If there was a better place for Allen Rose to forget that two-timing bitch Marianne, he didn't know about it. Santa Elisa was about as far as you could get from New York and still stay in the States. And there was nothing here to remind him of that wife of his - none of her gossiping friends, no old pals to slap him on the back and tell him with a sly grin on their faces how sorry they all were to hear about it. Sorry, hell! That cheap slut must have been running around on him for at least a year, and God knows how many of his good pals got in on the action while he was away with the Army in Vietnam. Damn, how he wished sometimes he'd gone ahead and killed her like he'd started to do! Just blown her and that greasy boyfriend of hers to hell and back and that would have been the end of it. At least in prison he'd have something to occupy his mind, somebody to tell him what to do and think. In some ways, that kind of life might have been better than the eight months of running from his memories, drifting from town to town around the country just in the hope that one day, somewhere, he'd manage to erase that permanent portrait of her smiling face that lingered in his thoughts like a bad smell wafts around a room for days on end. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't actually caught her in the act. Christ it was just like some scene in a second-rate movie. He had to play Mr. Wise Guy and come home a week earlier than he'd wired her from the base - it wasn't his fault that the President's speeded-up withdrawal program brought him back sooner than anyone had expected. And that included Marianne.
Just like the jerk that he was, he'd sneaked into their apartment on Long Island, loaded to the shoulders with souveniers and flowers to surprise dear Marianne who had waited for him so devotedly. At least that was the way he'd planned it; nobody thought to tell him he'd find Sonny Devechio, a washed-up pro baseball player they'd both known before Allen went into service, stretched out naked as a jaybird on his bed. And Marianne! God, how the memory of that second in time burned into his brain like it had been etched there with acid - that sweet little honey of a wife, her long blonde hair falling over her bare shoulders, was going down on that oily-skinned jerk like a two-dollar whore with a dollar tip. Even now, just closing his eyes, he could see it all as clearly as he could then. At least he'd gotten the temporary satisfaction of breaking two of Sonny's ribs and turning that pretty-boy smile of his into a dentist's dream of broken teeth, but that short-lived revenge was hardly enoughto pay for the agony he'd had to endure these past eight months. In every city, every town he dropped down into, there would always be something, someone, to remind him of home. Or of the home that used to be, and of Marianne. Just some girl on the street, tall and buoyant and full of life, like the girl he'd married the summer between his second and third years in college, the Marianne Hardwick who'd said to hell with her parents' money and their social-climbing plans for her future and condescended to marry a college kid working his way through with a week-end job parking cars and hardly enough money to pay the rent on his third floor walk-up studio. That was the Marianne he wanted to remember, tried so hard to remember. But it was the Marianne he'd found "waiting" at home that ate at his guts like some tropical disease. Nothing lie could have caught in `Nam would have been worse.
But maybe now, just maybe, he'd found a place that wouldn't keep bringing those painful memories back to him. A place where he could try to carve out some new niche for himself in life, whatever it might happen to be. Writing again for a living, as he'd done right out of college until his number came up and it was off to fight somebody else's war, was out of the question, at least for now. Maybe it was living with Marianne that gave him that special spark, who knows. Perhaps she was his own special muse, but whatever the cause, he just couldn't bear to sit down at a typewriter now, even to write a letter. Writing just reminded him of her, and though he'd managed one fairly successful attempt at cracking the ranks of the acknowledged novelists, it looked as though that was all behind him now.
Here in Santa Elisa, nestled in the California redwoods in a pocket-sized valley that could have been straight out of the Gold Rush pages of western history. Even this bar where Allen Rose the writer had become, once again, Allen the bartender, fairly reeked of history and nostalgia. There were framed photographs lining the dark-paneled walls that had been taken of this Russian River settlement when the streets were all rutted wagon paths, and San Francisco was that booming Barbary Coast sin-city two days' ride to the south, yet to suffer its 1906 beating at the hands of fate.
Allen had been camping just north of here, alone in the off season in a state park campground, when he noticed the sign in the bar's leaded glass front window. Bartending wasn't exactly new to him, as that had been the job he held part-time his last year in college, and he still had his union card from back east, though his dues were far into the red. He'd ventured in mostly on a lark, just so he could tell himself for weeks that he actually had tried to get a job and that lady luck was as ruthless there as she had been on his homecoming. But as luck would have it, he was robbed of another chance to feel sorry for himself, for Clyde Kelly, the man behind Kelly's Sportsmans Bar, had hired him on the spot, complaining that he'd had that sign up for months, ever since the tourist season ended and his last boy took off for warmer weather down south. Kelly took down his name and social security number, grunted at his union card from some place way back east he'd never heard of, and handed him a clean bar towel. Just like that, Allen Rose, the drifter, became an honest citizen again. Or so he thought. If he'd known what awaited him in this sleepy little California town, he'd have run to the nearest bus stop and gotten as far from here as Greyhound could take him.
It was four o'clock in the afternoon this bleak February day, and Allen hadn't made enough in tips to play the juke box. Two customers all day, one cold beer from the cooler and even worse, one coke. Hardly the kind of business that bartenders' dreams are made of. But at least there had been some consolation today, since noon anyway, and she was still sitting right here at the bar, nursing her third orange juice, on the house at Clyde's instructions. Allen found it harder and harder to keep his eyes off her - she was the first girl who'd really turned him on since he left Marianne with a dish towel full of crushed ice pressed to her black eye.
God, was she ever beautiful! Maybe a shade over five and a half feet and as well assembled as any girl he'd ever seen. Incredibly long red, hair that flowed like a flaming waterfall over her delicate shoulders and down her back. And that face! She'd looked awfully young at first, so young, in fact, that he was going to ask to see her driver's license before serving her, but she asked for Mr. Kelly as though she knew him and seemed to know the place pretty well. Now, after a few hours of casual conversation as he busied himself cleaning and wiping glasses and polishing the mahogany bar until it reflected both their faces, he rested his elbows opposite her and struggled for a few words. This bartender's manner was slow coming back, and it had been a long time since he'd iust talked friendly-like to a girl like this. Oh, there'd been a few along the way west, but mostly cheap bar hustlers and an occasional small time hooker when he needed to answer that itch. But nothing like this! She had kind of a hippie look about her, something that went beyond just the clothes - jeans and a sweater. Maybe it was that soft sensual smile of hers whenever she spoke, or those eyes, green and sparkling like a couple of mountain pools. She had one hell of a figure, too? That much he could see when she went outside to the battered Volkswagen camper she'd arrived in. It wasn't a camper, really. It was one of the cheaper closed vans that passed for a camping vehicle among the California long-on-hair and short-on-money set. Allen had thought a couple of times of asking her why she had to keep returning to it so often, but he was dead set on remembering the clean-up man's advice. Old "Pop" Perkins looked to be about a hundred years old, so if anybody could offer the right formula for staying out of trouble, it ought to be him. They'd met on Allen's first night when Pop just showed up at closing time and started mopping the place, seemingly oblivious to Allen even being in the bar. "Learned a long time ago," he had explained, "that the best way to work for Clyde Kelly is to keep my eyes open but my mouth shut. I don't ask no questions ...never!" And that was the end of their conversation.
It seemed like apt enough advice now, even though his curiosity was getting the best of him and he was dying to know what a girl like this could possibly have to do with a man like Kelly. Hell, he was the magazines' stereotype of the backwoods man if there ever was one. Ex-lumberjack, arms like most men's thighs, prone to an occasional drink too many, and likely as not, running around right now in a tee-shirt and work pants in the souped-up pickup of his, doing whatever it is that keeps him busy all the time. That was another of the questions Allen had decided not to ask, at least not for now. Maybe this girl, Abigail she said her name was, maybe she was Clyde's girl! No, she couldn't be, she's just not the type to go for an oaf like him!
Whatever her story, Allen hadn't long to wait, for Clyde Kelly fish-tailed into the gravel and mud parking lot just a little past five. It was getting dark already, maybe a little earlier than usual since there had been a heavy drizzly overcast since early morning. Allen quickly turned on the outside lights, remembering Mr. Kelly's orders to have them on at least a half hour before dark so the truckers coming through with their day's load of logs from high up the Coast Range mountain sides would know the place was open. Kelly got them two ways, since he also owned the truck stop across the highway and the dingy little diner that adjoined it. But somehow, that seemed another world in itself over there, and though Allen had been tending bar here two weeks now, he'd only eaten there twice, choosing most of the time to just make a sandwich in the little cabin he'd rented from Amy Weathers a mile up the road. It was meant to be a summer place and only had one tiny, ancient, wood-burning stove for heat, but it was nice enough for now. Besides, he was here from mid-day until closing time, around ten o'clock, usually spending his dinner hour right here as there was hardly anything exciting going on in Santa Elisa at that hour. Or at any other hours, for that matter. What few people there were that remained here through the winter were mostly content to read a few dozen good books or just huddle by the fire and get up with the birds. Off-season folk hereabouts were a quiet lot by nature and sometimes Allen wondered why Kelly kept the bar open at all since it hardly ever took in enough to pay his salary.
"Hello, Al," bellowed Kelly as he swung his hulking torso through the doorway. "Think you can make room for one more?" This was Allen's fourteenth day on the job and he had heard that line at least a dozen times now, and still Kelly insisted on calling him Al; said it sounded more like a bartender. Allen was too sissified, he'd said one night, like a San Francisco bartender. So AI he had become, at least to Clyde Kelly and his friends.
And one of Kelly's least welcome friends was with him tonight, Thurman Marshburn, Santa Elisa's one and only deputy sheriff. Like they say in the westerns, the only law in these parts. And tonight, like every night, Thurman was out of uniform. Or at least, half out of it. He usually managed to wear the deputy's windbreaker jacket, and occasionally the regulation shoes, but usually he was dressed like this: wool lumberjack's shirt and heavy-duty denim workpants, his badge pinned to his shirt pocket and just kind of dangling there loosely. Sort of like the way Thurman saw his duties. Thurman was Clyde's age or close, about fifty, but sometimes it was hard to tell with these backwoods types. Most of them were well past the half-century mark, but tough as nails. It seemed that the rugged outdoors had just tempered them like felling trees does to a good premium grade axe, and Allen had already noticed that most of these older fellows around the village were far meaner looking than some of those burly truckers half their ages that roared through twice or four times a day in their huge snorting lumber rigs, water-cooled brakes steaming as they pulled in for a fill-up and a beer at Kelly's twin enterprises.
Kelly appeared not to notice his single customer at first, though it was hard to see how any man who was really a man could have missed Abigail even in a crowd. And even most faggots would have noticed her, if just out of insane jealousy.
"Hello, Abigail," he said finally, and Allen wondered if that was really a smirk on his face or if he was just being overly suspicious. "Decided to take me up on the offer, huh?"
Her warm friendly openness gone like someone had slipped another girl into her place, Abigail managed a weak smile. "Hello, Clyde," she said, those inviting green pools now pits of apprehension and maybe fear. "I guess you knew I would, sooner or later. There's no place for me but Santa Elisa."
Kelly looked up at Allen who was only a couple of feet away across the bar and shot him a cold look that said, "Go mind your own business, kid."
Thurman had sidled into his favorite corner, next to the oil stove and at the corner of the window where he could see out easily enough, but motorists passing through could not see him. He'd been strangely quiet since coming in with Clyde, and that only added to Allen's suspicions that something important was up. Thurman Marshburn was not exactly a bundle of electrifying wit and sparkling conversation, but he did always manage to have something to say on just about any subject.
"C'mon, Abigail, let's go into the office and talk." And with that out of the way for Thurman and Allen to hear, Kelly took the beautiful redhead into his private office and locked the door.
It was about ten minutes later when Allen finally discovered what it was about that battered orange van that kept the young girl so busy running back and forth. At first he thought it was his imagination, then he was convinced it had to be some tom on the prowl in the trees out back. Then it hit him - sure, it was a baby! It had to be!
Excusing himself from Thurman, who didn't notice him leave, Allen went outside to the vehicle and peered curiously through the dirty window. And there he was -playing in the back with a stuffed dog, all alone but seemingly safe and secure in the back of the van, bundled in a snowsuit that made him look like an Eskimo. He was maybe two, possibly less, and he seemed to take an instant liking to Allen, hurrying over to the back of the seat and grinning as only little kids can, all teeth and rosy cheeks. He was Abigail's, all right, the resemblance was uncanny, and with that mop of red hair and those freckles, there could be no doubt.
Whatever it was that he had been crying about seemed forgotten now, but Allen opened the door and talked to him anyway. It was nice to be around a kid, he thought. Having kids was something he and Marianne had planned for one day, though, thankfully, they never seemed to get around to it. He felt a cold shiver at just the thought of having her child around to remind him even more of her face.
Abigail's kid had gone through all his toys, bringing them up to the front of the van one by one, silently, for his new friend's inspection, when Allen saw the door open to Kelly's office and his big hulking frame suddenly fill the doorway like a big wedge, totally blocking out the light from inside and denying Allen just this one quick peek at the boss's inner retreat, the one he never left unlocked. He didn't even trust Pop with a key.
Allen hurried inside and was back behind the bar before Clyde and the girl came out. Clyde came out smiling and headed for his corner booth for a quick drink with Thurman before leaving again. He never stayed very long here, always dropping in for just a quick one and to give the place a once-over, then roaring off in that incredible truck of his to whatever it was that kept him so busy.
Abigail looked wistfully at Allen's face while she was putting on her jacket, her eyes filled with a hundred and one things she seemed to want to say, but her face was masked with that same look of fear and defeat he had noticed when Clyde first spoke to her. In another couple of minutes, she was gone without a word, and Allen didn't know if he'd ever see her again. He watched longingly through the frosted window until the red lamps of her Volkswagen disappeared around the first bend into the redwoods and along the river's bank.
Clyde and Thurman had double their normal one, but they were soon gone, laughing and howling like a couple of old women at some sort of private joke and only one more customer came in before closing time, leaving Allen alone with his thoughts.
And with the mirage-like memory of that incredibly beautiful creature who'd passed like sand through his fingers.
Chapter 2
Ten o'clock had come around awfully slowly, but now it was finally here and Allen could start tidying things up and making preparations for closing. He yawned a long, jaw-breaking yawn and laughed at himself for becoming such a rube overnight. Hell, back home he was just starting to enjoy himself about this time of night. Marianne had always been more of a night person anyway, preferring to keep late hours and pay for them with fewer hours of sleep in the morning. And probably in a bigger town, the bars would be just swinging into action right about now, but not here. What little action there was took place before ten, since practically everyone who worked around Santa Elisa in the off-season was connected with the lumbering operations up the coast a ways and they all were up before daylight, ready to move out with their giant hauling rigs and screaming two-man felling saws. Kelly's man at the grill opened at four A.M. across the way to catch the loggers for their huge he-man breakfasts, and the service portion of the truck stop was open twenty four hours, `round the clock, to snag what few straggling campers and long-distance haulers managed to wander through here late at night. And they did manage to stop most of them, since there was a big lighted sign about a mile down the coast road from here that told the honest truth - last twenty-four-hour station for a hundred and thirty miles. And that was a long, empty road at night.
Allen counted out the bills and change on the back bar, turned away from the door. It came to less than five dollars more than he'd started with at noon and he shook his head, laughing at the absurdity of keeping this place open at all. But at least it was a job, and it wasn't his concern if Kelly lost money, as long as Allen continued to get his pay on Saturday.
He heard footsteps scuffing on the big rubber doormat outside and turned quickly, his eyes darting instinctively to the heavy ancient .45 that Clyde kept under the counter on a special shelf, right about waist high, though he doubted he'd ever use it no matter what. There wasn't anything in this bar worth killing a man over.
The solid mahogany door swung open and a cold damp chill rushed through the cozily warmed bar. Allen waited to see who it was maybe if it was a tourist he could hustle him along in a hurry, but he doubted he would be so lucky. Probably some local with insomnia, and Kelly had warned him not to close until the legal hour if there were customers in the place, even if he had to call in Pop to help out. So far, that was an arrangement he had not been called upon to consider, as the bar had always been deserted by ten.
And then that gorgeous body flowed into the doorway and Allen could barely suppress the urge to jump over the bar to meet her. "Abigail! What on earth are you doing here?"
She looked sleepy, her hair a little tousled, but even more beautiful, if that was possible to comprehend. She had on leather sandals and though there was no rain at the moment, it was still awfully cold and wet out for much tramping around in barefeet.
"Couldn't sleep," she explained, wiping something from her eyes, "so I thought I'd walk down and have a beer maybe. Sometimes that helps me rest better." She sat down on a bar stool and propped her elbows on the counter, her long red hair flowing over her arms until it puddled on the bar. "I hope you weren't closing."
Allen tried to sidestep in front of the counted money on the mirrored back bar. "Oh, no, not for a while yet. I thought I'd stay open and maybe pick up a couple more customers before turning in."
"Great ...How about that beer?"
"Huh? Oh yeah, sure." Allen fumbled with the rounded aluminum door to the beer cooler like he had never been behind a bar in his life. Even pulling the metal cap off the bottle of Coors proved to be difficult. "Uh, here we are. Guess I'm a little tired."
"Thanks ...Business been good?"
Allen shook his head as the tractor portion of one of those enormous lumber rigs roared by, diesel engine screaming as the driver skillfully nursed the Road Ranger through its paces.
"I didn't really think so. It never was very busy when Jason worked here, except maybe once in awhile on pay day, if the loggers weren't all on their way to Santa Rosa for some real action."
"Jason?"
Abigail looked up from her beer, surprised. "Didn't Kelly tell you? Jason - my husband -used to work here. Had the same job as you until we moved to Berkeley."
Allen tried to hide the sudden sinking feeling of disappointment. "I didn't know you were married. Should've figured it out, I suppose, what with the kid and all."
"How did you know I had a kid if you didn't know about Jason?" Abigail's look was more accusing than curious. Allen instantly felt sorry for her - it was obvious she'd been lied to and deceived more than once by men, though a girl with looks like hers was lucky not to have been.
"He started crying this afternoon when you were in Kelly's office. We sort of had a little man-to-man talk until you'd finished."
The sparkle had returned to her green cat's-eyes and her face was as soft and warm as before. "Quite a little guy, isn't he? Just like his old man."
"Where is your husband? Does he work around here now?"
Abigail looked down into her beer as if she thought there was a message for her written on the botton of the glass. "No ...he's dead." Her face was still warm and innocent, but the sparkle had gone from her eyes.
"Oh ...I-I'm sorry."
"It's okay. I'm all right now," she explained.
"Happened last year. Anyway, life's for the living, right?" She faked a smile but Allen could see the hurt was far from gone.
"Where's the kid tonight? You got a sitter?" asked Allen, anxious to change the mood to something less painful for Abigail. He wasn't sure why, but suddenly it meant a lot to him that she shouldn't be unhappy. Maybe Abigail was that kind of girl. Some woman are - the sort you just want to make happy, to hold close to you and protect.
"No, he's all right though. He never wakes up after he goes to sleep. But I'd better get back just the same. Guess we'll be seeing a lot of each other, huh?"
Allen tried to take his time with that one. Whatever she meant by that, it had somehow gone right by him like a missed catch.
"I'm going to be working here, starting tomorrow ...as a dancer, didn't Kelly tell you?"
Again Allen had to shake his head. "I don't ask too many questions and Clyde and I aren't exactly drinking buddies."
Abigail laughed. "Sounds like you've been talking to Pop."
"Right, how did you know:"
"He gives everybody that same speech. Even told Jason, and Clyde's his uncle."
"Uncle!"
"Yeah, his sister's son. She's dead now too." Abigail stopped as if just the mention of someone's dying brought back the pain she'd tried to forget. "'Well, I'd better be going. Looks like rain and I wouldn't want to catch a cold before my first day on the job."
"Wait! Do you live nearby?" Allen knew he sounded foolish, like an over-anxious schoolboy chasing after the school's prettiest girl, but he couldn't help himself. "Maybe I could give you a lift."
"No, I'd rather walk," she smiled, "but you can walk me back to the cabin if you're closing up. It's the last one on Redwood Road."
"Sure! That's right on my way! I'm staying in that old place behind Miss Weather's house."
"You sound like you've lived here for years. Okay, it's a deal. Maybe we can have some coffee or something. I doubt I could get to sleep anyway."
"Great! I'll just be a minute." Allen could scarcely take his eyes off her as he hurriedly bagged the money and hid it in the prearranged hiding place behind the cola machine and switched off the lights. Only then did what Abigail had said begin to register ... Dancer! What on earth does this place need with a dancer! Oh well, remember Pop's motto and keep your lip buttoned!
Chapter 3
Somehow it was easier than Abigail would have imagined it to be - Jason had been dead now for over a year and anyway, she had known all along that he would never in a million years have wanted her to save herself for some sort of silly memory of him. It was not for Jason's memory, though, that Abigail had waited all this time before giving herself to another man; it was only what she wanted to do, what her heart told her was right and honest. Until now, no man had really interested her, and though all her friends told her she would know it easily enough when the right one came along, she'd steadfastly refused to believe she could ever allow herself to become involved with anyone now that Jason had gone out of her life. But it had happened, just as everyone had told her. Not something she had planned, not even something she'd dreamed would happen.
