The nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies have been the decades of the young. For the first time in the history of our American society, youth has gotten to have its say. Some folks believe it says too much, of course, - there are still plenty of people around who think children, in the words of the old saying, should be seen and not heard! But if there's one thing that history has proven, it's that clocks really cannot be turned back! Once the young have been allowed to realize their importance in a modern consumer society because of the spending power they now wield - and encouraged to exaggerate that importance by all the mass media selling the clothes and hi-fi equipment and records and cosmetics that this power can buy - then their elders must take that importance into account as a valid factor in the ordering of that society.
And here, paradoxically, it is the parents, rather than the young themselves, who so often need to be given direction and advice!
For it is one thing to accept the fact that youth can now speak with a voice of its own, but it is quite another to assume that this voice will necessarily know what to say ... or how to say it. More than ever today, and just because the young have an unaccustomed right to their say, it is up to their elders to guide them and instruct them along the way.
In The Family Ravishers, author Martin Uris highlights this fact with agonizing perceptiveness. Sally Wolff is a teenager who is in danger of becoming a problem to her parents, rising young ad-man Dale and his voluptuous wife Hester - not because she is wayward or particularly flighty, simply because she is growing up and she has suddenly become aware of boys. Discovering by chance that she had been petting with a youth of whom they disapprove, they at once blame the neighborhood they live in for her defection from the standards of morality and prudence. Instead of searching for the fault within themselves, they think that by removing her from the source of temptation they will automatically solve the problem.
Hurrying their daughter off to look at a new apartment on top of an unfinished skyscraper in Manhattan, the Wolffs fall in with a gang of unscrupulous escaped convicts . . . and it is only after they have suffered a weekend of terror which must be unequalled in modern fiction for its sheer spine-chilling veracity that they are able to take a second look at their problem - and decide that its solution must be psychological rather than merely geographical!
Despite the chills and thrills with which it is so suspensefully packed, The Family Ravishers proves once again with penetrating insight that understanding, like charity, must begin at home!
-The Publishers
PROLOGUE
The jail-break took place three hundred and eight miles from New York and although Joey Murchison flattened the gas pedal of the rented Buick every time they hit a freeway, it was almost seven hours before he was able to dump the three men at the drugstore on the outskirts of the city where their contact was to meet them. By that time two of the screws wounded during the battle inside the penitentiary had died, and every newspaper and radio station in the country was carrying descriptions of the fugitives.
The break had been Harry Butcher's idea. Harry was a junkie, a long-time mainliner whose love affair with the Big H dated from fourth grade. But the deal blew up in his face one night in Dayton, Ohio, when Harry shot himself a fix he'd gotten from a new pusher who wasn't wise to the fact that Mrs. Butcher's boy took his horse with a fifty percent cut. Harry syringed a double-strength dose of instant heaven into his median cephalic vein, three sixteenths of an inch away from the left sigmoid cavity, unaware that it was a one-way passport to oblivion. He could have ended up in the city mortuary as just one more unexplained O.D. if it hadn't been for the fact that he was turning over a jeweler's strongroom at the time.
They patched him up and gave him the cold turkey treatment, and when his hands had stopped shaking enough for him to grip the edge of the dock they sent him up the river for a rest cure. Less than a week after he had been discharged from the prison infirmary he was planning the break.
For although Harry knew more about gems than the Executive Committee of the New York Diamond Exchange, although he was a hard man, a cunning man, and a smart one, he had been on the stuff less because of the kicks than because it was the only way he knew how to get by. For Harry the Big H was a way of life, as American as clam chowder or the racetrack at Aqueduct. And Harry was a patriotic man. For him, then, the equation was simple: If jail equaled Harry minus horse, then jail minus Harry should equal horse . ..
His determination to get out was strengthened one Visitors' Day by a message he received from a broad who was shacked up with an old buddy of his who ran a syndicate offshoot in the Bronx. She was a big-hipped blonde with too much mascara and sweat patches beneath the arms of her white nylon dress. But to Harry she could have been the dove making its home run on the second leg of that rounded-trip from the Ark. He sat with lowered eyes, staring at the voluptuous contours of her thinly-clad breasts as they rose and fell with her breathing on the far side of the grill.
"It'll be the biggest heist in ten years," she said urgently. "But it has to be timed to the second - and for that we need someone who knows the merchandize like his own mother's milk. Bennie don't want to bring in the Organization: It has to be cut too many ways. So for his money, yours is the only name on the card."
"Sure," Harry said. "Except like I happen to be in jail. And jail happens to be nearly four hundred miles west of Bennie. You want I should ask for parole and borrow the Governor's Caddie?"
"Don't be like that," the girl said. "You get over the wall and we'll have transport waiting with the motor in first already. We can keep you under cover until we get word they're making the delivery - and after we split you can make tracks for Mexico, the Bahamas, or wherever."
"Great!" Harry said. "You got any ideas about getting over the wall?"
"Ah, come on Harry!" the girl said. "You're not going to let a little thing like that bug you? A smart guy like you?"
Harry sighed. "I'll let you know," he said.
"Next week at the latest," the blonde whispered, glancing sideways at a warden approaching behind the grill. "And Harry - fix it so that you come out with a coupla buddies you can trust. We need two strong-arm men to block the opposition."
"I'll let you know," Harry said again.
And back in the cell he smashed his fist impotently against the grey wall. If only he could lay his hands on a fix! With liquid fire running in his veins and inspiration his for the asking, he could think up anything ... a smart guy like him! Only this time it had to be the wrong way around: The inspiration had to be there before he could unstable the horse! He slumped on the narrow prison bed and began to think.
The following week he told the girl the deal was on.
He had already chosen the two other members of his team. The big hitter was Mario, a stocky, droop-eyed boy whose parents had come from Calabria, bitter because this background ruled him out of the Syndicate, a killer because he was bitter. Stoker was the End Stop - a lumbering ex-truck driver as powerful as a 300 h.p. diesel. Stoker could have made a fortune during Prohibition, but he had drawn a short straw when they lined up for the intelligence issue and in the days of computerized crime he spent more time inside than out. Which was tough because Stoker fancied himself as a ladies' man.
Not an entirely successful one, however, for the crime which had sent him to the penitentiary was rape, associated with robbery. Mario's ticket was equally at odds with his reputation: Although the fuzz knew perfectly well that he had killed more than once and would kill again, they could find no witnesses spunky enough to testify and all they could nail him with had been a Capone-style tax evasion rap.
Harry Butcher was well enough pleased with his recruits just the same. Each was a hard man in his way, each was bitter - and each was fired with an enthusiasm to get out, no matter what they had to do to make it. With men such as these, he might even make it himself!
They wouldn't have stood a chance, though, if Harry himself hadn't happened to hear of an existing escape plan one day in the prison laundry. With Stoker's help, he beat the details of the plan out of the punk who'd organized it - some commie high school teacher who was in for conspiracy - while Mario kept watch at the end of the corridor. Mario was only tough when there was a gun in his hand and six inches of steel tucked into the waistband of his pants. Stoker laid the punk out cold with a single left-hander. When he came to, the big man was screwing his wrists up between his shoulder blades and his feet were trapped in an agonizing leg-lock. Harry unzippered the punk's fly and began scientifically to squeeze his balls as he put the questions. Before he talked, the kid puked twice and had got himself a busted gut in the bargain. But apart from a slight swelling at one side of his jaw there wasn't a mark on him. Harry and Stoker were quite proud.
Next in line was to put out of action the three other guys in on the deal. Leaving the weakest to Mario, they took one each and beat the shit out of them on the morning of Visitors' Day. That way they made sure Harry could pass on the message to Bennie's blonde before the guys recovered consciousness and grassed on them.
There was to be no attempt, you see, to frighten the victims into silence: Harry, Mario and Stoker wanted to be identified as the aggressors; their whole plan depended on it. They would then be hauled off to the local courtroom and accused before a judge, so that their sentences could be increased, they could be confined to the punishment block, or whatever. And of course, the screws would be taking special precautions in case they made a break between the penitentiary and the courthouse.
This was where Harry got smart. They would make that break actually on the way out of the jail, as they crossed the exercise yard, which was flanked by the only wall giving direct access to the outer world. It was the obvious place if you were trying for an ordinary jail-break from inside - but prisoners on their way to town would be expected to try for it somewhere on the outside. Seeing Harry and his team doing this, the prison authorities' would credit him with being smart. .. and they would take the necessary steps to block him. There would be steps, Harry knew: A whole routine all laid out in the rule book. But this was where he showed he was smart-plus.
For awhile the screws operated the system to block an exercise yard break-out, Harry and his buddies would switch to the other plan, the plan they'd beaten out of the punk. And the exit signs for this one were hung over another part of the jail altogether.
It all depended on the fact that beyond the kitchens, there was a commissary block where outside personnel took delivery of supplies intended for the cookhouses and prepared them for the prisoner chefs. And that there were garbage chutes leading from the first floor of this block to the ground in back of the penitentiary. And that there would be a key to the door dividing the kitchens for the commissary on the bunch carried by the chief screw for every cell block .. .
Harry's plan was predicated on the assumption that they wouldn't be cuffed until just before they were put aboard the meat wagon taking them to the courthouse. In this he miscalculated: The bracelets were snapped on their wrists before they even left the cells. But there was a compensation. The chief screw in charge of the detail was McClusky . . . and Harry hated McClusky more than any man on earth. Because he was the man with the keys, McClusky was going to get hurt, Harry hoped. If he got hurt real bad, that was okay by Harry.
McClusky was tall and red-faced and beefy, with mean little pig's eyes above a rat trap mouth. With one exception, according to the gossip in the pen, he had been guilty of every crime for which the men under his charge had been sent there. The exception was bribery - and the only reason McClusky wouldn't take graft was because if he did, it would take some potential victim out of his clutches and deny him the pleasure of tormenting him. Or that's what they said in the pen.
Harry Butcher hated him not because he was tough, not because he was sadistic, not because he was unjust, not because he was the orneriest sonofabitch he had ever met. All those things he could accept in a screw. If you wanted to be a screw you had to be a bastard or go under. He hated him because he sneered with it. And if there was one thing that riled Harry more than anything else on earth, it was being sneered at.
McClusky was sneering when they came to take them to the courthouse on the morning of the big day. "On your feet, you lousy bum," he grated as the handcuffs clicked shut. "You think you're so fuckin' tough nobody can stand up to you? Okay, we got the toughest judge in the state to listen to your story today. We'll see how tough you smart-assed jerks feel after ninety days in the cooler on punishment diet!"
"Look, Mac," Harry said wearily, "would you lay off of me please?"
"Big shot Butcher, the terror of the pen! He's so big he can afford to leave his visiting cards all over the little guys he creases! Until it comes time to visit the courthouse - and then he says 'Please'!"
"Just cool it, will you? Be a good guy and cool it, huh?"
"Good guy?" McClusky roared. "Mac? Cool it? Say, what the hell is this? Who the fuck do you punks think you are, for Chrissake?" He swung his nightstick viciously against Harry's upper arm, sending the manacled man sprawling across the cell bed. "When you talk to me, Butcher, it's Sir - and you don't talk at all unless you're fuckin' spoken to, you know that."
"Have it your way," Harry said, struggling to rise to his feet.
"There ain't no other way!" McClusky shouted, belting Harry across the kidneys with the stick and sending him down gasping again. "Have it your way who, you lousy creep?"
Harry's nostrils were pinched and his face was white. His fingernails were digging into his palms. If he lost his temper now it could bitch up everything. "Have it your way, sir," he said between his teeth.
McClusky chuckled. "That's more like it," he said. "Big shot!"
Pozzo and Seigfried were the two screws assigned to Stoker and Mario. The six of them came together at the end of the corridor leading to the exercise yard, where they were joined by three more men from the headquarters wing, over the gates on the far side of the yard. Evidently the authorities weren't taking any chances!
Harry gave the signal when they were thirty yards out into the yard. It was no good starting it earlier or the men on the watch tower might not see - and it was essential that those screws believe they were going for the wall.
Hardly pausing in his stride, Stoker bent to grab Pozzo's ankles with his fettered hands. Hauling the warden off his feet, he whirled to scythe the helpless man's body around his shoulders like a human flail. Pozzo's cap flew off. His head and shoulders cannoned into two of the screws from the gatehouse, knocking them sprawling on the macadam, and then his skull thudded sickeningly against the temple of the third. Stoker dropped him senseless on top of his colleagues and turned to help Harry, who had slipped his manacled hands over McClusky's head and shoulders, pinioning the big man as he cursed and struggled across the yard.
Mario had meanwhile stopped dead in his tracks, bending double to thrust his hands into the open 'vee' of his fly, left unzippered after the search before they left the cell. The knife blade, stolen from the refectory and honed to a stiletto-sharp point in the stone quarry, hidden in a length of bamboo secreted in Mario's rectum to elude the friskers, was grasped firmly between his clenched hands when he straightened up. Siegfried was already standing over him snarling, his fingers reaching for the flap of his revolver holster. As Mario's laced fingers traveled savagely on upwards, the needle point of the doctored knife blade pierced the underside of the warden's chin, slicing up through the flesh between the two sides of the lower jawbone, transfixing the tongue, and finally spearing through the roof of the mouth to perforate the lower lobes of the brain. Siegfried, the two halves of his jaw skewered together by the murderous blade, uttered a strange muffled whinnying sound as he sagged to the ground. Mario leaned down again. Placing the heel of one foot against the fallen screw's chin, he seized the remnant of the knife's handle and laboriously dragged it free, skipping to one side with a curse as blood pumped out on to the macadam through the now unplugged incision. Mario hated his clients to make a mess.
Stoker and Harry, carrying the shouting McClusky between them like a sack of coals, were already racing for the colonnade at one side of the yard, where they could be temporarily out of sight of the guards in the tower. The siren was screaming, the first two screws knocked down by Pozzo were scrambling dazedly to their feet, and at any moment the yard could be swept by a hail of bullets.
Harry knew the routine. As soon as they saw signs of a break, the watch tower men had orders to seal off that part of the pen, isolate it from the rest of the jail. Thinking this was a yard break, they would be putting that plan into operation now. And this suited Harry fine: He was about to switch to the other plan!
Followed closely by Mario, they clattered under the colonnade just as the gray steel door protecting that corner of the yard was slamming across to seal off the corridor leading to Cell Block D. Using McClusky's body like a battering ram, they hurled themselves towards the closing gap and thrust his shoulders through an instant before the door shot home. McClusky screamed as the heavy steel edge, propelled by electrically operated hydraulic pistons, thudded into his flesh, jamming him inextricably against the steel jamb on the other side of the gap.
Harry, Stoker and Mario" ran up the imprisoned man's back, squeezed through the gap, and dropped to the floor on the inside of the corridor. Until the authorities realized that the yard was, in fact, not the center of an escape attempt, they would be safe from pursuit by other screws: The steel doors would soon see to that.
McClusky was wedged face downwards in the gap, his tortured breath laboring and his face scarlet. They could see the veins on his neck and forehead swelling as the remorseless pressure of the pistons forced the heavy door relentlessly against him. Mario squeezed one of his flailing hands and jerked the arm straight. Locked around the beefy wrist was a steel circlet from which there depended the bunch of keys they needed. The boy nodded, wiping the bloodstained blade of his knife of McClusky's sleeve.
"Man, it'll take you an hour to pick the lock with that thing!" Stoker said.
"I ain't pickin' no lock," Mario said. "It's easier to cut off his hand."
McClusky's contorted, agonized face jerked upwards. "No!" he shouted. "No! No! No! . . . Please! . . . You can't! ..."
Grasping the warden's hair-covered fingers, Mario put one foot against the steel door and hauled on McClusky's arm until it was bowstring taut. "It ain't really ... all that difficult," he panted, standing carefully to one side as he probed and sawed. "A guy knows ... his anatomy ... he can - Ah! - he can kinda slide around the joints .. . without actually havin' to cut through anythin'.. . like separatin' the thigh from the drumstick ... of a chicken . .. There! You see!" He stepped back as the heavy key ring and its steel circlet clanged to the cement floor along with the bloody carcass of the warden's hand.
McClusky's frenzied threshing had shifted his body, turning it sideways in the gap as the inexorable pressure edged the door still further shut. Over the incoherent babbling frothing from his lips they could hear the sinister creak of cracking ribs. And now, as his struggled weakened, he slipped down until there was only the muscular column of his neck between the edge of the steel door and the groove into which it was designed to home.
Harry was grinning like a maniac. He leaned down and stared into the bloodshot eyes bulging from the chief screw's suffused face. "So long," he exulted. "Big Shot!"
McClusky's severed hand lay in the middle of a huge splash of blood marking the floor and half the opposite wall. Harry bent to pick up the keys and jerked his head for Stoker and Mario to follow him as they raced for the kitchens.
The two screws supervising the trusties at work were taken completely by surprise as they burst through the door. Harry and Stoker seized the wooden handles of a ten-gallon cauldron of boiling soup and hurled the contents in their faces before they could go for their guns. They were still screaming when Harry found the right key and let them out into the commissary.
None of the outside personnel tried to stop them as they headed for the garbage chutes, and a minute later they were landing on a pile of stinking refuse at the back of the jail. Bennie's minder, Joey Murchison, was waiting in the Buick with the motor running, as the blonde had promised.
The girl herself met them at the drugstore rendezvous outside New York. "Jesus!" she cried. "Are you boys hot! It seems two of those screws croaked, and the whole world wants your heads!"
"You said you could keep us under cover," Harry reminded her.
"Yeah, we can - but it'll have to be somewhere kind of spartan. Bennie says it'd be too risky at any of the usual places. Too much loot on your heads; too much risk of someone talking."
"Okay. How long?"
"Longer than we thought. The delivery's been postponed."
"Shit!" Harry said. "Why, for Chrissake?"
"Because Monday's some goddamn public holiday - Halloween or Thanksgiving or something, I don't know. They'll deliver soon after that. In the meantime we'll stake you boys out nearby. Then, as soon as we get word on the exact time, we'll wise you up and collect you just before the show goes on, okay?"
Harry gave her a crooked grin. "You get me a fix, baby," he said, "and any thing's okay!"
CHAPTER ONE
Sally Wolff sprawled on the back seat of her father's imported Italian sedan and hooked the heel of one slender foot over the sill of the opened window. Between her widespread white thighs, the patterned leather of the seat cushion was cold against her naked buttocks - as cold as the fingers of the boy beside her who was caressing the softly quivering mound of her belly.
Sally was just fifteen, and she was wildly excited. The nubile young blonde was used to petting, of course - with the high school boys in her crowd. She would let them reach up under her sweater, unfasten her tight lace brassiere and massage her throbbing breasts when they were exposed. Sometimes she would even allow a boy's hand to stray down over her swollen pubic mound covered by her brief nylon panties. But that was all. She had never got near to going the whole way with any of them. Until tonight. ..
And tonight was different. Luis was different for a start. His mother had been a Puerto Rican, and there was something about his dark handsome good looks that stirred unfamiliar tinglings deep down in Sally's loins - a chaotic mixture of fluttery curiosity and forbidden pleasure and sheer wicked thrill that caused her heart to pound and her blue eyes to shine lasciviously in the gloom of the Wolffs garage. Luis was much older than the other beaux she had, too. He was almost nineteen, and there was a certain self-assurance about him, about the positive touch of his practiced fingers, the glint in his dark eyes and the angle of his head as he smiled quizzically down at her, that made her go all weak in the knees.
He had met her right after school and they had had a few drinks at a downtown bar before it was time for Sally to ride the bus back to the suburb where she lived. She was supposed to have a music lesson before she went home but the teacher was sick and Sally's parents didn't know it, so there was almost two hours to spare before she would be expected. For a while they sat in the park, talking and smoking, and then when Luis had asked if she knew any place they could go it had been Sally herself who had suggested her own garage. It was separated from the house by a tall shrubbery and you could get in the side door without being seen.
The pretty blonde teenager felt a guilty thrill ripple through her veins as she took the boy's lean dark hand and led him inside. The thought of petting with a strange youth, secretly shut up in her own father's car only a few yards away from her unsuspecting parents, made her nipples ache with forbidden excitement!
But supposing her father decided to use the car again that evening? Dale Wolff was a rising young executive in a Madison Avenue advertising agency. Thursdays, he came home early - and he usually stayed home. There was a television serial he and her mother watched around nine. But there was always a chance . . . Sally tossed her long blonde hair as she eased open the rear door of the sedan. The hell with it! You had to dare something to win something - wasn't that what they said?
Normally a cautious girl, she had been possessed of a curious lightheaded devil-may-care attitude ever since she had smoked that cigarette in the park. Luis had rolled it himself and it had a strange, sweetish, almost aromatic flavor. Sally wondered if there hadn't been marijuana mixed in with the tobacco - lots of the kids in her grade smoked "grass" but she had never tried it herself. Sliding across the back seat to make room for Luis she shrugged to herself. What the hell, she thought again. If it was marijuana . . . well, she just preferred not to know! In any case it had tasted great! And she felt great! Luis was great! Everything was great! . . .
After he pushed up her sweater and unfastened her flimsy brassiere, the boy began massaging her breasts into maddening hardness, rolling the nipples around and caressing the sensitive areolas with the palms of his hands. And then, he took one of the stiffly erect buds of flesh into his mouth, and the gentle playing of his tongue around the sensitively quivering skin drove her to near desperation so that she hardly noticed when his hand slipped up under her miniskirt and began to stroke the warm softness of her smooth inner thighs.
"No, Luis! Please! No!" she had gasped, sensing as the youth's caresses grew more urgent that she might not be able to hold him back as easily she could the younger high school boys.
But his hands kept on stroking her, roving the full length of her voluptuously curved body, over her flat white stomach, across her passionately heaving ribs, back to the hard ridge of her hips, and finally down to the nylon-sheathed softness of her trembling loins. But this time the hand did not stay outside. Luis insinuated his fingers slowly but insistently under the narrow elastic waistband of her panties and eased them down towards the silky curls of pubic hair in the tender "vee" between her thighs. As she shuddered and gasped with excitement, he stroked her there, slowly working his middle finger up into the moist virginal slit of her vagina, arousing a thrilling, tingling sensation she had never experienced before. Still incoherently murmuring the automatic refusals that sprang unbidden to her lips, the aroused young teenager squirmed around on the cold leather of the car seat under the pressure of her boy friend's expert finger-fucking. Their breathing had become so heavy that the windows of the sedan were all fogged up.
