Authors: R. D. Ronald
The incredulous face of Tazeem stared back at him. He was still robed, as was the misty-eyed girl in the room with him, who sat beside his chair with a drink in her hand.
‘Get up! Come on we have to go,’ Mangle barked and ran to Sadiq’s room.
Sadiq lay robeless on the floor, writhing around with two naked girls, all of them unaware that the door had opened. A bag of
white powder stood open, and three huge lines remained on the cocaine-dusted tray.
‘You idiot! Either come now or you’re staying here.’
Sadiq’s eyelids fluttered open as he was roused from his narcotic, sexual fugue state. The girls continued kissing and licking his body.
‘What’s happening?’ he slurred.
Mangle stepped in and slapped Sadiq across the face. He walked back out to the hallway. Either Sadiq would follow, or he wouldn’t, but Mangle wasn’t about to waste any more time on him.
‘Which way?’ he asked Tatiana.
She hurried ahead. Tazeem stood by the door to his booth but the girl who was with him wouldn’t come out. Mangle and Tazeem followed Tatiana, all of them barefoot, along the hallway. Mangle caught a glimpse of a man standing at the doorway of the last booth on the row as they rushed past. A middle-aged man, fully naked, with blood streaked down both arms and legs and also over his penis. Mangle’s stomach convulsed at the sight, but the feeling of recognition as their eyes briefly met stayed with him.
At the end of the hallway Tatiana turned left and rushed on. Tazeem looked back over his shoulder and saw Sadiq stagger out of the booth, trying to wrestle on his robe. Tatiana reached a double door, stopped and waited for the others to catch up.
‘I hope this isn’t locked or we have nowhere to go,’ she said, and pushed against it. To their relief the door swung inwards and she stepped into a narrow metal stairwell. Sadiq was the last one through and they descended to the floor below. On the landing there were four doors: two to their left, one directly ahead and one to the right.
‘Which one?’ Mangle hissed.
Tatiana moved to the door to their right and pushed against it. ‘It’s locked!’ she cried, looking back at them. ‘This is our way out.’
‘I don’t know what it is but I have to check it out. I’ll have Tom move them to a different booth whenever the fuck he decides
to show himself,’ a man said as he backed out of a doorway to their left.
Instinctively, Tatiana raised the pistol she clutched. Mangle, Tazeem and Sadiq tried to back out of his immediate line of sight.
‘Don’t fucking move,’ she commanded him.
The startled technician spun around, saw the gun pointed at him, and then the other three people in the hallway, and froze.
‘What is it, Bill?’ a voice from inside the room asked.
Tatiana clutched the gun in trembling hands. Sweat beaded her forehead. Perhaps sensing her hesitancy, the technician half-spun to duck back inside the room. Tatiana discharged the weapon’s solitary round. The technician wheezed and clawed at his chest for a moment before collapsing onto the floor.
‘What the fuck?’ the man inside the room shouted.
Mangle sprang forward wielding the hunting knife, and snatching the handle, threw the door open wide.
Computer consoles sat on desks, and the walls of the long rectangular room were lined with an array of security monitors. Some remained black but most displayed an image from one of the booths on the floor above. A seated technician at one of the desks stared back at him.
‘Open that door back there,’ Mangle snarled, and held out the knife menacingly in front of him.
At first Mangle thought the technician must be in shock, as he just blinked at him. But then he saw his hand snaking under the desk. He lunged for the man but it was too late. Flashing red lights pulsed around the room; the silent alarm had been triggered.
‘You’ll never get away,’ the technician stammered.
‘Maybe not, but how much damage do you think I can do with this before anybody gets here?’ Mangle couldn’t believe he was uttering such words, but he knew he had to sound convincing if they were to have any hope of escape.
‘No … no,’ the man whined.
‘Don’t do that, please.’
‘You’d better open the door now, I won’t ask again.’
The technician’s shaking hands fumbled as he tapped on his keyboard.
‘There, it’s open.’
‘I’ll wait up here till one of them shouts that the door below is unlocked as well. That way I won’t have to risk you trapping us in the stairwell.’
