Chapter Thirty-Four
As the gang burst out of the bank Dancy, instead of getting in the back of the truck with the hostages as planned, untied Torres’ horse and swung up on it as the truck doors all slammed. Only Morales and Torres, at the wheels of the getaway trucks, saw her. She had the pony figured out before it took five steps; young, poor quality, skittish enough for about anything. She took him in hand and headed him out into the street.
As the trucks pulled away from the curb Martillo saw her cutting across towards the park. Torres saw her too and braked the panel so suddenly that Morales bumped its rear end with the pickup. The whole gang watched Dancy canter over to the park and jump the three-foot white stone fence that supported the huge gilt bust of Padre Hidalgo. She went right to the center and up the stairs of the little bandstand as the whole town stared in universal wonder. Rearing the horse and spinning it around, she fired a burst into the air then smoothly recovered as the terrified horse tore off the platform and back into the street. At a full, dusty gallop she waved her hat, then scaled it away to let her hair blow free. She plunged past the taco venders, sidewalk stalls, and gawking campesinos, firing at the signs that stuck out above the rooftops. She punched 9mm holes through the ads for “La Isleña” liquors, “El Nayar” hardware, and “Luna de Miel” bar as she charged out towards the highway.
Torres was already accelerating. It was only his first bank job and evidently a highly unorthodox one at that, but he knew better than to stick around admiring the craziness of a gringa. He said, “Jefe?”
“Follow her,” Martillo said. “We’ll catch her on the highway.”
From the back, Ramos said, “Not until she’s out of bullets, I hope.”
She was waiting at the crossing. She jumped off the horse and fired a last burst into the air, then yelled at Peritas in general, “Too rad for you!”
“You could have just called the police and saved bullets,” Martillo grumped as she hopped in the panel’s rear doors.
“I think they got the word as soon as we were out the door, sugar. I just couldn’t resist. I mean how often does a girl get the chance to shoot up a town?”
Martillo said nothing as the two trucks blasted up the grade towards the hills to the south, making it clear he didn’t care for the cinematic school of bank jobs. But Regalado and Maldonado, sitting like tail gunners in the back of the pickup, approved enthusiastically. “I told him,” Maldonado swore, “We should have done it on horseback. How would the cops catch us if we’re in the jungle, not on the road?”
“That bandida mother has got it right,” Regalado agreed, “On horseback, all balls and a cloud of gunsmoke–a todo madre.” The gang had almost forgotten her as a sex object–she had big balls and that was that.
Doña Toña and her kids had been enjoying the hold-up, especially the equitation exhibition, which Reuben claimed was as good as the cabalcadas and rodeos the local charros put on. But when Dancy started shooting, she wondered if she hadn’t been rash letting the kids come outside. Especially when she heard a bullet whack into the sign above her shop. When the trucks had gone, she sent Reuben across the street to inspect it and was not surprised to hear that their plywood likeness of Condorito, the brash little condor that is Latin America’s answer to Bugs Bunny, had taken a round right in the gizzard. Doña Toña nodded as if she’d expected as much. A souvenir of the hold-up should be good for business. She wondered if the gringa had aimed the shot. Probably. Those hussies always seemed to know what they were about.
It only took the gang twenty minutes to reach the first turnoff, and another fifteen to climb to the end of the dirt road where they had stashed the hijacked bakery truck at a tiny rancho. While they hastily transferred the hostages and money sacks into the step van, Martillo and Ramos debated a change of plans on the hostages. They had planned to keep the manager with them until the last minute, then abandon him on the treacherous, twisting road they would take over the mountain to Bahia Mantechen. But the tall girl was so obviously in deep hysterical shock that Dancy felt sorry for her, even apprehensive that she might drop dead on them. They decided to leave her at the rancho, where the Señora clucked sympathetically and started cooking her something.
They loaded the other girl into the truck and crept back down to the highway, turning back towards the north. The big truck was painted with the name and design of Bimbo, Mexico’s largest bread company, and was therefore virtually invisible on the road. Dancy hadn’t missed the chance to pose for several pictures, mugging with guns and bandoliers under the big Bimbo logo. She hadn’t bothered to explain the pictures to Martillo, or her burst of laughter at her first sight of the truck. “It’s a gringo thing,” was all she’d say.
