Fierce Bitches (Crime Factory Single Shot) Read online

  Signaling that he desired privacy, Ramon staggered beyond the last hut and squatted in the shallow hole where the delivery driver’s body shared in eternal unrest and a host of crawling scavengers with Benji Metcalf’s bloated meat jacket. Ramon grabbed a handful of the geek’s hair and hauled him to an upright angle, the better to take the teeth out of his skull.

  Ramon worked savagely with a hammer, more for his own gratification than to clear space for the precision work with pliers, as he was not eager to damage the precious teeth. The gringo’s nose lay flat already, but Ramon smashed the gaunt cheek-bones upward until the skin was ready to tear away completely, and it felt like pounding on a balloon filled with coconut fragments. Then, depressing the frangible chin with his thumb, he slid the teeth from their positions–yellowed, but intact– and inserted them gently into the purse around his neck.

  Ramon repeated the job on the driver, minus the hammer work. Instead he simply reached behind the rubbery lips and scooped away the maggots beneath the tongue with his fingers. Working molars to denticles the pliers slipped them from the gum with minimum effort.

  The next day he scoured the contents of his clutch. He worked patiently with sand and a toothbrush soaking them in a bowl of whiskey until they were clean. Finished, he laid them on the table top behind the cantina and watched them shine, like pearls, in the sun.

  *

  When the men in dark suits had come, he had instructed the whores to hide inside their huts. Only Consuela had stood with him. His shattered jaw was bound with rags from underneath his chin, up over the top of his head. The swelling had begun to leave, but there was still a dark mask of bruising around his eyes and beneath the rags that covered the lower half of his face.

  As he and Consuela watched the current of automobiles approach in the growing dust cloud, he felt the pouch around his neck lie icy-hot against his skin–home now to fragments of dead voices that were chattering threats and pleas and prayers unceasingly. The liquid procession of obsidian vehicles languidly encircled them and he raised a hand to shield his view from the sun glinting off of their sleek and scaly bodies. He wondered at their teeth and wings.

  He fondled the tooth bag beneath his shirt. Slowly the contents of the sac rolled through his fingers one at a time like a rosary, focusing him, summoning wrath and willing stillness into his muscles. Only his left hand moved, mechanically precise over the smooth surface of the pocket, polishing the enamel inside. His right hand rested atop the club he used now as a cane.

  The Elephant Man From Lamancha.

  When the cars stopped and the dust plume settled, five men emerged baring fangs, scraping the dirt with gore-encrusted talons, hissing and spitting. Promising hell, but withholding it until commanded not to. With contemptuous grace Mr. Peck oozed as much as stepped out of the foremost vehicle at last, dressed as always, in a pressed black suit and sunglasses. Peck strode the grounds with scornful patience coolly inspecting the broken cantina, the violated safe and the cowering, silent whores peeking from their doorways before ever looking Ramon in the eyes. He took in the mess and sneered.

  “You had a chance to redeem yourself.” He smiled, a mocking show of pity that dissolved into open disgust. His lips spread over teeth for a mile. Continually pulling back over venom-dripping fangs. “Instead you’ve disgraced yourself further.” He flicked a split, serpentine tongue to his widow’s peak, and turned his back on Ramon. “Your replacement is here.”

  Peck gestured imperceptibly and the back door of the first sable carriage clicked open behind him. A large African man dressed in a gaudy vinyl track-suit that was already looking lived in for three days unfolded himself from the back seat of the Cadillac. He stood a full head over Peck and leveled a malevolent reptilian glare at Ramon.

  Peck smirked. “If I weren’t so angry, Ramon, I’d kill you.”

  *

  When Peck left, Ramon’s replacement set about business. The new pimp kicked the club out from Ramon’s grasp and tossed it over the cantina, then he kicked Ramon in the ribs and chased him thusly beyond the border of the shantytown. Ramon’s loyal whores followed at a calculated distance, watching the parade of two dance in the dust. Some of them covered their faces with their hands, others cried out, but the wisest kept their mouths shut, witnessing in silence.

  When Ramon’s banishment ceremony was complete, the replacement turned his attention upon the women, huddled in a semi-circle thirty yards away. “Go back home. Clean yourselves. You are filthy.”

