The Long Day of Revenge (7 page)

“Take your hands off me,” she protested, fighting against his grasp. “You aren’t doing this to me again!”

“Oh yes I am!”

As he grabbed for her, the towel fell off, exposing her naked body.

“Get over here.”

Manolo hurled his girlfriend against the small table by the bed and with her bent over, aimed right at her unprotected ass.

“Agua Prieta is nothing compared to what you get this time. The thing is I’ve found I like spanking better than fucking.”

Manolo brought his hand back as far as he could and swung forward, delivering a tremendous smack in the center of her bare bottom, which was tight, damp, and clammy from the shower.

“Ow, damn you!” Lucinda shouted in protest.

Angrily, she tried to rise, but with his left hand, Manolo pushed her back down across the table and holding her there, took aim again with his right palm.

“One way or another, I’m going to spank this attitude out of you,” he exclaimed. “You’re going to learn to appreciate all I do for us.”

The second blow was even harder, and when he pulled back he saw the handprint already forming.

“Ow!” Lucinda cried out again. “Stop it, you bastard!”

“I’ll stop it when you learn to respect me and my profession,” he lectured. “Until then, I’m going to spank the shit out of you. I’ll do it tonight. I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll do it forever until you fall into line.”

Holding Lucinda down, he continued to strike at her exposed buttocks. He could see her pussy, too, and wanted badly to enter it, but he was more interested in discipline at the moment than actual intercourse. The reality was, as he had readily admitted, he liked spanking more.

“You’re going to appreciate all the risks I’m taking to grow rich and famous so we can live better. When we’re married we will live like a king and queen, and the only way that will happen is to have me fight bulls. Gaditano nearly killed me, and I live. I live! Do you understand? I live!”

How peculiar that he spoke to his bovine enemy at this time.

“I live! I live! I live! I live!”

Each time he said the phrase, he delivered another punishing hand whap to Lucinda’s ass, seeing botched cheeks redden noticeably. Lucinda was not fighting him as much as he expected her to, but she was not enjoying the process. He was the only one thrilled by the same.

“You stay down and take this,” he ordered. “Move and you’ll get the brush or the belt!”

He stripped off his robe, so he was likewise naked. It was not the growing erection he noticed the most, but the keepsake on his abdomen left by Gaditano. The scar had physically healed, but mentally it had not.

“I live! I live! I live!”

Again, he whacked away at Lucinda’s poor bottom, watching it grow more and more inflamed. There were no longer handprints, but just two gigantic red circles, one on each side, where the many blows had mingled together into painful streaks of scarlet.

“Owwwww,” Lucinda moaned, with no standoffishness left in her voice. “Ow.”

It was then she started to not just cry, but blubber, yelping out indistinguishable phrases as tears poured down her face.

“Stop,” he could make out once or twice as he went on to whap her. “Stop. Please.”

As he continued to spank her, she moved her legs in a pumping motion, fanning her ass in the air in hope of bringing relief. She dared not place her hands behind her, as she so badly wanted, out of terror as to what retribution that would bring.

“Owwwwwwwwwwww…”

She gave a shriek that reached into the high heavens, leading Manolo to fear someone would think murder was taking place in the hotel room.

“Do you love me?” he asked, as he readied to bring the session to a close.

“I fucking hate you! I hate being spanked! I hate this! Fuck you!”

Lucinda had gotten her second wind and was capable of speech once more.

“Wrong answer,” he shot back and continued to whap his target. “That won’t do.”

His own hand was stinging from the impact against her bare flesh, yet he continued to dish out the punishment he felt she deserved.

“Do you wish Gaditano would have killed me?” he asked. “Do you wish I was dead?”

“Yes,” Lucinda spat out as her fury overruled her pain. “Yes, you prick!”

“Wrong answer,” he announced again and continued with the spanking.

Lucinda’s tail section was now glowering. He could sense the heat himself as he whapped her all the harder, feeling the flesh boil. The pain must have been excruciating, but what was this when compared to the goring he had taken? Why couldn’t she understand this? What was wrong with her? He was not the problem. He wasn’t the one at fault.

“One last set of spankings,” he told her. “Then you can get dressed and we’re going out to eat.”

“Fuck you!” Lucinda shouted.

