Renegade 30 Read online

  Captain Gringo took out a claro, lit it and blew a thoughtful smoke ring before he admitted, “I can’t add it up either. But let’s run through the figures again just for luck. One, on the face of it, El Chino and his followers are simply opportunistic outlaws out to take advantage of the confusion as a British colony goes out of business. But, two, a steamer flying the colors of the British Merchant Marine put in just a few hours ago to unload supplies for El Chino, and I doubt like hell the old goat has a charge account with Marks & Spencer! Three, a harbor patrol boat, also flying British colors, came putting over to join the fun and games.”

  “Mais we did not stay long enough to see what was going on by the waterfront, Dick. How do we know it was an official patrol boat and not a private vessel? Anyone can fly any kind of flag, non?”

  Captain Gringo nodded grudgingly and said, “Good Point. Let’s see just what’s in those crates the Trinidad dropped off.”

  Gaston started to follow him across the warehouse. But Captain Gringo hissed, “Watch the door, you idiot!” So Gaston did so as the tall American moved in the rest of the way, got out his pocketknife and pried off just enough raw lumber to see what was in the top crate—and whistle. He hammered the board back in place with his gun butt and rejoined Gaston at the entrance, saying, “He wasn’t fibbing about having machine guns, anyway. Aside from the one I spotted near the river, there’s another back there, still in its factory goo. Did you ever get the strange, sudden feeling you were not alone in the house after all, Gaston?”

  Gaston glanced outside and replied, “There is nobody in our vicinity but us at the moment, Dick.” But Captain Gringo shook his head and said, “This outfit has at least one lime-juicer writing checks for ’em. Somebody cleaned a machine gun and set it up by the river between the time we jumped ship and the time I saw it there. We just heard a steam locomotive hauling something somewhere, and natives who know how to run a locomotive don’t have to resort to joining guerrillas to get by in the world down here. Any guy with technical skills is in demand. That’s why we get hired so much by generals who move their lips when they read, see?”

  “Mais oui, the old bully admitted he needed followers of some technical ability just now.”

  “Bullshit. He’s already got ’em! I’m not in the mood for unbaked beans right now. Let’s see if we can get a closer look at that railroad setup. I didn’t know this colony was important enough to have a streetcar line, for God’s sake!”

  He started out the door. Gaston said, “Wait. We were just warned not to investigate such matters, and if we do, the other non-Hispanic members of this droll group may not like it.”

  “I don’t like it, either. There’s something sneaky as hell going on around here, and I doubt like hell anyone’s about to tell us what’s going on!” But as he started to press on, Gaston grabbed his arm to swing him around, insisting, “Pay attention to your sneaky elders, you rash and trés noisy youth! I was peeking in convent windows before you were born, and there is always a sneakier way to sneak!”

  “Gaston, do you have any idea what you’re talking about?”

  “Mais oui! Have you forgotten the women we left behind at that house? As I hid them under the roof, I told them to sneak back to their own place and wait for us there, trés discreet. By now they may have made it. It would have been safer for them to make a run for it during La Siesta than it will be any minute now, hein?”

  “You know where Filipa and her daughter live?”

  “Mais non, they told me to just guess when I came looking for them. These barrio shacks have no tedious numbers to remember, but Filipa said her casa was behind the farmacia across from La Cantine Azule, so—”

  “So what are we waiting for?” Captain Gringo cut in, adding; “Let’s go, before some guerrilla duty sergeant puts us on KP!”

  *

  The two native women had barricaded the door of their two room alley shack even though none of the guerrillas had quartered in that part of the barrio after all. Once they got the one door clear, they hauled the two soldiers of fortune in and seemed so glad to see them that it seemed impossible either was worried about being raped. They asked them what had happened to the redhead Gaston had left in their charge, and Filipa said Olivia had refused to enter what she referred to as “the nigger quarter.” Young Rosalita opined she’d probably gone back to her own house by the church.

