"Very good then," Cooley said with weird Anglo-style diction, wringing his gnarled hands, staring at Guy.
At that moment, with the abruptness of a synapse firing in the back of Guy's brain, he became certain of one thing: There's something wrong with this guy.
"Additionally, an addendum letter will be filed with your estate attorney," Guy was saying now, distracted by the gooseflesh rashing the back of his arms, "stating that my associate and I are from an historic preservation foundation, and we should be allowed to enter your domicile upon your death in order to collect some of the your — quote-unquote — important papers." Guy tried to smile and couldn't. "It's really just a formality. All of it completely legal."
Now it was Herbert Cooley's turn to approximate a smile, and the result was something that would haunt Guy's dreams from this day forward. The corners of Cooley's thin, liver-colored lips twitched, and his red-rimmed eyes widened, and his slack face pulled away from crooked yellow teeth as though a puppeteer's string were tugging at his deeply lined temples. "Where do I sign?" he softly intoned.
Guy's hands were shaking as he pulled open the drawer to fetch a contract.
An entire week passed before Guy finally acted on his suspicions. During that week, Guy went about his business in an orderly fashion, never letting on to anyone that he was being haunted by a major creep of a client. And the strangest part was, Guy had no proof of any irregularities. Cooley's deposit check had cleared, and his papers seemed to be in pristine order. There was no reason to believe that Cooley was anything other than a decent, red-blooded American user of pornography. The only thing that was eating at Guy was that one face-to-face. The incredible feeling during that meeting that Herbert G. Cooley was just... wrong.
But Guy kept this feeling to himself. Didn't even tell Bobby about it. Just kept it in the back of his brain where it festered like an abscess. This was a first for Guy. In the five years since he had founded The Porno Pal System — advertising mostly in the back pages of skin magazines as well as The Christian Science Monitor — he had taken on just about every client imaginable. Rabbi's with foot fetishes. Rich WASPy CEO's who keep pictures of pregnant, lactating black women. High school gym teachers with extensive collections of S&M tableaus. You name it. And Guy had never once felt the compulsion to check up on anybody. But this guy Cooley had him spooked. This doughy white face was infesting Guy's dreams. What in God's name could this jerk be hiding in the bowels of his home?
For an entire week, moving through his daily routine with zombie-like complacency, Guy got up every morning, had breakfast with Karen, and went to work (for years, Karen Fox had been operating under the false impression that her husband had been running a small research firm, and Guy had seen no reason to correct her). It was a relatively uneventful week, too, with only a few new clients and one death/retrieval scenario (a straight-forward job removing hardcore gay porn from the nooks and crannies of a Catholic rectory). Every night, Guy would come home exhausted. Not from the work but rather from the rumination. The image of Cooley's red-rimmed eyes and yellow smile was just too creepy for Guy to shake.
On the last evening before Guy finally did something about his suspicions, his parents were visiting. The Douche King rarely graced Guy and Karen with personal visits, but this week had been different. Guy's parents had been over a few days earlier to show slides from their trip to Branson, Missouri, and now, tonight, they had returned with paint swaths from Sherman Williams in order to help Karen choose a color for the spare room. For some reason, Guy's mother was harboring the delusion that this room might become a nursery. Little did the older woman know the longing, the misery, the ongoing angst between Guy and Karen about having children. Notwithstanding his mysterious impotence, Guy dreaded the prospect of having kids. He adored children — as did Karen — but he was also terrified of bringing one into this world. With all the shit, all the lies and secrets, metastasizing in the dark like a cancer.
"Now explain to me again the meaning of this piece," the Douche King was saying in his patented smug style, standing in Guy's living room, staring at the missing children collage on the wall, while Karen chattered away out in the kitchen with Guy's mother. The Douche King was a tall, lanky man with a head full of lustrous silver waves. He had a long patrician nose down which he would view most of the world, considering the bulk of it beneath him. He never really "got" Karen's art.
