Evil is no longer a stigma of the human race -or so it would seem it has become a way of life. Perhaps it has always been like this, but we were too busy surviving to dwell on these things. We are attuned to accept at face value, yet strangely enough, ready to condemn immediately. We do, in fact, live amongst ourselves on this sphere in dogmatic pride, ignorance, and superstition. We thrive en masse on deceit, hate, and war, though we preach truth, love and peace, and we are ready to destroy life itself to prove our dedication. All things are relevant only to "I" and Martin Uris hammers this chilling theme home in The Windmill Rapists.
Though fast-paced and packed with unexplored thrills unique in the pages of fiction, the basic theme of man's lust and inner corruption is interwoven in every iine. Amid the splendor of the Mediterranean, Mr. Uris sets us down on the enchanting island of Majorca with all of its exotic romance and pagentry. We live in magnificent palaces where kings once walked, and in one where rules a matador so famous that Pablo Piccasso has done a bust of him. We learn firsthand that the bullring is a place of horrifying death, but it is the how and why, plus the taste of the blood-wet sand in our mouths, that lives with us long after we have turned the final page. As well, do Monica, Katryn and Lucia, the grand cathedral, the aircraft carrier, John F. Kennedy, and illicit diamond smuggling stun us with their shocking implications.
This is an outstanding novel Martin Uris has written and we are privileged to present to you. The Windmill Rapists carries a moral impact similar to that involved in this true anecdote that Mr. Uris, who is now traveling in the Middle East, included with his manuscript.
"The Marabouts of North Africa have a cruel but telling method of explaining how man preys upon himself, how he castrates himself with phantom beliefs and superstition. The Marabout draws a large circle in the dirt, which represents the world. He places a scorpion, symbolic of man, inside the circle. The scorpion, believing that it has achieved freedom, starts to run around the circle but never attempts to go outside. After the scorpion has raced several times around the inside edge of the circle, the Marabout lowers his stick and divides the circle in half. The scorpion, stops for a few seconds, then begins to run around inside its half of the circle. The scorpion runs faster and faster, apparently looking for a way out, but never finding it. Strangely enough, the scorpion does not dare to cross over the line. After a few minutes the Marabout divides the half circle. The scorpion becomes frantic. Soon the Marabout makes a space no bigger than the scorpion's body. This is the "moment of truth". The scorpion, dazed and bewildered, finds itself unable to move one way or another. Raising its venomous tail, the scorpion turns rapidly 'round and 'round in a veritable frenzy. Whirling, whirling, whirling until all of its spirit and energy are spent. In utter hopelessness the scorpion stops, lowers the poisonous point of its tail, then stings itself to death. Its torment is ended."
-The Publishers
CHAPTER ONE
The stewardess, a curvy sprite of Anglo extraction, approached the sleeping broad-shouldered American sprawled in the seat nearest the aisle. The two seats beside him were empty except for the magazines he had tossed onto the middle one. He slept with his handsome mouth opened, she noted, showing a measure of those sound white teeth, and the not-too-long grayish-blond hair was mussed just enough to cause her an inner twinge of excitement. Her eager young eyes sparkled with appreciation. She touched the breadth of muscular shoulder nearest her and leaned down over him.
He was aroused instantly, discerning blue eyes appraising. The smile followed, a tilted grin the nymphet stewardess decided would be heavenly awakening to of a morning.
"We hind in five minutes, Mr. Shannon," she said. "Is this your first trip to Majorca'"'
"Yeah," Vic said, straightening up and brushing a hand over his hair. "Thanks for snapping me out of it." His grin broadened. "I have this thing about airplanes and my stomach. I try to sleep as much as possible."
She laughed. "I thought you'd want to get the air view. It's quite spectacular with all the windmills."
Shannon slipped into the seat next to the window and the auburn-haired, shapely girl eased part way in to continue leaning over him.
He wanted to see it all. Though it was to be a working trip primarily, the forty-year old writer intended to make it a pleasurable one. He still couldn't believe his good fortune at falling into such a deal, and right when he needed something little short of a miracle to haul him out of the post-divorce slump. Everything had seemed as if it were going to hell, and then this.
The Trident was in a bank to make its approach, giving him a sweeping panorama of a lush, green plain adorned with picturesque windmills and a sprawling city of pastels in the irradiating summer sunshine. There was a gentle mountainous backdrop, but he remembered from the island history he had read that the higher peaks were to the north running northeast to southwest parallel to the coast. The scene passed too quickly for him to concentrate on any one thing.
"Beautiful," he said. "The colors are really dazzling after good old smoggy California. How big is Palma, anyway?"
"Over 200,000. It's a breathtaking place, so much to see, both historical and modern," she replied. "Arc you going to be here long?"
"For some time, I expect," Shannon answered. "Is that the cathedral there?"
"Yes . . . and that's Bellver Castle on the hill beyond," she pointed out, her attractive young face mere inches from his own as they watched cheek to cheek. "The night life is terrific, too. You don't want to miss that. I never do when I have a layover here."
"Really swings, huh?" the rugged-featured American said, glancing at her with his tilted grin.
"You better believe it. Especially around El Torreno. " Her eyes were dancing invitingly. El Jonquet is another lively quarter. Old windmills converted into night clubs real dreamy spots. There's one called Nicki's where I always go. Everyone does."
"I'll have to catch it," Shannon said, beginning to anticipate the pert little doll.
She smiled directly into his face. "I'll be there tonight around eleven if you're not doing anything," she said in a suggestively fringed whisper. "You can buy me a drink and I'll introduce you to Nicki. He's American too."
Shannon nodded, glancing at the name-pin over her saucy left breast. "Sybil what?"
"Gorman."
"A pleasure, Sybil. I'm Vic Shannon."
"I know your name is on my passenger list," she said, patting his hand and straightening. "Better fasten your seatbelt, ducky. We'll be setting down at Son Sanjuan in about two minutes."
Shannon watched her trimly rounded buttocks undulating suggestively as she glided forward, stretching his neck to do it. Promising as hell . . . but he doubted if he'd make the scene. Someone should be waiting down there for him, and he imagined his itinerary would be pretty well planned, at least in the beginning. Besides, he was bushed, even with all the sleep he had gotten during the crossing, to say nothing of the Zs he'd racked since taking off the London. He'd even caught an hour or so out of the five layover at Heathrow. Flying raised hell with his constitution, and only sleep counteracted the misery.
Sybil's pleasing voice came over the intercom with the usual debarkation patter, first in Spanish, then English. He liked her British accent, but her Spanish emphasis was atrocious because of it. His own command of the language was good, critical too, having spent two years at the National University of Mexico. In fact, it was while there he had developed his fascination for toreo. the art of fighting bulls, and the root of his present good fortune.
The big man settled down in his seal, checking his seat-belt for the final time to the Trident's soaring descent. He was thinking that it was six years since that Sunday afternoon he had driven from La Jolla to Tijuana with his dentist sidekick. Doc Argon, to take in the corrida de toros of the year. El Gallardo, the sensational young matador from Majorca, Spain topped the program, and that he had. He'd been superb. After, Doc had suggested they catch a drink at the bar of the American Hotel where most of the aficionados gathered to rehash the highlights. What a surprise when El Gallardo himself had walked in with his personal servant, and even more so some thirty minutes later when Doc had approached the handsome young whip of a man. introducing himself, and then
Vic Shannon.
Rafael Ruiz, his real name, had been twenty-four at the time and yet to achieve the greatness he now enjoyed as Spain's most colorful bullfighter. Vic remembered him as an eager, friendly young man who had been obviously pleased with his success, but with a certain shy modesty. He had preferred discussing Vic's writing career rather than his own, wanting to know everything he'd done and his plans for the future. Shannon's second book, in fact, had just been released and looked like it might die on the vine from the reviews, but he'd promised the matador an autographed copy which had seemed to please the young man immensely. Senor Villelta, his servant, had scribbled El Gallardo's Majorca address for him, and the following day Vic had sent it off.
That was the last contact he had with the great torero for six years until a week ago when he'd received a call from his publisher, though he had followed his illustrious career religiously. El Garrardo, the famous matador, was trying to locate him. Something about writing his biography! Christ, what a jolt and what an uplift. Shannon hadn't been so mired since Eve sprung the divorce bit on him, though he'd known damned well their breakup was in the wind a must; whatever they had once shared was long washed out. While he had turned out two fairly successful novels and another dud in their three years of wedlock, his sometimes wife produced a series of lovers and two abortions. Hell, the split was inevitable; he would have done it eventually had she not, but six months back when he'd hammered the last period to that literary fiasco he'd been too buddy-buddy with the bourbon bottle to give a damn.
El Gallardo's commission to write his biography plus a sizable retainer and expenses had cured him overnight. On top of that, his publisher was romancing him with a healthy contract that included an open expense account if needed. There was a bundle awaiting Vic Shannon right around the corner, and he'd just arrived in heaven to begin collecting it.
The Trident taxied, stopped, and then the engines died. Shannon was already half out of his seat, but he just hung there letting the others crowd by, feeling complacent and gentlemanly as hell. Finally, Sybil caught his hand, holding it warmly.
"Don't forget. Nicki's at eleven," she said, smiling sexy promises that taunted where it counts. The other stewardess, a blonde angel, was radiant, too. "Bring a friend, Mr. Shannon," she whispered. "We'll have a ball!"
Christ, it was all too much! He was apt to destroy himself in the midst of such hedonistic passes, the towering American thought as he shuffled forward with passport at ready. Right at the moment, though, he was more concerned with the thought of someone waiting there for him at the airport and how he would identify them.
Once through the passport ritual he began examining the faces standing in a horde beyond the counters at the far-end of the long terminal. To the right was the conveyor where the luggage would appear and most of the passengers were congregating there. Shannon paused and surveyed until he saw him. Senor Villelta! No question! All those years ago, but he still remembered him. Tall, stately, aristocratic of expression, like a rapier wearing a conquistador's head on its needle-tip.
"I thought it was you, but I had to be sure," the Spaniard said with only the trace of a smile as he extended his firm, slender hand over the counter. His English was perfect, the way Vic remembered. "Is your luggage marked?"
"My name's on it, if that's what you mean," Shannon said. "Should be right along . . . "
"We haven't time, senor. There are servants here to handle that. Come with me, please."
Shannon stared at him.
"Please, come . . . come!"
The big man did, passing by the two uniformed guards who seemed to pay him no attention. Villelta caught at his arm with a certain urgency, silently leading him beyond the glassed doors to where autos, taxis, and buses clung in a jammed conglomeration. Yet, the big black Mercedes El Gallardo's mozo de estoques rolling toward him seemed free and ready. The powerful motor purred. He climbed in, the door slammed, and they were off.
"Kind of . . . 007-ish isn't it?" Shannon tossed at him, aware that there was a girl with streaming, hazel-colored hair at the wheel and they were already moving as if jet propelled.
Villelta ignored the remark. "Take the back road through Son Anglada, Monica. It is not so good, but safer I think," he said to the girl in Spanish.
Shannon looked at him. "Anything wrong, senor?" he asked.
"Wrong? No, of course not, Mr. Shannon. It is a scenic route to the villa . . . and quieter. We can talk, you see. El Gallardo wants me to inform you of certain things before we arrive."
"O-Oh," Vic managed, his eyes glued on the rear-view mirror. The girl driving the limousine like she was qualifying for some Grand Prix was little more than a teenager! They were weaving in and out of wild traffic and passing everything in sight, for Chrissakes. From what he could see of her reflection, she had that seductive charm peculiar to British birds, with sensually pouting lips and the glinting hazel eyes of a voluptuous little demon. Goddamn, he'd like to catch some of the passing sights, but he didn't dare take his eyes off the road and heavy traffic on all sides!
Finally, they burst onto a shoulder-less country road wide enough for a pair of ox-carts and the speedometer hovering around 130 kilometers per. "Damn! Are we late for something or other?" Shannon got out at last.
Vi Helta smiled and patted his arm reassuringly. "It is all right, senor. She is an excellent driver. Try not to be upset and let us talk now that we are away from the city noise. El Gallardo wants you to understand the secrecy of this task."
Vic tore his eyes from the narrow, winding road ahead as the other's words registered. Thank God there was little or no traffic . . . "Secrecy . . . ? I-I'm afraid I don't understand. senor."
"I know, I know, and there is not time to go into it deeply. El Gallardo will do that," the servant said. "Of extreme importance is that no one must know why you are here, Senor Shannon. You must understand this. Do not speak of the biography to anyone. Is that clear?"
Clear? Yeah, like what lie around the next hairpin curve was clear, the muscular American thought, tensing with every squeal of rubber as they began to ascend into spectacular hill country and the road grew more narrow and winding. At least, there were shoulders now and then and that was an improvement.
"Wh-Whatever you say is fine with me," Vic-got out, "but can't we entice this sparrow to slow down to a scream?"
Beside him, Senor Villelta sighed, as if satisfied that he had gotten over his point. "Do not be concerned with Monica's driving," he reiterated. "She is very capable."
Shannon could see her smile in the mirror. Her dark eyes were alive with tiny sparkling pinwheels. She was a stunner, but there was a possessed expression about her that chilled his Irish blood. Nothing more than a child, yet mature as any chick he'd ever bedded!
"Monica Christie," Villelta interrupted his appraisal. "This is Victor Shannon from the United States."
"Hi," the sensuous young voice floated back in crisp British. Then, some Soho crept in. "Don't cave, man. I know what I'm doing."
"I'm glad one of us does . . . as well as the car behind us, I hope . . . "
"What car?" Villclta snapped, twisting around quickly. "How long has it been behind us, Monica?"
"Since we passed through Son Anglada," she answered, unrattled. "I think it's a tail, all right."
"Damn!" the servant cursed in English. "Faster! There are three men. I do not like the looks of it! Faster and we will see what they do!"
"What the hell is going on, anyway?" Shannon demanded, gasping at the Citroen behind them.
"Get down!" Villclta ordered, shoving him away from the rear window. "Faster. Monica!"
"It's wide open! We're climbing!" the girl's voice exclaimed. "Goddammit! If we were on the straight I'd give them one hell of a run!"
"I don't want to appear nosey," Shannon said, suddenly feeling as if he were in the middle of a TV late-show spy thriller, "but what's the name of this game we're playing?" The Citroen was inching along side them now and he could see the three unfriendly faces, two of them glaring constantly at them.
"It is no game, Senor Shannon, I assure you! Stay down! They mean you harm!" Villelta commanded, leaning forward to encourage the demon sexpot behind the wheel. "Keep them from drawing up beside us, Monica! Bump them! Bump them!"
"Right on, man!" she replied almost gleefully. Shannon thought, still trying to make sense out of what Villelta had said. They mean you harm!
Him? Vic Shannon? Jesus Christ, he'd never seen them before in his life! Not an hour on this island yet . . . ! "
Suddenly, they swerved and there was a loud scraping and sickening crunch of metals . . . and then what sounded like a gunshot! What the hell. . . !
"They have a pistol!" Villelta shouted.
"You're telling me!" Monica replied, still unbelievably cool. "He's pointing at the tire! If I don't pull over he's going to shoot it, senor! What the devil will I do?"
"Pull over, for Chrissake!" Shannon barked, setting upright to lean forward. "Stop this damned thing so we can find out what's going on!"
"No!" the ashen-faced servant charged. "We must not take that chance!"
"Pull over, Monica! Do it, Goddammit!" Vic Shannon insisted harshly. "Right there's a spot. Pull off the road!"
She did to Villelta's groans and the Citroen's crowding screech of brakes directly behind them. Shannon was out of the Mercedes as if sprung from a trap to meet head-on an ugly jawed bruiser brandishing a revolver with six-inches of blue-steel barrel. The weapon and not the man brought the big-muscled American up short.
"What is the meaning of this?" Vic asserted in Spanish, his fists balled angrily.
"Shut up and get back into the car. American," the other growled. "You will listen. We will talk." Then, to one of the others behind him: "You drive, Manuel."
"Do not argue with them. Senor Shannon!" Villelta implored with his head poked out the open car door. "It is useless. Please? Come back inside."
Vic did, while the pair sandwiched Monica between them, the gunman never taking his wine-rimmed little eyes off the two men in back. The other, whom he'd called Manuel, was more interested in the teenager next to him, a cavity-eaten grin of lust distorting his unshaven, angular face.
"Take your filthy paw off my leg, you bastard!" the girl spat, slapping him hard across the cheek.
Shannon started forward, but caught himself when the business end of all that blue-steel cannoned not an inch from his nose.
"Prosliruta!" Manuel snarled.
"Never mind! Drive the car!" number one with the gun instructed. "There will be plenty of time for that. Go to the mill!"
Shannon inched back in the seat and stared at Villelta because he didn't know what else to do. Assuming that they spoke no English, he said: "What's happening, senor? I don't get it. A holdup, maybe?"
"I am not sure," the servant said without looking at him. his handsome aristocratic face strained. He was lying through his teeth, Vic-concluded, and evidently te keep him from worrying. Jesus Christ, some fucking isle of pleasure this was!
"Now look, Villelta. I've got a right to know . . . ! "
"Shut up, you!" the gunman ordered as suddenly Manuel careened the Mercedes off the main road onto an ascending, twin rutted pathway through a stand of wood. He spoke in Majorcan, a Catalan based Spanish, but Shannon could follow. "There are people here who do not want you on this island. American. We intend to make you understand. For your sake, I hope there will be no next time."
"Who? What people, and why?" Shannon questioned, bewildered.
"Shut up and get out of the car!" the gun handler ordered in his guttural voice as they came to a stop behind what looked like the ruins of an old windmill. He swung from the Mercedes gesturing with the revolver and they obeyed. The Citroen drew up behind them, its driver, the third of the trio, hopping out.
He and the gunman might have been brothers; they shared the same ugly jawline, a blue-shadowed jutting thrust, along with the wine-rimmed small eyes. Their noses were apish and their barrel-chested, bruiser-builds warned of an unconcealable ruthlessness. They talked briefly, calling each other by name. Finally, Jaime, the gunman, ordered them inside the mill while Manuel and Pedro followed behind Villelta. Shannon had edged over to Monica. Though she showed no sign of fear, he offered moral support anyway, getting his first up and down eyeful of the curvaceous teenager.
Christ, it was no wonder Manuel had slipped a feel to one of those legs! Such thighs and calves were strictly show-stuff. . . and the firm up tilt to her full young breasts with their peaks embossing the clinging knit pullover like a matched pair of hidden gems was like rubbing salt into an opened wound. Sonovabitch, she was a walking invitation to rape with that tiny mini-skirt, Vic reasoned, forcing his eyes upward away from the rippling sway her generously rounded hips and buttocks offered with every step in front of him.
Inside, Manuel lighted candles to illuminate the cool darkness, enough to see that the single room had been gutted. There were wooden boxes to be used for seating around a larger central one, and a dirty-looking mattress in one corner.
"Tie their hands above their heads," Manuel." Jaime ordered, holding the revolver trained on their prisoners.
"You are making a grave mistake." Senor Villelta spoke up at last. "This man is a house guest of El Gallardo! He will not rest until you are apprehended and punished . . . "
Pedro's brute fist smashed with a sickening splat against the slender servant's clean jaw, buckling his knees as if he'd been maced. Monica cried out and Shannon charged blindly, cursing in true descriptive Yankee English.
"You sonovabitch!" Vic snarled, lunging at the ugly-jawed Pedro a split-second before the explosion triggered inside his skull.
Somehow, even as he went down and the universe momentarily rocked, Vic realized he'd been gun-whipped, the only consoling result being his temporary numbness from head to toe . . . the agony was yet to register. All the same, he intended to get up and beat these bastards into the fucking ground! He floundered on hands and knees, the mirthless laugh sounding as it it were echoing in a huge tunnel, and then the torment burst against his ribs to the sound of Monica's screams.
Christ! He had to get up . . . couldn't let them hurt her . . . helpless little sparrow!
"You are a fool, American! Come on. Rise up a little higher!" a guttural voice chided. "Ah . . . that is fine!"
The craggy, rock-like fist hammered into his lace as if powered by a close-range crossbow, collapsing Vic Shannon's mighty frame a third time in less than a minute. Snorting gasps choked up out of him as blood spilled from his nose and ran in a jagged course from his hairline down his rugged left jaw. Agony tore through him. but bitter rage still held reign over his tortured mental capacities. He was up onto his hands and knees again.
"He is a determined one, Manuel," Jaime praised.
"He is a fool!" Manuel exclaimed, shaking his angular face in amazement. "Typical American."
"For God's sake, don't hurt him anymore, please . . . please?" Monica begged while Manuel clung to her wrist and Pedro jerked through a ring in the masonry wall, pulling until the half-stunned servant was touching the damp flooring with his toe-tips.
"Listen to this one, Jamie. The little prostitute is concerned for the fair-haired American's welfare. Maybe it is his cock she likes. Do you suppose?"
Jaime chuckled, glancing at her lecherously. "She would be wiser to think of the tight little hole up between her own legs, eh Manuel?"
"This is so! This is so!" the other rasped with goatish eyes gleaming as he suddenly hugged an arm around Monica's slender young waist to haul her against him. Again, the unshaven one with the decayed teeth grinned the way he had in the Mercedes, his big grimy hand clutching and cupping lustfully the ripe fullness of her defenseless teenage breast. "You will fuck us, eh little girl? Be nice and suck our pricks, restroom? Or would you rather that we continue beating your American friend until his handsome face resembles a gargoyle?"
"Oh . . . oh my God!" Monica cried, struggling against the foully smelling man's crushing strength, a wave of dread and desperation sweeping over her frightened brain. His brute hand was cruelly squeezing her breast's tender flesh while the outrage of his obscene words burned with caustic nausea into her shocked young mind. These things didn't happen here not on Majorca! The excitement she'd felt with the intrigue of it all had given way abruptly to overwhelming horror. Be careful, Gallardo had said. You should have no difficulty, but it is best to be cautious. Good God . . . and now this unbelievable nightmare!
She was no angel, no virgin either, but sex was a love and desire game, not a loathsome rape by a troop of repulsive brute-animals in a medieval ruins on a beautiful island where such abominations could never happen! Both pain and shame raced through the long-haired girl's curvaceous body as she scuffled beneath the mauling salacious hands of Manuel while he kneaded and pinched her sensitive firm breasts with flagitious savagery. And then, she saw Jaime moving behind the helpless Shannon sprawled on all-fours.
Monica could only guess at his barbaric intentions and a chill of icy panic swept up her youthful spine. They would kill him if they didn't stop!
"Don't! No, please don't?" she begged, resorting to English in her desperation as the ugly-jawed leader poised himself to kick. And then his foot lashed out viciously, well aimed at the bulge in the crotch of Vic Shannon's trousers!
"Oooouuuggghhhh!" the bloodied prostrate writer bellowed sickeningly, the remaining fight inside him suddenly destroyed by the ruthless bashing of his testicles.
"Stop it! Stop it! You goddamned fiends!" Monica screamed, tears gushing down her smoothly complected cheeks while she struggled in the powerful arms and pawing hands of Manuel. Gallardo would never forgive her or Villelta for letting this happen! She strained through her tears to see Shannon's agonized writhing on the damp, clay-packed floor, sobbing when she saw him clutching at his genitals between jackknifed legs, while Senor Villelta hung helplessly by his bonds. It was up to her! She couldn't let them beat him anymore no matter what! In their own tongue, she implored: "I beg you? Please . . . do no more to him! Let us go and we will say nothing of this. I promise!"
Now Pedro was laughing and there was a lewd swelling at the front of his pants. "But we would rather that you sucked and fucked us, young lady," he taunted, glancing down at the portentous bulge. "You see? My cock is already stiff like a log at the mere thought."
"Oh . . . please . . . " the despairing teenage girl whimpered in growing dread at their obscenities and odious demands.
"Well . . . ? " Jamie pressed, reaching down to stroke his own rising hardness. This was more than he had planned on, the presence of the young English girl, one of Gallardo's many mistresses, a woman who delighted in Haunting her sensuous curves before the lowly hands at the villa. He had seen her once when he had gone there with Senor Carlos, but she had not noticed him. Now she would, the wild-eyed little bitch! And what could Senor Carlos say? Besides, he would go to confession on Saturday . . . "Well . . . ? " he repeated in mounting lust, "do you accommodate us willingly, or do we go on beating the American, then rape your lovely little cunt until we are sick at the sight of it?"
Monica couldn't speak. Fear-filled repugnance and mounting rage forced the sobs from her slender throat, but she was too well educated in the school of male lust not to realize that she held the only bartering commodity which could save them all. especially the American, Shannon. If they didn't kill him, they would surely maim him for life . . . and what chance would she ever have with her El Gallardo then'. '
"L-Let go of me!" she suddenly yelled at Manuel, wrenching free of his grasp and blanking her mind to catch hold of the pullover, raising it upward over her head with a sweeping nourish. "I Is this what you want?"
"Jesus!" Pedro exclaimed as her tautly up-thrust breasts in their white satin brassiere cups came into view. "Such tits!"
Jaime licked at his lips and gaped hungrily. "Well, continue! Strip off everything!" he ordered. "Pedro, you rope the American up to the other ring while Manuel pulls the mattress over so our friends can watch it all. And you, bitch, do as I said. Strip naked so we can all see and feel your secret charms, eh?"
CHAPTER TWO
Absolute torment racked Vic Shannon's big suspended frame, but his senses had cleared to the point of computing what was taking place around him. The whys and wherefores hardly mattered; that it was actually happening for whatever reason in hell was what counted! Still dazed, Villelta hung by his wrists next to him. his head slumped to one side. Vic's own skull buzzed and throbbed as if the top were going to blow off, and his half-numbed, swollen face felt sticky with dried blood. His groin was a roaring inferno of nauseous agony, but what was going on in the center of the vault-like room emphasized the real barbarity of their captors!
Those three ugly bastards were making Monica strip had her standing in the center of that filthy mattress shedding her clothes before their leering eyes ogling her every hesitant move like a trio of lust-warped animals! Jesus Christ, the poor kid!
Vic could see that she'd been crying, though she was bravely holding it back now as she unzipped the tiny skirt and let it slide with reluctance down the smooth ivory columns of her young thighs. Damn, he had to swallow at the parched wad in his throat when she bent over to step out of it and the narrow crotch band of flimsy nylon panties caught in the deep cleft between her lushly rounded buttocks. Then, she straightened and stood in the midst of the three, maybe five feet two inches of trembling, seventeen year old white flesh, virginally helpless and naked except for the sheer wisps of brassiere and revealing panties hugging the ripeness of her voluptuous young curves.
"You filthy swine!" Shannon spat in their own language, straining uselessly at the rope and ring that held him dangling like a side of beef. "Cowards! Sons of whores!" he raged with the fury inside him at their lurid abuse of the defenseless British teenager, and ready to try anything that might draw them away from her.
"Oh God, no! No, Mr. Shannon . . . ! " Monica cried as Jamie turned, walking toward the vulnerable American while the others watched and grinned.
"Such degrading remarks cannot go unanswered, senor," the ugly-jawed leader hissed. "But first I will tell you: get off this island as fast as you can . . . if you are still able. This time, we only warn you!"
"Go to hell, swine!" Vic snarled at him, angry yes, but more intent on taking their attention from Monica who might be able to make a run for it . . .
Hatred burned in the heavy-set leader's small eyes as suddenly he drove his hammer-like fist into the pit of Shannon's hardened stomach. Then he grinned, sensing the American's tensing of defensive muscles, and slammed two pistoning rights above and below his heart. Shannon's mouth gaped open, a strangled gasp and glazing eyes broadening his assailant's ruthless grin. Jaime stepped back then and hurled a vicious punch at the relaxed muscles overlaying Vic Shannon's mid-section.
