High and Wild (10 page)

The bartender turned full around to the man striding toward him. He opened his mouth and pointed in shock and dismay at the black tracks trailing the customer from the batwings, down the steps, and across the opulent rug to his still-churning left boot.

Before the bartender could speak, however, Bear had gained the bar, and a shrill female voice shrieked from somewhere above, “My rug! My rug! Oh, my lovely
ru
g
! You . . . you
beast
, don't you read signs? Get out of my establishment this instant, or I'll have you thrown out and shot like a rabid dog in the street!”

10

H
askell set one elbow
on the bar and looked up to see a beautiful redheaded woman in pearls and a long, elegant gown a shade darker red than her hair glaring down at him from the second-floor balcony that ran around three sides of the main drinking hall. The velvet gown was edged in feathery spruce-green fur.

“Out!” she screamed, as she began striding along the balcony toward the broad, carpeted stairs at the room's far end. “Out, or I will indeed have you shot! Whipped and
then
shot!”

Haskell tracked the woman with his eyes. He smiled and said amiably, “Oh, I don't think you will. No, sir . . . er, I mean,
ma'am.
”

“Mister,” said the tall, elegant bartender, who wore a vest the same color as the rug that his latest customer had just soiled, “if you can't read a sign, you'd best get someone to read it for you. You just tracked mule shit in here, and Miss O'Brien just had that rug installed two weeks ago!”

The pretty redhead Haskell assumed was Miss O'Brien was coming down the stairs, having to take her time and hold her long red velvet skirt above her ankles lest she should trip and take a header. “Rock!” she called, tipping her chin toward the ceiling. “Samson! Where are you men when I need you?”

As she gained the bottom of the stairs, Miss O'Brien cast her angry, brown-eyed gaze at Haskell once more.

“Were you raised by wolves, sir?”

Haskell glanced back at the tracks he'd made on the floor. “Ah, jeepers.” He chuckled. “I do apologize, Miss O'Brien, but it is only a rug and all. And I guess you might say that in a way, I sorta was raised by wolves. See, Mam and Pap, they didn't have money for such a big, expensive rug. All we had was an earthen floor, though we did lay down some puncheons after a time, when we finally got our beeves trailed to the railhead at Abilene. So you see, there wasn't no real reason to pay such partic'lar attention to our boots. Anyways, set up the Sam Clay, partner! Nectar of the Kentucky gods! What the hell you waitin' for?”

“Rock!” Miss O'Brien screeched at the ceiling. “Samson! Get down here
pronto
!”

A door at the top of the stairs opened, and a balding middle-aged man well attired in a tailored gray suit stepped out, scowling down the steps at the main drinking hall. “Good God, Judith, what in heaven's name is going on down there?”

Judith O'Brien spun to yell up at the man, “Benjamin, fetch Rock and Samson for me, will you?” She spun again to glare up at the big man before her. “Seems we have another bear down from the mountains to wreak holy havoc on the good citizens of Wendigo!”

Her brown eyes scudded across the Pinkerton's impressive frame, and her pupils appeared to dilate.

Bear stared down at her, grinning, enjoying the redhead's beauty. She still had a well-turned figure, although judging by the crow's feet around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, she was probably pushing forty. Her pretty face was liberally freckled.

The freckles were the same color as her eyes, which sparked angrily as she planted her fists on her nicely rounded hips and said, “Mister, you're going to pay for that rug if I have to extract payment from your
hide
.”

Bear looked her up and down, let his eyes linger a second or two longer than respectable on her well-filled, spruce-edged bodice, cut low enough to offer a generous sampling of her freckled wares. The pearl choker around her neck glinted in the bright sunlight angling through the room's front windows.

“Well, if you say so, little lady,” Haskell said, laughing and lifting his hat straight up and down on his head in jeering salute. “Your place or mine?”

The woman gasped. “Why, you demented moron!”

She lunged and cracked him hard across the face with her right hand. Haskell threw his head back and laughed louder. She had put some venom behind the slap, but he'd been struck by far scarier bullies sporting brass knuckles, so he was used to taking much more than what Miss O'Brien could throw at him—and besides, his beard had cushioned the blow.

