High and Wild (23 page)

Haskell knew that the white specks dotting the slide were bighorn sheep pulling at the short alpine grass and fescue growing amid the rocks.

It would have been a jaw-droppingly beautiful scene if not for the wagon piled up on the canyon floor below Haskell, lying on its side sort of half in and half out of the stream. The wagon was in pieces, with wheel spokes and parts of its steel frame jutting here and there. The ore was spread out all around it, some in the stream and some on the gravelly bank beyond it.

The ten mules that had been pulling the wagon more than a year ago were dun-brown blotches, legs either crushed beneath them or under the ore or under the wagon itself or sticking out to one side. The poor beasts had nearly been turned to skeletons by time and carrion eaters, with only bits of hide remaining. Just now, Haskell watched a bald eagle sitting on the wither of one mule and poking its snout at the mule's face, probably feasting on what remained in an eye socket.

Haskell glanced at Teddy, who now stood beside him, staring stonily into the canyon. “How many men were part of Briar's train?”

“I heard it was just him and the two men who worked for him. They were going ahead. He was bringing up the rear.”

“They heard a gunshot just before he went off the trail?”

“That's the word that was goin' around Wendigo. Briar was the first one killed. His men got spooked and pulled out. About six weeks after Briar, one of Judith and Geist's men got beefed on this same trail farther up the mountain. Now someone gets hit about once a month.”

“I bet it's got the freighters pretty jumpy.”

“Ain't easy keepin' men on the roll. But me an' Burt, we got nothin' else to do, nowhere else to go. Neither does our hired man, Sonny Tidewater. We're stickin' it out. I heard one of Judith and Geist's men was wrecked last night. That means we got a few weeks clear till the shooter hits again. Maybe by then, the snows will come, and we'll all have to shut down for the winter. It ain't easy gettin' through the winter up here, but maybe the shooter will pull out, head down the mountains. Maybe he won't come back. I'm hopin'.”

Teddy removed her hand and ran it through her long, tawny hair.

“Dangerous damn work for kids,” Haskell said.

She narrowed an angry eye at him. “Who's a kid?”

“You know, Teddy,” Haskell couldn't help telling her, “there are easier ways to make a livin'.”

She shook her head and sighed. “Typical man. You ain't even got my panties off yet, and you're already tryin' to tell me what to do.”

Even Bear was shocked by that, his tongue in a knot.

Teddy said, “You wanna go down there and do your investigation, Mr. Pinkerton, or you wanna stand around up here telling me how to live my life?”

Haskell still couldn't get his tongue to work, so he just canted his head toward the canyon.

“All right, then, Mr. Pinkerton, sir.” Teddy arched her brows at him and turned to swing up onto her
pinto
's back. “I hope you can ride as well as you can give orders.”

She put the steel to the
pinto
's flanks with a raucous, “H-yah!” and galloped on down the trail in the direction from which they'd come, laughing over her shoulder at him.

25

H
askell had to admit
to feeling a little wary as he rode on down the trail after Teddy.

He usually preferred being the craziest one around, and when he wasn't—when he wasn't exactly sure how high the bar of relative sanity had been raised or, as regarding the case at hand, how deep was the chasm of craziness confronting him—he started feeling apprehensive.

He himself was crazier than a tree full of owls, so anyone crazier was pure loony and possibly even dangerous.

He was starting to believe that Teddy Redwine had him beat by at least an owl or two.

They weren't on the trail long before Teddy swerved off of it where it curved away from the canyon. She followed the line of the canyon, as did Haskell, at a hard gallop for at least twenty minutes before reining up on a slight rise. They rested their horses for five minutes, and then Teddy was off once more, jogging the
pinto
down the steepening grade for another half hour.

Finally, they came to a narrow canyon, which ostensibly fed the main one, and dropped into it via a precipitous, switchbacking trail marked with the tracks of bighorn sheep and damn little else. Teddy handled the trail easily, grinning snidely back at him from time to time and asking him how he was doing.

“Don't ask me.” Haskell grunted, feeling his balls rise up tight in his throat, constricting his air. “Ask my horse.”

“You look a little peaked,” Teddy said as she swung the
pinto
hard right and onto the next switchback in the trail.

Haskell only grumbled at that, cursing under his breath. The black stopped at the corner of the next switchback and looked down, as did Haskell, into the deep, narrow chasm before it—they still had at least another six hundred feet to the bottom—and gave a frightened chuff, twitching one ear and then the other.

