by James Hayman
She spent the next ten minutes sending him one more e-mail and another text. That made a total of two e-mails and three text messages since seven o’clock when she left the apartment to meet Annie. That seemed like it should be enough. Of course, it wasn’t like she ought to treat Josh’s lack of response as any kind of surprise. He frequently didn’t return her texts or e-mails when he was off on a business trip. Too busy making money. Or picking up strange women in bars. She rolled that around in her head for a while until she finally said the hell with it. Que sera sera.
She got out of the chair, walked to the window and stood looking across the water at the spectacular view of lower Manhattan and, off to her left, Lady Liberty. The condo occupied the top two floors of a six-story building on one of Brooklyn Heights’s best streets. They bought the place two years ago just weeks after Josh banked his fourth consecutive seven-figure, end-of-year bonus. He’d been working for HBC, Harris Brumfield Capital, since earning his MBA at Columbia nine years earlier. He’d been making good six-figure salaries plus generous bonuses right from the start. But the really big money, the extra zeros kind of money both Rachel and Josh lusted for, had only started coming in four bonuses ago.
The apartment’s location provided Josh with a dead easy commute to his office on Broad Street. When the weather was nice he could even walk it. Conversely it forced Rachel into an hour and then some haul up to the Charlton School building on East 84th Street. The black car Josh urged her to take was usually even slower than the subway. She’d complained about the unfairness of that when they’d first looked at the place and Josh had declared he wanted to buy it. But as usual, whenever any disagreement arose between them that involved spending money, especially a lot of money, Josh won and Rachel lost. Josh’s trump card in these arguments was always the same. Since he made the big bucks and she only made a “paltry” $75K a year, he got to make the decision. Still, if she was going to be fair, aside from the pain of the commute, she loved the apartment.
She drank the last few drops of wine, went upstairs and changed into her standard sleep outfit. A Charlton School soccer team T-shirt size XL and men’s boxer shorts size S. She washed her face, brushed her teeth and climbed into bed.
An hour later she was still lying there, eyes wide open. For about the hundredth time, she went over all the possible reasons other than the one she hoped for that Josh might not be getting back to her. Too many, she told herself, to be certain of any of them. Life was a gamble. The results unknown until the dice were tossed.
Hours passed. By three A.M. Josh still hadn’t called or texted and Rachel still couldn’t sleep. Finally, she figured she might as well get up, go downstairs and get some work done. Even before it started getting light she’d go for her run and then take her time getting showered and dressed before leaving for school at seven o’clock.
Chapter 4
THE FIRST THING Joshua Thorne became aware of as he began the long, slow climb back to consciousness was the drumbeat of pain inside his skull. A throbbing so insistent it was hard to think about anything else. It felt like someone pounding on his brain with a hammer. Possibly several hammers.
Jesus, he wondered, had he gotten himself so crazily drunk that he was now suffering the mother of all hangovers? No. He was pretty sure that wasn’t it. He’d been drunk a million times in his life, suffered a million hangovers. None of them remotely as bad as this.
He realized he was naked and lying on what felt like a bed. Whose bed? He wasn’t sure. But wherever he was, it wasn’t the Regency Hotel. There was no sheet under him and the bare mattress felt damp and smelled like somebody had taken a piss on it. His own piss? He didn’t know but he kind of hoped so. The idea of lying on somebody else’s piss was even less appealing than the possibility that he’d peed himself in his sleep. There was a bare pillow under his head, but no blankets or sheets covering his body.
Josh tried opening his eyes but something seemed to be holding his lids in place. This puzzled his jumbled brain for a few seconds before he realized it must be a blindfold. He tried to reach behind his head to pull the thing off. But his hand was stopped well short of its mark. He tried the other hand. Same result. Both wrists seemed to be tied tightly to the bed frame. He tried drawing his legs up. They too were restrained.
Josh lay still, trying to figure out what was going on. Had he indulged in fun and games that ended with somebody tying him to the bed? It seemed unlikely. He’d never gone in for whips, chains, bondage, any of that shit. The kinky stuff was strictly for weirdos and no way in hell was Joshua Joseph Thorne any kind of weirdo.
“Hello,” he called out. His voice was croaky with phlegm. He cleared it and called again. “Is anyone here?”
He listened hard. There was no answer to his question.
He called again, this time louder.
Still no response.
All he could hear was the occasional clank of what sounded like a radiator and, distantly, some music. Classical music. Mozart or some such.
The music made him think about Rachel, who was home, probably still asleep in their condo in Brooklyn Heights. An unwanted thought popped into his head. He had no idea how long he’d been lying here. No idea what time of day or night it was. He might have been conked out so long it was already morning and, back in Brooklyn, Rachel had already completed her morning run, taken her shower and left for school. Or, Jesus, even worse, maybe it already was the middle of the day and he’d missed his wrap-up meeting with the Tridents. He had no sense of time. No clue as to how long he might have been lying here dead to the world. Even worse he had no memory of how he’d gotten here. Or how he’d allowed himself to get tied up and blindfolded.
