The Killing Lessons (27 page)

Red Cliffs shopper traffic was thick by the time Valerie headed back downstairs into the mall. Christmas decorations glimmered and winked from every store, though she’d hardly noticed any of it in the blur of the last few hours. Christmas. The festivals were vague things to her now, minor events that barely registered on the cop continuum. Murder was not mindful of the time of year. She thought of the Mulvaneys, the tinselled tree in the tidy living room, all the times through Katrina’s childhood the family would have decked it, nothing left of the ritual’s magic now, just a sparkling redundancy. They’d make an effort for the grandchildren, but the main guest at the table would always be Katrina’s ghost. Always, for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, the world – or all the world not robbed of a loved one by homicide – would carry on, wrapping gifts, roasting turkeys, downing eggnog and gobbling up chocolates, watching
It’s a Wonderful Life
, spending credit. Valerie’s own family had long since stopped expecting her to be an engaged participant in the festive season. Her nieces and nephews – the niece via her younger brother, the two nephews via her older sister – had been advised, quietly, that she couldn’t be counted on. In fact for several years Valerie’s mother had taken care of buying the gifts ‘from Aunt Valerie’, which precipitated the wearying annual business of Valerie trying to find out how much her mother had spent and attempting to give her the cash, and her mother insisting that it was nothing, not worth the trouble. Valerie thought now, as she passed a Barnes & Noble window display occupied almost entirely by merchandising for the year’s Superman movie,
Man of Steel
, that she probably owed her mother more than a thousand bucks. She’d lost track of the movies, too. Movie stars, big new releases. There was a whole generation of actors, it seemed, whose identities were a complete mystery to her, although on the
Man of Steel
poster a few faces came to her from the past: Kevin Costner. Laurence Fishburne. A bearded Russell Crowe in some sort of silvery sci-fi get-up. She’d never understood his appeal. To her he looked porky, sullen and misogynistic. Like an overgrown sexist toddler was how she’d summed him up to Liza the last time the two of them had got together for drinks and to pretend they had a normal life. You can forgive Johnny Depp for being in love with himself, Liza had said. At least he does it with a bit of irony. But Russell Crowe—

Valerie stopped.

Crowe.

Fuck.

Joy Wallace’s words came back to her:
Five years earlier, Amy (now a heroin-addicted prostitute of fluid abode) had got pregnant by Lewis Crowe, a bipolar Las Vegas pimp and drug
peddler who’d been killed in a narcotics deal gone wrong a month before his son was born…

Amy must have given the father’s name on the birth certificate. Which was probably Leon’s only legitimate form of ID. With which he’d opened a bank account. Into which the money (wherever the hell it had come from) had been deposited. And out of which he’d paid for whatever property he’d bought in Utah.

Not Xander King. Not Leon Ghast.

Leon Crowe.

She called Will.

Claudia emerged from blackness. She didn’t know whether Xander had knocked her out or whether her system – pushed beyond its limits – had simply shut down. Either way she had no recollection of the time between then and now. ‘Then’ was the moment she’d been jerked backwards off her feet. ‘Now’ was – the facts were like a millstone grinding over her, slowly – back in the basement, back behind the locked-down grille, back to having her hands and feet bound and her mouth straining to accommodate a plastic ball-gag, the sort she’d seen in even the most cursory perusal of pornography. She could feel saliva running down her chin. Her hands were fastened to the ties that were cutting off the circulation in her ankles.
Hog-tied
. The terminology was available. You couldn’t help it: the language was the language. Even if you were its wretched object.

There was nothing for her now. All the micro-hopes were gone. Her finite future filled all the space around her, so that even her slightest movement pressed her up against it. It was solid, packed, immovable. It surrounded her with certainty. She was not getting out. What was going to happen to her was going to happen to her. She felt tired. The superficial exhaustion of her body’s resources, yes, but beyond it a weary contempt for the bare fact of her life having some of itself left to live. A portion of utterly pointless suffering. She was almost past fear. It sickened her that she would have to be here for the inevitable end of herself, that she would have to be (there was no arguing with this) both its subject and its witness. With not even a God to hurl her contempt at. No God, no scheme of things, nothing. Just the physical world’s slavery to cause and effect. If
x
, then
y
. She’d never felt pure disgust for life before. But she felt it now. She wanted it to be over. She wanted to be done with her body, even if being done with her body was being done with herself. She imagined a state beyond death: a confused, salving darkness. A long sleep.
At Peace
, the gravestones said. She understood it now. Without your body and its suffering, you could be at peace.

