by Fox, Nicole
She climbs into bed, crawls across the sheets, and places her hand on my belly. I feel hunger stirring and my cock hardening, but I know that if I try it on with her again so soon, she’ll get all crazy again. I guess I’ll have to settle for cuddling. Cuddling, goddamn, and with Scar it’s not such a bad thing. After a while, she starts to snore sweetly. Moving carefully, I turn over and look down at her face. The curtains are thin, allowing streetlamps, moonlight, and the light of passing trucks to shine onto her face. She’s smiling, a small, sad smile, and her eyebrows are furrowed in concern. I touch her face, smoothing my hand down her cheek, and her eyebrows relax. I feel pretty good about that, I have to admit. It feels like having a woman.
I lie back and wrap my arm around her, hugging her close to me. To have Scar as my woman ... now that’d be something else.
When I wake, she’s staring up at me. She quickly looks down, trying to pretend she wasn’t. The sun is shining now, cooking the room.
“I saw you,” I say. “And I feel violated. Staring at me like that.”
“You were moaning in your sleep,” she says quietly. “Moaning about your father—and your mother.”
“Bullshit.” I stand up and go into the bathroom, splashing some water in my face. “Moaning in my sleep,” I repeat, laughing to myself. “What a load of shit.”
“You know,” Scar calls from the bedroom. “Just because you’re a big strong man doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to moan in your sleep!”
“I was not moaning in my fucking sleep!”
I splash more water in my face.
“Okay, Cormac. Whatever you say, Mr. Big and Strong.”
“You’re a pain in my ass.” I walk back into the bedroom and start getting dressed. She’s on her bed now, legs tucked beneath her. At some point in the night she took off her clothes and now she’s in her underwear. Maybe her clothes were too uncomfortable. Her tits are pushed together and her long, lithe legs are driving me mad. Those are the sort of legs that men go to war for. I’d kill a thousand men to keep legs like those safe.
“Why? Because I try and bust through your phony macho-man routine?”
“I never knew you had freckles.” I walk across the room and kneel close to her, pointing to her chest. A smattering of freckles crawls from between her breasts up to near her neck. “They’re cute as hell, Scar. You shouldn’t’ve hid them from me for so long.”
“Pervert.” She pouts.
“Woah.” I stand up, holding my hands up. “Don’t pull your gun on me, Agent O—”
The door crashes open so fast that, at first, I think a bomb’s gone off. The hinges explode in shrapnel and the door collapses onto the floor with a heavy thump. I’m behind my bed, rooting around for my gun. Scar’s doing the same, but neither of us is quick enough. Two men, both of them holding twelve-gauge shotguns, march into the room, barrels aimed at us. The first man is even taller than me, almost seven feet, with a caved-in nose and a thin mustache penciled on above a small, cruel mouth. He’s bald, but wearing a Yankees cap to hide it. The other man is short, with ratty blonde hair and a goatee, wearing glasses which reflect the motel room in miniature.
“Okay, okay,” the big man says. “Let’s all stay nice and calm, okay? I don’t want to have to paint the walls with you, Cormac, but I will.”
He doesn’t speak like a criminal—not like any criminal I’ve ever met. He has this way of looking around the room, of holding his weapon, that tells me he’s police-trained. He looks like Scar when she goes into business mode. He looks like FBI.
“Hot damn,” the shorter one says. He has his gun trained on Scar. “Damn, sweetheart. Those are what I’d call some titties. Look at these, Bryan. These are what I’d call some titties.”
“Don’t use my name you fuckin’ dipshit,” Bryan snaps.
“Who cares, man? These two will be dead when we get them to the boss, anyway. I don’t see no harm in having a little fun with ’em. Look here, missy, my name is Harold, and this here is Bryan. Bryan, just think about it. We can do anything we like to these two and it won’t make no matter. Dead is dead. Just look at those titties, man. I’ve died and gone to titty heaven.”
Bryan shakes his head, growling as though Harold often goes off like this. He turns to his partner, still with the gun trained on me, but with his eyes looking away. I inch forward, clenching my fists and wishing I had my gun in my hand. I’ll have to be quick and brutal. Bryan looks like he could pick up a vending machine with one hand without breaking a sweat.
“Just leave her alone, you fool. What’d you think the boss is gonna say if he finds out you’ve—”
“Why would he care?” Harold hisses. “What’s it to him if the hole’s a little stretched?”
“You’re a sick fuck, you know that?”
“A sick fuck who gets more pussy’n you can ever dream of, you ogre cunt. Anyway, we both know you like it. You didn’t complain about the stripper sluts last night, and they weren’t exactly willin’. You need more powder or what?”
“Go fuck yourself, man. I’m getting us outta here.”
He’s about to turn back to me when I lurch forward and grab the barrel off the shotgun. He fires on instinct, but I just manage to push it away so that the thin, cheap wall is blown to hell, not me. Scar is screaming, Harold is shouting, and all around me is mayhem, but I just focus on that gun. Just get that gun aimed at his bald head and blow his brains out, and then it’ll be time for thinking. But Bryan is strong, stronger than any man I’ve ever fought. I wrench the gun one way, twisting it, hoping to twist his wrists and make him drop it. But he just wrenches it right back.
