by Lou Cameron
He rolled her off, spread her thighs, and mounted her right to finish what she’d started, saying, “Damn, where did you go now that I really need you? Never suck a guy halfway off if you don’t expect to finish, Sleeping Beauty!”
He came in her, fast, and lay weakly atop her, fighting to get his second wind, now that he could see she really wanted to fuck. Anita opened her eyes, smiled up radiantly, and said, “Oh, it’s you. For a moment I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Come to think of it, I have. My God, you make love fantastico, Deek!”
“You just noticed? You’re not bad yourself, querida.”
“Do I fuck as good as Dulcenia?”
“Don’t talk dirty. Why do you dames always ask the same dumb questions? Have I asked you who broke you in so swell, Anita?”
She giggled and said, “You don’t have to. You know no other man is as good as you at this! I thought Dulcenia was lying when she said you made her come three times without even any vice. I forget how far I am ahead of her, now. And wait until I tell her I took that monstrous thing in my mouth as well, eh?”
“What is this, some kind of a contest? What’s the prize if you win, Anita?”
She started moving her hips under him teasingly as she replied demurely, “This is the prize. Why have you stopped? Don’t you like me anymore?”
He laughed and managed to move in her a little as he said, “I like you a lot. But I’m only human. What say we stop for a smoke and if my spine ever comes back to life…”
“Don’t stop yet! Please don’t stop yet, Deek! I am too hot for to stop just yet.”
“So I notice. But, Jesus, we’ve been going at it hot and heavy for almost an hour and… Hmmm, come to think of it, my back does seem to be feeling better now.”
She raised her legs, locked her ankles around the nape of his neck, and reached down between them to start petting her own clit as she grinned up roguishly and said, “Bueno, see if you can get it up my ass now, por favor.” He frowned down at her and asked, “Are you sure? You said, before—”
“Never mind what I said before. I am trying to become a legend in my own time and Dulcenia only had you one way. I mean to pay her back for getting to you first, the bitch!”
He shrugged and said, “Well, as long as you girls are so fond of one another.” But when he tried to get it in her anal opening, they could both feel it just wasn’t meant to go in her that way. He said, “It’s no use, Anita. You’re just too tiny back there.” But she said, “No, wait, maybe if I try for to fart, as you shove …”
He laughed despite himself and then, as he felt her rectal muscles dilating against the pressure of his glans, said, “Well, what do you know. I’ve never heard it expressed so delicately, but … Am I hurting you?”
“Si ” she groaned, pulling him closer as she added, “But I love it! It feels so big this way, no?”
Actually he liked her front entrance as well, since his tastes were simple. But he knew maybe three out of ten dames got a perverse thrill out of sodomy, even if they had to strum their own banjo to come that way, and what the hell, cornholing a pretty girl had to beat cornholing a pretty boy. So he was cornholing her good when, out in the calle, somebody proceeded to shoot the hell out of something or somebody!
He stiffened, stiff in Anita’s ass, as he counted at least a dozen gunshots in the distance and muttered, “What the hell?”
Anita pleaded, “Don’t stop! Don’t stop! I wish for to feel you shooting love up into my bowels, my great bull!”
That sounded fair. The gunfight, if it was a gunfight, had to be going on at least two blocks away and he, for one, had no intention of running out naked to get into it. But though he managed to satisfy Anita, and himself as well, once he’d come in her again he rolled off, wiped his rather brown shaft with the drapes near the head of the bed, and said, “No shit, we’d better get dressed and ready to run. That much gunplay is bound to attract attention and we don’t exactly pay rent on this place!”
She grumbled but sat up and started to get dressed as Captain Gringo, still naked, clumped out in his boots to find out where Sanchez had spread their clothes to dry.
Sanchez hadn’t. When he got down to the kitchen, Captain Gringo found his and Gaston’s clothing still soaking in the sink and the beehive fireplace was still cold, or as cold as anything ever got in Limón. He called out, “Sanchez?” and got no answer. Gaston came in, wiping his own dong on a scrap of rag but otherwise armed. The little old Frenchman said, “I just heard shots. Where is that species of Sanchez?”
