Bad Things (12 page)

Fine. Let him have his petty defiance. Let him pour fuel on the hot, hard coal of anger burning in Xavier’s chest—it just made tormenting Carson all the more fun. Either way, Xavier would have his answers in the end.

“As it works out, I have a lot of correspondence to catch up on, and I’m sure it’ll give the guys at the club plenty to talk about. Like my old friend Rex from college. When we were at San Diego State together, I guess we were what you’d call fuck buddies.”

He let the pleasant memories fill his mind with images and flood his cock with blood.

“We tried everything you could think of. I mean, I’d been fucking since I was fourteen. But you’re away, out of your parents’ house for the first time, you don’t have to sneak around anymore. You fuck in the shower whenever you want. Suck each other off in the living room without worrying if someone’s going to walk in on you. It’s liberating. You know?”

Carson wasn’t meeting his gaze anymore, but it didn’t matter. The answer was no, he didn’t know.

“Anyway. We still swap conquest stories. Our way of keeping in touch.”

Xavier logged in to Gmail and typed in the first couple letters until the auto-complete kicked in.

“Subject: Fresh kill,” he said, watching his hostage’s face and typing at the same time. Carson in profile, eyes closed, like he was praying, or hoping really hard. For a couple seconds, maybe the word, “kill” had even toppled his hostage’s fear of being raped.

“
The latest. Got a tender morsel with me here at my place. A guy from work who needed a place to stay. Your height, but lean, so when he’s naked you see every little muscle. Skin soft and pale as a fucking baby’s, but black hair. Black and wavy, just long enough so you can grab a good fistful. Biggest, bluest eyes you’ve ever seen. So pretty, I bet even a straight guy’d want to tap his ass.”

Shuddering shoulders. Starting to cry.

“Caught him checking out my dick yesterday while I was working out. You know me, I’m not shy, so I offered it to him. Sweet thing, he’d never sucked a guy off, before. But he gave it an earnest effort, making himself gag trying to impress me. Don’t worry. By the end of the week, he’ll be a pro.”

Watching Carson curling slowly into a protective little ball like a pill bug, Xavier moved the mouse up over the button. Tapped.

“And…sent. Brian and the rest of them ought to enjoy that. Don’t you think?”

What better way to feed the wolves? Now Brian would be convinced he was tapped into Xavier’s online existence, and that his errand boy was not only doing his bidding, but going above and beyond the call of duty. Xavier
closed the decoy and opened his own laptop.

“
I’ll just take a look and make sure you really weren’t clever enough—Nope. All clear.”

He navigated to the file he wanted. He’d watched the video twice. Whatever deeply buried part of his brain kept trying to signal that he was fucking insane, tying Carson up in his basement, stripping him naked, playing those head games with him, knowing what was in that video convinced him that, if anything, he was being too damned easy on Brian and Max’s minion.

He queued the video up to the beginning of the final scene and set up the laptop, nice and close, on the seat of a folding chair, so it would be right at eye level for Carson, then he sat down just next to him, where he’d be able to read every reaction as it flickered in his eyes.

“
I don’t know, maybe you’ve seen this, already. Hell, maybe you were even there. Hopefully you won’t be bored.”

He hit the space bar, and the action started. He’d decided to play the scenes in reverse order. More shocking, that way. Depending on how deeply he was involved, maybe Carson was used to seeing the girls go from typical, nervous adolescence in the face of being uprooted and vulnerable, to being shell-shocked zombies who didn’t so much as whimper a protest against even the most revolting humiliations, even the cruelest violations.

No, Carson had never seen it before. The shock of the scene flared up bright in his eyes as soon as the three men started in on her.

“
I guess you recognize your friend in the gray suit,” Xavier said when Max came around the side of the bed, revealing his face.

No. That was another shock. Probably the brutality of the scene had distracted him, and he hadn’t really looked at the men’s faces. Noisily flaring nostrils, their dilation and contraction speeding with his adrenaline. Carson closed his eyes.