“If you keep fighting with my partner, I’ll blow her face off!” Harold roars. “Three, two ...”
I step back, letting my hands fall to my sides. Harold has his shotgun pressed into Scar’s mouth, right up to the back of her throat, and the fuck seems to be taking pleasure from it.
“That’s more like it,” Harold says. “That’s more like it, indeed.”
When Bryan smacks me across the jaw with the butt of the gun, I’m sure my neck has snapped. The pain is absolute, gripping my head, neck, and shoulders, making it so that when he pulls me to my feet, needles of pain work their way under my skin. The two of them drag us into the morning sunlight, across the tarmac, and throw us into a big black sedan, Scar and I sitting side by side. They haven’t let Scar put on any clothes. The sick fucks. The sick fucking bastards. I’m just wearing sweatpants, but I don’t think Harold or Bryan are going to give me much trouble. But Scar ...
They handcuff us to the seats, then climb into the front.
“Try anything and I’ll be eating her teddies for breakfast.” Harold grins at me. His teeth are yellow and he has a Band-Aid on the bridge of his nose. A cokehead. As if to confirm this thought, he sets out some lines on the dashboards and vacuums them up. “Teddies for breakfast, that’s what I’m talking about.”
“Just shut up,” Bryan says, backing the car out of the lot.
I look to Scar and see that she’s looking back at me. I thought she might be scared, but she doesn’t look scared. She looks like she has a plan.
Chapter Six Scarlet
“Well, first of all, you have to use whatever tools you’ve got,” my father told me once, when he’d had one too many whiskies and was in one of his more talkative moods. “But you can’t let shame or embarrassment or social rules get in the way of that. Say, for example, you’re a black man—or woman—working a case on the KKK. If this officer discovers a way to use the color of their skin to disturb the KKK, should that be taboo? Or let’s be more specific. I was once working a case on a homosexual serial killer. One of my tactics was to go into the club and pretend to be homosexual to get some information. Now, a woman couldn’t have done that. Does that make it wrong? There is no wrong, within limits, Scarlet. There’s only winning and losing.”
I always got the sense that dad was embarrassed for telling me that story, but it is advice I’ve never f
orgotten. You have to use what you have in any situation. If that means using the loudness of a concert to mask your approach or the quietness of a library to startle somebody, fine. And if that also means using the fact that you’re in your underwear and there’s a coke-snorting psychopath in the passenger seat, well, that’s fine too. I catch Cormac’s eye and try to communicate to him that this is all just a game, to go along with it, and to be ready. He looks back at me, nodding.
We drive north, heading toward the freeway through the nowhere towns we’ve been driving up and down for the past couple of days. The plan was always to go back to New York eventually, but not like this.
“Shall we call ahead and tell the boss we’re on our way?” the bald man called Bryan asks.
“Get your nose outta his ass, man. You’re always sniffing around there. Mickey’s a good guy, I won’t deny it, but you’ve always got your nose right up his asshole.”
“You’ve told them we work for Mickey now, you dumb fuck.” Bryan sighs. “You really are a stupid cokehead cunt, you know that?”
“You work for Mickey?” Cormac laughs. “I knew the blonde rat was a fucking idiot the second I saw him, but you, Bryan? You seem like a smart man.”
Bryan doesn’t say anything, just turns onto a dusty road with sparse traffic, the freeway a tiny dot in the distance.
“Oh, don’t call him a rat,” I say, making my voice syrupy and disgusting, the kind of voice hookers use with their clients. If there’s any irony in me being able to be like this with a stranger and not with Cormac without feeling uncomfortable, now isn’t the time to think about it. “He’s not a rat. He was very nice when he put me in the car—very gentle.”
“Exactly!” Harold grins, snapping his fingers. “Exactly. That’s exactly right.”
I look in the rear-view and see that Bryan looks confused, but not hostile. Which means my performance is at least halfway convincing.
“We should’ve gagged them,” Bryan murmurs. “Maybe we’ll stop and—”
“Oh, baby,” I say, directing my voice toward Harold. He’s the coked-up one. If there’s an out here, it’s him. “Oh, baby, don’t let him gag me. Then you won’t be able to hear my sweet voice.”
“You’re a woman all right,” Harold says. “Yeah, you’re a woman. You’re the real thing. There’s no doubt about that. No doubt at all. You’re a woman if I’ve ever seen one.”
“Harold.” I speak in a low voice, as though only he can hear. “Can I tell you something?”
“Sure you can.” He watches me in the rear-view. I make sure to keep smiling and to keep looking pretty. Somewhere faraway maggots are crawling over my skin. But I keep it professional. I can see Cormac, out of the corner of my eye, getting angrier and angrier, his hand gripping his knee. But he knows what I’m doing and stays quiet. Harold says, “You can tell me any damn thing you please. Look at those titties!”