“Good question. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Oui, he said he was homesick. That was the direction he would have taken, too, the pin-headed species of asshole! Wait, I take that back, I’ve just been in an asshole and I feel sure it had more brains! How much time do you think we have, if there’s enough of him left to talk?”
Captain Gringo hauled out Gaston’s dripping pants and tossed them to him, saying, “Not long enough. Wring your duds out as best you can and let’s vamoose!”
As they both twisted wet linen as dry as it would get, Gaston asked, “What about the girls?”
Somewhere in the house a door slammed and Captain Gringo grimaced and replied, “Yeah, what about ’em? It wouldn’t have been smart to ask them to hide us, anyway. You know how stuffy Spanish-speaking guys can be when you fuck their womenfolk. Our hotel’s out, too. The local law may have a good description of me, at least, and how many tall blond Anglos could be staying there? I’d say what we need about now is a three-island tramp steamer, going almost anywhere else!”
“Oui, but alas, this is not the banana-loading season. So the last time I looked, the harbor was almost empty.” Gaston hauled on his wet pants, put on his wet shirt, and added with a shudder, “To think I was just complaining of the heat! How far do you think we can get, dripping and squishing, when everyone else in town is not only dry but indoors for La Siesta?”
Captain Gringo said, “I don’t know. But we can’t stay here!”
They both stiffened as out front someone started pounding on the door and a voice called out, “Policia! Open up!” Captain Gringo added, “See what I mean?”
*
Captain Gringo struck a match in the fetid darkness, gulped when he found himself staring a human skull in the face, and said, “Forget what I said about the sewers you just dragged me through! Where do you come up with these neat shortcuts, Gaston?”
Gaston chuckled and replied, “It could be worse. The adorable dead in the drier catacombs around Mexico City tend to mummify avec somewhat grotesque expressions on their dried-out faces.”
Captain Gringo held the match higher, illuminating other damp, mossy skulls grinning at them from the niches all around, and asked, “This is an improvement? Hey, what was that?”
“No doubt a rat,” said Gaston, adding, “Otherwise, there should be nobody here but us chickens, hein? Come, let us make the tracks before those adorable cops find someone who might have seen us leaping gayly over the graveyard wall, hein?”
The match had burned down and had to be shaken out. But the crypt they were in seemed simply a long narrow tunnel leading south to who knew where. Captain Gringo followed as Gaston felt his way along the damp walls. Said walls were cut out of the bedrock under Limón, which was either very firm marl or awfully soft limestone and, worse yet, niched in a sort of elongated honeycomb pattern with the mortal remains of one or more human beings on every shelf. Some of them had been stuffed in sort of sloppy, or fallen into odd positions as they decomposed, so every once in a while a bone stuck out to try for a handshake in the dark. The smell wasn’t so bad, considering. The catacomb smelled more like a mushroom cellar than what it was. Gaston had explained that the local custom was to bury people first in regular graves and then, as more space was needed in the modest churchyard, quietly dig up the bones and stack them like library books down here.
They’d made it out the back of the deserted house just as the Limón
P.D. was battering in the front door. Fortunately the bush league cops had neglected to cover the back at first. But whistles had been blowing at both ends of the alley as they’d been trying to decide their next move, so their next move had been back over the wall of the cathedral burial grounds and then, since the front was exposed to view from the main avenue to the east, behind the biggest tomb they could find. It had been Gaston’s idea to pick the lock of the bronze doors facing a wall some species of cop was bound to stick his adorable head over any minute.
They’d shoved their way into a spooky enough space no bigger than a peon’s kitchen and manhandled some handy lead-sheathed coffins in place to barricade the door once they’d found they couldn’t lock it from inside. Again it had been Gaston, feeling claustrophobic no doubt, who’d found the iron ring set in one of the stone slabs of the floor and decided it might be a meat idea to pull like hell and see what might be under it.
Captain Gringo had agreed, once they’d discovered at least one entrance to the catacombs that seemed to go with older Spanish-built cathedrals, that anything beat staying where they were until the cops got around to trying doors. So here they were, but where they were going was still up for grabs.