She walked along the highway with this new man who had somehow come into her life out of nowhere. In some ways, he was a lot like Jason had been, a dreamer, a bit of a wanderer. And probably, if you scratched the surface just a mite, a lot like Jason in the success department - neither of them would ever aspire to climbing the well-trod corporate ladder or building the ranch house in the suburbs, but both of them shared that common bond of the perennially disatisfied, those people who set out to change things they don't like, rather then accepting all of life's unfairness.
Abigail, her long red hair billowing in the moonlight as the sky began to clear and the chalk-white light filtered through the towering redwoods along their route, told Allen finally of Jason's death, something she had never shared with anyone. But Allen seemed immediately to be more than a newcomer to her life; it was as if they'd known each other a long time and maybe had just drifted apart somewhere along the way and now had reunited in this quiet little California village in the middle of the night. She told him, painfully, of those months at Berkeley, when Jason fell in with a wild-eyed bunch and slowly, unknowingly, adopted their revolutionary talk and their anarchistic plans. Yet to Jason, new to this kind of excitement and as innocent as the small-town kid he was, it was all a kind of game, just a simple, maybe somewhat thrilling, sort of way to take out all those normal college-age frustrations against the system, against the establishment and the people who get us all into wars and then send off our young men in the best years of their life to die for us in some God-forsaken end of the earth most of us would never want to even visit, much less fight for.
That was the way she had told it because now, having spent countless sleepless, empty nights vainly struggling to piece the parts back together and make some kind of sense out of Jason's needless death, she could see and understand how it all had happened. How she had been so skeptical at first, hanging on stubbornly and determinedly to her small town Middle American notions about what was right and wrong; how she'd refused to agree with Jason and his college friends when they flared into all that frightening, violent rhetoric, that talk of destroying and killing, never of loving and rebuilding. And also how finally, she had found herself, without even knowing it, mindlessly trotting along their same doomed trail, the path that had led ultimately to the death of the one person who counted most in her life, the husband who left her that single fragment she clung to now like it was her last hope - her son and his namesake.
Abigail had left out the important part of her story, though she could tell that Allen sensed there was more. It was obvious that he was suppressing his curiosity out of friendship, that he was one of those rare people who cared enough to want others happy and at peace. They had stopped at the narrow doorstep of her cottage, all the tangible legacy Jason had left her, and paused in the moonlight, each waiting for some kind of hoped-for signal, some sort of cue to say that, yes, they shared the common bond of hurt and pain and that maybe, tonight, they would share a lot more.
"Allen ..." Abigail finally broke the long silence, her eyes downcast. "There's something I didn't tell you. Something I've never talked about with anybody except some old friends who knew about it anyway. I want you to know ...to share it with me. Okay?"
Allen held her hands in his. "If it's about your husband's death - the bomb explosion - I figured it out already. I'm a writer, remember. Or at least I used to be. It's supposed to be second nature for me to remember names and events. You never mentioned your last name and I figured you had a reason. It's Madison, right? Your husband was one of the college students killed in the bomb blast that wrecked those political headquarters in Berkeley. Am I right on both counts?"
Abigail nodded, still avoiding his eyes, for she would not have wanted this man who had suddenly come into her life to see tears that had begun to ripple down her smooth pink cheeks. "Then you know the rest, huh?"
"That they are still looking for Jason Madison's wife who disappeared shortly after the incident? Yeah, I remembered that too."
"And it doesn't make any difference to you:"
"Why should it? You've made it pretty apparent that you weren't involved in whatever it was those people were up to in that house when it blew up. Anyway, most everybody seems to think it was an accident, so what could you tell the police that they don't know already?"
Abigail leaned her head against his chest. He could feel the tantalizing warmth of her small curvaceous body against his, the fullness of her breasts against his body. "They want me to tell them about the group's activities, about what it was they planned to do with those bombs they were making the night ...the night Jason and the others were killed."
"So why don't you? It can't hurt Jason now."
"But I can't! I don't know anything and that's the truth! They never let me in on things like that. Everybody knew my head wasn't into that kind of trip. I mean, I just wasn't into killing or destroying. It's just not me and I can't help what I am."
"You don't have to apologize for that."
"Oh, I'm not sorry for the way I feel. It's just that the cops would never believe me. To those guys I'm just another crazy hippie off the Berkeley street scene and they'd never buy it if I just told the truth. They'd find some way of holding me. Remember that girl the Feds arrested in Wisconsin?"
"But you haven't done anything wrong. What could they do to you?"
Abigail turned her face away again, but she did not protest when Allen's arms encircled her warmly. "They could take my son, that's what they could do."
"Take little Jason! You can't be serious! Your're no criminal. How could they take your child away from you? This is America, remember, not Russia."
Abigail laughed weakly, remembering some similar words she had once spoken to her husband when he was trying so desperately to convert her to his radical philosophy. "Take my word for it, Allen. If they could mix me up in that mess in Berekely, Jason would be as good as gone. You see, those nuts weren't just playing games with all that gelignite and dynamite. They had some pretty nasty plans under way, and a lot of innocent people would have died if it all hadn't ended so ironically. I'd know if Jason was ever seriously into the really bad stuff. He didnt tell me much about their plans, but he did tell me he was against most of what was mapped out and that lie was going to try to change some minds. But I guess he never did."
"I'm really sorry ...1 didn't think it was so serious."
Abigail cuddled against him, shivering for a moment in the night chill. "Oh, it's serious, all right. And the police have some idea what was supposed to happen, but they don't know who was calling the shots, who the leader was."
"Do you know?" Allen asked, almost afraid of what she might answer.
"Unh-Unh, nobody would have trusted me with that. But if I did, Allen, believe me I'd tell them in a minute. Those people were rotten and they were slowly but surely infecting Jason with their poison. They claimed to be real beautiful humanitarians, but they were just killers, no better than the rest of the killers in this country who call themselves by a bunch of other names. Like politicians and generals and ..."
She stopped there, suddenly aware that it was late and that her voice was getting louder and louder. "I'm sorry if I got carried away, Allen, but it's obviously a touchy point with me. Jason's friends have made me a wanted criminal and I don't like the role. Come on in and let's have that coffee."
Abigail found her key in the pocket of the faded Army surplus field jacket she wore and opened the chipped and battered front door to the tiny wooden cottage that had once belonged to Jason's mother. She had left it to him on her death and it had been the first home Abigail and her husband had shared after their marriage; little Jason's bedroom now was the nursery where he had grown from a baby to a toddler, before they moved south to Berkeley - and disaster.
They both stepped into the narrow, cluttered living room, lit with only the soft glow of the single lamp she had left outside Jason's room. Abigail reached for the wall switch beside the door and her arm brushed over Allen's. For long moment, they both looked at each other, eyes searching in the dimness for that elusive signal. His arms went out to her and closed around her, the door still open to the moonlit night's stirring chill.
Suddenly, as if some secret switch had been found and opened within her, Abigail felt an enormous aching for this man rise from nothing and swell into a rapid-fire crescendo of emotion and desire. She merely looked yearningly into his eyes - that simple solitary act was enough. He grabbed her shoulders and eased her down onto the pillow-covered single bed that served her as a sofa. His lips locked onto hers, his tongue probed the hungry moistness of her mouth, his teeth rubbed hard against hers in the fast firmness of their intense embrace.
Abigail could not help herself - it had been a long time since she'd been with a man like this, and until this moment, she would never have believed it possible. But her reply was swift and to the point; she could feel those same tell-tale pangs of sorrow and of guilt that reminded her of her dead husband, but something else had seized her thoughts that was far more powerful and demanding. Her own tongue snaked between his teeth, pushed hard against his tongue deep inside. Her arms clamped together behind his back. Their mutually shared passions came quickly and fiercely, like a brush fire that raged spontaneously in the night in a flash of lightning-hot desires they were ground tightly together, breath coming hard and fast, their bodies aching to touch, to rub lasciviously together in the timeless manner of man and woman together in love and lust. The two of them suddenly ached - yearned - to be totally naked, to possess each other completely in a way that seemed only right and pure, to own each other if only for this moment in a blinding rage of passion. Abigail tried to slow herself, to ease this frantic impatience that had suddenly seized her. If this were to happen, it somehow only seemed right that she not rush into anything, if only for the memory of her husband, but it was useless to try - Allen's touch excited her beyond belief. Only his simple and innocent caress on her neck was doing things to her mind and body that the touch of another man could never do; merely the thought of a man having her body revulsed her, yet ...yet she wanted Allen desperately, hungrily, ached for his possession in a way that physically hurt her inside. Just the feel of his masculine firmness on her smooth soft flesh sent rippling chills of desire racing through her body. Her nipples had suddenly grown hard and jutting, and she could feel the coarseness of her sweater against the tender flesh as he pulled her hard against his strong chest. The sweater seemed tight and constrictive and she shivered at the very prospect of Allen stripping it from her body.
Still locked in this primeval embrace, they rolled together on the overstuffed pillows there on the sofa-bed, first rising then falling, wound tightly around each other like a couple of salmon spawning in the river that ran swiftly behind the cottage. His lips left the warmth of her mouth reluctantly and traced a path of warm kisses across her cheek to her neck, as his hand crept up the long smooth length of her thigh, still protected by her jeans. Teasingly, but with a tenderness that warmed them both in the night coolness, Allen eased his fingers closer to the "vee" between her gently scissoring legs. She tried to keep quiet, fearful of waking the sleeping child not far away, but it was impossible to totally suppress the moan that seeped from somewhere deep in her chest. Abigail discovered she was alive, explosive, with a desire she had not remembered or even known existed, every pore of her sensuous young body tingling, just the electricity of this man's touch on her skin was driving her insane. God, they were all right, she told herself between aching gasps, they said there would be another man for me some day...and now there is! Oh, I can't believe this is happening to me!
Allen slipped his fingers in the wool of her sweater at her tiny waist and pulled upward slowly. She gazed briefly into his eyes and then raised her arms above her so that he could pull the garment from her body. He gave an audible gasp as the sweater cleared her breasts, exposing the voluptuously swelling mounds of her proud-set breasts. They were rounded and firm as they rose like twin pink-capped peaks separated with a deep inviting cleft. His fingers touched her naked skin there between the sensous swells of her breasts, and she shivered with anticipation and excitement at the sensation.
His eyes anxiously awaiting the revelation of her whole unguarded nakedness, Allen unzipped her jeans and pulled the tight-fitting denim down along her smoth milk-white thighs, along with the sheer bikini-cut panties she wore beneath them. He gave an extra tug as the panties caught up between her softly trembling thighs where her warm female moisture had already seeped through the tight crotchband.
"Oh, yes, Allen, it's all right ...please take all my clothes off, Allen. I want so badly to be naked here with you," she blurted, embarrassed at her own words but not ashamed of the way she felt. It all seemed so right now, and now she was certain. Her eyes were closed and her lips parched with her growing eagerness. She lay there in the dim light on the sofa-bed with him as he yanked the jeans further down her slender supple legs, gazing all the while at the wispy burnished curls of her vee-shaped little pussy. She lifted herself to accommodate his movements and he pulled both the garments from her ankles and tossed them further down the sofa-bed ...and she was totally and absolutely naked beneath him. All of her red-haired young womanhood sprawled invitingly like some artist's fantasy from a mens' magazine, over the mountains of pillows they had not bothered to rearrange in their frantic haste. Her own fingers suddenly, with a mind of their own, touched and carressed the hugely swellings mounds of her breasts lifting their tender weight in her palms and offering them like ripened fruit to Allen's eager lips. He leaned over and took one throbbing pink nipple in his hands and then fastened his hungry wet lips on the round sensitive peak of the other breast. "Oh, hurry, Allen ... it's been so long! Hurry lover, hurry!"
Chapter 4
On any other night this time of year, Abigail Madison would have padded around her cottage shivering and muttering to herself, wearing her wool ski socks to keep her feet from soaking up the floor's damp chill, hurrying about to get ready for bed, anxious to hide beneath those quilted covers until she had regained some semblance of comfort. But not tonight - though she wore nothing but the smile of self-assured happiness on her face, Abigail was as warm as a summer's evening.
Allen had wasted not a moment getting out of his own clothes; his slacks and shirt were piled at the foot of the sofa-bed alongside his sorts and socks. He and Abigail were nearly hidden in the heaping pile of pillows that covered the sofa. Only the arched curve of clenched, muscular male buttocks was visible, and a pair of trim, deliciously-tapered calves that were locked together in the hollow of a strong male back. Abigail was stretched, naked, beneath his weight, her ample breasts crushed under the strong, hard muscles of his chest, her moist hungry lips locked in fierce combat with his. Her probing, yearning tongue had wormed its way between his teeth in a low moaning cry as their naked forms ground together in the night. Abigail could feel the incredible raging flames of her passion burning hotly inside her, fed with the painful memories of many long aching months without a man to hold her. Every taut, strained fiber of her young body was an inferno, fanned by the gnawing furnace of passion and desire that was her belly. Her loins seemed searing hot to the touch, as if actually about to burst into red-hot flames, the soft, quivering flesh of her vagina trembled with the intensity of the scalding maelstrom that swirled madly inside her body, a seething-hot whirlpool of long-suppressed passion that threatened to roast her alive with its fierceness.
Her buttocks were uplifted, nearly off the pillow that rested beneath the tempting curve of her ass-cheeks; her long, supple legs twisted together in a death-grip behind Allen's back. Between the warm, now-moist crease of her buttocks, his long, hard prick lay nestled, awaiting only the quick manly snap of his loins to elevate it slightly and sink it wetly into the soft, moistened lips of her eager young pussy. She kissed him again, without shame or reservation now, biting his lips, sucking his tongue into her own ravenous mouth, urging him on. "Please, Allen, please ...now, please. I've waited so long for this moment to come." Her voice was a throaty whimper, soft and tender and trusting, not a demand but a hoarse, hopeful plea for him to bring to her emptiness the full, satisfied warmth only a man can bring a woman.
He rocked up off her for a second, lifted his weight from her nakedly squirming body. Abigail answered instantly, reaching down between their anxiously poised bodies and fumbling nervously for the thick, swollen shaft of his penis with her tiny palm. Her fingers locked around the lust-distended cock and aimed it perfectly, though she was shivering with the fear and apprehension left from her long months of deprivation and loneliness. She shivered from the tips of her bare, curled-under toes to the soft red hairs on the back of her slender neck at the feel of his hotly throbbing penis as it brushed between the sparse, reddish pussy hairs and parted the soft, pink lips of her vagina with its turgid knob. It entered her with an obscene wet sucking noise that seemed to fill the room as her vaginal muscles contracted hungrily and eagerly and pulled his masculine hardness up into her warmly receptive cunt. "Oh, yes, Allen ...yes, now! Push hard into me! Now!"
Allen needed no further invitation -- with one long smooth stroke he rammed his desire-hardened cock all the way up to the smooth cushiony tip of her cervix. He moaned out loud at the breathtaking sensation of entering her at last. God, she was so hot and wet and so wonderfully tight! His cock felt like someone had wrapped it with a steaming hot towel and was squeezing it tightly with two clenched fists. The smooth wet walls of her pussy constricting around his lust-hardened penis as it sank into her soft hair-lined cunt almost drove him insane. He remembered her kid asleep in the house or he would have screamed with painful excitement at this fantastic pleasure. Never had he felt anything like this ...not with his wife, not with any girl he'd ever had. Christ, how those muscles closed in around his cock!
"Ooooohh, God, yes!" she groaned in the wanton anguish of her frenzied passion, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck, pulling his chest down against the soft, crushable mounds of her breats.
He plunged his heavily swollen cock up and up, deeper and deeper into the warm soft cavern of her womb, feeling the whole of her trembling belly openings before his onslaught as though this were her first fuck. She was so deliciously tight, and so wildly ecstatic, like a teeny-bopper getting it for the first time!
Her whole body jerked and twisted and she moaned incessantly, her face contorted in ecstatic passion. Her mouth moved endlessly and her nostrils flared in untamed animal desire as her body was suddenly and viciously seized in the throes of this enveloping, consuming, madness of forbidden desires and hunger. Her forehead was covered with a thin transparent sheen of perspiration and her hair was becoming moist where it brushed her face.
Abigail fought the urge to think at all, she struggled just to exist, to let her body move and squirm under Allen's relentless assault. She did not want to use her brain, to think for even a second of what she was doing, for she knew what would happen if she did. She tried, God how she tried ... but it just wouldn't work that way. Slowly, like and old television image coming into focus, a painful vision etched its way into her consciousness. It burned out of her past like it was painted with acid in her memories and in a moment it was foremost in her mind, as if it has been rammed physically into her brain and was blocking out everything else. It was Jason's face ...
Why, why can't I get this out of my system? He's dead and gone now and he'd want me to go on living! Why can't I just forget? Why can't I be a woman again!?
She tried vainly to choke back the words her mind cried out for but her body so desperately feared, but it was no use: Allen, Allen, I'm sorry! I can't! I just can't!
He could read it in her eyes, see her thoughts mirrored in the fearful, far-away look that glazed over her pupils like a coat of wax. Christ, how he knew what she was feeling! She did not have to even say it - he'd felt it a dozen different times with as many women. That sickening tightening in his stomach as he remembered his wife ...and what she had done to him. He could see that it was only slightly different with Abigail - still it was the memory of another that threatened to ruin the present for her and for both of them. Her lips trembled as she started to speak ...he knew what he had to do, not just for himself but for her also. She was so close ...so close to letting herself go and becoming a real woman again, dragging herself out of this self-imprisonment she had forced on herself. He knew he mustn't stop ...he could not stop now, not if there was to ever be anything more between them and right now he wanted that more than anything else.
Allen knew what her next words would be. She would beg, plead, then order him to stop and then it would be hopeless. He knew only one way to prevent it ...the one way a man could mold a woman into what he wanted. And he did it.
Nothing could stop him now as he fucked like a wild man to bring her to her senses, to exorcise this demon from her mind and free her from its clutches. He slithered his strong hands under the cheeks of her quivering buttocks and cupped them tightly, raising them off the bed for even greater access to her open and unguarded loins.
He fucked up into her from that position with all the strength of his hips and thighs and could feel the smooth, moist flesh of her cunt clasping and unclasping like the beat of her heart all around his hot bursting cock. Her lips were still now, though half parted as if about to speak, but he knew he was succeeding, he could see from her face that she was giving in to him, denying this phantom memory the power of controlling her body a second longer. He fucked into her harder and harder and rammed the last inch of blood-engorged cock thundering up into her tender young cunt, bringing a welcomed moan of ecstatic abandonment from far down her parched throat. Her nostrils flared and her eyes, open wide now but unseeing in her blind passion, stared up at the ceiling as he fucked her hard and deep with long punishing strokes that buried the lust-swollen head of his aching cock deep in her nakedly writhing belly.
He pulled his head back so that he could watch ...watch as he skewered her lewdly on his long thick cock and with the masculine prowess of the ages, played her like an instrument, heightening her desires in a lustful crescendo no orchestra conductor could match for intensity. God, it was fascinating to watch! Just to see what magical wonders he could work with only his God-given tool, turning this frightened young girl into a woman again with only the wet ravaging strokes of his penis to do his bidding. Her face was contorted with passion now and her lips bared back tightly over her teeth with greater and more desperate sounds escaping from her savagely heaving chest.
Her arms which had been wrapped tightly around his neck, her nails digging frantically into his back, slithered down now and dug demoniacally into his muscular sinewy buttocks as they pounded up into her openly defenseless loins. She was really coming alive from his stepped-up ravishment of her girlish treasures, and he smiled to himself as he saw her begin anew to writhe passionately under his madly skewering thrusts.
Wet smacking noises resounded through the tiny room with each cruel pile-driving lunge he made into her and only added to the thick atmosphere of musky excitement that hung like a cloud over their lewdly entwined bodies.
He ran his hands from the smooth hollowing cheeks of her buttocks down to her thighs and then up between them to the soft soaked reddish pussy hair surrounding her cock-stretched cunt-lips. He fondled and caressed her there and felt the eagerly clinging lips of pussy flesh which held and throbbed around his cock like a tight rubbery mouth that was devouring him alive, sucking him bodily into her long-empty womb where he was needed so desperately.
Her body was slippery from the sweat of the wild untamed gyrations of the two of them there in the dimness of her cabin and her head flailed uncontrollably back and forth on the cushions of the bed beneath them. Her mouth was wide open in ecstatic abandonment and she had become something nearly inhuman as she twisted and churned, lost in the raptures of her own total and unconditional surrender, spreading her legs wide apart and jerking them up to her shoulders, opening up her hungrily sucking cunt to his lewd desires.
He looked down into her lovely face, even more beautiful now as it was contorted and twisted in her passion, and marveled at the change that had swept over her in such a short time - she was his now, totally and wholly his. She belonged to no other man in the world at that moment, only to him, and he could do with her anything he desired and she would instantly humble herself to his wishes. Jesus, it was incredible! She was so fantastically good-looking, like a movie director's fantasy of womanhood, all rounded and firm and bouncing in just the right places, her skin so white and soft, her legs long and supple as the locked around him and pulled his lust-tightened loins up against hers.
