Justice for the Damned (5 page)

‘How do you know? Wait, don’t tell me. He’s got gentle eyes.’ There was a thick vein of sarcasm in Reece’s tone.

Irritation flashed in Staci’s gaze, but she suppressed it and said evenly, ‘No he hasn’t got gentle eyes. He’s got the eyes of a man who gets off on hurting people. I should know, I’ve seen the look in them as he’s beat the crap out of other girls. But I’ve never seen him lose control and go too far. After all, we’re not much use to him if we’re too badly hurt to work.’

Reece’s voice came tight and hard. ‘And what about you? Have you looked into his eyes as he’s beat the crap out of you?’

Staci knew better than to answer such a question. ‘Take it from me, Wayne’s the last person to be involved in Melinda’s disappearance. She was a good worker. And besides, he had a real thing for her. He treated her differently to the rest of us. He was always buying her clothes, shoes and other stuff. And he gave her as much free dope as she wanted. That’s why I know she hasn’t run off. She had it good with Wayne. Or at least as good as this kind of life gets.’

‘You say you were the last person to talk to Melinda. What did you talk about?’

Staci shrugged. ‘Nothing much, just the usual stuff. She was pissed at Wayne because he was making her work when she had a cold. It was raining, so business was a bit slow. But she was hoping one of her regulars would show up.’

‘Who?’

‘She didn’t say.’

‘And did this regular show up?’

‘I dunno. A punter picked me up and when I got back she was gone.’

Again, Reece couldn’t stop a slight wince from tugging at his face. An image of Staci in the front seat of a car, legs splayed, some faceless stranger grinding against her, rose out of a dark hole in his mind. He thrust it back down. ‘Do you know the names of any of Melinda’s punters?’

‘I know some of their first names. But they’re probably not their real names.’

‘You’d recognise their faces, though.’

‘Yes. Well, only the regulars.’

‘OK, so what I need you to do is if you see one of them take a photo on your phone. And if they’re in a car, get a photo of their reg too.’

Staci frowned uneasily. It went against every instinct she had to secretly photograph punters. There was Wayne to consider too. If he saw her doing it she’d be in big-time trouble. She gave a sudden determined nod. ‘I’ll do it. For Melinda I’ll do it.’

‘Earlier on you said,’ Reece read aloud from his notepad, ‘“some sick fuck who gets his kicks out of hurting prostitutes has taken her”. Assuming you’re right, what makes you think Melinda’s abductor was a man?’

Staci’s mouth twisted into a caustic smile. ‘Aren’t they always?’

There was little arguing with that rhetorical statement. Reece felt an illogical little stab of guilt, as if he was somehow partly to blame for the actions of his gender as a whole. ‘I think that’s enough to go on for now.’ He pocketed his notepad and finished dressing. Staci followed him downstairs to the front door.

‘Promise me you’ll call as soon as you find anything out.’ All the edge was gone from her voice. She simply sounded desperately concerned.

‘I will, but don’t get your hopes up. I probably won’t have much to tell you. And just in case – God forbid – you’re right, promise me you’ll take extra care out there.’

‘I always do, babe.’

Reece stooped and kissed Staci lingeringly. When he drew away, he licked his lips and wiped his hand across them as if he’d tasted something delicious yet toxic. He quickly turned and left.

Melinda jerked awake from a cold and sweaty nightmare to an even worse reality. Her gaze dazedly travelled the tomb-like room’s concrete ceiling and windowless walls, which were faintly illuminated by a red light glowing from a head-height horizontal slit in a metal door. There was a spray of rusty-red stains on the adjacent walls. She knew it was blood because her captor had taken great relish in telling her it was. There were stains on the mattress she was lying on too. Blood, sweat and semen. Her blood, her sweat, her captor’s semen. She scratched at the sores that had developed under the steel collar locked around her neck. Initially she’d tried to ignore the itching, but as time had passed there seemed less and less point in enduring it. She’d come to accept that she was never getting out of this place, so what did it matter if her scratching left scars? A chain ran from the collar to a pulley in the ceiling, then to a bolt in the wall. She had just enough slack to walk to the end of the mattress, where there was a bucket for pissing and shitting in. Not that she had much desire or strength left for walking. In the hours after she’d been abducted, almost all she’d thought about was escaping. But as hours had turned into what seemed like days and weeks – she’d quickly lost track of time – her thoughts had turned from escaping to dying.

