High and Wild (16 page)

From somewhere, he'd grabbed his revolver. He clicked the hammer back and aimed it at her.

“Get up, you lyin' bitch. You may not be a whore, but I'm gonna make you one. My whore!”

Raven thought of the derringer residing in the holster strapped to her thigh. She looked at the maw of Goodthunder's pistol yawning down at her. She'd never make it to the little .36 before he drilled a .44 pill through her head.

She didn't have to try.

There was a crisp tinkle of breaking glass.

Goodthunder grunted. His head jerked violently.

He lowered his arm and dropped the Remington. He staggered two steps forward before his knees buckled and he hit the floor. He knelt there beside Raven. He stared toward the door, down which thick gobs of blood speckled white with bone and brains dribbled. Then he fell forward and hit the floor flat on his face with a resolute thump.

Raven rose to her haunches and looked at the sheriff. Blood and brain shone through a large hole in the back of his head. She looked at the glass balcony door. The firelight from below showed her a neat, round hole about as large as a silver dollar.

Then she remembered that about the same time she'd heard the glass break, she'd heard a popping sound louder than the rest of the gunfire emanating from around the town.

She stared down at Goodthunder once more, and shock pitched her voice as she said, “Oh, my God, a Big Fifty . . .”

17

A
man clad in skins
and furs and a fur hat emerged from a beer tent on the right side of the trail, near the east end of Wendigo, and gave a howl as he triggered an old cap-and-ball pistol at the stars.

“Whoo-hoooo!” he whooped. “I'm prob'ly gonna be blind come mornin', pards, but ain't tonight grand? Whoo-hooo!”

He blasted the old Confederate popper skyward, and Haskell turned to Slake, riding just off his right stirrup.

“Christ, do these cork-headed fools do this every night?”

“What, shoot? Blow off steam?” asked Bodeen. “Yeah, I think there's something in the busthead the lesser barmen serve around here that makes 'em a little loco.”

“They ever shoot each other?”

“Why, of course they do. But the way Goodthunder sees it, the population is growin' too fast, anyways.”

“Shit,” said Slake, “the only real problem with it is that every morning, me an' Bodeen gotta go out and load up all the dead into a wagon and haul 'em way the hell out in the mountains 'less'n the bears and wildcats start comin' into town to dine!”

He snickered and pulled a little canvas sack of Levi Garrett snuff from inside his coat and packed a pinch against his gum.

There was more pistol fire and even some rifle blasts behind Haskell, who glanced back over his shoulder at the firelit main street of Wendigo. Being unarmed and trussed up like a pig to the slaughter, he felt edgy with so many guns being triggered around him. He was happy—at least, as happy as possible under such circumstances—to ride on out of the village and have the raucousness of the bacchanal dwindle behind him.

On the other hand, he was still unarmed out here, trussed up, and Slake and Bodeen might very well be leading him out to where they hauled the rest of the dead men, with him on the verge of being one of them.

Frustration and anger burned through him. He gave a grunt as he tried to pull his hands free of the cuffs. Powerful as he was, he was no match for the steel bracelets. As he strained against them, they merely cut deeper into his wrists.

But then lights shimmered on the trail's left side. The trail itself forked. Slake and Bodeen hazed Haskell's black onto the left tine of the fork and up onto a gravel-paved, circular drive crowned with a large house thrusting its steeply pitched roof and turrets toward the starry mountain sky. There appeared to be a barn and a couple of other outbuildings behind the place and a small corral beside which a buggy sat, its tongue drooping.

From one of the several chimneys of the grand house, gray smoke unfurled. It perfumed the air with a
piñon
tang.

Before the house's large front veranda, a rod-iron hitch rack stretched between six-foot-high stone pyramids. Haskell stared in fascination at the tall house with its gingerbread trim and the large front door bedecked with a brass knocker. The curtained windows glowed with a dull red light bespeaking warmth, opulence, and decadent comfort in dramatic contrast to the crudeness that Bear had just left.

“What the hell?” Bear said, still seated on the black and scowling at the house.

“Shut up,” Slake snarled at him. “Just climb down from there. You got an appointment.”

“Yeah, an appointment with a devil.” Bodeen snickered as he tied all three horses to the hitch rack.