"Oh, yes, yes!" she gasped hoarsely, lost now in the rapturous storm of her anguished desires and lust. "Harder, harder! Oh, Allen, fuck me so good! Please, fuck me hard!" She was nearing her orgasm and swung her soft tender thighs up and wound them voluptuously around his back, waving her lewdly dancing ass-cheeks in uncontrolled abandon from side to side and spiraling her cock-filled cunt up and down crazily on his hotly growing rod of male-flesh.
"Oh, God, I'm coming! I am, I am, I'm coming!" she cried, almost as if she couldn't believe what her body was telling her. And with a high-pitched gasp of intense passion she locked her ankles in a death-grip high up behind his laboring back. At the same time, her arms snaked tightly around his neck and smashed his mouth against hers, where, their tongues locked in mortal combat with each other. Her body shuddered intensely and she held tight to him, not moving but jerking around him in a pulsating rhythm that spewed her orgasmic fluid out around his still hard-driving cock with such intensity that it flooded the wide-spread crevice of her ass in the fury of her long-awaited fulfillment, soaking his balls as they slapped lewdly against the tiny puckered ring of her anus.
Allen could feel an orgasm welling inside himself like none he could remember. It was more than just the physical gratification, more than just the welcome relief of quenching the lustful flames that licked torturingly at his loins. Christ, this was something special and he knew it - something that transcended just the ordinary and soared on into a world all its own. God, he loved her, he lusted for her, he wanted to soothe her, he wanted to hurt her ...all of these powerful emotions swirled around inside him until he could feel his thickly jerking cock struggling to answer his feelings in its own fantastic way. It started with a slow aching pressure deep with his lust-bloated balls and he gripped the cheeks of her wildly undulating buttocks and squeezed with a crushing strength, feeling her cringe as great gasps of passion began spewing from his own throat.
"Oh, oh ...Oh!" he grunted and groaned and increased the viciousness of his strokes so that his pelvis smacked obscenely against the moist pink lips of her pussy and his lust-hardened cock dipped deep into the far, untouched recesses of her wantonly ravished belly.
He felt himself coming and, throwing his hands up behind her knees, shoved her lewdly upraised legs as far up over her shoulders as they would go, and ground down into her openly convulsing cunt with renewed fury, bringing groans of left-over passion from her lips still locked tightly and wetly to his in a hungry, ravenous union. Her arms still clasped him in their vise-like grip, and the ache in his sperm-swollen balls was unbearable. God, he had to cum now or he would explode like a blockbuster bomb!
He gasped into the moistness of her mouth, felt the bursting -at his loins, heard her whimpering cry and felt the tightening of her arms around his neck and then ...then with a deep soul shattering groan that went on and on into her throat, he exploded deep inside her, shooting his hot, liquid sperm far up into the warmly sucking depths of her womb. He could feel his insides empty into her, draining him until he thought he would collapse from the unbelievable pleasure-pain.
They lay still then, locked in the lewd embrace of love for what seemed forever though it lasted only a few minutes their interlocking limbs wound together like the figures from some Indian temple carving. And then he rolled off her perspiration-soaked body, noticing her breasts still heaving spasmodically from the continued fury of her orgasm. Only after a long while did she speak.
She looked deep into his eyes, neither of them saying the words that ached to be said. Finally, "Allen, you ...you have done me a fantastic favor. You've brought me back to something I though I'd never see or feel again. And I...I..."
He smiled and touched his finger softly to her trembling lips. "Don't say it, darling. There'll be time for all that. There will be a lot of time for us, I'm sure of it."
And he held her still-naked body tight against his as she began to cry quietly into his strong chest.
It was weird and crazy and wonderful all at once. There was so much to be happy for, so much more in store for her now that Allen had become part-all-of her life, save for the special niche she saved for her precious child. And yet ...there was so much to tell him, so many things he didn't know. But she couldn't spoil this moment now. Not after what this simple act had made them to each other ...Oh, Allen, Darling, I love you so much and I don't want to lie to you, to deceive you. I don't want to keep any part of my life from you. But I must ...I have to! Please forgive me! Please!
Chapter 5
Ask any man who's ever been a soldier and he'll tell you there are some things you just don't forget. You can be ten thousand miles from the nearest hostile artillery fire and suddenly, like you were back sweating your ass off in Georgia or South Carolina, are stuck off in God-awful places one of those tried-and-true lessons some drill instructor pounded into your brain will come rushing back and catch you unaware, fill you with that special kind of fear and apprehension that men who've weathered combat can remember only too well. That heart-racing alertness that tunes every single living cell of your body and mind - to a special frequency, one that tells you loud - and clearly, in a shout, not a whisper ...that something is wrong.
And Allen could feel it now. It had swept over him like a Pacific wave, leaving his skin cold and clammy in the night chill. At first, he thought it was some kind of inner feeling, some sort of sixth sense, about himself and Abigail. And after all, she had seemed a little bit upset after it was all over, but that was easy enough to attribute to those long months without a man.And she had even said herself that she was glad it had happened, that she felt a part of her had come back that she had nearly forgotten ever existed.
He could have spent the night there, probably, but he remembered enough about small towns to know that was probably a bad notion. Poeple around here knew everything anyone was doing, and probably most of what they were thinking of doing. No, staying there would only call attention to the two of them, and that was the last thing he wanted now. He still thought her worries about that nasty bomb business were a little overblown, but he certainly would do nothing that might get her in trouble. And in a community like Santa Elisa, the best way to avoid running into the law was to just stay out of sight.
No, that wasn't what was eating at him as he walked slowly down the graveled track that led to his tiny cabin. It had to be something else. Carefully, methodically, like he had been taught to do in Vietnam, he deliberated on all the possibilities, mulled over all the sensory data that his eyes and ears and thoughts were offering him ...and it hit him. It wasn't something in his mind after all!
He stopped dead in his tracks and ducked quickly behind an enormous redwood's trunk, one of hundreds that lined this road. Safely hidden in the darkness, he glanced back up the winding lane he had just come down from Abigail's. Near the top of the ridge, he could see the living room light still on at her cottage, and the four others that faced the trail below hers all darkened and still, probably empty now that the summer season was long gone. And there it was - that nearly invisible out-of-place object that had triggered his senses as he walked past, his thoughts all on Abigail, her warmth and tenderness and the rapidly-growing feelings he was developing for the beautiful girl. Maybe if he'd been just out for a stroll, his mind and body more attuned to what was going on around him, he would have noticed immediately. But as it was, only his sub-conscious picked up on it, that little portion of one's mind that stays constantly alert, the part that saves your life in combat. There was a car parked in that tiny dirt alley that led to the empty red-painted cabin just down from Abigail's. And now he knew why his brain had registered it when he'd only just walked past.
That driveway had been empty when he and Abigail had walked up the hill from Kelly's! He was certain of it because he had consciously noted that house and the brightness of its red paint job that seemed to glow in the moonlight as if it were freshly-painted and still wet. And there had been no car there then.
Maybe in the city or even in a bigger town, he would never have given it a second thought. But on this tiny deserted lane in the middle of winter, you could normally hear a car as it turned from the highway down the hillside that ran past Kelly's. Even in the middle of fucking Abigail he would have heard it under normal circumstances. Somehow, whoever drove that in must have quietly eased it up the road, lights probably off, and killed the ignition at the first chance, maybe backing it down the slight grade and into the alley with the engine off. And why should anyone go to such great lengths to avoid being noticed? Hell, why was anyone even parked around here this time of year? He'd been in Santa Elisa long enough to know all the cars, and that one was definitely not one of them. It was an imported job, maybe one of those Fiat roadsters, though he couldn't be sure hidden like it was in that driveway.
Acting more on instinct that on rational thought, Allen stepped from behind the tree and started towards the sports car to get a better look. Just then, there was a whiny scream as the engine turned over and suddenly, lights blazing on high beams, the car lunged from the driveway, spun a rooster-tail of gravel on the narrow roadway and raced by him in first gear. Like he was back in Vietnam, Allen dove headlong for the brush that lined his route, then cursed himself and that stupid driver as he realized he'd muddied both arms of his last clean shirt and ripped the elbow completely out. In a flash, he was back on his feet, straining for some clue to the identity of the driver, but it was too late. The car turned onto the highway and was gone in an acrid cloud of burning rubber, safely disappearing into the night.
Allen thought first of going back to Abigail's, maybe asking her if she knew anyone with a car like that one. But he decided not to worry her with it; she had enough to think about the rest of the night without adding this to her apprehensions. She'd made a big decision tonight, taken an irreversible step that would change her life, and he did not care to give her more to worry about.
No, this was something for him to figure out. His own little problem. Whoever it was in that car was obviously watching him or Abigail, and they certainly didn't care to be seen and identified. Allen brushed the mud from his clothes and made his way gingerly on down the hill, his, legs aching from the bruising dive he'd taken into the ditch. Ouch, Goddamn it! he cursed in the stillness of the Santa Elisa night. If I get my hands on that bastard, I 'll choke him to death!
Chapter 6
Clyde had gone back to check the double lock on the back door of his bar; otherwise, he and Thurman and Thurman's hired handyman assistant would have pulled out of the parking lot a couple of minutes earlier and they might have run headlong into the fast-moving sports job that raced out of Redwood Road and onto the highway inland towards Santa Rosa. As it happened, they had only just entered the highway themselves and Thurman barely had time to note the California license number before the car disappeared around the first tree-lined bend in the road east.
"Maybe you oughta' go after him, Thurman," joked Clyde, well aware that the deputy's county car could barely catch a fully loaded logging rig, much less a sports car with a head start. "Might be some escaped criminal or something," he laughed with a vigor that shook his huge beer-belly.
"Naw, I reckon not. Not this time," he answered, shifting the four-year-old Chevy's manual transmission into second as the wheezing six-cylinder engine lugged up the grade into the middle of Santa Elisa.
"Thurman, hold it!" shouted Kelly suddenly, all the boisterous humor now gone from his commanding voice. "Pull over and douse your lights."
"Oh, all right," he replied. "Wha'd you forget this time?"
Clyde Kelly didn't waste an answer but opened his door almost before the sedan came to a halt and stepped out quickly, pushing the door closed just enough to turn off the dome light, but not enough to make any noise. "Just sit real quiet, both of you. I'll be right back."
Thurman looked into the back seat at his hired man, Pres, sitting there looking confused. "Maybe Mr. Kelly gotta take a piss, huh?" he asked softly, his hoarse voice a whisper.
"No, Pres, not this time. Somethin's up, so you just sit with your mouth shut, hear?" Press obeyed his boss without hesitation; he had worked for Thurman since before he became a deputy, first as the clean-up man when he ran a little bar down by the beach, then later as a driver when Thurman made his ill-fated venture into trucking for the logging companies. He'd run out of money and jobs when he got the idea of applying for the deputy's job that came open when old Jake Masters died back in `62, and though the budget hardly accounted for it. Thurman succeeded in bringing Pres along to help him out. He didn't have any real authority, actually; nobody in his right mind would have trusted him with a badge and a gun. But he was with Deputy Marshburn most of the time just the same, keeping the car clean, cleaning up the one-cell jail behind the cinder-block office in Santa Elisa, and whatever else Marshburn found to keep him busy. Sometimes he wondered where Thurman got the money to pay his salary; it wasn't much, but it was no secret that deputy sheriffs for a town this small don't make much themselves. But that was something Pres never asked about - as long as the money came from somewhere, it did not matter to him. He suspected Thurman and Kelly were up to somethin' the way they were always disappearing together late at night, sometimes gone until way into the next morning, but that was none of his business. And if it was no good that they were up to, hell, that was all right, too. Pres could always remember that run-in he'd had years back down in San Francisco; pulled two-and-a-half for that, so he wasn't one to nose around into another man's doings, especially if that man paid his salary. Pres wasn't too bright with most things; sometimes he'd forget his own name if he wasn't reminded of it once in a while. But when it came to minding his own business, he was as skilled as of `Pop Perkins.
Clyde eased through the thick underbrush like he was part Indian, carefully sidestepping the scattered dead limbs that littered the ground from the massive redwoods. Only a couple of minutes ago, he had been red-faced and loud, the stereotype tippler out with the boys. But that was pleasure and this was business, and Clyde Kelly was never one to let the two mix. He knew his capacity, whether it was booze or women or fast cars, and he could cut it off as fast as he started it. Never did he allow himself the privilege of getting too drunk to minds his affairs. If he had not developed this uncanny knack early in life, he'd be still felling trees, or maybe tending bar in the place he now owned. No sir, nobody ever gave Clyde Kelly a nickel in this life, and he didn't aim to see any S.O.B. try to take so much as five cents away now that it was his.
Living this way for nearly ten years now, skirting the inevitable brush with the law, had honed his perceptive powers to a razor's edge. A man in his line of work could not afford to take chances. Some day the real law might come along, not some easily- bought hick like Thurman, but an honest-to-God sharp investigator from the city, and he knew he had to be on his toes day and night lest it be his last day as a free man. He was only too aware that he was balancing on the edge of a twenty-year pull at San Quentin, but he wasn't making any plans to start being a jailbird at this late date. Not if he had to kill a dozen men to keep it that way.
Clyde stood perfectly still in the shadow of a redwood, shielded from even the faint moonlight. He watched with the eyes of a red-tailed hawk stalking his prey from five hundred in the western sky, taking in everything the two sharp eyes could sense in the moonlight. And when he'd seen enough, he eased his way quietly back to the car and slipped into the front seat.
"Trouble?" asked Thurman, reading the worried look on his face.
"Maybe. Looks like Abigails's had company, and it don't look like no tea party. I just spotted that new bartender of mine making his way down the hill toward Amy's like he'd been dropped out of the back of a truck. He's covered in mud or blood, I can't tell which, and he's limping along like he had a busted leg or somethin'. I don't know what it is but I think I smell a rat somewhere and I aim to find out before it costs me. Got any idea who that was in the car?"
"Nope, never seen it before. But I got the license number. Want me to run an I.D. on it?" He reached for the glove compartment where the working end of his police radiotelephone was concealed.
"Are your crazy!? You got some kind of private line to the Motor Vehicles Department?"
The deputy shook his head puzzled, "Why, no, Clyde, just the usual. But the dispatcher in Santa Rosa can run a check for me in no time flat."
"Thurman, sometimes I wonder how the hell you ever passed the tests for deputy. You ain't got shit for brains in that fat head of yours."
Thurman attempted a laugh; he didn't like Clyde talking this way in front of Pres. That man was trying to pretend he wasn't paying attention, but he'd known the guy too long to fall for that trick. Not a word was past Pres that he didn't catch, particularly if it was something he wasn't supposed to be hearing. "I didn't pass'em, Clyde. You took care of it for me, remember?"
Kelly only looked at him in bewilderment. "I reckon we better pay a little visit to the grieving widow and see if she's got something to tell us. Pres, you want to come along? Maybe you'll get your first woman, huh?"
"Aw, hell, Mr. Kelly," shuffled the hired man nervously in the back seat. "You ought not to talk like that."
"Don't give me that shit, boy. You're all the same when it comes to a woman's pussy ...Get going, Thurman, let's see if we can get this all straightened out and go play some cards."
Chapter 7
Abigail had kissed Allen good-night warmly and passionately before she opened the front door and waved him off as he made his way home. At first, she was torn between asking him to leave and begging him to stay; her mind told her one thing but her heart saw it differently. She was glad he had made the decision for her; and he was right, it wouldn't do to start a nasty scandal with her name already on police blotters all over California. She never knew when some nosey cop might come through Santa Elisa, digging through the mire to see if she had come back to her husband's lifelong home. She knew already that the police had been to her parents' house in Yubaville; her kid sister had written her through a friend and told her all about it. There wasn't any hope of hearing about it from her folks-they'd stopped talking to her years ago, and this bombing mess was just a good excuse for believing they'd been right all along.
In some ways, she had to admit, it was hard to blame them for feeling they way they did. After all, they were just plain country folk, Oklahomans who had come to the Sacramento Valley farmlands during the thirties when they had already watched their own farm blow away in a swirl of hot dry dust, and with it every cent they'd worked for so long. Unlike some of the Okies who found real pot of gold in the sun-enriched farm lands of California, Agnes and Ernest Rudd had barely scratched enough out of their meager holdings to keep Abigail and her sister alive and in clothes. Maybe if they had been able to hold on to some of their savings and could have bought more land, things might have been different. But they had arrived in California dead broke, without even the battered pickup that was to become the trademark of the Dust Bowl immigrants. They'd entered the Promised Land riding in the back of a neighbor's truck, and Dad had to take a job as a helper in a blacksmith's forge to save enough for the down payment on twenty five acres of land none of the richer farmers wanted. And that was the life Abigail had been born into - long hours of back-breaking work, years of doing without on the hopeless wish that you might have something to call your own later. It was easy for Abigail to see now how they could have acted the way they did when it all happened. Maybe she would have been just as cruel, just as vengeful if it were her own child who had let her down. And now, they didn't even know the truth and didn't care to know it; they could not find it in their hearts to take her back as their daughter. Abigail was dead and long buried in their eyes, and nothing could bring her back, especially not the truth.
She had always been something of an irrepresible do-gooder, always looking out for the other kids, taking their problems onto her shoulders, trying to help them when she could scarcely help herself. Some of the teachers in high school in Yubaville had told her she ought to become a social worker, that way she could do what she was cut out for and get paid to boot. But it was one of Jason's friends at college who came closer to the truth - all that big-sister routine was just an escape. For only by throwing her whole self into other people's lives and misfortunes could she escape the endless misery of poverty that was her own. It was all easy enough to see now, of course, for she was almost twenty-four and a mother and a widow; any of those credentials were enough to sober her sufficiently. But it had not been so easy at 17.
Abigail's girlfriend, Jackie Wilder, was one of those girls that every high school has one or two of, the ones the pimply- face boys giggle about during gym class. The girl they all joked about like they'd all had her night after night, though hardly a one of them would have had the nerve to ask her out if the truth were known. Actually, it was worse than that, for Jackie committed the unpardonable sin for a junior girl at Waldo Emerson High. Especially if the girl happened to be built like Jackie - the trusting heart of a teenager, and the body of a real woman. Jackie had breasts like any of the girls in the girlie magazines they sold down at Diamond Drugs & Hardware in the rack next to the prescription counter where Mr. Lehman could keep an eye on them and shoo away any of the kids who tried to sneak a peak. And the rest of Jackie's body was every bit as spectacular; it was as if nature had gotten ahead of itself in her case, burdening her with a figure that any woman twice her age would have chopped off an arm and a leg for. But for Jackie it was nothing more than a burden, and one that would eventually cost her her life.
Yubaville was not a college town - it was worse than that. Yubaville was twenty-four miles from the middle of the Sutter Valley College, then an independent four-year college for kids who had plenty of money but were short on academic achievements. And when the boys from Sutter Valley hit town on a Saturday night, you would have thought the Russians were marching through on their way to "liberate" Berlin. And not even the girls of wartime Germany who collaborated with the occupying enemy forces could have been any more scorned or outcast than any young Yubaville maiden who dared to go out with one of the college boys. Maybe if she was twenty or so and living away from home, it would be all right; but of course, a girl like that was already a fallen woman in the eyes of the Yubaville good-Christian folk.
But even that sort of cardinal sacrilege was not enough for Jackie; not only did she regularly and openly go out with guys from the college, she had to go and get mixed up with some of the weirdest ones there, a bunch of rich kids who had nothing better to do than experiment with drugs and wild sex parties to keep themselves amused until they would finally, one by one, get kicked off the campus or even thrown into jail.
Abigail had seen it coming - first Jackie's boyfriends got stranger and stranger, then she started missing classes at high school, even going so far as getting caught with a note from home that she had forged over her mother's signature. Abigail wondered even then if the officials at school were harder on that poor girl out of some kind of hidden jealousy, particularly the women teachers. Other kids had gotten into trouble before; it certainly wasn't anything new at Emerson High. But for some reason, they decided to throw the book at Jackie, and her parents, both of them with less than grade-school educations, just took it without a murmur of protest, standing quietly by while the pompous bureaucrats tossed Jackie out of school for two weeks.
That was all it took - from there on, it was steadily downhill for the beautiful teenager, and it was a breathtakingly fast ride. Left on her own for those two short weeks, ostracized completely in the tiny community, Jackie fell in totally with that crowd of "crazies" at Sutter College. Today, probably, they would be called freaks or hippies, but then they were just an anomaly to the small college campus and most everyone left them alone and tried to avoid any more contact with them than was necessary.
Abigail had found herself embroiled in Jackie's troubles when her mother phoned, worried sick that her daughter had not been home all night. Abigail knew where to look, and like an adolescent Mary Worth, she took off in her parents' old car to look for her friend in Sutter Valley. Jackie had always been nice to Abigail, which was more than she could say for a lot of the supposedly better- class kids around town, and she didn't care to let her down when she needed a friend most. Everyone in school was talking about her, how she was probably shacked up with a bunch of college boys over at the school. There were all sorts of rumors flying like crazy; one girl even claimed she had seen Jackie in a car filled with older boys and that she was stark naked, just being passed back and forth like she was a bottle of liquor!
