He continued on up the porch steps. He’d just pulled open the screen door and held his hand up to knock when the inside door opened.
“Hello, Bear,” she said, standing just inside the door, looking radiant in a deep-purple, low-cut dress and a pearl choker, her thick hair carefully coifed into two neat piles atop her head. Silver hoops dangled from her ears, along with a couple of strategically placed sausage curls. She smelled like fresh-picked roses. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. “I was about to start thinking you’d turned yellow on me.”
She stepped back and drew the door open wider.
Chapter Twelve
“I’ve already eaten,” Suellen said. “But I kept a plate warm for you.”
She removed a plate from the warming rack of the range in her kitchen, set it on the table, and lifted the pot lid she’d placed over it. Steam rose toward the fancy, red-globed, gold-tasseled gas lamp hanging over the table bedecked with a white silk cloth.
Haskell stood in the doorway between the parlor and the kitchen, which was good-sized and well outfitted. He’d noticed when he’d first entered the house that the parlor was nicely appointed, as well. Cameron must have had some money when he’d come to Diamondback. Either that or Suellen’s tastes had put him in the debt jug, which was entirely possible.
Bear turned his hat in his hands, trying not to look at Suellen though her figure attracted the male eye—even the of eye of a male who should have been as sated as Haskell, after his tumble with Marlene—like a drunk to a bottle of good whiskey.
Only Suellen was cheap whiskey. Cheap rotgut who-hit-John that would leave one hell of a mark come morning. He had to remember that, and steer clear.
“You didn’t have to do that, Suellen.”
“I don’t mind. I bet you haven’t eaten much today, have you? Come on, come on. Don’t be shy. Peg your hat and sit down.”
Haskell had to admit he was hungry. She was right—he hadn’t eaten since a hasty breakfast consisting of a plate of the previous night’s beans and two bacon sandwiches. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he’d seen the food.
He hooked his hat on a wall peg, pulled out the chair before the plate, and sat down. Suellen pulled a bottle out of a cabinet, half-filled a tall water glass, and set the whiskey on the table by his plate.
“Bourbon. That’s your drink, isn’t it? Did I remember right?”
“That’s right.”
“Any branch water?”
“No, thanks.”
“That’s right—you take it as dry as Arizona. I remembered that, too.” She smiled.
“Congratulations on the good memory, Suellen,” Haskell said, a little annoyed by her fawning and sensing that it came wrapped in more than a little irony though it was hard to tell with Suellen. Everything was hard to tell with Suellen except the succulent body she came wrapped in. More than one man had learned that the hard way, Haskell suspected. More besides himself and Lou.
He dug into the fried steak and potatoes, cutting the meat and eating hungrily. She sank into a chair across from him, the table pushing up her breasts, and rested her chin in her hands. “Where’ve you been?”
Haskell swallowed a big bite, sipped his whiskey. “Miss Yvette’s.”
“Oh? Who was the lucky girl?”
“Miss Marlene.”
“Ah. She’s pretty.”
Haskell looked at her. “How do you know?”
Suellen lifted a shoulder. “Diamondback’s a small town. Everybody knows everybody. Besides, a pretty girl can attract the eye of a woman just like she attracts the eye of a man.” She tittered a laugh. “Well, maybe not just like it, but ... ”
She laughed again.
Haskell looked at her across the table as he ate. He wasn’t going to give her much. Not if she was going to keep fawning like this while staring at him with a hard kind of challenging coldness. She was crazy. He had to remember that about her, too. Cheap and crazy. She’d also imbibed before he’d come. He could see that in her eyes, too. Such a woman shouldn’t drink. Or such a man, for that matter ...
He continued to eat hungrily, throwing politeness to the wind. He also continued to not look at her breasts being pushed up by the table though he knew she wanted him to take a good, long look.
“Has Big Deal been by?” he asked her, and took another sip of whiskey, glancing at her pointedly across the table but still not looking at her breasts.
“Big Deal?”
“Yeah.”
Suellen’s cheeks flushed. “No. Why?”