  Captain Gringo said, “If she did, her husband hasn’t noticed yet. He was just over at El Chino’s GHQ, bleating for his lost lamb. She could have missed him in passing, I guess, but never mind about her. The guerrillas don’t seem to have her, and there are any number of places she could be holed up. The first thing I want you two to tell me about is the railroad here in Gilead. What do you know about it?”

  They looked blankly at each other. Then Rosalita said, “What can one say about a railroad, Deek? Los Anglos built it a few years ago for to haul timber out of the jungles to the west. None of us have ever ridden on it.”

  He nodded and said, “Right, short-haul logging line. Probably narrow-gauge, running from the waterfront back to the last mahogany anyone’s cut. Have either of you ever heard mention of a Nicaraguan military outpost the rails might make it at least close to?”

  This time it was the older native woman’s turn to shake her head and say, “Pero no. This has always been a British colony. There are no Nicaraguan settlements of importance in the swamps and jungle all around. A few Indio villages. A few how you say ‘squatters’ who live off the country and collect chicle for to make Yanqui chewing gum. No town important enough for the central government to even have a post office, though.”

  Captain Gringo nodded and told Gaston, “I thought he looked sort of shifty-eyed when he had to come up with artillery in a hurry. He was bluffing about having big guns.”

  Gaston shrugged and said, “You hope. I agree El Chino is not a most convincing military genius; but if he has serious backers, they must know what they are up to, and you, my own adorable military genius, are right about a frontal attack against the bigger British settlement being suicidal without some artillery to pave the way!”

  Captain Gringo glanced out the small shack’s tiny window and said, “Let’s not worry about the plans on this side of the river. They’re starting to give me a headache. It’ll be getting dark in a few hours. We’ll lay low here until it’s safe to move out. Then we’ll get our tails across to Zion and see if anyone down there makes any sense!”

  “You intend for to take us with you, do you not?” sobbed Filipa, throwing her arms around Captain Gringo and pressing him against the wall with her pelvis as she insisted, “Do not leave us here for the wicked bandits to abuse!”

  He said, “Take it easy. You’re getting splinters in my back, only lower down. We’ll have to think about that idea some, Filipa. There don’t seem to be any guerrillas this far from the center of your barrio, and we may have to fight our way through serious gunslicks between here and the British lines.”

  She hugged him tighter, and he had to put one of his own arms around her waist to keep them both from falling as she begged for him to take her and her daughter along. He said, “For God’s sake, nobody’s talking about going anywhere before at least six or seven o’clock! Let’s just calm down and catch up on our energy between now and then. Do you girls have anything to eat here? The rations the occupation forces issue around here didn’t look too inspiring, but we haven’t eaten since this morning.”

  Rosalita told her mother to stop trying to bump and grind Captain Gringo through the wall of the frame shack as she opened a cupboard to get out some cups and bowls. By the time she’d spread the table—or, in this case, a packing crate—Filipa had calmed down enough for Captain Gringo to pry her loose and join Gaston at the improvised table. The meal that mother and daughter produced in no time would not have rated four stars in Paris, or even Ciudad Juarez. But cold tortillas wrapped around tinned bully beef spiced up with red peppers beat going hungry; and the locally brew
ed pulque Rosalita poured in their cups wasn’t any worse than pulque always was. It served to wash the overspiced grub down, even if it did remind Captain Gringo of mildly alcoholic spit.

  The two women said they’d eaten earlier. It was just as well, since there were only two chairs. As they leaned back to light after dinner cigars, Captain Gringo noticed most of the other serious furniture in this room consisted of a bedroll in one comer. He tried not to think about bedrolls right now. Gaston had no doubt been right about old Estralita being a walking dose of clap, but, damn, those big bare tits had looked inspiring. Filipa had apparently given up on trying to talk her younger male guest into taking them along later, because now she was leaning all over Gaston, telling him no French caballero would wish for to leave unprotected women here at the mercy of banditos. Captain Gringo decided not to think about that, either. Rosalita was making a half-ass effort with the bowls she’d cleared from the table and a bigger pan of battleship gray water on a rickety sideboard. He rose, stepped over beside her and said, “I’d offer to dry if there was any way to wash in that greasy crud. Don’t you have a well around here?”