Again, Garza delivered a series of hard alternating slaps, listening to the whacking sound as he connected with her. Lucinda again howled and blithered unintelligible curses, but these had no effect on him or his desire to stop his attack.

“I live! I live! I live!”

Finally, he stopped, as he was completely exhausted. Adding insult to injury, he did not penetrate the hair covered hole that was so visible with Lucinda bent over with her ass facing toward him. Instead, he gave himself a quick set of jerks and erupted into the air.

“You bastard!” Lucinda screamed at him. “Fuck you! We’re done!”

Without bothering to dress, she did the incredible, running stark naked out of the hotel room and into the hallway, slamming the door behind her.

“And where do you think you’re going!” he called after her. “You won’t get far like that!”

Rising, he put on his robe and thought of what further punishment Lucinda needed when she realized she’d forgotten her clothes and returned. The belt? The hair brush? A lint remover? There were many possibilities.

“Bitch…”

There was a knock at the door. Expecting either Lucinda or hotel security, he opened it and was surprised to find neither there.

“Don Manolo Garza? Matador de novillos toros?”

There was a man he didn’t recognize standing before him. He was middle aged and wore a cloth cap over his head, like many bullfighters and fans. He also wore dark glasses, which looked ridiculous in a hotel at night.

“Yes,” Manolo answered. “And you are…”

“Satan,” came the casual reply.

“Satan?”

The figure nodded.

“I’ve got a deal for you.”

Manolo looked at him with obvious reluctance. What mental institution had this fool escaped from?

“Satan? A deal?”

The intruder again nodded.

“I can save your life, but if I do, I want you to make a deal with me.”

Manolo placed his hand below the bathrobe, feeling where the scar from the massive goring had been.

“A deal? I suppose you want my soul and you want me to sign a contract in blood?”

The stranger shook his head in the negative.

“Then what do you want?”

The devil smiled.

“I want you to kill Gaditano.”

Manolo was taken aback by this.

“You don’t want me to sell you my soul? You want me to kill a bull?”

The devil nodded in the affirmative once more.

“Hey, don’t blame me. This is your fucking dream, not mine.”

Manolo Garza opened his eyes to find himself in a Hermosillo hospital room. What he had just experienced had indeed been a bizarre dream, but now he was awake, though still quite badly wounded.

“I live,” he whispered, gazing up at the ceiling.

His eyes took on a glaze and an animalistic snarl crossed his lips as a new vow came to him.

“Death to Gaditano.”

Chapter Six

Lucinda sat in the hotel room of the Hotel Cesar in Tijuana, staring at the new pink and gold suit of lights draped across the chair. A year had passed and times had changed for them. Manolo had mentioned his strange dream in the hospital, and oddly enough things had worked out much like he had envisioned them. As a pair, they were quickly engaged, but long before, they had become lovers. They had each accepted this as their destiny and were married in a ceremony at the rodeo ring in Agua Prieta rather than a church.

The goring had made Manolo Garza famous overnight, as news of a young man being badly injured on a ranch and coming through made the public want to see him. The internet had seen to that.

Even before he was released, the retired banderillero who had helped save Manolo’s life in the truck that awful day, compressing the wound and holding him steady had come to visit alongside Eliseo Manzano himself.

The banderillero’s name was Rafael Gonzalez, not Rafael Something-or-other as Manolo had called him behind his back, and he offered the recuperating aspirant a contract. Manolo now had a manager.

There was, however, something else odd in the conversation, not with his new representative, but the bull breeder. Manolo had been emphatic about him saving Gaditano for down the road.

Even stranger behind the scenes was a superstitious ritual Manolo had developed. He somehow thought that giving Lucinda a spanking in one form or another before a bullfight would bring good luck.

She had done some reading in the past and found how other bullfighters had their peculiar quirks. Carlos Arruza thought purple and gold costumes brought bad luck, because he had received three major gorings while wearing this shade. The last of which was in Colombia, where like Manolo, they had to make a mad dash to the hospital to save his life. El Gallo, on the other hand, insisted green brought bad luck, as did the American, Walter De La Brosse.

The spanking thing was unique and a ritual never spoken about to the reporters. It was also something she hated.

It was questionable how this absurd rite would bring luck for anyone, for Manolo had given her that impromptu lesson in discipline during their training session and the following day had come within a pussy hair’s length of getting killed.