Gaston was sure the catacomb tunnel had to lead to the crypt under the cathedral, explaining, “It would never do to disturb the rest of the people in those expensive coffins we just left for the police to shove out of their way, hein? It makes more sense for the gravediggers to enter avec their grim loads via a more private entrance under the main building. The old Spanish were devoted to secret passages.”
Captain Gringo shrugged and said, “Some guys collect stamps. Some guys dig secret passages. But what was the point of having that entrance in that family crypt back there?”
“One imagines it was an exit, rather than an entrance, Dick. In times of trouble, and there was a lot of that going on around here during the turmoil of the twenties, the priesthood may have considered the advantages of a hidden passage to safety should a sudden mob come to church shouting about Libertad and saying rude things about His Most Catholic Majesty’s domesticated Spanish Church, hein? It never happened here in Costa Rica, the Costa Ricans being rather calm by nature next to some other Hispanics. But in Mexico some priests and worse yet, some nuns, were rather roughly handled in the first flush of democratic enthusiasm. Peasants who neither read nor write are a bit inclined to overdo Libertad. Ooops, end of the line! Some species of cochon has barred further progress with a door, locked from the other side, I fear!”
He started to strike a match. Captain Gringo said, “Don’t! I see a crack of light. Get out of the way. It looks as if lamplight from the far side is shining through between the door and the jamb.”
He traded places with Gaston and dropped to one knee to strain at the barely visible pencil line of dim light. He couldn’t have seen it at all had not his eyes adjusted to the darkness by now. He got out his knife, saying, “Yeah, there’s a break in the light that has to mean the bolt. I’ll just see if I can pry it up and … Damn, my pen knife is too short. Give me your snicker-snee.”
Gaston reached up to the damp nape of his shirt collar for the hidden hilt of the dagger few people knew he carried there until too late and produced the eight inches of cold steel, colder than ever after cooling all this time under a soggy shirt and jacket. Captain Gringo put his own knife away, took Gaston’s, and slid the longer blade in the slot to see which way the bolt wanted to go. Somewhere in the darkness behind them something rumbled like distant thunder and Gaston muttered, “Hurry. Unless we’re having a refreshing rain squall upstairs, the bastards have just broken into that tomb we were hoping they wouldn’t!”
Captain Gringo neither hurried nor hesitated as he probed with Gaston’s blade, found the bolt was a simple swing-up, and swung it up. Then he eased the door inward, peered out through the slit, and saw nothing more interesting than a candle sconce illuminating the cavernous arched crypt beyond. He whispered, “Let’s go. Keep it down to a roar.”
They naturally rebarred the door behind them and played peek-a-boo between the massive Romanesque pillars holding the floor of the cathedral above them up until they found a stone spiral stairway leading to a higher level. They eased up and peeked through the velvet curtains at the top. Captain Gringo said, “Shit, we’re right near the altar crossing, and it looks like a mass is about to begin!”
Gaston said, “Eh bien, the mass can’t last more than an hour or so and nobody should wish to visit the crypt during services, so why don’t we just sit tight and … Forget what I just said. Someone is pounding on that door down there! Try to look inconspicuous as we stroll up the side aisle for the main entrance, hein?”
Captain Gringo didn’t know what else to do. So he took a deep breath, stepped through the curtains with Gaston trailing, and nodded pleasantly to the little old nun he almost bumped noses with. She looked somewhat startled, but merely nodded in return as the two soldiers of fortune moved along the aisle, trying to keep the pillars between them and the robed churchmen doing something around the altar as other people filed in to take seats in the nave. Nobody seemed to be curious about them, but Captain Gringo felt as if he had at least a hundred-watt Edison bulb stuck in each ear as he walked primly as he knew how for what felt like a hundred miles.
Just as they’d almost made it to the open front door, lightning flashed outside and a mess of people dashed in, laughing or cursing depending on their natures, as it proceeded to rain cats and dogs outside. The last ones in were pretty soaked. Then the doorway was clear and they were about to step out into the rain. Only they didn’t. Because a mess of cops were coming up the steps, guns drawn, as wet as well as mad looking as wet hens!
