Tengu by Graham Masterton

Ada Grant, a cheerful big-breasted woman whose
husband had left her to go pick oranges in California, and who gladly took
young boys into her high brass bed for three dollars.
    Until he was
sixteen, Gerard had been a hick. Rural-minded easygoing, and
innocent. But on his sixteenth birthday, his life had been turned upside
down. Jay Leveret’s father had written to say that there was a place for him on
his tobacco plantation, if he cared for it. But Gerard’s father had sourly
refused. Gerard was to work in the store. Never mind if it was hard and
unprofitable. To labor without reward was a blessing of the Lord.
    After three
miserable weeks of sweeping up, unloading sacks, and scooping beans, Gerard had
had enough. One chilly mid-September dawn had found him thumbing a ride on the
highway south. He had been bound for Florida, and eventually for Cuba. He
didn’t think about those years of his life very often. Not these days. He
talked about them even less. But it was during those years that he had begun to
make his money, first by fixing boats on the Florida keys ,
and later, in the last days of President Batista, by dealing in drugs and girls
in Havana.
    In six years,
he had grown from a hick to a hard and knowledgeable young wheelerdealer. He
had been shot at, stabbed in the left thigh, and beaten up. He had contracted
gonorrhea eight times. He had spent days dead drunk in
shanty whorehouses on the outskirts of Havana, days which in latex years would
wake him up at night, sweating and shaking. He had put his life and his
determination on the line, and at the end of it all he had built up Crowley
Tobacco into what it was today–a tight-knit, highly profitable corporation with
a reputation for tackling unusual and different orders. Not all of those orders
were concerned with tobacco. Some of the most successful deals were those
Gerard called “capers.”
    Gerard’s
father, embittered by his son but well prepared for the Lord, had died of
emphysema in 1958. Gerard had attended the funeral, although his mother had
refused to speak to him.
    Four years
later, she had died, too. Gerard had become an orphan. A
wealthy, experience-hardened orphan.
    On the bed,
Francesca stretched. Her sex parted like a pink flower. Gerard continued to
listen to the news. A busload of old folks had dropped off the edge of
Slum-gullion Pass, Colorado. Francesca sat up and pulled at her tangled hair. “What
time is it?” she asked.
    “Seven-thirty,”
said Gerard, without taking his cigar out of his mouth.
    “I must have
fallen asleep.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    She yawned. “Do
you mind if I call room service and get some Perrier water? I have an unnatural
craving for Perrier water these days.”
    “You’re not
pregnant, are you?” Gerard asked her.
    She laughed.
Her breasts bounced. “Don’t you know the rhyme? There was a little goil, and
she had a little coil, right where it mattered most.”
    “I don’t know
why you’re laughing,” said Gerard. “I wouldn’t mind if you were pregnant.”
    “You don’t want
another child,” she said, although it was more of a question than a statement.
    “No, I don’t.
But I still wouldn’t mind if you were pregnant.”
    Francesca stood
up. “Are you more chauvinistic than flesh and blood can stand, or am I missing
something?”
    “You’re missing
something.”
    She leaned over
and kissed him on the parting of his dark hair. He smelled of cigars and
medicated shampoo. “I could be persuaded to love you,” she said.
    He smiled.
    She walked
across the bedroom and picked up a pack of cigarettes from the windowsill. She
took one out, lit it, and stood looking out through the nylon net drapes at the
sparkling dusky lights of downtown Los Angeles. Gerard watched her
appreciatively. She was an unusual girl.
    Not clever, but
strong-willed almost to the point of ruthless-ness. And
pretty, and unquenchably fierce in bed, and to Gerard that was all that
mattered. She appeared so aloof and elegant. She