Ramos and Santiamen drove the getaway trucks down almost to the highway, then out into a fallow tobacco field, where they punctured their gas tanks and set them on fire. Dancy and Torres watched out the rear windows as the Bimbo truck drove off and were rewarded by seeing both trucks explode into roiling balls of red flame.
Doña Toña watched the pursuit being organized. One exception to the general ban on guns in Mexico is that charros can carry pistols as part of their costume, so the posse consisted of local charros with heavy decoration-encrusted revolvers and a few state policemen carrying M-16’s and M-2 carbines. During the forming up and deploying there was a lot of excited jabbering and a lot of drinking. Also, gracias a Dios, a lot of sandwiches and beer purchased off the street from Reuben and the two oldest girls. By the time the posse lit out after the owlhoots, every pickup had a contingent of charros standing in the back like charioteers, pistols in one hand and bottles of Tequila or Pacifico in the other. More shots were fired into the air as they whooped out after justice. Those bandidos are the safest people in Nayarit right now, Doña Toña thought.
After awhile Arturo, the bank manager, came over for a much-needed cold beer. He said he’d gotten away from the bandits a lot easier than from the police interrogators and would probably not live long enough to see the end of the bank examiners and tabloid reporters from “Alarma!”. She asked his impression of the gringa and he rolled his eyes upward and touched his hand to his cleaved breastbone. She was a beautiful insane demon, he told her, a true angel from hell. Which was the way Doña Toña had figured it all along.
Martillo drove, since he was the only one who’d been masked. As they tooled right through the Peritas crossing, everyone ducked but Martillo, who cut his eyes down the main street of the town to gauge the milling around and count the trucks full of excited men. They pulled along sedately to the cutoff just past Las Varas, then headed up into the mountains on a road so sinuous, rutted, and overgrown as to be almost impassable. But they could squeeze past, and the road would eventually lead them over to Santa Cruz on Mantechen Bay, where Martillo’s Buick and a van were garaged in a sugar cane barn.
The posse would find the burned vehicles pretty quickly and start searching the web of roads to the south. By then they’d have left the bread truck in the barn, where it would sit for a month until the cane harvest. They would leave the pretty teller at a tiny farm commune halfway over the hill, where it would be at least three days before she could get out. Then they would zip straight up to the main highway, come through Tepic from the north, and be safely home by nightfall.
In the back of the lurching Bimbo truck, Dancy had been studying the frightened bank teller. “You know,” she told her, “You’re not a bad-looking kid.”
“She can’t understand you,” Martillo said from the front seat.
“Oh, she understands,” Dancy said, “Female vanity is a universal language.” She leaned across the scared Mexicana, who twisted around to face her, pushing back against Regalado’s shoulder. She slid a fingernail under the chain of the small gold crucifix and dangled it teasingly against the girl’s sweating cleavage. The girl gasped and Morales turned around to see what was going on and was rewarded when Dancy said, “Lemme see something here,” and tore the girl’s blouse open. She eyed the soft, prominent mounds quivering in black lace cups. The girl was at the point of desperation but froze, eyes and nostrils flaring wide, when Dancy pulled out Armando’s black and silver switchblade and snicked it open. Martillo glanced back at the sound and the truck yawed at his surprise, “What the devil are you doing?” he yelled.
“Just inspecting the booty,” Dancy drawled. “Well, the boobies, really, You just watch the road; this is girl talk.”
She slid the blade under the bra between the cups, then twisted it and whipped it away from the girl’s ribs, slashing the bra and letting her breasts tumble free. Carefully closing the knife and pocketing it, she reached for the bra cups. The girl’s hands fluttered up, but fell away at Dancy’s trademark glare. Dancy gathered the lapels of the navy blazer and white blouse in both hands and hunched them down over her shoulders. The whole gang was extremely interested by this time and Regalado, looking over the girl’s shoulder and feeling her shivering against him, was starting to think the gringa was the greatest thing that ever happened. Brushing the cups aside, she pulled both breasts out and cupped them gently. They were quite lovely; young, pale and firm with very dark aureoles and nipples standing out in sheer fear. “Well now, honey, this is just about pretty titty city. Right, boys?”
