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“ARtHuR tHyMweL

wE hAvE yOuR wIfE
tHiS iS yOuR oNe ChAnCe tO eVeR gEt HeR bAcK hOmE
gO tO tHe AdDrEsS bElOw ToNiGhT
wE kNoW yOu’Re SiTtInG nEaR tHe LeTtEr-HoLe
FaIlUrE tO aRrIvE qUaLiFiEs YoU fOr FiRsT cLaSs TwEnTy-FoUr HoUr sHiPpInG
A sPeCiAl DeLiVeRy FoR yOu!!!”

Arthur found the address along with the ransom below the clipping-message at the letter-hole but no name. The heat from his perspiring forehead fogged his glasses, and he rubbed it out. His wife had been missing for three days.
On the fourth morning, he received his most dubious glimmer of hope in life since his chief engineer of Mackafax R&D assured him that The Shrinker TM appealed to Americans like guns appealed to hunters. “It’s only bad when it’s used on other people, not just luggage or trash,” said the engineer then. Arthur remembered with irony that he had laughed and replied, “Y’know, if you’re wrong, I’ll have to shrink you and sell you in the next Barbie-doll line,” to which the engineer shook his head and flatly pled, “Oh, no, don’t do that, Arty.”
“bRiNg EvErYtHInG wE nEeD tO oWn ThE rIgHts To ThE SHrInKeR.”
A lone lighted window marked his destination five stories above the brick wall graffiti and tin garbage cans of the street view besides the slums. He ascended to the fifth floor and approached the second door.
“AbSoLuTeLy No CoPs.”
That last stipulation evoked a dreadful groan from his lips as he knocked on the door. No one knew where he was.
“You can come in.” It was a woman’s voice that thrummed through the door, but not his wife’s. His heart accelerated and he came in as suggested. There he met with the less pleasant sight of a kitchen whose owner saw fit to plastic wrap all of the appliances and ceiling fixtures.
“Come to the light in the other room.”
Indeed, there around the threshold’s shadows shone the light he had glimpsed from the street view. Almost everything in the room also stifled beneath an oppressive layer of plastic wrap. A lamp illuminated a long-legged lady who reclined atop a green armchair and rested her feet upon a matching footstool. She was a blonde-headed stunner with a fine nose, wearing scarlet hues on her spacious lips and black, cube-healed pumps on her rather large feet. By her outfit, a knee-length black skirt below business rouge, he guessed that she was connected through some clandestine organization.
Arthur breathed deep and declared, “I’m here to get my wife back. Where is she?”
“She’s here,” replied the strange lady, insinuating towards a closed door behind where her armchair sat, “first, put your cell phone on the table in the kitchen.”
Reluctantly, he relinquished his cell phone with a dull thud on the plastic-wrapped table surface. He no longer could alert anyone outside of this apartment.
“Did you bring the exclusive rights to the manufacture and development of The Shrinker TM?”
“Yes.”
“The original schematics along with the Alpha-Beta trials?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Your username, password, and any additional authorization? The street you grew up on? Your favorite English teacher from high school?”
“Yes, everything you need is in this folder. Is my wife in that room? I need to see her right now.”
She crossed one leg over the other, “Relax, we are civilized people here. You’ve done very well for yourself to make it this far.”
He actually managed to smirk with relief. He immediately retracted it. No strange lady in a CSI-yellow-taped-off-looking apartment could be permitted the warmth of his smile. That belonged to his Celia.
“Who I am,” proffered the lady, “We represent a government that demands access to the terror of shrink weapons. Guns kill and lives end. SHRUNKEN lives though, he heh heh,” laughed she with unnerving relish, wiggling the long tips of her purple toenails through her pumps, “they continue to pay taxes long after they’re tucked away.”
A distant car alarm from the city outside made Arthur pay attention.
“I, uh.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think I parked in a good spot. This is a bad neighborhood.”
“My associates likely have begun disassembling your car.”
“What,” sprang Arthur to the window on the other side of the room. He helplessly watched while a crew of indistinct silhouettes pilfered all of his hub-caps, rims, tires, bumpers, headlights, stereo system, upholstery, steering column, and everything else that gives presence to a car parked on the side of the street.
“You are Mr. Arthur Thymwel, the creator of Shrinkbase who sold its resonance frequency characteristics to Mackafax and secured himself one of the highest-paid positions in the company. I’m sure price is no object to you for a new car.”
Arthur’s forehead wrinkled angrily. “Your associates are going to get me a new car out of their pockets, especially with all this terror money they expect to grab!”
“That too can be arranged, provided you cooperate.”
Suddenly, sirens blared and blue lights cycled in faint cones against the walls of the buildings next to them. Arthur ceased being angry. Then, it was his captor’s turn to glare repugnantly at him.
“I said,” seethed she, unstrapping her right shoe, “absolutely,” slipping it off, spreading wide her liberated toes, “no,” unlatching the false heel, “cops!”
Celia tumbled from the false heel into the lady’s hand with a scream. Arthur froze where he stood against this chilling development. He helplessly watched his wife struggle against the lady’s fingers while she leaned forward and wedged his wife between her limber, naked toes.
“Celia!”
“Send your cops away, Arthur, or I’ll squish your wife, here and now!”
“I didn’t involve them! I know you told me no cops!”
Celia’s tiny body undulated above the lady’s footstool by the pumping of her long toes, struggling in vain to resist the pressure on her.
“Celia, please, hang on!”
“No false hope, Arthur! The love of your life depends on it!”
He had no recourse but to observe the unfolding police activity. Three cruisers and a K-9 unit parked on the main street right where it intersected with the apartment building. Amid the confusion and bright lights, he saw a cadre of cops running and an even fewer number of people running away, apparently with great haste.
“They’re giving chase! They’re after somebody else!”
“Bullshit, they are! I bet they like examining hot, sweaty, toe-jammy-”
“No, they got back in their cars, they’re following them down main street!”
“I want them gone now!”
“They’re going! For the love of God they’re going!”
And by God’s love the blue lights and sounds of alert disappeared into the night. Arthur took another deep breath and told the lady with confidence, “they’re gone. I don’t know where they came from or why but they’re gone. I haven’t told anyone about where I went tonight.”
“You sorry worm,” muttered she before she spat, “don’t even contemplate the NOTION of telling anyone about any of this! All of this is going to stay between you, me, and my new foot slave for the night, our darling, little, Celia.”
And then she rose from her chair, setting one foot down with a clack of the shoe she still wore, and leaving the other foot on the stool to display the entrapped Celia to a flabbergasted Arthur.
“As for the rest of this night,” sighed she, apparently calming down to a more controlled demeanor than her outburst, “there is a room set up right behind you. Make no illusions about this, Arthur: until we are done, both of you belong to us. Now, if you’ll excuse she and I, it’s girls’ time in my bedroom. No boys allowed.”
Delighting herself to such sensuous joy as using her own body as a kind of prison escort, the lady sauntered into her bedroom, letting the sole of her bare foot peel three times from the vinyl flooring. Then, she violently slammed the door shut behind them.

