The Badlands Brigade (A Captain Gringo Adventure Book 12) Read online

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  Escaping from Costa Rica on a murder rap, Captain Gringo hightails it to neighboring Honduras hired out as a munitions officer for a certain General Morales. His outfit, The Iron Brigade, is a gallows crew of murderous misfits. Their mission: to turn back the British troops invading the north. Meanwhile, Captain Gringo’s got a little action of his own, a man-sized Amazon who gets her money smuggling guns and her kicks making love.

  RENEGADE 12: THE BADLANDS BRIGADE

  By Lou Cameron, writing as Ramsay Thorne

  First Published by Warner Books in 1982

  Copyright © 1982, 2016 by Lou Cameron

  First Smashwords Edition: June 2016

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover image © 2016 by Tony Masero

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Mike Stotter * Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  The Serpent in Paradise answered to the name of Chirivita. Captain Gringo didn’t know she was a serpent in paradise when he picked her up at the evening paseo in San Jose. She looked more like a brown eyed redhead with Castilian-features and an hourglass figure that kept threatening to pop out the top of her low-cut cotton blouse as she bounded her way through life. Chirivita had a sensuous set of long eyelashes, a bedroom smile, and who cared if the red hair was a henna rinse? Captain Gringo liked redheads no matter what color hair they originally had, and how was he to know that Chirivita didn’t understand the rules of the paseo? Captain Gringo understood them and he’d been raised in Connecticut.

  The custom of El Paseo was one of the civilized improvements of Latin America the tall blond soldier of fortune intended to recommend to his Yankee neighbors if ever it was safe for him to return to the States. This didn’t seem likely, since he was wanted by the U.S. and a lot of other governments at the moment. But folks back home were missing out on a good bet as they did their courting the hard way. The evenings back home in Connecticut were probably getting too cold for El Paseo, anyway. It was hard to remember winter in Costa Rica. One month felt pretty much the same as all the others here in the capitol city of San Jose. The latitude and altitude combined to give San Jose an eternal balmy June and an accident of history made the paseo girls of the tropic highland city unusually attractive.

  Captain Gringo and his sidekick, Gaston Verrier, hadn’t come to Costa Rica to pick up girls at the nightly paseo; but the same historical flukes that made the girls so pretty made Costa Rica the best country in all Latin America for a couple of knockaround guys on the run to hole up for a while.

  The early Spanish explorers had named the little country Costa Rica as a sarcastic joke. While Cortez was looting Mexico and the Pizarro brothers were wallowing in Inca blood and gold, the Spaniards exploring this neck of the woods hadn’t found a damned thing worth stealing from the local Indians. They hadn’t even found enough Indians to matter. The narrow waistline of Central America offered nothing but empty land and an unusually nice climate in the trade-wind swept highlands. And so, when Spain finally got around to sending colonists, she sent simple hard-working Spanish peasants. Most of them had been pensioned off enlisted men from the Spanish army and navy, who had * brought their white Spanish wives, for there were no native women to seduce as well as no native men to enslave or peonize. The early settlers had brought along a few priests, of course, but here again Costa Rica had missed out on the dramatics of Spanish history, for there’d been nothing to attract the zealots of the inquisition. There’d been no pagans to convert at sword point and no point in searching for heretics among the simple peasants and artisans sent to carve a colony out of the rain forest. The first settlers hadn’t had the money to import slaves from Africa like their more prosperous neighbors to the north and south. They’d just gone to work like Anglo Saxon new Englanders had and the results had been surprisingly similar.

  They weren’t visible on the surface. To’ the untrained eye, Costa Rica was a typical “banana republic.” The people had Latin features and lived in pastel stucco houses instead of Cape Cods. They spoke a different lingo and ate different food. But, like New Englanders, the Costa Ricans were an ethnically homogenous breed of hard-working, no-nonsense folk who saw no need to have a revolution every other week and failed to see the romance of rural banditry. Hence the little country was politically stable and the local police were not paranoid, making Costa Rica a great place to hole up between jobs. There was no work for a soldier of fortune in Costa Rica, but nobody would bother him as long as he behaved himself and paid his bills. Thanks to their last frantic tour of South America, Captain Gringo and his pal, Gaston, had enough to live like kings for a while, or at least like dukes. It cost real dough to live like a king in any country. But they were checked into the best hotel in town and the paseo girls of San Jose were famous for their pretty faces and notorious for their casual attitude toward reasonably good-looking strangers. So Captain Gringo had made no plans to leave town in the immediate future the night he picked up Chirivita. How was he to know what a grisly mistake he’d made?

  The rules of El Paseo were simple albeit iron clad. As the sun went down the girls came out. The men came out, too, having changed from their work clothes and hopefully having had a bath and shave. The girls started walking one way around the plaza—the men walked the other way. It was considered bad form for unescorted men and women to be walking the same direction. The whole idea was that you kept encountering members of the opposite sex face to face as you walked ‘round and ‘round the plaza. Both sides got to size up all the opportunities being offered that evening as they strolled clockwise or counter clockwise in the soft light of streetlamps and store fronts under the pepper and magnolia trees. Any number could play and the unattractive were not rejected openly as they would have been at a dance back home. When you saw something you liked you smiled softly and moved on. The next time the two of you passed he or she smiled back, if interested, and a loser could always assume shyness if his or her smile drew no inviting response. It was delicate but to the point. If someone smiled back at you, you kept going until you met again on the next lap. That was when you got to smile harder and say something subtle like, “My God, what’s a beautiful broad like you doing all alone on a night like this?”

