AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 73

Courtney Foulke Ryan sat in the 8-person Lockheed helicopter, hands folded over her pregnant tummy, eyes staring blankly off into the brilliant pinpoints of the NYC skylight; her purposefully restful thoughts tried to calm the howling primal terror of her mind.

Courtney’s shoulder was healing fine.  But her responsibilities to this child growing within her were tugging at her values and ideals.  Is there a point at which the ends justify the means?  Better to die on your feet, than live on your knees?  What price Honor?——especially when every motherly gland is pumping secretions into the bloodstream that SCREAM for embryonic survival.

Philip had promised that if she did not behave, that he would kill her baby.  Courty believed him.  And Eric was delighted with her new cooperation; cooperation that all his mindgames and maneuvers hadn’t achieved.

The private heliport was brightly lit up.  Courty watched a huddle of bodies move under the slowly blowing rotorblade.

Reed!  Liz!  Hope leaped, jumped; and fell, dashed to the hard ground, many many floors below.

Reed was handcuffed; courtroom handcuffs, with the second chain going all the way around his body.  And his head was bandaged.  The bandage dark with seeped blood in two places.  His dark long hair was tangled, blowing back wildly in the wind, from under the cloth.  For several seconds Courty had an empathetic attack that completely cleaned out her mind of her own predicament.  Was Reed all right??  Philip and another of Eric’s creeps were forcing Reed to move along.

The pilot in front made a long hand reach, around back, and opened the side door to the six-person passenger area.  Three seats facing forward, one with a Courty in it, three seats facing backward, that filled up with Phil, Reed, and Liz, in that order.

What was Liz doing here?——Dressed up as telephone company personnel, her mouth taped over with heavy gray tape.  Her eyes were flaming with emotion, her mouth grunting above the roar of the engine, as she squirmed against her restraints.

And Reed?  In a security uniform?  Courty’s eyes searched Reed’s eyes, hunted them for information.  Reed’s eyes told her nothing.  Flameout.  His face was slack.  He looked at her, but Courtney hadn’t a clue as to what he was feeling.

Did it matter?  He was helpless.  She had held in her mind the image of Byron Reed coming to rescue her.  The image had been a cherished hope to cling to, that gave her sustenance to survive and continue functioning.  He was supposed to charge into the scene, with an army of FBI and police right behind, and whisk her up in his arms (after bashing Eric into bloody pulp).  But there Reed was: handcuffed and helpless, ludicrous as a would-be rescuer.  It was the story of her life: she kept wanting to see him as Prince Charming, but he was just a frog.

Then Reed winked at Courtney, and hope was reborn within her.

Eric climbed up into the copter, sat back next to her; the door was closed; the engine sped up for a take off.

Eric started chuckling; great, tumbling boulders of laughter . . . as he put his arm around her, and pulled her close to him.  Courtney did not resist.  She became aware that she had just made a dangerous decision.  In an instant, she made her choice between Byron Reed and Eric Des Barres.  Quickly, intuitively, Courtney aligned her loyalties to best safeguard her unborn child.

Courtney lay her head comfortably upon Eric’s shoulder, put both her arms around him, and hugged him tight.

Courtney did not look like an alleged kidnap/rape victim.  No sign of emotional skirmishes or stress.  No roadmap red eyes.  She did not look slightly dented or sleazed.

Squeaky clean icon Courty-cut hair, ladylike chic & sexy party-pants outfit, her face radiated yogurt health.

The helicopter sounded like a big diesel truck with the throttle wide open.  Mercedes diesel on the red line.  The energetic roar was loud, but not so loud that people couldn’t talk.

Eric was smoking another of his strange cigarettes.  He started to talk.  “I win, you lose, Byron.  I win everything.  You lose everything.”  He seemed to most particularly enjoy having Courtney’s head resting on his shoulder.  He glanced over at the top of her head for a second, smiling blissfully.

“The game ain’t over yet,” Reed drawled.  A caveat.

Eric enjoyed that remark.  He laughed easily.  “You’re going to be horizontal history pretty quick, guy.  Or should I say: floating flotsam?”

Liz was probably blaspheming, but it just came out as ubble-gubble under the duct tape.

Phil sat there silently, the psychopathic scum’s best black-hearted villain, but his brain was calculating.

“Courty and I are going on a honeymoon!” Eric said.

Reed’s headache was a hammering roar that made it difficult to do anything but fall over into a coma; nevertheless he remained vertical, conscious.  But he had nothing to say.  His sad, wounded hound-dog eyes stared at Eric and Courty, who evidenced every indication of buffet-love under the rose blossoms.  She was even tickling his neck.

Eric looked at Reed.  “How did you do it?  We’ll have to question you!  I’m sure Phil has many questions to ask you, and I have a few myself.  Richard Morgan does not often fail me.”  He smoked long and hard, seemingly considering.  “But later.  Later.”  He chuckled, his eyes wide and glowing at all the sadistic possibilities.

