Dundeen raised the guillotine blade as high as it would go. The highly polished steel flashed in the bright lights focused on Glinda’s head, which was locked securely into wooden stocks three feet or so below the gleaming blade. Dundeen stayed poised with arms held high for an excruciating minute, and then he brought the blade down with all his strength. It flashed through Glinda’s neck and hit the bottom of the stocks with a crash.
The audience in the Las Vegas showroom burst into wild applause. For a sometime drug smuggler, Dundeen the Great was a pretty good magician.
Two of Dundeen’s assistants unlocked the stocks, lifted the top half off Glinda’s neck and helped her to her feet. But unlike most of the glamorous young women who get chopped up, sawed in half and otherwise abused by stage magicians, Glinda didn’t join in the bows that Dundeen was taking after his latest feat. Her arms were tied behind her, and she was gagged with a broad strip of black leather. She stood there helpless in her spangled bra and panties, an unwilling victim for whatever magical atrocity Dundeen decided to attempt next.
You see, Dundeen the Great’s act was a magic show with a difference. He called it Dundeen’s Dungeon of Doom, and it was a Grand Guignol sort of thing, with fake blood flowing all over the place and all of the illusions featuring some kind of torture or execution theme. At one point, he appeared to drive a butcher knife through his own arm. It looked damn real — I’d seen him do it a half dozen times, and I still couldn’t figure it out.
In keeping with the tone of the show, the people whom he made disappear or ran his buzz saw through weren’t those perky chicks in short costume who come bouncing out of magicians’ boxes with a dazzling smile, as if a narrow escape from dismemberment was their idea of a fun time. No, Dundeen’s victims really looked like victims, bound, gagged, ready to burst into tears at any moment. And right now, the Great Dundeen had three naturals for that role — Glinda, Endora and yours truly, Dan Diamond, Ace Detective.
Better make that Ass Detective, because that’s what I’d been making of myself from the very beginning of this case. I’d gotten myself into the clutches of a bunch of nudists, who turned out to be witches, who turned out to be as thick as thieves with Joey Balls and his drug crew. Then my Great Escape worked out almost as badly for me as Steve McQueen’s did for him, winding up in my embarrassing encounter with a bunch of over-sexed Girl Scouts. And now here I was getting my bottom whipped twice a night in front of the tourists from Omaha and Des Moines and Grand Rapids who wandered into Dundeen’s magical extravaganza on their big Vegas vacation — but more on that later.
When Joey’s boys loaded us into the back of the truck that Dundeen used to transport his extravaganza, we had no idea that we were about to become featured performers in a magic show. We figured that we were taking the kind of ride made famous by the mob, ending in a lonely grave in the desert or a dive into a deep lake in a pair of cement overshoes. The guillotine strapped to the wall of the truck didn’t make us feel any better.
But when we did stop in the desert, it was just so the two guys handling the tractor-trailer could get us out to pee and crap. None of us could manage a dump, of course, squatting there by the side of the lonely back road with our hands still thumb-cuffed behind us and the two of them watching us, but we peed a lot and felt better for it. A couple of hours later, when we stopped again and the doors were opened, we were parked behind a casino in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip, surrounded by the familiar high-rise hotels that I’d seen a dozen times or more before. Down the Strip, I could see the Strat-O-Sphere tower.
The men pulled us out of the truck, set us down on the asphalt and threw a tarp over us. We couldn’t see anything then, but we could hear them unloading the truck and talking. Most of their conversation was limited to phrases like “Grab the other end,” but then they began discussing something they’d noticed on the trip to Las Vegas and I strained to hear every word.
“I still think that blue VW bug was following us,” one of them said. “It just couldn’t keep up when we got on I-15.”
“No way,” the other said. “Those new bugs have enough power to stay with us. You’re getting paranoid in your old age, Duane. You need to stop worrying so much.”
“Well, maybe it was laying back so we wouldn’t spot it,” the first one said.
The second man laughed at that, and they climbed back into the truck for another crate, while my own spirits soared. My secretary Stella’s pride and joy is her new bright blue Volkswagen Beetle, or whatever it is they call the latest version. It looked like ol’ Stel might be riding to the rescue, like the Seventh Cavalry. I could almost hear the bugles in the distance and see John Wayne and Victor McLaglen and Harry Carey Jr. come riding over a rise in the prairie.
