Carol (Carol Schmidt Series) (4 page)

He shook his head, wide-eyed, arms rising up. But she held the cloth
there with both hands, pushing down with all her weight.

One, two, three seconds, and his arms dropped.

He was out cold.

“All set?” the
Cardinal asks.

She nods, the heavy door of the black Mercedes clunking shut behind
her as she sits in the passenger seat.

They pull away, the broad tires of the Merc rolling effortlessly
over the rough dirt track. It will be nearly twenty miles before they hit
asphalt, but the dusty Arizona desert is pretty much flat, and with the car’s
deep German suspension beneath them they’ll hardly notice it.

They’ll be in Phoenix in ninety minutes, and a few hours after that
they’ll be two time zones away. Nobody will ever know they’ve been here.

As they drive, she looks in the mirror, watching as the small,
single-story building they’ve just left recedes into the distance. She has no
idea who owns it. The Cardinal had found it, telling her that nobody ever came there.
The place smelled of decay, as if it had been abandoned years ago. Even after
they’d fixed it up inside a bit, the stink of old dust and neglect was pungent
in the air. Not that it mattered. You can’t smell dust on-line...

His eyes open a fraction. There’s a tiny dot of red light.

Immediately, a wave of exhaustion washes over him. His eyes close.
That light? What was it?

There’s a fuzziness to his thoughts, like a bad hangover, but
without the headache. He forces himself to look again. His eyelids feel heavy,
as if there are stones sitting on them. The red light is still hovering in the
air, high up in front of him.

The fuzziness dispels quickly as panic sets in. Where the hell is
he? He twists his head, finds it difficult to move. Tries a shoulder. A leg. He
can’t.

His body jerks as the panic intensifies. He feels the restraints on
various points of his body. He is tied to a bed, and he can’t move.

And he can hear his own voice.

What the f...?

His own voice?

Definitely. Groaning. Wincing. Crying...

To his right, three feet away, is a small, beat-up table. On the
table is a laptop, and it’s playing a video. The video is of him and Carol in
the hotel room. It’s the second camera, the one that took in the whole bed and
nothing else.

As he strains to focus, he sees his stiffened penis disappear into
her mouth. He hears his own wince of delight, and on the screen he sees himself
arch his back, both hands up behind his head.

God, he remembers her doing that to him. For a second or two he’s
lost in the memory of it, transfixed by the vision of such recent pleasure, now
right before his eyes. He feels his cock twitch as he sees himself thrusting in
and out of her mouth, and he notices that she’s reaching down and playing with
her pussy as she sucks him off; she was
really
into it, he tells himself,
just amazingly horny, the best pickup...

Jesus! Where am I?

He looks around the room. Light comes from a large window on one
side, which has a stained bed sheet draped across it. The place is old and run
down, like a shed that no one’s used for a couple of decades. The bed he’s on
is hard and narrow, although the sheet itself is brilliant white, crisp,
shop-fresh. The bands which keep him there are thick, rounded leather, and seem
to puncture the mattress itself, running right through and under the frame of
the bed. Ankles, knees, wrists, and neck. He’s not getting out of this on his
own.

He turns his attention back to the laptop. He can hear his own
groans escalating, and he can see his rigid penis dripping with her saliva, a
sticky purple rod that she clearly loves having in her mouth, grasping it at
the base and steering it in and out, her tongue going wild.

He looks around, at the window, at the cracked walls, the dust
everywhere … It’s a game. It’s gotta be. What is this place? Her basement? No;
the window. A shed, then? She must have drugged him and somehow got him into her
shed. Dirty bitch. The video? How did she get that? She must have known about
the cameras in the hotel room...

Then, as his on-screen moans reach a crescendo, he realizes something:
his face is visible on the video footage. She whips his cock out of her mouth
just in time. He ejaculates violently, three great squirts of white semen
shooting onto the carpet, his face twisted in agony, and more come running down
her hand and the shaft of his cock.

The sordid bitch! She’ll be coming in through the door at any
moment, he tells himself, as he feels his cock stiffening. She’s gonna come in
and have her fill again. The thought of it makes him as hard as hell, yet
nervous at the same time.

“Hello?” he says. “Hello? Are you there?”

Nothing.

He shouts again, louder. Still nothing.

He lies there, breathing a little heavily, his heartbeat heavy in
his chest. Over on the laptop he’s now kneeling in front of her, sucking her
tits. She’s got her eyes closed as he works on them gently.

