Chapter 27
The predawn wind was cold. Damned cold. Its cutting bite brought tears to Mark’s eyes and then froze the wetness on his lashes as he stepped out his front door and jogged to the passenger side of Colleen Johnson's red Jeep Cherokee.
It irked him that he didn’t have his own car. As he slipped inside, he was met halfway into his seat with a kiss that would have steamed his glasses if he had worn any. One thing he had to admit: as uncool as it was to need to have his senior girlfriend drive him everywhere, she sure had a way of taking the sting out of it.
After last night, he could use a little of that kind of attention to take his mind off other worries. It had taken him nearly two hours to talk Jennifer and Heather out of the idea of giving the recording to the authorities, an action that would certainly result in the three of them spending several years in federal prison. Only his argument that their dads might also be implicated changed the girls’ minds.
The US government did not take kindly to someone making unauthorized recordings of highly classified material. Their intentions wouldn’t matter.
“Whacha thinking about?” Colleen asked as she sped along Pajarito Road toward school.
Mark smiled, putting his hand onto her knee. “Nothing, really. Just trying to get my head together this morning. Why are we off so early? School’s going to be locked up.”
“I have a surprise for you.” She glanced over at him and winked. “Bill, the custodian, said he’d leave the side door open for me. Anyway, I think you’ll find it exciting.”
Mark grinned. While people talked about Colleen’s “bad girl” image, she was really just fun. She was far and away more exciting than any girl Mark had ever dated. She had also surprised him by not being as wild as people said she was. Oh, she was willing to make out in public places for the thrill of it, and the way she kissed and moved her hands and body across him made him feel like a young bull that wanted to paw dirt and snort twin blasts of steam from his nose.
But when it came right down to it, Colleen always pulled back from going all the way, something Mark had no experience with but was more than willing to try. Colleen was more of a serious tease than a truly naughty girl, but man, could she ever torture him with the teasing. It reminded him of something he had once heard a famous comic say: “Man, if this is torture, chain me to the wall.”
So, if Colleen had a surprise for him, Mark was willing to play along.
They weren’t the first car at the school, but you could never really beat the custodian in, no matter what time you showed up. Colleen drove past the entrance to the school parking lot, bringing the jeep to a stop in the side lot. As he slammed the door, she grabbed his hand and led him surreptitiously around the side of the building, glanced around quickly, and then ducked in a side entrance.
“Ooh. Feeling pretty frisky this morning, eh?” Mark crooned.
Her laughing blue eyes crinkled at the edges as she whispered back, “You have no idea. Now come on.”
Turning a corner, Colleen led the way into the dark gymnasium. She pulled a small keychain light from her purse and then moved on across the court, pulling him into the boy’s locker room. As Mark grinned and reached for her, she pulled back.
“No, you have to wait a second. This is a surprise. Now turn around and close your eyes. Promise me you won’t open them until I tell you.”
Mark laughed softly. “Okay, okay. I promise. Just don’t take too long.”
“Just make sure they are closed tightly. I don’t want you spoiling everything after I’ve gone to all this effort to make it happen.”
“Don’t worry about me. I wouldn’t dream of messing up your surprise.”
Mark stood there facing the lockers, although he couldn’t have seen very much even if he had his eyes open, with as little light as the keychain flashlight provided.
A slight noise behind him brought goose bumps of anticipation to his arms and neck. What could the little vixen be up to? His imagination supplied a variety of intriguing answers to that question as he waited.
The large canvas ball bag came down over his head, arms, and waist so fast and with such force that by the time he realized that it wasn’t Colleen grappling him, he found he could barely move, much less fight back. Several sets of strong arms tackled him to the floor as he struggled against the canvas, but it might as well have been a straightjacket. He felt a knee on his back and another on his neck as yet another person pulled some sort of strap tight around the outside of the bag, binding his arms tight against his side.
“What the hell? Get off me, you assholes,” Mark yelled, although the sound came out muffled.
“Dream on, punk.”
Mark recognized the voice. It was Doug Brindal, senior star quarterback of the Hilltoppers football team, ex-boyfriend of one Colleen Johnson. A trail of little dots started to connect as a light dawned in his mind.
