“Because it involves women. Particularly nasty, beautiful women,” Pinkerton said, turning his mouth corners down reprovingly, though his pale blue eyes sparked with irony. “And you and I both know that if there’s anything you know, Bear, that thing is beautiful women, nasty and otherwise.”
Haskell grinned around the cigar and then continued to puff.
“That being said,” Pinkerton added, “and because women—good, nasty, and everywhere in between—do occasionally tend to cloud your rational thinking, I’ve decided to assign you a partner on this assignment. To, uh, help you see the finer points more clearly.”
Bear dropped the match into an ashtray on his side of the desk, glowering. “Ah, come on, Allan, you know I don’t . . .”
He let his voice trail off when a knock sounded on the door.
“I do believe she’s here now,” Pinkerton said, rising from his chair.
“She?” Bear said.
“Come in!” the elder detective called.
When the door opened and the black-haired beauty stepped into the room, lifting her chin to reveal her radiant cobalt-blue eyes beneath the brim of her black hat, he said, “Agent Haskell, surely you remember Detective Raven York?”
7
Haskell’s heart skipped a beat as he rose from his chair and tried like hell not to blush.
How could he have forgotten Miss York, whom he’d partnered up with on an assignment only last year in the Sawatch Range of central Colorado? Despite Pinkerton’s rules against his agents cavorting with each other, Bear and Raven had not only gotten the man who’d been trying to ignite a war between freighting companies up around the Ute Field of gold and silver mines near the mountain town of Wendigo, but they’d also cavorted to the point where they’d damned near fucked each other into early graves.
Of course, Allan Pinkerton must never know about that aspect of Bear and Raven’s partnering. The boss detective was well aware of Bear’s predilection for breaking the rules now and then, but he had a fatherly attitude toward Miss York, who in turn respected the old man most highly. Bear knew that she would be devastated and humiliated if her esteemed employer ever learned that she’d broken any rule at all, much less the one strictly forbidding dalliances between agents.
“I could never forget Agent York,” Haskell said, wincing as he stumbled over a leg of his chair.
Miss York dropped her eyes to the chair leg in question, and Haskell thought he could see the effort she was making not to titter. She restrained herself well, however, and after shaking Allan Pinkerton’s hand, she stepped forward to extend her own toward Haskell.
“Agent Haskell, how’ve you been?” she said with a cordial dip of her chin.
“Fine as frog hair,” Haskell said, taking his stogie in his left hand to give the girl’s a squeeze with his right. “You?”
He looked into her eyes. She refused to meet his gaze or to offer the faintest acknowledgment of their previous relationship.
Bear wasn’t surprised. With her clothes off, the raven-haired, blue-eyed beauty was the most unprofessional professional Bear had ever known. He could still hear her love cries raking his eardrums, feel her snatch expanding and contracting wildly around his dick as she ground her heels into his back.
Now dressed in a pink silk blouse buttoned to her throat, a dark green traveling skirt, a wide black belt, and black boots, however, Raven was as prim and proper as the parson’s teetotaling spinster daughter.
“I’m well,” Raven said, coolly turning her attention to their employer and saying, “I’m sorry if I’m late. You do park a ways out here, Mr. Pinkerton.”
“A man in my position can’t be too careful, my dear Miss York,” Pinkerton said. “Bear, why don’t you give your chair to Miss York and pull another one up from the wall?”
Haskell grabbed the back of a second visitor’s chair and pulled it up beside the one that Raven was just then sinking her pretty ass into.
God, how he remembered that ass! Round and firm and pale as porcelain, covered with a thin sheen of sweat that grew hotter and hotter and began to dribble down the backs of her slender legs as Haskell had rammed her over and over again from behind.
He set the chair to the left of hers. She didn’t look at him but merely crossed her long, coltish legs and smoothed her skirt over her thigh, leaned forward, and clasped her hands around her knee. She was giving their boss her complete attention.
