by Tabor Evans
She stopped sucking long enough to grin up at him like a mean little kid and said, "Later. After I get off work this evening. Right now we don't have time for a proper orgy. So let's come fast as well as wicked. You'll never guess what I'm doing to myself down here while I'm sucking you off up there!"
Then she couldn't talk with her mouth full, and he didn't much care what was going on in her ring-dang-do if it couldn't be with his old organ-grinder. Then he was coming, and, as always, it was driving him wild with mingled desires to be in every possible position at once as she took it all the way down her throat with her tongue licking the balls she'd pulled out of his jeans.
Then, as abruptly as she'd started, Inky Potts withdrew her smiling face from his lap, saying, "That's enough, for now. I have to get back to my job while I still have one!"
He could only lay there with his dick hanging out as he watched her tidy herself up, cool as if she'd just gotten up after a night alone.
As she brushed and pinned up her long hair, seated beside him on the cot, Longarm saw the red wax candle she'd left on the rug between his boots had been rounded off and molded sort of sassy at the thick end. He took some comfort in the modest dimensions of the candle she seemed to know better than him. He'd read somewhere that both men and women who took to using dildos or substitutes for the real thing tended to work their way up to bigger and bigger insertions until a real dick wasn't nearly enough to satisfy them.
She caught the direction of his interest and flushed slightly to confess, "I told you I've been doing without for months. I'm only a woman, not a saint or the kid sister Mr. Tanner seems to take me for."
Longarm said, "I thought I heard you say a wandering printer gal has to worry about men trying to get under her skirts."
To which she replied, "it all depends on who might be trying to do so, when. You men have the strangest sense of time and place. How would you like it if some girl made a grab for your buttocks when you were bending over to pick up an anvil?"
Longarm chuckled and said, "A heap of anvils would no doubt be dropped on heaps of toes. I'm glad you thought this was the time to grab my dick, Miss Inky. But that wasn't the favor I was about to ask of you."
She said, "I know. I told you you'd have to wait until I came home from work if you wanted to go all the way with me. That is what you really wanted, and I will find you here when I get back, won't I?"
Longarm's dick was soft enough to put away for the time being as he assured her he'd stay right where he was. So she kissed him, said she couldn't wait for closing time, and told him to help himself to anything else she had to offer before she lit out on him.
So Longarm never had to tell her that was what he'd been meaning to ask if he could do. He needed a place to hide out in Keller's Crossing while he let his plot with good old Covina take shape. You didn't have to lie to folks when they didn't see you and might even think you'd left town, satisfied.
So Longarm took off his duds and got into Inky's bed to read the telegrams and news clippings while he waited for her to come back and give him some real satisfaction.
CHAPTER 20
Inky did. It was just as well he'd had a whole afternoon's rest and heaps of sugar and chocolate to keep him going, once Inky had cooked him a fine supper and undressed entire for dessert.
It was purely a marvel, he thought, as he mounted the sweet young thing with two pillows under her firm little ass, how different gals could get and still seem lovely with two pillows under their asses.
For Covina had been a pale-thighed novelty after Lakota Sue, and the frolicksome fullblood had been nothing like the more sedate-looking but just as passionate Portia Parkhurst, attorney-at-law. He decided Inky reminded him more of that young wagon train gal from Poland, save for having different-colored hair, no Polish accent, and, come to study on it, a different way of moving her ass. It was only her ass that reminded him of that other sweet kid from Poland.
She took it dog style more like good old Roping Sally, save for Inky being built way smaller and good old Roping Sally being dead.
Thinking of dead gals reminded him of that Deputy Ida Weaver who'd shot Rusty Mansfield in front of him down in Denver. Looking down at a dead gal in this position would be awful, but he couldn't help wondering what he'd missed by treating her with so much respect. The poor thing might have still been alive, taking it dog style, had not he been ordered to tail her at such a discreet distance.
When Inky got on top with the late sun painting tiger stripes of light and shadow through the blinds on her pale bouncing body, she didn't do it at all like old Covina, and he was glad. He'd be meeting up with old Covina in a day or so, and it would be as bad as being married up if all the gals a man went to bed with screwed the same.
