by Pat Powers
Of course, he could have left his captives enough freedom to clean themselves. But the Wrangler had over the years developed a rep as a guy who saw to it that captives did not escape, did not cry out for help, did not talk members of the crew into doing things they shouldn't, or not doing things they should do.
That's why he got the calls for the big money jobs, like this one, where there was enough money to be had that the Man (or Woman) running the job could afford to pay for the very best help.
So he wiped her butt. For $250,000 he'd have done a lot more than wipe it.
Christine didn't care for the feel of strange hands on her body but she did appreciate being cleaned. And there was nothing sexual about the way she was being handled. It was all very prosaic.
The place they'd chosen as a hideout was a summer cabin in a popular vacation resort area on the Altamaha River. Near the coast the whole river was lined with vacation "cabins" ranging from something close to a mansion to something close to a shack. This particular trailer was fairly typical -- a nicely appointed double wide just a stone's throw from the river. Most of all, though, it was isolated -- there were trailers like it in lots every acre or so along the river. But the lush south Georgia vegetation formed an impenetrable screen around the trailer -- you couldn't see it from the road, or from the winding path that led from the river.
Best of all, from the Wrangler's point of view, the place was filled with tourists on vacation at this time of year. Unless they made some special attempt to attract attention to themselves, they would not be noticed.
And with the drunken carryings-on that went on some nights with these "fishing parties" that rented such cabins, it would take some effort to attract attention to themselves.
And ultimately, if negotiations didn't work out, well, it was a short walk to the riverbank and at night no one would see a weighted bundle silently slipped into the water, and with any luck, the body might not float for months and might not be discovered if it did. Or it could be eaten by the alligators that were common in the southern reaches of the Altamaha River, and never discovered.
But nobody expected things to go south on the negotiation end. The Man had done a thorough job of setting this one up. In California, south Florida and the Northeast, the kidnapping business had become risky -- all the targets left were hard targets indeed and the cops moved fast and hard on a case. Ever since the robot crash, as people called the economic stagnation caused by massive employment that was attendant on the rise of automation and roboticization of the labor markets, crime had been one of the few growth areas of the economy, and like many other Third World countries, America had discovered there was a certain justice in kidnapping the children of the rich, and the rich themselves, to make money.
But the Man had discovered there was a community of wealthy people in coastal Georgia who were still somewhat insulated from the rise in kidnappings. The area around Savannah had some VERY wealthy enclaves, primarily wealthy retirees from the northeast who found the beauty and grace of the city, combined with its very un-Southern tolerance of diversity, very attractive for themselves and their money.
In the last few years, the cultural backwardness of the area, especially with regard to the kidnapping of rich people and their family members, had made the area a real magnet for the One Percent whose wealth grew like topsy even as the rest of America went into an economic tailspin.
The Man had figured that this might make people in Savannah a little sloppy, and he'd gone to Savannah and spent some time hanging out in a hotel room across from a popular liquor store, peering out the window through some very nice binoculars, collecting tag numbers.
The tag numbers he routed to the Hacker, who was paid to pull up names and addresses associated with those tags. He wasn't in on the final cut, he didn't even know what the job was for, he just got very nice money for doing what was for him very easy work.
It was a very dull couple of weeks for the Man, but he figured sooner or later somebody's careless wife, lover, child or self would have made a habit of making secretive runs to the liquor store. Sure enough, he had half a dozen prospects after two weeks. And the Gengineering prospect had been the wealthiest of the lot.
The Man was smart, a good planner. He'd taken some photos of the driver of the car secretly with a very high-powered digital camera and compared it with some photos he'd been able to trace from Barnard College's Epsilon Delta sorority website, which gave him a positive ID on Christine Willock.
With that, he'd been able to recruit the Agent, the Driver, the Wrangler and the Cleaner. The terms -- $1 million for the Man, $250,000 each for the other four. Each of them did not really contribute equally to the project -- it could be argued the Cleaner's job was most important to all of them -- he was the one who made sure they didn't leave any evidence around for the forensics types -- but they were being paid for risk not specifically for the work they did.
Each of them "contributed" $10,000 of their cut to the local rep of the Dixie Mafia as a gesture of "respect," i.e, they respected the Dixie Mafia's inclination to kill people who conducted big jobs on their turf without getting their blessing first. At first, the Wrangler thought it was a lot to pay for all the nothing they were getting from the Dixie Mafia in return, but then he had to admit that the information about this resort "cabin" had been excellent. The Wrangler had done jobs out West where he'd felt way too exposed with all that naked desert all around him.
The Wrangler led Christine to the bed after getting her out of the bathroom. He gave her a casual shove that sent her sprawling atop it. Then he casually strapped her ankles into a pair of cuffs he had already tied to the foot of the bed.
The knot he'd used to tie them was a tautline hitch. After he had the cuffs on her ankles her removed the shackles holding her legs together. Then he pulled the loop formed by the tautline hitch open, effectively shortening the ropes that tied her ankles, forcing her legs into a wide spreadeagle. When her legs were spread so wide that it was just to the point of becoming uncomfortable, he stopped.
