“I’ll let you talk about it. I’ll be upstairs.”
“Hawk,” Mayor Pennybacker said when the Rogue Lawman was nearly to the door. He cleared his throat as he regarded Hawk from around his chair back. “We’ve already talked about it. The job is yours, on the terms you’ve laid out. When Reb returns from the undertaker’s, I’ll have him show you to the sheriff’s office.”
Hawk studied the men and nodded slowly. “One more thing before I get down to business. I’ll need the names of the men who were freed from the gallows when Brazos was freed.”
The men glanced around at each other. Finally, the mayor stood, turned to Hawk, and said with a solemn air, “J. T. Hostetler and ‘One-Eye’ Willie McGee.”
“They come to town often?”
Pennybacker glanced at Learner, as though the freighter with the impeccable gray hair and matching gray suit would be more qualified to relate what happened in Trinity’s saloons after sundown.
“Almost every night,” Learner said tensely. “They’re close friends of Brazos. All three come to town almost every damn night though they haven’t been seen since Blue and the other Two Troughs riders rode in and sprang all three.”
“All three ride together, huh?”
“Usually.” Mayor Pennybacker glowered as though thinking about his granddaughter. Darkly, he added, “They’re all hardened killers and rapists, Mr. Hawk. And they’re very brash. It’s most likely you’ll be seeing at least Brazos and his partners in town again before long.”
Hawk thought about that, shifted the saddle on his shoulder. “All right.”
He turned and headed into the lobby to register for a room with the persnickety and obviously disapproving Louise Lundy. The woman said nothing to him as she gestured at the register book, silently instructing him to sign after he’d paid a week’s rent in advance. When he’d set the pen down and picked up his key, he caught her studying him with an odd, faintly incredulous air. She quickly looked away.
Puzzling.
The puzzle was solved, however, when Hawk reached his room on the second floor, turned the key in the lock, and nudged the door open with his rifle barrel. The shadowy room was hammered with sunlight from beneath a half-drawn shade on the front wall, opposite the window.
Hawk kicked the door closed. Then he froze. The familiar female scent was his first warning.
No, she couldn’t be here.
How could she be here?
He whipped around, raising the Henry and aiming one-handed from his right hip.
He could see little more than her silhouette sitting in the armchair upholstered in purple velvet, her back to the window. Her thick hair tumbled down her shoulders in rich, golden waves. She had hiked a high-topped black boot onto a knee, very unladylike. Her cream, concho-banded Stetson was hooked over the other, upraised knee. Her rifle leaned against the wall beside her, near her saddlebags.
“Goddamn,” Hawk growled, grinding his back teeth. “How in the hell did you get here?”
“Mrs. Lundy looks respectable enough, but even her churchgoing fingers snapped up the two double eagles I wagged in front of her face. And turned over your room key.”
“You crazy bitch.”
“Nice to see you, too, Gid.”
Hawk let his war bag and saddlebags slide off his left shoulder and hit the floor with a thud. His pulse hammering in his temples, he strode forward, held the rifle out from his hip with both hands. Loudly, resolutely, he levered a live cartridge into the chamber and held his finger taut against the trigger.
“That was a nice stunt you pulled back in Arizona. Killing Ironside, those lawmen . . .”
“Well, look at it this way,” Saradee said, sticking the rolled quirley between her full lips, her white teeth glinting against the oval-shaped shadow of her face, and ran her tongue across the paper cylinder to seal it. “They died in the line of duty. Their families can be proud.”
Hawk held the maw of the cocked repeater two feet away from her forehead. “You crazy bitch.”
She fired a lucifer on the side of the marble-topped washstand to her left and touched the flame to the quirley. Puffing smoke, her lilac eyes touched his, and he felt a fire burn in his belly. It licked down toward his loins, setting the raw male need ablaze.
Christ, she was beautiful. And deadly. If some horned spirit residing in the farthest, darkest reaches of hell had wanted to send a beautiful siren to tease and torment Hawk beyond what he’d already been through, that demon could have done no better than this round-hipped, full-breasted succubus in men’s dusty trail garb seated before the Rogue Lawman now.
