It was a scorching late July day. Alex Wakefield had been planning on spending it at the beach ogling all the tourist chicks in their skimpy little bikinis. Maybe getting lucky in the evening. They were all dirty cows, especially when they were drunk.
Then the call from Teddy Demme had come in.
“Something’s come up, lads. I’m going to need you for the next twenty-four hours.”
Lads was Alex Wakefield and Jimmy Garton. They’d been mates since school. Or rather, since they’d both been kicked out of school. Currently they rented a flat on Greene Street. It was a shithole, but it was only temporary. Alex and Jimmy were lads on the make, and that was down to knowing people like Teddy Demme.
Jimmy wasn’t happy about the call.
“Aw fuck, I was supposed to be meeting Gemma this afternoon.”
“You’ll have to put it off,” Alex said.
“She goes back home tomorrow.”
“Tough.”
“Two weeks I’ve been working on her. Two weeks I’ve been trying to get in her knickers.”
Didn’t matter. If Teddy Demme put in a call, you dropped everything and did what you were told.
Jimmy was still grumbling about it while they waited for Teddy to come and pick them up.
“She would have put out for sure. That’s two weeks down the shitter.”
Alex didn’t really see the appeal. Gemma had a nice ass, but the rest was nothing to write home about. Nasty snobbish attitude as well, like most of the bitches that came over from the well-to-do suburbs. Thought they were better than everyone else.
Not that those girls were that much better. They wouldn’t be holidaying in Spackton-on-Sea if they were. Gemma’s father was probably a small-town lawyer. Thought he was a big shit with his own law practise, while all the real big shots in the big city thought he was just as much a hick as his daughter thought Alex was.
Alex didn’t think Gemma would put out. She’d just turned eighteen and was one of those former ‘good girls’ relishing the effect her looks and body had on all the boys. It was all a game to her. She’d prick-tease Jimmy all evening, then make up some excuse right at the end.
It wouldn’t work. Jimmy had a contingency plan for girls like Gemma, a little special something to slip in her drink. Alex knew his mate. Jimmy was gonna smash those doors in tonight one way or another.
Or would have, if Teddy Demme hadn’t put in the call.
Lucky for Little Miss Pricktease.
Probably lucky for Jimmy as well.
Alex kept telling him it was harder and harder to pull that shit nowadays with the feminazis running everything. Sooner or later he’d get caught, and then it’d be a lifetime of him getting his doors smashed in by big black cock in prison. Too much of a risk in Alex’s eyes. If you were that desperate for minge there was always The Pink Orchid on Queen Street.
Alex had visited on occasion, when watching all the dirty cows walk up and down the promenade in their itsy-bitsy bikinis had built up too much to be relieved by a furious early-evening wank.
He’d always hated himself afterwards.
But what could you do? He had big jug ears and his aunt said he had a face that looked like it had been whacked by a shovel. She wasn’t wrong.
That wouldn’t hold him back forever. Look at Teddy Demme. The bloke looked like the Thing and the Elephant Man had had a baby, and he probably had tons of minge throwing themselves at his feet. That was because he had power, and power was everything.
Which was why, when someone like Teddy Demme called, you fucking dropped everything. Because that was how you got to work up the ranks until, one day, you were the one making the phone calls.
Jimmy bitched, but he knew it too. Gemma was just another trampy tourist tart. Plenty more where she came from.
Teddy showed up in a big Beemer at just after quarter past three.
“Get in the back, lads,” he said.
Alex opened the back door and he and Jimmy slid along the wide back seat. The interior of the Beemer smelt of leather polish and stale cigarettes. Teddy hadn’t switched the aircon on, so it was almost unbearably stifling in the July heat.
Teddy was a craggy presence behind the wheel. His hair was snowy-white and patchy. He was the oldest of old firm. He’d been doing this shit since before Alex had been a little sperm swimming in his daddy’s testicles. Despite his advancing years he still had that aura of old-school hardness, the kind that said he was still capable of beating your ass with a knuckleduster if you even thought about giving him shit.
Usually.
He seemed less composed today. Jittery even.
“What’s the job, guv?” Alex asked.
“We’ll do whatever you need,” Jimmy said. “If you need someone whacked, just give us the shooters and… pow!”
Jimmy made a gun with his hand and mimed shooting through the windscreen.
Teddy’s craggy face cracked in a scowl.
“There ain’t gonna be any shooting,” he said.
Alex thought he heard him mutter “wouldn’t do any good anyway” under his breath.