"Unngghhhh!" the powerless writer expelled with a choked roar, the breath bursting from him as again the brute-bodied Jamie swung, digging his big gnarled fist into Shannon's unprotected gut, and then once more, until the American's legs began to jerkingly draw up from the floor while he hung there like a strung puppet from his bound wrists.
"Stop! Stop!" Monica begged. "I will do whatever you want! Do not beat him anymore! Look! See . . . ! " she exclaimed, unfastening her brassiere and tossing it away from her to stand nearly naked before them, tears once more dribbling from her pleading hazel eyes. "I am ready! Anything you say . . . ! "
Deepl sensations of raw lust clawed at Jamie. He was family man, a good man. he reasoned, thinking of his daughter. Carmen, who was sixteen, but then his eyes riveted on the rippling naked white breasts of the English girl with their little hardened nipples like wine-stained berry pits at their peaks, and the length of blood-engorged sinew between his legs jerked lecherously.
"Take them off!" he commanded, forcing all other thought from his desire-fired brain. "Strip naked and get down on your knees, bitch! I want to see your tight little cunt as the boar sees the sow's!"
"Let me!" Manuel exclaimed, lunging forward to jerk the tiny nylon panties down to the distraught girl's trim ankles with one lightning movement of his big clawing hands. He dropped onto his knees and remained hunched there, staring hungrily at the exposed "V" of dark silky pubic curls below her trembling white belly. Breathing loudly, he brushed one hand upward along her satiny inner thigh until it reached the yielding warmth of. soft, hair-covered flesh, where it began to stroke and lewdly explore the tight resilience her recoiling teenage pussy offered.
At the feel of his coarse hand and calloused fingers lustfully probing her sensitive genital flesh, Monica's brain whirled, her cheeks flushing to the shamed humiliation of standing there forsakenly naked, fearful of making any move to protect herself or try to stop them lest they turn back on the already brutally beaten Shannon. But God, could she endure it? His cruel fingers were like obscene tentacles . . . and then she moaned in self-abasement as she felt one finger part her fleshy cuntal lips and the tender folds protecting her vaginal opening to thrust deep up into the tight warmth of her cringing pussy channel.
Manuel sniggered in lecherous excitement as he looked up at Pedro's salaciously bugged eyes. "Christ, but it is a hugging little hole!" the angular faced one enlightened, focusing his own attention back onto the pink split his thick finger held partially splayed open between the naked girl's full white thighs. Damn! How very much he would love to lick it, slip his eager tongue up into that hot moist slit of her loins and taste its young fire, but he was afraid of what the others would think of him for doing such a thing. And then, he felt her hands gripping at his head as if to steady herself while he began to work his finger in and out of her girlish pussy-walls' snugly clasping flesh.
The blood rushing to her head from his obscene fingering up between her legs staggered Monica, and she clutched at his head to keep her balance. Then she saw Jaime ripping open his pants and shoving them down, the exposed sight of his waggling, thick penis driving home the shocking reality of her horrifying situation. God almighty, it was a brute-thing a granite-hard rod of thick veined ugliness, its bulbous head shining with a purple wetness from the oozing secretion seeping from the rubbery tip!
Naked to the waist, he moved toward her, his hand lewdly grasping the menacing cock to work its thick foreskin back and forth while his hairy sperm-bloated balls swung like a bull's between his massive thighs, his wine-rimmed eyes burning little spheres of base animal lust
She couldn't! No matter what they did to the American, or what Gallardo thought of her! It was impossible to just submit her body like a common whore to the depraved appetites of such coarse goatish beasts! She could never take such a horrendous penis inside her in the first place it wasn't human . . . !
"Get back, Manuel," Jamie ordered, stepping onto the mattress and still holding luridly to his throbbing hard shaft. "And you, little bitch, down on your hands and knees with that pretty young ass waving high! I have a present for you that will live long in your memory!"
Pedro chuckled as Manuel reluctantly pulled his finger from the tight moist heat of the naked girl's quivering cunt and looked up at the fear contorting her pretty face. Panic had suddenly twisted its youthful beauty and he anticipated her. grabbing one slender wrist before she could bolt. With a harsh laugh, the angular-faced one twisted the delicate limb cruelly, forcing the long-haired teenager down onto her knees.
"Take her other arm, Pedro, and we will hold her," Manuel said. "I think she is having a change of heart not so ready to offer anything for the American's safety as before!"
"This happens sometimes when they are young," Pedro laughingly said, clutching Monica's other wrist to wrench her arm cruelly up behind her back, while his free hand cupped her jutting, white breast and they forced her face down onto the putrid smelling mattress.
The grip of enraged terror blinded Monica to the pain as she began to struggle, fighting and kicking. "Oh . . . oh don't. . . damn you, stop it!" she cried into the foul smelling mattress in English. "You filthy bastards!" But she was held so securely that she could barely move, only thrash her legs and toss her naked buttocks wildly back and forth to their licentious laughter. Their hold tightened and suddenly legs were forcing her own apart with a harsh pressure from behind.
"Raise up to your knees," Jaime's guttural voice ordered.
Monica stiffened and tried to remain flat. Oh, the sonsofbitches! She'd never give in to them, never! She was crying loudly now. but more with anger than fear of pain. One arm was then wrenched excruciatingly up between her shoulder blades, while a hand reached beneath her loins to haul them up bodily. God, she was no match for their brute strength; they were tossing her about as if she was a stuffed toy. Yet she still continued fighting against them, writhing and swinging her up-thrust buttocks in an effort to evade what was certain to come.
"A goddamned little hellcat!" Vic Shannon heard one of their three kidnappers exclaim as he tried to focus agony-swimming eyes onto the obscene rape spectacle going on before him. Gagging bile erupted into his throat at the sight of Monica's young curved nakedness being brutally mauled and tormentedly spread open for the trio to ravage while he looked on, helpless to do anything. Her cries were like jagged razors slashing at him, but there was no give to the rope or ring securing his wrists above, and his shoulders felt as if they might pop out of their sockets from the strain he was putting on them.
"It is of no use, senor," Villelta's sickened voice came to him, and Vic twisted to see the tear-wet cheeks of the hanging servant beside him. "There is nothing we can do nothing but hope that they will be merciful with her."
Shannon stared at him. Jesus Christ, what a soothing philosophy that was! B-But he was right . . . for Chrissakes . . . what in hell could they do? The ugly bastards were on either side of the poor kid pinning her down while Jaime was kneeing up behind her frantically waving teen aged buttocks, his goddamned hairy legs spreading hers wide at the knees so that the white mounds of her rounded ass-cheeks were gaping open widely before him.
A shiver swept over the big American at the tender sight of her soft curl-fringed loins swaying defenselessly, her vulnerable pink pussy-slit between its fleshy folds no match for the heavy hardened cock the bastard was clutching not an inch from those pouting, young cunt-lips Christ . . . !
And then, Monica cried out in sheer torment. She felt the hard rubbery tip of his penile-head prodding and splaying apart her tight vaginal lips, felt with panicky shame their yielding flanges closing over its bulbous wet knob as he moaned and seemed to shudder against her back. She tried to steel herself in preparation; after all, it wasn't the first stiff prick she'd ever taken this way . . . but abruptly she realized in pain-filled shock that it was for damned sure the biggest!
The powerful man's penis pushed up into her exposed vagina with a thick bluntness that began to stretch the small opening between her wide-spread thighs with a horrible pressure, as if a length of fire-wood was being forced up into her dry unwelcoming passage. Her scream was more of a choking bleat as the expanding torment increased, burning tears of unhideable agony scalding her cheeks. She begged and cried back at him to stop, but the barbaric impalement went on while her thighs were being forced even wider apart, the solid weight of heavy hair-covered loins finally colliding with her naked buttocks and grinding her face down hard against the rough fetid mattress. Splitting shocks of knife-like pain tore at her brutally stretched vagina. Her cuntal passage that had never been entered without the erotic pamperings of thrilling love games felt as if it were being scorched with flame! His ruthless cock was scoring the thin, sensitive skin from its tender walls and there was nothing she could do but lie hunched down there and endure it!
Monica's degrading position was utter torture, and the teenager ached from head to toe. Other hands besides Jamie's began to paw and move over the flesh of her hips, wedging between her naked torso and the mattress to cruelly knead her breasts, while another coursed over her shamefully spread buttocks. She sensed the latter moving obscenely toward their openly exposed crevice and moaned aloud when a finger traced it downward to begin probing at the sensitive opening of her tiny puckered anus.
Then, as the massive cock-shaft began to fuck in and out of her anguish-filled pussy with merciless thrusts, Monica felt the thick, penis-like finger worm up into the tight virginal hole of her rectum, never stopping until the palm of its hand rested hotly against her ass-cheeks and the lewd finger routed in her defenseless nether-channel's spongy depths. Mother of God! They were going to kill her!
Muffled wails of gasping breath burst from the hazel-eyed girl's lips. Never had she known real pain from being fucked, not even the first time, but she did now and it was as if the delicate skin was being stripped from her already friction-raw vaginal walls. Though they had lubricated to some extent, the torment was still intense, for it helped his huge rod to dig deeper up into her trembling belly with his every sadistic in-charge. And with the added penetration of a thick finger routing in and out of her back passage almost to the depths of her bowels while her breasts were being brutally squeezed and twisted, the giddy realization that she would either go wild or vomit nauseously swept through Monica's nakedly imprisoned young body like an undammed flood tide. Something had to give!
Shannon couldn't look at Villelta again and hoped to Christ the servant wasn't glancing at him. They were both in the same boat, the big American realized when he saw the swelling in the front of the other man's trousers. Hanging there like helpless carcasses waiting to be drawn, both of them were suffering shamefully hardened cocks at the expense of the naked teenager's curvaceous young body being ravaged by the trio of ugly hijackers in front of them.
Christ, he was no better than a fucking animal himself, Vic self-reviled, flushed with angered shame, the fact that Villelta was as bad-off doing nothing for him. Even when she was being brutally raped right before his eyes! He must be warped someplace, for Chrissakes, but he couldn't take his stare from the sight of Jamie's glistening thick cock steaming like an axe-handle Up into Monica's wide-stretched young cunt from behind. And he was burying the whole huge length of his stiffened cock right in to his ugly cum-bloated balls!
Sonovabitch! . . . It had to be tight up in there she was just a kid but what a kid, with those luscious tits and that full rounded ass! And she wasn't crying out anymore, just whimpering and gasping in a kind of rhythm, as if she were actually getting with it! Manuel, that hatchet-faced prick, he'd finally gotten more than a feel of her leg, hadn't he? The bastard had his thick middle finger plunged right up her tight little asshole, while his other hand was filled with the overflowing resilience of one firm white tit!
No question, he, Vic Shannon, belonged in a goddamned psycho ward someplace . . . and maybe they all did . . . because Monica Christie was no longer being raped, not with the way those naked white buttocks were beginning to work and the expression on her open-mouthed young face!
Kneeling up behind the English girl's subjectively bent body, Jamie clenched his teeth, watching with lewd fascination his own pulsating cock fucking in and out of the moistly clutching hole between her spread, moon-shaped buttocks, their satin-whiteness and soft pliable .flesh like warm fluff beneath his kneading hands. He jerked Manuel's violating finger from her tiny rectum because its ugliness marred the erotic beauty before him. His daughter Carmen's tender girl-ass would look like this, but maybe she would have black fuzz around her little anus while this one was smoothly naked inflamed now from that idiot, Manuel's lout finger -though a touch of soft hairy fuzz could be exciting, too!
Mother of God! What was he thinking? He was a good man, a good father and husband . . . his own little Carmen with those tautly budding breasts and the raven hair down between her legs that he had seen by accident? Christ!
He began to fuck with greater, harder lunges into the helpless teenager, charges that began from his toes with shoe-tips dug into the mattress and his iron-hard cock bursting into her ripe youthful body to splash her cuntal flesh in all directions as it burrowed forward to undermine the valley between her full lush breasts.
His calloused hands gripped her smooth ivory flesh to squeeze and torment without mercy, wanting to hurt and punish her for his own bestial lust. She cried out beneath him, wriggling helplessly with the pain, making his sperm-heavy balls itch the more and his swollen cock throb with lecherous desire. He coursed his clutching hands everywhere over the soft-fleshed contours which were at his complete and dubious mercy. With hissing breaths, he forced her ovaled ass-cheeks farther apart, spreading them obscenely to better reveal the inflamed little circle of her tiny anus. If he only could he would bend down and lick it, worm his tongue right up into it! Instead, he slipped his middle finger without difficulty up into its hot gripping depths that Manuel had already stretched.
She moaned and lurched beneath him to this second invasion of her tender rectum. Pedro and Manuel's raspy breaths interspersed with his own filled the room while they held her tighter and his fiery prick buried itself deeper up into her warm young belly to the hilt. Damn, her sweet cunt was mincingly tight around his aching penis, its squeezing clasps pulling curses and chokes of pleasure from his food-smeared lips.
To Monica, pinned down on the filthy mattress in her obscenely degraded position with naked buttocks thrust high to his brutal fucking and fingering of her ravaged genitals, it seemed incredible that she could know anything beyond the furnace of torment inside her. Yet her stuffed loins had begun to tingle through the agony, as if myriad red hot bars within them were battering against each other, sending out a million sparks bursting through her body from the fluxing core of her raped vagina. His hard hairy pelvis buffeted her wide-spread buttocks with bruising force, and she could hear his grunts of pleasure tempoed with the tattoo of his cum-laden balls as they beat down heavily against her tiny clitoris and soft cushiony pubic mound.
Suddenly, Monica was aflame! The sparks had ignited a roaring fire of masochistic desire in the hearth of her young curvaceous body, the thought of being sadistically fucked like a defenseless slave blinding her with sensual passion. He was squirming and fucking fiercely up into her from behind, raising irrepressible gasps of excitement from the depths of her chest. His huge battering cock seemed to be ever growing inside her seething belly, and reaching farther and farther toward her very throat. Uncontrollably, she began to grind her wide-splayed buttocks back onto the slickened rod of sinewy hardness, forcing it deeper with every thrust up into her now seething, throbbing pussy.
"Sweet Christ! She is a wildcat with no mind now!" Pedro exclaimed, tearing open the front of his pants to unleash a shaft of hardened prick equaled only by his brother's skewering wildly up into the groveling girl's wetly clutching vagina from behind. He had watched her pink cunt-flesh clinging tightly to Jamie's thick shaft each time he pulled out of her and he could stand no more. His own rod was jerking like a muleta in the wind . . . and those young opened lips gasping with passion.. . . !
Monica didn't try to resist when her head was suddenly raised with a jerk, and coarse, greedily working fingers pried open her mouth. She saw it then, another massive wet-tipped cock frozen in lust and knew what was expected of her. Nor would that be a first in her young sexual life, the impassioned teenager thought wildly, remembering Soho nights and swinging college parties of pot and sex . . . but no one ever had to force her this way. The rubbery tip brushed wetly over her lips as he held the long, thick shaft with foreskin pulled back, then it moved between them, pushing into the warm, saliva-filling shelter of her open mouth.
His blood-engorged penis slid along the length of her tongue, filling the cavern of her mouth with its rigid girth. He grasped her head firmly between his big hands and began to fuck impatiently up into her face, causing her to gag and choke as he shoved his stiffened cock all the way to the back of her throat, until she thought all of the huge member must be thrust between her ovaly clasping lips! She struggled for breath, catching little intakes on his out-stroke, desperately trying to match the cadence of his merciless cock fucking into her mouth before he asphyxiated her with sheer lustful vengeance.
Shannon's own prick strained against his pants-front like a heavy crowbar. He hadn't looked at or spoken to Villelta in the past five minutes, and the other man had remained just as silent. Never in his life had he witnessed a more obscene, provocative spectacle than the brutal rape going on in the middle of the floor -except it was no longer a goddamned rape, because the naked teenager was out of her skull and reveling in it. Christ, it was incredible, but he actually heard the wanton little moan escape Monica's moist lips fastened around the fat prick ramming crazily up into her mouth, and she was grinding and undulating her open ass-cheeks like a demon back onto Jamie's ramrod shaft slamming up into her anguished vagina from behind.
Manuel had sprung his wicked-looking penis from his pants and stood stroking it as if looking for a hole to bury it in. Jesus, what sort of place was this, anyway, and what had he gotten himself into? Not that rape was unique to any particular area, but that was just a little frosting on the cake here; he'd been the main mark as his aching, bruised body kept reminding him . . .
"Aaghh . . . little whore! Suck it hard now! It cums . . . it cuummsss!" Pedro's lustful groans drew Shannon's eyes onto the man crushing his hairy pelvis into Monica's young face so that she was nearly suffocated and fighting for breath with the whole length of his jerking cock shoved right down her throat!
The big American saw her smooth cheeks begin to hollow and bloat while her slender throat worked in desperate gulping swallows to the gushing squirts of semen he was pumping salaciously into her mouth. And at the same time the thick organ began to lose its rigidity, until Manuel was pulling at him to get out of the way so that the hatchet-faced one could make her suck him off, too! And shit, she was ready, Vic saw, with her sperm-coated lips opened wide to clasp around the purplish glans of Manuel's poling hard cock! Goddamn, he was about to shoot off right in his own pants in just about a minute!
Eagerly, Monica welcomed the other lust-swollen penis into the wet heat of her cum-slippery mouth, immediately beginning to suck it with hungering abandon. Total sensuality reigned over her desire-infused body from the maddening fucking she was getting from behind, and the masochistic thought of being forced to suck their cocks and swallow their cum at the same time like some lowly naked serf was erotic fuel to the prurient flames devouring her lust-infused body. She began to explore this new intruder's heavy-veined ridges and wrinkles with lewd tremors of delight as her tongue examined and played, fervently licking at the blood-inflated head when he drew it nearly out, her tongue-tip probing into the tiny slit at its end. She followed the long solid length with her fingers until her hand found his heavy bloated balls and weighed them suggestively, caressing and milking them while the thought of the teeming load of sperm they contained raced excitedly through her fired brain.
And then, the lust-intoxicated Monica realized that her show of feverish passion had triggered him, for suddenly it was as though he had been shocked by a jolt of electric current. His hips shuddered as they writhed up into her face to thrust the full length of his pulsating cock down into her unready throat. Again, she struggled for breath, drawing her head away until the bulging glans was pulled back inside her mouth beyond her clasped lips where she could furiously suck it and simultaneously milk his heavy rippling balls.
"Ahhh . . . Jesus Christ! Like that, yesss it's cuummiinnggg!" he swore savagely and the hot. thick sperm shot into her waiting, sucking mouth in raging gusts.
Again and again. Monica's young mouth filled with the pungent tasting, creamy bath from his ejaculating loins, her cheeks puffing and hollowing as she swallowed and swallowed his fiery viscous semen, until she thought her cock-filled belly would burst from the pool of bubbling sperm it held. God, and if it were possible, Jaime's inhuman cock seemed to be getting bigger and bigger . . . and going higher and higher toward her throat from the other direction! She felt the flaccid length of Manuel's penis slip uselessly from her lips and drag wetly down her shin as she raised up onto her hands.
Her swollen breasts heaved and swayed to the barrage of thrusts whaling her from the rear. She began to throw her ass-cheeks back wildly onto the thick stalk of his cock as the building pressure began to culminate in her loins in a pyramid of promising ecstasy. Nothing else mattered! This was the moment of enormous fulfillment and it grew out of all proportion to what had begun as vile rape!
Monica screamed and screamed again as her voluptuous teenage body convulsed with the intensity of an overpowering orgasm, and she felt the blood rushing into and out of her spasming loins in chaotic torrents. A third shrill cry broke from her lips with the tears of joy and pleasurable release streaming down her cheeks . . . and then, she began to calm a little.
Shannon could see that she was trembling all over and wet with perspiration, her stomach quaking while the ugly-jawed bastard continued to ram his brute cock up into her with fury. He was wheezing like a winded horse and hurling her forward on the mattress with every animal thrust. It had to be hurting her again, Vic reasoned, when he saw her biting at her lips, then gritting her teeth. The sonovabitch! He belonged in a jungle someplace!
Monica heard him muttering lurid oaths in Spanish that grew louder until they were guttural roars and grunts. Suddenly his huge chafing cock slowed into deep thrusting heaves and she felt his ravaging sperm flood hotly up into her exhaustedly quivering belly, gushing back out around his jerking cock to spill down the backs of her thighs in a viscous torrent of unbridled animalistic release.
CHAPTER THREE
"What the hell do you mean, we don't tell him?" Shannon questioned as Monica bathed the dried blood from his face. He sat on one of the boxes Senor Villelta had dragged outside and placed next to a small tub of collected rainwater. Monica had asked for his handkerchief and set about the task as if nothing at all had happened to her.
"I will explain in a few minutes," the servant replied, walking away toward the Mercedes.
Monica said: "He knows best, Mr. Shannon. Better listen to him."
Vic looked up at her. With the exception of her big hazel eyes being a bit red-rimmed and her long hair still disheveled, she displayed no sign of the ordeal she'd been through. Christ, he thought, she was made of rugged stuff, all right. The moment the three hoods had walked out of the mill she had gotten right up and dressed, not crying, not saying one goddamned word. Then, she had come over to stand on a box and saw them down with a pair of manicuring scissors she had in her purse. He'd tried to think of something to say to her then and couldn't. He still couldn't.
Finally: "What do you know about all this, Monica? Why me? Who wants me off this island that bad, and why?"
She shook her pretty young head. "Rafael will have to clue you. I don't know the answer, Mr. Shannon." She stepped back to look at his face then smiled. "You're going to have one dim headlight, guy, and it's going to be a smasher."
Shannon felt around the bruised swollen flesh of his left eye. The gun-barrel had caught him just above it and that side of his skull throbbed like hell. His frigging testicles didn't feel like any bowl of daisies either. . . She'd called El Gallardo, Rafael he wondered what she was to him? The great torero had been married a couple of years now, but the way she'd spoken his name with a certain intimacy . . . "What's your capacity with El Gallardo, Monica if I may ask?"
"His private secretary," she answered, fishing into her purse and bringing out a hair-brush. "I also teach him English." She turned away, offering no more as she began to stroke through her straight hazel colored hair, and he let it rest there. But after what he'd witnessed inside, and the way she had come unglued before that cock brigade, other opinions were forming in Shannon's mind.
Villelta had started the Mercedes engine and was manipulating the limousine around. Suddenly, he gunned it and Vic shot to his feet. What the hell, was he blind? The vehicle was going to sideswipe that huge boulder and it did with an echoing crunch of rock and steel!
The slender man backed up and stepped out then, walking around to inspect the damage as Shannon approached.
"You all right?" Vic asked, a baffled expression on his face.
"Yes." Then, to the girl who was still brushing her hair "Come Monica. We must get to Paraiso. El Gallardo will be very upset."
"D-Didn't you see that damned boulder there?" Vic asked, a baffled expression on his face.
"Of course," the other replied in his perfect English. "I want the car to look as if we had an accident. That is what we will tell, Gallardo. He must not be upset with the corrida only two days off. It is the first and only time he will appear on the island this year, and it is important to him that he be excellent."
Shannon gaped at the man who might have descended from aristocracy., After what they had just been through and all he was concerned about was that El Gallardo not be upset? "Y-You mean . . . you don't intend to let him know what really happened, or try to have those raping bastards arrested, for Chrissakes?"
"Please, get into the limousine, senor, and I will endeavor to explain while Monica drives us to Casa de Paraiso. Hurry! Gallardo is sure to be beside himself already."
In minutes they were back onto the so-called highway with Monica once more behind the wheel and racing over the treacherous winding road as if they'd all just enjoyed a short comfort stop. Shannon was dumbstruck by the servant's determination to hide the truth from the famous young man he was devoted to, and just as shocked by the thrice-raped Monica's ready compliance with the idea. He listened while Villelta explained the particulars of the concocted accident to them in detail, just in case they were questioned, and then more intently as Villelta went deeper into the reasons for it.
"What has happened to you, and of course, to Monica . . . all of us, Senor Shannon, is a terrible outrage. But if we were to tell El Gallardo this story he would go to pieces; he is a highly emotional young man. Such a jolt to his nervous system only two days before he appears in the Coliseo Balear at Palma could be tragic for him. Do you understand?"
"Yeah . . . I think I do, senor, being somewhat of an aficionado," Shannon found himself agreeing. "But that doesn't tell me what it's all about, or why those crumbs worked me over and ordered me off to the island. I mean, what the hell, I'm just a writer . . . "
"And that is the reason, Senor Shannon," Villelta interrupted. "There are those who oppose your writing El Gallardo's biography."
"What? Why, for God sake?"
"That is another story, senor. But it was because of this opposition that I urged secrecy . . . though it seems that it is a little late for that."
"And then some," Shannon growled, tenderly touching the left side of his aching head, though not about to let the subject drop. Christ, this was too goddamned incredible to be real. "Look, senor, I might just as well tell you right off that if you don't put me straight on what's behind this, I won't go along with this accident crap you've dreamed up. I'm not in the habit of getting knocked around and just letting it ride without drawing some blood of my own. Is that clear?"
Villelta sighed heavily, then nodded his head. After a moment, he said, "I cannot tell you much, for I am not that informed. I know only what I see and chance to overhear, senor. I have been Gallardo's personal servant and sword handler since his beginning as a novillero. I was his father's servant before him. Try to understand that the name of Ruiz is a noble one with the roots of two centuries on Majorca, and it is an extremely wealthy one as well."
"Yes, I know of the wealth and ancestry," Shannon put in. "I've read a considerable amount about the family background, and the way I understand it, smuggling was their main industry back there in the shadows, am I right?"
The slender servant cleared his throat, as if it were a touchy subject. Then he nodded his head. "It was, senor . . . and perhaps, still is."
Vic's eyes widened with interest. This was a new twist. "Go on," he said.
"First, you must realize that smuggling is not necessarily considered an ignoble profession here, yet El Gallardo disassociates himself with all family interests. He is multi-wealthy in his own right from the bullring, and though family ties are traditionally strong with him, he is totally independent of the Ruiz enterprises."
"But he knows of this smuggling business?" Vic pressed.
"How could he help but know of it?" Senor Villelta replied. "He simply ignores its existence."
"And what of the artificial pearl business? The family does manufacture Majorcan pearls; don't they?" Shannon asked.
"Oh yes. That, as well as every other holding or enterprise the Ruiz family controls, is looked after by Senor Carlos, the oldest brother."
"Including the smuggling?" Vic tried.
The servant shrugged his stately shoulders, offering no word of answer.
"Well, what is the commodity . . . I mean what's the contraband?" Shannon made another stab while the other man eyed him levelly.
"Diamonds, I am told . . . perhaps from South Africa, but I do not know this to be a fact," Villelta said in a soft voice, as if he didn't want even Monica's shell-like ears to overhear. His face had assumed a strained expression. "All I have told you is in the strictest confidence, Senor Shannon. I would never have been so free with my tongue if it were not for what happened back there in the mill, and that El Gallardo must be spared the truth."
It was the big American's turn to nod, but he still hadn't put enough together to answer his question. "Do you know who opposes the biography, senor?"
"Senor Carlos is openly against it. I have heard him argue with Gallardo that such an effort and exposure of family background could well bring unfavorable notoriety to the name. And truly, senor, that is all I know."