Cold sweat beaded behind Hawk’s ears as he stared down at her fine-nosed, lightly tanned face.
“You’re starting to repeat yourself, Gideon.”
Saradee held the smoking cigarette away from her velvet pink lips and flicked a bit of chopped tobacco from a corner of her mouth with a long, tapering finger. Her eyes crossed slightly as she stared mockingly down the barrel of the cocked Henry.
“And we’ve been through this before, as well. You’re forcing me to repeat myself.” Slowly, enunciating every word clearly, and seeming to enjoy making her tongue work enticingly between her rich lips, she said, “Go ahead and pull the trigger . . . or set the rifle down, Gideon, and let’s enjoy each other’s company for a while, huh?”
11.
“WHY TORTURE ME?”
HAWK kept the rifle aimed at Saradee’s head. “Why’d you do it?”
“Kill the rangers? Why, because I couldn’t bear to part with, you my friend. Sergeant Ironside’s death was inadvertent. He was simply in the line of the Gatling gun’s fire.”
“They had me outnumbered and dead to rights. And they had every right to kill me.” Hawk depressed the Henry’s hammer, lowered the barrel, and turned away from the delectable blonde sitting there with a boot hiked on a knee, casually smoking her cigarette. “You should have let it shake down. Why torture me?”
Hawk set the Henry down against the wall beside the door.
“Because their killing you would torture me, lover.”
Hawk sagged onto the bed and doffed his hat. He rested his elbows on his knees and took his head in his hands, brusquely running his knuckles over his head, mussing his hair. He remembered the scene there at the end of that lonely canyon in western Arizona, when he and Ironside and Saradee had killed the contrabandista, Wilbur “Knife-Hand” Monjosa, and the five rangers had moved in on him unexpectedly.
They’d been sent by an old friend, Gavin Spurlock.
No, Spurlock was not merely a friend. Gavin had been like a father to Hawk. He’d given Hawk his first job as a deputy U.S. marshal out of Yankton, Dakota Territory, when Hawk had returned from the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. Hawk’s own father, an old Ute war chief who’d fallen in love with Hawk’s mother, a pretty blond immigrant girl named Ingrid Rasmussen, had died when Hawk was still a child. The chief had many wives, and Hawk had been one of many children, so the chief hadn’t paid much attention to his half-breed offspring.
For all practical purposes, Hawk had been fatherless, and he’d grown up fast, mostly on his own though he’d spent a few years with his mother’s brother and sister-in-law on a farm in western Kansas. But his uncle had been a hard, unemotional man, not at all like a father. Gavin Spurlock, however, had taken Hawk under his fatherly wing, given him a job, and made him an expert at it. He’d also given the young veteran cavalryman a place to call home, a place to, as Spurlock had said, “sink a taproot,” which Hawk had done when he’d married Linda and fathered Jubal.
Gavin Spurlock.
The name burned on a saber of a fiery guilt across Hawk’s brain, and Hawk heard himself groan as he pressed his knuckles against his temples. When he’d gone rogue, he’d become in essence a traitor to the one man he respected most in the world—a venerable chief marshal who held no laws more sacred than those laid out by the Constitution of the United States of America.
That’s why, last
year in the desert, Spurlock had sent the rangers to assassinate Hawk after the Rogue Lawman had fulfilled the mission that Spurlock himself had given him—ironically, to locate and assassinate the kill-crazy renegade, Wilbur “Knife-Hand” Monjosa, who’d murdered Spurlock’s blood son, Andrew.
But Saradee had managed to crawl into the wagon in which perched the deadly Gatling gun and taken all the rangers down in one long savage blast of .45-caliber bullets. Then she’d ridden away, leaving Hawk dumbfounded on hands and knees, staring aghast at the carnage before him—so many innocent men dead because of him. And the man he respected most had not only tried to kill him but become a vigilante himself, in ordering Hawk’s assassination.
“Ah, Christ,” Hawk said.
He heard Saradee chuckle. He felt a tug on his right boot, and looked down to see her kneeling on the floor before him.