The logic?

Manolo insisted he had survived.

Aside from this and her refusal to ever perform oral sex still left them as spicy hot lovers in the bed. Or the shower. Or the floor.

After a very short and in demand career as a novillero or aspirant, Manolo had taken the alternative, a ritual where he reached the highest rank in the profession. De La Torre, who had been at the Manzano ranch as well, bestowed the honors, where a man from Juarez named Teodoro Toledo served a witness. There was nothing spectacular to the ceremony. The men exchanged handshakes and capes, then Manolo was off to fight the full sized four year old bulls as a matador de toros, rather than the three year old novillos.

Clearly, he had arrived.

In rapid succession after leaving the hospital and training himself back into shape, Manolo had scored a series of triumphs. His novillero days were behind him, but so were afternoons leaving on the shoulders of the crowd in Tijuana, Guadalajara, Durango, Nogales, Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, Piedras Negras, and a number of other locations, leading right up to Plaza Mexico. It was in this gigantic punchbowl of a bullring that he cut ears and tail from both his bulls, and there he received the alternative shortly afterward.

He was able to afford his own car now. He also purchased several new suits of light, like the one before him.

Lucinda didn’t always come to the bullfights with Manolo. In truth, she did not like them that much and never had. It was also too hard on the nerves to sit in the stands and watch her lover risking death. Thus, if she was with him, they spanked and fucked in the hotel. If not, they did it in Agua Prieta before he left for the event.

Manolo had also informed her he was looking at apartments in Mexico City to be closer to the interior, but he had also spoken to Mario Soro, who owned the bullring in Nogales, which was the closest to Agua Prieta. She’d overheard the conversation about how two years from now, he wanted to rent the ring outright to promote his own event. Something was up that he wasn’t explaining. This was also the closest bullring, suspiciously enough, to the Eliseo Manzano ranch.

Yes, Manolo had survived his ordeal and prospered greatly from it, but he had been left scarred. It was not the scarring of his abdomen where Gaditano’s horn had entered that mattered. She and he were the only ones to see that now. It was a deeper scar, invisible to most, leading to an overwhelming hatred for a calf on a ranch that like him was growing. Behind the scenes, in a world as secretive as their spanking, he was preparing for a showdown. Clint Eastwood versus Gian Maria Volonte in Fistful of Dollars. A grand duel to the death at the end of a film. That was what Manolo was planning, and she was sure of it.

The long day of revenge was a phrase Manolo muttered from time to time, and while he never elaborated, it was discomforting to think of what he meant.

Manolo wanted to kill Gaditano for what the beast had done to him, though he should have perhaps been grateful. The goring was the springboard that made the Garza name famous.

Now they were in Tijuana, where Manolo was facing bulls of the Eliseo Manzano ranch again, though Gaditano was not yet one of them. The two alternates on the card were De La Torre and Tijuana’s own Fernando Callao.

Lucinda prayed Manolo would draw the best lot of bulls. Every sorteo filled her with fear for she knew, even if Manolo denied it, he was by no means invincible. That had been shown to anyone who would take notice back in Hermosillo. The incident, however, seemed like ages ago.

Manolo had a string of triumphs in Tijuana and had become a major draw there, known not only for suicidal courage with the capes, but for deadly skill with the sword. He was a killer of bulls in the truest sense of the word.

It was just a short time past noon, and Manolo had gone to the sorteo, where the numbers of the bulls were placed in a hat and the bullfighters drew lots to see who should fight what. It was a custom going back decades.

“This is like picking your own executioner,” Manolo had once described it. “It’s a perverse lottery. A bingo game where the prize could be death.”

He would be back soon. Then she knew what would happen.

Sex games were one thing, but the spanking system went beyond that. These were real and not foreplay. Usually, Manolo pulled some offense out of the air that she had done to deserve being punished like a little girl, leaving her to wonder if he had gone partially insane in that Hermosillo hospital. Her love for him stood stronger than this quirk, however, leading her to accept things, though she was admittedly growing tired of the same. With Manolo fighting every week, that meant a weekly spanking or paddling. Her ass couldn’t take it much more. It was a wonder she didn’t have scars or calluses on her buttocks.