15

THE DWARF CLIMBED off of her, wheezing, thin strands of hair in his eyes. He grinned down at her, his little pig eyes rheumy and red-rimmed from exertion, as he crawled to the edge of the bed and dropped to the floor with a slapping thump.

Ruth Rose drew her legs together, scrubbed the back of her hand across her mouth with a grimace. Revulsion rippled through her.

“Don’t lick my spittle off your lips!” the dwarf said, standing naked by the bed and poking an admonishing finger at her. He was so short that Ruth could only see his large head, bug eyes, and his spindly shoulders. “That’s nectar of the gods!”

Laughing, he turned to where Griselda May was dressing near the door of the large, sparsely furnished room—the dwarf’s and the crazy girl’s own room. “Ain’t it, Griselda?”

The girl had stepped into her skirt and dropped her lacy chemise over her head. Her small, cone-shaped breasts poked against the thin garment. She looked at Moon, stuck her tongue out, curled the tip, and ran it slowly, lasciviously across her upper lip.

That got him laughing harder.

His croaky, raspy voice was as revolting as the rest of him, including the heavy, fishy odor of his breath. Ruth could still smell it. It made her stomach clench, and for several seconds, she thought she’d be sick. She drew a deep breath and scrubbed her hand across her mouth once more, when the dwarf’s back was turned as he gathered his clothes from the floor.

“Can I go now?” she asked, unable to keep her fury from her tone. “I have to see to my husband.”

The dwarf was hopping around, pulling his pants up over his balbriggans. “Hell, no—you can’t go. I done told you, you was a permanent fixture in these parts. When me an’ Griselda’s done with ya, we’re turnin’ you over to our payin’ customers. When they tire of ya, you’re goin’ to Mexico with the Apache girls!”

He winked as he straightened, then bent both knees, crouching a little to bring his pants up over his paunch, sucking in his gut and buttoning the child-sized denims.

“Me,” Griselda said, “I’m tired of her, Mordecai. She just lays there. Don’t even pretend to be havin’ any fun at all.”

The dwarf reached down for his shirt and said with a grunt as he straightened once more, “Maybe she just needs a little more practice. She ain’t never whored before, Griselda. Not like some others. . . .” He snickered meaningfully.

Griselda stopped buttoning her cream blouse to swat Moon’s shoulder with the back of her hand. “I done told you, Mordecai, I ain’t never whored a day in my life! I done told you that! And I don’t like bein’ called a whore!”

The dwarf chuckled in devilish delight as he dodged another swat, sort of sidestepping and dancing around the sharp-faced, brown-haired girl, whose cheeks were red with rage, as they often were, Ruth had noticed. Rage and jealousy.

Ruth had seen it just a few minutes ago, when the dwarf was toiling over Ruth herself, and, bored, Griselda had climbed down off the bed and started washing herself at the porcelain basin.

An odd, funny girl. A dangerous one, too. Even more dangerous than Ruth had once thought.

And whatever fondness she had for Moon was faked.

“Please,” Ruth said, covering herself with a pillow and dropping her legs over the side of the bed. “My husband has been alone for two days. He needs food and water. He needs his medication!”

“Ah, keep quiet,” the dwarf said. “Your caterwaulin’s growin’ right tiresome. And when I get tired of you, you know what that means.” He pointed an admonishing finger at her again.

Before she could respond, the clatter of wagons and the thunder of many hooves rose in the street outside the hotel. The cacophony grew louder amidst the whistling and yells of bullwhackers or muleskinners. Another freight team rolling into Moon’s Well, Ruth knew. She’d grown so accustomed to the din that she often no longer even heard it.

“Ah, that’d be Chaz Burdick’s train from Amarillo,” the dwarf said. “His crew always comes in thirsty and girl hungry. We’re gonna make us a killin’ tonight, my dear Griselda.”

Moon ambled toward the window and stopped in front of Ruth. He placed one of his big, horny hands on her cheek, lifting her face to meet his wretched, leering gaze.

“You shouldn’t have piss-burned Griselda, Mrs. Rose. For that, I’m gonna turn you over to ole Burdick. He’s just rollin’ in money, and he’s asked about you before.” He winked. “Before you was in my stable.”

“You son of a—!”

“Oh, hush!”

The dwarf removed his hand from her face, hopped up on a chair fronting the window, and looked out. He yelled down a greeting and waved, then said with a big grin over his shoulder, “It’s him, all right. Burdick and his half-dozen skinners from the panhandle. They look even thirstier an’ hornier than usual!”

