Longarm and the Banker's Daughter (9781101613375) (11 page)

Chapter 17

Longarm led the coyote dun into the camp and dropped the reins. Lacy was still unconscious by the fire. Quickly, he retrieved her skirt, shirt, spare underclothes, and boots from around where she and Felix had been frolicking, then rolled the clothes up with her in the blankets she slept in. He saddled one of the Greer horses—a claybank mare—before turning the others loose and leading the claybank into the camp.

Gently but not too gently, Longarm picked up the blanketed bundle that was Lacy and slung her over the claybank's saddle. He tied the girl's hands to her ankles beneath the mare's belly. She groaned and shook her head in unconscious protest but did not awaken. He was glad. He was tired of listening to her. He hoped she stayed asleep until they reached the spot where she'd hid the loot from Gunn and Cruz.

He was about to kick dirt on the fire when he tapped his mackinaw over where he usually kept his cigars in the breast pocket of his frock coat and remembered he was out of smokes. This was going to be a tough pull to the hidden loot, and cigars were a necessity. They helped him think. Quickly, he rummaged through Greer's saddlebags, found the gunpowder can and a bottle of brandy, and stuffed Greer's five cigars into his frock coat pocket. He stuffed the brandy into his mackinaw pocket.

Feeling fortified, he kicked dirt on the fire, mounted the coyote dun, and leading the claybank mare by its bridle reins, let the claybank pick its own, slow way through the dark forest, heading toward the other side of the valley. He had to let the horses take their time or risk having one break its leg in the dense darkness that was only weakly illuminated by starlight. As he rode, Lacy riding behind him across the clay's back, he listened for riders along his back trail, though he heard only the wolves once again howling, now with more contentment than before.

It was sort of like him and the brandy and cigars . . .

If Gunn and Cruz were heading toward him, they'd have to take their time, just as he was. Maybe they weren't behind him. If they were, they'd probably wait to track him in the morning.

Or . . . maybe not.

A weird stiffness in the back of his neck told the lawman that the desperadoes had heard the gunfire, maybe even seen Greer's fire, and were heading toward him now. Slowly. Gradually, maybe. But they were back there, only a mile or two behind him. That stiffness in his neck told him so. At first light, they'd increase their pace, which meant he had to increase his, as well.

He just hoped they didn't run him down until he got the loot. After he got the loot, it would be easier to lose them. Now, they knew where he was heading, and it was just a matter of who got there with Lacy first.

He'd ridden for forty-five minutes before Lacy started to groan and sigh, the groans and sighs growing louder until she said in a thick, garbled voice, “Longarm? Longarm . . . what're you doing, damnit. Untie me, damn you!”

Longarm kept riding, putting the dun slowly up the gradual slope of the valley far ridge, climbing through the pines, crossing occasional small clearings.

“Longarm, goddamn your ornery hide, untie me, damn you, or so help me . . . !”

Longarm stopped the dun. With a sigh, he swung down from the saddle and walked back to where Lacy's head hung down the clay's side. “Damn, it was quiet.”

She jerked at the ropes. “Untie me, you bastard!”

He would have continued riding with her tied—at the speed he was traveling, it wouldn't kill her—but her screams would give his position away to Gunn and Cruz. He considered gagging her, but while she certainly deserved it, he couldn't bring himself to do it.

Pulling out his folding barlow knife, he cut her free and pulled her none too gently off the mare's back. She was bound up so tightly in the blankets that she stumbled backward and fell in the grass. “Ouch!”

“Keep it down or I'll bind you
and
gag you, and you wouldn't like that.”

“Help me, damnit!” she ordered, trying to wriggle free of the blankets.

He reached down, found an end of the blanket, and gave it a hard tug until she'd rolled pale and naked into the grass, her clothes and shoes tumbling away from her. She groaned and grunted, then cast him a hateful look, jutting her chin. “I hate you, you big, mean son of a bitch!”

“I'm gettin' bigger an' meaner, Miss Lacy. I reckon having done to me what you been doin', capped off by the whack over the head I took from your ole pal May, just made me moreso.”

She started to retort, but he stopped her with: “No, no. You just keep that purty mouth shut, or I will bound and gag you. I won't let you go until we get back to where you hid the loot.”

