The Girl and the Genie (17 page)

Again, Emily was gaping at him as she could see the haughtiness that Jack had warned her about. As he stared back at her, his mouth twisted into a nasty sneer.

“Oh, and I finished mulling over your edit suggestions. All very interesting, but I think I’ll keep my book exactly as it is.”

“Why is that?” Emily asked, a coolness filling her head.

“Why?” Ethan’s sneer grew uglier. “You’ve got a cute ass on you, I’ll give you that, and at least you’re smart enough to realize how good my book is, I’ll give you that also. But come on, I went to Yale; I’m guessing you went to some state school. I think I’m a tad brighter than you, don’t you think? I think my judgment means a bit more than yours.”

“You’re right,” Emily said, her eyes narrowed to slits, her voice dripping ice water. “I went to Iowa State University. Yet here I am working as an editor for a major New York publisher, while you, a Yale graduate, are working for a supermarket.”

“From what I understand, you’re an associate editor. And I’m sure if I looked like you I would’ve gotten a job in publishing also. You wiggle your cute ass, perform some sexual favors for the senior editing staff, and there you go.”

Emily was too furious to sit there with him any longer. If she did she’d throw something at him, at the very least. She jumped from the blanket and walked off at a determined pace to get away from him so she could cool off. He made no effort to stop her.

After she had walked about a hundred yards, she took out her cell phone to see if she could hire a taxi to take her back to her motel. No cell phone signal. Just great. She was going to have to ride back with him. The thought of doing that made her skin crawl. And what made her more furious than anything else was how Jack had been right about all of it. Ethan was every bit the insufferable narcissist that Jack said he was.

Emily heard a car engine revving. It took several seconds for her to realize what that meant, and then she took off running, heading back to where the blanket had been. She got back just in time to see Ethan drive off. He had left her stranded there. She stood for a long moment not quite believing that he had actually done that. She kept telling herself that he was only being a sullen jerk throwing a tantrum and that any minute he’d turn around and pick her up. After that long moment had stretched into ten minutes, Emily accepted that he wasn’t coming back.

Emily almost summoned Jack then, but she didn’t want to have to tell him what had happened or have to admit how right he had been. Besides, Ethan had only driven a half hour to get to the lake. It couldn’t be more than fifteen miles to get back to her motel. If she started walking, at some point she’d either be able to pick up a cell phone signal or she’d find a store or be able to flag down another motorist. If she found herself in any danger she’d be able to summon Jack then. It never took more than a fraction of a second for him to appear once he was summoned.

Emily set off walking. After she came to the first fork in the road, she wasn’t exactly sure which way to go, but she knew they drove west to get to the lake, so she used the sun to head east. She had walked two miles when she heard the rumbling of motorcycles, and the noise was growing louder by the second. She came close to calling for Jack, but as she told herself, Jack was only a whisper away. That she just needed to stay calm. There was no reason to panic.

The motorcycles came up from behind her and quickly surrounded her. They weren’t really motorcycles as much as choppers, and the men driving them were large and brutish looking. The one who stopped less than a foot from her was larger than the others. Bald, horseshoe mustache, and thick arms that were covered with tattoos. Instead of a helmet he covered part of his bald head with a bandana.

He nodded to Emily. “Looks to me, Missy, like you’re lost,” he said in a relaxed drawl. Let me guess, you had a lover’s quarrel. Your boyfriend got pissed at something and not being the gentlemanly type left you here all by your lonesome.”

Choppers were in front and behind her. Another pulled up onto the other side of her. Even if she wanted to run she was boxed in and wouldn’t be able to. But, as she told herself, at any moment she could call for Jack, so there was no need to panic or get scared. Still, it was scary as hell.

She nodded glumly. “That’s about what happened,” she forced out, her voice little more than a squeak.

The biker laughed at that. “No need to be nervous, Missy,” he said in that same drawl. “We’re here to help any cute little damsel in distress. Hop on.”

Emily tried to smile. “No thank you. Motorcycles scare me to death.”

“That’s a shame,” the biker said, shaking his head sadly at her.

Before Emily realized what was happening, a biker from behind shoved a gag into her mouth, and then she was lifted and dumped onto the bald biker’s lap. Next her wrists and ankles were bound together. She desperately tried to call for Jack, but the gag kept her from getting any discernible words out. And trying to summon Jack with her thoughts, no matter how desperate they were, didn’t work.