But Abigail, full of her seventeen-year-olds self-assurance, had refused to believe a word of it; she was sure something awful had happened to her girlfriend, but not anything like that. More likely an accident of some sort.
And an accident it was - though not quite what Abigail had counted on. She found her friend easily enough; the first couple of guys with long hair that she passed on the campus streets told her just where to look. There was only one house where the really wild ones stayed; and naturally, Jackie would have to choose to be with the ones most apart from the society that had rebuffed her.
Abigail had blundered in like some errant Florence Nightingale, probing around for her friend like she owned the place. But as luck would have it, there was hardly anyone home and Abigail found Jackie lying on a rumpled bed in a back bedroom of the pain- cracked Victorian house, naked and alone on the stained single bed. It was obviously she had been well used - there were dozens of sticky, hardened spots on the bed and a trail of bloodstains that ran from the foot of the bed to the headboard.
Jackie was unconscious when she found her, though Abigail thought at first she was only asleep. Only after she spotted the reddish marks on her forearms did she begin to suspect the terrible truth; Abigail was no expert, but she had heard enough and seen enough to know a junkie when she saw one. Some of the kids at school talked freely about the stuff, but she had never actually run into anyone who used the hard stuff. Today, she would have known immediately, but then, still in her teens, she could only quess. And only hope she had guessed wrong.
Abigail took her friend home, half-carrying and half-dragging the young girl to the car and propping her up by the opened window as if that might somehow bring her around.
Not knowing what to do, she first took the girl to her parents, assuming wrongly that they would know what to do and would care enough to do what was right for her. But she had misjudged them, making a mistake in assessing human nature she would never make again. Instead of the loving, understanding mother and father she had expected, she found the Wilders a hostile, questioning pair of strangers who only became incensed and afraid when she told them the truth. To Abigail there was no other way than to confide in them openly, but they wouldn't accept their own daughter; they told her to take Jackie to the county hospital and call the police, that they would have nothing more to do with her.
Alone and frightened and confused, Abigail had taken the still-unconscious girl home, half realizing that Jackie was near death from a heroin overdose that nobody seemed to care about.
Her own parents had refused to take the girl in at first, but when they saw the look of determination in their daughter's eyes, they knew it was best to relent. Abigail's father did call the family doctor, however, but not before he had called the local police. There was a detective in the foyer before the ambulance could be summoned from county hospital, and he followed the doctor and Abigail and Jackie in his patrol car, though the doctor steadfastly refused to allow any questioning until he was sure the girl was in condition to stand the pressure.
Abigail had stood by her girlfriend through the whole mess - the police investigation, the subsequent busy-bodying by the school officials, all of it. Probably, she could see now, it would have been better for Jackie if she had been made to face the music right then and there, but it didn't happen that way.
Yubaville was a small town and all this was seven years ago; today, with the drug problem one of nationwide significance and with drug addicts turning up in the smallest country hamlets as well as the big city ghettos, most any doctor or policeman would have recognized Jackie's condition and have spotted her as a junkie right away. But old Dr. Hornaby, well past seventy, and Detective McAllerman, were far from versed in the subtler aspects of the drug scene that was then confined to the larger metropolitan centers, though the kids in the valley town knew as much about it as the city kids a couple of hours away in San Francisco.
Now, looking back on it, Abigail could only hope she had done the right thing, but she would never really know. It had been her talking to Doc Hornaby that got him to keep quiet about the needle marks on her arms. The police had no reason to suspect anything of the sort, drugs being a problem they only read about in the law enforcement journals. And pretty quickly it was all smoothed over and Abigail had talked her parents into letting Jackie stay with them until things were well again with her own folks.
It seemed okay at first, even Doc Hornaby wasn't sure what was wrong with Jackie, and when he talked it over with Abigail, he agreed to keep all his suspicions to himself, at least until the girl was back on her feet again. It was becoming a heavy burden for seventeen-year-old Abigail, finding herself both a mother and big-sister overnight to a girl as old as herself. And it was fast becoming a thankless task; if only she could have seen it coming, then maybe somehow, some way, none of that horrible mess would ever have happened and Jackie would be alive today.
With Doc's treatment, hardly more than double-strength vitamins and tranquilizers to keep her calmed down, Jackie had made a remarkable recovery. In just a couple of days, she was nearly her old self again, boastingly unafraid of what the other kids and the townsfolk thought of her. Abigail had marveled at her girlfriends' miraculous metamorphosis almost overnight Jackie was strong and sure and seemingly the girl she had known so many years, the old friend she had played kids' games with growing up in Yubaville. Abigail had been delighted when Jackie said she would go back to school again, face all of those who had so viciously maligned her when she needed friendship most, make a new start for herself.
And Abigail fell for it, took in every lying word and believed it like it was straight from heaven, trusted her with the unscathed innocence of one who has never been face to face with a junkie. For a man or a woman, boy or girl, hooked on heroin is no longer a human being. Jackie Wilder might as well have still been back on that filthy bed where Abigail found her, left there after those creep friends of hers had run out of ways to abuse her. Jackie Wilder was dead - this was an imposter running around in her body, kept alive with increasingly frequent infusions of instant life and soul. Kept alive, that is, until her time ran out.
Abigail didn't even notice it when the evidence was practically thrown in her face. First it was the money missing from her wallet, her allowance for the month that Mom had given her. But that was easy enough .to explain away; after all, she could have lost it somewhere. There was scarcely any reason to believe Jackie might be responsible; wasn't she doing so well now? Didn't she seem so happy and elated now after all those weeks of depression?
And poor, naive, innocent Abigail refused to believe it when the bank called Mr. Rudd to notify him of his overdraft, two checks for twenty-five dollars that he had written to a Miss Jackie Wilder and she had cashed at Oakes Drug Store just yesterday. No, she had told herself, no it couldn't be true! Jackie just wouldn't do it!
Abigail had moped around her room for hours that afternoon, waiting for Jackie to get back from visiting her parents, trying to arrange a reconcilation, she had said. Only Jackie wasn't with the Wilders - that had been the first place her father called when he got the word about the checks he didn't sign.
From there on, it was all like a dream now, just a blurry, run-together collage of people and places and words that did not make sense even now, seven years later. All she remembered was the police coming to the house, the bank manager with them. The shouts and the threats, the I-told-you-so looks from her parents and from the police. There had been all sorts of talk ...Put her away for good where she belongs! Lock her up and teach her a lesson right now! Maybe some of these other wild kids will learn from this! We've got to stop this sort of thing from spreading here in Yubaville before it infects our own kids! She's like a cancer, she's got to be cut out!
Probably if one thing set it all off, it was seeing that warrant the plainclothesman was waving around like it was the Ten Commandments in the original version. Nobody had asked for Abigail's advice or even seriously questioned her, so when she spoke, her words dropped on the adults there in the room like a bomb. "You can forget about sending Jackie away," she said quietly. "I...I wrote those checks. I signed your name, Daddy, and loaned the money to Jackie. She didn't know they were forged when she cashed them. It's me you want, not her."
Her parents, the banker in his pin-striped vested suit, the two policeman, they all just looked first at her and then at each other. Like it was yesterday, Abigail could remember the exact looks on their faces - surprise on the bank manager's, pain and hurt on her Mom and Dad's. But most of all, the look of disappointment and anger on the cop's face, the one with the warrant. He actually looked sorry that he couldn't use that warrant to send a seventeen-year-old girl away to prison; she'd seen that look before often enough. It was that same expression of envy and lustful jealousy she had seen on the boys at school whenever Jackie passed and they were reminded bitterly that she preferred the older college boys to pimply-faced adolescents. That cop - she couldn't even remember his name now - was absolutely embittered that he couldn't get even with Jackie Wilder for being what she was. And for being beyond his grasp.
At first, still in shock like a pair of staggering accident victims, her parents had stood beside her, begging her to change her story, to tell the truth as they were sure it existed. But Abigail stuck to her confession; in fact, she told it so often and so emotionally that she began to believe it herself. And when the police picked up Jackie hitchhiking her way toward the Sutter College campus, Abigail had convinced nearly everyone, including herself, of her own quilt.
But her convincing deception had really helped no one, for the police charged both of them with forging the checks, despite both the bank and her parents' willingness to drop the charges.
Abigail could not see how she could have ever been so stupid; seven years of growing up made it even more difficult to under- stand why she had done what she did. Maybe it was just being young. Or perhaps it was her own naivete, her unfailing belief in Jackie even when the evidence was overwhelmingly against her.
She had stuck to her story in court, and Jackie had made no offer to clear her with the truth. In fact, the one time they talked privately before the trial, when Jackie was being held in jail and Abigail was free on bond, Jackie had even gone so far as to try to get her to take the whole blame, to testify that she could not have possibly known the checks were forged. Never once did Jackie even hint that she was guilty, though there could not have been a person in Yubaville who doubted it.
The trial had ended quickly and simply - a suspended sentence for both of them since Abigail stuck to her confession and shouldered most of the blame, and the two girls walked out of the courtroom free of the burden of prison time. But heavily laden with the telling weight of a lifelong felony record in their pasts, open for anyone to see.
Abigail had adjusted to it in time, though it wasn't until she left Yubaville and met Jason at a beach north of San Francisco that she really began to live again. There could be no real life for her in her home town - small town people just don't forget. And neither would Abigail forget - forget that she was just another convicted criminal in the eyes of the law, already carrying two strikes against her in the eyes of criminal justice. Nor would she forget her ill-fated attempts at "social work" . . Jackie was back with her friends inside a week. And nine weeks later, on a Sunday morning, the cleaning lady at 160 Carteret Circle, a block from the Sutter campus, found Jackie dead of an overdose of heroin. Her own parents refused to come to her burial, and as soon as it was over, Yubaville was back to normal, looking feverishly for its next errant victim. Abigail was only glad that she was not there to see it happen again.
She'd not had to face the re-telling of that nightmare again since she met Jason, but now it was time once more. It was part of her life she couldn't escape, the piece of her that made this running from the law in Berkeley so dangerous. She wasn't just another housewife - to the police, she would be a two-time loser, one they could really throw the book at this time. And t his was what she had to explain to Allen ...somehow she had to tell him, painful as it was. And she could only hope it would make no difference to him ...God, how she'd hate to lose the one man who was anything to her since Jason's death! She had to tell him, and tell him soon, for she could never really give herself completely to him until he knew it all.
She had just checked in on little Jason, quietly opening his bedroom door so that he wouldn't wake, wearing just her tiny sheer panties that she had retrieved from the cluttered pile of clothing on her sofa after Allen left. She felt nicely warm and contented, like after a hot soothing bath; this was going to be something special, she could just feel it inside her. Maybe not quite what she had had with Jason, but that was all in the past now. Allen was the present and the future ...and for the first time in over a year, both looked particularly enjoyable.
She heard footsteps shuffling on her front steps. Ordinarily, the sounds of anyone approaching at this hour would have scared her out of her wits, especially with all the neighbors on this quiet lane gone until spring. But tonight it wasn't frightening at all. Obviously, Allen had come back for something; maybe he justed wanted to talk and she'd like that. There was so much for them to talk about. Just a minute, you silly boy! I'm coming!
Abigail was smiling as she threw open the latch and opened the door about a foot, already amused at whatever lame excuse he had dreamed up to come back again. But what she saw stopped her heart dead in her chest ...it was Kelly!
She tried quickly to slam the door shut again, but his big booted foot was firmly in place. She jumped back away from the doorway, her arms folded across her bare breasts as she cringed in near-nakedness. He wasn't alone! Thurman was with him ...and that handyman who worked for him! There were three of them already inside her cabin. Three of them who looked at her hungrily with their drink-glazed eyes in the dim light. She cowered helplessly in the middle of the tiny living room with nowehere to run, no escape.
"Good evening, Mrs. Madison," sneered Clyde, his eyes lowered to the bulging mounds of her naked breasts as she struggled futilely to cover them with her hands. "Aren't you gonna' invite us in?"
Chapter 8
Abigail was frozen solid, too terrified to even move, as the three men quickly entered her house. Clyde closed the door behind them and fastened the latch. She was almost completely naked and she had never felt more exposed and vulnerable in her life than at this moment. Oh, if only she had looked before she opened that door!
"Uh ...I'll be right back, Clyde. I must put on some clothes," she attempted weakly, her lips quivering on every syllable. But the burly ex-lumberjack grabbed her with one swift pass of his immense forearm and his fingers tightened around her tiny wrist painfully.
"Naw, that's all right, sugar," he laughed lewdly. "You needn't go and dress up just for us. Hell, we're just of friends, ain't that right, Thurman." The deputy bellowed his reply so loud Abigail was afraid he would wake up Jason asleep in his room. "We just came by to do a little talking, that's all. Seems like there's something mighty fishy going on around here tonight, and 1 aim to find out what it is."
His grip tightened even more brutally on her arm, pulling her hand down so that one of her breasts was totally bare for the deputy and his dumb assistant to see. Abigail heard two quick gasps from the drunken intruders as they feasted their eyes ravenously on her youthful nakedness. The light was dim, but the glow of the single lightbulb seemed to fall like a spotlight on the rich full mound of her breast, flickering on the crinkly pink hardness of her nipple as it jutted unprotected for these men to see. "I-I don't know what you're talking about, Uncle Clyde," she stammered. She hadn't called him that more than twice since Jason had introduced them, but it seemed prudent at a moment like this. With each second, she could feel the atmosphere thicken with the evil that was on their minds, the lewd desires that filled their thoughts like some kind of obsession.
"You know damn well what I mean, Abigail! I saw that new bartender of mine leaving here a few minutes ago and some fancy sports car went tearing out of Redwood Road like it was a racetrack. And there ain't nobody living up here now but you. So start talking, honey! You been running your mouth about somethin' that don't concern you?"
"No, Clyde! Honest, I admit Allen was over here, but I haven't seen anybody in a sports car. Allen was by himself, honest!" She had hoped this would never enter their conversations again - she'd long suspected Clyde Kelly and Thurman were in some kind of illegal business on the side. Jason had joked about it often enough. But she really didn't know what it was. And if Jason had known, he never told her.
"Don't go making out like you don't know what I man, neither," he said menacingly. "You know your old man was in this, too, up to his ass ...`til he went and blew his ass off."
The deputy laughed out loud at Kelly's vicious joke, but he shut up when he caught a glimpse of the fierce hatred in Abigail's eyes at this callous heartless mention of her dead husband. "You're lying, Clyde, just like you always lie. I don't know what kind of crap you're mixed up in and I don't want to know. So stop trying to mix me up in your shady deals; Jason wouldn't do anything illegal." She realized how shaky that argument was before she had finished the sentence; nobody could excuse what those friends of his were plotting to do. But she had to be right -Jason wouldn't stoop to getting mixed up with his animal of an Uncle in anything wrong!
"Honey, you're even dumber than I thought, but we won't get into that now. Jason must have married you for those nice tits `cause it sure weren't for brains. Now start talking before I have to get mean. Who was that and why was he gettin' outa' here in such a hurry? Speak up!"
"I already told you, I don't know what you mean!" She was getting more and more terrified now - she could almost feel Thurman and the handyman's eyes on her nakedly exposed flesh.
"Well, maybe we can make you thing a little better. A good fuckin' kinda' clears the cobwebs out, right Thurman?" he leered, looking down at the uncovered breast and the smooth flowing, line of her belly where it disappeared under the sheerness of her skimpy panties. Her legs, long and smooth, were covered with goose-bumps from her fear and apprehension.
"That sounds like a might fine idea," added the deputy, his eyes widening at the prospect of getting this beautiful young redhead naked. God, what a fuck she would be! There wasn't a girl in the county who looked half as nice as this one. He'd thought often enough about it when she was living here with that long-haired husband of hers, but he always figured it was hopeless. Hippie girls just didn't care too much for deputy sheriffs.
"We just came up here for some kinda' explantion," said the beefy giant of a man painfully gripping her arm. "But it looks like you ain't talking, so I reckon' we'll have to settle for some other kind of satisfaction. How about it, honey? Think you could do with a little workout? Or have you done got all you want for one night?"
"No, please! You can't mean that ...you wouldn't! I was Jason's wife, your own flesh and blood!" But he answered with a quick snap of his arm that snared the other trembling forearm of the hapless redhead and she shivered in cold fright as he pulled her arms apart so that he and the other two men could see both her large, firmly jutting breasts in their entirety. Her nipples had grown tiny and hard from sheer terror and she could feel the three men's eyes locked on them as Kelly held her arms away from her sides. She could hear him suck in his breath as he looked her over slowly and intensely, following with his eyes every inch, every voluptuous contour of her young unclothed body. His very gaze left a trail of chills over her flesh. "Whoo-ee, would you look at that! That nephew of mine sure knew how to pick `em. Musta' got that from me ...What'ya think of those titties, Pres? I bet you ain't never seen no woman's titties before, now have ya'?"
The hired man was embarrassed at Kelly's obviously taunting jibe, but he couldn't bring himself to look away from the young girl's soft ivory nakedness. Yeah, he'd thought about what a beautiful woman must look like all naked like this. But thoses were just crazy fantasies when he was a kid growing up, not even wistful daydreams that he could have hoped would come true. But now, right here close enough to touch, was an almost-naked girl straight out of one of those men's magazines, right here in the bare flesh! God, he couldn't even imagine what just touching her would be like! And he didn't really expect too many favors .from Thurman and Clyde - after all, he was just a hired man, no matter what they said.
"Well, how about it, Abigail? Got some of that pretty little ass o' yours to share around? Ain't that what hippies are always preaching free love and sharing with your brothers? Then how about sharing it right here?" he sneered at her, his eyes still roaming her vulnerable young body.
"Clyde, please, - don't even talk like that. Little Jason's asleep in his room there," she said pleadingly. "Don't let him hear that kind of talk. It would scar him. Please go on home now, Uncle Clyde. I don't know any more than I already told you!"
But Kelly wasn't really paying any attention to what his niece had to say; he'd already made up his mind what he wanted and he did not aim to leave this house until he'd gotten all he cared for. Releasing one of her arms, he reached down and grabbed the taut elastic waistband of her panties. She quickly made a move to stop him, but it was hopeless - the sheer panties just shredded in his determined grip as he yanked them down over her hips. "No, please, no!" she begged, trying desperately to stop him without screaming and awakening her son. She couldn't have Jason see his mother like this! No matter what it cost her, she simply must not let him wake up and see this awful thing happening!
Her torn panties came away like some ripped-down banner and the room was suddenly electrified as she stood totally naked before the three lustful men. Six eyes immediately focused on the sparse fluffy triangle of reddish hair up between her legs-they didn't have to say a word to tell her what they were thinking. Their minds were already probing between her milk-smooth thighs.
Kelly twisted the one arm he still held until Abigail bit her lower lip to stifle the scream that was about to burst from her lungs. "Oh, God, you're hurting me! Please, leave me alone, please!"
But Clyde was as blinded by his consuming lust for his beautiful young niece as a man who'd been without a woman for years might have been, so great was her naturally earthy seductiveness. For even without a trace of effort on her part, Abigail was easily the most ravishingly gorgeous sight he'd ever seen. For the moment, at least, he had forgotten his mission in coming here, forgotten that his whole, carefully-nurtured operation might be in danger of collapse if this girl knew something and was trying to give him away. But even the thought of losing the empire he'd spent ten years nursing to where it was today was not enough to take his mind from this girl's beautiful squirming nakedness. He twisted her arm so that she doubled over and then gave her a shove that landed her on the bed on all fours. "Please ...please," she begged one last time, though she was beginning to see it was hopeless for her now. She could scream, awakening Jason to see this filthy tableau, but what good would that do? There was no one around to hear her anyway, and besides, the only law in Santa Elisa was right here, grinning down at her nakedness as she knelt before these men like some kind of love-slave from another age. She was waiting, waiting for the inevitable, afraid to look over her should as she heard the rustle of men's clothing being undone. She knew it would only be seconds before Clyde's hands were on her, before his lewd cock pierced her incestuously, before his lust-swollen balls emptied their obscene discharge into her belly and her insides swirled with the seething torrent of his despicable, salacious desires. God, how could she stand it! How could she hope for any future now!? And Allen, dear God, Allen ...she could never face him after this, never!
But even in her resigned, surrendered state, Abigail was not prepared for what actually happened. Just as she had expected, she felt Clyde's rough calloused hands on her thighs. First a painful pinch of the soft resilient flesh at the tops of her legs as she knelt there before the men helplessly; then, she cringed as she felt his fingers move upward toward the cleft of her buttocks. She trembled like a leaf in the wind as she felt his fingers spread apart the tender white cheeks of her buttocks, opening up her unguarded secret crevice like she was a two-dollar whore from one of the port towns up the coast. She could feel the tears flooding her closed eyes and trickling down her face as the cool night breeze rushed between her wide-spread thighs. But Clyde Kelly had a few surprises left in store for her yet, as she was soon to discover. "How about that ass, Pres?" he said finally, breaking the ominous chilling silence that had hung over the room like a cloud. "Think you'd know what to do with a piece o'tail like that, huh? Think you could handle it, boy?"
