Renegade 31

by Lou Cameron

  “Si, and a born thief as well! Your Captain Gringo may be, as some say, a soldado de fortuna. But his older friend, Verrier, has been known for to rob banks on occasion as well! Do you really expect us to place our gallant army under the command of such rogues?”

  There was an all too ominous murmur of agreement; Hakim shrugged and said, “You lot had better place it under the command of someone, poco tiempo! Do I hear any volunteers? Do any of you have at least a tough daughter to send out after El Viejo del Montaña?”

  Nobody answered. Hakim hadn’t expected anyone to. He smiled up at El Presidente and said, “Bueno. My people in San José should be in contact with Walker and Verrier any time now. Naturally, Woodbine Arms will see to the weaponry on credit, for the moment. But your government will have to work out the finances with your new general and his artillery aide. I think the going rate for soldiers of fortune comes to a thousand a month, U.S., these days.”

  El Presidente gulped and said, “That is much more than we paid our late general and his entire staff, Sir Basil.”

  Hakim shrugged and said, “You just got what you were paying for, then. Do you want your army run by soldiers or by punk kids playing King of the Hill on your time? El Viejo del Montaña is good. If you’re not prepared to hire someone better, just say so and I’ll be on my way. I’m here to dig lead, not to be macheted by disgruntled peasants.”

  “We need time for to consider your suggestion, Sir Basil,” said the small but much larger president, and his fellow junta members seemed to feel the same way, judging from their grunts.

  So Sir Basil Hakim rose to his full dwarfish height with a weary smile and said, “I wasn’t suggesting bloody shit. I was telling you there was only one bloody way to save your behinds! But if you don’t want to do it my way, let’s forget the whole bloody business. I imagine I have the better part of a week to get my own people out of here before El Viejo del Montaña has all the exits blocked. Oh, by the way, before I leave, I’d like to discuss the money you lot owe me and mine. I’ll take cash, if you don’t mind. I doubt if any of you will be alive by the time a check would clear, eh what?”

  The newspaperman, who hadn’t been told all the recent news, shot El Presidente a thoughtful look and asked, “La Republica owes money to this international cartel, Señor El Presidente?”

  Torrez paled and hastily assured him, “Not exactly, but we did resupply our army, a few months ago, with arms and equipment from Woodbine Arms Limited. It was my understanding at the time we had several years to pay, at modest interest.”

  Everyone in the room was looking at Sir Basil now. So the arms merchant nodded pleasantly and said, “That’s true. But it was my understanding there would be a government here in Ciudad Segovia to keep the payments up, modest or not. I’m sorry, chaps, but I have no agreement at all with El Viejo del Montaña and the rebels. So if you lot intend to go out of business in, oh, let’s say a week or so at the most, I’d like to settle accounts with you on my way out, eh what?”

  El Presidente was too smart to say anything before he knew what to say. But the big banana baron blustered, “Don’t be ridiculous, Englishman! How do you intend to foreclose on your credit to us if we simply refuse, eh? What if we simply told you to go to hell?”

  Sir Basil Hakim’s smile was not at all pleasant as he replied softly, “I’m not ready to go to hell just yet. But I suppose I could go to El Viejo del Montaña and see what sort of a deal he’d like to make for, oh, let’s say a dozen machine guns and a battery or two of field guns. I prefer to do business with gentlemen, but on the other hand, gentlemen don’t tell people they owe money to to go to hell!”

  “That’s enough, all of you!” shouted El Presidente, adding, in a voice of sweet reason, “Nobody said anything about either Woodbine Arms or La Republica de Segovia going out of business. Tell us some more about our new general, Captain Gringo, Sir Basil.”

  Three hundred miles to the south, the object of Sir Basil’s enthusiasm would have probably been amused to hear himself described in such glowing terms and certainly wouldn’t have returned the compliments. Captain Gringo considered the slippery arms merchant a murderous little shit, and Captain Gringo was a fair-minded man.

  But though he and Sir Basil Hakim had almost managed to kill one another more than once in the past, Captain Gringo wasn’t thinking about the ‘Merchant of Death’ or any other little shits at the moment. He was much more worried about the dead lady in bed with him.

