Alibi Island

by SLMN

  But it was a girl. A thin Asian looking girl, with a spray of blood across her chest and a SIG-Sauer in her shaking hand, was standing the doorway of the Gulfstream. Passion had to almost close her eyes and shake her head like a cartoon character recovering from a blow to the skull. The image was just too crazy, the gun looked so large and ludicrous in the girl’s hand. The blood covering her looked something out of a creepy kid horror movie. Passion checked to see if it was coming from any wounds on the girl. It was not. That was all the blood of other people.

  Oooookay.

  The pint-sized hijacker had taken out someone in the cockpit, at least one other person in the cabin, and the guy in the pilot’s uniform who’d done the face slam on the concrete below the plane.

  The girl was looking in every direction, seemingly trying to make up her mind if it was safe to slide down the Day-Glo orange, brain-smeared, inflatable safety slide.

  The girl got onto her backside in the doorway, and holding the gun up out of her way—as if it had been a practiced maneuver—slid down to the concrete.

  She got up, and pointed the gun at the dead pilot just in case. But the next time he was going to move would be into a coroner’s bag.

  Passion then watched with mounting discomfort, as the girl wiped at the blood starting to congeal across her chest, and looking up, seeing the door to the restroom, jogged towards it.

  Passion was in such an off the grid state of mind by what she’d witnessed she was not ready for this development at all, she spun away from the door, and headed for one of the stalls in a blind panic. The girl was homicidal and she was going to kill anyone and everything that got in her way, especially a witness watching her from the restroom.

  But the girl was too quick for Passion, she’d already reached the door before Passion could close the stall and climb up onto the toilet.

  “Stay there. Do not move.” The girl’s voice was accented and confirmed the Asian heritage of her eyes and skin. Passion raised her hands. Her own weapon was in her Ops bag in the back of the Hyundai. She cursed herself for being so careless and not bringing it into the hangar.

  But this was no time for self-recriminations. It was what it was.

  Passion turned just in time to see the girl raise the gun, point it at Passion’s face and coolly, with dead, emotionless eyes, squeeze the trigger.

  18

  They were in a hole in the ground.

  Thick tree roots moved across the rounded ceiling. The walls were dry mud, and the floor flagged with grey stones that were covered in spirals of dirt.

  There was a bed on which she lay: a table, a chair, and a thick green velvet curtain hanging over the doorway. There was a hearth, but it was not for a real fire. In it was a radiator of thick enameled iron. There was a dial on the side, with two small lights, neither of which were lit. That was a good thing because this hole in the ground was already stiflingly hot.

  The woman, who had a cumulous of grey white hair floating around her head, was dressed like something out of one of those stupid Tolkien movies Lainey’s mom loved so much. She had a cloak. A freaking cloak! Thin leather boots and a waistcoat running with gold brocade above the sturdy corduroy britches covering her stick thin legs.

  The sound coming from the woman’s hands as she sat at the table was the first thing Lainey had noticed as she came out of the deep sleep, she’d been put into.

  The last thing before this she remembered was being pulled from the water, back onto the jetty from which she’d just been propelled by a mighty slap. They pulled her to her feet, sodden and gasping next to the rusting steamer, hit her again for her insolence. Then one of the crew reached around from behind and put a cotton wool pad over her nose and mouth.

  It had sent her into a dreamless, silent sleep. And although that sleep had probably lasted many hours, she did not feel rested at all when she woke up. It felt like the aftermath of a sleep brought on by a fever, as a gritty, out of focus consciousness seeped back in. Lainey felt dirty, sweaty, and thirsty.

  The noise coming from the old woman’s hands was the sound of steel on leather. Lainey blinked, trying to get her eyes to work properly on what was going on in the old woman’s hands. As the images resolved, Lainey wondered if she was still dreaming and had woken up in a lame Renaissance Fayre, and the old woman was one of the idiots working in the craft tent. There was a leather-sharpening strap attached to the leg of the table, and the old woman was working a thin blade up and down in methodical strokes.

