High and Wild

by Peter Brandvold

Bodeen said, as though his throat were filled with glass shards, “Yes, ma’am, I purely do. Sometimes my tongue moves a little quicker than my thinker box, that’s all.”

  “Shut up, moron.” She lifted her chin a little and said, “Do you expect me to talk to him while he’s sitting on his horse?”

  “Uh . . . no, ma’am.”

  Bodeen and Slake both turned to Haskell and said at the same time, “Git down!”

  Haskell was mildly perplexed. The befuddlement was tempered, however, by his still being alive. He’d thought he’d had a good chance of sporting an extra hole in his head by now.

  He pulled his right boot out of its stirrup, swung that leg over the black’s neck, and dropped straight down to the ground. He landed flat-footed with a thud.

  “Git up there,” Bodeen said. “Miss Judith wants to have a talk with ya.”

  Haskell had already been moving to the porch. As he stepped between Goodthunder’s deputies, he looked coldly at each much shorter man down over each of his shoulders and then climbed the porch steps.

  He smelled the woman before he could even see any more than her gowned silhouette. She wore a scent that smelled strongly of lilacs. There was also the smell of tobacco, and then, when he was standing before her and could see her pretty albeit haughty face better, she lifted a long ebony cigarette holder to her lips and puffed the ready-made quirley protruding from the end.

  The cigarette glowed. The light was reflected in her jade eyes.

  Haskell scowled down at her. “I do apologize, ma’am. If I’d known I was goin’ callin’ this evenin’, I’d have brought flowers.”

  As she blew smoke at his broad chest, she said, “You are one big son of a bitch, aren’t you?” She paused to stare up at him obliquely, her painted lips slightly parted. Her heavy, pale breasts rose and fell behind the corset of her red velvet dress. She wore a cape of the same material negligently about her shoulders.

  She took a step back and drew the door wide. “Get in here.”

  Haskell heard a boot thud on a porch step behind him, and Judith snapped, “Bodeen, Slake, not you. Stay out here with the horses. And don’t piss on my shrubs.”

  Haskell had to smile at that. Then he turned to one side to show the woman the handcuffs. “I’d feel like a better-heeled guest if you’d have them remove these irons.”

  “If you’d been a better-heeled guest, you wouldn’t have tracked mule dung all over the rug in my saloon.”

  Haskell glanced into the dimly lit, dark-paneled foyer behind her. “I bet you got plenty of nice rugs.”

  She looked around him at Goodthunder’s deputies. “Take the cuffs off.”

  Slake said, “You sure about that?” But the woman cowed him with a look. Slake cleared his throat and came up and unlocked the cuffs.

  Haskell thought he’d go ahead and exploit to the fullest the woman’s inexplicable goodwill. “I feel right naked without my guns.”

  Her eyes flared. “Oh, you do, do you?”

  Haskell held her glare. They stared at each other for about fifteen seconds before a smile slowly shaped itself on her mouth, and she said, “Bring the bastard his weapons, for chrissakes.”

  It was almost as if she’d wanted to surprise the hell out of him. And she’d certainly done just that. A feather could have knocked Bear over when Bodeen rummaged around in his saddlebags and tramped up the porch steps. He had Haskell’s LeMat in one hand, his Russian .44 in the other.

  The deputy didn’t say anything, just stared hard at Bear as he held the guns out to him, barrels first.

  “Still missin’ my rifle,” Haskell said, feeling giddy as he dropped the LeMat into the holster strapped to his thigh and the Russian into the holster positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip.

  “It’s back at the office,” Bodeen said, curling his nose with disdain. “With your saddlebags and your coat. Hope you don’t get too chilly.”

  With that, he swung around and stomped back down to the yard to stand with Slake and the horses.

  “Come on in, and wipe your goddamn boots off on the rug—the one that is meant for soiling.” Judith glowered at him as she stepped back against the door. “I have a fire laid in the parlor.”

  Haskell walked into the foyer and scrubbed his boots off on the hemp rug in front of the door. When she’d inspected his boots closely, she gave a satisfied cluck and closed the door behind him.

