It was somewhere in the vicinity of sexual, though decidedly not my glass of bourbon. She was purely an anatomical prop, a means for the actor’s and the audience’s gratification. How somebody could get off on this was well beyond me, but then again, if you can imagine it, human beings can reach orgasm to it.
The sex was rough. Stomach-churning, if you want to know the truth. Nikki was manhandled, her clothes torn away as she begged for mercy.
I didn’t enjoy it, but I watched intently. I wondered if just the purveyors of this filth were responsible, or the people who engaged with it, too. Was I as responsible as the others? I’d endured the pre-video ad. Because of me, the views counter was one tick higher. Presumably, views of this…content resulted in money being funneled to the proprietors.
On-screen, Nikki was less than concerned with the metascore. She was panting, sweating, telling her partner to no, please don’t, please, please, receiving only a shut the fuck up for her efforts. White guy, thuggish patois, but indeterminate. I didn’t recognize his face, either. Sharp features, shark fin’s nose, slicked back hair, tattoos.
A gag was placed in her mouth. After a time, it was taken out, filled with the actor’s member, and then the gag made a second appearance. I shifted in my seat, struggling to identify if it were performance art or not.
She continued the act, but it was not clear if it were by choice or not. I flinched when the pulsing, grunting figure opposite her slid one hand around her neck and squeezed, but I couldn’t look away. Part of me thought I owed her this.
He pressed one thumb into the soft patch of neck just above the collarbone. Still pumping. Still thrusting. Still posing for the camera. He wasn’t fucking her. He was fucking the audience, and this was his piece de resistance.
Nikki slapped his hand, attempting to play it off, to be more than the object. He clamped his hand down harder, and she pulled at the fingers with her right hand, but he only doubled down on his efforts. She was trying to sit up, trying to end the scene without ruining it, but she had no idea what part she was really playing here.
Text appeared on-screen in an ironically chipper pink: To see the conclusion, click through to…and then there was an array of letters signifying an external web site. It was a lure. That’s all Nikki’s life was worth to these hyenas.
But, true to the arc of this, I did just as it asked.
My skin grew slick with perspiration. I jolted a cigarette from the pack and sparked the lighter next to the unfiltered end. I drew long and deep and listened to the crackle of the tobacco as it disintegrated into ash.
I hit pause on-screen and got up, walked around the room. I chased my smoke and let it catch up with me, but it never quite imbued me with the desired effect. I was jagged and raw, my whole body pulsing with a kind of fevered anxiety. I couldn’t get Nikki out of my head, and for a moment I was cosmically aligned with Taj. I wondered briefly if he had ever been in the same room as this sort of violence, and before I could allow the thought to disappear, I grabbed ahold and clung to it. If he had been integral to Nikki’s life, it was apparent he’d witnessed this scene.
Not this specific scene, however.
I stubbed the cig and immediately put fire to another. This one tasted half as good but twice as necessary, and I smoked it with a patience under the light of the computer screen.
This was a neon abattoir, a darkly lit slaughterhouse designed specifically for back alley Lolitas. Sex as transaction. Sex as commodity. Sex as cold, perfunctory action. The girls and women who lashed themselves to the mast of the site had no idea where the ride would come to port.
A grand percentage of Boys in Blue regard prostitutes with scorn. Pitfall of the job. Lumber Junction was not a hotbed of, well, hot beds, but we had a few, and mostly the guys on the force took pity on them. Heard downwind a cop named Ronald Bullen visited a retired gas station worker named Luanne on the side, that he paid her a hundred bucks for their time together, but that was about all I knew of the connection between cops and prostitutes.
But I’d been around folks long enough to know how these things work. Cop might adopt a woman in a bigger city, maybe take pity on her situation and let her know where not to turn tricks on Saturday nights.
Still, when a woman goes missing, some cops take the view that they’re just hookers. That sort of blind spot allows women to slip through the cracks, and who knew how many had become truly ‘missing’ missing persons, where there was not even a record of disappearance. Prostitutes are transient. They move around a lot. They get arrested a lot. There’s a high probability of arrest, drug abuse, or violence.
The internet has changed all of that. Guy plead guilty to luring people using a site called MySpace and killing them in a sick anonymity. If I had to bet, the fluidity of the web allows men and women to bypass the age-old ritual of trolling for ass by simply setting up a date online. No pimp. Little chance of arrest.
Was this how Nikki had slipped through the cracks?
Cops didn’t seem to care she’d disappeared. When she’d turned up, no one called for swift justice. No one protested, and either her parents weren’t involved or did not care that she was dead. Her death a sand castle in a rising tide.
But it mattered to Taj.
He had fought to drag her to the surface, but some other force had pulled her into the depths, where she had been lost and forgotten, swallowed whole by the force which had lured them here in the first place.
I peered into the cracks of the system. The thumbnails and descriptions left nothing to the imagination, and so I needn’t open the doors of this perilous back alley of the human condition too wide to see what mechanism drove each video.
