Blood on Celluloid Read online

  The display collapsed and Johnny fell right over the top of it.

  His falling actually saved his life.

  Ray, the tattooed headed wonder, had a sawed off shotgun in his hands and he fired a blast that went over Johnny’s head as he was going down.

  Johnny blindly fired two shots into the glass display case counter that Ray was behind and Ray went down.

  * * *

  The shots in the tight hallway made my ears ring, but I could hear well enough to know when the guy in that video booth stopped firing bullets and started clicking on empty chambers.

  I jumped out of the booth I was in and sent two shots into the booth that I figured the guy shooting at me was in.

  He screamed from inside his booth, “Oh god, I’m hit! It fucking hurts!”

  The sound of his voice told me exactly where he was. I ran to the booth and just as I got there he yelled, “I fucking give up. Take me to jail.”

  “Too fucking late,” I yelled back and pumped two shots through the clothe curtain into the booth.

  He didn’t make another sound.

  * * *

  In the front of the store Johnny scrambled around on the floor trying to find some cover behind a rack of triple X gay porno tapes.

  “Who the fuck are these guys?” The other guy who’d come in from the van yelled.

  “I don’t fucking know,” Ray yelled from behind the counter.

  “Police!” Johnny yelled back. “You are all under arrest. Drop your guns!”

  The kids crawled off into a corner and were hiding behind a rack of porno magazines.

  A voice came from the other side of the rack that Johnny was hiding behind, “You ain’t no fucking cops and fuck you if you are anyway.”

  Shots started blasting through the rack and Johnny tried to slide sideways away from them. After the fourth bullet boomed through the rack, the next shot cut a hole through Johnny’s left arm.

  Then whoever was firing was squeezing off shots from an empty gun.

  “I’m getting the fuck out of here,” the same voice yelled.

  Despite his arm burning like fire, Johnny jumped to his feet just in time to see a door between two racks of porno magazines swing open and the long stringy haired guy from the liquor store bolted through. Johnny took a shot at him.

  * * *

  The other guy from the van forgot about me the moment that Johnny stood up. He stepped out, raised his pistol, and took careful aim.

  At that moment I came out of the video arcade hallway through the curtain. I put the snub nose to his back, squeezed the trigger, and ripped lead through his back bone and heart.

  His arm jerked as he died and he blasted a shot that shattered a neon light fixture over Johnny’s head.

  From behind the counter Ray yelled, “Kill them goddamn-it.”

  Johnny laughed, and with the hand clutching the .45 he brushed the glass from the neon out of his hair.

  “All your boys are dead,” he yelled back at Ray.

  There was a moment of silence.

  The shotgun came sliding out from behind the counter. “That’s all I have,” Ray shouted. “I’m giving up.”

  “You come out from behind that counter with both hands in the air,” I told Ray. “You even fucking twitch we’re gonna shoot you so many times you could model for Swiss cheese.”

  He stood up slowly with his hands in the air.

  “Turn around and put your hands against the wall,” Johnny yelled at him pointing his .45 at Ray’s head.

  He did as he was told.

  As soon as he had his hands spread out on the wall, Ray yelled, “Man, my legs are fucking killing me. I got glass stuck in me from my ass to my ankles.”

  “You think I give a fuck,” Johnny yelled back at him.

  “I just don’t know how long I can stand like this,” Ray said.

  Johnny came back with, “You start looking like you’re gonna slide down that wall I’ll help your ass slide all the way down to hell mother-fucker. Don’t you even think about moving!”

  I went to Johnny and his arm was pumping out blood.

  “You gonna be all right?” I asked.

  “Fuck no!” He answered. “That’s the hand I wipe my ass with. I’ll have to make you do that now.”

  “You’ll be all right.” I told him.

  I grabbed the cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Joe Briggs. He answered on the third ring, almost like he was waiting for this call.

  “We’re at Ray’s Triple X Gallery,” I told him. “Bring an ambulance and,” I glanced at the kids huddled in the corner, “probably someone from social services.”

  “What happened out there?” Joe asked.

  “I ain’t got time to talk,” I told him. “It ain’t pretty and it’s still happening. Get out here fast.”

  I hung up.

  “I’m going after the last guy,” I told Johnny. “Can you hold out till an ambulance gets here?”

  Johnny answered, “Shit, go get him man. I get dizzy from lose of blood, this mother-fucker here is going to die.”

  CHAPTER 21

  I went through the door that the stringy haired guy fled through. Just past that door were wooden stairs leading down into a basement. Of course there was no light on. There never is when I got to go down into this kind of shit.

  The stairs went down into pitch blackness. I was getting tired of going down into inky black pits but I never really have a choice.

  There was no light switch at the top of the stairs. The wooden steps looked like they lead down into a murky muddy pool of water.

  I went down the stairs as quietly as I could. This didn’t make any sense at all because anybody down there knew I was coming.

  The stairs creaked beneath my feet with every step that I took. This was a deep basement. So deep that the stairs had a bend to the left that plunged me totally into darkness.