Martillo was pretty interested himself, even though he needed to keep a certain amount of attention on barreling the bread truck down the snaking, flaking road. He kept glancing into the mirror, not sure if he was more concerned with the girl’s tits or Dancy’s behavior.
“Dancy?” he finally asked, “Are you enjoying yourself?”
“I sure am, lover.” Dancy was almost giggling, “I’ve always wanted to do that. Just check it out, you know? See if they’re all they’re pushed up to be. Haven’t you?”
“Holy Virgin,” Martillo said, “Don’t hurt her, she’s just a poor working girl.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” Dancy said. She was holding the girl’s breasts up as proud as if she’d grown them herself from a seed packet. She was savoring the girl’s terror, her power over all the world’s nice young things. She held the girl’s eye like a cobra, examining her. Was she a virgin? A Catholic? A hypocritical little bitch who’d damn her for sex and murder out of wedlock? Probably. She softened, sighed. She released the girl, patted a breast in a friendly manner. “Very nice, sweetheart. Tender vittles. But get a little more upthrust here, a smaller cup size, and don’t fasten this button.” She pulled the blouse back together, holding it to get the décolleté look she recommended. She made the girl hold the torn blouse, then fished in her bag for a mirror and showed the girl what she meant. God knows what the girl thought–probably that gang rape by outlaws was apparently even weirder than she’d been imagining.
Dancy took a long look at the girl holding her tits, a portrait of sexy helplessness that had Morales so hard he could barely maintain his position twisted around over the front seat. She reached into one of the duffle bags and said, “Now let’s see if we can salvage that make-up.”
The next time Martillo could glance back to see what sort of jolly surprises his girl was doing to his hostage in front of his gang in the middle of his getaway, she was sorting through a fistful of cosmetics.
“Where did you get that stuff?” he asked her, since he distinctly remembered scotching the drug store stop.
“Oh, all those cows had tons of it in their purses with the money and jewelry.”
“You were stealing make-up during the bank robbery?”
“Well, it was pretty obvious YOU weren’t going to buy me any.”
Martillo shook his head and muttered, “I’ll bet Faye Dunaway didn’t bother stealing mascara and eye shadow.”
Dancy ignored his confusion of actress with role, “Well no, but who has cheekbones like her?”
“You don’t need make-up, Bandida. You don’t need clothes. You don’t need money.”
“Well, let’s not forget our guest, huh? In the States when you get taken hostage you end up on TV.”
Martillo gave up, but the boys in the back maintained a certain level of interest as Dancy searched among the little tubes and compacts, held the bank girl’s chin in her hand as she turned her head critically, then started wiping off her blue eye shadow and heavy mascara. “There’s a difference between foxes and raccoons, honey,” she said as she started painting a new face on the girl, who seemed to relax a little under her grooming. “The whole secret of subtlety is feathering; you shouldn’t be able to tell where the stuff ends yourself.”
By the time they reached the commune, the girl looked beautiful (if a little pale and shaky). Taking a last stroke with a fader, Dancy dusted her hands triumphantly and handed the girl the mirror. She was shocked, then became engrossed in studying her face, trying to memorize the effects and study out the techniques. Regalado and Maldonado enthusiastically applauded the effect, but maintained a somewhat closer scrutiny of those sweet round tits poorly confined by the ripped blouse and slashed bra.
When they dropped her out in front of the cane huts, Dancy gave her a good-bye kiss on the cheek, then looked her right in the eye. “Now don’t tell anybody anything about any of this, or I’ll come look you up, hear?”
Martillo translated and the girl shook her head violently, and continued after the bread truck loafed off down the washed-out road. She was very sure she wanted no further part of Dancy Russell. That bitch was crazy mean. A real gift for cosmetics, though.