Entangled

Tiffany adjusted the bowties, then walked around to the front of Chris, lifted her mask momentarily to show him her face, then lowered it, and signaled to us to start recording.

A high, squeaky voice began "Hello Li'l Bitch. Welcome to the Teddy Bear Picnic!"

The next half hour was one of the most surreal things I'd ever witnessed. Unlike Cherie's barely contained rage and aggressive humiliation, Tiffany kept up a sickeningly sweet patter, sang cutesy but twisted songs, told cute but pornographic stories and sing-songed a whole litany of absolutely obscene nursery rhymes. The whole time she kept abusing him.

"Onesy-twoesy-threesy" as she shoved baseball size anal beads into his butt. Then "Theesy-Twoesy-Onesy" as she popped them out. Several times. To music.

She also made a very nice flower arrangement. Chris got to hold the rather large vase, though not in his hands. It looked incredibly uncomfortable.

A hard spanking with a pink paw-shaped paddle was done to the tune of "Hot Cross Buns." Five verses, all twisted into obscene parody.

Finally, she walked toward my camera.

"You know what I think? I think no picnic is special without a Snack!"

The freaky little bear brought out a small plastic tea party plate with a small piece of sponge cake on it.

"Uh oh. We forgot the topping! You can't have your treat without that!"

One all-too-proficient prostate massage later, she pulled out his ball gag.

"Okey Dokey Lil Bitch, I have a snacky for you. It's your favorite, spooge cake!"

He was really too stoned by that time to understand what was going on and gobbled the cake down while Tiffany-bear giggled.

"Now wasn't that a fun picnic!"

We returned him to upright, stripped him and rinsed him off and gave him more Gatorade, while we set up a tiled area up to look like a sleazy subway bathroom, using bathroom stalls I pulled out of the two real bathrooms in the place as well as a sink that was already on the wall. A couple of printed subway signs made it look damned authentic.

Tanya and Cindy wore black PVC skinsuits, which was kind of a shame since both were in good shape. The suits were topped off with creepy black swine masks. They were like humiliation performance mimes.

They silently covered him in brown goo, chocolate syrup out of a prop toilet we put up. It looked for all the world like they were painting him with diarrhea. They put clothes pins on nearly every inch of his body and took turns reaming him with a toilet plunger handle. They retrieved mangled wet chocolate bars from the toilet and fed them to him.

The final scene was back to our industrial backdrop and this time, Cherie brought with her another woman in a blood-red cat woman outfit. She had a matching manacled skull tattoo. The Red Cat had a deep "Southern Belle" accent that contrasted sharply with Cherie's hard-bitten Chelsea accent. They tilted him back, fitted his mouth with a ring-gag that essentially held his mouth open, then squatted over him in turn relieving themselves. Without too much ceremony, they pretty much spit roasted him for the next half hour, swapping ends frequently. The Viagra was still obviously working and the near constant prostate stimulation had the expected results; each time it happened, they both backed off and began lambasting him about what a pathetic sick fuck he must be to enjoy being treated like the twisted piece of shit he was.

When the video was finished, the red Catwoman took off her mask and looked at me with tears in her eyes. Kasey was obviously unable to figure out what to say. Cherie had finally brought her up to speed the day before Chris arrived. She'd argued that Kasey needed this, needed to be sure Chris would have no power over her after this.

I had no idea what to say to her either and the whole process had left me somewhat numb, so I just turned to Cherie and told her that we needed to get everything cleaned up. We rinsed off Chris and moved him to a chair.

We burned all the outfits and "toys" in a metal 55 gallon drum I'd brought in for the purpose. They all talked quietly with Kasey and Cherie off in a corner before leaving. Just before Tiffany, Cindy and Tanya left, I noticed several concerned glances in my direction.

Michelle took the video off the cameras and spent the next several hours editing and enhancing the videos, cutting, mixing and adding sound effects and music.

She added prerecorded subway announcements, and the sound of periodic subway rumblings to the bathroom video. She seemed to really enjoy adding cartoon sound effects and silly music to the weird "Teddy Bear Picnic" video.

While she did that, Cherie worked at his laptop putting several final touches on the plan.

Kasey and I used outdoor sprayers with bleach water to clean the area completely. She still couldn't find anything to say.