Vic said no more. Now, it was beginning to make some sense. If this Carlos was shuttling diamonds up from Africa and through Majorca to wherever, he could see why the soft-peddle would be in order. The man wanted nothing that might stir up ever-interested authorities, and a biography of the great El Gallardo was bound to dig into family background, et cetera.
Suddenly, Shannon felt Senor Villelta's firm slender hand on the back of his own. "Please," he said, "will you cooperate on the accident story . . . at least until after Sunday's corrida?"
Shannon saw Monica's big eyes glancing at him in the rear-view mirror. They, too, were pleading, he thought. "All right," he agreed. "You tell the story and I won't deny it. Is that what you want, Monica? After all, you suffered the most."
She bobbed her young head, cheeks flushing. "Yes," she said. "Rafael does come first; doesn't he?"
"Good! Then we are in agreement," Villelta said, obviously pleased. "And there is a Casa de Paraiso ahead, a palace that once belonged to kings."
* * *
Nowhere on the peninsula does one find palatial country estates equivalent in splendor to those on Majorca. Built between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries and following strong Italian influence, they are extremely functional as well as beautiful, seeming to be in perfect harmony with the nature of the island, with large central covered patios, delicately curved tiles in rich hues and rubble-worked walls of natural stone.
Shannon had read this in a book-on Majorcan architecture when his spirits were soaring prior to his trip, and he found that El Gallardo's House of Paradise, as he had tagged it, made every phrase in that paragraph a reality. "Way out" were a couple of good American slang words for it, he thought from the moment they entered the private road to the villa until Gallardo and his beautiful young wife conducted him on the grand tour. Bordered by thick groves of ancient and gnarled olive trees, Paraiso overlooked the Mediterranean and was surrounded by extensive grounds reaching beyond what the eye could see. Large ponds, many fountains and gardens with a Moorish-oriental flavor abounded.
Inside, the main floor was divided into large and luxuriously furnished salons paneled in red pine, the walls hung with damask. Exquisite painting and tapestries were everywhere, the draperies and curtains worth a fortune alone. Though there was much Renaissance furniture, trunks and coffers of the Gothic, Floral and Baroque periods, the luxury amid comfort of western influence was there too. It was sumptuous all right, and that was just the main house. Shannon could only imagine what the many scattered out-buildings encompassed.
That the villa was crawling with guests there for Gallardo's Sunday spectacular in the Palma bull-ring somewhat surprised the writer. He would expect that the matador prefer solitude, a feeling the shy young man he had met in Tijuana those half-dozen years ago had instilled in him. But this handsome and piercing dark-eyed man of thirty who stood straight as a spear and moved like a ballet dancer was not the Rafael Ruiz the big American remembered. This sallow-cheeked, sleek-haired El Gallardo reminded him of a strutting movie matinee idol out of the thirties who thought he was fronting a camera every minute, and pity the one who made the mistake of upstaging him.
It was a hell of a letdown for his own admiration, Vic Shannon was thinking, remembering the dramatic tantrum the matador had thrown at the sight of his battered face. They had been in Gallardo's study where Senor Villelta and Monica had ushered him, a room about the size of the L.A. bus terminal, and for a moment Vic had thought Ruiz was going to whip them both with the rapier he'd been slashing the air with when they entered. Then, after the servant had told his fiction piece about an accident and Gallardo questioned whether he, Shannon, wanted medical care questioned with a hand on each of his biceps as if he were some long lost relative just returned from the wars, and with tears moistening those jet eyes, yet to which Vic'd refused, the matter was dropped and never mentioned again.
"But, of course, you want to rest awhile before cocktails, Senor Shannon, and I certainly have other things to do," he said in crisp, matter-of-fact Spanish, "so you may go now. We will chat later, perhaps while the others have cocktails. I deplore them."
"Yes . . . ah . . . that's fine," Vic had replied, too stunned by the matador's attitude and the absurd unreality of him to say anything else.
"Villelta will show you a room," he'd said, turning his back to Vic to flourish the rapier at an imaginary opponent. "I will send for you when I want you."
And that had been that, except that Shannon still didn't know why he hadn't toki him to shove his goddamned deal. . . write his own frigging biography. He wasn't and didn't intend to be one of his stooges, and it was beginning to look like he might have surrounded himself with any number, probably to feed his obviously inflated ego.
The husky writer lay fully clothed on the four-poster bed, studying the damask curtains surrounding it, then the altar screen at the foot of the bed that had to be priceless. The room was the size of his whole apartment back in the states and the adjoining bath crowding ballroom dimensions. The plumbing was of modern vintage, though, and he was grateful for that. Right then, he needed a shower . . . no, a good soaking bath to boil out some of the agonies he'd picked up in getting there. His damned knockers still throbbed with a dull thudding ache from the hoofing one of those sonovabitches had given them. He just hoped to hell he'd bump into that trio again sometime before he left which might be in the not-too-distant future, the way things were shaping up. So far, that bundle of money around the corner awaiting him was beginning to look like it might be booby-trapped.
He swung from the bed and stared at his luggage. At least that had gotten there safe and sound. And then, as he began to undress, he thought of Sylvia, the plane stewardess. Her version of this heaven they'd landed on was more in keeping with his own . . . and just maybe he'd get back to Palma tonight after all.
Shannon was, in fact, quite set on the idea when he dressed and went downstairs to find El Gallardo. The bath had done wonders for him, and during it he had decided to take quarters in Palma while he was there. He would still go ahead with the biography as planned hell, he'd banked too much on that to just blow it now. Arrangements could be made for interviews with Gallardo as often and whenever the matador preferred, but he would live and work away from Paraiso. It might be healthier anyway.
In route, and trying to find his way back to Rafael Ruiz's study, Vic came onto an alcove with shrine-like properties, except the figure of worship which sat upon an elaborate altar-like pedestal illuminated by a hidden source of beamed light was a bronze bust of none other than El Gallardo. Though it hardly flattered the handsome young torero in features or expression, its surroundings seemed almost blasphemous to Shannon, adding to the bitter taste for the famous matador that was rapidly galling the hell out of him.
"It was sculpted by Picasso," a soft throaty feminine voice informed from behind. "One of his last great works of art, Rafael says."
Shannon turned to see a rather tall and captivating green-eyed blonde gowned in a black cocktail affair cut low enough to display full, sun-tinted breasts and equally short enough to show off perfectly shaped thighs and calves. She hour-glassed in the middle and glowed alluringly from the frame of shoulder-length flaxen hair. A wide-mouthed smile presented envious white teeth, the tiny freckles spattering the little nose, suggesting she might have sunbathed through a sieve.
"Rafael says that, eh?" Shannon heard himself ask with the edge of contempt in his voice that he couldn't quite hide. "What do you say?"
Those wide and stunning green eyes focused on the bust, the lovely head tilting thoughtfully while the smile lessened but remained. "I've never liked it if you want to know the truth. There's almost a burlesque flavor to the expression."
"Maybe Picasso was trying to tell us something," Vic suggested, pretending not to notice the flash of light in those deep pools of green.
"Anyway, Rafael is far more handsome, don't you think? That nose . . . it's ugly. Rafael's is slenderer, braver, actually noble . . . "
"You can see all that in a nose?" Vic asked with raised brows.
She laughed. Then "I'm Katryn Casey, and you must be the American, Shannon, whom Rafael's been expecting."
The writer nodded. "That's right. You're American?" he questioned.
"Yes. Santa Barbara, California," Katryn Casey replied, offering her small tanned hand. Vic took it. gently holding its soft warmth inside his own as he mused over her using the great one's first name as Monica had, yet Senor Villelta, his mozo de cstoques, invariably referred to him as El Gallardo.
"Well, we're practically neighbors. I'm from La Jolla. You ah a guest here for Sunday's corrida?" Shannon asked;
"Oh, in a way," her evasive reply came through the still lessened smile. "Are you going in for a cocktail?"
"Well, frankly, I was trying to find my way back to Gallardo's study, but when I came across this," Vic pointed to the sanctuary-like alcove, "I knew I'd missed a turn somewhere."
"It's back there near the foot of the stairs." she said. "The corridor leads to the west wing and Rafael's private suite, garden, pool, et cetera. Come on; I'll show you."
They walked along together, exchanging small talk concerning the States and agreeing to drop the formality of mister and miss. Shannon learned that she had met "Rafael" in Madrid "some time" ago and had been here at Paraiso "some" two weeks. AH in all, she was about as illusive with her information as Monica, but just as it had been with the sexpot teenager. Shannon found Katryn Casey's evasiveness tolerable she was a breathtaking doll.
A half-dozen times along the way they stopped for her to introduce him to other passing guests, a melange of Europeans with titles or exotic occupations. His own occupation, Vic readily admitted to, not having been told different, but like the others, used the corrida Sunday and not the biography business as his reason for being invited. It was among the last of these groups moving toward the salon where cocktails were served that Katryn presented him to the devastating, raven-haired, onyx-eyed beauty, Senora Lucia Ruiz, El Gallardo's young wife.
While the blonde girl beside him was breathtaking with her glamorous and dazzling radiance, the graceful and svelte elegance of the Madonna-featured Lucia was sensuously hypnotizing. Dressed in floor-length, clinging white, in contrast to abundant blue-black hair in a carefully coiffured, plaited crown. Shannon sensed an undeniable nobility of blood, then remembered from his readings that she was exactly that. He couldn't help but wonder if she wore a damned thing beneath the immaculate gown molded to her sylphlike contours. Maybe she was twenty-six or seven, he habitually calculated, perhaps a couple of years older than Katryn . . .
"I am so pleased to meet you, Senor Shannon," she said in a voice just above a whisper, dark eyes subdued in the translucent, ivory-skinned background. "I heard you were coming. Have you met with Rafael as yet?"
"I am on my way to his study now," Shannon replied. "Katryn was directing me. I am afraid that I lost my way."
She smiled. "It is easy to do when you are not familiar with Paraiso. We shall have to give you the tour. I am surprised that Senorita Casey has not already seen to that. She is very well acquainted with our home."
"I have just met Vic myself, senora," Katryn said, emphasizing his first name sufficiently for Shannon to feel the sparks both of them were giving off in the scrimmage of personalities.
This went deep, the writer could see immediately, and what he couldn't see he could feel. "Rafael," had to be in the middle of this contest too.
"Yes, I ah just came down from my room, senora . . . only arrived a short while ago . . . "
"Might I inquire what happened to your eye. senor? It looks quite painful," the willowy young woman asked with concern . . . more than Katryn had done, but then maybe she hadn't wanted to become inquisitive.
"Oh, a little accident . . . nothing serious. It is tender, but the ache is gone," he said, beginning to feel uneasy between them. And then, Katryn solved that.
"Why don't I just leave you with Senora Ruiz now, Vic," she said, patting his hand. "She doesn't exactly dig my presence, as you can see. I'll be talking with you later. And oh yeah, she doesn't speak a word of English, poor dear."
With that, Vic watched the shapely curved blonde swing away and trip provocatively off in the direction they had come from. Christ, this was like being in some sort of splendorous hotel, he thought, as more guests strolled by and he was introduced, their presence at least eliminating the awkwardness of Katryn's sudden desertion that he'd expected. When they were gone, Lucia Ruiz took his arm and said:
"Lei us go together to the study, unless you prefer a cocktail with the others?"
"No that is. I had intended to talk with your husband if possible, but the subject is no longer of importance."
"We will find him anyway and then we will both show you our house of paradise . . . if you would like to?"
"Yes . . . yes, I would enjoy that," Vic said, beginning to stroll along beside the captivating young woman, the light pressure of her hand on his arm doing funny little things inside him.
* * *
El Gallardo's cordiality upon seeing him the second time flabbergasted Shannon. He was in total contrast to the man Vic had met on arriving, and once he and his beautiful wife had proudly shown him Paraiso, they had returned to his study for cocktails. For one who deplored them, Rafael Ruiz certainly suffered well, Vic decided, after watching the young matador do away with his fourth martini in three fast gulps, and immediately Lucia arose to concoct him another. Christ, he was a split personality if ever there were such people.
"Not so much vermouth this time, Lucia," he snapped. "You know I detest the vile stuff. A drop, that's all! Understand? Just a drop!"
"Si, queridor," she answered softly, the first endearment Shannon had heard pass between them. Not exactly normal for a two-year old marriage.
"And now, Shannon, let us talk about the biography," Gallardo said, reclining in the high-backed, velvet-upholstered chair, his piercing eyes animated with excitement. "I am extremely anxious to get at it and see the work completed for posterity. How long do you think it will take in the writing?"
"The actual writing will go rapidly, senor. It is the compiling of the data which consumes the time, for this will take many long interviews. In other words, it will depend entirely upon the hours you allot me," Shannon said, sipping at his martini.
"We must get right at it then," Gallardo said enthusiastically. "It is important, Shannon, that it be written while I live. . . and I have a premonition that this will not be too long." He dropped his head for a moment, as if in mourning for himself, or perhaps to say a silent prayer; whatever, Vic remained silent and unmoving to the egotistic gesture. Soundlessly, Lucia returned with his cocktail, setting it beside him and floating to a chair. From the non-expression on her exquisite young face. Shannon got the feeling she had heard it all before. "You see, it must be done properly; that is why I shall live to see it through! Though geniuses are sometimes taken before their time, isn't that so?"
Vic swallowed. "Depends whether you're a fatalist or not," he replied, irritated with the whole conversation.
"Please, speak in Spanish, Shannon," Rafael Ruiz snapped. "What did you say?"
"That you were undoubtedly right," Vic lied.
"Yes . . . yes, of course. Now . . . we will begin Monday following my Sunday triumphs. I cannot let anything interfere with that. I must be grand for all of them who wait from year to year for that moment when I enter the arena. They love me, Shannon! I am their idol! Can you imagine how I will be mourned when I'm gone? So now you can see why the biography is so vital. They deserve it! It is the least I can leave for them!"
Vic sat stupefied. He watched this thirty year old lance-like figure scoop up the martini and down it with a flourish, the thought striking him that the man was a mental case no normal person could possibly be that self-exalting. Lucia had dropped her head, while Gallardo's eyes sparkled like scintillating dark pearls. Christ, was it the booze? Shannon didn't think so . . . and what the hell difference did it make to him anyway; it was the loot he wanted.
"Now, we must go to the dining room," the young man said, gaining his feet. "We shall converse again tomorrow, perhaps, but in the meantime I must warn you that you will be opposed by my brother, Carlos. He is against the biography . . . feels that it might bring notoriety to the name of Ruiz, he maintains." Gallardo smiled broadly. "Of course, he is a liar. He could care less about the family name. He is concerned only for his wretched smuggling operations, but I am not. Be damned to all of it! I am the only noble Ruiz of the ignoble line! I am! El Gallardo, the greatest matador who ever lived, and the world is entitled to my life story!"
Shannon had never written a biography; therefore, he had never clobbered a client, but if he didn't get away from this pretentious ass, he might set a precedent for himself. Lucia must have read the mounting disgust in his eyes; he doubted if he was hiding it. She came forward and took her husband's arm.
"Shall we go to dinner, darling?"
"What? Oh yes, let us do that. Come along, Shannon. You may sit beside me at the head of the table, though we will not be able to discuss the biography. Carlos and his wife, Mari, are guests tonight, and he will be on my right." He smiled. "But we can discuss bullfighting, eh? Tell me," he went on as they walked toward the door. "How is your dentist friend, Doctor Argon, was that not his name...?"
CHAPTER FOUR
It was difficult in the soft glow of candlelight to see from one end of the long dining table to the other where the ivory-white beauty of Senora Lucia sat facing her husband a couple of yards away. Servants hovered while candelbras burned, the delicious food unending and the wines superb. Shannon glutted himself.
He was surprised and pleased to find Katryn seated on his left, but he had little opportunity to talk with her. The obese, egg-shaped man with multiple chins, lip-line black mustache and shrewd, dark popping eyes monopolized the conversation. He was Carlos Ruiz, and the dumpy, jewel-studded senora on his right, Mari, his wife. Vic was taken with the amusing reflection of candlelight dancing on the swarthy patriarca's completely bald pate. He was in total contrast to his younger, handsome brother. Though some twenty years older, his features and bearing suggested a different linage entirely. He ate slovenly and grinned often, especially when his mouth was full. He was doing that at the moment.
"It is a shame about your accident, Senor Shannon, and so soon after your arrival on our beautiful island too." The sarcasm in his guttural voice was obvious to Vic. He wondered if the others caught it. "Almost like an evil omen, eh? One cannot be too careful these days."
"Accidents will happen," the husky American remarked.
"And how long do you intend to remain with us, senor?" Carlos Ruiz pressed, stuffing his bloated face.
"I am not certain but until my work is completed."
"You are writing a book here, then? Ah, but of course. There is much colorful and romantic history to Majorca, an unlimited resource one might say." He grinned. "Will your book be novelistic or factual, senor?"
"Quite factual," Shannon replied, trading glares with the man he was beginning to surmise had more than a casual acquaintance with three punks named Jaime, Pedro, and Manuel. And the more he thought of that, the higher his blood pressure crept.
To Vic's right, at the head of the table. El Gallardo sat silent, seeming to be thoroughly relishing their parrying verbiage. especially when his patriarch brother continued:
"An historical piece praising some of our more famous figures of the past, I should imagine, eh?"
Shannon sipped at his wine, staring levelly into the narrowed popping eyes studying him almost fiercely. "A writer never likes to discuss his work before it is on paper, Senor Ruiz . . . at least, this writer does not. However, you are correct in part: it will deal with fame, but of the present. The historical end will reach only into particular aspects. I understand that Majorca has an intriguing background of smuggling. Is that correct?"
Instant flashes of vehement hatred burned in the swarthy fat man's thyroidal eyes. Vic might have sunk a table knife into his huge middle. His masticating jowls stopped performing as he menacingly glowered at the muscular, blond-haired foreigner, then began their crunching ritual once more, his glance dropping to the plate before him. No answer was forthcoming from Carlos Ruiz: it was as if they had never met throughout the rest of the dinner.
Late, El Gallardo arose to lead the way into a salon for cigars, cognacs, and coffee. He was beaming, conspicuously pleased at the way Shannon had handled his brother. For his own part, Vic was seething with anger, knowing damned well now that the fat sonovabitch had set those three bastards on them earlier; but there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it. Rising to his feet, the writer saw Lucia moving gracefully toward them and was about to ask Katryn to accompany him into the salon. But Gallardo interrupted that by slipping his arm around the blonde's wasp-like waist to draw her voluptuous curves tight and willingly against him. Then, he kissed her right there in front of God and everybody!
"Would you like a cognac in the salon with the others, or in my suite, darling?" the handsome matador asked, his warmth of tone suggesting as much as their brazenly flaunted kiss.
Christ! She had to be his mistress, and he wasn't making any goddamned bones about it!
"Your suite is more relaxing, Rafael, and I am tired tonight," Katryn Casey replied throatily.
"Very well, let us get out of here then. Goodnight, Shannon," Gallardo bade him. walking away with his arm still around her slender waist while a smiling Katryn gave Vic a little finger wave back over her shoulder.
But it was Lucia Ruiz who was commanding the writer's attention. She had come to an abrupt stop some ten yards off, freezing statuesquely; yet not the slightest visible emotion shown on her beautiful face, nor did it for the few long seconds she stood there with firm little chin held high. Then Shannon saw the shining wetness of her rounded onyx eyes and wanted to go to her . . . to say something . . . any goddamned thing, but before he could rally his own wits, she was gone, disappearing like an apparition.
Christ, now he'd seen it all! The great El Gallardo . . . cox-combing bastard is what he was, and potentate of his own little fiefdom! Shit, not for all the goddamned bread in the bakery could he stomach this situation. Out, that was his next move!
Vic Shannon took the wide staircase two and three stairs at a time, his mind a mirror for the last expressions on both Katryn and Lucia Ruiz's faces. He still couldn't believe it. Not that husbands and their mistresses were a new phenomenon to him, but there was such a thing as discretion and consideration for the little woman at the goddamned least! No question but what Lucia, too, had been stunned by that calloused demonstration . . .
Vic swung into the corridor leading to his room, his thoughts trailing off when he saw a familiar girlish figure working diligently at a door. Though the lighting was subdued, he was certain that it was Monica, and he realized that he hadn't seen her since their arrival. Evidently she was considered one of the help and ate elsewhere; he hadn't noticed her at the dinner table. She was still some distance from him and seemed to be having trouble with a key . . . or was it keys?
Something held the rugged-featured American back and he slowed his pace to watch. After several tries with different keys the door moved inward to her pressure and she looked up furtively in both directions, then pulled the barrier closed abruptly when she saw him approaching.
"Oh hi, Mr. Shannon," she greeted uneasily, trying to palm the keyes from his view. Her smile was pinched and forced. "I was ah...ah just trying to locate Miss Casey. H-Have you seen her?"
"Yeah. As a matter-of-fact I just left her. She was on her way with Gallardo to his suite from all indications," Vic said, putting two and two together. The door was obviously Katryn's that the teenager had just opened and intended to enter when he came along.
Monica's smile faded, those young hazel eyes immediately beginning to smolder. "A-Are you certain? . . . I mean, it is a little late in the evening for that isn't it."
"Depends what one has in mind," Shannon said, the girl's undisguised jealousy egging him to probe further. "Maybe they're planning a game of chess or something . . . "
"Chest would be more like it that blonde bitch!" Monica spat. "And with a capital 'B'! "
She stormed around him, the same young rounded buttocks he'd watched perform in the raw with veteran know how earlier that very day swishing and joggling angrily to her rapid gate. Vic watched them intently until they reached the end of the corridor and swung out of sight, then silently chalked up another unanswerable event to the list scribbled on the blackboard in his skull. Just what in hell was she doing slipping into Katryn's room? She certainly wouldn't have used a key had she been really looking for the blonde girl, she would've done the conventional thing and knocked. Not only that, but it'd taken several different keys before she'd found the right one.
The house of puzzles rather than paradise, Shannon labeled, going on to his own room and entering. He saw then that someone had been in there too since he'd left, but a welcomed visitor. One of the servants, he supposed, had wheeled in the service cart with several unopened bottles of spirits, ice, and all the trimmings. Christ, he couldn't remember ever wanting a good belt anymore than he did right then.
Tossing off his jacket and stripping away the tie. Vic Shannon christened the scotch, spilling plenty over ice before walking to a chair and slumping into it. Dammit, just what in hell was he going to do? It was okay to run off half-cocked and toss the whole bit over his shoulder, but then where was he? After all, he was in this for the money, not to make friends or try to influence people. All of it would gurgle down the drain if he didn't come through with the "genius's" biography, and then it would be back to hacking and praying.
Vic gulped at the scotch, thinking that he'd drunk more in the past few hours than he had in the weeks since he'd kicked the bourbon bottle. Better watch that, too. The frigging stuff could creep up on a guy. Okay . . . so he'd stay with the deal, at least another few days. Hell, he had too goddamned much at stake to just walk out . . .
The light tapping against his door disturbed his thoughts. Now, what? Monica back, maybe . . . ?
It wasn't! The ravishing person in white gracing the opening was Lucia Ruiz. Vic stared at her, his surprise apparent on his handsome face. She more or less smiled, her angelic expression that effective inside him that he couldn't be sure. He swallowed and she said:
"I-I am not adept at this...this sort of thing, Senor Shannon, but your eyes they tell me that you know kindness and understanding." Her silken voice was little more than a whisper. "M-Maybe I come in?"
It was seconds before Vic jarred from his brief mesmerism. "Please, please do!" he managed, stepping to one side and reaching to take her small, almost fragile white hand. He closed the door as she floated toward the center of the room and he moved behind her, still shocked by her sudden presence. "I-I was just having a drink. Will you join me, senora?"
She turned and faced him, truly smiling now. "I will on one condition . . . that you call me Lucia, and I shall call you Vic . . . Vic," she repeated his name as if savoring it, her accent giving it an exotic sound, "Vic . . . yes, I like that. It has a conquering ring to it."
Again, Shannon swallowed. Something wildly unbelievable was happening, and a good portion of it right in the depths of his gut. "S Sit down and tell me what you like. Scotch, bourbon, cognac . . . ? "
"What are you drinking, Vic?" She made it sound like "Veek."
"Scotch."
"I will have that, just as you drink yours," she said, gliding into a chair and crossing her legs beneath the long white folds. Her glowing dark eyes clung to him like sparkling jewels, a certain inconceivable light afire in them. He thought of a schoolgirl on her first date after a dozen years of sheltered preparatory life and secret dreams of shining armor and white steeds. Except that there was a multitude of other emotions in them too . . . fear was there, as well as frustration and heart-felt pain, jealousy, and a twinge of shame. But desire dominated them, yeah, and motivated them her. As the saying went, she might have worn her heart on her sleeve, and Christ, she'd come to the right room! He'd love her with every ounce of gentle passion his already excited brain could conceive. She would never be sorry . . . that was the important thing, she must never be sorry that she'd come to him!
"You saw them, did you not, Vic? Before everyone!" Her eyes moistened as he handed her the glass and she set it beside her. "Right now they are together in his suite . . . his bed! I seldom am invited there. But not because he does not love me. I am his wife and I know such things. It is because he is sick within himself, Vic Shannon, mentally plagued with his own greatness . . . "
"Stop it," the towering American looming above her charged. "You have not come here to talk of the great El Gallardo and we both know that. Why should we pretend?" He reached down for her hand, drawing her out of the chair up to him. She didn't resist as he enfolded her inside his arms, yet their was still a hesitance and he detected her breathing quickening, the delicate fragrance of her perfume making his brain spin crazily.
Vic kissed her. Her soft lips were warm, eager, but there was a rigid reluctance to her young willow body beneath her immaculate gown. Gently, he smoothed his big hand from between her shoulders downward to the small of her back. A tiny whimper of confusion escaped her lips against his when he teased their hungering softness with his tongue-tip. A lifetime of devout, moral breeding was tormenting her, he believed. She was a virgin to adultery; he'd stake his life on that.
"I am frightened," she whispered, looking up into his face for reassurance.
"I know . . . so am I."
"You? Frightened? You taunt me," she continued to whisper, then leaned up to kiss his lips. "There have been many women in your life, Vic Shannon, but I am not going to think of that. B-Be gentle with me love me tenderly."
"Christ!" he swore under his breath, forgetting immediately and crushing her against him, the length of her supple young curves fitting tightly into the muscular hollows of his body. She gasped warm, sweet-tasting breath into his face when the length of his swelling hardness pressured into the soft resilience of her lower belly. His hands stroked downward over the tautened mounds of her fleshy buttocks, surprised at their fullness as with spread fingers he cupped the roundly ovaled contours, pressuring the urgent heat of her trembling thighs and abdomen tight against him. Her lips opened as if he had touched a secret spring, her searching tongue racing moistly into his mouth to lock with his.
They stood for long moments clinging to each other in a series of passion-building embraces, their roused breathing filling the room. With arms around his neck, her long slender fingers moved caressingly through his longish, gray-blond hair while his big hands brushed and explored the veiled yielding moons of her ass-cheeks through the satiny material until there was no longer a trace of rigidity or reluctance in her young sensuous body.
"How do you say?" she whispered in broken English, taking him unawares. "Make love now . . . fuck me, darling. It is right way?"
A crazy shudder rippled over Shannon at the sound of the lewd word coming from her delicate lips, to say nothing of her blatant plea.
"Who the hell said you couldn't speak English?"
"I learn little from reading books just the dirty words, eh?" She smiled impishly up at him.
