999

by Al Sarrantonio

  Paone’s jaw dropped.

  At once the chase ended, the wild cat of memory finally falling down on its prey—Paone’s mind. He remembered it all, the pieces falling into place as quickly as pavement to a ledge-jumper.

  The master run. Rodz. The loops.

  And all the blood.

  Another day, another ten K, Paone thought, mounting the three flights of stairs to Rodz’s apartment. He wore jersey gloves—no way he was rockhead enough to leave his prints anywhere near Rodz’s crib. He knocked six times on the door, whistling “Love Me Tender” by the King.

  “Who is it?” came the craggy voice.

  “Santa Claus,” Paone said. “You really should think about getting a chimney.”

  Rodz let him in, then quickly relocked the door. “Anyone tailing you?”

  “No, just a busload of DJ agents and a camera crew from 60 Minutes.”

  Rodz glowered.

  Fuck you if you can’t take a joke, Paone thought. He didn’t much like Rodz—Newark slime, a whack. Nathan Rodz looked like an anorectic Tiny Tim after a bad facelift: long, frizzy black hair on the head of a pudgy medical cadaver, speedlines down his cheeks. Rodz was what parlance dubbed a “snatch-cam"—a subcontractor, so to speak. He abducted the kids, or got them on loan from freelance movers, then shot the tapes himself. “The Circuit” was what the Justice Department called the business: underground pornography. It was a 1.5-billion-dollar-per-year industry that almost no one knew about, a far cry from the Debbie Does Dallas bunk you rented down at Metro Video. Paone muled all kinds of underground: rape loops, “wet” S&M, animal flicks, scat, snuff, and (their biggest number) “kp” and “prepubes.” Paone picked up the masters from guys like Rodz, then muled them to Vinchetti’s mobile “dupe” lab. Vinchetti’s network controlled almost all of the underground pom in the East; Paone was the middleman, part of the family. It all worked through mail drops and coded distro points. Vinchetti paid two grand for a twenty-minute master if the resolution was good; from there each master was duped hundreds of times and sold to clients with a taste for the perverse. “Logboys,” the guys who did the actual rodwork, were hired freelance on the side; that way, nobody could spin on Vinchetti him-self. Paone had seen some shit in his time—part of his job was to sample each master for quality: biker chicks on PCP blowing horses and dogs, addicts excreting on each other and often consuming the produce of their bowels. “Nek” flicks. “Bag” flicks. Logboys getting down on pregnant girls, retarded girls, amputees and deformees. And snuff. It amazed Paone, in spite of its grotesquery: people paid to see this stuff. They got off on it. What a fucked-up world, he thought a million times over, but, hey, supply and demand—that was the American Way, wasn’t it? If Vinchetti didn’t supply the clients, someone else would, and as long as the money was there …

  I’ll take my cut, Paone stonily thought.

  The biggest orders were always for kp. According to federal stats, 10,000 kids disappeared each year and were never seen again; most of them wound up in the Circuit. The younger the kids, the more the tapes cost. Once kids got old (fourteen or fifteen) they were deemed as “beat,” and they were either sold overseas or put out on the street to turn tricks for Vinchetti’s pross net. One thing feeding the other. Yeah, it was a fucked-up world, all right, but that wasn’t Paone’s problem.

  The competition was squat. Only one other East Coast family ran underground porn, the Bontes, and they had a beef with Vinchetti going way back. Both families fought for pieces of the hard market, but the Bontes only owned a trickle of the action, and Paone could’ve laughed at the reason. Dario Bonte, the don, thought it was unethical to victimize children. Ain’t that a laugh, Paone had thought. The son of a bitch’ll string women out on junk and put them in scat films till they starve to death, but he won’t do any kiddie. What a chump. Most of the money was in kp anyway. No wonder Bonte was losing his ass. And every now and then some foreign outfit would try to move on Vinchetti’s turf with kp from Europe.

  But they never lasted very long.

  All in all, Paone’s job was simple: he bought the masters, muled them to the lab and kept the snatch-cams in line—guys like this muck-for-brains short-eyed scumbag Rodz.

  “I got five for ya,” said Rodz, “the usual.” Rodz’s voice was more annoying than nails across slate, a nasally, wet rasp. “But I been thinking, you know?”

