CHAPTER 10
The door of the motel room opened slowly and Dora Wilberforce peeked out cautiously. When she was sure there was no one about, she stepped out onto the cement walk that ran along the line of rooms and walked to her car, now pulled up just behind Marie’s. In her hands she held her brown paper shopping bag, now much less loaded and her purse which was obviously more full. She tossed the bag and the purse into the front seat and, after taking the keys from the ignition, went to the rear of the vehicle. She opened the trunk and smirked at its occupant.
“Have a nice nap, Miss Ryder?”
Despite wearing only her panties, Copper’s flushed skin and the sheen of perspiration on her body bore witness to the heat of the trunk of a car, even a light colored one like Dora’s, left in the sun of a fairly warm October morning. The blindfolded girl turned her head in the direction of Dora’s voice and mewed a spirited retort at the woman.
“Oh, you haven’t been in there that long,” said Dora, reaching in and pulling the girl to the rear of the trunk. Though she did not appear to be an especially strong woman, Dora helped Copper to kneel at the edge of the trunk and, using her shoulder, lifted her out without much trouble. The protesting girl was carried back into the motel room.
Once inside, Copper was plopped unceremoniously onto the room’s one armchair and the tape pulled from her eyes. The first sight the girl saw was Deputy Amy Cole, also wearing only panties sitting in the smaller chair that had been pulled from the kneehole space in the combination desk/dresser. Though not bound to the chair, the young deputy was obviously quite helpless being bound and gagged in a very similar fashion to Copper. The deputy’s blue eyes looked sympathetically at Copper over her gag of wide adhesive tape covering what appeared to be a strip of white terrycloth running between her teeth. Amy shifted her gaze to the bed and Copper turned that way.
On the bed sat two completely nude and thoroughly trussed women. Both of them were bound with enough rope to secure several people. Their hands were behind their backs, and the set of their shoulders indicated that their hands were tightly tied. Both women’s legs were tied together at the ankles, calves, knees (both above and below), and thighs. Though little of their arms could be seen from the front, there were multiple loops of cord about their arms and torsos at their waists and above and below their breasts. Both women also wore a set of cords that played no role in, but emphasized their helplessness: a double strand of rope around the waist that supported a double line through their crotches. The mouths of both had been stuffed so full of gag packing that their jaws were distended. The gags had been well sealed with wide white tape and their eyes covered by more. One of the women was blond, and Copper could tell from the spectacular figure that it was Marie Sanders. It took her a moment to identify the smaller brunette as her friend Sherry Johnson.
“Well, ladies, we’re quite a cozy little group, aren’t we?” Dora asked with gleeful malice. “And I’ve got something in mind for you all that’s much more entertaining than bridge. But we can’t have our fun here, so let’s find a couple of nice, quiet spots, Shall we? I think that the guests of honor should go first.”
She grabbed Marie by the hair and pulled her up, Marie howled into her gag as she struggled to stand. Dora took her by the arm and, with a slap on the rump for emphasis, forced her to hop to the door and outside. As they passed, Copper saw the reason for the strained appearance of their shoulders: Marie’s elbows had been tied within six or so inches each other. A minute or so later, Dora reappeared to repeat the performance with Sherry, whose elbows had also been tied back. Deputy Cole and Copper struggled with their bonds while Dora was out of the room, but it was no use. They were too well and thoroughly bound.
When Dora returned she was much less brutal with Copper, taking her by the arm and helping her up. She guided the helpless girl out to the car and put her face down on the back seat, hogtying her with a short rope before she went back for Amy. The shapely deputy was put on the floor of the back seat and hogtied as well. After a short pause while she retrieved a few more items from the room, Dora got in the driver’s seat and started the car.
“Your friends are in the trunk,” Dora informed Copper and Amy. “You’re going to have a shorter and much more pleasant ride than they will.”
She pulled the car out of the motel drive and onto the road, and added unpleasantly.
“But they shouldn’t mind it too much. After all, it’s their last ride.”
Sky Ryder looked at the landscape below. Though the Saddle Tramp Motel was within thirty miles of his ranch, he was not too familiar with the area immediately around the place. He kept in radio contact with Deputy Tyler, and was heartened to discover that they would not be too far behind him when he arrived there. Finally he spotted it: a white painted cinderblock building in the shape of the bottom half of the letter H. There was a waste area of scrub sage and sand to the east of it. Hoping that the sand was firm there, Sky set the Hummingbird down.
The tall rancher spotted Marie’s red car parked in front of one of the rooms facing him and raced from the plane to the room. The door was locked, and there was no way to see in the covered window. Looking for the office, Sky followed the walk around the corner at the bottom end of one of the H’s uprights and was surprised to find a pair of women’s flat-heeled shoes on the ground. They appeared to be one of Copper’s, but he could not be sure. Clutching the shoes in one hand, he ran the rest of the way to the office.
Sky threw open the office door. A tall, unshaven, pot-bellied man wearing black slacks and a sleeveless undershirt sat behind the reception desk, his feet propped up on an open desk drawer, reading a girly magazine. Mozart’s Great C Major Symphony poured incongruously from a hi-fi behind him. The man looked up.
“Yes, sir, may I help you?” he asked, making no attempt to put the magazine away.
“I want to know which room Marie Sanders is in!”
“Marie Sanders, sir?”
“Yes!” thundered the rancher. He stepped nimbly around the desk, knocked the man’s feet from the drawer and pulled him to his feet by the straps of his undershirt. “And I’m not going to be patient about it. The Sheriff is on his way here, and I’ll see this place torn down if I have to.”
The man peered curiously at Sky’s hand on the shoulder straps of his undershirt.
“No need to get rough, sir. I may not look like much now, but I still love Mozart and I know how to pronounce Goethe properly.”
He had used the correct German pronunciation for Goethe. Sky relaxed his grip a bit.
“Perhaps you’d better describe her, sir,” the man continued, unruffled. “People don’t always use their right names at a place like this.”
“Marie Sanders. Twenty-five or –six, five foot seven, and a good figure.”
“The blonde with the body like Monroe? Drives that little red number in the back?”
Sky nodded.
“She comes here a lot. Got something going with some important guy or other. She pays me twenty to look the other way when she’s here. Room 42.”
He took some keys from his belt and picked one out.
“Here’s the master key.”
Sky released his hold on the man, who followed him as he went to look at the room.
Dora Wilberforce did not even release Copper from the hogtie. She pulled the helpless girl to the end of the back seat and bent low enough to get her shoulder under the girl, then hoisted her up and carried her a few feet from the car. She had parked the vehicle in a small grove of trees about fifty yards off the road. Dora turned and looked back at the road.
“They’ll never see you from a car here,” she noted.
Though Copper feared being dropped, Dora lowered her gently to the ground and left her there face down. The woman returned to the car and, though she had a more difficult time, brought Amy Cole back and laid her beside the petite blonde. They both looked up anxiously at their captor.
Dora laughed. “Oh, don’t worry, girls. I really don’t have any grudge against either of you. The deputy here did me a favor by capturing Sherry and putting her in handcuffs. And Miss Ryder, I appreciate loyalty in a friend, even if the friend is nothing but a little man–stealing tramp. Besides, your uncle’s a busybody who helps the Sheriff all the time with that plane of his. So I’m going to make it easy to find you from the air.”
As the two girls puzzled over this, Dora went back to her car and took a bundle of clothes from the front seat. She walked past the girls out into a nearby clearing and tossed the clothes on the ground. As Copper and Amy watched in astonishment, Dora studied the look of the clothes on the ground. She bent over and rearranged them, even going so far as to take their discarded brassieres and put them in a bush that still had green leaves to provide a contrasting background for the bright white undergarments.
“There,” said Dora, stopping briefly on her way back to the car. “That ought to be easy for your uncle to spot from his plane. While he’s busy rescuing you, I’ll be having a little fun with the other girls. Enjoy yourselves, ladies.”
The two bound women watched as Dora paused to brush some sand off her skirt and arrange her hair before getting into her car and driving back onto the road. As soon as she was gone, Amy began to inch her way toward Copper in the hope that they could somehow work together to untie their wrists. But the ropes immobilizing their arms and the tight hogties made it impossible to get their hands close enough. Amy groaned into her gag in frustration. Copper was more worried about what the crazed Dora had in mind for her friend Sherry.
“You say she came in last night?” asked Sky.
