Dangerous

by Sharon Green

  "What's your name?" Tain opened with, speaking to the man in charge.

  "Nat Fremont," the man answered, still not quite understanding what was happening. "What the fuck is going on here? Who the fuck do you think you are, coming in here and - "

  "That's enough," Tain said quietly, the words instantly silencing the man. "You're a supplier, Nat, but you have your own supplier. Tell me who he or she is and where he or she can be found."

  "Ricky Norstrom is my supplier," Nat answered at once, then gave an address before adding, "But I'm not supposed to tell anyone that. If I keep quiet if I happen to be arrested Ricky will send a lawyer to get me out. If I don't keep quiet he'll send someone to make me dead."

  "You don't have to worry about Ricky sending anyone at all," Riss said, drawing Nat's attention. "He'll be too busy with his own problems to spend time on anyone or anything else. How long have you been in business with your supplier, and how have you been putting the word out about what you have for sale?"

  "Ricky and I have been in business for about a month," Nat replied, still bothered and still not quite understanding why. "We've been spreading the word through the s and m groups after wasting time with the d and s fools. The ones who play with dominance and submission have too many rules to appreciate what I can supply, but the sadists and masochists aren't the same. A good number of the sadists have at least one someone they want to dominate completely, very often someone who doesn't have the least interest in cooperating."

  "So you help them do it without cooperation," Tain remarked, keeping a tight hold on her growing anger. "Just the way you do the same for yourself. How do you get along without repeat business?"

  "Why would I have to get along without repeat business?" Nat asked after making a sound of ridicule. "My customers know they have to give the drug to their slaves once a week, otherwise the slaves will come out of it and be able to escape. The ones who use the stuff are hooked even if it isn't personally, hooked on the need to keep their slave under control. Even if I raise the price, which I'll be doing soon, they have no choice but to pay what I ask."

  "Are you sure about that?" Tain asked, studying the man closely. "That the drug has to be given once a week or it wears off, I mean."

  "Of course I'm sure," Nat responded with the same sound of ridicule. "Ricky said that that was the way of it, and he ought to know."

  "Is there anything else about your business or Ricky's that we would find out if we asked the right questions?" Tain put next. "Something we, as your enemies, really need to know?"

  "Only that Ricky isn't as easy to reach as I am," Nat told her. "His place is bigger and has more protection, stuff I can't afford yet. And he has more than a handful of girls to play with. When I move up to his level, I'll be able to have the same."

  "I wouldn't count on that promotion too heavily if I were you," Tain said dryly. "Just sit quietly and wait for your next instructions."

  Tain gestured to Riss before heading for the hall, and once the two of them were out there she explained to Riss about the experiment she wanted to try. Riss agreed that the experiment was necessary, and also agreed that they would have to ask for a volunteer. They went back in and got their volunteer - who, unsurprisingly, turned out to be the blonde - ran their experiment, and were very satisfied with the results. Once that matter was taken care of, Tain turned to the blond woman, who had introduced herself when she volunteered.

  "Thanks for helping with that, Dina," she said with a smile. "We now have what we need to go after the next level of lice, but you gals are still a little short in the needs department. If you'll tell us where they put your clothes we'll get them for you."

  "You can't," Dina answered with a grimace. "The first thing they did after forcing that drug on each of us was to make us strip. Once they had our clothes they cut everything into tiny pieces, an act they called proof that we'd never be free again. They were wrong about us being freed, but that doesn't put our clothes back together."

  "We checked the closets when we looked through the house," Riss put in as two of the girls started to cry again. "You'll probably have to do some folding and fixing, but there's no reason why you can't wear some of the clothes belonging to these guys."

  "And that leaves only one more need that you might be thinking about," Tain said while Dina nodded with satisfaction. "We can't have these lice arrested yet, not when we don't want to warn their supplier, so we have to leave them here. If any of you ladies want to stay with them to … thank them for the way they treated you, we won't mind a bit. If you'd rather have us drop you off somewhere, we can do that instead."

  Two of the girls immediately begged to be taken home, but the other three, including Dina, looked at each other and then at the men.

  "I think I'd rather stay here for a while," Dina said, and it was clear that she spoke for the other two women as well. "Once I'm finished with a couple of … chores I have in mind, I can get myself home."

  "I'll get a couple of the things we'll need," one of the other two said, then she left the room. The expressions worn by Dina and the third woman weren't very nice, but Tain considered them extremely suitable.

  While Riss took the two girls who wanted to leave upstairs for clothes, Tain spent a couple of minutes giving the men orders. The two who weren't going to be getting the attention of the three women - at least not at first - would be the ones who guarded the secret of what had happened in the house.

  If anyone came to the door, one of the two would say they were temporarily out of stock and the customer would have to come back. If someone called on the phone, they would put the caller off in the same way. If the big boss called, they were to try saying that Nat was busy with one of the slaves. If the boss insisted on speaking to Nat, they would promise to have Nat call right back.

