Long Island Noir (23 page)
The bedside clock told me I had been there more than an hour. Time to go. And I was eager to see if the setup worked.
Back in my office, I logged in the coordinates of the site. With a click of the mouse I could see the empty room, ready to fill with images.
I wanted to give him a name that fit his persona.
Kinky
was the first word that came to mind. I Googled
kinky
. There were millions of sites. Under Casey’s first name I discovered an Antarctic webcam:
Casey Station. Nineteen degrees below zero Celsius
. Frozen tundra was too good for my darling.
I tried
kinky sex
. There were about three times as many sites as
kinky
, ranging from the direct
—
kinky sex, strap-on dildo sex, kinky girls
—
to the educational:
Restraint, role-playing, domination, erotic punishment, and discipline are all parts of the BDSM scene. The term “fetish” is used loosely to describe any general turn-on that might not fall into mainstream sexuality, such as leather or vinyl clothing, food-play, or certain parts of the body not normally associated with sexuality … Find other likeminded people in your area or around the world!
I didn’t want Casey to be watched by others like him. I wanted him to attract a broader audience. People who would be shocked. I decided on
kinkycasey.com
.
I inserted Casey’s new webcam data into the
virtual voyeur’s hub of choice
to kick up the traffic. With a few clicks of the mouse, the camera was broadcasting live over the Internet from his bedroom. Anyone could watch whatever he was doing. It was all there. I had access to that, and whatever kinky sex sites linked to him in return. I would archive it all. And someday, when the time was right, I would send him the link and wait for the fireworks.
It wasn’t long before the traffic numbers began to spike. Three months in, Casey was becoming notorious among the “peeping toms” on the web. I waited until he was at his bedroom computer alone one night before I shot him the link. I watched on the webcam as he scrolled for a few minutes, then stood up, hefted his laptop, and threw it against the wall. Aha.
On the off chance I push him over the edge, I am making this podcast and uploading it to a spot on the web where only you, Sally, have the password. I know I can trust you to leave it alone unless something happens to me …
American Dreamers
J
efferson stirred to semiconsciousness. Dim and distorted, like his brain was a dark dungeon of bruised meat. Terrible
dolor
in his head. Tongue groping around in his mouth. Something was very wrong here. It tasted dry and foul and metallic, scabby and membrane-oozy textures, only empty spots where several teeth used to be.
In a grove of thin trees. Next to a pile of beer cans and 40s. Budweiser. Pabst Blue Ribbon. Coors Silver Bullet. Olde English 800. Steel Reserve.
Must be behind the strip of shops.
Fuck, my head hurts.
Ribs in agony. Worse than the head.
Ay Dios
, and I thought that was the mother of all hangovers. Memory cracked open in the rain of pain. Fucking
cabrones
kicked the shit out of me, an evil centipede of Nikes booting my chest like a whole fucking team taking penalty kicks.
He tried to lift himself up. One elbow. Failed. Fell. Never mind the knees, they’re collapsed like a cane-stalk house in an earthquake.
The bloody crust on his lips tasted faintly of tomatoes. He made it up onto his left elbow and puked. A pink-brown-red sunset of stale beer and bloodclots. He passed out again.
That’s where they found him two hours later. Strapped him onto a stretcher, head belted and braced to avoid any further damage, rolled him up and clipped him into the ambulance. Outside and above red and yellow and blue strobe lights and sirens cleared the way, assaulting his wounded brain.
Danny Seltzer said goodbye to his aging parents in Delray Beach, in one of the waveform high-rises that walled the coast of South Florida. He drove down I-95, dropped off the rental car, and got on line. He removed his sneakers and watch, emptied his pockets, and placed the lot in the gray plastic bin—the national-security jailhouse rigmarole of flying, empty your pockets, take off your shoes and belt, get patted down. To complete the metaphor, foreigners coming into the country had to get fingerprinted and mug-shot.
The bottom of the bin had an ad for Zappos, a shoe-selling website. What would history have been like if other cultures had the same mania for advertising and sponsorship? Paris 1793: a billboard on the guillotine proclaiming,
Bic: The National Razor!
Valencia, Spain, 1491: an
auto-da-fé
framed by pillars depicting the tonsured head of Torquemada, his outstretched arm wielding a small torch, touting,
Fuego de Dios:
The Official Matches of the Holy Inquisition.
His cell phone rang the minute the plane taxied toward the gate at LaGuardia. Lisa Vitaliano, his editor at the
Paumanok Weekly
. She’d already left two voicemails and three texts. There’d been an assault in Lake Ronkonkoma, possibly fatal. It might be racial.
Bloodofpatriots says:
The Federal Octopus is pursuing me. Osorio is an illegal alien. He’s from Mexico.
RealAmerican says:
He’s from Puerto Rico. He’s an anchor baby.
Mike from Smithtown says:
His real name is Castro. He’s covering it up to hide that he’s a Communist. He’s Fidel’s son.
LiptonLady55 says:
That’s his mother’s name. He’s a bastard. She was a prostitute in the South Bronx.
A cybermassive grapevine proliferated with accusations that the new U.S. president, Juan Ernesto Osorio, was not born in the United States, but in Mexico. Or Cuba. Or one of those bean-queen places.
His birth certificate said he was born in the Bronx, on July 16, 1965, at Morrisania Hospital, the son of Juan Wilmer Osorio, a solo-practice lawyer with a small office on Courtlandt Street off 149th, and the former Aracely Castro, who would take a leave of absence from her job as a sixth-grade teacher. Both were born in Puerto Rico, Juan in San Juan, Aracely in Carolina, where her older brother Papo played shortstop on a team whose right fielder was a rifle-armed kid named Roberto.
