High and Wild (22 page)

There was another shrill scream, and Haskell stepped back as the man tumbled down from the roof to hit the ground with another dull thud, the finely churned dust of the yard wafting around him.

The stalker's revolving Colt rifle followed him down to land beside him with a
clank
. Haskell stepped quickly forward and planted his boot on the
hombre
's chest while angling the LeMat at the man's head and scowling down along the barrel.

He froze. Frowned. There were two soft lumps beneath where his right boot was planted firmly on the man's chest.

A
woman
's chest, he saw now as the girl struggled beneath him, raising her head from which her hat had tumbled, curls of thick, tawny hair partly obscuring her face. Come to think of it, “his” screams had been rather high-pitched. She wrapped both hands around Haskell's black boot and cursed like an Irish gandy dancer as she tried to heave it off her tits snuggling behind a coarse wool plaid man's work shirt.

Haskell kept his boot firmly in place, although, realizing he had a female beneath him, he eased back on the pressure slightly so as not to bust her breastbone. He cuffed his slouch hat back off his broad forehead and said, “Well, Miss Redwine. Teddy, ain't it? Fancy meetin' you here!”

24

F
uck you, asshole.”

The girl lay back in defeat, breathing hard and glaring up at Haskell past the boot he still had on her chest. “If you're gonna kill me, go ahead and get it over with. If you think I'm gonna let you stick your dick in me, you got another think comin'!”

Bear gave a caustic chuff as he leaned down and pulled the old-model Remington from the holster on her right hip. He tossed it into the dirt about twenty yards away and then removed his boot from her chest. He reached down to grab her arm, and she recoiled from his hand as though from a striking snake.

“I'm just tryin' to help you up,” he said, and extended his hand.

“I don't need your fuckin' help.” She rolled onto her hands and knees and remained there as though catching her breath.

“You all right?”

“Fuck you.”

“You sure have a blue tongue for such a purty girl,” Haskell said. “If you ain't all right, you better stay down there, and I'll tend to you as best I can.”

With an angry, painful grunt, she heaved herself to her feet and turned around, shoving her tawny curls out of her eyes with both gloved hands while continuing to glare at him. Her eyes were copper with pretty yellow specks in them.

A nice-sized bust pushed against her pinstriped shirt. Suspenders pushed her breasts together alluringly. One button of her shirt had been ripped off, opening her shirt enough to reveal a well-filled chemise.

“I just bet you'd like to tend to me,” she spit out, wrinkling her nose and narrowing her eyes. A real polecat, Haskell thought.

Haughtily, she stooped to pick up her tobacco-brown Stetson. As she batted it against the chaps she wore over her jeans, Haskell picked up the Colt's revolving rifle, to keep it away from her, and rested the rifle's barrel on his shoulder.

“Why in the hell are you shadowin' me, little lady?”

“Don't ‘little lady' me, killer!”

“Killer?”

“You know what you are.”

“Yes, I do, and it ain't no killer.”

She stood back, glaring at him, her breasts rising and falling as she breathed from both exertion and fear, although also she seemed to be steaming with a good bit of rage. “I saw you ridin' the trail earlier, lookin' behind you like you were makin' sure no one was followin' you. You're headin' for the high country. I just sent my brother and our hired man on a run up to the North Star, and I followed you to make sure they weren't your next targets.”

Teddy Redwine spit dust from her lips. “What'd you stop here for? You usin' this place for a hideout? I reckon it's right fittin', in a sick sorta way, ain't it, since you killed the man who owned this place? Now look at it.” She waved her hat at the empty, dusty yard. “Like your handiwork?”

Haskell opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off. “Who you workin' for? Judith? I hear the deputies took you to her place last night. It's all over town, you damn fool.”

“Yeah, that's right,” Haskell said. “I tramped shit on her floor so Goodthunder's deputies could arrest me and then pull me out of the jail to visit with Judith under cover of darkness.”

