Chapter 8
MOOSE DROVE FOR PERHAPS HALF AN HOUR.
Trask was stiff, crouched on the floor in back, but again he paid no heed to discomfort. He tried to judge their location without being able to see out. He knew when they left the city by the change in traffic noises and the different tone when the motor noise no longer echoed from the buildings. He could see green through the side windows without sitting up. The road was smoother than the broken streets of town and then they made a right hand turn and the road was unpaved and crooked. Trask did not know much about the countryside around the city and he couldn't tell just where they were, but he knew that he would be able to drive back without undue difficulty, if he had to. It seemed likely that he would, one way or another. What he didn't know was what would happen to Moose. But he had a few ideas.
He didn't much like Moose.
Presently the car turned sharply and stopped. He heard Moose grunt as he shifted his bulk and got out. Then the front door slammed closed.
Trask waited for a few minutes and then he cautiously raised his eyes above the window.
They were parked in a driveway. Everything was very dark except for the little cabin beside which the driveway ran. There was one light there and a little gray smoke curled up from the chimney. Trees surrounded them and there were only a few stars in a dark sky. A breeze was drifting across the land, not very fast but cool.
Trask opened the door and got out. There was no other automobile in sight and no garage. He went around to the front of the car and lifted the hood. He looked around carefully before he put his head beneath. He didn't like that moment of being unable to see. But it was only a moment and then he put the rotor in his pocket. The car would not be leaving without him now.
He quietly approached the cabin.
Moose had gone onto the porch and rapped loudly at the wooden door. He waited. The light went out inside and he heard someone moving about.
The door opened a crack. "It's me," Moose, said.
The door opened more and Moose went in. After a moment the man who had opened the door turned the light on again. They were in the front room of the two room cabin. It was very crudely furnished. There was a picture of a naked woman pinned to one wall. The picture had been torn from a girlie magazine and had ragged edges. The girl wasn't pretty but she was professionally sexy with a pouty look and a body that had probably been very nice a few years before. The picture was the only spot of color in the room, a sad attempt to make the place habitable, tacked up long before.
The man was putting a gun away. He had a shoulder holster and was in his shirt sleeves. Moose always carried his gun in his pocket but this man was trying to be more professional about it. He looked professional. He looked dangerous, not mean like Moose, but coldly efficient.
He had a hawk nose and small eyes set close together so that he looked cross-eyed, as though he could not resist the temptation to look at his nose. The lips were thin and tight, the chin narrowed to a point. His hair was thin and swept straight back from a high rounded forehead. His ears lay flat against his face so that they were almost invisible from the front. His skin was blotchy but smooth. He looked as though he didn't have to shave more than once a week. He was very thin with long, delicate hands. His slacks were so tight that his knee-bulged through the material. His shoes were long and pointed.
"The girl all right. Spiro?" Moose asked
"Yeah."
Moose looked at him sharply. As sharply as was possible with his big, dull face
"You ain't touched her. Have you?"
"No, I did just like Arnold said. It was tempting, though When I had to take her out to the little house in back it got very tempting I had to watch, you know The boss said not to touch her but he also said to keep my eye on her. She sure looked out of place in an outhouse. She's got class, that dame."
Moose smiled. He was glad that she hadn't been touched. He wanted to be first.
"You know something?" Spiro said. "I think that she expected to be touched. I think that she wanted that. She doesn't act as though she's afraid at all, and when I was watching her in the toilet she kept smiling at me. I think she wouldn't mind that at all if we didn't have other orders."
"The orders are changed," Moose said.
Spiro raised his narrow eyebrows.
"What happened?"
"Her husband didn't pay."
"Well, well, well," Spiro said.
The boss said to let her know that we mean business and then to have her write another note asking for the money. He didn't say how to show that we meant business, though."
"That's up to us to decide, then."
"That's right," Moose said. "And I've got some ideas. I'm going to go first."
"Why should you?"
"Because I'm bigger than you, that's why." Spiro thought about this.
"Why not both at once?" he suggested. "Two could show how serious we are better than one."
"Yeah," Moose said. "Yeah, why not?" And they both smiled. "Where is she? In back?"
Spiro nodded. They moved to the door leading to the back room. Spiro opened it. The room was dark and the scent of perfume filled it. Good perfume.
Spiro snapped on the overhead light.
The girl was tied in a chair. Her hands were tied behind the chair and to the back, and her legs were tied to the chair legs. A few strands of rope were pulled tightly around her body too. But even in an uncomfortable position, or perhaps because of it, she looked very good.
