The Hard Way (Box Set)

by Stephanie Burke

  “Fabina and Fabian are out with friends,” Carmen snapped.

  “My children, fruitages of the belly,” Fabio explained as Jessica rolled her eyes again.

  “You do not enjoy children?” Carmen asked.

  “What I would enjoy is getting out of these chains and back to where I belong.”

  “With me, ur, uh, with us,” Fabio hastily amended as Carmen shot him a glance.

  Just then, there was the sound of a door slamming and quick footsteps.

  “Mama, I’m home!”

  “Fabina!” Fabio gasped, looking between Carmen and Jessica. How could he explain this one while keeping his daughter out of the family business? Too many daughters had wound up dead or kidnapped, er, gift wrapped for the enemies, for his taste. He didn’t want anything happening to his darling beloved daughter.

  “Dinner party?” she asked as she made her way into the dining room.

  Fabina had dark hair like her mother, and a well-rounded figure. She smiled sweetly at her father and shot a confused look at her mother and the other woman in the strange robe.

  “Something like that.” Carmen smiled. “Why don’t you go on up to your room and… find Miss Jessica something to wear. Something of yours should fit.”

  “Yeah right,” Jessica snorted, noting that little Fabina had massive tatas to go along with the well-rounded hips. Any shirt that girl loaned her would have interesting breast prints that she couldn’t fill with a Wonderbra!

  “Miss Jessica had a bit of an accident, and we are waiting for her people to come and retrieve her, poor girl.”

  “Right away.” Fabina smiled, then turned and swiftly made her way out of the room. Her father smiled and followed, hoping to draw her off with distractions while his wife handled the delectable Jessica.

  “You will be dealt with.” Carmen sneered at Jessica.

  “For being the daughter of an Egyptian prince?’ she asked archly.

  “For trying to steal my husband!”

  “Trying to… For the love of Pete, woman! Wake up and smell that biscotti! That man is hitting on me!”

  “Fabio would never --”

  “Sister, please! And I do mean sister! You know what the Moors did to Italy? So you all got dark hair, attitudes, and ghetto booties. We are sisters, sister, and I am telling you that you need to ditch that zero for a hero!”

  “How dare you!” Carmen’s eyes widened in outrage as she glared at the trussed up woman.

  “I dare because it’s true! I don’t want him! I have a candy-coated hard body around here somewhere. And I want to get back to him. So how about you let me go? I go, and you get fatso. Sound good?” She smiled her most engaging smile.

  Carmen jumped to her feet, knocking her chair back, and exited the room, shooting Jessica one nasty glare. “You will be sorry!”

  “I’m already sorry!” Jessica shot back. “I didn’t get my shower and I want to go back to my billions of unclaimed cash!”

  The slamming of the door was her only answer, and she soon turned her mind back to the food in front of her. No matter how hungry she was, she could not lift the damn fork to her mouth. She could only move it around on the plate.

  And she was getting thirsty, too!

  She sighed and tried to figure out what would happen next. It would be the great rescue, right? God, she hoped so! This was getting tedious.

  * * *

  “Potent venom from the deadly fangs of an Egyptian asp! Even more potent when swallowed.”

  Carmen chuckled as she placed three drops of the deadly poison into the wine glass on the tray. “Soon you’ll be sorry, my pretty Jessica!”

  Standing just outside the dining room doors, Fabina paused as she saw her mother doing something at yet another sideboard. Looked like she was putting something in a glass. She paused, holding out the T-shirt and skirt she brought for the visiting woman, Jessica.

  She stood there for a moment, watching her mother cackle, before her father came down the hall beside her and took the clothing from her arms.

  “You run along, poppet! You go and spend some time with your brother at your friend’s house. I will take these in to Jessica.”

  Smiling, Fabina left the house to join her friend and her brother, but the strange sight of her mother with that glass never left her mind.

  * * *

  “I brought you some clothing,” Fabio called as he entered the room, smiling like a loon. His wife entered a moment behind him, bearing a tray with two wine glasses.