Leaping off the chair, he looked at Griselda as he stuffed his shirttails into his pants. “What do you say, honey? Would you like that—me turnin’ her over to ole Burdick and his boys! They’d pay a purty penny for her, too. Virgins and married women. Nothin’ turns a man’s wheel faster!”

Griselda was strapping her derringers around her narrow waist. She looked at Ruth still sitting on the edge of the bed and curled her lip evilly. “I’d like that just fine, Mordecai.”

The dwarf ran over to her, wrapped his little arms around her legs, rose up on the balls of his stocking feet, and pooched out his lips. Griselda glanced once more, proprietarily, at Ruth, and then leaned down and pressed her lips to those of the dwarf. She tried hard to appear as though she were enjoying herself.

Moon groaned and cooed. When Griselda pulled her head away from his, he chuckled as she turned and walked toward the door. He stared at her butt until she’d left, leaving the door open behind her. Moon shook his head and sighed, thoroughly smitten by the girl who was every bit as demonic as he himself was, and then turned to Ruth.

“Ain’t she somethin’, Mrs. Rose? Ain’t she just somethin’?”

Ruth’s heart felt as though it had been torn to ribbons in her chest. She’d been violated with the promise of more violations to come. On top of everything, her husband was likely dying in the most ghastly way back at the Rose Hotel and Saloon.

“Why are you doing this, Moon?” she asked. “What did Frank and I ever do to you?”

The dwarf sat on a footstool to pull one of his little, black boots on. “You didn’t pay your taxes, Mrs. Rose. You know that. And you barely even been payin’ on your water contract.”

“You don’t need our money,” she said, her voice dull with shock and bewilderment as well as the torment and degradation she’d just endured—the wet lips and pawing, clawing hands of both him and that evil girl of his. “You make enough here to satisfy every need you could possibly have.”

“Yeah, I do, don’t I?” he said, buckling his shell belt and twisting his rounded hips this way and that, adjusting the holstered Colt.

He smiled so that his pasty, craggy cheeks dimpled and his little eyes narrowed to slits. “I do it ’cause I can do it.”

Moon scooped his hat off a chair, frowned at the hole in its crown, and then set it on his head. He walked toward Ruth, stopped about a foot away from her.

He said, “When you can do something—a man like me—you do it, no matter what it is. No matter how bad. Fuck good! To a man livin’ in a body like mine, eye level with crotches all my life, raised by folks who’d as soon spit on me as treat me even halfways decent, who kept me locked in a cellar when neighbors came cause they was embarrassed—laughed and called me the devil in the hole or hell’s little angel!—there ain’t much good in the world to begin with.

“See how it is? Well, I found out early that my body might be small. But my spirit was big, bad as it was. Big and bad! And for one reason or another, small as I was body-wise, I could command men. Get ’em to do just whatever I wanted. Don’t ask me how. But I could do it then and I can do it now. And by God, for a man like me, that’s everything!”

Moon rocked back on his heels and poked the first two fingers of each hand into the wool vest he wore under his black clawhammer coat. He considered her for a time. Ruth stared back at him, through the screen of hair hanging in her eyes. Pity only slightly tempered her loathing for the man. In her mind, she could still hear him grunting on top of her, staring down at her and grinning maliciously, his bug eyes crossing as he toiled.

“I could never win the heart of a woman like you,” he continued, raking his eyes across her, his little chest rising and falling slowly. “No, I could never make a woman like you—purty and upright and well-mannered and sophisticated in a country kind o’ way—feel anything but disgust for me. I seen it all my life. But I can put the fear of God into you, can’t I?” He grinned broadly, showing his yellow, crooked teeth. “And I have, haven’t I?”

Ruth said nothing, only stared at him, knowing that sooner or later, after he’d had his fill of torturing her simply because he could, he’d kill her. Or cause her to want to be dead in the worst way possible.

He winked, turned on a heel, and sauntered to the door. He stopped with one hand on the knob and looked back at her. He frowned as though troubled.

“Tell me somethin’ from your woman’s point of view, will you, Mrs. Rose? You think Griselda really loves me, or is she just playacting?”

“I think she had far more fun with me than she’s ever had with you, Mr. Moon.” The automatic response, spoken with quiet satisfaction, caused a devilish thrill to ripple through Ruth. She felt the ripple again when, for a fleeting half second, she witnessed genuine injury darken the dwarf’s eyes like a cloud sweeping the ground on a sunny day.

He covered it with a sigh, smoothed the colorless whiskers dangling off his chin, and turned to the door. “Get yourself ready for Burdick. He’ll be up shortly.”

He gave her another menacing wink and went out. She heard the key turn in the lock on the opposite side of the door, locking her in.