by Gregory Kay
“Hello, Fiona,” Cliff growled with sarcastically, “Did you have a nice evening screwing your new boyfriend? Or is it your old boyfriend; I understand you two have been an item for some time now.”
“Cliff!” she yelled, once she regained control over her jaw that seemed to have dropped to the vicinity of her chest, “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you.”
The shock wore off and the outrage took over.
“Get the hell out of my room!”
“Not until you listen to my side.
“Your side?” Her fury at what he had done came back full-force, and she slammed her small hand down on the dresser beside the door with enough force to rattle the lamp beside it. “What side? You don’t have a side!”
“I was just having a little fun on my birthday. Hell, you could have joined in, for that matter; a lot of women would have been glad to have a little casual threesome. Anyway, it was no big deal, and wouldn’t have affected our relationship at all if you hadn’t seen it.”
“Wouldn’t have – “ She couldn’t believe what she was hearing, and tried to force herself to calm down, with absolutely no success. “But I did see it, didn’t I, and I wouldn’t un-see it if I could! It told me just what you are, you smarmy, whore-chasing son of a bitch!”
“You sound just like your father! Now listen to me – “
“No! I will not listen to you! You have absolutely nothing to say that I want to hear! Get that through that thick freaking skull of yours, then get your ass out of my room and leave me alone!” When he didn’t move, she said, “Fine; then I’ll call security and have you thrown out!”
She started for the phone, but he knocked it off the stand with a sweep of his hand, sending it clattering onto the carpet.
“We can work this out.”
“Read my lips! We-are-not-working-anything-out! Now for the last time, get out of my room!”
“No; not until I make you see reason.”
“Fine! Then I’ll leave!” She turned and reached for the knob, and suddenly he was off the bed and she was smashed face-first against the door, pinned there by his weight. She saw stars for a second or two where her head had rebounded off the panel.
“You’re not going anywhere until I get my birthday present!” Cliff growled, rubbing his crotch suggestively against her, and, for the first time, she was frightened of him. “You’ll remember then how good you had it, just how good it was with us, and you’ll come back to me.”
Fiona managed to get her left arm loose, and what came back to him was an elbow in the ribs. She managed to hit him with it twice, causing no real damage other than the pain that enraged him all the more. The third time she tried, his weight suddenly left her, and he caught her attacking arm and spun her around to face him. Then he hit her.
The blow was commonly referred to in the martial arts as a ‘tiger mouth strike,’ delivered with the hand open in a ‘V’ with the thumb on one side and the four fingers on the other. The point of the attack, where the thumb joined the hand, slammed into her trachea, shocking it into closing, and suddenly, she couldn’t breathe.
Fiona instantly panicked, certain that her throat had been crushed, but retained just enough sanity to claw for his eyes. Cliff easily batted the attack aside and expertly delivered an uppercut with his fist into her solar plexus. What little air she had left whooshed out, her diaphragm began to spasm, her nervous system went haywire, and she hit the floor on her knees in the fetal position, forehead on the carpet.
Luke’s pistol! I need it...Her body refused to respond to her mind’s command, and, in any event, the weapon was still in her jacket pocket, in a chair halfway across the room.
“You forgot I was a black belt, didn’t you?” he said, before grabbing a handful of her blouse’s collar, dragging her to the bed and throwing her on it. In less than a second, he was reaching for the button on her jeans. “And no, you won’t be able to cry ‘rape,’ because those are non-marking strikes: no big, dark, long-lasting bruises. Since we’ve had sex before, no jury will ever buy your story, so you might as well just lie there and enjoy it.”
He’s going to rape me. The thought finally set in as a statement of simple fact, with no need for an exclamation point. As she felt the denim of her jeans sliding down over her legs, she began to get a little of her breath back. Wait...
She was on her back, lying across the bed with her rear on the edge and legs hanging over, and when he pulled her pants off over her feet, her right foot whipped up into his crotch.
