Wild to the Bone

by Peter Brandvold

  The saddlebags and his leather-booted Winchester Yellowboy rifle, around which he’d wrapped his bedroll, were all that Haskell owned—the gun, the scabbard, the bedroll, and everything he carried in the bags and in the canvas sack strapped to the bags themselves. Those relatively few things and what sundry possibles he carried on his person, of course, including his two pistols: a LeMat revolver, with a single, stout, twenty-gauge shotgun barrel positioned beneath the .44-chambered barrel, and a .44 Russian positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip.

  The horn-gripped bowie knife jutted from the well of his right boot, and a gold pocket watch resided in his black leather vest. Since Bear more or less lived on the trail, traveling between assignments, he preferred to journey light. He owned neither a horse nor a saddle; instead, he rented mounts and tack as he needed them.

  His most prized possessions were his guns and a badly worn, dog-eared, scribbled-in, cloth-bound copy of Moby-Dick. He’d been given the tome by a Union surgeon when he’d been healing from war wounds. Apparently, the sawbones had once met the author, a quiet, brooding former sailor who’d visited battlefields and written poetry about the War Between the States.

  Bored on the trail, Bear always found something in the long, meandering, incredibly rich, and inestimably wise volume that enlivened his lonely nights, reading around a crackling fire, and his days pondering the at once forlorn and exhilarating book’s mysteries, which seemed to reflect the vagaries of life itself, while he jounced along a trail somewhere on the vast, raw, and rugged frontier.

  He often wished he could meet the author of such an insightful story. He thought they would likely have much in common despite Haskell’s having read somewhere that the poor man had become “deranged” and, unable to write anymore, was working as a customs inspector in New York City.

  As Haskell hauled his load down the three steps to the boardwalk, he scowled. Two familiar faces were sneering at him from the shade beneath the depot’s awning. He’d hoped he’d have time for at least a couple of shots of Kentucky bourbon and the enjoyment of a saloon’s free lunch counter before having his visit with his secretive employer, but he should have known better.

  Pinkerton didn’t like to waste time, and he didn’t like his agents wasting any, either.

  The two faces that were sneering at him from beneath the awning belonged to the bodyguards of Allan Pinkerton himself. They were the pinched-up, fat-faced, small-eyed faces of Mortimer Pip and George Boorman. Both men were English, and both were dressed in finely cut worsted-wool suits wasted on two former London street brawlers built more like Brahma bulls than men. Haskell was certain sure that if either sneezed, he’d blow out his shoulder seams, and at least three vest buttons would go flying off like triggered .44 rounds.

  “Well, well,” Pip said, folding the newspaper he’d been reading and rising from the bench abutting the depot’s brick wall. “If it ain’t the big detective himself. Fine time you’re gettin’ here, too, boyo. The old man don’t like to be kept waitin’.”

  “What you been doin’, shackin’ up with some little Injun whore out in the godforsaken Wyomin’ desert?” asked Boorman, also rising and tossing away the loosely rolled quirley he’d been smoking.

  He was blond—blond hair, blond mustache, blond muttonchops—while Pip’s fur was sandy brown. Both men were shorter than Haskell but a good six inches broader through the shoulders, hips, and waist.

  Pip grinned, causing his ruddy cheeks to dimple and his evil eyes to flash beneath the narrow brim of his bowler hat, which looked two sizes too small for his head. “Fuckin’ like dogs out in the desert with them rancid little Injun girls, eh, Bear?”

  “Is that it?” asked Boorman, both men strolling toward him now, grinning. “You find you one o’ them? Do her doggie-style in the tipi? Tell me how an Injun gal does it. Does she like to have her pussy et?”

  The men rolled their eyes at each other and snickered like schoolboys.

  Haskell stared at them incredulously. “Really,” he said, “you two oughtta get out more. I know the old man doesn’t want you beddin’ the percentage gals for fear of you gettin’ drunk and givin’ away his secrets, not to mention missin’ work on account of the Cupid’s itch. But since no nice girl is gonna marry you, you’re gonna have to do somethin’ about gettin’ your rocks off.” He canted his head to one side. “Has either one of you ever been laid?”

