High Lonesome Page 6

  She tried a different tack. “You don’t like me, do you?” she asked. “Because of the way I talked to you this afternoon.”

  Lassiter shrugged. He didn’t know if he liked her. He knew he wanted to have her. Lassiter didn’t feel it necessary to like or even know the names of the women he bulled. Sometimes it made for better bulling if you didn’t like a woman. Probably the best bulling was when you hated a woman and made her beg for it. And then made her beg for more.

  “I don’t like you. I don’t dislike you,” Lassiter said.

  He lied. “I hadn’t thought about you one way or another. Maybe it isn’t polite to say that. It just happens to be the truth.”

  “What would you know about politeness?” Ellen Longley threw back. “Or anything else that’s decent?”

  Lassiter just looked at her without saying anything. There was a long silence and she got up and came over to the bed. Lassiter hoped to hell she wasn’t going to come at him with a knife. It would be one hell of a shame to have to kill her. He had other uses for Ellen Longley’s body than putting bullets in it.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, maybe a little drunker than Lassiter had figured when she first started with the smart talk. He didn’t do anything when she reached out and began to feel the muscles of his arms. There was no longer any doubt. She wanted it bad.

  “Big and hard,” she murmured. Suddenly she turned bitter. “A maiden’s prayer,” she said.

  The bitterness didn’t last. “Is everything about you so big and hard?”

  She smelled of bath soap and perfume. Without a word, Lassiter pulled her onto the bed. She tried to make some kind of struggle. It didn’t last. Suddenly she was a woman gone wild, rolling all over the big old bed, clawing at him, saying things he couldn’t make out. One of the things he could understand was, “God damn you, you son of a bitch!”

  Lassiter didn’t know if she hated him. But she sure as hell hated something, most likely herself. He couldn’t have cared one bit less than he did. While her hands tugged at his pants buttons, he dragged the fancy dress up over her head. She wasn’t wearing a thing underneath. No petticoat, no bloomers, nothing. She was eager as all get-out and Lassiter wasn’t about to keep her waiting.

  Lassiter straddled her quickly. Her eyes were blazing up at him. Her mouth was working, soundlessly now. Damn! she was strong for such a slim woman. Lassiter wasn’t much short of two-hundred pounds, but he had to work hard to keep her pinned to the bed. Though Lassiter was hardly a cautious man, especially at a time like this, he hoped she wouldn’t start screaming when she started to go. Because he had no desire to be shot in the back by the Major’s two Mexican bodyguards.

  As he pressed her down on the bed, bulling her savagely, he could feel her teeth biting into his shoulder and her. sharp fingernails tearing his back open. His big hands cupped her soft backside, steadying her for long massive thrusts. Suddenly she started to go, jerking and quivering like a woman undergoing torture. But there were no screams, just long shuddering gasps of breath. Lassiter held her firm and thrust deep and let himself go.

  God, it was good. The girl didn’t say anything for a while. Lassiter reached for the bottle and killed what was left in it. He didn’t figure she needed or wanted a drink. With him there was always a need for something, usually a drink or a woman. Now he wouldn’t be needing a woman for a while, but there was still the drink.

  There was nothing for him to say. If she wanted to talk he’d let her talk. Maybe what she’d have to say might tell him something he could use later.

  “I suppose you’d like to know about the Major and me,” she said.

  “Not ’specially,” Lassiter told her. “But if you want to tell me, go ahead.”

  Like most men, Lassiter didn’t fight the urge to sleep that came on after a bed battle with a woman. Usually, that is. Now he listened while she talked. Later, he figured, she might wish she hadn’t talked so much. That wasn’t his problem.

  According to the girl, she had come West from Charleston to work as a governess for the children of a mine owner in Arizona. The mine owner’s wife was middle-aged and dowdy. There had been bad feeling right from the beginning. It got worse when the mine owner himself began to get interested. What happened next was inevitable—she found herself without a job, without money, two thousand miles from home.

  “I was desperate when Caulfield found me,” she told Lassiter. “He had been an officer in the war and he never quite got over it. He wanted to be somebody in the eyes of other people. Only he didn’t quite know how to go about it. Oh, he was good at making money all right. Even then—seven years ago—he was getting rich. At a lot of things. Selling guns to the Indians, running cattle into Mexico. Things like that.”

  “But he never married you,” Lassiter said.

  “No,” she said. “You don’t understand. Anyway, he had a wife back in New Orleans. That wasn’t the point. Ex Major Caulfield wanted me to teach him to be a gentleman. The other thing wasn’t important. Now it doesn’t seem to be important at all.”

  “The Major is more interested in power than women?” Lassiter said.

  “I stayed with him all that time. I was from what he would describe as a fine old Southern family. Without any money, I might add. I don’t know, as time passed the Major and I just stayed together. I seem to have a good head for business. Now we’re partners and if this thing in McDade works out I guess I’ll be rich.”

  “And that’s what you want more than anything else,” Lassiter stated.

  The girl’s quiet mood was starting to wear off. Something of her old brittle self came back. She sounded irritable when she spoke. “I’ve earned the right,” she said. “I’ve put too much time into this to let anybody take it away from me.”

  “Including me,” Lassiter said.

  “Make no mistake about it,” she said. “Just because I came here tonight doesn’t mean...”

  “It means Caulfield isn’t all man,” Lassiter said. “It means that you’ve been wanting to do this for an awful long time. But you didn’t want to spoil things, did you. Maybe the Major doesn’t have any cojones, but he wouldn’t like it anyway.”

  Ellen Longley looked at him. “You don’t care what you say, do you, Lassiter?”

  Lassiter started to rub her breasts. She shoved his hand away.

  “Do you?” she asked.

  “Not ’specially,” he answered. “On the other hand I don’t tell stories out of school. If you get what I mean?”

  She laughed. “I don’t believe you do,” she said. “Unless, of course, it would do you some good. I don’t think telling the Major would do any good.”

  “Take it easy—relax,” Lassiter advised her. “I aim to get what’s coming to me—that’s why I’m in this thing—but that doesn’t mean I want your share too.”

  “Glad to hear it,” she said.

  “You’re glad, then I’m glad,” Lassiter said. “Now suppose you get out of here before you spoil everything.”

  Before she had finished dressing Lassiter was asleep.

  Chapter Eight

  It gets cold in the high country of New Mexico. Lassiter had left the window open anyway. The few times they’d put him behind bars, even temporarily, had given him a hatred for little rooms without air. That and the fact that he wasn’t accustomed to sleeping for long in any one bed, in any one place.

  Now he woke up when he heard the noise on the balcony outside his hotel room. The gun was in his hand while he slept. He didn’t have to reach for it or make any other move. The loose board creaked again. A shadow darkened the dirty muslin curtains and Lassiter fired three fast shots. A man screamed and there was the sound of a body falling.

  Lassiter snaked his leg over the window sill and got ready to use the other three bullets. He didn’t have to. There was a full moon and Lassiter could see the coughing man from the jail lying face down on the balcony. His gun was lying several feet away. Lassiter thought he was dead until he started to groan. With the
cocked .38 pointing at the cougher’s head, Lassiter turned him over with his boot.

  Down in the street men were running from all directions. Lassiter could hear the chief deputy, Lloyd Ketchell, yelling what the hell was going on. Another minute and the balcony would be blasted to bits by a hail of lead. Lassiter yelled good and loud. Ketchell shouted back.

  There was a bullet crease on the side of the cougher’s skull. No real damage in spite of all the blood. The cougher didn’t weigh much. Even in the best of health he wouldn’t have been able to hit worth a damn. He tried it anyway. Lassiter grabbed him by the neck and slammed him against the side of the building.

  “Easy, pilgrim,” Lassiter said. “You ain’t got the strength right now.”

  The cougher found his voice and it didn’t sound good. “Go on, whoreson,” he gasped. “Kill me and may God damn you to hell. Rotten bastard!”