He scooped her into his arms and walked to the big canopied bed, lowering her onto it and his own big frame half on top of her. His mouth found hers and he wetly drew her lush lips inside his own then crushed them back against her teeth while his tongue probed insistently at the warm moist sanctuary of her mouth.
"Christ yes, I'm going to fuck you all right," Vic rasped.
"Let us get naked then, darling. Hurry! I want you now before my courage leaves me!" she said and he got back onto his feet to draw her up.
She smiled in flushed excitement as she slipped out of the dress and he began to unbutton his shirt. He could never know what ardent sensations filled her, Lucia thought as she tossed her gown over a chair, then walked to the light switch and turned it off before stripping away her panties and brassiere. She knew that the moon was full and its silvery light would stream in through the windows as she drew open the heavy draperies. All things were more beautiful by moonlight.
She moved back toward the bed and could see him undressing. It was wrong, a mortal sin, but she would not think of that either, not now it was too late. She trembled with the sensual thrill of what she was doing. It would be the first time ever with another man. Briefly, Rafael crossed her mind and she put him out of it with no effort. There was no malice inside her for him either, not anymore, not after tonight with Katryn Casey in front of everyone. Something had been torn forever within her. Yet, she loved him, but not as compellingly at that moment as she did the handsome man who was getting naked before her in the moonlight to bring her pleasurable happiness. He would, she felt certain of that would lead her into gardens of forbidden ecstasy such as she had only dreamed.
She undid her hair and let it fall long down her back before climbing onto the bed, shivering impatiently in her complete nakedness, thrilled and frightened to the very core as she lay back on the silken coverlet feeling more like a young, desired new bride than she ever had in this house of paradise. Her hands crept to the firmness of her nipple-hardened breasts to caress them hedonistically, and then down over the smooth skin of her belly and thighs as she saw him coming toward her in the moonlight.
"Come to me, darling," she whispered passionately.
The view of her naked in the soft candescent glow before the window like a shimmering marble statue of some love goddess had sprung Shannon's long, thick cock into a throbbing hardness. The strain on his groin emphasized the ache his battering there earlier in the day had left with him, but he hardly noticed. His eyes had become accustomed to the pale illumination frosting the bed, and he drank in her curved naked beauty which was like sculpted alabaster to him against the dark silken coverlet.
He moved down over her, kneeling for a moment, and she writhed almost imperceptibly with anticipation, her high-set breasts gently rippling to the movements, her long raven hair fanned out beneath her like a spread velvet cloak. His eyes traced down along the slenderness of her waist to the smooth outward flare of hips, and into the sweep of full, slightly spread thighs, then up between them where the darkened triangle of pubic curls waited for him.
Lucia stretched her arms upward. The waiting would drive her mad! He came down onto her panting and heavy, deliciously crushing her. He said something in English that she did not understand except the one word "fuck", the sound of it making her quiver with sensual delight.
"Please, yes, fuck, fuck!" she begged.
Their mouths locked together and she strained up against him, feeling his thick penis wedged lengthwise beneath her hot squeezing thighs. His mouth moved away hungrily down toward her neck and shoulders, his lips and tongue kissing and licking her flesh on their way to her swelling, erect-nippled breasts.
"Ooooohhhh," she mewled when he began to suck the tiny sensitive tips, and then he bit them with a gentle firmness, raising gasps of unknown mixed pleasure and pain from the depths of her female being. She stroked his hair and felt him moving away, sliding down her trembling body. His warm lips were on her ribs below her breasts and then on her belly. His tongue played in her navel, until it began to trace the thin line of down further below to the cushiony mound of pubic hair! Oh God! Rafael never had done it . . . would he? She wanted him to! Please, please do it. . . ?
He spread her legs and eased between them.
Both shame and wild excitement raced through her as his hands slid under the cheeks of her buttocks, lifting them slightly, and then she felt his hot tongue wetly licking her trembling inner thighs! Her eager loins were suddenly a tumultuous whirlpool of wanton cascading desire.
Shannon stiffened out, grinding the length of his lust-hardened penis down into the thick coverlet, wishing to Christ he could better see the tight little cunt-slit opening up into her soft loins. She was breathing loudly and her hands were still in his hair as her smooth white thighs suddenly spread wider apart for him. He'd been afraid that she would freeze at this approach, but he knew now that she wanted it.
"Y-Yes! Yes, do it, Veek! Please . . . for me . . . ! " she whimpered, her dark fringed loins beginning to squirm impatiently with anticipation at what was to come.
Shannon laid his thumbs on her fleshy cunt lips, the gossamer texture of her silk-like pubic hair an aphrodisiac that he didn't need. She gave a little lurch and moan to the erogenous contact, the latter never really ceasing after that as he spread the fleshy folds revealingly apart.
Lucia Ruiz could no longer think clearly, such was her overwhelming desire for the American male. She felt the cooler air of the room rush in against the moistened inner flesh of her craving sensitive pussy. And then, he dropped his head and was burrowing his face up against her waiting loins, his hungering mouth following downward along the splayed cuntal flesh, fervently kissing, until his tongue began to flick and lave caressingly over the starved love-hole up between her legs.
Even the tiniest muscle of Lucia's sensually fired young body responded to the forbidden rapture the handsome American's exploring tongue was lewdly bringing her, and it was the very lewdness of his loving act which was feeding her rampant desire as much as were the erotic sensations of his lapping tongue. With another man, she would die of shame; with him it was the most beautiful happening of her entire life!
She stroked her hands down from his hair along the rugged jaw-line to inch in around his face until she spread her cuntal lips open for him with abandonly splaying fingers, her hands grazing the masculine shadow of his bristling cheeks. He groaned and drew his thick heated tongue wetly up through the exposed vaginal flanges.
"Ahhhhhh . . . sweet lover! No one has ever done this to me. Only you . . . and I adore it! My darling! You are making me so happy! Ooohhhh, please . . . never stop, never!"
Vic heard her gasping words of sensuous filled joy, heard them and reveled in their lustfully ardent sounds just as he was reveling in smothering his mouth and wildly lashing tongue into the piquant moisture of her uplifted, held-open pussy split. For a moment, he raised his head and gaped down at the flushed raven-fringed lips she held apart before him in her mindless lust, its liquid flesh glistening in colorless hues by moonlight. Mounting, almost painful, spasms of cock-hunger racked his still aching groin and again he pressured his thick, blood-en gorged rod down into the bedding beneath him.
Christ, she was more than a virgin because she'd been introduced then denied, Shannon reasoned, and that was like torturing a starving human with the smell of food without feeding him more than a morsel. But he realized that she wasn't sorry she'd come to him for love, and that was the main thing soaring crazily through his desire-infused skull.
Lucia began to whimper and writhe for more stimulation as he stared at the provocative sight of her finger-spread cunt reflecting the silvery light of its viscid and copious arousal. He wished he could see it better, see the smooth crevice between her gaping white ass-cheeks and the tiny little opening there that was just a darkly puckered circle to him. Her loins raised higher in ardent undulation toward his face, and he lowered his mouth once more into the heat-filled temptation of raw genital flesh, his mind racing with satirist thoughts as he suddenly plunged the full length of tongue for the first time up into the clasping walls of her seething, tight vaginal passage.
Sweet God! That was what she had been waiting for! The feel of his ravaging tongue reaching up into the depths of her vagina to touch her very soul! Nothing had ever been like this! Oh Rafael . . . you worthless nothing! This is love and he my lover!
Lucia moaned out her sensual elation, her gasping and writhing growing more intense as unintelligible words of enchantment dribbled from her parched lips. Vic felt her hands moving back into his hair to clutch and snarl as she pulled his face forcefully into the soft impassioned flesh of her wetly steaming cunt. He worked like a slave with his tongue, sensing the toss of her flailing head as he speared between the seething lips with stabbing slashes up into her throbbing cuntal passage.
She threw her young loins up at him, her ravenous cunt chasing his tongue like an omnivorous mouth, while simultaneously she pressed his face into the vertical split between her gaping thighs, its throat-like vaginal walls opening and closing around his invading tongue with crotch-cannibalism the equal of which Vic Shannon had never dreamed of experiencing. His brain still raced and his cock pulsated like an infected ear. He wanted it all to be perfect for her. . . yeah, and for him, too! Well all of life was a gamble, wasn't it?
He withdrew his tongue and licked upward through her velvety pussy-flesh, flicking its tip in route, circling her tiny hard clitoris; then, sucking up with wide-open lips, he drew the burning inner folds of raging vaginal flesh deep into the hot cavern of his pleasure-giving mouth.
"Oooooooh. Aaaaahhhhhh! Sweet Veek! Darling lover! Forever, forever, do this to me! I love you! I belong to you!" the feverishly intoxicated young wife cried down at him. He felt her trying to guide his mouth back to the tight nibbling oval of her vaginal opening. His own hands swept upward over her belly to the round firmness of her soft, palpitating breasts, cupping and grasping their firm fleshy resilience. His fingers found and rolled their tiny hardened nipples between them as he glued his lips once more to the passion-slippery hole between her legs, then drove his lashing tongue deeply up into her squirming loins.
Uncontrollably to the sensations of carnal pleasure his oral love-making was bringing her. Lucia moaned and purred, her hands flitting from his cheeks to his hair, loving him at that moment as she had no man in all of her young innocent life. He was truly leading her deeply into the garden of forbidden ecstasy, and for this unrivaled rapture she would always be indebted to him . . . And then, she felt him moving, raising up onto his knees, yet his wonderful mouth was not losing contact with her inflamed loins. She could feel his opened lips as if they were fused to the outer folds of her sizzling wet pussy, yet his big body was moving, working its way around in lurid fashion to puzzle her momentarily, until he had turned all the way around and was suddenly up over her!
His intentions struck her then as he placed his knees on either side of her ribs and folded his arms in under her thighs until she felt his fingers once more tugging at her tingling pussy-lips and widely spread buttocks. Oh God! Not that she had never thought of doing such a thing or felt the desire to when her passion was great, but -but. . . yes, it had been the association with depravity and the shame of that. But there was no depravity between her handsome lover and herself, nor was there the slightest vestige of shame any longer! There were only the maddening sensations of pure physical arousal their lusting hunger for each other was producing beautiful basic lust that was frantically consuming her loins and belly . . . and how else could she show him her love?
Never had she been this close with her eyes to a man's genitals, and almost immediately nothing else filled her mind but the sight of his hardened cock and semen-laden balls hanging heavily above her face in the soft pearl-white light. She stared upward at the long thick hardness, her mouth seeming to water from unknown emotions that were causing shivers of licentious fervor to race along her naked spine. She seldom had touched even Rafael's penis and now she reached up to curl her fingers around the pulsating cock, feeling Vic lurch and groan into the fiery liquid slit of her sizzling pussy. She began to stroke his blood-engorged member with an instinctive knowledge, working its heavy foreskin back and forth, watching the hairy sac of his bloated testicles sway luridly to her obscene ministrations. His laden balls felt heavenly inside her grasping hand, full and throbbing with the pent-up sperm he longed to spurt into her desirable body.
Lucia raised her head and drew his heavily veined penis downward, her impassioned eyes straining in the half-light to feast on the purplish bulbous head when she drew back the foreskin to the fullest. She knew now that she had to, that she would never be fulfilled nor forgive herself if she denied this moment. She pressed her hot, moist lips to the underside of the swollen shaft where the glans joined the rest of his penis in a mystery of her of dimpled, spongy flesh. Wild impulses of frantic craving ravaged her whirling brain. She drew his stiffened cock down further, slowly moving her gradually opening lips toward its tip, mewls of sensual intoxication escaping them until they were wide apart and slipping over the sleek rubbery head, until her ovaled lips were clasping hotly around the invading shaft just behind the coronal ridge. Feverishly, she ran her eager tongue up and down the smooth, sensitive underside, feeling his burgeoning penis throb and pulsate to her experimental caresses. Then, she tasted the sweet pungent tang of his sperm oozing from the tiny slit at its tip and she wormed her tongue's little point teasingly into the narrow aperture.
Oh dear God, such ecstasy she had only dreamed of! Her hands moved to enclose his cum-inflated balls in their small palms as minute explosions of blinding passion went on and on inside her entire young body. Then he began to move gently up and down, fucking his distended cock in and out of her hungrily locked lips in a slow cadence to his ravishing tongue spearing up into the flame-filled flesh of her burning cunt below.
How could she ever know or stand any other man after this exotic night? They would be shells next to her Vic, even Rafael . . . especially Rafael! But she did not want to think of that, to think of anything except her lover's thick hardened penis filling her mouth as he fucked his pistoning manhood into her open mouth. She began to suck on his swollen cock, trying to take more and more of his plundering penis greedily into the salivating cavern until it began to reach nearly to her throat. She could hear his erotic sucking sounds as he slavered with obscene dedication at her insanely pressuring loins. His big, gentle hands were clutching the rounded ovals of her ass-cheeks, lifting her loins up to him when he burrowed his jabbing tongue deeper and deeper up into her ravenously clasping cunt-walls.
Lucia's vagina was an inferno of devouring flames, their rapturous licking heat reaching out to her farthest bodily points from the maddening cuntal core between her widespread thighs. And then, she sensed his finger caressing the tiny dimpled circle of her snug anal inlet and a new erotic speculation raced into her brain. Would he? A tightness strapped at her belly and her naked breasts began to throb as if their tiny hardened nipples would burst. Suddenly there was a little sensuous pain as he pushed the finger inside her tight little anus, and she felt it worming thickly right up into her virginal rectum to the palm of his big warm hand cupping the widely-spread globes of her writhing buttocks.
"Oooohhhhh," she moaned around his ever-growing shaft in her mouth, her tongue pausing abruptly as his lust-inciting invasion of her nether-channel caused the wild pressure inside her soaring loins to whirl toward an impelling cataclysm. She felt the intense heat of his sucking mouth locked tight to the blood-tingling lips of her pussy, his depth-charging tongue swirling and lashing her throbbing vaginal walls in tempo with his stiffened finger lewdly fucking up into her excited rectum. Moaning incessantly, she again began to nurse his pulsing thick penis with a skill born of rampant, animalistic desire, sensing her cheeks hollowing and swelling as she laboriously pulled at his bludgeoning penis.
Never had the young deprived wife known such overwhelming sensations of shameless lust, for she realized now the ultimate moment she was striving for. She wanted his cum this lover of lovers who was fucking his powerfully hardened cock into her mouth! Ah yes, she had to have that to taste, to drink, to live with forever! Please, cum for me. my darling! Shoot your milk-white nectar into my mouth! she prayed within, her ovaled lips clasped tightly around the palpitating, blood-filled head, her tongue working tirelessly to tease his orgasm from the greedy grasp of his cum-laden balls.
Oh, God, please cum . . . cum. sweet darling! she wanted to cry out as suddenly in the depths of her loins the chaotic spasms of a passion-fired orgasm began. She squeezed and milked at his brimming testicles with both hands, then drew her fingernails gently beneath them as she-strained to the urgency of her own climax.
I'm cumming . . . dimming . . . ccccuuummmiinngggggg! she wanted to scream out, but could only whimper loudly around the raging thick rod she was sucking desperately. Then, he cursed in English, his pelvis jerking not an inch from her contorted, cock-stuffed face, the huge glans expanding in her hungrily sucking mouth! She knew and reached up for his buttocks, forcing her mouth farther up onto the shuddering rod until its tip brushed into her throat, and then it came! His wildly jerking penis shot into her throat in pumping spurts of teeming, cream-like liquid, gush after gush of his sweet acid-tasting semen, accompanied by the unbridled convulsions of her hips as her own cumming erupted in a blinding volcanic explosion of shattering release deep within her tongue-spread loins. She moaned out around the swollen rod of spending love-flesh in her mouth as again and again he spewed his hot issues of viscous cum deep into her throat moaned and sucked while her Adam's apple moved up and down to her swallowing of his fiery, lustful sperm flooding into the trembling softness of her wanting belly.
Later, they got into the bed and just lay there in each other's arms, kissing and stroking and whispering.
"I will stay until just before the dawn breaks, darling," she said, reaching down between them to fondle the flaccidness of his exhausted penis. "How many times can you fuck me in five hours?"
Shannon laughed and shook his head, still unable to believe that it had, and still was, happening. "I am not sure, but let us begin and you keep score," he replied in his excellent Spanish.
CHAPTER FIVE
Vic Shannon found himself grateful for all the sleep he had gotten on the planes in route to Majorca; he hadn't slept a single wink the entire night. Not that he regretted its loss he wished the night could've gone on indefinitely, never ended, though his enervated body was indebted for the breather. He actually trembled when he walked. After Lucia had left him during the gray light of dawn, he had gone into the shower and spent a half-hour beneath it trying to unwind, but he still couldn't sleep; his brain had been too filled with her. Now, moving around the grounds and watching the magnificent Mediterranean sunrise, he only wished that he could feel half as elegant as the new day looked, but she had kissed him that last time at the door and whispered good-bye, her onyx eyes saying all the rest. It was over!
They had found the real thing, that rarity of rarities, but it couldn't be. Twice she'd cried in his arms and he'd kissed the tears away, then made love to her again made love to her how many times? No one had kept score after all. It was over, yet each of them would live forever in the other's mind . . . like some goddamned romantically noble tale. Christ! It was ridiculous, but the word divorce didn't appear in her dictionary; nothing could come of it, and neither would ever know the voluptuousness of her warm naked curves going wantonly wild in his arms again. It was over! Passed! Done! Shit, he almost wished that it'd never happened . . . not really he didn't, no . . . not really.
Shannon wandered aimlessly around the luxuriant dew-dampened gardens, finally moving toward some out-buildings. The harsh sound of voices attracted him toward what was apparently a bullring, no doubt where El Gallardo kept his wits and skills keen. Vic saw the men on horseback inside the barrera fence as he approached.
"Olef" a voice shouted, and when he looked over there was a young man with a cape egging on an ugly, many-kiloed bull and attempting shaky passes with readied, ungracefully planted feet.
Shannon couldn't help but grin at the young man's inelegance at the art, though he knew that his own would be no better before a thousand pounds or more of brute-animal set on destroying him. He smiled as his mind continued to work. Lucia dominated it, but Katryn Casey was her counterpart annoying it. Something beyond the fact that the blonde lovely was laying the great one ate at him and had off and on since last night at the dinner table, yet he couldn't pinpoint it. Carlos Ruiz had been the dominating factor there, overshadowing the pleasanter surroundings. Christ! He wasn't thinking well, anyway.
The young man jiggled and taunted with the capa before the bull. Lowering its head and snorting, the beast pawed at the sandy earth, its sharp horns reflecting the brilliantly rising sun of the new day. The powerful hump of morrilla muscle in the animal's neck arose in a crest, proving it was disturbed. It was that, his tossing muscle, that must be tired, and was accomplished by the picadors and placing of the banderillas so that the brute would lower its head for the matador to kill the bull properly, Vic knew, his mind gradually becoming engrossed with the burlesque before him.
Christ, what a way to make a living. The torero would kill by putting a sword in from the front, high up between the bull's shoulder blades, his body deathly close to those vicious horns . . . and that was what bullfighting was all about. The particular type of courage it took Vic knew he didn't possess.. . or was it a paranoia like Rafael Ruiz was afflicted with? No. He had met other matadors, very fine and brave young toreros both proud and devoted to their art. There was only one El Gallardo, and now he felt for certain that the man was sick . . . and how the hell could he keep that out of his biography?
The bull's tormentor continued to challenge it with the cape. Laughing voices echoed from the men astride horses holding testing pics erect in their hands and braced in the stirrups of their saddles. The young man assumed a get-away stance and the bull charged the cape. Heroically, the would-be torero tried to stand his ground, then made several steps of amateur bravado before running like a frightened chicken to leap up and over the fence. Shannon laughed. The lad wasn't quite ready for the grande entrada, as were few who idolized the matadors.
Damn, what the hell was it about Katryn? Something he had seen which recorded at the time in his mind, but refused to reveal itself now. The young man leaped back into the arena and began goading the bull once more before Shannon's half-seeing eyes. He, himself, could perform a more graceful veronica, Vic mused, though he never had tried. The voices praised and he watched the faces as he thought of the curvaceous American girl. He was hardly aware of the horsemen guiding their mounts from the ring. Again, the young man teased the bull and it charged, the sounds of its heavy hooves filling his ears.
Suddenly, Vic remembered as the handsome brute-animal brought itself around in a minimum of space and the young man again raced from the ring to follow the others. Of course! It was the way she had . . .
A flash of lights burst like a cannonade in Vic Shannon's skull! He clutched at the top of the barrera but his fingers had no supporting strength! He knew his knees were sagging, that all of him was giving way beneath whatever it was that had happened to his head! Long slivers of white-hot fire stabbed through his skull as he felt himself folding helplessly, and then . . . there was nothing . . .
. . . His ears thundered with the sound of stampeding hooves! Shannon forced open his bleared eyes to the sight of an ugly half-ton animal's killer-face glaring at him from a distance. He saw its death-dealing horns manacingly glimmering in the sunlight as the animal's right hoof pawed the earth and the horns lowered. A bellowing wheeze came out of the massive beast when it began to move forward, picking up momentum toward him, its horns lowered like the cowcatcher of a steam locomotive!
Whatever inspired him, the stunned American did it, rolling to one side as the bull charged and missed his rolling body by inches to swing tight and come around once more! Shannon tried to get up onto all-fours but his arms refused to bear his weight. He sprawled like a paralyzed drunk in the sand, groveling toward the fence that he was never going to reach! Maybe he'd realized the feeling before, but there was no question this time . . . he was scared, Vic reasoned frantically, scared shitless!
Again, the snorting black monstrosity lumbered down on him in a fierce charge, its head lowered with needle-point horns set like a phalanx of razor sharp lances! Shannon took the only course, wishing to God he was half his size as he rolled tightly against the base of the fence and tried to become a part of it! He waited for the spearing rip of horn to pierce him as the bull came so close that its acrid smell burned into his nostrils! He couldn't breathe, didn't dare when the slashing horns collided with the fence in an ear-shattering roar not six-inches above his prostrate body! And it wasn't over. The bastard backed up and tried again, swinging its head wildly while it continued to swoop at him with scooping horn . . . and then Shannon felt it like a hot searing blade ripping across his thigh!
Desperately, the half-stunned writer rolled toward the animal's hooves to get out of range of the horns, even as he did it, knowing the brute had only to step on him and it was all over anyway, but then . . . then, something else happened!
A voice cried out in traditional goading!
"Hagh! Hagh! Toro! Hagh!"
The menacing shadow above Vic Shannon suddenly swung away, moved off until there was nothing between him and the morning sun; he sat up slowly with his head still reeling and with that sound of feminine voice ringing loudly in his ears. He saw her in black toreadors and white blouse manipulating a capa with all the gracefulness the art ever demanded. Her long flaxen hair shown like spun gold as she set herself and performed one of the most beautiful veronica's he'd ever seen!
Then, she ran toward him while the bull raced to the opposite end of the ring, came around and just stood there as if it had conquered all foes because there was nothing else in the range of its vision to charge.
"Are you all right, Vic?" Katryn gasped, dropping onto her knees to slide the last several inches toward him.
"Well . . . with the exception of wanting to collapse plus not bleed to death, I guess I am," he said, managing his lopsided grin.
"Oh God, he ripped you, darling!" she exclaimed, leaning over his thigh. "But it isn't.. . no, it's not too deep," she added, examining the wound through his torn trousers and looking close. "Maybe I can bridge it with tape if you can get up to my room. Can you make it, love?"
Shannon gaped at her. He couldn't help but think what might have happened if she hadn't appeared on the scene at the precise moment she had. He said: "Where is that sonovabitch, anyway?"
"On the other side. He won't bother us now, don't worry; he can't even see us."
"W-Where did you learn to handle a capa like that?" Vic questioned, moving onto his knees. Christ, he was groggy.
"Rafael taught me. . . but that's hardly important now. Please, let's try to get upstairs where we can fix this gash in your thigh."
"Is it bad?"
"Bad enough. It should have stitches really, but I think I can bridge it with adhesive, Vic. It's very clean."
"Okay. Just give me a hand, will you?"
She did, but the moment he was on his feet the blood began to spurt from Shannon's thigh.
"No good," Katryn said, her eyes on the gushing wound. "It's worse than I thought, darling. We'll get you outside of the barrera and I'll go for help . . . "
Vic felt like a child leaning on her and he was getting dizzy. Then he heard other sounds behind them . . . the men who had been in the ring . . . their voices and Katryn's growing fainter and fainter as suddenly he was lifted weightlessly, and that was all he remembered for awhile . . .
Vic awakened lying on his back and staring at a white ceiling, the pungent smell of antiseptics strong in his nostrils. For a moment, that and soft voices were all he was aware of, until his thigh began to throb and smart like hell.
He saw the white goateed face working over him and remembered it from an introduction the night before. He was Doctor Litri, Gallardo's personal medico. It all came back the bull, Katryn, the rip in his thigh; he was in the enfermeria, that necessary operating room attached to all bullrings.
Then Vic saw Katryn helping, and raised his head to catch a glimpse of his wound, but instead was startled to see that he was naked from the waist down and no covering had even been draped over his genitals not exactly standard hospital procedure.
Katryn took hold of his hand when she saw he'd come out of it. "How do you feel, love?"
"Like swimming the channel."
She smiled that radiant glow her long flaxen hair emphasized, then winked as she picked up a towel with her free hand and draped it over his loins. "That's to save you embarrassment I've had a good eyeful anyway."
"Was it worth it?"
Her smile broadened. "Could be," she said, as Doctor Litri cleared his throat and spoke in English:
"It is not a bad cornada, Senor Shannon, though I have taken some twenty-four stitches. The wound was clean, not too deep but the horn-tip grazed the Gluteal Artery which is why you bled so profusely. I would advise that you stay off the leg as much as possible for a few days, though I have sutured the artery wall. It should give you no trouble except for the discomfort."
Vic raised to his elbows. "Thanks, Doctor," he said as Katryn let free of his hand very suddenly and Shannon saw El Gallardo's slender frame burst through the swinging door with Senor Villelta behind him.
"What is it? What has happened?" the handsome torero questioned tensely. "Is he all right, Litri? Well tell me . . . ! "
The doctor did, along with Katryn wedging in a word here and there while Villelta was trying to keep the matador from becoming anymore upset than he already was. Shannon sat silent and feeling once more like a kid who had injured himself after getting into mischief though the dull throb behind his right ear, which he'd forgotten with all the rest, reminded him of the truth. Should he tell him what really happened?
"I am amazed, Shannon, with your knowledge of bulls that this could happen to you," Gallardo said, perturbed and making no attempt to hide it. "How? Please explain."
"An accident," Vic heard his own reply, remembering tomorrow's corrida and not wanting to be the cause of upsetting the "genius" any further, though he would've liked to slap him in the mouth. "I-I was sitting on the barrera watching the bull being tested, slipped off and stunned myself in the fall." Vic managed a sheepish smile. "If it had not been for Senorita Casey I might be much worse off then I am."
"And I just happened along," Katryn put in. "I couldn't sleep and thought I would go down and watch the testing."
El Gallardo shook his handsome young head, then smiled. "You, Senor Shannon, are a very fortunate man, fortunate that I have been instructing Katryn in some basics. Ah, but all is well with you and that is what is important." He sighed heavily. "Now, shall we enjoy some breakfast."