**********

Arthur listened through what pathways availed him in the crummy apartment that had so imperiously endangered his beloved Celia. He lied awake in bed for two and a half hours before the constant drone of people talking across the hall had quitted, signaling that the time had come to retaliate. Wearing only socks on his feet, he tiptoed across the room with the armchair and the footstool, cringing every time he heard the floor creak underfoot, paying heed to the execrable disrepair of this apartment unit.
He reached the door behind which the strange lady held his wife captive. A sound through the door like rustling bedsheets disheartened him, convincing him that she must still be awake. He gingerly grasped the doorknob and counted the seconds while he turned it. The door exhaled open with the scent of feminine perfume and, to his alarm, the sound of excited breath.
His eyes had adjusted to the dark, and he recognized the bed where the lady lied on her back, perceiving a womanly form underneath the covers. Her two sizable feet were restless while the woman to whom they belonged occupied herself with activity between her legs. Arthur’s face reddened to an uncomfortable heat.
He gently lifted the comforter at the foot of the bed in order to reveal her two restless feet, especially the right foot that continued to ensnare poor Celia, apparently to her grotesque amusement. His embarrassment turned to righteous indignation. Overcome with resolve, he grabbed her right ankle and prepared to remove Celia from her clutches with his other hand.
“Oh! You pervert!”
Her left foot struck him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him. He released her leg and doubled over at the foot of her bed, unable to think about anything but the pain. He rose back up and faced the business end of his patented Mackafax exclusive Shrinker TM limited edition with golden, shimmering conductors and mounted laser sight (he made a note to himself by the shiver down his spine that even he could mistake it for a ballistic firearm.)
“Reach for her again and you’ll learn how she feels! I have plenty of room for more, ya know!” He withheld his grasp upon observing the red dot square on his heart, not that it mattered where she shot as long as she hit. “You interrupted me, you bastard,” panted the lady in the bed, fixing the shrinker on Arthur while she more thoroughly cloaked herself in the comforter, “And I’m naked. I was so fucking close.”
Her left leg stretched towards him while her right foot kept a perch on the bed, anchoring both Celia by the toes and the lady’s lust by her sole. “You’re gonna take this foot here and put the toes in your mouth. That’s a start, and if you do anything except suck on these toes, then I shrink you.”
Arthur made a point not to give in to her sexual advances without some restraint. He looked down at the impatient foot that awaited his mouth, knowing that the first step of self-preservation against a threat was to suspend some scruples with disagreeable things. If he failed to stay unshrunk, then Celia would lose her only chance to go home.
He eventually knelt down and received the naked foot in his grasp, returning his wife’s fixed gaze by forlorn helplessness, murmuring, “I’m sorry, Celia, I have no choice.”
“Oh, shut up,” hissed the blonde who suddenly toed his mouth and wiggled her way inside, “before I give you something to be sorry about.”
The lady’s lengthy, purple toenails scratched at his tongue, rigorously encroaching like an obnoxious salon patron upon a new nail file. He responded by sucking as demanded. The task challenged him. The taste of the leather soles of her pumps upon the soles of her toes made him reel. Her foot flexed up and down where the ball of her foot met his bottom lip, forcing his head to nod like a genuine stooge.
“Just keep sucking,” huffed she while she returned her other hand to the warmth between her legs.
Arthur meanwhile consciously ignored the sound of a strange woman who pleased herself right in front of him. Little Celia, from whom everyone present had heard so little, groaned by the incidental twitches of her captor’s foot, whimpering as the toes around her began to heat up. “Oh, fuck, there it is, yes,” moaned the lady in bed, intensifying her pleasure, actively taking along for the ride both the husband and wife at her feet, “you’re both such great foot slaves.”
