and now he has no money either. He must look for compensation in other areas. He doubts Feldman can come up with the money, but he doesn’t doubt the man will try.