Peter Jensen - The blackmailed mother book II

"Martin? Roger here. Heard from your detective?"

"Christ yes, I have," the insidious sales vice-president replied in a show of concern. "It's just as we feared, I'm afraid. Lon… Lonnie is… is…" He paused as if choking on the news.

"Oh God," Carmel moaned, playing his part now, "Oh God, what can I do? My home, my family, my lovely Lonnie…"

"Do? Why Roger, I know what I'm going to do," Oliss said. "I'm going back. Tonight, on the supper flight that leaves at five. I've already booked a reservation for myself. I… I didn't know where you were, so I took a chance you might feel the same way I do and want to come along. I have a ticket in your name, too."

"Yes, yes, I want to come along," Carmel groaned into the receiver. "I want to… I want to see the detective… and my wife…"

"Good, good," Oliss said, hard pressed to temper the gloating in his anxious voice. "But where the hell have you been all afternoon?"

"Drinking," Carmel confessed humbly. "Trying to drown my aching heart and soul. One bar after another until I lost track of the time, the number of drinks, even the place I'm in now."

"Well, just make sure you get back here in time to catch the plane, Roger," Oliss said sympathetically. "I don't blame you for behaving like that; I'm sitting here doing the same, drinking."

"Sure, Oliss. We have to stick together, I can see that. I'll be at the motel in a little while, after another drink."

After hanging up, Carmel glanced briefly at Kim, who had gotten Saunders to his wavering feet and was cleaning him off, all the time telling him the story he had to stick to so that Zeigler wouldn't get his boys after him as well. The photographer was nodding, casting balefully malignant eyes at Carmel, who couldn't have cared less.

The long-distance operator connected Carmel with Skopos' vitriolic and ruthlessly overbearing president, Jerome Quarren. Carmel told him after introductions that he was coming back to Rapid City on a personal matter that was most urgent. And may last into the next week.

"If you, your wife, or your daughter aren't dead or dying, it's more important that you stay there in Kirsten and finish the project," Quarren rasped. "I don't pay a man to shirk his duty."

"I'm not asking permission, Jerome," Carmel said levelly. "I'm telling you that I am returning."

"That, young man," Quarren said coldly, "smacks of insubordination and a high-handed, un-cooperative attitude. I would reconsider your rash judgment, if I were you."

"Sorry, but my mind is made up." Carmel was getting hot under the collar, if he'd been wearing a collar or anything else, and he felt more of his already unleashed anger rising at the misanthropy his employer was showing. He'd never realized how kowtowed, how meekly under Quarren's thumb he'd been in his former all-too trusting and humbly honorable skin. Now he was resenting the blustering domineering as Quarren retorted with a stinging charge of disloyalty and lack of company dedication. He let his superior rant on, fleetingly remembering himself hurrying into the office early yesterday morning, torn between the insistent poles of his wife's needs and his company's demands, and how he had wavered with the woeful rationale that some how he had to serve two masters at the same time and why couldn't either of them take that into consideration. Thanks to the even more selfish taking by Oliss and Zeigler, Carmel was no longer their slave; no, by God, from now on he was going to serve only one master, himself, Number One – and they were soon going to realize that, all of them, Quarren included.

"Don't you threaten me with being fired, Jerome," he suddenly snapped into the phone, catching the drift of the president's last few implication-laden sentences. "Believe me, you give me much more static about my returning and I'll quit. And I'll take my invention with me."

"Haw!" Quarren scoffed. "I can see that generous promotion has fattened your head, Carmel. You can leave anytime and I could replace you with the floor sweeper, but if you try to take your invention, I'll sue you for breaking the contract you signed with me. Or don't you remember the part about giving me exclusive control?"

Why that dirty son-of-a-bitch, Carmel thought. He's no better than Zeigler, only he is working behind a very thin skin of legality. He grinned with cruel satisfaction. We'll see about that. Quarren wasn't aware that the miniskopos was only the forerunner of a whole series of developments which Carmel had been envisioning while working on the prototype. Up to this moment he had firmly decided to hand over the developments as he got around to them, but the retiring manner of the previous Roger Carmel had at least been good for one thing: it had provided an indirect veil of secrecy which effectively prevented anyone else from following the trail he was blazing should he leave Skopos. Yeah, he vowed, we'll see about Mr. Jerome Quarren after Oliss and Zeigler are dealt with.

Later… he glanced at his watch and saw that he'd spent too much time arguing with Quarren as it was. Quarren didn't matter right now, and there were other things to do. "Jerome," he said in a perfectly calm tone, "Jerome, go piss up a rope." He slammed the receiver down in the middle of an outraged squawk.

He turned to Kim, who stood in the middle of the room, still downcast and broken, her face tearfully helpless. She said in a quivering voice: "Saunders is gone. He'll… he'll go along with us."

"He has no choice, lover," Carmel said, crossing to her. Kim's firm, taut breasts trembled provocatively, and as he let his eyes roam over her hour-glass satin form and down to the enticing triangle of pubic hair with its coyly pink hint of vaginal lips, the newfound virility in his own loins began to stir once more. He stopped and allowed a full, pregnant minute of silence to pass as he salaciously openly admired her soft, white and bronze skin, and he licked his lips with the saliva his regenerating passions had provided. His penis began to perk and pulsate with the blood of his salacious thoughts, and he let it grow unhindered and unashamed until it was stiff and hard in its glistening erectness in front of his now aching scrotum.

Kim gasped, her eyes glued to the excited, lust responsive rigidity of his cock, a tingle of her own lascivious desires began to sweep through her blood, and she suddenly realized she wanted this naked, animal-like man standing spread-legged and proud before her to crush her with the heat and intensity of his lurid, unquenching sexual emotions. She wanted him to fuck her again and again… in any way he wanted to… as she had never wanted any man before.

"There's a couple of hours before I have to get back to my motel," Carmel said, now moving to where his prick grazed her rippling belly. "And I think that we were going to do something before we were so crudely interrupted."

"Yesss," she moaned, melting in his engulfing, muscular arms.

"Let's go back in your bedroom and I'll suck that sweet, tender cunt of yours like I promised. Hell, no use wasting a perfectly good opportunity like this."

He placed a hand on her white, smooth buttocks and together they returned to their carnal arena of unbridled lusts.

The small dressing room above Club Royale's second floor stage was misnomered; it was almost exclusively used for undressing. The haggard miserable wife of Roger Carmel, Lonnie, and his similarly black-haired young daughter, Jennifer, stood huddled in shivering fear, icy tendrils of horror touching their spines and making their white, firm flesh tremble convulsively…

The ride from Stan Lubin's house had been a kaleidoscope of nightmares, and both mother and daughter had sat dazed, unable to speak to each other for the long, interminable minute it had taken to drive to the rear entrance of the club. Sam Zeigler had sat hunched over the steering wheel, chuckling lewdly from time to time, occasionally taunting the pretty wife and her teen-age child with obscene comments as to what was going to happen to them.