She finally gasped and achieved the prime tension throughout her body, kicking away Arthur, wriggling the spit at her toes along the sole of her foot, relaxing the dangerous pressure she had applied to Celia. Arthur got off the floor and watched with some tentative relief that the lady’s right foot was still. Although the malevolent toes hoarded his Celia, the threat on her life had subsided. Panting, sighing, the lady sat back up and waved her wet foot towards the door, dripping his spit on the floor, “now get out of my room, you toe sucker. I’ll settle with you tomorrow.”
He shuffled off without saying another word, closing the doors behind him, climbing into his bed, harboring the most troubling arousal of his entire life.

**********

“Did you spend all night thinking about me?”
Arthur awoke both to the sound of his captor’s mocking voice and the image of the sole of her boot in his face. She moved her foot away from his eyes to reveal that she had on foreign army fatigues and an officer’s hat over her ponytail. There in her fist at the size of a tiny doll was Celia.
“You must have been having a rapturous dream about me. You didn’t struggle at all.”
At once, his hands and feet all met considerable resistance by two pairs of tie-downs that fettered him to the bed frame. He realized looking down at his exposed body that she had stripped him down to his underpants. Then, his full attention fell on the lady whose boot gained a foothold on his inner thigh.
“You set a perfect example for all of our new citizens,” pressed she, “you acquiesce to a restraint. I’m sure you were angry enough to hurt me. But you couldn’t. So you found a healthy alternative by obedience to us.”
“I didn't have a choice,” cried he.
“Of course you didn’t. A reasonable person understands that a fair chance at satisfaction depends on a choice. An unreasonable person, however,” untied she at her boot laces, gripping off her black sock, turning loose the same foot that Arthur unwittingly slathered in spit the previous night, “tends to favor opportunism instead of fairness.”
“You said you were going to settle with us in the morning, to let us go.”
“I did say that. So that would be the fair expectation. I have a lot of books that may interest you on the subject of expectations. How about one on the ‘mere exposure effect?’”
Her foot persuaded for her recommendation by eliciting that same, reluctant arousal as that which stalled Arther’s rest all night. The effect instantaneously provoked the guilty reaction between compromised husband and captive wife, comprising a simple repetitive stroke of her naked toes up and down his thigh. In the burning daylight, he could imagine where his spit had dripped from her sole, and how much more aroused than that he would be if it dripped yet.
“In theory,” smiled the woman in combat fatigues, “your life happiness depends on how well you please me. Your ego takes any measures that are necessary to protect itself, even though other people necessitate them. You love your wife as you love yourself. Now your love for yourself, and by extension your love for your wife, depends on your love for this foot that I have let linger so intimately close to you.”
Arthur squirmed in resistance to her elucidations, drawing in his mind upon those selfsame references to real psychological principles in order to filter out her corruptions (in college, he was a business major who took courses in both marketing and social psychology.) He also remembered he was a mediocre student at best due to his tendency to get distracted during study warnings. That was how he and Celia first met.
Upon this first contact, the sole of her foot had elicited the desired effect, making her chuckle, philosophically sealing Arthur in this world within the apartment. Then, he couldn’t help but let rise his humiliation to the point where his face smoldered, flushed. What ate him was that she only stepped on him for a warm three seconds before he failed to deny her satisfaction.
“That will do for now.” She removed his torment in order to begin undressing, changing her outfit from soldier to buxom nakedness to casual street. Arthur exploited the time to observe what he could. He failed to ascertain anything except for the shapeliness of the lady’s hips by unfortunately timed glances. Then, she brought the mouth of her warm, just-worn boot to his nose, ordering, “here, smell what I have prepared for you both.”
He lacked the option to escape the scent of her foot, breathing in the residual warmth and sweaty smell.
“Now,” smirked she, raising little Celia to the boot and dropping her inside, “you both will have something to remember me by while I leave you two alone.”