I periodically checked to see if Chris was still alive. He was, and although I was generally ambivalent about that status, I did recognize that adding murder to the stack of crimes we'd committed was probably a bad idea. If everything went even remotely as planned, he would have no proof anything had ever happened, all of his blackmail material would be destroyed and we'd have fixed the problem forever.

It was getting close to nightfall when he came to. I gave him some Gatorade, this time in a bottle with a straw. He didn't say anything; I was pretty sure he was certain I planned to kill him.

"Welcome back, Chris."

He stared at me, wide eyed and still woozy.

"Where'd you get the videos, Chris? Don't make me ask twice. I've got a car battery and some jumper cables I'd really like to try out on you."

He looked down at the ground. "When Brady died, Michelle had to go back to her hometown for his funeral for a week. I slipped in to her house and copied them."

I figured it was something like that. "This is the part where I lay out what's about to happen. Once we drop you off, I never want to hear from you again. You make any complaint to the cops, you disappear forever. You tell anyone about this, you disappear forever. You recognized some of the people here, but there are others who helped set you up who were never here. If anyone investigates, they will find out that you personally ordered and paid for all the 'playthings and toys' that were used today."

I grabbed his face. "They were delivered to your apartment in Chicago. You paid for the video cameras; your computer will show that you did everything. Don't bother looking for anything at your apartment; it's all gone. If you have any back-up copies, I'd recommend making sure they are destroyed." Cindy's ex-husband had texted earlier to let us know he'd cleaned out the apartment.

"We took down the website you created and used a multi-platform DryRot virus to track down and eliminate copies of the videos you were using. It may miss some of the videos, but it should get most of them. We felt that just taking content from your viewers wasn't exactly fair, and we didn't want to leave you broke, so..."

I turned the laptop to face Chris.

His website had been replaced with a much more professional site, with the banner "Li'l Bitch's World of Adventure."

He stared in horror at the screen. Bright cartoon wording offered downloads of clips, with small low-res video clips running alongside.

"Li'l Bitch Versus Catwoman."

"Li'l Bitch's Shithouse Adventure."

"Li'l Bitch's Teddy Bear PicNic."

"Catwoman and Angry Kitty Teach Li'l Bitch a Lesson."

Worse yet, the visitor counter was ticking up like the world population clock, while the master download indicator ran practically in the red zone.

Chris turned green and promptly threw up the Gatorade.

"Look on the bright side, Chris; you kind of got what you wanted. It looks like you have a pretty good amount of money coming in on your website, and you got to have sex with all the women you tried to blackmail. Maybe not quite the way you were expecting, but still, sex is sex, right?"

I gave him more tranquilizer, mixed with more Ecstasy, Fentanyl and Viagra. I was really hoping I wasn't overdosing him, or dropping his blood pressure too low with the Viagra. Kasey and Tiffany had calculating the dosages carefully, but there were no guarantees, especially in a mix. When he passed out, we dressed him in in a XXXXL red lace teddy. Kasey put even more garish "Dragon Lady" style makeup on him, quickly shaving his head and supergluing a long black wig on him.

I pulled in the van we'd "borrowed" from a repair shop that was temporarily closed due the owner's incarceration for domestic battery. I'd already put fake company signs and different plates on the van.

As we finished loading him into the van, Kasey finally said something to me. "Where are we taking this piece of shit?"

I actually smiled for the first time in a while. "I figured he could continue his adventure, I think waking up in the Memphis Tenderloin district, in an alley with no ID or money, dressed like this, with a raging hard on from the Viagra may expand his horizons."

She giggled. A little too long and a little too hard, but it was the first sign of humor she'd shown in weeks.

Cherie sat in the back hammering on another of her ubiquitous laptops, while I drove and Kasey stared out the passenger window, hugging herself. The entire drive was uncomfortable. Cherie occasionally tried to start conversations, but Kasey just soaked in her own misery. Once we got to Memphis, only stopping once to gas up and once to gas up and get coffee, it took about a half hour to locate the area that was perfect for dumping our toxic waste.

Kasey asked me how I picked it.

"Actually, Cherie cross-indexed gay prostitution, lack of camera presence, gang activity and high STD rates. Pretty much leads right here."

