Disclaimer: All characters property of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and WingNut Films.
"My first assignment," Dammers says, and in the darkness of the car, Lucy can hear the tremor in his voice, his panic and flight; teetering just on the brink of it. "I was the Manson family's sex slave for six months. Six months - disguised as a filthy hippie!"
Lucy's pretty sure they can't be seen from the road. They'd been heading towards the other entrance on the north side of the cemetery, where it opens onto Weaver Street, when Dammers had stopped the car, and they're still twenty or thirty yards from the gate. Here, and at this time of night, they might as well be at the end of the world for all the help she's likely to attract if she starts screaming. The moon's full tonight, its contours slipping in and out of view depending on how the clouds blow. Dammers' eyes, reflected in its light in the rear-view mirror, are as black as tar, set off by the deep hollows and sooty shadows around them, like something that could swallow you up. But he doesn't scare her. Not any more. She's too pissed off for that.
"You could have just had the sheriff throw me in jail as an accessory if you needed me out of the way. What do you want from me? Why did you bring me here?"
"Because!" He bites off the words, flecking them with spittle. "I need to make you understand, Mrs Lynskey, what I've done in the service of my country - and what I know about men like Frank Bannister! You are in danger, deadly danger, and you don't even realize what you've gotten yourself into!"
"And you're going to explain it to me, I suppose," Lucy says. Her voice, even to her own ears, is unsteady with barely-controlled fury.
Dammers half-twists in his seat. "I've seen it before! Innocent women, obsessed with psychopaths! Being suckered into the killer's sick games! And let me tell you, Bannister is playing a very sick game, both with you, and, ultimately with himself."
"You have no idea what's going on here! Why won't you listen to Frank? Look at the evidence!"
"I know exactly what's going on," Dammers says, and, abruptly, goes quiet. When he speaks again, his voice is a couple of octaves lower and has a slightly breathless undertone. His gaze jumps around, nervously, from the black skeletal arms of the maples and elms overhead, to his hand in his lap, and finally to her body. "It is my job as a federal agent to protect you, Mrs Lynskey. I feel a deep, personal connection between us."
Oh, God. Lucy looks at him, in something like abject horror. That's what he's about? After what Sheriff Perry had informed her, tactfully, that Agent Dammers had 'issues' with women, she'd taken it that he was a rampant misogynist and probably firmly in the closet at the same time. Now both guesses crumble away into as much dust as the corpses under the grass outside at the helpless, hungry way he keeps looking back to her reflected image. She's trying to save Frank, and this sleazeball's driven her to a graveyard to try to seduce her? Well, 'seduce' is a bullshit term here, anyway. Lucy tugs viciously at her handcuffed wrist, but the lock holds maddeningly strong, binding her there. Right where he wants me, she thinks. Her eyes narrow.
"Protect me?" she snaps. "What you want to do is rape me, isn't it?"
Dammers makes a squalling noise, and claps both hands over his ears. Curling into himself, he leaves them there for a minute, and then, still shaking, slowly lifts his eyes again to meet hers. "Please don't use that word. I find it extremely - upsetting."
"Well, that's what you brought me here for, isn't it? So why don't you just get on with it? Get it over with, and then let me go!"
His lips twitch. "So you can get back to Bannister?"
Lucy glares him down. "Yes. That's right - so I can get back to Frank."
"Have you had sex with him yet?" Dammers asks. He spits the question out, as if it disgusts him and he wants to throw it away from himself as quickly as possible.
"That's none of your goddamned business!"
"I wouldn't like to think that you had. The idea of his hands, running over your skin... spoiling you... contaminating you with his poison..."
"Let me guess - you think that should be your prerogative, right?"
"My boundaries are sacrosanct, Mrs Lynskey, and crossing those boundaries would constitute an unacceptable violation of my personal integrity!" Visibly shuddering, Dammers returns his hands to his lap. Quietly, he says, "I like to picture myself worshiping you."
"With your body?" Lucy asks, sarcastically.
"With my every breath. I want to adore you. I want to have you always first in my thoughts."
"Creep!"
Dammers shifts in his seat, fumbling with something, and there's a tiny sound, distinct from the squeak of the springs, that Lucy takes a second or two to place before her disbelieving brain identifies it as a zipper being tugged down. He huffs, just a few short juddering intakes through his nose. After another moment or two, she sees his hand start to move in a slow but unmistakable rhythm. Her jaw drops.
"Are you playing with yourself? Oh, my God, you are, aren't you? You sick son of a bitch!"
"Please - Lucy! I still have desires that have not been extinguished in me! I am still a man... a man with needs..!"
"I am getting out of this car. Right. Now. Do you hear me?"