Just then, the front door opened. A trapezoid of umber light slid out onto the dark veranda. A silhouette appeared in the half-open doorway, and a woman's crisp voice said, “What was that, Deputy?”

Bodeen jerked his hatted head toward the door. “Uh . . . sorry, Miss Judith. I didn't mean nothin'—”

“Shut up, you insolent bastard. You do realize that if it weren't for me, you'd likely be sweeping horse shit out of the local livery barns, don't you?”

Haskell could see the deputy's throat work as he swallowed. Bodeen glanced at Slake, who also stood staring dreadfully toward the silhouette of the woman in the doorway.

Bodeen said, as though his throat were filled with glass shards, “Yes, ma'am, I purely do. Sometimes my tongue moves a little quicker than my thinker box, that's all.”

“Shut up, moron.” She lifted her chin a little and said, “Do you expect me to talk to him while he's sitting on his horse?”

“Uh . . . no, ma'am.”

Bodeen and Slake both turned to Haskell and said at the same time, “Git down!”

Haskell was mildly perplexed. The befuddlement was tempered, however, by his still being alive. He'd thought he'd had a good chance of sporting an extra hole in his head by now.

He pulled his right boot out of its stirrup, swung that leg over the black's neck, and dropped straight down to the ground. He landed flat-footed with a thud.

“Git up there,” Bodeen said. “Miss Judith wants to have a talk with ya.”

Haskell had already been moving to the porch. As he stepped between Goodthunder's deputies, he looked coldly at each much shorter man down over each of his shoulders and then climbed the porch steps.

He smelled the woman before he could even see any more than her gowned silhouette. She wore a scent that smelled strongly of lilacs. There was also the smell of tobacco, and then, when he was standing before her and could see her pretty albeit haughty face better, she lifted a long ebony cigarette holder to her lips and puffed the ready-made quirley protruding from the end.

The cigarette glowed. The light was reflected in her jade eyes.

Haskell scowled down at her. “I do apologize, ma'am. If I'd known I was goin' callin' this evenin', I'd have brought flowers.”

As she blew smoke at his broad chest, she said, “You are one big son of a bitch, aren't you?” She paused to stare up at him obliquely, her painted lips slightly parted. Her heavy, pale breasts rose and fell behind the corset of her red velvet dress. She wore a cape of the same material negligently about her shoulders.

She took a step back and drew the door wide. “Get in here.”

Haskell heard a boot thud on a porch step behind him, and Judith snapped, “Bodeen, Slake, not you. Stay out here with the horses. And don't piss on my shrubs.”

Haskell had to smile at that. Then he turned to one side to show the woman the handcuffs. “I'd feel like a better-heeled guest if you'd have them remove these irons.”

“If you'd been a better-heeled guest, you wouldn't have tracked mule dung all over the rug in my saloon.”

Haskell glanced into the dimly lit, dark-paneled foyer behind her. “I bet you got plenty of nice rugs.”

She looked around him at Goodthunder's deputies. “Take the cuffs off.”

Slake said, “You sure about that?” But the woman cowed him with a look. Slake cleared his throat and came up and unlocked the cuffs.

Haskell thought he'd go ahead and exploit to the fullest the woman's inexplicable goodwill. “I feel right naked without my guns.”

Her eyes flared. “Oh, you do, do you?”

Haskell held her glare. They stared at each other for about fifteen seconds before a smile slowly shaped itself on her mouth, and she said, “Bring the bastard his weapons, for chrissakes.”

It was almost as if she'd wanted to surprise the hell out of him. And she'd certainly done just that. A feather could have knocked Bear over when Bodeen rummaged around in his saddlebags and tramped up the porch steps. He had Haskell's LeMat in one hand, his Russian .44 in the other.

The deputy didn't say anything, just stared hard at Bear as he held the guns out to him, barrels first.

“Still missin' my rifle,” Haskell said, feeling giddy as he dropped the LeMat into the holster strapped to his thigh and the Russian into the holster positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip.

“It's back at the office,” Bodeen said, curling his nose with disdain. “With your saddlebags and your coat. Hope you don't get too chilly.”

With that, he swung around and stomped back down to the yard to stand with Slake and the horses.

“Come on in, and wipe your goddamn boots off on the rug—the one that is
meant
for soiling.” Judith glowered at him as she stepped back against the door. “I have a fire laid in the parlor.”

