CHAPTER 2
Richard Armtree, aka, Mr.
John, tightened the bindings around Mark's wrists, and patted him on the head.
"Now you be a good
boy, while Cassandra and I have some recreational time." There was no pretense about being pious and
holy anymore.
"Take your time, Mr.
John. Give her a kiss for me." Mark
sarcastically quipped as he flipped his head to get the hair out of his eyes.
Armtree, who had walked
away, returned, smiled down at Mark, and cracked him against the side of his
head with the heel of his hand. Mark's
hair fell back across his eyes. Flipping
the hair away again, Mark laughed the words, "is that the best the holy
man can do."
Armtree stood over him,
reflexively poised to deliver another, but more powerful blow, but instead
backed away with a smile. He delivered
the words evenly and without anger. "Maybe
you need a gag. Keep the smart talk up
and that's what you'll get." Mark
glared, but said nothing. Armtree
retreated from the room, then shut and locked the door. Mark began struggling against the bindings,
but couldn't loosen the tightly wound leather straps around his wrists. His legs were chained to bolts fastened to
the cement floor beneath him. Because
there was enough slack in the chains and his hands were bound in front of him,
he could manage to stand, but that was all.
He stood surveying the room he was locked in. It measured about ten-feet-by-twelve with a
pot that formerly housed a large plant ostensibly serving now as a toilet. Unfortunately, it was just out of his reach. A twin-sized half deflated blow-up bed lay
behind him with a ragged wool blanket neatly folded on top of it.
The bare stud walls had
no insulation pressed against them. Mark
began to realize the chill in the heat-less room. It was the beginning of fall and the nights
would dip into the forties making the wool blanket seem more attractive to him
by the minute. The one source of light
was a small, forty-watt bulb plugged into the socket in the middle of the
ceiling. It would remain on. The whole environment gave him the feel of
an extreme rendition prison cell in Eastern Europe, made famous by the Bush
administration during the height of the Iraq war.
He lay down on the twin
blow-up bed. No more air appeared to
escape from it. Apparently, Mr. John and
Cassandra had partially inflated it intentionally, to add to his discomfort. It was a wonder they had provided a mattress
at all, he thought. He eased back to
wait, and wonder. He hadn't been able to
tell Beth anything of consequence his brief moment on the phone call. Mr. John had made sure of that when he ripped
the cell phone out of his hand. Mark had
only managed the feeble statement "they have me."
Richard Armtree left the
small shack that housed Mark and walked thirty yards back to the comfortable
log cabin that he and Cassandra occupied.
As he approached the door, it opened and Cassandra greeted him naked,
and with a smug expression on her face.
"How's our boy? She asked.
"A little too snotty
for my taste," said Armtree.
"I had to give him a knock to the head."
Cassandra smiled. "Will he keep for a while?"
Armtree grinned. "Oh yeah, he'll keep." He entered the cabin, closed the door behind
him, and began tearing every piece of clothing off his body.
An hour later, Cassandra
lay next to her lover practicing her newest habit, smoking cigarillos. Her current favorite was the Al Capone
Menthol. She drew a deep breath of the
smoke, held it, then turned and blew it on a sleeping Armtree. The smoke appeared to curl under his chin and
flow upwards against his cheek and roll into his graying hair. She took another drag and blew it directly
into his face. The turbulence produced
by her heavier breath deflected the smoke quickly from his face and bounced it
back into hers. This caught her by
surprise, making her laugh uproariously at herself. Richard, as she called him, awoke, looked at
her with a puzzled expression, then sat up.
Neither said a word for a minute, until Richard said, "can't you
quit smoking those damned things!"
"Why would I do that
when I enjoy them so much?"
"How can you enjoy
something so much that you've never tried before until now?" He asked with
exasperation.
She laughed uproariously
again and then replied, " because I'm so alive and doing everything I want
to do while I can." She threw her
arms up into the air, flicking ashes from the tip of the cigarillo that she
still held between her fingers of one hand.
The hot ashes settled onto the sheet covering Armtree.
"What the hell are
you doing?" Armtree said while
furiously brushing the ashes off.
"I'm happy. From now on, I'm doing anything and
everything that I want to do."
Proving her point, she flicked more ashes onto the sheet and then onto
him.
"You're crazy,"
he said while angrily throwing the sheet off and jumping out of bed. He then ran into the bathroom and began
taking a shower. Moments later,
Cassandra joined him. Everything was
made right between them during the next twenty minutes.
"Buying all this
land in the middle of hills and forests right here under everyone's nose was a
stroke of genius," Richard said as he dried off with the puffy, white
towel Cassandra had handed to him.
"It didn't hurt that
your financial genius hid the sales in a blizzard of paperwork so deep that no
one will ever know that it was connected to the church or us" Cassandra
purred.
His ego stroked along
with the favorite parts of his anatomy, Richard began to get dressed.
They possessed six hundred acres of rugged
hill and forest country tucked snugly into the southeastern glacial drift-free
country of Minnesota. The topsoils were
shallower and poorer than those to the west, resulting in primarily dairy
farming rather than cash crops as the principal agricultural activity. The land they occupied was filled with porous
limestone, leading to the formation of caverns and sinkholes. Duschee Creek meandered throughout the
property flanked by three-hundred foot bluffs.
They had made sure that no one else lived in the entire area. The land was thoroughly posted to keep hunters
out. Cassandra and Armtree had made it
as isolated as possible. It was a
perfect environment for the plan they had hatched to recover their money from
Beth and the others who had "stolen" from them.