  Pip’s face reddened, and his nostrils swelled. As he bulled toward Bear, Boorman threw a shoulder out to block his partner, saying, “Easy, boyo, the old man’s waitin’ for him, and he done told us no more roughhousin’ with the help, remember?”

  Pip stopped and glared at Haskell. “I remember.”

  Haskell shifted his weight to adjust the saddlebags and canvas sack riding his left shoulder and the sheathed rifle and bedroll riding the other shoulder. “Where is he?”

  Boorman jerked his chin to indicate the eastern far side of the yard. Haskell turned to gaze between a couple of trains stopped on the tracks, their pressure-release valves blowing up large clouds of rust-smelling steam to mix with the coal smoke puffing from the Baldwin locomotives’ large diamond-shaped stacks.

  Sure enough, on the far side of the yard, near a couple of lone stock cars, a flatcar, and a maintenance car loaded with ties, spare rails, and spools of telegraph wire, there sat what appeared to be an outdated, long-abandoned caboose. And that’s probably what Allan Pinkerton’s private car had once been, too, before the head of the toniest private detective agency in the world had lengthened and renovated it. Judging by the shabbiness of its outward appearance, anyone would have taken it for a derelict waiting to be hauled off to the nearest scrapyard.

  But that was all a mere disguise to throw off spies and possible assassins.

  The inside of the private office coach was a jaw-dropping contrast to the outside, decked out as it was in all the trimmings of the best hotel suites—at least, as many as could be stuffed attractively into a ten-by-forty-foot space. And presiding over it all was the regal, ruddy-faced, blue-eyed old Scotsman himself, Allan Pinkerton.

  “Get a move on, boyo,” Pip said, giving Bear a brisk shove. “You know how the old man don’t like to be kept waitin’.”

  6

  Haskell’s ears warmed with anger. He didn’t like the old man’s bodyguards any more than they liked him, mainly because they didn’t like him with such a mocking vehemence. He figured their own disdain stemmed mainly from the fact that he earned more money than they did and that he had the more glamorous job.

  The schoolyard jealousy made their belligerence only marginally more tolerable.

  When they put their hands on him, however, all sympathy was ground to a fine powder and blown away on the wind.

  “Pip,” Haskell complained, “are you gonna make me set my gear down?”

  The darker of the two Englishmen raised his fists and shadow-boxed, grinning. But, remembering previous bouts with the taller man during which neither he nor his partner had fared so well, he took two casual steps backward. That satisfied Haskell, who gave Boorman a warning glance and then swung around and tramped down off the station platform and into the cinder-paved rail yard. He made a beeline for the long, shabby car sitting so far away and glanced over his shoulder now and then to see the two bodyguards following from a safe distance, sneering and rolling their shoulders under their too-tight suitcoats.

  Haskell had just stepped over the last set of rails when Pip suddenly ran up around him and stopped in front of the big detective, manufacturing a mock-serious look as he said, “Say, there, Bear, we got a serious question for ya, Boorman an’ me.”

  Haskell stopped. In the periphery of his right eye, he watched Boorman’s shadow moving around behind him. “No shit? Well, pray tell, Pip. What’s the question?”

  “The question is this, boyo,” Pip said, and lunged toward Bear.

  Haskell head-butted t
he stocky gent before Pip could shove him over backward. And then he rammed the heel of his right boot back and up into the belly of Boorman, who’d gotten down on all fours behind Haskell.

  The old schoolyard “toppling” trick.

  Boorman yelped and rolled onto his side, raising his knees and folding his arms across his belly. At the same time, Pip staggered back away from Haskell, clutching his forehead and cursing.

  “Ah, you bloody well broke my nose, you dog!”

  “Oh, help me!” Boorman groaned. “I . . . I can’t catch . . . my fuckin’ breath!”

  “Bear!”

  The woman’s angry voice caused Haskell to look around, the delighted grin to fade from his large bearded face, and the devilish glint to dim in his eyes. He’d recognized the voice before he saw Pinkerton’s personal secretary, Miss Abigail Whitehurst, standing on the office car’s rear platform, her hands on the rickety wooden rail in bad need of fresh paint, scowling at Haskell standing between the groaning bodyguards.

