She took off her sunglasses and shoved them into the pocket with the paper packet of tulip bulbs. “Can I have his knife?”
“Absolutely not.” Kitt pocketed the folded, red-handled blade and went to a shelf outside the fitting room alcove. He found leather cuffs with metal rings and tossed them to Mae before he grabbed two other items. A minute and a half later, Gert was bound, hog tied, padded cuffs securing wrists to ankles, the ball gag in his mouth muffling moans as he began to come around. Kitt hauled him into the fitting room and shut the door.
“Now what? I wait here or come with you?”
Kitt swung Gert’s keys on one finger. There was a choice to make. Bryce was busy with a task and his escorting her wasn’t possible, which meant she would return to the hotel alone, but that option didn’t sit right in Kitt’s gut. Neither did the alternative of her staying there with him, where he could at least keep an eye on her. Simple decisions were sometimes tiny acorns that burst into giant oaks and he weighed both options; one avoided an argument and was slightly less nausea-inducing that the other, one reminding him that she was his downfall and his love for her would be her undoing as well, a fate she seemed to accept more readily than he could. “Against all better judgement, you come with me. Again. So, safety first. Go back in there,” he pointed, “lock the door, turn the shop sign to closed, and then stay on other side of this alcove.”
“Why can’t I help you look?” She picked up his hat and sunglasses and held them out to him.
“I can manage,” he said, taking his things and stuffing them into a jacket pocket. “Go on, the other side to the alcove, and stay low, in front of the bookcase with all the tasteful pornography.”
“Stay low?”
“I’d rather you didn’t get shot.”
Her face lost a little colour, there was a little less of an exhilarated glint in her eyes. “And what about you?”
“I’ll look after myself. Refresh my memory. What will you do if there’s gunfire?”
She exhaled, irritation mixing with apprehension. “Run,” she said and went into the shop with him watching her until she slouched in front of the bookcase.
“That’s a good love.” He twirled the keys on a finger, the Carly Simon song reminding him that Nobody Does it Better, and he looked from the final fitting room to the framed mirror, studying. Behind one of the doors would be a passageway to perdition and there were several possibilities that lined the way; illicit drugs, underaged sex workers, or both. “The lady or the tiger,” he said softly, and unlocked the last dressing room.
Chapter Ten
For his own safety, Kitt stood to the left of the door, took a breath, crouched, and swung it open into the alcove. When no bullets blazed and no one leapt forth with a knife, machete, or baseball bat, he hazarded a look—and found perdition was a space crammed with black and white mannequin segments: torsos, legs, wigs balanced on arms. No lady or tiger behind door number one.
“Kitt?” Mae’s low voice held a thread of controlled trepidation.
“Stay where you are,” he said evenly, and returned to the first, empty fitting room, pressing against the mirror inside and the rear wall, moved back to the little space where Gert huffed and puffed through his nose like a little piggy, and repeated the process of pressing and pushing walls. Again, no lady, no tiger, just a huffing and puffing tied-up little swine. Kitt shut the door on Gert and returned to the fitting room full of plastic body parts, tossing legs, bent arms, a smooth, black synthetic buttocks, a torso, a few heads, feeling, testing walls, an alarmed Mae shouting over the noise of crashing mannequin bits, again yielding nothing.
“Hamish!” Mae hissed, full of fearful exasperation.
“Stay there,” he said and kicked the arse he’d thrown aside out of the way and took a breath to moderate his frustration, staring at the mirror. Then he bit off an obscene phrase, pocketed the keys, and ridiculed himself for being a colossal, slipshod, blinded-by-love fool who, until this very point, had neglected to consider the idea that the mirror was not only hinged, but also two way.
Damn it, he’d done everything backwards, and the out-of-order process irritated him, rasped his brain, which fear and love and a sedentary life of deskwork had turned to mush. As he ought to have begun, he went to the mirror, stood in front of it and examined the frame to see if the mirror was hung on the wall or set into it the way windows were. The lights above the mirror were brighter than the ones shining down on the fitting cubicles. He ran the full fingertips of his right hand along the edge of the frame, feeling for a latch or spring, and found nothing, but to be thorough, he pressed against the mirror. No lady, no tiger.
