Sliphammer (9 page)

Warren's boyish grin was full of handsome charm. Josie hoped she'd be around to see what he'd be like once he discovered how easy it would be to get women. For a kid with his good looks and the magic of his name, it would be hke falhng off a log. He hadn't found that out yet, but when he did, she expected it would be fun to watch.

Warren had a shiny bruise on his cheek; soon enough it would work up into a painful discoloration. Warren was unsteady, brash because he wasn't sure of himself, but she liked him: he had the Earp wildness and the. flamboyant Earp contempt for mundane conversations. He even had the Earp brains—the shrewd ability to observe everything at once, carry a dozen trains of thought in his head at once, and calculate cleverly. He had that intelligence, whenever he stopped to use it; a few years and, if he managed to live that long, he would grow up to be an impressive man. Maybe not quite the man Wyatt was, but Wyatt was unique.

Warren brought up a chair and sat. “That was a good fight. I like a good fight.” He had evidently put the maimed miner clean out of his head.

Wyatt snorted. “Those miners were outnumbered four to one. Is that what you call a good fight?”

“You're the one who's always saying it's smart to make sure the odds are on your side before you mix into a thing.”

Wyatt said, “You still need to learn the difference between a serious fight and a fight for fun.”

“Which was this, then?”

“More fun than serious,” Wyatt said. “Sparrow only brought them here to feel us out If he'd been serious they'd have been armed.”

Josie said, “Horse shit. You call what Cooley did fun?”

Wyatt looked at her. “It was fun for Cooley,” he told her. His eyes were a bit cool.

Warren acted out a shudder with head and shoulders; he said, “Cooley's the kind of bastard you can have nightmares about. I'd hate to be alone with him in a dark alley.”

Wyatt said, “Cooley's all right. He knows what he does best and he takes pride in his work, which is one measure of a man.” That was, Josie thought, the kind of thing that could only be said by a man like Wyatt who was totally unafraid of Cooley. But she found it hard to reconcile with what Wyatt had said to Deputy Tree a few minutes before. Maybe Wyatt had just been testing Tree to find out which way Tree would jump.

Wyatt said to Warren, “You look kind of beat—you ought to go up and he down and put a beefsteak on that bruise.”

“I'm all right.”

“You look tired.”

“I'm
not
tired.”

“All right,” Wyatt said, “you're not tired.” He smiled and winked at Josie.

Warren was about to deliver some angry retort, but he curbed his tongue, thought a moment, and finally said earnestly, “Look, I just don't want you to think I'm weak. I know you haven't got patience with weakness.”

“I've got nothing against natural weakness,” Wyatt said. “I despise a man who decides to be weak when the choice is open to him. But nobody thinks you're soft, kid. You don't have to prove anything.”

“I don't want charity from you,” Warren said.

“You won't get any,” Wyatt told him. “I still recommend a beefsteak.”

Warren grumbled, got up, downed the last of his drink, and left. Wyatt watched him with filial amusement* his expression was more gentle than Josie could ever remember it.

At the door, Warren turned and looked back at them. Seeing Wyatt watching him, Warren grinned nastily and made a finger gesture and shouted, “Screw you!” and disappeared into the hotel.

Wyatt growled, “Pretty soon I'm going to have to teach him to hobble his mouth.”

“He's only trying to please you by showing you how tough he is.”

“I know, girl. Doesn't take toughness to make a fool out of yourself. What do you think of the deputy?”

“He's nice,” she said.

He laughed at her. “You're always man-hungry.”

“Not any more—not with you here. I'm only hungry for you. The deputy's not fit to wash your underwear.”

“Gently, girl. You exaggerate a thing too much and it'll make a man suspicious. The deputy's all right, he's got sand.”

“Why did you want him to jump Cooley?”

“I had my reasons,” he replied, and looked up. Wayde Cardiff was coming toward the table with two other captains of industry. Josie made a face.

The mineowners sat down and started talking all at once. After they got it sorted out the talk proceeded with lusty abandon. They were wealthy men whose power was unfettered by good manners. Josie didn't give the conversation her whole attention; it was man talk, about labor union agitators and miners: if Floyd Sparrow tried that kind of effrontery again it might be necessary to kill a few agitators. Teach the miners a lesson. Keep them in their place. Show them who was boss.

