Hell In High Heels --- A Jane Delacroix erotic novel: Sex, Sin, and Slaughter in Southern California (7 page)

               "Hello, American woman," Hun Sen said.

               He narrowed his eyes and inhaled until the cherry of the cigarette glowed red. He seemed deeply content. He smiled, revealing those crooked, amber teeth and released smoke through his nostrils.

               "I'm going to be asking you questions, but not all at once. Before we can get to matters of information we have to deal with those of punishment. Let me indicate to you that some people, probably not you though, would find it ironic that you chose to infiltrate my confidence pretending to be a whore. The irony being that, now that I know you're not who you claimed to be, I'm going to turn you over to my men to use just like the prostitute you claimed to be."

               He inhaled a lungful of smoke and began pacing back and forth, his lips rubbery around the soggy butt. He stopped, not looking at her now. He pulled a pearl handled switchblade from the pocket of his black tuxedo pants. He held it up like a Magician presenting some artifact to his audience.

               His thumb pressed the shiny metal study and the knife made a greasy
click
as it popped open, reveling a five inch blade. The harsh yellow illumination of the bulb glinted off the 440 surgical steel.

               Slowly he lifted his arm and pointed at the brooding figure of Boupha. The squat man swished the cane back and forth. It whistled through the air like a saber.

               Jane squeezed her eyes tightly shut. She was afraid she would throw up and, with the ball gag in place, choke on her own vomit. Hun Sen moved to the side of her. She could feel him looming next to her, despite that she couldn't help but jump when she felt the fat spider of his hand on her back.

               "In my country, indeed throughout the Asia’s, caning is a time honored and well established form of civic punishment. A dedicated and accomplished martial artist, who I assure you Boupha is, can flay the flesh from bone. He can lay the cane along the stroke line time and time again, never missing, until the skin splits, muscles unravel and bones are laid bare."

               She felt the cold length of the knife slid down her flesh under the tattered remains of her evening dress. She felt him twist the blade and then jerk once. Fabric split as he cut the last of her clothing away. She jerked her head up in outrage when his free hand began to caress the curve of her buttock.

               Rude fingers found the folds of her sex and pushed their way along the seam. She began to thrash against her bonds, shaking her head no and trying to shout. She was tied fast and could barely budge, her cries of protest were inarticulate mewlings.

               "That's it!" he hissed.

               Rough fingers snagged her hair and snatched her head back. She felt the opium warlord press his face against her cheek, his fetid breath blowing in her ear.

               "Cry for me," he whispered. His tongue lathed the side of her face like a jackal licking gristle clean from a bone. "Boupha!" he ordered.

               The cane whistled through the air. There was a sound like a slap across a face. The pain was blinding, white hot in its intensity. She tried to scream but the gag made her choke on the sound. Hun Sen's saliva rolled down her cheeks in sticky streams as he pressed his face into hers, as if he were trying to taste her agony.

               Again the cane whistled. Blood painted the floor and wine racks on the back stroke. Hun Sen had been true to his word; Boupha was more than capable of putting the cane in exactly the same spot with each stroke. She kept feeling the reverberations of her screams echoing back down her throat.

               All around her crude, evil men laughed crude, evil laughs. Hun Sen stood, hand still knotted in Jane's hair. He pressed her face against his crotch. "Eventually I'll start asking you why you're here, what you're trying to find. But for now?" He snapped her head back and forth. "For now I'm having too much fun to even care."

              David Sten woke up.

               Concern for Jane was immediate and he struggled to sit up. He was in the backseat of an automobile, hands cuffed behind him. His body hurt from the beating Javacovitch had metered out to him and from where the crazy Cambodian bitch had attacked him.

               He realized he was in the back of a prowl car driven by Sergeant Clark with Captain Gleason riding in the passenger seat. The lights on the boulevard glinted and shone with all the promises of fame and wealth that they always had. Somewhere behind him, in the Hollywood Hills, one of the bravest people he'd ever known was maybe dead and most certainly suffering at the hands of bad men.

               "Please, Captain," he begged. "Please, Jane Delacroix is back there, she's in danger!"

               Gleason spun, face red, his beefy hand came up and a he pointed an accusatory finger at the homicide detective.

              "If that's true, Sten--and I have no reason whatsoever to believe you--then it's your own goddamn fault!" he yelled. "The LAPD is not a vigilante force! We do not break the law to enforce the law, we adhere to rules, and last time I checked, whores aren’t cops.

              “Now I've got every senior policy maker from the police commissioner to the goddamn State Department telling me this little yellow bastard is off limits and the only thing I got on the other side is a rogue cop and a big tittied private escort with wild stories!" He lowered his hand and glared at Sten. "It's over, Sten," he said. "It's over. Whatever bullshit heroics you
thought
you were up to are now completely, utterly
over
. Full stop, fuck you very much. And another thing is over too, your career."

               Gleason turned around and glared out through the windshield. The whole incident left a bad taste in his mouth. Cops fighting cops, military and police pointing guns at each other, burning Bel Air mansions and strange looking foreigners arrogant enough to give him orders. This whole thing stunk.

               Sten leaned back in his seat. His head sagged forward on a neck covered in deep scratches. He let his breath out in a painful rush, fighting back a bitter sob. He closed his eyes tightly and blinked back frustrated tears. He wasn't a man given to crying and he'd be damned if he'd do it in front of a pompous ass like Gleason.

