enovel Where Have All The Little Girls Gone M.K. Callie [Future Story Codes]

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Where Have All The Little Girls Gone ....(163k)    by M.K. Callie

INTRODUCTION

An old dilapidated bus bumped down the dusty road of a Central Mexican state, lurching and swaying. It was full: chickens squawked from on top; a pig squealed as the boxes and cases of the roof-luggage made his willow poke creak, threatening to squash him. The springs of the venerable bus creaked with an ancient dryness, as old as the land itself.

"When do we get to San Francisco del Rincon, senor?" Maria Alverez inquired of the driver.

"Ah, soon, soon, maybe one hour, maybe two. Do not worry, pretty one. There is all of life in front of you." The mustached driver smiled at the very pretty, very young girl squeezed next to him.

Yes, yes indeed, he thought, we do have the prettiest little girls in all the world, here in our beloved Mexico. This one, she has the face of a Madonna. The face of the Mother of Christ herself. That is how a little girl so young and pure should be, with the love and the innocence pouring out of her eyes!

"Soon we shall be in San Francisco del Rincon, my pretty one," he murmured as he steered the old bus on own the arroyo track.

Her enormous brown eyes staring out the window, 'aria sighed. She was full of intense youthful excitement. She had run away from school, and from her home. Her eight brothers and sisters would not miss her until evening came. Then there would be one less mouth for Mama and Papa Alverez to have to feed.

Maria was determined to get the job she had set her young heart on. She had only enough money to get to town, so the job just had to be hers. With all of her sixteen-year-old maturity, she was certain she would be a success at whatever the work might be.

Her oval face, strangely sad and very beautiful, stared out at the rough arroyo as the bus bumped along the boulder-littered creek.

* * *

Maria Alverez, in virginal innocence on her way to San Francisco del Rincon--a little girl, like so many others, riding in an old bus, off on the first step into adult life.

But they never came back. There was no return for any of these girls who went to San Francisco del Rincon. In their dewy-eyed beauty, in their long-lashed innocence, with the touch of glory in their great eyes, these country girls traveled down the road to the dusty town. Every week they came. From all parts of central Mexico they journeyed, for work was scarce and hunger common in the large families of the poor farming communities.

Plenty of young girls had made the same decision. Plenty had traveled on this very route, even on this same rickety bus, during the past few years.

But-where had all the little girls gone? They had ventured out in faith, high-hearted, full of adventure, excitement gleaming in their eyes...

"In one hour, we will be in San Francisco del Rincon, senorita," said the smiling bus driver, wiping beads of sweat from his forehead.

"Good, good! I shall be so happy to get there!" Maria gave a nervous smile, for she had never been so far away from home in all her life.

The bus rolled on down out of the boulder-strewn arroyo. It swayed, lumbered, banged and thundered. It raised a fleeting shroud of gray dust behind it as it came to rising ground again.

Faces were peering out at the dry countryside, Maria's enormous sad brown eyes among them--one distant face that seemed to shimmer in the window-glass. Then the bus had passed. The girl's face was gone. Only the gray, dry arroyo, the drab boulders, and the settling dust remained.

In the distance, the bus engine started to roar and clatter, for there was yet one more hill to struggle slowly up and up.

The dust swirled before settling. The noisy climbing note of the bus motor choked several times, then died to a growl as the bus got to the top of the hill at last.

Then came the silence.

In the dry arroyo, the dust was settling as if it had never been disturbed in the first place. Once more the scene returned to that timeless, inscrutable image that is Mexico. Here, so it seems, nothing ever changes. A thousand buses may go lurching past, and all they do is stir the gray dust a little, nothing more than that. Yes, there may be a pretty sixteen-year-old girl on each bus, but it still makes no difference. The way of life in Mexico is timeless, enduring, ancient. The young girls with their bright eyes and happy laughter cannot change anything.

Yet Maria Alverez was the epitome of a great tragedy. She had boarded the bus with hope and excitement glowing in her eyes. She set off for San Francisco del Rincon, her young heart bursting with eagerness--but further along the trail of her life, and not very far ahead either, was her time of tragedy.

It is the same for young French girls hurrying toward Paris and the free bohemian life there. Or the host of runaway girls who trekked in their hippie garb toward San Francisco and the disastrous ways of the Flower Children. Many of them never come back. As though bound for some special harvesting of virginal innocence and young flesh, the girls go out... never to return.

So what happened to Maria Alverez is not any special indictment of Mexico, any more than what "happened to a hippie girl in Haight-Ashbury is an indictment of California.

Basically, the story is one of human depravity. It is the story of what a sub-species of human being will do to the innocent and the defenseless--for money, lust and power.

like the gray wolf that comes padding up the dusty, silent arroyo, panting and glaring about, sniffing the scent of the departed pig and the passing chickens, the wild predator is hungry, with a hunger that will never be satisfied.

And waiting for Maria Alverez is a lusting rapacious world, impossible to satisfy. Greedy and cruel, with claws and fangs. Savage without the beauty of the wolf. And merciless without the wolfs excuse of life-and-death necessity.

The gray wolf goes loping slowly up the dusty track. Its yellow eyes flicker and glare, like some shadowy image of life's menace, the wolf glides on, following the scent of the chickens, the smell of the pig, all mingled with the scent of hot oil and gasoline fumes. The bus has long gone, carrying the pig and chickens to market; and carrying Maria Alverez, the lamb, to the fate awaiting her in San Francisco del Rincon.

CHAPTER ONE - CHAOS IN THE WHOREHOUSE

There were three Sanchez sisters. Three tough, raucous women, of peasant origin and dubious background. Now they were rich, the proprietresses of good businesses. Some even called them ladies of property, with a certain smirking insinuation as to what kind of properties the sisters profited from.

For each of them was a full-fledged whorehouse madam. They had been giving their bodies to men for so long, they looked on it as the only natural way of life. And having become thus depraved, they were now slipping deeper and deeper into the world of ravenous males; savage brutality; collecting, debasing, and terrorizing young girls; and above all, making money.

In the upstairs front room of the Sanchez whorehouse in San Francisco del Rincon, the three sisters were in the midst of a furious argument.

"I am surrounded by fools and idiots!" Delfina, the most aggressive one, screamed at the other two. "I must have girls! Girls and more girls! Do you understand I get eighty dollars for a pretty young girl ready for the whorehouses in Tijuana? Eighty dollars for each girl-that's what they are worth to me! But where are they? They must be pretty, they must be sixteen. They must be able to please at least five customers a night.

"And what have I got to sell the good merchants of Tijuana? Nothing! Not a single girl who is not sick, puking, or pretending to be hurt. And it's all your fault!" Her voice was quivering in a husky rage as she glared ferociously at the other two sisters.

Though they were sisters, Delfina, Consuela, and Teresa were curiously different. Each had risen to the rank of madam by the time she was twenty-five. Perhaps it all began with Consuela, the oldest of the sisters, but it was so long ago, it is impossible now to disentangle the various causes and effects.

Consuela Sanchez was now in her late fifties. She had been a whore since she was fifteen. When her sister, Delfina, ten years younger, had come to visit Consuela at the same age, she was introduced to men, and to the money to be made out of whoring. And it had been another ten years later when young Teresa had come to see Consuela and Delfina, and she too, at fifteen, became a whore along with her two sisters who were now house madams. But each of the sisters was totally different in outlook.

Now, Consuela was a burnt-out husk of an old whore. She was completely dominated by the demanding Delfina. All Consuela wanted to do was to make money and keep out of the way. All decisions and authority lay in Delfina's hands.

Teresa was still comely at five-and-thirty. She preferred to tease men sexually, though if a rich customer came in, Teresa was always for sale, and could give satisfaction, for she knew her trade. But Teresa was the bright one of the trio of sisters. She did not care for the bartering and selling of young girls like cattle. And Teresa always avoided the disciplinary scene. The floggings and the bed-tortures, the starving and the cage-pits where the girls were flung to cool down, none of these were for Teresa. Teresa loved to dress well. She loved to swing around the town in style. True, she was a whorehouse madam, but she was still young, and men hungered for her with just one glance at her firm, hourglass figure. It was Teresa who entertained the buyers of young girls, with her conversation as well as with her body. Many were the lucrative offers Teresa turned down.

It was Delfina, the middle sister, who ruled. It was her power and cruelty, her glaring authority, that held the whole structure together. The oldest sister, Consuela, was a shapeless hulk of a woman. Yet she had the face of a cruel eagle. For back in the family was Aztec blood, and each sister had her share of it. Delfina, like Consuela, had the sculptured, angular, aquiline profile, the hungering, ice-cold cruelty of the Indian face.

And well she might, for the horrors that had been performed before her eyes, many with her approval or at her orders, were legion. And a glare of greed beamed out of her eyes. Delfina loved money. Everything was sacrificed for money. She would even have sold Teresa or Consuela off to the highest bidder. But she realized she could not carry on the entire Sanchez operation by herself. No matter how trustworthy and lustily loving her henchmen were, Delfina knew the only people faithfully supporting her were her two sisters, Consuela and Teresa.

In some ways, it could be said, life had been harsh to the powerful Delfina, so as to make her this demoniacal figure. At the age of fifteen, when she had come to town to see her older sister Consuela, as if it were a great joke Consuela had put the whorehouse pimp to work. His savage assaults, and then those of two eager customers, had changed the dewy-eyed, innocent Delfina into the hottest young whore in the place.

Somewhere within her twisted mind lurked that nightmare of rapine, when she had been a young girl one moment, and a whore for every man's use the next. Delfina seemed to harbor a constant vicious rage. It was directed not only at her aging sister Consuela, but also at every young girl who fell into her clutches.

Nothing was too cruel, too sadistic, too grotesque for Delfina. The thought of beating a naked, possibly virginal and beautiful young peasant girl about the shoulders and bare breasts made her quiver in excited fury. This was her madness, and it was now the main driving force behind the three Sanchez sisters. "I do not understand, pardon me if I say so, Delfina, but there have been many girls here. Myself, I have seen some twenty girls here during the past two months. What has happened to them? Some of them were very pretty." Teresa frowned as she spoke sharply to her powerful sister. "They could not all have turned out useless for our sort of business... " Delfina swore harshly. "Bitches, stupid country bitches! I have had nothing but trouble with all of them. I have had to send most of them to the ranch for some of Ricardo's disciplining." Delfina sighed. She much preferred the young Teresa to her older sister. "This work, it is too much for me, Teresa. You must understand, Consuela seems to be unable to do anything, even make up her mind. Without me here or at the ranch, always looking into things, there would be no discipline, no results, no girls trained, and no money."

"Perhaps you treat the new girls too well. In the old days you seemed to be able to train up a batch of willing girls quickly. That is what gave us our reputation in Tijuana. We are known for good country girls who like to take on man after man, and who lose their looks more slowly than do most other girls in this business," Teresa chuckled. "I myself have one lover who promises me a million pesos and a house at Acapulco, you know. Think of your younger sister living as a lady of leisure in beautiful Acapulco!"

"Stupido, he wants you to run his whorehouse there, that's all!" Delfina snapped. "I wish you would not interrupt our serious business discussions with your childish daydreams, Teresa."

Consuela had a haunted face, more gaunt in her features than either Teresa or the well-fed Delfina. There seemed to be a ghost of some vast cruelty floating inside her. "Oh, we have buried so many of them, in the dirt at the ranch, so many of them!" she murmured as if speaking her thoughts aloud.

"Shut up!" Delfina snarled. She suddenly lashed out with the stick she used for a walking cane. There was a deep thud as the stick hit Consuela's shin. The older woman gasped in the sudden ice-cold shock and then the agony of the bruising and vicious blow.

"No! Oh, Delfina, you mustn't treat me so, you must respect me!"

"I shall respect you when you are in your grave, and not before! I must have more girls. We must put more ads in the papers," Delfina bellowed.

"It will cost us a lot of money, this advertising, I know, but it is the only safe way we ever get the right kind of girls. Here, this is the ad. I want you both to look at it."

While she was speaking, a tremendous animation had come to Delfina's features. Her face had lost its evil, gleaming rage. Instead, a kind of maternal purity, a motherly beam of almost holy innocence and earnestness filled her face.

"These girls must be brought to us, as many as possible! That is why the pair of you have to help me more than you are doing. I know, I know, at times I am hated. This is because I'm trying to do good. This is because I am trying to help all these poor unfortunate peasant girls. They are so exactly like we were, when Father died and when we first came to San Francisco del Rincon."

Consuela chuckled. She recognized the paradoxical quirk in her younger sister's nature. One minute Delfina could be the devil incarnate. The next moment the same Delfina was cooing as softly and tenderly as any Mother Superior speaking to a group of white-clad novices.

Except that a novice nun was nowhere within a mile of the Sanchez house. In fact there never had been a virgin inside the buildings for more than a few hours.

And it was part of the paranoid intensity-almost hypnotic, Teresa felt as she heard Delfina speaking--to make it all seem a good work, something being done actually to help the impoverished girls of the central Mexican countryside. Teresa was always completely overwhelmed by Delfina when her forty-five-year-old sister was in the mystical, commanding mood accompanying her psychotic rages. She stared at Delfina's great brown eyes, and seemed lost in their magnetic pull.

"We must help all these poor, poor girls to find us," Delfina whispered.

The main similarity between Delfina and the older Consuela was in the face and in the shape of the head. Besides, Consuela always tried to copy Delfina's hairstyle, a pageboy cut with the curly dark hair swept back deftly from the temples. Because of the similar shape of their faces and hairstyles, people tended to mistake Consuela for Delfina, which gave the older sister the feeling that she might one day return to the seat of power. Indeed, it was only during the past five or six years, as Consuela had rapidly faded and become quieter and quieter, that the reins of power had been gathered up by Delfina.

The fact that Delfina was very possibly mentally unbalanced had never entered the other two sisters' minds. Surrounded by raw sex, with sexual demands being the basis and hub of their entire lives, they scarcely even noticed that Delfina tended to have strange quirks, strange shifts in mood. All the whores were this way, so why should they notice one more than another--even if that one were their own sister?

But it had been Consuela, her original rise to power and her original planning, that had established this vast vice network for the three sisters to control and operate. It had been Consuela who had earned enough, on her back, to buy their first whorehouse outright, and then to bring in her two younger sisters. They pooled their earnings, and ran a tight, good house with very young girls, aged from eleven years up to sixteen. At sixteen, a girl was appraised, and if found operating at a peak of a whore's efficiency, she was easily salable to one of the big whorehouses in Tijuana.

The house that Consuela had bought prospered. Soon she opened a second house. Then they came to need a rest place, and so the Sanchez ranch was purchased. It was at the rural rancho that there began to develop the outline of the new, larger little-girls-for-sale line of operations.

But meanwhile Consuela had rapidly become older and older. Whores do hit a certain time in their lives when they seem to suddenly be exhausted and completely spent. This happened to Consuela.

* * *

Thus the power came into the hands of Delfina, ten years younger than Consuela. And with her severe character, plus her very changeable moods, it was Delfina who brought with her the reign of terror which was to make the Sanchez sisters notorious.

Teresa avoided all nastiness. She avoided being in at the deals over the girls. She certainly avoided being in at the tortures or the disciplinary steps--some of them fatal. Teresa loved teasing men, and she never minded satisfying a well-paying customer. But beyond that, she was very careful to leave all the nasty business to her older sisters, first Consuela, now Delfina. Teresa wanted her share in the profits and the glamour; but not in the loathsome realities of the operation.

* * *

"Here is the advertisement I have written out--it is the same one that brought us eighty-seven girls last spring. That was one of our best ads--and we did not spend one single unnecessary peso!" Delfina held up a sheet of paper, on which in girlish lettering was scrawled the following advertisement:

WANTED Attractive girls, 14-22, to serve as domestics in the finest of homes. GOOD PAY-COMFORTABLE LIVING CONDITIONS-FREE PLACEMENT AFTER 2-WEEK TRAINING PERIOD. Apply in person, Hotel Molinos, San Francisco del Rincon.

The most important part of the ad was the requirement that the girls be attractive. The sisters were selective. If a girl was lucky enough to be ugly and to be turned down by them, then her ugliness had done that girl a great service.

For many of the girls taken into the whorehouses by the three sisters were very beautiful indeed. They were like the delicious, oval-faced Maria Alverez, who at this moment was coming to seek the job advertised in the newspapers last spring. The precious, yellowed, dog-eared clipping was stowed in her purse, in her bag next to her cherished rag doll which she so loved. The evil sisters knew that beauty was worth money, particularly in a busy whorehouse. A fresh young girl with that pristine beauty about her always made a lot of money for them all from her first night on the bed with the customers--and money was all Delfina, Consuela, and even Teresa thought about. They were "already rich, and dreamed of being richer and richer.

If a girl's great beauty and her slim young body brought in a few extra pesos, then the three sisters were certainly all for beauty. The girl would not be that pretty after a year of hard whoring. This kind of life made them look old and leathery within three years. Often they were finished by the time they were twenty, and then had to be gotten rid of. But in the meantime, the pretty ones, and the beautiful ones, would have earned the three sisters their full money's worth. They had ways of making very sure of that.

"If we could get only twenty girls a month, then we would be able to see about selling the others, now," Consuela suggested idly.

"Sell the others? What others?" The very fact her older sister had risked passing some kind of comment at all was enough to infuriate Delfina. "I wish you would shut up, you don't know what you're talking about!"

"There should be many, many young ones at our rancho. But I suppose they never leave there," Consuela muttered slowly.

"You have troubles at the rancho?" Teresa asked Delfina.

"Girls are always a lot of trouble. We have had some who do not wish to understand the good life we are offering them. It takes a few weeks and a little persuasion for this type of silly creature to understand." Delfina patted Teresa on the hand. "You know how some girls are so stupid."

"Yes, yes, they can be," Teresa smiled. Not that she was under any illusion concerning the activities at the ranch, but Teresa made very sure she was not involved with all that went on out there. That was the main thing.

"Then you both agree-this is the advertisement we run again. It was successful last year." Delfina sighed. The other two women nodded.

There was a curiously firm air and attitude about the three sisters. Each possessed it individually, and when they were together, it was a powerful aura. The whole thing seemed to suggest that everything was happy, and would be even happier if those in disagreement would just understand and not be so silly.

Yet, beneath this impression was a much deeper reality. A low level of intelligence was compensated for by a tremendously high level of native cunning.

The three Sanchez women had the cunning of fifty rattlesnakes. They were not bright mentally, and indeed, Consuela was perhaps close to being a moron in her present dotage. But this grim and grasping cunning each of the three sisters possessed--it was this cunning, and the self-assurance of years and years of running whorehouses so successfully, that made them so invincible.

And with this air, this shrewdness, went the pious attitude that they were bringing good, clean, healthy ways to earn money to the lovely and very poor young girls of the central states.

"We must save these girls!" Delfina would cry out when she came to look at four or five new, pretty sixteen-year-old arrivals in the hotel lobby. "We must save them, for their own good!"

The "save-them" part Delfina really was sincere about. Consuela was too old to care, and Teresa merely looked on each girl as representing so many satisfied customers a night, and her fifty per-cent cut of the pesos was the figure that registered in her mind.

"This advertisement has saved so many poor Mexican girls from wasting their lives in the fields," Delfina was explaining.

"Yes, yes, we do not want them to go to waste," Consuela agreed in her half-vacant way.

"They enjoy it, being with the men. That is what all girls are for," Teresa affirmed. She picked up a hairbrush and got busy casting her long, loose black hair down on one side. Then she brushed it with long, loving strokes.

So each of the three sisters had spoken her opinion about the new advertisement, in a way reflecting her own inner character. Yet Teresa and Consuela were aware of the mad streak in their Delfina. They agreed because they felt it was right, but they also glanced at Delfina to see how her rage was taking her this day.

For Delfina was a very changeable personality. Her rages came abruptly, in almost blinding moments of vicious insanity. In such a moment Delfina could strike out at anyone, even have them killed, as she had on many occasions. Even her two nearest and dearest, her sisters Teresa and Consuela, were scared at such times. They knew it was best to get away and keep out of Delfina's sight until a calmer mood came to replace the exhausted rage. It was often the lot of the younger girls, the newly arrived girls, especially out at the training ranch, to shoulder the full brunt of Delfina's insane fury.

"You are happy today," Consuela muttered as she stared into Delfina's dark eyes.

"I am never happy, when I do not have enough girls for our business. I wish to spread happiness. But it is true, after the Fiesta de la Marina last Friday, we did take in a great deal of money. When men are filled with wine and tequila, they pay a lot more for their pleasures," Delfina chuckled. "Our good girls worked hard, and they will all have extra pesos this month to send to their poor families."

"That is good." Consuela shrugged her shoulders. It was a nice feeling to know that the money was enough to make even the mercenary Delfina happy for a few hours. But Consuela was under no illusions concerning her sister. Delfina was a crazy one, right enough. Consuela had seen some of Delfina's rages at work, and the tortures, including the "Ladies' Bed," a crippling fiendish device to which Delfina seemed to love to condemn recalcitrant girls.

"I shall go to Tijuana next month, and see how the tourist business is doing. Also, I must get myself some new dress materials, and I like the bright colors that the Americano stores sell there." Teresa had dismissed the important subject of the girl advertisement completely.

"That is all you know, spending money, spending money, and never helping us in our work of running this great business! I need girls-fine, beautiful girls-girls I can get eighty dollars each for from the pimps in Tijuana. And all you, Teresa, can think of doing is going to where we have to sell our girls, and spending money and having a good time like a stupid Yankee tourist!" Delfina flushed as she growled these words. Her slow, deep voice was curious: it seemed almost masculine in quality.

Her large black eyes rested on the good looks of the younger Teresa for a moment. Startlingly alive, Teresa always filled a room with eager bustle. This Delfina knew only too well. Yet Delfina did not resent her younger sister. There was always this curious bond between the three sisters. Whores and whorehouse madams they might be, but they still trusted each other. They had no other choice, true, but for such women to trust each other was rare indeed, in this, the oldest profession in the world.

"Listen, sweet Delfina... " Teresa's eyes flashed. She had full, sharp cheekbones and enormous Indian black eyes, a wilder beauty, as well as being younger than either of her two sisters. "I earn my money my way! Now if you do not like what I do with my money, then what the hell is it any business of yours, I ask you? I run my house, you run the whole business. Now I never ask you what you do with your money--and I never ask to see exactly how much of my share you cheat me of, so you just be careful of what you say to me, and what I do with my own cash, I do it to please myself!"

Teresa's temper amused Delfina. She always loved to see her younger sister get into a rage.

"There, so, you wish to go to Tijuana, go there! But first, we have to send this ad to the papers. They charge so much money, these newspapers. They are robbers for charging people such fees just to print so few words. If it were not so expensive, then I would have this advertisement running every month in every newspaper in the whole of Mexico! That way, we would have all the girls we need!"

"Ah, we only need twenty girls a month, that's all. If we get more, poor Ricardo Will wear out his weapon working them up into being happy young whores. Poor Ricardo, he is always so very busy and so boastful," Teresa mused. She could not help twitching her hips as she thought of Ricardo's massive sexual equipment. He was the ex-officer, the thick-necked young bullock of a man who broke the girls into the whoring habit.

Teresa had tried him a few times herself, and been much astonished. Ricardo was about the only man in the whole of Mexico whom Teresa held in respect. In fact, whenever she considered what he had done to her, it made her quiver to resume the contest. But as Ricardo was the disciplinarian at the Sanchez rancho, as well as running most of the affairs of the Hotel Molinos, Teresa wisely avoided him. The youngest sister had, after all, her own busy whorehouse right in the neighboring town of Leon.

"Ricardo is troublesome. He wants too much," Delfina murmured as she heard Teresa mention the ex-officer's name. "But he is a clever one. One does not have to explain things three times over, like one has to to that idiot, the Fat Man."

"Ah, the Fat Man!" Teresa spat in contempt. "I do not understand why we keep that pig. He is always stealing, always acting stupid. Can a man really be as stupid as that? I think he is nothing but a fat thief, and we should be rid of him."

"One day, yes. But at the moment, he works for nothing. Who else would dig our graves so well, and so far out in the desert?" Delfina smiled. "He is a good gravedigger, the Fat Man. I like to watch him work in the hot afternoon, when he has rocks in the soil and a deep grave to dig. The sweat runs off him, and my goodness, he smells like the fat pig he is. It reminds me of when I was a girl and took on those Outzacatas Indians for a peso each-they sweated like that." Delfina had quite an insane look on her face as she remembered the lurid times of her girlhood.

"Yes, they smelt like Fat Man does, when he is grave digging. I could have ten Outzacatas for fifteen pesos, and I was good-looking--much too good for those pigs!"

"Delfina! Why is it you are always talking about your early days? I am sick and tired of hearing how much you suffered. We have all had similar experiences," Teresa snapped out angrily.

"You--you have slept with gentlemen, Teresa, mucha-cha mia. I was forced to service trash, pigs, the scum of the earth! That is why I like to watch the Fat Man digging graves in our desert. He smells so rich, and he makes all those years drop away." Delfina snickered. In her way, she was taunting Teresa with the sordid details.

In truth, all three sisters had been with men of all shapes, sizes, smells and capacities. Teresa perhaps had been more fortunate, but only because the younger girl had set a top price on her professional services. Peasants were not for Teresa.

"Ricardo was, an officer," Teresa pointed out slowly.

"So was Joaquin Mendosa, and a more lecherous pig than Joaquin I have yet to meet! He loves nothing more than ravishing a new girl while she is still sore. That seems to make him more excited than anything else." Delfina laughed. "Men are strange brutes. You would think they'd give it a chance to stretch and be comfortable."

"They make us what we are! They truly make us what we are!" Consuela could not help repeating the old Mexican saying..

"Ah, you two speak like old women! Ricardo is a gentleman compared to either Fat Man or Joaquin. Those two animals would put it into anything if you ordered them to, Delfina," Teresa snapped.

"That is what they are here for. I think the quicker the ad appears in the country newspapers, the better. We must have girls. We need all the little girls we can train, these days. Oh, but the girls of Guadalajara are so good for this business! And it saves them from such dreadful lives out on those barren farms." Delfina once again was about to lapse into her great soliloquy on the blessings of a whore's life.

"They are farm girls, all the same," Consuela murmured, out of context to Delfina's words.

"What do you mean, you old witch, farm girls?" Delfina's voice rose dangerously high again. "We train them up to be young ladies of service and ability. There are no finer girls for any house than here. Our girls, once they have completed their training course, are the finest whores in all Mexico!"

"True--well, I suppose you are correct." Consuela was quick to agree with her temperamental sister.

"You are so insulting, Consuela! I wonder about you, at times. I wonder if you are on my side," Delfina observed with a flash of almost insane rage. "I like to know who are my enemies, and who are my friends. Everyone speaks behind my back. Oh yes, I am used to that. I am long used to it! Now you are insulting the girls I have saved from such a terrible life. I have given them a chance to earn a fortune, and you say they always remain farm girls. That is dirty slander!"

* * *

While Delfina was tirading on and on against Consuela and everyone else in general, curious sounds were beginning to echo through the Hotel Molinos.

Deep inside the chaos of the Hotel Molinos, as this ramshackle old Mexican whorehouse was grandiosely named, was a large open kitchen with a sloping roof, separated from the chicken-dirt yard at the back of the hotel by blackened screens. Beside these filthy screens was the great kitchen table. A twenty-year-old whore named Anita Torres lay strapped to the table.

"You must shut up, Anita, or else you will raise the wrath of the dear sisters," the man bending over Anita informed her thickly.

"I--I cannot help it! I cannot stay--or wait--I must-must get away or I shall go mad!" Anita sobbed.

"Do you wish to be sent back to the rancho?" Ricardo Herrera asked softly. His hand was on Anita's right breast, his fingers holding the nipple. Ricardo had exquisite ways of torturing the girls. His discipline was based purely on the agony he could and did inflict upon their tenderest parts.

"No! Not the rancho! I shall--don't make me scream any more, Ricardo--I will do as you say!" Sweat was on Anita's smooth forehead. The girl was under no illusions at all concerning this man. He would kill her if necessary. That would be no new performance for him.

Ricardo smiled slowly. His hand stayed where it had ripped open her blouse to grab her nipple. The girls were always so helpless the moment Ricardo laid his gentle fingers on them! They seemed suddenly to melt into a quivering mass of fear and near-hysteria. This was due to the fact that Ricardo was the man who trained a virgin into being a whore capable of taking on a man every half hour for six hours of an evening. He did more than just discipline his girls. He knew every quiver and every emotion in all of their bodies. By the time he had finished with a girl, she was glad to get away to her ordinary customers.

Ricardo Herrera had a bull's neck and massive shoulders. They hunched forward when he was making a girl accept him physically. Ricardo thus had the obvious nickname of "Toro" among the girls. For he copulated like a bull, snuffling and heaving and intensely physical all the time. There was nothing in it as far as Ricardo was concerned except flesh forcing flesh. And he knew that as a muscular, intensely sexed male, he would eventually dominate any girl. No matter how she might resist him, she finally had to accept his rape. Then Ricardo slowly demolished her, both spiritually and morally. Finally they came to open their legs for Ricardo, or for Joaquin Mendosa, the driver, with almost the same automatic movement of the hips they showed a paying customer. Between them, Ricardo and Joaquin had taught close to four thousand young whores their business, over the twelve years that the Hotel Molinos had been operating.

Nor had either man lost his interest and pleasure in his work. Quite the reverse. Each would take a virginal Mexican girl of sixteen or younger, and quite brutally force her to indulge in fiercer and fiercer sexual sports. The sadistic side appealed to them, and both men had killed some of the girls over the years. They had also disposed of older whores or those too diseased or in trouble to make money for the three sisters. The work suited Ricardo perfectly, and he and Joaquin had a way of competing with each other on the girls to show their sexual skills.

"I will do--do--everything you say!" Anita stared straight up at the low sweep of the roof. She was praying he would not resume twisting her nipple. Ever since her last abortion, the whole of Anita's twenty-year-old body had been intensely sensitive. This had made whoring an agony for the girl. It seemed that Ricardo realized this, the way he handled her, and took her for the long pleasuring that he loved.

"Tonight, later, I come to you again. Meanwhile, muchacha, you go and make money, or else--it's the farm for you, and the bed waiting out there!"

Ricardo released her and pushed her from the table the moment the straps were loosened. His hands were slim and moved with the natural swiftness of a knife-thrower.

Anita Torres know she had to smile, even though her whole bare body was tingling with shame. In a quick move she drew her torn blouse together and hid her proud taut breasts.

"Yes, if you like, Ricardo," she nodded.

"We will practice on you a few more nights," Ricardo sighed. "There seem to be fewer and fewer new girls for me to train up. I must keep my skills going for when Madam Delfina gets a new girl to break in!" He smiled thinly. "You aren't pregnant again, are you, Anita?"

Anita blanched and almost fell down. "No! No--it will never happen again!" she swore.

"Good--you were lucky to survive my knife the last time! I hope that scraping taught you a lesson?"

Anita fled out of the darker side of the kitchen. She paused to adjust her dress. Her body felt hot and prickling from the fingerwork of the expert Ricardo.

Ricardo swung about and slowly took a cigarette, lit it and looked after the departing girl.

He was a very good-looking male. His mouth was wide, and he possessed a very good-natured smile. His nose had that aquiline curve which was an immediate mark of distinction and gave him a slightly haughty appearance. Rich, large brown eyes gave him a soulful air, as he rested and smoked. No stranger would guess he was the whorehouse terror and the killer of many a young girl.

There was within Ricardo a curiously carefree streak. He had been an officer in the Mexican army, once, but during a drunken quarrel he had knifed a fellow officer, and then fought others. He had always been wild and free with women, and once he encountered the Sanchez sisters, particularly Delfina, Ricardo knew where his fortune lay.

Apart from training the eleven-to-sixteen-year-old girls up into full professional whores, Ricardo was also entrusted with the money earned. Each girl had to give this master-pimp her evening's take, promptly. God help her if she were short, or tried to cheat in any way. Yet Ricardo insisted on being fair. The girls had half of their take put into a savings bank for them. The three sisters had their shares banked in many countries of the world.

So Ricardo was trusted by the three sisters, and had to be trusted by all of the girls in the Sanchez whorehouses. Their bodies he abused, their money he treated with a respect bordering on religious fervor. For Ricardo Herrera went to church early every Sunday morning and made a full confession. Quite what he told the priest was never known, of course, but as Ricardo had certain euphemistic phrases concerning his handling of the girls, it could be that the priest never knew the horrid truth.

For example, Ricardo might say: "My pet, you need a rest and some fresh air."

To the girl, this meant going out to the Sanchez ranch, where she would suffer torture and be fastened upon the dreaded special bed, the Cama Real, the "Royal Bed"-- which was a barbed wire rack that cut and killed.

"You need a little medical help," Ricardo might murmur to a pregnant whore. Then he would produce his long knife, which he used to perform an abortion in the most unsanitary way imaginable.

Many of these quietly spoken phrases meant death for the girl hearing them. But they were often said with a sad smile. It was as if there were no helping it, the Fates had decreed that it had to be. And the girls were filled with this complete, utter helplessness against him.

Ricardo Herrera had no living enemies. He terrorized the girls into such a state that they ceased to hate him. He was part of them, of their bodies and of their lives, and in time, he might well be the cause of their deaths. There was no hatred here. Just a frozen terror the moment Ricardo appeared.

Discipline in the three sisters' whorehouses was absolute.

"So--Delfina wishes to know why the screaming." Joaquin Mendosa glanced about the kitchen with a faint look of disappointment on his fleshy face.

"Ah, it was that Anita Torres! With her we shall have much trouble, that I know. She was never a good whore at heart." Ricardo took some Bacardi from a bottle and swallowed it neatly.

"I think she is a good whore. Some men like a girl who half refuses herself part of the time. She has her following," Joaquin smirked. He had used Anita many a time after Ricardo had finished with her. So in a way, he felt he was expert at taking the sexual bruises out of her. "She is a stubborn one. So--where is she now?" Joaquin inquired.

"Gone back to her room. I think she is cheating on us. God help her if I catch her at it! It will be the rancho for her."

"That rancho ruins too many of them. The sisters are all complaining that they are short of girls now. I think they are too rough out at the rancho. We have lost too many of our little girls out there." Joaquin picked up the tequila bottle and sniffed it. He took a sip.

Ricardo laughed.

"Why do you laugh, Ricardo?" Joaquin asked.

"Well, you are the man with the heavy hands. I think you have put away more girls than I have broken in." Ricardo looked at the fleshy giant.

"No... me? I treat them all like--like my own sisters--the lousy bitches! I like them to love me, and it really hurts me to have to kill them when they get sick or naughty and swollen up. We never seem to have the right kind of girl here, like we used to. Remember when we would sell them twenty, twenty-five at a time to Tijuana? They were great, those girls! Today, so many of them have wrong ideas in their silly little heads. The good whores are all gone. And do you know who I blame? I blame the schools for this!"

Ricardo rested back and folded his arms as he listened to Joaquin explain about the girls, between stiff doses of tequila.

Joaquin was an ex-wrestler, and also ex-army; he was an old sergeant, with a ferocious temper and the bedroom manners of a boar in heat. He always followed Ricardo onto a girl's body. If the girl had thought sex with Ricardo a violent rape, when Joaquin took her she screamed twice as loudly.

There was one streak of lingering jealousy within the very thickset Joaquin. He knew Ricardo had taken one of their employers, the famous Teresa Sanchez. But Teresa had never allowed Joaquin to so much as see her performing, let alone have sex with her. It was a point of festering jealousy with Joaquin. Neither he nor the Fat Man, who ruled out at the rancho, had ever touched Teresa. Both of them hungered for her in a deep, hopeless way.

Thus Ricardo Herrera not only had control over money matters, he also had a certain bland smugness concerning Teresa. In this manner, he showed himself to be the most important male in the whole of the enterprise.

"I bet no one works her body as well as Teresa does." Joaquin licked his fleshy lips and stared at Ricardo as he voiced this often repeated half-question.

"No, I suppose there aren't many girls as good as her." In an almost standard reply, Ricardo smiled slyly and lit a fresh cigarette.

"Teresa is full and ripe, with such a gorgeous body, and more sense to her. I bet she is a feast for any man willing to pay her price.

"Yes, she is a feast. But she is better when she does it for fun--then she is wonderful." Ricardo loved teasing the fat, gross lecher Joaquin this way.

"If I had two hundred pesos, I would buy her for the night and I would do it all night--she would see what a real man is like!" Joaquin quivered as he thought of Teresa's buxom body.

In truth, it was not the woman or her body that gave him and Fat Man such a craving to possess Teresa. It was the fact that she was one of the three sisters, and the youngest.

"Rich people can always buy the best," Joaquin grunted.

"Teresa is good that way--to those she likes."

"Well, I have never asked her, so I wouldn't know." Joaquin banged down the empty tequila bottle and swore.

"She is good," Ricardo nodded, but he was thinking of all the eleven-year-old girls, with their delicious young bodies he had plundered. Teresa was leathery now, and stiff in the waist.

"Senora Delfina was shrieking that we need more girls. Yes, it is true--where have all the little girls gone? Have they been swallowed up by the houses in Tijuana and Mexico City? I don't understand why we aren't getting plenty of those little whores like we used to."

"They've gotten too mean to advertise regularly. That's why. There are lots and lots of girls willing to come here and be trained. But see--they only put one advertisement out in six months. It's not enough, I tell them, but all Senora Delfina does is shriek about the money! So, instead, we sit around on our asses with fewer and fewer girls to break in!"

"Must be ten girls in the pits out at the rancho, ones with big bellies, and troubles-naughty girls those. They are such a waste! You would think a woman would not be so stupid-and yet these shits don't know how to take care of themselves! I ask you, even a goat knows how to wash out!" Joaquin glanced about. "Anyway, there is no more screaming, so that is that. Maybe we should go up and put this Anita to some good exercises on us?" He squinted eagerly at Ricardo as he suggested this sexual competition.

"No, not now, later. I must go up and see what they are going to do about getting more girls. You had best get down to the bus station and see if there are any little muchachas asking for the Hotel Molinos."

"Haven't been all week." Joaquin rubbed his chin. "Yes, later I go and settle with Anita. Time she learned that all that screaming does not pay." Joaquin grunted and spat.

There was a tap on the kitchen door and a girl, Melinda Castro, came sliding into the kitchen. She shivered and rubbed her needle-marked arm.

"He's looking for you, Ricardo." Melinda's low voice was as harsh as the croaking of a raven.

"Who is looking for me, Melinda?" Ricardo smiled. He was estimating how much longer Melinda would be able to earn her keep here. A few days maybe, not much more. The girl was doped again, and she shivered so that a man could hardly have sex with her without fear of catching her "malaria."

"The police-it's that Sergeant Lopez. He has a spider climbing out of his eye." Melinda giggled.

"A real one, or one you imagined?" Ricardo laughed.

"It is one I would like to see. Lopez is a bad man. He is the one who makes my heroin cost so much!"

"You take too much of the white powder. I shall have a word with you later, Melinda," Ricardo said softly as he went across the kitchen to meet the police sergeant outside. "We must get together."

"What for?" Melinda frowned, then giggled. "Oh, I shall make you all happy, as usual." She laughed, but a cloud of worry had entered her eyes. It was as if her dope-crazed mind had somehow picked up Ricardo's decision about her.

"I wonder why there are these giant yellow flowers in here. Are they real? Perhaps no one else sees them." Melinda spoke to herself as she walked slowly across the kitchen. "They plan to kill me-after all the money I have earned for them! I can hear their minds saying so, they plan to kill me! Then these great yellow flowers will grow over me, desert flowers, out of the dry soil where I am buried."

Sitting down, Melinda giggled senselessly to herself. Slowly she began rubbing her arm, working out the shot she had just gotten from the needle, moving it so it made her quiver and shake more and more.

"This is all there is," Melinda whispered alone to herself. "It's all that's left, for anyone, really... " Sergeant of Police Manuel Lopez had a worried look. This was nothing very new. Sergeant Lopez always had a worried look. His small eyes seemed to be peering down the sides of his huge nose as if trying to locate the drooping ends of his vast Mexican official mustache. Sergeant Lopez fancied himself another Zapata, so he adopted many Zapata poses--or at least, poses used by Marlon Brando when playing that role. This resulted in Sergeant Lopez looking like a slightly idiotic, cross-eyed Dalmatian dog. Or else it suggested he was a most obviously crooked cop which indeed he was.

"You must understand, senor Lieutenant Ricardo, my good friend, I am a most sensitive man--a very sensitive man-and also, I need other things which a man has to have." As Sergeant Lopez was whining this out, his black front tooth made him whistle his sibilants loudly. He stopped and flushed. He was staring past Ricardo, at someone else, down by the drab entrance to the Hotel Molinos.

Ricardo was considering cutting Sergeant Lopez off short with a firm "No more dinero." For like many of the petty officials, Sergeant Lopez was in the pay of the Sanchez sisters. He protected the brothel and girl-procuring operations very neatly from official prying. Now Ricardo glanced about to see what so fascinated Sergeant Lopez.

"Hello, Manuel!" came the throaty cry of the young whore's greeting. It was Alicia Cordone.

"Greetings, Alicia!" Lopez was so excited, a drop of spittle flowed down to the point of his chin. The ends of his drooping mustache seemed to be electrified all of a sudden.

"Alicia, are you friendly with the Sergeant here?" Ricardo asked in his quiet, deadly voice. But he did not scare Alicia Cordone, not in the slightest.

Of all the girls taken and trained to be whores by the vast, twelve-year-long Sanchez operation, Alicia was a natural. She had sexually exhausted both Ricardo Herrera and Joaquin Mendosa at her initiation rape. She had pumped both men dry and aching. Then, at that time aged thirteen, Alicia had asked for another man! Her love of whoring had made her a great, instant success. There was no other girl in either of the two houses owned by the Sanchez sisters, nor out at the farm, who came near to Alicia in love or capacity for this kind of work.

"You come to see me again, lover?" Alicia slid past the amused Ricardo, and slowly ran her hand across the front of the police sergeant's trousers.

Her fingers had an electric effect, not only on Sergeant Lopez's body, but also on his mind. For the policeman had come to put a cash squeeze on the Sanchez sisters. Each month, his services became more and more expensive. One day, when he asked too much he would have to be disposed of. He would not be the first police officer to lie in the vast common grave that was called the Sanchez rancho. But for now, the touch of Alicia's seventeen-year-old, uninnocent fingers completely obliterated all thoughts of money from the sergeant's mind.

"Ooooh, Alicia!" Manuel Lopez felt himself aching to be naked and with her.

"Entertain our good friend the sergeant, and I shall let you off early tomorrow," Ricardo instructed the keen young girl.

"I don't want to be off early, at all," Alicia told him. "But Manuel here is a good lover-I feel like it today."

"And every day, pet!" Ricardo chuckled.

"And every night," Alicia whispered to him.

"How hot can you be?" Ricardo snickered.

"Oh, oh, Mother of God!" Sergeant Lopez had his eyes closed and was almost falling over Alicia as she stroked him. His face was quivering like a bird dog having a goose-dream.

"Come along!" Alicia commanded the sergeant completely. She was hot, and gave Ricardo a smile. "I shall make him happy for you, Ricardo. He will not be able to go anywhere else, once I have drained away all his energies."

"Good, that is very good," Ricardo nodded his fullest approval. "Take his tip, but do not charge him."

Like a sex-enslaved somnambulist, Sergeant Lopez was led across the dingy lobby of the Hotel Molinos. He vanished into one of the many small bedrooms off the main hall.

From the bar, which was next to the lobby, came a shriek of laughter. Obviously a girl had gotten herself drunk. This was strictly against the house rules.

Ricardo frowned suddenly. His moods came and went with incredible speed. One minute he could be cooing and soft, like a dove or a lover. The next moment his voice would be low and menacing, with the deadly knife in his hand ready to strike. In a flash of anger, Ricardo swept off to see what was going on in the whorehouse bar.

* * *

Alicia Cordone had a noisy bed in her small room which happened to be right beneath the room where the three Sanchez sisters were having their weekly business meeting.

"Take your clothes off, my brave policeman! Have you arrested any rough, wild criminals lately?" Alicia whipped open the buttons down the front of her dress.

Sergeant Lopez sat down and tugged off his shirt. He was panting. The smell of the whorehouse was strong in this small room. A daytime session with a hot girl like Alicia could be enough to melt a lusty man's courage to nothing. But Sergeant Lopez was panting with eagerness. The tangy whorehouse scent of human sweat, excitement and talcum powder, all mixed up into a special Hotel Molinos perfume, was enough to make Lopez go almost berserk for a woman.

"Well, well, you are ready, aren't you!" Alicia giggled as she stepped up to the naked sergeant and placed her great melon breasts on each cheek, working his face into her powdered skin until her nipples seemed to be rolling over his closed eyes, pressing against his straining eyeballs.

"Madre Dios! Oooooh, si-si-sir Sergeant Lopez swung the young whore round and launched himself into her naked body the moment she lay down on the ruffled, stained sheets.

* * *

"Aaahh-aaahh-aaaah!" The crooning note of Alicia enjoying a customer came clearly into the room above, where the three sisters still sat. They were still discussing the girl shortage. The noise of Alicia Cordone and her lover, the naked Sergeant Lopez, came complete with orchestration of the bed springs.

"Listen-that is Alicia!" Teresa flushed and her body warmed to feel that one of her girls was giving so enthusiastically. "There's one who really puts her heart into the business!" Teresa gave a harsh chuckle that suggested how excited the sounds made her. .

"Especially her body! The fool will wear herself out before she is nineteen, then we shall have to sell her to Tijuana, instead of having her earning money for us here!" Delfina rarely saw the positive side of either a person or a situation.

