Chapter Three
Dancy was taking a very long shower, so hot she cooled off occasionally with a spritz of straight cold water and a pull off the icy room service martini that she’d poured into a hot pink plastic squeeze bottle with “I Sunned My Buns In Cabo San Lucas!” in black letters. She basked under the water; deeply relaxing, soaping, rinsing, stroking herself a little, wondering why Stan would have insisted she have a nice nightcap with him, then leave her alone while he went tearing off with Armando. As though he hadn’t spent all day with him. Not to mention letting him drag them out to La Langosta for dinner without giving her a chance to shower and change. San Lucas’ informal atmosphere and open-air warmth was neat and all, but she’d really needed a shower after two sets of tennis under maximum sun.
She wondered if that was why she was so tired, felt so wilting and languid under the steaming water. Not bloody likely after one match with a player like Roberto. He wasn’t at all bad, but he’d apparently never seen a lob before. Maybe Mexicans are too macho to lob. That had been the most fun in the first set; setting him up for smashes, knowing he’d go for every one like a bull for a red cape, blowing them worse as he got behind, finally blowing up his whole game to the point where she’d been able to just slug it out with him toe-to-toe, the way she liked. She smiled at the idea of going to bed with a strutter like Roberto–a rabbit-assed egotist blowing a series of smashes, or she’d miss her bet. She wondered what Stan would think if he’d known that those were precisely the stakes of the game. Talk about incentive. And since Roberto had lost he was going to have to screw that old sow on the air-conditioned power yacht out of Newport Beach. And provide proof. She couldn’t wait to see what the proof was. Or to collect that Victorian ring she’d bet the old bitch that she could get Roberto to do her. She stuck her head under the stream of water and thought, I’m getting very dangerously bored.
She took a long, hard hit of cold water all over, but still felt drowsy as she stepped out of the bronze glass stall and drew a fluffy blue towel around her. Maybe she was coming down with something. Nothing a martini and sleep wouldn’t cure, she figured. She turned down the bed and sat on it a second, getting a little groggy as she looked around for her teddy. Hell with it. Stan would just tear it off if he came home feeling frisky. She couldn’t decide lately if it was more annoying for him to run off neglecting her or to hang around bugging her. She laid down for a moment to think about that one. And why she had married that asshole in the first place, a thought she only entertained when extremely drunk or tired. She had to marry somebody. And at least with Stan she’d never had to wonder if it had been for her or the money. She snuggled under the sheets, and grinned sleepily. He’d been a fairly fine fuck there at first. Too bad she’d figured out his technical detachment came from sheer narcissism. As she started to drowse off she decided if Stan came in and woke her up she might just tell him to stick it. When the two Mexican toughs opened the suite door and slipped in she thought it first was her husband coming home and was just awake enough to pretend to be sleeping.
She froze when she saw who it was, scanning the men through her lashes. She immediately recognized the slim, fey Ramos as one of Armando’s omnipresent bodyguards, though she didn’t know his name. She wasn’t too surprised that a guy with such sharp, evil features and skinny mustache would take to creeping into hotel rooms. The other man was huge, the biggest Mexican she’d ever seen, but he moved quiet and loose, like a big bear. His face had the bland innocence of a sweet, slow child but she didn’t find that very reassuring. Fighting the fuzzy lassitude in her brain, she inventoried her options. It seemed best to lie low and wait. Relaxing and enjoying it, she thought, isn’t completely out the question, either.
Ramos teased the sheet up with two fingers and slowly peeled it off of her. She sprawled there wrapped in the towel, which had slipped down to show her breasts. Santiamen whispered, “Mother of God! Look at her.” Ramos was just as impressed by the golden vision of her lolling on the pastel sheets, but less theological about it. He reached down to tweak the towel up away from her crotch and whistled softly, “Look, Mano. Blonde to the bone.”
Dancy jackknifed, slamming both legs up against Ramos’ head, knocking him to the floor. “Why don’t you take a nice close look, fucker?” she said as she slashed her legs back down, using the momentum to fire off the bed towards the dresser. Ramos was stunned by the kick, but recovered in time to keep his head from crunching into the nightstand. He turned to see her grab a metal tennis racket off the dresser and spin around, naked breasts bobbing, honey hair whirling. Santiamen was frozen, his face as shocked as if he’d been holding an Easter egg when it exploded. She was on him in one leggy, net-driving stride and sliced a wicked flat forehand at the bridge of his nose. He managed to get his arm up, but yelled from the pain of the flat edge of the racket smashing into his forearm muscle and driving his fingers into his eye.
Ramos, back on his feet, bounced across the bed to flank her away from the door, then jumped back when he saw that she was driving past Santiamen with fast, powerful two-handed smashes to his head and shoulders. “One gorgeous hellcat,” he thought as he tackled her, carrying her to the floor and bulling on top of her, grabbing her tits and crotch as he went for the pin. She flipped over in his hands, bucked like a mule, then snapped her head forward and bit into his nose. Yelling, Ramos put both hands up to spread her jaws, only to take a knee in his groin. He folded up, gasping and retching as she slid out from under him, too hurt to appreciate the spectacle of the muscles flickering beneath the two-tone tawny flanks.
Santiamen was on her, but she chopped him across the shins with the racket, then raked her nails down his face as he bent forward. She sprang to her feet and retreated to the wall; panting, weaving, and holding the racket in front of her as though awaiting a serve. The two men were too ashamed to meet the other’s eye. Both wished they’d brought more help, but would have been too humiliated to admit it, even to themselves. They were also just a tiny bit nervous, as though they’d tied into something supernatural. Ramos caught himself realizing he was unarmed. He feinted in towards her and didn’t pull his hands back in time to avoid her backhand. He figured the fingers weren’t broken, but were deeply damaged. Santiamen faked a lunge from the other side and she ran right at him and sliced a stinging cut to his shoulder.
