High and Wild

by Peter Brandvold

  Haskell grunted a laugh at that but then sucked a sharp, painful breath through his gritted teeth. He’d gone back to staring at the street again when the local lawmen stopped suddenly in front of the porch steps. One of them said in a syrupy-sweet voice pitched with what Haskell recognized as a South Texas accent, “Well, hello there, Miss Redwine. My, aren’t you lookin’ purty today?”

  Haskell lifted his chin, ran his eyes up the legs of a person he at first took to be a man. For the gent was wearing denim trousers, the insides of the thighs of which had been sewn with buckskin. The gent wore a shell belt and a pistol in a soft leather holster, high and for the cross-draw on his left hip.

  Her hip, Haskell saw when his gaze had run on up the girl’s pinstriped shirt and he saw that her suspenders were somewhat squeezing together a rather nice pair of breasts. Above her neck, trimmed with a tightly wound, somewhat frayed green kerchief, she was also pretty, with curly tawny hair hanging to her shoulders and her eyes glinting like freshly minted copper beneath the crown of her chocolate-brown Stetson.

  Haskell didn’t think she was much over twenty, if that.

  Her tongue, however, was much older.

  “Kiss my ass, Deputy Bodeen,” she snarled, curling her fine, suntanned nose and her rich upper lip.

  “Well, hell, I’ll kiss more than that, Teddy,” said the other one of Haskell’s “helpers,” the man who had his left arm wrapped around his neck. “Hell, I’ll stick my tongue so far up your purty pussy you’ll feel ticklish all the way up to your tonsils.”

  The girl called Teddy Redwine said, “I wouldn’t let either one of you ugly devils stick your black tongues anywhere close to my pussy, but the next time I use the privy, I’ll call you to clean my ass!”

  With that, she strode on past Haskell and the lawmen, turning her head to say crisply over her shoulder, “Get ready to turn my brother loose. I’m heading to the bank to fetch his bail money.”

  Haskell and his assistants all turned their heads to watch her stomp away. Her ass was as impressive as the rest of her. Bear saw that the tanned buckskin curved up from the insides of her thighs to cup her taut, round butt like a large, loving hand. Each buttock moved in turn as she angled across the street.

  “Who in the hell is that?” Bear asked, getting his feet under him.

  “Shut up!” said the man on Haskell’s right, whom the girl had called Bodeen, as both lawmen jerked and pulled him up the porch steps.

  They stopped on the porch. A man in a black frock coat and a broad-brimmed, bullet-crowned black felt hat lounged in the open doorway, a snide grin on his thin lips beneath a carefully trimmed steel-gray mustache. A five-pointed sheriff’s star was pinned to a brocade vest, half concealed by his left lapel.

  He was long and lean, and he had the opaque gaze of an aging gunfighter, which he probably was. A pearl-gripped Remington jutted from the black oiled holster thonged low on his right thigh.

  “Well, well, what have we here?” His voice sounded like coarse sandpaper raked across raw wood.

  Bodeen said, “This here gentleman soiled Miss O’Brien’s new carpet over to the Sawatch. Made her madder’n a ol’ wet hen. Me and Slake was makin’ the rounds when we heard her screamin’.”

  Slake said, “Do you know that he ’bout killed both Rock and Samson? An’ I ain’t exaggeratin’, neither, Sheriff. He left them both in a bad way. Samson was layin’ atop one of Miss O’Brien’s tables with them purty silver teeth of his spit out on his chest!”

  “You don’t say.” The sheriff chuckled, staring up at Haskell, groaning and sighing against the hammering in his head. He glanced with devilish delight toward the Sawatch. “Boy, I bet that did get Judith’s bloomers in a bunch.”

  “They started it,” Haskell said. “I finished it.”

  “No, I’m the one who finished it,” Bodeen said. He raised the Winchester he was carrying in his right hand. “Just tapped this against the back of his head.”

  Slake said, “What should we charge him with, Sheriff?”

  “Why, piss-burnin’ Miss O’Brien, of course, ya damn fool.” The sheriff looked at Haskell. “That’s a law on the books here in Wendigo. And it’s one that just ain’t broken, you see?”