  Darkness seems to magnify silence.

  The light from the shop was a good twenty feet above me when my feet hit the level concrete floor of the basement. I stood at the bottom of the stairs in total blackness crouching, trying to see something in front of me and saw nothing but the strange tracers of light that you see when you close your eyes.

  In fact, it was so dark I was kind of wondering if I somehow had closed my eyes on the way down the stairs and blinked to make sure that my eyes were open. Yeah, I had my eyes open. It was just darker than hell down here.

  I heard shuffling somewhere in front of me so I stepped to the right in the dark and bumped into a steel support beam.

  A scraping sound came from my left.

  I wheeled that way with my gun geld out. I wanted to squeeze off a shot but knew that the muzzle flash would give away my exact position.

  Something pinged in a distant part of the basement. I crouched low trying to locate the sound with my ears.

  Breathing came from my right, like someone sniffling with a runny nose. More shuffling came from my left then a sound like a moan came from behind me.

  What the fuck was going on down here? I asked myself. Either this guy can see in the dark and he’s just fucking with me or there are more than four guys down here.

  Something light brushed my face and I went to wipe it away and it caught in my fingers.

  It was a string, a light string.

  What the fuck? I thought and pulled it.

  A single light bulb came on and illuminated the inside of the section of the basement that I was in.

  Lined up and stacked in two layers against the walls of the basement, in the kind of cages you’d see in a dog kennel, were children that I was guessing were between the ages of six and eleven.

  They were grimy and dirty and shied away from the light like they hadn’t seen much of that for a long time.

  There were around twenty kids in these cages and they had the same kind of shell shocked look that I’d seen on the faces of children in Viet Nam whose villages had been bombed to dust.

  In the dim bare
light of the single bulb I quickly scanned the room and didn’t see the stringy haired guy anywhere. What I did see at the far end of the basement was another door leading out.

  There was nothing in this room but the kids in their cages. There was nowhere to hide.

  Keeping my eyes on the door at the far end, I went to the cage that had a boy in it who looked somewhere around nine. I undid the latch and let him out. He seemed a little less frightened than the others.

  “You got to let the rest of them out,” I told him.

  He nodded.

  “Get them out and take them upstairs.”

  He nodded again and went to work.

  I walked to the door at the far end of the basement.

  * * *

  The knob turned and I eased the door open and peered around the edge. The light in this room, again from a single bulb in the ceiling, was on.

  I pushed the door all the way open and stepped inside. No one was in the room.

  I was alone in here.

  It was just me, the camera equipment, a messed up single bed, a couch, and a sturdy wooden chair with leather straps looped around the arms and legs, and a table with the tools on it that had been used to torture and murder the woman I loved.

  The room was set up so that beyond the camera equipment was a door. Taped on both sides of the door were dozens of photos. The photos showed the guy still alive upstairs, Ray, and the stringy haired guy, raping the kids from the cages and other kids.

  There were other guys in the photos too and also photos of torture. One photo that was of particular importance to me was the one of the stringy haired guy in a black rain coat. He had the mask in his hand that he would put on before he began to torture Sherry.

  I went to the door beyond the cameras and eased it open.

  It was a corridor.

  The corridor was in blackness.

  I couldn’t step into that hallway with the light shining behind me the way it was. Anyone just beyond my sight would blow me to hell with no problem.

  I took aim at the light in the center of the room where Sherry had died and shot it out.

  The room was bathed in total blackness.

  * * *

  I stepped out into the inky black corridor.

  This time I welcomed the darkness. With this total absence of light if I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me, unless if they had night vision goggles on. I just had to remind myself about that, didn’t I?

  Moving down the corridor I felt the wall in front of me with my left hand and shuffled forward in a semi-crouch. This corridor was so small if someone started shooting at me being in a crouch probably wouldn’t help at all, but what the fuck, it made me feel better.

  The tracers of light were back dancing in front of my face like fireflies on acid. That was just my optic nerves searching for something to focus on and finding nothing.

  The wall against my left hand was damp and cold. I would have been surprised if it had been any other way. Wintertime around East St. Louis is a cold mother-fucker. This one was colder than most and getting colder all the time.

  It was silent down here in the frozen dark. The only sounds I heard were my own breathing, the shuffle of my shoes on the cement floor, and my heart pounding in my chest.

  From two rooms over I heard cages being unlocked. The cage doors squeaked as they were swung open and then banged shut a few seconds later.

  My foot contacted something and I stumbled and sprawled forward and landed on my elbows and knees on wooden stairs leading upward.

  Searching the wall I found a handrail and went up.

  The first stair I stepped on creaked beneath my shoe. I held my breath expecting someone to fire down at me in the dark.

  After maybe one very long minute, where I heard nothing but the pounding of my own heart in my ears, I took another step up.

  This stair didn’t make a sound.

  The one after it didn’t either.

  Then I came to a bend in the stairs that mirrored the one leading into the basement back at Ray’s. Maybe five or six steps up from the bend I could see a line of light.

