The big lawman dismounted, tossed his reins over a hitch rack, and turned to Stumpy, who had stepped down from his own horse and was gazing at the Bare Naked Lady as though it was a giant turd fallen from some massive privy in the sky.
“Stump?”
“What?” said the oldster in a tone of deep dread, staring at the Bare Naked Lady’s batwings.
Haskell slid his Henry sixteen-shot repeater from his saddle boot. “Why don’t you have a smoke out here while I go inside and get the pleasantries out of the way?”
Stumpy jerked a surprised look at the big lawman. “You, uh ... you don’t think I’d better come in and, uh ... back your play, Bear? It’s five against one. Them’s steep odds even fer you.”
“True, true. But I think you’d be of more use out here, makin’ sure none of them hard-tails sneak out around me or skin out a window. I don’t want to lose one or two in the imminent foofaraw.” Haskell racked a cartridge into the Henry’s action, off-cocked the hammer, and rested the rifle on his right shoulder, his hand wrapped around the neck of the stock.
“Oh!” Stumpy said, nodding. “Yeah, I reckon you’re right. That’s probably what I should do, then. Okay, I’ll just stay out here and have me a smoke an’ watch the windows.”
Stumpy brushed a relieved grin from his bearded face with his fist and then watched as Bear adjusted his hat on his head as well as his two shell belts and the big, holstered, nickel-finished Schofield on his lean hips and climbed the porch’s three sun-blistered steps. From over the batwings came the low din of strident conversation as well as the snapping of pasteboards down on a table, and the clinking of coins.
Occasionally, Stumpy heard a bottle clink against a glass, refilling it.
Bear strode across the porch and shoved the batwings wide. He strode through the doors and Stumpy swallowed, wincing, as the saloon’s murky morning shadows consumed the big lawman, whose boots thudded loudly on the worn floorboards.
Bear’s boots fell silent.
The outlaws’ boisterous conversation fell silent, as well.
Stumpy winced again and put his back to a stout post supporting the porch’s ceiling, near his and Bear’s horses, and cast his dreadful gaze across the street. A man poked his head out a shop door on the street’s far side, pointed his face toward the Bare Naked Lady, and then pulled his head inside the shop and slammed the door closed.
The OPEN sign in the window right of the door was turned so that it read CLOSED as it rocked from side to side behind the dirty glass.
Stumpy steeled himself against the coming onslaught.
Silence issuing from inside the saloon weighed heavy on the old graybeard. It felt like an anvil on his brittle shoulders, bowing his back. His heart thudded heavily.
Stumpy jerked with a start as a man inside the saloon bellowed raucously. Then another man bellowed, as well, and there was the loud scrape of a chair being slid across floorboards, the din of coins clattering onto the floor.
A gun blasted.
In the close confines, it sounded like a high-powered Sharps rifle. The sudden thunder nearly caused Stumpy’s boots to leave the ground. Both horses lurched, as well, and pulled back on their reins. They and Stumpy lurched again as another blast followed the first one.
And then all hell broke loose, with a gun thundering like a violent mountain storm—BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG-BANG! BANG!
Men screamed and bellowed curses.
Boots hammered the floorboards. The hammering grew louder behind Stumpy. There rose a great screech of breaking glass.
Stumpy turned an anxious look over his left shoulder to see a man flying out a window to land in a shower of breaking glass and shredded window frame onto the porch floor, blood oozing from a hole in his chest as well as from glass shards embedded in his face and hands.
Inside the Bare Naked Lady, the thunder continued. And so did the cacophony of men’s screams and stomping boots and the hard thuds of bodies hitting the floor.
All at once, the gun thunder stopped.
Boots clomped heavily behind Stumpy again. The clomping grew louder. Stumpy cast an anxious look over his right shoulder as a man’s slack, unshaven face appeared over the batwings. The man blinked once, heavily, and then pushed through the batwings and staggered onto the porch.
He held a smoking pistol down low in his right hand.
Blood oozed from several bullet holes in his upper torso.
He took one more staggering step out across the porch, his lower jaw hanging slack. He triggered his pistol. Smoke and flames stabbed nearly straight down from the barrel. The bullet ripped through the top of his right boot. Blood oozed from the deep tear.
