Crude

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Jocko let out an exasperated hiss. “Well you weren’t on the fuckin’ pill, were you? I did it to protect you.”

“How very gallant of you. And when we pulled up to the dock in Galveston you didn’t even have the decency to say thanks for the hump.”

“My friggin’ wife was waiting for me. What did you expect me to do? Wave to her and say ‘Just a sec sweetie. This woman wants a goodbye fuck.’ That would have gone over in a big way.”

Mickey felt her insides start to crumble. Damn, she realized– she still had something left for this lug bolt. She looked out the porthole like an actress who had forgotten her lines and was requesting a prompt. “It just seemed so– so damned cold,”she heard herself say. “I know for you I was just an easy score but I got feelings, you know?”Mickey realized the tears had welled up and she swore at herself. She was not going to cry.

His voice softened. “Look, I know. It was just bad timing. Nothing against you, my fault entirely. Yeah, you were easy the first time and I took advantage. I admit that. But then you started dropping by my compartment. We had a few laughs and I got to know you; I developed my own feelings for our relationship. I’m not made outta stone.”

Mickey knew he was lying. She had been coming off a bad marriage; was lonely and vulnerable. And Jocko knew it, too. He assailed her at a party on one of the Galveston offshore oil rigs, someone’s birthday she remembered. She’d had a drink or two, gone outside for a smoke and was surprised to find Jocko had singled her out; had followed her onto the gantry. Before she knew what was happening, her boss had her backed into a railing and her jumpsuit was tangled about her knees. Without a word of regard for her feelings, Jocko had f****d her.

It had been a good old-fashioned backseat f**k. No words of endearment. No kissing. No promises. He just jammed his c**k in, f****d her hard, and left her with a smear on the inside of her thigh. If she had screamed, she could have claimed it was r**e.

But she hadn’t screamed. Mickey went to bed and, lying on her side, she had cupped herself between the legs and wondered if he would come back for more. And when he didn’t, she made it painfully obvious she was interested. Mickey stopped by his compartment late one night and knocked. When he opened the door he found her standing barefoot in her jumpsuit. The jumpsuit was open to the waist and she was naked beneath.

The touch of his fingertips on her right breast pried Mickey from her moldy memories. He was massaging in full round strokes with a squeeze to complement the finish of each rotation. “Feel nice?”he asked.

It felt like he was kneading-out a pound of bread dough but before Mickey could answer, he moved on, to Stage Two: that would be pinching the n****e.

She ignored the intrusion and looked forward into the crew compartment. “How come so many women this trip out?”

Jocko mumbled something incoherent. He was squeezing her breast harder now, trying to get the n****e to lift under the coarse denim.

“I mean we never leave the dock with ten women,”Mickey pressed. “Maybe four: company cook, domestic, nurse and maybe a radio operator. But never ten.”

Jocko dragged his hand up and tugged open the button at the vee of her neck. “We got two female explosive specialists this time out; recruited from the Navy.”

“Female explosive experts? There’s a twist.”

“Yeah. Cat and Tyson. But don’t discount them. They were stationed in the Persian Gulf. Story goes they were deployed from a navy sub to neutralize Iraqi mines in the Strait of Hormuz. The sub was detected and survived a torpedo attack but the Captain had to make a run for it. He was faced with the choice of abandoning two divers or losing his entire crew of seventy-five.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. When Tyson and Cat returned to the rendezvous, no submarine. They surfaced and using a dive compass, swam all the way to Kuwait. Eighteen miles, most of it at night. They landed on some beach, found an after-hours bar and, still dressed in dive suits, split a case of beer and a bottle of whiskey. At four in the morning when the bar owner finally demanded they leave, they borrowed a phone to call the American Consulate to come pick them up and to pay for the booze.

Mickey smirked. “You’re joking, right?”

Jocko shrugged. “I’m just telling yuh– that’s the story I got. You can take it up with them if you think I’m shittin’ you.”Jocko ran the side of his thumb along the soft lushness of her throat. “Then we got both a ship’s engineer and an electrician,”he continued, “Babbs and Sparky, both women. That’s also unusual. So, along with Rosa the cook and Precious the domestic, the crew is equally divided, men to women. Just the way it worked out, I guess.”

“Precious? Funny name for a girl.”

Jocko shrugged. “Girl is about the term for it. She’s eighteen going on twelve. Just look at her.”

Mickey saw a youngster who looked as if she would’ve been more at home on a school bus rather than in a crew-boat filled with a bunch of sweaty wildcatters.

“You better keep an eye on her,”Jocko continued. “She’s inexperienced and some of the boys would love to change that for her. You let me know if you hear of any s**t going down.”

“Christ, your hand is fuckin’ freezing,”Mickey complained. Jocko had slipped his fingers inside the cup of her bra and now held her by the left breast.