On April 24, 1966, the
Daily News
printed little Juan’s picture on its “Bronx Cuties” page, along with Maureen Gallagher, Teresa Ippolito, Elijah James, Jacqueline Barretto, Ramona Puente, Yvonne Bronson, Joseph Anthony Genzale, Gerald Nolan, Deona and Matthew DiMucci, Michelle Romero, Shelley Renee Koslowitz, Glenroy Neville, and James Slattery. A busload of big-eyed babies immortalized on newsprint in ashy gray ink.
From
www.letfreedomring.com
:
Yes, my fellow American patriots, they say the facts are obvious, they say the documentation is there, they say we are deluded fools for caring that our great nation is led by a dangerous alien. They say they have evidence, that it is not so.
Their so-called birth certificates and newspaper announcements are forgeries. And remember that there are powers greater than those of man, powers that we must call on God’s help to resist and constantly defend our homeland’s security against.
There is only one entity in the universe that has the power to perform such a forgery. There is only one entity in the universe that has the power to plant such an evil seed and care for it until it bears its poisonous fruit: The Evil One. 666. The Number of the Beast.
We have the number of this beast. Osorio is the Antichrist. It is our sacred duty as God-fearing, freedom-loving Americans to stop him in every way we can.
Thank you for reading, and Let Freedom Ring!
C.T. says:
We oughta deport all of them, send them back to whatever pisshole they came from. They’re like cockroaches, millions of them hiding in the dark and when you turn the lights on they run for cover. How do they get in the country? They just come here and nobody stops them, like they’re real Americans or something.
LiptonLady55 says:
They won’t let the Border Patrol do their jobs. They’re bringing them over to work cheap and take American jobs.
RealAmerican says:
First we got Obama, now we got this f*ckin’ beaner.
What’s the country coming to?
Skeptic says:
You have got to be kidding. Puerto Rico’s part of the U.S. They’re American citizens. And he was born in the Bronx. They got his birth certificate, his baby picture in the paper.
Avenger says:
STFU, moonbat!
WhiteMale14 says:
[comment removed for violating guidelines]
C.T. says:
Puerto Rico’s a foreign country, duh! They don’t speak English there.
Danny drove south on the Nicolls Road Highway and got off at Portion Road. It was a clear, beautiful, blue-green day. Coffee buzz of radios and gas pumps and America-runs-on-Dunkin’-Donuts. Eighty-seven degrees and sunny on this Sunday afternoon, traffic headed to the beach, construction and delivery, a white van with
We Buy Junk Cars
in red.
He pondered the story.
One victim.
Many vague threats.
No specific suspects.
Grass growing in the sidewalk cracks. Leaves undulating in the light breeze, middle-aged maples and scrubby pines. A strip mall off Portion Road west of Nicolls, one of the scores filling in the sides of this once-country road. A brown-brick slab topped by a shingled façade, housing a pizzeria, deli, Chinese takeout, paint store, RE/MAX real-estate office, a vacant Pilates gym, and the Dos Grandes Varones bar, where the night before an amiably rowdy crowd had watched Cruz Azul tie Club America 1-1, followed by the Yankees at Oakland.
This was the scene of the crime. Jefferson had stepped out for a slice of pizza after the soccer match. The slice had been slammed into his face.
The patch of woods behind the stores was taped off. A woman from the cops’ Public Information Office patrolled outside, keeping the media, the forest of working legs and camera tripods, from getting too close. The victim was believed to be an immigrant from Ecuador, based on an ID card found in his wallet. Identification was being withheld pending notification of relatives. He was in critical condition at University Hospital in Stony Brook.
Any suspects? Motive?
“The matter is under investigation and we can’t comment any further.”
Nothing more here. Danny took a walk. To feel out the atmosphere. The bar wasn’t open yet, but Portia’s Pizzeria was.
The Quality of Our Pizza Is Not Strained
, the sign boasted. He ordered a slice, sat down, and flipped through his notes.
A familiar face came out of the bathroom. Detective Peter Restino.
“Hey, Pete, how ya doin’?”
“Hanging in there. You writing about this mess?”
“Yeah, you know anything?”
“Yeah.” He dropped his voice low, leaned over the table. “You didn’t get this from me, but we’re looking at a pattern of assaults in the area. Victims a couple Hispanic males, one black male, one homeless male. The actors probably a group.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. If you do, I’ll feed your balls to my dog.”
Monday morning Danny parked his car by the
Weekly’s
eastern Suffolk bureau, upstairs in back of a row of storefronts by the railroad tracks in Port Jefferson Station. He knocked once on the open door of Lisa’s office and walked in. She looked up from her computer.
“Lisa, what’s your take on this?”
“You talk to the cops?”
“Officially, they said it was under investigation and they couldn’t comment. Privately, it might be a gang assault, might be racial. We can’t use that, though.”
“Not surprising. I don’t think Calero wants this to blow up. But I bet he puts his foot in it sooner or later.”
Suffolk County Executive Paul Calero was a former county police commissioner, brought in from Philly in the ’90s with promises of an easier life and a bigger paycheck. In turn, he’d promised to bring urban tough-guy policing to the white-flight suburbs to make sure they didn’t fall like the inner cities had. In his first campaign, he’d been racially conciliatory, dropping hints in Brentwood and Central Islip that his name might be Spanish, but when he’d won reelection a year and a half ago, he’d switched to swearing to crack down on the hordes of drug dealers, rapists, and drunk drivers allegedly inundating the county from points south of Key West and the Rio Grande.
