“Excuse me,” he called out in the strongest voice he could muster.
No reply. He sniffed the air, taking in a subtle scent that was her perfume or his imagination. He took several slow steps forward and planted himself in front of the black curtain.
He cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said again.
Silence.
How would it look if he entered the room with her? Just the two of them and all of those lurid young bodies, pouting lips, oiled muscles, smirking smiles and shocking-pink pockets of flesh. Jesus, he’d already been accused once this week of rape.
He backed up.
The easiest thing would have been to keep backing away and forget about her. Better than standing out here like a creep trying to catch a glimpse.
Instead, Griffin stepped forward. He took a deep breath, grabbed one curtain and, like an adrenaline-buzzed soldier who charges the enemy foxhole, he threw open the flap and entered the adult room.
Adult room. Where such “mature” subject matter as Butt Cop’s Most Penetrating Case, Here Come the Bitches and Goy Toy could be found.
“Hi,” he said, voice faltering to a squeak. “I’m just…is there anything…?”
The room, maybe eight feet by five with a standing rack in the center and three walls of shelves and DVD cases, was empty.
Chapter Seventeen
Griffin’s groin tingled once more, but now it was in balls-shrinking terror. He stared at the rows of DVD display boxes, listening to his heart thudding against his chest and the dry, whispery chuckle he still heard in his mind. Stood there and tried not to think about anything until the sound of the front entrance buzzing ran through his body like an electric jolt. Next, he heard the whisper of running shoes moving into the carpeted main room.
The sense of relief he felt at sharing the store with whoever had just walked in surprised him. He stared at the surrounding walls of naked flesh over taut young musculature and suddenly had to get out of there. If only his knees would unlock and release him.
The padded footfalls came to a halt. Then Griffin heard a DVD case slapping the counter.
Funny time of night for a return.
The footsteps picked up again—snick, snick over the carpeting—and the door buzzed open again and groaned shut.
Griffin wiped his wet palms on the side of his jeans, cocked his knees and ran. He flailed at the heavy curtain in its determination to hold him. His heart pumped furiously and purple spots blossomed and exploded in his vision. Out from behind the curtain at last, he backed out, never taking his eyes from the curtained room until he rapped an elbow against the checkout counter.
Griffin yelped. Rubbing at the tender spot, he let his eyes sweep the building, the window and the parking lot beyond.
The tingle in his elbow released him as if the minor injury provided context, brought him back to a time and a place where threats were bumps and bruises—not seductive blondes who chuckle softly and disappear into the night.
After several minutes of wide-eyed inspection of his surroundings—especially the black curtain—his gaze settled on the DVD case left on his counter. He picked it up, groaned in exasperation, and scanned the parking lot once more, this time in search of his careless customer.
It wasn’t his. Any idiot could have seen that. It was a blank gray plastic case with no markings on the front. No movie title, no logo, no nothing. He turned it over, mumbling under his breath. Nothing on the other side either. It swung open as he released the catch and yielded a disk also without sleeve or clue.
It looked shiny and new, the disk. None of the inevitable scratches and smudges from people playing what wasn’t theirs to worry about. But no label. Like the case, there was nothing here to identify the film or give Griffin any idea of where he could return it.
With a grunt, he took out the disk, loaded it into the DVD player at the counter and let it play.
He was still more than a little unsettled. And now he could add nervousness at receiving a mystery film from yet another unseen customer. A few layers of tension dissolved when the disk started and his TV started showing previews for fairly recent major releases. Griffin picked up the remote and forwarded to the Play Movie screen.
And felt a sense of disappointment mingled with his relief. No Country for Old Men was all that was playing. A weird, violent film that had won a Best Picture, but Griffin had never gotten into it.
He looked up and blinked into the white fluorescent overhead lights. They suddenly all seemed too bright, little suns that made him feel like he was in a fishbowl as he glanced back out at the black void and neon-pink reflection beyond the wall of windows. He shuddered. There could be a million eyes staring at him right now.
Yeah, right. Just freaked out from the…blonde. He turned up the sound and let the movie play.
He found the stool with his butt and plunked down on it.
“Shit,” he said.
She was back there. What he’d seen and heard had been too specific to be imagined. “Shit,” he said again.
Then, before he could talk himself out of it, Griffin stood fast enough to topple the stool he’d been sitting on, and took big steps toward the curtain.
Nearly got there, shivering uncontrollably, before the buzzing sound almost put him over the edge. He stopped, wheeled, crouched as though facing his own death.
The front door, that’s all. As it opened all the way, a figure stepped through. A familiar figure, thank God. Griffin tried to greet him but found himself only capable of uttering a wheeze. He took another breath, got control of himself and tried again.
“What’s up, guy?” he chirped, impressing himself with the ease he faked. “Hey, you weren’t here just a minute ago, were you? You didn’t drop off a movie…?”
Griffin froze at the look of revulsion on the other man’s face. He barely seemed to know Griffin was even standing there, so riveted was his attention elsewhere. At the television. He let out a strangled sound before slowly turning from it to confront Griffin with a glare that felt nearly lethal.
