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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 looking for new plantations," Mark explained, "and aerial photos from one of the overflights showed us activity in an area that hadn't been researched before."

"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.