At the center of this was greed. Greed, and callousness. Maybe a little revenge thrown in there. Nikki wasn’t simply a means to an end — eyeballs on the screen — but a message, a warning, to anyone who dared follow Nikki’s example.
Whatever that was.
I found Nikki’s grave through sheer persistence, not to mention a few dead ends. I sat myself next to her grave and willed her spirit to speak.
For several minutes, I got nothing.
The gift, if it could be called that, had left me.
I felt something, though, and I tried to without much success get her to talk.
The urge to make a grand promise was strong. In the abstract, a life is easy to mold into a commodity, a means to an end. The ice cold presence of a gravestone is hard to objectify.
I pictured a girl in the fire of her youth, perhaps a bit puzzled regarding her place in the world but looking for a niche anyway, and I saw her torn down, ripped apart by the wolves of this world, cast aside because she was seen as no more than an object.
Even worse: a paycheck. Probably not a big one, either. Those who had used her undoubtedly didn’t know her name, or if they did, it was yet another log in a book. An entry for tax evasion.
I wished now, more than ever, to be given a sense of her final moments, to know what she went through, not because I could in any way identify, but because I yearned to feel a rage that would sufficiently push me through to finish this.
I examined what a woman had to do to reach a fate similar to Nikki’s. Cheat? Lie? Steal?
Didn’t seem likely. A prostitute lies, the pimp beats her. Same for stealing, and as for cheating, well, I’d never heard of a pimp having such a basic sense of fidelity, before.
Disobedience, though, that was something else entirely. A woman steps out of line, she gets the stick. She intentionally disobeys and embarrasses her overseer, though, and she runs the risk of being publicly excoriated. That’s when the beatings get fierce.
For her to be murdered — and not only that, murdered on camera — is underpinned by a more fundamental malfeasance. Nikki, in all likelihood, didn’t just defy her pimp, Othello Dufour, she called the wrath of Big Bossman Hector Dominguez down on her.
It was only a theory, but one I had been mulling over since leaving the party.
My ques
tion was: How did the man I called my brother become involved?
6
I resumed my investigative business, talking to the prostitutes I figured ran in Nikki’s circle. I had to flash some money to get them talking, and one agreed to chat, so long as I gave her a spin in the car.
“It’s cold,” she told me.
I let her in and handed her a twenty. She rolled her eyes and tucked the money into her bra but started talking nonetheless.
“Did she have a pimp?”
She nodded. “She was working for Othello Dufour. Worked for Hector Dominguez.”
“I’ve heard of him.”
“She wished she could get out. Wasn’t a typical relationship, know what I’m saying? Not like me. I’ve gots me a man looks after me, and he don’t hit me or shit like that. Sometimes he’s mean as a motherfucker, but he don’t smack me up. Anyhow, Nikki ain’t get the same kind of treatment. She had to work. They dropped her off, picked her up, like it was a nine-to-five. Cold. Rain. Gang violence. Didn’t matter. Her narrow ass had to be out on the corner.”
“Was she afraid of him, of Othello?”
She raised one hand as if to say, Of Course. “Othello’s a scary-ass individual. It’s why he’s in the business. He can run women the way most people sell cars. They fear him, but they don't cross him.”
“Was she afraid enough to run away?”
She shook her head.
“She reveal anything that freaked her out? Did you know she was doing the porn sites on the side?”
She took out a cigarette and lit it. “You mind?” When I shook my head, she pulled out a flask, too, and drank deeply from that. The car filled up with the scent of cheap vodka.
“She was doing scenes right from the get-go. She had the most bangin’ body, and Othello knew he could turn that into a profit. I think he’s starting to get wise to putting stuff on the internet. That’s where everything’s going. I know plenty of girls, they’re dropping their pimps and jumping right onto the new sites. Craigslist, shit like that. No middle man. Soon as I get me a computer, that’s exactly what I’m-a do.”
“Her fear,” I responded. “Did she ever talk to you about it? Did she work with anyone on the videos that made her feel creeped out?”
“I mean, it was porn. They’re all creepy. They don't realize it, the men, but they’re always touching themselves. I may have to fuck for money, but I don’t have to put up with nothing that goes against the smell test.”
“The smell test?”
“Your instincts, white boy. You don’t like the way a situation smells, you get the fuck out, or you run the risk of ending up like Nikki.”
“You think she was murdered by a john?”
She shook her head. “Way she was torn apart, I can’t believe that.”
“So you think it’s Othello.”
“Othello’s violent, but he’s not repulsive,” she said. “Girl goes out and does something he doesn’t like, he beats her up, maybe puts her in the hospital. He doesn’t kill her. Else, he’d have no girls of his own.”
“That leaves Hector,” I replied.
She shook her head. “Edrick.”
The name sent chills through me. I steadied my hands. “What about him?” I managed to whisper.
“Now, that motherfucker is crazy,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “I ain’t gon’ lie, I’ve done a few of them videos, and Edrick showed up on set before.”
“What does that have to do with Nikki?”
“She was with him.”
“Like, with him?”