Then I heard someone else walk up and order the men to bring us inside. They pulled off the tarp, got us to our feet and marched us through a loading-dock door and down a long hallway, with the newcomer leading the way. Halfway down the hall, he opened a door, and we were led inside a small room and pushed down on a narrow bed against the rear wall. The first two men went back to the truck, but the third stood staring sadly at us. We sat on the bed and looked back at him. He was tall and very thin, with a gaunt, lined face that looked like Vincent Price on a very bad day.
“Mr. Diamond, Mr. Diamond,” he said finally. “You and your friends are causing me a very big problem.”
“I thought we were the ones with the problem,” I said.
“It’s the same problem,” he said. “Mr. Balsemo is eager to see you meet an untimely end, and he has entrusted me with seeing that this occurs. However, this is not something that I would like to have happen.”
“Me either,” I said. “So why don’t we just ring up the cops and let them handle Joey?”
“I’m afraid it’s not that easy,” he said with a sigh.
“Just who are you, mister?” Glinda interrupted.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I should have introduced myself. To the folks back home, I’m just plain Charley Fitzwater, but audiences on five continents know me as Dundeen the Great. Well, actually, it’s not really five continents — it’s more like northern Mexico and the southwestern U.S. But my reputation is growing. As a magic colleague of mine once said, I’m one of the better cheap acts.”
“You’re a magician?” I said. “What in the hell are you doing mixed up with Joey Balls?”
“I’m sorry to say that it involves drawing to an inside straight,” he said. “In fact, quite a few inside straights and busted flushes. It’s hard to believe that someone as skilled in card manipulation as myself is such a poor poker player, but I’m afraid that’s the case.”
“So you’re into Joey for a few bucks?” I asked.
“More than a few, Mr. Diamond,” he answered, “but that’s not the real problem. Mr. Balsemo got the idea that my truck, with all its boxes and trunks with hidden compartments and so on, would be a great way of smuggling things across the border. I said no at first, but he’s a hard man to turn down, and so I’ve hauled everything from illegal aliens to drugs into this country. If he goes down now, I’ll go down right with him, and I’ll be doing my card tricks in a federal prison from now on.”
“Show us a card trick,” Endora said.
We looked at her as if she were wacko. Dundeen had just told us that he’d been ordered to bump us off, and she wanted to see a card trick! Dundeen looked startled himself. He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but then he smiled.
“Never let it be said that Dundeen the Great turned down the chance to show someone a card trick,” he chuckled.
He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a deck of cards. He spread the deck and took a half dozen or so cards out of the middle, fanning the packet of cards so that Endora could see their faces.
“I want you to think of one of these cards,” he said. “Don’t tell me what it is. Don’t point at it. Just think of it and hold it in your mind. Got one?”
Endora said she did.
“Good,” he said. “Now I can feel the card going away. I can feel it being captured by your mind. See, it’s gone!”
He spread the half dozen cards with their backs facing us. The printed back of one of the cards had disappeared, leaving only a white blank!
“What was your card?” he asked.
“The five of hearts,” Endora said.
He turned the cards around so that we could see their faces. One of them was blank, and the five of hearts was gone!
“Pretty amazing,” I said.
“Not a very difficult effect, really,” he said. “Very subtle, though. Actually, Mr. Diamond, it was invented by a magician in your city, a gentleman who’s associated with the Magic Castle in Hollywood. Have you ever been there?”
“Never had the chance,” I said.
“Maybe I can take you someday,” he said.
“Let’s worry about Joey first,” I replied. “How come we’re still kicking? He could have bumped us off somewhere out in the desert long before this.”
“Well, I told Mr. Balsemo a little lie that appealed to his bizarre sense of humor,” Dundeen said. “I told him that I’ve always wanted to actually murder someone during a show. The audience would think it was all a trick, but they’d be absolutely amazed by how realistic it looked.”
“So Joey bought that?” I asked.
“He did indeed,” Dundeen said. “He became quite excited. In fact, he’s coming to see the show this weekend, and I’m afraid that I’ve promised him that he’ll see someone’s head actually chopped off.”
“And whose head did he have in mind?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Yours, Mr. Diamond,” he answered. “Yours.”
Dundeen went away then, presumably to ponder how to get out of his dilemma. I hoped he’d come up with an answer. After a while, the two guys who’d been in the truck came in and made us a little more comfortable. A wide leather collar was padlocked around each of our necks, and the collars were locked in turn to a long, fairly lightweight chain at intervals of about five feet. Then the end of the chain was locked to the frame of the bed, and the thumb cuffs were removed from our hands.
