by Tabor Evans
“Understand?” she demanded, splaying her hands across her ears and staring up at him, one of her eyes crossing beautifully. Her nipples were pebbling again.
“Lady, you’re every man’s dream.”
He smiled and then lowered his head and kissed each nipple in turn, sucking as he kissed her until she rolled her head back against the couch and was groaning, arching her back, lifting her breasts toward his mouth, running her hands through his hair.
He lowered his head and ran his tongue down her fine, flat belly, swirled it around inside her belly button. Now she started convulsing, giving little spasming jerks and shivers.
“Oh, Christ, you’re a devil!”
He continued to nibble and lick while gently kneading her proud breasts with his hands.
When his cock was fully engorged once more, he stood and reached for her.
“Oh, God, wait!” she said, and flung herself toward him on her knees. She grabbed his member in both her hands. “Oh, my God. You’re a monster. A big, brawny monster with a cock like a plow handle.”
Gazing at the organ of topic, she whispered, “You can really torment a woman with this thing, can’t you? Make her think about you and want you even when you’re no longer here.”
She seemed to be talking to herself, so he kept his own mouth shut and let her run her tongue and fingers down the length of him. She sucked the head of his cock until he’d rocked back on his heels and groaned. Then she pulled her mouth off him and lowered her head to suck his balls while she continued to hold him in both hands, gently squeezing.
“Christ!” he said, when she’d brought him to the boiling point.
Almost savagely, he reached down and picked her up in his arms. She gave a half-startled, half-thrilled little gasp. He strode over to the bed, tossed her on top of it, and swung her legs around brusquely, positioning her for accepting him.
“Oh, you cur!” she cried, eyes flashing in delight.
He spread her legs with his arms and mounted her.
He stared down into those incredible hazel eyes that returned his lusty, smoky, erotic gaze. “Fuck me, you dirty dog!” she said, smiling devilishly, causing her eyes to cross, wrapping her arms and legs around him and giving a throaty laugh. “Fuck me like the rabid cur you are!”
He drew a breath, shoved his cock into her, listened to her groan and yip softly, gently chewing on his shoulder and grinding her heels into his ass, and fucked her long and hard.
When he pulled out of her finally, a half hour later, he thought she was dead. She lay splayed out beneath him like a corpse.
Only, her lovely mouth was spread with a satisfied, half-delirious grin.
She drew a deep breath, causing her breasts to rise, the gold cross wedged sideways between them, and clung to him when he started to draw away from her. She lifted her head and kissed him passionately. She kissed his nose, nibbled it.
Keeping her fingers locked together behind his neck, she said, “Of any of them, I’d like to know who you are.”
He started to open his mouth to speak, but she pressed a finger to his mustache-mantled lips.
“No. There’s no point. No names. Sexier, this way. More mysterious. We’re just a couple of animals who met one night to fuck like dogs in the Grand Hotel in Leadville. Nothing more, nothing less. If we ever meet again, we’ll each walk on past, just two dirty dogs passing in the street. Understand?”
He smiled down at her. Yep, married.
“You’re the boss, lady.”
He kissed her again, swept his eyes over her again from her beautiful head to her long, delicate feet, marveling at her sumptuous, impeccable beauty.
And then he rose from the bed, took a whore’s bath at her washstand while she watched him quietly, lying sideways and naked on the bed, head propped on the heel of her hand. Watching him, she slid a hand around on one of her breasts and slowly caressed one foot with the other.
Like a cat in a window.
He reached for a towel with which to dry himself and paused. Something on her dresser had caught his eye. Beneath a newspaper and an overturned book lay a small, gold-washed, ivory-gripped derringer. A popper very much like the one he carried in his own vest pocket.
He dried himself with the towel, pretending he hadn’t seen the gun. A woman with her beauty and sexual precociousness likely couldn’t be too careful. She probably never really knew whom she was inviting into her room.
Longarm dressed, donned his hat, tipped it at its usual rakish, cavalry-style angle over his left eye, and turned to her. She continued to lay there, naked and beautiful and catlike, her smoky eyes seeming to take in every inch of him.
