Chapter 14
Longarm did not risk looking through the thin stretch of canvas, but he could vaguely see Haven Delacroix’s murky silhouette as she sat in the tub with her arms crossed on her breasts, hands on her shoulders.
“Have you been over there all this time?” she demanded.
He chuckled. “I reckon I could ask the same of you. I just now woke up from a little nap. Like to doze in the tub, don’t ya know. What’re you doin’ over there? I thought you was going to take a bath at the hotel!”
“Can you see me?”
“Why, no. Can you see me?”
Pause. He could see that she was staring toward him but that was about all he could see.
“I can only see a vague shadow.”
“That’s about all I can see, too.”
“Thank God,” she said.
“Thank him for me, too, will ya?” Longarm chuckled. “No wonder what you’d do, if you saw me naked again. Why, you’d probably tear right through this here canvas wall, and—!”
“Oh, please hush, will you? God, what a tiresome man you are! I just want to take a long, quiet bath. I was going to have one at the hotel but they had no wood split for a fire and the hired boy apparently got bit by a rattlesnake two days ago. His leg is swollen up, and I quote, ‘thick as a cottonwood stump!’”
“Ouch!”
“You can say that again.”
“Well, okay—ouch!”
She sighed. In the corner of his eye, he saw her lean back in her tub and lower her hands from her breasts. He leaned back in his own tub and looked down. His cock stood up like a brake handle, angling up over his belly button. He felt like giving it a knock against the side of the tub, to discourage it, but there was no denying the male organ when a woman like Haven was within twenty feet.
And naked.
Agent Delacroix said, “Since we’re both here, and I intend to lock myself in my room for the night with a good book, let’s go over what we know about the case, shall we?”
Longarm tried again to suppress his desire for the girl, to think and act like a professional. Why in hell did he have to be cursed with such a beautiful partner? Especially one whose wares and talents he’d been treated to once, just enough to make him ache for more.
“Shoot,” he said with a sigh.
“You’re the one with the most experience—you tell me what you know so far.”
“Hell, that’s easy,” he said, rolling his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “I know that five lawmen ended up dead down here and that they might have been killed because they’d gotten close to a cache of gold that was stolen three years ago.”
“But we don’t really know why they were killed, correct?” she said.
Longarm nodded and rolled his cigar to the other corner of his mouth. “They could have been killed for any number of reasons. They might have run into cattle rustlers or border bandits who thought the lawmen were shadowin’ them. Or they might simply have been killed because of the badges pinned to their vests. I’ve had guns aimed my direction for no better reason than that one there.”
“Right, it’s actually quite silly to think the killings had anything to do with the gold, isn’t it?”
“Silly?” Longarm plucked the cigar from his mouth, and studied the coal that had gone out while he’d been ogling his partner. “Well, I wouldn’t call it silly. Damned unlikely, though. Truth be told, I got a feelin’ we’re never going to learn who killed them fellas. The killer’s trail is likely cold as a grave digger’s ass—uh, pardon my French.”
“I believe I’ve grown inured to your French, Marshal.”
He wanted to mention something about the French lessons she’d given to him back in Leadville, but congratulated himself for resisting the notion and keeping his mind on business. “If the gold’s still where Santana’s boys buried it, though, there might be a chance we’ll find it when we ride down there and scout around.”
“If it’s still there.”
“Check.”
“And if Big Frank’s information is reliable.”
“Check again.”
Haven asked, “Do you believe Three Wolves’s story about why he never went looking for the cache himself?”
“Yeah, I reckon I do. Not sure why, but I can usually tell when a man is lyin’. I didn’t see that look in Big Frank’s eyes when he was explainin’ his side of it. He does only have one arm, remember. And if he got anyone to help him, he’d have had to tell ’em where the gold was buried and risk a double cross in the form of a knife in his back. Big Frank’s seen enough trouble, just wanted to run his freight business in peace.”
“Until he discovered his woman’s dalliance…”
“Yeah, there’s that.”
“I feel sorry for Big Frank.” Haven’s voice was thin and wistful. “Being a one-armed half-breed cannot be an easy way to go through life.”
“Yeah, and one with a nasty temper.”
“There is that.”
Longarm drew on his cigar and was reminded that it had gone out. He climbed out of the tub and walked over to the bench where’d he’d placed the contents of his pockets. He found his box of lucifers, struck one to life on the bench, and touched the flame to the stogie as he stepped back into the tub.
There was a shrill gasp.
“You filthy dog!” the girl fairly shrieked.
Standing in the tub, Longarm turned to see her milky silhouette leaning far forward in her own bath, gazing toward him…through the thin patch of canvas.
“You were watching me, weren’t you?”
Longarm opened and closed his mouth, but the words were all tangled up in his tonsils.
“Sleeping, like hell!” she said, rising up out of her tub. “Well, here, take a good look, you depraved son of a bitch!”
She walked over to the thin patch in the canvas, to Longarm’s right, three feet away from him. She turned this way and that, catlike, bending each knee in turn, hefting her breasts in her hands, caressing them alluringly, glaring at him, curling her upper lip back with a feral, feline anger.
“Like what you see? Would you like to have your hands on these?” She dropped her eyes to his cock, which had dwindled during their business conversation but which was now beginning to swell again, lift its thick head once more from between his thighs.
“Does that make your big plow handle stand up and take notice? Oh, it does, doesn’t it!”
She paused for just a second as she stared down at his cock, and he thought he saw her hesitate. A slight shudder rippled through her. She snapped her angry, flashing eyes back to his through the sheer spot in the canvas.
“You’re a beast!” she railed once more, her voice thicker this time. Covering her breasts with her elbows, she turned, stomped over to where her clothes hung from pegs, and began to dress.
Outside the tent, the Chinese couple was prattling away in their mixed tongue, obviously alarmed by the verbal skirmish that had erupted inside their place of business. “It’s all right,” Haven called angrily as she dressed, glaring at him through the thin patch in the canvas wall. “Don’t worry, good people—I’m very well armed and can take extremely good care of myself!”
Longarm bit down hard on his cigar and was about to stomp over to his bench and begin dressing, forgetting that his clothes were being laundered, his embarrassment about his current physical condition tempered somewhat by his knowing that Agent Delacroix was every bit as randy as he was.
Or at least nearly as randy. She was just too pigheaded to admit it. He’d have bet that her silky snatch was as hot as a freshly brewed pot of coffee at that moment.
Since there was nothing else on the bench save his hat, his saddlebags, and his Winchester, he grabbed the hat and clamped it down hard on his head, half-scowling and half-grinning over his shoulder at Haven, whose shadow he could see dressing against the fire on the other side of her.