Authors: Bryan Smith
She turned away from the window when she heard the door to her room open, grimacing when she saw Susan Wagner enter the room and shut the door behind her.
“Get the fuck out of here.”
Susan smiled. “I don’t think so.”
Her former tormentor was wearing black lace panties and nothing else. For a woman somewhere in her mid-forties, she was remarkably well-maintained, with pert breasts and a trim, toned figure that would be the envy of many women half her age. She normally kept her long hair in a ponytail, but tonight she had let the honey blonde locks down. Clutched loosely in her right hand was a thin rattan cane. In her other hand was a sleek cell phone.
Keely glanced at both items and shook her head. “Have you lost your mind? You know you’re supposed to stay away from me.” She smirked. “If you get out of here before I count to five,
maybe
I won’t tell John Wayne about this.”
Susan laughed and came farther into the room, swishing the cane back and forth as she moved. “Stupid girl. I’m here on John’s orders.”
Keely frowned. “I don’t believe you.”
Susan shrugged. “Boyd is standing guard in the hallway. Call him in if you want. He’ll confirm what I’ve told you.”
“
Boyd!
”
Susan laughed at Keely’s abruptly shouted call to the thuggish security man, but she said nothing further for the moment.
The door to the room opened again and Boyd poked his blond head in. “Yes, Miss Miller?”
Keely smiled as sweetly as possible. “Could you pretty please escort this psycho dyke from my room? She’s annoying me.”
Boyd grimaced. “Afraid I can’t do that. Miss Wagner is here on assignment.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
Another pained look crossed Boyd’s rugged features. “That’s not for me to say. I’m sorry, Miss Miller.”
He then ducked back out of the room and shut the door again.
Susan laughed as she came yet another step closer. This time she snapped the cane against the floor, making Keely jump. “Now then…where were we?”
Keely’s heart raced. Her mouth felt dry and she struggled to swallow as her gaze locked for a moment on the cane. The memory of being whipped was still so fresh in her mind. This wasn’t fair. She had been so sure this brand of humiliation was behind her.
“Please…” She struggled to keep a quaver out of her voice. Keely had her back to the wall as Susan continued to approach. Further retreat wasn’t an option. She could slide sideways to the corner, but that would accomplish nothing other than emphasizing her weakness and she didn’t want that. “What’s going on here? I don’t understand. I thought—”
“You thought you were his special girl.” Susan smiled in an irritatingly knowing way. She was only a few feet away now, nearly within touching distance. “In reality, you’re just another in a long line of naïve whores, albeit a slightly more useful than usual whore.”
Keely’s instinct was to refute the whore accusation, but in this case denial would have been laughable. It pained her how easily Susan shattered her illusions. Her tentatively restored pride had taken a heavy blow. “So what makes me useful?”
“John Wayne has a proposition for you. If you do what he wants, you can keep your favored position here in the big house.”
“And if not?”
Susan smirked. “You’ll belong to me again. And this time I’ll be able to do with you as I wish. I won’t have to hide or justify my treatment of you. No one will have a problem with it because everyone will know John approves. And after his speech tonight, the sheep will accept all John’s proclamations as holy writ.”
“That’s crazy.”
Susan laughed. “Is it? Do you really think so?”
Yet again Keely was forced to face an unpleasant truth. The Order faithful were already inclined to do as Susan said. John was their messiah. She had thought of him that way too. But now she felt only a sense of betrayal. She’d let herself believe John was genuinely interested in her as a person and as a valuable member of his inner circle. But the truth was he’d just been using her. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but now that she’d been confronted with this ugly reality all she could do was accept it. Because the only other scenario—a future as Susan’s slave—was no option at all.
She’d sooner die.
“Fine. What does John want me to do?”
Susan smiled brightly and held up an admonishing forefinger, which she waggled back and forth a time or two. “Ah-ah, not so fast. We’ll get to that in a moment. First I need something from you.” Her eyes flicked toward Keely’s chest. She opened her mouth and licked her lips. “Take off your top.”