That’s the way we spent the rest of our time with Dundeen, naked and fastened to that chain, except when we were bound up again and marched out to appear in his show. We bunked down together in the small bed, which didn’t bother me at all, but I didn’t enjoy sitting on a portable potty trying to poop while the girls stood impatiently on either side of me.
We all had a role in Dundeen’s performances. Glinda had her head chopped off, as I’ve already described, and Endora was very realistically bisected by a huge, screeching buzz saw. Me? I was the focus of a little melodrama in which a couple of Dundeen’s regular girl assistants strapped me to a cross and flogged me. Then I vanished! I still don’t know exactly how it worked, but I think it involved some kind of black roller blind that came down when a flashpot was fired.
Years before, I’d seen the “Showgirls of Magic” show at the San Remo, the one with a great magician named Kevin something or other who had a Charlie Chaplin puppet that came to life. Then I saw the show a second time a year or so later, and Kevin What’s-His-Name was gone, but so had the girls’ costumes. The first time I’d caught the early performance — the “family” show — and the showgirls had on their rhinestoned bras and panties. The second time was a late performance, and it was all tits and ass.
That’s pretty common in Vegas. I think even a hotshot magician like Lance Burton has nude assistants in his late shows. Dundeen went the same way. For his 8 o’clock show, Glinda and Endora wore brief two-piece costumes, and I had on a tight pair of workout trunks. For the 11 o’clock performance, we were all stripped down to tiny G-strings.
On our first night, at the early show, we were so worried about what was going to happen that we didn’t react to all those folks staring at us. But during the late show, it dawned on me that several hundred people were watching me get flogged on my bare butt, and when Dundeen’s girls spun me around to work on my front for a while, there was a huge boner pushing out my G-string like a tent pole. There was a collective gasp from the audience, and then someone pushed the button backstage, and the boner and I both disappeared in a burst of light.
Glinda and Endora has seen all this from the wings, and after the show, when Dundeen’s guys got us back to our little room and back on the chain, the girls wanted to know what the deal was with the hard-on. Endora didn’t have a clue, of course, but Glinda was no dummy, and she asked me pointblank if I got turned on by that kind of treatment. I figured that I knew these girls pretty well by now, so I told them the whole deal — how I’d been introduced to B&D during a couple of my recent cases and how I’d found that I enjoyed it. The more I told them, the bigger Endora’s eyes got.
“Let’s give him a spanking!” she said when I finished.
That was okay with Glinda, I guess, because in a few minutes, they had manipulated that chain so that they were sitting on the edge of the bed and I was stretched out across their laps. Endora, whose thighs were under my belly, reached down and smacked my bottom. She kept spanking until my buttocks were hot, and then she ran her hand over them, squealed at the heat and started spanking again. Meanwhile, Glinda, who was under my thighs, worked a thumb into my anus and began sliding it in and out. Her other hand went under me and pulled on my stiff penis.
I’d been interrupted in the midst of hot sessions so often lately that I should have known what was coming next. The door opened, and Dundeen and his little helpers came in.
“Don’t stop!” I moaned. “Don’t stop!”
But the girls did.
“I’m glad to see that you have him warmed up,” Dundeen said, “because Mr. Diamond has just been summoned to a command performance.”
“What are you talking about?” Glinda asked.
“It seems that Mr. Balsemo was telling some friends of his about a pony race that Mr. Diamond competed in several weeks ago,” Dundeen said. “A very curious story, I understand. I could hardly believe it myself. But at any rate, these friends have requested the use of Mr. Diamond for the evening.”
They tied my arms tightly behind me, unfastened me from the chain and filled my mouth with a wooden gag that reminded me of the bit I wore in that race Joey was talking about, the one at Mrs. Stern’s mansion in Santa Barbara when he put a butt plug coated with horse lineament up my ass. I owed him one for that, and I figured I was going to owe him another one before this evening was over.
Dundeen’s assistants covered me with a hooded, floor-length robe and pulled the hood over my head until it almost hid my face. Then they walked me out to the parking lot and put me into a car. As we left the lot, I looked around for a bright blue VW bug, but I didn’t see one. I decided that the VW that had followed us on the drive from the Sierras hadn’t been Stella after all. It was just a coincidence probably, or she would have turned up by now.
