Spy Games Ch. 17

"Yeah, she had a busy day," I said. "We bought eight houses, and in the process, Miss Hardwood gave five men stories to tell their drinking buddies."

"How long do we wait?" Miss Moorehead asked.

"At least an hour," Flanagan said. "We want to make sure she's sound asleep before we start."

Agreeing to meet back in the living room at 11:00, Miss Moorehead and I both opted for a shower -- which unfortunately happened in separate bathrooms -- while Flanagan and Sixty-nine claimed to have some unfinished tasks to attend to in the basement.

I took a quick shower and changed into sweats and a t-shirt. Hearing the water still running in an upstairs bathroom, I considered going up to volunteer my back washing services to Miss Moorehead but decided not to push it.

'She'll come to me when she's ready', my inner Mrs. Bancroft told me.

I had just picked up a bottle of bourbon from the kitchen and was headed towards the front porch when I heard an odd slapping sound coming from the basement.

Our not so little hide out in the woods came with a partially finished basement. While a good portion of it was the standard concrete floor storage area, a previous owner had transformed one corner into a bedroom / bathroom combination. I'm not sure why, but when we moved in, Sixty-nine took one of the upstairs bedrooms while Flanagan gravitated towards the basement... leaving me the master bedroom on the ground floor.

Not wanting to intrude on Flanagan's privacy, I closed the basement door and continued on to the porch. Miss Moorehead joined me a few minutes later.

We sat in silence for a while... Janis taking the occasional sip from my bourbon glass.

"You really do strive to give women what they want," she said after several minutes of pleasant silence.

I nodded in assent.

"All those women, when I was your realtor," she continued. "I thought you were molesting them. But, at least in your mind, you weren't. You actually thought you were making their lives better."

"All except you," I said. "That's my goal for the future. Make your life better... and make sure Miss Hardwood's gets worse."

"What about taking out the horde of terrorists that are supposedly descending upon us?"

"We'll take care of them as well. But you are my primary objective."

"Does that mean you're not going to leave town until you've seduced me again?"

"Not at all. When I leave Merryville, I want you to finally get both what you want and what you deserve. While sex might be a small part of the answer, you deserve much more than a night of fun between the sheets."

"Suppose you can't deliver what I want?"

"Then I will have failed."

I continued to enjoy the night sky... following what must have been a satellite race across the heavens... while Miss Moorehead considered what I said.

"I know you've had a different upbringing," she said a couple of minutes after the satellite passed out of view. "But that doesn't explain how you know so much about women. Even if I don't always approve of your methods, it's hard to argue with the results. Sometimes I think you can read a woman's mind, certainly my mind. Is that it? Are you psychic or is there some other explanation for your superpower?"

I looked into the beautiful blonde's eyes and knew, with a certainty I had never felt before, that it was time to tell her what I'd never told any other woman.

"When I was eighteen, my parents hired a tutor named Mrs. Bancroft..."

Forty-five minutes later, a satisfied looking Flanagan and red-faced Sixty-nine interrupted us by saying, "It's time to wake up Raven."

We reconvened in the living room, each of us in our assigned seats, except for Sixty-nine who, due to a tender back side, stood behind the couch. When we activated Miss Hardwood's bedroom cam, she was still slumbering peacefully, but that situation was soon to change.

In preparation for the moment, Flanagan and the two ladies had recorded several different sound effects which, thanks to the Wi-Fi connected hidden speakers, could be replayed in any of Miss Hardwood's bedrooms. They started with a soft scratching noise, like a person running their fingernails on a piece of wood. We let it play under Raven's bed for a few minutes, slowly increasing the volume until she stirred in her sleep. After a couple tosses and turns, we added a soft knocking sound which made Raven quickly sit up in bed.

"Shut it off," Flanagan said. "Let her think it was a dream."

Sixty-nine, who was in charge of the sound system, quickly complied.

Miss Hardwood looked around her room for a few seconds and then lay back into her bed and was soon sleeping again.

"Okay," Flanagan said. "Cue the scratching... Good. Now give her a little more volume... Perfect. Keep it going."

This time, when Miss Hardwood woke, she got out of her bed, turned on a lamp and walked around her room, looking for the source. It took her a minute to trace the noise to the floor under her bed and, just as she knelt to further investigate, the sound stopped.