The man turned to Stumpy, his face taut with pain, his eyes wide and bright.
“Ow!” he cried. It was a plaintive wail directed at the oldster, as though he somehow expected Stumpy to relieve his misery.
His right hand opened. The gun dropped to the floor.
The outlaw’s eyes rolled back in their sockets. He fell forward to land face first on the three steps, doing nothing to break his fall. Dead, he tumbled into the street and lay still, dust and finely ground horseshit rising around him.
From inside the saloon came a girl’s voice pitched high with concern. Haskell’s deep, resonate voice followed.
The girl said, “Oh, Bear, I was so worried about you!”
“You were, were you?”
“I thought those curly wolves had done killed you, you big lug!”
Footsteps rose behind Stumpy. Bear’s big face, still roguishly handsome even with his swollen eyes and cut lips and busted nose appeared over the batwings. So did the face of a pretty whore. The whore had her arms around Haskell’s neck. Silver rings dangled from her ears.
As Haskell turned to the girl, he nudged open the batwings far enough for Stumpy to see that while the girl wore a pair of fancily stitched pantalets, that was pretty much all she wore.
Her bare white breasts were pressed up against Haskell’s chest.
“All clear in there, Bear?” Stumpy asked, his eyes riveted on the pretty doxie.
“All clear, Stumpy.”
“You ready to start back to Denver?”
Haskell chuckled as the girl nuzzled his neck and pressed her hand against his crotch.
Bear turned to Stumpy. “I’m feelin’ poorly, Stump. Over taxed. I think I’m gonna rest up here for a day or two, get started back to Denver by week’s end.”
“Oh, you are, are you?”
Haskell groaned against the pretty whore’s ministrations. To Stumpy, he said, “Why don’t you call the undertaker, have him bury these dead coyotes, then buy yourself a bottle? I’ll be down when I’m better rested.” He turned to the girl, groaned again, then turned back to Stumpy. “Better make it two bottles.”
Haskell winked. With one arm wrapped around the dove, he drifted back into the saloon’s murky shadows. Stumpy heard the thumps of Haskell’s boots as the big lawman and the whore climbed the steps to the saloon’s second story.
“Oh, to be that age again,” Stumpy said. “Lucky catamount!”
Chapter Four
Two weeks and some-odd days later-who was counting?—Bear Haskell took the sandstone steps fronting the Federal Building on Denver’s bustling Capitol Hill two at a time, tipping his hat to the pretty young female secretaries busily striding around him but taking the time to blush at the big, darkly handsome man’s penetrating, openly admiring gray-blue gaze.
Whistling, Haskell pushed through the heavy oak doors and strode up the building’s stately marble steps to the official-looking and –smelling second story corridor. At a door whose pebbled glass upper panel announced CHIEF MARSHAL HENRY DADE, WESTERN DISTRICT in high-handedly neat gold-leaf lettering, Haskell paused and slapped his hand to the breast of the black leather jacket he wore against the mile-high city’s early autumn chill.
He’d had a brief moment of panic, wondering if he’d forgotten the report of his last assignment in his suite at the
Larimer Hotel, where a succulent young schoolteacher named Evelyn Landusky was likely still sleeping, warm and naked, under the twisted sheets and quilts on his bed. Haskell and the young teacher had nearly destroyed his stout, four-poster bed the night before, making a lie out of the old saw about schoolmarms being as stiff as starched sheets.
There’d been nothing stiff about Miss Landusky, and Haskell still had the aches and pains to prove it. Not to mention tooth marks on his back!
Fortunately, Bear had remembered to snatch the report off his dresser. He could hear the crunch of the folded pages behind his jacket, where the scribblings resided in the breast pocket of his shirt along with a handful of his favored Indian Kid cigars. He’d scrawled the report in pencil on a lined yellow legal pad around campfires as he had made his way out of the mountains.
Bear had taken extra care with the report, trying to give as much detail as he could, for his boss, Chief Marshal Dade, was constantly barking at him for lack of detail as well as the accounting behind his expense reports. Haskell didn’t have much time for paperwork. He was afraid of few men, because he’d fought all kinds and lived to tell the tale, but put a pencil in his hand and he’d break out in a cold sweat.
