High and Wild (8 page)

She aimed the gun at his broad chest. “I am a
professional
.”

Her voice cracked a little on that last, and a tear rolled out from the corner of her right eye to dribble down along her long, fine nose.

Haskell studied her, incredulous. Her hair hung down along the sides of her pale, perfectly shaped breasts still slightly red from the chafing of his beard and his callused hands.

“Get out!” she snarled, gritting her teeth and tossing her beautiful head at the door.

“All right, all right,” Haskell said, crawling down off the bed and holding his hands shoulder-high, palms out. “You mind if I get dressed first?”

“Yes, I do mind. Take your clothes and go!” She aimed the gun straight out from her shoulder, narrowing her right eye as she sighted down the barrel, drawing a bead on his heart.

Haskell gave a startled grunt. He'd be damned if she didn't look serious.

He hot-footed around the room, gathering his clothes from where she'd tossed them after practically tearing them off his body after he'd removed her widow's weeds with effort, and glanced at her once more, holding the duds and his spurred black boots against his chest.

She was still aiming the gun at him, biting down hard on her lower lip. The look in her eyes, the view of her soft breasts through her tangled tresses, started to give him another hard-on. At the same time, he was touched with apprehension. She was holding the pistol steadily in her clenched fist, keeping that bead tight against his ticker.

He opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off with a hard and fast, “Out, Agent Haskell!”

He fumbled with the doorknob, got the door open, and stumbled into the hall. He pressed his back to the door, blinked, and stared through his own tangled hair hanging in his eyes. “I'll be damned,” Haskell said, a wistful grin stretching his lips. “The girl fancies me.”

8

E
arly the next afternoon,
Haskell blew a long plume of cigar smoke into the wind rushing by the platform between coach cars. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe flyer he'd hopped, headed for Colorado Springs, was sashaying around the tracks, tapping over the seams, squawking and belching as it chugged up a steep grade in the bright afternoon sunshine.

They'd just taken on water at Castle Rock, and Haskell had gotten off with his saddlebags and rifle to wet his whistle at the little saloon next to the water tank. He'd looked around for his comely partner, but although there'd been only four coach cars on this particular combination, plus one parlor car for drinking and gambling, he hadn't spied the girl.

Raven must have been in some sort of disguise again, although he'd thought she always traveled in . . .

He let his thoughts trail off as he glanced through the soot-streaked window to his left. He frowned and continued to stare through the glass as he let the smoke from his Cleopatra Federal dribble out his broad nostrils. Finally, he raked the burning coal off the end, stubbed it out with his boot, and stuffed the rest of the stogie into the pocket of his cowhide vest.

He picked up his saddlebags, which he draped over his left shoulder—he had his bear-fur coat roped tightly to the bags, as now in September, it would likely be chilly up along the Continental Divide—and took his Winchester Yellowboy '66 in his right hand. He fumbled the door open, stopped, and grinned.

He kicked the door closed behind him and strode forward along the aisle, the passengers sitting in twos and threes on either side of him in the straight-backed, green velour bench seats beneath wooden-slatted luggage racks. It was warm enough that several windows were open, and some of the passengers were coughing against the smoke from the Baldwin locomotive's big, diamond-shaped stack that was slithering into the car, sometimes accompanied by glowing cinders that were known to set folks' clothes on fire.

Haskell stopped behind the black-haired young woman, dressed all in black, with a prim, square box hat on her head, sitting on the right side of the aisle, her back to him. She sat in the aisle seat, staring straight ahead. No one sat beside her. Even from the back, she had such a chilly set to her shoulders that Bear didn't wonder why.

He grinned at having finally run the girl down. He saw no reason they couldn't exchange the briefest of greetings. They were still a long way from their destination, and sometimes old Allan was secretive to the point of schoolboy foolishness.

Haskell crouched down behind the woman and said into her left ear, “Don't shoot, Miss York, it's only the stable boy you played house with last . . .”

He let his voice trail off. The woman had turned to him. He jerked his head back in surprise.

It was not Raven's oval-shaped, perfectly sculpted countenance and deep blue eyes facing him but the face of an old woman in her late fifties, early sixties, with deep crow's feet around her eyes and mouth and shock and dismay in her pale brown eyes. On the seat beside her, a Rhode Island Red hen clucked through the wicker bars of its cage, regarding Haskell with much the same expression as its owner.

