“Oh, get on with you, you big tease!”
Chuckling, Haskell left.
8
By the time Bear had stepped out of Pinkerton’s office car, Raven was gone.
The two bodyguards sitting on the car’s front steps merely glowered at him as Bear pinched his hat brim to them and then headed off across the rail yard toward the depot station and Cheyenne proper, in hopes of finding a meal.
He found one at the Mountain Lion Saloon on Railroad Avenue, a place he knew well and that had a Mexican cook who could throw together the best huevos rancheros north of the border. The Mexican also knew the size of Haskell’s appetite. When the cook’s pretty daughter carried out the steaming platters, one with a steak and fried green peppers and onions on it, one with a side of potatoes fried in butter, onions, and chili peppers, along with a tall ale and a shot of Sam Clay on the side, he grinned.
He doffed his hat and went to work in earnest, running a napkin across his beard a half hour later, when all three platters and the two glasses were sitting empty before him. He tipped the waitress, hitched his LeMat on his right thigh and his Russian .44 on his left hip, threw his saddlebags over his left shoulder, picked up his rifle scabbard and bedroll in his other hand, and headed on out into the afternoon’s bright sunlight.
The beer and bourbon sloshing around in his belly softened the light just a tad and dulled the din of horse hooves and ungreased wagon hubs and the yells of a teamster just then bounding into town atop a giant Pittsburgh freight wagon, behind six braying mules, dust dripping off the wagon’s iron-shod wheels. Sucking an unlit Cleopatra and smiling with satisfaction at the thought of spending time with the beautiful Raven York up in such remote country, Bear made tracks for the train station.
His partner had assured him that they’d frolicked together like alley cats for the last time, as her conscience wouldn’t allow her to continue breaking Pinkerton’s rules. But Haskell thought he could probably lure her off the primrose path if he worked at it hard enough. Remembering the urgent need in her long, slender, pliant, full-bosomed body, how her nipples had jutted as he’d licked them, he chuckled and registered a none-too-slight tug in the crotch of his gray tweed trousers.
He reached the station just in time to purchase his ticket for Douglas and stepped onto a day coach’s front vestibule as the locomotive gave several raucous clangs and roared on out of the station under a thick cloud of black coal smoke and steam. Haskell looked through both of the flyer’s coach cars, populated with cowboys, soldiers, cowpunchers, farmers, and more wild children than he liked to contend with, running up and down the aisles and squealing at the tops of their consarned little lungs.
But there was no sign of Agent York.
Haskell remembered that she’d liked to travel in widow’s weeds, thus discouraging any unwanted sparks from male fellow sojourners. But after Haskell had trudged through both coaches twice, he hadn’t seen a single woman decked out in mournful black, her face obscured by a cloudy black veil.
The snooty bitch either had missed the train or was hiding from him. He doubted that Raven York had ever missed any train in her life, so it had to be the latter. He wouldn’t doubt she’d somehow finagled her way into riding up with the engineers or perhaps back in the caboose with the brakeman.
Haskell gave a snort. They were working the same assignment, headed for the same place, so she couldn’t hide from him forever.
Could she?
He was pleased to see that the combination included a club and observation car, trailing along behind the second day coach. When he walked in, still loaded down with gear, there were only four other customers sitting at the tables running along the left wall. Three sat together playing Red Dog, while the fourth sat in the rear corner with his nose buried in the Cheyenne Leader, his boots crossed on a chair.
“Well, I’ll be damned, if it ain’t ol’ Bear Haskell,” said the barman, who’d just been closing one of the windows flanking the bar against the coal smoke wafting in. Burt Angel waved a hand in front of his broad, patch-bearded face, badly scarred from smallpox, coughing and saying, “Ain’t seen your big, ugly hide in a spell.”
“Seems I been workin’ mostly down south of late, Burt.” Haskell dropped his bags near the front door and leaned his rifle in the corner. He doffed his hat and ran a hand through his sweat-damp hair, gritty with coal soot and travel dust. “You got any Sam Clay on board, or is that too civilized for this boil-on-the-devil’s-ass country?”