* * *
The Case de Paraiso housed others who had not slept well and rose early to the picturesque spectacular of the Mediterranean sunrise: Monica Christie was one of these. The curvy teenage employee had awakened several times from fitful sleep throughout the night, her young mind ever tormented by the thought of Rafael making love to Katryn Casey that blonde hitch, and sure as hell he was . . he was!
God, she just couldn't stand it; she really loved him so, even knowing that she meant nothing to him. She'd been a novelty for him in the beginning, younger and fresher than the others, but that had soon worn thin after the many times she'd fucked and sucked him; he'd simply used her until she had become about as novel as a frayed muleta. The next step would be out for her, the long-haired girl had no doubts about that. Katryn Casey's arrival at the villa had destroyed any hope she might have had, and then last night right there in front of everyone in the dining room kissing her with even Lucia looking on. God! She was thankful not to have seen it, but one of the servants had whisperingly filled her in with all the heart-sickening details.
Monica had been watching from a hallway, hoping Rafael would return to his own suite where she could find some excuse to go to him, but the sight of Katryn sitting right up near the head of the table by Mr. Shannon and close to Rafael had set her blood to boiling. Somehow, she had to destroy Katryn Casey, but how?
That was what had led her to snitch the passkey ring from its place in the butler's pantry and go to Katryn's room. Maybe she would find something amongst her belongings . . . but then, Mr. Shannon had come along and practically caught her entering the American girl's room. Monica thought she'd covered pretty well; he hadn't seemed suspicious. But it was later when she'd gone back to search through the blonde girl's things that she'd stumbled across it.
At first, the teenager had wanted to run right then and show it to Gallardo, but second thoughts had awakened her to the uselessness of that. It was not important enough, whatever Katryn's reasons were, to alter Rafael's opinion of her. Didn't she know him well enough for that, though? All he was interested in was the beauty of Katryn's body the hole up between the blonde bitch's voluptuous legs, and how well she could suck his conceited prick!
So in the end, Monica had gone to her own room with the bit of discovered information locked in her brain, threw herself across the bed and cried until sleep had lulled her for awhile. When she'd awakened some two hours later there had been a misery deep up inside her young vagina that she laid to the raping of that Jamie bastard's huge cock, and that had helped to keep her awake for a long time. Finally, she had undressed and soaked in the tub until the ache between her legs was gone, and she felt sleepy enough to try it again.
It was dawn when she'd arisen and dressed, trying not to think of anything except the beauty of the morning. She had wandered toward the sounds coming from the bullring and saw Mr. Shannon watching over the barrera . . . and then, suddenly moving with obvious stealth behind him, Carlos Ruiz!
The hazel-eyed teenager had seen it all, the blow on the head with what looked like the butt-end of a pistol, Shannon crumpling to the ground, then the swarthy fat man dragging his unconscious body inside the arena where the men had left the angered bull. Monica had started to scream just as Katryn put in her appearance, the blonde's bravery surprising her more than a little, to say nothing of the skill she'd shown with the cape.
It would have been too much to hope that the bull might catch the green-eyed slut on one of its ugly horns, but Monica had wished for the blonde woman's death, she realized now, as she moved toward the broad back of the obese man standing near one of the fountains and looking off toward the vast deep blue of the sea. A little shiver rippled up the teenager's spine at the thought of her intentions. Maybe, as her nanny used to tell her, there was more than one way to skin a cat after all.
"Senor Ruiz?" she said, the sound of her voice startling him.
He swung around quickly for a man of his bulk. God, he must weigh eighteen stone, and he wasn't all that tall.
"Huh . . . ? Oh, you surprised me," Carlos Ruiz said, his heavy-jowled face breaking into an oily grin when he saw that it was his brother's sexy young secretary. Her ripe, youthful body had very much appealed to him since he first laid eyes on it, and even more so now after what Jaimie had told him happened yesterday at the old mill. In fact, he had been entertaining some lecherous thoughts of his own ever since.
"I-I would like to talk with you, senor," Monica said, not knowing quite how she should go about it.
His smile remained, his dark popping eyes raking over her hungrily. It was the young ones like this he enjoyed the most, but he preferred them virginal, though that would never stand in the way in her case. What a delicious shapely creature she was, and to think that Jaime had shoved his low-bred peon-cock into her, not to mention what the others had done.
"What is it, my dear?" he said, his lubricous-toned words sounding to Monica as if they had been coated with goose-grease.
She hesitated for a moment, then determined, said: "I saw it all this morning, senor . . . everything."
Carlos Ruiz' smile disappeared like the light from a current-cut electric bulb. His dark thyroidal eyes narrowed, dangerously. He cleared his throat. "What are you trying to say, girl?"
"I have said it. I saw it all this morning at the bullring," Monica repeated, keeping her voice at a level that only he could hear. "You struck the American on the back of the head with a pistol, then dragged him into the arena."
The fat man sensed himself paling. So . . . what was this, blackmail? The little whore! He fought to recover his smile, but knew that it was thin and false looking. "What sort of hallucination is this . . . ? "
"Never mind the pretense, Senor Ruiz," she interrupted. "It is not necessary; I have told no one what I saw."
The fat man studied her comely young face, seeing something in the round hazel eyes that was suggesting an alliance, perhaps, the thought intriguing him. "What are you getting at, young lady?"
"I-I want you to help me get Katryn Casey out and away from Paraiso."
Slowly, Carlos Ruiz' smile became genuine -genuine and repulsive, Monica thought to the cold clamminess it caused at the base of her spine. "And from Rafael also, I would gather," he said, his tone lewdly suggestive. "Well now, we might be able to make a bargain, my dear, but what do I get out of it?"
"My silence," she answered him firmly.
His eyebrows raised and he smoothed a fat, stubby hand over his bald pate. "That is all?"
"I would say it was a great deal under the circumstances, senor," Monica snapped.
The fat man started to speak, then hesitated when he saw others strolling through the garden toward them. He spoke quickly then and in a subdued voice: "It is not safe to talk here. Come to Calle Impenta, number 72 in Old Town Palma later this morning. Upstairs. There is but one door, you cannot miss it. There we can talk without fear of being overheard. Agreed?"
Monica thought for a long moment, but she had already made her decision when she approached him; he was the only weapon she had. She nodded. "I will be there, senor."
CHAPTER SIX
Rafael's suggestion over breakfast came quite unexpectedly, but welcomed indeed to Katryn, though she tried not to appear overly exuberant. She had been wondering how to get Vic Shannon off to one side where they could talk without creating suspicion, which was basically the reason she hadn't been able to sleep after leaving Rafael's suite around dawn. The night of so-called lovemaking with the supercilious genius had been frustrating enough, but then to see Lucia coming out of Vic's room in the gray hours had really upset her. Not that she had any right to be, Katryn realized, but nevertheless she was she was downright jealous, dammit.
"If Litri approves and Senor Shannon feels up to it after his two hectic experiences on our island," El Gallardo said with the air of an apologetic host proposing consolement for his calamitious guest, "I suggest you take one of the speed-launches, Katryn, and run him around Palma Bay . . . show him some of our marvelous beauty from the sea."
Katryn looked to Shannon, her green-eyed smile a question.
"Sounds fine to me," the writer answered it, "if Doctor Litri agrees."
"Providing you do not over exert the leg, senor, the wound should offer you no problem," the goateed physician replied.
So, it had come off easier than she could ever have planned it, Katryn thought, sitting beside the big fair-haired American who had wanted to handle the controls while she navigated, but it was impossible to carry on a conversation above the din of the powerful marine engine. She had pointed rather than shouted once they were out off by a finger of rugged peninsula from Paraiso, and he maneuvered the craft into a small inlet with high, jagged cliffs of rock fringed atop with scraggly pines.
It was peacefully deserted, the protected water still and crystal clear. Vic cut the engine back until they were down to a trolling speed and Katryn pointed to a small opening half way up in the wall of rock.
"That was a smuggler's cave used by pirates in the fifteenth century," she told him. "It's huge once you are inside, and not as hard to get to as it looks from here. When that leg heals we should climb up one day."
"Yeah. We'll have to do that," Vic agreed, wondering if she'd led him all the way into the cove just to point out a cave entrance. And then, she said:
"Cut the engine for a few minutes, will you, Vic? I-I want to talk."
Shannon did, her request more in keeping with what he considered logical reasoning for this little side-trip. He leaned back against the red vinyl upholstery. She wasn't looking at him, but rather, down at her lap where she was toying nervously with long-nailed fingers. Christ, she was a vivacious girl, he thought, and he owed her one hell of a lot for saving his ass from that goddamned bull . . .
"I-I don't know how to go about this, Vic Shannon, but I need you on my side," she said softly, still not looking directly up at him.
The statement struck Shannon as peculiar. "Are we choosing up sides?" His tilted grin became evident. "What's the game. Miss Casey?"
Now she looked at him, her deep-green eyes searching his, "That's part of it . . . My name isn't Casey it's Katryn Van Leyden . . .and I'm not American. I'm Dutch, born in and a citizen of the Republic of South Africa, though I did spend the last eight years in California where I went to high school and college before coming to Spain."
She was studying him closely, as if watching to see how he was going to take all of this enlightenment. So far, it meant little to Shannon, except that he could see no reason for her camouflage, and it did clear up another little puzzle for him.
"I'm not surprised," he said, the slanted grin ever present. "I had my doubts about your Yankee roots, but it was hardly any of my affair."
"You did? Why?" Katryn pressed, astonished.
"Well, oddly enough, your table manners." He laughed when her lovely blonde head leaned to one side in confusion. "They weren't quite Yankee enough, so to speak, as uncouth to the extent of my own. Last night at the dinner table, mine stood out like a sore thumb to me. Americans cut with their knife then lay it across the dinner plate and transfer the fork from left to right hand to pick up the food, shovel-fashion. Europeans invariably hold the two utensils throughout the course, knife in right hand and fork in left. They also tend to place the food on the back of the fork's tines with delicate knife maneuvers, eliminating the American shovel-routine. And when I saw that you, a fellow American, was following the more acceptable European approach, it struck me as rather odd; table habits, if they are polite and acceptable, are not something we think necessary to change just for conforming sake."
Katryn merely gaped at him. Finally, she managed: "Well...well I'll be damned. Sherlock Holmes had nothing on you, Senor Shannon. Though with eight years in the States I might have picked up their eating habits . . . "
"But you didn't." He laughed lightly. "Which is neither here nor there, as we Uncle Sams like to say." His rugged face grew more concerned. "Why the alias, Katryn? that is, if you want to tell me . . . "
"I do! I want to tell you everything, Vic," she cut him short, her slender tanned hand reaching over to lightly touch his knee. "I-I don't know what to do next, or if I should go on with it . . . Oh God, I'm only confusing you the more, aren't I?"
That was putting it mildly, the writer thought, thoroughly baffled. "Look, why don't you just start from the beginning?"
She nodded, running the tiny tip of her pink tongue over delicately glossed lips. "My father, Dirk Van Leyden, was a diamond smuggler. For years, he was connected with the Ruiz smuggling ring. Do you know about that?"
"Yes. That is, I knew smuggling had been a family trade for generations, but nothing more than that."
"Well, my father was a part of that so-called trade, handling the transport of diamonds from South Africa up to Morocco," Katryn went on. "Their movement from there to here I'm not certain about, though it would be comparatively simple. But from Majorca I know they funnel to many sources throughout Europe and the United States, and right under customs' noses. And I even know how that's accomplished, but destroying their damned operation is never going to give me the satisfaction I want . . . or bring back my father."
She dropped her head to hide the tears moistening her eyes and Shannon waited, trying to categorize all she had told him so far. He'd noticed from the beginning that she'd spoken of her father in past tense, which could mean but one thing: He wasn't around any longer.
"They had Daddy killed . . . murdered," the blonde girl said in a soft husky voice. "Almost six-months ago a Bantu broke into our house at night and chopped him up horribly with a machete. He was a huge black man, Gana, the woman who cooked for us, told me when I went back right after it happened. Of course, the monster wasn't caught, and after looking through my father's things, I could see where the Ruiz family had been cheating him out of his shares. Daddy was very accurate with records. He also kept a secret journal and from that I learned everything. He'd foolishly let them know that if they didn't pay him what he had coming he would go the authorities with the whole operation . . . "
Her voice trailed off and Vic waited while she touched at her eyes with a facial tissue. The plot was thickening intriguingly; what had held little interest for him at first was weaving into a fascinating story, some of which was falling into place logically before she told it. He was familiar enough with the politics of the South African republic to know that apartheid was the universal political policy, and that the native black Bantus outnumbered the white dominating minority better than three to one, though they were allowed no civil rights. Never a healthy situation at best.
When she raised her misted green-eyes to him again, Vic Shannon said: "So Katryn Van Leyden, alias Miss Casey, set out to even the score with the Ruiz family, maybe even collect what's owing to her father if possible." She said nothing and he continued. "To make a long story short, she decided that her abundant God-given charms would be her chief asset in getting into the inner circles; hence, the romance with El Gallardo; am I warm, doll?"
Her smooth cheeks flushed through sun-tinted skin. "You're sizzling, Sherlock."
"Well . . . at least it's consoling to know you're not really gone on that ego maniac," Vic said, eyeing her suggestively.
"Would it make a difference to you if I were?" she immediately picked him up.
"Let's say that I hate to see a beautiful young girl throw herself away on a man when it obviously can come to nothing," Vic replied, knowing it wasn't exactly what she wanted to hear, but Lucia was still too fresh in his mind to draw any new cards.
"Oh? And what makes you so damned sure nothing could come of it?" she snapped right back, surprising him, the edge of her tone razor-keen. "Did Lucia tell you that last night, or should I say this morning, before she left your bed?"
Oooo . . . he'd touched the hereditary female sore-spot, and gotten a beautiful parry in return; yet he couldn't help but grin. "Bien louche, "he complimented in French. "Score one for your side."
"Never mind. I'm not trying to be clever, and I only saw her by accident, but she didn't see me," Katryn said, looking off at nothing as if they were enjoying a lovers' tiff and waiting for him to make up. When he didn't speak, she added: "Frankly, I couldn't believe it, if you want to know the truth, with that goddamned 'holier than thou' manner of hers!"
"Okay," Vic clipped. "Shall we drop Lucia now and get back to me being on your side? Or would you rather call it off and we skip back to Paraiso and tell everyone we had a great good time?"
Katryn felt like an ass. She had no right to assume the attitude she had and knew it. And she really did want and need him on her side. She made a humble little smile and said: "I-I'm sorry, Vic. Please forgive me . . . I had no right . . . "
"It never happened," he interrupted, grinning as he took her hand. "Now for the record, baby, you're playing with dynamite. I don't know whether you've figured it out yet, but Carlos Ruiz is the man you have to reckon with. I doubt if Gallardo ever knew your father existed. His entire world is the arena and his own greatness."
"I know," she agreed. "Daddy even mentioned Carlos' name in the journal he kept, and remarked that he didn't trust him. Later, he wrote that Carlos Ruiz might well try to kill him once he made his demands and threat of exposing the whole operation. Not two weeks after that entry, Daddy was murdered."
Her logic was more than a little bit well founded, Shannon concurred. But whatever she hoped to gain was still way the hell beyond him. She'd apparently intended to somehow get at the fat man through scoring with Gallardo and making the family circle, but then what? And that was what Vic asked her.
The voluptuous blonde shook her golden, long-haired head, confusion written all over her enchanting young face. "God, I don't know, Vic! That's where I am right now, and why I'm pouring out my heart to you." She still held his hand, and was clinging to it like a small child lost in the woods and wanting to be led out. "If you want to know the truth, I hate like hell to think I've given myself to that that rabbit-paced bullfighter for nothing!"
Vic couldn't help but laugh at that one.
"Don't tell me his sexual prowess isn't all that's to be desired?" he teased.
"Shit!" she spat. "Excuse my vulgarity, but I hate to even think of it, and it's gone on for nearly a month now, ever since he fought in Madrid where I chanced to meet him." She leaned toward Shannon, her sensuous eyes pleading. "You've just got to help me, darling . . . otherwise, I'm going to let the next bull you fall in front of really tear you up."
Vic laughed again, then seriously began to unfold his side of the tale, from the moment he'd landed yesterday until this morning when he was slugged from behind. He didn't even spare Monica's part in the foray, to which Katryn had gasped in horrified disbelief.
"Oh Vic, that poor girl! My God, I had no idea Carlos Ruiz was such a a monster!"
"He's that all right, baby, and then some," the big American agreed. "Which ought to tell you something, and that's get out of here! Just forget your daddy's shares, as you put it. Go to the metro police and tell them everything you know; they're the best way you have of getting even for your father's death. And incidentally, you said the diamonds are smuggled into different countries right under customs' noses. How, Katryn?"
Now it was her turn to smile. "This was in Daddy's journal, too. I have it all tucked away in a safe deposit box for future evidence," she told him, shifting in the seat, the black toreadors clinging to her long shapely legs and rounded hips like a silken layer of skin. "Have you ever seen the Majorcan pearls made?" He shook his head negatively. "Well, that's another little trip we'll have to make, doll. But anyway, it is entirely a synthetic pearl, made by painting layers, coats of formulized material one on top of the other. The secret of this formula has been in the Ruiz family for over a century."
She paused and Vic pressed. "Well, go on. Don't leave me with a cliff-hanger."
"It's so simple when you stop and think what I've told you, Sherlock," she said. "The diamonds are coated with the pearl formula . . . several layers or more until they look exactly like a pearl. Maybe one of two will be concealed in a particular neck-less or bracelet, Daddy wrote, but, of course, he didn't know their destinations or methods of transportation and handling, but that's only incidental anyway."
"Well I'll be damned," Vic said softly, "I'll be damned! What a smooth operation."
They talked further, the main topic being Katryn's best move. She just couldn't suddenly up and leave, especially before tomorrow's corrida. And she did want to see Gallardo fight; he was so beautiful to watch in the arena!
"Monday, I can pretend that I have to fly to the mainland for clothes or something," she said.
"What about your own things? You certainly can't take them all with you without arousing suspicion?" Shannon reminded.
"The devil with them! At this point, I just want out, Vic. Like you say, I'm in over my head. But I have one consolation: Rafael won't be in any lusting mood tonight, not before the corrida. His performance in Palma means too much to him."
"Ooohhh, that's too bad, honey. And I know you were all set for whatever it is he turns on for you . . . "
"Go to hell, Vic Shannon!" the curvaceous blonde exclaimed, trying to climb up onto him playfully and slap his face, her own caught in a half-smile along with a warmth she was feeling for the man beside her. He tried to protect himself with covering arms as he cried: "Remember, I'm an invalid! A bull gored me! Mercy! Mercy!"
"I'll give you mercy, you bastard! Start this damned engine and let's get out of here before I drown you, you uncouth Yankee . . . ! "
* * *
Monica moved along the sun-denied alleys of Old Town Palma amongst the maze of tourists on every side. They were streets which had been constructed a thousand and more years ago, winding ways with thin stairs leading upward and never-ending little shops that had once held even the splendors from Cathay. Now, they were littered with over-priced trash for the tourist; not all, but too many.
Her young mind was a million miles from the spellbinding history surrounding her. She had moved along these narrow, alley-like streets a hundred times. That the Moors had developed them centuries before meant nothing to her revengefully obsessed brain. She raised her teenage head to glance at the street name, then moved into the narrower lane. At number 72 she saw the tile-laid staircase and climbed its steepness. At the top the darkened, stale-smelling gloom brought her up short for a moment, until she saw the door.
It opened only a particle to her knock and she looked up at the shining black face. The blazing eyes and gleaming teeth against their almost glistening background of black skin gave her a shocking start. There were not that many black people on Majorca.
The door moved inward and she waited hesitantly. "Senor Ruiz?" the teenager managed, realizing the tremendous height of the man. He had to be nearly seven feet tall!
"In there, Missy," he said in a voice that rumbled English like an earthquake. "Go ahead, Missy. Walk right in."
Monica did, if only to leave behind the massive black man. But the moment she pressed opened the door, the young hazel-haired girl saw Carlos Ruiz seated behind a small desk where velvet-covered cases of pearls were open before him.
"Ah, Monica, my dear, you have arrived," he said, closing the individual cases and standing before her like something out of a fairytale a fairytale because she could only think of Humpty Dumpty. My God, she'd never realized how repugnant he was with his egg-shaped obesity! "Come closer, come closer, dear! Don't be afraid! We have things to discuss, you and I."
There was a chair next to his desk and Monica moved toward it. She geared herself to the fact that it faced him; she had come for a purpose and this was no time to get cold-feet.
Carlos Ruiz watched her tender young body conform to the chair contours and her lovely youthful legs cross before him. The sheen of her nylons excited him. She would be wearing pantyhose, a marvelous innovation. He loved the way the strap of her ridiculous platform-soled shoe clasped around her slender instep. His eyes raised to the golden charm which hung between her ripely pointed breasts against the white of the silken blouse. He wondered if she wore a brassiere, and if so, did her panties match it? Of course he would know eventually, but these were the things he enjoyed contemplating. His eyes settled on her exquisite face and he said: "Now, where did we leave things, little darling?"
Monica had difficulty breathing; she was that overwhelmed by the obnoxious dominance of him, though he had never affected her this way before at the villa. He stood and so did she, as if something from beneath had bolted her upright.
"H-Have you decided to help me?" she questioned, trying to conceal the shakiness to her voice. She was sorry now that she'd come there. His office, if that's what it was, smelled strong of garlic, and then she remembered seeing the small dingy restaurant below; but it had been no more drab than this stuffy, badly lighted place.
"You are referring to ousting the Senorita Casey from Casa de Paraiso, of course," he said, the lines of his many chins seeming to follow the up-turned one separating his thick, grinning lips. "Jealousy, I presume, eh? Has she managed to bump you out of my young brother's bed, my dear?"
There was hardly any use being coy at this point, Monica concluded. In truth it was only revenge she wanted now; she hadn't deluded herself into thinking Rafael would take her back even with Katryn out of the picture. "This is unimportant," the teenager said, lifting her small chin. "Besides, her name is not Casey. She lies. I have seen her passport."
"Oh?" Carlos Ruiz shrugged his heavy shoulders as if that were unimportant to him. "I am more concerned for what reason I should offer you my help? Certainly, you are not trying to blackmail me into getting rid of the lovely American girl for you on the strength of what you thought you saw this morning?"
"We both know what I saw was so," Monica snapped at him. "And the lovely girl, as you call her, is not an American. She is Dutch from the Republic of South Africa."
The grin disappeared from Carlos Ruiz' heavy-jowled face. His black popping eyes narrowed. "Dutch, you say . . . ,from South Africa? What is her real name?"
"Van Leyden. Katryn Van Leyden," Monica replied, the ominous expression creeping over his swarthy features sending a tiny shudder up her spine.
It was not Carlos Ruiz' nature to show panic in the light of a jeopardizing situation; he had weathered too many throughout his nefarious career. His mind worked keenly.
Of course, she had to be a relative of Dirk Van Leyden, his ex-partner the stupid fool's daughter perhaps. Carlos remembered the Dutchman speaking of her and telling him that she was studying in the United States. There was no question about it; that was exactly who she was and he had been concerned for her welfare when he had instructed Jaime and his ignorant brother, Pedro, only an hour before. But maybe with a bit of luck both she and the American would be dead before the day was over.
"So, my dear, that is valuable information," the obese man said, his smile returning. He moved around the desk and took her arm gently. "Shall we go into my private salon where we can enjoy a cognac to celebrate our alliance?"
Monica swallowed tightly. "Y-You intend to help me then?"
"But of course, child," he said, ushering her through a doorway into a plushly furnished, well lighted room that made the young girl realize she was in one of the many old palaces for which the ancient city was noted. The high-ceilinged room was done entirely in Moorish motif with oriental carpets, luxurious pillows spread around abundantly, low divans and tables. The huge windows were heavily draped in rich wine-colored velvet, the strategically placed lights hardly noticeable. A pleasantly scented incense burned somewhere, its aromatic fragrance adding to the atmosphere and seeming to lighten Monica's uneasiness. "Sit down, my dear, and be comfortable while I pour us something over which we shall seal our bargain."
Monica eased to her knees on a pillow rather than assuming the traditional position that would expose her completely underneath the mini-skirt she wore. She watched the huge fat man pour from a decanter into small crystal glasses then move down cross-legged onto a cushion directly opposite and not three feet from her. He looked like some evil, bald-headed potentate out of the movies as he smiled and she took the glass he held out to her.
"To our future partnership, my dear," he said and both of them sipped.
"Mmmmmm. That is good . . . but not cognac," Monica commented.
"No, but I thought it might appeal to you more. It is a very delicate aperitif which I import from Morocco," he said. "Delicious, is it not?"
"Yes, yes it is," she replied, welcoming the sweet taste and the warm uplift it immediately began to spread through her young body. "And now, how do you propose to help me, Senor Ruiz?"
He smiled. "Perhaps to the point of gaining your love place in my brother's bed for you once more," he said softly, knowing it was a lie. "Does that interest you, my dear?"
Monica stared at him. She could hardly believe her ears, but she wanted to. That would be more than she'd ever hoped for. "How could you accomplish such a thing? And what about her, Katryn Van Leyden?" she put to him.
"Ah then, that is the first thing you must learn if we are to have an alliance, my pet," he said, his bulging dark eyes ever-raking hungrily over her. "You must trust me to my own methods of performance. It will be done as you want, I promise that. . . and in turn, you must do your little part for me. You see, in a partnership such as ours each of us must be satisfied. Do you agree?"
"I-I am not sure what you mean," Monica replied, his lecherous expression not something she was totally unfamiliar with, but hopefully she could be misreading it. "W-What is my part?"
He smiled, his thick tongue slithering out to wetly coat his worm-like lips. "To treat me generously with your lovely young favors, my dear, that is all."
That was all! No, she hadn't misread that goatish expression. Lust projected the same gleam whether they were old or young, handsome or horrifying. He was hardly the latter, but awfully damned close to it in his repugnance. God almighty, she couldn't. . . could she? And even if she could stomach him to that extent, was it worth it? Her mind raced calculatingly. God, she was thinking as a whore must have to time and again -weighing the cost against the gain, and this gain would be everything she really wanted . . . all that she ever wanted.
"Y-You are certain that you can do this, senor . . . you would not lie to me?" Monica pressed, her voice a near whisper.
"God forbid! That is the one thing I would never do, my pet," Carlos Ruiz assured her. "But if you do not trust me, then we will just forget the whole affair . . . "
"No, please. I-I only wanted to be sure. You must understand. Rafael . . . he means so much to me . . . I-I would do anything...anything to have it the way it was before that that bitch came," Monica said, reaching out to touch his huge thigh when he had begun to gain his feet as if their meeting was to end on that note. "Please, I do trust you, Carlos."
The fat swarthy man could not believe his ears, nor the sight of her small white hand gently pressuring against his thigh. Sweet Christ, just the delicate touch of it there was making his cock swell inside his pants. He could not believe that it had been so simple. Certainly, the absinthe could have no such effect in this short time . . . but no matter.
Monica fought the repulsion inside her when his big, puffy hand moved sweatily on top of hers. She forced a little smile, then tilted the glass to her lips. Thank God the stuff went down easily, in fact, it was rather good, and potent too. She could feel its effects, welcoming them as he stood to pour once more. No question but what she was going to need all the stimulant she could possibly hold before this day was over.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The third time he arose, Carlos Ruiz brought the decanter. Monica drank three more glassfuls rapidly to follow the three that were already lifting her as if she were on a cloud, crazy little sensations racing wildly through her alcohol-dazed brain. Though he'd hardly lost his Humpty Dumpty caricature for her, she no longer felt outright repulsion toward him; in fact, there was a certain doll-like buffoonery about his rolly-pollyness, to say nothing of the perverse fascination his father-like age and the unique though of his massive girth was causing her. She had never seen a real fat man naked, and there was something almost masochistic about that when one thought of doing sexy things with him.
