Longarm and the Diamondback Widow (3 page)

“I'll tell you later,” Rainey said, glancing at the window over his right shoulder. The rain was still coming hard and fast, forming a long waterfall roaring over the depot building's overhang, behind the tied, jittery sorrel. The sheriff cursed under his breath and turned back to Winthrop. “Fetch me when you get the line back up—will you, Edgar?”

“Sure. You wanna leave your message, and I'll send it soon as I can start transmitting again?”

Rainey thought it over. The fewer people who knew about his suspicions the better. He didn't want the killer or killers to know he was on to him or them, and he didn't want to get himself back-shot, either.

On the other hand, he needed to get the message out as quickly as possible. He didn't need to explain the whole nasty business, he just needed help.

“Why not?”

“Here, scribble it on that,” Winthrop said, sliding an envelope down the table toward Rainey. He fished a pencil stub out of his pocket and set it atop the envelope.

Rainey leaned down, touched the pencil to his tongue, and scribbled a short note.

“There ya go, Edgar. Send that out just as soon as you can, will you? I'll be in my office.”

Winthrop read the pencil-scrawled missive and raised an eyebrow. “The U.S. Marshals, eh? This must be serious, Des.”

“Just let me know when you've sent the telegram, Edgar,” Rainey said, and turned to the door standing partly open behind him.

“Stay and have a cup of mud with me, Des,” the old station agent said, raising his own steaming mug enticingly. “You look like you could use some. I'll splash some busthead in it. Settle your nerves a little.”

“Nothin's gonna settle my nerves today, Edgar,” Rainey said as he went out, drawing the door closed behind him.

He rode over to one of the two livery barns in town and turned the sorrel over to Ronnie Brown, the son of one of the two brothers who ran the place. Rainey shucked his Winchester from the boot and then strode east along the street toward his office, not bothering to stay under the awning roofs on the street's north side.

He was so soaked that the rain no longer mattered. Also, he wanted to keep a keen eye on both sides of the street for any gunmen who might be lurking there.

Apprehension raked cold fingers across the back of his neck, and he probed the shadows between buildings for a possible bushwhacker—the same man who'd tried to dry-gulch him and Garvey back at the Bear-Runner ranch.

He was relieved when he reached the wooden porch of his small, mud-brick jailhouse and office. He stopped just off the stoop and shuttled a careful gaze up and down the muddy street, and then, seeing nothing suspicious, he mounted the porch. There was no lock on the door, just a steel-and-leather latch outfitted with a six-inch curl of wire.

Rainey looked forward to getting out of his wet clothes and sitting back in his chair with a tall brandy . . .

He threw the door open, stepped inside.

The sheriff stopped suddenly. “What the hell . . . are . . . you doing . . . here . . .?”

His last word was drowned out by a shotgun's thunderous explosion. The blast lifted Des Rainey three feet in the air and threw him back across the porch and into the street, where he landed with a splash in the ankle-deep mud.

Deputy United States Marshal Custis P. Long, known far and wide to friend and foe as Longarm, checked his army bay down in the shade of the cottonwoods lining the stage road he was following west toward the little ranch supply town of Diamondback, Wyoming Territory, and curveted the mount as it switched its tail at blackflies.

Longarm stared back the way he'd come, at the trail winding up and around the shoulder of a bullet-shaped butte the slopes of which were littered with small boulders and tufts of sage and yucca. No movement on the trail. At least, not for as far back as he could see, which was only about a half a mile.

He saw no dust plumes rising on the other side of the butte, either.

The federal badge toter looked to either side of the bluff, squinting his keen brown eyes beneath the brim of his flat-brimmed, snuff-brown Stetson, tipped over his right eye, cavalry-style, to investigate every nook and cranny, small rocky shelf, and wedge of purple shade, though shade was damn scarce out here except under the occasional tree.

Nothing along his backtrail looked suspicious in the least. In fact, he could see nothing but the facets of the land itself—brush, rocks, a few piñon pines, a scattering of scraggly junipers. At this time of the day, around two, even the jackrabbits were hunkered down in their burrows, out of the hammering sun.

No deer or elk. Damn few birds even, except a couple of warblers scurrying around in the aspens above and behind him.

Damn strange.

For the past half hour, since he'd left the Lone Pine Relay Station of the Wyoming Stage Company, he'd felt that itchy feeling beneath his collar that he felt at only two times. One was just after he'd gotten a haircut and the barber hadn't properly whisked the trimmings away from his neck. The other time was when he was being shadowed—usually by someone with the dreariest of intentions.

