Nevada Vipers' Nest (9 page)

Fargo suddenly halted. It wasn't unusual, in his experience, for willing, wanting women to make themselves available quickly. But Libby
had
pounced mighty fast—and it was she who named the meeting place. All of a sudden it seemed like Sitch McDougall was the experienced hand and Fargo the greenhorn.

“Thank you all to hell and back,” he replied sarcastically. “You
do
know how to kill a mood.”

“Sorry if I spoiled your big time. But you'd better hope it's just a mood that gets killed.”

Fargo had seen crossroads towns on the frontier that went virtually dormant after sundown. Carson City, however, like all boomtowns, was in full swing. There was the usual unbroken, raucous laughter and shouting from the saloons, the frenetic tinkling of piano notes and the tinny blast of hurdy-gurdy machines, the occasional celebratory shot. Fargo had learned that one or two shots in a boomtown were almost always innocuous, while rapid strings of three or more often meant it was time to send for the undertaker.

He avoided the town proper, swinging wide of its eastern edge and then doubling back behind the lightning-damaged house Libby had mentioned. The windows had been boarded up on the undamaged portion at the rear, perhaps by a former squatter.

Or perhaps
, a nettlesome voice in his mind suggested,
by killers who don't want you to see who is inside?

Mindful of Sitch's sinister suggestion, Fargo crouched in the silver moonlight to watch and listen. Now and then the wind gusted to a hollow moaning, but if anyone was lurking outside to kill him, his experienced senses could not detect him.

Fargo moved up to one side of a rickety back door and tapped on it, dropping his right palm to the butt of his Colt. It occurred to him that the most efficient way to murder him would be to burn him down when the door was opened.

“Is that you, Skye?” a soft, feminine voice called out.

“Yeah, it's me, Libby.”

“The door's unlocked.”

Fargo remained on one side and thrust it open with his foot, half expecting a hail of lead. Instead, he saw only the soft light of a single candle throwing flickering shadows onto peeling rose-pattern wallpaper. Libby sat on the corn-shuck mattress she had mentioned, which was covered with a clean gray blanket.

“Why so cautious?” she teased him. “Afraid I'll bite?”

“Oh, I don't mind a little biting,” he replied suggestively. “But somebody's been trying damn hard to pop me over, and I want to make sure we enjoy ourselves in peace.”

“There's nobody here but us, silly.”

“I trust you, cupcake, but I always cut the cards anyway.”

He poked his head out of an interior door that led to a hallway. But the rest of the place had burned out and caved in on itself, leaving no place for an assassin to hide.

Fargo could almost hear Sitch's voice in his ear suggesting that maybe Libby herself was paid to kill him. But Fargo decided to roll the dice on that one—he could hardly insult the woman with his suspicions and expect to enjoy her favors.

The hallway door had a bolt lock, and Fargo slid it home. An old deal table sat alongside one wall of the undamaged room. Fargo dragged it over in front of the rear door. With the windows boarded up he now felt relatively assured that he'd have time to fill his hand with something besides tits if trouble broke out.

“You're late,” she pouted as he laid his Henry near the mattress and began to unbuckle his gun belt. “I was afraid maybe you were with Belle Star.”

“What, the Ice Queen? Tell you the truth, I'm surprised you showed up. By now you must've heard about that broadsheet.”

“Oh, pouf! That story is a crock. None of the gals in the saloon believe it for one minute.”

“Maybe, but some of the men do, right?”

Libby's skirt button-looped up the side. She began unlooping it.

“Most men are assholes, pardon my French. Bob Skinner doesn't believe it, and neither does Henry—the piano player. But a few of the usual blowhards are trying to stir up some of the other men.”

At the moment the topic clearly didn't interest her. “I wanted to be ready,” she explained, “so I didn't wear any underclothing. It takes too long to get out of.”

The skirt fell open and she spread her slender, shapely thighs wide to give Fargo the full vista. “You like?”

The flattering candlelight showed Fargo a silky triangle of mons hair crowning a love nest that already glowed with her desire.

“Damn straight I like it,” he replied in a voice made husky by sudden lust. “As you can see, I'm ready, too.”

He dropped his trousers and set free a straining erection that was swollen rock hard. It piston-bobbed up and down with each heartbeat that sent hot blood surging into it.

