by Wolfe, Layla
The juxtaposition of the degradation and sloth going on inside the rooms against the backdrop of the confectionary layers of the red buttes was something to behold. One wing was for private—if you could call it that—activity, the other for business. So there’d be a couple of guys daisy chaining with a sweetbutt while smoking a hookah and in the background there’s this blazingly brilliant Biblical sunset going on. I could see why artists came to P&E.
I mostly stayed in the private wing, with many trips across the hangar to give full reports to Cropper in his office, seemed like every hour on the hour. It was during one of these trips the second day that I began to have misgivings about my decision.
I was about to leave when Cropper commanded, “Face me.” Standing, he came around the front of his desk, looking me up and down like he wanted to wear my legs as a scarf.
I’d purposefully worn a sweater dress with no buttons up the front. I’d realized too late that the only bras I possessed were the push-up ones I’d loved to taunt Ford with.
So what does Cropper do? “I don’t like this dress.” He whipped his knife from its scabbard and sliced a new neckline in my dress! Of course the new neckline began just a few inches above my belly button and ended in the jagged tear of the knit fabric at my Adam’s apple. My abundant tits spilled out, and Cropper beamed with pride at his work. Of course I shrank back and held the split halves of my bodice together.
“What’s wrong with you? We agreed no touching.”
“Am I touching?” Cropper’s smile never quit. “Is it wrong of me to want some better scenery while I work? You’ve got an amazing pair of jugs, Cookie.”
I didn’t like Cropper calling me Cookie. He’d overheard Ford call me that, our private joke on him accidentally calling me “sugar cookie” that day in the pool. In Ford’s mouth it sounded divine. Coming from Cropper, as with everything else he said, it just sounded lewd and deviant.
Holding my own tits somehow wasn’t any less suggestive than just letting them jut out of my torn dress. “You promised me no perverted stuff.”
“Did I? I don’t think I promised anything like that. Why would I promise to alter my entire personality for a worthless slut?”
“If I’m such a worthless slut why are you always pursuing me?”
He smiled crookedly. “Isn’t that my favorite type?” The smile vanished abruptly. “Listen. You’re going to have to follow my rules if you want to make it through this week. Otherwise your beloved brother is going to be lying in his apartment with no food or money and unable to go get any more ‘cause he smashed up his pretty ride. So listen good, bitch. Put your hands against that wall.”
“Why?”
“Did I tell you to ask questions? We don’t like it when sweetbutts ask questions, or have you not noticed that?”
“Maybe that’s why they don’t want to tell you when they’ve got cottage cheese oozing from their slits. You’re so uninterested in them, they know you don’t care. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”
Cropper looked thoughtful. “Matter of fact, I am. And it’s not wise to argue with a man holding a buck knife. Now up against that wall.”
He was right. How could I argue with that knife? After all, what had I really expected of this bunch of depraved sinners? They took pride in their perversions, and it wasn’t really likely Cropper would let me just doctor a few sweetbutts to reinstate Speed in his rightful spot in their twisted hierarchy.
I had known it wasn’t going to be as easy as the TV Guide crossword puzzle. Cropper was an arrogant, willful ass who always got his own way. He’d already told me not to tell Ford that I was spending a week here. Ford had gone to the prison in Florence to retrieve some lawyer who was going to work for the club, taking Turk and Wild Man, the only other two members with a bit of human emotion. Faux Pas was all right, some sort of French Canadian special effects man who created zombies and other gore-riddled creatures for film. He got his bloody ideas from real life experience, and he was such a horndog he seemed to have a permanent hard-on. There was talk it might be a medical condition.
As a nurse and a formerly abused child, I knew how to grit my teeth and bear a lot of things. I had to call upon those talents now as Cropper, predictably, kicked my feet apart as I leaned on my hands against the wall. Predictably, he raised my dress salaciously over my ass and ran his hand over my glute.
“Perfect,” he sighed. “Juicy and slappable.”
I made one last feeble attempt. “You promised no touching.”