"Wha ...well, I don't know `bout that, Mr. Kelly. I reckon I could ...I mean, if the lady wanted me to. I'd never force myself on a lady, no sir." Pres was nervous -he'd never expected anything like this. Goddamn, the chance to fuck a voluptuous girl like this one! Shit, it was too good to be true - Mr. Kelly was putting him on, sure he was!
"Thurman, you got your flask on `ya?" asked Clyde, never taking his hand off Abigail's trembling buttocks as he spoke.
"Sure, you know I don't go nowhere without it. Here, you want a drink?"
"Naw, not for me. I think of Pres here could use one though, right boy?' he grinned sadistically. Thurman, looking more puzzled than astonished, handed his hired man his flask. It was something he'd never done in all their years together, but Pres took it willingly this time. He'd need all the strength he could muster for this - it didn't matter what the other men thought; if Clyde was on the level, Pres wasn't about to turn down a chance like this. Another one might never- come his way; after all, he was almost forty now and he didn't want to die without ever having any pussy.
"Well, get on with it, boy!" prodded Kelly, stepping aside. "Or don't you know how to fuck stuff like this here?"
Abigail had finally realized that her late husband's uncle wasn't kidding - he was going to have this ignorant hired man rape her! It wasn't enough for him to take what little honor and decency she had left himself ...he was going to actually watch while somebody else did it for him! "Oh, Clyde, please don't do this! I'll do anything for you, anything! But, please ...not this! I haven't been shooting my mouth off. I don't know enough to do any talking if I wanted to. Jason never told me about working for you, except in the bar. Honest, I don't know anything! Please, just leave me alone and I'll disappear. You'll never have to see me again!" Those words ached in her heart as she spoke them; she doubted she could bring herself to leave Allen, not now, not after what he had suddenly become to her. But if these men used her like this, Allen would never even spit on her! She couldn't let it happen! Suddenly she lunged for the end of the bed, hoping to somehow make it to the door and run for help. It was a long shot, but the only one she had ...and it didn't work. Clyde caught her with a bruising slap across her cheek before she had touched the floor, and, lifting her like she was a feather, he slung her back onto the bed where Pres was sitting, nervously fingering the leather-covered flask as he gulped down another burning swallow of hot liquid courage. She could see his eyes glowing like two fiery goals as he quickly found the strength he needed in the potent liquor.
"C'mon, boy, get with it! I'm starting to wonder if you ever knew how to fuck! Get that hunk o' meat out and get to it, Pres!"
The slightly-built muscular handyman nervously unzipped his trousers the rest of the way and pulled out his long fleshy cock, still flaccid but beginning to harden just at the sight of this girl with the milk-white skin and flowing red hair - and she was all his! His brain was whirling at the realization of what was happening ...it was really true! He was going to fuck this girl, this beautiful beautiful girl! What difference did it make that the other two men would be watching ...he'd give `em a show, all right! He'd show'em what a real man could do to a sweet piece of tail like this!
Almost reverently, he touched Abigail's smooth white flesh with his cupped palms as his rough coarse hands, hard and toughened from years of physical labor, moved over the rounded whiteness of her buttocks twisting and kneading the flaccid mounds of softly yielding ass-flesh with an unsatiated and rapidly growing lust.
She lay unresisting before him, slim and voluptuously curved at the buttocks and shoulders which flowered out teasingly in opposite directions from her narrow little waist. She seemed to be moaning in a half daze, as if she were not really aware yet what was happening to her, and that only intensified the erotic picture her innocent white form offered to the hired hand and his audience of two, crowded eagerly close as Pres knelt up behind Abigail on the sofa.
Abigail lay trembling, her face pressed tightly into one of the cushions so that they wouldn't see the tears that flooded her cheeks now. She bit into the cover of the soft pillow to hold back the scream she had stifled so long now. Oh God, no, this can't be happening to me! Not after tonight, after I finally found someone else after all these long empty months without Jason! Now that's going to all be taken from me! Maybe the police and the others are right; maybe I am a wicked, undeserving tramp ... maybe I deserve all of this and more. Why, why else would it happen this way? Why?
Suddenly she felt Pres's hands coursing over her back and she quivered again, but she did not resist, as she knew the consequences of any such attempt on her part would be worse than this despicable humiliation being forced on her now -there was no other way, she had to let them use her, all of them if that was what they wanted ...there was nothing she could do to stop them.
"Hey, Abigail, honey," came Kelly's hoarse voice from off to her left, "turn around and take a look at what Pres has got for you. Maybe you ain't never seen a real working class dick before!" Both Clyde and Thurman laughed heartily, but Abigail was aware of a conspicuous silence from the man she could not see but could feel behind her on the couch. She didn't move or answer until she felt a hand tangle in her long red hair that spilled over her bare shoulders and onto the sofa-bed. At first she thought it was Pres, but when she was jerked a few inches off the bed and opened her eyes, she could see it was Clyde. "I said take a look, bitch! I want you to see what you're gettin'!" She looked back at the swollen red penis hanging from Pres's loins and her face contorted in horror at the hugeness of the frightening organ. It was monstrous and webbed all along the underside with heavy throbbing veins, giving grim advance warning of the lustful state the handyman was in. Her eyes trailed a slow path up along the length of his torso to his face, a piteous plea written on her lips, but it was useless. Though she saw little on the hired man's blank face to evidence his feelings, it was obvious he cared not at all for her own emotions - to him she was just a naked piece of tail, a chance to prove himself equal to, and just as much a man as the other men in the room. And he apparently relished the chance.
"What 'ya think of that, Abigail?" asked Kelly, holding his face close to hers. "Think you'll like it, huh?" Abigail winced at the vileness and ugliness of his words, the contempt in them not just for her but for this man who was waiting for her as well. God, why did he take it from them? Was doing this awful thing to her more important that the abuse he was taking from Clyde and Thurman?
Both the men laughed nervously from excitement at what was about to happen. She was naked and completely helpless to resist ...and they were going to watch her get fucked like they'd never seen before. It was going to be like one of those sex-shows in Denmark, only this was for real and it was right here! Both their eyes glowed like hot coals in the shadows from the anticipation that was fast building in them as their eyes slowly and hungrily took in the incredibly lascivious sight of her young trim body kneeling in abject submission as the slow-witted handyman pawed her flesh in amazement, his eyes huge and white as he got his first close-up look at a naked woman. "I'll hold `er while you get it in, Pres," offered Clyde, a coarse chuckle in his voice.
Pres tried to speak but he couldn't, his throat tight with desire at the thought of what he was about to do to this young naked girl, and his long thick cock ached like it had never ached in his life. Even back in prison, sitting all that time in a lonely cell, he never wanted a piece of pussy like he wanted this one.
He pushed himself over her, catching her by surprise, and smashing her body against the bed beneath his weight, his face pressed into the clean soft smell of her rich red hair.
Abigail winced from the attack and began to struggle weakly, more from basic instinct than from thought, but unseen hands forced her back deeper into the mattress of the sofa-bed. Her arms were pulled to the sides of the bed and held in a vise-like grip by Clyde as Pres's knees behind her were slowly and relentlessly forcing her trembling legs apart with a rough pressure that scraped the tender backsides of her thighs and calves.
She strained with all her power to keep her knees together, but it was hopeless.. She gave a sudden grunting gasp as the breath surged from her lungs, her last resistance finally broken. The lust-driven hired man pushed up between her legs as they spread wide across the mattress, her bare toes hanging over either side of the sofa. A soft helpless moan escaped from her tightly closed lips as she felt the hardness of his penis make warm wet contact with the soft inner flesh of her thighs. He moved foward, insinuating the full length of it along the narrow wide-stretched crevice of her buttocks. Her shoulders were held down tight against the bed so that her struggles were limited to her lower torso. Her buttocks squirmed and twisted beneath him, inciting his lust to the utmost.
"Up on your knees, Abigail," came that voice again, close to her ear. She tried to stiffen her body and pressed tighter into the mattress. Bitter tears of anger and fear ran from her cheeks, wetting the sofa cover under her face as she felt Pres's tough hard skin pressing down onto her, covering the length of her now prostrate body. She tried not to move after Kelly's command, as if somehow ignoring it maybe this nightmare would miraculously end. But she knew that was a useless fantasy, for there was no hope for her now ... that awesome menacing hardness that was probing ruthlessly against her naked shivering flesh told her nothing would stop the hired man now.
A hand pushed down on the back of her head, pressing her face tight into the mattess. She struggled for a moment to breathe but could not. She tried to cry out, but her mouth would not open. A faint dizziness swept over her from the lack of oxygen and she felt her muscles betray her, going limp and slack. The hand was released and she gulped desperately at the air, greedily filling her tortured lungs with welcome relief. Hands on her now-relaxed hips pulled them powerfully up off the single bed, another hand staying hard behind her neck to keep her breasts and face pressed harshly down into the mattress. By the time Abigail fully recovered her breath, her buttocks were waving obscenely high off the bed behind, and she made a momentary and hopeless lurch forward to flatten herself again. But the hand pushed her face tight back into the mattress, cutting off her breath as before.
She relaxed and ceased her struggles ...she knew she had to eventually give in anyway. There was nothing left now but horrible humiliation and submission to their obscene desires. There was nothing else for her to do if she wanted her precious child spared the agony of seeing his mother like this. And she knew Clyde Kelly was capable of doing it ...that man could rape her right in front of little Jason and think it was a barrel of laughs. No, there was nothing but letting her body be used as a helpless toy in their sex-crazed hunger for animal satisfaction ...satisfaction that would only come to them when they had spent their lusts in a torrent of lewd hot sperm inside her soft and resilient body. Not until her naked belly sloshed with their hot liquid desire would they leave her alone.
Kneeling behind her, Pres gazed down at the full white moons of her buttocks stretched up in sacrifical offering to him, with eyes bulging wide with hot uncontrollable desire. God, he had never seen anything like it. His balls tingled and ached and he longed to thrust forward now into the narrow teasing slit swinging into the air before him, now, without further hesitation. But he couldn't. He had hungered in vain for this moment for most his life ...and he had waited too long to let it go by without savoring every golden second of it.
The handyman held himself back, purposely torturing himself for the moment in anticipation of when he would thrust forward and slide his throbbing hot cock deep between the full white moons of her proud little white ass, swaying gently in defeat before him. He wanted to feel her squirming beneath him, needing his strong thick cock as much as he needed the soft wetness of her female treasures. That would be the ultimate conquest...a good-looking young gal like this one begging him for another aching inch of his big fat prick. Goddamn, how good that would be!
His mind was aflame with savage passions, but there was something coming to the forefront, a notion making its way through the haze of the strong liquor and his even stronger lustful desires for this forbidden fruit. God, yes, he thought, I'll make her squirm, all right! She'll be begging me to throw it to her when I've finished with her!
For a few torturing moments he ground his long thick cock around in the narrow white crevice of her ass, pressing the softly quivering cheeks of flesh together around it to enclose it like a warm soft glove. He leaned forward and planted lewd wet kisses along the ridges of her spine, feeling her quiver helplessly beneath him. Kelly and Thurman both looked on in surprise, wondering what other tricks of Pres might have up his sleeve.
Abigail groaned slightly as her body shook and trembled from the moist contact at her loins and back.
And then Pres backed off slightly, running his tongue slowly and wetly down the full length of her back until he reached the tightly clenched crevice of her ass swaying gently, high off the bed. Her shoulders were still held down hard against the mattress by the other two leering men.
Pres dropped his hands to her full rounded buttocks, placing his thumbs on either side of the soft resilient cheeks and pressed out gently. He knew this was the time for patience. She had . passed the first stage of surrendering herself to his will, but now the final conquest of mind and spirit had to be with subtler means than physical force or coercion. This unexpected change from pain and brutality to one of tenderness and caressing should catch her off guard ...it was an old trick, but a tried and proven one.
Abigail had geared her mind to the fighting of pain and humiliation, that much she had already accepted with teethgritting determination ...but not this. She wasn't prepared for this at all, just as the hired man had anticipated. Thurman and Clyde could only look on in amazement - maybe this boy wasn't as dumb as they thought!
Her buttocks clenched together against the pressure he was exerting with his thumbs and he eased off slightly, still keeping up a constant gentle tension for a seeming eternity until the straining muscles of her inner thighs slowly tired and relaxed, bit by bit. His face was crouched on the same level with the thin red folds of flesh that covered her cowering vagina and as he watched, his eyes gleaming, they slowly parted before the almost imperceptible pressure of this thumbs. He could see a slight moisture forming and glistening on the soft insides of her thighs, as with the easing of fearful agony and the fatigue of resistance, she let her buttocks slip wider and wider apart.
He moved his face forward, careful not to shake the bed and alarm the sudden trust building inside her from the gentle touch he was subjecting her body to now. His face was a scant few inches from the soft reddish pubic hair covering the tender resilient folds of her vagina, and the smell was one of sweetness distinctly female, that drifted incitingly out to his flaring nostrils. There was, also, the faintly reminiscent smell of something else, the muskiness of a man, of sexual union ...had she ...but what did it matter, she was his!
He swallowed deeply as his thumbs pressured outward and the secret cavern of her cunt flowered open to his frozen gaze until suddenly it was completely open and the soft inner flesh came into tantalizing view. It was pink and smooth and a slight moisture from her secretions was visible, glistening and wet on the soft inner flesh of her thighs.
He breathed hard and blew softly into her. She squirmed and he could now hear a faint groan slipping from between her half- opened lips. She tried to move slightly, but the pressure of the other men's hands held her tightly in place, perfectly positioned for the exquisite pleasures to come. She was becoming quiet now, and her movements were not movements of escape of fear but of reflex from the torturing touch of his hands and breath against the softness of her secret flesh.
Abigail tried to still a rising moan she could feel building deep inside her throat. The sudden change in senations had done this to her ...something frightening. It was as if a great heavy weight had been lifted from her ...this was not something she was prepared to deal with. Pain and agony, yes ...but not this gentle, soothing caress, no, not this.
She sighed and let her muscles that had been so keyed against the inevitable ravishment of her loins relax into a loose tranquility that increased a thousandfold with the unexpected tenderness of the lumbering handyman's gentle touch.
This was not at all what she had expected, what she had steadfastly accepted as what fate had dealt her. This was soft and moist and warm ...strange magical trails of sensation along the length of her naked and unprotected back. Why was he doing this to her? Why didn't he just rape her and take what he wanted and get it over with? She shivered slightly as his tongue worked its way slowly down to the rounded moons of her buttocks widely exposed behind her.
There was a pressure from somewhere, and she felt a cool rush of air race between her full spreading ass-cheeks as the pressure increased in intensity. She clenched them tightly together in automatic rejection to this strange unseen probe.
"Mmmmmmmmmm," she sighed, ashamed of the sound that escaped her lips, but she couldn't help it. Her buttocks relaxed in a great feeling of warmth and peace as suddenly her buttocks felt open and wet as the pressure continued, pushing outward. Abigail did not - could not - resist, and another long low mewl left her throat as she let herself be pulled open wide by this unseen pair of hands and a tongue that explored her, caressed her, from behind. She tried to move her shoulders but they were locked tightly to the softness of the mattress by harsh hands whose touch she did not recognize. She could feel herself losing control, her mind wandering in response to thus strange and unexpected assault on her body and spirit. Who was this behind her doing these weird and wonderful things? Had Allen returned? Who was it? Did it really matter? She was afraid the answer was no ...this warm cloud of contentment that had suddenly and surprisingly enveloped her had wiped away any trace of the fearful anxiety that filled her just minutes ago. She was floating in space, her eyes closed, and nothing existed but the magical touch of her masculine firmness against her vulnerably upthrust ass-cheeks they waggled high and invitingly in the air. There was no hunt of danger now and she felt totally relaxed and secure ...the hired man's remarkably sensitive touch had done just what he expected, maybe even a little more.
Pres, kneeling up behind her with his thumb holding the deep-creased crevice of her buttocks wide, grinned an obscene grin at his boss and his boss's friend. He could feel their thoughts as they watched him, envied him as he won his short battle with the pretty young redhead's will and the cheeks of her ass slowly relaxed in front of his desire-flushed face. All of her slowly moistening cunt stood open and unprotected before him, his for the taking now.
His head raised slowly and he pressed his face forward, pushing his open mouth hard against the wetness of her vaginal slit. She squirmed slightly and he tightened his hands on her buttocks so that she couldn't slip away and with one quick rush of his thick wet tongue, he thrust it forward between the warm fleshy folds of her treasured pink cunt.
Pres cast a quick look at the two white men ...now it was their turn to look on with wide eyes in amazement and tormented hunger as he brought this gorgeous redhaired young girl around to do his bidding, manipulating her, playing her like some kind of instrument. Just wat me you guys. Guess I'll show you what a real man can do.
Chapter 9
The frantically working handyman heard the young red haired girl gasp from the sudden unexpected entry into her soft wet passage and a surprised sigh smothered itself in the mattress as she pressed her face down into it. She had jerked forward with the first hot teasing contact of his tongue in an involuntary spasm of delight but quickly screwed her buttocks back hard against his face. Her vaginal passage contracted, opening and closing tightly around the long length of his tongue sunk deep inside her. Her breath exploded down into the bed in small gasps that muffled themselves into small quick grunts, twisting her face harder and harder into the bed as he began a sudden curling and flicking of his tongue imbedded up inside her. He pushed his lips closer and began to work at the whole of her lewdly upthrust backside, sucking and licking at it ravenously while her buttocks throbbed and swayed around his face almost out of control.
"Shit, would you look at that," muttered Thurman as he watched with unbelieving eyes Abigail's sudden and complete surrender to his slow-witted assistant's face buried lewdly in her cunt from behind.
Clyde Kelly was dumb-struck at the sight ...he had released one hand from her shoulder and was pressing it tight againt the outside of his pants where a small circle of seminal fluid had seeped its way through from the hard throbbing excitement of his aching cock. He released her shoulder with his other hand as there was no longer any need to hold the completely subjugated girl so hard, and began coursing it up and down the nakedly quivering flesh of her back.
Pres worked slave-like behind the lewdly kneeling Abigail, his tongue withdrawing and plunging, making a wet sucking sluicing noise with each wicked thrust. Her cries were one long low continuous moan now, as he withdrew his lashing tongue suddenly from inside the warm smooth passage and found her tiny throbbing clitoris and licked. He pushed his face farther into her excitedly quivering cunt and began to suck and tease at it gleefully with his teeth, while she writhed and churned her buttocks above him in a lewd dance of desire.
"Oooooohhhh," she moaned, her body and mind completely out of control from the wild and obscene sucking of her loins. With a lewd and triumphant satisfaction, Pres could feel the muscles of her buttocks hollowing and contracting around the sides of his cheeks as he licked and sucked at her with a greedy untamed animal lust that threatened to drive him completely crazy.
Her soft wet cunt flowered open wider and wider, and her moistness increased with each further second his obscenely sucking mouth worked at her wide-stretched hole. It ran in slight warm trickles down the sides of the handyman's cheeks pressed tightly into the softness of her ass-cheeks warmly enclosing his face, and down the inside of her smoothly working loins and onto the soft inner flesh of her thighs. God, she was nearly ready to cum!
He could sense it from the wild abandoned tempo of her body and knew it was time, time to ram his cock into her innocent young softness. He wanted to feel her throbbing around him when she reached that climax that was so near now and wanted to explode inside her white little belly with himself in rhythm to her own cries of fulfillment. He wanted to fill her full of his hot male cum and he wanted Clyde and Thurman to watch every second of it as he fucked this pretty little redhead to within an inch of her life and she savagely enjoyed every second of it. Suddenly all the years he had spent in bitter subjugation himself began to bubble over in a boiling cauldron of hate and lust and desire to hurt.
His long thick cock ached from the anticipation he was building, building, while he worked at her lewdly undulating loins with .his hot punishing mouth. With some difficulty, he slithered up to his knees and worked his hips into the now wet and glistening opening of her buttocks from behind.
"Holy Jesus, he's gonna' throw it to her now, Clyde!" exclaimed Thurman, his eyes wide and gleaming.
"Yeah, damn it, I got eyes!" Kelly gulped, his own cock now out of his pants and held tight in his free hand, all swollen and purplish and filled with blood as he watched the deputy's assistant getting ready to shove his huge lust-engorged penis up inside the tiny young girl's nakedly quivering vagina. Fuck, man, this was better than some Danish sex show!
Pres was kneeling up behind Abigail now, his hips pressed tight into the thumb-spread crevice of her ass. He held his throbbing male hardness tightly between his fingers with the large blood-filled head poised just behind the tiny elastic opening of her cunt. He ached all over from the thought of the lovely young girl kneeling in abject servitude in front of him to be used as he would for as long as he liked.