Well, good for her, Haskell thought, finding himself only slightly miffed by her curt dismissal of him. To be haughty and dismissive was just her way. Downright arrogant. But you’d think she could at least meet his gaze directly in an acknowledgment of sorts of all the down-and-dirty things they’d done to each other—and, despite her snooty attitude, were bound to do again.
Maybe she was reading his mind, knowing that he was remembering her sucking his cock with abandon or lying naked on her back in that bed in the hotel in Wendigo, her supple legs wrapped around his waist, bucking up against him as he’d fucked her.
He almost snickered as he sagged into the second visitor’s chair.
“Now, then,” Pinkerton said, picking up a small wooden pointer and turning to a tripod set up to the right of and slightly behind his chair. A framed map of Wyoming and Dakota Territory was displayed on the tripod. “Your next assignment will take you here,” he said, pointing to an area up along Wyoming’s border with Dakota, north of the Belle Fourche River. With the pointer, he drew an invisible line roughly the size of Haskell’s hand. “The Hatch and Shirley Stage Line that serves this desert country along the Wyoming and Dakota border has been having a miserable time of late with stage robbers. Since their strongbox shipments from a certain gold mine are insured by Wells Fargo, Wells Fargo is sending us up to remedy the problem.”
“Not more stage robbers,” Haskell groaned, still bruised and sore from his recent ride aboard the runaway.
“Indeed,” Pinkerton said. “The main reason I want you on this job, Bear, is that you were so effective with that bit of stage-line trouble up on the Western Slope.”
“Bit of trouble? Allan, I damn near—”
“Oh, quit complaining, Agent Haskell,” Pinkerton scolded him, chuckling. And then he glanced at Miss York and winked. “Especially not in front of the lady. We wouldn’t want Agent York to think she was working with a Nancy boy, now, would we?”
“Nancy boy?” Haskell chuffed.
Raven turned her head toward him, and he thought they were going to make eye contact at last. But before their glances could meet, she turned away from him with a faint, caustic sigh and gave those pretty cobalt-blues back to their boss. Her thick tresses hung down to hide the near side of her patrician face, with its long, pale, slender nose.
“How many stage robbers are we dealing with here, Mr. Pinkerton?” she asked. “I would think that this matter would concern the local lawmen and/or, perhaps, the U.S. Marshals?”
“It would. And it has. The trouble is, the local lawman, the town marshal of Spotted Horse, was shot dead when he led a posse out after the robbers, after they held up a stage between Spotted Horse and another, smaller town called Recluse. Both robberies happened in the Pumpkin Buttes, between those two towns. Two deputy United States Marshals were called in to investigate the killings and the robberies in that neck of the Wyoming desert, and they found nothing. While they were there, the robberies stopped. The gang of cutthroats preying on the line made not a single appearance. The Marshals didn’t find so much as a warm horse apple!”
Pinkerton sighed and scratched his age-spotted right temple with the wooden pointer. “So, unable to find any clue whatever to who the gang members were or where they were holed up, the Marshals returned to Denver with their proverbial tails between their legs. Since they left six weeks ago . . .”
“The gang has gone back to work,” Haskell finished for his boss.
“Th
ere you have it,” Pinkerton said, pointing the pointer at his agents, nodding his head like a proud schoolmaster. “And they’ve murdered another local lawman, a fill-in for the dead town marshal of Spotted Horse. At least, the man is presumed dead. After a recent robbery, he headed out alone into the buttes to see if he could uncover the culprits’ prints. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since.”
Haskell rolled his stogie from one side of his mouth to the other. “Boss, don’t tell me women are responsible for this depravity!”
Raven glanced at him coolly, blinked once slowly, and said, “You think women incapable of savagery, Agent Haskell?”
There was nothing satisfying in her gaze. Nothing, at any rate, that acknowledged their history. She was looking at him now as if he were a damn fool she’d gotten herself stuck on another assignment with.
Haskell said, “Oh, I’ll admit, women can be savage in their own ways. You know—servin’ supper late when they’re piss-burned at their husbands or givin’ one of their own down-the-road because she served the wrong cake at the last Bible meetin’. But killin’ lawmen, causin’ another to disappear? Pshaw!”