And then - Sally never knew quite how it happened - her skirt was bunched up around her waist and her panties were off! As Luis rolled down the window to let in some air, she almost involuntarily spread her legs and rested one heel on the sill. Now, with the blood pulsating in her ears, she lay wondering excitedly what her classmate would do to her next.
She heard the metallic rip of his zipper opening . . . and then suddenly a blunt, heavy pressure against her hip. It was his penis! It had to be! The fifteen year old girl had never felt one before and the muscles of her body contracted away automatically at the unfamiliar and disturbing touch.
She was about to protest and pull away from him when abruptly Luis hunched himself up over her reclining body and dropped down on his knees between her whitely parted legs. She felt the hard bulge of his penis in the groove of her hip as he leaned forward and took the ripely swelling mound of one quivering breast in his two hands, dropping his head to suck the tautly throbbing nipple deep into his wet mouth.
Her blonde head moved dazedly from side to side on the seat as he began a gentle sucking pressure against the sensitive nipple between his lips. His hands dropped down to course lightly over the soft firmness of her waist and belly, stroking the tender skin to a trembling awareness that flamed suddenly through her loins. Knowing she should stop him now, before it was too late, Sally tried to protest again - but somehow the words stuck in her throat as his mouth played for long delicious moments around her throbbing breasts, moving from one to the other, his tongue trailing wetly through the wide fleshy valley between them.
And then his mouth was sliding hotly down over her trembling belly, his desire-swollen cock moving down the inside of her thigh as his body slipped lower. Soft mewls and gasps of pleasure panted from her parted pink lips as he ground his tongue for a moment in her navel. Again she sought to stop him - but it was as though she had become temporarily paralyzed. She settled herself lower in the seat, overcome by the maddening patterns of indecent sensation trailing after his gently nipping teeth. She felt her thighs being pressed farther apart as he hunched himself up between them, and she sucked in her breath with a shuddering gasp as she felt his thumbs on the softly quivering hair-covered lips of her vagina, splaying them apart, and the coolness of the garage air touched her there.
With a stifled moan, Luis dropped his head and his tongue flicked forward, the tip teasing moistly against the tiny swollen bud of her clitoris.
The blonde teenager jerked galvanically at the sudden tingling contact. "Aaaaaaaagh!" she moaned. "Oooooooooh! Oh, no! No... we mustn't.. . Please!"
But as the sensitive shaft of flesh throbbed into even greater hardness, Luis suddenly lowered his fingers and spread the opening of her cunt wider still, spearing his raping tongue deep into the moist virgin flesh of her cunt.
Sally jerked again, a low moan escaping from deep in her throat as her hands reached down involuntarily, her fingers tangled in his dark hair, and she pulled Luis' face hard and wantonly into her loins. His tongue circled around maddeningly inside her, the tip flickering against the sensitive wet walls of her pussy sending spasms of insane desire coursing wildly through her half-naked body. Then suddenly, to her astonishment and disappointment, he was moving up over her, leaving her tongue-aroused cunt aflame with lustful desire. An instant later he was kissing her, thrusting his tongue deep into her throat as he took her hand and placed it demandingly on his blood-engorged penis, wrapping the fingers around the hotly pulsating shaft.
Sally clenched them tight, nearing the groan of pleasure that forced itself between his lips over her own gasping breath. God, it was enormous! She had never expected a penis would be so big! If he were to put it up inside of her, it would split her vagina wide open! It would kill her! Nevertheless the thought of such a lewd thing, the feel of the rod of lust-hardened male flesh throbbing in her hand, was obscurely delighting her. She'd like to feel its pulsing rigidity plunging deep into her seething cunt at this very minute! Instinctively, she began to massage the outer skin back and forth, up and down the iron-hard shaft. Nothing in the world had ever felt so good or so right or so complete.
Luis reached back and slipped his middle finger once more up between her legs, parting the flowered open vaginal lips whose hair-fringed edges were now slippery wet with the secretions seeping excitedly from her pussy, and grinding it tantalizingly against her erectly throbbing clitoris.
Sally tensed on the seat as an electric shock of abandoned pleasure rippled up through her naked body. For a moment she could not move; she was frozen like a statue as the lustful sensations seared through her veins - and the boy took this to mean that she had given way. Carefully, he began levering himself up on his knees.
The wildly excited teenager felt a cold wetness on her exposed thigh as his massive cock swayed away from her flesh. For an instant she wondered if the boy had cum - but his throbbing member was still as hard as a plank of wood. Then she remembered that men too produced a seminal fluid before they reached orgasm, and this thought made her tingle with even wilder enthusiasm. Automatically, she increased the speed of her milking fingers, sliding the sleek hot skin more and more rapidly up and down the wetly gleaming cock-shaft.
Luis was panting heavily now, his breath playing hot and moist over her naked breasts. "Sally!" he moaned frantically. "Honey baby . . . My God, I want you! ... I've got to fuck you, kid! ... "
"No!" the lustfully aroused young blonde gasped. "No, Luis! No! You'd . . . you'd hate me afterwards. I know you would! We mustn't!" She pulled her long slender leg down from the open car window and scissored her thighs shut, wanting to let him do it with every fiber of her physical being while her brain fought to maintain control of her lust-inflamed senses.
"Sally!" the boy groaned hoarsely. "Come on ... I got to!"
Thrusting with his lean hips, he tried to squirm his penis between her now tightly closed thighs, forcing the blunt bulbous cock-head down through the upper part of her wetly hair-lined slit, fighting madly to reach the mouth of the hot pink passage she was denying him, his every plunge sending wilder sensations of abandon surging through her as his hardness grated against the moistly throbbing bud of her clitoris.
"No, Luis! No! We mustn't! It would ruin everything!" the girl breathed passionately. She hugged him tight and talked wetly into his mouth, murmuring incoherent and obscene endearments up into his slavering lips as she clamped her trembling thighs together.
Luis arched up his pumping hips and jammed his knees in between her thighs, forcing them slowly apart, she struggled against him with all her strength - and inadvertently her grip tightened around his straining cock just as the wetly seeping head was poised between the splayed-open lips of her cunt.
The boy threw back his head and uttered a gasping cry. His breath jetted out in a shuddering sigh as Sally felt the rigid shaft in her hand begin to jerk uncontrollably, and a hot thick stream of male cum spurted from it, pumping out in diminishing squirts until her golden pubic hair was drenched with the warm sticky sperm. It lay in moist pools on her quivering white belly, covered the insides of her thighs, and dripped wetly down between her legs to smear the car seat beneath her naked buttocks.
Luis emitted a final groan and collapsed across the young girl's body as she lay staring up through the dusk at the misted windows while his cum grew cold on her skin and she half wished that he would try again or at least realize how frustrated she was feeling.
At last he pushed himself upright and grinned down at her. She could just see his white teeth glimmering against the dark. "Sorry, kid," he said easily. "It happens like that sometimes. We'll try again in a minute. Guess we might as well take another smoke while we wait."
"Oh no, Luis . . . Darling ... I don't think ..." Sally began.
"No problem," the boy cut in. "I got a joint ready, right here in my pocket." He fumbled in his pants for a moment and then produced a battered stub, sticking it between his lips as he thumbed a lighter into flame. In the sudden bright glare that etched the rakish lines of his face against the night she watched him take a deep drag, automatically accepting the cigarette as he held it out to her and drawing in a lungful herself. Before he handed it back for the second time, she could feel the demons of unsatisfied lust begin to dance again through her trembling loins.
"Anyway," Luis said conversationally, "it's all your old man's fault."
"My old . .. ?"
"Your daddy's. I'd like to see the guy could make it first time in a layout as cramped as this! What kind of a buggy is this, for Chrissake?"
"Next time, you tell him to buy a Chevy, a Lincoln, some kind of wheels that give a man room to maneuver in the back seat here. I've gotten more-" He broke off as Sally clamped her fingers frantically over his lips.
"Listen!" she whispered. "What's that?"
Outside the garage, a man's footsteps were approaching along the cement driveway.
"My God!" Sally gasped in terror. "That's my father! What are we going to do?"
"Christ!" the boy exclaimed. He stubbed out the joint on the sole of his shoe and zippered up his fly as Sally frenziedly pulled down her sweater and skirt. The footsteps halted. Over the thudding of their hearts they heard a jingling sound, and then a muttered exclamation: "Shit! The wrong goddamn keys again!"
The footsteps receded towards the house.
"Quick!" .the terrified girl breathed. "We've got to get out of here before he comes back!" Hastily they piled out of the car, dragged the door shut, and hurried out the side door into the night.
Two minutes later, Dale Wolff turned the right key in the lock, pushed up the counterbalanced up-and-over exit door, and took his place behind the wheel. ..
He was back in a half hour carrying a paper sack of groceries - a tall, spare, dark man of 33 with a college-boy haircut and a Brooks Brothers suit.
His wife looked up from her work as he put the sack down on the breakfast room table. She was patching a pair of jeans belonging to their ten year old son, Martin. "That took you some time, honey," she said. "I thought you were only going to-"
"I had to call somebody," he interrupted brusquely. "Is Sally in?"
"Why, yes. She came in right after you left. She went up to her room. It seems she has a headache again."
"I'm not surprised," Dale Wolff said grimly.
"Why honey . . . what do you mean?"
"Do you recognize these?" he asked, ignoring her question. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and held out a flimsy pair of blue nylon panties. The narrow crotchband was dark with moisture.
"W-w-w-why yes. I guess they're Sally's. How did you .. . ?"
"I found them on the back seat of the Alfa," Dale said shortly. "I wouldn't have noticed them, only the door wasn't properly closed."
Hester Wolff rose slowly to her feet. She was the same age as her husband, but sixteen years of marriage and two children had neither dimmed the luster of her short-cut dark hair nor flawed the superb line of her body, with its shapely hips and full, high-set breasts. Now, though, her brown eyes were troubled and her face was pale. "You mean . . . ?" she faltered.
"Just what you think I mean. But that's not the worst. Whoever she was with - they must have been smoking something. Marijuana, I guess. The whole garage stank of it."
"Oh, my God!" Hester said. Automatically, she reached out for the wispy garment. And then, crumpling it into a ball in her clenched fist, she exclaimed hotly: "It's that Puerto Rican boy! I know it! I told you when we saw them together outside school last week . . . he's no good! You know his father ran that cheap club until the police closed it up. His older brother's been in reform school twice and the boy himself's always hanging around bars and poolrooms. I tell you the whole family's no good!"
"Okay, okay," Dale soothed. "I only wanted to-"
"And it's not just the boy either," Hester burst out. "It's this whole lousy neighborhood! Oh, it was fine when we moved in ten years ago - but look at it now! It's gone downhill ever since! All those crummy apartment blocks on the next street; those gangs of kids always fighting on the vacant lots by the river! Why some of the girls in Sally's class are no more than-"
"I know, honey. I know," her husband cut in. "But what can we do?"
"We can get out of here, that's what! But fast!"
He sighed. "You know the alternatives, Hester. Either we have to move right out -Westchester or some place, and you know what that costs. Or we forget all about the fresh air and the trees and we move back into the city."
"Anything's better than here," Hester cried. "If Sally's going to become a sex maniac and a drug addict before she's sixteen, what's going to happen to Martin?"
"Ah, come on now honey! It's not as bad as-"
"Our son will be up before the parole board before he's in sixth grade, that's what!"
"If you'd just let me finish, honey," Dale said gently. "I heard of an apartment in the city today. That's what I had to call about."
"You heard of one? Why didn't you ... ? Where?"
"It's a new 60-story block they just built on West 47th."
"West 47th!" Hester exclaimed. "But that's..."
"Sure, I know. It's in Manhattan. Between Fifth and Sixth. But listen honey - only the top two floors will be apartments. All the rest will be offices. And those apartments have big roof terraces. We could maybe plant flowers out there, put shrubs in boxes, that kind of thing. It wouldn't even be noisy: it's a hell of a way above the street."
"I don't know." Hester was dubious. "You keep saying it will be apartments, it will be offices."
"The block isn't even finished," Dale said. "That is to say the building's finished, but they haven't completed the interior fittings yet. Except for the apartments. And they're not officially on the market. I only heard of this one that's free through this client of ours that's connected with the construction company that's building the block."
Hester ran her hand through her dark hair. "I don't know," she said again. "Right in the center of the city! . . . How soon could we go there ... if we were interested?"
Dale grinned boyishly. "As of next week - if you don't mind having cement dust sprinkled on your breakfast cereal instead of sugar for the next three months!"
"When could we see it?"
"Any time you like. There's no full-time janitor yet. I just have to collect the keys from this client - it's not even in the agents' hands until next month - and we can go on up there."
Hester drew a deep breath. She glanced momentarily at the panties crumpled into her fist and then she drew herself up to her full height. She had made her decision.
"We'll go see it tomorrow evening," she said firmly.
CHAPTER TWO
Dale Wolff collected his family from Grand Central Station after work on Friday and drove them to the new apartment block, turning right off Sixth Avenue to pass the Wentworth Hotel on 46th Street, and then left and left again on Fifth to bring him heading in the right direction down one-way West 47th.
It was just after 7 p.m., the hour at which parking on the street was allowed, and Dale slid the Alfa Romeo into a space not far from the red and white awning over the entrance to the Del Pezzo restaurant. They walked down past the barred and empty armored-glass windows of the jeweler's stores lining the block and stared up at the soaring facade of the new building. The whole frontage rose sheer from the sidewalk for forty-eight floors - a bone-white wall of steel and concrete and glass. Above this, the structure narrowed to a ten-story central tower. And surmounting this were the two balconied apartment floors, their blank windows glittering in the rays of the setting sun.
Although the New York Diamond Exchange, which was centered on the block, remained open until seven, most of the brokers and salesmen and dealers had gone home early for the weekend and the sidewalks were almost deserted. Apart from a few light delivery trucks double parked outside the Gotham Jewelers' across the street, traffic was light.
Hester Wolff stepped back to the edge of the sidewalk and shaded her eyes. "For the city, it's certainly quiet enough down here," she said. "I guess you'd hardly hear a sound up there!"
"Pop, are we gonna live right up there?" ten year old Martin asked excitedly. "Will we see the airplanes coming in to Kennedy fly past the windows?"
Dale Wolff grinned. "Depends if your mother likes the apartment, son," he said. "Let's go take a look anyway."
Sally said nothing. She was busy with thoughts of her own.
They pushed through the plate-glass entrance doors and walked into the building. There were strips of bleached planking laid across the squares of unsanded marble flooring the lobby. A stack of paper sacks filled with cement flanked a miniature concrete mixer between two of the pillars, and there was a tangle of electric cables and hoses from a compressed-air machine in front of the unpolished reception desk. Footsteps clacked towards them from somewhere in back. A grey-haired man in brown denim overalls appeared behind the desk and stared at them suspiciously.
"You folks lookin' for somebody?" he asked.
"For you, I guess," Dale said pleasantly. "We've come to look over the apartment on the 60th."
"The 60th?" the man echoed, his lined forehead corrugating as his shaggy eyebrows rose. "Why them apartments ain't even on the market yet!"
"I know," the ad-man explained patiently. "But Mr. Anselmo's given me the keys to 6004. I have a chance to take it before it comes on the market, and he said it would be okay to view it today."
"Mr. Anselmo?" the man repeated again. "Yeah, come to think of it he did say somethin' about a client comin' by to take a look. But I kinda thought ..." He paused to consult an ancient fob watch on a strap which he dragged from the breast pocket of his overalls.
"What seems to be the trouble?" Dale asked.
"Well, it's just that . . . Well, there ain't no regular janitor yet, you see. And no night man neither, there bein' nothin' in the place to steal."
"So?" Dale was looking puzzled. "So I'm supposed to quit at seven, mister, is all."
Dale fished a roll of bills from his pants pocket and peeled off a ten-spot. "Will this pay for the extra time?" he enquired.
"Oh . . . Thank you, sir. Very kind of you." The bill disappeared as if by magic into another pocket of the denims. "No, it's not that. My old woman's sick, you see, and I have to stop by the grocery store and the pharmacy on my way home. Mr. Anselmo didn't say... I kinda thought you'd be here earlier."
"You mean you don't have time to show us the apartment?"
"I guess that's about the strength of it," the man said. "I'm sorry."
Hester gave an exclamation of disappointment. Dale bit his lips, thought for a moment, and then said: "Tell you what - why don't we go on up on our own? We have the keys after all. Are the elevators working?"
"Sure. But that's just the trouble: I'm supposed to switch off the current at the main before I leave, and I just can't wait."
"What else do you have to do?"
"Check that everybody's out of the building, switch off, and lock up. That's all."
"How do you lock up?"
"I use a special key to shoot the bolts top and bottom of the glass doors you just came through, lock and bolt the four fire exits in back, and let myself out the pass-door at the side - Hey! What's it to you, mister, anyway?"
"I was just thinking," Dale said slowly, peeling another ten dollar bill absent-mindedly from the roll, "if you were to show me where the master switch was for the electricity, you could lock the front and back doors and go on home, leaving the pass-door open - and then when we came down we could throw the switch to cut the current and lock that door behind us as we left. You don't need a key for that?"
"Hell, no. It's a spring lock. You just drag the door shut behind you and she locks automatic. You know."
"Well then, what do you say?"
The temporary janitor scratched his head. "I dunno. I'm supposed to-"
"Sure, I know. But we're quite responsible people," Dale said persuasively. "Anyway you said there's nothing to steal! And I guarantee we won't forget to cut that switch. There's four of us to remember after all!"
The man was still looking dubious, his eyes flicking to and from the bill in Dale's hand. "I dunno, mister..."
"Ah, come on," Dale said. "Buy your wife something nice to eat." He reached out and tucked the bill into the janitor's breast pocket. "You can trust us, honest."
The janitor sighed. "Well okay then," he said grudgingly. "Don't let me down, though. I ain't due back until next week and if anyone came by and found that door unlocked or those elevators runnin' ..."
"They won't!" Dale said firmly.
The man showed them where the steel box housing the main switch was located in the unfinished receptionist's office, pointed out the pass-door at the side of the building, and led them towards the elevators. He pressed the button beside the door at the extreme left of the bank. "... 'Cepting for the freight lift in back," he explained, "there ain't but this one workin' - and she ain't no express; But she'll get you there in time!"
The doors rolled smoothly back to reveal a mirrored car bright with stainless steel. There was a bench seat running the width of the elevator beneath the glass opposite the doors. Dale ushered in his wife and children and then stepped inside himself.
The janitor reached in to press the topmost button on the deep stack beside the doors. "All the way to the end of the line!" he said with a wink at Martin. "Don't let your daddy forget about that switch, huh?"
"Don't worry!" Dale called as the door slid shut. And then, jokingly: "Don't you forget and throw it yourself!"
The elevator shot upwards with a barely discernible whine. For a moment they stared at each other as they accustomed themselves to the familiar weightless sensation in the pit of the stomach, and then Dale and his wife exchanged a satisfied smile. Sally was gazing at her reflection in the mirror, pushing a stray tendril of blonde hair into place. Martin climbed on the seat and stared open-mouthed at the indicator needle as it slowly circled the illuminated dial. "Sixty floors!" he breathed. "Gee, I'll bet this is the highest apartment in the whole world! Hey, Pop - would we be higher'n Mount Everest if we lived here?"
"Higher than a kite if the altitude goes to your Momma's head the way it did on that skiing holiday in the Rockies!" Dale quipped.
"Higher'n a kite? Say, how high can a kite fly, Pop?" the boy demanded. "What's the highest, the very ever highest a kite ever flew?"
"Oh, Martin," Sally said irritably, "couldn't you just quit talking for just one second?"
It seemed a long time before the elevator finally bounced gently to a halt, but there was still sunshine streaming through the frosted glass of the foyer window when the doors eased back on the penthouse floor.
There were two apartments, and two on the floor below - one fronting on West 47th, the other looking over the roofs towards 46th. The one on which Dale had the option was at the front of the building, and they crowded excitedly around him as he fitted the key into the lock.
As the door swung open Hester gasped aloud with delight. Indian Summer - that autumnal miracle that makes Manhattan every year one of the world's most beautiful cities - had transformed the modernistic skyline into a frieze of enchantment. Beyond the wide French windows at the far side of the empty room, the last rays of the setting sun bathed the tops of the tall buildings in a flood of honey-colored golden light, a magical radiance that turned the towers and pinnacles of the soaring office blocks into the battlements of a fairy-tale town. Below, they saw as they hurried through and out on to the terrace, the night was already falling. In the steep stone canyons crisscrossing the great mass of brick and concrete and slate spread out before them, the crimson tail-lights of automobiles crawled through the dusk between the green and orange and red alternations of traffic signals as far as the eye could see in each direction.
"My God!" Hester breathed. "It's beautiful. . . beautiful!"
"Pretty spectacular, eh?" Dale said with a satisfied smile.
The terrace was wide. Above the waist-high stone parapet, double guard rails protected the unwary from the dizzying drop that plunged over 700 feet to the narrow ribbon of 47th Street gashing the confusion of roofs and chimneys immediately below. Young Martin was in transports of delight. "Hey, Momma, Pop," he cried, "look at those skyscrapers there! That's the Empire State Building . . . that one over there is the R.K.O. - and that one with the sun shining on all those windows, is that the U.N., Pop? See? Over there where you can see the river, between those walls?" He began excitedly clambering up on the rails as he pointed to the east.
"Martin!" Hester cried sharply. "Don't you dare . . .!"
"Watch it, son!" Dale exclaimed warningly as he darted across to pluck the boy away from the breathtaking abyss. "It's an awful long way down if you miss your footing there!"
"Quicker than the lift, though," Sally said sarcastically. "We could put plants in pots here, couldn't we? It's quite a big terrace. And little trees and shrubs even . . . with one of those nice swing chairs, maybe, and striped parasols and-"
"Okay, Sally, okay," her father laughed. "Let's go take a look at the apartment itself first, huh, before we start planning the roof garden? It'll be getting dark soon and I guess there'll be no electricity hitched up yet."
"Surely there must be, honey?" Hester objected. "We came up in the elevator after all. You wouldn't have got me up sixty floors by the emergency stairs!"
"Sure there's current available," Dale said. "But there won't be any fittings in an empty apartment that's not even officially for rent yet."