With the lamp on, we got a very good look at an extremely frustrated lady. We opted to not bring up the bathroom cam when she went to relieve herself but watched as she returned to her bedroom, checked under the bed one more time, turned off the light and climbed back into bed.

"How long do you plan to do this?" I asked no one in particular.

"All night," Flanagan said.

"Or until she checks into the insane asylum," Sixty-nine added.

"So, you're going to stay up all night?" I asked.

"We'll work in shifts," Miss Moorehead said. "Three hours each. And don't worry, since you're harassing Raven during the day, you don't have to take a night shift."

***

The next morning, an extremely tired and cranky Raven Hardwood met me downtown for breakfast.

"Are you not feeling well," I asked as she plopped down across from me and demanded coffee from the waitress.

"I'm fine. Just tired. There's something wrong with my house. Kept me up all night."

"That's not good. I've got big plans for the next few weeks. Plans that require a full-time, wide-awake realtor. Do I need to find somebody else?"

"No. I'll be fine." She straightened her back in a valiant effort to look perky and gave me a list of the properties we would see that morning.

All in all, it was an average day. Not because we didn't buy any houses, we purchased six before 5:00 pm. But three of the sellers were old folks who I didn't want to screw with, so I gave them each five thousand below asking without any drawn-out negotiations. I did get an erotic massage from a forty-year-old nurse and her twenty-one-year-old daughter in exchange for an extra ten thousand in sales price. And Miss Hardwood more than made up for my largess by taking a gentleman down her throat and, not an hour later, doing the same for his next-door neighbor.

She didn't mention her 'house issue' again, until she dropped me at my car.

"Have you ever heard strange noises in your house?" she asked.

"Depends on what you call strange. I once thought I heard a bear attacking a coyote, but it turned out to be the couple next door having sex."

"What I'm hearing sounds like somebody or something under my bed. It's like a scratchy sound."

"You can't see what's causing it?"

"No. It's under the floor."

"Probably some critter under your floorboards. Nothing a good exterminator can't fix."

"I hope it's that simple."

The next three days and nights were repeats of the previous. During the day, I bought houses, pleasured a few of the more deserving women in town and pimped my realtor to any male homeowner who could get it up. At night, while I slept like a baby, my three housemates woke Miss Hardwood every time she entered a REM cycle.

"I think we're getting to her," Flanagan told me at dinner. "She's called two exterminators and three of her neighbors for help. Despite the professional advice, she still thinks there's something living under her house. Tonight, we up the ante."

Now I like my sleep as much as the next guy. But, in my profession, a lot of my work was done between the hours of midnight and dawn. Balancing the pain of getting up at 3:00 am versus the reward of seeing Flanagan screw with Miss Hardwood's mind was a no brainer. At 2:45 the next morning, I joined the rest of my housemates as they put phase two into action.

"How do you know there is a ghost in your room?" Flanagan asked the assembled crowd.

"Spooky sounds," I suggested.

"The lights flicker," Miss Moorehead guessed.

"You hear chains dragging across the floor," Sixty-nine offered.

"All good ideas," Flanagan said. "But the number one indication that you are in the presence of a lost spirit -- according to most movies and ghost stories -- is a sudden drop in temperature. If you go from sweating to shivering for no good reason, start looking for a poltergeist.

"Thanks to the marvels of the 'internet-of-things' I can control Raven's air conditioner from my smart phone. All of the newer thermostats have the capability. It lets you turn down the air conditioning or turn up the heat when you're on the way home from work. Most people, like our dark-haired sleeping beauty, don't use the capability. I doubt Raven even knows about it. So, I linked my phone to her thermostat.

"Twenty minutes ago, I changed her desired temperature from a comfortable 72 degrees down to a frigid 55. The next time she wakes up, which will be in about two minutes, if nothing else, we'll at least see two frozen nips sticking out of her negligee."

Flanagan started with the standard "nails scratching on a wood coffin" noise. Once Miss Hardwood started to stir, he added what one might believe was the sound of someone rapping on wood with a knuckle and alternated the two while Raven sat up, turned on the light and got out of bed.

He was right. The woman visibly shivered when her feet hit the floor and, although the camera angle wasn't perfect, I might have seen the bumps of two rock hard nipples pressing against the cotton which barely hid her charms. Despite the cold, Raven got down on her hands and knees, giving us a good view of her impressive ass as she put her ear to the floor, trying to localize the source of her torment.

"Here comes the fun part," Flanagan said.

