High and Wild (5 page)

Haskell had worked for Allan Pinkerton for nearly five years now, and never once had he gotten a good look at any of the couriers his employer always sent with the name of the town in which Haskell was to meet Pinkerton himself, to be briefed on his next assignment. Just the name of the place. No date or time. Just the place. Never more than that. And the mysterious note cards—always the same shape and size and dove-gray color—were always sent as if by ghosts, or, as Pinkerton called them, “doves.”

These ghostlike doves had been able to find Haskell in the remotest of places—a line shack in the San Juan Mountains, a harborside opium den on the Barbary Coast, a brothel in Cheyenne, even a Sioux Indian reservation up in Dakota. Allan Pinkerton was either keeping a human shadow on his prized operative, trailing his every move, or the man had a crystal ball that showed him where every one of his operatives was at any given time.

That, of course, was impossible.

Wasn't it?

Bear was bound and determined to finally run down one of these crafty doves, if for no other reason than that he was tired of Pinkerton's dramatics. It was just like the man to make his couriers as invisible as he himself liked to be, as he wanted all of his operatives to be. Even when it wasn't necessary.

It was the man's oddball way.

Sometimes Haskell thought that his mysterious employer was living out some child's fantasy, even now in the middle of his life, and that this fantasy was what his tony agency had always been based on. While Allan Pinkerton might have run the most famous detective agency in the country, with branch offices in nearly every city of more than a few thousand people, and he'd been doing so since before the war—a war that he himself had helped bring to resolution—Haskell had a pretty good idea that the man really wasn't playing with a full deck.

Or, on the other hand, maybe the deck was too full.

Anyway, Bear was tired of being made a fool of by these damn doves, who, if they were not ghosts, were as sneaky and conniving as any Apache or Yaqui Indian. Hell, they even put Sonoma's tracking and hunting skills to shame.

Haskell had only sent a telegram to Chicago notifying Pinkerton that the president's niece had been sent to her cavalry-officer husband at Fort Clement under Army escort and that his assignment had been successfully completed. He had not told him that he, Rupert Glynn, and Sonoma had intended to hole up in Benson for a few days, resting and relaxing when they weren't fucking like minks.

But the dove who had delivered the latest card was not going to get away without Haskell learning who in the hell he, or she, was.

Haskell ran down the carpeted stairs to the shadowy main drinking hall. There were a dozen or so men scattered around the tables, indolently drinking and playing cards. Glynn, was there, too, rheumy-eyed and with a bare-breasted young whore on his knee.

The whore was giggling and feeding Glynn cheese and crackers.

“Whoa, there, cowboy!” Glynn intoned, looking Haskell's naked form up and down in astonishment as the big agent jogged past his table, where he sat with the girl and two other men dressed in the shabby checked suits of whiskey drummers.

The girl turned to the big bear of a brawny, shaggy-headed man striding naked past her. Her eyes raked his massive, muscular frame, and as her gaze settled beneath his belly, she hung her lower jaw in shock.

“Bear,” Glynn said, chuckling. “Hey, Bear, I don't know if I should be the one to tell you this, but you ain't wearin' a stitch!”

“Did you get a look at him, Rupe?” Haskell rushed through the batwings and stood just outside the doors, looking up and down the street, squinting against the westering sun.

Haskell stepped out onto the veranda. He'd been so intent on Pinkerton's dove that he'd only half realized he hadn't even stepped into his balbriggans before leaving his room. He was only half aware of the folks on the street—mostly cowpunchers and shopkeepers but also a few fashionably attired ladies—stopping to turn incredulous looks at him. One such lady, in the left periphery of his vision and on the far side of the main street, gave a scream and crumpled onto a boardwalk fronting a drugstore.

Haskell ignored her. He'd spied a rider galloping out of town toward the east. The man was a good quarter of a mile away, but something told Haskell that the rider was the dove the Pinkerton was looking for.

He leaped off the saloon's veranda and ran into the street, staring toward the courier fast dwindling into the distance. All that Haskell could see was a black-clad man on a dun horse, who just now glanced back over his right shoulder, then jerked his head forward, crouching low and whipping his reins' ends against the horse's right hip.

He dropped into a swale and out of Haskell's sight.