“Carol?
Yo, Carol!
”

He pauses, waits for any sign of life, the sound of a door,
footsteps, anything.

“I
get
it, OK! I’m ready, for christsake, I’m ready for you!
Let’s
do
it!”

Nothing.

There’s just the sound of the two of them on the hotel bed, the
faint click of saliva as he sucks her nipples, and her light, fluttering
breaths as she coos and sighs in appreciation.

Then he remembers the little red light high up on the wall opposite.
He struggles to make it out, but after a while he thinks he sees a video
camera.

“Hey, you!” he says, looking right at the source of the red light.
“Stop your games and get in here.” He looks down, sees his erection start to
fade slightly. “Now, baby. I’m ready for you, I’m...”

Not a sound.

He twists his head. Smells the ancient dust in the air.

There’s something wrong.

He listens hard, trying to block out the sound of the video. There’s
nothing. No traffic noise, no dogs barking in the distance, nothing. All he has
for company is the video of the two of them screwing. His best pickup ever.

The bastard! She’s trying to scare him, he tells himself. Must be a
turn-on for her...

He struggles to stay calm, looking at the laptop and watching as he
lies on his back and she straddles him. His hands grip her butt cheeks hard,
pulling them apart to reveal her soft, glorious pussy, glistening with juice.

His penis is hard again now. He can’t help it. He watches, desperate
to jack off, twisting in his restraints, knowing that there’s no way he can get
an arm loose.

His erection is aching as he stares at the screen, watching himself
lapping her fantastic sex, his fingers digging deep into her butt cheeks...

And she’s watching me, he tells himself, glancing from time to time
at the tiny red light high on the wall. Damn it! She’s watching as I lie here
in helpless agony. And she’s enjoying every second of it!

But he is wrong. She will never see him again. At this precise
moment she is walking through the sliding doors of yet another airport, her job
done.

Several million others, though, would see him. Because the footage
from that camera was being streamed live into BAD-DADDY-PICKUP.COM. People
across the globe would witness the events in that abandoned shack in the
Arizona desert.

They would watch, mesmerized, confused and horrified, staring at
their screens, unable to look away, the pickup master writhing in agony and
fear. But also in ecstasy. Because it had been, without a doubt, his best
pickup ever.

It would also be Bad Daddy’s last post.

They said good-bye
at Phoenix Airport.

“Anywhere nice?” the Cardinal asked, already looking around, keen to
be off.

“Not sure, might go to Europe for a while,” she said.

“Venice is nice this time of year.”

Carol smiled. He was right. She’d spent enough time in Venice to
know when to go and when there were just too many tourists and too much rain.

“Well, I’ll be in touch,” he said.

A brief nod and he was off in the direction of the British Airways
lounge.

She looked down. In her hand was a ticket to New York. A few days in
the Big Apple?

No, she didn’t feel like it. Not the place to relax. There’s a
certain mind-set that you need to really enjoy New York. It’s a combination of
childlike enthusiasm and a selfish, no-nonsense kind of determination. Wherever
you decide to go, MOMA, the Village Vanguard, some tiny Ethiopian restaurant
that only the very most knowledgeable food nut would know about... Whatever you
do, you have to go there with a sort of irrepressible eagerness, a willingness
to ignore everything other than your own goals. Damn the traffic, the lines, the
prices; take no heed of other people, crowding you out, everyone noisy and
unapologetic. New York requires more than simply your presence. It demands your
acquiescence, your willing surrender.

The East Coast would have to wait. She thought about Brad, left in
the desert, squealing at his own sex video. That image of him was playing on
her mind. She knew he deserved it. She also knew that he wouldn’t die. With the
Cardinal, the punishment was always exactly proportionate to the crime. In a
day or two a call would be made to the local sheriff’s office, and sometime
later a very tired, frightened
Bad Daddy
would be led out into the
sunlight, wondering what the hell had just happened to him, and with no idea
how he was going to explain it to the smirking sheriff.

She let the idea go, sensing in herself a sudden physical lethargy. Was
it a dip in her blood sugar? Perhaps, or just the inevitable drop in spirits
following a job which, if she were to be honest, had been pure pleasure.

One way or the other, then, she didn’t feel like having fun. So she
turned and looked for the cabs, deciding to do what she always did when she
felt a little down and deflated: hole-up somewhere expensive and blow a couple
of grand on room service.

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” she said, twenty minutes later, having
asked for a smoking room and remembering that most five-star hotels are smoke-free
these days.

“Luggage?” the young girl on the desk asked.

