Mexican standoff, p.1
Mexican Standoff, page 1
part #21 of Cherry Delight Series
Cherry Delight
The Mob was growing opium in Mexico. Cherry’s job was to smoke them out.
MEXICAN
STANDOFF
by Gardner Francis Fox
Written as Glen Chase
Originally printed in 1975
Digitally transcribed by Kurt Brugel
2021 for the Gardner Francis Fox Library LLC
Cover Illustration by Kurt Brugel 2021
Copyright © 2021 by The Gardner Francis Fox Library LLC.
All inquires please contact gardnerffox@gmail.com
Gardner Francis Fox (1911 to 1986) was a wordsmith. He originally was schooled as a lawyer. Rerouted by the depression, he joined the comic book industry in 1937. Writing and creating for the soon to be DC comics. Mr. Fox set out to create such iconic characters as the Flash and Hawkman. He is also known for inventing Batman‘s utility belt and the multi-verse concept.
At the same time, he was writing for comic books, he also contributed heavily to the paperback novel industry. Writing in all of the genres; westerns, historical romance, sword and sorcery, intergalactic adventures, even vintage sleaze.
The Gardner Francis Fox library is proud to be digitally transferring over 150 of Mr. Fox’s paperback novels back into print.
7.5x7.5 softcover paperback book with 165 black & white pages.
This is the book that collects Kurt Brugel’s first half of the scratchboard book cover illustrations he created for the new editions of Mr. Fox’s stories.
I chose scratchboard as my medium for its graphic punch. The book cover is responsible for giving the reader an initial lead-in for what the story is about. Having all of the book covers based on the same motif will also unify the library as a whole. There is enough of a challenge with doing 156 of anything in art, but to have to illustrate the contents of the book using a “pretty face”, well then we have something special in-store. Purchase from- - -
www.gardnerfrancisfoxlibrary.com/art
Table of Contents:
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER ONE
“Do it again, Mark!” I shrieked in a frenzy, “do it again.” I hadn’t had this much fun in a week. Mark had strung a hammock high over my king-sized bed, securing the ends to the bedposts which reached nearly to the ceiling. For a couple of hours we had been rollicking and frolicking in it, enjoying ourselves and each other in a brand-new kind of sport that we hadn’t enjoyed before.
We had already fallen off once, but it didn’t really matter, because the bed was stretched out a few feet beneath us. It made our tumbling love-play all the more exciting, hanging up there as we were, suspended in the air. The hammock itself was a tremendous thing. Very ingeniously made. Its woven strands were as strong as steel although soft and yielding to the flesh. The strands could stretch out to as wide as six feet, if one wanted to merely roll back and stretch out in it. But it was constructed so that the strands would mesh closely together by the weight of two bodies occupying it at the same time.
And occupying it we were!
“Where did you say this marvelous thing came from?” I asked Mark, gasping.
“From the Yucatan, in Mexico,” he answered. His words were somewhat hesitant, I thought, giggling to myself, not because he was unsure of his answer, but because I had asked it simultaneously with his starting to thrust himself inside me again. The question and answer had come just a little before we did.
The hammock swayed back and forth slightly as our own throbbing subsided and we sprawled out in its comforting hold.
“Down there, they sleep in them,” Mark went on.
“Really?” I opened one eye to stare at him intently. “Do they do what we’re doing, in them too?” I asked, mischievously.
“As a matter of fact, I don’t know,” Mark answered. “That’s part of the reason I’m sending you down there, baby, to check it out.”
“I’m going to Mexico?” I asked. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“Yep,” Mark replied, matter-of-factly, “I guess it is.”
I became more serious now, fun and games
were behind me at least for the moment. This was the beginning of a new assignment and I was all ears. My other parts had to be pushed aside at least momentarily.
Not that that was what Mark was doing with them exactly. He continued to prod and play with me even as he filled me in on the details of my new caper.
“Seems like there’s a lot of funny money and other strange business going on down there, lately,” he was saying as he busied himself with his fingers and with my own Down there, I noted happily. “That’s why I want you go down there and have a look-see.”
I raised one eyebrow at him. “Just to look around?” I queried him. “That isn’t my usual method of operation.”
Mark made a face at me. “Okay, okay,” he acknowledged. “We’ve got a little more to go on than that.”
“Like what?” I asked happily, snuggling myself inside his arms and against his hard warm body.
“We got a lead recently,” Mark continued seriously. “That some of the so-called missing bodies who haven’t been heard from in a long time, and have been assumed to have been done away with, are live and well south of the border.”
“Like who?” I asked. “Like a lot of the guys who we had assumed
were folded over in car trunks and then put through the compacting machine.” Mark replied tersely. “When the mob took over the auto wrecking industry as the means of disposing of unsightly corpses, we stopped looking for a lot of people who we assumed had gone the way of all scrap-metal. Now it seems that we might have been wrong.” His brow had settled into the deep horizontal lines of a frown.
