Longarm could feel himself starting to sweat under his hat. “Ma’am-” he began.
“You call me Dulcima. You know what that means in English?”
He said helplessly, “Kind of.”
“It means sweet.” She stepped up close to him, so close he could smell the musk of her body. “You taste lit, You never find nothing so sweet. You weel see.”
He took off his hat and used that as an excuse to step a little further away from her. “Ma’am,” he said, “I got to tell you that I ain’t got the slightest doubt that you are a mighty tasty dish. But the thing is, I ain’t one to go poaching on another man’s territory. Right now you are on Senor San Diego’s range, and that kind of makes it wrong to talk the way we’re talking now.”
She smiled. “I theenk you lie again. I theenk you doan care who a woman belongs to if you want her. No, you lie.” She shrugged. “I doan tell. Do you tell?”
“Ma’am,” Longarm said, “I think you ought to look around. Every eye in this plaza is on us. I don’t reckon it is going to take long for word to get back to your Raoul. And I don’t reckon he is going to be too happy.”
She snapped her fingers. “What do I care what he theenks! He ees my man so long as I weesh. But I have other men. What he going to do, keel them all? I doan theenk so.
Longarm gave a little laugh. “It’s just this one I’m worried about. Me.”
“Bah!” Dulcima said. She locked her eyes with his. “You lie. Look down at my breasts and tell me you doan lie.”
Longarm looked, instead, over her shoulder to see how much attention they were attracting. In his retreat he’d managed to keep himself hidden from the hotel porch, where a number of spectators were seated in wicker chairs. There wasn’t much behind him, but he could see a number of people to the south who appeared to be taking a considerable interest in their conversation. “No ma’am,” he told her. “I don’t reckon I’m going to do that. At least not out here on the street.”
She laughed, her voice tinkling like a bell. “You blush like a boy, but I doan theenk you do other theengs like a boy. I theenk you make love a mucho hombre.”
Longarm swallowed and tried again. “Ma’am, I reckon we ought to call off this here little talk. Or save it for some place a little less public. I can’t up and walk away from you. Wouldn’t be the gentlemanly thing to do. So I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just kind of sashaying on along.”
“Do you know where I leeve?”
“I can’t say I do.”
“I have the beeg house on the leetle hill east of town down by the river. Anyone can tell you where Dulcima leeve.”
He shifted his gaze from over her shoulder to her face. “Yeah,” he said. “Along with Mister Raoul San Diego.”
“Bah!” she said. “He leeve there when I say hokay. It ees my house. It ees my hacienda. You come see me and we weel talk and maybe then you weel want to look. No?”
“Ma’am,” Longarm said, “I assure you that if circumstances were different I’d follow you home so fast you’d need a race horse to beat me there.”
“Ha-ha! So, I theenk you like Dulcima a leetle.”
“It ain’t hard,” he admitted.
“Maybe not now, but I make it so. Ha-ha?”
Longarm said weakly, “Yeah, ha-ha. Ma’am, you are making me mighty uncomfortable. I shore wish you’d finish up your walk.”
“Not unteel you call me Dulcima.”
He let out his breath. “All right. Whatever you say. Dulcima, would you please let me out of this corner before you get me killed.”
She gave him an amused look. “You talk of being afraid. How come I doan theenk you are afraid? What is the reason for that? Huh?”
“I reckon you just never seen enough scared men.”
She laughed and twirled her parasol. “I go now. But you better come see me queek or I come see you at the hotel.” She laughed again when he gave her a quick glance. “Oh, yes. I know where you stay. Thees place does not get many han’some mens, so Dulcima keep her eye open all the time. I see you the first day and I see you seeing me, so I say myself, ‘Dulcima, there ees a good cheeken for your pot.’ So you see, eet has already been decided. I go now. Adios.”
She gave him one last smile with her sensual mouth, then turned and walked off, twirling her parasol. Longarm followed her with his eyes, thinking she made near as pretty a picture from the rear as from any other angle. But damnit if word got back to San Diego, there could be big trouble and he didn’t know a way to avoid it. If he had to, he’d kill the man, but that would more than likely make Caster that much harder to deal with. One thing for certain, he wasn’t going anywhere near her house, not until the deal was done and all parties were either dead or in custody. With his heart still beating a little rapidly, Longarm turned and walked back to the hotel. As he stepped up on the porch, he wondered if it was his imagination or did several of the railbirds give him more than just a casual eye.
He stayed close to the Hamilton the balance of that night, eating in the hotel dining room and drinking in the hotel bar. A little after nine a halfway decent poker game started up, though it was a limit game and five dollars at that. But it was something to do and his luck was just short of hot, so he managed to win about eighty dollars by midnight, when he decided to make it an early night and turn in. One of the gamblers made a remark about him quitting winners, and Longarm turned to stare at him. He hadn’t heard anything that foolish in a long time. “Why don’t you gents wise this fellow up?” he said to the rest of the players. Then he addressed the disgruntled man. “That’s the point to the game, fellow. The object is to win. It’s like coming out of a gunfight alive. You understand? Maybe nobody told you before and that’s the reason you keep losing. You don’t know no better.”
The gambler, a sharp-faced little ferret of a man who looked like a storekeeper, replied, “Maybe not, feller. But I know better’n to hold a conversation with Raoul San Diego’s woman right in the big middle of town.”
Another of the players said sharply, “Keep your mouth shut, Hurley.”
Longarm gave Hurley a long look. “And,” he said, “another thing you don’t seem to know is when to mind your own business.”
The man who had spoken sharply looked up at Longarm. “He don’t mean nothing, mister. He just runs off at the mouth sometimes. He didn’t mean to be butting into your business. No offense meant.”
Longarm stared at Hurley for a long moment. The little man kept his attention fixed on his cards. Finally Longarm let his breath out slowly, then he reached in his pocket, fished out a five-dollar gold piece, and flung it on the table. “No offense taken,” he said. “You gents have a drink on me.”
He had given the little storekeeper a hard look, but as he turned away and headed out of the bar, his heart was beating a little faster. If his encounter with Dulcima could be remarked upon so readily by a stranger in a bar, then heaven only knew how far the news had traveled around the town. Longarm had little doubt that unless Caster had sent him off on another errand, Raoul San Diego already knew about the long conversation that had taken place under the magnolia tree. And if not Raoul, then his brother, and if not his brother, then certainly Jasper White, and if Jasper White knew, it was a cinch that Raoul would know as soon as word could be carried to him. As he walked to his room Longarm resolved that he would have to regard Raoul San Diego in the same way he would a rattlesnake. Expect him to strike at any instant. He would have to walk a very devilish tightrope, watching San Diego with one eye, while keeping the other one on Caster and Mull. What he’d first expected to be a pretty straight-forward piece of business—catching and arresting a corrupt official—was rapidly getting more and more complicated. He wished to hell that Austin Davis would get back with the cattle and they could complete the deal and get the hell out of Laredo before somebody got killed. He had breakfast the next morning in the dining room and then sat around the lobby, watching the various characters come and go, until the banks opened. At nine o’clock he walked the two blocks to the First National Bank of Laredo, which was up from the river and in the center of town. As luck would have it, there was an apothecary in the same block, and with his tooth acting up again, Longarm swerved in at the door and asked for laudanum. The young man behind the counter took his money and handed over a small glass-stoppered bottle containing a milky white liquid. When the clerk asked if he’d ever taken laudanum before, Longarm hesitated. “Well, yeah, but it’s been a spell. I got shot accidentally once. Broke a bone and it hurt considerable.”