Shivering, she wrapped the blankets around her as she sat on her naked rump in the grass. “If you think I'm going to show you where that money is, you're badly mistaken.”

“If you don't show me where the money is, Lacy—”

“Yes?” she interrupted insolently. “What are you going to do about it? Spank my bare bottom? You'd just love that, wouldn't you?”

“Nothin' would please me more.” Longarm shucked his Colt and spun the cylinder, making it whine. Then he aimed the pistol at the girl's forehead and clicked back the hammer. “Nothin' more except puttin' a bullet between those purty, evil eyes of yours, that is.”

She stared at the gun aimed at her from a foot away. “You wouldn't dare!”

“After that last stunt you pulled,” he said with a caustic chuckle, “you bet I would. Now, get dressed. We're wastin' time. Gunn and Cruz are likely behind us. You don't want them boys catchin' up to us any more than I do. Probably less than I do, after what you pulled on them.” He chuckled again and depressed the Colt's hammer. “Face it, Lacy. You done run out of friends. The party's over. You an' me are gonna fetch those saddlebags and head to Jawbone once and for all.”

“Gunn and Cruz are gonna have somethin' to say about that.”

“Yep.”

She just stared at him, shivering inside the blankets. Her eyes were cold and cunning, just like before. He knew she was still thinking about how she could get away from him. She was trying to put some new tricks up her sleeve. Only problem was, even he himself didn't know if he was lying about drilling a bullet through her head if she didn't produce the loot. That uncertainty was in her eyes, too. Tempering the shrewness. That was one trick he himself had.

It was about time he had one . . .

“You get dressed and think about it,” he said, holstering the six-shooter, then reaching inside the mackinaw and plucking one of Greer's cheroots from the breast pocket of his frock coat. He stuck the cigar in his mouth, then fired a lucifer on his cartridge belt, cupping the flame as he lit the cigar, puffing the aromatic smoke out in the chill air.

She chuffed her disdain for him, then reached around her, gathering her clothes and shoes, then let the blanket slide off her shoulders as she climbed to her feet. Standing before him, letting him get a good look at her jiggling nakedness, she dressed, shivering, glaring at him, muttering oaths under her breath.

Longarm leaned back against her horse and smoked and watched her. At first he tried not to watch, because he feared the warm caress of desire her body evoked in him. But then he realized as he watched her that he felt nothing. No prickling in his belly or cock or elsewhere. He had no urge to grab her and pull her to him, feel those breasts mashed against his chest, or to throw her to the ground, spread her legs with his own, and mount her.

“Here,” he said, stiffly tossing her a wool poncho he'd found with the tack he'd rigged her horse with. “Gonna need that.”

She grabbed the poncho out of the air and stared at him. She seemed to sense his lack of desire, and it confounded her.

“In rather a hurry to have me cover up, aren't you?” she said.

“Cover or don't cover. Up to you. Just pull that on if you're going to.” He stared off along his back trail, puffing the cigar. “We're gonna be movin' again in three jerks of a whore's bell.”

With a caustic grunt, wrinkling her nose, she dropped the poncho over her head.

“Sure you wouldn't like one more look at my tits before we got moving?”

“I seen 'em.”

Longarm looked at her again and shook his head, amazed that she'd had such a hold on him. Why, she was nothing more than a black-hearted devil standing here before him. All that was missing were the green horns and yellow fangs. She appalled him.

Longarm took another puff from his cigar, then grabbed her and tossed her up onto the claybank's back as though she weighed little more than a small bag of Arbuckles. She gave an indignant squeal at his brusqueness, then leaned forward to grab the saddle horn. “Damn you!”

“Nah, you're the one who's damned.” Chuckling ironically, he filed the coal off his smoke with his thumbnail, then, stuffing the half-smoked cheroot in his coat pocket, he took the claybank's reins as well as his own horse's ribbons and stepped into the leather. “You'd best settle in. We ain't gonna be stoppin' much between now and reachin' that loot!”

He pressed heels to the dun's flanks, and the horses moved forward. She grabbed the horn again with a gasp, nearly falling off the clay's back.