“Come back and face me like a man, you son of a bitch!” the agent raged, shaking a fist above his head.

Another woman screamed.

“Good Lord!” a man cried. “He's gone mad!”

Haskell looked around. Suddenly, blood suffused his broad, ruggedly handsome face. Slowly, he lowered his fist and looked down at himself, and it dawned on him that he was standing out there in the middle of Benson's main street naked as the day he was born.

His heavy brows remained mantled in frustration, although his eyes betrayed his chagrin as he swung around and stomped back onto the saloon's veranda. Rupert Glynn stood looking over the batwings, puffing a long black cheroot and regarding his old friend doubtfully.

Haskell stopped in front of the Ranger. “You musta seen him. He musta walked through the saloon and up the stairs to my room. He musta asked what room I was in, for cryin' in the beer!”

Glynn sighed, wagged his head. “Sad to see this. You've gone over the edge, Bear. Purely, you have.”

“Nah.” Haskell, ignoring the muttering around him and the shocked gazes being cast in his direction, pushed through the batwings and brushed past the Ranger as he headed for the stairs. “I'm just goin' to Denver.”

5

O
ne week later, Haskell
climbed over a fence in the Denver stockyards near the grand Union Station and set his right boot down in a spruce-green pile of fresh cow shit.

He cursed as he lifted said boot to have a look at the damage. Aside from his books and weapons, his boots were his most prized possessions. Black, pointed-toed, steel-tipped stockmen's boots with undershot heels and stitched with red piping, they'd been crafted especially for the Pinkerton by an old Mexican friend of his in Abilene. They'd worn well, after five years only needing new heels, which Felipe Rivera masterfully fashioned and applied along with new soles.

Now the right one was covered in cow plop.

Fairly dripping with it, in fact.

Bear Haskell was not a dude in any way, shape, or form. But he loved his boots, which had served him well, and just as important, he was on his way to meet his employer. Allan Pinkerton was extremely persnickety, as protective of the rugs in his private rail car as Haskell was about his boots.

Neither the soil nor the stench would do.

Haskell scraped off as much of the filth as he could on the cinder lining a nearby rail bed and then used a stick and a freshly laundered handkerchief dampened in a stock trough to remove the rest, propping the boot on a rail of one of the hundred or so stock pens that lined the rail yard and were teeming with milling, bawling cattle waiting to be shipped off to the Chicago slaughterhouses.

Haskell didn't mind the cattle or even their shit, aside from that which was on his boot. The bovines and their accompanying smell reminded him of his home ranch in West Texas—or what had been partly his ranch until he'd gone off to fight for the Union and had been barred from returning to the Circle-Hash H by his Confederate-sympathizing father, who'd barred him from ever stepping foot on the land again.

What Haskell did mind was Pinkerton's infernal secrecy, which on his frequent visits to Denver, where he and Haskell usually met, compelled him to park his private car way the hell off on the far southwest edge of the grounds surrounding Union Station, a good three hundred yards from the cinder-paved walks of the depot, usually far beyond the stock pens.

Not only was the car parked on a remote siding normally reserved for maintenance cars, but the thing was about as inconspicuous as one could imagine. And Pinkerton kept changing its appearance so that Haskell rarely even knew what car he was combing the remotest reaches of the rail yard for.

He was thankful to find it only fifteen minutes after he'd finished cleaning his boot. Or he thought it was Pinkerton's private coach.

As he stopped near the car's front platform and propped a boot on a rail, he raked a thumb across his bearded chin. Frowning, he inspected the motley-looking beast that appeared to be a dilapidated and long-abandoned coach car. The faded paint was peeling to show the bald wood beneath, and the windows were so soot-covered as to be nearly totally opaque, dully reflecting the lens-clear, high-altitude light.

Bear looked around, but the only car nearby was a stock car that three beefy workmen in striped overalls were fitting with a new loading ramp, cursing with the effort. A click drew Haskell's gaze back to the ragged coach car.

The door at the car's front vestibule opened, and two men emerged, both large and beefy and appearing to be about to pop the seams on their too-tight but otherwise natty-looking three-piece suits. The men inside the suits were a sharp contrast to the broadcloth and wool they were swathed in, for they both appeared as rustic as the men working on the stock-car ramp.

