by Lou Cameron
The Home of Great Western Fiction!
Captain Gringo dodges death in revolution-torn Mazatlán!
First he gets double-crossed by a beautiful black-hearted blonde. Then he’s cold-cocked by an American officer obsessed with bringing “The Renegade” to the U.S. for hanging. If that isn’t enough, he’s got himself trapped in the middle of a bloody revolution—and either side would be happy to separate his head from his shoulders. But Captain Gringo’s greatest threat won’t come in the heat of battle—it’ll come in the heat of blood-boiling lust from a supple and sensuous señorita who knows the way to a man’s heart is definitely not through his stomach.
RENEGADE 17: SLAUGHTER IN SINALOA
By Lou Cameron, writing as Ramsay Thorne
First Published by Warner Books in 1983
Copyright © 1983, 2016 by Lou Cameron
First Smashwords Edition: November 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.
Captain Gringo wasn’t looking for a woman or any other kind of trouble as he sat alone at a sidewalk cantina table facing the main plaza of San José. The sun was setting, so the evening paseo would be starting soon. Captain Gringo didn’t intend to take part in it. The paseo was a neat way to pick up muchachas. But he had a muchacha, one who’d be getting off work in about an hour. He’d been keeping company with her since getting back to the comparative safety of San José, and he saw no need to look for another. The girls of Costa Rica were renowned for their good looks and relatively sweet dispositions. Old Maria lived up to the rep and then some. So why change horses in midstream?
Captain Gringo didn’t intend to. It made him appreciate his pleasantly passionate Maria even more, to sit here sipping cerveza in smug anticipation as the purple shadows lengthened, the trade winds promised a cool long night of loving, and the losers started prowling out there in the plaza.
The paseo wasn’t a bad way to meet a broad, if a guy liked to walk a lot. The way the game was played down here in the tropics was perhaps more civilized, or at least less complicated, than the way a guy got laid back in the States. After supper, all the single lads and lassies told the old folks they were going for a stroll to settle their tummies. Then, everyone who wasn’t married, going steady, or deformed, headed for the plaza. The guys circled the plaza one way. The gals strolled against the male current. Since it was understood that proper young ladies wouldn’t think of speaking to or even smiling at a gentleman they’d never been introduced to, their usual chaperons stayed home by tacit agreement. The results were predictable, albeit sometimes exhausting. A guy was almost supposed to bump into an oncoming señorita at least three times as each circled the whole damned square before he got around to nodding at her in passing. She, of course, paid no attention to him until he’d nodded politely a half-dozen times or so and given her a chance to check out all the other good-looking guys at the paseo that evening. If she decided on anyone, she had the option of nodding back, or, if she was really hot, smiling.
The civilized part was that nobody ever had to feel rejected. If an ugly girl wasn’t nodded to by a boy she fancied, she could always tell herself he was too shy to make advances. It worked as well for ugly boys. No gal ever told him she thought he was a miserable toad. She just went on ignoring him until he decided she was too shy, too. The paseo lasted until everyone had met somebody or gotten too tired walking to give a damn. Captain Gringo watched with an indulgent smile as the fun and games began. The early arrivals, as usual, were the very young and/or very desperate. There was nothing in a skirt out there a grown man would want to mess with.
So he kept an eye on the guys until he had them all checked out as harmless locals he’d seen before. He and his sidekick, Gaston, were as safe here in San José as two wanted outlaws could be in any part of Latin America. But that was no reason to start being careless. Costa Rica had a relatively stable government and no extradition treaty with any of the countries where Captain Gringo and Gaston Verrier were wanted. But when a knock-around guy has a dead-or-alive price on his head, he can’t afford bad habits. Letting down one’s guard was a bad habit that a Yank wanted for desertion, murder, and fighting on the losing side more than once could ill afford!
Getting drunk was another. So, he nursed his schooner of cerveza and lit a Havana claro while he watched the paseo and waited for Maria. Old Gaston, too, had said he might drop by the plaza that evening. The two soldiers of fortune hadn’t spent as much time together as usual since coming back to San José. The whole point of this informal furlough in one of the few banana republics that saw no need of their services had been to see a little less of each other. Gaston was about the only guy down here whom Captain Gringo could trust, up to a point, but they’d been getting on each other’s nerves, as well as watching each other’s back, of late in the field. Aside from being pretty fair fighting men, the two soldiers of fortune had little in common. Gaston Verrier was old enough to be the tall American’s father. Captain Gringo was a West Point-trained ex-officer of the U.S. Army. Old Gaston had deserted the French Legion as a gunnery sergeant. The only things they really agreed on was that it probably felt bad to get killed and it definitely felt better to sleep with almost any woman than with each other.
But, though each had gone his own way since escaping back to Costa Rica after that last wild job up north, their funds and hence their vacation time were beginning to run low. Gaston had said he knew a guy who knew another guy who might have a job for them. Captain Gringo hoped Maria would show up first. They weren’t that broke, and Maria hadn’t started to nag him yet.
