Shadow Walker

by J. R. Roberts

  Her hands touched Clint’s shoulders and eased him off of Jill’s trembling body. “I’m not through with you just yet,” Jasmine whispered.

  As much as Clint wanted to stay where he was, the sight of Jasmine’s naked body crawling on the edge of the bed was enough to coax him away. Jill didn’t seem to mind that he was climbing off of her. In fact, she scooted to one side and let her hand drift between her legs as she watched what Clint and Jasmine were doing.

  Jasmine stayed on all fours and grabbed hold of the footboard of the bed. She then lowered her chest against the mattress and arched her back so her tight little buttocks were lifted up high.

  That was all Clint needed to see before he moved in behind her and grabbed her hips. His cock was hard as rock and every muscle of his body ached for release. When he glided into Jasmine from behind, he thought he might explode right then and there.

  After making it through that initial moment, Clint grabbed a fistful of Jasmine’s hair and pulled her head back as he drove all the way inside of her. Judging by the moan that escaped Jasmine’s lips, it wouldn’t be long before she exploded again herself.

  FIVE

  It had been a long time since Clint had slept so soundly. In fact, even when he was finally roused from his sleep, he felt like he wouldn’t be able to move for another couple of hours. But the faint sound of a woman crying soon jolted him wide awake.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  Jill was already up and pulling her clothes on while Jasmine sat up and gathered the sheets over herself.

  “I’ll go check on it,” Jill said.

  Clint swung his legs over the side of the bed. “You want me to come along?”

  “No, that’s all right. You stay here and I’ll be right back.” Although she wasn’t made up as well as when she’d arrived, Jill was covered up enough to step outside. She opened the door and was gone before Clint could insist on joining her.

  “Relax,” Jasmine said as she laid a hand on his shoulder. “She probably wouldn’t want to talk to you anyway.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever is crying,” Jasmine replied. She leaned over to the table next to the bed and found a small case of cigarettes. Taking one and placing it between her lips, she then offered the case to Clint.

  “No, thanks,” he said.

  Jasmine shrugged, grabbed a box of matches from the same table and lit her cigarette.

  “Shouldn’t you be a little more concerned?” Clint asked. “What if one of your girls is in trouble?”

  “Usually, at least one of them is in trouble. If they were the kind of girls to lead steady lives, most of them wouldn’t exactly pick this as their first job.”

  “What if one of them is up against someone out to hurt them?”

  “It’s not that sort of trouble,” Jasmine replied confidently.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because,” she replied while the end of her cigarette flared up, “there weren’t any gunshots.”

  Normally, Clint might have asked if that was enough for them to let Jill handle the problem on her own. But, since he’d been working there for a bit himself, he knew Jasmine’s confidence was well founded.

  As if picking up on his misgivings, Jasmine explained, “The girls I employ are here of their own accord. I make sure they’re well paid, have a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. I make sure they can handle themselves and if they can’t, there’s someone like you to step in for them. If there’s a problem, I’ll know about it soon enough.”

  For the next few minutes, Clint sat on the edge of the bed listening to the crying fade away. It eventually died off completely and was replaced by the normal ruckus that filled Tad’s Billiards. When he looked back to Jasmine, he saw her finishing up her cigarette.

  “You see?” she said. “I told you so. A few new girls have come in and one of them probably just misses her family.”

  “What will happen if that’s the case?”

  “She’ll go to them or send them a letter. I don’t know. What would you do in that case?”

  Clint shrugged and swung his feet back up onto the bed. When Jasmine crawled on top of him, she crossed her arms on his chest and rested her chin against them.

  “You’re not used to being around so many women who can handle themselves,” she teased. “And here I thought you were different from the rest of these cowboys.”

  “Maybe I just don’t like hearing women cry,” Clint pointed out.

  Jasmine smiled warmly and ran the edge of her finger against his chin. “Then you really are different from most of these assholes. But I already knew that.”

  Just as Jasmine was leaning in to kiss Clint, she was interrupted by a frantic knock on the door.

  “Come in,” she said.

  The door was pushed open and Jill came rushing into the room. “It’s Kaylee. She’s down the hall.”

  “Kaylee? Doesn’t she work over on Third Street?”

  “Yes, but she came here. She says she needs to hide.”

  “From what?” Jasmine asked.

  “I don’t know.” Looking to Clint, she asked, “Do you think you could talk to her?”

  Clint was already dressed and buckling on his holster.

  SIX

  Jill knocked on the door that was down the hall from Jasmine’s. Rather than wait for an answer, she opened it a bit and peeked inside. “I brought someone to make sure nothing will happen to you. He’s the one you heard about.”

  After a few muffled words from inside, Jill nodded and looked over to Clint. “I really appreciate this.”

  “She’s heard about me?” Clint asked.

  Jill shrugged and nodded. “It’s not a big town, you know.”

  Although Clint was no stranger to having folks know about his comings and goings, he didn’t know that also applied to when he was chasing off drunks from a gambling hall. Rather than wonder too much about that, he stepped into the room as soon as Jill opened the door for him.

