Part Five
Cheevers and his men watched the truck drive in and then drive out and they followed it and watched and waited. Nobody came. And they went back to the house and reported to a visibly disappointed Alissa. Cheevers himself marked the carton as it tumbled with the rest of the refuse from the back of the boxlike truck. It was not molested. Alissa chewed her knuckles and went ahead with the performance she’d slated for the evening. A private and very, very intimate concatenation between herself and Madame.
The hardest moment for Gorila occurred when he realized that the garbage truck was being watched, seriously watched for the first time since the new “owners” had set up shop. Something was badly off here. He’d dumped the garbage and seen the goons scrambling for position as he drove away. Maria had been made. He didn’t need the note to know that the time for any action was now.
Madame found herself stretched and strapped and, for all intents and purposes, glued to a low, broad, bench-like affair before the brazier. The program had begun to get rather depersonalized; guards had done the dirty work, not Alissa.
The guards left and Madame had the variable solace of being left to herself before the moment of slaughter, the instant of irrevocable demarcation and the patina that it would lend to her life from that time on. She shifted and pulled at the restraints and none of them would budge in the slightest, weeniest bit. Never had her skin borne the tiniest of blemishes, the merest of flaws. And now… Jesus Christ, now…
Alissa clacked into the room on boots astoundingly high and polished so that the yellow eye of the brazier was reflected back to her. Her expression was oddly unformed. Madame didn’t know what to make of that. The nebulous information conveyed by the bland looks didn’t stay her from a quick reconnoiter to the iron-racks, however, almost as if she had some last-minute doubts about the precise letter to be engraved into Madame’s hide. The “A” iron was still the one she picked up, finally. The little door was opened and the figured end of the rod disappeared into the glare inside.
Alissa pounded back and forth across the room, seeming to ignore the body bound to the table for her ministrations. Madame thought she might have something a bit weighty on her mind. The weightier the better, she thought.
Gorila had the place so well cased that he figured it would be something like sticking out your hand and plucking one grape out of the bunch to enter anywhere he chose. That was on the surface, and it was tempting, but for had never been a surface-dweller. There was a catch in there, somewhere. He’d find it. The man and the time he’d chosen almost on first impressions. Most of the time his first impressions, but that was still the surface.
There were six goons at the mansion, as far as Gorila could tell. If there were more than the six, they hid in the house like moles, so six it was. Figuring a normal eight-hour working day within a framework of round-the-clock security, that would logically mean that only two of the fuckers would necessarily be up and around. Two of the remaining four would probably be asleep, and the other two were probably either sleeping themselves, or off the grounds of fucking-off someplace.
One of the two guards on the early evening shift had a scrofulous old MGB parked in the underground garage and, true to its British heritage, brought to its owner an entirely new meaning to the word perverse. It had run on only one other occasion that Gorila knew about and he’d been close enough as the thing clanked by to see the half-relieved, half-smug expression on the driver’s face; an expression much seen on the visages of those who have a taste for masochism and English cars. A fanatic, Gorila thought. Poor bastard. And he’d made his choice on the spot.
Tonight, as usual, the boob was at it again, his upper body disappearing into the open engine bay as if the damned thing had eaten him. The goon’s “uniform” of casual clothes was hidden under the coveralls he’d worn since he’d gotten the car and which looked even more scroungy than the car. Bertram B. would not have appreciated the attention lavished on the car at the expense of the attention that should have been lavished on the fact that Gorila had just strolled in through the open garage door. He’d made sure that the other guard was watching his end of the house as he was supposed to, and then came calling on this one, who wasn’t.
Gorila bopped him with a wrench and dropped him down into the trench in the floor which served the place rather than a hoist. No hue and cry.
Gorila immediately spotted a small portable transmitter/receiver the guards used to talk to one another while they were on duty in the house, and the larger set for calling the cavalry when things got a bit rough. An innocuous black button set into a separate box next to the radio was probably some kind of panic-button. A sheet of cheap typing paper had been taped onto the wall over the radio and contained call signs and frequencies.
One of the abbreviated call signs attracted Gorila’s immediate attention; BBB. Someone had gone over it with a broad-tipped dye marker and drawn the transparent line clean over to frequency itself. It was the only such indicator on the sheet of paper and clearly said, “Call if you must, but you’d better have a damned good reason!” Interesting.
