He chuckled and assured her, “If you were moving that sweet little ring-dang-doo any better it would hurt. I take it you aspire to become a full-time professional after you’ve waited tables a tad longer? It’s more often the other way around, ain’t it?”
She moaned, “Faster! Deeper! I don’t want to be a whore who does it with just anybody. But I love to feel like the man I do want to do it with considers me a totally depraved slut! My mama always told me girls who really let themselves come were totally depraved sluts!”
“I’ve heard Calvinist ministers explain why boys and girls were created different,” Longarm told her. He didn’t ask who’d taught her to finger a man’s crack like that as he was trying to move in her with her legs locked around his spine. To prove he understood her better now, and to get her damned finger out of his ass, he withdrew just long enough to roll her over on her bare belly and sweet little cupcakes, shove a pillow under her lap, and enter her some more from behind, with her slender thighs down and almost together as he braced his own knees outside instead of inside her legs to move it in her, as no man had ever moved it in her before, she said, while he planted a bare palm on either of her finn buttocks to shove them open and shut while singing to her:
“You naughty girl, her mama said. You’ve gone and lost your maidenhead! There’s only one thing left to do, We’ll advertise your ring-dang-doo!”
It made her laugh like hell, and then she laughed even louder as she panted, “I’m coming! I’m coming hard and, oh, Custis, it’s never, ever, felt so amusing before!”
He thought it was fun too. So a good time was had by all, and it made them both feel sad and sentimental when they just had to stop a spell lest they screw one another unconscious.
But neither felt really sleepy just yet. So as they reclined propped up on her pillows and sharing a smoke, Trisha finally recalled how they’d wound up such good friends and asked him, again, where he and her friend’s pony had been earlier.
He told her as much as he knew, adding, “Whoever reported a heap of white strangers hiding out amid those old Indian ruins must have been blind. Or else disgruntled Jicarilla have wiped them out and nobody this far from the mesa noticed the considerable gunplay that should have taken place.”
She said she hadn’t heard about anyone, red or white, camping up in those dry canyons in any numbers. When she asked how he felt about Indians and white renegades being up to something sneaky as hell—in cahoots the way those Mormons and Paiutes had acted out Utah way—Longarm said, “Na-dene ain’t Paiute, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre was a sort of ill-considered brawl that nobody had spent all that much time in plotting. The Jicarilla leaders smart enough to plot worth a tinker’s dam are up at the Dulce Agency, trying to get as good a deal as they can out of the Great White Father. Disgruntled young bronco Apache don’t meditate dark deeds up a canyon with any white outlaws. They kill ‘em for their guns and horses.”
She took the cheroot from him as she allowed that was the way she’d always heard Apache behaved, too. Billy Vail had never sent her down this way to investigate conflicting rumors.
Longarm speculated, “Not much mystery about disgruntled Indians. I’ve often felt disgruntled by our willy-nilly Indian policy, and I must have a better grasp of our two-party system than your average Indian. What can you tell me about numerous new faces in or about these parts, honey?”
Trisha said there were lots of new faces around Camino Viejo, including her own, but that she’d never been up any canyons over by that mesa.
When he asked her what had inspired a gal so fond of… nightlife to come up this way from Santa Fe to begin with, she explained she’d heard things were booming up this way, just as the place she’d been working in, near the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe, had been shut down by the new, reform administration.
She said she didn’t know why. They’d never told the gals waiting tables out front what went on in the back rooms, but there’d been boomtown talk about a ghost town coming back to life up this way. Hence, here she was.
She agreed with Longarm that Camino Viejo was hardly more than a bigger stagecoach stop than most, with the stage company’s local relay station four miles farther on. But she said old-timers said it had been much less before Queen Kirby had come out of the blue to do wonders with her fairy wand, or ready cash.
Trisha explained how the mysterious redhead had swept in one day, three summers back, to find a few forlorn merchants and the slightly more prosperous hotel, serving the crossroads near a river ford and not much else. The Mexicans had been run off years back, and the more stubborn or stupid Anglo homesteaders had eventually found it discouraging to live more forted up, and lose more stock, than folks just a few miles up or down the valley in either direction.
Trisha said, “The way I heard it, Queen Kirby started by buying out a couple of failing rancheros, hanging on to their cowboys, and adding some hired guns of her own to make stock-stealing in these parts more threatening to one’s health. Then she plowed those profits back into her card house and less wholesome enterprises. Some of the cowboys say there were never all those whorehouses just off the coach road in olden times.”
Longarm blew a smoke ring and said, “I was over to her card house earlier. Money can be a lot like snow, once you get a ball of it rolling right. She might or might not have come by her first wad of seed money honestly. I’ve got no warrant to question that. I fail to see how any federal court would be interested in an old carnival grifter using the profits from one business to start up or buy out another. They call that free enterprise, and I can see how she got her first holding almost free. It was smart to revive a ghost town with a handful of private guns instead of building a town from scratch with a far bigger army of masons and carpenters.”
Trisha said Queen Kirby had a building contractor working for her now. “You can’t get hardly anything new built here in Camino Viejo without Queen Kirby turning a profit on you. Why did you say she was a carnival grifter? I thought you said you’d never courted her down San Antone way like she said.”
Longarm explained, “That was a carnival grifter’s trick. I heard about it from another carnival gal one time.”
Trish pouted. “A younger and prettier one than Queen Kirby, I’ll bet, you rascal!”
He put the cheroot back between her pouting lips as he said soothingly, “You’d win. I thought you admired rascals, you nicely depraved little slut. Be that as it may, everything I know for certain about Queen Kirby smells of popcorn and the tinny blare of a carnival. That might explain her appearing from nowhere with a fast line of patter and a Minnesota bankroll.”
That term was a new one on Trisha, despite her sophisticated Santa Fe background. So Longarm explained, “Cheap flash. A Minnesota bankroll is a big bill wrapped around a lot of singles, or even newsprint cut to size. I ain’t sure why tinhorns are said to do that more in Minnesota. Heaps of greenhorns there, I reckon. But
