Pride, we learn at our mother's knee, goeth before a fall. But sometimes, as is the nature of most adages, the proverb inverts itself and the fall goeth before pride! In any case, like most of the seven deadly sins, pride is a two-edged weapon, capable of inflicting harm both on the wielder and those against whom it is flourished.
The Latin races, of course, do not consider pride especially masculine pride as a sin at all, deadly or otherwise. Rather it is a virtue, a possession to be treasured whose loss must at once, and speedily, be avenged.
The effect of this specialized view of masculine pride, and its conflict with the mores of our modern American society, lies at the core of Paul Hernandez's searing new novel, The Hijacked Virgin. Mr. Hernandez takes as his protagonist Alvaro Ortiz, a naturalized American of Mexican descent who is married to a beautiful modern American girl. Already there is the possibility of latent discord for the husband's sense of masculine pride, his machismo, which requires of a woman little more than that she should keep her place, accords ill with his wife's free-thinking, '70's outlook the more so as she is in fact the brains of the small-time air charter business which Ortiz runs in Southern California with the aid of one elderly converted wartime bomber.
But it is when this plane is hi-jacked by two brutal killers bent on forcing the pilot himself to break the laws of his adopted country that the battle between tradition and liberalism, the old and the new, really comes into the open.
Fearful of losing his operator's license, afraid of losing his prized citizenship and even being deported, Ortiz finds himself only half the man his inherited machismo demands . . . and it is only when he has suffered the intolerable indignity not only of witnessing helplessly the rape of his own wife, but also of hearing her react to that violation in a more positive manner than he has been able to achieve, that he at last finds the necessary courage to act decisively enough to worst the villains in one of the most suspenseful and spine-chilling dramas this author has ever contrived.
For Ortiz, the answer lies in pragmatism; in the right application of force and determination at the right time, in the forswearing of tradition for its own sake. And for Holly, his seductive red-haired wife, a different compromise the realization that she must come to terms with the complexities of her own woman's nature if her marriage is to survive.
This gripping story of violence and kidnapping and sudden death, of skyjacks and drug-smuggling and murder under the hot skies of Mexico, is as modern as today's news, as true in its delineation of the age-old battle between men and women as the oldest of our proverbs.
-The Publishers
PROLOGUE
Boscoe and Guardi were dead lucky. They'd been prepared to snatch Briggs by ramming the old jalopy he drove back and forth between El Centro and the strip. But Briggs had picked up a flat that day and they found him crouched in the sun beside the battered Chevrolet, sweating and swearing as he wrestled with the nuts on the jacked-up wheel. So Briggs wasn't lucky: he was just dead. But that didn't come until later.
He looked over his shoulder and wiped the sweat from his eyes with an oily forearm as the convertible rocked to a halt beside the stalled car a tough, wiry, nut-faced little man with dark stains across the back and under the arms of his olive-drab shirt. There were three men in the convertible. Boscoe and Guardi sat in the back, their sunglasses glittering under the wide brims of their hats as they stared contemptuously at the rusty Chevy. Each of them wore a black button-down shirt and a pale tie under a fawn lightweight jacket. Both were muscular, barrel-chested and heavy-jawed. But Guardi's face was blue-jowled with long sideburns, and Boscoe's craggy features were burned brick red by the desert sun. The driver was gazing through the windshield at the heat trembling above the hood. He looked as though he'd been turned down for a small part in a Cagney movie in the 1930's and had been sore about it ever since. Guardi leaned over the side of the car.
"Artie Briggs?" he asked curtly.
The little man stared at him. "What of it?"
"Works for the spic runs charter flights off that crummy strip a coupla miles down the road?"
Briggs stood up and took a pace toward the convertible, wiping the palms of his hands on his jeans. "I work with Mister Ortiz, sure," he said evenly. "He owns the field and the ship he flies, and he's an American citizen, if it interests you. I guess maybe his parents were Mexican."
Guardi laughed. "A greaser's a greaser," he said. "It don't matter a goddamn what passport he carries in his stinkin' pocket. But you keep that crate of his in the air, right?"
"Who wants to know?" Briggs demanded, bristling at his tone.
"Just a civil question, pal," Boscoe said. His voice was gravelly and curiously soft.
Brigg's eyes flicked right and left. The narrow blacktop ran straight as a ruler across the desert. The palms and fruit farms and railway yards of El Centro were five miles away to the west. Two miles ahead, the corrugated iron roof of the hangar at one end of the landing strip broke the flat horizon. And on either side the silver-gray wastes of cactus and paloverde stretched interminably into the shimmering heat haze. Apart from a buzzard wheeling against the brassy bowl of the sky, there wasn't another living creature to be seen. He licked the sweat from his upper lip. "Okay," he said huskily, "so I service the Ortiz plane. Was there something else you wanted to know?"
Guardi opened the rear door of the convertible and stepped to the ground. He was wearing tan and white calf shoes with pointed toes. "Just one thing, Artie," he said gently. "What time are you due to check in today? Ortiz aims to bring the plane back around dusk, don't he?"
"What the hell's that to you . . . ? " Briggs began, checking himself abruptly as Boscoe opened the other door and stepped delicately around the rear of the convertible to join his companion. The two of them stood facing him in the furnace heat of the sun, their arms hanging loosely by their sides, the bulges of their shoulder holsters clearly visible through the thin material of their jackets. Briggs swallowed and tightened his grip on the wheel brace he still held in his right hand.
"I was due in a three-thirty," he said sullenly. "I'm late already. There's work to do on the starboard motor before he takes off again tomorrow morning. I got to ready the kit, and stuff. . . Who the hell are you guys, anyway?"
"Well, we ain't the law, and that's for sure," Guardi said. "Let's say uh business associates of Mister Ortiz. Ain't that right, Boscoe?"
Boscoe chuckled. "That's right," he said hoarsely. "Future business associates!"
Briggs stared from one hard face to the other.
"I don't get it," he said flatly. He shrugged. "Still, I guess you know your business . . . Now, if you found out all you want to know, I'll attend to mine. This goddamn tire wasted enough of my time already." He turned around and bent down by the wheel once more.
"Too bad you got delayed," Guardi said. "That cute little redhead Ortiz runs'll be wonderin' what the hell happened to you. She's all alone out there, ain't she? Maybe you should call her and tell her you're late."
"Call. . . ? " Briggs paused in the middle of fitting the wheel brace to a nut and stared over his shoulder. "You're outa your mind! I'll have this wheel fixed in ten minutes; I'll be there in fifteen! Anyway, where the hell would I call her in this goddamn desert?"
"Seems to me we passed a shack awhile back," Guardi said. "There was a line runnin' out from El Centro. You could call from there."
"Jim Frazer's diner? He only opens weekends this time of year. But there ain't no point. I'll be through in ten minutes. I told you."
Guardi shook his head slowly. "I don't think so. It'll be a long time before that heap's fit to run again . . . eh, Boscoe?"
"Hell, yes," Boscoe said. "A long, long time, pal."
Briggs was getting angry. His eyes were glittering and a dark flush suffused his leathery cheeks. "Look, will you guys for chrissake quit bugging me?" he snapped. "Ortiz'll be sore as hell if I'm not ready for him when he gets back."
"Now ain't that just too bad!" Guardi said softly. Moving with incredible speed for a man of his bulk, he darted forward and slammed his left heel savagely down on the base of the crouching mechanic's spine. Taken completely by surprise, Briggs cried out in pain as he involuntarily arched his back and toppled over against the side of the Chevrolet.
The blue-chinned hood was on him in a flash. Before Briggs could regain his balance, his head snapped back on his shoulders as a ferocious back-handed blow smashed across his lips and sent his skull cracking against the rusting bodywork of the car. At the same time Boscoe leaped nimbly in and kicked his feet from under him. Briggs went down into the dust.
Guardi leaned down, grabbed a fistful of his shirt collar, and hauled him to his feet as Boscoe drew back his right arm and launched a murderous punch at the dazed mechanic's belly. The blow caught Briggs in the pit of the stomach. He gave a choked cry as the air was expelled from his lungs by his paralyzed diaphragm muscles, and then doubled up, retching.
Boscoe brought his knee up brutally into the mechanic's contorted face and then rabbit-punched him with the flat of his hand. For an instant Briggs stood swaying on rubber legs, bent forward from the waist as blood spattered from his smashed nose and the air gargled noisily back into his lungs. Then Guardi's ham-like hand plucked him upright and sent him staggering back against the Chevy. He leaned against the hot metal like a drunken man, his mouth opening and closing, his hands pressed against his tortured belly, his knees buckling.
Guardi steadied him there with an outstretched arm and nodded to his companion. "All yours," he said. "But leave the moosh alone. We want him to speak clearly."
Boscoe nodded in his turn, balanced himself on the balls of his feet, measured his distance, and then unloosed a pile-driving left and right that thudded sickeningly against the semi-conscious man's chest just over the heart. Briggs shuddered galvanically and then dropped face down in the dust.
Guardi took a colored handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped the blood fastidiously from his knuckles. "Okay, Frank," he called to the driver of the convertible. "You can get rid of the heap now." He wasn't even panting.
The driver pulled the big car off the road and cut the motor. The blue and yellow license plates announced that the convertible was registered in Miami, Florida, the garden state. He slouched across the road and kicked the jack away from under the old Chevrolet's sill, stepping back as the rusty sedan lurched down and the loosened wheel fell outwards on to the macadam. Then, climbing into the driving seat, he started up, gunned the motor, and sent the crippled auto careering over the hot sand between the sagebrush and cactus bushes, the wheel-less hub scoring an erratic trail in the dry ground.
Briggs was sitting up in the roadway, his bloodied face a mask of consternation as he stared at the showers of sand and stones and dust churned up by the limping Chevy. "What the hell are you doing?" he cried thickly. "You'll wreck the suspension! The brake drum will-"
He broke off aghast. The sedan, which had momentarily disappeared behind the cactus screen, rose into sight as it climbed a shallow dune, the back wheels scrabbling madly in the loose sand. It staggered to the lip of the rise, hung crazily for a second over the dip beyond, and then plunged over on to its roof with a jarring clatter that sent the buzzard swooping away towards the south.
"My car!" Briggs groaned, gazing horrorstruck at the cloud of dust settling beyond the dune. "You bastards! . . . My car! . . . " Struggling to his feet, he stumbled a few paces in the direction of the wrecked Chevrolet.
"Get that Frank!" Guardi said, shaking his head admiringly as the driver emerged from the murk, unconcernedly brushing off his jacket and pants. "He used to be a stock-car driver! He can do anything with an auto, and come out without a fuckin' scratch!"
"You sons of bitches!" Briggs raved. "You wrecked my car! . . . "
"Shuddup Artie you talk too much!" Guardi growled. "Boscoe . . . ? "
The red-faced hood took three quick steps towards Briggs. His big left hand reached out for the mechanic's shoulder, spinning him around to face the road again. Then his right whipped in to jolt stunningly against the side of Brigg's jaw. The little man dropped for the third time.
They picked him up and tossed him into the back of the convertible as if he had been a sack of potatoes. The driver rolled the abandoned wheel from the Chevrolet off into the brush and then got into the car. Two minutes later they were heading back towards El Centro, with Briggs face down on the floor between the front and back seats and Boscoe's feet resting on his neck.
The diner was a dilapidated clapboard and adobe shack standing fifty yards back off the road in a thicket of stunted scrub oak. The shuttered windows looked as though they hadn't been opened for months, and sand had drifted against the peeling door beneath a creaking Coca-Cola sign. Frank bumped the convertible across the cracked asphalt drive-in and stopped at the side of the cabin. Boscoe and Guardi dragged Briggs out of the car, slapped his face until he struggled back to consciousness, and then hustled him around to the back door.
"He won't be here," the battered mechanic mumbled. "I told you Jim only opens weekends now."
"That's fine, pal, just fine," Boscoe said genially. "That's the way we hoped it'd be." He stepped back and then leaped forward, planting the heel of one foot under the handle of the door. The flimsy lock burst open with the impact and the peeling woodwork shivered inward with a protesting screech. They pushed their way in and Guardi wrinkled his nose in disgust. "Jesus, what a dump!" he exclaimed.
It was stiflingly hot in the shuttered cabin. The close atmosphere reeked of stale fat and long-gone coffee, and huge bloated flies buzzed heavily through the stagnant air. Guardi's gimlet eyes raked the rickety chairs, the checkered oilcloth-covered tables, the scarred pin-ball machine by the door. Then with a grunt of satisfaction he strode across and lifted a telephone from the zinc-topped bar. "Okay, Artie," he said, placing the instrument on the nearest table, "now you can make that call to the Ortiz dame."
"I don't know what you're talkin' about," Briggs said thickly. "I don't have any call to make. What's the pitch with you guys anyway? Why d'you have to wreck my car and beat me up? What the hell did I do to you?"
Boscoe sighed and shook his head reprovingly. "Pal," he said, "you just won't learn, will you?" Grabbing Brigg's left wrist, he twisted it behind his back and screwed the mechanic's arm cruelly up between his shoulder blades. "As to the jalopy," he went on, "we may need the wreck as evidence. You could be found dead underneath it, stinkin' of liquor. Passed out at the wheel and drove clean off the road. You know? On the other hand, we might, we just might, let you go . . . if you make that goddamn call."
Brigg's gory face was contorted with pain. "I won't," he gasped. "I . . . You can't make me . . . "
Boscoe increased the pressure of his grip, screwing the twisted arm further up behind the mechanic's back, forcing him forward across the table. At the same time Guardi came around behind the pinioned man and kneed his legs apart. Wedging the toes of his shoes under the insides of Briggs's ankles, he slowly increased the space between his own legs, splaying the helpless captive's thighs agonizingly wide. Then, reaching under Briggs's crotch with one hand, he felt for the soft bulge of his testicles and grasped them through the rough material of the mechanic's jeans.
Briggs caught his breath. He knew what was coming next.
"Well?" Guardi asked softly. "Are you goin' to dial that number?"
The little man groaned deep in his chest and shook his head.
Guardi compressed his lips. His fingers tightened on the super-sensitive glands and his knuckles whitened as he squeezed.
Aaaaaaggggghhhhh!" Briggs screamed suddenly, his head flailing wildly and his body jerking spasmodically against Boscoe's grasp as the intolerable agony from his savaged genitals seared through his loins.
Boscoe moved the phone closer to the tortured man's staring eyes with his free hand. "You know the number, pal," he said.
Briggs's lips writhed back from his teeth. His pelvis threshed and slammed against the edge of the table. Hoarse, unintelligible cries forced themselves from his saliva-and blood-flecked mouth as Guardi alternately tightened and relaxed his crushing grip on the anguished mechanic's balls. He bucked and writhed against the imprisoning hands in shuddering convulsions of agony. And then, as the cruelly grinning hood gave an extra merciless squeeze to his inflamed and brutalized testicles, he screamed again; "Uuuuuurrrrrrggggh! . . . Aaaaaahhhhh! . . . Oh Christ! No! . . . Aaaagggghh!"
It felt as though the sundering blade of some giant harrow was plowing up through his loins and ripping his bowels apart. Waves and shafts and spasms of pain so insufferable that he could never have dreamed it existed speared through his belly like bolts of lightning, dissolving the seedy room and the world beyond in a crimson maelstrom of agony. His head thudded again and again against the table top and his shaking torso arched convulsively up from the stained oilcloth in time with the insupportable assault on his balls.
Boscoe was watching him with detached interest, his eyes glinting sadistically in the gloom. "The number.. . " he prompted gently, pulling fiercely on the helpless man's twisted wrist. "The number, pal. . . "
Brigg's free hand was beating at the air. The tough little mechanic was a veteran of World War II and Korea. He had survived some pretty rugged action with the USAF in the Philippines and on the Asian mainland near Seoul. But he knew too that there were certain techniques against which no man could hold out indefinitely . . . and this, the simplest, that he was suffering, was the most certain for you couldn't rely on a merciful unconsciousness blotting out the pain: it just went on and on getting worse and worse. The drill then was to give in and do what the torturers wanted or appear to do it hoping that you could somehow play it by ear later and minimize the damage you had done to your own side. He raised his agonized face and choked out:
"All right! . . . All right! . . . I'll do it! . . .
Anything you want.. . only stop . . . for Chrissake stop Aaaaaagggghhhh!" He broke off with another gurgling scream as Guardi pulled savagely at his brutalized balls and twisted his clenched fingers pitilessly in a final malicious assault on the broken man's genitals.
"That's better," the blue-jowled torpedo breathed. "Now we're gettin' someplace!" Relaxing his grip at last but keeping his punishing hand closed warningly over Briggs's aching testicles he leaned across the prostrate mechanic's body and lifted the receiver from its cradle.
Briggs dropped his head to the table and groaned. "What do you want me to do?" he sobbed.
"like I told you," Guardi said. "You call the dame and tell her you're sick. You won't be in today. That's all.. . but you better make it good, or else . . . ! "
Briggs sucked in his breath with a gasp as the fingers momentarily clenched again to send a shaft of pain flaming into his belly. "Okay," he croaked. "Okay, okay. I'll do it.. . "
"Well, see you do it good," Boscoe rasped. "One peep outa line from you, Artie, and you're a dead man, see? What you just had ain't nothin' to what you'll get if you louse this up. But nothin'. Now go on and dial."
Bent helplessly forward over the fable with his legs splayed and one arm twisted behind his back, Briggs scrabbled for the dial with his free hand, squinting his eyes at the figures just in front of his face as he laboriously spun out a number. As soon as the number rang out, Guardi handed the receiver to Boscoe, who lowered the mouthpiece until it was near the tortured man's bruised mouth.
There was a click as the line opened, and then a clear girl's voice: "Ortiz Charter.. . Good afternoon. May I help you?"
Guardi nudged the inside of Briggs's thigh with his knee, slightly increasing the pressure of his fingers on the vulnerable pouch of flesh under his hand. Briggs's mouth opened suddenly.
"Uh Mrs. Ortiz?" he gabbled. "Mrs. Ortiz, this is Briggs speakin'. Artie Briggs. I'm callin' from El Centre"
"Arthur?" The voice had an edge of coolness. "Why whatever happened to you? You were due in over half an hour ago. You know there's an overhaul scheduled for tonight and my husband expects everything to be ready when he arrives."
"Sure, I know . . . I . . . Gee, Mrs. Ortiz, I'm awful sorry but I guess I can't make it today," Briggs panted.
"Can't. . . make it?" The voice was distinctly icy now. "But you've got to make it. He's relying on you. What are you talking about?"
"I uh I'm real sorry, Mrs. Ortiz. I just can't. I Aaahhh!" Briggs paused in mid-sentence with an indrawn gasp of breath as Guardi tightened his fingers warningly on the inflamed testicles.
"What did you say?"
"Just coughin', " the mechanic said wildly, coughing realistically to make the point. "I'm sick. I got a fever. The doc said I wasn't to go out."
"Where are you calling from?"
"Where am I . . . Oh, yeah. The bar across the road. I'm callin' from the bar across the road. It's just across the road from my apartment. I figured I oughta let you know, so I wrapped up warm and came over."
"Why didn't you call before?"
"The uh the doc only just left. I hoped I might be able to make it, but he said no. It seems there's some kind of epidemic goin' around," Briggs improvised frantically.
"I don't believe you're sick at all!" the voice said angrily. "The only thing I believe is that you're in that bar. Arthur you promised my husband faithfully, after the last time, that you'd quit drinking for good! I hate to see you let him down."
"No, really . . . honest, Mrs. Ortiz, I'm sick. I swear it. I'm real sick!" Briggs babbled.
"Let me speak to the bartender."
In the sudden silence that fell over the stifling diner, the monotonous drip of a faucet behind the counter made itself heard. "The b-b-b-bartender?" Briggs repeated faintly at last.
"You heard what I said, Arthur."
The sprawled mechanic looked helplessly up at his captors, his wide eyes mutely asking for instructions. Boscoe lifted the phone to his own lips and said huskily: "Yes, ma'am?"
"Is this the bartender at the Vegas?"
"Yes indeed, ma'am. Can I help you?"
"You can help the man I was speaking to," the girl's voice said. "He had a drinking problem. He shouldn't be taking liquor at all. Don't you dare serve him anymore!"
"He hasn't been drinking," Boscoe said. "I just fixed him a hot grog, that's all. He looks in poor shape to me, ma'am. I guess he really is sick at that."
"I don't believe a word of it. You tell him to come right on over or it'll be the worse for him."
Boscoe sighed. "I'll do my best, ma'am," he said. But the phone had already been hung up at the other end.
"Nice go in'. . .pal!" Guardi said with a crooked grin. Releasing his grip on the stricken mechanic's testicles, he straightened up and stepped back. "But that dialogue of yours made me kinda thirsty. You figure they got anything but Coke to drink in this crummy dump?"
"I think I saw a crate of beer out in the kitchen," Boscoe said. Replacing the receiver, he carried the phone back to the bar and moved that way.
It was at that moment that Briggs made his break. He didn't know what villainy these ruthless hoods were planning, but it wasn't going to do any good to Ortiz and his wife, that was for sure. They had left the driver behind the wheel of the convertible. If he could make a dash for it while Boscoe and Guardi were looking for the beer.. . if he burst out unexpectedly and jumped the unsuspecting Frank there was just a chance, it seemed to his pain-crazed mind, that he could get away with it and drive the car out there to warn them. Heaving himself upright from the table, he whirled around and hurled himself toward the doorway.
He might even have gotten away with it if the driver had been where they left him. But Frank wasn't behind the wheel of the convertible: he was leaning against the wall just inside the outer door. And there was a gun in his hand.
As Briggs hurtled around the corner, the driver levered himself upright and raised his arm, pistol-whipping the escaping man viciously twice across the face. Briggs cried out in pain and surprise, lifting his hands to protect his head and Frank stepped swiftly in, spinning him around and sending him back into the diner with a savage shove.
The mechanic staggered off balance, tripped over a chair, and fell heavily to the floor. As he sprawled on one elbow with blood streaming from a gash over his cheekbone opened by the barrel of Frank's gun, he looked dazedly up . . . and found himself staring straight down the barrel of Guardi's gun.
"That was kind of a crazy thing to do, Artie," the big hood said slowly. "It shows you ain't with us. And if you ain't with us why, like they say, you're against us!"
Briggs was gazing mesmerized at the yawning black hole three feet away from the sweating skin of his forehead. He could visualize the nickel-jacketed slug nestling in the chamber at the far end of the barrel, ready to come roaring out and blast him into eternity. He could see the oiled sheen of the cylinder on either side of the barrel, and the black hairs on Guardi's forefinger curled around the trigger beneath it. "No! . . . " he cried wildly, his eyes widening in terror. "Please . . . "
Guardi smiled. Briggs saw the hairs on his finger stir as the flesh tightened and paled over the knuckle. He saw the cylinder begin to rotate. And then the black hole at the end of the barrel paled too and suddenly brightened. The brightness spread outward, becoming unbearably brilliant, spreading far out beyond the walls of the cabin, over the desert and out across the ocean until the whole universe was filled with its blinding light. Then suddenly the brightness crumbled into dark, whirling in toward a black center into which Briggs fell, spinning more and more slowly as he dropped.
* * *
"You shouldn'ta done that," Boscoe said reproachfully half an hour later. "We coulda smashed him up some, and then left the body underneath the wreck, like you said. That way, folks woulda thought he'd wrecked the jalopy when he was canned specially after that broad spoke to the bartender!"