It gratified Josie that these wealthy titans spoke to Wyatt with great respect. Not obeisance: they were too arrogant themselves to patronize anybody they didn't genuinely admire. They were a tough breed who did not hold ordinary gun-slingers in awe; they hired gunslingers by the dozens and treated them like dirt, which was to say they treated them as they would treat any other hired hands. But nobody had hired Wyatt. It was merely understood that they were all equals here. If Wyatt did these gentlemen a favor, they were in a position to repay him in kind, as equals; they had the Governor's ear.

A small part of the mutual respect had to do with money and-position, she thought: Wyatt wasn't rich, but he was financially sound; he still owned, or had a share of, a score of businesses down in Arizona. Like the mining bosses, he too was an owner.

But it went much farther than that. They respected him as a man.

That he
was
a man was a fact nobody knew better than Josie. He radiated force, like heat. He flowed full with the bull juices of life. She remembered first meeting him—a night in Tombstone, very late, all of them sitting around the saloon drinking and laughing after the last customers had left. Wyatt and Doc Holliday had won a lot of money dealing faro. Virgil, at the bar, was methodically counting the winnings and setting the money out in even stacks.

It was before all the trouble, before Warren came to Tombstone. Morgan Earp and Texas Jack were playing darts for a hundred dollars a game—they were drunk - and whooping. Josie had come over after the last curtain at the Bird Cage, brought by the three other girls from the show. Morg and Texas Jack had immediately adopted two of the girls and introduced them to the dart game. The third girl, the one who had suggested they all come over and meet the Earps, was a lusty, sensuous girl with abundant breasts and hips who was somehow fascinated by Doc Holliday. She was trying to cozy up to Holliday but Holliday was splendidly drunk by that time of night—as usual, as Josie later learned. The girl had pouted resentfully, taken three drinks in succession, and then jumped up on a table and clapped her hands for attention.

“Why don't we all sit down together and play a little game of strip poker for fun? Everybody know the rules?” She was glaring at Holliday with challenge in her eyes.

Josie had been startled by the idea. Then, looking at Wyatt Earp, she began to feel intrigued. Texas Jack roared in his prairie twang: “I thank thet sounds lak a hell of a good thang to do, honey!” Morg, high-spirited and youthfully wild, gathered them all around the table—all except Virgil, who grunted something in his resonant, strait-laced voice and left the place, probably going home to his wife.…

Josie remembered looking at Wyatt, then, seeing how he watched her, with his sleepy half smile; his frank scrutiny made her flush with sensation. He looked wholly self-assured, completely masculine: it was inconceivable he had ever stammered awkwardly to a girl, the way most men did at first meeting. He just sat there and watched Josie, the hint of a smile under the droop of his mustache, and it made her feel between her legs the tingle of excitement, the birth of an overwhelming appetite that was her response to the monolithic thrust of masculinity he radiated like musk.

She had never met a man like him; there never was anyone like him. They all sat down around the table. Morg and one or two of the girls were giggling nervously. Doc Holliday dealt the cards with suitable sarcasms. Holliday was a scrawny little runt, redolent of a distillery; he seemed sexless, but something about the game must have appealed to his warped sense of absurdities.

Josie had come straight out after the last show. It was late at night and she hadn't troubled to festoon herself with all the fashionable undergarments dictated by the customs of the day. She wore only shoes and a dress. She had a good body and she wanted Wyatt to see it—but perversely the cards fell against her: by some trick of the cynical fates the big-breasted girl who liked Holliday was the first to lose all her clothes, and Holliday himself was soon stripped naked. He seemed indifferent to it. The girl reached out and tried to stimulate him and Holliday pushed her hand away to deal the cards. He concentrated on the cards with the grim gravity of a single-minded gambler in a no-limit game against seven high-rolling millionaires. His chest was hollow, caved in; his ribs showed and he v had no hair, on his chest or arms. His skin was as pallid as the underbelly of a fish. His sickly little-boy body was oddly in contrast with the killer's face, etched with the tracks of lifelong pain, shaped into a habitual, sardonically satanic expression. With the table between them, Josie could not see Holliday below the waist, and did not particularly care to. Holliday dealt the cards and she watched them with tight concentration.

