Familiar Lies (6 page)

As he snapped his last picture a text message flashed on his phone from a number he didn’t recognize. He froze as he read it.

Get out now. They’re coming back.

Now Max did find himself frozen to the spot. A cold chill ran through his body as his face flushed hot and prickly. Butterflies took flight in his stomach as it seemed to twist into knots. The questions mounted quickly: how could anyone know his current whereabouts? How did this person get his number? Was the message to be believed?

Max had the distinct feeling that if Gabe—or whoever
they
might happen to be—caught him inside this basement it would become a crime scene if it wasn’t one already. Gathering his will and energy, Max turned to leave the basement, taking the warning at face value. As he did he caught sight of a DVD lying amid the trash and other debris littering the floor. He saw a name scribbled with Sharpie marker onto the surface:
Amanda
. He had an uncontrollable urge to take it, so he grabbed it up and headed back through the hallway between the rooms until he reached the bottom of the steps.

He bounded up them, certain he’d encounter someone at the top of the steps with a gun or a knife, but he met only the empty and dark hall at the top. The muggy air clung to him and he felt as if he might never be able to wash the awfulness of this place from his body, no matter how many showers he took. He headed through the kitchen and toward the back door, turning off the cell phone light and exiting in the same fashion in which he entered. He made sure to push the door back into the locked position before he headed off into the night and toward his parked car.

At the car, Max got inside and closed the door gently. The dome light died just as headlights appeared behind him. He slunk down in the seat and waited until the cars passed, rising to get a look. He saw two black Lincoln Towncars pull up in front of the house. A tall, thin man in a white suit got out of the trailing car, accompanied by two hulking men in dark suits. The trio entered the house, with White Suit bringing up the rear.

Max didn’t want to wait around any longer. He started the car and cursed himself; the goddamn daytime running lights. He might as well have turned on the headlights, they shone so brightly. But there was nothing he could do about that now, so he made a quick u-turn and drove out of the subdivision parking lot with an overdose of adrenaline in his system and a mysterious DVD lying on the passenger seat.

Max awoke the following morning feeling as if the previous night hadn’t occurred at all, but rather had been some sort of elaborate and realistic dream. But as much as he wanted to tell himself that—and how much more he wanted to
believe
it—the reality of the experience corroborated itself in the form of a DVD with the name
Amanda
scribbled on it.

Max sat at the kitchen table, a cup of hot coffee steaming away in front of him as he stared at the silver disc sitting on the living room coffee table. He drank the coffee despite the churning in his gut, partially because he needed the caffeine, but also because he needed something warm inside him to kick-start his internal heater. He felt cold inside, dank and dark like that terrible basement from which he’d narrowly escaped.

Questions paraded endlessly through his mind and Max wondered just how a police detective kept his sanity having to repeat this sort of thing, case after case. What went on in that basement? Was it still going on? Whose blood was that on the sheet? Who was Amanda? Who was the tall man in the white suit?

And, who the hell texted him right before White Suit arrived?

Max had opened the proverbial can of worms here, a Pandora’s Box that had been tightly closed only days before. Now the demons were free; horrible and terrible things that only lived in the shadows of Max’s world before finding that letter.

That goddamned letter.

Worse still, Max knew that there would be no getting these demons back into their box; not without a fight.

He stared at the disc and he felt his insides turn to mush. He shouldn’t watch it. How he could know such a thing so certainly, to be so convinced of the wrongness of a video disc with only a label handwritten on it rested squarely on the location and conditions in which the video had been found. In fact, the likelihood that the video did
not
contain something terrible on it seemed infinitely less so.

He should drop it off with the police. He knew this with the same certainty that he knew water was wet and the sky was blue. But something else, something sadistic that seemed not to want to help him but rather to scar him permanently, told him he should at least watch the video. Otherwise, how would he know what was on it? How could he know that he hadn’t brought the police someone’s home movie of their kid’s birthday party, the disc simply discarded on the floor by the previous owners and coincidently caught up in the squalor that some more recent tenant had laid upon it?

That logic branch started to make increasingly more sense the more Max thought about it, despite the fact that he knew his subconscious was actively engaged in the act of deception. Truth was, he wanted to know what was on that disc. No, he didn’t
want
to know, he
needed
to know, despite the obvious dangers such knowledge might pose.

But he also knew that once he watched the video he’d never be able to unwatch it.

Max rose from the table, coffee in hand, and made his way to the living room. There on the coffee table lay the disc, like a coiled snake lying in wait for a mouse to stroll by. Or a man stupid enough to poke it.

Feeling as if his body had been animated by a force he couldn’t control, Max picked up the disc and slid it into the DVD player’s tray. His stomach twisted up in knots at the sound of the tray closing and the laser seeking inside the player. He felt the sweats coming back on again, just as they had in the basement as the television woke up to the call of the DVD player.

Max watched the screen come to life and sat down on the couch, the coffee still in his hand despite his being oblivious to its existence. He focused exclusively on the screen, his mouth as dry as a desert. He swallowed hard, the act producing only a scraping sensation like two sanding blocks grinding together.

The screen showed an image of the basement he’d been in the previous night. A backlight shone on a girl as she sat on one of the mattresses fitted with a sheet. She smiled at the camera, but her eyes had a distant look to them, a far away presence that suggested an altered state. Max put the girl at sixteen or seventeen years old; a young-looking eighteen at the most.

Turn it off
, a voice said in his head. But it wasn’t the voice he’d been growing accustomed to hearing over the past few days.

It was Josh’s voice.

Max didn’t hear it with his ears, or maybe he did. He couldn’t be sure with his attention focused so squarely on the screen. He looked toward the closed door to Josh’s room and he wanted to turn off the television. He wanted to throw a brick at it, to destroy its ability to even function, performing the same destructive act on its guilty partner in crime, the DVD player.