No wonder no one had retrieved Briar's body or the ore he'd been hauling.

“Come on, fella,” Haskell said to the cautious beast, patting its left wither. “When we get to the bottom, first round's on me.”

Teddy was already circumnavigating the next switchback, glancing up at him with that faintly jeering look of hers.

The black and Haskell continued down the trail, and when they finally bottomed out on the rocky floor of the gorge, Bear wanted to climb down and kiss the ground. Instead, knowing you couldn't show weakness to a she-cat like Teddy Redwine, he booted the black on down the gorge in the girl's wake.

It took nearly another hour to make it back up the canyon to the point where the wagon, the dead mules, and the ore lay along the stream. Afternoon shadows were angling far out from the canyon wall, and it had grown at least ten degrees colder than it had been only an hour before.

Teddy was waiting by her horse, which grazed with its reins dangling. The girl sat on her butt, her arms around her raised knees, a long weed stem angling out of her pretty mouth. Her eyes owned their customary sneering cast that for some male reason, coupled with the girl's figure, made Haskell's trouser snake heavy.

Haskell climbed out of the saddle. The black hung its head and blew. Bear felt like doing the same thing. As he loosened the horse's saddle cinch so it could get a good blow, he glanced at Teddy.

“I thought you were freighters. Where'd you learn to ride like that?”

“I was raised up here. When I wasn't prospecting with my pa and brother, we were riding. When you're raised riding up and down country”—she hiked a shoulder and grinned with one side of her mouth—“you learn to ride up and down.”

She stared at him, the gold specks in her eyes glinting. He felt as though she'd just shoved a hand down his pants.

Trying to keep his marbles all in place, he said, “You were gold miners?”

“That's how my pa started up here. He discovered the Ute Field. But he didn't know how to develop it, and Geist and Judith came in and squeezed him out. Then they got out of mining, too, when even bigger men came in from back east, and Geist and Judith started buying up plots in town and buildin' up their own businesses. Includin' Black Diamond Freighting.”

She gave a sour look as she said that last.

Haskell said, “Sounds like you got quite a bone to pick with Geist and Judith.”

“I'll say I do,” she said with a slow nod, doing nothing to assuage the Pinkerton's faint suspicion.

She seemed just fine with remaining in his sphere of suspects. She was about as defiant a girl as Haskell had ever come across. He wasn't at all sure what to make of her. Could she be a killer?

He got out a fresh Cleopatra Federal and bit the tip off as he walked over to the wreck. The bald eagle had left the mule, but now a couple of magpies were rummaging around in the bones that had likely been scattered by mountain lions, coyotes, and a few wolves, judging by the tracks.

There was the sickly-sweet smell of decay everywhere around the wagon, as flesh didn't decompose all that fast in the cool, dry air of the high country. To help overcome the stench, and also to enjoy a smoke while he looked around—a Cleopatra always helped him think—Haskell lit the stogie and tossed the match into the shallow stream. One of the magpies flew up onto the top of a broken wheel and gave him a good chastising.

Ignoring the bird, Haskell walked around the ore that appeared to have fallen straight down onto the wagon after the big Pittsburgh freighter had plunged onto its side, half in and half out of the stream. The ore was spread out widely around the wagon, but there was still enough on top of it to cover it. Someday a brave prospector would likely haul it out on pack mules, but so far, it looked as though most of it, at least, remained right here where it had fallen.

Haskell walked a broad, slow circle around the wreck, smoking, scrutinizing the ore and the wagon and the dead mules, and saw no sign of Briar himself. Of course, the man might have fallen a good ways out away from the wagon, but even when Haskell had walked up nearly to the line of the forest, he saw no sign of a human body. Not so much as a boot or a bloody bone. The ore wasn't deep enough to have kept the predators away from Briar's carcass.

“Maybe he fell into the stream and the current took him down canyon.” Teddy was standing about twenty yards from the wreck, between the ruined wagon and the forest climbing the northeastern ridge. Obviously, she'd read Haskell's mind.

“Not unless the stream was higher back when this happened.” Haskell doubted that the water sliding and rippling past him was more than a foot deep at its deepest.

Sucking cigar smoke deep into his lungs and blowing it out through his nose, he looked up at the ridge. The drop wasn't a thousand feet, but it was close. The ridge wasn't as sheer as it had looked from above—there were nooks and crannies, slender pillars and thumbs, and shelves from which small pines and some shrubs grew.

