Renegade 22 Read online

  Issuing new and classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  Payoff in Panama

  The Renegade Series

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Captain Gringo-pinned down by pistoleros in Panama!

  But it’s worth the risk because this time The Renegade is actually working for Uncle Sam. The payoff? Thousands of dollars and a full pardon from the President of the United States. Except to get that money and a trip back home, he’s got to start by taking on a pack of hammerhead sharks, and then working his way up to fighting the crack Colombian Army! But that’s nothing compared to the danger he’s in from his own allies: a bloodthirsty revolutionary and the beautiful and nubile Inocencia—whom Gringo discovers is anything but innocent…

  The buxom brunette on the bottom protested, “Oh, no! I couldn’t! My dear departed husband explained on our wedding night how only the women of the lower classes make love completely naked!”

  Captain Gringo didn’t want to talk about her dear departed husband. He wanted her completely naked. He’d admired her black lace underwear, a lot, before she’d coyly trimmed her bedroom lamp and giggled into bed with him. But by now the stiff Spanish lace was becoming a pain in the ass, or, rather, an irritation to his own naked belly as she ground it against him. His bare ass was doing fine as they tortured the bedsprings together. For old Estralita, if that was her name, moved her ample hips with considerable skill and enthusiasm for a lady who seemed so worried about class distinctions.

  Her bedroom shutters were open to catch the cooling trade winds, of course, but it didn’t help much. It was a sultry night for the Costa Rican high country, and the tall Yank’s passion-flushed flesh was taking a beating from what now felt like sandpaper covering her otherwise voluptuous torso. It got worse when she started to bump and grind even harder, moaning, “Oh, querido! I am almost there again! Do it faster, por favor!”

  He didn’t. He stopped teasingly, still deep inside her, to insist, “This barbed-wire fence between us has to go, querida. Come on, I’ll help you slip it off over your pretty little head like so and …”

  “I do not wish for to be seen naked!” she protested, thrusting wildly with her hips as she weakly resisted his efforts to shuck her prickly rind. As he got the lace at least up around her shoulders and settled back against her now smooth, sensuous naked breasts, she gasped, moaned with pleasure, and gave in, saying, “Oh, it does feel nicer that way, no?”

  Captain Gringo started moving in her again as he replied. “It feels better this way, yes indeed!” Then he tossed the damned fool lace aside, kissed her, and went crazy with her for a while.

  When they came up for air at last, Estralita demanded her chemise back, saying, “The full moon is shining in on us from outside and, oh, Madre de Dios, we are both naked and ashamed! At least, I am ashamed. I know you men feel no shame about being naked but …”

  He kissed her some more to shut her up as he ran his hands over her. When he cupped her privates in a friendly palm he assured her it was at least as good as a fig leaf. Estralita giggled and replied, “I do not think a fig leaf would feel as comfortable down there. But can you see my nipples in the moonlight? I can see even the hair on your chest, and, oh, what must you think of my character now?”

  He held her closer, kissed her again, and assured her gallantly that his regard for her character hadn’t changed. This was true enough. He still didn’t know a hell of a lot about her.

  He’d picked her up a little over an hour earlier at the San José paseo. The easy way. He’d been seated under the awning of a sidewalk cantina, nursing a tall gin and tonic as he waited to meet his sidekick, Gaston, when this buxom brunette had plopped down beside him and proceeded to tell him how much she missed her dear departed husband.

  Since she’d been wearing a red satin flamenco outfit rather than the usual widow’s weeds, Captain Gringo had assumed her husband had been dearly departed for some time and, from the way she’d batted her lashes at him, left her hurting for someone to fill the void.

  He’d barely had time to leave a message at the cantina for Gaston before she’d almost dragged him by the hair up here to her apartamento. Now that they’d gotten the first shyness and that damned black lace out of the way, it was shaping up to be a lovely evening with a shapely lady indeed. Estralita was a little plump, but she had a pretty enough face and a really great way of moving those big hips. So, whatever Gaston had wanted to see him about could wait.

