Longarm 244: Longarm and the Devil's Sister Read online

  It was that aptly nicknamed Miss Bubbles from the stenographers pool. They called her Miss Bubbles because everything about her seemed to be as globular as anything could get while it managed to stay pretty. So a big round bun of blonde hair perched atop her pretty oval face, from which big round eyes stared innocent as hell, considering how innocent Miss Bubbles was when another body got to know her. Longarm stared up uncertainly at the globular breasts staring back at him from atop the books she was toting as he quietly said, “Evening, Miss Bubbles. I was expecting old Henry, and how come you don’t have anything on but them shoes and socks at the moment?”

  The blonde shut the door behind her with a playful bump from her globular bare behind as she calmly replied, “Henry had a supper date with another chum. So I told him I’d take good care of you and you know full well I’m a woman of my word, Custis!”

  Longarm gulped and said, “I sure do, and I told you how much I enjoyed it, Miss Bubbles. But I thought we agreed it wasn’t too wise to mix our private lives with our jobs, here in the same building.”

  She dropped the pile of books he’d asked for on the desk in front of him to stand there bold as brass and naked as a jay in the flattering lamplight, hands on globular bare hips, as she pouted, “You were planning the ruination of poor Elsbeth, weren’t you? What did she have to offer that I haven’t already given you, you brute?”

  It wasn’t easy, but Longarm kept a straight face as he assured her and the other ladies from the stenographers pool that he’d never even spoken to the poor gal murdered that very day.

  Miss Bubbles shrugged her rounded bare shoulders and replied, “You were getting ready to. She told us so, herself.”

  Longarm felt no call to fight the sheepish smile that crossed his face as he confessed, “That’s the trouble with messing with the gals where you work. Like I told you, it always gets around the whole blamed building and you never know who’s likely to take it the wrong way.”

  Miss Bubbles moved closer to perch her bare rump on a corner of the desk as she assured him, “I wasn’t jealous of poor Elsbeth. I knew she was cherry. She told us so herself, poor thing. So I knew that once you’d tried in vain you’d come limping back to this more willing blonde with your poor throbbing organ grinder.”

  She ground her bare crotch around on the corner of the desk to ask in a huskier tone just how hard he might be at the moment.

  Longarm laughed and insisted, “I never stayed after hours to worry about such matters, no offense. I didn’t even know you were still in the building and I really have to go through those federal ratifications of old Spanish land grants!”

  To which she demurely replied, “I did stay in the building when Henry told me you’d be in here working late. So we’re all alone up here and you’ve got all night to paw through those fool books after you’ve pawed me some and screwed me a lot to make up for even considering another woman when you had all this waiting for you, ready and willing!”

  Longarm started to argue. But life was too short to spend more than a man had to, arguing with women. So, thinking back to what a friendly whorehouse madam had told her working girls about just getting down and dirty to get it over with, he rose to toss his hat aside and haul Miss Bubbles in for a stand-up kiss.

  She kissed back like an eager pup with a dirty mind and then laughed up at him because she said his tobacco tweed pants tickled her bare flesh.

  He told her it was what she got for shaving her twat. She pouted that if he really wanted to please her he’d shave off his own pubic hair so’s they could fornicate like innocent babes. That was what Miss Bubbles called a chubby grown woman with no hair on her snatch, an innocent babe. But he had to admit it felt inspiring down yonder as he took the matter in hand, but warned, “Not in here. Have you forgot how silly you felt, hiding bareass under this same desk that time the judge came back to these chambers after hours?”

  She finished unbuttoning his fly and hauled out his dawning erection to lead him by it as she assured him she knew just the place.

  He let her haul him by his throbbing virility through the anteroom and out in the dark marble corridor, even though he protested, “Damn it, honey, they do have a night watch-man on duty!”

  She assured him she knew what she was doing. He had to allow that she seemed to when they made it into another office suite without getting caught in the corridor as their heels echoed on bare marble.