After we found a suitable abandoned alley and rolled him out, Kasey shivered. "I guess I should be glad it isn't me in that nightgown." There was a brittle pensive air in her tone. She wasn't sure she wasn't next on the agenda for something like this.

I figured I'd better say something before visions of a one-way freighter trip to a bordello in the Congo brought her to full panic mode.

"You're the mother of our children, and even if they're all grown, when the grandchildren are born they'll need a grandmother. I'm not sure where we go from here, but this wasn't about revenge, this was about resolving an ongoing problem. Not that I didn't really enjoy doing that to him."

I could see relief passing over her.

About two hours out of Memphis, Kasey spoke up. "Can we talk? All three of us. I want to tell you what happened. Everything."

"I don't need everything, I have plenty of video for that." My voice sounded a little calmer than I expected.

"I don't mean that, I mean how it started. Why it started."

Chris' comment about being an accessory after the fact suddenly came to mind. Maybe I did need to know. "We'll talk at the house."

She shrunk in on herself a bit, but nodded.

Once we got home and settled in, we sat in the living room and settled into chairs looking at each other.

I nodded to Kasey. "It's your story."

She stared down at her own feet and took a deep breath. "Chris had evidence that I killed a man."

That caught my attention and Cherie sat bolt upright. "What?"

"I went to Tiffany's sister's bachelorette party. I had a little bit to drink, but I watched what I was doing and I didn't get drunk or anything. I had one pina colada." She looked down at her feet. "From what I figured out later, the dancers had some kind of deal with the bartender. They had him slip something into our drinks so that everyone would lose their minds; ecstasy and a bunch of other shit. They did it enough to know what they were doing. I guess, with the reduced inhibitions and the already sexual atmosphere, the dancers usually got laid in a big way. The bachelorette party girls would never let anyone know how out of hand it got, so they got away with it all the time."

I looked at her. "So how does this lead to murder?"

"Not murder. I looked it up. Aggravated vehicular homicide, but it's pretty much the same sentence. I tried to leave early, I was feeling sick, kind of dizzy, and the music was too loud. I didn't know I'd been drugged, I thought I was coming down with the flu or something. One of the dancers followed me out of the club and tried to climb into the back of the minivan. I was too messed up by whatever they put in the drinks to even know he was there. I backed right over him, then pulled out and drove over him again. I don't even remember doing it or how I got home."

"Jesus." Cherie looked as horrified as I felt.

"Chris worked at the club as security, part time. He showed up with the security tapes a few days later. He said he told the police somebody snuck in and stole the tapes. If I didn't cooperate, he'd pretend to find them stashed somewhere in the club. There was no way anyone would believe I wasn't driving drunk, stumbling around the van like I did. He played that up. They'd just put a drunk driver away for hitting a homeless guy in heavy fog, so I knew what would happen. If I fought, I'd go to prison for twenty years, and you would have bankrupted yourself trying to save me. Even if I begged you not to, you'd still have spent every penny we had for me. I couldn't do that to you and the kids."

That was true and I knew it. She went on.

"I made a deal. I'd be his partner for the swingers club; that was his main thing. I refused to do anything else, I told him I had to take care of the kids and even getting the sitters for the swing party nights might be suspicious. He agreed to that. He wasn't happy about it, but he agreed to it. He made it clear that if he even thought I told you, he'd turn me in. I didn't even figure out I'd been drugged until almost a year later from something he said, and by that time it was too late. I couldn't prove anything. He said he'd let me off the hook when you came back, and he did, until now."

"You didn't look too trapped in a lot of those videos." Even as I said it, couldn't help remembering her lost look in the earliest ones.

"At first I tried to, well, stay out of things as much as I could. Chris said if I didn't show a lot more enthusiasm, I could think about it in prison. I just got numb to everything. I used the strap-on on the other girls because it kind of felt less like cheating. I figured out everyone had their 'kink.' Michelle had her camera, Ben wanted to be pegged by women. Tiffany was just wild." Kasey shook her head with a half-smile. "She just let that freak flag fly. To me, the lesbian stuff felt like it was somehow less of a betrayal, so I decided to be the biggest strap-on dyke ever. I know it's stupid, but I held on to that as much as I could. Because of Chris, I couldn't really avoid fucking all the guys, especially at first when I was 'fresh meat,' but I made a big show of the strap-on thing and they really liked watching me fuck other women, so they left me alone a lot more. I met Cherie, and she was at least someone I could be... I don't know... be comfortable with. She looked me in the eyes. It helped because I didn't feel so completely alone."

