by Tabor Evans
Gilchrist rose to walk him out front. "Glass eyes and gold teeth do say more about a well-done cadaver. How do you like a second in command using the name of his dead boss to confound us all further?"
Longarm didn't like it that much. But he never said so, lest he waste more time with a cuss, however agreeable, who didn't know one thing more about that fire in Denver or the note cashed in Minnesota than anyone else on the side of the law.
He allowed he'd see if the boys in the back rooms up the way knew anything about other strangers, the one called Chief in particular, who'd passed through Durango about the same time as the late Calvert Tyger. Then he asked when he could catch a train out. But Gilchrist said there wouldn't be another train in or out this side of sunrise, explaining, "The engineers are sort of unsure about the tracks ahead. So we have no call to cross the Divide by the dark of the moon."
To which Longarm could only answer, "Shit, I'll just have to study on finding me a room for the night then. Is it safe to say most new folks in town will have already booked their own rooms for the rest of the night by this late?"
Gilchrist agreed that seemed just about the size of it. So they parted friendly and Longarm ambled over to the one main street in no great hurry. For there was more than one primitive but brand-new hotel in the brand-new mushroom town, and if they couldn't fix him up at one he could always ask at another, or in a pinch, sleep sitting up in a lobby chair for the usual dime tip.
There was little going on in any of the four saloons and the one pool hall he dropped into long enough for a short beer and such few words as he could get out of anybody. It was the wrong night of the week and too far from payday for a town that tiny to show that much action along a public thoroughfare. It was tough for a new cuss in any town to find the high-stakes gambling and serious sinning the money folks indulged in behind closed doors and drawn curtains. So nobody he could get into a conversation with could recall much about that rooming house fire, even if they'd been in Durango a whole fortnight.
Longarm had a light supper of elk venison steak smothered in chili con carne under two fried eggs, washed that and the service-berry pie down with buttermilk instead of the usual black coffee--lest he find it tough to fall asleep sitting up--and headed for the nearest hotel with no baggage but his Winchester cradled in the crook of his right elbow with his thumb through the trigger guard.
It was easy to shift the saddle gun so its muzzle and fifteen-round magazine preceded him along the shadowy planking of the partly covered sidewalk as he walked with some interest in the direction of a gal complaining low and a male cussing loud in a drunken tone.
As Longarm drifted closer, unseen by anyone involved in the late night dispute, he saw the gal was in more trouble than he'd first expected. For the cowhand holding on to one arm of the gal in a dark velveteen riding habit was loudly calling her an infernally stuck-up whore. The two riders with him were just ogling her like hungry coyotes closing in on a newly yeaned calf with its momma off somewhere else.
Longarm told himself gang rapes were more unusual than lots of asshole remarks to an unescorted gal along Saloon Row, even in the town of Durango. Then he told himself that even if they were serious, the gal was likely partly to blame and Durango, dammit, had a half-ass company police force that was supposed to watch out for such rowdy behavior. Then he told himself that he was the only peace officer in sight and that the gal seemed really worried as she tried to get free, protesting, "Unhand me, sir! I'm not the sort of girl you seem to take me for, and I'll tell my husband if you get fresh with me!"
One of the ones just standing by, as if for his turn, laughed dirty and jeered, "You ain't wearing no ring for the same reasons you ain't got no man of your own, Amarillo Annie. You must really take us for tenderfeet if you hope to fool us with such a high and mighty act, you two-bit cunt!"
Longarm had heard enough. He stepped out of the shadows, saddle gun aimed politely at the planking between them, as he called out in a conversational tone, "Evening, Miss Annie. They told me you'd lit out just before I arrived to escort you... wherever it was you aimed to go."
The gal didn't answer. She was no fool. But the one who had her by one arm sneered, "She aims to go with us and you'd be well advised to stay out of this, pilgrim."
Longarm smiled pleasantly enough, considering how tricky the light was, but let an edge of steel creep into his voice when he softly but firmly replied, "I can see by the way all three of you wear your guns that you could be headed into a situation much like the one in that sad old song about the eastbound herd bull and the westbound train. I don't want to brag, but I am not a cowhand in town with a skinful, and even if I was, I got more rounds in the tube of this one Winchester than you could possibly have in the wheels of the two guns you seem to be packing betwixt the three of you. So don't tell this child whether he ought to stay in or out of anything, and Miss Annie just told you to let go her arm, amigo mio!"
The other one, who seemed more sure of the gal's social status, tried not to sound worried as he cautioned, "You don't want to get in a fight with three grown men over Amarillo Annie, pard. Don't you know what she is?"
To which Longarm could only reply in a dead-level way, "I do. She's the lady you all just heard me offer to escort on to wherever she may want to go. I'd sure hate to hear anyone call any lady I'm escorting anything less than a lady. For that would make me a sort of fool, in your eyes leastways, and that would mean I'd have to make you look even more foolish, wouldn't it?"
The one still holding the gal's arm, although not as firmly, tried a nervous horse laugh and blustered, "Hell, I see one of him and three of us, too spread out for him to get more than one of us as we both draw, Slim."
What the skinny one with the other six-gun might have answered remained a mystery. The gal they'd been tormenting wrenched her arm free and declared, "Now stop it this instant! Don't you silly kids know you're trying to scare the one and original Longarm, and him with the drop on you?"
The one who'd been about to grab for her arm some more crawfished back as if he'd just noticed a diamondback he'd been fixing to tread on barefoot. The skinny one with the other six-gun worn too high for a side-draw gulped and protested, "Nobody here never said nothing about scaring nobody, Miss Annie. Can't you take a little joke?"
The gal didn't answer. So he tried the same question on Longarm, who shrugged and quietly asked, "How about you, Miss Annie? Do we take all this as kid stuff and let 'em live, or would you like the three of them stuffed and mounted?"
By the time she'd grudgingly decided to let it go this one time, she and Longarm seemed to be alone on the walk. But he offered her a free elbow and suggested softly, "We'd best duck into this slot and let me carry you on from the far side of the block, ma'am. It's been my sad experience that some sore losers are inclined to wait up ahead in the shadows after you think you've backed 'em down."
The gal in dark velveteen slipped a gloved hand through the crook of his left elbow, and there was just room for the two of them to go side by side through some mighty dark shadows, dog-legging along that alleyway in line with the street out front, and then slip through yet another slot to the street beyond as he told her to hush every time she started to say something to him.
Once they'd crossed to the far side of the residential street he'd led her to, Longarm told her, softly, "We can talk now, long as we talk soft and walk no louder. I'd be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, as you seem to have guessed, and you still have the advantage on me, ma'am."
She sighed. "I might have known you didn't remember me, Custis. You really were just being your gallant self, to a gal in trouble who was really what they said she was for all you knew."
She hugged his arm to her nicely padded bodice and added, "They said you were like that, when you and me and the world were younger over in Dodge."
There were no street lamps, and the moon was only a thin fingernail paring of light in the starry sky above. So Longarm had to stare at her upturned face a while, n
oting she was sort of pretty or at least not downright deformed, as he replied uncertainly, "Are we speaking of you and me in Dodge before or after I started packing a badge six or eight years ago, Miss Annie?"
"Annie Newton, back in '72," she replied wistfully, and went on. "You were still punching cows and I was a skinny chambermaid at the Drover's Rest that afternoon you saved my virtue from yet another trail herder who'd come back to the hotel early to catch me alone upstairs, he thought."
She laughed girlishly. "I can still see him flopping like a rag doll down those stairs you sent him, and I guess you did do it because you thought it was only right. For you never got fresh with me yourself, even after I'd called you my hero and got up on my tippy-toes to kiss you smack on the mouth!"
Longarm broke stride to spin her around and bend closer as he marveled, "You're that bitty orphan child that drunk from my old outfit was scaring that time? Well, I never, and Lord have mercy if you ain't growed some since that day in Dodge, Miss Annie."
