Authors: Peter Brandvold
Wild to the Bone (4 page)
While his job as a Pinkerton detective was a public one, he often found himself spending way too much time alone between assignments. A bachelor's mind got to working on him during those long stretches of alone. Especially a bachelor who had no home and who'd been through what he'd been through back during the War Between the States, when Bear, a young Union officer and
guerrilla
fighter, swept up in the frenzy of the conflict, had fought so fiercely and single-mindedly behind enemy lines, assassinating Confederates and blowing up munitions dumps and rail lines.
After the war, Bear had wanted nothing more than to return home, to his family's West Texas ranch, where he could lick his physical and mental wounds. But his father, a Confederate sympathizer who had forbidden his oldest son to join the Union, barred him from the premises. Haskell's home had been taken away from him, and, that was before Allan Pinkerton, whom Haskell had met during the war, hunted him down and persuaded him to be a frontier operative.
Haskell removed the cigar from between his lips and blew several smoke rings at the darkening ceiling. He gave a pleased sigh.
His cock was at half-mast beneath the sheets, the girl's fingers caressing it with a little more vigor now. He smiled, curled his toes. He found himself liking Miss Cybill Downing, and not just because she enjoyed a good romp as much as he did and knew how to pleasure a man's equipment. She was smart and pretty, and she was fun to converse with, although he had to admit they hadn't had much time for idle chatter.
Now, because he was genuinely curious, he said, “Tell me, Miss Cybill, how come you're headed home when you seem so against the idea?”
Cybill stopped running her tongue very slowly up his cock from his balls. “My father can't afford Emma Willard anymore. The ranch has fallen on hard times due to drought and a glut of cattle on the eastern markets, causing prices to drop.” She continued licking from where she'd left off, and when she got to the head of his cock, causing a lightning bolt of pleasure to quicken his heart, she said, “My mother died some time ago, so it'll just be Father and me.”
“And the men who work for him.”
She smiled and kissed the head of his dong. It made him suck in a sharp breath and curl his toes. “Yes . . . and the men.” She bunched her brows and pooched out her lips, pouting. “Although I don't know how any other man is ever going to live up to this afternoon and evening, Bear.”
“Ah, just give 'em a chance,” he said.
“I think I've been properly inspired.” Smiling again radiantly, she shook her sexily mussed hair back from her eyes and said, “Ready?”
Haskell stared at her pretty pink lips pressed against the underside of the head of his dick. His heart beat heavily. He cleared the knot from his throat and said, “Ready when you are, Miss Cybill.”
She stretched her lips, her eyes flashing up at him, and then, with a little cherubic giggle, she dropped her mouth down over the swollen purple head.
As young and relatively inexperienced as she was, she blew him wonderfully, almost as well as two other women he knewâone a wildly beautiful, dark-eyed Yaqui with brick-red skin and high bosom named Sonoma, whom he met whenever an assignment took him to Arizona or New Mexico; and the other a ravishing, black-haired fellow Pinkerton agent, Raven York, who had cobalt-blue eyes, large, round breasts the color and texture of fresh-whipped, buttery cream, and lips as supple as doeskin.
Bear chuckled to himself and pushed his thoughts away from those two women. One, it wasn't fair to Cybill. And two, if he let himself imagine the special gifts of either one, he was likely to blow his load down Cybill's throat at this very moment, and he didn't want to shorten his and the girl's fun.
When she'd tormented him for nearly a half hour, Haskell gave a deep, rumbling groan, clutched the sheets in his fists, bucked up from the bed, and spewed his load into the girl's mouth.
She kept up with him for only about five seconds, choking and gagging, some of the pearl substance oozing out through her nose. Then she lifted her head off his cock and massaged him with both hands, quietly laughing and giggling as she pumped him dry on his belly.
Later, she gave them both a sponge bath, and then they talked some more and dozed. They woke once around midnight, and Bear went down and spread her legs and licked her pussy until she was chewing the sheets to keep from screaming.
