Chapter 3
The club was relatively quiet at this point in the evening, and Cassandra was glad she had insisted on an early appointment. Ten-thirty was dawn to these people, she knew.
So it had taken some doing.
But her head was pounding and she felt feverish. She had wanted it to be a short night.
Too much work.
Not enough relaxation.
She pretended to inspect the intricacies of one of the newly installed windows. This one was conceived by the vaunted Dandy Voivode in his trashiest style.
The stuff didn't interest her much as art, but she had to admit she got a kick out of the satirical symbolism.
The figures in the window were dressed up as jaded business and professional types.
They wore suggestive animal masks and pointed handguns and carbines at each other's genitals, which poked in brightly colored plastic and foam rubber exaggerations from cut-outs in their blue and gray pinstripes.
Cassandra stepped back from the glassed-in art installation and inspected her own reflection in the pane.
She was pleased with the way she looked. At the way the woman with the rather short chestnut hair, iced flat and parted in a Weimar-look, seemed to fit right in.
But she was uncomfortable in this get-up.
The harness of leather straps and steel rings that she wore against her naked torso underneath the loose oxblood calfskin bodysuit had already begun to chafe.
She hadn't the time, or so she had reckoned, to tape herself tonight before she had dressed. Now she was paying for her haste as the leather and steel nipped into her shoulders and gashed her heavy breasts.
Her perspiration was moistening her firm titflesh, so that the nipples and aureoles were squeaking in and out of the rings cinching the harness securing her nude torso, attached like a pair of suspenders to her latex corset-and-panties lingerie ensemble.
She hadn't put enough powder on her skin, for one thing. And in her hurry she had also neglected to don her jingly surgical steel earrings that were a miniature working set of handcuffs.
She stuck her hand into the partly unzipped top of her leather bodysuit and adjusted the strap to the portion of her harness that holstered her Walther PPK automatic pistol securely against her burgeoning boob, under her left arm.
She traipsed up to a nearly uninhabited stretch of marble-topped bar and ordered a double zombie. Her hand massaged the tightened cords of the back of her neck and her temples.
The drink would knock out her headache and make her not care about the physical exhaustion now pelting her muscles.
While the denizens of the night world of New York had been dining or otherwise priming themselves to stalk the downtown art clubs, Cassandra had been taking a nap before going back to work.
She couldn't even remember when the last time was that she had slept a full night. But that went with the territory. This was her job, after all. And she did it well.
Detective Sergeant Cassandra Derringer spotted Alistair Weed nearly the instant she had gained entry to the Lotus Room at Dashwood's Scented Garden. Though the tall, sandy-haired art entrepreneur had his back to her and his head bent forward, Cassandra had recognized the unmistakable outline of his ass-cheeks from several of her previous undercover assignments.
She would have to talk to him. Not now, for he was obviously in the middle of a spiel directed toward a tentative would-be collector.
Cassandra did not at all suspect Alistair in connection with the case currently under investigation by her department.
He was, rather, a man who had proven himself a valuable informant for the art crime division of the detective bureau.
Alistair knew who Cassandra was and could be counted upon not to blow her cover.
Likewise, she would not interfere with his business. Even though she had cause to believe it at least at times skirted the other side of the legal code.
Tonight's police work involved a matter only tangentially related to art, however. It had been thrown in her hot lap by the missing persons bureau.
Two different cases, really.
One involved a possibly wayward female art groupie whose parents had become frantic when she had not shown up for a family dinner.
Really bland stuff there.
The little cunt was probably just shacked up for a few days with some faggoty gigolo type who had her zonked out on tranquilizers while he lived off her cash.
The other was a request for an investigation by one of the city's many social editors, concerned over the whereabouts and recent activities of his prized columnist Zahndra Jergens.
Her columns continued to arrive, all right. In fact, Jergens Off! came in just before deadline, via modem or hand-delivered by messenger in final manuscript form.
It almost didn't matter that Zahndra hadn't been seen in the offices for nearly three weeks.
But Mark Golden was one editor who cared about more than just deadlines and advertising sales. He was worried about Zahndra.
Typical homo mothering instinct, Cassandra suspected.
She knew queers when she saw them.
Mark Golden was probably just jealous that Zahndra, for whom he evidently held some soft of fag-hag affection, had found some macho brute to pipe her in mouth, ass and cunt for a while.