**********

POUND POUND POUND
“Hey you!”
POUND POUND POUND POUND
“Hey! Open up! I wanna talk to you!”
Arthur jerked awake both to him still being tied up and the banging noise that erupted from the door to the apartment unit. He could tell only by the change of sunlight angle that at least several hours had passed since he apparently fell asleep. His futile escape procedure had exhausted him to the point where he passed out.
“Do you hear me, you bitch!? Open the door and face me! I know you stole my outfit!”
The voice belonged to someone other than his captor. A woman ostensibly had become frustrated and continuously struggled with the door. Arthur’s chance to extricate he and Celia perhaps had arrived.
“Hello!” yelled Arthur to the voice. “She’s not here right now! Listen, I need help right away!”
“Who the fuck is that?” cried the woman again, “open this goddam door now!”
“I can’t come to the door! I’m trapped in the room! Please, call the police! Get somebody over here now!”
“That skank!” shrieked she, “Who the hell are you? No! Shut up! You’re her gimp, aren’t you? You’re a gigolo who got in too deep!”
“I am not a gigolo!” exclaimed Arthur, “I am an inventor who has been trapped in this apartment! My wife is trapped in here too! You have to send someone to help us!”
“Nooooo,” retorted the woman in a harsh, sarcastic tone, “you poor, poor thing! That’s what you get for mixing up with a sex addict! I’m getting the super, evicting this bitch, and getting you arrested!”
“Yes!” cried Arthur, “Call the super! Call the police! Call somebody! Get us out of here!”
“I - want - my - outfit - back!” pounded she on the door, “I want everyone to know that Ilsa Malsea has the bottomless gall to break into her neighbor’s apartment and steal her clothes! And I’m not having these goddam sex games on my floor anymore!”
“Was it a business outfit or an army uniform?”
“WHAT?”
“Was it a skirt and business attire or army fatigues and combat boots?”
“It was my outfit for work, and I was going to wear it to my review meeting today, and last night it went missing, and I already called out, and now I might be fired!”
“Just,” tugged Arthur at his bed restraints while gaining no advantage, “just get somebody here for when she comes back! Somebody who can protect you! That woman is dangerous!”
After the silence resumed by the passing of verbal obscenities, Arthur calmly turned his head in order to project his voice to the boot that held his wife. “Celia, just hold on. I got us in this mess. I’ll get us out of it.”