"Shit, we didn't have the time," Guardi said. "I want us staked out near that strip an hour before dusk and I want this auto back in El Centro before Ortiz flies in from Mexico. I ain't takin' no chances of him spottin' us from the air and fouling up the whole deal. like I mean business comes before pleasure, huh?"
"Sure. But seein' as how we had to croak him anyway . . . I mean, you know, he'll be missed. There'll be a wreck and no body. The cops'll be called in, and when they find him-"
"Ah, forget it, will you?" Guardi interrupted brusquely. "We'll be outa here tomorrow and back in Miami days before they even know he's gone! How many cars you seen along this road since we left town?" He spat over the side of the convertible and settled his hat farther forward over his eyes to shield them from the setting sun.
They had just passed the place where Briggs's sedan had been run out into the desert. A mile and a half farther on, Frank stopped in the lee of a line of shallow dunes topped by sagebrush. Boscoe got out and walked through the soft sand toward the crest of the rise. When he was a few yards from the top, he dropped on to his hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way to the lip. Beyond the dunes, the road curved down a gentle slope of land to skirt the gaunt rectangular outline of an aircraft hangar flanked by three small adobe buildings beside an asphalt runway arrowing out into the desert.
"That's it, okay," he said as he came back to the car brushing sand from the knees of his pants. "If we go any farther, we'll be in full view of the dame or anyone else there. Up to here, the road and the auto are hidden."
Guardi climbed out to join him. "Right, Frank," he said. "You can get out the gear for us and be on your way. Go straight back to El Centro and lose the heap. Tell Louie we'll meet up with him at the cabin tomorrow at 6 p.m. as planned with the stuff, I hope!"
The driver nodded. He opened the trunk, took out a fat hide portfolio, a leather map case, and a long valise that looked as though it was designed to hold a violin, and handed them to the two hoods. Then, climbing back behind the wheel, he swung the big convertible around in a U-turn and waved one hand as he trod on the pedal and sent the car hurtling back toward El Centre
The two men stood beside the road watching the dust settle back on the cactus, their shadows stretched out long in the evening light. The sun was sinking behind a belt of violet cloud over the desert and the fierce heat of the afternoon was already diluted with the chill of the approaching night. Finally they hefted the three cases under their arms, turned up the collars of their jackets, and tramped off toward the scrub covering the top of the dunes. As they moved in among the breast-high branches, they heard the distant, pulsating drone of a twin-engined airplane approaching from the south.
CHAPTER ONE
Alvaro Ortiz kicked the ageing B25 into a steep turn and throttled back the motors to approach the strip from the north. He was worried by a clattering in the starboard engine that had no counterpart among the readings on the dials and gauges in the cluttered cockpit. The sooner he put the ship down, stripped off the cowling, and got to work with his man Briggs locating the trouble the better he would be pleased. Ortiz sighed. There was a two-way freight job tomorrow and he couldn't afford to have the B25 in pieces when the consignment arrived; it was bad sales psychology to let the client find the plane with the inspection covers off and wires dangling! It looked as though it might turn out to be a long night's work and he was bushed already. He had just flown a party of minor officials to Veracruz in southeastern Mexico and the five-hour round trip had taken it out of him.
Thank God, he thought as he wound on full flaps and steadied the nose of the plane against the artificial horizon, that he had Briggs to help him. The wiry little man was tough and he was taciturn and he had a drink problem but he was the best aviation mechanic in the southwest. Without him, Ortiz just wouldn't be able to keep going.
He glanced out the cockpit window to check his position with the highway running north from El Centro to Brawley. The lights of the city were already twinkling through the gathering dusk. Seventy miles farther west, under the coastal cloudbank on the far side of the desert, they'd be polishing up the glasses for the cocktail trade in the bars of San Diego. Ortiz sighed again. For a moment he wished he were there, checking out from some nice quiet job with a wad of dollar bills in his pants pocket. It was a hell of a thing trying to run an air charter business with one mechanic, a demanding wife, and a 25 year old ship that needed more coddling than a child if she wasn't to fall out of the sky!
But even as the thought formed in his mind Ortiz knew it would never work out. He had wanted to be a flyer ever since he was in fourth grade. He had used his Air Force gratuity to buy the tiny desert airfield from some film company that had put down the runway and built the hangar for a war movie that hadn't made the grade. The B25 came later from a small legacy left him by his father. She'd seen service in Korea as a Mitchell bomber with the USAF. After five thousand hours flying, they'd given her an overhaul and sold her to Venezuela, again as a bomber. Two thousand hours later according to the log book the ship had again been restored to zero-hours condition and acquired by a Colombian airline as a freight transport. That accounted for another 850 hours and brought her up to 1963. Ortiz had got her for eleven thousand dollars from a Mexican mining company who had used her occasionally to fly supplies and personnel to remote workings in the interior. It had cost him another six thousand to bring her back to a state where she could qualify for a non-limited certificate of airworthiness, so that he could ply for hire or reward! And he'd nicknamed her The Virgin because she'd been overhauled so much she was as good as new again . . . or pretty near!
Now he earned a meager living running special orders of soft fruit and tomatoes from California to the Middle West, ferrying engineers to Mexico City or out to Santa Catalina, working for the day when he could afford a Cessna jet and compete for the carriage trade from Los Angeles.
That day seemed further away than ever, he reflected grimly as he pulled levers to lower the nose-wheel and undercarriage. The deposit account in the El Centro bank was growing pitifully slowly. Some months it took all they had just to keep the Virgin in the air. And there was a "Check Four" coming up in less than a month. That would cost him over five thousand dollars just to have the plane torn apart by a bunch of inspection engineers and then put together again with a renewed license to fly for another 1800 hours! Ortiz blew out his breath in exasperation and switched on the landing lights. It was getting darker and darker as he sank below the featureless horizon. Why in hell hadn't Briggs switched on the runway flares? He knew perfectly well Ortiz was due back just after dusk . . .
The flyer put the B25 neatly down at the outer end of the 4,000-foot runway and eased the wheel forward to lower the nose. like the Dakota and other wartime medium bombers, the Mitchell had been designed for a 6,000-foot strip, but Ortiz never had been able to scrape together the money for that 2,000-foot extension.
Juggling with the throttles and kicking at the rudder, he slewed the old plane along the pitted asphalt of the perimeter track and up to the brightly-lit rectangle of the hangar doors. But it wasn't the chunky, purposeful figure of Briggs he saw silhouetted against the light with the chocks swinging at the end of their ropes; it was the voluptuous, lushly-curved shape of his wife, Holly, who was signaling him when to turn and when to stop. As the clatter of the two Wright Cyclones died away and the propellers wheezed to a halt, Ortiz clambered from his seat and bent down to open the hatch in the belly of the ship. Holly ran up and kissed him as he dropped to the ground and ducked up under the trailing edge of the wing. "Safe home, darling!" she enthused, putting up one slender hand to push a lock of dark hair off his forehead. "How did the trip go?"
But her husband's handsome, black-browed, slightly sullen face was set in a frown and his brown eyes glittered angrily. "Where the hell's Briggs?" he demanded. "You shouldn't have to heft those chocks around. Your place is in the office, trying to make some sense out of our goddamn accounts!"
"He's not here. He's sick," Holly explained pacifically. "He called in awhile back to say he was sorry he couldn't make it."
"Sick?" Ortiz exploded. "Sorry? What the hell's he playing at? He knows perfectly well we have to check out that motor tonight! How can he say he's sick? He was perfectly okay last night."
"It seems the doctor said he had to stay home. He has a fever."
"Fever, my ass!" Ortiz snapped. "The bastard's hit the bottle again, that's what!"
"That's what I thought too," Holly said. "At first. But I spoke with the bartender he was calling from that bar across the street from his apartment and the man said he really did look sick. It seems there's some kind of epidemic in town. Probably this year's flu virus."
"Of course he'd be calling from a bar. He slipped the man a dollar to say that. Damned alcoholics are too smart to live!" Ortiz tutted with exasperation. "You should've told him to come on out here, sick or not."
"That's just what I did. But he hasn't showed. I don't think he will now." Holly stared at her husband with a troubled frown, her red-gold hair burnished bright by the glaring hangar lights. "And, darling there was something odd about him. He seemed kind of. . . well, kind of hesitant. And he used too many words; he kept repeating himself. Not the usual Briggs at all. And he kept calling me Mrs. Ortiz; he said it three or four times. You know he never calls me anything but Holly."
"He was just drunk," Ortiz said. "And maybe a little embarrassed because he knew he was letting us down. The sonofabitch! Jesus!" He flung his arms wide in a gesture of frustration. "Now I'll have to stay up the whole goddamn night trying to fix that bastard motor myself!"
"Alvaro, darling," Holly soothed. "Why don't you go freshen up and I'll fix you something to eat. You'll feel better then. Right now, you're tired and everything seems hell.. . I tell you what why don't I call that bar again and see if Briggs is still there? Maybe you could talk to him yourself and persuade him to sober up and come on out."
"Do that," Ortiz said curtly. "But I don't know where you get that 'persuade' stuff. I'm going to tell him I'll break his lousy neck if he isn't here sober and ready to work in a half hour! And fire him as well!" He turned on his heel and strode angrily away across the concrete floor toward the washroom behind the office at the side of the hangar.
But fifteen minutes later, when he was washing down a T-bone steak with his second bottle of beer in the kitchen of the tiny bungalow they'd built for themselves beside the strip, Holly put a worried face around the door. "I don't get this at all," she said slowly. "I just called the Las Vegas that's the bar he goes to in town. They say nobody called us from there this afternoon. And Briggs hasn't been in all day . . . "
Ortiz grunted. "like I told you, honey, they're as artful as a truckload of monkeys, these alcoholics!" He pushed back his chair, rose, and stretched. "Well, I guess that settles it; I'll have to go take a look at her myself."
* * *
At eleven o'clock, Holly walked across to the hangar. Ortiz was sitting on top of a stepladder peering into the bowels of the starboard motor by the light of an inspection lamp clipped to the edge of the engine nacelle. Curved sections of cowling lay on the floor at the foot of the ladder, and there were tools and pieces of oily machinery laid out on the wing beside him. "Any luck?" she asked softly, staring at the complex of vaned castings and tubes and wiring exposed behind the propeller blades.
"It's the starter motor," her husband said wearily. "One of the brackets has shaken loose and sheared. The pinion's fouling the flywheel."
"D'you think you can fix it?"
"I could if I had the right kind of help. But it's a welding job and I'm not competent to do it myself. That sonofabitch Briggs . . . "
"Couldn't you leave it for one more trip?" Holly inquired anxiously.
He shook his head. "It might jam in mesh with the flywheel. Chew the whole damned motor to pieces if the flywheel disintegrated while she was running. That wheel turns at a hundred times engine speed; something like 100,000 rpm under full boost.. . no I'll have to fake up something temporary for the trip to Guaymas tomorrow."
"Well I'm going to bed," his wife said. "Don't be too long, honey. You're tired and you need the rest."
Ortiz grinned crookedly and squinted down at her, shielding his eyes against the light with a grimy hand. She looked infinitely desirable, standing there in her white sweater and jeans, the harsh unshaded light sculpting a blackly shadowed cleft between the full mounds of her high-set, tautly swelling breasts. Irritably, he wished that she wouldn't insist on wearing such tight garments without a brassiere. The twin buds of her nipples were clearly visible against the stretched material. A woman should keep her sex-appeal for her husband in the privacy of their home; it shouldn't be flaunted publicly where any mailman or delivery boy or passing client could see it! "I'll be over as soon as I can," he said.
Back in the house, Holly took a shower and then wiped a clear space in the steamy mirror as she toweled her body dry. The reflection staring out at her was pleasing enough, she thought critically. Her creamy skin, glowing pinkly after the hot shower, shone like satin in the subdued light. Below the lush ripened curves of her rose-nippled breasts, the subtly contoured planes of flesh melted into a slender, pliant waist and then flowed out into the voluptuous swell of hip and thigh. Between the tapered columns of her legs, a sparsely curling triangle of tawny hair nestled silkily beneath the soft bulge of her belly.
She leaned forward to examine her face. Framed in their coppery halo, wide violet eyes stared pertly out of the glass under delicately arched brows. Below them, wide sensuous lips curved into an appreciative smile. It would still do, she thought, eyeing the swelling curve of the wet breasts hanging slightly away from her inclined body; it wasn't too bad at all! What was too bad was that her husband didn't seem to appreciate it or not exactly the way she wanted him too . . .
Holly was 25, four years younger than the handsome Mexican-American she had married in her sophomore year at college. She had been both a stimulating and stabilizing influence throughout his long struggle to make a success of the business; indeed had it not been for her wizardry with figures it was doubtful if they could have kept financially afloat this long. To all outward appearances, therefore, the marriage was a success. And yet. . . and yet.. . as often as Holly told herself how lucky she was to have a young and good-looking husband who adored her, so did the insidious little quivers of doubt, the guilty feeling that maybe there should be something more, seep into her mind.
For although the marriage was basically successful, it carried with it a built-in conflict due to the difference in their characters and upbringing. The independent, modern-American outlook of Holly was constantly at war with Alvaro's traditional Spanish-style machismo-that Latin-American blend of arrogance and male pride which still regards women as chattel who must do what they are told and stay in their place. And the fact that the luscious redhead was the brains of the business naturally exacerbated this imbalance in their relationship.
For herself at least in one way Holly would gladly have succumbed to her husband's dominant streak. But this side of his nature was suppressed and inhibited by two factors: As a first-generation Mexican immigrant, a "greaser", he was particularly vulnerable . . . and following from this was the additional complication that he was constantly afraid of taking a false step and losing his operator's license. The result was that although he talked tough, his actions, especially sexually, tended toward the unadventurous. He therefore blamed his beautiful young wife for showing an occasional interest in other men without really giving her, through his own sexual behavior, any compulsive reason not to!
like any healthy young woman, Holly wanted an active sex life and she wanted it often. It wasn't enough just to be the passive and grateful recipient of Alvaro's lust whenever he happened to be in the mood; sex, Holly thought, should be a mutual affair and she too wanted a say in the how and the when. Particularly the how!
As to the when.. . well, she said to herself mischievously, they always did say there's no time like the present!
She finished drying herself, went through into the small bedroom, and slipped into a sheer black nylon shortie nightgown which set off to perfection her glossy auburn hair, and through whose diaphanous folds the tender curves of her ripe young body quivered languorously as she moved. Switching off all the lights but a pink-shaded lamp on the dressing-table, she put a record of romantic oldies on the hi-fi, lit a cigarette and settled back against the pillows to wait for her husband. .
It was nearly 1 a.m. and the ashtray was piled high with half-smoked stubs when at last she heard the outer door close and Alvaro's footsteps dragging across the hallway. The hi-fi was playing Smoke Gets In Your Eyes for the third time.
"Welcome home, darling!" Holly said brightly. "Did you fix it?"
His hands and forearms were covered with oil and there were black smears marking the swarthy skin of his face. "Temporarily," he said curtly. "God knows if it will last through tomorrow!" He went through into the shower room and she heard the water begin to run.
Holly re-positioned the lamp and arranged the cushions so that the bud-like nipples at the tips of her uptilted breasts thrust out the transparent black material of the nightgown as she lay back. She lit another cigarette.
Ten minutes later, Alvaro came back into the room knotting the cord of his pajama pants around his waist. Flipping aside the covers, he slid luxuriously down between the sheets and lay on his back with his eyes closed. "Jesus, what a day!" he groaned. "That bastard Briggs . . . ! "
The voluptuously reclining redhead reached over and stubbed out her cigarette in the pile of ash. "You haven't seen this nightgown since I shortened it, darling, have you?" she said huskily, profiling her body so that the outline of one tautly-swelling breast would be silhouetted through the flimsy material by the lamp beyond.
"It looks great, honey. Just great," Ortiz said. He was still lying with his eyes closed. He hadn't even glanced at her!
Holly compressed her lips. "Don't you care for me at all, Alvaro?" she pleaded.
"Care for you? I love you, Hoi. You know that. There's nobody but you," her husband said sleepily. "Now be a good girl, will you, and switch off that light? It's a long day tomorrow and I'm dead beat."
"Don't you think it's a long day for me?" Holly demanded. "Running this business and doing the marketing and running this house? Don't you think I get tired too?"
"Of course you do. There's nobody like you, baby. You're a treasure. Now put out that light and let's go to sleep."
"And don't you think I like a little fun sometimes? Just for a change? I mean like let's wake up and live every now and then, huh?"
"Sure you like your fun. So do we all. But you need sleep to have fun. So why not put out the light before we lose anymore?"
The seductively curved redhead blew out her breath with exasperation. "There's other things in life besides work and sleep," she said acidly as she padded across the room to switch off the lamp and draw back the drapes. "Or so they tell me. I wouldn't remember, myself."
"Aw, c'mon, honey!" Ortiz protested. "What's eating you, for God's sakes? You always choose the damnedest times to shoot off your pretty mouth!"
She stood at the foot of the bed clenching and unclenching her hands. "I know you had a tiring day," she said evenly. "I know you've been working all evening and you're worried about the ship and you'll have another tiring day tomorrow. But I'm your wife, remember? I have my problems too. Annd sometimes a woman-likes to be . . . well, reminded that she is a woman!"
"You sure choose your times, don't you!" Ortiz said, irritated now. It always angered him when Holly took the initiative like this, even in the most general way. It threw him on the defensive, almost made him feel inadequate, which affronted his self-image and turned his masculine world upside down.
Holly stared down at him, biting her lip. The moon was up and pale bars of light filtered through the panes of the window, silvering the covers on the bed and casting deep pools of shadow over her husband's closed eyes. For a moment she hesitated, the twin mounds of her breasts rising and galling in the wan radiance. And then with a sudden decisive gesture she pulled the flimsy garment off over her head and slid nakedly into bed beside him.
Ortiz grunted contentedly as he felt the long supple warmth of her body next to him. But he made no move to touch her and his breathing continued as quietly and evenly as before in the stillness of the desert night. Holly twined her arms and legs around him, a renewed desire for his hard muscular body flaming abruptly through her loins. She traced the angular line of his jaw with one soft hand and nibbled gently on the lobe of his ear with her small white teeth.
The weary flyer was both irritated and embarrassed. He knew very well he should have been reacting to the proximity of this voluptuous and sensual woman, his own wife, plastering her naked body seductively against him. But somehow it seemed difficult for him to generate any excitement or sexual urge these days. He knew he had been holding back lately of course, denying himself and, he supposed, her partly because he was overworked, more recently because of the approaching Check Four, and tonight because he was too damned worried over the sick motor and the absence of Briggs to think of anything else. Yet there was something more that complicated the thing; the attitude of Holly herself.
For oddly enough every time his lushly ripened young wife made heated overtures to him, his reaction was exactly the opposite to what she intended he turned off!
He knew enough about his own Latin temperament to realize that this was because it robbed him of a prerogative; the ancient right of the male to see himself in the role of the hunter, the pursuer. But hell, he thought honestly, he hadn't exactly been doing too much pursuing lately, had he? No, that was true. But it didn't invalidate the theory. A man had to have a touch of fox-and-hounds in his private life! First, though, the hound had to want to catch the fox . . .
As the sex-hungry redhead nestled her erotically demanding body in his arms, she raised her head and pressed her mouth warmly on his. At the touch of her lips, Ortiz murmured sleepily and kissed her tenderly.
But it wasn't the kind of kiss Holly craved. It was an affectionate kiss, a loving kiss but it was also a goodnight-from-daddy-and-be-a-good-girl kiss, a go-back-to-the-nursery-and-don't-bother-me kiss. The sex-starved young wife wanted a deep and scalding kiss from her husband . . . a real hot kiss; a probing, masterful kiss that would lead to something more than Alvaro turning on his side and snoring into the pillow! She wanted it to lead to something all right, she thought fiercely. She wanted it to lead to a long hard jackhammering penis spearing relentlessly up into her yearning belly; a stiff, lust-hardened and finally squirting penis fucking deep into her hotly hungering cunt!
Avidly, Holly's moist tongue darted into the drowsy flyer's mouth, questing, probing, exploring . . . the way she thirsted for his cock thrusting up into her now searing loins! And at last, as she stabbed her tongue rhythmically in and out of his mouth, her efforts were rewarded. Gently, he began sucking on its wetly trembling length. Moaning her pleasure down into his mouth, she felt his own tongue insinuate itself between her lips and she knew, with a tingling thrill of lustful arousal, that he was becoming interested.
Interested enough to want to make love to her, she wondered? And then, correcting herself, No! The hell with that! To FUCK her, the way a real husband should!
Brazenly, knowing what she wanted and ready to go to any lengths to get it, Holly slid a bold hand down inside the waist of her husband's pajamas, groping for what she hoped would be his already hardened cock. Her inquiring fingers had to reach further than she expected. She found and touched . . . and was disappointed. Alvaro's penis lay soft and flaccid along his thigh. Nothing she had done yet had succeeded in arousing him!
God! she raved to herself. What do I have to do to get my husband hard enough to fuck me? With frantic fingers, she milked the length of his limp shaft, skimming the loose skin rapidly up and down, trying desperately to bring it to vibrant throbbing life under her hand. But it was no use; the rubbery rod of warm male flesh lay lifeless and inert in her massaging grasp . . .
Holly drew a deep breath. She had set up all the props of a seduction scene. He hadn't even noticed. She had said as plainly as she could without offending his male pride that she wanted him to make love to her. He had told her to switch off the light. Not even the warm proximity of her own body, the lascivious probing of her lewdly exploring tongue or the masturbating grip of her fingers had been enough to make his penis respond. Okay evidently more extreme measures were called for! She would do her best to provide them. For although she knew it was a bad time to have chosen, she was determined beyond any chance of refusal that Alvaro was going to get an erection tonight or she would die in the attempt!
The lustfully panting young wife knew just what she was going to do. Yes, damn it, this time she would go through with it! She had thought of it often enough before but somehow she had never gotten around to putting this particular thought into action, mainly for fear of wounding that Latin pride; any scene that Alvaro didn't personally produce and direct was an offense against machismo! Well tonight, if this particular scene had never been written into Alvaro's scenario, that was just too bad! His goddamned machismo could go take a running jump into the Salton Sea; tonight she was going to be in the director's chair!
Strange new sensations of erotic arousal flamed through the frustrated young wife's loins as she tremblingly envisaged the lewd and salacious thing she was going to do. Oh God! I've never done it before, she thought with a sudden surge of panic. Suppose I don't do it right? Suppose it turns him off? Suppose he thinks it's perverted.. . or unseemly for a man's wife? And then, defiantly, as her courage returned, she said to herself fiercely: To hell with all that! You've decided you're going to do it so go on and do it!
Withdrawing her lips from her husband's, the young redhead shifted her position on the bed to kneel up by his hips and throw back the covers. She was still grasping the heavy limp tube of his unresponsive penis in one hand.
Ortiz opened his eyes to stare at the smooth curve of her belly palely outlined by the moon, at the jutting swell of her breasts with the taut rubbery nipples swelled out erect at their tips. Above the lush sweep of her thighs he could just distinguish the outline of the silkily curling red pubic hair mantling her loins. "Hoi, darling," he muttered. "I'm sorry.. . I guess I've got too many things on my mind. Come on be a good girl and let's get some sleep, huh?" She was really hot for him! She was crazy for it! But he wished the hell she would leave him alone. Why couldn't she see it was a man's place to make the first move?
He jerked suddenly as her hand snaked out to seize his pajama cord and pull the knot undone. Feverishly she hauled the striped pants down his legs and bent over until her face was poised above his limp penis. "Darling," she whispered, "I'm going to do it to you. I've often wanted to, but this time I'm really going to do it.. . to see if I can make it come up hard so that you can fuck me with it.. . you do want to, don't you?"
