Wild to the Bone (17 page)

At the door, she stopped and turned back to catch him staring at her rump. He flushed only a little.

Raven ignored the appraisal and asked, “When is your next stage due to pass through that country?”

“Tomorrow,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “The stage from Recluse is due in around nine in the morning.”

Raven nodded thoughtfully. “Will there be any gold on it?”

“No. The next gold shipment will come through in three days, due in Spotted Horse around noon.” He paused to add gravity. “It's a large one. Double the regular ones. The mine superintendent won't say exactly, but I'm guessing more than fifty thousand dollars in gold smelted into bars.”

“Three days.” Raven paused, pondering. “Who knows about the gold shipment, besides yourself and the superintendent of the Blue Moon?”

“No one. Tate Kimble, the superintendent, sent word to me personally two weeks ago about the exact date of the, as he put it, ‘sizable' shipment.”

“So only you and Mr. Kimble know about the gold being shipped on Saturday.”

“Yes.”

“At least, as far as you know.”

Shirley scowled and nodded. “Yes. At least, as far as I know.”

Raven sighed and opened the door.

Shirley said, “I'll see you out.” As they crossed the parlor, he said, “Again, I apologize for the foul-up concerning supper. I hope you can find something to eat.”

“Don't worry about that,” Raven said. “I'm sure Mrs. Waddell will rustle something up for me over at the hotel.”

“I'm sure she will.” Shirley chuckled. He closed his hand over the knob of the outside door and stopped, his face only a couple of feet from Raven's. She could smell the brandy on his breath. He smiled leeringly and said, “How is it such a beautiful woman came to be a detective, Agent York?”

He'd kept his voice low so that his wife upstairs with their children wouldn't hear.

Raven was saved from attempting to answer the question by a sudden knock on the door. It startled them both. They both gasped and jerked, and then Shirley said, “Oh, for chrissakes!” And he opened the door.

The simple-minded young man from the livery barn stood just outside the door, looking anxious. He stuttered, switching his gaze between Raven and Shirley before managing to spit out, “It's Miss Ver-verlaine, Mr. Sh-shirley. She says she-she-she needs to see you right away!”

Shirley grimaced. He glanced at Raven. “Uh, Verlaine Couchigan runs the stage office yonder, oversees the books and hostlers an' such.” He tipped his head forward. “I'd better see what's troubling her. I hope it's not another telegram from the Blue Moon!”

“I hope not, too,” Raven said, walking out onto the landing and around the stocky young liveryman.

She stepped aside as Shirley came out, donning his bowler hat, and then she followed Duke Shirley and Sonny to the bottom of the stairs. Shirley tipped his hat to Raven, and he and Sonny strolled off into the night, heading north of the mercantile.

Raven watched them recede into the balmy darkness, Loretta Waddell's voice whispering again inside her head:
sinister forces at work here in Spotted Horse
.

20

H
askell awoke to the warm,
wet sensation of a mouth sliding very slowly up and down on his cock.

It was a pleasant sensation. His cock was hard and tingling, and the tingling was steadily growing. But there was another sensation, too. A none-too-pleasant one.

It was the sensation of a sledgehammer being driven down hard against his forehead. In fact, when he opened his eyes, he imagined for a moment that he was watching the iron maul being slammed down on him from above. He thought he could almost make out the brawny, hairy arms of the man wielding it.

Slam!

Haskell squeezed his eyes shut as the pain shot through him, causing his ears to ring. He stiffened, curled his toes against it. But then he could feel the ass of the girl blowing him waggle a little against his chest, and his mind opened to the soothing feeling of her silky lips and tongue wrapped snugly around his staff.

He looked at her ass, planted firmly atop his chest about three inches from his nose. A round, taut ass the color and texture of whipped vanilla, the crack open enough that he could see the girl's little pink asshole and the beaver head, feel the fur prickling enticingly against his sternum.

She was getting creamy. He could feel a little of her oozings dribble out of her as she worked her torturously slow, sweet magic. She was hunkered low on her knees, feet resting against his shoulders, their pink undersides facing him. As she continued to suck him, she moaned and flexed the toes of first one foot and then the other.

He glanced around just to get his bearings and, in the dawn's gray light washing through the window, saw the empty bottle of Who-Hit-John sitting beside its cork on a chest of drawers. Then it all came back to him—the cards, the girl, the dancing, the whiskey.

