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I followed him inside. The apartment was painted parrot green. Two fans droned away, airing it out. Even next to this individual, I preferred the indoors to the barbecue-like heat outside.

“Small,” the man said. “It’s hard for me to guarantee steady income. But I develop the photos at home and don’t need much else.”

The kitchen had been installed on the short side of an L-shape, whose long side was the living room. The man set his grocery bag on the counter. I wanted to run to the sink and soak my face, or take a ten-minute shower in cold water. On the kitchen table, next to a bowl with milk and cereal leftovers, lay two pieces of plaster, like the cracked shell of a walnut, and a hammer.

“Remodeling?” I asked.

The man stepped toward me, casting a sidelong glance at the hammer.

“I needed to bash something. Arms up, friend.”

I raised an eyebrow. He made a gesture like surrendering to the police. When I obliged, he patted down the underarms of my jacket, searching for holsters. He checked the sides of my belt, then stepped back and rubbed his chin.

I straightened my jacket.

“Your potential employers come armed?”

He moved past me into the living room.

“After they booked me, a guy tried to stab me. You never know.”

He led me to the back of the room, partitioned by an orange velvet curtain with patterns like something that might emerge under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms. He pulled the curtain aside. On a table, he had left two cameras, three plastic trays for soaking negatives, and a lamp fitted with a red bulb.

The man slid the curtain closed, plunging us into inky darkness. The fans droned like a generator. My stomach turned, and the hair on my forearms prickled. After two steps and the press of a button, the lamp’s bulb struggled to ignite like an old engine, then bathed us in fluorescent blood-red light. His blond hair, skin, and teeth, even his pupils, all took on the hue of a cartoon demon.

“I’ve gathered what I need in this nook,” he said. “The magic depends on how you treat women and on framing, and you can’t buy that. People like you just rent it for a while.”

He opened a cabinet. Inside were five albums stacked up.

“Want to take a look at this year’s work?”

“Sure.”

He pulled out the first album. The look on his profile hinted at the pride he took in showing it off. When he opened the album, I glimpsed three rows of photos per page: gorgeous faces emerging from beneath cascades of hair, voluptuous bodies posed in varying degrees of undress, all tinted red.

He snapped the album shut.

“We’ll need a different light.”

With the album tucked under one arm, he switched off the bulb, and slid the curtain open. The living room consisted of a coffee table he’d pushed against an old sofa and a wicker chair. He might have bought them at a flea market or salvaged them from a dump. Concert posters hung on the walls, including a stand-out shot of Hendrix in a fancy jacket, laughing as he held his guitar. Above the sofa, a poster of Kubrick’s take on Lolita: the close-up of a pale girl donning heart-shaped sunglasses and clutching a lollipop to her cherry lips.

I nodded toward the piece of furniture where he’d set up a Thorens TD-125 turntable. In the open space below were about twenty vinyl records in their sleeves. Atop the turntable lay a record sleeve showing a cloud of pink smoke escaping a subway entrance—an album by The Velvet Underground.

“Nice setup for that other hobby of yours.”

“Photography’s my job, but yeah, you can’t live without music. And there’s never been better music than now.”

He set the photo album down on the coffee table. I sat in the wicker chair, which creaked as though riddled with termites.

“You must be surprised,” the man said.

“No. I love music.”

“There’s no TV. My guests always bring it up. They need the box that tells them what to think.”

“That’s a point in your favor.”

The muscles around his eyes helped shape his smile.

“Something to drink? A beer?”

“As long as it comes out of the fridge, anything works.”

He walked away and turned the corner that concealed half the counter, the oven, and the refrigerator. One of the fans rotated toward me, cooling my face. On the piece of furniture opposite the couch, the man had stacked a dozen books. Now that I was calmly looking around, I read the titles on the spines: Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche, Parerga and Paralipomena by Schopenhauer, the Bible, Story of the Eye by Bataille, Down There by Huysmans.