Keely scowled. “What? No way.”
She flinched as Susan raised the cane and touched the tip of it to her cheek. “Do it. Unless you’d like me to whip you mercilessly. The choice is up to you.”
“You fucking bitch.”
Susan laughed. “Yes. I am. You have until the count of five to remove your top. Five—”
Keely pulled her top off and held her chin high. “There. You happy?”
Susan smiled. “Very.”
She made no move to touch Keely. Instead she just stood there and stared at her bare breasts for at least a full minute. Her eyes had a glazed look. But she soon snapped out of it, giving her head a hard shake before smiling again. “My. I do believe you have the loveliest breasts I’ve ever seen. You can put your top back on.”
Keely wasted no time doing just that. “All right, you’ve had your fun. Now what the fuck does John Wayne want from me?”
Susan held up the cell phone. “We’re to record a scripted video message to your brother. You are to say every word exactly as we’ve written it out for you. Your job is to make your brother believe you really mean the things you say. Do you think you can manage that, stupid girl?”
Keely frowned. “But nobody knows where Casey is. John says he’s in hiding somewhere.”
Susan nodded. “And so he is. But the boy can’t lay low forever. He’s bound to surface eventually. And when he does, representatives of the Order will deliver the message to him personally.”
Keely chewed her bottom lip and fretted over it a moment. “What am I supposed to say?”
Susan called for Boyd again. He came into the room and produced a folded sheet of paper at Susan’s request. Susan passed it to Keely, who frowned as she unfolded it and began to read the short script.
Her breath caught in her throat and her eyes got big as she encountered a particularly alarming passage. “You’re gonna hurt Casey.”
“He’s caused us a lot of trouble.”
Keely had her issues with Casey, it was true. There were times when she felt like she hated him. But she had never wished him any real harm. She couldn’t go along with this.
Could she?
Susan came closer and put a hand on Keely’s hip. “I know you think I’m cold-hearted, but I’m not a total monster. You don’t have to do this. You can refuse John’s offer and surrender yourself to me.” She raised a hand to smooth back a lock of Keely’s blonde hair. “I think we both know it’s what you really want, deep down.”
Keely’s face hardened. “Back off, bitch. I’ll read the goddamned script.”
The humor leeched out of Susan’s face. She sniffed disdainfully. “So be it. Let’s get to work.”
Chapter Sixteen
Some Fucked-Up Shit that Happened on the Road, Part Three
Somewhere in Louisiana…
The look on the doorman’s face as the trio of tattooed badass babes strolled up to the strip club’s entrance was comical. The way his mouth dropped open and his eyes bugged out made the women smirk. Though he didn’t know who they were—had, in fact, never laid eyes on them in his life—he waved them in ahead of some guys who were waiting in line to show their ID’s.
The reason was simple—chicks with the kind of looks these three had were just good for business. It was standard operating procedure in a scenario like this. Hot female customers got a kick out of stirring up the male patrons. They would pay the strippers to give them lap dances, maybe even make out with them. Technically touching was against the rules, but the rules never applied to knockouts like these. The faux-Sapphic shenanigans got the male customers extra stimulated, causing them to get extra loose with their money. The female customers got the attention they wanted and the dancers and the club made serious bank, a win-win proposition for everyone.
These girls were maybe a little hotter than the usual pack of exhibitionist babes that occasionally came around, but there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with that. All in all, it was just another typically wild Saturday night in bayou country.
The girls booted some guys from a table near the front of the stage and claimed it for themselves. The guys initially invited them to pull up extra chairs and join them, but that idea was rejected in favor of outright eviction. There was some resistance on the part of the guys, but that withered when Dez opened her purse and showed them her shiny, nickel-plated handgun.
As soon as they were situated at the table, Lana got out some coke and started chopping lines on its pitted surface. All three girls took a turn hitting that shit. They seemed oblivious to the fact that the attention of everyone in the club—including the dancers—was riveted on them. Powered by a big supply of the high-octane marching powder, they were running on more than three full days without sleep. The result was they were dangerously unhinged and were actively seeking to incite chaos wherever they went.