Ortiz was staring at her blankly in the milky light. "Do it to me?" he echoed. "What are you talking about?" Why in hell couldn't she leave him alone and go to sleep?
Instead of replying, Holly dragged his pajama pants the rest of the way off and crawled between his legs to reach again for the now involuntarily hardening shaft of her husband's cock. She held it upright in her slender hand, staring at the thickening rod of flesh as though to strengthen her determination. "Oh God . . . I'm going to suck you, darling.. . I'm going to take your cock in my mouth . . . I want to make it good for you," she breathed, flexing the muscles of her fingers, working the loose dark foreskin back with her thumb to reveal the purplish and as yet unbloated head of his penis.
Ortiz caught his breath. Levering himself up on to his elbows and tilting his hips so that the lust-stiffening pole of flesh speared up toward his wife's eager face, he became suddenly aware of the crawling lift of his testicles that signaled sexual arousal. Jesus she was going to go down on him! He was tired and he wanted to go to sleep. He didn't know that he really went for this kind of deal, especially from his own wife. It went kind of against the grain to have her making obscene advances to him when her place was to lie on her back waiting for him to call the pitch. Yet the idea of those honey-soft lips closing over the throbbing head of his cock sure was exciting! It was thrilling the hell out of him! As Holly's free hand slid under his raised buttocks to cradle and caress his balls, massaging the heavy sperm-packed glands in their crinkled sac with lewdly suggestive fingers, he found himself panting with lustful anticipation.
Slowly the salaciously hunched young wife lowered her head, her wetly glistening lips pursed to kiss the satiny flesh of his cock-head on which a tiny pearl of seminal fluid was already gleaming in the moonlight. Alvaro tensed involuntarily at the searing contact of her moist hot lips with his sensitive flesh. And at once more blood surged through the veins of his penis and it began slowly to pulse to full erection. Despite himself, he began moaning softly in erotic rapture.
Holly's butter-soft mouth slipped wetly over his blood-engorged cock-head, her obscenely ovaled lips enclosing the mushroom-shaped tip in a scalding warmth that sent frenzied thrills rippling outward from the excited flyer's loins.
Inside her mouth, her tongue swirled, circling in lewd wet licking darts around the stiffly throbbing shaft.
As the lewdly sucking redhead trembled with excitement at the salacious novelty of the lascivious act she was performing, Alvaro's long hard penis jerked in her mouth and he felt in his balls the tingle of complete readiness. He was amazed at the speed with which his once limp penis had come alive between her lips! He hadn't felt like fucking her tonight, and that was the truth; the thought of the physical effort required was just too much for him. But if she was going to do all the work . . . he thrust from his mind the instinctive Latin resentment he had felt at the subservient position he was being forced to take and determined to relax and enjoy it! Christ, but it felt good! It was out of this world . . .
Holly held the rigid shaft of his pulsating cock with one hand as she continued to softly knead his testicles with the other, her fingers feather-gentle around the sperm-bloated glands buoyed up in their hairy sac. At the same time, overcoming her hesitancy, she began to suck on the lust-hardened rod of male flesh, milking the rock-hard rod in a steady drawing rhythm as her head moved experimentally up and. down on him and her lips clasped wetly around the quivering instrument like a hotly clinging cunt. Gradually, she began to take more and more of his pulsating length into her mouth and throat. She was surprised she could do it so easily and thrilled that it felt so good!
Tensing his loins, Ortiz thrust his rigidly throbbing hardness up into those hungrily ovaled lips, groaning softly in his throat as his hips began of their own accord to move in dazed hypnotic counterpoint to her rhythmically bobbing head, fucking his massive cock in and out of his red-haired wife's beautiful, lust-contorted face. In a trance of erotic excitement, he gave himself up totally to the enjoyment of Holly's voraciously sucking mouth, shuddering with wanton delight as the acceleration of her pumping head and the increase in the pressure exerted by her lips forced his penis to pulse into even greater hardness. She plunged her mouth fiercely down the rigid staff and then, clamping her lips still more firmly around the turgid, vein-webbed flesh, then drew tantalizingly back with agonizing slowness, her final caressing lick of the sensitive glans swelling the lust-inflated head to an almost unbearable tenseness on each out-stroke. It was sending Alvaro out of his mind!
Christ! he thought. There's nothing like it! There really isn't! Her mouth's as smooth and sweet as warm molasses, as clinging as a cunt! Will she suck me all the way? Will she go on until I cum? The obscene thought made him shiver with excitement. God, if only she would! It would be fantastic. . . to shoot it right into her mouth! To have her swallow his load.. .
Slaving over his upraised loins, her face in the brightening moonlight had subtly altered, he noticed. She seemed to be in some kind of sexual rapture of her own. Her eyes were closed and her breath was jetting through her flared nostrils in short jerky spurts. Then, as he looked beyond, down past her firmly rounded breasts dancing nakedly below her pumping torso, he saw that her other hand had released his balls and was working frantically at the tawny hair-covered lips of her vagina. My God! Ortiz thought excitedly. She's finger-fucking her own cunt! Maybe she'll suck me until I cum . . . and play with herself until she does too!
Ever more intensely, the overpowering sensations of lust raced through him as he arched his pelvis up toward the soft moist warmth of Holly's mouth. He gazed in rapt fascination at the cascade of coppery hair tumbling over his naked thighs, sweeping whip-like across his quivering flesh with each lewd movement of her bobbing head. Instinctively, he reached out and grasped two of the long red strands, using them like reins to guide her tightly clasping lips up and down the pistoning length of his bursting cock. He watched with obscene delight how a little ring of pink flesh from the inside of her lips was pulled out on each upstroke and then stuffed back into her mouth as she slid down over his hardened shaft to meet the forceful thrust of his loins on the downstroke. Her cheeks were hollowing in and out as she sucked voraciously on his desire-thickened cudgel. God, he wanted it to go on forever . . . but he knew it couldn't; already he could feel the searing birth of his coming orgasm pulsating deep in his balls!
With every stroke, he could sense his imminent ejaculation into her lewdly milking mouth! It wouldn't be long before he shot his white-hot load of sperm far down into that greedily working throat! The sweet agony of sensation building deep within him was concentrated in the lust-bloated head of his rigid cock; he could feel it throbbing, expanding and swelling with each jerk as her teasing tongue licked insanely at the super-sensitive skin of his glans! "Ooooooh!" he groaned. "That's so goooood . . . oh darling . . . oh, Holly my love . . . ooogggh! Ahhhhh! Keep on sucking, honey . . . go on, suck me until I cum . . . "
Over the wetly sluicing sound of Alvaro's cock sliding in and out of her tightly clasping mouth, the slavering redhead heard his words. . . and she panicked. She was only sucking him as a means to an end to get him hard enough to fuck her! She didn't want to have him shoot his load and then turn over and go to sleep, leaving her raging with unsatisfied lust! She wanted that wonderfully rigid cock rammed deep into her cunt! She wanted it plowing its searing length far up into the throbbing depths of her quivering belly! She had to have it. . . but if she waited a moment longer it would all be over and she would be too late. If she wanted to have it and she had to have it she must move fast.. .
Wrenching her hair from Alvaro's grasp, she kneeled suddenly upright, her mouth sucking loudly away from his long hard cock, leaving it spearing up stiff and straight above his heaving belly, glistening in the pale light with her saliva.
"What the hell.. . " Ortiz began angrily. He had been so near, only a hundredth of a second away from that final blinding ecstasy and now the stupid bitch had left him hanging in the air! "Put it back!" he hissed urgently. "Go on . . . put it back! Suck it again!"
"No!" Holly panted. "No! I want to be fucked!" Gasping hoarsely with desire, she began straddling herself up and over him, the wetly hair-lined lips of her cunt poised over the seeping tip of his thick throbbing penis.
Ortiz squirmed his hips and thrust savagely at her shoulders with his hands, trying desperately to shove her down again toward his aching cock. He didn't want the effort of holding back and slaving away until she had cum! This time, selfishly, he wanted to shoot off into that frenziedly sucking mouth and he wanted to do it now! "Put it back!" he almost shouted. "Go on suck it again!"
"Alvaro, darling.. . "
"Please . . . "
The two of them suddenly froze in then-struggle, their lewdly entwined bodies rigid in the light of the moon.
A lecherous chuckle had grated from the shadows at the far end of the room!
"I got somethin' here for you, baby!" a gravelly voice rasped. "If he ain't man enough to give you what you want, move over and let a better man take his place!"
Petrified with horror, Ortiz and his nakedly kneeling wife stared aghast at the corner by the door. And then suddenly Holly screamed.
There were two big men standing just inside the room. And in the faint radiance percolating through the window she could see, from the opened fly of the nearest one, the steely shaft of a huge penis jutting menacingly toward her like a heavy blunt spear.. . .
CHAPTER TWO
Ortiz leaped out of bed and made a dash for the dressing-table. Normally he slept with the gun he had bought as an insurance against intruders under his pillow; tonight, of all nights, because he was tired he had left the damned thing in the drawer! It was bad enough that these men, whoever they were, should enter his house while he was asleep in bed with his wife (he must have forgotten to bolt the outer door for he had heard no sounds of breaking in). It was worse, much worse, that they should catch him without his gun. But the thing that riled him most of all was that they should have been eavesdropping on his intimate lovemaking with Holly: they had heard her pleading to be fucked and they had heard him refuse! It was intolerable! It was an insult to his masculinity that must be avenged at once with blood!
His outstretched hand had just touched the wood of the dressing-table when a fist like a sledgehammer caught him a stunning blow on the side of the head. The second of the two men had moved with lightning speed across the room and taken him from behind. Ortiz crashed forward among Holly's bottles of perfume and jars of makeup to hurtle off the dressing-table and sprawl on his back on the floor among a litter of broken glass and dripping lotions as a flat-handed rabbit punch slammed with paralyzing force across the nape of his neck.
Holly was screaming as he scrambled groggily to his feet with his face a salad of foundation cream and blood from a cut over his eye. He shook his head like a dog coming out of water and rushed at his attacker. But the big man was waiting for him. Blocking the dazed flyer's wild punch with the palm of one hand, he unloosed a pile-driving right that thudded against Alvaro's chest and sent him staggering half way across the room.
The man with the exposed penis was still standing by the door. Suddenly he swept his hand across the wall and switched on the ceiling light, moving nimbly to the window with his great cock wagging obscenely to draw across the drapes.
Ortiz was the first to recover from the unexpected glare of light, his trained flyer's eyes adjusting to the extra brilliance more rapidly than the two hoods. Panting hoarsely, he danced in and cracked a stinging blow high up on his attacker's cheek, following it up with a solid left and right to be body while the big man's eyes were still squinting against the dazzle. The hood fell back grunting with pain as Ortiz whirled to meet the onslaught of his companion.
Holly was still kneeling on the bed, her violet eyes wide with terror and alarm over the flimsy nightgown she had snatched up to hold protectively against her nakedly exposed breasts.
She gasped aloud as her husband bravely slammed a flurry of punches at the second man and then winced as he cried out with pain at the impact of a savage blow that jolted his head back on his shoulders.
Both of them were on him now . . . their heavy fists thudding with sickening force against the almost-naked flesh of his shoulders and chest. Barefoot and dressed only in the top half of his pajamas, Ortiz was at a ludicrous disadvantage against the two fully-dressed hoods. For a moment he continued to hold his own, but the sheer weight of the attack and the merciless pounding of four viciously aimed fists against his head and torso soon wore him down and drained his strength. His movements became slow and labored; his punches grew weaker and his reactions delayed. One eye was already blackened and swollen. Blood from the cut in his forehead, a gash over one cheekbone and a split lip spattered his pajama jacket. Finally his arms dropped to his sides and the intruders battered him savagely between them, slamming his jerking body from one to the other with pitiless brutality.
Heedless of her nakedness, Holly leaped from the bed and hurled herself screaming onto the back of the nearest man. "Leave him alone, you bastards!" she shrieked, scratching and clawing and pummeling his broad back in a desperate attempt to aid her tottering husband. "You'll kill him! Why don't you leave him alone . . . ? "
The hood swung around with a curse and sent her sprawling across the bed with a vicious sweep of his arm. She lay there sobbing as they drew back from the semi-conscious flyer and stood watching him with malicious, sadistic smiles. Ortiz swayed on rubber legs, his face a bloody mask of pain and his breath struggling into his heaving lungs in choking gulps. He was almost out on his feet but courageously, with painful slowness, he raised his leaden arms and lurched toward the nearest man.
Chuckling hoarsely, the intruder drew back-and then pounced forward to stamp the heel of his shoe cruelly down across the flyer's naked toes. Ortiz jerked up his savaged foot with a howl of pain, his hands flying automatically down toward his agonized toes . . . and while he was hopping off balance the man stepped in and crashed a murderous punch to his unprotected jaw. For Ortiz the world exploded in a crimson mist punctuated by showers of falling stars. He shot across the room to slam into the wall and slide limply to the floor.
But even then his drowning senses commanded him to struggle once again to his feet. His universe was bordered by crashing waves of agony that thundered in toward the dwindling center of consciousness willing him to continue. A woman was screaming somewhere and, nearer at hand, a man's hoarse voice chuckled obscenely. A grotesque and bloodied figure, he hobbled forward, blindly swinging his arms.
The two hoods exchanged glances . . . and then the one nearest to Ortiz raised himself on the balls of his feet, judging his distance, and launched a savage kick that speared upward under the skirts of the dazed flyer's pajama jacket and smacked into the hairy pouch of his testicles.
Ortiz jack-knifed forward from the waist as a giant blade of agony scythed upward through his belly from his tortured balls, his breath screeching from his gaping mouth in a high, shrill, whinnying scream. At the same time the attacker's knee smashed up into his falling forehead with murderous force. He dropped to the floor like a stone and lay still.
Swiftly, they produced lengths of thin cord and lashed together his ankles and knees. Then, forcing his limp wrists high up behind his back, they bound them together and attached them to a noose around his neck so that the slightest struggle would tighten the loop of rope biting cruelly into the flesh of his throat. Panting slightly now, they propped the unconscious man up in a chair facing the bed and turned toward the terrified redhead cowering nakedly on the rumpled covers.
She was staring at them petrified with horror, her reeling mind a chaos of conflicting emotions pity for her beaten husband, outrage at the invasion of their home, puzzlement at their reasons for being there, and above all fear . . . fear of what they were going to do to her now.
She wasn't left long in doubt. The hood with his penis exposed astonishingly it was still as hard and stiff as the trunk of a tree! stood looking down at her with a sadistic smile twisting his heavy, sunburned features. "The name is Boscoe," he rasped in his grating voice. "like I was sayin' before that punk interrupted us . . . " He jerked his head contemptuously at the unconscious figure of Ortiz in the chair behind him. ". . . we're always happy to oblige a lady, me an' my pal Guardi! You was screamin' your pretty head off sayin' you wanted it thrown to you well, here we are ready to throw it to you, the both of us!"
Wide-eyed with terror, the defenseless redhead stared fearfully at the two implacable faces gazing lecherously down at her, searching desperately for some sign of compassion or decency in their stony features. She found none. Guardi's blue-jowled visage had cracked open in a lustfully expectant smile; and Boscoe was leering familiarly at the soft white body trembling hleplessly on the bed as he grasped the iron-hard shaft of the penis spearing out from his fly and skimmed the loose foreskin up and down its rigidly veined length. She was utterly alone and completely at their mercy!
"No!" she sobbed piteously. "Oh no! . . . Please . . . You mustn't. . . Don't do it to me, please . . . , "
Guardi chuckled. And then, with a swift movement that took Holly by surprise, he leaned down and seized her wrists, dragging them cruelly above her head and then forcing them down over the side of the bed so that she was thrown onto her back. At the same time Boscoe grasped her knees in his huge hands and jerked them savagely toward him. She was stretched nakedly across the bed between them, her trembling white breasts and belly and red-haired pussy shamefully exposed to their lascivious gaze!
Grinning cruelly, Boscoe slowly pried her shuddering thighs apart to reveal the whole passion-damp length of her vaginal furrow with its pinkly swollen cuntal lips flowering open in their nest of wet hair. "Jesus!" he breathed softly. "Would you take a look at that tight little cunt!"
Holly screamed shrilly as he knelt heavily on her splayed thighs, transferring his brutish hands to the silky curls mantling her pubic mound. She jerked and thrashed and squirmed her naked body wildly from side to side in a desperate attempt to evade the raping fingers now cruelly exploring her secret parts. Her tear-stained face twisted frantically between her pinioned arms. But they were too strong for her: the iron grip dragging her wrists back over her head and the excruciating weight of Boscoe pinning her legs held her as immobile as an insect pinned to a board! She was theirs to do with as they wished!
"You can scream your fuckin' head off, baby," Guardi panted behind her flailing head. "There ain't a building I could see between her and that crummy diner of Jim Frazer's . . . and he ain't there but at weekends!"
"Maybe she's expectin' Briggs to come to the rescue!" Boscoe guffawed. Then, still chuckling lustfully, he reached down his two hands and slowly pried apart the piteously weeping redhead's cringing pussy lips to expose the delicate coral slit of her cunt. Helplessly spread-eagled on the rumpled sheets, Holly groaned in abject humiliation as his prying fingers sank lewdly in between the swollen folds of her already seeping wet vagina. Then, splaying wide the quivering flanges of her inner flesh, he began systematically to massage the sensitively throbbing knob of her clitoris.
The frightened redhead was past all resistance. Terror-stricken by the brutal appearance of the hoodlum kneeling on her cruelly spread legs with his visibly pulsing cock swaying above her defenseless loins, she moaned hopelessly as his calloused fingertips probed and explored her wetly heated pussy. Overcome with revulsion at the lewd assault she was suffering and with self-disgust at the shameful revelation of her importunate demands on Alvaro before the intruders made themselves known she was beyond any feeling but black despair.
But there was one final degradation she had to endure. As Boscoe's obscenely stroking fingers probed lasciviously in her inner flesh, she felt with a thrill of additional horror her vaginal secretions begin to flow once more! She tensed, trying desperately to blot out from her mind the repulsive thought. But her body, aroused a short while before by her own wildly thrusting fingers and the sensation of Alvaro's cock in her mouth, refused to obey. She was getting wet between the legs again!
The kneeling crook, suddenly aware of the sluicing noises squelching obscenely from Holly's wide-splayed cunt under his crude manipulations, raised his head and chuckled. "Well, whaddya know!" he exclaimed with an evil grin to Guardi. "We got a hot one here, pally! There's a welcome mat on the doorstep already!"
Leaning down with all his weight on the struggling girl's cruelly pinioned wrists, the blue-chinned thug guffawed in his turn. "So what are you waitin' for?" he demanded. "A brass band?"
Boscoe was panting with lustful anticipation as he gazed sadistically down at the lush ripe body splayed nakedly before him. Shifting his knees abruptly back, he lowered his hips, seized his hard thick cock with one hand, and brought the bulging rubbery head up to the wet red hairs fringing Holly's cunt. Then, with a sudden savage lunge of his pelvis, he surged the rigidly muscled pole of male flesh straight up into the hot wet cavern of her vagina.
"Aiieee!" the helplessly pinned redhead screamed as the hotly throbbing staff wedged open the trembling lips of her pussy and raced up inside the tight tender depths of her belly. Squirming and twisting and threshing her naked body in a vain attempt to escape the brutal impalement, she sobbed and shrieked aloud as her cruelly stretched arms jerked impotently against Guardi's imprisoning grasp. Her legs, freed from the crushing weight of Boscoe's knees, flailed frantically in the air, while her hips rolled frenziedly from side to side in a desperate attempt to throw him off. But it was no use. Flattened to the bed under his punishing bulk, Holly was helplessly skewered on the stone-hard length of his raping cock!
Gasping hoarsely with animal lust, Boscoe began convulsively to undulate his hips, jack-hammering his turgid staff in and out of Holly's hotly clasping cunt like a well-oiled piston. She was weeping brokenly now, her body shaken by long racking sobs that sent the tears welling from her eyes and shivered the soft mounds of her breasts beneath his heaving chest. Her belly was on fire from the savage pounding of his huge cock plowing in and out of her secret flesh, and her mind was reeling with disgust.
Abruptly, Boscoe levered himself up off her body and sat back on his heels grasping her fiercely by the hips and pulling her along with him so that the head of his wetly glistening penis remained wedged into the wide-splayed lips of her cunt and her trembling buttocks now rested on the slopes of his thighs. As her legs jerked and twitched on either side of his hips, he spread her damp hair-lined vaginal lips with the forefinger and thumb of one hand and began once again to massage the hot rubbery head of her clitoris with the middle linger of the other.
Holly shuddered convulsively at the obscene contact with her sensitive cuntal flesh . . . and then she uttered a despairing groan. For she felt with a thrill of additional horror a tiny spark of rekindled excitement stir involuntarily in her ravished loins!
As the depraved fingers of her brutal violator continued remorselessly to caress and tweak the wetly sensitive shaft, it stiffened into erection, sending tremors of unwanted pleasure shuddering through her loins. Raising her head between her pinioned arms, she stared unbelievingly past her quivering breasts, down the smoothly contoured length of her naked body, and then past the uptilted slope of her belly to where the dark stump of Boscoe's cock protruded from her plungered vagina. Above the gleaming muscled shaft, his hard fingers stirred ripples of unbearable sensation up into her ravished belly. The spark of excitement grew rapidly into a flame . . . and the flame, fanned by the knowledge of her own helplessness and a curious, almost masochistic, pleasure in the idea that she was being raped by two men she had never seen before, spread soon into an uncontrollable fire.
Her legs dropped limply splayed to the bed; her thighs began to shudder with tiny spasms; soft tremors of arousal shivered the tender flesh of her belly. The taut rubbery nipples of her breasts thrust themselves achingly toward the ceiling as her chest began to rise and fall and her breathing quickened. In a moment her whole body was jerking spasmodically as she fought to conquer the inferno of unwanted desire that was consuming her. Her head dropped back between her stretched arms with a groan of despair.
For this was the worst horror of all. She was forced now to admit it to herself: she wanted it! She wanted it to go on, and she wanted it all! Overcome with shame at the betrayal of her body under her ravisher's obscenely manipulating hands, sickened by the brutal and senseless beating of her husband, repelled by the thought of this stranger's raping cudgel spearing into her body in grotesque violation, she nevertheless wanted it!
As though she were under some kind of spell, Holly found herself wantonly squirming her pelvis, undulating her uptilted hips to search with her hungrily throbbing cunt for more of the long thick penis whose tip was wedged hotly into her own cock-hungry furrow!
Boscoe had been watching with increasing excitement the effects of his maneuvers. Tiny pearls of moisture had appeared along the inner lips of Holly's cunt, beading the hairs that fringed her splayed pussy. Now there was a film of sweat dewing her trembling belly and glistening in the deep cleft between her heaving breasts. When her legs, almost of their own volition, rose hesitantly and then wrapped themselves tightly around his muscular back, he knew the moment had come. With a low animal groan he fell heavily forward along the helpless redhead's naked body and began fucking into her again with long thrusting strokes, grinding his pelvis down hard against the softness of her belly.
His hot breath gusted into her lust-contorted face; his hands insinuated themselves under her thrashing hips and cupped the milk-white moons of her soft warm ass-cheeks, pinching and squeezing as he pistoned his desire-thickened staff remorselessly in and out of her now obscenely milking cunt.