The two soldiers of fortune ducked back inside. Gaston said, “Take a pew. Take any pew.” But Captain Gringo had already figured that was their only chance, so he got to the first empty seat. The two soldiers of fortune were sitting with the other worshippers, heads bowed, as the police tore in.
It didn’t work. One of the cops spotted Captain Gringo’s blond hair and Anglo Saxon features, muttered to his sergeant, then drew a bead on the two soldiers of fortune with his gun as the sergeant snapped, “You there, with the blond hair. Come out here and let us have a better look at you, eh?”
They hadn’t mentioned Gaston. So the little semi-invisible Frenchman muttered, “Try to bluff. I’ll cover you.” But Captain Gringo had already figured that out as well; he was rising with a blank, innocent expression on his face. The police sergeant said, “Si, usted. Over here, poco tiempo.”
Captain Gringo pasted a smile across his numb lips and moved out to the aisle. The police sergeant was grinning, too, wolfishly, and he had more men with him than Captain Gringo had bullets in his hidden .38.
But then the same little old nun came flustering out of nowhere to demand of the police sergeant, “What is the meaning of this, young man? How dare you enter the house of God with drawn guns? Can’t you see the mass is about to begin?”
The sergeant touched the bill of his cap respectfully and said, “Forgive us, sister. We mean no disrespect to you or God. We are in hot pursuit of two men who were just seen entering church property and this big foreigner answers the description of one of them!”
The nun stared thoughtfully at Captain Gringo, who was beginning to feel like a bug on a pin, then she asked the sergeant, “Did the men you seek come in through that front entrance?”
“Pero no, sister. We think they came in by way of the catacomb tunnel from the graveyard. We found a tomb that had been trifled with, judging from the fresh scratches on the bronze. The tunnels below are empty, but if they came up through the crypt—”
“They would have had to pass by me,” the old nun cut in, adding, “That is where I am usually stationed, during mass, by the votive candles to the dead, near the doorway to the crypt. I only came from there, just now, when I saw how rude you and your men were behaving! Shame on you wicked boys! Are you Protestants?”
The sergeant grinned sheepishly and replied, “Pero no! But this one looks like an Anglo who could be, no?”
The old nun stamped a tiny foot on the stone floor and said, “If you are not Protestants you are idiots. Can’t you see this young man is soaking wet?”
“His clothes do seem damp, but what of it, sister?”
“What of it, and you call yourselves police officers? It just started raining, no?”
“Si, but—”
“Use the heads God gave you!” she cut in, touching Captain Gringo’s damp sleeve to continue, “The poor boy is soaking wet, but as a better Catholic than you he dashed across the plaza for to attend mass anyway. The men you are searching for, whoever they are, would have been in the tunnels or who knows where when the storm broke only moments ago, no?”
The sergeant frowned at Captain Gringo, caught on, and said, “Si, forgive me, señor. I was not thinking. But you do look a lot like someone else we are searching for.” Then he turned to his men and said, “¡Vamanos, muchachos! If they did not duck in here, they must be somewhere else in the neighborhood. Let us fan out and proceed to knock on doors, eh?”
Captain Gringo waited, standing by the tiny old nun, until they’d gone back out into the rain. Then he nodded soberly down at the nun and said, “Thank you, sister. That was very kind of you, but why?”
She said, “I don’t know what you are talking about. It is my duty to see good Christians are not disturbed during mass and I know you are a good Christian, for I heard it from a priest. Go back to your pew and behave yourself until the mass is over, señor.”
But as he turned away to do just as she said, she couldn’t help giving a sweet little giggle and adding, “I can’t wait to tell Mother Superior I just made Captain Gringo attend at least one mass for the good of his soul!”
*
Considering that the old priest conducting the post-siesta mass was considered a bit long-winded even by his admirers, and considering he was being considerate enough to drag the services out until the tropic squall let up outside, that was one short mass to Captain Gringo and Gaston!