Longarm 341

Deputy United States Marshal Custis Long, known by friend and foe as Longarm, opened his eyes, pulled the silk sheets and heavy wool comforter down from his face, and stared into the spacious room before him, a subtle but provocative women’s perfume touching his nostrils.

Only a misty, opal light washed through the window to his right, so he could barely make out the big armoire and heavy, ebony dresser beyond the end of the vast bed he was lying in.

Between the two obviously valuable pieces of furniture hung a gilt-framed painting nearly as large as one entire wall in his own rented digs on the poor side of Cherry Creek. Before the painting, a chair faced him. It, too, looked expensive, but Longarm couldn’t even begin to describe from what rare materials it had been so carefully, gracefully constructed.

The chair didn’t interest the lawman all that much, anyway. What caught the brunt of his attention was the black fishnet stocking hanging from one corner of the dresser by an even frillier red garter belt. Not far from the dangling toe of the stocking, a dainty high-heeled, patent-leather shoe lay on its side, as if casually tossed there.

Nearer the bed lay several pieces of Longarm’s own clothes—white cotton shirt, fawn vest, and one low-heeled cavalry boot. The boot was partially concealed by a pair of women’s silk panties so sheer that they appeared little more than a smudge on Longarm’s worn boot. They were so thin and insubstantial, Longarm decided as he lay half-dozing and half-savoring the luxuriant surroundings, that he could no doubt stuff the entire garment under one cheek.

He looked around the rest of the well-appointed room, spying more of his own clothes and those of his companion strewn about the ornate furniture and deep-carpeted floor—his string tie was hanging off a gilt wall taper—and remembered the theater last night and the lovely, raven-haired queen he’d attended it with—Cynthia Larimer, niece of General William H. Larimer himself, Denver’s founding father.

Cynthia, a debutante who’d attended one of the grandest finishing schools on the East Coast and who spent as much time traipsing around foreign continents as this one, was visiting Denver more and more often of late, ever since she and Longarm had been introduced at the last governor’s ball. Mostly, she arranged her visits to coincide with the absence of her uncle and aunt.

That made it easier for her and Longarm, after a late night on Larimer Street attending balls, the opera, the theater, or somesuch other foolishness she dragged him to as a prequisite for getting into her bloomers, to frolick away the early morning hours playing hide-and-seek, naked, in the Larimers’ grand hallways and smoking parlors and libraries.

Last night’s activity had begun on the front porch before Cynthia had even gotten the key in the lock. It had continued to the foyer for about eight more minutes, then to the large wooden food preparation table in the vast, stone-floored kitchen for nine or ten more.

From there, the fervor abating enough that they could more fully appreciate the journey as well as the destination, they’d moved to an ottoman in the cigar parlor, to a fainting couch in the second-floor hall under the stairs, then, finally, at around two in the morning, to the very bed upon which Longarm now lay.

The memories of last night were so vivid—he could even hear the girl’s passionate groans echoing off the cavernous ceiling as he’d plundered her in the kitchen—that Longarm’s loins stirred.

He turned to the brass-and-cherrywood clock on the bedside table. Not even six yet. He turned full around to face the other side of the bed, and frowned. The covers were pulled back. A dent remained in the cream silk pillow where Cynthia’s lovely head had reclined, and the silk sheets still bore the slender form of her body.

He’d no sooner registered her absence than he heard something. He lifted his head from the pillow, rising onto his elbows.

Soft footsteps sounded, the light slap of bare feet on wooden stairs. They were accompanied by the rattling of fine china. As the padding of bare feet on the hall carpet runner grew louder, as well as the dainty rattles of fine china on tin, the perfume fragrance intensified.

The girl’s slender silhouette entered the room, her long, raven hair falling from beneath a man’s flat-brimmed hat, a long, unlit cigar slanting from her mouth. She held a silver serving tray before her. As she stood beside the bed, Longarm stared up at her, his heart twisting with desire.

The girl—he figured she was in her early twenties though she’d never told him her exact age—wore Longarm’s own threadbare long underwear. They’d been washed so many times that they barely fit Longarm’s tall, muscular frame anymore. He owned better pairs, but they’d been in his landlady’s washtub when he’d dressed for last evening.

