Nothing Less Read online

  I’m a 46-year-old sonuvabitch with no retirement plan and enough scars to bore the average bastard to death with tales of how I acquired them. I’ve also seen more in this world than anyone should, at least anyone who wants to stay sane. Vendras, I can handle. He’s a punk, a cucaracha as the locals say. Here today, squashed on somebody’s windshield tomorrow. The day he had his little brother try to threaten me with a knife to scare me out of collecting my cash advance, I knocked it out of his hand, picked it up and made a lateral slash with it across my own upper arm.

  “You want my blood?” I challenged. “Here it is.”

  Sure, it hurt like hell, but from that point on they knew I was loco enough to kill both them and myself. So long as they think all I want is money, we have a perfect understanding. They don’t fuck with my pay and I don’t turn my little arsenal against them.

  The trouble is Nora.

  I can’t get her out of my head. The way she lays in that recliner, her one leg raised up, just so, her long, red-tipped fingers draped over the arms, that slinky bathing suit hugging every curve, and me up on the ridge with the field glasses and radio, supposedly supervising the placement of the mines and remote sensors or whatever crap I’m into that day. If Vendras’s men ever catch me turning those glasses the wrong way, up over the Spanish tile roof of the twenty-room villa to the ceramic-decked kidney bean pool with built-in palms and Jacuzzi, I’m a dead man.

  This has got to sound trite, I know. The tough old bird and the pretty young thing, with her straw hats, her perfectly painted little toes and enigmatic smile. They say she comes from a rich family, that she was supposed to marry a senator’s son. One of Vendras’s soldados—a foot soldier—tried to explain it to me over a bottle of tequila one night.

  It had to do with honor, and a tragic sense of Latin destiny. One night Nora had caught her father with a woman, not her mother. Nora looked into the matter and it turned out the woman worked for one of the cartels, and that her own father—the supposedly incorruptible chief judge of the national supreme court—was on the payroll of one of the most notorious coca jefes in the country. She was so wounded by the betrayal of the man she’d looked up to her whole life that she decided to pay him back in the only way that would hurt him as greatly as she’d been hurt herself.

  By ruining the family name.

  Thus did she dress herself to the nines one night and throw herself at Raoul Vendras in one of the clubs he owned in the capital city. The man was more than happy to fuck and use the young beauty, and once she made him see the political advantage, he also agreed to marriage. Vendras was anything but faithful, as I had seen dozens of knockouts driven up to the compound in the dead of night only to be taken back down the mountain early in the morning.

  Did Nora sleep around, too? I’d asked my new amigo. The man had promptly turned a deep shade of crimson and lunged at me with a switchblade. If you haven’t guessed already, knives are a common mode of communication in this part of the world.

  It turned out he was in love with Nora, as were many in Vendras’s employ, though she herself had remained utterly chaste and above reproach. To hear the man speak, she was the Virgin of Guadalupe herself, reincarnated with lips and tits.

  Once I’d succeeded in calming the man down, having assured him I meant no offense, I pried a little further. I was curious, naturally, why he was so sure he loved the girl.

  The man crossed himself three times in a row, his mustache twitching something terrible. Bloodshot eyes cast heavenward, he muttered an unintelligible prayer and took a long swig of the fresh bottle I’d just purchased.

  “Because,” he told me in Spanish, “I have fucked her.”

  So, too, according to him, had the others. Vendras, it seemed, in addition to being a bloodthirsty parasite who sold narcotics to schoolchildren, was also an enthusiast of certain sexual games. Power exchange as it’s called in the States.

  The lovely Nora wasn’t just a trophy wife; she was the man’s sexual captive, subject to his whims and fantasies. Among these was the arousal he enjoyed from having his beautiful, sweet wife fucked by his henchmen. The more coarse and lowborn they were, in fact, the more pleased Raoul was to have them use her.

  In great detail, he spelled out to me exactly what Nora was made to do. He personally had taken her both orally and anally and had even struck her a dozen times once with his belt while she laid spread-eagled on her back on the huge silk-covered bed she shared with her husband. All of this was done at Vendras’s command, the man’s orders coming over a loud speaker in the ceiling while he watched from another room.