  Miss Bubbles was one of those lusty amourists who liked to fornicate by lamplight in front of a mirror whenever she had the chance. So Longarm suspected she’d put some thought into the love nest she’d thrown together in a side room of what she said was a vacant office a disbanded government agency had moved their stuff out of. Miss Bubbles had moved a padded leather sofa, a lamp table, and a swamping pier glass in to reflect on anything she might want to try with anyone aboard that sofa and her globular charms. So Longarm sat beside her on the smooth black leather and watched himself take off his own duds. It hardly seemed fair. But, unlike a frisky gal, a man had to haul his boots off before he could get out of his pants.

  So the literally bubbly blonde was squirming her bare ass on smooth leather like a cat in heat by the time Longarm had his sixgun on the lamp table and himself on one knee to suit her pleasure. She rolled on her elbows and knees to thrust her double-bubble derriere up at him for a down-home dog-style entrance.

  Longarm was just as glad. It wouldn’t have been fair to call a gal who did it for free a whore. But when a gal made herself as available as Miss Bubbles it felt sort of silly to kiss her sincere.

  As he entered her lush wet warmth from behind and she arched her spine for more, he reflected on how she might feel much the same about romantic mush. But however she might feel about what he was doing to her, she sure gave one hell of a ride.

  “What are you grinning about?” she suddenly demanded, as Longarm realized she was watching them going at it dog-style. So he confided, “I ain’t grinning at your pretty ass, Miss Bubbles. I was just reminded of this dumb joke I heard.”

  Before she bit down on his thrusting manhood she said, “We do look sort of silly in the mirror, considering how sweet it feels. What was the joke?”

  He said, “I ain’t sure how it applies to us. I don’t see why it just came back to me. But it seems this old Papist priest was riding in a railroad club car with this rabbi of the Hebrew persuasion, the both of ’em sipping cider as fellow travelers will until they finally got around to confessing sins they’d have never told anybody they knew about.”

  Miss Bubbles moaned, “Ooh, faster! Harder! I promise not to tell if you make me come this beastly way! What had those other dirty old men have to confess in that joke? I don’t find it funny, so far.”

  Longarm got a good grip on either hip bone to satisfy her flesh as he tried to satisfy her curiosity with, “This old rabbi swore the old priest to secrecy and confessed he’d ate a ham sandwich one time, just to see what all the fuss was about. So the priest said eating ham was just a kid sin next to what he’d done, just one time. The rabbi had to order another round to get it out of him, but he finally got the priest to admit he’d done this to a woman once.”

  Miss Bubbles moaned, “I’m so happy for him. But what’s the point of the silly joke? Isn’t a joke supposed to be funny?”

  Longarm said, “I hadn’t finished. The joke ends with the rabbi sadly deciding that if a man aims to sin his way to hell, a woman has a ham sandwich beat by a mile. So Powder River and let her buck!”

  So the two of them came and somehow wound up on the floor face-to-face and still coming as they swapped spit and swore they’d never part again no matter what.

  Then Miss Bubbles sprang up to reach for the duds she’d hung on a wall hook, patting her hair bun back in shape with the other hand while Longarm stared up from the floor on one elbow, sort of bemused.

  She asked, “Do you really need all those land-grant ratifications, darling?”

  He said, “West Texas grants for sure.
There was nothing in the other records to indicate other family holdings in other parts. Young Devil Dave seems to run home to that same Lopez Grant every time he gets in real trouble anywhere else.”

  She said she’d be right back. He rose to his hands and knees to fish some matches and a three-for-a-nickel cheroot from the crumpled duds on the floor with him. He got back on the sofa to light up, with the smooth leather making his bare ass feel sort of wicked as he considered women and their mysterious ways. He’d been wondering how to gracefully get out of all this slap-and-tickle with the office punch board. So it was sort of surprising to feel relieved she’d be coming right back. The unfair sex was forever springing such surprises on mere men. That was likely why men spent so much time considering their mysterious ways.

