by Tabor Evans
He stopped suddenly as he angled toward the street’s south side, frowning wonderingly. Why in hell was he thinking of a bath? That wasn’t usually a big concern for him. Even less of a concern was the length of his beard stubble.
Agent Delacroix?
Was he so plum taken with the girl that he was allowing himself to be led around by some semiconscious impulse to look good for her?
Nah.
He just had some time to kill, that’s all. And why smell yourself when you didn’t have to? Besides, he had a feeling it was going to be a long time before he’d see another bathhouse again…
The appropriately named Chinaman’s Bathhouse, owned by a Chinamen who dressed like a Mexican peasant but also wore the traditional coolie hat with a braided rawhide chin thong, sat about midway down the main drag. The house was constructed of vertical cottonwood planks and cream-colored canvas that snapped and flapped in the hot breeze.
Fronting the place was a fire over which several iron kettles were suspended. The Chinaman and a Chinese woman, similarly dressed, were tending the fire and boiling clothes as Longarm approached. There were two clotheslines strung lengthwise along the side of the tent shack, and a young Chinese boy was hanging wet wash from a handcart on one of the lines.
Longarm walked under the flapping front awning and asked if he could have a bath.
“Teef poo?” the Chinaman asked grinning and bowing.
Longarm scowled, puzzled. “Teef poo?”
“Si, si,” said the Chinamen, apparently getting his Spanish and English confused. He pointed at his own front teeth with a finger. “Teef poo?”
He nodded at a sign hanging beside the one announcing the price for a bath. The second sign offered TOOF PULL for a mere dime. Another little sideline that the Chinaman had going, apparently. For the convenience of the customer with a grievous tooth, there was a wicker chair situated in the shade beside the tent, opposite the side on which the wash was hung. Pliers and a bottle of whiskey sat on a tree stump beside the chair.
“No teef poo,” Longarm said, shaking his head and smiling tightly. “Just bath, please, amigo. Not too hot, not too cold.” It was too hot for a hot bath; he wanted the water just warm enough to cut through the trail dust.
The Chinamen extended an arm to the bathhouse, and Longarm ducked through a flap and into one of the place’s two rooms equipped with a stylish copper tub sitting on a slatted wooden floor. There was a long wooden bench and a row of pegs for hanging clothes on. The canvas was so old and thin in places that he could see through it to the outside street.
It was warm and musty in here, smelling like boiled burlap, and Longarm quickly shucked out of his clothes and tossed them by the front flap. A few minutes later he was soaking in lukewarm water, and the Chinese couple was washing his clothes outside, for an extra four bits. He figured that with the air being as dry and as hot as it was even this late in the day—around five—the duds would be ready to go by six.
That had no more to do with the girl than the bath did, he reminded himself. It just made good horse sense. Why clad a clean body in soiled duds?
With his own horse brush and an egg-shaped cake of lye soap, he scrubbed himself from scalp to toe, singing, “O, Susanna, o, don’t you cry for me! I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee!”
Finished soaping and scrubbing, he whistled for the Chinaman to come in and pour another bucket of lukewarm water over his head, to rinse off the soap. When he sat back in the tub, the Chinaman offered him a fresh cigar for a nickel. The price was a little steep given that Longarm could buy three for that much at a little drugstore just down from the Federal Building in Denver. But the Chinese family was in business to make money like everyone else, and it wasn’t a bad-quality cigar.
Grinning and bowing and speaking rapidly in his undecipherable tongue, the bathhouse proprietor cut the end off the cigar, stuck it between the lawman’s lips, and lit it with a long stove match, bowing like a waiter in a fancy restaurant. He stayed long enough to make sure that the cigar was to his customer’s liking, and then, giving one last, resolute head bob, he shuffled back out the tent flap to his fire.
