Author: Andre Duza
Date: 2014-12-04 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: For as long as he can remember, Jaime Cole dreamed of being a Hollywood screenwriter. He thought his job as an editor for an Internet conglomerate that deals in everything from viral videos to pay-per-view porn would be a springboard to the legitimate side of the entertainment business. He thought wrong. Welcome to the dark side of the biz. Home of broken dreams, porn star meltdowns, tabloid reporters, homicidal ghosts, and a legendary Voodoo Drug Lord known as King Dollar. Haunted by disembodied things intent on driving him mad, Jaime must find the connection between a mysterious banned video

StrangeHouse Books
an Imprint of Rooster Republic Press

King Dollar

Copyright © Andre Duza 2014

All Rights Reserved

The story included in this publication is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Cover Art by Tjie Tsang

Interior Design and e-conversion by Lori Michelle
www.theauthorsalley.com

THE CITY NEVER SLEEPS, FULL OF VILLAINS AND CREEPS

-NAS

PROLOGUE

1986 . . .

The expressway off-ramp was choked with victims of the evening rush. The traffic poked ahead slowly, its monotony broken only by the pointless frenzy of car horns and the occasional I-don’t-give-a-fuck maneuver born out of hot-tempered desperation. Hulking masses of metal screeched and bucked along their everyday commute to the city.

Down from the expressway, on the avenue, the cars began to flow a little more freely. The street was swollen with people in all manner of transit. The sidewalks teemed with the purposeful and the deliberate as they pushed forward together. Cyclists courted death as they weaved in and out of the clutter and clouds of exhaust. Masses gathered at crosswalks pulsed forward in unison when given the signal to cross.

An elderly black gentleman with a wild, unkempt perm and a priest’s collar, stood at the head of the crowd on the corner. His face was contorting into painful and violent expressions. He began to move his head back and forth, searching the air around him for something that he apparently could not find. There was a momentary break in the string of vehicles, and the man calmly and deliberately stepped off the curb and into the road against the signal. He looked at the horrified faces on the corner, took a deep breath, and stiffened himself into a pivot facing traffic.

“Forgive me, Father,” he spoke to the darkening sky. And then he spread his arms, closed his eyes, and waited to die.

The onrushing cars jumped and swerved in their lanes as they ground to a sudden stop inches away from Mr. Death Wish.

“Get outta the street!”

“You’re gonna get-cher self killed!”

“Move it, Reverend Don King!”

A truck came zooming around the stuck traffic. The driver, blind with rage, saw the priest in the street, swerved violently, panicked and yanked the wheel to the right, losing control. The pickup tumbled and bounced and landed right on top of one of those rolling-box, hybrid thingies that was approaching in the opposite lanes. A sedan jackknifed and smashed two other cars, and a dump truck hit the whole procession with savage force.

The bent-metal crash gave way to cries of anguish that emanated from the smoking pile of vehicle husks. Gasoline, blood, and other liquids mingled on the asphalt. Folks began to back well away from the street, covering their mouths, unable to pull themselves away from the spectacle.

An engine revved in the distance. Seconds later, a massive SUV appeared along the median, gathering speed as it hurtled toward the wreckage. The crowd stood in shock as the driver fishtailed and weaved in an attempt to maintain control. The intersection was thick with smoke, so he didn’t even see the priest, who was still at the epicenter of the carnage. The man behind the wheel stomped on the brakes, turned his face away from the windshield, and waited for impact.

With his eyes squeezed shut, the priest tilted his ear toward the prolonged squealing of brake pads that quickly approached. He guessed it was a large vehicle from the pitch of its squeal, and the dirty air it shoved at him.

This is it, the priest thought. A moment of fear. A rush of adrenaline. Erection. At the peak of his euphoria, a tiny voice whispered, “Why don’t you open your eyes and face it with some dignity?”

The priest opened his eyes.

Time seemed to crawl. Insignificant things took on outsized importance. He noticed the nuclear-sick green of antifreeze and the prism of gas as it pooled in front of him. And then the only thing that existed was the SUV and the tearstained face of a cherub pressed against the back window.

The priest’s mouth was lining up a smile, his eyes welling with devotion. He blinked back to normal speed.

A frightened, 9-year-old boy replaced the cherub. The boy was on his knees in the back seat of the SUV with his hands and face pressed against the window. He was probably screaming, but the priest couldn’t hear as he was mesmerized by the SUV’s sliding, squealing bulk. It was just about to slap him extinct.

Twenty minutes later, what was left of the crowd cheered as the police escorted the priest, somehow still alive, in handcuffs toward the back of their van. By now word had gotten around that the crazy man’s name was Father Theodore Dubois and that he was the Pastor at St. Salacious Episcopal Church in North Philly. It was clear from the get-go that Father Dubois wanted to die. He gave no useful information to the authorities, instead rattling off paranoid nonsense about talking shadows and the feeling of sharp teeth against his skin.

“Please! For the love of God! Just let me end it!” Dubois growled as he struggled against the officers’ collective grasp. “I’m begging you! I don’t care if it’s a sin! You hear me? I don’t care!”

The applause faded when the officers finally got Dubois into the van and slammed the doors shut. Somebody yelled, “I’ll pray for you, brother!”

Dubois kicked the door from the inside and then peeked through the bars on the tiny, square window. He could see the constipated off-ramp in the background. He could see curious folks standing around their cars, most of them looking in his direction.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” Dubois yelled at them. “None of you knows what it’s like!”

The scene was finally winding down. The crowd was starting to thin. The ambulances had taken away the last of the injured. A crane was called in to right the overturned cars. Firemen on the ground guided the crane operator, who seemed annoyed by their direction. Tow-trucks were standing by to tow the crippled and dying vehicles away. Police examined the area, and directed traffic around it. There was even movement on the off-ramp. One unlucky officer was stuck addressing questions and concerns from passing cars and curious bystanders.

Father Dubois hadn’t said a word in several minutes, but a new sound was coming from the police van: a haunted underwater alarm-sound closely followed by an ethereal chirping that resonated like tiny bells filtered through a synthesizer.

The unnatural noise built to crescendo.

Dubois cried out, “Oh God. They’re out there. Can’t you hear them?”

The noise suddenly stopped. People barely took notice of the moment.

Without warning, the sound materialized inside the police van. This time, an alien buzzing, like a swarm of angry bees wielding tiny chainsaws, mixed with the other noises.

Father Dubois shrieked.

Outside the van, heads whipped toward the commotion.

“Dear God, no!” Dubois begged. “Heavenly father, please have mercy on me!”

The overpowering din drowned out the priest’s wailing.

Police officers ran over but stopped short of the van when they realized that Dubois was throwing himself against the sides of the van with enough force to shake the entire vehicle. They looked imploringly at one another, waiting for someone to take the lead.

And then the noise just stopped. The van rocked a few more times and then was still.

Two officers ran forward. The first officer pulled his gun from its holster, planted a wide-legged stance about five feet back from the rear of the van, and took aim at the doors with both hands. The second officer holstered his gun and approached the doors. He kept his hand resting on the butt, just in case.

Officer #2 pulled a set of keys from his belt and unlocked the door on the right. He curled his fingers around the handle and tossed a look to the first officer.

Don’t leave me hangin’, said his eyes. He glanced at the people watching in suspense, their faces anticipating something awful. In that moment, Officer #2 felt like the big, dumb, soon-to-be-victim in every bad horror movie he had ever seen.

Officer #2 turned the knob and pulled. The door was jammed. He pulled again and again, but it wouldn’t budge. He stepped back, dug his toes into the soles of his shoes, and tightened his grip around the handle. He gulped a lungful of air and…

The doors burst open from the inside. Officer #2 went flying and landed in a rolling heap a few feet away.

“Freeze!”

Officer #1 locked his sights on the extreme darkness inside the van. He expected anything at this point, but all was calm.

“You okay?” Officer #1 called behind him.

“I’m good,” Officer #2 responded, climbing to his feet. Once standing, he pulled his gun from the holster and approached the rear of the van. The doors were hanging wide open like arms inviting him to come closer. Officer #2’s nose registered the scent of blood before his eyes had a chance to adjust to the dark interior. He recoiled at the stench and held his breath.

Maybe the priest managed to cut a main artery and bleed out, was his first thought.

“What is it?” Officer #1 inquired.

Officer #2 shook his head, bewildered, and then leaned into the van. Officer #1 took a few steps closer and reacquainted his aim.

Officer #2 squinted to see the body but there was none. He leaned in a little further.

The unnatural noise began again. Officer #2 let out a startled yelp before the raucous chirping swallowed all other sounds. He tried to jump back but something yanked him forward.

From afar it looked like the van was ingesting the officer headfirst. His form was completely suspended, his feet jutting out from the darkness and kicking wildly.

Officer #1 unloaded his gun at the darkness around #2’s floating, thrashing body. He expected something resembling Father Theodore Dubois to fall into the open. His gun clicked empty, yet his partner was still afloat and thrashing. The other man’s screams suggested unfathomable pain.

The unnatural noise seemed to take form. It poured from the shadowy interior of the van into the surrounding air.

In a flash of pure instinct, Officer #1 ran up, wrapped his arms around #2’s waist, and tugged against whatever it was that was attempting to pull his partner into the van. He could feel #2’s body tighten and spasm as the thing on the other end yanked and tugged like a predatory beast tearing flesh from bone. The force was much stronger than he’d anticipated, more powerful than any man.

Officer #1 tightened his grip and planted his heels. He growled from deep in his belly, and . . .

The unnatural noise disappeared as suddenly as it came. The officers fell back and hit the ground together.

Officer #1 rolled until his feet were beneath him and then sprung to a full stand. His partner seemed dazed.

More officers were jogging toward them.

“Tha’ fuck was that?” #1 said to the gathering officers. He was facing #2’s right side as the other man staggered upright, still discombobulated. “Hey! You all right? What’d happened to the . . . ?”

He was about to say “priest” when #2 turned so that #1 could see him head on.

A one-armed, half-headed thing reached out to #1. Number 2 stumbled drunkenly, spurting fluids from the diagonal wound that stretched from the top of his head, on the right side, to just above his left oblique. The wound was jagged and raw with edges gnawed down to a lumpy, moist terrain that throbbed with a frenetic pulse. Chewed organs blossomed out. The face that remained was morphing through variants of shock and signaling for help.

Number 2 seemed confused by #1’s reaction, which was to back away hang-jawed, point, and repeatedly shake his head “No.”

He changed direction and got a similar vibe from the next person that he stumbled toward. He changed direction again and searched for the next closest person. He spied his reflection in the window of a squad car and stopped cold. Disbelief filled what remained of his face. He cried out. It was a helpless sound. He reached up slowly, reluctant to validate the injuries by touch, yet feeling the need to do so.

A single gunshot. It came from behind #2 and punched through the top of his flopping half-head, killing him instantly.

Time seemed to stop for #1. He fell to his knees, crying. He had yet to lower his right arm, a finger-wisp of smoke sifting from the barrel of his gun. Although it seemed like the only option, he wasn’t prepared for the clusterfuck of guilt that hit him right after he pulled the trigger and put his own partner out of his misery.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

The remaining officers weren’t sure how to react. Some of them had their guns drawn and half-pointed at #1. A few walked up to the back of the van and looked inside. There was no sign of Father Dubois, only blood and smeared handprints lining the interior walls.

ONE

Present

It was shaping up to be a fairly decent week. The days were moving along rapidly enough that Jamie Cole didn’t have time to dwell on all the shit in his life.

It was already Tuesday. The train had been on time for the second day in a row. Jamie found a seat with elbowroom on both sides. The ride was scored by a succession of old-school favorites, from Rakim, to Big Daddy Kane, to Public Enemy, to Rage Against the Machine. His eyes locked unexpectedly with his fantasy girl. A gap between songs and there she was, seated strategically so that he’d notice her. He liked the fact that he couldn’t guess her heritage. Possibly Latino, or Polynesian, or some kind of exotic mix . . . She had sleepy-eyes and a slight overbite that pushed her shapely upper lip forward and gave her small mouth a point. Her black hair shone pouring over her shoulders and down her back, looking almost solid until she moved her head and the fibrous tendrils swayed to follow.

Jamie named the girl Violet in his head, or sometimes Jade. He figured her real name was something boring like Lisa or Mary. When the time was right, he was going to make his move.

He arrived at work five minutes early. On the way into his building, Jamie learned that two of the most vocal protestors, the ones who had singled him out a few days ago, were arrested earlier in the morning for arguing about freedom of speech with some upwardly mobile stuffed suit. Apparently they spit on the man and he cried assault. That just about made Jamie’s day right there.

Jamie worked for Echelon Media. His official title was Managing Editor/Copy Writer. The money and designation were commiserate with where a 28-year-old male with a Bachelor’s Degree in English should be on the corporate ladder, if not a rung or two above. His department, his “team,” he liked to call them, was 14 people deep—six editors, four proofreaders, and four copy-writers, all of whom reported directly to him.

He (rarely) drove a 2011 Acura TL. He worked in Center City, Philadelphia, which was constantly clogged with traffic, and armed with various methods of parting commuters from their hard-earned money. Rather than pay for a lot or at the meters on the street, Jamie kept his car parked right in front of his newly renovated, two-story house on Spruce Street, an area known as University City, and took the train to work instead.

His was the house with the outward curving bay window. Aside from the updated windows and front door, the rest of the house retained the original architecture, which stamped it historic in the eyes of passing motorists. His mother proudly boasted that it was like his own little castle when Jamie walked his parents through the place for the first time. For all intents and purposes, Jamie Cole was living larger than most of his peers.

Tuesday morning came and went. There were a few minor fires to put out, but nothing that Jamie couldn’t handle with his eyes closed. He buried himself in work and spent some quality time with Keri Pak, his coworker and subconscious crush. They dished about office gossip.

“You should see Ronnie,” Keri said, her tone suggesting a juicy tidbit.

“No. Thank you,” Jamie replied.

“No. Really. He looks bad. Like he hasn’t slept in days. We were saying that maybe he’s on something.”

“Who’s we?”

“You know. The usual suspects.”

“Ronnie’s all show. He’s too much of a pussy to be into drugs. Maybe he’s just such an asshole that sleep doesn’t even want ‘em.”

“You’re mean,” Keri chuckled.

“No. I just couldn’t give two shits about Ronnie at the moment. If you know what I mean.”

“Nuff said. Well, didju hear about Stu in Sales? I guess he got arrested for stalking Gemma Arroyo last night. Apparently he was hiding in the bushes outside her condo.”

“The anal queen?! The hell’s she afraid of? The shit I’ve seen her shove up her nasty bung-hole. She could just spread her cheeks and sit on poor Stu and he’d be done.”

Keri laughed shaking her head at the image that Jamie’s barb conjured.

“You’re on a roll today, huh?” she said.

For lunch, Jamie had finally made it to that new Japanese take-out that Keri kept recommending. He stuffed himself on spicy tuna rolls and walked back to work high on the aftertaste and belching soy sauce vapors. It was a beautiful fall day in the big city. A “stop and smell the roses” kind of day, his mother would say.

Jamie found himself mesmerized by the huge LED display that wrapped around the façade of a building he approached. Something about the upcoming Pacquaio/Mayweather fight scrolled by horizontally followed by the time and temperature (12:52pm & 77 °), and finally gossip about some vacuous celebrity who had just flunked out of rehab for the umpteenth time. He tried not to let the magnitude of TV screens intimidate him as they had been doing since his argument was caught on video. They were everywhere. Big ones. Small ones. High-tech flat-screens. Old-school boxes. They hung in outdoor cafes, and fast food restaurants, and bars, and stared out from busy storefronts.

People hurried back and forth mostly oblivious to the images on the screens; arbitrary news anchors babbling away. Jamie half-expected to see his own face floating over the anchors’ shoulders. “Be on the look-out for this man,” they’d warn. “His name is Jamie Cole and he’s responsible for every wayward, troubled girl who has ever stumbled into porn.”

That’s how people looked at him since he was outed on the news as a “smut-peddler.” So Jamie did his best to avoid eye contact. He noticed, quite accidentally, that the shadows around him seemed out of synch with the people from whom they were cast. Maybe he was just seeing things. Stress could do that to a person.

Jamie was still a little bummed that he forgot to grab his iPod when he left work at lunchtime, as it was definitely a nod-your-head-and-strut-to-the-music kind of day. If he’d been wearing his headphones he wouldn’t have heard the haunted underwater alarm sound resonating in the air somewhere behind him. A series of warped mechanized chirps floated underneath it. The sounds were so faint that Jamie almost didn’t hear them over the normal Center City din, yet so alien that they fell upon his ears like a scream. At first, he blew it off as some weird-ass pining for good music to score the beautiful day, his head already perusing a mish-mash of music and sound effects from his favorite films. Jamie was a writer at heart, so his mind was constantly dreaming up stories scored by his favorite songs and soundtrack selections. Still, he was curious enough to focus on the sound more intently.

It changed pitch.

Jamie turned and glanced over his shoulder at . . .

He cried out and burst into an animated dance. Something had bitten him on the forearm. Jamie slapped his hand over the painful spot and looked around, embarrassed. It was heading south of lunchtime and the sidewalks were busy with people savoring the last few minutes of their temporary freedom from work. No one seemed to care about Jamie’s outburst. And then he noticed a young boy with mischievous features.

The boy must’ve been around eight years old. He was walking hand-in-hand with his mother, a stout woman. His big, melon-head bobbled as she tugged him forward. Judging by their distance from him, they had walked past Jamie just about when he felt the bite. And now the little bastard was looking back and chuckling.

Jamie lifted his arm to inspect it. The area of his forearm was hot and throbbing. He made a fist and the tight, inflamed skin that bordered the deep impression of teeth balked at the flexion of his muscle.

What the hell?

At first, the teeth impressions appeared hollow inside, but then moisture set in and they slowly filled with blood. They were aligned in a way that suggested a small mouth, possibly a child’s.

Jamie flashed back to the boy with the mischievous grin and the melon-head, walking with his mother.

“Hey!” Jamie yelled, then jogged toward them. “Aye, Kid.”

The boy turned. His eyes shot wide when he saw Jamie coming. He gasped, and then let out a shrill holler.

“Mommee!”

Mother’s stout body tightened. She whipped around. Her eyes were shooting death rays. She shoved the boy behind her—maybe a little too hard—and then stepped into Jamie’s path.

Jamie stopped farther away from the woman than he intended, ready to explain himself.

Sensing drama, people began to slow down and stop.

“Don’t chu dare touch mah son!” The stout women cocked her arm back and warned. Her tone was harsh and authoritative. Her expression mimicked confidence, yet still she trembled. A chunky purse dangled from her closed fist, as good a weapon as any.

Jamie immediately backed off. The boy’s mother was volatile. The whole situation could become a Jerry Springer moment, the mother and kid glomming off sympathy from the small crowd that had formed.

Fat chance that this drama-queen takes any responsibility for her kid, he thought.

“Chill out, lady! Your kid fucking bit me!”

“Hey! That’s not necessary!” An anonymous male voice scolded Jamie.

The boy was peering out from behind his mother’s leg, looking genuinely afraid. His eyes were fat and wide. They radiated a caramel glow that instantly turned the crowd against Jamie.

“What the hell are you talking about?” The drama queen said. “You on drugs or something?”

“Am I on drugs?” Jamie sounded offended. He held his arm up to let the drama queen—and everyone else—see the bleeding teeth impressions in his forearm. “Zis look like drugs to you?”

Drama queen took a defensive step backward.

“Don’t chu raise your arm to me!” she said.

Jamie twisted his lips at her performance. He was confident the crowd would side with him. Drama had just “taken it there”: the crowd would see her for the crazy, insecure, attention-whore that she was.

No wonder her kid is going around biting people.

But then a couple of chivalrous men in the crowd came to the woman’s defense. A gallery of scowls floated behind the men, Jamie locked squarely in their sights.

Jamie threw his arms up in surrender. “Whoa! Hold on now! I was just showing her the bite-mark on my arm.”

“After you grabbed my son by his arm . . . ” Drama replied.

“After he fuc . . . friggin’ bit me!”

“Oh Please! How could-e-ov bit you? He was walkin’ wit me tha whole time. And mah son wouldn’t just up-and-bite somebody. Not unless they done something to him.”

Suspicion in Drama’s tone. It implied something lascivious and nasty. That’s how Jamie understood it, and judging by the faces in the crowd, so did most of them.

Jamie shook his head, and tried to engage as many of the spectators as possible in one sweeping gaze. “Look, all I’m sayin’ is . . . I was just walking down the street . . . ” Minding my own business, his mind jokingly suggested. “ . . . when somebody bit me. I turn around and see your son looking back with a big grin on his face.”

Jamie addressed Drama directly but spoke to the entire crowd. He was holding his arm up again, and pivoting like one of Barker’s Beauties so that everyone could see the teeth impressions.

“I don’t care what chu think. It don’t give you tha right to come up on mah son like that.”

There was a heart-felt “Um Hmm,” from the crowd. It made him forget his response, if he even had one at all. Jamie just stood there with his mouth hanging open and nothing to say. People began to snicker.

Drama squatted next to her son and took his hands in her own. She spoke to him in cooing shorthand. “You all-wight, baby?”

All-wight???

The gallery of scowls relaxed as the spectators focused on the interaction between Drama and her eight-year-old-son. Floating heads tilted to loving angles. Warmth dissolved into vapors as it melted from expressions gone soft and gooey.

Jamie blew some air out. He couldn’t believe this.

“Yes.” The boy responded in a voice tuned to incite adoring gazes and calls of “Aweee” from the bystanders. Even Jamie found himself momentarily lulled by the boy’s saccharin charm.

“Was he trying to touch you or hurt you in any way?”

Jamie rolled his eyes as if to say, That’s ridiculous! And while I’m at it, stop talking to him like he’s a fucking baby.

“No,” the boy said. “He only just ah-scared me.”

Ah-scared??? Holy Fuck! What’s next?

The woman pulled her son into a lopsided embrace. His face was buried so deep in her cleavage that it looked like he might suffocate.

“It’s all-wight, baby. Mommy’s not gonna let anybody hurt you.”

Situation no-win, homes. Jamie thought, and looked down at the ground. He could hear the comments being slung under-breath.

“Coward.”

“Punk.”

“Thug.”

Just words, he repeated to himself.

Then he heard someone say, “Must be some kinda pervert.”

Jamie looked up and saw the man who said it; some oily, child molester-looking dude in a Target business-casual ensemble that looked like his mother, whose basement he probably still lived in, picked out for him to wear.

Jamie felt a sudden flush of heat. It was all he could do to keep from telling the oily dude to mind his own fucking business. But he knew that the anger was misdirected—most of it, anyway. It belonged to Drama for turning the tables on him, and to her son for biting him in the first place, and finally to people watching for not seeing through her bullshit. Acting on this feeling, no matter how badly the oily dude looked like he deserved to be told off, would only make things worse.

Jamie unintentionally locked eyes with Drama, who gave him a disgusted once-over and then sucked her teeth. She walked forward with her son in tow and shoulder-checked Jamie out of her way.

“Hey!” Jamie said, but Drama ignored him and kept on walking.

At some point the boy turned around and flashed an apologetic look. Jamie still wanted to choke the little fucker. He kept staring at their backs until Drama and her son were swallowed up by the crowd. Most of the spectators had left by then, but there were still a few nosey folks standing around.

Jamie’s heart sank when he saw Ronnie Hayes watching from across the street looking pale, bug-eyed, and disheveled.

Ronnie squinted when they made eye contact. Maybe he was wrong, but Jamie translated the look on Ronnie’s face to mean, “Gotcha!”

Sonofabitch’z gonna tell everybody!!! The thought made Jamie’s knees buckle.

TWO

Jamie hurried down the street with his hand clamped over his still painful arm, trying too hard to look inconspicuous. He turned into an alley—a short cut to the Lurmeyer Tower.

It was a typical downtown alley. Buildings standing tall to his left and right blocked out the sunlight. Fire escapes reached up the walls. Smoke-stained masonry. Dumpsters hid homeless folks in their shadows, the air polluted by the humid stench of their piss and funk. People passed back and forth at both ends of the alley, oblivious to the world within.

Jamie spied movement in his peripheral. He spun around angrily expecting an outstretched hand, a plea for money, but found only shadows. He looked closer and spotted a foot jutting out from behind one of the dumpsters he had passed.

He tilted his ear toward the dumpster and heard a man humming a pleasant melody.

Jamie threw disgust at the man and then quickly scolded himself.

Hey! At least he sounds happy.

He continued on. The humid stench was beginning to burn Jamie’s nostrils. He guessed about fifty feet of hot piss and funk vapors between where he stood and the other end of the alley, and decided to hold his breath the rest of the way.

He heard something above and behind him—a haunted underwater alarm-sound with chirping. The same sounds as before.

Jamie stopped, spit out his breath, and looked behind him.

Fire escapes and dumpsters. Same as before.

It was such an odd series of sounds, reverberating as if from another plane. Unnatural and intimidating. The chirping sound came in threes, each one at a different pitch, all three slightly distorted. Jamie searched his mind for some sort of definition.

He heard the noise again and listened carefully as it trailed off down the alley in the direction he had just come from. He stood there scanning the area with X-ray eyes. He paid special attention to the shadows lurking around the fire escape for what he assumed was probably just some kind of exotic bird. The thought intrigued him and filled his mind with speculation. His “story-material” senses were tingling.

Had it gotten loose from some eccentric nut-job in one of the high-rise condos? Did it escape from the zoo, or from some kind of animal smuggling operation?

The version that Jamie’s head cobbled together had the ‘thing’ escape from a research lab where it was part of some kind of secret experiment. Not his most original idea, but his best stories sometimes came from manipulating clichés to his own idiosyncratic liking.

The mood suddenly changed. Everything seemed darker. The shadows had shadows of their own. An unpleasant feeling crept up on Jamie. It felt as if someone was standing right behind him. In fact, he was almost sure of it.

He whipped around. There was no one there. The unnatural noise had gone away leaving normal, everyday city music. Jamie still felt eyes on him, though… and an uneasy presence. He noticed a new shadow on the wall to his right. Logic dictated that the large, plastic barrels that stood in front of it were casting the shadow. A semi-crushed pile of fat, lumpy garbage bags bulged from the mouth of the barrel on the end—the one right underneath the shadow. Jamie would have thought nothing of it, except that he was certain the shadow wasn’t there when he walked past those barrels. His imagination was trying to make him see the shadow as a person trying to hide from him. When he looked at it just right, it did ‘kinda-sorta’ resemble a smallish man squatting with his arms wrapped around his legs and his head between his knees. But a man would have to be in plain sight physically to cast a shadow right there on the wall.

A mugger? But Jamie didn’t get that vibe. Being a city-boy through and through, he was adept at sensing that brand of trouble.

He turned his ear to the shadow and thought he heard a voice whispering. He panned over to the dumpster with the legs jutting out to see if the homeless bum he’d clocked earlier had moved. He was still there, humming his cheerful melody.

Back to the shadow . . . Jamie listened harder and blocked out all other sound. The voice was all breath, making it difficult to ascertain gender. He couldn’t work out what it was saying as it spoke in an African-sounding dialect.

He drew closer.

Something jumped out of thin air over Jamie’s shoulder. And then the noise started again, chirping like before. It sounded close enough that he felt the need to duck and move away. At that moment, Jamie understood that they were all related. The haunted underwater alarm. The ethereal chirping. The whispering shadow. The feeling of eyes on him. And the uneasy presence.

The narrow alley began to close in on Jamie. The humid stench grew hot and nauseating. Jamie took off running.

The alley spat Jamie right into the middle of a heavy flow of human traffic. He paused, breathing heavily, and turned back and watched the sunlight chase a shadowy veil down the alley toward the opposite end.

He turned again, steadied himself.

Come on, pull yourself together, man!

A chain of protestors spanned the entire length of the black glass doors at the base of the Lurmeyer Tower. Jamie stood across the street waiting for the light to change. He held his hand over the bleeding teeth impressions on his arm and stood as small as possible among the huddle of folks waiting with him. He was angry with himself for forgetting about the subway entrance.

Stupid fucking mistake!

Echelon upper-management had asked that all employees enter through the subway concourse to avoid the protestors, and the undercover reporters, who’d been known to come right up and ask where you worked. “At least until we resolve this whole thing,” the company-wide email stated.

Jamie blamed Drama for stealing his focus. He blamed her for the alley as well, which he attributed to his stressed out mind playing tricks.

So now what?

Thanks to the news, the protestors knew Jamie’s face. He’d have to pass them to get back to work. He could always walk back to the subway entrance at the other end of the block, but why should he have to go out of his way to avoid these assholes. He squinted and judged them based on the editorial merit of their signs.

ECHELON MEDIA = SMUT PEDDLERS

ECHELON MEDIA EMPLOYS UNDER-AGED GIRLS

EVICT ECHELON MEDIA

NO PORN IN MY COMMUNITY

“Excuse me,” a soft, feminine voice nipped at Jamie’s ear. “Do you have the time?”

Jamie turned quickly, startled again. His eyes landed on a pretty girl in ankle- high boots and a fitted skirt that accentuated her Latin curves. Her hair was a wavy bouquet of bottle red. She looked too well put together to not have a watch or a cell phone. So, either she was into him or this was some kind of set-up.

Jamie looked himself up and down. He was wearing a Polo shirt and slacks, not exactly girl-gettin’ clothes. But maybe he could pull it off. So he gave the chemical redhead the benefit of the doubt.

“I’m sorry,” she smiled. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Thas-ssokay,” he replied.

Stiff-necked and looking straight ahead, Jamie glanced down at his watch, trying not to draw attention to his other hand, which was still clamped over the bleeding arm.

But Chemical Red was onto him.

“What’s the matter with your arm?” she asked.

Jamie’s mind left him hanging. He opened his mouth and let the words fall out as they came.

“Ahhh . . . jusss-t s-o-r-e frr-rom an old injury.” He moved his hand around as if to massage the area. It made the wound hurt worse.

“Hey . . . Don’t I know you from somewhere?” Chemical Red wondered aloud, seeming to forget about his arm. Her tone sounded practiced, like her entire performance up until now was building to that very line.

Jamie was about to answer her, to tell her the time—1:15pm—maybe chat some more, when he caught a whiff of realization. He looked Chemical Red up and down and then panned across the street. He spotted a white van with tinted windows parked down the block from the Lurmeyer’s main entrance. The employees of Echelon Media knew that van well. Its picture was taped to the wall of the elevator banks on each floor with a warning underneath.

Undercover News Van! Avoid at all costs!

Jamie felt all kinds of stupid.

“Nice try . . . ” he sneered at Chemical Red.

“Pardon me?” she replied.

The light turned green.

Jamie looked down and shook his head. That fucking drama-queen and her cannibal son had him making rookie mistakes. He was smarter than that. Too smart to let it affect him this way. Seconds later, a knowing smile melted to the surface of Jamie’s pensive, downward-facing mug. He looked up at Chemical Red and pointed at the white van across the street.

“So, you can tell your news-crew in the van over there to stop filming, because I have nothing to say.”

A cameraman stood on his knees in the back of the white van with tinted windows filming Jamie through the windshield. He wielded the camera like an appendage that grew out from his eye and set down on his right shoulder. The driver of the van squatted next to him in the crammed space watching Jamie and Chemical Red via the bank of monitors that lined the left wall. Their voices were filtered through the speakers.

“Look,” Chemical Red began, feigning sincere. “We’d just like to get a few words from you about the allegations of underage workers being employed by—”

“Kiss my ass! How’s that?” Jamie barked and started to cross the street.

Chemical Red waited by the sidewalk. Her shoulders dropped and hung disappointed as she watched Jamie cross. She turned to the white van and signaled for the cameraman to “Stop Filming,” by sliding her fingers across her throat.

“He made us,” she said into the tiny microphone clipped to the underside of her lapel.

Jamie stuck up his middle finger at the cameraman, and then disappeared between two parked cars.

“Ya think?” The cameraman replied. He kept the camera rolling though, hoping for some drama between Jamie and the protestors. But Jamie slipped right past them and into the building.

Jamie leaned over the sink next to Keri Pak, who was holding his arm under running water to clean the wound. His heart-rate was still slightly elevated from the ninja move he had pulled on the protestors out front. With his head down and his posture on “Invisible,” he slipped right past them and into the building without as much as a cat-call in honor of his smut-peddling. It probably wouldn’t work if he tried it again. He looked down at the top of Keri’s head intoxicated by the strawberry scent that wafted up from her scalp. He wanted to bury his nose in her thick, raven hair and take a huge whiff. But that would be inappropriate.

Jamie hissed in pain as Keri dabbed the wound with a paper towel.

He looked away.

A rectangular mirror reached over the row of pristine, automated sinks. A row of urinals lined the opposite wall. A few stalls next to the urinals.

We would make a great-looking couple, hunh? Jamie thought, catching their reflection in the mirror, and trying to distract himself from whatever Keri was going to do next with his arm. He figured a girl like her would keep him on his toes. She was almost, if not as smart as he was. Probably thought she was smarter. She was pretty enough that she could fall back on her looks if needs be, but too much of a brainiac to pull it off.

Jamie was dying to tell her that he knew she wrote the note.

You are very handsome. Wouldn’t you like to know who I am? it read.

He had only been with the company for a week when someone left it on his desk with a bite-sized Hershey’s chocolate square on top.

Generally speaking, it took about three weeks, from the point of hire, to become desensitized to the surreal atmosphere of lurid carnal gratification that saturated the otherwise office. Another week or so to work out the altered gender politics, the juvenile awkwardness, the fascination with how fellow employees—especially the female ones—dealt with the extreme sexual content. Was it apathy or interest? And why?

Mental lists were compiled.

•Male employees: Which women were the most comfortable with the environment, and as a result a possible lay?

•Female employees: Which men enjoy the job a little too much and should be avoided at all costs?

Back then Jamie knew Keri as the pretty Asian in the office next to his—probably an over-achiever and thus strictly business and asexual. No way a chick like that would be wasting her micro-managed time writing love notes. In retrospect, he felt a little ashamed for laying that kind of judgment on Keri. Especially when similar judgment had been laid on him so often in the past.

Aside from Marc Pierce, the Managing Director, who hired him, Keri was the only person Jamie felt comfortable saying more than a few words to up to that point. So he showed her the note. She snatched it from his hand almost as if she was embarrassed. He hadn’t even finished explaining it to her. Then she took it upon herself to investigate the matter. Looking back, it all seemed a bit overdone.

Keri had a suspect by that afternoon; a tiny-headed fat chick named Stella. Stella was one of those lonely people who rarely came out of her cubicle except to go to the bathroom, and to leave at the end of the day. She was the perfect red herring, completely undesirable to a guy like Jamie. At most, he’d pity her from afar, and then act like it never happened. That’s what Keri was hoping for.

One day when Jamie was bored, he thought it would be a cute idea to send Stella an email thanking her for the note. Stella was offended at the accusation. She cried harassment, but no one believed her when she said she didn’t write the note. The whole thing got ugly.

Keri never flat out admitted writing the note, but as their platonic relationship blossomed, Jamie became hip to the glances, and the subtle cues in her body language. When it finally dawned on him he felt stupid for not seeing it sooner. By then they had developed a rapport that had become an integral part of getting Jamie through a typical workday. He looked forward to their morning dish sessions, the occasional lunches, and just the sight of her face at his office door. The last thing he wanted to do was ruin what they had for one night of fun. He fantasized that the experience was worth the risk, and sometimes that it was not. The latter would always end in some apocalyptic catastrophe.

Jamie felt that they had developed an understanding. “I know that you know that I know that you like me.” And that’s where they were happy to let it linger for the time being.

“Jeeeez! He really got you good,” Keri said of the bite-mark. Her voice had a very specific nasally quality.

“Tell me about it,” Jamie replied.

A First Aid Kit sat on the next sink over. Inside was a small bottle of peroxide, a tube of Neosporin, some aspirin, medicated wetnaps, a roll of gauze, and a number of Band Aid packets of various sizes.

The teeth impressions were almost clearer now atop the tender, brown pedestal of inflamed skin. Keri ripped open a Wet Nap and pressed it over the wound to soothe the angry swelling. Jamie hissed again.

“Poor baby,” Keri joked.

Jamie started to respond, “You let me bite your—”

Ryan Gendler burst through the Men’s Room door like he was chasing someone. He stopped cold when he saw Keri standing by the sink and pinched off the preliminary squirt of urine that jumped out excited. Hopping from one foot to the other, his eyes screamed, “What the fuck?”

Keri sighed. “Relax,” she said. “I’ll be outta here in a second.” She turned back to Jamie, whose arm she was still holding and said, “You said it was totally unprovoked?”

“Yeah! Completely,” Jamie replied. “That’s what’s so fucked up about it.”

Keri lifted the arm up to her face and squinted at the wound.

“It looks pretty nasty, Jamie. Maybe you should think about getting a shot or something?”

“Fuck it,” Gendler said, and jogged toward the last stall.

Keri shrugged “Ooops . . . ” and then smiled with Jamie at how quickly Gendler closed the door behind him, locked it, unzipped his pants, and let loose like a water cannon.

“Ho-leeee shit!” they heard him moan over the continuous stream. “Whew!”

Gendler was a fun guy to have around the office on a boring afternoon. He was often annoying for the very same reason.

“I’ll be all right,” Jamie whispered to Keri. “Just put a Band Aid on it.”

Jamie stole glances at Keri while she prepared the inflamed area with Neosporin, rubbing gently to minimize his discomfort, before placing an extra-wide Band Aid on top. In the background, Gendler’s robust urine-stream continued to smack against the toilet water.

“There,” Keri said when she was done.

Jamie flashed an unguarded smile and replied, “Thanks, Keri.”

“Anytime. I’d still have a doctor look at it, though. You never know these days.”

Gendler’s urine-stream was finally sputtering out. He forced out the surplus with a series of false starts and finished with a satiated grunt.

“Hold it in a little longer next time, why don’t cha,” Jamie commented under his breath to Keri, who smiled and shook her head, playfully disgusted.

Jamie checked the dressing in the mirror as Keri discarded the Band Aid wrapper, closed the First Aid Kit, and picked it up.

“Kids these days, hunh?” Gendler’s voice came at them out of the blue.

“Fuck off!” Jamie snapped back.

Keri tugged reproachfully on Jamie’s good arm.

“Fuckin’ Ronnie, man . . . I knew he’d tell everybody,” Jamie quietly whined.

“Just ignore him,” Keri said as she nudged him forward with her shoulder and followed him out the Men’s Room door.

“Sorry, dude, but I couldn’t help myself,” Gendler quipped unaware that Jamie and Keri had left the room. He walked out of the stall fiddling with his belt buckle and looked up expecting to see them standing at the sink. “So, what exactly happened anywhaa . . . ”

THREE

The main office area was packed tight with cubicles. Upper management lived in larger offices built into the surrounding walls that looked out at the jumble of cubicle-walls, hiding homes away from home. Most people referred to the area as “the ghetto.”

An open-area in front of the main office housed the lobby. A dowdy receptionist worked the phones in a circular kiosk placed dead center. The kiosk’s chunky walls were designed at a slant, so that one side was higher than the other. An uncomfortable-looking couch greeted visitors on the right side of the room. An array of large artificial plants decorated the left side. Handsome, underlit lettering spelled out ECHELON MEDIA.

Echelon Media was the parent company of Sweetsweat.com, a pay-per-view website featuring explicit adult content, and Frigginawesomeclips.com, a viral video website. They were the two companies that fell under Jamie’s managerial purview. They shared an office space on the third floor. Echelon inhabited the first five floors of the Lurmeyer Tower.

Custom-designed placards hung on the walls of all the Echelon-owned offices. The placards contained an abstract symbol hovering next to whichever floor or room it designated. The employees had fun trying to guess what the artist was trying to convey with the strange symbol. Management had replaced the original flat-gray placards that hung everywhere else in the Lurmeyer Tower because the newer, stylish placards better suit the company’s personality.

The place resembled any other office, at first glance. Cubicles sectioned off by department; sales, advertising, graphic design, accounting, editorial. Short walls decorated with kitschy reminders of the occupants’ lives outside of work. Slouching bodies clothed in business-casual costumes, languishing through yet another day or socializing on the sly instead of working.

But then, as the sounds begin to register . . .

Uncomplicated keyboard riffs over the genderless symphony of moaning and screaming that translated both pleasure and pain in one sonorous sucker punch; the smack of skin on skin; the moist crackle and pop of natural lubricants, bedsprings squealing, furniture thumping against hollow walls.

From there the whole environment became surreal. The lurid details begin to reveal themselves. Stacks of adult DVDs sitting on desktops. Adult film starlets simulating sex-acts on posters. Hardcore screenshots with pixilated genitalia on posters promoting less ambitious productions. Catalogs and flyers lying around. Autographed photos of naked women hanging from cubicle walls like trophies.

Jamie and Keri walked through the ghetto. They were the only members of upper management who routinely took the shortcut to their offices. Marc Pierce occasionally came through to tell someone what they were doing wrong, but otherwise walked around the cubicle maze.

“You shoulda seen the way those people were looking at me, Keri,” Jamie said. “You’da thought I molested the kid or something.”

“People go a little nuts when you mess with the kiddies,” Keri replied. “What I wanna know is why the kid would do something like that.”

“I know. Right? And then to turn around and act all innocent and scared—hiding behind his mother’s leg, and everything. Little man had some skillz.”

Marc Pierce walked toward them hiding his shit-eating grin behind twisted lips. Jamie knew what that meant—that Marc had heard about the incident—and started shaking his head even before Pierce was close enough to make a smart-assed comment. As he approached, Pierce was fishing to make eye contact with Jamie, who purposely dodged his advances. Jamie wished he could block out the sound of Pierce’s voice, which he knew would make him cringe, and inspire him to say something in response that could put his job in jeopardy.

Marc Pierce was a nice-enough guy who enjoyed his authority a little too much. Cool one day and an asshole the next, he gave the impression of a man seeking retribution for all the beatdowns he suffered at the hands of schoolyard bullies. Yet he mostly targeted people whom he found unthreatening. That made him a pussy in Jamie’s book.

“Afternoon, Ms. Pak,” Pierce said.

“Marc.” Keri responded with semi-playful contempt.

“Mr. Cole. I heard about your little incident during lunch,” Pierce said, eyes fixed on Jamie. He stopped walking, expecting a conversation. “Everything’s all right, I hope.”

Jamie and Keri kept on walking.

“I’ll live,” Jamie replied without looking back.

Jamie and Keri stopped at an intersection in the cubicle maze.

“Well . . . back to work, I guess,” he said and held up his arm. “Thanks again.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Keri watched Jamie walk down the cubicle-lined corridor on the right, and then she started walking straight. She walked about ten feet when an effeminate male coworker named Jeffery “Parks” Parkson popped his head out of a cubicle that she had just walked past.

“What’s up, gurl?” Parks said.

Keri turned and smiled, “How’s it goin’, Parks?”

“Working hard for tha money. You know how I do?”

As Keri kept walking she eventually heard Ronnie Hayes’ voice coming from a cubicle up ahead. She softened her footsteps on her approach, and then stood defiant in the doorway.

Inside, Ronnie was standing over an anonymous coworker’s desk. He was in the middle of relaying Jamie’s incident to the coworker, who looked shocked by what he was hearing.

Ronnie stopped talking when he saw Keri. She made a face at his pallid, unkempt appearance, and then said, “You are such an asshole, Ronnie.”

“Ouch!” The anonymous coworker instigated.

Ronnie responded by playfully recoiling in pain, but Keri had already walked away.

“What’s with all the hostility?” he called out loud enough for Keri to hear him. “I’m not the one who went apeshit on some kid.”

Jamie leaned back in his chair reading silently from the sheet of paper pinched between his fingers. On the other side of his desk, Lisa Pritz, who was one of his best editors, sat anticipating his response. She couldn’t help but stare at the chunky Band Aid on Jamie’s forearm as she waited for him to finish reading. She had heard about the incident, and was waiting to get the details from Jamie. But she wasn’t going to bring it up unless he did first.

Lisa was a heavy-set woman in her mid-40s who could be quite attractive when she wanted. Most of the time, she wore little-to-no make-up, kept her thin, dirty-blond ponytail shackled in a arsenal of scrunchies and dressed in masculine clothing that made her look like a big ole butch lesbian even though she was straight. She came across as mean to people who didn’t know her, but underneath it all, was hard not to like.

An unexpected chuckle jumped out of Jamie’s mouth.

“I thought you might get a kick outta that,” Lisa smiled at his reaction.

Jamie put on an actorly expression, held the paper up to his face and prepared to read aloud from it.

“Remember that one friend whose mom you always wanted a piece of?” He read, and then nodded in approval. He let the paper sink just beneath his eyes. Slyly squinting, he stepped out of the actorly façade to address Lisa. “Okay. Good start. Right? But wait . . . ” And then Jamie tightened his expression and continued reading. “Remember the way her feminine curves guided your hand as you visualized her naked frame during your masturbatory interludes of youth? Man, was she a thing of beauty! Though idealized to an unrealistic degree, she was yours to place in all kind of lascivious imaginary scenarios.”

Jamie was laughing out loud by the time he finished reading.

“Shhhhh,” Lisa hissed, fighting back a pretty smile, and pointed to Jamie’s office door, which hung wide open.

The author of the overwrought synopsis sat a good few cubicles away. It was unlikely that he would hear them over all the moaning and grunting and moist-smacking sounds, but Jamie lowered his voice anyway.

“God-dayyum!” Jamie said. “And I thought I used to try too hard. This is some classic shit right here.”

“This is like . . . the second damn time with-at guy,” Lisa replied frustrated. “I tried to be nice about it. You know? Give ‘em hints-n-all . . . ”

Jamie flashed a smile.

“Sometimes you’ve gotta be the Boss-lady, Lisa.” He put on an authoritarian voice. “‘We do things this way here, and that’s it.’ But be nice about it. This dude’s obviously got some talent. What’s his name again?”

“Brent.”

“That’s right. Brent. Sounds like a fart. Right?”

Lisa didn’t laugh. She wasn’t offended or anything. She just didn’t see the humor in fart jokes.

“If you say so,” she replied.

“Anyway, it’s the Best Friend’s Milf series he’s writing about,” Jamie said. “Not exactly high art.”

Jamie leaned forward and fetched a DVD box from his desktop and looked it over.

“Best Friend’s Big-Butt Milf at that,” he corrected himself with a chuckle. “Part 8.”

He handed the box to Lisa, who reached across the crowded desk and took it from him.

“Just tell him to keep it simple,” Jamie added. “Something like; ‘Remember that kid whose mom you always wanted to fuck? Well, watch these plump, cock hungry Milfs get down and dirty with the boy next door.’ Blah, blah, blah. You get the idea.”

Jamie saw a blur that looked a lot like Keri Pak lean into and then out of his doorway.

“What’s up Keri?” he called out.

Keri stepped back into view like she had been waiting by the door for Jamie to acknowledge her. She held two DVDs in her left hand. She smiled at Lisa and said with an affectionate drawl, “Hey Leese.”

“Hey Keri,” Lisa responded with equal affection.

“It can wait,” Keri turned to Jamie and said. “I didn’t know you were busy.”

“Nah,” Jamie flagged his hand at her concern, and then checked with Lisa. “We’re finished here. Right?”

“I think so,” Lisa said and then started gathering papers from Jamie’s desk into a loose stack. She stood up . . .

“Unless there’s something else you wanted to ask me,” Jamie added.

Lisa started to walk out of his office. “Nope.”

Keri slid by her.

Lisa stopped at the door and turned around looking as if she’d just remembered something.

“Oh, yeah!” she said. “The new hire . . . David . . . Am I initiating him, or were you planning on doin’ it?”

“That’s all you, Lisa,” Jamie smiled. “Boss Lady.”

Lisa returned a blank expression, and then walked out.

