Cold Steel and Hot Lead [How the West Was Done 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (11 page)

His hands were free, but Derrick was slow in moving them to his lap. “Yes. For a moment I thought you might throw me into the abyss.” He exhaled mightily but made no move to clothe his prick. It pulsated against his hip like a giant slug.

“No. Prometheus taught men writing, mathematics, and agriculture. Why would I throw you into the abyss?” Standing, Rudy didn’t care that his own erection tented out his pants. He grabbed the whiskey bottle and refilled Derrick’s empty glass. “I suppose that makes me Zeus.”

Derrick had finally packed his cock away, and he accepted the glass as though Rudy were a fellow senator at a dinner table. Rudy imagined Derrick would just ignore what had transpired between them, as most “regular, normal” men attempted to do after receiving a whopping cocksucking from him. But no. Perhaps it was his political nature, but Derrick addressed it head-on. “We can’t do that anymore, Rudy.”

Rudy took his seat and exhaled. “I expected you’d say that.”

“Not for the reasons you probably think. I’m thinking of Alameda. If I’m to be courting her, I can’t be dallying with anyone else.”

Rudy found it within himself to smile. “Well, that’s a new rejection. Not that you’re mortified that the best cocksucking of your life was by another man.”

Derrick raised an eyebrow. “Who’s saying it was the best of my life?”

“I am.” Rudy was confident. He knew that much.

“So you don’t avoid women because you dislike them. You avoid them because the one you loved was murdered by Indians.”

Rudy sighed. He was sorry he’d brought it up. But more than a stunning, well-hung cock, he felt Derrick was his friend. The subject would come up eventually. “Yes. It seems to me that women are so vulnerable and weak, they’re always the first to die. They’re the first target of anyone diabolical with evil intentions. This recent Kittie business bears witness to that. Men, especially the anonymous ones I meet for a brief fucking, aren’t going to impact me like that. I also loathe Indians, especially the Lakota. When I’d be doing a show, I always wished it were a real Indian I was shooting at, not just some joe with a painted face and feathers stuck in his head.”

Derrick sighed, too, his whiskey glass balanced on his perfectly flat abdomen. “I’ve been in a similar position the past couple of years. Women are more susceptible to any disease that comes along, too. My Cora succumbed to cholera when it swept through our town and killed about half the population, most of them women and children. It’s very painful, allowing yourself to love the delicate and tender sex.”

“Amen.”

Rudy went down the hallway to the bathroom and, when he came back, was pleasantly surprised to find Derrick in bed. Rudy swiftly tossed off all his clothes and got under the sheet behind Derrick, who had his back to him. But when Rudy lifted a hand to Derrick’s naked shoulder, the senator said gruffly, “Sleep, Rudy. It’s been a long fucking day.”

Rudy of course was disappointed, but he had to smile as he curled up behind Derrick. He knew he would beat down Derrick’s resistance. Derrick was more than just another faceless screw. They had a mission together.

And Derrick might fall in love with Miss Alameda Hudson. But it was possible to love two people at the same time.

Alameda stepped out of the sleigh. She felt very conspicuous, being one of the few in town who owned a horse-drawn sleigh. But Albuquerque House was a good ten blocks from First Street, where she was to meet her two men.
Her two men!
Whenever did she start thinking of Derrick and Rudy in that manner? Derrick was hardly her man, much less Rudy. And Derrick would be gone once the snow melted, to his new abode in Cheyenne.

“We borrowed these snowshoes,” Derrick explained, looking entirely strapping in a tweed hunting jacket, a sportsman’s slouch hat slapped on his head. “We tried to get to the baggage car to get my things, but last night’s storm dumped another two feet of drifts, and they can’t even get the doors open.”

“Yes,” said Rudy. “You can stand on top of the drifts and you’re looking into the smokestack.” His silk scarf was thrown jauntily about his neck, and his derby gave him a rakish air. It was a shame he only made love to men. Both of Alameda’s sisters here in town had apparently set up congenial relations with not one but two men. These things didn’t seem to be frowned upon in the heartless prairie where there were so few luxuries. Such as women.