Longarm sat back in the tub. While he’d been washing and getting rinsed off by the Chinaman, he’d heard voices outside—the Chinese woman’s and someone else’s. Now he saw through the threadbare stretch of canvas forming a wall between his tub room and the one to his left, someone moving around. He had to lean forward a bit in his tub to see through a particularly thin part of the canvas. Normally, not being the sort who peeked on other bathers, he’d keep his eyes to himself.
However, in the back of his male brain he was remembering that one of the voices he’d heard outside a minute ago had sounded vaguely feminine. He’d thought he’d heard a soft, familiar, female laugh. Now as he stared through the threadbare patch of canvas, he felt the cool tip of an unseen tongue rise up out of the floor of his tub and gently touch his ball sac.
He winced from the pleasant shock.
The silhouette he could see beyond the canvas wall was clad in a long duster, which she was just now removing, along with her hat, and hanging on a wall peg. The Chinese family’s fire was on Agent Delacroix’s side of the tent, and its light through the wall beyond her silhouetted her in alluring mystery, all the more so when she stood in profile to Longarm, threw her long hair back, drew her shoulders back, and thrust her breasts forward, stretching.
Longarm’s cheeks warmed with shame, staring through the tent like a devilish child watching through a parsonage window as the preacher’s pretty wife skinned out of her Sunday duds, but he couldn’t help himself.
His heartbeat quickened. His rod began to stiffen under the soapy water when Haven—what was she doing here; he’d thought she was going to bathe at the hotel?—raised her hands to her chest and began unbuttoning her shirt.
Longarm licked his lips. He was on the verge of clearing his throat and announcing himself. That’s what an honorable man would do. Instead, he found himself sucking his lower lip and watching intently as the girl peeled out of her shirt and then her camisole and bent forward to lay the garments over the bench on the room’s far side, beyond the tub.
She’d sat on the bench to remove her boots when the Chinese woman said something in badly broken English.
“Come in!” Haven called.
The Chinese woman entered, carrying two buckets by their handles. She filled the tub, prattled off some broken English mixed with Spanish, then shuffled back out the tent’s front flap and secured the flap behind her.
By the time she’d left, Haven, who’d been continuing to undress, was down to her panties.
Leaning toward Longarm, her full, firm breasts slanting away from her chest, and silhouetted by the amber firelight and fading sunlight behind her, she daintily slid the panties down her legs, stepped out of them, raising each long, slender leg in turn. She dropped the panties on the bench and then leaned far forward, her back to Longarm, to pick up her gun belt and holstered LeMats, which had slid off the bench and onto the floor.
Longarm sucked a sharp breath as he stared at what appeared a gopher looking out from between her legs, up high near her comely, round ass. His cock lifted its purple head above the surface of the soapy water between his legs, and nodded like an old man waking from a short nap.
He stifled a groan.
She turned toward him, and he sat back quickly, water splashing against the sides of his tub. His heartbeat quickened further. Had she seen him? He was in deep shit now if she found out he was over here.
He leaned forward, felt a slight wave of relief. Facing him, she was pinning her hair up on her head, chin lowered. He could have sworn she was looking right at him, but she must not have been or by now she’d have filled her fists with her LeMats. Her breasts were pulled up slightly, bulging back against her chest, spilling slightly over the sides, both nipples aimed right at him.
His mouth turned to dust as she stepped into the tub, sat down in the water and gent
ly splashed it over her shoulders and rubbed it into her breasts, caressing each orb in turn. His cock became fully erect as he watched her stand and soap herself—not quickly, just to get it over with, as he’d done…but slowly, enjoying the sensation of the soap and her soft brush on her fine, smooth skin.
He watched her breasts jostle as she turned this way and that, lifted each leg to wash it, and then reached behind to run her hand gently up between her butt cheeks. She closed one hand over her breast as she massaged the soap slowly, tenderly into the hair between her legs.
She groaned softly, sighed luxuriously.
Longarm drew a slow, deep, calming breath.
