Longarm and the Wolf Women

by Tabor Evans

  A chill ran up the young lawman’s spine. “The old bastard could have a bead on us right now.”

  “That old killer ain’t necessarily nowhere near here,” said Miller in a faraway voice as he stared at the two girls frolicking atop the waterfall. “We can’t be sure these two are his daughters. They could be Mel Ramie’s girls. He’s got him one towhead and one half-breed, too. We’re too far away. I can’t see ’em clear enough to be sure.”

  Parsons turned to the tall liveryman and was instantly distracted by the black-haired girl suddenly throwing the blonde onto her back. The blonde screamed. Laughing, the black-haired girl crawled on top of her and, placing both hands on the blonde’s round breasts, began running her tongue down the blonde’s belly toward her crotch.

  The blonde shook her head from side to side and raised her knees. Her groans rose above the river’s gurgle.

  Parsons felt his face and loins warm. He didn’t like what these girls were doing to him, how they’d captured not only his attention but his imagination, made him not want to think of anything else. As the dark-haired girl dropped her head down even lower on the blonde’s belly, Parson raked his eyes toward Miller.

  “How many prospectors’ daughters cavort like that around here?” he scoffed, his voice thick in his throat. He jerked his head around, wary of an ambush. “You men stay here and keep an eye out for the old mountain man. I’m gonna head upstream, cross the river, and investigate the other shore.”

  When none of them said anything, Parsons turned to them. “Look alive, goddamnit!”

  “You got it, Marshal,” said Baron, not turning his head from the river.

  “Whatever you do,” Parsons said, “don’t leave these trees. And for chrissakes, don’t go into the river!”

  Miller turned to him, beetling his gray brows. “We’re not tinhorns, marshal. We’ll keep a sharp eye out for Magnusson. We’ll be coverin’ ya. Don’t you worry.”

  Parsons looked at the three men crouched in the brush, all three staring, mesmerized, toward the river. The young lawman shook his head and cursed as he turned and began walking upstream. When he was fifty yards beyond the waterfall, he looked around. Judging that he was alone at this section of the river, he stepped out from the bank and hop-scotched rocks to the other side, once slipping and filling his right boot with water.

  On the opposite bank, he took a slow look around, then sat down, set his rifle beside him, pulled off his boot, and poured out the water. When he’d tugged the boot back on, he rose, grabbed his rifle, and followed the girls’ caroming laughter downstream while inspecting every boulder and brush snag for their kill-happy father, Magnus Magnusson.

  Thirty yards from where the girls were entangled atop the waterfall—engaged in some sort of wrestling hold, it appeared, one yowling with mock pain—Parsons stopped. From a rocky hollow to his left, where the ground rose gently toward the southern canyon wall, smoke curled skyward.

  Parsons adjusted his grip on his Winchester and headed toward the concealed fire, setting each boot down carefully, wincing as the soaked one chirped softly, like a baby bird. He looked back toward the river.

  The girls were both sitting up Indian style, facing each other and playing patty-cake, breasts jiggling each time they slapped their hands together. Parsons looked beyond them, at the other side of the stream. No sign of the three townsmen crouched in the weeds.

  The young lawman was half-surprised they hadn’t descended on the two girls by now, throwing themselves on the pair like wild pack dogs on a crippled fawn.

  He stopped four feet from the snag and leaned left, casting his gaze into the hollow. He could see only the tops of two dancing flames. Swallowing, ignoring his pounding heart, he took one step left, then bolted forward, leaping an ancient deadfall and extending the Winchester straight out from his left hip.

  “Hold it, Mag—”

  He stopped. The hollow was vacant. Only the fire with a coffeepot sitting a few inches from the glowing coals. Three coffee cups were lined up along the far side of the fire ring. A couple of saddles and bridles were piled beneath a cedar, and while Parsons couldn’t see them, he heard the crunch of horses chewing grass, probably in the heavier brush at the base of the canyon wall.

  The hair at the back of his neck pricked as he moved around the fire, peering into the middle distance.

  Behind him, a rifle cracked. Parsons leaped a good foot in the air. His right boot landed awkwardly atop a deadfall, and he fell, dropping his rifle.

  On the other side of the river, where he’d left Baron and Behunek, a man screamed.

  Parsons extricated his right boot from the deadfall’s branches, scrambled onto his hands and knees, grabbed his rifle, and heaved himself to his feet.

  Another rifle crack, another scream, then another shot.

  Parsons ran back toward the river, leaping rocks and tufts of bunchgrass. He stopped just before he hit the stream. Mike Baron leaped off the opposite bank and into the river, screaming and clutching his right shoulder as he ran, splashing, toward Parsons.

  “It’s him!” Baron screamed. “Good God, it’s hi—”

  The grocer’s voice was clipped short by the roar of a rifle. As smoke puffed in the foliage behind Baron, the man’s chest opened up, spouting blood. The man’s head snapped back as the bullet thrust him forward. He hit the water face-first, arms and legs spread wide as he lolled in the current, dead.

  The grocer’s splash hadn’t settled before Parsons dropped to one knee, snapped the Winchester to his shoulder, aimed at the billowing smoke, and fired three quick shots into the shrubs on the other side of the river. He ejected the spent shell, which clattered on the rocks behind him. As he rammed a fresh cartridge into the rifle’s breech, he waded into the river, holding the rifle taut against his shoulder, staring down the barrel at the opposite shore.

  He was halfway across the stream, heart sounding like a tom-tom in his ears, before he remembered the girls. He glanced to his left. His breath caught in his throat and his heart did a somersault.

  Both girls were crouched behind a thumb of rocks sticking up from the edge of the waterfall. Both had carbines in their hands, and they were aiming the rifles at Parsons. They no longer looked quite as much like girls—at least, not in the face. Their eyes owned a feral, savage cast, and their lips were turned down grimly. They looked like animals. The wet hair hanging straight down both sides of their faces slid around in the breeze.

  “No!” Parsons cried involuntarily, swinging his own rifle toward them.

  He’d swung the gun only six inches before the girls triggered their carbines at the same time. The twin smoke puffs tore and dispersed as both bullets took Parsons high on his chest. He twisted around and stumbled sideways, triggering his own Winchester into the river then dropping the gun as he hit the water and lay on his back, the bullets searing him like war lances.

  “Oh . . . oh, Jesus . . . !”

  Staring straight up at the sky, he felt his blood welling out of him. Christ, he thought, that was a dunderheaded move. Longarm never would have forgotten about the two girls . . .

  As if his own thoughts had summoned them, the blonde and the brunette appeared in his field of vision, staring down at him. They held their rifles low across their thighs.

  The breeze had dried their naked bodies, which were just as incredible as they’d appeared before—the round-hipped, firm-thighed, full-breasted epitomes of perfect female flesh. It was their eyes that turned Parsons’s stomach, drew his balls up into his belly. They were savage, unfeeling, malicious in the most coldly objective way imaginable.

  As if from somewhere far away, Parsons heard someone striding toward him through the water. As a bearded, hatted head came into view, a wet muzzle prodded his right cheek. He smelled the dog before he saw it, and jerked away.

  No, not a dog. Not many dogs that size. The animal facing him—mottled brown and gunmetal gray, with a long, thick snoot and eyes even more feral than those of the women and the bearde
d man staring down at him—was a wolf. Big and lean, it drew its furry lips back from teeth white as porcelain and sharp as a Bowie knife.

  The bearded man had to be nearly seven feet tall, his face nearly entirely covered by the thick, curly, cinnamon beard which was lanced with white, as though from a scar on the left cheek. He prodded the wolf away with his rifle barrel.

  “Get away, Moon,” the man growled, his voice deep and resonant.

  “Lookee that, Pa,” said the blonde, still staring down at Parsons, prodding his badge with her rifle. “He’s law.”

  “Sure ’nough,” the bearded man grumbled. He dipped his chin to his chest, staring straight down at Parsons. “You after me, lawdog?”

  Parsons’s lights were dimming fast. He just stared up at the three savage faces staring down at him, feeling the wolf sniffing at his forehead. He kept thinking, Why didn’t I remember the girls? Longarm wouldn’t have forgotten the girls.

  “Well, that’s just too damn bad for you!” The mountain man grinned.

  The last thing Parsons saw was the rifle’s bore closing down over his right eye. He didn’t even hear the shot that killed him.

  Chapter 2

  Deputy United States Marshal Custis Long, known by friend and foe as Longarm, opened his eyes, pulled the silk sheets and heavy wool comforter down from his face, and stared into the spacious room before him, a subtle but provocative women’s perfume touching his nostrils.

  Only a misty, opal light washed through the window to his right, so he could barely make out the big armoire and heavy, ebony dresser beyond the end of the vast bed he was lying in.

  Between the two obviously valuable pieces of furniture hung a gilt-framed painting nearly as large as one entire wall in his own rented digs on the poor side of Cherry Creek. Before the painting, a chair faced him. It, too, looked expensive, but Longarm couldn’t even begin to describe from what rare materials it had been so carefully, gracefully constructed.

  The chair didn’t interest the lawman all that much, anyway. What caught the brunt of his attention was the black fishnet stocking hanging from one corner of the dresser by an even frillier red garter belt. Not far from the dangling toe of the stocking, a dainty high-heeled, patent-leather shoe lay on its side, as if casually tossed there.

  Nearer the bed lay several pieces of Longarm’s own clothes—white cotton shirt, fawn vest, and one low-heeled cavalry boot. The boot was partially concealed by a pair of women’s silk panties so sheer that they appeared little more than a smudge on Longarm’s worn boot. They were so thin and insubstantial, Longarm decided as he lay half-dozing and half-savoring the luxuriant surroundings, that he could no doubt stuff the entire garment under one cheek.

  He looked around the rest of the well-appointed room, spying more of his own clothes and those of his companion strewn about the ornate furniture and deep-carpeted floor—his string tie was hanging off a gilt wall taper—and remembered the theater last night and the lovely, raven-haired queen he’d attended it with—Cynthia Larimer, niece of General William H. Larimer himself, Denver’s founding father.

  Cynthia, a debutante who’d attended one of the grandest finishing schools on the East Coast and who spent as much time traipsing around foreign continents as this one, was visiting Denver more and more often of late, ever since she and Longarm had been introduced at the last governor’s ball. Mostly, she arranged her visits to coincide with the absence of her uncle and aunt.

  That made it easier for her and Longarm, after a late night on Larimer Street attending balls, the opera, the theater, or somesuch other foolishness she dragged him to as a prequisite for getting into her bloomers, to frolick away the early morning hours playing hide-and-seek, naked, in the Larimers’ grand hallways and smoking parlors and libraries.

  Last night’s activity had begun on the front porch before Cynthia had even gotten the key in the lock. It had continued to the foyer for about eight more minutes, then to the large wooden food preparation table in the vast, stone-floored kitchen for nine or ten more.

  From there, the fervor abating enough that they could more fully appreciate the journey as well as the destination, they’d moved to an ottoman in the cigar parlor, to a fainting couch in the second-floor hall under the stairs, then, finally, at around two in the morning, to the very bed upon which Longarm now lay.

  The memories of last night were so vivid—he could even hear the girl’s passionate groans echoing off the cavernous ceiling as he’d plundered her in the kitchen—that Longarm’s loins stirred.

  He turned to the brass-and-cherrywood clock on the bedside table. Not even six yet. He turned full around to face the other side of the bed, and frowned. The covers were pulled back. A dent remained in the cream silk pillow where Cynthia’s lovely head had reclined, and the silk sheets still bore the slender form of her body.

  The girl herself, however, was nowhere to be seen.

  He’d no sooner registered her absence than he heard something. He lifted his head from the pillow, rising onto his elbows.

  Soft footsteps sounded, the light slap of bare feet on wooden stairs. They were accompanied by the rattling of fine china. As the padding of bare feet on the hall carpet runner grew louder, as well as the dainty rattles of fine china on tin, the perfume fragrance intensified.

  The door latch clicked, the long brass handle dropped, and the door swung open.

  “Cust-isss?”

