“I’m through with her,” he snapped. “I
“Yeah, you did, but if I recall we were kind of far along the convincing path before you managed to choke that promise out.”
Stella had been surprised that Roy Dean had lasted as long as he had on the day she taught him a lesson. Some guys folded before she even got started—especially the ones who had heard the rumors about Stella being an insane dominatrix. When she started unpacking her bag of toys, some men turned into blubbering masses of terror, ready to talk sense without much exertion on Stella’s part.
Early in her justice-delivering career, the thought of being suspected of favoring kinky sexual practices was intensely embarrassing, especially since the source of the rumors came about for only the most practical reasons. Being five feet six, overweight, and out of shape, Stella had managed to pull a muscle in her lower back the first time she tied up a recalcitrant jerk at gunpoint. She almost shot him by accident as she staggered around, yelping in pain. There was also the fact that the knot-tying skills she learned in Girl Scouts weren’t up to the task: the same guy, as Stella waved the gun around wildly, managed to get his wrists free. It was only slightly reassuring that he immediately fell over as he tried to run away, having forgotten that his ankles were still bound.
Stella realized she had to make some changes. She started a fitness program, but she knew she also needed to find a more reliable way to subdue a man. She had a vague notion of learning some paramilitary restraint techniques that might rely more on finesse than brute force, but Google searches for words like
Stella had never seen anything like the photos featured on those sites. The gear was fascinating, in a creepy kind of way. In the photos, lovely young ladies looked quite pleased to be trussed up like roasts ready to go in the oven. That’s when she had an inspiration: why not try the same thing on her targets and see if it got them under control?
Stella’s first purchase was a spreader bar and a yoke, which worked out better than she could have hoped. The solid metal bar had restraint cuffs at either end; once fastened they kept the legs in a spread-eagle position. Stella didn’t skimp: she went for the most expensive model she could find and made arrangements with the vendor to bulk up the padded cuffs with an extra-sturdy locking mechanism.
The yoke worked in a similar fashion. The bar had padding at the neck and wrist restraints. Stella had to fasten these herself, but generally by the time the object of her attentions had maneuvered himself into the spreader bar, a lot of the fight had gone out of him.
For a while Stella had her eye on a custom-made Saint Andrew’s cross, an arrangement of two-by-sixes that could be bolted onto the wall, with rings for restraining purposes in a variety of positions. It was well made, finished in a choice of mahogany or natural stains, by a very nice man in Ohio, who offered to drive over and install it himself.
At that point, however, Stella figured she was going a little overboard. All she really needed, after all, was to get these guys settled down enough to have a rational discussion.
Sometimes the discussion was a little one-sided. Stella did not care to be yelled at or called names—she’d had enough of that with Ollie—so she bought a selection of gags with balls or bits or rings that fitted into the mouth and kept the wearer nice and silent. Efforts to talk usually just resulted in drooling, so Stella bought a stack of cheap burp cloths at the Babies-R-Us and added them to her kit.
Roy Dean had required the full treatment. He’d shut up briefly when Stella rose up off the floor of the passenger side of his truck in the darkened liquor store parking lot, aimed a gun at his temple, and told him they were going for a drive. Stella kept the gun on him all the way out to an abandoned barn she sometimes used, but Roy Dean kept up a string of ugliness as he drove. He kept hollering right up to the moment when Stella strapped the gag behind his head, and then he glared at her malevolently and fought against the bars and restraints. It took some work with a length of rubber hose and a hammer handle, and a brief poke with the electric shock baton, until she finally judged Roy Dean rehabilitated.
When she finished up with these guys, she had a little speech she delivered while packing up her supplies. In it, she reminded the man she was about to send back into society that if anything bad were to happen to her, there was an ever-growing army of women who owed her, and who were willing to pursue vengeance on her behalf; women who, like her, had once had very little to lose, and therefore viewed the whole risk-and-return equation somewhat differently than the average person.
Some righteous scary bitches, in other words.
Roy Dean seemed like he got the message, but not even a month later here he was making a new woman cry. Stella was pretty sure it hadn’t gone any further, but she was worried that Roy Dean was the sort of woman- smacker who truly believed down in his bones that it was his God-given right to settle every disagreement with force, that it was a woman’s job to absorb a man’s disappointments and frustrations in the form of taunts and put- downs and thrown punches.
Sadly, this was the type who was most likely to pick up again where he left off with some other poor woman. Which was why Stella was here today. Without proof of the incident at the speedway, she’d limit today’s visit to a warning, but it would be Roy Dean’s last before she dialed up their next encounter to a whole new level.
“You want a beer or not?” he demanded after starting half a dozen protestations and finally giving up.
“I don’t think so. Tell you what, let’s sit down and have this chat so I can get back on my way and you can get back to your knitting, or whatever it was you were doing when I interrupted.”
Roy Dean didn’t look too happy about it, but he lowered himself into one of the dinette chairs, never taking his eyes off Stella. She propped open the trailer’s front door, so as not to miss any small breeze that might happen to wander by. Roy Dean had the blinds down in the trailer, no doubt trying to keep the place cool, but without an air conditioner it was a losing proposition. Stella almost—for a fraction of a second—felt a little bit sorry for him.
The moment passed.
She sat down on the chair across from him and leaned her elbows on the table, resting her gun hand casually on the sticky surface.
“So you got you a new girl,” she said conversationally. “What’s her name?”
“She isn’t—I don’t got—”
“Aw, sugar, don’t try to keep secrets from Auntie Stella,” she said. “You know I’ll find out.”
Roy Dean stared at a nail-bitten thumb. “There
“Mmm-hmm,” Stella said slowly. She let the silence stretch out in front of them, letting him cook in his own juices. Nervous wasn’t a bad way to keep these boys.
“Well, that’s real good,” she finally said, keeping her voice friendly. “I always say, it’s good to let a little time go by after a tough breakup. You know? You’ve got to give your heart a chance to recover. Who needs a rebound relationship, all that drama? Nothing but trouble. Am I right, Roy Dean, or am I right?”
Roy Dean shrugged and mumbled something that might have been assent.
“Hey, Roy Dean,” Stella said, like she’d just thought of something interesting. “I ever tell you about my returning customer special?”
Roy Dean froze for a moment, then slowly shook his head, still not looking at her.
“Well, it works like this. First time around, I look at a guy and I say to myself, ‘Stella, what are the odds we can make a decent citizen out of this moron who’s been beating up on his woman?’ I look him over good and I try to find it in my heart to give him another chance. I believe in second chances, I really do.”
After staring at his thumb miserably, the temptation evidently became too much for Roy Dean, because he stuck the thing into his mouth and started gnawing at the nail. Stella tried to suppress a wave of nausea at the sight.
“But if that same man—the one I gave a chance to, the one I didn’t nail when I had his dick in a vise—if that man gets a little full of himself and decides to pick up on his old tricks with a new lady… well, then I tend to lose all my patience.”
She leaned across the table and waited until Roy Dean flicked an increasingly terrified glance in her direction to continue. “Roy Dean, you know that tire pile out back of Vett’s body shop?”
Roy Dean took his thumb away from his mouth long enough to moisten his lips with his tongue and choke out a “yeah.”
“Well, a couple years ago, a man—a preacher, if you can believe it—came back for my returning customer special. He was smart enough not to bother his ex-wife, she and I made sure of that. But get this, he wasn’t smart enough to stay away from the lady who played the organ at the noon service. Moved her right in with him and