Holly abandoned herself to the forbidden sensations of tingling joy flaming through her veins. The outrage and debasement of her nakedly defenseless body by the man whose cum-filled balls were bouncing crazily against her buttocks as he buried his lust-expanded shaft of male hardness far up in her cunt was arousing unexpected and lascivious reactions that astounded her by their force! She began gyrating her hips in abandoned harmony with the increasing speed of the lubricated shaft plowing into her. And then, just as she felt her own excitement rising to a climactic pitch, she sensed an abrupt crescendo in her despoiler's movements.
His head raised up and his open mouth sucked in gasping lungfuls of air. The pounding of his hips grew sporadic. His muscled belly shuddered and contracted as she felt the head of his skewering penis begin to bulge and heave against the tight clasp of her inner flesh. And then his wildly jerking staff was spewing his boiling load far up into the sucking depths of her womb!
It wasn't the most soul-shattering orgasm she had ever felt within herself but it was enough to goad the devils of frustration and desire into a wild dance along her trembling nerves. As the staccato pulsing of the hoodlum's cock within her belly gradually subsided, the lustfully aroused young wife tried desperately to stem the squirting flood of semen by grinding her seething loins up tight against his pelvis but the movement itself defeated her purpose: the sucking grasp of her cunt milked his deflating organ clean, drawing out the final drops of his spurting cum to gurgle deep within the distended walls of her impatiently steaming
She was left rolling from side to side in a frenzy of obscenely triggered abandon as her rapist collapsed across her writhing body and lay spent with his eyes closed.
It was at that moment that a deep groan from the chair at the foot of the bed signaled that Alvaro Ortiz had regained consciousness.
For an instant, the charter flyer's pain-wracked body struggled in bewilderment against the cruel bonds lashing his limbs together. And then, as the cord tightened around his neck with his efforts to free his hands, the full realization of his plight and the outrage to his lovely wife flooded in on him with sickening clarity. The degrading tableau in front of him etched itself into his mind with terrible force . . . the obscenely coupled pair on the bed, Boscoe lying in exhausted satiation with the limp tube of his deflated cock trailing sticky threads of sperm across Holly's naked thigh . . . the raped girl herself moaning and writhing in evident frustration . . . Guardi crouched down with a salacious smirk creasing his evil features as he retained his cruel grasp of the violated redhead's wrists.
"One thing is certain," Ortiz said thickly through swollen lips. "For this, you bastard, you are going to die!"
Boscoe chuckled as he levered himself off the panting girl. "You spies are all the same," he rasped. "It's all big talk and no fuckin' deeds. Why, you ain't even man enough to throw it to your hot little wife!"
The Mexican-American flushed a dark red. "We will see about that," he panted through set teeth. "I will certainly kill you, one day!"
"Aw, shuddup, greaser," Guardi put in harshly. "You talk too much, boy. Another peep outa you and I'll tighten that noose around your goddamn neck! Whyn't you sit back and relax and take a lesson in what a dame really wants?"
With his eyes fixed sadistically on the helpless flyer's outraged face, he slowly unzipped the fly of his pants and drew out the rigidly throbbing shaft of the biggest, thickest cock Ortiz had ever seen. "Come on, Boscoe," he gloated. "Jack her up in position three with her ass turned this way: I want the punk to get a piece of the action!"
As the flyer writhed in impotent fury, only easing up when the tightening noose around his neck threatened to choke him, Boscoe grinned maliciously and climbed on the bed. With Guardi's help he turned over Ortiz's limply unresisting wife and forced her knees up under her belly so that she was kneeling on the edge of the mattress with her upraised buttocks pointed straight at her husband's anguished face. Then, placing a hard hand on the nape of her neck, Boscoe forced Holly's head cruelly down until her forehead was on the covers. Kneeling in front of her, he clamped his knees roughly against her ears and reached down over her bent spine to seize the backs of her trembling thighs, hauling them toward him so that she was bent almost double with the whole flat plane of her upraised loins shamefully exposed to Guardi's leering gaze.
The blue-jowled hoodlum chuckled lasciviously. Leaning down, he kept his eyes on Alvaro's hate-contorted face as he ran his hands familiarly up and down the wetly hair-lined cleft of Holly's exposed pussy slit, probing between the moistly folded flanges of her distended cunt, flirting with a forefinger around her tiny puckered anus in its nest of cum-soaked hair, sinking his thumb between the hot folds of wet flesh to rasp against her throbbing clitoris.
The doubled-up redhead gave a muffled cry as she felt the lewd contact of his obscenely invading fingers, jerking sharply away from his cunt-plundering hand. But jack-knifed humiliatingly as she was, with her head clamped between Boscoe's knees and her arms and legs pinioned by his gorilla grasp, she was helpless to escape the degrading assault on her shamefully exposed flesh. Doubled up like a trussed chicken with her nakedly revealed cunt held high in the air, she was powerless to resist the ravishing manipulations of his lustfully chuckling companion.
Guardi gripped the fleshy swollen lips of the captive young wife's wetly quivering cunt and slowly drew them apart to expose the heated red red depths of her pussy. Then, as Ortiz cursed and writhed in helpless rage, he flexed his knees and approached the lust-bloated head of his massive cock to the gaping pink opening.
The raging flyer gazed at the monstrous instrument with a gasp of horror. It was immense! At the top of the huge, stiffly throbbing shaft, webbed all along the underside with pulsating veins, the purplish rubbery head was already protruding evilly from the distended foreskin like a huge clenched fist. Holly would never be able to take a weapon like that: it would split her belly apart!
As he watched in outraged disbelief, the bulging tip of that cock nosed between Guardi's cunt-splayed hands, nuzzling at the pink flanges of wetly folded cuntal flesh as a stallion's might and then, with a gasping exhalation of breath, the hoodlum flicked his hips forward and forced the chunky blood-engorged head an inch inside the hotly throbbing lips of Holly's cunt, brutally expanding the swollen rubbery flesh as she gave a muffled scream and jerked frantically in an attempt to evade the cruel impalement.
"Ungghhh! Nmmgghh!" came further groans as Holly tried to escape Guardi's continued attack. Upended in abject humiliation, the violated redhead groaned between Boscoe's mercilessly clamped knees as the penis penetrated another painful inch. She was certain her distended cuntal lips were tearing. The pain was almost unendurable, racking her belly with twinges of fire as Guardi lunged the long hard shaft of his penile flesh farther and farther up between her thighs, forcing the quivering walls of her vagina to give way before its relentless advance. She squirmed with all her strength to evade the bestial impalement. Her naked ass-cheeks writhed furiously under Guardi's grasping hands. But her anguished struggles served only to wedge the abnormally thickened cock more securely in her tortured cunt. It was as though a monstrous battering-ram was being hammered between the splayed-open lips of her pussy and up into her aching belly. She was hopelessly skewered on the brutally thick fleshiness of the hood's raping penis.
And then suddenly the hairy pouch of his balls slapped heavily against her pussy and he was all the way in! Without waiting for her to accustom herself to the alien girth thrust up into her belly, Guardi, panting wildly, began to fuck rhythmically in and out of the tight-clasping folds of the violated young wife's cruelly dilated cunt, plowing the inflamed spear of his lust-thickened cock again and again into the brutally ravished tightness of her vagina. She moaned and jerked in helpless subjugation as the tempo of his pistoning hips increased and his huge penis smashed with body-jolting force on and on up into her savagely stretched cuntal passage.
Pounded into total submission by the hot pulsing cock ramming up into her cruelly distended cunt, the helpless young wife groaned afresh with every vicious stroke. Her mind was adrift on a sea of pain. The flesh of her ripe young buttocks shuddered uncontrollably under the pressure of the wildly fucking hood's grasping fingers. The soft bulge of her compressed belly trembled convulsively within Boscoe's pinioning grasp every time her agonizingly gripped thighs were buffeted by another fierce thrust of the intruder's raping hips.
But amazingly the agony and the humiliation gradually became submerged again by whirling sensations of forbidden pleasure as her tingling loins accustomed themselves to the alien thickness wedging itself into them. The shame of being held obscenely doubled up in front of her husband on their own bed while they used her body like a whore's the masochistic thrill of feeling them satisfy in her their brutal male lust was arousing in her a storm of wanton passion she didn't know she possessed! There was no doubt about it now: pain and pleasure, shame and ecstasy, had become inextricably mixed in her reeling mind!
Abruptly her last remaining defenses crumbled and she began insanely mumbling and howling into the covers between Boscoe's savagely gripping knees as the pistoning rod of his cruel companion drew out the pink fleshy lips of her tight little cunt and then shoved them fiercely back up into her belly with each demonic thrust. Oh God! Oh God! It was intolerable . . . it was unbearable . . . it was unendurable . . . but it was so delicious! If the brutally invading shaft kept splatting into her loins and setting her secret flesh on fire for much longer, she was going to cum she knew she was!
The madly fucking hood felt his heart pumping wildly in his chest. His breath jetted faster and faster through his nose as Holly flexed and relaxed her pinioned hips convulsively back against him, gurgling her lust aloud into the rumpled covers. The little bitch was going out of her mind! Guardi couldn't remember when he had seen a broad so hot! Christ, it was as much as he could do to keep up with her . . . !
The cruelly raped young wife was writhing so violently that she was almost throwing Boscoe off her! Her tingling body was at the crest of the wave! It didn't matter what they did to her now . . . it didn't matter about Alvaro . . . she was going to cum at any moment!
Sensing that the violated redhead was about to peak, the blue-jowled hood plunged his stone-hard cock into her fire-filled cunt with redoubled fury, brutally splaying her obscenely exposed buttocks apart as he fucked faster and faster into her clasping young cunt. And then suddenly he felt her whole body stiffen and shudder.
Bound immovably on the chair, Ortiz gave a strangled cry of rage as his horrified eyes watched the stretched wet lips of his wife's cruelly distended cunt sucking greedily at the glistening stump of Guardi's huge cock plowing into her obscenely exposed loins. Her sensually ripened body jerked galvanically, bucking and threshing between the two raping hoods in a crescendo of intolerable delight as her orgasm tremored madly through her with the force of a tropical tempest!
The wild churning of her lust-inflamed body triggered off the raping intruder's own climax. He raised his brutal head to bellow out a gasping cry of release. His hips shuddered convulsively forward, ramming his skewering shaft even further up into the lewdly kneeling redhead's belly as the throbbing head of his huge penis exploded in the tightly convulsing depths of her vise-like pussy. Scalding squirts of his sperm jetted far up into the ravished young wife's vaginal passage and she moaned afresh in mindless ecstasy with each new spurt of his white-hot load.
For a long moment he held her cruelly there, impaled on his wildly jerking cock as he ejaculated his churning cum in forceful gushes up into her quivering belly. Then he thrust down on her obscenely splayed ass-cheeks and pushed himself exhaustedly away from her, his deflated, cum-smeared shaft pulling free of her plundered cunt with a wet squelching sound that echoed in the now silent room. At the same time Boscoe relaxed his hold and clambered off the bed to leave the ravished girl collapsed face-down across the covers, her violated body racked with the deep gasping sobs of release.
"Man," Guardi exclaimed as he stuffed his vast cock back inside his pants and zipped up the fly, "That was some tight little cunt in there!"
Boscoe smirked conspiratorially. "What did I tell you!" he leered.
Behind them the bound flyer's face was dark and congested with rage. "Have you had all you want from us now?" he croaked. "Now you've had your dirty fun, d'you think maybe you could get the hell out and leave us alone?"
Guardi swung around with a guffaw. "Hey, listen to him, willya!" he chortled. "Lover-boy wants us out! Now how d'ya like that! After all we done for him, servicing the little lady an' all, showin' him the way it should be done, he wants us out! What happened to that traditional spic hospitality, punk?"
Ortiz stared at him with hate-filled eyes and said nothing.
The two hoods exchanged glances and then lay deliberately down on the bed, stretched their naked bodies one on either side of Holly's weeping naked figure. As they settled the pillows behind them, Guardi reached inside the lapels of his jacket and produced his gun. "If you think this is the end," he said conversationally, holding the weapon loosely down beside his thigh, "brother, you got another think comin'! This is only the beginning!"
"W-what do you mean?" the helpless flyer asked huskily.
Boscoe laughed. "Bern' as how it's so late, pally," he rasped, "it'd be only polite to ask us to stay the night! It's time we got a little shut-eye anyway 'cause tomorrow the four of us are goin' to climb into that rattletrap plane of yours and take a little trip . . . "
CHAPTER THREE
The driver of the refrigerated truck swung the heavy vehicle off the desert road and ground in low gear across the bumpy perimeter track toward the open doors of the hangar standing at the side of the strip. It was just nine o'clock in the morning and already the sun was drawing shimmering waves of heat from the dry sand between the silver-gray cactus scrub pock marking the flat featureless landscape.
Ortiz stood in the shadow of the hangar wall as the truck jerked to a stop with a hiss of its powerful air brakes and the driver climbed down from the cab. The cold compartment behind the cab was painted a glaring white across which slanting red lettering announced South Central Fruit Mart and then underneath in smaller characters: Farm-fresh soft fruit to any destination.
The driver was wearing white overalls with a red SCFM monogram over the breast pocket. He tucked a pencil behind his ear and walked across to the flyer wiping one forearm across his sweating brow. "One thousand pounds of prime tomatoes for the lucky housewives of Guaymas!" he called cheerfully. "Jesus, the fruit may keep cold in back there, but it sure is hotter'n hell in that goddamn cab! It's gonna be a real scorcher!"
Ortiz nodded a greeting and stayed in the shadow. Guardi was standing just out of sight inside the hangar with a gun in his pocket. Boscoe was behind the drapes of the bedroom window in the house with the muzzle of his revolver held against the captive Holly's neck. The flyer knew that one false move on his part, one attempt to communicate his plight to the truck driver, would be as good as signing his beautiful wife's death warrant. The two hoods were watching his every action like hawks.
"Jesus what happened to you?" the driver exclaimed, staring curiously at the Mexican-American's black eye and battered face. "You make a forced landing in the Sierra Madre or something?"
Ortiz knew the answer to that. He had been primed what to say. He cleared his throat nervously. "Took a little too much liquor last night," he explained tonelessly. "Got into a fight in a bar. You know how it is."
"Sure." The driver chuckled understandingly. "Happens to all of us sometime or other!" He clapped the pilot on the shoulder. "Guess it's a lousy time to spring this on you, but I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to help me load the merchandise. I ain't got no help today."
"What happened to your loader?" Ortiz asked with an anxious glance over his shoulder.
The driver flung his arms wide in a theatrical gesture and then let them slump to his sides again. "Kids!" he said, rolling his eyes heavenward. "All I know is the young punk ain't showed. Probably hopped up in some lousy disco joint with a broad. They take all they can get and they ain't prepared to do nothin' for it. But nothin'! It's the same all over these days."
"Sure I'll help you. Be glad to," Ortiz said. This was a contingency the hoods hadn't bargained for! Surely they could hardly stop him helping the man: it would look too suspicious! And if he could get out of sight around the back of that truck long enough to pass him some kind of message . . .
"Sorry to ask you an' all," the driver was saying. "But if I hump all of them crates into your plane in this goddamn heat myself well, there wouldn'ta been much point in sending a refrigerator truck, would there?"
"I guess not," Ortiz said. It would be too much risk. The danger to Holly would be too great. Anyway, they'd never let him out of sight and sound for long enough. They wouldn't dare to. They'd find some reason to accompany him. Suddenly he grinned crookedly okay, if Boscoe wanted to survey everything he did, let the bastard work for it! "You don't have to worry," he said to the driver. "I have a buddy here who'll be glad to help you. . . Hey, Boscoe! The driver's one man short. Come on out and lend a hand with these tomatoes, will you?"
The big man came around the corner of the hangar scowling. There was nothing else he could do if he wanted to keep tabs on Ortiz without raising the driver's suspicions. "Well, that's fine, just fine," the driver said. "With three of us it won't take but a few minutes."
Boscoe contented himself with a surly grunt in reply.
As Ortiz went to open the loading bay in the tail of the old B25, the driver swung up the steel locking bars at the back of the truck and opened the thick double doors. Then the three of them began transferring the flat crates of tomatoes into the aircraft.
Ortiz's Virgin was a thin, flat-sided, square-cut ship with a long sneering transparent nose, high-cranked wings and oversize motors and wheels. Inside, there was a furnace glare of light streaming through the glasshouse over the two pilots' seats up front. Behind them, a steep step led down to the cabin floor and underneath a narrow passage went through to the position in the transparent nose where the bomb-aimer used to lie. But the perspex had gone smoky with time and now it was crackled with tiny veins like a drunk's nose.
A tall man could just stand upright in the cabin, and if he stretched out his arms he could place his palms flat on the two sidewalls. Most of the green plastic soundproofing on the metal skin was hanging loose, only kept in place by a crisscross of pipes and cables and a mess of junction boxes and contact breakers down the fuselage. But behind the old bomb bay, under a filled-in circle in the roof which had once housed the gun-turret, there was a strip of carpet in the tail and half a dozen swiveling seats bolted to the floor between two rows of circular portholes.
Under the flyer's direction, Boscoe and the driver stowed the crates of tomatoes in the empty center of the ship. "I thought you had 'em further for'rard than this usually," the driver commented when the last stack was lifted into place. His cheerful face was streaming with sweat in the blistering heat of the cabin.
"I do," Ortiz said as Boscoe looked up suspiciously. "Question of trim. I'm taking along a couple of passengers and the weight distribution has to be just right."
The driver nodded. "Sooner them than me," he chuckled. "How long you figure it'll take you to get there?"
"Guaymas? It's around four hundred and fifty miles. Damn near three hours in this old crate."
"Guess you'll be ready for another night on the town when you get there," the driver grinned. "In this heat an' all. But watch out for them Mexican bars, man they tell me the spies are mighty quick to take offense!"
"No bars for me," Ortiz grunted. "I have to fly back a consignment of Gulf shrimps for the rich folks in San Diego tonight."
As they climbed out of the stifling cabin into the hammering of the sun, the driver produced a book of pro-forma invoices and whipped the pencil from behind his ear. "Sign, please," he said.
Boscoe stepped up behind the flyer's shoulder and stared closely as he wrote his name on the printed slip. There was no chance of adding a single word!
The driver tore out a copy and handed it to Ortiz. "Be seeing you next week then," he said, clambering into his cab and starting the motor of the truck. As he spun the huge wheel to turn it back on to the road, he shook his head. There was no telling with folks! That young Ortiz now usually he was so full of cracks, a regular guy, and helpful too. But today you could hardly get a peep out of him! Maybe it was the company he kept: that black-browed bastard who couldn't bring himself to utter a civil lousy word looked as though he ought to have been in a pen! Or maybe the flight had been about some dame and Ortiz had lost! The driver shrugged, spat out the window, and headed the truck for El Centro.
As the cloud of dust raised by its huge wheels died down over the dunes, Boscoe hustled the flyer back to the house where Guardi was holding the terrified Holly at gunpoint.
"Okay, now here's the pitch," he explained. "We're taking over this plane. You'll fly to Guaymas with the goddamn tomatoes as planned only you'll arrive five minutes late because you're gonna put down in the desert and leave me with sweetheart here as a hostage for your good behavior. Guardi will go with you to see you don't step outa line or pass on any messages or crap like that."
Ortiz was staring at him in astonishment. So this was some kind of hijack! But he couldn't understand: skyjacking was for big-time commercial jetliners on international runs; it was for important people whose kidnaping would make the headlines! What the hell had it got to do with a two-bit operation like his? He didn't have to wait long to find out.
"You'll load up the shrimps, the hood went on, "and you'll take off and head for home. So far, nobody's going to take any notice of the plane because you already filed your flight plan and, apart from that five minutes, you kept to it. But on the way back you'll put down again Guardi will tell you where and you'll junk the shrimps and take on another consignment from friends of ours in Mexico. Then you'll come back to join me and sweetheart in the desert and deliver the stuff on the U.S. side of the border. After that, if you kept your nose clean, you can do what you fuckin' like. There'll be friends meetin' Guardi and me to take care of the consignment."
Ortiz was biting his lip. "What consignment?" he asked flatly.
Guardi grinned. "What do you think? One of the usual channels dried up this week. And there's a thousand pounds of high-grade refined hash waiting to be collected that friends of ours need urgently in the north."
Alvaro's swarthy skin paled. So that was it! They'd gotten themselves into the smuggling racket and not only smuggling but smuggling drugs! He knew that top quality refined hash, produced in secret laboratories from marijuana grown illicitly in Mexico, fetched as much as fifteen hundred dollars a pound in the United States. He would be flying a million and a half dollars worth of contraband across the border! Sweat started out on his brow at the thought. If the narcotics boys got even so much as a whisper that he had been involved, however innocently, in such a deal, he could say goodbye forever to his chances of retaining his operating license as a charter pilot!
But on the other hand what could he do? The job had all the hallmarks of a Syndicate deal. Someone had let them down someone who was probably dead by now. Needing the stuff in a hurry, they had sent Boscoe and Guardi to get it. . . and it had been planned to the last detail! They had found out about his trip to Guaymas and back . . . and calmly homed in on the flight as a means of evading the ever-watchful customs authorities along the border! The old B25 was a familiar sight to the county sheriff's men and CHP officers patrolling the frontier: nobody would think of questioning a flight whose plan had in any case already been filed. Ortiz had friends among the law enforcement men and they had even used the ship once to rescue a commune of hippies stranded in the Mojave Desert with a wrecked truck. But he had heard enough about the ruthlessness of Syndicate operations to know what would happen if he tried to alert those friends now! They would kill Holly without the slightest hesitation if he stepped an inch out of line . . .
The cold-bloodedness of the plan sent the young flyer's mind reeling. These two pitiless hoodlums had staked out the strip as methodically as a hunter stalking game. It was probably Boscoe and Guardi who were responsible for the non-appearance of Briggs. Maybe they had forced him in some way to make that phone call: if he had been held at gunpoint it was no wonder his voice had sounded odd to Holly! Perhaps the tough little mechanic had even been trying in his way to tip her off by constantly calling her Mrs. Ortiz when normally he used her Christian name . . . But with Briggs out of the way it had been a piece of cake to walk in to the isolated Ortiz home and hold up the flyer and his wife. The rape of Holly and his own brutal beating had been just for kicks, the frosting on the cake: now he knew the full horror of the plan in which they had gotten involved.
But with Holly at the mercy of the brutal Boscoe in some desert hide-out there was nothing he would be able to do! It would probably be easy enough to evade the menace of Guardi's gun during the loading and unloading of the merchandise at Guaymas and pass a message to someone but not without the hood knowing it. He should even be able to escape altogether if he was prepared to barter Holly's life for his own freedom!
Blocked at every turn by the cunning and simplicity of the crooks' plan, there was nothing he could do but carry out their orders!
But there was one thing Boscoe and Guardi hadn't taken into account in their contemptuous assessment of Ortiz: the burning sense of machismo inherited through Ortiz's Mexican blood. Weakened by a sleepless night agonizingly trussed up in the chair, exhausted by the merciless beating he had received, sickened and outraged by the dual rape of his wife, it was nevertheless the insult to his masculine pride that affected the flyer most. Not only had he been humbled in front of his wife and heard to refuse her sexually: he had been forced to watch her debasement and, worst of all, he had witnessed her turning on during that brutal violation in a way she never did when she was in bed with him! That was an affront so intolerable that it made him sick to his stomach just to think of it!
Yet, paradoxically, although it was this more than anything else that was flooring him now, the seething sense of outrage and the burning thirst for vengeance that would follow it provided the greatest incentive of all for him to strain to the uttermost to foil the hoodlums' evil plan.
For the moment, however, he must play it cool and do what they said.
