Chapter 6
Clint was heading back up to his room after spending the morning in a fruitless search for Katrina. She seemed to have disappeared into thin air, he thought, which was absurd, considering that she hadn't checked out of the hotel, and, even if she had, there was no place else on San Dozes she could go, as far as he knew. He wondered how she would react to his formal explanation and apology, hoping in his heart that she would respond to its frankness and sincerity. Probably, she was still mad and had gone off to brood somewhere letting him cool his heels. That was okay, he thought; he deserved to have to sweat it out for a while. But writing the letter had made him feel so good, coming clean with her, that he really didn't have doubts that they'd be together again before very long.
Maybe, he conjectured, walking down the hotel corridor, Katrina would be able to help him deal with Shirley. She was a capable and mature person, he figured, and that, along with a fresh mind, was what the problem of Shirley really demanded. For Clint had absolutely no bargaining power left with Shirley nothing he could threaten, cajole or bribe her with. She was just sinking farther into her personal abyss, he thought, trying every step of the way for some reason he had never figured out to drag him along with her.
As Clint turned the corner, his thoughts dwelling on his sister, Shirley suddenly slipped out of their suite into his view. He dodged back and, peering around the corner, saw her hustle down the other end of the hall toward the fire stairs. For a minute, he was tempted to call after her and ask her where the hell she was going now. But he swallowed his words and instead padded down the hall after her.
When he opened the fire door, he could hear her footsteps clattering down the iron stairwell. Letting her get some distance ahead of him, he proceeded after her. From the way she was hurrying along, in contrast to her usual casual pace not to mention the fact that she was using the back stairs Clint was sure she was up to something.
At the ground floor, as he followed her out the door, he noticed that they were near the kitchen, to the back of the hotel's large dining room. He peered 'round the doorway into the kitchen and caught a glimpse of her dress disappearing out a back door. Sneaking along the cooking tables, crouched low so that the huddle of cooks and their helpers at the other end of the kitchen wouldn't see him, he kept on her trail.
From the door he emerged in the kitchen courtyard, and then had to duck back in to avoid her catching sight of him. For she had stopped and looked back over her shoulder. Then, as he sneaked a peek at her, she grabbed an empty garbage can and rounded the corner of the hotel with it.
What the hell? he wondered. Had she really cracked up? Turned scavenger, maybe? There had to be some explanation. He rounded the corner and, at a discreet distance, followed her as she crashed through the thick vegetation that hugged the walls of the hotel. Then, as he watched, mystified, she repeated what had become a ritual, setting the garbage can upside-down and standing up on it to peer into a window.
His sister a peeping Tom? Clint wondered. Nothing was impossible, of course, but it wasn't quite her style.
Clint was startled by more noise in the brush coming from the direction of the courtyard. He melted back into the lush greenery as best he could, noting with interest the new party on the scene a young-looking native boy, who crept right past the place where he was standing in semi-camouflage.
Clint held his breath as the boy crept along until he had reached Shirley. He saw the youth tug at his sister's dress and then saw her response to his presence how her face lit up with the look of anticipation he had seen all too many times. She jumped off the garbage can and, as Clint watched with a sickened feeling, embraced the youth passionately. He hoped he wouldn't have to witness some more of his sister's debaucheries, and was relieved when she grabbed the youth by the hand and led him away into the undergrowth.
The thing that still puzzled Clint was what Shirley had been looking at through the window, which judging from her routine with the garbage can she was obviously familiar with.
When he was sure that the couple had fled the scene, going off to pursue God knows what varieties of mid-day lust, Clint crept up to the garbage can. With his old Marine stealth, he climbed up on it, carefully placing his feet on the rim so that the tin bottom would not buckle and give him away. Cautiously, he raised up and peered over the window-sill.
like his sister, he was peering into Boulo's office. Only Clint recognized the manager right away, having complained to him earlier in the week about his pestering staff members. And that's what seemed to be going on now, he thought. Some kind of daily staff meeting. He recognized most of the men and women who were standing around Boulo's desk as employees of the hotel. What he couldn't figure was what Shirley had been interested in.