Well, he’d wanted eye contact with the girl. Now he was getting it in spades. Pinkerton was staring at him, too, uncertainly, shifting his stare toward Raven, who continued to stare at Bear as though he were something a mule had deposited on the visitor’s chair beside her.
Haskell felt himself wilt, and, remembering how she’d saved his life aboard a train by impaling his would-be executioner with one of her own monogrammed, razor-edged stilettos, he said, “Uh, present company excepted, of course.”
She stared at him flatly for another beat before dipping her chin slightly and saying tonelessly, “Thank you, Agent Haskell . . . I think.”
“Miss York,” Pinkerton said, moving up and down once on the balls of his half-boots, “I know this shouldn’t be necessary, but I do apologize for the uncouthness of the man beside you. He is purely a bull . . . er, I dare say a bear in a tea shop. But then, having been on one assignment with him already, I’m sure you’re well aware of that.”
“I am, indeed, Mr. Pinkerton,” she said in the same toneless voice as before.
“I implore you to tolerate him as best you can. You’ll no doubt have to do most of the thinking on this assignment. I just hope his brawn won’t become necessary, but in case it does”—he tossed his head at Haskell—“there you’ll have it.”
“I reckon you have to take the horns with the hide,” Raven said, fabricating an ironic Texas drawl to match Haskell’s own natural one.
Pinkerton and Raven shared a laugh at that. Haskell had never enjoyed laughter at his own expense, and, his ears warming, he didn’t like it much now, though he was smart enough to know he deserved every note of it.
“Yeah, well, you can stop talking about me like I ain’t here. And if we could, boss, I’d like to get back to the topic at hand so I can track down a steak and a big bottle of Sam Clay before headin’ up to that swelterin’ Pumpkin Butte country.”
Haskell glanced at Raven, scowling, and then returned his gaze to Pinkerton, who was still smiling on the lee side of his laughter. “So, as I was sayin’, it’s women who done that to them lawmen, women robbin’ all them stagecoaches?”
“Not only women but men as well,” Pinkerton said. “But it’s two women leading up the gang.”
“How many in the gang?” Haskell asked.
“Six including the two female leaders. They all wear bandanas over their faces during the robberies, so their identities are unknown. They hit a stage in that country, on various routes, about twice a month. They take whatever strongbox the coach is carrying, and they rob the passengers of any and all valuables.
“And as far as anyone can tell, they head up into either the Pumpkin Buttes or the Sage Brush Hills northwest of the buttes, although the Marshals scoured that country and couldn’t find much more than scrawny coyotes and a few abandoned ranches. Drought and low cattle prices have devastated that region.”
“Big country,” Bear said, shaking his head and staring through his cigar smoke at the map. “Damn big country. Not much grows there but cow plops and rocks, a tuft of sage here and there. Floury-white country with buttes, rimrocks, bluffs, and dry creeks. Not much water.”
“Certainly, there can’t be much wealth in the area.” Raven recrossed her legs. “Why do you suppose the gang is preying on a stage line serving such a remote and relatively poor region? Especially one going through hard economic times?”
“And bein’ so determined about it,” Haskell added. “Quittin’ when the federal Marshals roll in and then, when the Marshals leave, startin’ up again. Killin’ local badge toters . . .”
“That’s the big question you two are going to have to find an answer for. We’ve been hired to figure the whole mess out, run that gang down, and arrest them. If the gang keeps running wild up there, the Hatch and Shirley line will soon have no passengers, and no mine will trust them with hauling scrip and specie. And Wells Fargo will stop insuring them. You should have some help in that regard.”
Haskell frowned. “How’s that, boss?”
Pinkerton said, “The U.S. Marshals office in Denver has sent two more deputies up there to investigate. They’re up there now. My contact in the Marshals office claims that all three are crack trackers. But apparently, Wells Fargo is hedging its bets. They want us to go up there and try to figure out who the robbers are, why they’re robbing a relatively poor stage line, and where they’re holing up between robberies.”