  "Which will give the louse time to pull himself together before he has to sound normal," Dina said, having followed the reason behind Tain's instructions. "When he calls the boss back he won't say a word that will give us away, and that way no one will be expecting you and Riss when you get there. I'd ask to go with you two - if I didn't have such pleasant plans of my own."

  "Just make sure you don't kill them," Tain warned. "You can get away with giving back what you were given, but if you cross that final line things will get really ugly."

  "Don't worry, I already know that and I'll be in charge of the … session," Dina said, then turned her head to see that the second woman had come back with the … props she'd gone after. "The first thing I want is that strap - and for you to get out of your clothes, Nat."

  "I don't know what you think you're going to do," Nat said as he immediately got to his feet and began to strip. "I'm the boss here, and you sluts are nothing but our slaves. Slaves don't give orders, they take them."

  "That's right, you and your friends insisted that we were the natural slaves because the drug worked on us and wouldn't work on a man," Dina said slowly as she watched Nat get naked. "Haven't you noticed yet that you were lied to? The drug does work on men, you just have to give them a little more of it to hold them as tight as a woman is held."

  "That's bullshit," Nat insisted, dropping his shorts on the pile of clothes he'd already taken off. "Ricky swore to me, and Ricky ought to know… What in hell is this? Why am I - "

  Nat's words broke off as shock set in, but all Dina did was laugh.

  "Ricky is a lying imbecile and so are you," Dina said to a man who was beginning to look worried. "Now get to your knees and then put your cheek on the floor. You used this strap on me all the time in the beginning, forcing me to do exactly as you wanted, not with reluctance as I'd been doing. When I finally had to give up trying to resist you laughed at me, telling me how soft I was for giving in. Now we get to see how tough you are."

  "I'm tough enough to take anything you can hand out, slut," Ned said from his place on the floor, his right cheek flat on the carpet. "You can't - Ow!"

  "What was that you called me, boy?" Dina asked as Nat roc
ked with the pain of the first stroke she'd given him. The strap she held was two or three inches wide and more stiff than flexible, and she'd put her whole body into the swing. "I'm not going to order you to call me mistress, boy, just to keep your hands out of the way. When you've had all the strapping you can take, you'll decide on your own to ask me to stop. If you ask nicely enough, I just may do it. And you can howl and cry all you like, but not too loudly. We wouldn't want anyone outside to hear you."

  Tain had seen the way Nat had tried to protect his backside with his hands, but as soon as Dina told him he couldn't do that his hands went flat to the floor like his face. The second stroke of the strap brought a strangled shout from him, as did the third and fourth strokes. After that the sound he produced was more like a throttled-down scream, and then another of the same kind of shout he'd started with joined in from a different part of the room.

  Looking at the other two women showed Tain that they'd had their own victims strip down, and one of the men was bent over while the other was kneeling back on his heels. The one kneeling was the one who'd screamed, but the woman near him just smiled.

  "You put those clamps on my nipples and one between my legs, and then you made me beg you to take them off again," the woman said softly to the now-whimpering man. "You laughed when I finally had to beg to be raped, but for some reason you aren't laughing right now. That might mean you're ready to beg, but you might as well not bother. Those clamps are staying right where they are for now, while I decide what I want you to do to get me to change my mind."

  Tain had no trouble seeing the clamps on the man's own nipples, but they weren't as obvious as the one on his penis. That last clamp seemed to be the one that bothered him the most, and even the hiss of pain coming from the third man didn't seem to distract the second from his own predicament.

  The third man was having a long, narrow wooden paddle applied to his behind, each stroke making him gasp and flinch. The woman using the paddle didn't seem to have Dina's strength, but she also wasn't being leisurely in the way she applied the wood to flesh. Very shortly the man began to bounce where he stood, his backside turning a deeper and deeper red. He wasn't making as much noise as Nat, but he seemed to be suffering almost as much.

  Nat's bottom was starting to bleed a little, but Dina just kept strapping him as if she didn't care. Just as the man began to call Dina mistress in a pain-choked voice, Riss came back down with the two women who wanted to leave. The women looked away from what was being done to the men and seemed ready to start trembling if not shivering, so Tain helped Riss get the two out of the house. Reminding Dina again about not killing the men would have been a waste of breath if Dina had a different idea, so Tain didn't bother. If Dina was able to stay on the right side of the line, she'd get a job offer. If she didn't…

  "Okay, now we're no longer a taxi service," Riss said once they'd dropped off the second woman at her apartment building. Both women had been ordered not to tell anyone who had kidnapped - or rescued - them, but they were free to get any kind of medical help they might need. "Are we going to wait for something to go wrong and wreck our plans, or are we going after Ricky right now?"

  "We're going after him now, as soon as we make a few preparations," Tain answered. "If we can get Ricky before daylight, I think I know who we can report to. Assuming, that is, that Ricky knows who his boss is. If he doesn't then we may have a problem."

  "We can talk about it once we have Ricky," Riss said, pulling away from the curb she'd stopped at. "We're on a roll, and you never stop to question your luck when you're on a roll, partner. Where to next?"

