The man wore a flat-brimmed black hat with a colorfully beaded band. A fancy meerschaum pipe with a porcelain bowl protruded from his lips, the upper one of which was mantled by a longhorn mustache.
The man wore three pistols, two on his thighs and one in a shoulder holster under his coat. Haskell could see the telltale bump under his arm.
As the man passed slowly, his fine-boned palomino clomping along with almost insolent nonchalance, holding its sleek head high, the man removed the pipe from his mouth, puffing smoke, and turned toward the sheriff’s office.
Both deputies seemed to tense slightly, edgily, at the newcomer’s gaze. Slake cleared his throat and said haltingly, “Evenin’, Kane.”
The stranger said nothing. Haskell didn’t think he even looked at the deputies. The man had his cold, dark eyes on Bear himself. He turned his head slowly, tracking Bear with that off-putting stare, and then, as the palomino clomped on past the jailhouse, the tall, oddly menacing rider swung his head forward and returned the meerschaum to his mouth.
Kane, Haskell thought. The man had looked vaguely familiar, but the name didn’t ring a bell.
Pale smoke billowed around Kane’s head as he angled over toward the Sawatch.
Haskell still sensed the deputies’ unease.
“Who’s that?” he asked, canting his head toward the hotel.
“Shut the fuck up,” Slake said with annoyance.
“Didn’t we tell you to get mounted?” Bodeen said, aiming his double-barreled shotgun at Bear’s head.
Haskell sighed. He looked at the two deputies, wondering where Goodthunder had found these two. They looked like raggedy-heeled tough nuts, possibly ex-outlaws. Likely too lazy and sorry to work the mines or drive a freight wagon, or even to steal for a living.
So they’d become lawmen instead.
Haskell snorted. He shouldered the black sideways to the trough, stepped up onto the trough, and then, cursing against the awkwardness of the maneuver and vowing revenge under his breath, stepped over onto the gelding’s back, the saddle squeaking beneath his weight.
A few minutes later, they were riding east along the main street. They appeared to be heading out of town.
In an alley mouth to Haskell’s right, illuminated by a near torch, a miner was fucking a dark-skinned whore against a rain barrel. The miner’s overalls and underwear were bunched around his boots. The girl’s red dress was pushed up and pulled down, exposing her round, dark ass, her breasts flopping against the top of the barrel.
She groaned and tossed her head. The miner grunted as he hammered his hips against her naked ass, driving his cock. As Bear and the deputies passed the rutting pair, the miner glanced toward them and grinned.
To Bear, the grin seemed ominous, telling. He had a feeling that not too many men whom Goodthunder’s deputies escorted out of town in the dark of night were ever seen or heard from again. He had a feeling that he was in deep trouble, and it was only going to get deeper. And while he had more important things to worry about, Haskell cast a look behind him at the Sawatch House.
The whore’s cries and the miner’s feral grunts caused those snakes of jealousy to writhe again in his belly as he wondered what his comely partner and Sheriff Goodthunder were up to.
15
Would you like a bite?” Goodthunder asked Raven. “It really is quite delicious.”
“It looks delicious. But you know, Jack, a girl in my line of work really needs to keep from getting fat.”
“Nonsense. You’ve a wonderful body.” Goodthunder raised a chunk of his banana cream pie to his lips, smiled with embarrassment as he stared down at the forkful, and said, “I do apologize. That was out of line.”
“Telling me I have a wonderful body? Nonsense.”
Raven gave him a calculatedly winning, subtly erotic smile as she ran her finger around the rim of her half-empty wineglass. They were the only two diners remaining in the Sawatch House’s elegant dining room—at least, elegant by mining-camp standards, although it was not nearly as fine as, say, the Larimer Hotel in Denver or even some of the third-rate eateries Raven had once frequented back east.
The large grandfather clock near the door to the kitchen accompanied their postsupper conversation, and occasional ribald laughter emanating from the saloon on the other side of the lobby frequently punctuated it.