“Let me get your boot off, Gid. You got an owie here,” she said in a little girl’s voice, canting her head to inspect Hawk’s bloody pant leg. She jerked the boot up off the floor, and Hawk winced as, applying steady pressure on the heel and toe, she worked it down his leg.
His calf, he realized now, felt hard and swollen, but when Saradee gently rolled his cuff up his leg, he saw through the broad blood stain only a shallow furrow carved across the outside of his shin. Saradee inspected it closely.
“Not bad, ‘specially for you,” she said, looking up at him, her breasts pushing out from behind her hickory blouse that she wore unbuttoned far enough that Hawk could get a good view of her deep, dark cleavage in which a small, silver crucifix nestled. “Saradee’ll have it cleaned up in no time.”
“Forget it.”
“Don’t be that way, lover.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“But, Hawk.” She spread her lips, and they rose up slowly at the corners, showing her teeth and dimples. “That’s what we are. Whether you like to believe it or not. Now, I ain’t sayin’ it’s love. Nor that I’ve been anymore loyal to you than you’ve been to me—a woman’s got her needs, after all. But I reckon I’d walk a long ways across a snowy prairie or a hot desert just to have you hold me in those big outlawlawman’s arms of yours.”
She leaned against his knees and ran her hands up and down his thighs; he could feel the warmth of her palms through his pants, and it set up a tingling in his crotch. She giggled delightfully, as if she could feel what he was feeling.
“There’s just somethin’ about an upside-down lawman that makes a girl turn all to jelly inside.”
“Saradee,” Hawk snarled, curling his upper lip at her. “Get the hell . . .”
He let his voice trail off when someone knocked on the door. Automatically, he closed his right hand around the Russian’s walnut grips.
“Easy, lover.” Saradee chuckled, rising, strolling over to the door, her round rump giving her tight, black denims a good stretching, and pulling the door open wide.
She grinned as a stocky Chinaman in a blue silk smock came in hauling a copper tub in his meaty hands.
“Bath, please,” the man said, glancing at Saradee, his dark eyes glowing with natural male delight at the girl’s curvy frame swathed in skintight trail duds. “You, Miss—bath, please?”
“Yes, please, please,” Saradee quipped, gesturing. “Sit right there, please, Chang.”
“Me no Chang.” The Chinaman shook his head seriously as he set the tub down in the middle of the room, on a deep, Oriental rug with woven green leaves against burnt umber. He tapped his board chest proudly and grinned, showing several silver teeth. “Me Baozhai!”
“Yeah, well, whatever your name is,” Saradee snarled, narrowing her eyes at the man impatiently. “Just fetch the damn water, and make it hot! Can’t you see I have a man bleeding to death over here?”
“Oh, blood no good! Blood no good!” Baozhai said, shaking his head as he glanced at Hawk’s bloody calf. “Blood stain rug!” He shuffled quickly out the door, sandals slapping the rug and then the wooden floor of the hall.
Saradee crouched down beside the chair she’d been sitting in earlier and fished a bottle out of her saddlebags. There were two water tumblers on Hawk’s washstand. She poured bourbon into each, handed one to Hawk, who still sat on the bed, scowling at her, then sat down in the chair. She sipped the whiskey, then, while the Chinaman made several trips with hot and cold buckets of water with which he filled the tub, she busied herself with more whiskey and building and smoking a second quirley.
Hawk sipped from the glass she’d given him. His heart beat persistently, slowly against his breastbone as he stared at her, and she met his gaze with a smug one of her own.
Why couldn’t he kick her out of his room? Out of this town? Out of his life?
Moreover, why couldn’t he kill her?
God knew he’d vowed to drill a bullet between her pretty breasts countless times before, ridding himself and the world of the kill-crazy blonde—a notorious long rider and killer both here and in Mexico—once and for all.
But when the Chinaman had finished filling the tub, which sent steam snaking toward the stamped tin ceiling, and left after Hawk had tossed him a silver dollar, the Rogue Lawman was reminded of why he hadn’t shot her. She threw back the last of her whiskey, exhaled the last puff of smoke through her nostrils, and slowly undressed before him. And then she knelt on the floor beside the bed, removed his second boot and then his cartridge belt and guns. Soon his pants and shirt were off, and his longhandles lay strewn about his castoff boots and pistols.
