by Ben Boswell
Jessi said, "Well, I could, I guess, tell Sal I stole his shit on DeMac's orders, but I was, you know, too scared of D to rat him out?"
Kris sighed. "That's actually close enough to true to be plausible. Problem is, I don't see Sal going to DeMarcus to collect, you know. He'd rather squeeze us for it. Unless he could see you and DeMac together."
Jessi chuckled darkly. "Which won't be easy since DeMac seems to want me dead."
"Yeah, even if they were just trying scare you off, after what happened in the other motel, I doubt his bro would be in a forgiving mood."
"Okay," I relented. "So that's not going to work. Anyone else?"
"Witness protection?" Kris suggested.
"What do you really have to offer the feds?" Damon asked.
Jessi nodded. "I'm the only one who knows anything, and I'm not, you know, the most credible witness."
That was for sure. Her hooking, drug use, perjury on the affidavit.
Jessi continued, "D's business is shot. Seems like he's running shit through T, and Tyrell, as you can tell, doesn't like me. It's not even like I could offer to go undercover."
Kris nodded. "Jessi and I could go to Sal, offer to work off the debt."
"No way," I shook my head. "Do you know what that would mean?"
"I do," she replied. "But you didn't let me finish. What I was going to say was that in the three days I was there, I didn't see anything. People coming and going. They're obviously shady characters, but despite what they did to me, I didn't see any crimes."
"And you couldn't prove that, anyway," Jessi added.
"Well," I replied, "we do have videos. Sal sent me several."
Kris looked aghast.
"What?" I asked. "You warned me that might happen."
She shivered. "I know. But you didn't tell me he had. Did you watch them?"
I nodded.
"What did they show?" Jessi asked.
I sighed. "You're right, we definitely don’t have a rape case if that is what you’re wondering."
Jessi snorted. "That asshole and his fucking videos."
"He filmed you too?" Kris asked.
Jessi nodded. "Yeah. All the time. He could release 'The Sexucation of Star.'"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
She sighed, cast an embarrassed glance at Damon. "Let's just say he captured many of my firsts."
That seemed unlikely. I knew Jessi had been having full-blown sex since she was thirteen. How many firsts could be left by the time she ran into Sal?
Kris was consoling her sister. "It's okay baby, he got some of mine too."
"Wait," I interject. "Jess, what kind of firsts? When did you first, um, hook up with Sal?"
"Daniel, don't badger her," my wife said protectively.
"I'm not. Jeez. And it's not prurient interest either. Jess?"
She looked at me. "I dunno. First group scene, maybe... Not sure about anal..."
"No, no. When did this start? That's what I care about."
"Oh. I dunno. I was sixteen? Seventeen maybe?"
I slapped my thigh. "We've got him."
The others looked at me quizzically.
"We've got him," I repeated. "It's statutory rape at the very least. Age of consent here is eighteen. But the bigger thing is, those videos, that is child porn technically."
Kris gasped and turned to her sister. "Do you have any of those videos? Has he ever sent them to you?"
Jessi shook her head. "No. Maybe? I don't know. Where would they be? I wouldn't have kept them on my phone."
"Fuck," I snapped. "If he sent them, maybe there is a record on his internet provider's servers."
Kris sighed. "That's too thin."
"If he's filming this shit," Damon said, "I'm betting he's keeping it. Probably on his computer if he has one. Password protected, but probably there."
"So what do we do? Break into his house? Steal his machine?" I asked.
Damon shrugged. "We're not law enforcement. Once we have it in our hands, he could argue we planted evidence."
"And anyway," Kris added, "I think this is more useful as blackmail fodder than anything else. What we need is to figure out for sure what he has. If it is damning, we make a copy of it. And then blackmail him to leave us alone."
I nodded. "So, we find ourselves a hacker who can break in remotely?"
Kris nodded. "Either that or we try to hack it on-site."
"I doubt we'd be able to get into his house and work there undetected long enough to pull it off," I said.