"Yes, she will wear her body loose, and get pregnant, then Fat Man will bury her at the rancho one day," Consuela murmured idly, as if the ideas were flying round and round in her head without control and just shot out of her mouth in a most irresponsible manner.

Thwack! The cane hit Consuela on her kneecap. The aging woman gave a gurgling shriek and half-fell off her chair as she grabbed the agonized part of her leg-.

"Shut up speaking about the rancho in that way, you evil fool!" Delfina whipped the stick straight across her older sister's back in a wicked stroke.

"Ahh! My-God!" Consuela fell over onto the floor. She held her hands about her head. In mortal terror of her sister, Consuela seemed to be paralyzed. Like a gaping gargoyle in black, with her round, gray face mouthing in agony, she lay staring up. Her whore's training still made her lie on her back with her legs up and apart. Delfina twitched with rage and threatened to land the stick across Consuela's crotch.

"No! No-you are mad, beating your own sister like this!" Teresa snapped out sharply.

"I am doing it for her own good! Consuela must learn to keep her mouth shut about what goes on at the ranch!"

"I promise. I promise!" wailed the defeated older sister. It was not that Delfina had struck Consuela so very hard. But there was a certain vicious savagery about Delfina's movements that seemed to increase the effect of the blows. Even the fury of her attack held that insane note-it was savage without sense, savage without being sharp, nor simply defined. In many things, like this beating of Consuela, her own sister, Delfina seemed to vent some blind rage that added this note of screaming insanity to it all.

The noise from the small room beneath was slowly increasing as Alicia and Lopez were coming to an ecstatic, orgasmic climax together. The creaking of the ancient bedsprings sounded like a shivering metallic sobbing.

"She is enjoying it too much!" Teresa swore. "Listen to her take that man! I've never known a girl to go with every man, every time, the way Alicia does."

"Oh, she will last a while, then we shall sell her to the Turk, for Tijuana or wherever he wishes." Delfina was rarely able to think or plan far ahead. She liked to live in an intense, traumatic present moment-all the time. There were moods in Delfina when a minute might seem an hour. Yet also, in some states of her diseased brain, she could dismiss three months as a few seconds. As long as there was this dangerous, swinging moodiness in Delfina, nothing made sense in their enterprises, nor in the immense sufferings they brought to others.

"I shall know what to do with her, once she is of no more use to us." Delfina glowered as her older sister got slowly up from the floor.

Consuela and Delfina habitually wore black. On some occasions they wore white lace collars. On working visits, they tended to wear older dresses, patched and repaired, but clean.

Teresa liked colored dresses, prints and gaudy styles. The two older women sniffed with disapproval over much of Teresa's behavior. But they both recognized enough of themselves within their younger sister to tolerate it to some degree. Teresa, when she was aroused, was a match even for the maniacal Delfina. So a peace of sorts prevailed among them.

"I think Alicia earns her money, and should be treated with all consideration," Teresa informed Delfina defiantly.

"Very well, she's one of your girls now, so you pay her half her money, and see what rudeness you get back!" Delfina was not in the mood to argue. She banged her fist down on the table.

"We need more girls! That is why we have come together to talk, not to argue, or to listen to Alicia Cordone enjoying another one of her lovers!" Delfina set down the advertisement. "Good, we shall put this in forty newspapers, and pay to have it run three times in one month. That is agreed! Also, the Turk will have to delay his coming to look over the new girls for at least a month.

"We have a bad lot of girls at the rancho, a really bad lot. They should have been trained and ready for work by now. Never have I seen such a lot of rubbish! Anyway, the Turk will want to buy many girls, so we must have them ready for him when he comes. Any silly girls you wish to be rid of, Teresa, and you, Consuela, put their names on the list, and we shall sell them off to the Turk. That idiot, he takes anything!"

"He pays little enough," Teresa frowned. "I suggest either he pays one hundred for each girl from now on, or we tell him to take his trade elsewhere. There is nowhere else in Mexico he can get such active girls."

"Leave it to me! I know how to drive a bargain with the Turk." Delfina slowly picked up her huge black handbag. She was feeling better, and the noise from the room beneath had diminished. Alicia Cordone had taken her lover to a sweating hot climax, and now they both lay wet and exhausted on the ruffled bed.

"How much money did we make last month, Delfina?" Teresa quietly asked her pointed question.

"How much money?" Delfina's cold eyes narrowed. The mention of money always seemed to throw her into an almost psychotic state. Her sisters were never sure if Delfina was or was not cheating them, all the time. For Delfina was the only person who got the money from the master pimps, Ricardo Herrera or Joaquin Mendosa.

"Yes, and are we putting it into the foreign accounts-- as we agreed to do a year ago?" Teresa demanded.

"Yes, yes, that is being done." Delfina felt her sisters had no right to question her like this. She was doing all the work. She was running the whole thing! Yet here they were demanding to know about the money. Delfina managed to control her rage.

"We shall all do very well, you will see, you will see." Delfina grasped her black handbag and glanced around. "It is time we went. I want to visit the rancho, to see what is being done about those stubborn girls out there. Is Ricardo or Joaquin here? I want one of them to drive us out there."

"I shall ask." Teresa smiled. The mention of Ricardo made her already excited body tingle. He was a lusty brute of a lover, too used to raping virgins to ever treat any woman gently. As she thought of his loving, Teresa seemed to melt like wet jello deep down inside. Ricardo was too much, even for this whorehouse madam!

Delfina sat stiffly staring out at the brilliant white sunlight of the day. The town was hot and dusty. Many times Delfina had wondered to herself why they still stayed here, in the desolate and poverty-stricken back country, nowhere near the comforts of Mexico City, out in a land of peasants.

"I love it here, that is why," Delfina murmured, answering her own unspoken question. "And we do good for the little ones--they need us here, to lead them to a better life than they would ever know on those terrible farms!"

Consuela did not reply. The oldest sister was weary and exhausted, not enough fire left within her to harbor anger, wrath, or even much thought. She managed to nod her agreement.

* * *

In the small room next to the active Alicia Cordone's cubicle were two girls. A drab blanket-screen was drawn between their beds when they were working--unless the customers of these two girls felt like an orgy, in which case the blanket was pulled to one side.

Melinda the dope addict shared the room with young Juanita Rojas. The idea had been to put Juanita with the older addict so as to make the younger girl feel as helpless as possible.

Juanita had jet-black hair and a very white skin. Before she had been broken in at the Sanchez rancho, she had indeed been as beautiful as a red rose on a summer's evening. But by now, Juanita had had three years of men paying her for the use of her body, and she had been unable to prevent herself from becoming a whore in manners and speech.

But within this girl burned a terrible fire. Juanita Rojas had been meant for the convent. She was preparing herself to be a nun when she was thirteen, and had gone on a visit to a famous shrine in Guadalajara. It was on this visit that her father had died, leaving the girl stranded and penniless.

In the course of a few days, Juanita Rojas was swept into the gathering net of the infamous Sanchez sisters. Instead of going to a convent, she was packed off to the Sanchez "training" ranch. From there she finally came to rest here in the whorehouse of the Hotel Molinos.

The shock of her physical rape, and of her continued compulsory whoring, had overwhelmed Juanita almost completely. She offered to the world a rather simple, white-faced expression of acceptance. But within her was an ever-increasing rage at the debasing of her own body and life.

"You will be serving men as well as you would have served God," was the bland counsel Delfina Sanchez had given the severely disturbed young girl every time she had protested about her faith. "And think of the good you are bringing!" Delfina had seemed to wander off into a spiritual dream that no amount of tears or cries could penetrate.

"They all have a good excuse for not lying on their backs. All they want is the money," had usually been Consuela's harsh comment when such matters came to her notice.

Teresa simply pointed out that it was a trifle late for an experienced young whore to turn novice. And anyway, Teresa was the last person in the world to understand any girl ever wishing to embrace such an abstract love as religion.

While Alicia Cordone had been making hot love and money from her session with Sergeant Lopez, each and every sound of that enthusiastic copulation had reverberated through the room where Juanita Rojas sat.

Juanita was holding her rosary. It was so long since the girl had been to church or to confession, she felt simply steeped in carnal sin. So she worked through the beads as the rhythmic sobs of joy came from Alicia next door.

"That hot bitch is with another!" Melinda came darting into their room. She paused and shivered, staring thoughtfully at the way Juanita was holding the rosary beads. "You never want to let them find you with those! They will send you back to the rancho for more training! The three bitches are upstairs. I just managed to escape through some yellow flowers. Ricardo was after me. In the kitchen he was, in the kitchen."

Melinda sat down on her army cot bed and shivered again. She worked up her pock-marked arm steadily, but seemed to have already lost the lift from the shot she had taken less than an hour ago.

"It costs so much! I'm sure he charges me more than I would have to pay outside. I never have any money no matter how many men I take. I never have any money! I can't borrow any more from you, Juanita, so I must think of some way out."

Melinda lay back and rested with her head on a gray pillow. She bit into her knuckles as she huddled down, thoughtful and yet still on a faint high from the heroin of the morning.

"Golden flowers will grow out of my grave, but I do not know their name. I can see them, and the way a small humming bird comes to my flowers and seeks honey, light and sweet. It is all hot and golden. So death is not such a terrible thing. Not after this life we have had." Suddenly Melinda giggled in a shaking, odd fashion that made Juanita stare at her.

"Are you well enough, today?" Juanita asked.

"Yes, yes! It was bad, the stuff I had earlier, that is why I keep seeing these great golden flowers. When it's good, then I see blue skies, and I'm drifting away, away, so smoothly. This, this bums in me. I think Ricardo does not get me the straight stuff, but I am too frightened not to take what he gets. It's better than nothing. It is, yes, yes!" Melinda's wizened face broke into a quick series of jerky smiles. "It makes life good. It does make life very good!"

"I was wondering what life is like... " Juanita said morosely. "I was sitting at the window looking out at the square and wondering if we are in this hell because of our sins."

"Oh, you are on God again! God didn't make us into whores, it was those three devils upstairs, those evil sisters Delfina, Consuela, and Teresa, they are the ones who made us into this! It is not our fault, nor is it anything that God wished." Melinda spoke jerkily, while her face twisted into spasms of reaction against the inferior heroin.

"I wonder! I think God must know. He must know. But can he forgive us for accepting, and being like animals, and doing the things they insist we do? I do not know. Maybe in his heart he will forgive us. But I cannot find it in my heart to forgive myself, nor to forgive the Sanchez sisters for what they have done to me."

"You think too much! You must--must accept what life gives you. It is good--when it is pure, it is good and smooth and brightens everything."

"You are speaking of the drugs you use." Juanita could not help addressing Melinda with a note of faint contempt in her voice. For the seventeen-year-old Juanita had been most careful never to get addicted to anything.

"I speak of life." Melinda lay stiff on her army blanket and clasped her hands tightly together. There was sweat from the shock of the rough dope working its way through her. Her forehead gleamed wetly from the strain and the sweat. She was quivering and yet her mouth was firmly closed. Melinda would be like this for at least an hour.

Thoughtfully, Juanita turned and placed a blanket over Melinda's quivering shape. She mopped the older girl's forehead. Then she sat on the side of the bed and took one of Melinda's quivering hands.

"I am sorry, Melinda. I am very sorry we are like this. I think I do have to agree with you. We were turned into--this--through no fault of our own," Juanita sighed. "But I cannot stand it! I just cannot stand it! It is almost impossible to go on living like this. But to kill oneself, that is a sin that one takes to the other world with one--and for that there is no forgiveness at all.

"So one has to put up with this life, bad and evil as it is--for one cannot kill oneself. No matter how much one wishes to do so, one must remain alive, and accept all this degradation, all this suffering."

Melinda was shivering so violently by now, she could not hear what Juanita was saying to her.

In the room next door to these two pathetic figures, Alicia Cordone was feeling better. She still had her plump legs locked about the resting figure of the naked Sergeant Lopez. But he was beginning to show a revitalizing of energy. His body was beginning to force itself back and make Alicia shiver and sigh.

"There--there--good, this I like very much! It's so good, yes, yes! Oh--what a man! What a man you are--a man indeed! Oh, my goodness me--a real man!" Alicia giggled and worked her wide hips round and round the sergeant's loins, as if to devour his excited member with her own body. "You are so big and strong!"

"God, you are good! You are the wildest woman of them all. I have never known such a wild creature!" Lopez was pinned on his side by the young whore's enthusiasm for his body. Sweat was pouring down his back and over his chest. For she had made him excited again, and Lopez was certain her body could not be satisfied.

But he would try--if it took him the rest of the day and all of the night, he would try.

"Yes, we go well together," Lopez laughed. "We shall go well together for as long as we can!"

"That's good! I like you, policeman, you make me feel so safe and secure!" Alicia giggled happily and locked her legs about him, twisting her feet together behind his naked buttocks so there was no chance of him slipping out of her.

Now that Alicia and Sergeant Lopez were busy once again, the noises in the Hotel Molinos were back on the increase.

In the bar, Ricardo Herrera was waiting his chance to drag Lupe Huerta away from a male drinker. The money she was making her man-friend spend on booze, she should make him spend on her body. The whores copulated at no cost at all to the house, while even the rough tequila Lupe and her man were guzzling did cost a few centavos per bottle.

The cactus juice was about the fiercest of its kind, so Ricardo could not see either Lupe nor her male lasting very long-perhaps half a bottle. Then, when her male friend was drunk enough to have his pockets picked and be thrown out of the Hotel Molinos, Ricardo would slap Lupe about some, to let her know the hotel rules were not made to be ignored.

Lupe Huerta drank the peppery tequila half a glass at a time. As long as this hot twenty-year-old whore had tequila, she did not care about anything or anyone. Like Melinda with her heroin, or like Juanita with her religion, Lupe Huerta had her bottle to keep her from facing reality. Not even the terror of what Ricardo would do to her later tonight could stop Lupe from drinking.

"Psst-Ricardo, I am on my way down to the bus station--there might be another chick coming in on the bus--who knows?" Joaquin paused to look into the barroom of the hotel and to whisper to his boss.

"Could be-a new girl would be a change." Ricardo yawned and rubbed his chin. He felt like slapping someone around, and at the moment, the next person on his list was going to be this drunken bitch Lupe Huerta. "See if you can find me a sixteen-year-old beauty to break in-good and pretty, you know."

Joaquin chuckled in reply. "I shall do my best, Ricardo! I could do with a fresh piece to exercise over too, you know."

"Don't be too long, Joaquin." Ricardo spoke softly, with his usual deadly smile. "Those three Sanchez bitches up there are likely to start fighting among themselves at any moment now. Then they will want to be driven off some place, so you be around as soon as the bus has emptied out, girl or no girl." Ricardo tapped his foot thoughtfully.

He stared down at the floor, wondering why the board was loose beneath his boot. Then he remembered. A girl had died and been buried down there, under the bar. That was a year ago. He had forgotten it. The girl had been rather pretty and used her body well, when she first came to the Hotel Molinos. Why she had been killed, Ricardo could not remember at all. But he did recall the trouble they had gone to, to dig her a grave down there under the floorboards of the bar.

There had been a couple other whores buried there, too. Yes, quite a little graveyard there was, under the flooring of this very small barroom. Ricardo laughed to himself, then looked up to watch Lupe drinking away, almost blindly, glass after glass.

He held his mouth to giggle as he thought of the trouble they had had with the bodies, getting them under the boards and into the dry hard earth...

"What is so funny, my pet Ricardo?" a throaty voice asked him.

"Ahh, Teresa, my pretty one, they are ready to leave?" he did not even turn his head to look at her. But his hand came out and touched her body, feeling it stiffen, then press against him.

"No, not now, Ricardo. They wish to go to the rancho. Later perhaps. I was listening to Alicia enjoy herself, and it excited me." Teresa had the same gravelly Sanchez voice as Delfina, but in Teresa it was slightly softer. Her hand slowly came to rest on Ricardo's body. It was not a touching hand, but a demanding hand.

Ricardo glanced down and nodded. "Alicia is pleasing the police sergeant--Lopez is going to be trouble for us soon. But at the moment, it is cheaper to let Alicia take care of him."

"Yes, I understand, she enjoys her work." Teresa had a puckered smile at the corners of her mouth as she said this.

"I can attend to this drunken bitch later." Ricardo reached out an arm and drew Teresa close against him. "First, we have things to look after, eh, Teresa Sanchez?"

"Yes--I suppose we do, Ricardo Herrera." Teresa was staring at him hungrily, fighting her desire, then giving up. Her tongue licked her lips like a svelte tigress contemplating a fat feast.

* * *

Outside the back of the kitchen, the tortillas were being made ready for the evening meal. Here at the Hotel Molinos, all the girls were working whores, and were comparatively well fed. The starvation hole and the terrible food of the Sanchez Rancho were threats that were constantly brought to bear on all the girls of the Sanchez establishments.

But here, the cook was beating out, then rolling the chapatis, and the meat, onions, chili and sauces were all being prepared. For the house made good money. The food was not superlative, but it was eatable, and the young whores never seemed to get enough of it.

The stillness of the day was passing. Soon it would be evening and then, after the evening meal, the Hotel Molinos could expect to be busy.

For there were a certain number of men who came most evenings. The services of the Sanchez girls were so cheap, hardly a visiting peasant but could afford a few pesos and take his pick of the twenty very young whores at the hotel.

There was always some fun there, as well as the young girls to enjoy--and tequila to be drunk, if one were of a mind not to bother with one of the whores. It all cost about the same, and was money well spent.

However, at this moment, the only girl working on her back was the enthusiastic Alicia Cordone. She had managed to get Sergeant Lopez back into action again. The hot talc-and-sweat scent, the whorehouse perfume odor, quivered with the wild cries of Alicia having fun on this hot afternoon.

CHAPTER TWO - WHAT TO DO WITH A VIRGIN

A great shyness came over Maria Alverez. It seemed to descend the moment she stepped neatly off the bus. She was at the bus station on the corner of La Plaza de San. Francisco del Rincon. In all of her sixteen years of country life, never before had Maria encountered such a frenzied scene.

"Hurry, hurry, who will buy my good Guadalajara chickens?"

"Look at these watermelons! I ask you, senorita, did you ever see such magnificent watermelons in all your life?"

"A shawl, a beautiful girl like you needs a shawl! A shawl good for a young Madonna like you--they are the finest craftsmanship in all Mexico!"

"These pots are hand-turned. They are the pride of our potters. There are no more wonderful pots in the world then these. I ask you--look at them--do you not have to buy them when you look at them?"

A great deluge of market activity flowed about the bus as the passengers debarked.

It was an exciting new world to Maria. She stared at the many streets and at the magnificent church across the plaza. The bell was chiming slowly from the ornately carved steeple as the merchants swirled busily below.

The frantic activity about her astonished Maria Alverez. It was all so different from her own home village. So much larger; so much more produce. The people of this town must be very wealthy indeed. Perhaps they all had maids working in the fine houses. Marians heart gave a tremendous leap within her. She was bewildered, but so excited! She was sure she had been right. To come here to San Francisco del Rincon to find work had been the wisest step of her young life.

Her great brown eyes were glistening with excitement. The oval shape of her face seemed to be accentuated by the size of her eyes and the way she pulled the kerchief tied about her hair down more tightly. Maria laughed and glanced at each stall she came to, walking along with her old suitcase in one hand, smiling easily.

Where was she going? This question immediately made her stop and look about her. The Hotel Molinos, that was the name the advertisement had given. Surely it could not be far from the main plaza of the town. But San Francisco del Rincon was, after all, something of a provincial capital. Perhaps there were several other squares as big as this.

Maria bowed her head in thought. She was thinking like a country girl--thinking like a silly girl. She nodded to herself. She would have to learn the city as quickly as possible. There might be a dozen fine squares such as this. But now she would have to ask someone the whereabouts of the Hotel Molinos.

Her classical Mexican beauty caused many youths to glance at her. Hers was the typical dark-eyed, sheer simplicity of beauty that comes from the land but rarely. Eyes wide as a baby's, small hands clinging to the battered suitcase containing her treasures from home, Maria Alverez was sufficiently different to stand out as a total stranger, here in San Francisco del Rincon.

The cold eyes of Joaquin Mendosa were watching Maria. He peered at her as she wandered with a crowd of women down one of the lanes of the marketplace. Joaquin wished to make very certain the girl was entirely alone. He had watched her ever since the steaming old bus had screeched to a halt. Of all the passengers to get off with their chickens, goats, melons, and assorted belongings, this young girl was the one who instantly fascinated Joaquin Mendosa, the brutal pimp.

"They all come this way at first, to taste my. thrills," Joaquin grinned and muttered to himself. "Tonight we shall have her. Tonight we shall have our sport!"

He slowly matched her pace. Only ten or so people were walking behind the bewildered Maria, but the girl was not used to even that many. Never before had she seen such a busy spot, with such an endless array of items being bought, sold, argued over, weighed, wrapped and carried away. This was the bartering center of the world, the sixteen-year-old farm girl was quite certain. And somewhere among all of these, there would be a person who could help her find the Hotel Molinos.

Maria was elated to have entered such an exciting new world. Of course she had been to many markets with her father, her mother, and half a dozen brothers or sisters, all in a swirling group of Alverezes. But now she was on her own. Alone in this dizzy world, anything could happen. It was wonderful to be alive!

Right behind her, Joaquin Mendosa was wondering how good her legs might be. He always liked a girl with shapely legs, sound legs that could lock about a man's waist and pump hotly. A man could almost tell how good a girl would be by the shape of her legs. Joaquin licked his lips and kept close behind.

Maria came to a sudden stop. She had a terrible feeling that someone was watching her. She realized that hundreds of people were glancing at her, or even looking at her figure and face. But there was something else. A shiver ran down Maria's back as she sensed there was someone very close to her who was making her feel so wary.

Maria glanced about behind her. Then she peered down the crowded market-lane. There was a policeman standing at the top of the lane, directing some traffic past the blocked end of the street. Hastily Maria set off toward him. She was suddenly determined to stop looking about and find the Hotel Molinos as soon as possible.

Joaquin peered out from behind a pile of eggplants on a stall. This girl had such huge brown eyes! What a joy it would be to force his flesh into her and see the expression in those wonderful eyes as she felt him right inside her body! Joaquin hastened after the girl. She had to be for the Hotel Molinos!

At this moment Maria Alverez reached the policeman, and felt better. Here was someone she could ask who would surely be able to direct her to the safety of the Hotel Molinos.

Joaquin had reached his taxi where he had parked it just at the edge of the market. He leapt in, swore, and started the motor at the third attempt. Noisily the ancient cab sagged, chugged and snarled its way across the plaza.

"Senorita, if you have the address of this hotel, perhaps then I recognize it." The young policeman was staring at the rich black curls that swept past the girl's exquisite ear. This was a real beauty, and he beamed at her.

"Hey there--ho--stop molesting that wonderful girl!" It was the voice of Joaquin Mendosa as he pulled his cab in close.

"Mendosa--what do you want?" A sour look came over the young policeman's face.

"I come to take this girl to the Hotel Molinos." Joaquin came scrambling out of his battered cab.

"Her--for the Hotel Molinos?" The policeman seemed stunned.

"Yes, that's right, isn't it, senorita, you are here to get a job at the Hotel Molinos?" Joaquin grinned hopefully, making a calculated guess, showing his gold tooth that flashed in the morning sunlight.

"This is going a bit far, Mendosa!" the young policeman began to grumble.

"Tell Sergeant Lopez about it, then. Here--let me take your suitcase. A pretty young girl like you must not carry such heavy weights." Joaquin Mendosa smiled again.

Maria Alverez was feeling confused, being the center of an apparent argument between the policeman and the cabdriver. But Joaquin neatly took her suitcase and put it into the back of the cab. The girl was as good as his.

"I do want the Hotel Molinos. But I--I have to walk there. I must walk there." Maria flushed as she protested. She had a vague idea of arriving for her job without being able to pay the cab fare.

"The Hotel Molinos! They pay me--you don't have to worry about money, senorita. The hotel takes care of everything. Now--into my cab and let us go there and see about your new job."

Somehow Maria still hesitated. This big smile the cabdriver kept giving her filled her heart with uneasiness. There was something nasty, something false--it was a cruel smile. But with her suitcase in his cab, Maria apparently had no choice.

"He will take me to the Hotel Molinos?" Maria asked the policeman hesitantly.

"Yes, yes, he will do that!" The young policeman stared across the Plaza. He wondered why it was such things happened. But the hotel would take care of her, all right. He looked at Mendosa and nodded.

"In you get," Joaquin Mendosa insisted. "Into the cab and let's be off to the Hotel Molinos. It is a very busy place and we must hurry. Can't keep the Sanchez sisters waiting!"

Maria Alverez found herself neatly put into the taxicab. Joaquin Mendosa even politely shut the door of the cab for her, then came around and got into the driving seat. He glanced at her great brown-eyed beauty and smiled slowly. Maria felt uncomfortable, dreading she knew not what.

"So, we are off to the Hotel!" he announced. "I think you are going to find a great new life there, my little one!"

"I do hope so," Maria murmured.

The cab went speeding across the Plaza. Joaquin Mendosa was in a hurry to get back with his prize.

Ricardo Herrera was running his hand down Teresa Sanchez's waist. It was a duty, to make love to Teresa. Her ways were stiff, like a typical whorehouse madam. Old whores always seem to hold their bodies so rigid. Ricardo glanced up at Teresa's hungry face and smiled.

"It seems our Sergeant Lopez is getting his payoff in flesh--and enjoying it!"

He nodded his head in the direction of Alicia Cordone's room. The crooning sighs of Alicia in her love throes came clearly to where Teresa stood. With thrills working through her as she felt the sheer animalism of Ricardo Herrera, Teresa quivered and shook her head.

"Later, Ricardo. All morning we were arguing over paying for one small newspaper ad. Honestly, I wonder what petty, idiotic ideas we shall have conferences over next! My, you are a toro-- no wonder the girls appreciate being broken in by you!"

"It is labor, with those young girls. They are hard work. I like an experienced woman." Ricardo glanced up again and smiled. Teresa's hands were slowly caressing his shoulders.

"Hmm, we experienced women know how to do it!" Teresa laughed.

There was a great deal about each of the three Sanchez sisters that sometimes seemed curiously naive.

It could be the old Consuela, speaking of girls and women who had long since been sold off or buried. It might be Delfina and the insane way she rasped out about all the good they were bringing to the beautiful but poor girls of the Mexican farmlands. And now here was the youngest one, Teresa, speaking of wholesome womanly loving. Teresa was a whore of a whore, with a leathery vagina from too much disinfecting, and a thick waist from years of copulating night after night like a bed-horse. Yet Teresa still liked to act as if she were seventeen.

Yes, each of the three sisters had their blind spots to show they also lived in worlds of complete fantasy.

They did not seem to notice the male customers washing their private parts in dirty bowls of water. Nor the soiled towels and the loose way the girls grew, until the "heaviness" came and they were off to the Sanchez farm for a "rest." The three sisters seemed to see other worlds. And these other worlds just did not exist...

* * *

"Yes, you make me! You make me!" Alicia cried out in her ecstasy. "I feel the earth move! Si-sr-aaah!"

"God, Cordone--stop shouting out how good you are--he will pay you nothing!" Ricardo yelled with rage at the noisy whore in her small room nearby.

"Ricardo--Ricardo--you sound as if it is making you jealous to hear what a good time Alicia is giving Sergeant Lopez!" Teresa taunted.

Her hand ran down under the shirt Ricardo wore, but not too far. For she knew Ricardo could turn anger into lust at any given moment. And Teresa was not sure she would be able to hold out against Ricardo if he took a hard hold of her, in that savage way he had when he was intent on taking a girl all the way to glory.

"You tow!" Teresa laughed.

Ricardo glanced at the youngest of the three sisters. Teresa's face was flushed and her plump figure was quivering from the spark that Alicia Cordone's sexual excitement had ignited.

Before Ricardo could make up his mind, there was a noise on the terrace balcony. Ricardo stood up and craned to see what was going on.

"Get down and stop telling me what to do! Get down there and tell Joaquin to hurry! We are going to the rancho!" It was the voice of the terrifying Delfina who was on her way down.

"Watch out, girls, here comes the mad one!" The wild whisper was distinctly heard. Ricardo and Teresa stared at each other, then glanced about to see who had said it.

"You get hard again! Get it up again, my lover!" came the sobbing noise of Alicia, still working over her police sergeant.

"God! Doesn't that girl ever have enough?!" Teresa swore.

Meanwhile Delfina was driving the older Consuela down the stairs, shrieking at her in a raging voice that brought a terrified stillness to the whole whorehouse.

"Where is that lazy Joaquin? Sticking his meat into one of our girls, I'll bet!" Delfina was not lost for words. "He thinks himself a customer! Get him off that girl in there and tell him we are to be driven to the rancho!"

Consuela was fluttering about, trying to get out of the way of her raging sister.

"Tell him to stop making that girl enjoy it so much!" the older madam told Teresa.

"It's not Mendosa in there with Alicia, it's the police sergeant--Lopez, having his payoff in flesh!" Teresa bristled.

"Lopez-he's getting to be trouble! Always after a girl, or money. It doesn't pay to give it away like this. I feel it's about time we took Sergeant Lopez out to the rancho and gave him a rest." Delfina glowered at the whore's door. Behind it Alicia was slowly stroking the wet back of the sleeping sergeant.

"Yes, take him to the ranch." Consuela peered forward, echoing her younger sister's manner and words. "Take him there and put him to rest, buried like the other police sergeants were!"

"Shut up! Shut up, you old fool!" Delfina flew into another rage at Consuela. Her vicious swipe with her stick sent Consuela reeling off out through the kitchen and out into the backyard. She sat down and sobbed as she nursed the bruise on her side.

It was at this moment that Joaquin Mendosa arrived in the entrance hall of the Hotel Molinos, bringing with him the demure Maria Alverez.

Maria was nervous and a bit frightened. The hotel was smaller than she had expected. But it had a certain wide open atmosphere that pleased her. It also looked very busy, for there were a lot of people in the barroom, and a crowd at the bottom of the stairs. Maria flushed as everyone in the place turned to stare at her.

"It is a girl from the bus stop." Joaquin Mendosa threw down Maria's battered suitcase and stood staring at the girl. He looked like a Thanksgiving butcher watching a fresh young turkey.

"Ahh, a girl, a new girl!" Ricardo slowly stood up.

Teresa glanced at him and a flash of anger played about her lips. Ricardo had the task of breaking the new girls in to be whores. Teresa distinctly felt a quiver of jealousy run down her body.

"Now you can enjoy yourself, you animal!" Teresa murmured to Ricardo. He glanced at her with a thick-lipped smile. "She is very beautiful!"

For there was an absolute halo of purity and innocence about Maria Alverez. She seemed to bring into the dusty air of the whorehouse, this Hotel Molinos, a calm, eternal beauty. It was as if the simplicity of the old Mexican world had suddenly intruded into an evil, dark, ancient cavern of disillusion. .

"You will be saved! God has brought you here for us to save!" Delfina whispered aloud. She seemed to rise on tiptoe and glide down the hall, her great black-brown eyes staring at the pristine beauty of the young girl.

"Fate has brought you here for us to save. My poor, poor child!" Delfina swayed before Maria, as if about to fall on her knees and pray for divine help.

"I--I came about the job. It is--advertised," Maria stammered.

"Oh, don't worry about that, girl, you've got the job. You walked right into it!" Joaquin Mendosa laughed. "That is Senora Sanchez--Delfina Sanchez, who owns everything here."

Maria bowed her head and felt tongue-tied; Delfina was still staring at her.

"Is the vacancy still open?" Maria stuttered. "Senora Sanchez?"

"Yes, yes, my child. It is being held open especially for you!"

Delfina glanced around. She could see the agitated figure of Teresa standing next to Ricardo. Delfina's lips thinned. Now Ricardo would be needed for working at the rancho tonight. The quicker this new child was introduced to the ways of earning soul-saving money, the better for them all.

"Ricardo, we are going to the rancho. I am bringing three other girls with us, Anita is one--she needs the rest; also Melinda has to have a proper cure; and we will take Lupe for the medication she needs." Delfina was into her grand, godmother personality. She turned about and her gaze rested on Maria Alverez.

"My child, how pleased we are to see you! What is your name?"

"I am Maria Alverez, Senora Sanchez."

"Maria--that is a pure, godly name. Maria Alverez. Well, have you eaten yet, Maria?"

Delfina led Maria down past the doors to the single cubicles. From one, that of Alicia Cordone, came a crooning noise. Delfina thought a moment, paused, and tapped on Alicia's door.

"Alicia, my dear girl, we are going to have some hot burritos for lunch. Won't you join us?" Delfina flashed Maria a smile as they waited.

"Yes, Senorita Delfina,. I would love to," came the faint reply as Alicia wondered why on earth they were making her rise from a satiated lover.

"One of our nicest girls. She will be a real companion for you, Maria. Maria Alverez!" Delfina smiled and seemed to enjoy repeating the new girl's name over and over to herself.

"That is a very pleasant name, indeed. Maria Alverez; yes, yes, I have great hopes for you, Maria. I expect you have traveled a long way from your home to come here. Or do you live close to San Francisco del Rincon?"

She ignored the girl's murmured reply as they came out through the kitchen. At the same table where Ricardo had been torturing Anita Torres an hour earlier, they sat down. The cook had spread a grubby white tablecloth, and dishes clattered.

"Serve us luncheon, and hurry," Delfina ordered. 'Tell me, Maria, are there many people in your family?"

"That is why I left home and came all this way here to get myself a job," Maria explained hastily. "There were eleven of us at home, nine of us children, and there was never, just never, enough food to go around! I got so I could not stand to stay there and see my mother starve herself so we could eat. I had long ago decided to get a job, so I left without telling one single person where I was going."

"Take my hand, you brave and sensible child! How sweet of you--and you really never told a single person where you were going?" Delfina's great brown-black eyes seemed almost to consume Maria. But the innocent girl had gained more confidence now.

"Of course! No one knows I am even in this state, much less here in San Francisco del Rincon! That I swear-for I dare not risk my parents coming after me on the train and bringing me back to their world of poverty."

"I am so proud of you!"

"Thank you, Senora Sanchez. Until I stepped into the hotel and saw you, I was just too scared. I could not make up my mind whether to come here for this job, or maybe going to one of the tanning works."

"Never! What a shocking waste! You must get that idea right out of your mind. Why, with this angelic face of yours, Maria, I am certain you are going to be a most popular girl here. Now there is the matter of the two weeks training period."

Delfina glanced about. "Where are the burritos?" her voice lashed out.

"Coming, coming, right away!" The cook was serving the burritos within a few seconds.

"So, there were nine of you at home. My sisters and I, we had twelve, and we were always starving. It is not a good life to be the daughter of a poor farmer."

Maria had not realized how hungry she was until the plate with the three steaming burritos was placed right under her nose.

"Eat well, eat it all! There is plenty more." Delfina smiled and rocked backwards and forwards. She seemed to take a huge delight in the sight of Maria eating happily.

"Yes, there is this matter of your two weeks training. We cannot pay you while you are training, of course."

"Oh?" Maria frowned. "What can I do, then?"

"Oh, we keep you and feed you; these are necessities, of course, and you have this training that you so badly need. Then you will come back either here to the Hotel Molinos or to our other hotel in Leon, where you will be as happy as you were out at the rancho or as you will be here, once you get to know the ways of our business."

"I see," Maria nodded enthusiastically, as she bit into a new, delicious burrito.

For the food at her father's farm had been very plain. Even this humble meal here in the Hotel Molinos was a feast in comparison to the bread-and-beans diet of her farm home.

"Your people do not know you are coming to us, then?" Delfina pressed in a light, casual way.

"No! When I write and tell them--goodness, that will be such a big surprise! They will be so proud of me, I am sure!" Maria laughed, her perfect white teeth glowing like ivory in the kitchen's gloom.

"They will, yes, yes, they will, when you write," Delfina nodded.

There was a cryptic Aztec streak in the Sanchez sisters; moments when they seemed to be able to wrap their arms about themselves and stand there, eyes almost closed, like statues. Somehow, when Delfina did this, it was almost as if she were communicating with some superior being, as if she were actually in contact with some deity who told her everything she had to do. And against this divine authority, there was absolutely no recourse.

As Maria Alverez busily ate through a second plate of the freshly prepared burritos, Delfina had performed her act of sitting cold and upright and aloof--as if she were waiting for some word, and yet as if there was all the time in the world for them to take in their midday meal.

"Is there anything left over for me?" Alicia Cordone had come into the kitchen without seeing the set figure of Delfina.

"Yes, sit down with us, Alicia. I heard you full of happy laughter this morning!" Delfina's words surprised Alicia.

"Senorita Sanchez! How are you? Burritos--they look very good. I shall have some." Alicia sat down at the table and ordered her food from the cook. Delfina nodded her authorization. The cook hurried off.

"I have had such a wonderful morning! One just never knows here, who will turn out to be good, and who will turn out to be bad. I was surprised, I had such a good time!" Alicia was now staring at Maria Alverez as she spoke.

"This is Maria, a new girl for us, Alicia," Delfina said. "We must be understanding and kind to Maria. We really feel it has been a blessing for her that she has found her way here to be one of us."

"Oh yes, she'll enjoy it, that's for sure!" Alicia smiled as a plate of fresh burritos was placed before her. "Thank you. It's a good life here, very exciting. I for one enjoy myself each and every time. So I think there is nothing to complain about. Senora Delfina gives you a very thorough training. I was sorry to leave the rancho and come here."

Alicia got busy eating. She always found that exerting all this energy in loving gave her a tremendous appetite, and she was starting to get fat. Even though she was only seventeen, Alicia was a highly trained whore of three years' professional standing. She ate easily, and smiled at Maria in a sisterly way.

"I hope I get the job," Maria Alverez whispered.

"Oh yes, you will, with your looks--they love pretty girls. It makes it much easier when the girl is pretty. They like to show off--not that they last five minutes, but they like to show off if the girl is pretty--and you are pretty. I can see that!" Alicia reassured Maria.

"Thank you! I have to have this job," Maria said simply.

"Don't worry--Senora Sanchez would not have invited you here to dine with us, if you had not already been accepted. It is very easy work. Myself, I find it so, because I love it. I don't think I am ever uninterested in what I am doing!"

Somehow the confidence that glowed from Alicia Cordone, the girl who so loved whoring, made Maria feel much better. Alicia didn't speak of whoring, of course, but she got close to it as using terms like "male friends," or "those I like to entertain in my room," which was about as euphemistic as Ricardo Herrera's language.

Even if they had discussed whoring in the plainest and most obvious terms, Maria Alverez might well not have understood what they were talking about. For while, like all peasant girls, Maria had a fundamental knowledge of farm sex, she did not know the terms. In their farm life, breeding, mating, and the birth of animals were all natural, part of nature. But those matters that pertained to human love and human sex were all clouded with mystery, expressed only in religious terms.

It was here that the innocent, virginal girl was lost. For her the mother role and the sexual role were combined as one-all comprehended within the pristine image of the Virgin Mother Mary. Thus there was a great gulf in the natural language of these Mexican peasant women and girls. They never spoke of their own sexual activities or feelings. They only touched the mysteries of life and procreation through the terms used in the church, in prayer before their shrines.

Hence when a whore such as Alicia Cordone could praise a woman's actions, meaning how the girl copulated, this implication would only be understood by a sister whore. Maria, and about any other Mexican woman, would think Alicia was using terms of praise about ordinary chaste deeds well done.

"It is good to be loved and appreciated in one's work," Alicia rattled on. She meant the full force of male into female on the bed.

Her words brought a frown to Delfina Sanchez's face.

"You are loved by too many, and you will not last," Delfina told Alicia coolly, but most carefully.

"I shall outlast you." Alicia made this strange prophesy as she finished her second plate of burritos. "Those were good! Now for a rest this afternoon, and more fun this evening."

"I am glad you are happy here," Maria murmured. "It makes me feel that I shall be happy too."

"It's what you must get used to, Maria," Alicia told her, then called for a cup of fresh coffee.

"Yes, yes, one has to make up one's mind to what one wants to do. Nothing is impossible." Delfina frowned and glanced into her large black leather hold-all handbag. "If you are to work here, Maria Alverez, you have to sign a form-can you write, child?"

"Oh yes, I can write! My teacher said I had a brilliant mind, if I had the schooling!" Maria showed her magnificent white teeth again as she smiled enthusiastically.

"You have to sign so the Sanchez sisters can get a license for you to work here," Alicia explained. "Without a license, a girl cannot work anywhere."

"Oh, is that so?" Maria took the ballpoint pen from Delfina Sanchez. "Yes, I have heard my father speak about licenses and the cost of them, just to get our stuff to market. It is impossible to live these days, without some kind of license!"

As she said this, Maria signed her full name-Maria Teresa Luisa Margolata Alverez. She did not bother to read the form-which was her professional prostitute's blue application form, to be handled by the local police department.

"There, that is good! Now we have to go to the rancho, but I think that will be a little later."

Delfina suddenly kissed Maria on the forehead and hugged the girl. "You pretty thing! You will make so much, so much good--for yourself! I can feel how happy you will make them--oh yes, it is an act of God, a miracle that has brought you to us, and saved you from that terrible life out on that dreadful farm."

"I rather liked it there," Maria whispered thoughtfully.

"You will love it here, much more. Here we have love all the time. All the time, nothing but love, don't we, Alicia?" Delfina's throbbing voice was absolutely sincere, in full, pulsating praise of the glories of a whore's existence.

"Yes, it can make one sore, but there is always plenty of love," Alicia commented coarsely.

Maria was puzzled by the way Alicia spoke. The girl certainly used a lot of town-phrases that Maria just could not understand. Alicia saw Maria's bewilderment and put her arms around the girl.

"It's great fun, great fun here! Too much at times, but always great fun!" Alicia giggled affectionately.

For Alicia, being a whore had become a natural pastime, and it was quite beyond her comprehension that not every girl in the world might want to be a whore. Therefore she hugged Maria with a sisterly affection and nodded eagerly.

"You hurry through that training out at the rancho, and come back here so we can be real friends!"

"I'll do my best," Maria agreed, not knowing what she was letting herself in for.

Delfina was waiting for more coffee. Having gotten the new girl's signature on the prostitute's application form, Delfina felt satisfied. It was a good turn for today, to have a new girl arrive. And the fact that Maria Alverez was very beautiful indeed satisfied Delfina for the moment. Ricardo would have to work tonight, breaking in this new girl. But he would have Joaquin Mendosa with him to keep the girl training right on and on; no matter if one of the males exhausted himself momentarily in his enthusiasm for his work--the other would be ready to take over!

"I shall go and collect my sister. Maria, you will meet my sister Consuela later. She is old, and very foolish. All I ask of you is to ignore the wild things she says about me, or about the rancho. Consuela sometimes does not understand the great work we are doing for you poor farming girls.

"Of course, we are not a charity. That I am sure you know. We could not run our business with all the tremendous expenses we have, our advertising costs and such, if we were not allowed to make money somewhere. But we do try to be fair. Everyone agrees with me when I say that. Each person gets what is due them, when the time is right." Delfina stood up and walked out of the kitchen to get the party organized for the rancho.

"Yes, even if it's a bullet in the head," Alicia muttered grimly. "She is getting worse and worse. I don't know what's going to become of this place. In a year's time, they will all be gone, I think." Alicia smiled at the way Maria was listening to her so intensely, not comprehending at all.

"Don't you worry, Maria, we'll come out of this just fine! I know how these bitches have worked things, and I'm not a fool. Time comes, we shall be up and off to a place of our own. Just you wait and see!"

Maria blinked and nodded. She was not at all certain what it was that Alicia seemed so certain about. But the whole thing had an air of high excitement. Maria could feel her young heart racing with eager anticipation. Who knew what the future might bring to her?

* * *

Teresa was pressing her body against Ricardo Herrera in no uncertain way.

"So tonight you will be breaking in another virgin!" she giggled. "I remember the way you came to me, that first time!"

Ricardo could feel his thick manhood pressing against Teresa's belly. It was strange, how these girls always felt subservient to the man who had broken them in. Even Teresa would never forget that her first bed-master had been the skilled Ricardo.

"You loved it, right from the start!" Ricardo held her stiff back to him. It was all of ten thousand men since that moment, as far as Teresa was concerned. Ten thousand times on her back for Teresa, and two thousand virgins broken in by Ricardo. They were such professionals at all sexual matters, it was amazing it still sparked any emotional reaction within them at all. Soon her feelings would harden. Soon his manhood would weaken. Then they would be old--dragging, beaten, and muddled, even as Consuela was right now.

"I loved you--I would have gone with you--given you my life!" Teresa told him hotly. "But instead, it had to be another man, and then another-and each of them, I so tried to make him my Ricardo!"

Ricardo laughed. All the girls gave their lovers his image, but they could never find his skills elsewhere.

"Ahh, young girls-these virgins, I am sick of them! If he were less cruel, I would leave it all to Joaquin. He could break them in-but he tears them, and ruins them, and it is weeks before they are fit for work after Joaquin shows them what to do."

"A girl is like a frightened wild thing, she has to be handled firmly, not too firmly, but with a giving as well as a taking. This new one, she is too beautiful. Such beauties do not make good whores." Ricardo was a fine judge of material from his vast experiences.

"How do you mean? How do you know this one will not make a good paying girl?" Teresa asked with immediate interest.

"Ah, you were always good with your hips, and you opened up your body for a man to really feel you," Ricardo muttered. "This new one, this Maria, she will never know such moves are possible. I find girls with beautiful faces have stupid bodies. God does not give everything to one woman, Teresa."