She gasped again and hardened her jaws till the muscles in her attractive face bulged. She swung her right hand back behind her shoulder, and as she swung it forward once more, Bear grabbed her wrist and spun her around. She gave another enraged screech and followed it up with yet another as Haskell swatted her rump.

“
Oh
!
” she cried, swinging toward him again, her face flushed with fury. She was so enraged now that words seemed to fail her, although she was doing a good job of flinging sharp little javelins of raw rage at him with her lustrous brown eyes.

“Say there!” This from the man who'd stepped out of the door at the top of the stairs. Scowling, he closed both hands around his jacket lapels as he started down the stairs. “Say there, Mister, just who in the hell do you think you are?” He lifted his head toward the ceiling to join Miss O'Brien's refrain: “Rock! Samson! Where in God's name are you?”

Another door opened, this one to the right of the one through which the well-attired gent had surfaced. A plain-faced young blonde poked her head out of the room, blinking groggily, as though she'd just awakened from a long nap, wearing a powder-blue robe and pink slippers. “What's going on out here?”

“Morgana,” the man said, wheeling toward her. “This is none of your affair. Please, go on into my suite, and see if you can straighten out the mess I've made of the books.”

As the dour-looking girl did as she'd been told, closing the door of her room and looking warily down toward Haskell and Miss O'Brien as she crossed to the other door, the well-dressed gent continued on down the stairs. As he did, boots thumped on the balcony above him.

Haskell saw one large brute of a man come running out of a hall to the right of the door into which the dour blonde had disappeared. Another brute was close on his heels, just as big as the first.

Both were dressed in suits that appeared to have been tailored to accommodate their lumpy muscles bulging beneath several yards' worth of broadcloth. The first man was shoving his blond curls down against his head and donning a hat, while the other, who had long black hair and the large, flat face of an Indian or at least a half-breed, was still shrugging into his claw-hammer frock coat.

Haskell had the impression that both men, like the dour blonde, had been napping. They were probably all catching up on their sleep in preparation for the long night ahead in the Sawatch Hotel and Saloon, which boasted a gambling layout, likely a large one, through a closed door beyond the stairs. Haskell always recognized such rooms because they were hardly ever marked, lending an air of alluring sin.

“Rock! Samson!” Miss O'Brien yelled. “I hope you were enjoying your slumbers while this behemoth ruined my new rug! Throw him out of here. Bloody him! Go ahead, boys, have some fun with this son of a bitch!”

The blond gent was almost as large as Haskell himself, although he had a rounded belly. Round but hard beneath his coat and vest. The half-breed was long-striding up behind him, his long hair blowing out behind his shoulders. He stretched his lips back far enough to reveal two silver front teeth, adding an air of menace to his narrow-eyed glower.

Miss O'Brien stepped back to make way for the brutes.

Haskell stepped away from the bar, giving the apron a wink, and said out of the corner of his mouth, “You can go ahead and set it up, pard. This'll just take a second.”

With that last, he ducked a roundhouse flung by the blond brute, whom he assumed was Rock. Rock grunted as his big fist whistled through the air where Bear's head had been a moment before. Haskell rammed his clenched fist so deep into the big blond's hard belly that he thought he heard a rib pop.

When the blond brute jackknifed with a loud chuff and grunt and dropped to his knees clutching his belly, his eyes bulging, Haskell drove his right knee into the man's forehead. The blond flew back against the knees of the half-breed, forestalling the big, dark-eyed brute's progress toward his target.

Haskell stepped back, spread his boots, planted his fists on his hips, and poked his hat back off his forehead. “Ain't leavin' here, no, sir, not till I've met up with that old rascal Malcolm Briar. Son of a bitch told me he had a job for me up here in this high-and-rocky boil on the devil's ass, and I ain't leavin' till I've found the son of a bitch and kept him to his word!”

That froze the half-breed in his tracks on the other side of the groaning blond. The woman, Miss O'Brien, stared at Haskell incredulously. The look turned to narrow-eyed suspicion. The middle-aged dandy had stopped about twenty feet away, regarding Haskell with much the same expression as the woman.

She seemed to shake off her momentary befuddlement and whipped her head toward the half-breed. “Samson, what're you waiting for?”