“Sir, would you
pleas
e
!” the matron said.

“Beg your pardon, ma'am,” Haskell said, tipping his hat to the woman. “Beg your pardon. I thought you were somebody else.”

“Indeed, I am not!”

“I see that.” Bear pinched the brim of his slouch hat. The stark contrast between the girl he'd expected to see and the middle-aged woman he'd actually seen was like a punch to the solar plexus. “My sympathies for your loss.”

“Oh, that old scoundrel wasn't much of a loss. I donned the weeds for his sister. Just the same, I do not talk to strangers, sir!”

“All right, all right, I understand, and good day to you, ma'am!”

Flushed with embarrassment, Haskell retreated several rows to an empty aisle seat. He stowed his saddlebags and rifle in the overhead rack and glanced at the man sitting beside the window. He was a gray-bearded old-timer in a shabby bowler hat, and he was chuckling delightedly, obviously having heard Haskell's brief exchange with the widow.

“I was married to one like that,” the graybeard said. He spoke around his gnarly old hand. “Meaner'n a barrel full o' snakes. You ask me, her husband's the lucky one!” The old man laughed, wheezing, and finished up by coughing and wiping spittle from his lips with a soiled red handkerchief.

Haskell sat down beside the oldster and removed his hat to inspect it for burning cinders. He was about to say something about his own devotion to bachelorhood but stopped when a shadow flickered in the upper corner of his right eye.

A half-second later, he thought he heard a slight thump in the pressed-tin ceiling.

He canted his head to his right to get a better look out the window. The train was nearing the top of the pass and slowly picking up speed. Rock escarpments bristling with sparse Ponderosa pines cropped up on both sides of the track, jutting from six to twenty feet above the jerking, stuttering cars.

“Did you see that?” Haskell said, frowning at the pale chunks of granite and limestone glowing in the bright sunlight.

“See what?” the graybeard said, turning to gaze out the window. “What'd you see—eagle, coyote? Bear?”

Haskell looked out the windows on the other side of the car. He couldn't see anything except the glowing walls of rock relieved by small wedges of shadow and the occasional twisted trunk of a hardy pine.

Apprehension raked cold fingers across the back of his neck.

He rose from his seat, reached up into the luggage rack, and slid his Winchester, its rear walnut stock inlaid with an ivory bear's head, from his wool-lined saddle scabbard. The rifle had a lanyard and a sling ring set in the brass receiver, and he slung the rifle over his shoulder now as he looked both ways along the coach car, which was about two-thirds full.

He turned and walked along the aisle toward the rear of the car. Only a few people regarded him incredulously. Most were involved in conversations or were sleeping with their hat brims pulled down over their eyes. A couple of cowpunchers were desultorily playing two-handed poker, sitting sideways on their bench seat.

Apparently, no one else had seen what Haskell thought could possibly be a man, possibly one of a group of men, leaping from the rocks along the trail to the train. Maybe what he'd seen had only been the silhouette of a passing tree or a large bird, possibly an eagle, flying over the coach. But what about the thump he'd heard in the ceiling?

Merely the conjuring of his imagination, honed too sharply from all his years of brawling and warring and tracking bad men, the spawn of an overly acute sense of imminent danger? Maybe. But together, those two things had fashioned in him a sixth sense that had kept his bacon out of the frying pan more times than he cared to remember.

Haskell pushed through the rear door and pulled his hat down tighter on his head to keep the passing wind from stealing it. He looked up at the tin-edged roof of the next car back.

Nothing there but the deep, faultless blue bowl of sky with a few, small, very high tufts of benign clouds.

He glanced at the escarpment rising along both sides of the trail. Keeping his right hand on the stock of his rifle hanging against his side, he turned toward the platform of the car he was on and climbed the iron rings of the wall ladder rising to the right of the door.

He stopped halfway up the ladder and edged a look over the rim of the roof. All clear. Nothing but the slightly peaked roof itself, with a tin chimney pipe rising from the left front corner. The sun glinted off the roof, piercing Haskell's eyes like a million tiny javelins.

Bear turned to look at the coach roof behind him. Nothing there, either, or on any of the other cars jostling and swaying behind it.

Haskell turned his head forward and caught a glimpse of a man aiming a rifle at him from the other end of the coach. He jerked his head down none too soon.