They went reluctantly back inside and found that he was quite right: colored wires and cables twisted out of the plugs and ceiling roses in each room, but no lamp holders or sockets had been fitted. Although the sun had now sunk below the serrated skyline of the city, however, there was still enough light to see by. The apartment was spacious and well designed. There was a master bedroom and two smaller ones, a square hallway with a bathroom and closet leading off it, and one large living room with French windows to the balcony and a generous alcove which could be used as a dinette. The kitchen could be reached through an open hatchway from this or direct from the hall. Hester was impressed. "Darling, we could make this real nice," she said enthusiastically. "This kitchen's a dream, with all those power points and that sink unit and those crazy concealed closets. There'll even be room to move around when we have the washing machine and the icebox and the cooker and the waste disposal unit installed! The bedrooms are great, with that view over towards Queens and the East River. There doesn't seem to be any traffic noise at all - and the living room, with the terrace for good days . .. why, there's more space than we have now! I guess I could even get used to the height in time!"
She moved back towards the French windows and added: "Look, we could put the davenport there between the alcove and the door, and the television over here, and your desk-"
"Oh, Mother, no!" Sally interrupted. "Surely the desk should be by the alcove, so Daddy can see out the window, and the davenport-"
"Just a minute, you two!" Dale interrupted in his turn. "Quit hassling over what goes where, will you? At least until I check whether the price is right!"
Martin had been playing some private adventure game out in the lobby while they looked the apartment over. Now he came running back to them with his eyes shining. "Are we going to live here?" he asked breathlessly. "Is this going to be our new home, Pop? Hey, Sal - there's a great place in back of the elevators where you can play hide-and-seek. Are we going to live in this apartment, Pop?"
"We'll see, honey. We'll see," Hester said. "Right now, I think we ought to get out of here and get you something to eat. It'll soon be time for you to go to bed, young man!"
"There's a little Italian restaurant I know over in Brooklyn," Dale said. "We take clients there to lunch sometimes. What say we celebrate tonight and I buy you all dinner there?"
"Gee, that'd be great!" Sally enthused. "Do they have cannelloni?"
"They have most anything you could think of," Dale said. "Come on; let's go!"
With a last look at the bare, empty room, and the lights spangling the twilight beyond the terrace, they left the apartment, re-locked the door, and moved across to the elevator. "What's the Italian restaurant like?" Martin demanded as Dale thumbed the button. "Do the waiters talk Italian? Can I have pasghetti?"
"Spaghetti!" Sally corrected. "Really, Martin, you should know by now ..."
But the ten year old's grasshopper mind was already off on another tack. "Why don't the elevator doors open, Pop?" he asked.
"Because the car has a long way to come, son," Dale said. "I guess it returns automatically to the ground floor if nobody else calls it." He pressed the button again.
They waited in silence. After what seemed a long time, Dale said: "That's funny ..." He stepped back to look up at the indicator dial above the door. The needle pointed to the "G" at the bottom of the circle. With a muttered exclamation, he leaned on the button for the third time, screwing the plastic disc into its socket with his thumb. Inclining his head towards the crack between the sliding doors, he listened.
But there was no faint whine of hydraulic machinery, no discreet rumble of cables, no hiss of air pushed through the cracks as the cage rose up the shaft through the building.
"Are you sure you have the right one, dear?" Hester asked.
"Of course I have the right one," Dale snapped irritably. "There's only two that come up this far, as you can see - the express, and the one we came in: the one on the left."
"Well, try the other one just the same."
He shrugged and moved to the right. "The man told us the express elevators weren't working yet," he said as he pressed the button.
The dial of the express too remained obstinately at "G."
For the fourth time Dale tried to summon the left-hand car. "You know what, Pop?" Martin said. "When the janitor called the elevator, a red light came on behind the button as he pressed it."
"He's right - for once," Sally said. "The indicator dial was illuminated when we came up too. I noticed it before we went in to the apartment."
Dale smothered a curse. Abruptly he walked to the other side of the lobby and stared at the sign over the double doors leading to the emergency stairway. It had been illuminated when they arrived. Now it was dark.
"Jesus!" Dale exclaimed angrily. "Don't tell me that old-"
"Dale!" his wife warned sharply. "Not in front of the children!"
"But don't you understand? The current's cut! That irresponsible sonofabitch ..."
"Dale!"
"... must have thrown the master switch before he left after all! How can a man act that dumb!"
"Well, there's no point losing your temper about it," Hester said reasonably. "What shall we do?"
He let out his breath in an exasperated sigh. "There's only one thing we can do: take the emergency stairs and walk down . . . the whole sixty floors!"
"Oh, Daddy! Sixty floors! And I'm wearing my high heels!" Sally wailed.
"Sorry, folks!" Dale said. "-'Fraid there's nothing else for it."
"But it'll take hours!"
"The sooner we start the better, then," Dale said. "Thank God I have my cigarette lighter with me! It'll be dark on those stairs!" He strode through the gloom and jerked open the emergency doors, and then jumped back with an incoherent cry.
The passageway to the stairhead was barred by a sheet of solid steel!
"My God!" Dale cried distractedly. "The switch ... I remember when I saw the plans for this building . . . that's the emergency fire bulkhead! There's one on every floor. They close automatically if there's a failure of current for any reason... to seal off the block in fireproof compartments, like the watertight compartments in a ship. Otherwise, with those stairs and the elevator shafts, the whole place'd be like a flaming torch in a few seconds!"
"Is there . ... is there any hope of opening it?" Hester asked.
He shook his head. "Not a hope in hell. You couldn't open it with a bulldozer! That's quarter-inch steel plate. It runs in steel grooves cemented into the walls."
"But..." Hester began tremulously, "if the elevators are not working and the stairway's sealed off . . . ?"
Dale nodded grimly. "Exactly."
They were marooned 750 feet above the city as effectively as if they had been cast away on a desert island!
"Darling, what are we going to do?" Hester said in a small voice.
"We'll be stuck here all night!" Sally cried.
"If only that was all," Dale said. "But it's Friday night, remember? The workmen won't be here tomorrow. And that old fool told us he wasn't due back until next week."
"My God!" Hester exclaimed. "You ... you mean that. .. barring a miracle ... we might b-b-be trapped here until. . . Monday morning?"
"Hey, Pop - if we have to stay here all that time, do I have to go to school Monday?" Martin asked excitedly.
"Don't be silly, Martin," Sally reproved. "There is no school Monday! Have you forgotten already? It's a public holiday!"
There was a long silence. Through the gathering darkness, Dale stared at his wife's stricken face. "Friday night," he whispered, "Saturday . . . Saturday night. . . Sunday . . . Sunday night . . . Monday . . . Monday night..."
With no food, no drink, no heat, no light, and only the clothes they were wearing, they were condemned to wait 84 hours at the top of the deserted building before they could hope to be rescued.
* * *
Hester was crying. "There must be something we could do," she sobbed, "some way of attracting attention, surely?"
Dale tightened his arms around her as she laid her head on his shoulder. He swallowed. "If only there was something . . . anything," he said huskily. "Even if I could find some way of getting into another apartment or climbing down to a lower floor - a ledge or a stackpipe or something - the fire doors would seal off the stairs there too. It seems unbelievable, right in the center of the world's biggest city, but we could ... we could die here! In three and a half days we could die of starvation. In Manhattan!"
"Oh, Dale!" the distracted brunette wailed. "It's not so much us . . . it's the children. How can we sit here and watch them starve? Honey, you've got to do something!"
They were now standing just outside the French windows. He had punched the buttons a dozen times; he had pummeled and kicked the elevator gates; he had beaten his fists raw on the steel fire bulkhead; he had tried the locked door of the other empty apartment; they had all shouted and screamed until their throats were sore. But nobody had heard. There was nobody to hear. Finally, when Martin burst into tears and cried: "I'm hungry! I want to go home!" Hester was unable to bear it any longer and fled to the balcony.
It was very quiet between the French windows and the parapet. The muffled roar of the city's traffic far below sounded infinitely remote. Above their heads the stars glittered coldly in a cloudless sky, and ahead, behind and on either side as far as the eye could see, the myriad lights of New York spangled the dark with loops and squares and arabesques of gold. There was a cool breeze blowing off the Hudson River, rattling a loose wire somewhere and moaning softly among the television aerials on the roof. From time to time they could hear the hooting of the Staten Island ferry and the mournful siren of a tugboat working the harbor. It was almost nine o'clock.
Hester knuckled her eyes and gazed out over the rails at the checkerboard of lighted windows piercing the dim bulk of the Manhattan skyscrapers surrounding them. "Surely there must be somebody looking out from among all those windows?" she said. "Surely there must be something we could do to attract their attention?"
Dale sighed and shook his head. "We're in the dark, honey," he said gently. "Nobody'd see us, even if they were looking. Even in daylight, it'd be hopeless. Those buildings are not as near as they look. Can you see one identifiable person in all those lighted windows?"
"N-n-no. But. . . "
"And if you could, d'you think you'd know if they were waving to attract your attention?"
"I guess not. But couldn't we make some kind of signal? Fashion a flag or a banner from our clothes or something?"
"Even if folks saw such a thing, would they know it was an appeal for help? If they saw us at all, they'd probably just wave right back."
"If we set it alight . . . started a fire . .. wouldn't that bring the fire department to the block?"
"Smoke coming from the top of an empty building would certainly bring them around. But it'd be too dangerous. Don't forget we're trapped here. We could all suffocate or burn. Anyway, how do we start it? The apartment's clean as a whistle: there isn't a stick of wood or a shred of cloth in it. We haven't any paper -and you can't set clothes alight with a cigarette lighter. Most of them will have been fire-proofed anyway.
"Well we have to do something," Hester cried for the tenth time.
They thought of dropping messages into the street. But Dale had left his briefcase in the car, and the only paper they could raise between them was an old shopping list from Hester's purse, which was already covered with her neat handwriting, and a couple of used envelopes Dale found in the breast pocket of his jacket. He took his ballpoint and scrawled an urgent message on each. "But if we drop them from here," he said, "I know just what will happen: they'll be too light and the wind will carry them away. But if I crumple them up to give them a little weight, nobody'll bother to pick them up even if they do fall in the street..."
"Try anyway," Hester urged. "We've got to try."
Dale leaned over the rail and stared down at the distant ribbon of 47th Street. Below the dizzying perspective of the sheer facade, he could barely make out the ant-like movements of pedestrians on the sidewalk. A few cars moved towards the illuminated entrance to the subway station by the Sixth Avenue traffic lights. Behind them a flashing red light on the roof of a prowl car charted the course of a police patrol on the way back to the 47th precinct house between Eighth and Ninth. Dale knew that the car would be a green and white Plymouth with the number 16 painted on its sides. He knew that there would be another circling the block at exactly 9:30 and a third at ten o'clock. He knew that men from the Holmes agency too would be patrolling the rich Diamond Exchange district at ten to the hour and twenty after, throughout the night. But for all the chance he had of attracting their attention, the two hundred and fifty yards of vertical space between them might as well have been a million miles.
He looked back toward Fifth Avenue. Above the rooftops, the lights of Broadway cast a reflected glow into the night sky. The traffic signals at 47th and Fifth changed from red to green. He turned his head to the left. The lights flicked amber and then green at Sixth ... at Seventh ... at Eighth. When the distant signals at 47th and Ninth showed green he let the first envelope fall.
It spiraled lazily down past the office floors beneath them, swooped outwards, fluttered in a gust of wind, and was lost to sight against the dark background of chimneys above the Gotham Jewelers' Exchange.
Dale cursed. He waited for the lights to change again, reached as far out as he dared, and released the second.
The envelope took an entirely different course, planing away to his right in a series of see-saw dives, to land squarely on a painters' cradle hanging crazily against a facade a dozen floors below.
"Shit!" Dale said bitterly. "That's just great! The workmen will find it Tuesday morning, when we're all lying stiff and cold!"
"Maybe you should have stuffed something in the envelope to make it fall true - a pen or a length of electric cable or something." Hester said.
"Now she tells me!" her husband exclaimed, throwing his hands up in exasperation. He turned and strode back into the apartment. Martin was calling again. "I wanna go home! I'm thirsty! I wanna drink of water! I don't wanna stay here!" the boy cried tearfully.
Dale picked his way across the living room, kicking aside a telephone that was lying by the door. They had lifted the receiver earlier, but the line was dead. In the kitchen, he flicked on his lighter and turned the faucet. There was a gargling noise from the pipe, an expiring choke of air, and a few rusty drops pattered into the basin.
"Jesus!" he shouted. "Don't say the water's off too!"
He wrenched at the other faucet. As the lighter flame went out, a jet of clear cold water spurted across his hand.
Dale breathed a sigh of relief. If there was water there was hope. "Come on, son," he called. "There's nothing to drink it from, but you can fill the bowl and scoop it up from there." And then, turning back towards Hester, who was standing just inside the door: "I guess we'd better try and make ourselves comfortable for the night, honey. No point in wasting any more energy before it's light again."
There was nothing to sit or lie on in the apartment, and nothing to cover them. The rooms were completely bare. Martin found a squashed candy bar in his pants pocket, and after he shared this with Sally, he lay down with his head m his sister's lap, his small frame covered by Dale's jacket, and tried to go to sleep. Dale sat on the floor with his back to the wall and one arm around Hester's shoulders, waiting for the dawn.
For a long time he listened to the dwindling night sounds of the city, his mind sick with anxiety over their predicament. One by one, the lights in the neighboring skyscrapers went out. The freshening wind moaned under the door leading to the lobby. Occasionally he heard the hooting of tugs on the river, and once a distant siren followed by fire bells.
Finally he must have fallen asleep, for he awoke with a start to hear Martin calling. "Hush, baby!" he whispered. "You'll wake up Mommy. What is it you want?"
"I want Sally. Where's Sally gone?"
"Isn't she with you?"
"No, she isn't. My head's on the floor and it's hard!"
With an exclamation of annoyance, Dale eased his arm from behind the sleeping Hester and rose stiffly to his feet. "I'll go find her for you," he murmured. "Maybe she just went to the bathroom."
But he saw in the wavering flame from his lighter that the bathroom door was wide open. He tiptoed across the hall and into the kitchen. It was empty. "Where are you, Sal?" he called softly. "Your brother wants you."
There was no reply.
Tutting irritably, Dale went from one to the other of the three bedrooms. Sally wasn't in any of them.
"Good God!" he thought to himself. "Surely she can't be out on the terrace at this hour?" He saw by the illuminated dial of his watch that it was almost three o'clock.
Cautiously, he eased open the French window, shivering as the chill night air struck his through his thin shirt. Behind him, Hester stirred in her sleep as the draught swept across her legs. The terrace was deserted.
Aware of hunger gnawing at his belly - or perhaps it was something worse - Dale walked to the parapet and looked over. The lights flashed red and green as far as he could see in each direction. But apart from the distant blur of his own car parked beneath a street lamp, the block was as empty as the balcony. No ambulance nosed in to the curb; no tiny speck lay shattered on the shining ribbon of sidewalk.
Really alarmed now, he hurried back through the apartment and jerked open the front door, his lighter hot in his trembling hand.
The steel fire door still barred the passage to the stairs; the elevators were still at the ground-floor level; the door to the other apartment was still locked. But of Sally there was no sign.
His voluptuous fifteen year old daughter had disappeared from the sealed-off apartment as completely as though she had never existed . . .
CHAPTER THREE
Sally Wolff had been unable to sleep on the hard floor of the empty apartment. She had watched the pale reflection of the changing lights of the city out the window as she thought of Luis and their interrupted love-making the previous night. She wondered what it would have been like if the dark boy had been able to try again - if they hadn't been interrupted by her father. Had her father noticed anything when he came back to the garage? The smell of marijuana had seemed very strong to her as they stole out. And what had become of her discarded panties? She had been terrified when she realized that, in her haste, she had forgotten to put them on again. But they weren't in the Alfa when she crept down early this morning to look. Had he found them - or had she dropped them . . . could she have dropped them . . . someplace else? She hadn't seen him in the morning and he'd said nothing before they came to view the apartment tonight. But she had thought there had been a certain reserve in his manner towards her. Did he really suspect something - or was she just suffering from a guilty conscience?
When the sounds of deep, even breathing from across the room told her that her mother and father were both asleep, she eased Martin's head from her lap and rose quietly to her feet. She had too much on her mind to sleep. She had to get some air.
Tiptoeing across the bare floor, she slid the French windows open and stole out on the terrace. But the wind had strengthened and the night air was cold. She was only wearing her sky-blue miniskirt and a light sweater over her panties and brassiere. Anyway it was kind of creepy out there, all that way above the street with only the mournful hooting of tugs to break the silence, and all those lights changing from green to red with no traffic to stop. She almost wished her parents would decide not to take the place. There was nothing wrong with the house they were in now. She would never get to see Luis if they lived right up here in Manhattan. Sighing, she turned and went back indoors.
She prowled restlessly about the apartment, treading cautiously in the dark. But there was nothing to see and nothing to do. She was hungry too, she suddenly realized. She missed her dinner. She went to the kitchen and scooped a mouthful of water from the basin. Then, moving an inch at a time so as not to waken the others, she slid back the catch of the front door and walked out into the foyer. Maybe if she could open that frosted glass window she would be able to see the Brooklyn Bridge and all those floodlit underpasses and overpasses leading to it. ..
In the dim radiance filtering through the glass she could see no catch or other means of opening it. It was even creepier out there. The wind whined about the corners of the building, stammering one of the elevator doors in its frame. And then suddenly the apartment door blew shut with a decisive click.
Sally gasped with dismay. It was a self-locking door and you couldn't open it without a key! Either she would have to spend the rest of the night out here in front of the useless elevators or she would have to knock on the door until she wakened her father . . .
For a moment she stood indecisively, listening to the blood pounding in her ears and the sound of her own agitated breathing. Then in a quick flare of panic she suddenly wondered: was it her own breathing?
Deliberately, she breathed slowly and more deeply - but the respiration she could hear continued at the same shallow pace.
There was somebody else in the darkened foyer with her!
She could identify the direction now: it came from the dense shadows by the door to the other empty apartment. Somebody was standing there silently watching her . . .
With an inarticulate cry, the scared young blonde whirled to dash for their own front door - and ran full tilt into a second person who was I just behind her!
Her eyes flew open to register the dim bulk of a man, huge and ghostly in the half light, his arms spread to block her way. And then she threw back her head to scream. But before a sound could force its way past her lips, a powerful hand clamped itself over her mouth and nose from behind, completely muffling her cries, and a strong arm swept her from her feet.
The man in front of her moved in to grasp her ankles, and between them they carried her, struggling and writhing, across a foyer towards the other apartment. The man holding her feet shouldered the door open. The next moment, all three of them were inside.
Sally heard the lock click as the door swung shut. In total darkness she was manhandled down a passageway .. . and then abruptly she was set on her feet in a small room dimly lit by an oil lamp.
Terrified, she looked around her. There was an old blanket tacked up over the window, a trundle bed with a stained mattress in one corner, and three packing cases grouped around the lamp, which was set on the floor by a greasy pack of cards. The room smelled of liquor and sweat and stale cigarette smoke.
The man she had slammed into was about 35 - a tall, hard man with a lined face and thinning hair. His companion was even taller: he must have been at least six feet two inches, with long arms and a great barrel chest. His face, which wore a permanent expression of slight puzzlement, was young and almost cherubic, but the eyes, deep-set beneath a shallow brow, were flinty and cold. Both of them were unshaven.
"W-w-why have you brought me here? What are you doing?" Sally quavered as soon as she could find her voice.
The first man gave a short bark of laughter. "We got business to attend to," he said in a hoarse voice. "But it ain't yet and we got kinda bored, sittin' around doing nothin'. So we thought maybe a little female company would do us good."
"B-but you can't ... you've got no right. . . this apartment's not even on the market," the young blonde said, indignantly.
The man laughed again. "As to that, let's say the apartment was loaned us by a friend. A good friend: he ain't even chargin' us any rent, eh, Stoker?"
The huge man who had been behind Sally laughed in his turn, a rumbling grating sound that had no humor in it. "That's it, Harry," he said.
"Anyway," the girl said defiantly, "you have no business bringing me in here against my will. My father will-" She broke off with a gasp. A gun had appeared in Harry's hand, and one finger with a black-rimmed nail was curled around the trigger.
"This is another friend," he said evenly. "And it says I have the right to do whatever I goddamn please. Like I say, right now it's my pleasure to have you in here. As to your old man, there's work for him to do tomorrow, but he can wait."
Sally stared in horrified fascination at the weapon. It looked much bigger than the guns she had seen on TV or at the movies. The striated wood covering the butt and sides was worn and gray, and the blued steel of the barrel gleamed dully in the lamplight.
"One peep out of you," Harry continued huskily, "and you're a dead chicken. So you better make up your mind to do what I say."
The frightened girl gaped at the unwavering barrel. The wicked hole at its center was lined up with her diaphragm. Fighting back a rising wave of panic, she croaked: "My father will miss me. He'll-"
"Fuck your father," Harry interrupted. "There's slugs here for the whole goddamn family if necessary. Don't get me wrong, babe: I ain't kiddin' and I got nothin' to lose."
It was the foul language more than the underlying menace in his words that brought home to the girl the full extent of her plight. Before she could think of anything else to say, there was the sound of water flushing and a third man slouched into the room. He was younger than the others, a stocky youth with hooded eyes and dark stubble shadowing his swarthy chin. "What the hell goes on here?" he asked. "Jesus! Where'd you guys pick up the broad?"
"Creepin' about the hallway," Harry said. "She must be with them punks in the other apartment. You feel like a piece of tail tonight, Mario?"
"You bet!" the newcomer leered. "It's been a long time."
Realization suddenly flooded Sally's mind. "Mario!" she burst out. "Stoker! Harry . . . ! I know who you are! I read about you in the newspapers! You're the three escaped convicts who ..." Her voice trailed off and she cowered away from the three men, looking fearfully from one to the other.
"Now ain't that just too bad," Harry said quietly. "Maybe you shoulda spent more time in school and less time readin' the newspapers, 'cause that piece of information ain't goin' to do you no good at all. No good at all."
Sally swallowed. "What are you going to do with me?" she faltered.
"I don't know . .. yet." Harry eyed the ripely swelling contours of the girl's high-set breasts beneath the tight sweater, allowing his gaze to wander lasciviously down over the smoothly sculptured lines of her hips and down the slender taper of her legs. He licked his lips. "For the moment," he said, "you can take off them clothes."
"W-what did you say?"
"You heard me, take 'em off, baby, unless you want Stoker to tear them off. And he ain't gentle. Don't know his own strength, Stoker!"
