Blood on Celluloid Read online

  “You are a brave woman,” the man told her, “But your suffering is for nothing. You, more than most people, should know that we cannot be fought. We are only businessmen who supply a product. Right or wrong does not exist, only profit. We will show this,” he pointed directly at the camera, “As an example of those who work against us. We will find William Po and destroy him.”

  Sherry lifted her head and spit in the man’s face.

  He snatched a knife up from the table and cut Sherry’s throat.

  CHAPTER 18

  As the blood cascaded down Sherry’s naked breasts I hit the stop button on the VCR. The screen went blank. I ejected the tape and slid it into an inside jacket pocket.

  I stood up from the chair. A strange dizziness came over me. It was almost like I couldn’t feel the floor beneath my feet.

  I picked up the chair and slid it over in front of where the bars were. The room was lit by two sets of harsh neon lights.

  I turned to Joe. “Why were you keeping tabs on this piece of shit?” I asked.

  “We keep track of everybody who’s been accused of a sex crime. Mr. Arnold Jenkins here tried to molest a seven year old girl two years ago. Then his name turned up in a kiddy porn sting. Now, we got him with the goods.”

  “I want to call my lawyer right now,” Arnold Jenkins said.

  “Shut the fuck up!” I yelled at Jenkins.

  To Joe I said, “I think it’s time for you to leave. What’s going to happen here will not be good for your police career.”

  Joe Briggs considered this for a moment and then he said, “I think you’re right.”

  He clapped me on the back. “You boys can find your way out of here right?”

  “Oh hell yeah,” Johnny told him. “We’re about to give this gentleman a guided tour of hell. We’ve been there already. So we know the way back.”

  When Joe reached the door Jenkins shouted at him, “I got the right to call my lawyer.”

  Joe looked over his shoulder and told him, “You just lost all your rights.” Then to us, “Have fun. Someone will be by tomorrow to clean up the mess.”

  * * *

  A peculiar calmness came over me. I sat down in the chair facing the bars.

  Jenkins was standing up. He pointed at the TV/VCR combo. “I didn’t have anything to do with that,” he said.

  “I didn’t think you did,” I told him.

  “I…I just deliver this stuff and they pay me. That’s all.”

  “I don’t give a fuck,” I told him. I pulled the snub nosed .38 out of my pocket.

  “Hold on a second,” Jenkins said. “You’re just trying to scare me. Cops can’t do this.”

  Johnny asked me, “Do we look like cops?”

  “I’m beginning to think so,” I answered.

  I looked around the room for the key to the cage.

  Jenkins said, “I’m not saying anything until my lawyer gets here.”

  The key was lying next to the TV/VCR combo. I picked it up.

  “You just don’t get it,” I told Jenkins. “You’re not getting out of this room alive.”

  I pointed my gun at him and Jenkins covered his face with his hands. I shot him in the right foot.

  He shrieked falling to the floor. Thick crimson liquid pulsed between his fingers as he tried to hold together his ruined foot.

  “Oh man,” Johnny said, “That was fucked up! He sure ain’t gonna be entering any tap dancing contests for a while.”

  I unlocked the cage door and stepped inside. “So, you like kids,” I said to Jenkins.

  Jenkins was sitting down hugging his foot as good as he could, “Oh god,” he yelled. “Get me to a hospital!”

  I kicked him where the blood was flowing. Red spurted into the air.

  Jenkins screamed.

  “Where’d you get the tapes?” I asked him.

  “Get me to a hospital,” Jenkins yelled again. A pool of blood was forming around him.

  Johnny came to the bars. “Look man,” Johnny said to Jenkins. “If you tell him what he wants to know, I think I can talk John into taking you to a doctor. If you don’t, I ain’t even gonna try.”

  I said to Jenkins, “Tell me this, you sack of shit, what the hell can you get out of fucking kids anyway? They’re not even old enough to know what’s happening to them.”

  Jenkins surprised the hell out of me by answering. He spoke as if he was proud of what he did. “It’s doing something to them that they can’t imagine is going to happen. The look in their eyes just before you stick it in is incredible. They can’t believe it’s going to happen.”

  I looked at Johnny.

  He said, “This is a sick son-of-a-bitch we have here.”

  “This asshole has got to die,” I said and took aim at Arnold Jenkins head.

  He threw his hands up again kind of like he expected to catch the bullet being thrown at him. I shot the ring finger off of his left hand.

  The scream he let out was deafening. I loved the sound of it.

  When he had breath back in his lungs to speak, Jenkins asked, “Will you take me to a doctor if I tell you where I got the tapes from?”

  “If you convince me what you say is true,” I told him, “I’ll let Johnny have a shot at talking me into it.”

  “All right, all right,” Jenkins said. “Out on State Street and Fifth just outside East St. Louis is a porno shop. Ray’s Triple X Gallery. I’ve been buying the tapes from him. He picks up kids off the streets and makes his own tapes in his basement. He’s even let me in on making a few of them.”

  I knew the guy and I knew the place. I was already convinced.

  Johnny asked him, “What’s he do with the kids after he’s done with them?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenkins answered. “It’s better in this kind of thing that you don’t ask questions.”