"I could," Kris replied.
"Kris, no. If you went back to his place, the only thing you'd see is a metal cot in some back room." I said. "This is crazy.
"Actually, it isn't," she insisted. "I know he said he'd whore me out to recover his loses... and maybe he would. But not right away. He wants me for himself first. He wants to film my own firsts before he turns me out."
Now it was Jessi's turn to throw cold water on the idea, "Sis, you don't want to do this. What they did to you before. That's just a warm-up. Believe me, it can get much, much worse."
"You survived it."
Jessi nodded.
Damon asked, "Even if you got access, how could you prove they were made when she was seventeen? Time stamps are worth shit."
"Well, that's an easy one," I replied. "Jessi got that salamander tattoo on her eighteenth birthday. If it's there, she's legal, if it's not..."
Kris gave me a curious look, but Jessi just nodded. "He's right."
"Hmmm," said Kris. "That makes the plan even more attractive. We get our hands on the right video, with Sal and an under aged Jessi, and we can make at least our problems with him go away."
Damon stood suddenly. "Folks, if there is one thing I learned it is that you should never commit to a plan without reflecting on it, unless you have no choice. Sal, DeMarcus, they will all still be out there later. So let's all take a deep breath and talk about this again after we consider the ramifications."
_____
The group meeting broke up after that. Damon and I watched some basketball on TV.
I went through the mail that had come in while we were away. Mostly junk. All of our real correspondences come electronically now. But there was one letter from my office that was problematic.
It was a bunch of forms I would need to fill out justify the family emergency leave I'd claimed. I sighed. There was no way I could explain my continuing absence. I was out of a job.
Coincidentally, Kris came over a few minutes later. She was holding her phone by her side.
"Some guys came looking for me at my office."
I waved my envelop at her. "My boss wants documentary evidence of our emergency."
She said, "Yeah, I think that was the last straw for me too."
"Well, now that it looks like we're formally unemployed, it does open up the option of just leaving town."
She nodded. "Truth is, if we packed up, they probably wouldn't track us down, but... But do we want to spend the rest of our lives worrying about it?"
"Yeah, I know. But, I'm not sure that is worse than thinking about sending you back into that lion's den."
"I could handle it," she replied confidently.
"I know," I replied less confidently.
She returned to talking to her sister.
I turned to Damon. "Seriously man, what do you make of her plan?"
He shook his head. "I dunno. It isn't really my style, ya know? But the basic instinct is right. You don't want a war. So you need to convince him to back off. Holding something like that over his head is a pretty good way to do it. I think Kris is right. An inside job makes the most sense... but Jessi is right too. This won't be a cakewalk."
I sighed. "I'm not sure Kris is thinking that way. I think... I dunno... I think she sees that as a test or way to prove a point of some kind."
"You're all under a lot of pressure. That changes people's threat perception and risk tolerance."
I nodded. "And meanwhile, we sti
ll don't even have the outlines of a plan for DeMac."
"You could wait him out," Damon replied. "He's just out on bail. Once he goes away for good I doubt his crew will be much interested in rubbing out his old girlfriend."
"That's if he gets sent away. And the process could take months. Naw, we need to hurry along the process of getting him—and ideally his brother—behind bars."
"Do you know the terms of his bail? Does he wear an ankle bracelet? Is he allowed the leave the state? Frequent with known felons?"
"Hmmmm, that's interesting. Maybe we could trick him into voiding his bail terms."
"Probably need to do a little research on that," Damon suggested.
"Kris still has that press pass. Maybe she should call up the DA and get details."
Damon nodded. It was weird. But somehow a plan was coming together.
_____
The motel room was stuffy, so I decided to go for a walk. As I did, another email came through from Sal. No text this time, just an a video attachment.
This was a weird one. No sex at first. Just clips of Kris naked, showering, eating breakfast, sitting on a sofa reading a paperback novel. Then Rock walked into the frame and extended his hand. Kris seemed to smile as she stood and allowed him to lead her up the stairs.