  The room was easily half the size of Jasmine’s. In fact, it might have been less than half that size, but it was still large enough to accommodate a bed and a few pieces of furniture. It wasn’t much, but the girl huddled on the bed looked as if she would have been fine if she were locked in a closet.

  The girl looked to be in her late teens or possibly early twenties. She was small enough that it was hard to distinguish which. Her black hair fell in tight curls that didn’t even make it to shoulder length. Her wide, brown eyes stared at Clint and she clutched her arms a bit tighter around her bent knees.

  “Are you Kaylee?” Clint asked.

  The girl nodded.

  “My name’s Clint. What’s the matter?”

  “You’re the one who’s been chasing all the men out of here?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  She forced a smile onto her face. “I work at the Cherry Blossom on Third Street. That’s where some of the men go once they can’t get in here anymore.” Saying that was enough to dim her smile.

  Clint hadn’t heard about the Cherry Blossom until after his bad turn at poker. In fact, he hadn’t even heard about it until his second day working for Sal. Since he didn’t have much cause to visit a cathouse, that wasn’t too surprising. Even if he did need to pay for a woman’s company, he doubted he would have gone to a place like the Cherry Blossom. By all accounts, it was a rundown place owned by a man who robbed his own customers if they didn’t spend enough money on his girls.

  “Did one of them hurt you?” Clint asked.

  Kaylee’s eyes slowly wandered away from him and she shook her head. “No.”

  “Then what about the man who runs that place? Did he hurt you?”

  “No.”

  Clint looked over to Jill for some help, but didn’t get anything more than a confused shrug. Hunkering down so he could look straight into her eyes, he placed his hand on the side of her face and asked, “Then what’s the matter?”

  It took a few
seconds, but Kaylee finally replied, “My sister. She’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Where’d she go, Kaylee?” Jill asked.

  “I . . . don’t know. She’s just . . . gone. I think they came for her.”

  Clint didn’t like the sound of that one bit. That much must have shown in his voice, because both women in the room cringed when he snarled, “Who are they? Tell me.”

  Still looking rattled, Kaylee began to explain: “We’ve heard about other girls who’ve gone missing, but we thought it was a lot of talk.”

  Jill saw the disbelief on Clint’s face, so she quickly interjected, “Plenty of men who have a lot of working girls under their roof tell stories like that.”

  “Like what?” Clint asked.

  “Like someone will take them away or cut them up if they’re on their own. It keeps the girls scared so they don’t take off on their own. Most of the younger ones don’t know any better than to believe it.”

  “But this weren’t no story,” Kaylee said. “We thought it was, but it’s not. It’s true and now my sister’s gone.”

  “When’s the last time you saw her?” Clint asked. Now that he’d taken a breath and calmed down a bit, his voice wasn’t as harsh as it had been before.

  Kaylee responded to him immediately and some of the panic in her eyes faded away. “I saw her two Sundays ago. We go to church together.”

  “What about this past Sunday? Did you see her then?”

  “No, sir. That’s when I started looking around for her.”

  “You can call me Clint,” he told her while patting her hand and then easing back into a chair next to the bed.

  That seemed to relax Kaylee even more. She released her grip on her knees and even stretched out her legs so she could straighten her skirts over them. “Sometimes she misses church, but not that often. When she does, it’s usually because she’s in trouble or . . . working. Either way, I usually track her down and give her hell for it. Sometimes, she has to do the same for me, too.”

  “That’s what sisters are for,” Clint said.

  Kaylee nodded. “I don’t have to go far to find her most times. I couldn’t find her for a while, but Mr. Holling said she was just busy every time I asked.”

  “Both of you work at the Cherry Blossom?” Clint asked.

  “I clean up there every now and then. My sister works at the Blossom, but she doesn’t want me to spend much time there. I barely get to see her at all anymore.”

  “What’s your sister’s name?”

  “Alicia.”

  Since saying her name was almost enough to close Kaylee up again, Clint decided to keep from asking about anything more personal than the facts he needed to know about Alicia. Otherwise, he might have his hands full just trying to get Kaylee calmed down again.

  “So you think Holling said Alicia was busy to get you to stop asking questions about her?” Clint asked.

  Kaylee nodded. “He told me them things about how he protects his girls and that he’d protect me, too, if I came to work for him like the rest of the girls there do. He said he wouldn’t never let anything happen to my sister and that she was fine. When Alicia missed a Sunday mass, I knew something was wrong.”

  Reluctantly, Clint pointed out, “Today is Wednesday. Have you been looking for her this whole time?”

  Kaylee shook her head. “I asked Mr. Holling yesterday, but he said she went to Cheyenne to work at a big saloon there where she could make a hundred dollars or more in no time at all. I went to the room she rents and took a look for myself.”

  Even though tears were coming to her eyes, Kaylee kept talking and Clint wasn’t about to stop her.

  “The man who runs the boardinghouse let me into her room because he knew I was her sister. Everything she owned was thrown all over the place. All of the tables and chairs were knocked over. All of her things were tossed around, but there was also her clothes.”

  “Her clothes were messed up?” Jill asked sympathetically.

  “No,” Clint said. “Her clothes were still there.”

