Wild to the Bone (24 page)

Raven's heartbeat increased.

She'd been right. She had seen someone move. He'd headed down the ravine to Raven's right and then followed the cut to the north.

Just as Raven started to follow the ravine's curve toward the buttes, a young woman stepped out from behind a boulder along the wash's right side. She wore a cream-colored, lace-edged cotton blouse cut and embroidered in the Mexican style. It was cut low enough to leave her shoulders exposed and her breasts bare nearly to her nipples.

Obviously, she wore nothing beneath it.

Around her waist, she wore a brightly colored sash embroidered with flowers. Her black leather slacks were shoved down into the tops of her black boots adorned with silver tips and spurs.

Her dark brown hair, pulled back by a red
bandana
, spilled in curls about her shoulders.

Raven had seen the beautiful, dark-eyed brunette before, but she couldn't remember where. Just as she did remember—she'd been on Haskell's lap in the Spotted Horse Watering Trough—a man stepped out into the wash. He stopped beside the brunette and turned to face Raven. He wore a long duster, and the duster blew out behind him in the wind, revealing the two pistols holstered on his lean hips.

His face was a maze of long, knotted scars.

And then two more stepped out from behind the boulder. Tall, unshaven men in high-crowned hats, dusters, and billowing neckerchiefs, they were three of the four
hombres
who had been playing cards in the saloon earlier.

They stared sharp-eyed at Raven, canting their heads to one side, vaguely sneering. All three hooked their thumbs behind their cartridge belts.

“Hey, there, Pinkerton lady,” the first man said, and quirked his mouth corners.

Raven aimed her pistol at the man's chest, shifting her weight from one boot to the other, raking her eyes across the men and the young woman lined up before her. “What're you doing out here?” Apprehension was a cold finger poking her back. “Where's the fourth . . .?”

Raven heard the crunch of a boot setting down in sand and gravel behind her a second too late. Before she could even start to turn around, two beefy arms snaked around her from behind. She smelled man sweat and whiskey. A large, thick hand was closed over her mouth and nose, while the other arm wrapped around her waist, picking her up off her feet.

The man gave a jubilant howl.

Raven triggered the Lightning into the air, but then she dropped the pistol as she desperately tried to pry the man's big hand off her mouth and nose, before he suffocated her.

But trying to remove that hand from her face was like trying to lift a boulder. It wasn't coming.

And then, as the big man held her about two feet off the ground, keeping his hand snugged against her nose and mouth, blocking off her wind, everything grew fuzzy and gray before turning completely black.

28

H
askell woke the next morning
with his cock feeling like a side of tough beef that had been hammered into submission for the stew pot by a semidemented cook.

He sat up in bed, fisting sleep from his eyes. He could no longer hear the wind, only the soft snores of the girl lying belly-down beside him, one leg hooked over his right one. Through Dulcy's upstairs room's single window, he could see that dawn was just beginning to spread a gray glow across the eastern horizon.

The air was refreshingly cool and damp, so different from before the rain, when it had had the texture of rough sandpaper, drying the eyes and nose and lungs. He hoped the washes weren't flooded to the point of making travel impossible. He had to get back to Spotted Horse and see if the stage had made it in unharassed and generally get to the work that had brought him here.

He threw the sheet aside and looked down at his badly abused manhood. At least, it was still there, and he couldn't see any blood. As he remembered all the times that he and the girl had fucked each other silly and raw the afternoon and evening before, it even started to stir.

He'd swear the girl was half mountain lion, with the teeth, claws, and tooth-gnashing snarls to prove it.

Bear shook his head to rid his mind of the pesky albeit sexy rememberings and gently slid his leg from beneath Dulcy's. The girl groaned, turned her head a little, whimpered, and went back to snoring.

He took a moment to admire her pale back and the curve of breast bulging out from beneath her right arm, flattened against the sheets. Then, feeling his cock stir again painfully, he rose and began dressing. He took his time, moving slowly because of stiffness and the chafing she'd given his cock and balls and arms and even his legs and ass—she'd seemed to enjoy digging her fingernails into his buttocks as she'd blown him.

