Hangtown Hellcat (19 page)

Fargo could make out very little, especially whatever Jenny said. But snatches of McDade’s talk reached him occasionally like distant sounds wafting on the wind:

“…not my idea, damn it…what the men want…bets already…and if Fargo…nobody killed…”

Jenny’s voice rose one final time, the door slammed, and a cloak of ominous silence fell over the house.

“What’s the grift?” Buckshot demanded. “Jenny sounded all exfluctuated.”

Fargo lifted a shoulder. “Damned if I know. But Her Nibs definitely doesn’t like it. I heard my name, too.”

“Hunh. Mebbe he’s after her to write that ransom letter.”

“Could be, I s’pose. Somehow I don’t think so. Judging by her tone, there’s something new on the spit and she doesn’t like it.”

“And I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut we ain’t gonna like it none, neither. That Butch McDade is bad cess. And us without any shooters.”

“We’ve got one,” Fargo reminded him in a sarcastic tone. “But it might’s well be under her bed with the rest for all the good it does us.”

“Speaking ’bout her bed, Trailsman, sounds like you’re gonna be in it soon. See if you can’t dangle one hand down and fill it with blue steel while you’re trimming her.”

“Yeah,” Fargo said absently. He had said nothing to Buckshot about that basket dangling from her ceiling—he couldn’t puzzle it out himself much less explain it to anyone else.

“God’s trousers,” Buckshot added. “They say two’s company and three’s a riot. You don’t think she’ll have one of them dickless wonders in the room with you two, hanh?”

Fargo stopped pacing. “I never thought of that. I don’t mind women watching, but I draw the line at a man—even a gelding.”

“You done it with gals watching?”

“Sure, when I’m doing two at once.”

Buckshot cursed. “Fargo, you greedy son of a bitch.” But after a pause curiosity got the best of him. “
How
can you do two at one time? A man ain’t got but one pizzle.”

“Never mind that, you old whoremonger. We got bigger fish to fry.”

The day dragged on some more, broken up only by a quick march to the kitchen for a plate of soda biscuits smothered in flour gravy. When Fargo judged it was nearly sunset, El Burro and Jenny again showed up in the doorway.

She crooked her finger in a beckoning motion. “Come along, Mr. Fargo.”

Mr. Fargo
…The Trailsman just couldn’t fathom this woman. She was about to drop her linen for him, yet still
stood on formalities. Was she going to make him sign a contract, too?

“El Burro will be right outside in the hallway,” she informed Fargo, “and Norton has instructions to kill your friend at the first sign of trouble. So be on your best behavior.”

“You do know how to put a man in the mood,” he jibed.

“Don’t play the wounded cavalier, Mr. Fargo. Are ‘moods’ really necessary for a stallion like you to perform?”

“No,” he admitted, hoisted on his own petard.

“And like you, I have no need for proper moods. I don’t hug. I don’t kiss. I don’t submit to caresses. In fact, I don’t even like to touch a man when I use him for my pleasure—except, of course, the one part I need. Thus, we’re going to try this.”

By now they were in her room. She pointed at the pulley-and-block rigged basket suspended from the crossbeam.

“The only reason I’m stripping,” she informed him in a no-nonsense tone, “is to get you aroused. Do
not
touch me.”

Fargo had bagged some strange quail in his time, including a gal in the Rockies who insisted they do it in the saddle while the Ovaro galloped. But this one took the blue ribbon for queer notions. However, all that was flushed from his mind after she’d peeled off her clothing. She was almost a foot shorter than he, a creamy little erotic doll with plum-tipped tits that rode high and came directly at him like artillery shells.

“Drop your trousers,” she ordered like an army doctor inspecting recruits for hernias.

He unbuckled his belt and let his buckskins slide down. When she saw his curved saber, blood-swollen and bobbing, her eyes widened in disbelief.

“Jasmine didn’t exaggerate one bit,” she said, her tone fretful. “Damn it, it might be too big for the hole.”

“It’s never been too big for any woman,” Fargo assured her.

“Not
my
hole, you handsome stallion.
This
hole.”

She pointed into the wicker basket. Fargo did a double take. A hole had been cut in the very center of the bottom, the edges well padded with silk.

“What the hell…?”

She grabbed the
Kama Sutra
manual off the bed. “Here’s
one of the pages I didn’t show you,” she explained, thrusting it before his startled face. “See how it works? The woman is in full control—the man just lays there and enjoys it.”

Fargo studied the vivid illustration. The skeptical look slowly ebbed from his face.

“Well, now,” he finally said. “With me it’s always the woman’s choice.”

“I doubt if you could pronounce the Sanskrit name for it,” she added. “Just think of it as snatch-in-a-basket.”

She climbed in and squatted down. “When I pull this rope on the right, the basket goes up; the rope on the left drops it down. There’s a folded-up quilt under it—when I raise the basket up high enough, you lie under it and line your pecker up with the hole. If it fits all right, I’ll do the rest.”

She was a few bricks short of a load, all right, but Fargo found it an exciting kind of crazy. Jenny easily raised the basket and Fargo stretched out under it, carefully scootching to just the right spot.

“Fits just fine,” he reported.

The basket jiggled a little as she positioned herself perfectly over the opening. She tugged the left rope and a wondrous, tight, hot velvet glove wrapped his blue-veiner.

Both of them gasped with pleasure at the same time. Jenny began tugging left-right, left-right in an expert rhythm that increased in tempo as her breathing grew ragged and loud. Up to the very tip, down again in gliding ecstasy, over and over, sending galvanic pleasure surges exploding through him.

