“Here we go,” I muttered to no one. I got out. The headlights blinked and the horn hiccupped, the locks clicked shut and I walked into the store.
If I expected the inside to dovetail with the seedy exterior, a shock awaited me upon entry. Bright fluorescents lit row after row of neatly arranged erotica, a surprisingly professional cornucopia of pornographic videos, magazines and adult toys. The linoleum tile floor showed signs of age but also glowed from the recent attention of a mop. I had anticipated the scent of cigarettes and old motor oil but my nose detected neither of these; a man could have spent hours in here and walked out with no telltale smells clinging to his clothes, nothing to raise concern in the sensitive olfactory receptors of a wife or girlfriend. What sounded like the Top 40 station out of Raleigh drifted from speakers set into the acoustic tile overhead. It could have been any Blockbuster Video store in the country.
But for the inventory. When the door closed behind me, I found myself looking at a stack of small boxes with a photo of a strange lump of plastic and a young blond woman licking cherry red lips.
LARA LOVITT FUCKABLE VAGINA, the box proclaimed. The lip licker, I presumed, being Lara. REALISTIC FEEL! E-Z CLEANING!
“Welcome to Ryan’s,” called a young man seated behind a cash register on the far end of the store, reading a magazine. He didn’t look up. “Holler if you need help.”
“I will,” I said, clearing my throat. “Thanks.”
I moved past the adult toy aisle and through a section marked ASIAN, which offered a plethora of DVDs with covers showing small women of Asian descent finding creative ways to get boned. There stood another section marked INTERRACIAL, another for GAY/LESBIAN/TRANSSEXUAL, another for S&M and yet another labeled HETEROANAL. The last section before the register promised ALTERNATIVE. Apparently, all the other material was just too mainstream for some people.
“Help you find something?” Asked the young man.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Are you Ryan?”
“I’m Cory.”
He was younger than me, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but taller, broader in the shoulders. He wore a hooded sweatshirt with HOLLISTER printed on the chest, but the long sleeves didn’t quite disguise the flames tattooed on the undersides of his arms. Another look and I saw more tattoos on the topsides; with his shirt off, this guy would have resembled a New York City subway car. He had shaved his head, like Dr. Koenig. He had a gold tooth, unlike Dr. Koenig.
Behind him, a red curtain covered the doorway to another room in the building. A dim light turned red by the gauzy material glowed inside it, and I felt suddenly certain that I was looking at the entrance to the VIP section. Just in case the stuff in the ALTERNATIVE section wasn’t donkeyshow weird enough for some patrons.
I reached inside my London Fog overcoat and pulled out a sheet of paper—a photocopy of the membership card to Ryan’s—which I unfolded and displayed for the clerk. “You guys issue cards like this?”
“Yeah. That’s…who are you?”
“I’m Kevin Swanson,” I said. “I’m an attorney from Alamance County.” Seeing his face tighten up, I quickly added, “Nobody’s in trouble. I’m just looking for information on two guys who might have a connection to this card right here.”
“What two guys?”
“Leon Pinnix and Trayshaun Ramseur. Ring a bell?”
Cory shook his head.
“There’s two of them,” I said. “Cards, I mean. One for Pinnix and one for Ramseur. You mind checking your records and seeing if you have an address?”
“We don’t keep records,” he said. “People that come here don’t necessarily want a paper trail, you know? And even if we had records, I probably couldn’t show them to you. Privacy laws. Know what I’m saying?”
“I do,” I said. My face remained impassive, but inside I felt myself flailing. This was my one and only lead. This was the part of the show where I threatened to subpoena him to a deposition and threatened to force him to produce business records. But it had become very obvious to me—since I wasn’t dealing with Ryan himself here, or anybody else with skin in the game—that Cory wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if I subpoenaed the entire world. In fact, he might enjoy collecting his eight dollars an hour to come sit at a deposition.
