“The camera has just seen him enter this building here, but we…eh, I guess we should wait for SWAT?”
“No,” the detectives replied in unison as they opened the doors and jumped out.
—
When Betty Jackson, the ticket attendant at the Rialto, saw the two people with their guns and MPD badges approaching her booth she got a feeling of déjà vu. She was the only member of the staff who had worked at the theater since way back in the seventies, when the king of Minneapolis pornography, Ferris Alexander, took over the run-down Rialto and started showing blue movies there. The place wasn’t licensed to show porn, but the police raided only when the city council specifically demanded it, because so many of their own were regulars there. Ferris Alexander’s porn empire finally collapsed, and he ended up doing time on tax evasion charges, but the Rialto managed to survive without him, and in spite of the fact that theaters specializing in pornography all over the country had to close, as home movies and the internet gradually took over the market. The Rialto didn’t make much money, but it was enough to keep the wheels turning. And there were no longer any applicable laws the authorities could use to close down movie theaters like they could in the seventies. The most they could do was insist the theaters be located outside certain designated porn-free zones of the city. The Rialto showed mainly Swedish, Danish and German pornography from the sixties and seventies, mostly classics and some underground. Things you wouldn’t find online. But nothing extreme, no animals, underage, defecation, no hard S&M. Straightforward fucking. Generally for the same audience of white men aged sixty plus, probably family men who didn’t want to watch porn on the internet at home. Or just lonely men who didn’t recognize their dream woman among the slick pornography on the internet. Here they could still see Scandinavian girls with pubic hair and no silicone, the way they remembered girls from their own youth. A mixture of the smuttyfrom the days before pornography became a legitimate business, and innocence from a time when a shred of modesty still existed.
So this was in every way a respectable theater showing adult movies, with a geographical location that put it in a gray area, as half the building lay within the city council’s porn-free zone and the other half outside it. The part containing the screen was, unfortunately, within. But Betty soon realized the visit had nothing to do with this. She saw a slight uncertainty in the eyes of the two officers as they realized exactly what kind of establishment they were about to enter.
“Excuse me,” said the black policewoman as Betty tried to recall the last time she’d heard someone from MPD open a sentence so politely, “did this person just come in here?”
The woman had lowered her pistol. She held up a cell phone in front of the ticket booth.
Betty looked at the picture on the screen. Normally she didn’t look at the patrons, they didn’t like it. Instead she concentrated on the hands that shoved the money in through the little window. Only if they looked like a child’s hands rather than an adult’s did she look up and decide whether to turn them away or ask to see some ID. But the person in the photograph had done something that was almost unheard of; he had actually spoken to her. Told her she ought to try the Polish sausages being sold right outside. As though hewantedher to look up and see him. And since Betty, in her seventy-eighth year, no longer suspected men of trying to hit on her, shehadlooked up. It was the same man as the one she now saw on the screen the policewoman was holding up in front of her. No doubt about it.
“He’s inside,” she said with a nod toward the door leading into the theater itself. It was a swinging door with no handles on either side. Not as a fire precaution but because a swinging door can be opened with a foot, or a shoulder, so you didn’t have to touch a handle that you might suspect with good reason had just beentouched by a hand that had just been touching something you didn’t want any contact with at all, not even secondary contact.
“Turn the movie off and put the lights on in there,” said the police officer.
“Without a search warrant I can’t…” Betty stopped when she saw the look in the woman’s eyes. Behind her were now three uniformed policemen, all with weapons drawn. Betty pressed the intercom in front of her, another relic of the seventies, and said with a sigh, as though this were a daily but regrettable occurrence:
“Mel, stop the movie and turn the lights on. The police are here.”
—
Kay pushed open the door into the auditorium with her foot, continuing to hold the pistol with both hands. In the security cam footage Gomez hadn’t looked to be carrying anything, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t armed. From where she was standing at the rear left of the auditorium she had time to register a pale and hairy couple going hard at it on the screen before switching her attention to the isolated silhouettes of men dotted about across the hundred or so mostly empty seats in front of her.
“Police!” she shouted as loudly as she could. “Everybody stay where you are!”