The casino where Dundeen was appearing was one of the older ones on the Strip, considerably rundown now and catering to a geriatric crowd with low room rates and nickel slots. But it was surrounded by newer, fancier joints, and not far down the Strip was one of the fanciest of them all. I was surprised when we went up that casino’s drive and stopped at one of the private “villas” set in a row across the front of the casino, overlooking a lagoon.
A guy who looked like a butler answered the door and ushered us through a foyer into a huge living room where a man and a woman were sitting on a low couch. They appeared to be in their fifties, very fit and trim but a little stretched looking, like a lot of time and money had gone into preserving what remained of their youth. They were dressed as though they were going out for the evening, to the opera maybe, and had decided to stay home at the last minute. The men who had brought me pulled off the robe, leaving me naked and feeling as out of place as Courtney Love at a Hardshell Baptist prayer meeting.
The two thugs left, but the butler stuck around, and when the lady on the couch tinkled a little bell, a guy dressed as a chauffeur and a babe in a maid’s uniform came into the room. They both looked faintly Oriental — or Filipino, maybe. They were inscrutable, for sure. Neither seemed surprised to see me standing there with a hard-on rising, and there wasn’t a trace of an expression on their faces as they stopped and stood with their hands folded in front of them. Maybe they were waiting for further instructions. Maybe their boss lady just wanted them to have a look at the funny naked man with the stiff dick.
“Come over here,” she ordered me.
I walked over to the couch, and she took my penis in her hand, turning it up as though she were checking for marks on the underside or making sure my balls were attached. She had one of those little cigars than are not much larger than a king-size cigarette in an ashtray on a side table next to the couch. She picked it up and puffed on it until it was glowing red, and then she took it out of her mouth and brought its burning tip a few inches away from my dick.
She was holding my erection tightly with her other hand, but I could have pulled away. What was the use? My arms were still tied behind me, and if she really wanted to burn my penis, she could have had the butler and chauffeur hold me. She moved the cigar closer until the end was almost touching the underside of my penis. She looked up at me and smiled. I smiled back. I could feel the heat, but I didn’t move. After a long minute, she pulled away the cigar, released my dick and leaned back on the couch.
“Balsemo was right,” she said to her husband. “He’s got a hard-on that doesn’t scare easily.”
“Let’s try him with the Tiger Balm,” the man said.
The woman motioned to the butler, who came forward and pulled me a few feet away from the couch. He took a latex glove out of his pocket and put it on his right hand. Then he picked up a small jar from another side table, unscrewed the top and dipped his gloved fingers into the cream inside. After he had carefully replaced the jar on the table, he seized my dick in his ungloved hand and lifted it while he spread the cream on my balls with his other hand.
I knew it was going to be hot, but I didn’t think it would work so quickly. My balls began to burn almost instantly. I knew they wanted me to put on a show for them, to dance around as though I were trying to get away from the fire down below, so I tried to stand as still as I could. But I couldn’t do it. The burning pain from the cream was too intense. I hopped from foot to foot, and I saw a little smirk slip across the maid’s deadpan expression. After a while, the burning lessened. My balls were still hot, but I was able to stop bouncing around.
“Still stiff,” the woman said, reaching out to pinch my prick on the end. “Get the bench, Charles.”
The butler went to the far end of the room and carried back a short bench with a padded, leather-covered top. It was so tall that it was almost a table, and when the butler and the chauffeur pushed me down along its length, my butt hung off the end at just the right height for whipping or fucking. They untied my hands from behind my back and retied them under the bench, and the chauffeur went back to stand with the maid. Their boss lady picked up a small paddle off the side table and showed it to me before handing it to the butler. I’d been spanked with leather-covered implements shaped like Ping-Pong paddles, but this was the actual thing — an old-fashioned table tennis paddle with its surface covered with what looked and felt like fine-grain sandpaper.
Charles stepped behind me and swatted me hard on my left buttock. The loud smack was followed by another on the right side. He paused, but the man on the couch nodded for him to continue, and the smacks of paddle on quivering flesh echoed across the large room. The couple on the couch were watching my face intently. I like to think that I don’t really cry at times like this, but before long my eyes were tearing, and my face was wet. My nose was running, too, and the gag in my mouth made it hard to breathe. Charles paddled me long and hard, and when he finished I was gasping and my face was a mess.
“Clean him up, Lupe,” the woman said.
The maid picked up a bowl of water and a cloth from another table and brought them over to the bench. She took the gag out of my mouth, dipped the cloth into the bowl and washed my face roughly. Then she took the bowl away.
“Nice little place you’ve got here,” I said to the woman on the couch. “You’ll have to give me the name of your decorator.”
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your mouth shut, Mr. Diamond,” she said. “I think we need something to keep it busy.”
She motioned to the maid, who reached down, grabbed the hem of her dress and pulled it off over her head. She wasn’t wearing any underwear. She certainly couldn’t be called fat, but her breasts and hips were full and swelling. She walked over to the bench, swung one leg over it and sat down with her crotch a few inches from my face. She leaned back on her arms and pressed her pussy into my face. While this was going on, I’d noticed the chauffer pulling off his pants and underwear, displaying a semi-erect penis. I didn’t like the looks of that.
Charles the butler was still behind me with the paddle, and he smacked me hard. I knew what was expected, and I began licking the moist lips of Lupe’s cunt. The chauffeur had walked around behind me, too, and I felt a lubricated finger enter my rectum. It moved in and out several times before being withdrawn. Hands gripped my hips, and something hard pressed against the ring of my anus. Then the chauffeur’s penis penetrated me.
I’d been screwed by a king-sized dildo or two, and the chauffeur’s dick wasn’t particularly big, but to me it felt huge, gigantic by comparison with those artificial penises. I suppose it was because I knew that it was another guy who was violating me, not a piece of plastic. I forgot about everything except the hard column of flesh sliding into me, and I stopped licking between Lupe’s plump thighs. She lifted my head up by the hair, slapped my face and pushed my face back into her pussy. My tongue got busy again.
I licked Lupe. The chauffeur fucked me. It seemed to go on forever. Finally, I knew Lupe was getting close because her hips were jerking, pushing her sex hard into my face. Then she came, and he came at almost the same time, with a final hard thrust that buried his penis deep inside. She scooted back on the bench, lifted a leg over my head and got to her feet. He pulled out his shrinking erection. I lay there tied to the bench, my face wet with Lupe’s juices and a string of cum running out of my anus and sliding down onto my balls. I couldn’t stand to look at the watching couple on the couch, so I stared down at the leather surface of the bench.
Then I could see them getting up from the couch out of the corner of my eye, and I glanced over at them. They were both taking off their clothing. Oh, no, I thought, don’t let this happen again. They were both amazingly fit for their age, but their lean bodies had the same drawn and stretched look as their faces. The woman had almost no breasts or hips, so that except for her partner’s long, slender penis, they could have been twins. I’d assumed they were husband and wife, but maybe they were brother and sister?
She walked behind me and stretched out on top of me, her mound pressing into my buttocks, still burning from the paddling. She wrapped her arms tightly around me and wriggled around until she was satisfied with her position. The man stepped behind her.
“Which shall it be, my love?” he asked.
“In the ass first,” she said, “but don’t cum.”
I could hear her grunt as he worked his penis into her, and then I could tell he was fucking her by the way she slid back and forth on top of me. She was slamming against my butt as her hips worked up and down to meet his strokes. The old guy had a lot of will power because this went on for some time.
“Change now,” she said finally.
He withdrew and walked over to where the maid was waiting with the bowl of water. She dipped the cloth into the bowl, wrung it out and began washing his penis. She did too thorough a job, though, because he suddenly gasped and cum jetted out into her hands.
“I’m so sorry, my dear,” he said, when he had recovered his composure. “Most unfortunate.”
“No matter,” she said. “Charles can finish up.”
I heard another pair of pants hit the floor, and in a few minutes, she was sliding back and forth on my back again and beginning to moan. Her long fingernails dug into my sides. I guess she was getting fucked in the pussy this time, and Charles must have had the right equipment for the job, because it wasn’t long until a shudder ran through her body and she went limp on my back. She lay there for a while before she got to her feet.
“Tie his hands behind his back again and stand him up,” she ordered.
Charles and the chauffeur unfastened me from the bench, bent my arms behind my back and tied them tightly before getting me to the feet. Both were still nude from the waist down but fully clothed on the top half of their bodies, and they looked pretty silly, but neither of them cracked a smile. I guess this sort of thing was all part of the job for them. They turned me to face the woman, who reached out and grabbed me by the balls.
“Still erect, I see, Mr. Diamond,” she said. “That kind of persistence deserves a reward.”
As she continued holding the family jewels, her husband — or whoever he was — walked over, grasped my dick and began masturbating me. I wasn’t crazy about that, and it took them a long time to get something stirring, but her fondling of my balls helped things along, and when she reached up with her other hand and pinched one of my nipples, that sent me over the edge. As the cum spurted out, she caught it in her hand, and when she decided I was done, she pushed my head back and emptied her hand into my mouth.
I was afraid to spit out what she’d poured between my lips, but most of it missed anyway and ran down my cheek. She wiped her hand on my chest, spun around and walked out of the room without saying another word. Her husband followed her. The maid picked up their clothing and headed in the same direction, but not before looking back over her shoulder at me with a mocking smile.
“I’ll call Dundeen’s people to come get him,” Charles said. “Keep an eye on him until they get here.”
He went away, too, and the chauffeur pushed me down onto the bench, where I sat with a tender bottom, my face smeared with Lupe’s fluids and my own cum, feeling thoroughly used and humiliated. I could blame Joey Balls for this, too, and if by some miracle I got me out of this mess, I was going to make him pay.
The two guys who worked for Dundeen — or maybe for Joey — came and picked me up. When I was back in the room with Glinda and Endora, fastened to the chain again, they asked me a few questions about where I’d been, but they didn’t say much and looked even unhappier than usual. I asked them what was wrong, and Glinda finally told me that Dundeen had been in an hour or so earlier to warn them that Joey was coming into Vegas the next night and expected to see me featured in the for-real head-chopping bit. Needless to say, this news didn’t make me jump for joy.
When the three of us crawled into the little bed, Glinda and Endora made love to me in a very gentle, subdued manner for a couple of hours. Even in the circumstances, it was a lot of fun, but I couldn’t help from feeling like a condemned man eating his final meal — though if there had to be a final meal, I was glad that Endora and Glinda were on the menu.
The next day dragged slowly past until it was time for the first performance. That came off as usual, so we figured that Joey wasn’t turning up until the late show. We were back in our room, sitting together on the bed with the girls holding my hands — actually, Endora was holding my penis — when Dundeen suddenly came into the room. He went to where our chain was padlocked to the bed and opened the lock.
“I don’t have the keys to the locks on your collars,” he said, “but you can get the hell out of here together. And don’t waste any time.”
We were so stunned that we didn’t think to thank him before he spun around and went hurriedly out of the room. We got up and peered into the hall. No one was there. The showroom in the casino was a recent addition, and it was next door rather than in the casino itself, so it opened directly onto the sidewalk flanking Las Vegas Boulevard. That seemed to be the best way out, so we went down the hall toward the showroom. We skirted the backstage area and turned into a hall that led along the side of the auditorium itself. At one point, a divided curtain covered an entry into the showroom, and I parted it slightly and looked in.
Dundeen’s show had begun, and he was apparently changing the order of his routines because he was already hauling out the guillotine. He placed it at center stage and walked back into the wings for a moment. When he came back, he was dragging what appeared to be a pretty large person, but it had to be a dummy, because it wasn’t moving at all. I wondered why his assistants weren’t helping — he was having a hard time managing by himself. Finally, he got the figure to the guillotine and placed its head and neck into the stocks below the raised blade. Then he did something that usually wasn’t part of the routine. He set a large basket under the protruding head.
He made a little bow to the expectant audience, and then he stepped behind the guillotine, raised the blade as high as it would go, paused to heighten the suspense and brought it down with a slam. The head leaped off the figure in a spray of blood and dropped into the basket! There were screams in the audience, and I felt my own heart go into my throat, but Dundeen stepped in front of the apparatus, so that the spotlight fell on him, and he took a low bow. When he straightened he was smiling broadly, and he spread his arms to the crowd and took another bow.
You could hear the sighs of relief spreading through the audience when they realized that it had all been a hoax, and then the applause began. The spectators rose to their feet and began clapping and cheering wildly. Dundeen stepped forward, and the curtain fell behind him, hiding the guillotine. He continued to take bows as the ovation grew even louder. It had been one hell of a trick!
We didn’t wait for the applause to end. We ran down the hall until it opened into the lobby of the theater and dashed through the lobby and out onto the sidewalk. It wasn’t easy running with our collars chained together, and we had to maneuver to get through the swinging doors, but I figured we had it easier than Tony and Sidney, who were chained together at their ankles. (Yep, for an old movie buff like me, “The Defiant Ones” was the first thing that came to mind when we were making our escape fastened to a chain.)