The man squeaked, jerked reflexively and immediately began pressing more keys.
‘There, everything is unlocked. Just go and leave me be.’
Mangle turned away from him; he was reasonably sure the technician was telling the truth. He shouted to the others to go down and make sure they had a way out while he waited by the door of the control room. They filed through the door Tatiana had first tried. Sadiq waited and held it open. Mangle looked back at the technician to make sure the man wasn’t about to try anything, but he had pushed his chair back from the console and was holding up his hands to show he posed them no threat.
‘It’s open, Mangle. Come on,’ Tazeem yelled up. Mangle was about to run for the door when he noticed a bank of DVD drives by the computer closest to him.
‘That’s nothing, they aren’t even used,’ the technician said, before Mangle had a chance to ask anything.
Mangle began randomly pushing buttons to eject the drives. After a few seconds, the plastic drawers began to slide out, each proffering a solitary disk. Mangle snatched five of them, and fled for the door Sadiq held open. They ran down the stairway, and the sound of shouting echoed from above as the door slowly closed after them.
‘Hurry up, they won’t be far behind,’ Mangle urged, as he ran into the welcome embrace of the cold night air.
Tazeem needed no further encouragement, and bolted in the direction of the car, Sadiq only a few steps behind. Mangle took Tatiana’s hand and they ran as well as they could over the cracked and uneven concrete.
They’d barely gone a few hundred yards and were wriggling through the holes in the chain-link fence, when voices from behind announced the pursuing security guards had spotted them. Three shots were fired, forcing Mangle’s already accelerated heart rate up even further. Tatiana cried out. At first he thought she must have been hit, but then realised it was a cry of frustration as her hair had become entangled in the ragged fence.
‘Don’t let them catch me,’ she pleaded as Mangle struggled to free her.
Tazeem and Sadiq ran ahead, and after a moment the sound of a car engine fired up. Mangle prayed they weren’t being left behind, as he tugged the last of Tatiana’s hair free from the fence. She let out a squeal as a clump was torn out at the roots. Two more shots rang out. One impacted a few feet from where they stood, scattering pieces of smashed asphalt.
Tazeem’s Mercedes swung around the corner of the warehouse and accelerated towards them. Mangle risked a glance over his shoulder. The security men were almost upon them. He grabbed Tatiana and ran for the car as another bullet lacerated the air above his head. Sadiq threw open the back door of the car as it skidded to a halt, and they both bundled inside.
14
Tazeem sped away from The Club as fast as he dared. They couldn’t risk attracting the attention of the authorities until they had enough evidence to indict the owners and operators. Being suspects in a murder investigation, and God knew what else by now, driving around with wires hanging down from the steering column where Sadiq had hot-wired the car wasn’t a good look.
Tatiana shivered continually and clung to Mangle in the back seat. The shock of her ordeal and shooting the technician was taking hold. He wrapped his robe around them both as best he could, and tried to ignore the sensation of her thighs brushing up against his own as she wrapped her arms around his chest.
It was the early hours of the morning and there was very little traffic on the roads. Three men in a car wearing nothing but bathrobes and a girl in black lingerie made for an unusual spectacle, so Tazeem chose sleepy suburban roads as much as he could for the route back to the bungalow. He was certain no one had followed them back. He hadn’t seen another car on the road for over ten minutes now and they were almost home.
‘I’ll leave the car a few streets away just on the off-chance it could be recognised,’ Tazeem said.
He dropped the other three at the kerb and pulled away. Sadiq went around to the back where he improvised a way inside as quietly as he could. Mangle went to put some clothes on and Tatiana picked through his things for something suitable to wear. She took the clothes into the bathroom to change into after she’d taken a shower. The scent of bleach still hung thickly in the air.
Sadiq said he’d had enough for one day and was going to get some sleep. Mangle took the DVDs he’d appropriated into the lounge to see what was on them. He switched on the TV, inserted the first disk into the player and collapsed into an armchair. The picture flickered for several seconds, remaining mostly black with an occasional green or purple peppering of digital artifacts. Eventually, an image appeared. It was recorded footage from one of the booths at The Club, as Mangle had suspected. An attendant was walking around, spraying and wiping the surfaces. Then he walked off camera into the bathroom at the rear of the booth. A moment later the picture went black. Another brief scattering of purple squares and the picture returned. The same attendant walked back through the booth and exited at the front. The screen went black.