  Tears in his own eyes, the gunman told me how Nora had often looked at him, with such perfect resignation, such indescribable martyrdom. That was the exact word, too. Martyrdom. Like she was a saint, up on some cross. Most of it seemed like bullshit to me. Religion and sex are a bad mix as far as I’m concerned, and my own temperament runs much more towards the icy Nordic than the passionate Latin. A cold, deliberative son of a bitch. That’s me.

  I did start looking at Nora more closely after that, though. For signs of abuse. Marks from a belt, or as the soldado had hinted, from a whip. There never were any, which made me think the whole story was the tequila talking. It was a relief in a way, and I returned to my work with a vengeance. By the time I was done, scumbag that he was, I had vowed to myself that Mr. Vendras would have a citadel the match of any military installation in the world, complete with the latest high tech gadgets and a crack private army.

  I would have been all right at this point if I hadn’t seen it for myself.

  It was two nights ago. I was working upstairs, wiring for a new alarm system. I should have been asleep, but often I can’t, and so I work instead. Vendras had just come home drunk and was calling out for Nora. She met him at the head of the stairs, barefoot in a long, white nightgown.

  He shouted for her to come down, cursing her name and telling her that she should have been there at the door to greet him. The girl hurried, her shapely body springing down the stairs. He met her halfway. Getting a good grip on her luxuriant, sleep-tossed hair, he dragged her back upstairs and into the bedroom. I was in the room next door. There’s a series of peepholes in the bookcase, which I’d discovered and which I suspect Vendras himself used to watch his wife. Through one of them, I saw it all.

  First, he thrust her down at his feet and ordered her to strip. When she was too slow in removing the sheer gown, he bent down and ripped it from her cringing skin. Cowering in the scraps of her nightgown, she knelt and put her head to the tassel of his loafers.

  “Puta,” he spat at her, drawing the alligator belt from the loops of his custom made silk trousers.

  “Yes, sir,” she replied, never even flinching as the leather came sailing down onto her naked back. Three times he hit her, raising instant welts.

  “Suck,” he ordered now, unzipping his trousers.

  Nora was instantly obedient, putting her sweet lips to his cock. Eyes closed, the look of an angel on her face, she fellated her drug lord husband.

  “Slut,” he hissed, his eyes lost in some gangster’s trance. “Tomorrow I will give you to Julio. Fat, stinking Julio.”

  It was like he was mainlining pure power. It could have been anyone on his cock. It was all about forcing a woman to do something she hated.

  “Get up,” he said at last.

  Nora rose to her feet, palms on her hips at attention. She made no attempt to hide herself, nor to evade his cruel, sneering gaze as he inspected her lovely cocoa-colored body.

  “Tomorrow,” he said again, letting the word roll off his lips like a scorpion’s kiss. “Tomorrow.”

  Vendras has this little scar on his cheek, to the right of his nose, and it was moving as he talked. Pulling a nine-millimeter from his silk jacket he put it to his wife’s cheek. “Tomorrow maybe I kill your father, hmm? Tomorrow?”

  There was no reaction from Nora. I doubted it was the first time he’d made the threat nor would it be the last. Twice
, then, he walked around her, swaggering, smirking. Personally, I found it ridiculous, because the man is just five-foot-three and Nora is five-six. Just three inches shorter than me.

  But the effect on the woman was real enough. Head lowered, defeated, she made her submission obvious. He met no resistance when he slid the gun barrel into her wet cunt. Nor did she balk when he made her clean the glistening barrel with her tongue afterwards.

  “Get on the bed,” he sneered, when he was satisfied he’d bullied her enough.

  Nora did so, putting herself on her back, arms and legs spread wide. My skin crawled as he began to touch her, running his filthy, drug-dealing hands over the satiny, perfect flesh. And when I say perfect, I mean this girl is unblemished. Too pure for this world, if you ask me.

  I’m not a poet, so don’t expect details.

  There were velvet ropes on the bed, which he used to secure her wrists and ankles. Obviously this was a familiar game. Rummaging in the drawers, he came up with a little pile of toys. I knew what most of the stuff was. The clamps were for the girl’s nipples. The ball with leather straps was for her mouth. Then there was the knife.

