by phuc
(III)
When Maxwell's consciousness bled back into his brain, there seemed to be blobs of light hanging frozen before his vision. A clack resounded. He heard someone breathing. Then one of the light blobs approached, its details turning crisp, and he remembered. Her, he thought.
Clad just in black panties and a bra, the beautiful body stood to his left. He could see the trim, alabaster abdomen, the bellybutton, the twin bottoms of breasts satcheled in the black bra.
The beautiful face stared down.
I've got to get out of here, came the stark, moronic thought.
Then she raised her left hand.
Oh, my
She was holding a power drill.
God.
"Are you ready, Daddy?"
Her finger squeezed the plastic trigger. The drill's motor engaged, filling the confines of this place and the confines of Maxwell's soul with the scream of its hellish, unending shrill.
When Maxwell tried to move his legs, he couldn't. When he tried to move his arms, he couldn't.
When he tried to open his mouth to scream...he couldn't.
So he screamed in his mind. His body tremored. His muscles cramped. His eyes pushed forth in their sockets.
The drill screamed on.
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Chapter 30
(I)
The feds called them "Short Points," out of the way bars or porno places where requests for certain desires could be made. Sammy felt secure that Vinchetti's people didn't know he was out of stir, but he didn't want to take a chance by going to a place where he might be recognized. A short point was safer. It cost more but it was worth the piece of mind. Short points were hard for the cops to get a handle on because transactions were never made on the premises. You paid for a middleman.
Sammy still remembered a few.
New Carrolton, in P.G. County. A few blocks off the main drag. NEWSSTAND vibrated the sign in tacky red neon. Local laws made them cover their windows. The insides of these places always smelled the same, like pine cleaner and grunge. Sammy walked in to find the joint empty, save for an oriental guy behind a high counter. Adult video tapes lined the walls from floor to ceiling.
Pap, Sammy thought. The legal, licensed shit. The current trend seemed to be flicks with names that mocked Hollywood productions. Rambone. Sperminator II. Backside To The Future. Edward Penishands. Sammy chuckled aloud. Even the gay section sported such titles: All Hands On Dick, Sleeping With The Enema, Rear Admiral. A mag rack stretched through the center, 10% of which was, also via local ordinance, devoted to regular magazines like Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and the like. Sammy even noticed a copy of '90s Woman staring him in the face.
Hardcore porn mags weighed down the rest of the rack. Cumshot Revue, Pizza Slut, The Hot, Wet Best of Selena Steele!
Sammy picked up one called Cum Bath and set it down on the counter along with a crisp $100
bill. The lingo was like a password. If you didn't get the lingo right, you didn't get shit.
"Anything short these days?" Sammy asked.
The counterman didn't look at him. "You a cop?" That was the first thing they always asked, to beat a bust with entrapment.
"No," Sammy said. "Are you?"
"No. Live stuff or something to eye?"
"Live. Of the double x variety. Can you help me out?"
The counter guy made a quick call, murmuring only, "You open? Gotta double x." Then he hung up, pocketed the 100, and told Sammy, "Here're some slugs. Last stall. Fifteen minutes. Okay?"
Sammy nodded and went to the back, after picking up some box slugs the proprietor had slid across the counter. Through a curtain, on either side, were video stalls. Sammy slipped into the last one next to an EXIT sign. The lights went out when he dropped some slugs into the box, on which had been affixed a label: WARNING! THIS COIN BOX IS PROTECTED BY A MOISTURE SENSITIVE ALARM! Sammy, bored, punched through the eight feature selector and looked at the screen. It was all conventional fare: generic porn queens with silicon embellished breasts and electrolysized pubic regions doing it every which way with equally generic nine inch California golden boys. They all looked the same, and even sounded the same in their waves of fake orgasmic groans. The hard underground Sammy used to make made this stuff look more tame than Barney the Purple Dinosaur. The average chump who rents this shit probably doesn't even know hard underground exists, he thought. No way in hell you'd ever catch any kp or prepubes here.
A few minutes later there was a knock. Finally, Sammy thought. He opened the stall to face a tall white guy in painter's pants and a buzzcut. "You a cop?" he asked.
"No," Sammy said. "Are you?"
"No. Right out back. Five minute ride. That square with you?"
"Sure."
He followed the guy out the back exit door and got into a primer patched old Chevy Nova. The car pulled out of the lot onto a road lined by subsidized apartment buildings. "You want a girl, right?"
"Yeah," Sammy said. "Prepube. Doesn't matter."
"Okay, two bills for black, three for white, four for a blondie."
Sammy thought back to his Polaroid of Kathleen. "I'll pay five for something slim, short light brown hair."
"I think we can do that. Gotta see your green first."
Sammy had already rolled the bills up with a paper towel. He slipped the wad out of his pocket, touching it only by the edges. He didn't want his prints on the paper. Then he passed it to the guy.