To be vigilant, as he should have been from the start, he cupped his hands around his eyes and looked into the mirror, but saw no light from the other side. Finally, he rapped a knuckle against the glass and when it produced a hollow sound rather than a dull thud, he was certain the mirror was two-way, or more accurately transparent. Instead of jumping to the conclusion that someone was on the other side watching, he said, “You can come in.”
Mae was already behind him, stepping around a wig and foot, looking at about the tangle of fibreglass limbs, the thirteen-thousand euro gold personal massager in her hand. “Did you have a little tantrum?”
“Yes.”
“Have we made an enormous mistake?” she said glancing at the dressing room where the trussed-up man lay. “Is Gert just a sex shop owner?”
“No. There’s another room on the other side of that mirror, but I’d prefer not to smash it to get inside, as my guess is, it’s most likely alarmed.” He began to look at the walls of the fitting room, at the seam where wall met ceiling, at the skirting board where floor joined wall.
“Did you look behind those boxes or try to move the bookcase?” she said, pointing the gold massager at the bookcase full of Easter egg-toned vibrators.
“This is not the Anne Frank house,” he said gazing at the bookcase and the boxes beside it, at the way they’d been stacked a bit haphazardly, like carefully arranged clutter. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said loudly.
When they’d first entered the shop, they’d heard the sound of things being moved about. Kitt looked down at the floor where very faint scuff marks curved across the tiles. He stepped to the side of the bookcase, kneeing boxes aside, and ran his hand behind the shelved unit full of pastel sex toys, and repeated the process on the other side, feeling for hinges, finding nothing. He swore again, pushed against the bookcase, the right side then the edge by the mirror’s frame. There was a slight popping click-click, and a whole section of wall moved, swivelling like a secret door in a manor house—or the bookcase in the Anne Frank house a few blocks away.
“This is why you should have let me help you look.” Mae peered into the dim little space lit only by the light spilling through the doorway, Donna Summer moaning the breathy Love to Love You Baby. “Perhaps we’re about to step into a world of hydroponic nutraceuticals and medicinal marijuana.”
“And perhaps we’re not.”
She moved to look inside. Kitt grabbed the shoulder of her coat and hauled her back. “Safety first.” He tugged the expensive gold vibrator from her, tucked it on the bookcase, and switched on the torch on his phone. “Stay behind me,” he said, going into the no-longer hidden room, the mobile’s torchlight shining about on two crates with pictures of cabbages on them, passing over the partition hanging above the mirror. The partition, set into runners, gave Kitt a pretty good indication what the room had been used for, and it wasn’t hydroponic, nutraceutical, or anything medicinal.
“What’s all over the glass on this side?” Mae said.
Kitt shone the torch on the mirror, the small blue-white beam passing over cloudy, smears showing that someone had made a marginal attempt to clean the glass. Given the sort of shop that was on the other side, there was a good chance the dull cloudiness was something he preferred not to get too close to check. “My guess,” he said, “is that this little space was once a
private booth for watching a live sex show. I’ll let you form your own opinion of what may be on the glass.”
She made a face. “Oh, that does my head in.”
Diagonal from the swivel entrance stood a door without a handle. Kitt crossed the space to have a closer look. While missing a knob, the door did have a light-catching chrome deadbolt cylinder lock, the brand name Schlege imprinted across the keyhole. He handed the phone torch to Mae and dug the keys from his pocket. “Shine that over here, please,” he said and flipped through the keys on the ring until he found the one stamped Schlege.
“At last, something easy,” Mae said.
“Easy is seldom a good thing.” Kitt gave her a little pat and took back his mobile, shoving it into his pocket. “Keep beside the door. Don’t move.” He stood sideways, on the opposite side of the doorway. Anyone rushing out of the room would meet him first. He inserted the key, turned the deadbolt, and pushed the door with his forearm. It swung open easily and soundlessly, flat, kissing the wall inside with a soft pliff, making it plain no one hid behind the door. Fluorescent light cast a rectangular beam across the floor of the booth. Kitt peered around the edge of the door frame. Again, no hydroponic set-up, no marijuana, but a storeroom full of merchandise one would expect to find in a sex shop: blow-up dolls, racks full of saucy outfits and bondagewear, shelves of gels, lotions, and toys, expensive items like the gold vibrator locked inside a glass-faced cabinet. A rather typical shop stockroom—had it not been for the corrugated foam soundproofing on the walls, the bunk bed with a dangling manacle chained to it, and the dark red drops that trailed across the space, along the wooden floor and into the little viewing booth.