He had a ready answer. “Since when does the Bare Bones Prez keep his word? If I did that I’d be out of business.” Slap. Slap. Slap. “Mm. Might give even more resistance and make a louder sound if I did this.”
Squeezing my eyes shut, I didn’t even breathe as he sliced through the flimsy panty material as though it were butter. A rush of air cooled my vagina, and his next few slaps hit me right on the sensitive outer labia.
“This’ll show you,” he oozed, “how to deny me my God-given right to molest my son’s old lady. You thought you’d stop me from feeling these plump, juicy titties? I know you never told Torino what happened between us, so I figured you were ashamed. Good. Be ashamed. You should be. Letting me watch you shower, knowing I was behind the wall watching you tickling your taco all those times? You should be ashamed of yourself. Ah. Nice fat knobs.”
As you can tell, he was squeezing my bare tits by now, so he must’ve put down the knife. There wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. He was so lost in his own arrogance, he had no clue that the only reason I’d never told Ford was to avoid a fresh murder. I knew Ford had committed murder as a teen and I knew it had something to do with Cropper, so it was likely he might do it again, if enraged enough. Ford wasn’t famous for controlling his temper. None of them were. Cropper had been smart to send Ford off on that errand that anyone else probably could’ve done. How hard was it to drive a lawyer back to P&E?
So I held my breath until all I saw was the rosy glow of sheer anger. Cropper had broken my nose back in Cottonwood when he’d bashed my face against that garage wall. I’d seen him hit my mother a few times, although I did nothing to stop it, since she always hit me. Cropper wouldn’t hesitate to use force again. He could always tell Ford I’d fallen down or whatever. Now I held my breath and tried to imagine something pleasant as Cropper slapped my vagina and mauled my breasts.
At first I automatically thought of Ford. I didn’t want to associate him with this warped act, so I erased his image from my mind’s eye and thought of surgeries instead. I was always calm, almost sublime during surgeries, in complete control. That’s why I liked it. I could control the outcome. From a chaotic childhood where absolutely nothing was guaranteed and disaster lurked around every corner, I went into a field where we controlled everything with our tiniest action.
So that day I thought about balloon angioplasties. I loved the godlike, life-or-death feeling of moving the coronary guide wire through the artery. What a superior, controlling feeling.
Cropper was muttering perverted stuff as he “punished” me for being such a slut back in the day. I found I could remove myself, take myself so out of the scene that I almost felt like I was floating above it all, somewhere up near the ceiling. I felt as though I were looking down on the scene, watching Cropper alternately spank and then feel my white, now reddened, ass.
“That’s right…obey my every word…Makes you wet when I feel your boobs, doesn’t it?”
I saw more than felt his arm jerking rhythmically as his breaths grew hotter and more insistent on my neck. I “saw” with my new strange spirit eyes that he was jerking off against my ass. He gripped a tit as though it was a life preserver, and the closer he got to crisis, the faster he jerked and the less he tormented me.
I found that I could hover around the ceiling like one of those operating room patients who almost died. I was a light, disembodied spirit closer to the heavenly realm than the bodily one, and I was watching some grunt perform a routine,
and gross, operation.
This had nothing to do with sex, with the beautiful, heavenly things Ford and I did with each other. What Cropper did to my body wasn’t sex. It was low, twisted, depraved violence, an assault on my privacy and pride.
When it was over Cropper staggered back to his chair and fell into it like an ape man. I could cover my bare ass with my dress but couldn’t do much about my neckline.
“May I have my phone back?” I asked meekly. I was dizzy, coming down from that ceiling, being sucked back into my body.
Cropper chuckled lazily. Apparently abusing his son’s old lady was just one of the many items on his daily “to do” list. “Why? So you can cry to Torino how mean his daddy’s being? Not a chance. You need to experience the total slave package. Besides. Torino’s going to be spending a few more nights down there. His mission just, ah, became a little more complicated than he knew.”
My heart sank lower, if such a thing was possible.
