Wild to the Bone

by Peter Brandvold

  It was the sensation of a sledgehammer being driven down hard against his forehead. In fact, when he opened his eyes, he imagined for a moment that he was watching the iron maul being slammed down on him from above. He thought he could almost make out the brawny, hairy arms of the man wielding it.

  Slam!

  Haskell squeezed his eyes shut as the pain shot through him, causing his ears to ring. He stiffened, curled his toes against it. But then he could feel the ass of the girl blowing him waggle a little against his chest, and his mind opened to the soothing feeling of her silky lips and tongue wrapped snugly around his staff.

  He looked at her ass, planted firmly atop his chest about three inches from his nose. A round, taut ass the color and texture of whipped vanilla, the crack open enough that he could see the girl’s little pink asshole and the beaver head, feel the fur prickling enticingly against his sternum.

  She was getting creamy. He could feel a little of her oozings dribble out of her as she worked her torturously slow, sweet magic. She was hunkered low on her knees, feet resting against his shoulders, their pink undersides facing him. As she continued to suck him, she moaned and flexed the toes of first one foot and then the other.

  He glanced around just to get his bearings and, in the dawn’s gray light washing through the window, saw the empty bottle of Who-Hit-John sitting beside its cork on a chest of drawers. Then it all came back to him—the cards, the girl, the dancing, the whiskey.

  The burly track layer slung that sledge of his against the railroad spike of Bear’s nose once more, and he tensed his body against it. He groaned. The girl’s smooth lips slid up and over the head of his cock, and she glanced at him over her shoulder.

  “Isn’t it helping?” she asked in her ever-so-slight Mexican accent. He remembered her name just then. Ana. He was glad. He hated forgetting their names and then the awkwardness that always came with that in the morning.

  “Yeah, but you’re competing with a mighty big gent with a mighty big hammer.”

  “I heard you groaning in your sleep and thought it would help.”

  “It is helping,” he said, lifting his head and running his tongue through her ass crack.

  Ana giggled and wagged her butt and turned her head to drop her mouth down over his cock once more.

  He licked her while she sucked him, and then, when he felt his time was nigh, he pressed his head back against the pillow and exploded down her throat. She slid her mouth up and down faster, sucking, trying to stay ahead of the fusillade, but finally, it was too much for her, and she lifted her head off of him, choking and gasping and pumping him desperately with her hands.

  When he was finished, she licked him clean, then got up and poured water from a pitcher into a porcelain basin and set the basin on the bed. Ana sat beside him Indian-style and slowly, gingerly cleaned him with a cool cloth.

  “You are much man, Bear.”

  He stared at her face between the jostling wings of her hanging hair. “You are much woman.”

  “Who was the woman in the saloon last night?”

  Haskell frowned. “What?” He pushed through the mental cobwebs to remember Raven visiting him in the saloon, when he’d been playing cards and Ana had been sprawled on his lap. He chuckled against his chagrin.

  “Oh. Just my partner.”

  “You have a most beautiful partner. Do you fuck her?”

  “Occasionally, when she climbs down off her high horse.”

  “Do you fuck her like you fucked me last night?” Ana glanced at the dresser. Haskell stared at it, only vaguely remembering fucking the girl while she sat on the dresser, knees spread wide, corset bunched around her belly, and full, light tan breasts with their brown nipples jostling free.

  Haskell snorted again. “I never knew a whore who liked to talk so much about other women, Ana.”

  “It is just curiosity,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, I do appreciate your services.” Haskell gave a chuff against the sledgehammer as he pushed up onto his elbows and looked at her hands slowly sliding the cloth up the length of his slack dong. “But I gotta haul my freight.”

  When he’d remembered Raven, he’d remembered his reason for being here in Spotted Horse.

  And then he’d remembered the boy he’d shot and whose body he needed to haul back to his sister’s ranch for burial.

  “Go where?”

  “The Stoveville ranch. You couldn’t tell me how to get there, could you?”

