Slocum and the Larcenous Lady
Page 13
He’d been watching them surreptitiously all morning. Lil was in there. He had mentally given himself a good kicking already this morning, and more than once. He should have snuck up to her room and finished the job last night, that was what.
But he hadn’t, more’s the pity. Now he was stuck with doing it today, and with absolutely no plan in mind. He was just going to watch until he saw her, that was all. But he wasn’t any too confident that he’d think of the right move, even then.
It was just a pity he hadn’t gotten her yesterday at the wedding. Why did they have to shift at the last second, anyway? He had rotten luck, that was why. He’d always had rotten luck. Something about Tiger Lil just brought it to the fore, that was all.
Well, screw her!
And then he found himself wishing that he had. Just once. Just one time, to make up for those years in prison, to make those work details in the beating sun and his tiny cell even halfway bearable. But he hadn’t even had any fond memories to look back on.
Which was another reason she deserved to die like the bitch she was.
He dug into one of his pockets and pulled out his whittling knife, then ferreted in another to find the bit of pine he’d been working on. It was slowly taking form as a tiny pronghorn antelope. Messenger had been quite the woodcarver back in the days before he went away to Yuma. He wasn’t up to his old skills yet, though. He figured it would just take time.
And he was patient.
Look how long he’d waited to get back at Lil!
He started whittling his little pronghorn, glancing up the street every few seconds. Besides Lil, he had another problem: how to flee Poleaxe once he’d accomplished the deed. He didn’t own a horse, and he’d used up practically all his cash on the stage, just to get here.
He supposed he could always steal one, but dammit, he wouldn’t want to go through all this crud to get back at Lil, only to be hanged for thieving a horse!
He stilled his fingers. He’d nearly cut off one of the pronghorn’s legs, which he most surely didn’t want to do. He sat there for a moment, very still, and thinking, Just calm the hell down, Bill! Something will happen. It always does, doesn’t it?
Slocum stood in the lobby while Lil settled her account, and the desk clerk made over her, offering his sympathies over and over on the untimely death of her husband and offering, at the same time, his hopes that she’d had a pleasant stay. Slocum was embarrassed for him, but Lil didn’t seem to mind.
The thought of all that land and money she’d just come into probably made up for a lot of indiscretions on the part of the townspeople.
She had mentioned that David Chandler’s attorney had come to see her early this morning. She hadn’t seemed a bit sad about it, either.
Apparently, she got everything. And there was a lot of everything to get.
“Ready, Lil?” he asked when she turned away from the desk.
“I believe I am, Slocum,” she said, and hoisting his bedroll under his arm to fill his hands with most of her luggage, he led her through the front door.
The livery had sent up a buckboard—nothing fancy—to take them out to her ranch, and the desk clerk followed behind them, dragging her big trunk. Once they got it loaded to Slocum’s satisfaction, he checked his Appy’s tether line, then climbed up into the driver’s seat beside Lil.
He gave a cluck to the horses, and a little shake of the reins, and they were off. As they drove down Main Street, he noticed a fellow sitting out front of the café, a man just sitting there, whittling, but who looked up and watched their progress with some interest.
It might have been a local, just snooping on them to have a good story to tell later on, at the bar. Then again, it might be a suspect. Slocum thought he recognized him, maybe from dinner last night. It was hard to tell at this distance. And he didn’t want to actually turn back at stare at the fellow. Why alert him if he was, indeed, important?
“I’m gettin’ spooky in my old age,” he muttered.
And Lil asked, “What did you say?”
“Nothin’, darlin’,” he replied, letting a smile spread out over his face. “Nothin’ at all.”
19
She had warmed up quite a bit since they’d come to question her the morning before. Not enough for her to lean against his side as he drove. Not enough for her to pepper his cheek with kisses or slide her hand up his thigh. But enough that once they reached the ranch, she thought she just might have him do some more . . . domestic work, rather than fixing fences.
Something that could be best accomplished in the bedroom.
“You ever been out here, Lil?” Slocum asked.
“No, David never showed me the ranch,” she said. “I guess he was saving it for a surprise.” She hoped it would be a big, fat, juicy surprise. Something like a jewel of a house, set amid green lawns and . . .
And then she remembered she was in Arizona. Just a rough house set in the middle of the gravelly desert would probably be more like it.
“Hope so,” Slocum muttered, and Lil knew he’d been thinking much the same as she. She smiled.
Not long after Slocum and Lil left town on the buckboard, Bill Messenger took a leisurely stroll down to the livery and rented himself a horse for the day. He set off, following the telltale ruts of the buckboard’s passing, but he didn’t hurry. There was plenty of time. Besides, at his current slow jog, he’d catch up with that buckboard before it got halfway to the ranch.
He hadn’t asked the man at the livery about this, though. Best not to raise suspicions. He’d gotten it out of a local over dinner last night.
The horse he’d rented was just that: a sorrel, broken-down rental horse, with choppy gaits and all. Probably twenty years old, too. Didn’t neck rein worth spit, and he was pretty certain that the gelding was deaf, too. At least, Jess, back at the livery, had shouted directly into its ear every time he wanted it to do something.