“Been fun,” he said.
She smiled, flung her hair back from her face, then rested her head on her hand again and rubbed her feet together luxuriously. “I’ll be walking bull-legged for a week,” she said in her sexy, raspy voice.
He walked over to her, bent down, placed one hand on her ass, and kissed her. She returned the kiss, and when he pulled away, she leaned toward him, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her nose, wanting more.
He grinned down at her, winked. Her pretty face acquired a look of frustration, and then he pinched his hat brim to her, strode across the carpeted floor to the door, glanced back once more at her still lying there gazing at him with her lips slightly parted, and went out.
In the hall, he pulled the door closed behind him, sighed, and shook his head.
He felt the peace that comes after having his manly desires so thoroughly sated. After tonight, he likely wouldn’t need a woman again for a week at the most. Wincing, he adjusted his crotch. Another like her inside of a month would likely cripple him for life.
Chuckling quietly, he dug a cheroot out of his shirt pocket and headed for the stairs. He needed some air and a fresh smoke. Then he’d head to bed and no doubt enjoy the best sleep of his life.
Chapter 7
Two days later and right on schedule, Longarm climbed the stone steps of Denver’s Federal Building at eight A.M., nodding at his male acquaintances and pinching his hat brim to the office girls.
He climbed the stairs to the cavernous second floor and said howdy-do to a couple of attorneys he’d come to know over the years and who were going over some papers together on a wooden bench outside a federal courtroom. He followed his well-practiced route to the end of the hall that smelled of varnish and cigar smoke as well as the coal used to heat the sprawling building, and pulled open the stout wooden door whose frosted glass panel bore the name of his boss, Chief Marshal William H. Vail, First District Court of Colorado, and went in.
“How’s it hangin’, Henry?” he asked the prissy gent playing typewriter on the desk to his left, while he tossed his freshly steamed and brushed hat on the tree to his right.
Without looking up but continuing to pound the odd-looking contraption’s keys with his long, slim, white fingers, Billy Vail’s secretary said, “The chief marshal is expecting you, Marshal Long. Am I imagining things or are you on time for a change?”
Longarm stared down at Henry’s dancing fingers, amazed as always that each finger seemed to know where each of the two dozen or so keys on the contraption was, and they never seemed to get entangled or miss a beat. And how did each key know where it was supposed to go on the travel voucher Henry was typing on? The world was changing mighty fast, Longarm thought, and he’d better figure out such things or get lost in the dust!
When the secretary’s words finally made their way through his silent musings on the nature of progress and the fast fading of the old frontier, the big lawman glanced at the clock on the wall behind Henry, saw that the hour hand was on the eight and that the minute hand was pointing straight up at twelve.
“Well, look at that,” Longarm said, as amazed as Henry was, planting one fist on a hip. “Henry, you’d better write this down in your work log. Custis Long was on time for a change. Put it on the page where you write down such things as why certain lawmen deserve a raise.”
He muttered grumpily and raked a thumb along the line of his freshly shaven jaw. “’Cause such tedious little insignificant happenings as his savin’ a whole trainload of train passengers from being slaughtered by the Rio Hayes Gang or ending up at the bottom of Horse Thief Gorge don’t seem worthy!”
He said that last loudly enough to catch Henry’s attention. The young, dapper little gent’s long fingers rose all at once from the keys, hovering over them, as the pale, bespectacled face lifted toward Longarm. Henry furled his slender, light brown brows over his pale blue eyes. “What’s that, Marshal Long?”
Longarm smiled at having finally captured the seemingly always distracted little fellow’s attention. “Did you hear about my most recent exploits?”
“Exploits?”
“Yeah, you know—about me takin’ down the Arkansas River Gang. All by my damn lonesome. And then I noticed that train we was on was headed on the downhill side of Horse Thief Pass without brakes, and…”
He let his voice trail off. Henry stared up at him over the tops of his round spectacles, with the expression of a man who hadn’t understood a word Longarm had said, as though the lawman had been speaking Sanskrit!
