Sliphammer (10 page)

He came toward her. She climbed rushing against him, put her hands on his shoulders, spreading her thighs. He kissed her lightly, teasing her, and her throat made a breaking groan: her fingers bit deep, pulling him hard against her with crazy hunger. Her tingling rubber-hard nipples crushed against his chest. Her legs felt weak and she panted against his mouth.

His big hands cupped her swelling buttocks. She squirmed against him, her hand sliding down his stomach to the great veined ivory pole of his rigid organ. He laughed at her, twisted his body and rubbed and stroked her breast. She closed her eyes and cried out softly, arching her back. With a thunderclap of booming laughter he thrust her back onto the bed—she fell back splayed, squirming, moaning her panicky eagerness; she reached for his great stiff column and felt his throbbings alive in her hand.

He put one knee-on the bed and came down, flattening himself against her, his hard, seeking organ pushing between her legs inside her wetness. She sucked and locked him in; her body twisted against him. They began to move together, slowly at first like a railroad engine getting purchase—a long, slow rhythm that filled her with exquisite agony—then faster, to a driving thud and crash of uncontrollable urgency, a hot, slick writhing of limbs and locked bodies flailing together in ecstasy: they came rigid together, so taut-crushed she felt her bones must break. She cried out, screamed with an agony of white-hot joy, feeling the spurt and ooze of him inside her; the roar of his voice blended with the thunder of blood in her ears.

He did not roll away. They lay together, pulses drumming, lungs gasping. She felt the hungry cravings subside in logged satiety. She said, “Oh, God, let's do it forever, it feels so damned good.”

He could make her feel as though she was the only woman on earth. She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed; he was still inside her and she didn't want him to go. She said, “Know something?”

“Not much.”

“Sometimes I hate your guts because I need you so bad. Nobody should have to need anybody as bad as I need you.”

He ruffled her hair. “You're a good girl,” he said, and rolled his weight off her. He lay back naked, his belly rising and falling gently. She felt as if she had been surgically wounded; she felt raw with the residues of high, sweet pleasure.

After a while he sat up and looked down at her. She smiled almost shyly. Lying on her back, with her breasts diminished to the shape of inverted teacups, she knew she looked girlish and wistful. She felt somnolent pleasure, the soft glow of warmth, the temporary easing of lustful needs which soon would overcome her all over again.

He did an unusual thing: he bent and very softly kissed her. And then he got off the bed and walked into the private bathroom that was part of the great carpeted suite.

He was seldom so gentle with her; it made her feel strange and puzzled. She sat up, put her feet on the floor and walked to the mirror. She could feel the wet, draining stickiness between her thighs; she liked it there.

She studied herself in the mirror. She always liked to look at herself. Once, when she was sixteen, her father had caught her admiring herself naked in front of a mirror. He had grinned: “Don't let that spoil, Josie. Be a shame to let it go to waste.” Her father had been like that. She wondered how he had been able to stand her prude of a mother. There were rumors about the women he was supposed to be keeping on the side, particularly a red-haired wench down on Mission Street. It didn't matter any more; he had died when she was nineteen and after that, all that mattered to her was to get away from her mother; she had joined the traveling troupe, and she had met Wyatt.

Her face in the mirror had a bright, hard, shiny-eyed after-sex look. She thought,
There really wasn't much else than this; you went through the rest of the time just waiting for this.

He came out of the bathroom naked. He wasn't smiling; he wasn't looking at her: his mind had moved on to other things. She was struck by the sudden fear that his gentle gesture a few moments ago had been the sort of thing a man might do if he felt guilty about something. Was he getting weary of her? She felt a moment's horror. She had always tried to ignore the dark cranny of her mind which housed the suspicion that what, to her, was both serious and desperate, was to him only occasionally desperate and never serious.

She knew it was altogether the wrong thing to say to him but she couldn't help it. “Darling, when are we going to get married? Really married, I mean?”

She felt cold, anxious, unnerved. When he looked at her it was only a brief distracted glance, but at least it was without irritation.

