[This is a completed four-chapter story that will post within ten days]
*****
He should have known. He should have known that Hal Etheridge wouldn't have had him brought to a fleabag hotel like the Downtowner on 14th Street. Etheridge wouldn't be in a place like this. Chaz and Fred, two of Etheridge's minions—goons, really—had met Jason at the elevators on the 12th floor and virtually frog marched him down the corridor to a room off the back of the hotel.
"Is he here? Is Etheridge here?" Jason asked with a shaky voice. He didn't like it that it was Chaz and Fred who had picked him up. They'd always leered at him when he was brought someplace to service Etheridge.
"What d'ya care as long as you get paid?" Fred asked. "You don't care who uses you as long as you're paid."
"Shh, keep your voices down in the corridor," Chaz admonished. Chaz was the leader of the two. Neither of them was really bright enough to be considered a leader. But they both were just the type of muscle a politician like Hal Etheridge needed to do his dirty work and cover it over, when needed.
Jason only now was getting the idea that maybe he'd been moved to the "cover-it-over" phase. Maybe he'd gone too far in his snit with Etheridge the last time they'd trysted. He didn't know then, though, that a candidate likely to get a party's nomination for president had already named U.S. Senator Hal Etheridge as a vice presidential running mate.
They stopped by a door at the end of the hall next to a window with a fire escape outside it and the brick wall of yet another building, probably built in the thirties as this hotel had been, across the alley. The neighboring building probably was as dreary and outdated as this hotel was.
"Inside," Chaz growled as he turned the lock of the door to a room with an old-style key. The door swung open, and Jason saw a smallish sort of hotel room with scruffed up furnishings, a window overlooking yet another solid brick building wall, and a tired-looking bed with a brass head and footboard and a yellowing white chenille bedspread.
It wasn't the sort of room vice-presidential contender Hal Etheridge would pick for a sex session with a regular servicing rent-boy like Jason Stuart. He didn't go in for hotel rooms at all. He required special equipment to scratch his itch—and insulated walls. Jason was trained to serve these needs. The young blond was a real looker—a male model, minor porn star, and barista in a trending coffee bar. With blond hair, a small and perfect body, and boyish facial features, he didn't have any trouble keeping his dance card filled in. Hal Etheridge might be his most prominent client, but he wasn't the only up and coming politician Jason serviced.
"Where's Senator Etheridge?" Jason asked in panic, well knowing the answer to that.
"Inside, I said," Chaz repeated and pushed Jason inside the room, making the young man stumble forward. "And I said no talkin' in the corridor."
As the door clicked shut, Fred voiced the obvious. "The senator isn't coming. He's busy with more important matters. We're taking care of this for him. We're your clients tonight. Who's first, you or me?" he said, turning to Chaz, who had Jason contained with one arm around his neck and the other around his waist, holding Jason into his body. Jason could feel that the big bruiser was hard.
"Show him the cash. My back pocket."
Fred pulled a wallet out of Chaz' back pocket while Chaz was working Jason's belt buckle and zipper. Jason moaned, but he didn't struggle. He did it for money and they were talking money. Fred fished four fifties out of Chaz' wallet and went over and slapped them down on the top of a scruffed dresser.
Quickly making Jason naked, Chaz draped him bent over the back of an upholstered, low-backed boudoir chair, on his belly. Fred stood in front of the chair, holding Jason's wrists captive and face fucking Jason with a meaty cock he'd pulled out of his unzipped pants, while Chaz knelt behind Chaz and ate his ass out while pulling on his own cock.
When he was ready, Chaz did a circle of the room holding Jason in front of him, Jason's knees hooked on his hips and Jason's fists locked behind Chaz' neck, while the big bruiser crouched a bit, held Jason's slim waist between his hands, and bounced Jason's channel up and down on his hard cock until he'd ejaculated. Jason had come first.
Jason was calming down. This was his world, what he did for men. He even fell into the "Yes, yes, you're so big. Give it to me; be good to me, daddy" routine he used to inflame johns. His eyes were on the money on the dresser. They had shown the money. Everything was going to be all right. They'd shown the money.
Chaz then dropped Jason on the bed on his belly, and before Jason could respond—even if a response were possible with these two muscle men manhandling him in the small hotel room—he had been trussed up with three pairs of handcuffs—two on his ankles, chained to the corners of the brass foot rail, with his legs spread, and the other pair handcuffing his wrists behind him. Chaz stuffed the young rent-boy's mouth with his own briefs.
Jason started to struggle with Fred when he was handcuffing his wrists, but a fist to chin had sent Jason sprawled with an "ooff." After that lashes to his buttocks and back again and again and again with Jason's own leather belt subdued him to whimpers and ended any fight he had in him. Even this wasn't beyond the zone yet. The fetishes Jason served—indeed what he took with the senator—included the lash and a bit of beating.
"You love the strap," Fred hissed at him. "Almost as much as you love the fuck."
"Your turn. I'm gonna take a shower," Chaz said.
"Where do you think . . . afterward? Down river or a public dump near Baltimore?"
"Shut your yap," Chaz admonished. "He's still got ears."