Goodthunder picked up the open wine bottle on the table between them and refilled her glass. “Well, in that case, let me assure you, young lady, your body is quite wonderful. Ravishing, I might even say.”
“How do you know?” Raven said, knowing she could very possibly be treading into dangerous territory by being so forward, so brash. But she’d gotten very little information out of the man so far, and she’d decided to let her instincts guide her. “You haven’t seen my body, Jack.”
Goodthunder refilled his own wineglass and let his gaze flick to the corset of yet another of the dresses Raven had hauled to town in one of her two steamer trunks.
This evening gown was even lower-cut than the day dress she’d worn earlier—a strapless black velvet number trimmed in red silk and white lace. She wore a white silk shawl but kept it low on her shoulders, revealing every bit as much as the dress’s scanty corset allowed, which was just about all of her bosom except her nipples.
Raven was very aware of her nipples this evening. She thought there was probably something of the exhibitionist in her, because it always seemed to arouse her when she revealed so much of her body, which she was very aware was beautiful. She often mused in idle moments that she’d have made as good a prostitute as a Pinkerton detective.
She had to admit, there was something about the profession of seduction that intrigued her. Not so much the coupling—in fact, she’d never been all that fascinated with fucking until she’d been fucked so gloriously by Agent Haskell, the bastard—but the art of playing the temptress, the succubus. The woman who can transform a proud, full-grown man into a sniveling schoolboy.
Raven knew, of course, that what had seduced her about the profession of seduction was the goddesslike power it gave her. And her veins and nerves fairly sizzled with every ounce of that power this evening, making her breasts feel tender and heavy, her pussy sensuous.
She very much felt the need for copulation but not with Goodthunder. He himself did not arouse her all that much, although she guessed he would do in a pinch. If she had to—if she deemed it the only way to learn more about Malcolm Briar—she’d sleep with him. It was part of her job, and it might amuse her to make the fool so happy.
But the man she really wanted to fuck again was that big bastard Bear Haskell.
And that’s exactly why she must never allow him to touch her again, because she did not ever again want to feel as powerless as she did the other night when she’d fallen under that big man’s extraordinary spell. Thinking of his beard, his hands, his big cock, caused a hot wind out of a dry summer desert to wash through her, and she had to will the images away lest she break out in a sweat.
She hadn’t realized she’d fallen into a reverie until she heard Goodthunder’s deep voice say, as though from far away, “Raven, I dare say you’re flushed. Don’t tell me you’re not feeling right, my dear. Is it too warm in here?”
Raven kept her cool and fanned her face with her hand. “Must be the wine.”
“Maybe we should retire.” Goodthunder threw back half his wine. “My room has a balcony overlooking the main street, which can be quite entertaining the deeper we push into the evening. Care to join me there for some fresh, cool mountain air, possibly a brandy?”
“Now, Jack,” Raven gently scolded, at the same time brushing her right foot against his ankle beneath the table with the intention of arousing as well as confusing him, “I might be working the line, but I am first and foremost a lady.” She brightened her smile to further mix her signals.
He smiled
a little uncertainly over the rim of his wineglass. “I’ll keep that in mind. Now, then, shall we—”
He stopped and turned his head toward the large door that opened onto the lobby. A man stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame—a tall, angular-faced man with seedy eyes, a longhorn mustache, and a flat-brimmed black hat with a colorfully beaded crown. His legs were extremely skinny, little stouter than cottonwood saplings. They looked creaky and brittle.
His features were so weathered and craggy it was tough to judge his age. He could have been anywhere from thirty to sixty.
He wore two pearl-gripped Peacemakers tied low on his thighs. Raven saw from the bulge in his waist-length wolf-fur coat that he was carrying another pistol in a shoulder holster. A decorative red neckerchief was knotted around his neck.
The dark stranger was holding a meerschaum pipe to his mouth with a black-gloved left hand. The thumb of his right hand was hooked behind his cartridge belt. He shuttled his faintly insinuating, amused gaze from Goodthunder to Raven and back again.