  She said, “Si, around the back. But my mother is afraid someone will rape me the momento I step outside.”

  He grinned crookedly, picked up the bowl of dirty dishwater and said he was willing to risk it if she’d get the door. So she held it open for him and he stepped out to dump the crud in the weeds. They could probably use fertilizer as well as water, so what the hell. He moved around to the back of the shack and, sure enough, there was a cast-iron hand pump rising among more weeds. The handle said it had been made in England. It figured. As he pumped the bowl full to overflowing to rinse at least some of the looser grease over the rim, he reflected on the advantages as well as disadvantages of colonialism. This hand pump was an easy example of the advantages the Brits brought to their little brown brothers and sisters, as long as they kept in their own place. He knew that once this place reverted to Nicaragua, people like Rosalita would get to carry water from the nearest river on their heads a lot, again. Banana republics didn’t go in much for anything but collecting taxes and drafting soldados in out-of-the-way villages like this one. There was a better than even chance that Nicaragua would never do anything at all about Gilead. They had their own problems around the lakes to the west, so why should they bother with a semi-ghost town cut off from the rest of the country by miles of trackless jungle and at least one good mountain range nobody’d built a road through yet either? It seemed a shame that all this work the English colonists and their domesticated natives had put into Gilead would go to waste and be nothing but a memory in a few short years. But there was nothing he could do about it. So he picked up the bowl of now-clear dishwater to lug it back inside.

  As he passed a corner of the shack, he heard a woman’s voice moaning in agony or ecstasy inside. So he risked a quick peek in the rear window and, yeah, Gaston was up to his usual tricks; and old Filipa, spread out on the floor pallet in the rear room, was acting as if she’d never been eaten before but sure found it something to grin and bear. Captain Gringo muttered, “Bastard. Might have known he’d stick me with the only virgin left in town!” as he went on around to the front and shoved the door open with one hip. Rosalita was still standing at the sideboard, blushing a dusky rose, as he put the bowl down for her without commenting on the curtain across the door to the next room or the considerable noise coming from that direction. Rosalita put the bowls from the table into the water to soak, but made no further attempt at washing them as she confided in a whisper, “I think Mother and your friend are doing wicked things in there.”

  He said, “Well, she did seem anxious to come.”

  She got it. She giggled and said, “Bueno, I like for to come, too, and she would not hear a cannon going off out here right now.”

  Suiting actions to her unexpected words, Rosalita moved over to her own bedroll, unrolled it across the floor and knelt on it to whip her blouse and skirt off over her head as he just stood there thunderstruck. She looked boldly as well as archly up at him as she knelt there in all her tawny nakedness and asked, “Well? Do you expect me to start without you?”

  He grinned, dropped to his knees on the roll beside her and took her in his arms as he whispered back, “Aren’t we cutting this sort of thin? Your mother’s right in the next room, and she seems to think you’re some kind of virgin!”

  She wrapped her bare arms around him, pressed her firm brown breasts against his still-clad chest and insisted, “Let me show you the kind of virgin I think I am. But hurry, Deek! We do not have time for all this courting nonsense, querido!”

  That seemed for sure. So he shucked his own duds, fast, as the pretty teenage mestiza lay back smiling sensuously up at him. By the time he’d kicked his pants off, he was feeling sort of sensual too, and she’d told him to cut the bullshit. So he just mounted her like an old friend who didn’t expect much foreplay. But she hissed and gave a little whimper of discomfort as he entered her amazingly tight little love box.

  He stopped with it halfway in to mutter, “Oh, my God, you really are a fucking virgin!” But Rosalita wrapped her shapely brown legs around his bare buttocks to pull him closer and all the way in as she moaned, “If I got more fucking, I would not be such a virgin. It is most difficult for to get laid when one’s mother is always telling hombres not to rob you of your virginity, see?”