Sooner or later she was going to be killed. That much was obvious from the films she’d been forced to watch of other women being tortured. In them, her captor pushed grotesquely large dildos into the sexual orifices of his victims. He attached crocodile clips wired up to some electrical source outside the room to their nipples. He sliced off ragged flaps of their skin with surgical instruments. And the more they sobbed, screamed and pleaded for mercy, the more aroused he became.
This is what’s going to happen to you, bitch.
That was what he’d told her, and he’d been as good as his words.

Melinda drew her legs up to her chest, hugging her arms around her knees. The movement sent blades of pain shooting from her bruised and torn genitals, through her stomach into her chest. A whimper rose up her throat. She forced it back down with a swallow. She was done whimpering. She was done sobbing, screaming and pleading. Her captor gorged on fear like a leech does blood. Well, she would give him no more of it. Not even if it provoked the twisted fuck into killing her. If this was the only life she had left, she was better off dead. She’d considered suicide. She was pretty sure she could rig some way to hang herself with the chain and collar. But she wasn’t desperate enough to attempt it. Not yet.

Melinda’s heart lurched with sickening force at the sound of multiple bolts being drawn back. Her head jerked up as the metal door scraped open. Her captor entered the room. As usual, he was wearing a black leather gimp suit with peepholes for his eyes and nipples, and a zip at his mouth and groin. Only the zip at his mouth was currently open. Like a great red slug, his tongue emerged through it, running slowly back and forth. The skintight suit hugged the contours of his broad shoulders, thick arms, slightly paunchy belly, and spindly legs that seemed to be attached to the wrong torso. Almost femininely large brown nipples jutted through the peepholes. In another context, Melinda might have found the sight comical, even pathetic. But here in this airless dungeon it made her bladder spasm with fear.

Melinda assumed her captor wore the mask because he got a kick out of it. She’d seen his face on the night she was abducted, so there wasn’t any point in concealing it – that is, unless he and the man who’d brought her here were two different people. The thought had crossed her mind, especially as her captor switched between several accents and voices. Sometimes his accent was broad Yorkshire, other times it was as posh as Prince Charles. Sometimes his voice was slow and almost gutturally deep, other times it was fast and almost childishly high-pitched. She would have become convinced that more than one man was involved in her abduction, if it hadn’t been for two things. Firstly, the tone of the voice didn’t always match up with the same accent. Secondly, the eyes behind the mask never changed. They were always the same, like cold little piss holes in the snow. She’d come to the conclusion that the point of the mask and the different voices was simply to fuck with her head, to keep her in a state of confusion. It was all part of the game. And the name of the game was control. Layer by layer, he was stripping away her identity, her dignity, her sanity. Already she could barely remember who she’d been before she was abducted. Soon all that would be left of her was an empty husk with no will of its own.

‘Hello, my sweet little whore.’ Today his voice was excited, high-pitched, well-spoken. ‘How are we feeling?’

Melinda stared at the gimp. Her gaze wasn’t confrontational, it wasn’t scared. It was simply blank. But inside she was shaking so badly it took all of her willpower to keep her teeth from chattering.
No more
, she kept mentally repeating to herself.
No fucking more!

The gimp held up a long yellow rod with two black prongs at its end. He pressed a button and electricity crackled between the prongs. ‘You know the drill. On your face. Hands behind your back. Move or even flinch and I’ll give you a taste of my rod.’ The gimp gave a strange little chuckle, as if he’d made a joke.

Melinda rolled obediently onto her front, biting back a wince as the collar chafed her sores. She held herself perfectly still as her captor pulled away the thin, rough blanket that covered her scrawny naked form and clicked metal cuffs on her wrists and ankles, squeezing them painfully tight against her bruised skin. ‘Good girl,’ he breathed in her ear, rolling her back over. ‘I’ve brought some new toys for us to play with.’ He opened a holdall and withdrew an object that was familiar to Melinda from S&M sessions with punters. It was a stainless steel device about seven inches long with a small wheel at one end. A series of evenly spaced short, sharp spikes radiated from the wheel. ‘Have you seen one of these before? Answer with a nod or a shake of your head.’