“Jesus, Tim, what is it?”
Griffin realized that he was avoiding even a brief glimpse at the television behind the counter. He was doing everything possible to avoid really even hearing the muffled cries coming from the mystery DVD. And yet, there was another part of him trying desperately to review No Country for Old Men, the movie he’d seen a couple years ago, trying to remember a scene that would have accounted for the screaming and whimpering and snarling, muttered threats. It was a pretty violent flick, but Griffin didn’t recall it sounding anything like this. He knew the film, not well, but well enough to distrust what he heard behind him.
Griffin turned slowly, forced himself to look where he knew Tim was looking. Forced himself to watch the woman under attack while an unsteady camera produced a crude and horrific home movie rather than the award-winning feature he was expecting.
She screamed. “Help me! Somebody help me!” Screamed it as a half-hidden and yet very familiar face under an AfterHours Video ball cap straddled her. “Shut up, bitch,” the ball-capped figure grunted as he plunged into her time after time.
Tim Brentwood backed away from the center of the room and moved toward the front door, his face etched with revulsion.
Chapter Eighteen
She’d given him two numbers for reaching her. He’d contact her precinct first.
But before that, he peeled off his sticky shirt and dug a beer out of the fridge. His sitting alone in the kitchen drinking beer at nearly one in the morning wasn’t going to charm the pants off Patty, but what the hell? He needed it. He slammed home a throatful.
Melinda had scribbled her name and two phone numbers on the margin of an appetizer menu on her way out of the Beer Belly the other night. “In case anything comes up,” she’d said, and boy, had something come up.
Tim’s cell phone sat on the table in front of him, as if he needed a reminder to make the call. Or encouragement to do so. But that was exactly the sit
uation. For some reason, he felt all but paralyzed by his loyalty to the weird video store owner.
And yet…when he got another mental image of what he’d seen twenty minutes ago, his finger flew to the keypad and he punched out the digits from the appetizer menu.
The cop who answered and took his request for Detective Dillon didn’t ask for Tim’s name or his reason for calling. He just grunted something about holding on, and left the line.
What if she wasn’t there? Tim thought. He assumed the second number to be her personal cell phone or landline. Would he have to work up all over again the courage to call it?
“Detective Dillon,” she said in his ear, her tone serious, even brusque. More like the first time he’d met her than the second.
Tim identified himself in similar no-nonsense fashion and waited for a response. When none came, he continued. “Melinda, I just saw something very strange at AfterHours. Griffin Solloway’s place.”
“Tell me.” Still no softening of tone.
“I had a wedding gig this evening. On my way home I stopped in just to…I don’t know. Talk, I guess. There wasn’t anyone else in the place at the time and there was a, uh, movie playing. A DVD playing on the TV behind his counter.”
Now it sounded almost foolish to his ears. Sure, it was pretty disgusting, but it wasn’t illegal to possess porn. Not most porn, anyway, though he would have bet what he saw to be an exception.
“What kind of movie?”
“It was pretty serious stuff.” Tim could hear the detective sighing, obviously impatient for details. “It looked like a woman being raped,” he added quickly, before he could change his mind. “It wasn’t a real clear picture, more like a home movie than anything professionally shot, but…it got the job done. Let’s just say, if the woman was an actress, she was a pretty damn good one.”
Silence now. Then, “What did she look like? The victim?”
Victim. Tim didn’t like the sound of that. Couldn’t they assume her to be an actress or some sexual thrill-seeker until they knew otherwise?
“I don’t know,” he said, only lying slightly. “Middle-age, I guess. Not unattractive, but…”
“Did it look like Germaine Marberry?”
And there it was. The detective had obviously forgotten she’d kept the name a secret, and, while Tim hadn’t heard it before, he knew instantly she was who’d been attacked that night.
“I guess so. I don’t know. I mean, I never saw her clearly. It’s dark…nighttime on the screen. It’s poorly lit. She was filmed from behind as if the cameraman—the attacker—had just thrown her to the ground. And it was a shaky, handheld point of view. He’s grunting and out of breath and…like he’s trying to do too many things at once. The camera’s shaking all around, but I’m telling you, it looked real.”
He could hear her inhale sharply. “It was playing as you walked in the door?”
“Yes.”
“Where was Griffin during all this?”
“It looked like he was headed away from the counter and the screen, his back to it. But he stopped and caught my attention when I stepped through the door.”
Now she was muttering to someone in the room with her, the words muffled as though she was covering the phone mouthpiece. Then to him she said, “Could you identify the film if you saw it again?”
“Maybe.”
More conferring with whoever was with her. Then, “What was Griffin’s reaction?”
Tim scrunched up his face in thought. “That’s the curious thing. Well, one of the curious things. He seemed as shocked as I was. More shocked, even. Kept telling me over and over again that he’d been playing No Country for Old Men. And why would he lie, Melinda? His store was open and the way it’s lit you can see what he’s playing even if you’re just on the sidewalk or street. Why would he have something like that playing there?”
“He thought he’d taped over it, so he was playing the Hollywood movie. Or thought so.”