She sank back down in the tub and then called to the Chinese woman to come rinse her off. When the Chinese woman had come and gone, Longarm’s heart thudded. He saw Haven resting with her head back against the back of her tub, as though dozing. Knowing that he couldn’t leave here until his clothes were dry, and that she was bound to find out sooner or later that he was over here, he began splashing loudly and sing, “O, Susanna, o, don’t you cry—!”
Her loud gasp cut him off.
“Marshal Long?” she said.
Longarm feigned a surprised grunt. “Holy moly—is that you over there, Agent Delacroix?”
Chapter 14
Longarm did not risk looking through the thin stretch of canvas, but he could vaguely see Haven Delacroix’s murky silhouette as she sat in the tub with her arms crossed on her breasts, hands on her shoulders.
“Have you been over there all this time?” she demanded.
He chuckled. “I reckon I could ask the same of you. I just now woke up from a little nap. Like to doze in the tub, don’t ya know. What’re you doin’ over there? I thought you was going to take a bath at the hotel!”
“Can you see me?”
“Why, no. Can you see me?”
Pause. He could see that she was staring toward him but that was about all he could see.
“I can only see a vague shadow.”
“That’s about all I can see, too.”
“Thank God,” she said.
“Thank him for me, too, will ya?” Longarm chuckled. “No wonder what you’d do, if you saw me naked again. Why, you’d probably tear right through this here canvas wall, and—!”
“Oh, please hush, will you? God, what a tiresome man you are! I just want to take a long, quiet bath. I was going to have one at the hotel but they had no wood split for a fire and the hired boy apparently got bit by a rattlesnake two days ago. His leg is swollen up, and I quote, ‘thick as a cottonwood stump!’”
“Ouch!”
“You can say that again.”
“Well, okay—ouch!”
She sighed. In the corner of his eye, he saw her lean back in her tub and lower her hands from her breasts. He leaned back in his own tub and looked down. His cock stood up like a brake handle, angling up over his belly button. He felt like giving it a knock against the side of the tub, to discourage it, but there was no denying the male organ when a woman like Haven was within twenty feet.
And naked.
Agent Delacroix said, “Since we’re both here, and I intend to lock myself in my room for the night with a good book, let’s go over what we know about the case, shall we?”
Longarm tried again to suppress his desire for the girl, to think and act like a professional. Why in hell did he have to be cursed with such a beautiful partner? Especially one whose wares and talents he’d been treated to once, just enough to make him ache for more.
“Shoot,” he said with a sigh.
“You’re the one with the most experience—you tell me what you know so far.”
“Hell, that’s easy,” he said, rolling his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “I know that five lawmen ended up dead down here and that they might have been killed because they’d gotten close to a cache of gold that was stolen three years ago.”
“But we don’t really know why they were killed, correct?” she said.
Longarm nodded and rolled his cigar to the other corner of his mouth. “They could have been killed for any number of reasons. They might have run into cattle rustlers or border bandits who thought the lawmen were shadowin’ them. Or they might simply have been killed because of the badges pinned to their vests. I’ve had guns aimed my direction for no better reason than that one there.”
“Right, it’s actually quite silly to think the killings had anything to do with the gold, isn’t it?”
“Silly?” Longarm plucked the cigar from his mouth, and studied the coal that had gone out while he’d been ogling his partner. “Well, I wouldn’t call it silly. Damned unlikely, though. Truth be told, I got a feelin’ we’re never going to learn who killed them fellas. The killer’s trail is likely cold as a grave digger’s ass—uh, pardon my French.”
“I believe I’ve grown inured to your French, Marshal.”
He wanted to mention something about the French lessons she’d given to him back in Leadville, but congratulated himself for resisting the notion and keeping his mind on business. “If the gold’s still where Santana’s boys buried it, though, there might be a chance we’ll find it when we ride down there and scout around.”
“If it’s still there.”
“Check.”
“And if Big Frank’s information is reliable.”
“Check again.”
Haven asked, “Do you believe Three Wolves’s story about why he never went looking for the cache himself?”