And when the light came on she blinked.
And then she smiled.
She didn't look at all like a woman who had been kidnapped. Not at all. She looked as though she were enjoying the whole thing, in fact.
And she was.
She was a woman with strange ideas.
Her name was Susannah Audley and she was twenty years old and she was beautiful. She had knowing green eyes that practically shot off sparks, all fringed around with a thick tangle of black eyelashes. Her eyebrows were dark brown streaks over her eyes punctuating them.
Her forehead was high and smooth and her chestnut hair swooped down on one side in a thick glossy wing. Her hair was piled high on her head in a cluster of large, soft looking curls. It was thick, healthy, shiny hair and was just past shoulder length when it was let down. The curls were held with a gold plated barrette and a small gold clip held her hair at the side.
Her mouth was wide, but with rather thin lips that made it look knowing, like her eyes, and mocking too. It was a brilliant coral color and her lipstick matched her nail polish. Her hands were long with tapered fingers that looked as if they had never done a lick of work. Smooth, while hands with long oval nails painted coral. She wore a ring on her left hand, not a diamond engagement ring or anything of the sort, but a thin gold ring that looked more like a wire than a ring. It was so thin that it hardly showed if one were to glance at her hands casually.
Her neck was long and graceful and her shoulders were straight. There wasn't much else they could be under the circumstances. Her breasts were forced out, upright and firm swelling beneath the clinging material of her jersey. It was a metallic blue green color and accented her eyes and coloring. It didn't look as if she were wearing a brassiere beneath the jersey be cause the outline of her nipples was visible. If she wasn't wearing a brassiere, she had very good breasts indeed.
Beneath her breasts a rope was drawn tightly, holding her back to the chair. The rope was quite tight and held her ribs in. It restricted her breathing a bit, but it made her body look unbelievably slender with those swelling breasts and rounded, flaring hips and the tiny waist created only fractionally by the ropes that bound her to the chair.
Her legs were long and smooth with tapering ankles and small, delicate feet. Her shoes had been kicked off and lay in front of the chair. They were highheeled Italian leather sandals, the gold printing on the shank of the shoes gave the name of a shop in Milan. Her toenails, of course, matched the rest of her cosmetics and her feet were soft as though she had never done a great deal of walking for either fun or profit.
The slacks she wore were gold lame and were very tight. Her legs swelled the tops of her pant legs and her stomach domed gently under the material. She held her legs together, her ankles bound to the legs of the chair. They were growing red from the chafing of the ropes on her skin. Thinking of the marks they would leave rather excited her. They would be testimonial of her present bondage.
Susannah was enjoying it tremendously.
It was the most thrilling thing that had ever happened to her, and she was a girl who spent most of her life looking for thrills. It never occurred to her that there might be any danger. No one had ever hurt her and she could not conceive of it. Especially not with a man, or men. She had hurt men-it was one of the bigger thrills-but no man had hurt her, other than the small physical hurts that adds so much to love.
She had been kidnapped and had been in this cabin for three days now. It was all quite novel and the only thing that she regretted was that the man who was guarding her was so polite.
She had done everything to tempt him, and she could see how tempted he had been, especially on the trips to the outhouse when she left the door open. But he had resisted temptation thus far. She didn't like that, and now she wondered if they were coming to release her without ever having added to the thrill of abduction by the greater thrill of rape.
Susannah smiled at the two men as they came into the room. It was unnerving, even to them. They had never known that high class women behaved that way.
Susannah had always behaved that way, however.
When she was a child of eight or nine, her family had gone to their summer home at fashionable Lake Lazur. She had beguiled the grubby farmer's grubbier sons into taking her behind the barn for a peek into her panties. The farmer owned a fruit farm, the property of which was adjacent to the acreage of the Lake Lazur Residents' Association. The Audley cottage was the largest one of any of the Association's members. Mr. Audley was Association chairman.
The farmer's grubby sons were three in number and were between the ages of ten and fourteen. They were known throughout the area for having dirty minds and Association children were cautioned not to associate with them. It was said that they lurked just outside the boundaries lying in wait for unwary children. They had, in fact, snatched one of the young Millar boys, yanked his pants off and then dragged him through a patch of nettles after he had resisted their bullying advances.
