by Tabor Evans
A pack of riders was galloping toward her from the same direction.
Chapter 35
Longarm paused as the riders thundered toward him.
He raised his carbine. Vonda stopped, looked forward, and then dropped to her knees, bowing her head as though in prayer.
Stretch Azrael was leading the pack of riders, which, Longarm was surprised to see, included his little, wiry, wizened-up mother on a smart-stepping palomino, in the saddle of which she appeared doll-sized. Mrs. Azrael was dressed for the trail in a cream shirt, denims, and an ornately stitched leather vest, with a flat-crowned, broad-brimmed hat on her black head, chin thong dangling down her spindly chest.
“Vonda, what in Christ?” Stretch yelled, hauling back on his grulla’s reins and leaping out of the saddle. He looked at his wounded, sobbing wife kneeling before him, and then at Longarm and the broke-up wagon behind the lawman.
Longarm doubted that Stretch had ever been at a loss for words before. Well, he certainly was now. He cuffed his hat brim back off his forehead and regarded Longarm incredulously.
“What’s goin’ on? She disappears in the middle of the night. I wake and eight of my riders are gone, including my first two lieutenants—slipped out around the same time as Vonda, not a word to anyone…”
“I told you she was about as good as rattlesnake ahead of a wildfire,” said Mrs. Azrael, looking down her nose at the blond girl sobbing before her and her son. The old ranch woman looked beyond Longarm at the gold. “What in God’s name did she get herself involved in?”
Longarm walked up behind Vonda. She had a pistol in the holster strapped to her right hip. He pulled the gun out, tossed it away, and she jerked her dirty, tear-streaked face at him, scowling savagely. “I should have killed you when I had the chance! Know why I didn’t?”
She laughed devilishly, glanced at Stretch, and then turned back to Longarm. “’Cause you satisfied me like I ain’t been satisfied since I moved out to the Double D—that’s why!”
Mrs. Azrael gave a disapproving chuff and clucked while she shook her head.
Stretch glared at Longarm, his face as red as an Arizona sunset.
Longarm turned to Vonda. “Why were you heading back to the Double D?”
“To get the gold!” she fairly screamed, laughing again and casting her hate-filled gaze at both Stretch and his still-mounted mother.
“What gold?” grunted Mrs. Azrael.
“The gold under your bed, you old hag!” This she screamed at the tops of her lungs, shaking her head wildly and clamping her hand over her bloody arm. “The gold your husband found where Santana buried it and was saving for when he decided to run off with your housekeeper—Senorita Angelina! Only, he got thrown by his horse before he could make his escape!”
Mrs. Azrael and Stretch just stared down at Vonda as though she were speaking some foreign tongue.
“How do you know he was going to run off with the housekeeper?” Longarm asked.
“Oh, I just guessed it…after I saw Angelina giving the old boy a blow job in his office, a few nights before he fell and turned his brains to mush. I seen ’em together before that. Many times! And I heard ’em talking about the gold many times, too, snickering to themselves while ole Whip had Angelina bent over his desk in his office! That’s when I started scheming to add the Wells Fargo gold to the plunder I got today—and could have damn near doubled in size if it weren’t for you, you son of a bitch of a crafty ole lawdog!”
Longarm stared down at the girl with an expression similar to the one on her husband’s and her mother-in-law’s faces.
“Old Whip saw the holdup,” the girl told Longarm, enjoying every minute of telling her story. Wounding the Azraels was at least some compensation for the bitter end of the trail she found herself facing. “He told as much to Angelina. I overheard him. He was hidden in the buttes near the stage.
“After the Indians attacked Santana, Whip went out and dug up the box, brought it back to the ranch, and hid it under his bed. Mrs. Azrael, you been sleepin’ on a hundred thousand dollars in gold coins for the past three years, you silly old bitch! Hah! And you and Stretch both thought you was so much smarter than me! Ha-ha-hahh!”
Vonda laughed like a witch ready to fly off on her broom, pointing a jeering finger at Stretch. “He didn’t tell his own son because he didn’t trust him! He was afraid Stretch would tell his mother, and old Whip just wanted to be rid of ’em both! I don’t know why he didn’t just take off right away. Maybe he was waiting for the right woman to come along…a puta like Angelina! I reckon you couldn’t satisfy Whip any better than Stretch could satisfy me, Mrs. Azrael!”