  “Oh, you think?” Paone asked. He’d never seen such a pit for an apartment. Little living room full of put-it-together-yourself furniture, smudged walls, tacky green-and-brown carpet tile; an odiferous kitchen. Buckingham Fucking Palace this ain’t.

  “Like two K a pop is getting pretty skimpy these days,” Rodz went on. “Come on, man, for a fucking master that Vinchetti’s crew’ll dupe hundreds of times? That’s serious green for him. But what about me? Every time I make a master for your man, I’m sticking my neck out a mile.”

  “That’s because you were bom with a mile-long neck, Ichabod.”

  “I think two-point-five at least is fair. I mean, I heard that the Bonte family’s paying three.”

  “The Bontes don’t do kiddie pom, grapehead,” Paone informed him. “And anybody in the biz knows that.”

  “Yeah, but they do snuff and nek and all the other hard stuff. I’m the one busting my ass making the masters. I should be able to go to the highest bidder.”

  Paone stared him down. “Watch that, Rodz. No jive. You master for Vinchetti and Vinchetti only. Period. You want some advice? Don’t even think about peddling your shit to some other family. The last guy who pulled a stunt like that, you know what happened to him? Jersey cops found him hanging upside-down in some apartment laundry room. Blowtorched. And they cut off his cock and Express Mailed it to his grandmother in San Bernardino.”

  Rodz’s face did a twitch. “Yeah, well, like I was saying, two K a pop sounds pretty square.”

  I thought so, Paone regarded.

  “So where’s that green?”

  Paone headed toward the back bedroom, where Rodz did his thing. “You don’t touch doggie-doo till I see the fruits of your labor.”

  He sat down on a couch that had no doubt served as a prop in dozens of Rodz’s viddies. High-end cameras and lights sat on tripods, not the kind of gear they sold down at Radio Shack. The masters had to be shot on large-format inch-and-a-quarter high-speed tape so the dupes retained good contrast. The five boxed tapes sat before a thirty-five-inch Sony Trinitron and a studio double-player by Thompson Electronics. “Good kids this time, too,” Rodz complimented himself. “All level.” Sometimes a kid would freak on camera, or space out; lots of them were screwed up from the get-go: Fetal Cocaine babies, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Battered Child Syndrome. There were times when Paone actually felt sad about the way things worked.

  Now came the sadder part: Paone had to sit back and watch each master; lighting, resolution, and clarity all had to be good. He plugged in the first tape. …

  Jesus, he thought. Pale movement flickered on the screen. They were always the same in a way. What bothered Paone most were the faces—the forlorn, tiny faces on the kids, the look while Rodz’s stunt cocks got busy. What do they think? Paone wondered. What goes on in their heads? Every so often the kid would look into the camera and offer a stare that defied description. …

  “At least let me UV the cash while you’re watching,” Rodz said.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Paone threw him the stuffed envelope. His face felt molded of clay as he watched on. Rodz always fronted his flicks with cutesy tides, like Vaseline Alley, The Young and the Hairless, Stomper Room. Meanwhile, Rodz himself donned nylon gloves and took out the band of century notes. Ten grand didn’t look like much. He scanned each bill front and back with a Sirchie ultraviolet lamp. Technicians from Treasury worked liaison with DJ and the Bureau all the time. Their favorite game was to turn someone out and dust buy-money with invisible uranyl phosphate dyes. Dead solid perfect in court.

  “Clean enough for ya?” Paone asked. “I mean, a clean
guy like yourself?”

  “Yeah, looks good.” Rodz’s face looked lit up as he inspected the bills. “Unsequenced numbers too. That’s great.”

  Paone winced when he glanced back to the screen. In the last tape, here was Rodz himself, with his hair pulled back and a phony beard, doing the rodwork himself. Paone frowned.

  “Sweet, huh?” Rodz grinned at himself on the screen. “Always wanted to be in pictures.”

  “You should get an Oscar. Best Supporting Pervert.”

  “It’s some fringe bennie. And look who’s talking about pervert. I just make the tapes. It’s your people who distribute them.”

  Rodz had a point. I’m just a player in the big game, Paone reminded himself. When the money’s good you do what you gotta do.