Jamie glanced at his watch as Keri sat down in the chair in front of his desk. It was 4:35pm.

“I didn’t realize it was so late,” Jamie said. He looked up and yelled at the doorway. “Just save the initiation for tomorrow, Lisa.”

He waited for her to answer and thought maybe he heard her curse at him. But it could’ve just as easily have been from one of the films playing in the background.

Jamie leaned forward.

“I think she’s mad at me,” he said quietly to Keri.

“Lisa’s a big girl. She’ll get over it,” Keri replied.

“So, what’s up?”

Keri held up the DVDs in her hand.

“Don’t hate me for this,” she purred sheepishly, “but Pierce asked me to give these to you for a back cover synopsis.”

She placed the DVDs on Jamie’s desk.

Jamie paused, disappointed. “Are you kidding me?”

“Sor-reee!” Keri mouthed.

Jamie picked up the DVDs and looked them over one-by-one.

DVD #1

Title: Got MILF!

Front cover: Three haggard-looking women at the tail end of their thirties standing nearly naked in seductive poses. Each woman is assigned scant accessories that depict MILF stereotypes: the female boss, the schoolteacher, and the soccer mom. In the background a group of fit, manufactured-looking men dressed as teenagers look pleasantly surprised to see the women.

DVD #2

Title: Thugz Munchin’ Rugz 13: Makin’ House Calls

Front Cover: A bald, chocolate-colored face buried below the eyes in the naked crotch of an anonymous actress. He is looking up at us with bugged-out eyes. A black van superimposed into the background. Rug-Munchers Inc. is spray-painted on the side.

Jamie flung the DVDs onto his desk and sighed angrily.

“Tell ‘em I’m busy, man,” he said. “Tell ‘em I’ll have one of the copy-writers do it.”

“Ooo-kay. But he did say that the company specifically requested one of your ‘unique descriptions.’”

Jamie cringed at the finger quotes that Keri just made in the air.

“What? Cause I don’t recycle the same three sentences for every fucking synopsis?” He said snatched up one of the DVDs and flipped it on its back to look for the credits info. “Who is it? Jizz Junkies?” He spotted the familiar logo . . . “Yup.”

He flung the DVD back to his desktop and sat there silently stewing.

Keri felt bad for delivering the assignment, but had to wonder if Jamie’s reaction had more to do with the incident over lunch.

“Man, I am so done with this bullshit,” he glowered.

“You shoulda just taken the rest of the day off after lunch.”

“Why?”

“It seems like this thing with the kid has you all stressed out. I mean . . . I probably would be, too.”

“Yeah. But, it’s not just that. I’ve just been feelin’ kinda—I dunno—kinda burnt out on this place, I guess. Like I’m somehow contributing to the decline of society or something. At the same time, it’s like . . . I can appreciate the fact that I’m at least doing something closely related to my field of interest.” His eyes met Keri’s. “Screenwriting, I mean,” he added, worried that Keri might think he was naming porn as his field of interest.

Jamie was in it strictly for the opportunity it afforded him. Adult entertainment was his foothold into the legitimate side of the entertainment industry. As such he had no interest in schmoozing with porn stars and starlets at conventions, or when one of them came to Echelon to meet with management about some project. He barely even knew most of their names.

Keri smiled affectionately. She found Jamie’s vulnerability cute.

“I know what you meant. Goofball,” she said. “You’ve gotta look at it like this. It’s just a job, and a well-paying job at that . . . annnnnd it allows you to work in a field related to your interests. You know how hard it is to find a decent-paying job, let alone one doing something that you’re into?”

“Maybe I should’ve gone home,” Jamie complained after a moment’s thought.

“I would’ve if I were in your shoes. First I would’ve gone to the doctor to get that bite checked out, though.”

Jamie glanced down at the Band Aid on his forearm.

“I’ll be fine. I guess I’m just sick of always having to defend what I do.”

“Who cares what people think?”

“So, when you’re meeting somebody for the first time, you tell them where you work?”

“No.”

“Of course not, right?”

“It’s none of their business.”

“So that’s what you tell them?”

“No,” Keri chuckled. “Dummy. I’m saying that I don’t just walk up to people like, ‘Hi, I’m Keri Pak. I’m 25, Korean-American, and I’m the Director of Marketing for Echelon Media. Echelon’s a porn company, in case you didn’t know.’”

Jamie shot a glare at Keri. A smile hid behind it.

“What if they ask? Then what?”

“Then I tell them that I work in Marketing.”

“Okay. I’ll be someone you’re meeting for the first time,” Jamie said, and then put on an artificial persona. “’Marketing, hunh? I have a friend who works in Marketing at . . . J.P. Moneybags. Where do you work?’”

A snicker leapt out of Keri’s mouth. “J.P. Moneybags,’” she repeated, laughing. Afterward, she straightened up and said, “’I work at a video production company downtown.’ If they go any further, then I just change the subject.”

“So you’re not completely honest with them.”

“I’m not being dishonest. What’s the point, anyway? Unless it’s somebody I’m planning on getting to know better.”

“Well . . . at least you have that option. It’s different when people in the street recognize you as the smut-peddler from the news who exploits under-aged girls.”

Keri paused in reverence, thinking, You got that one.

“All I can say is, you’ll get through it,” she said. “As corny as that sounds.”

“I hope you’re right, man. As much as I bitch-and-moan, I can’t afford to lose this job. Guess, we’ll know for sure after my meeting with Bettencourt tomorrow.”

Zane Bettencourt was the head honcho of Echelon Media. Jamie had been stressing about the meeting for a week and a half. As a writer, he liked to work through his problems through detailed visualization during which he embellished everyday situations to suit his artistic desires. The meeting with Bettencourt had been repeatedly subjected to this process.

“Where does Pierce stand on all this? I mean, everybody’s so hush, hush about it. You’d think it was some kind of government conspiracy going on here.”

Jamie laughed.

“I’m serious,” she added. “And then with you being so distant lately.”

It was an odd comment to make. It sounded intimate, like something said between lovers. He used surprise to milk the moment.

“Distant? Really? I didn’t think you cared.”

“Of course I care.”

Now that definitely sounded platonic, Jamie thought.

“I knew it must’ve been eating you up inside, but you made it seem like you didn’t wanna talk about it.”

“You’re right. I didn’t,” Jamie said. “But now I do.”

They smiled at each other.

“Now what were you asking me?” Jamie inquired.

“I was asking about Pierce . . . ”

“Oh yeah! He just gave me some bullshit about supervisory responsibility. Like it was my fault Ronnie posted the damn clip.”

Keri made a face at the thought of being talked down to by Marc Pierce.

“Well. I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” she said with confidence. “If they were gonna fire you over all this, then I would think they’d have done it by now.”

“Ronnie’s saying I OK’d the clip, though. So it basically comes down to my word against his. And you know how far up Pierce’s ass Ronnie is.”

“Yeah, but everybody knows that Ronnie would sell out his own mother to get ahead. And there are plenty people—myself included—who would have your back on it. If it ever came to that.”

“Thanks.”

“Anytime. Now cheer up.”

A voice came from the main office area. It was Marc Pierce beginning his customary end-of-the-day missive.

“Can I have everyone’s attention,” Pierce said.

Jamie rolled his eyes. Smirking, Keri checked her watch.

“Guess it’s about that time,” she said and got up from the chair. “Go home and get some rest. You know my number if you need to talk or anything.”

“I will,” Jamie smiled warmly.

Jamie focused eagle eyes on the round of Keri’s hips and ass as she walked away from him. He could have sworn that she put an extra sway in her step just for his benefit.

“Wish me luck, tomorrow,” he said just as she reached the door.

“I don’t believe in luck. You’ll be fine. See ya tomorrow,” Keri replied without looking and disappeared out into the main office area.

FOUR

Jamie shut his computer down for the day and started to straighten his desk like he did every day before leaving work. In the background, he could hear Marc Pierce address the entire office.

“I shouldn’t have to remind you all of this,” Pierce began, “but there is to be absolutely no interaction with the protestors or the press outside of this building. Until the situation is dealt with, I ask again that you refrain from using the lobby doors to enter and exit the building and instead use the subway concourse entrance located to the left of the elevator banks in the lobby. From there you’ll have access to the Market/Frankfurt El, the Broad Street Subway, and various trolleys.”

Jamie retrieved his canvas shoulder bag from the floor beside his desk and loaded it for the trip home. Based on the sound of his voice, Jamie suspected that Pierce was walking toward his office. He hustled through the rest of his routine.

“Those of you who walk or bike or take a bus to-and-from work can access any of the various street exits in the concourse,” Pierce said. “I know that it’s a bit of an inconvenience, folks, but management has assured me that the situation will be resolved relatively soon.”

“Yeah. Right,” Jamie commented under his breath as he slung the bag over his shoulder and headed for the door.

Just then Marc Pierce stepped into the doorway. Jamie stopped abruptly and settled into an annoyed posture. Pierce had a look on his face that Jamie interpreted as “Please smack me with an opened hand!”

“That goes double for you, Mr. Cole,” Pierce said in a tone that seemed to suggest Jamie’s lack of intelligence.

Jamie glared at Pierce, and then, without saying a word, he walked right past him and out into the main office area.

People were going through similar end-of-the-day routines out in the ghetto. An enthusiastic herd of individuals made their way through the lobby and out the front doors. A noisy crowd was forming out by the elevator banks.

Jamie pretended that Pierce’s voice was an annoying fly that he couldn’t quite pinpoint as he walked toward the lobby with his eyes locked on the front door as if salvation lay behind it.

He could almost feel Pierce on his tail, shooting death rays at his back. Although outward appearances would seem to suggest otherwise, Pierce was Jamie’s direct superior. And Goddamn it, he was going to make Jamie understand that if it killed him.

“You know, I’ve had just about enough of your disrespectful attitude toward me, Mr. Cole,” Pierce said.

As he walked, Jamie reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of headphones. The cord dangled long from his hands. The other end snaked back into an outer pocket of his bag.

“You may not like me,” Pierce continued, “but you’d better remember that I am still your boss and I—”

Jamie placed the headphones over his ears and pushed “Play” on the iPod nestled inside the pocket. “Code of the Streets” by Gangstarr poured into his ears.

He noticed Pierce give up the chase, the other man staring in disbelief as Jamie walked through the lobby and traded parting gestures with a random clique of coworkers.

Jamie spent the train ride nudged firmly between two ample bodies. But that was negligible in the grand scheme and especially with the music in his head that kept him nodding the whole way. The player shuffled through a roster that included songs from Cannibal Ox, Clouded, and a number of Goblin perennials to appease his soundtrack fix. It was currently on the theme from “Demons,” which was technically scored by keyboardist, Claudio Simonetti since Goblin had disbanded six years earlier. The signature sound was so undeniable that Jamie had cataloged it under “Goblin Favorites” anyway.

The music put Jamie in a darker mood as the train shook the ample bodies on either side of him. The constant shifting squeezed Jamie and had him feeling like he might pop out from between them like a blackhead.

Light flashed through the rectangular windows and illuminated the colorful graffiti speeding by in a blur. Jamie stared trying to catch familiar strokes from the graffiti. It was a little game he played to keep his eyes still during rush hour when the train was crowded with wandering gazes. As many times as he had traveled this route, he managed to find strokes that he hadn’t noticed before. That wasn’t the case this time, when he spied the ostentatious letter G from the tag that read, “I’m the Godzilla of this ma-fuckin’ city!” Although he had seen it a million times, it struck him as significant today and immediately got him thinking about that weird ass noise that he had heard during his lunch-break.

He remembered two parts to the noise: a haunted underwater alarm sound layered by what could only be described as ethereal chirping.

Thinking hard, Jamie searched his brain for anything that the unnatural noise reminded him of. Although it wasn’t entirely similar, the ethereal chirping resembled King Ghidorah’s, three-headed, ringing roar from the old Toho Godzilla flicks.

Then a song came to him—“Ain’t No Half-Steppin’” by Big Daddy Kane. It gave Jamie chills when he let it play in his head. The eerie horns, or whatever they were echoing way in the background of the song, sounded very similar to the haunted, underwater alarm.

As he played the sounds over and over in his head, the colorful underground world continued to fly across his eyes.

***

“That’ll be $17.99, sir,” said the teenager with the shiny face standing behind the register.

Little bastard had the nerve to be laughing—or trying not to laugh—at Horace’s appearance. It wasn’t that he looked particularly funny. Horace Figg was a regular customer of the Havana Deli. He traded small talk with the shiny-faced clerk at least three times a week, so the kid was privy to what he really looked like underneath the disguise.

“Seventeen, ninety-nine?” Horace complained as he checked the prices on the items spread out on the counter. A single roll of toilet paper. A half-pint of milk. A Stouffers TV dinner (Salisbury Steak), a Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpet. And a 12oz bottle of hand-lotion. “Six-freakin’-ninety nine for a bottle of hand lotion?”

Shiny face shrugged and said, “How will you be paying for that tonight, sir?”

Grumbling under his breath, Horace pulled his wallet from his back pocket and dug out his debit card. He just wanted to get home so that he could masturbate in the shower. All that porn with no outlet had him backed up something awful.

He had made it through another day—the third so far of his undercover assignment. Don Keating, his boss at the Between The Lines Times Newspaper, suggested that he go undercover, in disguise, to find out what exactly was going on at Echelon Media—on Horace’s own dime, of course. Don talked it up as the perfect follow-up to the article Horace had just written about the mysterious video clip that Echelon Media yanked hours after running it on their website. The article was set to run in this week’s edition of the Times.

Horace resisted initially. He was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to pull it off at his age. He’d gone undercover a few times in the past, back when he was young and hungry. But he had convinced himself that those days of freewheeling vigor were winding down.

Horace shoved the front door open with his shoulder and walked in holding the bag in one hand and a package of half-eaten Krimpets in the other. He put the bags down on the couch, scooped up his mini-recorder from the coffee table and pressed “record” without turning on the lights.

“Day three,” he began, speaking directly into the tiny rectangular device as he walked around the unlit living room. “Feeling like I’m finally settling into character at Echelon. No more butterflies or stress headaches, which at my age, is definitely a good thing.”

Horace was at the point in his life where he was constantly reflecting on his successes and failures, weighing his regrets, analyzing his place in the world, and considering his mortality. He already accepted that he’d never win the “most respected journalist in the world,” award; that there would be no moment in history to which his name was forever linked; no schmoozing with the presidents, and foreign dignitaries, and the Hollywood elite. At 52-years-old, Horace Figg was finished climbing. And so be it.

“Had my first face-to-face with Jamie Cole after avoiding the kid for the past two days. It was just a brief meeting of eyes as we passed each other in the hall, but he didn’t seem to recognize me.”

Just two weeks ago, Jamie had thrown Horace (sans disguise) out of Echelon offices when he came to inquire about an interview to discuss the video clip and the allegations of under-aged workers. As a result, Horace worried that Jamie would see through his disguise and recognize him.

With his article debuting tomorrow, Horace was both curious and nervous as to what Jamie’s reaction to it might be. He had named Jamie directly in the article, even quoted him without his knowledge. People generally felt violated by that kind of thing. Plus Jamie was already in the doghouse with management over the clip. Everyone in the office was whispering about Jamie’s meeting with Mr. Bettencourt, whom so far, Horace had only seen in photos.

He figured Bettencourt for one of those ‘too-cool-for-school’ types. He was always decked out in expensive clothing made to look vintage and hiding behind sunglasses with pitch-black lenses. He had a swagger that charmed all the young people, but Horace wasn’t impressed. He had seen the same swagger on bigger and badder guys than this schmo was trying to be.

“If there’s a downside, so far, it’s the looks I get from these young broads. Can’t say I blame them with this freakin’ get-up,” Horace chuckled as he paused in front of the cheap, full length mirror mounted on the closet door and glared at his reflection hiding in shadows like it was embarrassed to be seen. “Christ. I look like those middle-age assholes who sit at the corner of the bar ogling young coeds.”

The original disguise was even worse. Not only did he resemble a middle-aged creeper, but one who was trying too hard to be hip. The look came compliments of the trendy, overpriced beauty salon just off of Rittenhouse Square on 18th Street. The team of stylists kept calling him a rock star. Horace thought he looked like a gay Kris Kristofferson that had raided Don Johnson’s old wardrobe from Miami Vice. His boss, Don Keating reminded him of the purpose of the disguise and added that team ‘Queer Eye for the Straight, Middle-Aged Journalist’ had accomplished just that.

Horace made a few edits before debuting his new identity at Echelon. He replaced the Sonny Crockett attire with solid-colored sweaters, khakis, and jeans, and added a pair of old, semi-round glasses that had brought him luck when he used them years ago on a previous undercover assignment. He kept the Kristofferson beard, but reigned in the hair a bit. He chose the name David Newman. He thought it sounded unassuming enough.

“You can forget about snagging any ancillary tail looking like that,” Horace quipped to his reflection. “Like that Keri Pak . . . Man Alive! If Jamie Cole isn’t screwing that piece-of-ass, then he’s gotta be gay.”

More likely, Jamie was one-a-those ambitious youngsters who’re so into their work that they’re blind to the world around them. Keri was certainly giving off “fuck me” vibes in Jamie’s presence. Horace could see it without even trying. He imaged Keri looking at him that way. Man, what he wouldn’t do with that?

Horace caught himself going off-topic and thumbed the “stop” button on the mini recorder. He rewound the tape past his tangential rant and pressed “record” again. That’s right ‘tape.’ Horace was old school all the way.

“Nothing else of significance to report,” he said and then he thumbed “stop,” and placed the recorder on the countertop that divided the kitchen and the living room where he could easily find it should anything of significance come to him in the next few hours.

A deep yawn sneaked out and Horace stretched his arms and twisted his torso to work out the days’ tension. He fingered a few buttons on the Bose Wave Radio backed up against the counter wall. Classical music poured from the speakers.

He walked into the kitchen and knocked back the last third of a 2-liter of Ginger Ale and then headed for the bathroom to shower away the sticky porn residue and jack off to the flood of lurid images that he’d compiled from a day’s work.

It took some adjusting before Horace got the temperature right. Afterward he stood there motionless under the near scalding water until his skin acclimated to the heat’s stinging kiss. He stroked his penis, but was unable to maintain an erection as the compilation of hardcore sex scenes that flooded his mind was repeatedly cock-blocked by jarring images of man-on-man action, giant black penises, and pretty girls with prolapsed anuses. He angrily tossed his penis to a flaccid dangle, took a step backward so that he was directly underneath the stream, closed his eyes, and let the hot water assuage his disappointment.

Coated by a layer of liquid warmth, Horace felt disembodied. In that moment there were no age-appropriate aches and pains, no stiff joints, and no obsessing over the hereditary defect that stopped his mother’s heart from beating when she was only 56.

The occasional chest-pains had been with Horace since his twenties when he was old enough to understand the impact of the condition should he let it go unchecked. He promised himself that he’d go see a doctor the next time it happened. Then it was the next time… And the next. He kept coming up with excuses, mostly out of fear of hearing the doctor tell him that he would have to go under the knife to correct the problem. Horace was petrified of being put under anesthesia.

And now, with this new assignment, Horace was on the verge of resolving an old issue. One that had greatly affected the trajectory of his career. The last thing he needed was a doctor giving him bad news

The shower put Horace in a sleepy state of mind. He slipped into bed afterward and lay there trying to ignore his inner dialogue . . . and his weak bladder.

It wasn’t that Horace looked down on his current designation. His feet were firmly planted on the rung of a tabloid journalist, which, despite popular opinion, was not an oxy-moron in Horace’s eyes. He’d much rather rub elbows with the Center City Vampire, or the sewer fairies, or the crudely painted ghosts that haunt the mural district than listen to the self-indulgent nonsense that generally fell out of the mouths of celebrities and politicians. The proof was always underwhelming, but the years had taught Horace that nine-times-out-of-ten, the real story was in the flesh-and-blood characters, the witnesses, and the would-be victims. They often came with quirks and/or questionable pasts that served to raise suspicions about their motives or even their states of mind.

But then that damn video clip came along. The feeling it roused was as potent today as the night he watched the thing.

When it became clear that sleep would not be had, Horace got up, pee’d, fetched himself a cup of raspberry tea and surfed the Internet. His computer was an older model desktop monster of a thing that took up far too much space and was way too slow.

It happened on a Tuesday. Horace was sitting on his front stoop enjoying the night when Don Keating called, full of enthusiasm.

“You’ve gotta see this video,” Don rattled off before Horace had finished saying hello.

Horace had heard something on the News earlier that evening about two smut peddlers from the porn tower downtown arguing in public over a video clip.

“What is it? Some kind of snuff thing?” he replied, disinterested.

“Nah,” Don said, as if he had just been let in on some delicious secret that Horace needed to hear. “Just watch the damn thing. Trust me.”

Horace had spent many a night trading “war” stories over drinks with Don, so they were well informed of each other’s past transgressions.

Standing over the computer ready to be thoroughly unimpressed, Horace waited impatiently for the clip to load. A circular outline floated in the middle of the viewer. Light chasing itself inside, indicated the clip’s status.

A grainy image materialized. A familiar song. The picture quality was like watching through a layer of Vaseline, the sound filtered through quicksand.

Horace squinted at a strange, upright shape that writhed and undulated to the music. It was a girl. It was hard to tell through the distortion, but she looked a lot like someone from Horace’s past. His legs became weak. He had to sit down to keep from falling.

The girl’s identity—if she was who Horace suspected—had implications that reached back two decades to the story that sent him running away from reality to the safety of the supernatural.

The journalist in him longed to see the clip again, to study it from every angle. But he couldn’t find it anywhere after it was yanked from the Echelon website. Horace had spent far too much time looking for it online.

At some point he started to type “Echelon dancing girl clip,” into the Google search bar, but stopped himself at the last minute, and shut down his computer.

Feeling the need for some fresh air—as fresh as the city had to offer—Horace went outside and sat on his front stoop.

It was a nice night. Horace waved to a few of his neighbors and drank raspberry tea. He could see the Center City skyline from his stoop. The tight jumble of thousand-eyed structures were entrancing at night if you stared too long. So that’s what Horace did.

FIVE

Twenty Four years ago, Horace Figg worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He was reporting on the drug problem in North Philly when he stumbled onto a story that he hoped would be a positive change-of-pace from the depressing tales generally told about this part of the city. Somewhere along the way an all-out war broke out between the Senghors, a family of African immigrants, and King Dollar, a local drug kingpin.

For years Horace wouldn’t even allow himself to think of the Senghor girl’s name. He always hoped that time would sedate the intense guilt that her memory raised, but here he was 24 years later feeling just as responsible for her death as the day her body parts started showing up in shoe boxes at Father Theodore Dubois’ doorstep. There were eight boxes in all, spread out over six months. The girl was only thirteen when she died.

There was no question that King Dollar and his Voodoo Thugs were behind it. Everyone in the area he claimed as his turf knew that they had kidnapped the girl, hooked her on the stuff, and turned her out for tricks.

Horace was certain that someone would go to the police. He envisioned them raining down on droplines, S.W.A.T.-style to take down King Dollar’s organization. Then he could write his expose without coming off like a stool pigeon, which he feared might get him killed.

King Dollar was a stone killer who co-opted Voodoo and Santeria to season his reign with a supernatural flavor. He had a costume that he wore in public—a black blazer with no shirt underneath. A skull painted over his face with white and black grease paint. A top hat and a necklace made of shells. He walked with a cane that was just for show. It was a sleek, black thing with a gold Raven’s head handle. He made his small army of heavily armed thugs walk around with white and black skulls painted over their faces as well.

King Dollar was known for his volatile swagger and his grandiose phraseology. A collection of his greatest hits remained on constant rotation, rolling from the tongues of all the young-bucks in the community who tried to emulate his style.

“I am the numeral uno supernatural dandata of this city! Fuck with ME and I’ll steal your MUTHAFUCKIN’ soul!” he would yell into the night sky from atop Building #2 of the Raymond Rosen Projects. That was where his operation was headquartered. He and his boys had taken over the entire building.

People whispered his name as if he was more than a man. They subscribed wholeheartedly to the mythology. He was directly linked to Satan. He could see and hear everything. He kept the souls of his enemies in an assortment of jars.

Once, during a town hall meeting, Horace pointed out that King Dollar had stolen the jar reference from a movie and was yanked from the microphone and manhandled for trying to bring a curse down on the community.

“See. That’s the problem with you white folks,” an old lady said to him, “Always thinking you know something about that which you don’t understand.”

She was quite wrong. But deep down Horace understood her anger. This lady was older than old-school and probably held onto memories of the type of good old American racism that Horace had only read about. Horace grew up in the 60s, and had seen his fair share. Even still, he wanted to smack the old lady for being stupid.

Horace felt that it was obvious to anyone with half-a-brain that King Dollar didn’t know a damn thing about Voodoo or Santeria, and he most likely didn’t even believe in either of them. He found the whole persona laughable and even felt embarrassed for all the suckers who bought what he considered, at best, a B-movie villain level performance.

But then one night Horace woke up to find the grease-painted skull hovering over him as he slept. Reddened eyes plump with hate floated inside the skull’s blackened ocular cavities and glared down at him. A hand clamped over his nose and mouth just as he started to scream. It came from the side, from an angle that suggested someone else was with King Dollar in the darkness.

“I see you snoopin’ around, white boy! Askin’ quessss-sstionzzzz!” The painted skull hissed through gnashed teeth bordered in gums glowing a radiant pink against the moist, white, grease-painted background. “Gettin’ involved in shit that don’t concern you. What? You think you gonna save these people? Well, I’m-onna let you in on a lil’ secret . . . There is no safety. Not from me. You dig? I’m everywhere, muthafucka! Like the mutha-fuckin’ wind!”

The skull’s hot breath was laced with marijuana-flavored spittle. It set Horace’s eyes a flutter. He tried to turn away, but the beefy hand held him still. It was pressed down hard, making it difficult for him to breathe. The thick skin had a coarse texture and a chemical smell that reminded Horace of the manly soap they used at the Auto Body Shop he worked in during the summer between high school and college. The harsh perfume made him dizzy. After inhaling it for a few minutes he was feeling like maybe this whole thing was a nightmare—an extremely vivid, extremely fucked up nightmare. So, he laid back and let it unfold.

“Consider this a warning,” the painted skull said as Horace floated away from it. “I’mma be watchin’ you from now on, reporter-man. Makin’ sure you don’t get no stupid ideas, like writing about what’s been goin’ on round here in your little newzzz-paper. Now, if I gotta come back . . . Well then, you liable ta wake up in a jar like this one here.”

A disembodied arm reached out of the darkness holding an old Mayonnaise jar with a piece of cloth fixed over the top with a rubber band; some kind of mist swirling inside the jar. Horace understood that the mist was to represent the trapped soul of one of the King’s enemies, but he assumed that it was nothing more than marijuana smoke. The arm that held the jar was swollen with muscle. Plump veins snaking up and down it threatened to burst through thin skin. It looked too firm to belong to the hand that obstructed Horace’s breathing, which meant that there was yet another person in the room.

From that point on, Horace feared what the light might reveal. He became paranoid that one of them was going to turn the lights on and show him.

The next morning Horace woke up with a massive headache and a nauseated feeling brought on by the lingering memory of the manly soap fumes. He was naked, which usually only happened when he drank. But okay. He felt the ghosts of touch about his groin, wrists and his face, and raised his eyebrows in testament to the nightmare. As he hurried to the bathroom to slake his painful morning erection, Horace noticed a pair of sunglasses on the floor next to his bed. They didn’t look like any kind he would wear. But his bladder was on the verge of an explosion, so the glasses never really manifested as a full-fledged thought.

He thought about the nightmare as he emptied his bladder, and was mildly embarrassed that it scared him so badly. He had a laugh that came and went throughout his morning shower, shave, and coffee. The big story on the news that morning was about some hooker found floating, face-down in the Schuylkill River. They showed a photo of the woman taken during a happier time in her life.

Pretty girl, Horace thought. But pretty girls died all the time in Philly, especially ones who, through some series of unfortunate circumstances, turn to prostitution. He’d seen it a million times. Just another night in the city.

On his way out the door Horace found a large, manila envelope lying in the hallway. Inside there were Polaroids of Horace lying buck-naked in bed next to an equally naked girl who looked a lot like the dead hooker from the news. Horace was seated nearly upright in bed with his back against a mound of pillows. A pair of sunglasses on his face—the same sunglasses that he had just seen on the floor in his bedroom—to hide the fact that he was unconscious. Each photo was strategically shot to make it appear that Horace was a conscious and willing participant.

In one photo the girl lay on top of him in 69 position. Horace’s right hand was placed on the back of her head, the other on her buttock.

In another photo, both of Horace’s hands were placed on the girl’s hips. She held them there by the wrists as she pretended to ride him cowgirl-style.

Some of the photos were innocent enough; the girl lying snuggled against Horace like he was her man. She seemed happy to play along and put on all the right faces to help sell the scenario. Like she had no idea what was coming.

Horace felt like he was going to faint. So many lines had been crossed. For a few lost moments he was willing to accept King Dollar’s “Voodoo” persona as legit. But he simply wouldn’t let himself be taken down that road. Even if the reality of it scared him more. Someone—not only someone, but King-fucking-Dollar—had been in his apartment while he slept, had drugged him, and set him up for murder in a manner that was tantamount to rape.

Horace quit his job at the Inquirer the following day and spent the next few years sequestered to a four-block radius around his old apartment on Chestnut Street, which he rarely left. He stuck to freelance work—mostly fluff pieces for the local life-and-style rags—and made it a point to steer clear of the heavy stuff. He took on some freelance editing when money was tight, which was most of the time.

The photos forever loomed, reminding Horace that his life could take a drastic turn at a moment’s notice. He expected them to turn up on the Internet and/or the evening news one of these days. To put it in perspective, he thought about how he, as a journalist—former journalist—would react to similar photos. But that only scared him more.

Horace played it out in his head a million times; the police coming to arrest him for the hooker’s murder. The trial. Prison showers. The chair. Bzzzzt! Trying to fathom the electric surge made his scalp itch.

When he wasn’t obsessing over the photos, Horace was looking over his shoulder everywhere he went and double- and triple-checking all the potential hiding places in his apartment whenever he came home. It didn’t matter if he only stepped out for a minute.

He lived that way for the better part of two years. And then one night back in 1986, Horace was listening to the police scanner when he heard a call go out over the airwaves.

“All units in the vicinity of Belmont Avenue and Montgomery Drive . . . Possible homicide involving late model black Mercedes Benz belonging to drug dealer, King Dollar . . . ”

The police found the King’s car riddled with bullets and engulfed in flames at the bottom of a ravine in Fairmont Park. The front end was folded like an accordion from the headfirst dive into a robust tree trunk. Apparently the driver—King Dollar’s chauffeur—lost control after being fatally shot, and stepped on the gas. There were two bodies inside, burned beyond recognition—the chauffeur and a passenger whose remains fit King Dollar’s general description.

The official announcement was made the next morning.

“King Dollar is dead, killed by an assassin’s bullet.”

The police never tried to find out who may have done it. Most of them would have probably shaken the assassin’s hand and bought him a beer.

That’s just what someone who faked his own death would be counting on to happen, Horace thought at the time.

It just seemed too convenient that King Dollar’s murder occurred within weeks of Father Theodore Dubois’ disappearance from the back of the police van. Horace happened to know that no one outside the King’s inner circle had ever seen his face unpainted. Maybe that was a calculated move just in case he ever wanted to drop off the face of the planet and start a new life somewhere. It was just a thought.

The community celebrated. The police gloated.

Even if he didn’t buy the Voodoo Magic Man act, Horace revered King Dollar as a larger-than-life figure, so it was hard for him to accept that the King might be gone. There were three theories that were being whispered in the streets.

The first was that the Senghors had put a curse on Father Dubois and King Dollar. This played into the community’s misunderstanding of the Senghors’ African religion, which they saw as pagan and ungodly.

Horace was well-versed in a myriad of colorful spirits and devils that populated the Senghors’ belief-system, but he wasn’t one to believe in curses.

The second theory was that some members of the community had banded together to dish out some payback.

And the third held an unknown assassin, possibly from a rival drug dealer/gang, responsible. There were several to choose from—the Southwest Gunnerz, Princess Mangela (The transsexual pimp) and her ‘girls,’ King Rob, Daddy Morebucks, Dem Hos, and Too-Fly.

Horace floated somewhere between the second and third theories, but he still held on to the possibility that the hit was staged.

Some time went by and Horace began to wean himself on the outside world. He landed the reporter gig at the Between The Lines Times right out of the gate. His boss, Don Keating, was surprised that someone with Horace’s pedigree was even interested.

“I don’t need to remind you of the stigma placed—unfairly placed—on tabloids, if you will,” Don warned.

But Horace was just happy to be doing what he loved again. And he was intrigued by the idea of investigating the supernatural. His would be a strictly scientific approach.

If there was one thing Horace could change, it would be to have gone to the police with what he knew about the kidnapped girl. He could actually say her name now that he was gunning to redeem his guilty conscious with this undercover assignment.

Keisha Senghor. Keisha Senghor. Keisha Senghor.

A late evening chill settled in and eventually chased Horace back inside his house. He went into the kitchen and put his cup in the sink. Then he grabbed the mini-recorder from the countertop and ejected the tape. He placed it in a case marked “Echelon”, walked around to the other side of the counter and put the case, with the tape inside, in a drawer of his computer table. He fished out another case marked “Memoirs,” placed the tape into the recorder, and began to think out loud.

***

“It’s not like that, mom!” Jamie whined into the phone for what seemed like the thousandth time. He held the phone between his shoulder and ear as he stood over the kitchen sink scrubbing dishes to busy his mind.

Coffee brewed in the over-complicated, over-priced coffeemaker in the background. The rest of the kitchen was stocked with shiny steel appliances set against black tile, faux-marble countertops and designer cabinets with a lacquered, birch veneer.

Jamie’s patience with his mother—whom he called his ‘Moms’ when talking about her to other people—was wearing thin. She was the last person with whom he wanted to be discussing his problems. She had been calling since the news aired his argument with Ronnie Hayes. That meant two and a half weeks worth of messages on his answering machine. She left so many that he had to reset the damn thing twice. He was definitely going to hear something about that. It made a good case for avoiding her indefinitely, but as much as he tried to resist it, Jamie felt that he owed her some kind of explanation. She was his mother after all.

Might as well get it over with, he thought when the phone rang twelve minutes ago and Moms’ number showed up on the caller ID. So he snatched it up before he could reconsider. Given a few minutes to think about it and he probably would have let the machine pick up, again.

“Whaddoes that mean; it’s not like that?” Moms replied in a whiny, distressed pitch. “Either you’re doing it or you’re not.”

It was that pitch that Jamie knew would make him cringe and want to hang up the phone on her ass.

“Echelon is an adult entertainment company, mom. So, yes, they do make adult films. But that’s not what I do,” Jamie said. “I work in a completely separate division. It’s not even on the same floor.”

“Why would you even want to be a part of a company like that, Jamie? That’s not how I raised you; to degrade women and peddle all that filth.”

Jamie felt that there was nothing he could say that would make Moms understand. But he was just mad enough to try. Maybe ‘mad’ was the wrong word. He felt trapped, boxed in, with no other option but to fight back. She always got him to that point.

Shoulda known, he thought. Shoulda fucking known . . .

Jamie turned off the faucet, used a hand-towel to dry his hands, and then took the phone in his hand and held it to his ear. With no more dishes to clean, the kitchen was starting to feel small, so he walked out into the dining room and hit the light switch.

Post-modern orbs dangled from skinny metal rods and cast light downward. Blurred attempts at reflection bounced up from polished hardwood floors. A rectangular table made of metal and glass in the middle of the room. Twisty metal chairs pushed underneath. A door to the basement in the corner of the room remained closed ninety-nine percent of the time. Jamie had so much junk stuffed in large boxes and stored in the basement that there was little room to move down there. So, unless he was searching for something specific, he stayed out of the basement.

Furniture throughout the house was courtesy of the thrift store on 47th and Market and Ikea. Together with the renovations that were made before Jamie bought the house, they produced an elegant, if not slightly anal vibe. Cult film memorabilia leapt out of the background to offset the vibe. Posters and framed stills and collectible figures decorated walls and shelves and mantles and bookcases. A 42” Flatscreen TV was mounted on the living room wall. It looked like whomever lived here could afford to indulge their hobbies. It was more than he could say for Moms when she was 28-years old.

“What about that crap you’re always giving me about how well I’m doing?” Jamie said. “How proud you are that I can live the way I want. How you wished that you could’ve had the opportunities to pursue your—”

“That was before I knew what you were doing . . . where you were working, I mean,” Moms interrupted. “Now it all makes sense . . . why you were so evasive about it.”

“You wanna know what I do? I’m the Managing Editor, mom,” Jamie boasted. “That means I run the whole damn Editorial Department.”

“Well then why couldn’t you just come out and tell me, if what you’re doing is so innocent?”

“Because I knew you’d react like this!”

“I call and call and you don’t answer your phone.”

“I’ve been busy dealing with this stuff, Mom. I do have a life, you know.”

“I have to find out about my own son from the evening news? Exploiting under-aged girls for goodness sakes, Jamie. That’s not you. Not the Jamie I know.”

Jamie pulled the phone away from his ear and willed himself calm before replacing it. His relationship with his mother was difficult to classify. He had love for her as an arbitrary maternal figure, but disliked her as a person. She was too passive, too set in her old-world ways and resistant to change, too child-like and naïve in her view of the world, too forgiving of people who had clearly done her wrong, too insecure and uncomfortable in her own skin, too up God’s ass, and too accepting of things at face value.

She had him fooled until his early teens when some of her shortcomings—namely passivity, insecurity, and discomfort for discomfort’s sake—began to manifest in Jamie. But he was damned if they were going to control his destiny the way they had controlled hers.

Those shortcomings were responsible for the way Moms mishandled the situation with his father, whom Jamie met for ten whole minutes when he was twelve-years-old.

“I was trying to explain that to you before you started in on me, mom,” Jamie began. “The stuff about the under-aged girls has to do with the phone-sex hotline, which is another completely separate division. And as far as I know, it’s not true.”

“They said you had something to do with a video,” Moms replied.

“One of my editors posted a video clip without my approval, and . . . Well, you kinda hafta see the thing.”

“Why? What’s wrong with it?”

Jamie was standing in the living room when the coffeemaker gurgled finished. As he headed into the kitchen . . .

“Well, it’s kinda like thisss . . . deformed girl sorta dancing around a stripper pole,” he said, attempting to soften the blow with an unsure tone. He retrieved a mug and a box of sugar from the cupboard, and a carton of Half & Half from the fridge, and prepared a cup of coffee. “It’s hard to see because the video quality is so bad, but she looks like she’s being kinda . . . forced to dance against her will.”

“Oh Jamie!”

“Just let me finish,” Jamie snapped. He paused and allowed a few seconds to pass, and then fished a spoon from the silverware drawer and scooped two tablespoons of sugar into his mug. “The general consensus is that the footage has been doctored.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that it’s probably fake. You just have to see this thing to believe it. It’s actually kinda creepy.” He really preferred that she didn’t watch it, but the words jumped out of Jamie’s mouth before he could censor them.

“So then what’s the problem if it’s not real?”

“It’s because my editor, Ronnie, panicked under all the pressure we got from the clip and tried to cover his own ass by saying that I authorized it.”

“Did you?”

Jamie held the phone away from his face and glared at it.

“I’m gonna act like you didn’t just ask me that,” he said.

“Well I . . . ”

“Ronnie’s a sneaky bastard, mom. He went over my head before I had a chance to fire him for lying about the clip and now it’s my word against his.”

A silent pause . . .

“So, what happens next?” Moms inquired.

“I have a meeting with the big boss tomorrow, so we’ll see,” Jamie responded.

A horrified gasp leapt out of Moms’ lungs.

“I want you to call me right after your meeting tomorrow,” she demanded.

“I’m not gonna do that, mom.”

Jamie could hear Moms thinking over the phone. She was buying his fake confidence, which came as a pleasant surprise to him. It had him dusting off his, “Maybe she isn’t so bad after all,” schpiel.

“Well. What about this argument with your coworker?” she asked.

“That was Ronnie! The news crew that’s been staked out in front of our building caught us arguing about the whole thing on camera.”

The local media pounced on the story and ran it on all the network affiliates. They had been aware of Echelon Media due to complaints over the years from neighboring businesses. “We don’t want that kind of business anywhere near us decent folks,” and the like. The neighbors had a hard-on for bringing the company down. But Echelon’s lawyers were like slick, Semitic-flavored androids constructed with the single-minded edict of defending the company’s right to exist. The hint of trouble and they came marching out of their biomechanical alcoves ready to illuminate the finer points of harassment and the legal ramifications of such. Or so it seemed. As a result, many people had no idea that there was an adult entertainment company operating right under their noses.

“I want you to stop working there, Jamie.”

“I gotta go, mom.”

“Please, Jamie? You can find something better than that place.”

“Really mom, I gotta go. I got somebody on the other line. Okay. I’ll call you later. Love you. Bye.”

Jamie hung up the phone and took a moment to decompress. He lifted the steaming mug to his lips and sipped from it.

SIX

Jamie wasted the better part of an hour going over the conversation with Moms in his head. He eventually found himself standing in front of the bathroom mirror. The Band Aid on his forearm was pretty beat up from the constant hiking up of his sleeve all day. He stood there for a few moments trying to decide whether or not he felt like going through the trouble of replacing it. Then he turned on the faucet, dug his fingertips under the edge of the Band Aid and counted to three. He made a face, and then ripped it off. It didn’t hurt nearly as bad as he thought it would.

The impression of a mouthful of teeth was more visible now, embedded in puffy skin that glowed an angry shade of reddish-brown. Jamie hissed at the site. The thought of touching it gave him chills. He adjusted the flow to lukewarm and then lowered his arm under the running water. It stung at first, but then he felt a soothing coolness come over the area. He closed his eyes at the sensation and stood there for a while.

Afterward, Jamie held his arm up in front of the mirror and squinted at the wound as he turned it back and forth to inspect it from all angles. He only had small Band Aids in his cupboard. He ended up using two of them side-by-side. Then he wrapped the area with a foot and a half of Ace Bandage. He cut it from the roll he used when he sprained his ankle playing basketball two years ago. He thought it looked more dignified that way, like a sports injury.

Jamie floated from room to room trying to find something to get his mind off of his problems. He thought about writing. But that was a whole process. He spent some time perusing his DVD collection for a movie to whisk his mind away for a few hours. Nothing appealed to him at the moment, not even Repo Man, which he’d been itching to re-watch recently. He fiddled with his collectibles, adjusting things that didn’t require it. Then he remembered the book he’d been reading. Navigating the Mental Map was the title. He had bought it in the summer as research for the new screenplay idea that he was vibing on, about the untapped potential of the human brain. It was going to be his masterpiece if he ever got around to writing it.

Perfect, Jamie thought on his way to retrieving the book from the Barrister bookcase in the living room. He could chalk it up to research. This way he wouldn’t feel so guilty about neglecting his writing.

Jamie’s enthusiasm withered about twenty pages into chapter four. He was lying on the couch holding the book afloat above his face when the words started messing with him. The TV remote was calling him, too. He could see it out of the corner of his eye lying within arms’ reach on the coffee table.

Awe . . . Fuck it!

There was nothing on TV, yet Jamie continued surfing the same channels that he had already passed, hoping against reason that something new would materialize on one of them. The book was handing out guilt trips from the coffee table where Jamie had placed it facedown when he grabbed the remote. He was lying with his back dug into the corner of the plump, leather couch just the way he liked, his arm extended toward the television, the remote teetering in his loose grip, lingering on the usual suspects—Forensic Files, Cold Case Detectives, Autopsy with Dr. Boden.

Can’t fuck with Dr. Boden, he often joked.

Each time Jamie would catch himself nodding off, he’d flinch awake and instantly change the channel as if doing so helped to reset his grip on consciousness.

He was skimming sleep when a voice he recognized interrupted his transition between planes. Jamie sat up, swung his legs over the side of the couch, and pointed his face at the television. His eyelids peeled back. Dry, lighting-veined eyes focused through sleepy haze on the skinny, long-necked comedian standing in front of a green screen. He was the host of the Internet Clip show that ran the footage Ronnie Hayes posted on Friggin’ Awesome. Jamie chose not to watch when the episode first aired last week—when everybody and their grandmother saw it. But if he had heard the opening tease correctly, he had just woken up to a rerun of that very episode.

Fuckin’ great, Jamie mused.

A still frame from Ronnie’s clip materialized in a rectangular graphic box that hovered over the host’s right shoulder.

Jamie’s body tightened. Butterfly wings aflutter. They tickled the inner walls of his belly. He wanted to turn away, but his eyes wouldn’t leave the screen. So he held his breath and watched. He kept telling himself, I don’t need to see this.

On the television:

The male host is standing in front of a green screen. A chunky graphic representing the show’s title oozes sideways across the screen behind him. Over his right shoulder a still frame from Ronnie Hayes’ clip is frozen in a rectangular graphic box.

Host: This next clip comes to us from those purveyors of all things wholesome at Friggin’ Awesome Clips, and easily gets our vote for creepiest clip of the week.

VIDEO

The footage is old and blurry. Familiar objects with fuzzy edges inhabit a scene marred by distortion. There is a stage lined with chairs reaching into a roomful of empty tables, pillars wrapped in carpet, and walls painted a brutal shade of red. A stripper pole impales the end of the extended stage. Spotlights dance and criss-cross beams. “Eyes Without A Face,” by Billy Idol pollutes the murky atmosphere. Like the picture, the sound is distorted.

Beneath a smoldering ether of deep red ugliness and lurid 70s porn, a sickly, naked shape writhes and undulates around the stripper pole. It looks like a girl. She can’t be any older than 12 or 13. It looks like she is being forced to perform. Her body is afflicted with . . . something. Her skin is dark and shrink-wrapped to a skeleton with bulbous joints and limbs jutting slightly askew. One arm is pinned to her chest to conceal droopy, teardrop breasts. With the other arm she swats at crumpled dollar bills being tossed at her from off camera. She stands knock-kneed to hide her vagina. A patch of nappy hair peeks out from between her thighs. She slides one arm over her buttocks as she turns her back to us. Though frightened to death, the girl is determined to channel her inner-sexy.

Someone off camera finds that extremely funny. It’s a vulgar, drunken cackle meant to demean.

The camera zooms in and reveals the afflicted girl’s angular face, sunken eyes, harsh cheekbones, and jutting teeth like a mummy’s. A bad blond wig sits crooked on her head.

Between fits of drunken laughter, a garbled male voice taunts the girl off camera. His tone is filled with deviant sexual aggression.

Garbled male voice (off-camera): C’mon! Smile for me, Babee! (laughs) Show me that smile!

***

It must’ve taken Jamie 45 minutes to will himself out of bed this morning. He haunted the house, half-alive, shambling in a zombie-fied gait, and prepared for work on autopilot while his mind forced thoughts on him. They played out in split-screen. On one side, the spindly, afflicted girl from the video did her awkward dance. On the other side, Zane Bettencourt glared at him across an ostentatious wooden desk fit for a king. Today, he had his meeting.

Jamie vaguely remembered showering, shaving, scarfing down two packets of cinnamon/raisin oatmeal, and then walking, at a brisk pace, to the 46th Street Station to catch the 8:40am train. He thought he was running late. He didn’t think to get a second opinion until he arrived at the train station and looked up at the clock embedded in the wall. The clock’s face was covered with gook that appeared sticky. It blurred the numbers underneath. When Jamie saw 8:19, he thought maybe the gooky layer had distorted the clock’s arms, but he had read it correctly.

He was running early, well ahead of schedule.

He decided to take the local instead of the express, which he almost always caught because he was almost always running late. The local was a nice change of pace. He could sit back and let his mind wander as he stared into the dark, dank belly of the tunnel. Sometimes the best ideas came to him that way.

