The Mexico Run

    

    

    
I picked up the XKE in San Francisco. It cost me 2,600 bucks and it would do one hundred and forty. I needed that speed because what I was planning was a very fast buck.

    
I was on my way to Mexico to pick up some Acapulco gold for a very hungry U.S. dealer.

    
It was OK until I ran into a crooked Mexican cop named Morales. He had a slice of everything-grass, hard goods, gambling, prostitution, you name it. He was dangerous and tricky. And he would just as soon kill you as do business with you.

    
He was trying to do both with me. What started out as a simple plan to make a few illicit shekels was turning into a horror story.

    
It began with murder. A very kinky murder.

    

    

    
Bitemeok
(grand book owner & heroic scan provider) &
P.
(OCR, formatting & proofing) edition.

    

    

    
This book is for LILLIAN BERGIDA-a truly fine lady.

    

    

    I picked up the XKE in San Francisco. It cost me twenty-six hundred dollars, and I bought it from an instructor at the University over at Berkeley, who I figured had probably used it mostly for girl-bait on weekend trips down to the Monterey Peninsula. He lived only a few blocks from the campus.

    The speedometer showed twenty-eight thousand miles, and, although the car was four years old, I believed that it was a correct reading.

    I didn't buy it because the price was right; I bought it because I needed a certain amount of performance for the money I had to spend.

    The chances were that I would not need this particular type of performance more than once or twice, but it was going to be damned important that I got it if and when I needed it.

    New, the Jag had the capability of a hundred and forty miles an hour. I road-tested the car and managed to get a little over a hundred and twenty, but figured, with some work on the engine, I could bring it pretty close to its original maximum.

    As I say, there probably would be only one or two times I would have to approach that maximum, considering the type of terrain in which an emergency might come up. It could happen on either a crowded freeway, or else on some dusty, rutted mountain road, south of the Mexican border, in which case the prime factor would not be speed so much as a fast pickup, the capacity to corner well, to exhibit superb braking power.

    Needless to say, I could have obtained all these features from some souped-up hot rod, but I was anxious to have a stock car which would not necessarily create any undue interest on the part of traffic officers, or the immigration inspectors at the border.

    Twenty-six hundred dollars made a sizable dent in my bank roll, but I wasn't putting out money merely for flash or comfort.

    Comfort and luxury are commodities which I could have used a good deal of, after those four years in Vietnam, but at the moment I was primarily interested in a practical business expenditure.

    I had been discharged from the army exactly two weeks to the day from the time I bought the car. I'd come out of the service with the rating of master sergeant, along with an honorable discharge, a handful of medals, which were worth about $6.10 in any good hock shop, $18,812 in cash, most of which represented monies I had made in gambling and in the black market in Saigon and which was worth exactly $18,812, along with a lot of very bad memories.

    Unlike hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other ex-GI's who managed to survive Vietnam and return to civilian life, I knew exactly what I wanted to do and where I was going to do it.

    San Francisco is a beautiful city, and I would have really liked to have stayed there for a while. The two weeks that I spent in the town might have been enjoyable, had it not been for the things I had to do during the time, the people I contacted. They would have spoiled any city.

    The exception, of course, was Ann. Ann Sherwood. Ann could never have spoiled anything for me, or anyone else, and I had been looking forward to seeing her for over a year now.

    But it was still a mistake. A bad mistake. I had first met Ann Sherwood in the Philippines, while I was on furlough from Vietnam. She had flown out to pay a visit to her brother, Donald Sherwood, who was a technical sergeant in the army and also on furlough.

    Don and I were buddies. We had met in Vietnam and had taken to each other immediately. He had shown me pictures of his young sister, and when he told me that she was coming out to the Philippines and would spend a few days with him while he was on furlough, I had been anxious to meet her. He had told me that she was twenty-four years old and worked as a legal secretary for a firm of attorneys in San Francisco, where she shared an apartment with a younger sister who was still in school. Their parents were dead. Because they had been orphaned at a relatively early age, the three of them were very close to each other.

    The photograph he had shown me was of an extremely pretty, dark-eyed, dark-haired, rather slight girl. She had a winsome, almost pixieish face. The picture had been taken on a beach somewhere, and she was in a bikini; and although I guess just about any girl would look pretty damned attractive to me, after my stretch in Vietnam, Ann Sherwood was an absolute knock-out. She had the kind of body you might see in a centerfold of
Playboy,
except that her breasts were not monstrosities.

    When she stepped off the plane and walked over to where we were waiting at the airport, I saw at once that the photograph had not lied.

    Ann had come to spend a few days with her brother, but the way it turned out, I think we spent more time together than they did. We knew each other for less than a week, but by the time she left to fly back to San Francisco, I was head over heels in love with her. I don't know whether it was a reaction from those lonely and bitter weeks and months and years in Vietnam, or what it was, but I fell for her hook, line, and sinker.

    Was it mutual? I don't honestly know. I do know that she liked me, liked being with me. But she had a peculiar reserve, sort of a reluctance to commit herself emotionally.

    Her brother was often with us when we were together, and that may have had something to do. with it, but I don't think so. I thought, at first, that she might have some boy back in the States, but I was wrong about that.

