Chapter 8
The trailer was nearing the ocean. Still huddled in one dark corner of the big van, draped in her torn clothes, Sherry could smell the salt air. If anything it only added to the panic she had begun to feel when she first saw the four men climb out of the secret compartment in the floor of the trailer and learned that they were the ones who had robbed the bank of more than one million dollars.
During the long ride, she had learned a great many things about the robbery as well as about her husband's part in it, because the men talked freely about their caper, bragging about how easily and cleverly they'd pulled it off.
From what she could gather from their conversations, the whole idea of the robbery had been conceived in Ben's brain when he first came to Grano and found out that she worked in the bank. Without her even being aware of it, he had abstracted bits of information about the bank from her, until he had enough facts to go ahead and make plans.
Ben wasn't enough of an organizer to put the plan into effect, so he called in Gus Muggins, the man with the Yul Brynner hairdo. Gus was an old pal, from Ben's unsavory past, that included a stretch in reform school and a couple of turns in the state pen--about which Margo or Sherry had not even a suspicion.
Gus willingly took charge of the operation. His first move was to enlist Louie Kelso, who not only had pulled his share of bank robberies but who could operate every firearm in the arsenal from a BB rifle to a sub-machine gun. They'd have pulled the heist earlier except for the fact that Gus wanted Red Kling to work with them on the job.
"Red's the best damn nitro-man in the business," was the way Gus put it to Ben. "Whether it's a piggy bank or one of them underground vaults at Fort Knox, Red knows just the right amount of sauce to sprinkle on the tumblers, so the door'll open first crack. With Red handling the stuff, that inner door you say the bank has in its vault, will be a cinch to blow off. Without him--we run one hell of a risk."
Only hitch was, Red was sweating it out in the state hoosegow for armed robbery; had a couple of months of his three-year sentence to go before he'd be paroled. So they decided to wait until he was released. As it developed, it was the best thing that could have happened. Not only did it give Ben a chance to take that "eye-wash" job in the factory, directly across from the bank, so he could case operations, it also gave them a more lucrative target date. The exact time when there would be over a million dollars in the bank, instead of the few hundred thousand usually kept on hand.
As for Denny Price, the young faggot, he was included in the robbery because he could drive a getaway car as well as Red could blast open a safe. Besides that, he'd been Gus' caddy for the past couple of years, ever since he got out of stir, where he landed after being picked up behind the wheel of a hot car. Denny ran Gus' errands, cooked his meals, looked after his apartment and did everything else that the man with the shaved head required, including going down on him when he got hard up and didn't have the price to pay a girl to take care of his outsized phallus.
The one thing that Sherry hadn't been able to determine by the time that they reached their destination was what part she was to play in the setup. There was little doubt how they planned to use her at first. Gus had made it crystal clear that one of her initial tasks would be taking care of his sexual needs. After that, she undoubtedly would be required to accommodate each of the others. But what then? And why her?
Of course, she had one of the answers. She worked in the bank and even though she hadn't been aware of it at the time, Ben had pumped her continually about the bank's operations, until he knew almost as much about its workings and precise layout as she did. Innocently she'd told him everything he wanted to know, because she sincerely believed he was, as he said, interested in knowing all about her work.
But after he found out all those things, he very easily could have walked out on her. She had no hold on him. Why had he followed through and married her? Why had he brought her along to share her with four other men, on what was to have been their honeymoon? As Gus said with all the money they had, they could buy as many girls as they wanted. So why select her?
The more she tried to fathom it out, the further away from logic she seemed to drift. Somewhere in the days, or weeks, or maybe even the months ahead, she'd find out the answers. Although when she did, she had no idea what good they'd do her. All she knew at the moment, was that once more she'd given her love to a man and once again he'd let her down.
Sherry could feel the wheels of the trailer suddenly pull a little harder in the hard-packed sand and she knew they must be on the beach. The windows of the trailer were too high for her to see anything through them from her place on the floor, but she could hear the rhythmic roar of the ocean.
They rolled for several hundred yards more, then came to a halt. She knew they were finally there and her heart began to pump faster, fear taking over her brain.
Louie was the first one up off the floor and to the back door. He unlocked it, threw it open and jumped out. He took a moment to look up and down the beach, then announced, "Okay. All clear."
"Bring her out," Gus said to Red, as he followed Louie out of the trailer.
The man with the red hair grasped Sherry's arm and yanked her to her feet. As soon as she was standing, he slipped behind her and pressed against her buttocks. She could feel his hard-on through the thin material of her dress as he fitted it between her cheeks. Cupping her breasts in his two hands from behind, he massaged them, vigorously, as he whispered close to her ear, "I ain't had a woman in three years, Baby--am I ever gonna fuck the ass off you!"
She pulled away from him, hurried to the rear door and jumped out. Her heels sank into the sand and the sand spilled over into her pumps, so she stepped out of them. The wind blowing in strong off the ocean whipped her hair around like so many strands of fine silk and molded her thin dress to her body, deliciously.
Brushing the hair from in front of her face, Sherry looked to her right and to her left. As far as she could see in either direction was sandy beach. Here and there at a great distance apart was a beach house or bungalow, boarded up and deserted now, during the off-season.
Directly back of her were bluffs of jagged rocks that climbed several hundred feet into the air, sealing off the stretch of private beach below.
While ahead was the endless ribbon ocean, marked with white caps that followed the waves as they rolled up and crashed angrily on the sandy shore. A few of the houses, including the one in front of which the trailer had parked, had piers that extended on tall stilts several hundred feet out into the water. Obviously the site had been selected with great care and would make an ideal, natural hideout for as long as they cared to stay there.
