Longarm and the Cry of the Wolf (9781101619506) (7 page)

When Calvin and the doctor had gone into the marshal's office and closed the door behind them, leaving Mrs. Leonard kneeling in the street, sobbing with her head down, Longarm looked again at Emil. The giant sidestepped over to the marshal's office door and stood in front of it, making it obvious that anyone intending to enter the office would have to go through him. Through him and the two cocked Remington pistols in his hands, that was.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Leonard,” Catherine said, kneeling beside the crying woman. “I'm so sorry. At least the marshal is going to let you see little David soon.”

“I shouldn't have let him muck out the stable,” the woman said through her cries, shaking her head, shoulders quivering. “I shouldn't have let him outside with so many wolves prowling around!”

“I'll take care of her.” This from behind Longarm and Catherine. Both turned to see the woman whom Longarm had been eyeing a few minutes ago, in the back doorway of the whorehouse. She stood now in a quilted deerskin coat, looking between Longarm and Catherine and Mrs. Leonard. She stepped forward and placed her hands on the woman's shoulders.

“Come, Muriel,” she said. “We'll go inside your house, and I'll fix us both some tea. I'll add a shot of brandy. Take the edge off.” As Mrs. Leonard rose, wiping the tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands, she turned to look up at the dark-eyed woman before her. “Oh, Zeena, I don't know what I'm going to do. David is all I have. You don't think . . . don't think . . . ?” Her eyes were bright with horror.

“Shh, it's going to be all right,” Zeena said, beginning to lead Muriel away. “I doubt very much that he's cursed, Muriel. It's such a rare, rare thing!”

“Oh, but what if he
does turn?”

When they'd walked off down the street and turned to head to Mrs. Leonard's house off the street's north side, Longarm glanced at Emil, who stood like a giant statue in front of the door, boots spread a little more than shoulder width apart. He held the Remingtons crossed on his chest. His cold, gray eyes bored into Longarm.

Catherine looked at the giant, too, and sighed. She swung her head toward Longarm, turning her mouth corners down in silent, helpless exasperation. “Buy you a drink?” She canted her head toward the Carpathian Mountain Saloon.

Longarm glanced at Emil and then turned to Catherine. “Why the hell not?”

Longarm tipped his bottle of Maryland rye to one side and watched the honey-brown liquid run out of the bottle's neck. It hit the deep valley between Catherine Fortescue's breasts and splashed up against the side of each. The splashes were little larger than freckles.

Goose bumps rose on them.

Her nipples pebbled.

“Oh!” the young woman groaned as she lay on her back in her room in the Carpathian Hotel. She shivered delightedly, lifting one bare knee and then the other. “Oh, God, that's incredible!”

She was holding Longarm's fully erect cock in her left hand, pumping him slowly. Longarm turned the bottle up and then lowered his head to the girl's belly, watching the whiskey run down the valley between her breasts and across her belly to pool in her belly button. As it did, quickly filling the dimple, he dipped his tongue in it and then slurped it up.

“Ahh . . .
Christ!
” Catherine cried tensing her jaws and squirming around, releasing his cock to press both hands to his head as he ran his tongue up north of her belly button, following the trail of liquor, to her breasts.

She giggled, grunted, groaned, arched her back as his tongue very slowly made the journey. Just below her breasts that jutted like pale, pink-tipped mountains, he glanced up to see that chicken flesh stood out on nearly every inch of her torso. Her nipples jutted, hard as thimbles.

Longarm smiled and continued sliding his tongue up between her breasts to the point where the whiskey had dropped onto her. Lapped up off the girl's sweet body, the tanglefoot tasted like honey. A nice contrast to the sweetness was the burn at the back of his tongue and in his throat.

Another nice contrast was the slick wetness he felt against his left middle finger, which he had inserted into the delicate, petal-like folds of her pussy, flicking it up and down and sideways and in and out. That caused her to groan and grind her thighs together.

When Longarm pulled his finger out of the lightly furred portal of her core, she sighed and drew a long, deep breath.

He smacked his lips together. “Tasty.”

“Come down here,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck and drawing his lips down to hers. They kissed hungrily, entangling each other's tongue. With his left hand, he kneaded her breasts, flicking her nipples with his thumb.

