The Wrangler: The only thing standing between the beautiful kidnapped heiress and death was -- The Wrangler. (2 page)

...and suddenly Christine's ears were filled with a crackling, roaring noise that drowned out all other noises. She could probably have made out a gunshot or a shout OK through it -- it wasn't THAT loud -- but it definitely would have reduced ordinary conversation to meaningless bits and jumbles.

She was, for all practical purposes, rendered deaf.

Christine also did not see the Wrangler placing some tiny bits of paper next to the on-off controls and the volume controls of the DVD player that was playing white noise. She wouldn't have understood why he was doing it, anyway.

Then Christine felt something that made her mmph in alarm and protest -- her clothes being pulled at. Worse yet, they were being pulled off. But not in the right way. Far too easily. Christine had dressed casually -- jeans cutoffs, a halter top, panties and sandals. Bound as she was, the T-shirt, bra, panties and jeans should have been really difficult to pull off. Instead she was just feeling a moment's pressure on the item, then it would slide right off her, as if it had been cut ... off. Which was exactly what was happening.

In a minute or two Christine was stark naked, and like the drooling, there wasn't a thing she could do about it. Being stark naked and utterly helpless among strange men was a lot more frightening than drooling.

At least she knew now. From the moment they'd grabbed her, she had been wondering if they were going to rape her. Now she knew. They were.

And when she felt a body sliding atop hers, she tensed up for the brutality she was sure would come next.

It didn't happen. While she was treated roughly, there was no rape. Instead, her arms first freed and then were tied together behind her back in a very complex manner.

She thought of struggling to escape when her arms were freed, but her arms were so cramped from her long ride in the trunk that she could hardly move them.

The new position in which her arms were bound was much less painful -- each wrist was bound to its opposite forearm behind her back, with another rope encircling her upper arms behind her back. She did not understand why her upper arms had to be bound until later, when she tried to work the ropes binding her arms together loose. Then she discovered that the arm binds prevented her from loosening the ropes around her wrists by working her arms back and forth. With her upper arms tied together, she couldn't pull them any farther apart, and the way her wrists were tied to her forearms near her elbows prevented her from pushing her arms closer together.

It was really simple, really elegant and really effective, and frightening for those reasons. She had to believe she was the captive of people who really, really knew what they were doing.

The X thing was still cuffed to her ankles. Her captor managed that next. She felt her ankles being uncuffed. Because her ankles had been released from the bonds securing them to her wrists when her hands were bound with rope, her legs were less cramped, and Christine made some show of resisting, but a casual blow from her captor set her head ringing once again and she allowed her feet to be shackled together. There was a short length of chain between them, enough to permit her to walk if she took small steps.

There was a reason for that, she discovered when the Wrangler pulled her to her feet and gave her shoulder a tiny shove.

As she walked with tiny steps, naked, bound and unable to see, it occurred to Christine that she had been kidnapped for sexual reasons, not financial reasons, and that what she was doing now might be the whole point of her kidnapping. Certainly, her present state was very fetish-y, though there was a certain lack of stockings, high heels, corsets and such she'd seen in fetish-y fashion spreads.

She was led to a tiny room and forced to sit on a very low, tiny porcelain seat, and the moment she felt it make contact with her butt, she knew why she was there.

Her captor said nothing, but she did hear a door shut. She was alone in the dark and able to do her business. She was also pretty sure that when the door opened, she'd better have her business done, or she wouldn't get another chance.

She did her business. She didn't have any way to clean up after herself, and she felt vaguely ashamed about that, although it was not her fault her arms were tied behind her back.

The Wrangler didn't think it was her fault either when he entered the bathroom door a few minutes later (he'd opened it wide after closing it so he could keep an eye on Christine). He didn't really want to watch her pee -- wasn't his thing. But he wasn't a Wrangler because he let things like that bother him. She wasn't going to sneak off anywhere. Not that there was anywhere to sneak off to.

There was no place for Christine to go to, but that didn't really matter. It was the Wrangler's job to see that she didn't go there, anyway.

So he wiped Christine's butt for her after she went to the bathroom. He'd done it before for various captives. He didn't like doing it, but he didn't like being around captives who smelled like pee or shit.