  He remembered that Duke Shirley had offered to guide him out to the Stoveville ranch, but he felt the need to ride out alone. He’d killed the boy. It was his responsibility to inform the kid’s sister, and he didn’t feel like having anyone else around when he did it. Informing someone of a dead relative, especially when he’d been the one to cause the relative’s demise, seemed a personal matter.

  And now, thinking about it, his moroseness over the kid’s death returned like a fever. Despite the track layer continuing to hammer his nose down deep into his brain plate with that heavy maul, he desperately wanted another shot of busthead.

  Ana set the pan of water and the cloth on a chair beside the bed and lay down with a sigh, resting her head on the heel of her hand. Her legs were long and slender, and they looked brown in the dawn’s dim light, her hair almost as black as Raven’s.

  “The Stoveville place? Sure. Why you go out there, big man?”

  “I killed the Stoveville kid.”

  Ana blinked. “Why?”

  “Because he tried to kill me.”

  “Figures.”

  Haskell was up and stumbling around, gritting his teeth and gathering his clothes from where he and the girl had tossed them after tearing them off his body. His were entangled with hers, the few of hers there were.

  “Why does it figure?”

  “Nothing good has ever come from the Pumpkin Buttes. Ride north two miles. You’ll come to a cottonwood. Take the trail that angles east for another two miles. You’ll cross a wash, and there you are. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss it.”

  “You know the place?”

  “My old man worked for the Stovevilles once, and I lived out there for a few months. My papa was a horse breaker, the best in the Buttes. That was before the drought, when the ranchers out there had enough money for hiring horse breakers. At least, a Mexican horse breaker with a girl to raise.”

  Haskell sat down on the edge of the bed to pull his socks on. “You knew the Stoveville boy, then, I take it?”

  “He was a couple years younger than me. Quiet boy. I don’t ever remember seein’ him smile. His pa worked him like a dog, though, so maybe that’s why.”

  “You think either him or his sister might be involved in the stage holdups?”

  Ana sighed and looked down at the hair she was curling around a finger. “Who knows? They say nothing good ever came out of the Pumpkin Buttes. But I don’t think those two—Dulcy and Danny—have enough gumption to rob stagecoaches. Especially not Duke Shirley’s line! If there is one good thing that ever came out of those buttes, the folks around here say it was Shirley.”

  “Ol’ Duke’s from the Buttes, eh?”

  “Yes. One of the few who prospered. But he was wise to get out when he did.” Ana tilted her head to look up at him gravely. “You be careful out there, big man.”

  “Why?”

  “Like I said, nothing good ever came out of those buttes. Nothing good happens in them.”

  Haskell frowned, slid a lock of hair back from her right eye, and tucked it behind her ear. “Ana, you wouldn’t have any idea who the two women are leadin’ up that stage-robbin’ gang, would you?”

  She shook her head. “I doubt that they are from around here. Probably from over in Dakota.”

  “How ’bout this? You got any idea why Danny Stoveville would shoot three lawmen?”

  She
drew a deep, raspy breath and looked at him directly. “Danny wouldn’t do that, Bear. At least, not the boy I remember.” She hiked a shoulder. “But he came from the buttes, didn’t he?”

  “Ah, but you came out of them buttes, too,” Bear said, and leaned down to plant a kiss on Ana’s forehead.

  She smiled and reached up to pinch his cheeks. “So I did.” She gave him a wink and pressed her lips to his.

  When he’d dressed, paid Ana for her services, and kissed her good-bye, Haskell went down into the saloon’s main drinking hall and drained three ladles of cool well water.

  The water was left over from the night before, but it sure made him feel better. All that busthead had dried him out like the parched, cracked bed of a long-defunct salt lake, but the water made him feel buoyant and almost chipper as he headed on outside into the cool, fresh morning air. The big Irishman was still hammering away at his temples but not with as much ire as before and not so damn regular.

  A thought graveled him, however. Bear couldn’t shake the possibility that Danny Stoveville had been trying to shoot the two riders who’d killed the lawmen. Shooting an innocent kid didn’t sit any better with him in the light of a new day than it had in the old light of the previous one. Despite all the busthead he’d tried to dull the pain with.