Inky fucked him all the different ways she could think of, and, as the old trail song went, if she'd have had wings she'd have fucked him flying. But they had plenty of time to smoke, talk, and even catch up on their sleep before she was shaking him awake by his dick and demanding he tell her where the night had flown.
He said he didn't know how high up went or how long forever was, either. So they tore off a morning quickie, had bacon and eggs, and she left first, warning him to be discreet, as she put it, when he let himself out.
Longarm tried to be. He waited until nigh nine, when everyone would be at work, and slipped out and along a shady alley, fully dressed, to circle around to the vomit-green house of old Edith Penn Keller, J.P.
He found the black-robed fat lady telling a young boy she couldn't issue him a wedding license no matter how much he loved the little gal next door. When it was Longarm's turn, he said he'd come for a writ of exhumation. He had to explain that was a permit to open a grave. One got the impression their J.P. had never attended Harvard Law.
She said it was jake with her if he wanted to dig a hog farmer up. She rang for her clerk, a little brown sparrow, and told Longarm to just spell out what he needed.
So Longarm did and a few minutes later he was over at the churchyard with a couple of stable hands from the hotel. They'd allowed they had the time, and he'd already noticed they had shovels.
Finding his way to the tombstone of the late Nathan Hemmings as they followed, Longarm pointed down and declared, "Like Brother Brigham said, this is the place. Like I told you, you'll find the 'dobe ain't been soaked and sun baked since they buried him."
One of the stable hands sank his shovel in the bare dirt mounded over the coffin far below and said, "You're right. It feels more like digging bird gravel. Almost as loose packed, least ways."
As the recruits began to get down to business they were naturally joined by others. It seemed you could hardly have a gunfight or dig up a grave in a small town without others coming over to ask what you thought you were doing.
Longarm saw Big Jim Tanner and young Pony Bodie, among others, as things got sort of crowded around the hog farmer's last resting place. So he said, "I wish you'd give us more room and be careful of them other graves, gents. How come so many of you are still packing guns?"
Pony Bodie replied, "I told you. We're on the prod for the persons unknown who cut up poor Preacher Shearer and his squaw."
Big Jim volunteered, "I keep telling the boys you shot the killer right next door. But who listens? Why are we exhuming poor old Nate, Deputy Long?"
Longarm said, "We ain't. I don't expect we'll have to dig down as far as the coffin lid. The killer wouldn't have had time to dig down more than a yard or so at the most."
The newspaperman demanded, "What killer? Gus Bergman? He wasn't in town when we buried the old timer in that grave."
Before Longarm had to answer, one of his stable hands called out, "I've hit something soft and mushy here."
Longarm moved over to stare down at a scrap of floral-print calico visible amid the dusty 'dobe clods and said, "Brush the dirt off her gentle, boys. She'd have wanted it that way."
So they did and soon had one arm, then a shoulder, then half the swollen face of the o
nce-pretty Deputy Ida Weaver exposed to the cruel morning sun. Somebody gasped. "Good Gawd! It's Ida Weaver!" Somebody usually did.
Longarm said, "I wish folk didn't have to turn such funny colors after they were dead. It would be so much tidier if we could just dry up and blow away like faded flowers. But we don't. So pending an autopsy, I'd say they killed her as soon as she got home from Denver near to half a week ago."
"Do you have any idea who killed her?" asked Big Jim Tanner.
Longarm saw Rita Mae Reynolds coming over from her nearby house with her own gun strapped on, now, as he told the newspaperman it was too soon to say.
Rita rolled over the fence in her riding skirts and came over to take one look and gasp. "Oh, no! Not poor Ida! We were such good friends!"
Longarm said, "I'm sorry, ma'am. But that's what comes of sending inexperienced gals to carry out chores many a man would find too big a boo."
"But how could this have happened here in Keller's Crossing?" the auburn-haired bossy gal demanded, adding, "Ida won when she met up with that dangerous killer down in Denver, Custis!"