  “Please, drink and refresh yourself,” she chuckled as she poured the wine, handing one glass to her husband and the other to Jessica.

  “Thank you, but I never touch the stuff. And why are you being so nice to me now?”

  “You will be dying soon, so that makes me happy!” Carmen chuckled as she sat back and watched the strange black woman pale.

  “They may not, Carmen,” Fabio sighed. “They may spare her.”

  He walked over to Jessica, placing his glass beside the untouched one that Carmen had offered to her. Jessica refused to even touch the glass, preferring to glare at the nasty woman instead.

  “They will kill her,” Carmen sang. “And then, husband, we will be happy together again.”

  Rolling his eyes, Fabio picked up his wineglass and drank deeply.

  “Excellent vintage as usual, Carmen,” he conceded after draining the glass. “You have excellent taste, my love.”

  “Too bad her choice in men sucks ass,” Jessica snapped, shifting away from him.

  “Now see here, Carmen has excellent taste in whatever she decides to do.”

  Jessica rolled her eyes. Carmen grinned.

  “Drink up,” she called to Jessica. “Your end is near.”

  “Wine is fine, but liquor’s quicker,” Jessica intoned, rolling her eyes. “You wouldn’t happen to have any tequila around here, would you?”

  “Plebeian!” Fabio snorted, picking up her glass and draining it in a few gulps.

  “No!” Carmen shouted, racing across the room to her beloved husband.

  Suddenly, dark, fast-paced music began to play, and Jessica strained her mind to try and recall what that meant. It didn’t bode well, she thought, as the music turned to dark violins and piano.

  “Why?” Carmen wailed. “Why did you drink from the glass, my love?”

  But Fabio was beyond answering. His face turned an interesting shade of purple before he clutched his chest and collapsed on the floor.

  Death music began to play and a piano pounded discordant notes.

  Tension built, as the man writhed for a moment, then gasped out his wife’s name. “Carmen…”

  Then he exhaled deeply, his head tilting to the side.

  “Nooo!” Carmen wailed. She tossed her head back and then collapsed onto the dead man’s chest. “Fabio!”

  “Holy shit!” Jessica gasped, drawing the attention of the maddened woman.

  “Fabio was all that I had left, all that I cared for, and you took him away!” She looked at Jessica, her eyes filled with hate and death as panic music began to play, the shrilling violin reminding her of a scene in Psycho. “Now you will pay!”

  Chapter Five

  The police were less than cooperative.

  Especially with a weeping, maybe Mafia wife wailing about voudon bitches who hexed their husbands!

  Carmen was a great actress. In fact, Jessica had never seen someone just change their whole attitude during questioning.

  But then, she didn’t get to stick around for the whole show, as she was currently being cuffed and led to the back seat of a patrol car.

  “Lord help me,” she gasped as the kindly officer placed his hand on the back of her head and eased her into the cage of a back seat. “I’m now a statistic!”

  Who knew a Mafia wife would call in the cops after she did something to her own husband! That bitch was trying to poison her and the not so indomitable don got it instead.

  If it wasn’t so corny and pathetic, she
would have laughed.

  But her thoughts were carried away as dark, depressing music began to fill the air.

  “Oh for the love of…”

  Before she could finish, a man opened the cruiser door and peered in. “Jessica?” he asked.

  “Do I know you?” She peered at him, trying to remember if she had seen him before.

  “I am Crenshaw, Ace Crenshaw.”

  “Bully for you. I wanna go home.”

  “You can’t go home. We have to take you in for questioning. What were you doing at the Carlieonies’ home?”

  “I was handcuffed to a chair waiting for psycho bitch to call in the rest of the boys and fit me with cement shoes so I can go and nap with the fishes.”

  “Being fresh will not help your cute little self.”

  God, not another one!

  Before she could scream or cry, there was shouting and a distraught Fabina ran toward her mother, who was currently being offered oxygen by a few paramedics. Too bad the bitch wouldn’t share. Jessica could use a shot of the fresh stuff right about now.

