Longarm 397 : Longarm and the Doomed Beauty (9781101545973) Page 2

  He reached up to cup one of those breasts.

  “No,” she chided him, pulling back slightly and brushing his hand away. “I’ll do the touching. You just lay there and let me clean you.”

  “You’re killing me.”

  She showed her fine, white teeth. “I know.”

  “Devil.”

  She chuckled again huskily, then gestured for him to turn over. Wetting the sponge, she dribbled water down his back, along his spine, then scrubbed every inch of his back and the back of his neck and behind his ears, and then his backside—even the bottoms of his feet. It must have taken her nearly a half hour, though to Longarm—with that hickory knot hardening in his throat—it seemed even longer. While her slow, damp caresses were infinitely soothing, his body hungered for her, his hard-on throbbing against the bed beneath him.

  Finally, there was the soft plunk of the sponge being dropped into the bowl. She touched his shoulder, and he rolled over onto his back in time to see her rise from the bed and dump the water from the bowl into the chamber pot beside the night table.

  Another nice view of her black snatch opening pinkly beneath the round, pale globe of her delightful bottom.

  “Cynthia, Christ,” he rasped, curling his toes in desperation.

  “Just you wait, mister.” She smiled at him over her shoulder as she splashed more water into the bowl. Then she returned to the bed, sat down on its edge once more, dipped the sponge in the bowl, and touched the sponge to the head of his hard-on. Longarm drew a short, quick breath. She ran the sponge down the iron-hard organ’s underside to his balls.

  He drew another fast, shallow breath.

  She lowered her head, so her hair slithered across his thigh, tickling him, and touched her tongue to the underside of her upper lip as she slowly, deftly, torturously ran the sponge up and down and all around his throbbing dong.

  Longarm’s heart turned somersaults.

  When she was finished, she returned the sponge to the bowl. She dumped the bowl out in the chamber pot and returned the bowl to the washstand. Longarm’s cock was both hot from the blood coursing through it and cool and damp from the water Cynthia had washed it with. He lay there as though tied down, his heart thumping slowly now in his chest, distant bells of excruciating desire tolling in his ears.

  “Now, then,” Cynthia said.

  She stood beside the bed, lifted the fishnet shift up and over her head, and let it fall to the floor at her feet. Her hair fluttered like black feathers around her shoulders and the swollen globes of her breasts.

  Longarm swallowed against the hard knot in his throat.

  He stared up at her—his buxom, beguiling, cobalt-eyed executioner.

  Slowly, she sank back down on the edge of the bed, crossed her fine legs, twisted her torso around and lowered her warm, soft breasts to his thighs. She wrapped both her hands around the base of his waiting member, and closed her hot, wet mouth of the swollen mushroom head.

  “Oh, boy.” Longarm flexed his toes and ground his shoulders into the sheets as she swallowed him. “Oh . . . oh, boy . . .”

  Chapter 2

  Longarm awoke at dawn, only an hour or so after she finally let him sleep, and only long enough to glimpse her dressing in the shadowy room, clothing that magnificent long-legged, round-hipped, full-bosomed body, tossing her long black hair.

  The wind kicked up by her movements smelled like spring roses.

  He’d drifted off for a time, exhausted from the long train ride from Kansas and the near-savage coupling with the delectable and tireless Miss Larimer—three times after her initial French lesson!—and was pulled up from his slumber once more when she kissed him lingeringly on the mouth, then giggled as she squeezed his already sore and chafed old member.

  Just as the stalwart beast between his legs started to come alive—like a grumpy, sleepy bear stirring instinctively to head back out on the hunt—she pecked his cheek, laughed raspily, nibbled his ear, told him she’d see him again in a month or two, when she returned from Paris or wherever the hell she was off to with her sketches of him in the buff, and left.

  Her sketches of him in the buff . . .

  “Cynthia!” he cried, jerking up in the bed and shooting his anxious gaze at the door.

  He gulped. He was too late. She’d left when it was still almost dark, at least an hour ago. Now saffron sunlight filtered through the ash and maple trees that the city of Denver had planted along the street outside his boardinghouse on the poor side of Cherry Creek. Shadows were long. Dust motes filtered through the prisms of light angling through the soot-streaked door panes and the window over the small eating table at which he’d never actually sat down to a meal.