I heard a drawer slide open, some utensils clatter, then the drawer slam shut. The man reappeared clutching two bottles by their necks, and a bottle opener. He slumped onto the sofa, in front of the photo album. With the opener, he popped the cap off his beer.

“One of the greatest sounds.”

He took a swig.

“And the best one?” I asked.

He wiped his lips and glanced aside.

“A secret.”

He tossed me the opener in a smooth arc. I opened my beer. As I drank, the bitter brew ran down my throat and settled in my stomach, cooling my insides the way flash floods scrub dry riverbeds.

The man opened the album halfway and turned it so we could both see. I studied the photographs, flipping through several pages. A blonde woman with cobalt eyes, nude and seated on a king-size bed, had tilted her face away from the camera in a calculated pose. A woman with wavy brown hair, kneeling on the bed, looked over her bare shoulder as though inviting the watcher; her half-lidded eyes suggested she might have been high. The same woman standing on the mattress or on a carpet, striking ballet poses. A necklace of wooden beads strung on a bronzed wire reached between her pale breasts. Another woman wore a salmon-colored blouse, and the ends of her hair flipped upward, mimicking the style shown in magazines and on TV. She was smiling as if mustering the courage to undress. The same woman leaned against a window that cast back her phantom-like reflection. She had slipped into a dress a size too big, and one strap had slid off her shoulder. Other photos caught this woman mid-conversation, her face suggesting she was talking to a friend. Another woman, her dyed-blonde hair tied into pigtails, knelt naked in front of the camera, looking up with the confidence of someone who knows her beauty. A woman silhouetted against an unlit spotlight had black hair streaked with glints of midnight blue, her gaze roaming the room as though familiarizing herself with her surroundings.

The sun washed out half the face of a little girl who was tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. A nude woman lay on the couch where the man was now seated. Huge headphones covered her ears, and her eyes were closed to listen more intently. A father, a boy, and a girl stood under a spray of water pouring from one of the Venice Beach showers, against the backdrop of the ocean and a lifeguard station. One photo captured a woman from her bangs down to the top of her breasts. She had rested her head on a pillow, and her lips glistened with moisture. A woman dressed as though she were out for a Saturday stroll posed shyly in front of blurred branches resembling a tattered curtain. The pigtailed girl, topless, sat in front of this apartment’s record collection, her hands pressed against her headphones. A series of pictures showed women in wet hair and swimsuits, outlined against water like molten metal where the sun had burned white holes.

I imagined these women living on for centuries. Wearing the same clothes and accessories, their skin immune to wrinkles, their expressions forever fresh. A secret community bound by the knowledge that they all once confronted the same camera lens. Perhaps I would find the bed, apart from the lights that had illuminated many of these shots, in whatever place the man and his aspiring model were heading to yesterday.

The man rubbed his chin as he nodded.

“Fascinating, isn’t it? How everyday life differs from those moments immersed in the ritual. The camera knows. If you saw many of these women on the street, you’d walk right by, but in the photos, they’re goddesses. And they’ll endure until the pictures turn to dust.”

I locked my eyes on his. When he noticed, he raised his brows. He tipped up his beer bottle and drank.

“How many of these women have you slept with?” I asked.

He laughed as he swallowed. After giving himself a thump on the chest, he bent forward, elbows on his thighs, and shot me a roguish smile.

“Trade secret. Pretty unprofessional of you to ask. But women open up to whoever makes them feel beautiful.”

I drank half my beer, swished the bitter liquid in my mouth, swallowed. I set the bottle next to the album and leaned back against the wicker chair.

“How many of these women are still alive?”

He gave me a once-over, imitating the way his future prey had scrutinized me yesterday, trying to figure out if I was joking.

“When they leave my studio, they vanish into the jungle.”

“You really don’t know if any of them dropped dead around the time they met you?”

He soured like a kid who just unwrapped the box for the game console he wanted, only to find socks inside.