Raven didn’t care for the way the man was looking at her. His seedy eyes and the faint grin on his thin lips beneath the gaudy mustache made her feel naked.
In his mind, she knew, he’d undressed her and was peeling her like an orange.
Goodthunder didn’t seem to care for the man any more than Raven did. The sheriff’s face reddened between his gray-brown sideburns, and he snarled, “God damn it, Kane. What the hell . . . ?”
He turned to Raven, looking a little abashed by his own outburst. “I’m sorry. Will you please excuse me for a minute? I need to have a word with this man.”
“Of course,” Raven said, gazing at the stranger, who just then fired a match on his gun holster and proceeded to light his pipe, blowing thick, billowy swirls of smoke around his black-hatted head. The flame was reflected by the colorful beads banding his hat.
He continued to grin and stare at Raven as though she were spread naked before him.
Goodthunder brushed his napkin across his mouth, rose, and tossed the napkin angrily onto the table. He strode across the room, and when he reached the stranger, he said, just loudly enough for Raven to hear, “God damn it, Kane, I told you never to come here.”
“Am I interruptin’ somethin’, Jack?” Kane continued lighting his pipe, the long flame leaping from the bowl. His voice was oddly high-pitched, almost squeaky. “Kinda young for ya, ain’t she, Jack? Sure is purty, though. What do you say we both give her a go?”
Goodthunder glanced over his shoulder at Raven, grabbed Kane’s left arm, and started to pull the man into the lobby. Kane gave an angry grunt as he pulled his elbow out of the sheriff’s hand and gave him a sour look. That seemed to cow Goodthunder, who glanced at Raven once more and then rasped, “We’ll discuss this in the saloon!” and walked away.
Kane looked once more at Raven, his lusty eyes raking her in such a way that she felt the need to take a cleansing bath. He blew out the match flame, dropped the smoldering match onto the floor, and, puffing the meerschaum, reluctantly turned and followed Goodthunder across the lobby and into the saloon on the other side of it.
From where she sat, Raven had a good view of the saloon through the broad door exactly across the lobby from that of the dining room.
As Goodthunder walked into the saloon with Kane on his heels, casually puffing his pipe, several men standing at the bar on the far side of the room regarded the tall, black-hatted man with wary scowls, a couple with open disgust. They moved aside as Goodthunder and his companion stepped up to the bar, directly across the room from the door, where Raven still had a good view of them.
Goodthunder spoke briefly with the bartender, and then he and Kane faced each other, having what appeared to be a heated private conversation. Smoke from Kane’s pipe obscured their faces.
Kane spoke first, briefly. Goodthunder did most of the talking after that. The bartender set a filled shot glass in front of each man, and Kane threw back the contents of his while Goodthunder was still speaking, scowling at the man he was speaking to, chin dipped toward his chest.
The self-satisfied half-grin never left Kane’s face.
Raven watched the pair out of the corner of her left eye, not wanting to betray her curiosity. A subdued, electric excitement caused a tingling across the back of her neck and through her shoulders.
She had a feeling she was watching something significant. These two men obviously didn’t like each other. But they were aligned in some way. Judging by the type and number of weapons Kane was carrying and the coldness of his eyes, he was most likely a gunman.
If so, what was his and Goodthunder’s relationship?
Finally, after a conversation that lasted less than five minutes, and which Goodthunder had found less than satisfactory, the sheriff turned to face the bar, tossed some coins onto the zinc-covered mahogany, threw back the contents of his shot glass, wheeled, and walked back out of the saloon, across the lobby, and into the dining room.
Raven had turned toward the table, and now she casually dabbed her napkin at her lips, turned to the approaching sheriff, and arched her brow.
“Trouble?” she asked, feigning concern.
Goodthunder stopped before the table. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, you seem concerned about something. Who was that man? Or”—she offered her winning smile, hoping to put the obviously peeved man at ease—“is it none of my business?”