  It was probably a job offer from someone who liked noise. Captain Gringo and his fellow soldier of fortune had been resting up between jobs in Costa Rica for some time now, and while the younger, American member of the team was still fairly flush from that last frantic field mission up in Nicaragua, old Gaston could spend money as if it were about to go out of style, if he met something pretty to spend it on. And the girls of Costa Rica were as pretty as any in Latin America.

  The one he was in bed with now had one hand on the back of his and was rubbing it deeper in her naked lap as she murmured, “Oh, you make me feel so passionate, querido. I confess my dear departed husband never made me feel so, ah, forward. Do you think I am too forward?”

  He stopped wondering what the hell Gaston might have wanted with him as he literally grasped what Estralita wanted, and she spread her pale thighs in the moonlight to jerk herself off harder with his willing enough fingers. As he concentrated more politely on pleasing her, she let go of his now nicely moving hand and reached for his semi-sated shaft to return the favor. She did that great, too.

  But as he found himself rising once more to the occasion, they were both still sort of sticky from the last body contact. So he said, “It sure is hot and humid tonight. Let’s see if we can’t manage a cooler position this time.”

  Estralita seemed game enough, until she realized what he had in mind as he positioned her across the mattress on her hands and knees and got into position behind her with his bare feet on the floor.

  She protested, “Are you mad? Do you expect a woman of my position to make love with an animal?”

  “Lean back just a little, querida; your position is yummy as hell except for that.”

  “No, wait, I admit there is more to be said for naked peon lovemaking than my dear departed husband told me, but this is too much to ask of a decent woman and … Ay, que linda!”

  “I thought you’d like it,” said Captain Gringo, grinning down at her pale rump in the moonlight as he proceeded to hump her dog-style, hard. Estralita buried her face in the sheets and protested how humiliated she felt, even as she betrayed how much she liked it by the way she was moving her whole lower body to meet his thrusts. She arched her spine to take it deeper, groaning, “Oh, Madre de Dios, this is fantastico! Not even my dear departed husband ever got it in that deep, querido!”

  Captain Gringo growled, “Will you shut up about your dear departed husband and concentrate on the guy you’re giving it to now, damm it? In the first place, it’s not polite to speak ill of the dead, and in the second place I’m not interested in how you learned to screw so good. I just want to screw you good, all right?”

  For some reason, that made Estralita laugh like hell, and her laughter did all sorts of interesting things to her warm wet insides. So Captain Gringo started pounding harder, and that must have delighted her even more, because she suddenly gasped, “Oh, Jesus, Maria, y José! I am coming again!”

  That made two of them. Captain Gringo clung to her strong hipbones with his hands to keep it all the way in as he fired a nice long burst into her.

  Then the door popped open and a strange male voice bellowed, “By the balls of Santiago! What has been going on in here?”

  That was a pretty st
upid question for anyone to ask a naked man with his dong still in a naked lady, dog-style, but the guy in the doorway was making a stupid move for something under his linen jacket, too. So Captain Gringo popped out of Estralita to pop him with a hard left cross before he could do or say anything else stupid.

  The solid punch to the jaw bounced the mysterious intruder’s head off the solid wall behind him, damaging him some more before he could manage to sprawl face down and very still at Captain Gringo’s bare feet.

  The naked American slammed the door shut for privacy before turning to the bare brunette on the bed to ask, “Is this anyone we know?”

  Estralita was trying to cover her considerable charms with the end of a sheet as she stared in horror at the stranger Captain Gringo had cold cocked in the moonlight. She gasped. “Do you think he saw what we were doing?”

  “Never mind what he saw, damm it! Who the hell is he?”

  “My husband. Oh, querido, what are we to do?”

  Captain Gringo dropped to one knee to feel the side of the unconscious man’s neck as he answered, “Damm it, Estralita, you told me the poor bastard was already dead!”

  She sobbed. “No, I didn’t. Is he dead now?”

