Political Abuse

They had taken Zach Taylor down from the X-frame and had him covered with a black cloth, waiting for a gurney, when Hardesty got to the apartment.

“You want to see him?” Lieutenant Crane asked when Hardesty reached the bedroom door.

“I don’t think so. I’d like to think of him in life.”

Crane raised his eyebrow. “This one too?” he asked. He didn’t have to be clearer. He knew how Hardesty interacted with hot young informants and suspects alike. He didn’t come down hard on it because Hardesty got results and those he fucked who were still alive didn’t complain about it. Unfortunately, this one wasn’t alive. But had he managed to be an informant yet? Crane asked the question.

“Yeah, just the once, though,” Hardesty answered, as if it made all of the difference in the world. “And he got away before I could find out much of anything useful from him. He was sure that he’d find something at Zeller’s office in the Capitol building. You were there, but you say it had been ransacked before you got there? Did you find anything at all we can use?”

“Nada. But I have a couple of men sifting through everything there again. The place was a mess.”

“So, you don’t think Taylor was offed here?” Hardesty said. “He wasn’t bound to the frame and beaten to death?”

“No. I’m sure he was killed in Zeller’s office—or beaten so badly there it didn’t take much of a push elsewhere. His trousers, with his wallet in them, were at the Capitol building and there was some blood there and signs of a struggle on the desktop.”

“Blood?”

“He was beaten and whipped. Enough to raise blood. He’d also been sodomized. The Med Examiner said he’d had sex as recently as when he died. A condom had been used, though. And he wasn’t killed on this X-frame in here, I don’t think. He was just left here for us to find. His back had been whipped, but he was hung with his back to the frame, and he had been strangled and his neck was broken. We’re saying that he wasn’t offed here. But about the sex before death?” He gave Hardesty a meaningful look.

“I can’t say it wasn’t me, Chief. We fucked before he went off to the Capitol building. But I didn’t beat him or strangle him. And he was a rent-boy. He’d just come from a weekend of client sex when he came to me. So, the check is likely to find something from any number of men. Me included.”

“Well, we’ll see what we can do to keep you out of it. Good thing you were straight with me on having been with him. And you didn’t get any leads out of him?”

“I still have a lead to check out, and he gave me some names, yes. Too important for me to say them out loud unless I can get corroboration. But I think I know where I can get that. I’ll go see him after leaving here.”

“Him?”

“Jeremy Brand. I’ve had a couple of guys, including both Goldstein and Taylor, mention his name as being in the operation in the early days, but having left it. I know where to find him, I think, though.”

“Good. By the way, I think we’re getting someplace on the Zeller killing at the federal prison. We’re zeroing in on a guard with money troubles and an appetite for young men. And we’re working on Zeller’s lawyers. They claim they don’t know who hired them to represent Zeller, but we don’t necessarily believe that. I’ll let you know if we come up with a name from either of those probes.”

“Thanks, Chief.”

“I’d like to get this wrapped up before we have any more of these deaths,” Crane said. “These guys play nasty, and if our probing goes very far up in the power chain here in D.C., they might move faster in getting the investigation thrown off the rails than we can catch up to them.”

“I agree. It’s frustrating to ferret out a lead and get it taken away from you under your nose. And I have my own reasons for getting this closed down fast.”

“Oh, what’s that? You found you had an affection for this Taylor guy?”

“I have an affection for all good-looking, small blond guys, I’m sorry to say. But for one in particular. I’m getting the sinking feeling that Toby is caught up in this somehow. And he didn’t come home last night.”

“Then I guess you need to shove off and get on with it. I think . . . hold on, I’m getting a call.” Crane pulled out his cell phone and Hardesty could tell from Crane’s excitement and his side of the conversation that the cops at the Capitol building had found something in Zeller’s office.

“Zeller had a safe hidden there and our guys got into it,” the police lieutenant said to Hardesty when he got off the phone. “There’s a list of names. Near the top of the list is the name of Ted Colver.”

“The TV commentator?” Hardesty asked. “I was just on his program the . . . well, shit. I was on his program with Jacob Goldstein, who told us off camera that he had more information on this congressional sex ring than he’d revealed so far. He was telling just Colver and me and that night Goldstein was dead. But Colver’s a TV guy.”