Lastly, he took a leash and looped it through a hole he'd drilled in the headboard of the bed. He clipped it to a ring set at the base of the hood covering Christine's head and adjusted the leash until it had just a little give -- not enough to choke Christine or even cause her any discomfort, unless she tried to make any sort of significant change in her position.
Then the Wrangler stood there and just looked at Christine for a moment. He wasn't gloating, or enjoying the view (well, he enjoyed the view, it just wasn't why he was looking) so much as he was making a visual inspection to make sure he had her bound properly.
She was. There was no way for her to escape from her bonds or even to move very much. She was naked, with her legs spread wide apart. This would psychologically reinforce her sense of vulnerability. Keeping your subject as fearful and intimidated as possible was the best way to ensure that they didn't try to escape. Keeping her legs spread wide would keep her mind on the possibility of being raped. It would make her want to escape more, but she would want to escape anyway -- adding fuel to that fire didn't matter much either way.
The Wrangler was pretty sure she was going to get raped anyway. She was very attractive and there was no reason not to rape her. The Wrangler considered his primary job to be keeping himself and the crew out of jail by preventing escapes, with a secondary duty to keep the kidnapee alive by preventing him or her from hearing or seeing anything they shouldn't (thus necessitating their death).
Keeping their cherries intact was not his concern. With some of the crews he'd worked with, keeping victims alive long enough to be transferred was a tough challenge. Killing the kidnapee was a very appealing move to a lot of crews. It was actually a bad move, in the Wrangler's opinion. It ensured a death sentence if things went south, and more to the point, it made the crew sloppy. They tended to think of the victim as a corpse from the moment of capture on. This sometimes led to escapes and rescues. very bad outcomes for any kidnapping.
And disposing of the body was sometimes quite a bitch, and all too likely to generate clues.
Keeping them alive and returning them as promised was the smart move, in the Wrangler's opinion. If you were careful with physical evidence, it was the very best way to dispose of a body. And it was good for business -- the families and businesses of victims were a lot more likely to cough up the cash without any tricks if they knew there was a very good chance that doing so would get their kidnapee back alive and unharmed.
It was all a matter of logic and biz to the Wrangler. Some of the crews had thought him soft because of it but everybody liked the smooth way things tended to work when he was part of the crew, so they overlooked it. That and his rep. He'd wiped out an entire crew about ten years ago, when they'd tried to frame him. They thought because he liked bondage they could set him up as a nutjob kidnapper. It was a good idea, except for being an obvious one. The Wrangler smelled the set-up early on and at an appropriate moment, when no one else was around, put a slug through the ringleader's skull. Then he announced to the rest of the gang that he'd spotted the setup and killed their chief. He was all for letting bygones be bygones, and he figured that the crew would be, too, since they were a pick-up crew and not tight with the boss. But somebody drew on him, probably figuring the Wrangler was going to do them all, and the rest drew, too. When the bullets stopped flying the Wrangler had a slug in his shoulder and his thigh. Everybody else was lying on the ground with holes in considerably more damaging places. They were not all dead, though, so the Wrangler limped about the room briefly and fired a few rounds into the ones that were still twitching and/or making noises, and then they were all dead.
The Wrangler had checked himself. No arterial bleeding. He'd bandaged his wounds with some cut up bedsheets and headed out, pausing only to call in a 911 about the place from the remote phone they'd planned to set up the ransom drop with, so the kidnapee would be rescued. He didn't try to collect the ransom -- getting medical attention seemed more germane.
The main reason kidnapees tended to survive when the Wrangler was involved in a job was that they didn't tend to have a chance to give him any trouble. If they had a chance to given him trouble, and they took it, their chances of dying went up sharply.
Christine was giving the Wrangler no trouble, for the same reason most of his charges didn't give him any trouble -- she had no chance. Naked, vulnerable, blinded, gagged and deafened, she was unable to move and unable to communicate.
Christine did some rational thinking while she was lying naked and bound to the bed. What else was there for her to do? She figured this was a kidnapping for money. Her father had warned her never to travel alone. She knew there were bad people out there, but she hadn't thought they'd gotten all the way to Savannah. Savannah had always felt safe, not like New York or L.A.
Christine now realized she was wrong about that.
Well, if they were kidnapping her for money, her father had plenty of that, and he'd pay up for her, although he'd be royally pissed about it. So the only thing to do -- the only thing she could do -- was try to ride it out as best she could until she was released by the kidnappers.
Of course, things might not work out. Or they might be planning to kill her from the beginning. That was a scary thought, first time she had it. Then she had a happier one. They probably weren't going to kill her, because if they were going to, they probably already would have done so. After all, so long as she was alive, she might escape. Dead, she was much less of a problem for them.
Then Christine had an even happier thought -- the fact that they had gone to so much trouble to keep her blinded and deafened and helpless was further evidence that they didn't intend to kill her. There would be no point in concealing their identities and locations and so forth if they intended her to wind up with a bullet in her head.
Those were scary thoughts to have to think, but given her circumstances -- naked, bound and gagged -- they were oddly comforting.
