Now the nurse turned to finick with the IV monitor; Paone continued to struggle against the freight of chasing memory. More images churned in some mental recess. Fragments of wood and ceiling tile raining on his shoulders. The mad cacophony of what could only be machine gun fire. A head exploding to pulp.
Blank-faced, then, the nurse returned her gaze. “What do you remember, Mr. Paone?”
“I—” was all he said. He stared up. Paone never carried real ID on a run, and whatever he drove was either hot or chopped, with phony plates. The question ground out of his throat. “How do you know my name?”
“We know all about you,” she said, unfolding a slip of paper. “The police showed us this teletype from Washington. Francis K. ‘Frankie’ Paone. You have seven aliases. You’re thirty-seven years old, never been married, and you have no known place of legal residence. In 1985 you were convicted of interstate flight to avoid prosecution, interstate transportation of obscene material depicting minors, and multiple violations of Section 18 of the United States Code. Two years ago you were released from Alderton Federal Penitentiary after serving sixty-two months of concurrent eleven- and five-year jail terms. You are a known associate of the Vinchetti crime family. You’re a child pornographer, Mr. Paone.”
Christ, a fuckin’ burn, Paone realized. Somebody set me up. By now it wasn’t hard to figure: lying in some ICU ward strapped to a bed, shot up like a hinged duck in a shooting gallery, one hand gone, one leg gone, and now this stolid bitch reading him his own rap sheet off an FBI fax. He sure as shit hadn’t gotten busted taking down some candy store.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Her eyes blazed down. Her face could’ve been carved from stone. Yeah. Paone thought. I’ll bet she’s got a couple kids herself flunking out of school and smoking pot. Bet her car just broke down and her insurance just went up and her hubby’s late for dinner every night because he’s too busy balling his secretary and snorting rails of coke off her tits, and all of a sudden it’s my fault that the world’s a shithouse full of perverts and pedophiles. It’s my fault that a lot of people out there pay righteous cash for kiddie flicks, right, baby? Co ahead, blame me. Why not? Oh, hey, and how about the drug problem? And the recession and the Middle East and the ozone layer? That’s all my fault too, right?
Her voice sounded like she had gravel in her throat when again she asked: “What do you remember?”
The query haunted him. The bits of memory blurred along with the room in his myopic eyes — bullets popping into flesh, the megaphone grating, spent cartridges spewing out of wafts of smoke — and chased him further, stalking him as relentlessly as a wild cat running down a fawn, while Paone fled on, desperate to know vet never daring to look back...
“Shit, nothing,” he finally said. “I can’t remember anything except bits and pieces.”
The nurse seemed to talk more to herself than to him. “A transient-global amnesic effect, retrograde and generally nonaphasic, induced by acute traumatic shock. Don’t worry, it’s a short-term symptom and quite commonplace.” The big blue eyes bore back into him. “So I think I’ll refresh your memory. Several hours ago, you murdered two state police officers and a federal agent.”
Paone’s jaw dropped.
At once the chase ended, the wild cat of memory finally falling down on its prey — Paone’s mind. He remembered it all, the pieces falling into place as quickly as pavement to a ledge-jumper.
The master run. Rodz. The loops.
And all the blood.
Another day, another ten K, Paone thought, mounting the three flights of stairs to Rodz’s apartment. He wore jersey gloves — no way he was rockhead enough to leave his prints anywhere near Rodz’s crib. He knocked six times on the door, whistling “Love Me Tender” by the King.
“Who is it?” came the craggy voice.
“Santa Claus,” Paone said. “You really should think about getting a chimney.”
Rodz let him in, then quickly relocked the door. “Anyone tailing you?”
“No, just a busload of DJ agents and a camera crew from 60 Minutes.”
Rodz glowered.
Fuck you if you can’t take a joke, Paone thought. He didn’t much like Rodz — Newark slime, a whack. Nathan Rodz looked like an anorectic Tiny Tim after a bad facelift: long, frizzy black hair on the head of a pudgy medical cadaver, speedlines down his cheeks. Rodz was what parlance dubbed a “snatch-cam” — a subcontractor, so to speak. He abducted the kids, or got them on loan from freelance movers, then shot the tapes himself. “The Circuit” was what the Justice Department called the business: underground pornography. It was a $1.5-billion-per-year industry that almost no one knew about, a far cry from the Debbie Does Dallas bunk you rented down at Metro Video. Paone muled all kinds of underground: rape loops, “wet” S&M, animal flicks, scat, snuff, and (their biggest number) “kp” and “prepubes.” Paone picked up the masters from guys like Rodz, then muled them to Vinchetti’s mobile “dupe” lab. Vinchetti’s network controlled almost all of the underground porn in the East; Paone was the middleman, part of the family. It all worked through mail drops and coded distro points. Vinchetti paid two grand for a twenty-minute master if the resolution was good; from there each master was duped hundreds of times and sold to clients with a taste for the perverse. “Logboys,” the guys who did the actual rodwork, were hired freelance on the side; that way, nobody could spin on Vinchetti himself. Paone had seen some shit in his time — part of his job was to sample each master for quality: biker chicks on PCP blowing horses and dogs, addicts excreting on each other and often consuming the produce of their bowels. “Nek” flicks. “Bag” flicks. Logboys getting down on pregnant girls, retarded girls, amputees and deformees. And snuff. It amazed Paone, in spite of its grotesquery: people paid to see this stuff. They got off on it. What a fucked-up world, he thought a million times over, but, hey, supply and demand — that was the American Way, wasn’t it? If Vinchetti didn’t supply the clients, someone else would, and as long as the money was there...
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, hut 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.