At that exact moment the movie began to slow down, the slaps and groans of pleasure sank in pitch and intensity, as though the people involved had suddenly lost interest. Strangely, there was no reaction from the audience. There were no groans of displeasure, no cries of frustration and anger. But in the dark two seconds between the projector being turned off and the overhead lights going on she spotted movement. A rectangle of light slid into the room to the right of the screen. A door opening. A green EMERGENCY EXIT sign above it. Then closing.
Kay responded immediately. She ran down the stairs, withHanson right behind her. She crossed between the front row and the screen, past a man still struggling to button up his pants, pushed open the emergency exit and tumbled out into daylight.
She caught a glimpse of a back disappearing around the corner of a house. Took up pursuit. Around the corner, into an alley, around another corner, another glimpse of the same disappearing back. Ran. Ran like she used to in the alleyways around their old house in Englewood. Running from all the other kids. Running to school and back. Running like she did that night when she was eleven years old and her father had broken into the house to steal their money, but she’d been quicker, taken her mother’s money from under the bed and jumped out the window, running, her father running after her. Running as fast as she could but still she could feel how, like some lurching zombie, he was gaining on her. And when they came to the dog yard at the back of the Jenkins house he was right behind. She could feel his fingers clutching at the soles of her shoes as she swung up and over the wire-net fence that was luckily only six feet high or she wouldn’t have made it, because as strong as her legs were, her arms were thin and weak. But she did make it, and as she landed on the other side the dog, which looked like a cross between a pit bull and an Alsatian, came charging out of its doghouse, salivating and snarling. It leaped at the intruder with teeth bared. Not at her, who so often stopped by on her way home from school and gave it something from her lunch box, but at the wire fence and the man on the other side, the one threatening her. She saw her father back off to a safe distance. And through the furious barking of the dog she heard a stream of curses she tried to blank out, because even though she knew he was half crazy from the need for a fix and she hated him, the words were like acid, they burned through her skin and could not be washed away. There they stood, daughter and father, one on each side of the fence, with another man’s dog between them. She was crying. She heard him change his tune and start to beg formoney, and when that didn’t work he gave up and started crying. Lights went on in the Jenkins house, and he turned and ran off. The strange thing was that later, when she looked back over her childhood, she couldn’t remember a time when she had ever felt closer to her father than she had that night, when they stood there face-to-face, each with their own despair.
Kay had once again lost sight of the running back ahead of her, but she heard a crack. The sound of a man jumping up at a wooden fence. She cleared the corner, saw sure enough there was a wooden fence surrounding a property and caught a glimpse of a pair of hands as they disappeared over on the other side. She adjusted her stride and jumped. Got hold of the top of the fence with the tips of her fingers and tried to pull herself up but lost her grip and fell back down. As she scrambled to her feet she heard another crack a little way off. Another fence. Swearing. Must be a higher fence. Olav Hanson ran up, his face contorted.
“He can’t get over the next fence,” said Kay. “If we can get over this, we’ve got him! Give me a leg up.”
“Easier if I take him,” said Hanson. He pushed his gun back into the shoulder holster, measured his six foot four up against the fence, gripped the top and tried to jump. He scarcely even left the ground. With a groan of pain he collapsed against the slats.
“Goddamn knee,” he hissed between clenched teeth. He sounded so desperate that for an instant Kay almost felt sorry for him. She caught sight of a frail-looking fruit crate next to the wall of the house, tipped out the plant pots inside it then stood it, long side up, against the fence.
“I’ve got this!” said Hanson. He pushed Kay aside and stepped up onto the box. It brought him so high Kay realized he could see over the top to the other side. Abruptly the box began to creak and sway.
“Steady it!” Hanson shouted to Kay as he pulled out his pistol.
“Okay, but get the hell over!”
“Keep it steady! He’s got a gun!”
As Kay bent and put her weight against the crate she heard Hanson fire three shots in quick succession.
“Don’t shoot!” came a voice from the other side. “In the name of God, don’t shoot!”
Kay stood back from the crate and gave it a kick. Over it went, Hanson with it.
“What the hell?” he growled as he lay on the ground.