Haskell grinned with mock affability and strode forward. “Hey, Pip! Hey, Boorman! Boy, am I glad to see you two fellers. I was about to start thinkin' I'd tramped all the way out here and nearly ruined a good pair of boots for nothin'!”

Pinkerton's two bodyguards stood side-by-side, each man digging a cheap cigar out of his coat pocket and regarding Haskell snidely. They didn't like Haskell, and he didn't like them. He didn't know why—mainly, he supposed, because they didn't like him.

He thought their acrimony lay in the fact that although Haskell hailed from their same lowly station, he was highly regarded by Pinkerton for his war service and for his service to the agency. Although a more accurate reason might be that he made more money than they did.

“Best get your ass in there, boyo,” Pip said in his English accent, sticking his cigar between his large yellow teeth. “The old man's been waitin', and he's startin' to pace.”

“Pacin' so he's rockin' the whole damn car,” added Boorman, who looked so much like the fat-faced, small-eyed Pip that they could have been brothers. “All the rockin's makin' Miss Whitehurst a little hot between the legs.”

He leaned forward on the tarnished brass rail and grinned devilishly as he struck a match to dramatic life on his thumbnail.

“How the hell would you know anything about how Miss Whitehurst feels between her legs?” Haskell asked as he mounted the vestibule steps. He stopped at the top and turned toward Pip standing to his left. “In fact, have you ever seen what any female has between her legs, Boor, or haven't you found a heifer that desperate?”

Haskell saw the flick of a shadow in the corner of his right eye. He stepped into Pip's punch, so that the man's heavy fist merely glanced off the agent's right shoulder. Haskell rammed his right elbow deep into the bodyguard's belly, and Pip gave a great
“Gha-nahhhh!”
of expelled air. He bent sharply forward at the waist before dropping to his knees, groaning and cursing.

The scowling Boorman took a step forward, raising his fists, the left one with a large green ring on it, but he stopped when Haskell said, “Boor, do you really want to turn this little misunderstanding into a big disagreement?” He feigned a look of perplexity. “How's it gonna look if I leave you two out here airing your paunches on the platform when you're supposed to be guarding the old man?”

Boorman lowered his fists but kept his hate-bright gaze on the detective, who stood a good two inches taller.

“You fuckin' asshole,” said Pip, just now able to start getting his wind back.

“That's no language for the old man's private coach,” Haskell scolded the bodyguard as he opened the weathered door set with a dusty pane of badly warped glass in its top panel.

He walked into the office of Pinkerton's private secretary, Miss Abigail Whitehurst, who looked up from a payment voucher she was busily filling out, no doubt for Haskell himself. She wrinkled the skin above the bridge of her pretty nose, which was done a grave injustice by the round-rimmed old-lady spectacles she always chose to wear.

“Bear, must you taunt them so?”

“They started it, Abby.”

“But they're children. You're the grown-up.” The secretary, a lovely redheaded spinster at thirty who'd been working for and traveling with Pinkerton for the past eight years and ran his office with the precision of a Swiss watch, jerked the pen she'd been writing with at the door behind her and to her right, beside the small table holding her bulky black steel typewriting machine. “He's going to wear holes in the carpet if you don't get in there soon.”

Haskell doffed his brown slouch hat with its dyed horsehair band and hung it on one of the gold pegs on the wall to his left. As he reached for the gilded doorknob in the shape of a horse head below the old man's name etched in tastefully small cursive letters in the glass, Abby said, “Be careful, Bear.”

He glanced at her. She'd gone back to writing, but she was smiling.

“Say again?” the agent said.

“Just be care-
ful
,” the secretary said in a faintly taunting singsong, her pen scratching black ink on the payment voucher.

Haskell stared at her. He had no idea what she was talking about, and she didn't want him to yet. He'd no doubt find out shortly.

He took a second or two to feel the old pull in his loins that the secretary, far more beautiful and sexy than she wanted anyone to know, always gave him. For a moment, he indulged in an imagined picture of how she might look naked, maybe wearing only a long string of pearls, her legs wrapped around his back as he pummeled her with his cock in some vast canopied bed in the Larimer Hotel.