Another period of silence, as the city moved under them, the engine’s roar mundane and hypnotic.

“We’re going to be married!” Eric said.  “Just as soon as Courty decides.  As soon as she chooses.”

“Really,” Reed said.

Courty lifted her head off Eric’s shoulder.  She looked at Reed.  She was scorn.  “Really.”  She nodded.  “What are you doing here, Reed?  What’s the matter?  Won’t Estelle take you back?”

That got a reaction out of Reed: he tilted his head slightly to the side.

“Won’t she?” Courty asked again.

This time Reed just stared.

“Won’t she?”

No additional reaction from Reed.

“WON’T SHE!?”

Reactionless Reed.

Courtney was sitting up now, erect and hostile, charged and angry, none of this lovey-dovey with Des Barres stuff; then she reached out and whacked Reed across the face!  “WON’T SHE!?”

Eric was chuckling joyfully at the developments.

Reed recovered from the whanging headache, the blast of stars all across his vision.  “Estelle and I are history.”

“History?” Courty said.  “History?”  Her voice was drenched with sarcasm.  “I know all about you and her, Reed.  I know all about your little stable of mistresses, your little group-sex escapades with Estelle.  History . . . I’ll give you history.  Eric, why don’t you drop him out of the plane?  Right now?  What about it, Darling?  Would you do that for me?”  Her eyes were bright, intense, hostile laserbeams; but she held her breath.

Eric seemed to consider.  He smiled a dazed smile.  “It’s an idea.”

“It’s not an idea!” Phil snapped.  “We’re on a flightplan!”  After a second, he went on forcefully, “The balance of a single-rotor helicopter is critical, even one as large as this one.  You just don’t go dropping two hundred pound weights out of it whenever you feel like it.  Lighten the load that much unexpectedly from the side door, and we could crash, unless the pilot knew to the second when it was going to happen so he could compensate.  That’s movie crap.”

Liz made a furious, berserk dolphin-leap there in her seat; a moaning pyrotechnic whirlwind of chained up energy demanding attention.

Eric suddenly said, “Take off her tape.  I want to hear why she’s here.”

Phil sighed, reached across Reed, and fingered off an edge of the heavy-duty duct tape.  He grabbed a healthy handful of the harpy’s hair with one hand, the edge of the tape with the other hand, and yanked like hell!

“AAAAaaaaaah!!” Liz yelled.  “Quad-Christ In A Tongue-Driven Wheelchair!  What’re ya tryin’ to do, Rip My Face Off??”

“Why are you here, little girl?” Eric Des Barres said.  “If you’re this guy’s Girl Friday, now I’ve seen everything.  Just what the shit are you two trying to accomplish?”

Liz spat the words at him.  “What do you think, numbnuts?”

It took Eric a cocaine inhale and an ecstasy exhale to formulate his response.  “You talk damn proud for a whore with her legs tied together.”  He gave Courty a special squeeze.  “Give me some facts, bitch, or I’ll open this door, and they’ll be scraping your body off one of those skyscrapers tomorrow.  Now what the hell did you two think you were doing by breaking into my building?”

“Gee, it’s a party.  I guess we just forgot our invitations.  Right, Bullet-Brain?”

“This is some party, all right,” Reed agreed.

“Have you figured out how they got in?” Eric asked Phil.

Phil said, “He reprogrammed the elevator to open at your floor, and used air guns to fire some kind of fast acting sleep drug in the guards.”

“Reprogrammed the elevator?  How the fuck did he do that?”

“He had a programmer,” Phil said.

“A programmer?  Are you bullshitting me?”  Eric’s narrowed suspicious eyes.

“Why do you keep asking if I’m bullshitting you?  Of course I’m not bullshitting you.  We found a programmer for the elevator’s brain in one of the bags he left behind.”

“Elevator’s brain?  What is this: Star Trek shit?”

Phil said, “The elevators are controlled by microprocessors.  There’s one chip that makes it do what it does, when it does it.  The programmer apparently changes the chip or bypasses it or reconfigures it; I don’t understand it exactly.  Somehow he used the programmer to bring the elevator up to your floor and open the door.”

Eric snorted.  “Your super-assed two million dollar security system . . . and this asshole just shuts it down and ignores it?  Who fucked up?  If any asshole can walk right in and reprogram our elevators . . . SHIT!”

“What’re you guys talkin’?” Liz said.  “We just pushed the up button, ’n’ here we are!  Right, BB?”

