by Pat Powers
She felt hands undoing the fetters that held her to the bed. She desperately wanted to resist, to escape, but hours spent lying with her legs in a split and having men many times her size pounding on her crotch while her legs were secured wide apart had left her legs cramped and so stiff that they were unable to move at all. She just laid their passively as her captor slowly bent her legs at the knees. He seemed to understand that her legs would be cramped.
Then he tied her ankles together and then tied her ankles to her thighs with several strands of rope. It hurt when he bent her legs so severely after having them stretched out for so long, it hurt a lot. But all she could do about it was mmph into her gag.
She felt another rope being secured around her entire body, running behind her back, between her arms and then over her shins, several times. She could not move at all. All she could do was wiggle her head back and forth and do the same with her feet. Once again she wondered if she had been captured by kinky types. Instinctively, she doubted it. If they'd been kinky types they would have played with her more.
Then again, maybe they were playing with her and this was just the beginning.
Nasty thoughts. She didn't need nasty thoughts right now. She really didn't.
The Wrangler tightened the ropes on Christine so that they fit snugly but didn't cut her circulation and picked her up. He carefully dropped her into the circular suitcase. She fit easily, with room to spare -- Christine was a very small woman. The Wrangler had had to really cram a couple of captives into it, bending their heads and feet and then leaning on the lid to force it shut over their furiously mmphing bodies. Christine would have a relatively comfortable ride in it.
When the latches were shut, the Wrangler easily picked up the case and carried out to the car, casually tossing it into the trunk as if it were much lighter than it actually was. He was rehearsing for when he would be doing this within sight of others. If he didn't look like he was carrying anything heavy in the case, potential witnesses wouldn't make the connection.
The Cleaner came out of the trailer.
"It's clean," he said, meaning he'd destroyed anything that might constitute evidence inside the trailer.
"Good, said the Wrangler.
"You got your cell, right?" the Cleaner asked.
The Wrangler nodded as he got behind the wheel of the car. He wanted to get out as fast as possible.
"Good," said the Cleaner, "cuz I've been thinkin' about what I'd do if I was the Man. I'd call one of us on our cell phone before setting off the bomb," said the Cleaner. "That way, I'd be sure I was killing people and not just blowing up an empty trailer."
"What if he doesn't bother calling us first?" asked the Wrangler. "What if he just pushes the button and then calls to check things out. He'll know we're alive if we answer the phone. That'll make recovering the money a lot harder."
"It's possible but I don't think he's gonna," said the Cleaner. "It's not as sure as blowing us up while he's talking to us."
"Not as satisfying, either," said the Wrangler, nodding.
"Exactly," said the Cleaner.
"The other thing I'm wondering about, is how are we gonna know whether or not he blows us up, when he calls?" said the Wrangler.
"No problemo," said the Cleaner. "That's what this laptop is all about. I set up a webcam and hooked it up to the desktop computer while you were strapping up the package. It's transmitting to a little site I keep up for various reasons, giving us a nice view of the living room. The minute it goes black, we know we've been blowed up. Only problem is, we just gotta 56K connection in that place. So there might be a second or two of delay in pic transmission. I've got the window on my site set at absolute minimum, so it shouldn't be much more than that, but those 56K connections really suck."
"So, let's see," said the Wrangler. "When the Man calls, you answer, unless it's my cell, in which case I answer. You monitor the computer and as soon as the screen goes blank, you shut off the phone."
"OK," said the Wrangler. "If it works, the Man don't know we're on to him. Make collecting our share a lot easier."
"Ya still gonna collect just our share?" asked the Cleaner.
"Of course not," said the Wrangler. "If we leave the Man alive, he'll track us down and kill us, sure as shit. I'd like to get that problem sorted as soon as possible by killing him first."
"Gotcha," said the Cleaner. "What about the Driver and the Agent?"
"I got no beef with them, if they're alive," said the Wrangler. "I'm still square with the original deal. But I think the Man is gonna kill them, too, if he hasn't killed them already. If he'll kill us for our shares, he'll kill them for their shares."
