12 Bliss Street (19 page)

“Do you mind if I load your dishwasher?” Lou asked her. He was standing at the sink.

“What?”

“Some people are particular.”

He had wet hands and Nicola pictured him wearing rubber gloves as he sprayed the bottom of the skillet. Why did this turn her on?

“Do you want some help?” she asked.

“Under control,” he told her.

“What’s this?” Davette said suddenly from the table.

She was looking at another Web site on screen.

“A semi-invisible link,” she said.

“Semi-invisible?”

“From your landlord’s site. The porn site. There’s a semi-invisible link. Which means you have to know where it is. Let’s see where it goes.”

She pressed the link. Nicola moved closer. A new screen appeared: the face of a rubber doll looking up. It was heavily made-up and dressed like a cabaret dancer in, say, Berlin around 1930.

Lou came over to see. “Dolls for sale,” he read.

“A site selling rubber dolls,” Nicola said.

“A site behind a site.”

“Strange.”

“But still nothing illegal.”

“I bet there’s more,” Davette told them.

Nicola stared at another doll, which was dressed in a turquoise negligee that looked familiar. “More?” she asked.

“Just a sec,” Davette said.

Lou pulled a chair up behind Davette and after a few minutes Davette found what she was looking for: another transparent link on the rubber doll site. There was only the slightest change in the cursor arrow as Davette passed over it, like a faint ripple on the surface of the moon.

“Here we go,” she said.

“Should I wake up Carmen?” Lou asked.

“Let’s just take a peek,” Davette told them, and clicked on the link.

Nicola was watching over Davette’s shoulder as a window popped up on the screen.

“It’s asking for a credit card number,” Nicola said. Lou reached for his wallet. “No, wait,” she said. She went into the living room past the sleeping Carmen and knelt beside Scooter’s duffel. Carmen was breathing lightly. Inside the duffel, at the toe of one of the shoes, was a credit card.

“Okay, here,” she said coming back into the kitchen.

Davette typed in the number and confirmed.

“How much does this cost?” Lou asked.

“I didn’t look.”

The screen had faded and was now a flat dull uniform gray. Then a small window popped up indicating that a video file was loading. After a moment music began.

“Hawaiian,” Lou said. “The Guy Pardos band. I think I have this album.”

“You have Hawaiian music?”

But the video was starting—hula dancers on a stage, filmed from the waist up, their dark hair held back by large pink flowers. It was some sort of old documentary clip. When the drums began, they started to dance.

“Weird,” Lou said.

Nicola looked over at him. “Do you think this is it?”

The drums got louder and louder and the women shook their hips though you couldn’t see their hips, you could only see their naked navels and their tanned stomachs and their shoulders and their shiny black hair with the flowers. They moved faster and faster with concentration and precision but with smiles on their faces. The drums beat harder. The women moved their hands. Mahalo, they mouthed. Their palms were up, giving. Mahalo.

“WTF,” Davette said.

“Here comes the finale,” Lou said.

But just as the drums got very loud and the camera began to pull back to show the whole shot—tanned women with grass skirts and bare feet on a wooden stage—the video sort of just crinkled—crinkle was the only word Nicola could think of to describe it—crinkled into a new video, though still accompanied by Hawaiian music. She stared as the image of the dancing women faded and the new image crinkled in.

It was a woman lying on a bed.

Next to her, a man. He had scissors in his left hand and he snipped at the air above her throat. As he snipped, new music began—Brian Eno.

“What’s he doing to her?” Davette asked.

*   *   *

Her clothes were
in shreds and the boy was raping her and she was going to die right there on camera.

Call a spade a spade.

Her eyes didn’t open again. Chorizo listened to the rattle in her throat as her breaths unevenly came and went. Was that her last breath? He waited, listening hard. No, there was another. That one, then? He waited again. Ricky moved up and down, up and down, but the girl was absolutely still. Nothing. No more breath. That was it, then, there would be nothing more. The body was so still, so still, as though something had evaporated and moved away, just moved away. So that was the end. A spirit dispersing. Chorizo kept the videotape rolling.