Monica was wet down between her warm flushing thighs, and she sensibly laid it to the aperitif. Maybe it was something he'd doctored; she didn't know and hardly cared. She was hot, and like the hypothetical whore in her thoughts earlier, exactly the way she wanted to be if she had that sort of job to do. The ultimate gain of having Rafael back was worth anything.
"Come and kiss me, little girl," Carlos hissed. watching her aroused eyes, her rippling young breasts, and the occasional peek she gave him up between her full, youthful thighs as she giggled and squirmed on the pillow. The absinthe had taken its hold, just as the promises he had made her were pleasurably intoxicating her mind.
He watched her creep child-like toward him with her lovely little-girl face caught up in smiling, sensual mischief. Her soft tender lips kissed his and then she giggled again. He reached out and ran his hands over her shoulders and naked arms down to the slender waist. "Again," he ordered and she did, tickling his lips with her tiny tongue. He cupped the pointed fullness of her ripe teenage breasts and she laughed, pressing them into his hands, their soft, yet firm resilience inside the brassiere making his swollen cock jerk excitedly.
"Stand up!" he ordered and she responded as if he were a ringmaster with a whip. Unsteadily, she wavered for a moment, the wildness of her smile raining down on him like an aphrodisiac of his own. "Lift up your skirt. Show me how lovely you are!"
She did that, too, spreading her feet and drawing her skirt up with a wantonness that sent wild charges along his spine. He gaped at the exquisite shapeliness of her nylon-encased legs upward to the shaded panties beneath the waistband of pantyhose, but especially at the cushiony protrusion the crotch band of her snug white panties concealed.
"Undress!" he choked. "Right now! Undress for me!"
"You like me, Carlos. You are hot and want to see me all naked for you, do you not?" Monica taunted in sultry Spanish, delighting in the sensual excitement the bizarre scene was causing to ripple fervently through her expectant loins.
"I love you, little girl! And yes, I want you to please me with your naked loveliness."
"My cunt?"
He swallowed. "Especially your sweet little cunt, my love!"
Monica giggled. She had never felt more abandon in her life as she began to unbutton and toss, unfasten and wriggle, dancing out of her clothes until suddenly there was nothing left, and standing before his bugged eyes stripped, she place her hands on the arched flare of her smooth naked hips and walked toward him, never stopping until her feet were spread on either side of his crossed legs on the pillow, and her dark, ringlet-cove red pussy was less than inches from his face. She thrust it forward lewdly and said:
"There daddy, kiss it!"
He grasped at her buttocks' ovaled fullness, hauling her to him as he pushed his face up into her warm heady loins, lecherously thrusting his thick tongue right up into the sensitive moistened split of her young pussy. She lurched and squealed, gasping with lust-incited arousal, her hands dropping to smooth over the swarthy skin of his naked head, clutching it to pull his open mouth and thick licking tongue tighter up into the tingling flesh between her obscenely spread apart legs.
The feel of her satiny teenage ass-cheeks cupped in the palms of his hands, and the yielding, hot liquid flesh of her pungently sweet-smelling loins smothered agains his nuzzling face, sent wicked sensations through Carlos Ruiz' huge squatting bulk. He lashed his slavering tongue like a hungry animal up between her tight young cunt's fleshy lips, its silken fringe of dark pubic hair tickling his nose and cheeks as he wetly glued his open mouth to them and speared his tongue snakelike up into her quivering cuntal slit's fluid pinkness. He felt her first caressing, then clawing at his head, her cushiony buttocks beginning to undulate in his hands as she squirmed her hot little cunt in tiny circles against his fused, open mouth.
"Eeeiii," Monica squealed and shivered excitedly to his salacious mouthing of her so-suddenly keyed-up loins. His darting tongue was like a fiery fat lizard probing around inside her already feverish pussy. She felt it stab wantonly at the sensation-filled bud of her tiny hardened clitoris, stab and stab again before slithering down to her quivering tight vaginal mouth. Than it raced right up inside the slippery clasping walls of her wildly elated cuntal hole.
Again she mewled, clutching at his bald head buried lewdly up between her gaping thighs. Wet slurping sounds almost drowned the raspy harshness of his hot breaths as he licked and sucked at her impassioned open pussy that was rocking and writhing in lurid rhythm tight against his mouth in her obscene, half-squatting stance. She watched her nipple-tautened breasts rippling and swaying to her own lewd dance. then gasped as his lips abruptly closed on her erect clitoral nub once more. His hands moved from her buttocks upward over her waist to her jutting breasts, clutching and squeezing their supple fullness severely while she strained her hips at his mouth, arching her back and nibbling at her lips in sensually mounting desire.
God, she wanted so badly to cum right there in his mouth! It had to be the aperitif she was so frigging hot! She revolved her hips in a grinding, circular motion, pushing at his luridly sucking lips every time that motion reached the six o'clock position.
"Oh God, don't stop!" she pleaded in English, but he did. He grabbed her waist and pulled her down on top of him, running his fat sweaty hands all over her naked body, squeezing and digging at the secret hollows of her back as she whimpered and lay over him like an intoxicated harem slave. He made her kiss his slobbered lips wet with her own pussy juice while his thick finger played in the wanting hair-fringed slit between her spread thighs. She felt its stiffened thickness thrust deep up into her vagina and she began to squirm on his finger as he fucked it up in and out of her. "Take out my cock!" he commanded, and she began to fumble at the pulsating bulge of his lower belly. But it was not all that difficult finding once she had his pants open. It was longer and thicker than she expected with his physique, the plum-like bulbous head wetly glistening with escaped seminal fluid from his lecherous arousal. She clasped hold of its sinewy veined hardness, hearing his choked gasp when she began to work the sleeve of foreskin up and down, erotic impulses of perversity charging through her at the thought of the obscene things she was doing with this evil, freakish man.
He never had to tell her. Monica knew what he wanted and got onto her knees beside him where she could bend down over his up-thrusting hard penis and at the same time he could reach her wetly inflamed pussy-slit from behind. She felt his breath like a blowtorch against her naked back as he smoothed his hand over her ass-cheeks, and she dropped her head to lick her tiny tongue over the sperm-slickened rubbery head of his swollen cock.
"Sweet Jesus!" the fat man swore when he felt the searing delight of her probing tongue licking his cock-head, then teasing at the tiny slit at its tip. He jerked the throbbing shaft up at her face and sensed her warm soft lips wetly slipping down over the bloated shaft. The pulsating knob slid along her tongue until it was absorbed inside the moist heat of her lovely teenaged mouth with ovaled lips clasping tight behind the coronal rim. Her head began to bob lewdly up and down, sliding the sensitive glans in and out of her eager, sucking cheeks, lips locked tight with the drawing pressure of a young virgin's ardently craving vagina.
Carlos ran his hand down over her raised, smooth buttocks, tracing their deep separating crevice to her wetly pouting cunt-lips. He pinched their flaccid resilience and massaged the soft-haired folds one against the other before slipping his middle finger back up into the hugging warmth of her fiery little cuntal passage.
She squirmed her hips back at his insinuated finger, and he pushed it way up in her proffered pussy to make her lurch and groan when its tip nudged the hidden mouth of her tender cervix. Then he felt her small hand following down his hardened cock-shaft to its thick base until she was fingering his balls, gently drawing her nails beneath them and palming the sperm-bloated sac to knowing pressure and milk at his pent-up load of semen.
The lovely little slut was driving him insane. Such utter abandon he had never seen in so young a beauty even with the absinthe. Already she had brought a dull ache into his swirling loins, and his over-hardened penis felt as if she were thrusting needles down into the depths of his member. God Almighty! He lay back suddenly with his head on another pillow. "Get up over me," he commanded. "I want to play in your pussy with my tongue."
Monica climbed onto the huge mound of his middle, truly draped over him now for she rested her own little belly on the mountain of obese flesh, her prickling breasts flattened against his abdomen with her legs and buttocks spread obscenely wide above his face. She wished that he was naked so she could see the ugliness of him, knowing the weird thrill that would add to her uncontrollable sordid desires. And then as she felt his thumbs spreading open the outer flanges of her seething pussy she began to work at his trousers, trying to push them farther down while she continued to avidly suck his hard thick cock stuffing her gaping mouth.
Carlos Ruiz had been lustfully saving this until last, letting it all build inside him to this one exotic moment when he would first view her tight little anus. This above all was the tiny secret inlet of fulfillment for him, though few of his choice young partners enjoyed it to the extent he did.
The intoxicating sight of her youthful cunt with pouting, blood-swollen lips fleeced in soft black pubic curls was enough to unhinge an old rake like himself, and especially when he thumbed apart the clinging folds to gape up into the rose-colored inner flesh in its sensitive, glistening desire. Wafts of fragrant cuntal heat poignantly trickled up his nose not an inch below as he hungrily studied her secret intimacies: the delicate inner pussy petals, her quivering, baby-like clitoris, and the ovaled trembling mouth of her exposed vaginal hole. He caught his hands to the rounded white moons of her ass-cheeks and drew the enticing pussy slit down onto his opened lips, curling his lecherous tongue once more far up into her passionately throbbing vagina.
She whimpered around the swollen length of his thick cock shoved deep toward her throat, and he noticed that she had stopped pulling at his trousers. Christ, Rafael must be mad to pass this sensually enslaved young creature up! What could the blonde bitch possibly have that this one did not? Certainly not the youth, and her beauty, though of a different nature, was no more impelling. Bullfighters and tax collectors, they were of a breed, ridiculously mad. But to hell with them . . . now it was time . . . and he let his eyes feast on the tiny pink nether-circle centered so exquisitely between her wide-spread ass-cheeks.
My God, not a blemish nor a single hair marred its dimpled puckering delicacy. He moved his tongue up to it and let it play there, licking and probing to raise more mewling purls around his cock that was as pulsing hard as a rod of Toledo steel. Christ! It was time . . . time!
"Do you want to cum first?" he hissed down at her and Monica had to think several moments before she realized there was a specific reason behind his question. She drew her lips up off his solid prick, resting the saliva-covered glans against her cheek and gently stroking it as with face half-turned she said: "What do you mean?"
"If you want, I will make you cum this way, but I myself prefer not to."
"Not to be sucked off?" Monica questioned in amazement. "You want to fuck me now?"
"You might say that, my dear, but to be more accurate, I enjoy sodomy when I empty my loins."
"Sodomy!" she gasped.
"Have you ever tried it? If not, you might find it quite ravishing, especially when one is as passionately worked up as you are. I have been told that when a woman cums this way once she will never consider any other method of fulfillment."
Monica heard every syllable he spoke, and she was sufficiently excited with sizzling desire not to consider his lewd proposal as total lecherous sadism. In fact, the idea sent wild chills of sensuous lust quivering over her naked body. His finger was buried up inside her cuntal passage as he spoke, gently swirling and moving in and out to the same rhythm of her clasping hand slowly stroking the long, thick shaft of his hardened cock. She had thought of being sodomized before, wondered about it lustfully, knowing that many couples did it if for no other reason than to avoid pregnancies.
"I-I am not sure, Carlos," she finally said. "It must hurt.. . I cannot imagine anything so big as your . . . "
"A little perhaps in the beginning, my love, but I will stretch your little hole first for you," the fat man said, once more licking his wet thick tongue up through the smooth crevice of her splayed open buttocks and feeling her shiver when he played at her tiny anus. "Now, get off me, pet, and into a comfortable position on the pillows. Stretch out and spread your legs wide while I remove my trousers."
He was surprised when she reacted so quickly and without further persuasion. His brain raced salaciously as he sat up and squirmed out of his pants and shorts, his eyes fastened on the curvaceous white body she was stretching out face-down on pillows according to his instructions.
He got onto his knees and moved in between her spread legs, then leaned down to kiss her smooth oval buttocks and nip at them with his teeth. He pressured them apart with his thumbs and again licked the deep crevice between, while Monica twisted her head to see him crouched over and obscenely tonguing between her uplifted ass-cheeks.
At the sight of his half-naked obesity, his huge flabby thighs and rolls of overhanging, gray-white fat which nearly concealed his thrusting cock, wicked shivers of lewd depravity swept over Monica's naked teenage flesh. She saw his thumbs spreading open her buttocks and felt the strain on her tiny anus as he pulled the sensitive skin around it, a sense of exhibitionism thrilling rather than embarrassing her at the licentious exposure of her secret little hole this way to his bulging eyes.
And then she felt his finger probing at the small puckered opening.
"Spread your legs farther, my dear. Farther . . . that is better," he hissed.
Monica scissored her legs out wide until they were way off the pillows and he continued to prod back there, the thought of what he was doing feverishly exciting her. She winced and strained back at his finger until suddenly the thick column seemed to pop inside and slowly move right up into her tight rectum. It hardly hurt at all, surprising her, the feeling of it imbedding itself up into her unused nether-channel along with the obscene knowledge of their licentious act, giving her wanton pleasure.
He moved his stiffened finger around in circular motions inside her rectum, gently expanding her anal mouth, beginning to saw it in and out of the tight, stretching channel to set off unnatural sensations of eroticism in her worked-up loins and soft young belly. She wondered if she could really cum this way? It must be tremendous. She wriggled her hips lewdly for him and he dug a second finger up in to accompany the first, hurting her like hell!
Monica cried out and tried to squirm away, but he was immediately on top of her, holding her with one pinning hand in the small of her back.
"God, that hurts!" she gasped back at him.
"Just a little pain preceding the delicious pleasure for you to come, pet," he consoled, the pair of fingers remaining still for a few moments until the pressure seemed to grow more and more bearable.
Monica slowly relaxed, releasing the breath she had held as the fingers began to lewdly fuck in and out of her impaled anus again, and she began to wriggle and undulate her buttocks to help. Though it wasn't exactly pleasurable now, it was still tolerable, the subjugation she was incredibly reveling in balancing it all for her. Both of them working together were very deliberately trying to stretch her tiny rectum so that he could fuck her there. What an absolutely lustful endeavor she must be losing her mind . . . but she wanted it now . . . and right now!
"Do it, Carlos," she said hoarsely, twisting her head so that he could see her impassioned face partially covered with her long disheveled hair. "Fuck me there now. It's as ready as it ever will be!"
Monica could hear his heavy breathing as he pulled his fingers out of her reluctantly freeing anal channel, as if the rubbery rectal flesh had clung to them possessively. Suddenly, his huge hot body came down heavily on top of hers, stretching his flaccid flesh the length of her body until she thought he would crush her like an insect. Still she trembled with excitement, feeling the length of his greedy penis nuzzling between her splayed ass-cheeks. He ground his bloated cock into the wedged open crevice for a moment with all of his weight on top of her until she couldn't breathe, and then he kneeled back up between her spread thighs, giving her a chance to catch her breath.
Monica felt his hands on her hips as he said: "Come, pet, kneel up for me, and keep your knees out wide."
She did, presenting him with the wide-stretched globes of her rounded buttocks, sloping down away from him with breasts, face and shoulders against the pillow. His puffy hands smoothed down to the tops of her thighs to grip tightly. She thought her mind would go berserk in the wild excitement of the waiting, and she reached back between her legs to stroke his heavy cum-laden balls and finally the thrusting rod of his thick cock. She curled her fingers around it, truly measuring for the first time . . . God, it was thick . . . but she had to try now, and she placed the blunt head nuzzling at the little opening of her anus while he grunted and immediately began to prod and push against the tiny defiant ring of tender flesh.
God! It was way out of proportion . . . not about to fit! Together, they could never get the brute-thing up into her rectum! She felt the resistant little opening stretching and knew that the thick, blunt head was actually worming up into her anal channel. She gritted her teeth and clenched her hands into tight fists, desperately struggling to bear the initial agony, remembering his promise of unlimited pleasure to come. She gaped back at him, her eyes beginning to saucer in panic. He was as huge as a tank behind her and suddenly his massive prick was its long-barreled turret cannon obscenely bursting right up into her body!
She couldn't stand anymore and jerked forward, but he held to her unyieldingly, forcing his heavy hips and pelvis forward for all he was worth!
"God, stop! Stop, Carlos! I can't. . . you can't. . . oh Christ!" she cried back in a mixture of Spanish and English, but it was as if she had encouraged him! He held to her with brute strength and continued to shove and force the ungodly thing up into her ravished anus until she thought her buttocks were going to split apart. "Damn you! Ooohhh . . . it cannot fit in me! My God, you can see . . . it is too big! Please, oh please stop!" she screamed now.
In, in, in, his rock-hard cock wormed, her pleas useless as his elephant thighs pressed forward, his arms wrapped around her hips to hold them back against him, the overpowering bulk of his massive body making the teenager frightenedly aware that she was utterly helpless!
"Do not fight it! Push your ass back! Do it . . . shove back, damn you!" the fat man snarled down at her.
The agony was blinding her. She was almost mindless from the pain. He cursed at her, again demanding she shove back and she did, grunting loudly as she sensed her impaled, pain-racked rectum opening still wider as if her incredulously expanded anus had ripped. Suddenly, she felt his enormous cock inching deeper, stuffing her cringing anus full to the depths of her bowels as the hairy flab of his loins crashed against her wide-split buttocks.
"Oh God, oh God, ooohhhhh!" Monica choked. Never had she imagined such excruciating agony . . . yet, even as she comprehended this the torment was beginning to diminish, if that were possible. Right off he began to snort and hump like a bull, mercilessly fucking with rhythmic thrusts deep up into the soft virginal premises of her nether-channel. Her head still whirled giddily even as the pain grew lighter, but there was a weird stimulation too which was gradually creeping over her, revitalizing the perverse sensations she had known only minutes before.
She sensed his stroked increasing, each one a scorching thrust that hurled her forward and made her writhe back onto the hard hammering cock slamming lustfully up into her well-reamed rectum. His ravaging satyr-cock had opened her last secret hole and was punishing it sadistically. Masochistic emotions swept back over the young girl like an engulfing cloud, and she began to move backward to lustfully join forces with his obscene sodomizing cock. Excitedly, she fell into a little undulation of her body, rotating her spread-open buttocks in lewd circles that twisted and gyrated his tightly fitted penis each time he thundered it up into her burning rectum from behind. Again she reached back between her thighs to gently scratch at the cum-bloated pendulum of his balls slapping down hard against her splayed, soft cunt-lips and the erogenous wet flesh between.
Monica felt his hand moving under her belly and back between her legs into her sensitively tingling pussy-slit, and she moved her own hand out of the way as his sought and found the erect little bud of her clitoris. His fingers began to pinch and roll it between them, causing her to squeal out in shuddering delight.
"Now, you do the fucking, little one, while I caress your little love button until you are ready to cum like a fountain," Ruiz commanded.
Monica needed no further encouragement as she rocked with wanton lewdness back and forth on his thrust-forward rod soaring right up into the spongy depths of her bowels. She wiggled her ass-cheeks and ground them back onto the furious staff while he hung over her with his hand smothered in her steaming cunt, his fingers tweaking and pinching her wildly quivering clitoris until she thought she would go out of her mind with the pressure-building ecstasy.
"Oh, oh, oh . . . I will cum right off if you do not stop!" she gasped breathlessly.
Carlos did, for he was not quite ready for it all to end yet. He clasped at her rounded white hips and began to share in the rhythmic fucking of her grotesquely stretched little hind-hole once more, watching its inflamed raw flesh draw out with his throbbing penis, clutching at his reaming cock-shaft as had her young mouth earlier. Never had he sodomized such a tight, exhilarating girl. Christ, he would cum in a torrent of squirting semen. He watched his frenzied cock vanish right up to her now palpitating rectum with each ramming thrust, shuddering at the feel of his loins smacking against the perspiring heat of her luscious young ass-crevice.
His sperm-inflated balls ached and his swollen rod was tormented with slivers of white-hot fire shooting through it every time he drove up into her feverish rectum, while she moaned incessantly as she threw her opened buttocks back at him in mindless passion. Mouth agape, hair streaming wildly over her young flushed face, she was like a slave resigned to endure whatever he wanted of her, and he burst his long heavy cock with a furious thrust up her rectum, just leaving it there as she murmured incoherently. He waggled his hips and loins to move his invading cock around in her stretched passage like a prodding truncheon.
"Oh, ooohhh," Monica groaned. "Do not stop . . . I will explode!"
The fat man drew his pillaging penis out to the rim of its pulsating head then shoved it right up in again in one continuous long thrust. She cried out like a child filled with joy. Again he did it and once more she bleated, her hand suddenly moving down between her thighs. He began to fuck rapidly into her clasping anal hole, ramming like a compressed air drill, her young white ass-cheeks quivering before the battering attack. He gripped her waist in flesh-twisting hands that knew no mercy and suddenly she screamed as if she were being
"E e e e e iigghhh . . . nowww . . . cuummmiinnggg . . . my Goddddd!"
Her nakedly straining young body began to shudder and convulse beneath him, her rounded hips and white buttocks thrown into spasms as she fitfully tossed on the spit of his cock like a speared fish. He felt the soft heat of her spongy rectal walls tighten and release to the tempoed contractions of her climaxing loins and his own mouth gaped open with the rush of warmth within her loins. His breathing caught in his throat, the length of his prick feeling as if it were suddenly mummified . . . the deadness before the upheaval!
An explosive orgasm tore at his groin with the intensity of an electric storm, shards of white-hot lightning ripping down through his pelvis into the lining of his struck balls. And then it all reversed, as if his thundering cock and testicles were generating the bolts of electric power, the heat of their searing flashes lacerating his jerking penis to the stream of boiling cum shooting from its tip far up into the soft confines of her trembling anal depths.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Palma Bay was a bustling spectacle of every conceivable type boat, even to the tremendous aircraft carrier, John F. Kennedy, pride of the United States Sixth Fleet. Shannon was having a ball manipulating the luxurious launch in and out of the marine traffic while Katryn pointed out different sights which help make up the panoramic, off-shore view of the ancient port-city. Most impressive was the gigantic Gothic cathedral begun in the early thirteenth century and not completed until the start of the seventeenth. That and the Almudaina Palace, standing almost on the same site, were two of the many things the American writer had looked forward to touring first hand, but at the rate he was going, he wondered if he'd live long enough.
The Palace had been the home of the Moorish kings and later the Majorcan monarchs, the Kings of Aragon, and finally Spanish regents. Of course, there were a multitude more of historical spectaculars such as churches, palaces, Roman ruins, Arabian Baths, Bellver Castle, and just the winding narrow streets of the Old Town itself, to say nothing of the rest of the island he wanted to enjoy. But now, with a painful rip in his leg to remind him that someone, namely Carlos Ruiz, wanted him off the island bad enough to waste him, Vic was beginning to feel that the place was definitely off-limits for him. Not that he was chicken, but could the results possibly be worth the goddamned risks? After all, it was his life he was gambling, and for what?
The dazzling blonde girl beside him was shouting something and Vic nodded, though he hadn't understood a word she said. But she was smiling, her long flaxen hair blowing wildly in the wind and he didn't figure it to be too important. He'd set a course for the JFK, wanting to get a closer look at the mighty ship, cutting back their speed to the heavier activity as they approached closer into the port. He hadn't been able to get the story she had unfolded for him out of his mind either, the thought of what that swarthy fat bastard, Carlos, might do to her if he found out her true identity gnawing the hell out of him. And then there was Lucia who kept dancing through his tired brain like a naked, passion-starved goddess . . .
A sharp cracking sound split his thoughts as well as leaving a clean, round little hole in the plexiglass windshield before him, and then he felt Katryn's hand clawing at his arm to gain his attention.
"What the hell is going on?" Vic shouted, tearing his eyes from the little bullet hole to the sudden frantic girl beside him.
She screamed and pointed at the launch bearing down on them from the port side, her words clear enough now. "It's going to ram us broadside, Vic!"
Shannon jerked the throttle wide open and spun the wheel toward the oncoming craft, his brain reacting instinctively, the logic of narrowing their target and chance of collision to no more than a bad scraping foremost in his mind. But his split-second maneuver was even better than expected as they missed each other by harrowing inches and another slug buzzed past his skull with deadly intentions.
"My God! They shot at us!" Katryn exclaimed, twisting in the seat to see that they were coming around after them. "Vic! Who are they?"
"Carlos's flunkies! Two of the three at the mill. . . yesterday!" he yelled. "Keep down! I'll try to lose them!"
Easier said then done, the big American realized, one look at the other boat letting him know they had at least twenty to thirty more horsepower than this cumbersome launch built for pleasure and capacity rather than speed. Vic stole a glance behind him to see they were quickly narrowing the gap. It was Jaime and Pedro all right, the fucking bastards! There was no goddamned question but what they'd overtake this galleon on a straight course! He'd have to out-maneuver them; it was their only chance, and the best bet was in toward port where the activity was the thickest and where those two hoods weren't so apt to throw lead at them.
"What are you doing?" Katryn called from her crouched position on the seat and at the same time holding something she'd taken from her purse out to him. It was a gun, for Chrissake, a little .25 automatic.
"We're going in where we've -got lots of company!" he yelled, taking the small weapon and shoving it into his belt. "We can't out distance them! Got to . . . ! "
Another bullet ripped through the windshield just to the right of the wheel, not three inches from his head and he jerked reflexively.
"Stay down, for Chrissakes! They're almost on top of us again . . . Here we go, hang on!" Shannon barked, spinning the wheel to veer off at a right angle, the big launch straining to respond as its stern slapped water like a hurled, skipping stone. The screws churned to the effort as a slug slammed into the hull not a pair of inches below the gunwale protecting the American's ribs.
Sonovabitch! What now? He headed for a small sailing skiff at full tilt. Maybe if he could get enough people worked up they'd wind up with some angry help on their side! The bastards were bearing down on them again from behind.
"Watch out for that sailboat, Vic!" Katryn cried as Shannon gave it five more seconds before doing another ninety-degree shift of direction and voices swore at him from the skiff they'd damned near rammed.
Again, Katryn cried out as they missed a cabin cruiser by a few feet that had loomed up out of nowhere, bringing more curses spilling down on them.
That had been a close one. Shannon sighed, stealing another look behind him to see that Jaime at the controls had been forced to swing out around the melee, widening the distance separating them . . . and now there was nothing between the launch and the JFK except a wide expanse of open water, with Jaime hot on their wake and bound to overtake them again. Christ, there was only one thing left to do.
"Work you way over here and take the wheel!" Shannon called to Katryn.
She did as he lifted up over her and two more slugs sung past his ear.
"They're going to catch us, Vic! We can't out-run them!"
"Head straight for the JFK and keep it wide open!" he yelled, jerking out the automatic and twisting around in the seat.
Their pursuers were no more than fifty feet behind them and cutting that down rapidly. Christ, the weapon in his hand was about as potent as a pea-shooter and probably half as accurate. Let 'em get closer. . . keep the automatic out of sight. Pedro, the sonovabitch was standing and trying to get a bead on him!
"Duck!" Vic yelled at Katryn and dropped himself.
Two more holes appeared in the windshield right in line with where Katryn's head would have been. Shannon saw the expression of horror on her face as she seemed to freeze in her crouched down position. Out of the corner of his eye he saw it then, the huge wall of gray that seemed to go right up to the atmosphere! Behind them, Ruiz's punks were less than ten yards off their stem and coming on like a destroyer!