A bouncer came over to the table and told them they would have to leave. No weapons were allowed on the premises. Openly abusing piles of narcotics on the tables was sort of frowned upon too. Dez reached into her purse for her gun, but Echo forestalled disaster by seizing her wrist. This was too public a place to start wasting everybody in sight. Even gacked to the nines on blow, she had enough residual common sense to recognize that.
Dez folded her arms beneath her breasts and pouted. “You bitches are no fucking fun tonight.”
The bouncer said, “Look, ladies, I’d really hate to have to call the cops, but…”
Dez snorted. “Do you want your cock sucked?”
“What?”
“You heard me. Every problem has a solution, motherfucker.” Dez eyed the guy up and down. He was six foot and then some and filled out his clothes in ways even a girl who liked girls found interesting. “Take me somewhere private and I’ll blow your mind. That’s a fucking promise. Then we can all relax and have some goddamn fun.”
The bouncer laughed. “Take a look around, lady.” He waved a hand in a gesture meant to indicate the abundance of exposed female flesh on display. “You’re not offering anything special. Cheap bitches like you are a dime a dozen here at Vixens.”
Echo and Lana exchanged a worried glance.
Dez kicked her chair over as she stood up from the table. “You are dead.”
The bouncer laughed at what he no doubt took as idle bluster. But Lana and Echo knew better. The good-looking son of a bitch had sealed his fate the moment the rude insult passed his lips. You just didn’t say things like that to Dez and get away with it. But his punishment wouldn’t happen here because he was now a special case. Dez would want to savor his suffering and eventual demise and that would call for a quieter, more isolated location.
She knocked the table over and stomped her way out of the club. Echo and Lana were hot on her heels. All three women were burning with disappointment. It had been too long since they had last gotten to cavort in a strip club.
Outside the club, three sets of heels clicked on asphalt as the girls made their meandering way across the parking lot toward the Impala. Dez was a little wobbly as she sought to dredge a pack of smokes and a lighter from the depths of her purse while continuing to fume over the bouncer’s rude behavior.
“Still say I should have shot that cocksucker in the face right then and there. You can’t tell me he didn’t have it coming.”
Lana laughed. “No doubt, but you’ve gotta be smarter than that, Dez. Might have been our last fucking stand if you’d pulled that shit there. And I don’t know about you, but I ain’t in any hurry to die.”
Dez flicked at a neon green disposable lighter several times before finally summoning a thin column of flickering flame. She applied it to a fresh Marlboro Light and lit up. “Fuck that bullshit right in the ass. Ain’t anybody gonna kill us, baby. We’re too tough to die.”
Echo rolled her eyes. “Nobody’s too tough to die, Dez. One day your skull will get in the way of a bullet and that’ll be all she wrote.”
Dez sneered. “I say again,
bullshit
. Never gonna happen.”
Echo sniffed. “Look, I know how it is. You do a bunch of badass shit like we’ve done and you get to feeling invincible. But nobody’s invincible, including us. One day our luck’s gonna run out. That’s just how it is.”
Lana made a face. “Ugh. What’s with the doom and gloom? I just want to have some goddamn fun tonight. Hey…that who I think it is?”
She nodded at a line of cars to their right. Loitering next to a red Corvette was a trio of young men. They were smoking and passing around a whiskey bottle.
Dez cackled. “That’s them, all right. Let’s go say hi.”
Echo felt another jolt of apprehension. This was the same group of men who’d involuntarily surrendered their table to them. It stood to reason they were responsible for getting them ejected from the club. Obviously they’d told the bouncer about the gun in Dez’s purse. The pending confrontation here could only be bad news. It didn’t take much to rile Dez under more or less normal circumstances, but her current state of intense agitation meant every interaction with strangers held the potential for disaster. The smart move would be to get somewhere quiet so they could chill until they could finally pass out, but getting Dez under control when she was like this was easier said than done.