by Lou Cameron
He was just about to when the door opened and a familiar teasing voice said, “Oh, dear, you’ve let it go soft, you brute. Have you been naughty while I was confirming your contract, or are you simply tired of me already?”
He opened one eye and growled, “Come over here and find out how weak and helpless I am, doll box. Did the front office say when I get to see any of your other charms?”
She stripped even faster than the last time, and as she got on the bed with him he noticed she’d taken time to get rid of her stockings and those damned high heels, bless her. She cuddled beside him and reached for his groin as she said, “We’ll give you boys your checks in the morning before you catch the coach to San José. I don’t have my fountain pen or anything else on me at the moment.”
He laughed, said that was for damned sure, and reeled her in for a kiss. He wasn’t sure if he meant it or not. She’d left him way in the middle of the air, but now that he’d had time to cool down, his back sure felt stiff.
She kissed back, passionately enough to inform him that if he’d had enough, she surely hadn’t. She tongued him and did other things as teasing with her soft, experienced hand. So maybe his back wasn’t that stiff after all. He was getting stiff enough where it mattered.
But she must have been a perfectionist. She withdrew her tongue, sat up, and said, “The poor thing seems to be injured. Mommy had better kiss it and make it well.”
That seemed fair. It seemed even better when she went down on him again and commenced to play French music even better than his old meat flute remembered. He wondered if she expected him to return the favor. Esperanza usually did, but Esperanza hadn’t been laying anyone else of late, and though Flora said she hadn’t been with another man for some time, he found it hard to buy. No lady screwed that good without constant practice, and, hell, he hadn’t even had to ask. He could imagine who or what she might go to bed with if he, or it, really begged for it!
But she didn’t offer him any seafood. She simply sucked it to full attention and then forked a shapely and now naked thigh across him to straddle him as she said, “I like it best on top. Just lie still, dear. This freak of nature you carry in your pants takes a little getting used to.”
He didn’t answer. He just lay supine, not moving anything, as she began slowly and teasingly to impale herself on his now raging erection. As she did so, her eyes got wider and she hissed, “Oh, I don’t know, dear. This is really a little too much of a good thing, if you ask me!”
He hadn’t asked her. He’d thought they’d gotten beyond that maidenly crap by now. But damned if she didn’t feel even tighter as she gingerly settled down, biting her lower lip as if she were getting into a hot bath she wasn’t sure she could stand.
Apparently she could. Because once it was all the way in she leaned forward and started moving her hips very nicely indeed. Now he was glad he hadn’t fallen asleep. They hadn’t tried it this way before, and it felt completely different. He reached up to fondle her breasts as she started bouncing faster. That was funny. He hadn’t noticed, the last time, that one of Flora’s nipples was inverted. But the little mole he had noticed at the base of Flora’s throat seemed to be missing, and so, what in the hell were they up to if this was Dora?
He knew that was a dumb question as soon as he asked it of himself. He was blessed with natural curiosity. Why should dames be all that different? Obviously the dizzy twins had compared notes on more than their report to the home office, and the guy who’d said variety was the spice of life had had a good point. It was sort of flattering to know old Flora had recommended him so highly as she took her turn learning about French culture. He wondered if Gaston would catch on as quickly. He hoped not. He decided not to tell him if he didn’t. Even Gaston had some standards, and Captain Gringo knew he’d be mad as hell if he found out he’d just eaten out a broad who’d come more than once with another guy.
Dora, still pretending to be Flora, moaned that she was too excited to go on that way. So he rolled her over to do it right, and, yeah, now he knew for sure.
The two girls had the same faces and bodies. They were even built much the same between their identical thighs. But this one moved nothing like her twin sister. She was not only more acrobatic, she was double-jointed as well, he learned, as she locked one ankle around the nape of his neck and proceeded to run her bare toes through his hair while she fondled his nuts with one hand and tried to sodomize him with one finger of the other.
He told her he didn’t enjoy that. She giggled and said lots of men did and that she wanted to find out if his rectum was as tight as her pussy. He laughed and told her nothing was as tight as her pussy. If she got the joke, she went on playing dumb, until they’d both enjoyed themselves beyond passion into just plain showing off.
He knew she was waiting for him to call a halt. So he did, got up to make sure the door was locked, and staggered back to bed. They were both asleep within minutes.
Captain Gringo would have slept until noon, if the lady in bed with him had let him. But as the tropic sun peeped through the jalousie slats across the window, she nudged him awake and said they had to think about getting up and dressed if he expected to eat any breakfast before the stage to the high country pulled out.
He groaned, sat up, and looked around for something to put on. She lay there, stark naked, looking a little hurt as she asked, “Just like that? We’ll probably never meet again, and you don’t even want to screw me good-bye properly?”
She did look tempting with the strips of sunlight painting tiger stripes across her naked flesh like that, and now that he reconsidered his options, he did have a morning hard-on. So he laughed, kissed her, and laughed even harder when he mounted her. She naturally asked why, and he naturally didn’t tell her he’d just noticed that her mole was back and both her nipples were normal again this morning. Considering what Gaston had probably been doing to her tight little twat in recent memory, it was mighty flattering to know she’d come back for another old-fashioned lay with him.