"Pull off to the right when I start shooting!"
Vic ordered Katryn, trying to steady the automatic with both hands on the rim of the seat behind him.
Another slug and then another whistled past his head as Vic opened up, firing as fast as he could with the little weapon. He saw Pedro grab at his shoulder and flop back in the seat and then the hammer of the .25 fell on an empty cartridge. Shit. . . ! Katryn hadn't moved! Her hands looked as if they were fused to the wheel, her eyes staring wildly at the huge gray barrier not thirty feet ahead!
Shannon leaped on her, smashing her grip from the wheel as he spun it crazily and the clumsy launch went into the groaning maneuver of coming around like a runaway prairie schooner! And then he heard the scream and twisted to see Jaime trying to wipe blood from his eyes. Christ, he'd hit him with that goddamned pea-shooter . . . and they were going to . . . !
A tremendous crash and explosion followed with billows of flame bursting from the massive hull of the John F. Kennedy right above the waterline where Jaime had rammed their pursuing boat head-on at full speed into the steel-girded side of the huge aircraft carrier!
Jesus! Out of there and post-haste was in order!
* * *
Vic pulled into the cove and cut the engine to let the launch float with the mild current toward shore and the wall of rock where the smuggler's cave still looked secretly out over its peaceful little domain. The blonde girl beside him had not moved from her slumped position the entire trip up the coast. They eased along slow and he studied the strained vivacious face beside him.
"You all right, Katryn?" he asked, taking her small trembling hand inside his own.
"Y-Yes . . . but.. . it was so horrible . . . my God. T-They must be dead, don't you think? No one could've lived through that terrible crash . . . and the fire . . . I-It might've been us, Vic . . . "
"But it wasn't, baby, so don't think about that," he tried to console her.
"How did we ever get away without being questioned or something?"
"I just haul-assed out of there, that's how," Vic said, "and with the confusion of the crash we were able to without anyone paying us so much as a look."
"A-Are you all right, darling?" she questioned anxiously then, noticing for the first time the blood-stains on his trousers.
"It's nothing, just a little seepage from the rip this morning. I probably opened it some when we were playing acrobat," he said.
"You better let me have a look . . . "
"No, it's fine, Katryn. I just wanted to be sure you had hold of yourself before we went back to the villa."
"Oh Vic. . . I'm so sorry for freezing up on you like I did," the blonde girl apologized, dropping her head shamefully. "I almost killed us both, b-but suddenly I just couldn't seem to to react, or something . . . "
"Come on now, baby, let's forget about that," Vic said, patting her hand. "The important thing now is either we both get off this island, or we have a showdown with Carlos Ruiz. Personally, I prefer the latter, otherwise I lose all the way around. But it's different with you, honey. You've got nothing to gain, and I believe you've wised up to that haven't you?"
"Yes . . . I guess I just never realized what an animal Carlos Ruiz is . . . though I should have after the way he had my father murdered," she said, squeezing his hand. "B-But you shouldn't stay either, Vic. That's the second time today he's tried to have you killed! My God, no foolish biography is worth that."
"Yeah . . . but I counted a lot on doing that book, baby. It's kind of a passport for me into bigger things . . . "
"Into hell, you mean," she snapped. "I'll tell you right now, Vic Shannon, that I'm not leaving unless you go too."
She squeezed his hand inside both of hers, the green depth of her round eyes saying more than he was ready for right at the moment. Lucia still played in the private chamber of his mind. And then she seemed to back off, as if sensing his feelings. She said:
"Anyway, I don't believe we should say or do anything until after the corrida tomorrow, unless we want El Gallardo to come unglued completely."
Vic nodded. He'd gone along with that ridiculous reasoning to this point might just as well see it through all the way now. "Yeah. . . okay, we'll wait until after the corrida then lay it on the table for the "genius" to work out. Maybe that's the answer after all. But meantime, baby, I need some sleep. This Yankee is just about done in."
Katryn made a teasing little grin. "Well just for the record, Yankee, you're supposed to sleep nights; that's what the bed is really all about."
Vic laughed and started the engine. "I'll bear that in mind," he said.
CHAPTER NINE
Vic Shannon slept some fifteen hours from three o'clock in the afternoon until six the following morning. After he'd left Katryn, who felt she should make some sort of report to the great one, the dragging, badly mauled writer met Lucia in one of the corridors and told her he would probably not be joining them for dinner. She was quite withdrawn and formal, surprising the hell out of him and hurting him too, but at the same time she seemed anxious about his wound from the bull, noticing the blood on his pant leg. He hardly remembered what he'd said, something about seepage, more concerned and flabbergasted by her coldness than anything. It wasn't as if they'd just stolen a kiss under the frigging arbor or something. But that's the way she'd left him standing there as she walked off, chilled to the goddamned marrow of his bones.
In his room, he'd grabbed the scotch bottle and belted a good portion of its contents down straight from the neck, trying not to think. Shit, he had a case on that enchanting creature and that would never do! He stripped naked and climbed into the four-poster's inviting sheets, wishing to hell he hadn't run into her. Now, he'd never get to sleep . . .
Fifteen hours later, the big man stretched his trim, athletic muscles before the open terazza doors and knew that he had he couldn't feel more rested and like his old self. What he'd taken to bed in his head yesterday afternoon all seemed infinitesimal when weighed against the beautiful sea-scape of another typical Majorca morning. Even Lucia had dwindled in scope, though what might happen inside him once he laid eyes on her again was another story.
His thigh wound was sore as hell, but the throb had gone out of it, and after the first few steps he was able to put his full weight on it, the stiffness lessening. He took a makeshift bath to keep that portion of him out of the water, dressed, and went downstairs. Doctor Litri was the first person he came onto. The physician was having coffee on one of the terraces and immediately insisted on looking at the thigh.
In the infirmary, the goateed man seemed pleased. "It is coming fine, Senor Shannon,"he said. "If only cornadas were never worse."
He seemed tense, not himself to Vic's limited acquaintance with him. "Well, today is the big day for El Gallardo and Majorcans," Shannon said, swinging his legs off the table when he'd finished dressing the wound. "I suppose the arena will be mobbed. He is their gallant son."
"Yes. It is the fiesta of fiestas for his many followers. El Gallardo returns to them in all his glory . . . and let us pray to the Almighty that it is."
He made the sign of the cross and stood silent for a moment as Vic watched, wondering if maybe he wasn't always this uneasy before a corrida in which Gallardo appeared. Later, the American learned that there were as many more of the guests who moved about or clung in conclaves bearing the same apprehensive attitude.
He would have expected elation about the Villa, it being the day, but it was more like a conglomeration of people preparing for some morbid ritual. Even Katryn seemed nervous, and resist as he did, Vic couldn't help but pick up the contagious tension.
Breakfast was more solemn than communion. When Gallardo didn't appear, it occurred to the American that they would probably not see him all day, until after the corrida. Katryn was visibly shaking. She excused herself and disappeared. Vic sat there over coffee, feeling completely ostracized. It was all little clicks now.
"The bulls are fierce, I have heard," a short fat Frenchman said.
"El Gallardo insists on that!" another replied.
"They must be the fiercest and most noble when he appears here!" spoke a third.
"And he will be magnificent as always," the first one said. "There should be a splendid party tonight."
"If all goes well," a wife dared to chime in.
"Of course it will go well! What a thing to say!" a male voice charged. "We better all go to Mass for him this morning. The padre told me at nine in the chapel."
"Yes, we will go . . . but if only he would not be so openly flaunting with his women," the second man said, shaking his head. "What a terrible experience for the young senora, and she is so lovely."
"Hush, Henri!" a female voice cautioned. "This is not for you to speak of."
"I agree with him," said the first man. "But I would do the same with that blonde American creature . . . "
Vic stood and left the table. He wandered outside where more guests sat in separated clusters. From one he heard:
"He is great. No one would ever deny that, but how do you compare him with the real greats, that is what I want to know? He is like an American showman! He knows how and what to do to draw the most from the crowd, and he does it with the most absolute grace of any grand matador. Still, I say that rubbing the bull's blood across his middle does not make of him a Manolete! If you want to know the truth, it sickens me! He is a showman, a burlesque of the art . . . ! "
And from another: "I have not seen them all, of course, but I watched Belmonte and Joselito in Madrid. I saw Granero gored and Luis Freg after he had been ripped and carried on the bull's horn once around the arena come down and make the kill, his own blood streaming from him. Yet, I have to say that Gallardo is greater. Anyone who speaks different just does not know the history of the art!"
Vic wandered away, steering clear of individuals and groups. He'd heard enough to realize that as an ignorant Yankee aficionado he knew nothing.
But the strained atmosphere permeating the villa had caught him up. Alone, he went into the chapel and knelt through the ceremony. The solemnity impressed him as few things had in his lifetime. He watched Lucia go to the altar rail, raise her head and take something into her mouth from the padre. He never saw her again until they were at the Coliseo Balaer.
After the Mass, Shannon walked down to the bullring, trying to get his head straight. He was watching two young men very clumsily working a young bull when Senor Villelta came up to him.
"Have you seen Monica, senor?" the servant questioned softly.
"Monica? Me? Hell no."
"No one has seen her since yesterday," he said, his eyes level with Shannon's. "She has just disappeared. Maybe it was what happened to her at the mill . . . do you think?"
"Could be. Things like that kind of rack a girl's nerves," Vic commented. "Maybe she's just flown the coop for good."
Villelta stood silent for a moment as if deciphering the American euphemism. "Yes, maybe, he agreed. "Have you seen Senorita Casey?"
"No."
"She, too, seems to have gone off someplace, and El Gallardo wishes for her company."
"If I see her I'll let her know, senor," Vic said.
The slender, aristocratic-faced man again stood silent. Suddenly his hand reached out to pressure Shannon's arm. "I saw you in the chapel. I don't know whether you pray or not, but whatever you do, now is the time."
Vic studied him. "What do you mean, Villelta?"
He shook his head as if mysterious omens of doom were filling him. "Who can say, senor? All is not well.. . but I must get back to Gallardo. After, we will talk."
"Yeah.. . after," Shannon said at his hurrying away slender frame.
He thought of going upstairs and putting it all down onto paper. He'd had no idea that such anxiety existed under the roof of the matador before a corrida. But it made more than sense from an American viewpoint: this wasn't a game where the losers might huddle to praise the winner; it was a matter of certain death for the beast and possibly the man. Christ!
He wandered off trying to categorize it all, moving down toward the villa's pier, his brain working. He found a place in the sun, a chair with one leg broken and he slumped into it, removing his shirt. He was in some sort of daze when Villelta aroused him.
"El Gallardo wishes you to join him, in his suite, Senor Shannon.
Vic pulled on his shirt and accompanied the other man. Gallardo was in swim trunks, slippers and a wine-colored dressing gown, his hands in the pockets as he walked aimlessly around the luxurious salon.
"It occurred to me that you should be at my side today, Shannon," the handsome young matador said. "The world is entitled to know how the great El Gallardo approaches his face to face encounter with death. It will be your task to inject the flavor of my bravery into the biography. Have you seen Katryn?"
"No," Vic replied, choosing a huge chair to lower into, never ceasing to be jarred stupid by the other's unbelievable opinions of himself.
"She is probably somewhere by herself suffering with private fear for her Gallardo's safety," he said, smiling. "Magnificent girl. I could not be with her last night and that too would upset her. She loves me, you know . . . "
There was more, an entire boring afternoon of it that damned near drove Shannon out of his skull, and he more than welcomed the hour when it was time to leave for the arena.
"I will have no more time to spend with you until the corrida is over, Shannon," the young torero said, holding out his hand. "Do not fear for me. El Gallardo will be superb as always."
Shannon rode into Palma with Gallardo's entourage, a procession of over a dozen limousines. The streets were jammed for blocks away from the plaza de toros, but a Guardia Civil escort routed them right through. The coliseum was mobbed, both outside and within the huge, steep oval. Gallardo's guests had a series of palcos, choice covered boxes, and Vic examined them all to see if he could locate Katryn. He couldn't.
The big clock read 4:45; the grand entrance would commence at five on the dot. The other matadors on the cartel and their retinue would arrive from their hotels or wherever, dressed and ready; only El Gallardo had private quarters at the arena where he would prepare. Shannon went there and was allowed inside. The young torero was already in his traje de luces, looking even handsomer in the heavily padded, gold braided jacket and skin-tight breeches. Villelta was attaching the short braided coleta to the back of his head, the traditional pigtail caste mark of the bullfighter.
"Have you found Katryn?" Gallardo pressed anxiously.
"Sorry, no luck, Shannon said. "She is not amongst the guests in the boxes."
"Damn! I must see her hold her before I go out there! Do you understand?" he half-shrilled, his dark eyes blazing, for the first time the tension really surfacing.
Shannon shrugged. "I will look again," he said, anxious to get away from the other man's company. That was for Villelta and his cuadrilla to stomach, but not Vic Shannon. At the doorway, he came face to face with Lucia, looking pale and beautiful. Her eyes hung with his for a moment, then dropped as she moved past him. Abruptly, Vic heard Gallardo: "What are you doing here, woman?"
"I-I came to bid you good fortune, darling, as always," she said, her voice meek.
"Nonsense! Leave, or go over in the corner and sit where you are out of the way."
Vic slammed the door and moved back toward the palcos. That sonovabitch! How he'd love to belt him just once. Christ! And just what in hell had happened to Katryn, anyway? She should've turned up by now; he knew how badly she wanted to watch that puffed up banty rooster. Could something have really gone wrong for her . . . like Carlos Ruiz for instance?
Shannon toured the boxes again, but no Katryn, nor Carlos either, and that seemed unusual. Suddenly, a trumpet blew and Vic looked up toward the president's box to see a tall, distinguished Spaniard putting down the white handkerchief he'd just waved. Then, from the patio across the ring two mounted men in costumes from the time of Philip II rode out across the sand, Vic saw El Gallardo taking his place with the other two matadors, the sun shining on the gold braid of their suits and the rest of their cuadrillas both mounted and on foot amassed behind them.
The pair of mounted bailiffs had doffed their hats to the president and returned, the music beginning which always thrilled the big American right to the core. The parade had commenced. Again, Shannon traced his way back through the boxes and still no Katryn. Now, he was getting more than a little bit worried and rapidly losing interest in the spectacle taking place in the ring. He saw that the pageantry was over and that everyone was looking at the red planked door. A solemn figure stood behind his little shelter in the arena also watching; he was the first matador, but not El Gallardo. Again the trumpet sounded to the president's signal and a roar went up as a black monster thundered out from the low passageway with hell burning in its little eyes.
The bulls were all brave and fierce animals that afternoon, performing to the ultimate, but Shannon couldn't say the same of the matadors. Though he didn't watch the fights as close as he would have had Katryn's disappearance not plagued the hell out of him, Vic saw enough of the first and second toreros to know that one was cowardly and the other too inexperienced. Neither man fought nor killed well and in both cases the picadors had made bloody, sluggish hulks of the powerful brutes. The crowd was alive with jeering whistles; only the tourists were shouting their lungs out at what they didn't understand.
All this forerunning made El Gallardo's appearance a spectacular, and that he was, Shannon had to admit. His skill with the cape was masterwork. He allowed his pics only one shot at the beast, especially after the big picador's horse was gored in the flank beneath the heavy mattress-like covering to the dismay of groaning tourists. They would be more sickened, Shannon thought, if they knew that the horse would be led off, the wound stuffed with sawdust and sewn up for the next fight.
Gallardo placed his own pairs of banderillas with grace and perfection. From that moment he led the proud, killer-animal through a series of charges with breath-shattering daring that literally brought the house down. His first thrust of the sword struck bone, bent, then shot into the air; his second was a perfect kill, high up between the shoulders as it should be done, his body following the blade over the horn and coming away with the horn just clearing his gut, his face a solemn mask. He stepped back then as the coliseum thundered and the bull went down on its buckled fore-legs. It was done except for the coup de grace, and worth the bull's ears.
In his special quarters, Gallardo was beside himself with rage when Shannon told him that he hadn't located Katryn. Vic had avoided going back for that very reason but then Villelta had come looking for him.
"Something has happened to her. Shannon! She would not do this to me! Do you not understand?" the matador ranted. "Find her! Find her!"
Vic refused to answer, knowing if he did his next step would be to hang one right on the conceited bastard's button. Instead, he whirled around and walked out once more. The little sonovabitch had his wires crossed; Vic Shannon wasn't one of his stooges, even though he couldn't think of anything he'd rather do at that moment than find that blonde doll. And the other little sex-pot, Monica, where the hell had she gone?
Something was wrong, all right, but what . . . and just what the hell should or could he do about it? Lucia came out of the small chapel as Shannon was passing the door. She was carrying a small bottle and wearing that same expression of meekness. Christ, he wanted to say something to her, but his jaws seemed to lock. She smiled faintly.
"For Rafael," she said in her whispering voice, gazing down at the bottle. "Holy water . . . he always drinks it before his second bull . . . a superstition I suppose. Matadors are that way you know."
She walked past him and he turned, following her with his eyes. He realized it then, never in his goddamned life had he ever felt so sorry for anyone.
* * *
It was the screams and that horrifying sound of terror that one only hears at a bullfight when disaster is imminent that brought Vic Shannon running from the telephone booth. He had finally managed to get a call through to the butler at Paraiso after some twenty minutes, only to learn they had seen nothing of Senorita Casey since early in the day. Nor was Senorita Christie available . . . and then the frightened roar of the crowd.
It was El Gallardo, but something was obviously wrong with him. He was working with the muleta, but unsteadily, his passes clumsy and uncertain. Once, as the bull charged, Vic saw his hand raise to his forehead as if he were shading the sun except there was no sun shining on that part of the arena to blind him. He staggered and there were more screams. Then the big American tensed because he saw it coming!
Like a man-sized puppet the bull scooped Gallardo up on its horn, racing with him draped over its angry head toward the opposite fence! It seemed like a hundred bullfighters rushed into the ring at once, yelling and waving capes wildly to attract the bull's attention. It stopped and tossed that raging head with a sudden braking of dug-in hooves, throwing the blood-spurting body of its tormentor off the horn and through the air some fifteen feet as if it were weightless . . . !
The great El Gallardo was already dead when they carried him into the infirmary. The passageway was jammed with moaning and weeping men, while others shouted at the police who were trying to clear them out. One of the officers recognized Shannon as being with the matador earlier and let him through. Doctor Litri, Villelta and Lucia, plus two other physicians were there, standing beside the still body on the table. He had been horribly gored in the stomach. Litri's eyes were filled with tears, while both Lucia and Villelta stood with the expressionless stares of statues.
Suddenly, the servant cursed violently, swung about, and raced past Shannon like a man gone mad! Vic hesitated only long enough to glance at Lucia before charging after him, never hearing those confessing words she spoke to the trio of doctors.
"I-It was the holy water he drank . . . I drugged it, senors . . . "
CHAPTER TEN
Vic almost lost the running Villelta in the crowd, catching up to him just as the other managed to flag down a taxi.
"Where the hell are you going?" Shannon barked in English, following him into the backseat of the cab.
"To kill Carlos Ruiz!" the wild-eyed servant threw back at him. "Gallardo's death was his doing, I am sure of it! That devil, he had him drugged some way, and he himself was not there! That is all the proof I need . . . ! "
"My God!" the driver moaned, clutching at Villelta's arm. "Is it true? Is it so?" Tears blurred his eyes. "El Gallardo . . . he is . . . ? "
"Yes, it is so, the Lord have mercy on his soul. El Gallardo is dead!"
"Mother of God!" the driver lamented, shaking his head in weeping disbelief.
"Now wait a minute, senor, for Chrissake!" Shannon swore. "Let's give this some thought.. . "
"Old Town, driver, and hurry!" Villelta ordered, ignoring Vic completely.
Still groaning, the cabbie began to worm through the impossible traffic by wheeling up onto sidewalks and veering into alleyways with a skill that would put New York's fender-benders to shame, Shannon thought as he continued trying to talk sense into the servant's head, but it was useless. Villelta sat with eyes fixed straight ahead, his ears deafened to Vic's words.
Christ, this was mad, but he couldn't desert the crazed man now. "Do you know where to find him?" the big American tried, hoping to crack the other's silence, but he got merely a nod. "Well, have you got a gun or something?"
The servant never looked at him as he drew from his sleeve a puntilla. a vicious dagger used to sever the dying bull's spinal cord in the coup de grace. It disappeared again.
"Listen to me, Villelta, Gallardo would never want this," Shannon persisted, but it was hopeless.
"It is my task, senor not for you to be involved," Villelta replied. "You stay with the taxi when I get out. Find Senorita Casey and both of you get away from all this . . . "
"Goddammit, I'm going to leave you to get wiped out by that swarthy fat bastard!" Shannon swore as the cabbie swung the hack into a narrow back street which brought them up behind the cathedral, the immensity of the aged structure at close range registering with the American.
It was only by chance that he glanced back out the rear window and recognized what looked like a familiar Citroen coming fast up the narrow street behind them. "What the hell . . . have we got company again?"
Villelta swung around in the seat. He pulled a bill from his pocket and threw it at the driver. "Come on. Shannon! Follow me! We will take sanctuary in the cathedral if it is still open!"
It was and their pursuers were hot behind, four of them with nothing but trouble written all over their charging frames. One was a black man who might have been a fugitive from a pro basketball team; he looked like a mountain of coal coming down on Shannon, he was that damned huge and close to the writer's heels! Vic could only hope there would be people inside as he raced through the massive doorway into the dark and silent sanctity of the holy place, but it was empty! Not a movement of human life stirred.
He could hear the hot breath of the panting black man behind and like that. Shannon half-turned, dropping to his knees, the other hurling over his bent low body like a falling tree. The big American came up to meet the other three then at the same time yelling:
"Run! Get out of here, Villelta, while I keep 'em busy!"
The three, ugly faced men of husky proportions, came at Shannon like the middle of the L.A. Rams' front line, high-lowing the crouched American, but not before his big fists hammered home a solid left and right to the gut and jaw of the center. The blows dropped the punk as Vic was swept backward by the onrushing weight of the other two, his own frame doing a complete somersault, the grandeur of the High Altar all those hundred meters away flashing before his upside-down eyes.
Shannon came down hard on the foot-worn stone flooring, the breath heaving from him with a snorting roar. He heard Villelta cry out and tried to get a look at him, but all he could see was the black giant's swinging arms. His own hands were full with the two who had thrown their heavy bodies down onto him and were kicking and gouging in true street-brawl fashion. A fist smashed against the eye that was still bearing a purplish swollen ring from his go with the three at the mill, but Shannon hardly felt the pain. He drew his knee up with ramming force into the soft give of a crotch and heard a cursing grunt before the one he'd felled with his fists came charging forward and ground his own heavy foot like a sledge into Shannon's groin.
The mile-high ceiling began to swirl. Another fist crashed against the side of his head, followed by a barrage of them in his gut and chest. Shannon made one last desperate attempt to roll away and get to his feet, but there was no eluding them. Blows rained down on him like jack-hammers pounding his face and body. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the black man leap back and grab at his powerful forearm where blood was smeared as if he'd plunged it into a bucket of red paint.
"He cut me!" the big man snarled. "The bastard cut me!"
And then something burst in Vic Shannon's head . . . and there was nothing but cobwebby shadows all the way down into the abyss . . .
* * *
The clawing struggle up out of the murky pit lasted for an agonizing eternity, the prostrate American reasoned, eons creeping by while he fought to re-organize his mentality. The centuries old surroundings brought reality back to him and then the tormented whine of a human cry made him try to rise only to find that his wrists had been bound behind him. His head throbbed and his groin and belly pained nauseously. A little to his left he saw the broad backs of the three he had battled. They were facing a side altar and beyond them came another cry of pain.
"Cut me will you, bastard!" the huge black's voice thundered in accented English. "Nobody knifes Juga and lives to talk about it! There, damn you! That makes you feel holy . . . hanging up there?"
The onlookers laughed, one of them moving enough for Shannon to see. Good Christ! It was Villelta stripped, and the black had tied his lean naked body by hands and feet to the large crucifix mounted on top of the altar! Shuddering horror swept over Shannon at the sacrilegious act of cruelty.
"You filthy animal!" Vic snarled, trying to get onto his feet as he strained at the bonds holding his wrists. Twice he stumbled before making it erect and just in time to meet a brute-fist thundering into his abdomen from one of the three, crumpling him to his knees once more.
"D-Do n-not, senor . . . please . . . " Villelta's voice came down feebly through the whirring roar in Vic's head. "It is . . . no use . . . no use . . . "
The black grinned widely, the smile fading as he moved toward Shannon. "He cut me! Look!" he thundered, unwinding Villelta's shirt that he'd used to bind the deep, long ugly slash in his massive forearm. "Nobody cuts Juga, Yankee, nobody!"
"Too bad it wasn't your lousy throat!" Vic spat venomously.
The black's vicious face twisted grotesquely. He jerked the puntilla from his belt and moved toward Shannon, but one of the three stopped him.
"Not here, Juga. One is enough," he said in Spanish, as if in authority. "We will take him to the senor and see what is to be done with him. Hurry, before someone comes. Juan, you go and get the car. You know where to meet us."
The man that Vic had floored left quickly, while Juga grunted and backed away. Then: "What about him?" the big black questioned, pointing up at the crucified Villelta.
The one of authority looked up at the naked, hanging white body. "Finish him!" he ordered, grabbing hold of Shannon's arm while his cohort swung in on the opposite side to do the same and Juga moved up the two steps toward the altar.
Villelta's lips were mumbling as if in prayer. Shannon couldn't believe his eyes. He roared out something and tried to free himself but the pair were able to hold him in his dazed condition. Then he saw the black's huge hand reach up between Villelta's legs and clutch the helpless servant's naked testicles. The big man gritted his glistening white teeth, the cords and muscles of his arm standing out as he squeezed and laughed.
Villelta's scream of torment echoed and re-echoed against the stone walls of the colossal building to the inhuman pulverizing of his defenseless testicles. Shannon broke free then, but the two clubbed him down with little effort, and from the floor he saw the black plunge the glistening puntilla deep into the tortured servant's heart!
The pair dragged Shannon upright, hauling him behind the altar with the murdering black bringing up the rear. One of them triggered a spring of sorts, opening a panel in the back of the structure.
"Light the candles, Felix," number one ordered.
"Where does this go?" the black questioned, pointing toward the descending steps.
"It will bring us out at the old wall of the city. Juan will be there with the car. I learned of it from my father, and he from his. It was an escape route for royalty in case the city was besieged."
"Come on, let us get away from here," Felix said nervously. "I do not like it with him hanging up there on the cross. It is a desecration, Hymie."
"Shut up and go on, rabbit!" Hymie, the number one, snapped. "You are getting paid well enough."
"But I did not expect such a thing as that . . .
"Go on! Go on!" Juga roared, grabbing hold of Shannon's arm to shove him into the passageway. "I'm anxious to get back for some of that golden dessert the senor promised me."
Shannon harbored no expectations of coming out of this alive, not after what he'd seen happen to Villelta. These were ruthless killers of the first rank; yet he didn't intend to throw in the towel like some punch drunk ass either. His brain was trying to work, to function inside the agony brimming his skull, but all he could think of was that aristocratic, brave and faithful man crucified and the way he had been forced to die. He had to shake it from his mind at least for now otherwise, it might not be necessary.
They moved in silence along a winding tunnel through several inches of foul smelling water, the latter making the distance seem longer. Juan was waiting with the Citroen when they emerged from a man-hole type drain. Vic thought they might blindfold him, but they didn't.