  Haskell went over to the livery barn and found the simple-minded kid, Sonny, cleaning out stalls with a pitchfork and wheelbarrow. Bear rented a buckboard wagon and a horse that could pull it, and while the kid rigged the horse to the wagon, Haskell retrieved Danny Stoveville from the tack room, laid the dead young man in the wagon bed, and latched the tailgate.

  “Y-you headin’ into the buttes?” Sonny asked as he buckled the traces to the double tree.

  “I reckon so, since that’s where Danny’s from.”

  Sonny sort of smiled, though it wasn’t so much a smile as a grimace, Bear opined as the hostler went up and adjusted the collar on the horse’s neck.

  Haskell tipped his hat to the kid, who watched him dubiously as he shook the ribbons out over the back of the white-legged black, and the horse jerked the wagon out into the street, which was still mostly murky brown shadows only gradually purpling along their edges, though more gray had seeped into the sky and birds were chirping.

  The wind had died, and that seemed to make the birds happy. Bear figured that it would likely pick up again, as it usually did in this godforsaken country, not long after high noon. He’d made sure he’d tied a billowy green neckerchief around his neck in case it did, so he could pull the cloth up to keep the dust out of his mouth and nose.

  He swung right onto the side street that passed in front of the Overland Hotel, where he assumed his lovely partner was still slumbering. He vaguely wondered if she realized he hadn’t slept in his room. Most likely. That was all right. She knew he wasn’t an acolyte. And just because they’d tumbled a time or two didn’t make them beholden to each other in any way. He was a man, and he had his needs, by God.

  He glanced at the hotel once more as he passed.

  What if she had a man up there? How would he feel about that? Maybe Duke Shirley, say, who’d given her the favoring eye when they’d been standing out front of the town marshal’s office.

  Haskell brushed the thought from his mind. “Giddyup, there, horse,” he said, shaking the ribbons over the black’s back, clomping and rattling on out of the town.

  Immediately, the wagon began climbing through low buttes. When Haskell was only a couple of hundred yards out of Spotted Horse, the sun poked its bold, brassy head above the desert prairie, dissolving the last of the night shadows and blowing an acrid breath of hot breeze against his bearded cheeks.

  Bear shook his head. It was going to be another hot, dusty day. After another hundred yards, he took the ribbons in his teeth, rolled his shirtsleeves above his forearms, and took a drink from the canteen riding the floorboard at his feet.

  When he came to the large, half-dead cottonwood standing at a level spot among the buttes, with the main trail continuing through a crease between buttes ahead and left, he swung the black onto the secondary trail angling off through another crease to the right. The trail was narrow and rocky, almost washed out in places by the rains that came to this country in the spring and late summer.

  It was hard, slow going. After a couple more hundred yards, Haskell found himself between two steep, boulder-strewn ridges.

  One ridge jutted on his right, blocking the sun and laying out a welcoming wedge of shade over the bottom of the canyon. Haskell stopped the black in the shade, near a single, spindly cottonwood whose branches were tufted with only about a dozen sick-looking leaves.

  He’d water the horse here and give the animal a brief rest before continuing on to the Stoveville place.

  Bear set the wagon brake. Movement out of the corner of his left eye caught his attention. He reached for the Winchester ’66 resting on the leather-padded seat beside him but stopped when he saw the coyote angling down the ridge toward him, weaving between boulders.

  The coyote just then swung its head toward Haskell and changed course suddenly. Haskell heard the beast’s startled grunt. The coyote—a scrawny, dingy yellow thing with a thick gray tail—ran along the side of the slope past Bear’s right shoulder and out of sight among the rocks.

  Haskell frowned. He hadn’t been the first one to startle the beast this morning. Something else had frightened it down the ridge toward the canyon.

  What could that have been?

  Or who?

  As if in response to the unspoken question, smoke puffed from a shaded nest of rocks near the top of the ridge. A wink later, Haskell heard something sing past his face and hammer a boulder over his left shoulder.

