Chapter 1
Helga Anderson's nineteen year old heart pumped faster, flushing her apple cheeks deeper red as she stole furtive glances at the bristly handle-bar mustache sprouting from the swarthy custom agent's upper lip, above a row of impossibly white teeth. God, what a knock-out! she gushed silently... until he crooked his finger at her, singling her out from the horde of poverty stripped Mexicans carrying crates of chickens and the straggly, sun-bronzed backpackers toting crying babies surrounding her in the stifling Nuevo Laredo bus station border check point, buzzing with flies and raucous Spanish chatter.
Hardly proper, was it, for a custom's official to treat an American lady with such blatant salacity? Again, Helga's virginal Scandinavian blonde hair and blue eyed beauty was getting in the way.
"Si, Señorita... eet ees you I want to talk to," the young agent pointed an accusing finger at her.
"But..." Helga's incredulous robin-egg eyes trailed over, questioning the one's staring back at her, before locking finally on the stony chocolate eyes, bushed over by heavy brows meeting over the bridge of a Spanish nose.
"But... what? Oh, my God, what... are you...?" Her tiny fist flew to her mouth as a guard sprang from nowhere and tore the suitcase from her grip, unlatched it, and dumped out her clothes, breaking the terra cotta ceramics she'd bought on the street for her roommate back in Fargo. Like a dog digging for a bone, the official clawed at the lining of her new suitcase, ripping it to shreds until he found what he was looking for.
The San Antonio-bent crowd sucked in their breath, whispered behind upheld hands and crowded together like so many chickens in the rain while two aduana charged from the office, tromping over luggage and shoving people aside amidst a deafening squawk of chickens and frightened babies clinging to their mothers' necks.
The two officers pounced on her, grabbed her under the arms and, in the next conscious moment, Helga remembered a greasy-faced officer stroking her silken hair bleached to platinum under two weeks of Mexican sun, lusty sounds rattling in his throat. A metallic rattle sounded and sweaty palms clamped cold steel handcuffs over her tiny wrists, burning into her baby soft pink flesh... then locked shut. Unforgettable, too, was the foul man-smell of stale cigarettes and perspiration, coupled with the repulsive feel of his stuffed body rubbing against hers, sandwiched in the back seat of the squad car... and disgusting was the erection he pushed down with the heel of his hand while he and the driver snickered in lewd undertones as they sped through Nuevo Laredo's streets, scattering chickens, mangy dogs scouring the gutters for food and half-naked children. Outside of a building marked Policia, the car came to an angry screech and Helga instinctively knew her hell had yet to begin...
A faceless person grabbed her cold hand, stuck her thumb on a wet ink pad and smeared her print on the paper, while unseen hands snaked up from behind to rake over her lush body, stroking her full breasts and coming down over her smooth rippling belly to rummage in the vee of her femininity. This perfunctory tortured finished, Manuel, the mustached military man, unceremoniously ushered her into a windowless room, dank with cigarette smoke and empty, save for a filthy mattress dumped in the middle of the floor and a naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling, next to which hung a sticky fly strip dotted with dead, insects. Helga spied what resembled a front tooth lying on the cement floor below a smudge of sticky red blood and, afraid to look the policeman in the eye, she gulped and licked her parched lips, running her velvety pink tongue over her perfect white teeth. Panic, worse than the fear of flunking final exams, shot through the tall, well curved Norwegian girl from North Dakota when the metal hinged door behind her slammed shut ominously. Helga thought she might vomit right there, and judging from the spots caked on the grimy floor, she realized others had done just that.
Manuel's black eyes sparkled animalishly, reminding her of a coiled snake's shallow-eyed stare. She shivered, even in the heat of the afternoon. What had she done to deserve this?
He spun around in mid-pace. "You know a Señor Kinsey?" he asked in a heavy Mexican accent and swiped at a fly landing on the tip of his nose.
Douglas Kinsey? Helga shivered again, her jaw falling slack. "Yes... yes, I met Douglas on the beach in Mazatlan," she answered tremulously, trying to sound both calm and cooperative. A forced smile withered on her face when she realized neither would do any good.
"Ah ha!" Manuel chortled, running his thumbs over the smooth well-used length of his gashed night stick, while he made circles, his leather soled boots slapping on the cement floor, gnashing like salt on the grime as he turned in mid-pace. "You two were... lovers?" The tips of his moustache twitched lewdly.
"No! We... were just friends. He gave me a place to stay... and that suitcase when... somebody stole mine... and..."
"And you conspired weeth heem to smuggle seex kilos of pure Peruvian rock cocaine in the Señorita's false-bottomed suitcase," he charged undiplomatically, spinning around on his heel and bathing her neck with hot jets of stale cigarette smoke breath.
"No! No... I didn't! I DIDN'T!" She was frantic now.
"We found eet een the bottom of your suitcase, Señorita... you think me stupid?" His eyebrows knit together in a Machiavellian hint at torture. "We were teeped off, you see, by narcotic officials that you might be a mule for thees Señor Kinsey." Manual straightened to a dignified posture and shrugged his shoulders while a conquering smirk widened his grin. Rewards for this arrest would be generous. "And I suppose the Señorita deed not know Kinsey was one of the biggest smugglers een all of Mexico?"
