Gil Mason/Gunwood USA Box Set

by Gordon Carroll

  “This job,” said his FTO. “You could buy it any time. Everyone’s gunning for you.” He looked around and shook his head. “Bull’s-eyes, that’s all we are to them. Big blue bull’s-eyes.”

  16

  The Stripper

  * * *

  Image

  * * *

  Cinnamon Twist pulled into the parking lot of Elephant Guns at 1:45 pm. She parked where all the girls parked, in the back, close to the back door. She pulled her gleaming Ford GT500 Super Snake Mustang cross ways between two slots and set the emergency brake. The pedals were specially equipped for her stature, as was the driver’s seat. When you were only three feet five inches tall, driving, like most things in a big people world, could be a challenge.

  She grabbed her bag from the trunk and stepped into the afternoon sunshine. She loved the sun. Not only did it do wonders for her tan, but it charged her naturally blond hair with an almost supernatural glow.

  Cinnamon was not a dwarf, despite what most people thought. She was a midget; the difference being that although very small her body, limbs and head were of normal proportions relative to her size.

  She was also drop dead gorgeous.

  Men would stop in their tracks to look at her.

  Arguments would stop.

  Fights cease.

  Cars crash.

  Cinnamon Twist, her stage name, began life as Sandra Lloyd. At the age of nine Sandra lost her parents in a car crash. None of her few surviving relatives wanted her. Minnesota’s Department of Social Services placed her in a co-ed group home where she stayed for nearly five months. During that time she was sexually assaulted by three teenage boys who lived at the home and one adult male counselor. After that she transferred to another group home, this one a female only facility. There Sandra suffered sexual abuse at the hands of five teenage girls and three adult female counselors. By the time she turned eleven she had resided in four group homes, eight foster homes and done time in two juvenile detention centers.

  After her second stint in juvi she ran away for the last time. Almost twelve and barely three feet tall, she packed her meager belongings, stole some food from the kitchen of her current foster home, lifted thirty some odd dollars from her foster dad’s wallet (he’d started having sex with her the first week she moved in), and hit the highway with her thumb stretched high.

  Before anyone knew she’d left, a traveling salesman with a penchant for pedophilia picked her up and whisked her out of town. But the last three years had taught her things. She’d learned how to use sex to her favor. Sandra convinced the pedophile salesman to drive her three states out of his way to Nevada.

  The first few weeks on the streets of Las Vegas were hard for Sandra. The salesman had given her a hundred dollars, but that and the money from her foster dad’s wallet didn’t last long.

  Nobody was hiring midget twelve year-olds, not even the brothels. That was, until Mary Cochran spotted her begging money from a tourist on the strip. Mary ran a moderate sized brothel on the far west end of town. She employed nineteen girls on her payroll and another five that were not. Those five were each special in their own way. A mulatto with exquisite mocha colored skin and eyes as blue as a crisp, cloudless fall sky. It cost men fifteen hundred dollars an hour to be with her. Another, a redhead with only a right arm; the missing left arm had been severed mid-bicep when she was thirteen years old leaving only a stump. Her hair, so thick and long that men claimed they got lost in it. Mary Cochran knew it wasn’t the girl’s hair that kept men coming to her — no — the uniqueness of the experience — the contrast between strength and weakness fed the seed of lust that bred in the heart of men.

  Mary explained all this to Cinnamon one night over several shots of high-grade whisky several years later. But that first night when Mary had seen the perfectly proportioned midget she recognized the child’s potential for greatness. Cinnamon wasn’t beautiful yet, her cheeks were still puffed with baby fat and her form hadn’t blossomed, but Mary had an eye for diamonds in the rough and believed Cinnamon might one day become her star attraction.

  She was no saint, Mary, she prostituted women, exploiting the weaknesses of both sexes to line her pockets, and she could be as hard and mean as any back-street pimp when times called for it, but one thing she wouldn’t stand for was the abuse of children. Of course both the word abuse and children had to be seen through Mary’s own filter. For instance she didn’t consider it abuse to encourage Cinnamon to watch the other girls work from the security vault where hidden cameras from the rooms dumped their digital images onto HD cinematic screens, recording everything. Mary also considered a girl a woman at the age of sixteen.

  Mary took Cinnamon in, gave her a home, food, clothes, affection. Men were not allowed to look on her in lust, and no one could touch her. Mary became a slightly warped mother figure to Cinnamon. She kept Cinnamon safe. But Cinnamon reasoned it wasn’t out of love alone that Mary did these things. She knew of the special five, and understood in short order that one day she would be expected to take her place among them.

  For three years Mary kept Cinnamon chaste, so to speak, nurturing her investment with special care, instruction and conditioning. During those years a remarkable thing happened. Cinnamon morphed from a gawky, pudgy-faced child into a very pretty girl, although still but a shadow of the beauty she would become.

  Mary Cochran threw a party on Cinnamon’s sixteenth birthday. Everyone gave Cinnamon presents. All the girls loved her and were intensely protective of her. But Cinnamon realized her life was about to change; her chaste status about to end. The time to start paying back on Mary’s investment had come.