Her ooze ran as warm and rich as tree sap down the insides of her thighs.
Bear had a few pulls off his bottle of Sam Clay, finished his cigar, and then fucked her once moreâslowly, tenderly, kissing her lips, her eyes, her foreheadâand they slept more deeply, entangled like two long-lost lovers in each other's arms.
Just before dawn, he rose and dressed, kissed her good-bye as she continued to doze, and left her room for his own. He hadn't left her long before Haskell found himself feeling envious of the men back at her father's ranch.
He slept in his own bed for another hour, until his slumbers were disturbed by some unidentifiable sound. Suddenly, he was sitting up, his LeMat revolver in his right hand, the hammer cocked. Blinking sleep from his eyes, he stared at the door. When he dropped his gaze and saw something on the floor in front of the door, he gave a caustic chuff and depressed the LeMat's hammer.
Haskell got up, walked over to the door, and picked up the small dove-gray envelope. He slipped the card out of the envelope and opened it.
The single word “CHEYENNE” had been printed in plain lettering on the inside in black ink.
Bear gave another caustic chuff and jerked open the door, turning his head to look both ways down the hall.
Empty. Nothing but dawn shadows.
But then, he'd known that was all he'd find. Pinkerton's “doves,” the courier riders who delivered messages from the esteemed head Pinkerton himself to his field operatives, were rarelyâif everâseen. At least, Haskell himself had never seen one. They were shadows, slippery as tooth fairies, the only evidence of their fleeting presence the small dove-gray envelopes they left in passing.
Even the cards themselves were mysterious, usually only bearing the name of whatever town or place Haskell was to meet either Allan Pinkerton or a field supervisor to be filled in on his next assignment. It was like Haskell's boss.
Secretive and mysterious almost to the point of absurdity.
How the man's “doves” ever knew where to find Haskell, he would love to know. He swore they'd be able to track him to the moon.
“Cheyenne, eh, Allan?” he said now, tossing the note into a wastebasket and then throwing his head back and raking his hands across his longhandles-clad chest, chuckling. “Cheyenneâyeah, all right. Cheyenne it is.”
5
G
etting to Cheyenne, Wyoming,
from New Haven, Colorado, wasn't so easy or fast.
First, Haskell had to complete his current assignment by escorting the payroll money to Montrose and not leaving until he'd seen it locked up in the safe at the headquarters of the Montrose Mining Company. That took two days, since the stage company wasn't able to run another stage through New Haven until two days after Bear and Miss Cybill almost died. And then the stage ride from Montrose to the Denver and Rio Grande Western tracks in the little, windy, dusty jerkwater town of Rosemary, south of the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming, took another two full days of slow, often treacherous travel through mountains and canyons and over hot, dry plains.
The train ride east from Rosemary aboard a four-car mail train was in luxurious contrast to Haskell's previous four days, and he nearly slept for the entire eight-hour ride. When he finally arrived at the bustling depot yard in Cheyenne, he was relatively fresh though covered in coal soot and in dire need of a big steak with all the trimmings, a couple of tall drinksâhe'd polished off his bottle of Sam Clay during his few waking moments aboard the flyerâand a long, hot bath, preferably with another pretty damsel impaled upon his staff.
When the mail train jerked to a screeching halt in front of the long, green-roofed, red-brick Cheyenne depot building, he smacked his lips, blinked his eyes, and rammed his brown slouch hat onto his shaggy head. There were only five other passengers in the single-passenger coach: an old couple with a couple of chickens in a wicker cage, a dapper gent who looked like a successful gambler, and three unshaven, hungover, down-on-their-luck saddle tramps.
There was no jostling for position as Haskell shouldered his saddlebags and headed out to the coach's rear platform.