She softly murmured, "I feel even older. For I've been scared a lot since. But they call me Amarillo Annie because I was working there until recent. I was dealing blackjack, just in case that matters to you, Custis. I deal cards these days at that Pronghorn Saloon up the street a ways. Sometimes I have the sort of trouble you just got me out of with idiots who think a gal willing to lie down with them for money would stay on her feet like that, hour after hour, for the commission the house pays a dealer."
Longarm nodded. "I figured they were idjets too. So where would you like me to carry you from here, Miss Annie?"
She said she lived up the slope and a couple of corners to the south. So that was the way they walked in the faint moonlight, with her doing most of the talking as she caught up on the more recent career of a handsome cowhand she'd once had a young girl's dreams about. It was her idea to confide that he could have had her virginity, once she'd kissed a grown man for the very first time and noticed how exciting it felt. He wasn't cruel enough to tell her he'd paid little attention to the shy lips of a little orphan gal. But as if she could read his mind, as they got to the gate of her hillside cottage, she confided, "I've followed your fame as a lawman in the papers, Custis. I was so surprised to read about you in that shootout shortly after you'd been so sweet to me in Dodge. But then I read where you'd been in the war even earlier, and so I suppose that to you I was just a silly little kid, even kissing you as grown-up as I knew how, right?"
"Wrong," he lied gallantly, moving the Winchester out of their way to kiss her some more in her front yard the way he figured she'd want to be kissed good night, these days.
Then he suspected, from the way she was kissing back, good night was not what she had in mind just yet. For this time, while she still had to stand on her toes to get at him right, her kissing was nothing at all like he dimly recalled from that awkward day in Dodge. He was sure glad he smoked instead of chewed as her nosy tongue seemed intent on exploring his surprised mouth. She sucked his tongue deep too when he tried to return the favor, and it was just as well she seemed to be hauling him inside her unlit cottage, once he considered where she'd grabbed hold of him to haul.
It was black as a bitch indoors, but when he tried to strike a light she blew it out, gasping, "No. Don't spoil it with the cruel teeth of time, Custis. Take me as if we were still a young cowhand and a maiden of fifteen!"
He allowed he'd be more than willing, if she'd lead him to some less vertical position. So she did, and they wound up across a bed in the blackness with her clutching at his duds and vice versa till he was in her, both of them still half dressed, and going at it with more enthusiasm than he'd thought he'd saved up aboard that train from Denver. She moved in a way no fifteen-year-old would have ever moved in, biting down hard with her vaginal muscles as she slid up and down his erection in time with his thrusts, gasping downright embarrassing love words as she pleaded with him to make a woman of her at last, after all these years. So he did his best, and managed to get them both entirely undressed by the time he'd come in her a second time. It was her fourth, according to her. When she shyly repeated she'd known it would be grand with him, although not this grand, he was too polite to observe she'd sure as shooting done it with somebody a lot to get that good at losing her virginity.
He finally got her to let him stop long enough to smoke at least one cheroot and maybe get his second wind. But when he thumbnailed a light with their naked bodies together across the rumpled sheets, she turned her head away, as if not wanting him to see more than the way her jet-black hair came out of the base of her skull mousy brown. He looked the other way, spied a candlestick on the bed table, and lit the candle along with his cheroot.
When she softly protested, Longarm got rid of the match and gently reached across her swell tits to take her small chin in hand and turn her face toward the light.
She sobbed, "Oh, Custis, you don't look like I remembered, and I've gotten so old and plain since then!"
He blinked in bemused delight. "I see what you mean about us both screwing somebody else just now. But it wasn't that long ago you were too young for me, and to tell the truth, I find you just about right and even prettier than I thought whilst I was coming with some other image just a moment or so ago."
She archly suggested they come some more by candlelight, and asked how long he'd be in town. Like most men, Longarm had found gals tended to freeze up on a man or demand a honeymoon's worth of humping when he told them they'd likely part by the cold gray light of dawn. So he answered, truthfully enough when you studied on it, "Ain't sure. My boss never sent me to Durango to begin with, and now that I'm here I ain't sure just what I was expecting to find."