Longarm leaned forward, planting both hands on Henry’s desk and lowering his voice for emphasis. “You just wait till you read my next report. Got Marcella over at the Black Cat scribblin’ it all down for me even as I speak. When you read that, Mr. Henry, you’re gonna be seein’ old Custis Long in a little different ligh—”
The door flanking Henry’s neat desk on the right opened suddenly, and Chief Marshal Billy Vail poked his round head out the door. It was ensconced in a roiling cloud of cigar smoke. “Get your ass in here, Longarm. You’re late again, as usual!”
Billy pulled his head back inside his office and swung his door wide as he retreated to his desk. Longarm looked at the clock. The minute hand was now at a minute past the twelve.
“Goddamnit, Henry,” he said, “now you went and made me late!”
As Longarm moved to the door, he heard the prissy secretary give a snort before the typing machine resumed its raucous clattering. Longarm stepped into Vail’s office and closed the door behind him.
“I was just tellin’ Henry about what a great job I did over the past few days. Wait till you see my report, Chief, you’re gonna—”
“Yeah, well, Henry would appreciate it if you’d tell whatever doxie you have writing up your reports these days to go a little easier on the smelly water.” Billy brushed a pudgy fist across his doughy nose. “Irritates the soft tissues in his nose.”
Longarm scowled indignantly.
“Have a seat and see if you can shut your pie hole long enough to roll your eyeballs over this file,” Billy Vail said as he sort of floated through the smoke cloud hovering over and around his giant desk, the surface of which Longarm doubted the chief marshal had seen since he’d first been promoted to his esteemed echelon of public service.
He plucked a manila file folder off one of the several stacks surrounding many small piles of papers hiding his blotter and slid it toward Longarm’s side of his desk. “We’ll be waitin’ on your partner, due to arrive in ten minutes.”
Longarm jerked the red Moroccan leather guest chair out of its corner near the door and angled it in front of his boss’s desk. “Partner?”
“Detective from the Pinkerton agency.”
“Ah, hell, Billy,” Longarm said, sagging into the chair with a sour look. “You know I always work alone. And them Pinkertons are pains in the ass! They think they’re real lawmen and all they do is get in the galldarned way!”
“Don’t start pissin’ in the Pinkerton well again, Custis. You know as well as I do that the James Gang would still be runnin’ wild up and down the Midwest if it wasn’t for Allan Pinkerton. It’s an old and illustrious company.”
“Maybe so, but their agents of late are either old men or snot-nosed shavers who haven’t yet taken a piss standing up but think they know everything there is to know about bringin’ owlhoots to bay. Uppity sons o’ bitches. No, sir, Billy, you know I work best when I work alone.”
“You’re not workin’ alone on this one. And that’s an order. The Pinkertons think they have a stake in what happened to them lawmen down in Arizona, and they’ve sent an agent.”
Billy leaned forward to read a name scribbled on a coffee-stained, ash-speckled notepad. “A…uh…Mr. Harvey Delacroix. That’s with an ‘o-i-x’ at the end, and if I remember what little I ever knew about French, I believe it’s pronounced ‘oy.’”
The pudgy chief marshal, once a tough-nut lawbringer himself, sagged back in his chair and brushed cigar ashes from the bulbous paunch threatening to bust the buttons on the wash-worn white dress shirt he wore under a ratty brown wool vest. “As in ‘Oy, oy, oy, Custis, you’re gonna be partnerin’ up with this Pinkerton agent whether you like it or not!’”
Billy guffawed, delighted with himself. He stuck the stub of the fat stogie between his lips, blew more smoke into the already smoggy air over his desk, and laughed some more.
Longarm sighed in disgust. Sometimes, despite his knowing that Vail prized him above all the other deputies in his deputy U.S. marshal stable, he couldn’t help thinking that Billy kept him around just to torture him. He certainly gave him the toughest assignments, and on this one the chief marshal was not only partnering him up with a wet-behind-the-ears Pinkerton agent who no doubt thought himself as skilled or better than Allan Pinkerton himself, but he was sending him to Arizona right smack-dab in the heat of summer.
