Free The Viper Squad by J.B. Hadley Page B

a hotel cocktail lounge and paid her to spend the night with him. Besides being pretty and being a good lay, she
     spoke reasonable English and knewher way around. She gave him what sounded to be a reasonable three-day rate.
    She wasn’t bad as a driver when she remembered to keep her eyes on the road. They were leaving the city of San Salvador, passing
     through its outer ring of shanties, hovels and lean-tos.
    “Are these the people who have come in from the rural areas to escape the violence?” he asked, remembering something he had
     seen on TV that, so far as he could recall, had been about El Salvador.
    “Yes,” Rosita said, waving a hand. “They come for work, but there’s so little work for anybody. These people are not as poor
     as others.”
    Chips looked at the miserable conditions about him and wondered what being really poor here must look like. Odd-shaped pieces
     of lumber leaning against each other like houses built of playing cards, sheets of plastic, scrap metal, running children,
     bony dogs, scorching sun.
    “Look down there,” he said. “They’re living in a dried-up river gulley.”
    “That’s what we call
barranca.”
    “Doesn’t it flood them out?” he asked.
    “Sometimes, in the rainy season.”
    “You grew up in a place like this?”
    “Yes, it was a nice place, iot of friendly people,” she said. Then she smiled and touched his knee, taking her eyes off the
     road to look at him. “I prefer living in luxury hotel.”
    He pointed out that she was veering left into oncoming traffic.
    A minute later she cut off a guy in a big car, who blew his horn furiously, then raced after and overtook them. When the driver
     saw it was a pretty girl who had cut him off, his anger changed to laughter and the two cars had a friendly race, side by
     side, that made Stadnick’s hair stand on end.
    Rosita laughed and slowed down. “You come all thisway to El Salvador, Chips, and it is not the guerrillas who kill you, it is a woman driver.”
    After an hour, they pulled into the small town’s dusty square.
    “It’s the one with the Coca-Cola sign.” He pointed, checking once again the typed instructions that had been ready for him
     at the American embassy.
    Inside the cinder-block hut, the heavyset man behind the counter politely bade them good day.
    Rosita told him in Spanish what Chips had told her to say. “This norteamericano works for the blond girl’s father, the one
     you drove out to the guerrillas. We know it was you who took her. The National Police reported it to the American embassy.
     The embassy has insisted that you be allowed to remain free.”
    “Nobody here wants to harm me. The soldiers are my friends.”
    “It seems to me you’re playing a dangerous game,” Rosita commented.
    “And you?” he challenged.
    She laughed. “I do it for money. Here is the name and hotel in San Salvador of my norteamericano. He says the rebels should
     contact him there so they can talk.”
    “That will cost him a hundred Yanqui dollars.”
    Rosita raised her eyebrows in appreciation and said to Chips in English, “He say he want one hundred Yanqui dollar.”
    “A hundred dollars!” Chips rooted in his pocket. “Here, give him this twenty.”
    The shopkeeper held up a hand and shook his head. “Fifty,” Chips offered.
    “Cincuenta,” Rosita translated.
    “Ciento,” the man responded.
    Rosita began in English, “He say—”
    “I know, I know.” Chips peeled off another four twenties from a wad, added them to the fifth bill and handed them to the man.
    He sensed Rosita’s eyes following the thick wad of bills from which he had peeled the five twenties, and he allowed it to
     float under her nose a moment to arouse her desires.
    Seven members of the Clara Elizabeth Ramirez Metropolitan Commando sat on wood boxes beneath the banana—leaf thatch of a shack
     in a barranca near the San Salvador football stadium. They were secure here with the poor as their watchdogs. A lone