The Killing Lessons (29 page)

The house was innocently committed to giving Valerie away. Floorboards ticked and groaned. Every step detonated a new sound. Her grip around the Glock was wet. Her breathing stirred the stillness. The kitchen windows were so filthy they cut half the light, but there was enough to show the signs of minimal habitation: canned food in the open cupboard; an overflowing garbage pail; unwashed glasses and cups; empty beer bottles; a pair of sneakers.

Beyond the kitchen, a dark corridor. Stairs going up on the right. Two doorways on the left. A closed door leading outside at the far end. Another door in the stairs’ flank – surely down to the basement.

The basement.

Valerie put her left hand on the wall to steady herself. She had to keep reminding herself there were most likely two men in here. Which meant going room by room.

But the basement.

The seconds. The minutes. The time.

The basement.

She crept to the door and pressed her ear against it.

Nothing.

Very carefully, she tried the handle.

Locked.

Upstairs, a floorboard creaked.

She backed from the door. Her mouth was dry. A rogue shiver – a stubborn symptom that wouldn’t quit – went through her.

Someone upstairs.

But check the downstairs rooms first.

She eased the handle on the door on her left, gun steadied and raised. The door wasn’t locked. She opened it fast.

She was looking at a sitting room, heavy floral curtains, closed. A bulky fireplace with a pale ceramic surround. Dense gloom and an unused atmosphere. But for an incongruous wicker couch and a deck chair, it was empty.

She stepped back into the corridor. The next door on the left was ajar. Curtains closed. A duplicate fireplace. An elephantine dark vinyl armchair. Alcoves with empty shelves. A hole the size of a watermelon in the corner of the floor. Torn remnants of broad-striped wallpaper. Again, empty.

Kitchen and downstairs rooms clear.

Except the basement.

But the basement was locked. Which meant shooting the lock. Which meant the end of stealth. Not yet. Upstairs, first. Quickly. Or as quickly as whoever was up there would allow.

The stairs made a further farce of concealment, for all her tiptoeing. Halfway up, one of them gave out a report like a branch snapping. At the top she turned back on herself onto a landing. A bathroom over the kitchen. Two rooms on the left. A third above what would be the front hall downstairs. The bathroom was exposed plumbing and a watermarked tub with its side panel missing, one wall bare stone, a toilet with a shit smear in its dark-watered bowl. It smelled of cramped masculinity up here, stale singlets and sweaty socks, a meat-heavy diet, burped beer, ashtrays. Every second the sense that they were right here – feet away – rested heavier on her. The air around her bristled. Her scalp shrank, loosened, shrank. Her heartbeat would be, she thought,
visible
.

But the bedrooms, though obviously lived-in, were empty. One of them had a television on, with the sound muted.
The Apprentice
. Donald Trump with that idiotic
croissant
of a wig. Of course they watched television. Of course they ate, drank, moved their bowels, bought cigarettes, took showers. Of course they did. They were men. They were people.

Hypotheses formed and dissolved. Leon had seen her. Had alerted the beta and the two of them had got out the hallway door. Or only Leon
was
here. Or he was in the basement. Or they both were. Waiting for her.

She got back out onto the upstairs landing and looked up. There was a hatch in the ceiling – but it was padlocked from the outside.

They were in the basement or they were gone.

There was only one room in the house she hadn’t looked in.

Xander cold-cocked the girl with a swipe – a flick, practically – of the shotgun’s butt, then waited until he heard whoever the fuck it was going upstairs. His body was fluttery and confused. The objects were a self-repeating explosion in his head. Someone was in the house. It was impossible. Someone was… Who was in the house? How could someone be in the house?

The events of the last few days churned in his slipstream. He groped backwards to find the… To find out how… How the
fuck
could someone be in the house?

This was Colorado. This was still Colorado, expanding, unravelling. This was what happened when you didn’t do it right.

He’d rarely thought about the police. Paulie had been the one worrying the whole time about the police. How many times hadn’t Xander said to him:
Quit going on about the police. The police are idiots.
And yet, he thought now, quietly unlocking the basement door and slipping out into the hall, ‘the police’ had always been with him. It was as if the police were with him the whole time, close enough so that he could feel them like a dumb crowd at his back, but always facing the wrong way. As if they knew something was going on behind
their
backs, but could never turn around and see it. Occasionally he’d thought about getting caught. Occasionally he’d had a vague image of the police turning up at his door. But he couldn’t hold the image. The image petered out into knowing that regardless of the police he wasn’t going to stop doing what he had to do. What he had to do pulled him along with a persuasive warmth. He was in sleepy agreement with it. Even trying to imagine the time when it was finished wasn’t easy. When he tried he saw himself like someone walking out of a dark movie theatre into blinding sunlight and a bleached world, dazed, vague, unsure, wanting to return to the rich colours inside. What he had to do was nothing to do with police.