“Does the technology even allow—”
“Listen,” she said, interrupting. “I sent a squad car to his place to keep him from destroying evidence. That’s where I’m headed right now. Keep your phone on and I’ll call you back if I need you.”
“But what if he’s innocent and—?”
“Just keep your phone on.”
What had he done?
Chapter Nineteen
She crouched before the front bumper of his canary-yellow ’69 Beetle, smiling. “What do I have to do,” she asked languidly, “to make you believe?”
He backed away. She wore a pair of skimpy shorts and a knit shirt in broad strokes of gray and lavender and white. He wasn’t sure about the shorts, but the shirt he remembered well. It had such sentimental value that he’d been unable to give it away after Laney died. It was upstairs, that shirt, carefully folded in a cedar chest on his dead wife’s side of the closet.
“I’ve given it a lot of thought,” he told the woman crouching on his concrete garage floor. “The conclusion I’ve drawn is that you’re entirely in my mind.”
“A figment of,” she said.
Her joints popped as she stood and stretched. Sounds that hardly seemed like what his overactive imagination might capture, so he made himself ignore them. She extended her palm so he could see her holding the valve-stem cap from the front passenger-side tire. “A wisp of the imagination,” she said. “Interesting theory.”
“All in my mind,” he said.
“Your own private reality.”
Yes, he thought as he eased himself into the canvas chair he’d recently set up for these now-nightly closed-door garage sessions. My own private reality. Not like he was losing his mind or anything.
“But here’s the thing.” She rummaged in her purse, the purse which could actually be found in that same cedar chest in which he’d folded her gray-and-lavender-and-white top. From it, Laney extracted a long, sharp, shiny object.
“Oh God.” He’d be found in the morning on his garage floor with a knife in his heart, and the police were sure as shit never going to find the killer.
“Nail file,” Laney said, smirking at the expression on his face. She held it up for his inspection. “I use it to manicure the fingernails I can’t possibly have.” She twirled the file on her fingertips as proficiently as if she’d had an eternity to practice the move. “The rub, hubby, is that if I’m not for real, we can’t possibly explain the physics of what you’re about to see.”
The tip of her tongue lolled at a corner of her mouth as she inserted the nail file into his tire’s exposed valve stem. He heard the ghostly hiss of escaping air and watched the tire soften.
She delicately patted her hands free of tire grime, stood to the accompaniment of more popping joints and said, “See what I’m getting at? If I only exist within the narrow confines of your mind—and trust me, I know how narrow those confines are—that tire can’t really be soft. Can it? Here’s an interesting thought. Say tomorrow morning you drive out of here with an imaginary soft tire and have an imaginary accident that kills pedestrians, do those folks really die or simply discontinue ever having existed in the first place?”
Her eyes lit. “Wow! You see how the existential dilemmas stack up when you ignore them?”
He closed his eyes. His main problem was that he wasn’t getting enough sleep. She was wearing him down with her nightly appearances. Always the same—the taunts, the mind games. He knew exactly what she was doing to him. If he had just a single night of uninterrupted sleep, he could figure it out, some way of fighting back.
The skritch, skritch of metal on metal worked its way under his lids to pry them open. He’d drifted off. Now he watched Laney going to work on the passenger-side door panel. In moments, half a heart took shape, then the mirror image other side, the figure encompassing two sets of initials gouged into his high-gloss, multicoat yellow finish.
“Our love,” she told him pleasantly, “is eternal. And so is my proclamation of said love. Check it out tomorrow mor
ning. It’ll still be there. I promise.”
His eyes remained fixed on the three-inch-high scarring of his auto finish, but he wasn’t really seeing it. He said, “It was the church that sent you, wasn’t it?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You know what I mean. If I’m not imagining you, it’s the church drawing you back here. It’s starting things up again just like before, isn’t it?”
Her laughter was a musical note that rang off of the cement floor. “That church never gave you what you didn’t want, honey. Not before and not now. That’s why you can’t stay away from the place.”
He wiped a hand across his face and stared at her.
“Contrary to what you might think, honey, the church has never changed you,” she told him. “It’s not making you do what you eventually will do. Deep down, the idea excites you. Just like before.”
“That’s not true,” he whispered.
He turned his head so he wouldn’t have to look at the ghost in his garage. The truth, the possibility that he was, at his core, a heartless, evil man was crushing. It was a possibility that had to be fought, staved off, held at arm’s length.
The skritch, skritch picked up again, but he refused to watch her complete her declaration of love. Anyway, it didn’t matter if he looked or not.
He finally accepted that it, and his soft tire, would still be there for him when dawn finally came.
Chapter Twenty
What had he done? Not the first time he’d asked the question of himself that night. He pictured a police car, siren wailing, screeching to a halt in front of Griffin’s store, chasing away the solitary customer or two. Griffin would immediately know who’d placed the call.
Tim’s imagination pushed the scene further. Now he was in a witness chair, surrounded by polished wood and stern jurors and a scared defendant. The scowling judge brings down his thunderous gavel and—
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