  As he sat there blowing smoke rings Longarm idly wondered whether Miss Bubbles shared his mingled feelings of delight and distaste for such late-night slap-and-tickle atop office furniture meant for more officious government business. He’d meant what he said when he’d told the unpredictable blonde they were asking for trouble, and Miss Bubbles had sounded sincere when she’d agreed they ought to quit whilst they were ahead. Almost getting caught, more than once, had convinced them both, or Longarm, at any rate, that the pleasures of carefree rutting with a casual acquaintance weren’t worth the risk to a good government job. But it sure beat-all how tough it was to leave that last chocolate in the box, that last peanut in a bowl on the Parthenon bar, or pass on a sure piece of ass where you worked.

  So he couldn’t help from grinning like a shit-eating dog when Miss Bubbles nipped back in with just one of the bound ledgers from Judge Dickerson’s desk across the way. She dropped it on the tufted leather by his bare hip and commenced to get undressed some more as Longarm reached for the heavy tome with his cheroot still gripped between his teeth, saying, “Hold the thought whilst I just look one or two things up, honey. You’ll find I screw better with an easy mind. All the time we were at it, the last time, part of my brain was in West Texas instead of up your sweet little ring-dang-doo!”

  She hung her spring frock back on the same hook and strode back to rejoin him in just her black lisle stockings and high button shoes as she told him to read all he wanted about West Texas land grants.

  So he began to as Miss Bubbles sank gracefully to the floor with a bare elbow on the sofa and her hand on his bare thigh.

  The rebel state of Texas had yet to win back the rights they’d once had to store such information in their Austin statehouse. It had been the United States who’d signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico to end their war back in ’48. One of the terms agreed to was that the federal government would guarantee old Spanish land grants recognized by Mexico in earlier treaties, no matter what the new states and territories of California, Texas, and the New Mexico, since divided into Arizona and New Mexico Territories, might want.

  Opening the tome to a map of West Texas, Longarm mused out loud how the Deveruex-Lopez Grant had to be somewhere close to where those three Texas counties met. He added, “I’d have heard tell of it if it was half as big as that million and three-quarters Beaubien-Miranda Grant that old Don Lucien Maxwell bought off the last Beaubien heirs further north along the Pecos. But it can’t be too small. You ain’t allowed to divide one of them land grants up. All bets are off as soon as you commence carving up the original gift from the king of Spain and, no offense, Miss Bubbles, but I’m trying to read these old records!”

  Miss Bubbles didn’t answer. Miss Bubbles couldn’t answer, with her mouth so full.

  Chapter 4

  Miss Bubbles had to be home alone by eleven lest her neighbors suspect her of less than she’d been up to. Longarm offered her hack fare but she seemed to feel that might call her amateur status into question. So in the end he wound up in his own hired digs on the less fashionable side of Cherry Creek before midnight with his notebook filled with the little anyone knew for certain about Devil Dave and his home range along the lower Pecos.

  The odds were fair that Deveruex and his pals would steer clear of the Deveruex-Lopez Grant long enough to make certain nobody was hot on their trail. So Longarm headed for West Texas the next morning, armed with a blanket, a federal warrant, and a tall story to go with his simple but time-tested disguise.

  Outlaw eyes grew keen along the owlhoot trail, and nobody but stage actors at some distance from the front row could hope to fool anybody who was really looking with fake beards or putty noses. But, thanks to the pestiferous dress code of the Hayes Reform Administration, Longarm had been sitting in court near the late Elsbeth Flagg clean shaven, save for his permitted mustache, in that three-piece tobacco tweed suit and shoestring tie, with his dark telescoped Stetson mostly on that table, and the tailored grips of his cross-drawn Colt ’78 hidden from the view of anybody casing the courtroom ahead of that fusillade.

  A gunfighter accustomed to a double-action sixgun and a Winchester ’73 loading the same .44-40 S&W rounds had no call packing any other brands of sidearm or saddle gun, and the double derringer Longarm had clipped to one end of his watch chain was nobody’s business but his own.