  “No, thank God, and no thanks to you, you stupid lying bitch! What do you mean, you didn’t tell me he was dead? All you’ve been talking about since you picked me up has been this dear departed husband of yours, goddamn it, and here he is, alive and well, almost!”

  She protested, “I did not lie, querido. My dear husband departed over two weeks ago, for to go to Limón on business. He wasn’t supposed to be back until the end of the month, and, oh, how shall we ever explain this most distressing business to him when he wakes up?”

  Captain Gringo muttered, “Oh boy!” and started scooping up his things. As he dressed, the cheating wife found her underwear, at least, and put it on as she asked again what they were going to tell her husband when and if.

  Captain Gringo buckled his shoulder holster, slipped his linen jacket on over it, and picked up his planter’s hat, saying, “You’ll think of something.”

  As he headed for the door she wailed, “Wait! You can’t leave me here like this for to face the music alone, querido!”

  Captain Gringo said, “Sure I can. Just watch my smoke. I don’t want to be anywhere near your dear departed husband when he comes back to life a second time on you!”

  *

  Captain Gringo had no idea how long it might take to beat the whole story out of the buxom brunette. But he figured he had at least a few minutes’ lead on her outraged husband. So he hurried back to the sidewalk cantina to see if Gaston had dropped by yet!

  Gaston had. The old Frenchman wasn’t there, but he’d left a message of his own. So Captain Gringo grabbed it from the waitress on the fly and whipped around the corner to read it under a side-street streetlamp.

  He muttered, “What the hell?” when he got to the part about Gaston meeting him at the American embassy across town. Then he tore up the note and made tracks for his own hotel, resisting the impulse to break into a dead run. For now, he was in real trouble. The note had been in Gaston’s handwriting, but he was sure the Frenchman would never have written such a dumb suggestion without a gun to his head!

  Captain Gringo hadn’t always been Captain Gringo. Back in the dear dead days when he’d still thought the world was run on the level, he’d been First Lieutenant Richard Walker of the U.S. Tenth Cavalry. Then Uncle Sam had decided to hang him on a false charge, so he escaped by killing his would-be executioner, and had been running ever since, with a dead-or-alive want chasing him.

  Costa Rica was a reasonably safe place for a wanted man.

  Or at least it had been before he’d started bouncing Costa Rican husbands off bedroom walls. The local government was easygoing and had no extradition deal with Tio Sam.

  But some pricks at the American embassy here in San José had tried once before to grab him and take him back to the States, and they’d almost succeeded, too!

  His hotel was around the next corner. He’d whip up to his room and pack a few things before he cut out for … where?

  It didn’t matter. They already had Gaston, and anywhere had to be safer than here right now. He got to the corner and saw that the entrance of his hotel was clear. Then he stopped, whipped back around the corner, and stepped into a dark doorway to light a Havana claro and reconsider his options.

  They were all pretty dismal. Gaston could probably hold out longer than a buxom brunette. But if they’d gotten him to write that dumb note, how long could it take them to get a hotel address out of him? The rules of the soldier-of-fortune game were rough. A knock around guy looked out for his own ass first. Gaston was wanted a lot of places for a lot of things. But not by Uncle Sam. So, yeah, they could let the Frenchman go if he was willing to play ball. Gaston was old enough to be Captain Gringo’s father, and he hadn’t gotten that old through self-sacrifice. He’d no doubt feel shitty about ratting on a pal. But when push came to shove, it was every man for himself.

  The tall American stepped out of the doorway and started walking away from the hotel. The pricks staked out in his room were welcome to the unimportant luggage up there. Captain Gringo had his money and a double-action .38 on him. What more did an ambitious youth need to get ahead in the world?

  Where in the world he was headed at the moment was still up for grabs. He couldn’t risk the railroad depot.

  They probably knew about his occasional redhead and the understanding madam he and Gaston had hidden out with in the past. If they had Gaston, they probably knew every friend the two of them had in San José. So okay, he could just keep walking and be well out of town before sunrise, right?