Sally almost fainted with terror at his words. To be at the mercy of three brutal, leering escaped convicts, within a few yards of her own father yet unable to cry out because of the threat of Harry's gun ... to be forced to strip herself naked before their lewdly curious stares ... to submit to their vile and lustful desires, as she was now certain she must. . . she couldn't even bear to think of what was to happen next. It was like a nightmare come true!
She turned and glanced at the huge bulk of Stoker. His meaty hands were curling and uncurling at his sides, and there was a look of brutish anticipation on his swarthy face. "Are you goin't to take 'em off, or do I have to do it for you?" he growled.
With trembling hands, the voluptuous young blonde slowly drew the sweater up over her head. "Jesus!" Mario exclaimed as her tautly upthrust breasts in their white satin brassiere cups came into view. "Would you look at them beautiful tits!" Harry licked his lips again and said nothing.
Sally unzippered her blue miniskirt next and slid it reluctantly down the smooth ivory columns of her thighs. Stoker's eyes glistened as she bent over to step out of it, the narrow crotchband of her white nylon panties caught enticingly in the cleft between her full, rounded buttocks.
She stood before them, five feet four inches of trembling, curvaceous, fifteen year old flesh, naked except for the flimsy white panties and brassiere. Her lower lips was quivering and her blue eyes were filled with tears.
"Come on," Harry said impatiently. "Take off the rest."
"Oh, please," Sally whimpered. "Please don't do it to me! Please ..."
"Take 'em off."
Still the girl hesitated. How could she reveal her most secret parts to these inhuman monsters?"
Harry gestured with the gun. "Have it your way. Stoker!"
The big man needed no second invitation. With a sudden movement that took her completely by surprise, he grabbed Sally's arm and twisted her wrist cruelly behind her so that she was forced to spin round and fall back against him. At the same time he reached over her shoulder with his other hand, slipped his thick dirty fingers into the soft white valley between her breasts, and ripped the flimsy brassiere from her body with a single powerful tug.
"Oh no! Noooo," the blonde teenager wailed. But one threatening look from Harry reduced her to quiet whimpering.
Mario's breath hissed between his teeth as he saw her ripe young breasts with their rose-pink nipple-buds spring out in defensive hardness. He jumped forward and hauled her panties down to her ankles with one swift movement of his hands - and then stayed crouching there before her, staring lustfully at the nakedly exposed triangle of blonde pubic hair beneath her trembling little belly.
Harry walked slowly across and reached out his free hand. As his hard calloused fingers began experimentally stroking the softly resilient pussy-curls, Sally closed her eyes, crimson at the indignity of being held there helpless while this bestial hoodlum pawed her obscenely exposed genitals. She moaned softly in shame and humiliation as she felt the tip of Harry's middle finger part the tender fleshy folds surrounding her vagina and push itself into the moist warm depths of her pussy. She felt the blood rising in her head until she thought her brain would burst with the pressure as he chuckled with lustful glee.
"Mrs. Butcher's boy gonna bake his bread real good in that little oven!" he exulted. "Bring her over to the bed, Stoker."
The captive girl gasped with pain as her wrist was screwed even more cruelly up her back and the big man forced her across the room. Her young face was set in a determined expression of defiance that seemed to increase as the inevitable assault of her defenseless body drew near. She was resisting them mentally with all her strength. Even the inhuman agony to which she was being subjected could not quench the intense fires of revulsion and hate she felt for the three coarse and lustful faces surrounding her.
Stoker forced her arm still farther up her back so that she was obliged to bend forward over the cheap mattress in an attempt to escape the searing pain. Dimly, through the waves of agony thundering in her veins, she heard Harry say: "Okay, blondie. Are you gonna do what you're told without no trouble?"
She clenched her teeth tightly together and refused to speak.
"The boss is talkin' to ya, kid," Stoker said warningly, twisting her wrist so far up between her shoulder blades that she thought her arm would break. "It ain't polite not to speak when you're spoken to."
Choking back a sob, Sally bit her lip and said nothing.
Harry was angry. It would have calmed the bitterness raging within him to have this snobby kid, with her stuck-up airs and her Ivy League punk of a father, whimpering and begging for mercy before him. "I guess I'll have to teach the little bitch a lesson," he said harshly. "You guys gimme a hand."
Stoker released the cruel hold on her wrist and savagely thrust her face-down on the bed. A fist thudded into the side of her head, and she groaned and went suddenly limp, her naked body splayed wide and helpless, her arms and legs spread-eagled across the mattress. For a moment she trembled loose and quivering, only to tighten her muscles once more as she heard Harry speak again. "Hold her down and stop her squawkin'," he commanded. "And Stoker - gimme the belt out of your pants."
Harsh fingers tangled in Sally's blonde hair, dragging her head back as her own nylon panties were stuffed into her mouth. As she moaned behind the improvised gag, Stoker reached through the iron bars at the foot of the bed, grabbing her ankles and pulling her legs out straight. At the same time, Mario hauled on her wrists through the bars at the top, so that she was stretched between them like a victim on an ancient torture rack.
Harry wound the buckle end of the belt around his knuckles and flourished it experimentally over Sally's naked back. She cringed down into the lumpy mattress as she heard the leather whistle through the air, her whole body shuddering with helpless terror.
"Agggghhhhhh!" she tried to scream as the hard hot leather hit her full across the buttocks.
The wanted man chuckled viciously as he again lashed the belt down hard across her trembling white buttocks. Sally uttered another muffled scream and jerked her body frenziedly, but she couldn't overcome the strength of the two men holding her arms and legs. The belt raised up and hissed down again and again, tracing an agonizing path the whole length of her writhing, struggling form as her frantic cries were stifled by the panty-gag.
"You sure nobody can hear, Harry?" Mario asked anxiously. "Suppose her old man wakes up in the next apartment?"
"This is the back room, boy, and them walls is thick," Harry panted. "But so what if he does? He can't get in and we have the shooters." He wiped his brow with the back of one hand and raised his other arm. The belt continued to lash down against Sally's sensitive skin for a seeming eternity of pain. As her body jerked again and again beneath the cruel blows raining down on her squirming back and buttocks her dazed and tortured mind lost all sense of time.
Finally the helpless girl felt the sodden panties wrenched from her mouth and she heard Harry's jeering voice: "Tell me what you want me to do to you, baby. Beg me to give you some real man's cock!"
Sally moaned and clenched her teeth together, flailing her head from side to side on the narrow bed. She thought she would die from the shame and agony of the unspeakable torture she was suffering at the hands of the three convicts, but still she could not bring herself to this final degradation they were demanding of her. She refused to utter a word.
The panties were stuffed back into her mouth and Harry started to beat her again, cracking the leather belt down across her quivering red-welted flesh with increasing fury. He was going to break this proud little bitch if it was the last thing he did.
"I'm waitin', baby," he gasped, snatching the gag from her mouth a second time. "Bet Mrs. Butcher's boy to fuck you!"
"No, I can't. I can't. Oh, God - don't make me!" she pleaded shrilly. And then suddenly, as he raised the belt once more, she could stand it no longer. The imprisoned teenager gave one final shuddering whimper and her body went limp on the bed. Harry lowered the belt and listened to the soft pleading mumblings that began to stream incoherently from the half-open mouth pressed tightly into the mattress.
"Fuck me . . . fuck me . . ., Anything .. . Oh, God! Oh God! I can't stand it... I don't care . . . Just stop it! . . .Please, please, please! ..."
Stoker and Mario let out their breaths in a concerted sigh as Harry's sadistic grin widened with satisfaction. The pathetic whimperings of the young blonde's final admission of surrender were music in his ears: Breaking the will of this voluptuously precocious school girl gave him a sense of power and importance he had lacked ever since he had been picked up by the police after his overdose of heroin in the jeweler's store. It went some way towards compensating him for the bitterness he felt about the unfairness of that debacle.
Stepping aside he threw Stocker's belt back to him and nodded to his two companions to release the girl's arms and legs. There was no longer any reason to hold her: All the fight had gone out of her tortured and aching body and she was completely limp. She was his for the taking and he knew it. So did Mario and Stoker as they gazed down at the prostrate form of the defeated young blonde.
"J-J-Jesus, look at her!" Stoker stuttered, staring avidly at the red weals crisscrossing Sally's tender skin. "Are you going to fuck her now, Harry?"
Harry jerked his thumb at the rising bulge in the crotch of his pants. "What do you think?" he asked with a lascivious smile.
"Can I touch her? Can I just feel her up a little first?"
"Sure, go ahead," Harry said generously. "Take a sample of what's coming your way while I get my pants off."
"Coming my way? You . .. you mean we all get to have a go?"
"Don't be a jerk, Stoker. You bet we do!" Mario said firmly. "We split three ways, don't we, on this deal? Well, okay - that goes for the side orders too, man."
Unzippering his pants, Harry watched Stoker lean over the bed and fondle Sally's soft resilient young flesh. The big man's dilated eyes shone brightly in the dim light cast by the oil lamp as his rough, coarse fingers moved over the rounded whiteness of her trembling buttocks, tweaking and kneading the flaccid mounds of yielding flesh with lustful anticipation. Face down on the mattress, Sally Wolff lay unresisting before him, moaning in a half daze as her innocent virgin body shuddered uncontrollably.
"Okay, Stoker, that's enough!" Harry warned suddenly as he saw Stoker's fingers begin pulling open the cheeks of the girl's buttocks and insert themselves in the crevice between. "I'm gonna fuck her now!"
Sally lay trembling with her face pressed tightly into the dirty mattress. Part of the panties they had used as a gag was clamped hard between her teeth to still the throbbing pain that racked her slender body and quiet the chattering of her jaws. She lay cowed, unable to and not caring to move. All thoughts of resistance had been beaten out of her by the lashing belt. She felt a momentary urge to turn her head and show her defiance with a look, but there was no strength left in her now. There was no point in prolonging the inevitable rape they were going to subject her to.
Suddenly she felt Harry's calloused fingers coursing over her back, and she shuddered anew. She didn't try to resist because she feared the pain that might follow: She knew now that her resistance could only be mental; a victory within herself.
"Turn around, blondie," Harry commanded above her. 'Take a look at what you asked for! See what a real man's prick looks like!"
The girl neither moved nor answered until she felt his hand tangling in her long hair and jerking her head up and around a few inches off the bed. Her eyes opened in surprise, and her face convulsed with horror at the sight of the long thick cock he held rigidly over her head. It was monstrous - and iron-hard shaft webbed all along the underside with heavy throbbing veins, and a purplish, bulbous head already glistening obscenely with the seminal fluid seeping from its tip. He had obviously worked himself into a state of lustful anticipation as he beat her with the belt. Her eyes trailed a slow path up the length of his powerful torso - past the menacing cock with its sperm-bloated, hair-covered balls, past the lean, muscled belly and the rumpled T-shirt with black chest hair curling out over the scooped neckline, to the strong, lined face staring maliciously down at her. A piteous and unspoken plea for mercy shone forth from her tearfully brimming eyes, but she saw none: The cold, unyielding eyes gazing back at her were implacable in their determination. "Like it, baby?" he tormented. She tried to answer, but her voice was frozen deep in her chest.
"I said do you like it?" he hissed again, twisting her hair viciously in his hand.
"Y-y-yes, I like it!" she finally managed to gasp desperately.
"Well, now I'm gonna stuff it so far up that soft white belly of yours that you can taste it!"
Harry said exultantly.
Stoker and Mario guffawed expectantly. This was really too good! Not only would they get to fuck this sexy little blonde kid themselves: They would be able to watch Harry throwing it to her too!
"Hold her down until I get it in," Harry ordered hoarsely.
His voice was husky from the salacious thought of what he was going to do to this virginally seductive young blonde, and his thickly distended cock ached like it had never ached in his life. He dropped to the bed and rolled across the full length of her inflamed back, his face pressed momentarily into the clean, soft odor of the long blonde hair glimmering in the light of the oil lamp.
Sally began weakly to struggle, but unseen hands thrust her harder down on the mattress. Her arms were pulled to the sides of the bed and held in a vice-like grip that she couldn't break. Behind her, Harry's hairy knees were forcing her legs apart.
She strained with all her might to keep her thighs closed, but it was hopeless. All at once, the breath surged from her lungs and her resistance broke. Harry dropped between her legs as they spread wide across the bed, her toes hanging out over the sides of the mattress. A soft, helpless moan escaped from between her clenched teeth as the trembling girl felt the hardness of his penis make warm wet contact with the flesh of her inner thighs. Easing himself forward, the ruthless convict insinuated the full lust-inflamed length of his throbbing shaft along the narrow crevice of her buttocks. Sally struggled again - but as her shoulders were held down so harshly against the bed, her movements were limited to her waist and hips. She squirmed wildly beneath him, the threshing of her ass-cheeks inciting him still further.
"Get up on your knees!" his voice breathed into her hair.
She tried to stiffen her body more and press herself tighter into the mattress, but it was useless. Bitter tears of shame and anger and fear dripped from her cheeks, wetting the harsh ticking of the mattress, as she felt Harry's hot skin weighing down on her, covering the full length of her prostrate body. She froze, knowing that whatever she did now could only worsen her position.
A hand seized the back of her neck, forcing her face down tight into the mattress, cutting off the pinioned girl's breath. She tried to cry out, but her mouth wouldn't open, and in a moment she was dizzy from lack of oxygen and had to let her body go limp again. The hand was removed and she gulped desperately at the life-giving air, filling her tortured lungs, unable to concentrate on anything else. Now more hands were at her hips, pulling them powerfully up off the bed, as somebody leaned cruelly on her shoulders, keeping her face and breasts thrust harshly down on the mattress. By the time she had fully recovered her breath, her buttocks were waving lewdly high in the air and she made a momentary and fruitless lurch forward in a vain attempt to flatten them again. The hand was immediately replaced on her neck, pushing her face into the mattress and cutting off her breath as before, forcing her to relax and stop struggling.
Sally knew she would have to give in eventually. There was nothing left now but the final degrading humiliation of submitting to their obscene desires. Her body was a mindless toy to be used as they wished in their animal quest for satisfaction... a satisfaction that would only be achieved when they had exploded their hot liquid desire deep inside her soft and resilient belly.
Kneeling behind her, Harry gazed down at the seductive body that was now beyond all resistance and care, staring at the full white moons of her buttocks stretched up in sacrificial offering to him, his eyes glittering in hot uncontrolled desire. His semen-bloated balls tingled and ached, and he longed to thrust forward into the teasing pink vaginal slit swaying lewdly before him without further hesitation. But he held himself back, purposely torturing himself in anticipation of the moment when he would slide his wetly gleaming cock deep in between those quivering ass-cheeks deep into her narrow untouched young cunt. He wanted to feel her squirming beneath him, needing him as much as he needed her. That would be the ultimate conquest: A stuck-up little suburban virgin who was horrified at the thought of a man's cock fucking into her, suddenly turning animal and losing control over herself, forgetting who she was, where she was, all but the overpowering need to be fucked until she couldn't move! The thought raced through his loins like an electric shock. He'd waited long enough for a fuck: It was worth waiting a few minutes longer, taking a little time, to get one like that!
Slowly the unscrupulous addict leaned forward and planted a warm, wet kiss on the narrow ridge of Sally's spine. If he wanted it that way, he knew this was the time for patience. The kid had passed the first stage of physical submission to violence; now the conquest of her mind and spirit must be achieved by caresses and tenderness. The unexpected switch from brutality to softness should catch her, in spite of her resistance, off guard.
The helpless blonde teenager groaned slightly and her body shook at the moist contact of his lips. And then he backed off, running his tongue slowly and wetly down the full length of her back until he reached the tightly clenched crevice of her ass-cheeks, quivering high off the bed.
Harry dropped his hands to her smoothly rounded buttocks, placed his thumbs on either side of the soft resilient cheeks and pressed gently outwards. As her muscles tensed afresh, he eased off a little, still keeping up a constant teasing pressure, until the clenched flesh of her inner thighs tired and began to relax. His face was poised on a level with the thin pink folds of her sensitive pussy, and as he watched his eyes gleaming, they parted slowly under the almost imperceptible outward pressure of his thumbs. He could see a slight moisture forming, glistening on the petal-like lips and the soft insides of her thighs as she let her buttocks slip wider and wider apart with the fatigue and pain of resistance. She had geared her mind to a struggle against agony and humiliation - but not against tenderness and pleasure. She was not prepared for that.
He moved his face forward, careful not to shake the bed and destroy the sudden trust building within her through the gentleness of the touch he was employing now. His nose was a scant few inches from the silken blonde pubic hair mantling the tender flanges of her vagina, and the heady female aroma drifting incitingly out to his flaring nostrils was one of youth and sweetness. He swallowed deeply as his thumbs pressed outwards and her secret cavern flowered open to his gaze until suddenly it was completely exposed and the moist inner flesh came tantalizingly into view, smooth and warm and glistening wetly with her secretions.
Harry blew his hot breath softly into her, making her squirm and a faint moan escaped from her open mouth. The obscenely kneeling girl tried to move, but the pressure of Stoker's and Mario's hands on her shoulders held her tightly in place. She was quieter now, and her movements were not prompted by fear or thoughts of escape, but by the automatic reflexes stemming from her reactions to Harry's torturing touch on her secret flesh.
The sudden lessening of the pain had done something to her .. . something frightening. It had been like the release of a great weight pressing down on her - and the unbelievable relief that follows the sudden lifting of such a burden. But now there was something else . .. something had replaced the cruel blows that had rained down on her helpless form only a few minutes before. It was soft and feather-like . . . and it was moist. Moist and warm, tracing magical circles along the length of her naked and unprotected back. She shivered slightly as it worked its way slowly down to the rounded moons of her lewdly exposed buttocks.
There was a pressure from somewhere, and Sally felt a cool rush of air race between her thumb-spread ass-cheeks as that pressure increased in intensity. She tried to clench them tightly in automatic rejection - but the pressure remained, gentle and caressing, lingering on as her dazed mind puzzled over it. Where was she? Who was she? What were the curiously tender creatures running over her sensitive flesh, caressing her kneeling body as though they were human - only smaller and a thousand times more gentle?
"Mmmmmmmmmm!" she sighed . . .,and she allowed her buttocks to relax in a great feeling of warmth and peace, as suddenly her pussy felt open and wet as it had never felt before, with the ever constant pressure pushing outwards again.
Sally resisted no longer, and another long low mewl escaped her lips as she felt herself pulled open wide by the magical beings playing upon her. She tried to shift her shoulders, but they were locked tightly to the mattress by hands whose touch she did not recognize. Luis? No. Her father? No. One of the boys from school? No again. But it didn't matter: There was no longer the excruciating pain that had permeated her whole being. . . only a light sensation of floating, being buoyed up on a soft, gentle, fleece-lined cloud whose very warmth allayed any suspicion of danger.
Harry, kneeling behind her with his thumbs holding the crevice of her buttocks wide, grinned an obscene grin. He could sense the confused thoughts racing through the blonde girl's mind and he knew he had won the battle as her buttocks slowly began to rotate in front of his excited face. He pried them wide, wide apart until all of her hair-covered virginal furrow stood open and unprotected before his lascivious gaze, his for the taking.
He raised his head and pressed his face forward, thrusting his open mouth hard against the wetness of her vaginal slit. Sally squirmed and he tightened his hands on her buttocks so that she couldn't elude him. Then with one quick rush, he speared his tongue in between the warm fleshy folds of her cunt.
The convict heard his young captive gasp at the abrupt and unexpected entry into her soft wet cuntal passage, and a surprised sigh smothered itself in the mattress. She had started forward at the first hotly teasing contact in an involuntary spasm of delight but now she screwed her buttocks back hard against his obscenely buried face. Her vaginal passage contracted, opening and closing tightly around the long smooth length of his tongue swirling maddeningly around inside her. Her breath exploded down into the bed in a series of small quick gasps that muffled themselves in choking grunts. And then she began twisting her face harder and harder against the mattress as he curled and flicked his moistly probing tongue imbedded lewdly within her. Pushing his mouth even harder against her wide-splayed loins, Harry worked his lips over the whole of her tongue-spread pussy, sucking and licking at it wildly as her buttocks gyrated uncontrollably around his face.
"Goddamn!" Stoker exclaimed as he watched with unbelieving eyes the girl's sudden and complete surrender to the slavering face buried in her cunt. "Would you look at that bitch screw!"
Mario made no reply. He had taken one hand from her shoulder and was pressing it tight against the outside of his pants, where a small dark circle of seminal fluid, seeping its way through from the hard throbbing excitement of his cock, had darkened the material. Almost of its own volition, his other hand strayed away too - there was no longer any need to grasp the subjugated girl so firmly - and began coursing up and down the quivering white flesh of her back.
Harry worked slave-like behind the kneeling blonde, his tongue plunging and withdrawing, plunging and withdrawing from her trembling cunt with a sucking, sluicing sound that drowned the continuous low moan that was now drooling from her mouth. He withdrew his lashing tongue suddenly from the scalding depths of her smooth warm passage and found the erect little shaft of her throbbing clitoris, pushing his face farther into the wetly shuddering crevice as he sucked and teased at it with his teeth while she writhed and churned her buttocks in lewdly inciting arabesques of desire.
"Oooooooohhhhh! Aaaaaaaaaah! Mmmmmmmmmmmmm!" she chanted softly, her mind and body completely out of control at the delicious and obscene sucking of her loins. With a salacious and triumphant satisfaction, he felt the muscles of her buttocks tensing and contracting around the outside of his slaving cheeks as he licked and sucked at her with a greedy untamed animal lust that threatened to drive him out of his mind.
Sally's cunt flowered open wider and wider, its hotly sliding wetness increasing with every wicked thrust of his tongue into her wide-stretched hole. The moisture ran in warm trickles down the side of the convict's cheeks as they pressed tightly into the softness of her buttocks, enveloping his face in warmth, and down the inside of her smoothly working loins into the tender inner flesh of her hollowing thighs.
Christ, he thought, the little blonde bitch was almost ready to cum! ; He could sense it from the abandoned tempo of her wildly squirming body and he knew it was time, time to ram his cock into her virginal softness. He wanted to feel it throbbing around him when the snotty little society brat reached that climax that was now so near, wanted to explode his boiling sperm inside her in time with her own gasping cries of fulfillment. His blood-expanded cock ached from the desperate anticipation building deep in his cum-swollen testicles as he worked at her steaming loins with his punishing mouth.