“He was a U.S. senator before that. He would have been in Congress when this ring started off in business. Tell you what. You go ahead and run down your lead, and I’ll find out where this Colver guy lives, and we’ll pay him a little visit. If he’s involved, we can at least rattle his cage and let him know he’s in our sights. I’ll have the unit look into everyone else mentioned on Zeller’s list from the safe.”

Crane would quickly find that Ted Colver had a house off MacArthur Boulevard on the Potomac Palisades, and he’d go there. But he’d find no one home. Then he had to go through the red tape to get a warrant to get into the house and check it out. He wisely got that more quickly out of a judge by identifying Colver as a media commentator rather than a former U.S. senator.

* * * *

Later Hardesty was able to identify several mistakes he’d made in this investigation—it hadn’t just been that he’d let Zach Taylor go to the Capitol building alone. He also had failed to confiscate Adrian Mills’s cell phone when he’d stashed him away in supposed safety in his northwest Washington nondescript brick, 1950s-style rambler—and he’d let Mills know what the address of the house was. He hadn’t realized how really dumb Adrian Mills was.

The neighbor had settled Mills after bringing him breakfast and had gone back to her house, when the cell phone rang.

“It’s Judge Morton,” the man on the connection said. “I need you this weekend. There’s a gathering.”

“I can’t do it. Sorry, Judge,” Mills answered. “I’ve had an accident and am all banged up. Both my arm and one of my calves are in casts.”

“We just need your ass,” the judge said, with a laugh. “And some of the men might be aroused by a guy all bandaged up. Your hole can still take a cock, can’t it? All you have to do is lay there and take it.”

“Yes, but I’m really too messed up to—”

“We’ll pay you $2,000 for the weekend and we won’t make you swing on any trapezes.”

Mills desperately needed the money, and that was before he had started mounting up medical bills for this mugging. Lord only knew what that would be and how much of it he could get anyone else to pay. Toby had said the escort service would pay, but who knew if that was true? And Michael Morton was one of his best clients. He could hardly get it up and keep it up and he wasn’t rough. Mills desperately needed the money.

Adrian Mills also was dumb as a rock.

When he went out to the car, idling in front of Hardesty’s secret house, after giving the judge the address and saying he’d do it, he saw that Morton was in the front passenger seat and there were two other men in the car. Only when the passenger door of the backseat opened and the man came out and manhandled Mills into between them in the backseat did Adrian realize that one of them was Doug Quillen. He had only a split second to see that the driver of the car was one of the thugs who had beaten him up in the zoo parking lot.

He suddenly decided that, no, he didn’t really want to do this, but Quillen punched him in the face, dragged him into the car, and had a hypodermic needle out and plunged into Mills’s bicep before the bandaged-up man could give any more resistance. He was out like a light.

“Hey, what?” Morton exclaimed. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“We need to keep him quiet, Judge,” Quillen growled. “We don’t want to alarm the neighborhood and have someone recognize you, do we? You’ve done your part. Just sit back and enjoy being part of the club. You haven’t seen anything. You’ll want to be able to continue saying you haven’t seen anything.” The car eased away from the curb and drove off.

Doug Quillen now had yet another blackmail issue to hold over Judge Morton’s head, as needed.

The neighbor, who had been at the back of her house when the car had driven up, heard it start up and glanced out of the window in time to get the make of the car and the first three letters of the license plate. She was a retired cop; she took the plate number of every unfamiliar car stopping in the neighborhood. But she had no specific reason to be alarmed that a car had paused in front of Hardesty’s house and she didn’t find that Mills was gone until she came over to the house to make him lunch.

* * * *

Toby was on the bed in the darkened room of the MacArthur Boulevard house. He was naked, on his side, and with his arms stretched over his head, cuffed, and restrained at the headboard. Senator Clayton Hughes, stretched out behind Toby, his cock inside Toby, churning in the young rent-boy’s channel, was beating Toby off with one hand and had the other hand over Toby’s nose and mouth, controlling the prostitute’s breathing. He had been controlling Toby’s breathing for some time, increasingly constricting the young man’s airway. All of the fight was out of Toby, all of his energy going to grabbing whatever gasp of air he could. His back stung from the whipping he’d taken before, with Pete Drummond’s help, the senator had taken Toby off the X-frame in one corner of the room and moved him back to the bed.

