<strong>Warning to my readers: What follows is brutal sadistic murder. </strong>
<em>There is little sexual content in this chapter and readers are free to skip ahead to Chapter 10. To avoid confusion later, note that Dave Shateel has a cut down and suppressed .22 rifle he calls "Whispering Death" and acquires one of his victim's Cadillac sedan.</em>
CHAPTER 9
8:29 PM Sunday, the Route Six News adult video store.
The Route Six News was by far the best local source for all your erotic needs. It had glossy magazines in cellophane wrappers in long ranks sorted by category, an equally impressive collection of VHS tapes, sex toys in hard plastic bubble packs, not so glossy swingers publications in a rotating rack by the door and private video booths in the back—tokens only, twelve for five dollars, no refunds.
Discreet parking available in the rear.
The sign on the door had said open ten in the morning until midnight Tuesday through Sunday. Besides the sign saying not to enter if you were offended by nudity or if you were under twenty-one, there was another sign saying attendant does not have access to the safe.
Steel pipe support pillars ran down the center of the store. The suspended ceiling tiles were stained and several were missing. The place had the sickly sweet cherry blossom smell as if a thousand Onans had spilled their seed upon the ground. Possibly more.
David Shateel felt right at home as he cased the place.
The clerk was a older bleached blonde woman with tattoos on her shoulders and upper arms. Her voice was gravelly from smoking. Dave knew this because she had rasped out "No access to the booth area without tokens buddy!" as he had started to wander back there. Dave had surrendered five bucks to buy a pack. After all, he'd get it back.
He passed a sign saying "NO loitering, ONE person per booth, it's the LAW.
Dave stepped into one of the booths to spend a token or two. It had a flimsy louvered door that didn't go all the way to the floor, like half the swinging saloon doors you see in westerns. There was homosexual graffiti all over the booth, even on the margins of the plexiglass guarding the small color TV from direct molestation. He put a token in the slot and hit a channel button at random. A digital counter set itself at one hundred and eighty and started counting down. A video of a cheap looking blonde teenager swallowing the sperm of a fat black man came on. The channel went dead for a full minute as the tape somewhere in the store reset. When it did, the scene showed the same teenager walk in through a door and begin to disrobe as the large black man's fingers probed and poked her body. Dave changed the channel to see a skinny white man sucking a biker's cock. Dave changed the channel again. A Japanese man with an inscrutable face was introducing his penis to the rectum of a darker Asian woman with a pained expression. They were on a beach somewhere and waves were washing up close. The video quality was surprisingly good. In the background you could see weird breast shaped mountains. Dave watched this for a while, feeding tokens every three minutes.
In the front of the shop he heard a clerk loudly protesting something about harassment. The tone sounded proforma and resigned. A man's voice answered in tone pitched to fill the whole place. "Relax, I'm just gonna count feet."
A flashlight beam wandered into the bottom or the booth and illuminated Dave's feet for three seconds and moved on. Dave peeked out to see the retreating back of a fat sheriff's deputy. In any booth where he didn't see feet, the deputy pushed the door open and flashed his light around the interior.
"Got another peephole in six!" he called to the clerk.
Dave noticed the walls of the booth he occupied were a patchwork of plaster, some repairs were very recent as in no phone numbers yet on their rough white surface offering blowjobs. Some of the patches were quite large.