Panting with lustful abandon, Harry slithered to his knees and slotted his hips into the now wetly glistening opening of her buttocks.
"Jesus! He's gonna fuck her now!" the gaping Stoker gasped.
Mario nodded excitedly. His own cock was now out of his pants, held tightly in his milking hand.
Kneeling behind the frenzied girl, Harry held the rigidly throbbing shaft of his cock between his fingers with the hard rubbery head poised right at her tight elastic cuntal opening. With lust-glazed eyes he watched the tiny wet pussy-lips expanding and contracting like the mouth of a fish gasping desperately for air on the surface of a neglected bowl. His body ached all over at the thought of the lovely young teenager kneeling in abject servitude before him, to be used as he wished for as long as he wanted. He visualized her lying on her back with the dainty strength of those slender tapering calves locked tightly up around his back, pulling him into her in a savage burst of passion. But that could wait until later! Right now, his penis and balls ached so intolerably that he knew he had to stuff it into her before it was too late! If he delayed much longer, he would empty his sperm all over those soft white buttocks waving helplessly before him .. .
There was only a finger's breadth now between her fully exposed pussy and the end of his bulging cock, and he pressed her ass-cheeks still wider apart to see it more clearly. His cock jerked with impatient desire when the tiny puckered anus nestling in its hairless furrow came teasingly into view. For a moment he was tempted to take her there. But the thought passed from his mind as another drop of moisture welled slowly from the tip of his tortured penis. He had to have it now or it would be too late: He couldn't hold back another instant!
He moved forward, sliding his knees as far up between her wide-stretched thighs as he could, guiding his long thick cock forward between his forefinger and thumb, gently parting the curly blonde pubic hair with the rigidity of the throbbing head. He felt the hot soft outer folds of the fleshy cuntal lips close wetly over his bulbous cock-head. He groaned.
Never in his entire life had he felt anything so soft and tender! Trapped between the delicious layers of wet and ready flesh, he allowed his cock to lie there throbbing for a moment. The lewd contact of his quivering pole rammed in between her milk-white thighs incited him to a further frenzy of lust, and all the bitterness and frustration of his life suddenly surged forward with him into the warm wet pussy of the groaning young virgin in front of him. He gasped aloud with relief as he felt the tight hot walls of her contracting cunt slip soothingly over and then enclosed the rock-hard length of his surging penis.
"Arrrgggghhhhhh!" Sally screamed. "Stop it! Stop! You'll tear me apart!"
And she sobbed and groaned beneath him as he plowed relentlessly through the tender membrane of her hymen, cruelly ripping her virginity away in one lust-crazed lunge. In spite of the young girl's feverish arousal, the narrow unstretched little passage of her cunt was too small for the convict's huge, blood-thickened penis. Her body trembled and shook before the sudden assault, which had taken her completely by surprise.
She had passively accepted the strangely consoling caresses her beaten body had received after the brutal indignities it had suffered. But now the mood had changed again. Gone were the tender wet probings of her vagina that had seemed so far away and unreal, gone the hallucinatory stroking that set the nerves of her spine quivering, and gone the daze that had encompassed her mind and transported her into another world of half-conscious ecstasy. With the unexpected assault into her most secret passage, she was suddenly thrust back again into the reality of the narrow bed in the bare room as she felt her thighs and buttocks being swept apart by the hoodlum's lust-engorged cock tunneling mercilessly up between her legs from behind.
"Man, this is a tight one!" she heard Harry's voice exclaim. "God, what a pussy!" And he inched his pulsating hardness a few more inches deeper inside her.
Sally squealed suddenly - though not so much from the pain this time, as from the sudden and degrading realization that she was hopelessly trapped in this room on this bed between the hands of the wanted men in front of her and the raping cock skewering into her from behind. Again she screamed for Harry to stop, helpless tears of humiliation and frustration flooding once more from her terror-stricken eyes. But there was no respite. The cruel intrusion deep into her dilated vagina grew and grew before his uncontrolled assault until suddenly she felt the weight of strong muscular loins crushing against her buttocks, and his hard rubbery cock-head rammed roughly up against the tender cushiony tip of her cervix deep inside her quivering belly.
"Man!" Harry breathed, looking up to meet the lustfully excited stares of Mario and Stoker at the head of the bed. "I'm all the way in!"
Sally moaned piteously beneath him, her face pushed deep down into the mattress by the brutal pressure on her loins. Her ravished vagina felt as stretched and torn as if it had been impaled on a telegraph pole. She tried to fight against him, clenching the muscles of her buttocks together in a desperate attempt to push the lewdly invading shaft of male hardness back out again. But her efforts were useless. Her frantic writhing only incited him more as her cuntal muscles clasped around him, wetly and warmly enclosing him while the huge cock throbbed and grew inside her until her belly felt stretched and filled beyond all possible imagination.
The young teenager's back ached horribly from the cruel position in which she had been held for so long, and she tried to move, but the hands which had been holding her down were now back on her shoulders. There were other hands too - lustfully roaming the length and breadth of her body. Her breasts were being kneaded and squeezed by fingers that had slipped secretly in between her flesh and the mattress, hard cruel fingers that tweaked her tender bud-like nipples into involuntary erection. Another hand traced the ridges of her cruelly bent spine, following it down to the deep split of her buttocks, where a finger suddenly thrust deep into the confines of her virginal anus.
"I got my finger in her ass!" she heard Stoker cry excitedly. "Man!"
"Unggh!" Sally grunted, humping as though she had been stung at the first unexpected and painful intrusion, then froze to ease the torture of the unnatural invasion. The dual ravishment of her loins, with the big man's long thick finger implanted deep in her rectum, increased the feelings of shame and humiliation sweeping over her tenfold. She tried not to move as she felt the pain easing with the stillness of her body, but the lustfully excited Stoker drilled his raping finger deeper, circling it around the rubbery depths of her anal passage until she thought her rectum would split from the unbearable pressure. The hand cupping her naked breasts from beneath twisted and squeezed with brutal insistence, teasing and pulling at every inch of their swelling young firmness until she felt they too would burst from the painful manipulation.
Still kneeling behind her bent and trembling form, Harry flared his nostrils and began to fuck in and out of her with long, plunging strokes. His strong thick hands grasped firmly on the round curves of her hips, slipping the moist sheath of her hotly stretched vagina more easily now back and forth over the rigidly throbbing thickness of his cock as though he were thrusting a finger into a Vaseline-filled rubber glove.
But this still wasn't enough for him. He had to have even more from this proud little bitch who wouldn't even have spit on him if she'd seen him in the street. He wanted her bent completely to his will. Raising his hand, he brought it smacking down hard across her quivering buttocks.
"Move that soft little ass, blondie!" he hissed. "And let's see you move it good!"
Sally gave a muffled scream and complied without hesitation. She knew enough by now to realize that the first blow would only be followed by more if she defied this dangerous convict. Her buttocks rotated slightly as she tried an experimental little rotation, and then, feeling no pain, she allowed herself to follow his rhythm, grinding and twisting her ass back against his hard driving pelvis as he thrust more and more fiercely into her.
Again and again she groaned aloud as she bucked at his command, feeling his fingers kneading and squeezing in wild abandon at her roundly straining buttocks. Jerking the excited Stoker's finger from her anus, Harry replaced it with one of his own in a hard and brutal thrust deep into the rubbery depths that brought a fresh scream bubbling from the fifteen year old's throat.
He rammed his massive cock into her with a fury that was incited every second to further lustful frenzy by the sight of her obediently bucking body. Her respiration had become one long continuous groan gasped out into the room with her face turned sideways on the mattress so that he could watch with lewdly gleaming eyes the total effect he was having on her. Her lips opened and closed half in torment, half in humiliation and shame at the sudden uncontrollable feelings of wantonness and desire beginning to surge through her imprisoned body.
At the same time, the helpless blonde was consumed with fear that she would be ripped asunder by the cruel hands coursing brutally over her naked flesh. Then suddenly the mattress sank in front of her face as a heavy weight descended upon it. Fingers fumbled at her gasping lips, trying to pry her jaws apart - and she felt a spongy wet sensation pressing hotly around her mouth. She opened her eyes and saw to her horror a long and swarthy penis pulsating thickly in front of her face. Mario, who could no longer take the sight of Harry fucking into her from behind, had sat on the bed and wriggled himself beneath her head, which was now pressed tightly into his loins as his legs splayed out on either side of her shoulders.
With the flat of his palm, he pushed on her forehead, so that her head was forced back and he could thrust the blood-filled tip of his cock between her quivering lips. Sally mumbled in terror and tried to turn her head away, but the Italian held her tight and she could not move. She could only clench her teeth and lips firmly together and try to keep the glistening instrument out.
But Mario was not to be denied. As he increased the pressure, it felt as though her lips were being pushed back through the sharpness of her teeth. He struggled against their softness, feeling them part little by little until suddenly, with the help of an extra hard lunge from Harry fucking into her cunt from the rear, she opened her mouth to gasp - and the broadly throbbing penis crushed through her soft lips and into the wet warm cavern of her mouth, slithering up the length of her tongue and filling her mouth completely with its thick fleshy hardness.
Mario, in his lust-incited state, began to screw his hips up and down towards the helpless blonde's face with his thick cock 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 additional rape of her mouth, but it was useless to resist. He quickened his thrusts to match those of his friend fucking into her from behind, never quite pulling the lust-bloated shaft all the way out, but always leaving the huge bulbous tip beyond her lips in the hot moist shelter of her mouth.
Sally closed her eyes, her agony and humiliation knowing no bounds. She felt numbed and devoid of sensation. In a trance-like state, she watched with glazed eyes the dark-fleshed length of the throbbing cock where it emerged from the fly of his pants and jerked towards her like some obscene snake creeping from its hole.
"Suck, baby, suck!" she heard Mario order harshly above her head. And there was nothing she could do but obey: She was conditioned to following their every command in her fear of the pain that could follow if she refused. Slowly her lips began to nibble at the lewdly thrusting rod as she coughed and spluttered at the unnatural invasion of her mouth. She tried not to think about what she was being forced to do .. . but it didn't work. Mario's hairy testicles were bouncing against her chin and there was a stale odor of sweat around his loins that filled her nostrils with a constant reminder of the cruel and depraved attack she was suffering.
Behind the doubly skewered teenager, Harry could feel himself building towards his climax. Every sensation in his body seemed to be draining away towards his pelvis, suffusing his veins with tremors of liquid fire. It couldn't be long now, he thought wildly - and he began fucking into her uplifted cunt still harder, increasing the tempo, battering mercilessly with his hips at her quivering ass-cheeks. His hands gripped feverishly at her hips, squeezing the soft tender flesh into random distorted shapes beneath his fingers. With his lips bared back against his teeth, he stared lustfully at her slender bucking body and bobbing head. The contrast of Mario's swarthy cock disappearing up into the chalky whiteness of her face rocketed chills of lewd sensation along his spine, and with his thumb he tore at her buttocks, stretching the twin moons wide apart as he watched his own thick cock disappearing between the moist pink flanges of her cunt. "Holy God!" he gasped aloud. "Jesus fucking Christ!"
As the gang leader slaved behind the ravished teenager, his eyes flickered wantonly back to her tender pink lips clasping and unclasping around the angry red cock of his companion who was forcing her to suck him at the other end of the bed.
Sally worked in a daze at the command of Mario's fingers, licking and sucking like a hungry child as he made her follow with her lips his every thrust into the tender shelter of her mouth. At the same time the frenzied Stoker cupped and kneaded the lewdly jiggling breasts hanging beneath her bucking torso with a cruel hard pressure that kept jerking her mind away from the relentless rape of her mouth and cunt.
The saliva flooding her mouth increased and increased, thickening now as emissions of sticky seminal fluid seeped from the end of Mario's cock and flowed into its warm depths. She could feel his hips writhing and straining below her bobbing face. His long sensuous fingers were curled tightly into her blonde hair, slipping her mouth up and down his thrusting fleshy staff as though it was another cunt into which he was plowing the full force of his animal lust. She could feel it stretching and expanding inside her mouth until it seemed to swell up into every crevice in her head. And in spite of her piteous moans Mario still continued his fierce forward thrusting as though he wanted to meet the hard cruel penis skewering deep into her belly from behind.
Sally had never felt so utterly used and debauched in her life, and she sucked wildly with her mouth and gyrated her buttocks frenziedly in an effort to end the torture as quickly as she could. That was all that was left now: To please them as well as she could in her innocence - and pray it would be all they would demand. Yet somehow, somewhere - and this was the most horrifying thing of all - deep down in the depths of her consciousness tiny flickers of forbidden pleasure were beginning to tremble in response to the savage misuse of her body. As she had reacted earlier to the tender ministrations of Harry's tongue, so now at last she found herself a prey to unwanted desire at the thought of the obscene ravishment of her mouth and loins.
In front of her Mario jerked suddenly as though he had received an electric shock, writhing his hips tightly up into her face to sink the full length of his cock deep down into her gasping throat. As she fought for breath, the bulging rod erupted in the warm wet interior of her ovalled lips, his hot thick sperm squirting into her mouth in raging gusts. It lasted for a seeming eternity, her mouth filled with the pungent taste of the viscous cream-like fluid as she sucked and swallowed, sucked and swallowed, her cheeks inflating and deflating as she fought to get rid of the bursting dam of sperm. Sally had lost all sense of time when at last it jerked a final jerk and began to soften beneath her swirling tongue.
A moment later his deflated cock slipped wetly from between her lips and his hands pulled her head limply forward to lie trapped against the whole of his trembling loins.
She could still feel the rubbery soft cock-shaft pressed against her cheek when there was a low grunt from behind her. She felt her thighs and buttocks swept wide apart in one last buttock-crushing rush as Harry, fucking mercilessly into her from the other end of the bed, speared his throbbing penis as far as it would go up into her naked belly and began spewing his hot sticky semen against the walls of her no-longer-virginal womb.
He groaned aloud with lustful satisfaction as his lewd sperm flooded out to fill her vaginal passage in wild shuddering spurts. She could feel it shooting hotly into her and filling the depths of her belly until she thought her inside must burst, and then oozing slowly back out again around his still jerking shaft. After several convulsive throbs of his cock between the softly quivering cheeks of her ass, he fell forward over her back, pushing her face down across the exhausted and satiated figure of his companion who had just forced her to suck him dry.
After a minute there was a movement of bodies, and Sally felt herself sliding down to the mattress as Mario slipped out from under her and Harry lifted himself exhaustedly from her back. There was a sudden cool rush of air between her legs as his spent penis withdrew from her wet and ravished loins, leaving a long thread of sperm glistening lewdly across her inner thigh.
The ravished young blonde rolled over on her back and closed her eyes, unable to move and no longer caring how she looked. She had never felt so debauched and lost in all her life . . . and to add to the confusion of her thoughts was the unmistakable and growing conviction that something still was wrong. The uninvited and unwanted devils of desire first aroused by Harry's slavering tongue and later incited by the twin rape of her mouth and cunt were clamoring for recognition. Unbelievable as it seemed, the brutal violation of her defenseless body had stimulated a lustful passion that smoldered still in the quivering depths of her loins. The devils danced along her veins . . . and the very thought of her debasement, of her innocent body being buffeted between the two men like a helpless rag-doll, in some strange masochistic way increased the intensity of their dance!
Now, unfulfilled without knowing it, she lay inert on the bed. Dimly she was aware of hands crawling over the wetness of her thighs, still sticky with Harry's cum. Unmoving, she felt rough fingers course through her cum-soaked pubic hair, once more splaying apart the tender swollen lips of her vagina.
Through half-closed eyes, the ravaged teenager looked up to see the towering figure of Stoker kneeling between her open legs, his pants gaping at the fly and the thick fleshy pole of his cock poised lewdly in his hand, ready to plunge into her.
With lustfully glittering eyes he leered down at her and licked his lips. "Open up, blondie," he gloated, "and make way for number three!"
CHAPTER FOUR
The door of the apartment jerked open almost as soon as Harry's knuckles had rapped on the panel. Dale Wolff stood staring out at them, his face haggard, his eyes bloodshot and his hair mussed. After a sleepless night worrying himself sick at the inexplicable disappearance of his teenage daughter, he looked at the end of his rope. Behind him, Hester stood white-faced with her arm around Martin's shoulders.
"What the hell goes on?" Dale croaked, gazing from one to the other of the three unshaven men grouped around the missing girl, whose pale and tear-stained face was downcast.
"Move over, bud. You got visitors," Harry said harshly, shouldering his way past the distraught father into the apartment entrance way Sally followed him, breaking away from Stoker's loose grip on her wrist and throwing herself into her mother's arms. "Oh, mother!" she sobbed, breaking into a storm of weeping and lowering her blonde head to the other woman's shoulders.
"What is this, for Christ's sake?" Dale blustered again. "Who the hell are you and what are you doing with my daughter?"
Stoker planted his beefy hands on the advertising man's shoulders and pushed him backward as Mario slid into the apartment, kicked the door shut and then leaned his back against it.
'Take your hands off me!" Dale said angrily. "I want an explanation. What are you doing here? How did you get here? And what are you doing with my daughter?"
Stoker laughed coarsely. "You're repeating yourself, Mac," he said. "Be more interestin' to ask what we done with her!"
"What the hell d'you mean?" Dale demanded angrily - and then broke off as Harry turned and slammed him up against the wall.
"Like they say in the movies," Harry snarled. "We ask the goddamn questions. Shut your mouth and listen to me!"
"Oh, daddy - be careful! Be careful! These are the three men who . . . the three convicts who ..." Sally began tearfully, raising her head from Hester's shoulder.
Her father's mouth dropped open in amazement. "But how the hell. . . ? What are they doing .. . ? How did they . . . ?" he stuttered.
"Shut up!" Harry shouted. "I told you to listen to me!"
"I'll do no such thing," Dale said heatedly. "I want to know how you got your filthy hands on my daughter. You've got no right to come pushing your way in here like this, shouting and acting tough. Who the hell d'you think you are?"
"You just been told who we are," Harry said quietly.
"Okay, so you're the three jailbirds all the papers have been full of. Before I turn you into the police, I still want an explanation."
"What did you say?" Harry demanded menacingly.
"I ... I said I wanted an explanation," Dale said huskily.
"Okay, punk, you got one," the wanted man said. Before anyone realized what was happening, he bunched his fist and unloosed a stiff shortarm jab carrying all his muscular weight that caught the unprepared father full on the solar plexus. The breath exploded from Dale's lungs as he jackknifed forward, choking. Then, as he doubled up, Harry's knees rose viciously and cracked dully against his forehead. Dale's legs buckled and he slumped to the floor.
As Hester and Sally screamed, Stoker leaped tigerishly forward and reached down to seize the shoulders of the fallen man. With a single powerful movement, he hauled Dale upright and slammed him once more against the wall as Harry drew back his fist and pounded in two piledriving blows over the heart. Dale's mouth flew open and a strangled cry tore itself from his lips. He flung out his arms to grasp handfuls of air and pitched forward again onto his knees.
"Leave him alone! Don't you hurt my pop!"
Martin screamed suddenly, rushing forward and beating at Harry's back with his ineffective child's fists.
Harry turned on the ten year old and swept his right arm back viciously, hurling him to the far side of the entrance way where he crashed to the wall and slid dizzily to the floor. Martin's mouth opened wide and he uttered a howl of fear and outrage as Hester dashed frenziedly to his aid.
"You better keep that damn brat quiet if you don't want him to get hurt," Harry snarled.
Stoker had once again dragged Dale to his feet and now he stood, holding the smaller man in a crushing arm lock, presenting his limp and defenseless body, arms pinioned behind his back, as a target for the scowling Harry.
The burly gang leader stepped up to the helpless man and positioned himself on the balls of his feet, flexing his lean fingers by his sides. Dale was still desperately trying to drag air into his tortured lungs, his face purple and his breath rasping dreadfully in his throat.
Measuring the distance carefully with his eyes, Harry drew back his arm again and punched him heavily in the pit of the stomach. Dale gave a deep groan and the little breath he had been able to draw into his lungs wheezed out again in an agonized gasp. The involuntary doubling up of his torso demanded by his violated abdominal muscles was blocked by the fact that Stoker was holding him rigidly upright; instead, his knees rose slowly as though pulled on wires, until he was entirely supported by the big man's grip. Harry waited calmly until they lowered themselves, jerking, to the floor - and then hammered him three times savagely on the chest, the left-right-left blows thudding sickeningly in the empty apartment as the pinioned man grunted in agony with every impact.
"You animals!" Hester screamed hysterically as Sally burst into a storm of weeping and Martin wailed afresh. "You'll kill him!"
"Maybe," Harry panted. "Okay, Stoker, you can turn him loose."
Stoker released his crippling grasp on Dale's arms and stepped back. Dale stood for a moment, swaying, his breath still snoring in his throat in a racking, retching gasp. He staggered a drunken step forward . . . and Harry hit him again, a long, looping blow that caught him above the heart and sent him spinning around to career against the solid mass of Stoker.
Stoker steadied him with one hand, and smashed a stunning hook into his ribs that swept him on rubber legs towards the door . . . where Mario drew up his knee sharply into the pit of Dale's stomach and then rabbit-punched him viciously with the flat of his hand. Dale grunted in agony, his eyes rolling up into his skull as he veered once more in Harry's direction.
His lips drawn back over his teeth in a savage and merciless grin, Harry slammed a jarring right to the teetering man's chest, sending him hurtling back to Stoker. Stoker punched him twice in the kidneys. Mario lifted his leg and kicked him expertly in the groin. And then, as Dale spun around for the third time on buckling knees, a dreadful moaning noise bubbling from his lips, Harry stepped in and brought his laced hands down with all his strength on the back of the semi-conscious man's neck.
Dale dropped to his knees as if he had been poleaxed. For a moment he swayed there, his face a mask of pain and his torso shuddering uncontrollably. And then his eyes rolled up in his head and he crashed over backwards to lie spread-eagled on the floor, out for the count.
Over the sound of helpless sobbing from Martin and the two women, Harry laughed harshly. "Okay, he wanted an explanation," he panted. "So there's the explanation: We're tougher than you, so you can fuckin' well do what we tell you now!"
Hester rushed forward to kneel by her fallen husband, but Stoker seized her by the arms and hauled her brutally back. "Stay where you are," he growled. "We ain't finished with him yet."
