by Evans, Tabor
He stopped in the open doorway. Lacy stood before him, dressed in a heavy coat over her torn gray shirt and long skirt, and in a man’s battered Stetson, aiming a big Remington at him. The gun was cocked. Her hands were shaking.
“Nooo!” she screamed as, closing her eyes and turning her face away from the gun, it leaped and roared in her hands, its kick sending her stumbling straight backward.
Longarm had thrown himself hard left against the door as the girl’s bullet careened through the opening behind him. Pushing off the door frame, he hurled himself forward and onto the girl, turning to one side before they hit the floor together, Longarm ripping the Remington from her slender hands.
“What the hell you think you’re doing, you damn crazy catamount?” he bellowed.
She lay on her side, hair hanging down across her face, gasping and peering at him wide-eyed through the honey-blond locks. “I thought you were them!” she screamed, throwing herself against him.
Her sudden weight sent him onto his back with Lacy squirming around on top of him, wrapping her arms around his neck and pressing her head to his chest. Even through his coat and her coat, he could feel the swell of her breasts against him, was visited with another vague, ludicrous pang of desire.
“Get off me, goddamnit!” he barked. “We don’t have time for no tearful reunions. Gunn and Cruz are behind me, probably headed this way, angry as hornets.” Rising, peering outside carefully, not liking the eerie silence hanging heavy as an August storm over the clearing, he pulled his saddlebags and bedroll inside and kicked the door closed.
Turning to her, confused thoughts tumbling around inside his head, he said, “Say, what the hell did you do to get them boys’ necks in such a hump, anyway?”
She lay propped on her elbows, and a faint flush rose in her tapered cheeks. “What did they say?”
Hoof thuds rose outside the cabin. Longarm opened the door and edged a look through the crack. Jostling shadows were moving toward him from the clearing’s far side—a good ten or so riders, their tack flashing in the starlight. There were too many for him to hold off even from inside the cabin.
Gunn and Cruz would either shoot him out or burn him out.
“Never mind.” He closed and barred the door, then slung his saddlebags over one shoulder, clamped his bedroll under his arm, and jerked her to her feet. “Come on—we’re gonna have to light a shuck.”
“Where to?”
“As far as I can tell, there’s only one way out of this canyon that ain’t via the river, and Gunn and Cruz done have that trail covered.”
“So . . . ?”
He grabbed a small sack of what appeared to be food off a shelf, shoved it against her chest, then pushed her toward the back door. “So, we’re gonna have to light off down stream. Go!”
He’d followed her out the back door when he turned toward H. G. Ryan, whose legs he’d nearly tripped over. The gunman was no longer leaning against the door frame. He lay on his side. Blood oozed in two rivulets down the side of his head from just over his ear. He wasn’t moving. A stick of bloodstained stove wood lay near his head.
Longarm looked at Lacy, who had turned to give him a sheepish look.
“You told me to keep him quiet!” she cried. “Now, just with the hell are you talking about—how are we going to get downstream?”
“Ain’t that what boats are usually for?”
Longarm brushed past her, picked up his rifle from where he’d left it near the boulder, and strode over to the boat that hunched in the shadows of a tall willow at the edge of the water. The girl was running along behind him. He couldn’t hear the hoof thuds of Gunn and Cruz from here, because of the stream, but he was sure they were working their way around the cabin, likely assuming that he and the girl were still inside.
They’d know soon enough that they weren’t.
“I’m not getting on that thing,” Lacy said as Longarm set his gear in the boat. A paddle lay across the two log seats.
“That’s up to you.” Longarm had untied the boat’s rope from a branch of the willow and tossed it aboard, then began shoving the rickety vessel out into the water beyond a gently slanting shelf of scalloped sand. “But if I was you, with as mad as you seem to have made your ole pards Gunn and Cruz, I’d reconsider.”
Longarm kicked the boat into deeper water, until it started bobbing and slowly turning downstream. Guns barked and flashed from the direction of the cabin. The slugs blew up dirt and gravel along the shore of the river, one within inches of Lacy’s right foot.