  He stood in front of it, staring at the half-breed bouncer whose face he had destroyed back at the Sawatch earlier in the day. The half-breed had been sitting in an upholstered armchair near a potted plant, against the foyer’s left wall. Both his eyes were swollen nearly shut, and one arm was in a sling. His lips were puffy.

  He sat stiffly, staring back at Haskell and opening and closing his hands around the sawed-off ten-gauge shotgun he held barrel-up between his legs. His face was expressionless, although his nostrils were expanding and contracting slowly.

  Judith took a drag off her cigarette. “My boy Samson has had better days. Haven’t you, Samson?”

  Samson kept his swollen-eyed gaze on Bear.

  Judith said, “Rock’s around here somewhere, patrolling the grounds, I think. He didn’t fare much better, but they’ll both live. I’m hoping they learned something.” She looked coolly at Haskell. “I’m hoping you did, too.”

  “All right, all right—next time, I’ll scrape my boots.”

  She walked saucily past him, thin tendrils of blue smoke curling in the air behind her. “Follow me.”

  Haskell said, “Samson, it’s been a pleasure,” and followed the woman through a door to the right.

  They walked down another short hall between two smaller rooms—one appeared to be a sunroom filled with plants—and through a set of French doors and into a smartly appointed parlor.

  Here the furniture was all elegantly upholstered armchairs, a settee, a spruce-green fainting couch, and a baby grand piano in a corner. The paper on the walls was the same green as the fainting couch.

  Oil paintings hung here and there between heavy, walnut shelves teeming with books, some of which appeared worn enough to have been read. Across from a stone fireplace, in which long flames danced and crackled cozily, was a heavily varnished liquor cabinet with a mirror set between two rows of upper shelves bedecked with sparkling glasses of every shape and size.

  “Drink?” she asked, heading for the liquor layout.

  “Why not? I figure you didn’t drag me out here to poison me.”

  “What is your poison, Haskell?”

  “You got any Kentucky bourbon?”

  “Sam Clay all right?”

  Haskell chuckled. “It’ll do.”

  Judith crouched to pull a bottle off a lower shelf of the cabinet. Haskell recognized the label consisting of a black shield, with palms and hatchets on heavy gold-flecked paper. “Sam Clay Whiskey” was in heavy, ornate white letters.

  His mouth watered as she splashed the rich, dark red liquor into two snifters. There was a soft, mouselike squeak as she shoved the cork back into the bottle. She brought a snifter to him, sipped her own drink, and said with typical insolence, “You have a fine taste in liquor for a loud, obnoxious, shit-tracking brigand.”

  He was perusing the books on one of her shelves. “You got some fine reading for a saloon-ownin’, blue-tongued bitch.” He glanced at her with open challenge. “Or devil, as Bodeen put it outside.”

  She laughed huskily at that, more impressed than disparaged, and took another sip of her bourbon. “Don’t tell me a man like you reads.”

  “Sure as hell, I read.” Bear grinned down at her, but he himself couldn’t help being mildly offended. Everyone at first thought him soft in his thinker box, merely because he was big and shaggy and had been able to split an entire cord of seasoned oak by himself inside of an hour. They thought him illiterate, able only to sig
n his name with a thick black X.

  But Haskell had had plenty of schooling, though none of it formal. He’d been a naturally curious young man who’d been taught the fundamentals of reading and writing by the wife of a neighboring Texas rancher.

  She’d taught him other things, too, including the art of fornication in all its sundry incarnations.

  “Tell me something, Mister—”

  “Please, call me Bear. After all, I did track shit on your rug.”

  “What’s the last book you read, Bear?”

  “That would be the one I reread now and again, whenever I find myself with time on my hands. Moby-Dick by a feller named Melville.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Not many have. A sawbones gave it to me back when I was recovering from wounds I incurred during the war. I love the hell out of it, but I still haven’t figured it all out. Someday I hope to. I’m convinced I’ll be all the better for it.”