"Won't do him much good though, will they?" Fred asked. They both laughed. "So, you wanna do him again, or—?"
"Naw. No time for that," Chaz responded. "You can finish him. I'm taking a dump and then a shower. Nothing we have to clean up later, or you have to do the cleaning."
Now they were beyond the zone.
Jason, paralyzed with fear, heard the door to the bathroom close and Fred's belt buckle thump on the threadbare carpet. Then Fred, all 230 pounds of him, was on top of Jason's hips, his knees gripping Jason's thighs and the palms of his hands pressing down on Jason's shoulder blades. He was thicker than Chaz had been, so it took him a minute to bury his cock in Jason's ass, but once saddled, he began to ride Jason hard.
Jason's moans and groans from the thick, deep fuck were drowned out by the mechanical scream of the shower being turned on in the bathroom. After a few minutes of pumping him from behind and above, Fred wanted to change position. Jason felt the big man pull out of his ass, lift his weight from Jason's buttocks, and move off the bed. The handcuffs at Jason's ankles were undone and removed, and Fred came back up on the bed on his knees. He obviously wanted to do Jason in a missionary for a while. Surprisingly, he unlocked the handcuffs imprisoning Jason's wrists as well.
Jason's head was turned to the side and he could see a garrote strap laying on the bed. He no longer was paralyzed. There wasn't any doubt what these two goons had in mind—or why. Now that Etheridge was a national candidate, it was cleanup time on his background. Jason gathered all of the adrenaline that he could to unleash in one stroke. It was now or never.
With only one wrist out of the handcuffs and heavy metal handcuffs hanging from the other wrist, he now had a weapon of his own. He swung the loose cuffs at Fred's head in a desperate lunge that, nonetheless, worked a charm. Fred's eyes went large in surprise and pain as the metal of the free cuff slammed into his temple with the sickening sound of crushed bone. He toppled off the side of the bed and onto the floor with nothing louder than an "Ooof," which was covered from the bathroom with the grinding noise from the shower head.
Jason walloped him again on the side of the head for good measure, but the goon was already down for the count. Jason scrambled around on the floor, finding the key to the handcuff and freeing his other wrist. It was only a matter of seconds before he'd pulled his clothes back on, grabbed up the money from the dresser, and scooted out into the hall.
He couldn't chance the elevator and the lobby. Who knew that these two goons were the only ones who had been sent to capture and eliminate him? He had seen the fire escape through the window at the end of the corridor when he'd been shoved into the room. The window didn't want to cooperate on opening, but, feeling infused with superhuman strength fueled by the survival instinct, Jason muscled it open and scrambled down the fourteen stories of metal scaffolding before Chaz turned the shower off in the hotel room.
Did he dare go back to the apartment on R Street in Northwest D.C., near Logan Circle, that he shared with three other rent-boys to at least gather his shit together before he escaped town? Had he ever told the senator or any of his goons where he lived? He didn't think so. The goons had always picked him up on the street—on 13th Street—when the senator wanted to be serviced—just like they had tonight.
Yeah, he thought he could chance it. He'd been stupid, though. In that last argument he'd had with Etheridge, he not only had revealed that he knew who Etheridge really was, but that this gave him some form of control over Etheridge. But he'd never have snitched on Etheridge—not that the senator could or would count on that, Jason now realized.
* * * *
Hardesty was cruising the old Impala along 14th Street in the Logan Circle gay district, his eyes peeled for trade. Despite what he was out here for, he was looking for something special—in size and type. He was always on the lookout for something special in that regard. He had the tape recorder attached to his wide black leather belt on the driver's door side. He was dressed the part—black jeans and black leather boots and a black leather vest over a black muscle T, showing off his bodybuilder musculature. A black knit stocking cap was pulled down over his buzz-cut hair, hiding the gray that was starting to show here and there.
He was forty and would have looked it if he wasn't so muscled up. He had a close-cropped mustache and beard too, but the gray there didn't show in the not-long-past twilight in his dark Impala out on the street, as he pulled over by a group of young men standing near an alley entrance—one that opened at the other end for a quick getaway, as needed. He knew he looked like a thug, which he could easily be, on demand or when he got wound up. His gray eyes had a steely, piercing look to them and the nose had obviously taken a few too many off-center hits. Otherwise he looked good—if what you were looking for was a little danger and more than a bit of the rough.
It was hot enough that he didn't really need the vest, but it hid the tape recorder and the piece in the holster in his left armpit. He was right-handed.
A couple of the rent-boys moved away, either down the dimly lit street or into the alley, when he pulled the Impala over to the curb. Maybe some of them recognized him or the Impala. The guy who had caught his attention hadn't. Young and short, but very well formed. A look of innocence and nervousness. Hardesty hadn't seen this one before. He wasn't blond—he was at least partly Hispanic—but he was a pretty boy and looked like he'd be fun to break, and Hardesty knew he couldn't have everything. He turned the recorder on, hit the roll-down button for the passenger door, leaned over, stared the young Hispanic down, and called out, "You. Come here."
The young guy jerked, turned his full attention to the Impala, squinted, and squeaked out a "Me?"