The blow didn’t catch him exactly right, or hard enough to rupture him, but it startled him into instinctively doubling over, and Fiona promptly stomped out with the other foot, hitting his thigh and kicking him away long enough for her to turn over and scramble across the bed, desperately headed for the chair where her weapon lay. She was almost to the other side of the mattress when his hand closed on her ankle like a vice, and he dragged her back before slamming the edge of his hand in the side of her neck at an upward angle just under her jaw, and she went limp.
He was too angry to worry about bruises anymore, or anything else.
“You could have made this easy on yourself, you two-timing little whore,” he growled through clenched teeth at the semi-conscious woman, “but no! You wouldn’t do that! Now I’m going to make it hurt!” He bared his teeth. “I wonder how you like it in the ass?”
Fiona retained just enough of her consciousness to be dimly aware that she was lying face-down, bent over the edge of the bed, and Cliff was pulling down her panties.
“I owe you an apology, Luke.”
“I owe you one too,” he told Harry as the two friends shook hands, “I shouldn’t have gone off on you like that. Those sons of bitches would have shot me, and probably all of us if Fiona and Allie hadn’t been on the ball, so I was a little pissed.”
“Do tell,” the trooper muttered sarcastically, “I never would have noticed! And speaking of Fiona, you’re a pretty fast mover, aren’t you?” Harry asked, taking off his campaign hat once more and using it to make a brief fanning motion in the direction of Luke’s crotch as if he were trying to cool it down, until the deputy slapped the headgear away.
“Never mind about me. What else do you know about this guy that was bagged in the alley?”
The Trooper shrugged.
“Nothing other than what I told you, at least not yet. We’ll be checking around tomorrow with the local merchants to see if they know anything, but there aren’t many people around in the middle of the night on a Thursday to question, you know?”
“I know, but...” He was distracted by the rapid approach of the hotel desk clerk, a blond woman in her twenties, wringing her hands with an expression that looked like she thought she might have done something terribly wrong.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I just remembered something that might be important. I forgot, what with all the other stuff going on; I’m sorry!”
“That’s alright, ma’am,” they both assured her, then Harry asked, “What is it?”
“Well, I remember Mary – our evening clerk – saying something to me about that guy you all were asking about. She said she saw him out front, through the glass doors, talking to one of the hotel guests who was just checking in, and she said it looked like he passed him something, but she couldn’t say what. Then the guest came in and started asking if we could page Miss Pelligatti; said he was a friend of hers from New York, and he had the accent and all, and seemed legitimate. I told him she was out right now and asked if he’d like to leave a message, but he said he was going to be staying here anyway, so he’d just catch her later. He checked into room 304.”
Luke and Harry looked at one another, both thinking about the security camera footage. Since the State Police were handling the case, Luke let Harry go ahead and ask the question, “What does he look like?”
Nodding at Luke, she said, “He’s close to your height, maybe an inch or two shorter and just a little lig
hter-built than you, with dark hair. He’s a good looking guy, really, and very well-dressed.”
“That fits our kidnapping suspect,” Harry said thoughtfully, “It could be him...I think it’s worth going up and paying him a visit. If nothing else, it looks like he knows the victim.”
“There’s something else,” she said urgently, looking directly at Luke, “Everything lately has been so weird I just decided to do a key check, and I noticed the spare key to Miss Pelligatti’s room is missing...”
Harry was standing with his back to the lobby doors, and, even as she said that, Luke looked over his shoulder and saw a figure standing on the other side of the glass – a tall man in a trench coat that perfectly answered Harry’s description of the kidnapper and possible murderer – but before he could open his mouth to speak, a voice echoed inside of his head as loudly as if it had been screamed right in his hear.
Fiona is being attacked in her room. If you would save her from being raped and possibly killed, you must get there now!
“Master key – now!” he shouted at the clerk, then snatched it from the startled woman’s hand so hard she yelped as it scraped her skin. Before she could say anything else, Luke took off for the stairs at a dead run. He’d worry about the man at the door, why he looked so damned familiar, and where the voice inside his head came from later.