  Miss O’Brien narrowed a skeptical eye. “If you’ve read it so many times, quote me a few lines.”

  Haskell sipped his drink, drew a breath, and said without hesitation, the words rippling off his tongue as they’d flowed across his brain, carving their own furrow, so many times: “‘Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet’ . . . blah, blah . . . ‘then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.’”

  Miss O’Brien blinked at him. “That’s amazing.”

  “Ah, heck, it weren’t nothin’.”

  “No, you’re much smarter than you look, aren’t you?”

  Haskell grinned and shrugged.

  Suddenly, she hardened her jaws, grabbed his vest, and rose up onto her tiptoes. “Who are you here to kill?”

  18

  Bear stared down at the freckled redhead. He peeled her hand off his vest. “I ain’t here to kill no one. What I am here to do is get a job. I need to eat, same as everyone else.”

  “Yes, that’s what you said earlier . . . right after you tracked dung onto my rug.”

  “What I said was I was lookin’ for my friend, Malcolm Briar. He said he had a job for me.”

  “What kind of job?”

  Haskell decided to let his finely honed instincts dictate and see where they took him. He saw little chance to waver from his initial plan, since he was for all intents and purposes back to square one. “Malcolm said there was trouble here in Wendigo. Trouble among the freighters. He wanted me to come and help him figure it out before somethin’ bad happened. I could tell from his letter he was worried about his own fate and the fate of his company. Since I was so rudely waylaid by you and Goodthunder’s deputies, I haven’t had the opportunity to track him down.”

  “When did he write you this letter?” she asked him, tapping her index finger on the rim of her snifter.

  Haskell shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. A year ago or so. I was workin’ then, didn’t need the job. Now I do.”

  She stared at him, not buying his story.

  “How do you know Mr. Briar?”

  “He and I fought in the war together.”

  “What side?”

  “Union blue.”

  She searched him with a faintly skeptical cast. He didn’t like how close she was standing to him, because he could see way down her well-filled corset, and it was distracting. He’d been distracted enough. He couldn’t help glancing at the pearl necklace that dipped down into her freckled cleavage. He felt vaguely envious of the inanimate object.

  She followed one of his glances to its target and then looked up again, her mouth corners quirking knowingly. “You like what you see down there, Bear?”

  “I’d like to stay on the subject of Malcolm. You know where I might find him? I assume his freight yard is around here somewhere, but as I said, since I was so rudely—”

  She placed her hand on his crotch. Her hand was soft and warm. She pressed it down firmly against his cock, staring up at him as though to check his reaction. He gritted his teeth, not wanting to feel the sensations he was feeling.

  She gave him a smoky, devilish smile and then removed her hand. Fingering her necklace, she turned and walked over to stand in front of the fireplace and its dancing flames.

  “He’s dead,” she said, with her back to him, still fingering the necklace and staring down at the flames.

  “Since I haven’t heard from him in a while, I sort of had a feelin’,” Haskell said to her back. “Who did it?”

  Miss O’Brien turned to face him. “Goodthunder and that snake he’s in cahoots with, Pink Cheatum.”

  “Goodthunder and Pink Cheatum,” Haskell muttered half to himself. “Well, I know Goodthunder. Haven’t had the pleasure of meeting this Pink Cheatum yet. Who is he?”

  She flipped the necklace over her bosom a couple of times, and that faintly devilish smile returned to her full, sensuous lips. The lines at the corners of her eyes deepened slightly as she sipped from her glass and let her gaze flick to his crotch.

  “You and I might have business to discuss, Mr. Haskell. That is, after all, why I asked you here and gave you back your guns.”

  “What kind of business, Miss O’Brien?”

  She walked slowly over to him, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet. “No. Not yet. I don’t like to mix business with pleasure.” She stopped within inches of him, her breasts rising and falling about an inch from his belly. “I like the pleasure to come first. Meet me upstairs? I have a lovely room with a magnificent bed in it.”

  Haskell frowned. “I thought you and Benjamin Geist were . . .”