“I need you to babysit something for the next twenty-four hours. Nothing major. Should be a piece of cake. I’ll tell you more when we get there.”
Teddy took them out along Aquamarine Parade, the main high street that ran parallel to the promenade. Given the day was a scorcher, the tourists were out in force, and being tourists, kept walking out into the street with no care for the traffic trying to get through. Teddy mostly kept ice-cool until a particularly stupid family stopped in the middle of the road to gawp at something out to sea. Teddy hammered on the horn. The father, a jerk in a tank top who was in no way as muscular as he believed himself to be, thought about starting something. Then he saw Teddy glowering at him from the driver’s seat and thought better of it.
Smarter than he looks, Alex thought.
Once they left the main promenade the roads were largely unimpeded and the Beemer was able to glide smoothly up the road to Windrush Heights. Windrush Heights was the posh part of Spackton-on-Sea. All the posh wankers lived there. Or rather, owned houses there. People didn’t live in Windrush Heights. These were second homes for rich wankers to visit when they fancied a break from the city.
Windrush Heights overlooked Spackton-on-Sea and the rest of the bay. Exactly how the posh wankers wanted it. Teddy drove the Beemer right up to the biggest and fanciest house of them all—a two-storey villa situated on the highest point of the estate.
“Fuck me, it’s the swankiest pile in wankerville,” Jimmy said.
Alex got out and shielded his eyes from the bright sunshine. Seagulls whirled overhead. It was a fancy house, and so white it hurt the eyes to look at in the sunlight. Just around the left side of the building Alex saw the edge of a swimming pool. To the right side of the house the road terminated at a cliff edge. A set of rock steps led down to the beach below. The beach was currently carpeted in semi-naked tourists.
Prime spot for a party house, Alex thought.
“This is Mr Herbert’s summer house,” Teddy said. “I trust you know who Mr Herbert is.”
Alex nodded.
Everyone in the firm knew who Mr Herbert was. He was the firm. Mr Herbert was the guv’nor’s guv’nor. He was to Teddy what Teddy was to Alex and Jimmy.
They were going to do a job for Mr Herbert. That was fucking big. And also fucking scary. If you fucked up a job for Mr Herbert, you didn’t get sent on your way with a pink slip, you got a shiv in the kidneys down a dark alley.
“Good,” Teddy said. “Then you know what’ll happen if you nick or break anything.”
He walked up to the front door.
“Fuck, we’re working for Mr Herbert,” he whispered to Jimmy. “You know what that means?”
Jimmy was more interested in the house.
“Will you look at this gaff,” he said. “Imagine bringing a girl back to here. You’d shag her for sure.”
Teddy paused before opening the front door.
“I won’t lie to you, lads. If you’d asked me yesterday to pick someone for this job, your names would have been a long way down the list. But yesterday is yesterday, and today I ain’t got the manpower to be choosy.”
That explained something Alex had been wondering about. He’d never seen Teddy Demme behind the wheel before. It was always someone else. Where was Big Bri? Was there something else going down?
“Understand perfectly, guv,” Jimmy said.
“We’ll step up,” Alex said. “You can rely on us.”
“Good. Because this is Mr Herbert’s house, and if you fuck up Mr Herbert’s house, it’s my ass as well as yours.”
He opened the front door and Alex and Jimmy followed him inside. The curtains were still drawn and it took a short while for Alex’s eyes to adjust to the gloom after the blinding sunshine outside. The downstairs area was spread out and luxurious. The empty bottles and full ashtrays spoke of a recent party. With the curtains drawn, the air felt stale and stifling in the afternoon heat. There was also a strange smell in the air—a mix of perfume and something Alex couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“Phew, smells like an orgy in here,” Jimmy said.
Yeah, that was it, Alex thought. A sex smell. Jimmy would recognise it, of course. His friend was a pussy in some regards, but he was also a pussy magnet. He never seemed to have any problems getting the girls… even if some of them needed a few chemical inducements to go all the way.
“Voices down, lads,” Teddy said.
He led them up the stairs and along a hallway to one of the guest bedrooms. He seemed cautious and on-edge the whole way, as if they were creeping up to perform a hit on someone. It was only when they reached the back bedroom that he seemed to relax.
“In here,” he said.
It looked like a guest bedroom, but as with the rest of the house, the room was large and spacious. Alex didn’t have much opportunity to check it out thoroughly. His attention was drawn to the bed. Or rather, who was on it.