  “She poisoned your father!” Carmen screeched, and Fabina stepped back, tears running down her face. But she didn’t shoot Jessica an evil look. That look was leveled at Carmen.

  The violins changed to a rather dramatic chord, and Carmen and Fabina gave each other looks, like a pair of alpha bitches sizing each other up.

  Then the door slammed and Jessica was given a treat. She got to hear real live sirens in a police car, from the inside, as she was raced to the nearest Prefect City police station.

  * * *

  Lock-up was not fun.

  She went from having that ratty dirty white robe to having an ugly orange jumpsuit with a target on the back.

  Not an improvement, to say the least.

  Now she sat in a conference area, in her orange clothing, her bare feet (they let her keep the rollers), and with a major attitude.

  Detective Ace Crenshaw was leaning on the wooden desk that served as an interrogation table, right in her face, and asking, “Why did you do it, doll-face?”

  “Doll-face? Isn’t that sexual harassment?”

  “Are you trying to bribe me with… sex?”

  Bum Bummm Bum!

  “What?”

  “Because if you are, it’s working.” He waggled his eyebrows and growled and damned if she didn’t have Tony the Tiger flashbacks.

  “What drugs are you on, and when is it okay for a cop to be stoned?”

  “I find myself drugged by your beauty,” he sighed, reaching out to grasp her hand. “There is just something about you, Jessica, something I just can’t resist.”

  Jessica rose to her feet and leaned over the table, both palms braced on the rough surface. She got right into his face. “Try harder.”

  Before he could respond, the door swung open and two burly policewomen arrived to take her back to lock-up.

  “I believe you, Jessica!” he called as she was cuffed and led out of the room. “I’m going to do everything in my power to set you free!”

  “Whatever,” she groaned and turned when the two female officers urged her.

  As the door closed on Ace’s determined, lovelorn face, she caught sight of Fabina, head down, walking through the precinct. She gave a thought to what she was doing there, before she was led down and into a holding cell.

  “What about my phone call?” she suddenly asked, looking between the two women.

  “Your lawyer has already been contacted,” she was informed.

  “I have a lawyer?”

  “Satina Hellfritz Screwum from the law offices of Dewey, Screwum, and Howe.”

  “Uh…” Jessica wasn’t sure what to say to that.

  “She will arrive tomorrow and will meet you at the Prefect City Women’s Institution.”

  “Great.”

  After a small eternity that was actually about twenty minutes, Jessica was led to a van and placed in her own shared cell with her promised roommate, lead member of the Prefect City Broomstick Brigade.

  “Just lovely,” she murmured as the door slammed shut and she was left alone with the three-hundred-pound six-foot red-haired Haitian woman… with a hungry gleam in her eyes.

  “Lovely is right,” Big Bertha purred, and Jessica resisted the urge to climb the cell doors in an effort to escape.

  “Just stick with me, kid, and I will protect you from the riff-raff around here.”

  Big Bertha grinned, pointing out the riff-raff in question in the holding cell -- a collection of the fifteen scraggiest individuals Jessica had ever seen. They were rough-looking, smirking, overly-butch, and had sawed-off broomsticks and nasty smirks.

  Plus they were unwashed.

  After taking in the women, who were calling out things about tossing salad and sweet lips -- and she was sure they were not speaking about the ones on her face -- she turned to examine Big Bertha.

  Hell, she was clean!

  “Mommy!” she screeched, and jumped into the giantess’s arms. “I missed you!”

  A smirking Bertha carried her new baby off to the showers.

  * * *

  “Those other chicks,” Bertha whispered as she entered the gray tiled area, “don’t know what they’re missing.”

  The showers consisted of an open stall with several showerheads gleaming wetly along the far wall. There was a row of benches against the opposite wall and a row of circular drains on the floor.

  Institutional was too exciting a word to describe it.

  It was at the benches that Bertha finally put Jessica down, only to rip the orange jumpsuit off of her shoulders.

  Suddenly it wasn’t such a bad garment, Jessica thought. Maybe just a little misunderstood.

  But feeling the damp air of the showers caressing her bare breasts was another thing altogether.

  Time to put up a fight.