Like get the hell off his foot, for instance.
It seemed to be the beast’s favorite place to stand.
Well, Messenger wouldn’t have to worry about that. All he needed was some halfway reliable transportation to take him to Lil. That, and a loaded gun.
And now he had both.
He wasn’t sure just exactly how much trouble this Slocum character would be, but he’d done time with some god-awful rowdies, and he figured he was prepared for the worst. The very worst. He could handle it.
He was about a mile out of town when he began to have doubts. Mainly because his halfway reliable transportation suddenly stumbled—over his own feet was the only thing Messenger could figure—and pulled up lame.
Messenger dismounted and checked the hoof, cleaned it out, looking for stones, and even felt the whole of the pastern and lower leg, feeling for heat.
He couldn’t find an injury, couldn’t even find a clue.
And the gelding still limped when he led it a few feet.
Damn it!
Charlie Townsend was up and around, too.
His shoulder hurt him some less this morning, although he found out real quick that you didn’t want to do something foolish, like reach up to the top shelf for coffee.
He could have grabbed it with his good side, but instead he went without his own brew and wandered down to the bunkhouse to grab a cup of Cookie’s, instead.
His face was looking pretty damned good, too. If he squinted into the mirror really hard, he could just make out, just faintly, a few dim, pink lines where the glass had scratched him. But he figured a fellow would have to look long and hard to find them.
All in all, he was pretty chipper.
Some might say, a lot more chipper than a man who had just committed one murder and was about to commit another had any right to look. Charlie, however, wasn’t one of those unnamed “some” and didn’t give it a second thought. After partaking of the bunkhouse coffee and handing out orders for the day, he went back to his little cottage and sat on the porch, cleaning his guns.
And whist
ling.
He felt damned good this morning.
He hadn’t been at it too long when he saw a buckboard approaching, far out on the road, from the direction of town. From long habit, he quickly reassembled the gun he’d been cleaning, slid five shiny new bullets into the cylinder, and clicked it closed with a sharp snap.
Only then did he stand up to take a closer look.
The buckboard—he’d been right about that part, anyhow—wasn’t much closer, but close enough that he could see there was an Appy saddle horse tied to and being led by the back rail of it, and two people on the front seat.
A man and a woman.
A scowl gripped him from head to toe in a way it never had. It was that woman! That woman, come to take his ranch!
Anger froze him solid, or he would have grabbed his rifle and taken a shot at her from where he stood. It was a good thing that anger prevailed, because he realized a mere second later that this would have been the worst move he could possibly have made. First off, there were too many people around, and him in plain sight of most all of them!
He’d need to be plenty tricky to pull this off.
At last, he managed to thaw out his muscles, holster his gun, and take a stiff walk off the porch and out into the yard to greet the buckboard—and its inhabitants.
The man, Slocum, gave him a curious look when he stepped down, but shook his hand and said, “So you’re Chandler’s foreman. Pleased to meet you.”
That damn floozy, Lil, said just about the same thing. Oh, she was pretty, all right, a real treat to the eyes, but she wasn’t going to fool him the way she’d fooled nearly every man in the whole territory.
Why, one of the hands—a new kid named Thad Turner—fainted dead away! Charlie figured it’d be years before the rest of the boys got done teasing Thad about that!
Charlie gave orders for some of the men to follow them with Lil’s baggage, then led Lil and Slocum to the house. He knew it was silly, but he couldn’t get over the feeling that Slocum was looking at him funny, like he had the smallpox or something.
He brushed aside the feeling, though, and opened the front door, ushering them inside.
“This here’s the parlor,” he said, then swung his arm over to the side. “Kitchen’s in there. Dinin’ room, too.”
“The bedrooms are back here?” asked Lil. She was already at the mouth of the hall. Just like a woman!
Anger this time took the form of bile rising to the back of his throat. But he nodded and managed to say, “Yes, ma’am. Three of ’em.”
She smiled and said, “Good. Then there’ll be plenty of room for you to stay in the house, Mr. Slocum. Mr. Townsend, Sheriff Kiefer has asked Slocum to be my bodyguard for a few days.”
Charlie swallowed hard to clear his throat and said, “Yes, ma’am.”
The men began to traipse through the front door with Lil’s trunks, and she disappeared down the hall, obviously in search of the best room. Which left Slocum and Charlie standing uncomfortably in the parlor.
Charlie couldn’t stand it any longer. He said, “Mr. Slocum, seems you’re looking at me kinda odd. Any particular reason for that?”
Slocum’s features took on the very image of innocence. “Kind of odd? Nope, don’t think so, unless it’s just my natural vacant expression.” He put a hand on the shoulder of a passing ranch hand, pointed to the saddlebags and bedroll the man was carrying, and said, “You can just leave those with me, son.”
The hand did as he was told, but lingered. “Are you him? I mean, are you the Slocum they write about, mister?”
Slocum seemed to take a long breath. “I am,” he finally said, “but don’t take anything you read to heart. They make most of that shit up.” And then he smiled and winked.
“Th-thank you,” the hand stuttered, wide-eyed, and backed nearly to the front door before he turned, went outside, and from the porch, shouted, “Hey you, Curly! You owe me a sawbuck!”
