“I’m coming. Give me the address.”
Virgil gave her the address and Cohen’s name. “She’s calling her attorney. We could be a while.”
“I’m running.”
—
Cohen was on the phone to her attorney. “I don’t give a shit if you’re at dinner, I got a big problem here, Larry. I got two cops sitting in my living room like a couple of tombstones and they think they got something big on me.”
Pause to listen.
“I know she’ll be disappointed,” Cohen replied, “but think how disappointed she’ll be if the details of our relationship come out.”
Pause.
Then: “I don’t know. They think I was a witness to whoever killed that professor.”
Pause.
“Do you want me to answer that with them sitting here?”
Pause.
“Okay. You know where I’m at,” Cohen said.
—
She hung up, and said, “He’ll be here in twenty minutes.”
Capslock said, “I gotta pee. Where’s the bathroom?”
Without thinking, Cohen said, “Down the hall.”
Virgil quickly grabbed her attention. “Why can’t you tell us about Professor Quill right now? We know you had a relationship...”
“I really gotta...” Capslock was moving down the hall, and when Cohen saw him pass the first door on the right, she called out, “Hey, not that one...”
But Capslock had popped the farthest of the three doors, and now he stepped back, looked at Virgil, and said, “Oh my God. This is awful.”
“Get out of there,” Cohen screamed.
“I can’t just leave—the poor guy might be in desperate trouble here,” Capslock said. And, “Virgil, do you have a pocketknife? We have to free the victim.”
“He’s not a victim,” Cohen shouted. “This is adult consensual sex.”
Virgil walked down the hall, Cohen tagging anxiously behind him, and looked in the bedroom door: a large man—a fat man—pink in color, with fine skin resembling a baby’s, was on the bed, nude, gagged, trussed up like an Easter ham, ropes to all four corners of the bed to hold him in place with his ass up in the air. A box of battery-powered sex toys sat on the bed beside him.
Virgil said, “Excuse me, Del, but I can’t look at this.”
“I don’t want to, but we can’t let the guy die,” Capslock said.To the man on the bed he said, “If you’re okay, wiggle your fingers.”
The man wiggled his fingers.
“All right, then. We’ll leave the door open. You develop a problem, just yell.”
“He’s gagged, Del,” Virgil said. “He can’t yell.”
Capslock turned back to the man. “If you get in trouble, make some of those strangle sounds. We’ll hear you.”