On the slight girl before him this shrunken pair sagged like a pink army tent, the unbuttoned, V-necked top falling down to reveal a delectable portion of her full, round, creamy breasts, the nipples prodding the thin cotton like derringer bores. As overlarge as the garment was in the shoulders and chest, it clung alluringly to the full, tapering roundness of Cynthia’s hips and taut thighs.

The hat on her head was his own snuff brown Stetson, and the cigar between her teeth was one of his three-for-a-nickel cheroots he must have left downstairs in his Prince Albert coat pocket.

“Mornin’.” His voice was thick, his eyes tracing the row of bone buttons on his underwear top as they angled down her right breast and over the nipple peeking at him like a mouse from its hole.

“Custis, now, haven’t you had enough of that? I myself feel like a mare that’s been rode hard by a whole herd and put up wet.” Cynthia giggled. “Look.” She set the tray on his lap and sat down on the bed, leaning across his knees. “I brought you breakfast.”

Longarm had been so entranced by the girl’s figure in his own underwear that he hadn’t noticed the bottle of Maryland rye atop the tray, flanking the two bone-china cups, steaming silver server, and a plate filled with grapes and orange wedges, another with buttered toast.

Balancing the tray on his knees, he slid up against the headboard and reached for the bottle. “So you did! Thank you mighty kindly.” He plucked the bottle off the tray, popped the cork, and threw back a liberal shot. “Where are my manners?” he said lowering the bottle, running a hand across his mustache, and extending the rye to the girl. “A wake-me-up?”

Cynthia laughed, accepted the bottle, and tipped it back. Her eyes popped wide and she made several unladylike gagging sounds as the liquid hit her throat. Lowering the bottle, she pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth, swallowing hard.

“Enough!” She swallowed hard, eyes bulging. “Time for something a little more civilized for us both.” She gave him back the bottle and poured coffee into each cup.

When Longarm had added another shot of the rye to his java, he corked the bottle, set it on the floor, then sat back as, coffee in one hand, fruit plate in the other, Cynthia scooted up beside him and began feeding them both with her hands.

It was one of her morning rituals. Longarm didn’t mind. The problem was that by the time she’d slowly slipped a couple of grapes and orange slices into his mouth, sometimes even using her own mouth to do so, he was so damn horny that his head swam giddily in spite of his throbbing hangover from the night before.

Now she pulled away from him after stuffing an orange wedge into his mouth with her tongue and, grinning, chewed what remained of the wedge, the juice running down her full, red lips to her chin and down her long, creamy neck. Her eyes danced in the dawn light penetrating the curtained window behind Longarm.

A bead of orange juice ran into the deep V between her breasts. Longarm leaned down and licked the bead from her smooth, warm skin. She gave a shiver and chuckled.

He turned and strode back to the bed. Sitting up beside his pillow, her long legs doubled beneath her, breasts hanging out of the underwear top, Cynthia stared at him. She still wore his hat. She slipped another grape between her lips and opened her mouth to speak but stopped when her eyes dropped to his jutting shaft.

Longarm held out his hand. “Not that I’ll be needin’ it for a bit, but I’ll be takin’ back my underwear, young lady.”

Eyes riveted to Longarm’s swollen cock, Cynthia swallowed, wiggled her shoulders until the garment had fallen to her waist, then crawled to the edge of the bed before his jutting shaft. She wriggled like a snake until the washworn underwear had slipped over her hips and down her thighs to bunch up around her ankles.

She kicked them off the other side of the bed, rose onto her elbows, and ran her cheek along the side of Longarm’s shaft. She pulled her head back and wrapped a hand around the throbbing member, staring at it as a sultry smile touched her lips.

Cynthia stuck her tongue out, touched it to the bulging end of Longarm’s dong. He dug his toes into the carpet, almost unloading right there. He managed to hold back while silently humming the first few bars of an old hymn he’d learned as a child.

Looking down, he watched her, groaning softly, slide her mouth down over his organ and move her head toward his groin, the heat of her tickling tongue setting him on fire.

When she’d taken as much as she could, making a slight gagging sound, she pulled back slowly until her lips swelled over the head of his organ and popped off. Spittle stringing between her lips and his cock, she glanced up at him coyly.