He leveled a warning look at both Bear and Raven. “And to take the thieves down without getting yourselves killed.” He winced and clucked. “As you say, it’s big, empty country up there. Lots of places for a pair of detectives to disappear. So be careful, and don’t take any unnecessary chances.”
Haskell said, “Where do we start when we get up there, boss?”
“Check in with the new marshal and the man who runs the stage line, Duke Shirley. I understand there is no more Hatch, just Shirley. They’ll inform you of any new developments. You’d best have a powwow with those deputy marshals, too, if you run into them. They might have found something out, and hell, they might even be willing to share. You know how territorial those fellows can be.”
Pinkerton glanced at the clock on the wall above the fainting couch, carved in the shape of his native Scotland. “You’d best get a move on if you’re fixing to grab a bite to eat, Bear. I didn’t know if you’d make it here by now or not, but I had Miss Whitehurst check the schedule for the Cheyenne and Northern for today and tomorrow. The next flyer is heading north to Douglas in two hours. You’ll make it if you don’t dally. Pick up your ticket and expense vouchers from Miss Whitehurst on your way out.”
“Don’t worry about a thing, Mr. Pinkerton,” Raven said with her customarily crisp confidence, rising from her chair and tossing her hair behind her shoulders. “Agent Haskell and I will find out who those robbers are and run them to ground in short order. You can be sure of that.”
Smiling confidently, she extended her hand. Her employer squeezed it gently, gave a courtly dip of his chin, and said, “I don’t doubt it a bit. A safe journey to you both, and please fill me in from time to time via that wonderful invention known as the telegraph.”
“Will do, Allan.”
Bear rose and started to follow Raven to the door, but Pinkerton said, “Bear, hold on a minute. I’d like a private word.”
When Agent York had left the office and closed the door, Haskell said, “What is it, Allan?”
Pinkerton canted his head to one side and narrowed one eye suspiciously. “You and Miss York haven’t done anything, uh, against the rules, now, have you, Bear?”
The tips of Haskell’s ears burned. What in hell had put the head Pinkerton on the sex scent? A fella—and a gal—had to be mighty careful around a man with Allan Pinkerton’
s detective experience.
To cover his chagrin, Bear widened his eyes and dropped his jaw in feigned exasperation. “What do you take me for, boss?”
That didn’t seem to appease the older agent a bit. He continued to scrutinize the big man suspiciously as Bear, wagging his head as though his feelings had been irreparably hurt, turned, opened the door, and went out.
Raven was just then leaving. Miss Whitehurst caught him catching a brief glimpse of his partner’s round ass beneath her pleated wool skirt as she went out through the car’s rear door.
Bear blushed as he donned his hat.
Sitting at her desk, Miss Whitehurst shook her head and stared skeptically at him over the rims of her old-lady glasses. “Agent Haskell—”
“Oh, don’t you start!” Bear said, cutting her off.
She arched a light red brow and canted her head to one side. “It’s a long journey up to Spotted Horse in the Pumpkin Buttes,” she said in a lilting, faintly admonishing singsong voice, tapping a pencil on her desk. “One hundred and twenty-five miles to Douglas and then another hundred miles by horseback through some of the emptiest country on the western frontier.”
Haskell had already thought about that. It had tied his vocal cords in a knot, and he had to clear his throat of shame before croaking, “Meaning what, Abby?”
“Meaning”—she glanced at the door through which Raven had disappeared—“should I be jealous?”
Haskell chuckled as he hiked a hip on the corner of the secretary’s desk and leaned toward her. “Let’s say you are, though I assure you that you have no need to be. Me, I’m partial to redheads. Besides, that one’s snooty. How ’bout if when I return from them Pumpkin Buttes up yonder with another gang of stage robbers tied up in knots, I take you out to the Larimer Hotel in Denver for a nice porterhouse by candlelight, followed by . . . coffee and brandy, upstairs in one of them fine-appointed suites?”
“Hmmmm. I’ll have to think about that.”
“You do that.” Haskell poked his half-smoked stogie between his lips, rose from the secretary’s desk, and winked. “Me, I’ll be doin’ little else.”
Wild to the Bone Page 5