And so the anxious parents cautioned their young against any contact with the filthy little beasts. But Susannah, of course, sought them out the first day she and her parents arrived at Lake Lazur. They were swimming naked in the lake down by the sandbar and she just happened to be going by and they just happened to see her, and she just casually mentioned that it was filthy-rotten minded of them to be swimming naked where young Association children might see them. And that she might just tell her father about it.
They were probably impressed by her if not by her threats, said if she didn't drop her drawers right away that they would take her behind the barn and drop them for her. She resisted, of course, and held out for the more exciting of the two. So they did take her behind the barn and they did take her panties off and then they took their Levi's off, after first having put them on to get from the water's edge to the barn. There was a general exhibition and inspection and the fourteen-year-old got quite excited and it was he who got inspected the most, much to his joy and delight. But Susannah saw to it that she got her share first.
That was her most interesting summer up until the time she was fourteen herself and lost her virginity in the fun house during an electrical storm. After that earlier summer the farmer was bought out by the Association and he and his grubby kids pulled up stakes. That was the last Susannah saw of them. Their farewells in the hayloft of the barn were most touching. A good deal of feeling went into them.
But after Susannah lost her virginity, things got much more lively. She thought that if she could get lots of practice and become real good at that, she'd be the most popular girl in school. So she set out to find partners with which to practice. One was a man of about thirty who knew everything and taught her a lot. She was grateful to him and used to tell him about all her other affairs in great detail, after which he would reward her with another lesson. She was friends with this man for a few years and their friendship seemed to be mutually advantageous.
After a while, it seemed that the boys in her own class at school were getting to the age of being interested in girls and Susannah was of particular interest to them. She had felt very superior when she had taken three of them into the music department's practice room during lunch time one day. She had been so successful that day, she decided that she should hold instruction classes. The boys obviously needed instruction. And what's more, she'd do it for the pure love of teaching.
Hardly a day went by that she didn't have a nervously anxious pupil, awaiting the beginning of today's lesson. This went on for several months, and then Susannah tired of the game. She had decided that there was no more thrill in it. She hadn't been discovered by the school authorities, although the guidance counselor had called her in twice and had given her what she thought was a rather strong lecture on the importance of self-respect and personal integrity and responsibility, and had made vague allusions to rumors that were circulating among the students concerning some sort of a school.
She cautioned Susannah that no instruction was to be given on school property that wasn't first approved by the State Education Department, and that violation of this might invoke serious penalties. And so Susannah, having tired of the game anyway, searched for greater thrills in greener pastures.
Her search led her to the bars and taverns of the other side of town. She used to invent friends with which to spend long evenings, and joined imaginary clubs which met twice a week, and so she accounted to her parents for her time. All they seemed to demand was a plausible excuse. Or perhaps they really believed her. At any rate, they didn't interfere with her social life.
She never went anywhere where she might run into anybody who knew her family. She went to bars where there were mostly men of a middle income bracket, quiet men who would be thrilled at the prospect of going to bed with a young and attractive and above all, willing girl. Not all the men she met in the bars were like this. Some of them were in a higher income range, but a lower one socially, namely the hoodlum element, the higher-ups to be exact, as opposed to the men who actually did the work.
There weren't too many of these that Susannah had slept with, but there were a few. She took pains that they shouldn't know whose daughter she was. She imagined the embarrassment that would be hers if she were kidnapped and her father had investigated and found out what she had been up to.
Her father was a man with pretentions to untarnished morality and perhaps that was why Susannah had rebelled. Not that he was particularly pious, although he was a member of All Souls Episcopal Church and contributed generously to their appeals for funds. It was more the image of spotless respectability that he wished to promote. It was profitable to have an image like this and he made sure that his wife lived up to his high standards. Obviously, he was quite out of touch with Susannah.
And so she went out nearly every night and found a man. As soon as they got to know her in one bar, she would move on to the next. There were always free drinks and very few questions and sometimes she enjoyed what she was doing and sometimes she didn't. When she didn't she was cruel and sometimes nasty as she told the man with her that she loathed him, or that she had some horrible disease and wanted to give it to him because he was so loathsome. That usually cooled the ardor of the unwanted lover. Sometimes she had narrow escapes from dangerous men who would have done her grievous bodily injury had they been aware of the fact that she was going to get them to a hotel room and excite their passions and then reject them insultingly. Fortunately, they couldn't know this beforehand and so Susannah had her fun and they didn't even get a chance at the soothing balm of revenge.