He saw her face appear briefly over the edge of the basket, blushing red with excited blood. “You’re
huge
,” she praised. “It feels like you’re up to my navel! Now reach up and twirl the basket!”

Fargo followed orders, and suddenly he felt that new “sensuous sensation” she had promised earlier in the day. Up-down, up-down, spinning first clockwise and then counterclockwise as the rope untwisted itself. As if that wasn’t enough pleasure, she pumped and squeezed with her love muscle, a pleasure overload.

A few minutes of this and Fargo felt the floodgates about to burst open. As his staff swelled and tightened for imminent release, she cried out, “Oh no, you don’t!”

Even swept up in delirious pleasure, Fargo felt a sharp jolt of fear when she stopped tugging the ropes long enough to flash her over-and-under gun at him. “If you
dare
finish before I do,” she panted hoarsely, “I’ll shoot you!”

“Christ sakes, lady,” he panted back, “get your finger off that trigger! I’ll do my best.”

Right-left, right-left, up and down, faster, even faster, Jenny beginning to whimper like a bitch in heat as Fargo made a Herculean effort to hold off. Finally she went for the strong finish and cried out, “Now, Fargo! GET IT!”

Strong spasms jerked him like a fish in the bottom of a boat as he spent himself. Jenny gave out a strange warbling sound, the basket wobbling and jerking as she, too, lost all control. Slowly it settled again into a dead hang as, for uncounted minutes, both of them slacked into a mindless daze, aware of nothing but a milky haze and the music of the spheres.

14

Fargo was just drifting into sleep, a few hours after his strange encounter with Jenny, when the curtains over the doorway parted, light spilling in from the hallway.

“Skye,” came Jasmine’s nervous voice from the doorway, “she wants to see you and Buckshot in the kitchen. And she’s fit to be tied.”

“Hell, Fargo,” Buckshot muttered as he tugged his boots on, “mebbe she wants to do both of us in the sink this time.”

“Nothing like that,” Jasmine said. “Norton found something outside.”

“Shit-oh-dear,” Buckshot said. “It’s that damn pinfire.”

El Burro, a Colt in each hand, hazed them into the kitchen. The pinfire, its cylinder open and empty, lay on the table.

“It would appear,” she greeted them, “that you two are wandering from pillar to post, would it not?”

Neither man understood the high-blown remark and said nothing. Red leaped into her cheeks.

“Look at you,” she taunted Fargo, voice dripping contempt. “Ruggedly handsome, a virtuoso lover, the fighting prowess of a Japanese samurai—and lacking the common sense of a donkey! What has your noble ‘code’ been good for? Mince pie, that’s what!”

Fargo ignored the pinfire. “If you wander near a point, feel free to make it.”

“Rubbish! You know damn well what I’m talking about—that pathetic weapon you stashed behind the privy. I was on the verge of offering you and Mr. Brady stakes in a bonanza. I guess we can drop the pretense, can’t we, that you are intelligent enough to recognize a good opportunity?”

“Good opportunity? You’re laying it on thick, lady. Yeah,
it’s my gun—so what? You want me to put some water on to boil?”

“Keep a civil tongue in your head, you arrogant bastard! What we did in that bedroom this evening gives you no license to address me this way.”

“Jenny, you best lower your hammer and square with the facts. I’ve never heard of a woman being hanged in the West nor even brought to trial. But you’ve broken serious federal laws, and if they haul you back to the land of steady habits, you
will
end up in a penitentiary for women.”

“I’ll be sure to wear ashes and sackcloth after you’re gone.”

Fargo didn’t like that last word. “You mean after I leave?”

“Clean your ears or cut your hair, long shanks. I said
gone
.”

“All your threats,” Fargo said, “don’t change what I said. You need to go to the street called straight, and mighty damn quick.”

“Save it for your memoirs, buckskins. I’ve seen how it is with
honest
women in the West. They work like plow horses from can to can’t. By age thirty most of them have skin like the cracked leather spines of old books. Hangtown is just a start, a way for me to get the money I need.”

“Need for what?”

“For speculation and investment, that’s what. That’s how people not born to wealth get rich. You’re smart and handsome, but you’re a bigger fool than God made you. You give a good day’s work for a poor day’s pay, and when you can no longer work you’ll die. The key is to profit off the hard labor of fools like you, but it takes money to make money.”

Fargo nodded. “Yeah, I’ve heard this line of blather before. By your way of looking at it, I’m a fool, right enough, and so is Buckshot. But you’ll never put this gulch behind you, even if you manage to get out alive. All that money you made from speculation and investment will have the stink of blood and murder on it.”

This barb stuck deep, and she bristled like a feist. “You’re out of line, you worthless, crusading drifter! I told you—I’ve murdered no one nor ordered anyone to do it unless a man deserved it. You’ll find no flies on me.”

“What is wrong with you and what doctor told you so? You brag about being the ‘mayor’ of a stinking cesspool called
Hangtown—you’re telling me those graveyard rats on your payroll aren’t murderers? You can see the proof dangling from that gallows. In my book that makes you a murderer, too.”

“Life is cheap out here,” she retorted in a pointed tone. “I suppose all that dried blood in the fringes of your buckskins came from animals?”

“Killing isn’t the same as murder.”

“Yes, you remember that,” she said cryptically.

“All right then, kill me. I’ve supped full of your guff. You been threatening to do it ever since your bootlicks clouted me and Buckshot on the head three days ago.”

Her shoulders suddenly slumped and she said in a miserable tone, “It appears that I won’t have to kill you. It looks like Lupe Cruz is going to do that tomorrow, and I’m powerless to stop him—unless, of course, you simply refuse to go along with it.”