Of course, he could have left his captives enough freedom to clean themselves. But the Wrangler had over the years developed a rep as a guy who saw to it that captives did not escape, did not cry out for help, did not talk members of the crew into doing things they shouldn't, or not doing things they should do.

That's why he got the calls for the big money jobs, like this one, where there was enough money to be had that the Man (or Woman) running the job could afford to pay for the very best help.

So he wiped her butt. For $250,000 he'd have done a lot more than wipe it.

Christine didn't care for the feel of strange hands on her body but she did appreciate being cleaned. And there was nothing sexual about the way she was being handled. It was all very prosaic.

The place they'd chosen as a hideout was a summer cabin in a popular vacation resort area on the Altamaha River. Near the coast the whole river was lined with vacation "cabins" ranging from something close to a mansion to something close to a shack. This particular trailer was fairly typical -- a nicely appointed double wide just a stone's throw from the river. Most of all, though, it was isolated -- there were trailers like it in lots every acre or so along the river. But the lush south Georgia vegetation formed an impenetrable screen around the trailer -- you couldn't see it from the road, or from the winding path that led from the river.

Best of all, from the Wrangler's point of view, the place was filled with tourists on vacation at this time of year. Unless they made some special attempt to attract attention to themselves, they would not be noticed.

And with the drunken carryings-on that went on some nights with these "fishing parties" that rented such cabins, it would take some effort to attract attention to themselves.

And ultimately, if negotiations didn't work out, well, it was a short walk to the riverbank and at night no one would see a weighted bundle silently slipped into the water, and with any luck, the body might not float for months and might not be discovered if it did. Or it could be eaten by the alligators that were common in the southern reaches of the Altamaha River, and never discovered.

But nobody expected things to go south on the negotiation end. The Man had done a thorough job of setting this one up. In California, south Florida and the Northeast, the kidnapping business had become risky -- all the targets left were hard targets indeed and the cops moved fast and hard on a case. Ever since the robot crash, as people called the economic stagnation caused by massive employment that was attendant on the rise of automation and roboticization of the labor markets, crime had been one of the few growth areas of the economy, and like many other Third World countries, America had discovered there was a certain justice in kidnapping the children of the rich, and the rich themselves, to make money.

But the Man had discovered there was a community of wealthy people in coastal Georgia who were still somewhat insulated from the rise in kidnappings. The area around Savannah had some VERY wealthy enclaves, primarily wealthy retirees from the northeast who found the beauty and grace of the city, combined with its very un-Southern tolerance of diversity, very attractive for themselves and their money.

In the last few years, the cultural backwardness of the area, especially with regard to the kidnapping of rich people and their family members, had made the area a real magnet for the One Percent whose wealth grew like topsy even as the rest of America went into an economic tailspin.

The Man had figured that this might make people in Savannah a little sloppy, and he'd gone to Savannah and spent some time hanging out in a hotel room across from a popular liquor store, peering out the window through some very nice binoculars, collecting tag numbers.

The tag numbers he routed to the Hacker, who was paid to pull up names and addresses associated with those tags. He wasn't in on the final cut, he didn't even know what the job was for, he just got very nice money for doing what was for him very easy work.

It was a very dull couple of weeks for the Man, but he figured sooner or later somebody's careless wife, lover, child or self would have made a habit of making secretive runs to the liquor store. Sure enough, he had half a dozen prospects after two weeks. And the Gengineering prospect had been the wealthiest of the lot.

The Man was smart, a good planner. He'd taken some photos of the driver of the car secretly with a very high-powered digital camera and compared it with some photos he'd been able to trace from Barnard College's Epsilon Delta sorority website, which gave him a positive ID on Christine Willock.

With that, he'd been able to recruit the Agent, the Driver, the Wrangler and the Cleaner. The terms -- $1 million for the Man, $250,000 each for the other four. Each of them did not really contribute equally to the project -- it could be argued the Cleaner's job was most important to all of them -- he was the one who made sure they didn't leave any evidence around for the forensics types -- but they were being paid for risk not specifically for the work they did.

