Longarm 242: Red-light (20 page)

“Oh, Custis, you fill me up so good!” she moaned.

Her hips began to pump back and forth as she rode him. Longarm reached up and caught hold of her breasts, his fingers sinking into the soft flesh as he cupped and kneaded them. Rafaela and Mickey sprawled on either side of him, nipping and kissing at his chest, shoulders, and neck.

Just as Rafaela had predicted, he didn't last very long. He had let Angie do most of the work, but as he felt his seed boiling up he gripped her hips and held her still as he drove into her, bottoming out again and holding it there. He began to spasm, the hot, thick juices exploding out of him and flooding into her. Rafaela and Mickey threw their arms around him and hung on. Angie cried out as her own climax shook her. Longarm shuddered once, twice, three times as the last of his seed leaped from him. He fell back against the pillows.

“Are you sure ... you gals ... ain't trying to kill me?” he asked when he could summon up enough breath to speak again.

Angie leaned over and kissed him quickly, almost shyly. “Oh, Custis, that was so good,” she whispered. “I wish you could do that to me every day for the rest of my life.”

He reached up and stroked her hair. “That'd be a mighty nice way to spend the next forty years or so,” he said. “If I didn't have a job waiting for me, that is.”

Rafaela and Mickey each kissed him on the cheek. “You are a nice man, Custis Long,” whispered Rafaela. She almost sounded sad about something, Longarm thought, but then, Rafaela was always more solemn than the other young women.

“Nola will be here later,” Rafaela went on. “She said that you were to sleep when we were finished with you.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Longarm with a drowsy grin. “You ladies wrung me out, that's for damn sure.”

The three of them slipped out of the bed. Angie was the most reluctant to go. She leaned over and gave his now-soft manhood a farewell squeeze. “When do you reckon you'll be ready to go again?” she asked.

“Angie,” Rafaela said sternly before Longarm could answer. “Come along now. Remember what Nola said.”

“Yeah, I guess you're right.” She grinned brightly at Longarm. “Good night, Custis!”

“Good night, Angie,” he told her. “Good night to all you ladies.”

The three women slipped out of the room, and Longarm rolled onto his right side again, favoring the left side where he had been shot. Even after all the exertion of the last hour or so, the wound didn't feel too bad, and it hadn't started bleeding again. He chuckled as he thought of the way those three hussies had taken advantage of a poor, injured man.

As he drifted off to sleep, he wondered if they might be willing to take advantage of him again a few more times before he started back to Denver.

He woke up to the sound of a metallic clicking.

Thinking that someone in the room had just cocked a gun, Longarm started to lunge upright in the bed. His hand reached out for the pistol on the table.

His arm was jerked back before it got there, and he was thrown back down on the pillows. “What the hell!” he exclaimed.

“I'm sorry, Custis, I truly am. But I just can't pass this chance up. There may never be another one.”

That was Nola's voice. Longarm looked up, saw her in the light of the lamp that was burning on the dressing table. Something clattered, and he looked down at his hands.

A pair of manacles had been snapped around his wrists, and they were attached to a chain that was fastened around one of the bedposts.

“What the hell!” Longarm said again, this time practically in a roar.

“Just settle down, Custis, and no one will get hurt,” said Nola. Her voice was calm, yet it had a faint quaver in it.

Longarm stared at her in astonishment. She was wearing boots, denim trousers, and a man's shirt and jacket. Her hair was tucked up under a broad-brimmed Stetson. She even had a gunbelt buckled around her trim hips. With her red hair and the way she was dressed, she reminded Longarm of his old friend Jessie Starbuck, but Jessie was 'way down in Texas and had always been on the side of the law.

From the looks of things, Nola had decided to try the outlaw trail. Either that, or she had something mighty odd in mind for pleasuring herself with him.

Longarm forced his raging emotions to settle down, just as Nola had urged. He said in a fairly calm voice, “All right, Nola, what's this all about?”

