The Damned Read Online Free PDF Page B

had an ungrammatical flair for languages, came from New Jersey, and thought of all other races as gooks.
    And this time trouble had closed in on him, but firmly. Leaving the two bodies behind him, he had boomed up over the mountains through Tres Cumbres and down onto the plain of Mexico City, and the night wind at ten thousand feet had sobered him for the first time in three days. That’s where the party had started, in Mexico City. He’d started drinking alone, and by the third drink had picked up an americano, a correspondent for one of the news magazines. The americano knew of a big party going on among the embassy crowd. They decided to grace the party with their presence. The more tireless members of the party broke off and established a new party in a Chapultepec apartment. One of the drunker citizens was a good bullfighter named Miguel Larra, and he had with him a young item named Amparo, who had just enough indio blood in her to make Del Bennicke taper off on the drinking and start a series of oblique maneuvers intended to cut her loose from her bullfighter.
    So when the party moved to the bullfighter’s Cuernavaca house, Del Bennicke went right along, all of them singing in the big car that swayed and roared across the mountains, with the girl conscious of what Bennicke was up to, and, warm beside him in the car, doing just enough teasing to keep his teeth on edge. It was a big party and it dwindled fast in the big walled house just north of Cuernavaca as people paired off and/or passed out. After Larra passed out, Del got to the little girl with neither more nor less difficulty than he had anticipated, and found it to be very good indeed, very unusual, and as torrid as an expert flamenco. And now he knew that he should have taken off right then and there, hopping a turismo back to the city. But it had been so good he was thinking in terms of just one more time. “Solamente una vez más, por favor.” But the bullfighter had bounced back from what should have been a clobbering hangover, and dragged Del with him down to Lake Tequesquitengo and initiated him into the art of fishing with goggles and harpoon gun for large-mouth bass. They picked up half a dozen bass and drank a large bottle of tequila in the process and drove back, tight, to Cuernavaca, and somehow the chance didn’t materialize. On the next day, the rest of the party having faded gently away, the three of them drove far on dusty roads to look at some bulls and drink acid pulque, and they got back at dusk, and Del, bushed and sodden, had hit the sack right way, only to be awakened perhaps an hour later by the warm and scented body burrowing against his side like a small furry animal seeking shelter.
    And she had to have a light on, because she was one of those who has to have a light on, and when she suddenly gasped and stiffened under him, Del turned his head and saw the bullfighter standing there, face twisted, eyes gone dead, aiming one of the guns they had used underwater. The short spear with the harpoon on the end fitted into a slotted tube, and fat rubber bands slammed it out of the tube. As the rubber bands made their vicious whacking sound, Del threw himself up and back, and the thing made a quick gleam in the lamplight and chomped into Amparo with a sound that was both hard and wet. It hit right under her left breast and she half turned toward the bullfighter. She made the smallest of gasps and put both hands on the shaft and pulled at it very delicately, but the barbed head had turned inside her, precisely as it was designed to do. She coughed in a most delicate and ladylike way, and shivered just a bit, and died very quietly, as though to make up by discreetness during her last moments for twenty years of bounding lustiness.
    As Del came off the bed, the bullfighter hurled the gun itself and Del eeled away from it and came in fast, thinking only of putting the character out of action long enough to give him time to think. He caught the