What She Doesn't Know

by Irene Glass

Chapter One

“You shouldn’t have come,” he declared. “You shouldn’t have followed me here.”

“Do you think I would have if I had had a choice?” she replied. “I have no where else to turn. Believe me, I would rather go to the police, but they can’t help.”

He looked at her and sneered. “The police? Who said anything about the police? You should have gone to O’Dell.”

“O’Dell is the police.”

“Only in the loosest sense of the word. He would have handled it, no hassles. Quick. Easy. Cheap.”

“He would have killed Rooney.”

“So what. He needs killing.”

“That’s not my concern now. I just want the computer back.” Unwisely, she added, “There’s a project on there that’s taken me two years to complete.”

“And you think O’Dell would kill Rooney just for stealing your computer?” Shane’s incredulous look told Macy that Shane, for all his business acumen, didn’t know much about affairs of the heart.

“Yes. He would have cut Rooney up into little pieces and fed him to his goldfish. O’Dell and I have some history.” As soon as she said it, she regretted giving him that bit of information. It wasn’t wise to tell things to a man who used insight like ammunition.

“What kind of history?” Shane wanted to know. He wanted to know everything. Of course, he could find out for himself, but seeing her squirm was a self-indulgence he could afford.

“Do you really need all the gory details?” Macy said dismissively, but Shane was not so easily dismissed.

“I’ll need to know that and a whole lot more,” Shane stated firmly, “if, and I reiterate, if I decide to come out and help you. I’ve been out of circulation for some time now, as you well know. That reminds me. How did you find me? I’m not exactly in the phone book.”

Macy looked down. “I found you. That’s all that matters.”

Shane looked up and gave Macy a long slow glare. “Trina.”

Macy shook her head, started to turn away, daunted at last. All his threatening looks and gruff manner had not put her off her purpose, but the mention of that name had her running for cover. “All right, fine. If you aren’t going to help me, I’ll go elsewhere after all. I’m sure Michael will jump at the chance.”

“He hasn’t got the skills and you know it. But Trina does. Trina could find me at least. Where is she?” He asked the question as if it were a statement. As if he had the right to know. As if he would not breathe again until he heard her answer.

“If you think I’m telling you…”

Shane took her arm and wouldn’t let her pull away. “Where is Trina?”

“Let go of me or I’ll have you up for assault.”

“You’ll never make it stick and we both know it. That’s why you need me. They don’t call me Teflonman for nothing.”

His voice was hypnotic, like the sound of a river rushing over rocks. But she knew the rapids would go from level 1 to level 5 in a heartbeat. Her heartbeat. Which was going much too fast.

“What makes you think I need Trina to find you?”

“Who else do you know, besides me, who has the connections to locate a professional of my description, shall we say?” This last phrase made a mockery of the decency it implied. This man was anything but decent. And calling him a professional, while technically accurate, gave him a legitimacy he did not deserve. “I know I didn’t help you. So it must have been she.”

“There are ways of locating someone that have nothing to do with connections,” Macy said, not looking away from him now. She was trying to match his stare, but for intensity, her cardboard brown eyes were nothing compared to his light grey.

“Are you trying to say that you can hack in to the satellite systems of our revered federal government?” Again with the sarcasm. Disdain was like breath to him.

“The Feds fund the birds with our tax dollars. Why not make use of them if I can? I pay my taxes.”

Shane digested this information. If she could tap into federal information systems, her skills had increased since the last time he had needed to deal with her. How long ago had that been? Two years? Three? Ten? It seemed to him like ages since he had moved freely around the country. But she wasn’t old enough for those kinds of numbers. Ten years ago, she would barely have been out of high school. If they still had such things.

“But you know where she is. And that’s my price.”

“You think I’ll give up my friend just to get back a computer?”

“You committed a felony ‘just to get back a computer’. Some might even call it treason. It will definitely get you hard time. The Feds are rather sensitive about their assets in the skies. They don’t like little hackers stowing away for free rides.”