“Wait!” she called, running into the stream. “Oh, Longarm—wait for me!”
Chapter 9
As the bullets ripped up the water around Lacy, one thudding into the boat near Longarm’s right knee, he reached out and grabbed her hand. She screamed as another bullet blew up water beside her, and then he pulled her up out of the knee-deep water and into the boat. He extended the paddle out over the boat’s opposite, trying to equally distribute their weight so they wouldn’t swamp.
While the girl folded up on the rough planks between the two seats, Longarm picked up his Winchester, quickly plucked shells from his cartridge belt, and thumbed them through the rifle’s loading gate. The boat bobbed and weaved, bouncing off rocks.
“Oh, God!” the girl cried, burying her head in her arms. “We’re doomed. Doomed!”
As Longarm saw the shadows of several men running toward the river from the cabin, their guns flashing, ricochets screeching off rocks and slapping the water around him, he dropped to a knee and raised the Winchester.
Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
He heard a yelp that was nearly inaudible above the river’s quiet rush, the occasional thuds of the boat bouncing off rocks, and the girl’s sobbing. The other shadows dropped, and the rifles and pistols flashed again as Gunn’s men kept up their fusillade.
“Doomed!” Lacy cried. “Oh, damnit, I had such big plans!”
But then suddenly the boat drifted behind a screen of brush and spindly trees, and then a mountain wall slid past on Longarm’s right, and the gun flashes disappeared, as did the screeching and slapping of the gang’s angry bullets. The boat pitched sharply to the right, and Longarm nearly flew out of it. He dropped to a knee and steadied himself on the gunwale.
Looking around at the dark, silver water around him, he saw that they were in the middle of the stream though still bouncing off rocks, tossing and turning. Just then, a corner of the boat went over a large rock firmly planted on the river’s bottom, and Lacy screeched as she rolled toward the opposite side of the boat. Longarm grabbed her just before she would have tumbled overboard.
“Hold on!” he shouted.
Setting his rifle down, he picked up the paddle. With effort, he got the boat turned so that the prow was heading downstream. They dropped over a slight falls and then the river widened between towering, black ridges and became more placid. The boat slid smoothly off through the easy ripples between rocks.
The ridges were steep on both sides. The river was as black as the inside of a glove. Eerily black with only the occasional flash of ambient light off a wavelet. The water gurgled against the sides of the boat. That was the only sound. Even Lacy had fallen silent under the river’s hushed influence.
After they’d drifted around a slight bend, she whispered, “It’s so dark I can’t see a thing.”
“Yeah,” Longarm said, trying to keep the boat in the middle of the stream though there were damn few reference points to tell him where the middle was.
The river chugged quietly. Wolves howled in the mountains. A night bird cooed.
The boat drifted quietly, moving at what Longarm figured was only about three or four miles an hour—about walking speed. He kept his ear pricked for the thud of horse hooves. He hadn’t gotten a good enough look at the clearing to know if any trails led o
ut of it along the stream. He hoped not. Or, if there were trails, he hoped that Gunn and Cruz didn’t find them, which didn’t seem likely as dark as it was out here.
“How far we gonna go?” Lacy asked, her quiet voice sounding crisp and inordinately loud in the heavy silence.
Longarm used a handkerchief to dab at the bullet burn along his side. “Not sure. For a time.”
“Used to driving a boat, are you?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, God, what if there’s a falls?” Lacy’s voice rose with anxiety. “What if there’s a falls ahead and we can’t see it because it’s so goddamn dark?”
“They teach you that blue tongue of yours back home in the piano parlor, did they?”
Longarm’s wry tone belied his own fear of the same thing. He didn’t recognize this part of the Sawatch in the dark, but he was beginning to think they were on the Mulehead River, a relatively short stream but one that threaded through several deep canyons in the Sawatch before emptying out in the Arkansas farther east. If the Mulehead indeed was the river he was on, he’d have his work cut out for him, as he’d heard there were several nasty stretches where the river dropped fast. Those stretches would likely be worse this time of the year, when the low water would expose more rocks like the one they’d gone over and that had nearly capsized them.
