Whipped

William Deverell

Description

'The toughest case of Beauchamp s brilliant career features sex, slander, and dirty politics Montreal journalist Lou Sabatino, under witness protection after nearly being gunned down by the Mafia, is sucked into the quirky world of a conniving Russian dominatrix who has secretly recorded herself putting the whip to the bare bottom of a high-ranking federal cabinet minister. It s the scoop of the century, but too hot a potato if Lou breaks the story, he risks exposing himself to the mercies of the Mafia. Instead, he shows the video to Green Party leader Margaret Blake. The video is leaked, and Margaret is sued by the minister for $50 million. Enter Arthur Beauchamp, Margaret s husband and famed criminal lawyer, who had found or so he hoped blissful retirement on idyllic Garibaldi Island on the West Coast. But now he s representing the woman he loves while tormented by fears that she s embroiled in an affair. Whether you re encountering Arthur

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 19 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773050928
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

WHIPPED
AN ARTHUR BEAUCHAMP NOVEL
William Deverell



To Amy, Rachel, Will, Sophie, and David.


THE ARTHUR BEAUCHAMP NOVELS
Trial of Passion
April Fool
Kill All the Judges
Snow Job
I’ll See You in My Dreams
Sing a Worried Song
Whipped
ALSO BY WILLIAM DEVERELL
Fiction
Needles
High Crimes
Mecca
The Dance of Shiva
Platinum Blues
Mindfield
Kill All the Lawyers
Street Legal: The Betrayal
Slander
The Laughing Falcon
Mind Games
Non-fiction
A Life on Trial


CONTENTS
PART ONE
VERY BAD BOY, VERY BAD DAY
THE TRANSFORMATION MISSION
THE CHIEF WHIP
A LADY HAS TO MAKE A LIVING
LOVE ALL THINGS
THEMES OF SEX AND VIOLENCE
UNTESTED FAITHS
BAD NIGHT, WORSE DAY
BANGLES AND BEADS
WHO WE ARE IS WHO WE ARE
THE DRONE AND THE SCRUM
UNSAFE HOUSE
HORNY IN SEATTLE
SUCH SIGHTS AS YOUTHFUL POETS DREAM
PENNILESS IN PORCUPINE PLAIN
NO ONE NEEDS TO KNOW
TWEETS
PART TWO
THE CLIPPINGS FILE
THE SIERRA FILE
THE CLIPPINGS FILE
THE SIERRA FILE
THE SIERRA FILE
THE CLIPPINGS FILE
THE SIERRA FILE
THE CLIPPINGS FILE
THE SIERRA FILE
PART THREE
EIGHT SECRETS TO A LASTING ORGASM
DOUBT THOU THE STARS ARE FIRE
LET WHAT COMES COME; LET WHAT GOES GO.
GRAVE SECRETS FROM THE MORGUE
LANDSLIDE LLOYD
EXODUS
THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND
THE SPEAKER
PART FOUR
A VERY UNMERRY CHRISTMAS
ARTHUR BEAUCHAMP / THE FULL MONTY
BUGGED
DINING WITH THE ENEMY
LIONHEART
THE CLIPPINGS FILE
SUCKER PUNCH
CONFIDENTIALITY CLAUSE
SCRUM FLUSTER
PART FIVE
THE AWAKENING
HAPPY ENDING
MOVIE NIGHT
THE AFTER-PARTY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT


PART ONE


VERY BAD BOY, VERY BAD DAY
“God help me! I was bad! Forgive me!” A thwack , as whip met bottom.
The bottom in question glowed pinkly at Lou Sabatino from the screen of a two-point-eight-gigahertz Toshiba Satellite laptop.
“I was a bad boy, very bad!” Thwack! “Please, Mother, I beg you! On my knees!” Which he was, in fact. On his elbows too, his wrists tied with thongs.
Lou figured it couldn’t hurt that much, despite the pain freak’s petitions for leniency. The voice was familiar. Someone he knew. Someone important? Whoever it was, he was on a gaudy Oriental carpet, his plump rear raised, his head down, out of view. In the background was a wall of rough-hewn logs, a blazing fireplace, a window overlooking an iced-over lake and looming hills clad with the skeletal trees of a boreal forest. The Laurentians, maybe.
The flogger was Svetlana Glinka, a professional dominatrix, whose elegant bared tits bobbed with every stroke. Other than those, her main adornment was something that looked like a leather corset. The real Svetlana, well clothed except for the apparent lack of underwear, was standing beside Lou, enjoying her little movie, exulting in the prospect of . . . What? Sweet revenge?
She had recorded this session with a hidden webcam, and was showing Lou her little docudrama in her therapy clinic, as she called it, in a ground-floor triplex in Montreal’s Centre-Sud. Lou had the misfortune to live in the apartment just above hers.
He asked, “How long does this last?”
“I think maybe seventy seconds.” Russian accent, a throaty voice that oozed sex. She made Lou nervous, and he drew away from her a little. “Watch this. He likes this specially.”
The Svetlana on the screen was greasing a king-size dildo.
“No, not that, Mother, I beg you!”
She piggybacked onto her victim, riding him, penetrating him with the dildo as he crawled on his knees and trussed hands, screaming his repentance while trying to toss her like a rodeo bull.
§
This episode had come toward the end of what was definitely not the finest day in the once unremarkable life of ace reporter Lou Sabatino. He’d spent most of the day, as usual, in the frigid climate of the Sabatino household. “I’ve had it with this hole!” Celeste had yelled at him. “ C’est un trou, un dump! ” This after the kids had backpacked off to school.
Celeste’s complaints were many and justified. The nineteenth-century triplex on Rue de la Visitation lacked the comforts of their former home in Côte-des-Neiges. It offered a covered, open balcony, but was cramped, worn, mouse-ridden, drafty, accessed only by an exterior staircase, a spiralling, wrought-iron, ice-slicked death trap. To top it off, sleep-disturbing thumps and howls regularly emanated from the poorly muffled ground-floor apartment. The top floor had remained empty ever since its tenant was busted a month ago in a drug sweep.
Lou escaped for a couple of hours into his computer room, then returned for lunch to more of the same. “I’m not going to be cooped up in this shithole for the rest of my life!” Celeste, a work-at-home couturière, had been threatening to pack up and ship out, take the kids to the crap mining town up north where her parents lived. Or out west. She had a sister in Calgary.
“We’ve got no choice,” he whimpered. “My hands are tied.” Which, he later recognized, put him in league with the flake in the video.
“You twerp! You’ve got the backbone of un ver de terre .” A worm.
Once again, Lou proved he wasn’t man enough to withstand her vivid detailing of his lack of manliness by fleeing into the relative comfort of a cold, drizzly mid-May morning, wishing he’d taken more than a scarf and a sweater. For most of his time in the house of horrors, he’d ventured out only at night, choosing ill-lit streets for the only exercise he was getting.
His fear was that he’d be recognized by one of his Quartier Centre-Sud neighbours or, worse, a Mafia hit man. There were assassins afoot. Lou’s face had been in the papers, on the tube, the internet. He always wore dark clip-ons over his glasses, even on murky days like this, to hide his myopic, mournful grey eyes.
Lost for somewhere to go, he meandered down toward the Gay Village, then west on busy St. Catherine, stopping occasionally at storefronts, his breath clouding the plate glass behind which leggy women sold lingerie or jewellery. Fodder for his masturbatory fantasies. Ultimately he found himself at a Métro stop, wondering if he dared make another quiet visit to the Canadian Press bureau.
On paid leave from the wire service, Lou spent most of his time these days online or fiddling with his computers. He was a nerd. A horny nerd, since Celeste cut him off a couple of months ago. An out-of-shape nerd: fifteen excess pounds on his five-nine frame. Only forty-one, and he already had a comb-over bald spot. In compensation, he’d grown a moustache and full russet beard that hid his weak chin. All part of his new identity. He was now Robert O’Brien, computer analyst, and he had the papers to prove it.
Lou’s fears were not delusions.
Three months ago, he had filed a four-instalment exposé of how deeply the Mafia had entrenched itself into the Montreal waterfront, buying off local politicians and public servants, some in Ottawa, at Transport Canada. He’d worked on this series for five months, a welcome long break from the rewrite desk. When the first instalment got play in every daily serviced by CP, there was champagne in the bureau chief’s office, there was back-slapping. Waterfrontgate!
He’d got a lot of quiet help from his sister’s husband’s uncle, Nick Giusti, a former lawyer for the mob. Despite Nick’s cunning, two of his Mafioso clients had been sent up for gunning down an informant, prompting the compagnia to withdraw their fat retainer, and he was pretty disgruntled.
Nick had an unsavoury reputation as a fixer, a washer of ill-gotten gains, but you take your sources where you find them. Jules “the Monk” Moncrief and his pals would fit him with cement shoes if they ever figured out he was Lou’s Deep Throat.
Nick had been the source of voluminous court records, bank statements, notes, ledgers, hard copies of paper exhibits from a dozen trials. He would not be suspected as the source because most of the material was on public record, but without his help the research would have taken a year. As it was, Lou had to painstakingly assemble the jigsaw puzzle of waterfront connections. He’d got no cooperation from the cops — they’d gruffly refused to talk to him.
After the third instalment went nationwide, someone fired a fusillade of bullets at Lou from a passing car, outside his home in Côte-des-Neiges.
§
Lou’s near-death experience, on a frigid ten-below evening in the midst of an unrelenting snowfall, had happened in mid-February. He was wheeling the big green recycle bin to the curb in front of his semi-detached. He’d had a few whiskys, celebrating his national scoop — heads were ducking, the Prime Minister was “concerned,” the Montreal Port Authority was scrambling, refusing comment. The series was perfectly timed, with Parliament in session and the Opposition pelting a Conservative government that had squeaked to a minority victory on an anti-graft platform.
Fortunately for the slightly tiddly ace reporter, he slipped on the icy walkway, and the bin went down and so did Lou, just as a black sedan cruised by, just before a burst of automatic fire went over his head and took out the snowman behind him.
When the police came, he was still holed up in the bathroom, throwing up. He gave a garbled, frantic account, Celeste a more coherent one — she had seen everything from an upstairs window. Amazingly cool, this unyielding, practical woman. The police posted a guard that night, adding to the posse of media outside.
The next day, Superintendent Malraux came by and stayed for a few hours, talking about motive, about the famously ruthl