by Lou Cameron
He hesitated, then pointed out, “For openers, there’s just this one bed, Miss Zelda.”
She said, “I know. But I can leave my chemise on and it will be dark and… well, don’t you think you could be trusted if we each stayed on our own side all night?”
He sighed and answered truthfully. “Nope. I could mayhaps manage to behave that platonic if you had two heads and both of ’em ugly. But to tell the truth, I find it sort of tough to behave myself now with you in the dark, fully dressed atop the covers. So we’re going to have to study on bedding you down safer somewhere else, unless you’d like to see me make a total fool of myself.”
She sighed and said, “Oh dear, there seems to be only one practical way to deal with this awkward situation then.”
He agreed and, as she rose to her feet, he assumed she meant her words more properly than her next action showed. There was no mistaking her meaning, though, once she started to climb out of her duds. There was enough light for him to stare up at her, slack-jawed, as she tossed her shimmy shirt aside to rejoin him, naked as a jay, atop the covers.
It didn’t take Stringer long to shuck his own duds and get the two of them under the covers. But she was still imploring, “Hurry! Please don’t tease me so!” by the time he was in her with a pillow under her rollicking rump and, though he rode her to glory with more than a little enthusiasm, Zelda climaxed ahead of him—twice—and begged for more as he lay gasping for his second wind atop her firm naked breasts. As she wrapped her strong slender thighs around him to hug him closer, Stringer knew he’d been right about that wedding band she’d shucked. He didn’t want to know whether an extremely enthusiastic marriage had ended in some unfortunate manner or whether she was just a married gal who traveled incognito away from home. So he didn’t ask. They made love again, and then again, before she had mercy on him and gave him a chance to roll a smoke and cuddle her more calmly for a spell.
By this time she’d calmed down enough, if she’d ever really been that scared, to ask once more about the rifle shot that had brought them together so romantically. He took a thoughtful drag of Bull Durham and told her, “It works two ways. The obvious way could have been a grouchy Chicano, as I mentioned before. On the other hand, I’m a fairly well-known newspaperman who’s written more than one exposé on crooked dealings. Just before we met I’d been nosing about a mayhaps crooked land office, and they’d just figured out who I really was as I was leaving.”
She said that sounded confusing but thrilling, so he wound up telling her the story of his life in the condensed version he used for such pillow conversations. He found it no more tedious than to listen to the self-serving tales that gals seemed to feel situations like this called for. He’d never seen why folk needed excuses to go to bed together. It surely had sleeping alone beat all hollow.
When he’d finished his tale and even shorter smoke, Zelda went on combing his belly hairs with her nails, purring, “Well, I never would have taken you for a newspaperman, dear. You look and talk so… well, outdoorsy. I thought you were a rancher or something.”
He sighed, then answered, “Yeah, for some reason I have to explain that to half the grammar school graduates I meet up with. They pay me to write educated English with all the spelling and punctuation right. I just told you how I worked my way through Stanford by herding cows part-time. Anyways, nobody talks as formal as they write. How often do you reckon Sir Walter Scott used Thee and Thou in normal conversation with his kith and kin? I was born and reared in the Mother Lode country amid folk who talked cow unless they talked Spanish or Miwok. You ought to hear old Jack London talk some time. Come to think on it, your pretty little ears might be too delicate.”
She gasped, “Heavens! Do you know the famous Jack London, the author of Call of the Wild?”
“We met up in Frisco as rival cub reporters,” Stringer grimaced. “He’s still a fair newspaperman. It’s those potboiling novels he’s taken to writing that are full of bull. Fancy as he writes, old Jack was a product of the Frisco Bay mudflats. He grew up Shanty Irish and got to be more famous as an oyster pirate than anything else until he discovered, in jail, he had a knack for writing. He’s yet to learn to spell. But that’s why editors were born, so it don’t show by the time those fancy words he can’t even pronounce show up in print. Old Sam Clemens, now—you probably know him as Mark Twain—is just the opposite. He talks like an educated gentleman and writes like a Mississippi deck hand. You can’t judge a book by its cover or expect a writer to sound like he writes, unless he’s reading you his own stuff, see?”