“If you don’t mind me asking, what’d they do? I mean, what’s a lawyer from Alamance doing sniffing around a porn store?”
I folded the paper and slipped it back into my coat along with my hands.
“Last year, they tried to break into my house,” I said, maintaining my expression. “They tried to kill me but didn’t do a great job. So I shot and killed them.”
Cory’s thick eyebrows raised and brought the corners of his mouth up with them in a slight smile. “I thought you looked familiar. I saw you on the news, dude.”
“They didn’t have any ID,” I continued. “In fact, but for these cards to your store I don’t think the cops would have even known their names. I’m just trying to get more information. So I can get some…closure.”
“Closure,” he echoed.
“Closure,” I repeated.
His eyes moved over my overcoat, the suit visible beneath it. White shirt, dark tie. I read his mind; this guy killed somebody? You got to be fucking kidding me.
“The nature of the attack,” I said, “suggests that if they held memberships to a place like this—no offense—they would have come here a lot. They’d be regulars.”
“We have a lot of regulars.”
“Two black males, early to mid thirties.”
“Dude, this is Durham. You’re going to need more than that.”
“They would have been into alternative.”
Up climbed the eyebrows, slight but noticeable. “How alternative?”
“The cops found handcuffs and duct tape. Theory is, these guys were getting ready to act something out.”
Cory’s mouth transformed into an O and his eyebrows raised all the way. He whistled. “I see. That’s pretty alternative.”
“It is. Anyway, do these guys ring any kind of a bell? They wouldn’t necessarily have been coming in together—I’m looking for two black guys about my age who consistently rent…very alternative material. The most alternative material you have.”
He looked down at my hand, which still held the photocopies of the membership cards. He motioned for me to hand it over, which I did. He studied it for a moment and handed it back.
“That’s a VIP card,” he said. “Gives the customer access to certain collections. Material we don’t just put out there for everybody. Hey, are you a cop?”
“My State Bar number is 503612. Look me up.”
“If you’re a cop, you have to tell me. Otherwise, it’s entrapment.”
That wasn’t true, but I wasn’t going to disabuse him of that notion just now. “My firm’s website is www.carwoodallisonlaw.com,” I offered. “My mug shot’s on it. Fire up your laptop and take a look.”
He folded his arms and regarded me with eyes that narrowed in suspicious appraisal. Whirs and clicks sounded as he tried to decide whether I was telling the truth or not. After another look at my suit—one of my expensive ones, perfectly tailored to my figure—he must have decided that I dressed too nicely for an undercover cop. His arms unfolded. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the glowing red curtain behind him.
“Come on,” he said. “I’m going to show you the VIP section.”
I honestly didn’t want to see what kind of things the owners of a store like this considered too spicy to set out with the S&M and anal material. And I didn’t want to stand in that red light. I didn’t want that at all.
But I went.
Cory hadn’t answered my question. He hadn’t indicated whether Pinnix or Ramseur rang a bell.
Because they don’t, I thought. Because they weren’t born and didn’t grow up with sexual desires that could deform like the branches of some twisted tree in the black heart of the forest. They had no lives before the Bald Man gav
e them air. They had no thoughts other than his.
Impossible. The video store, these membership cards, they proved that. Golems didn’t like porn, because they couldn’t; ergo, the fact that Pinnix and Ramseur had possessed membership cards indicated that they weren’t golems at all and I needed to stop thinking that stupid bullshit right now.
Or not, Bobby mused. He conjured men, but maybe he can’t conjure clothes
What the hell are you talking about? I asked.
I’m saying that maybe the membership cards belong to the people they killed to get the wallets and clothes.
Before I could process that last thought, I had followed Cory through the curtain and found myself in the exclusive VIP section of Ryan’s News & Video.
The light burned dimmer in here, lengthening the shadows and removing the shine from the magazine and DVD covers. I didn’t get a great look at those, because the merchandise on the wall grabbed my attention first.
