Longarm and the Banker's Daughter (9781101613375) (7 page)

Chapter 10

“What I want to know,” Longarm said, trying to ignore her taunting invitation, staring out the oval-shaped cavern door, puffing the cheroot with a little too much vigor, “is what kind of trouble you got yourself into with Gunn and Cruz?”

“Do you have something I can wash myself with?”

Frowning, he turned to where she still sprawled as though on some red plush settee in an expensive flesh parlor in Denver, naked as the day she was born. He let smoke dribble out his nostrils. “Huh?”

“I asked you if you have something I could wash myself with, Longarm.”

He gave another disgusted chuff. “Reach into my saddlebags there.”

She leaned over, flattening one leg while tilting the other toward it, and rummaged around in one of his saddlebag pouches. She pulled a frayed green cloth he used for giving himself the occasional whore's bath when out on the trail, and a cake of lye soap tucked inside it, then pulled the steaming cook pot to the side of the fire. She rose up onto her knees, soaked the cloth in the water, wrung it out, and rubbed the soap over it.

Slowly, gently, she began rubbing the rag down her right arm while Longarm pointedly ignored her, knowing she wanted nothing more than to get him worked up so he'd forget the question and maybe even forget about hauling her beautiful, nasty ass back to Jawbone.

“Would you like to do this for me?” she asked, staring at him from beneath her brow on the other side of the fire, the flames playing beguilingly over her breasts, shoulders, flat belly, swelling hips, and long, supple thighs. It caused copper sparks to flick like miniature javelins from her eyes.

He couldn't help feasting his eyes on her hands and the soapy rag and the breast she was soaping so thoroughly, the nipple jouncing as she did. He swallowed down the hard knot in his throat, grunted softly at the pull of his pants across his stiffening member.

“I'll say I don't,” he said, hearing the lie in his own heavy words. “But you go ahead and take your time. We got all night, I reckon.”

“Oh, you're such a sourpuss!” she said, pooching her lips out in a pout. “Okay, if you must know, I snuck off away from the camp you found me in . . . with the money that Heck Gunn and Orlando Cruz stole from my father's bank.”

She lifted her chin and closed her eyes in sensual delight as she ran the wet, soapy cloth up over her right breast, making it jiggle. As the import of what she'd just said reached his brain, he lifted his eyes from the soapy orb to her eyes on the other side of the fire.

Lines of incredulity sawed across his forehead. “You what?”

She giggled and gently squeezed the soapy nipple between her thumb and index finger, causing it to stiffen. “Sure enough. I double-crossed them before they had time to double-cross me. You don't think they'd really take me all the way to Mexico with them, do you? When men like that get their fill of a girl, they toss her out like the bacon rinds on a trash heap.”

She continued to pinch the pebbling nipple while running the soapy cloth over her other breast. “That's what I was off doing when you found me. I'd just finished burying the money bag where they wouldn't find it.”

“What about the men I had to shoot two nights ago?”

“Oh, them.” Lacy chuckled. “Me and those three had a double-cross on. I was to sneak away from the camp with the loot and hide it and then meet up with them later, after they'd bushwhacked the others. You sort of tied a knot on our plans, Longarm—at least the part about me running away and meeting up with the others later to retrieve the loot. I figured I'd need those three to get me safely to San Francisco, you see.”

Longarm sat riveted, his back pressed taut against the cave wall. He lifted the half-smoked cheroot to his lips once more, drew the smoke deep into his lungs, and let it out slowly, thinking over what she'd told him while unable to stop watching her hands massage her breasts.

It was like having a whole hive of angry bees buzzing around in his head. He couldn't think straight. His pants and balbriggans were drawn taut across his groin, his rock-hard cock throbbing, wanting nothing so badly as to burst free of its confines and have its way with the exquisitely intoxicating witch bathing on the other side of the fire. Her own eyes were on his midsection. Those copper, green-ensconced light javelins caressed him as would her warm, soft fingers, and he couldn't help imagining, with one part of his brain, those fingers stroking him, as with the rest of his mind he tried to sort through what she'd divulged.

Christ, she had a hold on him. Just as she had a vice-like hold on every other man she came across. It was every bit as unsettling as it was arousing!

“You took the money,” he said tonelessly, narrowing his eyes as he took another drag off the cheroot, unconsciously trying to clear his mind with the smoke, “and buried it . . .”

“Correct.”

She continued to stare at him as she very slowly rinsed the soap off her breasts. She dried herself with his blanket, then spread it out beside her, right up close to the fire, and lay down upon it. She turned on her side facing him, head propped on an elbow. She crooked her finger at him, her lips spread to show the glistening white line of her teeth.