Melinda nodded.

The gimp gave a click in his throat, annoyed his toy was nothing new to her. ‘Do you know what it’s called?’

She shook her head.

‘It’s a neurological wheel. Originally it was used to test nerve reactions as it was rolled across the skin, like so.’ The gimp pushed the pinwheel lightly over Melinda’s stomach, producing a sharp, prickling sensation.

Again, she held herself as motionless as a dead thing, allowing no flicker of expression to cross her features.

‘Nowadays it’s more commonly used as a sex toy,’ continued the gimp. ‘Of course, most people only use it to stimulate the flesh. They don’t press down hard enough to puncture it. But where’s the fun in that?’ He ran the wheel across Melinda’s stomach again, this time with enough force to leave a trail of bloody full stops.

She gave no sign of having felt anything. The gimp raked the wheel across her breasts and nipples several times, pushing the pins in deeper with every pass he made. Still nothing. Not even the faintest of moans. He scrutinised her face for any sign of pain. There was none. She stared at the ceiling as if seeing through it to some other place – a place where no pain could reach her. He flipped her onto her front again, and attacked the backs of her thighs and her buttocks, going at it so viciously that soon clumps of ploughed up flesh and skin clogged the pinwheel. He stopped suddenly and hurled the device aside as if it disgusted him.

‘Fucking bitch. Fucking whore.’ His slightly breathless voice quivered not with pleasure but with anger. He grabbed the chain close to the wall and, grunting with effort, hauled down on it until Melinda’s toes dangled a couple of inches above the mattress.

The pain of the pins piercing and tearing Melinda’s flesh had been agonising. But it was nothing compared to the pain of being hanged. She felt as if her neck was stretching like a rubber band, and as if her head was expanding like a balloon. Her tongue protruded. Her eyes bulged. Bloated veins wormed their way across her forehead and temples. But even worse than the pain was the fear. The room was swimming before her eyes. Blackness was seeping in from the edges of her vision. Soon, she knew, she would lose consciousness, maybe never to regain it. Every instinct, every thought screamed at her to beg her captor to stop. But somehow, calling up some reserve of strength she never knew she possessed, she resisted and resisted, until darkness came crashing down on her. And suddenly she was no longer scared, and an overwhelming feeling that everything was going to be fine spread warmly through her.

As rapidly as it had come down, the darkness receded. Air swelled Melinda’s lungs in a huge gulping gasp. She woke up to the realisation that she was lying in an awkward heap on the mattress. Her eyes roamed the room like those of a lost little child.
Where am I?
she wondered.
How did I get here?
Then the gimp mask loomed into view and she remembered and all the fear came rushing back.

‘That’s it,’ said her captor, his voice tauntingly soft. ‘Breathe, breathe.’

Melinda sucked in another lungful of the fetid air. She barely had a chance to exhale before the chain jerked taut again. This time unconsciousness was almost instantaneous. She had a strange feeling that time was moving past her blurringly fast. A jolt hit her like a hammer. Streams of blood-red light split the darkness as her pupils rolled back into view. It seemed to her that she was waking from a long sleep. Again came the thought,
Where am I? What’s going on?
A figure was straddling her, hands clasped one on top of the other, compressing her chest.

‘Welcome back,’ said the gimp. ‘I thought I’d lost you for a moment there.’

He gave Melinda a few seconds to get some oxygen back into her body, which was trembling now no matter how hard she tried to control it. Then he reached for the chain again. She quickly lost count of how many times he choked her out and revived her over the next few minutes or hours or whatever it was. All she knew was that at the end of it she was still alive. And she was in pain beyond bearing. Despite her best efforts, tears streamed silently down her cheeks.

‘Well, well,’ said her captor. He didn’t sound angry any more. He sounded amused and pleased. ‘You’ve got more about you than I thought.’ He rubbed his leather-encased hands together, like someone eagerly anticipating a challenge. He left the room, returning after a moment with a bottle of water, a towel and some other items. He tilted the bottle against Melinda’s lips. She drank, but coughed most of the water back up her raw, swollen throat.