Longarm and the Banker's Daughter (9781101613375) Page 5

  The girl whimpered from somewhere off ahead of Longarm and to his right, southwest of the camp. He started running, boots thudding softly. The others came after him, no one saying anything, the air around them tense and expectant. Starlight glistened weakly off their extended pistols.

  Longarm stopped, turning an ear in the direction the girl’s scream had come from.

  Longarm was beginning to think he’d imagined the screech and ensuing whimper when there was another sound—deeper this time and obviously caused by Lacy drawing a ragged breath.

  Longarm continued forward and stopped near a broad juniper. Just as he held a branch aside and peered through the tree, a man grunted, sighed, and then Longarm knew what had caused the commotion.

  About twenty feet beyond him, a low fire burned. Two silhouettes hunkered down between Longarm and the fire—one that Longarm recognized as Lacy kneeling bent forward, her ass in the air. Her hair shone in the firelight.

  The other pale shadow belonged to Shafter, who, wearing only his hat, knelt behind her. The captain had his hands on the girl’s hips, and grinding his pelvis against her ass, he grunted softly and jerked while she continued to whimper with satisfaction.

  Longarm released the branch with a disgusted chuff and turned toward the men spread out behind him. “False alarm, amigos.”

  He depressed the Colt’s hammer, shoved it down into its holster, and started walking back to the fire. The gunmen lingered behind him, peering through the juniper, snorting and chuckling.

  The tall, lanky pistoleer called Goose said, “Suppose he’s gonna give us each a turn?”

  Another man snorted.

  “Hell, that weren’t no love scream,” the man called Ryan said as they walked slowly back to their own fire behind Longarm. “Now, me—I could make that pretty little puss really meow!”

  More snorts and muffled laughter.

  While the others settled back down in their own soogans on the other side of the fire ring, muttering amongst themselves, Longarm slacked down into his own bedroll. He leaned back against his saddle and crossed his arms on his chest. He stared at the stars through the thin vapor of his own breath.

  Something was eating at him. What was it?

  Lacy.

  He chewed his mustache as he recognized the emotion despite his having felt it but maybe once or twice in his life before.

  Jealousy.

  Lacy gave another groan as the captain finished. On the quiet night air, he could hear them speaking in hushed tones. He said something and she gave a husky laugh. Suddenly their fire flared as one of them added more wood to it.

  He couldn’t help remembering his own night with the diabolical vixen. Even knowing how evil she was—or maybe because of it—he’d had one hell of a fine, old time between her legs, enjoying her warm, soft lips and teasing tongue on his pecker. Now she was giving all that to Captain Shafter, and while Longarm felt no emotional pull toward the girl, he did feel an ache in his crotch, and that was enough to cause him to bite down hard on his back teeth and give a deep, ragged sigh as he tipped his hat down low over his eyes and beckoned sleep.

  The four gunmen must have been suffering a similar frustration. He could hear them about twenty feet beyond him, whispering and chuckling, expressing their own goatish desires. Longarm grinned at the next thought that entered his head.

  The captain better watch himself with that demonic little filly, he thought, or he’s liable to end up with a bullet in his head.

  * * *

  “Sleep well, Longarm?” she asked the next day just after sunrise, when he and the four gunmen were rigging their horses.

  She strolled up to him wearing one of the captain’s spare shirts—a brown wool shirt trimmed with red piping that she’d left about half unbuttoned and knotted around her waist, leaving about two inches of her midriff bare. The shirt was pulled taught against the two round mounds of her jutting breasts.

  Her freshly brushed hair glistened like honey with buttery sunlight shining through it.

  Longarm ignored the twinge of desire in the head of his otherwise slack cock.

  “There’s nothing like the cool night air for helping a man to a good night’s rest,” he said, puffing a three-for-a-nickel cheroot as he tied his bedroll behind his saddle.