“You drop remarks like you did yesterday. I get your perspective, but airing it is pointless. Do you think people want to stay close to someone who dredges up that stuff?”

“I don’t want them close. How many of these women walked into your studio, got photographed, and disappeared? How many families are searching for their daughters?”

His lips parted in a dark slit. His brow furrowed, and his face lost some of that California tan. He stood up straight. From his shirt pocket, he yanked out three fifty-dollar bills and slapped them onto the table.

“Your mind is twisted. I ignored the vibe you were giving off, but I should’ve refused the job the moment I realized who was offering it. Money corrupts—blinds you, blinds me too. Out. Don’t ever contact me again or show your face around here.”

“I’m staying for now.”

He held his breath, closing the fingers of his right hand on his knee so hard that his knuckles pressed white against the fabric.

“You think you can stay when I forbid it?”

“I’ll say what I have to say and then leave.”

The man squared his shoulders. His right fist trembled. A tendon in his neck bulged like a strip of wood.

I primed my muscles, bracing for an attack. While my gaze held his, I also kept an eye on the edges of my vision in case he reached for a weapon.

“Yesterday, July 16, 1977, you followed little Cassie June—doe-eyed Cassie—while she skated home. Maybe you smiled when you offered her a ride to spare her the heat and exhaustion. She trusted you. She got into a stranger’s car because you were kind enough to offer. She was raised to embrace life with a smile, to enjoy the rosy world inside her bubble, before that bubble popped and exposed her to the rancid air of adulthood. Cassie June. She belonged to a dance group with several school friends. Four days a week, she skated. She loved birds and had asked for books so she could learn to identify them. She loved spending afternoons at the beach. Sometimes, sitting on the rocks, she wrote in her journal. She wondered what lay on the far side of that mass of water, and kept saying how badly she wanted to find out.”

The man let one eyebrow drop. His fist unclenched, then tightened again as though trying to recall his anger. I didn’t let the rage quake my voice.

“But Cassie June got into your car. Instead of taking her home, you took her somewhere else. Maybe to your studio, where you shot many of the photos in this album. For two hours you raped her and sodomized her. When you were done, you strangled her until she was nearly unconscious—or with luck she passed out—and then you crushed her face with a hammer. You got rid of the corpse. It destroyed her family, obviously. When they woke up every morning, they remembered the midday they last saw Cassie, a scene that ate at them each night before they fell asleep.”

My red blindness faded as the pounding in my temples eased. The man was smiling like a TV host, a smile that said every hole he had to dodge was already paved over. He knew he had never picked up Cassie June in his Ford Thunderbird just as well as I knew he had—and thanks to me, the evidence for that knowledge was gone.

“You’ve made up one wild story,” he said.

I took another sip. The man did the same, tipping his bottle by fractions of an inch until the last drop trickled into his mouth.

“Those who knew Cassie remembered her as a beacon of joy,” I said. “She signed up for everything. She was inquisitive. Instinctively she got along with everyone she met, without hesitation or fear. The adults in her childhood listened to her, helped her. Whenever she needed them, they were there. People like her, with that innate trust and radiance, can make living in this world worthwhile. But Cassie believed a smiling stranger would drive her home, and that’s why you were able to rape and kill her. California and the West have turned into a hunting ground, open season all year round. If people knew what lurks in the dark, the diet of monsters like you, who would they trust? If Cassie had been afraid of strangers, if she had refused to get into strange cars, would she have been as happy? I don’t think so. Would she have been miserable? Maybe. She would have grown used to fear, to the myriad dangers it signals. But she’d still be alive. What does that mean?”

One fan blew a strand of the man’s hair aside. He looked at me like a blank sheet of paper, wanting to speak but unable to string words together, absently twisting his empty bottle.