  “Oh, we are. But he goes his way, and I go my way. To the horror of his unlovely daughter.” She smiled deviously. “Would you like to see how that works, exactly, Bear?” She chuckled as she pressed her bosom against his belly. “You sure are big. Might break my bed. That’s all right”—she winked—“I can get another one.”

  She walked over to the cabinet, picked up the bottle of Sam Clay, and started for the door to the foyer. Without looking back at him, she said, “Bring your glass, Bear. Come hither.”

  She said that last with an amused air and a faint titter. Apparently, she thought him amusing. A circus bear. Maybe she’d even like to watch him straddle a tightrope.

  Haskell stared at her, glowering. He didn’t like her much. He liked the way she looked, and he was intrigued by the way she carried herself. He’d have bet a pocketful of silver she was good in the sack.

  Still, he didn’t like her much.

  Oh, well. He’d endure the pleasure, and then he’d find out what this talk of business was all about. And then, if he had to pistol-whip the saucy bitch, he’d find out more about Malcolm Briar and the missing detective, Wexler.

  As he headed for the door, he heard her out in the hall say to Samson with a lazy, arrogant drag to her voice, “If Benjamin calls this evening, tell him I have a headache. You and Rock stay on your toes, but unless the house is on fire, I don’t want to be disturbed.”

  She was already on the stairs by the time Haskell got out into the foyer. As he headed for the stairs behind her, Samson rose from his chair, holding his double-barreled gut shredder up high across his chest. “Hey, where you think you’re goin’?” Owing to the fact that he no longer had any front teeth, he had a sissy’s lisp.

  Miss O’Brien stopped on the stairs and half-turned. “He’s with me. Remember, Samson, not unless the house is on fire and only then if you can’t put it out yourselves.”

  Samson scowled oddly with his swollen eyes at Haskell, who grinned and threw his arms up as if to say, “What’re you gonna do?”

  Then he climbed the stairs behind Miss O’Brien, whom he idly thought he should start thinking of as Judith, since they were
about get to know each other in the biblical sense and all, and found himself admiring her round ass, which appeared as firm as that of a woman ten years younger. He figured she was a few years older than he was, which would put her close to forty, old for a woman on the rough-hewn frontier.

  She’d held up well. At least, with all her clothes on, she appeared to have.

  They went all the way to the third story and down a carpeted hallway with two small candles burning in wall brackets. She opened a door, turned to him, pressed her hand on his chest, and gazed up at him with a coy smile. Then she stepped into the room and closed the door.

  Haskell waited.

  His heart throbbed in his scrotum.

  The bitch had gotten to him. She was toying with him, and she knew he knew she was toying with him, and she was enjoying every minute of the devilish charade.

  Sometimes it was damn hard being a male with all the foolishness a man must submit to simply because his cock insisted.

  “Come,” she said quietly on the other side of the door.

  Haskell walked in and closed the door behind him. There were four candles lit, casting more darkness than light. The room was opulently, expensively tricked out in baroque-style furniture dominated by a bed at the room’s far end, with curtained windows to each side. The bed was about the size of two prairie schooners sitting side-by-side. It had a large black velvet canopy secured to the four tall posters.

  Judith rolled a black spread and a heavy flowered quilt very neatly down to the foot of the bed in two long, tight rolls. She lay on her side, clad in only the pearl necklace, her chin in her hand. Her heavy breasts sloped toward the sheets, the top one touching the one beneath it.

  She looked at him without expression.

  Haskell’s heart shuddered, rolled.

  He stepped forward, doffed his hat, and, standing at the foot of the bed, staring down at her, he began unbuttoning his shirt. As he undressed, his breathing growing labored as he feasted his eyes on her, he saw that she was indeed beautiful.

  Long-limbed, heavy-busted, every inch of her smooth skin lightly freckled, including her breasts. She had some extra flesh on her—a slight roll at the belly, some dimpled tallow at her hips and thighs—but just enough to add a sumptuous eroticism to her figure. The same for the shallow lines and creases.