In fact, she had earlier seen her sister Ivy at their father’s Vancouver House, where Alameda was gathering some clothes to take to Albuquerque House. When she pressed Ivy to divulge the gist of the message Derrick had sent to Cheyenne, Ivy had given her chilling news. Derrick’s message had gone not to the senate building but to the Dodge Hotel, where apparently a Miss Victoria Russell was employed. Oddly, Derrick requested her to send him a “clockwork-driven apparatus” that she must have known all about, since he needed to offer no more description.

Alameda consoled herself that Miss Russell couldn’t be a prairie flower, one of the many girls in many towns Derrick had confessed to knowing. Why would a hooker be sending him an apparatus? No, this sounded more like something he might give to Rudy for a magic show.

“He exaggerates,” said Derrick grandly, taking Alameda’s gloved hand. “You can look into the window of the first-class car, but you can’t get in the door. We saw Major Littlefinger, who of course denied having anything to do with taking Kittie. We followed Antonio Franconi to his tent but found nothing suspicious.”

Alameda said, “I would loan you some of my father’s clothes, but he’s much too big for you. You’re rather strapping, but he’s more…corpulent. His clothes would hang on you. Perhaps the clothing of his adjutant, Ezekiel. He’s quite tall. Is this Chang’s shop? I’ve seen the petrified monkeys in the window and the jars containing organs.”

But it was hard to even see Chang’s front door, carved with dragons and the label “C. Chang, Proprietor.” Citizens had been shoveling snow away from First Street since sunrise, piling it up against the shops for a lack of anywhere better to put it. Derrick had to clamber over a seven-foot muddy snow pile to knock on the wooden door. Luckily it opened inward, emitting a cloud of frankincense and perhaps opium, from what Alameda had seen of these ricemen and their follies. A skeletal figure wearing a round cap poked just his eyeballs over the edge of the drift, blinking at them.

“We need whiskey root,” Derrick explained. “And some other items.”

C. Chang frowned at Derrick. “You need ginseng!”

Derrick looked confused, crouched atop the snow pile. “Ginseng? Whatever for?”

Chang’s eyes flitted to Alameda, then to Rudy. “You have yin, and you have yang!” he declared. “You need ginseng root for too much yang.” His bony finger pointed over the snow directly at Rudy. “He is too much yang!’

“Whatever is this odd fellow talking about?” Alameda murmured to Rudy. “What’s ginseng?”

Rudy spoke from behind his hand. “It’s a root, used to increase one’s desire for sex.”

“Oh. And you need more of that?”

“Apparently,” said Rudy, “I need
less
of that.”

Chang held his door open, and a few Laramie residents assisted in clearing his doorway so Alameda could step down into the shop without sledding. Chang went about lighting lamps, but it was dismally dark in there—the sun hadn’t come out yet, though it had stopped snowing—and Alameda found herself bumping up against a stuffed Asian tiger. The shop was creepy and enchanting at the same time. Jars with floating seahorses and other pickled monstrosities were placed next to vivid yellow powders and sticks that smelled of cinnamon. On the wall was a frightening chart of a man’s profile showing where someone should stick a hundred needles into the body—for health reasons, Alameda hoped.

C. Chang handed Derrick a handful of roots, telling him, “You must take ginseng to keep up with those two.”

“All right, now,” said Derrick, although he did pocket the roots. “Now what about the whiskey root?”

C. Chang squinted at him. “Who told you to take whiskey root?”

“It’s not for me. It’s for my associate, who is afflicted with Saint Vitus’s Dance. Someone—ah, an herbal practitioner told us it would be good for him.”

Chang nodded, serious. “Is also good for hallucinations. He will see the fellow in the moon!” And he vanished behind the counter, as though a little trap door had dropped beneath him.

He popped back up, hands full of the dehydrated mushrooms that apparently were the whiskey root. He pointed at a jar Derrick was touching. “Wormwood! For big balloons in anus.”

Derrick withdrew his hand. “Just the whiskey root is fine. Oh.” He took a small jar out of his pocket and banged it on the counter. “Chang. Do you mix paints? Can you make us some more of this vermilion paint?”

Chang uncorked the jar and sniffed the red paint. He recoiled with a sour face. “This even
better
for hallucinations! Cinnabar. I get from Mexico and Spain. We sometimes add red lead and dragon’s blood.”