  A big wet toad plopped down on the brim of Captain Gringo’s hat. He cursed and kept walking as he braced himself for the inevitable. He’d noticed earlier that the night had been unusually warm and humid. It was cooler now. That meant the sky was about to open up and dump a gully washer any minute now.

  Another spoonful-sized warning drop put out his cigar. He grimaced and put the claro away, muttering, “Waste not, want not.” He didn’t know when he’d next see a tobacco shop with a wooden Indian instead of a cop standing out front. It started to rain harder. Captain Gringo tried to look on the bright side. At least nobody with a lick of sense was going to be out on the streets until the cloudburst let up. He could live with being soaked to the skin, if it improved his chances of living.

  He came to the plaza. He ducked into another doorway to scout the situation. The plaza was of course deserted, with the paseo called on account of rain. The cantina across the wide expanse of wet pavement was deserted too. He decided to go around the plaza anyway. He was about to step back out into the rain when a familiar sardonic voice said, “Eh bien, I thought you’d out distanced me, you species of long-limbed suspicion!”

  Captain Gringo turned to stare thoughtfully down at the short damp figure who’d just joined him, asking, “Are you alone, you old goat?”

  “Merde alors,” Gaston replied. “Do you think anyone else cares enough about you to get soaked chasing you all over town in a deluge?”

  Captain Gringo didn’t answer until he’d had a thoughtful look around. Anyone who took Gaston Verrier’s word on anything without checking was a chump.

  The little Legion deserter didn’t look like a sneak. Gaston owed his amazing longevity to the fact that he didn’t look like anything in particular. He was one of those gray little guys who could melt into a crowd or a police lineup like he wasn’t there. His English was sort of weird, but he could and did pass for a native in Spanish-speaking countries. Women found him reasonably attractive. Most men failed to notice him unless they were bullies who liked to pick on little guys, in which case they were in big trouble.

  Gaston had come over with the French Foreign Legion to back the illfated play of the so-called Emperor Maximilian in Mexico. When Juarez had started winning with monotonous regularity, Gaston had been practiqué
, as he put it, about changing sides.

  Captain Gringo said, “Speaking of changing sides, what was that shit about meeting you at the American embassy, and how did you get away?”

  Gaston said, “I realized later you might have reservations about meeting me there. So I went to your hotel to wait for you. You do stand out on a corner under a streetlamp, even when you are trying not to. So when I regarded your hasty retreat, I most naturally dashed madly after you. Mon Dieu, you do cover ground with those trés formidable legs of yours, you damned moose!”

  He took Captain Gringo by one elbow as he added, “Meanwhile, it is raining les chats et chiens. Come, we can follow that adorable arcade while staying reasonably dry to a species of cafe one hopes to be still open, hein?”

  Captain Gringo went with him. Anything beat standing in the rain, As they moved along the dark arcade past dark and shuttered shops, he asked the Frenchman to explain the grotesque message, adding, “You know damned well I’m wanted in the States on every charge but the common cold. Did you really think I’d go anywhere near that fucking embassy?”

  Gaston said, “I told you I regretted my hasty note, Dick. Voila, here is the adorable cafe, and, as you see, we shall have it to our adorable selves as I fill you in on the fantastique deal I made for you, you ungrateful child!”

  They went in and took a back booth with their black coffee. Gaston waited until the bored-looking waitress was out of earshot before he explained, “The offer is a thousand a month, U.S. Plus a chance for a full pardon from your President Cleveland if all goes as planned. How do you like the payoff so far?”

  The homesick Captain Gringo couldn’t believe it. So he didn’t. He stared suspiciously across the table at Gaston and said, “Okay, let me fill in the rest. They want me to drop by the embassy like a good little boy and hold out my hands while they slap on the cuffs and tell me all about the neat fair trial I’ll get back in the States this time, right?”

  “Wrong. I mentioned the time that unpleasant M’sieur Carson tried to trick you back to trip the light fantastique at the end of a rope. They assured me they understand your concern and that there is no need for either of us to contact the U.S. State Department again. In fact, one gets the distinct impression that the deal is to be, how you say, off the books?”