by Tabor Evans
A lamp burned on the nightstand and the bed had been turned back, but it was obvious it had not been slept in.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine, but you look a mess,” Beth said. “Would you like to come in?”
“No need for that. I just wanted t’ look in on you before I turn in.”
“Let me rephrase that, Marshal. Would you please come in?”
His eyebrow went up in inquiry. “Something wrong?”
Beth hesitated, then said, “Yes. Please come in.”
“Sure.” He removed his hat and entered her room. There was a trunk at the foot of the bed. She must have been sitting there in order to leave the bed so undisturbed. “What’s wrong, Miz Bacon?”
“Nothing.” Tears began to flow from her eyes. “I miss him, Marshal.”
“O’ course you do. I reckon you always will. But you need t’ go on anyway.”
“Yes. Of course.” She fabricated a smile that she obviously did not feel. “Please. Sit down. Uh, there, I suppose.” She pointed toward the bed.
Longarm perched on the edge of the cot and held his hat in his lap.
“Did you see Washakie?”
“Yeah, that’s where I just been.”
“And did you learn anything?”
He shook his head. “Not a damn thing. The chief swears he hasn’t heard anything about your husband. Mathers says I should believe him, that what Washakie doesn’t hear his own self, one of his spies does. Mathers says there isn’t a thing goes on anywhere on this reservation that he doesn’t hear about. Mathers says he would swear your husband wasn’t killed by any Indian. An’ for other reasons, I feel the same.”
He did not want to get into a discussion about skulls and bullet holes and what that gunshot likely meant about Hank Bacon’s last moments. Beth was having a hard enough time without that.
“Then the killer will get away with it?” she said.
“I hope not, but I ain’t gonna tell you anything for certain sure. All I can do is poke around an’ see what comes my way. In the meantime, I’ve hired a wagon an’ a couple young Indians. We’ll drive out tomorrow to where Hank camped an’, uh, collect his remains. We’ll be back day after tomorrow. In the meantime they’re building a stout coffin that you can take with you back home.”
“You’ve been wonderful to me, Custis. Thank you.”
He could not remember for sure but thought that might have been the first time Beth called him by his first name. He considered that to be something of a victory.
Beth came and sat beside him on the bed. Close beside him.
She reached over and placed her hand on top of his crotch. Longarm’s reaction was immediate. And vigorous.
It had been too damn long since he’d had a woman, any woman, and this woman’s presence had been teasing him for days.
Now he amazed himself by saying, “You’re alone an’ widowed an’ scared. It ain’t me you want but a substitute for him. So I reckon it wouldn’t be a real good idea.”
Longarm took her hand and moved it away from his dick. He leaned close and gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek, then stood.
“Excuse me, Beth. I’m dead tired an’ want t’ go to bed. But I think it’d be better for me t’ do that alone tonight. When I get back with your husband’s body, if you still think it’s a good idea, well, we’ll talk about it then.”
He put his hat back on and headed for his own room.
Chapter 52
Come morning, Longarm was surprised to find Beth standing outside his room along with a young Indian, a teenager perhaps.
He tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes and almost managed it.
“Good morning,” Beth said, sounding as cheerful as she had been since he’d first laid eyes on her. “I brought you some squaw bread and some slices of meat. I don’t know what kind it is, but it’s meat.”
“Thank you. Uh, where . . .”
“I thought about it last night. I’m going with you. This is the last trip Hank will ever take, and I want to be with him,” she said.
“I s’pose you should have that right,” Longarm agreed. “You already know what it’s like up there. If you’ve thought it over, then fine. What about you?” he asked, looking at the young Shoshone.
The boy just grinned, did not say a word.
“The wagon is already hitched and out front. There is another Indian boy out there, too. Did you ask them to help?”
“Yeah, I did. Figured I could use it.”
“All right then. They can go on ahead. I intend to have some breakfast before we leave.”
Longarm dispatched the young men with the wagon, giving them a general idea of where they should go. Once the wagon was on the way, he and Beth walked over to the sutler’s to buy some boiled eggs and pickled sausages for their breakfast. After that they saddled Beth’s horse and Longarm’s mule and started off after the slower-moving wagon.
The boys chattered away like a pair of magpies but in their own tongue. Longarm could not understand a word they said. Not only did he understand no more than a handful of words, but they were speaking much too rapidly for him to follow even if he had had more of their language. Both seemed content, however.
Even Beth seemed in a better humor this morning.
The difference, Longarm thought, was that now she was busy. She was actively doing something toward getting Hank’s body home.
They stopped to noon beside a tiny rill, ate a cold lunch, and got back on the way.
They reached Bacon’s campsite late in the afternoon.
The boys seemed to have no aversion to touching Bacon’s decaying remains. They piled everything they could find—body parts, bones, boots, and skull—into the dead man’s sleeping bag and buttoned it closed.