“Certain sure,” he grated out, guiding her head back onto his cock then grinding his feet into the carpet as she began throwing the blocks to him, making loud sucking and choking noises as she worked.

The blood surged with more vigor through his veins, and he threw his head back on his shoulders and stretched his lips back from his teeth.

Unable to hold back any longer, he spread his feet and let himself go, his hands clutching her shoulders as, knees bent slightly and leaning back from his waist, he jettisoned his seed down the frantically opening and closing throat of General Larimer’s bewitching niece.

Forty-five minutes later, having taken a whore’s bath and dressed while Cynthia, spent from the blow job and one more hard, parting romp, dozed beneath the sheets, Longarm let himself out the back door of the Larimer mansion and lit a three-for-a-nickel cheroot in the lee of the brick carriage house.

The last time he’d left the Larimer place, after a night and morning similar to the one he’d just enjoyed, someone had tried to bore a bullet through his forehead. The shooter had been a relative of an outlaw he’d kicked out with a shovel after said outlaw had ambushed him from the privy behind Longarm’s own rented digs on the other side of Cherry Creek. The relative was old history now, too, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more relatives of other dead or incarcerated men on his trail.

It was a cautious Longarm, puffing his cigar and keeping his .44 loose in the cross-draw holster on his left hip, who made his way down Sherman Avenue to the heart of the waking city, hearing the meadowlarks pipe, the black-birds caw, and the coal wagons squawk and rattle over the cobbles.

The smell of wood and coal smoke tinged the damp breeze blowing in from the prairie. As he made his way to a bathhouse not far from the Federal Building, the sun rose from the prairie to set fire to the snow-tipped peak of Mount Evans rising above of the Front Range in the west.

After a bath and a shave, and pleased as punch no one had tried to clean his clock this morning—having to parry lead after lovemaking was no way to start a day—he strode up the broad stone steps of the Federal Building. He wove his way among the pretty young office clerks in their summer-weight frocks and shining hair, and climbed to the building’s second floor.

“Mornin’, Henry!” Longarm stepped through the oak door on which the words “U.S. MARSHAL WILLIAM VAIL” were stenciled in gold-leaf lettering, and tossed his hat on the rack.

The pimple-faced clerk pounding a sandwich of onion skins and carbon paper with his typewriter keys kept his nearsighted eyes on the newfangled machine and continued pecking away with the practiced ease of a true paper pusher.

Longarm paused before the secretary’s tidy desk. He was about to mention that he was exactly two minutes early—some time ago he’d turned over a new leaf of punctuality—but what was the point? Reputations were as hard to reconfigure as the planets and stars.

“Jesus Christ, you’re early!” The pudgy, balding man behind the desk, swathed in cigar smoke, turned to the banjo clock on the wall to his left. “A full two minutes!”

“Are you all right?” With the stubby cigar in his right hand Vail gestured at the red Moroccan leather chair. “You better have a seat.” He beetled his sandy brows, inspecting Longarm ironically. “But, hell, you look all right. Don’t appear fever-flushed. In fact, I swear, Custis, you’re looking even lighter on your feet than usual. And your eyes are dancing like those of a carnival barker who’s just spied a whole gaggle of wealthy tinhorns!”

Vail sat back in his own swivel chair, voice booming around the sparsely furnished office. “Don’t tell me you’re fucking General Larimer’s niece again!”

“It’s fucking, and you know it. You two have been goin’ at it like a couple of back-alley dogs. What—the general’s out of town again, so you two have that big old house to your nymphomaniac selves?”

Longarm opened his mouth to object, but Vail cut him off. He poked the cigar at Longarm for emphasis. “If the general ever finds out you and that niece he prizes almost as much as his Thoroughbred racing horses are using his house for a stud barn, he’s liable to come in here with a double-barreled shotgun. I just hope for my sake and Henry’s that the old bastard can aim straight.”

“No, he’ll probably wait and ambush you from his carriage house some early morning while you’re walking out his back door buttoning your fly.”

Longarm set his right cavalry boot on his left knee and flicked coal ash from his trousers. “Trouble’s our bread and butter, Chief.”

