by Tabor Evans
When she saw Longarm’s skeptical glance, she paused, shrugged, and popped the cork. “Oh, I got drunk a couple weeks back and told him I would. I mean, I guess I did. I don’t recollect. That’s what Jake and a couple others told me. Anyway, when I told Falcon I’d had a change of heart, he got all sour and said I had three days to reconsider . . . or else.”
She sighed, puffed the cigar, and glanced at the second dead man the bartender was hauling out the door. “I reckon this was his ‘or else.’” She chuckled. “He brought his pa’s men in from their Royal Flush ranch to give me hell. Couldn’t do it himself.” She looked pointedly at Longarm, squinting her eyes a little. “Now, what kinda man is that?”
Longarm let smoke stream out his nostrils and looked at her from under his brows. “I for one, Merle, would do it myself.”
Her cool gaze slid across his chest and shoulders, returned to his eyes. Her upper lip curled. “You reckon you could?”
“I reckon I’d try.” His eyes flashed rascally. “And the devil take the hindmost.”
She dipped her chin slightly and pursed her lips. She raised her shot glass. “I reckon he would at that.”
Longarm raised his own glass, and they both threw back their shots. “Now, then,” he said, skidding his glass toward the middle of the table and waving her off when she extended the bottle toward him. “Seems to be the fashion in this country—comely lasses luring men off to their graves. Wanna fill me in?”
Marshal Blassingame refilled her glass. Longarm was not only amazed by how well she handled a six-shooter, but by how well she could hold her hooch. She was on her third shot in five minutes, and her eyes were blue steel.
“Magnusson and his wolf women,” Merle said, leaning back and shoving her fingers into her jeans pockets. “That’s what we call ’em around here, on account of they have a pet wolf runnin’ with ’em. Magnusson’s off his nut, and so, apparently, are his daughters.”
“When’d they start killin’?”
“About nine months ago. When prospectors started rushing into Diamondback Canyon after a man named Hjelmar Petterson found a nugget in his placer diggings worth four thousand dollars. Magnusson has several cabins up there. Apparently, he got tired of the company, so he and his girls went to work killin’ most of the prospectors in their area. Eight men dead in three weeks. A couple witnesses claimed the girls got them to let their guard down, and ole Magnusson went in either shootin’ or swinging a pick. They stripped the bodies, took all valuables, and vamoosed.”
“They pretty much stick around the Diamondback?”
“Pretty much. Magnusson was one of the first to settle the canyon—him and about three Basque sheepherders—after the French fur trappers disappeared about twenty years ago. His last Indian wife is buried near Skull Pass. I figure that’s why he’s staying.”
She sighed and threw back her shot, gritted her teeth as the coffin varnish hit her stomach. “Good luck finding them. I’ve been up and down that canyon twice now, and found neither hide nor hair. Magnusson’s got about three or four other cabins, some in the Mummy Range, some in the Neversummers. Some claim they’ve even seen him and those wolf girls as far south as Ute Creek Peak in the Mummy Range. They haul an old teepee around on a travois.”
“What about the girls?”
The marshal snorted. “They’re pretty . . . and wild.”
“Must be something in the water around here.”
“And men, bein’ men, can’t resist ’em. I hope you can resist them, Longarm, cause I hear tell they’ll give you a hard-on that’ll last a lifetime.”
“Business before pleasure,” Longarm said, feeling his ears warm at the lass’s salty talk. He’d been around farm-talking females before, but none of them filled out their blouses half as well as this gal did. “Both of ’em have Indian blood?”
“Yeah, but only one is dark. The other must’ve taken after Magnusson’s Norski side. She favors a Viking queen.” Merle snorted again. “They’re quite a pair. If you ever catch sight of ’em, you won’t forget ’em. Just don’t forget yourself and try to fuck ’em.” She clucked and threw back the rest of her drink.
The whiskey was so bad, Longarm decided to have another shot to numb the dull ache this alley-talking looker was setting up in his loins. What was it about pretty women with blue tongues . . . ?