Jamie sat by the window with his hands dug deep into his jacket pockets watching vertical pockets of smoldering yellow light separated by varying degrees of darkness as the train snaked through the tunnel. Earplug headphones dosed him with sonic crack and had him nodding like an addict. The song—“Daytona 500,” by Ghostface Killah—had caught him at just the right moment. It injected him with an adrenal rush that coursed through every inch of his body and upgraded his mood to optimistic. The grinding wheels of the train squealed under loosely connected boxes, kicking up sparks, rocking and bumping in and out of line between soot and sludge-covered columns.

The visual got Jamie thinking. The idea that materialized was one that often came to him while on the train. It was more pieces with a related theme than a coherent story. The subway tunnels, the stations, and the elaborate concourse painted with stylize strokes, would serve as the backdrop. Like a vast underground metropolis in which the main plot—something about cops working the subways—takes place.

He envisioned the cops riding the train disguised as normal passengers, watching for muggers, and pickpockets, and rapists. Something big would come along and thrust them into a larger-than-life mystery. Jamie hadn’t decided what that “something big” was just yet. Maybe it would involve a member of the city’s VIP community. Some local government type. Maybe the Mayor. Maybe a slick corporate big wig with delusions of super-villainy.

He saw black-clothed assassins snatching folks off of lonely train platforms and dragging them into the darkness. A lone assassin standing on the tracks at the edge of darkness staring back at a horrified passenger who spots him from the window of a passing train. Working as a team the black-clothed assassins slip in and out of the darkness, wraith-like, and attack the protagonists. The scenes are intercut with random shots of the subway cops running through crowded train stations, jumping turnstiles, standing in stylized gun poses and unloading rounds that barked like thunder. Smash cuts of the train barreling past the camera at various angles.

Jamie compiled the scenes into a trailer that played in his head in perfect synergy with the music. He needed a title to end the trailer. A few possibilities came and went . . .

•Phantoms of the Underground—too B-movie sounding.

or

•Phantoms—My favorite so far. Still don’t love it, though.

or

•Underground—Too vague.

or

•Undercover—Too generic.

or

•Subway Cops—Pah-leeaaazze . . .

By the time Jamie reached his stop—13th and Market—his enthusiasm toward the Phantoms idea had waned. He knew that if he didn’t write it down while it was fresh then it would fall to the back of his idea rotation until the next time, and he didn’t feel like fishing a pen and notepad from his shoulder bag.

Jamie went from feeling like he could take on the world, to a more pragmatic “don’t get your hopes up” state of mind. His iPod still played, selecting a song—“Pyrex Vision,” by Raekwon—that meshed well with his low-key stroll. He traveled through the underground concourse. The current of bodies was swift and deliberate. The cafes, and restaurants, and coffee shops, and cheap eateries were going through their opening routine as lines of people waited impatiently for their morning fix. Musicians played for spare change. Police shooed homeless folks away from storefronts.

He spotted Keri up ahead, waiting for him in her usual spot by the cellular phone kiosk. She craned her neck to see through the sea of heads. Her eyes passed right by him. Jamie smiled at the idea that sprung up. There was no shortage of bobbing heads and shoulders to take cover behind as he moved at a wide arc and sidestepped behind Keri when she wasn’t looking.

Someone noticed him, slowing their stride and looking as if suspecting Jamie to be up to no good.

Jamie made sure that the gallant bystander saw him lean in close to Keri’s ear and whisper.

“Are you lost ma’am,” he said in a smoldering voice. “Because heaven is a long way from here.”

Keri smiled halfway through the cheesy pick-up line. She turned and gave Jamie a playful smack on the arm.

“You would say something like that to a girl, wouldn’t you?” She laughed.

“You figured me out.”

The gallant man was still watching. Jamie gave him a wink that said, “That’s right. She’s with me.” To which the gallant man responded with an envious expression.

Jamie and Keri headed toward the subway entrance to the Lurmeyer Tower.

He was talking about his job, how much he hated it.

“I dunno. I guess I thought I’d be livin’ the dream by now,” he said. “Ya know? Writing movies and stuff. I know it sounds silly.”

“Not at all,” Keri replied. “Not if you really believe in it. I mean, somebody’s gotta do it. Why not you, right?

Jamie smiled, charmed by Keri’s comment.

“Right. But two years is a long time for me to be at one place, at this point in my life. Especially a place like Echelon.”

“You’ll get there.”

“It just sucks because I’ve been gettin’ into this book about the untapped power of the mind. Z’got me all inspired to write something, but then I’m like, for what? Plus, the train ride just now had me all amped like I used to get when I was young and hungry.”

“Listen to you,” Keri sneered. “Young and hungry. Please . . . What are you; all of 27?”

“Twenty eight, actually.”

“Twenty eight? Oh, then that’s different,” Keri smiled.

Jamie nudged her sideways with his shoulder. He was smiling, too.

“So you got jokes, now?” he said.

Keri exhaled a breathy snicker and shuffled back over to Jamie’s side.

“Why don’t you just say something to Bettencourt instead of being all covert about it,” she suggested.

“Nah . . . I’ve dropped enough hints over the years. If he was interested, he’da prolley said something by now. Plus, I can’t just go up to him all starry-eyed.” Jamie loosened his expression. He made his eyes wide and hopeful and put on a desperate, pleading affect. “‘Oh pretty please Mr. Bettencourt will you make me a screenwriter?’” And then in his normal voice added, “You gotta be subtle about that kinda shit. Specially with ballers like Bettencourt. Dudes like him are all private and inaccessible for a reason.”

“I know, right,” Keri said hungrily. “He’s so mysterious.”

Jamie felt a twinge of jealousy.

“Really?” He replied.

“Wha-it?”

“I thought you’d be above that kind of thing.”

Keri picked up on the jealous vibe. She felt both flattered and slightly ashamed for falling short of Jamie’s expectations. It made her realize why she preferred being single.

“I didn’t say I wanted to have his baby or anything,” she said in her defense. “But you gotta wonder about a guy like that who’s made so much money at such a young age. What’s he like, in his late forties or something? And he’s got that whole Latin Lover thing going on.”

“Latin lover? I thought he was a brotha. Besides, he always seemed kinda slimy to me. Like a used car salesman or something.”

“Oh, C’mon. Now you’re just being jealous.”

“Well, yeah . . . He’s loaded. I’m willing to bet, though, that he’s got a few skeletons in his closet.”

“Don’t we all?”

Jamie let Keri’s comment percolate in his mind as they broke off from the larger crowd and headed up a marble staircase. He felt oddly aroused by what she’d said. They moved through a pair of heavy double-doors at the top. An engraved placard above the doors read, LURMEYER TOWER. Once inside the lobby, they walked towards the elevator banks.

“So, let’s say I got a job screenwriting upstairs,” Jamie said. “Then two more years go by and I’m still writing porn flicks? Then what?”

“Then that’s two years of experience that you can use to make your own movie. Right? Doesn’t matter where you learned it. You said so yourself. Remember?”

“That was two weeks ago, Keri. Before that fucking clip, and the news report.” Jamie held his arm up. “Not to mention this shit.”

Keri stared at the sleeve of his jacket as if she could see through it.

“How is your arm?” She asked.

“Stings a little, but it’s fine.”

“You really should get that looked at.”

“I’ve got way more important things on my mind.”

Keri stopped and pulled him aside.

“Look, Jamie,” she began. She looked deep into his eyes at the real man that lay beneath all the surface fodder. “You have to actually get the job, before you start to worry about it. And the only way that’s going to happen is if you make it happen.”

Jamie glanced down at Keri’s hand on his bicep, and then trailed up to the crystalline brown orbs rolling around inside almond-shaped cases. Her concern was genuine. He sight-checked the passers-by who gave an extra look, sniffing possible drama.

“You’re probably right,” he conceded with a smile.

“I know I’m right,” Keri proclaimed with certainty.

They started walking again.

“I can always count on you to put me in check,” Jamie said. “You’re like my therapist.”

“Maybe I should start charging you for my services.”

Jamie found himself aroused again.

SEVEN

Lisa Pritz ran up to Jamie as soon as he and Keri walked into the main office area. She was holding a rolled up newspaper in her hand. Her worried look gave Jamie instant stomachache.

“What’s-a-matter?” Keri asked.

Jamie nipped at the words, but they had already fallen out of Keri’s mouth. He felt that he wasn’t ready to accept any bad news.

“So, you guys haven’t heard?” Lisa directed the question at the both of them.

Jamie shook his head, “No.”

“Heard what?” Keri asked.

“Remember that tabloid reporter who came by about the clip last week,” Lisa began. “The one who you threw out, Jamie?”

“Whoa! I didn’t throw anybody out,” Jamie countered, jumping on legal ramifications. For what he had no idea . . . “I took his card and told him to leave.”

“The paranormal guy?” Keri asked.

“Yeah. Horace Figg is his name,” Lisa said to Keri and then turned to Jamie who was waiting for her to acknowledge his correction. “Well, you know what I mean.”

“So, what about him?” Keri asked.

Lisa hesitated, and then handed Jamie the rolled up paper.

Jamie unrolled it and examined the cover. A colorful tabloid template blasted him in the face. It was one that he would often spot while he stood in the grocery-store checkout line. The Between The Lines Times was the name of the paper.

Keri leaned in close to Jamie’s shoulder and held her head at a crooked angle to see.

The cover of the Times was split into two panels. A headline at the top stretched across both of them.

MYSTERIOUS VIDEO CLIP MAY HAVE TIES TO UNSOLVED MURDER. The headline read. Chunky arrows pointed from the left panel to the right. Superlative text floated freely. The author’s name hid at the bottom of the page—“by Horace Figg.”

In the left panel, a blurry still frame from the infamous video clip. In the right panel, an old color photo (circa 1980) of an eight-year-old black girl—Keisha Senghor. A vibrant smile highlighted appealing features floating confidently amidst a noble, blue-black hue. There was a vague resemblance to the deformed girl in the clip, like a sister who had grown up under better circumstances. But it couldn’t possibly be the same person.

A caption underneath the photo read, “What Ever Happened To Keisha Senghor?”

An excerpt from the article jumped out at Jamie—“When asked if he believed that there was a connection, Jamie Cole, the Managing Editor at Echelon Media responded, ‘Sure. Why not.’”

Jamie looked up, incredulous and threw disbelief at both of them.

“Sneaky motherfucker!” he fumed. “I was being sarcastic.” He looked at Keri. “You were there. You saw.”

Keri nodded.

“Yeah. I saw it,” she said, backing up Jamie’s claim. “But whaddayou expect from a tabloid reporter? The truth probably wouldn’t sell as many papers.”

“Fuck, man! This is just what I need!”

“Marc already knows,” Lisa warned. “I figured I’d give you a heads-up before . . . ”

Just then Marc Pierce walked up from the side, seeming to come out of nowhere.

“Morning all,” he smiled, nodding at Lisa, Keri, and . . . He motioned toward Jamie, but stopped when Jamie didn’t look up from the newspaper. As he walked by, Marc reached through and tapped the cover of the newspaper with his index finger, then said, “Something else to discuss during your meeting today, Mr. Cole.”

Marc kept on walking. He had a rigid gait with a slight bounce on every third footfall. The impact gave his head a funny bobble that he seemed completely unaware of.

Jamie balled his lips and smiled away his bad feelings as he watched Marc walk away.

“Douchebag,” Keri said.

“That’s putting it mildly,” Lisa Pritz added.

The elevators didn’t stop on the fifth floor. To get there you had to walk up a private staircase located to the immediate right of the elevator banks on the fourth floor. Access to the staircase was restricted to upper-level executives and their assistants. Marc Pierce and up, for instance. It was Echelon Media’s main floor. The hub. ‘Heaven,’ to the employees who subscribed to the hype about what goes on up there. Namely that it was where the photo-shoots were done and where the cheapo gonzo scenes were shot.

As he ascended the stairs, Jamie acknowledged the cameras that angled down at him above each landing with a smile. When he reached the top, he stood just out of the camera’s field of vision and gave himself a quick once-over. He held his hand up to his mouth and checked his breath. He had been sucking on Starburst Squares all morning, so it smelled like an array of fruity flavors. He cricked his neck to the left, and then to the right, and shook out his arms.

“Ain’t no thang,” Jamie whispered. “Gotta hold your ground. Show ‘em that you’re not the problem. Ronnie’ll dig his own grave.” He took a deep breath. “Okay. Here we go!”

Jamie walked into the fifth floor lobby as if this meeting with Bettencourt was just a little business that needed handling and he was all, “I got this.”

He smiled at the receptionist sitting in the back. She had cat eyes and hair like an evil schoolteacher. Jamie had never seen her at any of the meetings or office functions, but then most of the fifth floor employees probably considered themselves above all that. Besides, Jamie was terrible with names and faces. They could have spoken in the past, and he wouldn’t know. Not likely, but possible.

The cat-eyed receptionist sat there watching Jamie like she thought he might steal something. It was as if being allowed up here was such an honor to a lower-level executive like him that he’d want some kind of a memento; one of the abstract sculptures standing guard on either side of the receptionist’s little island, perhaps.

Neon-enhanced paintings decorated warm-colored walls. A coffee table and a plump, leather couch that looked like it came from one of those Middle Eastern furniture places that sold lamps in the shape of panthers, and mermaids, and dolphins leaping from cresting waves, made up the waiting area. Despite its tackiness, the couch looked like it cost a pretty penny, too.

Cat-eyes stayed that way until Jamie reached her kiosk and announced himself.

“Hi. Jamie Cole,” he said. “I have a 10:30 meeting with . . . ”

“Yes. I know who you are,” she replied and began to blindly type on the wireless keyboard in front of her with the tips of her long, fake fingernails. She brought up Zane Bettencourt’s itinerary on her computer screen and scanned it for the name Jamie Cole.

He noticed that there was no signage on the walls, no call letters or anything. The average person off the street would have no idea what kind of office they were walking into—just the way Bettencourt intended.

Cat-eyes picked up the phone and held it to her ear and then let her eyes roll up at Jamie, who immediately smiled at her without meaning to.

“You can have a seat on the couch while I get someone on the phone,” she said in a monotone voice. And then she started dialing a number.

“Thanks,” Jamie replied. He doubted that Cat-eyes even heard him.

Jamie walked over to the waiting area and feigned interest in the selection of magazines on the coffee table while Cat-eyes spoke quietly into the phone. He tried unsuccessfully to eavesdrop.

Cat-eyes hung up the phone.

“Bernie’ll be out in a second to take you back,” she said.

“Okay. Thanks, again,” Jamie responded.

Ten minutes passed. Jamie was becoming impatient. He worried that the wait was a bad sign. Cat-eyes never even looked up again once she settled back into her work, which seemed to consist of frowning at her computer screen.

Jamie was flipping through an old Entertainment Weekly when a door opened in the wall next to the reception kiosk. He didn’t even realize there was a door there. An older gentlemen stuck his head out from behind the door and spotted Jamie sitting on the couch.

“James Cole?” Bernie asked him.

Jamie tossed the magazine onto the coffee table and stood up. “It’s Jamie,” he replied.

“Come on back,” Bernie said and waved his hand.

Jamie thought it strange that Bernie didn’t at least acknowledge the flubbing of his name. But, Okay.

I guess that’s how they do things up here in ‘Heaven,’ he mused.

Bernie looked like a dirty old man with terrible posture and a playful, ratfaced charisma. His skin was orange and leathery from too much tanning. The moving parts were bordered in cracks and creases. The lower 3rd of his face was shaded with an omnipresent beard of white stubble. Stringy graying hair reached down to his shoulders. He wore a Hawaiian-style shirt, wrinkled khakis, and loafers without socks. His shirt was unbuttoned down to his sternum revealing an unruly tuft of white chest-hair.

Jamie followed him through an open area filled with props and film equipment. He looked around with wonderment, dreaming up quick vignettes with himself calling the shots as director.

A statuesque woman in a string-bikini came out of a door on the other side of the room and started walking toward them. She had an athletic frame. Her fake breasts were disproportionately large. It was the first thing Jamie noticed. The way she pushed her chest forward made her breasts look as if they were about to tear through the taut skin that struggled to hold them afloat with little to no bounce.

As the woman approached, Jamie looked away to avoid staring at her breasts. She smirked at Jamie’s discomfort.

“Hey Bernie,” the woman said as she walked passed.

“Howya doin’, doll?” Bernie replied.

Jamie waited a few seconds, and then turned around and glanced at the woman’s backside. Her ample buttocks bubbled outward from the thong riding the deep valley between them. Some men would call that too big, but it looked just right to Jamie.

The woman turned and caught Jamie looking. He spun around, embarrassed, and didn’t see the woman laugh at him as she disappeared inside one of the rooms that they had already passed.

“Nice, hunh?” Bernie said.

Jamie nodded. “Her tits look hard as a rock though. Must hurt like hell.”

Bernie made an expression like he had just smelled something foul, and looked Jamie up and down. “What’r you, some kinda fruit?”

“What? Hell no!”

Bernie spoke with a rasp that swam in half-swallowed mucus. Words flowed from his mouth with a passive-aggressive cadence ready-made for dishing out witty insults.

They came to a burly, security door with a card-reader on the wall next to it. In one quick motion, Bernie pulled a security card from his shirt-pocket, slid it through the card-reader, put the card back into his pocket, and opened the door.

He waited for Jamie to enter, and then pulled the door shut. Air squeezed out around the edges as the door hissed into place. A heavy lock clicked secure. It reminded Jamie of one those scenes in a movie where some unlucky bastard was being escorted through prison for the first time.

A layer of carpeting muffled their footsteps as they walked down a long hallway. A heavy, steel door marked “Studio” coming up on the left side and a number of less sturdy doors on the right. A card-reader on the wall next to each door. A light above the studio door glowed red.

Bernie led Jamie down the hall toward the last door on the right. A placard on the face of the door read, “Backstage—Performers Only Please!” The familiar, abstract symbol floated next to the text on the custom-designed placard.

“So whaddayou do, here, Bernie?” Jamie inquired. “If you don’t mind me ask—”

“I mind, kid,” Bernie said, breaking in. “And it’s Bernard to you.”

So, it’s like that? Jamie thought.

His eyes must have gave him away because Bernie laughed and said quickly, “I’m just bustin’ yer balls, kid. Don’t be so friggin’ gullible.” He smacked Jamie on the shoulder. “Whadoeye do? A little-a-this and a little-a-that. Whatever needs ta be done.”

“Yeah. Real funny,” Jamie replied, relieved yet still slightly annoyed. “You should do stand-up.”

“Been there, done that, kid,” Bernie said as slid his card through the reader and opened the door. “Now c’mon.”

The room looked more like an upscale efficiency apartment than any “Backstage” that Jamie had ever seen. There were modern amenities throughout. A half-wall separated the kitchen from the living room area. A few barstools against the half-wall on the ‘living room’ side. A huge leather sectional. A flatscreen TV. Posters of Echelon Media’s films decorated the walls. Two doors in the back of the room lead to the bathroom/showers and the dressing room respectively. Both were unisex.

A shirtless male actor who went by the stage-name Rod Longwood stood in the kitchen staring down at a script that lay open on the bar. Jamie recognized Rod from some of the films he had written synopses for. He had seen Rod in action and wondered how he could keep from cumming for so long. But then Jamie posed that question mentally to most of the male actors, especially if the girl they performed with in the scene was attractive.

Rod was making faces at the script on the bar, perplexed by the words or the scene that they created, or something . . . Rod was in extremely good shape with an effeminate-looking face. He was what Jamie’s mother would call, “too good-looking.” Jamie made a mental note not to let that intimidate him. It wasn’t like there were any girls around anyway.

Rod looked up, startled away from the script when Bernie and Jamie walked into the room.

“Zup Bernie,” Rod said.

“Eh . . . ya know . . . Nutin’ ta complain about,” Bernie replied. He stopped in the center of the room and turned to Jamie. “You can wait in here. If you get thirsty there’s soma-doze faggy coffee drinks inna fridge. Couch-chiz obviously over there. Bathroom’s inna back. Just ask ‘tiny’ there ta show ya.”

Rod playfully recoiled from the imaginary blow dealt him by Bernie’s remark.

“Stop hatin’,” he shot back.

Bernie didn’t hear Rod’s retort. He had only stopped talking long enough to take a breath.

“You can watch TV, whatever . . . ” he told Jamie. “The boss should be done in a bit.” And then he walked out.

Jamie plopped down on the couch and nearly drowned in the immense cushion, which was much softer than it looked. He righted himself and whipped his gaze toward the kitchen area to check for a witness. Rod was still facedown in the script. You’d think it was written in a foreign language, the way he twisted and scrunched his face at it.

Jamie scooped up the remote control from the arm of the couch. It was identical to the one he had at home.

“Mind if I turn this on?” he asked Rod, who looked up after about 30 seconds all weary-eyed and dumb.

“Not at all, bro,” Rod replied.

Jamie pushed the “On” button and proceeded to channel surf like a pro.

Rod let his gaze linger on Jamie. “I’ve seen you . . . in the lobby,” he said. “You work downstairs, right?”

Jamie smirked knowingly. “Don’t you mean, you saw me on the news?”

“Well . . . That too, but I didn’t want to say anything. Must be pretty serious if the big man wants to see you personally, though.”

Jamie exhaled loudly. His shoulders dropped to a slump. Rod seemed like a cool enough guy, someone with whom he could vibe on a regular-guy level without worrying about jeopardizing his job.

So, he let his guard down. “Maaaan, I’ve been stressing about it for days! The way things’ve been going, I’ll be lucky if—”

“Yeah . . . Can I get your opinion on something, bro?” Rod interrupted.

What the fuck? Are you serious?

Jamie waited for a punchline. In the meantime Rod waited for an answer.

“Sure,” Jamie replied with an eyeroll and a confused expression.

Rod scooped up the script and started walking out from behind the bar.

“All right, so in the scene we’re about to shoot, I play this personal trainer—”

“Lemme guess,” Jamie interrupted. “A trainer who bangs all his clients?”

Rod smiled and threw a casual point at Jamie, “How’d you know?”

Jamie almost laughed. He was loosening up a little. But then . . .

Rod rounded the outer edge of the bar and walked into full view. He was wearing purple bikini underpants and nothing else.

Jamie struggled to look away. A nervous smile crossed his face. Rod was virtually hairless with tanned skin pulled taut over lean muscle. Underwear like a second skin hugged the thick, cylindrical bulge snaking down the front. The fact that Rod’s penis was uncircumcised—and Jamie knew it—freaked him out.

“Yo! Dude! I don’t know you like that,” he complained.

Rod stopped and looked behind him for the cause of Jamie’s sudden dismay. He spun all the way around and wound up back on Jamie, who now had his face turned away.

Rod looked himself up and down thinking, Z’there something on me, er somethin’?

Finding nothing, he looked up at Jamie. “What’s the problem, bro?”

Jamie paused as if to let it sink in. It never did.

“Nothing,” he conceded.

Rod gave Jamie a weird look.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Yeah, man. I’m good.” Jamie replied. He feigned interest in the channels that flew by on the television. He couldn’t believe that Rod was that oblivious to how ridiculous he looked. Great body though, Jamie had to admit. You could’ve sworn the dumbfuck had walked right off of a Calvin Klein Ad.

Smirking, Rod shook his head and then climbed back into his script. He flipped through a few pages and used his finger to guide his eyes down the page to the paragraph he was looking for. He looked up when he found it.

By now, Jamie might as well have been inside the TV.

Rod walked over and turned it off manually.

“Okay. So, I’m waxin’ this housewife from behind, right?” he said, acting out the movement. “And she’s all like . . . ” He put on a terrible female voice. “’Oh God! This is the best workout I’ve ever had!’” Back to normal voice. “Then I say, ‘It’s my special program, baby. Guaranteed to work you into shape.’”

Silence . . .

Rod’s stance shifted impatient.

“Oh. You’re finished?” Jamie asked.

“Yeah . . . That was the line,” Rod replied.

“Kinna sounds like standard porn dialogue to me.”

“Yeah, but I think I should say something like . . . like . . . ‘This is what I call the squat-fuck, baby. It’s good for the ass,’ er something like that.”

Jamie repeated both lines in his head and thought for a moment.

“I guess I’d probably stick with what’s in the script,” he said.

“I don’t know, man,” said Rod. He sounded disappointed.

But Jamie took pleasure in the fact that they were discussing a script change. Who knew that it would be a porn script read by a half-naked Adonis in purple bikini underwear with a thick, sausagey bulge in the front? That kind of thing was becoming the story of his life.

EIGHT

The bathroom door opened inward. Fibrous mist clouds reached out, vanishing within the cooler air outside the bathroom. A female shape with exaggerated curves stepped out of the mist. She had bottle-red hair with streaks of yellow and black, and a vibe that screamed fake-pretty. She wore an ankle-length, terrycloth robe loosely tied around her extremely thin waist, and high-heeled shoes. She fumbled with the tie; pulling it tighter. Jamie reckoned that she would be naked underneath the robe.

He had seen the woman on a number of the posters and video boxes he wrote copy for. Lana Blaze was her name. Jamie was surprised at how much better she looked—younger and less harsh—than when her face was contorted in response to a gaggle of giant dicks invading multiple orifices at once.

Jamie looked away before Lana noticed him, and watched her blurred shape in his peripheral vision as she walked over to the fridge and opened it. He could tell that she was checking him out.

Don’t flatter yourself, J. The look was probably more of a, “Hey, isn’t that the idiot from the news?” kind of thing.

“Rod, would you get your schlong outta that poor guy’s face fer Christ sakes,” Lana scolded, successfully homing in on Jamie’s discomfort. It wasn’t difficult to spot.

“What?” Rod replied as clueless as before. Like, to him, it was perfectly normal for a man to stand half-naked, groin to eye-level with another man, whom he’d just met, and have a prolonged discussion. “He’s helping me out with something,” he added looking at Jamie and opening his arms. “Zis botherin’ you, bro?”

“Well, actually . . . ” Jamie started to say.

“My bad, bro,” Rod said and walked back behind the bar.

“It’s okay.” Jamie said.

“That’s just how I am, bro. I’m free with my shit,” Rod remarked.

You don’t say?

“So. Who are you?” Lana asked Jamie. “A new actor?”

“Ah . . . a writer, actually. Well, sorta. I work downstairs in Editorial.”

“That’s too bad,” Lana playfully pouted.

Jamie felt a surge of heat. He wondered if Lana’s response was genuine. Did she really just allude to the fact—in so many words—that she wanted to fuck him? He remembered all the things he ever said about “used up porn chicks” like Lana Blaze. “I wouldn’t fuck one-a-them . . . if you paid me . . . with someone else’s dick . . . if my life depended on it . . . if we were the last people on earth . . . ” Now that it seemed within reach, Jamie was hard-as-a-rock and rearing to go.

“Uh oh . . . Somebodeez crushin’ on you, bro,” Rod joked.

A commotion in the hallway. It sounded like a door slamming in the distance followed by heavy footsteps.

“I don’t care! You do it, then!” a female voice yelled. Although muffled by the closed, backstage door, her tearful anger was crystal clear.

The voice belonged to Rod and Lana’s coworker, a newcomer to the adult scene who went by the stage name Sterling Silver.

Sterling shoved the door open and barged into the room in a whirlwind of peaking emotions.

Jamie was stunned . . . horrified, even . . . to see the exotic, sleepy-eyed girl that he crushed on whenever he saw her on the train. She appeared so sweet and virginal that he never would’ve guess that she was an adult actress. But then again, a look like hers could work well in this business.

Sterling was wearing a robe identical to Lana’s, and holding it closed with her hand. Belt-straps dangling. Her make-up was badly smeared from crying.

“You knew I wouldn’t-na gone for that shit,” she yelled over her shoulder at the door as she stormed toward the bathroom. “That’s why you sprung it on me like that?”

Lana hurried over and blocked Sterling’s path.

“What happened? What’d he do?” Lana knowingly asked.

“I was only supposed to do a single today, but that fucker had me out there doin’ DP!”

Lana rolled her eyes and gave her head a shake. She had been there before herself.

“How much’d he offer you?”

Sterling sobbed and wiped her eyes.

“I don’t wanna say . . . But that’s not the point,” she said in a fragile, shaky voice. “He knows DP ain’t my thing, but I did it anyway. Then he’s gonna have the nerve to get all critical during the scene. Call me a bitch! I don’t think so!”

The front door pushed open. A swarthy-looking, ex-tough-guy with a metrosexual makeover came into the room like he was after someone. He wore a lizard-print, leather blazer and dark slacks with a vintage shirt underneath. For a smallish guy—in terms of height and girth—he possessed a larger-than-life presence with eyes that could bore through steel. You knew right away that this was someone to be taken seriously. A leader. A baller.

He wore his confidence in a broad-shouldered swagger that eschewed self-doubt in favor of utter and complete faith in his own decisions. His skin was peanut butter brown with patches of lightness throughout. A thin shade of hair colored the top of his head black. His goatee, laser-cut to perfection, surrounded an unremarkable mouth. This was Zane Bettencourt and he was the owner of Echelon Media.

Bernie walked in a few beats later. He stood behind Bettencourt and mimicked his boss’ displeased attitude like the good little lackey that he was.

Sterling took one look at Bettencourt and walked around Lana and into the bathroom. Lana flashed a “Shame on you,” smirk, but was careful not to aim it directly at Bettencourt. She kept it on her face as she followed Sterling into the bathroom.

Bettencourt scanned the remaining inhabitants. He stopped on Rod and said, “Get chor silly ass onset. They’re waiting for you.”

Rod grabbed his script and jogged out the front door. He feigned an aggressive lunge at Bernie as he passed.

Bernie flinched, and then tried to play it off like he wasn’t startled.

“Next time . . . ” he threatened as Rod jogged down the hall.

Without looking, Rod stuck his middle finger up at Bernie and disappeared behind the door marked, “Studio.”

Jamie was still reflecting on his train-ride fantasy girl’s true identity. On the outside he appeared calm and unaffected by the drama going on around him.

Bettencourt put his hands on his hips and searched the room. Jamie could see the frustration in his posture.

Please don’t take it out on me? Please don’t take it out on me? Please don’t take it out on me? He sat there thinking.

Bernie stood behind Bettencourt, half-in, and half-out of the room. He followed the movement of Bettencourt’s head, his own eyes mirroring the bossman’s severity.

Jamie landed in Bettencourt’s sights. He walked over to Jamie and offered his hand.

“Mr. Cole, I presume?” he said like Jamie had just walked in a second ago.

Jamie half-stood and shook Bettencourt’s hand. Bettencourt had a firm grip and dry, coarse palms despite otherwise well-oiled skin. Jamie noticed a tattoo on the narrow wrist.

“Yes,” Jamie replied and then swallowed to force down the hot lump that was climbing up his throat.

Introductions aside, Bettencourt’s expression quickly shifted back to serious. He could’ve sat down by now, but chose to remain standing over Jamie lest there be any confusion as to the dynamic of their relationship. His iron eyes bore down and made Jamie wonder, Is he pissed at me, or is that just the way he always looks?

Bernie stood in the background with his arms folded over his chest, watching.

“So you knew nothing about the clip?” Bettencourt asked. His tone carried suspicion.

“No, sir. I swear,” Jamie replied.

Bettencourt traded doubtful glances with Bernie.

“Would you have OK’d it if Mr. Hayes brought it to you, first?” he asked Jamie. “I’m curious.”

Sounded like a trick question. Unsure how to respond, Jamie looked over at Bernie.

“Well,” Jamie started, “from what I understand, Ronnie couldn’t find any source info, so definitely not, on those grounds alone.”

Bettencourt hesitated. As he stood over Jamie with eyes bearing down, he gave no indication as to whether or not he was buying Jamie’s explanation.

Jamie took the opportunity to solidify his case. “Look, I just want to apologize for all the trouble that this has caused and to let you know that I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize my job,” he said. “If I would’ve known—”

“Relax, Mr. Cole. I know you’re a hard worker,” said Bettencourt. “And I believe that you didn’t know about the clip.”

A relieved smile tried to push its way through Jamie’s tightly closed lips.

“Otherwise you’d no longer be here with us.”

The grim-sounding comment chased the brewing smile away. Jamie immediately became tense. What is that supposed to mean, no longer with us?

Bernie sported a devilish grin that vanished the instant Jamie looked his way.

“Because I would’ve fired you, of course,” Bettencourt added.

Ooohhhh . . . Jamie laughed at himself internally. What the hell did I think he was gonna say? Silly.

“Of course,” Jamie replied.

He was beginning to catch the shifting emotional cues. Bettencourt would say something, and then watch Jamie’s expression, reading him. He seemed to enjoy watching Jamie squirm.

“Don’t think you’re gettin’ off scot-free, though,” Bettencourt warned. “You handled yourself poorly here. The argument with Mr. Hayes. The tabloid hack.”

“I barely said two words to that reporter! He kept throwing questions at me while I was trying to get him to leave! I was just being—”

“Shhh! Listen,” Bettencourt demanded. “You show them the door—very even tempered. You say—very calmly, ‘Please leave.’ Nothing else. If they persist, then simply repeat it as you guide them to the door.”

“Yes, sir. And again, I’m sorry.”

“The argument, I could maybe sympathize with given the circumstances, but confronting Mr. Hayes right outside of the building. Very bad decision.”

Bernie was busy backing up everything Bettencourt said with a nod.

“It won’t happen again,” Jamie said. “I promise.”

A burst of excitement forced Bettencourt’s iron eyes wide.

“You’re damn right it won’t,” he said. “I didn’t build this company from the ground up to have it all brought down by careless mistakes.”

“Yes, sir.” Jamie replied.

“This may be just a job to you, but this place is like a part-a-me. There’s over a decade of my blood, sweat, and tears within these walls. Not to mention the blood, sweat, and tears of those who’ve helped along the way. So, you can understand why I’m so . . . protective of it,” he said to Jamie.

“Completely,” Jamie replied.

“Good. Now that we’ve gotten that outta the way, let’s talk about what you’re going to do to rectify the situation.”

Jamie gnashed his teeth underneath a calm-face and prepared for the worse.

Here we go! He thought.

Bettencourt pondered his response before finally speaking.

“Starting Monday, your first priority is going to be getting us out of the mess we’re in with our advertisers as a result of that damn clip,” he said. “You’ll coordinate with marketing and advertising. You’ll stay late to work on it. Maybe an hour or two a night. Weekends. However long you need.”

Jamie was hesitant to accept, but knew he had no choice. That he still had a job was his only consolation.

“Yes, sir,” he replied glumly.

“As for Mr. Hayes. I’m afraid today will be his last with the company.”

The atmosphere at Sweet Sweat/Friggin’ Awesome Clips was slightly different on payday, more light-hearted and jovial, like Friday afternoon without the loud music and the lackadaisical attitude. Employees awaited the stuffed shirt from HR who went around handing out checks and lording over their distribution with his ring binder full of signatures. Everyone was required to sign before receiving their checks.

“Check man! Check man!” someone happily sang.

Lisa Pritz was going over the ins and outs of the job with Horace Figg—in the role of David, the new hire—when the check man appeared at the doorway of her cubicle. She was in mid-sentence, looking out through the bottom of her glasses, holding a sheet of paper in her hand that she read like she was rhyming off ingredients for a recipe.

“S & M. BDSM. Cum-swapping. Cum-drinking. Creampie. Squirters. Gapers. Anal tulip. Extreme gagging. Fisting.” She took her check and signed for it without looking up.

David sat in a chair beside her desk with a pamphlet and a few stacks of paper on his lap. His face registered horror at some of the terms she rattled off, all part of Horace’s performance.

“Spanking. Squashing. Face-sitting. Ass-licking. Pony riding. And diaper games.” Lisa happened to look up sensing David’s reaction. “What? D’ju think it was all just suckin’ and fuckin’?”

Her candor was off-putting.

“Don’t worry, hun,” she added. “This environment takes most people some time to get used to. If not, then there’s somethin’ wrong with ya.”

“That’s nice to know,” David replied sporting fake relief.

As Lisa handed him the sheet of paper . . .

“You’d do best to familiarize yourself with the terms.”

“Thanks,” David replied and placed the paper at the top of the stack on his lap.

Lisa scanned the top of her desk, and said, “I guess that’s everything.” Then she picked up a stack of DVDs and handed them to David. There were five altogether. “You can get started on these.”

David took the DVDs.

“Now remember, a screenshot every 10-minutes or so. Just enough to give the customer an idea of what they’re payin’ for.” Lisa said.

David was staring at the DVDs, concerned. They were all gay films. He flipped through the first three.

DVD #1

Title: Beach Buddies

Front cover: Two extremely fit men in Speedos sunning naked side-by-side on a beach.

DVD #2

Title: He Got Wood

Front Cover: A basketball player going up for a slam dunk as the other players surround him, their faces at his groin level. They all stare wantingly at the huge bulge in his shorts.

DVD #3

Title: Balls 2 Balls

Front Cover: Two men entangled in a strange position that enables their scrotum to touch.

“And try ta mix it up,” Lisa added. “If the movie’s got oral, and straight sex, and anal, let’s say, then you show a little bit of each.”

She picked up on David’s stolen focus and saw his liquefied features shifting through shock portrayals. Horace was so put off by the images on the DVDs that it pulled him out of character for a moment.

“Christ Almighty!” he whispered.

“Hey! You gettin’ all this?” Lisa inquired in a slightly raised voice.

“Yeah. I got it. Sorry,” David replied, climbing out of fluster. “Screenshot every 10-minutes. And mix it up.”

“Good. Cause it ain’t like I couldn’t be doin’ better things with my . . . ”

Something caught Lisa’s attention. It was Jamie. From where she sat, she could see the exact spot where the lobby opened up into the main office area just by peeking over the top of her cubicle wall. Jamie entered the ghetto looking angry and defeated. Lisa instantly forgot what she was saying, and watched him walk directly to his office and slam the door shut.

“Wonder what’s wrong with him?” she mumbled in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

“Excuse me?” David said, confused.

“Huh? Oh . .. Nevermind,” Lisa replied. “Just you go and get started on your screenshots. If you have any questions you can ask me or any one of the other editors.”

David stood and peeked in the direction that Lisa’s eyes had just come from, spotting Jamie’s closed door. Inside, the office’s sole occupant looked perplexed

Somethin’s afoot, he thought as he exited Lisa’s cubicle. Obviously the meeting hadn’t gone well. Did they fire him? He hoped not.

He thought back to this morning, watching from the wings as Jamie heard about the article he’d written. Horace still felt slightly guilty about it.

NINE

At that very moment, Ronnie Hayes sat on layers of folded toilet paper carefully placed atop the cold, sticky toilet seat, in the last stall of the subway concourse Men’s Room crying like a baby. It was an awful place to seek comfort, like a public restroom along the stairway to hell. The cover was missing from the overhead light fixture revealing its innards—dual fluorescent light tubes stuck on the ceiling side-by-side. The tube on the right shined with a halfhearted glow. The left one flickered to life every 30 seconds, and then snapped out. Used paper towels and cigarette butts and gum wrappers marinated in aromatic puddles. Toilets left unflushed or backed up with a strange brew of waste products floating in yellow-brown water. Stalls hand-decorated with limericks, and lizard-brain pussy jokes, and nonsensical scribblings.

It was a last resort kind of place, an only after you’ve held it until you can’t hold it anymore kind of place. A strictly “Number one” kinda place.

Ronnie Hayes had his reasons for being here with his pants in a heap around his ankles and his ass layers away from the nasty toilet seat. He had no choice once his colon started to flutter and his sphincter threatened to open involuntarily and let loose the rampaging load that gurgled and sloshed around his bowels dying to escape.

It happened as he walked the gauntlet from the lobby of the Lurmeyer Tower, and down the concourse stairs carrying the cardboard box full of his life over the past three years. He was on his way to the parking lot on 20th and Market where his car—an ‘09 Cadillac Escalade—was parked.

It was just Ronnie’s dumb luck that he had been holding off a mad dookie all morning while he worked on a few things he had brewing to put him back in a good light with the company. He intended to go to the bathroom when he was done. That way he could sit back and savor the dump while reflecting on well-laid plans. But an email chime interrupted him. The message was from Marc Pierce, and it read, “See me in my office.” That was when Marc dropped the bomb.

“I’m sorry, Ronald, but we’re gonna have to let you go,” Marc said as calm and cool as if he was shooting the breeze about his weekend. And he had called him Ronald. Everyone who knew Ronnie knew how much he hated being called Ronald.

The shock of being kicked to the curb had temporarily rearranged Ronnie’s priorities and pushed his body’s needs to the back of the line only to come back later with a vengeance. Sharp pain and cramping dropped him to his knees. He had to put down the box and push on his stomach with his hand to dampen the pain. Squeeze his buttocks to hold off the downward rumbling.

It was the only public restroom in the two-mile expanse of the underground complex, the only option to simply shitting himself right there in public. Not that it could’ve made him feel any worse than he already did. He doubted anything could do that.

Ronnie had used all his tricks, worked every angle. He’d even resorted to begging for his job back. But nothing worked. It made him want to hide his head from the world, to erase the sight of his puffy, weeping face from the memories of all the people who had seen him before he ran into the restroom with his hand held over his ass.

Being the only bathroom in the subway concourse, the place saw a constant flow of traffic in and out through the squeaky door that banged closed with an echo that slapped the air. Most of them took one look at the box overflowing with stationery sitting outside the last stall and went about their business. It was obvious that some poor dope had just gotten the “old heave-ho” from his job, especially when they heard the sobbing coming from inside the stall. Judging by the amount of papers, and file folders, and textbooks, and procedural manuals in the box, the poor dope had put in a few years at the place.

Sucks to be that guy, was the general reaction. Every fourth or fifth person would make it his business to try and console the sobbing stall.

“You okay in there, buddy?” they would say.

The dank, murky atmosphere, mixed with Ronnie’s mild homophobia, painted their concern lascivious in his mind. He had seen many-a-plot unfold the very same way. Besides, he was too upset to speak, sitting slumped forward on the toilet with his face in his hands.

Eventually someone walked into the stall next to his, sat down, and unleashed a torrent of flatulent, fecal explosions. This despite the other four unoccupied stalls.

Why the hell does this shithead have to use the stall right next to me? Didn’t he see the box of stationery? Doesn’t he know the rules of men’s room interaction?

His new neighbor’s leg grazed him. Ronnie flinched and snatched his leg away. He looked down to see a pair of ankles clothed in brown slacks draped over expensive dress shoes with extra pointy tips in the next stall. They looked like they were attached to someone important. The leg contact was probably an accident, so Ronnie was willing to let that slide, but as he looked closer . . .

He couldn’t be sure without sticking his head up under the stall and taking a look, but as far as Ronnie could tell, the man hadn’t ever pulled down his pants. He had clearly relieved himself, though. There was no mistaking the sound . . . or the smell. Maybe the man had shit his pants?

This was a stink for the ages, a rancid concoction of sulfur, methane and vile, unconscionable odors that couldn’t possibly have come from a human. Hot, putrid vapors burned away the surrounding oxygen and made it hard for Ronnie to breathe. He was hesitant to inhale as the thought of the pungent, ungodly wind coursing through his airways tickled his gag reflex. He squinted at the hot, stinky air, pinched his nostrils closed, and leaned away.

No ‘excuse me.’ No explanation or apology—for the choice of stalls, and/or the horrible sound, and/or the smell. No courtesy flush.

Not that Ronnie was into conversing with men in public restrooms, but this shit called for a “You’ll have to forgive me, but . . . ” or something along those lines. If he weren’t feeling so physically ill from being fired, Ronnie would’ve taken his box and gone elsewhere to feel sorry for himself.

Other people came and went. Five minutes passed . . . Ten . . . Fifteen . . .

The important legs in the next stall hadn’t made a sound or moved an inch since the original round of bubbling, liquid blasts, so Ronnie said “fuck it,” and went back to grieving.

What am I gonna do? He lamented. Echelon had given him a six-week, severance package, but Ronnie lived an extravagant lifestyle—to compensate for a lack of self-identity—and was in debt up to his ears.

Rent (Luxury Apartment) = $1800 a month

Utilities = $600

Car-note = $835

Cable (Comcast Gold Package) = $136

Food (he mostly dined out) = $500-$1000

Flash money (to impress the ladies and the porn starlets, and to silence the haters) = $500, at least.

The important-legs in the next stall were tapping the tips of their pointy shoes on the floor. It had been going on for a while in a weird, deliberate rhythm like they were trying to hone in on the frequency of Ronnie’s thoughts to disrupt them. And that’s exactly what the tapping had accomplished.

FUCK-king ASS-hole! Ronnie seethed as he slanted his head down and glared at the important legs.

The feet didn’t just stop, but instead froze in mid-tap, as soon as Ronnie’s eyes landed on them. They stayed that way, one pointed-tip raised, the other pointed down on its way to a meeting with the floor.

Ronnie got the idea that maybe there was a hole in the wall of the stall. Maybe Mr. Important Legs was watching him through that hole. He scanned the surface of the stall wall like a nervous insect. He checked the ugly tiled wall on his other side just to be sure. There was no hole that he could see.

Ronnie buried his face back into the palms of his hands and broke down crying. He didn’t even try to quiet the sobbing, simpering sniffles or to hold back the funny sounds he made with his voice. He sat there with his pants around his ankles, an emotionally beaten-up, and physically broken-down mess. Somewhere in the back of his mind he heard a few more people come and go, but then . . .

A voice floated above him, slightly muffled. It was making gibberish sounds like baby talk spoken in a foreign language. Possibly African. As he listened, his mind translated the sounds as something like, “Awe . . . Poor bab-beee . . . Wha did wittle bab-bee hurt himself . . . Does wittle bab-beee need his wittle mommee?”

Startled by the voice, Ronnie peeked through his fingers and saw . . .

There was Mr. Important Legs standing outside his stall. He was standing only inches away from the door; so close that his nose was probably touching it; so close that the pointy tips of his shoes were technically in the stall with Ronnie.

Ronnie yanked his hands away from his face, sprung to an upright-seated position, and stared quizzically at the feet that had invaded his personal space. His eyes moved to the space underneath the wall between his stall and the next one over. It was empty.

“Hey! What gives, man?!” Ronnie yelled at the door.

The baby talk stopped.

Ronnie reached down and fidgeted with his pants, ready to hike them up and get to his feet, but for the fact that he hadn’t wiped yet. He slowly leaned sideways and attempted to spy Important Legs from the knees up, through the vertical sliver between the door and the frame. He couldn’t see that far around front. Even still he found it strange that there wasn’t at least a hint of darkness from someone standing there taking up space.

As he watched, Important Legs took one robotic step backward, pivoted on the smooth, grip-less soles of his pointy-tipped shoes and pointed them at Ronnie’s box of stationery.

“Look, dude,” Ronnie said, unsure. “I just wanna be left alone. Okay?”

He noticed a shifting of weight in the important legs, and then . . .

The stationery box was snatched up off the floor.

Ronnie gasped and jumped in his seat. He wound up with his palms pressed against the walls on either side of him.

“Hey!” he yelled. “What the hell do you think yer—”

He heard Important Legs grunt. Then came the busy, crowded sound of books, and papers, and plastic bins, and holders full of pins, and rulers, and paper clips, and boxes of stapler ammo flying across the room, smacking into, and shattering against the tile wall, and splashing down in toxic puddles.

Ronnie lunged forward, shoved the door open, and came stumbling out of the stall with his pants around his ankles just in time to see Important Legs’ legs hightail it out of the bathroom.

Another man walked in before the door swung closed. It wasn’t even a full second later. The man gasped and stopped cold with his zipper pinched between his thumb and his index finger. The smell hit him next. The new guy cupped his hand over his nose and mouth and grimaced.

Ronnie stood there like a crook caught red-handed. Pants down, tightie-whities pulled halfway up and stretched like a hammock between his thighs. He possessed a pale, sickly hue, sunken eyes, and what looked like human teeth impressions all over his legs.