The sidewalks are usually a little less crowded along this part of the Strip, but there were still a lot of people outside the showroom doors. They stopped dead and stared at us as we ran south toward the busier stretch of the Strip. The more people, the better, I thought, if anyone was going to be chasing us. Everyone stopped and looked as we ran by, but no one tried to get in our way. Two naked girls and a naked guy running along fastened to a chain is a pretty startling sight, especially with Endora’s big tits bouncing and my dick flopping around, but I guess people figured anything went in Vegas.
For a few years, the city fathers and the casino owners tried to push Las Vegas as a “family” vacation destination, but when gambling revenues went down and the bosses realized that the kiddies really weren’t going to be playing the slots all that much, they went back to the old Sin City image. In the last year or so, sex has become the big sell again, so it must not have seemed all that unlikely to the people on the sidewalk that our naked jaunt was some kind of publicity stunt.
We crossed one side street and ran past Treasure Island. Luckily, the pirates and the sailors weren’t pairing off in their big sea battle just then, so the sidewalk wasn’t packed, but when we got to the Mirage, the people were shoulder to shoulder, with everyone frozen in their tracks watching us approach. There must have been three or four hundred people staring at us, but then the Mirage Volcano erupted, and everyone turned to gape at that. A little nudity apparently couldn’t top that fake volcano. There was no way to get through the mass of people, so we headed back in the direction we’d come. The first thing we spotted were a half dozen cops running our way, and I was damn glad to see them.
When they reached us, they pulled off their dark blue jackets and wrapped them around us. They weren’t quite long enough to hide all of Endora’s butt and the tip of my dangling penis poked out from under the edge, but we were happy to have the cover. Then I realized that the jackets weren’t marked “Las Vegas Police.” They had the letters “DEA.” While I was trying to figure out what the federal drug boys were doing picking up streakers on the Strip, I looked up and saw Tommy Donnell walking toward me with a big smile on his face. Tommy is my friend who’s a detective in the Rampart Division back in L.A.
“How’s it hanging, Danny boy,” he said.
“What took you so long?” I asked.
“I was taking a couple of days off when Stella called the office,” he said, “so she had a hard time getting in touch with me. Then it took a while to get everybody lined up on this after I called the Vegas cops and found out they were already looking at Dundeen and Joey Balls, along with the DEA guys.”
“So that really was Stella following the truck?” I asked.
“Right,” he said. “She’s a sharp kid, Danny. I guess you’re going to have to come up with a raise. Even a cheapskate like you should be able to dig up a few bucks for that.”
“I could pop for it,” I said. “I might even buy you a drink if you’re lucky.”
One of the DEA cops used a bolt cutter to slice through the padlock fastening me to the chain, and I took Tommy’s arm and walked him away from the others.
“So what’s up with the perps?” I asked. “Did you get them all?”
“We had another team hit that camp up in the Sierras,” he said, “and Clive Jones and the Cosmic Truth people who were in on the deal are all in the slammer. And Clive spilled his guts about the bookstore guy, so we got him, too.”
“The bookstore guy?” I said. “You’re not talking about Ron McDonald, are you?”
“You got it,” he answered. “He was the one who tipped Joey Balls to that nudist camp, and he set you up by sending you up there because he knew Joey had it in for you. In fact, he was the guy who was telling Joey how to run the whole operation. That’s how he knew that Glinda dame was going to blow the whistle on the camp — she told him, not knowing he had rigged the whole deal.”
“No shit!” I said. “Poor Glinda.”
“Probably a break for her,” he said. “Ronnie was no prize.”
“What about Dundeen?” I asked.
“Gone,” he said. “Not a trace. He made himself disappear right in the middle of his act, after that guillotine thing.”
“I guess he knew he had to get away from Joey,” I said. “He told Joey that he was going to cut my head off, so he must have figured that Joey was going to be really pissed when he found out it was just a dummy.”
“Not exactly,” Tommy said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“That wasn’t a dummy, Dan,” he said. “The guy who got separated from his head? That was Joey Balls.”
THE END
Come to Wasteland, the Darker Side of Desire. HD Authentic BDSM Movies, Photos and a massive library of BDSM guides, how-to info, articles and many other features. Since 1994, the premier destination on the web for real BDSM content.
Coleen is a writer, photographer and film maker at Wasteland and Sssh.com.
Here at BDSMCafe.com, she is editor and curator of this comprehensive library of BDSM fiction, informational articles and other educational features that date back to the early days of the internet in 1996 when the site was first launched.