“Not long ago, I questioned my role,” I said. “I could crush the trust of people like Cassie, scare them so they never get into strangers’ cars, never walk down dark alleys, never let a slick-talking man with a winning smile charm them. They’d learn they live in a sandpaper world, prowled by evil that would exploit their faith and innocence and grind them to the bone. Or I could keep them from discovering it. I could make sure that evil never reaches them—make sure they get into my car instead of the one behind me. They’d go on dancing, skating, sitting on those rocks by the beach, writing at sunset. Any stray bits of night would remain sedated beneath the anesthesia of their hope. Should I remove monsters like you so that these potential victims can go on living with a smile, still believing this world that almost devoured them is actually worth inhabiting? Is it better to stare into the abyss, or to look away and trust in humanity? Maybe those who see light everywhere must build the world they need, while people like me, the tar-smeared brethren, stand guard around the perimeter, making sure those who’ve drowned in tar don’t choke out that light. I followed that approach for years. And it worked, more or less. It saved thousands. But aside from sparing those people, what good am I really doing? I stand watch at the edges of the darkness, stopping the beasts from slipping into the glow of a streetlamp around which these bright-eyed souls flit. They learn they can let their guard down. They preach that self-defense is a vice or a sin, that monsters can be bought off or cured. I spare them the worst that might happen if they keep wearing those tinted glasses.”

The man reclined on the couch as he rubbed his eyelids, and snorted.

“You see,” I went on, “I found out by accident that this girl existed. I felt lost, torn from where I belonged, all while searching for the albums and classic movies that had bubbled into existence the last time I tangled with the timeline. Then I stumbled upon the news. They found Cassie June’s skeleton in the desert, stuffed in a rusted barrel under a pile of rocks. Usually I steer clear of news like that. The gallons of blood spilled in the darkness as I turn away corrode me, keep me up at night. But I read every article I could find about that girl. They described her life. They interviewed her family—whoever was left. I gathered every fact, every video, the court cases. Most people who heard the story during dinner might have lost their appetite for a minute, but what would that information do for them? They lock it away, forget it by the next day. They accept that the abyss has swallowed another sacrifice and are relieved it happened to someone else’s child. How could anyone keep walking burdened by the weight of so many injustices? Even I manage to let most of these stories pass right through me—otherwise, I might throw myself off a building. But that night, I was drowning in the black tide. Cassie’s murder stabbed me like a lance. I wanted to prevent it, to stop that trusting, life-loving girl from being snuffed out. A window of opportunity had opened, and if I’d refused to step through, I’d have to live knowing I could have saved her but instead swallowed a handful of sleeping pills, crawled into bed, and pulled the covers up to my forehead. I came back to get the job done and avoid Cassie’s ghost trailing after me to my grave.”

I paused for breath, but all the air had fled the apartment. The sunlight coming through the window had dimmed as though a translucent veil had wrapped my head. My body still sank into the wicker chair, but it felt like I was viewing the scene from a few yards beneath it, from the bottom of a pit. I spoke with effort, like cranking up some ancient, forgotten machine.

“It hit me, you know. The lack of meaning. We live for a handful of orbits around this star and then vanish. Some people, whether they deserve it or not, vanish much sooner, before they get to die in a bed surrounded by loved ones. Cassie’s life was cut short when she could have been spared. And that news story tied her to me, this irate beast. Merely annoyances and irritating noises stoke my anger until it boils over, and one day the flames might break out and burn this world to ashes. But my locomotive furnace devours that coal to plow into monsters like you. There have always been Cassies, and there will be more. Anyone you care about can die at any moment—I know that better than most because I live it week after week. It usually comes down to luck. Coincidence. Cassie’s luck was crossing your path. Your luck was crossing mine.”

---

Author’s note: this novella belongs to a self-published book titled Los reinos de brea (The Kingdoms of Tar), that released about ten years ago. I presented this scene to the writing course I was attending at the time, and those present were disturbed, even the instructor, who is a reasonably famous local mystery writer. I don’t think the scene is that impactful, but I’m glad to find out that I still like it after these many years.

The Deep Dive couple produced an interesting podcast about this part of the story: