Cold Steel and Hot Lead [How the West Was Done 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)

by Karen Mercury

  Her two new friends were laughing like jackasses. They were slapping each other on the shoulder and were so weak with mirth they had to cling to each other to stay upright. The source of the hilarity involved Albuquerque House. They kept gasping over and over things like “Albuquerque House!”

  “The Phenomenal Percy Tibbles!”

  “He was right again!”

  “We need to call on him for more clues.”

  What was so damned funny? Alameda smiled and even chuckled, too, although she had no idea why.

  Chapter Five

  Rudy had seen Simon Hudson around town, pointed out to him as the richest merchant. He had even encountered Alameda’s sister Ivy, who worked the telegraph in the depot. But he wondered if old Simon had fucked the Hudson maid to produce Alameda. Ivy was also dark and beauteous, with high rounded cheekbones like Alameda. But Alameda was of a different breed altogether.

  She seemed to have some Latin blood in her. It wasn’t just her fiery disposition, her lust for life. Ivy seemed to be that way, too. No, it was her voluptuous figure and her dark-lined chestnut eyes that set her apart from her sister. Her shape was the body poets had written about and playwrights had committed suicide over. Her abundant breasts sat high and muscular on her frame, begging to be sucked. Her small waist sloped to an ass of ample proportions, one could easily see, although she obviously didn’t wear a crinoline. Her ass was a balcony you could do Shakespeare from. Alameda had the classic hourglass proportions that the usual men sought in a mother for their children, and Rudy wondered why she had never wed. Twenty-eight, she had said she was. How did such a striking woman get to be that age without having been wed?

  Rudy didn’t want to be attracted to a woman again. He had put such effort into only dallying with other men the past few years. He had dreaded this moment, but in the back of his mind, he’d known it would happen. His cock had just erected when he had smeared mustard oil on the luscious upraised titties. Well, what man would not obtain an erection under such circumstances? A man who was dead set and determined in his pursuit of the Italian fashion with other men. A man who was convinced that yes, indeed, women were the scourge of the earth and to love one again would be his annihilation.

  Rudy was obviously, suddenly, not that man anymore. And it terrified him.

  He would have to finish this Memphis Kittie business and leave town, perhaps with the Great Wilson Circus. He would never allow his love for a woman to devastate him so thoroughly again.

  Now they sat in the parlor of Albuquerque House, which he discovered was not named after the territory in New Mexico but after some Portuguese explorer who had gone to India. Alameda found some whiskey in the sideboard, which she served the men. She took some herself, but Montreal Jed could only tolerate sarsaparilla. They had fetched him from his hiding spot in Rudy’s hotel room, and he draped himself weakly in a wing chair, his gaudy vest askew on his skeletal frame.

  Rudy said, “I’m glad we don’t have to venture to New Mexico Territory to figure out what Albuquerque meant.”

  Derrick shared a conspiratorial look with him. “Percy said we would find out more in Albuquerque. What do you think he meant?”

  Alameda exhaled. “Now, who is this Percy fellow you keep mentioning? He told you to venture to Albuquerque to find out more about Kittie? Then he must know me or my sister, but I’ve never heard of any Percy here in town.”

  Rudy had been figuring out how to explain the Phenomenal Percy to her. He hadn’t come up with anything satisfactory, so now he said, “He’s a sort of spirit guide, a mentor you might say. So he didn’t have to necessarily know you to suggest we might find answers in Albuquerque. He can see things other people can’t. “

  “And sometimes people can’t see him,” Jeremiah said with disgust and a shudder.

  “Jeremiah,” said Rudy, to change the subject, “I’ve been thinking that you might be neurasthenic. You tire easily, and you’re plainly not cut out for the showman’s life. Would you be agreeable to me treating you with my animal magnetism?”

  “Animal magnetism?” Alameda sat up straighter. “You have healing powers?”

  “Indeed,” Rudy answered grandly. “I have healed many people of trivial ailments such as headaches and women’s disorders and have even seen improvements in cases of consumption, insanity, and typhus.”

  Alameda said, “I do wish you’d been around while my mother was ailing of consumption. But we tried everything, including healers who laid their hands on her, and nothing helped.”

  “I’m so very sorry,” Rudy said. “But it can’t hurt to try, can it? Jeremiah here is much too fatigued to even rejoin his troupe or help us search for Kittie.”

