Billy paused. His hate for the world and for politicians had not begun with his brother's murder, and Mark Denning, whose actions as a local lawmaker had hampered his drug peddling business, was a man he particularly hated. The idea of planting a strange baby in his wife's womb, like a human cuckoo, appealed immediately to his perverse and selfish nature. To Billy, Mark Denning needed to be punished for hampering his private enterprise in pharmacopoeia. Then, something else occurred to him.
"But what if it's your baby?"
"Well, there's no real way of knowing until the kid gets big enough to resemble its father, but wouldn't it be a kick to plant your seed in Denning's garden?"
Billy thought, his unbalanced, drug-riddled mind going over the possibilities. "But the buyer in Europe wanted a snuff film."
"You'll have to disappoint him. We don't need the money that bad, do we? Just tell him the girl OD'ed before she could be set up. I'm sure he's had girls get away from him before."
Billy thought some more. "Don't we need the money?"
Sam shook his head, thinking fast, for DesirЋe's sake. He saw her lying there, pretending to be asleep but now hearing everything. He saw the tears running from her eyes as she tried to prepare herself for death.
"We don't need it that much. All we gotta do is get out of town, go over to the falls for a few nights and sell some shit. We can snuff someone later. There's always more bitches."
Billy looked down at DesirЋe's lovely form. "She is one beautiful bitch, isn't she?"
"She is. Be a shame to kill her. A girl like this isn't born every day."
Billy was still not convinced. His mind was unhinged from his brother's death and overuse of his own product. He had wanted to spill blood today, and this girl was available and close to the source of his personal irritation – Clete. "But – I still want to cut her up."
Sam saw Billy's jerky eye movements and knew that it would be almost impossible to appeal to reason. And, at that last sentence, he saw DesirЋe's body flinch and start to quiver. He cast his gaze about for something that would inspire him, but found nothing until he looked out the open window.
"Fucking hell, look at that!"
Billy looked out the window and saw the plume of dust behind Clete's car as he moved at speed up the road toward the house. "That son of a bitch! We can kill him now."
Sam shook his head. "No way, man. All we've got is that little Walther and you can't hit anything with that if it isn't standing next to you. He's a good shot, and you aren't. Hell no, count me out if you want a gunfight. Let's sneak out of here and get to the car."
Billy was indecisive, but the adrenaline of fear was clearing his mind. "What about all this gear?"
Sam thought quickly, watching the approach of the car still two miles away. Clete would be here soon and there was no way they could explain their being here with DesirЋe in bed. The jealous Clete would make short work of them surely. "Hide the tripods in a closet and take the cameras with us."
"What about her? She'll talk. I've got to whack her."
"No, no, no, man," Sam hurried to say. "We can't kill anyone here today. We've left too much physical evidence already. Sperm, hair, pubes, prints – Do you want to clean up all the fingerprints here? Can you remember everything you've touched? He's the sheriff, her husband's a politician. It'd be manhunt of the year. Let her live, man. She's only a girl, nineteen or twenty. You can catch Clete some other time, with his pants down."
Billy fidgeted, and Sam took his arm. "Come on, man. He'll be here soon, and then you will have a gunfight on your hands, and I promise you'll lose."
The two fleeing rapists picked up the larger equipment and hurriedly stashed it in one of the closets, then turned with their cameras and started toward the stairs.
Clete parked in front of the house and looked around. He couldn't imagine DesirЋe being anywhere else in the vicinity, after finding her car just down the road. Other tracks in the dust showed that another car had driven her away, but he had lost those tracks on the harder surface nearby and saw no other vehicle here. What was going on?
Clete tried the door, found it locked, and used a credit card to open the old lock. The entry hall was empty and appeared undisturbed since he had last been here, the day Nancy had been raped by Lobo. Then, he heard a sound upstairs, a female voice, he thought.
What the hell was going on?
Because they had spent so much time arguing about DesirЋe's fate, the two young men had delayed their escape past the point of no return. As they saw the sheriff begin to mount the curved staircase, Sam motioned to Billy to go the other way. They moved silently past the first bedroom where DesirЋe was coming slowly to life, moaning sorrowfully, thinking that they had gone. A few doors down, they closed themselves into another room and waited. And while they stood there in fear, Billy fumbled with the small pistol he had brought.
Clete reached the top of the stairs and heard the rustling of sheets in the first bedroom. It was an eerie place, this mansion, completely furnished yet unoccupied. When the well had gone dry some years previously, the family had moved down to another, smaller house on the estate, fully intending to return when the work could be accomplished to bring running water to the property, leaving all the antique furniture in place. He and Nancy had used it for their own special trysting place, but he would not have expected anyone else in this community ever to come up here uninvited.
The family had been given a bid for piping in the water, but since it appeared to be a huge expense, they had not initiated work yet. Nancy's uncle, with whom she lived now, since her parents' death, was an heir and not the most resourceful fellow in the world, having inherited everything without first earning it, and so the work had been postponed for a long time. During this past summer, Clete and Nancy had often come up here to make love. This was their place, so why had DesirЋe come up here?
DesirЋe was just rising to her hands and knees to look out the window, wondering who it was that had scared off her two abductors, inadvertently treating Clete to an intimate view of her bottom's open cleft and the hair-fringed split of her wet, sperm-flooded pussy. At the sight, Clete's breath caught in his throat.
"DesirЋe," he said quietly.
DesirЋe gasped and turned on the bed, sitting on her heels with her knees pressed together in front of her, holding the big, round, white melons in her dainty hands, the ripe, pink nipples peeking out between her fingers. She was terrified! Terrified of him, even though she knew she had had sex with him twice before and remembered the last time vividly, remembered his huge, womb-piercing cock that had brought her to many orgasms over the desk in his back office while her husband Mark had stood outside in the front office. He had coerced her with that awful video tape, and she could not say that she was surprised to learn that he had murdered the brother of one of her abductors.
What would happen to her if Clete found out that she knew that he had committed murder? He would kill her as well, she was certain. He was an evil, bloodthirsty man and he would surmise that she knew about the murder if he found out that she was here with the other two. Yes, if he found out that she had been here with them, having full unprotected sex with them, then he would count her as being in cahoots with them. No, she could never report this rape to him, nor even let him know that she knew of them. For her own safety now, she hoped sincerely now that they had got away clean.
"What's going on, DesirЋe?" Clete asked, his eyes devouring her nakedness. He remembered that she had stolen that incriminating video tape from under his nose, yet once again, here she was, naked and vulnerable before him. Very strange. "What are you doing here, Dez?"
The wide-eyed girl seemed to choke for a moment, and then she said, "Waiting for you, Clete."