Chapter Thirty-Three
The towns of the Nayarit coast present foreign travelers with some exotic contrasts. In Buenas Peras, now commonly called Peritas, you can stand in the tower room of the Los Arcos restaurant, and look out the open space that was a wall before El Nino’s storms toppled all the nice places along the stone-trimmed malecón and carved away most of the wide beach and covered everything in rubble, and you’ll be looking south along a postcard-perfect tropical beach with leaning palms, white coral sand, squadrons of pelicans, and inverted hulls of wooden fishing boats. To experience the contrast, all it takes is a glance up the main street at a dusty cowtown full of men in boots and Stetsons, shuffling livestock, rusty pickups, and rodeo posters. Cowpokes idly twirling lassos while their bored horses clop down the cobblestone streets are as common a sight as the surfers bobbing on the big breaks at the river mouth berm.
So Torres and Morales blended right in as they sidled their ponies past the cinema (double feature of a Cantinflas film and “Police Academy 3” doing business as “Academia de Locos”) and the “Flor de Michoacan” popsicle parlor, then poked very slowly past the glass front of the BanComer branch. Just two more cowboys down to town for whatever thrill a guy could buy in Peritas, not even noteworthy for the odd way the blankets draped over their saddles hung down several feet on each side.
The two gangsters noted that the bank was as full of gringo retirees cashing money orders and travelers checks as they had hoped it would be. More to the point, there were no cops. So the men just loitered their nags near the bank’s front doors and did nothing to stop the battered panel truck from driving up and double parking right in front. Torres had wondered why the truck stopped abruptly in front of the La Korita drugstore then moved steadily on down the street past the trees, sleeping dogs and hicks sitting on curbs. He didn’t know that the gringa had been trying to get Martillo to wait while she ran in the store for a few quick purchases, and he had refused fairly harshly on the grounds that the course of a heist was no time to be buying lipstick.
Nobody paid much attention to the truck, either; one more lumpy Dina looking like an off-kilter Suburban. Then Dancy Russell got out and started walking down the sidewalk wearing a very minimal bikini top and Levi’s cut short enough to show little white moons of butt over her world-class golden legs and nobody noticed much else. Her stride was even more inflammatory than usual, since she was in a tail-twitching snit at Martillo for not letting her stock up on cosmetics. Even the women stared, roughly divided between scowling disapproval and a bottomless envy. It is doubtful that anyone even saw four men get out of the back of the truck and walk into the bank–or even the two horsemen slipping them machine guns from under their blankets.
Across the street in her sandwich shop, Doña Toña Alvirez watched Dancy parading the street in next to nothing and clucked to herself over the shamelessness of gringas. She had even seen them sunning themselves stark naked over on the beaches at Chacala and Los Ayala. Which was actually better than wearing a suit like that one, come to think of it. More straightforward at any rate.
Once she turned off the main street Dancy broke into a jog, racing down the block while plunging her hands into her large beach bag. As she ducked into the open gate of “Bloqueria Gomez”, she was already shrugging into a long, shapeless gray frock. She quickly threaded her way through the courtyard and sheds inside, pulling a beach towel over her shoulders like a rebozo. The place was a tile and block factory, where the workers were pouring cement slurry into molds, then using a manual press to squeeze the “ceramic” tiles tight enough to handle. Predictably, they gaped at Dancy, one of them hanging from the long handle of the press where he’d been bouncing like a monkey for greater pressure. She drew out a pop-up sunhat, let its wide brim snap open, then bent over to pour her hair into it, transfixing the bloqueros. When she reached the opposite door, she turned and struck a model’s pose then “flashed” open her wrap at the tile-makers, blew them a kiss, dashed out the door and ran up to the main drag buttoning the frock then calmly rounded the corner and walked into the bank doors. Morales had gone to get the stolen pickup they’d left on the next block, but his horse was tied to a gutted parking meter in front of the bank and Torres was there to give her a pirate grin and a submachine gun. Holding the gun under her skirts (and, truth to tell, rubbing it against her rather excited crotch) she walked into the bank like gangbusters.
Dancy’s re-emergence didn’t escape notice in the sandwich shop. Just as Doña Toña was awarding grudging approval to the gringa for covering herself up, she saw her step in the bank door and take a short, ugly firearm out of her dress. Doña Toña batted her eyes–this was one gringa that would bear watching. She squinted into the dark interior of the bank and could see people moving around instead of standing still in line. She turned around and shuffled slowly back into the shop where six of her children were huddled around a fritzing TV set watching a snowy semblance of the Disney Channel. She turned off the TV and told Reuben, the oldest of her brood, to bring a chair out front for her. She settled into the chair on the sidewalk, her kids came out and sat in a line on the stoop. Reuben and passed a bag of chips down the line of kids keeping an expectant eye on the bank.