Cassandra herself would rather be relaxing in some cozy little dyke joint, tossing down a few beers with a couple of her sisters as they watched the hockey game.
But she was a professional.
And she couldn't deny her interest in art.
Especially tonight, she mused as she became riveted by one of the moving-almost alive, it seemed-sculptures on display.
On an ebony pedestal-something between a cone and a pyramid that reminded Cassandra of an African sculpture of a breast-was an ultra-tacky bust of a monkey-haired woman literally bristling with rising and falling breastbuds.
Cassandra felt her clit twinge.
The hornlike crown, shaped like a crescent moon and studded with trash-glitz baubles and lights, seemed to say something to her.
Let me horn your haunch, Cassandra; let me spike your tit, my dear.
"Cassandra, darling," came the other voice.
"So glad to see you, Alistair, love," she said, embracing and kissing the tall, sandy-haired man who had come up behind her.
"I know you want to get it over with fast this time, honey," Alistair said, escorting her toward an empty booth upholstered in heavily ridged pink-flamingo plastic.
"I have to make it an early scene tonight," Cassandra said, feeling his hand on her rump.
She wanted it in.
But she was so exhausted that it wouldn't feel good, she thought.
Besides, she had an early appointment with a gallery owner the next day. In connection with several pieces now missing from a recently imported inventory of Hellenistic erotica.
Heavily insured, naturally.
"What's the matter, Cassandra? Too much work?" Alistair said, taking her hand in his as he sat next to her.
"That is for sure-but I can do with another drink if I don't have to fuck anyone for it."
Alistair chuckled as he motioned for a skimpily clad youth to take their order.
"Two zombies, sir?" the waiter said.
"Are you referring to the drinks or to the drinkers," Francis Dash wood shot in as he passed by the booth.
"You're very funny tonight, Francis," Cassandra said. "I just don't happen to be in a funny mood."
Francis kissed her cheeks, frisking her for weapons. Sure enough, there was the piece, strapped to her tit.
"On the job?" he said as he slid next to her in the booth.
"Wouldn't be here if I weren't," Cassandra sighed, dropping her eyes to the thatch of hair that stuck up from his partially opened Brooks Brothers button down shirt.
She'd suck his nipples if she weren't so tired. Maybe even be up for a little orgy pudding with some of her sisters and these two dudes.
But business was business.
Ask a few questions. One more drink. Home to bed. Maybe jerk off her clit with a heavy metal dildo while watching a videotape she had recorded of Hecate's Horrorhouse.
That was it! Cassandra turned her head to try to pick out the multititted sculpture.
The face, and the hair-were they not reminiscent in an abstract way of the hostess of that punk-sleaze show featuring awful films and zany S&M skits?
"Looking for someone?" Alistair asked.
"No," she said. "Yes, I mean."
She took her drink from the youthful waiter and drank a long quaff.
"I was just looking at that sculpture," Cassandra explained.
"The one with the throbbing tits," Alistair said. "It is not for sale at this point-on exhibitional loan from the artist."
"Mmm hmm," Cassandra said, downing the remainder of her zombie.
She wished that she had ordered another double.
"But I am also looking for a pair of missing persons who happen to be habitual night-prowlers and have been known to frequent the lewder clubs of the art world," she said.
Francis and Alistair smiled calmly. The men were on either side of her and she could sense their body rut intent.
"Or related species," she added.
Cassandra could taste the Demerara rum heavy on her tongue. Burning her like the sear in her nips, clitbud and bun.
"Not Zahndra Jergens," Alistair said smoothly.
Cassandra nodded, unsurprised.
The man knew everything and everyone who mattered in this scene. She wasn't always sure he was telling her everything he knew.
But all she needed was something to go on.
"She was here last night, wasn't she?" Francis said to Alistair, who nodded.
"Yeah," Alistair said, shifting in his seat closer to Cassandra. "But-whose the fag?-Mark Golden, her editor, called my office asking about her this afternoon."
"What did you tell him?" Cassandra asked.
"Nothing," Alistair said, looking insulted. "I was asleep."
Cassandra laughed.
"I could use another," she said.
Alistair flicked his fingers and the young waiter came over.