“I’m surrounded by incompetents!” Eric yelled.  “A simple, piss-ant protection job, and you assholes . . .”  His breathing suddenly chocked off, and he actually couldn’t inhale for a moment.  Violently he wrenched Courtney’s arms off his shoulders.  Eric reached around, hurriedly, back behind him, over his head, to a recessed compartment and pulled a small oxygen tank out of there.  It had a tiny little breather on it, he fumbled with it for a second and then covered his face with it.  Still his face was in a panic, and his breaths came in chocked little mini-gasps.  Half a minute later his breathing freed up, and he seemed to lunge for the oxygen, taking enormous great hungry gasps of life-giving pure oxygen.

Eric started to put the little oxygen tank back, but noticed that it was only half full.  He hit the intercom switch, and hauled the side flex-cable microphone over to his mouth.  “The oxygen tank’s almost empty!” he thundered.  “Sam, don’t you EVER let that happen again!  Damn you!”  He knocked the microphone aside, out of his way.

Over a hidden loudspeaker came the immediate reply.  “Sorry, Mr. Des Barres.  It won’t happen again.”

Eric sulked for a second; lit up another cocaine ciggy; but the high was flat and tasteless.  To cheer himself up, Eric reached deep down into Courty’s sleek pants and started feeling her up, petting her, possibly inserting a finger.

Courty put her arms around Eric’s neck, eased down a little and widened her legs.  She was seemingly humming with contentment.

Liz looked as though she was going to blow beets.

Philip smiled strangely, shook his head and watched the nighttime lights out the window.

Stonefaced Reed.

“Do you love me?” Eric asked Courty.

“Do I love you?” Courtney murmured.  “Don’t you think that’s rather a . . . personal question?  Oooh!”  She jumped a little at something his hand did on or in her genitals.

Eric chuckled.  “You’re perfect.”

“I may not be perfect,” Courtney said, “but parts of me are primo.”

Eric gave her another tweak that made her jump.

There was a long, deep pool of human silence; Reed threw in his two bits: “How’s your poetry coming along?” he asked Courtney.

Courtney instantly blasted into an orgasm of violent anger!

“I trusted you!” Courty shouted.  She reached and hit Reed——BAM!——with a wild swing of her little fist.  Never mind that she had someone else’s finger up her home sweet home.  Blood dripped off, down from out of Reed’s left nostril.  “What good are you?” she shouted.  “You’re useless!  You just can’t cut it.  You just don’t measure up!”  Her face twisted into renewed rage, and she clobbered him again with her fist.  This time on his jaw.

Reed had tried to hold his arms up to block the blow, but the chains held his arms down.

“I hate you!” Courty shouted.

Eric removed his hand from inside her pants, rather than have it mangled.  He lazed back, enjoying this.

Phil didn’t like it a bit, but then again, he didn’t like much of anything about this whole scene.

Liz was just another handcuffed cocaine crash.

But Courtney couldn’t get a reaction out of Reed.  He just bled.  From his nose.  From his cut lip.  Perhaps a renewed ooze under his bandage.  His lack of a reaction seemed to intensify her own reaction.

“Say something!” she shouted.

He was silent.

She threatened to hit him again.

After a moment, Reed said, “There’s nothing to say.”

“Nothing to say,” she mimicked.  “Nothing to say!  I think I’m falling in love with Eric!  What do you say about that?”

Honestly, at this point, Reed was so confused and weary that he didn’t know what was coming off anymore.  He did not understand the way she was acting AT ALL.  “Say something!” Courty shouted.  “My baby’s going to have the best of everything!  Things you could never give her!  Say something!”

Reed smiled, sadly and bloodily.  Somehow he was unable to believe the things she was saying.  It all sounded phony to his ears.

Courty said, “Don’t just sit there!  That’s all you ever do!  You just sit there!  You never DO anything!  You had your chance with me, but you didn’t TAKE it!  You didn’t DO ANYTHING about it!  I like a man of action!  You should have insisted I marry you!  But no!  Not you, you useless lump!  I like a man of action who knows what he wants and doesn’t let anything stand in his way!”  She triumphantly threw both hands around Eric and hugged him tight.

“You two deserve each other,” Reed said.

That remark was like kicking over the wild beehive.

Courty took her hands off Eric, and threw herself across onto Reed, hitting and biting and screaming and slapping and punching and kneeing him!  She was the vicious genie out of Pandora’s Box, angrier than a witch off the broom!

It took both Eric and Phil to drag her off of Reed and get her under control.

Reed almost passed out, under the onslaught.  But he didn’t.  And he felt a strange something fall inside his shirt, a piece of warm metal, that slid down his chest and stopped where his shirt was tucked into his pants.  He moved a little, and immediately stopped moving, as a sharp edge on it cut him slightly!  It was sharp at the point, four or five inches long, with an edge on it like a knife!

Courty had given him a weapon!  There she was, appearing to sob out of control against Eric’s shoulder.

Reed’s vision fuzzed, everything split into two images, and then his head sagged as he lost consciousness.

COURTNEY, Chapter 74
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47