Ransom X

by I.B. Holder

  Chapter 56 Late Deliveries

  If they’d driven through the night, they’d be here by now. His impatience was quickly turning to anger.

  Blade paced on the worn tufted industrial carpet in the control room. He could tell something was wrong. Even though he wasn’t expecting a call upon the completion of the job, in fact, he’d given express orders to run completely silent on these missions. He still could not shake the feeling that something was wrong.

  He adjusted a camera, zooming in on Laura’s face. There was a bit between her teeth and shiny beads of residue from earlier copulations in the corners of her mouth. Her mouth stretched each time Yellow pulled on the bridle and his weight shifted into her from behind. Fresh jockey silks were hanging on the wall; there were still two more riders to come after Yellow. Even though they were not broadcasting, they kept up the façade. They couldn’t give Laura any reason for hope, that would ruin the whole game.

  He tore his eyes away from the screens and looked instead at a figure on a palm pilot in his hand. Thirty million dollars was sitting in an account. Laura accounted for twenty million of that sum. It was the kind of ransom demand that would have been impossible to collect and protect the identity of the recipient in almost any other case. He was the breadwinner of so many pornographers, they were lining up to feed him a piece of their prize. Clean, pure revenues that couldn’t be traced any easier than a drop of rain could be tracked down a river.

  There was more money in human flesh than all of the major entertainments combined. If Shakespeare were alive and as smart as they said, Blade thought, he’d be writing and directing porn.

  Blade couldn’t quite tap the source of his unease. He’d read the reports of the concert, the scene of disarray. It all seemed to be going to plan. But there was something in the release of information, something in the way things were related to the public that sounded – crafted. There were reports of journalists complaining about access, and although Blade knew that the last thing the FBI wanted to do was advertise its gross failure to the public. He was waiting expectantly to hear the approach of tires, and the familiar guttural laughter of the Harley engine accompanying the van.

  If they’d driven through the night, they’d be here by now. He’d send the boys away for the afternoon after this session. He had to prepare for the worst. He was the best when preparing for the worst. A dubious smile crossed his lips thinking of the worst things he could do to the girl still locked in his cage.

  Yellow was in the home stretch. Laura’s hair cascaded down and fell into her face as he let the reigns go. Before the rhythm could even be broken, there was a fresh rider. The orange silks had been taken from the wall, and Yellow was staggering into the blackness out of sight of the cameras.

  He was met at the door by Blade; a brief exchange sent him out of the room with a jump in his step. Blade sent him away; he spoke loud enough to be heard by everyone in the studio. Blade wanted to be alone in the compound with her tonight. The eerie chill of that thought crossed the floor and climbed up her naked limbs. Laura began moving at a fevered pace, alive with a new purpose. She needed to finish this session; she needed to get back to her cell. Blade watched her from the doorway, sending his most sympathetic glance her way. She had on blinders, eyes forced straight ahead; she knew what she had to do.

  When Blade reentered the control room, he looked at the close up of her eyes in the camera lens. She was as blank and mysterious as instinct itself. Her senses behind a stone wall, grey concrete eyes feeling the pressure of the air from the surrounding atmosphere poked forward like they wanted to burst from her head.

  Blade informed the rest of the men that they could have the afternoon off as they filed out of the room.

  “Lay low and stay close.” That was his message for each nodding matchstick head. He knew that would send them to the nearby bar where they’d sit on wobbly bar stools drinking the piss nectar of some domestic brewery.

  It would give him time to set about covering the tracks of a suddenly very weighty organization. If his feeling were right, there would be people coming after them. It was always best in any conflict to give the opponent a moving target. He mouthed a silent deadline of 9pm tonight to the air surrounding his lips. He assured the air that he would be initiating the new girl, or be riding down some midnight highway, arson blazing from his tailpipe, ashes falling through his headlights like a rainstorm formed in a codicil of hell.

  He often thought about what the girls he’d chosen would be doing right now if they hadn’t been taken from their miserable lives.

  Was there an invisible wind that blew through the souls of people that left the residue of unrealized torment? Were there other potential girls who felt a stinging cold in their spine when they brushed against a stranger in public, or when they saw their image on a closed circuit TV in their local drug store? Did they feel a fleeting tingle because it might just have well been them bent over a librarian’s desk learning new ways of collecting a late fee? If they did, Blade was willing to bet the most fragrant white pus that collected in front of his stained gums that they pinched themselves beneath their shirtsleeves trying to bring the torture back.

  He sucked his doctrines back into his lungs through wheezing nostrils. It was a product of his condition; all of his fluids, saliva, snot, and even semen were less viscous than normal. It might have been his physical deficiencies that caused him to need to test the limits of pain of all of the normal people he encountered. The dumbfucks who could spit, chew and spew like regular people. The kind of people who wet their eyes with their own tears and saw red when they were angry. Blade never saw red, and although it wasn’t an excuse, he never would, nor would he do any of those things that bring pleasure to the idiots of the planet. The only crossover between him and them was money. It was the sole prop in the counterweighted systems of supports that constitute happiness in a society that he found himself running with the mainstream in pursuit of. He would take their money, without batting a dry eye. And he would satisfy himself on the way out the door.

  Blade had never planned on splitting the money amongst the group. This was something that he chose not to share with his long time comrades. In fact, he had spoken of the day of cashing out many times, reciting like it were a passage from a prophesy, reassuring everyone that the equitable distribution of the ransom was in the stars. Even Blade could not rip out the skeleton of the constellations and blink out what was predestined.

  They were the workers, they were given sex, food and lodging, any two out of the three and they would be happy on a normal day. He led them to a blissful three months of having it all, he certainly wasn’t going to extend his generosity and pay them for it. One wouldn’t think of dividing a diamond that grew to immense size against the rules of pressure and probability. It would be a crime to divide a jewel, the way one shares is by putting it on display in front of the world.

  He glanced at Laura, her nostrils flaring into an unconscious sneer, the cameras tracing her perfect skin tone down the side of her figure until it disappeared into he shadow of her satin undergarments.

  Blade felt at that instant the drums of distant twisted humor that beat somewhere well beneath the cover of his pumping heart. It sounded haunting, wicked, like some dark tribal ritual had found its way deep within him and died.