Ah, there you are my little house, Fanni was thinking to herself as  another in a relatively consistent succession of small bushes and trees  blazed its splintery trail of The-Journey-to-and-From-Town; never a  particularly fastidious rider of the trails and byways, Fanni would  simply mow down anything smaller than herself and bounce off anything  bigger.  Inevitably a certain flittering process was brought into play;  certain hitherto silent parts of the brain-stem were speaking in most  forceful terms to the effect that the broad may be an out-and-out loon  but that house-sized boulders and redwoods were to be avoided  assiduously.  Most of the time.  Fanni spat out a few more pine needles  and lumped into the yard-like clearing before the cabin.

Bertram B.  Bertram.  The old man had a name, courtesy of some of  Suni’s cajolery on Dawnelle and armed with same, the task precipitating  the over the hill and through the woods dash had become to find out as  much as possible about the bad guys.  And Bertram B.  in particular.  No  phone in the cabin meant that it was off to Chas Grey’s  house/lodging/fleabag, depending on whether you were the owner of one of  the guests.

It had a phone, though, old and beaten and dog-gnawed, but it  worked.  And she’d been able to et through to Alissa.  And Alissa could  find out about anything.  For a price.  She would be at Chas’ place in a  few days with as much as she could find.

Fanni was pleased; finally, something seemed to be going right.  She  glanced around the clearing and bounced over to the Gazelle still  squatting under its tangle of branches.  Its windows were fogged with  condensation and great clear drops of water bombed form the tips of the  rotors.  The wind was coming up again, sodden and moaning through the  trees and rustling the branches stacked around the helicopter.  Fanni  wrapped her arms around herself and scurried toward the house.  Goddamn  weather.  The newest armies of raindrops were the size of marbles.

She ducked in the rear door, down a very short corridor from the main  room and out of sight of same and into the bathroom.  Suni would be  anxious to hear the news, but first things first and the first thing was  a shower.  She kicked her clothes into a heap by the door and then  stood and soaked till the steam was so thick she couldn’t see across the  room.  The clothes were probably ruined.

The bathroom opened directly onto the cabins single bedroom and she  strode into it naked and glowing and warm.  A little too warm, she  thought to herself.  Damn, Suni must love heat.  Jesus.

From beneath the closed door she could see the read and orange  flickering’s of what must be an immense blaze in the fireplace.  She’ll  burn the goddamn place down, Fanni thought, irritated.

The only things in the drawers were wool or thermal-insulated or  goose-down.  Not appropriate.  She moved to the other set of drawers and  rummaged around in the few bits and pieces of summer-weight gear she’d  brought up of the years and finally settled on the teensy leather  postage stamp of a bikini she’d worn several years before in Europe.   The straps even had wee gold buckles on them.  Fanni grinned to herself;  Suni’d get a good snicker out of this one.  She fitted herself into the  absurdly small bra, brushed her hear a couple of licks before the  mirror and turned to the door.

The fire was as big as she’d thought and Suni was curled directly in  front of it still wearing the heavy terry cloth robe.  Fanni shook her  head in faint awe and oly then noticed the figure dangling from the  ceiling in the corner.  It twisted slowly against the ropes that bound  it and moaned softly into the huge gag stuffed into its mouth.  The face  was blinded by a broad band of cloth over the eyes and the dark hear  was tied tightly back to the cord holding it off the floor.  A rope tied  around the belly dived deeply down into the crotch and emerged behind,  hidden, to hold the hands well into the buttocks.  Fanni walked closer.

“She’s been a bad girl?” it was more a statement than a question.   The figure in the chair shifted position slightly and said nothing.   Fanni was immediately in from of the figure, now.  Dark hair!  Dawnelle  was blond!  Instantly, as if running up from behind and suddenly  appearing at her shoulder, Fanni noticed the differences in stature  between she two women and the coloring of skin, subtle and hard to  define in the shifty light of the fire.  The figure was Suni.

“Oops,” Fanni froze, arms still crossed across her stomach.

“Oops is right, you dirty, rotten bitch!  And stupid, too.”   Dawnelle’s voice raged at her with a mixture of gloating and loathing.   Fanni’s eyes jerked around the room, hidden from Dawnelle’s searching or  place to jump to.  Nada.  Zilch.  Dawnelle had done her homework.  An  A+.

“if you make even the slightest move before I tell you to, I’ll  shoot.  Do you understand that?” the voice bordered on hysteria.  Fanni  nodded her head almost imperceptibly, Dawnelle was off the chair and  moving around behind her.  Suni seemed to be listing to the interchange,  although blindfolded and gagged as she was it was hard to tell.