  The indigo-haired she-tiger, portfolio of his naked pecker in hand, was probably heading into the far eastern reaches of Colorado now, maybe to Julesburg already, on her journey back to New York, where she’d display her sketches and oil paintings of him in the nude. She’d used him for a model last summer along the Arkansas River, up near the picturesque little mining town of Buena Vista, a two-day’s train ride west of Denver. Somehow, she’d coaxed him out of every stitch of clothing, and now he, in all his nakedness, was on his way to the most populace city in the country—one of the largest in the world!

  Oh, Lord—what if his boss, Billy Vail, learned that his most senior of federal law bringers was on full display in some highfalutin art gallery patronized by half the mucky-mucks on the East Coast? Or, worse yet, what if Cynthia’s regal, legendary, filthy rich clan headed up by General William Larimer himself, and the kindly, pious, albeit perpetually befuddled Aunt May, found out he’d been exposing himself to his favorite debutante in the tall and rocky when Longarm was only supposed to have been the girl’s unofficial bodyguard?

  Two things settled the lawman down.

  One—Cynthia had likely been correct when she’d asserted that no one who knew the Larimers, let alone Chief Billy Vail, would ever see the art in the first place, let alone recognize the burly, naked gent lounging in the verdant grass along the river, his big cock in repose across his thigh.

  Two—the sun shining so brightly meant that Longarm was late for his nine o’clock meeting with said boss, Chief Vail!

  Longarm glanced at the small clock hanging above his bed. Yep, he was late, all right. A whole five minutes already.

  The big lawman shoved a wing of his dark brown hair back off his forehead, brushed a hand across his longhorn mustache that bore not one fleck of gray despite all his professional stresses and wild travails, and scrambled out of the bed still warm from the girl’s supple, eager body. He dug around in his secondhand armoire for fresh clothes, duplicates of those he’d torn off last night in his haste to fuck the general’s princess.

  Then he scooped his saddlebags, saddle, rifle, and war sack off the top landing of the stairs outside his front door, and kicked his McClellan saddle through the open door and into his flat. He preferred the cavalry saddle to the bulkier western stockmen’s saddle, but surely he wouldn’t need it today. Billy wouldn’t send him out of town on assignment the morning after he’d just returned from a three-week sojourn fighting back robbers out on the Kansas flats!

  He knew that wasn’t true, but he decided to risk it, for he was too tired from the journey, the fuck-tussle, and the abbreviated rest, to haul the heavy load up Colfax to the Federal Building.

  Balancing the gear on both shoulders, he headed on down the steps. He’d walked only half a block before he begged a ride in the back of a coal dray to Colfax Avenue, where he leaped off under the burden of his gear and tramped past the U.S. Mint. It might have only been a few hours since he’d reveled between Cynthia Larimer’s spread legs, but he grinned as he admired the female shop clerks and bank secretaries and hash throwers bustling to work in their lightweight summer frocks.

  He dragged his gaze away from one such buxom, round-assed little lass, blond as the sun itself, noting that his obvious admiration for the girl was lifting a flush in her chubby cheeks, a
nd hoofed it up the stone steps of the Federal Building.

  He rushed through the heavy oak door under the always-closed transom, said, “How’s it hangin’, Henry?” to the chief’s snotty, dapper secretary.

  The scrawny, little, bespectacled gent in a three-piece suit did not so much as glance over his shoulder at Longarm, nor slow his pace on the clattering keys of the newfangled typing machine, but merely wagged his head. Longarm dropped his gear on the floor, tossed his hat onto the elk antler rack to the right of the door, and headed toward the door flanking the young secretary’s desk and on which CHIEF MARSHAL VAIL was stenciled in gold-leaf lettering.

  A shadow appeared in the frosted glass of the door’s upper panel. The door opened, and there stood the short, squat, balding, badly rumpled Chief Marshal Billy Vail, plucking a fat stogie from his wet lips and snarling, “Goddamnit, Custis, get the hell in here. You’re late again. Twenty minutes late!”

