Choice of Cages

by Parker Avrile

  Fuck Ryan. Fuck New Orleans. Fuck everybody and everything.

  I'd missed the date, fuck, I hadn't even been able to call Ryan and give him an excuse. Not that being in jail was an acceptable excuse for standing somebody up.

  Ryan's too good for you anyway. He's sweet, and there's something wrong with you. Something that doesn't respond to sweet.

  The same thing was wrong with Lane. We didn't need to talk about it. We knew. It was a scent on each other that other men couldn't smell.

  Fucking Lane...

  My stomach rumbled. They hadn't fed me. Well, there was a stale doughnut some deputy brought in on a paper plate, but that didn't really count. I'd licked the powdered sugar from my fingers and thought of the taste of Lane's finger. A nip that didn't break the skin, nothing more.

  I wanted to nip harder. To make a line of little bites and bruises along the side of his hand and then his arm. His belly. His...

  This was not a productive line of thought.

  I got up and pounded on the wired window glass. After a moment, a deputy opened the door and leaned in.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Ain't nobody got time for your shit right now.”

  “How long am I supposed to wait?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  “How long is that?”

  “I'm not here to debate with you, boy.”

  He slammed the door. The knob rattled, although I knew the real lock was in the keypad. He was making some point.

  Well, that was an interesting ninety seconds. And now I was left alone to brood some more.

  Fucking Lane. If he thought he was going to soften me up that easy...

  Fuck him, that's all. Fuck him. I was tougher than that. I was tougher than any of it.

  Chapter Seven

  LANE

  A busy day, and yet it seemed to inch along at the speed of snail. It could have only gone more slowly to Thorne, sitting on a hard steel chair in an empty room with no phone, no computer, no books, no TV. Nothing to do but look at four walls and try to figure out how people had scratched them up with graffiti in a place where you weren't allowed to have a knife or a pen.

  No fried oyster on crunchy French bread for him. I'd authorized some stale doughnuts left over from the break room. Warm water in a Dixie cup.

  There was a ping from the lab. The results of his cheek swab. “DNA,” they would have said, flashing a warrant. It was more than that, of course. Only healthy men qualified for this treatment, so I'd ordered a full health screen. And, no, I didn't have the warrant or the authority to do that. I was violating every kind of health privacy law, and I couldn't give one tiny flying fuck.

  I pulled up the results on my phone and smiled.

  The day took its time about sauntering into night. A deputy escorted Thorne to the toilet a time or two. Occasionally, I checked the camera stream from interrogation room three to see how he was doing. Once he was staring directly into the camera, an annoyed expression on his face as if he knew someone was watching. Often, he was slumped in the chair to stare down at the dirty floor between his feet.

  Once he was pacing back and forth like a tiger I'd seen caged in a truck stop zoo.

  I needed the cloak of full dark, but jails can be busy places late at night. It was a balance to decide the right time to take him out. In the summer, eight was too early, but nine might be too late. I ended up walking through that door at approximately eight forty-five.

  Thorne did not look pleased to see me. “The fuck? I've been sitting here all fucking day. And somebody took my DNA. I'm here for a property crime. What the fuck do they need with my DNA?”

  “You have a strange idea of property crime. You're here for assault on a police officer. It's reasonable to see if your DNA ever appeared at the scene of any other violent crime open unsolveds.”

  “Like I said. The fuck. That doesn't even make any sense. If I'm so fucking dangerous, why am I not back in the jail?”

  “I didn't want you breaking any more noses,” I said. “The other prisoners are safer if you're in here.”

  “Don't do me no favors. What did my father have to say about all this?”

  “I'm asking the questions,” I said. “Actually, I'm not. I'm giving the orders. Face the wall. Assume the position. You know the score.”

  He made a point of moving into place as slowly as he possibly could while still putting up the minimum appearance of compliance. I cuffed his wrists at the small of his back. “Don't say a word,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did I just say?”