Alameda chortled. “Dragon’s blood? We just want to paint with it, not attract vermin.”

But Chang was insistent on the strong properties of the vermilion paint. “You paint too much with this, you lose vision, hearing, speech. Become disturbed in the…” He gestured about his head.

“Hallucinate?” Derrick prompted.

“Hallucinate,” Chang agreed, shaking his hands in demonstration. “Fall down.”

Alameda said, “Perhaps we shouldn’t ask for more paint.”

Chang added, “Death.”

Derrick corked the bottle and returned it to his pocket. “Never mind, then. Chang, has anyone asked you to make anything with cinnabar lately?”

“Yesterday circus fellow asked for more paint. He said his was stolen.”

Derrick splayed his hand on his chest. “Me? Steal paint? My good fellow. I am a senator from Cheyenne. Why would I steal some circus fellow’s paint? Now, did this fellow resemble an Italian? You said you get this cinnabar from Spain. Could this fellow have been a Spaniard?”

“Yes, could be.” Chang shrugged. “All Spaniards look the same to me.”

Alameda asked, “Did he have big muttonchop whiskers?” Chang looked perplexed, so Alameda drew invisible side-whiskers on herself, of the sort that Antonio Franconi had.

Chang shook his head vehemently. “None of that. Just smooth face. Older fellow. Older than you.”

Rudy said, “Then he must be ancient. And it obviously wasn’t Antonio Franconi. You could see his side-whiskers a mile away. It looks like our culprit is the carpenter—Castillo you said his name was, Derrick?”

“Yes, Eliazar Castillo. He’s about fifty years of age, I’d guess. We failed to look into his tent this morning.”

Chang added helpfully, “You can tell who is using this paint. He likes to paint his nails with it.”

“I
knew
it was Castillo!” Jeremiah pointed a weak forefinger at Derrick.

Derrick said, “You thought it was Antonio Franconi. He stole your jar of vermilion paint, remember?”‘

“Well,” said Jeremiah. “Castillo could have easily been the thief.” He looked at the wall of Albuquerque House’s parlor. “Now, why did I accuse poor Antonio Franconi of being the culprit? Just because he was angry with me for accusing him of stealing my paint? Castillo is a much more likely culprit. He’s always stealing things from other people. He’s the knife thrower, you know. He’s constantly going on about the ‘cold steel’ of his knives.”

“Cold steel,” Derrick grumbled. “I’d like to show him some hot lead.”

Jeremiah shuddered. “What a deep and darkly disturbed individual. I think you should get right on over there and have him arrested.”

“With no proof?” Derrick said. “Besides, we had to come back here and give you the medicine that Percy prescribed.”

Alameda said, “My brother-in-law Neil is the deputy of Laramie, but he’s stuck out at his ranch in the Snowy Range. Right now we’re likely to find Castillo at the Oddfellows Hall, building scenery for the play. Where I should be now, rehearsing and getting fitted for my new costume. Oh, my.” Alameda coughed into her fist, then reached for a glass of sherry on a nearby table.

Her face looked a bit red, so Derrick stood by her. “Is it the asthma again? You didn’t don another tight corset, did you?”

Alameda seemed unable to sip the sherry. “I…need…a corset…”

Derrick frowned. “You could wear one that allows you to breathe, at least. Alameda, just because you have a voluptuous figure doesn’t mean you need to—
damn it!
”

She was choking again, able to inhale only extremely shallow wheezes. Just as Derrick kneeled to unbutton her bodice once more, Rudy skidded over to take his place, but Alameda’s fingers were already on her velvet-covered buttons.

“Allow me,” said Rudy, shouldering Derrick aside. “I can perform some animal magnetism on her. There are certain tides in the human body—”

Derrick shouldered him back. “Damn the tides, Rudy. She needs to breathe.”

“Oh, dear Lord,” lamented Jeremiah. “Not more animal magnetism. That always brings forth that horribly creepy Percival fellow. It’s just not natural, ghosts from beyond piercing the veil that separates us. There’s a reason for that veil, you know. It prevents those of us still incorporated in human bodies from going loco—oh, my, what is that?”