  “I’m sure,” said Jeremiah, “my fatigue is partially due to the shock of actually seeing The Phenomenal Percy. In the flesh, if you will.”

  “Now, now,” said Rudy. Standing, he moved his wing chair near Jeremiah’s. “Let’s just give this a try. It’s called animal magnetism because it controls the fluid that moves in the bodies of animate beings.”

  Jeremiah cringed back into his chair. “But I don’t want my fluids controlled.”

  “Relax. I barely have to touch you.” He took his seat and expounded more to Alameda than to Jeremiah. “Health is the free flow of life through thousands of channels in our bodies. Illness is caused by obstacles to this flow, like in your asthma. Restoring this flow produces a crisis that restores health.”

  Jeremiah wailed, “But I don’t want a crisis! I’m sick to death of crisises!”

  Rudy cocked an eyebrow. “Crises. Well, you just said it. You’re sick to death and will be dead soon if you don’t do something about this. Now. Since Nature is failing to aid you, I am just provoking her efforts.”

  Jeremiah squealed, “I thought you weren’t going to touch me!”

  Rudy had only touched his knees to the patient’s. “I said barely touch. Relax. This isn’t bodily fluid we’re talking about. It’s a fluid that is the basis of the cosmos, the basis of which matter is made. It’s an energy, a life force. When it circulates, we’re healthy. When it’s blocked, we’re sick. Trust me.”

  “Trust him,” Alameda echoed. She sat so far on the edge of the couch she was nearly toppling off. Rudy was proud that she was so interested. Then he despised himself for caring what she thought.

  “Now.” Staring into Jeremiah’s fearful eyes, Rudy made passes with his hands hovering about an inch over Jeremiah’s form from his shoulders down his arms. He wished he had his glass harmonica—playing its crystalline tunes seemed to enhance the movement of cosmic fluid—but he had found success without it.

  “This is creepy,” Jeremiah whispered.

  Now Rudy had to press his fingers lightly to Jeremiah’s diaphragm.

  Jeremiah giggled and squirmed. “I’m ticklish.”

  Rudy hadn’t mentioned that this portion of the treatment could be held for an hour or so. The desired effect was a convulsion that would enhance the cure. “Do you feel any sensations?”

  Jeremiah giggled. “Only the heat from your hands.”

  “Well, you must relax. It’s what the Chinese call chi, the flow of energy—”

  “He is afflicted with the Saint Vitus dance!”

  Rudy gasped, sat upright, and looked around the ceiling, as if he expected to find The Phenomenal Percy hovering up there!

  Derrick was on his feet, standing over Alameda with protective outspread hands. “It’s that bear wrestler,” he hissed.

  But they saw no one.

  “Did you hear that?” Rudy asked Alameda. He removed his hands from Montreal Jed’s stomach region, as the fellow had apparently fainted again, from shock at hearing the voice, or the diagnosis.

  “Yes,” said Alameda, some of the hearty Latin color drained from her face. She lifted a shaky hand to point at the fireplace. “It sounded like it came from there.”

  Rudy tried a different tactic. “Percy,” he said with authority. “You are apparently a medical authority as we
ll as a bear wrestler. How would you recommend that I treat Montreal Jed? As a fellow circus performer,” he added, remembering the Irishman’s fondness for his fellow showmen.

  “What you are doing is fine,” came the raspy whispering from somewhere near a painting of tipis above the fireplace. “But go to the pharmacy of Chang in town and get some whiskey root. Steep it into a tea and make him drink it.”

  Alameda now clutched Derrick’s hand, her eyes frozen open in horror. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she whispered. Derrick sat next to her and put an arm around her as they stared at the fireplace. “What is that?” she asked.

  “That,” said Rudy, “is The Phenomenal Percy Tibbles.”

  “But…” Alameda whispered. “He has no body.”

  That was a very apt description of the disembodied bear wrestler. “Percy,” Rudy called. “Can you show yourself? The lovely girl here is doubtful of your existence.”

  Sure enough, before the river rocks of the fireplace there appeared the image of the muttonchopped Percy as though projected from a hidden magic lantern. He was transparent, but this time his movements were more fluid. He lifted an arm to gesture as though greeting Alameda. This movement consisted of perhaps six projected lantern slides instead of the two they had previously witnessed. Percy seemed to be getting the hang of this specter business.