One or another of the three men had been beating and fucking Toby through the night. The young man was cowed and just wanted to have it over. There still was some semblance of the will to survive left in him, though. He concentrated on not coming for Hughes. He somehow had it in his mind that the senator wanted just one last ejaculation out of him and then he’d end it. Very little air was getting to Toby now.

Toby knew that he wasn’t meant to survive this, because the three men had spoken in the room of the congressional sex ring they now operated and of the deaths of Jim Zeller, Jacob, and Zach Taylor in the effort to head off the police investigation of the ring and minimize fallout. They talked of Adrian Mills, as well, Hughes thinking that he too was dead, but Pete Drummond saying he wasn’t and that he had been spirited out of Sibley Hospital.

“But I’ll find him,” Drummond said.

And they spoke of Jeremy Brand, another loose end. They didn’t know where he was now, but Drummond had said, “I’ll find him too. Doug is tracking him down.”

Toby knew where both Mills and Brand were but they hadn’t asked him. If they had, they would have to take the ball gag out of his mouth. While they had talked, reviewing the state of play, Toby was spread-eagled on his belly on the bed, tied off at all corners and his pelvis elevated on pillows. He had been whipped and each of the three men had fucked him. Hughes and Drummond had spoken of sharing him and had reviewed what positions they might use to get that done.

And they had spoken of Toby’s partner, Hardesty, and speculated on what Toby might have heard the previous weekend at Senator Douglas Pender’s party on the Chesapeake Bay about the congressional sex ring that he might have passed on to Hardesty. They had already interrogated Toby about this when they had him hanging from the X-frame and Pete Drummond was whipping him, but Toby hadn’t told them anything to indicate that he knew anything about their operations or Hardesty’s investigation of that.

And they spoke of this weekend’s retreat up in the mountains and something about Hughes’s hunting lodge.

And then Hughes and Drummond had decided on a double penetration position to take with Toby, and Drummond had wormed his way underneath Toby’s spread-eagled and bound body, lifted Toby, and saddled the young man on his pelvis. There was enough give in Toby’s arm and leg restraints to permit him to be put in a cowboy position, facing Drummond’s head, and on his cock. Hughes climbed up on the bed, behind Toby and straddling Drummond’s thighs. He grasped Toby’s waist and helped to raise and lower the young man’s passage on Drummond’s cock for a couple moments. Then he worked his own cock inside Toby’s channel above that of Drummond, and the two men worked Toby together as Toby writhed between them and bit hard into his rubber ball gag.

They left Toby for a while after they had finished him together, but Hughes had come back and Drummond had helped him put Toby on the X-frame again for another whipping session before taking him to the bed. The whipping wasn’t for Toby. Hughes needed it to get himself hard. Although each separate session wasn’t extremely intense, putting them all together and for as long as this had been going on, Toby had few illusions how far they intended to go with him.

Toby was coming close to ejaculation under the beating of Hughes’s hand, and he felt that Hughes was tensing up too, ready to blow inside Toby’s passageway. He had to hold on, he told himself. But he couldn’t. He was so weak, and he hurt all over, and he couldn’t get his next breath.

Toby came and then so did Hughes. Both of Hughes’s hands came to Toby’s throat, and he was gently turning Toby’s head this way and that way with the hands gripping his throat. He was at the point, Toby knew, of snapping the young man’s neck—and Toby almost welcomed that as a relief from his long ordeal with these three men—when Ted Colver opened the door to the bedroom and called out. “Leave him, Clay, and hold off. We’ll want him for entertainment at the lodge. And we’d best be going. Let him get cleaned up, and we’ll meet at the car in twenty minutes.”

His voice had been authoritative. Toby had wondered who was in charge of this business. He no longer wondered that. Pete Drummond came back in the room and untied him and helped him to the bathroom, standing at the door while Toby showered and then close enough, with a pistol in his hand, to intervene, as needed, while Toby dressed by the bed.

