by John Flynn
“Ahhhhh, but you really don’t know why I’m here,” he said, raising his hand in objection. “You just assume that I’m another customer. Perhaps some loser who feeds quarters into a tiny booth around back because he can’t face real intimacy.”
“I really don’t care,” she replied.
“You know that’s not true. You’re intrigued by me, but you won’t let your guard down long enough to be honest with yourself.”
“Okay, smart guy, I’ll play along,” Kate said. She was getting really pissed off. “Why are you here?”
Monroe removed a book from the center table, and handed it to her. Titled The Master-Slave Relationship: A Study in Duality, the book’s dust jacket featured a lurid cover of a man dressed from head to toe in black leather whipping a naked, honey-tanned blonde who was tied by her wrists to a bench. The blood-stained welts on the woman’s back and buttocks suggested that the whip had cut into her bare skin with a violent force, but the look on her face was pure ecstasy. To some, the image might have proved shocking; to others, exciting, almost titillating; for Kate, the image was simply repugnant.
“The answers to all of your questions are right here,” he said, flashing one of his patented smiles.
“What are you?” she demanded, paging through the text. “Some kind of dungeon master trolling for sex slaves?”
“Well, no. A dungeon master is a figure from D&D.”
“D&D? S&M? It’s all alphabet soup to me, you twisted fuck,” Kate exclaimed, shoving the book back into his hands. She turned her back on him and started to walk away, towards her partner.
“No, no, you don’t understand,” Monroe protested, trailing after her. “D&D stands for Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a game that kids play. I’m not a dungeon master. I’m an—”
Kate and Monroe exchanged glances like the crossing of swords.
“You people are really sick, you know that? You get your rocks off by inflicting pain on other people, and then try to blame it all on some kid’s game.”
“It’s not about the pain. In fact, most BDSM doesn’t even involve pain,” Monroe said, in a matter-of-fact tone. He thumbed to a section in the book, and handed it back to her with the pages open to Chapter Seven. “It’s about the exchange of power. One person willingly hands over control to another. It’s the most beautiful and pure example of trust between two people that I know of.”
“I’ll bet,” she replied, snapping the book shut, still not convinced. “Sick bastards like you just want to keep trying to convince yourselves that’s true.”
“You’re wrong. The submissive person is always the one with the power. He or she always has the option to say ‘no.’”
Kate glanced down at the cover of the book she was holding, and for a fleeting instant in time, she became stuck between the tick and the tock on a clock as the author’s name—John P. Monroe—registered. Monroe was not just some misguided fan, as she had first surmised, but the actual author of the book.
Kate felt a hand come down on her shoulder, and jumped as if she had been given an electric shock to set her free. The hand belonged to her partner.
“I think we’ve got all we’re going to get out of Carl,” Miller said with a sour look on his face.
“Right.”
As lead detective, Frank had the right to decide when it was time for them to get the show on the road. “We should get moving, Kate. We’ve got fourteen more sewers just like this one . . . and the rats are getting hungry.”
“Sure. Just give me a couple of minutes, and I’ll meet you outside,” she said.
“Okay, just make it fast,” he added, on his way to the door. “I don’t want to be in this toilet any longer than I have to.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
Kate watched Miller exit the store, then turned back around to finish her conversation with Monroe, but he was no longer there. “Sonuvabitch,” she exclaimed. In a confused and reckless state of mind, she scrambled up and down the aisles, and then crashed the peep shows out back, but there was no sign of him. Monroe had completely vanished from the store without a trace.
“Get hold of yourself, Kate,” she said, breathing hard, her head between her knees. “Can’t afford to let Frank see me like this.” She took a couple of deep breaths, and straightened up.
A noise! Kate swiveled around, gun in hand, and came face to face with the last person in the world that she was expecting—Carl.
“I can get you a signed, first edition for just fifteen bucks more if you like, Inspector,” the clerk said, still eager to please.
“No, that won’t be necessary.”
“It’s a real classic,” he persisted.
“No, thank you,” Kate said, holstering her gun. Angry and annoyed, she slapped the book down on the checkout counter, and pointed to the author’s photo on the back page. “But I would like to know what happened to the author.”
“Can’t say. I haven’t seen him here in weeks.”
Kate gazed up at him, startled. “But I was just talking to him . . .”
“You were?” Carl replied with a dumb look on his face. He sat up in his chair, and pantomimed the action of looking around the store. “They come, and they go. It’s not my job to identify every Tom, Dick, and Harry that walks into the store. I got far more important things to do.”
“You must have seen him,” she insisted.
“Sure, officer, whatever you say,” he said, suddenly changing his story. “He looked just the dude on this cover. Big as life . . .”
“Forget it, Carl. I don’t think you even know when you’re lying or telling the truth.”
“Listen, lady, are you going to buy the book, or not?”
Dawson shook her head. As she exited the store, Kate had a strange look on her face, as if she had been talking with a madman. She was desperate for answers about Monroe, but she also knew that she would not find them there. Carl was either stoned or totally out of his mind. Probably both.
