by Lionel White
Lionel White
The Mexico Run
***
I picked up the XKE in San Francisco. It cost me 2,600 bucks and it would do one hundred and forty. I needed that speed because what I was planning was a very fast buck.
I was on my way to Mexico to pick up some Acapulco gold for a very hungry U.S. dealer.
It was OK until I ran into a crooked Mexican cop named Morales. He had a slice of everything-grass, hard goods, gambling, prostitution, you name it. He was dangerous and tricky. And he would just as soon kill you as do business with you.
He was trying to do both with me. What started out as a simple plan to make a few illicit shekels was turning into a horror story.
It began with murder. A very kinky murder.
***
Bitemeok (grand book owner & heroic scan provider) & P. (OCR, formatting & proofing) edition.
***
This book is for LILLIAN BERGIDA-a truly fine lady.
1
I picked up the XKE in San Francisco. It cost me twenty-six hundred dollars, and I bought it from an instructor at the University over at Berkeley, who I figured had probably used it mostly for girl-bait on weekend trips down to the Monterey Peninsula. He lived only a few blocks from the campus.
The speedometer showed twenty-eight thousand miles, and, although the car was four years old, I believed that it was a correct reading.
I didn’t buy it because the price was right; I bought it because I needed a certain amount of performance for the money I had to spend.
The chances were that I would not need this particular type of performance more than once or twice, but it was going to be damned important that I got it if and when I needed it.
New, the Jag had the capability of a hundred and forty miles an hour. I road-tested the car and managed to get a little over a hundred and twenty, but figured, with some work on the engine, I could bring it pretty close to its original maximum.
As I say, there probably would be only one or two times I would have to approach that maximum, considering the type of terrain in which an emergency might come up. It could happen on either a crowded freeway, or else on some dusty, rutted mountain road, south of the Mexican border, in which case the prime factor would not be speed so much as a fast pickup, the capacity to corner well, to exhibit superb braking power.
Needless to say, I could have obtained all these features from some souped-up hot rod, but I was anxious to have a stock car which would not necessarily create any undue interest on the part of traffic officers, or the immigration inspectors at the border.
Twenty-six hundred dollars made a sizable dent in my bank roll, but I wasn’t putting out money merely for flash or comfort.
Comfort and luxury are commodities which I could have used a good deal of, after those four years in Vietnam, but at the moment I was primarily interested in a practical business expenditure.
I had been discharged from the army exactly two weeks to the day from the time I bought the car. I’d come out of the service with the rating of master sergeant, along with an honorable discharge, a handful of medals, which were worth about $6.10 in any good hock shop, $18,812 in cash, most of which represented monies I had made in gambling and in the black market in Saigon and which was worth exactly $18,812, along with a lot of very bad memories.
Unlike hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other ex-GI’s who managed to survive Vietnam and return to civilian life, I knew exactly what I wanted to do and where I was going to do it.
San Francisco is a beautiful city, and I would have really liked to have stayed there for a while. The two weeks that I spent in the town might have been enjoyable, had it not been for the things I had to do during the time, the people I contacted. They would have spoiled any city.
The exception, of course, was Ann. Ann Sherwood. Ann could never have spoiled anything for me, or anyone else, and I had been looking forward to seeing her for over a year now.
But it was still a mistake. A bad mistake. I had first met Ann Sherwood in the Philippines, while I was on furlough from Vietnam. She had flown out to pay a visit to her brother, Donald Sherwood, who was a technical sergeant in the army and also on furlough.
Don and I were buddies. We had met in Vietnam and had taken to each other immediately. He had shown me pictures of his young sister, and when he told me that she was coming out to the Philippines and would spend a few days with him while he was on furlough, I had been anxious to meet her. He had told me that she was twenty-four years old and worked as a legal secretary for a firm of attorneys in San Francisco, where she shared an apartment with a younger sister who was still in school. Their parents were dead. Because they had been orphaned at a relatively early age, the three of them were very close to each other.
The photograph he had shown me was of an extremely pretty, dark-eyed, dark-haired, rather slight girl. She had a winsome, almost pixieish face. The picture had been taken on a beach somewhere, and she was in a bikini; and although I guess just about any girl would look pretty damned attractive to me, after my stretch in Vietnam, Ann Sherwood was an absolute knock-out. She had the kind of body you might see in a centerfold of Playboy, except that her breasts were not monstrosities.
When she stepped off the plane and walked over to where we were waiting at the airport, I saw at once that the photograph had not lied.
Ann had come to spend a few days with her brother, but the way it turned out, I think we spent more time together than they did. We knew each other for less than a week, but by the time she left to fly back to San Francisco, I was head over heels in love with her. I don’t know whether it was a reaction from those lonely and bitter weeks and months and years in Vietnam, or what it was, but I fell for her hook, line, and sinker.
Was it mutual? I don’t honestly know. I do know that she liked me, liked being with me. But she had a peculiar reserve, sort of a reluctance to commit herself emotionally.