  The girl’s slender silhouette entered the room, her long, raven hair falling from beneath a man’s flat-brimmed hat, a long, unlit cigar slanting from her mouth. She held a silver serving tray before her. As she stood beside the bed, Longarm stared up at her, his heart twisting with desire.

  The girl—he figured she was in her early twenties though she’d never told him her exact age—wore Longarm’s own threadbare long underwear. They’d been washed so many times that they barely fit Longarm’s tall, muscular frame anymore. He owned better pairs, but they’d been in his landlady’s washtub when he’d dressed for last evening.

  On the slight girl before him this shrunken pair sagged like a pink army tent, the unbuttoned, V-necked top falling down to reveal a delectable portion of her full, round, creamy breasts, the nipples prodding the thin cotton like derringer bores. As overlarge as the garment was in the shoulders and chest, it clung alluringly to the full, tapering roundness of Cynthia’s hips and taut thighs.

  The hat on her head was his own snuff brown Stetson, and the cigar between her teeth was one of his three-for-a-nickel cheroots he must have left downstairs in his Prince Albert coat pocket.

  Cynthia grinned. “Hi, there.”

  “Mornin’.” His voice was thick, his eyes tracing the row of bone buttons on his underwear top as they angled down her right breast and over the nipple peeking at him like a mouse from its hole.

  “I’m wearing your underwear. Hope you don’t mind. I was chilly.”

  “I won’t arrest you if you get out of them pronto.”

  “Custis, now, haven’t you had enough of that? I myself feel like a mare that’s been rode hard by a whole herd and put up wet.” Cynthia giggled. “Look.” She set the tray on his lap and sat down on the bed, leaning across his knees. “I brought you breakfast.”

  Longarm had been so entranced by the girl’s figure in his own underwear that he hadn’t noticed the bottle of Maryland rye atop the tray, flanking the two bone-china cups, steaming silver server, and a plate filled with grapes and orange wedges, another with buttered toast.

  Balancing the tray on his knees, he slid up against the headboard and reached for the bottle. “So you did! Thank you mighty kindly.” He plucked the bottle off the tray, popped the cork, and threw back a liberal shot. “Where are my manners?” he said lowering the bottle, running a hand across his mustache, and extending the rye to the girl. “A wake-me-up?”

  Cynthia laughed, accepted the bottle, and tipped it back. Her eyes popped wide and she made several unladylike gagging sounds as the liquid hit her throat. Lowering the
bottle, she pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth, swallowing hard.

  “How can you stand that stuff?” she croaked.

  “That’s nectar of the gods, girl!”

  “Enough!” She swallowed hard, eyes bulging. “Time for something a little more civilized for us both.” She gave him back the bottle and poured coffee into each cup.

  When Longarm had added another shot of the rye to his java, he corked the bottle, set it on the floor, then sat back as, coffee in one hand, fruit plate in the other, Cynthia scooted up beside him and began feeding them both with her hands.

  It was one of her morning rituals. Longarm didn’t mind. The problem was that by the time she’d slowly slipped a couple of grapes and orange slices into his mouth, sometimes even using her own mouth to do so, he was so damn horny that his head swam giddily in spite of his throbbing hangover from the night before.

  Now she pulled away from him after stuffing an orange wedge into his mouth with her tongue and, grinning, chewed what remained of the wedge, the juice running down her full, red lips to her chin and down her long, creamy neck. Her eyes danced in the dawn light penetrating the curtained window behind Longarm.

  He looked at her breasts, both revealed by his billowing underwear top, nipples jutting like pink rubber knobs.

  “Now, Custis, don’t get in a hurry,” Cynthia admonished huskily. “We need our nourishment.”

  A bead of orange juice ran into the deep V between her breasts. Longarm leaned down and licked the bead from her smooth, warm skin. She gave a shiver and chuckled.

  “Ooo!”

  Longarm smacked his lips as he sat up, lifted the silver tray from his lap, and dropped his legs to the floor.

  “Custis, we’re not finished yet,” Cynthia said primly. “We each still have two oranges and two grapes left.”

  “I’ve had enough,” Longarm said as he padded naked across the room and set the tray on the dresser. “Of that.”