Sleeping Policemen (6 page)

If he was careful. If the mailer held cash.

Nick reached for it at the same time as Tucker; he pushed the other boy's hand away, and lifted it out himself. He knew right away it wasn't money. He could feel the shape of the thing, flat and rectangular, three-quarters of an inch thick. A black current of disappointment poured through him, an infinitely receding tide dragging him from an aspiring shore. He didn't realize he was holding his breath until it burst out of him.

Suddenly he had to urinate. His bladder burned with it.

“What is it?” Tucker said.

“Shut up,” Nick said.

“No, I wanna—”

“Outside,” said Finney firmly, steering them back toward the door. Nick swerved toward the restrooms on the far side of the ticket counter. “I'm right behind you.”

“You okay?” Sue said.

“I have to piss.”

He went past the ticket counter and up a short flight of stairs. The men's room was to his right, a plain, wooden door that swung soundlessly open at a push. A dying fluorescent light flickered within, producing an almost subaural hum. An enormous white man obstructed the sinks, brushing strands of greasy hair across his pate. Two black kids in oversize jeans and hockey jerseys were arguing about something in the archway that gave onto the urinals. Nick slid past them and stopped before a urinal, wedging the mailer under his arm. He fished himself out of his trousers and waited for a moment, unable to release the flow of urine. And then it came, a hard, yellow arc, the acrid stench of it rising to mix with the other odors that hovered there, almost palpable—a fouled toilet and too many unwashed bodies, the faint, clean pine scent of over-matched disinfectant.

Nick flushed and turned away. The black kids had gone with a last flourish of shouts. The fat man grunted and made room for Nick at the sinks. “Fucking niggers,” he remarked, working with a toothpick at a few cancerous stumps of teeth.

Nick ignored him.

He laid the mailer on the ledge and washed his hands. He studied his image in the mirror: deep-set eyes and close-shorn brown hair, shoulders broad from long days in the warehouse, working until every muscle ached. Not handsome, he thought, but not unpleasant either. Just normal. He didn't look like a guy who could run down an innocent man, steal ten grand, and go looking for more.

But the plain fact of it was there, too. He could see it in his eyes, a wariness he'd seen only once before, in the eyes of that frightened deer. The sense that he was hunted.

Nick closed his eyes and leaned over the sink to splash water on his face. When he lifted his head, he gazed with renewed intensity into the visage staring back at him from the rust-stained mirror. In the depths beyond the wavering image reflected there, he sensed something inexorable rising up to claim him. Fate, maybe. A bloated, terrible fish, wearing a dead man's face.

The others were gone.

Nick stood at the foot of the stairs, clutching the mailer as he scanned the terminal. The black guys still huddled by the vending machines, and a punked-out kid in engineer boots and orange-spiked hair studied the magazines in the newsstand, but otherwise the terminal was empty. No Finney, no Tuck. No Sue.

A black tide of certainty buoyed him up: They had left him.

Left him
.

Nick repeated the phrase under his breath, his mouth bitter with the ashes of a previous betrayal: an afternoon the previous spring, Finney's voice.
Why didn't you tell me Sue's folks were coming in?
The thing was, Nick hadn't known—might never have known if Finney hadn't screwed up and let it slip. Finney and Sue had gone to dinner with them while Nick had spent the evening laboring over a Shakespeare paper, unaware.

Stupid and unaware.

“She didn't
tell
you?” Finney had said. “She said she called you, you weren't—”

And then, lamely: “Oh hell, Nick. I'm sorry. It's just Sue. She didn't mean it.”

But she
did
, Nick had seen it in her eyes later that same afternoon when he dropped in at her place unannounced. Her parents were still there, Mira, a brittle forty-something blonde in an iridescent pantsuit, and Campbell, broad-shouldered and handsome, his red hair trimmed close above a prominently boned face.

“This is my friend Nick,” Sue had said, the word she chose—

—
friend
—

—inadequate, hurtful.

Nick blushed, suddenly sorry he had come. “I just wanted that book,” he said off the top of his head.