While Boscoe loaded the portfolio, the map case and the long valise into the tail of the Virgin and then hustled the frightened Holly into one of the seats behind the freight compartment, Ortiz settled himself up front with Guardi in the co-pilot's seat.
It was oven-hot under the glasshouse in the glare of the sun. The blue-jowled hood lowered himself gingerly on to the cracked leather of the cushion and looked around. A bewildering complex of unmatched dials and naked wires and switches and levers bound up in insulating tape met his eyes. There was an airspeed indicator reading up to 800 m.p.h. that must have come from a crashed jet lighter, for the Mitchell had never been capable of even half that speed. Beside was an empty socket whose use Ortiz never had discovered. And the stifling air in the cramped cabin was heavy with the odor of gasoline and oil and hydraulic fluid and plastic and leather and the sweat of thousands of hours of anxious flying.
"Jesus!" Guardi said. "I musta been outa my mind! D'you really think this old wreck's fit to make the trip to Guaymas and back?"
"That's your worry, isn't it?" Ortiz said sourly.
He began to go through the cockpit drill checklist for take-off. Guardi stuck a finger down the side of his neck to ease his collar and nervously watched the lights of the engine instruments come on across the board. Supercharger to low gear. . . booster pumps to emergency . . . mixture. . . one after another the tiny points of colored light glowed into life.
Ortiz showed the hood how to connect up the inter-com equipment and pressed the energize switch. The lights on the instrument panel dimmed and a faint whine started in the port engine as the flywheel built up speed. When the whine had reached a constant pitch, Ortiz thumbed the switch across to mesh. The airscrew wheezed, grunted, groaned, began to turn, coughed, and then suddenly spun. He stabbed the prime button and caught it with the throttle . . . and abruptly the air was filled with an earsplitting rackety clatter as blue flames stabbed back from the cowling outside the open cockpit window.
The pilot repeated the process with the starboard motor and eased up the throttles to warm the engines. The noise was deafening and the whole ship shuddered and shook to the pounding of the two Wright Cyclones as he waited with his eyes on the temperature gauge, holding it against the brakes.
When the needles were on the edge of the red lines, Ortiz pushed the throttles to thirty inches of boost and flipped off the brakes. The Virgin lurched and rolled, and suddenly they were moving.
He taxied around to the edge of the runway, called the tower at El Centro to announce his take-off, and swung the ship onto the macadam strip.
The clatter of the motors rose to a deafening roar. The cabin shook and buzzed and vibrated . . . and then they were moving, slowly at first and then faster and faster, the cactus scrub blurring into a continuous gray line as the indicator needle shivered to 50 mph . . . 60 . . . 75 . . .
At 80 mph, Ortiz felt the rudder pedals hardening and the wheel grow stiff under his hands. At 85 the nose wheel lifted and the flat horizon sank below the level of the windshield. The needle was flickering towards 110 when the shuddering of solid earth beneath the racing wheels dropped away and they were airborne, the red warning lights at the end of the strip flicking past only feet below.
There was a sudden roar as Ortiz hauled on a lever and the under cart doors opened to accept the retracting wheels and then he hauled on the column and the B25 settled into a shallow climb, the strip with its toy town buildings spiraling away beneath them and the thin line of the El Centro-Brawley highway running ruler-straight across the desolate scrub.
Guardi looked down past the exhaust flames on his right to the distant railroad yards of El Centro. "What course d'you usually set for Guaymas?" his harsh voice asked suddenly in the pilot's headset.
"South-southwest until I hit the gulf and then follow the coastline down," Ortiz replied. He was watching the engine instruments anxiously, half fearful and half hopeful that his temporary repair to the starboard starter motor would pack up and force them down.
"Turn east before you get to the border," Guardi ordered. "like you were making a sweep to gain height or somethin'. But don't get too high. What's your normal operational height in this crate?"
"My flight plan calls for two thousand."
"Shit, that's low enough! Keep her below a thousand then. We ain't got far to go."
"Where are we going?" Ortiz asked, kicking on full left rudder and banking towards the east.
"You ever heard of Borrego Springs?"
The flyer's head turned to stare at Guardi over the headset mike. "Sure. Just off the main state highway, a few miles west of-"
"State highway is right," the hood's voice cut in. "That's why we chose it. It makes for a quick getaway once we're back with the merchandise."
"But. . . there's no strip at Borrego Springs."
"There's an abandoned mine working out to the northwest of town. That's where Boscoe and the broad will hide out while we're on our way. You can put down there."
"That's cactus scrub desert, just like here," Ortiz objected. "I could probably put down, sure, if we found a long enough tract without the scrub. But it's soft sand: we could never take off again!"
"There's an old stretch of blacktop between the workings and some crummy bunkhouse set-up. She's dead straight and she's wide. You can use that as a strip."
"Yeah . . . if the Santa Ana hasn't blown and covered it up with sand so you can't see it from the air."
"There won't be any sand," Guardi said irritably. "I've had friends of mine checking out the place."
Ortiz sighed. The bastards thought of everything!
Fifteen minutes later, with the airspeed indicator reading 190 mph, they roared over the desert township and banked to the left, as though they were heading north. Ten miles beyond, the hood ordered Ortiz to circle around to the west and south. Below them, the flat monotony of the cactus desert was broken by the rusted gantries and broken derricks of the old mine in the lee of a shallow sandstone bluff. A mile away across the barren plain a collection of derelict wooden buildings scoured pale by the wind huddled in a depression. And between them ran a length of roadway, its ancient tarred surface still gleaming in the sun.
Ortiz throttled back the motors, wound on full flaps, and eased the wheel forward.
Guardi pressed the transmit switch and spoke into the headset. "She looks kinda narrow from here," he said. "But she's wide enough for this plane. I had it checked out. So don't give me any shit about puttin' one wheel in the sand and wreckin' the ship, or you and that pretty little wife'll end up under the sand yourselves."
Ortiz bit his lip. He had been wondering if he could get away with just such a maneuver. If he could make them believe it really had been an accident, he had thought, he could slew the plane off the roadway and tip her onto one wing . . . or retract the under cart and pancake her on the macadam as she landed . . . or run off the far end of the strip into the soft sand so that she couldn't take off again. Now he knew that even if he did make a genuine mistake Holly's life and his own would be forfeit. And it was going to be difficult enough, with all his flying experience, to put the ship down exactly on that narrow strip of road at nearly 100 mph!
His hands were clammy with sweat as he rocked the Mitchell's wings, swinging her gently from side to side with delicate touches of rudder as he lined the nose up on the fast rising stretch of road.
"You gotta put her down right at the beginning of that strip," Guardi's harsh voice commanded. "And brake the bitch to a stop right away. We're takin' off again just as soon as Boscoe and the dame hit the deck, see. And I don't want no taxiing around and back to the start. You gotta land and take off in one straight line, in the length of that road. That way, anyone watching the plane from the Springs will think you just flew in low to rubberneck the mine and then took her up again."
He would have to hit that roadway dead accurately not only laterally but in a fore-and-aft direction as well for he would need every foot of space available now: he would have to bring the Mitchell to a halt long before the halfway mark if he was to get her into the air again before the blacktop swerved off to the left towards the ruined buildings.
There was a heavy rumbling thump as he lowered the wheels. Then, holding his breath, he throttled back still more, holding her off just a fraction above stalling speed, veering to right and left as the long line of the old road flashed towards them and the scrub skimmed past below their wingtips.
The ochre sandstone of the bluff raced past on the left. A burst of throttle lifted them over the ruined spars of the derricks, and then with a shock that shivered every fitting in the plane, the Mitchell touched down . . . bounced . . . hit the ground again, slewed wildly, swung back in line, and then thundered along the narrow track as the clatter of the motors rose to a roar with the alteration of the pitch of the screws and the nose wheel came down.
Ortiz clamped on the brakes as soon as he dared and the plane screeched to a shuddering halt with the propellers idling.
Guardi was on his feet yelling over the racket of the motors as Boscoe hustled the girl up from the rear toward the hatchway. A moment later they had dropped through and ducked under the wing. Ortiz caught one glimpse of them hurrying away across the arid ground, their clothes plastered to their bodies by the whirling slipstream of the propellers and then the hoodlum was thumping him on the shoulder and signaling him to get going.
The sound of the Wright Cyclones rose to a howl and then a scream. The B25 shuddered and shook. Ortiz checked the engine instruments, the hydraulics and the magnetos, shoved the motors up to full power against the brakes and then jerked the brakes off. The plane surged forward along the eroded, pitted surface of the old road, gathering speed as she hurtled towards the bend in the macadam that now seemed too close . . . far too close.
It was going to be one of the shortest take-offs the ancient bomber had ever made . . . if she did make it! He had decided to use an old Air Force trick to gain extra lift a trick that was frowned on by the theorists and instructors but a trick nevertheless that had gotten enough ships out of trouble on the temporary jungle strips of Korea and Vietnam to make it almost a legend. Basically it consisted in making the aircraft airborne before she was really ready for it in taking her as it were by surprise . . .
He put down full flaps, kept the motors on maximum boost, and watched the dials anxiously with one hand on the undercarriage lever.
The needle crept slowly, slowly around the face of the indicator. At 80 mph, when the end of the roadway was dangerously near and his Virgin was bumping on the rough surface like a pea on a drum, Ortiz tried a little back pressure. The nose wheel came unstuck sluggishly.
For a moment longer he waited . . . and then, when he could no longer see the bend in the road that was their deadline under the speeding nose, he hauled back the control column with all his strength and at the same time yanked up the lever.
For an instant they heard the amplified roar and thump of the wheels on the rough surface as the under cart doors opened . . . then the plane lurched, staggered and yawed sickeningly before she was properly clear of the ground. But they were flying . . . just. . . when the end of the road slid past beneath them at 100 mph and the upper spines of the cactus scrub beyond it ripped along the metal belly of the ship.
Ortiz blew out his breath in a shuddering sigh as the gray blur of the desert rushed past and they staggered flatly toward the south, picking up speed as he retracted the flaps and pulled her gently into a laden climb to cruising height. It had been a close thing. A damned close thing! He wondered if Guardi realized how close to death he had been.
The blue-chinned gangster was fixing his intercom again. "Head back inland and then fly south over your own field," his harsh voice commanded soon. "If there's any query from the tower at El Centro, you can say you made a circuit to check the motors or some fuckin' crap . . . "
A few minutes later the hangar and the strip floated by two thousand feet below and they were flying into the blinding glare of the sun toward the Mexican border and Guaymas.
CHAPTER FOUR
The cabin was unfurnished and bare. Sand had blown in under the ill-fitting door and silted up beneath the shuttered windows. There was a wind sighing across the desert now, moaning eerily around the bleached wood of the abandoned shack, stirring the grains on rafter and beam and sill so that the close overheated air was filled with a constant whispering trickle, a continuous series of tiny pattering sounds that served to underline the desolation of the place and emphasize the perilousness of Holly's position.
She hoped the wind would not freshen into a Santa Ana the dreaded three-day blow that raised violent dust storms to blot out the sky and cut communications for hundreds of miles. She had no idea how her husband planned to get them out of the terrifying fix they were in; she had had no opportunity to speak to him alone since the hoods had broken into their house last night. But somehow she was sure Alvaro would manage something. Her pity for his wounded pride had even overcome her self-disgust at her own inexplicable behavior during the horrors of the previous night. Yet, beaten and humiliated as her husband was, Holly still had a childish confidence in his male ability to cope. But if the Santa Ana blew before he returned . . . she dare not think of what would happen then! He would be unable to land. He wouldn't even be able to locate the old mine workings. They would probably both be killed while the two ruthless monsters who had captured them made their separate getaways . . . Despite the suffocating heat, Holly shivered.
Her own position was as humiliating and uncomfortable as she could imagine. Crude though the cabin was, it had seemed to be the only one among the tumbledown buildings that had a roof left. Soon after they had arrived, the sadistic Boscoe had unearthed a length of rope, bound her wrists behind her back and then run the rope up over a beam and secured it to a rusted hook in the wall, hauling it cruelly tight so that her arms were drawn out stiffly and painfully behind her, and she was forced to stand bent almost double from the waist in abject submission before him.
He had left her there and gone out banging the door behind him How long ago? It seemed hours since she had heard the drone of Alvaro's plane fading toward the west and she had been there ever since, the blood pounding in her head in the airless heat, and her bound arms tingling with cramp from the unnatural position in which they were held.
She had tried shifting the position of her feet, hobbling a few steps forward and back, but the rope drawing her wrists cruelly out and up behind her passed over a beam directly above; every move she made effectively shortened it and raised her agonized arms still further. It was almost a relief when she heard the door burst open and the sunburned hoodlum was back with her.
Evidently, the 'friends' who had checked out the old mine and cleared the roadway of sand had hidden some supplies for him, for he carried a paper sack of provisions, and there was a whiskey bottle in his hand. The terrified young hostage saw with a thrill of dismay that the level of the amber liquor was already almost down to the halfway mark and Boscoe's face was redder than ever!
He had taken off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, which was stained with dark crescents of sweat under the arms. Breathing heavily, he raised the bottle to his lips and took a long pull of the fiery spirit. Then, swaying slightly, he stood leering at the helpless girl.
"Please," Holly whispered tearfully. "Please untie me . . . or loosen the rope or something. It hurts so. I c-c-can't stand it much longer!"
"Okay, sweetheart," the half-drunken hood said genially. "You want me to do something for you. It so happens I'd like you to do something for me. So you help me and I'll help you. That's fair, ain't it?"
"W-w-what do you mean?"
"I was just thinkin', " Boscoe said, pausing to take another swig from the bottle. "It's gonna be a long day. It ain't eleven o'clock yet and Guardi and your old man ain't due back until six. They don't seem to have no television here, so me and you are gonna have to amuse ourselves. And as I don't have no deck of cards, there's only one way I can think of doing that . . . " He stared meaningly at the tautly swelling hips stretching the denim of the captive redhead's jeans as she stood painfully bent over by the rope hauling on her arms behind.
"Oh, no!" Holly cried in a shrill whisper. "Not again! Please . . . "
"To make myself clear," Boscoe said thickly, "I'll untie you an' give you somethin' to eat and drink but first you gotta do somethin' for me. Just by way of an appetizer.. . " He chuckled coarsely at his own obscene joke. ". . . just by way of an appetizer, before we do anythin' else, you're gonna suck my cock!"
"W-W-What did you say?" Despite the agony of her jackknife position, the kidnapped redhead raised her lovely head to stare at him uncomprehendingly.
Holly gasped aloud, her face crimsoning with indignation. My God! Her villainous and insufferable captor was going to make her do . . . what she had forced herself to do to her husband only last night for the very first time!
Only this time it wouldn't be Alvaro; it would be this dreadful leering bully whose disgusting penis she would be forced to take right into her mouth and suck! It was intolerable! Her whole body shuddered at the obscene thought. "I won't!" she cried frantically. "I won't! I won't! You can't make me!"
Boscoe grinned salaciously. "Don't give me that shocked virgin shit," he rasped. "Not after the way you turned on last night! Why, you little whore, you're the hottest thing Guardi and me've seen for months! You're gonna suck cock all right. . . and you're gonna like it, too!"
"Never!" Holly hobbled a pace backward with a squeal of alarm as the gravel-voiced hoodlum set the whiskey bottle on the board floor and approached until his hips were a few inches in front of her lowered face. She gazed in fascinated horror as he slowly unzipped the fly of his pants, splaying the material apart to reveal the rigidly pulsating length of his long erect penis. Gradually, he pulled the throbbing shaft free, the veined pink rod with its purplish bulbous tip spearing towards the rafters like the head of a lance a lance that was destined to plunge home in the wet warm cavern of her own mouth! She shivered again with disgust.
"Go on, sweetheart suck!" Boscoe commanded with a brutal laugh.
The terrified redhead gasped with alarm. Pressing her lips tightly together, she turned her face away and shook her head violently.
"Don't give me that stuff!" Boscoe yelled furiously. Seized by a sudden fit of rage, he strode around behind her, his stiffly upstanding penis thwacking obscenely against her cheek as he passed and grasped the collar of Holly's cotton shirt. With a single savage jerk, he ripped it ferociously down between her pinioned arms so that the buttons tore off and the garment, with the skimpy brassiere beneath it, split open across her chest to expose her shoulders and the lushly swelling mounds of her naked breasts!
"Aaaaggghhh!"
Holly's scream of terror set the scoured timbers of the shack vibrating. A thin trickle of sand pattered down from the beam above her to shower amongst the tawny hairs of her flailing head.
Boscoe was in front of her again, his calloused hands snaking out to cup and fondle the tautly ripened mounds of her breasts hanging below the tattered remnants of her shirt. Suddenly, he seized the rubbery bud-like nipples in the forefinger and thumb of each hand and dragged them cruelly downward, bringing a gasp of pain to the captive girl's lips as her torso was forced down and her clenched lips brushed against the hood's nakedly pulsing cock.
"Go on take my prick in your mouth, you little bitch," he shouted, "or I'll beat the shit outa you!"
Holly's eyes were wide with horror. A strangled cry burst from her throat as Boscoe arched his pelvis forward, thrusting the sperm-bloated head of his cock up into her contorted face to nudge lewdly against her clenched lips. Instinctively, she turned her head away with a tremor of disgust. . . and then screamed again as the enraged gangster let go of one nipple, drew back his arm and struck her viciously across the cheek with the palm of his hand. The blow rocked her head on her shoulders and raised a livid weal on her tender flesh.
Still pinching one nipple cruelly with his other hand, he began systematically slapping her face, forehand and backhand, one cheek and then the other, the savage impacts ringing out like pistol shots in the empty cabin as tears spurted from Holly's eyes and her mind was dulled by an inferno of stinging pain.
Bosco was still shouting with insane rage. "Suck it!" he yelled between slaps. "Go on . . . suck it . . . you dirty . . . little whore! . . . Or I'll go on . . . hitting you . . . the whole . . . fuckin'. . . day!"
Abruptly, the despairing young wife could stand it no longer. Her arms were hurting unbearably. The cruel fingers squeezing her nipple were sending waves of agony shooting through her body. Her cheeks were on fire . . . and now even her feet were beginning to be affected by cramp!
"Stop!" she shrieked. "I'll do it! All right, I'll do it! I'll do it! Only stop hurting me!. . . "
Boscoe let his arm fall with a grunt of satisfaction and released the anguished captive's nipple. "That's more like it!" he breathed.
Trembling with shame and revulsion, the tearful redhead stared at the blood-engorged head of his hotly throbbing penis and the veined rigidity of the lust-thickened shaft where it speared out from the gaping fly of the brutal hoodlum's pants. The creased gabardine creaked infinitesimally in the silence as he tensed his hips in preparation for the first exciting contact with her soft warm lips. And then suddenly his palms were pressed hard against Holly's ears, and he was dragging her beautiful face toward him as the blood-engorged rod of flesh crushed through her wetly parted lips and into the heated moistness of her mouth. She could feel with a shudder of repulsion the hugeness of it sliding up the length of her tongue and filling her mouth completely with its thick fleshy hardness.
Bent down in abject humiliation before her violator, her breasts stripped bare and her aching arms strung up brutally behind her, Holly struggled mentally against the obscene rape of her mouth. She closed her eyes to shut out the vision of the tormentor who was reveling in her shame. She felt numb with despair, empty of all sensation except disgust. . . and the insistent sound, from a long way away, of a hated voice, urging, "Go on, you sexy little bitch! Suck it! Let's have some action down there, huh?. . .Suck! . . . Suck! . . . Suck! . . . "
Dully, the half-stripped young wife complied; she was conditioned to obey now for fear of the further pain and humiliation she might suffer if she angered the inhuman monster who held her captive further. Her lips began slowly and reluctantly to nibble at the rigid shaft of male flesh thrusting into her as she spluttered and coughed at the lewd and unnatural invasion of her mouth. She tried to think of other things . . . of her life with Alvaro . . . of the rescue she was still convinced he could fix . . . to wipe from her mind the horror of what she was being forced to do. But it was impossible. The warmly pulsating penis that Boscoe was now slowly fucking in and out of her mouth was stretching her jaws cruelly wide. The man's hairy, sperm-swollen testicles which had escaped from the confining sheath of material at his groin were bouncing softly against her chin. And there was an odor of stale masculine sweat around his genitals that filled her nostrils with a constant reminder of the depraved and sadistic debauch she was suffering.
As he undulated his hips to thrust his raping cock faster and faster in and out of the captive young wife's violated mouth, the panting Boscoe leaned forward over her bent back to undo the side-buttoning waistband of her jeans. The slaving girl moaned through the gagging bulk of the cock in her mouth, shivering with fearful anticipation as she felt him thrust the garments down over the luscious swell of her hips and insinuate his plundering lingers between the sheer white nylon of her panties and the trembling flesh beneath. The obscenely invading digits trailed over the prominence of her hipbone, across the softly quivering curve of her belly and then buried themselves in the "vee" of coppery pubic hair covering Holly's loins.
Jerking in protest at the lewd contact of the salaciously probing fingers with her secret genitals, she continued to work in a daze at the command of the gangster's other hand on her bobbing head. She licked and sucked frantically as he forced her to follow slave-like with her lips his every lunge into the soft shelter of her cruelly distended mouth. The saliva flooding around her tongue was becoming sticky from the emission of seminal fluid wetly seeping from the throbbing head of his penis. She could feel his hips writhing and straining beyond her pumping head as though he was in the grip of some convulsive seizure, his breath panting hoarsely out of his gaping mouth as he lunged and thrust. The long hard fingers of one of his hands were entangled in her hair, forcing her ovaled mouth up and down over the end of his spearing fleshy instrument as if it was a cunt into which he was grinding the full fury of his animal lust.
Whimpering piteously deep in her throat, Holly squirmed her hips in a vain attempt to evade the lewdly exploring fingertips of his other hand. She jerked again as he parted the hair-fringed fleshy lips of her cunt and rummaged in her moistly heated vaginal passage . . . and then she moaned aloud when the ravishing digits found the bud-like shaft of her clitoris. With an inward thrill of horror she felt him begin a maddening rotary movement against the throbbing button of flesh that sent waves of indecent sensation flaming through her loins to war with the tremors of disgust shaking her frame at the brutally pistoning cock stuffing her mouth.
She could feel Boscoe's pulsating penile shaft stretching and expanding between her cheeks, filling every last crevice of her mouth as the gangster's breathing became as harsh and uneven as her own in the overheated air. Mumbling helplessly as it skewered hard down toward her tonsils, Holly sucked wildly in an attempt to end the intolerable rape of her lips as quickly as possible. If she wanted it to end . . . and, more urgently, if she wanted to avoid the forbidden flickers of unwelcome desire once again setting her veins on fire . . . it was the only thing to do. She had never felt so utterly debauched and debased in her life!
Abruptly, the sadistic hoodlum gave a choked cry and stiffened as though he had received an electric shock. He ground his powerful hips tightly against the helpless young wife's face, sinking the full length of his long hard cock deep down into her gasping throat. As she fought for breath, his jerking penis erupted wildly in the warm wet interior of her clasping mouth. Incoherent mumbled of profanity streamed from his lips as his thickly heated sperm squirted into her mouth like the violent spurting of a torrent through a storm drain.
Holly sucked and swallowed, sucked and swallowed, her cheeks inflating and deflating as she gulped down the acrid scalding fluid to keep from choking. But still the convulsively heaving staff distending her ravished lips continued its staccato pumping. It seemed to go on forever, the frantically ejaculating penis jetting its white-hot load far down in her throat as her nose was crushed against the wiry pubic hair framed by the fly of Boscoe's pants, the scrabbling fingers of his intruding hand stimulating wild shivers of erotic delight to flame through her loins.