Longarm said, "Aw, he wasn't all that dangerous, next to some I've tangled with. Like Amarillo Cordwain, Texas Tom, and all them others, he was mostly too lazy to work and too dumb to cheat at cards. The one fairly experienced tinhorn they recruited lit out on them as soon as he saw how dumb they were acting."
Big Jim stared soberly down at the partly exposed cadaver of Ida Weaver to say, "Call them anything you like, as long as you bring them to justice! Why did you just say it was too soon to say? Do you have any idea at all who's behind all this?"
Longarm said, "Sure. But you can't get milk out of a turtle just by trying to milk it, or a conviction out of a judge and jury just by pointing your finger with no proof."
"What more proof do you need?" asked Pony Bodie with a puzzled smile, pointing over at the nearby church as he said, "That preacher played with fire until he got burnt. He was running some sort of home for wayward boys. But he felt he had to turn them in when they left home or robbed other folk or, shucks, he just got tired of them. He'd have been defrocked or worse had word gotten out that he went in for queer parties under his very own church. So, knowing Miss Rita, here, had a firmer way than most for dealing with outlaws, he saw she got tipped off they were outlaws, whether they were or not, and told her where they might be found, so's her deputy gals could finish them off for the old sneak!"
Longarm nodded thoughtfully as more than one in the crowd agreed that all made sense.
Longarm said, "Well, like the old song says, farther along we'll know more about it. Your notion only adds up part way, Pony Bodie. I see how a dirty old man might use the law to aid and abet his fickle nature, or his worries about being blackmailed or exposed. But tell me how you think he got ten discarded lovers in a row to go where he wanted them to go and wait until he could sic the law on them."
Pony Bodie looked confused.
Big Jim said, "I might be able to answer that. You may have it backward. What if those double-gaited owlhoot riders just left him, friendly or unfriendly. He told me he'd gotten wires from others he knew. Not as swishy lads of course. He told me he got to comfort and advise heaps of prairie drifters, good, bad, and indifferent. Couldn't he have simply put the word out on some former pal and waited until another wired him from wherever?"
Rita said, "That works for me. I'd heard Amarillo Cordwain had spent a lot of time in prison, getting known in the Biblical sense by a lot of other shady young men with no visible means of support."
Longarm said, "I've been thinking about that since first I found out about the preacher's other interests, Miss Rita. Not all the nine fugitives you and your wild deputies have accounted for had spent that much time in prison. Not all of them were thieves or robbers. So try her this way. What if somebody who knew about poor old Preacher Shearer and his rough-and-ready pansies was only using that angle to razzle-dazzle us with others?"
She said she didn't know what he was talking about.
He said, "It don't matter. I've been lying to you, too."
In the following silence he could have cut with a knife, Longarm explained, "I knew that once I got past Texas Tom and Ram Rogers, the survivors would be ordered to head somewhere else and await further instructions. I felt sure that once they arrived to be set up like clay pigeons, somebody was going to tell you where they were, so's you could send another wildwoman after them, no offense."
Rita gasped. "You did? Then why did you let me send that Covina Rivers from Cheyenne if you didn't want me to?"
Longarm said, "I wanted you to. That's how come I let you. Miss Covina was working with me. I asked her to. She lied to you herself. She never met Ram Rogers, and that shop gal she told you about was just a petty thief."
Rita looked hurt. "But why, Custis, why? I trusted you and I liked Covina! Why did you both lie to me?"
Longarm said, "I just told you she had orders to lie to you. I had to lie to everybody here, save for those pals from the hotel stable, least ways. I didn't know which one of you was behind all this dumb but deadly razzle-dazzle."
"But you do now?" asked Big Jim warily.
Longarm hesitated, stepped back from the open grave a ways, and declared, "Not for certain, but likely by this afternoon. I'm waiting on a wire that ought to get here well before that last train out for the day. So the one I want ain't going nowheres before I'm ready to do some serious arresting around here!"