“There's no hurry, is there?” he said absently, and went to put on his clothes and guns.

Seven

In a dismal morning drizzle, Tree walked down to the telegraph office, his loose oilskin poncho flapping. Water dripped from the trough of his hat brim and his feet squished in his boots, the result of having to cross intersections that were a foot deep in mud after the steady two-day rain.

His mood was as bleak as the sky, the passage of time had screwed his nerves up past the point of alert tautness, into a state of apathetic indifference. His expression had faded to blankness.

The telegrapher gave him one brief look and said, “Nothing for you today.”

“You sure?”

The telegrapher, a wizened little man, gave him a waspish glance. “I told you, Deputy, when anything comes in for you I'll send a runner. You don't have to keep checking in here.”

Tree turned the oilskin collar up around hii? face and ducked his head and stepped outside into the drizzle. He didn't
have
to keep checking in with Western Union. But it gave him something to do. Besides, he didn't trust the telegrapher: the man might deliver the message to Wyatt Earp before he delivered it to Tree.

By this time he didn't trust anybody at all. It was a miserable feeling. Two weeks in this town had been ample to prove to him that the whole community was locked up tight against him. No one had threatened him, but no one had opened up to him. He was an enemy, tolerated because of Wyatt Earp's truce. Even the miners, who were Earp's enemies or thought they were, gave him wide berth. They probably didn't want to get mixed up in what could turn out to be trouble—they had enough of that of their own.

Walking through town he passed occasional pedestrians darting from shelter to shelter, their faces as gray as the rain. He wandered unhurriedly toward the Inter Ocean because his orders were to keep an eye on the Earps. The fact was, the Earps weren't going anywhere—they were safest right here, why should they leave? But this, too, gave him something to do.

Under the flowing oilskin his wrists brushed the paired sliphammer revolvers. His eyes, silver-hued in good light, seemed dulled to the color of tarnished lead. His face had developed a pinched pair of creases that bracketed his mouth, ordinarily good-humored, with a pattern of mute anger and volatility held precariously in check. At this point he would even welcome a fight with Reese Cooley: but Cooley, for reasons of his own, had made a point of ignoring him for two weeks.

He turned a corner a block from the Inter Ocean and stopped. A hundred feet away, under the shelter of the overhanging veranda roof, Wyatt Earp had posted himself in a porch rocking chair. Earp basked there with one boot up against the porch rail, lazy-eyed and droopy-mustached as a king lion keeping watch over his pride. If he saw Tree he made no sign of it, but it was inconceivable he was unaware of Tree's appearance: Tree was virtually the only pedestrian in sight. Earp sat with a proprietary air, with the wise indolence of authority. He was smoking a cigar. Earp was a bit of an actor, Tree had learned; he liked to strike poses. He carried himself with the presumed superiority of a public figure who knew he was at all times on display. But his arrogance was earned. Tree had studied him with close care and thus far he had found in Earp no false note, no weakness, no sign that the pose was hollow bravado.

He and Earp had spent the two weeks feeling each other out—warily, like strange dogs on unfamiliar territory. Tree had come to Gunnison prepared to be impressed; Earp, hard-nosed and yet judicious, had not disappointed him. He did not want to think his judgment or intentions could be colored by the tall shadow of the Wyatt Earp legend, but he had taken care to make sure that was not the case. He had poked and prodded and by now he was more than satisfied. As a result, more than ever he did not want to have to try to arrest Earp.

While he stood watching, Josie Earp came out of the Inter Ocean, pouted at the rain, and said something to Wyatt, who nodded and gave her his sly, slow smile and whacked her rump affectionately before she turned to go back inside. At the door she paused and gave Tree a long direct glance. She excited his interest, and she knew it: she was a girl who exuded a subtle air of compressed amoral sexuality, calculated—by design or by nature—to excite a man. With a fleeting lidded smile she pulled her glance away from Tree and went inside, hips churning.

Tree dropped off the boardwalk and quartered across the muddy street, climbed onto the porch and kicked excess mud off his boots, and walked down the rail to where Earp sat. Earp only looked up when he stopped six feet away.

