Funeral By The Sea (6 page)

Barnaby Gold clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

CHAPTER SIX

THE activity in the cantina was resumed in a manner that suggested it had been interrupted by no more than a call to witness something which had been of no interest to anybody.

The black-clad stranger to Oceanville was paid not the slightest attention when he went inside to get his gear. When he re-emerged, the Mexican woman was shuffling back home, the hem of her dress held up to retain the broken glass and her head averted so that she did not look at him.

Joe and Vic came out of the house as he started up the steps and they leered at him as they stood to either side, to usher him inside with mocking gestures.

‘What does making the old man comfortable mean?’ Gold asked.

‘It means he’s been took care of in the third best room in the house, stud,’ the bearded man answered.

‘Who by?’

‘Couple of Mex whores who make the cantina tail look like somethin’ that’s been stampeded over, stud,’ the scar-faced man told him. ‘Right, Vic?’

‘Sure, Joe. But we can wait, can’t we?’

They went to either side of Gold and down the steps.

‘Don’t reckon we’ll have to wait long for that well-stacked Emily?’ the bearded Vic said conversationally.

‘Sometimes the best lookers are the worst hookers,’ the scar-faced Joe responded.

And they both laughed.

‘Almost time to change the guard,’ Gold heard one of them say wearily as he entered the house and closed the door behind him.

A great deal of money had been spent on the sumptuous furnishings of the hall, stairway and landing, which were the only parts he saw on his way to Eve Delroy’s room. Deep pile carpets covered the entire floor area and there were gilt framed oil-paintings of great age hung on the wood-paneled walls.

There was too much furniture, with chairs and sideboards, settees and tables, desks and highboys cluttering every inch of available wall space. With an overabundance of porcelain ornaments littering flat surfaces.

Barnaby Gold could admire the fineness of the porcelain without knowing anything about it. The furniture he could date as from the Federal Period and take pleasure in seeing the craftsmanship with which the mahogany and maple, the satinwood and birch, had been carved. Knew from his own experience of working with seasoned timber what labors of love had gone into the vast array of furniture collected in this house.

But he did not indulge himself deeply or for long in appreciation of the cabinet-making craft that was displayed in the house, nor did he allow these examples to re-awake anticipation of the much greater treasures that were in Europe.

He neither saw nor heard anybody on his slow approach to the door of Eve Delroy’s room, to one side of which there was a padded feather-back chair. Where he sat down and waited for perhaps ten minutes, smoking the cheroot and knocking the ash into the lid of the open tin.

Until the door opened and the woman thrust out her head, mouth wide to yell a command. Until she saw him sitting there and uttered a gasp of surprise that became a sound of pleasure accompanied by a smile of delight.

‘I was going to call for one of the servants to bring you to me, Barnaby Gold. It’s gratifying to know you are eager enough to make that unnecessary. Come on inside.’

She was wearing a nightgown of the sheerest fabric, but comprised of so many layers that the garment as a whole was not diaphanous. It was fastened with a tie at the throat and she held it closed at the waist with a hand. She smelled freshly bathed and perfumed and her long hair had a sheen from recent brushing. She had made up her face with expertise, skillfully highlighting her best features.

Barnaby Gold rose from the chair, lifted his gear and carried it into the large room. An obviously feminine bedroom tastelessly overcrowded with fine furniture, pictures and ornaments, its centerpiece a Pennsylvanian four-poster bed hung with brocade drapery.

A door in a side wall was open and from it wafted some steam which was aromatic with perfume. Only as the door from the landing was closed and the key was turned in the lock did he do a double take at the pictures and ornaments and see that each one depicted or was styled to show some facet of the sexual act.

‘Get those stinking clothes off, Gold,’ she rasped as she came around him and went toward the bed. ‘I’ve never been more ready to get screwed.’

She was still stirred up from the effects of flogging Seth Harrow. But her cultured tone of voice remained as she reached the bed, unfastened the tie and allowed the nightgown to slide off her shoulders as she turned to face him.

He clicked his tongue at sight of her nakedness and dropped his gear on the floor as he answered, ‘Be my pleasure, lady.’

He started to get out of his own clothes.

‘And it better be mine, Gold. It has been a very long time since I last had a man.’

She watched his every move as he undressed, her wet lips slightly parted and her dark eyes bright. While his gaze roved over her slender body and limbs, lingering on the erect nipples that were so dark against the cream-colored low mounds of her breasts, the even darker luxuriant triangle of hair at the base of her Oat belly and the lithe lengths of her splayed thighs.

‘He was a lot older than you. Gold. And flabby at the gut. Good, but lacking in stamina. Did I have to work on him after he finished too fast the first time! But after a week here he was the way I like my men. Well now, I think I may have the same trouble with you. After the first time.’

He was naked, standing amid his discarded clothing. As slim in masculine terms as she was slender. Not muscularly over-developed, but his flesh firm. With the hair on his chest, at his armpits and the lower belly as blond as that on his head. His readiness to give her what she wanted was thrustingly apparent.

Her eyes feasted hungrily on the sight of him, then flashed with anger as he stepped toward her.

‘I’ll tell you when, Gold!’ she snarled.

‘Shut your mouth, lady,’ he told her, softly but with a more commanding tone than she had used.

‘What?’

He quickened his pace and she took a backward step and banged into a tea table set against the wall, which caused her to cry out. He halted and reached forward, to curl a hand around the back of her neck. Gazed with dead eyes into her frightened ones for a moment. Then shoved her hard to the side. So that she was sprawled, with another cry, across the bed.

‘If I scream, every man in...’

‘You wanted a man and you’ve got one, lady,’ he rasped. And knelt on the bed between her
splayed legs. ‘So if you ain’t woman enough to take what he’s going to give you, start screaming.’