  Tain told her, then sat back to consider what she meant to do when Ricky was their prisoner. It might not be the best of moves, but she really had no choice at all…

  Chapter Twenty

  Tain had Riss drive her back to her car, then they moved her car to a place that was about a mile away from Ricky's house. If for some reason they weren't able to reach Riss's car when the time came to leave, Tain's car would be a backup vehicle waiting not far away. It would also be a secondary rendezvous point in case things really went bad. Ricky's house was not likely to be undefended and their best bet was to cover all bases before they went in.

  "All right, now we take a good look around," Riss murmured as she parked not far from the beginning of the large stretch of property that held Ricky's equally large house. "The fewer surprises we get, the happier I'll be."

  "You and me both," Tain muttered as they got out of the car. They still had their shoulder bags with the guns in them, but now they carried different hand guns also and a couple of devices they would certainly need rather soon. The device Tain held would get them through whatever Ricky had in the way of household security, but the one Riss held would be of more immediate use…

  "I'm already getting a reading," Riss whispered as Tain joined her in the dark near the beginning of the treed approach to Ricky's house. "There are two definite sources of heat not far from this silly little archway pretending to be a gate, and the sources of heat are moving."

  "Patrolling guards," Tain murmured, the only possible conclusion to come to. "I think we need to find out how many of them there are altogether before we take out any of them. They have to either report in or stay in touch with each other on a regular basis, and if one or two miss the reporting time the others will be alerted. If all of them miss the reporting time, their supervisor inside the house will hopefully waste some time thinking there's a problem with the communication link before deciding the house is under attack."

  "Also hopefully, before he decides there's an attack we'll be in the house taking him out," Riss agreed softly. "Let's get started."

  Tain nodded, and then the two of them moved soundlessly through the middle of the low fence that bracketed that very inviting archway. The wooden fence was low enough for just about anyone to go over, but doing that would have been the same as walking through the archway. Both fence and archway might have been made of wood, but the alarm system attached wasn't. The device Tain held showed that going under the fence, so to speak, was the way to enter without setting off the alarms, so that's what they did.

  Once inside the perimeter, it didn't take long to find out that there were six patrolling guards. Their heat signatures were perfectly clear, and their movement defined their areas of patrol. Tain and Riss waited an extra few minutes to be absolutely certain, and then they moved off separately after putting their two devices away in their shoulder bags. The only things left in their hands were the special dart guns they'd taken from their cars, guns containing darts that would knock out even twelve foot giants and keep them out for hours.

  The three guards Tain was responsible for taking out weren't twelve feet tall and weren't even close to being giants. They were ordinary men who went down one after the other, having no idea they were being stalked before a dart hit them. Each of them wore kevlar, but not on their arms and hands. As guards they weren't bad, but as a stalker Tain had learned to be better.

  And so, apparently, had Riss. She appeared out of the dark only seconds after Tain had reached the house, and while Tain studied the security system guarding the house, Riss made sure that all the heat signatures behind them were unmoving ones on the ground. When Tain's device turned off the house's security system, Tain was able to switch to ordinary burglar tools to work on the front door with. The lock was very simple, something Tain had hoped it would be, and it didn't take long before the door opened to her touch on the knob.

  "Yes!" Riss breathed in delight, but Tain was glad that her partner didn't immediately rush inside. They did have to find the security center as quickly as possible to avoid any alarms being set off to announce their presence, but going carefully was a better idea than rushing. Once the entire place was secure they'd be able to go looking for Ricky himself, and maybe then they'd find it possible to get a few very pertinent answers.

  * * *

  Jake and Matt left the area of what used to be Coleson's office a
nd went down to the department's restaurant to talk. The room was buzzing with people deep in whispered conversations, all of them knowing that it wasn't possible for anyone to record what was being said. The department made sure that the room was swept constantly for the presence of any recording devices - or anything else that might be a breach of security - so everyone tended to take advantage of the relative safety.

  "I've always wondered if this place really was completely secure," Matt commented after they'd each been given cups of coffee and the waiter had moved away. "I mean, not letting anyone else do recordings doesn't mean that our own people aren't paying attention."

  "When Coleson was in charge I wouldn't have been surprised to find out that he had every table in this place bugged," Jake put in while adding sugar and cream to his cup. "But only in the name of departmental security, of course. Whoever gets to take Coleson's place might feel the same way, but it's more likely that they won't."

  "Unless they're into the same kind of games Coleson was," Matt agreed with a nod, drinking his coffee black. "So when are we going to get started with this new assignment we've been given? And while I'm asking questions I might as well add in the one that goes, how are we going to do it? Checking out rumors of strange activities in the dominant-submissive crowd won't be easy."

  "It's too early to get into the real thick of things, but it isn't too early to make some arrangements," Jake responded, reaching for his cell phone with a smile. "Don't tell me you haven't ever gotten involved in the d-s world? You sounded like someone with no contacts on the inside."