Her brother was often with us when we were together, and that may have had something to do. with it, but I don’t think so. I thought, at first, that she might have some boy back in the States, but I was wrong about that.
We did, before those brief few days were over, make love in a very restricted way, but although she seemed to enjoy having me kiss her, caress her, she was really unable to commit herself fully.
I was probably pretty inept. In any case, by the time she had to return, I was completely crazy about her and couldn’t wait until I would be able to see her again.
Once back in Vietnam, I wrote her and she wrote back, and for a month or so, we exchanged letters several times a week. Then I was shifted down into the Mekong Delta, and for almost six weeks my mail didn’t catch up with me. By the time it did, something had happened which made it impossible for me to go on writing Ann Sherwood, at least, for several months.
The thing which happened is not really a part of this story, and it’s something that I would prefer to forget. I know the tone of my letters must have changed, and by the time I was ready to be mustered out and return to the States, Ann’s letters had also changed in tone. Whether it was a reaction to my own attitude, I am not prepared to say, but I do know that our correspondence degenerated into almost mere formalities.
Ann Sherwood was, however, the first person I telephoned when I arrived in San Francisco. We met the following evening for dinner, after she got off from work. It was almost like two strangers meeting for the first time.
She was as desirable as ever, more so perhaps, and the moment I saw her, I knew that I loved her and wanted her. I knew it, but I couldn’t express it. I had changed a great deal in this last year, but my feelings about her had not changed. On the other hand, it wasn’t like it had been in the Philippines. This time, I seemed hopelessly unable
to convey those feelings.
Ann herself had changed. It wasn’t that she was cold or distant. She was just different. Perhaps she sensed the change in me.
That first evening was a disaster. We talked for a while about her brother, but there was very little I could tell her about him, as he had been shifted to a different sector upon our return to Vietnam, and I hadn’t seen him since the first week after we got back. I found conversation difficult, and Ann herself seemed preoccupied. She was friendly and she was warm, but for some reason a wall seemed to have arisen between us. By the time we had finished dinner, we had run out of things to say to each other. I asked if she would like to go to a movie or a nightclub, but she said that she had to get back to her apartment.
“My young sister is home alone,” she said, “and I don’t like to stay out late when there’s no one with her. Why don’t you come back with me and have a drink at the apartment?”
I said I would. We called a cab, and she directed the driver to an address up on Telegraph Hill.
It was one of those old Victorian houses, built around the turn of the century, which had recently been handsomely restored and broken up into apartments. Ann’s was on the third floor, and we walked up. She opened the door with a key, but it probably would have been better if she had knocked.
The minute we entered the darkened room and she snapped on the light, I got an idea of what had inspired her to get back early. I also think I began to get an idea of the reason for the peculiarly preoccupied manner which I had noticed earlier in the evening.
They were on the couch and they still had their clothes on, but that was about the only modest thing that could be said for them. He was lying on top of her, and her skirt had been pulled up around her hips.
The boy leaped to his feet the moment the light went on, and the only thing he could do -was tuck himself in and pull up his zipper. He mumbled something and looked at me nervously, as he slipped past and reached the door to the hallway.
I have to hand it to Lynn Sherwood. She not only wasn’t embarrassed, she wasn’t even flustered. She sat up on the couch, pulled her skirt down, looked at me for a moment, and then said, “Hi, sis. I guess I should have snapped on the chain lock.”
“I guess you should have,” Ann said. And then she introduced me.
“Lynn, this is Mark Johns. He’s a friend of Don’s. They were together in Vietnam.”
Lynn Sherwood walked over and held out her hand.
I’ve said that Ann Sherwood was beautiful, and she was. But Lynn was something else. She had a dark complexion, like her sister’s, but her hair was startlingly blond, and it was not dyed. Instead of dark eyes, she had azure-blue eyes. Her face wasn’t exactly pretty, but it was about the most sensuous face I had ever seen on a girl or a woman.
Lynn Sherwood was sixteen years old, but her body was fully developed. She still looked only sixteen, and in fact could have passed for younger, but she absolutely exuded sex. She was completely aware of her own attractiveness, and when she spoke, her voice sounded like an open invitation to go to bed with her. It was pretty obvious why Ann didn’t want to leave her alone in the apartment in the evening.
“Ann always gets the tall handsome ones,” she said, “and I get stuck with dolts like Carl.”
“If that was Carl,” Ann said, “you might tell him that he is no longer welcome in my apartment. And now, if you’ll pull yourself together, I think we’ll all settle down. Mr. Johns and I are going to have a drink, and if you’d like to join us, you can have some Coke.”
She not only joined us, but for the next hour, until I left, she didn’t let us out of her sight. It was a very uncomfortable hour, and I couldn’t wait to leave.
At the door, as I was saying goodnight, I told Ann that I would call her the next day. She merely nodded, and we mumbled casual goodbyes.
“You come back soon now, Mark,” Lynn said. She was already calling me Mark. “This place could stand a man around once in a while.”
I muttered something, and then the door closed behind me.
