Sixteen of the Best

by Sarah Veitch

  The room was very warm. I waited, anticipation clenching in my belly like a fist. To calm myself I focused on the pulsating light, counted five rotations, then ten. Its simple hypnotic pattern seemed to draw me into its center, called to engulf me. Is this how sperm saw the ova? I wondered.

  Then click-snap, click-snap. My erection bobbed. Madame had entered the room behind me, and she was wearing mules. I listened to her unhurried progress across the hardwood, the distinct strike of the sole, then the tantalizing smack against her heel. It almost sounded wet, and I thought longingly of the time she'd let me lick her feet.

  'Today we are going to talk about time, Lieutenant,' Madame said. Her English was perfect, but there was a slant to the words, if not exactly an accent. She was full-bred Quebecois, and kept that edge of herself polished to a gloss. 'How long does it take to be strangled?'

  A breath of winter swept over me. There would be no preliminaries. 'Four minutes, or five.'

  'And when I whip you with a crop, how long does that take?'

  Oh, God - forever. It felt like an eternity. 'I don't know.'

  She was very close to my back. I felt a flutter against my inner thigh and flinched, but she was only stroking me with the leather, exploring the newly-bare skin. The throbbing dot on the wall disappeared, replaced by a video of a woman's leg, an extreme close-up that followed the smooth skin up to a tight triangle of black pubic hair. The thrill surged to my cockhead in a rush of blood; it felt like a club swaying between my legs.

  The tip of Madame's lash traced the cleft of my ass. 'Why don't you know, Lieutenant?'

  On the wall, the video woman spread her legs wider, and began to tease her rosy vagina lips with the end of a riding crop. The cuffs bit into my wrists as I strained forward, but experience was crying alarm. For Gods sake, answer her, Dan.

  'Because I am...'

  Crack! A welt of pain seared my left buttock and I wrenched, the manacle chains squeaking at the ceiling bolt.

  'Easily distracted, Lieutenant?'

  'Yes, Madame,' I gasped. Fuck, that hurt.

  'That's why we are going to play with time - to help you concentrate. I will ask questions and you will answer them, within two seconds. Right or wrong, I don't care. Guess if you have to, but you will answer. You will not say I don't know.'

  On the wall, the woman's sex glistened. She lifted her hips in a slow undulation, rubbing against the crop as if it were a braided leather pole, the way a stripper would. I knew I would concentrate better if I didn't watch, so I closed my eyes. I opened them again immediately. Addict.

  'How old were the girls who were murdered?'

  'Two were fifteen, one eighteen, one sixteen.'

  'Prostitutes?'

  'One.'

  'How do bikers dispatch their enemies, Lieutenant?'

  The question caught me off guard and I hesitated, mentally running through the dozen gang murders in the last year.

  Crack! The savage bite of the whip made me twist, half in pain, half in animal fury.

  'They shoot them, Madame! Car bombs, knifings.'

  'Then why do you waste your time on the Hell's Angels?'

  'Because they're at war with Les Bandits, over teen hookers. Did you read in La Presse...'

  One blow, then another, stinging nettles across each thigh. God damn!

  'I'm the one asking the questions, Lieutenant.'

  It went on and on, eternity creeping forward in two-second increments, the distance between her question and the lash. My ass danced and my mind scrambled ahead in a ragged, desperate dash. I quickly exhausted my own logical theories and reached for wild conjecture: truth, guesses, bald lies - I tossed out anything to save my skin.

  Yet she caught me again and again, and always with the same bait. On the wall, the first woman was replaced by two others, who were joined together, feasting between each other's thighs. I was mesmerized by the undulating landscapes, one pale and one caramel, ass cheeks bucking in slow, sinuous waves, breasts trembling with soft weight. My erection had dipped but now it surged again, straining forward eagerly. I ached to touch it.

  'Which girl was pregnant?'

  'Neither...' They were two tigresses lapping cream, I thought, then caught myself. 'None!' I blurted. Oh, God, she'd read through my scribble on the card.

  'You expect your superiors to have faith in an officer who is so uncertain, Lieutenant?' She squashed the word like a grape under her heel. 'Do you waste their time like you waste mine?'