But at last the man's gagging cock gave a final convulsive jerk and softened beneath her swirling tongue. The lewdly probing fingers-just when she was beginning to succumb to the insanely exciting sensations they provoked clenched fiercely on her tender inner flesh and then relaxed. And the limp rod of Boscoe's spent cock oozed from between her cum-smeared lips as he stepped back with a sigh of satisfaction.
Debased, degraded, ashamed and humiliated by the lewd unnatural ravishment of her mouth and loins, the hysterically sobbing young wife drooped on swaying legs from the rope raising her pinioned arms toward the rafters. Her plundered breasts hung down through the tatters of her shirt and brassiere; her pants were down around her knees, and under the drenched nylon of the panties sheathing her loins, her wetly inflamed cunt clamored for relief from the intolerable tremors of erotic desire stirred in her reluctant flesh by the gangster's lewd manipulations.
"Man!" Boscoe breathed as he stuffed his deflated cock back inside his pants and zipped up the fly. "That was something! I'm tellin' ya, baby, that was something!" Breathing heavily, he pucked up the sack of provisions and strode across to the wall to loosen the rope that was knotted around the hook. "And don't say I ain't a man of my word," he quipped. "I said I'd free you and give you somethin' to eat afterwards. Here's your second course comin' up now . . . ! "
The rope flipped up and over the beam. Holly's pinioned arms, released from the unbearable strain hauling them up behind her bent back, jerked down and she dropped half-fainting to the floor, her dazed mind a chaos of outrage and self-disgust.
As she lay piteously sobbing while Boscoe bent to untie her aching wrists, she realized with a thrill of despairing horror that the emotion uppermost in her thoughts was one of disappointment. . . disappointment that the brutally ravishing hoodlum had cum too soon!
CHAPTER FIVE
Ortiz took his B25 up 200 feet above his assigned cruising height and then put the ship "on the step" another stratagem frowned on and said to be impossible by aeronautical theorists but nevertheless much used by private operators to save fuel. He leveled out until the airspeed indicator registered 190 mph . . . and then throttled back to lean cruising power and let the plane slide gently downhill. When he flattened out again at exactly 2,000 feet, the needle had crept up almost to the 200 mark and there it stayed, using less fuel than it had been at 190!
Guardi sat silently beside him, suspiciously watching the pilot's hands at the controls. In fact, Ortiz was fidgeting with the switches and levers more than was necessary correcting the trim for nonexistent winds, cutting the magnetos in and out, pushing the mixture controls to Full Rich and back to accustom the hood to a variety of movements along the panel. For he had just one card in his hand. It was a weak card, but he was determined to play it.. .
The Virgin had once been hired by a movie production company to take part in a wartime epic. And for this purpose Briggs had rigged up a system to open the old bomb bay doors. That system could still be operated by the pilot through a lever below the instrument panel, or by a second lever near the doors themselves in the cabin (a device insisted on by the director so that he could control close-ups taken from inside the fuselage).
Ortiz had deliberately stacked the bulk of his 1,000 lb. tomato cargo immediately over these doors. For it was his plan to jettison the consignment en route . . .
It wasn't a very daring plan, and it didn't have much hope of producing positive results. But it was a gesture, and the negative results were undeniable. With no cargo as Guardi must realized it would be virtually impossible for them to land at Guaymas. Because if a plant whose pilot had filed a flight plan to take a certain cargo to a certain field arrived without that cargo, especially after announcing his departure with it then questions were bound to be asked. And questions from airport authorities were one hazard that the ruthless hood could not possibly afford to risk.
Ortiz had not thought out any scheme to follow up the jettisoning of the tomatoes he would have to play that by ear when he saw Guardi's reaction but at least it was a small step in the direction of thwarting the hoods' own plan. And if by some miracle, the blue-jowled gangster didn't notice that the cargo had gone, then they could fly on to Guaymas and let him deal with the questions when they were asked!
They were approaching the Mexican border when a more positive aspect of the maneuver presented itself to the flyer. Glancing down past the flames spitting from the port motor, he saw a road twisting through the barren, sun-baked country below. And on the road, slanting away toward the southeast, was an automobile. Ortiz could just make out with his sharp pilot's eyes the numerals 18 painted in white on its roof.
This meant, he knew, that the car was driven by an officer from the county sheriff's office a man, probably on patrol anyway, who would be constantly on the lookout for any suspicious or unusual circumstances along the frontier region! If, therefore, he could junk the tomatoes within sight of the speeding auto . . .
Imperceptibly, as the distant road and the car on it rushed toward them far below, he eased forward the control column and throttled back the motors. Slowly, the Mitchell lost height.
Guardi was staring out the starboard cockpit window, squinting his eyes against the glare of the sun to see if he could see the ocean seventy miles away to the west.
Ortiz made rapid calculations of heights, speeds, distances and weights in his head. His left hand stole out to grasp the tape-bound lever of the bomb release. He gave the ship a touch of left rudder to bring her nearer to the line of the road . . . and then, as road and car slid past the B25's nose toward the leading edge of the starboard wing, he yanked suddenly on the lever.
The curved doors in the belly of the ship opened downward and outward. More than half the stacked crates of tomatoes fell through instantly into the void, holding together in a compact mass at first and then separating as they turned over and over, disgorging their scarlet cargo like a shower of soft meteorites hurtling toward the earth. More stacks on the edge of the opening swayed, tottered and fell through after them. By the time the flyer released the lever there were only a dozen crates left.
The howl of the air rushing past the opening while the bomb doors hung open drowned the clatter of the motors through the muffling effect of the headset cans. And it would have taken an imbecile not to have noticed the Mitchell's sudden lurch and upward bound as she was freed of nearly a thousand pound's weight in her belly. Guardi swung around with an oath and half rose from his seat. Staring over his shoulder into the cabin just as the doors folded shut, he saw at once what had happened.
"Why you double-crossing spic bastard . . . he snarled, raising his clenched fists towards Ortiz. And then as suddenly, he lowered it, smashing the knuckled violently into the palm of his other hand. If he harmed Ortiz now, he would be signing his own death warrant, for he had no idea how to fly or land the ship . . .
"Okay," he hissed into the intercom as he lowered himself back slowly into his seat, "so the little punk wants to play games, does he? Well, we'll fuckin' see about that when we land, you lousy creep." For a moment he was silent, his heavy brows knitted as he worked out the repercussions of the pilot's action. And then, having evidently reasoned the same way as Ortiz, he said again, "Okay, smart-ass so we don't land at Guaymas after all. But if you think that louses up the deal, you can fuckin' think again! Now you're gonna fly straight to my pick-up point and we'll just wait out the time until the merchandise is due to arrive."
Ortiz was staring expressionlessly ahead at the gaunt bulk of the Sierra Madre thrusting its serrated edge against the blue sky to the east of the long glittering arm of the Gulf of California. "Where is the pick-up?" he asked.
"Fly on down the gulf until you hit Angel de la Guarda, and I'll let you know," Guardi said sourly.
* * *
The strip was fifty miles north of Hermosillo in a shallow depression high up in the foothills of the tree-clad mountains. Someone had cleared away boulders and felled a couple of isolated trees, but otherwise the iron-hard ground was unprepared. The Mitchell flew around the shoulder of a jagged peak, side-slipped expertly to lose height, and then planed in along the line of a steep-sided, wooded valley to skim over the tops of the forest trees and touch down in the empty clearing. At the far side of the depression, under Guardi's directions. Ortiz swung her around and taxied back to the edge of the forest across the baked earth. Then, when they were as near as they could get to the trees, he made another 180 degree turn to face the strip once more and cut the motors.
As the screws clattered into silence, Guardi took out his gun, put his map away in its leather case and motioned the pilot to get out. Ortiz bent down to open the hatchway and dropped into a heat so fierce that it seemed to hammer his eyeballs into his skull as he ducked out from the shadow beneath the wing. There wasn't a soul or a sign of habitation in the clearing. Beyond the hot air shimmering above the blistering metal of the engine cowlings, the trees stood dense and silent under the brassy sky.
Guardi had followed him out, his revolver still in his hand. "We got just over an hour to wait until my friends are due," the hood said grimly. "Seems to me that after all your hard work you oughta take a little rest . . . " His hand flashed out and the barrel of the gun smashed twice savagely across the pilot's face. Taken completely by surprise, Ortiz threw up his hands with a cry of agony and dropped to the ground. He was bleeding profusely from the gash in his cheek suffered the previous night and a new wound on the other side of his face where the pistol whipping had split the skin over his cheekbone. There was a thundering behind his eyes and his face was still on fire.
As he struggled to a sitting position, shaking his head, the brutal hood stepped in and kicked him viciously on the side of the neck. Ortiz went down again, raising a cloud of dust from the stony ground.
Holstering his gun, Guardi leaned down and hauled him to his feet by the shirt collar, bunching his huge fist and driving a murderous blow to the point of the pilot's already bruised jaw. Ortiz grunted and sagged in his grasp. But still the angry gangster was not satisfied. He drew back his arm and punched the semi-conscious flyer twice more short, chopping blows carrying all his weight that slammed with sickening force into the sensitive flesh over his victim's solar plexus.
Ortiz dropped to his knees uttering strange gargling cries. The plane and the forest spun away into red darkness, and he fell on his face in the dust.
He came to lying on his back among the trees, the blood thumping agonizingly through his ravaged flesh in the suffocating heat. Guardi was standing above him with his hard face set in a scowl. "Next time you cross me up, boy, it'll be for keeps!" he snarled menacingly. "Right now If this deal still goes off without a hitch you might get away with it with no more beating. But if anything goes wrong now, anything at all, you and that sexy little bitch of a wife of yours are going to be so full of holes that you won't throw a fuckin' shadow in the sun! And you won't die quick, I promise you!" He stared vindictively down at the prostrate and bloodied pilot for a moment, and then he added, "Now go on back in that plane and get set to start the motors. When I give you the sign to roll, I wanna get outa here fast, see? But fast!"
Ortiz picked himself up and limped painfully back to the B25. His mind was a seething turmoil of rage. To be contemptuously beaten up again and ordered around like a schoolboy by this murderous thug after all the humiliations he had already suffered was intolerable. His painfully lacerated face was black with hate as he bent down under the wing to gain the hatchway.
The metal skin of the aircraft blistered his hand as he inadvertently touched the folding doors, and the thermometer in the cabin registered a shade temperature of more than a hundred and twenty degrees. The sweat ran down his back between his shoulder blades with every move he made, and by the time he had checked through the takeoff drill, his clothes were plastered to his body. A few minutes later, Guardi clambered up into the cockpit and stripped off his shirt, tie and jacket. "Jesus!" he complained, dumping them on the copilot's seat. "And I thought it was hot in Arizona last week! Those spic bastards better show up on time or else!" He looked out the open window at the deserted clearing, scratching his hairy, sweat-shining chest.
Suddenly he laughed. "I'll bet that ass Boscoe had his fuckin' shirt off him an hour ago and his pants too, if I know him!"
Ortiz looked up at him sullenly. "What do you mean?"
"Boscoe ain't a man to waste time or opportunities," Guardi said with a sly, malicious smile at the battered flyer. "In this heat an' all, five gets you ten he laid that hot little broad before we was even over the border!"
Ortiz bit his lip and said nothing. His face had flushed a dark red.
"She'll be layin' on them luscious tits of hers right now," the sweating hoodlum pursued, sadistically turning the knife in the wound, "while Mister B turns on his specialty act!"
"Specialty . . . ? " the tormented pilot had to know more. The thought of his lovely wife in the hands of the brutal gangster was bad enough. He had been manfully tearing his mind away from the thought of what might be happening to her ever since he had seen her hustled towards the abandoned cabin. But sometimes imagination is worse than the reality; if this ape-like hood knew the worst that Boscoe could do, surely it was better to let his mind dwell on that, humiliating though it was, rather than live through one more nightmare after another at the command of his fertile imagination?
"Boscoe was framed a coupla times a few years back," Guardi explained. "He took the rap for someone else. But while he was in the pen he uh developed certain tastes, as they say. Got real hung up on it! Now he don't go for nothin' else . . . except maybe to oblige a friend every now and then."
The flyer's face was turned towards him in anguished incomprehension.
"like I mean he goes for ass," Guardi said deliberately. "That's all he could get in the pen and he kinda took to it. Now he don't really imagine your ordinary piece of tail; man or woman, it's all the same to old Boscoe, just so long as he can get in the back way!" He chuckled and shook his head. "Why, I'll bet that lousy prick of his is jammed up your pretty little wife's backside right now and she'll be lovin' it! By the time you get her back if you get her back that tight little asshole of hers'll be so stretched you could drive a truck through it!"
Ortiz had listened to this obscene recital of Boscoe's depraved and unnatural habits with increasing fury. My God! If that debased and brutal thug had actually sodomized Holly . . . if he had forced his disgusting penis into her tender little anus . . . Sickened with blind rage, his whole body was trembling and the knuckles showed bone-white through his clenched fingers. Before he could reply, Guardi leaned suddenly toward the cockpit window and exclaimed, "Shit! The bastards are on time! Well, whaddya know! Whatever happened to that old spic manana stuff?"
Ortiz followed the direction of his gaze and saw an ancient Buick fitted with a truck body lumbering towards them out of the trees. There was a tarpaulin over the tailboard and three Mexicans in wide-brimmed straw hats crowded into the cab with the driver.
"You stay right where you are!" Guardi snapped at the pilot. "And when I give you the word to go, you go, okay?" He hurried through to the cabin and returned with the valise and the bulging portfolio which he tucked under his bare arm before he dropped to the ground.
The Buick wheezed to a halt beside the B25's loading bay with steam curling from under its rusty hood. The three Mexicans jumped to the sun-baked earth and ran around to whip the tarpaulin from the load as the driver climbed stiffly from behind the wheel and approached Guardi. He was a tubby little man with a swarthy skin and black mustachios.
"Buenas dias, senor, " he said, tipping back his hat and mopping his streaming brow with a scarlet silk handkerchief. "You are early. We were not expecting you until . . . We would have placed indicators across the clearing . . . If we had known . . . "
Guardi nodded a curt greeting. "It's okay, Perez. We ran into a little hitch and had to change our plans. No problem. You got the stuff?"
"But of course I have got the stuff." Perez swept his arm toward the three men hastily unloading the Buick's cargo. "One thousand pounds of the best, the very best. Thirty-three packages of thirty pounds each, and one of ten pounds only. "You er you have the money with you?"
"Naturally," Guardi produced the hide portfolio and unbuckled the flap. "I have your man's receipt here for the down payment "
"No, no. It is not necessary." Perez waved the paper away. "The money came through two days ago. It is only the other half we need."
"Well, it's right here. Seventy-five thousand dollars. All in used and unmarked bills. Nothing bigger'n a twenty. You better check it while we load the stuff."
"Gracias, senor. It is a pleasure to do business with you," Perez said politely, taking the portfolio and moving into the shadow of one of the Mitchell's wings. "Madre de Dios, but it is hot!"
The hash was packaged in square bales like miniature tea chests. It was covered with lead foil and had been neatly wired by a packaging instrument. Sweating profusely in the broiling heat of the sun, the three men hefted the heavy cubes from one to the other and then stacked them in the plane's fuselage under Guardi's directions. He deployed as much of the load as he could forward of the bomb bay doors and the rest among the seats and the remaining tomato crates behind. "I ain't runnin' no risk of having this lot dumped in the gulf," he said sourly. "Por favor, senor?"
"Nothin', " Guardi said heavily. "Just a joke. Don't put nothin' anywhere near them doors, is all."
When the final ten pound package which was about as big as four cigarette cartons, had been safely stowed in the tail, Perez appeared in the entrance hatchway grinning broadly. "All is in order," he said, patting the portfolio slung over his shoulder. "Perhaps, senor, for the next consignment we can arrange a more normal-"
He broke off suddenly as an urgent shout sounded from outside the plane. Ortiz looked out the window and saw the three men running for the Buick. Two of them had guns in their hands. On the far side of the clearing, two jeeps, each carrying three armed men, had appeared through the dark line of the trees' and were now bumping across the rough ground toward them.
Across the flat hood of each, white lettering spelled out the word Polizia.
Perez had ducked down below the belly of the plane to see what his men were warning him about. "Santa Maria!" he exclaimed wildly, his fat cheeks paling. "The police! Somebody must have given us away!"
Guardi leaped up into the cockpit and thumped Ortiz on the shoulder. "Start the motors!" he rapped.
The pilot flicked through the routine for the port motor. The airscrew wheezed twice as the overheated engine backfired and then caught with a blasting roar that sent clouds of dust swirling into the trees behind the plane. The jeeps were halfway across the clearing. A uniformed officer was standing up holding on to the windshield of the leading vehicle, shouting something through a bullhorn. Ortiz could see the carbines across the knees of his companions. A clammy rash of sweat dewed the backs of his hands.
The starboard engine caught. But as he pushed up the throttle, there was a sudden grinding screech that shrilled metallically up the scale and shuddered the whole plane. He slammed the switch to OFF. The noise continued.
"What the hell's that?" Guardi bellowed into his ear.
"Starter motor!" Ortiz shouted. "It's jammed in mesh. Won't free from the flywheel. I can't declutch it." He reached for the switches.
"Keep 'em going!" Guardi yelled.
"But.. . ? "
The hood produced his gun. "I said keep 'em going."
Ortiz slammed the pitch of the starboard screw to full revs to try and shake the fouled pinion free. The scream of tortured metal rose up the scale and doubled in volume but the faulty starter stayed in mesh. Evidently, the makeshift repair he had effected last night just wasn't good enough . . .
Over the infernal racket in the furnace-hot cockpit, he could hear nothing outside the plane, but he saw that the two men with guns had crouched down behind the fender of the Buick and were firing at the police. The driver was scrambling into the cab to start the motor. As the puffs of blue smoke blossomed from the barrels of the revolvers and then drifted back toward the spinning propellers of the B25, one of the jeeps slewed to a halt in the middle of the clearing and the occupants piled out to return the fire. The second jeep sped on toward the plane. The officer still had the bullhorn to his mouth, and the man in the back seat was loosing off his carbine as they went.
Guardi leaned over the back of his seat and gestured wildly to Perez who was still beneath the hatchway, petrified with alarm. The fat little dope supplier shouted something in reply, but his words were drowned by the clatter of the motors and the screech of the fouled starter. The next moment, blood fountained grotesquely from Perez' open mouth. His eyes rolled up into his head, and he dropped like a stone to the ground. A shot from one of the police carbines had caught him between the shoulder blades.
Guardi swore. He looked rapidly around. One of the Mexicans lay on the ground beside the Buick, twitching in the dust. The other had climbed in beside the driver, and the old auto had swung around and was not lurching toward the shelter of the trees. The first jeep was nearing the plane, and the second had started up again and was racing toward them.
The desperate hoodlum hurtled through into the cabin, dropped to the ground through the hatch, seized the satchel of money from the dead man's unresisting arm and flung himself panting back into the cockpit. Ortiz raised his eyebrows and gestured towards the throttles. He was shaking with anxiety.
Guardi shook his head. "Let her idle," he called with his mouth close to the pilot's ear. "The bastards may think she has flown solo . . . and that Perez was the pilot. Duck below the windshield so they can't see you when they come close."
His mind in a daze, Ortiz complied. For a wild moment he had toyed with the idea of trying to take Guardi from behind and then calling on the police. But they would probably assume he was one of the gang, too. He might languish in a Mexican jail for days before he could prove his innocence and if he didn't return to the abandoned mine at the right time, Boscoe would kill Holly . . . Obviously, if he was to save her, he must help Guardi get away rather than stop him!
Abruptly, there was a tearing thump from the tortured starboard motor and then just the usual clattery engine noise as the screaming died away. Something had given way probably the flywheel and the starter motor together; his burst of throttle must have thrown them up toward 200,000 rpm! He could only pray that they had damaged nothing else . . . Listening anxiously as he crouched down over the control column, he heard the suspect motor settle down into its normal racket and saw with a thrill of horror that Guardi had opened the long valise and taken out a Thompson submachine gun!
The scowling hood banged a clip into the ugly snub-nosed weapon and raised his head cautiously to peer out the open cockpit window. The two jeeps had stopped one behind the other just behind the starboard wingtip. Led by the officer with his revolver drawn, the six men were fanning out toward the fuselage.
Guardi leaped into action. Thrusting the muzzle of the Thompson through the gap, he ripped off a savage burst of fire the chattering weapon bucking violently in his hands as the spent shells pumped over his shoulder, and the blast of deadly slugs sprayed the unsuspecting policeman.
The officer, a tall lean man with a hairline mustache, crumpled up in mid-stride and spun to the ground in a shower of blood, his head almost severed from his neatly-uniformed body.
The man nearest to him was flung back to land with outstretched arms across the hood of the first jeep as the hail of bullets lashed across his chest like a steel whip. A third man went down cursing, flopping around in the dust like a gaffed fish as he scrabbled with gory fingers at his smashed kneecap.
Guardi ducked down, popped up again to blast off another burst then dodged out of sight as the three remaining policemen whipped up their carbines to fire at the maniac figure in the cockpit. The starboard corner of the windshield starred and went opaque. Another express slug drilled a hole in the metal skin of the nose and lodged itself with a clatter somewhere in a nest of switchboxes behind Ortiz's head.
The young flyer was staring aghast at the window, his palsied fingers hovering over the throttles. Guardi was on his feet once more, his lips bared back from his teeth in an insane grin as he slapped in another magazine and shouldered the Thompson to loose off the entire clip in a single savage burst. Wreathed in gun smoke, he hosed the reloading policemen with a deadly hail of fire, a mad figure galvanically shaken by the appalling pounding of the flame-belching gun in his hands.
Caught in the open with no cover, the three remaining policemen stood no chance. They were literally mown down by the fury of lead spraying on them from above. Two of them dropped where they stood, their useless carbines clattering to the ground. The last was whirled about and slammed against the bodywork of the jeep before he crashed over onto his back, his body jumping grotesquely as the last few slugs in the magazine smacked into him. A bright jet of blood fountained into the air from a hole in his throat, wilting and dying with the high, shrill keening noise that bubbled into silence from his punctured lungs.
The triumphant hood swung back into the cockpit with a chuckle of glee, gesturing Ortiz to take off with a sweep of his arm. The hot air was thick with the acrid stench of cordite fumes and the racket of the B25's motors sounded almost quiet after the shocking staccato roar of the Thompson.
There was a ringing in the pilot's ears, and his belly heaved with nausea at the cold-blooded savagery of the massacre he had just witnessed. Biting his trembling lip, he shoved forward the throttles and flipped off the brakes.
The Virgin lurched, slewed sideways, was corrected by an automatic dab at the pedals and began to roll.
Gathering speed slowly, she trundled away from the jeeps and the prone figures whose blood was already congealing rust-brown in the sun, her wings flashing silver in the blinding light as she accelerated across the clearing, lifted her nose, and then staggered into the air to clear the trees at the far end by inches.
Ortiz's mind was sick with horror as he banked to fly northwards along the winding, steeply-wooded valley leading down to the plain . . . not only at the brutal and senseless slaughter he had seen but at the difference this made to his own situation and Holly's.
If he had had any doubts about the kind of men they were dealing with, these were dispelled now. The policeman with the shattered knee was still alive. He would drag himself to the radio in the jeep and broadcast the description of the plane to headquarters. The old bomber was well enough known in Mexico as well as in California; Ortiz himself would be indissolubly linked up not only with smuggling and drugs but also with murder and the murder of policemen at that! Worse still, he was a witness of that murder. Once he had landed Guardi and his million and a half dollar load of contraband, his life and Holly's wouldn't be worth a nickel; knowing what he knew, the two gangsters couldn't afford to let them live!
