Used By The Mob by Louise Cayne

Chapter 1
     
    'Put a bullet in each of his knees,' sighed Vincent, as he sat
calmly, with his legs stretched out, resting on a coffee table and
lighting a cigar. A puff of smoke temporarily masked the grey
stubble on his world-weary face as well as the evil smirk strewn
upon it. His cool demeanour suggested he had done this kind of
thing plenty of times before.
    'Please, don't hurt him,' Stacey pleaded, 'He hasn't done
anything.'
    Vincent laughed huskily as one of his henchmen held Stacey’s
arms behind her back. She had no idea why they had come to her
apartment, but every so often her husband would mention his name in
conversation, and from this she knew he was a very dangerous man
with a history of violence.
     
    * * * *
     
    Her husband, Mark had only been a part of her life for a
little over a year. They married a few months after meeting and
since that date, Stacey had made real progress in turning her life
around.
    Before Mark, she had led a miserable existence. Drugs and
prostitution were all that she knew. Fucking at least a dozen guys
a night, she was pulling in hundreds of dollars every shift, but
she was lucky if she saw anything close to 50 dollars of that after
her pimp – an obese wannabe gangster going by the name of 'Bubba,'
had taken his commission. Based in one of the roughest
neighbourhoods in the city, Bubba kept his whores loyal by
supplying them with drugs. Loyal as they were, many of his girls
went missing, though not through choice. Some eventually came back
alive, usually scarred or disfigured in some way after getting
caught up with one of the many unsavoury characters within the
city. Not that Bubba cared about their wellbeing; he knew people
that could find him replacements within a matter of
hours.
    Stacey had been assigned her own patch a few blocks east of
Bubba’s place near the meat factory. The labourers worked into the
early hours, and then the truck drivers started before sunrise so
business was steady each night. Some of the labourers paid her over
the odds to get her to act out the troubled fantasies that occupied
their minds. Ranging from giving blowjobs in the back of the trucks
whilst the drivers fondled carcasses and slabs of meat, to the time
she was stripped and cuffed to the meat hooks inside the factory; a
nightmarish evening that haunted her ever since.
    She had been lured into the factory by the shift manager who
had promised her easy money, but as soon as the shutters were
pulled down, the labourers pounced on her, pawing at her exposed
flesh. They stripped her, cuffed her hands and hung the chain over
a meat hook. Left dangling helplessly a few feet in the air between
two slabs of beef on the processing belt, the workers took up their
usual positions and turned the power on. The belt started to move
and as Stacey was paraded past the workers one by one, they
feverishly grabbed her skin, groping her legs as she moved slowly
towards the grinder at the end of the line. Stacey feared for her
life. Her heart beating so hard it felt like it was stuck in her
throat, her screams stifled only by a blood stained apron wrapped
tightly around her mouth. A look of resignation washed across her
colour drained face as she witnessed the meat in front of her get
ripped to shreds by the sharp metal blades.
    Her eyes closed, forcing the tears that had welled up to run
down her cheeks. She could feel the flurry of air generated by the
speed of the blades just up ahead. Time temporarily stood still as
she recalled being beaten as a child, and running away from home
when most other girls her age were still in high school. She
remembered the abandoned warehouse where she had lived for a while,
and the peculiar man who had kidnapped her and sold her to Bubba in
the first place. Then, as she tensed her body in anticipation of
being sliced apart, she was brought back into reality suddenly, as
the machine lost power and shuddered to a halt. Her whole body
shook as the workers lifted her down and