Hester shook herself free of his grasp and drew herself up to her full height. Her dark eyes were flashing and her full, wide-set breasts heaved stormily beneath the jacket of her tan pantsuit. "I don't know what you think you can gain by this senseless brutality," she began contemptuously. "But I can tell you - "
"Don't tell us, sweetheart: We'll tell you!" Harry interrupted, a sardonic smile twisting his mouth. "Lover-boy on the floor there, he's gonna do a little service for us later. But first we have to teach him who's boss around here, see?"
"If that means show him who's least civilized and nearest to a wild animal," flared the angry brunette, "I should think you've done that quite efficiently already!"
"That's only Lesson One," Mario said. It was the first time he had spoken since they had entered the apartment. "He might think we didn't mean it if we didn't repeat the routine. Anyway, people have been pushing us around long enough: It's time we got some of our own back."
"So you push around a defenseless man who never did you any harm?" Hester's lips were curling more contemptuously than ever.
Mario flicked her a cold glance from his hooded eyes. "I like pushing people around," he said. "It makes me feel good."
"Oh, mother, they're so brave!" Sally cried suddenly. "It only takes three of them to ... to ... " Abruptly she burst into tears and dropped her head onto Hester's shoulder again.
"My God!" the older woman exclaimed sharply. "Don't tell me they . . . were you . . . ?"
The helplessly weeping girl could only nod her head wordlessly.
"You bastards!" Hester cried, hugging her young daughter protectively to her.
Stoker laughed coarsely. "As to that," he leered with a sidelong glance at the seductively curved teenager, "there may be another one to join us soon. In about nine months, I'd say?"
Hester went white to the lips. She drew a deep breath as she strove to master her feelings. "All right," she said icily. "So you've beaten my husband senseless and raped my daughter. Congratulations! So what comes next? You'll rape me, I suppose, and strangle my little boy!"
"Maybe," Harry said levelly. "If lover-boy don't do us that little service I was speaking about."
"Service!" the furious woman shouted. "What service? What can he possibly do for you?"
"I'll explain," the wanted man said. "I want you should know the score. Me and my friends here, we're waiting to meet certain persons we have business with. But these persons have been delayed on account of. . . well, on account of the holiday Monday. So we gotta wait here until they show - and in the meantime we ran clear outta food and liquor and . . . certain other things we require. Like bread for a start, and other things too. Lover-boy there, we aim to send him out to raise those supplies, on account of we ourselves are hotter than hell right now."
"Send him out?" Hester echoed. "He won't go; he'll refuse!"
"Not if we keep you and them two kids as hostages and threaten to croak you if he don't play ball," Harry said calmly.
Hester drew in her breath with a sharp hiss. "Threaten to ... ? You wouldn't dare!" she gasped.
"Sweetheart, you don't know what we'd dare," Harry said. "We're desperate men. It said so right in the newspaper."
"B-b-b-but you . . . you can't.. . you can't send him out anyway," Hester said desperately. "We're marooned up here. There's no way of getting down until T-t-t-tuesday. The elevators don't work and the stairs are blocked. You must know that."
The three men looked at one another and guffawed. "Blocked is right, lady," Stoker chortled. "They sure are!"
"Well then? There's no way of getting them work from up here. We tried everything. If there was, we'd have found - "
"Shuddup!" Harry cut in brutally. "They're fucked up because we fucked 'em up. There happens to be an emergency main switch in back of the elevator . . . and we have the key to the box, is all."
"But that must be on the other side of the fire door, or we'd have seen it."
"So what?"
"So if you'd done what you said, you'd have cut yourselves off on the other side of the fire door. I don't believe you!"
"Look," Harry said tiredly. "them doors ain't automatic. Jesus, they'd trap every goddamn prick in their pad if they were, and there was a fire! Why don't you people ever use your loaf, for Chrissake!" 'Then how . .. ?"
"Because there's another box and we have the key to that too. There's one on each floor, so the people can seal themselves off in an emergency if they want to. Then they sit and wait for the Fire Department boys to rescue them. We figured this was an emergency so we dropped the door."
"Even so," Hester began dubiously, "I don't see how ... I mean, why aren't you on the other side . . . ?" She stopped short suddenly and bit her lip, remembering that Martin had said something, seemingly hundreds of years ago when they were first viewing the apartment, about finding a great place to play hide-and-seek "in back of the elevators." That must be where the box was! Why, why, why hadn't they listened to him! Why hadn't they thought of looking there! If only they'd paid attention, and not assumed right away that the door and the elevators were controlled by the same switch, they could have been at home right now enjoying a lazy Saturday breakfast instead of starving at the top of an empty block in Manhattan, in fear of their lives from three desperate escaped convicts!
Harry nodded. "I see you dig," he said.
"What did you mean - an emergency?" Hester demanded suddenly. "Why did you decide . . . ? You don't mean .. . ?"
"Some punks come up to look at the neighboring apartment," Harry grinned. "At first it bugged us - then we figured how we might turn it to our advantage."
"My God! You mean you . ..you deliberately trapped us here. . . with two children and no food . . . allowing us to think we were stuck here until Tuesday . . . leaving us to worry ourselves sick all night. But that's inhuman!" Hester cried angrily.
Harry laughed. "We wanted to make use of lover-boy here," he said. "Like I say, we planned to send him out while we kept you as hostages. Why d'you think we were so careful not to mark his pretty face?"
Martin had been following the conversation round-eyed. Now he opened his mouth suddenly and uttered a piercing howl. "I don't like these men," he wailed. "I wanna go home!"
As Hester turned to soothe her frightened son, Harry snapped: "Stoker! For Chrissake shut that brat up! Lock him in the John."
The big man lurched across the apartment, picked up Martin and tucked him under his arm as though he had been a doll, and strode towards the bathroom. He barged open the door with his hip, thrust the kicking and screaming ten year old inside, slammed the door and turned the key.
At once the sound of the frantic youth's cries, muffled by the closed door, rose in pitch. "Momma! Mommma, I don't like it in here! I'm scared of the dark, Momma! Momma! Make them let me out! Let me out!" he sobbed in a terrified falsetto.
Harry held out his hand for the key, dropped it in his pocket, and scowled. "If he don't quit that screamin'," he snarled. "I'll have Stoker beat him to a pulp. You better go on over there and fix him - or else!"
As Sally flew across to murmur reassuring words to her brother through the locked door, the gang leader turned to stare at her father. The fallen man was just regaining consciousness, his eyelids flickering and his body twitching and jerking on the floor. His breath rasped in and out of his lungs in tortured gasps. "Okay," Harry said. "Take him in the other apartment, Stoker. We're gonna need that bed. Mario . . . you got your rod?"
The swarthy convict nodded and drew a small but wicked-looking automatic from his pocket. "Ready for action," he said, sticking his forefinger through the trigger-guard and spinning the weapon expertly.
"Okay. You stay here and watch the blonde. Plug her if she talks out of turn or gets smart. Plug the kid too if he doesn't shut up."
Mario nodded again. "Check," he said.
Harry produced his own Mauser pistol from the waistband of his pants and pointed it at Hester. "This is loaded and it works and I'm not afraid to use it," he said. "Come on - you're coming with us."
'Mother.. ." Sally called desperately from the bathroom door.
Hester looked over her shoulder. Early morning sunshine streaming in through the French windows haloed her daughter's blonde hair and threw her anxious tear-stained face into silhouette. Behind her, the blank eyes of Manhattan skyscrapers, glittering in the golden light, stared unseeingly across the city at the new building on whose top floor so much unsuspected drama was taking place.
"Sally," she replied in anguished tones. "Darling ... for God's sake try and make him stop crying. Tell him it'll be all right. Tell him anything. And ... oh, Sally, honey, please - be careful!"
With her chin held high, she walked firmly out of the apartment in front of Harry as Stoker picked up Dale's ankles and dragged him on his back into the foyer.
Hester wrinkled her nose with disgust as she was pushed into the back room of the other apartment. The odors of liquor and sweat and stale smoke were still more rank in the daylight filtering around the edges of the old blanket tacked over the window. "Stand over there by the wall and don't move," Harry ordered, "unless you want that pretty face marked up."
Trembling inwardly, she did what she was told as the gang leader opened the door of the room so that Stoker could drag in the inert form of her husband.
They dumped him in the center of the floor and stood over him as Hester dug her nails into the palms of her clenched hands and tried to master the rising tide of panic that was sweeping over her. It was as much as she could do not to cry aloud at the pitiable sight of Dale, beaten unconscious and now slowly regaining his senses, in the clutches of these merciless and implacable villains.
After awhile Dale rolled over on to his face and levered himself carefully up on to his hands and knees, shaking himself like a dog emerging from the sea as he tried to clear his spinning head. As he knelt there with his hair hanging over his face, Harry came up behind him, took two quick steps, and kicked viciously up into his groin, the toe of his shoe sinking savagely into the soft bulge of the ad-man's testicles where they swelled out the material of his pants leg.
Dale gave an animal howl and collapsed on his face again, his arms and legs shooting out across the floor as his pelvis arched and flattened, arched and flattened at the intolerable agony searing through his loins. His breath was whistling through his flared nostrils and a series of shrill whinnying yelps forced themselves past his lips. Finally he writhed onto his side, his knees drawn up into his belly and his hands pressed between his shuddering thighs.
At once Harry and Stoker were on him, kicking him brutally in the back, the shoulders, the stomach, the kidneys, anywhere except the face. As Dale jerked and threshed in an agony of pain on the floor, the small room was filled with the sounds of Hester's anguished entreaties, the stomping of feet, the hoarse panting of Stoker and Harry, and the grunts and gasps of the tortured man as the heavy toe caps thudded again and again with sickening force into his unprotected flesh and bone.
After what seemed to the distraught young wife an eternity, they dragged her husband half-conscious to the bed, propped him up in a kneeling position on the floor facing the iron uprights at its foot, lashed his wrists to the outer corners of the crosspiece with their belts, and tied his ankles together with his own necktie. Dale stared through the bars at the stained mattress like a caged animal, his shirt-front sodden with blood and vomit, his dust-grimed gabardine pants dark with urine, and his head slumped on his chest.
Harry turned to Hester Wolff. His lips were wet with saliva and his eyes were shining. "Your turn now, sweetheart," he panted. "Take off your clothes and get on that bed!"
She lifted her chin defiantly. "I'll do no such thing."
"We'll see about that," Harry said. Watched by the leering Stoker, he ripped the leather belt from the waistband of Dale's pants, jerked the crucified man's jacket and shirt up over his shoulders and stood menacingly over his naked back. Hester gasped in horror as she saw her husband's flesh, scratched and smeared with blood, swollen and red with angry contusions and already mottled yellow and blue with savage bruises.
Harry raised the belt and brought it whistling down on the worst of the wounds lacerating Dale's back, making him jerk and utter a shuddering cry.
"I'm gonna go on . . . belting the shit outta him," Harry rasped as he struck savagely again and again at the bound man's tortured body, "until you've stripped off.. . every goddamn stitch . . .of your clothes ... and you're lyin'. . . naked on that bed . . . with your fuckin' cunt. . . held wide open!"
CHAPTER FIVE
Sally Wolff was on her knees outside the bathroom door, murmuring words of quiet reassurance to her younger brother locked inside, when Stoker appeared in the apartment again. Glancing across at Mario, who was leaning against the wall outside the sitting-room door cleaning his nails with his murderous prison knife, the big man said: "Harry says to come in now. And bring the broad with you."
Mario looked up under hooded eyelids. "What about the kid?"
"What, the little brat? Leave him in the John. It's locked ain't it?"
"Yeah, but supposin' he hollers? Kids do, ya know."
"Aw, act your age, Mario," Stoker protested. "Who the hell's goin' to hear if he does? Just leave him there and come on, huh?"
Mario levered himself off the wall and jerked a thumb towards the front door. "Come on," he said to Sally. "We're goin' in there."
She rose to her feet, absent-mindedly brushing the dust off her mini-skirt. "But... but what about Martin?"
"He stays here," the Italian answered curtly.
"Come on. On your way."
"But you can't. . . you can't leave him all alone locked in there! He's only ten and he's frightened. It's dark. He doesn't know when he'll be let out. It's enough to give him nightmares the rest of his life!"
"I should worry!" Mario said. "Come on. Get goin'."
"Oh, please let me stay with him. Please!" the curvaceous young blonde pleaded. "Or at least unlock that door... he can't get away from here, after all!"
Mario strode across the hallway and seized her by the wrist, dragging her roughly to her feet. "When are you gonna learn to do what you're told?" he demanded. "I told you twice already. Now get on out there before I beat the shit outta you!" Pushing the young teenager savagely in the back, he sent her staggering towards the door.
Sally turned as the two men hustled her into the foyer and called desperately over her shoulder: "It's all right, Marty! I have to go for a few minutes, but I'll be back. Don't worry - we'll get you out of there, I promise. Be a good boy, Marty, and don't cry. It won't be for long."
But the scared ten year old was already shrieking and sobbing again before the door of the apartment clicked shut. "Let me out!" he wailed. "I want my momma... I want my pop ... I wanna go home!"
Pushed through the neighboring apartment, Sally stumbled through the doorway of the back room - and stopped dead with a gasp of horror. It was a bizarre and frightening tableau that met her eyes. Her father, disheveled and exhausted, knelt with his shirt tails out and his arms lashed to the bedposts, staring wildly through the uprights at her mother, who was lying naked on the mattress with her face turned to the wall. Beyond her, on the far side of the bed, Harry was stepping out of his jockey shorts, his thick dark-veined penis jutting rigidly from his loins like a blunt-ended spear. The hair curling on his chest and arms and along the backs of his fingers was jet black in the dim light.
The girl gaped in dismay at her mother's lewdly displayed body, at the full firm breasts, tautly upthrust above the slender waist and billowing hips, at the curling triangle of pubic hair darkly tufted between her open legs. "Mother... P'she cried.
"I ... I couldn't let them hurt him any more ..." Hester said dully without turning her head. "I had no choice."
Tears welled into Sally's blue eyes. "You bastards!" she said viciously. "You bastards!"
Mario gave a snort of laughter. "The things they teach 'em in school these days!" he said.
"Come on, Mario. Strip off, boy," Harry said. "You got work to do!" And then turning to Stoker, he added: "Why don't you get yourself a blow job from the kid? Come and sit on this packing case over here, so lover-boy can get a good view."
As the big man led the stunned teenager across the room, the girl's father began mouthing obscenities, the jumbled words streaming incoherently from his lips as he heaved and writhed against the straps binding him to the bed.
Harry and the now naked Mario sat down on either side of the bed and began licentiously exploring the ripely swelling contours of Hester's body with their hands. She lay naked and defenseless before them, shocked into indifference at the degrading assault on her belly and breasts and loins, as the rummaging fingers tweaked and pried. Stoker was sitting on the packing case, holding one of Sally's arms twisted behind her back so that she was forced to kneel between his spread legs. With his free hand, he unzippered his fly and drew out his monstrous cock - a veined and throbbing shaft so thick and huge that although it was only a few hours since she had seen it before, the terrified blonde groaned afresh at the sight of its pulsating length. "Now you're gonna suck that, baby," he growled. "An' you better suck it good unless you want to see your daddy roughed up some more." With an extra upward tug on her wrist that brought a whimper of pain to her lips, he forced her head slowly down towards the hard, blood-engorged head of his penis.
On the bed, Hester had allowed Harry to draw one of her legs up and over his hips on one side and Mario to do the same on the other, so that she was lying with her knees in the air and her thighs obscenely spread, the whole flat plane of her cuntal region lewdly exposed to their view -and to the view of her husband, struggling in impotent and inarticulate fury at the foot of the bed.
Mario was working at the helpless brunette's vagina, insinuating his fingers roughly up into the hot moist passage of her cunt, smoothing them around inside, and then sliding his other hand under her buttocks so that they were drawn up tight against the invading digits within her pussy. "She's getting wet!" he announced thickly.
Harry's head was bent over Hester's nipples, rolling first one and then the other between his teeth as his big fingers squeezed cruelly at the soft flesh beneath. "Great!" he mumbled. "Ill fuck her now then."
"Wait a minute!" Mario protested. "You had all the freeway with the kid! Shit, it's my turn to bat first, for Chrissake!"
"Like hell!" Harry scowled. "Whose idea was this anyway?"
"You couldn't have pulled it off without me and you know it! And who was it got her ready?"
The burly gang leader raised his head from Hester's swollen and inflamed nipples with an ugly expression darkening his features. And then suddenly his face cleared. "No problem: I gotta better idea," he said. "We'll both do it at once!"
"Both?" Mario echoed in bewilderment. "Come again, Harry?"
"You in the front and me in the back," Harry explained. "Come on, help me turn her over."
Her attention attracted by the sadistic undertone in Harry's voice, Sally looked up just as the lust-bloated head of Stoker's penis forced its way into her wide-stretched gagging mouth. My God! Those two vile hoodlums were going to sodomize her mother and fuck her at the same time! It was inhuman! Her mind reeled at the thought of the depraved and unnatural ravishment about to take place only a few feet away, in front of the agonized gaze of her tied up father.
Mario, who had been scouring the unresisting mother's vagina, stretching it wider and wider with each rotation of his lewdly probing fingers, withdrew his hand and stood up. Between them, they caught Hester by the shoulders, twisting her roughly around so that she was lying face downwards on the bed, with the nakedly exposed cleft of her vaginal furrow in full view of her helpless husband.
She slumped there without struggling, uttering small gasps of shame and desperation now, her buttocks quivering slightly each time her frame was racked with a sob. Harry stood looking at her for a moment with a cruel grin on his face. His eyes took in the long sleek line of her milk-white body, the full firm breasts squashed into the mattress by the pressure of Mario's hands still on her shoulders, the rounded moons of her buttocks trembling palely in fearful anticipation. His cock stood out from his hairy belly long and thick and dark like the trunk of some forest tree, with the purplish lines of veins marbling the underside. Suddenly he stooped and grabbed hold of the defenseless woman's ankles, thrusting out fiercely so that her legs were stretched wide apart and her feet projected over the sides of the narrow bed.
For the first time, Hester gave a strangled scream. "Oh, no! Please no!" she cried. "I can't... I can't! Not that way, please!" She jerked convulsively and tried to rise as she felt the cool rush of air between her thighs.
"Hold the bitch down!" Harry spat - and Mario slammed his hand hard into the small of her back, pressing her tightly down on the mattress. For a moment longer, she struggled vainly, and then she lay still, her whole body shaking and shuddering with the violent emotions warring within her.
Harry climbed onto the bed and knelt up between the struggling brunette's wide-splayed thighs, ramming his forefinger brutally into the tight puckered ring of her anus as he stroked his gleaming penis in preparation for the final and ultimate humiliation of the defeated woman spread-eagled on her belly before him . . . and with it, the final subjugation of the family he intended so cruelly to make use of. This was the kind of thing that really appealed to him -fucking a woman in the ass in front of her own husband and daughter! He spread his own thighs slightly, to make sure the bound man behind him would clearly see the ravishment of his wife's anus and the bulging sperm-bloated sac dangling obscenely from the instrument that would use it.
Hester cried aloud as the wanted man's finger plowed into her unprotected anus. Then she moaned again and squirmed desperately under the pressure of Mario's imprisoning hands as Harry gyrated his finger viciously in the warm rubbery depths of her rectum, widening and stretching the narrow passage in preparation for the more brutal entry that was to come.
Opening her trembling buttocks wide with the finger and thumb of his other hand, he leaned forward to allow a large drop of saliva to fall from his lips to the frantically clenched nether ring. With this to help lubricate the way, he pulled back the thick foreskin sheathing his cock and exposed the smooth bulbous head which he aimed directly at the tiny wrinkled opening now stretched wide by the lewd manipulations of his finger. Then, withdrawing the invading digit, he bent over and pressed the whole of his hairy body onto the sobbing woman's back, the thick hard length of his cock lying crammed into the crevice of her ass-cheeks. Splaying the quaking white half-moons apart, he levered himself up on his elbows, thrust with his hips, and surged his rock-hard staff straight at the spit-wet orifice of her anus.
"Aaaggghhh!" Hester screamed as the huge battering ram pressed relentlessly up between her wide-held buttocks. "No, no! Stop! Please!" Her hips jerked forward into the mattress as she began to twist and strain in a futile attempt to escape the imminent skewering.
Mario, stooped over her back with his hands on the bucking woman's shoulders, crooned with lustful excitement as he saw the merciless instrument plunge suddenly through the restricting ring of nether flesh. Behind him, Dale shouted in incoherent fury as the tiny stretched opening of his wife's anus slipped over and clasped the convict's invading cock-head like a stretched rubber band.
"Aaaiiieee!" Hester screamed again as she felt the first brutal thrust into her plundered rectum. Then she gasped with the blinding pain that seared through her pinioned loins. Harry lunged again and sank his cock halfway to the hilt, her groans muffled by the mattress pressing into her face as her legs flailed wildly on either side of him, struggling hopelessly to escape the inhuman impalement that was setting her belly on fire.
Her buttocks jerked and twisted beneath him, attempting to throw off his weight, but her desperation only worsened her position. Every time she bucked and writhed, she skewered herself further on the cock ramming itself inch by inch up into her tightly resisting anus. Finally she gave a long howling moan as Harry's throbbing penis slid the final inch up into the hot rubbery depths of her rectum and his hair-covered testicles slapped viciously against her cunt. For a moment she twitched spasmodically, still grinding her hips in a vain attempt to repulse him, and then she lay still to ease the pain of the cruel and complete invasion of her rectum. It was pointless to resist any further: Each throb of her tortured body served only to widen and stretch the tiny cavern to greater and more agonizing dimensions.
"Jesus, but it's tight in there!" Harry growled, resting for a moment despite his raging desire to begin fucking into her ass at once.
Mario, trembling with lust beside the obscenely coupled pair, was going out of his mind. His fingers, lewdly insinuated between her body and the mattress, were plucking brutally at her belly and breasts, kneading insanely at the soft white flesh as his blood-engorged cock dripped premature cum and swayed lewdly above her. "Harry!" he gasped. "For Chrissake! Turn her over and let me in, man!"
Harry locked his hands around Hester's hips and rolled to one side, pulling her over backwards on top of him. His hugely throbbing cock was still embedded deep in her anus as she lay full length on her back, hard against his stomach and chest. Her legs splayed out limply on either side of his as a low pleading mewl sobbed from her pain-parted lips.
Mario leaped onto the bed, straddling the jewel robber's knees, and pushing Hester's quivering thighs still farther apart. Then, grasping his hard, aching cock with both hands, he stuffed it straight up into the moistly gaping cavern of her cunt.
