Chapter 17
Francie had finally fallen asleep. When he had awakened with a start, Gracie had been still lying, naked, beside him.
He went into the bathroom and splashed water over his face, keeping the door open so that he could see her. Now he was going to have another bit of fun. He was determined to break Gracie physically and morally before he left with her. He wished now that he'd put her on drugs earlier. He'd always thought he'd keep any special girl of his off that poison. But now he realized it would have been the best way to have got her completely dependent on him in every way. He would have liked to have seen her on her knees begging him for another shot, promising him anything, looking up to him as to a god.
He came back into the room and looked out of the window into the street. He wondered how the police were getting on, how Hartnell was getting on and he chuckled. He was too smart, much too smart for them. He always had been and he always would be. It was a pity Gracie didn't realize that, didn't realize he was the one she should have tagged along with, not waited for that damned, gentlemanly fool, Hartnell, who didn't know the first thing about how to look after himself or her.
Hartnell wouldn't spill on the gang, he knew. That would involve Gracie and Hartnell knew they had her. Francie chuckled again. All he had to do was clear off into hiding, watch the papers to make sure there wasn't any unexpected turn of events, and wait until everything had blown over. It was all so simple.
He wondered if the rest of the boys had got away. He supposed they had. They were all pretty smart when it came to saving their guts. They'd probably all be waiting for him at the hideout when he took Gracie there later today.
Gracie stirred on the bed and opened her eyes. He turned towards her, watching her awaken to a world she didn't for the moment recognize. He grinned at the look of mingled fear and horror which flushed her face when she saw him, remembered where she was and what had been happening.
Watching her all the time, he began to dress slowly. He'd had so much of her during the night that he no longer felt any desire. He just wanted to see her squirm like a trussed rabbit.
With a final adjustment of his tie, he walked across the room and began to rummage in a drawer.
Gracie got out of bed and reached for a dressing gown.
"I wouldn't bother about that," Francie said without looking around. "I prefer you in the raw and I'll only have to undress you again."
Gracie sat on the edge of the bed. She found her fingers were trembling slightly and she felt as if she'd been on a several days' binge.
Francie straightened from the drawer. He had several items of clothing in his hand - all scarves, suspender belts, slight garments like that.
He came across to her.
"You'd better not struggle unless you want to be beaten up," he snarled. "I'm going to tie you up just to make things easier. Stand up and turn around.
Gracie glanced desperately at her bag with its hidden revolver. She wondered if Francie had slept, if she'd missed a chance to save herself. To struggle now would be hopeless. She had no idea what he was going to do to her. The thought of further rape left her almost indifferent. She turned her nude back towards him.
"Put your wrists together," he said.
He began to tie her arms, binding them tightly with a scarf. He pushed her face down on the bed and tied her ankles likewise. He rolled her over onto her back, stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth and bound another scarf over it.
"That should keep you quiet," he murmured.
Gracie followed his movements with her eyes. She felt a tremor of new fear. More than ever now, he seemed to her to be touched with madness. The hard eyes flickered all the time between a glare and a grin, the long, blond hair fell slightly over one ear and the sensual mouth sagged open from time to time in the oblong face.
Francie went back to the drawer and began to empty the contents onto the floor. He didn't seem to find what he was looking for and his eyes searched around the room alighting, eventually, on a thin, plastic-covered cord to one of the lamps. He went over to it, jerked the cord from both wall and lamp with a couple of sharp tugs.
He glanced back at Gracie, whose eyes still watched him, showing the whites as they followed him around the room. He began to double the flex, winding it around his right hand - and doubling it again.
"This is going to be your punishment," he said, with a low chuckle. "Always pleasure and then punishment, Gracie."
Gracie tried to say something, but all she could manage was a muffled grunt through the gag.
"If you could make a sound," Francie went on, "you'd soon be screaming for mercy. But I'm afraid, my sweet, that you'll have to suffer in silence."
He swished the cord twice through the air and the sound made Gracie wince.
The next instant she gave a violent jerk and rolled over onto her face. The cord had slashed across her breasts, bringing out a thin red weal, multiplied several times, across the flesh.
She bit into the gag. Her bosom was burning with sharp pain. And then the lash smacked across her rump, making her jerk back onto her side with the sizzling fire of the pain.
Tears came to her eyes, forced out by the gnawing agony. Her buttocks clamped together, straining in an effort to rid her of the hot stinging across their whip-marked expanse.
Francie raised his hand and brought the cord down again, across her hips this time, with all his force. His face was contorted in what seemed a paroxysm of malignity, as if he were about to have an orgasm.
"Bitch, bitch, bitch," he muttered insanely to himself as his arm rose and fell with increasing rapidity. All his hatred of the power which she in turn had exercised on him, came out in the violence in his face and in his movement.
Gracie squirmed on the bed uttering muffled sounds of anguish. She was like a fish hauled from the water and flung onto the bottom of a boat. Her body was becoming a mass of red weals. It was a prison of pain. She wanted to escape from her body. Between the slashes of the wire across her bare, tender skin she had wild, tear-filled thoughts - desire to have the power of a yogi impervious to physical pain; she tried to steel herself in a mental scream that this couldn't affect her spirit, that if she told herself it was nothing, she could conquer the torture of the flesh.