He knew she would in another Week or so. Dames were like that. It just couldn’t be helped. Men and women both deserved something better than each other. But there wasn’t anything else he wanted to try, so what the hell. Meanwhile, he and old Maria were still in the honeymoon stage of their relationship. So, she probably wouldn’t start nagging him to marry her and get a decent job for … oh, maybe another week or so. He’d been sleeping with her for three, had enough cash to last a full month, and that was why they called it a honeymoon, right?
A willowy brunette with an organdy rose pinned to the hip of her red fandango skirt smiled down at Captain Gringo as she passed his table. He didn’t smile back. He had to think about that, and he knew she’d be back as she completed her circuit of the plaza.
He blew a thoughtful smoke ring after her and watched her hips sway as the smoke made a bull’s-eye of her ass. She swayed good, and her face wasn’t bad, either. He wondered, idly, why she’d flirted with him so soon. Captain Gringo didn’t suffer false modesty. His mirror and more than one woman had assured him he wasn’t a bad-looking guy when he’d had a shave and wasn’t mad at anybody. The muchacha in the red skirt was of course Hispanic, and he supposed his blond hair and Anglo features were a novelty to her. From the bold way she walked, he figured she knew all the local talent worth knowing, in a biblical sense. She could be a puta. It was an unwritten rule of the paseo that neither whores nor married women were supposed to pick guys up like that in the plaza. But if everyone in Latin America obeyed all the rules, soldiers of fortune like himself and Gaston wouldn’t get nearl
y as many job offers.
He decided to pass on her offer. She was as pretty as Maria and offered a very interesting change of pace, but he’d learned, the hard way, that when dames down here acted too good to be true, they generally were.
He’d nursed his beer to a stale puddle in the bottom of the schooner by now. He looked at his watch, saw he still had time to kill, and held up a finger to the waiter lounging in the doorway under the awning.
The waiter ducked inside to get him another. Meanwhile, a woman with ash-blond hair and wearing a black dress sat down uninvited across from him at the tin table. He didn’t say anything. He had to think about this, too.
She was dressed like a European or North American, with a matching small black hat and veil perched atop her upswept blond hair. The veil covered her face to the tip of her nose. But she looked familiar as well as very, very pretty. As he tried to place her, she said, “I heard you were in town, Dick. I’m still very cross with you, but I need your help again.”
The waiter came back with Captain Gringo’s cerveza. The waiter looked surprised to see the blonde sitting there. That made two of them. The tall Yank asked the girl what she was drinking, and when she said gin and tonic, the waiter said he’d be right on it.
As soon as they were alone again, she said, “I have to run over to the west coast and pick up something in Puntarenas. It’s over fifty miles, and they tell me bandits have been stopping the stagecoaches again.”
He didn’t answer. He knew the face. But the world was full of ash-blondes, and somehow everything didn’t fit together right in his memory. She asked, “Is your friend Gaston still working with you, Dick?”
He said, “Maybe. I hadn’t heard about banditos on the Puntarenas Trail. Costa Rica has a pretty good national guard, and if anyone’s gone into business for himself in the hills to the west, I’m sure your coach will rate an armed escort. I’m an ordnance officer, not a professional bodyguard. I doubt you’d want to pay my going rates, even if you could afford ’em.”
The waiter came back out and put her drink in front of her before she said, a bit coldly, “I already paid you, Dick. I gave you a thousand dollars in Cayenne that time, and you never showed up as we’d agreed, remember?”
He remembered that time, and the dame who had almost gotten him killed. He studied her new hair and dress as he let blue smoke trickle out his nostrils. Then he nodded and said, “You used to be a brunette with a phony French accent. They told us later that you were a German agent working to stir up more trouble for the French over the Dreyfus affair. I thought you’d been arrested, Claudette.”
“Pooh, and I heard you’d been eaten by crocodiles on the Hondo. Never mind who I’m working for these days, Dick. The point is that I gave you earnest money and you never showed up to do the job!”
He took a sip of cerveza and said, “We showed. Gaston and I went to the address you gave us and walked into a goddamn ambush. I didn’t see you there when those effing bounty hunters shot it out with us. We blasted every sonofabitch laying for us, and they were all in your house in Cayenne!”
She looked sincerely startled as she said, “But Dick, there was no gunfight at the address I gave you! Why would we have … wait, I remember. There was a gunfight that night in Cayenne! It happened about two blocks away from where we were to meet. But not at the address I gave you. I swear it!”
He nodded and said, “Gaston and me figured it out later. A Yankee bounty hunter called Klondike set us up by marking phony house numbers with chalk. That still means somebody in that phony-baloney rescue operation of yours was in on it. Klondike never had time to give me all the details when I turned the tables on him. He died sort of sudden.”
She wrinkled her pert nose and said, “I can’t tell you if one of the other agents working with me played us false or not. It is true most of them were picked up by the French constabulary, thanks to a tip from you and British Intelligence, you mean old thing. As you see, I got away. What are we going to do about that thousand-dollar advance, Dick?”
It was a good question. Captain Gringo had about eight hundred in cash at the moment and needed it all. He sipped some cerveza as she said, “I paid you to help me and you never delivered. Now I need help again. It’s only fifty miles or so, Dick.”