Dancy slid into the bank with a lax smile, her eyes and gun sweeping the room for challenge. The line of customers still stretched entirely around the inside of the bank, but now they all had their hands clasped behind their heads and their eyes fastened on Santiamen and Ramos, who were looking quite capable of shooting them down for lunch meat. The two pretty young tellers were by the barred door of the vault, quivering like frightened mares in the lecherous clutches of Maldonado and Regalado. Martillo was having a heart-to-heart with the branch manager, who seemed very co-operative, as well as flabbergasted by Martillo’s mask.
He was the only masked member of the gang. since he was the one readily recognizable. Dancy had chosen the mask from the remains of Armando’s huge collection. It was carved wood, featuring the bearded face, elaborately curled hair, and glaring gaze of a biblical patriarch–but with a large red scorpion passed through his head, curving, steel-spiked tail coming out of one ear and the evil agate eyes from the other. It wouldn’t have looked half so surrealistic, though, without Martillo’s buff Stetson perched on top of it. Martillo had groused, “It’s just some stupid Indio superstitious thing.”
“It’s perfect,” Dancy had told him over his understandable objections, “Nobody will remember anything else about any of us.”
“I think they might remember somebody looking like Faye Dunaway,” he’d said. But Dancy was rooting among the other masks. “Too bad they don’t have some kind of codpiece,” she mumbled, “A nice beaded combat dildo with lobster claws or something.”
Martillo had to have “codpiece” and “dildo” explained. He grimaced, “How about if I just run in with a naked hard-on and a gun in each hand?”
“I like it,” Dancy crowed. “A lot. But not this time. You’ve gotta keep back something for the sequel.”
Martillo had made his preliminary announcements in both Spanish and English, and the Mexicans customers looked very cowed by his remarks and the cavalier display of firepower. Some foreigners, however, were just disgruntled, arrogant and ignorant enough to put up some guff. One bandy-legged, barrel-chested old fart with tufts of white hair sticking out his ears like a goat and “Navy Chief, Retired” practically tattooed on his forehead, rolled up to Ramos saying, “Look here, Peedro.” He thought of himself as a local hand because he’d owned a house in Peritas for twenty years, although he spoke no Spanish and knew no locals; that he was a shrewd investor because he had $30,000 in the BanComer at 95% interest, although that rate didn’t even match the peso’s inflation; and that he had a natural authority over Mexican riffraff, although nobody had understood his barked orders around the town and only humored him out of a pious regard for the feeble-minded.
He demanded that they get their butts out of the bank and quit pestering American bigod citizens. Ramos grinned, stuck the tip of a machine gun in the old salt’s mouth, pointed at his massive gold Omega, snapped his fingers for it. “What are you gonna do, Julio, shoot an American citizen?” the old guy cawed around the gun barrel.
“Not at all,” Dancy Russell snapped from behind him. As he turned, glad to deal with somebody intelligent enough to speak American, she went on. “We’re going slap your silly face.” She gave a full backhand swing that snapped through the bank like a pistol shot, almost knocking the geezer off his feet. “Then we’ll kick you in your used-up old nuts.” She did that so well he didn’t even cry out, just hit the floor unconscious. “Then I’ll just sit on your face while I go through your pockets and decide whether to cut off your shriveled old pecker and toast it over a campfire.” She plunked down on his face and looked around the other tourists. “Is there anyone else who doesn’t understand that they should give us everything they have and hope to God it’s enough?” There was a rapid tattoo of purses, wallets and watches hitting the floor. Dancy bounced up, curtsied and said, “Very good, now for short arm inspection and pap smears.”
The rudimentary vault had been locked only with a key, which had been forthcoming very fast when Torres and Santiamen loomed over the manager. Regalado and Maldonado whooped inside, rifling stacks of cash and documents and tossing them into sacks like demented Santas gone way bad. Torres looked at the deposit boxes sadly. “If only we could get into those. That’s where they keep the real money, the virgin wool.”
Santiamen agreed, “Gold,” he rumbled, “And dollars. Not these damned pesos.”
“Well, I don’t see any way to get into them other than drilling the locks one by one. Damn shame.”
Santiamen grunted, spit eloquently on the miserly little boxes, and lumbered out of the vault at Torres’ heels.
Maldonado and Regalado were stunned by this frustrating information and stared at the boxes in a mixture of awe and indignation. “Next time we’ll just blow the whole mother and pick up what’s left,” Regalado predicted.
Maldonado could really see the wisdom in that. “The boss should get one of those helicopters.”
Regalado’s eyes widened at his remembrance of the helicopter act, “Yeah, a motherless helicopter. You said it, compa. He wagged an admonitory finger at the offending boxes, “Next time we’ll bust your mother and take a look up your skirts, you little chingamadres.”
