The Killing Hour

His hands reach out and grab the railing as he falls. I tie off the end of the rope around the lamppost. He sees what I’m doing and knows he should have let go and taken his chances with the water. I kick his fingers and then he’s gone.

He doesn’t make a sound as he falls the four metres. But the rope does. It comes to a sudden snap, then strains against the side of the rail, moving back and forth in small sudden movements. It sounds like grinding teeth. When I look over the edge he’s swinging from side to side. He’s managed to wrap an arm around the rope to take the impact from his neck. Five metres below him is the ocean.

I turn and look back at the pier. Our struggle, from the moment he arrived, has brought us two-thirds of the way towards the end. I make my way over to my gun and spot Cyris’s black satchel just ahead of it. I pick it up, curious to see what he had planned for us tonight, and find Jo’s car keys in it, along with a bottle that holds around a litre of petrol, a lighter and a knife. I can only imagine.

Cyris is still swinging, his hands on the rope to keep him from strangling. He’s trying to untangle his neck. I open the bottle of petrol and pour a quarter of it onto the leather satchel, then I lie down and put my hand through the railing. I’m on automatic now. This path I’m taking is one I don’t even want to consider veering from. I dump the contents of the bottle, getting as much fuel onto Cyris as the wind will allow. I stand back up, then look down so I can see his eyes as I take the lighter from my pocket. I can see little because of the sand swirling around us. I tie the handle of the satchel around the rope so it has enough room to slide, then use the lighter to set fire to it. Even in the strong wind it catches immediately. I let it drop and it spirals down the rope towards Cyris. The wind pushes it around but doesn’t blow it out. Cyris swings harder as he struggles to untie the rope around his neck with his handcuffed hands. Short, jerky movements. He can’t do it. The satchel reaches his hands and he cries out and pulls them away, but then the noose starts choking him so he has to put his hands back.

The fire jumps onto his clothes. It starts eating the petrol. For a few seconds his screams drown out the sound of the wind.

For a few seconds I almost feel sorry for him.

Almost.

He struggles as the fire consumes him. I search inside myself to see how I feel. Am I happy at what I have done? I hope not, but the truth is I don’t know. Not yet, anyway. I feel nothing.

I lean over the railing and draw a bead on my target with the gun.

Action Man: it is time for all this to end.





48


Swinging around, swinging around, this is so bad, yeah, yeah, and the pain is intense, and the handcuffs dig into his wrists and he can’t fight his way out of them and he can’t fight the rope around his neck, can’t fight the fire, and if this is what revenge is, it tastes horrible, fucking horrible. His fingers are on fire, his body is on fire, and he swings in the breeze and gravity pulls at his body while there’s nothing, nothing, nothing he can do except burn. Burn to death, burn to ash. The fire evaporates his tears before they fall, and there must be a way, must be, yeah, must be a way he can escape this. The headache is back and his mind throbs without the pressure of any ideas. The skin on his fingers and the skin on his face hurts, hurts so much. The sounds it makes is horrible, the sizzle-sizzle of meat cooking, of skin cooking, and the smell, the smell is almost as bad as the pain.

He looks up and the night around him is shimmering through the flames. His hair is on fire and the satchel, his satchel that he’s always taken with him whenever he’s been on the job, is pushing at his fingers. He pulls his hands away and the rope tugs into his throat, cutting away his chance to breathe in the burning oxygen. The night starts to darken and he can feel himself falling now, falling now, falling into another world where death will be a release from this pain …

Yet when he falls he finds only a cold darkness. It surrounds him. A cold darkness that isn’t cold enough to soothe the pain. A cold darkness where the fire burns without any flames. He opens his eyes and can see nothing. The rope is around his neck but no longer taut. He kicks out, pulls with his arms, and a moment later he breaks the surface of the water. The remainder of the rope is still swinging in the wind above him.

He is free.

He sucks in a deep breath, then dives back beneath the surface. The cold fights the heat, and is now beginning to numb some of the pain. The salt stings the blisters on his face and neck, and his fingers are stinging too, but the pain is good, the pain is bliss, because he’s alive.