  “Look,” she reasoned. “You don’t want to do this to me. I am all skinny and dull and --”

  “Absolutely beautiful.” Bertha stepped back from her prey long enough to turn on a few showerheads. Steam almost concealed her return as she began to stalk Jessica.

  Jessica, of course, had managed to grab onto the edges of her open jumpsuit hoping she could reason with a seemingly immovable object. She lunged left when Bertha slid right and tumbled to the floor.

  “I like them feisty!’ Bertha chuckled, her thick accent making it difficult for Jessica to understand. “But you’d better not be too feisty. Then I get mad!” She lunged to her feet, arms held out as she tried to corner her skittish partner. “I’ll make you forget all about men!”

  “Not bloody likely!” Jessica spat, but then she slipped on the wet tiles. “Note to self,” she muttered as her ass hit the ground and she damn near skidded straight for Bertha. “There is no traction when running on wet tiles.”

  Amazingly enough, she did herself no major injury. Unfortunately, she landed right in the arms of her would-be suitor.

  “At last!” Bertha crowed. “Fresh meat!”

  Jessica shuddered as huge, callused hands cupped her bare breasts, shoving the wet upper portion of the jumpsuit to her waist, effectively trapping her hands.

  “Nice and perky, baby,” Bertha muttered as her head dipped low and she pulled one pert nipple into her mouth.

  “Oh, God!” Jessica squealed at the powerful suction. “Oh godohgodohgodohgod!”

  Holding the struggling Jessica to the hard tile floor, Bertha pulled off long enough to say, “Say my name!”

  “But I like men!” Jess wailed, only to have Bertha laugh.

  “Honey, when I am through with you, you will never want to look at a dick again!”

  “EEEEE!”

  Jessica’s squeal of fear was taken for one of pleasure and Bertha upped the ante. Her hands kneading one plump breast, her mouth made a foray across her chest and up to her neck.

  “Who’s your mommy?”

  “Faniqua Jackson, but she’s back in Baltimore!” Jessica wailed, tears of
frustration filling her eyes.

  “What?”

  “Stop! Get off! I can’t do… whoa!”

  With a move worthy of a wrestler, Bertha forced both knees between Jessica’s legs and, using sheer strength alone, spread hers wide, creating an area for her body to drop in between Jessica’s thighs. She ground her pelvis against Jessica’s. Her huge breasts pressed against Jessica’s diaphragm, preventing the cursing and swearing that was building up in her throat from coming out.

  “I bet your pussy is so tight,” Bertha purred, groaning as she shifted her big body against Jessica’s. If she were a man, they would have had a good case of frottage going on, but since the sheer thought of Bertha getting any closer to her crotch made Jessica’s skin crawl, she began to struggle in earnest.

  “Buck for me, baby,” Bertha growled, nipping at one ear. “I love my fresh fish wiggling on the line!”

  “Gah!”

  With the strength of ten men, or one woman scared out of her wits, Jessica scrambled until her bare feet found some purchase on top of a grate. With this leverage established, she bucked her hips as hard as he could.

  It sent a surprised Bertha flying, to belly flop beside her. It also gave Jessica enough time to slither away from the woman and look around for a weapon.

  Where was a broomstick when you needed one?

  But before she could find that, or any other suitable weapon, two other members of the Broomstick Brigade entered. They looked from Jessica, wet and frantic looking, to a prone, groaning Bertha, and immediately stepped back, fear in their eyes.

  Bertha was not getting up, just about all the air knocked from her body.

  “You did that?” one of the ladies asked, backing up when Jessica jumped at the sound of her voice.

  “Um…” Did she do this? Hell yeah! If it would get her away from the broomstick bitches… “Yeah, I did it!”

  She took a step closer to them and watched in amusement as they backed up. Her breathing returned to normal and her heart stopped pounding as she realized that she now had the upper hand. “I did it, and I’ll do it to you if you come at me again!”

  “No… ah… we wouldn’t…” one stuttered.

  “We was just… playing?” the other offered, and jumped when the shower room door opened once again.