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I saw, what he was talking about when two guys came out of nowhere and swept to the side of the bed where Roy had fallen. Whatever these men wanted had to do with Roy.

"Parker's not here!" one of them behind the bed yelled.

"But we all saw him land there," another man reminded the others of their earlier eavesdropping. "He's got to be around here someplace. Parker's a slick cop, but he's not magic."

They started to form a more comprehensive search. However, it was aborted with dramatic suddenness.

"Don't move, you bastards," the voice of the search's object filled the room like the hiss of a steam-pipe. "I can waste any one of you right from where I'm at."

Looking down, I saw Roy lying on his belly under the bed, clutching his.38 Police Special in front of him. When he'd figured out we had visitors, he must have grabbed the pistol from his pants on the floor and then rolled under the bed until he could make his move.

"Who are these people, Roy?" I blurted the minute my bearded assailant thought his chances might improve if he removed his gun from my mouth.

"They're kidnappers," Roy informed me in a rapid-fire voice, the urgency of the situation raising it a pitch above its usual tone. "They're trying to get me out of circulation so I can't become District Attorney. Every criminal in town, from gangsters all the way down to punks, is scared shitless of what I'm going to do to the underworld."

All of a sudden, one of the kidnappers got up enough nerve to make a move. Two shots fired out, one from across the room, one from under the bed. It was impossible for me to tell which was first.

My eyeballs were seared from the abrupt flash of the exploding gunpowder. For several seconds I was blinded. When I could see again, the scene had dramatically changed.

Blood seeped from under the bed like a miniature river, and Roy Parker was lying in it. He'd been hit. He wasn't moving.

In the middle of the bedroom, the other half of the target was clutching his leg and hopping around. For the first time I noticed he was howling with pain. He'd been wounded, too, but looked like he'd gotten off a lot less seriously than his opponent in the shoot-out.

"Come on," the bearded one hissed to his accomplices, "we've got to get out of here. Those shots must have woke up everybody for miles. The cops'll be here before we know it."

"What about Parker?" the one who had not been wounded said. "He looks like he's had it."

"Leave him here," the beard said. "He's dead-weight now. We're going to have our hands full just getting Jack out of here all right with his leg all shot up like that. Anyway, it doesn't look like the lieutenant'll be bothering us any more."

"But we're fingered," the guy with the bullet in his leg rasped between moans of pain.

"Jack's right," the guy in the middle said to tile beard. "The girl's seen everything. We've either got to take her with us or kill her on the spot."

"Tough talk, Grady," was the beard's succinct reply. "Which will it be?"

My heart lodged in my mouth and stayed there when I realized that my life was the stake in some brutal dare between psychopathic criminals. I could be rubbed out like a hapless insect trekking in a schoolboy's path.

Grady walked over toward me and pointed his pistol at my head. The sound of the hammer cocking was the loudest noise I'd ever heard.

There was a long and dreadful silence as I stared transfixed at the muzzle of the gun. It seemed like a shark that was coming to devour me.

What was worse, the man holding it kept giggling.

"Okay, Grady," the man with the beard broke the eerie spell, "stop showing your pistol off to the lady and let's go. Keep her and Jack in the middle so she can hold him up and can't run. We'll decide what to do with her after we get out of here."

It kept running through my mind, as they rousted me from the floor and made me support their wounded compatriot. However, they had railroaded me out of the house and dumped me in the back of their van before I openly admitted the truth to myself. In the process of being blindfolded and bound and gagged I could scarcely ignore it.

At the last possible moment, just before they put some tape across my mouth, I muttered the obvious: "I've been kidnapped."

"What'd she say?" Jack asked.

"I don't know," the bearded one said impatiently, "but I'm sure as hell not going to take this tape off to find out. I can already hear a siren. Tell Grady to give this heap the gas."

The next sound was the roar of an engine followed by the screech of rubber peeling beneath us. We were moving forward, and fast. I wondered if I had seen home and family for the last time.

CHAPTER TWO

The ride to their hideout seemed interminable. The last several miles of it were over bumpy unpaved roads and I thought my bowels and kidneys would burst.

When we got there, after a long discussion with their allies who were there to meet them, my abductors decided to lock me in a shed while they decided what to do. Since I was bound and gagged and blindfolded, it was like being thrown into a black hole.

I don't know how long I stayed there because my senses were no longer reliable, nor in some cases available. In addition to being blind, mute and immobile, I was afflicted with limbs that were numb and a fogged-in brain. I felt like a useless piece of protoplasm taking up space someplace.

On the other hand, had I been alert I would have undoubtedly bedeviled myself by imagining my captors plotting my ransom. This way I was as nerveless as an amoeba.

When the door to the shed finally opened, I was so deadened that I didn't even hear it. Any light, of course was cut off by my blindfold. I had no idea whether it was night or day.

It took somebody stroking me and cooing into my ear like I was a baby to finally attract my attention. "Oh, look, you've made a mess all over yourself," a woman's voice said as she surveyed the damage with her fingertips.

Reality jarred me with the truth of her observation. She was right the small enclosure was reeking with the stench of my own piss and shit. All of a sudden my nerve-endings tingled back to life, making my skin crawl under the slimy filth that coated my naked body.

"We've got to get you cleaned off," she said, tugging me from the shack. "Nobody'll pay a cent for you looking like this."

It was the first hint of ransom. My kidnapping had apparently been placed on a pay-as-you-go basis while I'd beep languishing in bondage.

It seemed so odd being held like this. I was just an ordinary middle-class suburban housewife. My husband was a successful insurance agent, but our house was still heavily mortgaged. About all Tom could come up with in the way of ransom was a group life insurance policy for my kidnappers. They'd have to die to collect.

My involvement with the controversial Lieutenant Parker had been strictly a fluke. He'd answered my church's women's club about the spread of crime to the suburbs. I'd gone to the luncheon with adultery the last thing on my mind.

However, never underestimate the power of a bulge in a man's pants on a woman's imagination. By the time Roy's talk to the ladies was through, my mind was engorged with a throbbing mental image of his unsheathed hard-on. When I got up from my seat, there would be a small puddle of dew from my leaking pussy.

I bolted toward him the minute he was finished speaking. Pushing the other women out of my way, I elbowed up next to him and boldly whispered in his ear, "Do you want to fuck me?"

He choked on the answer he was giving to somebody's question. Then he gave my thigh a discreet squeeze. An hour later we were back at my place and screwing.

Just before everything went haywire, and I was kidnapped.

Well, I was back to the present again. I noted its futility by damning myself for being such a jerk about sex. If I hadn't had hot pants looking for the orgasm-that-never-came, I'd have never gotten mixed up with somebody like Roy Parker.