It was dark only because the ebbing daylight was unable to penetrate into the narrow alley ways. Shannon concluded they were in Old Town. When they could go no further with the ear. it was parked, and they walked along the deserted streets to a steep stairway and up into a garlic-smelling series of dimly lit rooms.. . . and then suddenly, he was face to face with Carlos Ruiz! But that was only part of it!
Beside the bug-eyed fat man who sat behind a desk examining what were obviously diamonds, was draped Monica on the arm of his chair looking sensually provocative in a black negligee that hid none of her nakedly curvaceous young body! Her arm was around the swarthy bald man's neck and a silly smile fired her eyes as well as twisted loosely the attractive features of her alluring young face.
"Hi, man," she greeted, then giggled, her hand smoothing up over Ruiz' swarthy pate. "We've been waiting for you."
"Be quiet, pet. You must learn not to interfere in business," Carlos said to her. his thyroidal eyes fixing on Shannon. "So, my brother is dead. At last toro caught up with him, as he does with all idiots. Well . . . it is better for him this way, Shannon. He left this world the way he anticipated, but never knowing, I am certain, that his beloved Lucia drugged him."
His words struck Vic with the impact of a runaway freight car! "What the hell are you saying!" he spat at the fat man.
Carlos Ruiz' smile broadened. "So, you have not learned the truth as yet? But it is so, Senor Shannon. Lucia drugged his holy water before the second bull. Horrifying to you? It should not be. Such is the love of spurned Spanish women . . . especially wives. But we have taken care of it. There will be no scandal. All is hushed up and Lucia will return to Cordoba to a convent, and El Gallardo will go down in the annals of our national sport."
The immensity of what he was trying to fight, to escape, was sapping what strength was left in Vic Shannon's big frame. The ugly monstrosity seated before him was all powerful on this island, and his own existence no more than a fly's to be eliminated . . .
"We want to be sure that there will be no intimate El Gallardo biography, Shannon, eh? You can understand that," he was saying from his place behind the desk. And then to the black man: "Villelta?"
A brutal laugh filled the room. "Don't worry, senor. Villelta sleeps forever," Juga thundered. "And now, I want my blonde dessert."
"Of course you do, and so do your three compatriots, am I right?"
"Money first!" Felix exclaimed.
"Shut up, rabbit! Find your place or you may end up like Villelta!" Hymie's voice warned.
Carlos Ruiz chuckled once more, as if he enjoyed the tension amongst his peons. He rose up like a Buddha from his chair and said: "Shall we go downstairs?"
Shannon was shoved through several luxurious salons before being pushed ahead down a stairway. There were several flights, which had to be leading them deep under the ground. The smell of dampness and mold filled his nostrils as they moved through vast areas of stone filled semi-darkness.
"At one time this entire dungeon was a torture chamber of the Inquisition, Senor Shannon," Carlos' voice informed from behind him. "Just think of the souls that gave up their tormented bodies here, and realize how lucky you are. It will be the sea that claims you . . . and Miss Van Leyden."
Vic saw her then. They had moved into a lighted, small vault-like room with nothing but a mattress on the floor. Katryn lay on it stripped naked, her hands secured by rope to iron rings imbedded deep in the stone wall. Her legs were free but she lay as if drained of strength. Her long flaxen hair was a mass of twisted strands, and there were smudge marks on the voluptuous mounds of her pink-nippled breasts and the oval of her flat belly. The blondish crest of pubic curls between her rounded full thighs was like a golden crown surrounding the pinkish slit of her tightly pouting vaginal lips. Raging anger seethed within Shannon at the subjugated sight of her. He swung around at Ruiz who was grinning.
"It was necessary that I have her kidnapped and brought here, senor," the fat man said. "You see, she too is a detriment to me, but like you, Shannon, expendable, eh?"
"You you fat slob prick!" Vic spat at him. "Destroying helpless women is your meat, is it not, animal? Do you eat shit, too?"
Carlos Ruiz paled, the blood draining from his heavy jowls to give him the appearance of an albino walrus. He lashed the back of his puffy hand hard across the American's cheek, staggering the bound man. "We shall see! We shall see who eats the shit!" he hissed viciously. Then, to the black man: "Bring me a chair, Juga, I wish to watch this. Two of you secure our friend to the wall rings where he can also be a spectator. Hymie, you may fuck the lovely Miss Van Leyden first, and you, Monica pet, come and sit on my lap?"
According to Ruiz' commands it all came into being while Shannon watched as if he were reliving the nightmare at the old mill with a new cast of characters. He was hung with his wrists tied to the rings above his head. Ruiz sat upon a chair with Monica's curved near-nakedness perched on what he'd ludicrously called a lap, nothing about her normal. The fat man's hand was up between her lush young thighs working lewdly as Monica squirmed on it and stared wild-eyed at the helpless naked girl on the mattress while Hymie, stripped from the hips down, crawled up between Katryn's forced open legs.
The ugly hoodlum's thick length of hardened cock stood out with its ravaging intentions like a gnarled chunk of olive wood. The heavy foreskin had pulled back from its bulbous head glistening at the knob and his hairy, bloating balls swung goatishly down between his legs.
"Oh . . . oh God, Vic . . . stop them, stop them!" Katryn cried when her rapist's waggling hard penis moved menacingly closer between her helpless, spread tanned thighs.
Shannon strained like a fool at his bonds. Tears of bitter anger blinded him. Yet, through them he saw Hymie manipulating his swollen cock-head lustfully into the tight pink slit of Katryn's unprotected loins. It splayed the yielding fleshy lips as might the blunt end of a prying tool, insinuating itself in the soft, sensitive warmth . . . then plunged forward!
"Aaagghhh!" Katryn cried out to the thrusting invasion, her long legs jerking frantically with the unmerciful ruthlessness of his sadistic impalement. He grabbed at the shapely sun-tinted columns and forced them up and back as he crawled higher up on top of her, his hands clawing at her white breasts for leverage, while his hips worked with pistoned velocity to fuck up into her vulnerable young pussy as if she were a servicing slave.
Shannon had to fight back the urge to bellow at the top of his lungs, forcing himself to endure the obscene sight of the blonde beauty's rape before him while he hung there unable to help her. The ugly bastard's racing cock was savagely fucking up into her, but the rapidly changing expression on Katryn's face was letting him know she could bear up under it . . maybe even more. Her breathing was already beginning to come in deepened gasps and she was suddenly holding those spectacular long legs up and back as if all were not agony. Christ, he hoped for her sake it wasn't!
"Get ready, Juan. You will go next and then Felix," Ruiz ordered, his puffy hand still buried lewdly up between the squirming Monica's spread young thighs. Vic could see his thick middle finger slipping up in and out of the teenager's splayed cunt-lips, the dark curl-fringed flesh wetly shimmering as he luridly finger-fucked her proffered pussy with different changes of pace that had her cooing passionately with arousal.
"What about me?" Juga growled, his sparkling eyes brownish in their whites when he flashed them onto the fat man.
"Yes, Juga, do not worry. I would never forget you, but had I let you go first to ream her tight little hole the others might better shove their pricks in a cow as to follow, eh?"
The black grinned proudly, looking down at the huge bulge in his swollen pant leg. He bobbed his head and Carlos Ruiz chuckled obscenely.
"I'll fuck her and she'll know what cock is, eh!" Juga roared in his accented English as he reached down his bandaged slashed arm to coarsely stroke his hidden massive penis.
"The others will be finished and sent off by then," Ruiz said. "We will have her to ourselves for our own private little party while our American friend looks on."
"Does she know who I am?" the powerful black giant asked, an evil expression of perversity twisting his thick features. "I mean about chopping up her old man? She's got to know I done it, eh? That's what'll make it for me, senor. Not just fucking a white bitch who thinks I'm lower than an animal . . . "
"She knows, Juga. I have already had the pleasure of telling her that," the fat man said, grinning wickedly. "She almost went mad with tears, but as you can see she survived that rather well. Of course, the absinthe my pet here and I forced down her helps, too. But it will be most exciting to watch such an advocate of segregation respond when she sees that you are going to fuck her, eh?"
"Yeah," Juga said, still grinning like an untamed savage. "You'll see what the Bantus think of their white masters!"
The depths of their diabolical salacity left Shannon with his mouth hanging agape, though he didn't know why it should after what he had seen the Bantu do to Villelta. Christ, there must had to be someway he could save her from anymore of this insane abasement!
"Auggghhh . . . shit . . . fuck! It is cummiinngggg!" Hymie suddenly gnashed between clenched teeth, his lips drawn back as he skewered with maniacal fury up into Katryn's upturned blonde pussy. His naked hips humped in rapid-fire thrusts, his cum-filled balls slapping down loudly into the smooth furrow between her spread white ass-cheeks. Like a gasping madman he pumped his spewing penis up into her violated vagina, and Vic couldn't help but notice the way the voluptuous girl heaved her receptive soft loins up to his ultimate delivery of raging sperm as if all things were being answered between her legs in that lustful fusion of cock and cunt!
And then Juan threw himself on top of her. a panting Katryn undeniably welcoming the thick rod of his blood-filled hardness ramming right up into her cum-slickened vagina.
"Oh . . . oh Vic!" she whined out shamefully with her lovely legs drawn back high and the expression slackening her face an unfathomable enigma of lust and moral longing. Her generous breasts quivered like white dunes of pink-peaked fluff as she lay with her hands secured by the rings behind her head and the flared roundness of her untanned hips beginning to rotate sensually to the plunges of raping cock bursting up into her ravished cunt.
It was that unexpected bit of lasciviousness on the kidnapped young woman's part that caused Shannon's cock to respond inside his pants. While the realization made him disgustedly incensed at his own weakness, he nonetheless was raising an aroused stiffening rod that could only add to his misery.
"Let us expedite things a little, shall we, Felix?" Carlos Ruiz said with his thick-lipped grin as he continued to play in the wet teenage flesh of Monica's obviously excited young cunt. "I believe the fair-haired bitch is hungering to the point where she would love a hard cock to suck on. Can you accommodate her?"
"Ah, si, si! "the third of the fat man's ruthless crew exclaimed, his eyes burning like fiery agates as he thrust down his pants and clasped at his circumcised, vein-webbed penis.
A guttural sound of helpless wrath tore from the big American's throat when he saw the one called Felix, a hair-covered primate type, drop to his knees beside Katryn's tossing head, his heavy poling cock clutched lewdly in his hand. Her eyes were closed in a sensuous mask of goaded passions fired by the hammering thick shaft tunneling to its hilt up into her soft trembling belly, but they popped open wide when Felix wound his hand in her long hair and jerked her face over toward his thrusting prick.
"Suck it!" he snarled in Spanish. "Open those pretty lips, bitch!"
"Ooooohhhh . . . no, no!" Katryn cried, her eyes bulging from the painful pressure of his hand brutishly twisted in her hair.
"Yes! Yes!" he spat, grasping at one of her sensitive breasts with talon-like fingers and beginning to cruelly twist its tiny nipple until the defenseless naked girl squealed shrilly from the pain. "Suck it, cunt! Do it or I will rip the fucking nipple off and make you eat it!"
Katryn began to obey, sobs still choking up out of her opened lips as Shannon saw the vicious bastard's slimy cock-head plunge between them and disappear until it had to be brushing at the back of her throat. She sputtered and gagged around it, but that didn't stop the lust-warped rapist as he began to saw in and out of her clasping lips like a rutting animal.
"Now, Juga, supposing we move our Yankee guest, eh?" Carlos Ruiz suggested. "I want him nice and close so he can watch the main event. Hymie, help Juga secure Senor Shannon to that pair of rings in the floor where he can lie down and be comfortable. You might even strip him so we can see if he has any virile blood in his veins."
Vic thought of trying to make a fight of it when they unloosed his bonds from the rings, but the black anticipated him, wrenching his arm in a hammer-lock up between his shoulder blades while the other wrapped like a coil of rolled steel around his throat. Three minutes later he was on his back with arms spread out and secured to rings in the floor. Then, they stripped him from the waist down, the sight of his own rock-hardened cock towering long and thick enraging him while the others laughed and praised his masculinity with cynical delight. Monica saw it, too, Vic realized when her glazed hazel-eyes riveted between his legs and she began to mewl and writhe on Ruiz's finger fucking up into her, whimpering with shuddering quivers that could only mean one thing she was cumming! The proof was the sudden dripping wetness that suddenly spilled over the fat man's pudgy hand buried lewdly up between her gaping white thighs.
"Was it nice, pet?" he asked, kissing her on the cheek.
"Mmmmmmmmm, yes . . . do not stop, daddy." Monica shivered out lustfully. "Some more! Make me cum a hundred times!"
Shannon raised his head as if one cue, just in time to see the lost expression on Juan's face. He was squeezing the satiny flesh of Katryn's waist into mean ridges that left angry red marks there, and while he fucked barbarically into her upturned loins he was watching her ovaled lips clasped tightly around the pistoning cock of Felix who was writhing his hips as he forced her to suck his burgeoning penis. Vic, too, fastened his eyes on the obscene sight of the hairy one's pelvis crushing against her face and tensing in threatening trembles. The bastard gripped her cheeks and rammed as if he were trying to push his expanding thick cock right down her throat!
Suddenly, Vic saw the viscous white fluid escaping around the oval of her lips, her throat beginning to work wildly as Felix roared and shot his stream of ejaculating sperm obscenely into her open mouth. At the same time, the pumping shaft began to lose its rigidity, but she seemed to cling to it with her lips fastened tightly, her voluptuous body suddenly caught up in a series of convulsive little spasms, humming sounds vibrating passionately from the depths of her chest.
"Goddamn! Here it cummss!" Juan cursed, his face a grotesque image of released lust as he battered his screaming penis into her hungrily receptive, uplifting young cunt and Katryn cried out in shuddering ecstasy, the limp cock slipping from her sperm-smeared lips with a wet sucking sound that was like the death knell to her one powerful resistance.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Exhausted and aching from their bestial ravaging of her defenseless body, Katryn lay on the dirty mattress with head to one side to avoid the shame of looking at any of them. Amazingly enough, she still had her wits had never really lost them. It had to have been the green sweet-tasting liquid Monica had helped that fat monster pour down her throat that had made her lose all control. My God, it had been like a raging bed of sizzling hot coals burning passionately in the core of her wildly craving vagina as if it were impossible to get enough cock into her to feed it! Even worse, the ravenous hunger was still there tormenting her!
She moved her head and eyes finally to see that the first three had gone and . . . God Almighty! The black was stripping naked to the waist! Peripherally, Ruiz and Monica registered as did Vic, stretched out bound and half naked on the floor nearby; but the foreboding horror of the huge Bantu making himself naked held her stare in captivated repugnance. Not him too! Not a black man . . . this black man who had fiendishly hacked up her very own father!
He was grinning down at her like some demon out of hell as abruptly he kicked off his pants and she saw the unbelievable hardened length of his massive, blunt headed penis standing rigidly out from his hair-covered loins. His flat belly and muscular thighs glistened like polished ebony, and between them hung a bloated sac of balloon-filled proportions which sent shudders of near panic up her naked spine. Yet incredibly, the unwanted sensations in the depths of her sperm-saturated loins and belly churned to the lurid sight of his exposed savage genitals.
He moved toward her holding the brute shaft salaciously in his hand, working the thick foreskin with tormenting lewdness back and forth over the shiny black head, his heavy cum-laden balls swinging like a bull's at its thick base. He said something, and there were other taunting voices, but they were only sounds to the terrified girl. She began shaking her head negatively as he dropped to his knees and spread her futilely resistant legs with a minimum of effort. She heard Vic's curse and Carlos Ruiz's evil laugh. The Bantu sniggered childishly as he knelt over between the contrasting whiteness of her trembling thighs he had spread so far apart that the strain at her crotch and buttocks felt as if she were going to split.
Katryn raised her head in despairing confusion. Utter shame-filled revulsion forced the sobs from her throat and tears down her cheeks; yet, just as strong was the lusting hunger seething in the tumultuous depths of her loins. She gaped down to see him draw the fiat tipped head of his swollen cock through the wet, blood-flushed flesh between her pussy's swollen lips, the sensuous impulses the contact immediately set-off within her causing her hips to jerk reflexively upward toward his huge black penis.
He seated his stiffened cock at the mouth of her nibbling little cuntal hole. It was going to hurt horribly! A shudder of masochism raced blindingly through her! She wanted it. . . wanted it . . . his murdering, brute black cock mercilessly fucking up into her helpless vagina!
"Do it you filthy black bastard! Fuck me! Fill my cunt with that savage cock, damn you!" she screamed at him, twisting and writhing to make her nipple-tautened breasts ripple and sway wildly to her wanton, frantic motions.
Shannon lay stunned by the obscene plea pouring harshly from her lips. They'd done something to her had to drugged her maybe . . . She screamed and his eyes strained to the sight of the Bantu's horrendous rod of cock-flesh pushing slowly up into the blonde-fringed pink hole wetly splitting the softness between her gaping white thighs and buttocks.
"Aaaauuggghhh . . . aauuoooo . . .God Almighty!" she wailed and cried.
"You like it, white bitch?" the black man taunted.
"Aaaauuggghhh . . . yesssss! Do it! Fuck me with that monstrous thing!" the naked blonde spat back defiantly.
"Christ!" Carlos Ruiz roared in lust-charged amazement. Shannon saw him shove the now naked Monica off his lap. "Take off my pants!" the fat man ordered the teenager who immediately went at the task.
"Are you going to fuck me now, daddy?" the glazed-eyed girl crooned with desire. "Maybe in my ass again, please?"
"Shut up and get out of the way!" Ruiz snarled, standing to work the trousers down off his unsightly snobbish body.
"Please, Carlos?" the curvaceous, long-haired young girl begged.
Vic Shannon strained uselessly at his bonds when he saw the ugly fat man slap the dazed girl hard across the cheek, leaving her staggering as he lumbered over and began untying Katryn's wrists.
"Get on your back, Juga! Sit her up on top of you!" Ruiz ordered and Vic could see the length of his hardened fat prick protruding beneath the nauseating overhang of white-skinned flab. "That's it! Yes! Now draw her tits right down onto you . . . so I can fuck her tender little asshole!"
"You sonovabitch!" Shannon snarled, but then he couldn't see anything but the naked curved whiteness blocking his view as it crawled forward with teenage eyes riveted on the up-thrusting hardness of his own straining cock. "Monica!" Vic hissed at her. "For Chrissakes, help me! Snap out of it, baby! Untie my hands so we can get out of here . . . ! "
"I will! I will!" she whispered back in hot breaths, her ripe young breasts quivering as she climbed on top of him with knees snuggling against his ribs and her moistened, dark curled loins hovering above his throbbing cock. "But first I've got to fuck your cock up into me, Shannon! Man, I'm so goddamned hot . . . my pussy's on fire!"
"Oh Christ," Vic groaned half in despair and half in lust as he felt her soft hand encircle his hardened penis and begin manipulating the plum-shaped knob between her seething cunt lips. And even as he heard Katryn scream to what had to be the torment of Ruiz's rigid shaft worming up into her tiny nether-hole he knew he couldn't think about that for a moment, not with Monica's young slippery cuntal sheath slithering down over his aching rod with tight ravenous heat that immediately started to pull at his swollen balls like a starving mouth.
"Oh my God! You're splitting me! Aaauuuggghhh!" Shannon heard Katryn's cry of pain, its edge of perverse desire not escaping him, though his mind was rapidly dulling to the rawness of his own unbridled lust.
Monica rested on her hands over him, the full white mounds of her hanging, ruby-tipped breasts dancing above his chest as she began to plunge and churn her rounded buttocks up and down with eager fucking motions that drove his cock up into her slickened, clasping vagina with bruising force.
"Oh God, lover, that's beautiful!" the long haired teenager gasped, and Vic couldn't deny it. "Oooohhh . . . mmmmmmmm," she hummed, skewering his pulsing rod up into her burning little belly like some delectable sex fiend. "Ooohhhhh . . . I'm going to cum now, darling.. . b-but we just keep right on going . . . oohhh cccccuummiingggg . . . aaahhh!"
Shannon felt the gush of her warm vaginal release bathing his rigid penis, trickling down onto his pelvis and balls. And then while the breaths came raggedly out of her with belly and loins still spasming, she lay down flat on top of him and reached out with both hands to work at the knots securing his wrists.
"You've got to promise me you won't make me get off until you cum, lover," she whispered passionately down into his face.
"All right.. .just untie them. I promise," Shannon said, knowing he never could refuse her anyway.
He pulled his hands free, flexed them for a moment to get the blood circulating, then cupped the lush softness of her hanging breasts raised up over him once more. Monica gasped in delight. She whispered: "Now for your special treat, man!"
"Hurry," Vic said, the word and its meaning at a time when lives hung in the balance, sounding utterly mad, but he couldn't help himself now. He had to cum!
She had raised her hips and was looking down at the glistening rod of his heavy cock as it came out of her. "Goodbye," she whispered, suddenly swiveling around on top until her ovaled white ass-cheeks were facing him. Her hand came back between her thighs, took the shaft of his prick while Shannon watched and she nuzzled the wet rubbery tip up against the snug little opening of her tiny puckered anal ring. It happened so quick and right before his eyes, yet he hardly realized what was going on until he saw the dimpled little hole stretching open lewdly and slipping right down over his blood-rigid penis.
"Jesus!" he gulped as her rounded spread ass-cheeks began to wiggle and squirm, his eyes gaping lustfully to its worming like a foot into a boot, pushing right up into the hot spongy depths of her teenage rectum to her descending hips, until the thick length of it had vanished hilt-deep right up her anus!
Vaguely, he could hear the harsh rasps of lustful breathing mingled with the loud slapping of naked flesh and moans coming from the mattress, but the tremendous sensations that Monica's self-administered sodomy had electrified in the swirling pit of his groin demanded full attention. She was looking back over her shoulder to watch in sensual delight as he clutched her smooth buttocks and spread the soft white moons even farther apart, thrusting at the same time the length of his cock up into her rhythmically gyrating rectal passage. Suddenly, Vic could feel an erotic caressing against his almost numbed cock-shaft, and realized it was a couple of Monica's fingers sunk deep up into her vagina and rotating so that he could feel them lewdly working through the thin membrane separating her two erotic channels.
That did it! All hell broke loose in his cum-sloshing balls! Shannon dug his clawing fingers into the soft satiny flesh of her hips as the spine-shattering torrent of his sperm raced up the length of his jerking cock like a spurting geyser. She began to fuck and undulate her straining young buttocks furiously, at last thrusting them down tight to his pelvis while his spewing cock shot its load in muscle-racking spasms up into the seething heat wildly caressing his up-thrusting shaft.
Shannon bit his lip to keep from announcing the event, not wanting to jar the lustful concentration of the two bastards raping Katryn on the mattress . . . if that's what it still could be called. Monica's teenage nakedness shuddered in a fit of sensations and he knew she was cumming again. Vic waited, catching his breath and letting her get the full benefit of her salacious pleasure before gently easing her up off his already wilted organ that came out of her still clasping rectum with a little hissing sound. She swung around quickly and kissed him.
"What do we do now, man?" she panted, both of them looking to where the two grunting men held Katryn pinned in the lewdest sandwich of flesh imaginable. But the older woman was no longer responding, and it struck Vic that she'd fainted from their brutal double ravishment of her defenseless body.
More than rage ripped through the big American; the urge to kill choked up into his throat with acid-eating bitterness at the sight of Katryn's limp white body being buffeted like a voluptuous life-sized doll between the barbaric pair. Mercifully, she was unconscious to the thick blubber-cock tunneling viciously up into her back passage while the brutal shaft of black hardness continued to pummel her soft young loins from beneath. Vic lay as if frozen, forcing himself to wait for that precise second when they both would be the least trouble to take.
"We wait until they cum," he hissed to the naked girl beside him, "and that shouldn't be long by the looks of that swarthy bastard."
Shannon could see both of their huge cocks fucking rhythmically into the blonde girl's unresponding passages . . . and then Ruiz began to drool and clutch brutishly at Katryn's round lifeless hips.
"Christ!" he roared, his mountainous flab beginning to quiver all over. At exactly that moment, Shannon bolted.
The fat man was too engrossed to hear the charging movement racing toward him. Shannon kicked him in the temple with the heel of his naked foot, sending the giant oval of flesh into a sprawling blimp onto the stone floor. The spluttering mass of flesh grunted but didn't move as Vic scooped up the chair and swung back around. The Bantu had tossed Katryn off him with a snarl and was coiled in a half-spring when Shannon smashed the chair down against the side of his skull and one broad shoulder, the sickening snap of a breaking bone bringing a tierce bellow from the black man.
Shannon didn't wait. At the sight of Juga's broken collar bone, the muscular American rushed him from that side as the injured man tried to get to his feet. A looping right fist with everything Vic had crashed against the black man's jaw, flooring him once more. It wasn't over yet, but Shannon knew that he had him now. He would slowly and methodically beat him to death . . . and then he'd finish Ruiz . . . !
He well might have too had not the sudden onslaught of uniformed men with drawn automatics stopped him! Jesus Christ! It was the
Majorcan Police!
* * *
Monica almost missed the plane. Shannon with Katryn beside him was already seated on the Trident ready for the first hop of their long trip to the States. Katryn sat by the window, Vic in the middle, and Monica took the aisle seat. He knew he should feel thankful just to be alive now that it was all over, but right at the moment he didn't, though the two roses he sat between were more than blooming. They should be, he thought, the way the pair had drained him in their wild, all night celebration at a tourist hotel the night before.
Christ, what an unbelievable few days. Who would ever believe it? Well, he'd find that out once the book was completed, wouldn't he? It was Lucia who bothered him the most, the big American realized, and of course Villelta, that devoted man who had saved them in the end just by dying the horrible way he had. Once his body had been discovered, the authorities had been enraged by the sacrilege committed in the centuries old place of God. Someone had seen the Citroen parked and men chasing others. The Guardia Civil had never rested until they'd found the car, then began searching the sealed off area house by house. The rest was history . . .
"You don't seem very happy, darling," Katryn leaned close to whisper as she clasped his hand.
"Sure I am," Shannon said as he felt Monica take hold of the other and lean forward to join their conversation.
"Still thinking of Lucia?" the teenager pressed softly.
"No . . . not really, I guess," Vic fumbled nervously as the plane began to taxi toward the runway. "Maybe I'm just wondering what I'll do with two vivacious young lusty women," he admitted. "I do have a book to write, you know."
"And we both type," Monica said. "That ought to be some help."
"And I can cook . . . amongst other things," Katryn teased.
"Yeah . . . but it's those other things that take up so much valuable time," Shannon sighed, enjoying their game as much as the luscious creatures on either side of him. But it was going to be more relaxing after they climbed onto the 747 in London and drew a new cast of stewardesses. He felt that for certain as the auburn-haired sprite moved along the aisle toward them, her rounded eyes spitting venom directly at him.
She paused and stared angrily down into Vic Shannon's flushing face. "All right, lover-boy, fasten your seatbelt," Sybil Gorman snapped. She looked from Monica to Katryn and added: "I see you picked up some souvenirs. I hope they don't tarnish. Tourists Beware' is the watchword here you know."
She walked on and Vic swallowed tightly.
"Who the hell is she?" Monica pressed irritably. "Do you know her?"
"Never saw her before in my life," Vic replied.
"Liar," Katryn responded.
Then, they all laughed in that "nothing is forever" manner that pleased Shannon, and the big American leaned back to relax for the rest of the trip home.