“I got plain old drinkin’ whiskey and bottled beer. I might even be able to rustle up a bottle of tequila, if you give me a minute.”
“Ah, shit, just—”
“Bear Haskell!” said a man behind him, cutting him off. He looked into the back bar mirror to see a sharp-faced redheaded gent in a black suit and a string tie rise from the table where he had been engaged in a poker game with two others.
He was tall and slender, and he was wearing an eye patch. He was also wearing two pearl-butted Colts on his hips, both positioned for the cross-draw.
Haskell turned to face the man and said, “Well, I’ll be jiggered if it ain’t ‘One-Eye’ Clem Magnus, his own mean an’ ugly self.” He glanced at the other two men, both glaring at him, and said in the same droll voice he’d used to address Magnus, “And Charlie Butters and Dawg Anderson. What privy pit did some old hydrophobic bobcat drag you two out of ?”
“Same one it drug you out of, Bear,” said Charlie Butters, who gave a grunt as he hauled himself a little drunkenly out of his chair. He was as tall as Magnus, with dark, weather-beaten features and small, muddy eyes sunk deep in his bony face. He wore a fringed buckskin tunic and two shoulder holsters filled with Schofield .44s. A knife handle jutted from his high-topped right moccasin.
Butters was—or at least, he had been—a game hunter for the Southern Pacific Railroad, along with several other things not quite so civilized. He and Dawg Anderson, who stood only a little more than five feet tall and was as mean as a two-headed diamondback, had been known to sell whiskey on Colorado Indian reservations and to hire themselves out as regulators for crooked labor unions, since shooting men came as easily to them as shooting deer and antelope.
Bear knew of at least three territories both men were wanted in, so he assumed there were more.
The three men before Haskell, including One-Eye Magnus, had fought for the Confederacy. Since the war was still relatively fresh in everyone’s mind even twenty years after Appomattox, they took umbrage with those who wore Union blue. Especially those Union veterans whose war record was as famous—or infamous, depending on which side you were on—as Bear Haskell’s.
One-Eye said, “You killed my cousin at Monocacy Junction, you big bastard! And then because of you, my brother Willie and two more cousins was hanged down in New Mexico!”
Haskell dipped his chin. “Yep, you’re right about that, One-Eye. Your cousin Ambrose was a casualty of the war, though I heard he even needed killin’ before it started. And that worthless brother of yours and your own even more worthless other two cousins were claim-jumping, cheating hardworking miners out of the gold that was rightfully theirs. They hanged, all right, and I wish they could have hanged twice.”
Haskell shook his head once, slowly, keeping his hard gaze on Magnus’s lone, angry-bright eye. “They sure deserved it.”
All three stared at him. Magnus stood to the left of the table they’d been playing cards at. The short one, Dawg Anderson, stood in front of the table, his back to it. Butters stood to the right of it. Dawg’s fat face, fringed with dirty brown whiskers, was split in a delighted grin, big fists clenched at his sides.
Haskell had seen no reason to be diplomatic. There was little preventing a keg of dynamite from detonating when its lit fuse was as short as the unseen one in the club car. As soon as Magnus had heard the barman call out Haskell’s name, the fight was on.
The only que
stion in Bear’s mind was, would it be with guns, knives, or fists?
One-Eye Magnus left his guns in their holsters as he bolted toward Bear, screaming, “You scum-sucking Union dog!” and brought up his right fist from his knees. He’d moved so quickly—and Bear had been briefly distracted by Dawg opening and closing his own hands at his sides—that the haymaker hammered against Haskell’s left cheekbone.
The blow sent Haskell reeling back against the bar behind him. Burt Angel yelled, “Ah, shit, fellas!” When Bear had regained his balance, all three card players were on him, swinging or jabbing fists at his head, chest, and belly.
“Get around behind him and hold him, Charlie!” One-Eye shouted as he rammed his left fist into Haskell’s solar plexus.