  One by one they turned and left until only Consuela remained. She approached them and the African pivoted to obstruct her path, but she side-stepped him and knelt beside Ramon. He felt her fingers, strong and delicate, as they explored and kneaded him gently, searching for broken bones, and Ramon knew it was the finest touch he’d ever known. Her Nubian pimp watched them with clinical curiosity that turned to perverse amusement when Ramon reached for her face and she kissed his fingertips. Finally, her examination completed, she held his face with both hands for a brief moment, rose and stepped away from them without a glance at her new lord.

  Ramon watched her go, a tightness in his stomach, a firming of spirit with each step. As she retreated, the African knelt and whispered to him, “There are new girls on the way. New guests too.” He nodded at Consuela’s dissolving figure. “She is going to be the new specialist. I will give her to the violent ones, the sadists who will pay for her by the blemish. You think she’s ugly now? She will be beaten, cut on, and unnaturally violated for the rest of her life until one of them finally kills her.” Ramon could hear the man’s lips curl. “Or she kills herself.”

  *

  For three weeks Ramon lived in a cave, a hollow in the rocks just large enough to shelter him from the sun and the night winds. Consuela tended to him clandestinely, or sent one of the other women to administer medicine and clean his bandages. While he could not yet eat, they chewed his food for him and poured it down his throat with whiskey, tequila and rum smuggled out of the cantina. As his strength returned, and his visions became less frequent, he would make twilight ventures around the shanty, rummaging in the refuse, testing his strength and discovering the new and foreign workings of his own body. His limp would never leave him, but once he learned not to fight it, and use his recovered club as an aid, he found his mobility over a flat surface hardly to have changed at all.

  Speech was another matter. His voice would never sound human again, but as he spun the club in his hand, it occurred to him. He didn’t have much left to say to anyone.

  *

  On the day of the new arrivals, Ramon received no visit. Everyone was required for entertaining. He foraged for himself, keeping out of sight, but circling as close to the shanty as he dared, tracking the days’ progress by sound– isolated exclamations gradually increasing in frequency, and congregating into new vibrations of life issuing from the cantina. Throughout the night music, fighting and cheering dispersed into fainter echoes of a larger group splintering into multiple subsets and pairings until once again stillness ruled, disturbed only by the occasional and accidental ripples of equal and opposite reaction.

  The next morning he was attended to by Mama Rita, at fifty the oldest and fattest of the women, still heavily made-up, and smelling of last night’s carnality. Ramon accepted un-chewed bread and sucked on it while Rita collected his empty water jar and replaced it with a full one. She informed him in a hushed and nervous voice of the previous days’ arrivals. Four gringos and two new girls–one black, one Slav. The new girls were very pretty and the new men were very cruel. She chanced a look into his eyes and he saw her fear clearly, but she would not give him any more details.

  A week passed without a visit from Consuela, and Rita grew more agitated every time she attended him. When he tried to say her name, Rita only shook her head and bit her lip. On the seventh day, Ramon wrote Consuela’s name in the dirt, but Rita pretended she could not read it.

  That night, he went down among them to the shack where
Consuela lived. He listened for her voice, but heard only the occasional grunt of a customer. Ramon stayed outside the hut until the gringo left, barely able to walk. Ramon watched him stumble toward the cantina and rattle the locked door before lying down to sleep beneath the metal picnic table.

  Painfully, Ramon raised himself from his crouched vigil and cautiously entered Consuela’s cabin.

  Inside it was dark and the air hung heavy, oppressive with animal scents. Sweat, urine and excrement provided the atmospheric base with traces of blood, bile and semen occupying the higher strata. Ramon heard someone move and saw what he took to be the shape of a human being curling protectively around itself in the far corner. As he approached he heard a ragged and muffled keening emitting from the woman he still could not identify. The pitiful sound led him across the dirt floor. When he reached her, he knelt in the foul mud and searched, with his hands, for her shoulders.