  “Ah, hell, Billy—!”

  “Ah, hell, Billy—nothin’ !” the Chief Marshal bellowed, sliding his eyes toward the clerk still busily—and now with a little self-satisfied grin—playing the typing machine’s little round keys. “Henry, are Longarm’s orders and travel vouchers ready?”

  Without slowing his typing and keeping his eyes on the paper curling up from the machine’s roller, Henry said smugly, “They’ve been ready for nigh on an hour, now, Marshal Vail. I have, in the meantime, gone on to other chores.”

  Longarm thought he saw the bespectacled secretary cut a sneering glance at him. As Vail gave an exasperated sigh and turned and strode back into his office and around his cluttered desk the size of a lumber dray, Longarm followed him in, suppressing the urge to stick his tongue out at the typewriting-playing dandy.

  “I do apologize, Chief,” Longarm said, “but, holy Christ—I just got back into town last night. Late last night!”

  “I know when you got back into town. Somewhere south of midnight. But I done cabled you while you were still in Hays and told you I needed you in here by nine o’clock this morning and not a minute later!”

  “Like I said, I’m sor—”

  “You look like you been through the mill,” Billy said, suddenly lowering his voice with concern. He sagged into his high-backed leather chair, letting his big belly push his wrinkled white cotton shirt and the top of his belted broadcloth trousers out to the edge of the desk.

  “Yeah, well, it was a rough one,” Longarm said as he dropped into the Moroccan red leather visitor’s chair angled before Billy’s desk. He sighed, flopped his arms. “One of the toughest assignments I been through in a long time. Wrote up some notes on the train ride back. I’ll give ’em to Henry in a day or two.”

  “I would appreciate that,” Billy said, “and cut the bullshit.”

  Longarm scowled. “Huh?”

  “She was waitin’ for you, wasn’t she?”

  “Waitin’? For me?” Longarm scowled with a little more effort. “Who’d that be, Billy?”

  Billy leaned forward, jowls flushing, his washed-out blue eyes pinched to slits. “You know who I’m talkin’ about. The Larimer girl. The big-titted, long-haired debutante you been fuckin’ seven ways from sundown for the past two years against my dire warnings that, once the cat’s out of the bag, the old general himself is gonna fill you so full of holes that the buckshot’ll still be rattlin’ around inside your casket when they drop ya under!”

  Longarm let his scowl dissolve to a genuine expression of wonder. “You got a spy posted outside my boardinghouse, Billy?”

  “Hah—I was right!”

  “You mean—that was just a guess?” Longarm said indignantly.

  Billy threw himself back in his chair and jiggled around like a delighted moron. “Yes, it was a guess. Wished I’d have bet money on it. Oh, you’re a pistol, Custis. Just a goddamn pistol! I had a feelin’ I still smelled the stud musk on you, saw that well-fucked look you always carry in here after you been dippin’ your dick in that rich girl’s honeypot!”

  “Billy, you’re a dirty old man. You ought not to be thinkin’ about such things as what me and Miss Larimer do beneath the covers of a night.” Longarm let a smile crawl across his broad, scarred, brown-eyed countenance. “Liable to give you a heart stroke, and I’d have to break in a whole new boss.”

  “In spite of what you may believe, it does not please me to think of you two together. You got no idea the kind of trouble you’re courtin’. My God, man—you’re a government employee. A wage earner. That girl is high fuckin’ society!”

  “I don’t intend to marry the girl—just screw her. And, believe me, she wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Longarm laughed, dug one of his prized nickel cheroots out of his shirt pocket, and stuck it between his teeth as he fished a stove match out of his coat pocket. His mind flashed to last night, and Cynthia lifting both her bare legs over his right shoulder, to give his ax-handle hard-on a change of angle as he thrust it through the silky folds of her trembling, sopping snatch.

  He chuckled again.

  “Talkin’ to you’s like talkin’ to a brick wall,” Billy said, with a fateful wag of his head. He thumbed his dirty, round spectacles up his nose, plucked a manila file folder off an ungainly stack on the left side of his desk, and tossed it over to Longarm. “No point in tryin’ to save your ass, I reckon. No time, neither. You’re train’s gonna be pullin’ out in a bout twenty-five minutes, so we’d best make this quick.”

