Retired NYPD Detective Stan Goldman kept his eyes tightly fixed on the swaying tight little ass of Retired Detective Barbara Moore as the coffle of convicts made their way along West 42nd Street towards Times Square.
Yes, it was that tight little ass that had convinced him to go along with her hare-brained scheme, which had landed him in this fix. Still, it was better to look at Moore’s ass than at the garbage strewn street and the dog poop and worse that he couldn’t avoid stepping in with his bare feet, as his movements were constrained by those of Moore and the other convicts ahead of him.
For, he was bound to her and to the convict behind him by a heavy steel chain affixed to the equally heavy collar around his neck and to the collars around theirs. The group of twenty or so naked convicts were a motley assortment of miscreants, though as far as Stan could tell, he and Barb were the only ex-cops among them.
He glanced down momentarily at the placard hung around his neck. “Crooked Cop” it read, as did the one around Moore’s neck. What had they done? It was a long story, and Stan would swear on his mother’s grave that he never would have done it if not for Moore’s blandishments.
Regardless, it was too late for recriminations. The sentence had been pronounced-“eighteen lashes with the judicial cane on your bare bottoms to be delivered in public.” And this was no light cane, like he and Barb enjoyed playing with in their basement dungeon. No, this was a heavy judicial cane to be wielded with full force by a trained flogger, whose sole goal was to make them suffer to the maximal extent possible.
They had been carted away to Rikers Island, where they been stripped and searched and undergone a medical exam, which had certified them both as fit-oh, if only he had spent more time on the couch watching Seinfeld re-runs!
Then they had been put on a Department of Corrections bus, along with the other prisoners who had been similarly sentenced and deposited on a pier along the Hudson where they had been roughly formed into a coffle and marched towards their fate.
The public was out in force. The “stay at home” order had been lifted as new cases of the virus had finally ebbed, and the populace, who had been cooped up in their apartments for almost two months, was eager for any entertainment on this warm May evening.
“Look at her!” one drunken man yelled “Nice ass, now, but I wonder what it will look like after the cane.”
“And who’s the old dude?” his equally inebriated friend asked. “”Weren’t they, like cops back in the day?”
“Well they’re just criminals now like all the rest,” a woman next to them said. Stan couldn’t argue with that.
He felt a tug towards the left as they reached Broadway and the bright neon lights and huge video screens of Times Square, most of which were showing their coffle as they were led through the crowds towards the TKTS booths, now reopened after the long shutdown of the Theater District, in front of which the platform where they would be punished had been erected.
Stan couldn’t help taking his eyes away from Barb’s tight little to glance up at the nearest video screen which had cut away from the prisoners and was showing the flogging frames to which they would be strapped and the muscular floggers taking practice strokes.
The noise was almost deafening as they approached the place of their suffering. Stan’s only hope was that he and Barb would be caned side by side, so he could look into her eyes and see her suffering as she could see his.
