“It is. But they still have guys monitoring the boards to see if we can whack ’em.” Ollie leaned back in his chair and groaned, as though he’d just finished a hugely satisfying meal. “So, what’s this video thingy?”
“We need to get a closer look at one part of a frame. Can you do something like that?”
“Can Captain Kirk bang a green chick?”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“I’ll just drop the DVD into the ’puter and rip the file. I’m pretty sure I can jury rig some sort of video capture/enhancement program. It might take me a couple hours to convert the hardware and then render the MPEG into a negotiable file. Is MPEG an okay format? I know it’s almost archaic at this point, but so is the vid software I have.”
I recognized enough English in the sentence to feel retarded. “Whatever works for you, Ollie. The stuff on the DVD… it’s some messed up shit. It’s really important that you forget what’s on it, okay?”
“Gotcha. Can you give me a rough idea of where?”
“At three minutes, thirteen seconds, a curtain gets knocked aside. That’s what we need. We need to see better what’s outside that window.”
Ollie sucked in his upper lip and chewed on it, thinking. “Can do. Gonna take me about an hour or so. You wanna pick up some lunch?”
“Anyplace good around here?”
“Grinder shop down the street. Grab me a meatball parm?” Ollie began flipping through disks of software. “Just think. A couple years ago, I probably would have had to run a firewire through an AVID system to get this kind of video editing. Now it’s all inside here.” Ollie patted his computer like it was an old family pet.
“And you’d have to frammajamma interface with the hibbity-dibbity,” Junior said with a chuff.
Ollie found the right software and placed the CD into the computer tray. “Wouldn’t need a hibbity-dibbity for this.” Junior’s smile fell. Ollie shot Junior a wink, then reached behind the table and started reconfiguring wires.
An hour later, our stomachs full of greasy meatballs, we returned to Ollie’s. The door to his studio was open when we returned. He was nowhere in sight.
“Ollie?” I called out. No answer. I looked at Junior. He shrugged. I called again. “Oliver? You here?” A horrible sound came muffled from behind one of the wired walls.
Junior and I ran over to the wall. “Ollie? You all right?” The strangled choke came again. It was definitely behind the wall. I looked for a convenient place to put down the grease-soaked bag with Ollie’s grinder in it, but was afraid the wrong spot could cause a fire.
I dropped the bag on his desk chair, and Junior and I started moving sophisticated boards of God-knows-what and tangles of wire along the wall. About halfway down, under yet another colorful tangle, was a white doorknob. I pulled it and the thin door covered in shelves and bric-a-brac opened. Behind was a small bathroom. Ollie was sprawled on the tiled floor, face in the toilet. The horrible sound we heard was him emptying his stomach into the bowl.
“Ollie? You all right, man?”
“Jesus Christ, Boo!” was all he managed to say before his body spasmed over the toilet twice more. “You could have warned me a little more about what was on that fucking DVD before you left!”
I found a glass next to the computer and filled it up in the sink beside the toilet. I held it out to Ollie. He took it in a trembling hand.
Ollie was right. I should have given him a more specific warning regarding content. There’s tough and there’s hard. The Home made Ollie tougher than his exterior indicated. But he wasn’t ever going to be hard.
“Ollie, I’m sorry, man. I didn’t think. Junior and I have been looking for this girl and I just figured it was hard for us to watch, because, well… I dunno.” I did know. I couldn’t say it was because we knew her, because we didn’t. I couldn’t say it was because we cared about her, because as objective tough guys, we shouldn’t.
But I did. Or I was at least starting to, and that thought bothered me, because I knew why.
Unsteadily, Ollie got to his feet. “Boo, that video would have given Jeffrey Dahmer a nervous breakdown.” He walked over to his computer, typed for a second, and the screen shot appeared. The falling Cassandra. The pulled curtain. The sign.
“I still can’t make it out,” Junior said.
“I haven’t done the pixel rendering yet,” Ollie said, a little snippily. He looked at the bag on his chair. “What is that?”
“Your sandwich.”
