Virgin by Mary Elizabeth Murphy Read Free Book Online Page A

went
inside and watched their eyes go wide and round as he flashed his money and
rings and bought a round for the house.
    In the span of
a few heartbeats the word would get around: Emilio's back! Emilio's back! So
that when he strolled the narrow streets the children would follow and call his
name like a deity and beg for his attention. And not far behind them would be
their mothers and older sisters, doing the same.
    He loved to
drive by the St. Ignatio School where the priests and sisters had tried to beat
some religion into him and make him like all the other sheep they imprisoned in
their classrooms. He loved to stop in front of the adobe chapel and blow the
horn until one of those black-robed fools came out, then give them the
dirty-digit salute and screech away.
    He knew where
his mother was living--still in the same old shack down in the Camino Verde
settlement where he'd been born--but he never visited her. They'd be ice-skating
in hell before he gave that puta the time of day. Always putting him
down, always saying he was a good-for-nothing puerco just like his
father. Emilio had never known his father, and he'd spent years hating him for
deserting his family. But after Emilio's last blowup with his mother, he no
longer blamed his old man for leaving.
    That blowup had
come when Emilio turned twenty and took the
bouncer job at The Cockscomb, the toughest, meanest, low-rent whorehouse in
Tijuana. His mother had kicked him out of the trailer, telling him he was going
to hell, that he was going to die before he was twenty-one. Emilio had
sauntered off and never looked back.
    He proved
himself at The Cockscomb. He'd been fighting since he was a kid and he'd
learned every cheap, dirty, back-alley brawling trick there ever was, usually
the hard way. He had the scars to prove it. He was good with a knife--very good.
He'd stabbed his share and had been stabbed a few times in return. One of his
opponents had died, writhing on the floor at his feet. Emilio had felt nothing.
    He started
working out, popping steroids and bulking up until his shoulders were too wide
for most doorways. He had a short fuse to begin with, and the juice trimmed it
down to the nub.
    But not to
where he was out of control. Never out of control. He always eased the
belligerent drunken Americanos out to the street, but heaven help the
locals who got out of line. Emilio would beat them to a pulp and love every
bloody minute of it. Another man died from one of those beatings, but he'd
deserved it. Over the succeeding years he caused the death of three more
men--two with a blade, and one with a bullet.
    He moved up quickly through the Tijuana sex world, from
whorehouses, to brothels, to chief enforcer at the renowned Blue Senorita, a
high-ticket bordello and tavern that catered almost exclusively to Americanos. Orosco, the owner, liked to brag that the Blue Senorita was a
"full-service whorehouse," catering to all tastes--strip shows, live
sex shows, donkey sex shows; where a man could have a woman, or another man, or
a young girl, or a young boy, or--if he had the energy and a fat enough
wallet--all four. For his first few years at the Blue Senorita Emilio had been
proud of his position--inordinately so, he now thought-- but the sameness of its
nightly routine, along with the realization that he had risen as far as he
could go and that somewhere along the corridor of his years, when he'd aged and softened
and slowed, he'd be replaced by someone younger and stronger and hungrier. Then
he'd find himself out on the street with no income, no savings, no pension. And
he'd wind up one of those useless old men who hung around the square in their
cigarette-burned shirts and their pee-stained pants, sipping from bottles of
cheap wine and yammering to anybody who'd listen about their younger days when
they'd had all the money they could spend, and any women they wanted. When
they'd been somebody instead of nobody.
    He could see no
future in Tijuana. Nowhere in all of