Chapter Three
WHEN KATE ENTERED McGinty’s Public House, trailing behind her partner, she could not shake off the feeling that she was being watched or shadowed by someone. She knew that it sounded paranoid, particularly in a place where she was surrounded by her fellow officers, and chose not to reveal her suspicions to Miller.
Besides, she knew him well enough to know what he’d say. He would have told her to “relax and have a drink with friends.” But ever since her close encounter with John Monroe earlier in the day, she had been feeling especially vulnerable, almost naked. Kate bellied up to the bar, next to her partner, and ordered a Wild Turkey with a beer chaser. At least, if her stalker showed up, she’d be feeling no pain.
Kate Dawson knew that every city had one, a bar that was favored by members of the police department for its hospitality and friendliness. In the City of San Francisco, it was McGinty’s pub. The Irish-owned and Irish-managed McGinty’s was modeled after the traditional Irish Pub. Most public houses offered a range of beers, wines, and spirits, and even the occasional soft drink, but Irish pubs were better known for their hard liquor. Forget the margaritas, white-wine spritzers, designer beers and microbrews, Kate thought. McGinty’s sold hard drinks to the conservative, law-and-order crowd, and made no apologies about it. Located a few blocks from the Hall of Justice, the bar played host to every police detective and cop that had ever worked in or visited San Francisco. It was the place she favored after a long day.
O’Flynn, the bartender, placed a shot glass full of bourbon and a full-bodied beer on the bar in front of Kate.
“Thanks, Johnnie. Be a real pal and run me a tab, would you?”
“No problem, Kate,” he replied, with a broad smile.
She took a sip of the bourbon, then slugged back half of the beer in one gulp. She exhaled in satisfaction, and licked her lips. I
t tasted good. Too good.
As Kate smiled back at the bartender, she glimpsed someone vaguely familiar reflected in the mirror on the other side of the bar. But by the time she swiveled around on her bar seat, the figure had vanished into the crowd.
“Are you okay?” Frank asked, looking concerned. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
“I’m not sure . . .” she replied. “I think I just saw my stalker. Lenny.”
“Not that loser from your building who keeps following you around?” Miller had risen to his feet, and was looking all around the bar.
“The one and only . . .”
For the last several weeks, Kate had come to discover that she was the object of her neighbor’s misguided affection. She wasn’t particularly worried or concerned about Lenny Provolone. He seemed harmless enough. She was mostly just pissed off that he kept following her around. She would glimpse him at crime scenes. She would spot him in the rearview mirror, and then later see his car parked near the precinct. She would witness him in court. She would catch sight of him at the grocery store, would run into him at the laundromat, or spy him at the mall.
Nearly every place she went, he followed. She figured that he must be using some kind of souped-up police scanner to keep track of her whereabouts, but now he had crossed the line. McGinty’s pub was the last sacred spot where she could go to hang out and just be herself.
The first time that she laid eyes on her “stalker,” Lenny was struggling with a heavy load up the narrow stairway at her building at Bayside Village Apartments. She thought he looked a bit odd, carrying a lightsaber from Star Wars hooked to his belt with a D-ring, but nonetheless offered to give him a hand, and then stayed to help set up his apartment. Afterwards, she cooked him dinner, and listened politely as he regaled her with stories about his imaginary adventures in cyberspace.
Kate had little doubt about his intellectual capacity but seriously questioned his maturity. She had never met another man who was so consumed with himself and his fantasy life. She’d learned that Lenny had a near-genius IQ, and worked as a defense contractor at Northrop Grumman, designing high-tech components for civilian surveillance satellites. She also discovered that he had a serious crush on her, or rather the woman that he imagined she was.
Kate glanced across the bar as Lenny adjusted the NASA baseball cap on his head and smoothed out the wrinkles in his baggy trousers, and smiled. She thought that he looked very odd, hiding in plain sight next to her fellow police officers, and sketched his profile on the tabletop. The image was not a flattering one. She imagined that Provolone’s biggest disappointment in life was that he had gone prematurely bald in his early twenties and had doubted his virility ever since. The Biblical story of Samson must have seemed all too real to him, especially when other men with full heads of hair got the girls he wanted, and that left only those women that he considered to be trolls. To compensate for the lack of hair on his head, he must have grown his great bushy beard, which then went prematurely gray and made him look like Alec Guinness in Star Wars. The beard may have served him well at science fiction conventions, especially when he carried his lightsaber, but the rest of the time must have made him look terribly odd next to other men. Given a choice between his brains and a full head of hair, Kate imagined that Lenny would take the hair on any day of the week.
With the bar choked to capacity, the noise level—a low, thunder-like rumble—seemed ready to pop like a sonic boom. Several off-duty cops and plain-clothed detectives drank and mingled with a handful of police groupies who, they were hoping, would be willing to trade sex to gain entry to their law enforcement world. A couple of tourists snapped photographs of the place, while several older cops sat around a table, drinking, talking about the “good old days.”
Kate watched and waited for Lenny to make his move, as Kate, Frank and another member of Homicide sat at the bar, nursing their drinks and talking quietly among themselves.
