Chapter 8

I woke up at seven the next morning, which is unheard of for me, and I was too excited to get back to sleep. I lay in bed, smiling at the ceiling, luxuriating in my good fortune.

Fifty thousand dollars, tax free. That was almost five years rent on my apartment. Seventeen years rent on my office. Twenty-five hundred lap dances. You get the idea.

I got up and took a quick shower. When I was done, it was still too early to call Tina Callahan on a Sunday morning. I made myself some scrambled eggs, and as I was finishing them up, I remembered the other tapes I had found in Cahn's hidey-hole.

Curious, I took the box out of my safe and brought it into the living room. I selected one of the tapes with the cryptic handwritten labels and popped it into the VCR.

The tape started immediately - a girl was sitting on a couch, fidgeting nervously. It was obviously an amateur video, but pretty good quality. The camera was steady, probably on a tripod, and the lighting was decent. The girl didn't really look like someone you would select for a porno film. She had a round, uninteresting face, and a painfully thin body. She kept running her hand mechanically through her stringy brown hair, as if she had recently read a book on flirting. Her legs stuck out from her short skirt like pipe cleaners. The most enticing way to describe her, from a porno point of view, would be "barely legal."

A man standing behind the camera started asking her questions. The interview format reminded me of a wildly popular series of adult videos featuring young women having sex on camera, supposedly for the first time, in a set that looked like a truck driver's living room.

After establishing that the girl was nineteen, liked sex, and didn't have a boyfriend, the questions got a little more interesting. Here's a sample:

Man: "Do you consider yourself kinky?"
Girl: "Um ... yeah, I guess."
Man: "Have you ever been tied up?"
Girl: "Yeah, I went out with a guy that liked to tie me up."
Man: "And you liked it?"
Girl: (shrugs) "It was OK. Yeah."
Man: "What would he do to you while you were tied up?"
Girl: "You know ... have sex with me. Spank me a little."
Man: "Great, great. So you understand what we're going to do today?"
Girl: (Glances nervously to the side at something off camera.) "Yeah."
Man: "Why don't you take off your clothes, and let me see your body."

The girl stood up and mechanically removed her clothes. The male voice behind the camera - I was thinking of him as George Cahn, but of course I didn't know that - lied to her about what a great body she had. Then the screen turned blue for a few seconds, and when the picture came back the girl had been placed into a mediaeval-looking wooden device which I believed was called a "stocks."

Her neck and wrists were held firmly in place by a single long board which had three holes of the appropriate size, so that her head and hands protruded on one side, and the rest of her body on the other. The board was mounted on its side on top of a sawhorse, so that the girl was bent over sharply at the waist. Her ankles were held apart by a pair of cuffs attached to a metal bar about three feet long. It was hard to imagine a more helpless and exposed position, which, of course, was the point.

What happened next was not very pleasant to watch, although I know there are people who would disagree. The man behind the camera stepped out into view and spent the next hour or so whipping, paddling, pinching, and sodomizing the girl. There was no cameraman. Instead, the man would just move the camera and tripod to a different location every once in a while. I still didn't know if it was George Cahn, because he was wearing a leather hood that covered everything but his eyes and mouth, but the body type seemed to match the man I had seen in all the pictures.

Whether it was consensual or not was difficult to tell. Sometimes the girl would scream for him to stop what he was doing and let her out, and the man would talk to her in a low, reassuring voice for a few minutes, and the girl would calm down. The guy would then pick up where he left off, and a few minutes later she would be screaming again. I found myself mesmerized, unable to look away or fast-forward, and yet hating myself for watching. My best guess is that Cahn had promised to pay the girl a generous bonus if she successfully survived all the pain and indignity he wanted to inflict.

The man finally finished up by coming in the girl's ass, treating the viewer to a lingering close-up shot of his semen oozing out of her red, swollen anus. There was a jump, and then Cahn inflicted the final indignity, pissing all over the girl's face and hair while she screamed thrashed and swore at him.