"Well, you should know, Ricardo! If anyone in this world has taken the most beautiful girls as virgins and trained them to be good in bed, it is you who should know best."

Teresa relaxed and sighed. "Ah me, how I wish we could sell all of our businesses and go and live in Argentina for the rest of our lives! Consuela is frightened to ask Delfina, and Delfina won't discuss it, but I would sell out and go in an instant. Would you go with me--if I offered you the chance, Ricci?" Teresa chuckled as he held her.

"Yes, yes, perhaps. Who knows? Perhaps Delfina will sell one day, for she is given to many moods." Ricardo Herrera had serviced Delfina a few times also, but that fact he never mentioned to anyone. Delfina was a wild woman in bed.

Releasing her ex-lover, Teresa slowly gathered up her shawl and her handbag. She turned as Delfina came into the barroom and nodded.

"Well, is it a new girl for me?"

"We have to train her first. Ricardo, we shall need you at the rancho tonight. Best collect the other three girls so we can all start as soon as the heat of the day passes." Delfina sat down and sipped a cup of cold coffee. She wore her usual slightly mad, slightly vacant expression. When she lifted her broad face to stare at Ricardo, he was never certain what she would say.

"It is good to have another girl, so I am putting the advertisements out again. It is expensive. But we cannot help having to pay out some money, sometimes."

"Yes, you have to do that," Ricardo muttered sarcastically."

"You do not think we pay out enough?" There was a glitter in Delfina's eyes.

"No, you pay out as little as you can. You know that and I know that--so why fool each other?" Ricardo spat his words out. He had little use for Delfina's meannesses, and her rages left him unimpressed.

"My, my, you talk as if you hated us, Ricardo!" Delfina laughed. She knew better than to meet Ricardo in a head-on collision. In the final analysis, there was always the chance that Ricardo might strike her. He had once, and Delfina had that kernel of fear always within her. Ricardo was the last person she would cross. Crook him, cheat him, sneer at him, yes. But to confront him and to challenge his physical strength, that was the one thing Delfina was unable to do.

Oddly enough, or perhaps not so oddly, Delfina had killed several men in her life. Usually she used a heavy pistol and stood right behind the man, putting the bullets into his living brain before he even heard the crash of the pistol shots.

Yet with Ricardo she was scared to try it. Teresa, and some of the girls, had a certain strange loyalty toward this bull-necked ex-officer. It was as if instinct told the insane Delfina that if she ever harmed Ricardo, it would be her last act.

So Delfina had her small confrontations with Ricardo, and he always stepped aside after a few caustic remarks. Delfina felt secure this way. He was always the strong-arm, and he was the word of law for all the brothels and the rancho. Delfina had to trust someone, and in this relationship, she had come to trust Ricardo. It was a complex, fluid situation.

Ricardo had often considered killing her. He felt it would have to happen one day. Mainly, as far as he was concerned, it was a question of finding out where the big money was kept. Once he knew where Delfina had the vast Sanchez fortune sequestered, then Delfina might count her days on this earth-and soon be beneath it.

This was one of the reasons why Ricardo stayed. He hoped to learn just where all those vast sums of money he handed over to the three sisters each and every week disappeared to. He knew they must have millions and millions of pesos hidden in bank accounts somewhere. Perhaps in the Argentine. Perhaps in Switzerland. They might even have mattresses stuffed full of money, as the old whores used to have in the days before people's banks came to Mexico.

But Ricardo was content to wait. One day Consuela, or Teresa, or even Delfina, would make a slip. Then Ricardo would know how to act. He might kill only Delfina. He might kill all three. But Teresa would be useful in getting the money out of the banks, if that was where it was hidden. So Teresa was kept happy and hoping. The other two, he would enjoy killing.

In a sly way, the insane Delfina was aware of most of what Ricardo thought. Her shrewd peasant brain understood her dear Ricardo only too well. So did Consuela. Only Teresa was a weak link among the three of them. So Delfina was careful not to mention too many money matters to Teresa--just in case Ricardo got to know too much.

For there was the level of trust of the gutter among the principals of the Sanchez organization. They only trusted each other when there was absolutely no other alternative. And each knew that every grain of trust meted out might well be a fragment of information that could explode into her own death knell.

* * *

The three girls each knew, the moment they were told about their return to the rancho.

"I will die out there, and the yellow flowers will grow from my body, yes, yes, no more fixes!" Melinda Castro, the drug addict, babbled and giggled, then stared down at the dirty wood flooring of her room and sighed. "It didn't last long, did it?"

"What-what didn't last long?" asked Ricardo, who had just told her to get ready to come back to the rancho.

"My life. My life didn't last very long at all." Melinda lifted up her lean face, smiled weakly as she looked at his tight, harsh features. He was smiling in the way that always meant death.

"I think a girl--a girl ought to have a few years longer. I mean, I ought to have had a husband, and perhaps children, and to have--have gone away to some place where life had some hope." Melinda's voice trailed off to a whisper. "It's too short. But-there it is."

"Yes, there it is! Be ready about five, when it's cooler.

Joaquin will be driving us all out." Ricardo laughed. Melinda was a strange girl. She was right. Death would be with her very shortly, and in some ways, welcomed. Ricardo shrugged his shoulders as he went out to tell the rebellious Anita Torres the news.

"The-the rancho?" Anita stared into his eyes. There was pure terror in her gaze. She was so frightened, sweat formed along her upper Up, and it quivered as she tried to control her fear. "I am going back to the rancho, again? But-but why, Ricardo-haven't I been good to you, every night you ever wanted it? Haven't I done it again and again, even when I felt sick, or cold, or full of fear? And for this-you have me sent back to the rancho?"

"I'm not sending you back to the rancho, Anita," Ricardo told her softly, even smiling as if to ease the pain of his message.

"But you just said-we are going back on the truck, at five?" Anita muttered desperately, for a moment confused. Ricardo held the girls poised this way, between terror and deadly familiarity. He was their lover, he was their life, and he would be their deaths. Each seemed to know this.

Anita was another girl who at fourteen had blundered into the Hotel Molinos. Ricardo had broken her in with his skilled and massive manhood, just as he intended to break in the innocent new arrival Maria Alvarez later tonight. So Anita had no defense against Ricardo. Her eyes had tears in them as with a desperate appeal for mercy, she stared at his deathly smile.

"No, no, Ricardo-please!"

"Senora Delfina wished you to have a rest. I don't know what has made her so upset with you, but those are her orders. Me-I would keep you here. You are popular, you make good money. We do have our little troubles, but nothing much. I am sorry, Anita, you have to come with us."

Anita turned away with her head bowed. She did not even lift her gaze, or one little finger to protest against the law of fate that was taking her back to the dreaded rancho. It was as good as a sentence of death, both she and Melinda knew it the moment they saw that smile playing about Ricardo's lips. But their fatalism, their natural whore's acceptance made them sigh and bow their heads in complete obedience. This was the strangest part of all, not to have the spark to get fighting mad, to make a run for it, or to refuse to go.

But then, that was how those other girls had come to be buried under the floor of the small barroom. They had been fiery ones, who refused to go, and so they were now part of the Hotel Molinos forever.

There did seem precious little point in resistance.

The third girl, Lupe Huerta, lying ill on her bed, shared the room with an active girl, and the sick girl's bed was required for business. Lupe stared at Ricardo as he told her to get up and dress and be ready to be driven out to the rancho at five.

"I am finished!" Lupe said softly. Two great tears rolled down her cheeks. "It is so, I am finished. I go there for them to bury me. I have one loss, and a bad abortion, and I am finished. After all the money I have made for those three evil bitches!"

"You might get well, out at the rancho, Lupe," Ricardo did not even bother to disguise his disbelief in his own words.

"Get well-with a shovel patting my face! I shall die here, tell them that. They can bury me under the bar along with those other girls who would not go out to the rancho."

"You will come with us at five, or else I shall use this on you more painfully than I did last time." Ricardo flicked open his knife, and the blade flashed right before Lupe's eyes.

Lupe nodded silently. Her mouth opened and shut several times. Then she lifted her stare from the blade and looked right into Ricardo's eyes. She nodded soundlessly once more. For either way, death was all she could see for herself at this moment.

"Get your clothes on! If you aren't strong enough, I will carry you down to the cab. Joaquin is driving us out." Ricardo smiled.

He frequently smiled. It was like the hunting cobra, when Ricardo Herrera smiled.

* * *

Back in the kitchen, Maria Alverez was having a few doubts. It did seem to her that the whole place was very sordid. This was not the way a hotel should be run, somehow, so Maria felt. There was a lot of drinking going on-and all these little rooms, with washbasins outside their doors. Maria felt more and more uncertain, the longer she sat in the kitchen, or looked back into the hotel itself.

The truth was that without the glowing, hypnotic power of Delfina Sanchez working over her, the magic of the whole scene rapidly fell away. In its place the sordid reality of the whorehouse called the Hotel Molinos came into better perspective.

Several times Maria Alverez quietly thought of leaving the place. But she had eaten, and she felt under a naive obligation not to leave, having accepted their food and drink. Maria was old fashioned, and in her home town it would have been considered the height of discourtesy to leave after a meal without thanking the hostess and giving one's reason forgoing. So Maria patiently waited for Delfina to return.

Meanwhile her companion Alicia had eaten her fill. Now Alicia wandered off to the bar to have a drink, then to go to her room and rest until the evening session started about seven.

In her room, the bed was still untidy. Sergeant Lopez had recovered from his exhausted sleep. He had dressed and gone off into town to check in at the police station. He had a new prostitute's application to register for Delfina Sanchez. The name was Maria Alverez. Sergeant Lopez yawned and wondered how on earth the Sanchez sisters found so many of these girls willing to take up whoring as a livelihood.

As far as he could see, it was just a means of making vast sums for the three madams--and no one else. Secretly Sergeant Lopez despised Ricardo Herrera. He was also afraid of Ricardo, but one day, so Lopez swore to himself, he would draw his good police pistol and put a nice large bullet hole right through the middle of that smug pimp's face!

For such was the feeling between Sergeant Lopez and the ex-army officer. On his side, Ricardo would have loved to bury Sergeant Lopez as soon as possible. In fact, he was already thinking about what spot in the dreary mesquite out at the Sanchez rancho would be the place to dig Sergeant Lopez an easy grave, and soon.

Alicia flopped down after pulling the bed cover straight. She sighed and thought about the new girl, so stiff and timid, and looking so young.

"They always look so young when they come here," Alicia muttered to herself. "But none of them seem to stay that way for very long. None of them! There's hardly a girl here who started before I did--except maybe Anita Torres-and they're rather doubtful about her, these days!"

* * *

"Aren't you worried about your new little girl, Delfina?" Teresa asked her sister in a coarse, loud voice. "She might run away while you are arguing about money so much!"

"You, you are always acting so superior! Consuela and I, we have worked hard to build all this up, Teresa. You sneer at it as much as you like! But it all pays for your flashy dresses and your jaunts to Tijuana and Mexico City, whenever you feel like going." Delfina spoke in an oddly jerky way, as if she were close to tears.

The three sisters had a neat array of bank books spread out before them. Delfina had been explaining how some money was sent to Argentina, some to New York, and more to different banks in other states of Mexico. Also, there was a large cash hoard in a metal box, hidden right there in the Hotel Molinos.

Money always brought tears to the eyes of Delfina. In fact it was the only point in her life where she became sentimental at all. Money to her was life, light, truth, and virginity, all rolled into one worshipful ideal.

"Why do you attack me so, Teresa?" she wailed.

"Me-attack you?" Teresa laughed.

"I have worked hard for you. All of this-it is due to our sacrifices. The good God has been kind to us, bringing us all these innocent girls to save."

"Heaven help them, they will be buried soon," Consuela muttered.

"Shut up!" Delfina lashed out. The crack of the smack on the face she gave Consuela could be heard outside the room's locked door.

"You never say such things-Hem--do you understand? Or do I have to beat you with my stick again?" Delfina shook her older sister's shoulders as she screamed into the scared face.

"I won't! I won't!" Consuela's head wobbled stupidly.

"Ahh-so this is what I have got! A flirt of a fool for a younger sister, and an imbecile for an older one! And only one new girl has turned up in weeks, months, to help us out of this terrible situation!"

"I still think you ought to have left Ricardo or Joaquin down there in the kitchen with her. Our new recruit might get some ideas of what goes on, and take off!" Teresa chuckled.

"No, she has been fed, and I have spoken to her. We shall take her out to the rancho at five, along with the sick girls and those needing more training. Ricardo will soon have this new girl worked up to the necessary skills for keeping our dear customers happy."

Teresa flushed as she listened to Delfina speak about Ricardo and his work. It seemed to Teresa that a whole area of normal feeling was missing from both Consuela and Delfina. Certainly they regarded sex and intimacy as nothing more than a five-minute performance that had to be paid for.

Teresa shrugged her shoulders. They might be right. After all, Ricardo was great with his body. But he was that way with each and every girl it was his job to train. Teresa looked down at the tattered bank books before her. At least she had money. It was not a full share. Delfina cheated everyone. Her sisters were not beyond the circle of those being cheated, but at least they did get some share of the profits.

"You agree to pay for the advertisement?"

"Not that, all over again!" Teresa snapped. "We settled all that this morning. What was it you had to say, that was so important it could not wait?"

"I wanted to show you your bank books, so you could see what money you each have, and how honest I am. Also, the Turk is coming in a week or so."

"The Turk, he pays too little for good women." Consuela hated the Turk, for some deep reason. "Many is the time I wish we could kill him, take his money and bury him with the others on the farm!"

"What others? Shut up!" Delfina was about to strike Consuela yet again, when she stopped. "The Turk-he always has his bodyguards with him, and they have pistols."

"We have pistols too-Ricardo is a great shot!"

"No, no, we cannot do it." Delfina frowned. "One of us might get hit-it's too risky. We need to sell the Turk at least twenty girls. I know him, he will haggle over every wrinkle and every bruise they have. We need twenty girls-and it's no good selling the ones who make money for us. Consuela, you must help me sort out the ones we will sell to the Turk."

"Sell him the ones who are dying in the Hole! Save Fat Man some digging work!"

"No! Sanchez girls have a good reputation. We have to sell him girls who can work, at least for three or four months." Delfina sat still, her eyes glittering and her square Aztec face curiously blank.

"Well, I have eight girls at my place in Leon who could do with a change. I'm sick of the sight of them. They're over the hill, so I'll send them to you later this week. You want me to send them to the rancho?" Teresa asked.

"Yes, eight-and eight we might reclaim out of the Hole, if they get some sense. Then we need four more good girls from here. I shall check through the girls here and see which the Turk might find acceptable, ones we don't want anyway." Delfina smiled.

"He comes too often. Where do they send their girls when they have finished with them?" Consuela grumbled.

"To the mines, the mines in Bolivia and Peru-there they don't care what a girl looks like, or feels like, just as long as she is a woman with something between her legs!" Delfina sneered.

"I suppose someone will always pay something, no matter how little."

"It is a necessity," Delfina made one of her favorite comments. "Yes, it is a necessity." In the name of some necessity or other, vast crimes could be committed, or agreed to, or accepted as having happened.

Teresa checked down her list of sums and frowned. "I wish I could see your books, Delfina."

"Well, you cannot-you have to take my word for it, it is all very straight. I never cheat either of you two. Who knows, one day I might fall sick, or even have an accident, God forbid, and go to the hospital. Then you two will have all the books and all the money. I hate to think what would become of me if you found out I was cheating you badly!"

"You mean, if we found out you were cheating us at all! Teresa said coldly. "I am certain you are cheating us, Delfina, but it is a matter of proportion. Seeing the millions of pesos we have between us, at least makes me feel we are not wasting our time and our lives for nothing. So, I thought you were going to put the Turk off for a few weeks."

"I only just got his letter." Delfina frowned, then added, "Anyway, he means money for us, and we can sell him a rough girl or two this time, and explain to him that we'll make it up to him some other time.

"I sometimes think these girls are not for Tijuana at all, but are sent straight off to Chile or Bolivia. If I ever find this true, then I'll raise our prices and demand that the Turk take every bitch we offer."

"I think, as I told you," Teresa spoke slowly and softly, "the Turk does definitely ship these girls out, most of them, that he buys from us. I have only twice met any of our old girls when I was in Tijuana, or Mexico City-and each time they were girls we had not sold to the Turk. Turk is a crook. He ships the girls straight off-and probably makes an enormous profit just by having the connections."

"If we traveled, we could make the connections too. Girls are wanted all over the world. There is no country that does not buy and sell girls. Sanchez girls could go all over the world and make us a great reputation."

"No, this time we sell to the Turk. Then next time we meet here, we shall discuss traveling and finding out about new markets for our girls," Delfina decided. She sighed and her eyes took on a faraway look.

"It is good to think that we enable them to travel and see foreign countries. We do a great deal for these poor farm girls. They see a world they never, never knew existed.

"They have to be buried out at the rancho, anyway, eventually," Consuela tossed in her comment right out of nothing.

Crack! Yet again, the stick that Delfina wielded so skillfully hit Consuela on the upper arm. The older sister gasped, teetered back, fell onto the floor and rolled over and over.

"You learn to shut up! You learn to shut up!" Delfina's screams could be heard on the other side of the hotel.

"Ssssh--you'll scare away your new girl! There's no one to guard her in the kitchen." Teresa wrenched the stick out of Delfina's hand. "And stop beating the old fool all the time!"

Teresa suddenly was angry. "God! It's like a night-mare-always the same things over and over again. We seem to have been talking about the Turk and foreign connections for the last ten years! And you have beaten our Consuela black and blue. Get up, Consuela. At least, get off your back and sit up."

But the mystical, angelic look had now returned to the broad face of Delfina Sanchez. She did not even seem to hear what Teresa was shouting.

"God is good to us! He will bring us more and more little girls who want to travel the wide world and see life."

"Get up, Consuela!" Teresa had to bend over to help her older sister upright.

Once more they settled down. The heat of the day was full and sultry, making a white glaze of sunshine at the edges of the closed shutters.

"When it is cool, I shall take those girls out to the rancho, with Ricardo," Delfina murmured as they sat and brooded on their money, girls, and problems.

"I shall go back to my own house in Leon," Teresa said.

"That's good. I shall stay here. I do not wish to be buried out at the rancho--not yet, anyway." Consuela made the usual wrong comment.

But Delfina this time did not even have the energy to raise her stick, let alone to swipe out at her idiotic older sister. The hot day had taken a lot of the spring out of each of them by now. However, by five in the evening, they would be revived enough to start off on that ominous trip across the countryside to the rancho.

"We'll rest now, and I shall leave for the rancho later. Let me have your bank books back." Delfina collected the books and placed them neatly in a metal box. The box she put into the large black safe that stood on one side of the room.

"There, that's that for this week. I hope we get some more girls. Consuela, you go and have your siesta. You are on duty here this evening. Come down with me, Teresa. I must go and see how our new girl is waiting in the kitchen. I also want a word with you."

Teresa was keen to leave the hotel and be back at her own setup in the neighboring town of Leon. "Yes, very good, Delfina. See you later in the week, Consuela." She kissed her older sister dutifully on the cheek.

"Goodbye, Teresa. Be a good girl. Bring in plenty of money." Consuela got up, and, like an awkward raven, followed them to the door of the room. Outside, she turned and waved goodbye before entering her own private bedroom for a rest. Teresa glanced at Delfina. There was a curious look of iron-hard insanity upon Delfina's face at this moment.

"I think we are having too much trouble with Consuela," Delfina said darkly as she led the way downstairs."

"How do you mean, too much trouble?" Teresa asked carefully.

"Well, Consuela says things out loud that are best not spoken about--especially in front of people. Consuela is becoming a serious danger to us all."

"You are saying what, Delfina? Out with it!" Teresa snapped, standing still. Delfina turned around.

"Nothing, nothing but the truth, my dear Teresa. You have heard it, and seen, how many times I have had to hit Consuela to shut her up. One day she will say something that might bring ruin on us all. That is one of my many worries."

"We have to put up with it," Teresa said stubbornly. "She is our sister."

"All the same, it is very dangerous, both for you and for me." Delfina stared unseeingly down the dingy hall of the Hotel Molinos.

While the two Sanchez sisters were speaking, a curious stillness had settled over the place. It was as if everyone were listening, half-expecting to hear of some terrible fate that the sisters were plotting for each and every one of them.

"Consuela can be removed," Delfina said abruptly.

"No! You mean, killed? No! You are sick, Delfina! If anything happens to Consuela, I shall go straight to the police, and not to our police, either, but to the police in the capital!"

"She is dangerous, I am warning you!"

"Send her on a cruise to Argentina, to our friends the bankers down there. Let her see our property in New York. She might wish to stay down there awhile. Consuela has a long life ahead of her yet." Teresa moved toward the beaming white sunlight at the hotel's front door.

"Not if she keeps on talking. There will be trouble for all of us, you mark my words."

"Well, send her away, then."

"She will think I am arranging something."

"So-aren't you?" Teresa held her purse up against the glare while she got out her new Polaroid sunglasses. "It's so hot, and my car is down there in all the heat. I hope the man at the gas station has fixed the air conditioning."

"I was thinking," Delfina went on, "that if you asked Consuela to go on this holiday to New York, or Buenos Aires, then she might go. She'd feel well--knowing that you wish her well, and love her as a sister should love another. If I suggest it, Consuela will be afraid. She has this fear of me... "

"I don't blame her! Yes, yes, I agree with you. Perhaps if we send Consuela down to Rio and then on to Buenos Aires, she might decide to retire and settle on one of our estates down there. I shall speak to her next week. Adios."

They suddenly embraced. The younger, plumper, and brightly dressed Teresa kissed the mature, worn, worried looking Delfina on the cheek.

"Take care of yourself," Delfina sighed.

"Yes, and you too."

Teresa stepped out into the sunlight. She still had attractive legs. Her nylon hose shone in the sun, and her black hair looked like an onyx river. Teresa had style, and always avoided trouble. She was a born whore, and she loved it. She could still take on man after man and make her own money, any time. She strode down the street high and proud. Holding her large handbag, she looked like a queen ruling all she surveyed.

"Ahh, a proud woman! I wish there were more like her!" Delfina sighed and retreated into the darkened hotel.

Now she would go and chat with Maria Alverez. There was a six teen-year-old beauty, Maria! But nothing much in the personality, somehow. By no means a born whore. She lacked the brazen streak that Teresa possessed, which Delfina now recognized also in Alicia Cordone. No, Maria was just another rustic beauty from the farmlands of Guadalajara. She would never make whorehouse madam by the time she was twenty-five, as had the three Sanchez sisters.

"Young girls today don't have the right things in them!" Delfina grumbled as she walked heavily out through the cooler shade of the cluttered yard. At the back, there was the smell of cooking, and the dusty dry scent of the chickens.

"They don't have the ambition. They don't have the ideas, either. Nothing can stop a girl, once she has the determination," Delfina muttered on.

Maria Alverez started up in surprise as Delfina came through from the yard into the kitchen. The girl half-stood up. She had almost been on the point of leaving. It seemed to her that this place was too strange, and she was getting more and more frightened.

"Hello, my sweet!" Delfina glowed. She knew from the girl's wide eyes that she had arrived just in time. "You look so pretty, and so--well, it does my heart good to have you with us."

"Thank you, Senora Sanchez," Maria finally smiled and relaxed a bit. For when those dark brown eyes and that broad Indian face of Delfina's confronted a girl, the girl felt herself overwhelmed by a mystique, an aura, something that simply melted away all resistance.

"You are happy to be here?" Delfina asked softly, as she stared right into the heart and soul of the sixteen-year-old virgin.

"Yes, oh yes, I most truly am! It is so very nice here," Maria replied with a bright smile. She was quite reassured now. Any disturbing thoughts seemed to have been brushed completely out of her mind.

* * *

When the Sanchez sisters had gone down the stairs, and were standing in the golden sunlight of the entrance of Hotel Molinos, someone had been watching them.

Delfina had carefully locked the door of the room at the top of the stairs before coming down. Consuela had gone to take her rest. In the entrance, Delfina was speaking to Teresa just before Teresa left for Leon. The room with the large black safe and the accounts was silent.

After Teresa departed, Delfina had walked away to find Maria Alverez. It was then that the secret watcher made her move.

Alicia Cordone was not just a whore at heart, she was also a natural-born brigand and thief. Her family were all such, and Alicia had inherited three hundred years of cutthroat skills as well as whoring. Moving silently from her room now, she paused by the water-main, where the servants drew water for the men to wash themselves.

Alicia feared only one person, and that was Ricardo Herrera. She was determined not to be caught by Ricardo, not at any price! If Ricardo did surprise her, Alicia had a knife ready for his ribs.

Suddenly Alicia moved. One moment she was by the water-main. The next moment she was at the top of the stairs. Her skeleton key and her skill quickly had the door open.

Alicia stepped into the darkened office room, closing the door swiftly behind her and leaning against it as she stared around.

The seventeen-year-old born whore had a round bright face. She was pretty only with makeup on, and her eyes were like the round brown button-eyes of a squirrel, quick and darting. She seemed to sense everything inside the room in an instant, then her mind was made up. She flitted across to the safe and knelt to study it. From beneath her faded cotton print dress, she brought out a slip of paper, scrawled with a rough guess at the safe's combination. Alicia went to work.

For Alicia did not intend to be done out of her fifty per cent share of the whoring money she had earned. Nor did the bright young girl intend to stay here at the Hotel Molinos forever. She would need a stake, some capital to start her own whorehouse one day. When she left the Sanchez sisters, she was going to take with her enough money to have her own place. Nor was she particularly concerned whose money it was.

Ear against the old-fashioned safe, Alicia heard the tumblers click and roll. She was certain she was close to it. A few more tries, and she would have it.

Somewhere she could hear Ricardo's low rumbling voice, then a woman sobbing, then Ricardo speaking again. He was scaring more girls. A real killer, was that one! Alicia was under no illusions, even though she had enjoyed Ricardo's sexual skills many times herself. In the end, she would have to kill him. Or he would kill her. That was all there was to it. And Alicia was very sure that she would be the survivor of such an encounter.

She sighed and tucked the piece of paper back into her black lace panties. The safe would be easy to open now. She could do it any time she wished. But next, Alicia had to work out a plan to get away with as much money and far as possible.

"Mexico City, si, la capital, my uncle Hernandez Alvarado, could set me up there--but I need someone to help me here!"

A plan was slowly forming in her eager young mind. Her button-brown eyes flickered about. With quick squirrel movements, Alicia was back at the room door. She could hear Ricardo walking along the corridor below. If he looked into her room and found her gone, there might be trouble.

Alicia held her breath. Ricardo's footsteps echoed on. He was going to the sick girl, Lupe Huerta, that was the one he was going to see. Alicia nodded to herself, certain of it.

She slipped out of the room, locking the door behind her and gliding silently down the flight of steps.

Standing once again by the water-main, by the stack of bowls the men used to wash themselves afterwards, Alicia looked back. The golden haze of sunlight seemed to have set afire the whole world beyond the front door.

"I shall leave here rich! Rich, or dead!" Alicia vowed in a tense whisper.

* * *

It was curious, the many different moods of the people in the cab driving to Rancho Sanchez that evening.

In the front, Maria Alverez was sandwiched between Delfina Sanchez and the driver, the gross Joaquin Mendosa. He was amused to feel her slim form pressing against his thigh. It inevitably aroused him, and Joaquin drove faster and faster.

"Careful, Joaquin, you will have us over the cliff! Pay more attention to your driving, or none of us will ever reach the rancho!" Delfina admonished him sharply.

She was sitting in front, on the other side of Maria. She wore her usual semi-blank expression, but her eyes were staring far ahead, along the weaving, dusty highway before them. She was dreaming, and it was curious how her dreams took mobile shapes. Slithers of flesh kept curving and swirling about breasts and waists. Tongues and eyes were pressing closer and closer, and there was a hilarious laughter about it all, which brought a quirk of a smile to the corner of Delfina's large, straight mouth.

They drove west, into the sunset. The Rancho Sanchez was forty miles down the country road, an isolated world few ever left, and few enough arrived.

The land was poor and dry. It took five acres to support one cow. Yet the colors were magnificent, like silken skeins of pastels, intense and flung about the skies and the land in a breathtaking way.

In the back seat of the cab sat the three girls. They were wedged to one side, with Ricardo Herrera occupying a good third of the seat, so the girls were half on top of him, and half on top of each other. The girls were flung about as the cab skidded through rising red dust.

Ricardo swore. But he was used to this drive. Once the girls started coming in regularly again, he and Mendosa would get out the old army truck. That was a handier vehicle to use on this drive. It carried more, and one could put twenty girls into the back and chain up the tailgate, so there was no chance of their escaping.

And if they did try to escape, where would they go? Ricardo Herrera looked out of the cab window as it bumped and swayed along. There was a wilderness out there. The coyote and the mustang, it all belonged to them. A girl might last a day, but the sun would drive her mad with thirst the second day. Often they never even bothered to hunt for girls who had run away from the rancho. Ricardo or Mendosa would simply drive along the dusty road the following afternoon. Eventually they were sure to come upon the prostrate figure of the runaway girl or girls, lying close to the road, dehydrated and half-crazed with the heat. "The desert is as cruel as Delfina, as cruel as she," Ricardo muttered to himself. "But mucho magnifico! It is our real Mexico out here!"

Anita Torres sat in sullen despair. Melinda, the heroin addict, was high on her last full shot. The sick girl, Lupe Huerta, was worried that the drive might bring back her bleeding again. For she was almost on the mend, so Lupe felt. She sat stiffly in a corner of the back seat, praying that she would survive this trip back to the rancho. None of the three girls was under any illusion as to what lay before them.

"It is glorious--a great, glorious country out here. Sad, it is so poor." Delfina Sanchez made a tut-tutting noise with her teeth.

"It is very good and healthy," Maria commented in her girlish voice. "I love it too."

"Yes, I can tell, you are like me. The country, the soil is in your bones and in your blood. Oh, how I cried when I realized I was a changed girl and could never go back to my parents' farm! That was when I came to think of my older sister Consuela in quite a different way, I can tell you!" Delfina's eyes began to glaze with a rising rage.

"It was she and her tricks that changed me and changed all of us, including Teresa. Oh yes, I know they think Teresa is the smart one, the one who will inherit all this great business one day. But they are wrong. They talk against me and I shall have to crush them.

"I know who my enemies are, have no fear of that, my little girl, we shall win! You shall see how strongly we are made. There is nothing in this world we are afraid of. We shall win through. As I said, we are of the earth and of the water--and we are durable, like the land we spring from. It is good to belong. Si--si--si, it is good to belong, that is true!"

"Yes, I agree, it is good to belong." Maria turned and glanced at Delfina Sanchez and gave her a wistful smile. For at this moment she felt a great respect and awe for Delfina. It was strange how easily this older woman could control the emotions of Maria and all the girls who came under her hypnotic sway.

"Slow down, or you will kill us all! Slow down, Joaquin! There is no race. It will all be waiting for us when we arrive. There is no need to hurry!" Delfina told the driver once again.

Joaquin had such an urgent ache in his loins from the way this virginal Maria was rubbing against his thigh, he could only groan. For the quicker he got her to the rancho, the sooner would be his turn at training her fresh flesh for her new profession.

In the back seat, a crude sneer of a smile hung on Ricardo Herrera's mouth. He could almost smell Joaquin's lust. It was amusing to think that Joaquin was in such need.

The girls at the Hotel Molinos, or at Teresa Sanchez's establishment in Leon, could not be very generous to the fat muscleman!

In actual fact, Joaquin Mendosa was in the same class as the notorious Fat Man of Rancho Sanchez, as far as the girls of the whorehouses were concerned. Neither Fat Man nor Joaquin were ever allowed any extra flesh privileges. In fact if they tried, they were clawed or spat upon, and soon driven off.

The case of Ricardo Herrera was quite different. He had power, and was terror itself. A girl did not argue with Ricardo. In fact quite the reverse. She had better do her best to prove to him that her bed-work was as good as ever. Ricardo could have what he wanted any time he needed it. Fat Man and Joaquin Mendosa were strictly on the poor relatives list.

But when it came to breaking in a girl, as they planned for the virginal Maria Alverez this hot evening, then Joaquin was free to have her as much as he liked. Once Herrera had initially broken her in, he and Joaquin took it in turns to make the girl more and more obedient. In the end, it was Ricardo who trained her to the finer points of sucking a man, caressing him, and the many positions in which a true lecher might want a girl to perform. These finer points of sexual art were beyond the bull-like Joaquin. But all the same, Joaquin was quite useful when he was needed for pure rape power, to batter a girl until she could not resist any more. So he did enjoy his sexual excesses, whenever a new girl came.

Joaquin quivered as he felt the slim thigh of Maria Alverez rubbing against him. He was going to have her tonight, that was for sure. He licked his fleshy lips and peered through his expensive sunglasses at the red-dust route ahead. It was wild country, beautiful but wild.

The girl was something to look forward to. A fresh one was always welcome. After all, what else was a virgin for--but this? He smiled and tried to keep the car as slow as his surging desires would permit. Her thigh against his was a maddening flame, so Joaquin did have some excuse.

Maria had to shield her eyes. They seemed to be driving right into the red furnace of the sunset. The sky fired to crimson and gold, with rising flecks of purple and strains of silken blue. The blue spread and became darker right overhead, where the first stars of the evening were already showing in twinkling silver points.

The cab seemed like a lone, slow vessel, voyaging into a sky world of vast spaces and colors, all by itself.

CHAPTER THREE - LIE BACK AND ENJOY IT

Maria Alverez sat with her heart frozen in a small white tomb of complete fear. Why she was so terrified, Maria could not quite make out. But everything about the Sanchez rancho seemed to be of a texture of gloom, of slow menace.

Delfina Sanchez had changed in personality the moment they had all arrived at the rambling group of low stucco buildings. The grandiose name of Sanchez Hacienda was about as applicable as if it were labeled the Ritz. The place was a cheap, dilapidated shambles. It smelled of death and terror, of deeds that cast an aura of malevolence over the very outbuildings themselves.

Delfina had become a devil incarnate the moment she stepped from the cab. Anita Torres had been dragged off screaming. Maria was slapped and sent to sit alone in this small, horrid, locked room. Later a mute male, tall and with glistening eyes, brought her a plate of frijoles, stale and uneatable. He lit a smoky oil-lamp. Its weird light cast a yellow haze of slow decay over everything.

"I cannot understand why she has become so!" Maria muttered to herself. "This place is terrible. It is so terrible!"

In a curiously desperate way, Maria Alverez felt that the Sanchez rancho reminded her of her home farm. It was as if she had run in a complete circle. That was the deeply frustrating part of it. But the terror was something else.

For suddenly Maria Alverez knew she was in great danger. But she could not see what to do about it. The door of her small dusty room was locked. There was an old bed in the room with a solid wooden headpost, a chair and a bowl and jug of water for washing. But it was all so musty, so sordid. Maria shuddered as she looked around. This place was quite impossible. Her young, fiery, independent spirit rebelled against the whole thing.

"It was a trap! There is no job! They just want slave labor, to work this awful farm. That's what it is-a trap! Well, I will show them! I have escaped from a place like this once already, and I shall do it again. I shall walk all the way out, if necessary, this time!"

Having made up her mind what to do, Maria felt a lot better. It was now just a question of patience. Well, she shrugged her young shoulders, Mexican girls have lots and lots of patience. She would wait the opportunity, and then, presto-she would be off and away from this prison-place.

There was no question about it, these people were breaking the law by bringing her here and keeping her here. She would put the police onto them the very first opportunity she found.

All these thoughts made Maria Alverez feel much more sure of herself. There was a lot she could do, once she got free and out of here. It was only a matter of waiting her chance. This decision, and her confidence in her own patience, made her almost stoical as she sat in the gloomy, musty room, waiting.

* * *

Ricardo Herrera finally went to Maria's room. He had been bored most of the evening, listening to Delfina's tirades about the expenses of the ranch. He was glad to escape from the insane Sanchez woman, even if it was just to come down to this cell-like room and break in another virgin. It was still better than sitting out there listening to a madwoman babbling on and on.

"Hello. I am Ricardo Herrera-you can call me Ricci," he quietly said to the girl as she stared at him. Maria was sitting on the edge of the low bed, patiently waiting. "You are Maria. That's a good name for one of our girls-Maria."

Ricardo locked the door again on the inside. He did not want Delfina or Joaquin intruding as he broke this girl in. She was a beauty, and might well have to be taken very slowly.

"What do you wish with me, Senor Herrera?" Maria's voice quivered. Her face was white.

"Oh, we are going to be good friends! Real friends, you and I. Nothing to worry about. You will just have to get used to our friendship." Ricardo lit a cheroot and blew the smoke out. He went to the drawer of the battered old chest. In the drawer were some fluffy wrist-ropes. They would pin her hands to the headboard and keep her from trying to scratch his eyes out. He also found some of the petroleum jelly left, which pleased him.

"Good, we are going to do well!" Ricardo muttered softly. He turned and beamed his most deadly smile at Maria. "You look very beautiful, my pet! In fact, you are extremely beautiful. That is good. Senora Delfina has told me to treat you very very nicely. She thinks you are going to be a great success in your new work."

"My new work?" Maria hung her head, avoiding his gaze. "What is my new work to be, senor?"

"Oh, I'll explain as we train you for it!"

Ricardo moved smoothly. He took hold of one slim wrist, and Maria looked up in astonished surprise as she found her left hand deftly tied to the headboard of the bed. "And the other one-here-that is good. No trouble, you see. Are you comfortable, Maria?"

Maria was appalled to find herself lying stretched back on the old bed, with her arms out wide, her wrists attached by ropes to the corners of the headboard on each side. It was a nightmare-but no-it was real!

"No! No-undo me! This moment! You mustn't do this! Untie me or I'll--I'll scream!" Her voice rose in hysteria.

"Don't scream. It is a waste of time. No one will hear you. They are all very busy tonight, over at the Hole--Delfina is giving out punishments. She is a wild one, that Delfina."

As he smiled and chattered lightly, Ricardo stripped off his clothes. First he shed his shirt, then his pants, then his undershirt, and finally tugged off his socks. Naked, he stood with his manhood jutting out in the yellow light from the single lamp. His huge phallus had a worn, oily appearance. Maria blinked and stared at it, her mouth opening and shutting several times.

"What are you doing-what is it! Senor, I beg of you-I beg of you, release me! I am a good girl. I will do anything if you will just untie me. I beg of you!"

Maria was pleading in a muffled, half-stunned voice. Suddenly she had realized exactly what was going to happen to her. The same thing she had seen happen to the farm animals!

"In due time. First we must be good friends. I advise you not to scream as I train you. I have trained many, many hundreds of girls. The ones I tell not to scream, and they listen and obey me, they are not beaten, they do not suffer so much. It is best if you just open your mouth, and you can cry out--but do not scream."

He knelt naked by the bed, looking at her face. "You are very beautiful, and you must remain so. Don't scream, Maria."

"I will! I can't help it! I'll scream if you touch me! I'll scream and scream!" Maria panted and howled, then tore at the fluffy ropes binding her wrists. They were stronger than they looked.

Ricardo frowned. He reached over and ripped her dress down. He clawed all the clothes from her body as she wriggled and tried to twist her legs away from him.

"You have magnificent tits! They will make you very e popular. My, my, you have a much better body than I expected! Once you have been broken in, you and I are going to have a very good time, Maria, I can tell you that!"

0 Ricardo sat down and took out the jelly. He smeared it onto his jutting phallus in great daubs, making his hard manhood gleam like a blunt metal weapon.

"You are very lucky, Maria Alverez," Ricardo went on speaking in his soft, easy way. "Many, many girls in your position have been treated terribly. They have been beaten, torn as if by animals. That is never the way I train my girls. No, the hundreds of girls I have trained for the Sanchez sisters-they have all been very grateful to me. Because I have taken them Easily, not torn them, not made them feel broken.

"You will just have to accept what is going to happen to you, and then you can lie back and enjoy it. You are very lucky to be broken in by a good, gentlemanly expert such as myself!" He flashed Maria a great beaming smile.

Maria was quivering and wet. She was in such a fright, she could not believe this was happening to her. It was some hideous dream, of that she was most certain. Maria just knew that in a few minutes she would wake up and find herself back home on her parents' farm. She would be in the crowded bedroom, along with all her sisters, and listening to the nightly quarrel. She was not here! No, no, no, that was quite impossible! It simply could not be that this horrible man was crudely pulling her naked legs right apart.

Maria screamed. He slapped her on the side of the face. Falling silent, Maria stared at him.

"You must not scream like that, or you will get hurt!"

Ricardo pressed her legs further and further apart. Her body was wet with sweat. She was quivering as she panted and tried to wriggle from his grasp.

Ricardo hit her again. Maria gave a low moaning cry.

The pain made hot tears flow. Her legs were far back and apart.

"You have a very good body! You will make a lot of money in the houses! Come along now, you are going to be a whore and you must learn how to take a man. I will be your first man, and later, you will have to make me accept you--understand?"

He smiled at her. Now he was kneeling over her. He had her knees all the way back. His arms were under her knees, pressing her legs outward. Her vagina was open and wet. Maria was quivering, tossing, wriggling. But she was trapped with her hands tied, and her legs back almost level with his shoulders.

It had been done so smoothly, professionally. Maria lay back on her shoulders, with her buttocks up, rising higher and higher as Ricardo rocked his body against her crotch. She pleaded, cried out and shut her eyes! Inexorably he was bringing her up to him.

"Now, my plump little Maria, you are ready for it!"

Ricardo was panting. His body flushed with lust. Maria's brown wet body was being pulled up and up, and as her legs wriggled, she was opening her vagina wider and wider for him, in spite of herself. On her back with her buttocks so high, Maria was actually helping him into her.

Deftly Ricardo took his penis and inserted it into the lips of her love-nest. Maria cried out. She was being bent double and was fighting for breath, for sanity, for her body, and yet she could feel him entering a wide open gate down there. It was so infuriating, she howled and shot her body upwards.

On this stroke, Ricardo always entered them deeply. The girls always came to him. He was right into her, stabbing so deeply, a great crooning sob of surprise and agony came from Maria.

"Now you are a woman! I am in you!" Ricardo panted.

Sweat was dripping down the sides of his nose. His loins were ground into Maria's crotch. His phallus was forced into the very depths of her young body, as deep as his scrotum would let him enter her.

Maria's legs flopped wide open. She was unable to control her hips. All of Ricardo's weight, and that of her own body, was pressed down onto her neck and back. She was giving her womanhood to him without being able to help herself. All she could do was to try and fight back against the tremendous weight forcing down on her. JT Her body was being split right open. She could not believe it when she felt the size of what was rammed inside her. But she was too breathless, too crushed, to do anything but accept. Her body was no longer her own. He had taken her completely, and without her being able to do a thing about it!

Ricardo grunted and sweated. He had gotten rid of her maidenhead and was now working his loins faster and faster, ramming in and out. Each time, he pressed down more. He could feel her crotch being split wider and wider. Maria Alverez had never before had her legs forced apart like this, not in all her young life. He seemed to be spilling over and pouring his huge mound of flesh all the way into her.

"Aaaaahhh!" Maria managed only one short scream. She did not have any breath left.

She felt as if she had fainted, but her body kept rocking up and down to the hot strokes that were making her legs kick faster and faster.

Maria was dimly aware of two terrifying emotions. One was that she was weakening. She was opening up and actually giving herself to him, letting him in deeper and fuller. She was even trying to lock her legs about his waist, shuddering and riding with him.

This brought out the second emotion-a shocking feeling of rising pleasure. A great red wave of heat was making her heart beat faster and faster. It was flesh. It was force. It was the rhythm of Ricardo pumping into her faster and faster. Now he was pawing her breasts as he worked.

Maria felt a great, bursting, savage anger. But it was a sexual anger. She was being made love to! And she was loving it! She was accepting it, and sobbing for him to be as cruel as he wished. For he was hers. He was her Ricardo!

Maria suddenly flooded and her whole body flushed to be one with him. She had been taken, and now she was giving. He was her man!

"Si! Si, si, si! Ooooh-Ricci!" Maria screamed out.

For he had such great dynamic skill with his flesh, Ricardo was actually loved by the very girls he raped. His phallus became part of their flesh. He had taken the flowers of their maidenhoods. He had taken their bodies against their wills. He had done it to hundreds of girls, year after year. He did it wonderfully, without caring a damn for them.

And because he did not give a damn for them, they clung to him and actually loved him--heart, body, and soul. It was a curious paradox. The girl changed into a woman and loved the rapist for making her change!

"You-- you--you--man!" Maria sobbed to the rising rhythm of Ricardo's virile thrusts into her.

For she was beyond being able to fight him. She had screamed. She had been hit. She had fought back, and she had been hit again. The inevitable rape she was now experiencing was a savage one. Not for a moment did Ricardo Herrera consider what the girl was feeling. But because she had always been a quiet, subservient girl, Maria gave her body to him, in return for the rapacious thrusts he was forcing deeper and deeper into her.

"You--you are h-hurting me!" Maria groaned. Her legs felt numb. But she could feel that great throbbing, pumping phallus tearing her deeper and deeper. It was an agony that seemed even worse, once Maria had climaxed and given herself to her deflowerer.

This seemed to make- not the slightest difference to him. It was as if Ricardo was completely ignoring her body's yielding and accepting of his rape.

In truth this was not so. For Ricardo was slowly drawing her up and up again. He simply was so vastly experienced that he knew it was a complete waste of time to consider the girl and her feelings or her emotional state at this moment. She had a great deal more rape to experience as yet, both from him and from the animalistic Joaquin Mendosa. There were other perverse sexual ploys to be performed, which Maria did not even dream of as yet. So her giving in to him, in this first rape, while a good sign, was not all that important.