  Her name had been Ynez. At least that was the name she’d given him when he’d picked her up the night before at the paseo in the main plaza of San José. Ladies who picked strangers up for cost-free one-night stands seldom told the whole truth about themselves whether they picked them up in Costa Rica or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He hadn’t given her his right name, either, and the names he’d written in the hotel register downstairs had been intended as an inside joke since, under normal circumstances, Mr. and Mrs. Grover Cleveland would have been checking out about now. But in the cold gray light of a rainy morning, not even Captain Gringo could recall why he’d found it amusing to check in with a pretty but not too bright mestiza as the president of the United States. The local cops weren’t likely to find it amusing, either, and damn it to hell, he had signed the book in his own handwriting, with no attempt to disguise it. For, after all, how often did the damned dame die on you?

  He felt the side of the Costa Rican girl’s throat again and, yeah, she was still dead, and starting to get stiff as well as cold to the touch. He’d whipped the top sheet off the bed on waking up, reaching for a good morning feel, and feeling a tit as cold as the clay. So he had a clear view of her stark naked body and, Jesus H. Christ, what could have killed her?

  Ynez lay flat on her back, still shapely from head to toe without a mark on her tawny but now somewhat waxen flesh. Her face was still pretty even though her big brown eyes were open and glazed with death. Her lips were still lush, even though she was starting to smile rather disturbingly up at the cracked plaster ceiling. He tried closing her eyes. It didn’t work, and he knew she’d be grinning like an idiot by the time the rigor mortis set in all the way. So he sat up, swung his long naked legs off the far side of the bed, and proceeded to get dressed, fast.

  It didn’t take long. As he put on his linen jacket over the gun rig he’d strapped over his shirt he stared thoughtfully down at the still attractive corpse, shook his head wearily, and muttered, “Gee, Doc, I thought she was a nice girl!”

  Then he covered her with the sheet. The cops would rip it off again as soon as they arrived, of course, but it was the least he could do for an old friend. Ynez, if that had been her name, had been a sweet little kisser and a hell of a lay. Could that have been what killed her? She’d said when he’d first entered her around midnight that she admired men who were unusually tall, all over. But she hadn’t acted as if he’d been hurting her, damn it. It had been her idea to lock her ankles around the nape of his neck and take it as deep as it could go in her petite but muscular torso.

  Of course, they’d both been drinking pretty good and acting sort of silly by the time he’d gotten her up here and into the feathers and he was aware, in all modesty, he was a bigger guy than most ladies were used to long-donging, whether in Latin America or elsewhere. But even if he’d ruptured her, she should have for God’s sake mentioned it before they fell asleep in each other’s arms in such a friendly carefree way, right?

  He bent over the bed as he remembered her breath had smelled as if she’d been drinking pretty strong stuff even before he’d picked her up. He removed the sheet from her face and forced himself to take a deep sniff above her softly smiling lips. Even though she obviously hadn’t been breathing for some time, an unpleasantly sweet chemical odor was still detectable. He grimaced, covered her face again, and straightened up with a fatalistic sigh. Then he put on his wide-brimmed Panama hat and went downstairs to face the music.

  It got louder each time he tried to explain. The desk clerk
on morning duty had never seen him before, of course, and called him all sorts of awful things before sending a bellhop for La Policia. When the cops arrived, they tried to act professional until they’d read the register, said it wasn’t funny to forge Grover Cleveland’s name in a Costa Rican flophouse, and really started yelling when they led him back upstairs to view the mysterious female cadaver.

  Her identity was no mystery to the brace of cops who’d taken the squeal on what they’d assumed at first might be just one of those things that happen. But once they’d recognized her, apparently with no effort, the senior officer whipped out his revolver, trained it on Captain Gringo, and asked soberly, “For why did you murder the wife of Deputy Hurtado, señor?”

  “Oboy, Ynez was the cheating wife of a local big shot?”

