A bondage fan named Seiler recently wrote me with some cute text to go with the front page on T’s in Trouble, giving the back story leading up to my predicament. I thought it was pretty clever…

“Forget something, Ms. Gibbons?”
You spin around, heart pounding. “Vicki!”
“Just thought I’d check up on you, sweetie. Working after hours? You’re quite the busy bee!”
“I… I just had to finish one last thing… add a file here and—”
“Add a file? Or subtract one?” She flicks the light on. You squint in the sudden glare.
“I… I was just leaving,” you stammer, wet under the armpits. “Wha… what’s with the tape?”
She chuckles cryptically. “I think it’s time to put you out of operation for a while.”
“Out of operation?”
She steps toward you. “I’ll make a deal with you, sweetheart. Cooperate and I won’t go to Mullins.”
Mullins! You shudder. He’d not only kill you: He’d torture you before he did it—and then he’d slaughter your entire family.
“Okay, okay,” you say. “I’ll cooperate.”
She knew what you’d been up to. She knew that you knew. You understood each other perfectly.
“Turn around,” she says. “Hands behind your back.” She tapes them together, crosswise, deftly, firmly, with the alacrity of a pro, then throws a jacket over your shoulders and spins you around.
“Where are we going?” you ask.
“Your place.”
“My place? What for?”
“Ever missed a day of work, Ms. Gibbons?” She steers you into the hall.
“No,” you murmur, puzzled.
“There’s a first time for everything,” she chuckles. “We’ll make this look like a robbery, okay?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Why, don’t you see, Sandra? I’m doing you a favor. A quid for a quo. You just stay quiet and nobody’ll ever know a thing—no file, no data, no snooping. You’ll keep your job. Income. House. Watch your kids graduate. It’ll be just a robbery, that’s all. An ordinary break-in. A confrontation with some low-brow crook. In a month, you’ll be just one more statistic in a dreary list of statistics. That’s fine with you, isn’t it?”
Now you get it. By faking a robbery, you’ll have an alibi when the crap hit the fan—when Mullins found out about that missing file.
“You’ll cooperate then?”
“Of course,” you reply.
“Well!” she exclaims in mock admiration. “Not only industrious but smart too!”
There were worse things than being tied up, or than spending the rest of the night—and probably much of the next morning—bound and gagged.