~

The gun is cold and uncomfortable in her waistband. She stands alone in the middle of the street under a cathedral of magnificent ancient trees heavy with judgment. She stares at the name of the bookstore on the corner, etched in crimson and gold—MadBooks. It stands steadfast among the fading green, red, and yellow falling to the street as autumn and the breeze from the Rockies take a toll on the cold branches. It stares defiantly back at her.

A chill runs up her spine despite the navy peacoat and red wool scarf wrapped snug around her neck. It’s the fear she feels, not the nip in the air, nor the leaded skies hanging low over the century-old neighborhood bungalows. Her 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 she looks up and down the road for eyes that might still recognize her for who she once was.

Bending forward into the breeze, she crosses the street, blinking back watery eyes, sniffing a runny nose, pulling the scarf tighter. The thought of meeting the old pig on the third floor is terrifying, long overdue. Slowly, she passes through the trees and into the shadows of the three-story brick, hunched like a predator, its walls swollen with centuries of words, clauses, opinions, and unspoken crime.

MadBooks is primordial, a vessel of human desire and decay. Once a bawdy saloon, then a bordello for the unwashed and immoral, later a moth-eaten flophouse for struggling families, crooks, grifters, and deadbeats. Its walls have soaked up ambition and corruption alike. Now it reigns a university bookstore with an infamous reputation. It’s third floor bulging with first editions, rare books, and law publications chronicling unspeakable crimes—dark, maniacal murders defined in disturbing detail.

But the truth is not lost on Sarah. Madbooks is a Medusa serving as a nest for the top brass of an untouchable crime syndicate to meet and plot their vile undertakings.

She stops at the front steps, the handrail is cold as her heart. MadBooks had been there for her as a law student. The hours in the stacks she spent alone, chasing a dream of becoming a legal scholar, a clean, puritanical disciple of the law, dominated her life. For years, she slaved over the books before the night she stumbled into a clandestine gathering of the mob conniving with lawmen. She became their prey.

She hesitates. Thinks of turning back in fear of the memory.

You must endure it now, Sarah. Or never live it down.

She wipes her nose and stares over her shoulder, down the tree-lined street, before stepping into the artery of the city’s underbelly, daring her to sink into its bowels and face the serpent who had licked her underbelly, awakened desire, and built a ravenous appetite for toe-curling debauchery and shameless self-indulgence. That cold night, her integrity vanished, along with any will to obey her principles. Deviance forced its way into her, coiling, writhing, and breeding toxicity with every pulse of her life.

Inside, she loosens her jacket. “Norton.” She groans at the pencil-necked nerd hunched over the info desk. “Still here after all these years?”

“Crap,” he muttered with a high shouldered toss of flamboyant perfection, barely bothering to look up. “Figured you’d be dead by now.” He flings himself back to the laptop.

“Lennie in?”

Norton, working on a neck pimple the size of Guam, never looks up, offering a middle-finger gesture. “Third floor.”

She whispers, just soft enough, “Still a creep after all these years, I see.”

He peeks out from under goth horn rims, fondles his scrotum and gapes at the backside of her jeans gliding past. He licks 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 is more than ancient. Dust, grime, and tobacco smoke cling to her brick and beams like a clutched secret. In the pinched stairway and sway-backed oak floors, something human lingers—tragedy, desire, and wretched fertilizations with hapless consequences that never stay buried. She waits, knowing what happened here isn’t finished.”

Sarah winces at the awfulness of the place as she climbs creaky steps, one by one. The past emerges with every step, 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, like always. Remembrances long forgotten come back into focus.

At the second-floor landing, she stops to cough. Clutching her chest, she makes her way up the worn oak railing higher into the dusty old mess of the building. She reaches the 3rd-floor landing, panting, staring at that famous sign over the doorway.

LAW BOOKS/PUBLICATIONS FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE

ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK

Close Door Behind You

She pushes through into a spacious room. A narrow hallway leads through what had once been bedrooms but now stacks with volumes of dark and disturbing cases.

It’s cold and stuffy. She holds her jacket together and tightens her scarf. 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?”

No answer.

“Lennie?”

Out steps a massive, round body hunched forward in overalls. Large bulging eyes in a mottled and blotchy face. Squinting, he shuffles closer, peering over the top of round spectacles perched on a bubble nose. Tufts of white hair frame long, hairy ears. He licks his lips when he recognizes who is in front of him. “Sarah, my darling. Never thought I’d see you again.”

“You alone, Lennie?”

“Uhh. Uhh, no. You-know-who is back there. You remember him, don’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, I sure do. Of course I do. Let’s go see him, why don’t we?”

Downstairs, Norton, stacking books, hears it. The unforgettable crack of what sounds like a gunshot.

Did that come from upstairs?

He freezes, listening—praying he misheard. But the second and third blasts leave nothing to doubt. Books spill from his arms; he falls back, glasses skittering across the floor. He stumbles outside, falls, get’s up running full tilt, blind, graceless—into the leaf-strewn street, escaping not only for his life, but from the ruin he helped make—alone, unseen, and undeserving of grief.