"Okay," Gus bellowed above the roar of the surf. "Let's start unloading and getting this crap inside--so we can ditch this trailer."
As the others began taking the bags and cartons and boxes out of the trailer and setting them down on the sand, Ben came around from the front of the big van to join them.
"Take her inside," Gus said to Ben. "And see she keeps her yap shut."
Ben nodded and reached for Sherry's arm. But she drew it back rudely.
"I can manage myself--thank you," she said to him, icily. Then she picked up her shoes and walked a safe distance behind him toward the rear of the cottage.
When they got there, he took a key from his pocket, inserted it in the lock, turned it and pushed the door open. Sherry followed him inside.
She saw right away it wasn't really a cottage. It was more like a sprawling beach house with a half-a-dozen rooms that ran off in all different directions, each of the rooms, comfortably if not expensively furnished. But Sherry right now wasn't interested in the house or the furnishings, she wanted to hear from Ben. She wanted him to answer some of the questions tormenting her mind. But she got no satisfaction from him.
"If you're smart, you'll play nice and do what's expected of you," he told her.
"What is expected of me?" she wanted to know.
"You'll find out as you go along," he replied.
"You're actually going to just--turn me over to them?" she asked almost incredulously as she searched his big-boned face for a hoped-for denial.
He shrugged, unmoved. "That's how it was set up, that's how it's got to be."
"But I'm your wife!"
Still unperturbed. "Nothing I can do about it."
At that point, Gus and the others began bringing the stuff into the house. The bags of money first, which they all waited and watched stashed away in a secret compartment in one of the walls. When it was done, Gus turned to Ben as the other started to go.
"You better get your ass out there and lend a hand," the man with the shaved head said.
Ben wagged his blond head and left.
Gus stood a moment in the kitchen and ran lust-packed eyes upward over Sherry's legs, then her hips, finally coming to rest on her loosely contained breasts. Obviously he liked what he saw, but it didn't soften his feelings toward her.
"Ben says you ain't a bad cook," he remarked.
She met his gaze, unblinkingly, but made no answer.
"You're gonna have plenty of opportunity to prove it," he informed her. "In fact, you can start right now. We ain't even had breakfast. So start rustling us up some eats. You'll find everything you need in the boxes and crates."
When she didn't move quickly enough to satisfy him, his right hand whipped out and the flat of it caught her across the face. She went back several feet then shook her head and stared at him, as much in amazement as hurt.
"Let's get something straight, Sister," he growled at her. "When I tell you to do something, you shake your ass and do it--fast! Y'understand?"
She put a hand to the spot where he'd slapped her. It stung sharply.
"Y'understand?" he demanded, louder.
She wagged her head, fearfully.
Without further delay, she ripped open a couple of cartons, found the things she needed and started at once preparing a meal. By the time it was ready, everything had been brought in out of the trailer. Ben started to sit down at the table with the others. Gus halted him.
"Before you tie on the feedbag," Gus ordered, "You and Denny take the trailer some place and lose it."
"Where?" Ben asked.
"You said you cased up and down the coast before you rented this place, didn't you?" Gus demanded.
"Yen ..."
"Then run it off one of the cliffs, some place where nobody'll find it," Gus said, "We don't want anybody spotting it hanging around and start asking questions."
Ben didn't argue, he nodded to Denny and they both left.
Gus, Red and Louie broke out a couple of bottles of the hard stuff they'd brought along. Even though they might not have been drunk, by the time the food was ready, they were feeling pretty high.
"Okay, okay," Gus bellowed loudly at her, impatiently. "Let's get some of that goddam food on the table."
She hurried forward, a hot dish of hashed brown potatoes in one hand and a steaming platter of sliced ham and eggs in the other and placed them on the table.
As she drew back, Red grabbed her.
"I like my waitresses topless when they serve me," he declared and before she could stop him, he ripped her dress down the front and she was nude to the waist. Her beautiful white breasts stood out from her body, their scarlet points tastier-looking than anything she'd set before them on the table. She tried to reach the shreds of her dress to cover herself. But Louie's hands beat her to it and began working the dress down over her hips.
"For myself," Louie said, as he kept pulling the skirt of the dress lower and lower, "I go for the bottomless kind."
The next moment the dress was off and all that remained of Sherry's garments was her skimpy white panties. She tried to run away but the two men blocked her, while Gus sat across the table, stuffing food in his thick-lipped mouth and enjoying the performance.
"She may as well be bare-assed," Red said and off came her pants.
Lying naked before them on the floor of the trailer was one thing, but serving them their food in the nude was another. She could never remember feeling so degraded. There wasn't a square inch of her anatomy that wasn't blushing with humiliation and shame.
She made several attempts to get away but it was wasted effort. Each time they brought her back and passed her around for crude feels. So she decided the lesser of the evils was to try to forget she was nude and get their meal over with as quickly and painlessly as possible. Only it didn't work out that way.
Each time she passed close to them, they'd wipe their hands on her pubic hair as if it were a napkin, make her dip her nipples in their drinks under the pretext of "sweetening it", they slapped and pinched her buttocks a bright pink and did just about every other vulgar thing they could to her.
Louie acted the most depraved of the three of them He had her spread her legs so he could dip almost every morsel of his food in her free-flowing juices before devouring it.
By the time the meal was over and the three men had their fill, Sherry's body ached from their coarse caresses and she felt as if her mind would snap if she had to endure any more of their obscenities and abuses. It was almost with relief that she heard Gus say to her, "Time you and me crawled into the sack."
She offered no protest as he swept her up in his arms, held her naked body against his hard-rock chest and carried her into one of the bedrooms. She was amazed at his strength. His arms and shoulders felt as if they were forged of steel.