“I saw him outside as I walked up. He said he was checking on you.”
“Oh, that’s right—he did come to the door. To see if I was all right. Lordy, ever since Lou died, my mind has been in a fog.”
“So much of a fog that you forgot that Big Deal stopped by not a half hour ago?”
“Yes, that’s right.” Suellen frowned, indignant. “What are you sayin, Bear?”
Haskell shrugged and forked another bite into his mouth. “Pretty lonely, are you, Suellen?”
“Of course, I’m lonely. But, no, not just because Lou is gone, though that makes it worse.” Suellen got up, pulled the bottle down out of the cabinet, and poured as much whiskey into a tall water glass as she’d poured into Bear’s. “It wasn’t my idea to move here. To this tiny little town. To this house outside of this tiny little town. And then he goes and dies on me, the bastard!”
She threw back a good shot or so of the glass of whiskey, and plopped back down in the chair. She looked at Haskell but didn’t say anything. He stuffed the last bite of steak into his mouth, then the last bite of potatoes, and swallowed. He met her faintly sulking gaze.
“Who killed him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who do you think killed him?”
“I have no idea. Take your pick.”
“What does that mean?”
Suellen swallowed another healthy belt of the whiskey and leaned forward, pushing up her breasts again. “It means that Lou had a lot of enemies. He wasn’t the man you remember. Not at the end. When you knew him, and when I first met him, he was sweet. A poet. A roughhewn poet. That’s what I always called him—my burly poet!
“But over the years his drinking as well as his run of bad luck, I suppose, soured him. He turned mean and nasty, Bear. He hasn’t been so easy to live with. Most of the townsfolk will probably tell you he wasn’t so easy to get along with out on the street, either. He was always butting heads with someone. Pushing his weight around in ways that he never did before. He was moody and temperamental. He would make the saloon owners refuse service to certain customers because of old gripes he might have had with such men. Or even because he didn’t like how they looked. He once pistol-whipped a shotgun messenger for the stage line. Lou accused the man of having been a Confederate guerilla fighter during the war though the man insisted he’d been no such thing. He’d make up stories about people, Lou would. Bad stories. And he’d believe them. It was his drinking.”
“I have trouble believing that. That just doesn’t sound like Lou.”
“You don’t have to believe me, Bear. You always did idealize him. He was like an older brother to you—the one you never had. I understand that. But that’s the way it was. He ended up getting crossways with nearly everyone in Diamondback. Anyone could have killed him.”
“Your grief is overwhelming, Suellen.”
She picked up her glass and slammed it back down on the table, a good bit of whiskey splashing up out of it. She narrowed her eyes at Haskell. They crossed slightly, beautifully. “It’s hard to grieve for a man you’d come to hate.”
Haskell drained his glass and sat back in his chair. “Suellen, I’m going to ask you this one more time.”
“Ask away.” She tilted the bottle over his glass, but he covered it with his hand. She wrinkled her nose at him and set the bottle back down on the table.
“Do you think one of your ... uh ... admirers, of which I know you probab
ly have many ... ” He looked down at her chest but only to emphasize his point (he told himself). “Could one of them have killed Lou?”
Suellen glared at him. Her eyes were like two howitzers detonated at the same time, flashing. “You go to hell!” She slapped the table hard. A lock of her hair had come undone from one of the piles atop her head, and hung down against her left cheek.
“All right, well, sounds like that’s about all I’m going to get out of this visit.” Haskell slid his chair back and rose.
“No, wait—Bear, please, don’t go!”
Suellen stood up a little awkwardly, and strolled slowly around the table, brushing the tips of her left hand fingers along the tablecloth as she did.
“Stay where you are, Suellen.”
She stopped at the end of the table, to Haskell’s left. “He’s dead, Bear. Whatever he was, whatever he became, whoever he will always be in your memory, he is dead and buried on the hill over yonder!”
“Ah, the grieving widow again,” Haskell said. “Suellen you’re breaking my heart!”