His gaze was locked on the whiteness and purity of her naked body, and he let his eyes feast for the slightest of seconds on the way her soft full buttocks curved sharply down into a narrow waist. On either side of his kneeling legs, he could see her smooth white thighs tapering down sharply to her small well-formed knees and then blossoming out again to the fullness of firm shapely calves. He envisioned her lying on her back with the dainty strength of those white calves locked tightly behind his ass pulling him into her in a savage burst of passion that only the mind can conjure. That would come later, he thought ... Now his lust-engorged penis and balls ached as they had never ached for anything before, and he had to ram it into her now before it was too late ...before he emptied his thich hot sperm all over those soft white buttocks waving helplessly in front of him.
There was scarcely a finger's length between her open and fully exposed pussy and the end of his hotly throbbing cock now, and he pressed her buttocks wider apart to see it more clearly. His cock jerked slightly again as though unable to contain itself when the tiny puckered hole of her anus came into view just above the moist opening of her cunt. For a moment he was tempted to take her there, but the thought passed from his mind as he felt a small dewdrop of sticky moisture forming on the end of his tortured penis. God, he had to have it now or it would be too late ... he couldn't hold back another instant.
He moved forward, slipping his knees as far up between her wide-stretched thighs as he could possibly go, and guided his long thick cock forward between his thumb and forefinger, gently parting the soft reddish pussy hair with the rigidity of the huge bulbous cock-head. He felt the warm soft folds of her cunt close wetly over the rounded tip of his cock.
Pres groaned loudly ...he had never in his entire life felt anything so soft and tender. Trapped between the gently sucking layers of wet female flesh, his desire-hardened cock lay throbbing for a moment. The lewd contact of his thich blood-engorged cock pressed into the lewd moist softness of her cunt from behind, incited him to uncontrollable lust.
Damn, what an incredible feeling! He had to take her, take her hard and fast!
Pres flexed his buttocks. feeling all the frustration he had built up over a womanless lifetime suddenly surging forward with him into the warm wet flesh of the groaning young girl in front of him. He gasped aloud through the silence of the dim room as he felt the tight hot walls of her contracting cunt slip soothingly over and then wetly enclose his rock-hard cock.
"Ooooooooooh," she gasped beneath him as he surged into her, pushing the smooth, yielding walls of soft inner flesh before him like rippling waves off a speeding boat. Her body trembled and shook before the sudden assault that took her completely by surprise. She had lain dormant before the strange unknown caresses her body had received, grateful for pleasure and not pain. But now, her mood had changed. Gone was the daze that had encompassed her mind and taken her into another world of half-conscious ecstasy.
She was suddenly back in reality again, back on this bed with her shoulders being pressed down painfully again into the mattress, while three lustful, panting men gathered around her to sate their animal passions in her nakedness. Her shame and humiliation returned with a vengeance as she felt her thighs and buttocks being swept wide apart by the thick lewd cock of Thurman's hired man tunneling up into her mercilessly from behind.
"Mmmmm, she's tight!" exclaimed the handyman to no one in particular. "What a pussy!"
Abigail squealed suddenly, not from any new pain, for there was none. She was wet and open and he slid into her easily from the warm moist secretions that had flowed from her vagina during the teasing probings of his tongue a moment ago. But she squealed from the sudden and degrading realization that she was hopelessly trapped on the bed between the hands of those two _ despicable roughnecks and the thick rampaging cock of the third man skewering into her from behind. She hoarsely gasped for him to stop, only barely remembering her promise not to scream and risk waking her son. Helpless tears of frustration and humilation flooded again from her terror-stricken eyes. But there was no respite. The obscene intrusion deep in her dilated vagina grew and expanded before his uncontrolled assault until she felt the sudden heavy weight of muscular loins crushing hard into her buttocks, sweeping them wider and wider apart as he pressed forward more with all his strength to sink his lust-swollen cock as deep as he could inside her nakedly quivering belly.
"Hey, Thurman," the man grinned, "I'm all the way in `er."
Abigail groaned piteously beneath him, her face pushed deep down into the mattress by the pressure from behind until she could hardly breathe. Her vagina felt cruelly twisted and stretched on its lewd impalement. She fought, clenching the muscles of her cunt tightly together to keep the long hard fleshy staff from embedding itself further. But it was useless. Her struggles only incited Pres more, as her cuntal muscles clasped around him, wet and warm in protest against the unwanted entry, enclosed around him like warm melted butter and made the huge cock throb and grow inside her until she felt stretched and filled in her belly and loins beyond all possible imagination.
Her back ached horribly now from the cruel position she was held in for so long and she tried to move, but the hands had pressed against her shoulders again after her warning move when Pres had rammed it into her from behind. She felt other hands, too; hands roaming all over her body. Her breasts were being kneaded and squeezed by fingers that had slipped secretly between then and the mattress while she had been occupied with the lustful skewering of her vagina. They were hard and cruel and brought her tiny budding nipples to an involuntary erection from the harshness of the naked contact with her tingling flesh.
Another hand coursed over the ridges of her cruelly bent spine and followed it down to the juncture of her buttocks where quickly and without preparation, a finger was suddenly thrust deep into the confines of her tight, unused anus. She jumped from the first painful intrustion, and muffled her cry into the mattress beneath her face. The pain eased as her back passage slowly became adjusted to the unnatural intrustion.
"Man, that ass-hole's just as tight and sweet as her pussy!" came Thurman's excited voice from behind her and she could feel her face flush crimson in her shame and humiliation.
Tiny bursts of protest broke from her lips. Her vagina felt stretched and torn beyond all possible repair, and the dual ravishment of her loins with Thurman's thick finger implanted deep up her rectum made the feeling all the more intense. She tried not to move as she felt the pain easing with the stillness of her body, but the lust-crazed hired man ground and twisted deeper into her ravaged cunt as Thurman twisted his middle finger deeper into her cringing ass-hole, circling it and expanding her anal passage until she thought it would split from the unbearable pressure. The hand cupping her naked breasts beneath, twisted and squeezed with brutal thoroughness, teasing and pulling at every part of their young round firmness until she thought she would scream from the painful manipulations.
Kneeling behind her bent and trembling form, Pres flared his nostrils and began fucking in and out of her with long, lunging strokes. His short thick hands held tight to the rounded curves of her hips, slipping the moist sheath of her stretched and throbbing vagina back over the thickness of his cock as though he were thrusting it into a warm glove of soft wet skin.
But this was still not enough for the lunging Pres. He had to have more from this bitch who wouldn't have given him the time of day had they passed on the street. He wanted her bent to his will, completely bent to his will. He raised his hand high in the air as Thurman and Clyde looked on in puzzled disbelief while he continued the powerful in and out strokes he had established, and brought it down hard against her quivering white buttocks. The flat smack of flesh against flesh echoed like a rifle shot through the night and Abigail only barely managed to smother her scream in the softness of the mattress.
"Look at that boy go!" muttered Clyde excitedly. "That's the way, Pres ... show her who's boss!"
Abigail knew better than to resist now, for if she did, this first blow would have been followed by a rain of harder and more punishing blows if she defied them. Her buttocks rotated slightly as she heard Thurman's assistant urge her on, ordering her to move her ass. She experimented cautiously and, feeling no pain, she let herself follow his rhythm, grinding and twisting her buttocks back against his hard driving pelvis as though she were stuck to it.
"Atta girl, shake that thing," he spat at her from behind as he felt her being to respond to his hands digging into her gyrating hips.
"Oh ...oh ...oh ..." she gasped again and again as she bucked to his command. The sounds she made were muffled and indistinct from her face being smothered down into the mattress. With his every hard forward lunge now, his thick rigid cock which filled her cunt to the bursting point flung her hard forward against the restraining hands of the two men holding her while Pres fucked into her frantically from the rear. She felt as if some huge animal had attacked her, pushing her thighs open to the utmost angle and reaching to the deepest point in her belly with his monstrous ever-growing cock.
His fingers kneaded and squeezed at her buttocks with a wild frenzy, jerking his deputy-boss's middle finger from her anus and replacing it with one of his own in a hard cruel thrust into her soft rubbery depths. Thurman just quietly stepped aside, too amazed at the sudden intensity of this power they had unleashed in normally easy-going Pres to say anything or protest.
"Aaaaagggghhhh!" she choked into the mattress.
He swept and rammed into her with a growing frantic abandon of sensation from the hands working at her every sensual part. She could feel him thrusting more sadistically now, the sight of forcibly her bucking body inciting him to greater and greater effort. Her breath had become on long continuous groan that was only partly muffled in the cushions now. She was droning it out into the room uncontrollably, her face turned sideways on the mattress so that he could look down and see with lust-gleaming eyes, the effect it was having on her. Her lips opened and closed fish-like in torment, half in humiliation and shame from the uncontrollable feelings surging through her, and half in fear that she would be ripped asunder by the cruel thrusts and the vicious hands coursing brutally over her body.
There was suddenly another movement around her head and she could feel the mattress dropping in front of her face as a heavy weight descended around it. A hand jerked her head up while fingers funbled with her lips, trying to open her mouth. Then she felt a spongy wet sensation pressing against her lips. She jerked her eyes open and to her horror saw, right in front of her face, a long thick cock in rigid erection. Clyde, who could no longer take the lust inciting scene of this redhaired young girl being fucked from behind by his deputy's hired man, had sat on the edge of the bed and wriggled under her face. Her mouth was pressed tight into his loins. Thurman helped hold her securely in position, and Clyde's legs were splayed out on either side of her head.
He lifted her head, with the flat of his palm pushing back against her forehead, and with the other hand was forcing the head of his bulbous red cock into her mouth. She was shaking her head wildly from side to side, trying to keep the awful thing away, but he held her tight and she could not avoid it. She could only clench her teeth and lips tightly together and try to keep it away, but he was not to be denied. As he increased the pressure, it felt as if her lips were being pushed back through the sharpness of her teeth. He groaned and struggled against their softness, feeling them parting, until suddenly with the unexpected aid of an extra deep thrust from Pres fucking her from behind, she gasped. The broad thick cock crushed through her soft moist lips and into the wet warm cavern of her mouth. She could feel the hugeness of it slithering up the length of her tongue and filling her mouth completely with its thick fleshy hardness.
Clyde, in his excited desire for his young niece, began to slowly screw his loins up and down toward her face with his thickly- engorged penis sliding in and out of her mouth. His hands held her head in a vise-like grip, with the palms pressed hard against her ears. She struggled mentally against the obscene rape of her mouth, but it was useless as he quickened his thrusts to match those of the hired man fucking into her cunt from the rear, never quite pulling it all the way out of her, but always leaving a slight part of the tip beyond her lips in the hot moist shelter of her mouth.
Abigail had closed her eyes, her humiliation now complete. She felt numb to the world around her, devoid now of any sensation. In a trance-like state now, she watched the length of her uncle's cock where it came out of his fly and jerked toward her mouth like some horrible snake creeping from its hole in the ground.
"Suck it real nice like, baby," she heard him spit down at her ...and she obeyed without hesitation. She was conditioned now to following their every command from the fear of what might happen if she didn't. Her lips slowly began to nibble at the lewdly thrusting instrument, and she coughed and sputtered at first until she became accustomed to thus unnatural invasion of her mouth. She had done this only once before, and then only with her husband, but she hadn't liked it even that one time. She tried not to think about what she was doing, but it was impossible not to. His testicles bounced obscenely against her chin and there was the strong odor of lust-incited masculinity around his loins that filed her nostrils with a constant reminder of the cruel and depraved attack she was enduring.
Behind her, Pres could feel himself building toward the end. He knew it would be soon and began to fuck into her, harder and harder, faster and faster, mercilessly battering the quivering cheeks of her ass with his hard-driving hips. His hands gripped her waist tightly, squeezing the soft flaccid flesh into random crazy shapes between his fingers. His lips bared back against his teeth, and he could not close his mouth. His breath came in short staccato bursts that crackled loudly through the hushed silence of the girl's living room. He stared down at her slender bucking body and bobbing head. The sight of his lust-hardened cock, swollen and gleaming, disappearing in thrust after vicious thrust up into her lewdly clasping cunt from behind, and the thick white cock of Clyde's skewering madly in and out of her tightly ovalled lips, shot chills and lightning-like sensation up the length of his spine. Somehow it was even more erotic and exciting to be fucking this girl while she sucked another man's cock!
As Pres worked frantically behind her, his eyes flickered smokily back to her tender lips clasping and unclasping around the rapidly burgeoning penis of the man hunched at her head who was forcing her to suck him. Abigail worked in a daze at the command of Clyde's fingers, licking and sucking ravenously as he forced her to follow slave-like every thurst up into the tender shelter of her mouth. Her ravishment continued on and on at both ends of her bent and tortured body as the sex-crazed men grabbed and squeezed at every inch of her nakedly shivering body.
The saliva in her mouth grew and grew. It was becoming slightly sticky now as small emissions of lubricating fluid seeped into its warm depths from Kelly's huge cock. She could feel his hips writhing and straining from his lustful desire below her bobbing head as though lie were in the last spasmodic throes of death. His fingers were curled tightly in her hair, slipping her mouth up and down over the end of his thrusting fleshy instrument as though it were another cunt into which he was venting the full fury of his animal lust. She could feel it stretching and expanding inside her mouth until there was no room left, and moaned pitiously around it as it thrust forward hard down to her tonsils as though it were trying to meet the other hard cruel cock skewering deep into her squirming belly from behind.
She had never felt so utterly used and debauched in her life, and she sucked with her mouth and wiggled her buttocks wildly from behind to end it as quickly as she could. There was nothing else but that now, nothing but to please them all as best she could, and pray it would be over soon and that her little son wouldn't wake up and see his mother like this.
Her late husband's uncle in front of her suddenly jerked as though stuck with a knife and writhed his hips up tight into her face, sinking the full length of his cock deep down into her gasping throat. She fought to breathe, but it was hopeless as suddenly his cock erupted in the warm wet interior of her lewdly sucking mouth, unintelligible sounds of profanity coming from between his lips. His hot thick liquid squirted up into her mouth like the rush of raging water through the storm gates of a huge dam, and she sucked and swallowed, sucked and swallowed, her cheeks inflating and deflating all the time for the pressure of the bursting flood of sperm. It lasted for a seeming eternity, her mouth filled with the masculine taste of his lewd sperm and passion, and then it jerked a long last jerk and softened beneath her hotly swirling tongue. Her senses were gone and she was hardly aware of it when a moment later his cock oozed from between her lips in a sticky soft mass of male flesh. His hands pulled her head limply forward to lay trapped against the whole of his trembling loins.
She could still feel its rubbery soft , length pressed tight against her cheek when she heard a grunt from behind her. She felt her thighs and buttocks swept wide apart in one last asscrushing rush as handyman Pres, fucking into her mercilessly, shoved his lust- driven harness as far as it would go into her naked belly and began spewing his hot sticky liquid deep up inside her. His mouth opened wide with aloud gasp of relief as she felt his lewd male cum filling her cock-split vagina with a great white-hot rush. She could feel it flooding hotly up into her and filling the depths of her womb until she thought she would burst inside. There were several convulsive jerks of his pelvis against the soft flaccid cheeks of her ass, a desperate digging fo fingers into the smooth pliant flesh of her hips and then Pres fell forward over her back pushing her face down across the exhausted and satiated Kelly who had just forced her to suck him dry.
For a long while there seemed to be no movement at all, and then Abigail shivered from the sudden rush of chilling air that surged into her as the black man pulled his hot rubbery penis from her vagina and let her fall flat onto the sofa-bed, leaving a gaping hole where his huge stallion-like cock had just been embedded in her. She felt Kelly move from under her and thought for a moment it was over. But it wasn't ...there was a rustling movement of bodies, a couple of sinister laughs, and she found her head suddenly lifted off the bed by her hair and Thurman maneuvered into Kelly's place, his long thick penis hard and fully erect, filled with unsatisfied lust from watching her perform once with the other two men.
"C'mon, honey, one more for you!" And without protest, she opened her lips and let the lewd swollen cock slide over her tongue and into her throat. She sucked him quickly and ably, without thinking, without opening her eyes. and when she heard him gasp, felt his loins shudder with the fury of his coming orgasm, she opened her throat and swallowed and sucked and gulped until he, too, had vented his salacious desires down into her belly and her whole insides sloshed with the lewdly mingled flood of all their combined passion.
The better part of a half-hour had pasted and Abigail had washed her face of its sticky seminal stains brushed her teeth, and dressed herself painfully, easing her ravaged limbs into her clothes so that at least she wasn't still naked for these men to look at and ogle.
Clyde was seated closest to the door, finishing off the last of the only liquor she had in the house, an old bottle some one had left. Again he had questioned her about the car they had seen leaving here tonight, and again she had begged him, pleaded with him to believe her, that she had seen no one but Allen. Clyde had given up, finally, and though she expected to be beaten, he decided instead to have the deputy run an identification check on the vehicle while they waited.
There were footsteps on the porch outside and Thurman came in without knocking. "I got it, Clyde, but you ain't gonna' like it."
Kelly looked first at Abigail, his cold eyes threatening, then back at Thurman, "Go ahead, try me."
"It belongs to one Andrew W. McLain of Santa Rosa ...that's acting District Attorney McLain."
"Andy McLain! Why you lyin' little slut. I oughta' ..."
"Hold it, Clyde, maybe she's telling the truth. I talked to Roberts when I phoned in. I didn't want to use the radio and he happened to be working the night desk. He called me back on the private line, the one that ain't recorded. That's what took so long."
"Well, what're you gettin' at?"
"Nothing much, really, `cept Roberts is a good man, one of us, if you know what I mean."
"Roberts? He ain't workin' for me."
"I know, Clyde," assured the deputy. "But I just mean he's not one to go off shooting his trap if he thinks something's. kinda odd, ya know? Anyway, he said that new boy has been doing a lot of nosing around, asking a lot of questions, some of them about me, and a few about you and your operations. Seems he's on some kind of one-man investigation to clean up the drug ..."
"Shut up, Thurman, before you say more that you oughta"'
"All right, Clyde," he said, looking like a hurt little boy. "I was just trying to help."
"You've helped, all right. Helped me come up with a plan. Maybe we better shut that kid up right now before he gets the D.A.'s job and can really throw some weight around. Thurman, where's that punk college boy live?"
"Out in Hamilton Acres, why?"
"I got me an idea how to show him who's running things in this here part of the county. I remember that pretty little wife o' his, Caroline I think `er name was, right?"
"Yep, pretty as a picture."
"Well, how long would it take Frankie and Hal to get out to Hamilton Acres?"
" `Bout twenty minutes, time they wake up and all, why?"
"Never mind why, I'll do all the worrying `bout that. Abigail, I don't know whether you been talking to that D.A. punk or not, but I'm gonna' find out tonight, right here in this room. And either way, I'll show that motherfucker who's boss o' Santa Elisa, and you're gonna' help me."
"No, Clyde, I won't have any part of your filthy schemes. I'll work for you in your bar like I promised, `cause I need the money, but I won't do this."
"Oh, you'll do it all right. You'll do it and more, too ...Go in there and wake up that kid of yours and get him dressed. You can tell him he's goin' for a little visit with 01' Uncle Clyde."
"No! No, you can't take Jason! No, Clyde, he's all I got! Please!" she begged, tears flooding her cheeks anew.
"Don't go getting all hysterical woman. Nobody's gonna' hurt that kid as long as you cooperate. You just do what you're told and everything'll work out just fine. Now go get him!"
Chapter 10
He wondered if he was crazy or something. After all, driving this road again in the middle of the night like this ...damn, he must be cracking up. Maybe this job was just too much for him. He knew a lot of the old timers around the courthouse were betting he'd never last until the elections. And even though he'd been acting District Attorney for three months now, ever since Algernon Davies passed away in the middle of a heated courtroom argument, Andy McLain was prone to having a few doubts himself from time to time. It was one hell of a job, a bigger one than he had expected when the county commissioners asked him to step into Old Davies' shoes until the elections rolled around. He'd been an assistant in the D.A.'s office then, one year there and four years of private practice before that. He was still in his middle-thirties, but at this rate he'd be worn out before he ever reached forty.
It was hard to think of any other case that could have drawn him out on a chilly winter's night like this when he was already home. And when he'd already been here once tonight. But this was something special. There was always a certain attraction about a rogue cop case; men in the legal profession just didn't take too kindly to those occasional misfits who used it as a means to some illegal end. And he knew he was on to just such acase here in the Santa Elisa township.
It had started with just a routine tip from the D. A. down in San Francisco. He'd picked up a bit of information from one of his regular informers and thought it might be best to pass it on. But not through regular police channels, since this little tidbit meant there were officers in the sheriff's office that had apparently forgotten where their loyalties lay. He only hoped there was just the one ...just Thurman Marshburn. Andy already had enough evidence to put Marshburn and that crooked pal of his, Clyde Kelly, away for years. They had gotten fat and lazy after so long without any worries, and it was child's play gathering the evidence against them. What amazed Andy was how they had managed to get by so long without being found out.