Worse, Cropper radioed for one of the sweetbutts to bring my suitcase. He rifled through it, removing all the panties, after smelling them, of course. “You’re going to walk around here commando, my little slut,” he decreed. “That means your cunt is open and free to me at any given moment. I look forward to putting my dick, hands, and face where my son’s dick, hands, and face were. It’s a family thing, you know.”
The worst, probably, was the way the sweetbutt looked at me when Cropper decided this. She sneered. All high and mighty, and sneering at low old me.
In front of her, Cropper unbuckled my fur-lined leather collar. Everyone knew it was symbolic of Ford’s ownership of me, and Cropper just tossed it like an old Christmas tree into his desk drawer. “For now, you belong to me, Cookie. You obey me and answer to me to repay your fucking brother’s debt.”
Then he cut the bodices of all my tops.
There would be no way to hide what a slut I was, especially not from Riker.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FORD
“I’ve lived out my melancholy youth. I don’t give a fuck anymore what’s behind me or what’s ahead of me. I’m healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me.” ~ Henry Miller
Soledad Jonas turned out to be one badass vaquera, a Mexican who had married a rich Arizona cattle rancher. The owner of Hardscrabble had died, leaving Soledad with the land and its legacy—the tunnel underneath the border, the main source of his income after slowly selling off all his cattle.
Ford didn’t get around to seeing Soledad for another couple of days. First, they had to lay low, let Slushy rest, and doctor him up. His arm was broken but they couldn’t take him to the ER, so Ford used his best SEAL training to reset the bone and MacGiver up a sling. Slushy screamed such blue murder they may as well have told the cops he’d been beaten by the cartel. They gave him so much booze he slept for the next twenty-four hours.
Then they had to hang around Nogales in a Best Western for another night because the mysterious Soledad wouldn’t see them until she got her lawyer. Ford had to keep an eye on Slushy, too, due to the flight risk factor. Nothing prevented Slushy from making a run for it and selling his knowledge of the tunnel to the next highest bidder. However, Ford had gone through Slushy’s pockets, and the most valuable thing he owned seemed to be a picture of a daughter and a safe deposit box key, both of which Ford took for insurance.
Slushy asked, “How do I know that once I introduce you, you’re not going to cut and run?”
“You should be so lucky,” said Ford, bench pressing a hundred seventy-five pounds in the hotel’s gym. “Where you gonna go? With us you’ve got family.”
Slushy snorted. “Some family. A bunch of hoods who beat each other up over a toothless blowjob from some skank.”
“Hey. That was Ziggy and Tall Peril. Us longstanding charter members don’t fight amongst ourselves.”
“Right.” Turk stood over Ford, spotting him. “We just beat the shit out of rival clubs.”
“What’s the attraction?” asked Slushy. “Ford, you said your dad’s the President. But Turk? Why would you want to join? Something about never having had a family?”
“You got it,” grunted Turk. “Cropper and Ford were my family growing up. We all lived at the clubhouse, at the Bum Steer, until Cropper got a citizen wife—Ingrid, Madison’s mother. By then I was old enough to run the army surplus store alone, so I lived in the back until they built the Citadel. I imagine that’s where you’ll live. It’s nice. An old army airfield on top of a gorgeous mesa.”
“Madison,” said Slushy. “She’s someone’s old lady? See, I know the lingo. Jesus. I was on my way to Belize and I wound up here.”
Turk answered for Ford. “She’s Ford’s old lady. She’s a nurse.”
Slushy made a lip fart, caressing his injured arm. “Could’ve used her the past couple of days. How’d you wind up with a nurse, Capone? I guess opposites attract.”
Ford finally gave the thin-haired lawyer something. After all, the guy had a daughter somewhere. He was human. “It’s a fatal attraction that goes way back, Consigliore. We were meant to be.” Ford was frankly pissed off because he hadn’t heard from Maddy since he’d left P&E. He had only left one more message, not being the stalkery type. If a woman didn’t want to call him, he didn’t force himself on her.
