Longarm and the Cry of the Wolf (9781101619506) Read online

  Desperately seeking distraction, she’d dropped to her knees in front of Longarm, dug his cock out of his balbriggans, and sucked him so dry that he didn’t think he’d have another drop of jism to ejaculate for a month.

  Now they mashed their hot tongues together. As he pulled his head back from hers, her tongue followed his out of her mouth, and they separated. She rose onto her elbows, grabbed the bottle off the nightstand, and took a long, manlike pull, wiping her rich, red lips with the back of her hand.

  She narrowed one eye speculatively and smiled, her hazel eyes flashing in the gray afternoon light pushing through a near window. “I think I’d like to fuck one more time, Custis. Can we do that before we begin thinking again about the wolves and that poor David Leonard in Marshal Calvin’s cellar?”

  “Fine as frog hair.” Longarm rolled the girl onto her belly, Catherine laughing, her delightful breasts jostling. “I’d like a better angle this time,” he said, and holding her up against his hips with his right arm, he slowly impaled her with his jutting shaft.

  “Uh, God!” she groaned, grabbing the bed’s brass frame as though it were the rail of a storm-thrashed ship.

  He hammered her hard for nearly fifteen minutes, sweating, the bedsprings sighing in accompaniment to her groans and muffled cries. In and out, in and out. His cock seemed to grow and grow. Her snatch expanded and contracted like a hand wringing out a rag . . . until he drew her hard against him one last time and, arching his back and thrusting his pelvis forward, gave himself to the spasming release.

  His burly grunt echoed off the wooden walls.

  Catherine released the bed frame. She dropped like so much wet wash from a line, her head coming to rest on a pillow, her ass still drawn up hard against Longarm’s shaft that was only just now beginning to dwindle.

  “Mr. Lawman, sir,” she said in a rich, breathy voice, “you sure can fuck.”

  Outside, a wolf howled. Long and mournful. Longarm froze, listening. Something told him it was the same wolf he’d heard before—the one that seemed to be on a high perch above the town.

  He removed his arm from around Catherine’s waist, and her hips sagged down against the bed. She rolled onto her side and drew her knees toward her breasts as she watched him climb down off the bed, his pecker lightly slapping his thigh as he moved to the window over the washstand.

  “What do you suppose he wants?” she said, still a little breathless, sweeping her thick hair back behind her ear. “More blood?”

  Longarm remembered what Goldie had told him about the woman, Crazy Kate, who’d been locked up in the convent perched high on that pinnacle of rock. Just like before, he suppressed the nonsensical possibility that the howls could belong to the woman, and looked up and down the street.

  The sky was gray. Snow fell from it lazily, dusting the tan ground. Straight up, however, the clouds were parting. The light was fading at the end of a late-autumn day high in the San Juans. The moon would be rising soon.

  The full moon.

  It appeared that so far no wolves prowled the streets. But what would happen when darkness fell? Longarm hoped all the residents of Crazy Kate had strong doors and windows. Likely, they did. He had a feeling the current plethora of wolves around here was not a recent occurrence. Something told him the village had been living with this many critters for months. Maybe years.

  He grabbed the whiskey bottle, took a pull.

  Catherine reached out from the bed, wrapped her hand around his slack dong, running a thumb over the head. “I love your cock.”

  “My cock loves you.”

  “Could we stay right here and fuck the rest of the day and night away?”

  Longarm took another pull from the bottle and shook his head as he continued staring into the street, shuttling his gaze to the marshal’s office. Calvin’s two front windows were lit against the coming darkness. “I’m gonna see about my prisoner and the boy. I’d best check around to see if there’s any human wolves on the prowl out there . . . along with the four-legged brand.”

  “Human wolves?”

  “Goldie and his bunch had been aimin’ to meet up with some of their former gang members up here in the mountains somewhere. I don’t know where exactly. Somethin’ tells me they probably know by now what happened to three of their ilk back at Hawk’s Bluff, and that Goldie is here.”

  “You think they’ll try to bust him out of Calvin’s Wolf Hold?”