  Lainey’s father used a blade and a strap like that. He would swipe the blade back and forth on the leather until the straight razor sang with sharpness. When Lainey had been a little girl, she remembered watching her father sharpen his blade and then shave his lathered skin with the razor. She remembered the hiss and the swish, and the crackle of the whiskers as they succumbed to the cut of the blade.

  The old woman didn’t look up, she kept sharpening. Kept stroking.

  Lainey tried to sit up, and that was when she discovered her legs and arms were chained to the bed on which she lay. She looked down her body, at the silver shackles pinioning her ankles, and the thick cuffs around her wrists. There was a chain rattling beneath the bed as she moved her right hand, and she felt the pull of it on her left. She was chained to and through the bed. All she could do was raise her head and perhaps lift a shoulder, but that was the full extent of her movement.

  The old woman didn’t even look up as the chains rattled, as if the sounds didn’t matter to her at all. The old woman knew that Lainey was entirely secure, she could get on with working on the blade. It didn’t matter what Lainey did.

  “Where am I?” Lainey’s voice was thick with fear and felt trapped in her throat by the dryness of her mouth. She tried swallowing a couple of times, but it felt like the saliva in her mouth had fully dried up within her skull.

  The old woman stopped and held the blade up to the electric strip light hanging incongruously from the ceiling of the dry, hollowed out hole. The blade glinted, sending shivers of light bouncing over the walls and ceiling. The old woman seemed satisfied, and put the blade down on a metal tray on the table, next to a wooden rack of test tubes.

  The old woman got up, her face wincing with a sudden pain, breath escaping her lips in a hiss like a chill breeze through dry grass. She rubbed the small of her back and hobbled out of sight behind Lainey.

  Lainey could feel the terror clapping in her heart as it panicked in her chest. Not being able to see the old woman was worse than watching her sharpen the razor. Lainey tried to bring her head around, but there was a tall wooden headboard, ornately carved with centaurs and unicorns, which her body was too close to see over. All she could hear was the old woman shuffling and the sound of her breathing.

  Then something started to drag across the floor, and Lainey could hear exertion in the old woman’s breathing. The definite sound of her straining to pull something into Lainey’s field of vision.

  Slowly, and with rising horror, Lainey watched with terrified eyes as the old woman came into view, dragging a chair as she hobbled backwards. The chair had been tipped over onto its two back legs and screeched over the stone floor, setting Lainey’s teeth on edge.

  The chair had a fat man tied to it. He was dressed in a black uniform. There was dried blood caked to the side of his head from a sizeable wound which Lainey, with rising bile in her throat, thought had signs of exposed bone in the center.

  The man was conscious, his mouth covered in the same kind of duct tape which Daniel had used to bind Lainey’s ankles and wrists. The man with the head wound had his arms taped to the back legs of the chair and his legs taped to the front legs. His eyes were swiveling in his sockets, and the terror broadcasting from his face entirely matched that which Lainey’s guts were feeling.

  The old woman seemed relieved that the chair and its cargo were now in a position for Lainey to see. She ruffled the top of the fat man’s bloody head, and rolled her eyes as they came away sticky with blood.


  She wiped her fingers on the man’s shoulder until they were clean, and then in one swift movement pulled the tape from his mouth.

  The man’s voice came out like uncorked champagne. “Please, Rosa! Please! I’m sorry. She came up from behind! I didn’t know she was awake.”

  The old woman, Rosa, spoke for the first time, “If you hadn’t gone to the dormitory for your extra-curricular activities so many damn times, Mary-Joy wouldn’t have been able to predict your behavior and hit you with a rock! It’s not just the extra-curricular activity that you’re here to be punished for…it’s your stupidity.”

  Her voice like the sound of a graveyard. It was winter branches snickering on a chilly wind, it was the crunch of footsteps over cemetery gravel, and it was the creak of a coffin lid being opened. In short, it was the most Goth sounding thing Lainey had ever heard in her time on Earth.

