Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

Harvest, the Seer of Beauty and Growth. He is the Great God of Good Will. Like your severed rabbit foot, Xipe brings luck.”

You look like you’ve had plenty, buddy, Smith concluded. La Fiesta Del Sol, like all the bars down here, was an erect dump. Sticky floors and walls, seamy light, jabbering Mexican music. A young G.I. fussed with two whores at a corner booth, but that was it. Ramirez always picked shithouses like this. Perhaps they reminded him of home.

Smith was Vinchetti’s coverman; he handled the southern region of what the feds called “The Circuit,” the mob-operated underground porn network. Vinchetti said the southern region grossed a couple of million per year, a far cry from what they’d been taking before the advent of VCRs and x-rated videos; but then they weren’t losing anything anymore, either. Nobody worked in loops and stills now; it was all video. A single 3/4-inch master could be duplicated a thousand times and sold to point-men for a thousand dollars apiece. From there they stepped on them any way they wanted, depending on the orders. In other words, the days of running truckloads of the stuff out of South Texas were long gone. Just a handful of masters kept The Circuit going for months. It was almost too easy, and risk free. Vinchetti’s plants in Justice, working with set-ups from Smith, gave the feds plenty of old stuff and overstock to seize, and a couple of wetbacks to bust. Justice thought they were effectively fighting underground pornography, while Vinchetti lost nothing and made millions per year. The net was even safer from the distribution end; everything was mail drops these days, coded mailing lists and untraceable names. Even Vinchetti didn’t know who most of his point clients were, and on rare occasions when Postal agents busted a point at a drop, Vinchetti skated because the points didn’t know who he was, either.

The stuff, of course, was all made on the Mex side; the states were too hot, unless you were pure-ass stupid like those Dixie Mafia lightweights or the Lavender Hill people. The Circuit dealt only in what the feds called “Underground”; real S&M, torture, snuff, and lots of kiddie. The fucking perverts stateside paid big money for “kp,” as much as three bills for a 20 minute double dupe, as long as the kids were white. Smith made the buys and had the masters muled to San Angelo; Vinchetti’s dupe labs took it from there. Smith saw no shame in what he did. Supply and demand — hey, it was a free country, wasn’t it? The only real worry was getting the masters across the border, and that was Ramirez’ problem. Smith didn’t know how the guy did it — he was either a very good mule, or a very lucky one.

Where the hell is he? Smith thought. Lapeto was a ghost-town, like any of the notorious Texas border stops, a grim meld of rapid babble, dark faces, and sneers. The pop was 99 % Mex, half or more wet. All that kept these little pisshole towns alive were the EMs from Lackland and Fort Sam. The kids would come here, rent rooms, then cross over to catch the donkey shows in Acuna and Fuente. For all Smith cared, the entire border could burn.

“I’ve never been robbed,” the keep said. He was drying glasses, grinning.

“Huh?”

“Never been robbed like other bars, never been shaken. Never problems.”

“Big deal,” Smith sputtered.

“Is Xipe. He is good luck.”

Idiot. Smith stared at the figure again. It smiled much like the keep, emptily. Smith didn’t believe in gods, stone or otherwise. Gods were bad for business. “Another,” he said, and hopped off his stool.

In the john, he scanned incomprehensible graffiti. Most of it seemed to lack Spanish extraction altogether. Xoclan, ti coatl. Ut zetl! Huetar, Coatlicue, ay! Me socorro! Someone had drawn a hummingbird eating the heads off stick figures. Smith grimaced and zipped his fly. A shadow swung behind him. He spun, shucked his Glock, and drew down …

But it was only a trinket swinging from the light. A black plastic figure with pudgy hands and a big, empty smile.

Xipe.

This place gives me the creeps. He couldn’t wait to get back to San Angelo and the real world. A little coke, a little pussy — enough of this wasteland. A slim figure in a smudged azure-blue suit sat stooped beside Smith’s bar stool. The head turned as if psychic, big white smile with a gold tooth, greasy hair, greasy face.

“Amigo,” Ramirez greeted. “How is my favoreet yankee?” He offered a pale hand, which Smith declined to shake.

“I’ve been waiting a fucking hour.”

“Hey, we Mexicans, we’re always late, isn’t that right?”

“Come on, we’ve got business.”

Ramirez nodded, grinning, and paid the tab. The gold-flecked grin seemed permanently fixed. He led Smith out, slinking like a junkie after a mainline.

The street stood empty. It stank of dust. A lone whore yammered at a couple of G.I.s getting out of a cab. She gazed at Smith once, then quickly looked away. The main drag wasn’t even paved; it was dirt, strewn with litter. Smith checked the alleys for tails, but only emptiness returned his glances.

“I have much good stuff for you tonight, Meester Smeeth.” Ramirez held the door for him at the motel. PARADISA, the neon sign glowed. Jesus, Smith thought. Dark lamps lit the lobby. Ridiculous felt prints of matadors and Spanish women adorned the stained walls. A greasily rouged fat woman tended the counter, hair in a black bun. From a shelf of curios, the tiny figure of Xipe smiled.

Smith frowned.

They mounted stairs which smelled of beer-piss and smoke. Ramirez’ room smelled worse. La Biblia rested on a nightstand, beside a stained bed. Used condoms stuck to the side of the wastebasket. Ramirez was zipping open a battered suitcase, but Smith’s gaze turned to the room’s only wall painting. The quetzl-feathered head on a plump, squatting body. Its arms outstretched as if to invite embrace. The smile huge yet empty.

“Xipe,” Smith muttered at it.

Ramirez looked up, grinning gold. “The Giver of the Harvest, who protects the faithful. The Great God of —”

“Good Will, I know,” Smith interrupted. Xipe’s eyes were empty as its smile, its fat hands empty. Perhaps it was the mode of the trinket’s emptiness that distressed Smith so. It seemed to him a kind of vitality — a knowledge—hidden deep beneath the black facade. An emptiness that somehow yearned to be filled.

“He brings luck, Meester Smeeth. He guards us from our enemies.”

Smith blinked. A shiver of vertigo, like standing up too quickly after a neat shot of Uzzo, seemed to transpose Xipe’s smile to a momentary hollow grimace.

Smith turned away. He didn’t feel good — bad beer or something. In dismay, he glanced down. “Jesus Christ, you bring the stuff in a suitcase?”

“My people, like yours, we pay.”

“You can’t buy every Customs officer on the line.”

“Of course not.” Ramirez grinned at Xipe. “The rest is buena snerte.”

“What?”

“Luck.”

Smith felt a chill. The painting distracted him. “How many masters?”

“Ten. New faces, all new stuff. And chiquitas — the best.”

Smith carried forty large. He was authorized to pay three grand per master, but only if the production was good. The way it worked, if the larger-formatted master wasn’t excellent, the second dupes would look piss-poor. Ramirez plugged the first tape into the VCR he’d set up on the dresser. Now came the grueling part, having to watch a sample of each. Smith steeled himself, crossed his arms, and addressed the screen.

His eyes bulged when the image formed.

He expected the usual phantom scenes: stark-lighted rooms, hollow-eyed children and sneering spic studs, women gagged and tied and jerking as fingers sunk needles into banded breasts. Instead he saw a grainy black and white of a man getting out of a car in front of a San Angelo warehouse.

The man was Smith.