by Jake Logan
Loomis screamed as the first bullet tore a bloody chunk out of his left arm. He screamed again when Slocum’s second bullet slammed into his gut with the force of a sixteen-pound iron maul, a sledgehammer blow that caved in his stomach and drove him backward a half foot. He felt the warm rush of blood as it flowed down his arm and out over his belt buckle. There was no pain at first, but his eyes blurred as he tried to strike back, to shoot the man lying facedown in the street, a puddle of ink on starlit dirt.
Slocum counted his shots. He had not reloaded after he shot Thorson, and he had fired three shots there in the street. Four cartridges. He had two left in the cylinder and one was under the hammer, lurking there like a demon of death, waiting for the hammer to strike its thin metal dome and explode it into being.
Loomis staggered out into the open, out of that space between hardened clay brick buildings. His legs wobbled and pain now seethed through to his brain like a fiery poison, a malevolent fluid that robbed him of his reflexes and his senses.
“Christ,” Loomis gasped and tried to aim a pistol that floated back and forth in front of his eyes like something possessed of its own erratic will.
Slocum watched as Loomis lurched toward him. His jaw line hardened into steel and his eyes narrowed as he held the pistol steady, braced by his bipodal elbows. He aimed for a point in the middle of Loomis’s chest and fired the Colt. Just a gentle steady squeeze. That was all that it took and the projectile was on its way, faster than the speed of sound, a whistling death that traveled faster than a thought.
Smack, the bullet crashed through Loomis’s fragile breastplate, turning bone into splinters, ripping through an artery and gouging out a chunk of heart muscle, chewing it to a bloody pulp as it surged past, nipping off a portion of spine before blowing a hole the size of a man’s folded fist in the center of Loomis’s back.
His voice was gone, and in that last split second of consciousness, Loomis felt the light in his brain being snuffed out like a candle in a high wind. The light diminished to a pinpoint and then there was only blackness and a bottomless pit that was darker than the darkest night, deeper than the universe itself, and all feeling was gone. He toppled forward, a lifeless bag of useless bones and mortifying flesh. His body struck the ground with a thud, and his pistol twisted from his hand at a crazy angle.
There was the smell of burnt powder and wisps of smoke afloat like a fleeting mist that became part of the air, part of the night. Slocum’s ears reverberated with the sounds of explosions and made him temporarily deaf. He got to his feet, with one bullet left in its cylinder, and walked over to Loomis’s corpse. He towered above it as he pushed the slide and swung the cylinder out like a gate. He pushed the ramrod as he turned it from one click to another and each empty hull fell to the ground and made a brassy tink in the dirt.
He pushed fresh cartridges into the empty sleeves until his pistol’s round magazine was full, then snapped the cylinder back into its niche between the barrel and the slot where the hammer fell. He looked around and listened.
Was there another shooter? Had Loomis been the only man sent to kill him?
He stepped away and melted into the shadows where Loomis had stood in ambush, that place of concealment that now felt like the hollowed-out earth of an open grave.
Curious people began to step onto the street on both sides of where he stood. Patrons from Chez Soleil cautiously stood in front of the café and peered up the street.
Slocum brushed the dirt off the front of his clothes and stepped out. He headed for where he had left Linda. He found her leaning in an empty doorway.
“Did you kill him?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“It was Loomis, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I never did like that little toady,” she said. “You know he won’t quit. He’ll send Morgan Sombra after you, and Gustav Adler, another gunman in Willie’s employ. Gustav is pure mean and Sombra is as snaky as they come.”
“Obadiah told me about Adler and I’ve met Sombra.”
“John, let’s get out of here,” she said. “Do you have something to drink in your saddlebags?”
“Matter of fact, I do. Some fine Kentucky bourbon bought in Santa Fe.”
“I have a stomach full of butterflies. I heard someone tell someone else to go and fetch the sheriff.”
“We’ll have to go by the saloon, where my horse is hitched.”
“Can I ride double?”
“You bet,” he said.
They walked through the sparse crowd of gawkers back to the Socorro Saloon. Slocum helped Linda step up and take a seat behind the cantle. He mounted up and she clung to him as he turned Ferro onto the street. Swain walked toward them.
“I was just coming to get our horses,” he said. “The rooming house has a small stable right behind it. Your room is ready, John.”
“Want us to wait for you?” Slocum asked.
“No, you go on. I heard shots a while ago. Close to the rooming house.”
“Rabbits,” Slocum said.
“He shot Ruben Loomis,” Linda blurted out. “Scroggs sent him to kill John.”
“Ah, did you kill him, John?”
“He wasn’t moving. And he wasn’t breathing.”
“Good riddance. You watch your back, John. There’s more where he came from.”
“I know. Adler and Sombra.”
“Two that we know of,” Swain said enigmatically.
“Did you get your business done?”
“Some of it,” Swain said. “I’ll finish up in the morning. Breakfast? They have a little dining hall at the rooming house.”
“What time?”
“Oh, an hour or so after daybreak.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Slocum said.
“We’ll meet you there,” Linda said emphatically and squeezed Slocum’s waist with both arms.
“A threesome then,” Swain said, and touched a finger to his hat brim in farewell.
Slocum rode down the street. Linda put her head against his shoulder.
“I’m glad to be with you,” she whispered.
“I’m glad you’re staying the night. Socorro seems to be a dangerous place at night.”
She laughed, a feeble titter that tickled his ear.
“I feel safe with you,” she said.
After he put Ferro up in the stable and stripped him of saddle, bridle, saddlebags, and bedroll, with its double-barrel shotgun swathed inside it, he and Linda went into the rooming house. The clerk handed him his key after Slocum signed the register. He was a balding, gray-haired man in his sixties, with a day’s gray beard stubble on his chin, bright red suspenders, and horn-rimmed glasses with thick lenses.
“No loud singin’ or boisterous conversation or noise after eleven,” he said.
“We’ll be as quiet as a couple of mice,” Slocum said.
“ ’Night,” the clerk said, then affixed a green eyeshade to his head and sat down at the desk, adjusting the lamp wick to give him more light. He was reading Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
Slocum unlocked the door to Room 3 on the ground floor and entered to find a lamp already lit. There was a large brass bed against the wall, a table, two chairs, and a small sofa in the center. Next to the bed there was a wardrobe and, against the opposite wall, a bureau with a pitcher of water, glasses, and a chamber pot tucked under its wooden bottom.
“All the comforts of home,” Linda said as she patted the cotton comforter atop the bed. There were some Currier & Ives prints in frames on the walls, small scenes of New York with horses and hansoms and leafy trees.
Slocum set the bedroll on the floor next to the wardrobe and slung his saddlebags over the back of a chair. He reached in and pulled out a bottle of Old Kentucky bourbon that was 100 proof.
He dug out a tin cup from his saddlebag as Linda went to the bureau and filled two glasses half-full of water.
“I have only one cup for the bourbon,” he said. “I’ll swig from the bottle.
”
“We could both swig from the bottle,” she said. “After all, we’ll be kissing each other.”
“Will we?”
“Passionately,” she said as she sat down and placed the water glasses on the table, one for her, and one for Slocum, opposite each other.
He pulled the cork from the bottle with his teeth, poured bourbon into the cup, and handed it to her. He set the bottle down and sat.
She sniffed the liquid in her cup.
Closed her eyes.
“Umm. It smells so nice. Makes me think of hayfields and woods full of oak trees and black walnuts, an old silo, and a field of wheat.”
“Kentucky is a fine place for all those things,” he said. He lifted the bottle, tilted it, and drank a swallow. She held the cup to her lips, smelled the aroma, and drank a sip.
“It tastes like it smells,” she said, and there was promise in her voice, a cat’s purr of contentment, a smoky sinuousness that slinked through her voice like a prowling cougar.
“What is it like to kill a man?” she asked abruptly.
“What?”