"Si-oooh-si! Si-si-si-si!" Maria panted, and felt her shaken body being melted away by the onstrokes of this huge battering phallus. She was hovering on the verge of a crimson faint. Her body had been hurt, and her mind was once more refusing to believe that what had happened to her was real.

"I am going to come inside you, so you will wash, later," Ricardo panted as his phallus grew harder and seemed to swell so that it locked into her as part of her torn flesh.

Maria screamed again. He was taking her in and out, in and out, and her legs jerked to his wildly free abuse of her body. It was the pressure his swelling phallus was building up that made her scream out so wildly.

Ricardo orgasmed with a great bull-heaving completeness. To him it was flesh-and-flesh, and nothing more. He was surprised at how long Maria had stayed with him.

"All you girls-" Ricardo panted as he surged his massive jets into her, "-are whores-whores, aaaah-at-heart!" He gasped and shuddered as he slowly collapsed onto her streaming wet, bloody body.

"You-you tore me," Maria whimpered. But she could do nothing as his weight kept her legs locked paralyzingly open. They were under his control, not hers. Her whole body was now his. She lay with her tear-stained face staring upwards, her mouth open as she panted slowly. His head was rising and falling as it lay between her magnificently tight, virginal breasts. The breasts were of a soft coffee-color, all honey and glistening with sweat. Ricardo slowly kissed one nipple, and sighed.

"We will get to know each other very well, muchacha!" he grunted. "You will love it, all the time! It's good for you. No woman ever died of it." He wiped his nose against her quivering breast and sniggered. "No, no woman was ever worn out by too much of it, either. Now you can take as many as you like!"

He wriggled his loins, forcing her vaginal lips to hold onto his now slippery-soft penis. Then he sighed.

"I shall begin again in a little while. Got to get my hard-on back, first, Maria!"

His mouth opened and abruptly he was snoring as he slept. The sweat was glistening on his back. He was half-crouched, still the intruder inside her young body.

Maria was sobbing slowly, soundlessly. She could not help it. Nor could she wipe the tears from her cheeks as they streamed down. For she knew now what was happening to her, and she hated herself, and him, and the entire world for its base cruelty.

* * *

The second time Ricardo thrust into her and jerked so deeply, Maria at first screamed at each stroke. For he seemed to be splitting her body open in a crude, relentless drive to make her into a ripped, raw piece of broken womanhood. He worked faster and faster, until once again Maria was riding with him.

"You feel the glory!" Ricardo grunted.

"No! No, no!" Maria was determined to deny everything.

But her hips were flexing up and out, and her legs were working furiously with his pumping strokes. Her whole body was giving back as fully as he was taking it.

"This is what you must learn to control." Ricardo began her lessons. "You must learn to suck in your cunt, and make the man shoot right off--no messing about like this. You are not in the business to have fun yourself. The quicker you make him come, the more you can earn with less effort."

Maria fell back panting and heaving. She could hardly hear or understand his words. For he was plunging on and on, and it seemed to Maria that this time, she would certainly explode and die. No woman could take this. Nothing could take it. Maria knew she was going to die of it. Then she went into a furious orgasm, and sobbing with rage and passion, yielded herself to Ricardo completely.

"Your body betrays you, my pet! It loves a man too much. Until you are over this, you will be no good. You must take six men in an evening, and speed is everything." Ricardo drove each point home with a forward thrust of his phallus. Each time, Maria's head shot back and her eyes seemed to almost pop out of her head. For he was too deeply into her. She was being broken again and again.

"Aaahhhh! No--no--please, have mercy!" she whispered in a small, very girlish voice. "No more--mercy on me, please! Just let me go home now. Please, kind senor, please!"

Her legs fell wide open and her love-mound rose to meet the thick root of his phallus. Against her own will, against her own being, Maria's body was answering the skilled ministrations of Ricardo Herrera. The Bull was always loved this way! El Tow, the girls all called him. And they shivered at the memory of precisely the experience Maria Alverez was undergoing right now.

"You like it too much!" Ricardo rammed home and held still a moment as he growled this at her.

"No-my arms-they hurt so much! I hate it! I do-I wish nothing more-than to die, or escape from this!" Maria cried and whimpered wildly, over and over again.

"Your body enjoys it! You will have to be trained hard, to get over what your body enjoys. Otherwise you will take too much time with each man. They do not pay enough for this kind of fucking! You will have to learn, and learn fast. I haven't the time to waste on any one girl. Joaquin will have to teach you the rough way."

Ricardo recommenced his surging in and out. He was going as kind as possible, in his bull-like way. But he was still the rapist.

Maria Alverez had already changed. Now she was a woman, and now she had taken the first step toward being a Sanchez whore. It was the way Ricardo made them take him, and made them hurt. They never got over him, nor the way he broke them in to the thrusts of a man's hot demands.

* * *

When Ricardo was ready to rape Maria the third time, e she lay half-asleep and exhausted. He undid her thongs, loosening her hands. Ricardo knew that by now she would be too tired to attack him. And if she did try to claw him, he could easily overpower her.

Maria dimly felt herself being rolled over onto her back. Her crotch was sore from the pounding of Ricardo's huge phallus. He forced her legs apart, then mounted her. Easing right into her on the first stroke, he made her lock her legs behind him.

"There you are, my big-eyed beauty. You have such fine tits! I think you are one of the sweetest girls I have taken in a long while. Yes, you are one of the best this year." Ricardo was rocking her back and down, then in and down.

Slowly Maria's body came tighter around his, and her hips were more compliant than ever. She was now used to the rolling action of Ricardo's rhythmic copulation. She locked her heels and rode with him, her eyes closed, her mouth tightly shut.

"You are lucky, my little one! Not all men are as gentle as I am. You must learn how to deal with men. They all have different ways of loving a girl. You must learn to make them accept you, and get rid of them immediately afterwards.

"Yes, now you are soft and bleeding. But later you will be tough and used to man after man. You will look back on this first time, when you were soft and hurt, in amazement.

"Girls forget very quickly. They have so many men. They forget what it was like when they had their first and only lover. I shall always be your first and only lover-you know that, my little one!"

Maria sobbed softly. For she could not prevent his taking her again and again. Her arms slipped down and locked about his shoulders. Her body was hot, and now, so completely possessed, she wondered what she had been screaming about.

Ricardo Herrera loved women. He had always had a tremendous rapacious appetite for all women. Now, for the moment, he seemed to have focused on one single girl, and her essence. True, he gave this impression to every girl he raped for the Sanchez whorehouses, but it was his control, and his size, and the way he shook them into complete physical subservience toward him, then towards all men, that made Ricardo a great whoremaster. He was the head pimp not only by virtue of collecting the money, but in controlling their bodies. It was a curious, very intimate relationship, and he had many inner reasons why this life was all of him, and occupied him so completely. But these were secrets that were locked in the shadows of his own childhood days.

"Si-si-you make me!" Maria muttered desperately, and sobbed for breath. She shuddered into another quick orgasm, then her legs fell limply on either side of Ricardo.

"Come, come, little one! You must learn more staying power. You release everything, and then you have nothing left. You must learn never to give to a man. Unless you are a nonstop whore like Alicia Cordone-she can go on and on like an oil gusher! But you, you have beauty, a fine golden brown skin, great tits, lovely eyes. You must learn to control your body, otherwise, with all this fucking every night, you will be an old woman in two years."

Maria Alverez opened her enormous brown-black eyes and stared at him. She was not crying any more. There was a spark of pain in the dark pools of her eyes, also a spark of hatred. For he had raped her. And she was now slowly realizing what life was going to be for her.

The hatred she could not help. But he still made her body quiver, and her naked legs still locked tightly against his sides as he stroked in and out, in and out, till she groaned and went into yet another orgasm for him. .

Ricardo worked at raping all his girls in the same savage, thrusting way. Kneeling with their legs about him, holding on to their thighs, Ricardo would vibrate to and fro, slowly, like a copulating bronze figure. His face was set, and once in a while he grunted. When he had worked into a near-orgasmic fury, then his hands might seize the girl's breasts and massage her up to a heat. But this was only in the first phases of the girl's whore training. Later, Ricardo would pump into a girl's body almost like a metronome, a copulating machine more than a man.

It took several weeks for a girl to get used to this harsh, heavy copulating, without spirit or emotion. But once he had trained them to service a man, there was nothing sexual that his girls did not know. For with his thick skull low on his shoulders, looking as if he were hunched down, in deep thought, Ricardo would work away and away at a girl's body relentlessly.

It was a curious thing, the way he moved. Ricardo seemed able to flex out his loins and phallus, and work them back and forth without effort. Perhaps over the hundreds and hundreds of young girls he had trained up to be high-quality whores, Ricardo had indeed developed very special muscles. Certainly, with the way his loins were so fluid, he had a devastating complete command of any girl or any woman's body. Even the brazen Teresa Sanchez had to admit that Ricardo was a man apart.

But all the same, it seemed that Ricardo looked on his rapes, and the busy training sessions afterwards, as just so much humping toil. He was kneeling all the time, his phallus flowing in and out, in and out. His rough hands would manipulate the girl. His fingers would twist her nipples, stroke her breasts, move down and part her buttocks. Once he was operating on a girl or woman at full intensity, there was not a female in the world who could stand against him.

Ricardo loved his work. He was close to being an automatic lover, true. But he still loved to rape a young girl, to mold her vaginal flesh tightly to the tricks and slippery movements of his thick phallus. He always felt he was tuning each new girl up to be the best of them all. Certainly, by the time a girl had been forced and then trained by Ricardo and his rapist assistant Joaquin, she was a fully fledged whore who knew every trick and every possible sex position.

Ricardo covered all forms of sexual excesses, from oralism to anal sex. These extra skills he considered a side amusement. The basic operation of in-and-out thrusting was the bovine delight that he relished most, for himself. He could kneel and work away at a girl's crotch for hours at a time, long past her complete exhaustion. His thick neck down, his head bent forward, Ricardo would thrust on and on and on. In some ways, it seemed to be almost obsessional with him.

"You will learn to like this!" he grunted.

All Maria could do was to stare helplessly at his sweating face. She was over on her back again. He was ploughing relentlessly into her body. Maria wondered why it was she had been so shocked, that first time. Now he was doing it over and over again. Maria closed her eyes, her mouth opened. She was being forced to accept his complete male dominance.

* * *

Tired, but finally content, Ricardo washed himself slowly. He dried his privates with a towel, then pulled on his trousers. This first session was always the toughest.

On the drab bed behind him, Maria Alverez lay in a semiconscious daze. Her glistening coffee-brown body was wet with perspiration. There were bruises about her naked hips and her large breasts. She was too dazed even to pull the gray blanket over her nakedness. In any case, now she had nothing to hide. Her body was open, torn and bleeding. She was just lying there, trying to recover from the vast brutality of the last few hours. Her mind was still thinking about the farm where her brothers and sisters lived, but now all that seemed a million miles away.

"The bull will be at you next! You will see how gentle I have been, once he's at you!" Ricardo laughed, and gave her one of his charming smiles. He knotted his shirt about his belly and stared down at her gaping body.

"You will be a good money earner! Men like a beautiful girl. You will not make love as well as some, but you will show them a wonderful body. Men like a girl to have a good shape. Keep it as long as you can--and don't forget to wash yourself out later, or you will start off in too much trouble, right away!"

His back was stiff, and his scrotum ached from having orgasmed so many times into the girl's delicious body. Ricardo sat down on the drab bed and patted her naked hip. Maria stared down at his hand as if still unable to believe it was happening. Ricardo sighed.

"Yes, you will learn to fuck with them all! You will learn. You have a good body, and it will earn much money. When the bull Joaquin comes in for you, relax and let him play. He can be very rough with a girl who upsets him. I shall be back with you tomorrow afternoon for more, Maria--good girl!"

* * *

Joaquin Mendosa sat smoking a cheroot and listening to the night cicadas beyond the veranda of the hacienda. He blew smoke and turned his head as Ricardo at last appeared.

"Well, how is she?" Joaquin asked eagerly.

"Oh, a soft one, this Maria-all tears! You will have to be careful not to tear her body up too badly, she bruises easily. I'm hungry! All this breaking in of the virgins, it gives me the appetite of a small bull!"

Joaquin laughed. "I'll bet you're sore from making her a woman--or are you so used to it, you never notice the maidenhead breaking?"

"Some of them have one, some of them do not. It is the girl we have to change into a whore--not her body. And we must make her a Sanchez whore. That is all I am thinking about. See you later." Ricardo wandered on toward the kitchen, then paused to call back. "What's going on in the Hole?"

"Ah, she treats them too badly! Three died today, and they are out burning them now. I tell you, it's a shocking waste of girls. We work so hard to break them in, and the mad one, she is killing them faster than we get new ones." Joaquin sighed. "One even has to speak carefully when she is around now; you never know when she has a pistol in her hand. Is it not time someone took her to see the head doctor, in the city?"

"Yes, it is getting that way." Ricardo paused and thought a moment. "I shall mention it to Teresa soon," he added.

"You and Teresa, you could run the Sanchez businesses very well between you. You know that, Ricci. You will always have my support. We are both army, and we both know what's what. That madwoman is becoming a danger to us all."

"Yes, she and the old one. I don't know about Teresa."

"Teresa is a tricky one," Joaquin agreed. "She might--or she might not."

"I think you would have to be very careful." Joaquin slowly got up and dusted the seat of his trousers. "So much money in these girls, and they let them die like pigs, in the Hole-and then burn them to ashes and bury them out here. It is a waste, a great waste of talented girls!"

Ricardo nodded. "We shall have to see about it."

"I'll go now and excavate this new Maria Alverez bigger and bigger! Maybe I'll stay with her until morning. I shall see how good she is. It is always work--one more girl to fuck, always work, night and day. Perhaps this one will be tender, and I will enjoy her."

Joaquin laughed deeply and crudely. He was a bear of a man, with a massive phallus and a very crude method of forcing a girl to copulate with him. Joaquin enjoyed many different positions, as well as oral lovemaking by the girl. He was rough and free with his fists. A girl either learned to please Joaquin Mendosa very quickly, or she was soon a mass of blood and bruises.

"I have been fancying this one half the night! I think I shall make her perform hot for me right at the start."

Joaquin's boots made a thumping noise as he went down the steps and along the corridor to the room where Maria Alverez was lying prisoner on her drab bed.

* * *

In the kitchen, Ricardo found two of the tough women guards who controlled the girls while they were here at the Sanchez rancho. They smiled at him, and were careful how they spoke. Ricardo was dangerous, both in his influence with the Sanchez sisters, and the stiletto he always carried about him.

"There are some tortillas, plenty of eggs, and a lot of rice. We eat well, even if the girls here don't," one of the leathery-faced women laughed.

Ricardo Herrera filled his plate and sat down at the kitchen table. The rancho was a dull place to be. Nothing but sick girls, or girls being punished. New girls came here to be broken in, and stayed up to two months, until they were really ready to be good Sanchez whores.

A scream echoed in the kitchen. Ricardo looked up. The scream came a second time, louder, wilder, longer.

"Ahh, that is Joaquin going at the new girl! He is a cruel bastard when he wishes to be." Ricardo shook his head, then went on busily shoveling eggs and rice into his mouth.

"We need more new girls. We seem always to be burying them, these days. I think there is something-" The leathery-faced woman stopped in mid-sentence. A look from the other had silenced her. "Something-well, no matter."

Ricardo stared at her. He was thinking of that fat, obscene bear of a man, Joaquin, happily abusing the slim body of the sixteen-year-old Maria Alverez. It seemed a pity to make the girl scream again. Joaquin ought to be more gentle at his work. However, there was no time to give a girl much of a chance to get over the assault. Maria would be needed in the Hotel Molinos soon, at the present rate of girl wastage.

"When the Turk comes, he will clear off all the rough ones. Senora Delfina says we are to stop bruising them, give them a few days to recover. They are even sending up some clean dresses for them from Leon. I don't think all this sort of fancy stuff will fool the Turk. He's a pretty wise trader," one of the guards said quietly.

"Where is Delfina now?" Ricardo asked.

"She was over at the Hole-but I think she has gone to her room now, and is resting."

"I don't know how anyone can stand the Hole for five minutes," Ricardo muttered. "That place stinks like a cesspool."

"That's why it's called the Hole. Anyway, the girls in it don't seem to notice. I can't stand the rats there--Senora Delfina doesn't seem to mind them, but I never liked rats."

"I wonder why she tortures the girls that way. It is a waste, just a pure waste of good material." Ricardo did not address the guards as he said this. It was more his own thoughts coming out.

"Will the new girl you've just been with--will she make a lot of money?" One of the more lesbian-inclined guards could not help betraying her eagerness as she asked Ricardo this.

"Maria? Yes, yes, she will be very nice. She is sixteen, and soft in the flesh, but she will be good and attractive. I hope that brute Joaquin doesn't break her nose and ruin her looks. He's done that to so many girls, it's silly. He always liked to beat them when he gets excited. If he breaks Maria's nose, that will be the last time I use him for training anyone."

"He says he doesn't do it any more."

"He had better not," Ricardo frowned.

There seemed to be so many things wrong with the vast Sanchez organization. It was as Joaquin said, the top was senile or insane. Now nothing seemed to have any sensible purpose at all. Sick girls and noisy girls were thrown into the horrors of the Hole, where they died or went crazy and had to be killed. Girls were good material and cost a lot to train and keep. It was Delfina who had set up this wasteful killing business, as part of her insane reign of terror.

Ricardo frowned. In some ways, he was scared of her too. He would have to do something about it. It was getting to be a complete waste of time and of good girls.

A short, sharp, wild scream echoed. Ricardo put down his plate and swore.

"That crazy bear is ruining her! I'll have to go and tell him to ease off." Ricardo got up and left the room.

He kicked open Maria's door with one massive lash of his boot.

"Joaquin! What the hell are you making her scream so much for?" Ricardo demanded. He had his knife handy in his sleeve. One was never too certain of Joaquin.

Maria lay belly-down on the bed with the naked body of the sweating Joaquin sprawled over her buttocks. He was slowly working her butt up and apart. The girl had fainted from the pain of his hard anal entry.

"She has gone out on me! It's no good when they pass out. But she has a wonderful ass. She has an ass like a milk-fed calf!" Joaquin gurgled and laughed.

"Leave her alone-you've taken her ass too early. You always ruin a girl. Get off her and leave her alone!"

Joaquin slithered off Maria's bloody butt and sat up on the bed with a grunt. He knew the girl would be useless for a long while. Besides, he was physically exhausted. Maria had drawn three huge orgasms out of him in quick succession.

"I enjoyed this little bitch! I needed her and it was quick. I like it quick for a change. Tomorrow she will be better still for me. I'll go and wash."

"We ought to go over to the Hole and see if there are any girls we can help out over there." Ricardo leaned against the door while Joaquin got a basin and filled it with fresh water. The unconscious girl lay face-down on the bed, her naked body looking like bronze in the smoky-yellow light from the single oil-lamp.

"Where did you say, Ricci-the Hole? No, no, they are all clapped or poxed up or with babies over there. All they get out of the Hole are stiffs for burning and burying. The gravedigger was complaining to me he is working so hard, he has two graves a day to dig now, and each time they are . farther and farther out among the rocks." Joaquin laughed. "Poor damn gravedigger-a fine thing when even the undertakers are complaining!"

"Come along, we'll go over to the Hole and see why it's causing us to lose so many girls. It's bad for business, this girl shortage. You and I, Mendosa, we work hard turning out good little whores. Someone is poxing them up for us." Ricardo chewed on his cheroot and spat out a loose tobacco strand.

Having washed his privates and pulled on his shirt, Joaquin Mendosa tugged his boots on. He glanced at the humped-up shape of Maria Alverez.

"The women will be down to wash her out and get her straight. We'd best tell them she's being trained good and hard." Joaquin grunted and heaved at his boots. "Trouble is, we haven't had a new sixteen-year-old for three or four weeks--so we fall onto this one and make her raw in five minutes."

He got up and stamped his boots home. "She's gonna have a fine ass, when I finish with it. Yes, a real tight pleasure! Like you say, Ricci-some mad person is killing off the girls we have labored long and hard to train."

They walked out into the corridor and along to the steps leading to the veranda. One of the women guards came down and went in to wash Maria, and to teach her how to care for herself. The two men had even left Maria's bedroom door open. In her torn and exhausted state, there was no danger of Maria's going far.

"I tell you, Ricci, it's this madwoman! Something must be done. We had a fine business. It's been ruined by too much kindness. Look at the way they put up with girls who never earn a peso!"

Ricardo Herrera frowned. "It could be. This is a crazy world, Joaquin, and these girls are so simple. They do not understand the opportunities being offered to them." He waved an arm.

"But me, I always believe in a smile. Even when I am choking a girl I smile, so she cannot hate me. It makes them wonder. It makes it all a lot easier when people smile. I think that is the trouble here. This insanity, all this hard-faced business. Delfina Sanchez was good, but now--who knows when she is not going to turn a gun on you and blow your brains out? A fellow wouldn't even know--because she does it standing behind him!"

A twitch of fear crossed Joaquin Mendosa's gross face. "Si, si, she is a mad one! I am glad when she is standing in front of me. I know my brains will not be blown out at any moment.

"It is her fault, all of this. She is not close with the girls any more. They do not trust her. It is like you say, Ricci, the girls, they like you smiling, and they like me because I am big and gentle. But Senora Delfina--she is a devil. How-how do you get along with Teresa these days?"

"Very well. But I feel Teresa is like her sisters. It is a problem. I cannot tell Teresa anything without her sisters hearing the story. Then we would all be buried out here in this cemetery they call the rancho. I do not fancy that."

He paused and rubbed his groin. "That girl has made my cock sore! It's lack of practice. Like you say, Joaquin, we have not had young girls here for so long, it makes it hard to get back to breaking them in. And they do not appreciate what we are doing for them, either."

Joaquin Mendosa smiled in the half-light from the kitchen. He and Ricardo were going in to get a mug of coffee. Then they would go over and check through the outhouses, beyond the back of the rancho proper.

* * *

It was under one of these outhouses that the Hole was situated. Also there was the Cama Real or torture-bed, a plank studded with barbed wire, onto which a girl was bound for days at a time, until her skin was all cut and festering. And beyond the outbuildings themselves were the old oil-drums made into an oven for burning. It was here the grave digging started, and the graves littered the ranchland into the distance. They were scattered, their exact number unknown.

The further one traveled from the main ranch building, where Maria Alverez was being initiated into the joys of whoring, the more somber and sordid became the scene and the air.

Both men had their individual memories of events at the rear of the rancho, and both seemed to hang back. There were ghosts in that evil place.

"Maybe we go look in the morning," Joaquin grunted. "It is late, and we have worked hard this evening. That girl, she has a pleasant body, and the face of a beauty. But it is hard work. A man needs to rest well afterwards, to recover his strength."

"In the morning we shall be working on her again. It will take three days to wear her down to accept her new life. No--we'll go now and see what is wrong out there. Besides, in the morning Senorita Delfina may be around and watching us--and that could be fatal for someone-- probably us," Ricardo chuckled.

"Alright, so we go and look at the silly bitches. But they have all gotten into the Hole because of their own faults. Anita Torres is cheating on us. The other is a junkie and costs more in dope than she will ever earn. And the third, she had a bad abortion.

"These girls are no damned good! The young whores of today, they are not so clever, nor are they as tough as the old girls when we were young--eh, Ricci?" Joaquin Mendosa had a jibing note in his voice as he said this, but yet a note of uncertain apprehension.

For there was this air about Joaquin, that he was always afraid of making some terrible mistake. He never had real confidence. Even after all his rape sessions as follow-up trainer of the Sanchez whores, Joaquin had a smeared, wobbling way with women and girls. He could use his massive phallus skills, and he could make a girl scream, until she was only too eager to enter whorehouse service, if only to get away from the pawing and jolting ways of Joaquin. But all the same, it was as if the mushy slice of this wobbly stratum went right through Joaquin Mendosa. He fought against it-- obviously too much so. But he could hardly hide it, particularly not with Ricardo Herrera. Joaquin was always likely to start asking idiotic questions, as if he were a ten-year-old boy instead of a gross, mature pimp and rapist.

* * *

There was a curious littered atmosphere about the rancho, even at night--a feeling that chaos and debris were not only scattered among the brush, but also somewhere beneath the soil. There was no agricultural function to be observed at the Sanchez rancho. Where other ranches had cattle or goats or chickens, here at this ranch, there was only a litter of oil-drums, an old truck rusting and rotting in the sandy dirt, a pile of wooden posts sagging close to the rusted corrugated iron hulks of what once had been cow-houses.

In the fresh night wind, under the high bright Mexican stars, there was an air of cool freedom. In spite of this, the Sanchez rancho was filled with a kind of slow, paralytic inevitable sense of doom.

Ricardo and Joaquin walked slowly down to the drab sheds at the far end of the rancho. They walked with an air of infinite passive indifference. This was how they were. They had seen so many human disasters, they had raped and ruined so many hundreds of young girls, Ricardo and Joaquin were absolutely beyond compassion, and almost into a catatonic state of emotional death.

The only two things they ever found to raise their moods to activity and even to thought, were money, and power. One was so closely interrelated to the other, they were virtually the same thing in this world of pimp and whore. A few pesos could buy a life; a few dollars could be the ticket to hell.

Joaquin had been completely crushed by Ricardo, in regard to power. For Ricardo could get hold of Teresa Sanchez and make love to her any time he wished. Thus Joaquin knew for certain he could never outstrip the ex-army officer.

So, tired but wary, Joaquin followed Ricardo into the outbuilding that housed the infamous Hole.

* * *

Anita Torres was lying on the Cama Real. She was stiff and already bleeding from several barbed-wire cuts. She had resigned herself to this torture. Yet somehow, the strange streak of independence within Anita was growing. It was as if this bed of cuts was going to add the final fury of action to her long thought-about plan to escape from the nightmare life of a Sanchez girl.

The three planks of the Cama Real, and the coil of barbed wire that made the blanket of it, were in a side-room. There was a flight of steps beyond the side-room, which led down into a foul cellar. Here the stench of excreta and filthy bodies, and the oil-lamp's gutted flame, all combined to make the atmosphere of the Hole almost unbreathable.

Some fifteen young girls, thin, sick, wild and haggard, were lying on the rickety cots on each side of the Hole. They ignored the lice that crawled over them. The rats that now and again flittered past, made some of the girls blink and shrivel back. But even to these menaces, the girls who had been in the Hole a good length of time hardly seemed to react at all.

There was another room, further along, above the Hole. It was here a girl was brought when she was being "sent to the hospital." Actually, it was a death-room, and no girl entering it was ever seen again.

When a girl got too sick, or was obviously not going to recover, then either Delfina Sanchez or her sister Consuela ordered her to be taken to the "Illness Room." And that was the end of her as far as any of the other girls ever knew.

Both Ricardo and Joaquin were well aware of the grave digging duties attached to the nightmare of the Hole. Sick girls were helped to their end. Others were tortured as examples to those still obstinate about ever being whores. The two men had a passive, total indifference to it all. They saw only the money, and the power. Once in a while a very beautiful young virgin, such as Maria Alverez, might give them some pleasure. But even this lewd work of rape, they tended to regard as a toil of duty and not of love.

Tonight, the real rebel, in heart and soul, was Anita Torres. She had been badly beaten for telling a young American tourist customer that she was a slave. The young American had enjoyed her body, and then reported her tale to the police. Via Sergeant Lopez, a terrible punishment had landed on Anita Torres. From that time on, Anita was subject to total mistrust. Delfina would bring her out to the ranch as if for no other purpose than to try and kill the girl. Yet Anita's spirit was fired with an ever increasing determination not to yield.

This battle, which had developed more and more fiercely these last six months, had begun to fascinate many of the people. Teresa admired Anita Torres' spirit, and had suggested the girl be sold off to the Turk as soon as possible.

Ricardo had chosen Anita's pleasures for himself several times lately, for he enjoyed wielding his phallic authority over her. At the same time, he knew he could conquer only her body, for even as she gave herself to him, Anita's eyes blazed with defiance.

They had made her a whore, so she could not help herself, but something else raged within Anita. It was the fiery spirit of the truly independent woman.

"Ah, she would make a great madam, that one, if she was not always so full of right and wrong!" Delfina Sanchez herself had commented about Anita. For the old whorehouse madam recognized in the fiery resistance of Anita something of her own old passions when she was young--before insanity and coarse corruption of the flesh swept through her.

"Ahah! So you are back in the loving embrace of the Cama Real, Anita!" Ricardo paused in the doorway and sighed. "It is a bad thing, to have you damaged. I shall have a word with Senora Delfina and have it all stopped, if you wish."

Anita glared at him a moment. They both knew why she was here. Delfina feared and hated her. Anita nodded slowly. She even managed to smile.

"Yes, Ricci, please, please, if you can. I shall go mad--on this rack--I swear it--I shall go mad!" Her voice was a harsh, hard whisper.

"I shall see you are not wasted."

Joaquin grinned at Anita as he passed the doorway. Both men knew each and every girl, intimately and all the way. For a girl trained by these two men was attached to them for the rest of her life--unless sold out to the Turk, for the whorehouses at Tijuana.

"Anita always has spirit. That is a waste! We must get her off the bed," Joaquin muttered as he came with Ricardo down into the stench of the Hole. "Hell-what a stench! They must have fifty girls in here!"

Ricardo grunted. He and Joaquin carried out their inspection as quickly as they could. It was too depressing and took only a few minutes.

"These must be sold off. We ought to get them washed, stick clean dresses on them, and sell them off as soon as possible. That's the only way we'll ever see any money out of this lot," Ricardo gave his expert opinion.

"But that would leave us with even a greater girl shortage," Joaquin grumbled as he followed Ricardo out of the Hole. They both stared at Anita's naked body as they passed the small room with the Cama Real in it. Anita was a whore who kept her shape and made men hunger for her, the more they knew her. It was curious how this quality went with such an anti-male attitude. Anita had been there since she was sixteen, and she could hold nothing back from them now, except her spirit of independence.

"What girl shortage? All these girls are in the Hole and are of no use anyway. Selling them would make it easier to run the rancho and also leave us with money to go and get more new young girls. If only the old bitches would spend the money on advertising." Ricardo lit a new cheroot to get the taste of the Hole out of his mouth. They now stood outside the building.

"Yes, yes, we must sell them to the Turk. We ought to get Fat Man and the women guards to work on it, first thing in morning. Fat Man has nothing else to do but to caress and feed these chickens of his."

This Joaquin said with a giggle. The girls never allowed Fat Man to enter their bodies. When they started screaming and fighting, Fat Man backed away. Fat Man's being the idiot custodian of the rancho, including the girls in the Hole, probably accounted for the girls' being in such dreadful condition--this plus the insane reasoning of Delfina Sanchez.

"Ahh, the Fat Man, he needs shooting too--he and his dog. I think they both have the pox, and the dog is the only one of the two with any brains at all." Ricardo hated Fat Man deeply.

"But he works. Who else would feed the girls, if he were not here?" Joaquin laughed.

"Yes, they would starve. Lots of them did before he arrived. All the same, the very sight of Fat Man makes me sick," Ricardo spat.

"We still have to arrange for the Turk to buy them. He is very particular when it comes to price, so the girls will have to be washed and made to stand up long enough for him to inspect them." Joaquin laughed as he thought of the scene. "They are such a pitiful lot, down in the Hole, they might easily fall over and allow the Turk to buy them for next to nothing!"

The two men were walking back toward the main buildings of the ranch house.' A figure approached them through the dark.

"Hello--who is it?" came a quavering male voice.

"Talk of the devil! Fat Man, we were just speaking of you. And not nicely, either," Joaquin bellowed as the figure stopped.

Ricardo and Joaquin could almost feel the quivering waves of doubt and fear the gross figure of the Fat Man radiated. He was huge, like a dump-sack, with a small head on the massive slope of his shoulders. For all his size, the girls reported that his phallus was the size of that of a small boy. Certainly no girl ever gave Fat Man much chance. The sight of him was enough to enrage and disgust most of them.

"The Hole stinks-you ought to clear it out!" Ricardo growled this as an order.

"Yes, yes, Senor Herrera, I shall do it. Only-only Senorita Sanchez says they should wallow in it, like the pigs they are."

"It is bad for business. These girls are needed. Soon we are having a sale to the Turk, girls for Tijuana. These are too rough and dirty to fetch a decent price. Clean them up, and don't bruise them while you are mauling them about!"

"They don't let me--do anything," Fat Man whined in his high voice. "I offer them treats, and comfort, but all they do is try and scratch or bite me. It's not nice, the way they treat the one who takes care of them!"

"Perhaps you should try taking better care of them, my good vaquero! Anyway, there's a new girl to be put into the cage for you to feed. Her name is Maria Alverez, and she is just being broken in--so when Joaquin and I are through with her, you keep her in the cage until she's ready to go to the Hotel." Ricardo made this sound as if he were giving the Fat Man a present.

"A new girl-yes, yes, I heard about her! She is said to have the largest eyes! I like girls with big eyes. I shall be good to her, I shall feed her. Yes, I shall feed her many times if she smiles at me!" His voice wobbled with emotional stress.

"And see she is not bruised either. While she still has her looks she can make us a lot of money. Keep your paws off her, or she'll be ruined even before she gets to town!"

"I like to pet my girls. I like to make sure they are happy, that's all!" Fat Man sounded like a hurt child.

"Yes, we have seen you at work." Joaquin always felt like lifting his boot and sinking it into the enormous gross bulk of the Fat Man's buttock. The fact that Fat Man was twice his size meant nothing. The great man had the brain of an idiotic boy, and was nothing more than a hulking, retarded coward.

"Have you made love to a girl, lately, Fat Man?" Ricardo asked. He looked at Joaquin this time, grinning as his words distressed Fat Man.

"No, no, not for a long, long time! Girls do not understand me. I am different. I am very different! You say this new girl's name is Maria-Maria Alverez. That I must remember, so I can write it on the front of her cage. They can be wild when they get hungry, and they don't understand I forget their names so easily. Maria. You ought to know how much I am looking forward to seeing her and taking care of her, in every way I can."

"Aaah, you will beat her, bite her and ruin her long before she gets to the hotel. Ricardo, perhaps this is why we are so short of girls? This is the monster who is mistreating them, and making them waste away instead of earning good money!" Joaquin spoke half in jest.

"No, no, Ricardo, no! Senor Herrera, I do my best to save them! The Senora gets into such rages-such killing rages! I always try to amuse the girls with my dog Pepita, yes, that is true. Pepita and I are good to the girls. They like to see us. I have some tricks with Pepita that makes them smile.

"The madam-she is wilder and wilder-Senor Herrera, she is so wild, I wonder about her at times... " His voice trailed off uneasily. He was always terrified of speaking of the old she-devil, Delfina Sanchez. The witch had the habit of suddenly appearing right behind him, and of hearing every word Fat Man said. He glanced about in the dark, close by the ranch house. Fat Man made a faint sniveling noise when he was worried.

"Yes, yes, there is truth there, that is the root of our troubles," Ricardo muttered to Joaquin.

"Si-it is a difficult situation. Very difficult!"

"Come, let's go and crack a bottle of cactus-juice. I feel like some drink. We have a damned hard day tomorrow, again, working with Maria. We must make her understand what she has to do." Ricardo led the way up onto the veranda of the dark and ramshackle hacienda.

"Aye, hard work, she is! But, it's a change to have a fresh girl. Let's hope we'll start getting a regular supply of new ones, now." Joaquin and Fat Man came on up after Ricardo.

Ricardo had a key to the liquor cabinet. They did not. They stood there and watched in the light of the oil-lamp, as Ricardo produced two bottles of tequila. They both licked their lips. This was the best way to spend the night at Rancho Sanchez. After raping girls all day, a man had to relax and let his body recover at night-before starting work in the morning.

* * *

Maria Alverez was dozing. Her body felt torn and altered. It did not seem possible that this had all really happened. In her innermost mind, Maria firmly refused to let the rape scene or the imprisonment in this place really register. She smiled and held her rag doll firmly, for she was certain it was all a grotesque nightmare. People did not behave like animals. Her body was just not made for that kind of treatment. Maria closed her puffed eyes and hugged her rag doll, smiling as she felt it against her cheek.

Life was better than this, Maria felt certain. She was going to wake up and find it had all been changed by the arrival of daylight.

For her small heart still held up proudly. Maria knew she was beautiful, and that one day she would meet a nice fellow, marry him and live happily ever after. This was how it had to be.

Nothing else could happen to her. Whatever she had imagined them doing to her here, on this bed, was some kind of strange confusion she had fallen into. Her body was sore. It was so sore, Maria felt like crying. But all the same, she refused to accept it. Life was not like this, at all! It couldn't be!

CHAPTER FOUR - THE WHITE SLAVER

The Turk was at once a basilisk, a cretinous sphinx, a slick salamander, and an evil ogre. There was about him a knife-edge of cruelty, with a sinister kind of Von Stroheim flair. His appearance was quite enough to create the impression of life-or-death power, which indeed the Turk possessed. For he was one of the top white slavers in the whole of North America. His girls he collected from procurers in San Francisco, San Antonio, Los Angeles and even as far off as Chicago. The girls ended up in the brothels of Bolivia, Argentina, and even in the black states of the new African countries, where white whores are highly popular.

The Turk stood five feet seven inches tall. He had a completely bald head, and no eyebrows. Like many hairless men, the Turk had a richly tanned skin, with the same folds about the jowls and neck as a lizard. His black button-eyes flickered and saw everything. He had small hands, holding a small riding whip that went with his English jodhpurs. But the whip rarely touched the skin of any horse.

"I did well with a bunch of hippie girls this spring! Very well! American girls sell well in the East-and San Francisco is full of young stuff. Cheap too, once they've been hooked." He smiled thinly. He might have been discussing shipments of frozen beef or sacks of wheat.

The Turk was an international trader. His merchandise was flesh, and he could never get enough of it. Of the twenty thousand young French girls that turn up missing every year, for example, several hundred came through the Turk's hands. He operated with madams in Buenos Aires, or with hard-faced brothel owners of Tunis.

"There is such a demand for white girls! The whiter your girls are, the better! I shall have one more cup of coffee, and then shall we see what you have for sale?" The Turk lifted his cup, a thick-lipped smile on his face, almost as if he were suggesting a visit to church.

"Yes, this is good coffee, Senora Consuela, very good coffee you always have for me here at your beautiful ranch." The Turk sighed and gently brushed his spotless white tunic. His whip shone like a short black leather snake on the table.

Only Consuela, an old friend of the Turk, and Delfina were able to deal with the great trader himself. It was said that the Turk had once tried to buy Consuela Sanchez, when she was very young. It was only her sexual success with him that had saved her from shipment to the Bolivian tin mines.

Thus Delfina could not cut into this strange liaison between Consuela and the Turk. But the Turk had long since realized who he had to deal with. Once the money talk and the bargaining started, Delfina became the prime figure.

"It is a pity your sister Teresa is unable to come here and see me." The Turk meant an insinuation here. For in past years, when she was younger, Teresa had gladly sealed the sales by sleeping with the Turk. Hence he had savored each of the three Sanchez sisters, having made a point of taking Delfina a few times in her youth also.

There was, between the Turk and his many customers, a great deal of financial and physical intimacy. Buying and selling human flesh created within these people scant regard for morals. They could settle an argument either in bed, or with a whip, or with a knife. One had to be of their own status and stature to be either an opponent or a bed-companion. In this odd way, the brothel-keepers and girl-runners of the world have their own curious class-consciousness.

"Yes, it is a very good year for American girls. I had some from Chicago with the most spotless white skin. They will do very well in Argentina." The Turk slowly stirred his fresh cup of coffee.

He was a millionaire in many countries, many times over. But he was also flesh, and of the flesh trade. He could no more give up his vast operations than he could give up breathing.

"It has not been a very good time for us, with girls," Delfina said. "You must understand, there has been a great deal of sickness, and the farmers have been using their girls for more and more work--so we were unable to rescue them for you so easily. Still we do have a few, twenty or so, for you to look at."

"So?" The Turk's button-hard eyes stared at Delfina. He knew the sagging shape of her face. He knew the strange note in her voice. He knew the nervous tic which made her lips quiver, the same tic that ran right down to her right hand.

"Senora, did you see the doctor, like I tell you last time?" He always spoke to Delfina with a faint implication of her being a lesser mortal.

"No, no, Senor Turk. I have the pills, they are good enough." Delfina was quivering, for she feared the Turk. He had been very cruel to her in bed, and used his whip. Yet here he was, still ruling over her and the whole of the Sanchez organization, even after such indignities suffered years ago by herself!

"Well, I need girls for Bolivia, also some girls for the Nigerian houses--they need not be white, but not black either. They have their own black stuff down there, a lot cheaper than ours. Your Mexican girls can do well in Nigeria as they are white enough for the Africans to feel they are fucking someone different." The Turk sipped his coffee, smiled at the wizened face of old Consuela, and nodded. "Good coffee, my pretty one!"

"Thank you, thank you, senor!" Consuela beamed with pleasure.

"I like it here, on your fine rancho. It reminds me of the plantations I have in Rio Negres. Very fine property." He paused and glanced at the rough track that led toward the highway. "Do we wait long, now, Senora?"

"Ricardo was told to be here at twelve. He will be here. He has to collect the girls from Leon, and then we will come straight here. We shall have lunch, and then we can conclude our business once they are all here." Delfina had taken over the arrangements again.

"Good!" was the Turk's single comment. His cold eyes stared at the ragged landscape patiently.

Not far from this main hacienda at the Sanchez rancho stood a long new limousine. It had three young blond German guards, loafing patiently in the sun, waiting for the Turk's cargo to be purchased and loaded. The three men were the Turk's personal entourage and bodyguards. The German guard who drove the big car slowly began polishing the dust off the front fenders. One of his comrades glanced over and laughed.

"You'll get more dust when we move out. Have to take this bunch to the Coast, for the freighter to pick them up. These girls are for the sea-trip--so don't bother to clean up dust off yet. Be a lot more by the time we get the shipload off our hands." He spoke with an easy, soft Austrian accent.

"Yes, but I like to keep her polished. She's an expensive car, and these girls make it smell and make it dirty. It's a shame, the way we have to treat good machinery!"

"Yes, and it's a shame to spend half the damn hot day in this Godforsaken hole, waiting. We could be down on the Coast swimming and waiting for the freighter."

"The Turk wants us to wait, so we wait."

"Maybe the girls won't be too long now. We'll pull out soon as he's bought them."

"Hope so! Couple of days in this place would drive me nuts!"

The other two guards glanced at the speaker, nodded in agreement and laughed with him.

The sound of their laughter floated through the hot air. The Turk glanced over to watch his boys. He smiled and nodded. They were a smart, ruthless crew of international hustlers.

"It is good to hear the sound of laughter here." He smiled at the two sisters sitting with him. There was no comment at his remark.

* * *

Ricardo Herrera was brooding as Joaquin Mendosa drove the truck along the dusty trail toward the Sanchez rancho.

"It's two weeks since we came this way--that was with the last new girl, Maria Alverez. And she's been the only new one for the whole month," Ricardo commented.

"Yes, true!" Joaquin scowled. "And this Maria is a real sour bitch. No wonder they had to stick her in the cage. But if we sell the ones we have here, plus the four from the hotel--then we have no girls to replace them."

"What's it matter? We are selling old useless ones anyway. The tin miners of Bolivia must think all Mexican girls are beat-up old whores, judging by what we send them." Ricardo laughed.

The truck was bumping along steadily. In the back were eight girls, being taken out for the Turk's inspection and possible purchase. They were the girls whose earnings had dropped off, or who had crossed one of the Sanchez sisters for one of many trivial reasons.

"I wonder why a beautiful girl like Maria does not welcome becoming a whore. Once she is agreeable to men, she can make a lot of money." Joaquin sucked through his teeth as he spoke. "Not that Maria is very good on her back for a man right now. But once she learns, we will take her out of the cage and send her to the hotel, where she is needed."

"Ahh, that Maria is not very good, because she dreams of marrying and having children. I keep telling her she is finished with all that. I shall get her fucking properly before long. Once she has tasted the cage a few more nights, she CD will even let Fat Man have her, instead of biting him and making him howl like she did last time. What a sight, the way that slob cried when she bit him!" Ricardo chuckled at the recollection.

"Yes, yes, he is so stupid! I think she bit his hand to the bone. I know it's all swollen now." Joaquin burst into a giggle. "If he knew how badly Maria fucked, he would realize it was not worth the bites he is getting!"

Both men in the cab shrieked with laughter at the idea of Fat Man being so" ambitious as to try and rape Maria.

"I think Delfina is mad with Fat Man," Ricardo announced suddenly.

"Ooooh?" This made Joaquin glance at Ricardo quickly. "He is for the hole in the ground, then?"

"Maybe--who knows? Delfina is a quick one to blow a fellow's brains out-but with Fat Man, who can do that? He has a hollow head already!"

Both Joaquin and Ricardo laughed uproariously at the idea.

"All the same, if she is going to kill him, I would prefer not to be around," Joaquin confessed. "He makes me sick--and he is so big! It will take a full afternoon's digging to make a grave for that fat slob. He is too big to put in the incinerator and shrink down with the heat, like the girls shrink when the flames melt their fat off." Joaquin loved the gory details.

"You speak of it with such delight." Ricardo took out a cheroot and inspected it. "Careful how you drive, or you will put us all over the edge, and there will be more graves needing digging today."