“Now, come over here, Longarm.”

“Uh-uh,” he grunted.

“I know you want to.”

“Nope, I ain't gonna do that.” Longarm felt drunk though he hadn't had a shot of rye for a long time. His coffee water was boiling, but he was only vaguely aware of it. “You're bad, Lacy. You're about as bad as they come, and I ain't . . .”

She opened her legs slightly. The firelight shone on the pink petals of the flower at her center, beneath her belly button. The silky, blond fur there shone wetly, as did the pink flesh nestling inside it.

Inside the pink was a small, dark line that was her opening. Slowly, she dropped her hand to it, touched her index finger to the opening.

“Come on over here, Longarm. You don't want me to have to do this all by myself, do you?”

With her other hand, she cupped her breast, slowly massaged it.

“Christ.” Longarm flicked his cigar into the fire. Why fight it? He wouldn't be able to think straight until he had her again. Maybe after one more time, he'd finally have her out of his system.

He was thinking like an addict and he knew it. Still, he found himself climbing to his feet, kicking out of his boots, unbuckling his gun belt, and shucking out of all his clothes except his balbriggans. He walked over to her, lay down beside her. She rolled toward him, kissed him hungrily, and massaged his cock through his balbriggans.

She pulled her lips back from his, looked down at his cock that appeared a giant blood sausage pushing out from behind the crotch of his threadbare underwear, slanting up against his thigh, throbbing. It was so hard that the big mushroom head was clearly defined.

She ran her small hand across it, staring at it, while he nuzzled her left breast and massaging the other one, cupping it, hefting it gently, flicking his thumb across the nipple. Fires of raging desire burned within him. Everything else went away in his mind except the warmth of her, the touch of her, the feel of her damp, warm breast in his hand . . . the smoothness of her neck beneath his mustache as he nuzzled it . . .

“Take it out, Longarm,” she said. “Take it out and let me suck it.”

“Ah, Christ.”

“Take it out,” she whispered in a commanding tone. “Oh, never mind,” she said, her voice sharp and somehow even more alluring. “I'll do it myself!” She shoved both hands inside his balbriggans, widening the fly with one hand while pulling his long, throbbing member out with the other.

“I was thinking about this when Dickie was fucking me,” she whispered, holding the base of it in both hands, staring down at its long, thick, throbbing length jutting up over his belly button. “I was thinking about how much more fun I'd be having if it were you fucking me from behind, like Dickie was doing in his inept little way . . .”

She pumped him so hard with both hands, gritting her teeth, that it almost hurt. But what exquisite pain! Longarm lay back on his elbows and watched her hands work their hard magic.

She turned her hands this way and that, grunting softly with the effort. Finally, she lowered her head and went to work on him with her mouth nearly as vigorously as with her hand, her loud sucking and moaning sounds filling the small, firelit cavern.

Longarm squeezed his eyes shut and curled his toes. “Ah, bless me,” he groaned, all thoughts of Gunn and Cruz and the money and Lacy's wickedness shuffling off to the far, dark reaches of his brain.

It was only her in his mind now. Her and her lips. Her tongue. Her breasts raking his thighs, her hair lightly caressing his belly and balls as she sucked him.

“'Nough o' that,” he said through a groan, when he couldn't stand it any longer, the juices fairly exploding out of him. “Time to finish proper.”

He pushed her onto her back, but as he started to mount her, she squirmed around on her belly. “No, like this. The way I imagined you were doing it when Dickie was sticking his little thing in me.”

“Fine as frog hair.”

She climbed to her hands and knees, looked over her shoulder at him, and wagged her pretty, pale ass that was burnished salmon by the firelight. She giggled, then, as he hunched over her, reaching around her to cup her breasts in his hands, she reached down past her belly, wrapped her hand around his cock, and guided the head through her portal.

She sighed, whimpered. Longarm grunted, feeling her wet heat and the flesh just inside her tender as molasses in a warm jar. He pushed his rod farther in.

“Wait, wait!” she said, lifting her head, her rich hair tumbling down to the slender small of her back. “Oh, God . . . wait! Okay, now . . . just a little at a time or you'll split me wide open!”

Longarm curled his lip with own brand of devilishness. He adjusted his knees, grabbed each tit harder, squeezing, and rammed the entire length of his shaft deep inside her, until he thought he could feel her heart hammering against the swollen head.

“Ahhhh!”
she cried, the scream echoing shrilly around the cavern. “Oh, God, you fucking
bass-tard
! Don't you dare stop, damn you. Fuck me! Fuck me good, Longarm. I've been a very bad girl, and I deserve it hard and nasty . . . oh, Jesus
Chri-iist
!”