Chains. Rope. Rolls of tape. Blindfolds.
Handcuffs.
“Good material isn’t all about big titties and tight asses,” Cory said. “I mean, if that’s all it was, we could all get off on Playboy, you know what I’m saying? The good stuff is situational.”
Right next to the handcuffs hung a clear plastic package with what looked like garbage bag ties inside. A handwritten label on the bag proclaimed these to be FLEXICUFFS.
“The good stuff gets to the heart of what you want. Your center. Digs deep into those places that you don’t want to admit exist but are running things anyway. Under every skin is a nasty, nasty son of a bitch. This section is for him.”
I tore my eyes away from the restraints and found myself looking at a DVD showing a girl in what looked like an evening gown. She looked young, probably too young to have her face on a DVD cover in a place like this. The title read simply Prom Night. Next to that, another girl, blindfolded and gagged and chained to a wall. This one was called Please Don’t.
I felt my immortal soul in danger just by being here.
There was another doorway beyond the one I’d just stepped through. Solid metal, with a double lock, it looked like an exterior door. This, logic said, would lead to the outside of the building.
That part of me that believed in golems piped up again. No, it said, it doesn’t. It goes somewhere else.
The thought hit me like a bucket of ice water.
This building isn’t big enough for a room this size, let alone another one behind it. Think about it.
I did. The general merchandise section of the store took up almost its entire width. The old gas station sat on a relatively narrow lot and the builders had structured it accordingly. The room I stood in right now shouldn’t have been here.
Where am I? I asked.
No answer. Oblivious to my thoughts, Cory continued.
“The thing about most bondage material is, the girl is actually okay with it. She’s part of the game, or she’s getting paid, or whatever. Even in your so-called rape videos, what you’ve got is a couple of actors. But in the best shit, they don’t want it. Like this one.”
He picked up a magazine in a language I couldn’t decipher. It looked like Spanish. He flipped it open to reveal a Hispanic woman in her mid-twenties bent over a table, a desk, some nameless piece of furniture. A set of hands pinned her arms to its surface. Behind her stood a man in a ski mask, naked from the waist down. He was
Leering
smiling, I felt this even though the mask covered his face. The woman was crying.
“You can get away with things in other countries that would get your ass sent to prison here,” Cory said.
I looked back at the door. The edges glowed now, like someone had turned on the lights in a room on the other side. I couldn’t ask about this, though, because my throat had closed up.
Where am I where the fuck am I where does that door go if it goes to the outside how are the goddamn lights on because it’s DARK out there
You wanted to see where those two fuckers came from, Bobby said in my head. I think you found it.
My throat unstuck enough to where I could say, “Thanks. I appreciate you showing me this.”
“Anything in here you like?”
“No, thanks.”
“You sure, man? Hey, I got more than just this third-world bullshit. If you’re only into white bitches, I got stacks and stacks of that.”
“I’m good to go,” I said. “Thanks.”
Before he could say another word and before my eyes could take another look at that other door, I turned and walked out as fast as I could. By the time I hit the front door to the building, I was running.
22.
Cory didn’t follow me. I point that out because when I hit the night air outside, it took awhile for the crazy thoughts to subside, and it struck me that Cory could have been a golem, too. He could have chased me out into the parking area and dragged me back inside.
And so I ran. I actually ran past the BMW, because even as my mind yelled hey, wait a minute, my arms and legs seized on this idea of Cory The Porn-Peddling Golem and so they pumped up and down, up and down, continuing long past the point where my heart and lungs could supply them with air. By the time all my systems reached the mutual understanding that Cory wasn’t chasing me, I had left Ryan’s News & Video—and my car—several hundred yards behind. My adrenaline boost spent, my legs first slowed and then stopped. I bounded to a halt and rested my hands on a lamp post, bending over and gasping for breath. I felt more than a little dizzy.
Effective immediately, Bobby said, you are to begin a program of intense physical training with the goal of burning all that candy off your ass. Jesus, man, look at you!