"Well," she said, after the double zombie had been ordered, "what would you have told Mark Golden if you had been awake?"
Alistair laughed as he and Francis exchanged glances. Francis spoke, now moving close into Cassandra's body from her other side.
"It is not for gossip-as the gossip columnist herself has told us. But Zahndra Jergens is undergoing-"
"Francis, please," Alistair said quietly but firmly, his hand on Francis's wrist.
"I might suggest we go to the private sanctorum of the management for this little exchange," Francis said.
Alistair caught the attention of the young waiter and the boy carried their drinks behind them on a tray while the threesome ascended the several flights of concealed stairwell leading from the basement Lotus Room to a large executive office suite.
Francis flicked a tab on the panel of an enormous walnut desk and a large glass wall shimmered. Now Cassandra could see through the two-way plate the gyrations on the dance floor below and the shenanigans of a last-wave rock group onstage.
"Some set-up," Cassandra said with admiration.
She sat in a deep, leather-upholstered chair and crossed her legs. Taking the drink from the boy, she lit a cigarette.
"Zahndra Jergens," Francis said, "is in the process of undergoing cosmetic surgery and doesn't want anyone to see her until its complete."
"Simple enough," Cassandra said.
She could relax and get drunk if it were that simple. Something told her that it wasn't though. But she'd get drunk anyway.
Help her sleep better tonight.
"She's been making the rounds of the fashion shows and clubs incognito-in disguises," Alistair added, borrowing one of Cassandra's cigarettes.
"I would have thought maybe she'd found some hung stud to keep her off the streets and out of the office," Cassandra remarked.
"That too," Alistair said with a wolfish grin.
"And who might that be?" Cassandra inquired.
The heat was building inside her.
The harness rings were hard against her nipples and the gun metal was impressing the Walther's form into her tit and underarm.
What she had to go through in the line of duty. She took a discreet whiff and smelled her musk in the leather of her bodysuit.
"Antoine Chevalier," Alistair allowed.
"The Creole chef," Cassandra said. "I'll bet he blackens her redfish."
The three of them laughed, and Francis was about to dismiss the waiter.
"Oh, wait a second," Cassandra said. "Don't send him away just yet."
"Cassandra is hungry again tonight?" Francis said to her jocularly.
"Now that you mention it..." Alistair intoned insinuatingly.
He made out the throb of Cassandra's hard nipples through her oxblood calfskin.
'Tired of cuntjuice?" Francis said, slapping the boy's rump and sending him over to Cassandra.
"Not by a longshot," she said as the boy jumped playfully into her lap.
"She just wants a bit of boyjuice," Alistair said to Francis.
"That can get pretty rough, sometimes," Francis said with a gleam in his eye.
Cassandra giggled as the boy unsnapped his loincloth and wiggled his nude fanny on her thigh. His cock stood out and up, flopping as he kissed her face with loud smacks.
Francis opened a drawer in the walnut desk and reached in. Alistair looked over at him and smirked. His cock was hard in his pants and he was ready for a diversion.
They watched as Cassandra held the boy by his hips and let him stick his thin penis into her yip. She was next unzipping her bodysuit and the boy's head was bobbing for her boobs.
Francis passed to Alistair a matched pair of pistol-sized crossbows, each one loaded with long thin sterilized needles.
He sighted his own pair at Cassandra's wriggling tits as the boy clambered down around her legs, stripping her outer clothing away.
The arms and legs of the leather bodysuit were unzipped and Cassandra reclined, lowering the back of the leather chair to a slight incline.
Alistair and Francis licked their lips.
She was certainly a morsel to anyone who had the hunger. Anyone who liked squirming meat.
She was a wash of sweat as she flicked her legs and reached for her drink. The boy waiter sat on one thigh and reached between her legs.
Cassandra was now clad only in her on-the-job lingerie: latex corset-and-panties, high-heeled ankle booties with small spurs, and a leather holstered harness with steel nipple rings.
The waiter unsnapped the woman's crotch, and the latex leapt up her white belly.
Cassandra's cuntflesh was swollen and split, with cream trickling from between reddened labia.
"Time for target practice," Francis said mildly.
He shot both his needles at once, one hitting the bull's-eye of her thick white breast, the other catching loosely the pod of her pussy.