He felt his body lifted by four sets of hands, no doubt some of Doug’s good buds who had volunteered to lend a hand. His head banged hard against a corner as they carried him along, and he heard the doorway back into the gym swing open. Something screeched, and he was thrown down hard on a metal rack. From the hard, curved lumps and narrow rods he felt pressed against his chest, it could only be one of the wheeled basketball racks.
He yelled again, but this time a chorus of laughter was all that greeted him. “There’s nobody here to hear you but us, Smythe. No teachers or coaches to save your sorry ass from getting a lesson you’ve had coming all year.”
“You tell him, Doug!” Mark recognized this new voice as belonging to another senior member of the football team, Bob Fedun, a hulking 230-pound defensive tackle. “Every basketball wimp needs a lesson, and you seem to think you’re somewhere above your true station in life.”
Mark focused, channeling all his enhanced neural pathways, coordinating his muscles into one concerted effort. The bag bulged, accompanied by the sound of canvas thread popping at the seams, but the straps that had been looped around the outside held.
“Hey, watch it,” Doug yelled. “This cheap bag is starting to rip. You guys hold him tight while I give this strap a couple more wraps around his body. That’s it. Now slide him back this way. I want him hunched over the end of this thing like he was humping this line of basketballs. That’s right.”
Unable to get any leverage, Mark felt himself being tied firm. His feet were pulled apart and tied just above the wheels, while his upper body was bent forward along the line of the rack and strapped down tight against it, his arms pinned to his torso.
Doug’s panting voice came close to his ear. “Okay. Give me that knife.”
With a loud ripping sound, the top of the canvas bag was torn away from around his head.
“You son of a bitch,” Mark spat out. “If you don’t let me loose, I’m going to—”
A vicious pull on his hair jerked his head up so that he could see the knife blade inches from his throat. “You’re going to what? Kick our butts? I don’t think so, Smythe.”
The others laughed loudly.
“Tape his mouth,” Doug said. A long strip of duct tape accomplished the task.
The gang worked rapidly. Pulling his pants down around his ankles, they pulled out a large permanent marker and carefully lettered the words FOOTBALL RULES, one word on each butt cheek.
Doug pulled Mark’s head up by the hair one more time, grinning into his face. “I believe you know my girlfriend.”
Colleen bent down, her beautiful, full lips just inches from his own.
“Did you really think I would dump Doug for you, just because you can play a little basketball? Don’t get me wrong. You’re cute, but get serious.
“Doug’s father was number one in his class at Cal Tech. He got his PhD in chemistry by the time he was twenty-three. He started his own company and made his first million before he was twenty-five. Now he runs a division at the lab just because he likes it.
“Your father, on the other hand, doesn’t even have a master’s degree. He’s just a technician. Do you really think I would slum over to your side of the tracks?”
Her laughter was musical.
Doug let go of Mark’s hair. “Okay, enough of this. It’s showtime.”
The wheels of the rack squealed as it was pushed rapidly across the gym. A door banged shut as they left him alone in the dark locker room.
Mark continued to struggle against his bonds but to no avail. There were too many straps and too much tape to allow him to break free, and the duct-tape gag made it difficult to breathe, much less yell loudly enough to be heard.
After what seemed like an eternity, but which must have been only an hour, distant sounds in the hallway alerted Mark to the arrival of the first wave of students. There was no mistaking the unique crescendo of squealing laughter, yells, and banging lockers of a school hallway in full-throated cry.
Almost as soon as the sound began, the door banged open and his tormentors were back, wheeling the cart out into the gym and toward the hallway door.
Doug gave the command. “Ready. Go.”
With a shove, the gang of four opened the gym door just enough, pushing the cart, Mark’s butt first, out into the hallway. In the sudden suffocating silence that followed, and before the gym door could swing closed behind the cart, Mark heard their footsteps racing back through the gym toward the far exit.
“Oh my God!” someone yelled.
The hallway of Los Alamos High suddenly exploded into a chorus of laughter that rattled the wall lockers in accompaniment. There, amidst the commotion, too stunned to move, Jennifer and Heather stared at the words printed on the naked posterior of Marcus Aurelius Smythe.