The half-breed leaped over his downed comrade and bolted toward Haskell with both fists flying. Samson was about the blond's size, maybe a little shorter but broader through the shoulders, but his fighting skills were no better. Haskell, who had earned extra money in the Union Army over the dreary Southern winters as a part-time bare-knuckle fighter, made quick ground beef of the half-breed's face, punched the air out of his lungs, and left him writhing back-down on a near table, groaning and spitting his silver teeth out from between his lips in a spray of liver-colored blood.

“There,” Haskell said, turning toward the bar and winking at the apron. “Told you it'd just take—”

But he didn't like the way Miss O'Brien was suddenly grinning like the cat that ate the canary. The well-dressed gent merely cleared his throat and tugged on his coat lapels. The barman's gaze fluttered over Haskell's left shoulder to something or someone behind him.

Haskell saw a shadow slide across the floor on his left.

The shadow moved quickly.

Something very hard smashed against the back of Bear's head, setting up the tolling of many cracked bells in his ears.

He was aware of a hot, searing pain radiating down from the crown of his skull, turning his shoulders to pudding, a half-second before his eyes closed, and his knees hit the floor with a thundering boom. He groaned, “Ah, shit,” and everything went dark.

11

T
here in a nutshell—and
his head did feel like a cracked nutshell—was the trouble with that technique, Haskell vaguely ruminated, as his eyes fluttered open and he became aware of two men, one to each side, half leading and half dragging him along the street.

He stared down at his boots—one still “soiled”—which with every missed step carved long furrows in the finely ground dirt and the horse and mule shit of the trace.

Yes, there was the trouble with the technique. While it did get everyone's attention, it sometimes—not all the time but enough times to give the Pinkerton pause—got him a cracked skull for his efforts. What it did do, however, was cause no one to believe him a professional investigator, merely a big blowhard who didn't mind getting an entire town's shorts in a twist. He was only looking for a man who'd promised to give him a job, and he was piss-burned because he couldn't locate said gent, never mind that he hadn't actually tried.

An annoyance with fairly innocent intentions rather than a genuine threat . . .

Now, if he lived past the braining he'd taken in the Sawatch House, he might be able to learn something by hook or by crook about the missing Malcolm Briar. Although his brains felt as if they were being scrambled inside his head by two sharp-tined forks that had been poked through the top of his skull, he hoped he'd be able to understand what he learned.

The two men “accompanying” him, whom he hadn't gotten a good look at yet but who he assumed were lawmen, were dragging him toward the opposite side of the street and some distance east of the Sawatch, toward a low, shake-roofed log cabin that appeared to be L-shaped, with a front stoop boasting a wooden washstand topped with a tin pan. A white sign attached to two posts jutting into the street in front of the place was painted with the words in black, “Sheriff Jack Goodthunder—Looking Out for Wendigo!”

Haskell grunted a laugh at that but then sucked a sharp, painful breath through his gritted teeth. He'd gone back to staring at the street again when the local lawmen stopped suddenly in front of the porch steps. One of them said in a syrupy-sweet voice pitched with what Haskell recognized as a South Texas accent, “Well, hello there, Miss Redwine. My, aren't you lookin' purty today?”

Haskell lifted his chin, ran his eyes up the legs of a person he at first took to be a man. For the gent was wearing denim trousers, the insides of the thighs of which had been sewn with buckskin. The gent wore a shell belt and a pistol in a soft leather holster, high and for the cross-draw on his left hip.

Her
hip, Haskell saw when his gaze had run on up the girl's pinstriped shirt and he saw that her suspenders were somewhat squeezing together a rather nice pair of breasts. Above her neck, trimmed with a tightly wound, somewhat frayed green kerchief, she was also pretty, with curly tawny hair hanging to her shoulders and her eyes glinting like freshly minted copper beneath the crown of her chocolate-brown Stetson.

Haskell didn't think she was much over twenty, if that.

Her tongue, however, was much older.

“Kiss my ass,
Deputy
Bodeen,” she snarled, curling her fine, suntanned nose and her rich upper lip.

“Well, hell, I'll kiss more than that, Teddy,” said the other one of Haskell's “helpers,” the man who had his left arm wrapped around his neck. “Hell, I'll stick my tongue so far up your purty pussy you'll feel ticklish all the way up to your tonsils.”

The girl called Teddy Redwine said, “I wouldn't let either one of you ugly devils stick your black tongues anywhere close to my pussy, but the next time I use the privy, I'll call you to clean my ass!”