  He firmed his mouth and went silent.

  I listened for a moment. Checked some streams on my phone. Then I took him by the elbow and hurried him down the hall toward a back exit. At one point I heard voices, and I smoothly pulled him into the nearest open office. It was dark, and I didn't hit the lights.

  A couple of deputies walked past laughing. Footfalls on thin carpet, a door opening and closing at the other end, silence.

  Thorne could have called for help. He could have even made a noise and claimed it was a mistake. There were a lot of things he could have done to stop me from taking him out of the complex, and he didn't do any of them.

  “Come on,” I said.

  Thorne came.

  The white step van at the back of the lot had the name of a delivery service painted on the side. No windows in the back. The Angelina Parish Police Department used it sometimes for surveillance operations, but it had been a while. Arresting meth cookers and bath salt smokers rarely demanded a prolonged surveillance.

  I opened the tailgate. The inside was lined with carpet new enough you could still smell the allegedly eco-friendly chemicals. He couldn't see it, but there was a freshly installed layer of soundproofing material under that new carpet. The tiny overhead light painted our skin in shades of jaundice.

  He hesitated.

  “In,” I said.

  “This isn't what I thought.”

  “Up to you. You remember your safeword.”

  He inhaled sharply and climbed in, a difficult scramble without the use of his hands. Without really thinking it through, I helped lift him with a touch to his flank. The firm flesh beneath the jumpsuit seemed to shoot an electric spark into my fingertips.

  So tempted to touch where I shouldn't be touching, but I couldn't teach him control if I couldn't control myself.

  I climbed in behind him and closed the door. Tugged off his shoes, perhaps with a rougher twist than I would have normally used. He flexed his sock feet a few times but otherwise remained somewhat sprawled across the carpeted floor. Our eyes met.

  “You're enjoying this,” he said.

  “So are you. A little too much.” I knelt to twist a dial set in the metal wall, and a small cupboard came open.

  His pupils, already large in the thin light, seemed to expand to turn his eyes the color of ink. “No,” he said. “No. That won't be necessary.”

  Notice what he didn't say? I noticed too. “I decide what's necessary.”

  “I can't see where we're going from back here anyway.”

  “I'm not going to take that chance.”

  The black leather hood had holes for nose and mouth but not for eyes. It was the kind that you pulled over the head and then laced in place from behind. The cuffs on Thorne's wrists would stop him from removing it.

  He shivered against my torso, and for the first time I felt like he might be taking me seriously.

  There were no holes for ears either. My voice would be substantially muffled as long as he wore the hood. I bent close, my fingers grasping his shoulder for emphasis. “It's going to be a rough ride. I suggest you lay down.” I pushed, although not hard.

  He went down in a semi-controlled fall that let him sprawl cautiously on the carpet. I shoved a small, hard pillow under his hooded skull, a minimal comfort but a suggestion that I wasn't entirely uncaring. Mixed emotions are the most disturbing emotions, after all. I needed to keep Thorne off-balance.<
br />
  He looked so vulnerable like that, hooded and cuffed, turned on his side, the pillow for his head no softer than an airline's pillow.

  My prisoner. My captive.

  My fingers itched. So tempting. But I wouldn't touch him. Not that way. “The drive will take about an hour. Do you have anything to say?”

  It was his final chance to blurt out the safeword.

  In the silence between us, a distant barred owl hooted its enduring question, “Whooo cooks for youuuu?” Much closer, the whoop of a siren announced a black-and-white heading out on a call. I doubted he could hear the owl, but I'm confident he heard the siren.

  It faded, and he finally spoke.

  “If you're waiting for me to cry uncle, you'll be waiting a long time. I'm not afraid of you.”

  “That's the trouble with you, Thorne. I think we've established that. You're not afraid of anything. You're going to have to learn some respect.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  Pretty bold for a man in a hood with his hands cuffed behind his back. I shrugged and climbed forward into the driver's seat. The lot was fenced, but there was a back way out featuring a bored deputy who recognized the parish district attorney. I knew he wouldn't look into the back of the step van.