  “Pero no. Her name was Maria, and I feel sure her husband will be the first to say she was a woman of virtue who never would have hung horns on him, even if it was not an election year!”

  The cop cocked his .45, and Captain Gringo stopped breathing as he tensed to go for his own smaller and hopelessly-far-to-reach .38. But the other cop snapped, “Pedro, no! It won’t work! Too many people outside know we have responded to a death in this hotel and this scandal calls for delicacy, not an even greater crowd!”

  The one covering Captain Gringo said, “I’m listening. But this Anglo who fucks society women to death must be silenced before he can speak to even one reporter, no?”

  “We can always have him try for to escape from Police Headquarters. People are always trying to escape from there and reporters are not allowed in the back. Our job is to get both him and his victim out of here, poco tiempo, and let our superiors worry about the fine print in the final press release, no?”

  So that’s how they worked it. Captain Gringo never found out how they got the body to wherever they wanted it. The cops who’d arrested him turned him over to a whole squad of others who’d arrived downstairs by this time, and it sure was a pain in the ass to be frog marched at gun point to the casa carcel, a good eight blocks away, by a mess of guys who came to his shoulders and left his bare face hanging out for people to stare at!

  Captain Gringo was well known in San José, thanks to his habit of holing up there between jobs. Up to now that had seemed a good idea, because Costa Rica was a pleasant little country with no extradition treaty with Uncle Sam. But as the people they passed kept shouting, “There goes Captain Gringo, under arrest!” he felt like the guy in the old song that went, “Sure there goes that Protestant son of a bitch, the man who shagged the Riley’s daughter!”

  He didn’t feel any better when they got him to the casa carcel, booked him on Murder One and, worse yet, took his smokes as well as his gun away before tossing him in a dimly lit cell decorated by graffiti and crushed roaches. A million years went by, and then a court-appointed lawyer showed up to tell him he was in big trouble.

  Captain Gringo stared soberly at the shorter and fatter Costa Rican seated on the bare bunk beside him and said, “Tell me something I didn’t know. What did the autopsy show as the cause of death?”

  The lawyer looked blank and answered, “Autopsy? Autopsy? For why should there be an autopsy? La Señora Hurtado was a pillar of the Catholic Faith. It would be obscene to cut open the flesh of a woman whose friends and relations will be coming from near and far for to attend her state funeral at the cathedral, no?”

  “I’m not her Father Confessor, so I won’t discuss how good a Catholic she might have been at the paseo last night. But how in the hell do they expect to charge me with murdering her if they don’t know the cause of her death?”

  The lawyer shrugged and said, “Oh, you have already been charged with murdering her, Señor Walker. We were hoping you would tell us just how you did it. The police report shows no signs of cuts or bruises on the body they found you lurking over.”

  “Oh, shit, you’re supposed to be defending me? I can’t wait to hear what the prosecution has to say about me! Look, damn it, I’ll say it slow and if I talk too fast just say so and I’ll draw pictures on the wall. I never laid a hand on the dame. The last time I saw her alive she was smiling up at me like a contented cow who’d just been milked.”

  “But you can’t deny you had considerable, ah, physical contact with her, Señor Walker?”

  “Of course not. I always check into no-questions-asked hotels with dames to put ’em to sleep with bedtime stories! I picked her up at the paseo. It was easy. She’d been drinking and her engine was running before she ever gave me the eye. I’d had a few drinks myself. So we didn’t futz around. I asked her if she didn’t want to lie down and talk things over, and she went up to that room with me of her own free will, see?”

  “Then you admit you took advantage of her in a carnal manner, once you had her alone and helpless?”

  “What advantage, damn it? She was out of her duds before I was, and she dragged me into bed by the dong. The dame was so hot to get laid she was acting like a wild woman and ... Hold it, you say she was a well-known society dame here in San José?”

  “Unfortunately for you, she was all too well known, señor. To rough a puta up and perhaps cause her demise by overenthusiastic lovemaking is one thing, but when a woman of the ruling junta is ravaged to her grave, someone must pay, so—”

  “Stop right there. I don’t want to talk in fucking circles about a little harmless fucking. If she was from a prosperous background, she must have had regular medical attention, right?”