“The book. Right.” Coldly, she added: “I'll get it.” They listened to her mount the stairs, Mira in her shiny pantsuit, Campbell in a summer sweater of hand-woven silk, Nick in torn Levis and a pair of beat-up work boots he had stolen from Jake last Christmas. Nick scratched his head, studied the weave of the carpet.

Mira Thompson cleared her throat. “Where are you from, Rick?”

He stammered, started to correct her, thought better of it. He managed to get it out at last: “Louisiana.” He coughed, abruptly conscious of his bayou accent, so different from the honeyed cadence of old Savannah.

Suddenly he understood Sue's reluctance to bring him here, to introduce him to such people.

And hated himself for it.

“Mira and I just love New Orleans. Went down for Mardi Gras—what was it, Mira, five years ago?”

Nick studied his boots.

“What do your folks do down there, son?”

“Sales,” Nick said. It might have been the most shameful moment of his life. He smiled weakly. “Dad's in—”

Sue saved him. She appeared at the bottom of the stairs in a rush, thrusting a paperback at him. He shoved it in a back pocket without even glancing at the title.

“I'll be off then.”

An awkward moment passed, everyone standing and talking simultaneously, handshakes exchanged, and then Nick found himself on the stoop alone with Sue, staring into her angry face.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I'll call—”

“I'll call you.”

But she did not.

In the days that followed, Nick blew off classes, drank beer, and studied the book she had given him—an unread copy of
Sons and Lovers
from the British novel class—for answers to questions he dared not ask. The third afternoon—a sullen, rainy day that reflected Nick's mood—she showed up at his door.

“What's up, Nicky?” she said, dropping her coat. There was nothing underneath, just the long, slim lines of the body that haunted his dreams. He knelt before her.

“Nick,” she said. “Oh, Nick.”

Neither of them ever mentioned her parents again.

“Hey, buddy!”

Nick turned. The ticket attendant rested his elbows on the counter.

“You talking to me?”

“You the one with that redhead, the two fellas?”

“Yeah.”

“Outside. Said they'd be in the car.”

Nick nodded, a knot loosening in his chest. That sense of resentment—the three of them closing ranks against him—retreated a little. Waiting. “Thanks.”

Nick hurried to the stairs, anxious to escape the bus station's contagion of fried food and diesel fuel, the doubt spreading like infection in his mind. He glimpsed the Mercedes, an electric blue SEL 450, at the curb through the old men clustered outside the door. They turned to look at him as he passed among them, their faces inscrutable. The cold was like a wall.

“Hey, pal?”

A hand touched his elbow.

“Hey.”

Nick glanced over his shoulder, clasping the mailer against his chest. A seamed face leaned toward him: booze-stained eyes and stubbled jaw, teeth yellow and slick-looking in a smile that wanted something. A shit-eating grin, Nick's father would have called it. The old man's breath hung between them like a veil, a reek of cigarettes and cheap wine.

“You got a buck? Coffee?”

Involuntarily, Nick's hand clutched his jacket, the roll of bills curled there, seed of a future as yet unborn. But a future.

“I'm in a hurry.”

He started for the car, but the hand touched his elbow once again, gripping this time.

He turned. “Let me go, man.”

“In a fuckin Mercedes and you can't spare a measly buck, friend?”

“It's not my car—”

“You ain't like them, huh?”

Nick hesitated, wrenched his arm away. He turned to the car, digging in his jeans. The old man reached out for him once again, jarring his elbow as Nick lifted out a handful of change. Silver rained against the broken sidewalk, but none of them moved. Not Nick and not the old man, not the bums gathered beyond him.

Nick met the old man's bleary eyes for a single instant longer, and then he turned away.

“So let's see what's inside,” Tucker said from the back seat.

Nick slid a finger under the flap and tore open the end of the mailer. He could hear the silence, sense the three of them lean toward him as he tilted the contents into his hand.

A videotape.

No one said anything. The Mercedes sped south into the gathering twilight, leaving Knoxville behind.

Casey
, the typewritten label read.
Tape 14
.