I lick my lips, pout them, and then say in the sweetest voice I can manage, “I’ve always had a, well, a sort of, you know ...oh, it’s so hard to say!” I giggle. I wonder if I’m going too far, but he looks completely enraptured. Even Bryan, the smarter of the two, keeps glancing at me in the mirror. “I’ve always had this fantasy of a big, strong man with a big, hard gun crashing into my room and taking me—you know, just really making me his. I’m sure you’ve heard of girls with similar fantasies before.”
“Well, yeah, but not, ahem, not in real life.” Porn, of course. In porn he has.
“But I can never find a man who can, really, like, perform. Hehe!” The laugh is a sorority girl caricature. But Harold doesn’t see through the performance. He’s in too deep now. “I was wondering if you ...”
“I’ve never had a problem performing,” Harold says proudly.
“No, neither have I,” Bryan says, and that’s how I know I’ve got them both.
I’m constantly amazed by what a woman’s body can do. One minute you have men who are on their guard, ready for anything—men who see you as a threat. The next they see you as a piece of sex ready to be taken; they forget that you’re an FBI agent. They forget everything apart from their cocks. Their minds get fogged and you have control.
“Ooh, look over there!” I squeak. “Look at that!”
I point off the road, where an old abandoned barn sits, a burned-out shell of a tractor resting beside it.
“What about it?” Harold says, but Bryan is already slowing down.
“It’s so silly,” I say. “It’s, like, oh, hehe, it’s like, so, so silly. But what if we sort of pulled up and then got out, and we could see if my fantasy is as good in real life as it is in my head. Do you know what I mean? I don’t want you to think I’m a slut, or anything.”
“I’d never say that about you,” Harold says with so much sincerity I almost laugh. “I’d never insult you like that. Bryan, just pull up a second, will you?”
“It could be a trick,” Bryan says quietly. “What if she’s playing us?”
“Look at her!” Harold snaps. “She’s a skinny woman in her fucking underwear! Why would she play us? What does she think she can do? No, she wants it. I knew she was game when I saw those teddies.”
Bryan stares at me in the rear-view mirror. “And you’ll do both of us, sweetheart? Is that it?”
I nod, biting my lip and giggling. “Of course, baby. Whatever you want.”
“But me first.” Harold pinches some coke from his bag and rubs it over his gums. “I don’t want you there, watching me. All right? Me first. That’s the deal. Or I’ll kill everyone and then myself.”
“All right, all right. You first.”
Bryan turns the car toward the barn. I glance at Cormac, seeing that his face is red and his fists are clenched, shaking. He looks like he might try something. I shake my head subtly. If he tries something now, all that will happen is the spell will break and my plan will fail. Even the strongest men can’t break out of handcuffs.
The car comes to a stop just outside the barn. It’s empty inside except for some old, rusted equipment. Looking back at the road, I see that it’s farther away then it seemed, the road now a tiny snaking line just short of the horizon. Harold drums his fingers on the dashboard like a man who’s just found out he’s got the promotion. “We hit the jackpot today!” Bryan reaches across and takes the bag of coke from Harold, pouring out way more than he should onto the dash and vacuuming it in one quick snort. Maybe Bryan’s been coked up this whole time, too, which would make sense since he’s not seeing through my act.
“Me first! Me first!” Harold leaps from the car. I’m dismayed to see that he still has the presence of mind to pick up his shotgun from the foot well. Then he comes around to my door and opens it. He looks for a moment at my handcuffs, as though this might remind him of what exactly he’s doing.
I force my lips into a wide, flirtatious smile. “What’re you waiting for, baby?”
“Nothing!” He grins, reaching into his pocket and unlocking my handcuffs. “Nothing at all.”
I walk toward the barn with Harold’s gun aimed at the back of my head, with the knowledge that if I mess this up, I’m dead, and maybe Cormac as well. The barn reeks of old, rusted metal, dampness, and shit. But Harold doesn’t seem to notice. He leads me deep into the barn, to some old dusty boxes.
“Look at that ass move,” he says, sighing heavily. “I’ve never seen an ass move like that.”
I turn around, smiling, always smiling, and watch as he leans the shotgun up against a supporting beam and then starts fumbling with his pants.
“Here,” I say, stepping forward. “Let me help you with that.”
“Oh, sure!” He drops his hands.
I don’t think he realizes what’s happened until he’s flat on his back with my heel digging into his face, over and over, stamping quickly and brutally. When he tries to scream, I grab the shotgun and shove the barrel into his mouth, just like he did with me back in the motel room.
“You stupid fuck,” I say, forcing the weapo
n down his throat. “You think a woman who’s just been kidnapped wants to be screwed, you moron? Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to come out with me quietly, and your partner is going to set my friend free. Otherwise, I’ll blow your brains out the back of your skull.” His eyes go wide, but not just in fear. Recognition, too. Like he’s seeing me for the first time—like, in fact, this flirty, giggly sorority girl has just transformed into an efficient FBI agent.
