Chapter Forty-Five
For fifteen minutes the taxi van bumped Doc and Dancy through a maze of cobbled streets solidly lined with walls broken only by doors with iron bars or steel shutters. There was trash in the streets, and old cars and furniture. Everything seemed covered with dust or dirt, though there were the usual flowers and Mexican splashes of bright color. They passed a pack of dogs tearing at something that looked like a pig’s carcass. Dancy was still fooling with her hair and didn’t like the cobblestones. Doc didn’t like the imagery of the dogpack ripping the bloody ribcage.
The “night club” turned out to be a stretch of whitewashed wall with pictures of cowboys and letters made of lasso spelling out, “La Cama de Piedra”. Three men were squatting by the wall with a guitar, an accordion and a plywood bass fiddle so boxy it looked like a small coffin with neck and strings. One of them spotted an American couple holding hands and started over to pitch serenades at a dollar a song. At a single glance from Doc, he stopped and went back to squat by the wall. Doc hated the looks of that coffin-shaped bass.
They got out of the cab and Doc invited the driver in for a drink, smoothly insisting before the man could complete his demur. He got the idea and shrugged, sliding out of the van and heading for the curtained door.
“Saving the cab for later?” Dancy asked idly as she inspected La Cama’s shabby facade.
“I don’t want him going back and talking to any Buick drivers,” Doc said as he hustled her across the street. Two burly loafers in straw cowboy hats melted aside as he pushed her through the curtains. “I’m not so sure there’s going to be any later.”
She’d expected a dark, low, smoky interior for some reason. With sinister gold-toothed grins flashing at her from under mustaches and sombreros, fleshy Latinas in clinging robes laughing threateningly. Instead a shallow foyer led to an open air patio surrounded by three walls of evenly-spaced doors, each numbered and painted a different vivid color. The rear wall was filled by a long bar and a kitchen. The center of the patio was a raised, covered stage with elaborate light and sound equipment. Red metal folding tables filled the rest of the floor, four or five of them occupied by demurely dressed girls and cowboys drinking beer and Tequila. Bougainvillea grew up the walls and filled the space around the roof over the stage. Not too bad, she thought, for the worst little whorehouse in Cruz de Whatchamacallo. Doc looked at the dense thicket of bougainvillea overhead and swore. She realized he’d assumed the place was open air and had expected to be able to climb out the back into the warren of yards and houses around them.
A woman in her late forties walked up to them, undulating just enough to show that, while she was management now and just did drinks, she was a veteran around here and proud of it. She shot Dancy a glance that made her feel like livestock being priced, then turned full attention to Doc, who nudged the cabbie towards the bar and told her to serve him as much of whatever as he wanted and handed her some 50,000 peso notes. He asked her to point out the telephone and the back door. Dancy saw her point to the phone, then shake her head and make it plain with a sweeping gesture that they were in a cul-de-sac. As soon as the driver sat down, Doc went to the phone. She noticed that while he was moving purposefully and casing the layout, he was also always had a clear view of the front door and was always between it and both her and the driver. She swung up on a barstool and wondered if they could make an Alexander. Doc seemed to have gotten through to whoever he was calling, but as soon as he hung up she heard the sound of motorcycles.
Doc ransacked the kitchen but the cook had left and taken his knives. The girls, bouncers and customers watched incredulously as he examined and pocketed an icepick. The taxi driver was resigned to being in the hands of some sort of madman or delinquent and was just trying to see how much Tequila he could put away before things got truly ugly. Doc walked over to the occupied tables and quietly asked if anyone had a gun. He was probably projecting the quality of his desperation because he got no flack or monkeybusiness, just quiet headshakes all around. He nodded thanks to them, then motioned her over to him, picked a room at random and nodded for her to go in. She stroked his jaw as she slid past him through the door, brushing his crotch with her hips. “Step into my parlor, sailor,” she whispered. The motorcycles were much closer now, one of them within a few blocks.
Doc scanned the little crib quickly. There was no back door, no window. He grabbed one of the peeled wood rafters and swung a foot up to test the corrugated steel roof. It was bolted down firmly and sounded as if it had weights on it to keep it from blowing off. Perfunctorily, he glanced into the closet and raised the blanket to look under the bed. It was merely a mattress on a cement slab. “La Cama de Piedra,” Doc said, almost smiling, “I thought that was a funny name for a whorehouse.”
Dancy had been poking around the whore’s clothes and trinkets with a female curiosity; sniffing perfume, dangling earrings by her cheeks, twiddling the knobs on the large plastic radio above the bed. She looked at the cement bed and asked, “What does it mean?”
“Bed of Stone,” Doc told her, “And that’s the way it is. We’ve hit the bottom of the rabbit hole, Kiddo. Welcome to bedrock.”
She looked around at the tiny cubicle, the flashy clothes and tawdry decorations. She said, “Yabba dabba doo.”
As soon as Ramos saw the taxi, he knew the gringos were in La Cama de Piedra, just as he’d known who took the taxi that should have been out at the bus stop. He stopped at the mouth of the street, wary of traps, and unslung his submachine gun. Keeping an eye on the taxi and the door to the whorehouse, he fired a short burst into the air. He heard the other bike turn, then whine, as Santiamen headed for his position. The boss and the others would be right behind him. Ramos leaned his bike against a wall and took a spot at the corner, aiming right towards the van and the white wall of La Cama. The musicians who had been sitting by the wall seemed to be leaving. The boss surprised him, as usual. Even before Santiamen skidded up on the Yamaha, he saw the Park Avenue slide across the other end of the block like a shiny black shadow, sealing off the street. As soon as he saw Ruiz and Regalado get out and head up the block, he nodded at Santieseban and started sliding down the wall towards the taxi. Even with his machine gun in one hand, he reached into his pocket to touch his knife. He grinned.
Doc stared at the door a minute, thinking. She looked at his profile, marvelling at the change in such a man when he is in action instead of lying comfortably in bed. There was no humor now, no softness, the eyes full of nothing but animal calculation and schemes of destruction as they scanned the little sex closet. It was like the difference between an unplugged machine and one turned on and ready to function, she thought. The difference between a wee-wee and a hard-on. She saw his eyes harden and followed his stare to the mirror over the flimsy vanity. Amid the hearts and Catholic booster buttons was a small gold sticker with a black hammer. And the inevitable motto, “He could take you.” She glanced at Doc quickly, to read his reaction. He was looking at her, with something on his face that could have been a smile. “Last time I believed a sticker,” he said, ” It said ‘Make Love Not War’. Then next thing I knew I was carrying a gun and still a virgin.” But he reached over and peeled the decal off the mirror and handed it to her. She gave it a glance before tucking it in her pocket. “Boy, couldn’t he just?” she whispered to herself.
Then the hard, mechanical look was back on Doc’s face, and a resolution of some kind, like he had made a decision or solved a nagging problem. He turned and barked at her, “Take all your clothes off.”
She was taken aback, then laughed. “Think we’ve got time, lover?”
Doc almost sprung over to her, grabbed her shirt and snatched it right off her back, snarling, “Take!”
He stuck a quick, hard hand into her waist and broke her belt, jerked it out of its loops, “Them!”
He pulled her shorts open, tearing the zipper off, “OFF!”
She knew better than to mess with that. She hurriedly pulled off what was left of her clothes, even the bandanna in her hair when she saw him look at it. “If you don’t see anything you like, just ask,” she pouted. Doc gave a tight-lipped grin that turned her on a little as she stood there naked in the little whore’s hovel. “You just became Plan B,” Doc said.
She fluttered her lashes and said, “That’s me; just a B-girl at heart.”