Only Child

“Because you still have them. And the cops don’t.”

“Could I have one of your cigarettes, please? I don’t smoke, actually. I used to, when I was a kid. We all did. But I stopped when I got pregnant. Then I started again, but I stopped years later. When Vonni got upset with me for it. Now there’s no reason....”

I shook one out of my pack, held it out to her. She took it. I fired a wooden match. She lit up without touching my hand.

“The police never asked me to...help them understand what was in Vonni’s diary,” she said, her voice chilly and controlled. “They just read it themselves, and asked me questions. ‘Who’s Jermaine?’ Questions like that.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Were you a police officer once?”

“No, Ms. Greene. I understand how angry you are at what they did. It wasn’t just disrespectful; it was stupid. Who knows Vonni better than you?” I said. Not proud of myself for strumming those strings.

“Yes,” she said. “And...I thought maybe I would...see something on the tapes, I don’t know.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What’s on them?” she said, tight-voiced. “Craziness. Stupid...craziness. That’s what’s on there. Nothing else. I can’t imagine why Vonni would have—”

“What kind of craziness, Ms. Greene?”

“A...dogfight. A vicious fight, with people watching and...Their faces! Some kind of...gauntlet a boy had to run, between other boys with fists, hitting him. A bunch of girls paddling another girl, like for some sorority initiation. Some people spray-painting a swastika on the side of a Jewish temple. What looks like a...mugging, I guess you’d call it. Some insane young boy on a skateboard jumping right through a plate-glass window. All kinds of things like that.”

“Vonni’s not in any of them? Not even her voice?”

“Just one. By herself. There’s no sound. She’s running. Jogging, like. In the woods. She hears something. Or someone. And she gets scared. Starts to run really fast...”

“Did you see who—?”

“The tape just trailed off,” she said. “It trailed off with Vonni running. Still running.”

“I don’t have the equipment to do that,” the Mole said. “Not here.”

“But you could get it?”

“Sure he could!” Terry said, jumping up. “Come on, Pop. Let’s take a ride.”

“You think people around here notice all this coming and going?” Michelle asked.

“This neighborhood? Sure. They probably think we’re running a tweek lab.”

“I wish we’d picked a nicer place, baby. I mean, if I am going to be spending all this time here...”

“You want to stay at the hotel tonight, girl? I can fix that easy enough.”

“And not see what’s on those tapes? Don’t be demented.”

The dogfight was made more hideous by the lack of sound, especially the expressions on the faces of the spectators. Looked like a single-camera setup, but it wasn’t static. The lens picked up all kinds of strange angles—one from what had to be damn near inside the pit itself. No matter how many times I asked the Mole to stop on a particular frame, isolate pieces of it, and blow them up, I couldn’t make out any real details—the quality was about as good as an ATM surveillance camera.

“Isn’t this against the law?” Michelle asked me, her voice vibrating just below breakage.

“In New York it is,” I said. “Not in all states.”

“Do you think it was filmed here, though?”

“I can’t tell. There’s nothing that would ID a location.”

“What’s the penalty?” she demanded. “I mean, if they were caught, what would happen to them?”

“A fine, probably; not more.”

“For having the dogs do...that?”

“Yeah.”

Max watched the next tape intently, holding up his index finger for the Mole to stop the action, twirling the same finger for him to resume. The Mongolian nodded a few times, as if working out a problem in his head. At his signal, the Mole started the tape from the beginning.

The tape had shown us a teenage boy, Latin, with a West Coast cholo’s haircut. He faced a group of young men, and yelled something. Then he made a “Come on!” gesture with his hands, waving them in. The gang circled slowly until the boy was surrounded. Then they rushed him, fists and feet. When it was over, the boy was on the ground, not moving.

Nobody knows the mechanics of physical combat better than Max. The dogfighting couldn’t have been faked, but...

I made a “Well?” gesture. Max gave me the sign for “Yes.” This one had been the real thing, too.

But it nagged at me. So I ran it again a few hours later.

“It’s a jump-in tape, all right,” the Prof said.

“No doubt?”

“That was the Max man’s verdict, too, Schoolboy,” he reminded me. “And who knows a bone-breaker better than the widow-maker?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But...there’s something about it. I just don’t...”

“What, bro?”

“I...can’t tell you. It has to come to the surface by itself. But there’s something off about it, Prof.”

The little man closed his eyes, concentrating. Then he looked over at Clarence, said, “Let’s glide, Clyde.”

The drag races were easier. The cameraman made sure you couldn’t see the license numbers, but to anyone who knows cars, some of the rides were as distinctive as fingerprints.

“I think I may have seen the shoebox,” I told Clarence.

“What’s a shoebox?” Rejji asked.

“The ’55 Chevy,” Clarence said. “You sure, mahn?”

“Not a hundred percent. But there’s something about the stance...”

“I’ve seen a million of these,” Cyn said, pointing at the screen, where a slender girl was bent over, palms against the wall, her shorts and panties around her ankles, being paddled by a taller girl in a sorority sweater and pleated skirt, while a bunch of other girls watched. “It used to be a big deal, to do the real thing, no acting. Years ago, some of the product even came with warranties. You know, ‘All the girls in this session were really spanked.’ But now there’s so many subs going into the business that there’s no market for fakes. This one doesn’t even look professional.”

“Because of the single camera?”

“No. Most of the digital stuff—you know, for the Net—is that way. But the camera doesn’t come in on her ass, to show you it really is red from the punishment. And the paddling doesn’t last very long. It doesn’t even look like a good hard one.”

“So you couldn’t sell this?”

“Oh, you could sell it, all right. There’s one thing about it that’s different from the commercial stuff.”

“The look?”

“No,” Cyn said. “It’s that they’re all so young. I can’t tell their ages...and you can’t really see their faces, but those are high-school girls. Or maybe college. Anyway, it looks like whoever shot this was hidden. As if the girls didn’t know they were on camera. For that, there’s a real market.”

“Yeah. Remember when that guy paid us to shill?” Rejji said.