Once the other two gang members had gone Salvador turned his attention to Nancy Taggart, who was still standing half-naked in the center of the filthy room, nervously clutching around her curvaceous body what little remained of her bra and slip and the unbuttoned bodice of her dress. Still unnerved by the encounter with his younger brother, Salvador scarcely looked at the reporter's wife, whose recent naked trembling was sharply etched in his brain, but he knew who she was and who her husband was.
'You can put your clothes on behind that wall over there,' he said, nodding in the direction of the other end of the room where a wall had been opened up into the next room.
Rick Taggart's young wife was still in a state of near-shock from her lewd manhandling by Bernardo and Chico, and was grateful for the opportunity to retreat for a few moments before confronting yet another ominous member of the Morros gang. Gathering up her limp pair of white nylon panties from the floor where they had been flung in her struggles with Salvador's younger brother and the other Morros, she made her way unsteadily into the hole in the wall and into the other room to repair her ravaged appearance and jumbled thoughts.
Her heart pounded fearfully at the knowledge that she was now in the presence of Salvador Mendosa, whose exploits in the world of street gangs were widely known throughout the city. What had she gotten herself into, she thought, as she dressed herself in her battered clothes. She was right in the middle of a potentially dangerous situation, and her only desire was to get out as quickly as possible.
Growing up in a secluded section of the East where, as far as she knew, life was still lived in the relatively honest spirit that she had always enjoyed, the young blonde had never fully grasped the reality of a life where joining a street gang was the only hope of survival. In her world, the existence of a gang like the Morros was a product of the imagination only, the subject for best-selling novels and movies, but never actually a force that she herself would have to contend with. But her encounter with Bernardo and Chico brought home to her the relentless brutality of life on the streets of the ghetto.
These men would stop at nothing, she realized, to protect themselves.
Perhaps Rick Taggart was wrong to try to expose them and destroy them.
Already he was in jail, and she had been saved from a brutal rape by two hoodlums only by the unexpected intervention of the Morros gang leader himself, and she had no idea what fate awaited her when she went out into the other room. Frightened nearly out of her wits, the abused young reporter's wife's only thoughts centered on removing herself and her husband from danger.
'Now, what the hell are you doing down here on Morros turf?' Salvador asked her when she finally climbed back through the hole in the wall separating the two rooms. 'Who are you and what are you doing here?' He was going to really make her squirm.
'My name is Nancy Taggart,' the beautiful blonde replied in a trembling voice. 'My husband is Rick Taggart, the reporter who's supposed to write a series of articles about you and about your gang the Morros and about street gangs in general.'
Salvador, leaning up against a wall, laughed shortly at her words.
'From what I read in his own newspaper, your husband's gonna be too busy writing articles about himself to have any time to write articles about the Morros. Selling grass to high school students – still a serious crime in this state,' he informed her, looking very serious.
Nancy fought down an angry reply. She had to tread carefully now, and she knew it instinctively.
'My husband has never even smoked any marijuana, let alone sold it to anyone, kids included,' she replied vehemently. 'The day he was arrested, a Spanish girl came to our house saying she had something to tell Rick for his newspaper article. I went into the kitchen to get her a cup of coffee because she was crying, and when I came back she was gone. That afternoon the cops got an anonymous phone call saying that Rick was selling grass. They came over to the house and found all that marijuana. It must have been planted by that Spanish girl.'
'That still doesn't explain what you are doing in Morros territory,'
Salvador said noncommittally, although he listened to her story with interest. 'I mean, lady, this is a dangerous neighborhood for a gringa to walk into alone.'
'I know, but I had to,' Nancy continued. 'I had to find that girl, I had to clear my husband's name. I saw her on the street a few minutes after I got here and followed her. I was pretty sure she came into this house. When I asked about her, your brother and that other Morro brought me in here. And that's all I know.'
'What did the girl look like?' Salvador asked casually.
Nancy again described Maria's appearance, but the gang leader already knew who the young Spanish girl was, because after all, he had sent her to the Taggart house in the first place. Pretty soon she was going to be out on the streets to support her habit, like a lot of other girls in the neighborhood. So it was Maria who'd done him the favor of getting Taggart off their backs. She had done it for enough money to buy herself a fix for a week.
'So you followed her into a cruddy old building in this neighborhood knowing the risk you were taking?'
'Well,' Nancy replied, choosing her words carefully, 'I wasn't thinking of risk at the time. The most important thing on my mind was finding that girl and clearing my husband.'
Salvador smiled indulgently. 'Yeah, but look what happened to you because you weren't thinking about what you were doing. It was damn lucky for you I came along. But the fact is, Mrs. Taggart, I don't know nothing about any girl like you described. That description fits most of the women on our turf. Anyway, we have nothing against your husband.
I mean, he's just doing his job, right?'
'Yes, yes, that's right,' Nancy answered, after looking at the Morros leader for a moment. She had no real reason to trust his word, but something about the way he swore his innocence impressed her. In fact, her whole impression of Salvador Mendosa, the supposedly dangerous leader of the Morros was rapidly becoming very different from what she had expected from her husband's descriptions of him.
'Well, then, who planted the grass on him?'
'Well, even a reporter's wife doesn't know all of the stories he is working on. Maybe somebody else had something to hide that he was finding out about and this was their way of getting him out of the way.'
The powerfully built Morros leader was beginning to enjoy the little game he was playing with Rick Taggart's naive young wife. Surveying her calmly from beneath his heavy eyelids, he couldn't help noticing that Nancy was exceptionally beautiful, with a face and figure that looked as if they were made for fucking. I wouldn't mind throwing a fuck into her, he found himself thinking as his eyes wandered over her wavy blonde hair and the huge, softly swelling contours of her tits. A button had ripped off the front of her dress and in the space it left, he could see the tantalizing shadow of her cleavage, a deep canyon between the soft mounds of her hugely billowing tits.
He remembered, too, with a sudden rush of keenly felt sexual excitement, the image of this voluptuous blonde girl as she had been when he first entered the derelict room, her lush body nearly naked, her long white legs wide apart to receive the throbbing length of his younger brother's pulsing cock. She'd been scared, yes, but also flushed with desire for it. Christ, a kid like Bernardo wouldn't even know what to do with a body like that, Salvador thought. This chica oughta be laid by a real man, not some relatively inexperienced little man like his younger brother or her own husband. She'd probably never really been turned on in her life. An idea began to form in Salvador's scheming brain, a scurrilous idea whose moral aspects he didn't even bother to question.
'Of course,' he said, moving away from the wall and walking casually around the garbage cluttered room, 'there's no reason why we can't help each other out, is there?'
'What do you mean?' Nancy asked.
'Well,' he paused, standing behind her, 'I got a lot of connections in this neighborhood, you know. It's possible, just possible that I might be able to get some information about this Maria you need to talk to.'
Nancy turned to face him, looking up at him with eyes wide with disbelief and sudden hope. 'Oh, do you think you could? You don't know how grateful I'd be if I thought that you could help me clear my husband.'
'Just how grateful would you be?'
'What do you mean?'
'One good turn deserves another, doesn't it? What would I get out of finding this chica and making her talk to the cops?'
Puzzled, Nancy tried to interpret what he was asking her. 'I… I don't have much influence over what my husband chooses to write about in his newspaper articles, if that's what you mean,' she began, but Salvador cut her off in mid-sentence.
'I don't care what he writes about,' he replied curtly.