  She stopped a few feet away from him, crossing her arms beneath her breasts and cocking one leg forward, glancing back to where the captain sat on a rock, enjoying a cup of coffee and one of his prissy cigarettes. “Dickie slept well, also. After he finally got to sleep, I mean. I don’t think the percentage gals down Texas way can satisfy him—not after enjoying the pleasure of moi in Jawbone. So we had a reunion of sorts. I hope I didn’t scream too loudly.”

  “Oh, did you scream?”

  “Fuck you,” she said softly through a crooked smile. “You know I did. But I was thinking about you, Longarm. And that plow handle you battered me with the night before.”

  Longarm didn’t look at her, hoping she’d go away, as he tied the second strap on his hot roll. The other men were several yards away, smoking and tending their own mounts, one cleaning out the frog of his skewbald paint’s left front hoof.

  She stepped up beside Longarm and whispered just off his left shoulder, “You could have me again, if you wanted me badly enough. Me . . . and so much more, Custis.” She pivoted coquettishly, giving him a saucy look as she swung her hair back, then started back toward Shafter, saying quietly over her shoulder to Longarm, “I reckon you’re just going to have to want it again badly enough, aren’t you?”

  Longarm almost choked on the raw knot in his throat as he pulled the strap taut on his bedroll. His knees felt like sponges, and a vein in his temple throbbed. He could hear her behind him, talking in sultry tones with Shafter, and he hated the way he hated it. Hated her and hated Shafter.

  The girl needed to be locked up, the key thrown in the ocean.

  He backed his grullo out away from the other horses and stepped into the saddle. He glanced down at where the captain sat on a rock near the fire they’d built up for breakfast and had Lacy on his knee. They both looked up at him.

  “I’m gonna ride back a few miles, make sure we haven’t been followed by Gunn and Cruz’s bunch.”

  “Well, I for one applaud your decision, Marshal!” said the fancy Dan, widening his eyes and puffing out his too-thin chest behind that silly elk-skin jacket that made him look like a younger, sillier version of Buffalo Bill Cody.

  Lacy wrapped her arms around his neck and beamed at him. She slid her eyes once, snidely, toward Longarm, then slid them back to Shafter as if the gaudy, overwrought sissy were the man of her dreams.

  Longarm pinched his hat brim to the pair, then reined the grullo away from the fire and loped it back out to the main trail, the four gunmen looking after him curiously. When he was half a mile out from the camp, he started feeling better, looser. Or at least not as tight.

  Christ, that girl had a hold on him. But what man wouldn’t she have a hold on? He’d known a few women like that—women you could fall in love with after a single glance, as though that glance were a net they dropped over you, tightened up like Glidden wire and with which they drew you toward them and held you there, under an otherwordly spell you couldn’t break free of.

  Of course, it was a net that in reality men really only threw over themselves and paid dearly for doing it. But it couldn’t be helped. Girls like Lacy Sackett—and there were damn few of her caliber—quickly became the objects of men’s obsessions. Often several men at once. And they knew it from an early age, and they took full advantage of it.

  Why the hell not?

  As he put the horse up a long, low rise straight south of where he and the others had bivouacked, he came to the rock-hard conclusion that this girl, Lacy Sackett, was more of a succubus than any other siren on earth or elsewhere.
This one really was a witch. Pure-dee dyed-in-the-wool evil.

  He snorted a wry, mirthless laugh.

  And what he wouldn’t give to be able to let his guard down and have her writhing under him one more time!

  He rode for another mile. To his right lay a shelving mesa about the size of a small frontier settlement. It resembled a sinking ship, and he rode up the sunken end to the prow of steep, crenelated sandstone.

  Dismounting the grullo, he reached into his saddlebags and pulled out a pair of army field glasses. He hunkered down behind a boulder at the lip of the mesa and cast his gaze out over the top of the rock to the south, adjusting the glasses’ focus until he had clear, broad view of his and the others’ back trail for a couple of miles.

  He studied the broad valley closely, spying nothing but two riders heading from his left to his right about a mile away. They were trailing a small herd of horses and likely worked for one of the area’s sprawling ranches. The only other movement was a trio of coyotes and several rabbits scuttling about between sage clumps.