She grasped his semi-erection firmly and forked a shapely and now full-grown leg across his naked flesh to impale herself on his suddenly inspired shaft, demurely demanding to know if he was disappointed in what he'd found in Durango so far.
Longarm laughed up at her sweet face and bouncing candle-lit bosom. "I like surprises more than I can say. So I'll just have to show you. But no offense, Miss Annie, you wasn't exactly what I was expecting to investigate in Durango."
She allowed no offense was taken as he rolled her on her back to treat her right in a softer, more romantic way. They took turns puffing on the cheroot with half his weight on one elbow. He was pleased to learn she knew how nice it could be that way too, despite all her virginity bullshit. For once a man and woman got past the mad dash for eternal orgasm, it could be mighty nice to just drift together down the currents of togetherness with calmer but lingering pleasures.
She followed his drift, dilating and tightening her innards in time with his languid thrusts as they shared a smoke and conversed like pals over coffee and dessert. He told her more about his own reasons for being in Durango, and added, "Seeing a lady dealing blackjack sees more of life than, say, a schoolmarm, I don't suppose you'd have noticed if anyone had been flashing hundred-dollar treasury notes where the lights are brighter late at night?"
She shook her head, putting the cheroot back between his lips as she replied, "Betting a twenty in paper raises an eyebrow and calls for the floor manager, Custis. Most of the miners and railroad men out our way are paid in silver cartwheels. A top hardrock man draws a double eagle in gold. The boys don't cotton much to paper, and the house likes it even less."
She thrust her hips for a better grip on him as she calmly went on. "Trying to cash a hundred dollars in paper would cause way more excitement in Durango than a Chinaman trying to marry that schoolmarm you just mentioned. What made you ask such a question to begin with?"
He got rid of the cheroot so he could roll her higher atop that pillow under her bare behind, and got deeper in the saddle with her soft thighs hugging his hips while he nuzzled her naked collarbone and explained, "Like I told you, that gang led by a cuss who seems to keep dying in one rooming house fire after another grabbed a heap of hundred-dollar treasury notes up Fort Collins way."
She seemed to be paying less attenti
on as he continued. "Cashing hundred-dollar treasury notes attracts raised eyebrows no matter who tries to cash one, anywhere outside a bank, and you'd play the fool trying to cash a stolen hundred-dollar note in any bank worth its charter."
She murmured, "If you say so, darling. Could you move in in me a little faster?"
He could, and did, but whether she really cared or not he said, or panted, "I asked about somebody trying to cash such paper in a gambling house because I was on another case a spell back, on this same side of the Divide, where outlaws were trying to account for their ill-gotten gains by passing it off as gaming house winnings. But riding off to a remote mining town with the proceeds of that payroll robbery sounds even dumber when nobody seems to have cashed any of the proceeds and... Never mind, spread them sweet legs and come with Pappa!"
She did. It felt so good it almost hurt him, and seemed to cause her considerable agony, judging by the way she was moaning and groaning and carrying on till they somehow wound up with him pounding her even harder dog-style. She called him a brute for abusing her in such a beastly way and threatened to strangle him with her bare hands if he dared to take it out with her right on the razor's edge of infinite pleasure that would last for all eternity.
Then she came and said, "Shit. I was trying to make it last too. What was that about dying in one rooming house fire after another? I've heard of going back for second helpings of this hot stuff, Custis, but wouldn't one rooming house fire be enough for anybody?"
He planted his bare feet wider on the rug, and got a friendly grip on either of her hipbones so he could keep it in half soft as he explained. "I don't buy the same Calvert Tyger burning to death more than once, if he ever burned to death at all. We know for a fact who one of the victims was. I ain't sure it matters who they buried here in Durango by the same name. The real mystery, as soon as you study on it, was why in thunder anybody would check into any rooming house as Calvert Tyger to begin with."