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By Root 313 0

remote control again, and once more, four quarter-frame black-and-white pictures fill the screen. Camera One shows the basement in an extra-wide shot. The black plastic on the walls, ceiling and floor have lowered the light level so much that it’s impossible to see where one surface ends and another begins. The result is that the prostrate body of Lu Zagalsky appears to be floating in the middle of space. Of all the camera shots, it’s this one that Spider loves most. He imagines her in the total, never-ending darkness of afterlife, suspended there for ever – eternally his. The next shot comes from an overhead camera, fixed to a ‘hothead’, a special device that allows the lens to rotate 360 degrees as well as zoom in and out. The third and fourth cameras are set at much lower angles. Camera Three is fixed behind Lu’s head and looks down her body. Camera Four is a reverse angle, positioned at the same height as Camera Three but looking up her body from a line along her left foot. From his remote control, Spider is able to direct his own deathly video show, pulling in every imaginable combination of wide shots, close-ups, zooms, pans and tilts of his victim.

He creeps in on Lu’s face.

The picture goes soft as the auto-focus kicks in and takes a second to get the correct focal length and exposure rates. The remote-control box also has a digi-pic facility which allows him to freeze-frame shots and download them to store or make digital printouts.

Spider watches her for a minute or two, his eyes locked on hers. He tries to get inside her mind, tries to imagine what is going on in her head as she lies there, naked and vulnerable in almost virtual darkness. He notices that she doesn’t blink, that her body is no longer riddled with fear. He suspects that mentally she is removing herself from the scene, using some form of crude meditation to block out the reality of what is happening to her.

Or what is going to happen to her.

Spider fires off a couple of digi-pics that he thinks will at a later date be both pleasurable and useful for him, and then he switches the screen view to his favourite shot on Camera One.

The Lidocaine is making him feel groggy. He knows it’ll last two to three hours before wearing off. He cradles his injured hand and lies down on his side in the coffin bed. The bed feels good, he is ready to rest. He reaches out his undamaged hand and strokes the glass of the TV screen next to him.

She looks so beautiful down there.

So wonderfully peaceful.

So nearly dead.

33

West Village, SoHo, New York

Howie Baumguard’s all-time favourite movie scene was in Pulp Fiction: the part when Vincent goes to the toilet during a stakeout at the apartment of runaway boxer Butch and then Butch unexpectedly appears in the doorway with a Mac-10 and blows the hitman away while his pants are still around his ankles. Like most boys, even those in their mid-thirties, Howie is hooked on toilet humour. But what he told people killed him most about this scene was the sheer realism of it. As a cop who had found people dead on the pan (one heavy drug-user and one geriatric Mafioso with a heart condition), he loved the fact that Tarantino ‘has the balls to tell it how it is’. Fittingly, Howie was taking his regula-as-clockwork morning dump, just as his cell phone rang. Now usually Howie would take one peek at the user display and forget about it until a more opportune moment. But as this call showed an Italian prefix, he automatically jammed the phone to his ear.

‘Baumguard residence, how the fuck can I help you?’

Jack’s laugh rolled down the line before he answered. ‘Well, Mr B, glad to find you’re up bright and early. How’re you doing?’

‘Early bird gets to bite the head off the friggin’ worm, you know me, boss.’

Jack let the ‘boss’ remark slide. He guessed the big guy had been saying it for so long that he still hadn’t managed to kick the habit. ‘Well, when you’ve finished your bowl of worms and Cheerios, maybe you can let me in on why you’ve been calling my beloved wife? You and she got some kind of thing going? Maybe