He thought about how in the final version the music would build to a climax, and just as the viewers adjusted to the snipped clothes the camera would cut suddenly to Ricky climbing on top of her and then they would get to see a long shot of the girl dying while Ricky worked himself over her, raping her, killing her, and then if they were lucky a long last take of her strangely still and strangely colored body. If they were very lucky there would be a little blood, just a trickle, slithering down from her nose. Her clothes cut away from her. Her clothes in shreds. He always appreciated that added effect. A woman whose most intimate clothing, a symbol of her deeper side, her sensuality—her secret thoughts of sex—all of this stripped away, destroyed.

God is in the details, his wife used to say as she made her inferior bombs.

Ricky rolled off the girl and rubbed his eyes with his thumbs. For a moment the noise outside abated and Chorizo could hear Ricky breathe heavily, then cough once into his hands. No doubt about it then, the girl was dead. She’d passed over. Or, as Chorizo considered it, she’d passed through. Ricky moved his legs over the edge of the bed and began to pull on his pants. Dead bodies—it seemed they meant nothing to him. He would get paid and he would get the junk that Chorizo had purchased that morning and he would eat something and find a hotel room and shoot up in peace while Marlina finished with her john in the room just below them. He would save some food for her.

And meanwhile Chorizo would do all the rest—get rid of the bedspread, the posters, the girl. Anything that appeared on the video. The main thing was not to allow himself caught on camera, and how could he be, if he were the cameraman? There would be no trace of him on the Internet. There would only be poor Ricky: one indistinguishable junkie in a country of a thousand indistinguishable junkies.

Chorizo stopped the video and examined the lens of the camera. Everything appeared normal. He was always very careful with the disk files even though technically he was not very proficient; but he was learning, he was watching Carmen and asking her questions and soon he would be able to handle the nuts and bolts of the Web site himself. Carmen knew so little of what really went on. Still, she would have to die.

She was so pretty; almost certainly she would be photogenic. He wished he could do it on video. But there must be no links back to himself; that was important.

Chorizo covered the girl’s body with the bedsheet, tucking the edges in around her shoulders and head. Be true to yourself: this is the first rule of Shambhala. No backward links: this is the first rule of crime.

Seventeen

Nicola woke early
the next morning, scared out of sleep by a dream—what was it? But no, it wasn’t a dream, it was a video. It was that video. Jesus, that girl, she thought. Her bare bluish shoulders and feet. The strange color of her lips. Nicola turned and looked at the clock. What had she gotten herself into? Fear: this is what it felt like. She wanted to stay in bed.

But the screech of a garbage truck coming down the street got her up—as usual she had forgotten to put out the cans. “Oh shit,” Nicola said and she threw herself out of bed and onto Carmen, who was sleeping on a foam pad on the floor. “What?” said Carmen, still mostly asleep.

“Oh shit, oh shit,” Nicola said, pulling a sweatshirt over her nightgown.

In the kitchen, a faint pearl-gray light was filtering through the blinds. She opened a paper grocery bag and began throwing cans and bottles inside. The recycling truck always came first. From the street she could hear it start up, then brake again, and also the sound of a second truck starting and braking not far behind. Nicola quickly began throwing old newspapers and junk mail into another empty paper bag, then she picked up all the bags and ran.

The recycling guy—Ulyssey—was grinning at her as she opened the front gate.

“I’m waiting for you,” he called.

“One of these days I’m going to surprise you,” she told him.

He swung the bags up into the truck and jumped into the cab, driving with one foot and one hand. Nicola looked up. It was cold out, but surprisingly clear. The sky was a soft baby blue. She shivered. She would never get back to sleep.

When Lou called later Nicola was on her computer looking again at the snuff video, which she had illegally copied onto her computer using software she got off a hacker who occasionally freelanced for her. She was running the video over and over, pausing to look at something more closely, then running it and pausing it and running it and pausing it, trying to find something … she didn’t know what. She was thinking about Carmen, who was still asleep on her bedroom floor. Was this what was in store for her? The video scared her every time.

“I wasn’t sure if I would wake you,” Lou said.

“I was just about to do my power-walk. This girl is a size eight, like me.”

“The girl?”