"Probably," said the Cleaner gloomily. "Maybe we should call them and give them a heads-up."
"Good idea," said the Wrangler.
Then a moment later, the Wrangler said, "Maybe not such a good idea for us."
"Why?" asked the Cleaner.
"Could blow our cover," said the Wrangler. "If the guy answers the phone and the Man figures out somebody has given him the heads up, the Man's gonna figure out who did it about a second later. Then we'll have a hell of a time, and so will whoever warns him."
"I don't think the Agent will give himself away like that," said the Cleaner. "He's a cool one."
"Yeah, but what if the Agent is dead and his cell starts ringing?" asked the Wrangler. "The Man is gonna wonder who's calling him, because I don't remember him or the Driver getting many calls at all on this gig, 'cause they're using hot phones just like we are. No, the Man is gonna think it's one of us. And it'll give us away."
The Cleaner nodded.
"OK, what'll we do with Christine?" he asked.
"Keep her with us until we get the ransom money, then dump her and give her father a call," said the Wrangler. "Her father hasn't screwed up, the Man has."
"Wouldn't be that you don't like to kill your captives," said the Cleaner.
"I don't like to kill my captives UNNECCESARILY," said the Wrangler. "It's an important distinction. I've killed three captives when their ransoms went south, hell, should I be killing them just for the fun of it?"
"Hell, no," answered the Cleaner. "We just notice how much care you take of your captives, is all and we like to ride you about it."
"It's my JOB," said the Wrangler. "I don't notice anyone riding you for your cleaning or the driver for his driving."
"Yeah, but ..." the Cleaner said, but was interrupted by his cell phone ringing.
The Wrangler glanced at the Cleaner and grinned, pulling over to the side of the road. They were on a two lane blacktop with not much traffic, and there was plenty of cover under the moss-draped oaks and palmetto thickets that fringed the road.
"Hello," said the Cleaner. "What? The Driver? I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, we're pretty sure he was planning to kill us. Yeah, sure. Repeat that ... OK, we'll come getcha. We're in the green Grand Cherokee. Yeah, wave at us when you see us. See you in a bit. Watch out for the cops."
The Cleaner disconnected and said, "That was the Agent ..."
Then his phone rang again.
"Hey, how ya doin?" said the Cleaner. "Nah, nuthin'. Watchin' TV with the Wrangler. Yeah, he's watchin' with me."
The screen on the Cleaner's laptop went blank. He quickly turned off the phone.
"Well, we're dead now," he said, grinning, "as far as the Man is concerned."
The Wrangler nodded. "Who was that first call from?" he asked.
"The Agent," responded the Cleaner. "The Man tried to kill him. He DID kill the Driver, but the Agent managed to throw himself out of the car and roll into a marsh and act dead. The Man didn't stop to check him out. Probably figured he was dead and didn't want to attract attention with all the traffic out there. The Agent says he took one in the shoulder, but he's OK."
"I'm surprised the Man didn't come back to finish him off," observed the Wrangler. "So, I guess the Agent needs a ride?"
"Yeah, he's over on that side road that runs towards St
. Simon's," said the Cleaner, "hiding out in the palmettos, but he'll watch for us and flag us down when he sees us. You need to slow down when you go past the Quickie Mart that's just over the bridge is all."
"All right, then," said the Wrangler. "I'm kinda surprised the Man took on the Agent directly like that, though. I'd have cut a deal with him."
"You ain't the Man," said the Cleaner.
"Damn right," said the Wrangler, grinning. "But I don't think the Man is the Man, or at least, not the Man he thinks he is."
A few minutes later, they drove past a Quickie Mart. A few seconds after that, the Agent stepped out from behind a palmetto thicket. He did not flag them down, and it was easy to see why not -- his suit coat had a large dark stain just below the shoulder.
The Cleaner got out of the car and helped the Agent in. But before he let the Agent get in, he spread a large plastic sheet over the seat. He made sure the Agent was sitting on it and only it. The Cleaner hated blood. It was DNA evidence, it spattered everywhere very easily, and it was damn hard to get out of fabric once it soaked in.