She lowered her head between his knees and worked her magic on him—slowly, excruciatingly—like she always had before, until he was grinding his toes into the rug and fairly ripping up the mattress with his fists.
When she’d finished, she ran the back of her hand across her mouth, straightened those long legs, her heavy breasts with swollen nipples swaying across her chest, and stepped into the hot water. She stood there for a time, copper-colored steam tendrils snaking about her knees and longmuscled thighs. She returned his smoldering gaze as she hastily knotted her yellow-blond hair atop her head, and then sank slowly into the water.
“Come on, Gid,” she said huskily. “Join me.” She stretched her lips and lowered her chin slightly, cupping her breasts in the palms of her hands. “Stop fighting me. I’m one battle you’re never gonna win. You know it, and I know it.”
Her teeth glistened white between her fleshy lips.
Loins heavy, his pulse thudding slowly in his temples, Hawk stepped into the tub with her, cupped her breasts in his hands, hearing her sigh, and ground his lips against her neck, devouring her.
The soft caress of the woman’s hair, the soft, wet kisses of her probing lips were still on the Rogue Lawman’s body when he woke later from a nap, buried deep in the bed’s sheets and quilts and down-filled pillow.
Before he’d climbed into the tub with Saradee, thus beginning two hours of pure, carnal bliss in the charms of a beautiful demon for which he knew he would sometime in the future pay a hefty price, Hawk had built a fire in the room’s potbelly stove.
He looked at the stove now, over the tub around which the rug was still saturated with soapy water. The coals lay flat in the stove’s grate, glowing dully.
Out the window, long afternoon shadows were spreading amidst shafts of salmon light angling over the tall false building fronts on the street’s opposite side. Pigeons cooed from the tops of the facades, their bullet-shaped heads and tapering bodies silhouetted against the green-lemon sky.
Hawk drew a deep breath, raked his hands over his face. Time to inspect his new office digs. He wondered why Reb Winter hadn’t knocked on his door. Had Saradee told Mrs. Lundy that Hawk shouldn’t be disturbed?
He smiled grimly at the ceiling. Of course she had.
He glanced to his right, expecting to see her long body humped beneath the quilts beside him, her blond hair splayed across the pillow. But she wasn’t there. The covers were thrown back to reveal the wrinkled mattress sheet. Her pillow st
ill bore the dent of her head and a single strand of blond hair.
Hawk frowned. Disappointment nipped at him. It was followed by a keen wave of shame.
After Arizona, he hadn’t wanted to see her again except to kill her. But he hadn’t killed her. Instead, he’d bedded her. Enjoyed every joyous carnal moment that he’d toiled between her writhing legs. He could still feel the scratches her fingernails had raked across his shoulder blades and buttocks.
Hawk sat up, dropping his feet over the side of the bed. A dull throb in his lower right leg reminded him of Rance Harvin’s bullet, and he looked down to see the calf that Saradee had deftly cleaned with whiskey and then wrapped with gauze after their bath . . . while doing other things to him that he would likely remember on his deathbed with the same bite of chagrin he felt now.
He’d enjoyed her. He’d enjoyed every minute of her. And he’d likely enjoy her again, next time she blew in like a wisp of sweet-smelling pine, a shrieking, yellow-fanged witch in the body of a flaxen-haired Saxon queen. . ..
A floorboard squawked in the hall. Hawk lifted his head from his hands, eyes glinting with apprehension. The floor squeaked again, and he reached down for his horn-gripped Colt and cocked the piece as he strode naked to the door. He placed his hand on the knob, waited a second, then drew the door open quickly, thrusting the pistol into the hall.
Reb Winter jerked with a start and pressed his broad back against the hall’s opposite, wainscoted wall, his watch cap in his hands. His eyes were wide and fearful in his round, boyish face. He tried to say something but didn’t get more than two full words out before Hawk depressed the Colt’s hammer, lowering the gun.
“Hang on.”
He closed the door and dressed in clean clothes from his saddlebags and war sack. When he’d donned his hat and buckled his shell belt around his hips, Reb was still waiting for him in the hall.
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