I nodded. I could see the logic. I could see her remembering how trapped she'd felt. Her eyes were unfocused and haunted.

She breathed out slowly, with a slow shudder. She looked even more gaunt and dark, her voice turned hollow and soft. "When you don't have a choice, it gets easier. Fill yourself with unscented lube before you go. Do your best to just act like you're having fun. Pretend that it's someone else doing all that. Go home afterwards, heave your guts into a toilet half the night. Take showers so long and so hot you think your skin will burn off. You look at the bottles of painkillers in the medicine cabinet and think about taking them all at once and how easy that would be. Then you remember that you have to take care of your kids, and you don't want them to come down and find you cold and dead. So you don't take the pills. Then you do it again the next time. And the next. And the next. I was planning to kill myself after you came home and could take care of the kids, so you'd never find out. I even had a plan to make it look like an accident, but you had the job offer here so we had to move. It was like being let off death row. Even then, I couldn't even tell you. That would have made you an accessory, and there was no way I'd risk you going to prison for me. I wasn't really sure Chris destroyed the tapes, until now."

I leaned back in the chair. "Christ."

Cherie made a soft gasping sound and I looked over at her. She was almost grey. "I swear to God, I didn't know. I'm so... so sorry." She got up and started backing towards the door, stumbling. I probably wouldn't have even thought to stop her except she fell to her knees to throw up.

I caught it before Kasey did. Cherie realized that she'd essentially been an unwitting accomplice to a year-long rape. Kasey was so numbed to what had happened, had built up so many walls in her head, that she couldn't figure out why Cherie was so horrified, at first. She'd had years to deal with it, but Cherie hadn't.

Chris hadn't physically held a gun to Kasey's head, but he might as well have. I was starting to think we'd been way too lenient with him. We should have killed that fucker.

Kasey grabbed some towels and we got Cherie cleaned up. She flinched every time Kasey touched her, whispering "I'm sorry." Over and over.

We managed to get her back to the living room and she started to apologize again before Kasey cut her off.

"Cherie, you were part of what helped me hold it together. You didn't know what was going on, only Chris did. You were the only person who looked at me like I was something besides a warm body with some convenient holes. Your love probably saved me on some of the nights when it was all too much, and I was thinking about stepping off a bridge."

I looked at Kasey and she sighed. "I'm sorry, Carl, but I needed someone. I had feelings for her, strong ones. I loved her. And I still do."

She'd needed something to hold on to. A shipwreck survivor hanging onto whatever could support her. She'd been lucky, Cherie really did care for her, enough to let her go without fighting it when I came back. "I get it."

Kasey shook her head. "I love Cherie, I do. I always will, but I'm yours, all the way. I always will be. You may throw me out after this, but I won't ever leave you if I have a choice. I may have fucked everything up, but I didn't know what else to do."

I looked at her holding onto a half curled up Cherie. I walked over and sat next to her. "I don't know. You couldn't exactly talk to a lawyer about it. I think..." I realized I'd made a decision. "I think you did the best you could do. You did what you thought would be best for me and the kids. That's all I could have ever asked."

Her eyes shot open and she looked at me with an almost pleading look. "Really? You're really going to forgive me?"

"We'll be okay. I don't know if 'forgive' is even the right word. You were set up; you really didn't have many options. You took the least shitty choice for all of us, even if you had to suffer for it."

She leaned against me. "So now what?"

"We go day by day. Your skinny ass is going to start eating some sandwiches, though. You're just skin and bones." I reached across her and touched Cherie's shoulder. "You saved her. I'll never forget that."

Cherie nodded. Still a bit grey, but she was recovering from her shock. "Kasey... a lot of stuff makes more sense now. I'm... I'm glad we had... what we had. I wish it hadn't been covered in all this... shit."

Kasey kissed her forehead softly. "Me, too. You'll always be my girl though. I'll always love you."