“Right,” he said, a bilious flare in his belly. He flipped the switch he’d found just inside the stockroom. A single fluorescent light hummed and flickered to life overhead in the booth, illuminating the dulled colour of the dried smears on the mirror and the red-brown splotches on the dirty, pale grey carpet underfoot. The blood was old, but how old; hours, days, weeks? There was no way to know how long the smears and splotches had been there; the stains had passed from fluid to beyond the gel state, yet the marks lacked the flaking, blackened hue of late-stage evaporation, and evaporation was dependent on size, humidity, temperature, and the climate control system operating in the shop and stockroom. He turned off the light in the booth and pulled the bookcase shut.
A thread of queasiness trickled along the top of his stomach as he took Mae’s elbow and stepped into the stockroom. Kitt looked at Mae following the trail of blotches. The room smelled of bathroom cleaner and air-freshener. On the other side of a bed with balled-up dingy bedlinen in the middle, was a kitchen of sorts; a small microwave and electric kettle on a short, stainless worktop surrounded by various cleaning products. Plumped, tied refuse bags sat beside a laundry tub, drying towels pegged on a makeshift line above it. To the right of the tub, a door opened into an orange and pink tiled bathroom, the pink toilet, and black-handled toilet brush beside it framed like a still-life painting. Opposite the lav were two doors; one, a shorter, angled-top often used to access storage under a staircase, the other stood ajar, the imprint of fingers that had gripped the door’s edge had left smears of now-dried blood. Kitt considered options again: send her to the hotel alone or soldier on with a woman who had never been a soldier.
Mae took a few steps into the storeroom and froze. The place smelled of bleach and deodorising cleaning products, but the cleaning had been half-arsed. She stared at bloodstains in a back-of-shop flat that housed a bed with cuffs attached to foot posts and a mattress that needed a good boil in a hospital-grade sterilising, sanitising, disinfecting fungicide.
Up to this moment, the play acting had been…fun, but the fight with Gert had been scary—and disquietingly exciting. The exhilaration she felt came from a brush with danger, which Kitt would tell her was perfectly natural human response, yet physiological response aside, she grappled with the thrill, with the morality of the sensation. Was it odd that she preferred clear-cut fear, like the tiny-footed millipede of dread slinking up her spine as she looked at dried blood to gleeful immorality? “As much as I’d prefer to believe that Gert lives here and is an accident-prone, rather half-arsed housekeeper,” she said, eyes on the manacle and chain on the bedpost, “but someone’s been held here, like as a sexual slave?”
“If I recall correctly, two thirds of the people trafficked every year fall victim to sexual slavery and abuse, but I’m not sure it’s only sexual slavery we’re looking at here.” Kitt gave her a sideways look. “What do you see besides the bed and bits of blood?” he asked.
The question defrosted her frozen feet and shoved aside her immoral tingle, and she began to examine the space again. Amid all the sex merchandise and small bloodstains, there stood an out of place, freestanding metal rack hung with clean, button-front, orange-trimmed grey uniforms, not the kind of uniforms people wore for role-playing sex games, but the kind that housekeeping staff wore in hotels, the sort the two skinny black men they’d seen outside were wearing. “Two men came out of the building next door wearing those uniforms.”
“Very good. What else do you see?” He glanced down at the floor, close to the rack of clothes, to where several small, whitish pellets laying in a little puddle of very dark, congealing blood.
She stooped over slightly and straightened immediately. “Are those teeth?”
“They are.”
“Something diabolical happened here, didn’t it?” she said, shuddering, her breath coming out sharply.
“I believe so, yes.”
She hugged herself. And shuddered again. “Does being afraid ever make you need to pee?”
“Are you afraid, Mae?”
“Yes, and I have to pee. Are you scared?”
“Yes, but fear is good. Fear puts you in a heightened state of awareness.”
“Are you aware that you have to pee?”