"I know this road well! I chase up and down it for many years now. I go and collect girls who run away. I go and bring in fresh girls for you to fuck. I go for oil to burn the dead bodies, and food to feed the living bodies, and I even go to the banks with money for them. Yes, I know this road only too well. Death is on this road, Ricardo, and it will catch up with us one day. Do not worry, it will happen very fast."

"Well, just make sure when death takes you, I am not around. I do not wish to die, yet," Ricardo told him.

"Who knows, Senor Herrera, maybe you will be my death!" Joaquin glanced shrewdly at Ricardo.

"No, Joaquin, no! We have worked too long together. Our problems are the same--Delfina Sanchez and her madness. Today we have to sell twenty girls--and who have we to replace them at our own houses? Maria Alverez, who cannot fuck properly yet! And I tell them it takes us two months of training to get a girl ready to properly please men. But they are mad. One half-trained girl--and Anita Torres, who runs and tells every man who has her she is a slave, a prisoner! I tell you, Joaquin, we are in a very, very dangerous position. But I think Fat Man and Sergeant Lopez might be in unhealthier spots than we are."

"Oh, the sergeant-and Fat Man!" Joaquin sighed. "There is always this killing. I never remember us having to kill so many people before. One day there will be so many graves on the rancho, we shall run out of fresh plots."

"Yes," Ricardo sighed in agreement. "Delfina Sanchez is the mad one!"

The truck crested a hill and started down. Its engine roared as Joaquin kept it rolling down the dusty track. In the far distance, between the clumps of thin trees, could be seen the hacienda of the Sanchez rancho.

"We are almost there--in good time, too. You have done well, getting us here, Joaquin. I hate to think of what might happen to us all if we kept that bastard the Turk waiting too long." Ricardo spat out the words. The Turk was the only man Ricardo did fear.

"Si, the Turk." Joaquin squinted into the brilliant white sunlight as if trying to glimpse the bald menace of the Turk out in the heat-hazed distance. "He is a real killer. They say he takes a girl and strangles her at the peak of his orgasm. He is a real weird one, that Turk!"

Ricardo frowned and slowly checked his knife. It was free and dangling nicely in his sleeve holster. He knew it could never be quicker than the guns of the German guards the Turk always had with him. All the same, Ricardo reckoned on at least killing the Turk if things went sour. One never knew in this flesh business--from hour to hour, one never knew.

"Once they have gone, perhaps we can take care of Delfina." This was an open offer from Joaquin Mendosa. "It is time, Ricci, it is time we kill her--before she kills us!"

"I shall think about it. Yes, her time may be very soon." Ricardo nodded heavily. He hated to have to have Joaquin as a confidant. But the menace of the insane Delfina Sanchez seemed to be growing more and more sinister.

* * *

It was three weeks since the virginal Maria Alverez had come this route out to the Sanchez rancho. There she had been raped furiously, first by Ricardo then by Joaquin, the first night. Then again, for three days, both men had exhausted all their sexual potencies upon her.

By the fourth day, Maria Alverez was unable to hold out against them. She had reached the more pliable stage of acquiescing to a man's taking her, without a struggle. But it would be several weeks before she could be relied upon to accept paying customers.

The sixteen-year-old Maria still had many strains of her girlhood within her. She clung to them with a dour obstinacy. Until she released herself fully into the life of a Sanchez whore, the beautiful young girl would be, and remain, a problem out at the rancho.

Not that one recalcitrant sixteen-year-old was any o special problem. After all, this place had trained, buried, sold off, raped and crippled nearly four thousand such girls over the past twelve years. It was just that Maria was the only fresh girl, the only new one. Hence the concentrated sexual needs of both Ricardo and Joaquin were lavished on her training, and the full venom of Delfina Sanchez was quick to pounce on the girl's sullen attitude.

"Throw her into the cage until she learns to smile when a man speaks to her! She'll be no good to me until she smiles. No matter how good a girl is on her back, she must learn to smile. It's worth an extra peso or two, is a good smile." Thus had shrieked Delfina Sanchez, after watching Maria perform with Ricardo. This was the first time Maria had a woman watching what these two men did to her. It made Maria half-freeze in terror and shame. She prayed to the Virgin Mary, and closed her eyes as Ricardo ravished her pitilessly. To smile was the last possible thing Maria could have done!

So Maria Alverez was thrown into the metal cage like a wildcat, and fed plates of beans by the maudlin Fat Man. Once a day, she was taken out and had to perform again with either Joaquin or Ricardo, while Delfina shrieked at her.

"Faster, faster, caress his neck, you stupida--caress his, neck, stroke his back-draw your belly in, make him come! God! What stupid ones there are--draw your belly in and suck him dry! Have all these weeks of good training and understanding been wasted on you? Do you wish to be sent back to that terrible life on the farm--do you?"

Under the shrieking woman's upraised stick, Maria could only shiver and shake her head. For the terror at Rancho Sanchez was a bitter, bruising reality.

"Then lock your legs tighter and draw your belly in! You've got to make a man come in you within a few minutes, you stupid young bitch!"

There was nothing subtle about the sex training for these young country girls. As far as the Sanchez sisters were concerned, the quicker a girl cleaned a man dry, and got his money, the better for them all.

In truth there were many tricks to be learned. A girl had to be taught how to avoid catching diseases. She had to learn to wash herself out quickly with disinfectant. She had to learn when it was necessary to call out for a strongman, like Ricardo or Joaquin, to come and help her with a dangerous customer; a whore's life had a hundred problems, none of them taught in any other school.

The slim, naked body of the abused Maria was now a thoroughly appraised item. Both Ricardo and Joaquin enjoyed her body. It was the beginning of a long training. For once these two men started on a girl, like Anita Torres when she had been sixteen, they expected to have possession of her whenever they wished, for the rest of her life. Maria Alverez was only just beginning. The terrible thought that she was their sex slave, a whore for the rest of her life, had not yet fully registered.

But in time it would, for like Anita Torres, who was now plotting another escape attempt, Maria was proud in her heart. Whatever might be done to her body, she was determined to keep a small sacred point within her heart inviolate. That was the small candle of hope Maria carried. This was the flame that now inspired Anita Torres to plan a final attempt to escape or die.

But little of this registered within the bovine minds of either Ricardo Herrera or Joaquin Mendosa, as they slowed the truck to a stop in the front yard of the sunlit Sanchez hacienda.

"You in the back, get yourself all smart and alert! We have the big man here. If he likes you, my muchachas, then you will be lucky, and off to the good life!" Ricardo shouted this news to the girls as they got up and prepared to get down from the truck.

On the veranda of the hacienda, Delfina tapped Consuela on the shoulder.

"The truck is here, Consuela," Delfina informed her.

"What truck is that?" A semi-idiot attempt to think came over Consuela's dark, brooding face.

Opposite the two sisters, a glass of cognac in his hand, the Turk chuckled. "The truck from Leon, with the girls you wish me to look over, my dear Consuela."

"Oh, the truck from Leon, yes, of course. Yes, Delfina, the truck from Leon is here. Don't push me that way. I remember. I remember everything." Consuela quivered and tears came into her eyes as she saw the enraged look flicker into Delfina's eyes. Someone was going to suffer for this, and Consuela had a terrible feeling it was to be herself. Delfina had a mad rage on. It was only with the greatest effort at self-control that Delfina managed to keep herself from yelling out wildly before the Turk.

"Come, let us get Fat Man to bring the girls out from the back." Delfina got down from the veranda. She slapped one of the female guards sharply on the face.

"Go, tell Fat Man to bring the girls out from the back. And they had better look good!" She spat and glowered.

"Senora Delfina, they have all got the new dresses on, and we washed them specially for this." The female guard, on old whore bent on survival, fled from the enraged Delfina.

"I hope your girls are good. The Sanchez girls used to be so easily salable. Everyone wanted Sanchez girls." The Turk got up and followed Delfina from the veranda. His bald head glowed like a wrinkled bronze knob in the brilliant midday sunlight. Then he flipped up a spotlessly white flat cap to cover his shining dome.

His German guards came wandering over from the coach. One actually carried a submachine gun. The Turk never believed in being either negative or timid.

"Line those daft bitches up, Ricardo--line them up!" There was that shrill raging note in Delfina's voice now.

The girls from Leon and the Hotel Molinos were in a hurry to be accepted. The story always went that they would be flown to Paris, or to luxury houses in Buenos Aires. There they would earn a fortune and retire early from the profession. As not one single girl had ever come back from these sales, there was no one to dispute these statements, even though the rumors were planted by such people as Delfina, Consuela, Ricardo, and the guards.

The girl had no hope here. Neither here at the Sanchez rancho, nor at Leon, under Teresa, nor at the drab Hotel Molinos. So they actually did their best to look alert, bright and fresh. It was a ghastly struggle. But the Turk was not exactly expecting to see pristine beauty--if he did, he was certain she must be a badly diseased case, so he would turn a pretty young girl down immediately. There was enough clap and syphilis in Africa, Bolivia, and Argentina without importing extra doses from Mexico.

Having watched Delfina and her rages, the Turk had a feeling that the Sanchez organization was getting all poxed up, in any case. It did happen, in the best of whorehouses. Once the infection was endemic, the Turk never bothered to call again. So this would be the last lot of girls he would ever purchase from the Sanchez sisters. That was a pity, for in the past they had done a lot of business. Over two thousand girls had been sold through the Sanchez sisters into whorehouses all over the world.

Now the Turk would have to concentrate on his Marseilles and San Francisco connections to get his white girls. Little girls were always running away from home, running away from Dullsville to the Big City. It was only a question of having a well-trained procurer to hook the girls onto the needle habit and swing them into the whorehouse life.

"They are quite a collection--these are all from the towns?" The Turk managed to smile, for he knew the girls were rough goods, very rough indeed.

The girls from the truck smiled hideously in the brilliant clean sunlight. Near them, Ricardo frowned as he studied the German guard carrying the submachine gun. Such gangster display was not in the Ricardo idiom. He knew well enough that any move against the Turk, or any attempt at robbing this group of their large sums of ready cash, would result in a massacre.

It was said that the Turk and his crew had once killed eighteen bandits who tried to ambush them somewhere in Chihuahua, near El Paso. Ricardo thought this was quite possibly true, for these were highly professional killers indeed. In this one regard he felt considerable respect for them.

"Yes, a good sea voyage will put some genuine color into their cheeks. They are rather thin-you keep them working hard, my Consuela?" The Turk slowly stepped precisely from one girl on to the next. The ravaged faces, the rouged lips, the sagging bodies were enough to make a selector of ordinary girls blanch.

But the curious truth was that the Turk knew the miners in Bolivia and the Africans in Lagos liked rough women. They preferred the rough, worked-out whore to any other type of creature for their sex fun and games.

"Here are the others--from the back." Delfina motioned in the direction of a newly approaching group.

"I hope they are worth more than these!" The Turk was already knocking the goods to get his price as low as possible.

A weird procession was coming round the side of the ranch building. It was led by a tough woman guard. On one side shambled the gross figure of the imbecilic Fat Man, with his little dog. With them came six girls who had been resurrected from the terrors of the Hole, and prettied up for this sale.

At least, there had been an attempt to make them look like women. But they were such wrecks, even the Turk gave a sigh of regret--which was a very rare emotion in him.

"These are our best girls!" Delfina announced loudly. "God! I would hate to see your worst!" The Turk replied.

"These girls are hard-working and thorough. They know their business!" Delfina shouted half-insanely.

"I think they have had too much business," the Turk muttered to himself.

The staff of the Hole had washed the girls and picked out those who could walk. These they had managed to clean up and put into new print dresses. The flat white makeup was ghastly. The white looked like flour. From it, gazed sad rheumy eyes, and painted on were massive eyelashes, red gashes of mouths and sometimes a great smear of black eyebrows. Such were the six girls surviving long enough at the Sanchez rancho for the delightful purpose of being sold to the Turk and his great export trade.

"Good Mexican girls! Great Mexican girls!" screamed Delfina Sanchez in an access of paranoia. "They can take a man and suck the spunk out of him, pssst!--in two minutes--and then they can have man after man after man. There's a lot of good work left in these girls! They are worth two hundred dollars American, each of them--but for you, seeing as how you are an old friend, I shall let you have them for one hundred seventy-five dollars each. Feel them--feel those good Mexican bodies!"

The Turk sniffed disdainfully. To touch or sample the talents of the merchandise he purchased was the last thought in his mind.

"Fifty, and not worth that!" he growled as he peered at one cringing whore and her painted mask of a face. "Is this a woman? She is sick--she trembles--I don't want her--take her away."

"Take Melinda out--who brought that junkie here, with my precious sparrows of the fields? Take that doped bitch out!" Delfina's voice rose to a scream.

Fat Man lurched forward, and still holding his small dog, he shoved and booted the quivering Melinda Castro back toward the rear shacks, where the Hole waited her return.

"And this one--is she praying?" The Turk peered at Juanita Rojas. "Yes, she is praying--that I should buy her? Is this why she prays?"

Juanita was on the brink of another of her religious deliriums, in which she had fully persuaded herself she was a child of God. Her religious mania was becoming more and more acute, as' her seventeen-year-old mind refused to accept becoming a prostitute instead of a nun.

"She is a good one! Men like her. She is holy, and they enjoy her as if she came from a convent." Delfina tried to push the sale.

"No--not in Nigeria. They would get angry. I don't want her. And I shall pay only fifty dollars for those I do accept. They are a very rough bunch, too rough." The Turk wiped the sweat from his face. He loved this haggling and bargaining. It was the best part of the whole deal, to buy as cheaply as possible. There really was not a girl here he could not sell to some whorehouse or other, no matter how badly damaged or deranged she was. There was always a need for whores, of all ages and grades.

"Take Juanita Rojas to the Cama Real! Let her taste sacrifice!" Delfina screamed.

Suddenly her rage choked her. She swung round and glared at the Turk. "Did you say fifty dollars? You insult us by saying only fifty dollars?" A note of incredulity sang high.

Delfina stepped back from the Turk as if bodily hurt, accusing him of treason in this shrill way.

The line of girls were standing awkwardly, legs and hands splayed out. Their cheap cotton dresses fitted none of them--some had high hems at the back, others had sleeves that hung over. It was a line of tragic marionettes that stood silently in the heat, watching the argument flare over the selling of their own bodies to faraway places.

Beyond, the three German guards stiffened with interest. They took a few quiet steps forward. The one with the submachine gun strap over his shoulder swung from side to side, idly, amused, but his eyes were traveling fast, checking the men on the other side.

Ricardo was well aware of the moment of menace. He had his knife ready. He was glad to observe a pistol in Joaquin's hand. The pistol had slid down the sleeve, and Joaquin stood grinning, with his armed hand away from the observation of the machine gunner.

"We have to get him first," Ricardo muttered in thick Spanish.

"Si, si, him we kill quick! Or he kill us all. Then we get the Turk--you can get him with the knife."

Strangely enough, the cause of this moment of direct confrontation, Delfina Sanchez, seemed to be unaware of the trigger-poised silence that had fallen. It was the Turk who suddenly felt a very cold spot in the midst of the heat of the day.

"I put her back, Senora." Fat Man's squeaky voice sounded behind the three Germans. He was lumbering forward, having put Melinda Castro back into the Hole. In one hand, the massive Fat Man held a long-handled shovel.

The three Germans stiffened. At this moment a sudden move would have started a blasting shoot-out. One slowly turned to face Fat Man, to see if he was armed. Fat Man stopped as the silence and stillness of the scene registered in the dim corridors of his mind.

"You think your girls are worth more?" The Turk gave a chuckle. "I shall make it seventy-five dollars each, Senorita Sanchez. Since we are such great friends, and have done so much good business for the past ten years, I make it eighty dollars a girl for you. Boys, you had better prepare the coach-I shall be buying fifteen of these fine girls."

"I want a hundred dollars each for my fine Mexican beauties! They are worth at least a hundred dollars American each! They are good girls, and will earn far more than their keep for at least a year. See them--they are clean--you can try any one of them out, if you doubt my word, Turk!" Delfina's eyes blazed challengingly.

"No, no--I know you are a good, honest woman. I know it, but--I have the shipping expenses, and they have to travel so far. I have so many expensive payments to make to officials, my dear, pretty Delfina; you know how hard I work."

The Turk's face twitched and his whip quivered in the tight grip of his hand. "I cannot pay more than eighty dollars, that is certain!"

"That is not enough!" Delfina screamed suddenly. The scream made everyone jump with fright.

"Please, please, I do not like people yelling at me!"

"Then you shouldn't try crooking good honest women!" Delfina hardly seemed aware of the peril of the moment. For the scene had somehow become her theater, the whole thing was being acted out for her own intimate audience.

"We work ourselves to the bone to get good girls, and to make them clean and hard-working!" Delfina tiraded on. "We work twenty-four hours a day, all day and all night, to make the best we can of the kind of material we save from those savages on the farms.

"It is worth more. Far more! I tell you we have never crooked anyone! We have given our lives to the cause of giving these girls a chance of being free of their poverty!" Delfina's words suddenly lapsed into an almost senseless babble.

"She is raving! God in heaven, she is raving! A whorehouse madam gone nuts!" one of the Germans whispered to his friend with the machine gun. "Get her first if the shooting starts. I don't like those two over there--they're staying very still."

"Tell the boss we'd best move out." There was a nod between the three guards. They were not only outnumbered, but strategically trapped. The Fat Man behind them now had two tough-looking women guards standing close. The main thing, it seemed, was to allow Delfina to finish her tirade.

"Eighty dollars for fifteen girls, eighty each, that is all I am going to pay. That is all I am going to pay!" the Turk shouted finally. "Eighty dollars each-that is all I am going to pay for these-these travesties of women!"

In a single sweep, Delfina now completely changed her mood. Her rage seemed to evaporate, and she stood smiling at the Turk as if about to embrace him.

"Then it is a deal, Senor Turk, eighty dollars a girl! You take this fifteen right now. They have nothing to pack--put them on your bus and away with them! Where is the money?"

"I have it. Otto, Kurt, see the girls are ready to travel, then get them onto the bus--the best of them, you understand." There was an amused sparkle in the Turk's button-black eyes. He had won without a shooting affair. But then, the Sanchez people were a good source of girls, once upon a time one of his best sources. It was only this past couple of years that the girls had fallen off in quality and he had had to be far more careful of what he bought.

"Here--we'll have a final drink to settle our bargain. Come along, you old fool!" Delfina suddenly lashed out and hit Consuela on the shin with her black stick. "Get our kind friend, the Turk, some fresh coffee. Whatever will he think of our Mexican hospitality, being treated this way!"

Consuela was in such pain from the blow, she almost fell over. But her pride demanded she keep upright. She hobbled hastily past where the German guards stood thoughtfully checking the list of girls' names, staring at the new purchases as if in awe of them.

"There, she gives them away for nothing!" Ricardo hissed angrily as he said this. "Nothing--and the flesh buyer will make a fortune out of them! It is bad business, to have an insane woman running the whole thing, very bad business!"

"They must have a lot of cash with them," Joaquin said thoughtfully. "The Turk always pays from such thick rolls of money."

"Fool, why do you think he has these three killer guards? They have pistols, American cannons and machine guns. It would take an army, or a surprise attack, to get anything but death from them!"

"Yes, it is a pity we do not try it one day, a surprise attack!"

"Then who would come to the rancho to buy our girls, once we have them trained and ready for sale? Fool! That reminds me, I must go and give that Maria Alverez another lesson. She is improving now. In time she will be good enough for Leon and the men there. Is she in the Hole?"

"Yes, in the cage for a while. I think we should have sold Anita Torres with this bunch. She is trouble, is that Anita." Joaquin slowly walked with Ricardo over to the veranda.

"Yes, we'll have to get rid of Anita one day. No one lasts forever." Ricardo lit a cheroot, then strode off to attend to the training needs of Maria Alverez.

The Turk was sitting at the table back on the veranda. He nodded as Ricardo went past. Delfina Sanchez was in a high, elated mood now. The bargaining was over. Delfina did not really care whether she had done well or badly. She had really staged that hysterical scene to get rid of the throttling fear she always felt for the Turk. For he had beaten her cruelly a few times with the whip when she was younger and had to please him after a sale. Now she was through with that memory, and she felt she had won a great victory, even if no one else in the whole world understood the reason for her odd behavior.

The girls who had been selected for traveling were slowly led over to the limousine. Here a small discussion went on. It seemed that they should be fed before they departed. The food at the Sanchez rancho was so horrible, the girls did not seem to care. Then one of the Germans suggested stopping at a wayside restaurant, and immediately all the girls were desperate to leave as soon as possible.

In the hot sunlight, Fat Man frowned. He held his small black and white dog in his arms and stroked its fur. Fat Man had a curious streak, an odd kind of jealousy in him. He hated anyone to leave the rancho. Fat Man did not mind burying someone here, as long as they stayed forever. He felt that his years at the rancho, in the service of the Sanchez sisters, gave him the right of possession over everything, both in life and in death.

His face sloped outwards toward his chin. This domelike pimple of a head made him look even more moronic than he actually was. Fat Man had killed several girls, usually with a shovel, on the screamed orders of Delfina. But he always felt very upset for hours after such events. He only strove to please, and living in terror of Delfina, her word was life and death for the Fat Man.

It was strange how the moment of hot tension in the blazing white sunlight had come and gone so swiftly. Now the girls were all chattering happily as they boarded the bus. Fat Man turned and shuffled along, looking at the veranda to see how the money transaction was progressing.

"Fifteen times eighty dollars, is one thousand two hundred dollars, Senor Turk." Delfina was slowly counting the twelve one-hundred-dollar bills the Turk had stripped off his thick roll of notes.

"Si, si, that is right, and we have made the deal. I have to get these girls to the Coast, but that won't be until tomorrow evening now." The Turk sipped his coffee and smiled.

Delfina always glowed, the moment she laid a hand on any kind of money--be it only a single peso. The delightful feeling of the vast sum of twelve hundred dollars made the old madam quiver with delight.

"It is good, you take these girls off to a much better life! That is it!" Delfina's dark face had a strange luminous intensity about it as she echoed her upside-down beliefs. "You save these girls from such a terrible fate! God will repay you for your task."

"Thank you, Senora Delfina--a toast to your brains and your beauty--a toast to the Sanchez sisters!" The Turk lifted his glass of cognac.

The two sisters giggled like innocent little girls.

* * *

Ricardo Herrera was ramming his rigid manhood right into the open body of Maria Alverez. The girl gasped, wet with sweat, and clung to him. She held tight, then seemed to contract her muscles. It made Ricardo orgasm into her with a sobbing gasp.

"Good--good, Maria! You have the trick! You got me that time!"

Her new-found sexual prowess meant little or nothing to Maria at this moment. She clung to Ricardo, still working her hips. She was sobbing, tears rolling down her sunken cheeks.

"Don't let them put me back into the cage, Ricci, please, Ricci! Anything--anything but the cage! I can do this--I can do it for anyone. But I can't go back in there. I shall die or go mad first! Please! I'll do anything to make men happy."

She pumped her body right against him furiously to emphasize her complete subjugation to the Sanchez whoredom.

"Good, my little one, that is good! You know how to suck a man dry, and you can use your mouth or round the back. You know it all, and you are willing now. Good girl!"

Ricardo caressed her as she lay back. Her enormous dark eyes stared at him. Maria even managed a flicker of a smile. Then she frowned as he mentioned other ways of copulation.

"Joaquin keeps tearing me-he is so big! And that Fat Man, I would really rather die than ever let him touch me! He beats me, but I still don't allow him anything!" Maria's tight breasts gleamed with sweat. They were on a dingy cot, in a room close to the stairs leading down to the Hole.

"Can you persuade them not to put me back there, Ricci-please? You know how hard, how hard I have tried. I have learned it all. I'll do anything-please, for God's sake, please!" She closed her eyes and sobbed slowly.

"I shall put you with Anita, then both of you can go back to the hotel together." Ricardo was pleasuring himself on Maria's sixteen-year-old body yet again. It seemed her fresh flesh renewed his urges almost immediately. He felt sorry to think that the men would soon be lining up at the hotel to try out the new girl, Maria. But that was the way it had to be, what with the girl shortage and all.

When Maria lay back and rested, her body shone with sweat. The heat in the room where Ricardo was making her love him simply stifled them both. Ricardo's sweat dripped down onto her gleaming breasts. Maria lay there, her great eyes staring up at his face as she drew her loins in suddenly. Ricardo grunted as he orgasmed a second time and shuddered into her.

"There-you know how a man has to have it. Quickly! Good." Ricardo fondled her with his hands. Her body was still very delectable. Maria had lost the virginal innocence, the bashful wish to avoid physical contact. Now she lay with her legs locked about him or Joaquin, as if this was the way she had always been. Yet there was not the whorish brazenness about her. It was simply complete acceptance of the physical world of copulation and demand. Later she would acquire the brassy surface look, and the near-automatic bed movements that the young whores seemed to develop so quickly.

"Yes, you are ready, I think. I shall tell the Madame that you and Anita Torres can go back to the hotel together. Do you know Anita? You remind me of her when she first came to work with us."

"I have met her," Maria whispered. "I starve here. I simply crave for food, all the time! When Fat Man brings me food, he expects me--expects me to do this for a plate of beans! But I cannot-not with him!"

"He wants to make you-for a plate of beans? That gross pig!" Ricardo snapped with contempt. "I shall have a word with Senora Delfina about him. He is getting to be too much. I don't trust him. Even if there had been a fight this afternoon, when we were selling the girls to the Turk, I think Fat Man would have run at the first shot."

"You-sold them? Is that why the Hole is empty? You sold them? Like my father sold his cows-girls sold for money?" Maria had a strange note of awe in her voice.

"Ahh, they go to a better place than this Hole! They will do well, and they will make money."

"I am sorry. I liked some of them. But Melinda is back with us, and she is very sick." Maria felt Ricardo slowly amusing himself between her loins. All this sexual body contact was now a matter of almost complete indifference to the girl. The rough training of these past few weeks had killed all sex desire in her. There was just the acting of the scene, the deep, simple, harsh desire to survive. The survival demand was greater than the sexual, or the hope, or anything else. Maria Alverez had been starved, thrashed, and raped so often, over and over again, she was now a complete slave to whatever they asked of her.

Yet, her beauty lingered. She could still smile, and deep within her heart, like Anita, she kept a small candle of hope flickering quietly, unseen.

Having enjoyed the young body of Maria again, Ricardo did not tarry with her, except to get his breath back. He went off to the primitive showers, washed his privates and the rest of himself.

Owing to his daily sexual exercise, Ricardo had the scrotum and penis of a heavy bull. He never even noticed this. The girls felt the impact of it. At least once a day, Ricardo had to have his woman--preferably a girl in training. Like anything else, when exercised constantly, his sexual prowess had developed the whole of his loins into a machine for satisfying and training women into the arts of whoredom.

* * *

"It was so good of you to come here and purchase our wonderful girls!" Glowing with a peculiar insane delight, Delfina Sanchez nodded and smirked. For the Turk was kissing her hand as he bade the Sanchez sisters goodbye.

His large white Cadillac had come to park beside the coach. Inside the coach, the fifteen girls stared out dully. They could not yet clearly understand that they were actually leaving the Sanchez organization. Indeed, they were really leaving Guanajuato and Mexico forever.

Delfina smiled and her black eyes glowed with amusement.

"It has been a pleasure doing business with you, my dear!" The Turk nodded, then stepped past his heavy German chauffeur and got into his white sedan. "I shall send you a card, and be back round this way in three months' time or so. Take care, and be good!"

"Take good care of yourself! Goodbye-if any of those girls misbehave, do not fail to send her back to us-we have a special cure for that!" A flicker of menace crossed Delfina's face.

The Turk blinked slowly, then nodded and waved his hand out of the car window before closing it and resting back in the air-conditioned interior.

"Crazy woman! God! What a crazy creature this Sanchez woman has become!" The Turk sighed and took out yet another thin Cuban cigar. "Fifteen girls for Nigeria, and I need more."

"Be good girls, all of you, be good girls!" This shrill admonition was called up to them by Delfina as she waved goodbye to the girls in the coach. The Germans grinned and nodded. Then, with a muffled roar, the engine of the coach started up. None of the girls waved back. They seemed to be terrified into paralysis as they stared down at the lady in black, with her sister, bidding them adieu.

The afternoon heat shimmered with the cloud of dust left by the two automobiles. The sound faded as Delfina and Consuela came walking slowly back toward the veranda of the hacienda. Fat Man stood there, blinking and wondering where on earth the girls were being taken. He was certain the world ended at the rising high ground of the rancho's boundary.

Ricardo was back from his session with Maria. He felt better. There was always a certain sleekness about Ricardo, once he had had his daily satisfaction.

"What is it, Ricardo?" Delfina demanded as she suddenly clutched her great handbag to her shawled chest. Often Delfina acted as though she were in imminent danger of being attacked.

"I have just seen the new girl. She is ready for Molinos, and we might as well send back Anita Torres top. We are very short of girls at the hotel right now."

"Yes, yes! That is, I suppose, what we have to do. Maria is saved for the good life? That is excellent, she is a clever girl to have been so understanding. I think she will make a lot of money and enjoy herself with us now."

A dark shadow of rage flickered over Delfina's Aztec face. "Anita Torres is not to be trusted! It was she who opened her mouth to those young American tourists!" Is that not so? Yes, yes, it is! I hope Anita has learned a lesson.

"You are too gentle with them, Ricardo! Far too gentle with disloyal bitches like Anita. Perhaps I did not beat her enough times. I cannot have thrashed her enough. I shall go now and beat her half to death-" Delfina turned and began a curiously jerky movement toward the steps.

"No, no Senora! She understands, she has been well beaten." Ricardo could see Anita being beaten to a bloody pulp by Delfina. When the madam was in this mood she did occasionally beat a girl to death. "We are too short of girls--you might ruin her for the good work!"

"Ah, yes, the good work! We have saved so many girls from the poor, wretched life of the farms. Anita must learn to keep her mouth shut, to everyone! Next time, next time Fat Man will be using the oil-drums for her." An expression of thin cruelty masked Delfina's face now. "Yes, Anita is too dangerous to sell to anyone!"

Ricardo listened with a cool contempt for Delfina. As long as she was facing him, Ricardo was never scared of her. Delfina only killed men from the back, with her pistol. Ricardo smiled as he recalled that in her first sessions with him, when she had been sixteen, Anita Torres had worked exactly as Maria Alverez worked now. It had been the same young flesh, the hot innocence. And now she was a cold, very skilled young whore, this Anita Torres. But Ricardo still liked to have her once in a while. There was always this bond between him and each of the girls he had broken in. They never forgave him, and he made certain no matter how many men they had, they never forgot him, either!

"Fat Man is annoying Maria. He beats her, and tries to use food to get her to go down on her back for his pleasure." Ricardo said this in the confident whispering way he had. "Fat Man needs a thrashing."

"He does? He-does that to Maria? He thrashes her so she will not be able to take the customers?" A scream of rage broke from Delfina. Ricardo could always plant such a rage in her mind. Heaven help the guilty party once Ricardo had set Delfina in their direction!

It was a curious scene as Delfina Sanchez set about chastising the gross Fat Man. Simply cussing and screaming was not the way Delfina instilled terror. When she was really enraged, she went white and stood quivering, as if about to dart forward and claw at her victim.

Fat Man was standing in the hot yellow sunlight of the brilliant afternoon. He stood in the middle of the yard, paralyzed now that he knew his mistress's rage was directed at him.

He was mortally afraid she might get behind him. For that was the direction, the only direction, from which Delfina would blow a man's brains out, using the massive pistol she kept in her huge black handbag.

That was how the strange dance began.

It was like a tarantella. Delfina was dressed in her usual black, and she circled about Fat Man, clutching her great black handbag. Keeping away from her, Fat Man had to turn so that he was facing her all the time. But Delfina had her black stick with her. She used this to lash out at Fat Man, hitting him, all over. They were ringing blows.

Once the wood contacted his thick dome-shaped skull with an almost metallic zunk! The blow made the whole of Fat Man's body quiver and vibrate. It appeared that he was about to topple over, and Delfina would have him. But though he staggered, Fat Man succeeded in turning about, reeling and facing Delfina.

Delfina drove her hand into her bag, as if to pull out the heavy black pistol to kill Fat Man. But she could never face a person and shoot them that way. Fat Man shouted, dust swirled. Delfina's black skirts spun and glistened in the sun-gilded dust.

It was a real life-and-death ritual dance. Had Fat Man succumbed to one of the thudding thwacks on the body or head, he would have been shot as he lay in the dirt. Sweat streamed down between the crimson welts of the stick-marks. His small piggy eyes seemed to flood and glow with tears. His great square boots thumped and leaped, spun and spurted dust as he kept the encircling Delfina before him.

"You will leave them alone, you pig!" Thwack! Delfina's stick struck Fat Man's skull so hard, one could see the blue egg-shaped lump rising like a bubble the moment the stick spun away.

"Oh--si --si-si--oooh--ahh!" Fat Man almost crumpled again. "I beg of you, I plead with you, I ask of you!"

The gross body had such a reedy voice! The small head towered right at the. top of the huge, useless mound of quivering fat. The black, cutting, swirling shape of Delfina Sanchez circled about him, more and more like a tarantula attacking a beetle, or a torero ready to close in on a bewildered bull.

Ricardo Herrera had been hoping to see the climax, with Delfina blowing half of Fat Man's head off. He roared with laughter at the sight of Fat Man dancing grimly round and round as Delfina scurried to get behind him.

Ricardo came down and stood there, along with the other spectators, knowing that Delfina could not manage to catch Fat Man this time. Now Delfina started to beat Fat Man steadily with the stick, meaning she had given up the idea of trying to get behind him and blow Iris head off with her pistol.

"Bravo! Bravo! Bravo, Senora Sanchez!" Ricardo laughed as he encouraged her, and the ring of spectators clapped in time to the beating of the blows. "Ole! Ole!"

Bloodied and desperate, Fat Man still held her off.

"You leave those girls alone--unless you can pay for your fucking!" Delfina screamed at the gross, staggering man.

Sobbing and clutching his bleeding head, Fat Man suddenly broke away and blundered off into the scrub. At last he felt safe to collapse in the shade of some trees, where his whimpering, snorting cries echoed in the heat of the day.

"That will teach him! But I should have killed him! Si, si, I should have killed the fat fool! Trying to ruin our good girls! Who the hell does he think he is?"

Delfina's face was filmed with sweat. Her features quivered and shook as she staggered back into the shade of the veranda to sit down at the table, panting and trembling.

"You waste your energies so, my sister!" Consuela as usual chose the wrong moment to pass comment.

Thwack! Delfina's deftly spun stick hit her sister on the shoulder. The older woman collapsed sideways, her aged mouth hanging open, a chicken like squawk coming from her throat.

"Fool--you will be buried, too, out here one day, that I swear!!" Delfina did not even bother to glance at her older sister quivering on the veranda's wooden floor.

Delfina's face glowed with a strange inner triumph. She loved beating someone, and Fat Man was a very large and easy target for her stick. Girls tended to get their bones broken too easily when Delfina beat them, and that was bad for business. Fat Man's snuffling howls as he staggered away had made a great shriek of joy well up in Delfina's heart. Now the fact that Consuela lay on the floor in agony increased her sadistic pleasure.

Her face shone. Delfina felt that she was absolutely the queen of all she surveyed. It was strange, but her paranoia just happened to coincide with her absolute power over them all, making tins sadly true. Delfina Sanchez did rule them all!

* * *

In his strange, intuitive way, the Turk felt he had seen the last of the Sanchez sisters. He stopped the caravan with the girls and the German guards twice along the route to the Coast. Each time they changed about, and took different roads.

In his pocket he had a letter from ex-major Ricardo Herrera. It was a vague, rambling letter. Ricardo was good with his physical tasks but bad in expressing his thoughts.

His ideas tended to ramble all over the place. The point of the letter was to ask the Turk for a job in his international organization. There was a strong hint that Ricardo Herrera knew far more about the Turk and the flesh trade than just the Sanchez rancho and brothel work.

"Hmm, he could be dangerous," the Turk muttered to himself as he reread the letter.

Seated in the back of his Cadillac, he watched the far coastline appearing out of the evening haze. There would be a ship tomorrow, and the girls would be on their way to distant lands by tomorrow night. He turned over Herrera's envelope, took a pencil and totted up. He had some sixty girls now going in this batch. He had bought his flesh cheap, and was selling to the top markets. The Turk chuckled to himself.

It was an amusing way of making money. He tucked the envelope into his pocket. He needed to think about Ricardo Herrera. Who knows, he might find use for such a man as the tough Mexican ex-officer. On the other hand, it might be necessary for someone to go and get rid of Herrera. The Turk believed in taking care of everything, right down to the smallest detail.

This was how the Turk had managed to survive and prosper. Many others had succumbed, vanished, and died. The Turk nodded to himself. It was an evil world, this world of today. One really had to know how to stop people from talking.

CHAPTER FIVE - LEARNING HOW TO PLEASE

Melinda Castro had died in the night. This was all Maria knew. The fact was, Joaquin had broken the girl's neck and Fat Man was now staggering off down through the brush. He carried a shovel in one hand, and was dragging the girl's emaciated body by the skirt with the other. The way Fat Man selected a grave-site, and the way he moved, it was obvious he had done this many, many times before.

Ironically, the sordid obsequies marked the first moment of freedom for Maria Alverez. She stood with Anita Torres, the wild older girl, and Juanita Rojas, watching as the earth was shoveled onto the still form of Melinda. Tears streamed down Maria's cheeks. Juanita was praying. Her prayers made Anita angry.

"They killed her! This is no place for prayers! These brutes killed her! I know it!"

Anita fell silent as Ricardo came through the morning haze to collect the three and bring them to breakfast.

"You will have to clean up and be ready to work at the hotel tonight. I am taking all three of you back to town. We have a great girl shortage right now."

"Don't any more girls want to work for the sweet, nice sisters?" Anita sneered.

"You still have not learned to hold your tongue! You have just seen one buried, and still you are rude," Ricardo sighed. "You girls never seem to learn how to shut up!"

It was curious, but in some ways Ricardo liked the girl's spirit. There was never a time when Ricardo felt he had actually subdued Anita Torres. Even in his raping of her, the girl was still a complete individual, aloof and unreachable. Knowing her all this time had created a peculiar sort of respect for her in his brutish mind. He was resigned to Anita's defiance, and he wondered what it would mean eventually for them all.

The three girls followed the stocky figure of Ricardo back to the ranch house. Behind them, they left the mole-like figure of Fat Man busy filling in the grave of Melinda Castro.

Maria Alverez had cried for her thin, drug-plagued friend. The girl's death was about the final blow for Maria. She knew now that there was no turning back. There was no other route for her, but to go with Anita and Juanita, back to the brothel in San Francisco del Rincon.

"I will look after you, Maria. Do not worry. I was your age, and in your position once. I had someone who looked after me," Anita whispered to Maria, and clasped her hand in a token of friendship.

Maria sniffed back her tears. Juanita, the other girl, was in some remote religious world entirely of her own. But Anita was a closer, real person. Maria lifted her head and felt somehow she was going to be alright now.

During these past few days at Rancho Sanchez, Maria and Anita Torres had become good friends. In many ways, Anita seemed automatically to fill the role of Maria's big sister. Maria had long been aware of Anita. For Anita had a curiously forceful personality that everyone, from Delfina Sanchez right down to Fat Man, had to acknowledge. They had never broken her spirit, though they had turned her into a rather wild whore. Delfina alternately loathed Anita, and at other times seemed to think that one day Anita might make an excellent madam for a new bordello the sisters were thinking of opening.

The trouble was not with Anita Torres, for in truth she might well have changed direction, stopped her rebellious ways, had she become head of a house. The trouble was that the Sanchez sisters had reached a fragmentation of direction and aims. They could not even decide on a newspaper advertisement, let alone buying and opening a new whorehouse. Such was Delfina's paranoia that no one could interfere. Thus nothing was decided, and thus Anita Torres grew more and more the rebel.

"You see, Maria, you have found a good friend. Do you know why I am here?" Anita asked Maria over their meager breakfast in one of the outhouses at the rear of the rancho.

Maria had not felt like eating, but now she was ravenously devouring everything. The young girl had been through a several weeks' ordeal of semi-starvation and daily rape. She was not the same Maria Alverez who had arrived so dewy-eyed.

"They say the customers like you and the management hates you!" Maria grinned and took some more beans. It was poor food, but it was food.

"I took two very nice Americanos, they were boys, and I told them I was a slave, like we all are, and that no girls ever escape from the Sanchez sisters," Anita sighed.

"You told them that? What did they do?" Maria asked with wide-eyed astonishment.

"They went to the police, to Sergeant Lopez, of all people! He took the report, which he tore up or gave to the Madame, so you can imagine how they came and beat me! I am surprised I was not killed. Ricci likes me-he and I--we do--well, you know, we have known each other a long time. I think if it were not for Ricci, they would have killed me and I would have been buried out here at the rancho, like all the others."

Maria hung her head. "How many others have--been buried out here?" she whispered.

"Oh, no one knows, no one has ever counted! Girls come, girls go. Some are sold to the Turk, and go to Bolivia. Others get sick, and some never give in to Ricci, so they just vanish. There is a room they call the sick-room. They put girls in there when they are ill, hurt, or not to be seen again."

"What happens to them in the sick-room?" Maria asked.

"No one knows. Fat Man goes off and digs a grave out there, like he did for Melinda this morning. And Melinda was in the sick-room last night, so someone killed her."

"I cannot believe it!" Tears welled afresh in Maria's eyes. "But I know what you are saying is the truth. You-you are very brave, Anita. I admire you, fighting against them. I cannot fight. I just--I just feel this is, well, this is what has happened, and now I accept what they have made of me." Maria ate her beans slowly.

"We'll never get away then; they'll kill us? she suddenly asked in a very quiet voice.

"Some are sold, and they go off, to what I do not know. Others fight free and run away, but I think they are caught and killed. This is quite a place. The sisters seem to have bought everyone, and I am now thinking what to do next." Anita hung her head. "I shall not be so stupid, next time!"

"I don't know how you can fight them!" Maria shivered.

"I have to fight them! That is how I am."

"You are very brave, Anita."

Anita laughed. "No, I am simply determined to fight to the end. I won't die like some pig or fool, stuck in a dark room with a killer coming, or put into an oven and burned. I am going to fight them to the end, with every tooth and claw!

"Meanwhile, I work as a whore to survive, so they make money out of me and let me live. But I know they hate me. The first opportunity that comes, they will kill me. I know I do not have much time to plan my escape."

"Anita, please be careful!" Maria whispered and touched Anita's hand.

"I haven't decided what to do yet. But it will have to be successful, or they will kill me for sure! I must get away from them!"

Anita Torres had once been the most beautiful girl in her school. This beauty still showed through the premature aging that a whore's existence had brought to her. Only Anita's eyes were still young and as full of fire as ever. The pride and spirit of Anita Torres filled young Maria Alverez with awe and admiration. Such a girl was bound to get away, eventually. Even if that escape was death!

"They think by making us watch the burial of these poor wretches, and by forcing us to listen to the screams and the beatings, we shall be made cowards!" Anita spoke with cold, forceful logic. "No. Not with me! When they buried Melinda this morning, it made up my mind that I have to escape, or it will be me that Fat Man will be shoveling earth onto, before long. At least if I die trying to get away from them, I have died honorably, struggling against evil."

"Yes, yes, but you have more will-power than I do," Maria mused.

"No, one day you will find that you have to fight, too. Otherwise they will kill you, or ship you off to the dirty tin mines."

"Is that why the place is deserted today?"

"Yes, fifteen girls went off with the Turk. He buys the flesh, and they go by steamer to another country where they are sold again, mainly to the black people."

"Oh, how terrible!" Maria shuddered. "Before that, I would escape or kill myself!"

"By the time they sell you, most of the girls don't care what happens to them. Remember, Sanchez sisters do not sell anyone they can still make one single peso out of!"

"They have our money?" Maria asked.

"The money you earn by letting men take you?" Anita laughed, a firm, deep laugh. "Si, si, they have millions, and we get nothing--except food that is fit for hogs. They are mad, these Sanchez skiers! They are all crazy for money, but Delfina, she has the pox madness. She caught it when she was a girl, and now it festers in her bones. That is why every one of us has to be so careful when she is around."

"I have never heard of that before," Maria shuddered. "All the time, all these things, I never knew existed before."

"That's how they caught you. That's how they catch each and every one of us," Anita sighed. "We come from poor, large families. Too many mouths to feed, so we girls answer the advertisement, and then they trap us, beat us, and make us into what we are. Once we've come to this, then they sneer and tell us we are good for nothing else.

"That is the cruel part. Once they have made us bedroom companions for any man that pays, they spit at us for being what we are. I hate them for being so evil, for being so wicked and disgusting, and for killing so many. God will not forgive them, of that we can be sure, and neither will I. If I had the strength of a man, I would kill every lousy one of them! Only Ricci is too strong, and he would break my neck before I even started!"

"Ricci?" Maria felt her body contract. "He is so very efficient, at everything... "

"Yes, he trained you, and he trained me. He loves training fresh little girls. He and Joaquin are bulls who train the girls, no matter how much the girls may hurt and fight and scream. The more the girl screams, the more Joaquin enjoys himself! Oh yes, they are a very dangerous pair! I often wonder if Senora Delfina herself is not frightened of Ricci and Joaquin, those two murderous bulls. Who knows, one day they might turn around and kill each other. Then we would all be free!"

"Could that really happen?" Maria asked innocently.

"Not very likely, but it might, if fate was kind. I wonder if there is such a thing as fate? We girls seem to have been condemned to hell without a chance at any other kind of life at all." Anita sighed deeply.