The burly track layer slung that sledge of his against the railroad spike of Bear's nose once more, and he tensed his body against it. He groaned. The girl's smooth lips slid up and over the head of his cock, and she glanced at him over her shoulder.

“Isn't it helping?” she asked in her ever-so-slight Mexican accent. He remembered her name just then. Ana. He was glad. He hated forgetting their names and then the awkwardness that always came with that in the morning.

“Yeah, but you're competing with a mighty big gent with a mighty big hammer.”

“I heard you groaning in your sleep and thought it would help.”

“It is helping,” he said, lifting his head and running his tongue through her ass crack.

Ana giggled and wagged her butt and turned her head to drop her mouth down over his cock once more.

He licked her while she sucked him, and then, when he felt his time was nigh, he pressed his head back against the pillow and exploded down her throat. She slid her mouth up and down faster, sucking, trying to stay ahead of the fusillade, but finally, it was too much for her, and she lifted her head off of him, choking and gasping and pumping him desperately with her hands.

When he was finished, she licked him clean, then got up and poured water from a pitcher into a porcelain basin and set the basin on the bed. Ana sat beside him Indian-style and slowly, gingerly cleaned him with a cool cloth.

“You are much man, Bear.”

He stared at her face between the jostling wings of her hanging hair. “You are much woman.”

“Who was the woman in the saloon last night?”

Haskell frowned. “What?” He pushed through the mental cobwebs to remember Raven visiting him in the saloon, when he'd been playing cards and Ana had been sprawled on his lap. He chuckled against his chagrin.

“Oh. Just my partner.”

“You have a most beautiful partner. Do you fuck her?”

“Occasionally, when she climbs down off her high horse.”

“Do you fuck her like you fucked me last night?” Ana glanced at the dresser. Haskell stared at it, only vaguely remembering fucking the girl while she sat on the dresser, knees spread wide, corset bunched around her belly, and full, light tan breasts with their brown nipples jostling free.

Haskell snorted again. “I never knew a whore who liked to talk so much about other women, Ana.”

“It is just curiosity,” she said.

“Yeah, well, I do appreciate your services.” Haskell gave a chuff against the sledgehammer as he pushed up onto his elbows and looked at her hands slowly sliding the cloth up the length of his slack dong. “But I gotta haul my freight.”

When he'd remembered Raven, he'd remembered his reason for being here in Spotted Horse.

And then he'd remembered the boy he'd shot and whose body he needed to haul back to his sister's ranch for burial.

“Go where?”

“The Stoveville ranch. You couldn't tell me how to get there, could you?”

He remembered that Duke Shirley had offered to guide him out to the Stoveville ranch, but he felt the need to ride out alone. He'd killed the boy. It was his responsibility to inform the kid's sister, and he didn't feel like having anyone else around when he did it. Informing someone of a dead relative, especially when he'd been the one to cause the relative's demise, seemed a personal matter.

And now, thinking about it, his moroseness over the kid's death returned like a fever. Despite the track layer continuing to hammer his nose down deep into his brain plate with that heavy maul, he desperately wanted another shot of busthead.

Ana set the pan of water and the cloth on a chair beside the bed and lay down with a sigh, resting her head on the heel of her hand. Her legs were long and slender, and they looked brown in the dawn's dim light, her hair almost as black as Raven's.

“The Stoveville place? Sure. Why you go out there, big man?”

“I killed the Stoveville kid.”

Ana blinked. “Why?”

“Because he tried to kill me.”

“Figures.”

Haskell was up and stumbling around, gritting his teeth and gathering his clothes from where he and the girl had tossed them after tearing them off his body. His were entangled with hers, the few of hers there were.

“Why does it figure?”

“Nothing good has ever come from the Pumpkin Buttes. Ride north two miles. You'll come to a cottonwood. Take the trail that angles east for another two miles. You'll cross a wash, and there you are. Don't blink, or you'll miss it.”

“You know the place?”

“My old man worked for the Stovevilles once, and I lived out there for a few months. My papa was a horse breaker, the best in the Buttes. That was before the drought, when the ranchers out there had enough money for hiring horse breakers. At least, a Mexican horse breaker with a girl to raise.”

Haskell sat down on the edge of the bed to pull his socks on. “You knew the Stoveville boy, then, I take it?”

“He was a couple years younger than me. Quiet boy. I don't ever remember seein' him smile. His pa worked him like a dog, though, so maybe that's why.”

“You think either him or his sister might be involved in the stage holdups?”