Cool, lacking an expression of any sort, Kitt looked at her, at the door with the dried blood fingerprints, and back to her again. “Pee? No. You being here instead of safe at home has me in a constant state of nausea,” he said.
Her laugh was thin. “While it remains flattering that you love me so much it makes you feel sick, I still have to pee.”
“Go on then,” he said, glanced at the lav with a slight jerk of his chin, and Mae hurried to the dodgy-looking toilet and tried to shut a door that hung crooked on its hinges, a long, narrow gap running down the framing prevented complete privacy. Mindful of the gap and bathroom etiquette, Kitt pulled out his mobile and began taking photos of the storeroom, of the half-opened door that led to a staircase, of the short door under the staircase on the other side of the padded wall, until someone warbling, “Jamme, jamme 'ncoppa, jamme jà, funiculì, funiculà, funiculì, funiculà,‘ncoppa, jamme jà, funiculì, funiculà!” came from the stairway on the other side.
In a half second, he was in the lav, switching the light off, Mae half-crouched, coat and dress bunched, knickers halfway along her thighs, and his fingers went to her mouth to stifle her protest, a startled look on her face.
Thank the baby Jaysus she’d finished, elsewise there’d be piss all over her legs. Hastily, Mae jerked up her pants and Kitt shut the door on crooked hinges, the gap between the door’s edge and frame suddenly seemed wider than she remembered. The shard of light coming from the door gap reflected off a small mirror above the sink, the bathroom very dimly lit by it.
Most Dutch bathrooms had barely enough space to do one’s business and turn around. By comparison, this one was a palace—albeit a cosy, colourful tiny palace much cleaner than the living space in the stockroom. The toilet was the typical Dutch sort; a ridged, flat-surfaced bowl with a button for flushing set into the top of the tank. To the right of the toilet, the teeny-tiny sink, and the perpetual birthday calendar that was de rigueur in Dutch lavs, stood a narrow shower stall with an orange and pink floral curtain. The whole tiny room smelled of Domestos and lily of the valley.
Dress and coat semi-tucked into the elastic of her underpants, Kitt backed Mae into the shower, lifting the curtain to not make a sound. “Stay here,” he said at her ear and she screwed her eye shut. He drew away and a half-second later was back at her ear, murmuring, “Don’t shut your eyes, keep them open—wide open—and whatever happens, don’t get any ideas about using that toilet brush there as a weapon.” Then, as soundlessly as the curtain falling about her, he stepped out of the shower.
In the dimness, she peered around the edge of pink and orange fabric, watching him lower the lid of the open toilet as someone called out, cautiously, “Gert?”
Seated on the toilet’s edge in half-darkness, Kitt, muttered a throaty “Ja,” and peeked through the little gap in the door at a man in a black and white hoodie, what looked like a fat riding crop under his arm.
The man faced the entrance into the alcove with the mirror and sighed in irritation, shaking his head, hands on his hips. “Hé klootzak! Deur dicht doen!”
Kitt’s little “Uh…” blended into a small moan of discomfort as he drew the not-quite-useless little gun from his pocket. While he knew the weapon lacked bullets, it could still be used to menace, just like the cattle prod the man had tucked in the crook of his arm. To some, a cattle prod would have seemed a very odd thing to have in a sex shop, yet this shop catered to all tastes and there were those in the BDSM world who got off on electro-torture and electro-stimulation. There was a very real possibility the blood they’d found was related to consensual SM, but Kitt guessed that this had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with non-consensual pain and fear and domination of another kind.
“Idioot! Sluit deze deur!” With a grumble, the man jerked the hood from his dark hair and shut the door into the little alcove.
Not game to make any noise by pulling her dress and coat from her knickers, Mae peeked around the edge of the shower curtain again. Still seated on the toilet, Kitt had a foot planted against the door and Gert’s stupid gun—the one without bullets—in hand. She knew guns gave people a false sense of security and power. She knew that most people were injured by their own firearms. She knew that she would rather have that feckin’ manky chrome-handled brush next to the base of the toilet than a stupid Walther, Beretta, Sig or whatever pistol Kitt held at the ready. Ever cool, void of expression of any sort, he glanced at her, jerked his chin to indicate she needed to stay behind the curtain, and gave an uncomfortable moan once she’d stopped peeking around the fabric.
True to Your Service Page 13