I stroked the ends of my fingernails against it, trying to erase the deep creases; I hated to see my boss baby unhappy.
“But what would they be doing in Mexico, honey?” I asked lightly, trying to get him back into the mood we had both been thrashing around in, only a few minutes before he had turned so serious. “They can’t even speak the language.”
“You know the language they speak, Cherry,” Mark admonished me sternly. His tone of voice told me that this was not the time for me to be kidding around. He was dead serious.
“Money talks, Cherry,” he said quietly. “That’s all the language that they need to know. I think there’s a whole bunch of them down there. And they’ve set up a new empire of crime.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“They seemed to have carved out a nice little niche for themselves,” Mark replied. “They’ve bought out the police and local officials in an area that’s still pretty inaccessible. They’re growing dope, acres and acres of it, that much we’re sure of. The Feds have been on it for quite a while now. Only they seem helpless to try to stop it. But I think there’s a lot more.”
“Like what?” I insisted again. The whole thing sounded very new to me. I had been down to Mexico countless times. I knew there was some amount of hanky panky going on. You get that everywhere, but what Mark seemed to be indicating was much more large scale than anything I had ever come up against.
“Like I said, funny money,” Mark replied. “There seems to be a large-scale laundering operation going on down there and for all we know they might even be manufacturing.”
My ears picked up at that one. Counterfeiting was a new wrinkle in the Mafia coat of many colors. At least as far as I was concerned.
“Then of course they’ve got a dozen little side issues,” Mark continued. “Gambling, booze, women,—the usual gamut.”
“Counterfeiting isn’t their usual stick, Mark,” I reminded him. “Why do you think they’d get involved in something as risky as that?”
“The worldwide money situation,” Mark replied. “It’s created all sorts of opportunities that the mob hadn’t really been into before, and from the way I’ve heard about how they’ve been operating in this Mexican thing, they practically set up their own government.
“Sounds like Mulberry Street at the beginning of the century all over again,” I commented.
“You might not be far off the beam, Cherry,” Mark agreed. “From the little bit of information we’ve been able to gather, it sounds as if some of our old cronies have set up their own fiefdom down there.”
“What are the names being mentioned?” I asked.
“Bandelli, for one,” Mark replied.
I let out a long, low whistle. “Bandelli,” I echoed. “We thought he had been blown away a long time ago!”
“Yeh, well now it looks like Bandelli has flown the coop with a lot of other birds,” Mark said. “A lot of unsolved murders, might not have been murders after all.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” I exclaimed.
“Who would have thought that they would have switched from cement suits to sombreros?”
“They wanted us to think that they’d been iced so we’d stop looking for them,” Mark surmised. “At least that’s the way I see it; they’ve got an awfully strong sense of security about this whole deal from the way they’ve been running this thing. They don’t seem to be afraid of being noticed, let alone caught.”
“How did you get wind of it?” I asked.
“Some of the narcotics boys were
“How does all of the other activity tie in with the drug deal?” I wanted to know.
“After the fields were spotted, we went in for a closer look,” Mark explained. “There’s been a lot of activity coming into California and Arizona. We haven’t been able to pinpoint the origin but this looks close enough to warrant these suspicions and at least more comprehensive investigation we can give it.”
“Namely me,” I said brightly. “Namely you,” Mark repeated.
He put the tip of his index finger on my right nipple and started drawing concentric circles wider and wider till he had cupped my entire breast in his hand. He squeezed a little bit and said, “we’re going to have to smuggle you in there somehow.”
“Smuggle me?” I exclaimed. I had visions of being wrapped up in a carpet ala Cleopatra or being shoved in by a pipeline. “I want to go first class as usual!” I said.
“Flying you down there in style is no problem, my love,” Mark said continuing his circling. “The trick is to get you into the inner sanctum without arousing any suspicion.”
He patted me on my bare bottom. “Go get me my attache case,” he ordered. I got down out of the hammock, fell to the bed and rolled off that and onto the floor. By the time I had the case on the bed Mark was there too and I knew that fun and games time was over.
He unlocked his case and out of a manila folder drew several 8 by 10 glossies. A smaller photo was in color. Mark spread them out on the bed and I could see that they were all of the same guy.
“Not bad,” I commented, indicating the glossies. “Who is he?”
“Your new playmate, Nicky Tonelli,” Mark grinned.
I frowned a little. “Who is he?” I asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him.”
“We think he’s an important new hit-man,” Mark said. “We’re not quite sure the one thing we do know though is that he’s a regular commuter on the New York to Mexico circuit.
“I don’t exactly love playing footsies with a hit-man,” I grumbled. “Suppose he decides to rub me—the wrong way.”
“Stop pouting, Cherry,” Mark said. “We’ve got to get you in there and so far this is the only way we’ve come up with.”
