like an onion. “It’s your husband, Wendy. It’s important.”
He was just about to knock again when the deadbolt clicked. The door parted a few inches, a thick security chain in place. One of Wendy’s onyx eyes and half her face appeared in the gap.
“My husband?” she said.
Oh, fuck. They got to you, too, didn’t they?
Instead of explaining, he simply held up the orange bottle and showed her the label. “We need to talk.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Kleingarten peeled off the latex gloves.
Hand rubbers. I hope she wasn’t carrying anything.
He’d left her in the cell in the back of the Monkey House, a few doors down from David Underwood’s hellhole. Anita’s walls were tricked out with the same kind of freakish collages, except hers were more colorful-photographs of autopsies, gaping flesh wounds, and invasive surgeries.
Mixed in with the gore were lewd images of every conceivable kind of coupling, including one that looked like two women and a hairless dog, but Kleingarten hadn’t checked closely enough to be certain.
Anita had felt damned good in his arms, despite her being a slut, but entering the room had sickened him enough that he’d dumped her on the cot and backed away. Briggs must have been watching from the monitors, because he immediately started a syncopated overhead light show of red and orange bulbs.
A soundtrack started, and it took a moment for Kleingarten to recognize it. He’d heard his share of porn voice-overs, where the actors pretended to groan and grunt in pleasure, and this sounded like a dozen of them stacked on top of one another and mixed together into one huge orgy.
Kleingarten hurried through the main alley toward Briggs’s cage, anxious to get paid and get the hell out of there. As he reached the opening of the cage, he was struck by the impression that Briggs was just as much a monkey as the others, except Briggs was in his cage voluntarily.
“That thing about fear,” Kleingarten said. “I’m starting to figure out your game.”
Briggs looked away from the bank of video monitors, which were now divided between images of Anita and images of David Underwood. Briggs seemed annoyed at the intrusion, but like a true egghead, he never passed up a chance for a lecture.
“We each have a greatest fear,” Briggs said. “And in some ways, your fear is also your greatest strength. When you overcome it, then you are ready for a higher purpose.”
“You make people scared with your joy juice, and then you hook them on the pills so they forget they’re afraid. Sort of like crack. The first hit is always free.”
Briggs narrowed his eyes in a gesture of consideration that might have signaled respect. “If you can both induce fear and eliminate fear, you could help people control themselves. But fear is also our friend, a survival mechanism. Take Anita Molkesky here.”
Briggs pointed to the screen that showed Anita sprawled on the cot, undulating in a faint but clearly sensual motion. Her eyes were closed and she seemed lights-out oblivious, and Kleingarten wondered how many brain cells Briggs’s medicine chewed up and spat out in the process.
“Anita is afraid of abandonment,” Briggs said. “It’s so classically Freudian that it’s too easy. Father left when she was seven, mother had a string of bad boyfriends. She wasn’t molested, which was truly a miracle given the opportunities and cast of characters, but she formed an unhealthy need to seek attention and approval from this revolving cast of losers.”
“So she started screwing for money?”
“You don’t understand. This isn’t about sex or pleasure or reward of any kind. In her pornography work, she doesn’t display any enthusiasm.”
Kleingarten recalled the disgusting scene in Patti Cake Patti Cake where two men and a woman had rubbed chocolate batter all over Anita’s body and licked half of it off while plugging every hole in her body with different kitchen implements. Anita had uttered a few grunts and groans, although she might just as well have been complaining about a headache. But she went through the motions just fine and everybody got their money shots.
“No, Mr. Drummond, to Anita, it’s all about acceptance. She is an exhibitionist because she expects to be rejected. She was a model who took her clothes off because her body was the one thing that no one rejected.”
“She’s sweet stuff, all right,” Kleingarten said, then laid out his bait: “But the Sla-I mean, Wendy Leng-she’s a lot hotter.”
Briggs glared at him, and then glanced at the nude charcoal drawing. “Wendy’s beauty radiates from the inside. She has the soul of an artist.”
Kleingarten wondered why Briggs simply didn’t have him just kidnap the Slant, drug her, and then tie her up in one of those cells where he could work his magic.
This game was getting way more complicated than the pay was worth. Still, it was tax-free, and if not for this gig, Kleingarten would probably be working as a bodyguard for some rich-kid drug dealer.
Movement on one of the corner monitors caught his eye. “What’s that?”
Briggs huddled over the keyboard and clacked until the camera zoomed in. The monitor showed the outside perimeter of the lot, and a guy in a jogging suit was huffing and blowing, moving through the pine trees on a narrow trail that followed a creek.
“Penetration,” Briggs said.
“Is that one of your people?”
“I don’t have any ‘people.’ Except you.”
Kleingarten wanted to lecture the egghead for a change, tell him that you didn’t go engaging in double- crosses and setups unless you had a few layers of insulation. Instead, he touched the 9mm in his shoulder holster. “Guy must not be able to read. He just ran past a ‘No Trespassing’ sign.”
“And the gate closed after you came through?”
“That’s what you told me to check, right?”
“It’s probably nothing.”
Some egghead. The way Kleingarten did math, probability was measured on a scale between “Dead certainty” and “Don’t take the chance.”
“Want me to check it out for you?”
“Okay, but act like you’re a security guard patrolling the property. Don’t make him suspicious. I’ll unlock the back door.”
Briggs bent over his series of switches and buttons, hitting a couple.
Kleingarten wended through a series of wenches with hooked cables, once used for lifting motors, until he came to the emergency exit. The inside of the door had no handle, which probably worked great at keeping factory workers from playing hooky back in the old days.
He oriented himself to determine the location of the jogger and began strolling as if he were a bored plainclothes guard. Most real security guards wore little uniforms to make them feel good and to intimidate those who equated a brass badge with authority. Kleingarten had a few like the campus-cop uniform hanging in his closet back home, but today he’d just have to fake it.
The spring air was crisp but not cold, and pine needles squeaked under his new leather shoes. He reached the creek, which was little more than a drainage ditch with a slimy green trickle of fluid ruining through it. A path meandered parallel to it, probably used by the wildlife that was fenced in on the twenty-acre compound, unaware they were imprisoned.
Kleingarten transferred the 9mm to his jacket pocket in case he needed a quick response. By his calculations, the jogger should be visible between the corrugated brown tree trunks any moment now.
After an enforced casual stroll of more than a minute, Kleingarten was antsy. Ease up. The guy probably was winded and needed to catch his breath.
Yeah, and he also accidentally climbed over a ten-foot fence topped with barbed wire.
Kleingarten gave it another minute, picking up his pace, before he decided to hustle back to the Monkey