***
When I telephoned Ann at her office the following day, she told me she was going to be tied up until the weekend, so we arranged to have lunch the following Sunday. It was the only other time I saw her during that two weeks I was in San Francisco, because by Sunday I was already involved with other people, and wanted to get certain things out of the way before I could feel free to pursue what I still hoped would be a romance with Ann Sherwood.
That lunch was pretty much like our previous dinner, except that this time Ann talked to me a little about her sister, explaining that she was having a good many problems with her and, as a result, found that her time was very tied up.
I told her that I would probably be leaving town on a business trip shortly, but would get in touch with her when I returned.
The following day, I began initiating the first steps in the plan which had brought me to San Francisco in the first place.
I was told that I would find him in one of those tourist traps, down on Fisherman’s Wharf. A little hole-in-the-wall place, off the sidewalk, which specialized in fraudulent, imported artifacts, phony Mexican paper bulls, imitation-marble chess sets, cute sweatshirts and other valueless objects.
His name had been given to me by Bongo, who was a hashish dealer-when he wasn’t dealing in more sinister products-on the streets of Saigon, and with whom I had done a certain amount of business at one time.
Bongo was a thoroughly disreputable, thoroughly unreliable character. However, one could rely on his recommendations, if those recommendations had a criminal content.
It pleases me to know that shortly before I left Saigon to return to the States, Bongo was assassinated by the Saigon police as a result of his having supplied a fifteen-year-old girl to a Vietnamese general. Along with the girl, the general also received a classic venereal disease.
I recognized the man at once from Bongo’s description.
A heavy-set man, with a head too big for his body, he was, like Bongo himself, a Eurasian. He had a dubious cast in one eye, a set of badly fitting false teeth, and he wore a Hawaiian shirt which could have stood laundering. He was waiting on two elderly ladies, who looked as though they had just arrived from East Jesus, Mississippi, attempting to sell them an imitation-jade elephant for about half the price of the real thing.
I waited until he had consummated his deal, and when they paid what he asked for the elephant, I casually wondered why he bothered to deal in the particular commodity in which I was interested.
The lady tourists left his shop, and he turned to me. I’d walked toward the back, pretending an interest in a tray of fake-silver daggers.
He was skeptical when I mentioned Bongo’s name, and it wasn’t until I had fully identified myself and confided certain highly specialized bits of information that he was willing to accept me at face value. He assumed at once that I merely wanted to make a purchase, and it took me a little while to explain to him that I was not interested in merely picking up a lid or two.
I wanted an introduction. An introduction to a man named O’Farrell. O’Farrell was a wholesaler, not a pusher.
I think he knew at once what I wanted, but he also had ambitions of his own.
“But O’Farrell would not be necessary,” he said. “Charlie can give you what you want, any amount of what you want.”
He was Charlie. It took a little more explaining, and it also took a hundred dollar bill. The hundred dollars didn’t buy me anything that I could carry out with me, except the suggestion that if I went back to my hotel and waited, I would be contacted.
Bongo knew of O’Farrell, but had no direct connection with him. He had told me that I would have to have a stateside introduction. Charlie was to be that introduction.
I only knew one thing about O’Farrell. He was probably the biggest wholesaler in the San Francisco area, if not in all of California. A man without a telephone, a man without an address, a man without a face. A man it wo
uld be very difficult to see, unless one went through proper channels.
I went back to my hotel room and I waited. I waited for thirty-six hours. I waited through a quart and a half of bourbon. I didn’t leave my room. I had my meals sent up. I didn’t use the telephone. I had no one to call. And I began to wonder if I’d misplaced my confidence in Bongo’s recommendations.
I certainly hoped that I had not. If this one fell through, then it was very likely the one in Mexico would fall through, and that would spell complete disaster for all of my plans. I was beginning also to worry about the one hundred dollars I had put out to Charlie.
But finally the telephone rang. It rang at two o’clock in the morning.”
“Mr. Johns-Mark Johns?” The voice had the timbre of gravel falling over a washboard.
“This is Mr. Johns.”
“You wanted to talk to someone, Mr. Johns?”
“To Mr. O’Farrell.”
“Bring your identification, and nothing else with you. Come down and walk through the lobby and stand in front of the main entrance to the hotel. When you get outside, take a cigarette from a package and light it and immediately drop it on the ground and stomp it out.”
He hung up before I could say anything.
Five minutes later, as I stood before the deserted entrance of the Mark Hopkins, a Continental IV limousine whispered up to the curb beside me, and a rear door opened. Simultaneously, a man whom I had not seen before stepped out of the shadows of the building to my left and soundlessly approached me. His hands were like twin mice as they patted down the sides of my body. He was very thorough. No doubt he would have found even a penknife, had I carried one. A moment later, he reached into the inside pocket of my jacket, took out my wallet and handed it to someone in the back seat of the limousine. He spoke for the first time.
“Turn around.”
I turned, facing the door of the hotel as a dome light went on in the limousine. A minute later, the light went off, and I was gently nudged through the opened door. The man who had searched me followed. I felt a second body next to me as I sat down. Someone blindfolded my eyes, and they returned my wallet.