His curiosity compelled him to stay at his vantage point longer than he otherwise would have. From what he could make out of the conversation, Boulo was discussing some kind of schedule with the staff, passing folders full of papers back and forth to them. He tried to guess what it was all about personnel procedures, guest complaints but couldn't fit anything to the comments and actions he was witness to.
Then he started. Had that been his name, Clint Westwood, he had just heard? He located the speaker and recognized her as the woman who had followed him around, bugging him with stupid questions about how happy was he with the hotel and the island and his vacation. The very person he had in mind when he had complained to Boulo, in fact. He listened more carefully.
" ... I've tried everything I can think of," the girl was saying to the manager. "The guy's a dead show, that's all. The agency screwed up. He's not our mark."
Clint noticed Boulo's face crease with annoyance. And he heard the manager break in on the woman.
"So he's hard. Big deal. I've had him in here, because you rode all over him. But let me tell you he's not invulnerable. Alya here thinks maybe there's a connection between him and that Nadie woman. But whatever's going on, Alya managed to get the broad. You just play it a little less low-keyed. You'll get through to him. We'll extend his slot until after the weekend, so that gives you lots of time. Okay, no more questions? Good. Beat it, all of you."
Clint watched the men and women file out of the room, but his mind was working at a thousand miles a minute. What wasn't he invulnerable to? he wondered. And what were they interested in himself and Kat for? Or for that matter, any of the guests' personal affairs? And what had this girl Alya accomplished with respect to Kat? It all sounded more than peculiar. Clint was a past master at piecing together a picture from a few disjointed scraps of behavior. That's what journalism was all about. But he was sure as hell lost this time. And that made him more than usually interested in the fact that his name and Katrina's had been mentioned in whatever connection they were with this meeting Boulo had just adjourned.
He almost got so wrapped up in his reflections that he didn't hear the noise in the undergrowth. But at the crucial instant, he did notice it and, jumping off the can, faded back into the cover afforded by the lush vegetation. Well, he thought, here was Shirley again. No puzzles where she was concerned, he thought with sudden savagery, as he noted the disarray of her dress and hair in particular the green grass stains on her heels. Clint smiled to himself ironically as he thought of what must have become of the youth who had been dragged off by his predatory sister only moments before.
What a waste of life, he thought absently, watching Shirley look around and then clamber up to peek in the window again. A waste of a lovely girl intelligence, beauty and a body going down the rat hole. Clint backed off through the brush and left the scene, taking the long way out of the courtyard around to the hotel terrace. What was really occupying his thoughts was the puzzling scene he had witnessed; and since Katrina was still nowhere to be found, and Shirley, he assumed, was only up to her normal mischief, Clint settled down with a drink to theorize about possible explanations of the scene.
It was this reporter's instinct for becoming absorbed with incongruities that had won Clint his few honors in journalism. And there had been times when he had almost regretted how this instinct had distracted him from other things. If Clint had known at this moment that this was one time he should not have chosen to be distracted by such a loose end, something he would come to realize shortly, he would have stayed with his sister and watched more of her nutty behavior. As it was, she was the farthest thing from his mind.
And for Shirley, her brother, like most other things in the world, was the farthest thing from her mind. It had been a ball during the last few days, feeding off cheap rum and enjoying the furtive visits arranged by her scruffy host before her brother tracked her down. Left without anything to do, she had been reminded of the bizarre scene she had seen at Boulo's window earlier in the vacation. It was only the sheerest chance that she had caught her young lover's eye as she sneaked through the hotel kitchen. A nice sort of chance, she thought, as her body gradually stopped glowing from their recent torrid little session which had taken her away from her post. Now, stationed once again on the can, she knew she was having her cake and eating it too.
She hadn't lost anything by abandoning the window long enough to roll in the jungle growth with the young native. For the scene she remembered having seen was just beginning to unfold again as her eyes inched over the window sill. With variations, of course, but how much the nicer, she smiled to herself, squeezing her legs together in anticipation of the further excitement promised by the drama unfolding before her.