As though reading his mind, Abigail Whitehurst jerked her head toward him, frowning, a flush rising in her pale cheeks. The tips of Haskell's ears warmed with chagrin.

He gave the woman a wink, knocked on the door with his customary two quick raps, and went in as the old man said, “Ah, Agent Haskell—I was wondering if you were coming or if you'd gotten caught up in another weeklong game of five-card stud!”

“Only happened once, Allan,” Haskell said, “and a long damn time ago.”

He and the old man had been on a first-name basis for years, since right after Pinkerton had talked Haskell into coming to work for his renowned agency. After the war and his banishment from the family ranch, Haskell had merely wanted to disappear somewhere in the western mountains and live the hermit life of a Rocky Mountain horse rancher. Having learned of the big man's war record, Pinkerton would not take no for an answer. And Allan Pinkerton could be as persistent as he was secretive.

“Nah,” Haskell said, striding forward across the deep-pile burnt-orange rug. “I was just . . .”

Haskell stopped dead in his tracks. There was a third person in the room. A young woman with a pale heart-shaped faced and the most lustrous cobalt-blue eyes Haskell had ever seen was sitting in one of the two leather armchairs facing Pinkerton's large leather-upholstered desk.

Pinkerton himself was standing behind his high-backed chair, gazing at Haskell with his left eye customarily twitching. His pale blue eyes had a faintly bemused light in them, although it wasn't his employer who had caught the brunt of the big agent's attention.

That dubious honor went to the blood-boilingly beautiful young lady sitting in the visitor chair, who had twisted around to get a better look at the newcomer. She was beautiful, to be sure, with long raven-black hair gathered behind her head in a chignon, but what lent a faintly bizarre touch to her exquisitely fine-boned face and ravishing figure was the entirely black dress she wore. Buttoned all the way to her throat, the collar secured with a silver pin. Shiny black patent side-button shoes with short heels were tucked neatly under her chair.

The young lady was dressed in mourning.

Pinkerton chuckled softly and said, “Detective Bear Haskell, meet Detective Raven York.”

The young woman stood and turned to face Haskell square-on. A little thing with long legs and a high bust, her mesmerizing cobalt eyes highlighted by long lashes the same ebony as her hair. She strode forward and offered her gloved hand. “Before you say you're sorry, Detective, let me assure you that no one has died. At least, no one that I know. I am not in mourning.”

Her voice was sexily throaty, raspy. Her eyes met Haskell's straight-on, though up-tilted, of course, to compensate for their height difference. Those cobalt orbs were incredibly wide and bold. They appeared to be staring right through him to the back of his skull. It made him feel odd. He wasn't accustomed to women regarding him so brassily, almost confrontationally.

He squeezed the woman's hand and wished he'd applied as much pressure as she did before she slipped her hand from his and let it drop to her side.

A woman—a beautiful young woman—who shook hands like a man . . .

Haskell couldn't help raking his eyes up and down her delectable frame once more, noting the high, proud bust behind the rather tight frock. “Then why the widow's weeds, Miss York?”

“A cover, of course,” said Pinkerton, smiling admiringly at the young woman. “Miss York is, as you've no doubt noticed, Bear, quite the well-put-together girl. Since she travels alone, without a chaperone, she finds that the widow's makeup functions very well as a repellent to unwanted male advances.”

“Ah.” Haskell nodded, then admonished the girl with a furrowed brow. “Ain't fittin', though, a girl travelin' alone without someone to, uh . . . to, uh . . . keep her out of trouble.” It was Haskell's turn to grin and let his eyes dance up and down Miss York's splendid body once more and note the natural male pull in his loins.

She let her own gaze slide up and down his brawny physique and returned his faintly mocking leer. “A chaperone might make my occupation somewhat difficult, Mr. Haskell.”

“Do please call me Bear.”

“And let me assure you that while I am indeed young, I am certainly no
girl
. I am a
woman
. I would appreciate being addressed as such when it isn't more appropriate for you to call me Miss York. And I must warn you, Mr. Haskell—er,
Bea
r
—that I have been working as a Pinkerton operative for more than two years. Mr. Pinkerton will attest to my exemplary record.