He hammered against her wildly, his groin slapping loudly against her ass. She sobbed and groaned and cried out for mercy, then berated him to fuck her harder, as hard as he could. “And don't come too fast, you bastard, because I've never known it could be like this and I want it to last forever!”

But when he could feel that she was ready by the frantic contracting of her pussy against him and the intensifying of her heat and wetness, he let go with a guttural roar of his own, tipping his head far back and hearing his own bearlike love cry reverberating around the cavern like empty barrels bouncing around in a freight wagon.

He drove nearly literally right into the ground.

When he finished, he pulled out of her, his cock still dripping on her pink ass, and she lay belly down on the blanket, arms thrown straight up above her head, groaning.

He rolled onto his back beside her. They were both breathing as hard as a couple of Pony Express horses.

When Lacy finally caught hers, she rolled onto her back beside him, dropped one hand to his dwindled cock, and said, “Oh, Custis, it could be like this every night . . . every morning . . . hell, it could be like this every hour of every day! . . . if we dug up the bank loot and ran off together. Just you and me and thirty-some dollars!”

He drew a deep breath, felt his heart slowing.

“What do you say, Custis?” She tickled his balls with the tips of her fingers.

“I say forget it.”

Silence.

She pulled her hand away from his balls. A second later he saw the hand arcing toward him from his left. It was a fist now, and the fist had a stout chunk of wood in it. Longarm grabbed the wrist a foot above his head and pressed the barrel of his Colt against her forehead.

She stared down at him, her mouth open wide, eyes cast with horror.

He ratcheted the Colt's hammer back loudly. “Let's get it straight, you saucy little wench,” he snarled through gritted teeth. “I don't care how many times you lure me between those beautiful legs of yours. You're going to lead me to that loot or I'm going to drill a .44 round through your purty head and toss your hot little carcass to the
wildcats
! You clear on that?”

Chapter 11

Longarm made the troublesome Lacy Sackett sleep handcuffed so he could saw a few logs himself.

He needed it. The night before, when he and the gunmen had lay listening to her pleasing the dear departed Dickie Shafter, seemed a lifetime ago. He woke sometime before dawn, the girl sleeping curled against him for warmth, as, since he'd been too busy frolicking with his prisoner, he hadn't been able to gather much wood for a fire. He blew the coals back to life, tossed the rest of the wood on the fire, and thought through his situation.

As soon as he could find a couple of horses, he'd take Lacy to where the loot was buried. He probably wouldn't kill her if she refused to tell him the stolen money's exact location, but it made him feel better to tell himself he would. And he thought he had her convinced that he would, too. What he'd seen in her eyes when he'd snugged the butt of his Colt to her head had been genuine terror.

“You're a damn fool,” she said later that morning, as he hauled his gear back out to the boat. She followed close on his heels, hands cuffed behind her back so she couldn't try to brain him again. “No man in his right mind would turn down that much money, not to mention a girl like me. Not only one as beautiful as I am, but one who can please a man like I can.
Fool!
”

“Don't forget the great personality,” Longarm said, chuckling, as he dropped his gear on the boat. “That's an added benefit.”

“A girl doesn't need a personality when she's got the other stuff.”

“I don't know—a good ride between the sheets goes only so far when the rest of the time a man's gotta listen to all that caterwaulin'. And sleep with one eye open.”

“Shut up, Longarm! Just shut up!”

“Took the words out of my mouth,” he said, tossing the rope onto the boat and kicking the boat into the water that was gray-green in the cool dawn. He went over and removed her handcuffs, stuffed them into his coat pocket. “Now, get aboard or I'll leave you here for Gunn and Cruz.”

“Fuck Gunn and Cruz!”

“You already done that and look where it got you.” He gave her a brusque shove and she stumbled into the boat, nearly overturning it. She squealed. Longarm grabbed the side and steadied it before giving it another, harder shove and leaping inside.

Lacy shuffled to the front of the boat and sat down, facing him, hunched over with her elbows on her knees. As he paddled them into the middle of the river where there didn't seem to be so many rocks, she said, “Think about it, will you? Just think about it?”

“All right, I'll think about it,” he lied.

He just wanted her to shut up.

When the boat was drifting steadily between the gradually lightening cliffs, he sat down and used the paddle only to adjust their course. The current moved them along at a slow jog. Where it would take them, he had no idea. But he hoped they'd come upon a ranch or settlement somewhere along the stream, so he could appropriate a mount, saddle up, and ride off to retrieve the Jawbone loot.