  The deputies chuckled.

  Haskell didn’t think Sheriff Goodthunder looked much like an Indian despite the native-sounding name. “I left a horse back at the hotel. If you plan on lockin’ me up for a short time, I’d appreciate someone seein’ to him.”

  And if anyone stole his rifle or anything in his saddlebags, he’d make them wish they hadn’t. He didn’t say that, because he didn’t want to give these men any ideas, but that’s what he would do, all right.

  “Don’t worry,” Goodthunder said. “Your horse will be well treated. You, on the other hand”—he shook his head ominously, with that needling little grin on his high-cheeked, sun-bronzed face—“got some back-waterin’ to do, friend. You don’t mess with Miss O’Brien, or her bully boys over to the Sawatch, without your payin’ for it in blood.”

  “Ah, hell, I was just joshin’,” Haskell said with an off-putting, boyish grin.

  “You drunk?”

  “No, but I was fixin’ to be.”

  Slake said, “He said he was waitin’ for Malcolm Briar, Sheriff.”

  Goodthunder’s smile faded. He canted his head as though to make a better appraisal of his new prisoner.

  He said, “Oh?”

  “Bastard said he had a job for me.” Haskell grunted, rubbing the back of his head. He was still being held up by the deputies. His knees felt like warm water. “If you’ll just point me in his direction . . .”

  He tried to put his full weight on his boots, but the porch pitched around him. Goodthunder stepped forward. Bodeen had both of Haskell’s pistols wedged behind the waistband of his own pants. He had Haskell’s bowie knife, which he’d pulled from Bear’s right boot well, wedged behind his cartridge belt.

  Goodthunder pulled the pistols out of Bodeen’s pants, looked them over, and hefted them in his hands, smiling shrewdly.

  “That his knife?”

  Bodeen nodded.

  “You come armed for bear, Mister . . .”

  “Haskell. You can call me ‘Sir.’” Bear winked.

  Glowering, Goodthunder jerked his head toward the door behind him and stepped aside.

  “Sure thing, Sheriff,” Slake said, as he and Bodeen wrestled Haskell through the door and into the main office. “I’d just love to turn the key on this son of a bitch!”

  Minutes later, they’d led Bear back into the cell block that ran parallel with the main street, shoved him into a cell, and turned the key on him. Haskell tried to take a step forward under his own power, but his knees buckled, and he hit the lumpy stone floor. He knelt there, groaning.

  The bastard had given him a none-too-gentle “tap” on the backside of his head. That was all right, though. He’d remember it, and just as the fiery Miss O’Brien had intended done to him, Haskell intended to extract payment from Deputy Bodeen.

  In the meantime, he’d take a little catnap, and then, when his head was clear, he’d figure a way out of Goodthunder’s lockup. One thing he’d found out in short order, although the cost had been rather high: something fishy had indeed happened to Malcolm Briar. He’d read it in the eyes of all to whom he’d mentioned Briar’s name. The man hadn’t just gotten too busy to correspond with his sister. That Briar had likely come to a bad end meant that something fishy had likely also befallen the private detective, Calvin Wexler.

  Now Haskell just had to figure out what had happened to both men and who was responsible for it.

  “Mister, you look a little peaked over there.”

  Haskell was lying on his cot, boot toward the cell door. The voice had come from his left. He turned his head that way, squinted one eye. A sandy-haired young man in a green shirt and pi
nto vest, one mule-eared boot propped on the edge of his cot, was sitting back against the wall of the cell behind him, leisurely smoking a cigarette. His eyes owned a brash, devil-may-care brightness, a good-looking, loose-limbed kid who didn’t take much very seriously.

  “I gotta admit,” Bear said, “I’ve felt better.”

  “Who took you down, ol’ Goodthunder himself or one of them two deputies of his?”

  “One of them two deputies . . . and the extra-hard butt plate of a Winchester carbine.”

  “Ah. That’d likely be Jake Bodeen. Nasty son of a bitch had a piece of iron set into his rifle butt for just such purposes as cracking men’s skulls. Usually sneaks up behind ’em, real catlike, and pow!” He stuck his quirley between his teeth to smash his fist into the palm of his other hand, making a sharp cracking sound that shoved a railroad spike through Haskell’s one ear and out the other. “Lights out!”

