He thought he’d hit the outlaws around midnight or shortly thereafter.
He hunkered lower and pulled his hat brim down to help keep the dirt from his eyes as he continued to hold his vigil, gazing toward the cabin. Several times throughout the day, one or two of the stage robbers at a time circled the house cautiously, cradling a carbine in their arms. Haskell was relatively sure that at least one man was outside now, keeping an eye on the yard’s perimeter, but he was no longer sure where.
The man hadn’t shown himself in more than an hour.
Suddenly, the wind switched direction slightly, blowing something out from behind a rock ahead and to the right of him. The object rolled and bounced along the ground and came to rest about four feet away.
Haskell stared at the object, trying to make it out in the moonless darkness, the wan lamplight in the windows beyond offering the only illumination. It appeared to be a hat.
Haskell looked at the cabin. Then he looked at the object on the ground before him. Curiosity got the better of him. He muttered a curse and then crabbed out and over the lip of the shelf he was on, grabbed the hat off the prickly pear it had gotten hung up on, and dragged it back behind the shelf.
He inspected it, immediately recognizing it.
Haskell’s heart hammered. He fingered the hat, blinked as he stared at it.
No, it couldn’t be. But sure enough, it was.
It was Raven York’s tan Stetson with the leather band trimmed with a single square ornament of hammered silver. He’d recognize it anywhere.
Hang-jawed, Haskell looked toward the cabin again. The shack, lit by a few dim lamps, suddenly took on a new, brighter significance.
How in the hell had she gotten out here?
Or . . . maybe they’d brought her.
However it was she’d come to be out here, Raven was out here. Her hat hadn’t blown here all the way from town.
Holding the hat in both hands, Haskell stared at the cabin, incredulous. She’d been out here all day. In the hands of those savages.
Haskell weighed the hat down with a rock and then rose and ran down the slope toward where the outlaws’ horse stood, staring in the direction of the ranch yard. Bear untied the reins from the cedar, saying, “You wanna join your pards, old son? All right. You got it.”
Quickly, he tied the reins around the horse’s saddle horn. And then he swatted the mount’s rump with his rifle stock and rasped against the wind, “Go on, then, join your pards! I’ll be along shortly!”
Upstairs in the Stoveville house, Raven lay spread-eagle on the bed in which Bear and Dulcy had cavorted hours before. She could still smell the man, and she wished like hell he were here with her now.
She was getting scared. She was beginning to wonder if he’d been wounded when Swede had fired on him. Was he lying out in the buttes somewhere, slowly dying?
Or maybe he already was dead.
That meant Raven wouldn’t be alive much longer, either. She’d overheard the outlaws’ plans last night and all day today as she lay up here on the bed, her breasts exposed, her wrists and ankles tied to the bed’s brass frame. She’d heard about their operation. At least, enough of it to be able to put all the parts together, to know exactly how they’d worked and who all was involved.
They’d been in town yesterday to find out from Verlaine Couchigan, the young woman Duke Shirley had been fucking in the woodshed, the exact time that the gold shipment was due to pull through the butte country tomorrow. Apparently, Miss Couchigan, also part of the gang, had left a note somewhere in the stage station.
There was no way in hell the gang was going to let Raven live. Not after she’d stopped being useful as a hostage.
Raven winced as she continued trying to loosen the spool of the headboard to which her left wrist had been tied. If she could work that hand loose, she could untie the other one. She wasn’t sure what she’d do once that had happened, but she had a stiletto sheathed in her right boot, which the outlaws hadn’t found. If she could arm herself with that stiletto, she might be able to disarm the next person who walked into the room.
Either Dulcy or Ana was checking on her every hour or so. Dulcy had given her a few spoonfuls of stew and a couple of shots of whiskey. The last time she’d visited the room, the pretty blonde had kissed Raven’s left breast before she’d left, chuckling, telling her she’d be requiring more of that later.
Raven gritted her teeth as she continued to work on the spool. She could hear it turning in its hole, and if she could only turn it just a little more while pulling down, she thought she could pull the spool right out of its socket.