He picked up the guard’s keys and stole into the house. The other goons had to be accounted for. Quickly. The guard on the bottom of the grease rack stirred.
Mari again flew into the cell, propelled into the opposing wall with some enthusiasm by the same woman guard who’d brought her in the first time. Alissa ceased her pacing and glared at the girl, signaling to the guard with a jerk of her chin. The guard hauled Maria to her feet and banged her back into a corner of the room. Tears of rage and humiliation poured from Maria’s eyes and streaked her cheeks. She hated, despised herself for her weakness on the knob. Now the bitch knew about her and Gorila and that she worked for Madame. She couldn’t meet Madame’s eyes.
The guard was busy in the meantime. From rings at the sides of the corner, straps dangled and into these Maria was woven like a piece of cloth. Two heavy bands encircled her at waist and throat and pressed her into the angle of the corner, her arms crushed between her back and the juncture. Each knee was lifted to the level of her waist and banded into place against the cold stone so that she was left spread wide and vulnerable. Her ankles were then crossed and strapped together and pulled into the angle of the corner, under her bottom.
“I’m going to let you watch, you little twat,” Alissa threatened. “I’m going to show you exactly what’s coming to her.” She gestured over her shoulder toward Madame, “and then, to you.”
Maria’s whine was a tiny thing in the room, small but distinct. Alissa pressed a gleamy red nail into the doe-soft skin on Maria’s inner thighs to add to her point and to give Maria an exact indication of where she’d be getting the marks. The guard uttered an ill-covered snicker and went to stand by the door.
Alissa walked to the brazier and drew out the iron. A short plank of pine wood was leaning from the brazier’s stand onto the wall at an angle Alissa looked over the glowing end of the iron and then, with a quick movement of her arm, pressed the signature hard into the wood. There came to the listener’s ears the tiniest of sizzles and to their eyes the sight of acrid grey smoke spiraling up from the meeting.
Maria’s whine was more evident now, and Madame jerked her head away and bit her lip. Alissa gave the tow of them a nasty look from over her shoulder, then put the iron back into the furnace. The guard looked disappointed.
The guards downstairs in the prison section were all women, just as Maria had said. Gorila was pleased, but still tense. Three of them he’d already dispensed with, finding two of them asleep in their beds and ambushing one more as she walked down a hallway. This latter had been tougher than Gorila would have expected, but with his combination of speed, agility, and ineluctable strength, it was only seconds before she, too, joined her two sisters in a single, otherwise unoccupied cell.
In this, of all places, Gorila had expected, and encountered, absolutely no difficulty in obtaining restraints. The choice of the day happened to be sitting in a large cardboard box in the cell, and that was plasti-cuffs in the hundreds, neatly housed in clear plastic envelopes. Several dozens of the new disposable nylon/plastic gags were in a small box in with the cuffs. These were simple hollow pear-section plugs with straps identical to the plasti-cuffs sprouting from the forward edges. At the front edges of the gag, which would protrude slightly from the mouth, shallow grooves had been cast to accommodate teeth so that once forced into the mouth, the teeth would tend to snap down into the depressions and hold the plugs in place. Some of the gags came with the straps and some without. Gorila used the ones with both.
The last of the three women had kicked out savagely with her feet as Gorila had snared her and her scream for help was reduced to a muffled squawk when he popped the translucent pear into her mouth. The stiff side straps dangled around like a pair of thick whiskers as he threw her to the floor and pulled her arms behind her back. The lock serrations on the inside of the plastic band that bound her hands buzzed through the lock-block and the hard, sharp-edged strap dug into her wrists. He twisted around, then, and entrammeled her feet, she yelling into the gag and clawing at him with her tied hands all the while, leaving a couple of nasty gouges running down his back.
Irritated by this lack of affection and niggerdly show of cooperation, Gorila sat astride her arms and pulled another of the bands around her elbows and pulled till they touched one another. That little ploy visibly quieted her rejection. To assure it, he secured her wrists to her ankles with the last of the bands, hogtying her in the middle of the hall. Only then did he fasten the two bands attached to the sides of the gag. She glared up at him and panted, wincing once as the gag straps dug into her cheeks. Gro patted her on the head and then slung her over his shoulder, her feet and hands on top of his shoulder and the rest of her describing and attractive, but grunting, bow at his waist. Then he plopped her into the cell with her two girlfriends. It was then that he heard the scream.