Vonda laughed even harder.
Then she fainted and fell face-first to the ground.
Stretch, Mrs. Azrael, and the seven riders behind them just stared down at Vonda as though at some creature that had winged in and landed here from outer space. Longarm swung around and walked back through the brush, looking over the wagon wreckage and the strewn gold.
He spied movement ahead. Haven was walking toward him, her wounded arm in a makeshift sling. The flaps of her tan duster were tucked behind the butts of her twin LeMats.
The Pinkerton agent was looking off to Longarm’s left, where Kimble Dobson sat his horse looking down at Cocheta. The Apache girl was standing over Jack Leyton, who was flopping around like a landed fish, blood spurting from the long, deep gash across his neck.
Cocheta leaned forward to wipe the blade of her bowie knife on the man’s trouser leg. When the blade was clean, she slid the knife back into its sheath on her hip and glanced at Longarm.
It was the first time he’d seen her smile.
Epilogue
Two weeks later, all the stolen gold was heading back to its rightful owners. All the bodies, including that of Jack Leyton, were buried.
Cocheta and Dobson returned to their saloon at Holy Defiance.
Vonda was on the mend at the ranger post in Broken Jaw, where she was also preparing to stand trial for thievery and murder. Longarm didn’t think that Roscoe Sanders had chained her to an iron ball and put her to work, slinging drinks at Slim’s while she awaited trial, but he wouldn’t put it past the old ranger.
Whip Azrael remained out at the Double D. Longarm and Haven both agreed that the elderly ranch owner had gotten and, under the care of his angry wife, was continuing to get his just desserts for making off with the stolen Wells Fargo gold.
Longarm and Agent Haven Delacroix were heading back to Denver on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe flyer, enjoying the Pullman sleeper car they shared.
“Custis, I should really be very angry at you,” she said late one desert night, four hours north of Santa Fe, while sucking his cock in the Pullman berth they were sharing.
“Because of Cocheta and Vonda?” Longarm said through a groan. “Haven, you ain’t gonna believe this, but I didn’t start any of it with them two gals.”
“You were an innocent bystander?”
“You could say that, yes.”
“Not that you mean anything at all to me, you understand,” she said, sliding her mouth off the swollen mushroom head of his cock and looking up past his bare belly and chest, her intoxicating hazel gaze melding with his. “It’s just that I prefer gentlemen to callous rogues.”
“Well, with you comin’ from such aristocratic French blood, with some highfalutin painter for a long-lost cousin or such, you would.”
He looked down at her. Haven lay belly down and naked between his bare legs, holding his cock in both her hands, her wet lips glistening in the flickering light of a bracket lamp.
Beside them was her own reflection in the dark window, holding his cock before her as though praying to it. She appeared there in the misty darkness, limned with wan lamplight, a lovely girl shrouded in mystery.
A mystery he hadn’t yet even begun to plumb or to solve.
She touched her tongue to the head. He shuddered at the keen pleasure the sensation gave him.
; “Well, this works out just right, then, Agent Delacroix. There’s nothing callous about me.”
He smiled. He threw his head back and sucked a breath when she lowered her warm, wet mouth down over his jutting cock once more.
She sucked him very slowly for a time before she lifted her mouth back off of him again with a slight wet, popping sound and licked her lips. “Do you think we’ll ever work together again, Longarm?”
“I hope so, Agent Delacroix. I sure as hell do certainly hope so.” He wanted…needed…to solve her mystery.
“Mhmmmm.” She smiled. “It’s nice to work with a fellow…uh…professional. Even if he is a lusty cur.”
She rose to her knees and straddled him, her full breasts jostling just inches in front of his face. She wrapped her arms around his head and drew his face against those beautiful, heaving orbs, waggling her shoulders to rake his longhorn mustache across her nipples, which hardened instantly beneath his lips.
He took her breasts in his hands and squeezed them as he nuzzled them. Reaching down behind her, Haven closed her hand over his cock and lowered her warm and welcoming love nest down on top of it.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Yeah, this lusty ole dog does certainly hope to be workin’ with you again real soon, Agent Delacroix!”