Goodthunder smiled, although his eyes did not give up their vaguely troubled cast. He reached into his pocket for his wallet and set some bills on the table. Raven reached for her reticule, but Goodthunder said, “Tonight is on me, Raven. My pleasure.”
“You don’t need to do that, Jack. I’m a self-sufficient woman.”
“No doubt you are. Still, I want to pay for both meals. Now, will you join me upstairs for that brandy?”
“Are you sure you’re still in the mood?” Raven said, gathering her shawl about her bare shoulders and rising as he slid her chair back from the table.
“I couldn’t be more in the mood for your lovely company.”
Raven was glad. She felt an even stronger need than before to probe the man. The sheriff likely knew more about Wendigo than anyone, and his conversation with the mysterious Kane had the young Pinkerton operative more curious about Goodthunder than ever. If anyone knew about what had happened to Malcolm Briar, the sheriff would know.
The trick was to probe him without causing suspicion. If he discovered she was anything but who she said she was and he was responsible for Briar’s disappearance, her life could very well be in danger.
Usually, that didn’t bother her. Raven was accustomed to having her life in danger. Truth be known, it was one of the things that she found compelling, even intoxicating, about the work. Tonight, however, because of the skimpiness of the dress she was wearing, all she was carrying for a weapon was a single-barreled derringer.
It was strapped to the inside of her right thigh and damned hard to get to in a hurry.
As she and Goodthunder climbed the broad, carpeted stairs, apprehension added a bite to the electric jeopardy sparking and snapping at her nerve endings. Since the sheriff’s meeting with Kane, a dark cloud had seemed to hover over him. He didn’t seem nearly as chatty as before, and she was a little worried that she would get nothing more out of him this evening—at least, nothing useful.
He, however, might very well think he was getting something more out of her than she might wish to give. She sort of wished she’d declined his invitation for a drink.
He led her down a hall that was not off the balcony surrounding the saloon, although she could hear the growing hum of conversation from the drinking hall, along with the loudening jeers of the mining camp’s boisterous outdoor night life. The sounds were vaguely comforting, even what she took to be the sporadic, celebratory pops of gunfire, as Goodthunder’s roo
m was down a dark, disconcertingly quiet hall on the hotel’s far west end, a corner room overlooking the street and the empty lot beside the building.
Goodthunder unlocked the door, stepped aside to let Raven enter ahead of him, and then walked in behind her. He closed the door. There was enough firelight from the street below to allow him to light a lamp without trouble.
When he’d lit a salmon-and-green Tiffany sitting atop a mirrored bureau, he lit one more lamp on a marble-topped dresser. Raven glanced around at the rough-hewn elegance of the suite’s sitting room, with its pine wainscoting beneath purple wallpaper adorned with faux-gilt oak leaves. She vaguely noted there were no wall trimmings, not even a family tintype.
She’d turned to look through an open door at a bedroom outfitted with a large, unmade four-poster bed on whose side table was a half-empty whiskey bottle and an ashtray overflowing with slender black cigar butts. Clothes and newspapers were strewn around the bedroom floor.
The air in the suite smelled of coal oil, cigar smoke, hair oil, general male musk, and whiskey.
Raven heard Goodthunder’s approach too late. By the time she’d turned toward him, he’d taken her into his arms, bent her slightly backward, said, “Christ, I’ve been wanting to do this all night,” and pressed his hungry mouth to hers.
16
Hold on, cowboy!” Raven forced a laugh and wriggled out of his arms, brushing his liquory saliva from her lips with the back of her hand. “Good God, Jack, I’m not a two-peso whore you bend over a hitching post in the back alley!”
She chuckled again, although she heard the unease in it.
Goodthunder stared at her. His eyes were very dark. It was more than just the shadows trimming the hollows of his eye sockets and limning the heavy line of his brow. The eyes themselves were like black marbles set with large, even blacker irises.
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