Cassandra squealed and sucked her tongue through her teeth. Her legs flailed convulsively as the youthful waiter jumped up and ran for cover.
Alistair shot off his lefthand crossbow first. The needle speared into her throbbing flesh, piercing the aureole of the tit Francis's shot had merely grazed.
Cassandra looked down and gasped as she saw the thin metal go in one side of the nipple and protrude slightly from the other.
Alistair's second shot zinged into her clit, and Cassandra wailed, eyes widened and red.
She crouched on her chair, the needles dangling from hobbling breasts and pulsating clitbud.
The rings of her holster harness had broken the skin around her nipples and tiny smudges of red patterned her firm bosom.
The waiter came up to her from her left and reached his hand up under her arm. Cassandra brought her elbow back into the boy's solar plexus and sent him flying.
Cassandra pulled the needles from her left tit and pitched them like tiny darts at the waiter's rear. He had his ass raised and split, and one found the kid's pucker.
He grabbed for his own dick and stuck a thumb in his asshole.
Cassandra unsnapped her left shoulder strap and the tit was freed from the nipple ring. It seemed to expand as it pushed out and up.
She removed the holstered firearm and went into a small wallet pouch.
Cassandra took out a small school picture and flashed it to Alistair and Francis, who were closing in on her, having reloaded their hand-held crossbows with a new set of needles.
"This is a few years old," she said.
"That's the art groupie?" Alistair asked.
Cassandra nodded.
She leaned back in her chair, tweaking her remaining harnessed tit with her fingers, feeling the thin needle pinch her clitoris.
"With all the makeup and crazy outfits," Francis was saying, "I couldn't relate to this photograph if it were of my own wife."
Cassandra lit another cigarette and pushed her hips up. She spread her knees a bit and heard the tlock-tlock of her gummy cuntlips.
"The name Cynthia Luna mean anything to you?" Cassandra said smokily.
"That's Cynthia?" Francis said in disbelief.
"In her schoolgirl days, obviously," Alistair said with a wrinkle to his nose.
"Haven't seen her around the last few days," Francis said.
"I think I heard that she was out in Los Angeles for some special commission," Alistair allowed.
He stepped back and again took aim at the detective's simmering body.
"What is she, a call-girl?" Cassandra said.
She readied herself for the attack of the needles, but was stunned when the two sets of hands grabbed her ankles and elbows.
"Ra-ther," Alistair joked. "Cynthia Luna is a fitness coach. She holds classes and she also caters on a private consultant basis to the richest clients she can find." mm
"How does she find them?" Cassandra asked.
There was a real element of uncertainty, of hear. Cassandra's arms were locked into position at the sides of the leather lounge chair, and her legs hooked to the bottom corners.
The whole contraption was slanted at a seventy-five degree angle. Cassandra was spread-eagled, with her brewing pussy and tumbling tits heaving as vermilion targets.
The young waiter pulled the needle from her clit and removed the one from her harnessed tit.
He sucked the little spots of blood from her flesh and stepped back.
"Cynthia Luna finds her clients by hanging out in clubs, at openings, the usual," Alistair continued as he got off a shot at the nude waiter's flat tummy.
Francis stood next to Alistair and both of them spread their legs and bent their knees. Just like what they must have seen on television movies of cops at target practice, Cassandra thought.
There was indeed real danger in what they were doing to her.
One wild shot. One false move.
That was why she liked them so much.
Now it looked as though Cassandra might have to go out to Los Angeles herself. And it would have to be as soon as possible.
There would be a red-eye flight out of JFK Airport later tonight. She would have to catch that-and she wouldn't bother to pack anything.
Just go with what she had on her.
Meanwhile, she might as well have a bit of fun her last night at home.
The waiter dangled his dick in front of her twat. Metallic streaks shot through the air and embedded themselves at the end of their flight into his taut asscheeks.
Jism flashed from his sputtering cocktip and anointed Cassandra's brewing cunny.
The youth stepped aside and admired Cassandra's pussy as it became gummed up with his own boyish juice and heaps of Cassandra's oozing slime.
Tiny knives shot from pistol-sized crossbows at tits and clits, found home in her slit and stung her mouth cheeks.
Cassandra quaked in momentous orgasm, frazzling every nerve ending in her body.
All in the line of duty.