However, he did not want to climb Henry’s hump today. Not after the extra time Bear had taken for his “recovery” in Henry’s Ford under the “care” of the buxom doxie, Miss Darla Day.
The chief marshal had been a wild old Texas Ranger in his hell-bringin’ days, and you didn’t want to hand a rawhider like Henry too much ammunition. If you made such a mistake, sure as snow in April in the Rockies, Henry would make you dance!
Blowing out a relieved breath at realizing he was armed with his five pages of detailed scrawl, Haskell opened the door and strode into the chief marshal’s outer office, where Henry’s secretary, Miss Lucy Kimble, daughter of state senator Luther Kimble, sat behind her desk doing paperwork.
“Good morning, Miss Kimble,” Bear said, tossing his bullet-crowned black hat with its braided horsehair thong onto the hat tree by the door. “I do declare what a sight for these sore old eyes you are this morning!”
The young woman looked up from her work with a tolerant sigh and feigned a smile. With her dark-brown hair pulled back into a tight old woman’s bun, with her round, steel-framed, old-lady spectacles hiked up onto her resolute nose, and not a lick of rouge anywhere on her face, her features were prairie plain. Still, Haskell was intrigued by the girl. He had a feeling she’d be a real looker if she chose a less severe style of attire. As it was, she always appeared like she was coming or going from a funeral.
Crisply and officiously, she droned, “Good morning, Marshal Haskell. The chief mar—”
“Oh, I know, ole Henry’s probably in his office, still wakin’ up, most likely, sluggin’ back his first cup of hot mud and smoking one of them stinky stogies of his. Let’s give him a minute before I rush in and disturb him, shall we?”
“I don’t think—”
“You and I get far too little time to talk, Miss Kimble.” Haskell hiked a hip onto the corner of the young woman’s desk. “How in the heck are you doing, anyway ... Lucy? Do you mind if I call you Lucy?”
Miss Kimble opened her mouth to speak but Haskell cut her off with, “You can call me Bear. Enough with this Marshal Haskell business. I am not a formal sorta feller.”
“Marshal Haskell, I would prefer—”
“See? There you go again, soundin’ so formal. Tell me, Miss Lucy, what do you usually do in your non-business hours?”
Haskell knew via the grapevine that she’d been seeing the son of another senator, with plans to be married somewhere down the road. But these high-society types often prolonged engagements to the point of indefiniteness. That left Miss Lucy, to Haskell’s mischievous way of thinking, wide open for a possible minor dalliance or two.
He knew he was being a bit of a rascal for thinking the way he was about the girl, who’d never shown any interest in him whatsoever—in fact, she’d always lifted her nose snootily whenever he entered the chief marshal’s outer office—yet, still, deep down he sensed a mutual attraction. And he’d like nothing more than to see how she’d look without her glasses on, lying warm and naked under his bedcovers.
Was the attraction he sensed in his head only, and not one bit in hers?
“What I do in my non-business hours, Marshal Haskell, is not one bit your business. Now, I must insist that you address me as Miss Kimble while I call you Marshal Haskell. We are professional associates and nothing more. I have heard more than a goodly portion of rumors about you and your penchant for trophy hunting.”
Studying the girl regarding him from over the tops of her glasses, Haskell felt a smile tug at his mouth corners. “So, you been askin’ around about me—have you, Miss Lucy?”
A flush rose in the girl’s smooth, pale cheeks. The blush even crept up into her ears. Was this the confirmation he’d been fishing for?
Miss Kimble sat up straight in her chair and narrowed her eyes behind her spectacles. “Marshal Haskell, I assure you I have not been asking—”
She stopped when the chief marshal’s office door opened and Henry Dade poked his gray head out, scowling, thick cigar smoke roiling around him. “Bear, is that you I’ve been hearing out here? Get your ass in my office—uh, pardon my French, Lucy,” he hurried to add with chagrin. Then, scowling at the big lawman once more, he said, “What in the hell is the holdup, anyway?”
Haskell reached inside his jacket and pulled out the folded sheets of legal paper. “I was just giving Miss Kimble my report, Chief. A full, detailed accounting of my last assignment—you know, bringin’ down those stagecoach robbers?” Grinning, he waved the pages in the air. “Five pages—imagine that! I was just makin’ sure Miss Kimble can read my chicken scratch.”