“Didn’t you see ‘em?” Ronnie asked the new guy. He was mystified that the man was standing: Important Legs had run out the door so fast, Ronnie should’ve been picking the new guy up off of the floor. But the man looked as good as new, save for a face twisted into some kind of death grimace at the smell.

“See who?” the new guy nervously replied through his hand. He was looking at Ronnie like he had two heads.

Chasing the man’s horrified gaze, Ronnie was reminded of the healing bite-marks that peppered his thighs. He then laid eyes on the fresh coating of smeared shit that loosely covered everything in sight—the walls, the sinks, the mirrors, the florescent tubing on the ceiling. He traced the smeared trail back to the stall he was sitting in. Someone had smeared shit on the door of the stall.

Oh God, Ronnie thought.

“Now wait a minute,” he said, pointing at the stall door. “You don’t think I did all this?”

The new guy wasn’t buying it.

Ronnie stretched his hand towards the fluorescent tubes, showing how they were at least a foot out of his reach.

“I can’t even reach that high,” he said. “It was the guy . . . the one who just ran out. You had to’ve seen ‘em! He must’ve set me up.” It sounded pretty far-fetched that Important Legs could have done that without Ronnie noticing. It would’ve taken a long time. But it was the only explanation.

The new guy walked backward, step-by-step, as if he feared that a full-on retreat might incite Ronnie—aka the sick, disgusting little man who shit all over the bathroom—to attack.

Ronnie shifted to a knock-kneed stance and then squatted, slid his pants up his legs, and fastened them around his waist. He took a few steps toward the new guy.

“Look. I’m telling you the truth,” he pleaded. “I would never . . . ”

But the man was already heading out the door.

Ronnie stood there, for a moment, his head still fried. The door banged shut. The echo slapped him alert. He retrieved the overturned box and then hurried around the room making spot inspections to assess the salvageability of the papers and books, and shattered pieces of things he held important, and then deciding whether or not to throw them in the box.

He liked to think that there was a body connected to the important legs, but all signs were pointing to them being just that; legs without a body. Which meant that he . . . it . . . Mr. Important Legs . . . was one of one of them. A thing that went bump in the night—and apparently in hellishly funky Men’s Rooms, too. This one seemed more playful than the others, though, but with an equally mean spirit. Until now, they were restricted to Ronnie’s apartment. He hadn’t been home in a week because of it.

The bathroom seemed to become darker and smaller all of a sudden. Ronnie couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Never mind washing his hands, or wiping his ass. Never mind his apprehension about running into the new guy, who was probably standing right outside the door waiting for him to exit so that he could point him out to his friends.

Ronnie scooped the box up in both hands and waited by the door, with his ear pressed against it, listening as the new guy described the scene inside the Men’s Room. Of course he blamed everything on Ronnie.

“Human feces?” an incredulous male voice inquired.

“Human feces, man,” the new guy responded. “Shit. The sick fucker smeared it all over the place. You shoulda seen it.”

“Yer kidding?”

“Take a look for yourself.”

“You saw him do it?” asked a female voice.

“Nah, but there was shit smeared all over the stall he came running out of with his pants down around his ankles. Looked like he was on drugs or something. He tried to blame it on some imaginary guy.”

“He’s still in there?” the female voice asked.

“Yeah. Unless he can walk through walls. Looked like he had teeth marks on his legs, too.”

“Teeth marks?”

The new guy was standing with two other people—a Nordic-looking blond man, and a mousy girl—when Ronnie came barreling out of the Men’s Room with his box held in front of him like a battering ram. They hastily parted to let him pass. Their faces were scrunched disgusted and afraid. The mousy girl’s eyes were bursting from her small face. Her mouth was hanging wide open. In the split second that Ronnie saw her he knew that she was one of those people who reacted that way to just about everything.

Ronnie was damn near running from the voices that echoed around the corner and down the long underground corridor and nipped at his back. From the sound of it, they had picked up a few followers since the chase started outside the Men’s Room.

“Somebudee stop that dude!” a young black man yelled. “He smeared crap all over the bathroom!”

Instead of trying to apprehend him, people flung themselves out of Ronnie’s way like he had the plague. Suited him just fine. That way he wouldn’t have to beat the shit out of some Good Samaritan.

He was running more to escape the thing in the bathroom. It had been teasing and tormenting him since the clip ran. It manifested in various forms. Maybe they were separate, like parts of a whole, or entirely unrelated, yet working together toward a collective goal. It could be as subtle as a feeling, like eyes watching him constantly or recognizing that his personal space had been breached, yet there was nothing there. It could be as tangible and real as a firm tap on the shoulder when he was home alone, a whisper in his ear as he slept, a terrible smell that came and went, floating patches of cold air, disconcerting sounds that suggested something awful lurking just out of sight, or in another room, the hint of movement in his periphery—always in the periphery. And last, but not least, the sensation of tiny invisible mouths full of human teeth that clamped down of his flesh when he least expected it. He figured that they were about the size of children’s mouths by measuring the bite radius with his thumb and middle finger.

The incidents or events were usually preceded by a peculiar set of sounds. Ronnie referred to these sounds as the presence. He hadn’t heard the presence back in the Men’s Room.

Ronnie had mostly saved his books. The bigger ones slid from end-to-end inside the box as he ran and made it a bit unwieldy.

He thought he heard someone yell about a transit cop.

Not good.

Fortunately, Ronnie had put enough distance between himself and the chasing voices by now that people weren’t really sure what was going on, just that there was some kind of drama, which was nothing out of the ordinary on any given day in the city.

TEN

David—aka Horace Figg—was sick of watching pretty-faced, overly muscled men fucking each other with conviction, and loving every minute of it. He wasn’t all that keen on watching straight people fuck unless it was to facilitate a jerk-off session, which generally led to chest pains these days. He looked away from the screen, eyes finding the abstract symbol on the wall placards. He had looked up the symbol last night, out of curiosity, and found that it closely resembled an old Voodoo charm, basically akin to a horseshoe. It had many uses. Most involved bestowing luck and good fortune upon the owner. One of the uses was to ward off evil spirits.

He looked back to the computer screen, grimaced once more at the thrusting, sliding, undulating masculinity. Legs intertwining. Skin slapping against skin. Deep voices interacting, grunting out aggression. Talking dirty. The grunting sounds reminded David of the noises that all the meatheads made in the back of all the gyms he had ever worked out in.

Ryan Gendler stuck his head in to check on the new hire and smiled at David’s retreating posture. He looked like an old-school vampire cowering from a cross.

David spotted Gendler at the doorway of his cubicle, and shook his head.

“You all right in here, old-timer?” Gendler chuckled as he walked up and stood over David.

That was the second time this kid had called him “old-timer.” He was quickly earning himself a spot on Horace’s shit list.

“Man alive!” David lamented. “I’m all for gay rights, but I’m not sure how much more of this I can stomach.”

“The initiation, man,” Gendler said after a good laugh. “We all had to go through it.”

“I never thought I’d actually have to sit through an entire gay porn film, though. Let alone five of ‘em.”

“Well, you don’t have to . . . technically speaking.”

David made a funny face.

“It’s kinda like Echelon’s final test to see if you’re here just to watch porn,” Gendler explained.

The reporter inside David reacted with suspicion.

They can’t do that. Alarm bells rang. Inappropriate business practices! Discrimination! Call the police!

Twenty-five years ago, Horace Figg would’ve been all over that. As David, the middle-aged flunkee, he had to play it relatively cool.

“Yeah, man,” Gendler said. “We handle everything here. Well . . . almost everything. Even Echelon’s got some standards.”

“What about that guy, Parkson? He’s gay, right? What’d they make him sit through straight porn?”

“You know, that’s a good question,” Gendler wondered like a stranger to analytical thought. “I never actually thought about that. He was hired way before me, though, so I don’t know how they initiated him.”

Someone else joined Ryan Gendler in the doorway.

“Hey Gendler,” they said.

“Yeah?” Gendler replied, mildly startled.

David recognized the voice. Shifting down to sneak mode, he peeked through Gendler’s arms, which were extended and locked, bracing his body as he leaned on David’s desk. David saw Jamie standing there, looking spent. Their eyes met briefly. Alarm bells rang. You’re busted! He’s going to recognize you!

“Can I see you in my office for a minute?” Jamie said to Gendler, who feigned apprehension, and then smiled.

“Sure,” Gendler replied. Then he turned to David and gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Hang in there, old timer. You’ll be all right.”

Ryan Gendler followed Jamie into the office. Jamie closed the door behind them and directed Gendler to the chair across from his desk.

Jamie leaned against the outer edge of his desk, half-standing, half-sitting. He held his arms across his chest. Looking down at Gendler with interrogating eyes, he seemed to be searching for the right way to broach an uncomfortable subject.

Sensing an uncomfortable moment, Gendler threw his hands up.

“I didn’t do it, officer,” he smiled.

Jamie didn’t laugh.

“I know this is going to sound weird coming from me,” Jamie said, “but you wouldn’t have a joint you could spare?”

Really now, Gendler’s inner voice adopted a Jamaican accent. But then his mind jumped paranoid. Maybe it was a set-up.

“A what?” Gendler said it like he had never heard of a joint before. It was a panic move, and a bad one at that.

“Oh, c’mon, man,” Jamie scolded. “I know that you disappear for like 10 minutes every morning to go get high somewhere. You think just cause I get to work on time and do my job well that I don’t smoke a little weed?”

“I never said—”

“I just have enough sense not to do that shit at work.”

Gendler was a little confused. Should he feel relieved or worried?

“Relax, man. You’re a good editor,” Jamie said. “That’s all I really care about. I’m just having an extremely bad, fucking day, and I feel like if I don’t do something to calm myself down, I’m gonna go off on somebody.”

Balconies stacked ten stories high were carved into the north side of the Lurmeyer Tower. The view—the ugly side of the next skyscraper over—was underwhelming. An alleyway at the bottom snaked between the buildings. Warm, stinky air carried up from the street on the back of a breeze, established a musty atmosphere that seemed unhealthy to breathe. Clunky air-conditioning units stuck halfway out of large windows of beveled glass in the adjacent building. The units made entirely too much noise. For that fact, and that the Lurmeyer was notorious for coming down hard on smokers who violated the city’s anti-smoking law, only the hardcore cigarette fiends came out here for a fix. If you leaned over the balcony railing and listened over the air conditioners, you could hear traces of their stealthy, smoke-lounge conversations wafting up or trickling down from the sixth floor, where the balcony doors were the most loosely monitored. Generally smokers traveled there from other floors just to use the sixth-floor balcony. Everyone else went out front and down the block rather than break the law.

And then there were the pigeons with whom the rebellious smokers shared the balconies. Perched en mass on the railings, the balconies proper, and any protruding surface they could find along the building’s facade, the birds laid claim to the area with excrement, which they dropped anywhere they pleased. It was like a game trying to find the least shat-upon area to stand and smoke.

The building’s management tried everything to get rid of the pigeons—poison, spraying them with water, whacking them. They might kill a few and send a few more fluttering for their lives. But the pigeons always came back. And each time there seemed to be more. The most they could do was spray-wash the shit-layer once a month.

On the highest (tenth floor) balcony, Jamie and Ryan Gendler were alone with the pigeons. The door leading inside was wedged slightly open by a piece of wood carved into a triangle. The entire tenth floor had been vacant since the fire a year and a half ago. It started in the kitchen suite of a law office and quickly engulfed the whole floor before the fire department got the flames under control. The damage was mostly cosmetic and building management promised speedy repairs. But Mr. Lurmeyer was notoriously tight with his money, and balked at the cost. The floor sat vacant while his people searched for a contractor to do the job for a price he could live with. Everyone they approached so far had turned them down. That was the story that passed from watercooler to watercooler.

Abandoned + top floor (nothing but the roof and sky above to smell the rising aroma) = Weed smoker’s haven. So, for the time being, the tenth floor balcony became the “at work spot.”

The pigeons refused to move even when Jamie nudged one with his foot. The damn thing just sidestepped twice, flapping wildly, and then settled into a new spot inches away from the previous one.

Gendler was standing in a clearing over in the corner taking pleasure in Jamie’s efforts to negotiate a truce with the pigeons. He was going about it all wrong. Gendler pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pants pocket, and took two cigarettes out.

“Over here,” he called out.

Jamie created a temporary path by kicking his legs in front of him, and then walked over to Gendler. He was breathing heavily by the time he reached him.

“You sure this ain’t some kinda sting operation?” Gendler half-joked as he slid the pack back into his pocket.

“Yeah, nigga. And I’m wearin’ a wire,” Jamie sarcastically replied.

“Hey, man. You never know. You seemed pretty pissed at me in the bathroom yesterday.”

“So, what? I’m gonna have you arrested for making a joke?”

Gendler smirked at his own paranoia.

“I guess not,” he said and handed Jamie one of the cigarettes.

Jamie paused, looked down at the cigarette, and then back up at Gendler’s face.

“You’re kidding, right?” he asked.

“You’ll see.”

Eyeing Gendler with suspicion, Jamie took the cigarette.

Gendler pulled a Zippo lighter with a skull painted over a biohazard symbol on its face from his left hip pocket. He pulled a short, stubby pipe made of aluminum and rubber from the right pocket.

“There’s a whole process,” Gendler assured Jamie.

“Oh. You’ll have to excuse me for not being up on my smoking-weed-at-work etiquette.”

Gendler lit his cigarette, took a drag and then quickly exhaled the smoke. Pinched between his fingertips and thumb, he rolled the cigarette, switching fingers and held it out of the way while he put the stubby pipe to his lips and lit the other end. He took a drag, quick and deep, and then held it in.

Jamie was impressed with Gendler’s dexterous fingerwork. This guy was a frickin’ Jedi at undercover weed smoking. How he exhaled, long and slow, ending with a cough and then quickly puffing the cigarette, letting his head oscillate as he blew out.

“First of all . . . you use the cigarette smoke to mask the weed smell. If anyone happens to come out here—which they never do, by the way—then you’re covered. See?”

Gendler pantomimed the smoking process.

“Why even bother trying to hide it if nobody ever comes out here,” Jamie asked.

“You never know, man,” Gendler said as he made his way over to the railing and scanned the scenery. Jamie was impressed at how easily Gendler handled the pigeons, simply kicking them aside with each step. They moved and settled without the panicked flutter of wings. “Remember those construction workers that got busted smoking weed? It was a couple years ago . . . ”

“They were working high up or something. Right?” Jamie suggested as the memory begin to gestate.

“Yep. On the top floors of Liberty Place, when they were still building it. They were sitting on a girder during their lunch break. Thought they were safe way up there, but somebody in the next building over saw them and dropped dime.”

“That’s a fucking asshole, right there. Granted, I wouldn’t want a construction crew I hired to work on my building to be getting’ high on the job.”

“I don’t even know how they can do that and not get all paranoid working way up there. Walking around on those girders and everything.”

“Yeah. You can have that shit.” Jamie snickered.

Gendler handed the stubby pipe and the lighter to Jamie and reiterated, “Just take a drag from the cigarette right after you hit this,” he gestured to the pipe, “and blow it out right away.”

Jamie followed Gendler’s directions and immediately started coughing. Gendler pat him on the back until the coughing fit subsided.

“I don’t think anyone’s gonna mistake me for a smoker,” Jamie joked catching his breath. His eyes were red and welled up with tears. He took a series of deep breaths and then repeated the stubby pipe-to-cigarette process, only this time he didn’t cough. He felt silly when Gendler said, “There you go,” as he blew out the hit.

Jamie handed the stubby pipe and lighter back to Gendler, who asked, “You cool?” and waited for Jamie to nod “Yes,” before putting them back in his pocket.

It became strangely quiet. Gendler stood over by the railing savoring every last drag of his cigarette. Jamie was standing nearby, making faces in testament to the marijuana’s potency. His mind was all over the place, drifting aimlessly, sedated and fluffy and overly introspective.

At some point Jamie walked up to the railing and looked over. It was a long way down.

“So, what happened today?” Gendler inquired.

Jamie’s response-time was retarded by crowded thoughts. He lifted his head out of the figurative clouds and said, “Huh?”

“—that made you want to smoke some weed?” Gendler responded and then started laughing at Jamie’s highness. “You are officially baked, mah brotha.”

“Maybe a little too baked,” Jamie said and kneaded his face with his hands as if to work out the funny feeling. “It’s just this place in general. I don’t know if I can do it anymore. Plus, I just found out that the girl I’ve been crushing on for the past month and a half is an actress upstairs.”

Gendler perked up and said, “Who?”

“Calls herself Sterling Silver.”

“The new girl?” Gendler said smiling devilishly. “Yeah, she’s smokin’, man.”

“I used to see her on the train lookin’ all sweet and innocent. I told myself that I’d ask her out once I got outta this place. Like I didn’t want to expose her to it. Pretty corny, hunh?”

“You saw them filming?”

“Nah. Right after. She came in all upset about having to do a DP scene.”

“DP?! Awe man! Now that’s hot.”

Jamie shot a glare at Gendler that instantly shut down his adulation. A few moments passed.

“You always seemed like one of those ‘I love my job,’ type-a-dudes,” Gendler said to Jamie.

“It’s called a game plan, homes. You gotta play the game if you wanna get ahead. I ain’t trying to work here for the rest of my life.”

“I just look at it like; where else can I go to work in jeans and a T-shirt, smoke weed, and look at naked chicks all day? And get paid for it?”

“You’ve been here for what? Six months?”

“Four actually.”

“Give it time. You’ll feel differently. Trust me.”

Gendler took one last drag and then put his cigarette out against the wall.

“Well, I gotta get back to my desk,” he said holding the door open wide enough for him to slide through.

“Oh, so now you’re all eager to get back to work,” Jamie replied.

“To be honest, this whole ‘smoking-weed-with-my-boss,’ thing is sort of weirding me out. You know? Like I keep expecting cops or ninjas or something to jump out.”

Jamie laughed. It was probably the most genuine laugh he’d had in a while. It made him feel good.

“Thanks for the smoke,” he said afterward, still smiling.

“Ah . . . Any time?” Gendler put on an unsure face, but he was only being facetious. “No, seriously, though. Just make sure you close the door all-the-way when you come in. And leave the doorstop outside.”

“No prob.”

As Gendler started to walk inside . . .

“Oh! And this never happened,” Jamie said. “Got it?!”

“What never happened?” Gendler replied, looking over his shoulder, and then he disappeared inside and closed the door against the wedge.

“Atta boy.”

ELEVEN

What’s wrong with this picture? Jamie playfully lamented, standing on a carpet of Pigeon shit, stoned out of his mind, and nursing a lit cigarette—a Menthol. It helped him to understand the appeal—the stolen moments of freedom, unbound by workplace etiquette, spent mingling with like-minded folks looking for more honest human interaction, or spent alone with your own thoughts. Either way had its merits.

The marijuana had eased a tension that Jamie was previously unaware of. It spread from the small of his back up to his shoulders, and around the back of his neck. The release left him feeling light and airy, like he might take flight if he pushed off too hard with his feet.

Jamie kept catching himself staring, stupidly, like a drunk, at insignificant things and mounting complex dissertations on them.

•You’d think they (pigeons) would be wearier of us (humans), we being so much larger than they are.

•Maybe the shit-carpet is the pigeons’ way of marking their territory.

•What’s the point of having these balconies if people can’t use them? How much would it take to clean these things (balconies) up and set some outdoor furniture out here? And maybe some plants . . .

•What’s taking Mr. Lurmeyer so long to fix up this floor?

•What the hell are they (smokers on the sixth-floor balcony) talking about down there?

The smokers sounded angry about something. Their voices were speaking in some kind of African-sounding dialect. A familiar sense of envy followed, Jamie being black and feeling detached from his cultural base. He leaned over the railing and turned his ear to the voices, which stopped as soon as he honed in on their exact location.

He turned and looked down at the sixth-floor balcony and saw no sign of people. Maybe someone had caught them smoking. Maybe that someone was building security. The thought set butterflies aflutter in Jamie’s empty belly. He couldn’t afford to get caught out here. Not with everything that was going on. Bettencourt would most definitely fire him then, maybe even bring him up on charges for the weed, which he was sure they would find out about. If his behavior didn’t give him away, then it would be Gendler blabbing to his friends that he smoked with the boss. In retrospect, Jamie felt incredibly naïve for assuming that he could do something like that without word getting around.

Jamie inspected the area for anything that he might’ve set down, and then started walking toward the door when he heard a voice again on six. It belonged to a man. He sounded angry, like he was mumbling a perpetual string of indecipherable complaints a la Popeye, the Sailor.

“Wait til I get my hands on you, you little expletive! I’m gonna tear you limb-from-limb and rip out cher heart and . . . ” the man seemed to be mumbling. But there was something not quite right here: the man was speaking in the same African-sounding dialect as the previous voices.

Jamie tiptoed to the edge of the balcony and looked over the railing. The voice stopped as if it were snatched away. He focused on the sixth-floor balcony. Nothing but bird shit and cigarette butts. But then he caught sight of something in the corner of the balcony. The way it gradually materialized in his peripheral vision made Jamie think it had been there the whole time, watching him.

Jamie turned only partially and then flung himself back away from the railing. He choked on his last breath and began to cough. The face he saw looking back at him from the corner of the sixth floor balcony was one that he never, ever wanted to see again. Its features were human enough, but not entirely. They were arranged in a lunatic expression possibly meant to mock or intimidate or inspire horror.

Jamie could hear his heart pounding as if it was right inside his ears. That face had startled him so badly that his mind was wiped clean for a moment while he stood there taking long breaths to allay his shock. Although it tried, Jamie refused to let his mind recreate those features and that expression. For now he was satisfied to leave it at What the fuck was that?!

Two minutes later and Jamie was up for another look. A face like the one he saw demanded explanation. He walked back over to the railing, this time mentally prepared for what he might see.

Jamie looked over the railing at the corner of the sixth-floor balcony. There was no one there.

The threat of falling 100 feet to the alley below suddenly became very real to Jamie. It would be as easy as climbing over the railing and pushing off. But why the hell would he do something like that? Why was he even thinking it? The thoughts had come to him like suggestions whispered in his ear by some other person.

Jamie whipped around, stirred by a feeling that his personal space had been breached from behind. He sensed someone skulking around. As far as he could see, he was all alone on the tenth-floor balcony, standing on a carpet of pigeon shit, stoned out of his mind, and nursing a lit . . .

“Ow! Fuck!” Jamie cried out and shook his arm violently, his hand flailing, fingers snapping at the burning sensation. Afterward, he put his index and middle fingers in his mouth and ran the tip of his tongue over the spot where the cigarette burned down to the butt and singed them. He tasted a twinge of rawness. Then he inspected his fingers for a mark, which he was sure he’d find considering how badly they stung. There was only a pinprick of redness.

An unnatural noise materialized in the air between buildings. It was the same sound —like Big Daddy Kane and King Ghidorah—that Jamie had heard yesterday. And it was coming from an alley not unlike the one 100 feet below the balcony. Maybe it had something to do with sound passing through tight spaces. But that wouldn’t account for the sense of presence. It felt like he was standing in a moderately crowded room full of people who didn’t like him very much.

Jamie returned to his office long enough to check his email, download the attachments that Zane Bettencourt sent him regarding his punitive assignment, print them out, load them into his shoulder bag along with the DVDs that Keri gave him earlier—to work on at home—and a half-finished bottle of Kiwi-Strawberry Snapple, fasten the flap, and sling the strap across his torso. He was taking deep breaths to slow his racing heart, which he hoped would similarly affect the sweating, trembling hands, nausea, fear, and good old-fashioned Marijuana-induced paranoia. It took him three tries to shut down his computer his hands were shaking so badly.

Someone quietly wrapped on Jamie’s half-open office door. It was Keri’s knock. She stuck her head in.

“There you are,” she said and walked in before Jamie could invite her; something she normally didn’t do. She was talking before she even entered. “I’ve been looking for you since I got back from . . . ” And then she realized that something was wrong with Jamie, physically. He was white as a ghost, clammy, and sporting a discombobulated expression.

“What’s the matter?!” Keri asked, excited. “Don’t tell me he fired you?!”

Jamie looked up at Keri for a second and then performed a final visual sweep of his desktop to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything.

“Not now, Keri,” he said.

“Well, aren’t you at least gonna tell me what happened? Lisa said she saw you storm into your office earlier. Then I couldn’t find you. I was worried.”

“He didn’t fire me. Okay!” Jamie snapped.

Keri recoiled from his anger, and wrinkled her face as if to scold Jamie with her expression. “What are you yelling at me for?” said her features.

Feeling bad for his outburst, Jamie calmed down and apologized to Keri.

“I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Keri smiled.

He backtracked to the meeting, which strangely was of little consequence now. Getting home without losing his mind was his main concern. He couldn’t remember the last time he was as high as he felt. Maybe he came close a few times in college, but even then he didn’t hallucinate like he did out on the balcony just now.

“Bettencourt basically made me his bitch for the next few months as punishment for the clip,” he said. “I felt too stupid to even mention a screenwriting job after that. Prolley woulda just laughed at me, anyway.”

Perhaps detecting deception in Jamie’s forced calm, Keri asked, “You sure there’s not something else?” And then she searched his expression for something that might indicate what that ‘something else’ might be.

Damn, Girl! Jamie thought of Keri’s persistence. But a part of him welcomed it. Maybe he should tell her about the face on the sixth-floor balcony. She would probably try her best to believe him, to find some way to satiate his fear. Or maybe she would just twist her pretty face the way she did when she thought he was being insincere or mean. Like just now when he barked at her.

“I gotta get outta here, Keri. I’m sorry,” Jamie said as he curled his fingers around the strap of his shoulder bag and headed for the door. “Tell Marc I got sick or something.”

He glanced sheepishly in Keri’s direction and smiled as he walked past her.

“Wha? Where are you going?” Keri whined.

“Home. I’ll call you later. I promise,” he said on his way out the door.

Jamie was looking forward to the journey home to allay his scattershot thoughts with some good music. The concert began as soon as he walked out of the third-floor lobby and stood waiting for one of the four elevators. Scrolling through musical categories on his iPod, he stopped on “Ambient Soundtrack Mix” and pushed “shuffle,” and then, “play.” He waited for the bot to select a song, “Bus Station” by Tangerine Dream from the Near Dark Soundtrack, and then set his posture on slouch as he watched the light number above elevator #2 come down from 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 . . .

The elevator dinged and the doors glided open. Jamie didn’t realize it was lunchtime until he saw the crowd inside. It was such that he instantly thought of the elevator’s maximum weight capacity, and looked for the placard addressing such, but it must have been posted where he couldn’t see it from outside the elevator. The crowd was squeezed together so tightly that the contact, in some cases, could’ve qualified as intimate.

Jamie decided to pass on the crowded box. As long as he had his music, which wasn’t doing the trick, as he’d hoped—not yet anyway—he didn’t mind waiting.

Elevator #1 dinged next. There were only two other people on board when the doors glided open. Jamie had picked up some company while he waited—a small crowd of lunch revelers from Echelon. Jamie’s dope-tinged mind thought suddenly of the clock on the wall at the front of the main office area. It was always around five minutes slower than the clock on his computer, and seven minutes slower than his cell phone. Of the two, he trusted his cell phone clock the most.

Most folks in the ghetto looked to the clock on the wall as a momentary distraction from the tedium of their duties. It could bring hope, like when it was closer to lunch or the end of the day than a person expected it to be when they looked up. And it could bring disappointment, like when the seconds lasted whole minutes and the minutes lasted hours.

A few of Jamie’s colleagues were angling for conversation as they waited for the elevator, desirous of an answer to some question about work, and most likely a stupid one. Or worse yet, they were looking to engage Jamie in the proverbial office small talk. But Jamie kept his head pointed forward, his music turned up loud enough to deter the conversationalists, and his eyes locked on the descending numbered lights on Elevator #1.

By the time his fellow employees filed into the elevator it was just as crowded as the first one. Jamie found a fingerprint smudge on the inside of the elevator door and spent the trip down to the lobby staring at it and nodding his head in contrast to the soothing melody that oozed from his headphones. He knew that the other occupants could hear the music, and would probably think it strange that he was nodding his head to it, but he didn’t care. His mind was grasping for anything to keep him from having to interact and give away his stupefied euphoric state.

Jamie walked through the lobby with blinders on, the stairwell leading down to the subway concourse in his crosshairs. He stopped when he noticed two men working on the double doors at the bottom. One of the men was using a welding torch. Sparks flying everywhere. A “Men Working” sign, placed halfway down the stairs, cordoned off the area. Placing it there, where people couldn’t see it until they reached the top step seemed, to Jamie, like a cruel joke.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Jamie grumbled and panned his eyes over to and out the glass front doors. As usual he saw protestors waving signs and chanting. His worried eyes tracked up to the sky as his memory reproduced the unnatural noises from before.

Jamie hurried down the busy street, chased by an army of footsteps that he could hear over the music from his headphones. He tried to block out the sight of people in front of and behind him, thinking that their footsteps would go away with them, but as hard as he tried, he just couldn’t bury the noise. He remembered having to leave a crowded party back in college because he could hear every last conversation. This was something like that, only he was much, much higher.

Jamie felt pressured to say or do something about the footsteps. But he had already been made a fool of in public once this week. Any reaction that he might settle on in his current state would surely come off as egregious to the people around him. From the sound of their footsteps, they were many.

You’re making too much of a completely normal situation, Jamie told himself. Just put it out of your mind and keep walking. The sooner we get to the train, the sooner we get home, where he could hide out until he came down from this cloud.

Jamie fixed his focus on the subway entrance as it bounced from side-to-side in his sights, and long-stepped it toward the two short walls and the stairway leading down into the city’s guts. It was up ahead fifty . . . now sixty . . . now seventy feet and continuing to move further away along with the corner upon which it was located.

Jamie stopped walking, and the subway entrance stopped moving further away. He performed a double take that looked right out of a slapstick comedy. He took a single step and watched as the end of the block, which included the subway entrance, stretched forward a few feet. Then a thought occurred to him.

What if Gendler laced the weed with . . .

He reached breaking point right in the middle of his thought. Maybe it was the thought that brought it on. Maybe it was the footsteps, which did their part in breaking his concentration. Suddenly they had become too much to bear. Without warning, Jamie erupted in a fit of jittery, paranoid anger. He snatched the headphones from his ears and performed a 30-degree spin toward the loudest footsteps, which were coming from right behind him. He was already shouting before he was completely turned around.

“Would you please stop . . . ” he was caught, though only for a second, between ‘stepping’ and ‘walking,’ “ . . . WALKING so fucking loud!”

There was no one behind him. In fact, he was completely alone on that side of the street save for the people previously in front of him, who had continued walking when he first stopped in reverence of the moving subway entrance. Those folks were at the far corner (next to the subway entrance) waiting to cross the street. There were a few people who had been walking in Jamie’s direction before he spun around. They had stopped, intimidated by his raised voice, his crazy tone, and the weirdness of his demand.

Jamie was stunned. Apparently the footsteps, like the moving subway entrance, the face on the sixth-floor balcony, and the unnatural noise, had been a figment of his altered imagination. Standing there, hang-jawed and dumb, he happened to look across the street and saw an inordinate amount of people standing on the pavement, as if they had gone over there on purpose to get away from something . . . or someone. But this had to have happened long before his outburst.

Most of the people were throwing screw-faced expressions at Jamie, like he had done something not only wrong, but something abnormal. Or were they looking past him?

Jamie tensed up at the sudden suspicion of a presence somewhere behind him in the nearby. It was the exact same feeling he’d had on the balcony. Slow, and reluctant, he half-turned so that his peripheral vision spied movement on the wall, five feet away. A shadow perhaps. His shadow. It had to be as he was the only person standing close enough to the wall.

The shadow’s movement seemed to contradict Jamie’s. He (Jamie) was standing still, not perfectly, but close. Like an evil mime reveling in Jamie’s ignorance of its performance, the shadow appeared to be doing a silly dance, then it was acting paranoid, then pretending to cry all ‘boo-hoo style,’ and rubbing its eyes with its fists. After that it pointed at Jamie and pantomimed deep laughter.

Of course, this was all witnessed in a split second, under mental duress, and from the corner of Jamie’s eyes. The movement stopped abruptly as soon as the shadow was more than a hint in his peripheral vision. When that happened, the shadow hurried to copy Jamie’s stance, and then to follow his movements, like it was currently doing quite expertly now that he faced it full on. It even had dangling headphone cords that matched Jamie’s.

Jamie looked across the street thinking that this time he had witnesses. Thankfully, they were still there looking his way with odd curiosity. Their faces suddenly lit up. A number of the people flinched, and then pointed at him . . . behind him. Jamie knew what that meant. The shadow was moving again. And then . . .

Somewhere in the air above him, Jamie heard a hint of the haunted underwater alarm. He didn’t acknowledge either thing. Doing so would probably put him over the edge. Instead, he took off running toward the subway entrance.

TWELVE

Jamie was skipping steps as he ran down them and into the subway station. A train, packed with passengers, was sitting idle on the tracks as people continued to board it. Jamie ran through the station, weaving around and arching away from unsuspecting folks, and onto the train. He pushed against the fleshy barrier with his back to put some space between himself and the doorway. The barrier pushed back, but he had gained a couple inches. Still Jamie leaned away when the doors hissed closed.

He heard people complaining about a bad smell, but paid it no attention. He was watching the stairs through the train’s blurred and scuffed windows, and waiting impatiently for it to start moving.

“C’mon. C’mon. C’mon,” Jamie urged under his breath as he scanned the entire station. Dirty tile walls, turnstiles and ticket booths, and automatic token dispensers.

He wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for, but he paid special attention to the dark areas and the shadows cast by suspicious-looking folks.

The train jolted, and then started to move. The crowd swayed in unison to the sudden motion, but gave it no further acknowledgement.

A number of stops later . . .

The train was even more crowded than before. Jamie’s mind had come down from red alert status and leveled off on perturbed. Here he was, stuck in the middle of another fucking crowd. Any other day it would be a non-factor, but today . . . at this very moment, it was downright torture for Jamie to keep from losing it at anything that caused him to deviate from the process he needed to employ in order to get home as fast as possible and without incident.

Jamie was squashed between two bodies; one in front, one behind. He favored one over the other based on the train’s movement. The train hugged a corner and the centrifugal force pushed Jamie forward and into the expansive valley between the ample ass cheeks of the pear-shaped woman in front of him. Her thighs and ass were disproportionately large, with a soft, fluffy texture that seemed to go on forever as the force continued to push the man behind Jamie into his back, which pushed Jamie deeper into the valley. From what he could see of the pear-shaped woman’s reflection in the window, she had a pretty face—beautiful, in fact. But her size kept Jamie from seeing her that way. He liked a plump ass on a woman, but hers was ridiculous.

Jamie felt a strange sensation on his thigh, a slight pressure that quickly turned painful. He cried out and snatched his leg away from the sensation, which registered in his mind as teeth clamping down. He could only move so much, yet the pain required more space to appreciate its intensity. His sudden movement disrupted the pear-shaped woman’s footing. She yelped and stumbled forward reaching blind for anything to grab hold of. Her clumsy weight caused a chain-reaction. Passengers fell into one another. A few of them hit the floor. Those who were able to, shoved back. Expletives came from every direction.

“It was him!” said the pear-shaped woman, pointing at Jamie, who the crowd had heard cry out.

An angry man lunged at Jamie and gripped him up by his shirt like a schoolyard bully.

“What-chu lookin’ ta catch a beatdown, mah-fucka!” he growled. This was a hardened-looking dude with a face that classified him as ‘someone not to fuck with’ in most people’s eyes.

Jamie whipped his head toward the man and met his anger with demented alarm. Fearing that he might have underestimated this clean-cut brotha (Jamie), the angry man relaxed his grip, and then let go of Jamie’s shirt.

Jamie’s attention shifted back to the hot, pulsating stinging in his thigh, and the unnatural noises that seemed to suddenly fill his head.

Another bite . . . This one was on his arm—his good arm, right around the bicep.

Groaning at the pain, Jamie snapped away from the bite. Although the other passengers were prepared this time, a few of them still got hit or shoved. And then . . .

Many bites . . . happening all over his body. An aggressive, alien buzzing accentuated the unnatural noise. Jamie thrashed about screaming and swatting himself.

People started shoving each other to give Jamie some space to perform his screaming, swatting dance. He was yelling, “Stop it! Stop it!” And, “They’re all over me!”

Light from the next station intruded on the tunnel’s mostly dark reign. Pushing with their bodies, the passengers had created a small clearing in which Jamie danced, and spun, and swatted himself, and screamed, “Stop! Please just . . . Arrrgh!”

He was positioned by the doors, beside a short row of now empty seats. People dug their feet in as the train slowed and then bucked to a stop.

Distracted by the invisible teeth, Jamie was unprepared when motion was yanked from underfoot. He stumbled into the doors, bounced, and fell on the ground thrashing and screaming.

He struggled to get up.

The doors opened and let in new sounds and smells. Jamie came running off the train like a crazy man.

“Get ‘em offa me!” he screamed. “Get em offa . . . ”

Then it occurred to him that the biting had stopped. In fact, it had stopped 20 seconds ago. There had been so many bites that the residual, pulsating, stinging, heat from the fresh wounds made it seem like he was still being attacked. The unnatural noise, sans the alien buzzing, was still with him though, floating in the middleground as if it had fallen back to let Jamie tire himself out before moving in to finish him off. At least that was the sense that he got.

Jamie wished he could vanish and be magically whisked away from this place. The station was fairly crowded. People had stopped what they were doing to investigate the screaming crazy man whose echoed cries had reached way down the connecting subterranean walkways.

He looked down at his legs, then his arms, thinking that the invisible teeth had ripped through his clothing. There was not a rip or tear in sight. Did that mean that it was all in his head?

“Somebodee stop him!” a voice yelled from behind.

Jamie turned and saw the people on the train glaring at him. The doors were still open and some of the passengers were standing on the platform just outside of the train. Two men were assisting a woman whose nose had been bloodied.

Shit! Did I do that? Jamie wondered.

The train operator had come out of his booth and was making his way toward the woman with the bloody nose. Apparently she was missing a few teeth as well.

Jamie backed away fearing the worse. Police. Jail. Unemployment. His mother lecturing him about everything he was doing wrong with his life. Before he knew it, he was running up the steps and out into the street. He could vaguely hear commotion down in the station, as if maybe someone had decided to come after him.

Jamie ran in the front door of his house like he had to pee. He had jogged the first ten blocks from the train station on 15th street and walked the remaining fifteen at a brisk pace. He had traveled out of his way a block or two just to stay on a street with a good amount of people around in case the unnatural noises, which hung back and followed him the whole way, decided to make a move. Other than that, he refused to look back and acknowledge them, fearing that doing so would incite whatever they were to attack.

Breathing heavily, Jamie slammed the door shut, rested his forehead against it, and waited for his breathing to return to a normal pace. Then he ran around the first floor of his house closing all of the blinds. Afterward he crouched next to the living room window, peeked out between the closed slats and scrolled through unlikely scenarios in his head.

Scenario #1

Police cars pull up in front. Police officers jump out and crouch behind their cars with their guns drawn. Some random officer tries to talk him out with a bullhorn. “Jamie Cole. We know you’re in there,” he would say. “Come out with your hands above your head and no one will get hurt.”

Scenario #2

An angry mob of passengers from the train run down his block. They aren’t sure which house Jamie lives in. One of them takes a wild guess. “This one,” the man says pointing at Jamie’s house. The angry mob runs up the front steps and starts banging on the door. “Come out you sonofabitch! You’re gonna pay for what you did to that poor woman!”

Scenario #3

People run screaming down Jamie’s block dancing in circles and swatting at their own bodies. Slivers of clothing flying from their bodies as they are eaten alive by invisible teeth.

But none of that happened.

Jamie could still hear the unnatural noises coming from somewhere outside his front door. They were moving up and down the block as if looking for someone. The sounds were loud enough that the people who occasionally walked by should’ve heard them as well. But they gave no indication that they had.

So what the fuck is going on here? Jamie asked himself while simultaneously searching for an answer. Stress, maybe? But that seemed too easy an answer; too convenient. Besides, this hadn’t been his first brush with stress, nor his worst. That would’ve been around the time he was in his late teens and searching for a father figure that wasn’t there.

Jamie considered himself too intelligent to entertain the thought that buzzed around the back of his mind—that there was some supernatural cause behind the events that he befallen him. Yet it still hovered back there waiting for him to let it in.

His legs had fallen asleep beneath him as he crouched there by the window. He tried to stand and was rocked by searing pain from his legs and arms. Though aware of the bites the entire time he crouched by the window, the pain had taken a back seat to his mental confusion. Plus, it didn’t make sense that his clothes were intact.

Jamie cried out at the pain. His legs buckled beneath him. He fell over and caught himself with his arms, which hurt almost as badly. Like before, it was a hot sensation, stinging, and pulsating like he imaged cartoon characters would’ve felt when they injured themselves and sported a huge, throbbing appendage.

Jamie staggered to his feet. Groaning with each step, he made his way up the stairs and into the bathroom. He turned on the shower and cranked the cold water as far right (on) as it would turn, peeled off his clothes, and jumped in. He told himself not to look down and validate the teeth impressions (if they were in fact there) until the cold water hopefully shocked him out of his psychosis. It was a last ditch attempt to explain the day’s events to his overstressed mind.

***

David the editor—aka Horace Figg—walked through the lobby of the Lurmeyer Tower on the way to the concourse entrance. The men who had been working on the steps had finished for the day and moved their sign to the side to repost tomorrow morning after the bulk of the building’s inhabitants were snug in their cubicles and working away. It was 5:09pm, and the after-work rush was just settling into a chaotic groove.

David was lucky enough to have shared the elevator with Keri Pak, against whom he was smushed—his front, to her side—during the ride down to the lobby. Although he still wasn’t sure how he pulled it off with all the elevator’s jerking stops and starts, David had managed to fight back an erection. There was the occasional spasm, a flutter of muscle that produced an upward check-swing in his penis, which was pressed firmly against Keri’s forearm and pointed downward.

David assumed that Keri felt it. She had to have. But if she had, she was either too embarrassed (for him) to say anything about it, or she was letting him off the hook. Given the nature of her job, he figured that the latter was most likely the case. From what David knew of Keri—based on watching her from afar—she struck him as the type of person who didn’t sweat the small stuff. Maybe some part of her was even a little flattered.

When the elevator doors opened and the passengers eagerly filed out, Keri didn’t make any attempt to distance herself from David, as he thought she might. Instead, she looked at him full on and commented, “Maybe we should’ve taken the stairs.”

We? David thought.

“Yeah, might have made for a more comfortable ride,” David responded, and immediately cringed at his clumsy words. Thinking that she was about to wave him off with a “Goodbye,” or a “Have a good night,” his mind jumped the gun. “I’m sorry,” he said with a smile meant to disarm.

“Don’t worry about it,” Keri replied. And with that exchange the ice had officially been broken in David’s eyes.

David was the first to follow up on the opening dialogue. He hit Keri with a line about the job, and how he wasn’t sure he could ever truly get used to the environment. Keri came back with something about it being because he had a sense of decency.

Cha-ching! David thought. So far the conversation was going exactly as he planned. You old devil, you.

The conversation drifted from small talk—weather, current events, and even sports—to workplace gossip. It was the perfect opportunity for David to pry a little and dig up some juicy info for his story, and to a lesser degree, to find out more about the nature of Keri and Jamie Cole’s relationship. Not that David thought he really stood a chance with someone of Keri’s age and caliber, however, so far she was treating him like a peer and not some irrelevant old-timer.

“Management must’ve given Jamie a good spanking over that clip, huh?” he asked.

Keri screwed her face at him. “You know something I don’t,” her expression seemed to say.

“Wha’d you speak to him?” she replied.

“Who, Jamie? No. But I saw him leave in a hurry earlier. Looked like he was pretty upset. Personally, I try to stay out of people’s business, but Jamie’s meeting with Bettencourt was all everybody was talking about this morning.”

“What were they saying?”

“You know. Ronnie’s an asshole, and how Jamie got a raw deal.”

“Yeah. Well, they’re right,” Keri said. “I’m not one to wish losing your job on somebody, but if anybody deserved it, it was Ronnie.”

David sensed then that Keri’s feelings for Jamie ran deeper than the typical coworker relationship.

“That’s what I hear.”

They walked down the stairs and into the subway concourse and were immediately struck by an awful smell.

“Holy Christ!” David said and pinched his nose shut with his fingertips. Keri already had her hand over hers. She held her face in a tight crinkle, eyes squinting at the fumes. The people who hurried back and forth were reacting similarly, moving quicker than the normal end-of-the-day sprint as if the horrible smell, which infected the underground maze as far as David could see, was literally toxic. He saw a woman lurch as if she was about to vomit. Another man coughed repeatedly and then ran over to a trash receptacle and spit in it.

“What iz that?” Keri wondered aloud, her voice muffled by her hand.

“Sbells like somebuddee took a dump,” David replied, his nose pinched shut.

“More like everybody down here took one all at once.”

David pantomimed a chuckle.

The fecal aroma had a chemical quality, like bad perfume left to marinate in sweaty crevices. There were hints of rotten meat and vegetable farts.

Keri stopped and eyed the staircase that they had just walked down.

“Maybe we should take the street,” she said. “I don’t know how far you have to go, but I ain’t walking all the way to 13th street down here.”

David stood beside her, looking around as she spoke. He spotted a police officer talking to a small crowd of people approximately 50 feet away. He could tell by the looks on their faces that the people were inquiring about the horrible smell.

“Agreed,” he replied. “Gimme a second, though? I wanna ask the cop what happened.”

“I think it’s pretty obvious,” Keri replied.

David was already on his way over to the police officer.

“I know, but still. I won’t be a second.”

“You’re a nosey one, aren’t you? Hurry up. I’m gonna wait upstairs.”

David overheard some of the conversation as he approached the cop, who had just said something about it being a crazy day.

“So, what happened?” David asked.

“Eh . . . some sicko took a shit and smeared it all over the Men’s Room wall,” the officer replied.

“They’re saying there was an incident on a train a few blocks from here, too,” a woman interjected. “Maybe it was the same person.”

“Apparently not,” said the officer. “That’s what we thought, too, at first. The guy on the train supposedly clocked some woman in the face pretty good, too.”

“Didja catch ‘em?” David asked the officer.

“We’re working on it,” the officer responded in a defensive tone.

Maybe there’s gonna be a full moon tonight,” the woman commented.

One of the people in the crowd around the officer—a spindly man in a suit with his tie pushed to the side—remarked, “Well actually, the moon is in the waning gibbous phase. We won’t see another full moon until next month.”

The officer rolled his eyes at the man.

THIRTEEN

Jamie shuddered under the cold water’s icy touch. It felt good. The initial blast had made him jump back and shriek like a girl. His feet slid underneath him and for a moment, he thought he was going down on his ass. But then he forced himself to relax into the shower’s frigid embrace, to appreciate its cooling touch as it soothed the hot throbbing from his wounds. It was just what the doctor ordered.

He kept his eyes closed and his mind tuned to pleasant thoughts, such as the turkey sandwich with American Cheese, mayo, hot banana peppers, onions, lettuce and tomato, on a Carangi Hoagie Roll, that he been planning to make for dinner.

Eventually the throbbing heat fought its way back from defeat. The icy water wasn’t doing its job anymore, and Jamie reckoned that it was time to get the fuck out.

He wasted a good chunk of the evening trying to find some other explanation for what he saw looking back at him in the mirror, but the shriveled-skinned boy in the reflection, standing naked, scared, and covered in teeth marks, all red and inflamed, was proof undeniable that the biting had actually happened. Jamie knew he wasn’t crazy. But the constant questioning going through his mind was really starting to irritate him.

And another thing . . .