“How do you feel when you take the life of another man? Do you feel guilt? Remorse? Anger? Regret?”
He looked off at the window, then tilted his head and examined the ceiling. But he was looking beyond those things, looking inside himself. He was searching for memory, for feelings that he had discarded like worn-out shoes or crumpled up like paper and thrown in a wastebasket.
“The first time I killed a man,” he said, “it felt like the earth had dropped out from under me. It felt like I was in an elevator and the ropes had been slashed. I felt as if I were falling through a trapdoor, or from a high cliff.”
“My, that’s interesting,” she said. “What about tonight? You shot and killed two men. How did you feel when you did it?”
She leaned forward and he saw that she was genuinely interested in his answer.
“Tonight,” he said, “was different. When I was a boy, there was a mean dog that came onto our place in Georgia and he chased me and he bit my ankles. I started carrying a stick, and when this dog snarled and ragged me, I hit him, drove him off. That’s how I felt with the Swede. He was a vicious dog out to chew me up. My gun was a stick and I beat him off.”
“And Loomis?”
“One time, up in the Rockies, I was hunted by a hungry wolf. I had killed an elk and was packing some of the meat back to camp. The smell was enough to attract this big timber wolf. He came after me, snarling and baring his fangs. I tried to shoo him away, but he went for my throat. I pulled out my pistol and shot him in midair. That bastard was at least nine feet long from tail tip to muzzle. Black as night. He was a beautiful animal and I hated to kill it. But it was me or him. That’s how I felt about Loomis. Hiding in the dark, trying to put out my lamp. A wolf on the prowl. I didn’t shoot a man, Linda. I shot a coward who put his life on the line when he came after me. He expected to win. He lost.”
Linda was silent for several seconds.
“I think I want you to make love to me,” she said, and there was a husk in her voice that was like a woman in season. He felt the breath of her lust on his face and a tickle in his loins as if she had touched his manhood with one of her fingernails.
“Do you want to finish your drink first?” he said, and the words fought through his throat to emerge in that same kind of husk, a raspy series of voluble vowels and consonants that were an invitation to bed him in some ancient and forbidden garden.
To his surprise, she upended her cup and downed the whiskey without so much as a blink of an eye.
He corked the bottle and rose from his chair.
“Do you want me to put out the lamp?” he asked as she arose and walked to the bed, began to slip out of her dress.
“No,” she said. “I want to see your face when you lie on top of me. I want to see your body and what you do when I touch you.”
“Modesty becomes you,” he said, and she laughed.
“I want you to see me, too,” she said, and slipped out of her panties. She sat on the bed and removed her shoes and let them fall with a pair of thunks. She was all slender legs and trim ankles and delicate hands and wrists, and her breasts were sculptures fashioned by a master artist, her hair like flowing silk down her back over comely shoulders and the smooth expanse of womanly flesh.
He almost gasped at her beauty, and for a long moment, he stood there so enraptured he could not move.
When he did move, he was like a man on fire, divesting himself of flaming garments until he stood as naked as Adam before the Fall, and there, waiting for him, was Eve with her forbidden fruit, just waiting for him, as calm and beautiful as a Siren on a sea rock waiting for his ship to float in close.
He took her in his arms and they kissed.
The world dropped away into the night, and the soft breeze caressed them as they came together and became a single image known only to lovers and a night full of stars and drifting planets.
14
Linda was warm and sinewy as Slocum clasped her in his arms. Body to body. Lips to lips. They devoured each other with the pure energy of passion. A lambent fire built between them until both writhed with desire. His tongue ventured into her mouth and she undulated under his caress as if she were impaled on the spit of his manhood.
Linda reached down and grasped his cock. She squeezed it with a gentle tenderness that sent shoots of pleasure through his loins and up his spine as if his entire body was consumed by an icy wave that burned hot by the time the sensation reached his brain.
