Fear itself

For the first Tuesday evening in nearly a month, Jim and Gloria Gee had their house, and equally important, their computer, to themselves.

Inviting her old college roommate to stay with them had been a mistake-Gloria admitted that freely. (Gloria and Linda had roomed together as undergraduates at Stony Brook, before going on to different law schools, Linda to Fordham, Gloria to Georgetown.) But by the time the Gees realized how much the sessions of the Swingin’ Tuesdays Club had come to mean to them, Linda was already installed in the spare room. Although they considered themselves quite the liberated couple-flat-out wild, by Chinese-American standards-neither of them felt liberated enough to participate in a cyber-orgy with Linda just down the hall.

So this evening, they were eager to make up for lost time. Gloria, an attorney for a consortium of Taiwanese exporters, was already out of the shower by ten, squeaky clean, oiled and depilated, when Jim, who was well advanced on the partner track at a powerhouse D.C. law firm, arrived with the tabs of Ecstasy he’d picked up from one of the mail-room boys. While they waited in their living room for it to take effect, Gloria brushed the glossy, ass-length black hair that was her pride and joy; Jim, already stripped down to his red bikini briefs, set up the web- cam and logged on to the STC web site.

The session was already well under way. Five of the six segments of the split screen displayed photo-icons of the five couples logged on (including a promising pair of newbies who went by the screen names Hot and Hotter). As the Gees’ own photo-icon appeared in the upper left portion of the split screen, the bottom portion of the screen filled with welcoming chatter.

Hi our friends of the mysterious Orient, typed Plumpie, of Piers and Plumpie, the dedicated fiftyish couple who hosted the site-they had to be dedicated: it was three in the morning in Amsterdam. We missed you.

We missed you too, typed Gloria, aka Dragon-Girl-for some reason, it always seemed to be the women who did the typing.

How touching, typed the female half of the couple known as Wolfman and Wolfwoman. Let the games begin.

Like many other cyber-sexuals, the Gees were a predominantly male-voyeur-female-exhibitionist couple. Gloria was turned on by the presence of the camera and often made love with her eyes closed, while Jim usually kept one eye on the screen, even when he was having an orgasm. Gloria didn’t mind-it made her extra hot to think of other men watching Jim making love to her with the same hunger that Jim felt, watching them screwing their wives.

Tonight was good for both of them. Not only had they built up a head of steam during their three-week hiatus, but the new kids were indeed hot and hotter-mixed race, he hung, she stacked. The sense of connection between the two couples was immediate and undeniable; each couple had selected the other’s video stream for viewing-it was almost like a private four-way, especially under the influence of the Ecstasy.

Around one in the morning, however, just as two couples, presumably from the West Coast, were logging on to fill the slots vacated by the easterners and Europeans, Jim froze in mid-hump.

“No,” Gloria ordered him, thinking he was about to ejaculate prematurely-or at least prematurely as far as she was concerned. “Not yet, I’m not there yet.”

“Did you hear that?” he whispered into her ear, shrinking inside her.

“What?”

“I think somebody’s breaking in. You call nine-one-one; I’m going to get the gun.” He rolled off her, sprang to his feet, stuffed himself back into his red bikini briefs, adjusted his package self-importantly, then dashed out of the living room, bent double in a ridiculous commando crouch.

A moment later he was back with his hands in the air and the front of his trunks flat as a Ken doll; behind him, a tall skinheaded white man with a long-barreled revolver had stopped in the doorway, out of range of the camera.

“Turn it off,” the stranger said quietly.

Gloria, tripping on Ecstasy, dazed by the sudden turn of events, her system flooded with dozens, maybe hundreds, of conflicting hormones and neurotransmitters, was too bewildered to respond at first. On screen, Hot and Hotter were laughing. Looks like somebody dropped in unexpectedly, Hotter typed with one finger. Gloria rose, fumbling at her see-through peignoir, and with her eyes trained on the computer screen, she watched herself crossing to the desk in an awkward modesty crouch, covering her breasts with one hand and her crotch with the other. It was disorienting, watching herself cut obliquely across the screen while walking straight ahead, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from the screen, or bring herself to switch the computer off once she reached it-it was as if she wanted to see how the show was going to come out.

“I said, turn it off!”

Gloria was still frozen. Jim stumbled into the picture on the computer screen; an instant later he appeared bodily at the edge of her vision, crawling on his hands and knees toward the surge protector strip. There was a popping, staticky sound; the screen flared white, then black; reluctantly, Gloria turned back to the room.

“If you want money…” Jim was saying. Having unplugged the computer, he’d climbed out from under the desk and positioned himself in front of Gloria, shielding her with his body as he crossed the living room toward the man, who took one long stride toward him, grabbed his arm, spun him around, and clubbed him over the top of the head with the barrel of the revolver.

“Sorry about that, Skairdykat,” said the intruder, stepping over Jim’s twitching body. “But you shouldn’t have lied about living alone.”

8

Stoked on Mexican crosstops and anticipation, Simon had driven straight from Allenwood to Georgetown with only a single stop to gas up and purchase a street guide for the District of Columbia and a cheap canvas travel bag, into which he transferred the snakes. He’d parked the Volvo down on M Street and walked up to Conroy Circle, effecting an entry by the simple expedient of using the leather snake gauntlet to punch through a pane of glass in the back door.

As soon as he had the woman secured-Simon was operating on the assumption that the female was Skairdykat-he went off to explore the premises, with mixed results.

On the one hand, the house was hideously furnished. American Moderne in a neo-Georgian brownstone: oh, please! On the other hand Simon was extremely gratified not to find any little Chinese Rugrats tucked into their beddy-byes. In the thirty-odd years he’d been playing the game, it was a point of pride for Simon that he had never harmed or even frightened a child. Tempting as it might have been to taste that fruit, Simon had taken his self-imposed stricture to such extremes that the only thing his victims had in common was that they were all childless. Having been deprived of both his parents, he just couldn’t bring himself to do that to a kid.

When he returned to the living room, Skairdykat was wriggling around on the chrome and leather couch, rolling her eyes, and making those mmmff, mmmff sounds that meant she was ready for him to take the gag out.

“Are you sure?” he asked her, stroking her forehead, smoothing back that glorious head of jet-black hair.

An eager nod.

“Because if I take it off and then you try to scream again, you’re going to regret it deeply.”

She nodded that she understood. He walked around behind the couch and untied the gag-a terry-cloth bathrobe belt. She spat it out, turned, and followed him with her eyes as he came back around the couch and sat beside her. “Now, is there something you wanted to tell me, Skairdykat?”

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

“Skairdykat? You chose the name, not me.”

“I don’t…Please, I don’t-I have no idea what you’re talking about. You have to believe me; there’s been some kind of mistake.”

He held her face lightly by the chin, tilted her head up toward him, looked into her eyes. She was his first Oriental-there was something particularly appealing, almost childlike, about the smooth curve of the upper eyelid. They weren’t slanted at all, these brown eyes, but sweetly elliptical, like Missy’s. And he could finally see the fear in