One-Eye was damn good with those fists. Too good. Haskell doubled over as the air left his lungs in a loud chuff, but he knew that if Butters got behind him and pinned his arms behind his back, he’d be a human punching bag.
And when these curly wolves were done punching him, they’d likely slit his throat and throw him from the train.
Bear slammed his right elbow into Butters’s face, evoking a loud howl, and then he lowered his head and shoulders and threw his two hundred and forty pounds straight forward while raising his fists and forearms like shields. He bowled the other two men, Magnus and Dawg, straight back into the table and the chairs they’d been sitting in.
The men cursed as Dawg fell over one of the chairs and Magnus fell into the table, overturning it and hitting the floor, with cards, coins, drinks, and an ashtray raining down on top of him. In the corner of his right eye, Haskell saw Butters throw a fist at him. He stepped back, and as Butters’s fist glanced off Bear’s ear, Bear rammed his elbow into Butters’s nose, smashing it flat against the man’s face.
Blood spurted like red paint clear up to Butters’s hairline.
As Butters yowled and clamped his hands over his nose, Dawg pushed off the wall near the overturned table and chairs and ran toward Haskell, bellowing like a poleaxed bull. Bear’s left fist met the man’s forehead head-on. As Dawg stopped and rocked back on his heels, Bear smashed his fist two more times against the man’s face—smack! smack!—unhinging his lower jaw.
As Butters twisted around and fell to his knees, screaming, Magnus again came at Bear. This time, he was holding a chair in both hands above his head. Bear ducked low, and the screaming Magnus hurled the chair over Haskell’s back.
It clattered onto the bar behind him as Bear rammed his head and shoulders into the tall redhead’s chest and, surging off his boot heels, slammed the man so hard onto his back that the floor leaped on the car’s chassis, dust billowing from the cracks between the floorboards. Haskell landed on top of him and, straddling him, grabbed the collar of the man’s red calico shirt, lifted his head off the floor, and gave him two quick, powerful jabs with his left fist.
“You fuckin’ devil!” one of the others cried.
Bear heard the telltale snick of iron on leather and turned to see the bloody-faced, broken-nosed Butters, down on both knees, raising a long-barreled Remington .44 in his bloody right fist and clicking the hammer back. Haskell shucked his Russian from the cross-draw holster on his left hip and fired a half second before Butters did, Butters’s shot sounding like an echo of Bear’s own.
Butters’s bullet plunked into the car’s wall, over the overturned table. Haskell’s bullet chewed into the man’s right arm, evoking another shrill scream from the desperado, who dropped the Remy and fell back against the bar, groaning and clutching his arm, which was starting to ooze blood in earnest.
Haskell heard another gun hammer click back. This one came from his left. Magnus chuckled devilishly as he gained his feet and extended one of his own pearl-gripped Colts at Bear’s head.
“I been waitin’ for this moment for twenty years, Haskell.” Bear inwardly winced as the main steadied the Colt at his left temple and narrowed one eye.
A shadow, as though of a very small bird, flicked past Haskell. He heard a faint whistling.
“Gnahh!” Magnus cried, stumbling back and sideways as his Colt thudded to the floor, clutching his left hand in his right. From that hand, the slender ivory handle of a stiletto protruded.
Magnus dropped to a knee, his mouth open wide as he groaned deep in his throat and stared in shock at the fancy little blade sticking out of his hand. Magnus looked around, as did Haskell, to find out who’d thrown the knife.
The man Haskell had first assumed was a lone drifting cowpuncher reading the newspaper in the room’s rear corner now folded her newspaper on the table and removed her brown stockman’s boots from the chair. Agent York, decked out in skintight pale blue denim jeans and a hickory blouse with vertical red stripes, lifted her tan Stetson from her head, ran a hand through her raven-black hair, tumbling loose down her shoulders, and pushed herself to her feet.
“You!” Magnus hissed in shock, staring at the girl striding slowly, purposefully toward him on her long, slender legs, brown boots thudding on the floor. “You! You!”