All the while as he dressed and strapped his guns on and slid his bowie knife into his boot, she didn't stir.

She just continued to snore rhythmically into her pillow.

Bear donned his hat, went to the door that stood open to the narrow, dark hall, pinched the brim to the sleeping girl, and stole out and down the creaky stairs. Going through the immaculate kitchen, touched with the gray of dawn shadows, he felt a lonely pang for Dulcy. She had one hell of a hearty sexual appetite, but he doubted she'd ever marry.

Deep down, just as he himself was, she was a solitary soul. And it seemed that some man had done her wrong enough in the past to turn her against them all for the rest of her life.

Bear couldn't blame her, he thought, as he opened the door and stepped out onto the stoop. “We are a low-down, depraved, and stupid lot,” he whispered, clicking the door latch closed behind him.

He winced as he adjusted his fly across his aching cock, then moved gingerly down the porch steps and headed across the soggy yard to the barn, the mud squawking beneath his boots. Halfway to the barn, he stopped and turned to face the north, the direction in which the little boneyard lay.

He'd heard something over that way. A muffled bark or squawk. Likely a coyote trying to get at the relatively fresh meat of Danny Stoveville.

Haskell continued into the barn, fed and watered the black, and then rigged the horse to the rented wagon. He mounted up and drove the wagon out into the yard. As he climbed down to close the barn doors, he heard a chortling bark again from the direction of the Stoveville family cemetery.

Staring that way, he scowled.

Coyotes?

Then he remembered the buzzards that had been sitting on the lightning-topped cedar at the edge of the bench the cemetery was on. Curiosity poked at him.

He went over to the wagon, set the brake, and slid his Winchester out of its saddle boot. Leaving the scabbard on the leather-padded seat, he shouldered the rifle, patted the black's hip, and walked out away from the barn, heading north across the muddy yard.

He crossed the wash and started up the trail to the cemetery but stopped when he realized that the squawks and high-pitched barks were not coming from the hill. They seemed to be issuing from the right side of it.

He moved off the trail and walked around the base of the slope. Now he could hear what sounded like a dozen hens roosting, along with the occasional barks and screechy cries of what could only be buzzards. And then he saw the ragged-winged, bald-headed carrion eaters cavorting around something about fifty yards ahead, in some sparse brush and shrubs with limbs like strap iron, on the other side of two spindly cedars.

Haskell walked toward the milling birds.

There were maybe twelve of them, and they were having a raucous time, hopping and skipping around, getting into territorial skirmishes, and just generally being buzzards. Determined to find out what they were fighting over, the big man rushed the bone cleaners, not yelling, because he didn't want to awaken Dulcy, but stomping loudly and holding his rifle and arm out threateningly.

Some of the buzzards took ungainly flight, beating their ragged, black wings, while others merely hopped away before turning and raising their wings like geese, as though preparing to use them as weapons.

One of the birds, resembling a withered, bald, hook-nosed old man with flat, coppery eyes, held its ground, chortling and barking like a rabid dog, until Haskell batted the hellion away with his rifle butt. And then he wrinkled his nose against the sickly-sweet stench and looked down at what the birds had been tussling over.

A body had been dug up by mountain lions or coyotes, judging by the tracks. Loose sand and gravel and a few rocks lay near the man clad in wool and corduroy and a shirt that had at one time been white though now it was blood-crusted and dirt-stained. There wasn't enough of a face left to know much more than that the carcass had once been a man with a mustache.

His mouth was set in a perpetual grimace; his eyes had been eaten out of their sockets.

But the five-pointed tin star clinging by a thread to the vest of the poor
hombre
's badly soiled and torn coat lapel indicated that Haskell was most likely looking at what remained of Jeff Myers, the town marshal of Spotted Horse who'd ridden out here to investigate the stage robberies.

And had promptly disappeared.

Loud voices rose from the direction of the ranch yard.

Haskell wheeled, quickly pumping a cartridge into his Yellowboy's chamber as hooves hammered, growing louder. A rider appeared, galloping toward him, long brown duster blowing out behind him in the wind.