               But Jane was going to die hard and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

               Behind them a dark Packard pulled out of the line of traffic, raced forward with engine roaring, and slid into place right on the black-and-white's bumper. Clark snapped his head up, eyes cutting to the rear view mirror.

               "Who's this asshole?" he growled.

               Suddenly a hand appeared out the driver's window and slapped a light bubble on the rooftop. It began spinning like a red spotlight as a siren cut through the distance between the two vehicles.

               "What the hell!" Gleason snarled, turning in the seat.

               The prowl car's radio suddenly cracked to life. "Captain Gleason, pull over."

               Gleason snatched the handset up and broke squelch. "Who the hell is this!"

               "This is an open channel," the voice replied. "Pullover, I have information for you."

               Sten suddenly sat straight up in his seat. He recognized that voice, he felt hope. But he was also confused; what was
he
doing on a police radio?

               "You better not be jerking me off or I'll have you writing tickets in Watts!"

               Sten thought Gleason and Javacovitch must have gone to the same class on threats.

               "Just pullover, Captain."

               "Do it," Gleason ordered, throwing the radio handset down. "I really want to meet the cocky sonofabitch with balls enough to pull
me
over."

               Clark snapped the wheel to the side and brought the prowl car to an abrupt stop along the sidewalk in front of a seedy bar called Joey’s Tavern. Gleason threw open his door and swung his bulk out while Clark got out from behind the wheel, his hand on the butt of his holstered weapon.

               Sten saw who it was coming up to the car and he thought he'd been given a second chance. When he'd first agreed to work with the man, and to bring Jane in with him, he'd understood the operation called for them both to be expendable. It wasn't until everything went south that he really understood just how chilling the word "expendable" could be.

               The man was tall, looking fit in his charcoal gray suit coat, face angular with a comma shaped scar tilting his mouth up into a permanent sneer. Beside him, just as tall, just as fit, but wearing spectacles like a English professor, was a second man Sten didn't realize.

               Clark had been cruising in the California heat with his window rolled down and Sten had little trouble overhearing the conversation.

               "Who the fuck are you buddy?" Clark demanded.

               "You kiss your mother with that mouth?" the scarred man asked.

               "No, but I kiss
your
mother with it."

               The guy turned to Gleason, "all your uniforms Neanderthals, or just the ones working as your personal driver?"

               "The job doesn't require the finer social graces," Gleason said. "Mostly it just involves kicking the ass of whichever ass I say to kick."

               "Law enforcement in the provinces is so...provincial," the man in glasses said, voice dry as a Napa Valley chardonnay.

               Sten turned, looking out through the back window to watch the scene. It hadn't gotten off to the best start so far.

               "Who are you two clowns?" Gleason demanded.

               The scarred man jerked a thumb at his partner, "this is Special Agent Clive Makins."

               The man produced FBI ID and showed it to Gleason, "I'm with the Office of Counter-Intelligence."

               "Christ," Clark said. "There are so many damn spooks running around you'd think we was in a haunted house."

               The scarred man smiled, "clever."

               "Yeah well, that's him," Gleason said. "Who are you?"

               "I'm here as a liaison between the State Department and the FBI. I'm with the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. My name is Joseph Dawson."

               "Never heard of 'em," Gleason shot back.

               "We prefer it that way. At this point all you have to understand is that we're a part of the US intelligence community and we provide data specifically to the diplomats of the State Department."

               "Bully for you. What's going on? I just got the jolly jack off from the Police Commish because of State and the DIA. What the hell are you two all about?"

               "Detective Sten and his associate, Miss Delacroix, were working with us on a certain matter. We were attempting to acquire certain, let's say, source material, without our counterparts in other government agencies finding out." Makins said.

               "Source material?"

               "Yes. Specifically the name of a French children's book read by a Vietnamese refugee girl from a Catholic orphanage on the Cambodian border."

               "Uh, come again?"

               "The book is a key, the source material to a cipher used by one Nguyen Sinh Cung as a way to coordinate activities for what we believe is a major upcoming offensive to possibly start on Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

               "Who?"

               "Ho Chi Minh."

               "What!"

               "I assure you that it's true," Makins said.

               "How did a book some little girl in a refugee camp read become the backbone to a Viet Cong code?" Gleason demanded.

               Dawson smiled. "I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you."

               "What?"

               "He means it's classified," Makin said.

               "What's this got to do with Sten and that hot piece of ass for hire, Jane Delacroix?" Clark demanded.

               "Miss Delacroix's capability for resourcefulness is well established. When we brought in Detective Sten and he first suggested her we read her FBI file. It was most impressive."

               "And just how did you come to choose Sten for this extra-curricular activity? In my own back-goddamn-yard?"

               "Easy," Dawson smiled. "We were in the Marines together. Little place called the Chosin Reservoir. Once you're Frozen Chosin, you're all the reliable tough guy anyone needs."

               Gleason turned and glared over his shoulder, shooting Sten a disgusted look. Sten smiled back, grinning wide to show white, even teeth. "Hey coach, put me in," he said.

               "This is a touching Jarhead love story, but what exactly am I supposed to do about it?"