And then it became a question as she stood over him and he ran his pain-racked gaze up her slender legs, past the pleasing curve of her hips and the pistol belt and the twin uptilted mounds of her breasts, to her regal, blue-eyed face framed by the silky tresses of her Black Irish hair. “You?”
The man’s impaled hand was quivering, blood dribbling onto his knee and onto the floor.
Raven crouched over Magnus.
“Pardon me,” she said, and then ripped the knife out of the man’s hand, causing him to tip his head back and hurl a blood-freezing scream at the roof.
She wiped the blade on his shoulder and added, “I seem to have dropped my knife.”
9
She disappeared after that, and Haskell didn’t see her again until late that night in Douglas, dining alone in a Chinese eatery sandwiched between a harness shop and a tonsorial parlor.
He was a little chagrined over her having to pull his fat out of the fire again, after having done so twice before. And besides, she seemed especially snooty and aloof. That was why he did not go into the eatery and invite himself to sit down beside her and strike up a conversation with a girl—his partner, no less—who’d told him in her own haughty way that she wanted nothing to do with him until they reached Spotted Horse and started the job at hand.
Bear Haskell was many things, but he was not a prideless cur. He wasn’t going to go panting after her, for chrissakes.
He’d eaten at the only other restaurant in town, so, with a full belly and good dark coming soon—there was only a little cobalt light left over the silhouetted western ridges—he headed over to the hotel in which he’d secured a room. The place had a saloon in a little lean-to addition, and the beer wasn’t half bad, so he enjoyed a bucket and a shot of bourbon.
A half-breed girl was there, sitting around like part of the furniture and obviously for rent, but, oddly for him, he wasn’t in the mood for a tumble. So when he finished his beer, he patted the old dog that slept on a braided rug near the front door and headed up the rickety stairs to his room, one of only six in the wood-frame, mud-brick building.
In the narrow, dingy hall outside his room, he stopped and stared at his door. He wrinkled the skin above the bridge of his nose as he stared at the tin-plated number 9 attached to the door panel and felt the light wings of hope lift his heart.
Back up in the little mining town of Wendigo, during their last assignment together, Miss York had used her considerable sleuthing skills to steal into his locked room one night, and she’d been waiting there, naked and eager for him to come to her.
Haskell dropped to his knees and peered under the door and into his room. He always slid a .44 shell back under the door when he left his rented rooms, so he’d know if someone had entered while he was away and was waiting inside to do him harm. Anyone entering would have a hard time not kicking the shell
across the room.
This evening, the bullet was still there. That didn’t necessarily mean much concerning Agent York, however, because if Haskell remembered correctly, the bullet had been in place that night she’d been waiting for him.
That meant she might very well be waiting for him this evening, unable, finally, to resist his charms.
Haskell snickered, fumbled the key out of his pocket, and unlocked the door. In his eagerness, he forgot about the bullet and kicked it clanking across the wooden floor. He closed the door and stared at the bed, visible in the last rays of twilight issuing through the flour-sack-curtained window.
She wasn’t sitting in the room’s only chair, either.
She wasn’t here.
Haskell sighed.
Then he chuckled as he tossed the key onto the dresser and said, “What’d you think, she was going to come pantin’ after you? Nah, the girl’s bound and determined to be professional. Shit.”
He brushed Raven York out of his mind—at least, as much as any man could brush a looker like that out of his head—and undressed down to his summer-weight longhandles. He washed his face and the back of his neck at the washstand and then toweled off, smoked a third of a Cleopatra Federal before peeling off the coal to save the rest of the stogie for later, and slipped into bed.
Even with the window open, it was too hot in the small room for covers, so he tossed them off. He lay there with half a hard-on, remembering their last night together, how she’d felt and smelled and what she’d sounded like when they’d climaxed, and he considered stroking himself off.
No.
He wouldn’t let her do that to him.
Instead, he focused on the fight he’d had in the club car earlier. He considered how Magnus, Dawg, and Butters were faring in the spartan jail of the Douglas town marshal—man, Magnus’s hand had to really be hurting—and he grinned.
Wild to the Bone Page 6