High and Wild

by Peter Brandvold

  Haskell grabbed the dead rurale’s Colt Dragoon, unbuckled the man’s cartridge belt, and slung it over his own shoulder. Then he grabbed Miss Johnson’s hand and led her quickly over to the door, where Sonoma triggered several more shots toward the front of the hall.

  He pushed the pretty, scantily clad, bare-legged blonde back against the wall, wedged two of his three pistols behind his rope belt, and quickly reloaded his own LeMat from the dead rurale’s shell belt. When the LeMat was full, he reloaded the Dragoon. Just as he’d flicked the Dragoon’s loading gate closed and spun the wheel, Sonoma’s Springfield clicked, empty.

  She jerked back against Haskell, saying, “That’s it. I’m out.”

  Haskell pulled Sonoma back behind him, edged a look around the doorframe, and triggered two shots, pinking the hand of one of the two rurales running toward him and blowing out the right eye of the other.

  “You two run down the hall to the left!” Haskell yelled, stepping into the hall and aiming both freshly reloaded pistols to the right, toward the balcony. “Now! Run like hell! I’ll cover you!”

  “Where the hell are we going?” Sonoma shouted, pulling Miss Johnson out of the room and running fast down the hall behind the Pinkerton, with Miss Johnson cupping her free hand to her right ear and screaming at the rocketing gun blasts. “I thought you said there was no way out of the upper stories except for the main stairs!”

  “I lied about that!” the Pinkerton shouted, triggering lead toward the balcony, holding the rurales at bay. From the glimpses he’d caught, he figured there were at least twelve gathered on the balcony, trying like hell to avenge their leader. “At the end of the hall, swing left and wait for me!”

  Haskell fired another round, which plunked into the balcony rail. A rurale snaked a rifle around the left front corner of the balcony wall, and Haskell drew a neat round hole in the man’s left temple with a .44 slug hurled from his new Dragoon, which he’d quickly taken a shine to.

  Running backward, he continued firing. At the end of the hall, he turned and ran down the hall on his right, a narrower hall than the others. Sonoma and Miss Johnson stood halfway down the hall, standing about five feet apart. The girl eyed the ruggedly beautiful, high-busted Yaqui woman skeptically.

  Haskell jogged past them, stopped, flipped a rug back, and grunted and yelled as he hoisted a trapdoor out of the floor.

  Cobwebs and flying grit showered him as the door swung up and back to slam against the floor. Dust wafted on a wind of pent-up, moldy-smelling air.

  He coughed and brushed his forearm across his eyes. “Let’s go!” he yelled in a pinched voice, choking on the dust.

  “Where?” Sonoma yelled back, leading the president’s niece toward the door in the floor.

  “Escape route in case of Apache attack! The old Mexican told me about it when I was scouting the place!”

  Through the five-by-five hole in the floor, rickety wooden steps dropped away into stygian darkness.

  “Careful, it’s gonna be dark!”

  Haskell gave Sonoma a hand down first and then helped the barefoot and bare-legged Miss Johnson. He wasn’t sure what he was consigning them to. Possibly their graves. The old man had told them he wasn’t sure the other end hadn’t been sealed.

  If so, it would be Haskell’s grave, too, for there was only one back door.

  As Miss Johnson descended the steps dropping away beneath the Pinkerton, running footsteps and labored breaths rose from the other end of the hall. Haskell raised his LeMat. He’d been saving the twenty-gauge shotgun shell beneath the main barrel for a special occasion.

  A rurale ran around the corner of the intersecting hall forty yards away and sprinted toward Haskell, two more close on the first one’s heels. Haskell flipped the lever that engaged the LeMat’s shotgun barrel. He aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. The LeMat bucked and kicked in his fist.

  He swung the trapdoor down on top of him, clipping off the rurale’s bitter, agonized scream as the buckshot tore through his chest, and then he scurried down, down, after the women, into the tomblike, musty darkness, wondering if he’d ever see daylight again.

  4

  Salmon-colored light angled through the darkness. It was like a spear of illumination from the setting or rising sun.