Beth oversaw the operation but said little. When the boys were done and the body loaded into the light wagon, Longarm built a fire and they all settled down for the night.
Chapter 53
He was only half asleep when he heard the distinctive crack of a bullet flying past and the whine of a ricochet. The bullet struck, as closely as he could tell, somewhere not far to his right, which meant the shooter—he heard the rifle shot several seconds behind the bullet strike—was on the rise to his left.
Another damn gunman was after them. The rise was not a bad choice if a little too distant for this shooter’s abilities. Apparently this new son of a bitch was like the one he’d already killed—someone who toyed with his victims and wanted to watch them sweat before they died.
“Down!” Longarm shouted, taking his own good advice and rolling off his bedroll and away from the ring of light cast by the fire. “Get away from the fire.”
On the far side of the fire he could see that the Indian boys needed no urging. They’d already disappeared into the night.
Beth looked out from her bedroll and rose up on one elbow. She seemed sleepy and confused. “What—”
She barely had time to get the word out before Longarm threw himself on top of her and rolled away, taking her with him.
“Ouch, dammit.”
“You ain’t s’posed to cuss,” Longarm said. “You’re a lady.”
“But what—”
“It’s another asshole with a rifle,” Longarm said.
He could feel Beth’s heart thudding softly against his chest where he lay pressed tight against her. And he quickly got a hard-on that he was certain she could feel through the denim trousers she was wearing.
If she made that offer to him again . . .
But she would not. He was fairly sure of it. Dammit.
Longarm had his .45 in hand but nothing to shoot at. The rifleman was somewhere on the rise to their left, but it was a good hundred and fifty yards away and there was no way he could accurately shoot anything at that range.
�
��What is it?” Beth whispered.
“I don’t reckon we got t’ whisper,” he said. “Guy has to be a hundred yards off or more. Not all that good a shot either. He needs t’ be close in order to do any damage, and sweetie, I’m not gonna let him come in close. Can you lay still, I mean doin’ nothing but breathing, while I take a look-see?”
“Is this just a ruse so you can feel my breast?” Beth asked.
“What? Oh. Sorry. I wasn’t paying no mind to where that hand was.” He chuckled. “Wish I’d noticed earlier so’s I could’ve enjoyed it more.”
He removed the offending hand and scuttled away from her.
“Stay here. Keep to the dark. I won’t be long, but it will feel a lot longer than it actually is. All right?”
“Yes. All right.”
Longarm holstered his .45—he would not be needing it until or unless he could get close to the rifleman—and moved silently away into the night.
Chapter 54
Longarm put on a textbook-perfect stalk on the rise where the shot had been fired. The only problem . . . there was no one there. When he finally reached the spot he was silently stalking, he stood alone in the chill night air.
“Son of a bitch!” he mumbled, thumb hooked into his belt only inches away from the grips of his Colt revolver.
He removed his hat and wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead then brushed off the knees of his corduroy trousers, gritty from the low profile he had kept while stalking what he thought was an ambusher.
Again, though, whoever the bastard was and whatever reason he had for trying to shoot one or both of them, he was gone now. Oh, Longarm would come back up onto the hillock in the morning and look to see if there was anything that might help him to identify the shooter. There would be nothing. He knew that. He would make the effort anyway, just in case the cocksucker slipped up and left something behind.
Cocksucker. Funny thing about that word, Longarm thought as he hiked back down to the camp, where Beth was waiting.
To call a man a cocksucker was a deadly insult that could result in the death of one or both of the parties involved.
Yet a female cocksucker was a being to be cherished and appreciated.
When he reached the glowing embers that had been their fire, Beth was waiting for him.
“Did the boys come back?” he asked.
“Briefly. But as soon as they could, they jumped on their mules and rode away. I don’t think we’ll see them again unless we look them up when we get back to the agency. We, uh, we will get back to the agency, won’t we?” Beth asked.
Longarm smiled reassuringly and put a hand on her shoulder. “Yeah, we’ll live t’ get back to the agency.”
“But what about the wagon and . . . and Hank?”
“The remains are loaded on the wagon already. Come morning, we’ll put my mule an’ your horse into harness, and we’ll drive back the same way we came up here. Before we leave, you can pick through the camp and see if there’s anything else you want t’ take with you. Like for a, I don’t know, a keepsake,” Longarm said.
“What if the man with the gun tries again to shoot us?” she asked.
“Then I’ll kill the son of a bitch an’ be done with it,” he said, his tone flat and expression serious.
“You mean that.”
“Damn right I do. Now lay down an’ get some sleep. Tomorrow is gonna be a long day, and that wagon don’t have any springs.”
Beth returned to her bedroll but a few minutes later she sat up. “Custis?”
“Yes?”
“I hope you understand. I know you want . . . something. But I just can’t. Not with Hank lying right there in the wagon. It wouldn’t be right. I mean, I know, technically speaking I’m a widow now and free to . . . you know. But I wouldn’t feel right about it. I owe you my life. You’ve protected me and taken care of me and you should be entitled to some relief, but—”
“Go t’ sleep, Bethlehem. Your talkin’ is keepin’ me awake.”
