Bad Things (10 page)

Startled by a touch, Carson didn’t even have time to turn around. Something choking. Squeezing his neck. Thrashing, he tried to pull, tried to claw. Thick, hard arm almost lifting him from the floor. He yelled, but a huge hand clamped hard over his mouth. Kicking. Flailing. Helpless. The arm around his neck, the hand over his mouth didn’t move. Not suffocating. But weakening.

Computer screen blurring and dimming. He was dying. God, dying. For this? The day painted on the window fading to nothing.

Xavier hardly had him down the stairs before Carson started to regain consciousness, but he was still out of it. He stayed put where Xavier set him down, and was almost limp as Xavier put the restraints on him. While Carson’s gaze was still murky, Xavier dashed upstairs, adrenaline pumping hard through his chest and limbs, grabbed Carson’s backpack and camera bag. Throwing a smug glance up at the camera he’d hidden on a high shelf, pointed straight at the computer he’d left out as bait, he headed back downstairs.

There. Now Carson was awake. Alert. Scared fucking shitless.

Fuck, that look did something to Xavier, something having a lover bound had never done. But not the same dark, sadistic thrill of getting that other man—the one Dario had brought him—under his boot the year before, either.

Xavier put the bags on the work table, then went to where Carson was slumped against the beam he was tethered to. Squatting on his haunches, Xavier peered into his big, blue, fear-filled eyes.

“You’ve been making some bad choices. Haven’t you?”

Carson just stared at him in mute terror, and a sickening, muddy rage welled up in Xavier’s chest. The year before, with the man Dario had brought him, his rage had been pure. It had felt the way he imagined a violent high on PCP and Ecstasy would: an overwhelming sense of strength and energy, tinged at the edges with a dark, brutal eroticism.

But this rage he felt, looking down at Carson’s pathetic fear, was dirty. Nauseating. Vaguely familiar, like watching the neighbor kid slowly crushing a fat slug under his shoe when he was in third grade. He wished it was Max slumped at his feet, looking afraid for his life. Or Brian, even. Why did Carson have to be a piece of shit, too?

“
Right now,” Xavier said, his voice cold and sharp, “you have one chance—only one, trust me—to make a smart choice, for a change.”

Blue eyes clear and focused and bright with panic.

“I know you’re going to want to lie to me. To negotiate. To plead. To talk about cops and jail. But the only thing I want to hear out of your mouth is why you’re here at my house. No made up stories about needing a place to stay. The real reason. Who sent you. Why they sent you. What they told you to do. If you do that, I’ll think about letting you out of those restraints. If you don’t do that…” Xavier grinned. Some part of him wanted Carson to be stupid. To give him a reason to torture him. “…I’m going to leave you tied up. And I’m going to take my sweet time convincing you to tell me everything I want to know.”

The way his eyes lit up, like Carson’s alarm at coming out of his faint bound to a post had suddenly ignited an exponential chain reaction, for a second Xavier thought he was going to spill everything then and there. But Carson just sat there, staring. Trembling. Panting. Mute.

Fine.

Xavier fished Carson’s phone out of his jeans pocket and took it to the work table.

“This isn’t legal,” Carson said so softly Xavier barely heard him.

Grinning, Xavier turned. Carson’s hopeless look almost pricked the bubble of anticipation swelling up in Xavier’s chest.

Back to the phone. Not password locked. He was almost disappointed to miss the challenge of making Carson tell him. A few texts from someone with a cat for a profile picture. Carson’s mom, maybe. A text from Brian at the club just telling him his shift hours. Not on for two more days. Well, that was helpful. But nothing incriminating. No solid leads to follow. Not in his texts. Not in his emails. And there weren’t any voice messages. A few photos. His tax records. So, he’d been going through his files, too. But no sent emails or messages with the photos. Lucky. So, they still didn’t have his real name. His real address.