Alya had just seated herself in the hotel manager's lap, deliberately squirming around until she had worked her legs brazenly free of the boldly slit sheath. Shirley could hear her muttering into the fat man's ear, something about how well she'd done last night, bringing in a real chunk of money for the hotel from that one American girl, and didn't she deserve something extra for it?
Shirley felt a real identification with the dark-skinned girl who was trying to excite Boulo, using all the devices Shirley herself knew so well and loved to employ. From her vantage point at the shadow-protected window, Shirley leered as she watched Alya rocking back and forth on the man's lap, thrusting her beautiful legs out so that he couldn't help but notice and admire them, while at the same time, one of her hands swam under his shirt and tickled his adipose frame.
It was just the way Shirley loved to play with a man when the heat was on her, rubbing her breasts up against him the way the other was and teasing him around the ears with an adder-like tongue. She wasn't missing anything, Shirley noted with approval, but apparently there had to be some deliberate provocation according to the rules of their particular game. Just watching Alya made Shirley's body shiver with illicit interest and she found it hard to conceive how the man with this dark beauty in his lap could resist her teasing advances.
But all questions were answered when Alya, who had been distracting Boulo just enough with her playfulness, dug an ice cube out of the pitcher on his desk with her free hand. Shirley nodded vicarious encouragement as Alya's hand circled around Boulo and then slipped the ice cube down the back of his shirt.
With a roar of outrage, Boulo catapulted out of the chair, sending the guilty female rolling onto his desk. He bounded across his office, tearing his shirttails out of his pants. When that didn't solve his distress, he went into a madman's dance, trying to shake the offending ice out of his pants and down his leg. The sight was so comical between Boulo's antics and the expression of victory on the other girl's face that Shirley burst into laughter before she realized what she was doing.
Boulo stopped, virtually in mid-air, as if he'd been hit by a blowpipe. Then he raced to his desk, and before Shirley had even had time to react by clapping a hand over her mouth, Boulo was racing toward her with a pistol in his hand. There was only one way to deal with this, Shirley thought quickly, still laughing inside at how the man had been cavorting a few seconds before. As he came toward her, brandishing the pistol with a look of startled anger on his face, Shirley grabbed hold of the window-sill and lunged up into the window-frame itself.
Boulo stopped dead, as surprised by her emergence as the girl on his desk. But Shirley was feeling absolutely giddy with her own excited brand of sick humor and desire. She followed right on through, clambering through the window until she tumbled right into the office at Boulo's feet. She got right to her feet, intending to say something to cut the ice, as it were. Instead, taking her cue both from their confusion and her own impatience, she did something else.
Right in front of Boulo's widening eyes, as the pistol drooped in his hand, she unbuckled the cloth belt of her sundress and undid its buttons. Without hesitating for a second, she drew it over her head and tossed it on the floor; since she had lost her panties in the scuffle with the young boy only moments before, this left her standing dressed only in her bra and her mane of golden hair, which she shook in Boulo's face, taunting him all the more.
"Well," she announced, taking control with her usual dauntless willfulness. "What'll it be today, friends? A beating, a whipping anything you want to do'll be more fun with three. I can guarantee it!"
Shirley didn't realize it, but the expressions of amazement that Boulo and the girl shared were more the result of what they actually did share, rather than the surprise of her appearance and actions. And what they shared, of course, was not only the same sordid profession, but also a feeling of incredulity that anybody might have witnessed them at their mischief in the same way that they made a business out of witnessing the mischief they trapped the hotel's guests into.
"Well, c'mon!" she said. "You going to just stand there and stare at me. We're all wasting time. I'm just dying to take part in your games."
Boulo suddenly snapped out of his trance and went over to the window. When he had looked out and seen the garbage can and then looked back at Shirley and recognized her, the look of mystification on his face vanished. He managed at the same time to signal Alya that Shirley didn't represent the threat they had suspected.