  “Enough,” Lassiter cautioned him in a mild voice. “Don’t let your courage run away with your good sense.”

  Lassiter heard the door of his room slam open. It was Lloyd Ketchell toting a sawed-off shotgun. Lassiter told him not to come out. When Lassiter dragged the cougher inside Ketchell lunged at him and Lassiter had to push him hard to get him away from the blood-spattered little assassin.

  Ketchell didn’t like being pushed. The ex policeman thought about using the scattergun on Lassiter. Lassiter put his hand on the muzzle of the shotgun and pushed it aside.

  “But the little shit tried to kill you,” Ketchell protested.

  The cougher sent a gob of spit flying at the chief deputy and there was another tussle before Lassiter broke it up.

  “Don’t you even want to know why he tried to kill you?” Ketchell complained, sounding very much like the policeman he used to be.

  “Sure I do,” Lassiter answered. “And that’s what I aim to find out.”

  “You’re wasting your time, bastard,” the cougher screamed. He wrinkled up his mouth to spit. Lassiter pointed the Colt at the center of his forehead.

  “Spit one more time,” Lassiter said. “Just once more is all you have to spit. Now you sit down there on the bed and we’ll have ourselves a talk.”

  Ketchell was losing patience. “Let me have the mangy bastard for ten minutes and he’ll tell you everything he knows. Take my word for it, Lassiter, I know about these things.”

  “I told you, .Ketchell,” Lassiter replied. “I do things my way. I thought I made that clear when I took you on.”

  “Lassiter,” Ketchell began, clenching his hairy hands.

  Lassiter motioned his chief deputy to the door with the barrel of the Colt. The ex police lieutenant grunted with disgust and went out. Lassiter could hear him cursing to himself as he went down the stairs. It wasn’t hard to understand why he had been kicked off the St. Louis police force.

  It was quiet again out in the street. Convinced that no attack by Colonel Danvers was about to take place, Lassiter’s gunmen and the town loungers had gone back to the saloons or to their dirty beds. Lassiter half expected Caulfield or the girl to show up. Nothing happened. That was good because he had things to do. First order of business was to make this little weasel talk.

  Lassiter remembered the cougher’s name— George Sully. “I told you sit down,” Lassiter said when the little man tried to get up.

  “I won’t tell you a thing, bastard,” Sully started off defiantly.

  Lassiter held back the sudden urge he had to slap the little bastard halfway across the room. It had been a long day and he was getting tired of people trying to shoot him or choke him to death.

  “You’ll hang me anyway, so why should I tell you anything,” Sully said next, sensing that Lassiter wouldn’t take much more guff from him.

  Lassiter said and he meant every word of it, “I may very well kill you, friend, but with a gun, not a rope. Now if we can just get on with this. Let’s hear you say who sent you and why you tried to kill me. No more conversation from you, friend. All I want from you is some straight answers.”

  Lassiter had to admit to himself that it sounded an awful lot like his own set-to with Sheriff O’Neal only that morning.

  The cougher said, “Nobody sent me to kill you. It was all my idea. A good idea, I’d say...”

  “Don’t start that again,” Lassiter warned him with the Colt.

  A fit of coughing doubled up the little man. There was nothing to do but wait until it passed. Sully wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There was blood on it, and not from the crease on his head. Lassiter looked at him without a trace of pity.

  “Start talking,” he said, making it clear without having to say it in words that this would be George Sully’s last chance to die of natural causes, which wouldn’t be long anyway. Still and all, most people like to drag life out as long as they could.

  “I said it was my idea,” Sully started again. “No, Colonel Danvers didn’t send me, if that’s what you’re thinking. The Colonel isn’t like that. That stinking Irish back shooter may be like that, not the Colonel. I know a lot of people don’t like him because they think he’s stiff and hard. But that’s only his way. When you get to know him he’s a real white man. The whitest man I ever met in my life...”

  Lassiter didn’t interrupt.