She stopped, drew a breath. She was exhausting herself with the effort. She drew a few more deep breaths and then gritted her teeth again and began pulling down and turning the spool once more.
Dulcy’s voice sounded from the first story, where Raven could tell from the sounds that the others were playing poker at the kitchen table. Boots pounded slowly up the stairs. Raven looked up over her left shoulder at the spool in the flickering light of a single lamp on the nearby dresser. She thought she almost had it.
Dulcy’s boots continued pounding up the steps.
Raven grunted as she pulled at the spool.
Dulcy’s boots drummed along the hall. The door stood halfway open, so by now, Raven knew, Dulcy could see into the room. Raven cursed under her breath, stopped tugging on the spool, and relaxed her body.
Dulcy appeared in the doorway. She kicked the door wide open and leaned a shoulder against the frame. She had a pistol on her hip. She held up a bottle. “Another snort?” Her eyes were shiny. She was mildly drunk.
Raven glanced at the Schofield riding the holster on Dulcy’s round hip. She had an idea. “Yeah, I could use another snort,” she said.
Dulcy moved into the room. She smiled obliquely as she kicked the door closed. She sat on the edge of the bed, and as Raven lifted her head from the pillow that smelled like Haskell, Dulcy pressed the lip of the bottle to Raven’s mouth. Raven closed her lips over the mouth of the bottle, and Dulcy tipped it up.
The fiery liquor filled Raven’s mouth, ran down her throat, built a low fire in her belly.
“More?” Dulcy said.
Raven shook her head.
Dulcy stared down at her, let her gaze wander down to Raven’s torn blouse and chemise. “You like girls?”
Raven drew a deep breath, swallowed. “I’ve never tried girls.”
Dulcy arched a speculative brow as she continued to stare at Raven, her mouth corners raised a little. Finally, her mouth corners rose a little more, her eyes flashed deviously, and then she lowered her head to Raven’s chest. Her lips were warm and moist on Raven’s left nipple. Dulcy closed her hand around the other breast, squeezed it gently.
Raven looked down at the girl’s locks of gold-blond hair spilling across her chest. Through the locks, she could see the girl’s pink lips working Raven’s left nipple, her pale hand massaging the other breast. Her throat went dry. She’d thought she’d have to pretend to enjoy it, but she found the ministrations not as unpleasant as she’d expected.
In fact, Dulcy’s pliant lips making soft, wet crackling sounds as she suckled set up a warm heaviness in Raven’s belly.
Dulcy looked up, grinning. She pinched Raven’s left nipple between her fingers and said with playful accusing, “You like that.”
Raven swallowed, parted her lips as she stared down at Dulcy. The blonde went back to work, suckling, and then, apparently getting more of the same positive response as before, she lifted her head, grinned, took a pull from the bottle, and offered it again to Raven.
Raven shook her head. She had to keep her mind clear.
Dulcy chuckled and set the bottle on the floor, and then she went to work unbuttoning Raven’s denim trousers. Dulcy continued to grin lasciviously up at Raven from below her swollen breasts,
as she pulled Raven’s pants and underwear down her long legs to her ankles.
Dulcy lowered her head to Raven’s crotch. Raven heard herself groan softly when she felt the girl’s tongue slide inside her.
“Yeah, you like it,” Dulcy said. She flicked her tongue in and out of Raven’s snatch and then lapped her clitoris. “Huh?” she said. “Feel good?”
Raven had to admit that it did. But she had a job to do, and she had to stay alive to do it.
Back to the plan.
“It might be more fun if you untied me,” Raven said.
“More fun for who?” Dulcy said, then continued sliding her tongue in and out of Raven’s cunt.
As she did, Raven resumed pulling and twisting the spool above her head. She had to be careful and not use much force, or Dulcy would detect the tension in her straining muscles and get savvy about what she was up to. Raven found it hard to concentrate with the girl’s tongue lapping her and stabbing in and out of her.
