“Teach you to trifle with defenseless women,” she said in a cold, hard, razor-edged voice.
She dropped the LeMats into soft, leather holsters belted to her slender waist and which she must have donned after Longarm had left the day coach, because she hadn’t been wearing the guns before. She must have anticipated a move by the cutthroats.
She tugged her shirtwaist down and looked at Longarm. “I could go for that sandwich now. Fetch it for me, will you, Deputy Long? This wind wreaks havoc on a girl’s hair.”
She turned back through the coach car’s open door.
Longarm stood staring, dumbfounded, at the space she’d vacated. Footsteps rose behind him, and he turned woodenly to see the stage passengers approaching from the direction of the Mexican lady’s café, both men and women holding their hats on their heads and looking wary.
The spindly, gray-haired depot agent stood staring hang-jawed through the open door of his little shack. The two engineers and the fireman were walking slowly, cautiously toward Longarm from the direction of the engine, staring down at the dead man and the slow-dying Mexican rolling from side to side and clutching at the knife in his crotch.
He was sobbing now and begging for mercy as he died.
Longarm looked up at the coach car again, his rugged face creased with amazement. He scratched the back of his head. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Chapter 10
The dead man wore only a ratty Stetson with a braided rawhide band and a bullet hole in its crown.
He was about halfway from being dead to being a skeleton. Bits of sun-cured skin clung to the pale bones where the birds hadn’t yet finished pecking it away. Long, thin, grizzled strands of hair dangled from the cadaver’s eyeless skull to its spindly shoulders.
Where the man’s clothes had gone was anyone’s guess. Longarm was sure he hadn’t died up there on the boulder towering beside the narrow, jagged entrance to a canyon deep in an unnamed jog of rocky bluffs and sloping mesas, somewhere north of Broken Jaw in the northeast Arizona Territory. The dead man had been placed atop the rock as though he’d climbed up there to look out across the sloping desert hills to the south and gone to sleep and expired.
“What on earth?” Haven said, sitting a rented steeldust gelding to Longarm’s right. “Someone’s idea of a joke, isn’t it?”
“Sort of a joke,” Longarm said. “Mostly, a warnin’ to posses, lawmen, anyone with their hats set on scoutin’ that chasm.” His own mount was a strawberry roan with a cream-speckled hindquarters that he’d rented in Belen, New Mexico, when he and Haven had ended their train journey. The sure-footed mount cropped gama grass growing up around the rocks strewn out in front of the canyon mouth.
“Outlaw hideout?”
“Most likely. One of their amigos likely took a bullet some months back, and they decided to put his carcass to good use. An old tradition in these parts.”
Longarm glanced once more at the grisly totem. He reined his horse away from the canyon and touched heels to its flanks. “Well, we got other matters to tend to, but I’ll keep that old boy in mind. His friends might prove to have some federal paper on their heads. Every other rascal in these parts does.”
“How many times you been through here, Marshal?”
She put her horse up beside him, her steeldust keeping pace with his roan. In Belen, she’d exchanged her fancily stitched traveling dress for more practical trail gear, and while the men’s shirt, slacks, and suspenders worn beneath a long, tan duster and the light brown Stetson made her resemble a typical thirty-a-month-and-found cowpuncher from a distance, from close up she was as beautiful as ever. Maybe prettier, even more alluring, for the form-fitting albeit rough riding gear revealed more of the swells and curves than the dress had.
Her full breasts, which Longarm couldn’t help remember fondling, rolling the nipples between his thumbs and index fingers, pushed out from behind her striped shirt, straining the buttons, jiggling enticingly as she rode.
“Too many times to count, I reckon.”
“I haven’t traveled this far south.” She was looking around, taking in the high-desert landscape with a fascination that made her otherwise cool eyes glow. “Most of my work has been done in cities.”
“What kind of work has that been, Miss Delacroix?” Longarm still had trouble addressing the girl so formally. He couldn’t remember ever having tumbled with a woman, especially with such abandon, and her still not letting him call her by her first name. That was a first, but then, Agent Delacroix was many firsts for Longarm.
Including the first woman he’d ever seen so expertly dispatch three would-be rapists like those she had dispatched back in Jerkwater.
She swung her head toward him, her hair flying about her shoulders. “You mean, where did I learn how to shoot so well—isn’t that what you meant, Marshal Long?”
After the bodies were hauled off and the train had resumed its journey southward, they hadn’t discussed the killings in Jerkwater. Longarm had thought it her place to broach the subject. Obviously, Miss Haven Delacroix was a girl of many mysteries, and he doubted she’d tell him a damn thing about anything until she was good and ready, and she may or might not be ever be ready.
“Well, now that you mention it…”
“My father was a rich man from back East. He owned a lot of weapons. He had no sons to teach how to use them, so he taught me. We hunted in the Allegheny Mountains and throughout Appalachia. Deer, bear, turkeys, ducks, geese…”
“Killin’ men’s a special kind of shootin’, Miss Delacroix.”
“Is it, Marshal Long?” Haven looked at him askance. “Oh, but when we’re talking about men, we’re not including those three back in Jerkwater, are we?”
Longarm looked back at her, finding himself growing more and more curious about her. What he saw in her hazel eyes now was a peculiar, unsettling edge. He’d seen it before, when they were fucking like dogs back in her hotel room in Leadville. He’d chalked that up to raw desire. But here it was again after she’d killed three men, having stabbed a stiletto into the balls of one.
Men who’d had it coming in spades, certainly. But she’d killed them just the same. And she was cooler about it than most men would have been.
Yes, there was much that was mysterious about Miss Haven Delacroix. And while she’d proven that she could defend herself against three half-drunk cowhands, she was just too forthright and too damn pretty to be partnered up with on a murder investigation on the mostly untamed frontier, where a good many men would as soon shoot a man, especially a lawman, as let him pass in the street.
The same held true for Pinkerton detectives.
A pretty girl was a lightning rod for trouble, and Miss Delacroix’s being a Pinkerton made her stand all the taller against a stormy sky. Likely sooner rather than later, she was going to get herself and probably Longarm, too, in more trouble than either of them knew what to do with.
They rode throughout the afternoon, stopping now and then to rest their horses and drink from springs or muddy streams coursing down from the White Mountains in the northwest. Longarm followed an old wild-horse trail he’d taken through the area before, knowing it was the shortest route between Belen and Broken Jaw though the traveling was often rough. Wild horses knew the best routes between springs, however, so while they had to travel up and around some stony bluffs and steep mesas, water holes were relatively plentiful though a couple were already dry this late in the southwestern summer.
Late in the afternoon, they rode down a crease between slanting mesa walls. The trough was shaded by the west-angling sun, the hot air tanged with cedar. When Longarm rode around a thumb of rock jutting out from the mesa wall on his right, he reined up quickly, reaching a hand across his belly toward the Colt .44-40 holstered on his left hip.