With all this frantic running about at night it seemed only natural that her schoolwork would suffer. When it did. her father inquired as to the reasons for her low marks and was told that Susannah was less than conscientious about her work. Her father thought that the school must have been at fault since no daughter of his would behave in the way they had described.
He arranged for her to be sent to a private school with lower educational standards, but higher moral ones. This had no effect whatever on Susannah's moral deportment, and it was only a matter of days before she had discovered a way out of the school at night and was pursuing her hobby of picking up men in a nearby village tavern.
It didn't take the headmistress long to discover what was going on and straightaway told her father that unless Susannah mended her ways, she would be asked to leave the school.
Susannah went home for Easter vacation and found her father had fixed up a series of dates for her. He couldn't afford to have his reputation in the slightest way muddied because of an errant daughter, so he plotted another course of action. It was quite ingenious of him, though not exactly original. He planned to get her married off.
The prospect was the son of a less successful businessman, an associate, but a humbled one, of the Audley chain of enterprises. Mr. Audley had threatened that he would buy out, or if they wouldn't sell, starve out, the other business unless he received cooperation with his plan. His threats were unnecessary, as it turned out, because there was nothing the humbled associate liked better than the idea of getting close to the Audley chain. He liked the idea of marrying his son into the Audley money, too. It promised to be a practical match.
Richard Pomeroy wasn't actually handsome, but he wasn't ugly either. He dressed well in a collegiate style and was neat and had a self-contained look. He wasn't smug, though he had often been accused of it. His hair was dark blond and cut in a long crew cut. His eyes were rather too light a blue and his mouth a little too full to be handsome and manly. But his shoulders were wide and muscular from playing in various sports. It was too bad that his legs were also deficient in length. A man with an ugly face is fine if his body is well proportioned, but a man with short legs cannot be fine unless he has something to detract such as a handsome face.
Richard Pomeroy came to pick up Susannah for the first prearranged date and Susannah decided that he wasn't too bad. She had been suspicious of the way her father had been praising the fine, upstanding young man.
He had been described with nearly every flattering adjective in her father's vocabulary including such words as loyal, trust-worthy, up-and-coming and so forth. Susannah decided to find out for herself. When she appeared that first evening, she was wearing a low-cut dress that was embarrassingly tight in the hips. She was going to see for herself what sort of a man, if he was a man, this Richard Pomeroy was. Her father had kept calling him "that fine boy" and the mental picture that she constructed of the adjectives was of an exemplary eight-year-old with a head like a prizewinning beagle and a halo made of dollar bills. She was rather pleasantly surprised, though by no means impressed, with the fellow she met in the hall of her father's house.
They started out to go to an outdoor theater that was presenting a modern version of one of Aristophanes' comedies, but Susannah suggested that they go and have a drink first. Richard was very pleased with the suggestion. He hadn't bought the tickets, nor chosen the play in the first place. Susannah's father had done that, and neither Richard nor Susannah knew Aristophanes from airplanes.
They went to a bar on the right side of town and had three whiskies apiece, then bought a bag full of beer and went to a drive-in movie that was showin? God's Little Acre and Tobacco Road on a twin bill.
The pictures began and Susannah and Richard settled down in the front seat of his car and opened some beer, lighted cigarettes and began to watch the movie. It was all very innocent. Richard had been away at prep school while Susannah had been instructing all and sundry in the music rooms and so he knew nothing about her. He found out that night, though.
It had begun with the causally dropped comment that Griselda's breasts were bigger than Darling Jill's. Richard was taken aback by hearing his thoughts put into words by this girl he had only just met.
"Do you think Griselda's are bigger than mine?" she had asked, holding her dress open so that he could see to make the comparison properly.
After he had said that he thought they were, she took his hand and put it down the front of her dress. It inexpertly fumbled around but what he lacked in the finesse of love-making, he made up for in enthusiasm. She could see that once again she would have a willing, inexperienced pupil to instruct in the finer points. She was quite eager to begin.
She put her hand on him and he began to gather strength at her touch. She moved her hand on the outside of his clothing, and his body awakened. She put her hand past his clothing and asked him if he liked that. He was panting with excitement, nervousness and passion. He could scarcely answer her questions. She took his hand and put it under her skirt. The perspiration beaded on his forehead.
She lay back on the seat and pulled up her skirt. She wasn't wearing panties.
"Do you want to do things for me?" she asked him.
He shuddered in expectation and his breath sobbed out with the words.