In his mind, he was already figuring out a discreet way to burn the Agent's clothes.
"Gimme the medicine kit in the glove compartment," said the Cleaner. The Wrangler pulled the medicine kit out and tossed it back to the Cleaner. Then he pulled into traffic. He drove slowly and carefully. With a wounded guy in the back seat and a naked, bound woman in the trunk, all it would take is a traffic stop. They'd have to ice the cop and run for it. And that was how competent criminals wound up in jail.
"I'm going to find a place where we can hole up for a time," said the Wrangler.
"Good idea," said the Cleaner. "Got anything in mind?"
"A lot of places along the marsh have side roads for people to fish and crab from," said the Wrangler. "Some of them have big stands of brush that'll conceal us from the road."
The Wrangler soon found such a road, a white, dusty shell path that ran from the main road to the swamplands that fringed the road everywhere this close to the coast. He pulled in it and soon had the car completely screened from the road.
"Good job," said the Cleaner, surveying the spot. "This is only gonna take about twenty minutes."
He helped the Agent out of the car and onto the dried mud that fringed the road.
"Great," said the Cleaner approvingly. "Place'll be underwater in a couple of hours." And would clean up any clues such as bloodstains they might leave behind.
He stripped the coat and shirt off the Agent. He'd already plied him with oxycontin and penicillin from the medicine kit. There was a small hole in the front of his shoulder with blood slowly leaking out of it. There was a much larger hole in the back of his shoulder with a lot more blood leaking out of it, also slowly.
"Great, no arterial," said the Cleaner. "You been lucky."
"I dunno how lucky I am to get shot, but yeah, it coulda been worse," the Agent said in a strained voice. "Bastard."
"We all owe the bastard," said the Cleaner. He was sweating profusely. All of them were. The swamp was hot and incredibly muggy, it was almost like being underwater. Small crabs and insects scuttled everywhere, their buzzing muted by the sounds of traffic on the road behind the thicket.
The Cleaner doused the wound with hydrogen peroxide. The Agent winced as the peroxide burned at the infection in his wound, but made no sound. He was a tough guy, and it bugged him that he even winced for something like peroxide.
The Cleaner patched up the Agent quickly and efficiently, pouring more peroxide on some gauze, packing it into the back of the wound and into the front, then wrapping elastic bandages over his shoulder to hold the gauze in.
"You'll live," the Cleaner said.
"That's my plan," said the Agent.
"Speaking of plans," said the Wrangler, "it's about time we made one."
"What do we need with a plan?" asked the Agent. "We know where the Man's going to be. We know where the money is going to be. Let's go kill him and take the money."
"The Man may have some objections to that plan," the Wrangler said.
"Sure, but he doesn't think we're around to make any plans," said the Agent. "He knows he killed me and the Driver, and he knows he killed you two. How DID he plan to kill you two?"
"A bomb," said the Cleaner. "The Wrangler twigged to it when he told our guest he was going to kill her while he was fucking her. Figured if he was gonna kill her, he was gonna kill us, too. So we lit out."
"What about our guest?" asked the Agent.
"In the trunk, safe and sound," said the Wrangler. "An insurance policy."
"I'd rather have the money," said the Agent.
"Me, too," said the Wrangler. "So, you think we're gonna catch him by surprise?"
"Yep," said the Agent. "We're dead, he's sitting in that condo waiting for the money. We pop in, blow him away, get the money, and go on our merry way. What's not to like?"
"Nothing," said the Wrangler. "But the Man still might be worried about the cops."
"True," said the Agent. "He's not gonna answer any knocks on the door without his gun drawn, And he's gonna be watching the causeway with those binoculars."
"We'll need to ditch this car," said the Cleaner. "He sees it, he'll know we're still around."
"Good point," said the Wrangler.