But it was useless. The body was all of her, reaching up with stabbing pain into her mind, filling her head with a buzzing of sound and torment so that, at last, each fresh lash was no more than a faint sting to a background of unbearable, killing anguish.
She remembered only that the stings were last in the region of her buttocks when the sound and the pain in her head merged into a complete, deafening consistency of sound and then she could feel no more.
Francie was almost reaching an orgasm. As he followed, with a physical awareness of sensation the biting of the cord into the flesh, his penis had risen sharply, pressing with a series of sharp twinges into his trousers. He felt the familiar excitement in chest and loins and it seemed to grow as he bent over her prostrate, humiliated body.
Greedily he watched the way the black cord sank deep into the white skin and then rose out, leaving the ridged flesh below squirming as if each part of her lived a separate, sensitive existence.
She had twisted and turned, writhing awkwardly on the bed. The lash had fallen indiscriminately across nearly every portion of her body, caressing thighs and hips, making crisscross patterns across her stomach and breasts, giving her back and bottom a blaze of furious color.
His arm was beginning to ache as he realized she was no longer moving. But it didn't stop him. He was almost coming and he needed to go on slashing her body, tearing it into ribbons of violent pink, until the climax came.
His hips began to jerk after each down movement was completed. His thighs tensed, thrusting his loins towards her as he straightened.
With his free hand he searched frantically for his mass of stiff flesh and drew it out from his trousers so that it shot out like a cannon towards her body.
He rocked on his heels and the balls of his feet as the blows followed fast and furiously on one another. His organ was a massive projection, flaming red - almost purple at its tip, needing no external titivation to rush on its way to the orgasm.
He fixed his eyes madly, glazedly on the lines the whip left on the flesh. Each line seemed like the contraction of some tight vagina around his penis. He was coming; he wielded the wire with a last ferocity - and then it flew from his hand as the sperm shot from the tip of his taut weapon, described a large arc and cascaded down her buttocks, a trail of almost opaque white fluid, showing clearly on the red weals, slightly on the rare patches of white flesh.
Francie swayed, his hips twitching after the last charge of liquid had shattered from him. He leaned forward and placed his hands on the edge of the bed, bending forward in momentary exhaustion.
He stayed like that for only a few seconds. Then he straightened up and looked at the body in front of him. Little beads of blood were breaking through like dots along the line of the weals. Gracie was unconscious, with streaks of tear paths from her eyes to the gag. His lips drew back from his teeth. That was what he should have done to her long ago.
He turned away and sank into a chair. Her body still seemed slim and beautiful in spite of the angry blaze of its wounds. But he'd soon be rid of it altogether. Once she was dead there would be no more torment, no more desire to win her body and soul.
He pulled a piece of underwear from the pile on the floor and wiped his deflated penis. He looked at his watch. It was getting late - already into the afternoon. He felt slightly weary and debated whether he should take a nap while waiting for her to recover and decided against it in case she recovered too quickly and even now turned the tables on him.
She was already stirring and her eyes opened in a new recognition of pain. He decided to leave her for a while to wallow in anguish until he untied her and led her out smarting with the long aftermath of the beating, to a taxi and the hideout.
He considered rubbing salt in the wounds and then found he hadn't the energy. He stood up and crossed to the window again. He felt quite pleased in the way things had turned out. It must be pretty safe now, out there.
It was while he was looking that he heard the noise on the roof. It sounded heavy for a cat, like someone dislodging a slate, like a footstep, in fact.
He listened intently, but for several seconds there was no further sound. Perhaps it was a cat - must have been.
Nonetheless he stayed quite still, holding his breath, waiting for the next sound, eyes raised toward the ceiling.
The sound came, suddenly, from the kitchen roof. He took out his gun. Someone was trying to break through the kitchen skylight.
Francie looked at Gracie, once. He crept towards the open kitchen door. The skylight was to the side over the sink and he couldn't see it without going into the room.
The light was shadowed from the skylight and the head and shoulders of a figure were visible through the dusty glass.
For some seconds Francie stared as the man above tried to raise up the frame of the locked window. A shock of surprise flooded over him as he realized the man was Hartnell. He thought of Gracie lying in her bleeding state in the next room and for once he felt a little afraid, a little jittery. This man on the roof loved her. How he came to be there Francie couldn't imagine, but he had obviously broken out of a police cell and that meant he might be armed.
The head and shoulders were a perfect target, his gun was fitted with a silencer.
But Hartnell looked through and saw him just as he raised the weapon. The bullet shattered the glass, but there was no thud of a body. Hartnell had disappeared. He had missed.
Francie retreated to the door, watching the skylight all the way. His mind was whirling. He couldn't risk a gunfight in this place. He hadn't time to untie Gracie and get her away. She would be so much ballast. His own skin came, finally, before everything else. He considered putting a bullet through Gracie, but found he hadn't the nerve to finish his dream - perhaps he never would have been able to kill her.
He glanced quickly at the skylight for the last time and then slipped from the kitchen, crossed the other room into the tiny vestibule, let himself out, slammed the door and raced down the stairs three at a time.
When he walked out into the street he was moving smartly but not noticeably fast. He turned the nearby corner, doubled his pace and hailed the first taxi he saw.