And even if he could somehow escape from the clutches of the murderous hoods, even if he could get Holly away and disprove his complicity in the murders, there remained the smuggling question. Why had he been there in the first place, they would ask? The very least he could expect would be to lose his license; he might even lose his citizenship and be deported!
Sick to his stomach with dread, Ortiz knew that if he was to do anything at all, it must be done before the plane landed on the old roadway leading to the abandoned mine in Borrego Springs. It was the only chance he had for himself and Holly.
Otherwise there was no hope for them at all.
CHAPTER SIX
Ed Hanson read the newspapers and he knew about missiles he'd heard about ground-to-air missiles, air-to-air missiles, ground-to-ground missiles and intercontinental missiles. He'd even heard of air-to-ground missiles. But he never expected to run into a shower of them on a hot sunny day a few miles from the Mexican border!
Hanson worked out of the county sheriffs office in El Centro. He was patrolling the lonely stretch of road when the missiles came, shifting irritably on the hot leather seat of the official sedan and wishing for the hundredth time that he was in some job where the taxpayers weren't so mean they refused a man air-conditioning for his duty car! The car had a two-way radio hooked under the right side of the dashboard and there was a chicken wire partition between the front and the back. The rear doors could only be opened from the outside after the driver had operated a release. Which was great if the kids wanted to play Highway Patrol, but it didn't make the goddamn jalopy one degree cooler on a day like this, Hanson thought savagely.
Abruptly the sedan lurched and quivered, twitching the wheel in his hand. Something or some things: there had been three separate concussions that vibrated through the body shell had struck the car on the roof! Brigands? An avalanche? Kids fooling around with stones? Hanson shook his head: the brigands had all gone to Vegas, there weren't any kids for fifteen miles . . . and thinking of avalanches was just dumb: the country was dead flat! So what the hell just hit the car on the roof then?
Before he could think of any reply to his own question, blood splashed gruesomely across the windshield and there were several more thumps on the hood and roof. More blood thickened with chunks of raw flesh plastered itself across the slanting glass and then the screen starred and went opaque. Hanson swore violently and wrestled with the wheel as the sedan veered off the road and bumped to a halt in the soft desert sand with its nose against a clump of alfalfa grass.
Hanson reached for the door, thinking at first that perhaps he had hit a chicken a whole flock of birds, more like! But Christ! he hadn't been going fast enough for a lousy chicken to break his screen! Suddenly he froze, staring at the see-through portions of the clouded safety glass in front of the wheel. Hell, that wasn't flesh, or not living flesh anyway: there were pips in it for God's sake!
Stumbling from the driving seat, he stared unbelievingly at the outside of the sedan. The screen and most of the body were plastered with squashed tomatoes!
"Well for Jeez' sake!" Hanson gasped. What sane man would throw a couple of pounds of ripe tomatoes at a county sheriffs car? Tomatoes!
Stepping back, he looked around at the empty landscape and then he looked up. The tomatoes weren't being thrown: they were dropping from the sky! As he watched, hundreds and hundreds of them sailed down like tiny red balloons to splat on the roadway, thump onto his car and squash themselves on the spines of cactus plants. Two empty crates tumbled over and over after them to shatter on the hot macadam. Another cloud of the red fruit was dropping further out in the desert tiny floating dots that separated as they streamed down across the aching blue sky, gaining color as they hurtled towards the earth with an apparent acceleration like the tracer Hanson had seen in wartime aerial combat movies. He jumped and swore again as a late arrival struck him a powerful blow on the front of his short-sleeved suntan shirt, to leave a large wet stain and slide stickily to the ground. It was only then that he became aware of the drone of an aircraft overhead.
He looked up past the dwindling shower of tomatoes and crates thudding beyond him now into the scrub: the familiar twin-tailed, two-motor silhouette of a B25 was winging away toward the south.
Hanson stared after it as the pulse of its engines faded and died. He knew that old crate. It was the converted bomber that naturalized Mexican Ortiz, wasn't it? Alberto Ortiz? Alvaro Ortiz? used for his charter work. But why in hell would Ortiz be unloading what looked like a whole damned tomato crop into the desert? If he had been coming in to land maybe . . . perhaps jettisoning a cargo because the plane was sick or something . . . Hanson could have understood it. But the motors sounded fine, or as fine as they ever did. And the pilot wasn't coming in to land: he had evidently just taken off and now he was heading straight for Mexico, without tomatoes!
If he didn't want the lousy things, Hanson thought irritably, why in hell did he have them aboard? He just didn't get it. Shaking his head he went back to the car, slid into the driving seat, and reached out his right hand to unhook the radio transceiver from beneath the dashboard.
"Hallo?" he called, thumbing the transit button. "Nine-one-four to base. Hanson speaking. Are you receiving me?"
"Loud and clear," a voice replied over the faint crackle of static. "What's with you, Ed?"
"Search me. Maybe nothing. But would you ask the El Centro tower to run a check on Ortiz the guy who operates that charter deal from a little field out in the desert? I just saw that old
Mitchell of his heading south.. . and he dropped a whole field of tomatoes on the desert!"
"Will do," the voice said expressionlessly. "Call you back."
Hanson wiped off his shirt with a Kleenex, scraped tomato pulp from the dented bodywork of his car, punched a hole through the frosted screen, and lit a cigarette. It was insufferably hot in the steel-bodied sedan. Through the hole in the glass he could see the scrub stir as a dry breeze rustled the spines of cactus and alfalfa.
He was stubbing out his cigarette when they called him back. "Ortiz filed a flight plan," the checker said. "He's flying to Guaymas with a consignment of tomatoes for the SCFM. Bringin' back shrimps for Besson's in San Diego. It seems the tomatoes were loaded on schedule and he took off as planned. The tower says he made a big circuit before he flew south but he didn't report no trouble."
"Then why in Christ's name would he dump the bastards just after?"
"Search me! You want me to have the tower try to raise him on the radio?"
Hanson scratched his jaw. "Naw, it ain't worth it. But have them contact Guaymas and ask him to call in when he arrives, huh?"
"Okay, Ed. You on the inward or outward leg of your patrol?"
"Out, goddammit! It's hotter'n hell down here!"
"Okay. The chief says keep your eyes open. We'll call you if there's anything more comes up."
Hanson sighed and hooked back the radio. The hot dry wind was strengthening. It would be almost a relief to have it blowing through the shattered windshield, despite the dust that would come with it! Backing up the sedan across the fruit-stained sand, he steered on to the bizarrely pockmarked roadway and headed on east.
* * *
Far away over the wastes of sweltering scrub, the rising wind moaned through the sand-scoured timbers of the abandoned mine shacks. Holly Ortiz lay on a pile of sacking Boscoe had found. Her wrists were bound behind her again but otherwise she was free to move. Boscoe had given her food and drink and then he had suddenly drawn his revolver and slid out of the door into the glare of the sun. Had he heard something? Was there a chance, just a tiny chance, that rescue was on the way? The kidnapped redhead put the thought from her terrified mind: how could anybody possibly know she was here? The ruthless hoods had planned their coup too well for that! She sighed despairingly. Such miracles only happened in television soap opera . . .
The door burst open and Boscoe came in, prodding before him with the barrel of his gun a short dark-skinned Mexican girl of about nineteen wearing a dirndl skirt and a purple cotton blouse. She was barefoot and her thick mane of black hair hung down her back. She looked very frightened.
"Why are you bringing me here?" she asked fearfully, catching her breath as she saw the bound figure of the kidnapped girl on the floor. "You have no right to-"
"Shuddup!" Boscoe snarled. "I don't like snoopers, is all."
"I was not.. . snooping, do you say? I have as much right to be here as you."
"What the hell were you doin' then prowling around the cabin?"
"I told you. I come here to fetch wood. So that my family can cook food to eat. We are very poor."
"What goddamn family? Where do they live?"
"In a camp. Over there." The girl waved an arm vaguely in the direction of Borrego Springs.
"Illegal immigrants, most-likely," Boscoe said to Holly. "On their way to the coast for the fruit pickin'. Damn spies!"
"Nobody uses the cabins. The wood will not be missed," the girl said sullenly.
"I ain't interested in the fuckin' wood. What interests me is why you're here," the hood said roughly.
"I told you. I was-"
"Ah, shuddup! We'll decide what to do with you when my partner comes back. Meantime you can stay put and join in the fun. But if you step outta line one little bit.. . " He showed her the revolver and then thrust it back into his shoulder holster. "I'll fill you so full of lead your goddamn family won't recognize the pieces!" Producing a rusty key from his pocket, he strode across and locked the door.
"Let me go!" the Mexican girl screamed. "You have no right to keep me here! Let me go!" She ran across the empty room and seized his muscular arm, trying to wrest the key from his grasp.
Swearing violently, Boscoe flung her away from him so savagely that she crashed against the opposite wall and slid to the floor half dazed. She cowered there fearfully, staring piteously up at him with great brown tear-filled eyes. "You make a move outta there, you little bitch, and I'll beat the shit outta you!" the big hoodlum promised threateningly.
There were still three fingers of liquor left in the whiskey bottle. Boscoe took a long draught, re-corked the bottle, set it carefully on the floor. Then, with an evil glitter illuminating his cruel eyes, he moved across and stood looking down speculatively at Holly. "Seems like it's about time me and you had another little . . . talk!" he said softly.
The kidnapped redhead stared up at him petrified. His tongue was licking his lips and there was no mistaking the meaning behind his words. "Oh no!" the helplessly bound young wife cried frantically. "Not again! Please! Haven't you done enough to me already?"
Boscoe chuckled lustfully. "It's who ain't done enough to me!" he leered.
Holly twisted her head frenziedly from side to side. Dear God, was there to be no end to her suffering under the hands of this cruel and inhuman monster! So far she had exchanged only a commiserating glance with the cowed young Mexican girl. Now she looked directly at her. "Help me! Please help me!" she pleaded.
The salaciously smiling hood swung around. "You move outta that corner and you know what you'll get!" he called warningly. The girl shrank back submissively, lowering her eyes.
Licking his lips again, Boscoe moved closer to the anguished redhead . . . and then suddenly he stooped to seize her ankles and tuck them under one arm. As Holly screamed and levered herself off her bound arms to writhe and jerk her legs against his imprisoning grasp, he laughed cruelly and reached for the waistband of her jeans, tearing it open with a single savage rip.
Then, grasping the stiff denim fiercely with both calloused hands, he peeled the pants from her wildly kicking legs with a triumphant cry.
She lay helplessly before him, her naked breasts covered by the tatters of her ripped shirt, her long tanned legs bare and her loins sheathed only by the flimsy nylon triangle of her panties. As she pressed her trembling thighs tightly together, desperately trying to stave off the inevitable, the lustfully grinning hood dropped to his knees and hooked his fingers under the elasticized waistband of the panties. Moaning piteously, Holly squirmed and threshed on the hard wood floor, hopelessly attempting to preserve her loins from the assault of his raping hands. But slowly, inch by torturing inch, Boscoe drew the filmy garment off her past the lushly rounded swell of her hips, over the silkily curling "vee" of fiery pussy hair beneath the soft curve of her belly, and then relentlessly down the tapered columns of her thighs and over her ankles in a final swift jerk.
For a moment he swayed there on his knees, savoring the sight of her naked loins helplessly trembling before his lascivious gaze. Then, grasping her viciously behind the knees, he bent Holly's legs up and back so that they were doubled over, almost touching her chest.
Shifting his grip as she bucked and writhed, he clamped his sweating palms against the soft insides of her thighs and forced them slowly apart, exposing the moist pink slit of her naked vagina in its nest of hair.
"Aaaaaaaaaaggggggghhhhhhh!" The defenselessly spread-eagled young wife screamed again as the hood's brutal ravishing grasp pried her jerking legs apart to offer up the whole flat plane of her cuntal region in defenseless sacrifice. She lay frozen to the sack-covered floor, her humiliation complete, watching with abject terror as his tongue circled his lips in preparation for the lewd violation about to take place.
Lowering his grasp so that his thumbs rested on the swollen pink lips of her hair-fringed vagina, he drew the interfolded flanges inexorably apart to reveal the hot wet gash within to his lustful eyes. Then with an animal groan he dropped his head and laced the full length of his long slippery tongue into the warmly throbbing walls of her cunt.
Holly jerked, a soul-searing moan tearing itself from her lips. Her soft white buttocks ground down frenziedly against the sacking, trying to escape the maddening oral assault on her secret flesh. Her coppery head was up off the floor, staring in horrified disbelief as Boscoe's face rocked up and down in greedy feast between her wide-splayed legs.
But as the unprincipled hood's tongue speared in and out of the involuntarily dilating walls of her pussy, the violated young redhead felt despite her terror and revulsion at the degrading attack on her loins the first faint stirring of those forbidden wisps of pleasure to which she had so nearly succumbed earlier in the day. Horrorstruck anew, she allowed her head to fall despairingly back to the floor and lay tense under the gangster's slobbering invasion of the widespread tightness of her cunt. Boscoe's sadistic eyes were open, watching in arrogant delight the contortions of her face beyond the shuddering mounds of her buffeted white breasts. He was avidly waiting for the first signs of the surrender he knew must come . . .
Hunched down between her brutally splayed legs, he swirled his tongue tantalizingly over the hot little shaft of her bud-like clitoris, watching with cruel satisfaction the shudders of helpless desire flaming through her naked loins at each slavering lick along the erect and sensitive button. Holly sobbed helplessly before his depraved attack, feeling her body once more beginning to desert her. Her buttocks jerked back involuntarily at the darting tongue sending helpless spasms of delicious sensation thrilling through her quivering belly.
"Oh no! I can't! I can't!" she whimpered aloud as the cruel realization of her loss of control hit her with its full impact, bringing further moans of misery and shame at the thought, not only of the obscene and perverted adultery she was being forced to commit but more horrifying still of the fact that she was again beginning to enjoy it!
Clenching her teeth, she fought with all her will against the tiny sparks of pleasure that threatened to burst into sudden uncontrollable flame and devour her in her helplessness. But with Boscoe ceaselessly lapping at the lust-swollen shaft of her throbbing clitoris it was a losing battle. After a desperate and confused struggle in her tortured mind, the conflagration took over . . .
Her shamelessly aroused body shivered spasmodically and then began a slow abandoned movement up against his deep-thrusting tongue. Forgotten were the thoughts of Alvaro.. . of their mutual peril.. . of the mysterious Mexican girl; forgotten the shame and the humiliation-all that mattered now were the delirious twinges of forbidden joy piercing her flesh like tiny pricking needles of fire. She lay squirming and bucking under the teasing ministrations of the hood's punishing tongue until she thought the pounding of her heart would break through her chest.
It seemed as though the delicious sucking of her cunt had gone on forever when Boscoe's gravelly voice asked softly: "like it, baby?"
Aware only that the hypnotic slavering at her naked loins had ceased, Holly twisted her head from side to side and moaned.
Rolling her naked hips from side to side on the floor, the captive young wife bit her lip and tried to shut her mind to the intolerable tremors of arousal shuddering through her loins. But almost of its own volition her voice groaned out past her lips: "Do it to me . . . do it to me!"
"Not like that. Say fuck me."
Holly sobbed with self-disgust. But there was no longer any reason to fight the lewdly flaming furnace of desire consuming her. She had lost the battle against the obscenely exciting feelings sweeping over her; her face was contorted with servile passion as her body twitched and squirmed with abandon. "All right," she groaned. "Fuck me, damn you! Fuck me!"
"Say please," Boscoe commanded masterfully.
"Please fuck me."
The raping gangster's face split open in a triumphant grin. This was the way he liked them, begging and pleading! This was the final proof of his total mastery and subjugation of the lustfully panting redhead mewling and writhing below him. "All right, baby," he breathed. "I will. Roll over on your face so that you're lyin' on your tits."
"W-w-w-what do you mean?" Holly stared at him in blank incomprehension.
"Do as I say. You want to be fucked. Okay, I'm gonna fuck you. But I'm gonna fuck you in the ass!"
"No!" Holly shrieked as the full realization of the horrible, indecent ravishment he was proposing burst in her mind. "Not that! Please don't do it to me there! Not like that.. . it's inhuman! You can't.. . ! "
Seizing her legs, he yanked them roughly up and over, at the same time twisting her body violently so that she was flung face down on the floor with her bound hands tied up behind her. As she sobbed and whimpered into the dirty sacking, he kneeled between her spread thighs and forced them ruthlessly apart with his own knees. "Reach those hands down and spread the cheeks of your ass," he snarled.
"I won't! . . . You can't do it to me there! . . . Please, please-"
The piteously sobbing redhead broke off with a squeal of pain as Boscoe brought his open hand cracking viciously down across the naked white mound of one buttock, leaving the red weals of finger marks flaming on her softly trembling flesh. "Do what you're told, you bitch!"
Her chest wracked with deep tearing sobs, the defenseless captive girl reached down with her pinioned hands and spread her fingers, reluctantly dragging her rounded ass-cheeks apart to expose the tiny puckered hole of her anus nestling in its furrow of desire-moistened hair. She couldn't really believe that even Boscoe would do such a bestial thing to her! It was monstrous! It was the ultimate depth in degradation . . . surely he was just trying to intimidate her, to make her crawl and plead with him some more! It couldn't be true that he was going to fuck her . . . back there!
She felt his finger poking at the unprotected opening of her anus centered in her hot and sweating crevice and she jerked uncontrollably from the sudden pain, desperately clenching the tiny wrinkled hole tight. "Relax!" the obscenely probing hood hissed. "And keep that ass spread out!" Jamming his finger against the outer edge of the small elastic ring, he shoved it forcefully into the buttery warmth of the hotly throbbing passage beyond.
Holly yelped with pain as he drilled deeper and deeper, expanding the tightness of her velvety rectum until she thought she would faint from the agony of the cruel invasion. He began to move the finger around inside, rotating it in the tightly clenched hole, sawing it in and out to stretch her anus in preparation for the entry of his sodomizing penis.
Before long a flicker of surprised pleasure passed over Holly's tear-stained face: the pain was fading and a strangely enjoyable sensation was taking its place. She couldn't believe that it would feel so good but it did! The lustful tremors induced by Boscoe's remorseless sucking of her cunt had subsided under the fear of what he was going to do next: now they were back with redoubled force, sending wild thrills of perverse delight rocketing through her loins. Her mouth opened and she began panting and mewling as the hood's invading finger worked around and around deep in her distended rectum.
But as suddenly as he had plunged the finger in, Boscoe dragged it out again. Easing his hand between Holly's wantonly trembling belly and the floor, he stroked his fingers back along the moistened length of her passion-damp vaginal furrow and smeared the wetness up and around her plundered anus to lubricate the opening. An instant later she heard the metallic hiss of a zipper being opened and the hard rubbery tip of his cock was pressing against her tight hairless anal opening.
She held her breath as she felt him begin to thrust. Oh God, he was huge! She would never be able to take his entire penis in her rectum: her belly would be torn apart!
The muscles on Boscoe's stomach stood out as he strained forward and the nakedly writhing young wife felt the soft probing between her buttocks grow into a hard irresistible pressure against the tightly puckered circle of her asshole.
"Aaaaagggghhhh! God, no! . . . Pleeeeaaaase! . . . Aaaaaiiiiieeeee!" she screeched as the interfolded nether ring suddenly gave way and the bulbous lust-bloated head of the hood's cock surged inside with a plunging rush. A spasm of pain so unbearable that she screamed again and again shot through her, twisting and squirming with all her strength to try and evade the bestial impalement. Her bound hands scrabbled ineffectually at the big man's stomach in a vain attempt to push him away; her buttocks writhed and threshed like trapped animals but her movements served only to wedge the thickly gleaming rod more securely in her tortured back passage.
"Stop! Oh God, aiiieee, stop!" she screamed.
Boscoe's pounding thighs forced the lust-thickened pole of male hardness another inch and then another into Holly's plundered body. The sodomized redhead could scarcely think: everything she did brought pain and more pain! It was as though a monstrous battering ram was being relentlessly jack-hammered into the distended opening of her virginal anus!
But at last the cruelly ravishing hood's loins smacked heavily against the trembling softness of her spread buttocks. The punishing instrument was buried to the hilt in Holly's almost split rectum. She was hopelessly skewered on the cruelly expanded fleshiness of Boscoe's ravaging cock!
Panting hoarsely behind her, the ruthless gangster began to saw rhythmically deep into the warm buttery depths of her back passage as she groaned in anguish and fought with wild desperation against the horror and degradation of the depraved attack on her defenseless little anus. Then with a final moan of surrender her strength failed and her voluptuous white body subsided limply beneath his weight. At once Boscoe seized her elbows and, still keeping his impaling rod buried in her rectum, he rolled over onto his pack, pulling the anally ravished young wife over on top of him. She was now lying face upward, her shoulders resting on his muscular chest, his cock thrusting up into her cruelly dilated anus from underneath. As his hands snaked around to cup the full-swelling mounds of Holly's jiggling breasts through the ragged remains of her shirt, he looked up and met the glistening eyes of the Mexican girl. She had moved out from her position by the wall and was crouched down in the middle of the room, staring at Holly's obscenely exposed loins with an unfathomable expression on her dusky features.
"Hey, you!" Boscoe panted. "What's your name, kid."
"Juanita."
"What else! Well come on in, Juanita, and grab yourself a face full of pussy! . . . Come on do as I say and get down there, girl!"
The Mexican brunette gazed for an electrifying moment at the erotic tableau on the floor. Holly's head had fallen backward over Boscoe's shoulder. Her mouth was opening and shutting as the mewling sounds of wanton delight forced their way through her trembling lips. Her ripely mounded breasts rose and fell spasmodically under his imprisoning fingers, their darkly erect nipples visible through the shreds of her shirt. And between her spread legs the thickly gleaming stump of the hood's vast cock disappeared into her stretched anus below the wetly gaping aperture of her pinkly glistening cunt.
Juanita stared greedily at the red-haired woman's defenselessly splayed pussy, her own nipples spiking out tautly through the thin material of her blouse. She gazed in hypnotic fascination at the quivering hair-lined lips of Holly's cunt, at the rigidly pulsing shaft of Boscoe's penis below it, and at the sperm-bloated pouch of his balls resting on the floor between his thighs. Then, glancing doubtfully again at the sodomizing gangster as if to reassure herself that he had really meant what he said, she moved slowly forward until she was hunched in between the two pairs of lewdly spread legs and advanced her thick sensual lips toward the steaming loins obscenely exposed before her.
Lowering her head slowly, the Mexican girl took Boscoe's testicles knowingly in her mouth, rolling the sensitive sperm-laden glands softly around her tongue. Then she licked teasingly up the exposed portion of his throbbing stump, on through the wetly folded pink flanges of Holly's cunt, and up to the inflamed and swollen bud of the captive redhead's clitoris.
Holly had been too far gone in a transport of erotic delight to notice the feather-like touch of Juanita's mane of dark hair on her naked flesh. But at the first searing contact of the Mexican girl's expert tongue with her insanely throbbing pussy flesh she jerked galvanically, her loins arching up with an unbearable tingle of extra excitement. Juanita's lips and tongue slobbered forcefully up and down the whole gaping furrow of her genitals, licked maddeningly around the shaft of the huge penis plowing into her anus, and then swirled back to her clitoris again. At the same time the ruthlessly sodomizing hood began a slow and powerful plunging into her cruelly distended anal passage, pulling tiny pink ridges of clasping rectal flesh out with the base of his pistoning cock each time he withdrew for another savage lunge inside.