Gritting her teeth, the doubly skewered young mother tried to utter no sound, but a shrill squeal forced itself from her throat as the second man's rock-hard penis slithered up inside her quaking belly to join Harry's staff already buried there in her rectum. She lay groaning with pain and shame, sandwiched obscenely between the two ruthless escaped convicts, impaled on their two cocks with only the thin wall of flesh between her anus and cunt separating them.
Mario, already inflamed with lust from witnessing Harry's cruel rape of the woman's anus, began to fuck furiously into Hester's hot wet pussy while his companion started thrusting up from beneath her with long hard strokes into the wide-stretched depths of her rectum. Soon, hitting a reciprocating rhythm, they were buffeting her between them like a sack of soft resilient foam rubber, the throbbing poles of flesh shafting viciously into her like twin battering rams.
Forced to watch the lewd dual rape of his wife from his prison at the end of the bed, Dale Wolff choked back a cry of impotent rage as he gazed mesmerized at the two gleaming rods of lust-thickened male flesh as they skewered hard into her jerking loins. He could see the pinkly clasping edges of her cunt drawing back with Mario's cock on the outstroke, only to be stuffed back inside as he plunged it home again deep into her soft white belly .. . and then the same thing happening with the taut opening of her distended anus as Harry screwed into it from below with demonic fury.
Across the room the helpless father could see the soft flood of his teenage daughter's long blonde hair cascading over Stoker's lap as she sucked and nibbled desperately at the monstrous cock jammed far up into her innocent mouth. The big man himself was leaning back against the wall, staring open-mouthed at the obscene tableau on the bed. Now his hands reached out to clamp themselves on either side of Sally's bobbing head, guiding her tender young lips up and down the stiffly bulging length of his hardness.
On the bed, the pistoning cocks of the two panting men thrust faster and faster into Hester's cunt and anus ... and then suddenly she reared up convulsively between them, her mouth opening to emit a long wailing cry of subservience and shame.
As her head jerked up, her wildly staring eyes fell on the obscene sight of Stoker, sitting on the packing case and forcing her defenseless child to suck his steaming cock. At the same time her husband, lashed to the bars of the bed as reluctant witness to their double ravishment, cried out again with rage.
And then the unbelievable happened.
The sudden brutal realization that her husband and her daughter too, each in their own fashion, were suffering a kind of violation, wrought an astonishing change in the sandwiched young woman. Wild twinges of unadmitted desire which had begun to ravage her plundered loins now took command of her body. The low whining moans gargling in her throat altered subtly to whimpers of passionate pleading. She felt all at once free to ... yes, to exult in the rape of her body! It was a strange kind of exultation, a masochistic exultation, engendered by the very helplessness of her position, by the wantonly lewd thought that she was being fucked half to death by two men at once while her husband watched and her daughter was being forced to suck a third. But whatever it was, it was exciting her beyond her wildest imagination. And the guilt she felt because of that excitement served only to increase the lustful sensations flaming through her veins! It was the most incredible thing that had ever happened!
Her hips began to thrust backwards to meet the plunging strokes of Harry's cock crammed into her rectum . .. and then forward again to swallow the whole wet length of Mario's staff in her suddenly scalding pussy. Her entire body undulated wildly between the two men and her buttocks began a salacious gyrating rhythm of their own, squirming in desperate abandoned circles between the two impaling rods.
"Ooooogggg! Aaaagghh! Oooooggghhh!" she chanted in ecstasy. "Oooohhh . . . Aaaaaggg-hhh . . . Uuugghhh . . . Ooooohhh!" - and on and on in time with their pile-driving thrusts into her cunt and rectum. Wilder and wilder they became, heaving and groaning and plunging on the rumpled bed with ever-increasing fury as their animal grunts of desire mingled with the obscene suck and slap of flesh on naked flesh in a mounting crescendo of abandon.
Hester was the first to cum.
"Aaaaaaggghhh!" she screamed. And then a longer, louder cry: "Eeeeeeeeuggh! I'm cumming! God, I'm cuuuuuuuuumiinng! Keep on! Fuck me! Screw me! . . . Oh, Christ... Keep on ... I"
She was out of her mind with desire now, sobbing out an orgasm that seemed as though it would never end, begging and pleading with them to go on and on and on. This was the moment Harry had been waiting for! This was the culmination of his plan! It was the moment of truth when the captive Dale would be made to realize once and for all that he and all of his family were totally in Harry's power, to order and command as the convict wished! Sensing their complete conquest of Hester's body and mind, he and Mario both plunged savagely forward at the same time, embedding their suddenly wildly ejaculating cocks deep in her seething cunt and anus, and pumping their hot thick sperm far up into her heaving belly.
As the three of them collapsed in a spent and satiated tangle of limbs, Sally - obscurely excited by the very perversity of her mother's rape freed suddenly of her inhibitions by the abruptness of Hester's submission - began sucking wildly on Stoker's massively throbbing penis.
It was wicked, it was forbidden, it was shameful and it was wrong . . . but all at once she began to enjoy the wetly quivering stiffness of the monstrous staff distending her sucking mouth and filling the whole moist cavern between her aching jaws with lust-heated male flesh. She wanted to feel it heave and jerk; she wanted to sense once more the deliciously perverse pulsating of the bulbous head against her palate as it spewed its acrid load of sperm far back into the depths of her innocent throat! The demons of lust which had assaulted her tender young body during the night were dancing again.
As he felt the sudden increase in the intensity of her sucking, Stoker half rose to his feet, eyes and mouth widening in surprised gratification as he clamped his rough hands over her ears and pulled her bobbing head savagely up against his loins. For a moment he hung there on flexed knees, and then he uttered an inarticulate gasping cry as his cock began a furious staccato jerking that pumped spurt after spurt of boiling cream-like cum deep into the hot sluicing wetness of the young blonde teenager's mouth.
At the same time, shuddering tremors swept over Sally's entire body and she groaned out her own orgasm in strangled mewls behind the invading bulk of Stoker's penis as she voraciously sucked and swallowed, sucked and swallowed the squirts of scalding sperm.
Finally the big man dropped back heavily onto the packing case with a satisfied groan as his now deflated cock pulled wetly from her mouth. Sally collapsed over his knees, her mouth open and long strings of semen swaying floorwards from her lips.
Lashed wild-eyed between the bedposts, Dale Wolff dropped his forehead against the cold iron bars and wept.
CHAPTER SIX
"So okay you got the message," Harry said. "Maybe now you'll dig that we mean business."
He was sitting on the bed, dressed again, with his hands thrust into his pants pockets and the butt of his gun showing between the edges of his open jacket. Mario and Stoker leaned against the wall behind him. The blanket had been taken down from the window and Dale Wolff standing white-faced and furious in front of his ravaged wife and daughter, stared over the escaped con's shoulder at the view to the east of the building. Clouds had blown across the sky during the morning, investing the city with a curious gray drabness so that the segments of river glimpsed over the roofs of the Wentworth Hotel in 46th Street were cold and sad. From time to time wind moaned around the penthouse, sending a scatter of raindrops against the glass.
"Here's what you do, lover-boy," Harry said. "You go on out of here as soon as we unblock the fire door and fix the elevator. You collect some bread and you bring back liquor and provisions for three days. I'll fix you up with a list. Also you lay your hands on a grand in ready cash - the bills used, in small denominations, and with non-consecutive numbers - and you bring them back to me."
"You're out of your mind," Dale said through set teeth. "Where in hell would I get a thousand dollars in cash on a Saturday?"
"That's your problem," Harry said. "Don't tell me a nice respectable guy like you don't have some connections! Cash a check at your grocery store, your favorite bar, your fuckin' golf club. But bring that loot back here or else."
"Supposing I can't raise it?"
"You will," Harry said. "Look - don't mess with me, man. I want that money and those supplies back here before dark. And there's something else too." Twisting his nose so that his face wrinkled to one side, he sniffed. "There's a certain piece of merchandise I need. You know the Metropole on Seventh Avenue?"
"I don't think so."
"You'll find it. It's only a few blocks from here. In back, just past Seventh and 52nd, there's a musicians' hangout called Charley's Bar. Got a blue neon sign day and night, and a trio on the stand. Go to the nigger looking after the men's room and tell him you got an order from Bennie. You got that? - You got an order from Bennie. He'll give you a small package. Bring that back too."
"Do I have to pay for that as well?" Dale asked.
Harry laughed without humor. "What do you think?"
"How much?"
"Whatever the going rate is. Fifty dollars. A hundred. It's up to you to make it. But I want that package here in no time flat." He sniffed again.
"What about my wife and kids?" Dale demanded.
"That's up to you too. You keep your nose clean and deliver the goods, and maybe no harm will come to them. Could be we'll - uh - use them a little while you're away. After all, we gotta amuse ourselves while we wait. And the longer you are, the more they get used. That's logical, ain't it? But remember this, lover-boy ..." Harry's voice took on a hard edge of ruthless brutality. "... You take one step in the wrong direction, talk one word outta turn while you're away, and their lives ain't worth an ice cream's chance in hell. If I even think you glanced at a cop or tipped off some friend ..." He shook his head and tapped the butt of his gun. "I'll crock 'em as soon as look at 'em, the whole goddamn family. And it won't come easy for 'em, either, I'm tellin' you."
Dale clenched his hands at his sides and said nothing. His clothes had been cleaned up somewhat, but his whole body still ached and throbbed with searing pain from the beatings he had received. Hunger gnawed furiously at his stomach. And worst of all was the chilling realization that there was nothing, nothing in the world that he could do: These vile and unspeakable ruffians, who had not hesitated to violate his wife and daughter right in front of his eyes, would certainly carry out their threats if he attempted to put one over on them. While they held his family hostage he had no alternative but to do whatever they asked - and although he was being theoretically set free, he dared not use that freedom in any way to effect their rescue from the dreadful predicament in which they found themselves. Trembling with impotent fury and frustration, he bit his lower lip until the blood came.
"We already showed you we mean business," Harry went on menacingly. "And don't forget we got nothing to lose now. The first cop that sets foot in this building . . . that's curtains for your little brood, boy. The first shots fired'll be for them, I'm tellin' you ... the brat to start with, then the girl, and last the dame. And like I say, it won't come easy: We'll plug 'em in the balls, the tits, the guts - anywhere it hurts most, so you'll hear 'em screamin' as you come up!"
Stoker laughed his husky rumbling laugh. "Mario here knows some pretty tricks with a knife!" he offered.
"But.. . but supposing the police happened to find out you were here and it was nothing to do with me?" Dale said through stiff lips. "What if they came while I was away and .. . and it wasn't through me at all?"
Harry took out his gun and inspected the barrel. "That would be just too fuckin' bad," he said hoarsely.
Thrusting the weapon back into the waistband of his pants, he rose to his feet and stretched. "Come on," he said. "Time you were on your way. I'm starvin' and I need a drink. And don't forget these two broads are the only entertainment we got until you're back, so you better make it quick!"
Nodding to Stoker and Mario to follow him, he took two keys from his pocket and led the way out towards the elevators.
* * *
Night had fallen and the autumn sidewalks were glistening with long streamers of reflected light by the time Dale Wolff left Charley's Bar. For ten blocks around Times Square, theaters, movie houses and clubs flashed the neon advice of their attractions out across the rain-wet streets, the luminous signs above their canopies flowing horizontally in an endless flicker of reds and blues and yellows and greens, splashing highlights onto the pattern of stalled traffic, flooding the hurrying crowd with tides of eerie light. Even the fine drizzle drifting across the streets between the tall buildings transformed itself into a spiderwork of multicolored gems.
But the dark canyon of East 47th Street was deserted. There were a few cars parked outside the armored glass windows full of empty display cases, but no jostling groups of holiday-makers thronged the sidewalks. Dale parked the Alfa Romeo, hauled two paper sacks of groceries and liquor from the back seat, and stood looking up at the block on whose top floor his wife and family were held captive and, he fervently hoped, unharmed. Behind, the lighted pillars of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building shored up the night sky, but the block itself was still dark and unlit.
He hurried to the side door, his feet clacking on the empty paving. He'd been much longer than he intended because he'd had to drive all the way out to the country club to raise the cash - and now, although his mind was worrying the fear that his prolonged absence might have brought some further harm to Hester and Sally, it was the hunger boring into his belly that manifested itself shamefully above everything else.
Shouldering his way past the unlocked door, he groped a path to the elevators and elbowed the button beside the left-hand car. The gates rolled smoothly back and he stepped into the brightly-lit cage. It was then that Dale Wolff got the idea.
Exactly seventeen minutes later he entered the penthouse apartment where a scowling Harry Butcher was waiting for him. "You took your goddamn time, didn't you?" he snarled. "Did you get the package from Charley's?"
"In my jacket pocket," Dale panted over the top of the grocery sacks.
The jewel thief snatched the bulky envelope and hurried into the rear of the apartment as Mario and Stoker seized the sacks and tipped out bread, butter, salami, cheese, cigarettes, beer and Bourbon. "I hope it doesn't screw up your plans," Dale said sarcastically, "but I also brought some food for my family. We haven't eaten since Friday lunchtime."
Stoker and Mario were already eating, biting off chunks of the Italian sausage and cramming bread into their mouths as they gulped at the cans of beer. "Suit yourself," Stoker mumbled through the half-masticated food. "Just so long as you got what the boss said."
Dale looked through the open door of the front apartment. Hester sat on the bare floor with an arm around each of Sally's and Martin's shoulders. Her face was pale and composed, but there were dark circles of fatigue and nervous exhaustion beneath her tortured eyes. Sally too looked wan and distraught. Beyond them, ten year old Martin raised a face blotched and red from weeping and called out tearfully: "Pop, I'm hungry. Did you get something to eat? Why can't I go home? Pop, why do we have to stay here? I wanna go home!"
"All right, son. All right," Dale soothed. "We'll go home soon. And I did get something to eat, sure . . . Hester! Are you okay, honey?"
"Sure I'm okay," his wife said without looking at him. "I feel fine. There's nothing the matter with me. Sally and I both feel fine. We've had a lovely time while you were away ..." She glanced quickly sideways at Martin. "... entertaining our charming hosts."
Dale breathed hard, shooting a look of pure hatred at Stoker and Mario. The big man guffawed, opening his mouth to reveal a mess of half-chewed food as he raised his beer can in mock salute.
Dale's hands were shaking as he laid out the food he had brought for his family - slices of ham, pastrami sandwiches, and cartons of delicatessen salad. Before they had started eating, Harry was back with them, his eyes glistening and his pupils narrowed to pinpoints. Now that he'd had his fix, his mind was working in top gear again. "Come on you guys: Eat up! I got plans for tonight!" he cried, reaching for an unopened bottle of Bourbon. "Hey, lover-boy! Did you get the greenbacks I ordered?"
Reluctantly, Dale put his hand in his breast pocket and drew out a thickly crackling envelope.
Harry snatched it away and gleefully counted the tens and fifties inside. "That'll do for now," he chortled. "Maybe I'll send you out for more tomorrow. I haven't worked out what we'll need for out getaway. But right now it's time for entertainment! The feature's about to start!"
"What's on the program, Harry?" Mario grinned.
'The big attraction's a little number I just thought of called Turnabout," Harry said. "Come again?"
"We got cards," Harry explained. "We got two broads - and there's three of us. Plus we got three bottles of liquor and one bed in the other apartment."
"So?" Stoker looked puzzled, his brutish face creased into a frown.
"So we cut to see which of the dames takes two of us and which has one. And then we draw again to find out how we fuck 'em. You know. I got a schedule all worked out - a Royal Flush means up the cunt; a Full House, in the ass; Two Pair, a blow job. That kind of thing. It'll be a riot!"
"What happens when we've cum?" Mario enquired lazily. He was picking his yellow teeth with the point of his knife.
"We deal again for another hand, you dope! It's a game, ain't it?"
Dale had risen to his feet. His hands were clenched at his sides and his face was working in the lamplight. "Haven't you had enough from us, for God's sake?" he shouted. "You've got money, food, drink, and whatever filthy dope you shoot. You've already..." He glanced quickly at Martin and mastered his feelings with a superhuman effort. "You've already . . . made use ... of my wife and daughter. In the name of heaven, what kind of people are you? Do you really have to go on with this ... this disgusting performance?"
Anger blazed momentarily in Harry's eyes. He swung around like an uncoiling spring and smashed his right fist with terrible force into Dale's face. The blow caught the unprepared man full on the mouth. His head snapped back, his arms flung out wide, and he hurtled backwards to crash against the wall and slide unconscious to the floor. Blood from his lacerated lips oozed from the corner of his mouth and dripped redly onto his shirt.
Harry took out his gun. "The answer to the question," he snarled, "is: Yes, we do!" Motioning Stoker, Mario, and the two terrified women into the foyer, he picked up the oil lamp, slammed and locked the door, and left the senseless man in the dark with his screaming son.
* * *
It was on the Monday afternoon that something snapped inside of Dale. All of Sunday and Monday morning he had remained locked in the empty apartment with Martin, trying to console the frightened and bewildered boy as his mind seethed and his battered body and face ached abominably. However hard he tried to stop his imagination working, he was unable to shut out completely the sounds of drunken laughter laced with occasional screams that filtered through the door. A dozen times he had taken the boy out onto the terrace to shout and wave at the towering Manhattan blocks surrounding them. But for all the effect it had, the skyscrapers could have been staffed with robots as unfeeling and futuristic as their outlines.
By Monday lunchtime, his nerves were as raw as his unhealed back and belly. The hell in which he found himself, its fires stoked by the volatile fuels of outrage, frustration and sheer unadulterated fury, seemed as endless as eternity itself.
They were all together again, feeding from their dwindling supply of food, when Stoker looked out the window and yawned. The rain which had swept against the windows all Saturday night and most of Sunday had gone. The sky was a pale blue behind the honey-colored towers of stone, and the Indian Summer sunlight was burnishing the steep facades with liquid gold. The big man, like his two companions, were satiated and bored. "What the hell do we do now?" he complained. "Why in hell don't that goddamn Bennie show?"
"He's gotta check the time and date of the delivery," Harry said. "He thinks it's tomorrow at seven - but he's gotta wait until he gets word before he checks with us. Anyway, he ain't due before five, you know that."
"Jesus, that's hours off! What do we do until then, for Chrissake?"
"We could play cards again," Mario said with a leer at Sally.
Martin looked up suddenly. "Card games?" he piped without thinking. "Can I play?"
Stoker sat up, his bloodshot eyes opening wide. "Christ, yes!" he said slowly. "Why couldn't you at that?"
"Now just a minute ..." Dale began angrily. But the big man ignored him and went on musingly: "Maybe you got something there, kid! Come to think of it, I had just about enough tail! I'm bored outta my mind layin' it to them two bitches. But a nice tender piece of fresh young ass - now that'd be something else!"
"Hey, Stoker!" Mario raised his head and grinned excitedly. "For a lamebrain, you got some good thinkin' goin' on in that skull of yours! I could go for a piece of that myself!" He turned his head to stare appraisingly at the puzzled child.
And it was at that moment that something in Dale's mind exploded.
The thought of his innocent ten year old son being subjected to the brutal ravishment so calmly and matter-of-factly proposed by the two hoodlums drove him temporarily out of his mind. Forgetting his wife, forgetting his daughter, ignoring the danger to himself, he swooped forward and snatched up the boy -and then, tucking him firmly under his arm, he jerked open the apartment door and ran for his life.
His action was so quick and so unexpected that for a moment Harry and his two companions were taken off guard. By the time they had sprung to their feet and leaped for the door, Dale and his burden were half way down the emergency stairs to the next floor on a free run, for the power had been switched on again in anticipation of Bennie's visit, and the fire door was open.
'The elevator!" Harry yelled as he drew his gun and clattered down the stairway. "Call the elevator and cut them off!"
And then, pausing in mid-step, he called back: "One of you better stay there to keep tabs on the broads."
By this time Dale and Martin were half way down the flight of stairs leading from the 59th floor to the 58th. This was where the building widened out, and from the foyer here twin passageways led off to right and left. There were now six elevators in the bank, and behind them, circled by the emergency stairs, a separate shaft for the big freight lift. Dale set the boy down on his feet and looked frantically around him. Through the glass doors separating the stairs from the foyer he could see a receding perspective of unpainted office doors along one of the corridors. Below, slashed at each half-landing with bright bars of sunlight streaming through the frosted glass windows, the stairway spiraled interminably down. And above, over the approaching whine and rumble of the elevator rising up the shaft, he could hear the pounding of Harry's feet.
Gun in hand, he would appear on the flight above them at any minute. They had to get out of there fast! Holding a finger to his lips for silence, Dale pushed open the doors and hurried through, dragging the boy after him. The elevator sped past the foyer with a soft hydraulic hiss. They could just hear the slight thump as it bounced to a halt two floors above. Over the noise of the opening doors Harry's voice shouted: "They left the stairs on the 58th! They must be some place on that floor! Bring down the elevator and join me there."
The doors rumbled shut. Dale darted to the nearest office in the right-hand passageway at the back of the building, thrust Martin in ahead of him, and flattened himself against the wall as the keyless door swung to. Outside in the foyer, footsteps approached .. . and halted as the elevator doors opened again. Harry's voice said quietly: "They must be hiding in one of the rooms on this floor. You take the right and I'll take the left. We'll flush the bastards out!"
"Okay, boss. Do I shoot if I see them?" Mario's voice replied.
They could hear no answer, but two sets of footsteps moved cautiously away on either side, receded, halted as doors were flung open. Over the thudding of his heart, Dale heard himself breathe out a sigh of relief: They must be searching the corridors at the front of the building first!
Taking the boy by the hand, he stole out and crept across the foyer. The indicator needle above the doors was slowly circling the dial as the elevator returned itself to street level. Dale looked to the right. Mario was out of sight in one of the offices along the corridor. He looked to the left.. . and froze momentarily: At the far end of the passageway the menacing figure of Harry had appeared. As Dale pushed Martin frantically towards the emergency stairs as the jewel thief raised his gun hand. There was a bright flash... a thunderous explosion that shattered the silence of the empty building . . . and a shrill whine as the heavy caliber steel-jacketed slug ricocheted off the wall just behind Dale's head.
The next moment they were through the glass doors and on the stairway as Harry shouted furiously: "Mario! They're back on the stairs! Take the freight elevator and cut 'em off! It's an open cage and you can shoot through the grill!"
