Longarm and the Cry of the Wolf (9781101619506) (11 page)

“I'll finish you if you want, Longarm.”

“That'd be right selfish of me, wouldn't it?” he croaked. “Since you said you haven't had it in a while.”

“My,” she said, looking up at him from beneath his hard cock, touching the tip of her tongue teasingly to the end of it. “Maybe I misjudged you.”

She rose from the floor, turned the bedcovers back, and climbed in. Longarm climbed in after her. She fluffed the pillow and lay her head down on top of it, staring up at him with those beguiling brown eyes that were turned up ever-so-slightly at the corners, giving them a Slavic slant. They were framed by her long, dark brown hair that curled down over her shoulders to caress the sides of her heavy, sloping breasts, the nipples of each tilted to the side and fully distended.

As he mounted her, he could feel the wetness of her need. She lifted her head and looked down at his cock, spreading her legs, taking his iron-hard dong in both of her hands, and holding it tightly against her snatch.

He held himself suspended on his arms and the tips of his toes while she closed her eyes and pleasured herself very slowly with the head of his cock, running it up and down the warm, soft entrance to her womanhood. Her breasts rose and fell sharply, and he leaned his head down to lick and nuzzle them, to suck each nipple in turn.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh . . . oh, Christ . . . oh . . . oh . . . !”

Then she opened her eyes, smiled up at him, showing nearly all of her pearl-white teeth, and slipped his massively swollen head inside her. She wrapped her hands around his ass and drew him into her. He felt his cock, like a warm, sparking nerve, sliding into her—deep down and then up inside her womb, toward her belly, until it wouldn't go any farther.

He slid back out, and she sighed.

He slid back in, and she groaned.

He tried to slide back out again, but she held him there, and she herself tightened—every inch of her—tipping her head far back on the pillow until the cords stood out in her neck.

He felt her pussy quivering and oozing as she came, drawing her knees up hard against him. When she opened her eyes, she reached up and placed her hands on the sides of his face, holding his head as he began to hammer against her, smiling at him ethereally until he, too, had taken himself over the edge and felt the hot, relieving burst of release.

He squeezed his eyes closed and held himself hard against her as the final spasms rippled through him.

He felt something small and cold press against his chest. Opening his eyes, he looked down to see that she was holding her pearl-gripped pocket pistol against his sternum. She clicked the hammer back. Her brown eyes owned a sad cast as she said, “I'm sorry to have to end such a wonderful night this way, Custis.”

“No need to apologize,” Longarm said, keeping his still-hard cock deep inside her. “I took the bullets out when you were building a fire earlier.”

Zeena pulled the Remington's trigger. The hammer dropped with a click. Her mouth opened slightly in shock. “How . . . did . . . ?”

“While I don't believe in beatin' around the bush myself, you just seemed to come on a little too strong for someone I take to be the naturally reserved sort.”

She frowned angrily and pulled the pistol's trigger again, again, and again, until the hammer had clicked five more times. Longarm smiled grimly down at her, took the popper out of her hands, and pulled out of her. She threw her head back against the pillow with an enraged grunt.

Longarm dropped his feet to the floor and glanced over his shoulder at her. “Why?”

She lay naked on top of the bed, staring at the ceiling in defeat. Still, she summoned some steel into her voice as she said, “Go to hell.”

“Better tell me or I'll haul your ass in on federal charges. That's what attempting to drill a pill through a deputy U.S. marshal's heart will get you.” Longarm felt his own anger rise, as it did when folks tried to kill him. Especially those who had just fucked him. The two acts did not sit well so close together.

“Come on. Spill it. Who put you up to this? Goldie's friends? Calvin? Who?”

She lifted her head. “Calvin? Why would he want you dead?”

“Him and Goldie are about the only two folks I know in town, and Calvin's made no bones about wanting me to get my ass out of here sooner rather than later.”

Zeena rested her head back against her pillow once more. She sighed at length and turned her mouth corners down as she continued to stare at the ceiling. “No, it wasn't Calvin. It was the man you shot earlier. It was for him.”

Longarm scowled, knitting his brows together and carving a plethora of deeply skeptical lines across his forehead. “
Kansas Pete Durant?
”

She returned an indignant glare. “I loved him, all right?”

“You and
Pete Durant
?”

“I just told you I loved him, didn't I?”

“That stuck way up high in my craw, I'm afraid, Zeena. I just can't see a straight-backed, good-lookin' woman like yourself—a woman with her own business, no less—hitchin' her star to the likes of that worthless bushwhacker!”