Dancy wasn’t one to call for help when in trouble, having always concentrated her energies on solving the problem through sheer will. But as she faced the two grim, bleeding henchmen it occurred to her to make some noise, then just as quickly that nobody would hear anything through the expensive privacy of the plushly padded suite. But I should leave some evidence of a struggle, she thought. Maybe even scare these yahoos off. She moved down the wall towards the windows, Ramos and Santiamen silently shadowing her. Suddenly she kicked one of the chairs away from the table, distracting Santiamen a second as he blocked it with his knee. Then she whipped the racket down on the table with all her concentration. The aluminum Slazenger tore through the wooden table top and bounced up off the floor, ready to meet any rush from the Mexicans, but they had been too startled by the move to react. Spinning, she slashed at the dresser drawers with a rapid flurry of strokes. The drawers shattered noisily. She backhanded a lamp off the dresser, demolishing it against the wall. She grinned savagely at the two men and growled, “Come on, mess with me. Mess with me mucho.” The men didn’t run off, but seemed extremely impressed. Dancy stalked them, her nakedness gleaming gold in the dim light. She faced Santiamen and yowled at him like a cougar, startling him enough to let her drive a punishing shot in against his ribs. She was the scariest woman they’d ever seen and both had practically grown up in tough urban whorehouses.
But she was slowing down. Ramos could see it, an unsteadiness, her eyes slipping out of focus, then blinking back to concentration. She was weaving on her feet. He motioned to Santiamen, then began dancing in and out, keeping her moving, exerting herself. “She’s running down,” Ramos thought. “What would we do without drugs?”
Dancy knew what was happening by then, could feel the sedative being pumped into her bloodstream by the violent exercise. She was getting woozy and rubberlegged, her focus starting to flicker. In a few minutes she would just pass out. She glared at Ramos and Santiamen and snapped, “I’m damned if I’ll be raped by two flaky faggots like you.” Then she rushed Santiamen, swinging like a madwoman. He gave back and she broke by him and took a long, flat dive for the window. Ramos knew the image would be branded in his mind as long as he lived; that tawny body, as voluptuously sculpted and aggressively functional as a sports car, stretching out and taking clean, lean, bare-assed flight. What Dancy would never forget was bouncing face-first off the double-thick pane and landing on the floor, then slowly fading out of consciousness as two bleeding, extremely cautious Mexicans crept up on her.
Santiamen looked down at her body, swallowing his pride, his lust, the shameful trace of fear. “She almost gave us a hard time, eh Compa?” he said. Ramos gave him a sidewise look that booked no excuses and the big man blurted, “We don’t either of us talk about this, right?”
“Of course not,” Ramos sneered, “We’ll tell them I tore up your face and you bit my nose off.”
Santiamen goggled at her a second more. “Can you imagine what it would be like to fuck her?” he asked.
Ramos was pulling the sheets of the bed. “Perhaps if I’d taken lessons. Or if she’d had a few more of those Seconals.”
They rolled her up in a blanket off the bed, this time not fondling her, whether from some sort of respect they couldn’t have articulated or just out of shame at having the other man see them enjoying spoils unfairly won. Santiamen effortlessly hefted her wrapped body while Ramos opened the door and pulled the laundry cart into the room. He dumped her bundled form into the cart then paused as the other man motioned for him to push the cart out into the hall. He looked around the room and asked, “Should we bring anything with her?”
“Not that damn tennis thing,” Ramos said. “See if her husband keeps any leashes or chains.” But he stepped quickly to the closet, swept out an armful of dresses, bundled them with anything feminine-looking poking out of the ruined dresser drawers and dumped the bundle on top of the sleeping woman. He saw a pair of purple lace panties on the floor by the bed and bent over to pick them up. He took a deep sniff of them, then scaled them at Santiamen’s face. The big man whipped his head like a snake to catch them in his mouth. He rolled his eyes and jerked his head back and forth like a dog teasing a bone. “Maybe the chief will get tired of her sometime,” he growled around the panties.
“Damn good chance, I’d say.”
Santiamen spit out the panties and asked, “You think he can handle her?”
“Sure, the boss can handle her. If she doesn’t kill him first.”
Ramos carefully cracked the door, then shut it quickly but silently when Santiamen said, “Wait a minute.” He replied to Ramos’ lifted eyebrow by asking earnestly, “We’re stealing her, aren’t we?”
“No, Indio, ” Ramos gave the word its entire weight as synonym for “genetically stupid”, “We’re just taking her out for a walk so she can piss on the grass.”
Santiamen, unmoved by insult or sarcasm, insisted, “But it’s stealing.”
“Oh, I get it.” Ramos was having trouble choosing between humor and contempt. “You damned peasant. This isn’t some Tepito burglary, and that stuff is superstitious nonsense.”
“No, it isn’t. If you don’t do it, they find you, sooner or later.”
“Look, you big cretin, we’re in a bit of a hurry here.”
Santiamen leaped up on the bar flatfooted and dropped his pants. “It won’t take but a second.”
Ramos stood mortified while his partner grunted out a huge, steaming turd on the countertop, the traditional calling card of the zampillo burglar, and age-old protection from pursuit and the evil eye.
Jumping down and buckling up, he beamed at Ramos, “They’ll never catch us now.”
Ramos eyed the massive dropping in disgust. “They’ll certainly think twice.”