Footsteps pounded across the foyer as they dashed down the steps around the freight shaft. The Italian must have been much nearer to them than his boss.
As they reached past the doorway leading to the 57th floor, Mario hurled himself across the landing above and jerked open the steel grill gates to the freight lift.
But what he had thought was the ceiling of the car behind the criss-cross latticework was in fact the underside of its floor. Dale had stopped off on his way back to the penthouse floor on Saturday night and made use of the engineering knowledge he had gained once in the construction business. The freight elevator was halted in a special inspection bay above the 58th floor landing . .. and Dale tampered with the fail-safe mechanism controlling the gates.
Mario leaped through them as they opened . . . and trod on nothing.
They heard his wild sobbing scream of terror receding as his body flashed past them down the shaft, a shivering metallic thump as he bounced off a grill several floors below, and then - after a long silence - a dreadful distant crunch from the far depths of the building.
Beads of sweat dewed Dale's forehead and upper lips as he dragged his panting son frenziedly down the stairway two steps at a time. There was no sound of pursuit yet from above. If only they could get far enough ahead to call the elevator and shut themselves in it before Harry appeared .. .
On the 49th floor landing, a great splash of blood and brains, separated by the bars of the grill into segments like the sunrays on a Japanese flag, fanned out horribly across the floor.
On the 45th, his chest heaving with the exertion of his efforts, Harry was waiting for them, gun in hand. Dale had not realized that there were two more sets of emergency stairs, one at each end of the block. "Okay," the wanted man said grimly, his cold eyes glittering at them over the unwavering barrel. "Now just walk through them doors and we'll take the elevator back to join the others ..."
* * *
"Where's Mario?" Stoker asked as the two prisoners were shepherded back into the penthouse apartment.
"Croaked," Harry said. "Stepped into an empty elevator shaft."
"Jesus! How in hell did that happen? I mean, those gates ..."
Harry shrugged. "Search me. New building. Maybe they're not fixed yet or something. I don't know."
"You don't think lover-boy here . . . ?"
"Fucked it up? I don't see how he could of," Harry said. "There wasn't time, for one thing. Second of all, he ain't smart enough ... If I thought he had, though..." He left the sentence unfinished, glaring malevolently at Dale from under his eyebrows.
Martin, who had been blubbering softly ever since they were brought back, now turned to Hester and burst into a loud wail of frustration and tiredness and bad temper. "I wanna go home!" he yelled. "Why can't we leave? Why won't the nasty men let us go? Why doesn't Pop do something?" His eyes screwed up, his mouth opened wide, and his howls grew louder and louder as the tears coursed down his red face.
Harry's face had darkened at the first sign of weeping. Now he scowled furiously, muttered a curse, and strode forward to pick the ten year old up roughly by the scruff of his neck. "Take this rod," he snarled to Stoker, "and keep lover-boy, and the two cunts covered. Plug them if they move." Holding the kicking, struggling, screaming boy in front of him, he strode from the room.
There was a large living room next door, with French windows opening onto a wide terrace facing east, as the apartment was like a mirror-image of the one Dale and his family had viewed at the front of the building. Through the open doorway, they watched frozen with horror as Harry took Martin outside and vanished from sight along the balcony. When he came back two minutes later he was alone.
In the sudden silence which had fallen over the group, they could hear the wind moaning around the corners of the building through the open French windows. A ship's siren hooted mournfully on the river. But no sound of childish crying, no plaintive demands to be let back in, no choked-back sobs disturbed the sunlit air.
"W-w-w-what have you done with my little boy?" Hester quavered.
Harry laughed harshly. "Stopped his goddamn yowling once and for all," he growled. "I figured Mario could do with some company down there. Anyway the kid wanted to get back to street level, didn't he?" He laughed cruelly again.
As Sally screamed, Hester swayed for a moment and then crumpled to the floor. Dale hurled himself forward with a terrible shout of rage and desperation, his hands clawing for the hoodlum's throat. But before he had gone two steps, Stoker had reversed the gun in his hand and brought the butt crashing down behind his ear.
Dale dropped unconscious without uttering another sound.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ten year old Martin Wolff gazed at the blank stone face of the building and shivered miserably. That guy Harry - and he was the meanest of all the dangerous convicts - had warned him not to make a sound when he lifted him over the parapet and placed him in the narrow painter's cradle hanging dizzily over the 60-story drop to the alley behind the Wentworth Hotel.
"One more yap outta you, kid," he had hissed, "and I'll cut the ropes and send you down into the street! You stay there mum like a good brat and don't make a sound and maybe . . . maybe .. . I'll come back and lift you up again." And he had gone back onto the terrace, which was littered with empty buckets and coils of rope and ladders, and slowly lowered the cradle until it was swinging between two windows on the floor below.
It seemed a long time since he had gone. Martin gazed fearfully around him. Cripe, he was scared! He could see boats on the river between the tall buildings, their upperworks glittering in the afternoon sun. Away to the southeast, an airplane gleamed silver against the blue sky. He didn't like to look down: It gave him a funny feeling in his stomach - almost like being sick. It was queer looking at the people, he thought, from all this way up: They looked just like ants in the garden . .. and the cars, they were even smaller than the collection of models on the table beside the bed in his room back home!
He wondered when he would get back to his home, and he loved it more than ever now. The thought made him feel like crying again - but the gang leader had told him to keep his trap shut. He wondered why he and his family had ever come to this place. He wondered if he'd ever touch the ground again, and began to feel a little dizzy just thinking about how high up he was. Why hadn't his father stopped the escaped cons? Martin didn't know what had happened in the other apartment while he'd been locked up - first alone and then with his father - but it must have been something serious to make his dad do whatever those guys told him to do. After all, his dad was brave and strong - he wasn't a quitter. Things must really be bad. But maybe, just maybe, there was something he could do to help. Maybe he could capture those tough guys single-handedly and turn them in to the police!
Striving hard to master his tears, the boy looked wistfully up at the coping of the parapet where the ropes holding the painter's cradle disappeared over the top. A bird soared into view over the railings surmounting the coping, black against the pale sky, and it looked a long way away.
He shivered again, shifting from side to side along the flimsy wooden structure. The wind was cold and he didn't have his nice warm coat. The skyscrapers to his left and right, and the boats on the river beyond them, moved giddily to the left and the back again. That was queer, he thought. It made him feel sick again, and then suddenly he realized why. Moving that way, he had caused the cradle to swing slightly from side to side on the long ropes supporting it. Why, it was almost like the hammock chair in the garden at home - except that it went sideways instead of from back to front! He tried again, rocking his body to left and right so that the cradle began to sway crazily back and forth along the sheer facade of the building, shuddering slightly as the ropes slackened and tautened.
Not bad, Martin thought, beginning to get an idea. He rocked harder, increasing the amplitude of the cradle's pendular movement.
He stared in fascination at the rough wall of the building as it slid past him one way, stopped, and then swung back in the other direction. As he increased the movement of the cradle, rocking it wider with each swing, he could almost reach the sill of the window closest to him. Swinging so wide now that he was drawing almost level with the window's corner edge, Martin didn't dare look down for fear of losing his nerve.
Rocking even harder, the determined young hero began stamping his feet from side to side on the rough planking. The wind whistled through his hair, lifting and dropping the lock on his forehead. Maybe, if he could swing it a little wider, he could scramble off the cradle on to the window sill . . . then he could get back inside . . .
The wildly swinging cradle moved up once, twice, three times towards the sill and the three horizontal iron bars across its lower half . . . and each time the boy hesitated, not daring to transfer himself from the moving safety of the cradle to the unknown stillness of the narrow ledge.
On the fourth swing, something creaked protestingly amongst the wood and ropes - and the sudden panic he felt impelled him to jump. He launched himself at the sill as it slid towards him, grasping the topmost bar with both hands and scrambling out of the cradle as it swung away and down.
There was cement dust on the stone sill and his foot slipped.
Martin felt a sudden terrible jolt in his shoulder muscles as his small body plummeted downward, throwing all of his weight onto his arms. For a dizzy panic-stricken moment he hung there at full stretch 59 stories above the ground, supported only by the frantic grasp of his fingers on the window railing! Then he remembered how the physical education teacher at school had showed him how to lift himself up onto a high bar. Panting desperately, he flexed his arms and drew himself slowly and painfully upwards until he could raise one leg and hook the foot over the lowest rail. Sobbing with the effort, he shifted his grip with one hand and heaved himself thankfully over the bars on to the sill. That had been a close call: He had almost been done for!
After recovering his breath, Martin kneeled up and pressed his face to the apartment window. He looked in to see a bare room with sacks of cement in one corner and a bucket filled with paintbrushes in the center of the floor. The door was open and he could see a corridor beyond. Good! Now for the window. He raised his hand .. . and caught his breath.
The window had no catch on the outside!
Of course, he thought! Why should it have? Who would use it anyway? People who built skyscrapers didn't expect ten year old boys to try and get in from outside the 59th floor! There was a catch inside, though: He could see it clearly through the glass. But it was pushed home and the window wouldn't open. He slipped his fingers around the edge of the frame and tugged, just to see, but the window didn't budge.
Martin sighed. Now he would have to stay outside until: the escaped convicts came and got him after all. Heck! He would have to climb back on to that draughty painter's cradle once more! Looking out beyond the window embrasure, he gasped with dismay.
The cradle was hanging motionless along the side of the building several feet away. It had never occurred to him that it would stop swinging once he had left it. He looked down and swallowed, the hairs pricking on the nape of his neck. He couldn't possibly reach it - especially now that he had looked down!
For a moment the fifth grader panicked. And then he thought - No! He'd have to try to break the glass. If he didn't, it meant staying out here until somebody moved into the apartment... or letting go.
Breathing heavily, Martin carefully took off one of his shoes and swung the leather heel at the windowpane. The pane shivered but did not break, so he drew back his arm and swung the shoe again. This time, the glass burst inwards with an alarming clatter. He paused as the broken shards tinkled to the floor inside. It seemed to have made a terrible noise! He hoped nobody had heard.
Trembling slightly at the enormity of his desperate plan, he reached in the broken window and twisted the catch. A moment later he had opened the window and jumped down inside the vacant apartment.
The room opened onto a foyer just like the one upstairs. There were elevators there but he didn't dare use them in case anybody heard. He would have to go back upstairs the way he and his father had come down yesterday.
He paused, irresolute. On the other hand, what was he going to do when he got upstairs? Maybe it would be better if he went down and tried to find a policeman. A policeman might be able to help them get away. It was an awful long way down, though .. . another 59 floors. He sighed. And then, drawing a deep breath, he stepped purposefully towards the doors leading to the emergency stairs.
A quarter of an hour later he was standing on the sidewalk beside his father's sports car.
He looked up and down the street. There weren't many people about - and those there were seemed a long way away. None of them was a policeman. He stared at the trickle of traffic in the one-way street. And then suddenly he thought of a way to make a policeman come in a hurry.
His father kept a spare set of keys taped to the underside of one of the Alfa Romeo's fenders. Greatly daring, he reached in behind the wheel and stripped the tape away. Then, unlocking the door, he slid in behind the driving wheel and pushed the second key into the ignition switch.
Using all his strength, the boy turned the wheel as far to the right as it would go . . . and then he twisted the key. The motor burst into life with a frightening roar. Martin knew which position the lever had to be in for first gear, and he seized the knob with both hands and pushed as hard as he could.
There was a protesting shriek of metal and the Alfa lurched out from the curb, choked, jerked forward, almost stopped, and then swung around crazily as Martin clung to the wheel... to make a U-turn and stall facing the wrong way in 47th Street!
Brakes squealed, horns blared, people shouted. In no time at all, the car windows were darkened by an angry crowd milling around the stalled auto. Martin sat behind the wheel feeling very small, appalled at what he had done.
Finally a red-faced cop pushed his way to the front of the crowd and jerked open the door. "What the hell's goin' on?" he demanded. "Who does this belong to, for Chrissake?"
"It's my dad's car," Martin said in a small voice.
"Well, where the hell is your goddamn daddy - and what's his car doing facing the wrong way in a one-way street?"
"He's up there on top of that building with my momma and my sister and some escaped convicts. He's a ... a hostage," Martin said, a little cowed by the blustery cop. "I thought maybe you could help me get him out!"
A second cop had joined the first one now. Together they manhandled the Alfa back to the side of the street, dispersed the crowd and took Martin to the sidewalk. "Now what's all this crap about escaped convicts?" the red-faced one asked grimly.
"Ah, come on, Jim - the kid's nuts," the second cop said. "Let's get back to the Precinct House and turn him in. Let them find out where he's from. We got other things to do."
"It's true, I swear it's true!" Martin pleaded. "You gotta help them get out."
"Fairy tales," the second cop said. "My kids do it all the time. It's the damned television."
"But there are convicts up there," Martin said, feeling tears of frustration brimming in his eyes. "One's Stoker and one's Harry and - " "" "Stoker!" the first cop exclaimed. "Harry!" He looked meaningly at his companion. "And you said they were escaped convicts, kid?"
Martin nodded. "There were three of them but the other fell down an elevator shaft. I think he must be dead because it was on Saturday."
"Don't believe him," the second cop said. "He heard the names on the radio."
"Maybe we should just take a look at that elevator shaft," the red-faced cop said, hauling a huge bunch of master keys from his pocket.
A few minutes later, staring down through the opened doors of the elevator in the lobby of the empty building, he said: "Jesus!" And then, turning to his colleague: "I think we better take this young man down to the Precinct after all. This is too big for us to handle!"
* * *
Martin was very tired. It seemed a long time since he had been brought into the station and given some food. He had told his story to a gray-faced man in uniform sitting behind a desk, and then again to another man in plain clothes who had come in later. After that there had been all sorts of things happening - men coming and going, telephones ringing, what seemed like hundreds of voices all talking at once. Finally the man in plain clothes had asked him to tell them the story for the third time. It was very important, the man said, that he should tell them all that he remembered. Everything. Martin had done the best he could - although he had left out the bit about the broken window in case they got mad.
There was a lot more talking after that. Martin was too tired from his ordeal to understand it all, but it seemed that the cops were afraid to go and fetch his momma and pop in case the escaped cons saw them coming and killed his parents in revenge. "I don't dare risk it," the man in plain clothes kept saying. "Not with three innocent people up there. Not when that maniac has a gun."
"But if we wait for them to come out," another man said, "they may rub out those folks anyway before they leave. Jesus, look where they're at! Smack in the center of the Diamond Exchange district! They got some heist planned, and probably for tomorrow, too. Butcher's already killed once. You think he'd leave witnesses around now?"
"I know, I know," the plain-clothes man said. "So we stake out the district and alert the Holmes people and watch every goddamn broker's and dealer's in the street. But we still don't have the right to risk those people's lives. Up there in that building they'd hear us coming a mile off if we tried to jump them and get them out. They'd be dead ducks before we were in the door - or else they'd use them as shields or bargain with them so they could get clear. I don't just dare do it."
"Couldn't I go back on that lift thing and take a gun up to my dad?" Martin piped suddenly. "If they didn't see me coming I could give it to him secretly, and then he could get them out himself."
There was a sudden silence in the crowded, smoke-filled room.
"What did you say, kid?" the plain-clothes man asked softly.
"It's a thing that painters use," Martin said importantly, gaining courage now that they were all listening to him. "It's sort of hanging on ropes from the balcony at the top. If you put me back on it I could climb up the rope at night when they weren't looking and give him the gun."
"Climb up the rope?" the man echoed. "From the 59th floor?"
"You can't pull up the cradle," Martin explained, "because the ropes hang from the floor they're all on. But I could climb up. Really I could. Mr. Simmonds taught me how at school."
"You'd do that?" one of the uniformed cops asked. "At night?"
Martin's eyes opened wide. "Of course," he said. "It's my dad!"
* * *
The night was windless and quite cold. Standing alone on the cradle Martin shivered, though it was more from excitement than from the cold, because someone had given him a nice woolly coat to wear. Below him and all around, the lights of New York stretched as far as he could see, hundreds and hundreds of them. Thousands, probably. But he hadn't time to count because he had important things to do. He drew a deep breath and tried hard to remember all the things he had been told. They hadn't wanted to let him do it at all, at first. But finally he had persuaded them that he could, that he really didn't mind because he wanted to help. The gun they had given him was hanging on a strap around his neck. It felt heavy and important - and it looked just like the ones on television. Really, this whole thing was like being on television yourself! Sort of fun, too, even though he did have that funny feeling in his stomach again.
It had seemed to take hours, creeping up the stairs through the dark building with all those policemen, but he knew they couldn't have any lights, and whatever happened he mustn't make a noise. Not even the littlest noise. But at last they had reached out through the window he had broken and grabbed the cradle with a hook thing, and drawn it across so he could get onto it. Nobody seemed to mind about the window, so he was quite relieved.
"Now you know what you have to do," the plain-clothes man had whispered. "And for God's sake be careful, kid." He had shaken his head doubtfully and then added: "Good luck! And when my boy gets to be as old as you, I hope he has half as much guts, that's all!" Martin had felt quite proud.
He looked up now towards the parapet and tried to make out the rope as it went over the rail. The stars were very bright in the sky. The cradle had stopped swinging and it was time he started . ..
Suddenly a terrible row started on the terrace above. There was a stamping of feet, a woman's scream, voices shouting. "For God's sake, Harry!" Stoker's voice yelled. "You're outta your mind! You been as jumpy as a cat ever since Bennie came!"
"I tell you I heard something!" Harry's voice called angrily. And then, rising shrilly: "Stoker! Look out! Lover-boy's come to!"
Sounds of scuffling and panting broke out and then increased in volume. They seemed to be approaching the edge of the parapet. Harry's voice, further away now, cried hoarsely: Let go of me, you bitches. Just wait. .. until I get my hands ... on that fuckin' gun! ..."
A woman screamed again (Martin thought it was his big sister Sally) - and then suddenly the stars were blotted out as the dim bulk of two struggling men appeared in faint silhouette above the parapet. He knew from the sounds of the gasping voices that it was Stoker and his father. They were lying across the coping, rolling from side to side as they wrestled furiously for the advantage. Martin gasped with alarm. If they weren't careful, they'd fall off!
Now the unmistakable shape of Stoker rose menacingly above the other in the dim reflected light. He was forcing Martin's dad farther and farther back across the stone ledge, nearer and nearer to the black abyss that yawned below. Dale screamed in terror - a wild cry that was lost in the night.
Martin was trembling, but he knew what he had to do. Using both hands to lift the automatic hanging around his neck, he aimed it at the big man as well as he could. And then, closing his eyes tightly, he pressed the trigger.
There was a vivid orange flash and the loudest noise he had ever heard in his whole life. The gun jerked from his hands and fell back to the full extent of the strap. His ears ringing unbearably, the boy grasped one of the ropes supporting the painter's cradle to steady himself. At the same time the figure of Stoker appeared to leap forward from the parapet and hurtle down towards the cradle.
It struck the frail structure a couple of feet away from Martin with shattering force, snapping one of the ropes instantly. The far end of the cradle dropped, tipping Stoker out into the chasm and leaving the terrified boy clinging desperately to the rope 750 feet above the ground! A dreadful sobbing cry wailed out, receded, and was lost in the night.
Martin clung there dazed .. . and then slowly "he began to inch himself up the rope towards the parapet, not daring to look down, not daring to look sideways where the police would be watching, hardly daring even to think. When he was a few feet from the top, heads appeared above the coping again . .. and before he knew what was happening he was being dragged over the parapet amidst a chorus of sobs and cries and hysterical laughs from his family.
"It's all right! It's all right!" he kept repeating. "Don't cry, momma! Don't cry! What were they fighting about?"
"It's .. . daddy was ... he was . . . sleeping," Hester sobbed. "But he woke up before they expected and he ... he tried to ... " She broke down and started to weep again.
Martin turned to his father. "I brought this for you," he said, lifting the strap over his head and handing the gun to Dale.
As his father seized the weapon with an astonished exclamation, glass burst outwards onto the terrace with shattering impact and Harry Butcher - whom Hester and Sally had somehow contrived to lock in one of the rooms - appeared through the window with his own gun in his hand. In the light of the oil lamp streaming from the window, his face was twisted into a mask of violent hatred and his eyes glittered balefully. "All right, punk," he snarled hoarsely, aiming the weapon straight at Martin, "this is it!"
Still in the shadow, Dale had jerked up the barrel of the automatic as he whirled toward the sound of breaking glass. Now, almost in reflex, he pressed the trigger and the gun belched flame for the second time.
Silhouetted in the shattered window, the escaped convict was a perfect target. For a moment a crimson flower bloomed horribly over his belly - and then he pitched forward with a crash that seemed to shake the building and lay still.
Dale .lowered the automatic and blew out his breath in a shuddering sigh.
"Yeah," he said slowly and thankfully. "I guess this is it!"
THE END
EPILOGUE
The temporary janitor shrugged into his brown denims and shook his head. God knew what had been going on in the building since he left Friday night! The place was full of cops, for a start! They seemed to be everywhere, swarming through the lobby, working the elevators, taking pictures. It seemed some guy had fallen' down the shaft during the weekend . .. and there were other stiffs upstairs too. The police meat wagon had been parked outside almost half an hour!
Then there'd been some excitement in the street just before he arrived. There'd been cops staked out all night in the neighborhood. The man who ran the newsstand on the corner had told him: They'd ambushed Bennie Ferrando's team just as they were about to heist a special consignment of diamonds on early delivery at the Gotham Jeweler's Exchange right across the street! Picked up the lot without a shot being fired, the man had said. There was still a crowd milling around the sidewalk out there now.
The janitor shook his head again. You never knew these days! It was getting to be worse than television!
He raised his head as one of the elevators arrived at the ground floor. Who would it be this time? More cops, he supposed.
The doors rolled back - and the janitor gaped with astonishment.
Four people walked out of the car arm in arm. The man's face was swollen, bruised, and covered with thick stubble. The woman and the girl had blotchy complexions and their hair was mussed. Even the kid was red-eyed and looked as though he could do with a good night's sleep. But there was no doubt about it: It was the same family he had allowed to ride up to that empty apartment on the 60th floor Friday night! What in the name of tarnation were they doing here now?
The man grinned at his family and walked across to the desk. He planked a set of keys down on the unpolished top and laid a ten dollar bill beside them.
"You can return these to Mr.Anselmo with my compliments," he said to the gaping janitor. "My wife and I have decided to stay where we are. The apartment's great... but I guess it's a little too noisy for us, here in the city."