  She usually didn’t answer the first time. But since you both got to make a complete circuit of the plaza before you ran into one another again she had plenty of time to come up with something to let you know if you were barking up the right tree. After the two of you were on speaking terms the next move was to cut her out of the herd. “It’s awfully warm, why don’t we go have a drink?” worked as well as anything. Once you were in a cantina together the moves were about: the same as in the States, save for the fact that girls down here hadn’t heard as much about Queen Victoria’s current views on proper behavior as the girls back home had.

  Chirivita had been easier to get started with than most, and it had been her suggestion that they skip screwing around in the nearest cantina and go directly to her place for that drink to “cool off.”

  Captain Gringo frowned thoughtfully as she led him by the hand with no further delicacy up a narrow
side street. He knew a lot of Latin girls were intrigued by his tall blond looks, but Chirivita was coming on a lot bolder than most non-professionals in these parts. He braced himself for an unpleasant financial discussion about the time they got to her door. It was a rule of El Paseo that married women and whores were supposed to stay the hell away from the plaza during the nightly fun and games, but if she wasn’t a hooker, she was obviously hotter than a two-dollar pistol and he couldn’t see why a girl with her looks wasn’t getting laid regularly if she wanted it that badly.

  He frowned harder as the street got darker and narrower. A guy in his line of work made lots of enemies and you didn’t have to be a soldier of fortune to be robbed in a dark alley in even the nicer parts of Central America. But he was packing a double-action .38 under his linen jacket and Chirivita was between him and the unknown possibilities ahead, so what the hell.

  They came to a small door set in a blank stretch of stucco wall. The redhead squeezed his hand and said, “This is where I live, Querido.” She unlocked the hatch with her free hand and shoved the door inward on creaking hinges. It was black as a bitch inside. He’d have felt like he was entering a tomb if it hadn’t smelled so nice inside.

  He’d already noticed the jasmine perfume Chirivita apparently bathed in. The darkness she led him into reeked more strongly of the same scent, mixed with beeswax and sandalwood of what had to be scented candles. He hadn’t expected anyone in this part of town to have the new Edison lights.

  Chirivita let go of his hand as she shut the door behind them, plunging him into total darkness as he moved instinctively to one side and got his back to the wall just in case. He expected her to strike a light. She didn’t. He said, “It’s awfully dark in here.” And she said, “I know,” as he heard the rustle of cloth somewhere in the room.

  He reached in his pocket, took out a box of wax matches, and struck a light. The room was small, the walls were carrot red, and there was a terra cotta red spread on the big brass bedstead that took up most of the floor space. Chirivita apparently liked red. But, as he’d surmised, she wasn’t really a natural redhead. She was stark naked as she carefully folded her blouse and skirt over a chair near the head of the bed and when she turned to smile at him the little fuzzy apron between her creamy thighs was just plain brown.

  As he stared slack-jawed at her amazingly proportioned body, the match burned down to his fingers and he shook it out, cursing. In the renewed darkness she giggled and said, “Let me get into bed before you light the candles, Querido. I am shy with people I have just met.”

  That was a lie if ever he’d heard one, but some girls were like that about nudity, so before he struck another match he waited until she rustled the bed covers and said, “I am ready, Querido.”

  He was ready, too, now that he saw the situation was just an innocent shack-up with a very friendly little stranger. Chirivita batted her eyelashes coyly at him as she lay under the covers and asked, “Why are you still dressed, Querido?”

  He thought it was dumb too. He glanced around, located a thick candle stub in a bottle on a corner table, and lit it before sitting down on the edge of the bed to start undressing. He draped his jacket over Chirivita’s clothes and she said, “Oh, you are armed with a pistol!”

  He shucked the shoulder holster and draped it over the jacket as he said, “Not anymore,” and bent to haul off his mosquito boots. The redhead said, “I am frightened by pistols. My husband used to carry a pistol even bigger than yourn and ...”

  He stopped right there and cut in, “Hold it, Doll! What’s this shit about a husband?”

  Chirivita reached out from under the covers to pat his leg as she laughed and said, “Don’t be silly, poor Pancho is dead. He was killed a year ago fighting on the border with those crazy people from Nicaragua.”

  She moved her hand up his leg thoughtfully as she added, “Alas, I have been a woman alone for far too long.”

  Then she got her hand to where they both found it more exciting and added, “Oh, Madre de Dios! Is all of that you or are you carrying another pistol inside your pants?”

  He popped a couple of buttons unshucking the last of his duds before he lifted the covers and rolled into bed with her, saying, “It’s all me and it’s all yours, since great minds seem to be running in the same channels this evening.”