Josh lay still for a moment. All right, he told himself with as much calm as he could muster, this wasn’t a calamity. All he had to do was figure out how to untie his hands and feet, get dressed and get out of here. Wherever here was. Josh tried to ignore the pain still pounding in his head and concentrate his brain on remembering.
Slowly, by small degrees, memory returned. A fuzzy image of dinner at the Port Grill with people from Trident. He searched for their names and was pleased when they came to him without much effort. Joe Bonner. Tom Evans. Ryan Fundaro. Josh transported himself back to the table in the back room. The one he’d chosen because it was quieter than the main room and where it would be possible to hear and be heard. Slowly his mind began filling in details of the conversation, which was mostly about Trident’s future plans. The image of Joe Bonner popped into his head—Joe going on about how Josh was “part of the Trident team” and how this deal and others to come would make them all rich. Hell, they were already rich. All of them richer than 99.99 percent of the poor schmucks in the world. Richer even than the not so poor schmucks seated around them. The not so poor schmucks who could afford dinner at the Port Grill.
Josh smiled to himself. The slow return of his memory seemed like kind of a victory and victories were good. He lay there trying to reconstruct the rest of the evening in detail. After dinner, he remembered asking if anybody wanted to join him for a nightcap. As expected, nobody did. They left. He headed into the nearly empty bar. He saw no available attractive women so he schmoozed with the bartender who, while no great beauty, was kind of cute and would do just fine for a one-night stand if no one better turned up.
But then someone better did. Norah. Elegant, sexy Norah. And just like that, the game changed. But Norah what? She’d never told him her last name and he never asked. He hadn’t told her his either, had he? Why bother with last names when it seemed perfectly obvious Norah wanted the same thing Josh did. Safe, anonymous one-time sex with somebody more than a little attractive. He bought her a drink. They talked for a while. Some silliness about a line from a movie. When Harry Met Sally. When Josh met Norah. Then what? Then the weird shit started. Or what he should have realized was weird shit. The fog lifted and Josh remembered it all in exquisite detail.
Instead of going to the Regency, elegant, sexy Norah su
ggested driving back to her house. Really? A woman like that asking him to come home with her instead of going to a nice safe hotel after just twenty minutes bar chatter? That should have been a red light right there. Warning bells should have been clanging. But as usual Josh’s cock outranked his brain and made the decision for him. Schmuck that he was, he let her lead him on like a horny teenager. Or maybe more like an eager lamb to the slaughter.
He remembered driving to her house. A crummy house. Especially crummy for somebody wearing a forty thousand dollar watch. The house was maybe a ten-minute drive from the restaurant. On the way he remembered telling her about the project and she had said something about getting stoned. Stoned? Jesus, was that it? Had she given him some drug that had knocked the shit out of him?
When she opened the door from the garage and they dashed into the house it had been like a race to see who got their pants off first. They’d both kicked off their shoes. They stumbled around while she pulled down her thong and he pulled down his boxers. Then he grabbed her ass and pulled her to him, the two of them teetering around like a pair of clowns, both with their underpants down around their ankles. They stumbled in tandem from the kitchen into what must have been the living room and fell onto a grubby carpeted floor. Orange shag. Shag for shagging. Somehow Norah must have managed to kick off the thong completely because he remembered her wrapping her long legs around him. He pushed into her. She pushed back. Both their hips thrusting hard at each other. There was a lot of gasping and groaning and finally shouting as she came only seconds before he did.
Afterward she slid out from under, stood and smiled down at him.
“Baby, you really are good,” she said. “What a waste.”
What a waste? He wondered briefly what she meant by that but, at the time, he was too focused on watching her pull off the rest of her clothes to think too long or too hard about it. Then she stood there for a minute posing naked for him. Gorgeous body. Tall. Slender. Perfect boobs. Perfect everything. Not a Brazilian, just a regular bikini wax that left most of the hair between her legs and proof, had he needed any, that she was a natural blonde. She walked naked into the kitchen. As Josh took off the rest of his own clothes and tossed them on the floor, he heard the fridge door open and close. A clatter of ice cubes dropping into a cocktail shaker.
“Martini?” she called out.
“Of course,” he answered. At the time a postcoital drink seemed like an excellent idea.
He heard rattling and pouring and a minute later she came out holding two oversized martini glasses. She handed him one and they sat, facing each other, still naked, their backs resting against the opposite arms of the brown corduroy couch, their bare legs intertwined, her big toe, its nail covered with dark green polish, between his legs teasing his cock, trying to arouse another erection.
He leaned forward to clink glasses.
“To your health,” she said with what could only be described as a mischievous smile.
They sat quietly and sipped for a while and, when they’d finished the drinks, Norah said, “C’mon. Let’s go upstairs.”
Josh remembered thinking that sounded like a really good idea. He also remembered feeling wobbly as he got up and started for the stairs. Even more wobbly climbing the steep narrow steps. She held his hand and led him to a bedroom, urging him along. “C’mon, c’mon, Josh, you can make it. Don’t crap out on me.”
