Desolation Road (Torpedo Ink 4)

“Shit,” Ink said. “The little prick did whatever he wanted.”

Code nodded. “I found so many cases against this boy. His father has a law firm employed that worked nearly fulltime just to keep his son out of jail and out of the press. There must be twenty women who brought rape and assault charges against him, all dropped and settled out of court. Most never got that far, they were too intimidated. The security firm employed by Holden doubles as his enforcement. Those men are, believe it or not, men from the Venomous club. They use scare tactics on anyone who won’t accept his bribe money.”

“The Venomous club? An MC? He employs them as his security force?” Transporter couldn’t swallow that one.

“Not exactly,” Code clarified. “The security firm hires the members of the Venomous club to use scare tactics on anyone who won’t accept bribe money.”

“Great,” Absinthe said. “Is Scarlet aware that Holden Sr. uses clubs as enforcers and corrupts attorneys?”

“No doubt about it,” Code said. “She’s very informed.”

Absinthe was so fucked. It was no wonder Scarlet was unhappy with him admitting to being an attorney. Now, when he had to tell her he was in a club, she was really going to hate it and with good reason.

“So Robert Jr. grew up believing he was untouchable,” Alena mused. “Do you think he was even a little worried after what happened to his friends?”

“If he wasn’t, his father was,” Code said. “Robert Jr. lived in a guesthouse on the main property. It’s a multimillion-dollar estate with tennis courts, swimming pools and stables. Seems like Robert Jr. was filled with remorse and had been punishing himself, using a very primitive device on his private parts.”

A collective groan went up around the table. “A clapper,” Mechanic guessed. “Adrik fucking taught that girl how to make a clapper and get a man to confess every sin he has. That’s just not right.”

The clapper could have been a medieval torture device, although it was too ingenuous for that. It simply slapped the penis or balls hard, no rhythm, an unexpected but highly anticipated blow that went through a man, the pain excruciating, jarring every organ and bone in his body. Sweat poured from every pore as agony burst through him, building and building as the torture caught up with his brain. Tears would come. There was no way to stop them. Then the pain would gradually recede, and the terrible anticipation would start. When would it happen again? That was almost worse than the actual blow of the wood striking.

The spring tightened by minute increments as the hours went by, causing the blow to become harder and harder. At first, it wasn’t noticeable, because the initial strikes were so shocking, but as time passed and the torment continued, one had enough time between the blows to realize the slaps were much worse. The time in between was enough to recover so there was no way to become numb to the clapper.

The clapper was one of the worst kinds of torture to endure and it could be used for days. In the end, most men begged to do anything to get it to stop. A man like Robert Barnes-Holden Jr. would be sobbing and promising anything to Scarlet.

“That’s what he used, all right,” Code confirmed. “He wore a clapper on his penis and balls, and he wrote a letter confessing his sins to the press. It was very detailed, stating that his father had brought him his first whore when he was sixteen and demonstrated for him how to use her hard and share her with his friends. He chose Arnold and Beau of course for his birthday surprise. Daddy ‘helped’ him get it right. After that, Holden Sr. would bring him prostitutes all the time. That progressed to Robert Jr. and his friends finding their own girls at the college, using the drugs Daddy provided for them until they got their own sources. The letter detailed all sorts of crimes that Robert Jr. committed against dozens of women and men, including the rape of young Priscilla. Because she was one of many, it didn’t seem as if he had singled her out for any special reason. He named his friends as accomplices in every crime and his father as knowing about all of them and laughing, saying he could easily get them off—and of course his father had.”

Absinthe could picture Scarlet calmly instructing him to write out a confession of every crime he’d ever committed since early childhood. Apparently, he had done so quite happily to keep the clapper from pounding his bruised and terribly tender penis. “Did he write the letter in his own handwriting?” Absinthe asked.

“Yes, he did,” Code said. “He made several copies on his own machine from the guesthouse and mailed them to various newspapers and to the police chief from the Holden estate almost a full six hours prior to his death. There were no signs of violence in his home. No signs of another person. After he tortured himself and wrote his confession, he hanged himself in the middle of his living room in the exact manner that Scarlet’s little sister did.”