Zelda seemed to have become bored with all this talk of literary style. She yawned politely and moved her hand further down. When she inquired if he had his second wind yet, he allowed he had and rolled back in the saddle, saying with a friendly chuckle, “Open the chute and let’s see if I can stay aboard this bronc.”
She laughed like hell at his remark, showing that she appreciated his style, and then she bucked even harder.
So, all in all, his layover in L.A. was mighty enjoyable—as long as it was safe to assume nobody was out seriously to kill him that is.
CHAPTER FOUR
The dinky, dusty town of El Centro made Stringer glad he’d shared that last bath with the amazing Zelda before they’d parted. His teeth were gritty and his shirt collar felt grimy by the time he’d toted his gladstone from the sun-baked railroad platform to the nearest shade. Despite Sam Barca’s observation that it was early in the year for real heat in these parts, it was already hot enough. The town was surrounded by dead-flat miles of nothing much. El Centro was so small he could see outside it by peering down any street. A few of the buildings were badly built adobes, although most were boomtown frame. The soil underfoot was a sort of talcum powder silt that didn’t make for firm ’dobe bricks no matter how much straw and cow shit was mixed in with it. He spied a sign in the middle distance offering beer or Coca Cola, both on ice. So he spat out some liquid mud and headed that way.
As he did so, a one-horse hearse and some dusty Mexicans playing a funeral dirge passed him, headed the other way. Stringer idly assumed they meant to either bury the poor cuss farther out amid the slate-blue greasewood clumps or, just as likely, put the body on the next train through. If that was their intention, he could only hope they’d used plenty of embalming fluid. Trains ran few and far between along this stretch of the Southern Pacific. The track drifted south of the official border past Mexicali, but nobody seemed to care. Anyone aiming to cross the border unlawfully in these parts would have to be mighty ambitious as well as half camel. For unless and until that irrigation project ever got here, there wasn’t another water hole for many a dusty mile, north or south. A lazy daisy windmill back by the trackside water tower announced the presence of ground water, deep under the chalky surface. The railroad had apparently built the drab little settlement as a water stop for its thirsty locomotives. No matter where in the world they wandered, a steam train had to jerk water every hundred miles or so.
Stringer entered the dinky saloon and put down his bag. He’d strapped his gun on before getting down from the cross-country train, but there was hardly anyone in the place to mind. The saloon was store-front wide and about forty feet back, with the bar along one of the longer walls. The other wall was lined with tables and chairs, all painted an electric blue in the Mexican manner. Some said the color repelled flies, and that may have been why the flies in the saloon were circling a strip of flypaper at the far end of the bar. The old-timer mopping the other end with a damp rag asked Stringer to name his pleasure. He said he’d drink just about anything that was cold and wet, but he was still a mite surprised when the barkeep served him a bottle of Coca Cola, saying, “You may as well help me get rid of this stuff then. Hardly any of my regular customers seem to like it since Teddy Roosevelt made ’em take the cocaine outten Coca Cola. Nothing to it now but cola-nut juice and sugar water. They’ll likely be going out of business any day now.”
Stringer was too thirsty
to argue. He guzzled half the bottle at one gulp, belched, and observed, “Sure tastes better than your topsoil.”
The old-timer chuckled. “Oh, the soil ain’t so bad, this far to the south. Goes from good loam to pure alkali as you ride north into Salton’s Sink.”
“If you say so,” Stringer said, sipping some more soda pop. “I’d hate to try to grow serious weeds out there though.”
The old barkeep nodded. “So would I, without water. But it’s still damned fine dirt, brung all the way down from the Rockies by the Colorado. It assays out as all sorts of interesting minerals combined. You’ll see a few local folk have planted garths as you wander about. Stick a seed in, sprinkle it with water, and step back pronto lest you wind up with a sunflower stalk up your ass.”
Stringer said he hadn’t come to argue, put down the empty bottle, and asked if he could have a beer. The keeper of local lore chuckled agreeably. “Sure. Order more than one beer and that soda pop was on the house.” Then, as he opened a cold beer bottle for Stringer, he observed, “You didn’t say what brung you here, if it wasn’t to argue about our fine topsoil, stranger.”