  It was the sound of a nightmare come to life.

  “Rosa! I’m sorry, please. Fire me. Send me back to the mainland. Anything. Just not this. You don’t have to do this.”

  “Of course I don’t have to Parrish, of course I don’t. I’m doing it because I want to. It will serve two purposes tonight. It will visit upon you all the agonies your idiocy deserves, and it will be instructive to the audience.”

  Rosa lifted her head to the root gnarled roof, “Are we on? Carla?”

  A tinny voice came from a speaker high in the ceiling amongst the branches. Lainey recognized Carla. “Yes, Rosa, everything is ready.”

  “And Mr. Ralston?”

  Lainey’s heart skipped several beats at the mention of her father’s name.

  Carla’s tinny voice came again, “I am assured by Mr. Crane that the prospective Senator is all eyes and ears.”

  Rosa chuckled, “Which is more than I can say for Mr. Parrish in the next few minutes.”

  A groan escaped Parrish’s mouth, the groan of pure defeat. He’d stopped straining at his bonds, his head had fallen forward until his chin rested on his chest. His lips started moving. Lainey had to strain to hear what he was saying under his breath.

  It was the Lord’s Prayer.

  Huey Ralston was a man for whom the bottom had fallen out of the world.

  His hands could not be still, his breathing was interspersed with sobs, his chest heaved with crying. He was on the verge of throwing up over the blotter and marble fountain pen holder that sat on his desk.

  Crane had come into the room, and without a word had begun closing the drapes, so that without Huey’s desk light on, the room would have been in complete darkness.

  Myer had taken his customary seat in the corner of the room, his whole body now in a pool of shadows. Ralston could only see the occasional glitter from his quick eyes, or sometimes catch sight of the detective cleaning out of the dirt from beneath his fingernails.

  Ever since his telephone call to the island—when Huey had thought he would plan himself a nice little relaxing mini-break in the punishment bloc—everything in his life had turned to shit and that didn’t even include the kidnapping of his daughter.

  Huey’s past trips to the island to beat up on the captive slaves who had broken whatever rules Rosa and her band of Sado-Capitalists had deemed to have disobeyed, had been the highlights of his year.

  But to hear Rosa, calmly and deliberately say, “There has been a change of plans. We have your daughter. She is here with us now, and we will be holding her against your continued cooperation,” had side-swiped Huey like a baseball bat in the gut.

  Rosa had made it abundantly clear that unless Huey did exactly what he was ordered to do by Enchanted Holdings, Lainey would be killed. Not only killed, but tortured and raped to death.

  And yet, even that was not the worst of it.

  Crane turned on the desktop projector. A white screen hummed down from the ceiling on well-oiled gears and clicked into place. The picture fuzzed, rolled and then became a solid image.

  Rosa’s realm.

  Ralston had been into the Enchanted Forest on a number of occasions when he had visited the island in the past, but never had he been to Rosa’s domain beneath the central oak.

  He’d seen the massive tree of course, way off in the distance, rising from the center of the manmade forest. But like everyone else, he had been told not to approach it.

  To break that basic rule would make it necessary for the transgressor to be ejected from the island, never to return. Like many other visitors to the island, Huey would go only so far into the Enchanted Forest to walk among the cool trees, feeling the sweat he’d built up from his pleasures in the punishment block—dry with a satisfying sense of evaporation on his skin. He would imagine those drying vapors as his own sins leeching away from his body, leaving him pure and whole again.

  Of course he had to stop on occasion to vigorously pleasure himself while he thought back to the kicking, the punching, and the breaking. The busting of a young bone, watching it appear jagged and bloody from twisted flesh, as the screams of the young person resounded in his ears was the greatest aphrodisiac Huey had ever known.

  If truth be told, the succession of blond bimbos he’d fucked during his marriage and before had been all so many pieces of misdirection. In the circles he moved in: the rich, the famous, the connected, it was expected. But it wasn’t Huey’s true nature. No. Any fool could get pleasure from sex, but it took a special kind of man to enjoy the particular good offices of De Sade.