  “Mr. Lacompte,” he said. “Evening.”

  “Evening.”

  “Sign here.”

  I scribbled the stylus across the tablet and drove on. Using parish property like the step van for private purposes was the least of the crimes I'd commit tonight, and I hardly gave it a moment's thought.

  A few miles down the road, I heard Thorne start making little scooting noises behind me.

  “Sit still,” I said.

  “I'm hungry.” Was that a whine in his voice? Was I starting to get to him?

  “There's regularly scheduled mealtimes back at the jail.”

  “Stale doughnuts and green bologna are not mealtimes.”

  I couldn't be bothered to reply to that.

  “You think you're a real hard-ass son of a bitch, don't you?”

  I kept driving.

  “There's absolutely no reason I can't have a hamburger.”

  OK, now I had a comment. “Actually, there is a reason. Privileges are earned.”

  “Eating food isn't a privilege.”

  “The midnight munchies are a privilege.” I'm a patient man, but there's a limit. Why did he think he was in a position to debate with me? “I'm not going to discuss this with you any further.”

  Our destination was on a private easement deep in national forest. No streetlights this far out from civilization. No other vehicles. The exterior lights were faint and set in tiny niches, making them impossible to see from any distance.

  Even a hooded man can get a little glimpse of light through the breathing hole—there's a way of rolling your eyes down and a little crossed to peek out—so Thorne almost certainly had a good idea of how dark it was. The isolation and the dark were, for now, about all he could know about this place.

  Nobody who wasn't authorized to know could find this facility. True, in these wicked modern days, there's always the prying eyes of Google satellite. That's why some ex-Marine friend of Willis Dauphine had assisted us in constructing a sort of dome of both real and artificial vegetation that covered several acres. Google might know there was a building somewhere under all that, but they couldn't prove it.

  The forestry service had come around a few times asking questions, but they'd lost their enthusiasm for the project after I flashed a badge from the Centers for Disease Control. “Experimental biological research,” I'd said. “Highly classified.”

  So. No eye in the sky looking down, just stars and fireflies. No forestry officials snooping around in search of red-cockaded woodpeckers and illegal wacky weed plantations.

  Very secret. Very private. Exactly what we both needed.

  “Out,” I said.

  Thorne jumped out, his knees bending and then straightening. I don't think he expected the carpet of pine needles crunching under his feet.

  “Come on.” I took his arm and guided him onto the pebble path. Not entirely pleasant under sock feet but walkable if he trusted me.

  There were no deputies watching the doors here. We were protected by distance, darkness, and secrecy. I punched a twelve digit number into the electronic keypad. There was no electric service this far out, but the complex boasted a very expensive generator and an equally expensive backup.

  Even through the hood, Thorne could hear the beeps and understand we were going inside.

  This entrance opened directly on a room lined with interior brick. An interesting texture. It took masonry specialists to set those iron rings in the walls. I sometimes wondered what they'd thought about the job.

  “Kneel.” I pushed down on his hips to underline the order.

  He dropped to his knees a little too fast. The floor was concrete, and it couldn't be comfortable. Ask me if I cared.

  “Hold still.”

  His shoulders were tense where I brushed up against him. Couldn't really blame him. I unlaced the strings and pulled the hood free, and he lifted his head to look in the direction of the single spotlight.

  “Fuck,” he said, his hands going flat on the floor to push off and up.

  I pushed him back down, and he settled again on his knees. I don't think he was trying to run away. It's more that he was startled by the sudden removal of the hood.

  The light shone steadily on another prisoner shackled to a masonry wall, his arms in long padded cuffs that allowed him to be secured with his hands above his head by the hour. A black hood over his head, a pair of shoulder-length black gloves on his muscular arms to obscure some distinctive tats. Thorne wouldn't be able to identify the man again, but he could see the situation at a glance.