There was a young woman on the bed. She was on her knees and trussed up like a Christmas turkey with her arms behind her back. And really tied up. Whoever had done it wasn’t taking any chances. There were ropes all over her, some tight enough to dig into her exposed flesh, of which there was a lot as she was dressed in some kind of skimpy Halloween devil girl costume that was little more than leather straps and a red bikini. She had a red ball gag in her mouth. Her eyes were fearful as she glanced at the men entering the room.
A kidnapping, was Alex’s first thought. Teddy had nabbed a rich socialite or someone’s stupid slut daughter, and needed Alex and Jimmy to watch over her. This was bigger than the low-level head-cracking and drug-dealing Alex and Jimmy were usually asked to do. Alex again wondered if there was something else going down, and that was the reason why Big Bri and the others weren’t around.
The girl was pretty hot, Alex thought. Late teens or early twenties with flawless, sun-bronzed skin. The way she was all tied up was pretty kinky as well. Maybe that’s how Teddy had got her. The rich girls were always the dirtiest sluts in Alex’s experience. Thought she’d signed up for some kinky bondage games and bam!, time to put in a call to the bank of Mum and Dad.
Alex reckoned that bank was loaded. The girl’s red devil costume was way fancier than the usual trash you could get on Aquamarine Parade. She had fairly realistic looking horns, dainty little bat wings and a thick devil’s tail. They looked good enough to be proper movie prosthetics.
Wait. Did that wing just twitch.
Jimmy noticed it too. “Is that a costume?” he asked.
“No,” Teddy replied, flat and simple.
Alex stopped ogling the girl on the bed and turned to Teddy with a face full of shock.
“Then she’s…?”
“…something you’re better off not knowing about,” Teddy finished for him. “Trust me, lads. You don’t want to go digging here. You’ll only end up burying yourselves.”
Nah, it had to be a wind-up, Alex thought, looking at the girl on the bed.
“Don’t concern yourselves with who or what she is. I need you to make sure she stays here until…”
Teddy was interrupted by his phone going off in his pocket. He pulled it out and checked the screen.
“Hold on, lads. I have to take this.”
He moved to the door.
“Do not touch or talk to it.” He pointed to the girl on the bed before leaving the room to answer the call.
Alex and Jimmy, being curious, moved to the door to surreptitiously eavesdrop. Teddy had moved off down the corridor, but not so far away they couldn’t hear his side of the conversation.
“It’s subdued, for now.”
A pause.
“No, it was not fucking easy. But it’s done.”
A longer pause.
“Mr Herbert’s idiot son-in-law. I reckon he summoned it to bring a little extra spice to the party.”
A craggy chuckle from Teddy.
“Yeah, they got a little more spice than they were expecting.”
Another pause.
“Yeah, Mr Herbert has been informed. I don’t think he liked the little shit all that much anyway.”
Another craggy chuckle, but cut off as if the person on the other end wasn’t in a joking mood.
“No, I don’t know how he got hold of the book, or even knew about it. Must have grabbed it from Mr Herbert’s library.”
A pause.
“Yeah, it’s been retrieved. I’m on the way to return it.”
Teddy turned away and his voice became harder to discern. They missed most of what he said next.
“…got some people in the house.”
Teddy turned back and could be heard again.
“Yeah, they’re reliable. You don’t have anything to worry about.”
Alex and Jimmy turned to each other with broad smiles and gleaming eyes. Teddy Demme thought they were ‘reliable’.
Teddy ended the call and walked back to the door. Alex and Jimmy stopped staring through the crack in the doorway and jumped back to their original positions.
“Okay, lads,” Teddy said. “There’s a specialist on the way over from Germany. He gets in to Gatwick at 9am tomorrow. I’ll be collecting him from the airport and bringing him straight here. While I’m gone, I need you to babysit the house until I get back. Piece of cake, you’re thinking, right. It will be, providing you follow the rules.”
Teddy got stern then, holding up his finger like a teacher. Except, unlike every teacher that had tried to bring discipline to Alex and Jimmy, they respected him enough to pay attention.
“You don’t leave the house. You don’t let anyone in the house other than me. And most importantly. Do not mess with the thing on the bed. Do not touch it. Do not talk to it. Make sure at least one of you is in this room, keeping an eye on it, at all times. And if one of you has to leave the room, make it quick. Don’t leave your mate alone with her… it… for too long.
“There’s beer and food in the fridge, enough to keep you going for the night. If you do what I say, you’ll be alright. The hard part’s been done. You just have to see it through ’til morning.”
Teddy left them a key and walked out of the house. They heard tyres crunch on gravel as the Beemer drove off. They were left alone in the room with the tied-up girl.