The final scene on the tape was, in a sense, the most shocking. Cahn, without the hood, and the girl were sitting in his outdoor hot tub, drinking beer out bottles and chatting like old friends. At one point the girl stood up, displaying the fresh red stripes across her thighs and stomach, and they both laughed. I got up and turned off the tape, feeling like I had been tricked somehow.

I looked at the rest of the tapes briefly - they were all of a similar nature. Young girls, perhaps underage, submitting to a variety of vicious and humiliating indignities.

I had a sudden desire to talk to Tina Callahan. I put the tapes back in my safe and called her. The phone was busy, and I was transferred to her voice mail. I left a brief message and hung up. Just hearing her voice on the message caused some vivid flashbacks of the previous night.

I called back a few minutes later, got another busy signal, and hung up. On the spur of the moment, I decided to drive over to her place - after all, I knew she was home. I locked up carefully and got back in my van.

As I approached Tina's townhouse, she was backing her Honda out of her driveway. What I should have done, is tapped the horn as I came up behind her. Maybe I thought she would recognize my van in her mirror and stop. But she just accelerated away down the street. I kept going, and caught up with her at the next light, which was Linden - a busy commercial highway. I could have honked then, I suppose, but it would have been awkward communicating in the street. I was curious about where she was going. I was interested in Tina Callahan, and so I made the childish decision to follow her.

She turned right on Linden, and so did I. I figured she would be going to the supermarket, or to the mall, and I would just see her pull into the lot and keep going - no harm done. I had no intention of shadowing her through a department store or arranging a cute little coincidental meeting in front of the frozen peas.

But she went by a mall and a couple supermarkets, and a lot of other places that a woman might visit on a Sunday afternoon, and then we were in another residential neighborhood. The traffic thinned out, and I let a little more distance open up between us. When she pulled into the driveway of a yellow ranch with a neatly trimmed yard, I kept going and then parked on the street a good block away.

This would have been a really excellent time to turn around and go home, dignity more or less intact. Two things prevented it. The first was the way Tina was dressed, which I observed as she walked up to the front door. White overalls, the kind that are shorts on the bottom. Under that, a very brief bra top. A lot of skin was showing along the sides of the overalls. It wasn't as if she looked like a hooker, but it seemed a little scanty for visiting Mom and Dad, or shooting the breeze with a girlfriend. What clinched it for me was what she did after the front door opened. Instead of going inside, she went back to her car and got in. The garage door opened, and then closed behind her as soon as she drove inside.

I've got a few different uniforms in the back of my van - you've already heard about my pool-boy getup. For knocking on front doors to see who's home, you can't beat the brown UPS outfit. For general snooping around from the street, I might choose a versatile white short-sleeved dress shirt and tie. Add a clipboard and horn-rimmed glasses, and I'm taking a survey. Contort my face into a happy smile and carry a pack of leaflets, and I'm a religious proselytizer.

To poke around in one residential area, which is what the current situation called for, is tricky - it's always easier if you keep moving. I decided to be a meter reader - light-blue shirt, dark blue pants, heavy boots, a tool box, and a cap that said "SoCal Utility Co."

I selected a house on the next street over that had a backyard adjoining the yellow ranch Tina had gone into. I knocked on the front door, and when no one answered I went around to the back and located the meter. I picked the little padlock that secured the front panel and opened it up. None of the little dials were moving, which suggested that the occupants of the house were on vacation.

This is where it gets tricky, of course. As long as I was looking inside the meter box, I was well-nigh invisible, but I wasn't going to see anything that way. If I was staring into the next yard through a pair of binoculars, I would arouse well-founded suspicion. I looked over at the back of the yellow ranch. There was a large deck in back, reached by sliding glass doors, and windows on either side, probably kitchen and bedroom.

You have to get lucky in a situation like this. In the daytime, it's almost impossible to see into a house unless the windows are open. I was thinking about giving up, when the sliding glass door opened and Tina came out onto the deck, followed by an attractive, solidly-built brunette in her twenties. Both were wearing bikinis. They settled into a pair of chaise lounges, each with a drink in her hand. I kept my back to them, checking on them every few seconds out of the corner of my eye.