Bad Karma

by Dave Zeltserman

  Shannon breathed out slowly as he thought about it. “Fucking insidious,” he said.

  “It is that. Also a bit ingenious. What better way to find college students who are the most emotionally vulnerable than to set up a business that they’ll seek out. And then you have hours to work on them while they’re putting themselves in your hands. Of course, the so-called yoga classes they’re giving are as fraudulent as a wooden nickel.”

  “And how’s that?”

  Eli made a face. “The woman I talked with told me what they had her do, and while I don’t know exactly what you’d call it, it’s not yoga. Sounded more like the positions are meant to wear you down more than anything else. So let me guess, after all my attempts over the last five years to convince you of its benefits, you’re finally going to sign up for yoga classes?”

  “Well, I guess at least some fraudulent ones.”

  ***

  The Hill section of Boulder was directly across the street from the university and its businesses catered almost exclusively to students. Cheap to moderately priced restaurants, tanning salons, music shops, clothing stores, stuff like that. Vishna Yoga had a basement location in the heart of the Hill—off of Thirteenth Street, sandwiched between a music store and a nightclub. A sushi bar sat directly above it.

  The signs in front of the yoga studio were innocuous enough in the way they advertised new approaches to achieving well-being and stress relief. Several blown-up photos showed classes filled with young women, all seemingly in a state of bliss as they stretched in the same manner and direction.

  Shannon walked down half a dozen steps, opened the front door and entered a small vestibule where he was assaulted by a pungent overly-sweet odor. The smell seemed like a mix of musk and marijuana. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it was more powerful than any incense he had ever encountered and the air was thick with it.

  From behind a set of curtains he heard people chanting in a low monotone. Something about Vishna being the one and true source. A woman stepped quickly through the curtains to meet Shannon. She was dark-haired, short, petite, in her early twenties and wearing yellow leotards. Her eyes were wide open and expressionless as she stared at Shannon in the same manner a morgue worker might look over an incoming body that needs to be catalogued. Then, nodding to herself as if she had finished sizing him up, she told him Vishna Yoga would not be for him.

  “What?”

  “What we do here would not be right for you. I am sorry, but it would be a waste of your money.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be right for me?”

  “Your energy is all wrong. Please leave.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  Shannon was taken aback by the woman’s reaction to him. To bide time, he picked up a brochure from the counter and started to thumb through it. Inside was a picture of their founder, Vishna the One True Source. He was a few years older than Shannon, maybe forty, with a shaved head, brownish skin and sharp features that were made even sharper by his piercing black eyes.

  Shannon tried to act oblivious to the way the woman was staring at him and read aloud the marketing hype from the brochure. “Stress relief, improving my self-image, better sense of well-being.” Smiling, he added, “This sounds like what I’m looking for.”

  “I am telling you this would be a waste of your money. There is nothing we can do for you.”

  “It’s my money to waste.”

  “No.”

  Shannon gave her a hard look. “What if I stay to observe a class,” he said.

  “Leave now or I will call the police.”

  “I think I can stay for one class.”

  “I said leave!”

  An Asian woman, also very young, poked her head through the curtains and stared at Shannon with the same empty look in her eyes. With reinforcements now in place, the woman in the yellow leotard bent her knees, tensing, as if she were going to spring at him. A vein had started beating along her neck.

  Shannon took a step back. “You know,” he said, “this isn’t doing much to help my stress. Or my well-being, for that matter.”

  He got no reaction from either woman. Not even a crack of a smile. Backing up, he left the shop.

  He tried the music store first. The kid working the cash register shrugged when Shannon asked him about the yoga studio. “I see some nice looking girls going in and out of there.” He scratched his chin, frowned. “I tried talking to a couple of them. Not the nicest experience.”

  “How so?”

  “They’re kind of spacey, you know, and not that friendly. One of them wouldn’t even look at me. Made me feel like an idiot. Another, it was like she looked through me instead of at me. I stopped bothering after that. But they are nice to look at.”