There was the menacing buzz of a slug careening through the air where his head had been a quarter-second before. Haskell dropped his shoulder and brought up the Yellowboy, quickly levering a cartridge into the action and then raising the rifle over the top of the roof.

He took hasty aim at the man peering over the roof from the coach's other end—a broad-faced gent with red sideburns and a red mustache beneath a shabby brown bowler hat trimmed with a red hawk feather—and squeezed the trigger.

The Yellowboy leaped and belched, stabbing flames toward the far end of the coach. Haskell's opponent was jacking a fresh round into his own rifle's breech, bunching his lips and glaring toward Haskell, when the Pinkerton's bullet slammed through the middle of the man's broad forehead.

The man's head jerked back. His hat tumbled forward onto the edge of the roof before the wind ripped it away and it skidded sideways in a wind gust to bounce off the escarpment rising on Haskell's right.

The man himself fell backward and down from the ladder he was on, out of Haskell's sight. Bear thought he heard a scream above the noise of the train.

A shadow slid over his left shoulder and onto the coach's roof. Instinctively, the big detective threw himself to his left, holding the ladder's top rung with his left hand, and was rewarded for the quick action by another bullet missing his back and punching into the end of the coach, one foot below the roof.

He looked at the coach behind him. Another rifle-wielding son of a bitch was cocking another round into the breech of his carbine—a tall man with wind-blown auburn hair and wearing a long sand-colored duster, his brown Stetson blowing back behind him from the chin thong around his neck.

Heart thudding, Bear watched the man narrow his pale blue eyes as he snugged his rifle up to his right cheek and sighted down the barrel, stretching his mustache-mantled lip back in a dry grin.

The Pinkerton, hanging from the one ladder rung and facing his next opponent, opened his left hand, releasing the rung. As the shooter's rifle puffed smoke and stabbed flames, the Pinkerton's boots hit the coach's wooden platform.

Haskell bent his knees to save his back. Still, the drop was violent enough to stun him for a moment. He lost his balance on the moving train, pitched to his right, rolled, came up onto his heels still holding his rifle, and threw himself against the front wall of the rear coach car, his hat dangling down his back by its braided rawhide thong.

He looked up, unable to see the shooter from this vantage, which meant the shooter couldn't see Haskell, either.

The sun was angling behind the man, however. His shadow slid across the platform in front of Bear. The man, holding his rifle barrel-down, dipped his chin to stare into the gap between the cars. Haskell shuffled to his right and then took one step out away from the car. He aimed up at the hardcase, who jerked his head toward the Pinkerton, eyes startled.

He started to raise his carbine but promptly dropped it when Haskell's .44-caliber slug blew his jaw off and into the wind blowing beside the train. Blood sprayed, flecking the stone escarpment.

The man's carbine bounced off the edge of the roof and clanked onto the platform near Haskell's boots a half-second before the wind grabbed the jawless outlaw's weakened frame and tossed it straight back out of Bear's line of sight.

He gave a satisfied snort.

Then he heard a crunching sound to his left. Racking a fresh round into his Winchester's chamber, he turned to see a ragged hole in the rear wall of the coach car he'd been riding in.

Another hole appeared. Another and another, the muffled pops of the shooter from inside the car sounding little louder than snapping twigs beneath the clattering and grinding of the train's iron wheels.

Screams and anxious shouts rose. A baby began crying.

“God damn it!” Haskell shouted, and leaped across the platform, slamming into the door with his right shoulder and ripping the latching bolt out of the frame.

He stopped inside the door, crouching and raising his Winchester. The passengers were all hunkered down and yelling.

A man with a pair of saddlebags draped over one shoulder and wearing a flour-sack mask with the eyes cut out was running down the aisle toward Bear, eyes bright, the cloth buffeting in and out around the robber's mouth as he screamed and triggered the two pistols in his outstretched hands.

One of the slugs carved a burning trough over the top of the Pinkerton's left shoulder, while another plunked into the wall behind him. He was running too fast to draw a decent bead—to his own detriment.

Haskell pumped two quick rounds into the man's chest, throwing the shooter back and into the two cowboys who'd been playing two-handed poker, triggering one of his pistols into the ceiling. Another train robber was just then bursting through the door at the car's opposite end, shouting, “What in God's name is . . .?”