“Keep watching. If she can endure what they do to her, you can endure seeing it. If you shut your eyes again, I’ll rig you up like they do in A Clockwork Orange. Eyes pried wide open with tape and clamps.”

A few times, Carson flinched and his eyes squeezed shut, but only for a second before he obediently forced his gaze back to the screen. Well, at least he didn’t like it. His disgust broadcast by the downward bend at the corner of his mouth. The way he looked at the men in those few fleeting moments when the camera accidentally lingered on one of them, or unavoidably drifted over them on its way to a close up of the girl´s scream or some part of her body being assaulted, the line of Carson´s mouth was all condescension. His upper lip tensed in loathing.

What had Carson imagined happened with the girls Max brought over? Had he been picturing some
Pretty Woman
scenario? That they were just tough chicks bucking societal norms and getting paid to do something they probably enjoyed anyway? Or had he avoided thinking about it at all?

When Xavier paused the video, Carson closed his eyes for a few seconds, panting as if he was catching his breath. Xavier squatted down, nice and close, so he could watch his expression.

“So, errand boy. I wonder if Brian ever put you and your camera to work. You shoot any videos like that for him?”

Carson’s little flinch backward and the momentary flash of whites as his eyes went wide said no.

“How about a few still shots? Something to show the customers?”

Huffing more than panting, now, Carson shook his head.

“Well, I’ll have a look through the rest of the files on your camera, just to be sure. But for now, one last question for you. Give it a little thought before you answer, because the nicer you are to me, the nicer I’ll be to you. Understand?”

He waited until Carson finally gave him a faint nod.

“Have you seen any girls like her at the club? After hours, maybe? Or somewhere else?”

Carson just stared at him, collapsing in on himself.

“Is it a hard question? I’m not talking about Kayleigh and the other canvases at Gomorrah. I mean girls with accents, foreigners, young, like the girl in the video.”

Finally Carson shook his head, but it was hard to read what was going on behind his eyes, under the fear and surprise there. Was he shocked those things were going on? Or just that Xavier had made the connection between Gomorrah, Brian, and the crimes documented in the video?

“There are more scenes you’re going to watch. Just the highlights, so you really get to know her. But I know it’s kind of heavy, so you won’t watch them all at once. Life can’t be all pain and misery, right? I’ll make sure we have our nice times together, too, to keep things in balance. So, the next time you hear me coming down the stairs, don’t worry. It won’t be to show you home movies.”

An idea.

“On the other hand, I don’t want you to get bored, sitting down here all by yourself. So I’ll give you something to listen to.”

He started the video playing again, but turned the monitor away so Carson was left with just the audio. The indifferent, almost bored chatter of the men, punctuated now and then by a barked order. Laughter. A grunt. Their shouts. Then that scene abruptly ended at an editor’s brutal cut, and suddenly the basement filled with the girl’s sobbing, her rambling foreign words that were unmistakably her begging.

“It’s weird, isn’t it? The sounds—her voice…” Xavier paused, let Carson’s senses focus on the recording, “…that man talking…her sobs—they’re even more intense, more awful than actually watching what happens. At least for me. I’ve read it’s because our imagination is so powerful, the suggestion of what’s happening, the unknown is scarier than almost anything you could actually see. I think that’s why it’s so hard to listen to her begging. Since we don’t understand Ukrainian, the sound of her talking and crying and screaming is even harder to take than it would be if she were speaking English.”

With upturned eyes, Carson was begging not to be left there with the sound of that girl being tortured. Which was sweet of him, because now Xavier knew he was on the right path, getting to him, eroding his defenses.

After a moment’s thought Xavier dashed upstairs, then came back with the surveillance camera he’d set up to catch Carson at the computer in the dining room. He put it on the shelf and got it recording and transmitting.

“
Well, I’ve got a couple things to take care of.”

He grabbed an empty plastic bottle from the bag of recycling and set it next to Carson, then un-cuffed one of his hands.