But he didn’t turn off the television. He couldn’t move. He continued watching, the dread swirling around him like an invisible yet palpable fog, seeping into his body and crushing him with a terrible force.

Max watched as the girl began taking her clothes off. He noticed a scar on her abdomen, from an old surgery by the looks of it. He began to feel sick to his stomach. Amanda (Max had to assume) smiled at the camera with a look so distant her mind might as well have been on the moon, or some distant galaxy a million miles away.

Her shirt came off first, followed by a white lace bra. Max’s face burned with shame and dread as the video continued exactly where he thought it would. She sat on the filthy mattress with her legs open as a man with a thick Russian accent issued commands from behind the camera. Amanda obliged willingly enough, following the man’s instructions faithfully.

Then the cameraman stepped out from behind the camera and everything changed.

A look of confusion spread over her face as she looked up at the man. Her eyes revealed shock, but her body, slower to react, remained in place. The cameraman was completely naked, save for a leather mask on his face. He knelt beside Amanda and she backed away instinctively, her body now responding to the alarm bells her mind had already raised.

The man grabbed Amanda roughly, tossing her to the dirty mattress. She began to struggle, but the masked man doubled her in size, flipping her over on her belly with relative ease. She screamed now and Max felt the sound inside of his head, like claws shredding his brain into ribbons.

The masked man reached somewhere off camera and retrieved a dog leash, the kind used with large breeds; the kind with spikes facing inward to discourage dashing after squirrels and rabbits encountered during walks.
 

The masked man wrapped the leash around Amanda’s neck and pulled hard.

The screaming stopped and the worst of it began.

Max watched the rest of the video.

After it was over, he vomited in the toilet and went straight for the whiskey.

Max downed more whiskey than he ever had before in his life, passing out with the bottle in his hand. He awoke some time later in the day, vomited again, and passed out right away.

He didn’t wake up until later that evening when the sun had begun to dip in the sky toward the horizon. His head pounded and his throat was sore from throwing up, but he forced himself to get up and have some coffee. The first few sips tasted exactly like whiskey and for a moment, Max wondered if everything he ever drank again would taste like Jack Daniel’s poison.

The coffee eventually began to taste like coffee again and Max’s addled brain began to function normally. The booze had done its job of staving off the inevitable for a while, but as with any other unavoidable problem it simply lay in wait for him until he returned in a weaker state than he’d begun.

The things he’d seen on the video were like nothing he’d ever known could exist. Terrible, terrible things that only a monster would perform and only the most depraved would enjoy. For a gut-wrenching moment during the video, Max thought that the masked man might actually kill the poor girl, but he’d taken her just to the edge of death. She’d been alive when the video ended, even recounting a statement of how she’d agreed to everything beforehand and that she’d not been coerced in any fashion. Anyone with a brain extending beyond the stem could see that the statement had been rehearsed and made under duress, but the effort by the video maker to avoid culpability had been made nonetheless.

Max considered the bloodstain he’d seen on the sheet and wondered if the blood belonged to Amanda. Just because she was alive when the video ended didn’t mean she stayed that way. Would those animals have killed her after the camera stopped rolling and she’d been used up completely? Could they have simply discarded her like trash into the nearest hole in the ground once their video had been made?

Max didn’t know the answers to these questions and he didn’t want to entertain the possibilities.

He sat for the next hour, trying unsuccessfully to stop the horrific images from playing and then replaying in his mind. He watched the dark television screen as he sat, his mind overlaying unforgettable images onto the screen like a movie projector.

While it remained true that he could do nothing to erase what he’d seen from his memory, it was not true that he could do nothing about it. He turned his thoughts from the video, refocusing on the task at hand. He reminded himself again of his purpose: find out what happened to his son. Part of that would no doubt require he discover what happened to a poor girl named Amanda. For now, he had to start piecing his son’s secret life together.

He reviewed what he knew thus far. His son had been involved with a young woman named Julie who worked as a bartender at a strip club. The nature of their relationship hadn’t been clear, but Max assumed it had been romantic in nature. A man named Gabe ran the place and this man was involved in some unknown capacity with something absolutely terrible, something that definitely included the rape of at least one young girl. Considering the bloodstain, possibly worse. A young bartender, Ruby, knew his son from the relationship with Julie. And Max’s teenage son had had a sexual relationship with a middle-aged housewife named Vanessa Simmons.

That was a hell of a lot for a grieving father to take in.

When last they spoke, Vanessa had feared for the safety of herself and her family. Fear of what and who Max did not yet know.

But he intended to find out.

Max planned to have a follow-up conversation with Vanessa, whether she liked it or not. She knew something, something she hadn’t told Max about during their last conversation. Max had a sneaking suspicion that it had something to do with whatever was going on in that basement.

First, he needed to warn Ruby about Gabe. She could be in danger if she started sticking her nose in his business and Ruby seemed like the type who might very well decide to do such a thing.

He stood up too quickly and the room spun a little, enough to remind him of his hangover. Once stable, he retrieved his phone and typed a message to Ruby. He had to be extremely careful now, so he first asked her if she could talk in private. She worked in Gabe’s bar and there could be no way to tell whether or not he could get his eyes on her cell phone.

Ruby replied a few minutes later indicating she could talk in private. Max typed up his response a handful of different ways, eventually landing on the only phrasing he could manage:
Be careful around Gabe He could be dangerous don’t go snooping around. Please

Another minute passed with a response from Ruby on its heels:
What did you find out? Did you find Julie?

Max considered how much to divulge and decided less would be better.
No but it’s bad. Can’t say over text. Let’s meet.