Paulie was outside the cage, lying in the fetal position, covered in blood, his breathing a phlegmy rattle. His eyes were open. His thin face was wet and grey. The blood-swipe on the bare floor leading to his head said he’d been dragged there by his feet. Xander was standing over him, holding a rust-flecked machete. His limbs were heavy. His face was slack.

‘You did this,’ Xander said, very quietly.

Paulie tried to say something but nothing came out. A bubble of dark blood formed on his thin lips, then burst. The sound was small and tender.

‘I’ve been carrying you the whole time,’ Xander said. ‘Fucking Colorado.’ He raised his voice, as if talking to a person hard of hearing: ‘Fucking Ellinson, fucking
Colorado
, I said.’

Paulie, bizarrely, laughed.

Xander didn’t seem to notice.

‘Everything was fine,’ he said. ‘Everything was fucking
fine
until you fucked it up in Colorado. Now look!’ He gestured around the room with the machete. ‘Look at the situation! This is
all your fault
. You’ve never understood what I’m doing here. You’ve never understood that I’ve been
losing my patience
, for Christ’s sake. Does that mean anything to you? Do you think my patience is… Didn’t you think I’d lose my patience? I mean, why do you make me do this? Why?’

Without warning – in fact with a curious delayed action, as if first seeing if Paulie was going to flinch – Xander raised the machete and brought it down hard on Paulie’s bent hip.

Paulie screamed and jerked. The blade had gone through his jeans and into his flesh with a moist crunch. Xander had to put his foot on Paulie’s leg and brace himself to yank it out. Paulie screamed several more times in an abrasive falsetto. It was as if he were trying to mimic an alarmed alien bird. But he clearly didn’t have the strength to move or get to his feet. He just lay there, whimpering and shivering.

‘There is a way,’ Xander continued. ‘There is a way this has to be done. Don’t you get that? Do you think this is just fucking…
randomised
? Do you think there’s no
order
to this?’

In the same hesitant, exploratory way, he hacked at Paulie six or seven times with the machete. After the first three or four blows Paulie stopped jerking. Claudia absorbed the sounds of the blade going into the flesh. It evoked the butcher’s shop she used to half-relish, half-dread going into with her mother when she was small. Cheery Mr Donaldson whacking through lumps of fat-marbled meat, the brown fingerprints and bloodstains on his apron at surreal odds with his jolly face and bright banter. He wore a small straw hat with a blue and white striped ribbon above the brim. It intrigued and disturbed Claudia, her mother and Mr Donaldson exchanging brisk chat over the counter’s display of raw carnage. It was as if they were pretending something horrible wasn’t taking place.

‘She saw you,’ Paulie said.

There was a long pause. Xander, mouth hanging open, was returning from somewhere deep inside himself. At last he said, ‘What?’

Paulie coughed, struggled to get his breath. ‘The kid,’ he gasped. ‘The little girl in Colorado.’ He began to laugh again.

Xander breathed loudly through his nostrils.

Paulie was crying and laughing. Or in some elusive liminal state between crying and laughing.

‘What are you saying?’ Xander said, quietly.

‘She saw you and she…’ Paulie’s face crimped. He was silent, briefly, then he released a raw animal moan through gritted teeth. ‘She got away. Ran all the way through the woods. You didn’t even know she was there.
You
fucked up.’

One of the wounds on Paulie’s legs was rushing its blood out. The blood moved over the bare floor as if desperate to map its new terrain.

Xander just stood there, bent forward slightly, hands on hips, the right holding the machete. He might have been a truncheoned cop from an old light-hearted movie listening sceptically to a kid’s tall story. Then he straightened and walked a few paces away. His movements spoke of dense inner computation.

Paulie’s mouth leaked blood and saliva. His hands made small, weak movements.

Xander was at the basement’s far wall. He stood very still.

The machete slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor.

For what felt to Claudia like a long time he just stood there, staring at the bare brick.

Then he picked up the machete and returned to stand over Paulie.

Very carefully, he took hold of Paulie’s hair and eased his head back. Paulie’s breath bubbled. His eyes were closed now. One of his bootlaces, Claudia noticed, was undone. She had a brief image of him bending down to tie it. She had an imagined glimpse of his life of ordinary and extraordinary acts. All part of the same person, the same life.

Then Xander raised the machete and swung it down on Paulie’s neck.