  “Hope so. I might as well haul their asses back to Denver along with Goldie’s. Just as soon not have to come back here anytime soon.”

  She brushed her fingers along the underside of his scrotum. “After all the fun we’ve had?”

  Longarm shuddered to the thrill of her touch. He snorted and sat down on the bed. He handed her the bottle. She drank. When she was through, he leaned down and, cupping her right breast, kissed the nipple of the other one. She ran her hands through his hair, lightly raked her fingers across his unshaven jaw.

  “I’m gonna go out have me a talk with Calvin, see how deep this werewolf idea goes,” he said, rising and reaching for his clothes.

  She threw the covers back. “Can I come with you?”

  He looked at her lying naked and semi-curled on the bed, her young, taut body long-legged, firm-busted, and ripe. Her eyes were coy, playful as she stared up from beneath her brows, her beautiful face exquisitely framed by her love-tangled hair. Her cheeks were flushed with fulfillment.

  Longarm sighed. “Has any man ever been able to say no to you, Catherine?”

  She grinned, got up, and started washing herself at the stand beneath the window. They both froze for a second when the wolf howled again.

  • • •

  Longarm and Catherine left the room together, their boots clomping on the second-story floorboards.

  As Catherine gave him one last peck on the cheek and started down the stairs, Longarm paused to dig a three-for-a-nickel cheroot out of his shirt pocket and light it. He puffed on it for a while, rolling it expertly between his lips, savoring the honey-like taste of the girl and the whiskey lingering on his tongue and now mixing with the peppery, woodsy taste of the smoke. From below rose a cloud of tobacco smoke and the low rumble of conversation as well as the clinking of glasses and bottles.

  Longarm saw that the Carpathian was teeming with clientele—mostly bearded locals in suspenders, dungarees, and cone-shaped, floppy-brimmed hats or watch caps, but with several non-native shopkeepers and cowpunchers from area ranches thrown in, as well. The punchers were probably in town to wait out the long winter before roundup and the resumption of steady pay.

  The general’s men, conspicuous in their ostentatious frontier garb—fringed buckskin slacks and tunics decorated every which way with beads and fake porcupine quills—sat in the middle of the milling crowd. They were a raucous quartet, and the general was just now standing with his arm around a bare-breasted, bored-looking Indian whore and gesturing wildly while speaking to a bearded local at the table next to his own.

  “Strychnine!” the general said, poking his cigar at the man to whom he spoke. “You people get a wagonload of strychnine up here and toss it into the woods around the town. Hell, poison all the trash heaps. Now, you might kill a few dogs and coyotes”—the general laughed, taking several puffs from his cigar—“but I guarantee you’ll solve your wolf problem in a matter of days!”

  One of his friends, who resembled Buffalo Bill in his gray-streaked blond muttonchops and goatee, climbed wobbly footed from his chair and announced as though to the entire room, “And I, Hiriam H. R. Langeford the Fourth, here and now promise to pay for the entire load—wagon, driver, and as much poison as it takes to expunge your furry menace from these environs!”

  A tall, gangly puncher got up and whooped, waving his hat in the air. Several of the painted girls milling about the room clapped. One stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled.r />
  “Thank you, sir!” This from the bartender, a middle-aged man in a beard but with a clean-shaven upper lip. He had a heavy Old World accent, and he continued with what Longarm detected in his overloud voice to be irony: “That will certainly take care of our problem. Indeed!” He looked at several of the other native locals sitting about the room in their suspenders and smoking their pipes, looking bored with the moneyed gents’ carryings-on. “Won’t it, my brothers?”

  The men he’d spoken to merely smiled fatefully and shook their heads. One raised his beer schooner to the barman, turned his mouth corners down, and drank as though to a dark fate, a cold grave.

  Chapter 10

  Longarm felt a knot grow behind his belt buckle as, descending the stairs, he looked around at the locals and then at the more recent settlers of Crazy Kate, who were mostly younger and without that dark, Old World cynicism in their gazes. He looked at the general now, and the contrast was even starker as the man turned to his daughter, wobbling drunkenly, the pretty Indian doxie holding him up, one arm wrapped around his considerable waist, the other hand splayed on his chest.