“You can piss in there, if you need to. But no misbehaving. That includes removing the gag. I’ll be keeping my eye on you.” He pointed at the surveillance camera, then laughed. “Actually, please, go ahead and misbehave. One of my favorite things in the world is inventing and dispensing creative punishments.”

Hard to tell if Carson was relieved or suddenly frightened all over again at being left down there. Probably so hard to read him, because even Carson didn’t know how to feel about it. Xavier gathered up Carson’s things, shut the door and went upstairs.

The feed from the camera was coming through on his phone. Even if it failed, he figured if nothing else, it would be a good bluff to keep Carson in line. Like the Panopticon: internalized discipline.

But there he was live and in color, wiping the drool from his chin with his one liberated hand, possibly brushing away some tears, too. Looking around, no doubt making note of anything he could use as a weapon if he got the chance.

Xavier didn’t ask himself what he was going to do with Carson. How far he’d go. Didn’t scrutinize the morality of it, or ask himself whether the circumstances had provided him a flimsy excuse for crossing a line into otherwise unthinkable territory. Just like he didn’t ask himself those questions about the man he’d held prisoner and tortured the year before. The man Dario had brought him. The Loft Stalker, he’d named him in his mind, but never said the moniker aloud, because he and Dario never spoke of it again.

He’d known he wanted to hurt that man. He’d wanted that man to suffer horribly. And he had. More horribly, Xavier hoped, than the women the Stalker had doped and raped at Dario’s loft during those parties they used to have there. More horribly than Elena had suffered in her college dorm room when she’d been raped by the three men whose faces she never saw.

But Xavier didn’t need Carson to suffer. He was definitely more than a bartender; if he’d been sent to spy for Max, he’d probably gotten his hands dirty in other ways. But he was no predator, like those men in the video.

So Xavier just needed him to erode, one way or another. He had to make Carson fear him more than he feared whatever reprisals would come from Max. Or—a vague, shapeless mirage of a completely different idea half materialized—he could make Carson need him. Wear him down. Get control of him, through fear or need—either would do, so long as, at the end of their time together, Carson’s allegiance was firmly with him, and not the goons at Gomorrah.

That was as far as Xavier went, planning. There, barely keeping his balance at the crumbling, precariously narrow bit of certainty jutting over a vast void of nothing, Xavier leaped with his usual blind faith into the abyss of intuition. Even though there was some cool, rational process in his brain alerting him that it was dangerous, he felt safe. He trusted his instinct. That sixth sense, whatever it was he had, would lead him straight to the tender spot at the center of Carson’s being.

Before leaving for his shift at the club, he texted Brian from Carson’s phone, saying he’d set up the spyware, but that he hadn’t found anything useful around the house. Then he went to the basement.

“I’m glad you’ve been making use of the facilities.”

Xavier set the bottle of water he’d brought down on the shelf, and collected the plastic bottle a third full of urine. He took it to the bathroom, dumped it in the toilet, rinsed the bottle, washed his hands, and took it back to Carson, and asked if he wanted some food before he was left on his own for six hours. He got the surly look and shake of his head he was expecting, but when he offered the water, Carson reluctantly nodded. He obediently, wordlessly drained the bottle when Xavier removed the gag, and only fussed a little when he put it back in place, then bound his free hand to the post.

“Well, I’m off to the club. I’ll tell Brian you say hello.” He waved his phone in the air. “And so I don’t miss you too much while I’m gone, I’ll have the live feed from the camera. Be a good boy. You don’t want me to come home angry.”

A dull shift at the club. Just as well. Lots of time to ponder his next move with Carson. Every few minutes he checked the feed from the camera. It looked like Carson had fallen asleep. Good—now he’d be fresh and alert when he got back.

“
So. How’s it going with your new roommate?” Brian and his horrible smile, made extra ugly by an added twist of prurient curiosity. So, he’d seen the email.