Harry had his back to the door, so he had seen or heard nothing, and was so startled by his friend’s abrupt actions that, when he belatedly tried to follow, he caught his foot on the leg of an end table and went sprawling, twisting his knee painfully in the process. By the time he got to his feet, Luke was already up the stairs and out of sight.
Cliff had the fingers of his right hand clamped painfully on the back of Fiona’s neck, digging into the nerve centers, while he fumbled for his zipper with his left.
“Teach you, you little bitch!”
Fiona screamed and fought, but he only paused to dig his fingertips even deeper until she thought she was going to pass out again.
“Shut up!” he was shouting when the door flew open.
Luke had heard Fiona’s muffled scream cut off, and heard Cliff’s order for silence, so he didn’t hesitate, but entered with his pistol in his hand and a shout of, “Police! Freeze!”
Cliff picked up the intruder in his peripheral vision, and, on seeing the weapon, jerked Fiona up in front of him like a human shield, then shoved her hard, half-throwing her, and sending her stumbling into Luke. Forced to move the muzzle out of line to keep from accidentally shooting her, he made it the perfect target for his opponent, whose fast crescent kick whipped across his body to slam the hard inside of his shoe sole into the cop’s wrist and send the Glock flying across the room.
Cliff dropped into a classical fighting stance with a cruel smile, and said, “Let’s see what you’ve got, asshole, because I’m going to mess you up!” At least, he tried to say it, but before he got to the ‘-hole’ part, Luke ducked and charged straight forward into him like a bull. The startled Cliff was expecting the fists-up sparring he had experienced in the DoJang where he’d trained and with the occasional drunk he had beaten into the pavement outside the clubs he frequented; he’d never fought a wrestler. He managed to glance a fist off the side of Luke’s head when the deputy shoulder slammed into his chest, driving him off his feet and into the wall behind him with a crash that cracked the plaster and seemed to shake the building.
Cliff shot a knee to the deputy’s groin, but Luke had been in too many street fights, both in and out of the line of duty not to expect that tactic; he twisted and caught the knee painfully but otherwise harmlessly on his thigh. He followed up immediately; bending both knees, he grabbed Cliff around the waist, then straightened his legs, arched backward, jumped and twisted, all in one explosive motion, leaving his feet, turning in the air, and slamming the other man on his back on the floor, with all the deputy’s body weight on top of him, an impact that was even greater than their previous collision with the wall. The would-be rapist’s ribcage flexed almost to the breaking point as every last bit of air left his body.
Down but a long way from out, Cliff desperately whipped a right elbow across his body and into Luke’s face, splitting his left brow open in a deep cut, and Luke replied with a vicious head butt that crushed his opponent’s nose flat. Taking advantage of Cliff’s momentary distraction provided by the agonizing pain of his smashed proboscis’ cartilage, the deputy scrambled to a more secure position on top of him and he reached for the small of his back.
Luke’s grandfather had carried carried that same flat sap, and had passed it down to him when he first got on the department, despite the official discouragement of its use. The twelve-inch flat spring with its fourteen ounce flattened disk of lead on the tip was sandwiched between two pieces of thick black leather, the classic cop’s backup was designed to beat a combative suspect into submission without actually killing him, although it certainly could bring about that result...and in this case, Luke fully intended that it would.
Once he’d caught a glimpse of what had been about to happen – what, as far as he knew, may have already happened – and seen Fiona half-naked with that stricken look in eyes, Luke was no longer an officer of the law; now he was a man given completely over to a black, killing rage who fully intended on beating to death the person who had hurt someone he loved.
The first blow was a forehand from right to left that crushed a cheekbone; the second was a return backhand that sent teeth flying, and the third was a straight down smash into Cliff’s mouth that took out all his front teeth, fractured the bone beneath his philtrum, split both lips, and did absolutely nothing for his rapidly deteriorating looks.
Then Harry was grabbing him from behind and dragging him off, catching him off balance before jerking hard and sending him rolling.