  For a few seconds, Bear thought he was back in that cool, moldy tunnel that smelled like mushrooms and rotten planks. But then he realized what had awakened him from his afternoon nap.

  The light, glassy sound of splashing water.

  He opened his eyes. Down past the husky length of his naked body lying atop twisted sheets and a single rumpled quilt, he saw a naked woman bathing, reflected in a chipped mirror above a dresser in this rented room at the Carlisle House in Benson, Arizona Territory.

  Two weeks had passed since they’d rescued the president’s niece and made it through the tunnel to the escape hatch behind the church of La Ciudad, where Glynn had been waiting with their horses and a spare for the girl. Haskell had told the Ranger about the tunnel and its exit behind the church. Glynn knew if he heard shooting inside the hotel, Haskell would have to take the escape tunnel.

  And they’d galloped like hell with the devil’s hounds on their heels over the first jog of hills beyond La Ciudad, but the rurales hadn’t chased them far. Villarreal’s men had been too drunk to be that energetic, and besides, Villarreal himself was dead. They’d turned back only a couple of miles from the village and had likely returned to the village to sleep and to tend their hangovers and the captain’s carcass the next morning.

  Haskell stared down past his feet pointing at the ceiling to the dusky-skinned, curvaceous young woman bathing in the copper tub at the foot of the bed. Sonoma was humming some old Yaqui dirge softly under her breath as she slowly soaped her left arm and then her right arm, scrubbing gently with a wooden-handled horsehair brush.

  Her black hair hung straight down her back, jostling across her shoulders and beneath the blades of bone that slid this way and that as she scrubbed, as though they were trying to slide through that smooth skin the color of dark, polished cherry. Late-afternoon sunlight streamed through the windows on each side of the dresser, limning her hair so that certain strands shone like sunlit oil touched with lustrous pink while others flashed like long, blue diamonds.

  Sonoma set the cake of potash lye and the brush on the hide-bottom chair beside the tub, placed each hand on a side of the tub, and hoisted herself to her feet with a soft grunt. Now her upper body and belly were clearly visible in the mirror facing Haskell, just beyond the tub and slightly to the left of it.

  The young woman’s up-tilted breasts, with their large brown areolas and dark pink nipples, swayed slightly with her movements. Water cascaded down them and dripped off the pointed tips onto her flat belly, which flared to the full, firm hips and muscular thighs of a woman who spent much time in the saddle. The black nest between the tops of her thighs glistened darkly in the sunlight, beaded water showing like violet pearls.

  Haskell watched her lift her long, well-turned left leg and bend forward to scrub it with the soapy brush. As she did, her thighs parted slightly, and he could see the furred pink mound just under her large, round rump open slightly.

  Haskell felt his blood warm.

  He must have made a sound as he watched the girl, because she looked up suddenly and met his eyes in the mirror. She gave a cool smile, slowly blinked, and then straightened until he could see both of her firm, brown breasts. She dropped the soap and the brush and squeezed the lovely orbs together.

  “Christ,” Haskell said.

  Sonoma dipped her head. She smiled at him, showing her white teeth between her rich lips. And then she pooched her lips out at him in the mirror.

  Her eyes sparked devilishly. She lifted her breasts still higher and dropped her chin. Keeping her eyes on Haskell in the mirror, looking at him from beneath her black brows, she poke
d out her tongue and ran its tip across the jutting nipple of her left up-thrust breast.

  Haskell felt silky fingers of desire caressing his balls. His heartbeat quickened. He rose a little in the bed and rested his head back against the brass frame abutting the pine-paneled wall.

  Sonoma stretched her lips a little wider with a faintly jeering grin. She turned her head slightly and caressed the other slightly jutting nipple with her tongue, blinking slowly, her beautiful, clean-featured face acquiring a preorgasmic glow.

  Her eyes slid to one side in the mirror, and then she turned to look at him over her left shoulder. Her brown eyes dropped to his cock, which was fully erect and leaning back over Haskell’s flat, muscle-corded belly, bobbing with each heavy beat of his heart. The mushroom head was swollen to the size of a ripe plum.

  “You like watching me bathe, eh, big man?” Her voice was husky as she stepped out of the tub, still cupping her breasts in her hands.