Rita asked, "Who's supposed to wire you about what? That Covina Rivers who ran off with one of our badges?"
Longarm smiled thinly and soothed, "I'll see you get your badge back, Miss Rita. I'll bet it's worth at least a dollar. I told Miss Covina just to go back to her notions store in Cheyenne and wait for her own compensations from my outfit. I know you told her to go down to Pueblo and flirt her way close enough to Ram Rogers to get the drop on him. I know you told her not to kill him if it could be avoided. So, to your credit, you and Judge Edith have commenced to behave more sensible."
He reached in his jacket for some matches and a cheroot as he continued, "Miss Covina wouldn't know Ram Rogers if she woke up in bed with him, and, after that, she's a lady who sells notions, not no manhunter. So I gave her a message to wire my own boss when she got to Cheyenne. It's been long sent by this time. My boss will be sending a team we call Smiley and Dutch down to Pueblo by now. Smiley and Dutch will take Ram Rogers alive if he knows what's good for him."
He lit a cheroot without offering in such a crowd and told them all, "Ram Rogers won't be sitting there waiting to be taken alive. The mastermind who's been advising him will have told him to go there and lay low pending further instructions. So he's going to be mighty chagrined when Smiley and Dutch tell him they were tipped off to his whereabouts by the one pal who'd be in any position to know." Rita grinned like a kid who'd just spotted an unguarded apple tree and declared, "Then you've got him! He can't get away, and he's as good as in my jail the moment you hear from your friends in Pueblo!"
Longarm said, "That's about the size of it. Stay put, Miss Rita. I want to keep this private, and I see your words have inspired a certain nervousness over this way."
Then he snapped, "Don't do it, kid!" as Pony Bodie went for his Schofield.45, his weak-chinned face contorted with desperation!
The delivery boy was good, for a delivery boy or anybody else. Longarm would have been hard-pressed to beat the tensed-up killer to the draw if he hadn't been thinking ahead, himself.
But he had been. So he simply had to raise the right hand he'd been palming his derringer in and fire, pointblank, just as Pony Bodie's bigger gun was clearing leather.
The weak-chinned young terror staggered back against another tombstone, back-flipped over it, and landed facedown in the dust, sobbing as he struggled to rise with all that blood running out of his chest while Longarm held his double derringer's second round on him.
Then the treacherous young rascal collapsed limp as a bear rug left outside to air, a
nd someone said, "I think you killed him."
Longarm said, "That was my intent. Like you all heard me tell him, getting a conviction can be a chore, and this way we won't have to air the dirty laundry of a lot of lesser sinners in these parts."
Rita marveled, "You mean you were lying to him, just to trick him?"
Longarm shrugged and answered truthfully, "I won't know until I hear from Smiley and Dutch. All I left out was that Smiley and Dutch can be wild as any Wyoming woman when you send 'em after a want. So I'll be pleasantly surprised if they take Ram Rogers alive. Not that it really matters, now."
CHAPTER 21
Longarm was more than pleasantly surprised by the long wire he got late that afternoon. For once the team of Smiley and Dutch had worked the way Billy Vail had planned when he put them to work together.
Deputy Smiley hardly ever smiled. Smiley was his last name and he was the smart but slower one. Nobody could pronounce the outlandish last name of the one they just called Dutch, but he was the fastest gun on the payroll, albeit about as levelheaded as a scorpion in one's empty boot of a morning. Billy's hope in teaming such an odd pair was that Dutch might keep Smiley alive while Smiley kept Dutch from being indicted for murder.
That hadn't always been easy for either of them. But the wire said they'd busted in on Ram Rogers and his ladylove at that Pueblo hotel to catch them in the act of posing for French postcards without any concealed weapons on them at all.
Smiley had thought to separate the two of them as soon as they were out of bed in their duds and handcuffs. They said Ram Rogers had been as chagrined as promised when they told him he'd been turned in by his Wyoming mastermind. The terrified gal, of course, had sung even louder when they got her to see she could tell all she knew or hope her true love would be waiting when she got out, old and gray.
