Longarm 397 : Longarm and the Doomed Beauty (9781101545973) (13 page)

She jerked her chin toward the open door, toward where Tate and Dawg lay in the grass fronting the corral. “After they hit you, and I thought you were dead until you started groaning as they loaded you onto your horse.”

She continued to stare down at her steaming cup. Glancing up at him thoughtfully, she said, “I guess you set a good example, Deputy. You back down to no one, do you? Not even a whole gang of killers. I guess if I were you, I'd have left me where you found me and rode away.”

“Well, then,” Longarm said, “I reckon you wouldn't have the job very long, would you?”

She smiled at that. He liked the way the gold specks in her green eyes flashed, reflecting the light from the open door behind Longarm. “No, I guess I wouldn't.” She looked at him searchingly for several more seconds, and then took a sip of her coffee. “I think I'm tired of being scared.”

“Ah, hell—you're tougher than you think you are. If you weren't, you never would have left your home in Pinecone to testify up in Snow Mound against that scurvy devil, Babe Younger.”

“No, that was part of my fear, I guess, too.” She took another sip of her coffee, set the cup down, and dragged the burlap sack toward her. Opening it, she peered inside, then dragged the haunch out onto the table. “Fear of my employer, Mr. Cable, and my father, the good Reverend Pritchard.”

“Afraid I don't quite understand, Miss Pritchard. They pressured you into traveling up to Snow Mound?”

“In their own ways.” Squatting near the range, she was rummaging around in a low cupboard full of cooking utensils. She returned to the table with a skinning knife. She set it down beside the haunch, and a troubled look stole across her face. “Me and Mr. Cable, you see . . . We have more than just a business relationship.”

“Ah.”

“Yes.” She drew a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “I have no feelings for the man, and I doubt he has any feelings for me. If he did, he probably wouldn't have sent me to Snow Mound with only two Pinkertons to protect me. Wouldn't he have come himself?”

She looked at Longarm as though expecting an answer to her question.

“A good man would have accompanied you, yeah. He wouldn't have sent you alone, even if he had hired a couple of bodyguards.”

“Yes. They were just to lessen his guilt.” Color rose in her cheeks as she took up the knife and began carving away at the haunch. “My father, the good reverend, is no better. Mr. Cable built his church, holds the sizeable note on it.”

“He didn't join you, either.”

She pressed her lips together as she carved a steak from the haunch, deftly avoiding the gristle and choosing the tenderest parts of the meat. “I went not so much out of fear, I guess, but because I'm weak. You saw it yourself in the hotel room. A frightened little child, afraid of her own shadow . . . or the man she sleeps with to keep her job, and of the man who pretends not to know I'm sleeping with Mr. Cable but secretly approves. Because he's weak, too.” Her left hand shook as she set aside the steak she'd just carved. “I guess all we Pritchards are weak, Mr. Long.”

“Both Mr. Cable and the good reverend would be quaking in their boots, if they found themselves in this situation.”

She laughed. It was really more of a delighted sigh, as though she were imagining how either man would react to being here in this veritable bear's den. Also an expression of her relief at having found more steel in herself than either man could ever hope of finding.

Longarm sipped his coffee. He turned the cup in a slow, thoughtful circle on the table. “You know what I'd do once you get back to Pinecone?”

She was holding the deer's dun-and-cream hide back while she carved the steak out from under it, slicing through the silk-thin layer of pale fat coating the liver-colored venison. “What's that?”

“I'd tell both men to go to hell.”

Again, she smiled as she continued to cut. “You would at that. And I just might, too. If I still feel as brave . . . or as strong . . . as I do now. With you here,” she added, looking at him. She thought of something. “Look at me—I've been so wrapped up in myself I completely forgot about you.”

She looked around, finally grabbed a ragged scrap of towel, and went out the back door. He heard her walking around back there, her footsteps fading before growing louder as she returned. She came back into the cabin holding the cloth closed around a lump in her hands.