He regained his composure and casually re-crossed the office, sliding the gun back into his desk drawer. "Well, now, yourself, Miss ... ah..."
"Just call me Shirley!" she offered brightly, grinning crookedly at him. "I think all playmates ought to be on a first-name basis."
"That's nice, Shirley," he answered. "Shirley, this is Alya. Tell me, what kind of play did you have in mind?"
"Oh, I'm sure anything you suggest will be fine," she teased back.
"Boo," complained Alya, suddenly growing petulant. Shirley looked at the other girl, who was moving about restlessly on the desk, obviously consumed with her own ideas of pleasure and growing impatient now that the interruption was losing its novelty. "C'mon, Boo, it's been two days now."
"Easy, baby," he said. "You whine too much. You may not get it at all today. Unless, of course," he said, looking back at Shirley, who was standing dressed only in her bra, hands on her hips, "our guest might want to oblige you."
Alya looked at Shirley with new interest, at the same time squirming a little more coyly and running her tongue across her lips as she studied Shirley's own commanding charms and sized up her capabilities. "Would you?" she asked.
"Would I what?" laughed Shirley. "There's nothing I haven't been known to try."
"This," interjected Boulo, pulling the leather strap
Shirley had seen before from his desk. He walked over, flexing the thick leather in his pudgy hands and then handed it abruptly to Shirley, simultaneously pointing to Alya. "My friend has a remarkable taste for chastisement. Think you can manage?"
Shirley studied the strap, then hefted it in her hand, putting her fingers through the small loop at one end that formed a grip. "No problem," she said. "Is your friend ready?" she asked. But one more look at Alya told her the question was superfluous. For the darker girl had already slid off the desk and was pulling her dress from her body.
Shirley felt her heart bounce as the other exposed herself. Usually she was not so partial to women's bodies, but this was a special package. The lithe, muscular frame with its compact but specially molded endowments. Shirley could read the desire in the other's eyes like an open book and felt the muscles of her tummy contract involuntarily with a flicker of sadistic lust.
She raised her arm and tested the weight of the strap, snapping it in the air, watching with pleasure how the nude figure confronting her twitched at the sight of the leather in motion. Then she took a menacing step forward, as Alya retreated in semi-hypnotic reaction. Shirley was pretty sure she knew what Boulo liked, and she was even more certain that she knew how to embellish it for him.
"Grab your ankles," she barked at the other, who obediently bent forward and did just that. Out of the corner of her eye, Shirley noted Boulo's new interest as the doubled-over body automatically revealed some of its more absorbing features. A real nut, Shirley thought gaily to herself. This was going to be lots more fun than her usual escapades with more normal and strait-laced strangers.
Aware that a good show always needs continuity, Shirley edged closer to the bent-over figure, aroused herself by the employee's sacrificial posture. She dangled the leather strap near the girl's buttocks and then teased it over the girl's upraised rear end and the taut backs of her thighs. Boulo swallowed hard and unbuttoned his shirt in anticipation of coming events.
Shirley worked both of them up a little more, teasing and trailing the strap over the girl's shivering form. Then, without warning, she stepped back and at the same instant whirled her arm over her head, sending the leather down with a brutal blow on the girl's naked, rounded flesh.
The harshness of the lash drove a squeal from the target of her spirited abuse, while Boulo settled back against his desk, clasping his fingers over his rotund belly in relaxed satisfaction. Shirley delivered another blow, this time across the back of the girl's legs, causing her to stumble forward on her hands for a couple of feet.
"Hold onto those ankles," she sang out, warming to the job and bringing the strap down diagonally from the other side of her head, like a professional bullwhip artist. Again and again she crisscrossed the punishing leather across the soft, resilient flesh, filling the luxurious office with the sound of hard smacks, whimpering cries and her own and Boulo's hard breathing.
Where the blows were landing, Alya's burnished skin turned a dull, dark red. And with every strike that Shirley delivered, her arm flashing down harder and harder as she became intoxicated with the perverse satisfaction of her role, Alya became more and more unsteady. Now she was virtually dancing on her hands and feet under the lashing that rained down on her. Her ribs rippled under her skin as she fought for breath in between her delirious cries of pleasure, and her brown pointed breasts swung crazily from her tormented, unnaturally positioned body.