    We did, before those brief few days were over, make love in a very restricted way, but although she seemed to enjoy having me kiss her, caress her, she was really unable to commit herself fully.

    I was probably pretty inept. In any case, by the time she had to return, I was completely crazy about her and couldn't wait until I would be able to see her again.

    Once back in Vietnam, I wrote her and she wrote back, and for a month or so, we exchanged letters several times a week. Then I was shifted down into the Mekong Delta, and for almost six weeks my mail didn't catch up with me. By the time it did, something had happened which made it impossible for me to go on writing Ann Sherwood, at least, for several months.

    The thing which happened is not really a part of this story, and it's something that I would prefer to forget. I know the tone of my letters must have changed, and by the time I was ready to be mustered out and return to the States, Ann's letters had also changed in tone. Whether it was a reaction to my own attitude, I am not prepared to say, but I do know that our correspondence degenerated into almost mere formalities.

    Ann Sherwood was, however, the first person I telephoned when I arrived in San Francisco. We met the following evening for dinner, after she got off from work. It was almost like two strangers meeting for the first time.

    She was as desirable as ever, more so perhaps, and the moment I saw her, I knew that I loved her and wanted her. I knew it, but I couldn't express it. I had changed a great deal in this last year, but my feelings about her had not changed. On the other hand, it wasn't like it had been in the Philippines. This time, I seemed hopelessly unable to convey those feelings.

    Ann herself had changed. It wasn't that she was cold or distant. She was just different. Perhaps she sensed the change in me.

    That first evening was a disaster. We talked for a while about her brother, but there was very little I could tell her about him, as he had been shifted to a different sector upon our return to Vietnam, and I hadn't seen him since the first week after we got back. I found conversation difficult, and Ann herself seemed preoccupied. She was friendly and she was warm, but for some reason a wall seemed to have arisen between us. By the time we had finished dinner, we had run out of things to say to each other. I asked if she would like to go to a movie or a nightclub, but she said that she had to get back to her apartment.

    "My young sister is home alone," she said, "and I don't like to stay out late when there's no one with her. Why don't you come back with me and have a drink at the apartment?"

    I said I would. We called a cab, and she directed the driver to an address up on Telegraph Hill.

    It was one of those old Victorian houses, built around the turn of the century, which had recently been handsomely restored and broken up into apartments. Ann's was on the third floor, and we walked up. She opened the door with a key, but it probably would have been better if she had knocked.

    The minute we entered the darkened room and she snapped on the light, I got an idea of what had inspired her to get back early. I also think I began to get an idea of the reason for the peculiarly preoccupied manner which I had noticed earlier in the evening.

    They were on the couch and they still had their clothes on, but that was about the only modest thing that could be said for them. He was lying on top of her, and her skirt had been pulled up around her hips.

    The boy leaped to his feet the moment the light went on, and the only thing he could do -was tuck himself in and pull up his zipper. He mumbled something and looked at me nervously, as he slipped past and reached the door to the hallway.

    I have to hand it to Lynn Sherwood. She not only wasn't embarrassed, she wasn't even flustered. She sat up on the couch, pulled her skirt down, looked at me for a moment, and then said, "Hi, sis. I guess I should have snapped on the chain lock."

    "I guess you should have," Ann said. And then she introduced me.

    "Lynn, this is Mark Johns. He's a friend of Don's. They were together in Vietnam."

    Lynn Sherwood walked over and held out her hand.

    I've said that Ann Sherwood was beautiful, and she was. But Lynn was something else. She had a dark complexion, like her sister's, but her hair was startlingly blond, and it was not dyed. Instead of dark eyes, she had azure-blue eyes. Her face wasn't exactly pretty, but it was about the most sensuous face I had ever seen on a girl or a woman.

    Lynn Sherwood was sixteen years old, but her body was fully developed. She still looked only sixteen, and in fact could have passed for younger, but she absolutely exuded sex. She was completely aware of her own attractiveness, and when she spoke, her voice sounded like an open invitation to go to bed with her. It was pretty obvious why Ann didn't want to leave her alone in the apartment in the evening.

    "Ann always gets the tall handsome ones," she said, "and I get stuck with dolts like Carl."

    "If that was Carl," Ann said, "you might tell him that he is no longer welcome in my apartment. And now, if you'll pull yourself together, I think we'll all settle down. Mr. Johns and I are going to have a drink, and if you'd like to join us, you can have some Coke."

    She not only joined us, but for the next hour, until I left, she didn't let us out of her sight. It was a very uncomfortable hour, and I couldn't wait to leave.

    At the door, as I was saying goodnight, I told Ann that I would call her the next day. She merely nodded, and we mumbled casual goodbyes.

    "You come back soon now, Mark," Lynn said. She was already calling me Mark. "This place could stand a man around once in a while."

    I muttered something, and then the door closed behind me.

    

    

    When I telephoned Ann at her office the following day, she told me she was going to be tied up until the weekend, so we arranged to have lunch the following Sunday. It was the only other time I saw her during that two weeks I was in San Francisco, because by Sunday I was already involved with other people, and wanted to get certain things out of the way before I could feel free to pursue what I still hoped would be a romance with Ann Sherwood.