  “For why? La Señora Hurtado was not suffering any illness as far as her family knew, Señor Walker.”

  “There were a lot of things about her that her family might not have known about. Aside from being a dedicated cheater, I think she may have been a diabetic! I could kick myself, now, for not asking her last night why her breath smelled of acetone. But the state of her health was the last thing on my mind when she started making grabs at my crotch! I just remembered now that an untreated diabetic gives off acetone fumes. They’re not supposed to drink, either, and she was drinking like a fish before she picked me up. So try it this way. The dame was sick. So sick she should have been in a hospital. But maybe she didn’t want to go to the hospital because she knew as well as you and I that there just isn’t any cure for diabetes yet. So she settled for going out in a blaze of glory and, okay. I might have supplied some of the glory, but it was the heavy drinking and not my dong that her sick little body just couldn’t take, see?”

  The lawyer looked at him as if he’d just crawled out from under a rock and said flatly, “I heard you were an outlaw and a renegade, Captain Gringo. But have you no sense of decency at all? Would you offer such a disgusting defense in open court?”

  “To save my neck, why not?”

  “¡Madre de Dios! You would have the good name of the late Señora Hurtado dragged through such slime just for to save your own life? I reproach you, señor. It is obvious you are no gentleman!”

  “Well, that’s fair. A lady who gets drunk as a skunk and picks up total strangers behind her husband’s back is no lady, even when she isn’t violating her doctor’s orders. Don’t you see all we need is her medical history and we’re off the hook?”

  The rather short lawyer got grandly to his feet and said, “We are not accused of murdering a deputy’s wife, Captain Gringo. You are! And since I am of the same political party as that poor dead woman’s husband, I have no intention of defending you, now that I see what a disgusting person you are!”

  “You thought I was a swell guy to begin with? I thought you were my court-appointed … Oboy, never mind. It’s against the U.S. Constitution, but small-town D.A.s pull it up in the States, too. Before you report back to your team, would you mind telling me how a guy’s supposed to hire a real defense counsel down here?”

  The Costa Rican ignored him and called for the turnkey to let him out. Captain Gringo probably could have kicked the shit out of him before the guard arrived, but what the hell, he had enough to worry about as it was. So he l
et the shit-heel go, and good riddance.

  Another million years went by. They’d taken his watch out front. But he’d had no breakfast and his stomach kept growling that it had to be after his usual lunch time. He yelled out through the bars, but nobody answered and nobody came. There wasn’t even any water to drink. So he was hungry, thirsty, and dying for a smoke when, at least three hours later, a couple of guys came to unlock the cell door and wave him out. He didn’t ask where they were taking him. He knew nobody ever told a prisoner that he was about to try to escape and when it was time to start running, he knew he’d need all his breath.

  But it didn’t turn out that way after all. They took him out to the booking room, where a familiar figure was waiting for him, along with a much prettier total stranger. As another cop sullenly handed him a manila envelope filled with all his goodies but the .38, of course, he grinned and said, “I knew I could count on you, Gaston. But for chrissake give me a smoke!”

  The wiry little Frenchman answered in English, or his version of English, “Outside, my adorable tobacco fiend. It is not polite to offer one gentleman a good cigar unless one offers tobacco to all the Indians in sight, and these sons of astoundingly ugly streetwalkers kept us waiting all through La Siesta. May I present Miss Maureen O’Flannery, your attorney of record and poster of astonishing bail?”

  Captain Gringo nodded with even more warmth at the well-dressed Gibson Girl of Celtic bone structure, jet black hair, and eyes as blue as the lakes of Kerry as he said, “Gaston’s right. Let’s get out of here before you tell me how on earth we can afford you! I didn’t know you could post bond on a murder rap in Costa Rica, Miss O’Flannery.”

  Her accent sounded more Hispanic than he’d expected as she said in English, “That’s why your bail was so astonishing. And you may call me Maureen, Dick. I’ve a carriage waiting outside and this place does smell like a zoo. So let’s discuss your case on the way to my office.”