Only Child

“Who sent—?”

“Vision, who else? Now guess how many times I’m going to ask you again.”

“That little cocksucker. He said we could—”

“He changed his mind,” I said, placing my bet. “This is simple enough even for you, wet-brain. Yes or no. Live or die.”

“I...I got it hidden.”

“It better be hidden here.”

“You’re gonna kill me anyway,” he said, stalling. Thinking his brother would be home soon.

“We just want the tapes, you fucking moron,” I told him, lying with my eyes.

“What for? I mean, all we got’s a copy. He said we could—”

“He doesn’t want it floating around no more,” I said. “Come on. You give us what we came for, that’s the end of it.”

“You swear?”

“May my mother die,” I said. The one statement I could always pass a polygraph on.

“Let me get up.”

I nodded to Max, who changed grips.

The kitchen counter was lined with gallon-sized plastic jars of bodybuilding supplements. A stainless steel blender stood next to several bottles of yohimbe and shark cartilage. The hiding place was a cut- out slot in the wall behind the double-wide refrigerator. Not bad, actually—if Max had to strain to wrench it away from the wall, it would take at least two normal men to do the job.

I unwrapped the package like it was a Bomb Squad assignment. “There’s only one tape here, pal,” I said to the twin, looking at the standard-size cassette. The label showed four naked women, on their hands and knees in rows of two. They were yoked together by some kind of harness. Standing behind them, another woman in porno- regulation black leather, brandishing a whip. The title said: International Slut Racing Tournament!

“That’s the only one he let us keep,” he said, annoyed. “It’s proof, man. That we didn’t do anything. It don’t show no...Hey! What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to watch the movie,” I said.

The tape opened with a woman standing at an easel on which the rules of the race were printed, taking questions from an audience of “reporters.” The race contestants were all chained to a long wall, waiting. Some were facing the wall; others looked at the camera. A couple were lapping up something from bowls with their names on them.

“This is just—” Giovanni said, before I cut him off with a chopping motion of my right hand.

The tape rolled on, as predictable as a fixed fight, then suddenly became a plain gray screen with white lines of static running horizontally. Another few seconds passed; then...

A long corridor, mostly dark, with a few pools of reflected light. Looked like an industrial building, maybe an old factory. Abandoned, or maybe just closed for the night. A figure flitted past the far corner, then disappeared—all I could see was some kind of black robe, with a hood.

And a long knife.

A woman zipped across the screen. She was dressed in white shorts and a white T-shirt, white sneakers and white socks. A white hair-ribbon flamed from her dark hair as she ran.

Another black robe popped out of a doorway.

The only sound was breathing. Two, three separate tracks, as distinctive as voices would have been.

The woman in white turned a corner. Stopped when she spotted a ladder. Hesitated, as if making up her mind, then started to climb. The camera filled the frame with her from the waist down, coming in tight on her buttocks and thighs, frantic, in sync with her high, frightened breathing.

Somewhere behind her, confident, in-control breathing. Low-register grunting. Getting louder.

The woman made it to a higher floor. A more open space than what she’d left, but still mazelike from the play of shadow against lighter pockets of dark.

The images chased each other for what seemed like a long time, sometimes running, sometimes creeping. It was half-ass- surrealistic, black-and-white-in-color “symbolism.” A bad movie with a worse script.

Suddenly, the woman in white turned a shadow corner and ground to a stop in a puddle of diffused light. The black robes, two of them, had her bracketed. The camera rushed in on her face as she opened her mouth to scream, her eyes wide with shock.

Vonni.

I turned to the handcuffed twin, said “Where was the—?” just as Giovanni put his pistol against Heltman’s temple and blew skull fragments all over the room.

“The shell casing,” I said. “Find it, Giovanni.”

“I...”

“We don’t have time!” I snapped at him, and ran for the back bedroom.

The sodomized woman hadn’t even twitched. The drugs they’d fed her must have been near-terminal.

“They were the ones,” Giovanni said. “It was them who...”

I didn’t say anything.

“Burke, he had to go.”

“I’m not arguing.”

“But I shouldn’t have...gone off like that, right? We should have made him tell us—”

“It’s done,” I said, as I slid the Plymouth through wide streets, past landscaped lawns. “Get Felix on the phone, tell him we’re coming in.”

“There!” Giovanni said, pointing at a substantial brick Tudor, barely visible from the street.

Even as he spoke, the garage door started going up.

“That was slick, that pull-off stuff you got,” Giovanni said. He was talking to keep from going jagged, and I let him run with it. “When I yanked it off, it looked like a different car.”

“I must have swapped paint with that Mustang somewhere,” I said. “I’m going to need a whole new front end clip.”

“I’m good for—”

“I know,” I told him. “That’s not the problem now. Thing is, can I leave my car here?”

“Felix?” he asked his partner.

“For a couple of days, no problem. I can have someone come by, flat-bed it out, get it to the crusher.”

“No way!” Giovanni said. “You should have seen how this—”

“It doesn’t have to be disposed of,” I told Felix. “Just worked on. The people you’re talking about, they’re trustworthy?”

“Mi famiglia,” he said.

We pulled out in the late afternoon, me and Max in Giovanni’s BMW, Felix and Giovanni in a cream-colored Infiniti Q45. By Exit 12 on the Jersey Turnpike, we lost sight of them.

The Mustang driver’s wallet had nothing in it but cash, a few credit cards, and assorted ID, all in the name of Brett Heltman.

But his gym bag was the other side of the legit coin—a red-zone pharmacy. Dozens of clear plastic sheets of pop-out Dianabol pills, a half-dozen dark little rubber-topped bottles of Testovit, and a huge assortment of different kinds of alleged “andro,” flies just under the FDA’s radar. Inside the bag’s flap pockets were a Rambo knife, a cell phone, a handful of syringes, individually wrapped. And one of those “personal digital assistants,” a Palm