  The next night she entertained her first paying customer.

  Cinnamon steeled herself for the encounter. She practiced over and over in her mind how it would go. She thought that because of her past experiences she would be up for the task. After all back then she had taught herself to be numb to the actions and intentions of those older and bigger than her and had even learned to use sex to her advantage. Added to that were the years of living with worldly women and watching firsthand the many and varied practices of their individual talents.

  She was wrong.

  The man, over sixty, wasn’t brutal, but he wasn’t nice either. And at the first touch, all the memories and fears she thought she’d come to terms with flooded back in on her with crushing force. She ran from the room and found Mary waiting just outside the door. She tried to hug her, tears streaming down her face, but Mary wasn’t the mother now, she was the business woman, hard and stern and she held Cinnamon’s tiny shoulders in large hands, turned her around, told her in a voice low and quiet and as utterly devoid of mercy as lifeless stone that this was the way it had to be, and to be strong and brave and grown up. She led her back inside the room, gave her to the old man, turned and left without another word.

  Cinnamon finally understood, with a woman’s understanding, that she couldn’t back out. That no one would rescue her. That once again, and perhaps forever, she was on her own.

  Alone.

  She did what she was there to do. And she did not cry again. Not then and not later. But whatever love she had held in her heart for Mary died that night. Because with that newfound woman’s understanding that she had mysteriously acquired, she knew exactly what she was to Mary. And with that knowledge came a certain strength that she hadn’t known before.

  Before that knowledge, Cinnamon would have done anything for Mary — anything — out of love and love alone — but with the knowledge came the death of love — and that in itself proved a type of freedom for her.

  That first night Cinnamon had been sold to the man for two thousand dollars, the highest any of the specials had made on a single tryst. In the years to follow, Cinnamon would command as much as five thousand dollars an hour and would make a fortune for Mary Cochran.

  But Cinnamon never again thought of Mary as her mother and from that night on thought of nothing but the day she could make her escape.<
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  Cinnamon took a last look toward the sun, pushed the lock button on her keychain, the Super Snake’s headlights and horn spitting their signature beep and blink, and entered the back door of Elephant Guns. She smiled at Rick, the bouncer, and paused, as she always did, in front of the full-length mirror opposite the door.

  In the mirror, with nothing to gauge for perspective, she looked normal, like everyone else.

  Part III

  17

  Sammy Rothstein

  * * *

  Obsession

  * * *

  Sammy Rothstein parked across the street from Elephant Guns. He watched Cinnamon Twist through a pair of Canon Image Stabilized binoculars as she got out of her car and walked to the back door of the strip club. The binoculars cost him over six hundred dollars, but with his vision and tremor problems the electronic stabilization feature helped a lot.

  She was beautiful.

  He set the binoculars on the passenger seat and grabbed up his Canon Mark III digital SLR camera with the telephoto lens. The camera alone had been nearly ten thousand dollars and the telephoto lens more. He rapid fired digital images until she disappeared inside the club.

  Sammy had no track record with women. He’d never been with one, never dated even once. Self-conscious about his looks and impairments, he rarely had the courage to even start a conversation with a woman unless work related. His thick glasses made his eyes look huge — bug like. Add to that a weak chin, long, skinny legs, a thin build and gangly arms and what more could a woman want?

  The damage to his central nervous system from the drowning incident left him with slight tremors of the fingers and hands, a condition that should have made police work out of the question except that when he held a gun the tremors vanished. He was an excellent shot, the best in the department, one of maybe the five best in the world. He’d won trophies — lots of them. It was the same with certain leisure sports activities, like pool and darts, shuffleboard. Anything that combined limited muscular requirement with enhanced intellectual acumen; if the task required integrated real time knowledge of angular momentum and strategic finesse, even better.

  In Atlantic City, Sammy had once run thirty tables in a nine-ball tournament, never missing a shot. A record still held to this day and one Sammy took pride in; plus it netted him fifty-thousand dollars in prizes and side bets.

  Pressure never affected him, which made him very dangerous. It wasn’t a matter of being overly brave; just that when his mind started working on a problem, nothing else intruded on the process. The pieces of whatever kind of puzzle he worked on would simply float together, harmonizing in those musical notes and colors that his mind could see, hear, feel, smell and taste, and then the synapses would fire the messages to his muscles and nerves and tendons and ligaments in a smooth flowing stream that happened lightning fast.

  Part of his job was to perform background checks on all the new strippers to see if they had outstanding warrants and for intel for special operation task forces in the metro area. He could have done it all from his office, but wanted to know more about this woman.

  He’d conducted a study once on voodoo, spells and curses, because of a case he’d worked on where a man died after being cursed. He’d determined in the end that the main thrusts of supposed magical curses were accomplished through the power of suggestion. But still, the man was dead. The woman who cast the spell — or rather initiated the suggested statement that set the man on his path of self-destruction — was a master of the craft. Sammy had interviewed her twice and both times had been immensely impressed with her command presence, an underlying hint of sensuality and complete self-confidence.