A short piece of cord whipped into Fanni’s legs and dropped to the  floor at her feet.  She glanced down.  “Cross your ankles and tie ‘em  together.”  Fanni cautiously did as she was told, finding the thin hard  twine more by feel than with her eyes then, bending at both the waist  and at her knees, she carefully placed one ankle of then other and  circled them several times with the rope.

“I want it tight, bitch,” was the hissed command.

Fanni grimaced beneath the falls of her air and tugged the cord until  it bit into her legs and knotted it.  She then stood, awkward and  groping for her balance.

Another bit of cord, longer but no thicker, snaked through the air  and snared itself around her neck and shoulders.  “Tie your arms to your  sides, and I want that tighter than the rope on your feet!  Move!”

Dawnelle had already tied a loop into end of the cord.  Fanni draped  the rope around her back and pulled the ends tight around her arms and  sides with her hands and slipped the other end of the cord through the  loop and pulled it tight.  With her upper arms pinned down at her sides  it was difficult to tie off the loop, but she managed.  And it was  tighter than the banding on her ankles.

Dawnelle’s hands were hard and expert as thy jerked Fanni’s wrists  behind her back.  Fanni bit her lip against the pain of the rope burning  her arms as thy were shifted back but that pain was as nothing compared  to the searing bite of the cording on her wrists.  Dawnelle had  practice.  Lots of it.  Four turns went around the wrists and then  another four cinched the binding and Fanni’s hand were lost to her.

And there as more to come.

With a dry slithering susurration, the end of a stout line vaulted  the main beam running length of the ceiling and whacked back down onto  the floor.  Dawnelle pounced on it and dragged it to Fanni’s wrists and  wound it round and round into a balled knot.  She then got hold of the  other end and pulled down hard.

The rope around Fanni’s chest prevented her arms from lifting and so  all she could do was bend straight forward from the waist as her arms  were wrenched up and then higher still.

When Dawnelle finally tied off the bitter end of the rope, Fanni was  bent into a sharply inverted “V”.  already the backs of her knees were  on fire and her legs had begun to tremble.

Dawnelle delivered a vicious  kick to the poised and wholly vulnerable behind arrayed for her and  Fanni instantly lost what precarious balance she had maintained  throughout the development of this excruciating position and, in so  doing, put the full weight of her body into her arms and wrists.  The  pain was almost enough to make her scream and she thumped and bumped  around on her single leg with the two feet choking back the sobs.  There  was still more to come.

Dawnelle bundled Fanni’s mop of hair and laced more of the wire-thin  cord into it and then pulled the other end, and Fanni’s head, up and  back and tied it to the ceiling rope, where it laced her hands.  It was  another of those positions that are immediately intolerable but, as had  been the case earlier on at Madame’s place, tolerate was exactly what  she would have to do.  Fanni panted like a dog, the pain coming in  waves.  Suni could hear the pain but was immersed in her own private  hell: the rope running under her arms was slowly cutting her shoulders  from her body.  She bid down hard on the gag and endured.

Dawnelle let the robe slip to the floor in a soft bundle and  stretched like a cat, almost.  Her eyes glowed in the dark.  She walked  around the room, examining the walls and the fixtures, ignoring the two  women roped like packages.  She stopped at one of the windows and drew  little pictures in the condensation her breath produced.  The Gazelle  peered out at her.  She stared at it, then turned and walked to the  Chinese bitch.  Dawnelle thought she might well hum like some great  single-stringed musical instrument if she was plucked just right.

The afterglow she was experiencing was almost like after sex.  All  the fury was gone; all the banging at the walls finished.  It had quite  gone by the time the Asian had roped her to the chair and now, with the  tow women nicely dispatched, she sank into a kind of euphoria normally  reserved for an unusually devious ploy that worked her higher in the  structure of the old man’s business, or being personally present at the  death of an enemy.  She hadn’t got where she was by being stupid.  The  name of the game was power and stupid people didn’t get powerful.   Neither did unluck ones and here the euphoria ran into its snag; old  Bert didn’t like fuck-ups, no matter what the excuse.

First his factory gets blown to hell and gone and now this.  To say  that the old man was security conscious was to stretch euphemism to the  breaking point and she just plain knew too damned much.

On the one hand she could give herself a good pat on the back for  turning the tables on these two buffoons, but would that be enough?  The  old mand had considered her expendable the other night in the car, and  at the recurrence of that thought; of that ovoid grenade banging down  out of the rain with the old man’s hand behind it; she ground her teeth  and the old rage roiled to the surface.  She fought it back down.