Ollie’s gullet lurched audibly. “Ugh. Take it away.” I picked up the bag and stashed it in the mini fridge to the left.
Ollie sat at the desk. Again, his fingers flew over the keyboard faster than my eyes could follow. The capture focused, then enlarged. Focused and enlarged. A third time. The piece of the sign was clear. Distinctly, I could make out part of two words. They were all in caps, one word atop the other in red and yellow neon. APA above PANA.
Junior cocked his head at the screen. “What the hell does that say?”
“Apa Pana,” said Ollie. “Sounds Spanish. Either of you speak Spanish?”
“Un poquito,” Junior said. Unfortunately, I knew un poquito accounted for about a quarter of the Spanish phrases Junior spoke. The other three were filthy.
“I think it’s parts from two different words,” I said.
Ollie looked at the screen again, head cocked at the same angle as Junior. “Oh. Oh, yeah.”
“Panama?” Junior said. “Japanese?”
“Junior,” I said. “Does Japanese Panama make any goddamn sense to you?”
“Just train of thought, man. Could be a travel agency.”
“Next time you travel, fly Japanese Panama Airlines.”
“Okay, cheesedick. You think of something.”
I couldn’t. “Can you print that out for us, Ollie?”
“Already did.” He handed us both blowups of the picture on the screen. “Listen, Boo. Because I saw that, it doesn’t make me accessory to anything, does it?”
Oh, yeah. Forgot to mention. Ollie’s also one paranoid bastard. He didn’t eat fish for two years because he thought the government was spreading AIDS through seafood. I’m not kidding. He had a reason. It also made sense.
I squeezed his shoulder. “How could you be? You never saw the video, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah. My memory is already hazy. What are you going to do with this guy?”
Junior and I looked at each other. “That all depends on him. We’d love nothing more than to punch him so many times he shits sideways for a few weeks. But our job is to find the girl and get her back to her father. How much pain we inflict is directly in correlation to how much resistance he puts up.”
“I’m gonna fuck him up, either way,” Junior said.
“Aw, who am I kidding? We’re fucking him up either way.”
I looked back to Ollie. I really didn’t like what I saw. The color had run out of his face like rainwater down a drain. I thought he was going to be sick again. Softly, he said, “Oh, shit.”
“What?” Junior asked.
“You guys didn’t watch the whole thing, did you?”
Ollie couldn’t stay. Couldn’t watch it again. He left us to go get some beer from the packie. I’d never known Ollie to touch alcohol before.
Junior and I stared at the monitor, sick dread a lump in my stomach. Or maybe it was just the meatballs. Felt like dread. I hit play.
The scene played out like it had before, but silently. Either Ollie didn’t have speakers connected to the computer or had the sound turned off. For whatever reason, it made the viewing worse. Cassandra’s screaming was still there, but it was inside my head, along with the sound of the blood pounding through my veins. The rage flared red before my eyes.
We reached the point where we’d stopped watching. The video played on. Snake did… things. Things I’m not going to recount. After a minute, Cassie stopped struggling, resigned to the abuse, the humiliation. She just lay there, no fight
left in her. Easier to let it happen.
That is, until Snake picked up the knife again.
When she saw the knife in his hand, she bucked underneath him, kicked her legs.
He rode it out, letting his weight keep her pinned. I couldn’t hear it, but I knew he was laughing. He held the knife aloft, letting it catch the light, taunting her with it and his power over her.
A quick flash.
A spray of red along the headboard and wall.
One tiny arm reached up briefly, then fell to the bed. One last spurt of blood arced across the wall. Then the video faded to black.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Junior move to the bathroom. I stared at the black screen.
“You gonna be sick?” I called.
“I dunno.” He made a horrible gassy sound, then, “I think I might be. You?”
“No.” There was surprise in my answer, since a part of me felt like I should be. I wasn’t. Instead, I kept right on looking at the dead monitor. The red haze was gone. Instead, my vision took on a sharp clarity, as though the world had its edges filed to points. I felt no anger. I felt no sadness or pity or revulsion. I felt neither hot nor cold. Even my clenched jaw stopped hurting.
I felt absolutely nothing.
Chapter Thirteen
By the time I tracked down Underdog, the sky had gone purple, Kenmore Square filling up with Sox fans heading to a night game, the Fenway lights giving an eerie glow in the night sky behind The Cellar. Audrey said I had just missed him and he might have gone to Wolf’s Grill. I called Wolf’s, but nobody picked up. I took a cab over to Wolf’s. No Underdog. I realized I hadn’t eaten since Ollie’s. I ordered some ribs and asked the waitress if she’d seen Dog. She said he was headed to The Cellar or The Model. I called The Model. He wasn’t there, but they had a good idea where he might be. This went on for the better part of two hours. Eight calls to various bars and two call backs later, I finally reached him back at The Cellar.
“Hey, Boo. How’s it going?”
“I gotta talk to you, Dog. It looks like you might be needed on this thing after all.” I’d barely touched the ribs. Maybe the pile of sauce-slathered, meaty bones was hitting my psyche too close to home after what I’d seen.
“Oh. Okay.” He didn’t sound eager to help. He’d weighed it all against his fear of Danny the Bull and come up short. “Where are you?”
“I’m at Wolf’s”
“That’s weird. I was just there.”
“Listen, Dog. I gotta talk to you ASAP.”
“Well, I can just wait for you here.”
“No. I don’t want to talk about it there. You got a place?”
“You mean away from prying ears?”
“Ears, eyes, tongues, and anything else you can think of.”
“Let me think…” A soft, grating sound came out of the phone as Underdog scratched his stubble in thought. “Hows about you meet me at the pier right by the aquarium? You know which one I’m talking about?”
“That’ll work.”
“An hour okay?
“See you in an hour.” I hung up.
I chain-smoked during the wait. The hunger still roared in my stomach, and my recent sleeplessness was catching up to me. My eyelids felt like someone had glued a pair of bricks to them. A misty breeze blew off the harbor and moistened every surface around me. When I’d first arrived, I’d sat on the concrete ledge of the pier and gotten rewarded with a soggy ass.
So I paced and I smoked. Once in a while I mixed it up and smoked, then paced. Except for the soft red glow of the cherry, it was nearly pitch dark by the aquarium, the light swallowed by the fog. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid. I remembered a dolphin statue somewhere, but I couldn’t see it. One of my most vivid memories of my mother was of her waddling around the sculpture, chasing me and quacking penguin noises while I laughed and ran from her.
Part of me was glad I didn’t see the statue. The memory was beginning to fill me with shame for who that kid became.
A voice snapped me back from my childhood. “Boo? Where are you?” Dog’s voice carried well on the misty air, and I could see his silhouette on the border of the well-lit world.
“At the pier,” I called back. “Right where you said to meet you.”
“Shit, it’s dark.” He was hugging himself, shivering against a cold that wasn’t there. I kept the observation to myself.
Underdog gave the area a quick look over. “So… what’s up?”
I took one last drag on the dying cigarette and ground it out under my shoe. The tip sizzled on the damp ground. Bright cinders danced a ballet in the breeze. “We’re close to ending this.”
“That’s great.” Then he realized there wasn’t an ounce of great in my statement. “Isn’t it?”
“She’s dead. Snake killed her. Me and Junior saw it on a video.”
“Wh—what?”
“It’s a snuff video. Snake’s moved up from kiddie porn into blood-freak theater.”
“That stuff’s mostly urban legend, Boo. Most of that shit is faked. Buncha twisted fucks looking for a quick buck in the loony market.”
I shook my head at him. “Most is not all. I saw it, Dog. Shit wasn’t faked.”
Underdog looked away toward the Harbor. “Bastard… that fucking bastard,” he said softly.
“We’re getting close to him.” I lit another cigarette. I was still pacing, but I’d slowed it down to a conversational speed.
“When you do, call me. Do you still have the video? I’ll have Vice on his ass like—” Then, quietly, “Shit. It’s Homicide now, isn’t it?”