With that, she strode on past Haskell and the lawmen, turning her head to say crisply over her shoulder, “Get ready to turn my brother loose. I'm heading to the bank to fetch his bail money.”

Haskell and his assistants all turned their heads to watch her stomp away. Her ass was as impressive as the rest of her. Bear saw that the tanned buckskin curved up from the insides of her thighs to cup her taut, round butt like a large, loving hand. Each buttock moved in turn as she angled across the street.

“Who in the hell is that?” Bear asked, getting his feet under him.

“Shut up!” said the man on Haskell's right, whom the girl had called Bodeen, as both lawmen jerked and pulled him up the porch steps.

They stopped on the porch. A man in a black frock coat and a broad-brimmed, bullet-crowned black felt hat lounged in the open doorway, a snide grin on his thin lips beneath a carefully trimmed steel-gray mustache. A five-pointed sheriff's star was pinned to a brocade vest, half concealed by his left lapel.

He was long and lean, and he had the opaque gaze of an aging gunfighter, which he probably was. A pearl-gripped Remington jutted from the black oiled holster thonged low on his right thigh.

“Well, well, what have we here?” His voice sounded like coarse sandpaper raked across raw wood.

Bodeen said, “This here gentleman soiled Miss O'Brien's new carpet over to the Sawatch. Made her madder'n a ol' wet hen. Me and Slake was makin' the rounds when we heard her screamin'.”

Slake said, “Do you know that he 'bout killed both Rock and Samson? An' I ain't exaggeratin', neither, Sheriff. He left them both in a bad way. Samson was layin' atop one of Miss O'Brien's tables with them purty silver teeth of his spit out on his chest!”

“You don't say.” The sheriff chuckled, staring up at Haskell, groaning and sighing against the hammering in his head. He glanced with devilish delight toward the Sawatch. “Boy, I bet that did get Judith's bloomers in a bunch.”

“They started it,” Haskell said. “I finished it.”

“No, I'm the one who finished it,” Bodeen said. He raised the Winchester he was carrying in his right hand. “Just tapped this against the back of his head.”

Slake said, “What should we charge him with, Sheriff?”

“Why, piss-burnin' Miss O'Brien, of course, ya damn fool.” The sheriff looked at Haskell. “That's a law on the books here in Wendigo. And it's one that just ain't broken, you see?”

The deputies chuckled.

Haskell didn't think Sheriff Goodthunder looked much like an Indian despite the native-sounding name. “I left a horse back at the hotel. If you plan on lockin' me up for a short time, I'd appreciate someone seein' to him.”

And if anyone stole his rifle or anything in his saddlebags, he'd make them wish they hadn't. He didn't say that, because he didn't want to give these men any ideas, but that's what he would do, all right.

“Don't worry,” Goodthunder said. “Your horse will be well treated. You, on the other hand”—he shook his head ominously, with that needling little grin on his high-cheeked, sun-bronzed face—“got some back-waterin' to do, friend. You don't mess with Miss O'Brien, or her bully boys over to the Sawatch, without your payin' for it in blood.”

“Ah, hell, I was just joshin',” Haskell said with an off-putting, boyish grin.

“You drunk?”

“No, but I was fixin' to be.”

Slake said, “He said he was waitin' for Malcolm Briar, Sheriff.”

Goodthunder's smile faded. He canted his head as though to make a better appraisal of his new prisoner.

He said, “Oh?”

“Bastard said he had a job for me.” Haskell grunted, rubbing the back of his head. He was still being held up by the deputies. His knees felt like warm water. “If you'll just point me in his direction . . .”

He tried to put his full weight on his boots, but the porch pitched around him. Goodthunder stepped forward. Bodeen had both of Haskell's pistols wedged behind the waistband of his own pants. He had Haskell's bowie knife, which he'd pulled from Bear's right boot well, wedged behind his cartridge belt.

Goodthunder pulled the pistols out of Bodeen's pants, looked them over, and hefted them in his hands, smiling shrewdly.

“That his knife?”

Bodeen nodded.

“You come armed for bear, Mister . . .”

“Haskell. You can call me ‘Sir.'” Bear winked.

Glowering, Goodthunder jerked his head toward the door behind him and stepped aside.

