Note ... this is a little shorter because the tone very much changes in the next section
09 If Handcuffs Could TalkBy Marilyn (Ranger Hunters) and Kevan
Uploaded by Alfonsina.d
The 'ass off' (Mal)Two hours before my shift. Plenty of time to work out, shower off the sweat, grab something to eat from the breakroom, and make it to the shift change briefing. I took three steps into the gym and stopped dead in my tracks. My brain tried to process the information my eyes were sending it, but it kept getting a logic error.
Lester—naked—was standing in front of the mirrored wall that we used to make sure our form was correct when we worked out alone. He twisted and turned, looking back over his shoulder like he was trying to determine if there was something stuck on his backside. And he kept darting glances at a poster-sized picture he'd taped to the mirror—a poster of a guy's ass. Nice looking ass too. Poster guy's, I mean. Lester's ass is good, but poster guy had him beat.
"This is probably a dumb question and I'll probably regret asking, but what are you doing?"
"His ass isn't any better than mine!" Lester struck a pose that showed his ass to advantage. "No way his ass is better than mine."
"You're comparing your ass to some other guy's because…"
"Not one single vote! I didn't get one! That is not right, Mal. You know it's not."
Vote? "Les," I asked cautiously, "whose ass is that a picture of?"
"Ranger."
"Does he know you have a life-sized picture of his ass? Come to think of it, where did you get a life-size picture of the boss's naked ass?"
"Need to know," Lester said, continuing to pose and look back-and-forth between the picture and his own ass.
I shook my head. Lester was certifiable. "So, you're upset about not being the ultimate RangeMan ass?"
He paused long enough to glare at me. "Have the ultimate RangeMan ass not be the ultimate RangeMan ass," he growled.
"Well, I hate to tell you, but the real travesty is me not winning that category. Pretty sure they didn't give it to me because I'd already won a category and they didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings by giving me legs and ass. That would pretty much be half the ultimate body."
"Wanna put your ass where your mouth is?" he challenged. "Strip and get over here."
I never could refuse a challenge.
X0x0x0x
Lester and I were still posing in front of the mirrors and arguing when Breeze walked in. He stopped when he saw us and grinned like a kid at Christmas.
"Comparing your asses to Ranger's?" he asked.
"How did you figure that out so fast?" I demanded.
Breeze shrugged. "Makes sense. I did the same thing, but I admit you guys have a bigger picture than I used." He strolled over and examined the picture. "Same result though. I still have a better ass than the boss."
"Wanna put your ass where your mouth is?" Lester challenged. "Strip."
oxoxoxo
"I have a much better V from my obliques to my crack," Breeze announced after he'd stripped out of his clothes and joined us.
Hmmm. He might have a point there. Can't admit that though.
"And my medius beats his. Probably a tie on the maximus," Breeze continued.
Lester snorted. "Your medius needs serious work."
"No way." Breeze inspected his ass in the mirror, running a hand over the muscle under debate. "This medius is perfection."
"Nope," I said firmly, turning so that my ass was right next to Breeze. I stroked my hand over my own right medius. This is perfection. Perfect definition. Perfect angle."
"You know," Lester observed. "With the two of you standing there beside each other, stroking your asses, I'm tempted to handcuff you together and see what happens and whose ass you'll end up playing with."
X0x0x0x
The gym door swung open once more and Tank walked in. Nothing fazes Tank. He stopped, blinked once, then studied the three of us—and the poster.
I thought I caught a twitch that might have been a smile as he turned and walked out without a word.
Guess he didn't feel up to the challenge. Wasn't like he was going to win anyway.
Breeze, Lester, and I went back to comparing and arguing.
A few minutes passed and we heard the click and hum that meant someone had turned on the speaker system. Then Ranger's voice, sounding smug.
"Give it up, guys. It was unanimous. The only unanimous category. And I still had my pants on."
X0x0x0x0x Mal's Revenge (Lester)Mal waited two months to enact his revenge on Bobby for sleeping with Katja. Two months to let the tension build. Two months for Bobby to suffer, dread growing every day, never knowing when the shoe would drop. Talk about living with the sword of Damocles hanging over you. Yeesh. I'd rather just have Ranger kick my ass and be done with it.
Mal was waiting when Bobby got to work, standing in front of the elevator, holding a tablet flat on the palm of one hand. His other hand was above it with his forefinger pointed down like a spear.
Having been alerted it was 'Revenge Day' or, as I later thought of it "The Day Bobby Got Erased", all the guys were in the building, standing behind Mal. Waiting.
Bobby took one step out of the elevator and froze. He looked at Mal's face, then down at the tablet, then back up at Mal.
Mal is our electronics and computer genius. He can seriously screw with you. Very few systems exist that he can't get into if he really wants to. I know he's hacked into all sorts of financial institutions, military databases, and most of the alphabet-soup agencies. There are no secrets if Mal goes looking.