Between them, they worked in lustfully slaving rhythm over the whole sensitive area of Holly's lewdly exposed loins Juanita sucking and licking and nibbling at the berserk redhead's hotly shuddering cunt and Boscoe ramming his iron-hard cudgel deeper and deeper into her virgin rectum, his throbbing cock-head feeling as though it was about to burst apart in the tight rubbery grip of the ravished wife's vise-like anus.
Holly ground her ass wildly back against the panting hood's pounding thrusts, mewling and crooning with wanton delight. There was no longer any pain, no shame, no regrets only the at first unbidden but now consuming shafts of soul-destroying erotic passion that flamed through and through her insanely trembling body begging for more and more and more . . .
Juanita had slipped one hand under the loose folds of her skirt and she was madly fingering her own cunt as she speared her tongue far up into the hotly throbbing depths of Holly's naked pussy. And suddenly, over the fierce grinding of Boscoe's hips, she felt the shamelessly abandoned young wife tense and quiver uncontrollably. Holly's hips and belly began a wild shuddering, shaking movement, splatting down with unremitting force on her violator's pelvis as the Mexican girl sucked furiously at her cunt. Her back arched convulsively and she cried frenziedly:
"Oh God! Oh God! . . . Go on, go on, go on! . . . Fuck me, you bastard, fuck me in the ass, rape me, suck me! . . . Ooogggghhh! . . . Oh God, I'm cumming, I'm cumming! . . . Yes, I'm cuuuummmmiiiiinnnnnggggg! . . . Eeeeeee uuuugggghhhh!"
Juanita felt the insanely shuddering redhead's cunt opening and closing spasmodically under her sucking lips as warm gushes of hot sticky liquid flooded into her mouth and down over the jack-hammering cock below it. Simultaneously Boscoe uttered a hoarse cry and his hands began clawing Holly's jiggling breasts in wild abandon as his penis jerked convulsively and the first powerful wave of his thickly scalding cum squirted far up into the churning buttery depths of her savaged rectum.
Hearing the twin groans of mindless ecstasy above her, and feeling the urgent spasms of the two sweating bodies as they spurted their loads of boiling creamy fluid around her slavering mouth, Juanita too began to quiver and thresh between their thighs, groaning out her own orgasm deep into the heated wetness of their jerking loins as her saliva streamed down Holly's plundered cunt to mingle with the floods of cum around the hoodlum's spending balls.
The sucked and sodomized redhead lifted her head and uttered a long shuddering cry of fulfillment. She had never known that such a delirium of passion and joy could exist!
Outside the locked cabin, thin trails of sand swirled around the corners of the abandoned buildings and drifted insidiously across the macadam of the disused roadway as the wind arose.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Flying steadily north-northeast toward the frontier, Ortiz noticed the starboard motor miss a couple of beats from time to time. Normally he wouldn't have paid too much attention, but his mind was super tuned to any signs of distress from the ailing Wright Cyclone after the expensive noises they had heard before they fled from the clearing near Hermosillo. He kept an anxious eye on the instrument panel, constantly checking the oil pressure, the rpm, the temperature. All the dials were registering normally. He laid a hand on the engine control pedestal. It was shuddering slightly . . . but then it always did: the Mitchell was over 25 years old!
Guardi, still bare-chested despite the cool air whistling into the cockpit through the holed windshield, was staring ahead and to his right: the sun was sinking toward a band of bruised purplish-brown spanning the horizon and the aching blue of the sky had turned a dirty sulphurous yellow. Thousands of feet above them, wisps of cirrus teased out by an angry wind still shone golden in the light.
"What's with the Technicolor sky?" Guardi's voice growled in the pilot's headset.
"Could be the Santa Ana blowing up," Ortiz said tonelessly.
"That's great so long as the bastard holds off until after we land. It could cover our getaway! How far are we from the border now?"
The flyer glanced at his watch. "Ten minutes."
Guardi grunted and settled back in his seat. A moment later the starboard motor missed again, badly enough for the hood to notice this time. He turned and stared nervously at the flames stabbing back from the exhausts.
Ortiz had noticed a flicker on the rpm dial, a sudden trembling of the oil pressure needle. He shoved the starboard mixture control to Full Rich. That could cool things off if there was a hotspot the temperature gauge didn't show; it could burn off any excess carbon fouling the plugs.
The motor cut out for a full two seconds. The B25 slewed abruptly to the right and the engine caught again with a volley of backfires as Ortiz hauled the plane back on course.
"Jesus!" Guardi said. He was sweating. "You think she'll make it?"
Ortiz shrugged. He could fly the ship on one motor all right: it was one of the first things you learned on twins. But he saw no reason to allay the hood's fears. It was time the sonofabitch sweated a little! He reached out and tried cutting the two magnetos on the starboard engine one after the other. Without the first, the motor lost an expected 200 rpm; without the second . . . Ortiz swore and fought with the wheel as the plane yawed sickeningly, its starboard traction gone. He slammed the switch back to Both and the motor caught again with a ragged roar.
So that was it! He'd let the starter motor spin itself to bits when it jammed in mesh with the flywheel. But one of the bits must still be spinning rubbing the motor casing and building up enough heat to melt the wiring of the magneto housed alongside it in the rear cowling! Soon the wires would be trickles of hot metal which would affect the second magneto: it must already be sick or the engine wouldn't have cut out altogether.
There was only one thing to do: he would have to feather the sick motor and limp along with one, holding the few minutes life left to the other in reserve for emergencies. Throttling back both engines to reduce the swing, he put the B25 into a shallow dive to keep the speed up and stabbed the starboard feathering button as he cut the levers back.
The blades twisted to meet the airflow at right angles; the propeller slowed and spun to a stop. Ortiz turned on rudder trim to balance the uneven pull of the port engine and leveled out, flying slightly nose high, slightly crabwise, with the speed down to 150 . . . but still flying. Then he slotted in the automatic pilot and began to rise from his seat.
"Where the hell do you think you're going?" Guardi yelled.
'it's an electrical failure," Ortiz said truthfully. And then he added mendaciously: "I have to go down into the tail to check a junction box. It's okay she'll be fine on automatic." Unhitching the headset, he stepped down into the cabin.
There was, of course, no junction box remotely connected with the motors in the tail compartment. But the failure of the magnetos had given the bitterly humiliated flyer an idea . . . a wild million-to-one-chance idea, but an idea that he was determined to put into practice. Because although that chance might be a million to one against, it was his only chance . . .
Guardi sat looking apprehensively out the window as Ortiz disappeared. He was not a mechanically minded man. All he knew about motors was that you pressed a button and they started and when you pressed another they stopped. Sitting alone in this apparently pilot-less old wreck as she plowed through the sky gave him the creeps. The sonofabitch plane was lurching like a drunk! And weren't they losing height? Staring anxiously at the port engine, he thought the flames crackling back from the cowling were longer and fiercer than they had been . . . there was a thin film of oil spreading over the stressed metal of the shuddering wing. . . Jesus if there was a leak and they caught fire! . . . What the hell was that spic bastard up to?
He swung around in his seat and uttered a roar of rage. Ortiz was sitting with his legs crossed in one of the seats by a porthole in the tail. And he was . . . he was reading a newspaper!
Snatching off the headset, Guardi lumbered down into the cabin, his sallow face dark with anger. "What the fuck do you think you're doin', you lousy creep?" he bellowed, thrusting his way between the bales of hash stacked in the cargo bay. "Get right back in that pilot's seat before I kick the shit outa you!"
Ortiz looked up. "I quit!" he shouted.
"You what? Get back up here or I'll break your goddamn back!"
"You?" Ortiz jeered. "You can only beat folks when there's a gun in your hand and they're not looking! Why, you great tub of lard, you couldn't lick me in a fair fight if I had one arm in a plaster cast!"
The veins on Guardi's thick neck bulged with fury. "You're goin' back in that pilot's seat and fly this plane if I have to break every goddamn bone in your body!" he raved.
"Try and make me," Ortiz yelled. "Fatso! You're such a big guy fly the plane yourself!" He picked up the newspaper again.
"Why you lousy spic . . . " His face mottled with rage, the seething hood hurled himself with outstretched hands across the space between the main body of the cargo and the bales stacked among the seats . . . the space occupied by the old bomb bay doors.
Ortiz' hand streaked down to the film director's lever Briggs had mounted between his seat and the hull of the plane. Savagely, he jerked it up.
There was a roar of wind as the bomb bay doors dropped open.
For one frozen moment, as the floor sank away beneath his feet, Guardi was suspended in mid air, his mouth gaping and his face a mask of terror at the stunning realization of the trap into which, literally, he had fallen and of the certain death that awaited him thousands of feet below.
Then his heavy body plummeted through and was gone, his despairing scream torn away by the wind.
Ortiz released the lever and made his way slowly back to his seat. He was trembling in every limb.
The Virgin was equipped with a ten-channel VHF radio, but half the channels were without crystals. One that did work, however, was the police channel. The local law enforcement agencies had more than once made use of the old plane. Now Ortiz would make them return the compliment!
He slumped in his seat and snapped on the headset with shaking fingers. A moment later his voice was calling huskily into the microphone: "Hello? . . . Mexican Eagle calling KCC941 . . . Mexican Eagle calling KCC941 . . . Are you receiving me? . . . Over . . . "
* * *
Hanson had almost finished his long patrol when they called him again. "We never did get Ortiz to call us from Guaymas," the checker said. "According to the tower down there he never arrived. They posted him missing with presumed engine failure."
"Poor guy," Hanson said, shaking his head. "There must have been something wrong with the crate after all. I guess that's why he junked the cargo this morning. Funny he never sent out a distress call, though."
"Could be the radio packed up too," the checker said. "You never can tell. See you later, Ed."
Hanson hooked back the headset and was about to start the motor of the sedan when he heard the uneven throb of an aero engine overhead. He craned his head to look out the window and swore.
A B25 was limping through the sullen sky over the desert, its one motor spitting and backfiring. It was on a course that would take it miles to the east of the Ortiz strip but it was the Ortiz plane all right!
Hanson climbed out of the car and stared into the sky, scratching his head. The plane sounded sick enough but what the hell was it doing having engine failure now, when it had been reported missing hours ago?
As he watched, a tiny speck detached itself from the belly of the plane and plunged towards the earth. "Oh no!" Hanson groaned. "Not again! This is really too much! . . . "
And then suddenly he stiffened. Slanting towards him with incredible speed, the speck rapidly increased in size until it was recognizable as the body of a human being. "My God!" the sheriffs officer breathed. "He's baled out!"
He gazed wide-eyed, waiting for the parachute to open, his thin hair whipped around his head by the rising wind. But no canopy blossomed out behind the falling figure. The plane flew on unsteadily toward the north. The hurtling body plunged to the ground a couple of hundred yards away in the desert scrub. Years later, Hanson was to wake up sweating in the night with the dreadful sound of the impact still in his ears.
Hastily, he ran through the cactus in the direction of the fall. It took him ten minutes to find the victim. It wasn't Ortiz he could tell that from the color of the skin. Otherwise he wouldn't have known. It seemed to be the body of a man. The clothes had been ripped away in the long descent. The head had severed by the impact and lay ten yards away in the sand staring sightlessly at the sky. And from the pulverized mess of blood and skin and flesh and splintered bone that remained, the ridged staff of a cactus on which it had impaled itself protruded like some obscene caricature of an erect penis.
Hanson stumbled back to the car with his face ashy pale. The radio was bleeping urgently. "Ed," the voice of the sheriff himself said brusquely, "I don't know what the hell's going on, but Ortiz just called in to ask for help. It seems his plane got hijacked on some kind of a kidnap deal. They're holding his wife in a cabin out near Borrego Springs. He says they'll kill her if he's not back by six . . . and he just threw the guy who was with him out the plane. Can you hear me, Ed?"
"Loud and clear," Hanson said. "At least that explains something! What did you tell him to do?"
"Come back to El Centro to pick up reinforcements, but he said they'd knock off Mrs. Ortiz if they saw more than two people get off the plane. Also he's got a sick motor and he had to land to fix it some place. He's circling around waiting for instructions now. I sent a couple of squad cars off to the cabin but it'll take them some time to get there. What's your position, Ed?"
Hanson gave him the coordinates. He could see the Mitchell again now, lower down and some way off to the west. "What do you want me to do?" he asked.
"Just looking at the map," the sheriff said. "Ed, there's a salt pan four, five miles north of you. I'll give you the bearings. It's clear of scrub and hard as rock. Must be, oh, two miles across. If I tell Ortiz to land there, can you get that buggy of yours across the desert and meet up with him while he fixes the repair?"
Hanson sighed and looked at the battered body of the sedan. "I guess so," he said.
"Okay. I'll have to let you take it from there then but watch it, Ed. Ortiz thinks these guys are Syndicate killers. Jesus," the sheriff complained, "I wish the hell somebody would tell me what the hell's going on around here! Jim Frazer went out to that diner of his today to fix a broken icebox, and he found the body of Artie Briggs, the mechanic works for Ortiz. He'd been shot in the head. Now I got a radio report from the Mexican police that Ortiz was mixed up in the murder of five officers today and there's more than a million dollars worth of hash on the goddamn plane! That guy sure draws a load of trouble wherever he goes!"
Hanson chuckled. "I'll try to sort it out for you," he said.
He was climbing back behind the wheel when the Mitchell swooped low overhead and disappeared behind the low-lying scrub to the north. Thirty-five minutes later, his fenders more scratched and dented than ever, Hanson drove out of the last of the scrub and found himself on the edge of the below-sea-level pan. The Mitchell was half a mile away with Ortiz lying prone along the starboard wing, his blistered fingers busy with rolls of insulating tape in the bowels of the overheated motor. The sun had disappeared and the sky was the color of pewter above the scouring wind.
"Glad to see you," the flyer said, jumping down from the wing and shaking hands gingerly as Hanson arrived. "Goddamn magneto wiring was fusing in the heat! This is the best I can do in the time but I may need that motor!"
"What's the pitch?" Hanson asked. And then, when Ortiz had told him the full story: "So how d'you want to handle this?"
Ortiz was looking at the sheriffs man. He was tall and raw-boned but he wasn't as beefy as Guardi. Nevertheless it might do for the daring plan he had in mind. "Guardi left his shirt and tie and jacket in the plane," Ortiz said. "And his hat. Sunglasses, you already got and your pants are about the same. Now if you were to dress yourself as Guardi and we flew in as though nothing had happened . . . Say, what time do you have?"
"Five after six."
"Jesus, we'll have to hurry! We were due back before six! I don't dare think what Boscoe will do to my wife if he suspects-"
"Okay, okay," Hanson cut in. "Let's go then. I can change in the plane and you can fill me in on the way this guy acts. How do you see it after we land?"
Ortiz climbed up into the pilot's seat and ran his eye over the switches. "We have to get into that shack somehow and rescue Holly before Boscoe is wise to the substitution," he said soberly. "Otherwise he'll kill her straight off or use her as a shield to make his getaway and then kill her." He pressed the energize switch and the port propeller started to tum.
"Unless we could somehow tempt him away from the cabin . . . " Hanson began.
"Exactly." Ortiz thought for a moment and then he said: "Now here's what we could do . . . "
Two minutes later, with both motors firing, the B25 skimmed across the salt pan and rose into the air above the clouds of sand swirling angrily through the cactus scrub.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Boscoe was pacing angrily up and down the cabin. His gun was in his hand and there was an ugly scowl on his face. Outside, the wind moaned around the deserted buildings, stirring the hot dry sand into rising eddies under the leaden sky. The two girls, their hands bound behind their backs, were huddled nervously into a corner of the room opposite the door.
For the tenth time the brutal gangster flung the door open and stared out into the swirling dust. "What the hell can have happened to them?" he demanded furiously. "They shoulda been here a half hour ago! Louie and Frank are due with the wagon any minute. We're supposed to have the stuff unloaded and ready to transfer by the time they arrive." He paused and turned back toward Holly with an evil gleam in his eye. "If there's anything gone wrong," he threatened, gesturing with the gun, "if that sonofabitch husband of yours has fouled this up in any way . . . "
The kidnapped redhead's lips were trembling.
"I thought I heard a plane a few minutes ago," she faltered. Dear God, what was to happen to them when Alvaro did arrive?
"Yeah, so did I," Boscoe grated. "Twice. But I don't see no plane out on that strip. If they ain't here in a few minutes, that goddamn sand will have rubbed the roadway out!" He stiffened, his brutish head cocked on one side, staring out into the gathering storm.
Faintly over the thin howl of the wind the distinctive beat of a twin engined aircraft pulsed in the sky.
Holly's heart leaped and as quickly sank again. He was back . . . but what would the two ruthless hoods do when they had collected the evil cargo for which she and Alvaro had suffered so much? Would they really let them go? Or would they simply kill them on the spot as inconvenient witnesses to an illegal transaction, eliminating them as matter-of-factly as a housewife swatting a fly? Her blood pounding in her temples, she gazed out the open door into the murk.
The Mitchell came into sight low down over the scrub beyond the abandoned mine workings. Lurching and swaying in the gusting wind as the under cart came down, it sideslipped the derricks, touched down too early in a cloud of sand, bounced crazily . . . and then found a solid foundation of the almost obliterated roadway to roll to a halt with a roar of its motors two hundred yards from the shack.
Boscoe watched in astonishment as the motors were cut and the whirling disks of the propellers spun to a stop. Why didn't the bastard taxi it up to the cabin as he'd been told? It's take them a half hour to hump a 1,000-lb load all the way across from there! His fingers tightened around the butt of his gun. Then suddenly he tensed. The hatchway had opened and a man had dropped to the ground. It was Ortiz! He was running madly away from the plane, clutching something wrapped up in a bundle. The hood couldn't see what it was in the driving sand.
Another figure was ducking out from under the wing of the B25 a tall figure in wide-brimmed hat, tan jacket, black shirt and pale tie . . . He ran a few paces after the fleeing pilot, then halted and raised his right arm. Boscoe saw the two flashes from the gun an instant before the twin explosions ripped through the howling of the wind. Ortiz threw up his arms and fell forward across the bundle he had been carrying. The gun roared once more. The pilot's body twitched and then lay still.
Boscoe chuckled and re-holstered his revolver. Trust that bastard Guardi! The spic punk must have been trying on some kind of cross. Well, it saved them another slug later on . . . only now it meant they were one man short to help unload the hash!
As he turned back to the cabin, Holly, screaming hysterically, threw herself towards the door. "Alvaro!" she shrieked. "My God, the murdering bastard's killed him! . . . Alvaro!. . . "
Boscoe flung her back inside the shack with a curse and slammed the door. Taking the key from his pocket, he locked it and hurried out toward the plane.
He was twenty yards away when he realized there was something odd about the figure of "Guardi"; it wasn't bulky enough, it was too thin, the neck was too long.. . and for an instant he checked in his stride.
Seeing him hesitate, Hanson made the mistake of underestimating the ruthless hood. "All right, Boscoe," he called, diving for his gun, "I am an officer-"
Boscoe had drawn and fired before Hanson's fingers closed around the butt of his revolver. The heavy slug smashed into his shoulder and sent him sprawling in the dust. Boscoe took two paces forward and raised the gun again.
"Boscoe!"
The hate-filled voice had come from behind him! The hood swung around . . . his jaw dropping to see the "dead" Ortiz on his feet, the Thompson he had been carrying in his trembling hands.
Boscoe's gun arm leaped up, but before he could fire the muzzle of the sub-machine gun erupted in a searing blast of ragged flame. The hail of slugs smashed into his chest. The revolver dropped from his nerveless hand. His knees buckled. For an instant he swayed, staring foolishly at the multiple jets of his lifeblood pumping through the holes in his jacket. Then he crashed face down into the sand like a felled tree.
Ortiz blew out his breath in a shuddering sigh. Shakily, he dropped the Thompson, retrieved the key of the shack from Boscoe's bloodied pocket, and went to the aid of the injured Hanson. A few minutes later, he had released the girls and propped the groaning sheriffs officer against the wall of the room that had been their prison. There was nothing he could do now but wait for the arrival of the men from El Centro . . . or should he try and fly them back on his own?
He turned to the door. And stared straight into the leveled guns of the hoods' driver, Frank, and a short squat thug with an unshaven chin. Beyond them, a heavy panel truck was parked around the corner of the shack.
"Okay, mac," the driver said. "Out here with your hands up, you. The broads can stay inside until we decide what to do with them. Louie you better tie them up while the spic and me begin unloading the stuff."
"Why don't we rub 'em out right away?" the unshaven man grumbled, starting to move into the cabin.
The two shots were not much louder than a firecracker sharp, whip-like explosions that had hardly died away before the evil-looking new arrivals had slumped to the floor, each with a neat round hole drilled in the center of his forehead. As Holly and Alvaro swung around with gasps of surprise, Juanita, the Mexican girl, was calmly stowing the tiny smoking Berretta automatic back inside its special pocket in the waistband of her skirt.
"Mexican secret police," she said crisply in answer to the flyer's astonished question. "We've been on the trail of this gang for months, but we didn't know who was buying the stuff until we got the tip-off about the plan to hijack your plane."
It was later, after the sheriff's men had arrived to take care of the wounded Hanson and remove the bales of hash, that Holly took the dark-haired voluptuous policewoman aside. Ortiz was checking out his Virgin, for he had decided to brave the gathering sandstorm and fly them home.
"If you were here because you knew about the plan," the curvaceous redhead murmured, "and you had that gun with you all the time. . . why didn't you use it to capture Boscoe when he . . . when he . . . why didn't you use it. . . before?"
"It was better to catch them with the consignment," Juanita answered evasively. Her lustrous dark eyes held Holly's violet ones for an unfathomable moment and then she added softly: "Also . . . well, perhaps I had a reason a very special reason for wishing to remain a captive a little longer!"
Ortiz had turned his plane around to head back up the roadway and was waiting for Holly to climb up into the cockpit when he found the hide satchel stuffed down beside the seat Guardi had been sitting in. He picked it up with trembling fingers. In the drama and suspense at the end of this horror-filled and eventful day, everybody had forgotten about it. Now nobody but himself even knew it existed! . . . And there were seventy-five thousand dollars inside! All in used and unmarked bills, nothing larger than a twenty! Seventy-five-thousand dollars! Not enough to buy that Cessna jet but enough to bring the old B25 back to specification, enough to pay for that Check Four and leave a healthy balance in the bank! Buckling the flap, he slung the portfolio over his shoulder.
"What have you got there?" Holly asked teasingly as she climbed through the hatchway into the cabin.
"I'm licensed to ply for hire or reward," her husband said. "This is . . . well, you could say this is a reward for services rendered!" And then, seeing the taut swell of her breast through the ripped remains of her shirt, buoyant with the confidence stemming from the vengeance that had restored his masculine pride, he added in a low voice: "There's another kind of reward I'm applying for taking too! Just as soon as we get home, I'm going to throw you on that bed and screw the ass off you, you sexy bitch!"
"Ooooooooh! Yes, darling! Yes!" Holly shivered submissively. And because the night and day of horror had taught her something about herself too, she giggled and laced her fingers into those of Juanita, who had followed her into the plane. "I hope that traditional Mexican hospitality is working overtime tonight my love," she said, to her husband, "for I have a feeling we may have company . . . "
The Virgin's motors burst into life. The landing lights flared on. The plane surged forward through the clouds of swirling sand, rose into the air, and disappeared into the dusk towards El Centro.