###
Madame jerked and thrashed at the thick strapping. The iron was coming closer and closer and suddenly it touched, ever so lightly. Her scream was a wild tearing thing in the silence. Another scream of sympathy and fear, seeped its way through the wad in Maria’s mouth. Her eyes were as huge and wide as Madame’s. Alissa pulled the iron away, bending over the thigh to examine the touch. Light as it had been, the flesh was clearly imprinted with the big “A” and was already red and blistered. A real lasting brand had to be applied with some force and some waiting, she knew. She again poised the iron, directly over the mark. She smiled at Madame. It was a joy to be happy in one’s work.
Shed had eyes only for the job at hand and didn’t, thus, see the huge paw reach past the open door and pluck the last of her guards. She did, however, vaguely hear a small scuffling and then a decidedly solid thump. She glanced around the room, failing at first to notice that she was now alone with Madame and the still whining Maria. At first, she was nothing more than irked by the woman’s absence; the two slaves were well secured and she would need no real assistance. Still though…
“Gretchen?” she said, voice hard and authoritative. Silence. “Gretchen!” Her voice was now an admixture of command and a sneaking fear. Still nothing. Madame seemed unaware of anything other than that she was going to get another taste of the brand momentarily, but Maria had stopped her whining, Maria had noticed a couple of things. Alissa looked at her and walked over to the open door, the brand still in her hand.
As she began to peer around the sill, an enormous form filled the opening, huge and amorphous and moving fast. One hand reached under the brand and crushed her hand in his, her small fist disappearing completely within his grasp. The other grabbed her by the belt around her waist and bore her up straight off the floor and held her as one of his feet kicked hers out from beneath her. She was swept back onto the floor with her body flat to the surface. Her head cracked onto the tiles with a painful smack. Gorila! Here! The other guards!
Almost as if reading her thoughts, Gorila put his face to hers and growled, “All your helpers have been taken care of, little slave.” He pried the iron out of her hand and threw it across the floor then dragged her back to her feet and pushed her across the room and into the corner by Maria.
“Untie her. Quick.”
Alissa stood wither mouth open, eyes blank as Gorila turned to Madame. He saw her still gawking and picking up the iron, still hot to the touch but no longer glowing, and jammed it into the rounded leather-covered bottom that was half turned to him. Alissa yelped and jumped away as the hid burned away from the iron.
“I said move, little slave. Now.”
Alissa turned and began tugging at Maria’s bindings.
Gorila gazed at the “A” tentatively burned into Madame’s skin and felt a kind of empty despair at its ugliness, but at least it had a chance of heling up into healthy invisibility and for that, at least, he could be happy. He released Madame carefully, solicitously, but with disarming speed, nonetheless. He had dallied long enough and he remembered bleakly that he had done nothing to secure the first guard in the garage.
Madame seemed in a daze and was flaccid to his touch as he helped her up off the table. The shock of the pain and the speed of the turn of her situation had her punchy. As usual, though, ti took her little time to begin stabilizing. The Madame of yore and olde began to manifest herself.
After assuring herself that the apparition that stood before her was indeed Gorila, she turned to Maria, now down from the wall and standing behind Alissa, now suddenly very meek and mild-mannered with her eyes cast to the ground. Gorila stood between her and the door, but she showed no tendency toward moving.
“Where to?” Madame asked, voice flat. Gorila fidgeted and rubbed his face.
“Almost anyplace but here, but…”
“What?” Madame said, turning to face him.
“As crazy as this might sound, it might be better if we try to get together with Hall… maybe try to work out something so that we can work like some kind of team…” Madame made a face and thought about it and then slowly nodded, still watching Gorila. “The only thing is I don’t know where the hell she is…”
“She does,” Madame finished for him, nodding toward Alissa. Alissa seemed to shrink a couple of inches, standing there. “And I think that with a little prodding and poking…”
“Or maybe just a little hanging around!” Maria interjected. “You know just what I mean, don’t you, bitch!”