The saddlebags and his leather-booted Winchester Yellowboy rifle, around which he'd wrapped his bedroll, were all that Haskell ownedâthe gun, the scabbard, the bedroll, and everything he carried in the bags and in the canvas sack strapped to the bags themselves. Those relatively few things and what sundry possibles he carried on his person, of course, including his two pistols: a LeMat revolver, with a single, stout, twenty-gauge shotgun barrel positioned beneath the .44-chambered barrel, and a .44 Russian positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip.
The horn-gripped bowie knife jutted from the well of his right boot, and a gold pocket watch resided in his black leather vest. Since Bear more or less lived on the trail, traveling between assignments, he preferred to journey light. He owned neither a horse nor a saddle; instead, he rented mounts and tack as he needed them.
His most prized possessions were his guns and a badly worn, dog-eared, scribbled-in, cloth-bound copy of
Moby-Dick
. He'd been given the tome by a Union surgeon when he'd been healing from war wounds. Apparently, the sawbones had once met the author, a quiet, brooding former sailor who'd visited battlefields and written poetry about the War Between the States.
Bored on the trail, Bear always found something in the long, meandering, incredibly rich, and inestimably wise volume that enlivened his lonely nights, reading around a crackling fire, and his days pondering the at once forlorn and exhilarating book's mysteries, which seemed to reflect the vagaries of life itself, while he jounced along a trail somewhere on the vast, raw, and rugged frontier.
He often wished he could meet the author of such an insightful story. He thought they would likely have much in common despite Haskell's having read somewhere that the poor man had become “deranged” and, unable to write anymore, was working as a customs inspector in New York City.
As Haskell hauled his load down the three steps to the boardwalk, he scowled. Two familiar faces were sneering at him from the shade beneath the depot's awning. He'd hoped he'd have time for at least a couple of shots of Kentucky bourbon and the enjoyment of a saloon's free lunch counter before having his visit with his secretive employer, but he should have known better.
Pinkerton didn't like to waste time, and he didn't like his agents wasting any, either.
The two faces that were sneering at him from beneath the awning belonged to the bodyguards of Allan Pinkerton himself. They were the pinched-up, fat-faced, small-eyed faces of Mortimer Pip and George Boorman. Both men were English, and both were dressed in finely cut worsted-wool suits wasted on two former London street brawlers built more like Brahma bulls than men. Haskell was certain sure that if either sneezed, he'd blow out his shoulder seams, and at least three vest buttons would go flying off like triggered .44 rounds.
“Well, well,” Pip said, folding the newspaper he'd been reading and rising from the bench abutting the depot's brick wall. “If it ain't the big detective himself. Fine time you're gettin' here, too, boyo. The old man don't like to be kept waitin'.”
“What you been doin', shackin' up with some little Injun whore out in the godforsaken Wyomin' desert?” asked Boorman, also rising and tossing away the loosely rolled quirley he'd been smoking.
He was blondâblond hair, blond mustache, blond muttonchopsâwhile Pip's fur was sandy brown. Both men were shorter than Haskell but a good six inches broader through the shoulders, hips, and waist.
Pip grinned, causing his ruddy cheeks to dimple and his evil eyes to flash beneath the narrow brim of his bowler hat, which looked two sizes too small for his head. “Fuckin' like dogs out in the desert with them rancid little Injun girls, eh, Bear?”
“Is that it?” asked Boorman, both men strolling toward him now, grinning. “You find you one o' them? Do her doggie-style in the tipi? Tell me how an Injun gal does it. Does she like to have her pussy et?”
The men rolled their eyes at each other and snickered like schoolboys.
Haskell stared at them incredulously. “Really,” he said, “you two oughtta get out more. I know the old man doesn't want you beddin' the percentage gals for fear of you gettin' drunk and givin' away his secrets, not to mention missin' work on account of the Cupid's itch. But since no nice girl is gonna marry you, you're gonna have to do
somethin'
about gettin' your rocks off.” He canted his head to one side. “Has either one of you
ever
been laid?”