The manager nodded.
“And I’m sorry about your niece, Mr. Ryder, but if Marie had anyone with her, I couldn’t see, and not because she paid me not to, either. It was dark by the time she got here and she parked back here before she checked in. Said she wanted a nice quiet, private room on this side.”
“What about the maids? Could they have seen anyone?”
“This time of the year we only use two with business so slack. They work another job early and don’t even get here for another hour.”
The man’s eyes narrowed.
“But I had an idea that something was up. She went out this morning and told me that if the maid came early, she was to leave the room as it was. Then there were other woman sneaking around after she came back.”
“Other women?”
“First there was a zaftig little brunette, a real knockout, then another who could have been her twin sister except for the deputy’s uniform, both of them on foot. Then another woman, a little older but still a good looker, drove back here. Her car’s gone now.”
Sky looked around the room. There were a few small articles of clothing, socks, shoes, and some underwear, torn motel towels, and a few strands of rope left behind, but that was all. For all his unsavory appearance, the manager spoke concisely and intelligently, not even dropping his g’s, and Sky felt that the story was truthful.
“And how long have they been gone?”
The man scratched his head through his salt and pepper hair.
“That I couldn’t say. The woman drove in just over an hour ago, I’d say. They can’t have been gone too long.”
The sound of an approaching car drew them to the door. It was a County Sheriff’s car. Deputy Harry Tyler, stocky and fair, and Deputy Andy Rivera, tall and dark, got out.
“Glad to see you, Harry,” said Sky. “Marie was here all right, maybe hiding Copper with her, and it sounds like Sherry Johnson and Amy Cole might have run into her too. They’ve all gone in the car of another woman who’s possibly a prisoner as well.” He turned to the manager. “What did that car look like?”
The manager described the car. Now Tyler scratched his head.
“That sounds like the car that was in the Wilberforce’s driveway last night.”
Sky was caught off guard.
“Are you sure?”
“It was right in front of us for almost eight hours, Mr. Ryder.”
Rivera nodded as Tyler spoke.
“Well, I don’t know exactly what it means,” said Sky, after a moment’s thought, “but that’s the car we’re looking for now. Which way did she go?” he asked the manager.
“South on the County Road.”
Sky turned to Tyler.
“I’ll get back in the air and see if I can find it. You keep your eyes open along the road. How close is the Sheriff?”
“A half hour, maybe less.”
“Good. Let’s get started.”
As Sky trotted back to his plane, Rivera paused while opening the driver’s door and looked questioningly at Tyler. Harry Tyler shrugged and got back in the patrol car.
Dora Wilberforce’s excitement was growing. It wouldn’t be long now. On the seat beside her were Marie’s bag, containing the money package and three pistols taken from the women, her own purse with her pistol, and her shopping bag. She had to put a few more miles between herself and the two girls she had left behind before she could stop again, but she could hardly wait.
As if to reassure herself that it was still there, Dora reached into the shopping bag. She felt it. Not satisfied with only the touch and no view of it, Dora pulled her hand out to look. The very thick rope was there. Dora laughed as she drove.
Copper and Amy had no success in freeing themselves. Though they had not been bound with quite the gleefully savage thoroughness as Marie and Sherry had been, the job that Dora had done binding Copper and refining Amy’s bondage was sufficient keep the two secure. They had tried several times to work on each other’s bonds to no avail. Their wrists had been crossed and well tied, and Dora had wrapped and cinched their bodies and forearms in such a way that they could hardly get their hands away from their backs. And hogtied as they were, they could not get close enough to one another to reach one another’s wrist bonds. Copper was very anxious about what Dora had in mind for Sherry and Marie. It was something that Dora needed time to do, and was important enough that she had arranged for Sky to rescue her and Amy with comparative ease. Not only that, but she had left them in the shade so they would not even risk sunburn to rarely exposed areas of skin. What could she have in mind for Marie and Sherry? Dora’s crazed expression and naked hatred when she had talked about them led the girl to even think that Dora planned to do away with them. But how?
Copper looked over at Amy struggling against the thin cord that bound her almost naked form. And then it struck her. When she had replaced the items that had fallen out of the bag in Dora’s car, she had found a couple coils of very thick rope. None of that rope had been used to bind any of them.