Jamie wore a sweater and cargo pants today. They bore no marks from the attack on the train—he had checked them thoroughly after he got out of the shower. The new teeth impressions were as deep, and clear, and garishly inflamed as the previous one, which had been administered by teeth biting into the naked skin on his forearm—by that little shit with his mouthy mother, he had previously thought.

The kid . . . he thought. Maybe it wasn’t him.

Logic said that multiple biters had somehow gotten up under his clothing, but the impressions suggested human bite radiuses. He certainly would’ve remembered people snaking under his sleeves and pantlegs. He almost laughed at the thought. Almost.

Jamie shut down the mental rambling and then reluctantly patted down the wounds with rubbing alcohol. It burned so bad that he thought he was going to pass out, but Jamie groaned his way through it. Afterward, he slid into some comfort clothing—his favorite track pants and a Cypress Hill Concert Tour T-shirt from the 90s—dug through his filmmaking equipment, which he kept stored on a steel storage rack in his bedroom, and pulled out a digital camera (Canon EOS-5D Mark II with Night Vision Adapter). He found the smallest of his three tripods. He set the tripod up in the dining room, secured the camera on top, and aimed it at the chair at the head of the table. He turned on the stereo system in his living room, tuned it to the first happy, pop station he came to—to lighten the mood—and cranked the volume. Then he took off his shirt, draped it over the back of the chair, and stood in front of the camera.

Jamie set the camera on automatic, and posed as it snapped away. He allowed himself 15 seconds between shots to turn and settle into a different angle from the previous shot. He repeated this process until he was satisfied that he had sufficiently photographed all of the teeth impressions from the waist up. He put his shirt back on when he was done, being careful not to aggravate the sensitive wounds.

Using the same careful technique, Jamie started to slide his pants down. He remembered the book he had been reading—Navigating the Mental Map—and thought it might add some perspective to his situation. He retrieved the book from his bedroom and put it on the dining room table to look over when he was done photographing the teeth impressions on his legs.

Jamie reset the automatic flash, slid his pants down to his ankles, and posed while the camera fired away.

The phone rang. Jamie pulled his pants up and started toward the living room to answer it. Along the way, he changed his mind and decided to let his answering machine pick up.

The answering machine BEEPED after a number of rings. The outgoing message played.

“You’ve reached Jamie Cole. As much as I’d like to take your call, I’m either out or otherwise occupied, but if you leave a name and number I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks.”

Jamie was surprised to hear Keri’s voice follow his own. His expression perked up. His posture straightened. If he had a tail it would’ve been wagging. He wanted to answer the phone and lose himself in the soothing tones of her voice, but he was afraid he’d feel compelled to tell her what had happened today, and of how she might react.

“Hey, you. I thought you were gonna call me,” Keri pouted, sounding genuinely concerned. “You seemed really upset when you left and I just wanted to see how you were doin’. Anyway, gimme a call when you get this.”

Jamie stood there for a moment imagining the possibilities.

Next he went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of Orange juice. He took it with him and sat down at the dining room table and nestled in for some reading. He slid the book in front of him, opened it, and began skimming pages. He stopped occasionally to examine selections that spoke to his situation.

•STRESS: PHYSICAL EFFECTS

•EXTREME DISASSOCIATION/FUGUE STATE/BLACKOUTS

One passage in particular stood out from the rest—SELF-INJURY. Jamie read the text beneath the heading over and over.

•Self-Injury has often been reported as a means of relieving unbearable stress or anxiety due to the release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkiller.

•In some cases self-injurers report entering a trance-like or fugue state or simply blacking out before the self-injury event and waking with no memory of what happened.

That Jamie was somehow, without his knowledge, biting himself was starting to sound like a logical explanation for what had happened. Expounding on the theory, his mind reached to find a connection, something to lend more credence to the fact that he was capable of such a thing. Was there any family history, a crazy old aunt or uncle, or cousin? None that he could recall.

Jamie picked a difficult spot—teeth impressions on his shoulder—and mimicked taking a bite to see if he could reach it with his mouth. It was difficult, but not impossible. He picked a spot on his leg and did the same. Again, it was difficult, but not impossible.

Feeling fatigued, Jamie set his mind on “escape,” and went into the living room to watch some TV. The background music was so annoying and obtrusive that he gave the “power” button a slap and caused the entire stereo unit to slide diagonal.

Jamie was sore all over, tender and extremely sensitive to the slightest brush of clothing against his skin. He hobbled, wide-legged, over to the couch, and sat down like an old man with bum knees and a questionable back. He turned on the TV and scrolled through the DVR. He selected a nature show about predators that he had been looking forward to watching, but turned it off after a few minutes. The segments were linked by quick cuts of predatory mouths filled with sharp teeth snapping shut and tearing at raw, bloody meat. That was the last thing he needed to see right now.

Revisiting the DVR recordings, he stopped on Family Guy and vegged out to two full hours of recorded episodes. Jamie was nodding off by the end of the last episode. He was awake enough to pick up on a pot reference, and for the first time realized that he was no longer high. Maybe that meant something in the grand scheme of things, but right now he was too tired to think it through. At the very least, it was a positive.

Jamie stopped the recording with the intention of making his way upstairs and into bed, but the channel that popped up when he exited the DVR menu was airing The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. It was his all-time favorite film, and one of those movies that he generally watched to the end whenever he happened by it on television. This time was no different.

Jamie finally got to bed at around 11:30pm. Despite the painful journey from the couch to the bedroom, which briefly woke him from his groggy state, sleep came relatively quickly. He drifted off to the funny ramblings of one of the characters from the film he’d just watched.

A story played out in Jamie’s dreams. It was rife with fuzzy images that bounced and shivered to clarity, and hard skips in the narrative. Yet his subconscious was able to detect structure, main players, and a tense, spooky atmosphere set by deep male voices making dry-throated, “Ooorrrrrr Rreeeeee” sounds.

The Dream: Part 1

There are ten men. African American. Middle Aged. Well dressed. They are posing for a group photo on the steps of an old church. A photographer stands at the bottom preparing to snap a photo. One of the well-dressed men stands out from the others. He is overweight, and, on the surface, proudly so. His hair is processed. Something about him raises suspicion.

A banner swathed in African colors and tribal fonts hangs over the front doors of the old church. The banner reads: ST. THOMAS EPISCOPAL CHURCH SALUTES THE MOTHERLAND FOUNDATION. We assume that the well-dressed men are members of the foundation.

The photographer snaps the photo, which then becomes the main image, frozen in Black and White. Our mind’s eye closes in on the suspicious-looking man. We move in on the image.

Hard Skip

We are in a dark room now. The transition from the previous image is jarring and unpleasant. Bursts of lightning pierce the darkness through half-closed drapes hanging from tall window frames. The brief illumination tells us that that this is someone’s bedroom. Thunder rumbles on the lightning’s heels. With each lightning flash, we learn a little more about the room. Expensive art. Framed snapshots of tribal life in Africa, Safari scenes, and urban nightlife during the Harlem Renaissance decorate the walls.

Hard Skip

We see a male figure sitting on the edge of a large canopy bed. A lightning flash reveals him to be the suspicious-looking, overweight man with the bad process from the photo on the church steps. Clothed in pajama-bottoms and a wife-beater, he sits shivering and sweating bullets. Rubber tubing ties off a spot on his forearm. A syringe in his other hand. His face awash in painful wanting, he injects the syringe into his forearm, and thumbs the plunger down. His head immediately falls back. His eyes roll upward. He bucks to a euphoric sensation.

Hard Skip

We are rapidly moving away from a screaming skull floating in darkness. We soon see that the skull is painted over light-to-medium brown skin, belonging to a man sitting behind a large, steel desk wearing an expensive blazer with no shirt underneath, a top hat and a necklace made of shells. A name swims up from our subconscious—King Dollar. It’s a name that we’ve heard many times in the urban tales we traded with our childhood friends. We’re not sure if that’s who it’s supposed to be, but possibly. There is something familiar about the features underneath the paint.

Hard Skip

We are further away from the skull-faced man, and still moving. We see a table where stacks of money mingle with bricks of Marijuana and Cocaine. We see scales and general drug paraphernalia. Another table with guns on top. Lots of guns. A large, beefy bodyguard armed with an automatic weapon stands behind the skull-faced man. A skull painted on the beefy bodyguard’s face as well; darker skin underneath. As we continue to pull away, we move through a window and out into the night.

The window is one of many recessed into the facade of a high-rise housing project building. We recognize it as one of the buildings (Building #2) of the old Raymond Rosen Projects in North Philly. King Dollar’s men have commandeered this building. Thuggish-looking individuals with skull-faces stand guard at the entrance of the building and on the rooftop. The takeover of the Raymond Rosen Projects is a major plot point in the legend of King Dollar. The skull-faced guards at the door control a constant flow of junkies staggering into and out of the building.

***

Jamie’s eyelids rolled back, revealing the darkness that enveloped his bedroom as he slept. He was lying on his right side, facing the closet door, which he couldn’t see at the moment. The dream was still fresh in his memory, details jumping out like bullet points. He knew that dreams could be the mind’s way of organizing relatively current thoughts into some kind of narrative. Jamie retraced his thoughts from the previous day, looking for some mention of King Dollar. But as far as he could work out, he hadn’t heard the name in years.

He suddenly realized that the dry-throated “Oorrrrr Rreeeee” sound was still with him, rumbling in the background like he was still dreaming. But Jamie knew better. Still he tested the flexion of his muscles to make sure he was awake. He guessed it was somewhere between midnight and 2am. Maybe if he closed his eyes and tried not to think he could at least fall half-asleep. Based on the way he felt, it was doubtful, but Jamie was willing to give it the old college try.

As he lay there, forcing his mind clear, street sounds began to whisper over his shoulder. They sounded far away, but close enough that he wondered, Did I leave the window open? Having grown up in the ‘hood, his mother instilled in him an ardent sense of security and self-preservation that had become habit in his adult life. As such, Jamie wasn’t the type to leave windows open while he slept. Plus it was the fall, when the nights were frigid even if the days were relatively warm.

Jamie stayed put rather than investigate. Tired as he was, it could wait until later, when he was officially awake. Nestled sluggishly beneath layers of bedding, the frigid fall air wasn’t much of a factor, so he closed his eyes and told himself, Go back to sleep. But the street sounds were hard to ignore.

Jamie’s eyes snapped open again. The bedroom wasn’t as dark as it had been when he closed them. Yet it felt like only 10-minutes had passed. He could finally see the closet door. And now there were hints of a light source behind him, as if someone had flipped a switch on the streetlamp in front of his house and now it shined through his window. For that to happen, he would’ve had to roll up the blinds before he went to bed, which he also didn’t remember doing.

Man, what a night I must’ve had.

Jamie tried to recall the forgotten memory while the street sounds became more distinctive. He heard the rapid slap of rope against asphalt=a jump-rope turning double-Dutch. He heard precocious little voices giggling and singing in unison to the rhythm of the rope-slap and thought it odd that children so young—especially girls—would be outside playing at this time of night. These girls weren’t the typical neighborhood ruffians who stayed out to all hours in the summer. They spoke with thick African accents.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.

All good children go to heaven.

Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

You’ll welcome death when we are done.

The girls devolved into giggling, but then stopped, and fell completely silent, as if they could see the look on Jamie’s face. He was frowning quizzically at the lyrics, and at the girls’ lack of respect. Maybe he was wrong about them not being the typical ruffians. With those types, though, the rhymes were usually more overtly sexual than bleak and macabre. Jamie was familiar with the jump-rope perennials, which hadn’t changed much since the girls he ran with sung them.

Jamie could hear the girls whispering, which seemed rather odd considering the distance from his window to the street. Soon after, the ropes began to turn again. A new rhyme followed, coming without warning.

C-a-l-l the Army! C-a-l-l the Navy!

My friend Keisha was gonna have a baby.

But she never got to.

Cause of someone like you.

Soon you’ll know how she felt, too.

The girls didn’t giggle this time, but were talking softly amongst themselves. Jamie lifted his head and turned his ear toward their voices. They were saying something over and over. He listened closely.

“Yes you,” one said.

“That’s who,” said another.

And then the voices stopped. The rope stopped slapping against asphalt. But Jamie could still sense the girls’ presence. He felt like they were aware of him, too. It was like they were just standing there, waiting for him to react to their twisted jump-rope rhymes.

Without thinking, Jamie rolled onto his back, and . . . He hissed at the pain that surged through his entire body. “FUCK!” he yelled.

Jamie saw that the window was indeed open, not just a little, but pushed all the way up. The blinds were raised even higher, allowing the world to see in. The streetlamp cast a shadow on the large wall beyond Jamie’s feet—four little girl-shapes, maybe eight- or nine-years-old. Their shadows were stretched thin with long necks and slightly overstated heads. They were clothed in the types of frilly dresses that little girls wore.

One stood at each end of a jump-rope that dangled limp between them. Another girl-shape stood in the middle. She had obviously been jumping between the swinging ropes. A fourth girl-shape was standing beside the turner on the right. Based on the shape of their heads, all of them were looking at Jamie, who lay there in disbelief. He was awake enough to realize that he wasn’t dreaming. Some errant thought pitched an idea that the shadows he watched performing on the wall might be the result of some leftover affects from his marijuana high.

He rubbed his eyes and looked again.

The girl-shaped shadows remained on the wall.

Their ropes began to turn, crisscrossing at upward arcs and leaving shadowy traces of rapid movement. The girl-shape in the middle started hopping foot-to-foot. The girl-shape standing by the turner on the right was bouncing her shoulders to the rhythm of the arcing ropes, waiting for a chance to make her entrance and jump alongside her friend.

They started to sing again.

Jamie and Keri sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G—

Jamie shot upright and faced the shadow-girls full on. They stopped singing, and just stood there, seeming to look in his direction.

Jamie’s eyes rolled toward the window. It was about three feet to his left and back another two feet. From where he sat, he couldn’t see outside. A few seconds passed. Eventually Jamie willed himself up out of bed. He kept his eyes on the girl-shadows cast on his bedroom wall. They flinched when he moved.

Jamie stopped. The shadow-girls did the same. Based on the lean of their shadows, they were set to take off running as soon as . . .

Jamie bolted toward the window, but in the single moment it took for him to get there he heard the girls scream and run away. He looked back to the wall in time to see the last shadow-girl disappear into the mass of shadows that engulfed most of his bedroom.

He hunched over and stuck his head out the window. A car drove down his street blasting Biggie Smallz. He could see the passenger; some young thug-wannabe wearing shades and leaning way back into his seat—probably high as hell. The passenger gave no indication that there were little girls about. Surely he would have seen them running away and thought, like Jamie, that it was unusual for little girls to be outside at this time of night.

FOURTEEN

After closing the window and lowering the blinds, Jamie lay facedown on the bed. He screamed into the mattress, frustrated as hell. He was dog-tired and needed to rest. Sleep was the last thing on his mind, yet he soon found himself firmly in its embrace again.

The dream picked up right where it left off, like it had been waiting, on pause, for Jamie’s return. Though it had never truly gone away, the deep-voice, dry-throated “Oorrrrr Rrreeeee” sound returned to the foreground to score the occasionally fuzzy images that bounced and shivered to clarity.

The Dream: Part 2

The continents are laid out on a flat map of the globe. Thin red lines drawn by unseen hands travel from destination points throughout West Africa (Gambia, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria) to America (Philadelphia, Pa)

Hard Skip

We are floating above the crowd in a community meeting hall. Local residents and community activists are seated in folding chairs, their eyes filled with pride. At the front of the room African Dancers dressed in traditional costumes perform a ceremonial dance.

Hard Skip

An inner-city church. A woman in ceremonial African clothing is speaking to a captive audience. We see some of the same people from the community-meeting hall. The African woman’s features are strong and noble. She is someone important. Jesus on a cross looms giant over her shoulder.

Hard Skip

An elementary-school auditorium. The auditorium is full of children of various ages. Teachers stand in the aisles scolding unruly students. A panel of African delegates are seated on stage. They are clothed in expensive, westernized African attire—custom-tailored suits, and dresses, tribal jewelry. Wisdom in their stalwart gazes. They are proud, confident, and regal. An African man stands behind a wooden podium speaking passionately into a microphone. The children, save for a few ne’er-do-wells, are enchanted by whatever it is that the man at the podium is saying.

Hard Skip

An inner-city neighborhood. It’s a small street. Urban blight less than a block away at either end. A row of renovated houses sit unoccupied on one side of the small street. A large (clean) city park complete with a newly constructed playground on the other side. The park spans the entire row of houses on the other side. A banner (WELCOME HOME SENGHOR FAMILY) stretches between lightposts and hangs above the street. Africanized lettering on the banner.

A convoy of expensive cars circa 1982 (Mercedes, Cadillac) drive slowly down the street and double-park.

Hard Skip

We see the African delegates from the elementary-school auditorium standing, with their families, outside of the expensive cars. Our mind tells us that they must be the Senghor Family. A small group of well-dressed, middle-aged, African-American men stand on the pavement in front of the renovated houses, facing the extended Senghor Family. We recognize the African-American men as members of the Motherland Foundation from the photo on the church steps. The suspicious-looking man with the processed hair is there also, looking suspicious as he addresses the Senghors with a bullhorn. An authentic sense of nobility separates the Senghors from most of the African-Americans.

Hard Skip

As the members of the Motherland Foundation, led by the suspicious-looking man, walk the Senghors from house to house.

Hard Skip

We are in a room with concrete walls, possibly a basement. The suspicious-looking man is shaking hands with a male Senghor family elder in front of a large safe built into one of the concrete walls. Other Senghor family elders and members of the Motherland Foundation populate the background. Inside the safe we see the Senghors’ tribal artifacts—ceremonial jewelry, robes bordered in gold leaf, complicated ceremonial headdresses and costumes, jewel-encrusted chalices and crowns, etc. A man standing by the door of the safe closes it. A wheel on the face of the door. The man spins the wheel locked.

Hard Skip

The same room. We understand that some time has passed. The wheel is spun unlocked, and the safe door pulled open. It’s empty inside. The suspicious-looking man and the male Senghor elder stand in front of the opened safe, looking horrified. We see guilt in the suspicious-looking man’s eyes.

Hard Skip

We are floating above the entrance of the Raymond Rosen Projects, Building #2. A group of 15 angry young, male Senghor Family members are arguing with the thuggish, skull-faced guards posted outside the front doors. It looks like it’s going to get ugly.

***

Jamie’s first semi-waking thought was that he was lying face down in a crowded room. There were people standing all around him. He sensed bad intentions, and that he was the center of attention. His body was completely numb from the neck down. His face was mashed into a soft surface, yet it still offered enough resistance that it was slightly hard for him to breathe.

He opened one eye, and then another, but was hesitant to let them roll to the side and peek. He felt a terrible need to protect himself, so he pulled the covers over his head.

The covers . . . He was in bed . . . in his bedroom . . . alone . . .

Jamie exhaled. Hot, morning breath bounced back at him. His body was still numb. He was lying in a massive wet spot made from his own sweat. Although he’d established that his waking fear was unfounded —probably—there was still a sense of presence in the dark room with him. And then, he heard a voice. It came from somewhere behind him, in the dark.

“That’s him,” whispered a dainty female voice, speaking in an accent that he instantly recognized as belonging to the double-Dutch girls from earlier in the night.

Jamie heard a second person, a man, whisper, “Shhhhhhh!”

He felt the rush of adrenaline. His mind said, Move! Run! Reach for the nearest object, turn over, and start swinging like your life depended on it! Do something!

However, his body refused to accommodate. He was a slave to the numbness, completely defenseless to who- or what-ever lurked behind him in the dark. Jamie couldn’t think of a time when he felt more vulnerable.

“He’s the one who knows about Keisha,” the girl whispered as if she was tattling on someone to an authority figure.

There was a long silent pause, and then he heard another little girl whisper, “I want his eyes.” Her delivery was typically childlike.

“I want his skin,” said another girl.

“I want his liver,” said another.

A male voice interrupted, speaking authoritatively in hushed tones. “Quiet. Or he’ll hear you!” said the man. His voice was accented as well.

Jamie rolled onto his back and sat up. His movement was explosive, as if he had been trying to do so, since the first girl spoke, but only now managed to break free of the invisible force that held him down. His eyes wide as cue balls, scanned the room, and made a quick assessment.

He was alone.

The window was open—way open.

The blinds were rolled up as far as they could go.

The lamppost shined through the window and cast a shadowy mass on the wall beyond the foot of his bed.

Something about the shadowy mass on the wall. Its shape didn’t resemble anything Jamie could think of that he might find on his block at this time of night. It was literally just an upright mass with soft sides and a somewhat lumpy top. That it had been cast upon the wall by the same streetlamp shining through the same opened window, with the same blinds rolled way to the top, was secondary.

Sudden movement from the left side of the mass startled Jamie. He leaned away squinting, and tilted his head as if to question what his eyes had witnessed. The movement was slight, and then rather flagrant. Jamie interpreted the movement as a person, who had been standing in an uncomfortable hunch for too long, shifting their weight. This person was attempting to be inconspicuous, but quickly became impatient. It lasted only seconds before the mass was still again.

What the hell? Jamie thought as he focused, leaning forward.

He began to notice further evidence of a human-shape—hints of a skinny, adult male attempting to appear inanimate. Vertical slivers of light that appeared and disappeared at the bottom of the shadowy mass hinted at legs moving ever so slightly. Maybe there were a number of people standing there all huddled together.

Outside, a car drove down the street. The passing car’s headlights caused the entire shadowy mass to float up, across the ceiling, and down the wall to Jamie’s right. Jamie followed it with his eyes. The streetlamp’s glow didn’t reach the right side of the room, so the even darker area over by the closet door eventually gobbled up the shadowy mass.

The autumn chill touched Jamie’s skin and gave rise to a bumpy texture. He folded his arms across his chest to conserve warmth and stared at the darker area.

“Gooo baaaaack to sleeeeep,” whispered a heavily accented voice, belonging to a man Jamie couldn’t see. The voice had come from deep within the darker area.

Jamie leapt out of bed and ran over to the light switch. He reached out to turn it on…

The television came on by itself. The volume was turned all the way up. Transistor snow filled the screen. The ambush of sound interrupted Jamie’s forward motion and caused him to stumble.

The notorious video clip materialized on the TV. Jamie heard the music first—“Eyes Without A Face,” by Billy Idol—as it cut through the static. He refused to look at the screen.

He fingered the light switch down. It didn’t work. However, the light from the television illuminated the area by the closet door enough for Jamie to see that nothing was there.

Jamie turned off the television. At that very moment, the TV in the living room turned on by itself. The volume was cranked all the way up. Transistor snow preceded the Billy Idol song.

Jamie hurried down the stairs and turned off the living room television without looking at the screen. He didn’t want to see that girl again. The sound from the television was immediately replaced by a vague, detached wailing somewhere in the distance, and listless moans of wanting. Underneath the surface noise he heard whispered voices speaking gibberish with thick African accents.

Terrified, Jamie fingered the light switch on the wall, but like the bedroom light, it didn’t work. And then . . .

He heard the closet door in his bedroom open . . . and then slam shut. Heavy footsteps followed. His fear shifted from the unknown, to the possibility that a real person had broken in through the bedroom window and hid in the closet while he slept. While it didn’t explain the shadows, it was a start.

Jamie whipped his head around in search of a weapon to use against this lead-footed assailant. He pictured a large man, so the weapon would have to have some weight to it. His mind was moving too fast to stop on any one thing. He looked up and followed the footsteps over to his bed, where something big plopped down onto the mattress so hard that the metal frame cried out under the weight.

As he listened, the metal bedframe begin to squeak rhythmically almost like . . . no, exactly like someone was having sex on his bed. The squeaking increased in speed. The headboard slammed into the wall with a seismic thump that Jamie felt beneath his feet. He heard voices, both male and female, moaning pleasurably. The combined noise reached a crescendo at which point the woman’s moaning suddenly turned painful. The man’s moans turned aggressive. The rhythm of the squeaky frame was fast and asymmetric. The bed frame thumped against the bedroom wall with such force that Jamie feared it might break through. The man was growling like an animal now. The woman was screaming. Her fear was palpable. It made Jamie want to run out of his house, but curiosity held him still.

There was a loud cracking sound, like a neck being snapped. Someone wheezed in desperation. The wheezing turned to choking sounds, and finally a wet gargling.

Silence . . . It made the darkness seem to go on forever, as Jamie stood there, in the living room, exposed, helpless, and feeling incredibly small. The T-shirt and track pants that he was wearing felt like too little clothing. He was staring at the ceiling with his mouth hanging open and waiting for the next thing to happen. Each time he thought that he had never been so scared, that fear was quickly trumped, so he decided to just leave his mind open to anything.

Somewhere in the silent, dark expanse, Jamie heard the unnatural noises he had heard on the first day he’d been bitten. They came separately this time as if to maximize the impact of their entrance. First came the haunted underwater alarm, then the ethereal chirping. The noises resonated at frequency that made the teeth impressions all over Jamie’s body start to itch. Suddenly they were all he could think about.

Jamie assumed that the biting would soon follow. He hugged himself, caressing his upper arms with his hands, and backed away from the unnatural noises. The teeth impressions began to throb. Jamie’s skin became tender to the touch. Even the air brushing against them hurt.

A thunderous rumble shook the entire house. Jamie jumped and slapped his hands over his ears and shrunk away from the clamor. It was coming from his bedroom.

Jamie’s ears set the scene, his horrifically creative mind filling in the blanks. He imagined a giant, angry toddler-thing, the offspring of a human and some kind of large, amphibious devil-clown-fish monster hybrid that only a crazy (or stoned?) man might dream up.

The toddler-thing was deep in the throes of a monumental tantrum. It was crying and grunting like a spoiled brat refused some prized possession. It had a voice that was impossible to describe; like a whale-song belted out with aggression and echoing through miles of water. The toddler-thing stomped and thrashed, banging into walls that crumbled to its touch. There was power in the weird, shrill tone of its passionate holler. The whiney grunting peaked just before some large piece of furniture was hurled or kicked across the room. Glass shattered.

There were other voices—three or four, laughing and screaming over each other. The laughter was of the gut-busting variety. The screams were bloodcurdling, like someone in pain who knew that they were about to die. These voices were, at the very least, normal-sized and human sounding. Another voice, a man, chanted in the same African dialect as the voices on the sixth-floor balcony earlier today. The chanting was nonstop and sounded ceremonial, like something a priest or a Shaman might recite. Somewhere underneath it all, the unnatural noises from before resounded.

Jamie was losing himself in the assailing din. He screamed at the top of his lungs, a desperate attempt to validate his own existence. He couldn’t even hear himself in his own head.

The thunderous symphony moved out into the upstairs hallway. The toddler-thing hulking out. The laughing and the screaming. The chanting Shaman.

Jamie looked up when the noise reached the top of the stairs. Standing in the living room, he should have been able to see it or them by now, but there was only empty space through which the second floor of his house sat looking rather normal in the dark. The thunderous symphony was still there to contradict his eyes.

Jamie watched the cast iron railing buckle and twist as the ruckus made its way down the stairs toward the living room. Wooden steps crunched under pounding footsteps. Holes appeared in the walls.

Jamie ran into the dining room. His digital camera was still sitting atop the tripod next to the table with its one eye closed. In the dark it looked like a long-legged, robot-spider-thing. It surprised Jamie when he first saw it and tripped him up for a second. The thunderous symphony was halfway down the stairs.

Jamie ran over to the camera and turned it on. He did this for two reasons.

1. He could use the nightvision feature to get a good look at whatever was behind the noise (for safety purposes, not because he actually wanted to see it or them)

2. He could get photographic evidence to prove, among other things, that he wasn’t going fruit loops.

Jamie picked up the camera with the tripod still attached. The weight was awkward, unwieldy. He felt like the tripod might break and fall off, and if so, then so be it. He held the camera in front of his face and aimed it at the thunderous symphony.

It was in the living room now. The giant toddler-thing. The laughter. The screaming. The Shaman chanting away. And the unnatural noises underneath it all.

His eyes glued to the small, rectangular view-screen on the camera, Jamie saw a miniature rendition of the living room tinted green. He saw huge cavities, like indoor potholes, interrupt the smooth, shiny surface of the wood flooring. Each one came with a booming stomp that rattled Jamie’s balance. The cavities were deep and oddly shaped, not like a foot, but as he watched them appear one after the other, he decided that they were probably footsteps.

Forming quickly, the deep cavities marked a path toward the flatscreen TV, which then tore from its wall-mount like someone snatched it away and then hurled it across the room as if it were light as a small Tupperware Container lid. Jamie flinched at the crashing sound, but continued to watch through the camera’s view screen. The coffee table lifted off of the ground and slammed into the ceiling. Wood chunks and splinters rained down. The couch tumbled into the opposite wall and left a mark.

The thunderous symphony suddenly fell silent. Jamie detected a pause in the invisible force’s movement; like it had just noticed him standing there in the next room, turned, and locked his tiny, trembling frame in its eye-line. Suddenly Jamie felt like he was being watched by something predatory. He took a step backward.

And then . . .

The thunderous symphony leapt out of dead silence. The giant toddler-thing. The laughter. The screaming. The Shaman chanting away. The unnatural noises.

The deep cavities were coming toward him now.

Jamie bobbled, and then dropped the camera and backed away until he hit a wall. His fingers had accidentally pressed a few buttons before the camera left his hands. It hit the floor and bounced. The camera’s lone eye was pointed at the noise, and snapping photos, in rapid succession.

The archway that separated the living and dining rooms buckled inward and now the thunderous symphony was in the room with him. Jamie screamed and threw his arms up over his face as it charged right at him.

FIFTEEN

Ronnie Hayes sat at the bar, with heavy shoulders, nursing a tall glass of Pabst Blue Ribbon, his fifth since he first arrived at around 10pm. It was currently 3:05am. The Fox Trot Lounge officially locked its doors at 2am, but remained open, for VIPs and pretty ladies looking for attention, until 4:30.

Ronnie was drunk and on temporary vacation from reality. He had departed reality earlier in the day, soon after he finally made it to the parking lot on 20th and Market with his box and hopped into his Escalade. He sat there for half-an-hour afterward, thinking, Did all that shit just happen?

He drove around for an hour or so going nowhere in particular. He stopped by his room at the Sheraton Hotel and spent some time melting around the room deep in thought and fighting off fleeting memories of that unorthodox fecal stench from the concourse restroom, and Mr. Important Legs. In the background, some reality-show diva threw a hissy-fit on TV.

The Sheraton was another expense to consider. The weekly rate was $2100, which Ronnie couldn’t afford when he was employed. He was paid through tomorrow morning at 11am, which gave him less than a full day to figure out his next move.

Ronnie retrieved a handgun—a Glock 9mm—from the outside, zipper-flap of his suitcase and tucked it between his pants at the waist and the small of his back. Although he had always meant to, he never actually made it to the shooting range to practice firing the gun. In fact, he had never even fired a gun, period. He only had one because it was a requirement of any real baller.

Ronnie drove to the Springfield Mall and killed a few hours pretending to window-shop. From there he pecked at a Surf-N-Turf platter at Ruby Tuesday that he ultimately didn’t finish. The waitress looked at him funny when he instructed her to dispose of his barely touched dinner plate and then asked for a dessert menu in the same breath.

“Something wrong with your meal?” she asked.

“No. It’s fine. It just doesn’t look good to me anymore,” Ronnie replied, distracted.

He ate his dessert—a bowl of ice cream with chunks of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup sprinkled on top—and then ordered a Vodka and orange juice, which he sipped on for the next hour, before making his way to the Fox Trot Lounge.

Ronnie tried his damndest to ignore the ghostly shapes that sneaked up on him while he languished at the bar. Mostly they came via the mirrored wall behind the bar—phantom patrons that he never saw enter or leave. His eyes would spot their reflections as they made faces at him from the background. There was something askew about each phantom patron that Ronnie’s eyes landed on. It gave their twisted and sometimes even comical expressions more impact.

He lifted his glass and looked inside.

Maybe it’s the drink, he mused. Ominous messages were scribbled, by unseen hands, on the walls as Ronnie watched. The messages commented on everything from his sexual prowess, to his physical appearance, to his ability to protect himself when they—whomever they were—eventually grew tired of toying with him. The Fox Trot was relatively crowded, but, of course, no one else saw the phantom patrons or the messages.

Ronnie just laughed everything off. It was a laugh that said, “I’m in need of psychiatric help.” The bartender did everything possible to stay away from Ronnie’s end of the bar. He communicated with the big, beefy bouncer via a glance that warned, “Keep an eye on this asshole.”

The Fox Trot Lounge was a dive bar in the ‘hood. It was owned by an old, dark-skinned man with a gambling problem who went by the name Dizzy Fox. Ronnie had met Dizzy at a popular online Poker site, where they often played each other at Texas Hold ‘Em. Dizzy had the worst luck, yet he kept coming back to the site. Ronnie used to joke that he’d own Dizzy’s bar one day if he kept playing the way he did. Not that Ronnie would have wanted the place. As he saw it, the Fox Trot was vastly inferior to his typical haunts. He favored the kind of upscale clubs that attracted douche-bags, like himself, looking to be seen in the company of well-to-do-young folks and the people who wished they could be them.

Because of his rep as a high-roller (wannabe) Ronnie kept his affiliation with the Fox Trot silent. He always came alone, and usually after striking out with women whom he considered his caliber, but who were actually, way out of his reach. The employees of the Fox Trot cringed whenever Ronnie walked in the door. They, like everyone else who spent more than a half an hour in Ronnie’s presence, saw through his suburban-boy-fronting-like-he-understood-the-streets act, and his big money talk. Only he was too stupid to realize how transparent he was. Ronnie had a habit of flashing wads of money. The regulars told Dizzy to warn his asshole friend (Ronnie) that he was setting himself up to “get got.”

“Man, you come right out of a comic-book,” one of the bartenders once told Ronnie to his face.

Ronnie thought the man was simply referencing Jim Kelly from Enter the Dragon, which he was, but in a way that related to Ronnie’s behavior.

“Jim Kelly was the man,” Ronnie said in response. He was too drunk to get the implication.

“Yeah.” The bartender replied, and went back to washing glasses.

A reasonably attractive divorcee walked up and said to Ronnie, “She must’ve been pretty important.”

The woman recoiled into an exaggerated defensive pose when Ronnie turned and ambushed her with frantic eyes. Realizing that she wasn’t a threat, his expression switched to glassy-eyed confusion.

“Huh?” It was all that Ronnie could manage on such short notice.

“Whoever made you so sad,” the divorcee replied.

That’s whomever. Ronnie thought as he gave the woman a drunken once-over. She was both pretty and ugly and looked like she could’ve been a good friend of his alcoholic Aunt Gladys. But after five tall ones and two shots of chilled Citron she was looking doable. He spent the next 20 minutes tolerating the divorcee’s incessant babbling about all the men her age—and a few women—who had done her wrong, and how she was looking for a “boy toy,” to help her rediscover herself.

The divorcee had a harsh Philly accent that made her sound like she had to hock a massive loogie. She kept saying things like “gowin’,” instead of “going,” “now,” instead of “no,” “kays,” instead of “keys,” and “Froy-day,” instead of “Friday.”

Ronnie had to keep reaffirming that the experience between the sheets, or in the alley behind the bar, for that matter, would be worth having to listen to her nonsense. But after awhile it became too much for him to bear. Ronnie simply turned and faced forward forcing the divorcee to talk to the side of his head until she took the hint and stormed off in a tirade of cussing that went in one ear and out the other.

When the lights came on at 4:25, Ronnie stalled the inevitable by chatting up the bartender—the same one who had made the Jim Kelly reference—who appeared rather annoyed by him. Eventually the bouncer came over, put his big, beefy hand on Ronnie’s shoulder, and squeezed. Then he turned on the authoritative tone.

“Party’s over, slick,” the bouncer said.

Ronnie stood smoking a cigarette on the corner outside of the Fox Trot. It was dark and eerily quiet. He jumped at the sound of a heavy lock sliding into place behind him and turned around to see the big, beefy bouncer looking out through the tinted glass door of the Fox Trot. Then he turned and walked back into the place like he didn’t even see Ronnie standing there.

“Fucking meathead,” Ronnie quietly commented. “Thinks he’s better than somebody cause he’s got some size on ‘em.” He waited a few seconds to ensure that the bouncer was deep into the bar, and yelled, “I’ll buy yer stupid ass! Ya roid-freak! You know steroids make your dick shrivel up. Probably why yer walkin’ around looking all constipated and shit.”

Ronnie laughed and took a long forceful drag from his cigarette. When his eyes returned to the door, he saw the bouncer’s shadow darkening the tinted glass again. This time the bouncer was looking right at him.

Ronnie gasped and choked on his drag. He coughed out a puff of smoke. He told himself that the bouncer had only heard him yelling and not what he had said. But he wasn’t entirely sure.

Playing it safe, Ronnie smiled and waved. The bouncer responded by shaking his head in pity, and then walking back into the bar.

Whew! Ronnie actually thought the word. Then he took a few drags of his cigarette and forgot all about it.

Urban blight to his right and left, stretched for blocks and blocks. Shadows upon shadows all around him, and no sign of life. Ronnie felt alone, like he could’ve been the last living person on the planet. On second thought, that was probably a good thing considering the area. The last thing he needed was some suspicious-looking dude trying to jack him. His gun provided a little reassurance, but Ronnie was as scared of actually having to use it as he was of the possibility of being robbed. He armed himself knowing that he’d probably end up in this part of the city feeling superior to everyone around him as he drank his troubles away at the Fox Trot. He never really intended to use it, though. At most he’d have to pull it out and show it to whomever meant him physical harm. That was his ideal scenario should trouble ever arise.

Earlier in the night, Ronnie considered revealing his gun to the phantom patrons, but they kept catching him by surprise when he would look into the mirror at the crowded barroom over his shoulders. Then someone would walk by, and they’d be gone. Or he’d turn around and look for them only to find an empty space where the mirror said they were standing, or sitting. When Ronnie looked in the mirror again it was like they were never there to begin with.

From that type of thing, the gun offered no assistance. The best thing to do was to ignore it unless it affected him directly, like this afternoon when Mr. Important Legs almost got him arrested.

Ronnie’s car was parked far enough away that he couldn’t see it from where he stood, looking east. He wished he could just summon it with a verbal command, or a snap of his fingers, and then bitched and moaned in his head about the slow progress of technology.

Weren’t we supposed to have flying cars by now? He mused, half-serious.

He made a quick count of all the places capable of concealing a person, or a group of people, between where he stood and his parked car, some two and a half blocks away. There were too many to count.

Guess you’re just gonna have to make a break for it, champ. He thought, and gave himself until the end of the half-smoked cigarette. But then he heard the darkness whisper in a voice that he was familiar with. It came from the east, around the exact area he would have to travel through to reach his car.

“Show me that smile,” the voice said.

Ronnie could still feel the burn in his throat from where his heart had lodged itself as he sprinted the two and a half blocks to his car. He was driving now, speeding, in fact, and gripping the steering wheel in both hands like he thought it might try to escape should he let go. His foot lay heavy on the gas. He was leaning forward and squinting through the affects of intoxication to see where he was going.

Ronnie ran stop signs as if they weren’t there. Each time he reached a red light he let up on the gas pedal long enough to make sure that there were no police around, and then gunned it right through.

Ronnie finally slowed down when he crossed the border into the suburbs. Though darker, and quieter than Philly proper, the night was less intimidating out this way. Convenience stores and gas stations shined like lighthouse beacons in a peaceful sea every few blocks.

Ronnie pulled into the parking lot of an AM/PM Minimart, lowered the driver-side window, and smoked a few cigarettes. He leaned back into his seat and tried to relax. His arm was hanging out the window to keep the smoke from polluting the inside of his car.

He turned on the radio. Anguished voices jumped out screaming through heavy static. He quickly turned it off, and waited a few seconds, thinking that maybe he had just caught some weird cross-section of stations. When he turned it on again, the voices were still there. So he turned it off for good this time, and sat there in silence.

With nothing to distract his mind, it began to wander. Ronnie thought of all the things he was going to miss about his former job. The access to free porn and to the porn film community, and looking forward to going to work everyday because of it. His minor celebrity status on Facebook and the numerous online forums that he regularly posted ads on.

Posters of hotdogs and hoagies crowded the front window of the minimart. They were to blame for Ronnie’s grumbling stomach. He began to feel nauseous after the third or fourth cigarette. He noticed the Middle Eastern clerk watching him through the window, wondering who he was and what his intentions were, and he mused about the unsafe nature of such a job. Then he saw the ‘help wanted’ sign. It was written in magic marker and posted amongst the busy advertisements for smoothies and coffee drinks on the front door.

Fuuuck that shit, he thought.

On his way to grabbing a microwavable burrito and a 7-Up, Ronnie got sidetracked by some Maxim Magazine hottie smiling back at him from the magazine rack. The woman wore red-and-black bikini bottoms—or were those panties—and had her hands strategically placed over her breasts to conceal her nipples. Ronnie flipped through the pages finding fault with every woman he saw. Either her tits were too small, or her ass was too big, or she was just plain ugly by his standards.

“My friend . . . If you’re not going to purchase anything, then I have to ask you to leave,” said the clerk behind the counter speaking through a thick Lebanese accent. He had his arms crossed and a look on his face that indicated that he expected the situation to end badly.

“Oh. Sorry,” Ronnie responded as he returned the magazine to the rack, grabbed his items, heated the burrito in the filthy, ancient microwave oven in the back of the store, and made his way to the counter.

Angling for a friendly exchange, Ronnie sought out the clerk’s eyes. He was going to make a joke about the condition of the microwave, but the man didn’t say a word as he rung up the purchase. His expression remained on “just in case.”

“Don’t mind me,” Ronnie said to the clerk, slurring heavily. “I don’t mean any harm.”

The clerk nodded and handed Ronnie his bag.

“Oooo-K,” Ronnie said as he grabbed the bag and walked out.

He sat in the parking lot and savored every bite of the burrito. He spilled some on his leg, fretted briefly over it, and then promised himself that he’d clean it up later. He washed the burrito down with the soda, and noticed in mid-swig that the clerk was still watching him as if he were a potential threat.

“Tha fuck’s wrong withis guy?” Ronnie remarked. Doesn’t he see what I’m driving?

Ronnie drove around the dead-quiet suburbs for a while. He had the heat on full blast to counteract the frigid air coming in through the lowered driver-side window as his arm hung out of it holding a lit cigarette. He stopped at a red light, let his head fall back onto the headrest, and gave his eyelids a rest. He opened them and saw a man standing right outside his driver-side window. The man was bending over so that his face hovered a few feet away from Ronnie’s.

“Holy fuck!” Ronnie yelled and leaned away from the window. He started to reach around to his back to retrieve the gun from underneath his belt, but stopped halfway when he realized that the man was either homeless, drunk, crazy in a harmless way, or all of the above. “Are you out of your fucking mind walking up on somebody like that?!”

Sad eyes peeked out from beneath a full beard flecked with food-remnants and dried saliva. The homeless man wore an overcoat that time forgot on top of another one, a horrible funk wafting out from underneath. He looked the way Ronnie was starting to feel as the effects of all the alcohol he’d consumed earlier in the night wore off.

“Sorry, sir,” the homeless man said. “I was just—”

“I don’t have any money,” Ronnie replied as he righted himself in the driver-seat, relaxed his posture, and took a long drag from his cigarette. He looked up at the traffic light, wishing that it would change. He considered raising the window, but didn’t want to fill the inside of his car with smoke or waste the cigarette that he had only recently lit.

“Don’t want your money,” the homeless man replied. “I’m looking for my friend.”

“Your friend?”

“That’s right.”

“What the fuck makes you think—”

“She’s not well, you see,” said the homeless man, talking over Ronnie’s reply.

Oh, and you are?

“She went and got herself hooked up with some bad people, and . . . Well, she hasn’t been the same since. I think you might know them.”

Ronnie’s expression changed.

“S’cuze me?”

“I said I think you might know them. One of them at least. Used ta call himself King Dollar.”

Ronnie shook his head, having never heard of the name. It sounded like a pimp or some kind of second-tier blaxploitation icon. His foot tapped the gas pedal, anticipating the green light. The car started to creep forward. The homeless man sidestepped and stayed with him.

“My friend . . . She’s about yay, tall,” the man said demonstrating with his hands. “Looks a lot like your girl.”

“My girl?”

“Yeah, the one sitting in your back seat there.”

Ronnie tensed up, suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that someone was sitting behind him. In fact, he could hear that someone taking shallow, labored breaths.

The traffic light turning green. From behind, Ronnie heard the presence.

He shoved the driver-side door open, leapt out, and ran as fast as he could down a side street.

SIXTEEN

Jamie was on his feet before his muscles were ready to support his weight. He stumbled, sleepy-headed, and tripped over something that shouldn’t have been lying in the middle of the floor in his bedroom. He fell forward and softened the impact with his hands. He felt tiny broken pieces with hard edges underneath his palms. His mind was cloudy, and not yet fully awake.

Climbing to his knees, he wiped the sleep from his eyes. To clarify, he was in his bedroom, kneeling amidst debris from just about everything that could be broken. He saw his TV lying facedown, his laptop in two pieces, glass from the framed posters that were yanked from the walls, a shattered lamp, dresser drawers pulled open and emptied out onto the floor, clothing pulled from hangers in his closet, holes in the walls, a layer of plaster-dust covering the floor.

He remembered the thunderous symphony that chased him down into the dining room, but beyond that, his memory was blank.

“Hello! Anybody home?!” a voice called out from the first floor.

Jamie froze. Then it struck him that he had heard the voice in his sleep, and that it was probably responsible for waking him up. From its timbre, Jamie envisioned an older man. The man spoke without an accent, and sounded concerned, so he figured that it wasn’t connected to the voices that plagued him in the night.

“I say, hello in there!” the voice came again.

Jamie could tell that the voice was coming from his front door. Had it been open all night?

He climbed to his feet and winced at a series of painful sensations. They felt fresh, unlike the teeth impressions, which did hurt, but in a manner to which he had become somewhat desensitized. He was surprised to find rings of dark, discolored bruises on his wrists and forearms. He hiked his pantlegs up, one at a time, and found a ring of discoloration around each ankle. His throat hurt in a way that suggested strangulation.

“Everybody all right in there?” asked the old voice from downstairs.

Jamie left footprints in the plaster-dust layer as he made his way into the upstairs hallway. He stepped over the framed posters that lay in his path. The damage to the walls coincided with the path that the thunderous symphony traveled after leaving his bedroom last night. Based on the shape of the deep indentations, he pictured something with an arm span long enough to reach both walls while walking down the middle of the hall.

Jamie descended the steps from the second floor in disbelief, following the path of destruction. Looked like the living room had been ransacked, too, and once he reached the bottom of the staircase, he could see that the rest of his house looked the same. He saw his camera lying broken on the dining room floor. The detached tripod lay across the room with bent legs.

The front door was hanging wide open. Daylight shining through the opened door stung Jamie’s eyes and briefly darkened the interior to his sight. As such, it took a moment to decipher a message scribbled in red paint, or maybe blood, on the living room wall.

WATCHING YOU! the message read.

An elderly man was walking down the outside stairs away from his house. It almost surprised Jamie to see that the owner of the voice he’d heard in his sleep was a real person.

The phone rang. Save for the initial jolt, Jamie ignored it and stood there focusing on the message and the damage to his house.

Outside, the elderly man was halfway down the steps when he turned toward the ringing phone and spotted Jamie standing in the middle of the living room with a face full of questions.

“Hey there,” the man said as he made his way back up the steps. “I didn’t think anybody was home. Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

Jamie had seen the man before in the neighborhood. They had traded “Hello’s” in passing, and if he wasn’t mistaken, they had even briefly discussed the weather on a few occasions. He was one of those nice old men who came from a time when people looked out for one another.

Jamie started to answer the man when he heard Keri’s voice on the answering machine. He threw his hand up at the elderly man as if to say, “Hold on a second,” and then listened to Keri’s message.