"I'll rent another," said the Cleaner. Like the Wrangler, the Cleaner had three different sets of ID cards with him, each with its own credit cards and driver's licenses. Top of the line stuff, too, not like the kind of stuff they sold people just across the border from Mexico. The drivers' licenses would last indefinitely and the credit cards were good for about two weeks from their initial use. But the Cleaner never used them for more than a week.
The Wrangler dropped off the Cleaner for the rental, then drove off to a secluded spot they'd spotted on the way to the rental agency. The Cleaner came back and they made the switch, helping the Agent into the back seat and putting the bag with Christine in it into the trunk of the new car.
Christine mmphed a few times during the transfer. She was in a lot of pain. The circular container she was trapped in and the straps that confined her made all but the tiniest of movements impossible. Her body had stared a new round of cramping and once again she found herself screaming into her gag, alone and in darkness, in pain and fear and misery, writhing helplessly as her muscles contracted painfully, unable to relieve the pain in any way.
Yet strangely enough, all the pain and so forth was a considerable improvement over her state of mind when she had been convinced not so long ago that she was going to be killed.
She wasn't a fool. She understood very well that she still might be killed. She knew that they might just be toying with her, giving her hope and despair just for the fun of it. But being a plaything of people who might or might not kill you beat the hell out of thinking you would be killed, period.
She was of course deeply miserable, she just wasn't at the bottom of the black hole she'd been trapped in earlier. And anything, anything was better than that. Even all this pain and darkness and fear was better than that.
Still, Christine was deeply disappointed to hear an engine come to life and feel herself moving. She was in another damn car trunk. She hated being tied up and locked in the trunk of a car. She hated being kidnapped. She hated being raped. She hated being afraid she was going to die at any moment. She hated that most of all.
The car moved through the beautiful roads of St. Simon's Island, at times almost completely canopied by oaks with long beards of Spanish moss hanging from their branches, and the spiky green of palmettos lining the road. The condo they were heading for was just off the main drag, perched on a tiny spit of sand that had almost certainly been constructed into the marsh back before environmental rules made that difficult.
They pulled into the parking area underneath the condo next to the one they were headed for. The two condos were just 5 meters apart, built on stilts in case of flooding and also to take advantage of the tiny space
available.
The three of them had decided that there wasn't much point in doing anything fancy. The best plan would have been to have one of them sneak onto the condo's balcony overlooking the marsh and then break into the apartment at the same time as the other two broke into the front door. But in the early afternoon sun anyone climbing about on the outside of the condo balconies would have been visible to anyone on the causeway that crossed the marsh, and anyone fishing or boating in the marsh, and probably to anyone on the far side of the marsh visiting the Battle of Bloody Marsh memorial site.
A guy crawling around on the outside of a building had way too much chance of attracting official attention.
So they stood at the door and the Wrangler tried the handle very carefully. It was locked, of course. He pulled his gun out, took careful aim at the lock while the Agent took aim at the deadbolt. They fired nearly simultaneously. The Cleaner kicked the door in and it swung open easily. They Wrangler and then the Cleaner dove into the room.
A moment of staring intently over drawn guns showed there was no one in the room. They fanned out through the condo, guns at the ready, clearing each room in turn, then returned to the living room.
The Wrangler and the Cleaner returned to the living room while the Agent scoped out the balcony.
"Looks like he was here," said the Cleaner. "Got a laptop on the dining table."
The Wrangler glanced over at the laptop on the table. There was a webcam hooked up to it. It's light was on.
A connection formed in the Wrangler's mind. "Get out!" he cried to the Cleaner and the Agent, turning to run for the door as he did so.
There was a noise so loud it picked the Wrangler up and slammed him through the front door and into the wall that fronted it.
Things were hazy for the Wrangler after that. He could not move at all. He felt sticky stuff on his face. Nothing hurt, but he couldn't feel very much. He may have drifted in and out of consciousness, it was hard to tell. He smelled smoke and heard clattering and thunking noises. Then voices. Then sirens. Shortly after that, the voice of a young Coast Guardsman standing over him, saying, "This one's still with us."