“There's still some snow back there. Here.” She handed it over to the table to him. “Press that to your head. Bring the swelling down.”

“Obliged.” Longarm held the pack to the top of his head, wincing a little at the ache that quickly subsided after the snow's initial cold shock.

“You know what I think, Miss Pritchard, since we seem to be getting along better now . . . ?”

She stepped back and arched a brow, a slight flush rising in her tapering cheeks. “What's that, Deputy?”

He turned his chair around, so that he could see out the door and across the clearing. “I think you oughta call me Longarm.” He glanced over his shoulder and winked at her. “Most folks do.”

Those gold flecks flashed again as she smiled. “Then you may call me Jo. I know it's not a very attractive handle, Longarm, but it's the only one I have.”

“You make it just about as pretty a name as I ever heard, Jo,” Longarm said.

She blushed and turned to the stove. As she added more wood to the firebox and began frying the venison steaks, Longarm sipped his coffee and stared out the open door, keeping an eye out for the Babe Younger cutthroats.

He was likely wasting his time.

The gang was probably headed for Utah by now . . .

Longarm adjusted the focus on his government-issue field glasses, and the black speck clarified and grew in size as it swooped low over a sprawling pine. He saw the raptor's white head and tail, long, yellow beak, predatory eyes, and the flinty, granite-black feathers rippling in the late-afternoon wind.

The golden sunshine flashed silver off the bird's sleek back. The yellow talons folded down from the long body. The broad, ragged wings rose, and the toes hooked over the edge of the barrel-sized nest of woven brush, branches, and pine needles.

From the bald eagle's beak drooped a silver fish, just now flicking its tail. The big raptor dropped the fish into the nest amongst five of its fuzzy, charcoal-colored offspring. Longarm watched as the big raptor tore bits of meat from the fish and fed each of her offspring in turn, dropping the ragged chunks of flesh into each waiting, upturned mouth. Then she rose up out of the nest once more, becoming airborne with the heavy flapping of her powerful wings. Behind, all five fuzzy heads with big, perpetually open, black beaks dropped down to feed on what was left of the trout the mother bird had likely pulled from a lake or river that Longarm could not see from his vantage point.

He slid the lenses to the right, raking the pine forest southwest, to a far, rocky ridge, then pulled them down a little to inspect the trail twisting up from the canyon about two miles below and southeast—the trail up which Tate and Dawg had hauled him and the girl.

No movement on the trail. He scouted several clearings on either side of it, and saw nothing there, either, except a few mule deer sunning themselves in the greening spring grass of a gentle slope.

Now he slid the glasses to his left, following the trail through the forest and into the clearing where the cabin sat at the base of the giant knob of weathered granite turning slate gray as the sun angled behind it and began stretching purple shadows across the clearing. Smoke rose from the stone hearth.

Longarm had saddled his claybank and rode up here, on this knob jutting out from the main ridge, to scout the area around the cabin. He hadn't come far, because he hadn't wanted to leave Jo Pritchard alone for long in the cabin. From here he had a good view of all the possible routes the killers might take on their way up the ridge from below.

Up higher and behind him, the wind was blowing. It sounded like a distant train under a full head of steam. But down here, lower on the knob, all was quiet. Except for the slightly bending pine crowns below and him, all was still.

Maybe it was all too still and too quiet. He wasn't sure. But for some reason, he felt a prickle of apprehension deep in his belly. Probably just his old instincts telling him not to let his guard down. Just when he thought that he and the girl had outrun the killers, they'd likely show.

On the other hand, maybe, as he'd thought might happen, they'd indeed grown bored with the hunt for the girl—after all, killing her wasn't going to bring Babe up out of his cold grave—and had moved on to the wreaking of more havoc elsewhere. He hoped so.

Satisfied that no one was skulking around out here at the moment, and with night falling fast, they likely wouldn't be for a while, Longarm grabbed his rifle and picked his way down off the escarpment and into the hollow in which the clay was tied. He slid the Winchester into its saddle boot, returned the field glasses to their scratched case, and dropped them into a saddlebag pouch.

