Sabotage
Authors: Dale Wiley
To Mary, Sara, and Matt, who fill my life every day with adventure and love.
Sabotage
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 Dale Wiley
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher, except where permitted by law.
ISBN: 978-1-944109-04-2 (print)
ISBN: 978-1-944109-05-9 (ebook)
Published by Vesuvian Books
www.vesuvianbooks.com
To Mary, Sara, and Matt, who fill my life every day with adventure and love.
To Candice and Mackenzie, for friendship beyond compare.
Other Books by Dale Wiley
The Intern
Kissing Persuasive Lips
Coming Soon
Southern Gothic
The Jefferson Bible
T
he money, all forty thousand dollars, was lined up on the counter when Seth got there.
It might as well have been a million to Seth. He was used to big deals but that was when the economy was good, and people threw money around for fun. He did too, back then. Then everything changed, and the money people, even in Vegas, went into their holes and stopped sharing. This was important and different and better. And it came at the right time, too.
The deal worked like this: he got to leave with half the cash—twenty thousand dollars—right then. He rented a safe-deposit box to keep it in; that was the first time he had been in a bank in years. Yes, this was risky, but he got to leave with that unthinkable amount of money this morning. He would spend one hour on a plane, and then he was done—pretty much, anyway. And the rest of the money? His before nightfall.
He stood on the thirty-fourth floor of the Trump Tower, one of the newer and more impressive addresses in Las Vegas. It was seven a.m. The sky was a warm yellow and promised heat, like almost every day in Vegas, but he didn’t get to see it much, not like this anyway. He couldn’t remember when he had last been awake at this hour of the morning or, at least, when he had woken up at this time. In a town like Vegas, you often went down when the sun came up. Normally, he was either rolling in about now or sleeping off the after-effects of a long night. But an early morning was what the job required, and Seth desperately needed this.
Seth had been to this apartment several times before. He was initially wary of his benefactor’s strange behavior—aloof and put-on, far from the passionate pawing of his other suitors—but he began to understand. He felt sure he was hired because he looked so much like the man who paid him so well to come and visit. It was uncanny. His own skin was a shade darker than his doppelganger, but both men were handsome, around six feet tall, dark complexion, and had dark hair with light eyes. Twice on his visits, the doorman smiled at him as if he were the building’s resident. It took some getting used to, to sit across from yourself and talk, but Seth got used to things very quickly.
Seth was an escort, a plaything. He liked his job most of the time, but it led him into odd circumstances. Men paying to suck his toes. Men wanting to cut his hair. He still wasn’t fully sure what to make of the quiet man who brought him here to his apartment. Most other men desired Seth’s body, wanted to devour him, to come out of the closet in Vegas before stepping back in and heading home, or to add him to their strange Vegas menagerie—not Yankee. He told him he just wanted companionship and conversation, just like the ad on Seth’s website said—no sex and no toe-sucking. Seth wondered if Yankee liked the idea of talking to himself, given their similarity in appearance.
Yankee’s apartment, where they always met, was big and somewhat bland, looking and feeling more like a nice, big hotel suite than a real place where someone lived. Most of the men who lived in Vegas and invited him to their places loved to show off expansive and well-decorated homes, with Rothko’s, Hockney’s, and other tasteful paintings. The rest were festive and overdone palaces straight out of a Fellini film. Yankee’s place felt like the junior suite at the nicest hotel in town but nothing more. It featured maid service and a kitchen that looked like no one ever cooked there. Seth walked by the kitchen every time he walked in, and he always took a longing look inside. Seth, who was a good and thoughtful cook, hated to see such a wonderful space wasted by someone who didn’t appreciate or have time for it. He wondered how much time Yankee actually spent here.
After the third visit, when Yankee said he knew him well enough, he asked Seth if he would be interested in a big job—not just a thousand dollars here and there but a score. Yankee told him he looked into his background—or what he thought he knew of it—and felt he could be trusted. He also knew from Seth’s profession he long ago lost his tendency to gag.
Yankee looked at him seriously. “Are you interested? I understand if you’re not.”
Of course, Seth was interested. He occasionally made good money, but there were all of the craps tables and party drugs to think about. Seth wanted to have a nest egg. He nodded and waited for what Yankee would say.
“Just swallow three condoms, filled with drugs. Take a one-hour flight. Take some laxatives and release. Make twenty thousand upon swallowing, twenty thousand upon releasing the packages back to the owners. Some chance of death, some chance of prison.”
As Seth saw it, he dealt with those risks every day he sold himself in Las Vegas and for a much smaller return.
He was nervous. He sat on the stiff leather couch, which seemed like no one ever sat on, knowing Yankee would appear after what seemed like an eternity. This was his way. Seth sat and looked at the money.
He thought about just taking the money, grabbing the first elevator, and praying for ground, but he looked around and once again sensed he was being watched. He knew there was another entrance to this apartment, and he didn’t know whether Yankee was already here or coming through that entrance. But he knew enough to be sure he didn’t want to cross this man. Despite his kindness, Seth knew Yankee could be cruel without losing his quiet demeanor. There was always a chance that a condom would rupture in his stomach during his flight, or he would get caught by officers waiting in Los Angeles, but those risks were nothing compared with dashing away with the money. He assumed that indiscretion would assure an all but certain death. And though he might say in a fit of boy-induced drama that sometimes he wished he would die, he really didn’t. He wanted this to go well, and he wanted to pocket the rewards.