He crossed the hall. Both parlour doors were open. Whoever it was had looked in the rooms. He pictured a bum, a stumbling tramp in layers of rags, lizard-skinned and with that oily reek of homelessness. He imagined this bum, with his exhausted face and matted grey dreads and one sole flapping, ignoring the sign at the end of the track and shuffling all the way down to the house. He imagined him thinking the place was abandoned. He imagined him looking for food, sellable junk, money. Somewhere to take shelter for a while.

He knew it wasn’t a tramp. He was breathing shallow. Everything was happening too fast. The memory of the girl pulled at him. The swell of her little tits goosefleshed. The warmth and quickness of her struggle. Her dark head lashing from side to side. It was so good to feel all that in his hands. His hands had been betrayed. His hands were imprinted with her, and his hands had been robbed. But it would all be there when he got back. He’d throw water on her and wake her up, watch her eyes focus on him, watch her realise it hadn’t been a dream, that she was really here, watch the desolation rush back into her face. At which point he could start all over again. That was the best, being able to start all over again, seeing them seeing it wasn’t over, that it wouldn’t be over until he let it be. And that wouldn’t be for a long, long time.

But this. Someone in the house. He didn’t… He should… Everything jostled in his head: Would he have to get rid of the house? Would he have to start again? Shouldn’t he just get out – now? Everything was getting away from him. First Colorado, now this.

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

You fucked it up
, Mama Jean’s voice said.
Simplest thing in the world, unless you’re dumb as a rock.

He stepped into the first parlour, set the shotgun down and took the pistol out of the back of his jeans. The fish knife was in his back pocket. He took a little comfort in the feel of the blade pressed against him. He pushed the door half closed, just the way it had been left.

Valerie was in the state. She was a gathered focus flitted around by irrelevant thoughts and memories. Each step down the staircase solidified the focus, but bred new bits of mental litter that twittered and circled her: her mother looking up from the ironing and saying, Valerie, your hair looks like a Cossack’s hat; riding her bike across Golden Gate Bridge years ago, the salt breeze and the colours of the cars and the sunlit dangling feet of gulls; her family’s long-dead cat, Buster, who would slip in through the kitchen flap and come and look at them as if he had no clue who they were or where he was; Nick, who talked in his sleep, sitting up one night and announcing: That tube has a peanut in it. I do not want that tube. She’d woken him with her laughter.

These thoughts and dozens like them, but at the same time the monumental focus, the immersion in this expanding now, every step closer, the house like someone forced to watch and the absolute certainty that she wasn’t alone. She was alive. She was thudding with life.

She felt the pain before she heard the shot.

A hot blow to the side of her head followed a split second later by the sound of a handgun’s discharge, deafening in the narrow space of the corridor.

Time slowed. She had a great deal of time, apparently. Her body’s fall backwards went inch by leisurely inch. She had time to see Leon step out from the first parlour doorway, gun hand still raised. His face was moist and full of alert exhaustion. There was a dark V of perspiration descending from the neck of his pale blue sweatshirt.

She had time to think:
I’ve been shot in the head.
Already a warm numb flower of sensation there behind her temple, an event that was still working out its delivery of pain. The pain would come, but there was time for Valerie to realise it hadn’t begun yet, was still being unpacked by the bullet. Leon’s odour came to her, the dense origin of the smell of the bedrooms upstairs, sour and curiously sad. She had time to feel the distant computations of her arm trying to raise the Glock, her finger’s refusal to tighten on the trigger, the walls and ceiling pitching.

Somewhere far away the sound of a motorcycle engine gunning and dying.

Her head struck the door – softly, it seemed – then cracked hard on the boot scraper. Total blackness, the tunnel vision coming, closing, and opening again like a camera snapshot. It would come again, she knew. These were stray moments before the darkness sucked her back in for good. She’d fallen with her gun arm trapped under her back. Vaguely, already engaged in the dreamy articulations of attempting to
free
her arm, she wondered how you could get shot in the head and still know what was going on. It was an immense, protracted labour to lift her hip and release her arm. The gun was heavy. She doubted she’d be able to lift it.

Leon raised the automatic a second time just as her hand popped free.

He said, ‘You fucking—’

Then Valerie pulled the trigger.

For a few long moments Leon stood there visibly trying to assimilate what had happened. Then he bent forward and took his right hand in his left, gently. His gun was on the floor by his feet. Blood ran between his fingers. He opened and closed his mouth a few times. Made a strange sound, almost a laugh.

The blackness came again for Valerie. She thought:
This is death. This is my death.
She decided to fight it. She decided to call on every molecule. It would be her last act, the giant, stubborn resistance to death. She would fail, but it would give the final flicker of thoughts a little longer to play: that she had liked being alive; that her childhood had been filled with noticing things – skies, flowers, the personalities of animals, dreams; that her family had loved her; that she and Nick had had love, such love, love so sweet.