Haskell walked into the foyer and scrubbed his boots off on the hemp rug in front of the door. When she'd inspected his boots closely, she gave a satisfied cluck and closed the door behind him.

He stood in front of it, staring at the half-breed bouncer whose face he had destroyed back at the Sawatch earlier in the day. The half-breed had been sitting in an upholstered armchair near a potted plant, against the foyer's left wall. Both his eyes were swollen nearly shut, and one arm was in a sling. His lips were puffy.

He sat stiffly, staring back at Haskell and opening and closing his hands around the sawed-off ten-gauge shotgun he held barrel-up between his legs. His face was expressionless, although his nostrils were expanding and contracting slowly.

Judith took a drag off her cigarette. “My boy Samson has had better days. Haven't you, Samson?”

Samson kept his swollen-eyed gaze on Bear.

Judith said, “Rock's around here somewhere, patrolling the grounds, I think. He didn't fare much better, but they'll both live. I'm hoping they learned something.” She looked coolly at Haskell. “I'm hoping you did, too.”

“All right, all right—next time, I'll scrape my boots.”

She walked saucily past him, thin tendrils of blue smoke curling in the air behind her. “Follow me.”

Haskell said, “Samson, it's been a pleasure,” and followed the woman through a door to the right.

They walked down another short hall between two smaller rooms—one appeared to be a sunroom filled with plants—and through a set of French doors and into a smartly appointed parlor.

Here the furniture was all elegantly upholstered armchairs, a settee, a spruce-green fainting couch, and a baby grand piano in a corner. The paper on the walls was the same green as the fainting couch.

Oil paintings hung here and there between heavy, walnut shelves teeming with books, some of which appeared worn enough to have been read. Across from a stone fireplace, in which long flames danced and crackled cozily, was a heavily varnished liquor cabinet with a mirror set between two rows of upper shelves bedecked with sparkling glasses of every shape and size.

“Drink?” she asked, heading for the liquor layout.

“Why not? I figure you didn't drag me out here to poison me.”

“What is your poison, Haskell?”

“You got any Kentucky bourbon?”

“Sam Clay all right?”

Haskell chuckled. “It'll do.”

Judith crouched to pull a bottle off a lower shelf of the cabinet. Haskell recognized the label consisting of a black shield, with palms and hatchets on heavy gold-flecked paper. “Sam Clay Whiskey” was in heavy, ornate white letters.

His mouth watered as she splashed the rich, dark red liquor into two snifters. There was a soft, mouselike squeak as she shoved the cork back into the bottle. She brought a snifter to him, sipped her own drink, and said with typical insolence, “You have a fine taste in liquor for a loud, obnoxious, shit-tracking brigand.”

He was perusing the books on one of her shelves. “You got some fine reading for a saloon-ownin', blue-tongued bitch.” He glanced at her with open challenge. “Or devil, as Bodeen put it outside.”

She laughed huskily at that, more impressed than disparaged, and took another sip of her bourbon. “Don't tell me a man like you reads.”

“Sure as hell, I read.” Bear grinned down at her, but he himself couldn't help being mildly offended. Everyone at first thought him soft in his thinker box, merely because he was big and shaggy and had been able to split an entire cord of seasoned oak by himself inside of an hour. They thought him illiterate, able only to sign his name with a thick black X.

But Haskell had had plenty of schooling, though none of it formal. He'd been a naturally curious young man who'd been taught the fundamentals of reading and writing by the wife of a neighboring Texas rancher.

She'd taught him other things, too, including the art of fornication in all its sundry incarnations.

“Tell me something, Mister—”

“Please, call me Bear. After all, I did track shit on your rug.”

“What's the last book you read, Bear?”

“That would be the one I reread now and again, whenever I find myself with time on my hands.
Moby-Dick
by a feller named Melville.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Not many have. A sawbones gave it to me back when I was recovering from wounds I incurred during the war. I love the hell out of it, but I still haven't figured it all out. Someday I hope to. I'm convinced I'll be all the better for it.”

Miss O'Brien narrowed a skeptical eye. “If you've read it so many times, quote me a few lines.”

Haskell sipped his drink, drew a breath, and said without hesitation, the words rippling off his tongue as they'd flowed across his brain, carving their own furrow, so many times: “‘Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet' . . . blah, blah . . . ‘then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.'”