It was a feeling the lawman always heeded. Having been a deputy United States marshal in the service of Chief Marshal Billy Vail and Colorado's First District Federal Court in Denver for more years than he cared to count, he'd made his share of enemies. Every year it seemed that either someone he'd once locked up or the family or friends of someone he'd locked up or put away for a long time came gunning for him with the intention of turning him toe-down, sending him off pushing up daisies from the bottom of a deep, black grave.

At the moment, he could see no one on his backtrail. But the prickling under his collar told him that someone was back there, all right.

Sometimes, the best course of action in such a situation was to do as little as possible. If someone were indeed shadowing the lawman with evil intent, there was little reason to keep riding and allow the stalkers to possibly work around him and ambush him. Sometimes the best course of action was the least amount of action. He would sit down over there in those trees by that glinting brook, build a fire, boil up some coffee, and wait for the fellow or fellows to show himself or themselves.

Maybe they'd even have a cup of coffee together, talk things out in a civilized manner . . .

Longarm gave a wry snort as he reined the big army bay, which he'd requisitioned at the small cavalry outpost near Chugwater, off the trail and headed south through the aspens toward a shallow creek that flashed along the base of a boulder-strewn ridge, rippling and murmuring over rocks.

As the bay moved slowly, stepping around or over fallen branches, its hooves thumping and crunching dead leaves, the lawman cast another cautious look to the east. Beyond the trees and toward the bluff he'd ridden over ten minutes ago, still no movement.

Longarm reined the bay to a halt at the edge of the water lined with tall, green grass, moss, and coffee-colored foam licking at the bank. He stretched his six-foot-three-inch, broad-shouldered frame, outfitted with the narrow hips and muscular thighs of a veteran horseman, and then doffed his hat and ran his big, brown, callused hands through his close-cropped, dark brown hair. He scratched at his long sideburns and then ran a sleeve of his tobacco-tweed frock coat across his sweat-soaked, handlebar mustache.

It had been a long, hot trip out from Denver—blazes, it had been a hot summer!—and he'd be glad to get out of the sun for a while. The lawman's face, burned by many western suns and chewed by many a cold western wind, was customarily Indian-tan, but now at the tail end of a long, hot summer, it had been charred nearly as dark as mahogany. His mustache and sideburns had been bleached cinnamon, an interesting contrast to the mahogany. They were, in fact, nearly the exact color as his keen, intelligent eyes that could flash in jovial good humor and ribald laughter as easily and as quickly as they could flare in anger when riled.

Altogether the lawman called Longarm's earthy, chiseled, darkly handsome looks, accompanied as they were by a brawny, angular, long-muscled body clad in a now-dusty three-piece suit with a chocolate brown string tie, attracted quite a few admiring glances from the women of the species.

And Longarm had never been a man to brush away a woman's attentions. In fact, on the long trip out here by train and horseback he'd entertained himself remembering the silky, warm, wet lips of Cynthia Larimer. Yes, the heartrendingly beautiful young niece of Denver's founding father, General Larimer, had bequeathed to him a French lesson on the grandest scale the evening before his train departed Union Station for Wyoming.

He would remember the way she'd sucked and tongued and gently nibbled his cock while tickling his balls with her fingertips, holding him teetering on the edge of satisfaction until he'd thought his heart would explode—on his deathbed!

When Longarm had released the bay's latigo and bridle bit, so it could forage and drink at will, he knelt by the stream and dunked his head in the cold water, ridding his mind of the sensation of Cynthia Larimer's lips around his manhood. No use torturing himself.

He donned his hat, rose, and scrounged in the near trees for enough wood to make a coffee fire. While he worked, he kept a close eye on the trail curving just beyond the copse. He kept his ears pricked, as well, but so far he'd heard nothing but the slight breeze, the stream sliding between its broad banks, and the birds fluttering around the branches overhead.

He made coffee, and when the Arbuckle's had come to a boil, he settled the grounds with a little fresh water from his canteen and then filled a fire-blackened tin cup. He was sitting on a log by the fire, sipping the hot brew slowly and staring through the trees toward the trail, when the bay pricked its ears and gave a low nicker deep in its chest. The horse had been facing the stream, nibbling the green grass growing along the bank, but now the mount swung its head around to look toward the trail.

Longarm almost smiled when he, too, began picking up the slow clomps of a rider making his way along the trace.

That old sixth sense of his was as keen as ever.

He remained sitting on the log, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, steaming cup in his gloved hands, listening to the slow thuds growing gradually louder. He stared toward the trail and saw a shadow move. The shadow was shaped like a horse and rider. The rider angled off the trail and into the trees and was making straight for Longarm, slowly.

The horse was a sorrel with a left front stocking and an interrupted stripe down the muzzle. Longarm couldn't tell much about the rider because of the shade cloaking her, but that she was a girl was obvious by the curvy figure clad in a red-and-white checked shirt and faded blue denims with patched knees. Full, round mounds pushed out the shirt and jostled as horse and rider approached through the trees.