  I stepped back from Jenkins.

  “Let me out of here, OK. Get me to a doctor,” he said.

  I turned to Johnny.

  “Well, John, can’t you see what a wonderful guy we have here,” Johnny said, “We really ought to help him out a bit, seeing how he is a pillar of the community and all. Hell, he’s probably even a Boy Scout Master.”

  The thought of that turned my stomach.

  “You tried, Johnny,” I told him and stepped back outside the cage and locked the door. “But it just wasn’t good enough.”

  Johnny said, “Shit dude, I tried. What can I say, John’s a hard ass.”

  Jenkins yelled at us, “You can’t leave me here like this. I’ll bleed to death.”

  “That’s the idea,” I told him and shot him in the thigh.

  We left to the sounds of his screams behind us. I considered going back and plugging a few more holes in Jenkins but that would make his end that much faster and I wanted him to die slow.

  CHAPTER 19

  My Olds Delta 88 chugged along the snow covered icy roads real nice. It’s an old heavy steel boat of a car that has large tires that put a lot of rubber to the pavement. Now if I drive like an idiot I can definitely put this car in a ditch, but tonight I wasn’t into driving crazy.

  Tonight we were heading over to Ray’s Triple X Gallery. I wanted us to get there in one piece.

  We were on the outskirts of East St. Louis when Johnny told me, “You know I’m going to need to go in first.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well hell, he knows who you are,” Johnny said. “After what you done to him he’s probably keeping a gun under the counter, if he didn’t have one before. You come waltzing in through his front door he’d blow your head off before you’d have a chance to scratch your balls.”

  “So, you got a plan?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Johnny said. “Basically we wait until the last car leaves from in front of the place. I go in and check out the layout, find out if there’s more than one guy in the store. At the same time you go around back and see if there’s a back door and try it.

  “If you can come in through the bac
k that’s great, if you can’t, that’s OK too because by then I’ll have myself a spot where I can cover whoever is going to see you coming in through the front door.

  “We get the drop on whoever’s there whether there’s one or two of them. We put the closed sign up and take them to a back room and make them tell us who made that tape with Sherry in it.”

  “What if they don’t want to tell us?” I asked Johnny.

  He laughed.

  “Then,” Johnny said, with a mean looking smile on his face, “The real horror show begins.”

  “That’s exactly what I hoped you’d say,” I told him.

  * * *

  We arrived at Ray’s Triple X Gallery just after midnight. There were three cars parked in front, so we drove to the end of the block, past the only other open business, the liquor store, and parked back in the shadows.

  About thirty yards away was the entrance to an alley that ran behind the buildings on this block, directly behind Ray’s Triple X Gallery.

  It was relatively quiet. Every now and then a car would pull up to the liquor store. Someone would go in then come back out a few minutes later with a package.

  We sat far enough back in the shadows so that no one would notice the car idling as we waited.

  After a while Johnny asked me, “What you gonna do when all this is over?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I’m not even thinking about that.”

  “Yeah, probably the best way to be,” Johnny said. “Killing these guys ain’t gonna bring Sherry back though.”

  “You don’t think I know that?” I answered.

  “I guess you do,” he said. “So why are you doing this?”

  “Cause there ain’t a goddamned thing else I can do,” I told Johnny.

  “Guess not,” he answered.

  We sat and watched the snow come down out of the black sky.

  Time passed.

  The three cars stayed stationary in front of Ray’s Triple X Gallery. The guys inside must have been taking turns blowing each other in the video booths. Nobody thumbs through magazines for hours on end.

  Somewhere around two thirty the neon sign over the door to the liquor store flickered then went out. A small red neon sign, that we couldn’t read, beside the door came on. A few seconds later the front door opened and the guy with stringy long brown hair that I’d talked to came out and locked up behind himself.

  He walked to Ray’s and went in through the front door.

  A minute later two guys came out the front door and went to their cars.

  I tapped Johnny on the shoulder. “Looks like it’s almost show-time,” I told him.

  As the last word left my mouth another guy, a small guy, came out of the front door. He was helped along by a healthy shove from that tattooed headed idiot that I’d pulled over the counter and thrown to the floor.

  The small guy stumbled and slid in the snow and almost went down.

  He waved his arms and yelled something at Tattoo. From where we were we couldn’t hear what he yelled.

  Mr. Tattoo made a motion like he was going to go after the little guy and the little guy scurried to his car, got in, and reversed out of there.

  As the disgruntled customer drove on down the road away from us, Mr. Tattoo went back inside his Triple X Gallery.

  “Time to move,” I told Johnny. “Give me five minutes then head on in.”

  “Sure thing,” he answered.

  I went out the car door and into the yawning mouth of the pitch black alley.

  Stepping into that alley was like diving into a pool of oil. What light there was from the neon lights up front was completely cut off by the stone walls between them and where I was.

  The darkness was complete. I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face and the ground seemed like it was miles away.

  I pulled the snub nosed .38 and kept it down by my side. With my left hand I felt out in front of me like a blind man and moved forward into the dark.

  The walls of the buildings on both sides were just vague dark shapes, only blackness against a slightly less pitch blackness behind them.