  There hadn’t been enough evidence or case precedent to file charges against her, but again, the man was still dead.

  There hadn’t been anyone to use the power of suggestion on Sammy concerning Cinnamon Twist, but he wondered if perhaps it might be possible for a person to have such command of their will and self-domination that they could impose their desires with the power of a look alone. And if so, then might it not also be possible for that look — that power to be captured in the form of a photograph?

  He opened Cinnamon’s folder and stared at her. Looking into her eyes he thought he caught something hidden. Something she kept secret from everyone else. But he saw it — he saw it and he recognized it for what it was because he’d seen the same look staring back at him ten thousand times as he shaved, washed, combed his hair or even just passed a reflective window. The same thing he’d seen in his own eyes ever since that day he died and was reborn — different — the look of guilt and shame at being different — of being a freak.

  It didn’t matter that it wasn’t his or her fault. It made no difference that his had been an accident and that she had been born the way she was. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t fair or that it was wrong for people to stare or point or even just give them that look that told them they were freaks. Because beyond all that, it really came down to what they themselves saw and felt that mattered; the self-hatred, the shame and guilt of being a freak; because that is exactly what they were — the two of them — different. And the inescapable truth of that fact bled through the mirror of the soul and exposed itself to reflection and photographs, no matter how hard they tried to hide or deny its reality. That one terrible, horrible truth was always there and always would be.

  All the background information he could pull together sat in the folder, although he’d come up against several roadblocks on the way. He knew her real name, where she came from, that her parents died when she was nine and that she’d worked in an exclusive brothel in Vegas for several years. He knew her medical condition; her education level (thirty semester hours through online courses) and that she had a single tattoo on her right wrist; a yellow teddy bear. She had no warrants, had never been arrested as an adult, no history of drug use and a clean bill of health (for STDs) from the Nevada Board of Health as of a little over a year ago, and had a perfect driving record. What he didn’t know was where she had been or what she had done from February 27th of last year to May 3rd of this year. She quit her job at the brothel last year in February dropped from the radar screen until May when she auditioned for the job at Elephant Guns. He also didn’t know how she had survived after running away from the foster home until the time she started working at the brothel. He’d reasoned it was possible that she started turning tricks at a very young age; after all he knew there were plenty of perverts that would probably pay plenty for a midget child, but found it hard to believe she could have lasted so long on her own.

  She was a mystery, this tiny nymph, which only added to her allure.

  He scanned through the pictures he’d snapped and felt his heart speed up; his breathing increase.

  How did she do this to him? He’d never been affected by a woman this way. He had absolutely no affinity for strippers or whores, and he’d never found midgets or dwarves attractive. He had no inclinations toward children in the least, and did in fact hate pedophiles with an extreme passion, as did most cops; so why her, and why so devastating a reaction?

  He’d thought of her all night. He had no appetite. When he got to work this morning, an hour early, he scooped up here file and stared at her picture until other people started showing up. He’d tried to put her out of his mind and work on other cases — real cases, but couldn’t do it. Mesmerized, all he could think of was her. He even found himself scribbling her name on a napkin while stirring sugar into his morning coffee in the break room like some love struck sophomore. What next — drawn hearts with their names entwined and an arrow poking through?

  Crazy; Sammy shook his head. He had to snap out of it, but then he saw her looking up at him from the digital image on the camera screen and breathed out a sigh. He couldn’t just snap out of it. No more than he could stop the pieces of puzzles from fitting into place in his mind.

  He would have to meet her. He would have to let her shun him, as he knew she would. Then maybe
it would be over and he could get back to his life.

  He looked at her again — those eyes — those lips. Sammy tried to look away and found that he couldn’t.

  18

  Enrico Da Vinci

  * * *

  Revenge

  * * *

  Enrico Da Vinci had obtained every morsel of information available in recorded form on his target. Through the internet he learned her driver’s license number, the address of her apartment including her room number and zip code, the fact that her parents were deceased and that she had been a ward of the state. He clicked through countless pictures of her and even a short, grainy film of her dancing in some strip club.

  He used his considerable resources, legal and illegal, moral and immoral, to learn all he could. The fruit of his labor had yielded a list of seven people; six men and two women. Of the names on that list, he had already killed five of the men and one of the women. He knew the list was incomplete, that only Cinnamon herself could fill in the last of the gaps and he thought she might, if asked in the right way. Just as the woman he had tied to the chair would tell him her secrets — if asked in the right way. The question of course was what was the right way — for her?

  The woman showed strength; even for one of her profession. Still, Enrico understood art — all forms of art. Life itself, he thought, is an art; so too death. This woman had practiced her own form of art. Her art was sex, or rather the business of sex. And judging from her opulent lifestyle, she had at least some expertise in her art. That and the fact that she had seen the potential in an untrained child when others had seen her as only an oddity proved her talent.