Meanwhile Dancy was having more luck and good clean fun with the unsecured valuables about the persons of customers. She snatched a gaudy necklace off the leather-skinned neck of a ridiculously over-tanned woman wearing large round sunglasses and a T-shirt with a big red valentine and the words “I” and “Detroit”.
“Tacky enough, but maybe worth something if the stones are real.” Dancy nonchalantly draped the necklace around her neck with five others. “You should know better than to wear stuff like that on the street. I mean, Detroit, for God’s sake.”
“And who the hell are you, you little bitch,” the woman snorted, “An appraiser?”
Dancy turned to Martillo in astonishment, “See how soon they forget?” She turned back to the woman and stuck the chopper barrel into a sun-baked nostril as she introduced herself, “I’m Patty Fuckin’ Hearst. And introducing my merry men, the Semiautomatic Libertine Army. We make our money the old-fashioned way. We kill people and take it.”
Her crusty toughness cracked, the woman made an involuntary start with her hand, which brought Dancy’s eye to her large diamond solitaire. She grabbed the hand and whistled in admiration. “No, that’s my wedding ring,” the woman wailed, “Thirty seven years!”
“I’d feel sorry for your husband, but he apparently had enough money to spare him some of the horror,” Dancy commiserated. The woman jerked back into her normal vitriolic mode and spat out, “It won’t come off anyway.”
Dancy held the finger captive while reaching out towards Ramos and snapping her fingers. “Forceps,” she barked, “Scalpel.”
Terrified, the woman yelled, “No, no, wait!” and started trying to push the ring off. Her struggles and sweating increased as Ramos sauntered over, groping in the pockets of his coveralls. She was at the point of fainting when he extracted a pair of side-cutters, murmured “Con su permiso,” and snipped off the ring to present it to Dancy with a courtly flourish.
Dancy started off, admiring the ring, then stepped back, grabbed the woman’s sunglasses and put them on. “We’re just gangsters, lady,” she explained, “Gangsters of love.”
Nobody else gave Dancy the slightest trouble as she stripped their purses and pockets. While the Mexican customers kept nervous eyes on Santiamen as armed bear and Martillo as avatar of the Scorpion God protocols, the gringos unanimously rolled their eyes to follow Dancy; silently apprehensive as she did Paula Abdul steps around the lobby, cramming their stuff in her bag while singing to herself, “Money, it’s a crime…”
The only hitch was the manager. The man had been a shambles from the first, sweating and trembling. But when Santiamen pulled him to his feet and told him to be a good little hostage or else, the man turned gray and grabbed for his chest, nearly fainting. Both of the tellers gasped and the shorter, prettier one tried to run to help him, brought up short by Maldonado’s arm across her chest and fingers around her right tit. At her first movement Ramos had reflexively jerked his gun up to cover her, but she dared it, sobbing, “No, no, his heart…his surgery…oh, please don’t!”
The girl shrugged free of Maldonado’s groping and brushed past Ramos’ gun, running to where the manager had slumped back into his chair and falling on her knees beside him. “You can’t take him, you’ve hurt him enough. Take me instead.”
Annoyed, Martillo stepped over to the desk and tore open the sweat-stained white shirt. There was no mistaking the shiny red scar and raw stitch marks up the sternum. The man was deeply shaken, but licked his lips and said, “No. I’m okay. Leave the girls alone.”
Impressed by these sudden flourishes of courage and devotion, Martillo turned to Santiamen and ordered, “He’d just die on us. Take the girls instead.” The big man nodded as though he’d already assumed that much and gently pulled the sobbing teller off the man and motioned Regalado to take the other girl over to the door. At the sight of the tall girl’s pale, shocked face and shaky step the manager stirred in his chair, begging Martillo, “No, please. Take me and leave the girls. They’re just kids. I’ll be all right.”
Martillo growled that all the bravery was very touching but the girls were hostage and that was that. He leaned his hideous mask down into the manager’s face, as though menacing him, and said in a low, soft voice, “Don’t worry about the girls. No harm will come to them. I promise you that.” The manager stared at the grotesque persona in amazement, as though it had just occurred to him there was a human behind it.
As Santiamen slung his gun and gathered up most of the bags, Maldonado and Regalado hustled the girls to the door, restraining their more overt feel-copping under Ramos’ frown. Dancy finished gathering wallets and glanced at the girls. “Good thinking, boys,” she congratulated them, “Man doesn’t live by bread alone.”
As they formed up in the door for their dash to the car, Ramos and Torres covering the crowd for their withdrawal, she frowned and said, “But isn’t it more traditional to throw the women over your shoulders?”
“We’re robbing the bank,” Martillo snapped, “Not sacking the town.”
“Ah, right,” she shrugged, “One step at a time.”