Mangle began to fast-forward through the footage. It was evident that the recording was motion-activated. A succession of clients came into the booth and performed various sex acts with different girls. So far there was no evidence of anything other than prostitution. He put in the next disk and scanned through it. A client got violent with one of the girls and began slapping her around. The girl stood it as best she could as the attack became more brutal, and the perpetrator’s face grew darker and more twisted, as if he saw before him a physical manifestation of his own demons, rather than an innocent young woman. Mangle scanned through the next two disks.
Tatiana had dressed after her shower and lay down on the couch facing away from the screen. There was nothing the DVDs could reveal about the place that she didn’t already know. Tazeem
had returned and from the tinkle of crockery it sounded as if he was making something to eat in the kitchen.
The fourth disk, and one client used all three shots from a Taser gun on one of the girls. She was standing when the first shot hit but crashed to the floor as her body went into spasm. Barely waiting for her to stop convulsing from the first shot, he fired off another set of electrodes. The tendons in her neck stood out, taut as steel cables with the pressure from her grinding teeth. Mangle hit fast-forward again as the man fired the third. He’d seen enough.
He ejected the disk, feeling sick from the successive images of brutalisation and violence. Tazeem had poked his head around the door a few minutes earlier but withdrew back into the kitchen when he saw what was displayed on the TV screen.
Mangle called softly to Tatiana a couple of times to see if she was alright, and ask if she needed anything, but she didn’t respond. Her breathing had deepened now, the adrenalin rush from their escape perhaps subsiding sufficiently to allow her to sleep. Her body trembled slightly as she lay there. Mangle hoped that if it was the onset of the medication withdrawal, she would be able to cope with it better than Laura.
He put the final disk into the player. The beginning showed the usual combination of drink, drugs and violent sex. Mangle skipped ahead. The next client to come into the room looked familiar but he kept his face turned away from the camera, so it was hard to be sure. There was a steadiness, an assuredness about his movements. The other men had been jittery and nervous, even manic, but this guy was cool and in control. He selected some items from the screen and walked casually around the room sipping from a large glass while waiting for the attendant. He expertly defied the camera by turning his face away from the lens.
The attendant arrived, carrying the type of tray Mangle had seen earlier, and a girl, who judging from her looks and flawless appearance, must be from the ‘Pristine’ list and therefore
extortionately expensive. The attendant placed the tray down beside the chair and left the room.
The man returned to his seat as the girl disrobed and then removed her negligée. She knelt down between his legs, pulled open his robe and began to work on him with her hands. The man seemed content, and continued to sip from his glass as his erection grew. He leaned over and removed the lid from the tray. The arm of the chair obstructed the camera’s view, and it could not pick up the contents.
The man relaxed back into the chair and Mangle saw the minimal light within the room gleam coldly on the curved edge of the knife he now held in his left hand. The man played with it, twisting the handle this way and that and watching the light dance along the blade. He seemed almost to have forgotten about the girl working below him, until she slid his fully erect member into her mouth. He looked down, slightly amused it seemed, and gently pushed her back onto her haunches. She looked up at him expectantly, awaiting his next command.
Reaching forward he took hold of her left arm, delicately, as if she were a work of fine art. The girl surrendered to his touch. He examined her perfect white skin, then slid his fingertips gently upwards from her elbow before cupping her wrist in his right palm.
He leaned forward, and drew the tip of the blade slowly and precisely around her arm, working downwards in concentric circles. He kept stopping to readjust his seating position and grip on the handle, before continuing on with his macabre geometry. The girl sat motionless, unresisting to the light grip he held on her supple wrist. Blood began to flow, at first cautiously, as if embarrassed by its appearance; a few thin red lines exploring the gravitational trajectory of its new terrain. Now it flowed faster, steadily staining her pale flesh a horrific red.