When she came out of the trees, the girl stopped the sorrel about ten feet away from Longarm's fire. The lawman's throat swelled and dried as he stared up at her. She was a pretty, suntanned girl with coarse auburn hair hanging straight down past her shoulders from beneath her black Stetson, the chin thong of which dangled across her chest. Her hair was streaked copper by the sun. The girl's eyes were the most striking green Longarm had ever seen.

Her face was expressionless as she stared at Longarm, who canted his head to regard the girl more closely. Seventeen, eighteen, he would say. A tall girl—long-legged and full-busted. Those jade-green eyes were damned off-putting. She wore brush-scarred brown chaps and brown stockmen's boots.

The cat had gotten Longarm's tongue, so the girl was first to speak, lifting her smoky green gaze to the sun-dappled, cool, refreshing water behind him. “This is my swimmin' hole, mister.”

Longarm opened his mouth to tell her that he was sorry for intruding, but then she turned the sorrel around the fire and, clomping past him, turned her head toward him and quirked her mouth corners just slightly, provocatively. Then she turned forward and jogged up along the stream for about fifty yards, her hair bouncing on her shoulders, and stopped.

She swung her long right leg over the cantle of her saddle and leaped fleetly down to the ground, landing and bouncing slightly on the balls of her boots and immediately reaching under the sorrel's belly to release its latigo strap. She slipped the horse's bit from its teeth, dropped the reins, and doffed her black hat.

She tossed the hat on the ground, then reached into one of her saddlebag pouches and pulled out what appeared to be a towel. She tossed the towel over a small pine tree that was not as tall as she was. Glancing at him almost furtively, she stepped behind the tree and lifted her hands to her shirt. Again, she glanced at him, and Longarm turned away discreetly, dipping his nose in his coffee cup and taking a sip, feeling a hard thudding in his chest and a tightening in his crotch.

Christ, was she going to undress right there? Swim right there?

He held his head forward and continued to sip his coffee, making an effort to look nonchalant, but he kept glancing out the left corner of his eye. The girl was moving around over there. He thought he could see clothes being tossed to the ground. When she swung away from the tree, he turned his head toward her, and drew a deep breath.

She was stepping off the bank and into the stream, naked as the day she was born, but a whole lot better filled out.

Christ. She was tall and leggy, all right.

Slender-wasted, shoulders kind of broad in the way of girls who rode a lot get broad-shouldered and long-legged.

He couldn't see her front, but he could see the curve of her left breast under her arm, and it would be one nice handful indeed. She did not turn her head toward him as she walked slowly into the stream, holding her hands out slightly, taking one step at a time, hair dancing across her shoulders.

She walked out beyond the shade of the aspens and cottonwoods, and the sun shone on her. The rich light was like a lens revealing her dimpled, pale, round butt cheeks and another dimple at the small of her back.

The delicate spine curved down from her neck and between her shoulder blades to that beautiful rump any man in his right mind would want to sink his teeth into . . .

When she was about twenty feet out from the bank, she turned to face downstream, toward Longarm, and he turned his head away so sharply that he heard a couple of bones in his neck creak. His heart fluttered. His hands shook, rippling his coffee.

He brought the cup to his lips, sipped. The coffee had grown lukewarm.

He dropped to his knees, used a leather swatch to lift the pot from the fire, and poured himself another cup. He felt a little sick inside, the way a man will when he's “in season,” so to speak. His mannish desire was tempered by his lawman's sense of caution.

A lone girl getting naked out here and swimming around practically before his eyes could very easily be a trap. He kept his ears and eyes skinned, watching and listening for more hoof clomps or the crunch of brush under stealthy feet. Men might be using her to distract him so they could work around him and perforate his hide with hot lead.

A roar sounded in a branch over Longarm's head. His heart leaped in his chest. He dropped his coffee cup on his thigh, and groaned against the burn as he reached across his belly for the Frontier Colt .44 holstered for the cross-draw on his left hip.

He clicked the hammer back while at the same time he lost his balance and fell back on his rump with a shrill curse.

He lifted the Colt's maw, aiming up at the branch, but stayed his trigger finger.

A squirrel hung its head over the aspen branch arcing over him, glaring down at him, flicking its tail and chittering loudly, sounding like an unoiled whipsaw blade.

Longarm depressed the Colt's hammer. “You little bastard,” he snapped.

Sitting in the middle of the creek, upstream fifty yards, the girl lounged back on her arms, tipping her head far back on her shoulders, laughing huskily. Her bare breasts jostled as she laughed and idly tapped the heel of one bare foot against the water.