“He wasn't worthless anymore,” she said, scooting up to sit against the bed's brass headboard and drawing the quilts and blankets up to cover her breasts. “He'd come up here to hide out about a year ago. He came to work for me, doin' odd jobs about the place, and . . . well . . . he changed.” She lowered her voice, made it sound sincerely intimate. “We fell in love. When he saw you, he figured you were here to haul him back to Denver. I tried to get him to forget it, but Pete was one hardheaded man. He said he wouldn't let you take him in. Not alive, anyway. We'd built too much together.”

Longarm just stared at her, unable to imagine her and Kansas Pete Durant together. It would be like trying envision a pretty schoolmarm screwing the town drunk. But he had to admit he'd seen it before—two disparate people somehow throwing in together, to the total shock and surprise of everyone who knew them.

He shook his head as he continued to think it through. Behind him, Zeena sobbed quietly. “He was good and gentle. Of course, you wouldn't believe it, but he was as good a man as I'd ever known. He was kind to me. Eventually, we were going to run off to Mexico together.”

Her voice turned hard with acrimony. “And you took him away from me, you bastard! What does that leave me?” She sobbed, sniffed. “It leaves me nearing middle age up here in this wolf-haunted village—
alone!
Do you know what it's like for an aging woman
alone
?”

Longarm regarded her with less heat as she sat there, arms crossed on her chest, head down, sobbing. He sighed, heaved himself to his feet, and walked over to the washstand. He set the pistol on the stand, poured water from a pitcher into the basin, and began scrubbing his privates.

“Well, I'll be damned” was all he said.

It was the only thing either of them said. When he finished washing, he dressed, hearing the wolf howling from the northern ridge again. He donned his hat, noted a gathering chill in the room, and added a couple of chunks of split cedar to the stove from the wood box, closing the door afterward with a shrill squawk of the iron handle. He glanced at her once more, staring into empty space through a tangle of hair over her eyes. Then he grabbed his rifle, turned to the door, and stepped into the hall.

He stood there for nearly a minute, staring at the carpet. He couldn't quite wrap his mind around Zeena and Kansas Pete, but there were some things—especially regarding the relations of some men and some women—that just didn't figure. Love was one of them. Damn, she had him feeling bad about killing that no-good killer and general hard case Kansas Pete Durant.

Imagine that.

As he walked along the narrow hall, hearing only a few hushed voices behind the closed doors on either side of him and smelling liquor and the cloying midnight oil, he checked his old turnip watch. Damn near eleven o'clock.

One of those apprehensive twinges he'd been getting of late raked across his spine. It was sort of like being anxious about an upcoming appointment. He gave an amused snort, but again he noted a lack of real amusement in the snort; it expressed only his wanting to feel amused.

He felt genuine trepidation about midnight.

What did he think? he wondered as he headed on down the stairs, replacing the pocket watch and plucking a cheroot from his shirt pocket. Did he think ole Goldie and the little boy, David Leonard, were going to turn into werewolves and run in a bloody killing frenzy with all the other wolves of Crazy Kate, literally painting the town red?

He stood out on the Black Wolf's front porch, looking around carefully to make sure he was alone out there in the chilly darkness, and then he stared up at the moon. It was about a half hour away from its zenith. He could see the little pocks and fissures on the lunar landscape. The sunlight reflecting off it almost seemed to pulsate, white as a giant pearl.

Again, the wolf on the mountain howled. The call was as long and mournful and menacing as before. The echo took a long time to die. When it did, the howl came again, just like before.

Longarm felt himself shudder and then stepped off the porch and walked west along the street to the Carpathian, which was still as lit up as it had been several hours earlier. If anything, it was even busier than before, as though everyone was celebrating some religious holiday, though in reality they knew they were all merely trying to distract themselves from the moon rising ever higher above the Carpathian's shake-shingled roof.

The general and his hunting party were still there, at the same table as before. The general had gotten his second wind, and one of the pudgy local whores was teaching him how to dance what appeared to be a traditional dance of the Old Country while a good dozen other men sat or stood around, stomping their feet and clapping.

Longarm wended his way through the crowd. He was tired down deep in his bones, and he only wanted to check on Catherine and find a place to throw down for some sleep. If he could, that was. With the full moon on the rise.

