Stringer and the Deadly Flood (5 page)

She thought that was a fine notion and, as he sat down beside her, she unbuttoned her duster, revealing the print dress underneath. Stringer carefully helped her out of her coat. Then, because there were no clothes hooks in the closet, he took it over to the same table lamp, lifted his hat, and draped the poplin duster neatly over the domed lamp shade before he replaced his hat atop everything.

Zelda laughed, commenting that it looked like a little old man seated there. Then Stringer went back to the bed, sat down, and returned to work on her purse strap. She told him, as she watched, that he had clever hands. He didn't answer. He'd already noticed her hands but didn't think it would have been polite to comment on the paler ring of flesh around the third finger of her left hand. A gal had a right to remove her wedding band for whatever reason, and he wasn't up to hearing long, sad stories about such matters unless the folk involved were famous enough to rate a scandal column in the
Sun.

He'd just fashioned a small secure knot and trimmed it even neater with his pocketknife when a windowpane shattered and something buzzed just above their heads to thunk into the wall above the head of the bed.

Stringer shoved Zelda flat and sprang the other way to flip the light switch near the door. As the room was plunged in darkness, he heard her gasp, “What was that, a
rock
through the window?”

He told her to stay down as he moved toward the window in a crouch. Then he saw the bullet hole in the drawn shade, and he had to grope about on the floor near the table before he found his hat and her travel duster spread across the floor with the remains of the table lamp.

“I'd say somebody just shot at me as I was sitting by the window, outlined against the shade,” he said. “I sure hope it looked that way to whoever had it in for me, don't you?”

She sat up, despite his orders. “Oh, lord, it must have been those Mexicans!”

He answered thoughtfully, “Maybe. If they'd had a gun handy back there, we'd have had more trouble getting away from 'em. Of course, one of 'em could have gone home to borrow his papacito's hunting rifle. But this time, I don't know....”

He moved back to the bed to reach under it for his gladstone and haul it out. Their eyes had adjusted to the street glow from outside by now, so she was able to see what he was up to as he got out his gun rig and hung it over a bedpost with the grips of his S&W Double Action handy.

She asked soberly, “Do you think they'll really come all the way inside?”

He tried to sound reassuring as he bolted the door. “I doubt it. If they think they got me they'll want to put a heap of distance between themselves and the scene of their crime.”

He sat beside her again. There was no other furniture worth sitting on in the little room. She suddenly wrapped both arms around him and pleaded, “Oh, hold me! I'm so scared, Stuart!”

Being a gentleman, he did. He wasn't holding her at all sassy, but he could still tell she wasn't wearing whalebone or much of anything else under her thin frock. Her straw boater had fallen off and her hair smelled of lavender shampoo as she held her cheek to his chest and went on shivering like a frightened pup. He held her tighter and kissed the bare nape of her neck as he soothed, “There, there, it's likely over. I don't suspect anyone else in the place even noticed. We'll just sit tight a spell and then, once we're sure it's over, I'll go on down and see about a room for you, okay?”

She sobbed, “I don't want you to leave me alone in this horrid town for a second! Why can't I just stay here with you for the night?”

He hesitated, then pointed out, “For openers, there's just this one bed, Miss
Zelda.”

She said, “I know. But I can leave my chemise on and it will be dark and... well, don't you think you could be trusted if we each stayed on our own side all night?”

He sighed and answered truthfully. “Nope. I could mayhaps manage to behave that platonic if you had two heads and both of 'em ugly. But to tell the truth, I find it sort of tough to behave myself now with you in the dark, fully dressed atop the covers. So we're going to have to study on bedding you down safer somewhere else, unless you'd like to see me make a total fool of myself.”

She sighed and said, “Oh dear, there seems to be only one practical way to deal with this awkward situation then.”

He agreed and, as she rose to her feet, he assumed she meant her words more properly than her next action showed. There was no mistaking her meaning, though, once she started to climb out of her duds. There was enough light for him to stare up at her, slack-jawed, as she tossed her shimmy shirt aside to rejoin him, naked as a jay, atop the covers.

It didn't take Stringer long to shuck his own duds and get the two of them under the covers. But she was still imploring, “Hurry! Please don't tease me so!” by the time he was in her with a pillow under her rollicking rump and, though he rode her to glory with more than a little enthusiasm, Zelda climaxed ahead of him—twice—and begged for more as he lay gasping for his second wind atop her firm naked breasts. As she wrapped her strong slender thighs around him to hug him closer, Stringer knew he'd been right about that wedding band she'd shucked. He didn't want to know whether an extremely enthusiastic marriage had ended in some unfortunate manner or whether she was just a married gal who traveled incognito away from home. So he didn't ask. They made love again, and then again, before she had mercy on him and gave him a chance to roll a smoke and cuddle her more calmly for a spell.

By this time she'd calmed down enough, if she'd ever really been that scared, to ask once more about the rifle shot that had brought them together so romantically. He took a thoughtful drag of Bull Durham and told her, “It works two ways. The obvious way could have been a grouchy Chicano, as I mentioned before. On the other hand, I'm a fairly well-known newspaperman who's written more than one exposé on crooked dealings. Just before we met I'd been nosing about a mayhaps crooked land
office,
and they'd just figured out who I really was as I was leaving.”

She said that sounded confusing but thrilling, so he wound up telling her the story of his life in the condensed version he used for such pillow conversations. He found it no more tedious than to listen to the self-serving tales that gals seemed to feel situations like this called for. He'd never seen why folk needed excuses to go to bed together. It surely had sleeping alone beat all hollow.