“Pull up a chair. I hate to have to look up at a man.”

“You could stand up.”

“Still digesting my breakfast,” Earp replied, and waved his -cigar toward a vacant rocking chair. “You keep regular hours for a man with nothing to do.”

“Habit, I guess.” Tree pulled the rocker forward and sat, batting his hat against the side of the chair and hooking it over his knee. “Another day of this and the whole town will float away.”

“Heard anything from Denver?”

Tree looked at him and grinned. “Now ask me a question you don't already know the answer to.”

“If it's any comfort to you,” Earp said, “I haven't had any word either.” Which meant he had no news about whether there had been any success in his long-distance effort to pull strings in the Governor's office.

“No particular comfort,” Tree said.

“You'd just as soon have it over with.”

“One way or the other—either way,” Tree agreed. “Waiting drags on a man's nerves.” He gave Earp a sharp, sudden scrutiny in an effort to detect whether Earp felt the same pressure.

There was no change in Earp's expression—the impassive face of the professional gambler. He said, “Put that you get orders to arrest me. What do you do?”

“If I didn't mean to follow orders I wouldn't be here at all.”

Earp's big head moved back and forth morosely. “Then you're a gold-plated fool,
amigo.
Digging yourself a grave.”

Tree shrugged. “You can't lead my kind of life and expect to live forever. Yours either.”

“Oh, I don't know. I expect to live to a ripe old age.” Earp gave him a guileless cocked-eyebrow glance; hard to tell whether he. meant it humorously. “If I'm religious about anything,” Earp said, “it's that. I firmly believe I'll have my threescore and ten, and then some.”

“Who told you that? Tea leaves or a crystal ball?”

Earp shifted his seat, leaned back and crossed his legs. He murmured, “Let's use cards, Deputy—let's lay them face up on the table. Now, I've been gentle with you because nobody had to tell me the courage it took for you to come in here at me, in a town where every gun's against you. It takes guts to humble yourself to duty, obey an order you don't like and maybe don't even believe in. But you came here carrying the seeds of trouble—for me and my family. Every time the clock ticks it could mean you're coming at us with a warrant and a gun. I don't intend to hang, or see my brother hang, for doing what any decent man would have done to a mad dog like Stillwell. I don't have to ask any questions, I know I'm right. You haven't got that luxury. You're not sure, down deep, whether arresting me is the right thing or the wrong thing. Which puts you in a bad position—you've got a private conscience hanging deadweight around your neck no matter what your notion of duty tells you you've got to do.”

Earp turned to look him in the face. “It'll slow you down, you know. It'll take the edge off. You'll hesitate when you can't afford to.”

“Maybe.” Not liking it here any more, Tree got up out of the chair, holding his hat.

Earp said, “It'd be a shame if you got yourself hurt to no purpose.”

Tree thought,
God help me, I think you're right
He didn't say a word; he walked away, putting on his hat before he stepped into the rain.

When he turned into Main Street he saw the white thatched figure of Sheriff McKesson standing just inside the open door of the sheriff's office, ever vigilant, watching the town. As Tree went by on the opposite side of the street, the sheriff's grave face turned slowly, indicating his interest in Tree's passage. Tree waved at him and went on down to the little hotel. The clerk wasn't on the desk; nobody was in sight. He went back through the corridor to his room and, from habit, glanced to see if the tenpenny nail was in place.

It wasn't. The door stood ajar, open an inch.

He stood making a puddle in the shape of a ring around his dripping poncho. Disgust welled up in him. He drew both guns out through the pocket holes in the poncho, lifted his boot and kicked the door open.

Both of them jerked, startled. Caroline was by the window; Tree's half brother Rafe lay on his back on the bed in sock feet.

Rafe grinned. “If I was a bushwhacker waitin' with a gun I wouldn't have much of a chance, would I?”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Come in and shut the door and we might tell you.”

“Aagh,” Tree said in disgust, putting his guns away and lifting the poncho over his head. He tossed it across a chair, removed his hat, ran fingers through his matted hair and said, “Well?”