“Just this,” Carol said, indicating a small titanium case beside her
on the floor. “And can you send up some cranberry juice and some chilled
Vodka—
Stolichnaya
 blue
if possible—plus seafood, crayfish, lobster, whatever you’ve got.”

The girl said nothing, tapping away dutifully at
her keyboard. Ms. Carol Schmidt had just booked the most expensive suite in the
place, never asked the price, and said she didn’t know how many days she’d be.
With this kind of customer, you don’t ask too many questions.

“OK, can you have that taken up,” she said. “I’m
going out front for a cigarette.”

“There’s a smoking area around the side of the main building,” the
receptionist added helpfully.

“Out of harm’s way!” Carol said to herself as she rummaged in her
purse for the pack of
Camels
that she always kept, but hardly ever
smoked.

Today was different, though. Today she needed one. Something was on
her mind, but she didn’t know what.

Back up in her room, the disgusting taste of the cigarette still in
her mouth, she fixed herself a vodka and cranberry juice and grabbed her iPad
Mini from her purse. She fiddled with the Wi-Fi, taking two or three goes to
type in the password correctly. It always annoyed her that you paid so much for
a room and they still charged you for Internet access.

Five-star hotels invariably gave you free Wi-Fi if you asked for it.
Problem was, she always forgot to ask. Not that it mattered. Money didn’t mean
very much to Carol. Although she knew that the minute she decided to stop
working for the Cardinal, access to this lifestyle and the infinite line of
credit that went with it would immediately disappear.

Slumping back on the bed she flicked through
CNN
and a couple
of other news sites. Several times she thought about logging onto Bad Daddy’s
site, watching him lying there suffering. But it didn’t appeal. For her the job
was over, and even now she was beginning to put him completely out of her mind,
just as she did with every other job that she and the Cardinal had done over
the past nine years.

“Nine?” she said to herself, realizing that in a couple of months
she would be twenty-eight, and that would make it not nine but
ten
years
since she’d left the convent in Mexico and joined the Cardinal in his work. A
decade, most of it spent waiting for her next assignment, sometimes months at a
time, visiting the greatest cities on Earth, and travelling in pampered luxury
wherever she went.

Yes, in a couple of months it would be a full ten years ago that she
had gone to New York, straight from Mexico City, on the very day of her eighteenth
birthday. And a day later, ensconced at the
Marriot
on Times Square, she
had lost her virginity to one of the warmest and most remarkable men she had
ever met.

Jason had been sweet, innocent, and bursting with desire for her.
She knew as soon as she saw him that he was the one. And when she felt him
slowly enter her for the first time, it had seemed so natural she wanted desperately
to tell him how perfect he was. Instead, she had simply held him close and
whispered
yes
. It didn’t mean
yes, this is good
; it meant,
yes,
this is right
,
this is absolutely everything it should be.

Over the years she’d kept in touch with Jason. He was a computer
programmer, fresh out of Brown when they met. After a few years chasing the
hi-tech dream in Silicon Valley, he’d become a technology teacher in an
Oklahoma high school. He was always glad to hear from her, if sometimes a
little distant, as if that chance meeting in New York was a world away, a dream
that would fade if he were not coaxed into remembering it again each time Carol
Schmidt mailed.

That’s all it had been, too. Just the occasional e-mail, no
meetings, no rekindling of the passion they had both felt in New York. He’d
been willing, right from the outset, but she’d gotten herself a job with the
Cardinal, and long-term relationships were not really compatible with her line
of work.

For ten years, then, she and Jason had never met again. But she knew
what he looked like. The tech department at his school had a gallery on its
website, and there are even a couple of videos of him on YouTube, taken a
couple years earlier when a solar-powered car made by his students had won
first prize at a county science fair.

In the videos he looked tired and a bit saggy, as if the years had
weighed down more heavily on his shoulders than had seemed possible back in New
York, when he had been a fresh-faced graduate with a glittering career ahead of
him. She knew that he’d had his disappointments, one of the many casualties of
the tech market that people never see when they read about the success stories.
In science classrooms the length and breadth of the country are men and women
who came close to making it big, guys like Jason who had an idea, who pitched
it, developed it, dreamed of the yachts and the helicopters... all for nothing.

“Screw it,” she said, clicking Skype open and waiting for its
familiar “pop” sound.

She did a search and found seven people with his name in Oklahoma. Instantly
she recognized his face.