"No! NO! I DID NOT! I thought he was... my friend..." Helga's eyes squeezed scalding tears down her pink satin cheeks.
"But you agreed to carry hees cocaine back to the States weeth you... you... hees mule!" Manuel sucked in his breath. "We must make the final search on you," he said in a softer voice. "Take off that dress!"
Striving to hold back the tears of fear and humiliation, Helga turned her back to him and tugged at the hem of her hand-embroidered linen dress—another souvenir from Mexico she would never want to see again—and pulled it over her head, holding the wadded up garment over her braless chest. Manuel placed a hot hand on her cold arm and spun her around to face him, grabbed her dress and threw it to the floor. Automatically, her arms flew up to cross ritualistically over her naked, goosebumped breasts. He tore those away, too, leaving the shivering five-foot-six blonde with only the silken strands of her platinum hair covering the rosebud nipples of her D-cup breasts.
Needlessly, he felt the wide valley between her bronzed breasts, passing his steely fingers afterwards along the crease underneath each softly swelling mound of womanly flesh. "H'mph," he grunted, surly, his eyes boring hot holes into her puckered nipples.
Helga said nothing.
They met eye to eye as he stood before her, little beads of perspiration dotting his forehead like flecks on the fly strip overhead. "Señorita, turn around and bend over and take off your panties."
Scarlet with mortification, the speechless and deceived blonde spread her legs and leaned forward, exposing her naked genitals to the hungry eyes of the Mexican policeman.
Manuel left her in that undignified position while he produced a small cardboard box from his pocket, placed it on the floor, extracted a single-finger rubber medical examination glove, smoothed the fingerstall onto the middle finger of his right hand, and then smeared Vaseline over it from a tube he dug out of another pocket. He approached her from the front, with one greased finger held upright and the skirts of the glove falling over the rest of his clenched hand, he probed among the silky hairs covering the cleft between her lushly rounded buttocks until he found the entrance to her vagina, and shoved the finger in.
Helga gasped aloud and winced, jolted, her miasmaed mind too preoccupied with the moment to dwell on the deceptive man who'd landed her in this position.
He finally removed the invading finger with a slight squelch and peeled off the glove. "Hold that pose, un momento, Señorita." With that, he selected another from the box, drew it on and greased it as before. "You Americanos hide strange things in the asshole... glass tubes, heroin, gun shells," he tittered and, leaning over her, he thrust the rubber-gloved finger swiftly and accurately into the tightly puckered hole of her anus.
Helga rocked on her heels. She gasped, caught her breath and bit her lips to stop from crying aloud as the intruding digit sank its full length through the tightly clenched nether ring and began worming about in the soft buttery depths of her rectum. She was almost fainting from the abject shame of this degrading examination.
Manuel withdrew the finger gently and her belly muscles contracted involuntarily as it slid past the constricting ring of her asshole. He straightened up and stripped off the glove.
Wondering dully what further indignity could be heaped upon her, the trembling blonde American closed her eyes and did as she was told:
"Open your mouth, Señorita." Manuel pressed two fingers on her lower lip, forcing her jaw open wider still and shone a small flashlight into her mouth, turning his head this way and that to peer up at her palate and between her teeth. Finally, he snapped off the beam and stood back.
"We well be much easier on you, Senorita," he said, tucking everything back into his bulging pockets. "...eef you confess."
"Con-Confess? I didn't do anything wrong! I... I want to talk to somebody at the embassy... or-or my father. He's got lots of money and he'll pay to get me out of here." It was a blatant lie: Henry Anderson, a poor North Dakota farmer barely scratched a living from his eighty acres and, had it not been for Helga's scholarship, she would have been back in the fields even now.
"Señorita... everybody pays to get out of Mexican preesons," he chortled. "...Een one way or another."
"My father! Let me talk to my father!" she begged, even the poor humble man had made her promise not to take this vacation alone... considering the headline horrors of Mexican prisons.
Her pleas fell on deaf ears. "Perhaps after a few months in jail of fighting off lesbians and cockroaches, the Señorita weell change her mind and decide to cooperate with us... heh?"
"You... you can't lock me up for no reason! It's not right... It's not riiiiiight!" she screamed back, rage and fear bordering on hysteria. "Ohhhhh," her lithely tanned body wracked with sobs until a sobering hand stung across her cheek.
Helga slipped back into her panties and dress, and before she could protest; "What are you doing to me?!" she was ushered down a short hallway that opened, via a heavily clanging door, onto the tomb of cell blocks beyond.
Snaky shivers and bubbling regurgitation sweltered in a cold sweat over her body at the heady stench of locked up, unbathed bodies combined with urine and greasy dishes. An army of cockroaches parted under her feet, some crunching nauseatingly as her shoes echoed down the hallway, heading toward her cell. Curious, hollow eyed, wan faces stared speechlessly at the beautifully tanned American girl who'd fallen victim to the hell known as Mexican prison life.