"I guess it's a statement on all the injustices meted out to kids in this world," Guy surmised, standing behind his dad with his hands in his pockets. The "piece" that they were referring to was titled Lost Visage Number 13, and was basically a 4-by-4 foot piece of foam core plastered with a matrix of missing children. Blurry faces of kids from milk cartons all chockablock across a grey field.
The Douche King pointed his aquiline beak at Guy. "I don't get it."
Guy shrugged. "I guess it's not for everybody."
"Thank God for that," the older man mused, giving the art work one last glance.
That night, Guy jerked awake from a vague and troubling nightmare. In the dream he had been scratching a hole in himself with a rolled up porn magazine, the wound opening like a vulva, dripping a white, viscous fluid. Heart thumping, flabby body filmed with sweat, Guy shook off the disorienting dread and climbed out of bed.
He got dressed quietly, careful not to awaken Karen, then slipped out the side door. The interior of his car was as cold as a meat locker.
It was dawn by the time he arrived at Fifth Third Bank, the pale light glowing on the edges of the horizon, the air redolent with that sweet, dewy smell familiar only to fishermen, civil servants and methedrine addicts. He waited for forty-five minutes for the morning watchman to arrive and open the doors.
It took some talking to convince the safe deposit manager that there had been a mistake with Cooley's document package and Guy was merely "straightening out the paperwork." The manager finally let Guy into the box room, where Guy stood in the blazing fluorescent light, slipping the map of Cooley's house and the front door key into his briefcase.
Over the entire history of Guy's modest little enterprise, he had never attempted to get into a client's house prior to their death. This was wrong on so many levels. But Guy didn't care. He had never been so completely repulsed by the mere presence of a client.
Cooley's house was in an elite white-collar enclave on the north shore called Indian Hills: Miles of labyrinthine lanes bordered by stately mansions, manicured lawns, and cobblestone driveways dripping with money.
Guy waited a half a block away from Cooley's gorgeous three-story until the entire Cooley clan gradually drifted out the front door for their day's activities. Cooley came first—his cadaverous face in shadow, his lanky body clad in a suit and tie—hauling a briefcase off to some innocuous middle-management job. Then came mom and the kids. Squeaky-clean and freshly-scrubbed all. Like an ad for Martha Stewart's Living.
When the house was empty, Guy calmly strode up the walk and gained entrance.
At first Guy was stricken by the positively average quality of the place. He wasn't sure what he had expected... but certainly not this. The rooms were neat and well furnished, but nothing ostentatious. Tidy Scandinavian design furniture and signs of happy children all over the place. Toy boxes, and finger paintings on the refrigerator. Aquariums bubbling cheerfully. The air smelled of soap and cookies and floor wax. This was not the home of a monster.
Guy went downstairs. The basement was a cozy, finished playroom, toys neatly stowed in cabinets, tasteful, burnt umber wall-to-wall. Guy looked at the map again—a Xerox reduction of an architectural floor plan—which notated the stash in the basement. But something was wrong. The pornography was supposed to be in a shelving unit right here.
Pausing, Guy looked at the northeast corner of the room. There was a big screen TV and a book case filled with kid videos such as Shrek and The Lion King. But no stash. Not even the possibility of a stash.
A muffled click.
Guy jerked a
round, looking for the source of the sound, the faint clicking noise. He was jumpy now. He heard the noise again, and this time it seemed to be coming from underneath the floor. Guy blinked. He looked at the map again. Then he looked down at the floor. The realization struck him like an ice pick to the back of his neck. The stash was in a sub level. A crawlspace perhaps. A sub-basement.
He started nosing around the heating ducts, along the baseboard and behind the furniture. He consulted the map and extrapolated from Cooley's notations. Finally he found a loose panel in the southwest corner. He was about to push it inward when he heard the clicking noise again, closer, more pronounced, almost like a match-tip being struck.
Whirling toward the noise, Guy saw nothing. The room was empty. But something was wrong. There was something different about the room. Guy looked down at the carpet. In the middle of the room, on the floor, there lay a single Polaroid photograph. Had Guy missed it before? Not likely. Gooseflesh rashing up his back, he went over to the Polaroid, picked it up, and looked at it.
His throat went dry.