**********

“Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha hah hah hah!”
The derisive shrill laughter awakened Arthur. The sun had cast twilight on the city. The fiend who bore so many disguises reappeared under yet another masquerade, a flapper 20s throwback dress with tan stockings beneath both an aura of rouge and a sunhat with a feather ornament.
Ilsa Malsea, or so her neighbor had dubbed her, confirmed for all concerned that she held the reins of mastery, displaying to the captive, then cheap lightbulb-blinded Arthur a tiny, yelling lady from a point on the palm of her hand, smiling, saying, “you broke the laws, Arthur. Soon comes the court’s response.”
“No, now you listen to me, Ilsa Malsea,” retorted Arthur, almost gnashing his teeth with triumph at striking such a blow through her veil, “you’re not spearheading new world order, and you don’t really have an army of goons waiting at your beck and call. You’re just a rogue sexual beast that lacks a plan for either my wife or I when somebody else comes looking for us, or your neighbor! So the best thing you can do is let us all go before this gets worse!”
Ilsa stopped smiling. Her eyes lit up as though powered by a current, staring at Arthur, threatening to jump the gap between she and he in order to electrocute him. She simply retrieved her boot from the floor and fetched Celia from the toe end before adding her to the group of tiny prisoners in her hands.
“All right, Arthur, all right,” murmured she in soft resignation before she unbound all four of Arthur’s restraints and walked back out into the hall.
He knew that she expected him to follow her. She ostensibly counted on Arthur’s slow recovery after having all four limbs stretched to the limit all afternoon, gaining enough time to get away before he finished massaging life back into them. Once he could stand, he followed her into the hall.
There she sat in the same chair as the night before while her used tan stockings ran tributaries of nylon along the floor. This time she had dropped all pretense of pleasure, scowling all while her sunhat with the feather obscured her face toward Arthur, she impatiently pat-patted one hand over the other, and she faced the naked soles of her feet at him. She ordered him to fetch the roll of plastic wrap from the kitchen. When he returned, she pointed her finger at her skirt-clad shins with one hand and his patented Mackafax exclusive Shrinker TM limited edition with golden, shimmering conductors and mounted laser sight at him with the other.
“Take that plastic wrap and bind my legs together. Now.”
She still held the bargaining chips in her hands. Eventually, only her sizable feet dangled outside the plastic sleeve that bound her legs. Arthur had to wrinkle his nose by repulsion to the distinct odor of sweat that the nylons impressed upon her feet. Her toes wiggled to corroborate the pleasure that softened her lips.
“Now take all three of these souls and put them in my toes.”
And there in the palm of her hand were all three of Celia, Ilsa’s neighbor, and by mysterious circumstance Arthur’s chief engineer at Mackafax.
“How did YOU get here?” staggered Arthur.
“Today, Arthur,” countered Ilsa, “or maybe I’ll just squish all four of you.”
So he gently lifted his chief engineer between his thumb and forefinger and proceeded towards Ilsa’s big toe. “No,” objected she, reprimanding him by the wag of her tremendous foot , “let’s save my sweaty big toe for wifey. I want her there the most.” There besides went the chief engineer and Ilsa’s neighbor whom both meshed like human toe dividers. The big toe gesticulated Ilsa’s increasing delight for setting Arthur’s heart against it, especially widening the welcome gap when he relinquished Celia. Ilsa squeezed all three of them as soon as she joined the other inmates.
“Sexual beast, am I?” mocked Ilsa while ironically sitting in a bondage of plastic wrap, glowering from beneath her feathered sunhat at the three tiny people at her feet and the half-naked bespectacled man whom she held prisoner. “Every man and woman you’ve ever met has the heart of a beast that screws and the brain of a person who chooses. I choose you all. The charades about world domination and mind control? I want you all in my fantasy. Your conditioning to worship me? I want you all at my feet. My requirement that you bind my long legs together? Arthur,” plucking the feather from atop her head, “I want you to tickle my feet,” equipping it to Arthur who by self-control gently accepted it, “and you’re not going to get Celia back until you’re done.”
“You’re a liar,” objected Arthur, “and you can screw yourself - again - if you think I’ll trust you not to murder my wife while she’s under your feet.”
“No more tricks, college boy. Just do as I say or you guarantee that I murder them all.”
“And what if you accidentally squish them?”
Ilsa’s poignant eye winked, and she replied softly, “I’m more of a kicker than a wiggler.”