She weathered one big pull by the blackness. Opened her closing eyes. It was like fighting off the heaviest sleep, the feebleness of fluttering eyelashes against the weight of eternity. She thought:
I won’t be able to do that again. The next one will take me.

The light in the hallway changed, dimmed slightly. A walkie crackled. A man’s voice said, ‘Freeze. Hands over your head.’

Then the next wave came and Valerie went under.

Xander turned to see a young motorcycle cop standing in the kitchen doorway. With his gun drawn. Two-handed grip. They looked at each other. Xander felt dizzy. The woman’s bullet had gone clean through his right hand. His left still cradled it, gently. The pain was turning from ice to fire. He was confused. His life was full of changes, suddenly. He felt as if everything – the walls and floor of the house, the land outside, the sky – was being shifted and rearranged. Soon, he wouldn’t recognise anything. It was the clarity of this feeling of running out of time that let him know what he had to do. It occurred to him that Paulie was dead. The left-behind jacket. There was always the slight disappointment when they were dead. It was like getting the only thing you wanted and it not being enough. Just the thing that hurried you towards the next one.

‘My hand is shot,’ he said, extending both. A little puddle of his blood had already formed between his boots. ‘I don’t feel good.’

The cop took a step forward. ‘Face down on the floor,’ he said. ‘Right now. Face down on the floor. I’m not going to tell you again.’

Xander swayed. Pawed the air with his good hand. Crashed to his knees. Toppled, slightly, and came to rest in a half-sitting position, propped against the flank of the stairs. His eyes closed.

‘Hey,’ the cop said. ‘
Hey
.’

Xander didn’t respond.

The cop came nearer. Kicked him in the hip. ‘Hey.’

Xander’s mouth was open. His head rested on his chest. He could feel a little dribble of saliva creeping over his bottom lip. The cop kicked him harder. The bike boots were steel-capped. It hurt, but the pain in his hand was the big thing, a raging fire on the end of his wrist.

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ the cop said, quietly.

Xander heard him unclipping the cuffs from his belt.

There wasn’t much time. He had a very small window. He couldn’t believe he’d decided to do this, back himself into a corner so that there was only one option. It surprised him, that he’d made these decisions, privately, without really being aware of anything beyond the agony in his hand and the parts of the world being rearranged like big cardboard scenery.

The cop had the cuffs off his belt now. Xander could sense the movements through his shut eyelids. Gun in one hand, cuffs in the other. They were designed so that you only needed one hand to work them.

Xander groaned, still with his eyes closed. Turned himself, groggily. The cop set his knee against Xander’s chest and reached for the bloody right wrist to snap the first cuff on.

‘Ow!’ Xander said, his eyes opening. ‘Hey that hurts!’

Then he kicked the cop’s leg out from under him and launched himself.

The gun went off (the third shot in the corridor’s traumatised silence) but the bullet buried itself in the staircase. Xander had the fish knife in his left hand. The cop was slow. The situation had turned too fast for him. Xander could feel the guy trying to scramble, to react. His days were speeding tickets and iced tea, long hours on the Utah roads.

Xander drove the knife in hard and fast, more times than he could count, until the cop stopped struggling under his weight. The blood was warm between them. For the time it had taken, Xander’s hand had stopped screaming. A packet of gum had fallen out of the cop’s jacket pocket onto the floor. Wrigley’s Extra. Peppermint. His wristwatch was big and silver with a black face.

The world was still rearranging itself. Xander struggled to his feet, slipping once in the blood and nearly going over. He was very tired. His whole body buzzed with tiredness and with how quickly everything had gone wrong. He was still catching up to how wrong everything had gone. He had to get out. He glanced over at the woman by the front door. Her jacket was open. Shoulder holster. Badge clipped to her waistband. Cop. One cop. Two cops. There would be more. How had they found him? There were so many things he had to do, but there was no time. He could feel cops like an infestation rushing towards him, hundreds, thousands, like in that horror movie where the guy had got swarmed over and gobbled up by cockroaches. He thought he could hear sirens. He stumbled towards the kitchen. He couldn’t breathe. The house was shrinking. The monkey and the kite and the violin and the lemon and Mama Jean sitting in her chair smiling and shaking her head at what a fucking mess he was making of everything. His hand was giant and loud. He had to get out before the house started to fit him like a skin. Everything had gone wrong and there were sirens and
she saw you and she got away ran all the way through the woods you didn’t even know she was there
you
fucked it up
and everything since fucking Colorado had gone wrong.
That’s right
, Mama Jean said,
take your time. Hell, take all the time you like. Why don’t you make a cup of coffee and put your feet up while you’re at it?

There was no
time
.