“We might coax our rebellious little slave to draw us the nicest map, Madame continued. She walked slowly to the discarded iron and picked it up. “I wonder if there’s a letter “M” around here some place…?”
“I’ll tell you,” Alissa surrendered, her voice so soft that one had to strain to the ears to hear it.
“I’ll tell you.”
“A great pity,” Madame said. She’d found her letter “M”. “A genuine shame.”
The whole crowd of them stumped up the stairs leading to the main house. Gorila had introduced Alissa to the joys of the plasti-cuffs downstairs and she stood with her arms pulled hard behind her back, her small breast jutting. Maria walked beside her with a long rope of Alissa’s hair in one hand like a leash. Her ankles were presently unfettered, but surrounded by three people as she was, kicking would produce more pain than pleasure.
Gorila held them up at the head of the stairs, pausing with his hand on the doorknob. He looked back at Maria. “Gag her. Tight.”
Maria instantly did as she was told. The plastic pear was the biggest she had been able to find and it was an agonizing stretch for Alissa to get her mouth around it; her teeth clicked almost mechanically into the slots. There was no way she’d ever be able to spit it out. It was a long time since she’d warn a gag; nothing had changed. Maria locked the device more firmly into Alissa’s mouth with the two side-bands pulled into face-squeezing tightness. Over this, finally, went a heavily padded face mask of foam-filled leather.
When it was buckled into place, Gorila took his gaze from her and slowly, cautiously pried open the door. He looked out, gradually swinging the door further and further open. Nothing.
###
The door to the garage was open! Gorila knew it! The little bastard had recovered from the conk on the head. He could just barely make out the sound of the man’s voice talking.
Gorila could hear no reply. The radio! He motioned the women to stay back and he glided up to the door like a shark.
“No, goddamnit, I just came to, for Christ’s sake… No, no, I haven’t checked the goddamned place out yet, Simonds…. I tried that but I can’t raise Howards on the fuggin’ walkie-talkie. I can’t get hold of anybody else, either.”
“Bullshit! You call the old man, I sure as fuck ain’t!... Look asshole, I’m gonna check the house; whoever hit me didn’t take my gun. I’m going to check this out first, before I start hollering to Mr. Bertram!” there was another pause as the person on the other end of the connection said something and then the guard slammed down the mike with a clatter and picked up the Ingram machine gun. Gorila’s sharp little ears heard the brittle snickering as the bolt was pulled back. The guard’s muttered oaths almost covered it.
It was at this time that Gorila made a rather unpleasant discovery, his gun was gone. The little snubby .38 that fit right in his pocket. Only it wasn’t right in his pocket at all. Jesus Christ, he swore to himself, and his hands flashed around his pockets hoping that he’d merely dropped it into the wrong hole. No go. He must have lost it scuffling with those damned broads down in the basement. Fuck!
Light as a three-hundred-pound feather, he scampered back down the corridor to the women and bundled them back to the interior of the house, talking fast and low to Madame, who trotted at his side and kept still.
The guard slithered through the house like a snake, always with the gun’s stubby muzzle pointed to cover an arc in front of him. This was bad, bad, bad, fucking around with that miserable car and letting some sonofabitch just walk right in and bash him on the head.
The man lived in a genuine horror of pissing off the boss. He’d known the pilot of that helicopter that’d got ripped off by the broads and the rumors of what had happened to him subsequent to the event were rife and embellished and mostly true. The man bit down a scream of rage and id what he was supposed to have been doing when Gorila made his sly entrance earlier.
He heard a woman’s voice coming toward him and ducked behind a counter. The woman’s voice was accompanied by the sounds of more than one pair of feet and the odd soft sound a woman makes when she’s gagged and more than casually uncomfortable. The guard peered around the counter a little further.
Three women suddenly came into view on the other side of the room. The man instantly recognized the boss’s kid, all tied up like a Christmas package, with some kind of leather mask over her lower face. Alissa got herself shoved vigorously and she stumbled into the second of the three women, this one tiny and naked and tied up with some kind of thin red cord.
A wash cloth had been stuffed into her mouth and was held in place with what looked like a small towel. The tow of them went down in a pile.