  Nora whimpered only a little when he engaged the alligator pincers to the tips of her pert breasts. There was a silver chain between them that drifted provocatively in the valley of her cleavage. No doubt he could cause her exquisite pain by pulling on it.

  I was rock hard by now. My cock throbbed as I saw the perfect mouth open obediently for the gag.

  “I will make you weep,” the drug dealer told her. It sounded ten times more ominous and devastating in Spanish.

  The gag in place, he ran the flat edge of the silver knife up and down her belly, the flesh retracting in a perfect concave as he went. I could just see her ribs, the back arching slightly. Her lower lips were as full as the upper one. She was shaved, and I could see it all. Her eyes fluttered shut as he put the blade to her throat, swathing her cunt with his hand at the same time. The fingers came out sopping wet. Insolently, he smeared the juices onto her aristocratic belly.

  Again, I thought of where those hands had been. The whores he’d touched. The filth and scum he traveled with. I had a .45 at my belt, and I was goddamn tempted to use it on him, let me assure you. Never mind the hard-on; I was affronted, infuriated. A strange time to be moral, I know, given my profession. Maybe it’s my age—a delayed mid-life crisis.

  The thing I couldn’t figure, though, was why did Nora put herself through this? Poor girls are sold into slavery every day in this world, but she was the daughter of a judge. She’d been to university, majored in sociology, dabbled in art. I’d seen her paintings; they weren’t half bad. And she was beautiful, too. No doubt she could have had her choice of men.

  Vendras continued to toy with her, calling her names, spitting on her face. Evidently he had to beat a woman down pretty far till he felt man enough to mount her. He even had this flogger device, leather, with a dozen or so thin strips of leather. After shoving the handle inside her, he whipped her belly, breasts and thighs with it. The pain was minimal compared to the clamps, I suspected, but it was no doubt humiliating for a girl like her.

  At last he got down to business. Leaving his shirt on, he took down his pants and underwear. The latter he thrust in Nora’s face.

  “Smell it, whore,” he demanded. “You like, no? Tomorrow, you lick my arse, yes?”

  Again with tomorrow.

  The underwear remained draped across her lovely face as Vendras crawled on top of his tall, sexy wife. Bound as she was, she hadn’t any option but to receive him. Resting his weight on his palms on either side of her, he thrust himself to the hilt. He wasn’t even looking at her as he fucked. His back arched, he seemed to be trying to touch her as little as possible. She truly was nothing but a cunt to him, I realized.

  It was at that exact moment I fell in love with Nora Vendras.

  And now you know why she’s going to get me killed. Love and mercenary work don’t mix. Ever. Christ, I’m not even sure I know what love looks like. I can tell you I want to strangle Raoul and his brother and blow up their whole fucking compound. Then I want to take Nora in my arms till she stops shaking and tell her everything will be all right.

  Do you have any idea how hard it was to watch that animal fucking her when it could have been me, making love to her instead? That bastard just grit his teeth and spilled himself into her, like she was a toilet for sperm. And then he left her like that. Tied down, with the nipple clamps, alone in the dark while he went down and played cards with some of his men.

  I went in to help her. No one knows I did that, not even her. She couldn’t tell who it was, on account of the darkness. I move with the shadows, anyway. It’s in the blood. It was a stealth operation. The bonds I cut with my pocketknife. I also took off the clamps. She cried out into the gag when I released them. It had to have hurt as bad getting them off as having them put on, on account of all that pressure. More than anything I wanted to take off that gag; no mouth as gorgeous and innocent as that should be deformed that way.

  But I didn’t want her talking or worse still, screaming.

  It wasn’t a very smart move, to be sure, going in after her. I got away with it, but she didn’t.

  Nora’s punishment—though she couldn’t possibly have been held responsible—was to be driven off under heavy guard to a remote plantation for the day. A truckful of men followed, and I don’t think it was for security. One of the servants, a butler named Miguel, had his balls cut off, too, though he was nowhere near Nora’s bedroom all night.