He stopped the scratching tapping sound effects and switched to a voice recording.

"Help me. Please help me," the female voice said through the speaker hidden under Raven's bed.

The volume of the recording was purposefully low, but loud enough for Raven to hear with her ear to the floor and certainly loud enough for her to recognize the voice of Janis Moorehead.

I've always enjoyed watching the Olympics every four years and that's where my mind went next. Because, of all the sprinters I've seen win Olympic gold, none of them could have beaten Raven Hardwood in her mad dash from a kneeling position on the bedroom floor to the garage. And the speed at which she opened her garage door, started her Porsche and peeled out into the street would have made a Grand Prix driver proud.

"Did she just leave her house wearing nothing but a nightie?" Miss Moorehead asked.

"Apparently so."

"Where is she going?"

"North, on route 31," Flanagan said after consulting his iPad. "And she's pushing ninety miles per hour."

"How the hell do you know that?" I asked.

"I attached a GPS tracker to her car," Sixty-nine said.

"We can also track her phone," Flanagan added, "which she apparently took with her."

Flanagan projected his iPad display onto the sixty-inch TV, replacing the previous view of Miss Hardwood's bedroom with a map of Merryville.

"The two overlapping black dots moving up the screen belong to Raven's phone and car," he said. "The orange dots belong to the different city council members, the red dot is the mayor and the green denote the local cops."

"How about the two blue dots in the middle of the map?" I asked.

"Those mark your position and mine."

I was about to ask for details when Flanagan's phone rang.

"It's Raven," he said. "If you all can keep your mouths shut, I'll put it on speaker.

"Jesus Raven, it's three o'clock in the fucking morning." Flanagan said into the phone trying to sound like a man who was woken from a deep sleep. "This had better be --"

"Janis is under my bedroom," Raven said interrupting.

Flanagan gave us all a silent high five as he waited an appropriate amount of time to supposedly absorb what he was told.

"Any chance we can both go back to bed and talk about this when the sun's been up a few hours?" he asked.

"I'd rather not. I'm afraid to go back to my house."

"Where are you?"

"I'm not sure. I just started driving... wasn't paying attention to where I was going. All I wanted was to get away from the voice."

"Okay, here's what I want you to do. Find a safe place to pull over and use your phone to get to the Merryville Inn. Get a room for the night and we'll talk about this after you've had some sleep."

"That's not going to work," Raven said.

"Why not?"

"I left in kind of a hurry. I don't have my purse or credit cards and I'm not appropriately dressed to check into a hotel?"

"What are you wearing?"

"My nightie."

"Great. You're wandering aimlessly around town at three a.m. with no ID and what you're wearing will get you arrested for indecent exposure. Not exactly the actions of a future mayor."

"It's not like that. Something's going on in my house and I had to get away."

"Is that what you're going to tell the cop that pulls you over? You thought you heard the voice of the woman you buried alive, so you ran?"

Flanagan let his words sink in before continuing.

"Listen Raven. You're going to have to go back to your house eventually. Meet me there in half an hour. I'll go in with you and we'll sort this out. Take your time. Drive like an old woman in a funeral procession. Make sure I'm the only cop who gets to see your negligee tonight."

He hung up after Miss Hardwood agreed to his plan.

"Looks like I'm going to be making a house call," Flanagan said while the rest of us laughed.

A half hour later, the two women and I were on the couch looking at video of Miss Hardwood's empty kitchen. Miss Moorehead was cuddled up against my shoulder and almost asleep when Flanagan appeared on the TV screen, followed closely by Raven. Sixty-nine took control of the TV and followed Flanagan as he pretended to search Raven's house for an intruder. After going through every room, to include the attic, closets and bathroom, they ended up in Raven's bedroom.

"There's nobody here but the two of us," Flanagan said, "and I don't hear any strange noises. But I know something frightened you earlier tonight. Would you be more comfortable if I stayed for a while?"

"Yes, Officer Flanagan," an obviously shaken Raven said. "Please stay until dawn."

Miss Moorehead and I went to bed shortly after Flanagan relieved Raven of her night gown. The last thing I saw on the TV, just before we left the living room, Raven was bent over the side of the bed -- feet on the floor, boobs on the mattress -- and Flanagan was fucking her doggy style while treating her ass cheeks like speed bags.

I'm fairly sure Sixty-nine spent the night on the couch... watching the Raven-Flanagan sex show until dawn.