“Hey, you,”Keri said. “I got worried when you didn’t show up for work this morning. Hope everythingz all right. Call me. Okay?”

Jamie looked up at the empty spot on the wall where the clock used to be, then looked around the floor and found it lying on its back with a cracked face. Surprisingly, it was still working. Although his job was the last thing on Jamie’s mind, he felt a swell of fear when he saw the time—11:45am.

“You all right, son?” The elderly man queried, his voice sounding more concerned than before.

Jamie turned and met the elderly man’s worried expression, then looked down at his exposed forearms, realizing that the man could clearly see the teeth impressions. He shook his head, “No,” then “Yes,” correcting himself.

The message on the wall floated in Jamie’s sights as he walked over to the front door. He kept his arms against his sides attempting to conceal the impressions.

“I saw that your door was open and . . . ” the elderly man stammered, afraid to say the wrong thing. “Say, you sure you’re okay?”

“I . . . I don’t know.” Jamie responded, preoccupied.

Looking at the damage behind Jamie, the elderly man said, “Sure looks like you pissed somebody off good. Didju call the PO-lease yet?”

Calling the police sounded like a good idea at first to Jamie, but then he wondered what he’d tell them. He could picture the look on their faces and on the elderly man’s face if he told the truth of what had happened. Or his fucked-up version of events, anyway.

“Not yet. I just woke up and found the place like this.”

“You meanin’ ta tell me that you were in there when all this happened?”

Jamie hesitated, and then nodded sheepishly.

A knowing grin shifted the elderly man’s deep wrinkles. He shook his head, and then said, “Look, son. I know it ain’t my place to try-ta understand what you young folks call fun these days, but in the future you might not wanna leave your front door wide open for all the world ta see.”

Afterward, the elderly man turned and started walking down the steps. He was shaking his head and muttering something under his breath.

“Wait,” Jamie called out. “You think I did all this?”

The elderly man kept walking and turned around when he reached the bottom of the steps.

“Well, I’ll put it to you this way, son. Judging from those marks on your arm—”

Jamie felt an old-school zinger coming his way, but something caught the elderly man’s attention mid-sentence and replaced his words with a deep, inhaled gasp. His body jolted to flexion as if from a brief, yet powerful, electric shock. His expression changed from humorously perceptive to downright terrified, like his worst fear had suddenly materialized over Jamie’s left shoulder. He was staring with eyes as wide as silver dollars. His mouth was hanging open.

Jamie gasped and spun around expecting to see someone or something standing behind his back, but found only empty space between himself and the living room wall. He completed the circle and wound up back at the elderly man, whose eyes were locked on the same spot.

“What?! What is it?!” Jamie yelled.

His arm trembling, the elderly man pointed at the spot and started to back away between two parked cars. A wet spot formed around the man’s crotch.

A car came racing down the street. Jamie saw it at the last minute and tried to warn the elderly man, who continued to back away pointing. He had cleared the parked cars and was standing in the street, directly in the path of . . .

Brake pads squealed. Tires screeched against asphalt. But the car was going too fast to stop.

The car’s front end slammed into the elderly man, whose frail body folded around it. His upper torso and head smacked the hood with a crackling thud, denting it. His facial structure crumbled against fiberglass. Teeth jumped out of his mouth. His eyes collapsed inside fractured sockets. Skin flailed like a bag full of wet mud and shrapnel. Blood. His shattered mid-section stuck to the car’s grill as it continued to slide forward. His legs were sucked beneath the car. His heels dragged in the street kicking up sparks.

Although it happened in a matter of seconds, Jamie witnessed the collision in slow motion. He took a step forward once his mind allowed him to move, but the front door slammed shut in his face and nearly clocked him in the nose. He jumped back and landed approximately where whatever the elderly man had seen must have been standing, or floating, or whatever it was doing. There was no indication that anyone or anything else had occupied the space.

He heard a door in another room—the kitchen—yank open . . . and then slam shut. Upstairs the doors to the two bedrooms, the bathroom, and various closets slammed shut one after another. Jamie panicked and reached for the front doorknob. He struggled with it momentarily before it finally turned, and he yanked the door open and ran outside.

Jamie could think of a hundred reasons why he shouldn’t go back inside his own house and only three reasons why he should:

1. To put on some warmer clothes.

2. To eat something—he was weak from hunger.

3. To pack a suitcase full of essentials to sustain him until he figured out what the hell he was going to do with himself.

Jamie had been standing on the pavement outside his house since around 1pm after the ambulances left the accident scene with the elderly man’s mangled remains zipped up in a body bag, and after the police took his statement, all the while trading ponderous glances with each other concerning the bite marks on his arms.

“You might wanna get that checked out, kid,” one of them said with a smirk hiding just beneath the surface of his face.

It was late in the day now. Evening encroached on the afternoon. Nighttime on its heels. Jamie was tired of repeating what he had witnessed to neighbors—with whom he barely ever spoke—and strangers alike. As they walked past, he greeted them with a solemn-faced nod meant to keep them moving.

But they always had questions.

Based on the type of person he was dealing with, Jamie learned to predict their inevitable reaction to the teeth impressions. It was either dismay or disgust. The latter always seemed to suggest sexual deviance as the cause.

Jamie turned around and looked at his place, pondering whether to brave going back inside or not. He was reminded of the elderly man whenever he looked over his shoulder at the yellow police tape that cordoned off an area of the street decorated with headlight fragments, skid marks, and smeared blood.

His stomach was strangely bloated, from hunger he assumed, yet he had no answer for the burnt funk and spoiling meat vapors that he kept burping up. The corners of his mouth were raw and sore, as was his throat. His legs shook from fatigue, which he remedied by leaning against his car until his ass was numb.

He couldn’t stay here. He knew that now.

Although he had yet to decide on a destination, Jamie vowed to be away from this godforsaken place as soon as he possibly could. If he had his druthers he’d stay at Keri’s place, but a hotel was more likely. Despite numerous half-starts, he couldn’t even bring himself to run inside long enough to grab his cell phone. He wasn’t sure where he left it, but guessed that it was probably in his shoulder bag, which was somewhere in his bedroom.

He wanted to call Keri to, at least, tell her what had happened to the elderly man, and to derive comfort from the sound of her voice. He heard his house phone ring a few times since he ran out. Each time it rang long enough for the answering machine to pick up, but he couldn’t hear who it was from outside. He assumed it was Keri calling to check up on him. The more he stood by the door, the more angry and frustrated Jamie became.

This is my house, not yours! He directed the thought at the dark sliver between the partially opened front door and the frame, and then felt silly for doing so.

He waited.

Sundown was looming and still Jamie hadn’t gathered the courage to enter his house. He knew that nighttime, with its dark cloak, was the worst possible time to face whatever it was that lurked inside.

So, you’d better make your move. The least you can do is grab your keys—so he could gain access to his car, which seemed like a much better place to be than outside.

“Put some clothes on for goodness sake, before you catch cold,” said an old motherly woman who walked past him.

Jamie didn’t mean for the look he gave her to be so angry. But she must’ve been the 5th person to stick her nose in his business in the last hour. And the cold air was beginning to ware on him.

“All right, Jamie,” he whispered. “You can do this. Just make it quick.”

He took one step, then another, and continued the tentative process until he reached the top of the front staircase. He shoved the front door open with his fingertips and snatched his hand back as if he feared something might jump out and nip at it, paused for a moment to muster a burst of courage, and then ran inside.

Jamie’s plan was to, Run, and don’t look back, and keep running with blinders on until you get to the bedroom. That was where he expected to find his shoulder bag—hopefully in one piece—lying amidst the clothing, overturned furniture, and various broken things.

Don’t stop for anything. No matter what you see or hear. No! Matter! What!

He made it to the foot of the staircase that led up to the second floor before he stopped cold, completely stupefied (again) by what he thought he saw on the way.

The living room was back to normal; not a thing out of place, just as he left it when he originally went up to bed after falling asleep on the couch to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The holes in the walls were replaced by pristine drywall painted glossy white, same as always. The deep cavities in the floor were gone, too. The pristine state extended to the dining room, where his camera stood watching him like a three-legged Cyclops spider. The kitchen, too, from what he could see. It was like last night had never happened.

Jamie remembered the message scribbled on the wall and whipped around. But it was gone. He checked upstairs. The hallway. His bedroom. Both looked as if nothing had happened.

He came back downstairs and sat down on the bottom living room step, shaking, his eyes darting back and forth, and cried into his hands.

Maybe there is a God and all this shit is my punishment for “peddling filth.” I’d have to be crazy to believe that. Crazy. Insane. Loco. Batty. Bonkers. Looney Tunes . . . Crazy? Stop running from it, dumbass. The writing’s on the wall—No pun intended. I, hereby pronounced me, Jamie-Alan-Cole, officially kicked-in-tha-head fucking insa—

Jamie suddenly thought of the teeth impressions all over his body. Were they too a figment of his imagination? He had felt nothing physically since the latest mindfuck—no stinging, tightening wounds trying to heal, no soreness around his wrists, ankles and his neck.

Jamie lifted his arms and saw healthy, unblemished skin. But then a millisecond later the teeth impressions pushed through.

He balled his lips and stewed for a moment. He was close to the edge, close to losing it completely.

He envisioned himself lost in a druggy, Peter Max landscape full of pulsating color-strokes. Living trees pointed sharp, leafy branches at him. Suddenly, the elderly man came dancing through. Literally. He was all broken up and leaking blood from his concaved face. There were still traces of his elderly features floating in the gory mash of red. The elderly man moved through Jamie’s mental frame from left to right like a marionette controlled by a giant invisible hand.

Following the hint, Jamie thought, Wait-a-minute. The elderly manhad to have seen something. That’s proof, right?

He could still picture the face the elderly man made at whatever had scared him. It gave Jamie the chills. He preferred the gory mash of red to that face. He lingered on the idea of proof. Video was proof. Photos were proof. He had neither.

Unless . . .

Jamie remembered seeing camera flashes just before he blacked out last night. It was right after he dropped, or tossed, or threw the camera down.

Jamie detached his camera from the tripod, took it up to his bedroom, and plugged it in to his laptop. He doubted that he was going to find proof of anything other than his own mental collapse, but what did he have to lose. He started the ‘image transferring’ process and then fished a sweater and a pair of loose-fitting cargo pants from his closet and put them on while he waited anxiously for the photos to load onscreen.

The first 12 photos revealed Jamie posing to show off the teeth impressions. He didn’t realize that he had taken so many. After the fourth or fifth pose, he began to scroll through them without pausing to examine details. Eventually he came to a photo that he had no memory of taking.

Photo #13

Jamie is lying on his back on the dining room floor. He is in mid-struggle, and apparently screaming. Transparent, disembodied hands with extra long fingers pin his wrists and ankles to the floor. Another pair of hands are wrapped around his throat. The hands are formed up to about mid-forearm where they fade into thin air leaving a jagged-edged stump.

Jamie wasn’t aware that his face could contort the way it had in the photo. Seeing now what had caused the bruises on his wrists and ankles, he understood. Just looking at it made the soreness in the corners of his mouth increase tenfold. He didn’t want to scroll any further, afraid of what might turn up next. He held his finger over the mousepad, but was hesitant to touch it. He was staring down at the keyboard to escape the image onscreen. He looked up at it every couple seconds, just to be sure, and then quickly looked away.

On the screen, the pointer blinked as it hovered over the ‘next’ button. After some time, Jamie double-tapped the mousepad.

Photo #14

Jamie is still struggling, still held down by the wrists and ankles. Now he is choking, too. A blurred halo around his head suggests that he is whipping it violently from side-to-side. Four additional hands, transparent, and disembodied like the others, are grabbing hold of his upper and lower jaw as if they are about to pull it apart. Fingers all in his mouth.

Photo #15

The hands stretch Jamie’s mouth open wide enough to fit a basketball inside. The cartoon-like pliability affects his face, elongating his horrified expression. A transparent, disembodied foot—formed up to the ankle—is stepping inside of his forced open mouth. The foot is clothed in a men’s dress shoe and slacks.

Photo #16

Another disembodied foot—a little girl—is climbing into Jamie’s stretched open mouth. A deformed lump in his throat from the first person moving downward.

There were more photos. Each one showed a different pair of transparent, disembodied legs climbing into Jamie’s oversized mouth. He stopped counting after the sixth set. On the bottom, corner of the screen, he noticed that the overall number of new photos was 32. He had only made it to Photo #20.

Jamie looked down at his bloated stomach, and then jumped backward out of his chair and stumbled away from the desk. He took another long look at the screen and dwelt in silence on the terrifying truth that he was confronted with. And then he ran into the bathroom, stuck his finger down his throat and tried to force himself to vomit into the toilet.

The phone rang. It sounded like it was coming from a different plain of existence. Jamie barely heard it over his coughing and lurching.

The answering machine picked up downstairs. Jamie heard traces of his outgoing message, and then a male voice afterward that sounded a lot like Ronnie Hayes.

“Jamie . . . Are you there?” Ronnie said. He was out of breath and sounded strangely excited. “It’s me. Ronnie. From work. I know you probably hate me, Jamie. I know that I’m probably the last person on the planet you wanna talk to. But you have to listen to me!”

Jamie hurried down the steps, drooling and teary-eyed from straining to vomit. He stood in the living room listening to more of the message.

“I don’t know how exactly to say this, but . . . they’re after me, Jamie. If my hunch is right, they’re probably after you, too. I don’t know who, or what they are, or why they’re after me, but I think I really pissed them off tonight. It was different before, like they were only playing with me. But now . . . I managed to get away from them, though. I’m in a motel on Washington Ave—the Carlson, Room 16. Please, Jamie, call me as soon as you get this. I need your help.”

Afterward, Jamie gathered a few things—wallet, keys. He shooed away any reminder of photos #13 through #20 as he looked for his cell phone. He found it powered down in one of the outside flaps of his shoulder bag. When he turned it on, he saw that there were 15 missed calls, and 4 voicemail messages—all from Keri.

SEVENTEEN

Fourteen hours ago, Ronnie Hayes was on the move, slinking through the quiet, low-lit streets of suburban Philadelphia and ducking into dark spaces while he caught his breath. He could hear the presence lingering in the area.

He made himself as small as humanly possible and stayed that way until the presence eventually faded into the distance. Then he wasted precious time debating whether or not it knew where he was all along since it always managed to find him. It didn’t matter what uncharted driveway, or alley, or tiny street he ran down or how many times he changed direction on a dime. It seemed like the presence would wait until he thought he was gaining headway, before the haunted underwater alarm and the chirping sound leapt out of thin air. It resonated near and far, sometimes faint enough to make him believe that maybe he was hearing things and sometimes it was right up on him.

“Hey buddy,” yelled a sanitation worker from across the street. “I’m looking for a friend-a-mine . . . ”

That was the other thing. The presence must have found every last person who happened to be outside at this time of night, temporarily subjugated their minds, and then sic’d them on Ronnie. A young nurse standing at the bus stop pretty much repeated what the homeless, crazy man had said to Ronnie as he sat in his car waiting for the light to change.

“She looks a lot like the girl standing behind you,” said the nurse.

“She looks a lot like the girl peeking between your legs,” said a late-shift office worker walking down the street.

Ronnie never looked. He was too afraid. After the nurse he would run before they finished their first sentence. Then they would raise their voices so that he could hear them as he ran.

“She looks a lot like the girl running next to you,” said a young hipster roaming the streets.

Ronnie hummed a nonsensical song to block out the young hipster’s voice. He had no idea where he was going anymore. He scrapped the plan to double back to his car once he realized how far he had run from it. The goal, now, was simply to get away.

He was coming to the end of his endurance, and scoping the area for his next pit stop. He came to a large street and decided to keep going until he reached one of the smaller neighborhoods up ahead. He heard a screeching sound, like a car slamming on its brakes. He turned and saw headlights and a smiling grill approaching fast. He stumbled out of the car’s way and into the path of another one. The first car stopped a foot in front of where Ronnie stood a second ago. The second car was in the process of stopping, but hadn’t come to full rest by the time it reached him. Ronnie sprawled his legs away from the sliding bulk and fell forward with his arms held out in front of him. His palms smacked the hood like a double high-five. He bounced back a foot and fell on his ass.

Both drivers exited. One approached tentatively, almost as if the man didn’t want to see what his car might have done to Ronnie or maybe like he was in a trance of some sort. The other driver hung back behind the safety of her opened driver-side door.

Ronnie rolled onto his knees and made a quick inspection for injuries. Aside from his hands, which were numb, his shoulders, which were sore, and a few rips and smudges in his clothes, he found nothing. Ronnie put his feet underneath him and stood. He massaged his right shoulder, which hurt worse than the left, and looked up at the driver who slowly approached.

“I’m okay,” he nodded. “Sorry about that. I didn’t see y—”

“I’m looking for my friend,” the man said, talking over Ronnie.

“I’m looking for my friend, too.” Said the woman standing behind her driver-side door.

“She’s about yay tall.” The two drivers spoke at the same time and in the same droll monotone.

Ronnie took off running. He was humming again to block out the drivers’ voices, which he could still vaguely hear. He tripped half a block away and tumbled on the ground. He immediately got up and turned angrily toward the drivers. They were still standing outside of their cars staring in Ronnie’s direction. He snatched his gun from beneath his belt and held it up for the drivers to see.

“Fuck you!” Ronnie yelled at the drivers, and at the air around him, where he figured the presence was lurking. “Fuck you all! You don’t scare me! I’m Ronnie Hayes, bitch! Ronnie-Mother-fucking-Hayes! Who, the fuck, are you, huh?!”

Ronnie waited for some kind of response. The drivers just stood there, staring. The air was as still as it had been all night. Sirens perpetually shrieking, echoed from somewhere in the city. It was so quiet that he could hear them way out here.

Ronnie shook his head, confused by the drivers’ inaction. Fueled by anger, he continued to vent his frustration. Now he was loosely aiming the gun in the drivers’ general direction, holding it at a sideways point like they did in the movies.

“Whatcu gonna do now, huh? I’ll tell you watchu can do! You can all just fucking drop dead and leave me the fuck alone! And take your fucking friend with you! And fuck her, too! You got that! I hope you never find the ugly, stupid little BITCH!” Ronnie mocked the voices and mannerisms of the various people who had stopped him tonight. “She’s about yay tall. She looks a lot like the girl standing behind you, or next to—”

Something told Ronnie to look down and to his left. Something small was occupying that space. He froze. Only his eyes moved. There was a little girl standing next to him. His arm was blocking two thirds of her body, but he could see the side of a bad, blond wig hanging next to dark skin, and an arm clothed in a girlie dress with short frilly sleeves. And he could see the bottom corner of her dress dangling above the ground. The girl was standing in a way that suggested some kind of major deformity.

He knew it was the girl from the clip. But what did she want with him?

In the distance, the two drivers crumbled limp and fell into a heap in the middle of the street. Ronnie heard the cricking of stiff muscles. It was the little girl. She had turned her head and was looking up at him.

Ronnie started running. He didn’t want to see any more of the girl. He tucked the gun back underneath his belt as he ran through an empty SuperFresh Parking Lot toward a construction site on the other side. They were putting up an apartment building where the old Roller Rink used to be. He changed course at the last minute thinking that the presence would have had plenty of time to see him run through the open space and would know exactly where to look for him. He ran along the front of the Supermarket, through a wall of bushes, stumbled down a dirt mound and onto a small, semi-residential street. He looked back for the first time when he was far enough into the block that the lights from the large street couldn’t reach.

The next thing he knew he was falling.

“That’s when I fell in the manhole,” Ronnie said into the phone. “Actually, it was more like one-a-those corner sewer covers. You know, the rectangular ones?”

“Mmm hmmm,” Jamie replied. He was driving with one hand and holding his cell phone to his ear with the other one. His attention was split between the traffic, which whizzed by like a video game, and the scene Ronnie had painted with his story. Parts of it sounded eerily similar to Jamie’s own experience.

“It happened so fast that they didn’t see where I went. I was running and then, SLOOP! I fell right in. I didn’t even know where I was at first. I could hear them looking for me, so I hid under a pile of garbage. Smelled so bad that I almost puked, but I wasn’t coming out for nothing. It was fucked up, man. F-u-c-k-e-d Up!” A pause. “When they were looking for me this time, thisss . . . presence . . . they sounded . . . different. The noises they make—”

“Like weird, chirping sounds . . . ”

“Yeah! Or ringing. They were deeper, more aggressive—if that makes any sense. It was like they were pissed off all of a sudden. Maybe it was something I said. Crazy as this sounds, I get the feeling like they were only fucking with me before.”

At times, Jamie sensed that, too.

“I was so scared, man,” Ronnie said. “I stayed there, under the garbage, for so long that I eventually fell asleep. Didn’t wake up until this morning. People probably thought I was some kind of monster comin’ outta the ground . . . ”

Or a C.H.U.D., Jamie mused.

“ . . . when I came climbing outta there. But I didn’t give a fuck. Then I came here. I called the police and told ‘em that my car was stolen, so I guess they’re out looking for it. Left all my shit at the Sheraton, too. Fuck it.”

Jamie drove on autopilot while he digested Ronnie’s tale. The girl from the clip. She was the focal point of all this.

“Jamie? You still there?” came Ronnie’s worried voice through the phone.

“I’m here.” Jamie replied. He turned the corner and spotted the Carlson Motel sign peeking over a line of familiar store names in lights perched atop poles. “Hey. I’m coming up to the motel. I’ll see you in a few.”

“K. Room 16.”

“Got it.”

Jamie hung up the phone and tossed it into the passenger seat. Then he picked it up and turned it off thinking that Keri might call again and he would feel compelled to answer.

Jamie turned into the parking lot of the Carlson Motel and drove around reading room numbers until he came to #16. It was around back, on the second floor. Jamie parked, turned off the engine, and got out in one continuous motion. He closed the door and started walking toward the metal staircase.

“T-h-a-n-k-y-oooooooo,” a whispered voice came from the air around him.

Jamie looked up expecting to see Ronnie leaning over the balcony railing. He could see the doors of rooms #12 through #16 through the iron lattice in the railing. There was no one in sight. He looked down the balcony and saw Ronnie’s shadow against the curtains in room #16’s window. He was peeking out and probably looking for Jamie.

Jamie was suddenly overcome by voices that were not his own, speaking inside his head. The unnatural noise resonated from deep inside his gut this time. He felt ambushed by a foreign presence, pushed aside. His entire body became numb. He saw himself stumble up to the iron staircase and nearly fall. Through no action of his own, he was able to stay on his feet. Afterward, he swayed briefly as if to a bull-rush of euphoria. His eyes rolled up underneath his eyelids. His teeth were clenched and grinding. His hands curled into painful claws. But Jamie couldn’t feel any of it.

Consciousness began to escape him. He could literally see himself falling into a dark, bottomless void. His body seized. His vision went blurry, and then completely white. When it returned, he was watching the present unfold in his head unable to react to what he witnessed.

The Carlson Motel — Room #16

Ronnie Hayes cracks the door and peeks out. He is holding a handgun—a Glock 9mm—behind his back. He sees Jamie standing outside his room, heavily shadowed. He hurries Jamie inside and then sticks his head out the door and scans the vicinity as he closes it slowly.

“I knew I was right about you,” Ronnie says as he locks the door, and then takes a chair from the table next to the window and props it up under the doorknob.

Ronnie is working on no sleep and looks weary and disheveled as a result. He keeps his eyelids spread far apart to stop them from closing for another micro nap. His eyes are bulging white with brown orbs floating dead center and red lightening reaching in from the corners.

“I had a feeling since that day with the kid; when you thought he bit you,” he says. “But I couldn’t be sure.”

Jamie’s actions appear rigid, uncoordinated, as if controlled via satellite. His face is bloated. His skin is flushed and slightly venous. He is sweating and breathing heavily. Dark circles around his eyes. An oddly shaped potbelly. Jamie nods and gestures in response to Ronnie like he was parodying his own mannerisms, and doing a bad job of it.

Ronnie doesn’t see any of this as he moves from the door to the window, where he fingers the curtains aside and peeks out, and then over to the couch. He walks right past Jamie without making eye contact.

“I wasn’t even sure if what was happening was real at that point,” Ronnie says. “But now I know.”

Jamie follows Ronnie over to the couch. Along the way, he snatches up an old-fashioned lamp from a small table standing next to the couch, removes the lampshade, and turns it over so that the thick wooden base is on top. He does all of this while continuing to parody himself.

“They’re real, Jamie. They’re real, and they’re everywhere.”

Jamie handles the lamppost like a bludgeoning weapon. He performs a few check-swings and accidentally yanks the plug, which is attached to a short cord, from the outlet. The room becomes slightly darker.

Ronnie whips around to investigate. He sees something long and solid coming right at him. He doesn’t have time to react before the lamppost cracks him in the right side of his face.

The blow from the lamppost knocks Ronnie half-conscious on his feet. He lets go of the gun. The force spins him around and he falls into the couch, bounces off, and lands on the floor. The impact wakes him out of punch-drunkenness. He looks up and sees Jamie standing over him holding the upside down lamppost. There is blood on the end of it. His blood. The right side of his face is throbbing like it might soon explode. He is too terrified to feel the pain yet.

“Jay-mee . . . ” Ronnie tries to call out to Jamie, to ask him why he did that, but his mouth won’t move on the right side. It feels like his jaw is broken.

Jamie is looking down at Ronnie like a predator to its prey. His facial features are arranged slightly different, like someone else trying to fit into a Jamie Cole mask. Jamie’s lips are moving, his teeth flaring in anger, but the voice that comes out of his mouth is not his own. The voice is much deeper, ancient sounding, and rich with character. The language is out of Africa. The tone is rueful and loathing.

Ronnie can’t understand what the voice is saying, but he starts to recognize a phrase that keeps repeating. It sounds something like, “Lo-eka hen raso malu din FENAAA!”

Ronnie holds his arm up over his face and pleads, “Pl . . . please, Jamie? Wh-hut ddd-id I do? Is it about the clip?”

The deep, ancient voice coming out of Jamie’s mouth repeats the phrase over and over.

“Lo-eka hen raso malu din FENAAA!”

Jamie points at Ronnie and occasionally cranks his arm back like he is going to hit him again with the lamppost. Ronnie can see discrepancies in Jamie’s actions that contradict the normal rhythm and tempo of his movements. He just now notices the potbelly.

The man in the Jamie Cole mask and bodysuit appears suddenly frustrated. He walks into the kitchen and comes out holding a steak knife. He walks over to the wall and, using the knife, begins to carve large letters into the surface like a teacher angrily scribbling on a chalkboard. The deep, ancient voice speaks the words in English as he carves them into the wall.

“N-o M-o-r-e G-a-m-e-s!”

The man in the Jamie Cole costume turns and smiles at Ronnie. The smile is crooked and wider than Jamie’s mouth. He is pointing behind himself at the phrase carved into the wall.

“Re-mem-bah?! Ronnie-Mo-tha-focking-Hayes!” says the deep, ancient voice.

Jamie begins to cough and lurch this time through no effort of his own. He stumbles forward and doubles over. Bile oozes from his mouth as if to lubricate the exit. The bulge in his belly begins to pulsate. It travels up his torso with each lurching, belching episode. The pulsating bulge settles in his throat, stretching the skin painfully wide. Another episode sends the bulge upward. Jamie’s mouth stretches open like a snake unhinging its jaws. A rush of unnatural noise forces its way out.

Ronnie crawls away from the geyser of heat-ripple distortion that erupts from Jamie’s mouth and spreads out in the air above him.

Afterward, a newly thin Jamie swoons, lightheaded, and then collapses to the floor, semi-conscious.

Ronnie continues to crawl away from the distortion and the noise. He watches as it travels around the small room and then starts to surround him. He jumps to his feet and tries to run toward the door.

Hard Skip

Ronnie Hayes hovers in the air in the center of the room. His arms and legs are spread. His face is in full grimace. His breath exits in painful groans, bridged by throaty whimpering, and pushes frothy spittle through his clenched teeth. Tears stream from his eyes. He is flinching in reaction to bite-sized chunks that rapidly disappear from his body. The unnatural noise is worked into a frenzy and laced with an alien buzzing. Blood spurting from the wounds remains afloat and forms an aerosol-mist atmosphere around Ronnie’s hovering form.

“Heeeelp meeeeeee!” Ronnie cries out in dire pain.

EIGHTEEN

Jamie was finally able to pull himself from the vision. He put the present on hard-focus and ascended through the haze, to a reasonably clear state of mind. He was lying on his side on the floor with his arm extended, his head resting on his bicep like he had settled down for a nap. He shot upright and turned toward the horrible ruckus coming from the center of the room. He saw Ronnie hovering in mid-air. Much of him was eaten away, but he was still barely alive, convulsing from the pain. His eyes were rolled back. The aerosol-mist atmosphere blurred the outline of writhing stumps attached to a partial torso. Ronnie’s screaming had devolved into strange vocal sounds that fell out at an occasionally peaking mumble.

Jamie looked around the room. There was blood everywhere. Cheap furniture peeked through the moist crimson coating, ugly wallpaper, and carpeting. A television on a swiveling base mounted to the top of a short, wide dresser with uneven drawers. A stench both tangy and sweet filtered through the air. He contorted his face and turned away, but the stench of blood was all around him. He looked down and glanced at his clothing, and then realized that he, too, was covered in blood. He felt something on his face as well, something moist drying in the air.

Jamie frantically wiped the blood from his face. His hands slid on the heavy coating. Some went in his mouth. He immediately started spitting it out. He saw Ronnie’s gun on the floor, lying near his foot.

His eyes returned to Ronnie, who had passed away with no legs, one-and-a-half arm-stumps, and little more than a chest and partial abdomen below his neck. His head was slumped forward and bouncing slightly as the invisible teeth continued to feast on what remained.

Jamie crawled on all fours and grabbed the gun from the floor. He slid the gun into the lower hip pocket of his cargo pants and then, quietly, so as not to disturb the feasting ghosts, he crawled over to the front door of Room #16 and wrapped his fingers around the knob. He made a face as he twisted slowly, and then pulled.

Jamie crawled out the door and then stood on his knees and eased it closed. Afterward, he took a deep breath, put his feet underneath him, and started to stand. He turned to run and saw...

There were people standing outside of their rooms on the second floor walkway stirred by all the commotion coming from Room #16. A collective jolt hit the nosey-folks when Jamie’s eyes met theirs. A woman gasped, and said, “Oh my God!”

Everyone froze.

Jamie could tell by the looks on their faces what the people on the walkway thought of him as he stood there, a bloody, beaten-down mess, looking guilty as sin. He was more worried that the things in Room #16 would be finished with Ronnie any second now and would then come after him.

One of the nosey-folks ran back into his room.

Maybe to call the police. Just when the thought finished scrolling through his brain, Jamie heard sirens in the distance, almost like he had conjured them up. They were getting closer.

Jamie bolted for the stairs without warning. The nosey-folks hurried out of his way. He wondered what he’d do if . . . when the police finally caught up to him. He wondered if any of the nosey-folks had recognized him from the news, or if any of them had taken down his license plate as he drove out of the lot. If they had, then the police had probably put out an APB for his arrest.

He could still hear sirens in the distance as he drove down small street after small street slouched way down in the driver’s seat so that only his eyes and the top of his head were visible to anyone looking in. Based on the volume and pitch of the squealing sirens, the police had already arrived at the Carlson by now.

Jamie drove into the city and past his house a few times. He contemplated going inside, but was too afraid. He kept on driving and wound up in Center City, where all the tall buildings lived. The Lurmeyer Tower was there. He drove past it. He kept hearing sirens and kept telling himself that this was the city and that they—the sirens—could’ve been for anything. He would listen long enough to chart their approximate path, and then breathe a sigh of relief when they headed off in another direction.

They’re going to find you eventually. I know, Goddammit! Just shut up, and let me think!

His head was in chaos. He couldn’t put two thoughts together. The most pressing concern was to avoid the police. Anything else was a distraction.

The driver behind him started honking at Jamie for driving too slow. He stuck his arm out the window and flagged the driver around him, but the driver didn’t take the hint. Or he was just being an asshole. Either way, the horn was making Jamie nervous.

Jamie turned abruptly down the first street he came to and stepped on the gas, fearing that a cop may have seen him turn without using his signals. He didn’t see any police cars around, but that didn’t matter. Jamie had been pulled over enough times—for fitting the description—to know that the police were adept at materializing out of thin air. He kept his eyes on the rearview until he was certain that no one was following him.

The block Jamie crept down was one that he used to walk through after parking his car in that ridiculously expensive lot on Market Street. This was before deciding it was much less expensive to take the train to work. Discount clothing and beauty supply, and electronics stores that catered to black folks populated the dormant block. An empty, outdoor parking lot in the middle of the block. Cars parked on both sides of the street.

A horn blared and wiped Jamie’s brain clean. He turned and saw an angry woman sticking her head out of the window of the car behind him. She was yelling at him, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying.

Jamie stuck his arm out the window and waved his hand to apologize and to let the woman know that he was moving, and then drove to the end of the block. He pulled into a spot at the corner, next to a fire hydrant, turned off the engine, and lowered the driver-side window to get some air. The area was better lit than the rest of the block due to the security lights on the ‘We Buy and Sell Gold’ store on the corner that turned on automatically as soon as Jamie pulled into the space. He contemplated finding another spot, but then the lights went dark.

Jamie closed his eyes and exhaled. His mind stuttered. He immediately started to shake his head, “No,” at the memory of what happened to Ronnie Hayes.

“I could never do anything like that. Never. I wouldn’t!”

You saw what happened, Jamie’s inner voice chided. Kinda explains a lot, donnit? Like why your mouth is so sore. Your throat, too. And your stomach . . . what about that? Huh?

Jamie looked over his shoulder and saw a police car creeping down the block. He nearly passed out from the sight. The police car was approximately thirty feet away and closing very slowly. He could see that the driver was talking on a cell phone. The look on the cop’s face suggested that the conversation was of a personal nature. So, there was a chance that the cop might pass right by without noticing Jamie’s car. It was a very small chance. A risky one.

With his back pressed against the seat rest, Jamie slid down until he was literally sitting on the floor, and waited. He could hear the cop talking on the phone as he crept past Jamie’s car and kept on going. The conversation was about some actor who had just gotten busted cheating on his spouse of all things.

“Can you imagine the amount of top-shelf poontang that must come that guy’s way 24/7?” Jamie heard the cop say. “Can’t say I blame the guy. Lucky bastard. I pro-bly woulda done the same thing.” And then he laughed.

Jamie slowly inched his way up into his seat until his eyes broke the surface of the windshield. He sat there and watched the police car turn at the end of the block and disappear down the intersecting street. He was so relieved that he could’ve jumped up and kicked his heels together.

Jamie sat there for a while thinking about everything and nothing. At some point he noticed the newspaper dispenser at the corner. His eyes had passed it so many times since that he wondered how he could’ve missed the cover pressed against the dispenser’s scuffed display window. It was the Between The Lines Times, the one with the article about the video clip on the cover. The headline jumped out at him now. MYSTERIOUS VIDEO CLIP MAY HAVE TIES TO UNSOLVED MURDER.

The headline gave Jamie an idea. He dug into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He opened it and started thumbing back the edges of business cards from people whom he didn’t remember meeting. He came to the one he was looking for, slid it out of the horizontal stack, and held it up to his face.

HORACE FIGG, REPORTER,

BETWEEN THE LINES TIMES

It was late and Horace (aka David Newman) was one of seven people still working in the office. The lights were dimmed and the atmosphere was more intimate with only hints of sexualized moans and screams coming sporadically from far off cubicles. People worked with the volume turned down to accommodate the reduction in background noise.

Horace was proofreading the synopsis he had just struggled through. The title of the film was Spring Break Lesbian Sorority Haze-o-Rama. He was harboring a major boner—for which he felt guilty—and lingering somewhere between feeling sorry for these poor girls’ parents and wanting to sneak away to the bathroom to rub one out in their honor when his cell phone vibrated against his leg.

He slid the phone from his hip pocket and checked the display. He didn’t recognize the number, but assumed that it was for Horace and not David. Marc Pierce, who had hired him, was the only one who had this number, and Marc was one of the seven people still here.

Horace peeked over the cubicle and spotted Marc working in his office. Next he looked around to make sure that he was a safe distance from the other five people and then sank back into his seat, pressed, “answer,” and held the phone up to his face.

“Hello,” he whispered.

“My name is Jamie Cole,” said the distressed voice on the other end. “I’m an editor at Echelon Media. The one you spoke to when you came in a few weeks ago.”

Horace found the boy’s anxiety a bit overplayed and suspected that Jamie was up to something. Retaliation for quoting him in the article perhaps?

“The one who threw me out,” Horace replied, playing along. “Yes. I remember you. What’s this about?”

Maybe Jamie had figured out that David Newman was really Horace Figg, the reporter.

“I need your help.”

“My help, huh?” Horace said knowingly. “C’mon. I get it. The jig is up, right. Ya found me out?”

He peeked over the cubicle and looked around the office again. Was he being watched? Recorded?

“What?” Jamie said, confused.

Horace hesitated, wondering if maybe he had jumped the gun with his suspicion.

“Ah . . . nothing,” he said. “I was talking to . . . my neighbor. He stopped by for a . . . ” Horace looked around the cubicle for ideas. His eyes landed on a DVD case propped upright against a stack of movies ‘to be watched.’ A woman with massive breasts sitting in a giant champagne glass full of Jello smiled at him on the cover of the DVD. Gelatinous Juggs #7 was the title. “ . . . jug of . . . ” He snatched up another DVD and grimaced at the extreme close-up of a hairy vagina splashed across the cover. Winterbush Wonderland was the title. “ . . . clams?”

Horace shook his head at the awkward-as-all-hell-sounding bullshit that just fell from his mouth.

“Something’s . . . happening to me,” Jamie said as if he didn’t even hear Horace’s clumsy response. He spoke through rapid breathing, and with a watered down cadence, like he was only running at ten percent. His voice would occasionally tremble at which point he paused, swallowed, and then continued speaking. “I think . . . I’m pretty sure that it’s about the clip. The one you wrote your article about.”

“The Keisha Senghor video?” Pinching the phone between his shoulder and ear, Horace reached for a legal pad and a pen and leaned forward, ready to take notes.

“Are you in some kind of trouble?”

Jamie didn’t answer right away, which led Horace to believe that he was in trouble.

“Is someone after you?” Horace asked.

“Some-thing . . . ” Jamie gingerly replied after a long pause.

“I’m sorry. Did you say ‘some-thing?’”

“Forget that. It’s just . . . I’m just scared. I found your card in my wallet. I figured you might know something about what’s going on. Please? You have to help me.”

Horace was apprehensive to accept Jamie’s story. Problem was that it was the first real-seeming lead he’d come across since starting the undercover assignment.

“I can tell you about the girl, Keisha, and the events leading up to her disappearance, but the verdict is still out as to whether or not it’s her in that video of yours. I’d bet money on it, but I need definitive proof. Even if it is her, I don’t see how any of this going to help y—”

“Trust me. It’s the same girl from your article.” Jamie had the newspaper in his lap, having just read the article all the way through for the first time. Obtaining a copy from the newspaper dispenser sitting 25 feet away without being seen was quite an event.

“Really? And what makes you so sure? You know something that I don’t?”

“I’ll explain everything, but not here.”

“Where’s here?”

“In my car, but . . . ” Jamie paused. He had almost told the reporter too much. For this guy to believe his story, Jamie would have to get him on his side first; make the reporter feel comfortable with him; let him know he was level-headed. If he started carrying on about invisible teeth, and whispering shadows, and phantom appendages, and something that sounded like a giant angry human, amphibious devil-clown-fish monster hybrid toddler-thing, and whatever-the-hell had just happened to Ronnie Hayes, then he’d probably lose another potential ally right from the jump. Even if this guy did work for a goofy supermarket rag like the Times. Half of the shit they ran was probably faked anyway. Better to keep it down-to-earth for now. “It’s just not safe is what I’m tryin’ ta say. Can we meet somewhere private?”

Horace was aware of the risk involved. Jamie would find out his true identity, thus ending or at the very least jeopardizing the assignment. But he had a feeling; call it optimistic anxiety. It told him that this was the lead he had been waiting for. Fuck the risk. He was a journalist.

“You have a pen?” Horace asked. “I’m going to give you my address.”

Afterward, Jamie stole a black sweat suit—pants and a hoodie—that was dangling, with its back to him, from the rack closest to the front window of a store that sold clothing for complete idiots. He used a rock to smash the window, grabbed it in one swipe, jumped in his car, which he had left running, and sped away. He was surprised that there was no alarm.

Jamie drove for a number of blocks and then found a parking spot under a tree where he changed his clothing. He put Ronnie’s gun in the waistband of his sweatpants, and then moved it to his sock when the weight of the gun kept pulling his pants down. There was a logo emblazoned across the front of the hoodie at chest-level. Jamie hadn’t noticed it until he put the thing on. It was from that terrible animated flop called Thug-Bots. Jamie remembered cringing at the trailers when they ran on television a few months ago. Now it looked like he was endorsing the film.

At some point Jamie remembered the old, stainless steel water bottle in his gym bag in the trunk. If his mind served him correctly it was still full from his last gym visit.

Jamie retrieved the water bottle from his gym bag and used the warm water inside to wash the dried blood from his face and hands. Then he followed the directions Horace had given him over the phone and drove to his house.

NINETEEN

The meeting got off to a bad start. Horace was standing outside of his house in pajamas and a robe, holding a parking spot for Jamie, who drove up staring through the windshield like a confused dog. He stopped and lowered the driver-side window.

Horace walked up to the window and said, “Before you jump to any conclusions . . . ” And then he noticed the logo (Thug-Bots) printed across the front of Jamie’s hoodie. Horace had seen the trailer for the film as well and shook his head every time it came on the television. The Jamie Cole he thought he knew from work wouldn’t own a shirt like that.

Jamie watched Horace process the logo. He didn’t try to explain it. Instead, he was looking at Horace, who Jamie recognized as David, the new hire from work, like he owed Jamie an explanation.

“I was saying that I wanted you to know that my assignment had nothing to do with you personally,” Horace said.

“Assignment?”

Horace nodded.

“I was working undercover at Echelon for the Between The Lines Times.”

Staring up at Horace, Jamie let a frown linger. It seemed like he should feel insulted or offended in some way. He felt a little stupid for being duped by Horace.

“You know the newspaper that you read the article in?” Horace added when it looked like Jamie didn’t recognize the name.

“Yeah. I know what it is.”

“Sorry. You seemed a bit confused there for a minute.”

“Confused is an understatement.”

An awkward moment . . .

“I saved-ja a spot.” Horace said and then took a few steps backward and directed Jamie’s eyes to the empty space. “Just pull in right here.”

Jamie parked and then followed Horace inside.

“Finding a spot can be a bitch around here.” Horace said along the way.

“So, which is it; Horace or David?” Jamie asked. “Just so I know who I’m talking to.”

“Most people just call me Horace.”

Horace pushed the front door open, walked inside and waited for Jamie.

“Come on in and have a seat.”

Standing in the front doorway of his house, lit by a fat sliver of artificial light from inside, Horace got his first real look at Jamie Cole. Jamie looked, to Horace, like he had spent a month binging on hard drugs. It had been, what? A day since Horace had last seen Jamie, looking intense, but otherwise healthy.

Jamie was looking pale for a black man. His eyes were sunken into the sockets and encircled by dark ringlets of concaved skin. He presented as a weird combination of weary-eyed, but wide-awake and buzzing with spastic energy. He had stopped a few times between his car and Horace’s front door, to hold his stomach, and lurch like he was going to vomit. But he never did. Afterward, Jamie would instantly straighten-up, clear his throat, and pick up where he had left off like it never happened. So, Horace went along with it. He was hungry for a lead.

“I know it sounds crazy, but . . . ” Jamie began.

“Crazy is a relative term, son,” Horace responded from the kitchen where he had gone to pour himself another cup of blueberry tea. “You’d be surprised by all the crazy stories I deal with in my line-a-work. Not that I believe everything I hear.”

Jamie sat on the long, bulky—and comfortable as hell—living room couch looking small and inaccessible. He held his arms and legs close to his body and hunched his torso forward. He acted like he had something against comfort when Horace suggested earlier that he, “Lean back and relax.” He declined anything to eat or drink or a blanket to quell his chills, too.

Jamie used the break in the conversation to digest the cramped room. Some infomercial on the TV with the sound muted. Occasionally his eyes would roll down to the notepad lying face-up on the coffee table. Horace had written in it as Jamie relayed his story. The page that he could see was full of notes broken down into an outline with bullet points and words that were circled. The handwriting was slanted—away from Jamie—and pretty, but convoluted and impossible to read from afar. Jamie was tempted to pick up the notepad and read what Horace had written about him, but the clinging and jangling from the kitchen kept him jumpy.

There were stacks of—mostly old—books everywhere, a clunky old Dell Desktop Computer, and enough newspaper clippings in frames hanging on the walls to distract him from the notepad. Soon Jamie found himself fishing the framed clippings for outrageous headlines. His eyes landed on one after another.

•Woman Receives Twitter Messages . . . From Outer Space.

•Elvis Lives! On a remote Island off the South Pacific along with Morrison, Monroe, Hoffa . . .

•“ZOIKS!” New York man attacked and beaten by a mob of angry cartoon characters

•he knows when you’re sleeping . . . Network of intelligent Family pets may be responsible for rash of nighttime burglaries

•Doorway to hell found in Philadelphia subway tunnel

“I’m not exactly proud of a lot of those.” Horace commented on the framed clippings as he walked into the room carrying the steaming cup of tea. “But it pays the bills. And it’s never boring. I can say that much.”

Holding the cup out in front of him, Horace walked slowly, and kept his eyes on the shifting liquid inside so as not to spill any. He sat down on the couch near Jamie, slid a coaster from the coaster-caddy on the end of the coffee table, and placed his steaming cup of tea on top. There were three short stacks of books crowding his end of the coffee table. Horace combined the stacks into one and relocated it to the small table beside the couch.

“So. That’s quite a story you’ve got there. I have to admit.”

“I guess I could say the same thing to you. David.” Jamie came back with.

“Touché,” Horace smiled and took a sip of tea.

Jamie scooted further away when Horace wasn’t looking. It was only a few inches, but Jamie felt that he needed the breathing room. He hadn’t been completely forthcoming with Horace. He told him about the shadows, the voices, and the horrible face looking up at him from the sixth-floor balcony, but made it all sound like it could’ve been his mind playing tricks. He had left out the invisible teeth, the phantom appendages, the things in his gut, the giant angry human, amphibious devil-clown-fish monster hybrid toddler-thing, and the elderly man, and Ronnie Hayes’ death.

“So, I’m curious as to how what you’ve told me places you in any kind of danger . . . aside from a good bit of stress.”

“It’s just that . . . Ah . . . ” Jamie stammered, grabbing blindly at pieces of thought. “I guess I jusss—”

“You mentioned something strange on the phone earlier . . . ” Horace interrupted. “‘They’re inside me,’ I believe it was.”

Jamie was becoming frustrated with the questions. There were too many that he couldn’t answer without telling Horace the truth.

“Aaaaah . . . That was . . . I was just talking about . . . all these . . . things being figments of my imagination. You know, like they’re inside me—in my head.” Jamie quickly switched gears to steer the conversation away from his comment. “So you think the girl in the clip . . . Keisha . . . you think she was . . . murdered?”

“I’m sure of it. You could say that she died once they hooked her on the stuff.” Horace was reluctant to go any further on Keisha’s death.

Jamie returned a blank stare.

“Heroin,” Horace clarified.

Jamie made a face that said, Ohhhh . . .

“You know who did it?”

“I have a pretty good idea. You’re from around here, right? Philly, I mean.”

“Yeah. I grew up in Southwest.”

“Then I’m assuming you’ve heard of a miscreant who used to call himself King Dollar.”