Madison was supposed to be telling that dickhead doctor she was moving out. That alone had Ford’s nerves on edge. When he became edgy, he was more liable to explode, to prematurely react to something, to blow it, so to speak. He needed to be calm, cool, collected for this meeting with Mrs. Jonas. Every excuse he could think of for why Maddy wasn’t calling him was a bad, terrifying excuse. Something had gone wrong.
He had even called Faux Pas to get the lay of the land. “Oh yeah, I’ve seen her around the hangar,” was all Faux Pas would say. “I think she’s giving some medical exams to the whores.”
What? Why would Madison be doing that, and not answering his calls? A very foreboding feeling was hanging over Ford’s head. He was rarely wrong when this black cloud came hovering.
He said, “Listen, Slushy, what’s your real name? And why Slushy?”
“Slushy was what pirates always named their cook. The fat boiled out of meat was called slush. The cook guarded it with his life. The fatty slime that rose to the top was used as lubricant for ropes, rigging, almost everything.”
Turk chuckled. “So you’re named after slime?”
Ford said, “After a cook, asshat. Because he cooks the books.”
“Exactly,” said Slushy. “The slush was our first modern chapstick. I’m actually Aaron McGill, though you won’t have much use for that name. Ah, money laundering isn’t what it used to be. God, do I miss the nineties. Have you guys put any thought into zombies?”
Exhaling painfully, Ford replaced the bar onto the rack and sat upright on the bench. “Zombies? I’ve thought about them. In which way?”
“They’re hot. If you could find someone who could create a zombie video game, we could pay him with dirty money. Each copy bought would earn him forty dollars, right? Just make sure it’s someone you trust, of course. I’ve got a million ideas, some good smurfing plans. The zombie game doesn’t even have to be very good. You can just have those cheap-ass bendable buddy zombies that move like an old silent film, like three frames per second. They could be slow zombies that wouldn’t scare a 7-11 clerk. Doesn’t matter. Although, of course, if it were good, all the better. You might make some legitimate cash.”
Turk said, “We actually do have a guy with zombie connections.”
Ford thought about it. No matter how hammered Faux Pas got, he always showed up to the film sets where he worked. He could be relied on to make a guy really look like half his face had been shot off. Since that was a good excuse to call Faux Pas again, Ford took his phone outside the gym and called him.
He only got Faux Pas’ voicemail, so he called Cropper. Cropper would know why the fuck Madison was hangin
g around the Citadel doctoring sweetbutts.
Cropper wanted to talk about the tunnel, whether or not it really existed. Ford assured him the tunnel was real, and they were set to see it with their own eyes tomorrow.
Cropper said, “Make sure a Mr. Lyle Bloodgood is included in the meeting. He’s Mrs. Jonas’lawyer. He knows all the ins and outs of dealing with moving the product through the tunnel. Mrs. Jonas likes to have plausible deniability, which is understandable. Then you need to get a date from Mr. Bloodgood. That’s the date the first product will need to be picked up on the ranch. We can put Tall Peril in charge of that, so take him when you view the tunnel so he knows where it is.”
That was all fine with Ford, and he was finally able to ask, “Hey, I’ve heard Madison’s been at the Citadel? What’s she doing there?”
“Who told you that?” was Cropper’s first response.
That raised Ford’s suspicions. Why shouldn’t anyone tell him that? What did it matter? “What difference does it make? Why’s she there?”
Cropper affected a casual tone. “Oh, she’s giving the sweetbutts exams. About time, right? We’ve never been able to force them to get examined at the clinic, and I’m tired of having pants rabbits and seam squirrels running around my jeans.”
That was an extremely good idea, actually, so Ford didn’t question it. He was tired of the Neapolitan Bone Aches, too. “Well, she hasn’t returned any of my calls. When you see her, tell her her phone is dead or something. We’ll be back tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow night? Now, don’t rush this business, son. Take your time. Make sure this McGill is legit.”
“If by ‘legit,’ you mean does he seriously know how to cook the books, then yeah, he’s legit. I think he’ll be valuable. Now I’m assuming that Ochoa didn’t know about this tunnel or he wouldn’t have cut Slushy loose.”