  Shannon thanked him. As he got to the door the kid mentioned the smell from the yoga studio. “Sometimes it gets in here,” he said. “I think they’re smoking pot down there. Although it don’t smell quite like pot.”

  Shannon got less information from the night club. At the sushi bar, the only thing the chef told him was that none of the yoga students ever eat at his restaurant.

  “I wanted to put a flyer there offering their students a twenty-five percent discount, but they wouldn’t let me do it,” he complained. “Very unfriendly. Very un-Boulder like. Also smells bad.”

  True Light’s compound turned out to be only a twelve minute drive from the yoga studio, but the building seemed as if it were in the middle of nowhere. Located off a new road near the southeastern part of Baseline Reservoir, there was nothing for miles around it. And even though Pauline Cousins had described the compound to him, Shannon still didn’t expect what he saw. The place did remind him of a prison. Not that the building didn’t look expensive, and not that it wasn’t loaded with cathedral ceilings, large bay windows and stone chimneys. Maybe it was the gray stone they used, or that it was so isolated, or the six-foot iron fence surrounding the property—with each iron post topped off with a dagger-like spike. Or maybe it was the way the building seemed to be comprised of several unrelated smaller structures, all jammed together making it less like a house than something industrialized. It made Shannon think of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of a gothic mansion gone horribly wrong.

  After pulling up to the main gate, he got out and rang the intercom buzzer. A woman’s voice asked him who he was. Shannon identified himself and told her he was there to speak to one of their members, Melissa Cousins. The intercom went dead. After waiting several minutes, Shannon realized the woman had no intention of responding back. He rang the buzzer again.

  Angrier than before, the woman told him that Melissa did not wish to speak to him and he should leave.

  “I’d like to hear that from her.”

  “Too bad because you won’t.”

  Again the intercom went dead. Shannon pushed his thumb against the buzzer and held it there until two men with shaved heads came out of the building, both of them wearing white robes and sandals, their faces twisted into angry scowls.

  “Stop ringing that buzzer!” one of the men yelled at Shannon.

  He was the larger of the two, but other than that they were almost indistinguishable. Both had square-shaped heads, flat noses and small, almost baby-sized ears. As the larger man unlocked the gate, Shannon took a step back. He watched curiously as the two men stormed through it, scowls on both faces deepening.

  “Are those silk robes or polyester?” Shannon asked. “My guess is polyester. Doesn’t seem to have the texture of real silk.”

  The two men came towards him, stopping only when they were a foot away. Up close, they looked vaguely familiar but not as much alike as Shannon had first thought—it was more of an optical illusion caused by their shaved heads and identical outfits. Maybe they were enough alike to be brothers, but not identical clones. They were both young, probably in their early twenties. The larger man had beadier eyes, while his partner had a more angular face. Shannon realized why they had seemed familiar; the larger one resembled
Curly Howard from the Three Stooges, while the other could’ve been a young Shemp with a shaved head.

  He couldn’t help feeling angry as he thought of these two pushing Pauline Cousins to the ground. Swallowing it back, he said as flatly and evenly as he could that he was there only to make sure that Melissa Cousins was okay.

  “Why don’t the two of you back away from me,” he added with a tight grin.

  Lips separated from the Curly look-alike showing small white teeth about the size of corn kernels. He threw both hands outward trying to push Shannon in the chest. Shannon sidestepped it and grabbed Curly by his elbow as he stumbled forward off balance, then swung him head first into the fence. Curly’s forehead clanged off of it and he shot backwards as if he had come out of a cannon. As he lay unmoving on the ground, a gash showed over his right eye and blood from it trickled down and stained his robe.

  “I hope you don’t try something stupid also,” Shannon told the other man. “Cause as you can see I’m not a ninety pound middle-aged woman. I’m a little tougher to push around.”

  As the Shemp look-alike stared dumbfounded at Shannon, his face screwed into a look of fury. He screamed like a banshee and charged forward, throwing a wild uppercut. Shannon blocked it and, in almost the same motion, grabbed him above his wrist and swung him backwards. The man kept screaming until he tripped over his partner and hit the back of his head against an iron post, making the same clanging noise that Curly’s head had made. Then, his eyes rolling inward, he slumped forward and lay crisscrossed on top of his partner. Shannon checked to make sure they were both breathing, then walked through the unlocked gate to the front door.

  Like the gate, the door had been left unlocked. Shannon opened it and stepped down into a marble foyer that had been set up as an altar. Facing him was a life-sized painting of the cult leader, Vishna. In it he wore a long, flowing golden robe as he sat cross-legged, thumbs and forefingers touching, hands resting on his knees, his black eyes just as piercing as they were in the brochure photograph. On both sides of the painting were ornamental tables where candles and incense burned, the odor similar but not exactly the same as the one in the yoga studio. What looked like small offerings—flowers, jewelry, silk scarves—lay scattered on the floor in front of the painting.

  As Shannon took all this in, a woman with long black hair reaching to the middle of her back entered the foyer. She was wearing the same type of white robe as the two men who had attacked him. Like Melissa and the women from the yoga studio, she was young, petite and very pretty. Also like the women from the yoga studio, her eyes had an expressionless, almost glazed look to them. Still, seeing Shannon standing there, her jaw dropped, although no sign of her bewilderment showed in her eyes.

  “What—who are you?” she asked, stammering slightly.

  Shannon recognized her voice from the intercom. “The two thugs you sent after me are lying outside your gate. They probably need medical attention.”

  She walked past Shannon and looked out the front door. When she turned to face him again, her eyes were wider but still had the same expressionless, glazed quality to them.

  “They attacked me,” Shannon told her. “I could file assault charges against both of them, and maybe you also as an accessory. But I won’t. Not if you let me see Melissa Cousins.”

  “T-That’s not a decision I can make.”

  “Then talk to someone who can.”

  She stared blankly at Shannon for a good minute before blinking and nodding her head.

  “I’ll take you to a waiting area,” she said

  She led Shannon down a hallway decorated with paintings of different Hindu deities. Shannon recognized Shiva holding his trident, the four heads of Brahma, and many of the others from a book Eli had given him on Hinduism. At the end of the hallway was a marble sculpture of the cult leader. From somewhere beyond that, Shannon heard what sounded like sitar music and monotonic chanting.

  The woman put her hand out to stop him. “Wait here,” she ordered as she opened a door off the hallway. Shannon obliged and, as he walked into the room and the door closed behind him, saw that there was no doorknob on his side of it. The click of a lock being turned came from the other side. Not that it mattered—without a handle he had no way of opening that door whether it was locked or not.

  The door was solid oak. No chance of breaking it down with his shoulder. Maybe he could kick it down, but not without at least splintering his shin. He was in what amounted to an eight foot by eight foot cell with no furniture, nothing but a small half-moon shaped window on one wall and it wasn’t nearly large enough for him to crawl through if he had to. He walked over to the window and tapped on it. It made the dull sound of Plexiglas. For the hell of it he smacked the glass hard with the edge of his hand. While it gave a little, it didn’t break.

  Shannon sat on the floor and leaned against the wall. Taking out his phone, he prayed that the cult hadn’t thought enough ahead to have the room insulated with copper. A gnawing in his stomach grew until he saw that he had a signal to call out on. Feeling some relief, he tried Eli’s number at the Center and left a message, asking that his friend call him back as soon as he could. After ten minutes of waiting he considered whether or not to call Mark Daniels. A half hour later his internal debate had grown more serious and as he was making up his mind to try Daniels, his phone rang. It was Eunice Carver asking whether they were going to pay her.

  “Excuse me?”

  “People magazine. Are they going to pay me for my story?”