By the time he flopped down on to the bed, the room had begun growing darker and darker. Soon everything was black. The last thing he remembered her saying was, “Now you can tell me how much fun you’re having.”
That’s where the memories stopped.
Josh took a deep breath and tried to force himself to calm down. It was the drink. It had to be. The Double Cross martini. A double cross, all right. The bitch had drugged him. Rohypnol? Maybe. Or maybe not. Josh had enough experience feeding roofies to coeds back at Holden to know it’d take a double dose, maybe even a triple, to knock him out like that. So maybe it was something else. In fact, he was sure it was.
What he couldn’t figure out was why in hell she would want to drug him. Couldn’t have been for sex. She knew Josh was more than willing to let her go at him as many times as she wanted any way she wanted. Up, down, sideways or with both of them standing on their heads if there was any way they could manage it. After their first go last night he was already thinking about signing her up for a long term fling either here in Portland or down in New York, or even in fucking Timbuktu if that’s where she wanted to go. So what the hell was the deal? Why the drugs? Why the fucking drugs? That’s the question that weighed on him. There had to be a reason.
Maybe she just got her jollies fucking guys, then drugging them and tying them up. Mistress Norah and all that kind of shit. If that was what she wanted he was ready for more. Let her come on up and climb aboard. He pictured her straddling him and the picture was strong enough to start giving him a hard-on.
On the other hand maybe it didn’t have anything to do with sex. But what, then? The project? Could this whole little adventure have something to do with the project? He tossed that one around in his mind for a while. She’d pretty much admitted that, if she had the chance, she’d stop the project. What was it she’d said in the car? “There are people in this town who’d probably stone you to death if they found out you’re the guy financing that one.”
Stone him to death? That’s what she’d said. The thought flitted around in his brain. It seemed preposterous, but could she have meant that literally? Was the woman a killer? A pro hired to . . . what did they call it in the movies? Ice him? Whack him? Feed him to the fishes? Maybe this was a movie. Maybe he was lying here with his goodies hanging out so she could film the whole fucking thing. To do what with? Post it on the Internet and get his ass fired? Could that be it? He tried to imagine Floyd Brumfield’s reaction to seeing “the movie.” Probably laugh his ass off and show it to his buddies. But fire the firm’s number one rainmaker over some stupid sexual peccadillo . . . or was it a pecker-dillo? Josh found himself giggling at the pun. No way Floyd would toss his ass out. Rachel might. But Floyd? No way. Besides, if sweet little Norah really did want to fuck him over on the Internet she wouldn’t have covered half his face with a stupid blindfold, would she? There was no way anyone except maybe Rachel and possibly half a dozen other former and current girlfriends would ever recognize him just from his body. On the other hand maybe they’d been on camera the whole fucking time. As in the whole time they were fucking. If so, she’d also be one of the stars of the show and somehow she didn’t seem the type to want that.
His mind went back to the project. How was fucking him and drugging him and tying him to a smelly, bare, pee-soaked mattress supposed to affect the project? He had no idea. Maybe her plan was to make him miss the meeting. Maybe she was stupid enough, or maybe someone who’d hired her was stupid enough, to think missing one lousy meeting would screw up the deal. If Norah thought that, well, she was dumber than she seemed. Yes, the Tridents would be pissed. And yes, Joe Bonner had a short fuse. He’d probably been calling Josh all morning. All afternoon if he’d really been conked out that long. Josh wondered if his phone was ringing away in the pocket of his suit jacket, which, as best he could recall, was last seen downstairs on the floor by the couch. Either way missing a meeting was no biggie. Bonner would be pissed off but clients got pissed off all the time. Being pissed off didn’t mean walking away from a hundred million dollar deal that was almost done. All it’d take to put things right would be a whole bunch of mea culpas and a lot of sucking up.
Maybe Norah realized it wouldn’t stop things altogether. Maybe she just thought having him miss the meeting would hold up financing long enough for the locals to get their shit together and put more pressure on the politicians. That seemed more likely. Jesus Christ. Was all this shit he was going through just her idea of what she said in the car? Stoning him in the biblical sense?
It was ridiculous. Too fucking stupid for words. Josh felt
an angry storm building inside his gut. He willed it to stop. “Stay calm,” he whispered. “Lie still and stay calm.” He sucked in long slow breaths through his mouth and then slowly let them out through his nose.
When he was about as calm as he figured he was likely to get, Josh tested the knots that held his wrists. There wasn’t much play. His wrists were squooshed right up against the bed frame where the rope was tied and pulling just seemed to make the knots tighter. Not likely that he could somehow slip his hands out of the restraints. Still that was the only thing he could think of so he started working his right wrist. He wriggled it first this way, then that. He squeezed his fingers tightly together, trying to make them as narrow as possible. After what must have been twenty minutes or maybe more, it was obvious he was getting nowhere. No way the fat part of his good-sized throwing hand was going to slip through this rope. He wondered if the damned thing might even be cutting off the flow of blood and what would happen if it did.