“It ought to be obvious, Custis,” she replied. “You're my prisoner.”

“What are you going to do to me?” he asked, a part of him still hoping that this might be just some sort of game.

“I'm not going to do anything to you. I like you, Custis, and I don't want to see you hurt. That's why I'm going to leave you locked up here in my room, so that no harm will come to you when I take that silver and leave town with it.”

“Son of a bitch!” exploded Longarm. He had been afraid Nola was going to say something like that. She was dressed for traveling in a hurry, and that meant a getaway of some sort. That pile of recovered loot was about the only thing in Galena City worth getting away with.

“I know you thought better of me than that, and I'm truly sorry to disappoint you, Custis,” Nola went on. “But let's face it—I'm a whore, and if money wasn't important to me, I wouldn't be in this line of work.”

He gestured as much as he could with his chained hands. “What about the Silver Slipper? Looks to me like it makes plenty of money!”

“The place is profitable,” admitted Nola. “But I could run this saloon for the rest of my life and not make as much as what's sitting over there in that stage station.” She shook her head. “No, I have to do this. All my life I've wanted to be so rich that nobody could ever hurt me again. Ever since I was twelve years old and my brothers started taking turns with me on the farm back in Iowa—”

She stopped short, taking a deep, ragged breath. “But that doesn't matter to you, does it, Custis? You carry a badge, so when you get right down to it, nothing matters to you except the law.”

That wasn't strictly true, thought Longarm. He had bent the rules on more than one occasion to see justice done. But Nola wouldn't understand that, any more than he could really understand the pain inside her that had to be driving her.

He lifted his manacled hands. “Take these things off me, Nola, and we'll just forget that this ever happened. Hell, everybody gets carried away now and then—”

She shook her head and put her hand on the butt of the gun on her hip. “I can't do that.”

“I reckon I understand now why you worked so hard to keep me alive,” Longarm said, letting some of the bitterness he felt come out in his voice. “You had to keep me healthy until I recovered that silver.”

“That ... wasn't the only reason,” said Nola. “Remember, at first I didn't even know why you were here.”

That was true, and Longarm had to admit it. When he had stumbled into her office downstairs with a bullet hole in his side, she had risked her life to save him from Mallory's men, and at the time she'd had no idea there might be something in it for her. Still, that didn't justify what she was doing now.

“You're going to have to kill me to keep me from coming after you,” he said. “You know that, don't you?”

“Like I said, no one's going to get hurt.” She turned to the door and swung it open. “Come on in, girls.”

Longarm wasn't surprised to see Angie, Mickey, and Rafaela file into the room. Nor was he surprised by their garb. Instead of the gaudy outfits they wore on the dance floor of the saloon, they were dressed in range clothes like Nola, complete with boots, hats, and guns. With the bulky jackets they wore, they could have been taken for men instead of women, especially on a dark night.

“So all of you were in it together,” said Longarm. “That's why the three of you came to see me earlier. You felt guilty because of what you were planning, so you figured a little slap-and-tickle would make it all right.”

“You shouldn't talk to us like that, Custis,” said Angie. Of the four women, she was the only one who looked truly regretful. “We like you, we really do. But that silver is worth so much money...”

Stubbornly, he shook his head. “I ain't going to tell you that what you're doing is all right. I just can't.”

“Well, we're doing it anyway, whether you approve or not.” Nola gestured toward the bed. “Let's finish it up.”

Longarm opened his mouth to yell for help, but before any sound could come from his mouth, Angie bounded across the room and clapped her hand over his lips. She wrapped her other arm around his shoulders and bore him down on the bed. Longarm tried to kick his feet as one of the other women grabbed them, but a cord was wrapped around his ankles with the speed and dexterity of a cowboy tying the legs of .a calf with a piggin' string. Another rope ran from his ankles to one of the posts at the foot of the bed. Angie lifted her hand from his mouth, and Nola was ready to shove a wadded-up piece of cloth between his lips. Longarm tried to spit it out, but another strip of cloth was whipped around his head and tied to make the gag secure. He couldn't yell, he was bound hand and foot, and he was naked except for the bandages around his middle.