When he’d refilled his shot glass and taken another sip, he grated, “You drink this shit daily?”
She smiled. “Jake claims it has healing properties.”
Longarm took another sip and shook his head. “I reckon I don’t have anything to heal.” He lifted the glass to the window to see if anything solid were floating around in the hooch. “You really think old Magnusson and his wolf women are going to be that hard to track?”
“Yep. ’Cause I’ve tried. The canyon’s out of my jurisdiction, but the county sheriff ain’t worth puke. I tried, all right, and came up empty.”
“A man might have an easier time . . . since it’s men they’re after.”
“Chew that up finer.”
“If I was to go up the canyon rigged out like a prospector who aimed to stay awhile . . .”
The marshal stared at him pensively, nodding. “It’s worth a try, I reckon. You ever been up that country before?”
“Time or two, but I wouldn’t say I know it.”
“You’ll need a guide.”
“Got one in mind?”
“Got one already arranged. My uncle, Comanche John Blassingame. He’s been at loose ends lately, needs a job to keep him from drinkin’ too much and carousing. He was prospecting up the St. Vrain, but then his diggings dried up.”
“How much he charge?”
She hiked a shoulder and tapped ashes from her cigar onto the floor. “Five dollars a day. Uncle Sam can afford that, can’t he?”
“That’s nepotism, Marshal.”
“Sure as shit, Longarm.” She glanced out the street-side windows, beyond which several men were laying Falcon’s dead gunnies out on the boardwalk before the women’s clothing store. “Too late to get started today, though. Besides, Uncle John’s sparking a widow lady over to Camp Collins. Won’t be back here till late tonight.”
She stood and donned her hat, adjusting it atop her head, arranging her hair, taking her time as though to give Longarm a good study of her figure, full breasts pushing at the blouse and the lacy chemise exposed a good two inches beneath the top of her cleavage, nipples prodding the cotton like small buttons.
Though she was a big, healthy-looking girl, she had a proportionately narrow waist and well-turned hips and thighs. Her long legs were the kind that set a man to imagining how they’d feel, wrapped around his waist.
She glanced at Longarm and mashed out her cigar under her boot toe. “Forget it, Deputy. I’ve had enough trouble with men for one day.”
“Nothing to forget, Marshal. I never trifle with wildcats . . . no matter how pretty they are.”
She set her hands on the table and leaned toward him, her blouse billowing out from her chest, giving him a bird’s-eye view of her cleavage. “Remember that when you go up the canyon tomorrow. It’s usually the big, handsome sons of bitches who are especially vulnerable.”
She remained leaning over him a stretched second, giving him a good, long look of what she was denying him, then straightened, winked, adjusted her hat, and strolled out the batwings.
“I can’t tell if I was just complimented or insulted,” Longarm told the barman setting up a table on the other side of the room.
The man stopped, his sun-seared face flushed from exertion, a lock of hair hanging over his sweaty forehead. “Poison. That’s what that girl is.” He kicked a chair against the table. “Pretty poison.”
Longarm stood, donned his hat, and headed for the batwings. His headache was back. He’d take some air and get the lay of the town. “Lot of it around here, ain’t there?”
Longarm moseyed around town for a while, though there wasn’t much to mosey around but
shacks and sagebrush; then he rented a speckle-gray pack mule and packsaddle from the Occidental Livery and Feed Barn.
He purchased miner’s garb and a couple of picks and shovels from the mercantile for show, and camping supplies and foodstuffs. With his saddle horse, pack mule, and panniers secured in the livery barn, and a room rented at the Rutherford B. Hayes Hotel at the west edge of town, at the base of an anvil-shaped rimrock, he enjoyed a beer and a surprisingly good steak at a small brick-and-adobe tavern nestled in the cottonwoods along the Diamondback River. The place had been recommended by the livery owner.
Longarm had intended to call it an early day. He and the marshal’s uncle would be heading out at first light. Besides, it had been a long train ride from Denver, and, having been otherwise occupied with Cynthia Larimer, he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before.