"How far's the den?" Sammy asked.
"Right around the corner."
Here was more Justice Department slang. A "den" was a private residence, almost always an apartment, and was presided over by a "den mother." Den mothers were female drug addicts who rented out their children to people like this mover in the painter's pants, in exchange for crack money. If a den was connected, as were many of Vinchetti's, it was known as a "safehouse,"
where middlemen on the move could stay between jobs or hideout when the heat was on. It was not uncommon for den mothers to actually sell their children for lump sums (between 5,000 and 10,000) to mob connected porn outfits. According to recent Justice Department statistics, over 30,000 children disappeared per year in the United States. Of that, approximately 10,000 were never seen again, and a majority of this latter third were suspected to be den children sold to support chronic drug habits. Back when Sammy had been in the business, Vinchetti's people paid bonuses to den mothers who kept themselves perpetually pregnant and promised to sell their children to The Circuit once they were four or five.
Broad daylight receded behind them; Sammy followed his mark up an odoriferous stairwell to the apartment. Inside sat a malnourished white woman with stringy brown hair stuffing envelopes in front of a soap opera. She was probably 30 but looked 50; her lined face glowed beneath its waxen pallor when the guy asked: "Katie in her room?"
The woman's head wagged.
Sammy's escort took him down a dark hall that smelled like urine, emesis, and cooked onions.
"I'll wait out there with the broad. An hour, okay?"
"An hour's fine," Sammy consented.
"She's a little hyperactive, and a little fucked up in the head. You know. Her mother was drinking like a fish and smoking rock when she was carrying her. So take things easy, all right?"
Sammy'd seen it all before the kids. The mothers were bigtime addicts. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Fetal Cocaine Syndrome. They'd keep up their habit throughout the pregnancy, which debilitated the fetus' brain development. Ruined their IQs attention spans, creative and mechanical thought abilities. You could always tell an FCS kid: their eyes were abnormally close together, and they'd shake a lot, and stare at things. Some sad shit, Sammy considered, though at the same time his arousal began to glow. "I've never roughed up a kid in my life," he eventually answered his escort. Adults, sure. Street slag, crackheads that was different. Adults were accountable for the way they chose to live. But the kids didn't have a choice. Sammy was always gentle with them, like the way he'd been with<
br />
Kathleen, he remembered.
His mind drifted in memory.
"In here. Her name's Katie."
"Right. Katie."
The guy in the painter's pants opened the door. "Katie?" he said. "I've got a friend here who wants to see you."
Sammy peered in. Fantastic, he thought. Oh, yeah, that's so sweet... The little doe eyed girl looked up from her perch on a bed. Cartoons chattered on a small black and white TV. She wore a smudged summer dress with flowers on it. She was barefoot. Her obsidian dark eyes seemed immense when she looked up.
"Katie?" asked the escort. "I have a friend here who'd like to see you, okay?"
The little girl blinked; fidgeted a little.
"He's a friend of your mommy's. Okay?"
The little girl nodded.
Sammy stepped into the room. A gentle smile came to his lips. "Hi, Katie," he said. "I've heard a lot of very good things about you."
The dark gaze glittered. She twitched a little again. She had a chipped tooth. Eight or nine, Sammy figured. Just the right age. Her light brown hair was cut just above her shoulders. Just like Kathleen's when she was little.
Sammy stooped down, put his hands on his knees. "I thought that maybe you and I could have some fun together."
"Okay, Katie?" asked Sammy's escort.
She blinked again, twitched, scratched her tiny nose.
The escort's voice grew stern. "You're going to be good, right, Katie? Your mommy wants you to be nice to her friend, so you're going to be a good girl, aren't you, like all the other times?"
The little girl nodded.
"That's right, Katie," Sammy said in his well practiced, friendly hypnotic voice. "You and I are going to have a nice time together. A real nice time."
The man in the painter's pants left the room and very quietly closed the door behind him.
(II)
"...firmly planted now in her most delusory state," Simmons claimed behind his desk. Spence noted that the psychiatrist's desk was much more expensive than his own teak, not industrial gray metal. Perhaps the desks metaphored their personalities, or their hearts. It was an inexplicable observation. I'm gray, Spence thought. My heart feels as gray as my office desk.
"In the killer's manuscripts she made several references to ‘skulls.' ‘Skulls mean death.'
What's that?"
"Like ‘The Cross,'" Simmons replied. "A hallucinatory embellishment of a symbol.
Commonplace. Stage psychopaths frequently see antagonistic figures, and potential victims, with delusory trimmings, to set them apart. To categorize them. She probably sees most men as death figures. It's hallucination. I know of many, many accounts of stage psychopaths claiming to see a person's skull or bones beneath their flesh. It's actually part of a defense mechanism, triggered by the core delusion and synaptic anomalies."