Struck by the horrible thought, Copper burst into a frenzy of struggling. It was then she heard the plane.
Though he had seen many strange things in his aerial searches for the Sheriff, Sky had never seen anything quite like this.
The east side of the north-south county road he was following was arid waste, but along the west side was a meandering stream that supported a band of vegetation, including some hardy grass, some bushes, and a few stands of cottonwood trees. In a clearing not too far from the road, were two sets of clothes on the ground, one a pair of blue jeans and a light blue shirt the other a small sized khaki deputy’s uniform. The clothes were laid out almost as one would to display in a store window lacking a mannequin on which to put them. And on a bush nearby was a patch of white. Reaching for the radio microphone, Sky descended for a closer look. When he saw what the white items were, he almost dropped the mike.
“Hummingbird to Sheriff’s Car Five. Are you there, Harry? Over.”
Deputy Tyler took up the handset.
“We’re a couple miles behind you, Mr. Ryder. I can see you circling west of the road. Have you found something? Over.”
“I sure have. I’m not sure what. It could be a sign to find the women, or it could be a decoy or a trap, but there’s something in them trees up here. I’ll keep circling until you come up. Over.”
Sheriff Winchell’s voice broke in.
“I’m almost there, Sky. We can see you too. We’re not more than ten minutes away. Over.”
“Good work, Winch. I don’t know who are the prisoners or the fugitives anymore, but somebody’s going to need our help. Over.”
“Whoever it is, we’ll be there,” replied Winchell. “Step on it Harry. Sheriff out.”
Tyler hung the handset on its hook and looked wearily at Rivera.
“You see, Andy? Nobody knows what this is about.”
Sherry Johnson was grateful that the car had stopped. A ride in a car trunk while naked, bound and gagged was not a very comfortable experience. The blindfolded woman guessed that the car was parked in the shade, judging from the sudden relief from the heat. To keep from thinking about the pull on her tied elbows behind her and what Dora planned for her and Marie, Sherry tried to concentrate on pleasant thoughts of eventual rescue. But she kept coming back to the events that had brought her here.
It was difficult to believe that it was now almost exactly twenty-four hours since her decision to try to escape from custody and clear herself. She remembered Copper’s advice to go back to jail and let Sky and the authorities do the investigating. It had seemed intolerable advice at the time, but compared to being inescapably tied up in a hot car trunk jail did not look too bad.
A gagged groan came from Marie next to her. Watching Marie being forced to strip completely and be so cruelly tied by Dora had almost made Sherry feel sorry for her. Marie had wanted only money, but the crazed light in Dora’s eyes as she bound the younger woman made Sherry afraid for her. And for herself as well, for it seemed that Dora was only too eager to blame other women for her husband’s philandering. The fact that Sherry had wanted nothing to do with her boss while Marie had helped him steal and put the blame on her had no effect on Dora’s rage.
She tried not to think about what Dora had planned for them. All Sherry could do was hope that help would come soon.
The jingle of keys in the lock and a sudden rush of fresh air told her that the trunk was now open.
“I hope you both had a very pleasant ride.” It was Dora’s voice, though her tone was anything but pleasant. “Now you’ve reached the end of the line.”
Before Sherry could wonder what that phrase meant, she felt Dora’s hands on her, pulling her to a sitting position and, surprisingly, lifting her from the trunk. Her bare feet were in grass, and Dora leaned her against the rear of the car. The helpless, still blindfolded beauty waited, breathing the cooler air gratefully through her nose. Someone’s skin touched her shoulder. She guessed that Marie had been placed beside her. She felt fingers pulling on the tape over her eyes. When it fell away, the girl blinked while her eyes adjusted to the noticeably slanting sunlight of the early October noon. Dora was removing the tape from Marie’s eyes. Sherry looked sympathetically at her fellow prisoner as she blinked her eyes clear.
A smiling Dora watched them, arms folded across her chest.
“I had to take off those blindfolds for a few minutes,” she said with relish. “After all, I wouldn’t want you to be in suspense about what’s coming to you.”
The woman stepped aside and swept her arm like a magician presenting the scene for his greatest trick. Both women screamed into their gags.
From a nearby tree limb hung two thick ropes. At the end of each rope was a noose.