Of course, Dora was probably enjoying this weird game of musical beds right now, too, if he knew Gaston. So he just humped away arid went along with the harmless gag. He enjoyed amusing sex adventures as well as the next guy or gal.
But all good things must come to an end, and once they’d kissed the girls good-bye and boarded the San José stage with their gear, the rest of the day was boring as hell.
Costa Rica had nice scenery, a stable popular government, and not enough bandits along its dirt-paved coach roads to matter. The coaches were no better or worse than any others. There was no such thing as a comfortable stagecoach and it took forever to get up to the cooler high country.
They spent the night at a highland posada, with no other company, then spent another boring day getting to San José. Then things got better for a while. They cashed the checks the twins had given them, banked most of it, got laid, and caught the train down to the Pacific seaport of Puntarenas. They didn’t meet anyone pretty enough to matter on the train, nobody shot at them along the way, and while the train wasn’t a Pullman, it sure beat a coach in every way.
In Puntarenas they were met at the depot by a couple of gun thugs who said they were working for the same insurance company and probably were, because they helped Captain Gringo and Gaston with their considerable luggage and drove them to the docks where a steel-hulled schooner was waiting. Captain Gringo asked the bored-looking Yankee skipper if they had to worry about clearing customs and the skipper shifted the toothpick in his mouth to the other side and told him not to be silly. So the next thing the two soldiers of fortune knew, they’d been shown to not-great but not-bad staterooms and were on their way.
*
The voyage up the Pacific coast was a lot more comfortable than either a coach or train, but it seemed to be taking forever, so things tended to even out. The food, like everything else aboard the chartered schooner, was neither good nor bad. The crewmen, while polite enough, were either uncommunicative by nature
or, more probably, under orders not to discuss company business with temporary help.
Gaston made up for it by talking a blue streak, as usual. So far, his only comment on the twins back in Costa Rica had been to the effect that the one he’d had had been almost too much for a man his age. His younger American friend preferred to leave him in ignorant bliss and kept changing the subject to where they were going rather than where they’d just been. Hence, long before they got there, Captain-Gringo heard more about the Mexican-Guatemalan border country than he really felt the need to know.
Gaston, of course, knew Mexico like the back of his hand, having knocked around it since back in the seventies, fighting for various sides in the unsettled years since Juarez had died and left the place in one hell of a mess.
Gaston hadn’t passed through the particular part of Mexico they were headed for in recent memory. But he remembered it, not too fondly, from the time he’d been part of a French Foreign Legion border patrol for the late Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, and, as Gaston asked rhetorically, how much could the amusingly eroded scablands of the southern Sierra Madres have improved in a generation?
He added that the Sierra Madres paid no attention to any border drawn by human hands on any map. They simply ran on down through Central America, with a modest gap here and there, until they turned into the Andes of South America. Some parts were higher and some parts were lower, but the mountain chain was all rough-and-ready rock laced with live volcanoes, carved with deep canyons, and shaken with monotonous regularity by earthquakes. He said he had no idea why any sensible person would want to live in such country.
Captain Gringo said, “Never mind the geology lecture and let’s not worry about sensible people. What do you know about more truculent mountaineers, Gaston?”
The Frenchman shrugged and replied, “The last time we marched through, they shot at us avec annoying accuracy. We did not get to talk to many of the natives. For some reason they did not regard us as the liberators Maximilian insisted we were. One must assume, since El Presidente Diaz is an even bigger species of bastard, they have not changed much more than their adorable mountains.”
Captain Gringo nodded and said, “The twins said the country was too rough for Los Rurales to police. What do you make of this white knight character, Gaston?”
Gaston shrugged and said, “He sounds like the usual Mexican guerrilla with perhaps unusual taste in attire.”
“Hold it. El Caballero Blanco’s not supposed to be raising hell on the Mexican side of the border, remember?”
“I remember, but does El Caballero Blanco? The so-called border is an imaginary line on a map this species of pale idiot may not have ever read, if indeed he can read at all. You will see when we get there, assuming we ever get there, that there shall be neither a border fence nor a sign welcoming us to Guatemala. It’s the kind of country your old friend Geronimo would love to meet you in for a rematch. As a matter of fact, now that I think back, Geronimo could have some distant cousins already there, waiting for us. I forget the names of the local tribes. But I seem to recall they were poor relations of the Aztec, Maya, or some other dreadful Indians.”
“So what? By now they’ve been converted by missionaries, right?”
“Surely you jest. I just told you those hills were not safe for either the French Foreign Legion or Los Rurales! To convert a savage to anything, one must first get close enough to talk to him, alive.”
Captain Gringo knew better than to ask about the so-called Spanish conquest. But Gaston tended to pontificate about watch repair when all you’d asked him was the time of day. So the little Frenchman insisted on explaining, “The Conquistadores tended to skip the tribes who had no gold. So a lot of places that appear on the map as former Spanish colonies are still inhabited by people who never heard of His Most Catholic Majesty and—”
“Never mind the history lesson,” Captain Gringo cut in, adding, “I get the picture. Wild Indians don’t scare me as much as wilder bandits with modern weapons. What’s the bandit situation in the Sierra Madres right now?”