  “I’m outa here,” Paone said when the last master flicked off. He packed up the tapes and followed Rodz out to the living room. “I wish I could say it’s been a pleasure.”

  Rodz chuckled. “You should be nicer to me. One day I might let you be in one of my flicks. You’d never be the same.”

  “Yeah? And you’ll never be the same when I twist your head off and shove it up your ass.”

  By the apartment door, Rodz held the speedlined grin. “See you next time. … I’d offer to shake hands except I wouldn’t want to get any slime on you.”

  “Thanks for the thought.” Paone polished his glasses with a handkerchief, reached for the door, and—

  Ka-CRACK! “Holy shit!” Rodz yelled.

  —the door blew out of its frame. Not kicked open, knocked down, and it was no wonder when Paone, in a moment of static shock, noted the size of the TSD cop stepping back with the steelhead door-ram. An even bigger cop three-pointed into the room with a cocked revolver.

  “Freeze! Police!”

  Paone moved faster than he’d ever moved in his life, got an arm around Rodz, and began to jerk back. Rodz gasped, pissing his pants, as Paone used him as a human shield. Two shots rang out, both of which socked into Rodz’s upper sternum.

  “Give it up, Paone!” the cop advised. “There’s no way out!”

  Bullshit, Paone thought. Rodz twitched, gargling blood down his front, then suddenly turned to dead weight. But the move gave Paone time to duck behind the kitchen counter and shuck his SIG 220 chock-full of 9mm hardball. Move fast! he directed himself, then sprang up, squeezed off two rounds, and popped back down. Both slugs slammed into the cop’s throat. All Paone heard was the slump.

  Shadows stiffened in the doorway. A megaphone boomed: “Francis Frankie Paone, you’re surrounded by Justice Department agents and the state police. Throw down your weapon and surrender. Throw down your weapon and surrender, throw down your—” and on and on.

  Paone shucked his backup piece—an ice-cold Colt snub—and tossed it over the counter. Another state cop and a guy in a suit blundered in. Dumb fucks, Paone thought. He sprang up again, squeezed off two sets of doubletaps. The cop twirled, taking both bullets in the chin. And the suit, a DJ agent, took his pair between the eyes. In the frantic glimpse, Paone had time to see the guy’s head explode. A goulash of brains slapped the wall.

  No way I’m going down. Paone felt surprisingly calm. Back room. Window. Three-story drop into the bushes. It was his only chance. …

  But a chance he’d never get.

  Before he could move out, the room began to … vibrate. Three state SWAT men in Kevlar charged almost balletically into the room, and after that the world turned to chaos. Bullets swept toward Paone in waves. M-16s on full-auto spewed hot brass and rattled away like lawn mowers, rip-stitching holes along the walls, tearing the kitchen apart. “I give up!” Paone shouted, but the volley of gunfire only increased. He curled up into a ball as everything around him began to disintegrate into flying bits. Clip after clip, the bullets came, bursting cabinets, chewing up the counter and the floor, and when there was little left of the kitchen, there wasn’t much left of Paone. His left hand hung by a single sinew, his right leg looked gnawed off. Hot slivers of steel cooked in his guts.

  Then: silence.

  His stomach burned like swallowed napalm. His consciousness began to drift away with wafts of cordite. He sidled over; blood dotted his glasses. EMTs carried off the dead police as a man in blue utilities poked forward with a smoking rifle barrel. Radio squawk eddied foglike in the hot air, and next Paone was being stretchered out over what seemed a lake of blood.

  Dreamy moments later, red and white lights beat in his eyes. The doors of the ambulance slammed shut.

  “Great God Almighty,” he whispered.

  “I told you you’d remember,” the nurse said.

  “How bad am I shot?”

  “Not bad enough to kill you. IV antibiotics held off the peritoneal infection, and the EMTs got tourniquets on your arm and leg before you lost too much blood.” Her eyes narrowed. “Lucky for you there’s no death penalty in this state.”

  That’s right, Paone slowly thought. And the fed statutes only allowed capital punishment if an agent was killed during a narcotics offense. They’d send him up for life with no parole, sure, but that beat fertilizing the cemetery. The fed slams were easier than a lot of the state cuts; plus, Paone was a cop-killer, and cop-killers got instant status in stir. No bulls would be trying to bust his cherry. Things could he worse, he recognized now. He remembered what he’d told that punk Rodz about taking things for granted; Paone stuck to his guns. He was busted, shot up like Swiss cheese, and had left a hand and a leg on Rodz’s kitchen floor, but at least he was alive.