Stringer nodded and introduced himself. “I’m Stringer MacKail of the San Francisco Sun. I came here to look up a gent called Lockwood. Irrigation engineer. I don’t suppose you’d know where I could find him?”
The barkeep sighed and said, “You just missed him. Passed you in that hearse, outside. Been dead no more ‘n twelve hours. We like to plant ‘em pronto out here on the desert.”
Stringer accepted the beer but left it untasted for the moment. He whistled softly and replied, “Now that’s what I call timing. What did the poor old gent die from?”
The informative barkeep nodded sagely. “Bullets. He wasn’t all that old, leastways not from where I stand these days. No more than forty at the most.”
Stringer sipped some beer. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t exactly up to Frisco Bay standards either. He tried to keep things casual as he quietly asked, “Does anybody know who murdered him, or why?”
The old-timer replied just as casually, “He wasn’t murdered, unless you want to get picky. Lockwood and Cactus Jack Donovan got into an argument over cards, back yonder at the last table as a matter of fact. The shoot-out took place later, out front of course. We don’t allow no fighting in here. I didn’t see the shoot-out myself. But those who did told the law it seemed a fair enough fight. Cactus Jack rode out anyways. The sheriff had warned him more than once about his nasty disposition.”
Stringer sighed and inhaled some more suds. “That’s that then. With the man I was sent to see shot and the man who shot him long gone as well, I don’t see who on earth my paper might want me to look up here now.”
The barkeep thought on this a moment, then offered, “Well, there’s that young gal Lockwood was shacked up with if she’s still here in town. I wasn’t at the funeral, so I just can’t say.”
Finishing his beer, Stringer thanked him for the suggestion. “I’d best hear what the late Lockwood’s play-pretty has to say, as long as I’ve already come so far on little more than a vague news tip.” He pushed back from the bar. “Would you by any chance know where I could find the lady?”
“I never said she was no lady,” the barkeep sniffed. “More like a Mex if you ask me. Don’t recall her name. But she and Lockwood was camped in a sort of gypsy cart, red wheels, down to the north end of Main Street. You can’t miss it. Just look for a red-wheeled cart in the shade of some half-dead cotton woods.”
Stringer paid, leaving his change on the mahogany with a nod of thanks, and strode back out into the blinding sunlight to see how well the old-timer’s directions worked.
He could see the treetops down that way and he could also see the old-timer didn’t know beans about botany. The trees the old barkeep had described as cottonwoods were really desert willows, which had little more business being this far from a seasonal stream than cottonwoods. But they drooped because they were willows, not because they were dying.
As he ambled along the shady side of the walkless street, a gent riding a dusty roan tore past him, oblivious to the dust he was churning up in the middle of the already dusty enough settlement. Stringer held his breath a good ten paces to let the dust settle back on the street instead of in his lungs, although there wasn’t much he could do about the dust in his eyes but blink and bear it.
Stringer had almost forgotten the annoying cuss by the time he passed the last frame shack and its fenced-in garden to spy the gypsy cart parked on four red wheels under the dusty, drooping willow branches. A mule was grazing in a weed patch beyond on a long ground tether. Stringer’s amber eyes focused thoughtfully, however, on the lathered pony tethered between him and the gypsy cart. It was the same dusty roan that had passed him just moments before, and Stringer swung around it to make out the source of all the noise coming from near the cart.
The heavy-set, dusty-suited gent who’d abused his horse seemed to be working himself up to abusing a woman now, though so far he was just at the cussing stage. She was a bitty Mex gal, standing her ground on bare feet in a frilly white blouse and a blue circle skirt that exposed a scandalous amount of shapely calf almost to her knees. Stringer had time to note that her face wasn’t bad, either.
Neither she nor the burly Anglo fussing with her was aware of Stringer’s approach until he was almost upon them. She was facing his way and saw him first but since he looked Anglo as well, she didn’t look at all happy to see him.