  I thought the question was rhetorical. The vicious blow caught me under the shoulder blades and I cried out, a curse of rage and pain.

  'Who did the bracelet belong to?' Madame demanded.

  'No one - I don't know. Not the killer!'

  'Why not? Explain.'

  I did, feeling guilty for my breach - that information hadn't been released to the public. But I was grateful for any kind of respite.

  The bracelet had been found at the scene with the first body, and while it was being held as a clue, it could have been dropped at any time, by anyone. Notre Dame Basilica was very popular with both tourists and the faithful. Our department didn't believe it was the perpetrator's because female serial killers were very, very rare. Most were poisoners; these strangulations had been brutal, hands-on murders. We had no record of violent serial killings being committed by a pregnant woman.

  The video image on the wall changed again. This one was a shock. It took me moments to recognize it, that pale, trembling body stretched between chains, torso bowed, shaved skin gleaming with sweat.

  You chose this, Dan Volka. Oh, God.

  Then Madame slipped out of the darkness and pressed her leather-clad body against the length of my ravaged back. I could have brayed in anguish but I swallowed it back to a low, whimpering moan in my throat. Madame laid her cheek between my shoulder blades, reached around my hips and began to caress my flagging erection with glistening, grease-smeared hands.

  Extreme close-up. Extreme bliss. My cock on the wall was two feet long and her delicate, feminine hands slithered over it, coaxing urgent life into it once more. She stroked the base, and the virgin skin tingled with fresh excitement, shimmering waves that lapped over my balls. Her other hand slid up and down the hardening shaft, smeared pre-cum over the throbbing head, stroked the cleft with her thumb. It was glorious, a sensual, serpentine dance that was intensified by its own image, a porno flick I saw and felt.

  'Daniel,' she murmured against my back, 'why did I ask you to shave?'

  The tenderness in her voice caught me by surprise, and my throat tightened. 'To humiliate me,' I whispered.

  'No.' She closed her thumb and forefinger in a ring under my cockhead, and squeezed. I groaned at the video image, the immense, dark-rose cap that seemed to be sitting on her fist, and the surge of sensation that churned between my legs.

  'I wanted you to remember places you had forgotten,' she said. 'I wanted you to feel them new, to begin again.' Pause. 'I do read La Presse, Lieutenant, and most of the other papers, too. I've been expecting you for a week. I read the headlines and I know the pressure you're under, I can feel the disorder of your thoughts.'

  She released me and stepped away. I almost cried out at the loss. But she set a little step in front of me, slipped out of her mules and got up on it. Her eyes were level with mine, and I stared into her face, startled and amazed by this unexpected privilege. This was Madame facing me like a lover, not bits of anatomy flickering on the wall.

  She was forty, certainly. No woman, no matter how beautiful, could have gathered that power of presence in twenty years, or even thirty. Her cheekbones were high and defined, her dark hair was still glossy, dyed, perhaps, and pulled back severely into a chignon. There was a delicate line on each side of her mouth, the tug of gravity on fine flesh, and a soft feathering of time at the edges of her eyes. But her dark gaze was alert, penetrating. A falcon.

  She smelled of leather, and roses. She clasped my face with both hands.

  'Do you doubt
the capacity of a woman to be terrible, Lieutenant?'

  No.

  'I will tell you, I was pregnant once,' she continued quietly. 'Twenty years ago. They call it the miracle of life, and it was - the miracle of mine. The power of creation was in my body. What other powers might I have? It was the beginning of a new journey. Some women become mothers, and a few become... goddesses.'

  I was transfixed, held by her hands and her glittering eyes. What she was suggesting was ludicrous - that the ability to produce new life might lead someone to believe she could dole out death, too? Yet, in the back of my mind, I heard the hum of the red light again, saw its timeless, repeating, consuming pulse.

  'Think again, Daniel,' Madame whispered. 'Start at the beginning and do not doubt what a woman may be capable of, upon your peril.'

  She pulled me forward into a kiss, and clamped my cock between her powerful thighs. That sensation eclipsed all others, pushed pain and exhaustion into the surreal past. I was embraced by tight heat, soaring in the sudden rush, overwhelmed by it. Greased and ready, I began to buck into the warm clasp of her flesh. In that instant I loved it like no other.