He unzipped the backpack and dumped its contents onto the work table. Clothes. Tooth brush. Razor. Nothing in the camera bag but a camera, lenses, spare batteries, some wipes, SD cards, some filters.

When Xavier picked up his camera, Carson blanched. Xavier didn’t suppress his grin at the ridiculous fact that the guy was more worried about his fucking camera than he was for his own safety. At the idea that he didn’t seem to think Xavier was actually capable of hurting him. If he had any idea what he was capable of, he wouldn’t give a fuck about what vandalism might befall his expensive gadget.

“
Be careful,” Carson pleaded, but with a sharp note, as if he were chastising a careless buddy who was being reckless.

Xavier popped the cap off the lens, contemplated the vacant display panel, then rotated the camera around in his hands, looking for the power button.

“Please,” Carson’s voice was tight with indignation at recognizing his powerlessness. “It took me almost a year to save up for it.”

Xavier turned the camera on, and the display lit up, a miniaturized image of the room, then, as he re-aimed, Carson, down on the floor, cuffed to the support beam.

“Yeah? How much does a camera like this cost?”

Carson looked annoyed by the question. “The body was only twenty-five hundred. But the lens was almost three.”

“Three hundred?”

“
Three thousand.” Carson looked like he might be about to get sick.

“
So this,” Xavier hefted the weight of the camera up and down, and Carson looked like he might jump out of his skin, “cost over five thousand dollars?”

“
Yes.” Oof. So angry.

“
It must take amazing pictures, then.”

He fiddled with the dials on the lens, trying to get Carson in focus.

“A camera doesn’t take good pictures. That’s like saying a hammer makes beautiful buildings.”

Xavier laughed. “A five thousand dollar hammer damn fucking well better build me something beautiful.”

He clicked the button, and there was Carson’s frustration and rage, frozen on the tiny screen. And when he pushed an arrow next to the screen, a different image appeared. An old woman. Xavier grabbed the thick, long barrel and showed the back of the camera to Carson.

“
Who’s that?”

“
None of your fucking business.”

“
Your mom?”

“
Those are private.”

Xavier laughed. Really fucking laughed. Was he actually serious? Sitting there cuffed in his basement because Xavier had just caught him digging through his computer and who the fuck knew what else, whining about his privacy?

Xavier started clicking through. Mom in the garden. Mom with the cat.

“
Seriously. Fucking put it down. You’re going to break it.”

“
Now, now. You were careful not to break my computer. And I’ll be careful not to break your camera.”

Cityscape.

Angled slice of a building interior.

Homeless guy.

“Please stop. I’m sorry for what I did. It wasn’t even my idea.”

Xavier looked at him. Waited. But that was it. That veil slid over Carson’s eyes again, and his lips went stiff. He’d rather protect Max and his circle of slavers than whatever he had on the camera.

Fine.

More street photography. He was pretty good, actually. Not terribly unique subject matter, but something about the mood. Xavier was seeing L.A. through different eyes, which was saying something, since he’d lived there all his life. First in Echo Park with his family, then Silverlake with Elena for a few years while she was slowly rebuilding the person who’d occupied the shell emptied by those three men, and now—fuck, had it really been six years already?—Venice. But here, on this luminous rectangle in his hands, a different L.A. Photography didn’t often do that for him.

He gave Carson a quick, appraising glance. Looking for the man, the artist he’d never guessed was in the affable but slightly skittish bartender behind the counter, politely, even cautiously flirtatious with the girls, and even with the clientele, in that way really good-looking straight men can be with other men. Their way of charming the masses who’d resent them, otherwise.

But that re-appraising look didn’t suddenly discover the artist behind the mask of the loquacious mixologist. All Xavier found in that twilight gaze was a bright constellation of desperate fear. Not the startled, confused fear that had ignited at waking up bound in Xavier’s basement. Now there was a life-draining, horrified dread sapping Carson’s strength, and he was slowly slumping, like he had a leak, an invisible cut draining him of all his blood, leaving him limp and pale and sheened in sweat.