She remained fearful as he gently cupped each of her breasts and began to move his palms on the nipples, trapping her eyes with his own. They had contracted when he had frightened her, but now they responded to his tender attentions. At the same time as the clouds of dread were drained from her eyes and the former light of desire entered them.

‘Oh,’ she uttered softly. And raised her arms, hands hooked to fasten behind his neck.

He lowered himself slowly to the floor, his head between her splayed legs which she closed toward him. He trailed his lips along each thigh in turn and drew moans from her. Her hands demanded that he advance the touch of his lips to the centre of her want, but he refused to comply.

‘Damn you!’ she hissed, but threw her arms wide to the sides to submit to what he wanted of her when he wanted it.

Whilst his hands continued to keep her breasts aroused, his lips encroached further along her thighs. Her flesh quivered and became sheened with sweat as a low moaning trickled from her wide mouth. He spared a single kiss for the centre of her black, moist want. Which caused her thighs to draw apart to their limit.

‘Now you bastard, now!’ she groaned.

He rose up on to the bed, his hand shifting from her breasts to the nape of her neck. He forced her head up from the bed, so that her lust-inscribed face with its tear-filled eyes looked down the length of her body between the low valley of her breasts. And she saw that part of him she wanted most as it began to penetrate her.

He entered her to the fullest extent and allowed her head to rest back on the bed. Cupped her cheeks in both hands and gazed down at her with no more than two inches between their faces as he slowly began to satisfy her trembling, moaning need.

Barnaby Gold’s face expressed no trace of emotion as he thrust into and partially withdrew from the body of this woman who was the most evil he had ever met or even heard of. While she locked her arms and legs about him as she writhed and thrashed and gasped and moaned in the most uninhibited way that he had ever experienced in taking a woman.

Carefully, he built toward his own climax so that he timed it to match perfectly with her shuddering, shrill-voiced orgasm that moments later left her limp and exhausted beneath him.

‘Oh God, oh God, oh God,’ she rasped breathlessly as he withdrew entirely from her to stand. Then demanded with sharp disappointment, ‘Where are you going?’

He did not reply. Went to where his clothing lay and took the box of cheroots and a match from the pocket of the caped Ulster. He struck the match on the stock of the Murcott and returned to the bed.

‘Move, lady.’

She wriggled her naked body around to lay lengthwise along the bed and he sat on it, swung up his legs and rested his back against the headboard.

With her head on the pillow beside his hip, she gazed up at him with weary elation.

‘That was ... it was...’

‘It was a screw, lady. Like you wanted.’

‘But where did you...?’

‘Whores mostly. And I was married for awhile.’

There was a tentativeness - totally out of character about the way in which she raised a hand to rest it on his naked thigh.

‘You didn’t seem to enjoy it, Barnaby.’

‘You did fine, lady.’

Now she reverted to her true nature as she snatched her hand away and snarled, “Fine? I’m the best, damn you! And when I’m ready for you again I’ll show you some tricks no whore ever learned. I’ll have you begging to me.’

‘It’s your party, lady.’

‘Damn right it is. And don’t think you can get away with that man the master act again, unless that’s the way I want it to be. Keep it in mind that I’ve already saved your life twice tonight. And I only have to give the word and you’ll be killed.’

Now there was an authoritarian challenge in the eyes peering up at him as, from the street, came the sounds of people leaving the cantina and heading for the house.

Barnaby Gold knocked cheroot ash into a porcelain dish on the bedside tea table and asked, ‘What makes you Delroys the top people in Oceanville?’

‘What?’

‘You’re quite a woman, lady. But just a woman. And your brother ain’t exactly a man-mountain. Yet the hard men treat the both of you like...’

She laughed harshly, to interrupt what he was saying as footfalls sounded within the house. ‘You’re all man in bed, Gold. But still a boy. Not yet old enough to have found out that in the contest between brain and brawn, there’s a certain winner.’

She interlocked her fingers behind her head and stared up at the canopy above the bed, but in her mind’s eye saw more than the floral pattern on the fabric.

‘There was just Hal and I at the start. Moving among the cities in the east. I was the bait for the rich men with families and reputations. And Hal never did have to do more than threaten violence if any one of them tried to get out of paying.

‘But then things got a little too risky for us and we came west. Over in Texas, the stage we were travelling on got held up. One of the three road agents was killed and the other two were captured. Hal went to see them in jail and made them a deal. We broke them out and started to rob more stages. But we did it the smart way. From inside, with Hal and I riding as innocent passengers until it was hold-up time.’

She laughed again at remembered excitement. ‘Trains and banks were next. But not just with the two roughnecks we started out with. And after awhile, we didn’t even have to be there. Word was spread about Hal’s fame for planning robberies and the roughnecks started to come to him. He just came up with the ideas and took a large share of the proceeds.’

‘Word spread to the law as well?’ Gold said, as the house became quiet again after footfalls had sounded along the landing and doors were closed.

‘That’s exactly right. We came here on the run. Five years ago, I guess. It was a hideout even then and we were recommended to come here. But the roughnecks just used to flop down in those fish-stinking Mexican hovels. Then Hal built this place. Styled like the house in Maine where we grew up.

‘Not just for ourselves, though. Which is part of the reason we have so much respect. Apart from how he keeps on coming up with new plans to raise money the easy way.’ She shifted her head to look at him again. ‘And how he’s proved time and time again that he can kill a man and not turn a hair.’

‘He impressed me that way, lady.’

‘Your hard and cold act doesn’t impress me at all, Gold,’ she sneered. ‘Bravado is all it is. It’s my guess that being good in bed is your only talent.’