Claudia had shoved herself back against the wall. The ties had cut into her wrists and her hands were warm and slippery with blood. Her shoulders ached. There was no position she could adjust herself into that relieved the pain.

Xander sat leaning forward in the busted armchair, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor.

The blood pool around Paulie had stopped expanding. His head was still raggedly attached to his shoulders. Claudia had closed her eyes after the first blow, but she’d heard. Four, five, six. The sounds reported themselves, since they had no choice. She heard them, since she couldn’t cover her ears, since
she
had no choice. These things had come into her life. Now there were only these things. She closed her eyes again. The cut on her throat was burning. The memory of moving freely through the house’s space was still a shock in her body. Her body was still protesting at having it taken away. For the last time.

Xander approached the grille.

‘I’ve got to fix this,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get your thing.’

The ball-gag was making Claudia’s jaws ache. The piece of metal she’d used on Paulie was on the floor next to his body. It hurt her that if she’d kept it she could have used it to slash her own wrists. Whatever he did to her then would be finite. There would be a limit. There would be an end.

But she hadn’t kept it, of course.

‘I’ve got to fix this,’ Xander repeated. ‘I won’t be long.’

He bent and checked the padlock, yanked it a couple of times. Pulled out the bunch of keys from his pants pocket. Looked at them. Put them back. He paused on his way out to look down at Paulie’s corpse. His face had an expression of mild confusion.

Then he turned and headed towards the stairs.

It took Xander a while to get going. He kept thinking he was heading out to the vehicles then finding that he hadn’t. He found himself in the bedroom. On the landing. In the kitchen. Little bits of time between these rooms he couldn’t account for.

She saw you and she got away. Ran all the way through the woods. You didn’t even know she was there.
You
fucked up
.

The half-painted room. A little girl’s room.

In the RV he sat for a while, shivering. It was a bright, cold morning. The sunlight showed up how dirty the windshield was, all the bugs that had splatted there. He felt terrible. When he put his hand up to his face he was shocked again at the feel of the stubble that was now a beard. He
still
hadn’t shaved. It was bad that he was forgetting these things. He’d have to get batteries. The jug and the batteries.

But at the thought of the jug a sick feeling went through him. It
wasn’t
right. The jug should have been for the cunt in Ellinson. There was no escaping that. Wait.
Was
it the jug next? Didn’t the kite come before the jug? The kite or the monkey?

The images shuffled and revolved and overlapped in front of him.

The monkey had a happy stupid face with round eyes and a grin. The monkey was scratching its armpit.

The lemon twinged in his throat and the balloon always made him think of the fairground. A girl in a red and white spotted dress had had one and she’d accidentally let go of it and it had gone snaking up into the air and within seconds become a wobbling dot in the blue sky. It had made him feel weird, that one minute it had been in her hand and the next so high up and far away. She’d cried, and her mom had shouted at her. He hadn’t liked it that she still seemed connected to it all the way up there. He’d felt connected to it himself. He’d felt – for a dizzy moment – that
he
was the balloon, looking down on all the people no bigger than ants.

Stop.

This was what happened. Goddammit this was what
happened
if you didn’t do it right.

The sunlit dirty windshield hurt his eyes. He grabbed Paulie’s sunglasses from the cluttered dash and put them on. Slightly better, but they felt heavy on his face. Despite the shivering there was still heat surging and receding in his skin. His teeth chattered. He clamped them shut. He imagined Paulie saying, Hey, those are
my
sunglasses, man. It would be better without Paulie. He could get on with what he needed to do. But at the same time it felt odd without him, already. Like he’d driven hundreds of miles away from a place and realised he’d left his jacket there. And he didn’t know how to work the camera. He didn’t like the iPad, but it was good to be able to watch the films. Seeing them again brought an unsatisfactory peace. Seeing them again brought the next one closer.

He was about to put the key in the ignition when he realised he was in the wrong vehicle. The RV for the road, the Honda was for local. There was the van, too, but the front left tyre was a little low on air. The thought of getting out and switching turned up the dial on his body’s troubles. He almost didn’t bother.

But at the last minute (because you couldn’t let these things slip, it was like the beard and Colorado, you let a couple of wrong things creep in and before you knew it the whole thing was fucked) he hauled himself out and crossed the yard to the Honda.

He would go into town and buy the jug, and the kite, and the lemon, and the monkey. He would figure it out. Even without Paulie.