“Yeah, I reckon I do. Not sure why, but I can usually tell when a man is lyin’. I didn’t see that look in Big Frank’s eyes when he was explainin’ his side of it. He does only have one arm, remember. And if he got anyone to help him, he’d have had to tell ’em where the gold was buried and risk a double cross in the form of a knife in his back. Big Frank’s seen enough trouble, just wanted to run his freight business in peace.”
“Until he discovered his woman’s dalliance…”
“Yeah, there’s that.”
“I feel sorry for Big Frank.” Haven’s voice was thin and wistful. “Being a one-armed half-breed cannot be an easy way to go through life.”
“Yeah, and one with a nasty temper.”
“There is that.”
Longarm drew on his cigar and was reminded that it had gone out. He climbed out of the tub and walked over to the bench where’d he’d placed the contents of his pockets. He found his box of lucifers, struck one to life on the bench, and touched the flame to the stogie as he stepped back into the tub.
There was a shrill gasp.
“You filthy dog!” the girl fairly shrieked.
Standing in the tub, Longarm turned to see her milky silhouette leaning far forward in her own bath, gazing toward him…through the thin patch of canvas.
“You were watching me, weren’t you?”
Longarm opened and closed his mouth, but the words were all tangled up in his tonsils.
“Sleeping, like hell!” she said, rising up out of her tub. “Well, here, take a good look, you depraved son of a bitch!”
She walked over to the thin patch in the canvas, to Longarm’s right, three feet away from him. She turned this way and that, catlike, bending each knee in turn, hefting her breasts in her hands, caressing them alluringly, glaring at him, curling her upper lip back with a feral, feline anger.
“Like what you see? Would you like to have your hands on these?” She dropped her eyes to his cock, which had dwindled during their business conversation but which was now beginning to swell again, lift its thick head once more from between his thighs.
“Does that make your big plow handle stand up and take notice? Oh, it does, doesn’t it!”
She paused for just a second as she stared down at his cock, and he thought he saw her hesitate. A slight shudder rippled through her. She snapped her angry, flashing eyes back to his through the sheer spot in the canvas.
“You’re a beast!” she railed once more, her voice thicker this time. Cov
ering her breasts with her elbows, she turned, stomped over to where her clothes hung from pegs, and began to dress.
Outside the tent, the Chinese couple was prattling away in their mixed tongue, obviously alarmed by the verbal skirmish that had erupted inside their place of business. “It’s all right,” Haven called angrily as she dressed, glaring at him through the thin patch in the canvas wall. “Don’t worry, good people—I’m very well armed and can take extremely good care of myself!”
Longarm bit down hard on his cigar and was about to stomp over to his bench and begin dressing, forgetting that his clothes were being laundered, his embarrassment about his current physical condition tempered somewhat by his knowing that Agent Delacroix was every bit as randy as he was.
Or at least nearly as randy. She was just too pigheaded to admit it. He’d have bet that her silky snatch was as hot as a freshly brewed pot of coffee at that moment.
Since there was nothing else on the bench save his hat, his saddlebags, and his Winchester, he grabbed the hat and clamped it down hard on his head, half-scowling and half-grinning over his shoulder at Haven, whose shadow he could see dressing against the fire on the other side of her.
Just then, the flap to his tub room opened, and the Chinese man entered, holding his clothes in a neatly folded pile in his hands. He was flushed and nervous, and his wife, who stood little higher than Longarm’s breastbone, entered behind him holding a double-barreled shotgun that must have weighed as much as she did.
She scowled at Longarm and prattled away angrily, but when her eyes dropped to his dong, which was at half-mast now, she fell silent.
The man shuffled over to the bench, bowing anxiously and not meeting Longarm’s gaze, and set the pile of clothes on the bench. He swung around quickly, like a chicken running from a dog, and started back to the flap, where his wife stood, holding the shotgun down in front of her and staring wide-eyed at Longarm’s manhood. Her husband prattled at her and turned her toward the door, and she shuffled out in front of him, turning her head to get one more look at the well-hung man behind her.