"Oh, do cheer up, Anita. Things may get better. We may suddenly find ourselves free one day. This cannot go on forever." Maria smiled and held her friend's hand.

"You innocent baby!" Anita laughed softly to herself. "After all Joaquin and Ricci and Delfina have done to you--you still are as innocent as ever!"

"I believe there will somehow be good in it-- somewhere. We shall find some good in it. I am certain that God will not let these evil people go on and on forever. Someone is bound to discover all these killings, and what has happened to all the girls who have disappeared. Someone must surely be wondering about those things right now!"

"No, Maria, one of us has to get away, to the city, to the capital, to the chief of police there, and tell him. That is what we have to do. Otherwise, there is no hope for this evil world and no one will ever be saved. It will just be more and more burials, until Fat Man has no more land to turn into a cemetery."

"Oh, don't say it! Don't speak like that. I'm certain something good will happen!" Maria protested.

"Yes, it will happen. That is what I am determined to do--to make it happen!" Anita patted Maria's hand. "Do not worry little one, I shall make it happen, if only to save you!"

"Not just for me--but for yourself!" Maria sighed and smiled. She had found a good new friend. Life was not all black, even if there were times when it seemed nothing but an agony of torture and rape.

Maria held Anita's hand firmly. For these words with Anita were the first moments that made sense, the first moments of hope, in four weeks of insane cruelty.

"I like you very much, Anita," Maria whispered.

"Thank you!" Anita smiled back at the young girl. "I like you too. Don't worry, little one."

It was Joaquin who drove the truck. He was bringing back six girls. Four were to go to the Delfina Sanchez place, the Hotel Molinos. The other two he had to take on to Leon, where Teresa was also very short of girls.

Joaquin moistened his lips as he thought about Teresa's voluptuous figure. There was a chance she might be nice to him, if he brought the girls over to Leon late enough. Teresa had twice almost accepted Joaquin as a lover. But each time she had pulled back and at the last minute refused. Joaquin knew that Ricardo was still the basic male for Teresa. It was an odd idea, that Teresa actually loved Ricardo.

Joaquin spat out of the truck window. As he sped along, the truck stirred up a great funnel of brown dust. The dust rose like a tail, up into the midday sky.

Maria Alverez sat in the back, along with her new friend, Anita Torres and the religious Juanita Rojas. The young girl sat in a state of fear, holding Anita's hand tightly. For Maria had originally arrived at the Hotel Molinos without knowing what fear or terror actually were. But after nearly a month of maltreatment at the Sanchez rancho, Maria now knew paralytic terror rising within her. The terror made her as helpless as if she were a white rabbit being grabbed by wolves.

Maria just could not help her terror. Four weeks, and the constant rapes, the beatings from Delfina's stick, the bad food, and Melinda's death, had almost robbed Maria of her own mind. Now she simply froze in terror. Merely being on this truck, being taken back to the Hotel Molinos, to work along with her new friends, was enough to make Maria scared, scared so badly that her bones ached with fear.

"You must get over this! It is no good, no good at all. You must learn to put up with life, and to keep yourself to yourself, Maria," Anita whispered as they held hands. "Ah, this Joaquin, he drives like he fucks, badly and all over the place. I think we. are as likely to be killed on some truck ride with Joaquin, as any other way!"

"I know God is with us every moment!" Beaming beatifically, Juanita leaned over to tell Maria this. "Yes, God is with us every moment, and he forgives us everything we have to do, because these people are possessed by the devil!"

"They are mad! True, they are possessed of the devil in their heads!" For once Anita agreed with the fervent Juanita Rojas. It was not often that Juanita and Anita even spoke, as Anita was wild with her tongue as well as with her desire to escape.

"The devil does possess them, as he possessed Ricardo Herrera when he took my maidenhood and turned me into what I am today-a whore-a cheap, four-peso disgusting whore!" There was an off inflection in Juanita's voice as she echoed it again. "A cheap four-peso whore-four pesos for my body for five minutes!"

"And you can pull a man's juice in four minutes. But as you say, what right did that big-cocked bastard have, taking your virginity in the first place? You can still become a nun, once they are put away!" Anita's coarse words made Maria feel shocked, and turned the sixteen-year-old girl's cheeks crimson.

"No, never! A nun who has had so many men, she cannot count them? I hate myself for it! I hate myself for each second of it! I hate myself for enjoying it!" Juanita's voice quivered with disgust and anger.

"Well, at least you do enjoy it. You and Alicia Cordones. The men really flock after you two. Me, that hates them, that shouts at them to set the fuck over with, me they come to as a kind of punishment." Anita laughed coarsely. 'They have even made us think like whores, these Sanchez bitches and their pimps!"

"Why should men ever come to me?" Maria asked, with a worried note in her youthful whisper of a voice.

Juanita smiled and Anita gave a great coarse bellow that had all the other girls glancing across the truck in their direction.

"Men will be after your nest like old bees going for young honey! When they see you-ahh, Maria, you will really have to be safeguarded! There are some men who are not nice to have near you. You will need another girl, or Ricci, close to you all the time. All the time!"

Anita squeezed the girl's hand tighter. "You will earn those nasty bitches too much money, have no fear of it! You have the face of a beauty, and men will flock to your room-I bet they'll make Maria twenty pesos a time for the first year!"

"Yes, yes, at least twenty pesos," Juanita Rojas agreed with almost a religious fervor.

"I don't want to be a prostitute," Maria protested. "I just hate the idea of being a prostitute. I am finished. I shall never be a real woman, or a mother, or anything. Now I'll just be a whore, until they have made enough money out of me to kill me or sell me off. This is what has happened to me, and I have to accept this. But why should I accept it?" Maria stared up at Anita.

"Because it is the will of God, that is why," Juanita insisted firmly.

"Nonsense! God didn't make us whores-those Sanchez sisters did, and the cock of Ricci and the cock of Joaquin forced us to lie down and act like whores-or be killed! Nothing to do with God, it has nothing at all to do with him!" Anita's voice rose in a shout.

"It has nothing to do with him, the cruelties of people toward other people. One must fight against that! Always, one must never accept, or creep away, or deny it is wrong. One must fight to the last ounce of one's strength, to the last breath in one's body! That is how I am made, and that is how I shall live, and that is how I shall die!" Anita Torres declared firmly.

They all stared at her, nodding and feeling a curious anger mingled with a flicker of hope in their young hearts.

Up in the cab, Joaquin Mendosa drove with his usual nonchalant ease. The road back to the highway was dirt, and it was hot in the afternoon sun. Sweat trickled down Joaquin's face. He sighed as he figured they should be in San Francisco del Rincon about five o'clock. He would have a wash and then amuse himself with Juanita Rojas for an hour before the evening meal. It was crazy, having to drive these girls back to town in the heat of the siesta. One should have more sense than to try it.

But then, working for these crazy Sanchez sisters, one always had the breath of death hovering around. So there was no other choice, if one wished to go on breathing. It was all a most careful matter of obeying instructions.

Joaquin sighed and wondered if Ricardo Herrera would ever get ambitious and strike out to take over the Sanchez business for himself. Joaquin doubted it. Ricardo had been with the sisters for too long. He had copulated his brain away. Now Ricardo was nothing more than a bull-man, and unable to think clearly for himself.

Joaquin knew how it was. After all these hundreds and hundreds of young girls they had had to train, Joaquin himself was much that way too. Constant copulation made the body good and used to it all. But it certainly sapped the mind and the will-power.

The truck bumped and lurched on over the vast flat mesquite of the Guanajuato, raising a shower of reddish brown dust that sparkled like flecks of gold in the sun.

So the girls were on their way back to the Hotel Molinos from the Sanchez Ranch after a stay of nearly a month. Their stay had had to be cut short by the sale and the girl shortage. There was a lot of work awaiting their bodies in town. A queue of work at each whorehouse, every evening now. Girls would soon fetch higher prices if the shortage went on like this.

* * *

Alicia Cordones frowned. Her baby face looked serious and her lips stuck out.

"You know, I am sick of pleasuring that Sergeant Lopez! He never gives me a tip. He seems to think he's doing me some kind of a favor!" Alicia complained to Ricardo.

"He was here again?" Ricardo frowned at Alicia. "Yes, I feel it is time we did something about the sergeant of police. What did Delfina have to say to him?"

"I don't know." Alicia hesitated, then added: "Senora Delfina was not here, so he saw Senora Consuela, and she--she gave him some money."

Ricardo swore. The girls and he did not work half the night, just to keep a crooked policeman rich and sexually satisfied!

"I'll go and see to it. Don't worry, he won't bother you again, ever. Oh yes, there is a new girl I want you to look after for us. Maria will be using the other half of your room, so you will have someone on the curtain for you. You instruct her while you can, and see that she doesn't meet some rough one, and if she does, give me or Joaquin the whistle. Got it?"

"Yes, but why me? I work hard enough as it is." Alicia felt annoyed. She much preferred her room to herself. But the new girl would not be with her for long. It was the custom for a new girl to be put into the same room with an older professional. Once the new girl showed she knew how to control herself and the male customers, then there were plenty of empty rooms to move the girl into. Alicia could only hope that her new girl would learn quickly arid be able to go off within a couple of days... "Maria Alverez?" Alicia asked.

"Yes, you are Alicia, I remember you. We met when I first came here a few weeks ago, remember?" Maria put down her old bag, full of the few treasures she had managed to cling to.

"I don't remember. Perhaps you looked different then. Girls change so quickly, the training out at the rancho does not agree with a lot of them. I think I remember you, but I'm not sure." Alicia smiled happily. This new girl Maria was certainly a bright one.

"Here, this is your half of the room. We sleep with the curtain back, so we are together. But when we are busy, we pull the curtain right across the middle of the room. That way we can both be entertaining men and not be embarrassed about it at all."

"Oh, I understand." Maria hesitated, then sat down gingerly on her bed. This was where she was to work? She felt a desperate feeling rising in her heart.

"Don't worry, Maria. I'll be with you the first few times-so you will have nothing to worry about. Men like to have two girls fussing about them. We don't tell them that one is training. But you will do your best, and I'll tell you what you are doing wrong. Once you get the hang of it, you'll be able to trick a fellow in two minutes easily. I just love to find a man who can last out against me! I do once in a while, but not often. Then, I suppose I am pretty hot to like it this way. A lot of girls just haven't the talent to make it in this business. But I'm certain you have, Maria.

"Now let's go and wash and have some food. The first customers usually arrive about six o'clock. Tonight is paynight, so we shall be busy. I do hope we don't get too many drunks. Drunks are fools with their money and fools with their cocks-they never get it up, and we charge them three times over for coming here. Once on the way in, once when they have their clothes off, and once on the way out. Drunks make a lot of money for the Hermanas Sanchez, believe me, they do!"

While they were chattering, Alicia showed Maria her closet and where to put her things. She also indicated the hand-basin, and the big bottles, one of peroxide and the other of potassium permanganate, for disinfecting purposes.

"You can use alum to tighten up your pussy, but you won't be loose down there for a year yet. Takes an awful lot of men to loosen a country girl's pussy! I have to use a bit of alum myself," Alicia giggled. "I used too much the other night, and this fellow tore himself in me. I could have died of laughter--I stuck some cotton wool on his bleeding cock, and tied it up, a bandage with a big big bow on the top.

"I asked him if he wanted his cock in a sling--you know, as a joke. But he looked down at the bandage-job and quite seriously asked me whether it was usual to go out of here with one's cock in a sling! To which, all I could say was no!" Alicia collapsed onto Maria's hard flat bed with shrieks of laughter. Even Maria could not help a giggle or two, though the story seemed to her impossibly crude.

"Imagine walking out of the Hotel Molinos with your cock in a sling!" Alicia shrieked. Then she sat up, dried her tears of laughter, and hugged and kissed Maria with a sudden flood of affection. "I like you, Maria! I can see we are going to have a great time together. It's very good you came to me, as I don't mind this business at all. I'll put you straight on a lot of things which will save you an awful lot of grief.

"Some others who don't like being a prostitute, they never bother to explain to a new girl all that can be done to save the wear and tear. Now, we need another pot of vaseline, and also some perfume. I've got some musk--deer musk, from the forests, that makes a man boil, and all you have to do is touch him and he comes, splat!

"Yes, there are lots of little things you have to learn, but meanwhile, let's go and have something to eat, then we shall rest and be all ready for your first customers when they come. Don't worry, I'll be by your side all the while!"

"I was going to be with Anita Torres, but I think she has a room of her own without a second bed or a curtain," Maria explained to Alicia as they washed and prepared for their meal.

"Anita is a lot of trouble. I like her, so does everyone. She wouldn't have lasted five minutes if the men had not been so keen on having her," Alicia said.

"Yes, Anita is great fun, but she will come to a bad end. Anita is the only girl Ricci has never had enough of, did you know that, Maria? Yes, one time Ricci was so in love with Anita he could hardly bring himself to let her have customers. Imagine--a pimp in love with one of his own whores! There--that's a story, isn't it? He still comes back to fuck her as often as he can. I think those two had something really great going between them, but the business kind of cut in and ruined it all. Anita had to become one of us, you see, and Ricci was too chicken to grab her and run for it. They wouldn't have got away, not really."

"No? Maybe, if they loved each other, the Sanchez sisters would have been happy for them?" Maria asked earnestly.

"What an innocent you are! Delfina wanted Anita killed. Several times! Ricci is the only person who could stop it. No, but they were even thinking of making her a madam of a new house, one day. But they do not know if they will ever be able to trust her.

"Anita Torres is a funny girl. She is a loyal friend. I've seen her stick out to the point where they would have killed anyone else, just to save a friend... " Alicia chattered on and on.

There had sprung up this instant friendship between Alicia and Maria. It was not the awed big-sister relationship that Maria felt with Anita. At the moment, Joaquin was enjoying Anita Torres on her bed, which was why Maria had been sidetracked off to stay with Alicia. But neither Alicia nor Maria realized the many, many times Anita had to appease both Joaquin and Ricardo with her fine body.

So Alicia led the way down through the dingy corridors, to where the sloping-roofed kitchen and backyard were filled with people. And Maria came busily along with her, animated and entirely an equal to the enthusiastic young whore.

"Don't worry, you will get used to it very easily. Once they have trained you--out there" Alicia gave a significant nod of her head, "you will find life at the hotel here a luxury, and the clients gentlemen, real senors, compared to the brutes who trained you-and I include that well-hung bastard Ricci Herrera in the pack--crude swine, they all are. I've had better loving from some road-sweeper who managed to save up his thirty pesos for ten minutes with me! Now, let's sit down and eat."

All of this life-and-death information was so gaily chattered out by Alicia, Maria felt herself becoming more and more relaxed. But in a strange way, Alicia was the one who felt the better of the two. Alicia was very bright, in her cunning little way. She had many important decisions to make, and a lot of these decisions she just could not make up her mind about. For months now, Alicia had been wanting a companion. It seemed to her, as she looked at the new girl, Maria, the gods had indeed been kind to Alicia Cordone, and given her a confidante, at long last.

"Sit down and eat-the food is better here, as this is where we earn the real money." Alicia winked at Maria, and they both took a place and eagerly helped themselves, like two schoolgirls let loose in the rambling old kitchen.

* * *

Sergeant Manuel Lopez was sitting back in his chair with his mouth open, using a toothpick. It was hot and he had just finished his post-siesta meal. Since most of his siesta time had been occupied by the pleasures of young Alicia's body, the good sergeant was more tired than usual. In fact he was exhausted, and half asleep.

"Ahh, Senor Ex-major of the Army Ricardo Herrera! Well, I am surprised to see you here!" Sergeant Lopez frowned and sighed as Ricardo entered the police sergeant's whitewashed office. "You see, we have to go elsewhere to talk. Not that I am worried, but one does not flout an association, my good friend!" The sergeant added in a quick undertone: "You brought the money from Senora Delfina?"

Ricardo looked stonily at the police sergeant. "Senora Delfina did give me a parcel for you, with instructions," he said. "I shall walk down to the trees on the other side of the Plaza, beyond the marketplace. We can talk there."

"No, no, I can't meet you there." Sergeant Lopez thought a moment. "Come to the barn-house at the side of my brother's place. You know where? I have a bunk there, where I sleep on my duty rounds at times. I shall meet you there, say in half an hour. You can give me the money now, if you wish--" A quiver of greed flickered over Sergeant Lopez's satiated face.

"I'll give it to you at the barn," Ricardo said.

And then, suddenly, Ricardo Herrera smiled!

It was that great flooding Herrera smile that the girls of the Sanchez organization knew only too well. It was his killer smile, and one that brought mortal terror to a girl's heart when she saw it.

Sergeant Lopez was frankly puzzled by the smile. He and Ricardo were not exactly friends, but Lopez was certainly not scared of Ricardo. All the same, the good police sergeant leaned over and pulled up his holster that was hanging by the webbing from the back of his chair. He took out his steel-blue revolver, flicked over the barrel and checked the bullets in each chamber, one after the other.

"Good! Si, Senor Herrera, at the barn in half an hour. Buenos tardes." He nodded, looking stonily at the beaming countenance of Ricardo Herrera. There was something odd about Ricardo this late afternoon, something that Lopez had never before observed in this whorehouse pimp who liked to call himself an ex-major.

"Louse-a small, nasty louse!" Sergeant Lopez murmured as he watched Ricardo walking off down into the white glazed sunshine beyond the adobe of the police station. "He will have to be trodden on soon, very soon. I think we might as well run him in with next month's quota. Yes-six months on the Island will tune him up for more pimping!"

Sergeant Lopez chuckled. He sighted along his beautiful revolver and checked the rise of the hammer. "Pop-pop-pop! Senor Herrera, you may well be dead tonight, if you act silly!"

* * *

Half an hour later, Lopez strolled out to the police jeep. He nodded to the man on duty by the door of the armory, then got into the jeep and lit a cheroot. He always drove off at this time, and his route was always exactly the same. In five minutes he arrived at the barn, driving the jeep through to a spot between a beanstalk rick and the side of the bam. In the blue-black shadows, Lopez smoked slowly, then wiped the sweat from his forehead.

"Ricardo Herrera, yes, he should be here any minute!" He got down from the jeep. Then he slipped off the leather safety thong covering his revolver-butt, and swung the holster round, loosening the gun for an easy draw. He had not liked Ricardo Herrera's smile.

"Louse-the pimps and the lice all run together!" So declaring, Sergeant Lopez went into the barn and across to the small storeroom, where he had a cot, some bottles, and a nice easy corner to relax in.

"Hello! Ahah, Ex-major Herrera, you got here very quickly!" Lopez had his hand resting on his gun.

Ricardo was standing by the window looking out at the flatland. Some peasant women were working slowly to bring in the last of the bean crop. He turned and smiled warmly at the sergeant of police.

"Yes, I drove here, like you. It is hot. It is too hot! I feel sorry for the poor women who have to work in the fields in this kind of heat." Ricardo spoke slowly, staring out the window again.

"You have the money for me, Herrera?" There was a crisp no-nonsense note in the sergeant's voice.

"The parcel is on the table." Ricardo nodded at a brown paper package. "That is what Senorita Delfina sent you. She told me to see to it that you got it personally. So-here I am!"

"Hmm, funny, she was funny with me. I have had to double the charges. There are so many people to pay, you understand, so I have to have five thousand this time.

"Delfina is a curious woman. I do not trust her, at times. Is she mad? I wonder if she has not lost her senses. One moment screaming at me, next moment being so nice. And she smiled-just the way you smiled at me just now!"

Lopez walked over to the table. He set his large revolver down beside the parcel and slowly stripped off the brown paper. It was a cardboard box.

"Is this a trick?-yes, it is a trick!" Lopez kept watch on Ricardo every second. "This is not money. I told the evil old bitch five thousand. Well, next time it will have to be ten thousand. There is nothing in this box!" A note of rage had entered Sergeant Lopez's voice.

"Open it, the treasures might be inside." Ricardo was smiling slightly, his eyes a soft, large brown, like an innocent young boy watching some strange ritual.

"Inside, eh? Let's see!" Lopez opened the box, jumped back and swore.

A tarantula scuttled past his finger. There was a thong, a thin leather thong in the box, with the tarantula.

"What is-?" Lopez began.

It was the knife that gave the policeman what Ricardo always called his "little spider's bite." For the knife came silently in a silver arc. It flashed with a scarcely visible movement of Ricardo's curved wrist. It plunged into the side of Sergeant Lopez's thick neck. The knife ran under his skull and straight across the sergeant's spinal column. His hands fell twitching on the table, beside his loaded revolver.

Quivering, shaking, Lopez was straining to remain upright. He was obviously a man of massive strength, as Alicia had often remarked. Now he was in the shock of spinal paralysis, yet he still struggled to keep upright, the knife sticking from his neck.

"You have been kissed by my steel spider, Sergeant! That is a great pity!" Ricardo chuckled. "I do not want to kill you, not just yet. It is too hot to carry a man about. I have the cord to garrote you with, when it is time to finish you off and bury you." Ricardo took the revolver and the box. Then he looked about for the tarantula, but it had escaped.

"Wise creature! Come along, Sergeant. We have a grave already dug and waiting for you. I'll take the knife out when I have garroted the breath from your body!" Ricardo chuckled happily.

He took hold of Lopez's shoulders and tugged him upright. Then he forced the sergeant to walk. They came out of the storeroom. Staggering, but carrying his own weight, Lopez walked back to where his police jeep was parked.

"You are dying slowly, so I shall have to drive. I'll take your keys, your wallet, the gold cross around your neck. Why is it such villains as you always have such big gold crosses next to their skin?"

Sergeant Lopez's face was beaded with diamonds of sweat. His features were quivering as he panted and struggled for life. He was numb! That was the most terrifying part about Ricardo Herrera's skilled knife-strike! It was a cut that brought almost complete paralysis. Soon the victim died of the paralysis that crept up from his toes. But it would take several hours for him to so die. Meanwhile, the chuckling Ricardo liked to amuse himself with the man or woman victim. It was these poor departing creatures who met the real Ricardo Herrera.

Pushed over, Lopez fell halfway into the small back seat of the police jeep. Ricardo had to heave his legs in for him.

"There, you'll last until we get out to your grave! I'm afraid it's a two-hour trip, and it's bumpy, so you're going to feel it rather badly!" Ricardo laughed long and loud at this. "In fact, you will be pleased when we do get to your grave and I take my knife out of your neck! The garroting may last five minutes or so, but you will at least know it is the end of all this suffering."

Ricardo, still chuckling, started the jeep. He glanced back, and gave the paralyzed, helpless sergeant a slap on his upturned rump.

"You became too expensive for us, my friend! Greed is the downfall of so many of you. Always the greed! And always beware when Delfina smiles. Still-you were too much of a fool ever to realize what was going to happen."

The blow so hurt Sergeant Lopez that he would have screamed and screamed. But he had no control over his body, not even his vocal cords, so his eyes merely rolled and saliva ran, and sweat poured down to make a wet pool on the floorboards of the jeep.

Ricardo was quite right. When death by garroting finally came to Sergeant Lopez, it was a most merciful release. He did not even feel Fat Man's shovelfuls of earth falling on his blood-streaked face.

Ricardo stepped back from throttling Lopez in the shallow grave. He took out the silver cheroot case he had filched from the dead policeman. Fat Man was toiling hard, throwing the earth over the sprawled form of the dead man. Ricardo lit a cheroot, smiled and inspected the silver case. He would have the Lopez escutcheon taken off, and his own name put on it. Luckily, both he and the sergeant had smoked the same type of cheroot.

"Adios, Fat Man-take his boots off if you think you can use them." Ricardo turned and walked back to the jeep. He sat in the shade of the jeep's canopy to watch. The gross, sweat-stained Fat Man was apparently pulling some nice new black boots out of the bowels of the earth.

"They will fit me, Senor Ricardo. Many thanks!" Fat Man beamed.

"Don't thank me, Fat Man-thank him-thank Sergeant Lopez for having the same size feet." Ricardo laughed and started the jeep. He would have to ditch it somewhere out in the desert.

Anyway, it would take the police a couple of months to replace the sergeant. Then the business and negotiations would have to commence all over again. Ricardo shook his head sadly. It was a great pity all these police sergeants got so greedy after a time. Just a waste of a good plot of land, and hot work in the late sun for Fat Man. However, at least now Fat Man had some nice new boots to wear. Lopez's death was not a total waste.

Ricardo laughed long and loud at this as he drove off.

The sound of his laughter disturbed the creatures of the desert in their hides and holes. They did not like the sound. For it came from the deadliest of deadly animals.

* * *

His name was Hernando and he was Maria's first paying customer. Hernando was in his late twenties, good-looking, with a charming smile. He was married and liked to call at the Hotel Molinos once a week for the extra sex his frail wife could not supply.

"Now be gentle with her, Hernando, be good to her, and she will give you anything you wish." Chattering away as usual, Alicia led the way to her room.

It was Alicia who had selected Hernando. She knew him as a gentle, patient lover, not a rough or demanding one. Once before she had used him to break in a new girl, and Hernando had found this an amusing task.

"That last one did well in Leon," Hernando commented. "She cried a lot-I hope this one does not cry with me."

"Maria? No, Maria will not cry. She is just getting used to it all. Anyway, she is good-looking and you will like her." Alicia opened the door to her small shared room, and there was Maria sitting on her bed. Maria looked up, white-faced.

"Hello, Maria, this is Hernando, he wishes to be with you. Now, undress and get onto the bed. Just slip your gown off, and I will show you how to put a rubber on your customer. Normally we do not put a rubber on our friends we know as well as we know Hernando here. He is such a charming senor, with a nice wife and family. But I shall show you, Maria, and Hernando won't mind."

Hernando was staring at the beauty of Maria as she took off her gown. She did not even blush now, but sat naked on the edge of the bed watching her instructress. Hernando had slipped off his clothes, so Alicia was able to work on him.

"You see, first we check to make sure our friend is good and clean. Then we roll the rubber on, so, and we put some jelly on the rubber, to make it easier. You must keep your fingers warm, and after a bit of practice, you'll find it very easy."

Alicia sounded just like a prim schoolteacher. 'The rubber will protect you if you are doubtful about the man-otherwise you will have to wash yourself out with permanganate or peroxide immediately afterwards. These rubbers are safer, even if they are a little more trouble."

Alicia looked up at Hernando's serious face and gave him a smile.

"There, Hernando, thank you-now you can make love to our little Maria and show her how nice it can be!"

Hernando blinked and nodded. He got onto the bed and Maria locked her legs about him. Her fingers came down to insert his manhood in her. This was what Ricardo had taught her to do, and Maria did it automatically.

"Good, you are well-skilled-that is very good! Now flex your hips, Maria, and let Hernando get comfortable." Alicia felt very excited as she bent and studied the whole action of the new young whore with her first paying customer. "Not too quick! We have to make certain that our good regular friends like Hernando are taken care of happily. Then we know they will come back again next week-won't they?"

Hernando turned and looked right into Alicia's face. He nodded as he slowly curved and bucked against the willing, if awkward form of Maria Alverez.

"She will be alright, this one! Rather tight, but she is young." Hernando gave his expert opinion very clearly, then smiled down at Maria's serious face. Her enormous brown eyes blinked, and a weak smile flickered across her mouth.

"Now work your hips, and remember what Ricardo taught you about your tummy muscles! Work your hips and give Hernando his money's worth. Yes, that is how-good! Very good, Maria! Now remember your tummy muscles!"

Maria panted as she worked with Hernando. Alicia's words echoed in her puzzled mind. For Maria was wondering why on earth she was allowing this strange man to do this to her. But she had no choice. And the insistent words of Alicia called to mind the use of her muscles, which Ricardo also had taught her.

Maria put her hands on Hernando's shoulders. Her fingers stroked his neck. It was purely an artificial gesture, to show Alicia that Maria was learning the oldest profession.

"That's it! You have it ail-now your muscles!" Alicia clapped her hands and beamed excitedly.

Contracting her vaginal muscles, Maria sucked in her stomach. This move vacuumed out Hernando's scrotum, with a great twisting shock of releasing orgasm.

"OOOh! Madre de Dios!" Hernando gasped out as he flung himself over on top of Maria, and his face quivered in massive shudders. His whole body seemed to have been drawn out and down into the massive orgasm. "Magnifico!" he cried out and slithered down, utterly exhausted.

"That's the trick!" Alicia cried, jumping up and down in glee.

"It-it is over?" Maria was astonished. After the pounding roughness of the long-lasting Ricardo, and the huge crude entries Joaquin had practiced upon her young body, Hernando seemed hardly to have arrived before he was finished!

"Yes, yes, they do not last long. It is your love-muscle. He has paid me, and here is the money. I shall put it in your box, so Ricci can collect it later. That was very good, Maria. Hernando never does last long." Alicia stroked the back of the exhausted man's head. He smiled and nodded as he started to get his breath back.

"She is going to be a good one! As good as you and as good as Anita Torres-this is a third good one!" Hernando panted.

"I am so pleased to hear it!" Alicia was delighted with the success of her young protege.

It was Alicia's young but very expert opinion that not every girl could make the top ranks of the oldest profession. Doing whoring on one's back was the basic act, of course. But Alicia was also rather widely read. All of her reading had dealt with mistresses of the past, such as Empress Josephine and Madame Pompadour. One of her old male friends brought her these books once a week, and was paid for them by Alicia's body.

One thing was certain, and that was that Alicia was determined not to be a hired house prostitute for a moment longer than she could help it. Not that she wished to leave the profession, for Alicia enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh far too much to wish to return to the moral world outside the kingdom of whores and bordellos.

No, Alicia Cordones was determined first to make herself rich in the business, and to have a good, even a married life later. From what she had read concerning the courtesans of the present and past, there was hope for a woman determined enough to lift herself from a prostitute's bed. Plenty had gotten to the highest beds of the land from such a beginning. Alicia did not have such vast ambitions, either politically or immediately. But the still-young woman had her savings, and her maps, and her plans. In time she would leave the Sanchez sisters, and it was only a matter of waiting for the opportunity.

Thus she was very pleased when her new girl, Maria, showed she knew how to behave on the bed with her first male. The money for this work was in Maria's tin collecting box, on the bedside stand.

'There, now you must wash Hernando. Some of them wash themselves-outside, where the water troughs are, that is why there is a pile of ten washbasins out there, and bars of soap. But special repeat customers, good friends of ours, we wash their cocks ourselves, to show them we like them."

Maria staggered up from the bed and put on her dressing gown. She felt oddly that it was only half done. Ricardo and Joaquin had worked on her body so fully, the girl even had a slight feeling of disappointment! But she smiled and hurriedly got a basin of water. Washing Hernando's privates for him, she looked so serious at the task, Hernando looked down and laughed.

"Well, she certainly takes it all to heart! That is good. Do not worry, Maria. Now you have this job, you will never want for food or money. You girls know that!" Hernando grinned. His white teeth shone like a flashing advertisement. "Thank you for washing me so gently!"

"You throw the used rubber away," Alicia resumed. "Some houses like to use them a second time, after washing, but I hate that. Here we throw them away-- straight off--see? Yes, now you know how to do it with a paying customer. Thank you, Hernando, for being so good to my new girl. She is very sweet, my Maria Alverez!"

Alicia put her arm about Maria and cuddled her, both girls glancing at each other and giggling.

"She is so beautiful! She is like a Madonna!" Hernando was dressing. He bent forward and kissed Maria on the cheek. Then he took out a fifty-peso note and pressed it into her hand. "For you, may it bring you success!"

Maria stared down at the money. It was enough to allow her not to have to work for the rest of the evening.

"That's good! I'll take this and save it for you." Alicia whisked the fifty-peso note out of Maria's hand. "Don't worry, when you need money, I can let you have as much as you ever want."

"To send home, too?" Maria asked in astonishment.

"To send to your family, or to buy a business, or anything. That is why we are here, isn't it? To make money!" Alicia seemed astonished that Maria was so naive.

"I must go now. Thank you very much Maria, and you, my sweet Alicia. I'll be here on Tuesday again-see you." Hernando kissed them each on the cheek. His boots made a clinking noise as he left then room.

'There is money, in this--this harlotry?" Maria sat down on the bed. The door was closed and Alicia was tidying the place for the next client to come and visit them.

"A girl makes a fortune here," Alicia whispered. "But never, never let Ricci or the Sanchez sisters know where your-or our-savings are. You are very well paid, while you are young and fresh. So you must put every peso you can away, and it will save you and buy you a good life later. Only let those devils have what they can collect. The rest, give to me, and we shall save until we can buy our freedom."

"Buy our freedom!" The words broke like a great bubble of excitement from Maria's very heart. 'That is possible?"

"Oh yes, a hundred dollars, that will buy you free! Why, if Delfina Sanchez thought she could get a hundred dollars for you, she would drag you to the sale this moment!"

"Then we must save every peso. It is an enormous sum-one hundred dollars. That is twelve hundred pesos!" Maria echoed. "But we can soon earn it."

"You can earn that in two weeks here," Alicia chuckled. "The thing to do is to keep the tips and the extras hidden from those thieves and murderers. Once we have a few hundred dollars saved, we can go off and open our own house."

"Open our-own house?" Maria could hardly believe what she heard. "In this business-being a prostitute? They raped me-they beat me and beat me, and raped me so often-I didn't want to be one-I shall never, never want to be one! It's the last thing-but-what else is there for me now?"

Alicia sat down and glowered at Maria.

"Oh, you are one of those innocent fools, Maria! I wondered how they had caught you. You came in answer to that ad. You expected to live a great life and marry a rich man's son and be happy forever afterwards. Well, it doesn't happen. Not in the whole wide world!"

"So--here you are, on a bed, on which you will earn a lot of money. If you are a fool, like so many of these-these in this house are-then you will end up by being sold like an old used-out cow, sold to Bolivia or sold off for the black men to fuck down in Africa. But those were the fools who fought, or had no sense, or could not save their money. For that type of stupid girl, the world has no time. It is a matter of life and death I am talking about, Maria!"

"I know it is, I know it!" Maria stared at Alicia for a moment. "Yes, Alicia, all that you have said is sense, and you are right. There is no other way. We must save and buy ourselves out."

"Good-it won't take long. I have a man friend who will put in a bid for me to Senora Sanchez, the moment I wish. Even then I will not give him the money, no fear of that! I shall pay her myself, in a way she will have to accept. Then, I am free! I walk out of here. And if ever any man like Ricardo or Joaquin comes near me, I shall have someone of my own who will stick a knife right into those pimps so deep they will die slowly-the way Ricci can make a person die for hours!"

Alicia swore. "Yes, and now you will have to get your one hundred American dollars together as quickly as you can. You see, once you have a hundred dollars, the whole world begins to look very, very different to you. I have mine, and more-and I shall have enough to open my own house, by the time I get out of the Hotel Molinos!"

"Why do you want your own house, Alicia?"

"Because I enjoy men, and I enjoy money, that is my answer! Do you enjoy poverty, Maria?" Alicia laughed scornfully.

"No, no, I shall have to send my family some money. But I must save. I must, must save that hundred dollars as soon as possible!" Maria took a deep breath. "There is a chance for me, after all!"

"Oh yes, if you use your head, and as well as you can use your body. We'll make it, no fear of that. Now, let's go and get you another customer. You must learn how to handle the rough ones. Some men can be very dangerous, and before you go into your own room, you must learn how to recognize the dangerous men."

"How can you tell when a man is dangerous, for a girl like me?" Maria asked seriously.

"Well, at times it is obvious. Then I call Ricci or Joaquin and the man is thrown out. I mean, they are playing with themselves, or swearing, or making grabs for you. But there is one type of man who is the worst of all. He is a real danger." Alicia frowned and looked at Maria.

"Why is he so dangerous-this type of man?"

"Well, Maria, you see, men get all hung up about having a girl. There is one type of man who wishes to have you, but also tries to hold back his come. He grabs at his cock, but his cock is of course inside your body, you understand?" Alicia explained slowly.

"Yes, of course, it would be." Maria blushed and hung her head, for she still had the modesty of an innocent.

"So, this man feels he is going to come-to orgasm out. He grabs hold of you-instead of his cock-and tries to squeeze his come back into himself-so they say, the doctors who treat these dangerous types of men."

"He tries to squeeze it back?" Maria raised her eyebrows.

"Yes, by squeezing your neck! You see, his cock is in you and he is coming, and he tries to force back his come, hold on to it, by beating it back-but he grabs hold of your neck-as being something to hold on to and squeeze as tightly as he can. That's the danger. We have had three girls strangled here at the Hotel Molinos by such sick men."

"Oh, my God!" Maria whispered softly, shocked.

"It's one of the big risks of our trade, these men. That is why we always have to have a pimp around. You can shout out, and our man will be in our room in a few seconds.

"Ricci and Joaquin have saved many a girl's life by running in--and being in time. Those three girls who died, they never called out-or our man would have been there and saved them."

Alicia sighed. "Yes, it is one big risk in being a whore. One never knows what the client may do. I have had to beat men in the face to get their hands away from my throat--and I could not take a customer for a week afterwards, I was so scared. The professional risk here is really more a matter of being strangled on your own bed, than of being buried at the Sanchez rancho!"

"I didn't know men strangled girls!" Maria was white.

"They don't, not very many. It's just that every girl in our profession has so many men, and scattered among them, is this ripe type of bastard who has this kink. So, we girls are more likely to meet him on our beds, than the ordinary woman. It's a risk. Like having Ricci, or Joaquin, or another of those dumb swine around. It is all a risk, that's why one must save every peso, and one must get free and into one's own business as soon as possible."

Alicia yawned. "Let's go and find you another nice customer, then we can start earning some money!"

Maria nodded. Fate had made her a whore. But in many ways it seemed she was landing lucky. First she had met the strong-willed Anita Torres. Now she was with this amazing, plump personality girl, Alicia.

The world is full of traps for the innocent and the unwary. Certainly Maria had walked into one of the biggest traps for young girls. Now her luck was changing. A startling degree of confidence was beginning to make itself felt within her. It could be that this confidence would blossom into that cocksure brassiness most whores have about them. But it still would stem from the very necessary weapon of self-confidence such girls have to acquire.

"Right. Now for my next man, and let's get a tip from him!" Maria got up crisply. "I think I am getting to understand men!"

"Oh yes! Now remember to make your muscles pull their come out of them-when you want them to be finished. Times we are so busy, that is about all one can do for them--that and take their money." Alicia giggled coarsely as she led the way out of the room.

* * *

Delfina Sanchez was in a sick dream-world, on a trip out into a hallucinatory God-country where King Paresis reigns. For there were no less than sixteen new girls sitting looking at her, fascinated, in the lobby of the Hotel Molinos.

"You will all be saved, my pets-my sweet angels! We are so pleased that you've come to us, and to this world of ours where you will enjoy the true luxuries of life!" Her brushed-back hair, her brown-black eyes, her uplifted face, all contributed to a hypnotic glow that seemed to radiate peace, good will and harmony.

"We need you all, each and every one of you! You will have to give of yourselves now, for the good of our community! You will have to spend and spread that warm, deep, loving kindness that I know each of you sweet country girls possesses."

As she rambled on and on, the girls seemed to fall into a kind of daze. Each of the sixteen girls was staring at Delfina with her own peculiar expression on her face. Some of them were glowing, uplifted into beaming delight at meeting such a warm reception. Others were puzzled and trying to look about, but Delfina magnetized their attention over and over again. One or two were anxious to escape at the first possible moment. But mostly, they were trapped.

"You must eat-we shall have a banquet for all of you! I know you must be starving, after the long bus journey you have come from all over Mexico to get here. Ah, but I can tell that each and every one of you has left some poor farm! You each left many beloved brothers and sisters. Now, hands up, those who told their people where they were coming to. Just put your hand in the air if your parents know about the Hotel Molinos."

Only one girl raised her hand in response to the prompting question.

"Just one of you? My goodness, you are a clever girl! Well-we shall speak to you later. But the rest of you, you must come and have something to eat. You should never, never have left your homes without telling your loving parents where you were off to. That girl was much smarter, and she will stay here and help wash up, until she wishes to leave. The rest of you will come with me and eat a great meal!"

Delfina moved so smoothly, her flock rose like a fluttering of poorly plumed birds. They were real country girls, with plain or print dresses, straight, black, well-washed hair. They were all tired, and each held a battered bag, which probably held objects very similar to those Maria Alverez had brought with her to this very spot ten weeks ago.

This new crop of girls was the first to appear since Maria had come, two-and-a-half months back. Maria was adept and working well by now. She could take six to ten men an evening and not feel tired. Once in a while she had to satisfy Joaquin or Ricardo, but this was also the duty of every girl. More, Maria had hardened up. She knew how to keep herself clean, free from pregnancy risk, and free from disease. All of these things she had learned from the hard-working Alicia Cordones.

"Dios! Did you see them? Sixteen of them--and all to be broken in!" Joaquin whispered in awe as the procession passed him and Ricardo Herrera.

"Sixteen! We are in for sore cocks and hard balls, my good friend! We shall have to take them out to the rancho five at a time, and work them over for the next month or two!" Ricardo pursed his lips... There were several fine-looking eleven-year-olds in this new group. Ricardo always loved them as young as possible.

"Yes, it is going to be a busy month, getting these new recruits trained up for here and Leon. It would seem that our shortage of little girls is over for a while."

Joaquin smiled. "We will have our cocks worn to a stub! Lucky we have only had little Maria these past few weeks."

Joaquin wandered off after the procession heading for the kitchen. Ricardo frowned and felt better. Now Delfina Sanchez really needed him and Joaquin. There would be plenty of time to get more money out of the crazy woman.

* * *

Maria came down into the hall of the Hotel Molinos, on her way to see Anita Torres. Anita was having a lot of trouble with Juanita Rojas, who was in the grip of a deep religious mania. It was difficult to make Juanita eat, take a man to her room, or even retain sense enough to survive.

One wrong word from Juanita now, and Delfina Sanchez had already announced the religious fanatic was as good as buried out at the rancho. So Anita Torres had taken on herself the fight to save Juanita. Maria was helping, but Juanita continued her babble of religious quotations--some of which sounded weirdly like the statements Delfina Sanchez had just made to. the new little girls who had walked into the trap.

A late arrival stood in the sunlight at the doors of the Hotel Molinos. She wore a shawl and carried a ragged bag. In her hand the new girl held a newspaper clipping of the advertisement.

"Hello-can you help me, please?" The fifteen-year-old girl addressed Maria. Maria paused, turned and stared at her.

"What is it?" she said hesitantly.

"I just wished to ask--" the young girl smiled at Maria warmly, in a country girl way. Maria felt frightened. "I just wanted to know--is this the Hotel Molinos, where they hire girls to be trained as maids for rich homes?"

The new girl waved the newspaper clipping. Maria felt she was going to be sick in a moment. For it was so unreal, this happening.

"Yes, yes, this is the Hotel Molinos," Maria stuttered.

She looked at the girl's dress and recognized it. It was the same pattern dress she herself had bought from the catalogue, and worn when she rode the bus to San Francisco del Rincon, all those life-times of weeks ago. The same dress! It gave Maria a stab in the heart as she remembered how her dress had been ripped from her body, and Ricardo had crouched over her in the initial rape. Perhaps the same would happen to this one. It was an unlucky dress for any girl who saved centavo after centavo to buy it and wear it to town.

"I have to wait here, to see them?" the new arrival whispered in awe, as she glanced around. She was obviously thinking that Maria was an older girl, at least twenty-five, who had been here at the hotel for years.

"You have come far?" Maria swallowed hard.

"I have traveled for one and a half days, from Durango. All of my money it is-well," the girl laughed, "I just have to get this job, that's all!"

"You have to have it?" Maria frowned. "There is nowhere else for you to go?"

"No, no! At home, there are fourteen of us in the family, and-there is nothing-not enough of anything!" The girl licked her lips nervously. She was peering past Maria, trying to make out exactly what the Hotel Molinos was like.

"You have nowhere else to go," Maria repeated dully, as if to herself. It was fate! Yes, it was meant to be. It was some kind of cruel jest, that's what it was. Maria felt like crying, because there was nothing she could do, except to tell the girl to go. But the girl had nowhere to go. And Maria knew that if anyone had told her to go, that first morning, she would not have been able to go away either.

"I suppose you are hungry, after your long journey!" A deep soft voice spoke from right behind Maria. Maria shivered and glanced up. It was Ricardo. He had been listening all the time.

"Yes, yes, senor, I-am rather hungry!" The girl's huge, brilliant eyes rested on Ricardo, and she smiled in a very shy manner.

"Good, good, you will be very well taken care of! I can vouch you will be taken complete care of!" Ricardo was smiling.

Maria watched his broad smile with a freezing chill in her young heart. She had been raped by him as he smiled that smile. It was the smile of a ravaging, rapacious tiger. Maria put her hand to her cheek and stared at his harsh face.

"Yes, food is being served in the kitchen. Madame Delfina Sanchez will be very pleased to see you. Come along now into our kitchen-what's your name?" Ricardo asked softly.

"I am Betina Hermosa. I traveled all yesterday and most of today to get here, for this good job, senor." The girl could not help giving Maria a flashing look of female triumph.

"I am Ricardo Herrera-people who are my intimate friends, they call me Ricci-as you will call me Ricci, soon."

His gaze rested on Maria for a moment, a curious smile about the corners of his mouth.

"We have trained you well, have we not, Maria? You are good and loyal to our house. I like that! That is very good. It is so important, to be loyal." His eyes had cold, small spots in them. The last thing Sergeant Lopez had seen in life had been those two cold points of glittering wildness in Ricardo's eyes. But they vanished as the threat moved away.