Would it be enough to just snuff these tow fuckers or would he want  ‘em back alive and squirming?  None of it would be any good if he  suspected even for the least little bit that she’d compromised hem to  this pair.  His “special-action” people could wring anything our of  anybody and if the old man was suspicious, they’d sing any damned son he  wanted to hear.  You dirty, rotten stupid, stupid, stupid cunts, she  rages.  Everything she worked for gone.  Everything.  But maybe, just  maybe not.  If she ran, the old man’s paranoia would be confirmed and  she’d run the rest of her life.  She couldn’t even run to the cops; they  wouldn’t believe her in the first place and even if they did, her word  would be unsupported and they would be able to prove nothing.  Even now,  the old man was probably moving the stuff that she knew about.  Big  job, but possible.  But the whole thing would be unnecessary if she  could convince him, or if he killed her.  She’d wandered back before the  window.  She stared at the helicopter some more.

“Which one of you assholes flies that thing, just the Asian over  there of both of you?” Fanni’s pans were the only sound in the room.   Suni had stiffened at the question.  “I want an answer, honey buns, and  you’d better be producing it damned fast.”

“Both of us,” Fanni lied.  Could the woman not have heard Suni and she talking when they got away from the car?

“Then one of you is expendable,” Dawnelle purred more to herself than to the captives.

“You need two people to fly it,” Fanni lied again.  Fanni had very, very good ears.

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true.  Besides, there’s no place you can run and you must know  you can’t go back to him.  Not now.”  The last two words cam out in a  gasping rush; Fanni’s legs were beginning to fail her.

“Yes, slut, and I’ve got you to thank for that, don’t I?” Dawnelle  said, turning away from the window.  “In effect you’ve done me in rather  nicely.”  The germ of hope was still there, but fading as the truth of  what the woman was saying sank in, reinforcing her own fears and drawing  a black pall of the world.  Done for.  Fucked over good and  thoroughly.  The rage began again.  “One wonders what one might do to  repay in kind,” she snarled, bending and putting her mouth close to  Fanni’s ear.

“One wonders.”  The pistol had a soft kind of gleam in the feeble light from the window.

“Killing us isn’t going to help you, and you know it,” Fanni gasped.   “You don’t know where you are, the nearest people are fifteen miles  away over dirt trails, and you don’t know how to fly the helicopter.   Kill us, either one of use, and you’re stuck here.  For good.”  Fanni  thought she was going to lose consciousness in another few minutes.

“Who said anything about killing, honey?  Who said anything about killing?

Came a rattling and clanking from the kitchen and Dawnelle padded  back into the room with one of the Henckels’ paring knives.  A dull  flash of light in the room and the line holding Fanni in her embrace  with the ceiling bar snapped with an audible twang and she collapsed  with a thump onto the floor.  A stools piney legs dragged over the floor  and Dawnelle hopped up onto it and severed the rope holding Suni aloft  and she, too, clumped to the floor, her scream of pain and surprise  soaked up by the wadding still jammed as tightly as ever into her mouth.

“Who said anything about killing?” she said, arms akimbo and still perched on the stool.

She hopped down next to Suni, writhing slowly on the floor like a  worm and quickly hogtied her, then strode to Fanni and repeated the  process, embellishing the restraint with a white hiking sock stuffed  into Fanni’s mouth and the belt from the robe to hold the gag in place.

“I’ve got lots better ideas than that.”

Just at that moment, Fanni couldn’t have cared less.

Dawnelle stood, threw on some of the heavy clothes in the other room  and a raincoat and went out into the rain, slamming the door behind her.

Fanni rolled slightly to her side and turned her face to the door.   Movement of her head was possible but difficult and painful because of  the cord still holding her head up.  She tensed in the ropes and found  no slack.  She turned her head back the other way to Suni.  No movement  there at all.  Her wrists and elbows were tied with the same thin cord  that bound Fanni and she knew that efforts to undo the small hard knots  with her fingers would be useless.  The paring knife was sitting on the  linoleum counter top by the door, but with her ankles tied to her  wrists, there was no way to reach it.

At that moment, Dawnelle walked back into the cabin preceded by a  blast of rain-sodden air.  The ends of the raincoat flapped like wings.   The small cardboard box she’d brought with her plunked onto the counter  with the knife.  From it she produced several rolls of very broad black  plastic rope and great lengths of electrical wire wound onto spools.   Fanni had noticed the box dimly in the flight to the cabin but hadn’t  paid it much attention.  Dawnelle had obviously noticed it, too, and had  paid it considerable attention.  She gave Fanni a poisonous smirk and  began reeling off some of the wire and cutting it into short bits with a  small pair of wire-cutters.