  It took him a few seconds to remember what she was talking about, “I don’t know yet. I have a call in and I’ll get back to you when I hear from them.”

  Within seconds of hanging up on her, his phone rang again. This time is was Eli.

  “What’s so urgent?”

  “Not much,” Shannon said. “Only that I’m sitting in a cell inside of True Light’s compound.”

  “What do you mean a cell?”

  “Just what I said. I’m alone in a room about the size of a prison cell. Door’s locked on the other side and the window’s too small even for Houdini to crawl out of. But that’s moot since it’s covered by Plexiglas.”

  “Jesus, is there any way for you to get out of there?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “I’m calling the police!”

  “No, not yet. But do me a favor. Call me back in fifteen minutes. If I don’t answer send the police here.”

  “Bill, I don’t like this.”

  “Neither do I. Next thing I know they’ll be pumping poison gas into this room.”

  “Shit, you’re scaring me.”

  “I’m a little scared myself. This place is a fucking freak show. You hit it on the head the other day when you talked about cults in Boulder. The guy who runs this one is a pure megalomaniac. You walk into the compound and the first thing you see is an altar to him. Then the hallway leading from the altar is lined with paintings of Hindu gods, and of course, residing alone at the end is a marble sculpture of this megalomaniac. The one god I saw missing from the hallway was Vishnu.”

  “Jesus, the reason for that is because he’s replacing himself as the supreme being. Sonofabitch. It’s no accident he named himself Vishna.”

  “My thoughts exactly. By the way, I stopped off at their yoga studio before coming here. Not only wouldn’t they let me sign up for classes, but the girl working there–all five foot and one hundred pounds of her–looked like she was going to try to physically throw me out.”

  “That is interesting.”

  “I guess I didn’t fit the profile of what they’re looking for.”

  “Or the girl could’ve had very good radar and picked up that you were a cop, or at least used to be a cop.” Eli hesitated, added, “Bill, you’ve got me worried. Why not call the police now?”

  “I could, but I came here to talk to my client’s daughter. I still want to give that a shot.”

  “Bill, if your life is in danger–”

 
; “I don’t want to be too melodramatic about this. I don’t think I can make a claim at this point for false imprisonment since I was asked to wait. And to their credit, they did provide me nice plush carpeting to sit on. Let’s just give it another fifteen minutes. See what happens.”

  A loud, unhappy sigh came from Eli’s end. “Alright,” he grumbled. “I’ll wait fifteen more minutes, but if you’re still locked in there I’m calling the police no matter what you say.”

  “Deal.”

  After talking with Eli, Shannon sat quietly and took deep breaths as he tried to calm the tension squeezing his gut. He had two reasons for calling Eli. First, he really was unnerved about being locked away in the room, which he assumed was the point of them doing it, and second, in case the room was bugged and he was being eavesdropped on, he wanted them to know he couldn’t be fucked with. Or at least make them think he couldn’t be fucked with.

  Nine minutes after Eli had called back and almost an hour after being locked up, the door opened and two men walked in. These two were a different breed than the robe-wearing stooges he had encountered earlier. One was dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, the other had on slacks and a light sports jacket. There was a hardness about both men. The one in the sports jacket was in his forties and looked solid, as if he were a weightlifter, his hair cut close to his scalp and scars running down both cheeks. His nose had been flattened a number of times and was now smeared sideways across his face. He smirked at Shannon, his small gray eyes as dull as sand. When he undid the buttons to his sports jacket, he unveiled both a Tony Bahama Hawaiian shirt underneath it and the handle of an automatic that stuck out from his waistband. From the shape of it, Shannon guessed it was a .45 caliber.

  His companion was younger, maybe early thirties. He was also taller and lankier, and had the wiry look of someone you didn’t want to mess with. He started laughing an ugly laugh as he pointed towards Shannon’s damaged hand.

  “He must be nervous,” he said, wheezing from his laughter as he elbowed his associate. “Look, he chewed his fingernails to bone.”