by JD Nixon
“Yeah, Rusty picked a real dud this time. No fight in her at all,” said the first guy with conspicuous contempt.
“Not like the last one. Man! She was fun to do.”
Another dirty laugh. “You’re spot on there. She was a right goer, that one.”
“Yeah. She kept going and going and going.”
“Until she stopped.”
They laughed again as they climbed the stairs and I knew without a doubt which direction I had to go. Upstairs. With them. I’d recognised one of the men. Although I couldn’t see the tattoo on his back, he was still wearing the gold snake ring with the red stone eyes – the man from the film cell with his hands around Lucy’s neck.
I crept from the kitchen to the darkened staircase and slowly followed the men upstairs. They were so engrossed in their unsavoury discussion that they didn’t notice the shadow of me behind them. At the top of the stairs, they turned right towards a room that faced the back of the house. Blinding light streamed from under the door.
I thought about that for a moment. Such brilliant lighting should have been visible from the outside, but I hadn’t noticed anything. Which probably meant that they had light-blocking blinds on the windows. That was enough to set a cop’s radar beeping. What on earth were they doing in that room? But it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. Burning film combined with bright lighting screamed one thing to me – movie-making. I was positive that Kylie was in that room.
But instead of turning right like the men did, I turned left. There were three other doors on the top floor, all shut. I needed to scope them before I made my move. I didn’t want any nasty surprises. What I was doing was already stupidly dangerous enough.
Tentatively, I turned the handle on the door to the far left and opened it, revealing a bathroom. A quick check from the doorway confirmed that it was empty, although not very tidy, wet towels and dirty clothes littering the floor. An economy-size box of condoms sat open on the vanity bench, a few wrappers carelessly strewn around.
The second door opened into an office of some sort. Boxes lined one wall and casually sitting on a desk, next to a phone and a laptop, was a small heap of five little plastic bags stuffed with a white powder.
Hmm, interesting, but not my concern now, I thought. I had only one goal and I was determined to remain focused on that. I wasn’t here to arrest anyone, to search the premises, or to investigate the bikies’ activities. I was here to rescue Kylie and to safely get the both of us out of this place as quickly as possible.
Reassured that the office was empty as well, I moved to the third door, the one closest to the room I’d soon be storming. I pressed my ear against the door and listened intently. I heard an indistinct noise, like a muffled whimper. I pushed my ear to the door again and heard the same noise. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound threatening.
I gently and slowly twisted the doorknob, but it didn’t take long to realise that it wasn’t moving far. The door was locked.
“Who’s there?” asked a frightened voice from inside the room.
It wasn’t a female voice, so I immediately quashed a brief flare of wishful thinking that my search for Kylie was over. I leaned down and peered through the keyhole, only to find an eyeball staring back at me.
“Who is it?” the voice said again. Listening to it a second time, I recognised it as the bikies’ IT guy.
“Did you ring me earlier?”
“You came?” His voice was breathless with hope.
“Yes,” I assured, looking around nervously, not particularly wanting to prolong the conversation. The last thing I needed was to be caught out in the hallway with no cover.
“They’ve locked me in here,” he said, his voice catching in a sob. “They’re forcing me to do this. I don’t want to do it! You have to believe me. I didn’t know what they do here. I would never –”
“Okay, Mickey,” I soothed, cutting him off, checking over my shoulder again. “Are you safe at the moment?”
A watery sniff. “Yeah, I guess. I’m working on the server and none of them know how to do that.” Another sniff. “But as soon as they’ve finished . . .”
“I’ll come back for you.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. I have to go now.”
“Don’t forget me.”
“I won’t. I have to go. I have to find Kylie.”
“She’s in the next room. She’s . . . You better hurry.” So I did.
It was time to tackle the brightly lit room. I gripped the doorknob my hand, trying to psych myself up. I would be outnumbered, I had no doubt about that at all. So the element of surprise was one of my key weapons. My biggest hope was that if they were filming up here, they wouldn’t be armed, and I’d have the advantage.
Taking a deep breath, I turned the handle and kicked open the door.
Chapter 25
Everyone in the room turned in surprise. I took in as much as detail as I could in the few seconds before things started happening. The room was cavernous but sparsely furnished, a large king-sized bed dominating, and a lounge off to one side. Bright studio lights were centred on the bed and a weird film camera with two heads was set up on a tripod at the end of the bed. A man with a more portable camera was circling the bed while filming.
Besides him, there were six other men in the room, all naked and erect, three of them on the bed, the other three standing around, watching and playing with themselves. I recognised two of them as the men I’d just followed up the stairs. The three men on the bed were doing awful things to a small pale naked figure, two of them interrupted mid-coitus, the other in the midst of thrusting himself down her throat. From the long blonde hair streaming over the side of the bed, I presumed the girl was Kylie, even though her face was obscured by the men’s bodies. She wasn’t moving, even with my surprise entrance.
None of the men was armed, I was relieved to notice.
“Police!” I shouted, pivotting my gun from one to the other. “None of you move until I tell you to.” I indicated towards the bed. “You three – get off her! Now! All of you move over there and face the wall. Put your hands up high, against the wall.”