“Thank you, Custis. You’re a better man than you make yourself out to be.”
“Shut up, woman. I’m tired.”
He heard her giggle, and after a moment she said, “Good night, Custis.”
“Good night, woman.”
Chapter 55
Sitting side by side on the narrow wagon seat the next day, with no one else for miles around, they had more than ample time to talk, much more than in all the days they had been together thus far.
“Hank loved these wild Western territories,” Beth said. “I know he was happy on this job. He didn’t believe he could find a rail route north to the mining camps, but Berriman and Jones were sure they’d make a lot of money if he could find one. Hank took the work mostly so he could come out here again. If he had to die, I’m glad it was in a place he loved so very much.”
If Beth was able to talk about her husband like that, Longarm thought it was a good sign. She was accepting Hank’s death.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Of course. Anything.” She blushed. “Well, almost anything.”
Longarm laughed. He was beginning to suspect that Bethlehem Bacon was a prime catch. Her husband had been one lucky SOB. “How was Hank with strangers?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was he talkative? Did he trust people? Would he likely turn his back on someone he didn’t know, for instance?”
“I know what you are really thinking when you ask those things,” Beth said. “That Indian boy yesterday, Talle, Talla, Tally-something, the shorter one, he was proud of himself for the way he was taking care of Hank’s skull. He brought it to show me. I saw . . . I saw the bullet hole in the back of his head, Custis.
“And no, Hank liked people well enough and could get along with pretty much anyone. But he would not have turned his back to a stranger like that.”
“So you think he was killed by someone he knew?” Longarm asked. “Maybe someone he had reason to trust?”
Beth nodded, her chin firm and her eyes growing moist. “Yes, Custis. Yes, I do.”
“There’s another thing,” Longarm said. “That ledger. I keep wonderin’ why anybody would take the time to rip pages out and burn them like they done, particularly after they just murdered the man whose campfire they were using to do the burning.”
“I can’t answer that,” Beth said, “but I know Hank’s ledgers were very important to him. He was meticulous about most things but passionate about his ledgers. He started a fresh one for every job.”
“So this ledger would have had his readings from this job?” Longarm said.
“Not just the numbers. He put down his thoughts, too. He put down everything that he thought might have any bearing at all on the job at hand, right down to botanical observations.”
“Yet someone thought it important enough to risk . . . small risk, true, but risk nonetheless . . . staying in the camp long enough to destroy that ledger,” Longarm said.
“That puzzles me, too,” Beth said.
After a little while she sighed. “I suppose we will never know why they went to all that trouble instead of just discarding it. Or tossing it on the fire and letting it go at that. Instead they ripped it apart bit by bit, and that would have been no easy task. Those canvas-bound ledgers are stout.”
Longarm mumbled something noncommittal, but his thoughts were churning. The killer was able to get behind Bacon. And the ledger had been important to him.
Who? Why? These were questions that needed to be answered.
There were no answers.
They rode in silence for a while after that, but a companionable silence without tension between them.
Chapter 56
They left the wagon, still containing the mortal remains of Hank Bacon, outside the sutler’s complex and put their horse and mule into the corral there then walked
over to the hotel, tired but satisfied that they had accomplished what was needed.
“What about supper?” Longarm asked. “There isn’t a regular restaurant but we can find something at the sutler’s store.”
“If you don’t mind, Custis, I’m really not hungry. I just want to wash and get a good night’s sleep,” Beth said.
He nodded. “No problem.”
Longarm saw Beth safely into the hotel then helped himself to some of the jerky they had taken along with them when they went to collect the body. He ate quickly, without much interest in the food, and wished he had thought to bring a bottle of whiskey with him as he could not buy any on the reservation. It was illegal for Indians to drink alcohol in any form and illegal for anyone to sell it to them.
He settled for a long drink of water and some wistful memories to go along with it.
What this place needed, he thought, was a good, old-fashioned saloon. With dancing girls.
What it had was . . . not very damn much. With a long and heartfelt sigh, Longarm went to his room and stripped.
He hung his gun belt on a corner of the bed and treated himself to a good, all-over wash with the basin and pitcher. Feeling much better once he was clean, he stretched out on the bed and pulled the blanket over himself.
He was asleep within seconds.
Chapter 57
Longarm awoke to the squeak of the door being opened. His first thought, and first hope, was that Beth was coming to him to get what he had declined to give her before. It was an impulse he did not intend to repeat. If she wanted the comfort of feeling a dick between her legs, he was just the boy to give it to her.
He was smiling when he looked up and saw a dark figure, definitely not Bethlehem Bacon, silhouetted against the pale glow of the lamp that was burning in the hallway.
More important than the silhouette of a man, though, was the faint glint of lamplight on steel.
