Jackson Bell - Trigger Finger

For the first time in forever, I went more than five minutes without wallowing in my problems. I felt pretty good until I looked on my things-to-do list and saw the notation:

Find neurologist

Right. Because a baseball bat had connected squarely with my skull. Shortly thereafter, I’d popped back up and shot the batter. Yet another miracle. Or not. Neither I—nor Dr. Koenig, for that matter, being a psychologist—knew diddly squat about head injuries. Was that particular aspect of the shooting so miraculous? I didn’t know. But, I’d been thinking, a neurologist probably would.

My father still had a few colleagues practicing at Catawba Memorial, and I decided I would seek advice from one of them. I buzzed Kristin, my secretary, to have her go online and find me somebody, but when the intercom returned only dead air, I looked at the clock and realized it was six P.M. and everybody but the lawyers had left. I could go online myself—maybe I couldn’t type very well, but I could surf the web with the best of the best—but nobody’s office would be answering phones at this hour. So I wouldn’t get this question answered tonight.

I set the receiver back in its cradle and sat back in my chair. On my desk, the folder Craig had brought me from the Burlington Police Department sat beside a stack of credit card statements received from opposing counsel in one of the dozens of marital Vietnams in which I stayed involved all the time. I picked up the folder, opened it. I flipped slowly through the useless sheets of paper until I came to the photocopy of the first video store card.

Ryan’s News and Video . It made sense that Pinnix and Ramseur would not only frequent a pornographic video store, but hold membership cards. They had probably been going there for years, seeking porn that got sicker and sicker as time went on and they became harder and harder to impress. At some point, watching actresses cry out in fake pain during fake rapes didn’t cut it for them anymore. And they’d taken things to the next level.

Note to self, I thought. Check and see if golems like porn.

Given what they’d tried to do, they probably liked it a lot. Which meant that they probably stopped by Ryan’s News and Video frequently. Which in turn meant that the clerk there could probably tell me something about them if I caught him at the right time. I could put my Alamance County Courthouse ID around my neck to make me look official, make him think he had to answer my questions. If he wanted to get cute, if he wanted to pull customer privacy on me, I could threaten to subpoena him to a deposition. Tell him I could make him produce all his business records, all his security tapes, everything. I couldn’t do this—not without filing a bona fide lawsuit first—but he didn’t know that. He would understand, though, that his business depended largely upon discretion. And that if I shined the light on his little store, the cockroaches would stop coming.

The sun was on its way down by the time I stepped out of the building and into the parking lot, but it had dropped entirely by the time I merged onto the Durham Freeway from the interstate. Electric light and the headlamps of a thousand cars beat the night back to the edges of the highway, where it pressed against the guardrails in an effort to collapse the whole works. When I got off the freeway, it suddenly hit me that Ryan’s News and Video probably didn’t rent commercial space in the best part of Durham, and I was going there at night. Evidently, since Pinnix and Ramseur screwed up their chance to kill me, I wanted to give their neighbors a crack at it, too.

This is some stupid shit, Swanson, Bobby warned me. You need to turn your ass around.

“Fuck it,” I growled. I turned onto Holloway Street and followed the directions as the robotic voice of my GPS delivered them. I arrived at the Water Street address on the photocopied card and stopped.

Ryan’s News and Video looked exactly as I’d pictured it: an adult bookstore set up in an old gas station. The owner had painted over the windows and bricked in the service door. A single island standing before the building hadn’t sheltered gas pumps in many years, but the overhead lights still worked and these threw a sickly yellow light over the storefront. It provided enough illumination by which to see and avoid tripping over the many places where the ancient asphalt had buckled, but not so much that the casual observer could ascertain one’s identity. Five or six cars and pickup trucks stood parked outside, all but one—probably the clerk’s car—backed into their spaces. Despite the poverty of the surrounding area, none of the vehicles looked more than five years old, and when I backed the BMW into the last remaining space, it didn’t look out of place. The business attracted a certain clientele from outside the neighborhood.

“Here we go,” I muttered to no one. I got out. The headlights blinked and the horn hiccupped, the locks clicked shut and I walked into the store.

If I expected the inside to dovetail with the seedy exterior, a shock awaited me upon entry. Bright fluorescents lit row after row of neatly arranged erotica, a surprisingly professional cornucopia of pornographic videos, magazines and adult toys. The linoleum tile floor showed signs of age but also glowed from the recent attention of a mop. I had anticipated the scent of cigarettes and old motor oil but my nose detected neither of these; a man could have spent hours in here and walked out with no telltale smells clinging to his clothes, nothing to raise concern in the sensitive olfactory receptors of a wife or girlfriend. What sounded like the Top 40 station out of Raleigh drifted from speakers set into the acoustic tile overhead. It could have been any Blockbuster Video store in the country.

But for the inventory. When the door closed behind me, I found myself looking at a stack of small boxes with a photo of a strange lump of plastic and a young blond woman licking cherry red lips.

LARA LOVITT FUCKABLE VAGINA, the box proclaimed. The lip licker, I presumed, being Lara. REALISTIC FEEL! E-Z CLEANING!

“Welcome to Ryan’s,” called a young man seated behind a cash register on the far end of the store, reading a magazine. He didn’t look up. “Holler if you need help.”

“I will,” I said, clearing my throat. “Thanks.”

I moved past the adult toy aisle and through a section marked ASIAN , which offered a plethora of DVDs with covers showing small women of Asian descent finding creative ways to get boned. There stood another section marked INTERRACIAL, another for GAY/LESBIAN/TRANSSEXUAL, another for S&M and yet another labeled HETEROANAL. The last section before the register promised ALTERNATIVE. Apparently, all the other material was just too mainstream for some people.

“Help you find something?” Asked the young man.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Are you Ryan?”

“I’m Cory.”

He was younger than me, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but taller, broader in the shoulders. He wore a hooded sweatshirt with HOLLISTER printed on the chest, but the long sleeves didn’t quite disguise the flames tattooed on the undersides of his arms. Another look and I saw more tattoos on the topsides; with his shirt off, this guy would have resembled a New York City subway car. He had shaved his head, like Dr. Koenig. He had a gold tooth, unlike Dr. Koenig.

Behind him, a red curtain covered the doorway to another room in the building. A dim light turned red by the gauzy material glowed inside it, and I felt suddenly certain that I was looking at the entrance to the VIP section. Just in case the stuff in the ALTERNATIVE section wasn’t donkeyshow weird enough for some patrons.