Sleeping Policemen by Dale Bailey Page A

future as yet unborn. But a future.
    â€œI’m in a hurry.”
    He started for the car, but the hand touched his elbow once again, gripping this time.
    He turned. “Let me go, man.”
    â€œIn a fuckin Mercedes and you can’t spare a measly buck, friend?”
    â€œIt’s not my car—”
    â€œYou ain’t like them, huh?”
    Nick hesitated, wrenched his arm away. He turned to the car, digging in his jeans. The old man reached out for him once again, jarring his elbow as Nick lifted out a handful of change. Silver rained against the broken sidewalk, but none of them moved. Not Nick and not the old man, not the bums gathered beyond him.
    Nick met the old man’s bleary eyes for a single instant longer, and then he turned away.
    â€œSo let’s see what’s inside,” Tucker said from the back seat.
    Nick slid a finger under the flap and tore open the end of the mailer. He could hear the silence, sense the three of them lean toward him as he tilted the contents into his hand.
    A videotape.
    No one said anything. The Mercedes sped south into the gathering twilight, leaving Knoxville behind.
    Casey , the typewritten label read. Tape 14 .
    Nick shook the tape from its cardboard box; Finney’s VCR swallowed it silently, its digital display flaring alight. He heard the spools catch with a click. The screen fuzzed over as the leader unwound, then gave way to a flawless ebony emptiness. Nick glanced at the others, mere shapes in the darkened room. Finney slouched with his arms crossed over the back of a kitchen chair, his face expressionless. Tucker sat rigidly in the recliner, chewing at a nail. Sue waited on the sofa. Nick stepped over the coffee table and sank into the cushions beside her, grateful for her warmth as she leaned against him.
    On the screen, blackness. No music.
    A title came up, white letters against a jet background: Casey . A moment later, the screen brightened to gray, a porous alien field rendered in stark precision. Gradually the camera pulled back and the gray field revealed itself as one wall of a cinderblock room, bright and sterile as a surgery. The camera held there for a moment, dipped to reveal a steel drain set in the center of a concrete floor, and then panned slowly, gray floor slipping by. Only then did Nick realize that there was sound, that there had been for some time, almost subliminal at first but growing slowly louder: muted sobs.
    Tension writhed in his belly.
    The first glimpse of color was like an electric shock: a dull steel band encircling a pale ankle. The camera climbed the leg slowly, caressing knee and thigh and finally the tangled thatch of pubic hair, black against translucent flesh, with the faintest coral hint of female genitals curled within. As it climbed higher, over a slight, rounded belly and girlish breasts, Nick felt his cock stiffening almost against his will. Sue moved still closer against him, her hand heavy on his thigh.
    â€œSome kind a freaky titty movie,” Tucker said, and for once Nick had to agree with him.
    Then the camera came to rest on the girl’s face, heart-shaped and fragile and not wholly formed, poised at the tremulous frontier of adolescence, no longer a girl and not quite a woman, maybe seventeen, maybe not. Her beauty was like an ache way down inside him. Dark hair curled around her pale shoulders and her green eyes gazed directly into the lens with a terrifying intensity. A bright, bright ribbon of blood flowed from the corner of her mouth.
    And she sobbed, a constant, defeated hitching of breath.
    â€œI got a bad feeling about this,” Finney said into the silence, and at the same time another figure stepped into the frame: an enormous man with his back to the camera, naked but for the black leather hood zipped over his head. Sobs caught and died in the girl’s throat. She backed away, and Nick saw how she was bound, steel shackles at wrist and ankle, connected by lengths of narrow