  Her small breasts jostled as she moved with the old, drunk soldier.

  “Catherine, my dear. So good of you to join us. I was getting worried.” The general looked at Longarm and grinned devilishy. “Fornicating again, my dear?” he asked his daughter. “Whatever will I do with you?”

  “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it, Father?” Catherine said, stopping and hiking an elbow atop the bar. She nodded at the Indian girl. “You pay her well. She’s gonna earn every penny.”

  Catherine glanced at Longarm, who bellied up to the bar beside her.

  With the help of the Indian girl, General Fortescue wended his way through the tables and chairs and approached his daughter and the tall federal lawman, who had just ordered a drink for him and her. He’d been intending on heading over to the town marshal’s office, but he saw Marshal Frank Calvin just now entering the Carpathian Mountain, batting his hat against his thigh to dislodge the fresh dusting of snow.

  Flanking him, the saloon’s large window was fading to lilac, snow pellets flecking the glass.

  The general said, “Marshal Long, I must say I’m surprised but pleased to see you here. The wolves were absolutely devilish along the trail. I take it Catherine informed you about what happened to one of our party?” The general cleared his throat and grinned with half of his mouth mantled with the thick, silver walrus mustache. “I assume you two do talk some . . .”

  “Some,” Catherine said, taking the glass from her father’s hand and skidding it across the bar.

  “She did,” Longarm said. “My condolences, General.”

  “Imagine these people believing in werewolves!”

  “It’s true, mister.” This from Frank Calvin walking up behind the general with his long, wool-lined deerskin coat hanging open.

  “Uh . . . that’s General Fortescue,” said his bodyguard, Captain Sidney Ashton-Green, who’d been slowly, not inconspicuously gravitating toward Catherine since she’d dropped down out of her and Longarm’s love nest on the second story.

  “Oh, that’s quite all right, Sidney,” the general said, extending his hand toward the town marshal. “Marshal, I don’t believe we’ve been formally introduced.”

  Calvin scowled back at the rotund ex-soldier, the town marshal’s eyes critically raking the general’s flashy buckskin attire. Reluctantly, he shook the man’s hand, not bothering to remove his glove. “Frank Calvin, General. How long do you and your people figure on stayin’ here in Crazy Kate? Winter’s comin’ on, don’t you know. The passes will have you all sealed in soon.” He narrowed an eye at Longarm. “You, too, Marshal Long.”

  “Kind of hard to leave now, isn’t it,” said Captain Ashton-Green, “with so many wolves on the prowl? The general and myself and our compadres have decided to head out first thing in the morning and shoot as many as we can.”

  “Yes,” said General Fortescue, lifting his chin and throwing his shoulders back, though the Indian girl had to lean into him hard to steady him, “we’ll be bringing back enough pelts by sundown tomorrow to provide winter coats for everyone residing in your fair town for quite some time. Might not get them all, but enough to scare the others away.”

  “Ah, never thought of that,” said Calvin with a wry glance at the bartender.

  “My associate, Mr. Langeford over there”—the general canted his head toward the goat-bearded dandy who sat sleeping in his chair, amid a plethora of empty bottles, shot glasses, and beer mugs—“has promised to send up a wagon loaded with arsenic. That should solve the problem straightaway. I suggest you keep a good supply of the poison on hand. A great many wolves do seem attracted to this neck of the mountains, for some odd reason.”

  “Ah, hell,” the barman intoned in his heavy, Eastern European brogue, scowling toward the front of the saloon. “I forgot to close the shutters on the place, and here the sun is nearly down!” He added a couple of what sounded like expletives in his native tongue and then, glancing worriedly at Calvin, scrambled out from around the bar, heading for the front door.

  Catherine glanced worriedly at Longarm. “Don’t worry,” he said beneath the crowd’s low roar. “They wouldn’t . . .”

  He let his voice trail off as he looked at the window and saw two yellow eyes, like miniature lanterns, glowing just beyond the glass. Wolf shadows danced around behind the eyes. Longarm’s pulse hammered. He shuttled his gaze to the bartender, who was just now walking out the front door.