“I got him!” the man shouted. “He's over here!”

The man palmed a six-shooter as he batted his boots against his horse's flanks. The mount lunged toward Haskell, sixty yards away and closing fast.

“You got me?” Haskell growled, graveled by having had the wool pulled over his eyes by Dulcy Stoveville and finding the marshal lying dead out here for the predators to eat.

He raised the Winchester to his shoulder, drew a quick bead on his assailant's chest, and fired. He wrinkled his nostrils in satisfaction as the rider rolled backward off his galloping horse's rump with a scream and hit the ground with a bone-crunching thump.

“Uh-uh,” Haskell said, ejecting the spent, smoking cartridge and seating a fresh one. “I don't think so. I got
you
,
amigo
!”

More shouts rose from the direction of the ranch yard. Apparently, Dulcy's gang had gathered here and found his wagon. Haskell stepped aside as the hardcase's horse galloped toward him. Bear grabbed the reins trailing along the ground. He jerked on the reins, half-stopping the horse, which gave an anxious whinny as it nearly fell, and leaped into its saddle.

Pistols popped behind him as he ground his spurs into the mount's flanks and galloped hell for leather toward the east and a jog of bald buttes turning pale now as the sun rose.

He rode hard, risking both himself and the horse in the misty light and uncertain terrain, for a half-mile before halting the horse in a swale northeast of the ranch yard. He tied the horse to a half-mineralized log remaining from a long-ago sea that must have covered this part of Wyoming and then clambered up a hill, staying low before dropping to his hands and knees.

He doffed his hat and cast his gaze back in the direction from which he'd come, pumping a fresh round into his Winchester's action. He lowered the weapon slightly.

No one seemed to be trailing him. He kept his gaze on his back trail, waiting for a rider to appear atop one of the several rises he'd crossed between here and the ranch, but when none appeared, he looked back at the ranch itself.

It didn't look like much from this distance, still lying in the morning shadows cast by the hills around it. He could see a few human figures and horses milling in the yard between the barn and the cabin, around his wagon. One man was helping another around the side of the cabin to the front.

The man being helped was likely the
hombre
Haskell had shot out of his saddle.

Switching his gaze to the others, he saw now as the light solidified that they were all holding rifles and moving around cautiously, on the scout for trouble. Haskell grinned savagely. They knew he was out here, of course, but they didn't know where, and that had them on edge. They'd been wise not to come after him, because he'd have bushwhacked them, but it would have been better for him if they had.

Because now they could hole up in the cabin and wait for him to come to them.

Of course, they couldn't know that he'd come. One man against a small gang was tall odds heaped against him. They might think he'd head on back to town with his tail between his legs, wait to take them when the odds were better or he had a chance of surprising them. But they didn't know him, and their not knowing that he'd come for them—one against a half-dozen or more—was in his favor.

These killers, including the one he'd enjoyed fucking last night, were going to be stopped right here at the Stoveville ranch. They'd hold up no more stages, and they'd kill no more lawmen.

Lying here against the side of the hill, Haskell turned his thoughts to young Danny. The kid had been Bear's key to the whole thing. He'd led him here to the lair, or to at least one of their lairs. And to the kid's pretty sister, who'd been a damn fine actress.

Here, only a few minutes ago, he'd been feeling sorry for the girl.

Chagrin touched the tips of Haskell's ears. Anger followed, and he hardened his jaws. He was about to have the last say in the matter.

He looked around, considered the situation, his plan of attack. He'd stay close to the ranch but out of sight. If the gang left the cabin, he'd follow them and wait for an opportune place and time to run them down. If they stayed in the cabin, he'd move in after the sun went down.

In the meantime, he needed to keep moving in case some of the gang decided to track him out here. He needed to find a more secure place and a better place to keep an eye on the cabin.

Haskell doffed his hat, crabbed back down the bluff, mounted up, and rode to the south, keeping a rise of low hills between himself and the killers holed up at the Stoveville ranch.