  “Bear Haskell, you incorrigible rogue!” the woman intoned, pounding one of her pale hands on the rail. “What has Mr. Pinkerton told you about beating up his bodyguards?”

  “Ah, hell, Abby, they started it!”

  “And don’t you use that farm talk with me, mister. Get in here at once. You’re already late for your appointment!” She stomped a black shoe down on the platform.

  Haskell said, “Ah, shucks,” and, wagging his head sheepishly, moved over to the car and climbed the corrugated steel steps to the platform.

  Miss Whitehurst—looking radiant even in her spinster’s attire of a printed brown Mother Hubbard with a tan leaf pattern that did nothing to conceal the voluptuousness of her figure, her light red hair pulled severely back and pinned in a tight bun atop her head—held the door open for him. She regarded him in disgust, wrinkling the skin above her pretty, slightly upturned nose, which was done a grave injustice by the small, round old-lady glasses she chose to wear.

  As Bear dropped his saddlebags onto the platform and leaned his rifle against the coach’s rear wall, he let his eyes rake the woman’s curvy figure. He had a brief imagined vision of the thirtyish brown-eyed redhead writhing naked beneath him in some cheap hotel room on Denver’s south side.

  He had to sweep the thought aside lest he should awaken his trouser snake. He doubted it would ever happen, but for some reason, he yearned to take those ugly glasses off the woman’s pretty nose, to let down her hair, to peel her old-maid dress off her shoulders, to kiss those yearning lips, and then to bury his face between those large, ripe breasts as he slid his shaft between her thighs.

  In his mind’s ears, he could hear her groaning as he fucked her, feel her legs wrap around his back and her teeth sink into his shoulder.

  He slid his gaze up from her full bosom to her face and felt his ears warm when he found her staring back at him in vague consternation, her fine cheeks mottled red.

  Had she been reading his mind? Possibly corroborating his feelings?

  He turned away quickly but not before noticing that her warm brown eyes flicked across his shoulders as though absently wondering what it would be like—the two of them together, being downright biblical . . .

  Or was he only wishing she were wondering? He didn’t have time to linger over the half-formed thoughts, because then he was inside her office, which was Pinkerton’s outer office, and she was coming in behind him, drawing the door closed while clucking at him reprovingly.

  “You really ought to know better, Bear. I mean, really!”

  Haskell doffed his hat and leaned forward over the woman’s tidy desk which took up a good half of the elegant, carpeted front-office space. “Spank me, Abby?”

  Standing at one corner of the desk, she flushed the deep red of an Arizona sunset and snickered, lifting her right index finger to her chin. “Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you?”

  “You might like it, too,” Haskell said, winking. “Go on”—he wagged his ass—“make it hurt!”

  “Oh, Bear, you are indeed incorrigible!” she intoned, trying not to laugh. “No, I am most certainly not going to spank you. What you need is—”

  A man’s deep baritone cut her off from behind the door to the right of her desk: “Haskell, leave my guards and my secretary alone, and get in here. You’re over schedule!”

  “Ah, hell,” Bear complained. “Just when we were getting to something good!”

  “He’ll be right in, Mr. Pinkerton!” the secretary called as she anxiously waved the big agent toward the beveled-glass door in which the name “Allan Pinkerton” had been etched tastefully in small, cursive, gold-leaf letters.

  Sheepishly, Miss Whitehurst sat down at the bulky black typewriting machine facing the wall that separated her office from their employer’s, giving Haskell her back. But as he hung his hat on a gold wall peg beneath a large tintype of the old man himself, he caught her giving him one more dubious glance as her slender fingers made the cumbersome machine clatter raucously.

  He winked at her, and she gasped and turned away again, clucking her disapproval and shaking her head.

  Chuckling, Haskell opened Pinkerton’s door and walked into the man’s grand office, which, in contrast to the car’s shabby exterior, was like walking directly from a privy into a palace. Pinkerton was lying on a quilted leather fainting couch against the wall to Haskell’s left, his ankles crossed, his black patent-leather half-boots glistening with the sunlight angling into the middle of the room from the open skylights arranged down the middle of the office’s low stamped-tin ceiling.