Spence felt crestfallen. The more he learned of the killer's profile, the less he understood.
"And you're still urging Shade to fake complicity with the killer?" Simmons inquired.
Spence nodded. "She pulled off a great job during the phone call. But now I'm worried about "
"You're worried about the ‘fake' complicity transforming into genuine complicity?" Simmons assumed.
"Well, yeah. Because "
"Because now your killer has abducted Kathleen Shade's lover. Shade doesn't like you, she doesn't trust you, and she feels that your only concern is the apprehension of the killer, regardless of the cost. Maxwell Platt is now part of that cost. Shade knows that Platt is more than likely dead, or will be soon, but she will resist that fact consciously, and cling to any hope that he might still be alive. She will do anything to increase his chances of survival. It's possible that she may pursue a genuine complicity with the killer. On her own. Behind your back. And she very easily has the impetus, the motive, and the utility to do that."
"How?" Spence questioned. "We're on her phones, we've got round the clock surveillance on her apartment."
"Don't be stupid, Jeffrey," Simmons said. "She's an industrious, creative, and capable woman.
You're a cold, objective man. Under these particular circumstances, she clearly has the power to fool you. To deceive you completely and utterly."
Spence crossed his legs, tapped a knuckle. He felt partly insulted but he knew the psychiatrist was right. Backfire, he thought.
"From your perspective," Simmons continued, his eyes strangely bemused, "the abduction of Platt is the worst thing that could've happened. You've now lost all control over Shade, who is your only real connection to the killer."
"I fucked up," Spence muttered.
Simmons assented, shrugged in a light, gray plaid jacket. "You should have foreseen the potentiality, yes. But don't blame yourself. After all, you're not a soothsayer. You're not God."
I'm my own god, Spence realized. The God of Inanities, in the Temple of Senselessness. The muse sunk deeper, like a malignancy. "The other day on the phone...you said I still had some investigative avenues left to ‘plunder.' What are they?"
Simmons' face always seemed luminous in some complacent and indecipherable joy. Or was it amusement? Spence frequently thought so. Simmons was possibly the only person in the world who liked Spence. So why did Spence, here in the doctor's office, always feel like an object of arcane mockery?
Simmons said: "Watch Kathleen Shade, Jeffrey. Watch her as closely as you can. Go to any extreme to maintain a constant monitor of her whereabouts."
Okay, okay. Spence nodded. He got the picture...
"What have I been telling you," Simmons asked, "throughout this entire ordeal?"
"Find the nascent."
"Yes." Simmons smiled. "You're boxed out now, Jeffrey. Your ploys have turned on you. That's why a rigorous surveillance of Shade is paramount."
"I don't know what you mean," Spence said.
"Given the turn of events," the psychiatrist elaborated, "I'd say it's quite possible that Shade will discover the nascent before you do."
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Chapter 31
(I)
Going to sleep for a 1,000 years was what Kathleen wished for most. Reverting to a state where she didn't have to think, or feel...anything. She could not think about the killer or Spence. She could not think about Uncle Sammy. She could not think about Maxwell.
I cannot think, she thought.
She lay in her underwear on the couch, gazing up. She was drunk. She'd drunk the second large bottle of ale she'd bought at Berose, plus some wine that had been fermenting in the refrigerator for about a year, hoping the borderline inebriation would carry her senses away. To some safe place. To some demesne where nothing mattered and nothing hurt.
More lies.
"Most of every negative emotion in the psyche, especially despair, is caused by a lack of oral gratification in the formative years," claimed the radio shrink. "That is, the stage of infantile development where the infant experiences a contentedness from nursing, biting, and chewing."
Who could she ask? Dad, did mother breastfeed me? Did you buy me plenty of teething rings when I was a baby? She couldn't imagine asking such a thing. Nevertheless, it all sounded like mumbo jumbo to her: excuses, psychoanalytic banalities.
The radio drifted away. I should call in sometime, Kathleen pondered. Everyone else did. Who would know it was me?
The fifth chapter of the killer's manuscript remained on her desk. She hadn't yet read it, and still refused to. Doing so felt akin to going to the morgue to identify a dead loved one. She knew she'd have to do it sometime; she simply couldn't now. Not after all she'd read thus far...
"...one big problem," a call in listener was saying. "Whenever my boyfriend tries to make love to me, I suddenly freak out. It's like he becomes someone else, a monster, a killer. Sometimes, I actually start screaming out loud."
"Were you sexually abused as a child?" the seemingly omnipotent radio shrink asked.
"Yes. Yes," admitted the caller. "My brother had sex with me
from the time I was eleven 'til I was about 16. Like...every night. Everything... He did everything to me every night..."
The pause crackled. "It's called ‘hyper dissociation,'" the radio shrink told the woman. "Your subconscious mind has been preprogrammed to think of sexual acts in a negative mode."