She wondered for a moment if he were low enough to turn her in. Yes, of course, he was. He would do something like that if it would serve his purpose, but since she was nothing to him, why should he bother?   The only woman he was interested in right now was Trina and putting Macy away for virtual breaking and entering wouldn’t further that aim. She had to call his bluff.

“Felonies are one thing. Betraying a friend is another.”

“Betrayal. Such an ugly word.” His bland, aloof expression hardly changed as the edge left his voice, but she felt the shift. He was going into charm mode. She’d seen it before. His tanned, craggy features smoothed just a bit. His voice lost it’s level five rapids status and pooled behind an invisible dam. “All I want to do is talk to her. What harm can it do? Just a few words.”

“Just a few words? What harm? The Declaration of Independence was just a few words, but ask King George what harm a few words can do.”

“And look how happily that turned out.”

“Not going to happen, Shane. Just forget it. Forget I came. It’s not worth it.”

Shane looked at her again. The kind of look a cobra gives a rat it thinks will be particularly satisfying. “Just a phone number.”

She laughed.

He inclined his head, conceding the point. They both knew giving him a phone number, even a cell phone, was as good as drawing him a map. Macy might as well deliver Trina to him in a gift-wrapped box. “I’ll give you the phone. Untraceable. Can’t be triangulated. Just take it to her.”

“Don’t grovel. I won’t buy it anyway. We both know you can find her if you really want to. Connections like hers work both ways.”

“Ah, but if you contact her for me…” He let the sentence trail off and his eyebrows raised a fraction of an inch. She wondered not for the first time how such a subtle gesture could reveal such evil intent.

“I see. Contacting her yourself would be too straightforward. You want to make her feel whatever it is you think she’ll feel. I’m not your cattle prod. You’re not going to use me to direct her.”

They looked at each other again, loathing on her side, cool calculation on his. “It’s not your opinion that counts here.”

He had released his grip on her some minutes earlier. Rejecting her instincts screaming for her to make a dive for the door, she took two steps toward fresh air. This office, buillt into the basement of a four star hotel, suddenly felt even more stifling than it had when she walked in. Menacing faces appeared in the knots and swirls of the dark wood paneling. The magenta border of the oriental rug seemed to absorb the dim light.

“I need to breathe,” Macy declared as he somehow casually reached over and barred her way. Despite herself, Macy felt the rush of awareness that sometimes flashed between her and this… what, man? Creature? Force of some forgotten underworld deity? The fleeting feeling passed as she felt the cool touch of his fingers on her skin. She had the sensation that the feeling passed because he no longer wanted it maintained.

“Take this.” Shane pressed the slim stainless steel into her palm, a pen he had drawn from the inside pocket of his dark, exquisitely tailored suit. The only rack that suit had ever seen was the rack of Shane’s closet, Macy thought. What it cost him would have paid her salary for a month. If she had a job. Without that computer, what little hope she had was gone.

She let it drop as soon as he withdrew his hand. He noted the reaction. His assessment of her will clicked up a notch as he withdrew another pen from the other side. This time, with both hands he held her hand and the pen, then broke it, smearing the ink and scratching her skin.

She refused to cry out or wipe the ink away. Refused to give him the power. She had always known that’s what he wanted. He fed on power like a vampire fed on blood. Nothing seemed to stick to him because he never wanted anything outside himself to have power over him. That much everyone knew, hence his nickname. His isolation from human connection or contact was legend. What Macy hadn’t known was the depth of his thirst for power over others.

Shane noted how Macy walked with controlled calm down the dim grimy hallway, so incongruous with the opulence of his sanctum. Design. Direction. Like a gum-ball falling through a chute to the hand waiting below. Like a bullet out of a gun. No direction but the one he chose. He allowed himself a slight smile of anticipation before he picked up the phone. Or was it satisfaction?

**********

“I’m sorry, Mr. DeLoach. I couldn’t recover the computer,” Macy said into the phone. She closed her eyes as if to block out the pain of the words she knew were heading toward her like the chill blast of wind blown rain in December.