  He found them, naked and unyielding, and sat down, pulling her into him. He tilted her into his chest, but her arms remained resolutely locked around her knees. He put his nose on the top of her head and breathed in deeply. The aroma was hideous, but he breathed deeper as if he could somehow process the pollution and breath purer air back to her, polish her scent till it shone like before. Deep, intense breaths through his nose, holding each breath like precious object, stained and misused. He turned the very air over in his nostrils, on the back of his tongue and filtered the blemish through his lungs before pushing it out again, gently into the world, then another deep, cleansing inhalation, until a final breath which he held for one minute. As he let it go, something tore loose inside of him. Tears sprung from his eyes, mucous flowed from his nose, and he muffled great, racking sobs in her hair.

  Ramon cried for an hour, clutching Consuela–silent and stiff–to his chest until he had purged himself of weakness, and exchanged pain for anger. Rage for purpose. He strode out of the shack toward the cantina in the last hour before dawn to where the gringo pig lay still beneath the picnic table.

  He already looked dead.

  *

  Mama Rita helped him. She packed water, food and medicine into a rolled up blanket, which she cinched at the ends with twine, and slung over his shoulder. Between the two of them, they supported a semi-catatonic Consuela beyond the border of the camp into the scant shelter of the nearest hills.

  When Rita left he told her to spread the word that he would return.

  And to prepare to leave.

  *

  The next day terrible sounds emitted from the camp. Cries and moans punctuated by flares of laughter and anger, but Ramon never moved from her side. Clouds of greasy smoke rose in the daylight and the shanty was lit with a sickly glow by night. Consuela slept fitfully throughout and regarded him in silence when she woke. Lucidity flared, frightened and fled from her leaving questions suspended like glow-bugs in the ether, but in the evenings when the shadows lengthened, the wind-born wailing of her sisters painted bloody murals along the corridors of her mind, and she walked it with purpose, a road now, decorated with crucified women sacrificing themselves for her chance at vengeance.

  Mi nombre es Spartacus.

  She possessed strength enough when she woke at dusk on the third day.

  *

  Ramon and Maria entered the shanty as one, inner arms slung about the other’s hips, outer hands filled with death deliverable by blunt trauma or organ puncture.

  Mama Rita sat, a lone figure out of doors in the heat, on a stool outside the cook shack, sharpening an ancient and irregular set of kitchen knives. When they appeared, she stopped her work, gathered her tools and slipped back inside the hut.

  They made their way down the thoroughfare, profaned with piles of charred animal remains sitting in puddles of grease and ash that added to the malodorous stew the atmosphere had become, gaining momentum with each step until they arrived at Consuela’s hut. In two minutes they had made a pile of clothing, rags and torn up magazines, doused it with the medicinal spirits they carried with them and put it to flame with the cigarette lighter Consuela kept under her mattress.

  Thin, black wisps of noxious smoke rose beneath the cleaner blaze of the alcohol, and they emerged from the hut with trails of the repugnant vapors seeping from the doorway and slipping between their figures, so that the African’s first glimpse of them they were framed in the mephitic smog.

  The African called out to them, “Eh, you cunts, I wondered how many bitches had to burn before you came back.” Then he called to the camp, “Come see this.”

  As the inhabitants appeared, trickling from the cantina and sundry huts, the new arrivals pushed to the fore to get a good look at Ramon, the butcher who’d gutted one of their number and left his entrails blooming like a putrid rose, out of the desiccated torso.

  Mama Rita’s squat form was moving around the perimeter, a rotund satellite orbiting the scene and Consuela’s gaze followed the top of the old woman’s head until she stopped behind the black man. Consuela met his eyes and stepped forward. She raised the hand she carried her knife in and leveled it at him.

  The silence of the crowd was broken by the chuckling of some of the men. The African laughed. “You hate me? Your turn to stick something in me, hey?” The chuckling increased and he slapped his chest, “Come do it, then.”

  Consuela screamed and threw the knife at his head.

  It turned with lethal grace, of an appropriate weight for the butt to drive the blade through any stubborn field. Each rotation gathered momentum and purpose and its aim was true. But the African brushed it away with his hand, and it clattered harmlessly into the tin wall behind him.