Nick shook the tape from its cardboard box; Finney's VCR swallowed it silently, its digital display flaring alight. He heard the spools catch with a click. The screen fuzzed over as the leader unwound, then gave way to a flawless ebony emptiness. Nick glanced at the others, mere shapes in the darkened room. Finney slouched with his arms crossed over the back of a kitchen chair, his face expressionless. Tucker sat rigidly in the recliner, chewing at a nail. Sue waited on the sofa. Nick stepped over the coffee table and sank into the cushions beside her, grateful for her warmth as she leaned against him.

On the screen, blackness. No music.

A title came up, white letters against a jet background:
Casey
. A moment later, the screen brightened to gray, a porous alien field rendered in stark precision. Gradually the camera pulled back and the gray field revealed itself as one wall of a cinderblock room, bright and sterile as a surgery. The camera held there for a moment, dipped to reveal a steel drain set in the center of a concrete floor, and then panned slowly, gray floor slipping by. Only then did Nick realize that there was sound, that there had been for some time, almost subliminal at first but growing slowly louder: muted sobs.

Tension writhed in his belly.

The first glimpse of color was like an electric shock: a dull steel band encircling a pale ankle. The camera climbed the leg slowly, caressing knee and thigh and finally the tangled thatch of pubic hair, black against translucent flesh, with the faintest coral hint of female genitals curled within. As it climbed higher, over a slight, rounded belly and girlish breasts, Nick felt his cock stiffening almost against his will. Sue moved still closer against him, her hand heavy on his thigh.

“Some kind a freaky titty movie,” Tucker said, and for once Nick had to agree with him.

Then the camera came to rest on the girl's face, heart-shaped and fragile and not wholly formed, poised at the tremulous frontier of adolescence, no longer a girl and not quite a woman, maybe seventeen, maybe not. Her beauty was like an ache way down inside him. Dark hair curled around her pale shoulders and her green eyes gazed directly into the lens with a terrifying intensity. A bright, bright ribbon of blood flowed from the corner of her mouth.

And she sobbed, a constant, defeated hitching of breath.

“I got a bad feeling about this,” Finney said into the silence, and at the same time another figure stepped into the frame: an enormous man with his back to the camera, naked but for the black leather hood zipped over his head. Sobs caught and died in the girl's throat. She backed away, and Nick saw how she was bound, steel shackles at wrist and ankle, connected by lengths of narrow chain to bolts in the concrete floor.

Another man, about Nick's size, and also hooded, stepped into the picture, his penis half-erect in a nest of brown hair. The hooded men caught the girl between them and lowered her wide-eyed and empty of resistance to the floor. The big man held her prone while the other man shortened the chains, giving the girl no more than a foot of play. The big man stepped out of frame and returned with two padded mats. He placed one in front of the girl, and one between her outspread thighs. The smaller man knelt behind the exposed mounds of her buttocks, stroking himself. The big man stepped in front of the girl, and now Nick saw that he had something in his hand. Something bone-handled, something shiny. It flickered and caught the light, and Nick felt an icy hand close around his heart.

A knife.

An off-camera voice spoke up.

“Now then,” it said, masculine and precise. “Let us begin.”

“It's a fake,” Tucker said.

But if it was a fake it was artfully done. The off-screen voice orchestrated changes in position; the two men were tireless. At one point, the big man sodomized her, while the smaller man knelt before her and pressed the knife to her throat, forcing her to fellate him. Nick stared in fascination at the narrow, crimson thread snaking down her breast to drip on the floor, helpless to turn away from the horror on screen. Sue whimpered, curled tighter into the shelter of his arm. He had to force himself not to recoil, shamed by the iron spike of his erection.

When they started to cut her, the girl began to scream. She screamed for a long time, and the sounds echoed in Nick's head. Still he forced himself to believe that it was all pretend, that after the take ended the three would get up, shake hands like professionals, and walk away.

Then the men took the girl's tongue and all screams stopped together. In the moment that followed, as wordless grunts and groans filled the room, he knew better.

“It's not a fake,” he said.

“I think we ought to turn this off,” Finney said.

“Me, too,” said Nick.

But he didn't move. None of them did.