  Haskell winced, pressed fingertips to his throbbing temples. “Thanks for the demonstration.”

  “Ah, no problem.” The sandy-haired kid chuckled. “What got you thrown in Goodthunder’s pit, as everyone around Wendigo calls it? Better not be too good a reason, or you can forget about ever seein’ daylight again.”

  “Pit, huh?” Haskell remembered Goodthunder’s dead eyes. “Wouldn’t doubt it. I take it he has a pretty good hold on the town.”

  “A good enough hold. Most folks like it that way, since it’s a minin’ town and all. You need a good lawman to keep a handle on things. Geist brought him in, got him elected to office. Geist and Judith.”

  Haskell blinked as he laid his head back against the cot’s sour pillow and stared at the herringbone-patterned ceiling tufted with cobwebs and soot from a wood stove in the middle of the cell block. “Who’s Geist?”

  “Dapper gent. He’s in business with Judith. Mostly hunkers down over at the Sawatch.”

  “Ah, stuffed shirt in a gray suit.”

  The kid chuckled. “Yeah, that’s him. Has an office over there. His daughter helps him with the books, sometimes plays the piano downstairs. Not a pleasant creature, Geist’s daughter. Together, him and Judith own a good quarter of the town, including Black Diamond Freighting, the greasy-assed old son of a bitch.”

  Haskell’s mind clung to “Freighting.”

  “Black Diamond, eh?”

  “That’s right. Sons o’ bitches.”

  Haskell looked over at the kid. He appeared to be in his early to mid-twenties. He had the fair features and frank demeanor of a Midwestern farm boy, many of whom Haskell had fought with in the Little Misunderstanding. Shy and soft-spoken, they’d been fierce fighters once the shooting and yelling had begun.

  Aside from one other, snoring gent sound asleep beyond him, the kid was the only other prisoner in the jail block, which appeared to house about ten cells, five on each side of the aisle running parallel with the main street behind Haskell and from which he could hear the town’s general hubbub, including the metronomic throb of the ore-processing mills and a dog barking in the distance.

  “Why is Geist a son of a bitch?” Haskell asked the sandy-haired lad.

  The kid sucked a deep drag off his quirley, blew the smoke toward the ceiling, and smiled obliquely. “’Cause he owns Black Diamond Freighting.”

  Haskell wanted to hear more about this freighting company, since the man he was looking for was or had been a freighter himself, and the file on him had mentioned a dispute between Wendigo freighting companies. But just then, a girl’s voice rose from outside a window above Haskell.

  “Burt, how you holdin’ up in there?”

  12

  The sandy-haired kid named Burt rose from his cot and looked toward the window just to Haskell’s right. It was crisscrossed with iron bands so that the face peering through it was obscured, but Haskell glimpsed curls of tawny hair tumbling to slender shoulders.

  “Teddy?” the kid called.

  “I got the money, Burt,” the girl said. “I’ll have you out in a minute.”

  “Ah, God damn it, Teddy, don’t go spendin’ our operatin’ money on me. I’ll spend the week Goodthunder sentenced me to right in here!”

  “We can’t afford to have you locked up for a week, Burt. I got the contract for the King Henry. Now, you hush. I’ll be right there!”

  Burt gave a caustic chuff and yelled, “Teddy!”

  But the girl had moved away from the window. Haskell could hear boots thudding beyond the stout log wall behind him. He sat up and regarded Burt, who sank back down on the edge of the cot with a curse.

  “Teddy?” Haskell said skeptically. “That girl I seen on the street sure didn’t look like no Teddy.”

  “Theodora,” Burt said, doffing his battered hat and raking his hands in frustration through his hair. “Theodora Redwine. A big, oyster-busting pain in the ass, though she probably don’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds.”

  “I sorta gathered that,” Haskell said, sitting up against the log wall. “I mean both that she could bust a fella’s oysters right quick and that she don’t weigh more than a thimbleful of whiskey.”

