Sleeping Policemen by Dale Bailey Page B

chain to bolts in the concrete floor.
    Another man, about Nick’s size, and also hooded, stepped into the picture, his penis half-erect in a nest of brown hair. The hooded men caught the girl between them and lowered her wide-eyed and empty of resistance to the floor. The big man held her prone while the other man shortened the chains, giving the girl no more than a foot of play. The big man stepped out of frame and returned with two padded mats. He placed one in front of the girl, and one between her outspread thighs. The smaller man knelt behind the exposed mounds of her buttocks, stroking himself. The big man stepped in front of the girl, and now Nick saw that he had something in his hand. Something bone-handled, something shiny. It flickered and caught the light, and Nick felt an icy hand close around his heart.
    A knife.
    An off-camera voice spoke up.
    â€œNow then,” it said, masculine and precise. “Let us begin.”
    â€œIt’s a fake,” Tucker said.
    But if it was a fake it was artfully done. The off-screen voice orchestrated changes in position; the two men were tireless. At one point, the big man sodomized her, while the smaller man knelt before her and pressed the knife to her throat, forcing her to fellate him. Nick stared in fascination at the narrow, crimson thread snaking down her breast to drip on the floor, helpless to turn away from the horror on screen. Sue whimpered, curled tighter into the shelter of his arm. He had to force himself not to recoil, shamed by the iron spike of his erection.
    When they started to cut her, the girl began to scream. She screamed for a long time, and the sounds echoed in Nick’s head. Still he forced himself to believe that it was all pretend, that after the take ended the three would get up, shake hands like professionals, and walk away.
    Then the men took the girl’s tongue and all screams stopped together. In the moment that followed, as wordless grunts and groans filled the room, he knew better.
    â€œIt’s not a fake,” he said.
    â€œI think we ought to turn this off,” Finney said.
    â€œMe, too,” said Nick.
    But he didn’t move. None of them did.
    Helpless to turn away, mesmerized, Nick felt reality slip, time grown fluid, Finney’s living room tainted with the smoky air of the strip joint, the flickering television screen a curtained doorway into a world he had never dared imagine.
    He could not—would not—look away.
    After a while, both men came. But the film didn’t end there. The two men on screen were good.
    They kept the girl alive for a long time.

Monday, 10:06 AM to 1:30 PM
    Nick slept through his nine o’clock sociology, but forced himself to his 11 o’clock, Twentieth-Century Novel with Dr. Gillespie. He seriously considered ditching the entire day, but after last night, after the tape , he ached for routine and order. He and Sue had talked long into the night, falling into a fitful doze just before dawn. His dreams had been a tumble of half-formed images, ogres in masks, girls in pain.
    He woke at 10:06, his penis rigid against his stomach, a vision of the writhing girl—
    â€” Casey, her name was Casey —
    â€”dissolving in the cool air above him. A disembodied voice uncoiled in the room, the words indecipherable. Nick caught his breath; the sounds carried the same clipped cadence as the voice behind the videotape, the one whose last command—a bark harsh with desire—still reverberated in his head: “ Finish her !”
    He did not think he would ever forget the tape’s final moments, the bigger of the two masked men wrenching the girl’s head back, his fist knotted in her hair. And the knife. My God, the knife—
    Nick swallowed, shuddering.
    He took a deep breath, forcing the tape from his mind, and slid out from under Sue’s arms. He showered and dressed quickly, grabbed his book bag, and slipped silently out of the apartment,