  Longarm jerked forward, sliding his Colt from its holster. “Hold on, mister!”

  Too late.

  The barman had no sooner stepped out onto the Carpathian Mountain’s front porch than he screamed as he swung to his left and a heavy, dark figure leaped onto him. Just as the barman struck the porch floor, the two yellow eyes beyond the glass moved upward, and suddenly a huge, black wolf was leaping through the window in a hail of breaking glass.

  A whore screamed. A man yelled. The crowd turned toward the front of the saloon as though all heads were attached to the same rope.

  Glass shattered and rained on the floor with a sound like ten babies screeching. Out of the curtain of spraying glass, the wolf leaped onto the far end of the bar, back humped, head down, hackles raised, fangs bared. The beast looked around quickly and, finding a victim sitting nearby, had just started to leap, when Longarm’s Colt spoke twice.

  The beast screeched and did a sort of pirouette in midair. It fell against a man smoking a pipe, throwing the man out of his chair and piling up on top of him while everyone nearby leaped away.

  Longarm saw another wolf leaping through the window, and fired. The wolf yipped and hit the floor behind the bar.

  Frank Calvin was running up behind Longarm, yelling, “Oh, Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!”

  Longarm dashed to the window, his Colt extended and ready to fire, broken glass crunching beneath his boots. He looked through what remained of the window.

  No other wolves were in view until he’d stepped through the window and turned to see three beasts attacking the bartender, who cowered and screamed, kicking and trying to shield his head and face with his hands. Blood spurted in all directions, staining the saloon’s front doors and the porch floor.

  Longarm lunged forward, stopped, took careful aim, and fired. One of the wolves—a wiry gray—screamed, twisted around, and rolled up against the porch rail, biting at its bullet-torn right side. The others were jouncing around so wildly that Longarm’s next two rounds merely punched holes in the porch floor. The wolves barked, snarled, and either ran down the front steps or leaped over the rail, and quickly disappeared into the snowy blue gloaming.

  “Ah, hell.” Marshal Calvin stood in the open saloon door, looking down at the apron-clad barman writhing in a growing pool of his own blood. He convulsed violently, dying fa
st.

  Across the street, a gun flashed, the roar of the shotgun’s two barrels reaching Longarm’s ears a quarter second later. The giant deputy, Emil, stood just outside the jailhouse, aiming the gut-shredder at the fleeing wolves, who were long out of range of the pellet-pusher.

  Emil lowered the shotgun, broke it open, and hurriedly began replacing the spent loads with fresh. Longarm reloaded his Colt as he moved down off the Carpathian’s porch steps, looking carefully up and down the street. Calvin followed him out, extending two cocked pistols.

  “Your wolves are mighty brave, Marshal,” Longarm said as he walked up the street a few feet and peered into the gap between the saloon and the building beside it—a harness shop over which was perched Dr. Solomon’s office.

  “They ain’t my wolves—I’ll tell you that.” Calvin triggered his pistol into the wolf now lying dead against the porch rail. He fired again, causing the animal to jerk.

  “What’s that for?” Longarm asked, satisfied that no wolves were lurking in the break between the saloon and the harness shop.

  “I’m loaded with silver.” Calvin turned and walked back into the saloon that was buzzing with nervous chatter as the drinkers and cardplayers milled around to inspect the two dead wolves.

  Calvin was inside only a few seconds before two pistol shots echoed inside the place. A girl gasped with a start. Then Calvin walked out the front door, plucking the spent cartridges from one of his pistols and muttering, “Gave them a little dollop of silver, too.”

  “Werewolves, you think?” Longarm said, ironically, as he peered down the gap along the saloon’s opposite side.

  “That’s what I think, all right.” Calvin looked at Emil, who stood in the middle of the street, turning slowly, aiming his shotgun straight out from his right shoulder, ready for another onslaught. “Emil, hitch up a wagon. You an’ me are gonna haul these critters off, show the others what happens when they get as brave as they’re gettin’ tonight.”