Now was the time to panic.

Chapter 17

Emily was taken deep into the woods over mostly dirt roads. In her terror, the trip seemed to last for hours, but when they stopped at a desolate cabin the sun was still visible on the horizon so she knew it couldn’t have been more than a half hour since she was abducted.

The large biker with the horseshoe mustache who had taken her flung her over his shoulder as if she were little more than a sack of flour and carried her into the cabin. The other bikers followed behind, all of them joking and laughing loudly over how they were going to be spending their next few days. The inside of the cabin had a musty and dirty smell. Emily couldn’t see much with the way she was being carried, but she caught sight of crates stacked up against one of the walls and had the impression from the military labeling on them that these were guns stolen from an armory. She was carried into the cabin and dumped onto a lumpy cot so that she landed on her side.

Her blood felt like it had been replaced by ice water and her heart raced in her chest like a rabbit’s would when cornered by a pack of rabid wild dogs. She watched as the bikers passed around a vial of blue pills and joked and leered at her. One of them had broken out a case of beer and after they washed down these pills and swallowed down more of their beer they all moved closer to her, the expressions on their faces hardening with lust and violence. Emily panicked for a moment that she was going to pass out, but she fought to stay conscious. She needed to stay conscious.

All the bikers looked brutish, but a particularly ugly one with his face frozen in a hungry, wolfish stare reached down for Emily as if he was going to rip her clothes off. The large biker with the horseshoe mustache stopped him.

“Not yet,” he said. “It’s not time yet. It takes a little while for them pills to work and some of us ain’t ready yet. Won’t be fair if you wear her out before all of us are ready. Besides, I want to first have a talk with the little missy.”

The particularly ugly biker didn’t like that. “Grizz, I’m revving to go now. You can have your talk with her when I’m done. And shit, watching what I’m going to do to her might just get the rest of you in the mood all that much quicker.”

“Spud, what the fuck is the hurry? We got days to have our fun with her. Chill, okay?”

The ugly biker named Spud made a face as if he couldn’t care less about what Grizz was telling him, and he moved again toward Emily, but Grizz blocked him and pushed him back. For a moment it looked as if the two bikers were going to come to blows, but a flicker of fear showed in Spud’s eyes and he relented. Two of the other bikers who were laughing so hard their faces had turned red and looked like they might piss themselves, put their thick arms around Spud’s shoulders and edged him a few steps back. Grizz, who was grinning widely, turned back to Emily and sat down on the edge of the bed so he could lean down and study her more closely. He bent further down so their faces were less than a foot apart. His breath had a strong sour, rotten egg odor to it and the smell of it made Emily nauseous. It was far worse than any whiff she had ever caught from Winston’s breath.

“You sure are a tasty-looking thing,” Grizz noted in that same slow drawl that Emily had heard earlier, kind of like snake venom dripping. “I can’t blame my brother over there for being anxious to get started.”

Emily tried looking away from him, but he took hold of her chin and forced her to meet his eyes. “That type of attitude won’t do you any good, Missy,” he said, shaking his head sadly at her. “It’s a real shame you didn’t get on my bike when I offered you a ride. If you had, we could’ve had ourselves a little consensual party for a few days and you’d be leaving here afterward. Now, though, I just don’t know. It’s an awfully big woods out there to bury a little thing like you, but maybe if you act right, things still might work out okay.”

Emily didn’t want to let any of these bikers see her cry, but she couldn’t help it as a tear leaked from her left eye and crept down her cheek. Grizz used a thumb to smudge the tear against her skin, being rough about it.

“Missy, you don’t want to start crying now. Me, I’m what you call a gentle lover, but that ain’t true of some of my brothers. Spud for one, he gets off on making a lady cry. Ain’t that right, Spud?”

The ugly biker named Spud glared angrily in response. Grizz let loose a bark-like laugh and turned his attention back to Emily.

“Now that they know they can make you cry this easy, they’ll be working harder to do so.” Grizz let out an exaggeratedly disgusted sigh, as if he were disappointed in Emily. “I just don’t know about you, Missy, about whether you’re smart enough to play along. Let’s take that gag for example. I could leave it in your mouth for the next few days, and it would be awfully uncomfortable for you. But instead, I could take it out now. I’d like to do that since you got an awfully pretty mouth as I remember, and I’d like to put it to proper use. But I don’t want to do that and then have you start screaming. Not because it would help you any. Ain’t no one around to hear a little lady like you scream. But I’m prone to headaches, and if you were to start screaming I’d have to bust up your mouth awfully bad, and it wouldn’t be so pretty after that. So the question I got for you is can I take out that gag and have you behave yourself and only use that mouth the way I want you to?”