  Yeah, he thought. Hope springs eternal.

  “What are you smiling about?” the nurse asked.

  “I don’t know. Just happy to be alive, I guess … Yeah, that’s it.” It was true. Despite these rather irrefutable circumstances, Paone was indeed very happy.

  “Happy to be alive?” The nurse looked coldly disgusted. “What about the men you murdered? They had wives, families. They had children. Those children are fatherless now. Those men are dead because of you.”

  Paone shrugged as best he could. “Life’s a gamble. They lost and I won. They’re the ones who wanted to play hardball, not me. If they hadn’t fucked with me, their kids would still have daddies. I’m not gonna feel guilty for wasting a bunch of guys who tried to take me down.”

  It was ironic. The pain in his gut sharpened yet Paone couldn’t help his exuberance. He wished he had his glasses so he could see the nurse better. Hell, he wished he had a cold beer too, and a smoke. He wished he wasn’t in these damn hospital restraints. A little celebration of life seemed in order, like maybe he wouldn’t mind putting the blocks on this ice-bitch nurse. Yeah, like maybe roll her over onto the bed and give that cold pussy of hers a good working over. Bet that’d take some of the starch out of her sails.

  Paone, next, began to actually laugh. What a weird turn of the cards the world was. God worked in strange ways, all right. At least He’s got a sense of humor. It was funny. Those three cops bite the dust and I’m lying here all snug and cozy, gandering the Ice Bitch. Paone’s low and choppy laughter did not abate.

  The nurse turned on the radio to drown out her patient’s unseemly jubilation. Light news filled the air as she checked Paone’s pulse and marked his IV bags. The newscaster droned the day’s paramount events: A heat wave in Texas had killed a hundred people. Zero-fat butter to hit the market next week. The Surgeon General was imploring manufacturers to suspend production of silicon testicular implants, and a U.S. Embassy in Africa somewhere just got bombed. It made things even funnier: the world and all its silliness suddenly meant nothing to Paone. He was going to the slam. What difference did anything, good or bad, make to him now?

  He squinted up when another figure came in. Through the room’s blurred features, a face leaned over: a sixtyish guy, snow-white hair and a great bushy mustache. “Good evening, Mr. Paone,” came the greeting. “My name’s Dr. Willet. I wanted to stop by and see how you’re doing. Is there anything I can get for you?”

  “Since
you asked, Doc, I wouldn’t mind having my glasses back, and to tell you the truth I wouldn’t mind having another nurse. This one here’s about as friendly as a mad dog.”

  Willet only smiled in response. “You were shot up pretty bad but you needn’t worry now about infection or blood loss. Those are always our chief concerns with multiple gunshot wounds. I’m happy to inform you that you’re in surprisingly good shape considering what happened.”

  Jolly good, Paone thought.

  “And I must say,” Willet went on, “I’ve been anxious to meet you. You’re the first child pornographer I’ve ever had the opportunity to speak with. In a bizarre sense, you’re famous. The renegade outlaw.”

  “Well, I’d offer to give you an autograph,” Paone joked, “but there’s a problem. I’m left-handed.”

  “Good, good, that’s the spirit. It’s a man of character who can maintain a sense of levity after going through what you’ve—”

  “Shhh!” the nurse hissed. She seemed jittery now, a pent-up blur. “This is it … I think this is it.”

  Paone made a face. From the radio, the newscaster droned on: “… in a year-long federal sting operation. One suspect, Nathan Rodz, was killed on-site in a frantic shootout with police. Two state police officers and one special agent from a Justice Department task force were also killed, according to authorities, by the second suspect, an alleged mob middleman by the name of Francis ‘Frankie’ Paone. Paone himself was under investigation for similar allegations, and thought to have direct ties with the Vinchetti crime family, which is said to control over fifty percent of all child pornography marketed in the U.S. Police spokesmen later announced that Paone, during the shootout, managed to escape the scene, and is currently the subject of a state-wide manhunt …”