“Stop it, buddy! Stop! You’re gonna kill him!”
“Yes I am!” he roared in return.
Luke rolled to the side and shot to his feet, ready to fight even his best friend to get at Cliff in order to finish the job, but the trooper was already on top of the battered suspect, had rolled him face-down, and was slapping on the cuffs. Without looking back, he yelled, “Check Fiona!”
That was the only thing he could have said to snap Luke out of his blind fury and prevent him from finishing the job he had started. He looked for her and didn’t see her at first. Finally he spotted her behind the bed, curled in the fetal position between it and the wall, naked from the waist down, shaking and sobbing.
“I’m here, Fiona; it’s over.” he said as soothingly as he could, and she looked at him with a face covered with tears, and tentatively held out her arms like a tiny, hurt, terrified child. In an instant, he scooped her up, sat down on the bed, and put her on his lap. He rocked her while she clung to him like she would never let go, and he said over and over, “I’ve got you! I’ve got you, baby, and nothing is going to happen to you! I promise! I’ve got you!”
“He was going to...”
“But he didn’t, did he?”
“No, but he tried!”
That, at least, was a relief. Luke nodded at the blood-spattered prisoner on the floor.
“And I don’t think the son of a bitch will be trying it again, not for a long, long time!”
“You go to Hell!” Cliff shouted, spraying blood from his ruined mouth and nose, “That whore invited me here!”
Before Luke could move, Harry pointed at him and ordered, “You sit still and help the lady! I’ll deal with Mr. douche-bag here.”
Bending over the prisoner, he fished around in Cliff’s pockets and held up a pair of objects. The first was small, clear vial that he up to the light and shook before nodding with satisfaction.
“Well looky here! Looks like somebody’s got himself a little coke, and what is this?” The trooper examined a second item. “Why it’s a key with this room number on it, stolen from the front desk. I guess we can add drug possession and theft to the charges too.”
> “I didn’t steal any key! That guy out front gave it to me when he told me what room she was in!” Cliff paused, then had an idea. “He told me she left it for me!”
“Did he now? And just who was this guy?”
“I don’t know,” he muttered sullenly, “just some guy. He said he was the one who called me back in New York and told me where she was staying, and he met me out front and gave me the key.”
“Who called you in New York?”
“He didn’t give a name! I’m not saying anymore! I want a lawyer!”
“Oh, you’ll need a lawyer, alright, Mr. douche-bag...”
“My name’s not douche-bag! I’m Clifford Ashley, and I’ve got enough money to buy and sell your hick aaaAAAAAHHH!”
“Careful of your nose there, douche-bag,” Harry said conversationally after he withdrew his hand, having pressed it against the back of Cliff’s head and used the pressure to momentarily grind the shattered appendage in question into the bloody carpet. Then he grabbed him by the cuffs and yanked him screaming to his feet as the metal biting into his wrists forced his compliance.
“Alright, Mr. douche-bag, you are under arrest for sexual assault, attempted rape, assault and battery, burglary, conspiracy, possession of a controlled substance, possession of stolen goods.” Glancing at Luke sitting there bleeding, he added, “And for felonious assault and attempting to disarm a police officer, obstruction, and for whatever the hell else I can think of before I have to take your sorry punk ass to court in the morning. You have the right to remain silent...”
“I didn’t assault him!” Cliff was shouting, “He assaulted me! He broke my nose and knocked my teeth out! He disfigured me! I’m filing charges! I demand he be arrested! Damn it, do you hear me!”
Ignoring the ranting, Harry finished his Miranda warning in front of two witnesses, then looked meaningfully at Luke and winked.
“You’d better put some new pants on the lady there; as soon as I get someone to escort Mr. douche-bag to the ER, I’ll come back and photograph the crime scene, so you’ll need to leave what she was wearing where it is and stay here to secure the scene. It’ll be a few minutes.” He frowned at his friend’s bloody forehead. “Are you going to be okay, buddy?”