It was still developing, still milky and faded, but slowly coming into focus: A photograph of Guy, crouching down in the corner of the basement, fiddling with the loose panel, preparing to push it in.
It was a photograph taken only moments ago.
"Very good then!"
The voice blurted from somewhere behind him, and Guy spun around reflexively —
— and what he saw standing there at the base of the stairs fifteen feet away was for some reason almost beyond his powers of comprehension: A pale, wrinkled figure in a pink marbled spandex suit holding an old fashioned Polaroid Land camera.
Click-whirrrrrrr! A flash in Guy's eyes, momentarily blinding him.
Then things were happening all at once, very quickly, in the silver blur of Guy's compromised vision: another photo oozing from the camera, and Guy jerking backward as he realized that this man wasn't wearing spandex at all, in fact, this man wasn't wearing anything. Cooley's pale nude body was spattered with blood, and he was holding a Taser gun in his other hand — the same kind of small electric cattle prod that police use nowadays to control unruly mobs.
"No wait no — !" Guy slammed backward into the flimsy wall at the precise moment a tendril of blue voltage arced out of the muzzle of the Taser.
The wall cracked under Guy's weight as electricity pierced him, making his fingers curl into claws. The wall opened with a sudden groan, the cheap panel snapping, and Guy tumbled backward into the dark, flailing his rigid arms. All he could see was a silver vein of light across his eyes as he plunged into the rotting shadows.
He landed with a thud on cold stone, literally gasping with shock.
There are so many flavors of pain, from the sharp, sudden sensation of a splinter under a nail to the dull, throbbing agonies of major surgery. But landing hard on the spur of one's tailbone on a surface such as stone elicits all these sensations all at once.
Guy lay there in the darkness writhing in a tidal wave of pain. In fact, it took him several seconds — very long seconds — to even draw a breath. Capillaries of light seethed across his eyeballs, the high voltage shock still strangling him as he finally gulped a lungful of air. He curled into a fetal position and let out a spontaneous mewl, holding his lower back. The pain was a tympani drum in his head now. He swallowed and tried to sit up but could only manage to get up on one elbow. The feeling was gradually coming back into his hands and feet.
In the shifting, yellow light of a swinging bare bulb, Guy tried to focus on something. Anything. And it took several moments for his eyes to register the images.
Cooley's gallery was taped and pasted and thumb-tacked across every available inch of the moldy, unfinished walls. Many more of the photographs were neatly boxed and stacked on rusted metal shelves. Here was the stash, which Guy had been contracted to retrieve. But these were more than mere pornographic pictures. These were trophies of some sort. Documentation of Cooley's lifelong perversions.
Guy heard heavy footsteps padding down a ladder behind him, and he tried to move but couldn't make his legs work properly. The pain was shackling his pelvis and his heart was racing so swiftly he could barely think but there was something about the profusion of pictures that was driving Guy on.
He noticed a row of photos taped to the ceiling beam above him and his heart contracted into a stone. He recognized some of the faces. Innocent, wide-eyed faces. Some of them school photos. Some of them cropped from family photos. The milk carton children.
The missing.
All of them victims of a doughy-faced insurance executive named Herbert Cooley —
— who was, at this very moment, reaching the bottom of a step ladder on the far side of the crawlspace. Guy could hear his watery, heavy breathing. The Taser was making a faint crackling noise.
Guy tried to rise but it was futile. The torment of his spine and the partial paralysis kept him glued to his ass on the moist floor of the crawlspace, surrounded by the litter of a compulsive masturbator. Empty bottles of lubricant. Soiled blankets and towels. A space heater rattling, the cozy orange glow for those wintry evenings of self-abuse.
Some of the pictures — the worst ones — showed the young victims bound and gagged. Guy wondered if there were tiny bones buried somewhere?
A photo screamed at Guy from the wall to his right, a wallet sized black-and-white photo of a two-year-old boy, pasted on yellow ruled paper, an edging of compulsive doodles around it – flowers and penises and skulls — all of it flooding Guy with memories.
