Stubborn few leaves still cling to branches against the cold wind blowing down from the peaks to the west. The young woman stands in the middle of the tree-lined street. The gun in her waistband is cold and uncomfortable. She stares at the old bookstore, Its name etched in crimson and gold lettering, on the storefront glass in the old neighborhood—MadBooks Unlimited. A chill runs up her spine despite the navy peacoat and red wool scarf wrapped close to her neck. The nip in the air has nothing to do with Autumn blowing in off the ridgeline of the Rockies. Nor the leaded skies hanging low over the century-old bungalows. The dread is as undeniable as the cemetery bones at the end of the lane. Cornsilk hair whisks about her eyes and catches at the corner of her mouth as she looks up and down the road for eyes who might recognize her. Should be no one with a memory of who she was. She bends forward, crosses the street blinking back watery eyes, sniffing back a runny nose from the brisk breeze. The scarf pulls tighter. The thought of the pig on the third floor she is here to see plays heavy in her head. But this is it. A meeting long overdue. Slowly she moves in the shadows of three-story red brick seemingly leaning eastward bloated with words, clauses, opinions, fact and fiction. MadBooks is primordial, once a saloon, once a bordello for decades serving the unwashed immoral degenerates, then a moth-eaten flophouse housing struggling families, crooks, grifters and deadbeats before her now infamous reputation of a university bookstore for law students. First editions, rare books and law publications are its mainstay as a bookhouse. But MadBooks is nothing of the kind. MadBooks serves as a nest for top brass of an untouchable crime syndicate. She stops at the steps, holds the cold handrail, looks up and remembers when MadBooks had been there for her as a law student. The hours in the stacks, alone, chasing a dream of becoming a legal scholar, a clean puritanical disciple of the law. Five years she slaved over the books before it happened. The late night she stumbled into a connected mob gathering with lawmen. She hesitates, almost turning back in fear of the memory. I must endure it now. Or never. She wipes her nose and stares back over her shoulder down the tree-lined street before entering the old cold vein of law siring crime, daring her to penetrate its bowels and face the serpent who had licked her underbelly, introduced her to desire and built a pleasure appetite for toe curling debauchery, shameless self-indulgence inside her. Overnight she had lost her sense of integrity and the will to . They had forced the deviance down her. It dwelled inside her now as she walks in. “Norton.” She groans at the pencil-necked nerd hunched over at the info desk. “Still here after all these years?” “Crap,” he muttered with a high shouldered toss in flamboyant perfection, barely bothering to look up. “Figured you’d be dead by now.” The dig was meant to hurt, as he flung himself back to the laptop. “Lennie in?” Working on a neck pimple the size of Guam Norton never looking up offered an upward middle-finger gesture. “Third floor,” he mumbled at his computer screen. She whispered, just soft enough, “Still a creep after all these years I see.” Norton peeks out from under goth horn rims, fondles his scrotum and gapes at the backside of the jeans gliding past. He licks at the corner of his lips and shoves a finger up at her ass climbing the steep stairs. “Still a bitch,” he mumbles just soft enough. The century-old building isn’t just ancient. The old gal has more than dust harbored in the pinched stairway, more than the creaky sway-back oak floors. She has endured her years with its brick and beams coated and recoated with awful memories chipped and marred, reviled and loved. She’s a whore soaked with human stain, tragedy, titillation, wretched fertilizations with hapless consequences. She winces with the awfulness of the place. She climbs, step by creaky step. Feeling the past emerging, tendrils snatching at her flesh, touching, clutching at her vulnerability, winding through her belly up into her throat. Whispering unintelligible yearnings, promises of things to come. Remembrances long forgotten coming back to focus. She coughs at the second -floor landing. Clutching her chest, she’s makes her way up the worn oak railing higher into the dusty old mess of a building. Panting, she reaches the 3rd floor landing and that famous sign on the doorway students had revered for years, still hangs there. She trembles. LAW BOOKS/PUBLICATIONS FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE ONLY ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK Close Door Behind You She pushes through to a spacious large room. A narrow hallway leads through what had once been bedrooms but now book stacks with volumes of cases dedicated to defense and prosecution of unspeakable crimes. Dark maniacal murders defined in disturbing detail. It’s cold and stuffy. She pulls her scarf closer. Somewhere an air filter hums softly. The third floor is clearly organized and clean. A stark contrast to the jumbled stacks managed by the creep downstairs. “Lennie,” she calls out. “Lennie, you in here?” Out steps a massive round body hunched forward in overalls. Large eyes in a face mottled and blotchy squinted in her direction. He shuffles closer, peering over the top of round spectacles perched on a bubble nose. Tufts of white hair framed long hairy ears. He licks his lips as he recognizes who it is in front of him. “Sarah, my darling. Never thought I’d see you again.” “You alone, Lennie?” “Uhh. Uhh, no. Killian’s back there. You remember him, don’t you?” “Yes, I sure do. Let’s go see him, why don’t we?” Downstairs, Norton is stacking books when he hears it. The unforgettable crack of what sounded like a gunshot from upstairs. He stops, arms full of books, and listens, thinking maybe he didn’t hear it correctly. The second and third blasts left no doubt. He drops the books, falls once, twice, losing his glasses in a disjointed run out the front door, and is down the sidewalk littered with yellow and red leaves.
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