When Toby was done, he picked up the duffle bag he’d brought for changes of clothes and toiletries for the weekend.

“Here, hand me your toiletry kit bag,” Drummond said. “You won’t be needing anything else. Leave the duffle to me.”

Toby knew it was as he had dreaded. He wouldn’t be needing a change of clothes at this mountain lodge. He wouldn’t be needing anything else, ever—other than being groomed to their liking for the remainder of the time they would give him.

What could he do? How could he at least give some indication to anyone coming looking for him to connect him to Ted Colver and his cohorts? Why hadn’t he given Hardesty a better idea of what his assignment had been—who it was with? He did all he could think to do while Pete Drummond was monitoring his movements.

It wasn’t lost to Toby that Drummond had been wearing gloves when he’d lifted Toby’s duffle bag, or that he stopped the car—Colver in the front seat with Pete, who was driving, and Clayton Hughes and a shackled and handcuffed Toby in the backseat—at the rest stop near the Bull Run battlefield on Route 66 coming out of Washington, D.C., to the west and heaved Toby’s duffle into a dumpster.

They drove northwest, toward the Blue Ridge Mountains, on 66, turning off before Front Royal, at Linden, and climbed the spine of Blue Mountain. Toby had been in the area, winery hopping, and to weekend parties by the Washington elite before, so he knew the area. His knowledge of where they were going ended, though, as the car went off the asphalted road running across the top of Blue Mountain and onto a rough, graveled road continuing across the top of the mountain, where the asphalted road started its descent to the Shenandoah River valley.

Toby caught a glimpse of the road sign at the turnoff—Fire Trail Road. And it certainly wasn’t much more than a fire trail, giving access to fire equipment, when needed, to fight forest fires in this remote area. There was forested parkland and the Appalachian Trail on the right of the car as they slowly drove through the ruts and by houses and cabins peeking out at intervals in the forest to the left. They were riding the ridge; the land dropped off to both sides of the road. Beyond this forest were periodic views down into the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley.

Toby thought he could be forgiven for not appreciating the breathtaking views and the forest drive. He knew he was in serious danger.

After a couple of miles driving across the spine of the long mountain range, the car turned left into a nearly hidden dirt drive and down the slope to a long, rambling, wooden log house. The building presented as one-story on the front and two on the back. They had arrived at Clayton Hughes’s hunting lodge. Civilization, including the nation’s capital, was all around them. But they could scarcely have been more isolated than they now were. No other houses could be seen from the lodge. There was a large parking area on the mountain side of the lodge and beside it, though. The place could accommodate a crowd.

Ted Colver and Clayton Hughes got out of the car and went up onto the front porch running the length of the lodge and into an entry door. Pete Drummond didn’t go in immediately, though, and neither did Toby. Drummond climbed into the backseat with Toby. Toby, shackled and handcuffed, tried to roll out of the car to make a run for the cover of trees. But Drummond punched him in the mouth and Toby fell back into the backseat. Drummond put him on all fours across the seat, pulled his shorts and briefs down, mounted and penetrated him, and fucked the shit out of him.

“Don’t want you frisky and getting any ideas,” he muttered as he started on Toby.

* * * *

Justine met Hardesty at the front door of the townhouse in the fashionable embassy section of Kalomara in northwest Washington, D.C., with a frown tinged with a scowl. She was tall and zaftig and being Justine today rather that Justin. Justine was the gatekeeper and madam of one of the more exclusive male brothels in the nation’s capital. She normally met Hardesty with a smile, as he was one of her more helpful protectors as well as being a favorite client of her boys. Today, though, she was standing in the doorway, a formidable presence that was more a barrier to the detective than a greeter. And, as ever, she was more formidable decked out as Justine than as Justin. Behind and peeking around her was a young, small, blond man, looking at Hardesty with awe, and making Hardesty’s loins ache. Hardesty couldn’t remember having seen the young man before, and he was just Hardesty’s type.

“If you’re here because of what is going on over at the Capitol building, we have nothing to do with that,” Justine said. She was standing squarely in the doorway, arms crossed. “You know I consider them competition, and if they go down, all the better for me.”