  She enfolded him in her arms and welcoming thighs with a purring sigh and her channel was great indeed as he entered her and she clamped down on his shaft, hard and hungrily.

  He let himself go, now that he had a better grasp on the situation as well as Chirivita. It seemed natural that a hard-up young widow might not have down pat the delicate moves of El Paseo, but she sure knew how to make her moves in bed. He figured she was just using him the way he was using her, so there’d be no cold gray dawn bullshit when it was time to move on. As he started pounding her, he wasn’t sure he’d be in all that hurry to move on. He and Gaston had no plans to leave their safe haven for a while. They had plenty of money, nobody in Costa Rica was after them, and he’d just struck gold. Chirivita was a fantastic lay as well as better looking than most girls you might meet in El Paseo, so how was he going to manage to hang on to her without getting too involved?

  They climaxed together in a long shuddering orgasm, their two experienced and hard-up bodies having found each other’s rhythm instinctively. As he pulsated on his shaft in the sweet-scented room, Chirivita sighed and said, “Oh, the angels must have designed your lovely thing for to fit my pussy. Do you like my pussy, querido?”

  “I love it. It’s the best little pussy in this world.”

  “It is your pussy, now, Querido. I give all of me to you. My lips, my breasts, my pussy and even my popo if you like for to be wicked in the Greek fashion. I wish for to be your love slave tonight!”

  He noticed she hadn’t said forever. Things were looking better by the minute. He was still hot and the first climax had filmed their flesh with sweat, so he threw the covers off to start again, propping himself up on his elbows to take some of his weight off her and give him a new angle of attack as he began to long-dick her fondly.

  Chirivita blushed and said, “Oh, you must not look at me. We are both naked!” But he laughed and said, “I noticed, and I sure do enjoy the view. It’s not as if we were strangers now, querida.”

  She began to move her hips in time with his thrusts but covered her naked breasts with her hands as she closed her eyes and protested, “I feel most wicked with the candle lit. Can you see yourself moving in and out of me down there?”

  “Yes. It’s a beautiful sight. What’s this bashful stuff, Chirivita? You did say you were a widow, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but poor Pancho was shy, too. We never did it in the light like this. I never let him see me naked and ...”

  The last thing Captain Gringo wanted to talk about was the late Pancho or anybody else she’d ever slept with. So he rolled off, hopped out of bed, and moved over to the corner to snuff the damned light. As he did so he spotted a mezzotint Santa Maria and the framed sepia photograph of a guy sporting a handlebar moustache and the cap of the Costa Rican Militia on the wall above the candle. They were both staring at him with expressions of disapproval as he snuffed the wick and returned to the bed. Chirivita had pulled the covers over her again, but she didn’t protest when he threw them off and remounted her in the pitch darkness. He was glad he’d doused the light when she raised her knees to an impossible angle and locked her trim ankles around the nape of his neck, sighing, “Oh, this is much nicer, no?”

  This was much nicer, yes, as he started hitting bottom with every stroke. She was one of those women who didn’t mind having her cervix treated roughly and so she moved to meet him as bottomed out inside her. She gasped, “Oh, I want it deeper. Let me get on top!”

  He had no idea how it was possible to get in deeper, but he rolled off and let her mount him like a pony. She hooked a naked heel in each of his arm pits and leaned her weight back on her locked arms, threatening
to break his shaft off at the roots as she started bouncing up and down, sobbing with pleasure. He liked it, too. He ejaculated hard up into her. She laughed when she felt it and kept moving, saying, “I will make you come again with me, no?”

  The answer was no indeed. Not because Captain Gringo wasn’t up to coming again in anything that nice, but because just then the door opened and a match flared in their startled faces!

  Chirivita said, “Oh, my God!” as the man standing over them with the lit match bellowed, “Mujer! What is the meaning of this? What are you doing with that man in my bed?”

  That was a pretty stupid question, considering the guy whose picture hung on the wall was holding a lit match in his hand at the time. Chirivita was squatting stark naked atop Captain Gringo with the nude American’s shaft still inside her. She licked her lips, smiled uncertainly and said, “Uh, Deek, this is Pancho. Pancho, this is my friend, Deek.”

  The uniformed man swore and-went for his sidearm as the match, fortunately, burned out, plunging all three of them in darkness again. Captain Gringo shoved the redhead off and rolled out of bed just as Pancho’s gun roared thunderously in the confined space and blew the hell out of the pillow the tall American’s head had been resting on!

  The outraged husband’s gun roared again and again as the American scrambled for his own weapon somewhere in the pile of clothing he hoped he’d be able to find—alive, in the dark. The top-heavy chair piled with clothes fell over in the dark as he got to it. Pancho put a bullet into the wall above the sound, showering Captain Gringo’s naked back with plaster dust as he rummaged through the tangled clothes for his own .38.

  He found it, got it out, and as he rose on one knee he heard the hollow click of a revolver hammer on a spent round. Pancho had managed to empty his gun without hitting anything important. So as Pancho stood cursing, Captain Gringo rose to his feet and swung. It seemed sort of shitty shooting at an outraged husband when a little pistol-whipping might serve as well.