  “Even a blind mule would enjoy the spectacle.”

  Sonoma chuckled through her teeth and climbed over the brass rail into the bed. She looked like a big puma, moving smoothly, nearly soundlessly, only the bedsprings creaking beneath her weight.

  She knelt beside Haskell’s long legs and dropped her head over his crotch, her beautiful, cherry-tan ass rising so that he could admire the long, graceful slope of her back. She looked up at him from beneath her brows and then touched her tongue to the base of his fully engorged shaft.

  Haskell groaned. Sonoma’s warm, damp tongue was a lance of cold fire. She kept her eyes on his face as she slowly ran her tongue up the thick length of his hard-on. When she got to the tip, she closed her mouth over the head and sucked it hard, groaning, mewling deep in her throat, placing one hand on his broad chest, hefting his balls with the other.

  “Oh, Jesus . . . Christ!” Haskell chuckled, squeezing his eyes closed and flexing his feet.

  No one could get his blood to boiling the way the Yaqui could.

  When she’d sucked the head of his cock until he felt himself creeping toward the edge of his precipice, she slid her head down toward his balls. His cock slid deep inside Sonoma’s mouth, until he could feel her throat expanding and contracting against the swollen head.

  Her tonsils tickled him.

  Gently, she kneaded his balls.

  That sensation, along with the warm-mud feeling of her entire mouth on him, sent rockets of radiant bliss through Haskell’s nerves and muscles. She swirled her tongue around him. She sucked by turns gently and vigorously, cupping his balls, entangling her fingers in the thick matt of curly, dark brown hair carpeting his chest.

  Haskell reached around and cupped her sloping breasts while she continued to torture him so sweetly. He rolled her nipples between his thumbs and index fingers, evoking little groans and sighs as she continued to ply him in the way that only she knew.

  She managed to keep him back from his cliff for more than twenty minutes. The girl had made an art of sucking a man. He finally felt the dam inside him rupture. It was a joy to let go and feel the wave of still-building carnal, erotic craving carry him on over the ridge and into the canyon of bittersweet fulfillment, to feel his seed geyser into her mouth and down her throat.

  As it came, Sonoma bunched herself like a cat feeding on its still-living quarry, and she opened her throat to accept him, holding her head down almost savagely against his belly, pressing her lips fast against the base of his spurting cock.

  She gagged and writhed as he spent himself, wriggling her beautiful ass, her throat moving frantically to keep up with him.

  When Haskell was finished, Sonoma slowly slid her lips back off of him, licking him clean. She raised her head and gasped, sucking a long-overdue draught of air into her lungs and brushing a forearm across her nose and mouth, smacking her lips.

  “You’re going to kill your dear Sonoma one of these days, wild man!”

  Haskell arched his back luxuriously, relaxed his muscles, and lay flat against the bed.

  “Shit . . .” he raked out through a long, blissful sigh, wrapping his hands around her shoulders and drawing her up against his chest. He’d taken her twice the night before, after they’d gotten in from the trail and had enjoyed a hearty meal, but Sonoma was one woman—the only woman he’d ever known—he never tired of.

  She snuggled against him, pressing her lips to his nipples, squeezing his hub-sized biceps in each of her hands. “I love sucking you. I love feeling your seed in my mouth, my belly. It makes me powerful. Almost as powerful as you, Bear.”

  “How ’bout a cigar?”

  “Sure.”

  Sonoma crawled to the far side of the bed and plucked a cigar he’d only half smoked the night before from a bowl that served as an ashtray. It was a fat Cuban stogie called a Cleopatra Federal, Haskell’s favorite brand. The hand-rolled, cognac-infused cigars were too expensive for the modest salary the Pinkertons paid him, but he’d arranged to be compensated partly in the cigars that Allan Pinkerton himself imported from the Cuban islands just for William Barrett Travis Haskell himself.

  At the end of every assignment, a fresh box was sent out from Chicago to wherever the operative had found himself. Haskell had no home but the trail, the railroad, or stage lines. He holed up between jobs wherever it struck his fancy. Sometimes alone in the mountains. Sometimes with a woman. Sometimes with a couple of women.