“Sakes and saints!” she exclaimed. “I knew it felt big when we was dancing, but I didn't know a man could be hung with something that large.”

Fingers trembling with desire, she quickly opened her shirtwaist so Fargo could admire two beautifully sculpted, plum-tipped breasts. He dropped onto his knees beside her and pushed her down onto the mattress, burying his face in this luscious pulchritude. Head swinging like a pendulum, Fargo moved back and forth between each nipple, sucking them until they felt hard as rock candy in his mouth.

“Nibble them a little,” she begged, twining her fingers into his hair to push him harder against her. “Little fish nibbles—and it's just fine if they hurt a little bit.”

While Fargo played taste-tester with those firm and fine tits, Libby extended one hand and wrapped it around his man gland, stroking its curved length.

“My lands, it feels like iron! Skye, would it offend you if I get on top instead of you?”

“I don't mind working under a woman,” Fargo quipped, stretching out onto his back on the mattress.

She was so fired up by now that she was panting. “Oh, but that's just the point—
I
want to do all the work. I want you to lay just as still as if you were dead. I know it sounds . . . perverse, but I get more shivers when I'm in full control.”

Fargo liked this better and better. “Perverse” had never bothered him one whit.

Libby straddled him, gripping his manhood and adjusting it perfectly before she nudged the swollen purple tip past the chamois-soft portal of her cunny, both of them gasping at the explosion of galvanic pleasure.

Instead of plunging down greedily, she teased both of them by rapidly working just his glans, stimulating her swollen pearl. Her first climax was almost instant, and Fargo did indeed feel her shiver. Unable to hold this discipline she suddenly twitched her hips and took all of him to the hilt, their pubic hairs grinding together.

She bent forward far enough for Fargo to again lick, suck, kiss and nibble her tits while she rode him wilder and harder, unable to suppress her cries of ecstasy. Fargo barely twitched a muscle and didn't need to—this enflamed fox, now climaxing every few seconds, worked him with her love muscles, gripping and relaxing until the Trailsman felt that familiar, indescribable tightening and tingling between his asshole and balls that signaled imminent volcanic release.

Only now did his pleasure-overloaded body force him to move, bucking repeatedly like a mustang trying to shake the saddle off as he spent himself. Afterward, Fargo had no idea how long the two of them lay there, his mind shutting down completely in postcoital daze. Libby's tired but happy voice broke the silence first.

“Skye Fargo, I swear—if every man was as good as you, I'd become a whore tomorrow so I could have it all night long.”

“Good? Me? You did everything—I just laid there.”

“It was that fine cod inside me that inspired me. I hope you weren't thinking about Belle Star while I was working it?”

“Honey, I wasn't
thinking
at all. But since you brought up the subject of Belle Star . . .”

Fargo was getting desperate and he had decided to take Libby into his confidence. He told her everything about what happened at the massacre site, including his brief sighting of a beautiful woman escaping the scene.

“That woman is the only witness to what happened,” he concluded. “If I can't find her, and soon, I just might be looking up to see daisies.”

“But you said the hair color is all wrong.”

“Yeah, but you would know this—could a woman change her hair color so good that it would look as natural as hers does?”

“Well . . . yes. There's a few shops in town that sell very good hair dyes—some of the dance gals have done that, and you can't tell it.”

“How 'bout a wig?”

“A wig might fool a man, but a woman could tell it. She's not wearing a wig.”

“And those blue eyes,” Fargo mused. “They do go perfect with the hair.”

“'Case you haven't noticed, you big galoot, your eyes are a fetching blue, too, and you're sure no blond.”

“There's a point,” Fargo conceded.

“You know, Skye, there's always been talk around Carson City about this Clement Hightower fellow, and folks say he's been living up in Washington Territory. Belle Star definitely has a Southern drawl in her speech.”

“Libby, very few of the folks now in the West, besides the tribes, were born here. And a good number of them hail from the South. That means nothing.”

“That's true enough. I was born in Illinois, and I don't know of one gal at the Sawdust Corner who was born west of the Missouri River.”

“But where could she be staying?” Fargo wondered. “Ma Kunkle's boardinghouse?”