In the second-floor hall, he stopped in front of her door. He turned the knob, expecting the door to be locked, but to his surprise, the latch clicked. He pushed the door open to find a lamp burning dully on the dresser. Catherine lay curled on her side beneath the covers, hair splayed out across her pillow.

Longarm closed the door, leaned his rifle against the dresser, walked over to the bed, and sat on the edge of it. He drew the covers down very gently, so as not to wake her, and exposed her right arm. She'd placed a white bandage over it. The bandage was wet—he could smell the whiskey she'd soaked it with—and slightly blood-spotted. Nothing too severe, though the beast had certainly drawn blood. But she'd live.

As long as she didn't turn into a werewolf in a half hour.

She gasped and snapped her eyes open with a start. “Oh!” she said, settling her head back onto the pillow and smiling. “It's you. Where've you been, Custis?”

“Uh . . . followin' up on a hunch.”

“About the man who tried to shoot you?”

“Yeah. How you feelin'?”

“Just fine. I swilled whiskey to kill the pain.” Catherine flung the covers back groggily, revealing her long, bare legs beneath a chemise so thin he could see everything under it. “Get undressed and crawl in here, you.”

For the first time in his life, Longarm's dong actually sagged down between his thighs at the thought of another mattress dance. That would be how many tussels in one day? He'd lost count.

“I figured I'd go out and keep an eye on things,” he lied, intending to hole up for a couple of hours in the livery barn with his horse, where he could probably get a lot more rest than he could here. Even if she didn't want to rassle again, sleeping beside a beautiful woman could be enervating as opposed to restful.

“I won't hear of it,” she said. “Even a federal lawman needs his sleep. Get those duds off that big, brawny carcass of yours, and crawl in here and keep me warm.”

So that's what he did. It turned out she even let him sleep, as she slept herself with the help of the whiskey. Only, he wasn't sure how much time had passed before she rose from the covers, flung her chemise aside, and rolled on top of him, sitting up and tenting the bedcovers with her body.

She placed his hands on her breasts and threw her head back, flinging her thick hair behind her shoulders. While he kneaded her lovely bosoms, she rubbed her silky snatch around on his cock. He didn't think he had any more lead in the old pistol, but he'd be damned if, after a few minutes of her moist snatch manipulating him, he didn't look down and see that raging hard-on standing at full mast in front of her belly.

She scuttled down his legs a ways, lowered her head, and licked him until he was even harder. She dropped her mouth down over his cock's head, and then she dropped it still farther along the shaft, until he felt her throat pressed up hard against him and heard the liquid sounds of her sucking, the sultry, beguiling sounds of her groaning in pleasure.

When she lifted her head, it was no longer Catherine's head but a wolf's head nearly as large as a cow's. The yellow eyes glowed in the midnight-black sockets. Somehow, they remained Catherine's eyes, only instead of hazel they were yellow. The beasts's hackles rose, shrouding the head in spiky fur, and the upper lips lifted to reveal two-inch-long, ivory-white, razor-edged fangs.

Catherine threw her wolf's head far back on her shoulders, loosed a long, shrill howl, then pointed her long, thick nose toward Longarm once more, growling and snarling savagely.

Longarm loosed a howl of his own as she thrust her teeth toward his throat.

“Custis!” the wolf screamed.

Longarm stared at the wolf's eyes. They were hazel now. And the wolf's head around them was suddenly Catherine Fortescue's head.

Her very beautiful, human head.

She was staring at him, her eyes bright with terror, sort of leaning back away from him. Longarm realized then why she was the one looking fearful now, for he was staring over the cocked hammer of his .44, which was aimed at the girl's beautiful, human—yes,
human
—head.

He lowered his eyes past her gold necklace to the red-plaid wool shirt she wore beneath her open fur coat. Her mussed, honey-blond hair glistened in the glow of the lamp that had been turned up on the dresser.

His heart hammering painfully against his breastbone, Longarm looked around for the wolf. No sign of it.

“Custis,” she said, loosing a long, relieved breath as he lowered the Colt, “you were dreaming, honey. Just dreaming.”

“Holy shit.”

“What . . . were you dreaming?” she asked, the color beginning to return to her cheeks.

Slow to shake the nightmare, still half-believing she was about to tear out his throat, he looked at her arm clad in fur and wool. “How's your arm?”

“Hurts a little,” she said, staring at him skeptically. “But it's better.” She leaned forward and placed a desperate hand on his shoulder. “Custis, you have to help me. My father . . . his men . . . they've gone out hunting.”