  “Did you bloody my guards again, Bear?” asked Allan Pinkerton, removing a long black cigar holder from between his lips and blowing smoke at the ceiling.

  “Just keepin’ ’em both in trim, Allan,” Bear said, vaguely bewildered again by the long, narrow room’s splendid opulence dominated by Pinkerton’s leather-covered, mahogany desk on which a green-shaded Tiffany lamp burned low.

  Because the car’s side windows were opaque, disguised to look as if they were painted over from the inside, the room’s only light came from the skylights and the single Tiffany. The light from the ceiling angled down on the large, cluttered desk as though it was a pillar of light shining from heaven onto a king’s throne—which, in a way, it was. At the moment, it was centered on Pinkerton’s high-backed leather chair.

  Haskell’s relationship with his esteemed employer was an informal one, as both men had gone to see the elephant, as they say, more than a time or two. And although Pinkerton was more than twenty years older than Bear, they were tough, seasoned men who gave no quarter. They’d been tested by the same war. Their respect was mutual, their bond almost familial.

  That’s why Bear knew he didn’t have to wait to be invited to sit down but merely pulled out the leather-upholstered visitor’s chair in front of his boss’s desk and sagged into it with a weary sigh. “Sorry, Allan. But as I told Miss Whitehurst, they were the ones who started it.”

  Pinkerton turned his head slightly to gaze at the big agent, blew out another long plume of cigarette smoke, and chuckled, his pale blues eyes glinting in the light tumbling from the ceiling. “A child you still are in many ways.”

  Bear scowled indignantly.

  Pinkerton swung his feet to the floor and rose to a sitting position, holding up his free hand, palm out. “Oh, don’t get your neck up. I don’t mean it as an insult. I, too, never got much past twenty in maturity, and that’s why we’re both so good at what we do. We both have a sense of fun and adventure, and we bat nary an eye at danger. It’s why, in fact, at least one of us doesn’t mind crawling up onto the hurricane deck of a runaway stagecoach and somehow single-handedly managing to prevent the damn thing and a young lady and a strongbox containing sixty-thousand dollars in scrip and specie from being strewn from hell to breakfast at the bottom of a Colorado canyon.” Chuckling, the elder detective heave
d himself up off the couch with faint pops issuing from his old knees, walked over to his desk, and opened a drawer.

  “The mine superintendent?” Haskell asked. The only telegram that he himself had sent to the Pinkerton main office in Chicago had read, “Assignment completed,” although apparently, Pinkerton had already figured it would have been by that time, thus the appearance of the dove and the note under Bear’s hotel-room door.

  Pinkerton nodded as he withdrew a cigar box from the drawer he’d opened and slid it across the cluttered desk toward Haskell. “They were quite pleased, recommended you for a commendation. I didn’t tell them that we don’t offer commendations, for we demand and expect nothing but excellence from our operatives.”

  Bear’s mouth watered as he studied the box of Cleopatra Federales, on the top of which was a gold engraving of the sultry, long-lashed Egyptian queen herself in full headdress, with “Federal” written in flowing black script on the scrolled banner beneath it. “Yeah, fuck the commendation. These are enough, though I could use a vacation, Allan.”

  Haskell had opened the box and plucked out one of the butterscotch-colored cigars, which he ran back and forth under his nose. It smelled like a mouthwatering amalgam of licorice, chili peppers, molasses, and brandy.

  “Under any other circumstances, my dear Bear, I would give you one.”

  Pinkerton sagged into his chair, removed his cigarette stub from the holder, and stubbed it out in a stone ashtray carved into the shape of a grizzly claw.

  “But I have another job for you. An important one. A particularly dire problem that needs to be resolved in a hurry.” He cast Haskell a grave look from over the desk and narrowed the corners of his eyes. “And you’re the only man I have who can resolve it.”

  “Why am I the only one?” Bear asked, firing a match to life on his cartridge belt and going to work lighting the fresh cigar, rolling it between his thumb and index finger.