As a toddler Guy had slightly crossed eyes for which he wore corrective glasses from pre-school through the second grade. Right now, at this very moment, this same cross-eyed child was staring out from a black and white snapshot taken on some discount store carousel.
The picture was worse than a Taser shock, jolting Guy with a primal memory:
Alone in an empty Corvair, in the darkness, terrified, sobbing, snot on his face, shackled to his car seat, mommy's door open, steam coming out of the car, and mommy out on the road, in the rain, waving at lights. The little boy cannot see her anymore. A scream, and then nothing but mist on the windows. The little boy sobs. And then, and then, and then—the moment that will change the little boy's life forever—the side door opens and a ghostly man appears, a very pale, tall man with red-rimmed eyes. "Very good then," he says, and reaches in and takes the boy. The boy is flailing and screaming. The pale man gets rough. Throws the boy in a dark trunk. And hours go by. Finally the trunk opens in a silent, dark place that smells of oil and chalk, and the man tries to lift the boy out. But the boy gets lucky. The boy bites into the man's wrist, and the man screams, and the boy manages to slip away and run across a dark place. The boy sees an opening and squeezes through it, then tears out into the night. Into the rain. Toward the closest house. Toward safety —
— and back in the here and now, lying supine in a puddle of God-knows-what—urine? —semen? — an overturned vanilla Slim-Fast shake? — Guy put the sudden revelation out of his mind. The fleeting realization that this was how Guy became an orphan, and this why Cooley had set off internal alarms when Guy had first met him — all of it — was short lived... because Guy had more pressing matters facing him at the current moment: trapped in a hellish subterranean museum, a naked pedophile approaching with a crackling Taser gun.
"I wondered how long it would take for you to get curious," Cooley mused as he towered over Guy, a pair of objects now aimed directly at Guy — the buzzing muzzle of a Taser gun and a crooked, veined, purple erection.
"Okay, look, let me go and, and, and —" Guy started to stammer but suddenly saw an opportunity that would probably only be available for a very brief instant.
Cooley was licking his lips. "It certainly took me long enough to find you."
"Don't do this," Guy pleaded, but it was all acting now because Guy saw his only chance plugged into an exposed duplex outlet mounted on the moldy wall-board ten feet away.
&
nbsp; "You were the only one," Cooley wanted Guy to know.
"The only one what?"
"The only one that got away," Cooley said with that cadaverous grin. In the gloom of the crawlspace, his teeth were the color of spoiled egg yolks.
"How did you —?"
Cooley aimed the stun-gun at Guy's face. "The irony! After all these years, I finally find you, and look at the service you're providing!"
"Wait, wait —"
"Pity you won't to be able to fulfill the covenants of our agreement."
Just as Cooley was about to pull the trigger Guy kicked the space heater over.
The glowing grille of the heater landed on the milky fluid on the floor.
Cooley's hand froze suddenly on the Taser, the muzzle spitting a tendril of lightning off into the shadows as the space heater boiled with sparks at his feet. Guy had to shield his face as a sheath of electricity flickered up Cooley's nude, varicose form, sending him into shuddering spasms. His mouth gaped. His blood-shot eyes bulged, and a blue flame licked up the back of his head, catching the delicate wisps of grey hair there. The stench of cooking meat was overwhelming.
Guy managed to roll away as the naked pedophile was fried to a crisp.
The conductor: Cooley's own watery spoor, his own ritual ejaculate.
Guy covered his face until the crackling stopped and silence returned to that terrible place.
The unmarked squad car smelled of stale cigar smoke and wintergreen deodorizer. Guy sat in the back behind the metal screen, wrapped in a woolen blanket. Through the window he could see the EMS attendants carrying Cooley's body — now covered with a sheet—across the lawn. In the pre-dawn gloom, the neighbors were gathered behind yellow tape, shaking their heads and clucking their tongues at such a spectacle unfolding in their gorgeous hermetically sealed world.
"About this so-called service you were talking about in your statement," the cop in the front seat was saying. He was plainclothes. Fifty-ish, bad sport coat, calloused gaze. He shot a look over the seat back at Guy.
Blood Samples Page 13