He didn’t answer. She said, “They say it’s an overnight trip by stage. You can be back here by this weekend, and as for a few bandits—”
“Screw the bandits.” He growled, adding, “It’s you I’m worried about. Tell me more about this job of yours. Are you still working for Der Kaiser, Claudette?”
“Of course not. Like yourself, I work for the highest bidder, and we both know the Brits broke up that operation in Cayenne. I’m working for a private syndicate now. French, if you have to know their nominal nationality. You know, of course, about the stalled Panama Canal situation?”
“Yeah. One of the reasons it’s stalled was because of Gaston and me helping out some Panamanian rebels a while back. I’m not about to go to Panama City with you, Claudette. The Colombian authorities down there don’t like me, and they’ve got a Colonel Maldonado working for them who’s almost as good as me!”
“Pooh, I said I only wanted to dash over to the Costa Rican seaport of Puntarenas. We’ll be coming right back.”
“We? You mean it’s a round trip? You must want to be guarded pretty good, Claudette. Which way are you headed and to deliver what?”
She hesitated, then said, “If you must know, I am to meet a coastal schooner in Puntarenas. They’re going to give me something. I am to see it gets back here to the capital. That’s all there is to the mission.”
He took out his watch to check the time. She said, “You owe me money, darling.”
That was true. He knew she’d called him darling to remind him of other things she might think he still owed her, damn it. He felt a tingle in his pants and tried to ignore it. The pale cool Claudette was built nothing at all like his short dusky Maria, and he couldn’t help wondering if Claudette had bleached her hair all over.
On the other hand, the adventuress across the table was about as safe to handle as an open bucket of bushmasters, and, while her story made some sense, he couldn’t help remembering the last time he’d made a date with her. He’d walked into a machine-gun ambush at close quarters!
She reached a hand across the table and placed it on the back of his as she slid a high-button shoe tip against his mosquito boot under the table and said, softly, “I don’t have anyone else to turn to, Dick. I don’t have enough money to hire any local bravos. I don’t get paid until I deliver. But if you get me and a certain package back from Puntarenas safe and sound, I may be able to swing a bonus for you and Gaston.”
As if he’d heard his name being paged, Gaston Verrier materialized out of nowhere and sat down between them, saying, “You are looking lovely this evening, m’mselle. One must assume the French constabulary failed in their duties again?”
Claudette smiled wanly and said, “Good-evening, M’sieur Verrier. I am flattered you remembered me at once. I fear Dick, here, may have trouble remembering old, ah, friends.”
Gaston shrugged and said, “He is younger and better-looking than I. So naturally he has more, ah, friends to remember.”
Then Gaston turned to Captain Gringo and said, “Speaking of friends, Dick, I just came from the bodega where your Maria is employed. They are taking inventory this evening and she asked me to tell you she may be very late, hein?”
Claudette sniffed and said, “Maria, eh? I might have known. But about that thousand dollars, Dick …”
Captain Gringo shushed her with a wave of his cigar as he turned to Gaston and asked, “Could we scrape up a thousand to spare between us, Gaston?”
Gaston shook his head and said, “Mais non, all the banks are closed for the night, my old and impossibly generous. I thought we had settled the matter of that droll cash advance in Cayenne, hein?”
Gaston turned to Claudette and said, “You hired us to
meet you at a certain place with a view to doing something about the trés fatigué affaire Dreyfus. Eh bien, we went to the address you gave us and nearly got shot. And later, when we were dragged into the business about Captain Dreyfus despite ourselves and tried to rescue him from Devil’s Island, he said he did not wish to be rescued since he had friends in Paris working on a full pardon for him at the moment. Add it all up, m’mselle, and you can see we owe you nothing for the modest front money you offered us, non?”
“Offered like hell! I gave you two scamps a thousand dollars, U.S.!”
“Now, now, let us not get picky, m’mselle. The point is that whether we did exactly as you asked or not, we don’t have the money anymore. So why are we having this tedious discussion, hein?”
She repeated to Gaston her plans about running over to the west coast and back. Captain Gringo kicked him under the table, but Gaston still asked Claudette what she was supposed to pick up and deliver.
She looked down hesitantly, sighed, and said, “Oh, very well. If you must know, it’s emeralds. Colombia has this ridiculous export duty on gemstones the damned old Andes are absolutely filled with, and—”
“I see the light,” Gaston cut in, adding, “Your friends cannot take emeralds out via the usual railroad across Panama province because of the fatigué customs officials in both Panama City and Colon. On the other hand, Costa Rica takes a more casual attitude than the Colombian junta and tends not to notice visitors who don’t happen to be biting anyone on the shin at the moment. That, of course, is why Dick and I lay up here between jobs, and why you and your syndicate find it such a friendly country to do business in, hein?”
She said, “Exactly. As I just told Dick, here, there is no danger involved in meeting the schooner and picking up the rough emeralds. I was planning to make the run alone, until I heard there were bandits in the hills to the west.”
Gaston smiled noncommittally as he stared at Captain Gringo. The tall American said nothing. Claudette said, “I’ll forget the thousand and pay you each a hundred a day after we get back. I don’t have a machine gun for you, but I have a brace of .44-40 Winchesters if you need them.”