She paused in her work when Dulcy, keeping her face in Raven’s snatch, reached up to massage Raven’s breasts as she fucked her with her tongue. Somehow the mental and physical strain of trying to work the spool loose coupled with Dulcy’s tongue and hands caused Raven’s blood to boil. Desire shot up from her pussy to spread like spokes throughout her body, causing every nerve ending to spark and sputter.
“Oh, Christ,” she heard herself say, pulling on the spool and spreading her thighs wider as Dulcy mashed her face up tighter against Raven’s cunt, continuing to slide her tongue in and out.
In and out . . .
The pressure built up inside Raven. She cursed and writhed, pulling on the spool. Just as she felt her dam break and her juices ooze down the walls of her snatch to coat the insides of her thighs, the spool broke loose of the bed frame. Dulcy pulled her face away from Raven’s snatch and stopped kneading her breasts as she looked up, frowning.
From downstairs, one of the men called, “Dulcy!”
Dulcy stared at Raven, suspicious. Raven used her head to block Dulcy’s view of her hand and the spool she’d broken loose. Apparently, Dulcy hadn’t seen it yet. Still frowning, she turned toward the door and yelled, “What?”
Albert shouted up the stairwell, “Swede’s horse just showed up at the barn!”
“Well, check it out!” Dulcy returned, irritated.
One of the other men yelled angrily, nervously, “Griggs is out there now. Why don’t you get your tongue out of that detective’s cunt and haul your ass down here!”
Ana chimed in with, “Get down here, Dulcy!”
Dulcy turned to Raven, narrowed one eye, and said, “What do you suppose that big ol’ Bear is up to?” Her eyes shifted focus. She raised her head slightly to look at the headboard. “And what the hell are you . . . ?”
“Sorry about this,” Raven said, grabbing the spool in her fist and sitting up as she swung it back behind her left shoulder.
She slung it forward, the spool connecting with Dulcy’s right temple just as the pretty blonde had opened her mouth to scream. Dulcy grunted and rolled off of Raven to lie beside her, flat on her back, body slack.
She was out like a blown lamp.
Raven scrambled to untie her other wrist.
Outside, a rifle cracked flatly beneath the moaning wind.
31
Haskell had sent the horse back to distract the outlaws. That was ten minutes ago. Now he strode quickly along the west side of the barn, heading toward the front. He held his Winchester ’66 up high across his chest, the hammer cocked.
The wind’s moaning and the ticking of the blown dust against the barn wall covered the sound of his footsteps. He hoped the barn’s shadow absorbed his own, so he couldn’t be seen from the house that sat straight across the yard from him.
He was breathing hard from his run from the limestone shelf. Sweat slithered down his back.
Near the barn’s front corner, he paused. He could hear voices, two men talking in hushed, anxious tones.
Bear continued to the barn’s front, edged a look around the corner.
The horse he’d appropriated now stood outside the corral, facing the other horses inside. The others had come up to greet the newcomer. Meanwhile, the two men he’d heard talking were now slowly walking away from each other, holding their rifles up high and defensively, turning their heads back and forth, scrutinizing the ranch yard.
The horse had spooked them. They knew Haskell was here. They just didn’t know where exactly.
Time to satisfy their curiosity.
One of the two killers was walking toward Haskell, whom the killer couldn’t see because of the barn’s shadow. The other man was walking in the opposite direction, his back to Haskell. They were about thirty yards apart and widening that gap with every step.
Haskell stepped out around the barn’s corner, aiming the Yellowboy straight out from his shoulder.
He snarled just loudly enough for the nearer man to hear him above the wind, “Hold it right there, you son of a bitch.”
The man jerked with a start, began swinging his own Winchester’s barrel around.
Haskell squeezed his Yellowboy’s trigger.
Crack!
The bullet punched through the man’s chest, just beneath his chin, and sent him staggering and triggering his own rifle skyward.
Crack!
Haskell ejected the spent cartridge casing, heard it clink on a rock behind him, and pumped a fresh one into the chamber. The other man was just now whipping around, his teeth showing white inside the silhouette of his hatted head.