When he'd finished his tale and even shorter smoke, Zelda went on combing his belly hairs with her nails, purring, “Well, I never would have taken you for a newspaperman, dear. You look and talk so... well, outdoorsy. I thought you were a rancher or something.”

He sighed, then answered, “Yeah, for some reason I have to explain that to half the grammar school graduates I meet up with. They pay me to write educated English with all the spelling and punctuation right. I just told you how I worked my way through Stanford by herding cows part-time. Anyways, nobody talks as formal as they write. How often do you reckon Sir Walter Scott used
Thee
and
Thou
in normal conversation with his kith and kin? I was born and reared in the Mother Lode country amid folk who talked cow unless they talked Spanish or Miwok. You ought to hear old Jack London talk some time. Come to think on it, your pretty little ears might be too delicate.”

She gasped, “Heavens! Do you know the famous Jack London, the author of
Call of the Wild?
”

“We met up in Frisco as rival cub reporters,” Stringer grimaced. “He's still a fair newspaperman. It's those potboiling novels he's taken to writing that are full of bull. Fancy as he writes, old Jack was a product of the Frisco Bay mudflats. He grew up Shanty Irish and got to be more famous as an oyster pirate than anything else until he discovered, in jail, he had a knack for writing. He's yet to learn to spell. But that's why editors were born, so it don't show by the time those fancy words he can't even pronounce show up in print. Old Sam Clemens, now—you probably know him as Mark Twain—is just the opposite. He talks like an educated gentleman and writes like a Mississippi deck hand. You can't judge a book by its cover or expect a writer to sound like he writes, unless he's reading you his own stuff, see?”

Zelda seemed to have become bored with all this talk of literary style. She yawned politely and moved her hand further down. When she inquired if he had his
second
wind yet, he allowed he had and rolled back in the saddle, saying with a friendly chuckle, “Open the chute and let's see if I can stay aboard this bronc.”

She laughed like hell at his remark, showing that she appreciated his style, and then she bucked even harder.

So, all in all, his layover in L.A. was mighty enjoyable—as long as it was safe to assume nobody was out seriously to kill him that is.

CHAPTER
FOUR

The dinky, dusty town of El Centro made Stringer glad he'd shared that last bath with the amazing Zelda before they'd parted. His teeth were gritty and his shirt collar felt grimy by the time he'd toted his gladstone from the sun-baked railroad platform to the nearest shade. Despite Sam Barca's observation that it was early in the year for real heat in these parts, it was already hot enough. The town was surrounded by dead-flat miles of nothing much. El Centro was so small he could see outside it by peering down any street. A few of the buildings were badly built adobes, although most were boomtown frame. The soil underfoot was a sort of talcum powder silt that didn't make for firm 'dobe bricks no matter how much straw and cow shit was mixed in with it. He spied a sign in the middle distance offering beer or Coca Cola, both on ice. So he spat out some liquid mud and headed that way.

As he did so, a one-horse hearse and some dusty Mexicans playing a funeral dirge passed him, headed the other way. Stringer idly assumed they meant to either bury the poor cuss farther out amid the slate-blue greasewood clumps or, just as likely, put the body on the next train through. If that was their intention, he could only hope they'd used plenty of embalming fluid. Trains ran few and far between along this stretch of the Southern Pacific. The track drifted south of the official border past Mexicali, but nobody seemed to care. Anyone aiming to cross the border unlawfully in these parts would have to be mighty ambitious as well as half camel. For unless and until that irrigation project ever got here, there wasn't another water hole for many a dusty mile, north or south. A lazy daisy windmill back by the trackside water tower announced the presence of ground water, deep under the chalky surface. The railroad had apparently built the drab little settlement as a water stop for its thirsty
locomotives.
No matter where in the world they wandered, a steam train had to jerk water every hundred miles or so.

Stringer entered the dinky saloon and put down his bag. He'd strapped his gun on before getting down from the cross-country train, but there was hardly anyone in the place to mind. The saloon was store-front wide and about forty feet back, with the bar along one of the longer walls. The other wall was lined with tables and chairs, all painted an electric blue in the Mexican manner. Some said the color repelled flies, and that may have been why the flies in the saloon were circling a strip of flypaper at the far end of the bar. The old-timer mopping the other end with a damp rag asked Stringer to name his pleasure. He said he'd drink just about anything that was cold and wet, but he was still a mite surprised when the barkeep served him a bottle of Coca Cola, saying, “You may as well help me get rid of this stuff then. Hardly any of my regular customers seem to like it since Teddy Roosevelt made 'em take the cocaine outten Coca Cola. Nothing to it now but cola-nut juice and sugar water. They'll likely be going out of business any day now.”

Stringer was too thirsty to argue. He guzzled half the bottle at one gulp, belched, and observed, “Sure tastes better than your topsoil.”

The old-timer chuckled. “Oh, the soil ain't so bad, this far to the south. Goes from good loam to pure alkali as you ride north into Salton's Sink.”

“If you say so,” Stringer said, sipping some more soda pop. “I'd hate to try to grow serious weeds out there though.”

The old barkeep nodded. “So would I, without water. But it's still damned fine dirt, brung all the way down from the Rockies by the Colorado. It assays out as all sorts of interesting minerals combined. You'll see a few local folk have planted garths as you wander about. Stick a seed in, sprinkle it with water, and step back pronto lest you wind up with a sunflower stalk up your ass.”

Stringer said he hadn't come to argue, put down the empty bottle, and asked if he could have a beer. The keeper of local lore chuckled agreeably. “Sure. Order more than one beer and that soda pop was on the house.” Then, as he opened a cold beer bottle for Stringer, he observed, “You didn't say what brung you here, if it wasn't to argue about our fine topsoil, stranger.”