  I moved forward down the alley feeling my way along with some kind of senses that I didn’t even know I possessed, and was feeling pretty good about how well I was doing in the dark when I walked full into a big steel dumpster.

  There was no way of knowing how far I had come or how close I was to the back of Ray’s Triple X Gallery in the dark. It hit me at that moment that I had no idea which back door would be The Gallery’s door. Hell, even if they had marked the names of the businesses on the doors I didn’t even have so much as a cigarette lighter to read what was wrote on them.

  I was fucked!

  Lights flashed on ahead momentarily blinding me.

  I was glad as hell that I was behind the dumpster I’d banged into.

  I crouched down and in a few seconds my eyes adjusted and I peeked around the side of the dumpster.

  * * *

  Johnny later told me what happened around front. This is what went down.

  Getting out of the rider’s side door onto the icy sidewalk, Johnny slipped and damn near busted his ass with the first step that he took.

  He walked past the liquor store and saw that the small neon in the window was a closed sign.

  He trudged on through the snow and got to Ray’s Triple X Gallery just as the closed sign came on in the front window of that place.

  Johnny tried the door anyway and it was locked. He banged on the door and yelled, “Hey! Your sign says open twenty four hours mother-fucker! Open the goddamned door!”

  He kicked on the door and grabbed the iron mesh grill and shook it like a gorilla wanting out of his cage. Except, this gorilla wanted in.

  Somebody yelled from inside, “We’re closed. Get the fuck out of here before I come out there and kick your ass!”

  Johnny yelled back, “Mother-fucker I need some K.Y. Jelly and I need it now! My old lady is ready to fuck but she’s dry as the Sahara. Shit, I’ll pay double price. I ain’t gonna be humping no hole that feels like a goddamned cheese grater. If I don’t get this K.Y. tonight, I swear I’ll come back here tomorrow and I’ll dry fuck you, you sorry ass bastard!”

  Johnny was always real suave about getting his way.

  CHAPTER 20

  Around back I crouched low and peeked around the edge of the dumpster, seeing that a van had just pulled around the edge of the building and stopped with its lights on. I couldn’t move anywhere because if I did, whoever was driving the van couldn’t help but see me almost directly in front of where he was parked.

  I stayed crouched down and waited.

  A few seconds, which seemed like hours, the driver got out of the van and slammed the door behind him. Someone got out of the rider’s side door too.

  It was just my luck that they left the van idling with its lights pointing straight at where I was. In the glare of the headlights, trying to peek around the dumpster, I couldn’t see shit except for the snowflakes falling between me and the van.

  I heard someone open the rear doors of the van and shout, “Get your asses out here!”

  I heard the sounds of shuffling and sniffling and a pitiful sound that was like the sound of frightened children sobbing.

  A rusty door hinge creaked and I could hear muted shouting coming from inside.

  “What the fuck is going on up there?” One of the guys who got out of the van yelled to whoever was inside as he came through the door.

  A muted answer was shouted back from the inside, “Some fucking asshole wants to get in and won’t go away.”

  I took a chance and stuck my head out far enough around the side of the dumpster to see around the van’s headlights.

  I couldn’t see a whole hell of a lot because the light was still blinding me but I did see the outline of an open door and the vague outline of two men and three smaller shapes.

  There was no way I could stay where I was and let that door close and lock behind
them.

  I charged the van running in a crouch and stopped just at the front of it, kneeling down between the two headlights.

  * * *

  Out front Johnny heard the guy inside yell, “I’m gonna give you to the count of five to get the fuck out of here or I’m coming out there to stomp you into the fucking pavement.”

  Johnny shouted back, “Five mother-fucker! Ten! Fifteen! Twenty! Get your monkey-ass out here! Talk shit to me. I will fuck you up, you son-of-a-bitch!”

  * * *

  Around back, Johnny was making so much noise that the two guys, who now I saw were leading three raggedy kids by a rope, just walked in through the door and left it wide open behind them.

  I darted for it and caught the outside handle just before it swung shut on its own.

  I swung the door open, stepped inside, and crouched low with my snub nose in my fist. At the far end of an aisle of video booths, the two guys were pushing the three kids in front of them.

  The scent of stale cum was heavy in the air as was the grinding sounds of techno-rock screeched from speakers.

  For whatever reason, I’ll never know, when they reached the end of the hall and the first guy pulled back a curtain to enter the main part of the store, the guy behind glanced backward over his shoulder and saw me racing toward him.

  He yelled, “What the fuck!” and dove into one of the video booths.

  The other guy knocked the kids out of his way and dove to the side into the store.

  I crouched and ducked into a video booth just as the first guy stuck his arm out and fired blindly into the hall.

  * * *

  Out front Johnny heard the shots and knew he had to get inside and fast. He jerked his chrome plated .45 out and, seeing the large painted over plate glass window, he blasted three shots into it and turned it into a pile of sharp, glittering, broken shards of glass.

  He leaped through where the window had been, ready to shoot anything that moved. The window sill had only been knee high but it was high enough so that Johnny slid on the glass on the tile floor from the window and fell into a display of dildos and lubricants of all colors and flavors.