As the sky continued lightening and the ridges pulled back away from the stream, Longarm carefully scrutinized both shores. He'd seen a trail angling down a northern bluff, which meant Gunn and Cruz might be on the prowl, maybe even holed up along the stream somewhere to effect an ambush.

Last night, before Lacy had confessed absconding with the Jawbone loot, Longarm had figured there was a good possibility that Gunn and Cruz would decide there were probably plenty of good-looking gals along the trail to Mexico. They'd decide that one Miss Lacy Sackett, despite being likely the greatest tumble on earth, was just too damn much trouble, so they'd stop stalking her and Longarm and head back south.

He doubted that now. In fact, he knew they wouldn't leave the loot.

He fired a lucifer on his thumbnail, touched it to a fresh cheroot, and scrutinized a small stand of willows along the stream's southern shore. No, they were out here. And sooner or later, he'd run into them . . .

An hour later, the sun cleared the ridges and rained liquid gold onto the stream and the leaves of the ponderosa pines, willows, and aspens along both shores. Some fish jumped near a dead, bark-less pine tree that extended partway out from the northern shore. Water splashed near the boat, also. It made a hollow chugging sound.

The flat report of a rifle reached Longarm's ears half a second later. Longarm saw the black-hatted rifleman with a red neckerchief kneeling behind the fallen tree, levering another round into his Winchester's breech. At the same time, Longarm dropped the paddle in the boat and reached for his own long gun.

“Girl, get your head down!” He racked a shell into the Winchester's breech, aimed, and fired at the same time that the rifle of the shooter behind the tree flashed and smoked.

Longarm merely blew up a dogget of gray wood from the bole of the dead tree as the black-hatted shooter drew his head down behind it. As Lacy cowered in the middle of the boat, the lawman fired twice more, blowing up more dead wood. More guns popped around the black-hatted man, smoke puffing from behind aspens, boulders, and fallen logs for a thirty-yard stretch along the northern shore.

“Ah, shit,” Longarm raked out, ejecting the spent shell to ping onto the boat floor behind him, “here's your friends, Miss Lacy!” He fired two shots quickly. “Don't you wanna say hi?”

Her only reply was a sob as she cowered, arms over her head, knees drawn toward her chest, at the bottom of the boat.

Longarm fired two more rounds as bullets sizzled around him, several plunking into the side of the boat with hollow thumps. He doffed his hat and crouched as low as he could, trying to keep his head below the gunwale. Quickly, he thumbed fresh cartridges through the Winchester's loading gate as the guns continued to crackle along the shore.

The boat rocked and jerked as the slugs hammered it. It rumbled over and against rocks but generally stayed on course. A man on the shore yelled beneath the cracks of rifle fire, “Throw that little bitch on out here, Longarm, and we'll leave you on your way!”

Lacy cried out as though she'd been slapped.

“Damn tempting!” Longarm spat through gritted teeth, glancing at her as he snaked the rifle over the gunwale. Taking quick aim, he fired three rounds. He evoked a yelp from behind a lightning-topped cottonwood and blew a hat off a head, but otherwise he doubted he did much damage from this distance and his moving perch.

“Come on, ya crazy star packer!” came another shout from shore. Longarm looked up to see a bespectacled man in a black opera hat and a black shirt with white polka dots on one knee beside a boulder. “Don't die for that little witch. She ain't worth it!”

“I'll say,” Longarm raked out again while Lacy just sobbed and drew her limbs tighter to her body.

He fired two more shots, driving the man in the black shirt—Heck Gunn himself—back behind his boulder. As more lead hammered the boat and splashed into the water around it, Longarm returned fire. Soon, however, the boat was fifty yards beyond the shooters and their shots were landing wilder and wilder, as were his own.

Longarm scanned the shore sliding back behind him. Gunn and Cruz's men scurried along the shore, a few slinging lead that dropped well behind the boat while the others were jogging along the rocky shore, sort of dancing around boulders and fir trees, trying to get another clear shot.

They couldn't come far upsteam, however, because there was a large thumb of rock before them—the bulging face of a high ridge. Two of the ambushers climbed the rock a ways and slung a couple of more rounds, but now they were only venting their frustration.

Longarm lowered his smoking repeater and ran his sleeve across his sweaty forehead. He gave a ragged sigh of relief, looking back once more to see the cutthroats gathering along the shore, gesturing wildly, angrily, trying to figure out what their next course of action should be.

“Well, looks like we're out of the woods again,” he said, resting his Winchester across his thighs and thumbing fresh cartridges through its loading gate.

“Yeah, but not for long.”