“They better be detailed!”
“How do you think I filled up five pages?”
Dade beckoned. “Stop boring my secretary to death and get in here!”
“Boring her?” Haskell exclaimed, phonily indignant. “She was the one doin’ all the yammerin’, just like always!”
As he strode toward Dade’s door, he cast the girl a wink. Again a flush rose in her cheeks, and she looked away quickly. Bear thought he saw her mouth quirk a slight grin just before he stepped into his boss’s office and closed the door.
Intriguing, that girl. Damned intriguing. Someday, he was gonna tear down her walls ... and a few other things.
He imagined her snuggling warm, naked, and well satisfied under his bedcovers ...
Inside Henry Dade’s office, Haskell waved the thick smoke away from his face with both hands, coughing. “Holy Jesus, Henry—when are you going to cut down on them stogies? Hell, I can hardly see you and you ain’t but six feet away!”
He peered through the heavy, roiling cigar smoke at his boss, who was just then making his way around behind his large desk, which filled up most of the small office, and slacked into his high-backed leather swivel chair. He leaned back in the chair and puffed the half-smoked stogie clenched in his beringed right hand. “If you can’t see me, how do you know I’m six feet away?”
The chief marshal gave a coyote grin and puffed more smoke into the cloudy room. If the clouds roiling around Bear’s head had been vapor clouds, it would have been pouring rain.
“There you go outsmarting me again, Chief,” Haskell said, sarcastically, kicking the hard wooden Windsor visitor’s chair away from his boss’s desk and easing into it. The chair was about as uncomfortable as one could find in a federal office building. There was a good reason for that. Chief Marshal Henry Dade didn’t like to bullshit overlong with anyone, so he saw no reason to make guests one bit comfortable.
“You leave my secretary alone,” Dade ordered.
“I was just—”
“I know what you were doing. That girl hails from Sherman Street, toniest neighborhood in Denver. Her father is a state senator. Some think he’s going to be the next governor.”
/> “Are you sayin’ she’s out of my depth?”
“That’s exactly what I’m sayin’. If you try to turn that girl into another notch on your gun butt, the senator will make you disappear. He’s known to do that on occasion. If he doesn’t, I will!”
Haskell had pulled the Schofield from its holster and was scrutinizing the grips. “Funny how I’m always being accused of notchin’ my pistol butt, but I don’t see nary a scratch anywhere on this hogleg!”
“Put that thing away before you shoot your pecker off. And tell me why in the hell it’s been two and a half weeks since your last assignment and this is the first I’ve seen of you. If memory serves, you’ve done already used up all your vacation time for the year ... ”
Haskell’s ears warm slightly. He’d known this was coming. He’d had plenty of time to prepare for his boss’s cross-examination on his way out of the mountains. “It’s all in my report, boss. What I didn’t write in my wire from Henry’s Ford is all in them five detailed pages. I was badly injured. Why, do you know what those rapscallions did to me?”
Obviously humoring his charge, Chief Marshal Dade blew a smoke ring into the cloudy air over his desk. “Pray tell.”
“They got the jump on me out back of the Bare Naked Lady. That’s the saloon/whorehouse I’d heard they’d been holin’ up in in Henry’s Ford. Apparently, they knew I was waitin’ for ’em. Maybe they were glassin’ me an’ Stumpy from a ridge above the town or somewhere like that. Anyway, like I said, they got the jump on me, beat holy hell out of me—I’m sayin’ they beat the shit out of both ends—and when my life was hangin’ by a mere thread—”
“A mere thread, eh?”
“A mere thread, Henry!”
The chief marshal frowned with concern. “I see, I see—go on.”
“When my life was hangin’ by a mere thread, they dragged me around to the back of the old furniture store there in town. The furniture maker was also Henry’s Ford’s undertaker, and there was some old coffins layin’ around. Well, they plopped my near-lifeless body in one o’ them coffins, nailed the lid down tight, pissed on me, and threw me in the Arkansas River!”
The Jackals of Sundown (A Bear Haskell Western Book 2) Page 3