  Sully said, “I come out here from the East thinking the climate might do something for my blasted lungs. It didn’t. It was too late. Don’t think I’m complaining. Because I’m not. There wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do, with the bad lungs and all. I didn’t know a damn thing about farming. Couldn’t even sit a horse right till I went to work for the Colonel. Yeah, that’s right. He give me a job when everybody else round these parts figured they’d have to give me a free funeral.”

  Lassiter was beginning to understand. “So you figured you hadn’t long to live anyway, so you took it on yourself to do something real noble for Colonel Danvers. Figured you’d come in here to McDade where nobody thought two cents about you and gun down the Colonel’s enemies. Starting with Caulfield, I suppose. Just tell me one thing, cougher. If you were so all fired to put a bullet in somebody why didn’t you do it?”

  Sully answered, “That’s what I started out to do, but the Sheriff threw me in jail.”

  “Surely O’Neal didn’t think you were going to kill anybody?” Lassiter asked the little man.

  Sully tried to smile. “O’Neal was a careful man, that’s all. Like all the rest of them in McDade, he didn’t think I was worth anything. He locked me up just to make sure.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why you came after me,” he prodded the little man.

  Sully said, “I saw the way you handled yourself with Clingman today. I decided with Caulfield dead-—if I did get to him—that you might take over. The way I saw it, you could be a lot more dangerous to the Colonel than Caulfield or any of his hired killers.”

  The cougher hesitated.

  “Maybe I was wrong about you,” he said. “A killer would have me dead right now.”

  Lassiter pressed the muzzle of the Colt against the little man’s forehead. “You weren’t wrong,” he said. “I’m as dangerous as I have to be. And that means to your Colonel Danvers or anybody else makes trouble for me. Course that don’t mean the Colonel and me couldn’t do some business together. If he’s as reasonable a man as you seem to think he is, the Colonel might just be persuaded that all this wrangling around here has to stop.”

  Sully looked surprised. “The Irishman would never agree to that. I know he’s sold you a bill of goods that Colonel Danvers is the one causing the trouble in these parts. It just ain’t true, no matter what Caulfield told you.”

  Lassiter grinned at the little man. “I sort of thought maybe it wasn’t. Course if you were to repeat anything I say outside this room, I’d just have to kill you. Understand?”

  The cougher nodded his head vigorously. Whatever he was, the little man wasn’t dumb.

  “Then you do figure to take over,” he stated. “Push Caulfield out and take over yours
elf. If that’s what you aim to do you got a lot of nerve, mister ...”

  To be honest, Lassiter hadn’t thought about it all that hard. It wouldn’t be easy, like the little man said. It could be done. McDade wasn’t what you would call a fat town. But it was there and he was the sheriff. Even if he did take over, it wouldn’t last very long. Sooner or later, the way it always did all over the frontier, the law would start to move in. And you couldn’t stay in one place and buck the law because the law had the power and the guns. But if it lasted for even a year—make it six months—that’s all he would need to ride out with a big stake. A lot bigger than many of the bank jobs he’d pulled.

  “What makes you think the Colonel would deal with you?” Sully was saying.

  Lassiter had an easy answer for that one. “Because he doesn’t really want a war even if he’s prepared to fight one if he has to. And that’s exactly what he’ll have on his hands if he doesn’t talk to me. I can promise the Colonel that if he doesn’t talk to me he’ll wish he never left Massachusetts.”

  “Rhode Island,” Sully put m.

  Now Lassiter was very glad he hadn’t killed the little man or handed him over to Lloyd Ketchell. It was downright crazy, he thought, the way things worked out.

  “Clean yourself up,” he ordered Sully. “You may die soon enough but not from that nick on the head. You’re going to do a little job for me. You’re going to ride out to Colonel Danvers place and tell him about our discussion. I mean all of it. Since you seem to be so thick with the Colonel he’s bound to take what you say as the truth. Tell him changes are about to be made in the town of McDade. Tell him that McDade won’t bother him if he won’t bother McDade. Tell him there won’t be any more trouble with Caulfield. I’ll see to that personally. And last but most important, tell him I want to have a talk with him—alone.”