The third woman was the one that really got the man’s attention, though. It was the tall brunette, the one who used to run the place. She was wearing what appeared to be one of the kinky uniforms that Alissa had her women guards wear, the uniform that always got him all hot and bothered on those few occasions that he got to see any of them. And she most definitely wasn’t tied up at all.
Madame slashed at the two on the floor with a short whip, with most of the blows ending up on Alissa. The other slave rolled adroitly away and tried to stand.
The guard glared at Madame, fuming. A goddamned broad had hit him. A fuckin’ woman! Now he regretted making that call to Simonds. Oh shit, did he ever regret making that call! And it was the boss’s kid getting her ass thrashed! And it was his fault that the broad had got out. But maybe not. It appeared that somehow the itch must have got free of the basement and then hit him over the head to clear the way (but how the hell did she get all the others!) and was just now trying to get away for real with Alissa.
It didn’t work and he knew it even as he thought it, but they were now right on top of him and it was all he had. He jumped out from behind the counter and leveled the gun at the woman.
“Hold it!” Madame froze on the spot, her eyes widening.
“Drop the whip!” it clattered onto the ground and the woman really looked scared and started backing away from him. Alissa was making wild sounds behind the gag and gesturing with her head, but the guard just thought she was being hysterical.
The woman kept inching away, her eyes huge and tearing, great gasps of fear wracking her body.
“Stop moving, goddamnit!” he snarled. The little slave ran to him and knelt at his feet, resting her bound face on the front of his thigh in gratitude and Alissa was turning red in the face with her stifled shouts and Madame kept getting further and further away, sniffling and shaking her head in terror. Fucking broads!
He kicked the small figure from him and walked out into the middle of the room shouting a Madame to stop moving or he’d shoot. She held out her hands to him piteously and begged him not to hurt her. The other slave began some garbled recitation behind her gag too, and the place was filled with the cacophony of a nuthouse. He almost wanted to put his hands over his ears. Jesus Christ, he couldn’t believe it!
He pounced on the woman, finally, and rolled her onto her stomach and handcuffed her. Her screams of fear hurt his ears and he cracked her across the side of the head with his hand and screamed at her to shut the fuck up. The broad was acting as crazy as Mr. Bertram’s little bitch! What the hell was going on?
Madame suddenly went wild beneath him, clawing at him from behind her back with her manacled hands, screaming full into his face and kicking at anything solid. One of her feet thumped into his groin perilously close to home and he finally, completely, lost what little temper he had left and began swinging. A solid left caught her on the side of the face and she slammed back onto the floor, but he had only just begun and cocked back his right as he lifted her head by the hair.
And he felt himself lifted right off the ground from behind and all of a sudden, the far wall of the study was getting very close very fast. And that was about all he was ever to remember of the whole shoddy escapade as he ended his short flight over the chairs and the coffee table. He didn’t even twitch when he finally hit the floor.
When the man had put down the gun, Gorila had finally elected to make his entrance from behind one of the gigantic wing chairs at the other side of the chamber. Ah, Madame the actress, he thought, she of the thousand-and-one small homey skills. Gorila dusted his hands and fetched out a handcuff key, then turned to his (mostly) admiring audience with a flourish. Time was wasting.
###
The trucks had been K5s like hers, Fanni thought. Two of ‘em off in the distance ghosting through the trees. And headed in the opposite direction, toward the cabin. She had been slightly closer to Grey’s place than to the cabin at the time. Her indecision was awful for a few minutes. Should she go back? She grabbed the microphone off its little hook and held the thing poised in front of her mouth with her thumb on the transmit button, but then held back.
If they were the bad guys, they could very possibly hear her transmission. If they were on the same channel. If they were listening at all. On the other hand, if they were nothing more than hunters, the call would be wasted, anyway. They were going awfully slowly and didn’t seem too familiar with the route they’d chosen.
Fanni stuck the mike back onto its hook and slammed the truck into gear and spun gravel and muck for fifty yards. She had to know what was going on at Grey’s. She would just have to trust to luck on those damnable trucks.
She parked well away from the buildings and slunk under the dripping trees into a tiny enclave surrounded by morose evergreens and brush. She snapped open the legs of the bipod and propped the HK on a sodden log and squinted through the sight. From here, she could see the entire clearing, and by spinning the concentric ring at the rear of the scope, she ran the magnification from three-power up to nine and slowly swung her circular field of view back and forth.