"Yes, I am pleased with you, Maria-very pleased! Come along, Betina-we shall introduce you to Senora Delfina Sanchez, and you will be accepted for our special training."

The girl walked slowly, step by step, behind Ricardo as he led the way down the hall.

Maria Alverez paused under the funnel of golden sunlight bursting through the front doors of the Hotel Molinos. She felt like sobbing. But it was no use.

It was all so enormously inevitable. That was what her heart told her. One could not fight against it. Perhaps Anita Torres could. But she was someone special. Maria shrugged her shoulders. She turned and went slowly back to her own room. She no longer felt like seeing anyone-not Anita, nor Juanita, nor even the gay bubbling Alicia.

For Maria felt she should have done something to stop the entry of Betina Hermosa into the whoring trade. But quite what, Maria could not for the life of her think.

She sat on her bed and sobbed. After a while she felt better.

CHAPTER SIX - ANITA MAKES HER BREAK

The collapse of an empire does not come about by any single failure of one person or thing, just as the loss of one battle does not mean the loss of a war. There must be a chain of events. There must be a domino-teetering effect that runs off into many avenues.

One fascination of studying the collapse of empires, or of organizations such as that of the Sanchez sisters, lies in discovering how completely unrelated are some factors in the collapse.

For example, one might say the Sanchez whore-kingdom collapsed due to the death of Juanita Rojas. Or, in another direction, that the killing of Sergeant of Police Lopez by the brutal Ricardo Herrera was the key factor in bringing about the decisive investigation.

Yet again, it might be that Anita Torres had battered away at the pillars of Delfina's madness, that in the end Anita won, and did so in a most startling manner.

One might even go as far as to say the whole thing was brought to official light by, of all things, Pepito, Fat Man's little dog!

None of these things alone was strong enough to precipitate the downfall of the three powerful, evil, corrupt Sanchez sisters. Delfina, Consuela, and Teresa had been in power over twenty years. They ruled a vast empire of vice, and collected over four thousand little girls into the vicious net of their brothel world. The millions made were paid out in bribes, or sunk in foreign bank accounts. Most of the great sums vanished so entirely, the authorities have never been able to trace any of it.

But the crumbling beginning of the end came unexpectedly, as such things frequently do. Hindsight shows that Delfina Sanchez, with her syphilitic dementia, was bound to cause the whole empire to crumble eventually. Her cruelty had become too great, too immense. Her insanity was already being noticed and talked about.

All of these items, and dozens more, gathered into a breaking wave. Like a great returning tidal sweep of truth and justice, so the forces of natural balance seemed to be working to bring about the end of the evil sisters' diabolical rule.

It was still surprising to see the Sanchez empire collapse so suddenly, after so long. But again, when all the cruelties and the shocking depravities were revealed, it was astonishing to think such a state of affairs had been ever allowed to develop at all, anywhere.

And then, as in many other societies, whitewash had to be applied. From the top came the censorship of the stories. From the top came the pressure on journalists and the slow damping down of the protests.

For what had been revealed was more than just a brothel scandal. It was the rottenness of the very basic pillars of the society concerned.

So the story was atrophied, strangled, and like the little girls themselves, it was allowed to perish in the vast dry landscape of Mexico.

* * *

Juanita Rojas, from her very earliest days, had wished to enter a convent and become a nun. But that took money; in the poor land of Mexico, not every girl who wishes can afford to become a nun. So Juanita had come to San Francisco del Rincon to earn money to become some kind of a religious helper eventually. Her search for work had led her straight to the Hotel Molinos and into the rapacious hands of Ricardo Herrera.

The religious fervor inside Juanita was divorced from her life as a Sanchez whore. In fact, the more she was plunged into the brothel world, the greater became her devotion. It was only the strenuous intervention of Anita Torres that had saved Juanita from being buried at the Sanchez rancho sooner than she was.

One busy evening Juanita Rojas lay down on her bed and cut her wrists open, then slashed at her own throat. She found the jugular vein, and the blood spurted in a crimson arc over the dingy wallpaper beside her bed. She was white and dead in a few minutes.

Anita's scream was half of despair and half of rage. She had entered Juanita's room to make her work. Anita was in fear that Delfina Sanchez might order Juanita's execution any time, a fear very soundly justified. Delfina was in fact already planning the trip out to the rancho for Juanita and two others. Finding Juanita dead, still warm in the bloody chaos of suicide, Anita swore and rushed out.

"What is this-why do you attack me? She killed herself, so what is it to do with me?" Delfina screamed as Ricardo held Anita back from clawing Delfina's eyes out. "You have become impossible to deal with, Anita! I see we shall have to send you to the rancho for good. You forget your status in life. You should kneel before me and pray for my good will-not attack me!" Eyes flashing, hair wild, Delfina Sanchez screamed this out.

A fight developed that included two other girls on Anita's side. They could not hope to win, but the fight was enough to close the Hotel Molinos for the night. This loss of revenue incensed Delfina Sanchez even more.

"Those three-take them to the rancho! Right away! Beat them senseless if you wish-but I don't want them here a moment longer!"

"Alright, Senora Sanchez, Ricardo assented. "Fat Man and Joaquin have the truck. They will be in from Leon in an hour, then I can take them."

"Very good! You and Fat Man, get rid of these three evil bitches! Get rid of them! You see how much they cost us? We are closed, empty, because of them! They will have to be dealt with for good. That Anita Torres, she should have gone a long time ago!"

Anita sat with her hands tied, in a locked room. She was in a white rage and still quivering. With her were Lupe Huerta and Rita Jimenez. All three seemed in a daze, but the rage Anita was in kept her quivering and tense.

"They will kill us now! There are twenty girls out at the rancho being trained, so they have no need of us any more," Lupe said quietly. "We are finished. They will not even keep us alive to sell us. She is mad! Dios, is she a mad one!"

"We must escape! We shall escape!" Anita swore and muttered over and over again. "There must be some way for us to escape. I am sure there is!"

* * *

A brooding atmosphere of intense terror had fallen over the closed Hotel Molinos. Everyone knew there were three girls as good as condemned to death. Delfina Sanchez paced about her rooms, then went down to the kitchen. She screamed and babbled, and Ricardo wondered. Perhaps Delfina had gone completely insane. Yet there was no one who dared question her authority. Delfina wandered back to her rooms and started drinking heavily. Now and again the wild cursing began again, but she seemed to have some measure of control over herself.

"What can we do-what can we do for Anita?" Maria whispered desperately to Alicia.

"Nothing, unless you wish to go out to the rancho with her," Alicia sighed. "But we ought to do something. Anita is a good girl, and she was trying to help poor Juanita. It wasn't her fault Juanita killed herself."

"We have to do something! We must!" Maria insisted.

"I have a knife-a thin knife. It would slip beneath their door. If someone could bend down and slide it through-there's a chance they might be able to pick it up."

Alicia frowned. "Yes, I think Anita will be in the corner-where they tied her when she was raging and screaming. The other two are not tied. They tried to get her released. Good. Then Rita and Lupe, they are good girls. We can give them some money too-oh, it's such a waste, but they will need money to escape."

Once she had decided something, Alicia was a girl of action. She got the flat knife, and a flat envelope, and then worked out just how to get them under the door.

Flittering up and down, listening, Alicia was on the look-out for Ricardo Herrera. He was the silent one. He was the one who would stand in the shadows and watch everything, but seldom really told everything he knew or saw. It was a strange silent way he had. This was the reason for Alicia's great caution. Ricardo would love to kill her if he ever caught her in any trickery.

"It is all clear-quick with you now!" Alicia whispered.

Maria went like a gray ghost. She slipped down the corridor in the shadows. Then she darted across the lighted area. She stooped sleetingly as she passed the locked door where the three girls were held awaiting transportation back to the rancho.

The money envelope and the knife slithered through perfectly. Maria stood stock-still in the dark by the end of the corridor. She was so scared, she could hear her own heart thumping wildly. There was a faint noise from inside the room.

"Thank you!" came the whispered call. The girls had gotten the knife and the money.

Maria had to put her hand over her mouth to stifle a sob of excitement. It was well she did, for there was a sudden movement at the far end of the corridor. From the stairway stepped a shadowy figure. It was Ricardo Herrera.

He paused, canted his head to one side and stood listening. It was odd. The whorehouse was usually such a swinging place this time of night. Now Ricardo could almost feel the terror like a thick black sea of fear engulfing himself and everyone else. But there was something else too. There was someone slipping about, doing something.

Ricardo's nose twitched. He was sure some girl or other was trying a trick or two--not a trick with a fellow, but some kind of trick with the girls locked up. He turned and stared down the dim corridor that led to the door, where Anita and the other two were held, awaiting the arrival of the truck.

Ricardo took a few steps and stood at the head of the corridor. He just could not make up his mind. The place was full of noises, squeaks, and groanings. He went a few more paces down the corridor. Suddenly there was a faint click.

Ricardo knew exactly what that click was! He knew it was a revolver being cocked. He also knew it was the revolver he had taken from Sergeant Lopez-and which had been stolen from his room a week ago. Furthermore, Ricardo knew the revolver was about ten paces behind him, and most certainly pointed directly at his back.

His brain was working frantically. He could not make out who it was. It was not one of the girls. Ricardo Herrera listened with his thick neck stiffly forward. Or maybe it might be a girl. But which girl? Anita Torres was the only girl who would dare point a pistol at Ricardo, and he smiled at the idea. No, the only feeling Ricardo could be sure of was that the person holding the gun in the shadows might blow a hole right through him at any second.

The whorehouse had gone silent again. It was as if the whole place had heard the cocking click of that revolver. Now they were all awaiting the blasting shot that would rip Ricardo apart. He smiled as he cautiously lifted his head without turning. They were cool! Whoever had the gun on him was cool and waiting.

A door at the top of the stairs banged open. A shaft of light came down and made a yellow frame on the floor of the entrance hall.

"Ricci--Ricci--come up here and comfort me!" Delfina's deep contralto voice was coarse and drunken. "Come and make love to me, you animal! Come along! Right away!"

Ricardo looked up and swallowed. Her summons had saved his life-of that he was quite certain.

At any other time, such a call to come and satisfy the lurid lusts of the half-mad Delfina might have been ignored or sidetracked. But now Ricardo hastened up the stairs like a prowling tiger. He paused at the top and looked down. He could just make out the dull gleam of the revolver, but the unseen person who held it was out of range of his knife.

"Take me, you brute-take me and make me sob for joy, my lover!" Delfina was naked down the front. She swayed and her body glowed. Ricardo hastily pushed her back into her room, then locked the door and rested back against it. There were beads of ice-cold sweat on his forehead.

"Take me--I need it--all the way--right up me and hard, for hours and hours!" Delfina babbled. "The whole world hates me! It does not understand my mission. It does not understand our mission. We Sanchez girls were sent to be the saviors of all Mexican girls! We were sent to be the saviors of all Mexico! I feel dizzy-come to bed with your Delfina, Ricci-and be kind to her. Be kind to her!"

Ricardo eyed Delfina's half-naked body professionally. Once she had been a slim Mexican girl from the farmlands. Her body had been tanned, lithe, and wonderful to hold. But those years were long past.

Ricardo's thumbs pressed into the layer of fat about her naked hips. She was swaying toward him and then away, mentally copulating with him in her drunkenness. Her eyes were half-closed and her great breasts heaving.

"Make me, make me! Be a man and make me feel it--I must feel it. There's no man who seems to be able to make me feel any more! I want it deep and hard and right there, with pain, real pain! Yes, Ricci-Ricci!" Delfina gasped and burbled obscenities as she struggled to overwhelm him with the flesh of her thick body.

Her breasts were loose and too large. There was a roll of fat about her belly. It was a strikingly curious contrast. For her hair, still in its neat pageboy bob even at this moment, was swept back where she had pressed her hands against the sides of her head in her clamor for loving. But the folds and wrinkles of her body were a chaos of lines and shadows. Her belly sagged too. Her legs were thick and strong, but ulcerated from her disease. The ravages of the lower part of her body suggested an old, sick woman.

Her face saved her--that imperious face with the solemn black-brown eyes that seemed to be brooding and seeing everything. Now they were tear-filled. Now her body quivered, heaved, and gave off a pink cloud of perfumed talc. There was everything of the ancient, raddled whore about Delfina Sanchez at this moment. She was at once a corruption of the flesh, and a total ruination of femininity. There could be no greater contrast than that between her body and those bodies of the young girls she had lured into the Sanchez organization.

Perhaps here was partly a clue to the intensity of her savage rages. For at times it seemed that the mere sight of the pure, brown, virginal bodies of the Mexican sixteen-year-olds, pressing forward eagerly into her power, incited Delfina Sanchez to the craziest of acts. She whipped them. She had them thrown onto the Cama Real where they would be scarred for life by the clutching coils of barbed wire. She had the girls starved and beaten, and ruined in health and mind.

It was as if this great dynamo of evil purpose was fired by a lust for revenge upon life. Just as her hatred for her older sister Consuela-so like her, too--was fired by an ancient grudge over being made a whore by Consuela's envy in days gone by.

These were the complex elements in Delfina's body and mind. Now they seemed to well up and nauseate Ricardo Herrera. He shuddered and held his head away from her. A quivering rage surged through him. Yet he was still her servant. As if he had a steel choker about his neck, he was her serf. It was only a question as to how far such servitude went.

But the full-blooded male within Ricardo Herrera triumphed in the end. He could not help but reject the diseased body of his whorehouse madam mistress. Never again could Ricardo touch her. He felt some strange obedience to her, always. There was no escaping that. But he was too well used to the seduction of tight little virgins, one after the other, not to be horrified by the gross flabby flesh being thrust at him.

"No, no-I cannot possibly, senora! I cannot do it! It's just not worth it. I have worked hard for these past weeks out at the rancho, training those girls, day after day. This is simply not possible!" He said it in a strange, half-strangulated voice.

He was weakening, as she staggered up against him again. He felt himself within the aura of her power. But he remembered the girls, and curiously enough, the pleasure of making love to Anita Torres entered Ricardo's mind at this moment...

Ricardo had no intention of touching Delfina, if he could possibly help it. He was well aware of what her sickness was, and how infectious. Nevertheless, her sudden appearance had saved his life. He stepped forward-and a gentle sapping punch beneath her left ear knocked Delfina out cold. He caught her as she slumped.

"There-that's the love I feel for you! Dh, you're so fat and heavy, you mad bitch!" Ricardo groaned as he pressed the unconscious woman back onto her bed. He covered her and sat down to get his nerve back.

He sipped from the bottle on the table and stared a moment at the unconscious face of the madam, Senorita Delfina, with the broad cheekbones, the brushed-back hair, the great hawk-black eyes. Yes, she was mad, stark mad, that was true. But she still ruled them all, no matter how insane she was. Life and death, was Delfina!

He stared down at his own hands. They were trembling, as the shock of nearly being killed worked its way out of him. He clasped his hands together. They still shook.

"Too close, Ricardo-much too close! You must be more careful!" He grabbed the bottle and had another drink.

Downstairs, in the dark, Maria crept back to her room. She looked at the silent figure of Alicia sitting on the bed.

"Are you all right, Alicia? I thought he was going to catch me!" Maria was also just getting over one of the biggest scares of her life.

"I should have done it!" Alicia muttered.

"You should have done what?" Maria asked.

"No matter-I could have gotten them both! No matter. What will be, will be. Come, I'll give you some coffee and tequila to get your nerves back in order."

Clinging to each other, they fled back to Alicia's room.

As they sipped their drinks, the truck arrived from Leon.

* * *

Joaquin and Fat Man found themselves confronted with a host of tasks. First Fat Man had to help carry down Juanita's body to the truck. He wrapped it in old sacking. Next he and Joaquin had to bring down the three girls.

"Ah, Anita, you are in trouble again! God, you are a great one for being a rebel! Now get up-and stay put!"

Joaquin thrust Anita Torres up into the back of the truck. Fat Man stood guard while Joaquin went back to discuss things with Ricardo.

Ricardo had come down from Delfina's room and stood brooding at the bottom of the stairs. He kept glancing about, into the shadows, as he listened to Joaquin.

"See-you never do anything, Ricci! I tell you, that woman will bring ruin to us all! Now what do you want me to do with these three? The place is closed and it looks like a morgue!" Joaquin lit a cheroot and felt unhappy. With the Hotel Molinos closed, no one was making any money.

"Take these three out to the rancho and stick them in the Hole. Anita is becoming impossible. I can understand why Delfina wants her dead!" Ricci frowned ominously.

"You mean the Madame wants these three buried? That I will not do!" Joaquin glowered. "But we can't stick them in the Hole, either. It is full-we have twenty girls out at the rancho. Anita and these two will make chaos! The new girls are not having their training sessions regularly enough. In fact, the whole thing is falling to pieces!

"Ricci-I appeal to you!" Joaquin spoke in a deep, urgent whisper. "The system does not work any more. You and I, we are both army men. We know when a battle is being lost. The Sanchez women have lost control. Why don't you do anything-why don't you take it all over? You must do something about it!"

Ricardo stood and stared at Joaquin Mendosa for a silent moment. Sweat beaded Ricardo's forehead. He was under a great strain, and yet his features seemed impassive, almost lifeless.

"There simply is nothing I can do," he grunted finally. "That's crazy-you know that's crazy! There's a lot you can do! You haven't the guts to do it!" Joaquin flushed. He was deeply angry. "You are the one person who can take the whole thing over and run it right! Instead of which, it is all going to hell! So you would let Anita Torres and the other two be killed out at the rancho? Three more killings? How many does that make we have had to do between us one hundred, two hundred, three?"

"It cannot be three hundred--no, not that many." Ricardo was staring at Joaquin as if afraid of what he might say next.

"It is--how many times have we loaded girls up and taken them out there, and the Fat Man has dug their graves or burned them in the incinerator? Good, salable girls-all because of these crazy women! You have to do something about it, Ricci-right here and now-you must!"

"I--I'll think about it." Ricardo was sweating again. He found the decision impossible to make. He could not rebel against the Sanchez sisters. He had been with them for too long, and through too much. Death and flesh, rape and money, blood and whoring. A great mountain of life's deeds and crimes seemed to weigh Ricardo Herrera down, until he was crushed and no longer capable of any personal initiative at all.

"You must do it!" Joaquin urged.

"Anita Torres should be spared." Ricardo tried to make himself think clearly. But he was all of the loins and of the heaving body. His skill was at taking a girl in sexual combat and making her a top whore. His mental capacities had wilted to allow his sexual side to become everything.

"I cannot think straight. That-that is the trouble, Joaquin! I know you are speaking the truth. But I cannot think clearly. What is to be done? I do not know!"

"You will have to kill them. Yes, you do all the killing yourself from now on. Either you kill the Sanchez sisters and take over the whole thing, or they will soon be killing you. Yes, have no doubt about that, Ricci, Delfina will put a bullet through the back of your head one day, that I know!"

"Ah, Joaquin, shut up! What are we to do about Anita? What are we to do about this mess?" Ricardo spun about as if half-expecting to find the black-clad figure of Delfina standing behind him. He could almost see her standing there with her pistol raised and ready to fire. Yet she was not the only person out to kill him here tonight at the Hotel Molinos. No, there was another one who had a gun, too.

"It's a matter of life and death, Ricardo! Our lives!" Joaquin half-shouted. Then he remembered where he was, and glanced hastily up toward Delfina Sanchez's room.

"She is out cold. Do not worry about Delfina. She had some kind of crazy attack in the head, and I laid her out cold." Ricardo sighed and lowered his head in deep thought.

"Then go up and kill her, right now!" Joaquin hissed.

"Go up-now?" Slowly Ricardo lifted his head and stared at the moonfaced strongman.

"Go up there and kill her-with a thong, while she is out! Then take care of Consuela, and Teresa will belong to us and do as we say. It is that simple! It is that simple, right here and right now, Ricci! I beg of you, Ricci-do it now!"

"Do--it now?" Ricardo stared up the stairs. There was a slice of yellow light coming from Delfina's bedroom, where he had left the door ajar. "Now-just-do it?"

"I shall-I shall go up there and knock her addled brains out!" Joaquin started toward the stairway.

"No-leave it--leave it to me!" Ricardo grabbed hold of him.

"But you won't do it!" Joaquin stared into Ricardo's eyes trying to make out why the ex-major had this weak streak in him. It seemed incredible, Ricardo, the king pimp, incapable of making up his mind. What was one more killing to Ricardo? Nothing at all. No more than swatting down a house fly would be to anyone else. "You will not do it, neither Will you let me do it. What is the matter with you?"

It was suddenly almost a fighting confrontation. But the anger that flared in Ricardo's eyes as he glared into Joaquin's was that of a deadly killer. He smiled, and the smile warned Joaquin like nothing else could. For Joaquin had seen that smile on Ricardo's face too many lethal times not to know what it really meant.

"All right, have it your way, Ricci," he said slowly. "That's the way it is--for sure. I'll take those three out--and you really want me to kill them, including Anita? Or wouldn't you rather come along and see if you've the guts to kill her yourself--instead of expecting me to do your dirty work?"

The repeated mention of Anita by Joaquin was a clever, shafting thrust on the heavier man's part. He knew of that strange flesh-bond between Anita and the brutal Ricardo. In fact, this was one of the reasons why Joaquin liked to pleasure himself with Anita on occasion, just to find out what was so special about her body. Each time he took Anita to bed, usually by near-force, he felt he was getting in a bit of revenge upon Ricardo. Anita knew this, and hated Joaquin all the more for it.

"Anita-that's the question! How can we kill Anita?" Ricardo spoke aloud, but as if to himself. "Anita has been here a long time with us. She is wild-but to kill her? To kill her now? It does not seem possible!" His voice trailed off.

"Why tell me about it? Go up there and get rid of Senora Delfina, and you can keep your precious Anita for the rest of your life!" Joaquin grunted.

But there was no decision, much less action, to be gotten out of Ricardo Herrera. He just could not make up his mind. He could not accept that he had to kill Delfina Sanchez. And he could not tolerate the thought that Anita Torres was tied up like a calf to be slaughtered, in the back of the truck.

And yet Ricardo Herrera had been party to many lethal outings, such as this one now ordered by the enraged Delfina. He had even managed to get sadistic pleasure out of it all-just as he had gotten a thrill from tweaking Anita's nipples when he had had her spread on the kitchen table for torturing once or twice.

"No, no -take them and do as you are told!" Ricardo spat out. Then he instantly changed his mind. "No--we cannot kill her--the other two, yes, they do not matter, but Anita must live. I might--need her." There was a deep astonishment inside Ricardo, that he had to face the fact that there was someone else in the world he might actually need.

"You have no mind left! All this fucking of young girls has drained away your brain!" Joaquin groaned. "We cannot do that! Either we kill them all, or we kill Delfina. One or the other. That is the choice. It is a simple thing, Ricci." There was pleading in his voice.

"Take them to the rancho; we can decide later." Ricardo wanted to avoid the moment of decision.

"No--we have to know now!"

"I said take them out there, and I shall come out later," Ricardo growled angrily.

"The rancho is too crowded; killing will upset--" Joaquin began.

"Those are my orders--take the girls out to the rancho, and keep them there until I have decided! That is all there is for you to do. Now--get going!" Ricardo half-shouted this at fat Joaquin Mendosa.

"Yes, yes, just as you say! Put it off as much as you like. But remember--it is all your decision. If you carry out this order--then, Ricci, there may never be another chance for you!"

"I shall think about it."

"Good! I go, and I shall take Fat Man out there with me to dig three graves. Maybe it would be best if we burned the bodies. But these girls are so thin. There is no fat on them, and it takes a lot of wood fuel--" Joaquin was rubbing it in.

"Shut up! You just hold your tongue, hear me? Just don't say another word unless you need a new throat!" Ricardo fairly shook with rage.

Yet both of them knew his rage was not really directed at Joaquin. It was an inner rage. Ricardo was in despair at his own lack of nerve. His lack of will-power was making him bounce up and down like an enraged, frustrated bull.

"You--Ricardo--make up your damn mind!" Joaquin took a final shot as he went out to the truck.

* * *

In the gloom of the night, Fat Man was an untidy heap leaning against the canvas-covered back of the truck. He was humming a happy tune as Joaquin came up to him.

'They safe in there?" Joaquin asked suspiciously.

"Yes, they are safe. I laced the back cover up. That girl is still tied. They'll stay put. Are we going to the rancho now, or are we eating here first?"

"We'll get out to the rancho. Be more troubles out there, I suppose. Too damn many girls to train! Wears a man out, having to go at it morning, afternoon, and night. I've got ten girls trained--and Ricci ignores the whole thing. What are you so happy about?" Joaquin asked Fat Man as they both got into the truck cab.

"Me? I'm glad to go back to the rancho! I've got a girl out there, she is nice to me for a plate of beans. She and me kick up dust like two fighting cockerels, but she gives it to me." Fat Man giggled happily. This was the first girl to yield to his gross, sweaty body in a long time.

"Poor bitch--must be a bit soft in the head, like you." Joaquin started up the motor.

"She fucks well! I've got one, and I want to get back and feed her and have her tonight!" Fat Man piped happily.

"Crazy--the whole thing! Crazy fool back there doesn't know what to do! Whole thing is run by three crazy dames! And now you, getting your share from some crazy fifteen-year-old fool!"

Joaquin slammed the truck into gear, released the brake and they rolled off. He switched on the headlights and drove slowly through the crooked streets that led out of San Francisco del Rincon. "Crazy, whole world is crazy--crazy place!" Joaquin kept muttering.

"How did you know my girl is only fifteen?" Fat Man piped up.

"How old are any of them? All fifteen--except two, and they are eleven. Must be fifteen, big enough to have you roll over her!"

"No, no, she does it to me! I'd crush her, so she gets on me! That's the best way." Fat Man went off into thin shrieks of laughter. "I got girl, and she's mine! I'm gonna train this one up the right way!"

"Saints preserve us!" Joaquin swore and peered through the dark to make certain he did not accidentally run over some burro or stray cattle.

Back at the Hotel Molinos, Ricardo was resting his head on his arm. He was trying to think, and wondering what the right decision might be.

He stood up abruptly and glanced about, instinctively wary. The girls were all supposed to be confined to their rooms, yet there was this faint sound. He was being watched. The whole place was alive tonight. Not the usual whorehouse bustle of drunken laughter and flesh-prodding, but a quiet, deadly life--as if, many eyes were silently watching the fatal turn of events this night.

"Ghosts--all dead and buried and gone to the devil!" Ricardo announced aloud. But he was more scared than he cared to admit to himself. The. thought that he must make a decision soon was even more terrifying.

* * *

Fat Man piped and babbled happily all the way back to Rancho Sanchez. The truck rolled along the dirt road, on and on through the darkness. Several times it slowed and almost stopped. In fact, it had almost stopped once on the main road, before turning off to the rancho. Driving the truck, Joaquin was tired and took it as easily as possible. Besides, the sexual excitement of Fat Man, who was having his first real girl, was very funny to listen to. At least, so Joaquin thought.

"What is to happen to those four in the back? One we bury, she's dead already-- but the other three, will they be dead too, later? I just want to know how many graves we have to dig tonight! Pity we are out of gasoline, or just burning them would be best," Fat Man babbled as the truck came down the final slopes toward the tree-shrouded rancho.

"We shall have to bury them. Ricci could not make up his mind." Joaquin rubbed the stubble on his chin. "But this Anita is very dangerous. Best get rid of them" He chuckled as he thought of how much Ricardo would miss his favorite young whore.

"Is that what Major says--get rid of them?" Fat Man always obeyed orders. He just wanted it to be clear in Joaquin's mind where the responsibility for the killings would be.

"Yes, that is what he says," Joaquin chuckled.

The truck bumped and lurched. The springs squeaked as it came to a stop before the lit windows of the ranch house. The hacienda seemed to be deserted. Most of the people would be in the outhouses and in the Hole, at the rear of the rancho.

"Alright, get them out and we can dig the graves later!" Joaquin cut the motor and got down from the cab. "Don't you run off to see this loving girl of yours until this job is done, Fat Man, you understand?"

"Yes, I understand. I've got to feed her, but I do that later. She is always glad to see me when I bring her food. She's been in cage a week, and she pleased to have me to work on!"

"Nothing like taking advantage of a good-hearted fifteen-year-old girl. Let's get the canvas back." Joaquin flicked on his large flashlight.

The girls were gone! The three living girls had skipped from the truck some way back, long before it turned onto the dirt road. Only the blanket-wrapped dead body of Juanita Rojas remained.

There was a laborious silence. Fat Man was puffing, worried, his fear rising. Joaquin felt sick and hunted. He leaped out and shone the light under his truck. He even scouted the nearby trees, in case a girl had gotten away at the very last minute.

"What we do, Joaquin? What we do?" Fat Man squeaked with terror.

"This is all that damned Ricci's fault! I'll bet he gave them the knife-see, the canvas is cut clean, with a knife!" Joaquin's hand was quivering as he held up the ropes he found on the floor of the truck, close to the body. They were the ropes that had bound Anita Torres.

"He framed us, Fat Man-he wanted us killed-so he did not come. That's why the bastard was acting so pussy-foot! I ought to have guessed he was up to some kind of trick. He will kill us now!"

"No he won't! I have a girl who gives me fucking. I can't be killed now!" Fat Man made it sound as if a vast change in the world had come to save him.

"If you don't want to be killed, you'd best either run for it, or come back with me to the Hotel Molinos and tell what we know about these girls getting away."

"No, I don't need to. I got girl here. She will fuck with me, and I need her, so I go and feed her." Fat Man was now ignoring the escape of the girls completely. He wished to have nothing to do with it.

"Senora Delfina will be furious, she will blow your head off!" Joaquin spat and raged. "I've got to go back to the hotel."

"I am staying here! Senora Delfina knows I am good, and I am loyal, and I dig good graves for everyone. No, she won't harm me. It's Ricardo, the Major, who will be in trouble!" Fat Man gave a short giggle, as if to try and persuade himself that this was what was going to happen.

"She will kill us all, you idiot! Senora Delfina is sick in the head. She will be the death of us!" Joaquin sounded very certain.

"Then we run. I take my girl out of the cage, and you bring someone you like, and we take truck and ride to Mexico City! We never be caught there. It is a good place. Many, many people there, sisters never find us there!"

"What would we live on-fresh air? You fool! Shut up if you don't have any bright suggestions!" Joaquin climbed into the truck's cab. He sat there, with the door shut, his fingers tapping on the steering wheel.

"Got to do something, or else we are as good as dead! Got to work out something! Very clever, Ricardo, very clever of you to set up such a trap for us. You dirty swine!"

Yet there was an echo of doubt in Joaquin's heart. He and Fat Man might well be guilty of inexcusable negligence, of allowing these three girls to escape on the routine, almost daily trip out to the rancho.

This was the first time three girls had broken free. Once two girls had leaped off and run away into the scrub. Joaquin and Ricardo had hunted those girls down as if they were wild deer, and killed them as they ran in panic. Joaquin slowly licked his lips as he remembered the lethal excitement of that chase.

"Yes, that's what we've got to do. Have another girl hunt! Kill them as they run for it! It will be something to break the damned monotony of this God-damned life!"

Without another word to Fat Man, he started up the truck motor and drove off. He would need some kind of cover-up. The only person who could cover him was Ricardo. Ricardo was also the great expert at hunting girls down. Between them, he and Joaquin had done the job many, many times, with killing success.

Joaquin drove swiftly on. He kept a sharp lookout for the slightest sign of anyone on either side of the rutted road. But he could guess that the escaped three girls would be well away from the area by now.

* * *

Ricardo poured two glasses of tequila and nodded heavily. It was well past midnight, and the girls in the Hotel Molinos were all sleeping. They slept by themselves tonight, for a change. Delfina Sanchez was also out cold from drinking too much, and another slap on the jaw from Ricardo. He had meant to kill her. But all he could steel himself to do was to knock the drunken madam out once more.

"So, they escaped! I always knew Anita would be big trouble; great girl--best screw in the house, always was." Ricardo grunted this out slowly. He was not exactly drunk, but heavy with liquor.

"Yes, yes, I agree! I have had her many a night, and Anita knew how to take a man and please him," Joaquin smirked.

"You are a pig! And listen, you pig, one day I shall be pleased to slit your throat from ear to ear, hang you up by your heels and piss in your blood as it gushes out of you! Pig!" Ricardo spat in rage.

"I am not afraid of you now, Ricci," Joaquin said with a grimace. "You talk, talk, and do nothing. Tonight you showed me--you have no guts!"

"I am the head man here-do not forget that!" Ricardo tapped his chest too heavily.

"You are all piss and wind! You are finished!" Joaquin leaned forward earnestly, leering viciously. "You talk, talk, and talk-and you do nothing! You haven't the guts to kill that mad bitch! You haven't the guts to take over the Sanchez houses. You have no guts, Ex-major Herrera! You are not a man, just a gutless pimp!"

Joaquin half-fell across the table. His drunken joy at being able to release his true feelings made a great, idiotic grin quiver over his face. Truly, he was no longer scared of Ricardo, and Ricardo was astonished to realize it.

"So, so, you lose your fear! At last, you are not frightened of me." Ricardo smiled, hung his handsome head. His thick bull's neck showed red and powerful, a continuation of the strength of his shoulders, a massively made back and neck.

"No, I am not afraid of you! I know you kill quickly, you have the Tarantula Bite as you call it-but tonight I say you are gutless! You know, my old friend Ricardo, for years and years we have fucked and fucked the same girls, one virgin after another. Hundreds and hundreds of girls have we deflowered for these Sanchez bitches. Hundreds of girls turned into the best and most valuable whores in the whole of Mexico.

"We--Ricardo Herrera and Joaquin Mendosa--we fucked them plenty, until they were good working whores. Now all ruined--all gone--finished! The stupid bitch you refuse to kill is insane, Ricci! She is crazy and has finished us all. I can see that. I am not afraid of you any more. I am not afraid of her. I am only sorry for all the work we have done, gone to nothing. We turned out the finest whores in all Mexico--and where did they go--where? Gone to nothing! It's a crime, such waste!"

"Yes, yes, you speak the truth, Joaquin. It is a crime. We did--did turn out the best whores! Anita Torres was a great whore. She could satisfy a man so his body sang for hours after. A great woman! I wonder--if she will escape or will be killed. Someone will have to go and find her and kill her. Otherwise, there will be trouble for us all." Ricardo poured out two more large drinks.

"But you have let it all go, because you have no guts!" Joaquin laughed at Ricardo. "No guts, and the one person you should remove--you allow to boss you about! Kill her, Ricci-kill her or she will soon be the death of you, and me, and everyone! These Sanchez sisters, they murder and ruin and cripple everything they touch. You will be doing the world and God a great service by getting rid of them-- especially that crazy one, Delfina!"

"She is crazy!" Suddenly Ricardo shrugged his shoulders. "First we have to go out at dawn and find the three girls, and silence them. Then I shall come back and silence Delfina."

"Why do you lie?" Joaquin laughed. "Why do you lie like this, Ricci? You are not fooling me. You are not even fooling yourself! You are finished. A gutless fool, you are finished! And if someone else does not kill you, that tarantula upstairs, Delfina, will kill you sure enough!"

"No, leave me alone! Leave me alone, Joaquin!" Ricardo turned and smiled slowly as he looked into Joaquin Mendosa's eyes. "Go away and sleep it off. We shall leave at dawn and find those girls! Now go and sleep."

"Yes, yes-I suppose that is the only thing to do." Joaquin licked his lips as he nodded his head.

For there were those certain cold spots of death right in the centers of Ricardo's eyes. One does not argue with death so obviously ready and eager.

Joaquin got up and stumbled off to the spare room where he had a cot-bed. He flung himself down.

"Anita Torres, tomorrow your lover comes to kill you! As he has killed so many times!" Joaquin giggled.

Then he slept. He slept in a black nothingness of timeless exhaustion. It was Ricardo who woke him an hour before dawn. They started the truck and drove off the gray still streets of San Francisco del Rincon without speaking.

The hunt was on.

* * *

The panic eased in Rita when she saw the well. She had run, walked, waited for the country bus, and then walked on and on. In the morning's bright light, she came down the slope into the deserted farm yard.

Rita was so thirsty, she felt she could hardly go another step. It was almost half a day since the three girls had leaped from the truck. They had split the money three ways, and each girl had gone by a different route. In this manner, they hoped at least one or two of them might get to freedom. Rita was making for El Centro and the terminal there, to get to Mexico City. But the country bus did not run this day of the week, and Rita felt in her heart of hearts she had lost.

However, the water of the well would revive her, she was certain. Rita was twenty, a firm-bodied girl. She had been one of the Sanchez whores for six and a half years, and had collected small stacks of bus timetables. But there had not been time to get them from her mattress. The whole escape had been totally unplanned. Rita smiled. The water came up crystal clear.

It was as she was washing that she caught sight of a movement out of the corner of her eye. Rita stared down into the water. On the embankment behind her, had risen two figures. A small death-knell sounded in her heart.

"I am finished!" Rita whispered to herself.

For approaching slowly were Ricardo Herrera and Joaquin Mendosa.

Rita spun around and looked at them. They were some fifty feet from her. The girl turned and went on washing her face, calmly, ignoring them. She was as good as dead. She had no intention of pleading for her life, nor of doing anything but making a fight for it. This thought brought a steel like calm to Rita. She slipped out the flat steel knife. Someone had given it to them last night, under the door of the room. Now she would use it to bring them all more luck. Rita washed her face and slowly resolved to fight and die.

"So, Ricci--do you see what I see?" Joaquin sighed. He rested one muddied boot on an old piece of rusty hinge. "Yes, it is one of our birds who flew away!" Ricci smiled warmly.

"But she can tell us where the other two are? Perhaps?"

"Yes, she will tell, of that I am most certain!" Ricardo spat and smiled even more as he stepped forward.

"Rita is a very strong girl, and she looks as if she intends to fight you, my friend!" Joaquin had a faint note of mockery in his voice.

"I shall douse the fire in her!" Ricardo came on toward the girl as she backed away.

"Where are Anita and Lupe? Are they around here--with you--hiding somewhere?"

"You are a slick pig, Toro, a fat, stupid pig!" Rita smiled. Her back was against the water trough. She kept the knife flat against her wrist, hidden.

Ricardo stepped quickly forward and grabbed Rita by the wrist and neck. The knife flashed out and sizzled across his face. Blood spurted. She was strong, Rita, a country girl with heavy bones.

"You bitch-cutting me up, eh?" Ricardo swore.

"She nearly sliced your nose off!" Joaquin laughed.

In the struggle, Ricardo bent Rita over backwards. Slowly, clutching her throat, he forced her head under the clear water into the wide cattle trough. Rita automatically opened her legs and tried to lock her body to Ricardo's.

"Ahah! She remembers when you took her maidenhead!" Joaquin laughed as he watched. "She is blowing bubbles now!"

Ricardo was intent on avoiding the knife as it swept the air in jerking wild arcs before his face.

Suddenly the girl went limp. Ricardo stumbled over the trough and landed with a crash amid straw, dung, and wet mud.

"Grab her, Joaquin!" Ricardo yelled as he leaped up, white and furious. He was out to kill now, this moment. But Rita lay still, with her head beneath the clear water, her great brown eyes staring up. It was as if her head was enclosed in a transparent cube, hah floating out, a trickle of blood staining the water. She was dead, and as Ricardo grabbed at her, she tumbled over like a lifeless rag doll.

"Ah--you broke her back, and she drowns! Now we have to hunt for the other two!" Joaquin squinted up at the morning sun. "Where the devil could they have gotten to?"

"The man back there may have been right. It could have been Lupe Huerta who caught the bus to the capital--and that means they each went a different way. And so--Anita then must have gone across country in that direction." Ricardo jerked his head. He was washing the mud from his sleeves, hands, and neck. "This bitch should have stayed alive long enough to tell us!"

"You should not have broken her back, Ricci. Now what do we do? If Lupe Huerta has gotten away, our search is already useless."

"I am going after Anita Torres. Anita is not going to get away from me!" Ricardo announced firmly. "I shall follow her to hell if necessary!"

"Maybe you will have to, amigo, but my truck only has just enough gas to get us back to the rancho. So--what do you suggest we do?"

Ricardo took out a cheroot, lit it and sucked in the smoke. He blew it out and stared up at a small line of puff-galleon clouds that were scattering down the morning sky.

"I have to-- have to get Anita Torres! I have to kill her--for running away from us, from me--if you understand, Joaquin."

"No, I only understand that you have to kill her because she is a load of trouble and must have her mouth shut for good." Joaquin didn't have the slightest inkling of what sentiment or love might be.

"I have to find Anita. So-you take this... " Ricardo prodded the folded-over, wet body of Rita with his muddy boot, "... and take it back to the rancho. It will show Senora Delfina that we are having success. Tell her you killed Lupe Huerta, and buried her, and that I am off after Anita Torres, and will not be back until I have found and killed her!"

"So do you think Senora Delfina will accept this story?" Joaquin hesitated.

"You have one body to prove it-and my word is good. Delfina will understand what I mean. You go-the truck will just get you there." Ricardo slowly began to walk up the slope toward the dirt road that ran on to the far horizon.

"Take Rita with you. She had a nice body. I thought her back was strong, otherwise I would never have forced her over so far," Ricardo chuckled. "Women are funny creatures. They die on us too easily, at times!"

"Yes, and they kill us too easily also!" In a sullen mood, Joaquin went off to bring the truck for Rita's body. He had no other choice but to follow out Ricardo's instructions. But he felt unsure and uneasy over it all.

Of one tiling Joaquin Mendosa was most certain. He was going back to face an insane woman, Delfina Sanchez.

"You should have killed that bitch last night! Then-then it all would have been so different!" Joaquin said bitterly.

Ricardo was staring down, for the mud was dry now, and he was figuring out in what direction to hunt. He would have to get himself a horse, first. Perhaps that same day he would catch up with Anita. Perhaps it might take a whole year. But, he would catch up with her in the end. It would have been different if he had summoned up enough nerve to kill Delfina last night, true.

"Yes, yes, that is true. I should have. But I did nor. I am a weak man. A fool and a weak man. That is why I work at the Sanchez whorehouses, being a whore's pimp!"

Joaquin was too far up the track toward the road to hear Ricardo's strangely quiet confession.

* * *

Fat Man stood petrified as Delfina Sanchez listened to the story Joaquin Mendosa was telling her. Fat Man knew from her shivers and quivers, that an explosion of rage was building up and up within the mad Delfina. His own quivering face was running with sweat. For Fat Man was terrified in whose direction that rage might suddenly switch.

It was late morning. They stood in the yard to the side of the Sanchez hacienda. The truck with Rita's dead body on the ground before it, was where it had rolled to a stop ten minutes ago.

"So-I bring back Rita's body, Lupe Huerta is dead, and Ricci is close on the track of Anita Torres!" Joaquin made it sound as convincing as possible.

The hot sunshine was filled with golden specks of dust. Heat shimmers played off the far mesquite. Delfina Sanchez was in black, and swaying to and fro as if she were in some great physical pain. She moaned and sobbed a few times. But not enough to interrupt Joaquin Mendosa's long story about the search for the three runaway girls.

"You let them escape last night, on purpose!" she finally burst out. "And Ricardo has run off because he wants that Anita Torres girl for himself! Now he will never come back!" Delfina said this in a great torrent of words, an out-rush of anger.

"Fools, fools, the lot of you, all fools! We have rescued all of you from the terrible life, and this-this is how you treat us in return!" She gave a sob of melodramatic laughter. "What a way to pay back the person who had fed you all, and saved you all! I would not have believed there was such ingratitude in all this world! Never would I have believed it!

"If Consuela or Teresa, my good and honest sisters, had told me, I still would not have believed it." Slowly Delfina Sanchez turned and stared down at the body of Rita. It lay sprawled in the gray dirt, a host of flies crawling over the dead girl's face.

"Fat Man, you must dig three graves now! One for each of them. Yes, one for each of them!" Delfina's voice carried clearly across to the people in the hacienda. "Dig three graves, now!"

"Si, si, Senorita Delfina, anything you say!" Fat Man hastily grabbed his shovel and rushed off to get away. He did not want to be present when murder was done again. There was always this killing. He was content just to dig the graves and bury the bodies. He did not want to see what actually happened.

Joaquin lit one of his cheroots. It seemed from the way Delfina was reacting, Ricardo's story was working. Ricardo always knew these Sanchez women and what they would believe, far better than anyone else ever had or would.

"Tell Fat Man I want him a moment!" Delfina spoke sharply to Joaquin.

Joaquin turned around and cupped his hands to his lips.

"Hey-Fat Man-Senora Delfina-" he began to shout. Fat Man stopped and stared back at the shouting Joaquin.

Behind Joaquin, Delfina was rummaging busily in her great black handbag. The sight froze Fat Man to stillness. He stared.

"Fat Man-Senora Delfina-" Joaquin shouted again. Then a terrible feeling of doubt struck him. Even as Joaquin was shouting, he knew he had turned his back on death!

With fumbling speed, Delfina Sanchez pulled out her large black automatic. She held it with both hands, having placed her handbag between her knees so that it did not fall in the dirt. The pistol wobbled, then blasted out with an ear-splitting crack! Crack! Crack!

Joaquin was half turning back toward the crouching black figure of Delfina. At the blast, a two-inch chunk of flesh flew off his cheek, and a second one from his forehead. The bullets were smashing right through his head. Joaquin did a twitching somersault and landed in a heap, his thrashing feet kicking the dust as he died.

"Bury him--dig three big holes--bury him and her--and then we shall wait for that Ricci!"

Delfina Sanchez straightened up and clutched her handbag. She walked back to the veranda with the smoking pistol dangling in one hand.