Kate took a sip of her drink as she surreptitiously listened in on his conversation.
“Hey, Lenny, I’m surprised to see you back here again. How are you doing, sugar?” one of the waitresses asked, as she set her tray with dirty glasses down on the counter. She was short and plump, but had a radiant smile that illuminated her entire face.
Kate grinned as Lenny looked hounded.
“Oh, hi, Rebecca. I can’t talk with you right now. I’ve got something that I’ve gotta do.”
“That’s okay, sugar. We can talk later,” Rebecca said, still beaming. She had taken hold of his arm. “Why don’t we meet after I get off work for a drink or something?”
“Yeah, sure, anything,” he replied, scrambling to get free of her grasp. “Look, I really do gotta go.”
Kate stared at Lenny for a long moment, pretending that she didn’t recognize him as he crossed the room. But she could not maintain that look of indifference for long. In fact, for a split second, she felt her expression betray her deep sense of irritation, feeling as if she was prepared to burn him down in his tracks with the fire in her eyes.
And why shouldn’t she react that way? She was surrounded by dozens of law enforcement officers who knew her well, including a few that she had dated. McGinty’s pub was her place, and as far as she was concerned, Provolone had violated her sanctuary. With a simple snap of her fingers, any one of her fellow officers would have taken him out, and been happy to do so. Her indifference turned into a frown.
“Kate,” he called to her, seeming to mistake her outward demeanor as an invitation for something more. He had made that mistake before, and was about to make it again as he started towards her.
“Is that him?” Miller asked, leaning over and whispering in his partner’s ear.
“Yeah, that’s him,” Kate replied with a sigh.
“What the hell is that hanging off his belt?”
She glimpsed the metal object clipped to Lenny’s belt, and tried unsuccessfully to contain her smile. “That’s a lightsaber.”
“A what?”
“A lightsaber,” she repeated. “Didn’t you ever see Star Wars?”
“Christ!”
“He’s a bit of an eccentric . . .”
“Well, this has gone on for long enough. I’m going to set this guy straight, if it’s the last thing I do,” he said, climbing to his feet.
Kate pulled him back down in his seat. “No, Frank, please don’t,” she said. “That will just make matters worse. Let me try to deal with him in my own way, and if things get out of hand . . .”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be right there.”
With a determined look on his face, Lenny pushed his way through the crowd of police personnel. Annoyed, Kate swiveled around on her bar seat. “Are you stalking me, Lenny?” she asked, all business.
Provolone froze in his tracks, his shoulders bunched up like a cartoon character that had hit an imaginary obstacle in the road.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” he said, meekly. “Alone.”
“Lenny, this may not be the right time,” she replied, pointing to her partner and the other detective from Homicide. Both of the men obviously regarded the bespectacled computer nerd, with his baggy pants, baseball cap and tennis shoes, as a kind of walking joke, and they covered their mouths to keep from laughing at him.
“We have to talk now,” he said, with a trifle more force, then cringed when he saw their expressions.
Annoyed, Kate glanced at Miller and then the other detective. “I’ll be right back,” she said.
She steered Lenny toward the exit. When she opened the door to the parking lot, she felt a cold blast of the night air. “Okay, I hope this is worth embarrassing me in front of my friends.”
“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe I should just talk to you later.”
Kate rolled her eyes and sighed loudly, folding her arms across her
chest. “If you’ve got something to say, Lenny, say it. Don’t beat around the bush. I don’t have all night.” She wanted to add, you’ll get sunburned basking in my radiance too long, but bit her tongue instead.
He fumbled for the right words, then blurted out, “You must be putting in a lot of overtime these days with all that I’ve heard about this ‘Angel of Death’ killer from the news bloggers.”
“I’m afraid that I can’t say anything about that, because it is considered an ongoing investigation.”
“That’s right,” he said, then paused awkwardly.
Kate put her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow. “Look, you didn’t hunt me down to ask me about my job, did you, Lenny?”
“No . . .”
“So what is it that you want to say to me?”
He felt his stomach muscles tighten as he realized the words just weren’t there. Finally, he just said, “You’re really special, Kate. You’re the kind of girl that . . .”
Kate slumped, feeling all of the weight of his emotional immaturity heaped on her back like a five-hundred pound valentine. She was certain that, if she had unlocked the door to his heart, she would have been buried in an avalanche of broken dreams and unfulfilled promises. She felt sorry for Lenny because he was such a sweet man; if only he’d learned a few social skills along the way, this would not have been so painfully hard. How could she respond to him without encouraging him further, or making herself seem like a total bitch?
“. . . I always thought would be right for me.”
“Why, thank you,” she said at last. “You’re special in your own way.”
“But you don’t understand,” he said, looking at her with his sad, almost tearful, puppy-dog eyes. “I thought that we might spend some time together . . . you know . . . as boyfriend and girlfriend.”
She looked at him, feeling bad. “I’m really flattered that you feel that way about me. Any woman in her right mind would be lucky to have such a decent man as you in her life.”