He sat up in bed, looking around. The window was dark; it was still night. How long had he been sleeping? “What time is it?”

“Half past midnight.”

He swung his feet to the floor, sitting up, blinking groggily, still trying to clear the cobwebs and the image of the yellow-eyed black wolf from his retinas. He looked at her, her words just then penetrating the thick skin of his consciousness. “Did you say . . . ?”

“They went out hunting, Custis. My father and his men.” She spoke slowly, as though to a thick child. “They made a bet with a couple of the local men. A thousand-dollar bet that they couldn't kill a wolf and bring it back to the Carpathian.”

“What the hell are you sayin', Catherine? Why the hell couldn't they kill a wolf?”

“The local men say that during a full moon, the only thing that will kill the wolves is silver bullets. Father and his men have foolishingly, drunkenly taken them up on the challenge, and they've headed out to hunt the wolves with regular bullets and bring at least
one
back to the saloon, though Father boasted that they'd
each
get one!”

“Well, that's just plain reckless,” Longarm said, clearer now, rising and looking for his clothes. “Who knows how many wolves are out there? And, hell, who knows if the locals are right or not?”

Catherine remained sitting on the edge of the bed, staring up at him incredulously. “What are you saying? You think they're really
werewolves
?”

“I'm sayin' that if I head out there after wolves tonight, I'd copper my bets and at least use silver bullets.” Longarm snorted and shook his head as he shoved one foot into his balbriggan bottoms. “Can't believe I just said that, but there it is. Shit, I'm as crazy as Calvin.”

“Will you help me find those idiots and bring them back? I didn't know what they'd done until I went down to the saloon just a few minutes ago, and the local men told me. Despite the moon, it's damn scary out there. I didn't want to go out there alone.” Catherine shuddered, hugged herself. “That one wolf keeps howling and howling.”

Longarm paused, listening. Sure enough, the wolf was still howling. He wondered if it had been howling steadily since the last time he'd noticed it.

“No, you'd best not go out there alone. In fact, you'd best not go out there at all.” Longarm reached for his gun rig, strapped it around his waist. “I'll go find'em and bring 'em back before they're wolf bait.” If it isn't too late, the fools, he added to himself.

“I'm going with you!” she insisted as he grabbed his Winchester and headed out of her room, Catherine on his heels.

The full-moon celebration had died down only slightly in the main drinking hall. The place was so smoky that it was like wading through a field after a pitched battle involving a thousand cannons. A couple of the local men, in beards, suspenders, billed watch caps, and with faces wizened from years of the high-country weather, danced together while the others conversed and drank. The whores were still making the rounds, though they looked tired and drawn. One was leading a stocky gent up the stairs as Longarm and Catherine made their ways along the bar to the front door.

Longarm could tell who'd challenged the general and the general's friends to the wolf hunt by the self-satisfied, faintly jeering expressions on a local man's face. Likely one of the original settlers, he had a long, hawk-nosed face with a dark mole on his cheek and slick black hair.

Longarm had seen him before, and because of the man's proud businessman's air, the lawman had assumed that he owned at least a couple of successful enterprises here in Crazy Kate. He was sitting with three others at a table near the ticking potbelly stove. He and his assocaties, all clad in suits and fur hats, were smoking pipes and sitting back in their chairs, waiting to see if any of the arrogant strangers survived the wolf hunt. The bowl of the pipe the challenger was smoking was a carving of a wolf's head.

Outside, the wolf from the north mountain gave its haunting cry as Catherine closed the saloon door behind her and Longarm. Their breath puffed in the chill air. The moon had reached its zenith and was beginning its long, slow fall to the west. It was nearly as light as day out here, though the shadows around buildings and objects were heavy, inky, and menacing with all that they might conceal.

The moonlight made the street look like a river angling between silhouetted ridges. On it, nothing moved. With his eyes Longarm probed the shadows beneath stoops and in alley mouths, and saw no sign of the wolves. He looked at the jailhouse. The lamp in its window had finally gone out.

“Any idea which way they headed?” Longarm asked Catherine.

“No. I came out and called for them a few minutes ago, but I got no reply. They must be a ways away.”

Longarm dropped down off the porch steps, squeezing the Winchester in his gloved hands. Part of him wished he had silver bullets for the long gun; another part of him scoffed at the notion.

“You stay close,” he said, as he moved out into the street, probing every shadow with his eyes, pricking his ears, trying to get some sense of which direction the general and his moneyed friends had headed.