“You really want me to be standing outside your door in this neighborhood and discussing this, Justine? I could always raise my voice—broadcast to the neighborhood that I’m a vice cop.”

“No, I suppose not,” she said, as she stood aside. The young blond faded back into the foyer but didn’t retreat from Hardesty’s presence. He was still looking at Hardesty like the detective was a legend the young man had heard awesome stories about, which was probably exactly the case.

“Who is this? New?” Hardesty asked. He didn’t have to be more explicit who he was talking about. As he brushed past Justine, his eyes were on the young man. Justine knew Hardesty’s tastes. Justine expended considerable time and effort catering to Hardesty’s tastes.

“Yes, he’s just signed on with us. His name is Curtis, and he’s legal—just barely. Initiated but not fully trained. Just learning the ropes. Would you like to have the honors?” Hardesty did, in fact, have special client privileges at the house.

“Could I use ropes?”

“Of course,” Justine answered, well knowing what Hardesty specialized in and, because he did it so well, why most of Justine’s young men favored him so much. “Nothing that leaves marks, though—or traumatizes the lad for all times, though I know I can trust you on that score.”

“If rainchecks are available, I’ll take one,” Hardesty answered, obviously a bit reluctantly. “For now I’m on a mission and have already run out of time. And, yes, this is about what’s going down on Capitol Hill. But I’m not here to connect Justine’s with any of that. I’m here to try to help you avoid it and to try to stop this from getting any bloodier than it is. And no beating around the bush, please. I think Toby might be at risk. I think he was with these guys last weekend and he’s off somewhere now.”

The mention of Toby told Justine this indeed was serious for Hardesty and there would be no waltzing around with him on the issue. “Curtis, take the gentleman’s coat and escort him into the parlor, please. Let him touch, but I don’t think there will be any humping with him today. Unless,” she turned and smiled at Hardesty, “you would have time and inclination for a quickie.” Justine turned and sailed off for that room herself.

Shyly looking down, Curtis came to Hardesty and took his coat. Hardesty cupped the young man’s chin, raised his face, and kissed him on the lips. “Later,” he said, adding, “Sit with me while I talk with Justine.” The young man shuddered and gave a little smile.

Justine was sitting in a wing chair, gesturing to a sofa across a coffee table from her for Hardesty to sit on. She intuitively knew he’d want Curtis by his side to fondle as they talked. She realized that the house was skirting on the edge of disaster with this congressional sex ring scandal that was unfolding, and she needed all of the support in the police department she could muster.

A bottle of scotch and two crystal glasses sat on the coffee table. Justine poured as Hardesty entered the parlor, and he and Curtis arranged themselves on the sofa, close together, Hardesty’s arm around the young man’s shoulders. Nothing was mentioned about Hardesty being on duty and therefore not permitted to take the proffered drink. Justine handed one of the glasses to Hardesty, and he took a deep drink of scotch before putting the glass down and looking directly at the madam. His other hand was exploring Curtis, both over his clothes and underneath as conveniently as possible. Curtis was sighing and doing nothing to hinder the exploration.

Hardesty was going hard. A quickie couldn’t take long. It could be just a straightforward fuck for the first time.

“Straight out, Justine, you have a rent-boy here who came to you from the Capitol Hill operation. I need to speak to him—and you need to let me take him away under protection, both for his and for your own good, until we wrap up this other mess. His name is Jeremy Brand.”

“Jeremy Brand? I don’t think we have anyone—”

“Don’t shit with me, Justine. Jeremy’s not in any legal trouble, but he’s toxic at the moment for what he knows. For the good of all of us, he needs to tell me what he knows and leave here for a while or you might have bloodbath in this parlor.”

“Oh, you must mean Larry Lindon,” Justine said, shaken by the directness Hardesty was taking, but trying not to show it. “He’s out with a client now. I can have him call you when—”

“What client?”

“You know I can’t reveal—”

“Don’t fuck with me on this, Justine. Is it someone from Congress? If it is, Jeremy might need help now—or he might be beyond help already.”

“Congress?” Justine said, a distressed look on her face.

“It is, isn’t it? Who?”