  To test this theory, Rudy rose and went to touch Percy’s arm. He seemed more solid than the previous pudding-like substance he had displayed. But Rudy’s hand could still go right through him if he just put a tiny effort into it. “This is Miss Alameda Hudson.” The poor girl had halfway collapsed into the crook of Derrick’s arm.

  Percy’s cardboard face changed to a leer. “Yes, I know. This is why I advised you to seek out her house.” His magic lantern arm moved in a succession of four slides to tip an invisible hat to Alameda.

  So Percy was playing cupid? Rudy said, “Oh, so you just wanted to lay eyes on her. Can’t say as I blame you. Can you tell me something? Why do you appear when I am mesmerizing Montreal Jed?”

  Percy’s face returned to its former lack of facial expression. “That is when the spiritual fluid is flowing the best.”

  “So I could, theoretically, call you forth when I am not laying hands on anyone?”

  Someone switched the slide now to depict Percy shrugging. “I suppose. I don’t care much about what you can or can’t do. I’m more interested in the ladies”—the leer replaced the apathetic expression—“and in protecting them from people who wish to harm the good reputation of acrobats and waxworks shows the world over!” He raised a cardboard arm to point idealistically at the ceiling.

  Rudy continued, “Then maybe you can tell us. Are we barking up the right tree in assuming it was Antonio Franconi who kidnapped Memphis Kittie?”

  Percy’s arm was lowered, and once again he shrugged, although the leer stayed fixed on his two-dimensional face. “I saw a contortionist who looked Italian hunched over the unconscious figure of Memphis Kittie.”

  “How did you know he was a contortionist?”

  “Because of the manner in which he was contorted over Kittie.”

  “What? That was your entire basis for assuming he was a contortionist?”

  Percy stayed frozen in the shrugging position. “Wouldn’t you assume that? His feet were up near her shoulders.”

  Rudy sputtered with exasperation. “He could have been fucking Kittie, did you think about that? It could have been this lover she prefers to marry. Alameda, does this lover fellow, could he possibly be mistaken for an Italian?”

  Alameda was struggling to her feet, as if she wished to view Percy closer. Derrick supported the woman by grasping her elbows as though she were elderly. “Ah, no. The fellow Kittie loves has blond hair. Now tell me, you devious men. How are you making this illusion?”

  “Go ahead and touch me!” cried Percy in his muddy voice. “Please, my spangled belle of tent and tightrope! Touch away!”

  “Oh,” said Rudy, as Alameda put her hand through Percy’s pudding arm, “she’s not a spangled belle. She’s an upstanding citizen of Laramie City.”

  Percy’s rectangular eyebrows moved into a wiggling position, like two black caterpillars tossed there. “Upstanding, indeed. I would baptize her ‘Deluxe Dora’ and use her theatrical skills over at the Oddfellows Hall, where they are gathering to rehearse a new tableau for Laramie citizens.” Derrick asked Alameda, “Do you have theatrical skills?”

  “Not that I know of. I did act in a production of Doctor Faustus at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. But I had to leave school halfway through the play’s run to care for my mother.”

  Rudy said admiringly, “Doctor Faustus? That’s a much beloved showman’s piece.”

  Percy plainly didn’t approve of the attention being taken off himself, for he now cried, “As well it should be! This is why you should go to the Oddfellows Hall tonight. There you will see the kidnapper of Memphis Kittie! Or better yet, ask the midgets that were assisting Montreal Jed.”

  “That’s a good point,” Derrick said thoughtfully. “They were standing behind the cabinet.”

  “Hell,” said Rudy. “They were in the cabinet. All right. Thank you, Percy. Oh, and can you tell me. What did you mean about following the trail of the nail paint? Who paints their nails, other than ricewomen from China?” And perhaps circus performers…

  “Avast!” cried Percy, having fallen into the persona of a seafarer. “My time grows short! But, Missy. Deluxe Dora.”

  “Yes?” said Alameda, as though she’d grown accustomed to the idea of conversing with a spirit.

  “You must tell your sister Liberty and her husband Levi. Paddy Worth tells me they must go down another hundred feet in the McKinley Shaft. There they will strike pay dirt.”

  “I will tell them,” Alameda said solemnly.

