Red Hot Obsessions (175 page)

A Freakishly Good Head for Numbers

In the dark, dusty security booth, Rae sat on the swivel chair beside Jeff, the big black guy who had run security at the party when she had met Wulf. On the wall, eight monitors took the high-definition video feeds from the security cameras in all the play rooms and the silent, still night club. Empty tables dotted the balconies that hung over the dark dance floor. It must take hundreds of people to fill such a space. Maybe thousands.

Beside her, Jeff the Security Guy glowered at the monitors, watching each one in turn with stern, dark eyes.

Georgie and Lizzy had said that Jeff was nice and that being gruff was just part of his job, but Rae got the feeling that Jeff didn’t like her. It wasn’t like a psychic thing, like she was picking up telepathic hate vibes from him. It was more the way that he stared at the television screens on the wall, even the ones that showed empty rooms, rather than acknowledge her timid hello.

Her arms and legs were still shaking.

She was being ridiculous. Jim Bob Mulligan—who was her second or third cousin or great uncle once removed or something but she wasn’t sure because generation lines blurred in her family like a desert-wind twisted scrub brush—wasn’t even near her right now. She could see him on the monitor in one of the dungeon play rooms, bound spread-eagle with nylon rope to a St. Andrew’s cross, facing the metal X. He had cranked his head around and was silently raging at Wulf. A shiner on his left eye marred his chubby face.

Wulf jerked Jim Bob’s pants down around his ankles, stepped back, and idly flipped a whip near Jim Bob’s head. He had removed his suit coat and tie and rolled his shirt sleeves up again. His white shirt blazed in the darkness and sometimes strobed on the monitor when he moved too fast, like he was an avenging blond blur.

Jim Bob Mulligan’s arse looked like he was wearing horsehair pants.

Two burly men stood at parade rest on either side of her cousin and a step back. Their black fatigues reminded Rae of a paramilitary outfit rather than a security guard’s pseudo-police uniform. They were even wearing combat boots.

“Um, sir?” Rae asked Jeff the Security Guy, who was wearing a very wide, very large suit, not fatigues. A baby blue tie was knotted around his thick neck muscles below his chin and ears.

“Yes?” His voice was so deep that rumbled.

“Could you please turn on the sound in Play Room One?”

The security guy flicked a switch.

Through the speakers, they heard a whipcrack pop the air, and Rae pushed herself back in the chair. Mulligan’s enraged screaming didn’t falter each time the signal whip broke the sound barrier near his head.

Jim Bob Mulligan had tormented Rae while she was growing up, teasing her and knocking her off her bike because she didn’t have any older brothers to defend her. When he was fifteen and she was five, he had been riding his bike inside their grandmother’s house and blamed Rae for the muddy tire tracks and broken china. Rae had been crying too hard to defend herself, and her father’s spanking had been brutal.

Her cousin Jim Bob flailed against the ropes and screamed, “You can’t do this to me! I’m a paying client! I can do anything I want to these girls! And that bitch is my cousin!”

The whip cracked again, louder.

Wulf’s calm voice was so low that Rae could barely hear him on the security booth’s speakers. “You signed the contract, James. Poor behavior may be punished in any way that we see fit.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong! She did! She didn’t spank me like I wanted!”

“I don’t like rapists, James.” On the monitor, while they watched from above, Wulf reared back.

“Oh, no,” Rae said.

With one muscular cast of his arm, Wulf laid the whip across Mulligan’s bare ass.

Jim Bob Mulligan screamed more in fury than pain. “You can’t do this to me!”

Rae said to the security guy, “Jim Bob is my cousin.”

Over the speakers, Jim Bob screamed, “I didn’t sign your contract!”

Wulf laid another stripe on Mulligan’s ass.

The security guy beside Rae snorted. “Oh, he signed the contract, all right.” Jeff turned to Rae. “This is your cousin?”

“Yeah,” she said. “We’re not on good terms.”

“I got folks like that.” His voice seemed warmer.

Over the speaker, Mulligan yelled, “Son of a bitch! I’ll call the police! This is assault!”

She leaned over and plucked futilely on the security guy’s sleeve. “Could you please tell The Dom to stop? I don’t want this.”

Wulf’s mild voice with that faint Germanic accent sent shivers down Rae’s back as she remembered Nazi movies. He said, “You should have read that contract more closely.”