He heard Lacy’s teeth clattering. It was so dark that he couldn’t see much of her but the light tan of her coat and hat, the blond of her hair. Her breath shone in the air around her head. It was cold out here, and she’d likely caught a good chill running through the water.
Longarm adjusted their coarse with the paddle and cursed.
“What is it?” she said, looking around fearfully as though expecting to see Gunn and Cruz bearing down on them from the pale cliff faces on either side of the trail.
“You.”
“What about me?”
“We’re gonna have to stop soon or you’ll catch your death of cold.”
Her teeth continued to clatter, and her voice shook as she said. “No! We mustn’t stop yet, Longarm. What if Heck catches up to us?”
Longarm gave a wry snort and studied her vague form in the darkness just ahead of him and left. “Maybe I should let ’em catch up to us. Turn you over to ’em. Why the hell not? Why take you back to Jawbone to stand trial when it looks like Gunn and Cruz have a better idea?”
She jerked her head toward him so quickly that she nearly lost her hat. “No!”
She softened her voice, made it silky and alluring so that whomever heard it would think about other things that were sexy about her.
“You wouldn’t, would you, Longarm? They’re awful men. Truly they are. I realize now how mistaken I was to hook up with them.” She paused, raked a liquid sigh as though she were about to tear up. “You see, I was just so bored at home. And Dickie . . . well, he was a nice enough fellow, but I just couldn’t stand the thought of living out there on that big ranch so far from town. Him and his father . . . hell . . . I mean, heck . . . they would have turned me into their slave.”
Her voice became crisper, as though she couldn’t keep up the charade long without the real Lacy Sackett resurfacing. “Old Ezekial is rich enough to buy and sell all of Colorado Territory, but he’s so cheap he won’t even hire a housekeeper. That’s the real reason he wanted Dickie to marry me. That and the fact that my father owns the bank in Jawbone. The old bastard said I had good, childbearing hips, and I looked strong enough to keep up a house!”
“I take it you didn’t shed too many tears over ole Dickie after Goose and the other gut-shot him and left him layin’ along the trail to die, eh?”
“Goddamn you! You just won’t listen to me, will you?”
Longarm looked at her. Even knowing how devilish she was, her anger still startled him. It had to come from somewhere other than that lovely face and body of hers. It had to belong to a demon inside her.
“How’d you rub Gunn and Cruz so raw?” he asked her, hearing her teeth chatter. Apparently, her rage hadn’t warmed her any.
Lacy stared at him but didn’t say anything for several seconds. Then she hugged herself: “If you stop and build a fire to get me dry and warm, I’ll tell you.”
Longarm watched her. He’d rarely been afraid of women—at least, women not aiming a gun at him—but this girl constantly made him feel as though he were staring down the deep, black maw of a cocked derringer.
What did she have up her sleeve? Or did she really just want him to stop and build a fire?
“Thought you were afraid they’d catch up to us.”
“We’ve come far enough now. They’ll never find us in the darkness. I doubt there’s even any trails back in those mountains. Besides, I know you’ll protect me, Custis.”
Longarm snorted at how deep and sultry her voice had gone with that last sentence. He sighed but started looking around for a place to land the boat. The cliff walls continued to bulge up close to the river for another mile or so, then fell back. Especially the one on the north side. Longarm brought the boat closer to that side of the river and saw a wide area of relatively flat shoreline. Quickly, fighting the current, he dug the paddle into the river and swung the boat’s nose toward shore.
When the boat scraped the bottom and gave a shudder, he set the paddle down and leaped off the boat and into the river, the water here climbing to his knees and causing him to suck a sharp breath against the chill. Snow must still have been melting in the high country, as it had been a relatively cool summer.