  21

  The rifle’s crack hadn’t finished echoing before he grabbed his own Winchester and leaped over the wagon’s left front wheel, landing flat-footed and immediately shucking his Yellowboy from its leather sheath. As he did, he glanced up over the iron-shod wheel.

  Smoke puffed again. Again, he heard the zing of the bullet before it hammered the same boulder as before.

  The black shifted and jerked in the traces, snorting and whickering its discontent at the rifle fire. Apprehension lifted the short hairs along the back of Bear’s neck.

  If the shooter took down the black, he’d be stranded out here on foot. The horse was only a secondary worry, however. Still, wanting to take the black out of the line of fire, Haskell ran up past the horse and dashed behind another boulder at the left of the trail just as another slug whined shrilly off the same boulder, spraying rock shards and bits of lead.

  The flat, echoing crack came a moment later. Its reverberations seemed to be sucked straight up into the faultless expanse of cobalt-blue sky arching over the jagged tops of the crags.

  Haskell gritted his teeth as he hot-footed to his left, snaked the Winchester with its brass receiver around his covering boulder, and sent two .44-caliber rounds hurling toward where he’d spied the smoke puffs. His rounds tore into two separate rocks, spraying rock dust but doing no more damage than that.

  A hatted head and a rifle barrel appeared above the nest he’d been shooting at. As he pulled his own head back down behind his covering boulder, the dry-gulcher’s rifle belched two more times and then a third time, like an afterthought.

  The chunks of lead pinged hysterically against the rocks around him, aggravating the hammering in his own head.

  Bear jerked his rifle up and fired two more rounds toward where the shooter’s smoke was still ribboning through the shade near the top of the ridge, and then, muttering an angry curse, he bolted out from behind his cover, crossed the trail in two long strides, and slipped in among the boulders on the trail’s other side.

  The shooter opened up on him from above, with two more bullets shrieking around him and screeching off rock. Bear kept moving, climbing the ridge through narrow corri
dors around the boulders that must have been hurled up out of the earth’s bowels a hundred million years ago.

  As he climbed between the rocks, he winced when he heard the eerie ratcheting hiss of a diamondback somewhere off to his left.

  By the hiss, the snake was close by.

  Wind, gunmen, and diamondbacks, Haskell thought, breathing hard as he climbed the slope. A fine damn country you sent me to, Allan!

  Hoping the snake didn’t strike from a rock—all he needed was a pair of razor-edged fangs, slender as fish bones but painful and deadly, digging into his cheek and filling him full of poison—he continued climbing. The shooter must have lost track of him, because all the man’s lead was landing several yards wide and several more yards behind his target.

  Three-quarters of the way up the ridge, Haskell stopped. He peered between two boulders and over a wiry gray shrub toward where he figured the dry-gulcher was. Sure enough, he could see an elbow and part of a shoulder and the very tip of a rifle protruding from the notch.

  Haskell snapped his Winchester’s butt to his shoulder and emptied the rifle’s magazine at the nest in the rocks above. When he’d triggered his last round, the empty cartridges clinking to the ground behind him and rolling on the gravel, he saw the shooter leap down through a narrow gap on the far side of the nest from which he’d been trying to perforate Bear’s hide.

  Haskell leaned the smoking, empty rifle against a rock and started running hard straight up the bluff. The shooter would know which direction Haskell’s slugs had come from, so he wanted to throw the bastard off by approaching from a different direction.

  When he’d nearly reached the top of the bluff, he stopped and, crouching low, his LeMat in one hand, his Russian in the other, his gloved thumbs caressing the revolvers’ hammers, he scuttled back along the slope, paralleling the ridge line.

  Approaching the nest from which his attacker had fired at him, he slowed and dropped to a knee, looking all around and listening. He spied movement ahead and to the right and glimpsed the shooter for half a second as the man turned abruptly toward his own left and slipped behind a large, pale, pocked and pitted limestone boulder that was the size of a poor prospector’s shack. The rock was streaked white with bird shit.