The Wrangler: The only thing standing between the beautiful kidnapped heiress and death was -- The Wrangler. by Pat Powers Read Free Book Online

that suddenly flooded her, into a kind of horrorgasm, fear and ecstasy combining into an unholy medley of emotion like nothing she had ever felt before.
    The Man flipped the switch on the CD controller back to "on" and the white noise flooded Christine's ears. She didn't notice. She was too overwhelmed by emotion to notice.
    After the Man withdrew, Christine just wanted to curl up into a ball. But she couldn't, she had to stay splayed open, held by the ropes, wide open for the death stroke which she now knew was going to be aimed at her.
    She wanted to scream, and perhaps she did -- she wasn't sure if the screaming was just the feeling in her heart or an actual sound. What difference did it make, since she was gagged?
    It was the most horrible moment in her life -- to feel so threatened, yet so exposed, so helpless and so violated.
    Christine's inner turmoil didn't register on the Man. He knew she was terrified, as he intended. He liked that. She oughtta be terrified. So should a lot of people.
    The Wrangler came in after the Man left, to "check the knots" as he told them. It was his job, so they accepted it. Actually, it was to check the telltales he'd set. The Wrangler noted immediately that the telltales by the CD player were disturbed. The Man had been dicking with the CD player. Almost certainly, it had been to turn it off so he could tell the captive something, as the CD made no sound that anyone but Christine could hear.
    And almost certainly, it was something the Man didn't want the Wrangler to know about, as everyone had been warned not to dick with the CD player, and why.
    Which meant the Man didn't care if Christine knew what his voice sounded like. That might be because he didn't think at all likely that he would ever wind up in a lineup for this job.
    But much more likely, it meant that the Man didn't think Christine was ever going to be in a position to listen to him speak in a lineup, because he intended to kill her.
    All of these thoughts flashed through the Wrangler's mind in the scant few seconds after he noted the CD player controls had been disturbed.
    The Wrangler found the thought disturbing, and not just because he generally disagreed with killing captives unnecessarily. Killing Christine just for the hell of it made no sense. The Wrangler's whole job was to ensure that they didn't have to kill her unless the ransom deal fell through. The only way it did make sense was if the Man planned to kill Christine along with others, say, the Wrangler and the Cleaner. That made $500,000 worth of sense, which was a great deal of sense.
    These thoughts were not evidence of great deductive powers on the Wrangler's part. He'd set the telltales with the thought that he might find something along these lines. He'd ben set up before, and had learned to set limits on his trust for his partners in crime. Once the telltale was triggered, it was a well-trodden path to the conclusions he'd reached.
    None of the Wrangler's thoughts showed as he left Christine's room and rejoined the group, after finishing his check of her restraints.
    Just as the Wrangler finished making his check on Christine, a cell phone rang. It was a very particular cell phone, enclosed in a double-paned plastic housing that sealed out exterior sound with a speaker at one end and a mike inside it. The mike was plugged into a jack that ran to a computer. The computer was running a speech synthesizing program.
    The Cleaner pressed a button and typed the word "hello" into the keyboard.
    "Hello," said the speaker next to the phone.
    "This is Arthur Willock, what have you done with my daughter?" asked an angry, frightened voice on the phone.
    "Your daughter is safe for the moment," the Cleaner typed.
    "You have to let her go immediately," Willock ordered, very much the CEO.
    "Whether your daughter remains safe or not depends on whether or not you do as we say," the Cleaner typed, ignoring the CEO's order. "You have to bring $2 million in $100 bills or smaller