It was a nice reprieve from the craziness of all that had come in the hours before.

When Longarm had stabled his and Goldie's mounts in the nearest livery barn, he'd met Catherine at the saloon, and they'd come directly to her room, using the rear steps climbing to a second-story door, to avoid the girl's father and the rest of her hunting party. Not that she cared what any of them thought about her dalliances with the federal lawman—and Longarm saw that the general had little say in his hot-blooded daughter's doings—but she'd said they were all drunk and getting loud and full of tiresome braggadocio, making plans to stalk and kill the wolf who'd leaped on Murphy's travois and dragged the poor, wounded man off so quickly that there'd been nothing the others could do about it.

“He was just gone, so suddenly gone,” Catherine had told Longarm while they undressed together quickly as soon as they walked into her room. “And then more wolves were running toward us, so we had to leave him there, his screams dying oh so slowly.”

Desperately seeking distraction, she'd dropped to her knees in front of Longarm, dug his cock out of his balbriggans, and sucked him so dry that he didn't think he'd have another drop of jism to ejaculate for a month.

Now they mashed their hot tongues together. As he pulled his head back from hers, her tongue followed his out of her mouth, and they separated. She rose onto her elbows, grabbed the bottle off the nightstand, and took a long, manlike pull, wiping her rich, red lips with the back of her hand.

She narrowed one eye speculatively and smiled, her hazel eyes flashing in the gray afternoon light pushing through a near window. “I think I'd like to fuck one more time, Custis. Can we do that before we begin thinking again about the wolves and that poor David Leonard in Marshal Calvin's cellar?”

“Fine as frog hair.” Longarm rolled the girl onto her belly, Catherine laughing, her delightful breasts jostling. “I'd like a better angle this time,” he said, and holding her up against his hips with his right arm, he slowly impaled her with his jutting shaft.

“Uh,
God!
” she groaned, grabbing the bed's brass frame as though it were the rail of a storm-thrashed ship.

He hammered her hard for nearly fifteen minutes, sweating, the bedsprings sighing in accompaniment to her groans and muffled cries. In and out, in and out. His cock seemed to grow and grow. Her snatch expanded and contracted like a hand wringing out a rag . . . until he drew her hard against him one last time and, arching his back and thrusting his pelvis forward, gave himself to the spasming release.

His burly grunt echoed off the wooden walls.

Catherine released the bed frame. She dropped like so much wet wash from a line, her head coming to rest on a pillow, her ass still drawn up hard against Longarm's shaft that was only just now beginning to dwindle.

“Mr. Lawman, sir,” she said in a rich, breathy voice, “you sure can fuck.”

Outside, a wolf howled. Long and mournful. Longarm froze, listening. Something told him it was the same wolf he'd heard before—the one that seemed to be on a high perch above the town.

He removed his arm from around Catherine's waist, and her hips sagged down against the bed. She rolled onto her side and drew her knees toward her breasts as she watched him climb down off the bed, his pecker lightly slapping his thigh as he moved to the window over the washstand.

“What do you suppose he wants?” she said, still a little breathless, sweeping her thick hair back behind her ear. “More blood?”

Longarm remembered what Goldie had told him about the woman, Crazy Kate, who'd been locked up in the convent perched high on that pinnacle of rock. Just like before, he suppressed the nonsensical possibility that the howls could belong to the woman, and looked up and down the street.

The sky was gray. Snow fell from it lazily, dusting the tan ground. Straight up, however, the clouds were parting. The light was fading at the end of a late-autumn day high in the San Juans. The moon would be rising soon.

The full moon.

It appeared that so far no wolves prowled the streets. But what would happen when darkness fell? Longarm hoped all the residents of Crazy Kate had strong doors and windows. Likely, they did. He had a feeling the current plethora of wolves around here was not a recent occurrence. Something told him the village had been living with this many critters for months. Maybe years.

He grabbed the whiskey bottle, took a pull.

Catherine reached out from the bed, wrapped her hand around his slack dong, running a thumb over the head. “I love your cock.”

“My cock loves you.”

“Could we stay right here and fuck the rest of the day and night away?”