  Apparently satisfied with his message, Percy cried, “Up and away!” His arm shot up in the pointing position, and a zealous expression appeared on his face.

  “Come back, though, right?” Rudy asked hopefully.

  Percy’s mouth didn’t move at all, but they heard him loud and clear. “I will not be far.”

  But already his voice came from farther away. Everyone looked to the ceiling and the four walls, and when they looked back to the fireplace, he was gone.

  Chapter Six

  Alameda was overcome with lust.

  After the meeting with the otherworldly Irishman, who had apparently been a bear wrestler in life, she had excused herself. She wanted to change into a toilette that had workable buttons up the bodice, but most of her sister Liberty’s clothes were much too small in the bosom for her. She found a green silk gown that she could leave unbuttoned at the waist. The gap could be covered by a striped tunic with lacey, slit sleeves.

  She had been so jealous of Liberty, whose husband Levi Colter seemed to embody everything that Alameda could desire in a man. Tall, dark, and dashing, he also owned a rich gold mine. But Alameda didn’t want a beau, so why was she jealous? After her experience betrothed to Ralph Ellis in Hyde Park, she felt she could easily go another ten years without courting a man. Liberty claimed that Levi—and Garrett O’Rourke, a fellow who seemed to always be there, working side by side with Levi—never lied, but Alameda didn’t believe it. All men were liars. Liars and adulterers.

  As she chose among the many hats in Liberty’s selection, her mind raced over today’s events. She wound up leaning on a vanity, staring distractedly at herself, voluptuous in her half-laced corset. She even leaned forward and hunched her shoulders to display her tits more prominently. Shadows of her nipples’ areolas were revealed. She had always known that men stopped dead in their tracks to get a better view of her bosom, jiggling even under the stricture of a steel cage like the swan-bill corset. But until today she had been disgusted with their ogling looks.

  Their drooling, slack-jawed looks. And in Laramie City, their crotch-grabbing, air-mauling, moronic hooting looks. Men here were much dirtier and more perv
erse than men in New York, and up until today, that had not been a thing to admire. Alameda was safe working at the Cactus Club, since the likes of Ivy’s paramour, the brutal and deadly Captain Park, protected her.

  Suddenly, now she was overcome with lust. Passion of the sort Liberty described as “hysterical paroxysm” but Alameda really knew was a sexual lust for men. Merely standing between Derrick and Rudy, she could feel the sexual heat exuding from their bodies. It made her nipples stiffen and gooseflesh rise on her shoulders just to sit a foot away from Derrick Spiro. And it couldn’t have been her imagination that when Rudy Dunraven leveled those riveting eyes on her, he was thinking of sucking on her throat.

  But one was married, the other a sodomite.

  Of all the damned awful luck! The first two men she’d been attracted to since fleeing from Mr. Ellis, and both were completely unsuitable. So Alameda did what any level-headed, modern woman would do. She dropped her petticoat to the floor, daubed her fingers in a pot of rose cold cream, and plunged them into the slit in her drawers.

  Ah. Perfect. The pulpy lips of her labia slithered between her fingers, and she let out a satisfied sigh. Her eyelids fluttered as her fingers found her enlarged button, taut and erect, crying out for attention. She sucked in a hiss when she stroked it but didn’t stop, knowing she would reach crisis extremely fast today.

  Alameda liked to think she was an expert at self-pleasuring. A former beau had taught her—the one beau she had taken, compared to Ralph Ellis’s what, one hundred fucks?—by demonstrating himself how one could accomplish this with the hand. Then the mouth.

  Thinking about a man’s mouth softly lapping at her button caused a tiny gusher of juice to flow over her fingers. She tugged on her corset, and a pendulous breast bobbed free, held up high and pert by the steel framework, bouncing saucily. She scooped some more rose cream from the jar, and when her fingers pinched her jutting nipple, she gasped so loudly the men in the parlor downstairs could probably have heard her.

  No matter. They would never know what they missed out on. If a man was fool enough to marry, he should never entertain the notion of canoodling with another woman! Alameda was very firm on that subject. It was the price a man had to pay for obtaining a lifelong companion who oversaw all the details of the home life, freeing up the man to pursue an exciting political career. As for Rudy—well, Alameda was a modern woman with suffragist leanings. If a man preferred the delights of a well-muscled masculine body—and who wouldn’t? She could hardly blame him—that was his business entirely.