"They were good people! I have helped them through to God!" Delfina yelled as she clomped up onto the veranda and vanished into the ranch house. "Helped them through to God, it was my duty to do so!"

The dead girl lay near the truck. Joaquin lay sprawled on his back with a brown crimson pool of dirt spreading about his head. For a few minutes nothing moved. The onlookers were too stunned by the swiftness of the killing.

"Fat Man-I told you to dig those graves!" Delfina screamed from inside the house. "Go and dig them!"

"Yes, yes, Madame. I go, I go, it will be done!" Fat Man stumbled and half fell over the long-handled shovel. He raced off through the scrubland, past the outhouses of the Sanchez rancho.

* * *

In the sweltering heat of the siesta time, Fat Man labored on. He had to dig the three graves in different places in the desert mesquite. He finished the first one, then went and dragged the body of Rita to it. He wrapped up the body, pressed her down into the hole until she fitted. Then he shoveled long arcs of sifting dirt onto her. Rita vanished into the soil.

Once he had smoothed off the top of the grave, Fat Man even went to the trouble of getting a bush. He planted the bush on the grave, tamping it home. It was as good a way as any of hiding Rita's final resting place. In some sections of the Sanchez rancho, every clump of bushes hid a grave.

Next Fat Man dragged the awkward, heavy body of Joaquin into the brush. Joaquin's hands spread out and left two trail marks beside the rut-mark of his body. Fat Man had never cared for Joaquin. He threw the body heavily into the deep new hole. Resting and sweating in the brilliant glare of the sun's full heat, Fat Man giggled.

"There-so it comes-the day when I flatten your face with my shovel, Senor Mendosa!"

He tossed the body in, tamped it down roughly, and began to shovel the earth in great arcs. He paused to stomp down the soil once in a while, packing it harder and harder. It would still sink, eventually, but by then the desert winds would be blowing dust along to fill in the hollows the graves made.

"So, adios, senor! Sleep well until hell is ready for you! Many little girls will be happy to know their sweet Joaquin has holes made through his hard head!" Fat Man giggled.

It was by so intimately knowing the people he was burying, that Fat Man got such a great kick out of death. He muttered away happily, telling the dead Joaquin Mendosa all about his depraved ancestors, his parentage, and what hell was going to make him do. All the while the dirt went showering in and down, filling up the yawning hole of the grave. Finally Fat Man tamped down the last soil and put some rocks on it. He did not bother to put a bush over male graves. There were not many men buried out here, among the hundreds of graves at the Sanchez ranching establishment for young ladies.

"Ah-and now the third hole for Ricardo! It is bad luck to dig a grave for someone who is living. Si, si, that is very bad luck!" Fat Man rumbled on.

He found a fresh site, and he did start digging. But he felt awkward. He always liked to dig a grave when there was a body ready for the hole he was making. There seemed no point in digging this hole, when Ricardo Herrera might come up and ask him what he was doing.

"Ah-what would I say then? That is a question! I tell you, that is a deep question! Senorita Delfina ought to think. She ought to know that digging a grave for an alive person is not good luck. It brings on bad things. I do not like it! No, Senora Delfina, I do not like this at all!"

He went on and on like this, grumbling to himself. All the time he was slowly shoveling the dirt out, streaming sweat and panting in the glazed heat of the scorching day.

"I do not like this! It brings the bad luck!"

Fat Man paused. He glanced round and was startled to see Delfina Sanchez standing there watching him. With her were two stern-faced women guards. Delfina's face glowered with a cross between inner rage and outward impatience.

"How did those girls escape, Fat Man?" Delfina demanded in her high, thin shriek of a voice.

"I do not know, Senora Delfina! It was not my fault." Fat Man stood up to his knees in the hole he was digging for Ricardo.

"Ricci let that bitch go, and he went off with her-didn't he?" Delfina screamed out her accusation.

"No, no, they escape as we drive back here, Senora. It is back at the hotel, that Ricardo stays!" Sweat began to trickle down Fat Man's face. Looking up at Delfina, he was staring straight into the white-hot sun.

"You lie to me, Fat Man!" Delfina's voice became deadly quiet.

"No, no, Senora, why I lie to you? I tell truth! Joaquin-I have buried him over there with three stones on top of him now-he goes back and I know nothing of what happens then!"

"This grave is not deep enough. It should be deeper and longer," Delfina's voice sounded sullen, as if she was angry, and yet controlling her anger to think.

"I can make it as big as you wish! I can make it big enough for everyone, or anyone! Senora Delfina, you are not angry with me-" Fat Man was quivering with fear. He could feel a great wet cold swatch of sweat sticking his shirt to his hot belly. He rubbed it slowly, feeling sick from the heat and the fear.

"Get busy and dig this hole bigger!" Delfina ordered. She turned to the two female guards with her and spoke to them. "I doubt if Ricci will ever show his nose here again! He is a thief and a louse, and I always knew he would run out on us. It is all that bitch's fault, that Anita Torres-they deserve each other!"

Delfina turned round and rummaged in her great black handbag. She wedged the handbag down between her knees, gripping it so that both her hands were free. Fat Man had turned around to resume his digging.

"Yes, it is all the men's fault, for allowing those three girls to escape! We are surrounded by traitors and liars and thieves! I know it is so, I know it!" As her voice rose, Delfina held up her reloaded black automatic with both hands.

The gun was steadied and pointing right at Fat Man's head, as he was stooped over, his back to her, shoveling soil and dirt up hastily, obeying her order to make the hole as large as possible.

"I think this hole is big. enough, as it is!" Delfina screeched. "It's big enough!"

Fat Man stopped perfectly still at the sound of her scream. It was as if the back of his head knew the pistol was pointed straight at it, a few feet away.

The crash of the pistol was repeated six times. But the first blast blew half the top off Fat Man's pointed head. He collapsed face-down in the bottom of his own hole. The bullets kept plumping into the sweat-marked back of his shirt. The force of the bullets seemed to hammer his body deeper, into a quivering pile just beneath the level of the soil.

"There, put the dirt over him, and hurry up!" Delfina snapped the order to the two hard-faced, frightened women with her. "At least he did one intelligent thing in his stupid life-he dug his own grave!"

She chuckled, straightened up and took proper hold of her black handbag. Then she turned away and seemed to drag her feet as she walked slowly back.

The heat was shimmering in a golden haze, in which Delfina's black-clad figure loomed like a dark obelisk, a marker of doom, a strange and insane black anomaly in the desert's pastel colors and the gold of the sun.

Behind her the two women worked slowly, laboriously, to sprinkle a layer of dirt over the body of the gross Fat Man dead in the hole of his own making.

"He will not come back to me! Ricci--you swine! You clever devil! You thief!" Delfina chuckled, then laughed out loud. For she felt she ought to respect the one living male who had gotten away from the Sanchez sisters.

"We shall find you, one day! Yes, one day, we shall!" Delfina strolled slowly along toward the ranch house.

She was hot and sobbing, her face stained with tears and dirt, when she reached the veranda. In the shade at last, she had to rest against a post, then sink down and wait for a drink to be brought to her.

"There is no one we can trust! In all the whole world, no one has ever proven worthy of our trust!" Delfina muttered. She wiped the sweat from her face, brushed back her steely black hair. "Not even Ricci! Not one of them--nobody in this God-damned world can be trusted!"

Back at the grave, the two guard women had had enough. They did not even bother to hide the grave. Slowly they staggered back through the shimmering heat, one towing the long-handled shovel Fat Man had been using on his last bit of toil for the Sanchez sisters.

Hardly had they gone, when a watching figure moved. It was Pepito, Fat Man's little Chihuahua dog, who had been shivering piteously in the shade, not far from his master.

Pepito came quivering over like a fawn whippet, the size of a rabbit. He sniffed about and pawed at the soil, then turned and ran off, taking a zig-zag trail back to where the girls would take care of him.

The dust settled, and the shimmering heat of the day seemed to broil the energy out of the very rocks themselves.

CHAPTER SEVEN - THE END OF A TRIO

Lieutenant of Federal Police Ramon Vasquez sat at the desk and slowly considered the facts.

"I am methodical. Always I have believed in the direct, steady approach. Logic gives us the answers, certainly! If we choose to be blind to logic, and ignore the facts, then we shall never solve the crimes." Lieutenant Vasquez adjusted his uniform tie and nodded as he looked at the three policemen seated opposite him.

"So--this is how it looks," he went on. "Four police sergeants have vanished in this district during the past ten years. That in itself is no great thing. Except for one point--no one has ever seen or heard of any one of those four since.

"Sergeant Manuel Lopez--two months ago he vanishes into thin air. His wife asks she be named a widow and given the widow's pension. I come here to see if that is in order. For one reason, our records show that there have been three other sergeants missing here. So what is the matter here in San Francisco del Rincon? What's going on?" He held up his hand for silence.

"Next we can consider the statement of a dying woman. This girl called Anita Torres is found out in the desert, suffering from severe exposure, of which she dies. But first she makes a statement accusing three sisters, Teresa, Delfina, and Consuela Sanchez of being procurers and white slavers, and of being corruptors of public officials, including, I see, Sergeant Lopez." Slowly Lieutenant Vasquez drummed his fingers on the table. It was the same table Sergeant Lopez had used in this office.

"I am from the capital, as you know, with full authority to handle this investigation." He glanced around at the three local policemen. They looked uncomfortable. Obviously they knew a great deal. "I am sending a daily report to my superiors, and should anyone give me information leading to further answers concerning the disappearance of Sergeant Lopez and the statement of the dead girl Anita Torres--that person will obviously be looked upon in a better light by the capital."

There was silence.

"So--no response!" Lieutenant Vasquez smiled. This provincial work was always hard going. The rural Mexican was not only stubborn. He would never say a thing about anyone, especially to officials from Mexico City.

"Very well, then. I want to see the licenses of the bordellos owned by these Sanchez sisters. I want the licenses and medical cards of every girl who works or has worked for these women. I also want a detailed bank statement, notarized, stating the sums paid to these girls, and also a full list of the properties and houses owned by the Sanchezes." He looked coldly at the three policemen.

"I know, and you know, that I shall find many discrepancies in these documents that I have asked to see. If you do not wish to speak, that is your right. But once I have found anything out of order, anything at all, then your silence, gentlemen, will be taken as a plea of guilty."

Lieutenant Vasquez did not smile as Ricardo Herrera did when he was threatening. But the full effect of his words was just as strong.

"Sir, sir-I think I can speak for the others-" one of the younger policemen began. The other two stared at him, then nodded.

"Good, we have a commencement! This is what I call rural cooperation!" Vasquez smiled now. "From this moment on, we shall be collaborating on our investigation. And should any criminals be brought to justice you can rest assured that the authorities in the capital will be fully appreciative."

"They are devils--these three sisters! First, we will take you to see the Hotel Molinos. Then we go to Leon, and after that, we must go out to their rancho." The young policeman had obviously been storing up the tales he had heard, for just such an occasion as this. "Three months ago, two young Norteamericano tourists came to me, and gave me a report that I passed on to Sergeant Lopez."

"There is no trace of such a report," Vasquez frowned. "Can you remember it? Have you a carbon copy of it?"

"Yes sir, I have a copy I kept at home, under lock and key. I mention this because I am certain the name Anita Torres was mentioned by the Americans. This could also relate to the reports of missing girls we keep getting."

"Missing girls? How many have been reported missing to you, in this area?" Lieutenant Vasquez began to have an uneasy feeling. The whole investigation gave him that feeling. It was going to be a big one. Of that he was certain.

"Oh, about fifty to one hundred a year are reported missing, in the state, mostly around here. Some years it has been almost two hundred. We never find them, Lieutenant."

"Two hundred-a year-girls-missing?" Lieutenant Vasquez was still for a moment. "You are not serious-- surely?"

"Oh yes, we are! We and the authorities in Guanajuato have hundreds and hundreds of reports of young girls missing, from the age of eleven up to twenty or so. I can take you to three mothers who are pestering me right now about this matter. Each had a little girl who has vanished."

"Where did they go?" Lieutenant Vasquez blinked. No one answered. He gathered up the documents he had spread over the desk to impress the three men assigned to work with him.

"Well, the quicker we start on this business, the better!"

He knew now he would have to ask for higher-echelon federal help from Mexico City, bypassing the state authorities. There was the unmistakable feel of a major scandal out here in rural Guanajuato.

"Yes, we must find out where all these girls have gone to, and quickly!" Vasquez smiled as he stood up. The case was off to a good start.

* * *

Three times he could have killed her. One time, she was in his arms, and they made love together in the same curious, fighting way. It was almost as if they were back at the Hotel Molinos, or in those first days, when Anita Torres had been brought to the Sanchez rancho and he, Ricardo Herrera, had been the first to break her in to copulating with males.

This time, they had clung together all night. It was in a deserted barn. He was going to kill her as she turned toward him and stared at his face. He was going to kill her after they had satisfied the sudden rage of lust they felt for each other. Then he was going to kill her at dawn, before he left and headed back to San Francisco del Rincon. But at dawn Anita Torres had slipped away from him. She had vanished on foot into the barren desert.

He was certain that the desert would finish Anita. In fact, he stood there staring at her tracks going out into the dazzling ripple of loose sand, and he could not believe it.

"Anita!" Ricardo had shouted. "Anita! You will die out there!"

He had ventured a little way up into the dune country. He had stood in the stifling heat, amid the sparse dune grass that was whipped about as if a real Moorish sirocco was blowing. The heat was impossible. He could feel the salt of his sweat caking his cheeks and eyebrows.

"Anita-you are gone!" He swore and knelt down, trying to see through the mirages, past the sand-devils and the great bowl of bright blue sky that seemed to be falling on him with the dazzle of the sun. He shielded his face. He bent over, turning away from the blazing sky-dish that was sizzling into his brain.

"Anita--Anita--you will die!" he yelled. Then Ricardo felt the heat seeming to explode inside his own muscular body. It was the same heat he had poured into Anita during their bitter clenched-teeth loving session in the barn the night before.

A twinge of pain came blowing down the hollows of his legs. Ricardo staggered off, out of the dunes, down to the salt-marshes.

"Anita! You damned whore! You stupid damned bitch! You have gone to your death!" Ricardo muttered wildly. "Anita! Anita Torres! I shall not see you again! Anita, you stupid bitch! The heat will kill you! The heat will kill me if I come after you! Anita--I would not have harmed you! You know that--I should have killed her--I should have killed that Delfina!"

Again Ricardo went up into the dunes where her footprints led off into the shimmering desert. He was so hot he had to sit down. He tied his shirt about his head, shielded his eyes.

"Nothing can live here! Nothing! You have run away from me to your own death, you stupid fool!" Ricardo got up and limped slowly across the wasteland after her.

The full heat of the day was beating down solidly by now. He knew it was a waste of time. He could go only as far as the next rise in the desert dunes. Here he stood and stared at the shimmering yellow and scrub, hollows and dunes, sky and grass. It was too hot. It was blistering hot.

"So, you find a hell of your own, my pretty one!" Ricardo grunted. Nevertheless he pressed on into the blazing heat.

Anita Torres had left well before dawn. Her faint footsteps showed in the hollows. But on the dunes, the wind-blown sand was swiftly obliterating her track.

Ricardo swore and spat. The heat seemed to penetrate his very flesh, to be roasting the bones of his legs and arms.

"Not good, my little friend, not good at all!"

At a wider patch of salt-marsh, he lost the last faint track of Anita. For another hour he managed to stumble and scout about, but all trace had vanished as the hot desert wind came roaring and burning across the land of the yellow bronze sun.

It was making his skin crack more and more. He was so dry, he felt all dry skin and hot bone. He realized he had wandered around in a complete circle.

"I have had it! This is the finish. If I go on, I shall die here too--I shall die as Anita has. No sense in this--I must get back. She is finished. Yes, she is finished!"

The primitive goal of survival was solidly embedded within the thick-necked body of Ricardo Herrera. His girl, his woman, his other being, the one he had to have, was out there in the shimmering desert furnace. But now Ricardo turned and started painfully back to life.

He had to wrap pieces of his torn shirt about his hands, for the sand burned like a red-hot oven lid. He could hardly see. He stumbled and fell. Four, five times he collapsed, sprawled in the sand, got up again. Finally he fell flat on his face and lay still for a long time, the sun burning into his tattered back.

"Anita! Anita!" he uttered through salt-caked lips.

He lay so still, an old coyote came panting in the glare and stood watching. The wise old coyote knew the man was not dead. Bit by bit, the coyote understood the man would live. The animal waited until the sprawled figure moved slowly. Then it slunk off. The man would live.

"I will not die here--no, too hot." Ricardo was up and crawling onward.

This time the sirocco of the desert had faded and the trilling murmur of the surf seemed to rise from the sand and work a rhythmic echo in the furnace hot air.

"I shall get--there!" Ricardo crawled on and on. He left the soft dry sand. He was in the salt-marsh again.

He no longer thought about Anita Torres. If one had whispered her name into the deep blue-black corners of his mind, Ricardo would have been surprised.

"I knew her once, but the bitch is dead!"

Anita Torres had been part of Ricardo Herrera, without his ever realizing it was so. And now, now he was nothing. He was just a bundle of rags that staggered painfully down the painter's wash of a desert landscape. He was alive, and also alive in his dull mind was the heartbreak and loss.

"I shall get to El Centro--and the Turk will employ me! I need never go back--there!" he shouted to the solitude.

But he knew, in some strange way, that his life had ended here, where Anita's footsteps were lost amid the drift of the burning hot sands.

* * *

"What are you doing, Alicia?" Maria asked softly as she came into Alicia Cordone's room on the ground floor of the Hotel Molinos.

"They have finished with you?" Alicia giggled. She brought out the papers she had hidden behind her back. "See--Rita gave these to me before she ran off with Anita and Lupe. What did they ask you, Maria?"

"My age, and whether I agreed to come into--into this place of my own free will, and whether I was paid regularly, and was I-medically inspected, you know. Didn't they ask you the same questions, Alicia?" Maria was blushing. She would never get used to being a whore, that she knew.

"Yes, the same, to which one just says si--otherwise later on the senora will lay us on the Cama Real and we will be scarred for the rest of our lives. You did say yes to everything?" Alicia stared at Maria with a concerned look.

"Of course I said yes! I know Senora Delfina has that pistol in her handbag all the time! I do not-want-well, you know. But I cannot understand how she can sit there, looking so saintly, when she is a fiend and a piece of the devil himself!" Maria was righteously indignant.

Alicia gave a giggle. "Here-these are the bus timetables. Our friend Rita used to collect them and hide them. She had marked all the best ways of getting away from here and going straight across Mexico. There is one that takes you right to El Paso, and then to Santa Fe in New Mexico. I have some friends in New Mexico."

"How could you ever get into the United States?"

"Oh, money will buy you anything! I can buy our way in, Maria. In fact this we might have to do. I have a feeling-I just have a feeling that the Sanchez sisters are through, finished!"

"Finished?" Maria put her hands to her cheeks. "You think-that is why that nice police lieutenant was here asking us all these questions?"

"I know it is! Anita died, but she died in the hospital, and she told them all about the Sanchez places, and the rancho and the killings. Now, they are slowly making certain it is all true. Then-hey, presto! The Sanchez sisters, they will be put away for the rest of their lives. Who knows what will happen to them? Their days are over!" Alicia was so certain her eyes shone with excitement.

"But-what-if the hotel is closed-what happens to us? We shall be almost penniless and have nowhere to live-" Maria seemed shocked.

"Do not worry, Maria! I know where the cash is kept. I mean-we shall be well off, and have not a worry in the world. I am so happy! I am happy because of you, Maria Alverez!" Alicia suddenly flung her arms about the puzzled younger girl.

"Why-why are you so crazy?" Maria asked gently.

"Oh, because I have someone! I have you, as a sister, as a friend, as someone I know cares for me. I shall look after you, that I promise, I promise, I promise! We shall see the whole world together, you and I. There will be nothing we shall not do. There will be nowhere we cannot go!" Alicia babbled on and oh.

"I think Anita's escape and death, and Ricardo being missing, it has all gone to your head and made you loco!" Maria murmured.

Alicia laughed and patted Maria's hand. "You belong to me. Yes?"

"I am very fond of you, Alicia. There is nothing I would not do for you. I mean, you know--"

"I know you would risk death for your friends, Maria. I have seen you do it." Alicia looked serious and still held Maria by the hand. "You see, things are going to change very, very suddenly. I have a friend--well, you know how much I like policemen, and they always seem to respond to me and my ways.

"I have this friend, who is working with Lieutenant Vasquez. He tells me they are worried, the police, because this case is going to blow up into an enormous scandal. Before things are finished, the troops will come, otherwise people might lynch the Sanchez sisters, and bum all their houses. That's why the investigation is going on so quietly. They are going out to the rancho--and they are going to dig there!" Alicia closed her eyes and shivered. "You know?"

"Yes, yes--I know!" Maria hung her head as she remembered the burial of Melinda Castro, the drug addict. It had been so cruel and so crude. Just a hole in the desert, nothing more, no shroud and no coffin. Maria shook her head slowly.

"They must be punished, for burying Melinda so!"

"And the others-they say there are hundreds of others." Alicia shuddered and the two girls clung to each other.

"You see, we shall escape with some money. I know where they keep some of it, and I know how to get it. We are going to New Mexico, and then to New York. Maria, Maria, you will be with me, all the time, no? I get frightened, to think of ever being by myself, day or night, now!"

"I shall be with you, all the time!" Maria clasped Alicia again.

It was odd, but Maria Alverez had her Madonna look about her once more. The enormous brown-black eyes seemed to be slightly smokier, slightly sadder. But the beauty of her was still radiant in a pale, breathtaking way.

Alicia was a jolly, lively figure. But Alicia was either up in the best of top spirits, or low and frightened and very much the little girl alone in the dark. This moment Alicia was full of doubts. For she had a vital task to perform, to make them rich. Now she was like a little girl, one of Maria's younger sisters, clinging to the great-eyed beauty, and pensive as they sat in the small room, here on the ground floor of the closed Hotel Molinos.

Outside the shut hotel, two policemen patrolled up and down. They turned away the anxious customers. They explained that an official investigation was under way. One of these policemen was wondering if he would be able to slip inside later, himself, and bed the rest of the night with the exciting Alicia. He knew he would be very welcome. Alicia was never the type of girl who liked to sleep by herself.

"I do not know. I just do not know!" Lieutenant Vasquez was speaking on the telephone call to his chief in Mexico City. It seemed that enormous political pressure was being put onto the investigation. "I cannot leave here, senor. That is quite impossible. I think-perhaps forty or fifty or more girls may have been sold recently--yes, white slavery-yes, I know it sounds impossible, in this day and age, but I am telling you, senor, there are at least hundreds of girls a year missing in this state of Guanajuato alone, over the past twelve years! Yes, a few thousand girls!

"I do not know! I have to find the answers. Yes, senor, I appreciate your position, but this is very, very serious here. There is talk of a lynch-mob. We have two detachments of federal troops from Guanajuato. Yes, the houses are closed. I shall be visiting the Rancho Sanchez tomorrow and will check it out carefully. Yes, senor, it is a big case, and it is going to be a major scandal. About that, I can do nothing at all. Yes, senor, those are my preliminary figures, a few hundred young girls a year, for twelve years--makes three or four thousand, I know--at least four thousand, senor. Thank you. I shall do my best. Thank you, senor." Lieutenant Vasquez delicately put down the telephone and stared at it in the silence that followed.

"The longer the pot cooks, the hotter will be the chili!" he quoted softly. "So-we have upset many, many people. It would seem these Sanchez sisters have people at the very top on their payoff list!"

The pressure had been building up and up during the ten days Lieutenant Vasquez had been working here at San Francisco del Rincon. Apart from anything else, the Lieutenant had to meet a whole roomful of mothers each and every morning. These distraught women were looking for their lost daughters. Somewhere, there had to be a whole hotel full of lost daughters. But the question was, where? The two bordellos he and his men had inspected held young girls, true. But every one of these young girls was a fully licensed and medically inspected prostitute, registered in the book--in fact, registered by the late Sergeant Lopez himself.

Which made Lieutenant Vasquez highly suspicious, but he could as yet prove nothing.

"They will lynch those Sanchez sisters, and tear this town apart if there is some discovery that points to the three of them as being guilty of all this," he explained to the fat young army captain who had come to help with security.

"Maybe we should let them hang them!" The captain was very bloody-minded. "If all those thousands of young girls have been shipped off to the whorehouses of the world, I shall be pleased to tie the knot behind each of those Sanchez sisters' left ear, myself!"

"The law will take care of them," Vasquez hastily pointed out.

"That's what I mean." The army captain sipped a drink. "There is no sentence of death here in Mexico. The most these devils can get would be forty years. Better to let a lynch-mob save the state forty years of food and lodging for those three terrible creatures. Hang them-the mob is right!"

"You, as an army officer, say this?" Vasquez was nervous.

"Do not worry, Ramon. My men and I, we will stand to the death to protect these bitches. I am just saying what I feel should be. But I am here on duty, and we shall do it, all the way. They would have to kill us to get at those three bitches."

"We don't know the Sanchez sisters are that guilty, yet. It may all be purely circumstantial evidence." Lieutenant Vasquez accepted a drink. "Thank you. But-I have a nasty feeling-I think we are going to find some really horrible things."

"Yes, yes, I have had that feeling from the moment I met Delfina Sanchez. If ever the devil lived in a person, she is the perfect example. Possessed of the devil, that woman! Makes me shiver even to look at her."

"Tomorrow, we shall go out to the ranch and see."

They both nodded and were glumly silent at the prospect.

* * *

The police stood in a scattered line of seven men. Lieutenant Vasquez was curious about the thick clots of dried-out grease that lay beneath the crude incinerator. The incinerator looked as if it had been made up of three oil-drums. There was an odd odor about the place. Vasquez frowned and stood up, holding his leather gloves in his left hand.

"I assure you, Lieutenant, it is much cooler on the veranda, and we have some refreshments for you and your men." Teresa Sanchez glowed as she smiled at his healthy tanned face.

"Thank you, Senorita Sanchez. It is getting hot. My men will finish their searching soon. This place is a good drive from your establishment at Leon." He skirted the mention of Teresa's whorehouse delicately.

"Two and a half hours-when the road is good." Teresa went lightly along. They were strolling back toward the Sanchez hacienda. So far nothing had been found. The girls from the Hole were hidden in some pits out in the mesquite. A stillness, as if many eyes were silently watching the scene, descended over the rancho. It was breathless. Lieutenant Vasquez glanced about.

"Perhaps there is a storm brewing. You say nearly three hours to Leon? It took me all of three and a half, along this kind of road. And I thought I was risking my neck-at least that my driver was risking both our necks. Yes, a drink would be fine, Senorita Sanchez."

Teresa, swaying ahead of him, led the way to the table where the bottles, the ice bucket and the white linen suggested siesta and leisure hours.

"We did have a driver who could do it in two hours. Joaquin was a superb driver." Teresa was immediately sorry she had mentioned his name.

"Joaquin Mendosa-the townsfolk say they have not seen him around for several weeks now. I wonder whatever became of him?" Lieutenant Vasquez stared into the dark pools of Teresa's black-brown eyes. It was curious, how all three sisters had these same eyes. They were deathly deep eyes, like tunnels that led into pits of utter darkness.

"Men go--they drift off. One went off a couple of weeks ago. Went with three of our best girls--and nothing has been heard of them." Teresa shrugged.

"Do you mean, one of the girls--Anita Torres--was not alone when she left here?" Lieutenant Vasquez asked softly.

"I do not mean anything, Lieutenant!" Teresa's temper flared. "What is this--the third degree? What do you wish me to confess to--that I run a brothel? Well, I pay a state license and a municipal license and then a federal license, don't I, for that honor? My money is clean enough to pay for the army, and to pay for the police, and to pay for their nosing into business that don't concern them at all!"

"Please, please, Senorita Teresa, I was just wondering that is all. This Anita Torres crossed a desert in the fullness of the day, and she gave us such a muddled statement. Perhaps the sun affected her mind, who can tell?"

Lieutenant Vasquez quietly sipped his iced drink. His men were now searching the outhouses in back, more thoroughly. The curious cellar, Vasquez had examined several times for himself. He came to the conclusion they kept goats down there, for the place was obviously impossible for humans to dwell in.

"I wonder if we had some of that fat analyzed, the fat from beneath the oil-drums--you say it is from pigs, or sheep?" Vasquez stared at Teresa seriously.

The glass shook in Teresa's hand. It was a faint but very definite jolt. This was as good as a deep-echoing confirmation of what the police lieutenant was thinking.

"It is--used for sheep. You must understand, Lieutenant, I do not come here myself, very much. My middle sister, Delfina, is the one who loves the sweet and peaceful rural life. I have a fondness for cities. I prefer to visit my friends in Acapulco and Tijuana, where I am always welcome. I know little or nothing about ranch matters. Now, if you will excuse me, I have some urgent legal business to see to, and I have to meet my lawyer in Leon."

Lieutenant Vasquez stood up, to bow stiffly as Teresa Sanchez took her leave of him.

"We shall be finished here soon, Senorita Teresa," he smiled. "I am sorry if this has been an embarrassment or a source of loss of revenue to you ladies, but--we have to investigate, especially when there are serious complaints of this nature."

"I understand, it is not your making, Lieutenant. It was just a lying girl, and some upset mothers. I shall be in Leon, if you wish to see me." Teresa walked off to where her smart American limousine was waiting for her.

"Style, elegance, and a whorehouse madam!" Lieutenant Vasquez mused to himself. "A whore, always a whore!"

* * *

A jeep passed the limousine in a cloud of dust and sped up to the house. In the jeep were three soldiers and the army captain who had been sent to work with Vasquez.

"Hello--was that Teresa Sanchez leaving us?" The army man grinned.

"Yes. If you had been a few minutes earlier, I would have introduced you. Come up here out of the heat and have a drink."

"Later--later. Let's see what this place is like. It has something of a death-camp reputation, you know, Lieutenant Vasquez."

The two officers strolled across the yard. They were surprised at the poverty of the place. There seemed to be so much rubbish and litter about. But there was only two sharp-faced women living here. These were the two guards Delfina had left to keep an eye on everything.

"It certainly does not look like a death-camp," the army officer said. "But then, what does a thing like that have to look like? I can't see where they would keep anyone, especially girls as prisoners."

"No, that's what is puzzling me. There is nothing here. In the outhouse over there is a small cellar but it is a heap of filth and has evidently been used by goats."

"Let's have a look at it." The army officer was getting very interested in the whole matter.

"They've had a week and more to prepare for us. I mean, they have obviously cleaned the place up. If there was any evidence here, we could only have discovered it if we had made some kind of a surprise raid earlier. By now, I don't think we have much of a chance of finding anything. Teresa Sanchez was off to see her lawyer. They are beginning to make noises like threatening us with a suit--for closing their businesses down, and that kind of thing."

"Damned insolence! I'll lay you a hundred to one they are guilty of these terrible crimes. You have to find proof, Vasquez! You have to get your police brain working, and find out the truth behind all these deserted huts, and this filthy hole, and those mounds out there."

"What mounds, out where?" Vasquez stared out at the wind-swept mesquite. The area beyond the outhouses did have a peculiar lumpy look about it. Nothing definite, but it simply seemed to be different from the rest of the desert farther out.

"They could have hidden them out there," the army officer mused. "Maybe I should send the jeep out to look around."

"If you wish, I have nothing against it. All I need is some kind of evidence. No matter how small, just one thing will get me off the hook that is waiting for me back in the capital!"

The army man looked at Vasquez and patted him on the shoulder. "Do not worry, Lieutenant. We still have need for honest, properly professional police officers. You will be safe, safer in fact!"

"I hope so! There seems to be a hell of a trouble brewing up for me. But it's not that, that's upsetting me. I simply hate to be outwitted by such women. That Delfina Sanchez--she is evil. I know it. You know it. But how on earth are we to prove it?"

He led the way down into the cellar which was the Hole where the young girls were raped and tortured, beaten and put on the Cama Real. The place was changed. Delfina had had goats running in there for several days. This was one of her cleverest tricks. She knew it was impossible to change the place entirely. But she managed to hide everything by using the goats.

"God, what a stench! Let's get out of here! No one could possibly live down here for five minutes." The army lieutenant was certain.

"Yes, and it is all like this. It is all so sordid, and so bad. I might send some of that fat to be tested. But it will turn out to be sheep-fat, of that I am certain. I cannot see them burning people out here, can you, Lieutenant?"

They walked on, slowly circling the building. Small search parties had spread out in the distance. There was a general attitude among the searchers, both police and soldiers, that the whole thing was a complete waste of time.

"There must be some evidence here!" Lieutenant Vasquez declared for the fiftieth time at least.

"Yes, yes, but you will not invent it by repeating that over and over again! I feel we might do better if we got away from the buildings. Supposing they needed to hide things--there is a hell of a lot of wilderness out there, where one could hide an army... " Just as he said this, there was a shout. Two soldiers were pointing into the scrub. The two officers slowly walked out and joined them.

"What is it?" Lieutenant Vasquez asked.

"It's-a rabbit--no, it's a dog, a little Chihuahua--a dog-maybe-could be a large rat." The army lieutenant crouched and whistled.

The two officers walked over to where scared little Pepito was circling round and round. The tiny dog had been flushed from his hideaway by the searchers. He had come back to his master. Now he scratched at the earth, trying to wake his master, Fat Man, who lay buried just beneath the surface.

The small dog had managed to scrape the earth and dirt from one of Fat Man's hands. The hand, blackened and unmistakable, stuck up like an ominous exclamation sign.

The two officers froze. Vasquez barked a command. Men came running with shovels. The small dog snarled, yapped, tried to bite. It was half wild and half mad now, but loyal even unto death.

In this way, they came across the first of the hundreds of bodies buried on Rancho Sanchez.

CHAPTER EIGHT - DIFFERENT HIGHWAYS

Ricardo Herrera stood and bowed his head. He knew that Anita Torres was standing around the corner of the road, listening and waiting. She was with him, watching him, all the time. But she would have to wait a little longer. For at the moment, Ricardo was speaking to none other than the famous international trader, the Turk himself.

"I read all about the arrests, Ricardo, and I knew as soon as I got your letter that I would have to do something about it." The Turk sat in his Mercedes. He slowly opened the car door. "I suppose you know just about everything about the Sanchez sisters--their business, where they put their money, all that sort of thing?"

"Yes, Senor Turk, I know it all!"

"Good, I am glad I came to meet you."

"But I have no money. I am a very wanted man, Senor Turk. Not that I care. I can always take care of myself." Ricardo was hanging his head to avoid looking around for Anita.

"Yes, yes, I am most certain you can." The Turk was not sure of many things. But he did agree that Ricardo Herrera had a wide reputation as a psychopathic killer. The Turk liked to savor danger. This was partly why he had come. He could have sent his two Germans and relied on their usual efficient work. But he was after a fortune, as well as gambling with his own safety.

"You knew my Paris address-you know all my addresses, Ricardo?" The Turk and Ricardo were walking slowly along the mountain road. In the distant haze lay the city of El Centro, where Ricardo had hidden and awaited the Turk's arrival.

"I know all about you. I wrote it down, and I left it with a friend," Ricardo said bluntly.

"You did? That was a wise precaution. I suppose your friend will--send the information on to the police if you don't come back?" The Turk gave a thin smile, then giggled. "It's one way of trying to come out alive, eh, Ricardo? I hear you are great with a knife. Oh yes, I have heard all about your Tarantula's Kiss! It is very famous. They say you can make a man die quickly, or make him last for hours in great agony. Is it true?"

"Yes, it is true! You I would make die over ten hours." Ricardo saw the blank frosted touch come into the Turk's eyes as he listened.

"Ten hours-that long? Nasty-nasty indeed! That is why I have him up there, of course!" The Turk nodded in the direction of the rock rubble on the up-slope of the mountain road.

Seated on a boulder was another German guard. He had the submachine gun unslung and was covering Ricardo. The German was the classic executioner figure. He was lolling against a rock with one leg up. He had a bent cigarette sticking out from his lips.

"He could not help you!" Ricardo chuckled. "No? He is an expert and a deadly shot."

"He would be too late. I am as fast as a snake!" Ricardo yawned and scratched his chin. He kept glancing back to see if Anita Torres was still following him.

"Why do you look back all the time? Are you scared the police will get here and seize us all?" The Turk lit a cigarette. He was enjoying this moment. The risk was enormous. But it was also a calculated risk.

"I am looking for a girl. She keeps coming after me. All the time, she is after me. I should have killed her. But she got away." Ricci suddenly grasped the Turk's arm. The machine gunner stood tense. "I know she died--the newspapers said she died in the hospital. I went there, but they had already sent her off to be buried."

"Who-who was this girl?" The Turk carefully freed himself from this madman's grip. Now was the time to get away.

Glancing over at the machine gunner, the Turk nodded imperceptibly. It had been a mistake coming here. Obviously Ricardo would know where the Sanchez sisters had salted away their millions. But now he was plainly unbalanced. This, for some reason, the Turk had not expected. Now the Turk just wanted to get away, alive and safe.

"I can give you some money, and a ticket to join our people in Bolivia," he told Ricardo as they turned and slowly began to walk back toward the parked Mercedes.

"Agreed! That is good! I am pleased. I shall--shall repay you. I know more about this business than any other--any other living person." Ricardo kept glancing at the huge drop from the roadside, down the precipice of the mountain. It was on his side as they walked. For some reason, Ricardo felt a growing elation at the thought of the three-thousand-foot drop.

"You will need money, a passport, and introductions." The Turk was slowly moving sideways, leaving his gunner a clear line of fire. The gunner was sighting. He poised his finger on the trigger. At the same time, Ricardo was tensing to strike...

Small flames flickered from the machine gun muzzle. The crashing shot echoed down the mountain.

For Ricardo, all time stopped, rose into a face and a smile.

"Anita! I have been looking for you! Anita! See, I have killed the Turk--see--he has my knife sticking out of his throat, and in ten hours the paralysis will reach his heart!"

A great warm glow exploded within Ricardo Herrera as he felt Anita Torres kiss his neck. Her arms were close about him. He gave a sobbing great cry, a shout of leaping joy.

For he loved her, and she was with him. He stood up and seemed to run forward as if to embrace her.

There was only air, thin high air. There was only the distant city in the late haze, with lights beginning to glow, so far away.

Anita Torres turned and laughed.

"Yes, Ricci, so you love me! Damn it all--even in death I cannot seem to lose you! Why have you chased me all this way? I hate you--yes, and I love you too--but we have always been hating and loving, and I thought you had gone back, and I was happy as I was."

Ricardo was poised and calm as the thin air grew deep and rushed about him. He could reach out and touch her jet-black hair. The half-sad, half-hurt smile on Anita's lips made him feel ashamed to the root of his very being.

She held him with her soft arms. Hot flashes seemed to be passing through and through Ricardo. He laughed and held her as tightly as she held him. For they were together, and the rest of the world did not exist.

"I made too many mistakes. I should have known from that first moment," Ricardo was trying to say.

"All the time in the world, there is now, yes, yes! I know you love me, and I cannot forgive you. Even so, we have all the time in the world."

Anita was bending her head forward. She was looking down on him as Ricardo fell away and away, swiftly accelerating. He was laughing and exploding with his great love for her. He was content to have found her. He was certain he was still in her arms, safe, and she safe in his arms.

The sky might grow tall. The wind might sing a high song all around his face and his thick neck and strong back. But he was falling toward her now, and Anita was smiling, slightly scornfully, slightly sadly, just as he had always known her.

The machine gunner took his finger off the trigger.

His gun stopped quivering. A haze of barrel-heat simmered up from it. The gunner stood up. He laughed. The man he had shot just now had seemed to walk straight off the edge of the precipice. The bullets had knocked the crazy fool right into space. Then the smile froze on the gunner's lips.

For the Turk was trying to turn around. But the Turk was now in the grip of the Tarantula Kiss--his hands out, fingers quivering helplessly. As the three Germans ran to help their master, the Turk toppled slowly over and quivered on his back like a dying beetle. The dust of the high mountain road was splattered by the kicks of his jerking feet. The hilt of the knife seemed to rest under the right side of his chin.

Ricardo Herrera had gone to his death. But he was quite right. It took just ten hours for the creeping spinal paralysis to reach the Turk's heart. Whereas Ricardo had died with a great shout of glory in his heart, the Turk died in a bitter, helpless raging fury.

* * *

Alicia held the bus schedules. She was all packed and sat on her bed for the last time. By the door, Maria was getting more and more nervous.

"How long is it now?" Maria asked.

"Half an hour!"

"Hadn't we better go now?"

"No, and do calm down, Maria," Alicia sighed. "My friend will run us to the bus station in his police car. There is nothing to worry about."

"I just want to get away from here, as soon as possible!" Maria walked up and down, then sat down on the far side of the empty cot with her chin on her fist.

"The trial won't be for months and months. Now is the best time to get away from all this," Alicia chattered happily.

"Yes, I agree. I just wish I knew where we were going. I made one big mistake last time, going off to a place I knew nothing about. That's what landed me here."

"Did you send the money off to your people?" Alicia asked, to change the subject tactfully.

"Yes, it went off this morning. Tell me, why it is we had to stay here, when everyone else moved out as fast as they could? I still cannot see why we stayed here. Now they are talking about digging under the barroom, because they have the idea someone is buried there."

"I know. There were four girls buried in there!"

"Oh, my God!" Maria stood up as if she had been shot. "I am not staying in this terrible place a moment longer."

"Oh, relax! In twenty minutes he will be here. We can wait outside, but it is hot, and there are all those people across the road, staring and staring at the place, all the time."

Alicia was dressed coolly in a tight white dress, with a large Peter Pan collar. She could not help looking sexy, nor could she avoid that slight brazen air that suggested her favorite occupation. But she had money now, she had a large sum of money.

For Alicia had waited and waited. She had known that among the many insane quirks in Delfina Sanchez's mind, was a fear of ever being poor again. So Delfina had skimmed the whorehouse profits off the top.

This money that Delfina took was all in cash, in currency. The notes were placed in a bag and hidden in Delfina's own bedroom. By listening night after night, and by working out the pattern that Delfina followed, Alicia had realized what was going on. There was a fortune in cash hidden away in that room over her own room.

It was of course a relatively small sum, compared to the vast profits the whorehouses made. Most of the big money was sent off to the foreign bank accounts. The three Sanchez sisters split their money, as was known. But the skimming of the profits was done by both Teresa and Delfina.

Once Alicia had become convinced the money was being hidden in Delfina's room by the insane madam, the whole thing began to become more and more exciting for the keen little whore. In fact, the events that followed the arrival of Maria Alverez seemed to have played everything perfectly into Alicia's own eager and quick hands.

She had even decided to stay at the dreaded Hotel Molinos a few nights extra, with her friend Maria as sole companion. There were the two policemen patrolling outside, true. Also one of the policemen did come and sleep with the girls most of the night. One was not exactly alone under such circumstances. But it had still required a great deal of nerve to stay in the place.

It was only now that Alicia had a chance to systematically search through Senorita Delfina's room. She had a good idea of where the money cache was, anyway. The footsteps had told her that. For the system had become very set and the routine gave everything away.

It was Ricardo Herrera who brought the money to Delfina late every night. Then he would come back down the stairs and prowl about the hall and corridors. Delfina would count the money, then make her deductions after Ricardo left her. Alicia had noticed a change in the sound of Delfina's echoing steps overhead, as the madam went to a far corner of the room, and then returned quickly, a few minutes later.

A few exciting minutes of hunting, it had taken Alicia.

Now that the three Sanchez sisters were in prison, awaiting trial for mass murder, procuring, and a dozen other crimes, Alicia knew the time was ripe. Those long minutes in Delfina's room did evoke terror. It was the lingering terror of all the people who had come here, worked here, died here, and even been buried here, at the grim Hotel Molinos.

The panel low in the wall had finally slid to one side. Delfina Sanchez had kept her personal hoard in American bills, converting the pesos from time to time. Most of them were twenty-dollar bills. There was a nice fat bag of them for Alicia to carry quickly down to her own room. Alicia was most careful to close the sliding panel first, and then lock the door after she left.

In her own room, she was so scared, she was in a cold sweat until Maria arrived. They were going to eat out. Alicia had to leave her new-found wealth lying there amid her carpetbag luggage...

* * *

Maria stared out of the express bus window. Next to her, a rather white-faced Alicia Cordones sat clutching her large gaily colored bag.

"Say goodbye to San Francisco del Rincon! El Paso, here we come! My friends from Santa Fe are coming down to El Paso to meet us." Alicia managed to keep her excited voice not too high.

"Goodbye--this is a strange old town. I'm sorry I ever read that advertisement," Maria Alverez murmured as she looked out at the busy market, the grand old church, the great Plaza, the thronged morning streets. "Goodbye--and never again!" she whispered.

"We are going places! And we are going to have a great time!" Alicia giggled. "I have sent some of our money ahead, for safety. And some of it we have with us. Some of it I have in a bank, where they know me and will look after it all."

"You make it sound as if we have a fortune!" Maria muttered as she kept staring hungrily out the bus window. "You know, Alicia, now that we are on our way, I am really becoming more and more excited by it all. You are right, we shall have a good time! I think perhaps our run of bad fortune is over, at last!"

"I know it is!" Alicia laughed.

The bus swept on down the rural highway, gradually going faster and faster. This was El Camino Real, and it led northward. The bus was modern, sleek, swift. It sped across the ancient countryside as if to proclaim that new ideas, new themes, and new ways of life were soon to be everywhere here.

THE END
Where Have All The Little Girls Gone ....(163k)    by M.K. Callie




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