Longarm took another pull from the bottle and shook his head as he continued staring into the street, shuttling his gaze to the marshal's office. Calvin's two front windows were lit against the coming darkness. “I'm gonna see about my prisoner and the boy. I'd best check around to see if there's any human wolves on the prowl out there . . . along with the four-legged brand.”

“Human wolves?”

“Goldie and his bunch had been aimin' to meet up with some of their former gang members up here in the mountains somewhere. I don't know where exactly. Somethin' tells me they probably know by now what happened to three of their ilk back at Hawk's Bluff, and that Goldie is here.”

“You think they'll try to bust him out of Calvin's Wolf Hold?”

“Hope so. I might as well haul their asses back to Denver along with Goldie's. Just as soon not have to come back here anytime soon.”

She brushed her fingers along the underside of his scrotum. “After all the fun we've had?”

Longarm shuddered to the thrill of her touch. He snorted and sat down on the bed. He handed her the bottle. She drank. When she was through, he leaned down and, cupping her right breast, kissed the nipple of the other one. She ran her hands through his hair, lightly raked her fingers across his unshaven jaw.

“I'm gonna go out have me a talk with Calvin, see how deep this werewolf idea goes,” he said, rising and reaching for his clothes.

She threw the covers back. “Can I come with you?”

He looked at her lying naked and semi-curled on the bed, her young, taut body long-legged, firm-busted, and ripe. Her eyes were coy, playful as she stared up from beneath her brows, her beautiful face exquisitely framed by her love-tangled hair. Her cheeks were flushed with fulfillment.

Longarm sighed. “Has any man ever been able to say no to you, Catherine?”

She grinned, got up, and started washing herself at the stand beneath the window. They both froze for a second when the wolf howled again.

•   •   •

Longarm and Catherine left the room together, their boots clomping on the second-story floorboards.

As Catherine gave him one last peck on the cheek and started down the stairs, Longarm paused to dig a three-for-a-nickel cheroot out of his shirt pocket and light it. He puffed on it for a while, rolling it expertly between his lips, savoring the honey-like taste of the girl and the whiskey lingering on his tongue and now mixing with the peppery, woodsy taste of the smoke. From below rose a cloud of tobacco smoke and the low rumble of conversation as well as the clinking of glasses and bottles.

Longarm saw that the Carpathian was teeming with clientele—mostly bearded locals in suspenders, dungarees, and cone-shaped, floppy-brimmed hats or watch caps, but with several non-native shopkeepers and cowpunchers from area ranches thrown in, as well. The punchers were probably in town to wait out the long winter before roundup and the resumption of steady pay.

The general's men, conspicuous in their ostentatious frontier garb—fringed buckskin slacks and tunics decorated every which way with beads and fake porcupine quills—sat in the middle of the milling crowd. They were a raucous quartet, and the general was just now standing with his arm around a bare-breasted, bored-looking Indian whore and gesturing wildly while speaking to a bearded local at the table next to his own.

“Strychnine!” the general said, poking his cigar at the man to whom he spoke. “You people get a wagonload of strychnine up here and toss it into the woods around the town. Hell, poison all the trash heaps. Now, you might kill a few dogs and coyotes”—the general laughed, taking several puffs from his cigar—“but I guarantee you'll solve your wolf problem in a matter of days!”

One of his friends, who resembled Buffalo Bill in his gray-streaked blond muttonchops and goatee, climbed wobbly footed from his chair and announced as though to the entire room, “And I, Hiriam H. R. Langeford the Fourth, here and now promise to pay for the entire load—wagon, driver, and as much poison as it takes to expunge your furry menace from these environs!”

A tall, gangly puncher got up and whooped, waving his hat in the air. Several of the painted girls milling about the room clapped. One stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled.

“Thank you, sir!” This from the bartender, a middle-aged man in a beard but with a clean-shaven upper lip. He had a heavy Old World accent, and he continued with what Longarm detected in his overloud voice to be irony: “That will certainly take care of our problem. Indeed!” He looked at several of the other native locals sitting about the room in their suspenders and smoking their pipes, looking bored with the moneyed gents' carryings-on. “Won't it, my brothers?”

The men he'd spoken to merely smiled fatefully and shook their heads. One raised his beer schooner to the barman, turned his mouth corners down, and drank as though to a dark fate, a cold grave.