“This is kinda fucked up,” Jimmy said, breaking the silence.
“Yeah,” Alex said.
There was another pause while they stared at the girl on the bed.
“Who’d you reckon she is?” Jimmy asked.
Alex shrugged. “No idea.”
“Teddy was just yanking our chain with that not-a-costume thing, right?” Jimmy said. “I mean, it is a costume, right?”
The wings and tail moved with the girl’s breathing. They also moved, slightly, on their own.
“Yeah, gotta be just a costume,” Alex said.
“Teddy trying to scare us so we don’t mess with her,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah,” Alex said.
She was kinda hot, and—tied up like she was—completely helpless. That might be too tempting for men of low morality. Stupid men of low morality. Teddy would kick their ass to London and back if they interfered with her.
“Did Teddy seem kinda off to you?” Alex asked. “Like he was rattled or something.”
“Something big must have gone down,” Jimmy said. “You ever seen Teddy drive before? Where’s Big Bri? He wouldn’t have called for us unless some major shit had hit the fan somewhere else.”
“Best to do as Teddy said and don’t go digging,” Alex said.
“Yeah.”
They pulled up a couple of chairs and sat with their backs to the wall. They watched the bound girl in silence. She didn’t do much, on account of being all trussed up like a Christmas turkey. She glanced a couple of times in their direction with big wet eyes. She stopped doing that when she realized they were neither going to free her or assault her.
They sat and stared at the girl while the minutes ticked away. After about an hour of nothing, the strangeness started to wear off. There was no storm raging outside. Nobody had come to the house. The girl on the bed was… just a girl tied up on the bed. They were just carrying out a job for Teddy—keeping an eye on a kidnapped woman. That in itself was unusual, but it was firm-job unusual rather than unusual unusual.
Jimmy in particular started to get antsy. He’d never been all that patient to begin with. He told Alex he needed to go to the bathroom, but Alex reckoned that was just an excuse to go and nose around the other rooms.
That suspicion was borne out as Jimmy returned after ten minutes with a an excited, “Look what I found.”
Then, before Alex could react, bonked him on the head with a rubbery object.
Alex snatched it from him and then recoiled in disgust when he realized he’d wrapped his hand around a giant rubber cock. Jimmy was doubled up with laughter.
“What the fuck?” Alex said, looking down at the big pink dildo. It must be nearly a foot in length.
Jimmy picked it up and gave it a waggle. The swollen bellend bobbed back and forth.
“Found it in one of the bedrooms,” he said with a broad grin. “You wouldn’t believe the other shit in there. Whoever was here was into some real pervy shit.”
With the dildo still bobbing away in his hand, he looked over at the girl on the bed.
“Do you reckon they were planning to use it on her, or maybe have her use it on them?”
The girl looked at the giant sex toy in Jimmy’s hands and her eyes widened.
“Don’t worry, love,” Jimmy said. “We ain’t pervs.”
“Makes you wonder what was going on last night,” Alex said.
“Why don’t I check it out?” Jimmy said. “Downstairs that is. We never got a good look when Teddy brought us in. Didn’t he say there were some beers in the fridge? My throat is parched.”
Alex’s throat was feeling a little dry as well. It was a hot day and the stifling atmosphere in the house was starting to get to him.
“Grab a couple for me,” he said. “But remember what Teddy said. Don’t be too long.”
Jimmy was gone for too long. Alex didn’t notice at first. In truth, he was happy for Jimmy to be out of the room. That left Alex alone to look at the girl, and Alex was starting to like looking at the girl. The more he looked at her, the more he realized just how hot she was.
Alex tended to bump into two types of girl.
The first were the trampy tourist sluts. They thought they were hot shit, but for the most part they were pretty ordinary on the eye. There was always something imperfect about their features—a too-big nose, an extra roll of puppy fat around the waist, breasts a cup-size too small. They got attention from the sex-starved boys around them and thought that made them goddesses. As bitchy and irritating as it made them, they still had a bit of class about them, enough to just about make up for their imperfections and bad attitudes.
Then you had the type of girl that worked in the sleazy strip clubs down Slagbury Road. Some of them had absolutely killer bodies, but were as dirty as fuck. So dirty you felt like you needed to take your eyeballs out and give them a good washing afterwards. Most of them were fucked up… on drugs, or a dumpster full of mental problems.
The girl on the bed seemed to be the best of both—killer body, but still with a hint of class about her. It was also pretty kinky seeing her all tied up like that. Tied up and helpless. Alex could do anything he wanted with her, anything at all.