“The drug dealer?”

“Oh, he was much more than that.”

“Yeah. All that Voodoo bullshit,” Jamie scoffed. “He’s kind of a mythical figure in the ‘hood. ‘Specially up north.”

“Well. About twenty-six years ago, there was a group called Motherland Foundation. The foundation was made up of local black clergy, businessmen, and entrepreneurs who charged themselves with reinvigorating the black community by going back to its roots in Africa. One of the group’s charter members was a flamboyant Episcopalian Reverend named Theodore Dubois. Father Dubois was secretly addicted to smack. He was also heavily indebted to a local drug dealer. Wanna take a guess who that dealer was?”

“King Dollar?”

“None other than.”

“So, what’s this got to do with the girl?” Jamie whined, impatient.

“Hold on . . . ” Horace’s tone indicated that the connection would be worth the wait. “Now, I’m not sure what you’ve heard about him, but the real King Dollar was a vicious bastard who liked to use bogus Voodoo and Santeria mysticism to instill fear in his clientele.”

Jamie’s face twisted dismissive as Horace rambled on. He nodded to indicate that he’d heard it all before.

“The King ran his operation out of Building #2 of the old Raymond Rosen Projects,” Horace continued.

“And if you crossed him,” Jamie cut in, “he would give you a choice of taking a bullet in the head or jumping off the roof of the building on the slight chance that you might survive the fall. But nobody ever did. Assassinated back in ’86, but the police never solved the case. I’ve heard all the stories.”

“Stories, huh?” Horace smirked knowingly. “I can show you crime scene photos of some of the jumpers if you’d like.”

Jamie gave Horace a look that said, Why would you think that I’d want to see something like that? By the time it filtered down to Jamie’s mouth it came out as simply, “Nah, man. No thanks.”

“The fuck of it is . . . he would have his boys fill one-a-those tiny, inflatable swimming pools with water and position it on the ground below the poor bastards while they stood there trying to decide which would be the least painful death.”

Jamie shook his head, “No.”

“He would do it just to fuck with their heads,” Horace continued. “When you see the bodies… Most of them actually tried to land in the water. A couple made it, but it didn’t do them any good.”

“What, the hell, would King Dollar want with a little girl?”

“Huh? Oh.”

Horace was lingering on memories of the crime scene photos. He brushed the gruesome images aside and backtracked to the central plot of his story.

“As part of their ‘Roots Project,’ the Motherland Foundation began sponsoring immigrants from all over West Africa,” Horace said. “The arrangement was that the immigrants would be provided with housing within the community in return for teaching their culture and traditions to the residents. Some stayed with local families, but most of ‘em were placed in what’s now known as the Little Africa section of the city. One family in particular, the Senghors, emigrated from Liberia where they were considered royalty. There were so many of ‘em. Brothers. Sisters. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Literally the entire extended family. The Senghors made the mistake of bringing along a wealth of tribal artifacts valued in the hundreds of thousands. The foundation set them up on Berks Street, between 24th and 25th. Father Dubois was assigned to personally handle their transition into the community.”

“25th and Berks?!” Jamie interrupted. “You mean Candyland?”

These days that area of the city was a sanctuary for junkies and homeless people. People in the ‘hood called it Candyland. Jamie had never seen Candyland as anything other than an abandoned city block shit on by time. The park across the street was always an overgrown, wasteland of garbage, and car husks, and disregarded appliances large and small, and populated by folks who looked like the walking dead.

“That’s what it is now,” Horace replied. “It was quite a different place back then. The foundation spared no expense on the Senghors, who they saw as the key to the success of the ‘Roots Project.’ Father Dubois convinced the family elders to let him oversee the safekeeping of their tribal artifacts. Of course, this was all part of his plan to use them to repay his debt to King Dollar. By the time anyone realized what had happened, the artifacts were gone. This caused a huge rift in the community and the foundation itself. Dubois gave up King Dollar when the other foundation members pressured him.”

Jamie was beginning to understand that this was the same story that his dream had shown him just last night.

•The well-dressed men posing for a group photo on the church steps = The Motherland Foundation.

•The suspicious-looking, overweight man with the bad process sitting on the edge of his bed shooting up = Father Dubois.

•The painted skull-faces = King Dollar and his thugs.

•The tenement fortified with skull-faced thugs holding automatic weapons = The Raymond Rosen Projects: Building #2.

•The continents laid out on the floating map. The animated lines traveling away from West Africa. The community hall. The church. The high school auditorium. The renovated neighborhood. = The Foundation-sponsored immigration and integration.

•The tribal artifacts missing from the large safe. = Father Dubois’ plan to repay King Dollar.

Jamie referenced the dream to explore the story visually in his head. Horace’s voice served as narrator.

Narrator: The news got back to the Senghors, which prompted a group of them to confront King Dollars’ thugs. It started an all-out war. Sadly for the Senghors, they were outnumbered and outgunned. People were gunned down in front of their own homes . . .

Jamie envisioned the Sengors’ neighborhood—25th and Berks Street circa the ‘80s. People sitting on porches, children playing in the beautifully maintained park across the street. A nice song playing in the background. A black van with tinted windows turns onto the block. The song turns ominous. The windows on both sides of the van creep down. Gunfire erupts from inside. People run screaming. Bullets tear into the unlucky ones.

Narrator: . . . or they were murdered in their beds as they slept. It was an outright slaughter.

A middle-aged couple is asleep in their bed when a group of skull-faced thugs burst into their bedroom and open fire on them.

Narrator: With many of the older family members gone, the neighborhood went downhill. The surviving members reached out to the foundation for help, but the foundation was having problems of its own, thanks to years of mismanagement and outright deception on Dubois’ behalf. The younger Senghor family members turned to gangs and drug-dealing just to survive. It was right around the start of the crack epidemic and many of them found themselves hooked on the drug.

The ‘picture postcard’ neighborhood devolves into 25th and Berks Street as it looks today.

Narrator: I mean it swept through that place like the plague. You would sometimes see the older folks sitting on their porches with a front row seat to what had become of their people. I imagine it must have broken their hearts.

A steely-eyed man, in his eighties, a Senghor elder. He is standing on his porch glaring at the wasteland of despair in front of him. A community of cardboard boxes covered with plastic or cut open garbage bags in the park across the street. People living inside them. Crack and smackheads everywhere, like roaches. They hobble about in zombie-stomp fashion. They loiter on front stoops of abandoned houses shivering from withdrawal and looking lost. They huddle together on porches smoking and shooting up. They stand on the corner trying to sell their bodies for drugs.

Narrator: A few of the remaining Senghor men mounted one last attack on King Dollar’s place.

Nighttime in the Raymond Rosen Projects. Skull-faced thugs armed with automatic weapons stand guard in front of Building #2. Junkies going in and out.

Four dark-clothed figures emerge from the shadows. They are wearing black ski-masks decorated with tribal war-paint and armed with firearms (handguns and shotguns) mixed with tribalized (Senghor) weapons—machete, daggers, stylized fighting sticks, strange circular-bladed things. The Senghor men slink through the darkness and silently dispatch of the first tier of skull-faced guards before they are detected.

The skull-faced guards open fire.

Narrator: And with only four men, they crippled King Dollar’s operation. But it would ultimately lead to their downfall. King Dollar escaped. Of course, he wasn’t going to let these ‘Africans’ get away with what they had done. So, he took a whole crew-a-his boys and raided Berks Street.

Nighttime on 25th and Berks Street. Three, dark-colored cars drive down the street and screech to a stop. Skull-faced thugs empty out of the cars. Light flickers from the backseat of the middle car. The tinted window is lowered slightly. Inside King Dollar with skull make-up and top hat sits puffing a blunt and watches as his thugs go from house to house, kicking down doors and shooting anything that moves.

TWENTY

Jamie was facing the present, unaware. It had come out of nowhere right in the middle of the vision. He turned to Horace once his mind caught up and looked at him like he was waiting to be let off the hook. His expression was set to a wide-eyed glower. His head was spinning.

Horace returned a confirming nod, and said, “Keisha Senghor was one of those children who succumbed to the streets. She developed a pretty ferocious drug habit. Started turning tricks at 14 just to facilitate it. The lifestyle withered her down to next ta nothing.” Horace reflected. “She was such a pretty little thing before that. I could show you before and after photos that would make you think you were looking at two completely different people.”

“So, then what?” Jamie snapped, keen to hurry Horace along.

“King Dollar’s thugs . . . they eventually got hold of her,” Horace said. “They used her addiction to make her turn tricks for them. I’m guessing that’s around when they shot the footage. You have any idea where Ronnie Hayes found that clip, by the way?”

“He said he got it from the stacks, which is where we keep all the clips we get in from various sources until we have a chance to sort through them. So, I guess it could’ve come from anywhere.”

Horace looked disappointed.

“So, why didn’t the police do something to stop King Dollar back then?” Jamie asked.

“Well, it never is quite that simple, son. The Motherland Foundation had some pull with city officials and with the public for what they were trying to do, but King Dollar had been paying off the beat cops since he first established a foothold in the community. He was smart enough to realize that the beat cops were the liaisons between the ‘hood and city hall. You get them on your side and not only will they look the other way, but through them you can control what information gets back to the people who make the rules. Y’almost have to take your hat off to tha-guy, in that regard. He certainly knew how to work the system to maintain a customer base. I always said he was one hell of a business man.”

“Sounds like you admire him.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“So, then the Senghors were behind the hit on King Dollar?”

“That’s the million-dollar question, son,” Horace said. “The ‘rumor’ was that they put some kinda spell on him.” Horace used his hands to translate the absurdity of that particular theory.

“Yeah. I think I heard that somewhere,” said Jamie.

“They said the same thing about Father Dubois, actually.”

“Why Father Dubois?”

“He went . . . missing—I guess you can say—under peculiar circumstances. It happened a few weeks before King Dollar was killed. So naturally, people assumed they were related.”

“Whaddoyou mean by ‘peculiar circumstances?’”

“Dubois tried to commit suicide by walking out into the middla rush hour traffic. Caused a huge accident instead. The officers at the scene where he was taken into custody reported putting him in the back of the police van in handcuffs. So, he’s back there while the police are helping the accident victims when all of a sudden they hear thrashing and screaming coming from inside. Sounded like someone being tossed around like a rag doll, they said. When they opened the doors to check on Dubois . . . he was gone.”

“Gone? Like he escaped?”

“Gone. As in vanished. Disappeared—seemingly into thin air,” said Horace. “The van was locked from the outside, and the police were standing within twenty feet of it on all sides when it happened. At least that’s what they said. So, there was no way Dubois could’ve escape without being seen. I’ve seen photos of the inside of the van. And let me tell ya . . . Whatever happened in there, it wasn’t pretty.” Horace used his entire body to describe the scene. “The whole interior was literally . . . coated in blood, and . . . fleshy . . . pieces . . . and bone fragments . . . and hair.”

The description of the van whisked Jamie’s mind back to the Carlson Motel, just before he ran out of Room #16.

“The blood was a match for Dubois’,” Horace added. “DNA testing wasn’t what it is now back in ‘86, so that was all that they could ascertain from what remained. The community cried foul. Police brutality. Cover-up. The works. But nothing was ever proven.”

“So, what do you think happened?”

Horace adjusted his legs and took a sip of tea.

“I’ll tell ya like this, son,” he began. “It’s been my experience that most things, no matter how unlikely or bizarre they may seem at first, can be explained by some logical means. Dubois’ was one-a-those rare exceptions that keep an old skeptic like me from going completely non-believer. King Dollar, too, but in a different way.”

“King Dollar got shot, like . . . a zillion times and then burned when the car crashed. What’s so strange about that?”

Horace’s face tightened.

“Didju know that he cleaned out his bank accounts a few days before he was ‘assassinated?’” Horace asked Jamie. “Or that the fingertips and all the teeth had been removed from his supposed charred remains?’”

“So they couldn’t identify him.” Jamie thought aloud.

“Exactly,” said Horace. “Been watching CSI, have we? Now think about it; why would someone go through the trouble of staging their own death?”

Jamie was on the spot. He sat there looking dumb.

“I’ll tell ya why,” Horace continued. “Because he saw that the situation with the Senghors was spiraling into something that he couldn’t control and decided to get out while he was still ahead. Maybe start a new life somewhere. A new gang. Who knows? It wouldn’t be all that difficult. The son-of-a-bitch walked around covered in face paint. His own men didn’t even know what he really looked like. You just take off the paint, make up some ridiculous rumor about African curses that plays into the community’s misunderstanding of the Senghors’ religion to help throw people off your trail, and voila.”

Horace turned and scanned the stack of books on the small table beside the couch, and then slid a large book from near the top. The stack wobbled like it was about to topple over, but Horace managed to keep it standing. The book was wide and covered with a glossy, loose-fitting jacket.

“The police found this book, here, among other things, when they raided the King’s place after the hit,” said Horace.

Horace placed the book on the coffee table. The cover was mostly black with an African Ceremonial Mask drawn in the shape of the African Continent floating in the middle. The title read, West Africa: Spirits, Deities & Devils.

As Jamie looked over the cover, Horace pointed at the book and said, “That says, to me, that he was doing his homework. Which makes perfect sense knowing how he operated.”

Horace had stumbled into hard-sell mode without even knowing it. He was so used to working uphill with his ‘King Dollar Lives,’ theory that he went there automatically. Once he became aware of it, he toned down his conviction with a deep, cleansing breath.

“Say he did fake his own death, right . . . How would anybody even recognize him if nobody ever saw his face?” Jamie proposed.

“I would recognize him—those eyes, at least,” Horace said. He could’ve kissed Jamie for running with the theory. “He paid me a visit late one night, 20-some years ago. I’ll never forget it. Woke up and there he was lookin’ down at me. Scared the shit outta me, you understand. He warned me not to write about what was going on with the Senghor Family. I was working as a reporter for the Inquirer at the time. I wasn’t always a ‘tabloid hack,’ ya know. I used to be a respected journalist.”

The phone rang. The base of the cordless phone was on a wall-mounted shelf across the room along with a standing tube of Chinese Incense Sticks, a Nessie-inspired incense holder (given to Horace as a gag-gift), a box of wooden matches, and a number of books stacked, spine-out.

Jamie was annoyed by the interruption. Horace got up to check caller ID.

“He had this tattoo also, like a wad of . . . rolled-up dollar bills with a king’s crown propped on top. Right here on his forearm,” Horace said tapping the top of the forearm/wrist area of his right arm. At the same time he leaned forward and squinted at the Caller ID screen and said to Jamie, “Excuse me. I’ve gotta take this.”

Horace picked up the phone, cleared his throat, and put on a pleasantly surprised facade before lifting the phone to his ear.

“Heya Don. I was just about to call y—Avoiding you? Noooo. Come onnnn . . . I’ve just been really busy with the assignme— Two dozen times?! I’m sorry. My phone has been acting up lately.”

Jamie was tapping his foot on the floor as he waited for Horace to end his awkward-sounding phone call. His eyes scrolled down and stopped on the cover of the book staring up at him from the coffee table. West Africa: Spirits, Deities & Devils. It made sense to look inside.

“Yeah. I know I told you every day, but I’ve been getting tied up with—You want a quality piece, don’t you? I’m aware of the deadline, Don.” Jamie heard Horace say in the background as he slid the book directly in front of him, opened it, and ventured cautiously inside.

The chapters were separated by country. Jamie grabbed the bulk of pages, and, with his thumb, flipped through them from back to front. Legions of words hurried past, chapter headings on their heels. Sierra Leone. Nigeria. Mauritania. Mali.

Jamie stopped when he came to Liberia, pressed the pages apart so that the book lay flat on the table, and started reading. He barely noticed Horace who had walked into the kitchen to finish his phone conversation.

Jamie read brief descriptions of tribes that he had never heard of as he turned pages and skimmed paragraphs. He eventually came upon a gallery of ugly, wildly speculative artist’s renderings of ‘supposed’ things delineated by type—guardian/protective, prophetic, vengeful, playful, violent/malicious. The heavily shaded pencil-sketches were drawn with a surreal, acid-trip flair. The artist had a predilection for long, skinny bodies with pot bellies, snarling faces, and bulging eyes set to haunted gazes. Some of the renderings were hard for Jamie to look at as the adjoining captions described a ‘supposed’ thing whose modus operandi was scarily similar to what he had been experiencing. Their names translated into English hit all the right chords.

•Borrower Wraiths.

•Plague of Shadows.

•Havoc Tormentors / Devil Tormentors

•The Harbinger Grimace

•Man-eater Cloud / Ravenous Cloud / Teeth / Floating Hunger (also nicknamed “Invisible Piranha” by Researcher Allen B. Holdgradt in 1977)

Jamie looked over at the TV by accident and saw a live News feed from the parking lot of the Carlson Motel. There were police cars everywhere. A caption at the bottom of the screen read, “Breaking News.”

Horace walked out of the kitchen smiling at something that Don Keating had said just before hanging up the phone. He was already talking to Jamie, “Sorry about that, but . . . ”

Jamie wasn’t sitting on the couch anymore. Horace didn’t see him anywhere in the living room, in fact.

“Jamie?” He called out directing his voice toward the stairs that led to the rooms on the second floor.

Horace headed over to the staircase looking up like he expected to find Jamie standing at the top. He noticed along the way that the front door had been left slightly ajar.

After leaving Horace’s house Jamie drove around on creep until he found a dark enough spot and parked there. He used the quiet time to stop himself from shaking, to calm the slideshow of horrific recent memories, and to squint at tiny, closely spaced type in the relative darkness of the back seat of his car. According to West Africa: Spirits, Deities & Devils, Jamie had apparently angered someone, or caused them great misfortune. That’s what it usually took to have a person or persons summon one of those vengeful things.

If the video clip of Keisha Senghor represented the “why” behind their presence, the “how” must’ve come when the news ran the hidden video of Jamie’s argument with Ronnie and ‘outed’ them both as Echelon Media ‘Smut-Peddlers,’ who were complicit in the exploitation of under-aged girls. Keisha’s clip was the evidence for that.

It wasn’t the clear-cut explanation that Jamie was looking for, but it was a start. He thought that maybe he could explain himself to the vengeful things, but then scoffed at the idea. What the hell would he say?

Uh . . . excuse me, Mr. Borrower Wraith . . . Mr. Plague of Grimacing Shadow Tormentor Clouds, but I only work as an editor at Echelon Media. So, you see, neither myself, nor Ronnie Hayes have any real connection to Keisha’s video.

In fact, it didn’t sound half-bad once he spoke it in his head.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a string of memories barged into Jamie’s mental dialogue. A tattoo that he had seen before ran through his mind. The tattoo was of a wad of dollar bills with a King’s crown propped on top and slanted to the side. He saw a date tattooed beneath the colorful rendering; 5.16.86. He saw a snapshot from his meeting with Zane Bettencourt . . .

Jamie had glimpsed that same tattoo on Bettencourt’s wrist when they shook hands during the meeting. Plus it matched the tattoo that Horace Figg described. Even the placement matched. Horace had said that it was on King Dollar’s wrist. And the date? 5.16.86 . . .

King Dollar was assassinated—allegedly—in 1986. Jamie always assumed it had happened during the summer, though.

Jamie’s mind replayed recent conversations. His head gave the voices an echo. He heard himself talking to Horace Figg.

“Didju know that he cleaned out his bank accounts a few days before he was ‘assassinated?’” He heard Horace ask. “Or that the fingertips and all the teeth had been removed from his supposed charred remains?”

Then he heard himself. “So they couldn’t identify him.”

Then back to Horace, “I always said he was one hell of a business man.”

Jamie’s mind jumped to an even earlier conversation with Keri Pak. They were walking through the concourse, on their way to work.

“He’s so mysterious,” he heard Keri say about Bettencourt. “ . . . you gotta wonder about a guy like that who’s made so much money at such a young age.”

And then back to Horace, “I would recognize him—those eyes, at least.”

Jamie remembered the weight of Bettencourt’s stare. He lingered on his memory of those iron eyes bearing down on him. He sat there with his mouth hanging open and his own eyes popping out of his head.

Zane Bettencourt is King Dollar!!! . . . was King Dollar . . . is King Dollar . . . Holy shit, man! This is huge! Monu-fucking-mental!

Assuming that they—the vengeful things—weren’t aware of this little tidbit of information, it provided Jamie with a bargaining chip.

The park across from the Senghor’s old neighborhood looked like a three-acre section of landscape lifted from a third world natural disaster and placed smack-dab into a pocket of urban squalor. Boxed in by sick and dying buildings, the area known as Candyland was hidden from the traffic that rumbled back and forth on the other side of the edificial barrier.

Jamie stepped cautiously through the raggedy, tent-city populated by refugees from proper society. Some of the residents were wandering aimlessly and talking to themselves. A small group congregated around each of the two burn-barrels, jockeying for a good spot. A woman reclined in an old, discarded Barcalounger with much of its guts exposed. Another man was arguing with a framed photograph of a pretty young woman wearing a men’s dress-shirt, and posed discretely. He would yell and then put the frame to his ear as if to listen to the pretty young woman’s rebuttal. Jamie looked again when he got close to the man and saw that the photo inside the frame was most likely the one that came with it.

“Nice shirt,” said a random male resident. Jamie didn’t see who said it, but he could tell by the man’s sarcastic tone that it was meant for him. Frankly he had forgotten about the Thug-Bots logo until that moment.

Mapping out his path, Jamie avoided debris with every other footfall. He had the flashlight from his trunk—a Maglight—in his hand and Ronnie Hayes’ Glock in his pocket.

Jamie was on a mission. ‘No more Mr. Nice Guy’ was his mantra. He was ready for anything that the vengeful things might throw at him on his way to making them understand that he was not their enemy. He had modified his planned speech to something that he hoped they could relate to, and included the King Dollar revelation. The speech changed slightly each time he reviewed it in his head.

Jamie’s Speech—A work in progress

“What happened to Keisha . . . to the Senghor Family was . . . fucked up . . . messed up . . . inexcusable, and they have every right to be pissed off . . . But if you’ve learned anything about me over the past few days, then you should realize that I’m the last person that they should be mad at. Why not go after the kind of people who did this to them in the first place? This is Philly, man. There’z plenty-ya drug dealers and pimps and dirty fucking cops and backwards-assed churches run by crooks in nice clothes. Why not go after King Dollar? He’s still alive, you know. And I can tell you where to find him.”

Jamie didn’t really expect to say all that. He knew that it might get hectic, that he might be on the run, or fighting away shadows, and invisible teeth as he tried to convince them. In that case he would have to rattle off the meat and potatoes of his speech in a sentence or two. The rest was just tangential venting that grew from earlier drafts.

By doing this Jamie was essentially sentencing Zane Bettencourt to a slow, torturous death, and as of this moment, he was fine with that. The way Jamie saw it, Bettencourt was responsible for everything that had happened. That included the elderly man, Ronnie Hayes, and what he, himself, had experienced. Not to mention all the hell he raised during his King Dollar days. So, if anyone deserved a supernatural ass-reaming, it was Bettencourt.

TWENTY-ONE

Jamie was locked in a staring contest with the row of abandoned and boarded up houses that lined the other side of Berks Street like a hollowed-out fortress built to house a spectral army. A number of the windows were uncovered.

The dilapidated structures wore their age in rotting wood and weeds sprouting from cracks, and sagging framework that gave some of the structures faces if you looked long enough. The sky was a deep, dark shade of blue, almost purple with slivers of moonlight peeking around the edges of bulky clouds. Looming above the neighborhood, it set a gothic mood that made Jamie feel as though he was only moments away from facing some mythical, castle-dwelling beast from the Savage Sword of Conan Magazines he read in his teens.

As he drew closer to the row of houses, Jamie began to ask himself why he chose to come here after what he’d gone through to get away from the vengeful things.

Jamie stared straight ahead, determined to desensitize himself to the dilapidated fortress’ intimidating appearance. To pull off what he had set out to accomplish, he couldn’t afford to let fear cloud his mind.

“You don’ wanna go ova there, son,” a beleaguered male voice warned.

Jamie turned around and saw a homeless man standing by a discarded washing machine. The man had just finished urinating and was shaking away the last few drops.

Jamie didn’t say anything in response. He kept on walking and came to an invisible border where the tents and makeshift structures stopped. A 20-foot area of dying grass and brittle, lifeless soil stood between the sidewalk and the invisible border, which stretched the entire length of the park. It was like someone had decided that this was the point beyond which no one was supposed to travel.

From where he stood, Jamie could hear what sounded like shifting wooden framework coming from the dilapidated fortress. From inside, glass, or something like it, crunched underfoot. Strange hissing sounds, like air squeezing through cracked pipes, came and went. Maybe it was a bus passing in the distance; the brakes on those things had a way of hissing like that. An eerie mist crawled around the foot of the fortress harboring an otherworldly light-source inside it—or so it seemed.

Following an urge that told him to do so, Jamie turned around and saw that many of the tent-city residents had stopped what they were doing to watch him.

“Don’t do it,” one of them warned.

But Jamie ignored the voice. He turned back around, took a deep breath, and then continued toward the dilapidated fortress.

Jamie entered a house near the middle of the block, holding his flashlight out in front of him like a gun. He picked the house because the wooden plank over the door had already been jimmied partially loose, so it looked easy to remove—easier than it turned out to be.

Inside the house, there were signs that the homeless had used the place as shelter in the distant past. There was graffiti on the walls; trash everywhere, and enough flies that Jamie could smell their insectoid musk in the downwind. Then there was the overriding stench of smoldering dread, and rotten wood.

The Senghor family had also lived here.

Jamie came across a few remnants of their presence—a handmade child’s toy, a broken lamp wrapped in cobwebs, decaying furniture.

Something winked as the flashlight passed over it. Jamie fished the object from underneath a pile of uprooted kitchen tile flooring and held it up to his face. The ornate locket was from a different era. He could tell by the antique design on its face. The patina was muted by years of muck.

Jamie blew on the locket and rubbed it against his shirt. He held it up for a second look and then used his thumbnails to peel it open.

An aged photo inside. Four little black girls in frilly dresses standing shoulder-to-shoulder. They were squinting at the sun or perhaps scowling at the photographer. It was hard to tell. The girl on the end was smiling in an, “I know something you don’t,” sort of way.

These were the jump-rope girls. The same ones whose shadows haunted Jamie’s bedroom last night. Somehow he just knew it.

Jamie dropped the locket and backed away staring at the thing as if he feared it might strike at his ankles.

Dubious sounds leapt out of distant rooms. It was probably just the wind, or settling wood, or mice/rats, or pigeons.

Jamie soldiered on, reluctant, yet determined to see his plan through. The upstairs rooms peeked through exposed framework in the ceiling. He came to a wall that had been reduced to framework allowing him to see right into the living room of the house next door. Jamie squeezed through the vertical planks and into the neighboring house. The condition was nearly identical to the first house.

He walked from room to room dowsing shadows with the high beam from his flashlight. He was starting to feel like something should have happened by now, and growing increasingly nervous the longer he trekked through the fortress’ guts looking for a sign of the vengeful things’ presence. The feeling of helplessness, the anticipation of what might be lurking around every corner and in every dark crevice he came upon was becoming unbearable. It was time to take some initiative.

“Hello?” Jamie called out nervously and listened to his voice echo into oblivion. “I come in peace.”

Nothing.

Jamie found an old, folding chair lying on the floor in one of the downstairs rooms. He picked it up and opened it. The metal was so rusted that it made a terrible shriek that gave him goosebumps. Afterward, he stood there holding the chair, thinking that the noise had definitely attracted the vengeful things’ attention. But nothing happened.

Jamie set the chair down on its legs and sat down. What now? He thought waving the flashlight back and forth so that the beam hit the wall like a theater spotlight searching for a performer to illuminate. He thought about using reverse psychology to taunt the vengeful things out of hiding. He could say something like, “What? You scared to come out and face me?” But that would probably anger them.

And then . . .

Movement; like a shadow shifting on its own. It came from the left side of the room.

Jamie jumped erect and then whipped around and found nothing out of the ordinary. His hairs were standing on end, sensing that someone or something was in the room with him. Scared as he was, Jamie knew it was the sign he was looking for. He looked up and prepared to address the presence.

A chirping sound resonated over his shoulder just as he was about to start talking. He choked on the opening syllables, paused… and then with his heart thumping like a bass drumbeat, he began again.

“Listen. What happened to you, to Kei─”

The unnatural sounds came on full blast; the haunted underwater alarm, the ethereal chirping, and a frenzied alien buzzing. In an instant, Jamie felt teeth all over him, biting away. He jumped out of the chair and began to flail.

“Wait! Stop!” he cried out. “I’m not the one you want.”

Shadows shifted and oozed all around Jamie as he danced in the dark swatting at himself and screaming. He could hear his clothes ripping and he could feel his flesh being torn away little by little. Blood from his wounds remained afloat and pooled into an aerosol-mist with tiny pieces of fabric, just like it had during Ronnie Hayes’ death. It terrified Jamie that he was about to experience the same thing.

“No! Stop! I said, Stop!” Jamie pleaded. “You’re making a mistake!”

But the onslaught continued. The teeth hurt the worst around his groin, behind his knees, and his armpits. He felt teeth nip at his ear, and then his lower lip, and held his arms up over his head and neck to protect them. He was groaning at the pain, as he twisted and spun. He ran over to the wall and began throwing himself against it. The entire room shook with each impact. Dust rained down from the ceiling.

Jamie felt himself lift off of the ground. The aerosol mist was dense enough that he could smell his own blood. His arms seized and then were yanked out to his sides in a Christ-like pose.

The thought of dying today, right here, right now, produced a final surge of adrenaline. Jamie remembered his trump card, and whipped it out.

“King Dollar!” he screamed, his voice leaping several octaves as the pain of teeth clamping down peaked again and again. “He’s alive! He’s alive, I said! I know where you can find him!”

The biting stopped. Jamie felt himself falling. His legs weren’t prepared to catch his weight when his feet touched the floor and they crumbled beneath him. He landed on his hands and knees. He felt a shower of blood flecks like spitting rain dampen his back. The unnatural noise hovered overhead sans the alien buzzing.

Jamie grunted out heavy breaths and gasped on the intake. He was physically numb from the multitude of flesh wounds, and mentally numb from endorphins that produced a high from coming so close to death. His sweat suit was a map of tears and large holes through which his bleeding wounds were visible. He looked down and saw that the Thug-Bots logo was mostly untouched.

“He’s out there. And he’s living off your money…” Jamie said once his breathing had settled enough for him to talk. “ . . . off the Senghor Family’s money. You kill me, and you’ll never find him.”

***

“What the hell, man! Since when don’t you return my calls?” Keri whined through the phone.

“I know. And I’m sorry,” Jamie replied.

“I’ve only been trying to call you for-like-ever!”

“I know, but—”

“I musta left like 20 messages!”

“I know—”

“I was worried that something happened to you! Everybody’s been asking where you’ve been!”

“Okay! I heard you! Now just shut the fuck up for a second! Please?!”

Jamie sat in his car holding the cell phone to his ear. Silence on the other end of the line.

“I’m sorry, Keri. I shouldn’t have said that, but I . . . ” Jamie paused. He was unsure how to begin.

“Is everything all right?” Keri asked.

“Not exactly,” Jamie replied looking himself over.

Looking like someone had dragged him behind a fast moving vehicle, Jamie’s sweat suit was in tatters and stained with blood. The passenger seat of his car was littered with balled-up pieces of various paper bags and napkins that he had dug from a dumpster and used to stop the bleeding. A super-sized, Styrofoam cup filled with ice was jammed between his knees. He’d swiped the cup from some vending machine he’d passed, filled it with water from his bottle and immediately chugged it down to quell his hunger pains. He used the ice as a topical painkiller. He had flitted between various states of mind—hazy, light-headed due to loss of blood—and planes of being—conscious, unconscious—and now he felt at least half ready to finish what he had started. The phone call to Keri was . . .

1. To see if Horace had said anything about his visit last night.

2. To apologize to Keri for waiting so long to call her back.

3. To let Keri know how he felt about her in case anything should happen to him.

“Where are you?” Keri asked.

“Sitting in my car, in the garage on Filbert.”

Sudden excitement in Keri’s voice. “You’re coming in to work?”

“No.”

Her excitement turned sour. “Then what are you doing?”

“Waiting for Bettencourt. This is the garage he parks his Hummer in. I’m assuming he hasn’t come in yet; right?”

“He’s not coming in,” Keri said. “He hasn’t been in since yesterday.”

“Why not,” Jamie replied, disappointed. He had planned to confront Bettencourt after he parked his truck and then to deliver him—at gunpoint if need be—to the vengeful things. Jamie wasn’t comfortable with the idea of pulling a gun on someone, especially in public, but he was prepared to do it.

“He’s been out looking for that actress, Sterling Silver. I guess she wigged out and went on some kinda drug binge and nobody knows where she is.”

Fuck! Jamie silently mouthed. He remembered Sterling Silver’s backstage breakdown the day he met with Bettencourt, and shook his head. But then Jamie saw an opportunity.

“She missed a big interview and a couple shoots so they’ve really been scrambling upstairs.” Keri added on the sly, “You know Bettencourt can’t let his new cash-cow get away.”

Jamie didn’t respond. He was mulling over a possible alternative to his plan.

“Then you don’t show up. You don’t call in. Everybody thinks they fired you over the clip.”

“They didn’t fire me.”

“That’s what I keep telling them,” Keri said sounding frustrated. “Plus, you heard about Ronnie; right? It was on the news last night. This morning, too.”

Jamie’s heart became heavy. He felt a burning sensation in his throat. For a moment, he lost the ability to swallow.

“Jamie?” Keri said after an extended silence.

“Yeah. I’m here.” He paused, and then asked, “What happened to Ronnie?”

“Nobody knows. He disappeared last night. He was staying in that funky motel on Washington Avenue; the Carlson.”

“Yeah. I know where it is.”

“I guess they said there was some kinda commotion coming from his room, then some guy ran out covered in blood. Plus they found blood all over the room. Can you believe that? I mean, Ronnie ain’t the most likable guy in the world, but damn. I hope he’s all right.”

Some guy ran out covered in blood . . . Jamie thought, terrified. The garage on Filbert was probably two-thirds full, and he was slouched way down in the driver-seat, however he felt suddenly exposed and vulnerable, worried that someone might see him.

“Did they say anything about the guy who did it?” Jamie was almost afraid to ask.

“Did what?”

“The one who came running outta Ronnie’s room?”

“No. Just that he looked like he was on drugs.”

“What about Hor . . . I mean David, you know, the new hire?”

“What about him?”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“About what?”

Jamie thought for a moment, and then said, “Nothing . . . ”

Another silent pause.

Then Keri said, “You would tell me if there was something wrong, wouldn’t you, Jamie? Cause you know that’d I’d do what I could to help.”

For a fleeting moment, Jamie felt completely at ease.

“I know you would,” he said.

“So, there’s really nothing wrong?”

“Nothing for you to worry about.”

“Now, what’s that supposed to mean, Jamie?” Keri whined. “Stop being so friggin’ cryptic. You know, they’re probably going to fire you if you don’t let them know what’s going on.”

“That’s the last thing on my mind right now.”

Keri was incredulous.

“Losing your job is the last thing on your mind? Are you seriously telling me that?”

Jamie felt that it was time to end the conversation. He had a new plan brewing and he wanted to spend some time fleshing it out.

“Listen Keri,” he began, invigorated by Keri’s concern for him. “I want you to know how much it means that you’re looking out for me. Truth is, I prolley should’ve grown some balls and asked you out a long time ago.”

Keri exhaled, confused and annoyed by Jamie’s conversational shift. She took a moment and then said, “Why didn’t you?”

“I guess I was afraid that you didn’t feel the same way. I mean, I kinda knew, but . . . well, you know how it is.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Keri asked.

“I gotta go, Keri.”

“Are you serious? You can’t just lay all that on me and then—”

Jamie hung up the phone and sat there holding it in his hand while he worked out the specifics of his new plan.

“We’ll get ‘em,” he said to the air around him.

TWENTY-TWO

“Was that Jamie you were talking to?” David—aka Horace Figg—stuck his head in the door and asked Keri, who still held the phone in her hand, staring at it in disbelief.

She looked up at David, clearly pissed at his eavesdropping.

“Cause I was walking by and I couldn’t help overhearing . . . ” he added, detecting Keri’s displeasure. “Everything’s okay, I hope.”

Keri dropped her guard. Her face switched emotions, from anger to hurt. She replaced the phone and said, “He just hung up on me!”

“Why? Did’ju guys get into an argument or something?”

“No. I mean, I tried to tell him that he’s got to let Marc know what’s going on or else they’re going to fire him. If you call that an argument.”

David stood there processing the information, and then replied, “Okay. I was just wondering.”

He smiled and started to walk away.

“David!” Keri said after him.

“Yeah,” David turned around and replied.

“Any idea why Jamie would ask about you?”

“About me?” David said, concern in his voice. “What’d he say?”

“He asked if you’d said anything to me.”

“Was I supposed to say something?”

“That’s what I’m wondering.”

David shrugged, “Not that I know of,” and turned to walk away, hoping that would be the end of it. He made a face at the close call when he didn’t hear Keri’s voice.

***

“I don’t know, boss. Somthin’ about this just don’t sit right,” Bernie said to Zane Bettencourt as he piloted the Hummer down a busy street with his eyes floating in the rearview.

Bettencourt was sitting in the backseat wearing designer shades—at 8:30pm—and poking keys with his stylus as he scrolled through important messages on his Blackberry Tour, deleting some and responding to others. Despite not looking, he could feel Bernie watching him in the rearview.

“What?!” Bettencourt snapped at Bernie’s floating gaze.

“Didn’t you hear me? I said—”

Bettencourt’s face rose from a downward slant and pointed at the back of Bernie’s head. Curled lips hovered below plastic bug-eyes. The tiny screen of his Blackberry was reflected in the blackened lenses.

“That’s funny . . . ” Bettencourt began. He sounded like he was about to voice a profound observation—something way off topic. “I don’t recall ever asking for your opinion.”

“Now, come on, boss. Don’t be like that. I’m just tryin’na voice a worda caution here.”

“Just drive,” said Bettencourt after staring down the floating eyes in the rearview.

Bernie didn’t like long silences while in such close proximity to another person. It made him feel uncomfortable, so he did little things to break the silence as he drove. He tapped his fingertips on the steering wheel. He cleared his throat excessively. He balled his lips and made breathy, “pa,” sounds. His eyes would occasionally dart to the rearview and back to glimpse what his boss was doing. But as usual Bettencourt was poking the keypad with his stylus.

Probably sleeps with the damn thing, Bernie mused.

Bernie turned on the radio. Guitar noise leapt out at a raised volume. He quickly turned it down and said, “Sorry bout that.”

Apparently Bettencourt hadn’t heard a thing.

Bernie shuffled through radio stations making scoffing sounds at the state of modern music. He heard hints of a song he liked and turned the dial back until he found the song, “These Boots Are Made For Walking,” by Nancy Sinatra. He turned it up slightly. Before long Bernie was mouthing the lyrics.

“Never did like her father’s muzic,” Bernie said to himself. “Shit puts me ta sleep. But thizzz-gal sure had her finger on sompthin’ with this song.”

“What?” Bettencourt said while poking keys, having only half-heard Bernie’s voice.

“Huh?” Bernie replied. “Oh. I was just talkin’ ta myself.”

Bernie turned the dial when the next song started. He continued to shuffle through stations but couldn’t find anything else that he liked, so he turned off the radio.

Now he was left to his thoughts, to the muffled street sounds coming through the closed windows—Bettencourt didn’t like to leave the windows down—and to the tick tick sounds of the stylus poking keys behind him.

His previous concerns started brimming to the surface again. He didn’t like that they had just taken this ‘friend’ of Sterling at his word without checking up on him. He had called out of the blue this afternoon and told them—via speakerphone—that Sterling was staying at his house. He said she was recovering from a two-day binge after the “DP incident,” which had upset her so much that she was talking about leaving the business.

“Nah! That ain’t happenin’!” Bettencourt had said in response to the mention of Sterling Silver’s early retirement. “You tell her that she’s still under contract.”

“She says she’ll talk to you, but—”

“Give me your address,” Bettencourt demanded.

And now they were on their way to “collect my property,” as Bettencourt had stated.

Bernie thought it was all too easy. And there was something about the friend’s voice that rang familiar to him. It sounded altered as well, like the guy was speaking in a deeper voice than he naturally spoke with.

“Idiots,” Bettencourt seethed.

“What was zat?” Bernie asked, worried that the comment was meant for him.

“These youngbucks over here,” Bettencourt replied and pointed out the window at two blinged out fools in a pimped out Mercedes S Class. They were nodding their heads to a hip- hop song that was light on lyrics and heavy on juvenile chorus. “Muthafuckaz wouldn’t know subtly if it walked up and clocked them over the head with an aluminum bat.”

“Tryin’ ta be you is what they’re doin’.”

“Nah! They ain’t tryin’ ta be me,” Bettencourt said. “These livin’-in-the-moment fools couldn’t hold a candle to my shit. What I did was art; carefully thought out and researched art, all done with the goal of making enough money to go legit and play with the big dogs. You think these punks know anything about longevity?”

“Longevity? What’s that?” Bernie joked. “It’s the kids these days, man. All about, ‘Look at me.’ ‘Look what I got.’ No stomach for hard work. Must be sompthin’ in that water. It’s like with that show, MTV Cribs. I always say that they should do Cribs: Five Years Later. Betcha it’d be an entirely different story.”

“Yeah . . . ” Bettencourt said, dismissive of Bernie’s comment. “It’s like that show.”

A quiet span passed while Bernie mustered the courage to voice his concerns.

“Look. I’m just gonna put it out there,” Bernie said, throwing caution to the wind. “You don’t think there’s sompthin’ fishy about thissss ‘friend’-a-Silver’s?”

Bettencourt pushed out an annoyed gust of breath and stopped poking with his stylus. He looked up at Bernie’s eyes in the rearview and tilted his head as if to say, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“I know what cher gonna say, boss, but just think about this for a minute,” Bernie began. “Now we looked everywhere for thiz-broad, checked every address, every phone number in her contact info. I had a few-a-my guyz tail Lana, who’s like her only friend here in the city, for two fuckin’ days. They staked out her place, even . . . and Silver’s. And nothing. And then some . . . friend I never heard of calls us outta the blue? Aunh unh . . . I don’t like it. What if it’s a set up?”

“By who? Some kid? Nah!” Bettencourt replied as if the notion offended him. “I should shoot your crusty ass for even thinking that shit. And what exactly would he be setting us up for, anyway; helping a friend get off drugs?”

“Maybe this guy’s lookin’ ta get some money outta you. The bottom line is we don’t know anything about ‘em.”

“Well, if that’s the case, then I expect you to handle it.”

“You can count on nat,” Bernie said with confidence.

“Good. Now do me a favor.”

“What’s that, boss?”

“Unless you magically come up with all the money I’m looking to lose on this junkie bitch, then shut-the-fuck-up and drive!”

The shiny black Hummer rolled through University City reflecting the city’s nightlife on the sides of its bulk. It turned onto 36th and Spruce Street.

Bernie started squinting at the houses as the Hummer crawled forward, looking for the one with the outward curving bay window.

“Bingo!” Bernie said as his eyes fell upon the place. It looked like someone with some sense lived there, and not the junkie-turned-amateur-criminal angling for a big score that Bernie had envisioned.

Bettencourt set his Blackberry on silent mode, slid it into the pocket of his leather jacket, and took off his shades. He leaned close to the tinted window and stared at the place as Bernie drove down to the middle of the block and parked.

Bernie got out first and waited for Bettencourt. He used the time to stretch and twist away the kinks in his back. He pulled a black mini-flashlight from inside his jacket, and then adjusted the straps of the armpit holster. The holster housed a Walther PPK—same as his secret man-crush James Bond. Anyone other than Sean Connery amounted to blasphemy in Bernie’s opinion.

Bernie pulled his jacket closed and started to zip it up. Bettencourt had made a big fuss about Bernie’s shirt, which was black and sported an Echelon Media logo.

“That’s your idea of inconspicuous?” Bettencourt had asked him. “You know, you’d be completely worthless if you weren’t so good at what you do.”

The street was dark save for a streetlamp standing right in front of the house they headed toward. Bernie threw suspicious gazes at every little sound. There was no light coming from the house with the outward curving bay window. It looked like whomever lived there was either sleeping or not home.

Bettencourt waited at the bottom of the front steps while Bernie walked up and rang the doorbell.

He rang the bell again when there was no answer.

Still nothing.

He rang it again, and knocked afterward.

Nothing.

Bernie turned to Bettencourt and shrugged his shoulders.

“Keep trying,” Bettencourt whispered, scanning the windows for any sign of movement and finding nothing.

Bernie reached out to ring the doorbell again, but then thought to try the doorknob.

It turned.

“Looks like it’s open,” Bernie said as he pushed with his body and opened the front door.

He turned on the mini-flashlight, leaned his head into the darkness inside, and shined the light all around the first room he saw—the living room.

The interior further validated Bernie’s opinion of the place. This definitely wasn’t the house of a criminal.

“Hello?” Bernie called out. “Silver?!”

“Quiet, Goddammit,” Bettencourt scolded. “You want the whole block to hear? Just go inside.” He walked up the front steps toward Bernie. “C’mon. I’m right behind you.”

Bernie unzipped the jacket to his sternum, slid his gun from the holster, and made his way inside. He used the mini-flashlight to find the nearest light-switch, walked over to it, and turned it on.

The living room lit up. It looked pretty normal as far as living rooms went.

Bettencourt walked in and closed the door softly behind him. He reached into his leather jacket and pulled his own gun—A Beretta Tomcat 32 Auto.

Standing there in the living room, they looked around like tourists.

“Hey Silver?! You in here, Silver?!” Bernie called out.

Again there was no response.

They walked around the first floor turning on lights and checking in closets and under tables.

“Fishy, huh?” Bettencourt said, recalling Bernie’s earlier concerns.

“Hate ta say I told you so, but—”

“Then don’t say it.”

“Sorry.”

They came to the basement doorway. The door was open. A light-switch on the wall inside the basement door. Bernie turned the light on and saw a narrow, wooden staircase leading down to an uneven cement floor. Boxes upon boxes like whoever lived here used the area for storage.

Bernie took the lead, but then . . .

They heard a thump from above. Eyes rolled up to the ceiling. Sharing the same thought, Bernie and Zane Bettencourt hurried toward the staircase leading up to the second floor.

Looking up the staircase into darkness, Bernie felt uneasy. He placed the flashlight against the side of the gun and held them together.

“Silver! It’s me! Bernie!” He said to the darkness at the top of the stairs. “I’m comin’ up. Okay?”

Bettencourt watched from the bottom of the stairs as Bernie headed up and disappeared into the darkness at the top.

Bernie kept calling out to Sterling Silver as he made his way from room to room turning on lights. Bettencourt followed the thump of Bernie’s footsteps until they suddenly stopped.

“Find anything up there?” asked Bettencourt.

There was a long, silent pause, and then . . .

“Uh . . . boss,” Bernie said. “I think you’d better come up here.”

Based on the tone of Bernie’s voice, Bettencourt pictured something bad as he jogged up the stairs, skipping steps. He thought of his worst-case scenario, which was that Silver had OD’ed. He reached the second floor, whipped around the railing in the direction that Bernie’s voice had come from, and stopped cold, confused by what he saw.

Jamie Cole was standing behind Bernie in the master bedroom holding a gun to his temple. Bernie’s gun lay on the floor across the room where Jamie had instructed him to kick it. The mini-flashlight lay by his feet.

Jamie looked like a no-budget, urban mummy. Hastily wrapped gauze covered his arms and neck. He was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and Timberlands. A mixture of gauze and paper-towels, all stained in blood, littered the floor around him.

“Don’t move!” Jamie yelled, his voice shaking from a swell of fear and adrenaline.