This was a damned sorry state of affairs, he thought.

If he had been at full strength, they might not have been able to do such things to him. But he was already somewhat weakened from everything he had gone through during the past week or so, and the bout of lovemaking with Angie and Rafaela and Mickey had worn him out even more. He had fallen into such a deep, exhausted sleep that Nola had been able to slip the manacles onto him without waking him, and now he had been unable to summon up the energy to throw off the other women as they finished the job of trussing him up. Longarm was thoroughly disgusted with himself.

The women straightened from their work and stepped back from the bed. Nola looked Longarm over and nodded in satisfaction. “I've left a note downstairs for my head bartender,” she told him. “He'll find it tomorrow morning and turn you loose. You'll be all right until then. And by then, we'll be a long way from Galena City.”

Longarm grunted angrily around the gag. That was all he could do.

Nola jerked her head toward the door and said, “Let's go.”

Angie lifted a hand and wiggled her fingers. “Goodbye, Custis.”

Rafaela and Mickey said their goodbyes as well, and at least they had the good grace to look a little embarrassed by the whole thing, Longarm noted. They slipped out of the room along with Angie, leaving Nola alone with him.

“You're the best man I've ever met, Custis, and I mean that in more ways than one,” she said. “It's too bad you didn't come along a few years earlier.”

Longarm made some more muffled gruntings.

“I wish things were different, too,” said Nola, “but they're not. Goodbye, Custis.”

Longarm would have cursed if he had been able to. As it was, all he could do was glare as Nola left the room and closed the door softly behind her.

Then he was alone, with nothing but his own anger and frustration to keep him company.

 

The soft knocking roused Claude Jessup from his sleep on the cot in the back room of the stage station. He hadn't been about to just go off and leave all that silver unguarded, so he had decided to sleep here with his shotgun at his side. George and Pryor had offered to stay with him, but he had sent them on down to the hotel to get some rest. “I'll be fine,” Jessup had told them.

Now, as he was pulled from sleep in the middle of the night, he had to wonder who was knocking on the door. It couldn't be anybody trying to steal the silver, he told himself. Thieves would have just busted down the door, instead of knocking.

Jessup had been sleeping in his pants and long underwear. As he stood up, he pulled his suspenders up onto his shoulders, then reached down and picked up the shotgun. He padded into the front room of the station and went to the door.

“Who is it?” he called, standing to one side of the door just in case anybody tried to shoot through it.

A woman's voice replied, startling him. He had expected to hear a man. “It's Nola Sutton, Claude. I need to talk to you.”

Jessup hesitated, despite the fact that he liked Nola and found himself very attracted to her. “What's this about?” he asked.

“Marshal Long sent me over here with a message for you. He said it was urgent.”

Well, that was different, Jessup supposed. Everybody in town knew by now that Nola and the lawman were close. After all, she had hidden him out when Mallory's men were searching for him and had nursed him back to health from that gunshot wound.

“Hang on a minute,” he called through the door. “I'll light a lamp.”

He set the shotgun aside and fumbled a match from his pants pocket. A moment later, he had the lamp lit on his desk, and the yellow glow filled the room, illuminating the stack of mailbags in the corner that were filled with silver ingots. The California & Nevada Stage Line was going to loan the bags to the mines so that the silver could be transported to Carson City in them.

Jessup went back to the door without bothering to pick up his shotgun. He took the key from his pocket, thrust it in the lock, turned it. He rattled the knob and swung the door open. “What's the message from Marshal L—” he began.

The words choked off abruptly when he saw the muzzle of the gun pointing straight at his face.

“Step back, Claude,” said Nola Sutton as she looked at him over the barrel of the pistol. “I don't want to have to hurt you.”