  “Yes,” Kaylee said quickly. “That’s how I knew she didn’t go nowhere like Cheyenne or anywhere else. She didn’t even pack her coat or bonnet.”

  “Maybe I should take a look over there for myself,” Clint said.

  SEVEN

  Kaylee told Clint which boardinghouse her sister had lived in and which room was hers. He didn’t have to ask her twice to stay behind, but Jill was a harder one to convince.

  “Holling is a pig and a bastard to women,” she’d said in the hallway outside of the room where Kaylee was huddled. “If he’s done something terrible to that poor girl’s sister, I want to know about it.”

  “If he did do something to her, you might be in danger around him as well,” Clint pointed out. “And if he didn’t, you’d just be wasting your time.”

  Jill crossed her arms and cocked her head as if she were about to scold Clint for leaving the barn door open. “Do you really think that girl’s so worked up over some kind of misunderstanding?”

  “I couldn’t say yet. That’s why I need to get a look for myself.”

  “Let me come along. I know Holling and I can tell you if he’s up to something or maybe even lying to you.”

  “And you’re already dead set on the notion that he’s guilty as sin,” Clint pointed out. “That’s not exactly going to be of much help.”

  Although Jill began to say something in her own defense, she couldn’t come up with much of anything.

  Before she tried again, Clint said, “I’ve done my share of reading people and getting them to talk.”

  “Yeah. That’s how you knew to borrow money to cover a bet that you would lose.”

  “If you know someone better suited for the job, be my guest. We might even try our luck with the law, if you’d rather.”

  It was no gamble that Jill wouldn’t want to bother with the law. All of the working girls in town knew that no man wearing a badge would show them much of any sympathy.

  “I just want to help, that’s all,” Jill finally told him.

  “Then stay here with Kaylee and make sure she doesn’t move from this spot until I come back. The last thing we need is for her to go running off to do something foolish. Besides, I think she’d rather not be alone right now.”

  “You’re right. Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?”

  “Yes. If things go bad, I can handle myself.”

  “And what if you find out that Kaylee was right and that her sister was taken somewhere?”

  “Then I’ll think of something else,” Clint said. “Now do you want me to get started on this or stand about talking to you some more?”

  Jill’s answer to that was a roll of her eyes as she stepped to one side until her back bumped against the wall.

  Clint walked down the hall and saw Jasmine open her door as he approached it.

  “What’s all the commotion?” she asked.

  “Ask Jill. I’ll be right back.”

  Jasmine obviously had plenty more she wanted to ask, but wasn’t about to stand in Clint’s way. Seeing as how he was headed down the stairs like an engine that had already gathered a head of steam, it was doubtful she could have stopped him even if she’d wanted to.

  The boardinghouse was almost halfway between Tad’s and the Cherry Blossom a few streets away. It was a narrow building wedged between a dentist’s office and a vacant structure that looked to have once been a bakery. Clint walked in to find himself inside a room that looked like a cross between a hotel lobby and someone’s sitting room.

  “What can I do fer ya?” a potbellied old man asked as he struggled to get up from his rocker.

  “I’d like to get a look inside room number four,” Clint said.

  The old man grimaced. “You’ll want to come back later. It’s still kind of a mess, but I do have another room available.”

  “Actually, I’m here to see the mess.”

  “Pardon me?”

&nbs
p; “I’m a friend of Kaylee’s and Alicia’s,” Clint told him, hoping that would be enough to make an impression.

  The old man stared at Clint for a few slack-jawed moments before shrugging and waddling over to a row of keys hanging from hooks in the wall. “Suit yerself, but if you try to steal any of that lady’s belongings, I’ll call the marshal.”

  Following the old man to the room, Clint tried to look for anything that struck him as peculiar. Sometimes, it was the smallest thing that rang a bell in his head. Clint didn’t always even know the importance of something the first time he saw it. This time, just like any other time he was trying to pick up on a trail, he simply kept his eyes and ears open and hoped for the best.

  The old man stepped up to the door of room number four, which didn’t look any different than the three other doors before it. After twisting the key in the lock, he shoved it open and swept his arm as if he were the keeper of the Pearly Gates.

  “There you go,” he muttered. “I’ll stay right here, watchin’ you.”

  Clint took one step inside and was instantly reminded of Kaylee’s description of what she’d found. True to her story, the room looked as if it had been picked up, shaken and then dropped back down again. “Is this the way you found it?” he asked.

  “I’m not in the habit of sifting through other people’s things. And since I don’t know you from Adam, I’m not letting you go any farther inside. You see she ain’t in there and you see how the room was left, so there’s no other reason for you to be here.”

  Since the room was small enough for Clint to see it all from the doorway, there wasn’t much need for him to push his way in any farther. From where he was, he could see the toppled furniture and clothes dumped next to the bed. He took a look at the door itself and then asked, “Has anyone else been here asking for her?”

  “Not since her sister and them two fellas.”

  “What two fellas?”

  “Some tall fella and an Injun. They were expected.”

  EIGHT

  It was getting late by the time Clint made it over to the Cherry Blossom. Compared to the other saloons on Third Street, the Blossom was one of the nicer ones. Then again, Third Street was known to be a row of filthy storefronts favored by rats and drunks.