My heart rate slowing now, I straightened up and stretched, feeling my vertebrae pop and crack as I surveyed my new surroundings. The streetlamp under which I stood had burned out—or shot out, as evidenced by the broken glass at my feet—and the city hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet. Consequently, I found myself in the darkest section of a street that didn’t have much light even on the best of nights. Down the street, a lamp on the curb outside Ryan’s Video marked the outer boundary of my present darkness. Another lamp down on the other street corner in the opposite direction petered out a hundred yards or so from where I stood, dribbling its miserly electric glow over rows of close-together houses built in the Craftsman style, with rambling front porches and angling rooflines. People paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for architecture and character like this in Burlington, but Durham’s elite had moved on to greener pastures years ago and now their old homes stood in neglected disrepair. Shadows of indoor furniture stood on sagging porches. Several windowless units shouted abandonment, while others with lights glowing in the few windows that weren’t boarded up spoke of residents so far down on the food chain that even their landlords couldn’t afford new glass.
“You all right?”
I jumped. That’s not an exaggeration; I actually jumped, both feet leaving the ground for a split-second when the voice in the darkness startled me so badly that my leg muscles gave a violent convulsion. I think I might have yipped, too.
I looked all around for the source of the voice. I found it on a darkened porch attached to the house just behind me. I saw the outline of a couch—probably fabric-covered, indoor furniture had a way of migrating outside in neighborhoods like this one—from which grew the outline of a man.
“I’m okay,” I replied. “Just out of shape, is all.”
“What are you running from?” His words ran together in that urban style that mashed syllables and dropped seemingly unnecessary verbs—the question came out as whachoo ruh-fum. I couldn’t see him, but he sounded older, fifties or even sixties. His voice was as dark as his home and as cracked as his street. I heard the snick of steel on flint and saw the flash of the lighter as he touched the flame to the end of a cigarette. I watched the cherry rise as he raised it to his lips, and fall as he lowered it. “Well?”
How to expl
ain that? Well, sir, I was perusing your neighborhood video store’s selection of very sick porn, and it occurred to me that the clerk might be a monster made from earth and clay sent by another monster who’s gotten his ass on his shoulders with me. So I ran.
I gestured down the street towards the oasis of light that contained Ryan’s Video and my BMW. “I was out in the parking lot and something spooked me. Guess I panicked.”
“So you ran up here?” So you ruhup heah?
“Yeah. I did.”
“Well, you best get on.”
I looked all around at the menacing shadows. Jesus, I thought, why doesn’t the city come out and fix this? “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for your concern. Have a nice night.”
“You don’t run into darkness. You supposed to run away from it. But you done run right up in it. And this ain’t no place for you. You don’t belong here. You need to go ahead on, and you need to go now. Before they finds you.”
I tried to swallow and failed.
“Who’s they?” I asked.
“The ones that do belong here.”
Although I wore a heavy overcoat, I shivered. Through a mouth of cotton, I said, “I’ll be going now, thanks.”
“Yeah, you get going. Don’t stop for nothing. Just go. And don’t never come back.”
“Thank you. Have a nice evening.”
My legs unfroze and I took off, walking instead of running partly because I felt silly running, but also because the sidewalk was so shattered and buckled that I couldn’t understand how I’d made it this far without tripping and plowing face-first into the concrete psoriasis. As I stepped over the worst spots, the man called out after me:
“You hear what I say? Don’t stop for nothing!”
And I didn’t. Until I heard noises in the shadows maybe a hundred yards from that line on the pavement where the streetlight outside Ryan’s News & Video gave way to the night. I stopped. And I looked.
Keep moving, my Better Sense told me.
Hey, now…what’s going on here? Asked my Inner Self. This was my Better Sense’s mentally handicapped roommate, and it kept me rooted to that spot on the sidewalk. And when I saw what was going on in the shadows, I couldn’t leave.
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