Lacy knelt near the front of the boat, staring forward. Her voice had owned a chilling flatness. Looking beyond her, Longarm saw why. About fifty yards before them, the river dropped eerily out of sight.

He dropped the Winchester as he grabbed both sides of the boat and rose to a crouch, staring ahead and hoping that what he was seeing was merely a mirage—a trick of the midmorning light on the water. But, no—the boat was drifting closer and closer to the falls, near enough now that Longarm could see beyond the base of it to where the river continued, stitched with shiny rapids.

His heart fell. His mouth went dry. It was a good fifty-foot drop. The boat wouldn't make it. At least, it wouldn't reach bottom without being turned into toothpicks . . .

Just as Longarm started to scramble to pick up the paddle and try to get the boat turned toward shore, the current grabbed them like a defiant hand and pulled them a little harder toward the drop between two hulking, pale boulders around the base of which water rose like windblown feather nests. It acted like a funnel, and suddenly the boat was caught within the sides of the funnel, and it was being poured along with the main current over the incline.

Lacy looked back at Longarm, her face white as a sheet, chin hanging, silently beseeching him to do something. But about all he could do at the moment was grab both sides of the boat and yell,
“Hold on!”

As the prow plunged nearly straight down, the girl screamed. Longarm fully expected the boat to crack up in the next second, but after it had dropped about ten feet, shaking him and Lacy like dice in a cup, it got wedged at a slant between two half-submerged boulders.

The river pushed from above and behind, and the boat inched forward with a grating shudder while Longarm dropped to both knees in the middle of the boat and leaned ahead to grab Lacy, who had been thrown half out of the boat upon impact with one of the boulders. When he got her back in, her head was soaked, hair basted to her head, and she gave another scream as the boat lurched forward and then plunged once more.

“Ahhh, shee-ittt!”
Longarm shouted as sheer gravity hurled him headfirst out of the boat. As he turned a forward somersault about six feet over the boat that disappeared in a spray of white foam ahead and below him, he caught a glimpse of Lacy disappearing into the foam just behind it. Longarm watched a half-submerge boulder sliding past him as he dropped like a stone into the water on the other side of the rock.

The cold water was like a giant fist clenched around him. Submerged in its icy, churning embrace, he fought to twist around and lift his head as one foot was rammed painfully against a submerged rock. When he finally did get his head above the torrent—at least, it felt like a torrent now that he was in it though the falls hadn't looked nearly as high or as perilous a few moments ago—he found himself being jerked unceremoniously to the right.

A trough of fast-moving, stone-colored water grabbed him violently and hurled him down it. And then another one grabbed him and did the same, though by the time he'd been tossed about by the fourth trough, he realized he was at the bottom of the river and being swept downstream.

At the same time, the current relented somewhat, and he found that he was able to swim a little. Shaking the water from his hair and eyes, he looked around.

Lacy's head and shoulders were twisting and turning about fifteen feet to his right, and beneath the constant chug of the river, he could hear her screaming though just barely. Her mouth formed a black circle in the pale oval of her face and amidst the spitting foam.

“Long-arrrrmmmm!”
she screamed louder now.

“Throw your arms out, head back,” he shouted, “and
float
!”

That's what he did, as he knew it was no use trying to make it over to her. Each of the two separate currents they were in was too strong. So he let the river carry him, weaving him between rocks and half over a boulder. He nudged another painfully with his shoulder, but then he watched the banks widen and the stream flatten out somewhat, and suddenly, his boots and then his knees were raking the bottom.

The water continued to push him along but now, finally, he was able to fight it back, and gain some footing. It was still like a fighter beating against him, but he stood and stumbled forward, weighed down by his dripping clothes and brushing the hair from his face with his hands, looking around.

Lacy was ahead and to his right about thirty yards, pinned against a boulder out where the water appeared a little deeper, the current there still strong. She hugged it like a lover, half facing him, looking at him beseechingly.

“Hang on!” He waded through the hip-deep water, feeling the river inch up his chest, but it had only reached his sternum by the time he reached the girl. He wrapped his arms around her, peeled her own arms from around the rock, and sort of dragged her back into shallower water.

For several minutes they knelt in the shallows, gasping. Longarm was shivering. It was a bright, sunny day, but the temperature was probably only in the fifties or so, and the water was probably about forty. He shrugged out of his heavy coat that had threatened to drag him to the bottom of the stream, and as he was about to toss it onto the bank in front of him, he froze.

Lacy must have seen them then, too—two hard-looking, bearded men in battered hats and checked shirts, kneeling along the top of the bank, regarding them both obliquely. The girl stopped shivering long enough to gasp.