  That must be the bottom of the door leading in. I crept up the stairs trying to move like a cat.

  At the top I stood still and holding my breath I listened.

  Silence was all I heard from the other side of the door.

  I felt around and found the door handle, turned it, and slowly eased it open.

  The question came to me, Why hadn’t he just locked this door behind him?

  I heard a sound like a guitar string being tightened and then a soft ping. Something, an old memory of a sound made me turn, take a running step and dive down the stairs.

  The old memory was from Viet Nam. The sound was of a grenade’s pin being popped loose.

  I slammed into the wall at the bend in the stairs, just as the world behind me exploded in a bright yellow flash that deafened me and knocked me rolling down the rest of the stairs.

  I landed on the cement at the bottom of the stairs on my face. My back seemed to be on fire. I rolled over, then a darkness deeper that the blackness already around me, swallowed me up.

  PART III

  PARTING WORDS

  CHAPTER 22

  I floated in the darkness between the worlds, gliding weightless in silence. I went nowhere, felt nothing, and the darkness was complete and comforting.

  Then, she was there and in my arms, warm and soft I held Sherry to me, and never wanted to let her go.

  The silence was all around us.

  The darkness was all around us.

  We were the only beings in this universe and that was exactly the way I wanted it to be.

  I kissed Sherry on the lips and held her, and she whispered to me, “You must go on.”

  “I want to stay here with you,” I told her.

  She turned to smoke in my arms but I could still hear her voice. “This place is nowhere,” she said. “It is only a meeting place. You must go on. The path you are on now is important.”

  “I’m going to kill the bastards who took you from me,” I shouted.

  “Your revenge will be denied for now,” Sherry’s voice answered. “I was unimportant. You must save the children.”

  A bright light cut into my eyes, a disk of white light.

  I reached for it.

  “He’s alive!” a voice shouted.

  I sat up on the cold cement and wiped dirt out of my hair. Another light appeared beside the first. I could now see it was two cops down here with me.

  “Stay down,” one of them told me, and put his hand on my shoulder.

  I slapped his hand away.

  “Get the fuck off me,” I told him and stood up.

  They shined their flashlights on the stairs I’d just been blown down by the blast of the grenade booby-trap. The way to the next floor was now a tangled mass of splintered wood beams and collapsed cement.

  Nobody was going to get through that way.

  I retraced my steps with the two cops behind me and went back up into Ray’s Triple X Gallery.

  An EMT was working on Johnny’s arm. The EMT was a sweet looking Mexican woman and Johnny was telling her how much he needed personal nursing. The way his eyes were looking down into the front of her uniform as she bent over applying bandages to his arm, I had a pretty good idea what Johnny wanted to be nursing on.

  Later Johnny would ride in the ambulance to the hospital. He did need his arm X-rayed and looked at by a doctor, but he couldn’t fool me with all his moaning and groaning. His main reason for wanting to go was so he could keep trying to put the clutch on that cute Mexican EMT.

  I can’t say I blamed him, either.

  The kids were all in a corner of the room with a woman who was trying to get their names from them. She had out a pad and pencil but most of them were too traumatized to even be able to speak.

  Joe Briggs had Ray in handcuffs. He motioned for me to come over to where he was.

  When I walked over, R
ay yelled, “Keep that bastard away from me!”

  Joe gave him an open-handed slap to the ear that was hard enough to bust an eardrum. “Shut up!” He told him.

  Ray shut up.

  “There was another one,” I told Joe, “The one that tortured Sherry. He got away.”

  “I ain’t saying shit till I see my lawyer,” Ray said.

  Me and Joe looked at each other and grinned.

  * * *

  Out at the small cinderblock house where I’d left Arnold Jenkins to bleed to death, Ray was only too happy to tell us everything we wanted to know.

  The clean-up crew was taking out Jenkin’s body as we arrived. They hadn’t mopped the blood off the floor yet.

  We told them to leave it. Ray got mighty pale when he saw that blood on the floor inside the cage. He told us the name and address of the stringy haired guy.

  His name…I can’t remember it now. It didn’t matter. He was just a thing to me, something that I had to kill. I wrote his address down. It was in West St. Louis County. I put it in my pocket.

  The name of the Oriental man who’d cut Sherry’s throat, he said, was Tian Kham. He didn’t know if he said it right, so I don’t know if I wrote it down right.

  As I was getting the last name from Ray, a stocky middle-aged undercover cop came in the door. He had a deeply lined face, a face that looked like he’s seen a lot of suffering, and the only way he was going to relieve some of his own pain was to inflict some suffering on someone else.

  “That’s all I know,” Ray said to Joe Briggs. “You can take me to the regular police department now. Tian hired us to grab the woman. I didn’t know they were going to hurt her.”

  That was a lie and we all knew it.

  This was when the undercover cop spoke up. “A small blond haired girl,” he pulled a photo out of his wallet and shoved it at the bars. “You grabbed her from Wilson Park in Granite City. She was my daughter. Where is she now?”

  Ray didn’t even look at the photo. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.