  Voices rose from the main office, beyond the cell block’s stout wooden door outfitted with a barred window in the top. Haskell could hear the girl’s voice pitched with threat.

  He could also hear the rumble of Goodthunder’s voice. The sheriff’s voice was drowned by the girl’s for a time, and then a key rattled in the cell-block door. The door opened, and Goodthunder strode into the cell block with a frustrated sigh, wagging his head in what appeared like bitter defeat.

  “Miss Redwine, I don’t believe I’ve ever known a young lady sassier than you,” Goodthunder lamented. He looked flustered as he strode past Haskell’s cell, lapels of his black frock coat flapping. He held a key ring in his right hand. “I can tell that your father did not take you over his knee near enough!”

  The girl followed the sheriff past Haskell’s cell. Haskell stared at her. She was a tough-nosed beauty, that one.

  When she glanced at Haskell, turning her head just slightly, he felt as though it was her expensive rug he’d just tramped shit on. She turned away with a little curl of her fine suntanned nose and pulled up behind Goodthunder, who’d stopped at Burt’s cell.

  “Your sister, Mr. Redwine, will not pay me the money for your bail until I have opened this door. She doesn’t trust me, she says, farther than she could throw me uphill against an East Texas cyclone.”

  Burt was glaring at his sister. “Teddy, I told you I’d rather rot in here than have you spend our operating money on my bail. It’s my own damn fault I’m in here in the first place!”

  “It sure as hell is,” Teddy said, “but we got a contract to fulfill, and Sonny can’t drive both wagons. You know I sure as hell can’t! Now, get your ass out here before this son of a bitch ups the bail on us. I never heard of no sheriff settin’ bail, anyways. Christ almighty, Goodthunder, ain’t that the judge’s job?”

  “Whenever the judge is on a bender,” Goodthunder said to the girl, glaring down at her from his six-foot-two height, “I am judge, jury, and executioner. Keep that in mind! Now, hand over the money, God damn it, before I lock both you consarned Redwines up together.”

  Teddy slapped a wad of bills against the sheriff’s chest. While he counted it, she strolled up to Haskell’s cell door, canting her head to one side, appraising the prisoner. “You’re a big son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

  Haskell chuckled. “The sheriff’s right—you got a mouth, girl!”

  “I wasn’t raised right. Neither was Burt. That’s why he’s in here. What about you? Why are you here?”

  “I tracked shit into the Sawatch House Saloon.”

  The girl grinned. She had a pretty grin made even prettier by the devilish glint in her eyes, which were the color of sandstone with the west-falling sun shining on it. “On Judith’s new rug?”

>   “One and the same. And then I tattooed Rock and Samson.” Haskell shook his head. “Those boys will never be the same.”

  “You weren’t raised right, either!”

  “Well, my mam and pap would disagree, but I reckon the proof’s in the puddin’.”

  Goodthunder stuffed the money into his shirt pocket and said, “No fraternizing with the prisoners, Miss Redwine.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Sheriff,” Teddy said casually, keeping her eyes on Haskell, sizing him up once more through the iron bands of his cell door. “If you ever get out of here, which I don’t expect you will after what you done, and if you want a job, look me an’ Burt up. Redwine Freighting Company. Sometimes, when my brother is indisposed, I need a relief driver.”

  Teddy looked at Haskell’s thick neck, shoulders, and arms. “I bet you could handle a ten-mule hitch . . . and just about any hitch you had a mind to.”

  She held his gaze for a beat, winked, glanced at Burt, who’d come up behind her, and started walking toward the cell-block door.

  “Never heard a girl talk like that in all my days,” Goodthunder said, shaking his head in disgust as he followed Teddy and Burt toward the main office. “That’s a new one on me. I don’t know how you’ll ever get a decent man to marry you, Miss Redwine.”

  The girl retorted with what sounded like her typical insolence, but what she said was obscured by the thump of the cell-block door being closed and the rattle of the bolt being thrown.

  Haskell rested his tender head against the sour pillow and thought through the girl’s offer.

  If he ever got out of Goodthunder’s jail, he might just see about taking her up on it. It might be a good way to mix with the area freighters, whom he’d probe for information about Briar.