Of course, even if they didn't intend to kill her it didn't mean that they didn't intend to do other things to her. Like rape. She didn't understand why her captor had stripped her naked and then left her. She'd been expecting rape when she was secured to the bed after going to the bathroom. In fact, she'd been crying under the hood, expecting rape. And when her captor spread her legs so wide, she'd felt SURE it was because he intended to rape her.
Well, he didn't intend to rape her, apparently, because he left her alone, stretched out like that. She thought she was alone, too, but she couldn't tell because the white noise made the small noises people made when they moved around in a room invisible. For all she knew, the men were sitting around her in a circle, looking at her and masturbating.
That was such an odd thought it almost made her laugh. Under other circumstances, it certainly would have.
Christine had been tied up by a couple of boyfriends during sex play, but it had always been strictly voluntary and of short duration, with her deciding how long the duration was.
And of course she had not been in terror of her life. That made this a VERY different experience. Having no idea when she would be untied or what would happen to her when she was made the experience screamingly intense, and not in a good way. Nothing at all like the mild pleasures of consensual bondage with a boyfriend.
There was also the pain. Her body had cramped much worse in the trunk in that nasty hogtie. But at least she had been clothed. And at least her legs were bound together. Lying with her legs spread so far apart was painful, but it also made her feel incredibly vulnerable. She only laid with her legs this for two reasons: sex and gymnastics.
It did not occur to Christine that she might have been chained with her legs spread apart specifically to make her feel vulnerable.
Christine waited for what seemed like many hours but was not nearly that long. In her sensory-deprived state, she had no way to keep track of time, so it passed very slowly.
When she felt a hand casually slap her shin, Christine's entire body jerked in an involuntary start. She couldn't help it, her nerves were on hair trigger.
The hands were the same ones that had handled her before -- they had a certain quality of assurance in the way they moved.
The hands unbuckled the shackles that held her feet spreadeagled. Then they rolled Christine over onto her stomach.
Ah, she thought, they were turning her. She remembered one of her friends who'd volunteered at a hospital for a time talking about turning bedridden patients over so their bodies didn't develop bedsores. How professional.
But they didn't leave her lying face down and spreadeagled as before. Oh, it started out like that, with her ankles once again cuffed to the corners of the bed. But then her captor took a rope and ran it over her shoulders and across the back of her neck, coming forward and down under her armpits, then under her body where he secured the ends to the foot of the bed. But before he pulled the rope tight, he took a thick heavy cloth of some kind -- probably a towel -- and slipped it between the rope and her shoulders, so that the rope wouldn't rub her skin raw. He also pulled Christine up so that she was kneeling on her knees, with her face pressed into the bed and her ass hiked into the air. When he tied the ropes down she discovered she was locked in that position -- she could not slide her torso forward because of the rope halter around her shoulders, and she could not stretch her legs out because of the ropes around her knees and ankles. And she couldn't move her torso backward because of the rope at the tip of her head harness that secured her to the headboard.
She was just as helpless and just as displayed as she was a few moments ago. She couldn't get her knees close together because of those ropes, either.
Still, it was nice to be able to change position. But she was beginning to wonder if she hadn't been kidnapped by some kind of bondage freaks. All those ropes on her -- it seemed like a lot more rope than they could possibly need to keep her tied down.
That thought was unsettling. She would much rather have been kidnapped by profe
ssional kidnappers who would release her as soon as they had the money than by some wacked out sexual freaks who might want to keep her around a long time and do all sorts of things with her before ... before ... well, that didn't bear thinking about.
Christine was busily thinking about that which didn't bear thinking about when she felt a hand on her butt. She knew immediately it was not the one who tied her up. Or thought she knew. The touch was entirely different. It wasn't the assured, professional touch of the other one, almost like a nurse's touch. It was more of a caress.
It WAS a caress. The hand was moving all over her legs, then her butt. It probed the cleft of her butt and then probed the cleft of her vaginal lips.
Christina found herself going, "No! No! No!" yelling the word at the top of her lungs, but the ballgag and the way her face was pressed into the bed rendered the word unintelligible, a muffled exclamation that meant nothing.
At least, it meant nothing to the man who fondled her and the climbed onto the bed behind her. Kneeling behind her, he reached forward and fondled her breasts, squeezing and pulling on her nipples. Then he plunged his fingers into her pussy. He didn't really jab them in there, but he didn't work them in slowly and carefully either. It was more like he was a mechanic sticking a dipstick into an engine to check the oil level.
He pulled his fingers out a minute later and smelled them with one hand while masturbating himself to erection with the other. It smelled right, the bitch was ready, or at least, ready enough.
He wasn't quite hard yet so he returned his hand to Christine's exposed pussy and began working his hand in and out and around, probing he pussy and also her anus with his fingers.
This did nothing to arouse Christine, who was mindlessly struggling against her bonds by this time. It was futile, there was no way she could escape the many coils of rope that held her in place -- in fact, the Wrangler had done his job so well that she couldn't even hurt herself in her struggles -- but she wasn't thinking rationally. The horror of what was being done to her had overcome her, and she only knew that she wanted to be OUT of this situation NOW.