Haskell figured his first shot had been fair warning for this hombre, so he didn’t wait for the man to turn full around before he shot him in the head, blowing off his hat and causing him to lower the barrel of his rifle and shoot himself in the foot a half second before he hit the ground without so much as a grunt.
Haskell pumped a fresh round into the Yellowboy’s chamber and dropped to a knee as guns flashed in the cabin windows. The flat barks reached his ears a wink later, one slug plunking into the front of the barn to his right, the other blowing up dust in front of him.
Haskell was about to return fire when a man yelled from the house, “Hey, Pinkerton, we got your purty partner in here! One shot in this direction, and we’re gonna drill a bullet through her head!”
Haskell sucked in a sharp breath through gritted teeth. He let the Winchester sag in his hands. He jerked it up again when more guns crashed inside the cabin. He threw himself forward and lay belly-down against the ground, expecting the bullets to come screeching around him.
But they didn’t come. The guns continued to pop inside the cabin.
A girl screamed shrilly.
Raven!
Bear scrambled to his feet and bounded out away from the barn, fairly hurling himself toward the house. He pumped his arms and legs, holding the Yellowboy across his chest with both hands, shouting, “You’re gonna die, you sons o’ bitches!”
He mounted the porch in a single stride, crossed it in half a stride, and threw his nearly two hundred and fifty pounds at the cabin door. He was surprised at how easily it came off its hinges. Suddenly, he was on the cabin floor, on top of the door, a wild screeching inside his ears.
His vision was blurry, and his head pounded.
Damn fool, he told himself. Damn near knocked yourself out.
He was mildly surprised not to hear any more gunfire. He rolled onto his back to look up and see Raven staring down at him, a smoking pistol in her hand. Her blouse was open. He could see most of her breasts.
He looked around. The cabin was filled with the haze of gunsmoke. One man lay to his left in a pool of fresh blood. To his right, the whore from the Spotted Horse Watering Trough—Ana?—knelt with her hands laced behind her head, looking both surprised and incredulous.
Another man, whom H
askell assumed to be dead since he had a bloody hole where his left eye should have been, lay sprawled across an overturned chair.
Bear looked up at his partner. She was staring down at him, wagging her head slowly and pursing her pretty pink lips.
“You sure like to make grand entrances, don’t you, Haskell?”
Bear winced as another lance of pain stabbed through his head. His ears warmed with embarrassment. Rising onto his elbows, he glanced at her chest once more and said, “Yeah, well, at least I don’t go walking around with my tits exposed.”
Raven smiled. “Yes, but your tits aren’t nearly as pretty as mine,” she said, and flashed him.
They were up early and on the trail at sunrise the next morning—Bear, Raven, and their two sullen prisoners, Dulcy and Ana. The two female outlaws rode behind the Pinkertons, their hands cuffed behind their backs. Dulcy had a nasty goose egg and a gash across her right temple. Bear had tied the reins of Dulcy’s mount to his own mount’s tail, the reins of Ana’s mount to Raven’s horse’s tail.
Bear rolled a Cleopatra Federal from one side of his mouth to the other as he shook his head in befuddlement. “I just don’t get it. I am truly baffled. Sometimes I think the world has gotten too complicated for the likes of this ol’ boy from the Big Bend.”
Raven, riding one of the outlaw horses to his right, glanced sidelong at him. “It wouldn’t be so baffling if you’d kept your pecker in your pants and actually done some detective work.”
“If I’d kept my pecker in my pants, Miss Fancy Britches, you’d likely be feeding the buzzards with ol’ Jeff Myers about now, while these two and their friends ran that gold shipment down and ruined poor ol’ Duke Shirley.”
“Poor ol’ Duke Shirley!” Ana scoffed, spitting to one side as though the man’s name were excrement she’d picked up on the breeze. “Shirley is a pendejo! A bastardo!”
“Oh?” Bear said, glancing over his shoulder at her. “I don’t think it was your stage line ol’ Shirley was robbin’, now, was it, ladies?”
Wild to the Bone Page 23