“You mean throw the wood to her, under the covers of that big bed I heard she has at that silly-looking house.”

“Jesus, you got a mouth on you!”

“Samson and Rock ain't the most tight-lipped bodyguards in the world.” Teddy glanced at her rifle riding Haskell's shoulder. “You gonna kill me now? If so, go ahead. If you think you're gonna rape me—”

“I know, I know, I got another think comin'.” Haskell clicked open the rifle's loading gate and rolled the cylinder until all six cartridges had plopped onto the ground.

Then he said, “Here,” and tossed the rifle to the girl, who caught it out of the air with one hand, frowning her befuddlement. He tossed her the cartridge he'd found inside the cabin. She caught that out of the air with her other hand.

“That mean anything to you?”

Teddy looked down at it in her hand and then looked up at Haskell, her eyes as perplexed as before. “A fifty-ninety shell?”

“Came from in there.”

“The killer's said to be shooting a Big Fifty.”

“Figured as much. It might be that he holes up here from time to time. Someone filled the
olla
on the porch recently, and there's kindling by the stove and a pallet on the floor.”

The girl tossed the cartridge back to Haskell, who returned it to the pocket of his coat. She narrowed one eye and planted her free hand on her hip. “Who the hell are you, Mister?”

Bear saw no reason to conceal his identity any longer.

“Pinkerton agent. I'm here to find out what happened to Malcolm Briar.” Haskell returned what was left of his stogie to his mouth. “His family's worried.”

He turned and walked away from the girl and around the cabin, heading for his horse. Behind him, he heard her say, “Pinkerton?”

He kept walking. He doubted she knew anything more than what he'd already learned, and he had a long climb into the mountains to find where Briar had wrecked. Besides, she wasn't friendly, and he didn't like the feelings that her full shirt was evoking in his loins. He was a guitar, as most men were, but sometimes he just felt foolish being played so easily.

Bear growled when he heard footsteps behind her. “Hold on, hold on!” she called.

Ignoring her, Haskell walked around the front of the cabin and headed toward where the black stood on the other side of the windmill from where it'd been standing before. Teddy ran up beside him and matched him stride for stride, although she was still practically running. “You really a Pinkerton?”

“That's right.”

“You work for Mr.
Allan
Pinkerton?”

Haskell chuckled. Everyone in the country had long since heard of the esteemed head of the Pinkerton Agency, about whom much had been written, although most of it was pulp confabulations churned out by dime novelists for the starry-eyed, unwashed masses.

“Shit, I didn't know they grew detectives big as you,” Teddy said as Haskell swung up onto the black's back.

“Learn somethin' new every day, Teddy. Uh, I can call you Teddy, can't I?” Haskell dug a match out of his shirt pocket. “I learned your name from your brother, but I wouldn't doubt every man in town knows it.” He gave her a lusty wink. “And would like to know it better.”

She stared up at him skeptically as he scratched the match to life and cupped the flame to the stogie. She said, “I'm not sure about that.”

“About what?”

“If I'd allow you to call me Teddy.”

“All right. I kinda like how ‘Theodora' rolls off the tongue, anyways.” Haskell tossed the match into the dust near her boots and sucked the cigar. “Or shall I stick to Miss Redwine? That is right pretty.”

He couldn't help raking her long, slender but also supple figure again with his customarily brash gaze, grinning like a snake noting the sudden appearance of a cottontail in its den.

She planted her fist on her hip again and canted her head far to one side. “Does Mr. Pinkerton know how you undress young ladies with your eyes?”

“I put it in all my reports.”

She held his stare, trying to keep her face stony, but suddenly, her mouth corners rose slightly and a flush started in her pretty suntanned cheeks. She glanced away quickly, embarrassed. “What shall I call you?”

“Bear.”

“Where you headed, Bear?”