  He was beginning to. He didn’t want to know how many other guys she’d done this with when her mother gave her a few minutes alone with them. As they got down to business, it seemed obvious she’d had some practice at this, indeed. So he felt better about what he was doing to such a young kid, and Rosalita liked what he was doing just fine. She came ahead of him, and as he kept pounding she gasped, “Oh, stop, por favor! What if my mother catches us, Deek?”

  He told her this was a fine time to worry about that, and as he kept pumping in and out of her post-climactic contractions, she began to move in time with him again and confided she didn’t really give a shit if the village priest walked in on them right now.

  But it was Gaston rather than the village priest or Filipa who caught them going at it hot and heavy on the floor as he stood in the doorway buttoning his pants. Gaston gulped, ducked back inside, and as Filipa rose from her bedding, buttoning her own blouse, the Frenchman grabbed her, kissed her passionately and lowered her back down to the already messy bed clothing. Filipa gasped, “Querido, what has come over you! I thought we were through for the momento!”

  Gaston ran an experienced hand up under her skirts as he told her, “Mais non, I thought so too. But for a man of my age, I feel rejuvenated by my lust for your fair flesh, you trés adorable creature!”

  Filipa giggled as he began to rock the man in the boat between her legs the way he knew she liked it. She said, “Wait, you mad, impetuous Frenchman! My virgin child is in the very next room, and if we do not rejoin them they may wonder what we are doing back here so long!”

  He said, “Right now mine feels so long I can’t stand it! Let me have just one more orgasm in your divine embrace, my goddess of amour!”

  She tried to struggle free. But by this time Gaston’s fingers had her love-slicked clit at full attention, so she lay back limply and moaned, “Oh, you are so masterful and I am so weak-willed. But do it fast this time, and let us not take off our clothes again. Rosalita will be wondering what is happening in here, and if she should look in on us …”

  Gaston assured her he doubted anything like that was about to happen, saying, “I just looked in on them. They seemed very busy with the dishes and, voila, I have it in you again, my proud beauty!”

  She gasped, “Madre de Dios, so you have, and it feels as big as ever! How old did you say you were, querido?”

  “A man is as old as he feels, and your little firm body feels as if I am a child molester once more! But could you help me just a bit by moving your adorable derriere, my precious?”

  She could, for enthusiastic p
elvic movements ran in her family, even if she didn’t know it. She might have found out soon, had not Gaston announced loudly in English, “Eh bien! I am coming! I repeat, I am coming, and no doubt we shall both be coming all too soon!”

  So when the two of them were done and Filipa insisted even more firmly on rejoining her virgin child and Captain Gringo, they came out to find Rosalita indeed washing dishes as Captain Gringo dried, trying to look more innocent than he felt. Gaston said, “Ah, there you are. Our hostess and I have just been discussing our escape across the river, Dick.”

  Captain Gringo said, “I heard. Thanks.” And Gaston said, “Think nothing of it. It was my pleasure. Does anyone have the time?”

  Captain Gringo said, “Not anymore. It’ll be dark enough to move out, soon. Let’s talk about that.” He turned to the older woman and explained, “As I just told your daughter here, it would be dumb to risk your pretty necks in a firefight at the ford.”

  “But, Deek! If those soldados find us here—”

  “Hear me out, damn it,” he cut in, insisting, “In the first place, no guerrillas seem interested in this part of town. They know most of these houses are deserted and stripped bare. So why bother? But if this part of the barrio is too rich for your blood, you still have the deserted English quarter to hide out in, and there are more empty houses in Gilead than there are men in El Chino’s army! The place is bigger than we thought.”

  She said, “Es verdad. But even if the rapists do not find us, what is to become of us if we stay here, Deek? The English people we once worked for are across the river in Zion.”

  “If they’re still there, you mean,” he cut in, adding in a gentler tone: “This colony is going out of business, whether peacefully or not, Filipa. I know it’ll be tough on you natives. But there just won’t be Anglos for you to work for here anymore. Where did you live before Queen Victoria set up shop here?”