It was obviously taken out of context, edited to make it seem as if Kris was actually pleased to be with Sal and his men. It got under my skin as calculated, but I couldn't figure out Sal's game. What was the point of taunting me? It wouldn't get his money back. Was he trying to provoke some sort of reckless reaction? Was it just spite?
I kept walking for a long time. When I finally returned to the motel, it was getting dark. We ate some frozen pizza, drank some more beers, and went to bed early.
_____
I woke up in the middle of the night. I lay still with my eyes closed trying to get my bearings. As I did, I realized I could hear them, Jessi and Damon, going at it through the thin walls. She had apparently recovered enough to want it hard, and Damon was obliging. Their bed was creaking, both of them moaning loud.
I felt my own bed was shaking slightly. It took me a moment to pick out Kris's moans, softer, more muffled than those coming from next door. I opened my eyes, gazed over at my wife. She was on her side, facing away from me, her arm beneath the covers, moving rhythmically.
"Does hearing them turn you on?" I asked softly.
Kris startled at the sound of my voice. She stopped moving. Still facing away from me.
"Yes," she replied in a small voice.
We heard Jessi's voice suddenly, surprisingly clear, "Oh yeah, baby."
"Do you wish that was you?"
She didn't answer. But I saw her arm begin to move again.
"Well?"
She thrust back against me by way of an answer. Her hard ass ground into my crotch. I slid my hand under her t-shirt and cupped her full breasts, feeling the sheen of perspiration in her cleavage. Her body was so hot, almost feverish.
"Is that a yes?" I persisted.
"Stop talking," she sighed.
She reached back and roughly thrust her hand into my boxers. She groped for my cock and seized the shaft at the base, stroking me roughly, hungrily. I was already primed and went rigid at her touch. As she felt me stiffen, she yanked my prick between her legs, running the head of my cock along her soaked, wet slit.
Instinctively I thrust forward, hard. She was so wet that I slid in effortlessly. But as wet as she was, she was still amazingly tight. We almost never made love with me behind her, and spooning like this was a new sensation. I fucked her tight, hot, wet cunt, shocked at myself when those words formed in my mind.
From next door, I could hear flesh slapping, louder, more desperate sighs and moans. I thought back to what Jessi had said as we watched Kris and Damon go at it.
"He's really fucking the shit out of her, isn't he?" I moaned in Kris' ear.
She stiffened then shuddered, her pussy spasming wildly on my cock.
I thrust several more time, each stroke rougher, hungrier. She reached between my legs, fondled my balls. Another first. I groaned and finished inside her.
As we lay there gasping for breath, I realized Damon and Jessi had also gone quiet in the next room.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The next morning, Kris went to call on the DA. Damon accompanied her as her bodyguard in case they ran into any of our nemeses.
I remained at the motel with Jessi. She sat with me at the breakfast table.
"How did you find me?" she asked.
"You mean with Amber?"
She shook her head. "No. The second time. When you and Kris grabbed me?"
I knew where she was going. "I follow you and that asshole lawyer out of the courtroom. I saw everything."
"Everything?"
I nodded.
"Even?"
"Yes," I replied. "I was standing on a dumpster, looking through a window. Should I have tried to stop it?"
She shook her head. "You might not be talking to me right now if you had. I don't think Ramirez would have taken kindly to knowing he was being spied on."
I nodded. There was a lull in the conversation. She obviously had something she wanted to say.
"Were you expecting it?" I prompted.
"You mean, you seeing it?" She shook her head. "No, you mean what happened there?"
I gave a quick nod.
"Fuck, I dunno. Yeah, I guess. Sort of at least. I mean, I guess I knew Tony was setting me up. I knew what was going to be expected of me."
She snorted, continued, "That should have a been a tip off, right? After everything I'd done already, Tony and DeMac were still willing to use my ass to close the deal."
"He knew?"