  He aimed to keep wearing his sixgun cross-draw. The lower slung buscadero side-draw favored by some quick-draw artists really did offer a split second edge in a face-to-face showdown, standing tall. After that, a sixgun in a side-draw holster was much more awkward to get at sitting down or on horseback, if it didn’t fall out of the holster whilst you mounted up in a hurry. So Longarm stuck with the safer and surer style of gun toting proven in action by the likes of Hickok and the less famous but way deadlier young new-comer from Tennessee, Commodore Perry Owens. Longarm settled for a used but fancy tooled leather cross-draw rig he picked up in a hock shop along Larimer Street. He already had a faded denim outfit, and the notion of wearing some broke stranger’s boots had little appeal to him. But a pair of pawned spurs, fancied up Border Style with coin-silver, inlaid against a gunmetal-blue ground, made his broken-in and unpolished army stovepipes seem more cow. Meanwhile a man could get around faster on foot with low heels, and Longarm was so tall that he didn’t seem to be walking lower than most riders.

  On most field missions Longarm brought his personal army saddle and bridle along, with his Winchester and possibles lashed to the same. But General McClellan hadn’t included a roping horn when he’d designed that popular cavalry seat. So Longarm had his Winchester and usual saddle bags lashed to the double-rig and tie-down stock-saddle riding on the baggage rack in the private Pullman compartment he’d hired for the long round-about train ride to West Texas.

  He hadn’t asked to ride so fancy. Marshal Billy Vail had ordered it. The duck-soup simple plan his boss had reluctantly gone along with hinged on nobody suspecting Longarm’s assumed name and occupation. A stranger drifting in from the west as a cow hand thrown out of work in the wake of the recent Lincoln County War was likely to have some awkward questions to answer if somebody else remembered riding a train down from Denver with the suspicious cuss.

  So he stayed in his compartment and had his meals delivered at some extra cost, cussing Billy Vail and his own luck whenever he spied a well-turned ankle getting on at more than one stop. But all things good and bad must end, and he got off at last in El Paso to hole up at once in a posada he knew there run by friendly Mexicans.

  He knew gals in El Paso of all complexions and persuasions. But the kindly old philosopher who’d warned a woman’s tongue could wag more than a dog’s tail had likely passed through parts where he was bettter known as a lawman than as an unemployed cowboy. So he holed up overnight in the posada to break any sign he’d left leaving the railroad depot and hired a Mex barkeep he trusted to buy him a good Spanish riding mule and tether it out back.

  Then he rode off down the Rio Grande by the dawn’s early light with a hard-on for that pretty little thing who’d served him huevos ranchero with his black coffee, in bed. He’d suspected she’d been anxious to serve him in other ways, but whether she’d have bragged
or not, she’d been a daughter of the house and Longarm got along better than most of his own kind with Spanish-speaking folk because he played by their rules when it came to mujares. There were mujares, or women, along the border anybody could mess with and there were others nobody messed with, unless he was up to licking all their male kin, out to kissing cousins. You never even mentioned any gal in a Mex pal’s family before you’d been introduced to her, formal, if you wanted said Mex to stay a pal. So whilst it was safe to thank a pretty little mestiza for a swell breakfast she’d been told to bring you, nothing any woman could possibly do for any man would be worth the risk of trying for it under her dad’s own roof.

  The first thing riders noticed about West Texas was the size of the place. Even when you beelined, it was over three hundred and fifty miles, or nigh two weeks in the saddle from El Paso, to where the Pecos drained into the Rio Grande, or Rio Bravo as most Mexicans still called her.

  Back in Denver, Longarm and Billy Vail had agreed this might be good or bad. Unless Devil Dave and his pals already had a lead on him, Longarm figured to dawdle in ahead of them but not too soon after word of their gunplay got spread across their home range. With Longarm’s wary agreement, Billy Vail had wired Texas Ranger Headquarters in San Antone about that federal warrant on their wandering boy. San Antone was a tad closer to the the Pecos Valley than El Paso and naturally, there were ranger substations even closer. So unless the rangers got luckier than usual, they should have paid their usual calls on the usual suspects and suspected hiding places by the time Longarm could ride in from another direction entire. In the unlikely event the rangers caught Devil Dave by the time he arrived—they’d had a wet spring and the water holes one called tanks in West Texas were full and the grass grew green amid the mesquite, prickle pear, and Spanish bayonet—so, what the hell, a nice long ride for nothing wouldn’t leave any permanent scars and a man got rusty around that infernal federal building.