“Cole . . . ” Bettencourt remembered aloud.

“Sorry, boss,” Bernie said, ashamed that he’d allowed himself to be taken by a kid.

“Put the gun on the floor!” Jamie ordered Bettencourt.

Bettencourt stood there like a bully whose bluff had been called. He was hesitant to give up his gun and surrender, especially to some ‘college boy,’ like Jamie Cole. But he was at a disadvantage. To take Jamie out, he’d have to sacrifice Bernie, which was starting to appeal to him right now.

Bettencourt looked around the upstairs hallway, and into the rooms that he could see from where he stood, nodding acceptance.

“So this is your place, huh?” he said to Jamie. “Not bad.”

“Yeah . . . ” Jamie said rejecting Bettencourt’s fake praise. “I’m sure you’re real impressed. Now, put down the gun!”

“She’s got at least a dozen guys like you. Pretty little thing like Silver . . . I guarantee you.” Bettencourt said to Jamie. His iron eyes were boring holes in Jamie’s retinas, frustrated anger seething beneath his icy-calm façade.

Jamie could see Bettencourt’s frustration—like that of a cornered predator who had never been beaten—and it scared him. Behind the legitimate business-mogul makeover, the baddass calm, and the stylish clothing, this was King Dollar, the hood legend, standing in front of him with a gun—still—in his hand. This was the same guy who’d killed or indirectly caused the deaths of men, women, and children without even blinking.

“Whatever she’s whispering in your ear, Jamie, she’s tellin’ all them suckaz the same thing. You just happen to be Mr. Right Now.”

“Ain’t no pussy worth dyin’ over, kid,” Bernie added.

“Shut up!” Jamie yelled in Bernie’s ear so loud that he pulled his head away and grimaced. Then Jamie turned to Bettencourt and said, “This ain’t about Sterling Silver. Now, PUT-THE-FUCKING GUN ON THE FLOOR or I swear ta God, I’ll—”

“Okay,” Bettencourt said as he crouched down until his hand touch the floor, released the gun, and stood back up.

“So wait a minute . . . You’re saying Silver ain’t even here?” Bernie asked.

“No. I didn’t even know she was missing until this morning,” Jamie replied.

Bernie’s eyes expressed his confusion. He traded glances with Bettencourt, who was equally puzzled. Bernie shook his head and chuckled.

“You are so in over your head, kid,” he said. “If I was you, I would just shoot myself now, cause—”

“I said, SHUT UP!” Jamie yelled and yanked on Bernie’s arm.

“So, what’s this about, then?” asked Bettencourt. He had dropped the disarming affect and was now channeling dead serious.

“You know what this-siz about!” Jamie hissed.

“Honestly, I don’t. I thought we were coming here to help Silver.”

“To help her,” Jamie sneered. “You’re the reason she took off.”

“Nobody forced her junkie-ass to start popping pills.”

Jamie shook his head, incredulous.

“You don’t even care,” he said. “All those lives you ruined and you don’t even care. You wanna know what this is about? This is about Keisha Senghor, and the rest of her family, and the community that you held hostage with your drugs and your Voodoo bullshit, and Ronnie Hayes, and thissss . . . ” Jamie lifted his bandaged arm and held it out for Bettencourt and Bernie to see. “This-siz about payback for all the pain you caused . . . King Dollar!”

“WHAT?!” Bettencourt said as if it was the last thing he expected to hear. Then he burst into laughter meant to make Jamie feel stupid for mentioning the name. “I don’t know what chu’ve been smoking, kid, but—”

“Stop it! Just stop!” Jamie demanded. “I know you’re him!”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Jamie, but you’re a few decades late. King Dollar got got back in ’86. Or was it ’87?”

“Eighty six,” Bernie corrected.

Jamie’s eyes started to well up. He felt like he was losing control, and worried that the vengeful things might fall for Bettencourt’s bullshit.

He pointed the gun at Bettencourt and said, “Pull up your sleeve. Your right sleeve.”

Bettencourt had had enough of being told what to do. His type was allergic to it.

“No.”

Jamie thrust the gun forward and yelled, “I said, pull up your sleeve!”

TWENTY-THREE

The next thing Jamie knew, he was lying on his back. He felt a sharp pain in his wrist from where Bernie was twisting against the joint to keep him there after flipping him over his back, and snatching the gun from his hand in one swift motion.

Bernie placed the gun against Jamie’s cheek and shoved the side of his face into the floor. Jamie opened his mouth so that his teeth wouldn’t break under the weight.

“Like I told you, kid; waaaay over your head! You shoulda just ended it when you had the chance, cause now you’re gonna—”

“Bernie! Chill!” Bettencourt ordered as he picked up his gun, walked up, and stood over Jamie. “I’m interested in hearing his beef with King Dollar—just for the hell of it.”

Bernie stood up and backed away from Jamie. He retrieved his gun from the floor and placed it back in the holster. He was still holding Ronnie Hayes’ Glock in his hand.

Jamie started to sit up and was met by the bottom of Bettencourt’s shoe against his chest. Bettencourt pushed with his leg, sending Jamie back down to the floor. A noise jumped out of Jamie’s mouth on impact. He winced afterward and rubbed the back of his head.

“So, what is it, Jamie?” said Bettencourt. “Don’t tell me; you’re a Senghor? I mean, everybody knows what went down between them and King Dollar back then.”

Jamie ignored the question and lay there looking defiant. Bettencourt crouched over Jamie nodding and sporting a Cheshire grin. He looked up at Bernie.

“I’ll make some calls,” Bernie said, reading his boss’ expression, and then dug into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone

Bettencourt looked down at Jamie and said, “We’ll get it outta you one way or another.”

“Why would you even care, if you’re not King Dollar?” Jamie asked.

“Let’s say that I was . . . for the sake of argument. From the stories I remember, Ole King Dollar was supposed to be a baaad motherfucker. Whatever your connection is to his victims, it must run pretty deep to make you throw away your life by pulling a gun on a killer like that—if I was who you think I am, that is. So, I’m curious.”

Jamie dodged Bettencourt’s iron eyes as he contemplated a retort. He was half-expecting Bettencourt to snap and swing on him or something.

“Oh . . . By the way,” Bettencourt said as he hiked up the right sleeve of his leather jacket, “Iz-zis what you wanted to see?”

There it was—a tattoo of a wad of dollar bills with a King’s crown propped on top and slanted to the side—emblazoned on Bettencourt’s wrist in faded red, black, and green ink. Underneath it, a date rendered in cursive black digits—5.16.86.

Jamie was maybe 99.5 percent certain that Bettencourt was King Dollar before he saw the tattoo again. Now he was 100 percent sure.

Bettencourt lowered his sleeve and then looked Jamie right in the eyes. Jamie met his cold stare for as long as he could muster, and then looked past it at the empty space above Bettencourt’s head. His eyes wandered around the room as if he were looking for something or someone.

Bettencourt looked up at Bernie and shrugged.

Bernie, who was holding the phone to his ear and waiting for someone to pick up on the other end, followed Jamie’s eyes, wondering what the hell he was looking for.

“What are you waiting for?!” Jamie yelled at the air. “I got ‘em here like you wanted!”

Bernie’s eyes grew big. He lowered the phone from his ear just as a male voice said, “Hello,” on the other end.

“I knew it!” Bernie yelled. “It’s a fuckin’ set up!”

Bettencourt sprung to a stand, ready to move. Bernie put the phone back into his pocket, hurried over, and snatched Jamie up off of the floor by his armpit. He put the gun to Jamie’s head and said, “You’d better pray that we make it outta here.”

“C’mon!” Bettencourt said to Bernie as he ran from the bedroom.

“Do something, Goddammit or they’re gonna get away!” Jamie screamed at the air as Bernie shoved him toward the door and walked quickly behind him with the gun aimed at the back of his head.

They had made it down to the living room when an explosion of glass interrupted their momentum. It came from the living room windows—all of them at once.

The explosion knocked Bettencourt, who was standing closest to a window when it happened, off of his feet. He landed on his back and slid a foot. Jamie and Bernie turned away from the flying glass, both using their arms to shield their faces.

Glass everywhere. Bernie quickly recovered, grabbed Jamie’s shirt and, thinking that the police were about to come through the blown-out windows, held him close like a hostage.

Jamie knew better. He smiled when he heard the ambush of unnatural noise. Bettencourt seemed familiar with the noise, too, as he climbed to his feet and whipped his head around the room looking for its source. Maybe he had heard the noise before… in another life. Either way, Jamie knew something was about to happen.

“Boss!” Bernie yelled. “You all right?!”

Bettencourt was too involved in the noise to hear Bernie, who was hiding behind Jamie with Ronnie Hayes’ gun pressed against his head.

The floor started to move. Bernie, who was the first to see it, jumped away like his feet were on fire. It was the glass. Tiny shards began to slide toward the center of the room and amass into a large swatch of jangling debris.

Bettencourt gasped and backed away lifting his feet, one-by-one to let the shards pass underneath.

Jamie just stood there smiling.

And then, as they watched, an arm, made of glass, and formed up to the mid-bicep, reached up from the swatch of jangling debris. The glass-shard appendage twisted and flexed its wrist and fingers and then reached forward, in Bettencourt’s direction, placed its sharp fingertips on the floor, and dug into the shiny wood surface. A bulge pushed out of its wrist and formed a second arm that reached over the first hand and planted sharp fingertips into the wood floor. The first arm dissolved into a mass at the base of the second. A third arm grew from a bulge in the second one’s wrist and did then same, then a fourth.

Bettencourt backed away until there was no more room to move. The glass arm procession followed, moving like a Slinky made of broken shards. He pulled his gun from his jacket and started shooting at the floor. He missed the arms, but hit his left foot and cried out in pain.

“Bernie!” Bettencourt screamed like a terrified child calling for his mommy. He was hopping on one foot.

Bernie shoved Jamie aside and fired a number of shots at the glass arms. Shards burst outward from the bullets’ impact, but the arms kept coming. Bernie fired until the gun clicked empty. He cocked his arm back to throw the empty gun. An icy grip closed and tightened around his forearm and twisted until his bones shattered and his skin bunched up like rubber.

Bernie made a high-pitched sound and used the muscles in his shoulder to tug the destroyed arm away from the icy grip. Looking at his arm as if to mourn its condition, Bernie saw nothing but empty space where the owner of the icy grip should have been standing. He felt himself lift off of the ground. Then he was moving backward at a high speed, and then . . . darkness.

Bernie crumbled to the floor at the foot of the wall that he had slammed into, sideways. He was out cold.

Bettencourt shrieked when a hand made of glass-shards reached up and wrapped its pointy fingers around his ankle. His other foot fell and touched the ground as he tried to maintain his balance. Weight bore down on the gunshot wound and inspired a prolonged grimace. He tugged at his leg and tried to lift it, but the arm held him there.

Another arm grew from that one’s wrist, but instead of dissolving into the mass of jangling shards at the base of the new arm, the first arm remained. Soon there were multiple arms crawling all over Bettencourt’s body, tearing his clothing, and opening garish wounds.

Bettencourt screamed and thrashed as hands made of glass wrapped around his wrists and ankles and pinned them against the wall. A number of glass arms crawled up toward his head. Anticipating their destination, Bettencourt stretched his neck to move his head further away.

Jamie’s satisfaction was difficult to maintain with Bettencourt’s screaming, which alluded to unfathomable pain. Knowing what he knew about the man, it made an impact to see him as the helpless victim.

Suddenly Jamie was feeling put-off by what he heard and witnessed. A rumble in his gut led to a sour taste, and then, nausea. He heard the door-latch click over his shoulder and spun around to see the living room door swinging open by itself.

Bettencourt’s screams, the jangling of glass, and the unnatural noises were abruptly snatched away so that all Jamie could hear was his own breathing. And then came an accented voice that whispered with the gust of autumn air that blew at him from outside.

“Walk awaayyyyyy . . . ” said the voice.

Jamie stood there staring at freedom on the other side of the doorway. The night had never looked so good. He turned and reluctantly glanced over his shoulder.

Bernie was on the ground, unconscious. Bettencourt was being held against the wall by disembodied arms made of glass. A gaggle of hands were tugging at his lower jaw and the sides of his mouth, attempting to pull them apart. His screams had degraded to wailing and he was still thrashing against their grip.

The accented voice spoke again, louder this time.

“W-A-L-K! A-W-A-Y!”

Jamie ran out. He heard the door slam shut behind him, but didn’t look back. Some of his neighbors had just come out of their houses to see what was going on. Jamie ignored them and kept on running to his car. There weren’t any parking spots on his block when he arrived home earlier, so he had parked on the next block.

Jamie drove a few blocks and then decided that he wasn’t in any condition to be operating a motor vehicle. He was numb, both physically and emotionally, and detached from what his eyes were showing him. Reality was like a dream of floating outside his body watching himself, while concentrating on something completely unrelated.

Jamie hastily parked his car, got out, and took a walk that spanned an entire night. He passed by landmarks that meant nothing to him except that they were where they were whenever he happened past them. He trekked through Center City, from end-to-end, down side streets and up alleys. He visited the city parks—Rittenhouse, Washington Square, Love, Schuylkill River—and sat down on benches for a time. People mostly ignored him, when there were people. The streets were mostly vacant save for the street-cleaning trucks and the taxis and the homeless folks sleeping on sidewalks, and a number of random people here and there. He caught a passing motorist looking at him like he was some kind of contagious freak. Then he saw his reflection in a window—looking like a no-budget, urban mummy on crack—and understood.

Can you live with this? Jamie asked himself during brief moments of clarity that came and went. He saw the exact moment when night became morning without even trying. People began to appear all around him as he walked, and stood staring off into space, and sat down, and walked—real people. They were the early birds of the morning rush.

Jamie had done so much walking that his legs threatened to give out on him unless he got some rest. So, he found a secluded bench in an easy-to-miss, walled-in, mini-park and sat down.

Is thissss . . . awake? It was Jamie’s first conscious thought when he woke up a few hours later on the secluded bench in the easy-to-miss minipark. He could tell it was later in the day by the way the sun felt on his face, and by the number of footsteps smacking against the pavement on the other side of the wall, and by the sound of traffic tied in knots.

He had a hangover from the things he saw and heard last night, and from staving off the emotions that those sights and sounds triggered. It felt like he’d been out drinking or shooting up for a few days straight. His body was still partially numb.

I Shouldn’t be here, Jamie thought. It was too exposed. He had to assume that the police would be looking for him by now. They would be looking for his car as well. No question.

Jamie adjusted his shirt and rubbed, in a downward motion, with the palms of his bandaged hands, to press away the wrinkles in his jeans. In his head, he mapped out the least dangerous path to the Salvation Army Store a few blocks away. There was always donated clothing in boxes out in back of the store where people would leave them for pick up. Sometimes the boxes would sit there for days before someone took them inside. He could swipe a new outfit.

At a diner on the corner, a number of people were standing around a TV in the window. He could see that they were watching the news and wondered if it was about him. He listened as he sneaked past and heard something about a gunman on the loose at the Lurmeyer Tower.

Jamie whipped his head toward the TV, and then he ran forward and pushed and climbed through the crowd to get a good look.

On the television:

SHAKY VIDEO

A police barricade has been set up outside of the Lurmeyer Tower. People run screaming out the front doors and up to the barricade. A duo of police officers drag two limp bodies, by the armpits, to the safety of the barricade. Blood marks their paths. Discarded handwritten signs lay on the ground. A newscaster talks over the footage.

Newscaster (Voice over): If you’ve just tuned in, you’re watching live footage of the Lurmeyer Tower where just over half-an-hour ago, two skull-faced gunmen opened fire without warning on a group of protestors who had gathered outside of the building before heading into the lobby and killing two security guards. The gunmen then took an elevator up to the fifth-floor offices of adult entertainment company, Echelon Media where, according to survivors, they began shooting anyone in sight. CNW News has obtained a cell phone video from the lobby of the building. A warning. The footage is graphic.

CELL PHONE VIDEO FOOTAGE:

The owner of the cell phone is filming from a crouch, through a large potted plant. We hear muffled gunshots followed by panicked screaming coming from somewhere off-camera. The people in the lobby are startled by the commotion. They turn toward the front doors just as Bernie comes running in holding the Walther PPK in his left hand. A skull painted over his face. His right arm is dangling limp like a wet noodle that’d been chewed on and spit out. He is saying something, but we can’t make out the words. People scream and run away from him. They hide in corners and behind walls and crouch behind large decorative fixtures. Some people take shelter behind the guard kiosk.

The security guards reach for their guns, but Bernie shoots them both, cowboy-style with his left hand. He walks over to the elevator banks, pushes a button, and gives a ‘thumbs up’ to someone off camera.

A few seconds later, King Dollar walks into the lobby holding a shotgun and wearing a skull-face. His skull-face is more detailed than Bernie’s, and takes up more of his face. His mouth is swollen and covered with deep lacerations. He is wearing a top hat and dressed in the same dark clothing that he wore as Bettencourt last night. But the clothing is badly torn. Bleeding gashes peek through. A belt of shotgun-shells is strapped across his torso. A rifle strapped to his back. A handgun tucked into his waist.

King Dollar walks calmly toward the elevator bank and waits with Bernie. The doors open and then two men enter.

Jamie backed away from the window and into the first tier of the crowd. It was larger than before. He was shaking his head at the images on the screen. He felt like his brain was going to short-circuit.

“Wha . . . No! But . . . ” he stammered. And then he exhaled and surrendered to the moment.

The next story was about gunshots in West Philly—the 3600 block of Spruce Street. Police were looking for the homeowner, who witnesses saw run from the property last night at around 10:30pm.

Then Jamie heard his name—Jamie Alan Cole. He looked up and saw his smiling face on the TV screen. It was a decent photo, at least. It had come from the bulletin board in Keri’s office. Keri was probably there right now with all the others.

Jamie took off running toward the Lurmeyer Tower. From where he was, he had a good twelve blocks to cover. Someone had recognized him from the photo on the News just as he started running and yelled, “Hey! Aren’t chu . . . ”

Jamie was weaker than his peaking adrenaline led him to believe. He had to stop running and catch his breath after only one block. He came to the conclusion that the police would never let him past the barricades at the Lurmeyer Tower, and there wasn’t much he could do standing in a crowd of spectators.

Jamie pulled his cell phone from his back pocket and dialed Keri’s office number.

TWENTY-FOUR

Keri sat with her knees to her chest in the recessed space beneath her desk, cringing at each shrill ring. She was trying to force herself to move, to reach up over her head and grab the phone. She could tell the caller about the man going around shooting people and have whomever it was call the police.

Keri shrunk away from the terrifying sounds coming from the other side of her closed office door—her coworkers’ screams, gunblasts, stampeding feet, bodies falling into things. She was shivering and making involuntary vocal noises. She had turned the lights and her monitor off to make it seem like the occupant of this office was ‘not in today’ if the gunman happened to open the door and peek inside. Before closing her door, she heard the man say something before each gunblast. It sounded like, “Smile for me, baby!”

Keri picked a random moment and crawled out from under the desk, snatched the entire phone console from the surface, and disappeared back into the recessed space. She picked up the phone, and grimaced, afraid the gunman would detect the abrupt cessation of ringing to mean that someone had answered the phone, thus the occupant of this office was indeed ‘in today.’

Keri could hear Jamie’s voice even before she put the phone to her ear. He sounded excited.

“Holy Shit! Keri?!” Jamie said relieved that someone had picked up. “Izzat you? Are you okay?”

“I’m scared, Jamie,” Keri whimpered in a mostly hushed voice. “There’s someone here . . . He’s sh . . . shooting everybody.”

“It’s Bettencourt, Keri. Bernie, too. I saw it on the news.”

“What? Why would—”

“Listen! Is he there; on the third floor?”

“Yes. I can hear him walking around.

“Can you find someplace to hide, until—”

“I’m under my desk right now. I closed the door and turned off the lights.” Keri sobbed between words. “I don’t wanna die, Jamie.”

“You’re not going to die, Keri,” Jamie said, but he feared that she might. “You have to try to be calm and stay as quiet as—”

“Oh God! Jamie!” Keri whispered. “Someone’s outside my door!”

The doorknob jostled, and then turned. The door swung slowly open and let in an unnatural noise. Keri sank deeper into the recessed space and tried not to come apart. She could hear the unnatural noise, but her concern was focused on physical danger. She listened as a pair of footsteps moved casual and confident across her office and around to the back of her desk.

From the other end of the line, Jamie shuddered at the haunted underwater alarm and the ethereal chirping. As usual, the unnatural noise gave him chills. Keri’s stuttered breathing was growing faster and shallower in the foreground. He wanted to reach through the phone and snatch her away from there or at the very least to yell at King Dollar to stop.

Maybe he won’t see her, Jamie thought. If that were the case, then his voice coming through the phone might give away Keri’s hiding place.

A pair of legs clothed in tattered black slacks walked up and stood over the recessed area of Keri’s desk. A shotgun barrel dangled beside the right leg. The unnatural noise was louder than before. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere above her desk.

Keri backed away from the skull-face that floated down and hovered sideways in front of her. The top hat was pulled snug onto his head. She recognized Bettencourt’s features through the face paint. His mouth was badly lacerated. The expression on his face was a contradiction. Horrified eyes pleaded for mercy above a gory smile. Flayed skin dangling away like fleshy insectoid mandibles surrounding a gaping maw filled with chipped and broken teeth.

“Why are you doing this?” Keri asked attempting to reach the person behind the pleading eyes.

“Keri, Run!” Jamie yelled through the phone. “Get outta there, NOW!”

Ignoring Keri’s question, King Dollar stood up and took a few steps backward. He lifted the shotgun and aimed it at Keri, closed one eye, and curled his finger around the trigger.

Keri turned away from the barrel and squeezed her eyes shut. She assumed that the blast would hit her around the neck area and the left side of her face, briefly wondering how badly it would hurt and if her death would be instantaneous.

“Smile for me, babee!” King Dollar said. His voice trembled with deviant sexual aggression.

“Leave her alone!” came a male voice.

King Dollar looked up to see Marc Pierce standing in the doorway of Keri’s office, looking scared but determined. Dollar turned the gun on Marc and squeezed the trigger.

Keri shuddered at the blast. When she opened her eyes King Dollar was gone. She could hear his footsteps moving quickly toward the door.

People were hiding under desks, and behind cubicle-walls, and support pillars out in the main office area. Sexual sounds poured from computer speakers left turned on. A small group of office workers was making its way toward the front, cubicle-by-cubicle.

Marc Pierce came running down the hall toward the lobby area. King Dollar hurried out of Keri’s office, locked onto Marc, and walked after him taking large, deliberate steps. The unnatural noise followed him wherever he went. Without stopping, he took aim at Marc’s back and said, “Show me that smile!” And then he pulled the trigger.

The blast knocked Marc forward and off of his feet. He made a yelping sound. In the background Keri Pak tiptoed out of her office and ran in the opposite direction.

Jamie was starting to understand that the vengeful things were in control of the situation and that their intent was to torture, and then kill King Dollar, and wipe out everything that he stood for. That included Echelon Media and everyone who worked there. The fact that he’d turned King Dollar over to the vengeful things had apparently earned Jamie a pass.

But there was no way he could live with all that. No way. He thought especially of Keri, for whom his feelings had suddenly deepened.

It’s my fault if she dies! My fault!

Jamie always knew that this thing would end badly. As such, he had been trying to think of ways to stop the vengeful things in case they turned on him—which he fully expected them to do at some point. The book mentioned complicated ceremonies involving animal sacrifices—usually a goat. Jamie didn’t have access to any animals, nor did he have the luxury of time to familiarize himself with the intricate details of the ceremonies, never mind perform them in the right order. He needed to think of something else.

He thought of the source of the phantoms, the dilapidated fortress. Of setting fire to it, burning it to the ground. Maybe that would banish the ghosts for good.

Jamie hurried back to his car. Based on what the News had reported, he was only considered ‘missing,’ and not a murder suspect just yet.

The police couldn’t give a fuck about a missing, 28-year-old, black male, especially not with what was going down at Echelon. He might be able to make it across town without being stopped. God, he hoped so. Keri’s life depended on it.

The bodies were beginning to accumulate in the main office area as King Dollar walked up and down aisles looking for people to shoot—pleading eyes hovering over a gory smile. He kept repeating the same two lines in the same sexually aggressive tone before he pulled the trigger on someone, “Smile for me, babee,” or “Show me that smile!”

When there weren’t any people around he shot at the posters on the walls, stacks of DVDs on shelves, standing displays, a large printing machine, and at computer monitors sitting on crowded desktops. Sometimes he would growl, “Blood Money!” in a voice filled with hate.

The carnage continued.

King Dollar eventually came upon a pair of feet sticking out from behind a large copy machine that he had yet to shoot. He raised the shotgun, said, “Show me that smile,” and then pulled the trigger.

The right foot and lower leg exploded into fragments. The hapless employee fell out of his hiding place, screaming at the stump below his right knee. King Dollar calmly reloaded the shotgun as the wounded man crawled away hyperventilating and trailing blood.

Some of those hiding could see what was happening, but nobody seemed willing to do anything to help.

After he reloaded, King Dollar walked up and stood over the crawling, hyperventilating employee and shot the man in the spine.

Another group made up of Keri Pak, Ryan Gendler, Jeffrey “Parks” Parkson, and Lisa Pritz were huddled together on the floor of a cubicle near the lobby, looking varying degrees of scared shitless. The background was filled with screams, and gunblasts, and footsteps coming from every direction. Any of those footsteps could belong to the gunman.

Lisa Pritz was the closest to the doorway of the cubicle. After a quiet period, she looked out into the aisle and let her head linger there. Horace Figg was peeking out from the cubicle across the aisle. They acknowledged each other with concerned eyes.

Lisa scanned the aisle in both directions, and then she turned to the group and whispered, “Sounds like he’s on the other side of the office. I think we can make it to the stairs by the elevator bank. But we have to be quiet.”

Keri and Parks nodded. Ryan Gendler was too scared to respond.

Across the aisle, Horace was waving his hand to get Lisa’s attention and warn her. Making a run for it would be stupid. That was how most of these people were getting picked off.

Horace had been moving around from hiding place to hiding place and had seen a lot of what had happened. The journalist in him kicked in when he heard the first gunblast. He completely abandoned the David façade and looked for a vantage point from which he could see who was doing the shooting, when everyone else was running away. His chest hurt so badly from the bum-rush of emotion when he first saw King Dollar that Horace thought, for a moment, that he was having a heart attack.

He watched how King Dollar just stood there out by the elevator banks waiting while Bernie walked around the office shooting at all the placards on the wall. Once they were all destroyed, King Dollar entered the lobby and Bernie calmly walked into the stairwell and headed down—probably to the next floor to repeat the process there.

“No! Go back,” Horace whispered and waved at Lisa as she crawled out of the cubicle and stood up.

Lisa whispered back that she knew what she was doing. Then she turned and motioned for the rest of the group to “C’mon!”

Keri led the way as the group crouch-walked toward the doorway of the cubicle, and . . .

“Smile for me, babee!” The voice came from the left, seemingly out of nowhere.

Seconds later, a shotgun blast reduced Lisa Pritz’s head to fragmented bits of flesh and bone and brain matter blowing sideways in a violent wind. What remained was displaced to the cubicle wall beside her. Her headless body stumbled around, reaching blindly. Flatulent arterial spurts leapt from the hideous stump atop her shoulders. She ran right into the cubicle wall and toppled it on her way to the ground where her body came to rest in a sloppy pile.

Keri screamed and took off running toward the lobby doors. Parks and Ryan Gendler followed her.

“No!” Horace yelled as King Dollar raised his gun and took aim at the group. The undercover journalist tackled him from behind.

The shotgun went off. The blast hit the ceiling lights—sparks raining down. Horace didn’t know what to do once he had King Dollar on the ground, so he crawled away. The unnatural noise intensified. Horace had thought it was coming from someone’s computer until now.

King Dollar climbed to his feet, picked the top hat up off of the floor and placed it back onto his head, and then calmly loaded the shotgun right in front of Horace. He raised it and took aim. Horace froze, staring up the barrel of the shotgun. He could see the skull-face slant sideways at the other end.

Horace looked away waiting for the gun to go off and darkness to come claim him. He spied the small group that included Keri Pak, Jeffrey “Parks” Parkson, and Ryan Gendler run into the stairwell out by the elevator bank.

King Dollar lowered the gun and looked Horace over. Horace sensed recognition.

Without saying a word, King Dollar walked forward, around Horace, and continued on his hunt for victims.

Horace just sat there in the middle of the aisle, wallowing in the shell shock of nearly dying. He was in such a daze that he didn’t even flinch when he heard gunblasts and screaming out by the elevator banks. At some point, a little voice in his head told him, This is gonna make for a great story, you know.

Sitting there amongst all that death and destruction, a very wrong part of him couldn’t help but smile a little.

Outside the Lurmeyer Tower, police officers hid behind a barricade of squad cars. There was a pool of blood near the front doors from the protestors that Bernie shot on his way into the building. A crowd of spectators stood in the distance, necks craning to see over shoulders.

Keri Pak, Jeffrey “Parks” Parkson, Ryan Gendler, two half-naked, up-and-coming adult film actors, and several anonymous office workers ran screaming from the building, and up to the barricade. Moments later, a S.W.A.T. Team entered the lobby and headed straight for the staircase beside the elevator banks.

Jamie drove like a maniac through heavy mid-day traffic. There wasn’t much room to move around the tight clog of automobiles and pedestrians fighting for the right of way, but Jamie kept going. Sometimes it was at the expense of another car’s bumper or fender, or a number of pedestrians that he nearly creamed. People yelled and cursed at him when he didn’t stop after each nick and ding and near miss. An angry man ran up and pounded his fist on the driver’s side window before Jamie peeled off and turned down a side street, unfettered by the drama.

Although he was still in no condition to be operating a motor vehicle, Jamie had little choice if he wanted to save Keri. He kept picturing her hiding under her desk, her delicate features twisted into a fearful mask that pained him to visualize. He was afraid that he would be too late, that this plan of his wouldn’t even work, that . . .

Jamie came to a knot of automobiles set at cockeyed angles as they attempted to work their way around a broken convoy of city buses. A chorus of blaring horns polluted the air. Jamie sat there waiting for his turn to move. He was a few cars back from freedom—a few cars too many.

Green lights came and went as he waited. His patience withered slightly with each green-to-red cycle. This was going to ruin everything. He saw Keri’s face again, twisted into a fearful mask. He chased away the image and searched his mental database for an alternative route to Candyland. He was close enough that he could make it there on foot in under the time it would take for his turn to come around in traffic and then for him to drive the rest of the way there. So he got out of his car and started to jog.

He was running on fumes, gasping and nursing cramps, but Jamie refused to stop. Failure simply wasn’t an option. He wasn’t sure how many blocks he had covered so far, but his limbs were starting to turn on him. He could feel it in his knees, which seemed to be struggling under his weight and threatening to give. Lactic acid was building in his shoulders and arms, making them heavy. His lungs felt like they were going to explode. His vision was starting to blur. Images came in twos.

Jamie squeezed his eyes shut and opened them. Buildings floated together in his sights, which then began to fade to clarity. He glimpsed pieces of the dilapidated fortress peeking through buildings up ahead. It gave him a sudden burst of energy.

King Dollar stood in a daze amongst bodies lying in pools of blood in the middle of the 1st floor lobby. Over his shoulder, the remains of an Echelon Media sign dangled from the wall, which was peppered with tiny holes surrounding a larger one. A lifeless body lay in the doorway propping the door open; more bodies out by the bank of elevators.

Bernie lay facedown at King Dollar’s feet. A large hole in the back of his head leaked cerebral chunks bathed in blood. The empty shotgun lay on the floor next to him. The Beretta—also empty—lay next to the shotgun. Tears streamed down King Dollar’s painted cheeks. His eyes were brimming with regret, and terror, pleading for mercy. The unnatural noise flooded his ears. He seemed to understand that it was his turn to die.

Out by the elevator banks, an elevator dinged. The doors glided open. King Dollar saw a peripheral blur surrounded by an aural glow swaying awkwardly in the middle of the lit square. It was shaped like a little girl with bulbous joints and limbs jutting askew.

King Dollar’s head turned toward the blur as if someone had grabbed the bottom of his face and forced him to do so against his will. He tried to look away, but his eyes, like 99.5% of his faculties, were under foreign control.

Smackhead gimp, Keisha Senghor, floated off of the elevator channeling inner sexy like a sheltered virgin. She looked almost real, her form manifested in degraded video quality. She was naked like King Dollar remembered from the decades’ old, improvised shoot; the same sunken eyes, harsh cheekbones, and teeth jutting like a mummified corpse. Her toes dragged in the air inches above the ground.

Keisha Senghor continued to dance forward to a non-existent melody, swaying, twisting, and arching her back in an afflicted manner. Fake blond hair whipped in aural goo that slowed her movement, and everything relating to it, down to half-speed. She danced up to King Dollar and extended her right arm toward him, her hand held in a tight fist, palm facing down.

Crumpled dollar bills fell out and landed at King Dollars’ feet when Keisha opened her hand.

Zane Bettencourt briefly triumphed over the dominant force that had been suppressing him.

“I . . . I’m ssss . . . sooorreeeee,” he whimpered, tears rolling down his cheeks in a constant stream.

Keisha smiled at him, and then lifted the rifle off of his back by the butt, and slid the strap over his head. She adjusted her grasp on the long weapon and then, as he watched helplessly, she placed the tip of the barrel up under King Dollar’s chin.

One of Echelon’s employees, who had been playing dead the entire time, watched the skull-faced gunman’s every move, looking for an opportunity to run. He saw the gunman apologize to thin air right before he took the rifle off of his back and placed it to his own chin.

Go on! Do it! The desperate employee thought to himself.

King Dollar watched Keisha curl her finger around the trigger of the rifle. She did it slowly to fuck with him, and then hissed in a desiccated tone, “Ssssmile for meeeeee! Babee!”

Somewhere deep inside his mind Bettencourt aka Dollar was begging her not to shoot.

“You again! Whatchu got a deathwish, son?” One of the homeless men said to Jamie. But Jamie said nothing, instead running up and dipping a wooden plank that he’d picked up off the ground into the burn-barrel, and then moving toward the dilapidated fortress like some torch-bearer for the ‘Hood Olympics.

Jamie entered through the same loose plank as before. He walked from room to room, stumbling over uprooted floorboards. He was searching the air as if he expected something to be there.

“This isn’t how it was supposed to be!” he yelled. “You weren’t supposed to kill everybody! I gave you who you wanted! I gave you King Dollar!”

He didn’t really expect a reply.

“Goddamn you!” he roared, frustrated with the vengeful things for what he was about to do, and then touching the flame to anything he thought looked flammable. “You can’t have ‘em all! I gave you what you wanted, but you can’t have them all!”

At that very moment . . .

Keisha Senghor froze. Her nearly skeletal face adopted a look of sudden concern. The unnatural noise worked itself into a frenzy, which seemed, to King Dollar, to suggest fear. Keisha spun her head around as if to lay eyes on a distant threat, and then vanished.

The employee who’d been playing dead until now was waiting, on pins and needles, for the skull-faced gunman to pull the trigger. Instead the gunman lowered his rifle and let it dangle beside him. He seemed shocked, as if he’s suddenly realized the gravity of what he’d just done.

After a few moments, King Dollar’s expression melted knowing. Entranced, he turned, walked through the lobby door, and stopped when he heard . . .

The S.W.A.T. Team was in the stairwell. They sounded pretty close.

King Dollar changed direction and jumped back, startled by the sight of one his victims—a clearly dead man—pointing east. The clearly dead man sat in a heap against the outer wall of a cubicle with a gaping hole in his chest and his head slumped in a way that would be too painful to maintain if he were still alive. The clearly dead man’s arm was extended to the side and held there, index-finger pointing.

Further down the hall another, clearly dead victim, pointed east in the same involuntary fashion. Although hesitant at first, the sound of the S.W.A.T. Team getting closer in the stairwell gave King Dollar motivation to follow the dead people’s directions. Heading east, he came upon more bodies pointing. They eventually lead him to a window that looked out at the alley between the Lurmeyer Tower and its immediate neighbor. He opened the window and found a thick, iron pipe snaking up the side of the building right next to the window. The pipe extended all the way to the ground.

Jamie disappeared into the crowd of homeless folks who stood, mesmerized by the fire across the street. He had swiped a blanket from a heap that somebody probably called home and draped it over his head. He found a spot on a little block that led away from Candyland, and stood on the corner next to the last house on the left side of the block watching the fire burn. Setting the fire was easier than he thought. It was so easy, in fact, that Jamie wondered why none of the homeless folks had ever thought to burn down the damned thing before him. He wondered if maybe they held a certain respect for the vengeful things whose roots were planted firmly in a homeland that they knew nothing of, yet still felt connected to somehow. If that was the case, then had he done a bad thing?

The flames had engulfed the entire length of the dilapidated fortress by the time the fire trucks arrived. The fire had further damaged the gradually weakening structure enough that the highly pressurized water from their hoses simply shoved over everything that remained until there was nothing left but a pile of soggy, burnt wood.

Jamie watched in a daze until he was satisfied that the fortress was destroyed. Hours passed in minutes. His cell phone rang. It was Keri. In the heat and intensity of the moment he had almost forgotten about her.

She said that she was calling from the hospital and told Jamie how she, Parks and Gendler had made it out, but that a lot of people hadn’t. She cried as she described the deaths that she had witnessed, and then asked if he was okay.

“You know what?” Jamie said as he watched a fireman walk around the charred remains of the fortress trying to determine a cause. “I think I am.”

Jamie heard a noise over his shoulder, a chirping sound that he knew all too well. He froze. A familiar voice nipped at his ear from behind.

“Smile for me, Babee!”

Keri heard the voice, too. She gasped and nearly dropped the phone.

Jamie spun around to see a white skull painted over a badly lacerated face floating at the other end of a long gun barrel—terrified eyes pleading for mercy. It was King Dollar.

A flash of light jumped out at Jamie. It made a deafening sound.

EPILOGUE

Horace Figg was in disguise again and standing behind some annoying old crow in the grocery store checkout line. The disguise (a baseball cap and a pair of aviator shades with reflective lenses) was just a little something that he had thrown together on the fly so that he could do his grocery shopping in peace.

The old crow was one of those people who like to broadcast her private conversations to everyone within earshot. She had a friend with her, a meek little man who hung on to her every word. The old crow had a voice like a parrot gargling broken glass and she used that awful squawking to comment on the tabloids and gossip rags in the magazine rack by register three.

Horace kept his head down and prayed for the line to move. The old crow kept turning 30 degrees to face the magazine rack before snapping back to her whipping boy to comment on some headline. Horace did this move where he leaned back and turned his face away from the woman whenever she would look at the magazines.

The cashier was some overly pleasant, chatty girl who looked like a shaved colobus monkey. She insisted on engaging each customer in meaningless dialogue about something they had purchased.

“People swear by this stuff,” she said to the young man standing in front of her as she scanned the plastic jug of detergent and then examined it for a moment before placing it in a plastic bag. “Is it really as good as they say?”

The young man was busy with his own thoughts and couldn’t be bothered to respond. The chatty monkey made a funny face at the old crow and her whipping boy, who were next in line, and then shrugged her shoulders. The old crow glanced at the young man and shrugged back. Her whipping boy smiled.

Horace was third in line but he might as well have been 23rd. The old crow was squawking about some actress who didn’t need to get all that collagen, about how she looked like she had fish lips, and about how all these celebrities should stop being so superficial and age gracefully like her.

The lines for registers two and four were just as long, and they moved twice as fast. Horace wondered when the old crow would notice that. The way she was talking, it seemed like the old crow might linger on her current topic long enough for the line to move her away from the magazine rack before she could focus her cynical squawking down at the Between The Lines Times, whose cover faced up at a slant from the bottom shelf. But the line didn’t move. The cashier was waiting for a price check on one of the young man’s items and talking at him in the meantime.

The old crow shifted sideways and faced the magazine rack. Horace watched her from the corners of his eyes. She seemed to have run out of things to say about celebrities and was looking for something to inspire another tirade. He could see her head tilting downward. And then it stopped.

“Some hero,” the old crow squawked to her whipping boy. “Cashing in on all those people’s deaths like that.”

“Who’s that?” the whipping boy inquired. He had been perusing a different cover and had no idea to whom she referred.

“That reporter who tackled that gunman . . . ”

“The one who was all over the News?”

The old crow nodded “Yes,” and then she pointed at the Between The Lines Times. The Return of King Dollar, Part 1, was the headline.

Just then the line moved and it was the old crow’s turn at the register. The overly pleasant cashier tossed out small talk. The old crow responded with something equally inconsequential and they were all fast friends.

Anxiety chased Horace all the way home. He played out what he would have said to the old crow had she recognized him under the disguise. He did the same for the cashier, who seemed determined to make eye contact as she rang up his purchase.

The shooting at the Lurmeyer Tower had made the national news. When people learned that Horace had tackled the gunman he was labeled a hero. He became the darling of the interview circuit. CNN. Good Morning America. NPR. His story made good TV and the media milked it dry. People would come up to him in the streets and shake his hand or give him a hug. They would ask him stupid questions about what it was like and about what had happened to King Dollar, who seemed to drop off the face of the planet after killing Jamie Cole.

Horace felt conflicted by the recognition. A hero would have finished the job once he had King Dollar on the ground. A hero wouldn’t have taken advantage of instant celebrity to push an article or, in the wake of such a tragedy, felt some sense of satisfaction over being right about King Dollar faking his death back in ‘86.

Horace had presented a first hand account of the shooting in a two-part article that was to run in the Between The Lines Times despite offers from several legitimate media outlets. Part one came out last week.

There were still unanswered questions. What made Zane Bettencourt do what he had done and what had happened to him? Why did he target his own company? Why revive his King Dollar persona after working so hard to create this new life for himself? Why didn’t he shoot Horace when he had the chance? Why did he travel across town to shoot Jamie Cole and how did he get past all those cops? Why did Jamie start the fire on Berks Street?

Horace hoped to address those questions in part two of the article.

He returned home from the grocery store and tossed the baseball cap and glasses on the couch. He changed his clothes, popped a “Jazz Greats” CD in the CD Player, and put away the groceries. When he was done, he made himself a cup of raspberry tea, stretched out on the living room couch with the self-help book about positive thinking that he had been reading, cracked it open, and dove in. The words began to hurt his eyes after awhile so Horace turned on the television and jacked in to the shitstorm of stylized imagery. At some point he felt the urge to talk into his mini-recorder.

Later, Horace found himself sitting on the couch holding the mini-recorder like he was about to speak into it, casting a cynical expression at the panel of know-it-alls on CNN. They were discussing King Dollar and the Lurmeyer Tower Incident like snarky fanboys giddily dissecting a movie they had just seen. He was waiting for his name to come up. He didn’t have to wait long.

“With all the attention this Figg received, he knew the article would give the Times a much needed boost in sales, maybe even a little prestige,” said one know-it-all regarding Horace’s decision not to go with a more respectable venue with his story.

The exposure was Horace’s way of saying “Thank you,” to the paper that helped him fall in love with journalism again, and for his boss, Don Keating, whom he considered a friend.

“Now there’s a guy whose brain I’d like to pick,” said another know-it-all. “I mean, he was right there, in the thick of it.”

“Apparently he’s not doing interviews anymore.”

Ironically, that very same exposure became too much for Horace to handle. He had a heart-to-heart with Don Keating, who suggested that he take a sabbatical from the outside world to finish part two. So he did.

Horace used the time to wrangle all the horrible memories of the shooting and the painful feelings that they stirred and to channel them into something that worked for and not against his sanity. His investigation was leading him down a dark road full of unsettling phenomena that side-stepped the laws of nature. Experience had taught him that those kinds of things were best confronted with a sound mind. Otherwise they could really fuck with your head.

The know-it-alls moved on to another topic and Horace lost interest in what the television had to say. He wasn’t interested in talking into the recorder anymore either.

Horace dragged his lazy bones across the room and sat down at his computer. He frittered around online for awhile and then logged into one of the online forums for survivors of violence and trauma that he had joined. Horace found that it helped to communicate with people with similar experiences. He used an anonymous name “Oldtimer” so as not to reveal his identity. Otherwise the know-it-alls would find a way to exploit his posts.

He acted as informal therapist to Keri Pak, who phoned Horace frequently, in tears, to lament about Jamie Cole, who she still had deep feelings for, and to the other 3rd floor Echelon Media Employees with whom he had developed a patriarchal bond since the shooting.

Horace climbed into bed at around 10pm, and was asleep within minutes.

The phone rang and woke Horace from a pleasant dream. It was Keri Pak. Her voice was filled with nervous excitement.

“Have you seen it?!” she said laboring to maintain her composure.

“Seen what?” Horace groggily replied, yawning as he spoke.

“The video on the Echelon Website!”

“What video? I thought the site was taken down.”

“It was. But . . . ”

Horace felt that Keri was probably making something out of nothing as had been the case with some dreams involving Jamie that she had shared with him. He advised accordingly.

“I know it’s difficult Keri, but I really don’t think it’s healthy for you to be—”

“Just go to the site and watch it!” she demanded. “Please? Then call me back.”

Keri hung up. Horace placed the phone on the end table and lay there not wanting to move. He replayed Keri’s voice in his head several times. Her tone indicated to him that whatever she had seen had really scared her and Keri wasn’t the type to scare easily.

Horace went into the living room and sat down at his computer. He got online and typed www.echelonmedia.com into the address bar and hit “Enter.”

A black screen with no text appeared. A still frame from a single, blurred video hovered in the center of the screen. The blurred image was difficult to ascertain, but it looked like a naked man frozen in an awkward pose. The lurid setting jumped out at him. He had seen it before.

After a few reluctant moments, Horace pressed “Play.”

VIDEO

The footage is old and blurry. Familiar objects with fuzzy edges inhabit a scene marred by distortion. There is a stage lined with chairs reaching into a roomful of empty tables, pillars wrapped in carpet, and walls painted a brutal shade of red. A stripper pole impales the end of the extended stage. Spotlights dance and crisscross beams. “Eyes Without A Face,” by Billy Idol pollutes the murky atmosphere. Like the picture, the sound is distorted.

A smeared, skull-face with lacerations underneath peeks out from beneath the downward pointing brim of a top hat. The naked wearer cowers from an ambush of dead stares cast by a collection of shadowy figures recessed into the smoldering ether of deep red ugliness and lurid 70s porn. Save for their eyes, which cut like daggers of aural luminescence, the details of the shadowy figures are muted by a dense stank-cloud of evaporated lust and cigarette smoke. Occasionally we glimpse a face or a body-part wrapped in African clothing that floats to the surface of the cloud and teases us with the promise of full disclosure, and then reneges on that promise. We see the shape of a bulbous-jointed, knock-kneed little girl holding hands with a woman.

The smeared skull-face holds himself in a crippled pose, shrinking inward, and trembling as he struggles against a pair of handcuffs that link him, by the wrist, to the stripper pole. His other arm is locked painfully straight and kept in constant tension against his side. His fingers are curled into a claw. A red, ball-gag forces his mouth open. The circumference is bordered by flared teeth and spittle. Saliva converges at the rounded bottom. Multiple strands dangle and sway. They vibrate to the anguished tenor of his pleading grunts.

The smeared skull-face attempts to lift his dead arm and swat at crumpled bills tossed at him from off camera, but the pain is too much to bear. His legs can hardly support his weight. One of them might be broken. Darkened patches surrounded by moisture decorate his peanut butter hue. We understand that they are wounds. There are many throughout his body. Several of them appear fatal.

As his struggling intensifies the skull-faced man with the peanut butter hue shudders at a deep-throated command hurled angrily in a familiar African dialect, and then he turns his back to the camera and ducks his head behind his shoulder. Somehow we understand the command—“Smile for me, Babee! Show me that smile!”