*   *   *

The next day, in the midafternoon, he lay atop a volcanic dike in the foothills of the San Juan Mountains, staring through a spyglass he'd found in Heck Gunn's saddlebags. He slid the glass from left to right, scrutinizing a wooded, grassy area along a creek that meandered near the base of the dike. This was where he'd nabbed Lacy away from Gunn and Cruz back in what seemed another lifetime, so much had happened since then.

Twisting the brass-chased telescope slightly this way and that, he adjusted the single sphere of magnified vision, bringing up the scattered pines and piñons running along the creek's other side and up a slight, boulder-strewn rise from the water. No sign of Gunn and Cruz over there. Longarm had thought they might have somehow gotten ahead of him and Lacy and been waiting for them here.

The cottonwoods were shedding their leaves, giving him a good view of where the gang had been camped and the area around where she'd hid the loot with the intention of somehow shedding the gang later that day and returning to it later. Nothing here now but orange and yellow leaves dancing as they fell from the gray-brown branches and flashing in the golden, high-country sunlight. There were scattered piñons, a few wolf willows, sage, and rocks. Not much else to offer cover to possible ambushers.

That Gunn and Cruz did not appear to have set a trap for Longarm did little set him at ease, however. He turned to peruse a broader area around him, beyond the slope on toward the San Juan valley to the northeast, where the Sangre de Cristo jutted against a cobalt sky.

He'd seen no sign of the outlaws since he'd nabbed Lacy from the Greers. His veteran lawman's sense, as well as just plain old common sense, told him they were back there, however. They had to be. That he hadn't seen them only made him all the more nettled, anxious.

Where the hell were they?

He lowered the glasses, looked down the slope behind him, saw the claybank mare and his coyote dun idly cropping the blond needlegrass that grew up from the thin, gravelly soil in front of a low mound of rock. Lacy sat on a rock between him and the horses and slightly to his left, at the base of a small, jagged-topped scarp.

She leaned forward with her elbows on her spread knees, staring at the ground with a wary, crestfallen cast to hear near-blank gaze. She hadn't said more than two or three words to him in over twenty-four hours. She'd been sullenly silent as a scolded schoolgirl, realizing the game was finally over. She looked so raggedy-heeled that Longarm almost felt sorry for her.

Almost.

A hell of a lot of folks had died on account of her, and he'd almost been one of them more than once.

“Get over here,” he ordered.

She lifted her head to look at him dully. Then she rose from the rock with a sigh and walked toward him, her honey-blond hair shining in the sun, soiled skirt buffeting about her long legs. Wisps of hair blew against her pale, drawn cheeks. With another, fateful sigh, she dropped to her knees before him, and he held out the spyglass.

“Look over there,” he said, canting his head toward the creek. “Point out where you hid the loot, and don't fuck around. Remember my warning.”

“Or you'll drill a bullet through my
purty
head
?”

“You got it.”

She stared back at him, upper lip curled in a sneer. The sneer faded, and apprehension grew in her eyes. She took the spyglass, and aimed it toward the creek, giving it a couple of twists as she stared through it, then handed it back to Longarm. “See that tree with its roots pulling out of the bank?” She canted her head toward the creek.

Longarm nodded. He'd seen the tree through the glass.

“The saddlebags are in the hollow with the roots,” she said, rolling onto her side, propped on an elbow, staring off in grim defeat.

Longarm narrowed an eye at her, tapped his open palm with the glass. “They better be.”

She scowled at him.

Longarm rose to his knees, grabbed a pair of handcuffs he'd worn hooked over his cartridge belt. “Hold your hands out.”

“Why?”

“I'm gonna fetch the saddlebags. Don't want you runnin' off. You're headin' with me and the money back to Jawbone.”

She gave him another scowl and looked up at him from beneath her slender, blond brows as he clicked the cuffs closed around her wrists. “It's not too late, Custis,” she said with a hopeful half smile. “You don't mind if I still call you Custis, do you? Mexico's a lot warmer than here. Especially, with me . . .”

Longarm chuckled. “You're a stubborn little thing, I'll give you that.” He stood, grabbed his rifle, and looked around. Seeing none of the cutthroats moving in on him, he said, “Sit tight. I'll be back.”