And the summers in Arizona were second on the heat scale only to Hell itself.
“All right, enough of that,” Billy said with a final snort, sitting up straighter in his chair and brushing his fist across his nose. “This is serious business. Five lawmen dead, fer chriss-fuckin’-sakes!”
“So I heard,” Longarm said, glancing at the file he hadn’t yet plucked off the chief marshal’s desk. “Why don’t you give me the lowdown on it, Billy. You know I don’t read so well until after lunch. I’ll peruse the whole thing on the train ride down to Las Cruces. Who was killed and where?”
“I didn’t recognize the names of any of the dead,” Billy said. “They’re in the file. They were killed outside a little town along Defiance Wash. Town’s called Holy Defiance on account of a stand the locals including a Catholic priest made several years ago against a bronco band of Coyotero Apaches. Not much there now. Some old desert rat and his daughter. Anyway, the lawmen had banded together to go looking for a cache of gold that was stolen off a stagecoach three years ago but was never recovered.
“Everyone thought the gold was lost for good after a passel of border toughs robbed it and the toughs themselves were attacked by a small band of Apaches who’d jumped the reservation. Apparently, the bandits buried the loot when they’d forted themselves up in a nest of rocks in the Black Puma Mountains and then lit out under cover of darkness. They intended to return for it later, but they were all gunned down by a rival gang in Nogales a few weeks later.
“That there is all I know,” Billy said. “There’s a little more in the file there—names and dates and whatnot, the name of the ranch that the money’s supposedly buried on. Some highfalutin rancher down there named Azrael, if I remember. Whip Azrael.”
“How’s this Pinkerton territory, Billy?”
“The Pinkertons had insured the gold shipment. It was headed for the bank in Tucson. Two Pinkerton guards were killed as well as two guards the bank especially hired—two fairly well-known gunmen at the time named Roy Dupree and ‘Cougar’ Charlie McCallum.”
Billy puffed his cigar, staring pensively down at his desk. “Them two names I do remember, ’cause when I was ridin’ for the Texas Rangers back in them days, them two were a couple of the most wanted curly wolves in all of Texas and half of Louisiana. Cold-blooded killers, both. Cougar Charlie cut down a good partner of mine back in Alpine, just north of the Chisos Mountains, after we’d run ’im down after a saloon robbery
. Walked up to my partner, H. C. Boyle, in an alley and blew him in half with a double-barreled shotgun from point-blank range.”
“Cougar Charlie and the other gunman…?”
“Dupree.”
“They’re both dead?”
“Killed during the robbery.”
Longarm was thinking over what he’d heard. In the meantime, he’d plucked a cheroot from his shirt pocket and bit the end off. Now he struck a match on the edge of Billy’s desk, touched the flame to the stogie, and said between smoke puffs, “How did the Arizona Rangers and the two U.S. marshals get wind of all this and start thinkin’ they had a handle on where the gold was buried?”
“I’m told that one of the rangers heard from a man named Three Wolves a few weeks ago. Three Wolves apparently had known a couple of the killers, including the leader of the gang that robbed the stage—Rafael Santana. Three Wolves and Santana played poker together one night in Nogales, the night before Santana and his bunch were killed.
“Three Wolves claimed that when Santana was about to lose his shirt to Three Wolves, Santana told him he knew where some gold was buried. When Three Wolves pressed the matter, Santana gave him some details about where exactly Santana’s bunch had buried the gold. Three Wolves kept what Santana had told him under his hat, only half believing it was true, I reckon. But he never did go looking for the gold himself. Don’t ask me why. Maybe you’ll find out when you get down there.
“In the meantime, Three Wolves ran his own freighting service until about six weeks ago when he ran afoul of the rangers. Killed a man in a jealous rage, it seems. The rangers tracked him down and arrested him. Three Wolves exchanged the information about where the loot was buried for a promise of a possibly lighter sentence, and three rangers and two deputy marshals out of Prescott ended up deader’n last year’s Christmas goose for their trouble.”
Longarm scowled dubiously as he exhaled smoke through his nostrils. “Where’s this Three Wolves feller now?”
