Destined to Die (10 page)

‘I’m Anne Kruger. This is Arnie Dalton. His wife Fran is fixin’ your supper. If you tell us your name, we won’t be strangers, will we?’

‘Barnaby Gold. And I’m still not going to buy you a drink.’

‘Leave it, Annie,’ Dalton said harshly, eyeing his customer intently.

The whore gave a toss of her head which set her dyed blonde hair swinging. Then overemphasised the sway of her hips when she returned to the game of solitaire.

‘Gold,uh?’

‘More like iron, as in pig,’ Annie rasped venomously.

Dalton tried to mask the words by saying quickly: ‘You got no need of that shotgun, Mr Gold.’

‘I haven’t?’

‘The Gunman
who was askin’ about you - stayed here in the hotel for a week - he left town this mornin’.’

‘After he got a telegraph? His name was Clinton Davis?’

A nod.

‘He found me.’

Dalton looked tense. Then shrugged his shoulders.

A silence followed, in which Barnaby Gold was the only one of the trio to seem at ease with it. The bartender and the whore were relieved when the double doors swung open and Fran Dalton emerged. Carrying a tray on which there was a plate of food, mug of coffee and a knife and fork.

She was perhaps ten years younger than her husband. A little taller and much slimmer. Her face was angular and plain, but attractive in the set of her blue eyes and the way her short black hair hugged her cheeks. Somehow sultry. She carried her small-breasted, narrow-hipped body well. Her sexuality far more alluring than the obvious sensualness of the professional seller of favours.

‘Here all right, mister?’ she asked as she set down the tray on a table at the edge of the dance floor.

‘Appreciate it,’ Gold acknowledged, aware of the intensity of her glance at him - perhaps indicating that Annie had said more about him than that he was hungry. She went back to the kitchen.

He finished his beer and took the Murcott to the table, laid it on a spare chair. He wiped his hands down his coat before he started to eat. And kept on both the coat and hat. The food was plain, well-cooked and tasty.

Annie continued to play solitaire and Dalton went back to the mail order catalogue he had been reading before Gold entered. But both cast frequent surreptitious glances at the eating man. Apprehensive and riled.

When he had satisfied the edge of his hunger, he asked: ‘You have a room I can rent, Mr Dalton?’

‘Twelve of them. We’re empty right now.’

‘Hot bath?’

‘No trouble, Mr Gold.’

‘The livery is closed. Have a horse outside.’

‘Fred Street will be in later. He’ll take care of your mount.’

‘How about Floyd Polk?’

‘The sheriff?’

‘Name I was given.’

‘The right one. He ain’t in town right now. Had to go over to Prescott last week. Due back pretty soon, I guess.’

Another silence, disturbed by the scrape of fork on plate and the swallowing sounds Gold made.

‘Bounty hunter!’ Annie said suddenly.

Arnie Dalton glared at her.

‘Why else would someone like him want to see the sheriff?’

‘His business is his own!’ He blurted it out so fast that spittle ran down his chin. He wiped it off with his shirt sleeve. ‘I’ve told you before, girl! If you don’t watch your mouth, I’ll throw you outta this place!’

‘I don’t kill for money, lady.’

Both of them broke free of the angry stares they were locked on. To gaze at Gold. Who finished the last of his coffee and lifted the Murcott off the chair before getting to his feet.

‘Coming, lady?’

‘Uh? Where?’

‘Upstairs.’

‘Well, you’ve changed your damn tune.’

‘Be nice, Annie,’ Dalton urged.

‘Well,’ she said with a petulant pout, but got to her feet. ‘He wouldn’t even buy me one lousy drink.’

‘I’ll see Fred Street tends to your mount, Mr Gold.’

‘Appreciate it.’

He gestured with the Murcott for Annie to go up the stairs ahead of him.

‘When’ll you be wantin’ to take the hot bath?’ Dalton called after him.

The young man on the stairway did not shift his gaze away from the swaying rear of the whore, each movement of the flesh visible because of the tautness of the red fabric stretched over it. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth then called out: ‘First things first’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘ANY room you like, mister Mine if you want, but it ain’t hardly got space to turn around in.’

The hallway leading off from the head of the stairs was illuminated only by blue moonlight entering through a window at the far end. Gold halted at the first door on the left he came to and swung it open. Went across the threshold into a room with a window overlooking the balcony and the street. Furnished with a double bed with a small table on one side and a chair at the other, a clothes closet, a bureau with a basin and pitcher on it and three small rugs. A kerosene lamp on the bedhead table. Two framed prints of flowers in vases on the wall flanking the bureau.

Annie had to come back down the hallway several yards when she realised he was no longer behind her.

‘Don’t tell a person what you’re gonna do, will you?’ she snapped. And slammed the door at her back.

Gold was at the window, and now he opened it a crack at the bottom, after glancing out along the still-deserted street.

‘Okay, lady. I’m going to screw you. So get out of those clothes.’

‘You gonna pull the drapes?’

‘No.’

He was at the chair now. Rested the Murcott against it and began to take off his hat and coat

‘So you don’t want the lamp lit?’

‘I get it cheaper for putting on a show for the local folks?’

Her dress had loops and buttons down the back from the nape of the neck to her waist. She glared her displeasure at him while she put both hands behind her, working at unfastening the loops from the buttons.

He took off his clothing with the same kind of slow deliberation he did most things. Draped each item carefully across the chair. Appeared to pay no attention to the whore as the top of the dress slid off her arms and torso. Nor when she kicked off her shoes, inserted a thumb under the
waistline at either side and crouched to push the dress, her underclothing and hose free of her hips and legs. Then stood up and stepped away from the heap of garments on the floor. Totally naked.

Barnaby Gold was still wearing his grey long-johns.