She tended to Suni first, beginning with the tips of her fingers and  working upper her arms with windings of black tape, sealing her arms  into a gleaming cocoon.  She paused momentarily when the level of the  tape was just beneath the cords holding her elbows hard together and  snipped the lines apart with a scissors.  The marks of the ropes looked  as if they’d been branded into her skin.  The tape held her elbows just  as effectively.  The climbing and winding continued and when it was  through it was as if Suni wore a seamless single-sleeve from her fingers  to her upper arms.

The next stop was to cut and remove both the rope at her waist and  that dividing her crotch.  Dawnelle carefully cut the bonds first in  front and pulled them from Suni’s body, then snipped off the line where  it erupted from beneath the covering of tape over the ropes still on her  wrists.  More of the tape was wound around the hidden hands and then  pulled between the legs and pulled hard up her belly.  Never endowed  with much pubic hair in the first place, Suni looked to lose it all when  the tape was finally removed.  Dawnelle patted and smoothed as she  pulled and when she was done the strip of tape resembled some really  scandalous bikini for the new bathing year.  She stuck the tongue of the  tape up the center of Suni’s belly to just below her gracefully  indented navel, then carefully wound the end of the tape around a  crosspiece which she then wound around and around the girl’s waist,  duplicating in tape what had previously existed in rope.  Such a  craftsman, Fanni thought.  She eyed the coils of wire sitting next to  her as Dawnelle prepared to continue on Suni; it looked as if the latter  was going to get the better end of the deal.

Dawnelle wound poor Suni up like a mummy beginning at the waist band  and continuing up her rib cage, running the tape completely around her  arms in back and pinning them even more helplessly than they already  were.  When she had finally finished, just the tips of the dainty breast  were left exposed and the pressure of the yards of tape caused them to  jut like two soft fingers.

The feet were next, starting at the toes and continuing to the  ankles.  Dawnelle bent the legs double after that, digging Suni’s heels  into her bottom and ran a couple of turns of the tap clear around her  legs, holding them in that position.  More mummification, then, all the  way down to her knees.

The cloth gag and blindfold were ripped away then, the blindfold  first.  Suni’s eyes blinked like semaphores as she glared first up at a  smiling Dawnelle, then down at herself encased in the plastic and  finally over at Fanni lying on her belly with her hands and feet pulled  back to meet one another, mouth stuffed to overflowing with the dingy  sock.  As Suni’s gag fell away, she stretched her jaws and ran her  tongue over her lips and seemed on the point of saying something when  Dawnelle jammed first ne and then two large kitchen sponges into her  mouth.  Suni jerked and fought but the other woman merely stuffed harder  with both hands and got the whole enormous wad into Suni’s mouth in  what seemed to be only seconds.  A single turn of tape centered over the  stuffing held it in place.  Dawnelle shifted her tactics then, and  wound a number of turns of tape over the top of Suni’s head and wound  under her chin and then up again, forcing her to bite down harder and  harder on the sponges.  She used the last of the tape to form a broad  gleaming back band covering the whole of Suni’s lower face from just  below her nostrils to just above her chin.  Suni’s silence was to be  assured, come hell or high water.

Dawnelle stood up, dusted imaginary dust from her hands, and looked  toward Fanni as if saying, “It’s your turn, dummy.”  Which turned out to  be exactly the case.

The blonde kicked the little three-legged stool she’d so recently  used on Suni over to the center of the room directly under the ceiling  beam and stood up on it again.  She tied two short pieces of wire around  the beam about six feet apart and formed slip-loops in them with the  free end of the wire gangling stiff and hard out from the side.  She  then shoved the stool to a position below and centered between the two  loops and fetched a wooden chair and set beneath one of them.

Next, she cut the cord connecting Fanni’s hands to her ankles and  dragged her to her feet.  The hairline was still knotted hard and tight  and Fanni was forced to examine the ceiling as she stood.  Dawnelle then  hefted Fanni bodily onto the stool and braced her till she’d found her  balance.  Then, with Fanni desperately teetering back and forth on the  stool, she got a long piece of the wire and before Fanni’s ever wider  eyes fashioned a tight spiraled hangman’s noose and threw it over the  beam so that it bumped into Fanni’s shoulder.

Dawnelle finally cut the  hairline, then roughly jerked the loop larger and slipped it around  Fanni’s throat and drew it tight with the knot at the side of her head.   She walked around behind then and drew up the slack of the wire with a  brutal jerk, tightening the noose even more.

