by Henry Morgan
Dino’s smile appeared to be painted on as he collected the gold checks from his briefcase. ‘The usual deal,’ he said. ‘Present these checks at the tables and you’ll walk away with a hundred and fifty grand. You get clean money, and we make a little profit in exchange for washing your notes.’
Jake downed a shot of bourbon. ‘Yeah, but we take all the chances.’
‘Seems like a good deal to me,’ Dino replied smoothly. ‘Now, where’s the cash?’
‘It’s in the tank of a chopper outside,’ Bobby told him.
Dino looked impressed. ‘You take chances.’
Bobby laughed. ‘Who’s going to steal a biker’s hog? Some fucker with a death wish?’
For the briefest of moments the tension lifted, but the peace was short-lived. With a loud crashing sound the door to the room suddenly burst open as someone kicked it in.
‘Hands up!’ a man yelled. ‘Hands up where I can fucking see them!’
David felt his stomach convulse as he recognised the two men from the Cadillac. He held himself perfectly still, and said a silent prayer.
Dino’s smile thinned to the point where it looked more like a grimace. ‘We’ll find you,’ he warned quietly. ‘This country’s not big enough for you to hide in. Someone will talk.’
‘Shut the fuck up!’ the man holding the gun barked, unaware of the fact that the nameless biker, who had been standing behind the door when it was kicked open, was now holding a sawn-off shotgun to the back of his head.
‘You’re too fucking early,’ the clean-cut biker said furiously, ‘the fucking money’s not here yet.’
‘Blow the bastard away,’ Jake growled, nodding towards the second gunman. ‘They can’t shoot us all.’
It seemed to David that control was about to switch away from the men at the door to the table, but he was very wrong, for the nameless biker abruptly trained his shotgun on the group he had ridden into town with.
‘The money’s in Bobby’s chopper outside,’ he said calmly.
Jake made to get up, but stopped himself. ‘I knew there was something fucking rotten about you,’ he hissed. ‘I just fucking knew it!’
‘You want to see my badge? Go and get the money,’ he said to the second man from the Cadillac, ‘we’ll clean up here. It’s the bike with the green tank.’
David looked back at Dino. His hand was inside his briefcase.
Who fired the first shot was a matter for the Las Vegas PD to determine. It seemed to David that the room had suddenly exploded with gunfire. Smoke burned his eyes and his brain shut down in response to the ear-splitting reports. The shooting could not have gone on for more than two or three seconds, yet it felt like an eternity. He had no way of knowing how long it lasted, all he knew was that he was still breathing, and wasn’t aware of any life-threatening pains anywhere on his body. His only injury turned out to be a bump on the forehead he got diving for cover under the table.
After the riot of gunfire ceased, an eerie silence descended over the room. David did not even think of calling for help, as he knew none would be forthcoming.
‘I knew you were cool...’ Bobby’s voice was barely a whisper.
‘I’ll get some help,’ David said.
‘No point.’ The biker lifted his hand to reveal a hole the size of a fist in his belly. ‘It’s your lucky day,’ he groaned. His face was a mask of pain as he reached into his denim pocket, and pulled out the key to his bike. ‘Take it,’ he urged.
David took the key, there was no point arguing with a dying man. Then he quickly got to his feet and made for the door, too squeamish to check on the state of anyone else’s health. The floor was strewn with bodies, and their stillness, not to mention the pools of blood spreading around them, did not bode well.
The first hungry flies had just begun entering the room when David closed the door behind him.
There was a decision to be made, and not much time in which to make it. Remarkably, David felt calm as he stepped outside into the blazing sunshine. He did not hear any police sirens in the distance, and the street looked just as it had before. He walked over to the bikes, kicked up the stand on the bike with the green tank, and pushed it across to his RV. A minute later he had attached the chopper to the rear bike mounts and was pulling slowly away from Gambelli’s.
He drove five hundred miles before he stopped again.
It was all there, all two hundred thousand dollars, crammed inside a false cover sitting over the original tank. It took David over an hour to count the money.
His problem now was what to do with the bike. If he dumped it at the side of the road out in the middle of nowhere, there was a chance it would be reported to the police. The same thing would happen if he attempted to burn it. The best thing to do was to head for Albuquerque and leave the bike parked on the street. That way, it might just sit there for a day or two before someone reported it. More likely than not, it would be stolen, and then it would either be cut down or repainted and driven until it fell apart. Whatever happened, abandoning it on a street somewhere would put time and distance between him and the hot vehicle.
The day after he left the bike outside a bar in Albuquerque, David woke up to a beautiful morning near a tiny settlement called Nogal on the road to Roswell and the infamous air force base. He had spent a fitful night waiting for the sound of police sirens that, fortunately, never materialised. The bloody event had not even made the six o’clock news. Finally, he found a brief report on a local Internet news site that put the violence down to a dispute between members of the Las Vegas underworld and a group of bikers from out of town. The police issued a statement that they were not looking for any suspects because a large amount of valuable casino checks had been found at the scene. The motive had clearly been robbery, and since the checks were still there it meant the potential thief had been killed along with everyone else. David looked to be in the clear.