Kelly's operation was simple, so simple that it was the sort of thing you might just overlook in an investigation. He had built up a nice string of operatives, running from the fishing towns up the coast, through the logging truckers that ran the coast highway, and finally, his city routeman who finished the run with the smuggled-in heroin and cocaine the fishermen picked up outside the three- mile limit from the smuggling outfit's big offshore tuna fishing craft that plied the coast from British Columbia to the Baja Mexican beaches. Once he got the first real lead, the rest just fell into place without hardly digging. It seemed that Kelly had been operating so long and so openly, going through operatives one by one as they either earned all they wanted and split or got scared and begged off. It was one of those who got scared who supplied most of the details, trading everything he knew for a guarantee of immunity from the D. A.'s office. Andy had been more than willing to lose a little fish like that for the chance at the real big one ... Clyde Baxley Kelly.
Actually, he'd planned to order Clyde and Thurman arrested two days ago, but when he got word of a couple of newcomers on the scene, a bartender and a mysterious good-looking redhead who had appeared out of nowhere, he decided to take a look himself before closing the noose on Kelly and Marshburn. After all, no sense blowing the whistle if there were still more fingers in the pie. That was why he'd been parked outside Abigail's house earlier tonight, why he'd been nearly spotted by Allen and had to run for it, risking identification rather than a confrontation that night blow the lid on the whole raid. He had run the usual check on both of them and found the bartender as clean as glass; but lie wasn't too sure about the girl. Cod, she was a real looker, all right, and it wouldn't be too pleasant having to put her away. But that message back from the state had been all too definite-she was wanted for questioning in connection with a serious bombing down at Berkeley and to top it off, she had a felony conviction with a suspended sentence to boot. He'd have never guessed it, not with those sweet green eyes and that angelic face. But you never know, there have been a lot of good-looking murderers around, so she could be mixed up in this right up to her pretty little ass.
Andy drove slowly along the Russian River, easing his way through the scattered patches of ground fog that hung close to the river banks. He wondered if he would have come out again tonight if anyone else had called him. Still though, it was sort of strange, and he couldn't help feeling a bit apprehensive about it. How did she find out he was investigating the dope ring? And what kind of information could she possibly have for him that lie didn't have already? Yeah, it was weird all right ...but he couldn't pass it up, not with the case practically in the bag. He had to drive back to Santa Elisa and see the girl, even if it was a waste of time. And he doubted that seeing that gorgeous creature again could possibly be a waste of time. God, how he'd envied that bartender kid tonight, spending all that time in there with the lights off. And when she came to the door to see him off in nothing but her panties - man, he just about gave up the legal profession right then and there and became a bartender.
Caroline McLain was finally sound asleep again. It all seemed like a dream - Andy coming in quietly and coming to bed, then that telephone call and he was gone again. She hadn't really tried to figure it out, she'd long ago grown accustomed to the erratic hours a man in her husband's line of work had to keep. Whenever something went wrong, it was invariably at four o'clock in the morning. It was something you got used to, though you never really enjoyed it. She could only just shake her head and then smile to herself proudly, glad she had married such a devoted public-spirited man like Andy McLain.
It wasn't easy at first. Andy had been a trial lawyer in the office of three of the county's oldest and most esteemed attorneys. The job had certainly carried with it the necessary amounts of prestige - it was probably responsible for Andy having the job he had now - but it had been pure hell for their marriage. The senior partners really did nothing but lend their names to the firm, having long ago worked their last courtroom battles. So that left all the back-breaking hours to juniors like Andy had been then. They'd come awfully close to splitting up a couple of times then, but they had somehow managed to get through it all relatively unscathed. It seemed awfully long ago now, longer than the few years it had actually been, but for the both of them, this D. A.'s role was paradise, even with the headaches and the middle-of-the-night emergencies. She hadn't even asked Andy what it was that was taking him away so urgently; she tried to stay out of his business life as much as she could. Whatever it was must have been important, for she couldn't remember when he'd climbed out of a warm bed in ages.
She wasn't really aware that there were noises around her until she heard the loud thudding sound from the living room. She jumped from the bed and reached for the light switch, more sleepy than afraid at this point. But before she could switch on the lights, a strong male hand grabbed her wrist and shoved her back onto the bed. She screamed loudly at the top of her lungs, but that was quickly stifled by a piece of cloth that was tied in her mouth, nearly choking her. Her eyes pleaded in the darkness, who are you, why are you doing this?
Suddenly the bedside lamp was turned on and she wished she could have stayed in the dark. There were two men in her bedroom, both of them wearing ladies stockings pulled over their heads so that their faces were all smeared and indistinguishable. "Just keep real quiet, honey," said one, "and don't get no ideas about fighting `cause it's hopeless."
One of them reached for her hands, pulled them tightly together behind her back and tied them with a piece of cord he had brought with him. Suddenly it became painfully obvious what they intended for her ...they were going to rape her! That had to be it, she was going to get raped!
She suddenly felt very sick at the thought and looked around instinctively for a weapon, a way of escape. But the men only grinned at her and the terrible horror of her situation suddenly overcame her and she tried desperatly to scream, but even that escape was denied her.
"Listen, cunt, I'm not interested in killing you, but if you try anything funny, I'll cut your throat, understan?" one of them said in a tone that was obviously authentic. The other one had his hand to her mouth, as if she could possible scream with the cloth shoved in it and she tried to bite hum but was unable to even touch his flesh through the gag that held her mouth and lips immobile. She was pushed roughly back onto the bed and one of them ripped off her nightie and started for her panties.
"Please, please," she sobbed through the gag, though the words were barely intelligible. They held her firmly on the bed while one of them finished stripping her, gripping her panties and yanking them down her bare legs. Her shoulder-length blonde hair tossed wildly behind her head as she struggled to stop them before it was too late. Her breasts soared free before their eyes, and she could see the look of lust and viciousness in those eyes as they watched her becoming naked in a few deft moves of their strong hands.
"Now, let's see what else she's got," said the bigger of the two, now as naked as she was, except for his socks. With eyes deep in fear she saw his hair-covered body and the great huge penis that rose tree-like out of the tangle of his pubic hair. Caroline closed her eyes to shut out the sight and felt uneasily faint, as if she were about to black out. She was naked and helpless before their eager gaze, sick and chilled to the marrow of her bones with the fears of the sexual horrors they looked capable of heaping upon her defenseless body. Oh God, Andy, where arc you? Why aren't you here to stop this!'
One of them came closer to her face, his features a horrid nightmarish smear of flesh beneath the stocking mask, while the other one toyed viciously with her thighs, pulling them apart and roughly fondling the soft white flesh of her inner thigh. "Mmmmm ... sweet little pussy," he muttered through the gauze of his mask.
Frankie DeLano had been working on one of the company trucks in his garage with his partner Hal Tunstall when Kelly's phone call came through. He had listened carefully to the big boss' instructions over the wire, then agreed to the assignment and went to tell Hal about it. If it had been anyone else calling with a job like this one, he would have told them to go straight to hell. But Kelly was the big man, and he knew only too well that it didn't pay to cross him when he needed you. A couple of guys, at least, had disappeared somewhere up in the logging country after similar refusals. This kind of job was out of their line, but so far, at least, it didn't seem too bad. He'd sort of expected some hatchet-faced old bitch, not the pretty young thing that he and Hal had found when they forced the latch on the back door of this split-level suburban home, just as Kelly had told them to do. Neither of them knew who she was or what she had done to deserve what they were going to do to her, but that wasn't their concern. That sort of thing was left up to the bosses, not the lieutenants. Hal and Frankie just followed orders, whether it was blowing up a logging rig of some holdout driver of picking up a load of heroin for delivery to the city pick-up boys. Or this ...
Caroline felt his fingers on her vagina and she cringed her naked squirming loins away, but it was futile. His middle finger probed and poked lewdly and entered her roughly at last, filling her with an awful dread and shame as she felt the coarseness of his thick finger spreading open the delicate pink lips of her vagina and forcing its way inside.
"Nice and tight," he said to his friend with a hoarse chuckle under his breath. "Give her the stuff."
Caroline looked up at the one closest to her with huge frightened eyes, but before she could even hope to figure out what was happening, he held a tiny spoonful of some substance right up to her nostrils and clamped his hand over her mouth. She tried to hold her breath, but finally, she had to breathe in and when she did, the white grainy powder was sucked up into her nose with the gasping breath. She could feel her head spinning from the effects of the powder, whatever it was, and she felt suddenly very lightheaded. Yet, strangely, some of her fear seemed to have subsided; at least it seemed that way. It was strange and weird, the things that were happening to her. For a few minutes, her thoughts were diverted by the fantastic things that were going on in her mind ...somehow these men didn't even exist. It was as if she had somehow tuned them out and turned on to another channel inside her brain somewhere.
She didn't even struggle as, confused more than frightened, she felt herself being lifted and turned onto her belly on the bed. In this sudden new daze she felt their hands again up between her legs, drawing apart her softly yielding buttocks. Instinctively she tried to tense her trembling ass-cheeks and close off this unguarded channel, feeling even more uncomfortably naked and vulnerable now. But she couldn't stop the pressure, and her buttocks were stretched apart until she could feel the cool air on the hot perspiring interior of the smooth white half-moons.
"Cute little thing there ... all puckered and hairless," she heard one of them say.
His words chilled her but somehow Caroline couldn't bring herself to respond. It was as if she knew how she should feel and react, but her mond and body seemed to be functioning on a different plane, somehow away from all this and apart. Just this awareness was perhaps as frightening as that first initial awareness of what they intended to do to her. She felt his fingers exploring the tight-puckered skin of her anus until with a painful shock she felt one of them enter her and go in up to the first knuckle joint. For the moment, at least, that bruising entry brought her mind back to the present and she tried to cry out, but couldn't as the gag was too tight. Only a silly muffled noise escaped around the tightly bound cloth and she realized that no one beyond this room could hear her pleas. She was totally alone and helpless ...no one would come, no one would help her. Whatever they wanted of her, why they had ever picked her for the venting of their savage desires ...she was alone and powerless to stop them.
She tried closing her buttocks, squeezing the muscles to see if that would somehow drive thus alien invading finger from her rectum, but the masked man only laughed at her feeble efforts and made some rude coarse remark about her tightening it up just for him. She had never had anything pushed up there before; she and Andy would never have dreamed of such a thing, and she felt suddenly very ashamed that this man was doing something to her that even her beloved husband had never done .
"Tie her up," the one who was so lewdly probing her anus with his middle finger.
Viciously they dragged her the length of the bed and produced two pieces of rope. Obviously, this whole thing was carefully planned, right down to the last necessary accessory. This was no sudden crime of passion - these men had not chanced to gaze upon her lying on her bed alone and suddenly were stricken with the urge to ravage her. No, this was carefully detailed and organized. But why, why me?
They tied her belly-down, to the posts of the wooden bed so that her arms stretched out in an open V across the top of the mattress.
Caroline felt hot breath on her neck and then the crushing weight of a great hairy body as the bigger of the two men lowered his bulk onto her helplessly cringing nakedness and seemed to grind all over against her as if reveling in the touch of her shivering flesh against his own naked skin. She wished she could somehow pass out, that she would awaken and this would all be over, but instead, she seemed even more alert and conscious than before. And as she had felt moments ago, there was less and less fear somehow. God, what was it they gave me? What's happening to me?
She could feel the hotly throbbing length of a cock pressing against her buttocks and rough hands ran all over her neck shoulders and back. He bit her playfully on the back of her neck and she tried to cry out, her eyes suddenly popping open from the unexpected pain. The other man was close by the head of her bed, a vicious grin on his face, making him look even more wicked and frightening through the nylon-stocking mask. She closed her eyes with a gasp and dropped her head back to the bed. Never had she felt such humiliation and shame ...and yet, somehow, she was less and less afraid. At first, she had thought she would die, that just the shameful memory of this would kill her. But now ...now she wasn't so sure.
She felt a tongue running down her spine, felt the body moving off hers. He roughly forced apart her thighs, which she was trying to clasp together out of shame, and knelt up between them. She felt his face against her buttocks, and then, without warning, he bit into the tender flesh of one buttock. As she winced to mask the pain, she could hear the two of them talking. But the words came as through a haze, muted and mysterious. She knew something was happening to her ...not this awful, brutal rape of her body, but something even worse. A rape of her mind!
She tried to cringe her buttocks away from his crudely probing lips and tongue, but she only managed to wiggle them in what appeared to the two men to be a lewd invitation to take her back there.
"Look at that, will 'ya! She can't hardly wait!' one of them laughed.
The man's knees up between her thighs pushed wide, hard and painful against her own soft flesh. She could feel herself spread wide and helpless and she knew he could take her there any time he cared to. That there was nothing she could do but wait for his vicious ravishment to begin.
Andy McLain's helplessly tied wife felt the strange man's hand on her hips, clasping the soft flesh, digging into it. And he finally pulled her up to a forced kneeling position, his hairy loins smashed against her cruelly wide-held thighs and his thick blood-engorged cock probing roughly up between them prodding into her hair-fringed cunt. She could feel his thumbs digging into the tender white flesh on either side of her defenseless anus. And then, a hard-pointed thrusting began against the tiny nether ring, a probing that rammed roughly into her between the man's outstretched thumbs. Her whole body seemed to chill with renewed fear and horror ...she tried again to scream and could only curse into the gag in frustration and in terror.
"Hold her," the one behind her commanded, as she tried to struggle. She was in a vise now as she could feel her anus being stretched open to accommodate the big man's throbbing cock now poked hard against the tiny puckered hole. She could feel his hotly loaded cock pushing and pushing, could hear him grunting from the strain of forcing his way into this tender virginal passage. There were tears on her cheeks and her eyes stung with their saltiness, but she couldn't escape the nagging sensation that somehow she wasn't responding properly, that something was as dead wrong inside her as this horrible, unspeakable act going on behind tier.
The other man held her tight to the bed, unable to move, her buttocks waving lewdly high up in the air, naked ass-cheeks spread openly for his enjoyment and she could feel her stomach twist into a dozen different knots at the prospect of what was about to happen.
" ...a little more stuff ..." was all she caught of their conversation. Then, suddenly, her head was lifted and another tiny spoonful of the strange powdery substance was forced up into her nostrils. She could feel its potent tingling, more acute this time, and she suddenly felt as if she had somehow floated free of the bed and was drifting around the room with these strange stocking- faced men holding onto tier like she was some kind of balloon. She nearly giggled at the thought and then was jerked back to reality as she now felt the big man's cock push solidly up into her vainly cringing ass-hole.
Her anus was splitting. She was sure it would tear the whole length of her body and she felt she could not bear the horrible pain a second longer. But somehow she did ...and as it continued, she bore it still. She could feel the enormous intrusion of his cock pushing solidly into her now, widening her delicate rear passage, opening it up into her belly as he pushed his throbbing, lust-swollen cock right up the soft rubbery forbidden channel and into her very insides.
She became aware of his hand gripping her hips with a strange numbing sensation as he plunged into her like the piston of a pump, stroking deep and painfully up her incredibly tight, constricting rectum. Each thrust seemed to go deeper and to split her open more, but somehow she managed to stand the pain. Her thoughts were wild and scattered ...What's wrong with me? These feelings ... it's not pain I'm feeling now, but what is it? What is it?
He was pummeling into her now with long, smooth strokes, fucking her with the whole aching length of his cock. She heard him gasping at the pleasurable tightness and somehow his moans and grunts only added fuel to the growing sensations she herself could feel mounting in her ravaged, twisted belly. There was a fiery ball of feeling growing ravenously there, an enormous furnace-hote globe of something she couldn't understand beginning to rage out of control inside her. She was enjoying this!
"Ooooohhhhh ...mmmmmm," she managed to breathe around the gag in her mouth. If she could have seen the faces of the two men above her, she would have seen them glance knowingly at one another and grin lewdly as the biggest one continued to fuck her sadistically up her rectal passage. "Mmmmmmmm ..."
Her breasts heaved and bounced around underneath her as she was held in this awkward kneeling position. Her whole body shook, her thighs trembled and the flesh was weak. If they had not been holding her, she would have sunk to her belly on the mattress.
"Ooooohhhh," she moaned and grunted beneath him and he pressed forward as far as he could, pulling the soft cheeks of her ass wide apart to allow him to go deeper, and just holding it there now. His cock was buried to the hilt up her painfully expanded rectum and he suddenly gasped again. Surprisingly, her ass began to grind rhythmically, urging him on, beckoning him into her deeper.
"Oooooh, yes," she muttered through the gag as he gorged into her buttocks as hard as he could and rotated the giant blood-filled head of his cock deep around in her asshole.
Caroline could almost feel herself splitting open from the power and pressure he was exerting deep inside her but she gritted her teeth and began to do strange things, things she herself could not begin to understand. But she could not fight it ...whatever it was that had seized her mind and body was too powerful for her to struggle against it. It was as if someone were directing her thoughts, ordering her body to perform while she stood by helplessly in terror and shame and watched. But she couldn't ...wouldn't ... change it.
Behind her, the elated man began to throb and ache in his balls from the excitement of seeing her come to life, to respond like this to his pummeling thrusts into her ravaged back passage. He knew the drug would work, it always did ...and now they were dealing with another woman. They had found that little bit of whore that lurks in every woman's soul and it had seized control of her now. From here on, it would be easy!
Caroline could feel his throbbing hugeness growing even more up inside her stretched and expanded rectum, and she knew what was coming. She knew her cruel ravisher was going to shoot his lewd, hot sperm deep into her helpless anus and she would have to take every drop of the seething liquid until it filled her very insides.
He began to fuck into her ass-hole with ever increasing speed. His hand ripped and pulled at the soft white rounded half-moons of her buttocks like they were soft resilient clay in his hands. He spread the resilient cheeks of her ass wide apart and with bulging eyes watched the full length of his lewdly pistoning cock split the madly sucking whiteness of her tiny anus. His cock felt as though it would burst, not just at the end but all along the full lust-hardened length where the rubbery tight walls of her rectum held it vise-like and hot. The poor confused married woman was mumbling and whimpering incoherent noises into the mattress, tiny cries of wanton passion that she tried to suppress but was unable to. And the man behind her only increased his vigorous strokes in keeping with this newly displayed passion until he was buffeting her forward into the headboard of the bed with cruel shattering lunges. The other man suddenly yanked off her gag, sensing now that she wouldn't cry for help. She was beyond that now, the evil drug having worked its lewd magic on her brain and she gulped in the cool air now that she could breathe freely once more.
"Oooohh, yes, yes! Fuck me there, fuck me hard!" she gasped, amazed at her own animal cries but powerless to stop these wicked, lust-inspired words from escaping her lips. Oh no, what has come over me?! Am l crazy?!
Her sobs jerked down her throat as she felt him quiver inside her and realized to her horror that the moment was here when he would explode inside her and fill her helpless and unprotected belly with his obscene hot cum and there was nothing she could do to stop him. Yet, another portion of her mind cried out in shameless hunger for his orgasmic fury ...part of her wanted this lewd and despicable humiliation!
"Oh, yes, cum in me! Cum in me!" she heard herself saying and there was a strangled gurgle from behind her and she felt his great throbbing cock burst like a dam as he gave one last tremendous thrust back into her obscenely upraised buttocks and emptied his boiling hot sperm in wave after deep wave into the flowering depths of her rectum. Caroline thought the wildly ejaculating instrument would never stop flowing into her and she could feel the hot sticky fluid overflowing around his still jerking cock and forcing its way out the tight nether ring of her ass-hole clamped tight around the base of his throbbing cock. Her humiliation and shame were complete ...wantonly, she ground her buttocks back against his hair loins to swallow up every drop of his lewd male stickiness and she clamped the muscles of her rectum tightly together to milk his balls completely dry. She had whored herself shamelessly and was powerless to stop it. She gasped out a deep sigh as she felt his deflated and limp shaft of softening flesh withdraw from her flooded behind.
She thought for a moment that it was over, and was amazed, humiliated, that that same tiny part of her soul craved even more! She felt her bonds being loosened, offered no resistance as she was rolled over. Her legs suddenly were scissored back against her breasts and he opened her eyes. She wanted to cry out, wanted desperately to cling to some last vestige of her dignity and faithfulness to her husband, but she couldn't!
Her eyes locked on the immense length of the other man's long, purplish cock poised inches above her wide-spread upturned cunt. She could see him between her legs as she looked down over the quivering mounds of her thigh-crushed breasts. "Yes, yes, fuck me! Fuck me!" she cried, tears of shame and humiliation in her eyes. She couldn't stand it any longer, she had to have a man's throbbing hardness in her cunt!
He looked at his friend who was wiping the traces of his orgasm from his flaccidly dangling cock with the bedspread. "That stuff sure does the job, don't it?"
The big man grinned, "Cocaine'll do it every time!" And the room was suddenly filled with the anquished woman's gasping sigh as the man sank up the hilt inside her well-lubricated vagina. She gasped again and again, her legs wrapped around his back, her nails digging viciously into his flesh.
"Oh God, yes, fuck me, fuck me good!"