She crossed her arms on her chest and then reached up and slipped the straps of her dress down her shoulders. The dress dropped down below her whalebone corset.
Haskell’s breath caught in his throat.
Christ, even drunk and mean, she was an incredible looking woman.
“I need you to stay, Bear.” Suellen reached behind her to unlace the corset. “I’m lonely.”
“Stop it.”
She adroitly ripped the laces out of the corset, one by one. They sounded like the cracks of a blacksnake. She narrowed her eyes at him, but her lips were smiling. Sneering.
“You remember that night in Amarillo,” she said huskily. “Don’t tell me you don’t. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. Unless I have something better to replace it with.”
“I’m warning you to stop it right there, Suellen.”
But she didn’t stop there. She ripped the laces through two more eyelets. The corset opened, dropped to the floor. Her breasts sprang free. She started to walk toward him again.
Haskell’s knees turned to mud. At the same time, fury exploded behind his eyeballs, and he unsnapped the keeper thong from over his Schofield’s hammer, slipped the piece from its holster, and cocked it.
“One more step, and I’m gonna pop a pill between your pretty tits, Suellen!”
“Bear ... ”
“Stop!”
She stopped. “Please, Bear. Just tonight. I don’t want to be alone ... tonight!” Her voice cracked, she sobbed.
Haskell grabbed his hat off the peg and walked around her, heading for the parlor, which is where the front door was. “I’ll send Big Deal over.”
She pivoted, following him with her gaze, her swollen, upturned breasts rising and falling as she breathed. Her voice was deep, quavering. “He’s just a boy. I need a man.”
“I’ll send a ranch hand over from the North Star.”
Haskell turned, holstered his revolver, and strode quickly through the parlor to the front door.
“Bear!” Suellen screamed.
He went out and slammed the door behind him. She screamed his name once more, from inside the house, as he strode off into the night. His heart was a racehorse inside him.
Chapter Thirteen
The next day, in the late morning, the sun already heating up again, Haskell rode toward the X that Big Deal had drawn on the map, and found himself staring into a gap between two low, stone-colored buttes where a burned out log cabin sat, its charred sod roof partially collapsed.
The brush around the cabin was also charred. The stink of burned timber hung heavy in the air. A large cottonwood towered over the cabin on its right. Roughly half the tree had been burned by the fire. The blackened leaves continued to tumble one by one or two by two from the branches, swirling on the breeze as they sank into the yard.
Haskell stepped down from the buckskin’s back and tossed the reins over a cedar branch. He walked toward the cabin, the stench growing more cloying in his nose.
There was no porch on the humble place, only a four-by-four square of boardwalk fronting the door, which sagged inward and sideways, propped on inner rubble including a fallen ceiling beam. Haskell stepped up onto the boardwalk and peered into the cabin, seeing only piles of half-burned rubble and gray ashes around a blackened hearth. There were some pots and pans and airtight tins and the skeleton of a rocking chair, but most everything had been burned beyond recognition.
The pungent stench was so keen that there was no doubt that the fire had happened recently. Within the past two weeks was Haskell’s guess.
Had the fire brought Lou Cameron out here?
Haskell moved off the wooden stoop and walked over to a corner of the cabin to take a gander at the backyard. A small log barn had also been burned though it was still standing. It was nearly entirely charred black, the weeds growing up along its stone foundation burned to the ground. Near the barn was a lean-to stable with a rail corral. The corral gate was open. Whatever stock had been inside had apparently been run off. There was also a chicken coop, to the left of the barn. It had been constructed of stone and logs, with a wire fence around it though the fence was down.
The coop had been burned. Haskell couldn’t see any chickens. They were likely dead—either burned in the fire or taken by fox or coyotes afterwards.
The lawman raked a pensive thumbnail down the hard line of his unshaven jaw. He looked around for sign of the culprits. The fire had been no accident, since it had involved more than one building and the stock had been run out of the corral.