He ate some breakfast, and then checked his e-mail. He had a few messages from some Frisco Swingers he could do nothing about now, and a nice note from Donna thanking him for a good time, and wishing him a safe journey. He laughed out loud.
The last message was from Justin. He was flying to Miami in two days’ time. If David drove for two days and two nights with only brief stops, he could make it there in time to meet his friend, but he decided on a compromise. He would drive to New Orleans, and from there fly to Miami. He e-mailed Justin his plans, and took his familiar position in the driver’s seat.
‘Excuse me,’ a girl’s voice said through his open window. ‘Are you going to Roswell? I sure would appreciate a lift.’
David saw long blonde hair blowing across a young woman’s pretty features. ‘Jump in,’ he said. ‘That’s just where I’m headed.’
Chapter 10
It was a shame for David to be making the last leg of his journey more of a race than a tour, but he had agreed to meet Justin in Miami so they could look for a nice property in sunny Florida together. David doubted this was going to be possible now. Sooner or later the police would find out about the Englishman who suddenly disappeared from Gambelli’s after the shootout. They would come looking for him, and he had learned, to his cost, that a man could even be found in the icy wastes of Siberia. He wanted to spend a day or two enjoying the Florida sun, but then it was almost certain he would have to leave America and keep travelling.
He had about a day-and-a-half to make it to Shreveport and from there to New Orleans. For the moment, he was enjoying some iced tea and pancakes while commerce clattered its noisy way along the interstate.
He squinted against the nearly blinding sunlight, closed his eyes, and drifted back to Roswell and Cindy, the hiker. God, he loved girls named Cindy, and there were so many of them, blonde-haired, blue-eyed and pert-breasted, hitchhiking and carrying their fares inside well-stacked T-shirts. This particular Cindy was n
o different. She was pretty, she was American, and she was looking for new experiences. That’s why she wanted to see Roswell.
‘It’s a cover-up!’ she told him in an excited whisper. ‘The military picked up the bodies of some aliens there years ago.’
The experiences she got were not the ones she was searching for, but David liked to think they were more enlightening than the pointless pursuit of lost aliens. He showed her that the real danger lies not in the interior of a spaceship from another galaxy, but in the interior of a Chevy, a Pontiac, a Nissan, or even a family camper driven by a polite Englishman.
He was not usually a cruel man, but he had been strangely energised by the long journey - by his experiences on the road with Minnie, by meeting up with Donna again, by barely escaping a violent death and, of course, by picking up two hundred thousand dollars along the way.
Naturally, Cindy was not averse to a little sexual play. That was the hitchhiker’s standard fare and she did not mind paying. She was, after all, an active young woman, and she did not even baulk at a little light bondage; she found it thrilling. She was a little more nervous about the blindfold and the gag, but even they seemed to heighten her excitement, and David’s sophisticated accent reassured her. What he was saying also added a certain amount of frisson to her sexual tension. He was telling her how completely helpless she was, and that he could do anything he wanted to her. The threat scared her, but no more than it turned her on.
The feel of his leather belt on her bare bottom was the first indication that the mixture was a bit too rich for her. The light lashes gradually increasing in intensity, and the calm voice commanding her to hold still, soon became quite frightening to her. With a ball gag in her mouth, she had no way of protesting against the pain, no way of indicating her displeasure, no way of pleading for him to stop. The whipping went on, and on. At first he only beat her bottom, but then he moved up to her back, and finally he could not resist turning her around and giving her a few exceedingly cruel strokes across her breasts.
When he knew she felt as though her whole body was on fire, he finally stopped. She was totally at his mercy, and she moved her body compliantly in whatever direction he desired, which happened to be face down over the table again, her cheek pressed against the cold Formica surface and her arms lashed firmly behind her.
She pushed her bottom back towards him, offering him both entrances into her body. David did not rush, smiling at the thought that she undoubtedly expected a rectal probe now since an Englishman was technically considered an alien in the United States. Then he remembered Minnie’s experiences with rum, and searched the cupboard. He found a bottle of vodka, and trickled a little into the sweet hollow of her back. The liquid felt cool at first, but then its high alcohol content started to burn and she squirmed against the table, moaning through her ball gag. David chose this highly inviting moment to thrust his impatient cock into her pussy. She writhed even more violently at his sudden invasion, and her clenched vagina formed the perfect sheathe for his iron-hard rod. When she looked as though she was beginning to relax and enjoy his deep strokes, he spanked her hard a few times, adding more pain to her pleasure.
It was not long before the drawn out combination of fear and excitement, torment and ecstasy, led to the unmistakable signs of an orgasm tearing through her flesh. It was a terrifyingly powerful experience for Cindy. Her body screamed for release, but her bonds held fast, so when a climax suddenly found a way through, and freed her, her whole body stiffened in disbelief at the intensity of the pleasure.
David kept right on fucking her after she came, with the goal of making her clitoris supersensitive, while promising her that when he was finished with her pussy he was going to fuck her arse. But then he decided he preferred to sample both her holes at once. So as she squealed into her gag he penetrated her bottom, enjoyed its delicious tightness for a few moments, and then returned to her slick pussy. He kept this up for a long time, sometimes pulling out of whatever orifice he was enjoying, and then thrusting right back in just to shock her, because she had expected him to switch. Everything he did was designed to increase her confusion and her torment and, inevitably, her pleasure.