Mr. DeLoach made no attempt to soften the blow. “Contact me when you do. I’ll hold your last paycheck until then.”

“Mr. DeLoach,” Macy began, but her now former boss cut her off.

“You knew when you took company property home that this would be the consequence. Even if you had not lost it, if you had been caught with that machine outside this building, you would have been fired. Sensitive information as well as a valuable project have all been forfeited because of your actions.   As it is, I doubt this is the first time you have been guilty of an action worthy of dismissal. If you return our property, I will try to convince the board to forego prosecution. Good day, Miss Fancher.”

Prosecution. There it was. Out in the open, the dreaded word she had somehow managed until now to relegate to the back shelves of the library of her mind. Now it was on the end cap where the new best sellers sat. Prosecution. O’Dell would know.

Macy drew in a deep breath and cringed out the dread like a physical pain. Regret. Wishes. If onlies. Not useful, not productive, but oh, so persistent. The tears didn’t help. The sick feeling in her stomach only made her less willing to move. But it was the terrible longing for a way to fix the past and undo her mistake that paralyzed her now.

She tried to put it away from her, gather it as one would gather unwanted thorn branches cut out of a thriving garden. But the thorns stuck her and she couldn’t will the pain away enough to get the grip she needed to thrust the regret aside. So it ached and she sat, rocking at her kitchen table, defeated and alone. Would she lose this modest apartment, evicted for non-payment of rent? No, she realized she would be taken away by the police long before that happened. Comforting thought.

**********

“Have you completed your assignment?” Shane asked DeLoach. It had been barely two minutes since DeLoach had hung up the phone and the call from Shane startled him.

“How did you know? No, on second thought, don’t tell me. Yes, I did as you said. It cost me one of our best employees, you know.” His tone was only slightly belligerent, with a dash of resentment thrown in for flavor.

“Better to lose one employee and keep your business than to lose the whole business, at which point one employee would be useless to you.” Shane’s sub-arctic pronouncement echoed in DeLoach’s mind. If it hadn’t been Macy, it would have been you, he said to himself. This is what you get for becoming desperate enough to borrow money from a man like Shane. And he won’t let her starve. This is one of his games. If she is driven to despair, the game will be over. Despicable and cruel, he is. Destructive for it’s own sake, he isn’t. Macy will survive, like my business will survive. At least for another day.

***********

The pounding on her door broke into her masochistic reverie. Macy ignored it, resting her head on the cold formica and covering her ears with her hands crossed over her head. She wasn’t ready for the jolt of reason that would pry her out of her homemade morass, but there it was in form of one middle-aged, stocky cop making a scene in her hallway.

Speak of the devil, hear the rattle of his horns, she thought as she heard O’Dell’s voice adding to the din. “Open up, blast you! Open up or so help me, I’ll knock it down. You know I will.”

She knew he would. Indeed, whether he meant to or not, he still might knock down her door. What she didn’t need was to provoke her landlord at this point, so she waded through her emotional quagmire to the door, trying not to wake up enough to feel the pain again. No use. The door was no more than half unlatched before it swung off its hinges and clattered against the wall behind. At least the lock is still intact, she thought.

“I was opening the d…”   Macy’s tired complaint, interrupted as it was, told O’Dell two things. The first was that she was even more upset than he had suspected. In her normal ornery state, her reaction would have made lighter fluid on a grill flame look like a birthday candle. The second was that he had his work cut out for him if he wanted to snap her out of this depression.

He decided that the best way to start was to get right to business. In his own mind, it was as if this was a sudden decision, suited to that particular moment, while in reality, this was his life philosophy. Get the job done was his motto and if anything got in the way, it didn’t stay there long.

Right now, his job was to protect Macy. And what was getting in the way was Macy. Or at least her stubborn pride and willfulness, so it had to go. There was one sure-fire way to crank it down a notch, so that was what he had planned.