They were slow to move. I would have liked to let off a warning shot to get them hustling, but I didn’t want to alert anyone else. I also didn’t want to waste any of my ammunition either. God only knew how much I’d need later trying to get out of this place.
“Move it! Or I’m going to start shooting off your balls, one by one,” I shouted and they slouched over to face the wall resentfully, a lineup of bare bums staring back at me. I couldn’t believe my job sometimes.
I shifted over to the bed, distressed to see Kylie lying limply, unconscious. She’d been badly used and was covered with scratches, bites and knife cuts. Nasty bruises had started to blossom on her face and neck. She had thick white globs dotting her face, neck, chest, stomach and thighs, indicating that she’d been abused for hours on end. The men were probably taking shifts. The blood dribbling down her thighs and smeared on the white sheets gave testimony to how roughly they’d been treating her. I put two fingers against her neck, feeling for her pulse. It was surprisingly strong.
“What have you bastards done to her?” I asked, well past the point of mere anger.
One of the men spoke to me over his shoulder. “She’s just drugged a bit, that’s all. To shut the little bitch up. She wouldn’t stop screaming. It gets on your nerves after a while.”
My stomach churned. “You people are sick. She’s only fourteen. She’s just a kid!”
“The bitch wanted the money. Nobody forced her,” he sneered.
I ignored him, not wanting to waste any precious time indulging in a moral debate with a degenerate creep like him. Having Kylie unconscious was probably going to make my life much easier, because I didn’t have to worry about an hysterical teenager. Luckily for me, she was only slight – much less of a burden for me to carry.
I leaned down to heft her over my shoulder, jugg
ling her weight and my gun. It wasn’t very dignified for her to be slung over my shoulder naked, but I couldn’t see any clothes for her in the room. Besides, I was confident that, like most people, she’d pick being undignified over being dead any day. I’d give her my jacket when we were out of the house and I had also stashed a blanket in the patrol car for her.
But first I had to make it there.
“Right, this is what’s going to happen,” I instructed in my cop voice. “I’m not interested in any of you pedo perverts tonight. I just want to get the girl out of here. You let me do that without any fuss, then we can all live happily ever after.” I was lying, of course. I had every intention of coming back here with reinforcements and busting their butts, the sick bastards.
“Yeah, right,” scoffed one of the men I followed upstairs, looking over his shoulder at me. “As if she won’t squeal on us all.”
Suddenly his eyes widened and a smile spread over his face. Too late, I looked over my own shoulder to see a shadow behind me. There was an instant of blinding pain in the back of my head and that was all I knew for a long time.
*****
I didn’t know where I was. It was mostly dark in the room I was in, but bright sunshine streamed in from the far end where a window had its blind pulled up. My head pounded with a cracking headache and my eyes burnt looking at the light. When I tried to sit up, I couldn’t because my arms and legs were restrained.
Nausea rolled over me and I leaned to the side and vomited on to the floor, over and over, until everything was out. I wiped my mouth on my jacket sleeve and rolled away from the mess. I lay on my back, looking up at the ceiling, trying to remember what had happened.
It came back to me slowly. The phone call. The bikies’ retreat. The room with the cameras. Kylie! I thought with a stab of worry and wriggled myself into a sitting position, searching the room frantically. She was sprawled on the bed, preternaturally still, her long blonde hair hanging over the edge. For a heart-stopping moment I thought she was dead, until I noticed the slight rise and fall of her fragile chest.
We were currently alone in the room. I looked down and groaned to myself when I noticed that my utility belt was missing. So was the knife I’d strapped to my thigh, but when I pushed down on the floor, I could feel my second knife digging into my back. They hadn’t searched me properly.
Heavy footsteps approached the room. I laid down again and played possum, not wanting them to know that I’d regained consciousness.
“Rusty, for the last time, I’m not being involved in killing a cop.”
“Don’t be such a fucking pussy.” I recognised the voice of Rusty, the head bikie. “You’ve never been so squeamish about the girls.”
“Different situation altogether, brother. They’re runaway whores who nobody gives a shit about. This is a fucking cop! Not to mention a female cop. The town’s probably already crawling with bacon looking for her. She’s been here for hours.”
They walked over to stand next to me. Rusty kicked me.
“Stupid, nosy bitch! It’s her own fault if something happens to her. Breaking into people’s houses in the middle of the night. It’s fucking illegal!” He kicked me again, harder. I bit my tongue not to cry out and tried not to flinch. “I’d like to teach her a lesson. Give her a bit of rough Rusty romance,” he sniggered.
“You touch her in any way, then every fucking oink in the state will be howling for your blood. You won’t even make it to trial. There will be some faked escape and they’ll shoot you dead,” warned the other voice. “That’s what happened to someone I knew. He killed some dumbarse young cop, fresh out of the academy, in a shootout in the city about four years ago. Not even his fault. Stupid bastard oink got in the way. He didn’t make it to court. Was shot in the back seven times trying to escape custody, they said. Problem was he still had his arm and leg shackles on. Load of fucking bullshit if you ask me. And they won’t stop until they hunt you down. Not for me, no thanks. I have kids to think about. I’m not dying over a nosy bitch of a cop.”