Stepping into the saddle, he threaded his way through the escarpments, then rode on down the mountain, crossed the trail, and entered the clearing in which the cabin sat, thick smoke pouring from its chimney. Jo must have stoked the stove against the coming chill.

Longarm returned the clay to its stable, where he unsaddled the mount and forked hay to it and the others. He hauled water from the creek that snaked around behind the cabin and stable, filling the stock trough, then headed back to the cabin.

He wrapped his hand around the front door knob and pushed the door open a foot. Inside, Jo, sitting in a washtub filled with soapy water, her blond hair piled atop her beautiful head, gasped and covered her wet, soapy breasts with her arm. Longarm felt a sting of automatic lust as he saw her close her right hand over her right, tender breast, but closed the door only about a second after he'd opened it.

“Sorry, Jo! I didn't know you were bathing!” he said through the door.

“I'll be done in a minute, Longarm,” the girl called, the fear gone from her voice. Again, she called from inside the cabin. “Sorry—I decided to heat water for a bath just after you left.”

“No problem.” Longarm turned away from the door as though from the remembered image of her sitting there in the tub that did nothing to hide her firm, young, pink-tipped breasts adorned with diaphanous soap bubbles. “No problem at all,” he added wryly, sitting down on a log bench fronting the cabin and digging a nickel cheroot from his shirt pocket.

He tried to keep his mind off the girl, remembering Billy Vail's admonishment cloaked as a joke. It would be damned unprofessional as well as downright careless of him to try to bed the girl out here, with a whole gang of cutthroats possibly on their heels. But his pecker tingled as he sat there, firing the cheroot and listening to the water splashing on the other side of the door.

“Longarm?” she called after a time. “Would you come in here, please?”

Longarm groaned against the tightness of his pants as he rose from the bench and, clamping the cigar between his teeth, opened the cabin door. The girl stood at the range atop which two kettles of water steamed. “Would you empty my bathwater?” Facing the water steaming on the range, she smiled at him over her shoulder exposed by the overlarge, man's wool shirt hanging off of it. “If you'll haul water from the creek, I'll fix you up your own nice, hot bath. Hot water's almost ready.”

Longarm looked at her—even in the men's overlarge duds, she was one delightful, alluring display of female curves—and rolled the cigar between his lips. “Ah, you don't need to do that, Miss Jo.”

“Oh, it feels so good to get the trail grime off, Longarm. I insist!” She grinned at him—coquettishly? “Go on now. It won't take a minute, and then I'll fry us up some more steaks for supper. I even found some beans and greens in airtight tins!”

“Oh, well . . . hell.”

Longarm rolled the cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other as he picked up the tub by its metal handles and hauled it out the back door and emptied it into the brush. He went back into the cabin, set down the tub, and picked up a wooden bucket by the door, letting his eyes rake the girl's small, curvy frame once more as she rummaged around on a high shelf near the range, rising onto the toes of her black boots.

The jeans she wore were much too large for her, but they still revealed a nicely rounded ass and gently curving hips tapering to well-turned thighs.

“Knock it off, you cork-headed fool,” he grumbled silently to himself as he carried the bucket out toward the stream flashing beyond a screen of willows dappled with late-afternoon salmon light. “You're supposed to be protecting the girl, not
fucking
her!”

Well, taking a bath wasn't fucking her. He could think about fucking her, though, couldn't he? As good as she looked, what man wouldn't be entertaining such thoughts?

When he returned to the cabin, she was pouring one of the kettles of hot water into the washtub. Steam wafted above the tub and into the shadowy air of the cabin.

“What're you gonna do while I bathe?”

“Don't worry,” she said, removing the second steam pot from the range. “I won't peek.”

She gave him a coy, little smile, then dumped the water into the tub. Longarm set his own bucket down, then sagged into a kitchen chair.

“I'll sit right here,” she said, turning a chair out away from the opposite side of the table, facing the front window right of the door. “I'll keep watch while you wash.”