No people. No sign of the bike. A bilious green Chevy four-door added its dubious coloring to the grays and browns. A wan glow from one of old man Grey’s Colemans leaked through the front window. Lots of tire tracks. Nice and new, too.
Fanni pried the operating handle out from its hold-open notch by pulling it back and down and let the bolt slide forward slowly, looking in through the breech to make sure that it picked up a round off the top of the magazine, then let go of the handle and the bolt snapped forward and locked up with a very Germanic clank. Properly melodramatic enough for the most devout of fanatics, she thought. No wonder Daddy loved the fucker. She snapped the bipod back along the forearm and snuck closer to the clearing.
The house finally bulked before her. Her head never stopped turning; her eyes never ceased their darting. It would seem that there was nobody about. Or else they were very, very sneaky. She hoped for the former and suspected the latter.
The bush she was behind screened her from most of the immediate area, and it was but a short run it the side door of the place, hopefully left unlocked. She looked around again, listening for the faintest sound, the slightest anomaly. Nothing.
She sprang out from the bush and banged through the door in what was only a matter of seconds. It felt longer. It was warm and humid and close inside the store. Old Grey was only just now turning his head toward the commotion. Fanni scanned the interior of the place with two quick shakes of her head and was satisfied, but stayed in the shadows.
Old man Grey was finally up on his feet, peering at her. “Where are the two women who were here, Mr. Grey?”
“Hun? Who is that? Is that you, Miss Hall? I can’t see you too good back there.”
“The two women who were here, Mr. Grey<” Fanni bored on. “A black woman name Black, and an Asian named Ling. Where are they!”
“Oh! It is you, Miss Hall. Yup,” he said, straightening up and walking over to the grubby counter.
“The women, Mr. Grey!” the old man walked over a little closer to Fanni and finally noticed the lumpish rifle and the basilisk stare that flicked over him and the store and out the windows.
“Missed ‘em,” he said he smiled to himself and went on. “That’s the same thing I said to that little niggra gal that drove up here just after you’d left two days ago.” Fanni jerked at the information. Two days!
“What do you mean, ‘missed ‘em’?”
“Well, funny thing, that. The little niggra gal comes in here all het up ‘bout somethin’ to do with meetin’ you and then has to stay the night in one of mah cabins out there and then the next day, yer slant-eye friend shows up – say, she ain’t some Commie, is she? Never liked gooks mahself; and then she goes on down to meet her and then neither one of ‘em so much as takes a step outside the whole next day. Course, I can’t say as I blame ‘em much, the weather bein’ so bad and all.
“Then just a hour or so ago, these two fancy rigs pulls up in front of mah place and out hops this bunch of the meanest, orneriest lookin’ fellers I ever lays eyes on, and a couple of ‘em stays out in the middle of the parking lot and just looks around while the rest of ‘em goes into the cabins. Hell, lady, I was afraid to poke this old head o’ mine out the door, so I watched ‘em through the winders, like.
“Then the whole bunch of ‘em comes back out the cabin and piles into the trucks. Yer two friends was with ‘em and they wasn’t lookin’ too awful pleasured by the company. They wasn’t fightin’ or kickin’ like, but they sure as hell didn’t look none too happy about it, if ya know what I mean.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
Fanni snarled.
“Hell’s bells, lady, them dudes wasn’t doin’ nothin’ wrong that I could see. Besides, they was carrin’ enough guns for a army and by the time old Archy Crews coulda got up here in his constable’s car they’d a been long gone or maybe ‘a just shot him dead on the spot; Archy don’t even carry no gun no more! Anyway, they all took off up toward yer daddy’s cabin.”
“All of them?”
“Well, all but two of ‘em. They kinda snuck off into the woods down by the road.” Fanni snapped off the safety with a dull click.
As she did, a man, huge and bundled in a down-filled coat, smashed in through the door and ran right out into the middle of the store waving a pistol around. In the seconds that it took for his eyes to adjust to the relative dark and to see Fanni by the side door, she had swung the gun down at him and leaned forward, her left hand pushing down on the forearm just behind the front sight and her right arm pushing the stock tightly into her right side.
