Nick Carter - The Aztec Avenger

She said, once, gasping, “I didn’t think it was going to be like this. God, it’s good.”

She shuddered in my arms. “Oh, god, it is good!” she exclaimed, breathing her warm, moist breath into my ear. “I love what you’re doing to me! Don’t stop!”

Her skin was fine and soft, slick with the thin sheen of perspiration, smooth with the ripeness of a woman’s body swollen with excitement. Her lips were warm and damp, clinging moistly to me wherever she kissed me. She moved slowly in response to my stroking fingers until she became wet and full and could not help twisting herself urgently against me.

In the end, we came together in a frantic outburst, her arms clenched around me, her legs entwined with mine, pressing herself upward against me as hard as she could, pulling me into her with her arms, her throat making little high-pitched sounds that grew into cat growls of sheer, helpless abandon.

At the final moment, her eyes opened and stared into my face, only a hand’s breadth away from hers, and she cried out in a torn voice, “You goddamned animal!” as her body exploded against mine, her hips beating against me with a fury she could not control.

Later, we lay together, her head on my shoulder, each of us smoking a cigarette,

“It doesn’t change anything,” Consuela said to me. Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling. “It was just something I wanted to do—”

“—we wanted to do,” I corrected her.

“All right, we,” she said. “But it doesn’t change one thing. Get that straight in your mind.”

“I didn’t think it would.”

“It was good though,” she said, turning to smile at me. “I like making love in the daylight.”

“It was very good.”

“Christ,” she said, “it was so nice having a man again. Not someone freaked out. Just straight,” I tightened my arm about her.

“It’s crazy,” Consuela mused. “It’s not supposed to be that good the first time.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“I think it would be good with you every time,” Consuela said. “Only it doesn’t pay to think about it, does it? We don’t know if it’s ever going to happen again, do we?”

She turned against me so that she lay on her side and put one leg across mine and pressed herself against my body.

“Listen,” she said, in an urgent whisper, “you be careful, will you? Promise me you’ll be careful.”

“I can take care of myself,” I said.

“That’s what they all say,” she said. Her fingers touched the scars on my chest. “You weren’t so careful when you got these, were you?”

“I’ll be more careful.”

Consuela flung herself away from me and lay on her back.

“Damn it!” she said, in her husky, ripe voice. “It’s hell being a woman. You know that?”

Consuela went home to dress. She said she’d return in about an hour to pick me up for our appointment later on. I showered leisurely and was shaving when the telephone rang. The rough voice did not bother to identify itself.

“Stocelli wants to see you. Right now. He says it’s important. Get up here as fast as you can.”

The phone went dead in my hands.

Stocelli’s swarthy, round face was almost purple with impotent rage.

“Look at that,” he bellowed at me. “Goddamn it! Just look at it! The son-of-a-bitch got it in here in spite of everything.”

He jabbed a thick forefinger at a parcel wrapped in brown paper with a blue slip of paper taped to it

“You think that’s my damned laundry?” Stocelli yelled at me in his rasping voice. “Pick it up. Go ahead, pick it up!”

I lifted the package from the coffee table. It was a lot heavier than laundry should be.

“We opened it,” growled Stocelli “Guess what’s inside.”

“I don’t have to guess.”

“You’re right,” he said furiously. “Five kilos of horse. How do you like that?”

“How’d it get here?”

“A bellhop brought it He comes up in the elevator so my boys stop him in the entry. He tells them it’s the laundry I sent out yesterday and puts it on a chair and goes back down the elevator. They even tip him. Those dumb bastards! The goddamned package sits around for more than an hour before they think to tell me about it How do you like that?”

“Was he a hotel employee?”

Stocelli nodded. “Yeah, he’s legitimate. We brought him back up here.. All he knows, it’s sitting on the counter in the valet shop waiting to be delivered. The laundry slip has my name and penthouse suite on it, so he brings it up.”

“I don’t suppose he saw who left it?” I asked.

Stocelli shook his round, almost bald head. “No, it was just there. Any of the hotel employees working in the valet shop could have brought it up. He just happened to see it first and thought he’d pick up another tip.”

Stocelli stomped heavily over to the windows. He gazed blankly out at the view without seeing it. Then he turned his thick lumpy body back to face me.

“What the hell have you been doing for the last day and a half?” he asked, irritably.

“Keeping you from getting killed,” I said, equally as blunt. “Michaud’s organization sent a man over here to get the local organization to knock you off.”

For a moment, Stocelli was speechless. He pounded one clublike fist into the palm of his other hand in frustration.

“What the hell am I?” he burst out. “A goddamned clay pigeon? First the Commission, now Michaud’s mob?” He shook his head like a short, angry bull. “How’d you learn about it?” he demanded.

“He made contact with me.”

“What for?” Stocelli’s small eyes focused on me, narrowing suspiciously in his round face. He hadn’t shaved and the bristle on his face was a gray and black stubble, contrasting with the black sheen of the few strands of hair he combed over his bald pate.

“They want me to help them knock you off.”

“And you’re telling me about it?” He put his hands on his hips, his legs astride, leaning toward me, almost as if he were barely able to restrain himself from attacking me.

“Why not? You want to know, don’t you?”

“What’d you tell them?” Stocelli asked.

“To lay off you.”

Stocelli lifted an inquiring eyebrow. “Yeah? What else? Suppose they don’t, then what?”

“Then I’ll blow their organization wide open.”

“You told them that?”

I nodded.

Stocelli pursed his small lips thoughtfully.. “You play rough, don’t you….”

“So do they.”

“What’d they say when you told them that?”

“I’m supposed to get their answer this afternoon.”

Stocelli tried not to appear anxious. “What do you think they’ll say?”

“Figure it out for yourself. They need Michaud’s organization more than they need you. That makes you expendable.”

Stocelli was a realist. If he was frightened, he didn’t show it. “Yeah. You gotta figure it that way, right?” He changed the subject suddenly. “Who’s over here from Marseille?”

“Someone named Jean-Paul Sevier. Do you know him?”

His brow furrowed in thought. “Sevier?” He shook his head. “I don’t think I ever met him.”

I described Jean-Paul.

Stocelli shook his head again. “I still don’t know him. But that don’t mean anything. I never paid no attention to any of them except the guys running the organization. Michaud, Berthier, Duprè. I wouldn’t know the others.”

“Does the name Dietrich mean anything to you?”

There was no reaction. If Stocelli knew the name, he hid it well. “Never heard of him. Who’s he with?”

“I don’t know if he’s with anybody. Did you ever have dealings with anyone by that name?”