  That was two days ago. Nora’s back by the pool now, serene as ever, and I’m laying fucking land mines. Christ, but it’s beautiful up here, though. The sky is blue as a jigsaw puzzle background and the wildflowers on the cliff sides are about a million different colors. Like I said, I’m not a poet, so you’ll have to live with my half-assed descriptions.

  Shit, before this job I wouldn’t have even tried to describe flowers. It’s like I’m noticing things I never even thought of before. Colors. The way the earth smells after a rain shower. The way Nora lights up a room when she walks into it. The way the whole goddamned world makes more sense because she’s in it.

  It’s fucking insane is what it is. We’ve exchanged, what, three words to each other in all these weeks? I’ve seen her paint, heard her sing and watched her sunbathe. All right, and I’ve seen her tortured by her husband. Other than that, what do we have? I’ve seen cases like this; it’s part of what they now officially call PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

  Back in ‘Nam I knew an NCO who fell in love with a picture of Nancy Sinatra. Carried it with him everywhere. Practically fucked the goddamn thing. One night a couple of the guys drew a mustache on it just to mess with him while he was sleeping. He woke up, saw it and went ape shit. We had to chase him a mile into the friggin’ jungle. Charlie got him first, though, with a heavy mortar. We managed to carry the biggest pieces home. I was only seventeen at the time, having lied about my age to get in. Afterwards, I threw up for an hour straight.

  The thing is, I’m not in fucking combat now. Haven’t seen any in three years, actually. It’s all about consulting now. Sure, I still vomit every time I see what my clients do with the shit I give them, but that’s life. Show me a guy who claims he can stomach the evil mess in this fucked-up world and I’ll show you a man with his head up his ass.

  The truth is, we’re all part of the problem, ‘cause we ain’t part of the solution. A missionary taught me that in Salvador. Right after I fucked her brains out.

  Basically, I have three choices. One, mind my own fucking business and forget Nora. Two…hell, there is no two. Other than option one, any idea I could come up with in this situation would be suicide.

  Actually, I have been thinking a lot about Vendras’s helicopter. It’s always kept fully fueled and if I work it right, I could be across the border of this piece-of-shit country before the man had time to scratch his balls. And if I took her with me, what the
hell could he do about it?

  That little beauty of a plan is option two, if you must know. Option three is…well, you don’t want to know what option three is. It’s too fucking stupid to repeat.

  Unfortunately it’s the one I’m going with.

  See if you can follow the logic here as I work it out.

  Step one begins now. Turning temporary mine laying command over to one of Vendras’s men, I make my way to Raoul’s office. Walking right past Nora in her lounge chair as I go. Beautiful naked feet greet me, nails pink as a rose, long brown legs. I’m hard inside my khakis. Hard as steel.

  “I need to see the boss,” I tell the thug at the door. The man frowns like he’s never seen me. Then again, he’s paid to be suspicious of everyone. I get patted down. I’m not packing heat, so I pass through fine.

  Vendras is behind his desk. Pure mahogany. Likewise the shelves and table. The leather chair and sofa are like butter, just as pure and just as creamy. Out the full-length window behind him you can see the jigsaw puzzle sky and the million different color wild flowers down the cliff. The cliff leads to a ravine into which I’ve seen the man throw two of his enemies already since coming here a little less than a month ago.

  “Mr. Lawton,” he smiles indulgently, revealing a mouthful of gold teeth. “What an unexpected pleasure.”

  I nod brusquely. Supposedly the little fucker’s been to some academy somewhere to learn charm. The three-thousand-dollar custom-tailored English silk suit aside, he’s still an insect.

  “I’ll make it quick,” I tell him, hands on my khaki-covered hips, my biceps more than a little visible in the tank top. “You told me when I got here ‘mi casa es su casa,’ right? Well, then, I want a shot at your wife.”

  No shit, I actually just said that.

  Vendras’s gaze narrowed like a panther’s watching his future meal. Leaning back in his chair he commenced to studying me. Everything hinged on the man’s reaction. If he figured out at this point that I was in love with his wife, my balls would be joining Miguel’s in the jar that was up on one of his mahogany shelf in short order. On the other hand, coming right out and asking for her, though, that was actually a good way to throw him off the trail.