“Deputy Johnny Parsons. Of course. You’ve made me work with the little privy rat a time or two, and I do believe I told you he’d been promoted way before his time. Say, about twenty years before his time. Why, that younker can’t even . . .”

“Goddamndest thing I ever heard of,” Vail said, wagging his head and taking a couple of big, shallow puffs off his cigar. “There’s a crazy mountain man up in the bluffs and canyons west of Diamondback, just north of Fort Collins. Magnus Magnusson’s the name. Lived with a couple squaws up near Ute Peak back in the old days, when there was still a market for beaver furs.

“Anyway, this Magnusson is crazier than a tree full of owls. He’s got two daughters just as crazy and wild as he is. They’re preying on the miners around the Diamondback River, up around the Neversummer Range and the Mummies. The girls sort of act like sirens, getting the prospectors’ guard down with their feminine wiles—apparently they’re both prettier’n a coupla speckled pups, with jugs the size of watermelons—and just when they’re at their most vulnerable, Magnusson comes in and shoots or stabs ’em. Him and the girls make off with the prospectors’ pokes or any other valuables.”

“How did Johnny Parsons end up toe-down, Chief? I wouldn’t think old Magnusson and his daughters are even a federal problem. Sounds local.”

“I’m getting to that.” Vale took another puff from his cigar and waved the smoke away, squinting. “The trouble all started about six months ago. Finally, when seven or eight miners had been murdered, the sheriff, Merle Blassingame, wired me for help. He just didn’t have the manpower to put a stop to it.”

“Yes, I sent Parsons, goddamnit!” Billy yelled, slamming his fist on his broad, mahogany desk, knocking the first couple inches of a two-foot stack of papers onto the floor. Ignoring the mess, he jerked his chair toward the window. “Didn’t sound like a job for a real lawman. I figured, hell, how hard could it be for the kid to go up there and hire a guide to take him up that canyon and haul an old mountain man and his two daughters down to the local hoosegow?”

“Yeah, I knew Johnny. Fancied himself Custis Long in his brown hat and cavalry boots. Shit, I think he smoked the same cigars as you.”

“The kid was downright frightening. Whenever I seen him, I thought I was seein’ myself in the mirror about fifteen years ago.” Longarm shrugged. “Didn’t care for me much, though.”

“Shit, he idolized you. But he didn’t like you because he knew you didn’t respect him. It was his old man’s political connections that got him the goddamn deputy’s job in the first place. His only training was the Army. Well, now he’s dead and his old man, Julian Parsons, is demanding justice.”

Vail was staring out the window, a pensive expression on his fleshy, clean-shaven face. His cigar smoldered in his right hand, that elbow propped on the edge of the desk.

Longarm felt sorry for his boss. He wouldn’t have taken on the pressure of the chief marshal’s job for all the money in the world. To think that a leaner, tougher Billy Vail had once been a Texas Ranger, a cap-and-ball blazing in each fist . . .

Suddenly, Billy swung toward Longarm, scowling, his chair squawking loudly. “Does a bear shit in the woods? Of course I want them brought in. And make it fast! I just got two cables—one from Parsons’s old man and one from the governor, both urging me to spare no expense in avenging the kid’s death.”

Billy leaned forward to regard Longarm with vehemence. “Now, neither you nor I, Custis, give a diddly goddamn about that little make-believe badge-toter, but, political pressure or not, I did hire him. So my ass is over the fire here, you understand?”

“Personally, Chief, I’m more concerned about the prospectors those three are preying on than avenging that rich little privy snipe, but I get your drift.” Longarm dropped his right foot to the floor and sat up in his chair. “Henry’s working on my pay vouchers, I take it?”

Vail nodded. “He’s got your train ticket, too. The flier leaves at noon. Rent a horse at Longmont, then head for Diamondback. Your contact there is Sheriff Blassingame. Merle Blassingame. I’ve never met him, but you’ll know where to find him. He’ll know someone who can guide you up the canyon. After killing Parsons, Magnusson and his two heifers are probably holing up pretty deep in the mountains. You’ll need a good guide to root ’em out, most likely.”

Vail was grinning but there wasn’t an ounce of humor in it. “And, Custis . . . please remember that, while Magnusson’s daughters are both right pretty and, I understand, built like a choirboy’s wet dream, they’re also deadly.”