The rider who’d loped his pony and a whole town dusty to get at her correctly read the way she was staring and turned to give Stringer a once-over. He growled, “Do you have any business here, cowboy?”
Stringer nodded and dropped his gladstone. “Friend of the family. This lady just now buried her esposo, if I got the address right. So I’ll thank you to simmer down a mite or at least cuss at me instead of her.”
The older and bigger man let his dusty frock coat fall open to expose the ivory grips of his cross-draw Colt. “That can be arranged, sonny. I ride for International Irrigation and I’ve reason to suspect an employee they had to fire rode off with some company papers. All I want from this greaser gal is a look-see inside her wagon. If the papers I’m after are there, I’ll just take ’em off her hands. If they ain’t, I’ll just ride on. I’d say that was fair enough, wouldn’t you?”
Stringer smiled thinly and said, “It ain’t for me to say. It’s up to this lady here. And don’t call her a greaser again. I don’t like it.”
The girl looked a lot prettier now that she saw she didn’t have to shoot daggers from her big sloe eyes at Stringer after all.
“I do not know what this hombre wants,” she appealed to Stringer. “I have no papers such as he describes and I will not have my belongings pawed through by rude people I do not know.”
Stringer nodded at both of them and told the water company man, “You could both have a point. I’d say your best bet, Amigo, would be a court order. The Constitution gives this little lady the right to total privacy unless and until you can produce a search warrant stating exactly what you’re looking for and what business it is of yours to look for the same.”
The company rider laughed incredulously. “Are you suffering sun stroke, cowboy? No Mexicans are mentioned in any American constitution.”
Stringer shrugged in reply. “In that case you’re really out of luck. She wouldn’t have to let you search her wagon even if you had a proper search warrant from a California court. Have you considered offering her something for her trouble, or even talking to her respectfully?”
The company rider snorted in disgust. “As a matter of fact I’ve wasted all the time in talking I ever meant to. I was sent to search for them papers and so now I aim to do so. You’ll both stand aside if you know what’s good for you.”
He put his gun hand casually to his gun grips as a not too subtle hint of his sincerity. Then he found himself staring down the unwinking muzzle of Stringer’s .38 as the younger gent he�
��d taken for a local cowhand with a gallant streak quietly asked, “Why don’t you go ahead and tell me just what’s good for me?”
The company rider gulped, let go his own gun as if it had just turned into a redhot poker, and asked, “Have you been mixing the one and original Coca Cola with tequilla, old son? Who said anything here about slapping leather?”
Stringer put his .38 back in its holster. “I’m sure sorry if I misjudged your intent. Where I come from a man doesn’t talk growly and pat his gun grips unless he means it. I sure hope we’ve got that straight. You can see we’re both back to scratch now. Go for that hog leg again and I won’t be holding my fire. Your move, Amigo.”
The company rider kept his gun hand well clear of his far side as he stared thoughtfully at Stringer for a half dozen heart beats. Then he shrugged. “They don’t pay me that much. I was told I might have a little trouble from a Mexican spitfire. Nobody mentioned a hired quick-draw artist. So I reckon I’ll be leaving now. You wouldn’t throw down on a friendly cuss like me as he was mounting up, would you?”
Stringer said, “Depends on how far you keep either hand from that Colt as you do so. Why don’t you show me how polite you can ride off, Amigo?”
The company rider did. But as he rode out of easy pistol shot he turned in his saddle and called back, “Maybe next time, Mister Quick Draw!” Then he lit out at full gallop.
Stringer chuckled and said, “Most men hate to back down in front of a woman. I doubt he’ll be back without some back-up, ma’am.”
Then he saw he was talking to himself. When he turned around, he saw the pretty little gal had climbed up into her cart to rest a shotgun barrel over the bottom wing of the double door built into the rear end under the arched roof. He laughed and told her, “Shucks, ma’am, I thought I was scaring him all by myself.”
She smiled back at him, hauling the gun barrel in, as she told him, “I think you made a believer of him the first time you displayed your lightning draw, señor. I am called Juanita Vasques, by the way. Were you a friend of poor Herberto?”