Ana sighed and looked down at the hair she was curling around a finger. “Who knows? They say nothing good ever came out of the Pumpkin Buttes. But I don't think those two—Dulcy and Danny—have enough gumption to rob stagecoaches. Especially not Duke Shirley's line! If there is one good thing that ever came out of those buttes, the folks around here say it was Shirley.”

“Ol' Duke's from the Buttes, eh?”

“Yes. One of the few who prospered. But he was wise to get out when he did.” Ana tilted her head to look up at him gravely. “You be careful out there, big man.”

“Why?”

“Like I said, nothing good ever came out of those buttes. Nothing good happens in them.”

Haskell frowned, slid a lock of hair back from her right eye, and tucked it behind her ear. “Ana, you wouldn't have any idea who the two women are leadin' up that stage-robbin' gang, would you?”

She shook her head. “I doubt that they are from around here. Probably from over in Dakota.”

“How 'bout this? You got any idea why Danny Stoveville would shoot three lawmen?”

She drew a deep, raspy breath and looked at him directly. “Danny wouldn't do that, Bear. At least, not the boy I remember.” She hiked a shoulder. “But he came from the buttes, didn't he?”

“Ah, but you came out of them buttes, too,” Bear said, and leaned down to plant a kiss on Ana's forehead.

She smiled and reached up to pinch his cheeks. “So I did.” She gave him a wink and pressed her lips to his.

W
hen he'd dressed,
paid Ana for her services, and kissed her good-bye, Haskell went down into the saloon's main drinking hall and drained three ladles of cool well water.

The water was left over from the night before, but it sure made him feel better. All that busthead had dried him out like the parched, cracked bed of a long-defunct salt lake, but the water made him feel buoyant and almost chipper as he headed on outside into the cool, fresh morning air. The big Irishman was still hammering away at his temples but not with as much ire as before and not so damn regular.

A thought graveled him, however. Bear couldn't shake the possibility that Danny Stoveville had been trying to shoot the two riders who'd killed the lawmen. Shooting an innocent kid didn't sit any better with him in the light of a new day than it had in the old light of the previous one. Despite all the busthead he'd tried to dull the pain with.

Haskell went over to the livery barn and found the simple-minded kid, Sonny, cleaning out stalls with a pitchfork and wheelbarrow. Bear rented a buckboard wagon and a horse that could pull it, and while the kid rigged the horse to the wagon, Haskell retrieved Danny Stoveville from the tack room, laid the dead young man in the wagon bed, and latched the tailgate.

“Y-you headin' into the buttes?” Sonny asked as he buckled the traces to the double tree.

“I reckon so, since that's where Danny's from.”

Sonny sort of smiled, though it wasn't so much a smile as a grimace, Bear opined as the hostler went up and adjusted the collar on the horse's neck.

Haskell tipped his hat to the kid, who watched him dubiously as he shook the ribbons out over the back of the white-legged black, and the horse jerked the wagon out into the street, which was still mostly murky brown shadows only gradually purpling along their edges, though more gray had seeped into the sky and birds were chirping.

The wind had died, and that seemed to make the birds happy. Bear figured that it would likely pick up again, as it usually did in this godforsaken country, not long after high noon. He'd made sure he'd tied a billowy green neckerchief around his neck in case it did, so he could pull the cloth up to keep the dust out of his mouth and nose.

He swung right onto the side street that passed in front of the Overland Hotel, where he assumed his lovely partner was still slumbering. He vaguely wondered if she realized he hadn't slept in his room. Most likely. That was all right. She knew he wasn't an acolyte. And just because they'd tumbled a time or two didn't make them beholden to each other in any way. He was a man, and he had his needs, by God.

He glanced at the hotel once more as he passed.

What if she had a man up there? How would he feel about that? Maybe Duke Shirley, say, who'd given her the favoring eye when they'd been standing out front of the town marshal's office.

Haskell brushed the thought from his mind. “Giddyup, there, horse,” he said, shaking the ribbons over the black's back, clomping and rattling on out of the town.

Immediately, the wagon began climbing through low buttes. When Haskell was only a couple of hundred yards out of Spotted Horse, the sun poked its bold, brassy head above the desert prairie, dissolving the last of the night shadows and blowing an acrid breath of hot breeze against his bearded cheeks.

Bear shook his head. It was going to be another hot, dusty day. After another hundred yards, he took the ribbons in his teeth, rolled his shirtsleeves above his forearms, and took a drink from the canteen riding the floorboard at his feet.