“You all right?”
I jumped. That’s not an exaggeration; I actually jumped, both feet leaving the ground for a split-second when the voice in the darkness startled me so badly that my leg muscles gave a violent convulsion. I think I might have yipped, too.
I looked all around for the source of the voice. I found it on a darkened porch attached to the house just behind me. I saw the outline of a couch—probably fabric-covered, indoor furniture had a way of migrating outside in neighborhoods like this one—from which grew the outline of a man.
“I’m okay,” I replied. “Just out of shape, is all.”
“What are you running from?” His words ran together in that urban style that mashed syllables and dropped seemingly unnecessary verbs—the question came out as whachoo ruh-fum. I couldn’t see him, but he sounded older, fifties or even sixties. His voice was as dark as his home and as cracked as his street. I heard the snick of steel on flint and saw the flash of the lighter as he touched the flame to the end of a cigarette. I watched the cherry rise as he raised it to his lips, and fall as he lowered it. “Well?”
How to explain that? Well, sir, I was perusing your neighborhood video store’s selection of very sick porn, and it occurred to me that the clerk might be a monster made from earth and clay sent by another monster who’s gotten his ass on his shoulders with me. So I ran.
I gestured down the street towards the oasis of light that contained Ryan’s Video and my BMW. “I was out in the parking lot and something spooked me. Guess I panicked.”
“So you ran up here?” So you ruhup heah?
“Yeah. I did.”
“Well, you best get on.”
I looked all around at the menacing shadows. Jesus, I thought, why doesn’t the city come out and fix this? “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for your concern. Have a nice night.”
“You don’t run into darkness. You supposed to run away from it. But you done run right up in it. And this ain’t no place for you. You don’t belong here. You need to go ahead on, and you need to go now. Before they finds you.”
I tried to swallow and failed.
“Who’s they?” I asked.
“The ones that do belong here.”
Although I wore a heavy overcoat, I shivered. Through a mouth of cotton, I said, “I’ll be going now, thanks.”
“Yeah, you get going. Don’t stop for nothing. Just go. And don’t never come back.”
“Thank you. Have a nice evening.”
My legs unfroze and I took off, walking instead of running partly because I felt silly running, but also because the sidewalk was so shattered and buckled that I couldn’t understand how I’d made it this far without tripping and plowing face-first into the concrete psoriasis. As I stepped over the worst spots, the man called out after me:
“You hear what I say? Don’t stop for nothing!”
And I didn’t. Until I heard noises in the shadows maybe a hundred yards from that line on the pavement where the streetlight outside Ryan’s News & Video gave way to the night. I stopped. And I looked.
Keep moving, my Better Sense told me.
Hey, now… what’s going on here? Asked my Inner Self. This was my Better Sense’s mentally handicapped roommate, and it kept me rooted to that spot on the sidewalk. And when I saw what was going on in the shadows, I couldn’t leave.
23.
Where the houses came together, even the moon couldn’t penetrate the darkness. A narrow alleyway separated a boarded-up Victorian from the Craftsman bungalow next door, also boarded up—but the properties weren’t deserted. Up against the wall of the Victorian, three men stood shrouded in black velvet. I blinked and saw a smaller figure, too, a woman. And when I saw the positions they were in, I froze.
Two of the men stood on either side of the woman, who struggled unsuccessfully against the hands pinning her arms against the rotten siding. They’d forced her face-first against the house, the two subduing her while the third, standing behind her, reached around and did something with the front of her pants. He pulled these down, and as he did so her struggle seemed to take on a new intensity. She began to moan no, no, no over and over, gaining in volume until the man who had just pulled her pants down grabbed her by the hair and bounced her face off the side of the house.
“Shut up,” he growled.
The moaning stopped. So did the struggling. The man began to undo his belt buckle.
I knew what I was witnessing, but I couldn’t move. The scene unfolding before me came from another planet, another world whose gravities and atmosphere I couldn’t process—my muscles couldn’t work there, my lungs couldn’t breathe. A cold, slippery feeling writhed in my stomach and I thought that I had never felt so sick in my life.
“Fuck her brains out,” said one of her restrainers.
The woman began to moan again, prompting the third man to take his hands off his belt buckle long enough to smash her face against the wall again. Her knees buckled this time, and she would have fallen but for the two other men pinning her up against the house. His hands returned to his waist. I heard the clink of the buckle, then the snick of his zipper.
Do something, Bobby shouted. Do it now!
And so I did.
“What in the fuck are you clowns doing?” I barked, stepping forward. “Get your hands off that woman right now!”
Mr. Pants Puller jumped about a mile in the air, stumbling backwards so fast that he would have gone sprawling on his backside had the wall of the bungalow next door not stopped him. But it did stop him, and when he hit it he bounced forward just as his partners in crime released the woman and scrambled away from where they’d been holding her for their friend. She collapsed and fell sideways.
“Shit!” One of them exclaimed.
Shit, indeed. Three of them, one of me. Closer in now, I could see that they were all young—the one fiddling to get his pants zippered back up couldn’t have been more than twenty, twenty-two. He had his head down, trying to see his zipper in the dark, but even with this I could tell that he, like his friends, stood taller than me. Three of them, one of me, and while the two restrainers held their hands up, in just about five seconds they would figure out that this newcomer wasn’t anyone to be afraid of and then…
Burn that bridge when we get there, Bobby said.
“Who is you?” Asked the restrainer on the left.
“Detective Bobby Swanson of the Durham Police Department,” I said in my best command voice. “You got five seconds to get your asses out of here!”