The man had a funny gleam in his eyes and a tight grin on his lips as he swung the pistol toward Fanni. He intended to shoot. The range was only about fifteen feet; he could hardly miss, but then again, neither could she.
She fired eight times; a burst of three, fractions of a second apart, then another group of three just as fast with a pause just long enough to get the gun back in battery for the second time, and then two shots and the gun had finally pushed her back onto one foot and she had to stop shooting or lose her balance completely and fall down.
The man with the pistol had caught at least five of the pills and was, as a fairly predictable result, not up to much more horsing around. In fact, he was, literally, shot to shit. Old man Grey dolefully regarded the three small, and five very much larger, holes in his wall. A conversation piece for the lonely winter months.
The man’s buddy running for the back door came to a screeching halt at the racket inside; somebody in there had a big gun. All of a sudden, his P-38 didn’t look like much more than a convincing water pistol. Shit. This wasn’t fair. A broad with an assault gun.
Fanni saw him before he saw her. His first warning of the wrath of God coming his way was the screech of the side door and the vision of the broad swinging a garganzo black thing to her shoulder with hi in mind and he ran for the trees like a rabbit.
Amazingly, she let him get behind an oak that must have been a couple of hundred years old. Emboldened by this, he stuck the pistol around the tree and popped off a couple of rounds. The response to this folly was instantaneous and truly spectacular to behold.
One of the few, but repeated, criticisms of the HK91/G3 rifle is that the bolt doesn’t stay open after the last show and the infantryman using it thus has no way of knowing whether or not he has anything left in the magazine. A similar criticism was leveled at the M16 in Vietnam. Canny veterans in Southeast Asia simply made sure that the last two or three rounds in the magazine were tracers, and when you saw the lights, your changed mags. Old Dad had gone one step further; they were all tracers. You were still left with the problem of no knowing when you were empty until the hammer clicked on a deserted chamber, but it sure made for a neat light show.
The man’s eyes were like saucers as a continuous roar of .308s bashed into the other side of the tree or howled past as iridescent red lines. If the things didn’t immediately hit a tree they seemed to go on and on forever, gradually dwindling into red dots. He thought he peed his pants.
All good things must eventually come to an end. The firing stopped and he heaved a sigh of relief only to freeze once more at the sound of the empty magazine hitting the floor and the metallic “snick” as a new one was inserted into the gun. Christ, she was reloading!”
He dropped his gun and bolted back into the woods. A job was a job, but this was ridiculous!
When she was sure he was ell and truly gone, Fanni pelted back to the truck and frantically grabbed the microphone. She got only static. The mountains or the weather or something. She couldn’t get through to the cabin!
She threw the gun into the passenger’s seat and drove as she had never driven before. She had to get back!
###
Suni chewed on the gag and jerked against the ropes. She was exhausted by the effort, but she had to keep on trying. They’d laced her into a cross-legged sitting position with her ankles pulled up almost to her face. Her corded wrists and arms were held in position by a rope that ran from them between her legs and up to meet her ankles as well. She couldn’t move an inch and howled into the packing in her mouth in frustration. She supposed that Alissa was similarly bound in the other truck.
The men who’d arrived at the cabin in the morning were some of the old man’s best shock troops and they were thorough to excess. She and Alissa had been laced like fishnets in the dingy little hovel by one of the men who appeared to specialize in restraints. They’d even been hobbled with a heavy, clear nylon fishing line as they were escorted to the waiting trucks.
Coats had been thrown over their shoulders to hide their bindings. The hobbles were uncovered, but largely invisible at any distance. There were no gags, but none were needed; if she attracted the Grey man’s attention, the killers would shoot him with no more qualms than they expend on a dog. And Alissa had enough horror for this time around. She just hoped there would be others. They were put into separate trucks, Suni in the lead to show the way. The bike was thrown into the second truck, and all signs of her having been there were erased.
Their only chance, their only chance would be Ian’s instincts and his uncanny knack for instantaneous right decisions under stress. That and the fact that the goons didn’t know of his existence; they hadn’t asked, and she sure as hell want about to volunteer. They had eyes and intentions only for Fanni and Dawnelle and herself.
She strained against the ropes again, wincing as the thin cords bit into her. And she had already been taken out of the picture. She realized. It was all up to them, now. All to them. Another moan of frustration filtered out from behind the gag.