"Could I ... really?" He could hardly believe his good fortune. He'd only done that with two other girls in his life and they had both cried and protested and then lay still as statues while he performed with a frenzied thrashing. His love life had been most unsatisfactory to date.
"Take your things off," she whispered as her hand stroked him and urged him on.
He fumbled with his buttons and tore the last two off in his haste. He kicked his shoes off and wriggled out of his trousers and shorts until he was sitting quite naked in his car, his bare buttocks sticking uncomfortably to the warm, smooth plastic seat cover. But he didn't notice the warmth, nor the stickness, nor the lights shining in his rear window, or anything. His whole being yearned toward the girl on the seat beside him.
She had taken off her dress and was sitting toward him with her breasts reaching out and she was asking him to do the most wonderful things.
"Touch my breasts," she said and he obeyed joyfully. His instruction had begun.
"Kiss them," she commanded and he wanted to with every fiber of his being.
She made him do things for her until she knew he could stand that no longer. She didn't let him know that she was ready, too, she wanted to make him ask for that, to beg her to allow him to get as near to her as man can get to woman. She sat still and let the fires of her body smoulder. She said nothing more and sat still.
For a while he fondled her, touching her breasts and putting his hand on her legs, and then he put his arms around her, forcing his body against hers. He lay her down on the seat. His muscles jumped and twitched, his breath was on her neck and breasts and he'd pushed himself against her. She still didn't respond, although she was burning with need.
"What's wrong?" he croaked.
"Ask me," she panted. "Just ask me."
"Let me love you," he almost shouted, and she accepted and his body crashed quickly. And again. She put her hands on his buttocks and held him as his thrashing body carried her to the heights. She could sense the spiraling, pulsating thrill building as he moved. Together they rose to dizzying heights, and then they crashed. Desire exploded and the fragments melted away.
Two weeks later they were married. It was a grand wedding. The bride's picture appeared three columns wide by half a page in the newspaper and the fashion writer went into rhapsodies about her wedding gown and the reception which was held after the ceremony to which many important people were invited.
Richard was thrilled and beamed and glowed at the slightest mention of how lucky she was. Everyone said they would be a devoted couple and that it was obvious that they were madly in love with each other.
Just three weeks later Susannah had an affair with the driver of the truck that brought their weekly supply of dinner wine. That was the first affair. Since the thrill of adultery was greater than premarital thrills, Susannah enjoyed that a great deal, even though the man had scaly elbows. She enjoyed it so much that she had an affair with the man who ran the bookstore on the corner. He had a scaly neck. But it was a start. After that it was a rare week that went by without some man or other sharing Richard's wife.
Richard wasn't particularly suspicious. In fact, he was very trusting. But Susannah was so obvious about the things that she did, and took so few pains to hide her actions, that after a while he began to wonder.
One night she came home (from visiting a girl friend, he had been led to believe) with her clothing torn, her hair disheveled, and her lipstick smeared. She was very drunk. She was so drunk that she thought it might be fun to tease her husband a little.
"Where have you been, darling?" he asked, trying to sound as unsuspicious as the situation would allow, without also sounding ridiculous.
"Making love," she said.
"Hen, hen," he said, nervously.
"What's so funny?"
"I thought you said, making love.'"
"I did. I got picked up in a bar and the guy took me in an alley in back. Ha, ha. He made me sit on an ashcan and he stood up. He was pretty good, though."
"Oh," said Richard Pomeroy.
In the morning Susannah remembered what she had confessed (it had been true) and she was a little nervous about meeting her husband at breakfast. She wondered whether she should deny it or justify it. However, she found that there was no reason to fear. Instead of being angry he acted very loving. She saw that he was trying to make her love him more so that she would not cheat on him again.
And she lost what little respect that she had had for her husband.
But she gained a new thrill. Telling her husband about her other lovers was a very exciting thing. And he did not do anything about it. Perhaps it excited him a bit too. Sometimes she told him a few details, sometimes she only hinted, sometimes she merely looked at him and laughed. She looked at him and laughed quite often wnen he was next to her, making love. But it only made Richard try all the harder. When Susannah came home after being with another man he was very passionate and these were the only times when she enjoyed sleeping with him. They had twin beds at first and after a while she made him move into a room of his own and she only let him come to her when she had a new lover to think about. Richard accepted it all with bowed head, as though it were his fault alone. Susannah when she thought about it, realized that she had made the perfect marriage for a woman with her desires.
Susannah was quite content with her life.