  Sometimes with only a stray dog or some old desert rat whose conversation he enjoyed, whose madness had somehow coalesced easily with Haskell’s own view of life, which had turned much toward chaos and anarchy since the war he’d fought so hard in, a war that no rational being could believe either side had won.

  Haskell believed in freedom for himself as well as for others. For him personally, that meant he owned no more than he could wear or fit in his cavvy sack. He didn’t even own a saddle but rented one along with a horse wherever his next assignment took him.

  He owned a few clothes, a few weapons, some camping gear, a well-worn copy of his favorite book, Moby-Dick, and a book of the poems of John Donne, which his mother, the whang-tough Texas rancher Alma Haskell, had also loved and had given to a young Bear when he’d gone off to fight for the Union against the wishes of his father, Rance Haskell. Bear’s own blood stained the book of fiery poems around the hole of a minie ball in the left front corner. The bullet’s power had been diminished by the book he’d carried inside his shell jacket, and it had kept the bullet from penetrating to his heart, essentially saving his life.

  Sonoma had sat up against the headboard. She looked beautiful there, naked legs crossed Indian-style, revealing her pink, still-wet snatch, her long hair tumbling messily across her breasts, as she struck a match and touched the flame to the end of the fat cigar. She got the Cleopatra going, blowing the blue smoke out into the room cleaved by several slanting rays of late-afternoon, early-autumn desert light, and then waved out the match.

  Haskell leaned sideways to suckle and fondle her breasts, which he believed, having traveled throughout the southern continent, were the most beautiful natural formations at least in this country and northern Mexico. Sonoma chomped down on the stogie and ran her hand roughly through Haskell’s thick, curly, dark brown hair which fell to his shoulders.

  She cooed as she massaged his neck, as big around as a milk bucket, and tugged on his ears, as he lapped her like a hungry hound.

  He was about to slide down further and poke his nose in her bush when his keen ears picked up a sound. He lifted his head.

  “Don’t stop now, lover,” Sonoma said, puffing the cigar and pushing his head down toward her pussy, spreading her thighs for easy access. “You’re just getting me—”

  “Shh.”

  Haskell turned to the door. Instantly, his Smith & Wesson Model 3 Russian .44 was in his hand. He clicked the hammer back, extended the gun at the door flanking the bed to his right. There were no so
unds except those rising from the street below the hotel—the clomps of horse hooves, men’s conversational voices, the distant braying of an angry mule.

  Something lay on the floor in front of the door. A small dove-gray envelope. Haskell depressed the Russian’s hammer, leaped out of bed, turned the key in the lock, and opened the door.

  He looked both ways down the hall. No one.

  “I’ll be damned,” Haskell said.

  “What is it, lover?”

  “Just can’t figure it out.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “Who he sends.”

  “Who who sends?” Sonoma said, kneeling at the edge of the bed, staring down at him as he dropped to a knee beside the envelope, which he plucked from the floor.

  Haskell opened the folded dove-gray card inside. There were no markings of any kind. No delivery or return address. Inside, written in clear blue-black ink in bold, printed letters, was the single word “DENVER.”

  That’s all it said.

  “A dove!” Haskell said, standing and bolting out the door.

  “Bear!” Sonoma yelled behind him. “Come back, you fool!”

  Haskell had worked for Allan Pinkerton for nearly five years now, and never once had he gotten a good look at any of the couriers his employer always sent with the name of the town in which Haskell was to meet Pinkerton himself, to be briefed on his next assignment. Just the name of the place. No date or time. Just the place. Never more than that. And the mysterious note cards—always the same shape and size and dove-gray color—were always sent as if by ghosts, or, as Pinkerton called them, “doves.”

  These ghostlike doves had been able to find Haskell in the remotest of places—a line shack in the San Juan Mountains, a harborside opium den on the Barbary Coast, a brothel in Cheyenne, even a Sioux Indian reservation up in Dakota. Allan Pinkerton was either keeping a human shadow on his prized operative, trailing his every move, or the man had a crystal ball that showed him where every one of his operatives was at any given time.