  He’d paid to beat women many times.

  Professional submissives whose masochism was such that they enjoyed selling themselves to the men, and women, who would enjoy hurting them. It always left a bad taste in Huey’s mouth. Not because he didn’t enjoy it, but because it was all a game. There were agreed limits, boundaries over which he was not allowed to cross. As he made more of his political career, it had also become more imperative that he kept his desires to himself. Once his face started to appear statewide, and occasionally across the nation on TV, Ralston’s visits to the pro-subs had necessarily dwindled to zero.

  All his desires in that direction had to be met with pornography, and compared to what Huey really wanted to do to those girls, porn was very slim pickings indeed.

  And then one day, Stephen Crane had come into his life, seemingly parachuted in from nowhere, with the promise to be the best political operator Huey could ever imagine. Although Ralston could not find any evidence to back up Crane’s claims, other than stupendous recommendations from well-regarded GOP luminaries, who gave Crane the most glowing references.

  From the start, Crane moved through Huey’s personal staff like a tornado through a trailer park, firing nearly everyone and hiring his own people, introducing him to Myer, the useful detective who was forever on hand to smooth over any legal difficulties that Huey might encounter. Whatever reservations Huey might have had about the operation Crane was setting up were dispelled, as the poll numbers started coming in, as the incandescently positive editorials appeared. And the debates with his opponents went so well, it was almost liked they’d been paid to throw the match.

  They had.

  They’d been paid off, and they’d been neutralized as political opponents.

  By Crane.

  It was only when Crane told Huey about the island— specifically La Isla Encantada (the Enchanted Island), and that Huey’s passions were already well known to the people who ran the facilities there—that the possibilities of becoming connected with the most powerful people on the planet became a reality.

  “The People behind the People,” Crane had called them. “These are the real movers and shakers, Mr. Ralston. They can give you whatever you want, whatever desire you want met. For a price.”

  Huey had always thought that he made a good fist of being rich and powerful. He wore the trappings well and played the role even better, but he soon realized he was a small fry compared to these people. The People behind the People.

  “I can do anything?”

  “Anything.” Crane said. “Anythi
ng your heart desires. And there is absolutely no comeback, guaranteed.”

  The very idea sent fluttery jitters whizzing around his body like pinballs. The shiver of anticipation, and the edgy pleasures to be not just fantasized about, but made actuality.

  “You are to be offered membership, Mr. Ralston. Your polling numbers are so good that the Owners of the island would welcome you among their number. It’s not…er…cheap.”

  “I can’t imagine it is.”

  “Membership fees are twenty million dollars US per year, plus five million dollars per day for your visit.”

  Huey had done a quick calculation in his head, say five visits a year plus fees amounted to $45 million. That represented somewhere in the region of one tenth of his gross income in a year. Well, one tenth of what he admitted to the IRS he was earning. In that context it was $45 million to do whatever he wanted, however he liked, to anyone he chose. It seemed like the steal of the century.

  “First visit is of course complimentary.”

  And that had been the clincher which had pushed any last iota of doubt from his mind.

  That first trip had been a whirlwind of depravity and a truly life changing experience for Huey. The blindfolded trip to the airport, the three or four hour flight—watches and smart phones weren’t allowed on the island so it was difficult to tell—to what he guessed was a jungle airstrip in the middle of Central America given the flight time. Then the 12-hour trip on the rusty old steamer to La Isla Encantada had been the most exciting journey he had ever taken. Even the grubby cabin, two decks down with the blacked out portholes and desultory bed had not dampened his anticipation.

  Once within his chalet—showered, fed and ready for a night of delicious torture, the blond Columbian Amazon Carla had arrived with an iPad loaded with photographs of the children and young women who were awaiting his attentions in the punishment block.

  “House rules?” he’d asked Carla after he’d chosen the girl with whom he was to spend his first night on the island.