  He’d just started to lower the glasses when something moved. He steadied them, turning slightly left until he brought up several riders riding toward him along his and the others’ back trail. His heart quickened. He continued to steady the glasses and squint through the two semicircles of magnified terrain. The figures themselves were loping their mounts, rising up and down, but as they came down a rise Longarm could make out the two lead riders.

  Heck Gunn was on the left, wearing his customary opera hat with a spray of wildflowers rising from the silk band around the crown. He also wore round-rimmed, steel-framed glasses, and a gold hoop ring dangled from his right ear.

  Orlando Cruz rode to Gunn’s left—a stocky Mexican in a bowler hat, with long black hair hanging to his shoulders, and cartridge bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest, over a short, Mexican-style leather jacket. He rode with a sawed-off shotgun hanging down his chest by a leather lanyard. Gunn’s own arsenal included three pistols holstered on his hips and over his belly.

  The ten or so men behind him and Gunn were similarly attired and armed. A rugged, mean, nasty bunch. And they were after Lacy. Sure enough, they had to be. What else could lure them back north—back in the direction of the last bank they’d robbed—instead of south to the safety and anonymity of Mexico?

  Gunn and Cruz and maybe all the others had gotten a taste of something they needed more of.

  Longarm lowered the glasses, rose, and dropped them back into his saddlebags. He swung into the saddle and gigged the grullo back down the slanting mesa to the tableland, then turned the horse right, heading back to the trail.

  As he did, he glanced behind him. He couldn’t see the men trailing him from nearly a mile away, but they were pushing their horses hard. If they kept up that frantic pace, they’d be on Shafter’s group soon. Longarm had to reach them and warn them. With Shafter’s four gunnies, Shafter himself, and Longarm, they should be able to bring down Heck Gunn and Orlando Cruz handily, and then Longarm would not only have captured their deceitful albeit beautiful coconspirator, but he’d have the money they’d stolen from Alexander Sackett’s bank, as well.

  He tapped the heels of his cavalry stovepipes against the grullo’s flanks, and the horse responded by stretching its stride into a sage-chewing gallop straight north along the old Indian trail he and the others had followed. He was starting to feel better, less like a damn sap and more like a lawman again, when he, staring straight ahead over his lunging horse’s head and twitching ears, saw something that created an instant ache in the pit of his belly.

  Someone lying beside the trail near where he and the others had camped the night before.

  He knew right away who it was. Some inner voice told him, and when he’d swung down from the grullo while it was still running, he dropped to a knee beside the man and saw the fringed elk-skin jacket, the red-blond hair curling over the collar.

  Shafter lay on his side. He was still breathing, his shoulders rising and falling quickly. With every breath, he shuddered.

  Longarm rolled him over on his back and winced when he saw the blood over the man’s belly. The fancy Dan had both his gloved hands clamped tight to the wound, but they weren’t stopping the blood and viscera from oozing out of the two or three holes in him. His open eyes were vacant, but they swung toward Longarm, and his mouth opened and closed as he managed to say, “B-bastards . . . took her. Took . . . Lacy.”

  “Why?” But of course Longarm knew why. They wanted some of what they’d heard last night for themselves.

  “They laughed,” Shafter said. “They just kept . . . laughing . . .”

  “Do you know where they’re headed?”

  All Captain Richard Shafter said was, “B-bastards . . .” And then he turned his head to one side, and his shoulders stopped rising and falling. His hands fell away from his belly.

  Longarm cursed and looked down his back trail. The pack of Gunn and Cruz riders were merely a brown splotch from this distance. It was hard to tell, but Longarm thought they were walking their horses.

  He turned back to Shafter, shook his head in frustration. “You stupid son of a bitch, Dickie!” If the man hadn’t been lording the girl over his men, this might not have happened. Now, Longarm had a decision to make. Did he want to try to ambush Gunn and Cruz and retrieve the stolen money or go after Lacy?

  He didn’t have much sympathy for the girl, but it was her he’d go after. He couldn’t let Dickie’s four gunnies rape her and likely kill her and toss her in some ravine. Gunn and Cruz’s men could wait. At least, he’d save them for later if they didn’t catch up to him before he’d caught up to Lacy and her four captors . . .

