Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [19]
I took out a twenty, finally catching his full attention, and carefully tore it in half. I held out half the bill to him. “I don’t want anyone to bother my car for a couple of hours, okay?” He took the bill, gave me a quick look, nodded his head. I smiled to tell him there was nothing worth more than twenty bucks in the car, kept smiling at him until he realized I was memorizing his face, and walked off down the block. I didn’t look back—a survivor works with what he’s got. This was costing me a lot of cash already, but I figured there was still a thousand-dollar pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Without a description, I didn’t expect to run into the Cobra on the street, but I knew enough to check certain places first. Once before I was working on a locate and the target was a porno freak, so I dropped into a joint in the Village where I knew the owner. The place was called Leather Pleasure, and the owner was the prime mover in some kind of society where they get together for coffee and consensual torture. I told him my subject was addicted to porn, and the owner told me he ran a specialty house that didn’t cater to the general trade. When I asked him what he was talking about he launched into a long-winded explanation that began somewhere with the Roman Empire, touched on his unique brand of nationalism—“The Germans don’t understand the creativity in pain, they don’t understand that you have to give to get. Only the British genuinely conceptualize human relationships”—and ended up with a generous splat of snobbery. “If you just want porn, you know, like dirty pictures and all that, my friend, you must go to Times Square. Down here, each shop has its own unique character, its own personality, if you will. A client will know he’s in the wrong place in a minute should he come in here without the proper attitude.” Funny place—the owner was this pleasant guy who sounded like a college professor and his merchandise was full of all this violence.
All the porn houses looked about the same from the outside. Only the joints that featured live human beings did any promotion, and they promised anything the mind could dredge up for ten bucks. But the magazine and photo joints just had windows that were painted over or boarded up or were solid-faced storefronts, with the usual menu on the outside—“Bondage, Discipline, Animal Love, Lesbian Love, Latest from Denmark.”
Nothing on the covers of these dumps indicated kiddie porn on the inside. I went into the first door I came to, checked the fat guy sitting at a register by the opening, and saw row after row of sterile-looking aisles. Magazines and books, all in plastic shrink-wrap, were neatly arranged according to topic—a sort of Dewey Decimal System of Dirt. But there was no kiddie stuff. I kept walking up and down the aisles, occasionally taking a magazine off the shelves, glancing at the front and back cover, putting it back. It was a good place to work, actually, since all of the other five customers studiously looked down. No eye contact—big surprise. I made two circuits before I found the back section marked Adults Only. Maybe the boss had a sense of irony—it had nothing but pictures of kids, books about kids, and magazines with kids. Nice stuff—everything from naked kids romping in the sun to a little boy with his hands and legs hog-tied behind him being double-sodomized.
There was just one guy in this section. Nicely dressed, he had a three-piece suit, polished shoes, briefcase. Wandered from shelf