“Senator Pender,” she said. “You don’t think—?” She stopped because the expression on Hardesty’s face showed that he, indeed, did “think” Pender might be a problem.

“Can you call him in—have him break off from Pender with an excuse that doesn’t alert the senator to trouble brewing? You keep constant contact with your men out on assignment, don’t you? You have panic recall capability, don’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

“Use it. Call Jeremy back in. Now. Or find out where he is. Now.”

Justine gave Hardesty a sour look, but she got up and sailed out of the room. Before she left, though, she said, “It looks like you won’t be waiting for that raincheck with Curtis. It may take some time to track Larry down. Feel free to indulge.”

Well, she was right. As much as he was worried about Toby, this was going to take a while. And this honey he was fondling was a hot little piece who had him erect.

She hadn’t been gone more than five minutes before Hardesty had Curtis draped over his lap and the young man’s pants and trousers pulled down and off his legs to expose his bare buttocks. Hardesty patted and squeezed Curtis’s butt cheeks and ran fingers into his crease and worried the young’s man’s hole, pulling the young man’s butt cheeks apart to open the hole up and rimming it and penetrating it with his fingers to coax it even more open. Curtis dangled his legs off one side of Hardesty’s lap and his arms and head off the other and moaned at the attention he was receiving. He flinched and gave a little yelp when Hardesty slapped him on the buttocks—several times, more sharply each time than the last, leaving his handprint on the young man’s cheeks.

Pushing the young man onto his knees, Hardesty unzipped himself, pulled his hard cock out, and moved Curtis’s mouth into position. The young man worked at swallowing the cock, gagging on it because it was too big for him to handle. But he gave it a good try.

“Crown me,” Hardesty growled, knowing full well that there were disks of condoms scattered throughout the room. That done, Hardesty turned Curtis onto all fours between his spread thighs, grasped the young man’s waist in his hands, and pulled Curtis’s ass back onto his cock. The young man moaned and groaned as Hardesty pulled him back and forth on the hard shaft and Curtis stroked himself off.

When Justine returned to the parlor, Hardesty was zipped up again, but Curtis was still naked below, sitting close beside Hardesty, and the detective was fondling the young man’s cock and balls.

“It’s done,” Justine said without taking notice of what Hardesty was doing to her new rent-boy. It was what Justine expected to see clients doing with her staff. “I’ve called him back immediately. Now we have to wait for him to get back in. He hadn’t met up with the senator yet. I told him to avoid contact with the man. I’ve also sent a message to the senator saying something has come up and that Larry can’t make the meeting.” Although she obviously saw that Hardesty was playing with Curtis, she took no note other than to say, “You may wish to wait in one of the rooms upstairs for Larry to return. Curtis can show you where.”

When Justine came upstairs to tell Hardesty that the young man she called Larry and who Hardesty was interested in as Jeremy Brand had returned, she found Hardesty heavily engaged. He was standing, legs in a bit of a spread crouch, in the middle of one of the bedrooms, his fists clutching the handles of a plow belt, a thick length of black leather, with clutch handles at each end, in front of him. The small, blond Curtis was belly down on the plow belt, facing away from Hardesty, his buttocks nestled into Hardesty’s crotch, and Hardesty’s thick, hard cock buried deep up the young man’s ass. Curtis, bent over, was bound with cuff restraints at the wrists and ankles, which, along with his head, were dangling toward the floor, but not reaching it. Hardesty was using the strength of his arm and leg muscles to pull the young man up and down on the buried cock, each deep pull accompanied by an exclamation and whimper from Curtis.

“Be there in a minute,” Hardesty growled through clinched teeth. “Just finishing up something here.”

Curtis raised his head and gave Justine a grin-grimace couched in both pain and exquisite pleasure.

“I’ll tell Larry to pack for a few days away from here,” Justine said, taking in the scenario but finding nothing objectionable in it; it was all good training for the new rent-boy. “I agree that it’s a good idea for him not to be here until this Capitol ring issue is resolved.” And then she turned, shut the door as Curtis’s exclamations were building into the “Oh, shit. Fuckin’ A, I’m gonna come” crescendo.