“I don’t even know the guy, remember?” I said. “How am I going to get close enough to him for him to take me on one of these jaunts? I would imagine they would be super secret.”
“Exactly,” said Mark grimly. “That’s why we’re going to set you up with handsome Nicky, under the very finest circumstances.”
I eyed the pictures again. He wasn’t really half bad if you like the type. Actually I didn’t know whether I liked the type or not, but I thought I could get used to it. “What kind of circumstances?” I asked.
“On recommendation from one of the finest pimps in New York,” Mark laughed.
I threw a pillow at him. But he ducked adroitly and it missed by a mile.
“What kind of girl do you think I am, any way?” I asked him in mock anger.
“It’s not the kind of girl that I think you are that’s important,” Mark reminded me. “It’s the kind of girl that we’ve got to get Nicky Tonelli to think you are—sexy, gorgeous, and terribly dumb.”
“Well, two out of three isn’t bad,” I smiled. “But on the other hand, if this place is as isolated and well guarded as you seem to indicate maybe it would be stupid to go in that openly.”
“What are you thinking?” Mark asked.
“I’m not too sure, yet,” I said uneasily. “But maybe some underground infiltration would make more sense.”
“I don’t see how we could,” Mark said. “It would take months and months to plan and execute something like that, and it would be much riskier if you got caught.”
“Riskier?” I repeated with the accent on the last syllable. “It seems to me I’m taking an awfully big risk either way.”
“Yes, you are,” Mark smiled. “But isn’t that what you love about this business, baby? Admit it.”
“Yes, I suppose it’s true, I agreed, I guess I just wasn’t made for sitting home by the fire.”
“No, just for being the fire,” Mark smiled as he reached for me.
“But I’ve got to get ready to go to Mexico,” I pretended to protest.
His arms were already encircling my naked body and bringing me closer to him. “Don’t I?”
“Ole,” Mark replied, as he pressed himself down on top of me.
I wonder what he meant by that, was my last conscious thought.
CHAPTER TWO
The cocktail lounge was so dark you could barely see anything or anyone in it, only loud, insistent beat of the music and the constant haze of smoke rising toward the ceiling and the insistent murmur of people were indicators that anyone was present.
“Take the last stool at the end of the bar,” the fat man who held my elbow in his pudgy hand directed me.
“Then what?” I asked.
“We’ll tell you what to do when it’s time to do it,” he replied.
I shrugged and followed orders, walking carefully and quietly to the indicated bar-stool. I sat down and spread my legs slightly. It was less of a come-on than to gain a little comfort. For this auspicious occasion I had poured myself into a slightly too tight dress, a straight sheath that encased me in golden sequins from throat to toe. It was as glamorous as all get out but not exactly the most comfortable thing to sit in. I hoisted it a couple of inches to give myself better seating arrangements while I waited for Nicky Tonelli to arrive.
I took out a long cigarette and made an elaborate display of lighting it with a gold DuPont lighter. I never smoked but it gave me something to do.
Before I could take a pretended exhale the fat little man was at my elbow again. “Go to the last booth on the left,” he instructed.
I blew the nonexistent smoke, toward his eyes. “Where the hell is that?” I spat out. “I can’t see anything in this dark dump!”
“Just get up and walk straight ahead,” he told me. “And walk nice, Nicky’s sitting and watching for you.”
I sidled over to where he had pointed in a low provocative saunter. I was in no rush to encounter my new playmate right now. Besides I knew the way to play this game was to let him drink in all he could and make his desires for me all the more potent. Not that Tonelli or anyone else would be able to see much of me or anything else in this damn darkness, but at least I might as well begin acting the part that I was now expect to play.
“Sit down,” I heard a deep masculine voice say.
I eased my backside downward hoping it would make contact with upholstery. Luckily it did.
“Good evening,” I said, in a practiced greasy voice.
“Good evening, doll,” he replied.
I hated that, there was something so cheap about these hoods and the way they spoke to women.
I smiled at him. That part wasn’t hard, Nicky was even better in the flesh than he had in his photos.
“Want a drink?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “No thank you, I don’t like drinking.”
“You mean drinking all the time, or when you’re working?” His voice had an edge of ice in it that belied the smile that his face still held. I shuttered a little.
“All the time,” I replied. “I work my equipment too hard to take any chances with it.”
He gave me a long hard stare straight at the boobs. I pushed forward a little so that he wouldn’t be disappointed.
“You look like you could use a little vacation, doll,” he said, still staring.
“Brother I sure could!” I laughed. “That would be heaven.”
“How would you like to come away with me for a couple of weeks?” he asked.
“That sounds more like work than vacation,”
I replied. Eyeing him very steadily. “Besides, my time away from home comes kind of high.”
“How high is high?” he asked.
“Two hundred bucks a day,” I replied. “Cause naturally you’ll pick up all the tabs for everything.”