“Do you know who I am?” Jim Bob hollered. “I can have you arrested and this whole whorehouse closed down with one phone call!”

Over the booth’s speakers, Rae heard Wulf chuckle and say, “I doubt that.”

Rae patted the security guy’s arm to get his attention. “Please. The Dom needs to stop.
Please
tell him to stop. Jim Bob means it. There are a lot of police and politicians in our family. I don’t want you guys to get into trouble.”

The security guy looked at her and grinned. Maybe he didn’t hate her after all. “Don’t you worry. That pissant can’t do a damn thing. This place is all legit. The Boss has some seriously fancy lawyers, and I never met so many politicians since I’ve been working here.”

Rae shook her head. “He’s my cousin. I don’t want him to be beaten any more.” Family was family, even if it was Jim Bob.

The security guy snorted. “The Boss will decide how we’re going to handle him. He seems like a garden-variety jackass to me. The Boss will get through to him, given time.” He reclined in his oversized office chair. “You just watch the Boss do his work.”

Rae watched Wulf whip her cousin, and her hands clenched around the office chair’s arms. Every time Jim Bob said something obnoxious, belligerent, or threatening, Wulf flicked the whip and let him have it again.

Why didn’t Jim Bob just shut up?

“I’m going to go ask him to stop,” she said to the security guy.

The security guy’s jubilant grin crushed her hopes. “I wouldn’t bother The Boss while he’s working. He takes his job seriously.”

On the screen, Jim Bob squealed, “I’ll call my uncles! They’ll find your dead body out in the desert! We have connections with the—Ow! Stop that you asshole!”

“That’s it.” Rae stood and rushed out of the room.

She sprinted the hallways, looking for Play Room One. The Devilhouse’s twisted passages conspired against her. What kind of drunken architect designed this office space?

She slipped around a corner, skating on those high-heeled boots, and found the back hallway for the Play Rooms. The doors were labeled Five, then Four, and she turned on a burst of speed to reach the far end of the hallway.

The gothic door for Play Room One loomed just ahead. She slammed it open and dug her heels in to stop in the dungeonesque chamber. Her eyes widened, trying to see Wulf and Jim Bob in the darkness.

Wulf glanced up, his arm cocked to deliver another vicious blow to Jim Bob’s striped back. The cold expression in his blue eyes unnerved her.

Decorum,
she had to observe decorum and say this right. Her eyes were so wide that the corners hurt. “Um, Sir? May I beg a favor, Sir?”

“Of course.” Wulf unfurled his arm and lashed Jim Bob one more time. Her cousin howled like a redheaded werewolf.

Wulf strode over to her, and she held the door open for him to exit into the lobby area. After she dragged the heavy door shut behind them, Wulf stretched his whipping arm as if he had been exercising and asked, “Yes?”

“Please stop,” she pled. “Please don’t beat him any more.”

“Whyever not?”

“He really does know police and politicians, and he’s my cousin. Even if we don’t get along, I don’t want you to hurt him.”

“He was planning to rape you.”

“Oh, he would have stopped. It was just the shock, or something. And he didn’t actually rape me.”

“I do not like rapists.” His measured tone made that pronouncement all the more menacing.

“This’ll blow back on my family. Just don’t whip him any more.”

One of Wulf’s golden eyebrows rose.

Sure, he was skeptical, but Rae meant it. “Please.”

“All right. I’ll only speak to him.”

“Okay.”

“Please continue to watch from the security booth. I will defend any of my girls, but you,” he ran a finger under her jawline, sending shivers down the skin on her back, “you, I will never allow anything to happen to.”

Wulf walked back into the dungeon.

Rae trotted through the hallways back to the security booth. She trusted Wulf to keep his word, but she worried about what else he would say to Jim Bob.

Back in the swivel chair next to the Jeff the Security Guy, she watched the monitor for Play Room One, clutching her hands together.

Jim Bob was screaming at Wulf, “I’ll get you for this! My uncle is the mayor of Pirtleville, and you may not understand what that means because you’re some damned foreigner, but you’ll find out! You’ll find out!”

Wulf coiled the whip and placed it in the cleaning bin near the door. “James, I’ll be frank with you. You attempted to sexually assault one of my women.”

“She’s a bitch! She led me on! She said she wanted it! And she’s not just one of
your
women. She’s
my
cousin!”