“Sure thing, Sheriff,” Slake said, as he and Bodeen wrestled Haskell through the door and into the main office. “I'd just love to turn the key on this son of a bitch!”

Minutes later, they'd led Bear back into the cell block that ran parallel with the main street, shoved him into a cell, and turned the key on him. Haskell tried to take a step forward under his own power, but his knees buckled, and he hit the lumpy stone floor. He knelt there, groaning.

The bastard had given him a none-too-gentle “tap” on the backside of his head. That was all right, though. He'd remember it, and just as the fiery Miss O'Brien had intended done to him, Haskell intended to extract payment from Deputy Bodeen.

In the meantime, he'd take a little catnap, and then, when his head was clear, he'd figure a way out of Goodthunder's lockup. One thing he'd found out in short order, although the cost had been rather high: something fishy had indeed happened to Malcolm Briar. He'd read it in the eyes of all to whom he'd mentioned Briar's name. The man hadn't just gotten too busy to correspond with his sister. That Briar had likely come to a bad end meant that something fishy had likely also befallen the private detective, Calvin Wexler.

Now Haskell just had to figure out what had happened to both men and who was responsible for it.

“Mister, you look a little peaked over there.”

Haskell was lying on his cot, boot toward the cell door. The voice had come from his left. He turned his head that way, squinted one eye. A sandy-haired young man in a green shirt and
pinto
vest, one mule-eared boot propped on the edge of his cot, was sitting back against the wall of the cell behind him, leisurely smoking a cigarette. His eyes owned a brash, devil-may-care brightness, a good-looking, loose-limbed kid who didn't take much very seriously.

“I gotta admit,” Bear said, “I've felt better.”

“Who took you down, ol' Goodthunder himself or one of them two deputies of his?”

“One of them two deputies . . . and the extra-hard butt plate of a Winchester carbine.”

“Ah. That'd likely be Jake Bodeen. Nasty son of a bitch had a piece of iron set into his rifle butt for just such purposes as cracking men's skulls. Usually sneaks up behind 'em, real catlike, and
pow
!” He stuck his quirley between his teeth to smash his fist into the palm of his other hand, making a sharp cracking sound that shoved a railroad spike through Haskell's one ear and out the other. “Lights out!”

Haskell winced, pressed fingertips to his throbbing temples. “Thanks for the demonstration.”

“Ah, no problem.” The sandy-haired kid chuckled. “What got you thrown in Goodthunder's pit, as everyone around Wendigo calls it? Better not be too good a reason, or you can forget about ever seein' daylight again.”

“Pit, huh?” Haskell remembered Goodthunder's dead eyes. “Wouldn't doubt it. I take it he has a pretty good hold on the town.”

“A good enough hold. Most folks like it that way, since it's a minin' town and all. You need a good lawman to keep a handle on things. Geist brought him in, got him elected to office. Geist and Judith.”

Haskell blinked as he laid his head back against the cot's sour pillow and stared at the herringbone-patterned ceiling tufted with cobwebs and soot from a wood stove in the middle of the cell block. “Who's Geist?”

“Dapper gent. He's in business with Judith. Mostly hunkers down over at the Sawatch.”

“Ah, stuffed shirt in a gray suit.”

The kid chuckled. “Yeah, that's him. Has an office over there. His daughter helps him with the books, sometimes plays the piano downstairs. Not a pleasant creature, Geist's daughter. Together, him and Judith own a good quarter of the town, including Black Diamond Freighting, the greasy-assed old son of a bitch.”

Haskell's mind clung to “Freighting.”

“Black Diamond, eh?”

“That's right. Sons o' bitches.”

Haskell looked over at the kid. He appeared to be in his early to mid-twenties. He had the fair features and frank demeanor of a Midwestern farm boy, many of whom Haskell had fought with in the Little Misunderstanding. Shy and soft-spoken, they'd been fierce fighters once the shooting and yelling had begun.

Aside from one other, snoring gent sound asleep beyond him, the kid was the only other prisoner in the jail block, which appeared to house about ten cells, five on each side of the aisle running parallel with the main street behind Haskell and from which he could hear the town's general hubbub, including the metronomic throb of the ore-processing mills and a dog barking in the distance.

“Why is Geist a son of a bitch?” Haskell asked the sandy-haired lad.