Emily nodded desperately. From behind Grizz, the biker named Spud grumbled that when it was his turn the gag would be put back in place. Two of the other bikers said the same. Grizz ignored them and removed the gag, his dirty, smelly fingers lingering along Emily’s lips. She resisted the urge to bite him, and as his hand pulled away from her mouth she whispered in a halting, cracking voice, “Jack, please save me.”

All of them were crowded around Emily enjoying the show, so none of them saw Jack as he appeared amidst a cloud of quickly dissipating blue smoke. If Grizz had seen the genie he wouldn’t have smiled sadly at Emily and told her that his name wasn’t Jack and asking to be saved wasn’t what he considered behaving herself. Emily saw Jack, though. Saw the way he stood surveying the scene, his jaw muscles tightly clenched, his lips pulled up slightly into a hard, grim smile, a fury raging brightly in his eyes. Emily broke out crying then.

“Now Missy, what did I tell you about crying?”

Jack spoke up then, asking Emily if she was hurt. He didn’t call her by her name, but by
Miss M
. Emily realized that he was doing that so that the bikers wouldn’t know her name. The bikers all turned around then. If they were surprised to see Jack there, they didn’t show it. Instead they all looked amused by the fact. They started moving slowly to surround Jack. Emily told Jack between sobs that they hadn’t hurt her badly yet.

Grizz said to Jack, “Boy, I don’t know where you came from, but you made a mistake of a lifetime coming here.”

Jack ignored him and asked Emily if she wished to be rescued. This caused Grizz and several of the other bikers to break out laughing as they continued to edge closer to him. A couple of them drained their beer bottles and held them by the neck as if they were clubs. Emily bit down hard on her gum to stop sobbing. She nodded bleakly to the genie.

“That will have to count as a wish, leaving you only four remaining,” Jack said.

“I understand.”

This was barely uttered by Emily in that same halting whisper. Jack nodded grimly. “Very well,” he said. The look in Jack’s eyes made Emily shudder as she understood what he was going to do. “Please don’t touch them,” she forced out. “I don’t think I could stand to be responsible for that. Even with them.”

“Are you sure,
Miss M.
? If there was ever a group of miscreants who deserved a demonstration of a thousand black mambas in action, I would have to believe that they would be it.”

“Please, Jack, no. Just take me away from here.”

“Very well,” Jack said, disappointment heavy in his voice. “I will take you away from here shortly, but first they must pay a price for what they did, and even more so for that they were going to do.”

“And what price would that be?” Grizz broke in, amusement shining in his eyes and a menacing smile tightening his lips.

“Simple,” Jack said, “You and the rest of your lads will be going away to prison for the rest of your lives.”

“And why would that be?”

“For starters, gun and drug charges. But once the police start investigating you more thoroughly, they’ll find more victims.” Jack made a face as if he found what he was going to say next distasteful. “For
Miss. M.’s
sake I will give all of you the opportunity to surrender until the police arrive. I’d rather that you didn’t so I can send you all to jail with broken bones and other injuries, which is the very least you deserve.”

“You’re one crazy muthafucka, I’ll give you that,” Grizz said, chuckling softly to himself. “And you’re also going to be a messed up one real soon.”

Grizz nodded to one of the bikers who had crept closer to Jack so that he was only a few feet to the left of the genie. This biker on seeing Grizz’s signal charged Jack swinging a beer bottle at the genie’s head. All at once a nightstick appeared in Jack’s hand, and in a flash he dropped into a low crouch while swinging out with the nightstick and catching the biker flush in the shins. The impact of the blow caused a sickening crunching noise as bones were broken, as well as flipping the biker head over heels and sending him crashing onto one of his brother bikers who had charged Jack from the other side. The biker with the broken shins started screaming. In a fluid cat-like motion, Jack dove at them, and while in midair he cracked the screaming biker on the side of the head to shut him up and in a blur of activity smacked the other biker twice with the nightstick—the first blow shattering the biker’s jaw, the second rendering him unconscious. Jack landed on his feet with a panther-like grace.