Wulf raised his hand and continued in his nonchalant monotone. “We have video footage of that session. It was quite obvious that you were trying to rape her. Beyond that, the warehouses that your father left you, the ones at 593 D Street and 32 Bueno Gato Drive, are mortgaged for three times in excess of what they are worth, and you report only a small fraction of the exorbitant rents to your government for taxes. It seems to us that those extortionate rents from Mexican corporations conceal the true nature of the business that is conducted in those warehouses.”

“You don’t know anything! My uncle will shut you guys down!”

Rae’s fingers cramped on the chair’s arms. She asked Jeff, “How did The Dom know about Jim Bob’s warehouses?”

The security guy shrugged his massive shoulders. “Once The Boss reads something, he never forgets it.”

On the television screen, Wulf said to Rae’s cousin, “Again, you must stop making these uncivilized threats, or I shall be forced to return to our previous method of instruction.”

Jim Bob fell silent, and Rae exhaled.

“You will leave here,” Wulf told Jim Bob. “Your membership is terminated. Reagan Stone is under my protection. If you disclose these events to anyone, whether within your family or not, I will have the mortgage company call all three of your mortgages due at once and your questionable taxation practices will be examined, in depth, by your government. Do you understand?”

“Fuck you!” Jim Bob screamed.

“I’ll take that as an affirmative.” Wulf strolled over to where Jim Bob was bound spread-eagle to the X-cross. Wulf grasped Jim Bob’s jaw in his hand and forced him to look directly into his eyes.

Watching in the security booth, Rae leaned in to hear what Wulf said.

“Listen to me. Listen to me,” Wulf whispered, and his Germanic accent became guttural. “If you try to hurt her, I will utterly destroy you. I will take away everything that you own, and then I will come for you. Do you understand that?”

Jim Bob’s weak eyes were wide with shock, and he nodded.

Wulf released him by twitching Jim Bob’s face as if trying to flick dirt off. He seated himself on a wide chair and spoke to the black-clothed security guys standing beside the St. Andrew’s cross. “Lancaster, Jock, give him his clothes and show him out of the establishment.”

The two security men unwound the cords around Jim Bob’s arms and legs. When Jim Bob took a swing at one of them, the man twisted Jim Bob’s arm and frog-marched him out of the room. The other guard swiped a pile of clothes from the floor and followed. Jim Bob tripped on his leather pants, which were drooping around his ankles, and then Rae couldn’t see him on the monitor.

Wulf pulled his cell phone from his pants pocket.

Rae turned to ask a question, but Jeff the Security Guy’s malicious grin unnerved her. He said, “You think your cousin was screwed before? Watch this.” He twisted a dial on the board to increase the volume from Wulf’s dungeon.

Wulf held his cell phone up to his ear, and Rae watched through the security camera as if she were hovering on the ceiling of Play Room One.

Wulf said, “Mayor Harding. Your nephew, James Mulligan, the one you vouched for, attempted to rape one of my girls and threatened me with your influence.”

He paused, and his dry tone became derisive. “I found it less than humorous. I trust you will take care of the problem?”

After another moment, Wulf said, “Your membership remains in good standing then. Your appointment next week may proceed as scheduled.” He tapped the phone to hang it up.

In the booth, Rae turned to the security guy. “He has my uncle on speed-dial?”

“Nah. Scrolling through contacts slows him down. He memorizes every phone number he sees. All the girls. All our clients. All our vendors. He has a freakishly good head for numbers. By the way, I’m Jeff. Head of Security.”

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Rae. I’m new here.”

He chuckled. “Yeah. I know.”

Wulf’s voice came over the speakers, “Rae, may I see you in my office?”

“You better go,” Jeff said. “The Boss does not like it when people are late.”

Rae had to ask Jeff one more question, since he seemed to be warming up to her. “Do you know The Dom’s real name?”

“Nope. No one ‘round here does. And don’t go asking. He takes his privacy real seriously.”

“How seriously?” She wanted to know just how far that shiny shell extended.

Jeff glanced at the monitor as if Wulf might hear them through the screen. “After work, he has our security guys here drive him a ways or else follow him in his car, and then they pull over, and another big, black SUV driven by other security guys escorts him the rest of the way home, I assume. We never knew why he was so paranoid, but maybe getting shot as a kid will do that to you. You didn’t tell anyone ‘bout that, right?”