Arthur thoroughly disliked the sound of that, aching at the spot on his chest where her foot collided on the previous night. Now the feet that anticipated his tickling threatened even his full-sized body. At the same time, the first seeds of a plan took root, concentrating on the “wiggling” that Ilsa apparently deigned not to let flourish while being tickled.
It somehow started with the black bodied with white-highlight feather that his fingers had to master. He touched the tip of the feather directly at her arch, and both of her feet retaliated immediately, toppling Arthur over backwards. “Ow!” said she, “don’t prick me with that thing! Use the frills, you idiot!”
Suddenly, Arthur’s frustration illuminated a glare in his eyes that forged his path. He descended upon Ilsa’s legs and used the remaining plastic wrap to fetter her legs to the footstool where they rested. She protested only until the feather frills on which she insisted met the delicate, tender arch of her left foot, giggling at first reluctantly than jubilantly.
“You-hoo-hoo-hoo son of a biAAAATCH!!” laughed she when a second assault of fingers drummed over her instep while the feather frills discovered the sensitive arch where it met her sole, “tha-hat was goo-hoo-hood! Hah hahaha! Ye-hehehehess!”
Ilsa surrendered to hysterics that bordered on a psychotic meltdown borne of laughter. Her latest restriction from leg movement trapped her left foot in the cage of relentless giggles. The blood flowed vividly through her cheeks, flushing a sincere, warm, joyful tone. Her white knuckle grip on the arm of her chair gave away how thoroughly her body circuit concentrated on the electric sensation. She finally got what she wanted all along.
Arthur thought more clearly than before as his hands, busy as they were tickling Ilsa into ecstasy, got the blood flowing to his brain. He observed that Ilsa might not have been lying after all. Although her right foot twitched and gesticulated Ilsa’s desperate pleas for escape from the tickle mania, albeit that which she demanded, not to mention that she would have kicked many times over if she could, her toes remained still. She sporadically scratched his hands with her toenails just by the writhing of her entire leg. Celia and the rest retained the living vigor to keep their arms raised through the chaos. Timing, thought Arthur, must be correct.
“I-high shou-hood keep you-hoo a-as a-huh tickle sla-hay-hay-ve! Plea-hee-hee-hee-hese! Stay with uh-huss! I-high am go-ho-ing to-hoo explo-ho-ho-ho-ode! Ha-hah-HAH!”
He watched his patented Mackafax exclusive Shrinker TM limited edition with golden, shimmering conductors and mounted laser sight dangle more and more precariously in her compromised grasp. Her face had reddened like a cherry, and tears of joy streamed down her laughing cheeks. His left hand hovered near the foot that possessed all three of her captives between her fiendish toes, carefully evading the arcs of her long toenails while she wriggled furiously.
“Ih-hit tickles so-ho-ho-ho-oo good ah hah hah! I ca-ha-hant ha-hard-lee-hee-y brea-he-he-he-he-heathe! Ah! Ah-hah! Oh-huh-huh fu-hu-hu-hu-huck ye-heh-heh-heh-heh-hess!!”
At last, Ilsa absolutely and happily shrieked, simultaneously sighing through her incessant giggles and letting thud to the floor his patented Mackafax exclusive Shrinker TM limited edition with golden, shimmering conductors and mounted laser sight. Arthur squeezed the ball of Ilsa’s right foot and pulled from toes to tips all three of Celia, Ilsa’s neighbor, and his chief engineer at Mackafax.
“No-ho-ho-ho! NOO!!” cried Ilsa, reaching in vain with the same toes that clutched them, “come ba-hack!” And then Arthur ran out through the door, naked down to his underpants in the cooling night, barefoot, and urban highlights that ran through his legs. They all were free.

**************

So Arthur, Celia, Ilsa’s neighbor, and Arthur’s chief engineer at Mackafax all eventually returned to their homes, and the shrunken persons all returned to their normal sizes. Arthur’s car had been pilfered not by an army of goons that waited on Ilsa’s beck and call but a bad neighborhood coupled with unemployment above the national average. The police had arrested two suspects in a reported vehicle break-in and robbery that took place during and near Arthur’s incident at Ilsa’s apartment. Fortunately, the public largely ignored what had happened to some of Mackafax’s highest paid employees, purchasing every last one of Mackafax’s hottest sellers during the buying season. Arthur used some of the profits to buy a new car.
The necessary materials with which a capable person might usurp the rights to Mackafax’s products quitted usefulness in the possession of Ilsa’s duplicity.
Ilsa Malsea mysteriously had vanished after that incident. Due to the circumstances by which Arthur had encountered her, she became the Nately’s whore in his life a la Catch-22. Everywhere, it seemed, she lurked, plotting to exact her vengeance, disguising herself among the people he met, emerging from the shadows only when the moment came, aiming the red dot on his chest, pulling the trigger, anticipating the savoriness of the name on her smile, “Arthur Thymwel."