He kicked around, eyes to the ground, but not surprisingly came up with nothing. Any boot or hoof prints would likely have been rubbed out by the wind, the morning dew, or recent rains. There might be some other form of sign, however—something that would give him some clue as to what had happened here and who the culprit or culprits were. He might also find a body or two.
When he found nothing in the yard, he walked out behind the corral to a fringe of cottonwoods and willows that lined the bank of a creek bed. A trickle of water ran down the center of the rocky bed, murmuring softly. The water was probably runoff from the springs—Weeping Squaw Springs—that Haskell had spotted just before he’d seen the cabin.
He looked off past the creek bed and the trickle of water, and something held his gaze.
Two mounds of dirt, sand, and rock.
Haskell dropped down into the creek bed, stepped across the freshet, and climbed the bed’s opposite side. He stared down at the two mounds—two graves fronted by crude wooden crosses fashioned from sun-bleached driftwood and rawhide. The mounds, roughly ten feet from the lip of the creek bed, were covered by stones against predators.
Haskell frowned down at the grave on his left, scrutinizing it. He dropped to a knee beside it. At the very top of the mound, the larger rocks had been pushed back to reveal a bald patch of dirt and gravel. A heart shape had been formed in this bare spot with small polished stones likely gathered from the creek bed. Inside the heart lay a small burlap pouch only a little larger than one of Haskell’s thumbs. It had a drawstring on it.
Haskell glanced around sheepishly, rubbed his right hand on the thigh of his canvas trousers. The pouch was obviously a memorial, a token of love for the deceased. He hated to desecrate it, but he had a good hunch that the burning of the small ranch and the possible killing of the two people buried here were related to the murder of Lou Cameron, which was the reason he was here in the first place.
Looking inside the pouch was his job. Besides, he’d return the pouch to its place atop the grave when he was finished with his investigation.
He picked up the pouch, opened it, and spilled its sole contents into his right hand. He held up the filigreed gold ring set with a round amethyst stone. It was very small. The ring would barely fit over the tip of Haskell’s right pinky. Obviously a young woman’s ring.
Bear inspected it carefully, looking for any possible inscr
iption or initials. Nothing. He could tell by the tarnished condition of the gold that the ring was old. Possibly very old.
“I’ll be damned,” Haskell said with sigh, looking around again pensively.
He slipped the ring back into the pouch, tightened the drawstring, and dropped it into his shirt pocket. He saw something on the ground near his own boot. The imprint of a heel much smaller than his own. It appeared fresh.
He’d just started to crouch over the print for a better look when something screeched through the air just right of where his head had been a half a second ago. The bullet spanged off a rock behind him.
Haskell threw himself forward, hitting the ground on his chest and rolling to his left. Another bullet plumed dirt where he’d first fallen. It was followed by another angry rifle crack. Haskell crawled behind a cedar, put his back to the tree, and tried to make himself as small as possible.
A bullet hammered the opposite side of the tree, making it quiver, spraying bark.
Bear slipped his Schofield from its holster and cursed himself for not shucking his Henry from its saddle sheath. Whoever had ambushed him obviously had a rifle, and the ambusher was shooting from too far away for Haskell’s hogleg to be much use.
Two more bullets hammered the ground around Bear, followed by screeching rifle reports. Haskell glanced around the tree. Smoke puffed from the crest of a low, sandy ridge maybe fifty yards away from him. The bullet hammered the tree again, just as Haskell pulled his head back behind it.
The witch-like scream of the rifle followed an eyewink later.
When no more reports followed, Haskell threw himself out to his left, rolling, quickly scanning the terrain around him, and then rose to run ahead and left, crouching low, staying as much as possible between the cover of trees and rocks and low swells of ground.
No more shots came. The shooter must be reloading.
Haskell ran hard for the ridge ahead of him and which ran roughly from his left to his right, beyond another, shallower wash. He had to get to the shooter—or at least get within his Schofield’s range of the shooter—before the son of a bitch reloaded.
GUN TROUBLE AT DIAMONDBACK (Bear Haskell, U.S. Marshal Book 1) Page 10