Beside her, Wyatt put his big hand on her thigh. The shock made her heart jump. The others were all drunk, laughing, paying no attention. She turned her head slowly, tingling with arousal, yet afraid; when her eyes reached his face he was smiling with unmistakable insinuation.

She hesitated; she smiled back, and presently moved her chair closer to his. After a moment, when everyone was watching Texas Jack get up and hobble desperately on one foot to get his pants off, she pushed her soft breast against Wyatt's arm and reached over to touch him under the table. Her mouth was slack; her eyes had gone loose and half-lidded. She felt the marks of Wyatt's fingers on the flesh of her leg like hot iron brands.

Wyatt got up from his chair and reached for her hand. He watched her unblinkingly, paying utterly no attention to the others. Someone—Morg—roared a raucous obscenity. Josie had kicked her shoes off; her naked feet reached for them and she got into them, got upright with her ankles wobbling, and went with him. Morg and Texas Jack spoke derisively. Josie was afraid to look back at them; Wyatt ignored them. He led her outside and walked her up the street.

She had difficulty getting full breaths into her lungs. Wyatt set the pace and it was up to her to keep up. Dark in the small hours, the streets of Tombstone were empty; dust hung in the cool air.

Wyatt reached a corner and stopped to wait. She ran right against him, tugged his head down and kissed him with passionate violence.
Hurry up,
she pleaded silently—
I may explode if you don't, I've got to have you quick!

He pressed his swollen manhood against her through the cloth of his pants. She” moaned, rubbed herself against him, and heard his deep chuckle before he picked her up and carried her around the corner into a narrow street. His room was right there: he took her inside. Her temples thudded with a hot crimson pulsebeat; her eyes were unfocused. She squeezed him, climbed tight against him. Her eyes closed. “Oh, hurry up, God damn you!”

Here and now, with the drone of the mining bosses' voices in her ears, she remembered that first night with vivid intensity. The memory flushed her with the same excitement over again. It was always that way, sometimes frighteningly out of control.

She turned to look at Wyatt. He sat listening to the rich men speak; he sat lazy, at his ease, but always coiled like a primitive volatile animal ready to ex-' plode—like a natural force, radiating tangible lines of taut energy, held precariously in check. She had learned that first night that nature had endowed him with a massive organ and the appetite to go with it: he had hurt her but even the pain had made her want him more.

The mining bosses argued among themselves. Abruptly Wyatt, momentarily left out of the discussion, turned to look at her, his eyes burning with gemlike brilliance. Her mouth softened and parted; her long breath lifted her breasts.

Wyatt stood up. He said something to Cardiff—some remark that was courteous and yet left no room for question or dispute. Overcome by sensual lust Josie did not hear the words. The hot bodily urge drove her to her feet. She walked across the room like a mechanism, her back rigid, long lithe legs striding crisply, feeling her inner thighs rub against each other as she moved. She crossed the dining room and the lobby; at the foot of the stairs he took her by the elbow and even that casual touch was fiery. They went up the stairs side by side, not looking at each other; but she heard his growling small laugh and felt an absurd thrill when he said, “You're all woman, Josie—all woman.” Their feet made no sound on the carpet. Dreamlike, she went into the bedroom, disrobing with automatic, unthinking haste: by the time she reached the bedside, the floor was strewn with her clothes.

Her body felt full, swollen, ready to burst. The sight of herself in the mirror surprised her: slim and taut with a dancer's hard grace. She
looked
lean, long-waisted, high-breasted; she
felt
small, loose, heavy—a hot softness of weighted flesh, singing with painful anticipation. Her skin was flushed to a scarlet and burgundy rash.

She turned around. He was stripping off his underwear. His great muscles rippled: he was bigger, more solid, more massive and powerful than he appeared when he had his clothes on. His body was a steel engine. His shoulder-holstered guns were on the chair. She stood mute, feeling short of breath, relishing the exquisite pain of a sensitiveness so taut that she felt certain she would burst into flame at the touch of his finger. The flow of her soft hair across her bare shoulders felt like the scrape of a red-hot iron file.