  “The hell is this?” He whispered the question as if he still thought it mattered whether anyone could hear.

  I took hold of his chin and made him look directly at me. “Did you really think you would be the only one held in this dungeon? Time for you to learn you're not as fucking important as you think you are.”

  Chapter Eight

  THORNE

  It was like Lane was two men in one body. The uptight prosecutor sworn to uphold the law. The twisted kinkster who wanted nothing more than to see a hot man shackled at his feet.

  I'd thought he was in denial about who he was. That he didn't know that he wanted a man in chains. That he had a self-image of himself as a guy who always did the right thing.

  Every time he let me go, it wasn't because he was a horndog with a crush on a cutie. It was because he wanted to give me another chance to turn things around. He was an idealist, you know? He was trying to save a good kid who'd taken the wrong detour.

  That's what he told himself. Or so I thought.

  Fuck. I really thought I had the right read on him. I honestly believed he was invested in that image of himself as the good guy.

  Now, suddenly, I knelt blinking upward at the harsh evidence that the only person in denial about the reality of the situation was me.

  A single spotlight, CIA interrogation level bright, pointed at a masonry wall where a man in hood and gloves dangled from wrist shackles. Why gloves? They were oversized, going all the way up to the ball of the shoulders. There was a tattoo of wings across the back. A popular pattern. The sleeves might include a less popular pattern. Something that gave away the prisoner's identity.

  Interesting.

  Another man walked into the light. He too was hooded, but his hood allowed abundant openings for the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears—a hood not intended to muffle his senses but to obscure his identity. Leather chaps and motorcycle boots. Mid-forties, I thought. His tight, ridged abdomen said he put in his hours in the gym, but he hadn't bothered to wax away the white hairs peppering the dark tangle on his bare chest. It was the sort of vanity that comes from power. He didn't have to please anybody except himself.

  “Gag him.” The man's
voice was a husky whisper. Not his normal voice. Maybe he thought I'd recognize it.

  The hood and the whisper was for me, I thought. Lane would already know who he was.

  Hmm.

  Lane considered the choices spread across a low wooden bench covered with BDSM equipment. After some unnecessarily prolonged thought, he picked up a bright red rubber ball gag, the kind that straps in place around a man's head. He was torturing me. Deliberately torturing me.

  “Hey,” I said. “You don't have to do that.”

  Lane didn't say a word, but he was at my side in two long strides. I clamped my mouth, but I couldn't stop him from wedging his fingers between my lips to pull them back open. I made as if to bite him, and he laughed a short, sharp laugh.

  Big hands, confident hands. While my own hands were cuffed and helpless behind my back.

  The ball gag tasted vaguely chemical and new. Ugh. Clean, I suppose, but I didn't still care for the flavor. I jerked my cuffed wrists up and down, knocking against his belly and hips as he buckled the strap tight at the back of my head. He paid about as much attention to that as to the buzzing of a gnat.

  “You're going to shut up and observe,” he said. “We don't need the color commentary from the peanut gallery.”

  I made some muffled sounds from the back of my throat. The gag didn't completely silence me, but it sure the fuck kept me from making a lot of sense. The worst thing about it was the way drool immediately started pooling in my mouth. How did that happen? I wasn't a drooler. Was it some chemical in the rubber that made me do that?

  “Come on.” He tugged on my arm, and I found myself back on my feet, padding barefoot to the bench.

  He pushed some of the toys into a little heap to create a square of space where I could sit. Then he pushed me down. I sat, but I jiggled my wrists in the cuffs at the small of my back. They didn't seem impossibly tight, and I thought I could use my not-inconsiderable skills to remove them.

  I'd thought about doing it in the step van, but I hadn't wanted to piss him off too much at the very beginning of our journey. Now I was starting not to care because I was the one getting pissed off.