Four more long pulls, a cry of ecstasy from Curtis, and a shot of cum toward the floor and Hardesty was finished with the training session and he could go back to worrying about what was happening with these congressmen and whether Toby had gotten embroiled with them.

* * * *

Toby had been hanging on the X-frame in the basement of Clayton Hughes’s Blue Mountain hunting lodge for a couple of hours, during which Pete Drummond had come down and let him free to piss once and told him Ted Colver, the man who clearly was the one calling the shots here, wasn’t finished with him yet. Toby had been bound facing the frame and Colver had taken a couple of licks at his buttocks and back with a hand whip before the political commentator had been called upstairs to help Hughes receive arriving guests.

The floorboard in the old hunting lodge weren’t joined together tightly, so Toby not only could hear those arriving treading around above but also could distinguish voices. It largely was the same guest list—or at least the closer inner circle—of the men who had been at Senator Pender’s retreat on the Chesapeake Bay the previous weekend. He didn’t hear Pender’s voice, though. He did hear the voices of a couple of the Capitol pages, like the young black page, Ray, and junior staffers who had been made into rent-boys. Already, in what was very likely a bedroom just over his head, Toby could hear the sounds of bedsprings being taxed and Ray being vigorously fucked. Ray was noisy during sex.

Other than similar sounds, life above Toby’s head had gone more silent for a while. The bulk of the activity had appeared to move to a cleared field behind and downslope from the hunting lodge, where target practice was being conducted amidst the sound of gunfire and laughter. That stopped too and the focus of activity went to the front of the lodge, where vehicles were arriving. Toby heard the voice of Judge Morton complaining and Ted Colver shouting him down, with the judge giving in. Their voices continued around the side of the lodge and back to where the practice shooting was under way.

After a few minutes, Toby heard the clumping of feet coming down the wooden stairs into the basement and he turned his head to see that a bandaged-up and unconscious Adrian Mills was being carried into the basement room by Doug Quillen and Pete Drummond. He was stripped and lowered to a contraption quite similar to a medical examination table, with foot stirrups that raised and spread his legs, putting his ass on the lower edge of the table, and restraining his wrists to the sides of the table. His head flopped off the top of the table and a throat restraint held it in place.

When they had Adrian, still unconscious, trussed up, Quillen and Drummond took their pleasure with him before going back upstairs. Quillen moved in between Adrian’s spread and raised legs, unzipped himself, saddled up to Adrian’s pelvis, and thrust inside him. At the same time Drummond, slapping Adrian’s face to bring him back into some semblance of consciousness, fed his cock into Adrian’s mouth at the other end of the table. While these two were fucking Mills, two other middle-aged men Toby hadn’t seen before came down into the basement and watched Quillen and Drummond at work. Both of them pulled their cocks out and stroked them. One pulled away from watching and came over to Toby. After going on his knees and eating Toby’s ass out for a while and pulling the young man’s cock through his thighs and milking it, he saddled up to the back of the bound Toby, penetrated him, and began to fuck him.

The other man who had come down into the basement with him took over fucking Adrian in the ass when Quillen and Drummond were finished, had zipped up, and went back upstairs.

The man fucking Toby had nothing special hanging on him and wasn’t too taxing. Toby just gritted his teeth and took it. He knew there was going to be more of the same before this came to an end. And as long as it continued at least he still was alive. He knew too, that that wasn’t meant to be a forever condition here at the hunting lodge. The signs were too clear that this was meant as an end of the line for both him and Adrian Mills. It was mountain wilderness out here. They could be buried in the forest and never found again. And much of the area was national forest; it wouldn’t be developed.

Toby wondered what Hardesty was doing and where he was, and his mind went to the warnings and pleadings Hardesty had been giving him—not pushily so, though—about giving this life up. Maybe Hardesty should have been pushier about that, Toby was belatedly thinking.

He looked over at Adrian, trussed up on the table, casts on his leg and arm. With the exception of a brief time when Drummond was face fucking him, the young man hadn’t made a sound or moved from the time he’d been brought down into the hunting lodge’s basement, bound on the table, and fucked by more than one man. Toby couldn’t be sure the young man was still even alive. It might be a mercy if he wasn’t.

(To be continued)