Chapter 11
Andy McLain parked his car far down the road that led to the redhead's cottage. He was acting on instinct and experience more than real knowledge, but he figured it would be better to take a look before he went blundering into anything that he might regret later. He walked cautiously up Redwood Road, staying close to the trees; there was no moon now as it was almost four o'clock in the morning, but he could see that the lights were on at Mrs. Madison's cottage. She was up and apparently waiting for him, just like she had said she'd be on the telephone. Jesus, he told himself, shivering in the wintry night chill, this had better be worth the trip. I've got a trial in less than five hours!
Abigail felt very alone and small and frightened. If only Allen were here she thought. Oh, God, how I need him now! She heard footsteps outside and looked through the window. It had to be the man she had been ordered to telphone. She opened the door before he could knock.
"Are your Mrs. Madison?" he began.
"Abigail. ..yes, come in, please." She stepped aside and motioned him into the living room. It was all straightened up now and normal-looking enough, not a trace of the struggle that had gone on here just an hour or so ago.
"What was it you wanted to tell me?" he asked, feeling suddenly very sleepy and tired now that the tension of driving those back roads in the fog had been removed.
Abigail tensed - she had known it wasn't going to be easy, but this was ridiculous! She couldn't even remember Clyde's story, the one he had made her go over and over so that he was sure she had it right. All she could think of was her precious little boy all confused and sleepy when she woke him up, and now he was out there somewhere with that horrible Clyde Kelly. The words wouldn't come from her throat abd she could only look at the D. A. with pleading eyes, her heart bursting to tell him the truth.
"Listen, Ma'am, if you don't have something important for me, I'll have to be going. I have to be in court in a few hours and I need some rest. Now what was it you wanted to tell me that was so important. You said on the phone it couldn't wait until tomorrow."
"Uh ...it's about the dope ring."
"Yes, you told me that much on the phone. What is it?" He was beginning to doubt very seriously that she had anything to tell him he didn't know already.
"I ...I ..." she stuttered, twisting her fingers together nervously. What's wrong with me! I can't even think!
"Well, listen, why don't you call me tomorrow at the office in Santa Rosa. I've got to be going. And next time, try not to wake me up unless you've got something to say." He knew there wasn't going to be a next time, not for her anyway. For tomorrow, when he ordered the arrests of Clyde Kelly and Thurman Marshburn and the others whose names he'd gathered in his investigation, including the other deputies Kelly kept paid off to keep their noses out of his operation, he would have to issue a warrant for this girl too. The police in Berkeley would be dealing with her then. He turned and started to go.
"Wait!" He turned and nearly popped his jaw as his mouth dropped open. She had pulled off her sweater and was standing there naked to the waist, her hugely swelling breasts just jutting out there openly and obviously intended as an invitation. "Do you have to hurry?"
Abigail forced a come-hither smile, while in her stomach she was nearly sick with humiliation and disgust. But she remembered Clyde's threat ...Keep him there at least a half-hour or you'll never see this kid o yours again!
In all his years in law enforcement, Andy McLain had never come across a more obvious set-up, but he couldn't help himself. Jesus, she was every bit as beautiful as he had imagined. That rich red hair and those tits! Goddamn, what a woman!
She opened her arms and he couldn't help himself. He stepped forward hurriedly and threw his arms around her tiny body, felt those fantastic breasts crush against his chest. And the rest came as naturally as breath itself. His fingers coursed over the full twin mounds, kneading the supple white flesh, tweaking the crinkly peaks of her hardening nipples. He heard her moan as his hand closed around the full pear-shaped mound of her breast and he pushed her back onto the sofa, the same sofa where Clyde and Thurman and Thurman's assistant had raped her so thoroughly.
His hand went to the zipper on her jeans, tugged it down and then yanked her tightly-fitting denims down over her long shapely legs and finally pulled them free. Her panties he almost reverently removed, first gripping them delicately in the waist, then pulling them tenderly down over her lushly swelling hips as she raised her buttocks to accommodate him. God, he knew better, but this was just too much to turn down! He'd thought about fucking this girl the minute he laid eyes on her, but he never though it would actually happen!
He looked into her eyes and saw that they were misted over ...with passion, he thought. And he lowered his mouth to her breast, taking in as much of it as he could and swirling his tongue-tip around her throbbing pink nipple.
His hand went down between her thighs which she unhesitatingly opened for him and found the honey-sweet slit of her pussy, nearly hidden under the reddish triangle of her soft pubic hair. Hurriedly, he unzipped his pants and pulled them down to his knees. He couldn't contain his lust a second longer. He had to have her now!
She looked up at him mutely as he knelt over her, his fully-erect cock in his hand. He pulled back the thick foreskin and let the swollen purplish head see what awaited it. As if it were alive, the long rubbery shaft began to throb and jerk in anticipation. Abigail managed another smile as the district attorney sank down to her and she pulled back her knees ...just as at this moment, an hour away, the man's wife was pulling back her legs to accommodate her strange lover. Abigail opened her arms to him and he took her violently, not waiting for foreplay, just pushing the turgid knob of his cock between the soft moist lips of her vagina and sinking it home into her deliciously soft belly. It was like a knife through melted butter as he entered her and she gasped aloud at the suddenness and the depth of his quick entry.
"Ooooohh," she moaned as she felt her insides flowering open involuntarily to receive him deep in her womb. She was groaning and muttering incoherently now as he bagan to fuck viciously into her, gritting his teeth with desire. Her body followed him and began to move in wild abandoned jerks beneath him. At first, at very first, the frightened young redhead had been pretending, only acting out her make-believe desires of necessity in a desperate move to keep this man here for her child's sake and for hers. But now ...now that age-old awakening was stirring in her belly as his long thrusting cock probed deliciously deeply again and again in the tender wet depths of her womb. She had been well used tonight, fucked in every manner and by all manner of cocks and fingers, and now ...now it wasn't difficult for this new intruder to work his magic deep in her belly. She hated herself for these feelings that were being fanned inside her, but there was no denying them. When they were this intense, there was no way to hold them back ... she was beginning to enjoy it for real, and she couldn't lie to herself.
"Ohhh, God, yes, it's so good! It's so good!" Abigail groaned as if in anquish, her arms wrapped tight around his back and neck, pulling his chest against the softness of her breasts.
He plunged his long cock up and up, deeper and deeper into the warm soft cavern of her cunt, feeling the whole of her belly flowering open before his onslaught like she had never been fucked in her whole life.
Andy McLain thought for a moment about his wife, sound asleep in their suburban house just over the coast range of mountains. He'd never been unfaithful to her before this moment, but he felt no regrets. If anything, just the thought of her lying there asleep waiting for him to return somehow made all this even more wickedly erotic. And the fact that it was a hippie girl he was with ...man, how he'd thought, about it often enough! Seeing them out in their sweaters and jeans, with no brassiers, hitchiking along the county's roads. Hell, what real man hadn't wondered what one of these gorgeous sun-bronzed California honevs would be like in bed: Christ, he thought, I'll bet there are a thousand men right here in this county who'd give a week's pay to be where I am right now!
Her whole body jerked and twisted and she moaned incessantly, her face contorted in ecstatic passion. Her mouth moved ceaselessly and her nostrils flared in the untamed animal desire that had taken hold of her body for real. Man, this was no act ... this was the real thing, and she couldn't help herself!
Her forehead was covered with a light coat of glistening perspiration that had broken out beneath her disheveled long red hair. There was nothing that could stop her wild race for filfillment now and he fucked her like a madman to end it for them both.
"Oooohh, God, yes!" she cried into the room, grateful at least that there was no one to hear now, as he slithered his strong hands under the wildly pumping cheeks of her ass and cupped them tightly, raising them off the bed for greater access to her openly pleading loins.
He squirmed down into her from that position, feeling the smooth sucking flesh of her cunt as it clasped and unclasped around his bursting hot cock. Lifting his weight onto the tips of his toes, he fucked into her and rammed the last inch of aching cock thundering up into her ravenously man-hungry cunt-hole, bringing a new ecstatic moan to her lips that echoed throughout the house.
He pulled his head back to watch her face ...it made him feel good to know that he could do all this to a young girl like this one. He hadn't lost his touch, that was for sure! Being a married man had not taken one degree of ability away from Andy McLain!
"Oh, deeper, harder, yes! Yes!" she begged, gasping as if it were her last breath. She was almost there, nearing her orgasm and she swung her soft tender thighs up and wound them tightly around his back, her feet straight up in the air and flailing wildly in time with the ecstatic rhythm of her passion. She was spiraling herself up and down on his long blood-swollen shaft, skewering it deeply into her belly with every lunge upward of her frantically aroused pussy.
"Oh, yes, I'm cumming! I'm cumming!" she squealed ecstatically and locked her ankles tightly behind his laboring back. Her body arched and she held tight to him, not moving but quivering and jerking around him in a madly pulsating tempo of naked desires that spewed her orgasmic juices out around his still driving cock and they seeped in a warm sticky flood down the crevice of her ass and soaked his sperm-bloated balls as they slapped rhythmically against the upturned plane of her buttocks.
He could feel himself about to cum and he grabbed the tender softness of her buttocks and lifted her higher, pushing her thighs over her shoulders and he ground into her open and yielding cunt as deeply as he could go, bringing anew groans of passion from her parched, half-parted lips. God, he had to shoot it all in her now or he would die!
He gasped aloud, felt the unbearable bursting tightness in his loins and heard her whimpering under him, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck as he rammed everything he had up into her wildly grasping pussy. And then with a deep, choking moan that seemed to go on endlessly, he could feel his balls blow apart and explode their aching flood of seething hot sperm up into her naked belly. She shivered like she was suffering from some tropical fever until he had made that last little trembling jerk that signalled the end of his orgasm deep in her warmly sucking womb. And they lay there silently for a long while, not speaking a word.
Andy lifted himself off the bed and then pulled on his shorts and trousers. The girl was lying as he had left her, naked and sprawled on the sofa bed, whimpering slightly with her hand to her mouth now, her head turned away so that he couldn't see the look of utter shame and humiliation that was there in her eyes.
He was fully dressed when he heard the noise outside the front door and instinctively, he jerked it open to find a young man easing away down the front steps. It was Allen, the bartender from Kelly's!
First Allen only looked at him coldly, a fierce look of anger and hurt and blind rage boiling just inside his eyes. And then he could stand it no longer. In one swift move, one that his combat sergeant would have been proud of, Allen lunged forward and caught the man in the doorway square on the jaw. His blow resounded loudly through the night and Andy McLain fell backward onto the living room floor as he heard Abigail scream suddenly at the top of her lungs.
Allen stood there like some triumphant gladiator, but there was no smile of victory on his lips. Instead, he could only shake his head and mutter his inner thoughts to himself as he turned to walk away, leaving Abigail lying there naked and still wet with this man's perspiration.
"Allen, please, wait! Please!"
* * *
Allen had found he just could not sleep. He'd floated home like he was on a cloud, undressed and just lain there on the bed in his tiny cabin, his arms behind his head, just looking out the window toward the redwood grove atop the opposite hill where he knew Abigail was asleep, even though he couldn't see her cabin. It only seemed like minutes but pretty soon he realized he'd been lying there wide awake for hours. It became apparent pretty fast after that he wasn't going to fall asleep, so he dressed again and went back outside for a brisk walk in the night air. He deliberately didn't walk past the bar, just in case Clyde was still around, but he could see the back of the place as he passed on the hillside and out in front, Clyde's pickup and Thurman's cruiser. That hadn't struck him as particularly unusual, as he knew they often came in after closing and sat around drinking until early morning. He could tell from the mess that they left behind after Pop had cleaned up from the night's business.
He hadn't been going anywhere in particular, not even paying attention as he wound down on empty deserted lane, then another, just shuffling along in the darkness, shooing an occasional stray who ran up to challenge him. But mostly thinking of Abigail ... Damn, it was wonderful just to be able to feel this way again about a woman! He'd wondered for a long time after he left Marianne if he would ever fall in love again. Maybe he'd just be a perennial bachelor, he figured more than once, just taking his sex where he could get it and never getting involved. That had seemed like a helluva good idea until tonight. Now, he knew he hadn't lost that spark after all; there really still was that capacity for love and for tenderness that Marianne had tried to erase but had failed.
He had not actually intended to turn onto Redwood Drive, but somehow, he did. Call it fate, blind luck, or maybe something bigger than all that. Whatever it was, he was halfway up the winding street before he realized that Abigail's cabin- lay just ahead. His heart had nearly jumped from his chest when he saw that he lights were on. Maybe she was still up, too! His pulse had quickened at just the thought of seeing her again before tomorrow.
Allen had quietly tip-toed up the stairs so as not to awaken her if she wasn't up, but his hand was poised, ready to knock, when he heard a moan from inside. At first, he thought she was in pain, and he was a second away from bursting the door from its hinges when he heard enough to tell him the truth. He could see in through the front window where the curtains didn't fall together completely. At first, he had not been able to make out anything in the dim interior. Then, he saw them ...Abigail flat on her back, naked as sin, and another man was pumping his thick red cock into her for all he was worth. He had watched dumbly, struck nearly paralyzed by the sudden awareness of history repeating itself. Here he'd gone and fallen for another broad and she turned out to be as rotten as the first one! He'd watched until he saw with his own eyes this stranger empty his lewd sperm into his precious Abigail's nakedly squirming belly and he could see that she wasn't being raped. Far from it, her hands had cupped his buttocks and she was pulling him deeper up into her belly, muttering obscene things into the air and writhing savagely as he impaled her on his long thrusting cock. Allen had seen it all, seen the man tighten and his face grow contorted, heard his groan as he emptied himself into her, watched as he pulled his limp, rubbery cock out from her glistening pink vaginal lips. Even saw the sticky trail of semen that dangled for a moment like a spider's web between the man's cock and his own Abigail's thigh, and then, after a few minutes trying to breathe again, he turned to walk away.
And that was when the man heard him and opened the door.
"Allen, please, just a minute, please!" she begged, standing there on the narrow front porch completely naked for anyone outside to see. He didn't know why, but he decided to listen. His heart told him to belt her in the mouth and get the hell out, but for some reason, he denied himself that privilege this time and stood his ground.
"Allen, I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong. Oh, I'm so sorry, so sorry, but there was no other way. It's Clyde, Allen, he has little Jason and ..."
"Clyde! What the hell are you talking about, woman? What would Clyde want with Jason?"
Abigail looked over her shoulder at Andy McLain who was just getting to his knees, holding his jaw tenderly and moaning as he struggled to his feet. Allen tensed his arm, ready to give the bastard another punch if he tried anything. "It's true, Allen, he's got Jason. And I had to do this. It's all Kelly's idea ...something about me keeping the D.A. out of sight for a while. I don't know what it's about, he didn't tell me. But he's got Jason, honest, and ...and ..."
"C'mon, spill it all, Abigail. If you expect me to believe you you've got to come clean."
Abigail looked first at Allen, then at the half-sitting, half-reclining form of McLain and tears came to her eyes for the millionth time this night. Yes, she'd tell him, she'd tell everybody and maybe this curse she had struggled under for so long would leave her alone. She told everything in one great outpouring of emotion and fear and shame and regret, told Allen, told Andy McLain, told anyone who would listen. She was mindless even of her own nakedness as she spoke. Allen and the D.A. listened intently as she told all about the criminal charge on her record, about the bombing, about Jason, about her suspicions confirmed tonight that he, too, might have been mixed up in Clyde's dirty operations. And when she had finished, she only stood there, breathless, afraid that she had poured out her heart and soul for nothing.
McLain was the first to speak, "Why did Kelly want me out of the way tonight?" he asked skeptically.
Abigail shook her head and then remembered the conversation between Clyde and the deputy. "Something about somebody named Caroline, I think, if that means anything."
"Caroline! Oh my God, that's my wife! You don't suppose ...Do you have a telephone here?"
Abigail pointed to the kitchen, "Yeah ...right there."
Andy McLain rushed to the phone and dialed his number in Santa Rosa. It rang and rang and rang until he was sure there would be no answer. He pushed down the receiver cradle and dialed again, this time his private number at the Santa Rosa police headquarters. After a couple of rings, the reassuring sounds of a sergeant's voice came on the line. Andy identified himself and spoke distinctly and authoritatively. When he put the phone back in its place, two prowl cars were already racing at full speed across the Santa Rosa back streets toward Hamilton Acres. His eyes were far away and clouded when he spoke.
"Let's go get that kid of yours, Abigail. Allen, you with me?"
He didn't need to think it out. The two men were on their way down the hill toward Kelly's as soon as Allen told him about seeing the cars there on his way up. Abigail struggled to grab some clothes and run along behind, but they were nearly out of sight before she could get dressed.
It was child's play, literally, Kelly and Marshburn had never in a million years expected any trouble and they were sitting playing gin rummy when Allen and Andy reached the back door. Even there, luck was with them ...it was unlocked! They entered and crept through Clyde's private hideaway, Andy mentally noting the files and locked cabinets that would make his case against these bastards air-tight.
When they both stepped out into the open bar room, they could only stare in disbelief at first. The Deputy Marshburn, probably suffering from the delusions of two many westerns on television, reached for his gun in the buttoned down holster at his right side. But Allen was behind him before he could even slap his hand to leather and he shoved him forward onto the table, his arm twisted grotesquely up behind his back.
"I wouldn't try to be a hero, Thurman," said Allen quietly and McLain just motioned with one wiggle of his finger for Kelly to get to his feet. The burly man opened his mouth as if to speak, but Andy spread it all over his face before he could move a muscle. One straight-on jab that dumped him over his chair and onto the floor.
"I seen that! You cain't get away with that kind of stuff around here. I...Aaawwww!" Thurman's complain was silenced as Allen twisted his arm completely up to his opposite shoulder.
"What stuff, Depty? I didn't see a thing." He looked at little Jason, sitting quietly on a chair that dwarfed him, holding his teddy bear and still wearing his nighttime sleeper.
"Did you see anything, Jason?" And the little boy with the shaggy hair cut shook his head.
An hour's drive away, Kelly's two henchmen were getting into their car, parked just down from the McLain home in the Hamilton Acres suburb. They were both joking about how the bitch really come alive when they gave her that second dose of coke. They'd left her tied securely so that she wouldn't go getting any ideas about calling the police or anything. That had been part of Kelly's orders, anyway, to leave her tied like that and gagged so that her husband would find her that way when he returned. And even at this moment, they still had no idea they'd been sent to rape the District Attorney's wife.
But Hal and Frankie were to find out soon enough that they'd bitten off one hell of a chew - just as Frankie turned the ignition on, the night was lit up with sirens and flashing lights coming from opposite ends of the block. The two prowl cars screeched to a halt with their bright lights blazing in the darkness, and four uniformed men leaped out, guns drawn. "Hold it, Police!"
Frankie opened his door cautiously and stood with his hands over his head, but Hal had decided to make a run for it. He opened his door slowly enough, but as soon as he touched ground, he took off running like a scared rabbit across the McLain lawn. There was one quick warning shot and then another that ripped open his thigh and sent him sprawling like a sack of dirty laundry dumped from a moving truck. Two of the officers raced to his side and handcuffed him and then went running into the house. Frankie could only shake his head and mutter, "Christ, who the fuck was the broad, anyway?"
* * *
Abigail was trying to wash dishes by the kitchen window and keep an eye on Jason playing with his toys in the backyard when she heard Allen's car in the drive. Hurrying, she dried the last of the glassware and raced out the back door to scoop up the puzzled child and make it around to the side of the house before he went in.
"Honey, how did it go?" she asked, standing quietly in the shadow of the cottage, her eyes filled with expectant anguish and dread. Instinctively, she clutched her little boy tighter against her side.
"You can stop worrying. Andy got a phone call from the D.A. in Contra Costa county. They've agreed, after reading the affidavits you signed, to drop the whole business. They're not interested in questioning you at all now."
Abigail's shoulders sank with relief, "Oh Allen, darling, it's over ...it's finally over!" She let Jason down and threw her arms around him. "Now we can start living our own lives again!"
"And I passed Kelly's on the way. It's all boarded up and there's a notice of a legal sale posted to the front door. Andy said he'd probably make just enough to pay his legal fees but it wouldn't help him. He's sure that both Clyde and Thurman will be sent away so long we can just forget about them completely."
"Allen, it's just too good to be true!" she sighed, tears of joy on her cheeks as they stood together in the bright sunlight of the California afternoon.
"I saw Andy's wife, Caroline ..."
Her mood suddenly changed as she remembered the horrors of that night that both of them had shared, Caroline McLain in her house across the mountains, and herself, here in this cottage. "How was she, Allen?" she asked somberly, like one would inquire of a terminal cancer patient.
"Oh, she's fine! Looks great! One strange thing, though ... she invited us to come over sometime for dinner. And then she said `since Andy and Abigail have already gotten to know each other so well, maybe we can catch up on them'. What'ya make of that?"
Abigail looked stunned for a moment, then caught the grin on her lover's face and slapped him playfully on his behind. "Oh, you! Just wait `til I get you inside! You won't have anything left for Caroline McLain or anybody else!"