But before he knew it, he’d become involved shooting craps with a couple of good-humored placer miners, who told him this and that about the river and the canyon he was about to traverse. He didn’t wander over to the Hayes until well after ten o’clock, with distant thunder and the smell of rain pushing in from the mountains.
He shucked out of his clothes and crawled into the soft, albeit lumpy bed, and blew out his lamp. He watched lightning flash in the window for about two minutes before the rumbling thunder and the fresh smell of the rain and sage lured him off to slumberland.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep before something woke him.
He opened his eyes and blinked into the darkness. Lightning lit up the two west-facing windows, for half a second filling the room with a cold, violet light.
Just enough light for just enough time for Longarm to see the hatted, jacket-clad figure moving toward him from the door. One flap of the jacket was pulled back behind a holstered revolver.
Chapter 5
Warning bells clanging in his head, Longarm flung his right hand out toward the double-action .44 holstered on the chair back beside the bed.
“Hold on!” a female voice hissed, so drowned by a sudden thunderclap that Longarm was slow to comprehend.
In an eyeblink, his pistol was in his hand, cocked, and aimed at the intruder’s belly. The intruder aimed a silver-plated Colt at Longarm.
“It’s Merle,” she said, keeping her voice low.
“Christalmighty!” Longarm groused, still too shocked to release his grip on his .44. “What the hell you think you’re doin’?”
She stood about five feet from the bed. He could see only her silhouette during lightning flashes. Rain pelted the windows, and the wind was kicking up.
“You holster yours,” she said, voice like steel, “I’ll holster mine.”
Longarm wasn’t in the habit of dropping his own gun when another was being aimed at him—even when that other gun was held by a blond heart-stopper like Merle Blassingame.
“You first,” Longarm countered.
“We’ll do it together.”
“On the count of three.”
Merle said, “One, two, three . . .”
Neither gun moved a hair.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” she said, giving her silver-plated Navy a twirl and dropping it into its holster. “I came to fuck, not swap lead.”
Longarm let his Colt sag. “Huh?”
She doffed her hat, slung it toward a chair in the far corner, then began unbuckling her cartridge belt. When she had the belt off and was slinging it over the same chair holding Longarm’s belt and holster, he reached over toward the chair himself and, keeping his eyes on the girl, dropped his .44 in its sheath.
He watched, by intermittent lightning flashes, thunder rumbling and rattling the windows, as Merle unbuttoned her shirt quickly, shrugged out of the loose-woven garment and her deerskin jacket, and tossed both in the general direction of her hat.
“Mind if I light a lamp? I like to see what I’m gettin’ into.”
Longarm swallowed. “Right practical.”
When she’d lit the lamp on the dresser, she kicked out of her boots and did a cobra imitation, wiggling out of her jeans and men’s skintight longhandles, then hopping around, full breasts jouncing beneath a lacy chemise, as she pulled off her men’s white socks.
Finally, naked from the waist down, she stepped up to the bed, regarded Longarm wistfully from between the mussed wings of her long, blond hair, which the wan lamplight caressed lovingly.
She crossed her arms and lifted the sheer chamise toward her neck. The material raked over her breasts, catching on the nipples, jostling them slightly before she pulled the garment up over her head. Her hair rose with the chamise and fell back down across her shoulders, sticking out here and there like straw from a shock, several strands framing the big, round, pink-nippled globes of her breasts.
Assuming a mock bullfighter’s stance, she held the chamise out between the thumb and index finger of her left hand, as though it were a cape, then dropped it straight down to the floor. She tossed her hair out, giving Longarm an uncluttered view of her body.
Her belly was flat, the hips nicely rounded, and the thighs arcing in a long, graceful curve—the hard, toned thighs of a woman who spent a lot of time on horseback.
“You like?” she said.
Longarm swallowed. His heart was thudding like a Ute war drum. He always slept in his birthday suit, and his shaft was tenting the single blanket he’d drawn up to his waist.