Between the long, echoing calls of the wolf on the north mountain, a sound came from the northwest. Hard to tell what it was. An echoing snarl? What sounded like a man's yell followed.

Catherine gasped.

“That must be them. Damn Father, the drunken idiot!”

“He do this sort of thing often?” Longarm asked, keeping his voice low as he began walking west along the street.

“You mean does he get drunk with his friends and accept crazy challenges? Yes.” Catherine was speaking just above a whisper, clinging to Longarm's elbow. “Never anything this crazy, though. I'd thought his trying to lasso a grizzly a couple of months ago was as bad as it would ever get.”

“He must be damn bored.”

“I regret that I ever encouraged him to retire,” Catherine said.

Longarm continued walking along the street. The sounds—whatever they were, a commotion of some kind—continued to rise from what seemed to be the northwest.

Longarm headed that way, swerving to the right of the main street, traversing a break between buildings, and then curving westward among cabins, stock pens, and privies. Most of the cabins he passed were dark. Longarm assumed that everyone who lived out here was either in the Carpathian Saloon or in Zeena's Black Wolf House of a Thousand Delights, or one of the other smaller watering holes now providing sanctuary from the wild beasts preying on the town.

That was where Longarm should be. Catherine, too. If her old man wanted to kill himself, let him have it. No better way to do it than to be out here hunting wolves in the dark, even if the moon was full. Or, maybe,
especially
if the moon was full . . .

“What an awful smell,” Catherine said when they'd stolen slowly along the edge of the town, between Crazy Kate and the northern ridge, for about fifteen minutes.

Longarm had smelled it, too. On his right a large barn loomed. On his left was a cabin with a caved-in roof. They'd strayed onto an old farmstead, maybe home to one of the original settlers. The town had spread out just south of it. There was no sign that anyone still lived here. The thick, sickly sweet fetor of putrefying flesh wafted from the direction of the barn.

Suspicion raked at Longarm as he stared at the barn, frowning.

“Come on,” he told Catherine. “I'm gonna check it out.”

As he walked toward the big building hulking before him, she followed, both of them stepping lightly, he with his rifle up and ready, she extending her revolver. They pivoted on their hips and turned their heads back and forth slowly, looking around. The sounds they'd been following had died.

The fetor grew stronger with each step Longarm took toward the barn. The structure's large front doors were gone, the opening forming a black rectangle against the moon-silvered front wall. The light penetrated only a few feet, laying down a silver prism. By the time he reached the barn's opening, his eyes were watering from the stench of decay. Catherine held her arm over her nose and mouth.

Longarm peered inside but couldn't see anything; in contrast to the moonlight, the barn's bowels were nearly as dark as the bottom of a well. Not hearing anything moving around inside, or seeing any yellow eyes glowing at him, he lit a lucifer and held it up as he walked into the darkness beyond the door.

The flickering match light revealed a lamp hanging from a stout post on his right. He lit the lamp and held it high, walking around, wincing against the horrible, nearly overpowering smell, breathing through his mouth to keep from retching.

The sphere of flickering lamplight revealed several ropes dangling from high rafters. Some of these ropes held what were obviously the remains of deer or elk, judging by the sizes of the remaining bones and the heads that were still suspended in loops a good eight or ten feet above the barn floor.

Very little meat, hide, or fur remained on the bones. In fact, some of the ropes held nothing at all, but that they had once suspended dead animals above the floor was obvious by the dried red blood that clung to the hemp.

Lowering the lamp and continuing to move around the barn, Longarm saw that the floor was thickly carpeted in more dried blood that crunched when he walked on it. The floor was strewn with white bones of all shapes and sizes; they'd been stripped clean, scoured by feral teeth that had first ripped chunks of the bodies down from the ropes.

Despite the grisliness of the discovery and the rancid smell that caused tears to ooze out of his eyes and dribble down his cheeks, Longarm chuckled. He lifted the lamp's cowl, blew out the flame, and hung the lamp on its post.

As he walked outside, Catherine stared at him over the arm she still held over her mouth. In the moonlight glistening in her hair spilling over her shoulders, he could see that she was frowning curiously at him.

“Think I just found out what makes the wolves love Crazy Kate so much.”

“You don't think someone's been feeding them, do you?”

“Not only someone but who.”

Catherine opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it suddenly. Several rifles barked in the west. Wolves snarled and yipped. Men shouted.

“Oh, no!” Catherine said, her voice quaking.

She and Longarm broke into a run across the farmyard.