Haskell supposed that Briar might have been snagged by one of those. Judging by the angle with which the wagon had dropped, though, landing on the far side of the stream, it was doubtful that the body could have landed anywhere but on the canyon floor.

Haskell glanced at Teddy, who stood with her thumbs in her pockets. “His men heard a shot just before he went over?”

The girl nodded. “That's how I heard it told.”

“A loud one? Like one made by a big rifle?”

She nudged up one shoulder and then the other. “I think so . . . yeah.”

Just then, the sun fell behind the towering western ridges, and dusk instantly filled the canyon with blue-tinged, oily shadows. The temperature must have dropped another ten degrees in a matter of seconds. Teddy grabbed her arms and shivered, staring up toward the ridge.

“Cold,” she said.

Using his thumbnail, Haskell peeled the coal off his stogie. “No point in startin' back to town tonight. It'll be dark as a grave soon.” He looked around for a place to camp. “We'll spend the night here, start back in the mornin'.”

“You had this planned all along, didn't you?” Teddy said, giving him a knowing frown.

Haskell looked at her. Her image was soft and lithe in the sudden shadows. Bear grinned.

L
ater, the firelight shimmered
like liquid gold across the girl's pert breasts.

The tender orbs rose and fell as, straddling Haskell naked, squatting over him with her knees jutting before her and slightly out away from their bodies, she rocked up and down, impaling her sweet cunt over and over again on his swollen, thundering cock.

She leaned forward, pressing her hands against his broad chest to steady herself. As she bounced on her haunches, she gazed at him, and her copper eyes were darker now in the firelight, but the little gold specks in them flashed like bright lights.

“You sure had it planned out good.” She grunted, hardening her jaws, swallowing.

“Yep, I sure did.”

“I want you to know, I . . . I'm not usually so willin'.”

Haskell reached down and ran the index fingers of both hands along the insides of her thighs. Her skin was as creamy-smooth as polished marble. She gave a shudder as she continued to bounce up and down on his staff.

Teddy laughed. “That tickles.”

“Sure as hell does.” Haskell grunted. He had a Cleopatra in his mouth, and he was rolling it from one side of his mouth to the other, trying desperately to hold back the tide of his passion.

Her little pussy clutched at him. He imagined that she had several tiny tongues inside her, licking him, each one ensconcing him in its own hot lather.

“You fuck good, Bear.”

“You're the one doin' the work, girl.”

Teddy giggled. She sat down on top of him and swung her left leg over his head, lifting her pussy off of his cock. She twisted around and rolled onto her back on the blankets they'd laid out beside the large fire they'd built against the night's penetrating chill.

“Hey, where you goin'?” Haskell said.

She plucked the cigar out of his mouth and placed it between her lips. Around it, she said, “Don't worry, I'm stayin' right here. Just wanna . . . make it laaast . . .”

She puffed the stogie and pulled it out of her mouth, choking, smoke blowing out of her mouth and nostrils and looking blue and red in the firelight and the starlight. “Them's potent,” Haskell said.

She gave him back the cigar and snuggled against him, scissoring her bare leg over one of his and reaching down to wrap her hand around his rock-hard shaft. “That's not the only thing that's potent out here in these woods tonight. Christ, you keep it up a long time.”

“Not if you keep doin' what you're doin'.”

Teddy gave a snort and removed her hand from his cock. Snuggling against him some more, she placed her hand on his flat belly and then walked her fingers very slowly, enticingly, up his chest to his throat. She ran her index finger along first his lower lip and then his upper lip.

“Where you from, Bear?”

“Texas.”

“You fight in the war?”

Haskell nodded. Then he shoved her over onto her back and lapped her tits with his tongue.

“I had a feelin' you did,” she said softly, her voice girlishly singsong.

“How can you tell?” he said, tonguing her right nipple.

“You got that kinda owly-crazy look in your eyes. And you fuck like it's the last time you'll ever do it.”

“Well, hell,” Haskell said between licks, “you just never know.”

“That feels nice. You got a nice tongue to go along with your nice cock.” Scissoring against him, Teddy scrubbed her hands through his hair. “Who do you think's doin' the killin', Bear?”

Haskell lifted his head and hooked his arms under her legs, spreading them wide. “I don't believe in mixin' business with pleasure,” he said, echoing Judith.

She lifted her head and looked down between them at his cock jutting darkly above her belly. She ran her hand down it, pumping him gently. “Still hard.”

“Not for long.”