Macy wondered how long it would take him to start his lecture. Ten minutes? Five? He got started in less than thirty seconds. That had to be some kind of record.

“What were you thinking? You followed him, don’t deny it.”

“I didn’t follow him. Well, okay, actually I did follow him, but I didn’t have to. I knew where his lair was located. Is that what you call where snakes live? A lair? A den? What?” She was trying to distract him, but she knew her chances of doing that were about as good as her chances of getting her old job back even if she found the computer. She needed to find Rooney in order to stay out of prison and she knew it. Her attention wandered, giving him the advantage he looked for.

O’Dell saw her momentary distraction and seized his chance. “I won’t take that from you and you know it,” he said as he grabbed her around the waist.

Too late, she came to her senses and tried to push away from him. She knew him too well to be in doubt as to what came next if she allowed him to shoot the scene his way. His mental camera had one lens: action. All other thoughts seemed to be filtered through that lens. Now, when it came to women, particularly women he thought he loved or had a duty to protect, action had one predominant form: spanking.

Here he was, at it again, as if she had never filed for divorce, as if they hadn’t lived apart for over a year. “Let go, O’Dell. I’m not your wife any more.”

“Says you.” Snappy comebacks were not his strong point.

“Says me and the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

“I never signed those papers. We are still married.”

She contemplated the limbo that was their relationship. Divorced in her mind, their marriage had never really had a chance. On the rocks temporarily was how he saw it. Again her distraction played right into his hands. Now who was trying to distract who?

He had her over his lap. His seat in the armchair was secure for him and not too uncomfortable for her, but she knew that wouldn’t last. In about five minutes, she’d be very uncomfortable and on the fast-track towards agony if she didn’t do something now. But of all the times for this to happen, this was the worst. She couldn’t stop it. The memories came flooding back. The passion. The pain. The security. The… Cripes!

Stay focussed, she told herself. Stay in the game. Game. If this was a game it must be some kind of Indian Burns or Dodge Ball, something stingy and hot. Maybe Crack the Whip. Ow! Her robe spilled over her waist and back. His hand slapped down on her bare backside over and over again with the heat of a match and the sting of a wasp.

“I don’t want you anywhere near him,” O’Dell was saying. She tried to listen to him, but his words were drowned out by some dumb blonde saying inane things like, “Oh, please ! Ow, that hurts.” Who was that idiot, squealing like a rusty hinge? Uh, that would be me, she suddenly realized. She tried to shut her mouth on the sounds that were coming out of it, but for some reason his hand seemed to be stronger than her will right then.

Her heart took three giant steps backward in time. She was his again, really his. And he was hers, body and soul. They were living in the same space, breathing the same air, eating off the same plate. What went wrong, she asked herself for the thousandth time.

The burning in her rear end got too intense to be ignored. That’ll keep me in the here and now, she thought as he landed a particularly well-placed smack on her thighs. “Not there! That’s not spanking. Spanking is only on the rear. Not the legs or anywhere else. Ow! Sheesh!” He could make bottom smacks feel worse than thigh smacks.

“Is it still there?” he asked. She couldn’t figure what he meant, but as he reached over her back and under the recliner, another memory hit her. That was one of his favorite hiding places for the crop.

“No, don’t bother. I moved it ages ago,” she lied, hoping he would give up and quit groping for it. She was glad for the break while he looked for it, but if he found it, she was in big trouble.

“Yeah, right,” he sneered as he brought the crop, complete with dust bunny out from under the recliner and into the first light it had seen in over a year. Snap!

“Ow!”

Snap!

“Ow!”

She had no more sense of time and barely any sense of reason by the end of it. Heat and pain consumed not just her bottom cheeks and thighs but her whole body. There was no way for her to tell how long he went on or what else he said. All she knew was that her resistance to him, little as it had been, was now completely melted. The last year vanished for those few minutes and she was back again, in a less desperate, less complicated time. The only thing that would save her would be the fact that he would have no idea.