"Tony wouldn't have done it unless DeMac signed off."
"And still you..."
"What do you want me to say? Denial is not just a river in Egypt, right? You think I wanted to believe that I was just a whore to him?" She paused and gave me a smirk. "I'm not the only one in denial."
"Oh?"
"You and Kris. Jesus. How long ago did you realize it was going wrong with you two?"
"It wasn't going wrong."
"It wasn't going right either. Look at the two of you. You're out there playing detective, scheming about blackmailing a drug dealer. And Kris... she should be in fucking shock. Instead, she's plotting to get back into Sal's house on some crazy Mata Hari routine."
"We did what..."
"You had to do," she droned. She paused. "Whatever it takes. I get it. But you're both getting off on this shit. It's the first excitement either one of you has gotten in... in forever."
"That's not fair. You make us seem like we've turned into adrenaline junkies or something. We didn't want any of this."
She shrugged. "I don't want to argue. This is something you two are going to need to explore yourselves. But look, Danny, you saw what happened to me. And that's far from the worst that can happen."
"What are you saying?"
"Why don't you two skip town, start afresh? Get away from all this shit?"
I was shaking my head before she even finished. But even as I was doing so, I realized I was seeing things in a new light.
From the first moment Sal took Kris, I justified everything in terms of recovering our old lives, and my worries revolved around the fear that we might never be able to do so. More recently, I'd begun to worry that Kris had changed. I saw it as a threat. But Jessi's words had catalyzed an emotion I'd been suppressing, the realization that I didn't really want to go back to how things had been. In a weird, crazy way, the life we'd now fallen into was actually fun.
I'd stared down a robber in an alley. I'd navigated strip clubs. I'd had sex with a whore. I'd rescued my wife from thugs at gunpoint. It was insane, dangerous, scary, but oddly addictive.
Thinking about Kris in all of this conjured mixed emotions. She liked it too. But for her the adrenaline was even more sexually charged than with me. I thought about her su
ggestion of a "flexible" marriage. I forced myself to face that squarely. For Kris, this was not just an adventure; it was a form of sexual liberation. She was unwilling perhaps, at first, but increasingly over time, Kris wanted it. Going back to Sal's was not just a sacrifice she would be willing to make to trap him, she was also, at some level, turned on by the idea of what he would do to her, force her to do to them.
That realization was painful, and yet paradoxically liberating. We both wanted to cast off the old. But that still left two big problems. The first was that I knew intellectually we'd been lucky. Jessi was right. Things could have been a lot worse, and not just for Kris. Surviving near misses was making us bold, maybe reckless. The second problem was that leaving that past behind also called into question our future. What had always bound us together was our normalcy. Could we still be "us" if we embraced the crazy?
_____
We had another group meeting when Kris returned. The news was exciting. DeMac was on a twenty-mile restriction. We didn't even need to lure him across state lines; we could void his bail by just getting him to drive a few miles down the road.
If Kris was the logical person to infiltrate Sal's house, Jessi was the obvious lure for DeMac. That didn't sit well with Damon. Putting women in harm's way violated his values. Mine too, of course. But Kris and Jessi faced us down. Tough broads both of them.
The girls went off together to plot, and Damon and I worked through what we'd need to support them. There was a "spy" shop downtown. They sold mostly overpriced crap, but we picked up a couple of easily concealable GPS transmitters as well as some surveillance mics disguised as earrings.
When we returned to the motel, Kris had washed out her blond hair coloring, and restored her natural mahogany brown. Jessi had reapplied her violet highlights.
Still, despite the preparations, I'm not sure we'd have followed through on the plot until I got a call from my sister.
"Jesus, Daniel, what the fuck have you gotten into?"
"What's the matter, Stace? Are the kids okay?"
Kris gave me a panicked look.
"Yes... for now," my sister replied. "Mom and the kids were at the park. A couple of guys came looking for you. Dick didn't like the look of them. He got the shotgun out. They said you needed to return your calls."