“The dead video girl. There’s something about her that seems familiar.”

“Can you see her face?”

“Not clearly, no. I’ve tried to zoom in, but then everything gets so blurry.” She pointed her mouse to a frame in the video then stopped and picked up her coffee instead. It was ice cold. She was sitting at her kitchen table, her back to the door.

“Scooter never came back last night,” she told Lou.

“Does this worry you?”

“Not really. Not normally. But right now I guess everything worries me. I’ve decided to call in sick for work.”

“I’m with you on that,” Lou said.

“You call in?”

“From time to time.”

Nicola stood up and went to the sink to pour out her coffee. She cradled the phone against her shoulder and told Lou she wanted to ask him a favor. Had he by any chance cashed her check yet?

“Oh that’s long gone,” he said.

“Because I was thinking I might need money … I’m not sure now what might come up.”

“I’m sorry, princess,” Lou said.

Nicola looked out her kitchen window. The fog was beginning to come in. Long stalks of grass swayed in the wind like a row of musicians. She closed the blind. It was a good day to stay inside and hide. But was she thinking about Carmen or herself?

She asked Lou if he wanted to come over.

“I mean as long as you’re sick,” she said.

*   *   *

Nicola and Lou
watched the video maybe fifteen times together, taking time off to ask Carmen, when she emerged, if she wanted breakfast. Lou poured her a cup of strong black coffee and Nicola started the video, explaining what had happened last night after Carmen fell asleep.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Carmen kept saying as she watched. “This is what I did for him?”

“You did not kill this girl,” Nicola said.

“Oh my God in heaven,” said Carmen.

She drank her coffee and watched it for a second time. They looked at every sequence. It was Carmen who noticed a small item by the foot of the bed, seen only once, very briefly. A jar? A wine glass? A glass, they decided. Lou said the woman was definitely drugged; she had probably died from an overdose.

“I mean you can see she’s dying the whole time,” he said. “Maybe he slipped something into a drink. Or maybe he gave her pills, and she used a glass of water to wash them down.”

It was hard to tell the exact moment of death. But clearly the girl was gone by the end.

“I can’t look at this anymore,” Carmen said after the fourth round.

But Nicola felt both scared and hardened—she was determined to watch the video until she figured things out. The wineglass was important. Was it important? If it wasn’t important, then she had nothing.

She handed Carmen a pad of paper and a pen.

“Okay. Then write down everything about this man,” she told her. “His name, anything he owns, what kind of car he drives—anything you can think of.”

Carmen took the pen. Adam Lightwell. Age—mid fifties? Dark hair, dark eyes, drives a Toyota station wagon. Nicola went to the cupboard and opened a box of pretzels. The kitchen brightened as sunlight pushed through the fog. Already it was past noon. Carmen had pulled her hair into a ponytail and was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of Nicola’s sweat pants. Nicola realized she had never gone for her walk.

“We should break for lunch,” she said, eating a pretzel. “I mean go out somewhere.”

“I don’t want to go out,” Carmen said. She handed Nicola the list.

“This is it?”

“This is all I can think of.”

Nicola read through it. All of a sudden her left hand dropped to her side. “Wait a minute,” she said. “He owns the Golden Gate Arms?”

“With my brother.”

“He’s maybe five, five eleven, with dark hair? He wears a silver chainlink bracelet and has a birthmark on his neck?”

“You know him?”

Nicola turned to Lou, who was sitting on the counter. “He’s the one at the motel. Remember? The one we saw by the wharf.”

It was Chorizo. Why hadn’t she made the connection before? He was the motel owner, or at least a partial owner, but at any rate not a guest like she had assumed or whatever it is you call people who go to places like that. Johns? Or in his case.… And, Jesus, he had asked her out. He had asked her to go out with him, alone; he wanted her to take off work and go off with him that day. That Friday. The day that … Nicola’s eyes lost focus and she looked down at the list until it became just a sheet with lined patterns. Carmen and Lou were quiet, watching her. A car honked outside, and the door to the Russian’s house slammed shut, but Nicola didn’t hear it; she didn’t hear anything. She was thinking hard—something was coming together.