“Up on your toes.”

Fanni stretched for all she was worth, the noose a band of tightening  fire around her neck.  already there was a bussing in her ears.   Dawnelle tied off the rope and walked back around to stand in front of  Fanni.

“I’m going to untie your hands now, fool, and when they’re free, I  want you to put one hand in that loop,” she gestured to the wire loop at  Fanni’s right, “and the other hand in the other loop, like a good  little girl.  If you fuck around or try anything stupid, I’ll kick the  stool out from under you and you’ll hang yourself.  Understand?”

Fanni tried to nod her head, couldn’t and grunted a yes into the gag.  Yes, yes, yes!

Dawnelle stood on her chair and severed first the wrist cords and  then those on Fanni’s chest and stood back, expectant, wary, seeming  almost to hope for resistance.  Fanni could hardly feel her arms at all,  let alone her hands, but stuck them out and up, missing the loops  completely on the first shot, then steadying herself for the second  effort.  She turned her head against the fire of the noose and guided  one little paw into its slick black loop and instantly Dawnelle vised it  home around the wrist and knotted the knot.  The chair banged down on  the floor beneath the second and unoccupied loop.  Fanni turned to it  and surrendered her other hand to the restraint.  With a quick jerk, it  was down.

The next step in the process had Dawnelle tying each of Fanni’s  ankles separately, the long tails of the wires snaking off into the  dimness and over the oak flooring.  She walked away and secured the two  ends to stout vertical beams supporting the ceiling beam, drawing out  all the slack, and returned with the paring knife.  The cord holding  Fanni’s ankles together was cut and the paring knife returned to its  spot on the counter.  She loosened the noose just a fraction, returned  to stand in front of Fanni, gave her an appraising stare and pulled the  chair out from beneath Fanni’s feet.

The jolting pain in her wrists was unbelievable when she hit the end  of what little slack the loops possessed.  The noose around her neck  snapped her head off to the side; not quite enough slack.  The cord bit  into her neck under her chin and she sought frantically for the floor  with her toes, finding that she was able to attain the barest contact  with the wood; she wouldn’t strangle, but she wouldn’t be taking any  deep breaths.  She thought.

Dawnelle added the final crowning and ignominious touch to the  position, splaying Fanni wide and gaping with the ropes stretching away  from her ankles.  She pulled and jerked on each of the ropes, adjusting  Fanni until her torso was perfectly vertical and her legs formed a  gigantic inverted V.  her toes could no longer touch the floor and her  vision turned a grayish black shot with tiny stars that burst and  disappeared with noiseless pings.  As the grey faded into the  ever-deepening gloom of the encroaching blackness, Dawnelle loosed the  coil of rope around her throat and Fanni heaved and gulped at the air.   The noose was left still taut around her neck but she was no longer  strangling.

The blow, when it struck, was so intense, so terrifyingly unexpected,  that Fanni shrieked into the gag and she jerked in the wire’s grip.   Another excoriating blow and another muffled cry and tiny twitching and  minuscule turnings.  The total immobility of the position seemed to  exacerbate the pain further; she was denied even the psychological  succor of thrashing.  She couldn’t even throw her head with the noose  holding her neck stretched.  She clenched her teeth on the sock and  blinked her eyes at the pain and the tears.  It was all that Dawnelle  had left her.

And now, the beating switched to the front.  Dawnelle held a six-foot  length of hard bristly hemp rope that she’d soaked in a bucket of brine  after she’d strung poor Suni from the rafters.  Fanni looked with very  real and unaffected pleading into Dawnelle’s eyes and saw there a cold,  controlled fury that told her with a certainty that needed no words that  she might come out of this alive, but that she might regret not dying.   Dawnelle planted her feet, twisted back from her waist, the muscles  beneath the skin firm and supple, and brought the lash hissing out to  Fanni with the full force of her strength and the fury of her revenge.   It bit into Fanni’s belly just above the navel and wrapped around her  side like a snake, sinking almost out of sight into her skin.  Fanni’s  scream was a mindless thang.

Dawnelle stood, watching the purplish-red band spring instantly into  the tight skin, then examined her target speculatively and her eyes were  drawn to the juncture of the legs and its small patch of black curled  hair.  She hefted the rope and shifted her stance slight.

The front door banged open, admitting rain and light that sprang across the ceiling and the silhouetted shape of a man.

“Right, luv.  That’ll be enough of that for now.”  Suni uttered a  strange cry, made more so by all the sponge packed into her mouth and  Fanni fainted dead away.