I shook my head again. “He’s gone. We find him, nobody else does. Not Vice. Not Homicide. Nobody.”
Before he could respond, a yellow flashlight beam caught me right in the eyes, blinding me. I held up my hand to cut the glare, but flash burn still coated my vision. Peering through my fingers, I could see a pair of silhouettes slowly walking toward us. The saunter spelled cops, even at fifty paces.
“Whatcha doing out here, boys? Aquarium’s closed.” The arrogance of authority rang in the voice.
My eyes adjusted, and I could make out the pair. Two young cops. Younger than me.
“We’re just talking, officers,” Underdog said.
“You sure?” the other one said. He was smaller than the first and that much cockier. “Because it looks like you two are up to something, lurking around in the dark here.”
As they got closer, I could see the taller one was blond, a wispy cop moustache over a thin mouth. The shorter one had a dark buzz cut and power-lifter muscles under a generous layer of fat. Both wore matching sneers.
“There a law against conversation?” I asked.
“On closed property there is.”
“Hey,” the shorter one said. “Maybe the crackhead was just about to suck off big boy’s dick, here. Maybe we interrupted a date?”
“That right?” the other asked. “You two faggots about to exchange a little kneel and bob?”
“Actually, we were waiting for your dad to show up,” I said.
“You fucking—” The little one was reaching for his club when Underdog jammed his own badge halfway up his nose.
“I know you’re an idiot, but I assume you can read.” Brendan Miller had made a sudden appearance—one that probably saved me a long sentence at Cedar Junction.
The taller one’s face blanched as he looked at the ID. “Oh. Oh! We’re sorry, Detective. We didn’t…” He couldn’t seem to find a satisfactory way to finish his sentence.
The muscle midget scowled and gave the card a once-over, like he was expecting a fake. Even in the dark, I saw his color turn three shades of green before he swallowed hard. “Yeah. We were just… We didn’t…”
“You didn’t what?” There was a real edge in Dog’s voice. “You didn’t know you were interrupting a ranking officer’s conversation?”
“No sir, we didn’t.” The taller one had completely lost his swagger. The smaller one sti
ll looked fit to bust, but was keeping himself under control. I debated patting him on the top of the head, but as far as the totem pole of power went, I was still at the bottom of the present quartet.
Underdog poked the tall one in the chest with his loaded finger. “So, in the event that I was not a detective, you two assholes saw fit to verbally abuse and possibly assault a pair of citizens.”
“There have been trespasses by graffiti vandals.” The short one’s voice had started to whine.
“Shut your mouth, Pee-Wee,” Underdog said. “Obviously you didn’t see us tagging the wharf, so you and your excuses can kiss my hairy ass.” Underdog was only a few inches taller, but the dig worked. The midget deflated, punctured by Dog’s tone. “What district are you idiots out of? A-1?”
“Yes sir,” they said simultaneously.
“Larson’s your captain, then?”
The two exchanged a quick, nervous glance. “Yes sir,” in unison again.
“All right. Unless you two want a disciplinary phone call made to Captain Larson in the morning, you’re going to head back to your car and fuck off.”
“Yes sir,” in unison one more time, heads hung like a pair of beaten puppies. They turned to go.
“And put on your goddamn hats. You officers are out of uniform.”
They flinched at the last comment and walked off. In the distance, I saw them both put their hats on the second they climbed into their cruiser.
“Damn, Dog. That was tight.”
“And you—” He spun on me, the same loaded finger trained right in my face this time. “Did you just tell me that you and Junior are going to kill off this Snake character when you find him?”
“You didn’t see that DVD, Dog. He cut her fucking throat. You didn’t watch that little girl die. I did. So did Junior.”
“You know what, Boo? You know I’m a loser.” He jammed his finger hard into his own bony chest. “I know I’m a fucking loser. But I am still an officer of the goddamn law. And you just confessed to me intent to murder. Murder, Boo!”
“You want to see it? I’ll fucking show it to you. Watch the video. You decide whether this cocksucker deserves to die or not.”
The Hard Bounce Page 13