Haskell turned his chin toward the high northern mountains. “I'm headin' up to investigate the scene of Briar's wreck. I doubt I'll find anything of interest except twenty tons of rock, maybe some bones scattered by scavengers, but I gotta write somethin' in the report that'll be sent to the man's family. I'd also like to include the name of his killer before I'm finished here.”

“Do you know where it's at?”

“The wreck? I was told in town.”

“You were told in town, huh?” Teddy turned her mouth down and shook her head in disgust. “Then you don't know shit. Them mountains look a whole lot different up there than they do down here, and not all the trails are marked.”

She added in even deeper disgust, as though it was just one more thing she had to add to a growing list of her day's onerous chores, “I'd better ride along, show you where it's at.”

She thrust her hand up at him. “Give me a ride to my horse, will you? I left him ground-reined outside the gate.”

H
askell decided to let
Teddy Redwine serve as his guide for two reasons.

One, he knew how vast the Sawatch was and how easily even a veteran traveler could get hopelessly lost in it. Two, while he didn't like being played like a guitar, feeling the two soft mounds of Teddy's breasts pressing against his back as he rode her out to her
pinto
pony waiting outside the freight-yard gate caused him not to mind having his strings strummed quite so much.

They rode stirrup-to-stirrup across the floor of the valley and up into the pines. It wasn't long after reaching the trees and the first jog of forested foothills that Haskell became well aware of just how large the Ute Field was and how varied in landscape. He and Teddy rode through more valleys and climbed more ridges, each ridge steeper than the last, and then they rode through another canyon, following a creek through firs, spruce, tamaracks, and aspens.

There were prospector cabins here and there in hollows where creeks flashed and murmured. Some of the hovels looked hunched, dark, and abandoned, while a few had thin tendrils of smoke curling from their brick chimneys or tin stovepipes and long stretches of sluice boxes, or “long toms,” extending down slopes to nearby streams.

Haskell saw several trails branching off from the one that he and Teddy were following. Some were marked with signs of routes to different mines, including the Fancy Lady and the Irish Rose.

An hour after they'd left the Briar freight yard, he saw the sign marking the trail to the highest mine in the field, the North Star. The trail didn't look any different from the others: two deep wheel tracks winding and climbing off through the boulder-strewn, crag-pocked forest, visible for only a few yards before disappearing around a bend.

As the riders climbed the trail leading toward the King Henry mine and the scene of Briar's wreck, they had to pull off the trail to let a freight train pass. The train consisted of four large Murphy wagons with wheels nearly as tall as Haskell himself and outfitted with log chains for steep cornering.

Each wagon had a driver and a shotgun rider, both looking owly and regarding Haskell and Teddy warily owing in no small part to the killer on the loose. The four wagons, each pulled by ten braying, steaming mules, were piled high with gravelly ore headed for the stamping mills outside Wendigo for processing.

The drivers bellowed curses at the stubborn teams negotiating the steep terrain and the rocks that had been pushed up into the tracks by the frequent mountain rains coupled with near-freezing nights all year long. The blacksnakes popped like gunfire.

Men, mules, and clattering wagons rumbled past, their din dwindling faintly as they continued bouncing and churning and swaying off down the mountain.

Haskell and Teddy stopped to rest their horses a couple of times, an hour later, in the early afternoon, reaching the place on the trail where Briar had gone off the road. The aspens along the trail were nearly all yellow-leafed with the coming fall, the sunlight dancing and flashing silver as the breeze brushed them.

The trail descended the shoulder of a mountain. On Haskell's left, the pine and aspen forest climbed. To his right, just beyond the trail that had likely been blasted by dynamite out of the mountainside, a deep canyon dropped away.

Haskell dismounted the black, dropped the horse's reins, and walked over to the canyon's lip, staring down into the chasm. On the bottom, a wide stream flashed, rippling over rocks. Beyond the stream, the gravelly floor of the canyon rose toward more forest covering the canyon's opposite side, which was not as steep as the one upon which he stood. Beyond and above the trees, a great pinnacle of wind-blasted rock jutted above a massive talus slide.