  “I just want you to know I protest this out-of-town assignment so close on the heels of my last one, Billy. Even I need to rest up at least a day before I’m sent back out on the wolf hunt.”

  “You could have slept last night. Instead, you chose to fornicate like a back-alley cur.”

  “What would you have done—thrown her out?” Longarm struck the stove match to life on his boot heel and touched the flickering flame to the end of his cheap cheroot.

  A tad sheepishly, knowing he was lying through his teeth, Billy said with the air of a Baptist preacher addressing his flock, “I would have told her, ‘Thank you for coming, Miss Larimer, but perhaps we could set another time? I just got back from a long, tiresome journey, and my employer has ordered me into his office at nine o’clock sharp tomorrow morning—and I am far too dedicated to my job, my badge, and to the respected chief marshal himself to be even one minute late!’ ”

  Longarm was choking so hard on his first smoke puff that he couldn’t even laugh.

  “Anyway,” Billy said, scowling impatiently, “as I was sayin’—you got a train to catch! And this is serious business, Longarm, so I hope you have your brains in order after your love tussle. I need you more focused than ever for this job.”

  “What is it?” Longarm said, pounding his chest to work some fresh oxygen into his lungs, his face still flushed from the choking fit. “It best be important, dang it, Billy!”

  “Matter of life and death, in fact,” the chief marshal said, taking a quick puff off his fat, wet stogie and blowing a smoke ring over his crowded desk toward Longarm. “Death for one man—a hired Pinkerton bodyguard. Life for an important trial witness, if you can get to her in time.”

  Chapter 3

  “You wanna chew that up a little finer?” Longarm asked his boss as he finally sucked a complete breath down his throat.

  “It’s all in the folder there. You can read it on the train. Just to give you some sense of where you’re going and what you’re riding into—remember that cousin of Cole Younger’s, Little Babe Younger, who a local town marshal caught up in Snow Mound a few weeks back? The bastard was in the process of robbing a bank there, all by himself while he was waitin’ for the rest of his gang, and the marshal somehow managed to throw a loop around him and took Younger into custody. Younger was no doubt drunk. Has a penchant for the firewater.”

  “All right—my memory’s refreshed, Billy. This Younger worm break out of the hoosegow, did he?”

  “Nope. He was held for trial there in Snow Mound. They were ho
lding him on a charge of robbery only. But the town of Pinecone just west of Denver, near the base of Mount Rosalie, had a murder warrant out for the son of a bitch, for a previous bank job and murder. Well, the law bringers up thataway saw no reason to haul Younger down mountain to Pinecone and risk his gang springing him.

  “So they sent a willing witness up from Pinecone to Snow Mound, to testify at Younger’s trial that she watched from two feet away as the kill-crazy little rapscallion shot the Pinecone bank’s vice president in the right eye from a distance of six inches. Blew the poor man’s brains all over the bank vault gaping behind him. For no other reason than Younger didn’t seem to care for the smell of the pomade with which the vice president oiled his hair.”

  “Okay, I’m with you so far, Billy. Younger got tried for murder up in Snow Mound. And the witness from Pinecone testified, did she?”

  “Yes, she did. Very willingly, I might add. And Babe Younger was hanged all legal and proper for his murderous ways, on the main thoroughfare of Snow Mound, with a whole crowd gathered and clappin’ their hands and hootin’ and hollerin’ and fireworks poppin’ and kids and dogs runnin’ wild.”

  “Typical small-town hangin’, in other words.” Longarm blew a smoke plume toward the banjo clock near the window in Billy’s east wall. “So, what’s the problem?”

  “The witness is in trouble. Seems the gang got there too late to stop the hanging, but they’re out for revenge. She’s due to head back to Pinecone on the next train, only the next train is late due to a rockslide on the tracks. A crew of Denver and Rio Grande boys is working on clearing the rocks, but, in the meantime, the witness is stranded there in Snow Mound—with one of her bodyguards dead.