Boulo was joining his lover in sound now, urging Shirley to hit the girl harder and becoming more restless as the girl's pain visibly increased. He beat his little ham-like fists on his desk in accompaniment to the smacking sounds the strap made as it bit into the sensitive skin, and he started doing a little ecstatic jig of his own in time to Shirley's impetuous flailing.
Shirley herself felt her throat thicken with the headiness of passion as she beat on, each stroke more vehement and searching than the last. She broke her stride only long enough to free herself of her bra, her last article of clothing, adding the completeness of herself to Boulo's visual feast. The pounding of her heart was sending insistent messages to the whole of her body, messages of quickening lust that inflamed her vital areas. Her arm ached and she knew she could not last much longer without herself receiving some physical relief. She hoped Boulo would initiate something. But when she realized that he was completely absorbed in what she was doing, she became desperate.
At last she flung the strap directly at him, unable to resist the clamor in her own flesh any more, incited as she was by her exertions and the portrait of Alya's self-seeking misery. Her nostrils flaring with a heightened fury, she flung her naked body onto the other girl, toppling them both to the floor.
Instantly, Alya reacted to the delicious contact of their two sweating forms by grappling with her, pulling Shirley into a crazed, writhing embrace of lust. Boulo danced with glee as the two women rolled on the floor, responding to each other with all the passion of a normal couple going out of their minds with passion. He seized the strap from where Shirley had abandoned it and himself began lashing out at the female form with two backs.
His blows caused spasms of delight and delirious pain in both women. When his first vicious blow caught
Shirley half across one of her throbbing breasts, she reacted by sinking her teeth into one of Alya's swollen mounds of pleasure. Never had she experienced such bizarre stimulation, Shirley thought, as she rolled with Alya in what was actually a pitched battle between two bitches in heat.
Boulo circled about them, kicking at their soft, shining bodies and employing the strap whenever he saw a particularly choice opening. But his blows came from a distant world to the women, who were locked in their own world of savage kisses and nipping teeth, their hands at once mauling each other's delicate flesh and spurring each other to greater ecstasy.
Boulo, for all that he was removed from the direct center of the storm, was practically beside himself with delight. Not for years had his head rung dizzily with the sick sense of chaos that it did now, as the two women roiled about on the floor. He wanted them to degrade themselves even more than they were, and they soon complied.
Neither Shirley nor Alya had ever been in the arms of a woman before, but this didn't prevent either from following a mutually twisted instinct. Boulo bit his fingers in excitement as the white and brown figures wrestled with what seemed to be mindless fury, but was actually deliberate maneuvering. And then Shirley and Alya had achieved what they wanted having gotten themselves locked to each other's beaten, boiling bodies, but facing in opposite directions. Each woman flung her legs open to the other and locked them shut again, presenting to Boulo the extraordinary spectacle of consummated lesbian love laboring to greedy fulfillment under the umbrella of his wildly-inflicted torture.
This was the sort of pleasure Shirley had been seeking all these years, she thought, as her body seemed to cleave apart under Alya's tempestuous, searching kisses. And she drove herself to repay her new lover in kind, seeking with ravaging mouth the lush secrets of her mirror image.
As the two women became completely absorbed and muffled in one another, Boulo's exhaustion and pleasure reached a new pinnacle. At last he was forced to toss away the strap and, flinging himself on his couch, oblivious to the passionate embrace of the double-backed beast on his carpet, finished out the reality of his boyish fantasies by retiring to the world of boyish pleasure, seeking with his own hands to relieve his jaded tensions.
On the other side of the soundproof door, Boulo's secretary looked at her watch in astonishment and closed up her desk for the afternoon. Never had the two of them taken this long, she thought. At this rate, there'd be nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon, and she was going to get a little sun as long as everybody else on the payroll was going to hell.