  Quickly, he dragged the dead Dickie Shafter off the trail and behind a knoll. “Sorry, pal. I’d like to dig you a proper grave, but we’re burnin’ daylight.”

  Longarm merely laid the man out as respectfully as he could—on his back, legs together, wrists crossed on his bloody belly—then jogged back out to where his grullo cropped fescue and buckbrush. Swinging into the saddle, he glanced behind once more.

  Gunn and Cruz were no longer visible, having most likely dropped into a crease between low prairie swells. They were back there, though. They had to be. And since Longarm didn’t have time to cover his and the four gunmen’s tracks, they’d be tracking him as he tracked them until they eventually caught up to him.

  And then, if his current streak of sour luck continued, he’d likely be caught in one hell of a cross fire.

  Chapter 7

  The night was cold as a grave digger’s ass.

  Cold moonlight reflected off the sheer peaks rising around Longarm, jutting tall above the pines and firs crowding close to the trail, the stony crests hidden far above. A lone wolf howled—a mournful, bewitching sound on such a cold, moonlit night this far up in the high and rocky.

  The pine boughs rained the silvery lunar light like Christmas tassels.

  Behind Longarm, a wildcat whined. At what? The Gunn and Cruz Bunch? Were they behind him? He couldn’t tell. It had been dark for hours so he’d long ago given up looking for shadowers. He hadn’t spied them before the sun had gone down, either, but Gunn and Cruz were sneaky. If they were near, he likely wouldn’t know it.

  He had to assume they were behind him, for he hadn’t had time to cover his own tracks, let alone those of the four gunmen who’d kidnapped Lacy. When they’d reached the mountains, instead of swinging east in the direction of the Arkansas River and Jawbone, they’d headed west before turning north into the rugged slopes themselves. They’d followed a game path up through the forested mountain shoulders, and Longarm had followed them, as the Gunn and Cruz Bunch had probably followed him, and now here he was at the edge of clearing somewhere in the craggy reaches of the Sawatch Range.

  Killers ahead of him, killers behind.

  The wolf gav
e its mournful howl once more. The short hairs lifted under Longarm’s shirt collar. As he stared out from the edge of the forest and into a broad clearing beyond, he held his Winchester repeater up high across his chest, index finger curled through the trigger guard, his thumb worrying the uncocked hammer.

  On the far side of the clearing, a hundred yards away, a cabin hunched at the base of another sheer ridge that the moonlight painted nearly the white of parchment. It was relieved in shadows. At the ridge’s rock-strewn base, Longarm could see the faint silver line of what must have been a stream.

  The cabin itself sat in front of the stream—a simple log affair with a brush roof and a large hearth running up the right end. Smoke gushed from the chimney, unfurling like small, pale ghosts above the tops of the pines that closed in around both sides of the cabin. Longarm could see the vague shadow of a stable and a corral flanking the cabin to the right.

  The horses of Fallon, Brennan, Studemyer, and Ryan were likely confined there. It had to be the gunmen and Lacy in the cabin. Their trail led directly out from beneath Longarm’s boots and into the clearing toward the shack that had most likely been built by a trapper or a prospector, for those were the only breed of men who lived this far up in the craggy reaches. Fallon or one of the other gunmen had to have known about it previously, for their trail had led directly here without wavering. The group had only stopped a few times, quickly, to rest and water their horses.

  And then they’d continued here—the four cold-steel artists and their saucy prize.

  Longarm stared at the shack’s lighted windows. They were likely in there at this very moment, enjoying what Dickie Shafter had enjoyed the night before. Funny that Longarm couldn’t hear her screaming, though. Or maybe four at once was just her style . . .

  His impulse was to hurry across the clearing and save the girl, even though she didn’t deserve it, but caution was his friend. Most likely at least one of the four gunmen was keeping scout over the place. They had to have figured that Longarm was shadowing them. He’d been surprised at least one of them hadn’t held back to bushwhack him earlier along the trail.