"I don't think that you'll be going anywhere just yet," Dammers says in a small voice, and his eyes dart to where the handcuffs shackle her to the car. Lucy kicks the back of his seat, the only thing she can vent herself on.
"Pervert!"
Dammers flinches, and whimpers low in his throat, but doesn't stop stroking. He spreads his legs wider to work the full length of his cock, his tongue flicking over his lips like a lizard's as his eyes fixate on Lucy again in the mirror. He does something with his wrist that makes him squeak. "Beautiful. So pure - so lovely -"
Lucy's beyond pissed off now. Way beyond. She's left it in the distance, someplace back at the police station, maybe. 'Pissed off' has become a phrase that she doesn't even relate to any longer, having become something that you might be if someone rear-ended you at a stop light then drove away before you could get their license plate, not what you feel being made to sit in the back of a patrol car and listen to a psychotic fed touch his dick. A kind of furious, what-the-hell defiance is creeping over her. That's how he wants to think about her? That's what he wants? Because if it is, she's damned if she's going to sit here and give it to him on a platter.
"You don't know what you're talking about," she says. "You don't know women at all, do you?"
"I know enough," Dammers says. His butt lifts fractionally off the cushion. "I know that there are women like you, and then there are -" he breathes out the word, heavily, " - sluts."
"You don't think I'm a slut, Dammers?" Lucy asks. Wriggling into a better position on the seat, she hikes her shirt up her belly with her free hand and pops the first button of her pants. Knowing that he's watching her every move, she pushes the rest of them apart slowly, one after the other, until she can tease the fly open and give him a partial but enticing flash of her panties. "Does this make me a slut?" she says, as she traces her fingers upwards, over the lace, and, finally, lets them dip under the elastic of the waistband. "What about this?"
She hears his gasp as she reaches deeper, pressing the heel of her hand into the swell of her mound. "Filthy," he mumbles, and immediately starts to stroke himself harder, never taking his eyes off the mirror.
Lucy touches herself, lightly, with her fingers. On the outside only; that's going to be as far as she goes with this, even if it's to get back at him. No way is she going to stick her fingers in and pretend that they're cock on this occasion, even if she used to do it sometimes when Ray wasn't there. She slides back and forth, applying different degrees of pressure, letting him see exactly what she's doing and where she's aiming for. Two of her fingers slip, unbidden, between her folds, and Lucy shivers. God, that feels really good, actually. Why is she responding like this, so quickly?
She tries her best not to watch or listen to Dammers' contortions, distorted fragments of speech, and various throaty groans as she works at herself. She couldn't really care less about his evident sexual pleasure, but then the fact wanders through her mind that she hasn't seen him take his gloves off at any point, and the sudden thought of what butter-soft leather must feel like skimming up and down hot, sensitive flesh makes her bite her lip.
Lucy runs the pad of her finger in slippery, concentric circles. She can't remember feeling this ready before, not for practically no reason. When she ghosts over her clit, she feels her inner muscles clench down on themselves. She wants it; wants something inside to help her put on this performance, even if it's only her own fingers, because she's damn sure it's never going to be his cock.
Even if she does want to see it.
Even if she is squirming along the seat, as far the cuffs will let her, so that she can catch a shadowy glimpse, listening at the same time to the increasingly slick, viscous sounds as he thrusts up into his hand. Lucy rubs faster at her clit, just a bit harder and a bit lower, feeling how soft and swollen she is against her palm. "You like what you see, Dammers?" she says, through gritted teeth. "You have no idea how wet I am. I bet you do want to fuck me. I bet you'd love to be inside me, right this minute."
"Oh, God," Dammers says, quaveringly. "Oh, God. Oh, God, yes - I would - I -"
Lucy's panting. She doesn't know how long she's going to be able to keep this up now without climaxing, and she's loathed to give him the satisfaction and extra incentive of watching her come first. Just when she starts to wonder if he's ever going to get there, she sees his hips jerk, and watches him come undone; watches him grow more desperate, moaning her name in embarrassment and shameful depth of want.
"Well, you can't," she says, and pushes two fingers inside herself as far as she can. How good it is, and the thought that Dammers knows exactly how she's feeling right now, couple weirdly together to send her right over the edge, and she holds his gaze in the mirror the whole time, coming even harder for the wounded kind of longing that she sees in it.
When, eventually, she can think straight again, she lifts her chin. Slowly and deliberately, she says, "Now will you let me go, you bastard?"
"Later," Dammers says, thickly. In the half-light, the broken blood vessels in his forehead stand out, and the smaller ones in his eyes. A small rivulet of sweat is making its way down his left temple, and another one down the center of his belly. Drawing a handkerchief from his pocket, he wipes fastidiously at himself with it, and starts to do up his pants. "Perhaps - a little later."