‘Most men enjoy watchin’ a woman take off her clothes.’

He looked at her blatantly now, as he unfastened the buttons down his chest. ‘You’re good at it, lady. Fast’

His eyes, their colour concealed by the darkness, glinted a little in the low level of moonlight as he surveyed her from the ankles up.

Her skin was very white and looked smooth. Her legs were finely shaped, slender, the tapered thighs in proportion with the calves. He had seen the broadness of her hips. Without the camouflage of the flare of the dress’s skirt and the constricting influence of the severely gathered waistline, her belly was seen to bulge and there was only a slight inward curve above each hipbone. Her sex was marked with a large and luxuriant triangle of jet black pubic hair. Her breasts were as large as they had promised to be: necessarily drooped into pear-shapes rather than standing as cones. The areas of the nipples were very dark. There was a lot of hair under her armpits.

Since she was a whore, she would not always have been well used by men. Maybe hated all men, if less forth-rightly than she loathed Gold. But she had taken care of her body well enough, ensuring that the merchandise she had to sell was attractive to the committed purchaser.

‘You like what you see, mister?’

He shrugged out of the top of the long-johns, to reveal a firm fleshed and not overly muscled torso, the matting of hair on his chest fine and as blond as that on his head.

‘You hear me complaining, lady?’

‘Well, you sure don’t look so happy at what you’re seein’.’

He straightened up from taking off the long-johns and when the whore raised her gaze from the base of his belly to his face, her mood had altered. From resentful petulance to smiling pride.

‘Well, in one way you’re as hard as you look, mister.’

She brought up her hands to cradle each heavy breast in the palms as she came across the room toward the bed.

‘I’ll take care of that,’ he told her.

She moved around the end of the bed to his side of it and halted a foot in front of him. He reached out and gently caressed her breasts with his hands in the attitudes of claws: his fingertips testing the soft smoothness of her skin while the palms massaged her nipples.

She had dropped her arms to her sides. Now raised them to cup the hard, sparse flesh contouring his hipbones. He moaned softly. Her hands moved around to the back of him and exerted a slight pressure.

‘Not yet, lady.’

Footfalls sounded on the street below the cracked open window. Then across the stoop boarding,

‘Why don’t you call me Anne?’

He made no response. Leaned his head down. She thought he was going to kiss her on the mouth and she pouted her lips in readiness. But instead his face went lower and his hands raised her breasts. He brushed his lips delicately across the upper slope of each.

She leaned the side of her face into his hair. Then, as he continued to move his mouth on her breasts, alternately upon the rough texture of the nipples and the creamy smoothness of the pale
skin, she tentatively brought her hands up the sides of his body. To his shoulders, his neck and then his face.

His day’s growth of bristles prickled her hands when she clutched his cheeks tightly. But he did not allow her to pull his exploring mouth closer. And his beard did not scrape her flesh. Merely brushed it, to become part of the pleasure his moist lips and tongue gave her.

Now she moaned, and arched her body toward his.

He allowed this to the extent where the hirsute base of her belly made the lightest of contacts with the exposed tip of his sex. And when he held back from her, she moved a hand away from his face: to grasp him.

‘Oh, God, it’s been so long!’ she rasped through teeth clenched in a half-grin, half-scowl of desire.

‘Okay, lady,’ he said and slowly, in a series of fluid motions, straightened up and eased away from her.

For perhaps a full second, her expression was entirely a scowl, as she released her hold on him and from the utter lack of emotion on his face feared he had merely been toying with her. As a prelude to some kind of punishment for the way she had been toward him down in the saloon.

But then he moved again. To lift her off her feet, turn, and lay her gently on the bed. And she submitted entirely to him. Forcing herself to control the urgency of her desire as he carefully eased her thighs apart with his clawed hands, knelt on the bed between them and then lowered himself down on to her.

His hands went to her face and held each cheek. His chest hair brushed her nipples. He kissed her on the lips, as gently as every other way he had touched her since she came to him.

She moaned, a sound on the threshold of ecstatic pleasure, as she felt him enter her: experienced, too, the feel of his belly and chest along her body.

For a moment longer, he remained perfectly still: locked into her burning, very wet want to the full extent of his own. Then he raised his lips from her mouth, said: ‘Open your eyes, lady.’

She snapped the lids wide and in the soft moonlight from the window her face in its surround of blonde hair on the pillow was a distraught mask: as if she were on the verge of tearful pleading for release. This as he raised himself slightly, still cradling her cheeks in his cupped hands. His own youthful face still totally expressionless.

But then he began to fulfil her searing need. And to ease the pent-up lust he had controlled until now. Withdrawing and thrusting, withdrawing and thrusting. Angling himself into her in such a way that she received the utmost pleasure: driving deeply enough to bring himself toward the peak of sexual gratification at a carefully measured pace.

His eyes held hers in a fixed stare across a gap of twelve inches. His lips stayed in a firm line.

Until she began to roll her head from side to side on the pillow. Was allowed to by his hands which continued to hold her. Then she forced her legs wider apart. Writhed her belly and breasts beneath him. Brought up her hands to cup his face. Parted her lips and protruded and withdrew the tip of her tongue between them in a cadence that matched his movements inside her.

Moaned and cried out with soft shrillness. Her eyes closed tightly now. She sweated. Became silent and rigid Let out her breath, hot on his face, in a long sigh. Felt his lust flood into her. Snapped open her eyes and saw that he was staring at her face in the same way as before. While he spasmed to the climax.

When his features were abruptly softened by a gentle smile.

‘Mister, I ain’t never had a payin’ customer who...’ She ran out of breath and had to suck more into her lungs.

‘My pleasure, lady,’ he told her as he came out of her, released her face and swung off the bed.