“What the fuck am I supposed to do with her then?”
“Drug her up and dump her somewhere isolated. Do it to both of them. I think that little whore has had it anyway. You gotta tell those guys not to be so rough so early with the next one. It spoils the buildup if they’re out too early. And also not to drug them up so much. It’s no fun for anyone if they stop struggling too soon.”
“I suppose,” Rusty agreed reluctantly.
“We’re fucking burned here. We can’t ever come back. We’ll just have to hope to Christ that Mickey is able to make something from what we’ve been able to shoot so far. We shot some ace footage early on – it might be enough to make this a profitable trip for us. Otherwise, we’re screwed. One thing I know, I’m not staying here one second longer than necessary.”
“Fucking hell,” Rusty sighed. “You’re right. This has all gone to shit because of this bitch. I knew she was going to be fucking trouble the second I set eyes on her.” He kicked me again. I could taste my own blood I was biting my tongue so hard. “Get some of the lads up here to dose them up and get rid of them. Shove them in the boot of that old shitbox round the back, then they can torch the car after dumping them somewhere in the bush. Make sure it’s far enough away to give us all time to get the fuck out of this craphole.”
“What about this place? The oinks will be crawling all over it once they realise we’re gone.”
“Blow it up,” said Rusty. “That’s all it’s good for now. We can’t use it again because of her. Interfering slag!” He kicked me one last time before stalking out of the room.
“Okay, Rusty. We’ll get right on to it.”
Kylie and I were left alone again. I struggled to a sitting position and shifted over so I was propped up against the nearest wall. My hands were behind my back and that’s where my spare knife was, as well. I wriggled my back up and down against the wall, slowly moving the knife from its sheath. Careful, I cautioned myself. The last thing I needed at this point was to accidently stab myself in the back with my own knife.
When I’d pushed enough of the knife free of the sheath to give me a cutting edge, I contorted to stretch my arms up to twist the knife slightly in its sheath. I slipped my hands under my shirt and started sawing the bindings on my wrists back and forth across the knife edge. Inevitably, not being able to see what I was doing, I cut my skin a few times, the sharp knife slicing through my delicate wrist and palm flesh easily. And although it stung like hell, I had no time to worry about it. Luckily, the knife was just as effective on the nylon bindings I’d been tied up with as it was on my skin and it wasn’t long before my hands were free. I quickly pulled out the knife from its sheath and used it to cut through my ankle bindings as well, before re-sheathing it. I sprang to my feet.
That was a mistake. Everything spun around me and darkness clouded my vision for a second. I had to lean against the wall for a moment to recover my equilibrium before I could move again. That knock on the head must have been a doozy. It was fortunate that I’d already thrown up everything, because nausea rolled over me again. I would have given anything at that moment to swallow a couple of painkillers and lie down in a dark room with a cool washcloth on my head. Gingerly, I felt the back of my skull, running my fingers over the egg-sized lump at the back.
After a detour to the bed to assure myself that Kylie was still alive, I positioned myself behind the door, not pulling out my knife at this stage. I might need it more urgently later and I didn’t want it turned on me in any struggle. My plan was simply to escape to the office, barricade myself inside and ring the Sarge or the Super. They could organise for a storm of cops to turn up at the premises. Maybe there were even some in town right now searching for me? Those two men hadn’t been lying and looking out of the window, it was well into Thursday, maybe ten o’clock in the morning. That meant that I’d been at this house for hours already. If the Sarge had been in town he would have missed me by now and raised the alarm. Bu
t with him in Big Town and not knowing what time he planned to return, nobody might yet have even realised that I was even missing, let alone in trouble.
My musings were cut short by the sound of heavy footsteps clumping up the staircase. Judging by the noise, there was more than one of them – definitely at least two, maybe even three. I focused my mind and tried to steady my breathing. I wasn’t feeling tip-top though and with my arm injuries and crippling headache, it was going to be an uphill battle to get through this one.
I let the first man enter the room, quickly followed by the second. Listening to them carefully, I was pretty sure there was a third man as well, but I wasn’t given the luxury of time to confirm that.
“Hey!” puzzled the first man. “The boss said there were two bitches up here to get rid of. Where’s the other one?”
I didn’t waste another second, but pushed the door half-closed, crunching the third man in the face with it, before opening it again and ramming myself past the first and second men towards the doorway. They were slow to react, taken completely by surprise.
The first man reached out to grab me, but I dodged out of his way. The second man came at me and I kicked him viciously in the knee cap, causing his leg to collapse under him. The first man reached out again, his hand grasping my upper left arm cruelly. It was where I’d been shot and I let out an involuntary cry of pain. I turned my head and bit his hand hard and then punched him in the throat while he was so close to me, leaving him gagging.
The second man came back for more and received an eye gouge for his trouble. His screams of pain echoed down the hallway, and probably down the staircase as well. I needed to get to that office fast. I pulled out my knife and waved it at the two men menacingly, managing to keep them temporarily at bay.
But there was still the third man to handle. A giant menacing brute, he wiped away a trickle of blood from his nose with the back of his hand, seething. I guess he wasn’t happy about having a door slammed in his face.