Xavier’s heart thumped heavily and began to beat faster. Maybe there was something right there in his hands. The pictures. Maybe Carson was miles deeper in the shit at Gomorrah than Xavier had guessed. God, what if they’d had him photograph the women? For profiles online, for some kind of ad, something to show clients?

Xavier leveled a triumphant grin at his hostage, and Carson shuddered.

More of L.A. confessing the secrets she’d kept from him for thirty-two years. Then people, indoors. A party. People Carson knew. People who let themselves forget they were being photographed, let the man behind the camera see the intimacy of a quiet conversation in a corner. A kiss. A melancholy moment of isolation in a hallway.

The dusty scrub of hills. Griffith Park, maybe.

The Venice boardwalk with its endless parade of tourists and locals, their oddness equal but distinct.

Another hard thump of his heart. Racing now. Here. This.

Bare skin. Close ups, abstracting angles of naked form. Then out, a wide perspective that gave the viewer a person.

For a few seconds, a few frames, Xavier felt a muddled doubt. Elena and her organization had it wrong. The cops, the FBI had it wrong. They were looking for the wrong kind of trafficking. The wrong kind of victims.

But no. He hadn’t taken these pictures for them. These were his. Intimately, warmly, happily his.

Nude. At ease. Flirting. Teasing. Model perfect. A young, leanly muscled, broad-shouldered man.

So, that looking-over Carson had given him in the men’s room his first night on shift, that furtive glance at his crotch while he’d been working out hadn’t been innocent curiosity and surprise, after all. Or resentful envy. Xavier had probably missed it because Carson had been putting so much into his buddy routine and covering up his ulterior motives. Signal interference.

“
Well.” Xavier leveled a look at Carson, and grinned. “You should have shown me your work weeks ago. I feel like I’m finally getting to know you. I had no idea you were an artist. Or into cock.”

Carson’s pallid face went such a deep red so suddenly, it was as if it had been scalded.

“Or that you were such a master of deception. Because I’ll tell you, I have a real talent for reading people. The big things, the important things are usually right there for me,” he gestured toward his own face.

“
You missed it, because it’s not true,” Carson articulated, slowly, emphatically, as if using those few words to alter the shape of reality. “Photographers shoot nude models. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Xavier laughed. From the way his laughter twisted Carson’s expression, you’d think he was urinating on him.

“A few dick pics might not mean anything. But you going apoplectic over there sure as fuck does.”

“
I’m just angry.”

Xavier laughed again. He couldn’t help it.

These photos were good, too. Not shot with the same assurance as the people at the party or the city streets and its denizens. There was a tension, a slightly disconcerting incongruity between the obvious ease of the model, and the hesitant obliqueness of the camera. But the effect had its own charm. Like a shy, nervous seduction.

When he got to the end, which was the beginning because he was traveling backward in time through the archive, Xavier started clicking forward again, from the first shots of the model, grinning and flirting in close-up, still dressed. Then the strip tease. The camera remote. Shy. The model teasing. Inviting. The camera daring to venture nearer. To seek. To look.

“Fuck, Carson.” He waited. When the silence finally provoked Carson to look up, face trying to be blank, trying to hide, and to hide from, Xavier said, “It’s like watching a virgin being made love to for the first time.”

Those words drove such a shudder through his hostage, Xavier wondered.

“Did he? Did this beautiful man make love to you, when you’d finished your work?”

“
Fuck you.”

Xavier laughed. “Well, if you’re offering…”

It hadn’t occurred to him. Well, maybe just for a few seconds, after that awkward, obvious looking over Carson had given him while he’d been working out. But now, he let the image of Carson pinned under him thrash around in his mind, partly because he hoped Carson would see it in his face.

And he did. Now his eyes were lighting up with a whole new shade of fear. “I told you. I’m not gay.”

Xavier squatted down on his haunches so he could get a proper look into Carson’s eyes. So he could spot the lie.

“
So, you didn’t fuck him?”