She shrugged. “He stood by her, and she wasn’t allowed to move unless he did. Maybe they was together. Shit, maybe she was just under his thumb. Either way, he was scary.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You could feel it coming off him. He stared at the girls like a wild animal, like he wanted nothing more than to cut them into itty-bitty pieces.”
“But you don’t have any evidence of that.”
“I don’t need evidence. Girls disappear all the time. They hitch a ride, try to go up to Georgia or down to Miami. That’s usual.”
“But with Edrick around—”
“They get cut the fuck up. Ever since I been hearing his name around, girls who work for Hector and Othello seem real fucking scared of stepping out of line. You ask me, it’s that crazy prick who’s responsible for all these hoes turning up in bits and pieces.”
I dropped her off and drove around the next corner, where I slammed on brakes and leaned out of the car, puking up everything I had eaten for the last day.
He’s the one, I thought. He’s the one, and he’s got to die.
“I don’t think that girl your brother was dating simply disappeared and ended up in pieces on the side of the road.”
“Nobody just ends up that way, Rol. What’re you getting at?”
“She was being pimped out. Girls go missing that way.”
“Story old as recorded history.”
“She was also making cash under-the-table as a cam girl and pornographic actress.”
“Okay,” Deuce responded. “You have my attention.”
“I visited the virtual residence of her illicit activities, and, man, the stuff I saw there almost clogged up the hard drive.”
“You thinking maybe she got snuffed out by a romantic interest?”
“I think worse than that, old friend. This site, it had the normal guy-on-girl stuff, like you used to expect to see in a Penthouse, Hustler, whatever.”
He nodded.
I continued. “It also had some pretty sick and particularly twisted kinks, and the girls who served as the models for those kinks did not seem to be enjoying it much.”
“What sorts of videos?”
“Rape fantasies. Rough sex. Slapping. Bondage. It doesn’t all point toward something more sinister going on behind the scenes, but I’ve got a few thoughts on it all.”
“Shoot.”
“I’d bet dimes to dollars if you ran the names and faces of the girls from that site with the photos of the missing and dismembered girls, you’d come up with a surprisingly high percentage, and I’m not even thinking of those that can’t be found.”
“What do we do?”
I said, “I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”
“And?”
I exhaled. “The man looks like me — Edrick — is in the business of making snuff films, and it’s time we shut his file once and for good.”
Somewhere in the world of dreams, there is a field made of fire, and a woman composed of sticks and dirt, standing beneath a mountain range. Could be the Rockies. Could be the Himalayas, for all anyone knows. It’s a dream, after all, and the only thing that sticks is how real it feels.
The sky burns a pumpkin orange, the entirety of existence engulfed in flame.
“Rolson, Rolson, wake up.”
Aunt Birdie is shaking him. He’s not in the mountains, nowhere close. He’s in his bed, the whap-whap-whap of the ceiling fan breaking through the silence.
But beneath that, he hears above him another sound, one he doesn’t quite recognize.
It is then he realizes the entire home is bathed in orange.
“The house on fire, Birdie?” he asks.
Birdie shakes her head. “Worse.”
Outside, the truth becomes clear. Rolson is at first confused and then enraged by what he sees. He is not a stranger to race issues. His mother is often invoked as a nigger lover with jungle fever, and at some point he developed a violent reaction to it, but he’s never seen this side of it. He doesn’t quite understand why, but he believes it has something to do with his best friend. He usually eschews time with his white friends to sit with Deuce, and he realizes it is not he who was breaking some kind of unspoken barrier. He is nevertheless at a sort of loss at how it could get this bad.
He watches the orange flames lick the sides of the cross. It is a sign, a warning. It is the sort of occurrence supposed to make you stand up and take notice.
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The cops appear some time later, feigning an interest in the Klan. As if they genuinely want to find out who had brought these old-timey tactics out of the woodshed.
Big John Dawes gets out, toothpick jutting from the corner of his mouth.
“Truth being what it is,” Big John says, adjusting his belt, “I ain’t seen anything like this.”
“John,” Birdie says, exasperated, “you know who it is.”
He plucks at his shirt, pulling it away from his not inconsiderable gut. “I can’t prove anything,” he says. “This could be anybody.”
“Could be anybody, but it ain’t just anybody,” she replies.
“Now, Birdie—”
“You know where they have meetings, and you know what they believe. Might not be something they act on too often, but this is one of those times, and it has to stop.”
When Rolson returns inside, he’s greeted by the sound of a ringing phone. Perhaps because of the late hour, he’s surprised and put off by it.
He picks up the receiver and places it to his ear, knowing instinctively what he will hear next.
“Rol?”
“Deuce? What’s up? You all right?”
“Something happened at my house.”
“Mine too.”
“Fire and crosses?”
Deuce says, “Fire and crosses.”
There exists here an interminable pause.
“Deuce, I—”
“Don’t say it,” he says.
“But I am. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”
The memory is a hazy one, but it is clear that this is not the result of a single event, but the culmination of several of them. Rolson has been an outspoken opponent of the segregation plaguing Lumber Junction. Through his encounter with the two rednecks last fall, he no longer sees things in just black and white, if ever he did.
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