“Right now? Merde alors, it’s been over twenty years, Dick. Since the country is trés rustiqué, one may assume anyone dwelling in the scablands wearing pants and guns would tend to be antisocial, hein?”
“The twins said the guys who’ll be meeting us up the coast are Mexican smugglers who know the way into the Guatemalan version of the Sierra Madres. Does that make sense to you?”
Gaston shrugged and observed, “To indulge in smuggling, one would have to know the way across some border or other, non?”
“Maybe. But what in the hell would they be smuggling? Guatemala is a poor country. Even if it wasn’t, the Guatemalans grow the same crops, drink the same coffee, and smoke the same weeds.”
Gaston laughed and said, “Eh bien, that is easy to answer, Dick. Our smugglers will most obviously be running silver into Guatemala and guns into Mexico on the return trip. El Presidente Diaz has an annoying habit of demanding one-fifth of all minerals exported from Mexico, and of course he takes a trés dim view of anyone importing guns into his private paradise for peons.”
Captain Gringo thought, nodded, and said, “Yeah, that works. If the guides the company’s hired jump the border regularly, they must have some sort of arrangement with the local Indian and mestizo types. So the only question left before the house is how far we can trust our guides, right?”
Gaston grimaced and said, “That is no question. Never trust any stranger with a gun. Have you considered the ties obvious easy way out yet, my donquichottesque child?”
Captain Gringo shook his head and said, “It won’t work any better. We can’t get off this boat until it docks, and once we’re ashore in Mexico, we’ll already have all the enemies we need without having to double-cross anyone. The insurance company has the local law fixed. But they won’t stay fixed very long unless we carry out our part of the bargain.”
“True, up to a point. My plan was to go along with the joke until we’d cleared the seaport they control. Once in the foothills of the Sierra Madres, if we cut north instead of south—”
“Are you crazy? That would mean playing tag with Los Rurales again!”
“Oui, but in much nicer country. We only have to make it as far as Tehuantepec, where the women are beautiful, the pulque is drinkable, and I know rogues who can get us aboard a southbound boat.”
“You asshole. Have you forgotten there’s a federate army post in Tehuantepec?”
“Sacre goddamn, Dick. I said nothing about reporting in to the duty sergeant there. The shitty species of town is trés lousy with all sorts of unwashed beachcombers of various complexions. Who is going to notice two more, if we don’t stay long?”
“The guides the insurance company’s hired, of course. They’ve just paid us the front money, in case you forgot, and somehow I have a pretty good suspicion they’ll want to protect their investment.”
Gaston shrugged and said, “The guides are no problem. As for the front money, we have already cashed our checks. So what could they do about it, once we were safely back in San José?”
“Back up and run that shit about our guides past me again. Are you suggesting what it sounds like you’re suggesting, you murderous little bastard?”
“Oui, but would it not make more sense to murder them before they can murder us? What hold can the insurance company have on them, once they have us at their mercy in the high country? If they make a regular habit of passing through it, they must have lots of friends there, non?”
“Okay, but—”
“But me no buts, Dick. We are discussing professional criminals on their own home grounds. The insurance company could hardly have offered them more than they just paid us. The machine gun, ammo, and other supplies we’re packing in could be sold for much more to any of a dozen Mexican rebel factions. Merde alors, we’d be trusting them with our lives in a savage area where most men would kill a stranger for his shoes, or just for practice!”
C
aptain Gringo fished out a claro, lit it, and blew a thoughtful smoke ring before he said, “You’ve got more than a point. But let’s not cross our bridges before we’re even ashore. We’ll play it by ear as we go. If the guides act reasonable, we’ll go along with the gag. If they stare too much at our mosquito boots, we’ll do it your way.”
“Dick, a ladrón out to rob you seldom tells you in advance.”
“I’ve noticed that. I’m still not about to gun anyone who hasn’t given me a good reason.”
“Eh bien, what are we arguing about, then? I shall watch the sons of the bitch while you are sleeping. You shall watch the sons of the bitch while I am sleeping. When they prove me right, we shall kill the sons of the bitch and cut this shit of the bull, hein?”
*
The Yankee skipper had timed it so that the schooner put into the fishing village and former pirate cove after dark. The shoreline was ringed with lantern light since, like most people in the tropics, the local Mexicans were night people. But the skipper wasn’t interested in the dimer illumination. He waited until someone ashore flashed a bull’s-eye lantern at him exactly twice, then thrice, before he dropped anchor, well out in the harbor roads.
Captain Gringo and Gaston went aft to the poop to ask him what happened next. The laconic New Englander spat over the side and said, “We wait until they send out a lighter for you and your gear. We don’t wait long. They sent the right signal. But I don’t like the looks of them other two vessels, yonder.”
They followed his gaze shoreward and could just make out the black outlines of two moored vessels, both bigger than the one they were on. Captain Gringo squinted and said, “I make the one closer in a three-island tramp steamer. The other sure looks a lot like a gunboat. Would it be Mexican, skipper?”