“I’d forgotten how tender your t**s are.”

Mickey was still looking forward into the crew compartment. How tender my t**s are? she almost laughed out loud. The guy certainly had a charming way with words. “You get anything further on the weather?”

Jocko trapped a stout n****e under his thumb and twiddled it like he was coaxing a joystick, which in a crude sense, he was. At least Mickey thought so, though joy was not exactly the word she would have chosen.

“The last advisory had the front passing overhead at sunrise. Might take another six hours for it to blow itself out,”he answered.

“Six hours. That’ll be noon tomorrow. I hope I can hold things together that long.”

Jocko diverted his eyes momentarily to a surveillance camera mounted in the overhead; one of four cameras onboard the boat. But this one was made obvious by a glowing green LED bulb and as Jocko watched, the lens rotated; zooming in for a tighter shot.

Sitting at his desk in the private penthouse office atop the Pentoxx Petroleum Tower located in the Skyline District of downtown Houston, Texas, Mark DeVillier watched his computer screen. He keyed up the recorder to preserve the images of Jocko with his hand stuffed into the front of Mickey’s jumpsuit. Nice piece of tail, he thought. Good skin. Too bad really, but with luck, the scarring will not be extensive.

He crowded the screen to see better and whispered into his headset. “C’mon Jocko. Let’s have a look at it for christ-sake. Pull out the meat.”

Jocko used his free hand to discretely adjust the ear bud, then looked up at the camera and nodded perceptively. He slipped two more buttons loose. “I know you’ll find this hard to believe, Mickey, but I’ve missed you.”

Mickey didn’t say a word. And she didn’t flinch when he reached across and pushed her bra strap free of her left shoulder and let it slide down her arm. He squirmed at the sight of the black lace cup bulging with rubbery goodness. Jocko slipped his hand back in and taking the weight of her breast in his palm, he pried the pale orb out into the open.

In Houston, Mark DeVillier groaned under his breath and fine-tuned the camera controls.

Her soft breast was lovely– the skin pure and blemish free. The areola was large, the size of a cookie, and not the store-bought kind but the cookies mother used to make: fat and round and the color of dark milk chocolate. And the n****e Jocko held between thumb and forefinger, he rolled like a fine cigar.

Mark DeVillier squeezed the front of his suit trousers and looked beyond the computer screen to the wall opposite. It was covered with mounted photographs. Of naked women. Dozens of them.

Each frame contained two photos: the woman with her long luxurious hair still intact and a mirror image of the same woman after she had been shaved. It was a bragging wall like no other and his business associates loved it.

He smiled without humor and turned to a computer screen opposite. He saw a grid map of the Sea of Cortez, bounded by the Baja Peninsula on the left and mainland Mexico on the right. A flashing cursor marked the position of his crew-boat. “Christ,”Mark hissed, “fuckin’ storm.”His boat was miles off course and barely making headway against the steep seas.

He picked up his phone. “Needleman? I’m assuming by now, the renovations are complete. Has the crew been assembled?”He listened a moment. “And the medical personnel? ...Good. I plan to fly down tomorrow. I’ll be taking the corporate jet and I’ll get the pilot to radio ahead. Be sure my car is clean and waiting. Yes... see to it. As soon as I inspect the installations onboard the yacht we’ll set out to sea. No screw-ups this time, understand? The Hibernia was a disaster.”He hung up and opened a fresh pack of sanitary napkins.

Mark DeVillier returned his full attention to the images relayed from the crew-boat and, with a catch in his breath, found Jocko had freed Mickey’s opposite breast. The pair of sloped t**s buoyed beautifully as Mickey shifted in her seat. “God she’s got a nice rack,”he whispered into the headset. “A pair of bobbily twins all set to party. And look at the size of her n*****s,”he laughed. “They look like a set of pegs at a game of ring-toss.”He watched Jocko smile. “And you say you’ve been f*****g her?”Jocko nodded at the camera. “Lucky bastard,”Mark continued. “Well I hope you don’t mind sharing. I fly outta here tomorrow and should see you the day after, provided this storm abates. Make sure she’s photographed before I arrive, shaved clean and knows what’s expected of her. Got it?”

Jocko nodded once again.

“Good. Now, when you arrive at the oil rig you’ll find a small boat tied up to the staging and a helmsman waiting to ferry you and the girl across to the yacht. The helmsman is expendable and I don’t want him to survive the crossing. Understood?”

Jocko nodded again and held Mickey’s t**s up to the camera lens. She looked sullen and subservient, staring into the middle distance and not making the slightest movement– accepting Jocko’s advances like a dull witted cow, without protest nor complaint.

The camera’s LED turned from green to red.