  Madame closed her fists in my hair, hanging on as I thrust my hips in wild, needy lunges, terrified she would pull away again. I drove harder, faster until I was shaking her, my chains holding us both. I heard a raw sound, an animal in the distance - it was myself moaning. I climbed and climbed, numb to everything now except that pinnacle I wanted so desperately to reach.

  Rapture. I convulsed, twisted by pleasure so sharp it began as pain, a thunderclap roaring up from my balls. All the tortured waiting, teasing, misery and urgent hunger spun together in a white sphere and released, shooting deep into the blackness beyond her thighs.

  I sagged, trembling. Madame unlocked my cuffs and I fell to my knees. My arms were deadwood except for the grinding ache in the sockets; I couldn't raise them. My swollen hands were throbbing mitts, my legs, rubber. I leaned forward until my forehead touched the mat.

  'Au revoir, Lieutenant,' Madame said. I heard her slip into her mules and walk away, the distinct steps on the hardwood ringing throughout the room. Click-snap, click-snap, faster now.

  I lay there, a crumpled, battered man, still shuddering with pleasure. I couldn't move yet but the gift from my goddess was already in motion, burning ahead of me, the clear, white beacon of my thoughts.

  It lit up the tiniest stone, a pebble of possibility that cast a very long shadow. Twenty years long. I pushed myself up on one arm, ignoring the scream in my shoulder.

  'Did you have a son - or a daughter?' I called out.

  Madame turned at the open door, a thrilling magazine fantasy with dangerous white legs and a fine, high-breasted body, armored in black leather. But the face above it floated, a tremulous petal in a pond. I realized I'd never seen her look afraid.

  Way Out West

  Suzee Moon and Stan Strap

  STAN shook some dust from his red bandana and tied it loosely at his neck before pushing open the swing doors of The Lucky Seven. It was nine o'clock on a summer's night in Tombstone and the place was packed. Old George was belting out Beautiful Dreamer on the slightly out of tune piano, and, best of all, Stan noticed Miss Kitty and her girls were already mingling with the crowd.

  There was the usual pause as when anyone stepped in, but most people knew Stan and those who didn't were quickly advised to leave him be. When he ordered his usual drink of sarsaparilla no one laughed. For one thing he was the only one who could spell it, and for another they remembered the night that Scruffy Jake had made fun of him. The memory of what followed still made hard men wince.

  A big bear of a man standing next to him at the bar turned and said, 'You gonna let me take your money off you in poker tonight, Deputy?'

  'The hell I will, Calhoun,' said Stan. 'You know I never play cards.'

  'Just checking,' said Calhoun with a chuckle. 'You know where I'm sitting if you want to join us.' He nodded to the far corner.

  'You take care now,' said Stan.

  He took his drink and went to sit near the piano.

  'What'll it be, Stan?' Old George asked him.

  'I've been out in the desert for three days. Play me some music with rocks in it.'

  George began a rolling left hand pattern and then added triplets across the beat with his right.

  'That's fine,' said Stan tapping his boots, 'just fine.'

  After a while, Miss Kitty came over to see him. 'You looking for company tonight?' she asked him.

  As it happened one of the girls had caught Stan's attention. It was the tumbling black hair that had first attracted him, quickly followed by the full curve of her delightful hips. When he noticed the sassy look in her eyes, he just knew he had to have her.

  As it happened Stan had caught the girl's attention, too. Tales of the deputy had filtered through the saloon and he was preceded by his reputation. Good lovers were not exactly common in the back-of-beyond, but nor were they that thick on the ground in Kansas. It was not that which had intrigued Suzee, though. It was the rumour of his delight at upturning a pretty woman's bottom for a sound spanking that had caused her to shiver, despite her show of contemptuous outrage when one of the girls had warned her to behave herself in front of the deputy. No one was going to tell Suzee what to do! She'd had enough of men trying to rule her life in Kansas. Here she was going to be a big fish in a little bowl, she'd decided. As a dancer she'd never made it further than the chorus line in Kansas, but here at The Lucky Seven she could be a star.

