Trigger Finger (16 page)

“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 gave
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 explain
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.