Never taking his eyes off Bobby, Mal waited for a count of three, then lowered his finger and tapped on the tablet. He smiled—a tiny, Ranger-like twitch of his lips—and walked away.
Bobby didn't move. I could see him swallow hard. He looked like a man who's just seen a cobra in front of him, poised to strike.
"Have fun, Brown."
"Let us know how it turns out for you."
"Hate to be you, man."
"Looks like you are VSF, dude. Very severely fucked."
The guys were calling out and laughing, enjoying Bobby's discomfort, sharing some small part of Mal's revenge. Hey, Katja was Mal's sister but Bobby had broken one of the rules we all live by. We all thought she was hot, but none of us made a move on her, much less had wild monkey sex with her. Bobby deserved whatever Mal did to him. I hoped he enjoyed it. I hoped she had been worth it.
As it turned out, no woman was worth what Mal did to Bobby.
Breeze had suggested stripping Bobby naked and leaving him without food or water, handcuffed to an overhead pipe in the completely dark basement of an abandoned building for several days to enjoy the company of the resident rats. Breeze is a sick puppy.
Az suggested acting on a long-standing Ranger threat and actually shipping Bobby—dressed in nothing but a pink tutu and a tiara super-glued to his body—to a third world country and letting him find his own way back without weapons, money, or ID.
Rav suggested taking him sailing—and keelhauling him. Repeatedly. Or turning him into a naked, human figurehead lashed to the bowsprit for a leisurely cruise around New York harbor.
Any of those would have been a vacation compared to what Mal did.
Without laying a finger on him, Mal erased Bobby. With no blood, bruises, or broken bones, Mal gave Bobby the worst beat down I've ever seen put on somebody.
Local bank accounts, gone. Not drained—gone. No trace they ever existed. Credit cards, subscriptions, memberships, gone. Military service records, health insurance and medical records, gone. Driver's license and all other IDs, gone. SSN, gone. Mal even erased all traces of Bobby's birth certificate. Good luck proving who you are without that one.
But he didn't stop there. He erased everything in the names of the aliases Bobby routinely used—and every alias he'd ever used. Mal even erased Bobby's offshore bank account and removed all records of him from the TSA, the IRS, customs and passport control. I was pretty sure he'd done it in every country Bobby'd ever been in. Bobby was a non-person. He didn't exist. He'd never existed.
Mal hadn't stolen Bobby's identity; he'd erased it.
With all that, the best part was what he did to Bobby's apartment. Granted, he had help on that from all the guys not on duty to get it done in time, but it was his fiendish idea and it gave them an added share of the revenge on Bobby.
The same day, after finishing his shift—Ranger cut him no slack and insisted he work every minute of it, making him inventory all the equipment in the weapons room, down to the last bullet—Bobby returned to his apartment to find it cleaned out. Like a lot of the guys, Bobby has an apartment on the residential floor of the RangeMan building. Perk of the job and convenient when you were tired, sore, and beat-up from a tough day. When I say Mal cleaned out Bobby's apartment, I mean it was somewhere beyond empty. It was stripped of everything—clothes, books, furniture, tv, computer, window blinds, pictures. The refrigerator was empty. Kitchen cabinets were bare. Soap, shampoo, and everything else, including toilet paper, was gone from the bathroom. He'd vacuumed the carpet so there weren't any stray hairs of Bobby's remaining. There weren't even any dust bunnies left. It was as if Bobby had never lived there, never set foot in the door.
Oh, Mal did leave one thing. Well, he didn't actually leave it; he added it because it wasn't there before the cleansing.
Mal left a tombstone in the middle of the living room. No name. No engraving of any kind. It was a smooth, polished, blank slab of marble tombstone anchored to the floor.
The message was clear: Bobby was a dead man, and he still didn't exist.
X0x0x0x
Two weeks on, Bobby was still desperately trying to untangle what Mal had done to his life and prove he existed—and failing. He still had no ID, no credit cards, no bank account, no money, no furniture.
And no personal car. Mal had that towed from the garage to an undisclosed location.
Bobby had nothing; he was destitute.
And Ranger wasn't helping. He refused to pay Bobby—even in cash—claiming he had no employment records for Bobby and the IRS had never heard of him. He was, however, making Bobby work his scheduled shifts. It was Ranger's way of approving what Mal had done. His way of punishing Bobby for breaking the rule.
Bobby had managed to scrounge some non-RangeMan clothes from a shelter—Ranger insisted he not wear RangeMan clothing when not on duty and none of the guys would lend him any—and a couple of blankets so he wasn't sleeping on the bare floor anymore, although he was still sleeping with the tombstone. The guys had anchored it to the floor solidly enough that Bobby hadn't found a way to get rid of it. And he was able to scrounge food from the break room. But that was it. And it wouldn't get any better until Mal resurrected Bobby. And Mal wouldn't do that until all the guys decided he'd suffered enough.
Tank was running a book on how long that would take and the betting was brisk. The shortest amount of time anyone had bet on so far was three months. The guys were pissed.
No woman was worth that.
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