Ridges of all angles, heights, and pitches rolled up against each other and extended out away from each other in a cosmic mess of ancient, plowed-up dirt, sand, and rock. Even the most veteran of reclusive, crafty desert rats would have a hard time matching all the peaks with their respective ranges.
Somewhere out here, however, was the Black Puma Mountains in which the lawmen had been murdered. Longarm just hoped Big Frank and Ranger Sanders’s map wasn’t a shovelful of bullshit. As he and Haven rode throughout that first day from Broken Jaw, all the ranges to the southwest appeared to be colored different shades of black or gray.
And none of them as far as he could tell looked anything like a puma.
Or, maybe if you stared at them long enough, they all did…
As what had become the norm for them, he and Haven did not speak much as they rode. They were each bound in testy silence.
Only after they stopped for the night, when the sun was a red ball impaled by a high, arrow-shaped western peak, did Longarm say, “Not much grub. You gather firewood, and I’ll scout around, see if I can’t scare up a jackrabbit, maybe a javelina.”
“Hold on.”
“Huh?”
She’d just finished tending her horse and hobbling it so it couldn’t wander far from the canyon they’d stopped in. Now she swept a flap of her duster back behind the handle of her right LeMat, and strode off through the brush. She walked soundlessly, Longarm noticed. No easy trick if you weren’t Apache.
He scowled after her. Finally, deciding she’d merely drifted off to tend nature, he formed rocks into a fire ring and gathered some mesquite branches, piling them all next to the ring. Dry mesquite burned quickly, so he’d wait and build the fire after he had something beside Arbuckles to cook.
He started to slide his Winchester from the saddle sheath he’d leaned against a tree with his other gear, when a bang-bang! sounded, startling the horses. Longarm snapped his head up and his gun from the boot, looking around as the reports bounced off the rocky ridges.
Tossing the empty sheath aside, he racked a shell into the Winchester’s breech but off-cocked the hammer when footsteps sounded. She was moving toward him through the mesquites lining a small, dry spring at the southern edge of their camp. As she came closer, he saw that she held a snake down low by her side, the diamondback’s rattles trailing along the ground and making a faint rattling sound that always made his short hairs bristle even when he knew the snake was dead.
She held up the snake, still writhing in death, and said without expression. “Supper.”
“Holy shit.”
She glanced at him as she walked over to where she’d deposited her saddlebags and her carpetbag. “You don’t like snake?”
“I got nothin’ against rattler. Tastes like chicken. Just never figured you to like it.” Longarm chuckled as he picked up his rifle sheath. “How’d you know that was out there?”
“Slithered across the trail in front of us as we rode into the canyon. You didn’t see it?” She’d pulled a sheathed skinning knife out of her saddlebags, and now she knelt by a flat-topped rock and began cutting the snake’s head off.
Longarm shook his head in amazement. Would she ever stop surprising him? “Well, why don’t I gather that firewood,” he said whimsically and strode off into the brush.
He returned a few minutes later and built a fire over which Haven cooked a right tasty rattlesnake stew with a potato and a carrot she’d bought in Broken Jaw and spiced with jerky and dried chili peppers. They washed the meal down with coffee, and then Longarm gathered a little more firewood, in case they needed it later in the night, and took a short stroll around their camp with his Winchester.
It was good dark, stars offering the only light. When he was relatively certain they were alone out here, and that the pretty woman hadn’t picked up more admirers since they’d ridden out of Broken Jaw, he spread his bedroll and rolled up in it.
She drifted off to tend nature, then came back to sit by the fire and pour herself one more cup of coffee.
She sat back against a boulder near the fire, and stared pensively off into the darkness beyond the sphere of wan, orange firelight. Longarm stared at her from beneath the brim of his hat, which he’d tipped down to just above his eyes.
“Tell me about yourself, Agent Delacroix,” he said as the fire popped and snapped to his left.
She looked at him as though faintly surprised he was still awake.
“Why the interest?”
Longarm sighed and closed his eyes. “Never mind.”
He willed himself asleep but before he could get there, she said softly, so that he could just barely hear her above the fire’s crackling and the sporadic yammering of a coyote. “I was born in Maryland. My family is wealthy. Civilized and wealthy. We’re descendants of the French painter, Delacroix, whom I’m sure you’ve never heard of.”
“He teach you how to shoot rattlesnakes?”
Her voice owned the timber of strained patience. “He’s dead. Long dead.”
“What’s your family’s business?”
“They deal in rare art and antiquities, when they deal in anything. For the most part, they entertain and they travel…and they enjoy the finer things in life. They educate themselves. They’re good people, though. Not spoiled. They give money to the poor.”
Longarm poked his hat brim up onto his head and rose onto his elbows, scowling at her skeptically. “If you came from all that, how in hell did you end up out West, workin’ for the Pinkertons?”
“None of that was enough for me. I’ve always had an adventurous edge. When I completed finishing school, I fell in love with a wonderful young man. But…I just couldn’t marry him. I’m not sure why. My heart fairly boiled with the need to see the world, to experience the world on a grand if often violent scale.”
She looked at him, the fire dancing in her hazel eyes. “I know it probably doesn’t make sense. I wouldn’t expect anyone else to understand. Someday, when I’m ready, I’ll return home and take up life where I left it there…educating myself and entertaining and appreciating art and ancient relics from the Greeks and Romans. I’ll travel to Greece and Turkey, and my beau and I will marry in Paris.”
“You stay in communication with him?”
She studied the fire thoughtfully, shook her head. “No.”
“How do you know he’s waitin’?”
“Oh, I know.” Her mouth corners lifted a confident smile.
Longarm studied her for a time, puzzled by her, fascinated. “Where’d you pick up the habit of invitin’ strange men to your rooms?”
Her cheeks darkened slightly, and her eyes regarding the wavering flames were slightly abashed. But only slightly. “A girl gets lonely.”
“Only strangers?”
She looked at him, vaguely puzzled.
“You only sleep with strangers.” He was playing a hunch, but only a slight one. “Anonymously. Never sleep with men you know. Why is that, Agent Delacroix?”
Her voice hardened a little, defensively. “It’s simpler.”
“Kind of risk-free, too—ain’t it? No risk of you tumblin’ for the fella. No risk of him tumblin’ for you. This way you can sort of stay undercover all the time, even in your real life.” Longarm smiled his perplexity. “What’re you afraid of, Haven? What’re you runnin’ from?”
Her brows stitched. “What’re you talking about? I don’t run from anything! I run toward things!”
Longarm nodded thoughtfully as he watched her. “That was you outside my door last night, wasn’t it? Before your admirers showed up with their shotguns.”