  Suzee was a natural flirt and as a dancer and hostess she knew how to perform, but was usually sensible not to push things too far. She didn't believe flirting entitled anyone to her favours, but she knew that with so few women around it was easy to stir up a situation that could turn nasty. So why the heck did she suddenly turn up the flame as soon as she sensed the legendary deputy's presence? Of course it was nothing to do with Deputy Strap's entrance, or the rumours she'd heard...

  'Who's that?' the deputy asked, pointing to Suzee, who was now bent so low that her ample breasts looked in real danger of tumbling out of her low-cut gown. And did she actually push down her dress further as she pretended to rearrange her hair? Stan didn't know whether to be outraged or amused, but the stirring in his constraining denim was unambiguous in its appreciation of the hussy. Stan couldn't help stare with baited breath, unaware that clever corsetry allowed Suzee to flash outrageously with no danger of escape. Those almost tumbling assets of hers made the mesmerised Stan long to uncover her more modestly covered assets and give her the spanking she undoubtedly deserved.

  Stan sighed to himself. Much as he longed to have her over his knee, she was new to town, and perhaps was not as worldly as she appeared. True, her dress seemed tighter and lower cut than some of the other girls' frocks but she was from Kansas. A word of advice would be more appropriate, he decided reluctantly...

  His reverie was broken by Kitty's contemptuous response: 'That's the new girl, Suzee. She's fresh in from Kansas City and she's driving the guys wild.'

  'I can see why,' said Stan as he watched her flirt and sway from one table to another. 'Call her over.'

  Kitty looked unsure. 'The thing is, Stan, she's new to the work. She sees herself as a dancer and hostess only, if you take my meaning.'

  'That would be fair enough if she wasn't going around swaying that lovely behind of hers, and bending over the table in that low-cut bodice. Don't worry Kitty. I just want a word. She needs to behave herself if she's not for sale. And when have I ever gone where I wasn't invited?' he smiled at her. 'Or paid for it?' he added, giving her rump a lazy slap as he grinned at her.

  Kitty blushed, despite herself. 'I know, Stan. She is a terrible tease.'

  'Call her over,' said Stan. 'She won't tease me for too long.'

  Suzee had watched the exchange between Kitty and Stan in excitement and contempt. She noted the sly smack that had caused Kitty to turn quite girlish. There was no way Suzee would let any man tr
eat her with such casual contempt and get away with it. And how dare he pay Kitty such attention when she was in the room! Had the man no taste? She felt a flicker of triumph when Kitty told her that the deputy wanted a word. Suzee took great delight in choosing her words. The fear and excitement she was trying so hard to contain were not assuaged by the look of amazement, nor the sly grin Kitty gave as Suzee delivered her message.

  A minute later Kitty returned. She seemed unsure whether to laugh or run for cover.

  'She says she's busy for a moment but she'll be over as soon as she has time.'

  'Will she now?'

  Stan stood up slowly and moved languidly across the room. He came up close to Suzee as she joked with Gil Calhoun while sitting on his knee.

  'Excuse me,' he said, putting his hand very lightly on her wrist. 'Can I have a word with you for a moment?'

  'If you don't mind,' said Suzee haughtily, 'I'll see you when I'm through here.'

  Everyone around the table took a sudden interest in their shoes. There was a long pause during which the silence began to spread to the next table.

  'That's okay,' said Calhoun, suddenly grinning. 'You go and chat with the Deputy while I finish my card game.'

  Suzee looked affronted as Calhoun roughly pushed her from his lap, but before she could say too much about it, Stan led her over to his seat near the piano.

  'Well, really,' Suzee sniffed and tossed her head, 'what a terrible display of manners. I would have thought that as lawman you would be setting a better example.'

  'It is partly because I am a lawman that I want to speak to you. You're not helping me to keep good order if you're going to flaunt yourself at the men and then turn them down if they get too frisky.'

  'Who says I'm flaunting?' She crossed her legs revealing tight black ankle boots with three-inch heels. 'Or turning anyone down?' she added, dangerously.

  Stan realised that he was staring at her. Damn but she was a bewitching woman. He took in the full breasts and deep cleavage and the way her skirt sat across her thighs. He decided to show her a very good example.