He pulled the boat to shore with the rope, helped Lacy off, then tied the rope around a small tree about ten feet away from the water. Looking around, he scrutinized the flat around him. The north ridge fell back far enough to let some starlight in, so he could see better here than he had been a little ways upriver.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing his saddlebags, bedroll, and rifle. He’d spied a notch between steep ridges, and he headed for the black crack now, the girl following him and audibly shivering.
A few minutes later, he found a notch cave deep inside the crack, well hidden from the river. By the light of a torch he made from a chunk of dry driftwood and a lucifer, he gathered wood and built a small fire inside the cave. Both he and Lacy hunkered over the fledgling flames, rubbing their hands and warming themselves.
When the fire had grown a bit, spreading a comforting warmth inside the small, rocky cavern, Lacy quickly shed her coat. She didn’t stop there. Off came Dickie’s shirt and then her chemise. Bare breasts jiggling, she turned onto her rump and slid her skirt and pantaloons down her legs, until she sat before him, knees slightly raised, arms crossed beneath her pale breasts, shivering and favoring Longarm with that sexy jade gaze of hers.
“Oh, what I wouldn’t give for some hot water for a sponge bath!” She leaned forward, wrapping her arms around her legs. Her breasts sloped forward, away from her chest, until she pressed them against her knees, blinking at him and coyly smiling.
His cock tingled and his loins itched.
“Ah, shit.” He picked up his tin pot, coffeepot, and his rifle, looking around to make sure there were no other weapons she could get a hold of. Seeing nothing more than rocks, but reminding himself that she could make good use of those if she wanted, he pinned her with a commanding look. “You stay here and behave yourself.”
“You’re a wonderful man, Custis Long!” she yelled back at him as he crouched out of the cave to fetch water from the river.
He grumbled a reply and headed down the uneven cleft in the rocks, trailing a hand along the rock wall on his left, the starlight dimly lighting his way. When he got to the river, he dragged the boat into some brush, where it would be less conspicuous if Gunn and Cruz found a way into this wilderness. Then he filled both pots, and grumbling his frustration over the girl once more—one second he wanted nothing more than to throw he
r down and take her, the next he wanted nothing but to drill a bullet through her pretty head—he strode back to the cave.
Cautiously, he glanced inside the cavern, making sure she wasn’t about to try to brain him again with a rock. She was lounging on the same side of the fire as before, only now she was facing the entrance.
She had her knees bent slightly, and she sat propped on her outstretched arms, head thrown back, pointing those beautiful, firm, upturned orbs at the cave ceiling on which the fire danced redly. It danced redly on her body, as well, lending her the aspect of a demon dancing in the fires of hell—albeit a beautiful, willowy, curvy demon with honey-blond hair.
As he ducked into the cave, his rifle under his arm, she looked at him and smiled beautifully, jade eyes flashing. “Thank you!”
He grumbled another reply, set both pots near the flames, then sat back against the cave wall and reached into his buckskin to dig a three-for-a-nickel cheroot from the breast pocket of his frock coat. He struck a match, got the smoke going, and stared at the egg-shaped cave opening as he said, “Let’s have it.”
“Let’s have what?” In the periphery of his vision, he saw her looking at him with wide-eyed innocence. Then her eyelids dropped halfway and her mouth corners rose lustily. “Are you saying you’d like me again, Longarm? Maybe you’ve been thinking about how much fun we had, and you’d like to impale me again with that ax handle of yours.”
She shrugged. “I know I certainly wouldn’t mind it a bit. Might even take my mind off all the trouble I’m in!”
Chapter 10
“What I want to know,” Longarm said, trying to ignore her taunting invitation, staring out the oval-shaped cavern door, puffing the cheroot with a little too much vigor, “is what kind of trouble you got yourself into with Gunn and Cruz?”
“Do you have something I can wash myself with?”
Frowning, he turned to where she still sprawled as though on some red plush settee in an expensive flesh parlor in Denver, naked as the day she was born. He let smoke dribble out his nostrils. “Huh?”