The hours passed, and she became increasingly weak from all the attention he was paying her. Then at last David decided it was time for him to have mercy on her, and ejaculated deep inside her bottom. Her body went limp beneath the sensation of his eruption, and she moaned at this final, humiliating caress.
David sipped his iced tea and smiled in satisfaction. Cindy had proved very satisfying. She had also surprised him. Once she realised she was not in any danger with him, she began talking about the intensity of her feelings when she was helpless. He listened, and then enjoyed her body again, both inside and outside the RV, where he chased her naked across the desert and played out her abduction fantasy by dragging her back into his vehicle, and subjecting her to another thorough examination of her anus with his rigid penis. She admitted to harbouring violent fantasies ever since she took to the road and a truck driver made her suck his cock in return for a lift. She had been hitching rides ever since, always hoping to go one further, always looking for the next experience.
David dropped her off at Roswell, and gave her three thousand dollars to keep her off the road for a while. He knew it wouldn’t.
He arrived in New Orleans late in the evening and decided to stay in a hotel for the night. He booked a room in The Lafayette, and then walked to a restaurant where he ate Cajun chicken watching the rain bouncing off the pavement and turning to steam in the oppressive heat. As quickly as the downpour began, it ceased, and the only evidence of its brief appearance were the colourful serpents of reflected neon light slithering in the oily kerbside water.
New Orleans had its own definite smell - the pervasive harbour scent of salt water and fish mixed with a hint of spice, and the heavy sensual essence of sweat-borne pheromones emanating from every tobacco-filled Creole bar.
A black waitress with flawless skin, her hair pulled tightly back away from the beautiful bones of her face, lit David’s cheroot for him before taking his empty plate away. He watched her tight bottom saunter away, and called after her. When she turned back towards him, he once again admired her features and asked for another bottle of red wine. The girl recognised his interest in her - it was not unexpected or unique - which was why she was irritated by his lack of response when she brought him the bottle he had requested, and then remained hovering at his elbow. She was awaiting further instructions, or at least a hint of appreciation, but none were forthcoming. She followed David’s gaze to a restaurant across the street. The new object of his attention was a blonde woman sitting framed by a French door closed against the wet weather. Her white skirt and jacket looked expensive, and her stockinged feet sat snugly inside white shoes with stiletto heels. The waitress smirked, and left him alone with his bottle and his blonde.
Through the humid atmosphere, and in the glow from an oil lamp on the table beside her, David saw a softly focused vision of serene beauty. She was not alone. Her two companions were a glass of what looked like whisky, and a very tall, equally well-dressed, black man. He was not actually with her, however; he stood to one side of her table. David smoked his cheroot and drank his wine and watched the blonde pull a silver case from her white handbag. She held a cigarette up to her red lips, and the big black man promptly leaned forward and lit it for her. She did not acknowledge his action. She simply smoked silently, lost in her own thoughts. David could have watched her all night, but his bladder was demanding attention. He held out for ten more minutes, and then finally got up and went in search of the toilets.
When he emerged his heart missed a beat. The beautiful blonde was there, in his restaurant, and she was actually sitting at his table, the tip of a fresh cigarette embraced by her crimson lips, her silky legs crossed. And beside her towered the black man who seemed to be her shadow. For a moment David hesit
ated, trying to think, but he did precious little of that before arriving at his own table feeling like the interloper.
‘I saw you watching me,’ she explained at once. She looked to be in her late twenties, but she had the deep, smoky voice of a much older and more experienced woman. ‘You intrigued me, so I thought I would introduce myself.’
‘Right,’ David replied, rather stupidly. ‘May I?’
‘It’s your table,’ she reminded him soberly. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m being rude.’
‘Not at all,’ he assured her. He sat down gingerly, keeping his eye on the black man, who had yet to speak. ‘I’ve only just arrived in the city,’ he added.
As she stubbed out her cigarette, he noticed that her fingernails matched her bold red lipstick. ‘I’m Monique Petain.’ She held her hand out formally. ‘You’re English?’
‘Yes, though I haven’t been to England for a while.’
‘Oh?’ She pulled out another cigarette, and the black man lit it for her right on cue. ‘There is a reason for that?’ She blew the smoke over David’s head.
‘Just travelling,’ he replied, strangely at a loss for words. ‘Seeking new experiences.’
‘That’s interesting... I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’
‘David.’
‘Maybe I could show you something of old Louisiana, David. Would you like that?’ She gave him the faintest of smiles while holding him in her cool blue eyes.
‘That would be lovely,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid I’ll be leaving tomorrow. I’m flying to Miami.’
‘Then let me show you tonight,’ she insisted. ‘I see you’ve already eaten. What were you planning to do now, go to bed early?’
‘N-no,’ he stammered. ‘Where were you thinking of taking me?’
‘To my plantation.’ With an elegant tilt of her head, she indicated the tall black man standing behind her chair. ‘Jubal will drive us.’