  The pimp laughed, a dry sound without reverberation, that dissolved into the atmosphere immediately though there was no wind to carry it away. He looked at Consuela and said “It is going to be a good day.” Then, turning his eyes on Ramon, he tilted his head at one of the gringos at his three o’clock. “Serge, this is the piece of shit who killed your partner.”

  “S’what I thought,” the gringo replied as he stepped to the center of the circle. “Awright you Mexican bastard, I want to talk to you.” At six feet tall, he had a couple of inches on Ramon and thirty pounds, but Ramon guessed they were about the same age and only one of them was carrying a bat.

  The hitch in Ramon’s step was pronounced when he went for speed, and he seemed to be hopping toward the circle’s center and his foe with a comical gate that caused his opponent to smirk. Ramon aimed for that smirk, turning the club over in his palm and swinging it with considerable velocity at the asshole’s head. But the man pivoted and extended his left arm absorbing most of the blow in the meat of his shoulder and closing his fingers around Ramon’s at the base of the stick. With his right hand he took the air from Ramon’s lungs.

  A massive fist smashed into Ramon’s solar plexus and he sunk to his knees in search of his spilled breath. Had the gringo’s hand not held his to the bat, he certainly would have dropped it, but he gripped the wooden stick with his own hand still, and turned his wrist trying to angle the end toward the man’s crotch.

  He succeeded in pointing the club’s end at his opponent’s gut. It was harmless hanging between the two of them gripped by both, but it required an extra maneuver from his enemy to reach Ramon’s exposed face. As the delayed second blow sped toward his nose, Ramon inclined his head to meet the throw with his forehead.

  The knuckles drove backward into the man’s right hand and the grip around Ramon’s own disappeared. The large man tried to wring elasticity back into his fingers with quick, violent shakes of the lame hand and he took two steps backward, clutching the injured extremity with his left hand now, squeezing, then releasing and flicking the fingers in extension, then squeezing again. “Son of a bitch,” he hissed.

  Released, Ramon fell to hands and knees, his eyes on the gringo’s retreating feet while his lungs slowly re-inflated. The large man circled to his right and kicked at Ramon, but it was easy to dodge. Ramon watched the man’s boots retrea
t and come in again, this time kicking dust at his eyes. He squeezed them shut and rose to his knees, grasping the club with both hands and swinging in one fluid motion at the anticipated location of his foe’s left knee.

  The crack was barely audible, but the cry was loud. The bat’s tip had connected with the gringo’s knee-cap, felling him with a single blow. While his enemy clutched his left leg and howled, he kicked out with his right–turning himself in a slow circle on his back. Ramon planted the end of his stick in the dirt and pulled himself upright.

  Once on his feet, Ramon raised himself to his full height and leveled his weapon at the circle of faces, waiting for the next challenger. The African snorted his contempt, knelt to retrieve Consuela’s knife from the dirt and righted himself saying, “Okay. Come on you cripple, let’s finish it.”

  The African took a single step toward Ramon before collapsing with a shriek. His falling figure revealed Mama Rita behind him smiling–having plunged a kitchen knife through the back of the pimp’s knee. The blade’s tip protruded two centimeters from just below the knob of his left knee and the handle stuck out five inches behind him.

  Mama Rita’s yell was like the popping cork on a fizzy drink. The violence tamped down in the women roiled, surged and splashed out in highly concentrated bursts directed at the other men among them. The gringos fell beneath a swarm of slashing knives, pounding fists and biting mouths. They were consumed in five minutes of frenzied savagery, and lay in heaps like discarded scraps from a butcher block around the camp.

  Except the African. He lay unmolested, still curled around his wounded leg, guarded by Ramon and Mama Rita. When the others had been finished off, the women gathered about the black man. Mama Rita left her post and melted into the crowd and Ramon looked down at his replacement taking his last breaths.

  Reduced to a former threat, Ramon no longer tasted anger when he looked upon him. The man was himself save a random sprinkling of fate. In rendering Ramon a pitiful creature, the retard had probably saved his life. He could have easily found himself drowned in the blood tide rather than riding atop its foamy surf. It was a rare moment of reflection and the clarity and plainness of the revelation stole his appetite to claim vengeance. It would not be right for him to kill this man. It should be an event alive with heat, passionate and personal as he was no longer capable of delivering.