999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [145]
I’ll take my cut, Paone stonily thought.
The biggest orders were always for kp. According to federal stats, 10,000 kids disappeared each year and were never seen again; most of them wound up in the Circuit. The younger the kids, the more the tapes cost. Once kids got old (fourteen or fifteen) they were deemed as “beat,” and they were either sold overseas or put out on the street to turn tricks for Vinchetti’s pross net. One thing feeding the other. Yeah, it was a fucked-up world, all right, but that wasn’t Paone’s problem.
The competition was squat. Only one other East Coast family ran underground porn, the Bontes, and they had a beef with Vinchetti going way back. Both families fought for pieces of the hard market, but the Bontes only owned a trickle of the action, and Paone could’ve laughed at the reason. Dario Bonte, the don, thought it was unethical to victimize children. Ain’t that a laugh, Paone had thought. The son of a bitch’ll string women out on junk and put them in scat films till they starve to death, but he won’t do any kiddie. What a chump. Most of the money was in kp anyway. No wonder Bonte was losing his ass. And every now and then some foreign outfit would try to move on Vinchetti’s turf with kp from Europe.
But they never lasted very long.
All in all, Paone’s job was simple: he bought the masters, muled them to the lab and kept the snatch-cams in line—guys like this muck-for-brains short-eyed scumbag Rodz.
“I got five for ya,” said Rodz, “the usual.” Rodz’s voice was more annoying than nails across slate, a nasally, wet rasp. “But I been thinking, you know?”
“Oh, you think?” Paone asked. He’d never seen such a pit for an apartment. Little living room full of put-it-together-yourself furniture, smudged walls, tacky green-and-brown carpet tile; an odiferous kitchen. Buckingham Fucking Palace this ain’t.
“Like two K a pop is getting pretty skimpy these days,” Rodz went on. “Come on, man, for a fucking master that Vinchetti’s crew’ll dupe hundreds of times? That’s serious green for him. But what about me? Every time I make a master for your man, I’m sticking my neck out a mile.”
“That’s because you were bom with a mile-long neck, Ichabod.”
“I think two-point-five at least is fair. I mean, I heard that the Bonte family’s paying three.”
“The Bontes don’t do kiddie pom, grapehead,” Paone informed him. “And anybody in the biz knows that.”
“Yeah, but they do snuff and nek and all the other hard stuff. I’m the one busting my ass making the masters. I should be able to go to the highest bidder.”
Paone stared him down. “Watch that, Rodz. No jive. You master for Vinchetti and Vinchetti only. Period. You want some advice? Don’t even think about peddling your shit to some other family. The last guy who pulled a stunt like that, you know what happened to him? Jersey cops found him hanging upside-down in some apartment laundry room. Blowtorched. And they cut off his cock and Express Mailed it to his grandmother in San Bernardino.”
Rodz’s face did a twitch. “Yeah, well, like I was saying, two K a pop sounds pretty square.”
I thought so, Paone regarded.
“So where’s that green?”
Paone headed toward the back bedroom, where Rodz did his thing. “You don’t touch doggie-doo till I see the fruits of your labor.”
He sat down on a couch that had no doubt served as a prop in dozens of Rodz’s viddies. High-end cameras and lights sat on tripods, not the kind of gear they sold down at Radio Shack. The masters had to be shot on large-format inch-and-a-quarter high-speed tape so the dupes retained