“You are the one in them books,” Charlie Townsend said flatly. Slocum didn’t quite know how to take the comment, considering the manner in which it was said, so he just nodded curtly.
“I read one’a those,” Charlie continued. “One a while back.”
Again, Slocum just nodded.
Charlie shifted his weight. His eyes narrowed. “You make much’a anything off those?”
Slocum smiled. “You thinkin’ of going into the dime hero business?”
“Just curious, that’s all.”
“Well, the answer is no. I don’t make a plug nickel off ’em. The writer does, I suppose,” he added when Charlie’s weathered face fell. “And the folks who publish ’em. Me, I’m just a . . . a topic, I guess you’d call it.”
“You mean they can use your name and not pay you for it?” Charlie asked. He appeared to be more than a little incensed on Slocum’s behalf.
“Reckon so. They’re doin’ it.”
“Don’t seem fair,” Charlie huffed. “Don’t even seem American!”
Slocum shrugged, said, “That’s the way it is,” and hoped Lil would reappear damn soon.
He had the foggiest recollection of having seen Charlie somewhere before, and the association it was bringing up was none too good. He just wished he could remember!
The hands, minus the luggage they’d traipsed in with, began to emerge from the hall right about then, thus effectively shutting Charlie’s piehole. For the moment. Slocum nodded and said his thanks to each man as he passed, and when the last one let the screen door slam behind him, Charlie set in again.
“Them things they write about you. You say they make most of ’em up?”
He was like a dog with a bone, Charlie was. Slocum said, “ ’Fraid so. Parts of ’em are true, though, if you take ’em with a grain of salt.”
“Which parts?”
Slocum exhaled loudly. “Charlie, that’s like tryin’ to pick the black pepper outta the fly shit. Let’s just leave it at some here, some there.”
Charlie nodded sagely and said, “I reckon so.” But then he brightened. “That big leopard Appy tied behind the buckboard. He’s yours, ain’t he?”
Slocum nodded. “That part’s true.”
“Well, then,” Charlie said, seemingly satisfied. “Well, then.”
Just then, Lil’s bright, “Slocum?” wafted up the hall, and he had his excuse.
Shrugging, he said, “Duty calls, I reckon. See you later, Charlie.”
Lil waited in the largest bedroom, her trunk and bags scattered about the room. She heard Slocum’s boot steps coming down the hall, and a little shiver ran up her spine. Gone was her desire to send Slocum out to the fields and the fences, gone was any wish except to have him right here and right now, deep inside her.
As his steps drew closer, her fingers flew to the buttons of her bodice, and by the time he entered the room, hat in his hand, she had unbuttoned it to the waist and was already working at the ties of her chemise.
Slocum cocked a brow.
“You a little anxious, Lil?”
She snorted. “As if you’re not. I know you too well, Slocum.”
“I reckon you do,” he said, suddenly sweeping her off her feet and into his arms. “But not good enough to know I won’t make love to you in your dead husband’s bedroom.”
He carried her out into the hall and to one of the smaller rooms, tossed her on the bed, and lifted her skirts.
For a moment, she couldn’t see for the cloud of taffeta in her face, but she could certainly feel it when he parted her thighs and pushed deep inside her, filling her completely. Batting her hems away from her face, she let out a satisfied sigh and lifted her legs, wrapping them around his hips. Her arms ringed his neck.
“That’s my boy,” she murmured.
“That’s my girl,” he said with a grin and began to move inside her.
He was wonderful, as always. He fit her, and she him, as if they had been made for each other.
She tingled when he pushed her camisole aside to expose one breast, a
nd shivered with pleasure when he fastened his mouth on her nipple and began to tease it with his teeth. She tried to push everything—her pelvis, her breast, her face—up toward him, to meet him, to merge with him, to be one with the thrusting, powerful force of him.
Why couldn’t he have money? she wondered, even as she lost herself in him. Slocum was the one man on earth that she could have stayed with, lived with, and loved forever. But a saddle tramp was always a saddle tramp—which meant no visible means of support—and it was hard to soothe itchy feet.
And then his hands slipped between her fanny and the fabric of her skirt. They cupped her and lifted her, pulling her hard against him over and over, until she found herself tumbling, tumbling, tumbling into a teeth-clenching, molar-grinding, lose-your-mind orgasm that seemed to go on forever.
She felt him spasm as he came inside her, and if her eyes had been open, she knew she would have seen the telltale grimace of ultimate satisfaction he always made just as the sensation overtook him.
He pumped into her once more, then twice, before he relaxed and collapsed next to her on the coverlet and pulled her atop him.
“God damn you, girl!” he said, head back, eyes closed, and a little out of breath. “I’m so mad at you, I could just spank you.”
20
Bill Messenger, now afoot and leading his limping gelding, drew slowly closer to the Circle C.
And with every step he took, he plotted his revenge against the fair Lil.
Shooting was really too good for her, although he couldn’t think of anything more expedient or anything that could be accomplished from farther away.
After all, she had stolen not only his money and his past but his future as well. She’d stolen his whole life, when you came right down to it, and it probably hadn’t bothered her as much as a sneeze.