“Could be. That's a big place, and Ma's got it divided up into at least twenty rooms. I haven't seen her there, though. It's no use in asking Ma. Most of her boarders are women, and she's very protective—she won't tell you a thing, even with you being a deputy. Somehow I don't think she's staying there—one of the other gals would have mentioned it. And her being the prima ballerina and all, she won't talk to any of the women at the Sawdust Corner.”

“I s'pose there's other places to stay in town, huh?”

“Quite a few folks have rooms to let. If Bob Skinner knows, he won't let on. He's crazy in love with her, and she's got him wrapped around her little finger. A man as ugly as him is putty in the hands of a beautiful woman.”

“Yeah, Bob Skinner,” Fargo said. “So he's loopy on the girl, huh? That's interesting.”

“You sure you're not asking all these questions because you want to get under her petticoats?”

“Libby, you know the deal. There's no red-blooded man alive that can look at any pretty girl—you included—and not immediately think about what's under her petticoats.”

“That's true,” she conceded. “Didn't take me long to wonder what was under your buckskins, and if women do that, men surely do.”

“Believe me, that's not my main interest in Belle Star. I'm still not convinced she's the same woman I saw running away, and I might just be barking at a knot. But I would truly appreciate anything you can find out about her. Remember, if it is the same woman, she's scared spitless. She knows she's the only witness to what really happened, and the scum that killed her family won't hesitate to put the quietus on a witness.”

“If it is her, Skye,” Libby said, “that would explain her snotty behavior and why she stays so private, the poor thing.”

“Damn straight it would. Matter fact, she's in more danger than I am. And Iron Mike Scully made a big deal out of asking me about a woman. That means him and his bunch of cutthroats are looking for her, too. If I don't find and identify her before they do, she's going to die hard. And Skye Fargo might not be far behind.”

•   •   •

At the same time that Fargo was disporting himself with Libby Snyder in Carson City, Iron Mike Scully was sharing a bottle of forty-rod at Rough and Ready with his chief lieutenants, Romer Stanton and Leroy Jackman.

“I shoulda listened to you boys on day one,” Iron Mike said. “You both told me that Skye Fargo was death to the devil. First he busts out of here a-smokin' and scatters our mounts to hell and back. Then he rides into an ambush and manages to pin down three men well hidden in boulders. Yesterday he beats Russ up so bad that he still can't move from his bedroll. And then today he guns down Deadwood Dick, one of our best shots.”

“On top of all that,” Jackman said in his hillman's twang, “he's got hisself made a deputy goddamn sheriff.”

“I still say we just leave the son of a bitch alone,” Romer put in. “He ain't got the map, so screw him.”

Iron Mike Scully spat into the fire, loosing a string of creative curses. “'Course he ain't got the map, you thundering asshole! We searched him and that sad sack of shit with him, di'n't we? We went through their saddlebags, too. Unless one of them shoved it up his bunghole, they didn't have it. The problem with Fargo ain't that he's got the map.”

Iron Mike took down at least two inches of whiskey and passed the bottle to Leroy.

“The problem, Romer, you ferret-faced idiot, is Fargo himself. Why do you think he pinned on that star? You think a newspaper hero like him is going to let the murder of Hightower and his family stand? Or that he's just going to sit on his prat after we tried to hang him? He means to shoot us or hang us, and you can take that to the bank.”

“You think he seen the woman?” Leroy asked.

“Now there I'm neither up the well nor down. By the time he rode in, she had plenty of time to vamoose. I wish we knew what the bitch looks like. But she had to be with that family. In his letter saying he was coming down to help us, Hightower named everybody in his family that was coming with him. And he definitely mentioned a sister named Dora. It was pitch-dark when we jumped them, she could easy have slipped out taking that map with her.”

“Well, she didn't go to Virginia City,” Romer pointed out. “We've had two boys up there watching the only road in, and they got there way before she could've. And even a woman ain't stupid enough to flee into the desert east of us. Either she escaped toward the eastern slope of the Sierra or she's holed up in Carson City.”

“I just can't see her running toward the Sierra,” Iron Mike said. “That's mighty rough country and there ain't nobody living on it but grizz bears and a few trappers. What prospectors are left are way the hell up near the summit. We got no choice but to assume she went to Carson City.”