Her finger hovered over his face a while, wondering whether this was
really fair. He had two kids, she knew, and a wife who rarely got much of a
mention in his light, jokey e-mails. Did Jason really need this, to see her
again, after all this time? And did she want to see him?

“What’s the worst that can happen?” she asked herself, pressing an
index finger into the screen and waiting for the ring tone.

“Oh, shit,” she said, as Skype told he was off-line.

She’d have to add him as a contact and ring him later.

Almost relieved, she tossed the iPad onto the pillow beside her and
stretched out on the bed. There was chilled lobster on a trolley close by, but
she didn’t fancy it yet. All she wanted to do was stare at the ceiling.

Almost without noticing, her mind had begun to relive those two
fantastic nights she spent with Jason in New York. Nights
and
days; the
two of them had been inseparable, dashing from museums to theatres and
restaurants, and leaping back into bed at every opportunity. He was
twenty-three, and seemed to know everything there was to know about art,
science, and politics; plus, he knew the location of every single place of
interest in the city. He also knew how to make a woman feel as if she was the
only person on the planet that he ever wanted to touch.

She lay right back and closed her eyes. She’d been young, inexperienced,
and he made her feel so fabulous. The feeling of having him inside her had been
crazy good, wonderful, and over the years that followed she’d had plenty of
evidence that all men were not like him, and that all sex would not live up to
the tingling, ecstatic peaks of pleasure she had felt there in the
Marriot
,
high above Times Square with her young, slim lover.

Now, almost out of a sense of nostalgia, she found her hand slipping
down beneath the waistband of her pants and resting gently against her pubic
hair. She recalled how he had kissed and toyed with it, softly and without any
rush, until she had yearned for him to go further, to tease her apart with his
lips and drink her up.

Before long she was stroking herself, letting her fingers get sticky
without them even moving inside her. She could stay like this for hours, toying
calmly with herself, the delicate masturbation no more than an
aide de
memoir
.

Then the sound of Skype’s ringtone suddenly filled her ears.

She turned onto her side and saw Jason’s photo.

He’d called her.

For a moment she paused. What was she going to say?
Hi Jason,
what a surprise! I was just jerking off over your memory!

Propping herself up on the bed, she ran a hand through her hair,
made herself half decent, and answered.

“Hi, Jason! Good to see you, at last!”

“Hiya!” Jason said. “Yeah, right... Where... I mean, how, where the fuck
are ya!”

Then the blurred image of him disappeared, replaced by what looked
like the ceiling of a bar, the image spinning. Clearly he’d dropped his tablet
or whatever device he was using.

A few seconds he picked it up again, staring hard into the screen. His
eyes were blue, just like they had been all those years ago. But now they were
massively blood shot, enough to make him seem like a vagrant. And the bags
beneath his eyes were ridiculous, so loose and voluminous he seemed fifty-three
rather than the thirty-three she knew him to be.

“Are you all right there, Jason?”

“What? Me?”

He looked around, as if trying to work out where he was. There were
bottles behind him, a bar it looked like, and a big, old-fashioned jukebox to one
side. A row of empty stools stood along the bar.

“I’m just...” he said, unsure of himself, “it’s, I mean, it’s that
just it’s... Dawn has the kids, and I... it’s school vacation. So...”

So you’re alone and shit-faced in a bar at six in the evening
, she refrained from saying.

“How are the kids?” she asked.

“Oh, they’re great. Don’t get to see ’em as much as I’d like, not
now...”

“Oh, I see.”

“Temporary thing. Couple of months, trial separation it’s called.
You mighta heard of it.”

“Yes, I have.”

“So, here I am, drinking a toast to Alex Strange. Hey!” he cried, as
if something just struck him as incredibly important. “You remember that guy,
don’t you? It was, ehm, y’know, in New York.”

The words seemed to shock them both, as if New York was some
unspeakable secret between them that he’d just blurted out.

“I remember him,” she said, almost trying to change the subject.
“Why? Has something happened?”

Jason shook his head as if he could hardly remember, as if the whole
thing had simply vanished from his mind.

“Jason? What happened to Alex Strange?”

“Ugh?”

Strange was a tech guy, she told herself. Hadn’t he been in the news
recently?

“Jason? What is it?”

Jason smiled. He seemed to gather his thoughts, but before he said
anything he gestured to the young man behind the bar to line him up another
beer.

“Strange Tech. Remember the name? He floats his company in a couple
mouths,” Jason said, as he waited for his glass to arrive, then held it up as
he spoke. “Strange Tech goes public in exactly eight weeks. And that bastard
becomes a billionaire over night.”