She reached down—“Christ, is that another .44 under there?”—and wrapped her hand around his cock as though around the neck of a chicken she were about to strangle for supper.
Longarm’s stomach lurched as though he’d been shot out of a cannon.
He grabbed her wrist, pulled her down to him, and kissed her. She sagged against him and opened her lips, ramming her tongue into his mouth and squirming against him, her feet still on the floor.
Kissing her, he wrapped his left arm around her shoulders and, sliding to one side, began pulling her onto the bed.
She pulled her tongue back into her mouth and smiled while pressing her lips to his. “I wanna be on top.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
Longarm squeezed her arm, pulling her close while he kissed her, enjoying her warm, full lips against his. Then he lay back and threw aside the covers, exposing his fully erect, throbbing shaft which a sudden lightning flash illuminated dramatically.
She groaned like a bitch in heat and straddled him, thunder clapping and making the entire building shudder, while the wind blasted the walls and windows with heavy rain.
She kissed him and ran her hands down his arms and across the hard bulging slabs of his chest. Suddenly she looked down at him, her eyes meeting his. “I don’t visit the room of every handsome stranger who rides into town, I want you to know.”
He pinched her nipples between his thumbs and index fingers, his thick mustache turning up with a grin. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“I reckon you saved my life. I was outgunned.”
“I have a feelin’ you’d have figured a way to save your bacon.”
“Doubt it. Some of Falcon’s boys were gunslicks from Texsas and Oklahoma. His daddy, ole Amos Falcon himself, hired ’em to keep squatters off his spread.” She scooted down his thighs then leaned forward until her hair was dropping down over Longarm’s groin, making his whole being tingle.
“No sir,” she cooed as the lightning flashed and the thunder clapped, the guttering lamplight sliding shadows to and fro, “I’d be pushing up daisies now if it hadn’t been for you, Longarm.” She took his shaft in one hand, wrapping her fingers around it, and kissed the head.
“Oh well . . . I reckon there’s no point in arguin’.” He groaned as she suddenly slid her lips quickly down the length of his shaft, until his head met the back of her opening and closing throat.
He bunched the sheets in his hands and curled his toes as she whipped her lips back up the length of his iron-hard cock, over the circumcised head and off with a slight popping sound.
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br /> She scooted back up his thighs, until her hip bones lay over his. She pushed up on her knees and guided the head of his shaft into her furred slot, then slowly slid down upon him, the shaft rising into the hot, wet core of her.
Her voice was graveled and breathy. “Thank you, Custis.” She rose up and down, shuddering as if chilled to the bone, her hair tumbling around her shoulders. “It’s all right if I call you Custis, isn’t it?”
“Ma’am,” Longarm grunted as she began rising and falling faster, his fingertips digging into her waist just above her hipbones, “you can call me anything you want.”
“Merle.”
“Huh?” She was fairly bouncing atop him now, the bed springs squawking, the headboard tapping the wall.
“Call me Merle.”
She stopped suddenly and looked down at him seriously again, her round, sweat-slick breasts flattened on his chest.
She lowered her lips to his, chewed his lower lip for a second, then lifted her head again and ran her hand brusquely through his hair. “But only here. Out there, I’m Marshal Blassingame to you, chump, and everyone else.”
“Why not, since you ask so nice?” Longarm winced, his shaft standing tall inside her, waiting, his heart threatening to blow blood out his ears. “Now, you mind if we save the rest of the chitchat for later?”
She began thrusting her hips again, rising up and down on her haunches. It wasn’t long before the bed was complaining like a sawyer’s two-man timber saw and Merle was groaning and sighing and Longarm was grunting and gritting his teeth as the storm blasted away outside like a night skirmish during the Little Misunderstanding Between the States.
Longarm held himself back for as long as he could, grinding his teeth and digging his fingers into her hips. Finally, he threw his head back, arched his back, and let go.
“Gawd!” the marshal cried, grinding down hard and throwing her own head back on her shoulders, stretching her lips back from her teeth and hissing like a wildcat.
It took about five minutes for them both to catch their breath.