“Oh, oh,” she moaned, and Slocum slid a hand down to her nest, probed through the wiry hairs that guarded the portal to her sex, and slid a finger into that warm wet cunny where desire beckoned like some hungry mouth. He rubbed his fingertip over the crown of her clitoris and she buckled under him. Her legs spread wide and he probed her with his finger until she squirmed and cried out, “There, there, oh yes, John, right there.”
She squeezed his cock and it throbbed in her fingers like a bird beating its wings against a cage. His temples pulsed with the pressure of her hand and she thrashed against him as an electric orgasm surged through her body, through every fiber of her being.
“Oh, John,” she cried, “now, now. Take me now.”
He withdrew his hand at her hot wet portal and mounted her, thrusting his cock into her with unerring accuracy. He slid deep, brushing over the tingle of her clit, and felt her body push against his, her cunt grasping him in a muscular grip and squeezing, squeezing as her hips undulated in an ancient rhythm that knew no boundaries of race or creed.
“Sweet,” he murmured as he plunged still deeper into the warm moist honeycomb of her sex. “So damned sweet.”
“That’s it,” she breathed. “Go deep, John, go deep.”
He rose and fell, loin to loin, his cock a smooth driving piston into her pulsating, grasping purse, rubbing against her clit and making her buck beneath him like a galloping mare.
She tightened her embrace around his back, and he felt the sharp pressure of her fingertips as she buried them in his flesh.
Golden lamplight flayed their shadows against the wall, delicate whips that transformed their movements into a dark ballet performed in slow motion. Shadows flowed into shadows and light flitted like large fireflies in a spinning cascade of fluid searchlights, dazzling stars that had come to the earth in masquerade, ever moving, ever changing, ever challenging the shades of their beings dancing on the wall, the glassy windowpane.
“Don’t come yet,” she whispered, her whisper a gasp laden with the throaty husk of desire.
“No,” he said. “Not yet. It’s too good, Linda. Too damned good.”
“Yes, it’s wonderful,” she breathed and gave herself up to him, relaxing her fingers digging into his back, and swabbing him with her hands, sliding over his hips and up his sides as if she were a blind person seeking to identify the lover at her loins.
“Precious,” she said. Her voice was soft
and the word held a meaning only for herself, but Slocum felt the weight of it as her hips rose to meet his and he plunged to the very depths of her womb, his cock basking in the warm flow of her honey, his nostrils filled with the musk of her womanly scent.
“So precious,” she said again.
He slowed his rhythmic thrusts and drew pleasure from her as smoke through a pipe stem. Slow and deep. Slow and deep. Until she was clawing at him like a woman gone insane, screaming softly and begging him for more with every snail-slow thrust.
“Ooooh, you do it so good, John,” she said, and her hips rose to meet him on the downward thrust until he held fast inside her, feeling the heat of her surge through him like flame-warmed fleece.
Linda gave back as much as she was given, and Slocum felt their vibrations meld together as if they were one person, joined together below the waist. He pumped in and out of her, but she matched his thrusts with upward jolts of her own, a perfect twin of himself, circus performers on a galloping steed, each in harmony with the other.
They did not speak for a long time as he prolonged his own orgasm to satisfy her. Her capacity for climaxes seemed to be limitless. She cried out each time her body rippled with a volcanic orgasm, and that emotional energy erupted from her body and blended into his.
“Oh, John,” she cried out, and “Yes, John,” and a stream of “ohs” burst from her throat as she soared ever higher on the throb-whip of ecstatic wings, a condor and an eagle, locked together in flight, cresting the tallest peaks with nearly every thrust of Slocum’s driving bone into the moist hot pudding of her sex.
Finally, they both reached a plateau, some leveling off of need and desire, and he sensed that she was ready to finish this first segment of their lovemaking. His seed boiled in its sac, and it took all of his mental focus to keep it in check. But at last, he could hold back no longer.
“I’m going to come,” he said, his voice a rasp of sound, a hoarse series of vocables from a throat squeezed tight with emotion.
“Yes, John, come, come, come inside me,” she urged. “Blow your seed in me so that I can feel your soul.”