Each of them "contributed" $10,000 of their cut to the local rep of the Dixie Mafia as a gesture of "respect," i.e, they respected the Dixie Mafia's inclination to kill people who conducted big jobs on their turf without getting their blessing first. At first, the Wrangler thought it was a lot to pay for all the nothing they were getting from the Dixie Mafia in return, but then he had to admit that the information about this resort "cabin" had been excellent. The Wrangler had done jobs out West where he'd felt way too exposed with all that naked desert all around him.

The Wrangler led Christine to the bed after getting her out of the bathroom. He gave her a casual shove that sent her sprawling atop it. Then he casually strapped her ankles into a pair of cuffs he had already tied to the foot of the bed.

The knot he'd used to tie them was a tautline hitch. After he had the cuffs on her ankles her removed the shackles holding her legs together. Then he pulled the loop formed by the tautline hitch open, effectively shortening the ropes that tied her ankles, forcing her legs into a wide spreadeagle. When her legs were spread so wide that it was just to the point of becoming uncomfortable, he stopped.

Lastly, he took a leash and looped it through a hole he'd drilled in the headboard of the bed. He clipped it to a ring set at the base of the hood covering Christine's head and adjusted the leash until it had just a little give -- not enough to choke Christine or even cause her any discomfort, unless she tried to make any sort of significant change in her position.

Then the Wrangler stood there and just looked at Christine for a moment. He wasn't gloating, or enjoying the view (well, he enjoyed the view, it just wasn't why he was looking) so much as he was making a visual inspection to make sure he had her bound properly.

She was. There was no way for her to escape from her bonds or even to move very much. She was naked, with her legs spread wide apart. This would psychologically reinforce her sense of vulnerability. Keeping your subject as fearful and intimidated as possible was the best way to ensure that they didn't try to escape. Keeping her legs spread wide would keep her mind on the possibility of being raped. It would make her want to escape more, but she would want to escape anyway -- adding fuel to that fire didn't matter much either way.

The Wrangler was pretty sure she was going to get raped anyway. She was very attractive and there was no reason not to rape her. The Wrangler considered his primary job to be keeping himself and the crew out of jail by preventing escapes, with a secondary duty to keep the kidnapee alive by preventing him or her from hearing or seeing anything they shouldn't (thus necessitating their death).

Keeping their cherries intact was not his concern. With some of the crews he'd worked with, keeping victims alive long enough to be transferred was a tough challenge. Killing the kidnapee was a very appealing move to a lot of crews. It was actually a bad move, in the Wrangler's opinion. It ensured a death sentence if things went south, and more to the point, it made the crew sloppy. They tended to think of the victim as a corpse from the moment of capture on. This sometimes led to escapes and rescues. very bad outcomes for any kidnapping. And disposing of the body was sometimes quite a bitch, and all too likely to generate clues.

Keeping them alive and returning them as promised was the smart move, in the Wrangler's opinion. If you were careful with physical evidence, it was the very best way to dispose of a body. And it was good for business -- the families and businesses of victims were a lot more likely to cough up the cash without any tricks if they knew there was a very good chance that doing so would get their kidnapee back alive and unharmed.

It was all a matter of logic and biz to the Wrangler. Some of the crews had thought him soft because of it but everybody liked the smooth way things tended to work when he was part of the crew, so they overlooked it. That and his rep. He'd wiped out an entire crew about ten years ago, when they'd tried to frame him. They thought because he liked bondage they could set him up as a nutjob kidnapper. It was a good idea, except for being an obvious one. The Wrangler smelled the set-up early on and at an appropriate moment, when no one else was around, put a slug through the ringleader's skull. Then he announced to the rest of the gang that he'd spotted the setup and killed their chief. He was all for letting bygones be bygones, and he figured that the crew would be, too, since they were a pick-up crew and not tight with the boss. But somebody drew on him, probably figuring the Wrangler was going to do them all, and the rest drew, too. When the bullets stopped flying the Wrangler had a slug in his shoulder and his thigh. Everybody else was lying on the ground with holes in considerably more damaging places. They were not all dead, though, so the Wrangler limped about the room briefly and fired a few rounds into the ones that were still twitching and/or making noises, and then they were all dead.