“You hear the lady?” Elliot asked. “She don’t want you killed, which is what you are going to be unless you clear out fast.”
“Touch that gun and I’ll shove it down your throat,” Longarm warned.
Elliot went for his gun and he was fast. Longarm just had an instant in which to slam a straight right fist into Elliot’s jaw, causing him to fire his gun into the boardwalk. Before he could lift and take aim for a second shot, Longarm hit him with a vicious uppercut that sent him crashing off the boardwalk into an empty water trough.
When Elliot recovered enough to lift his gun in one last attempt to shoot, Longarm booted him in the crotch.
“Ahhhh!” the man howled, falling back into the empty trough and clutching his groin.
Longarm wrenched Elliot’s pistol from his grasp and hurled it end over end so that it landed on the roof of the nearest building.
“You big sonofabitch!” Elliot screamed. “I paid for her.”
“Here!” Irma snapped, tearing Elliot’s three dollars out of her handbag and hurling it into his pain-contorted face. “Keep your money! With your balls kicked halfway up your damn throat, I expect that it’ll be weeks before you’ll even be able to piss straight, much less pleasure yourself or some poor damn woman.”
Irma slipped her arm through Longarm’s as people from a nearby saloon began to emerge, curious as to what all the commotion was about.
“My room or yours?” Longarm asked.
“Let’s try mine first,” she said, leading him away.
Her room was not as nice as his own, but it would do. She led him inside and then locked the door, saying, “I’ve got some whiskey and I expect we both need a drink.”
“I expect so,” Longarm agreed. “Irma, I thought you were going to quit whoring.”
“I will, one of these days.”
“And one of these days some hothead like Elliot might kill you.”
“I know,” she said, finding a bottle and glasses. “Elliot is a bad one, all right. But he pays well and he never got rough with me before.”
Longarm knew it was pointless to give this pretty young woman a lecture. Irma was her own person and as tough as nails. She was a brunette with a full figure and a mischievous smile that bordered on making her look slightly devilish. She also had gorgeous legs and a beautiful bottom. But tonight, he could see that she looked worn and world-weary.
Irma was trembling too, and Longarm pretended not to notice how the bottle rattled against the rim of their glasses as she poured their drinks.
“You haven’t been taking care of yourself like you were in Denver,” he said. “Why did you leave to come up to a boom town like this?”
“They ran me out of Denver.” Irma handed him a whiskey. “Maybe I should have told the Denver law that you were my very good friend, huh?” she said.
She was teasing him and he knew it. “I very much doubt that would have cut you any slack,” he replied. “But you could have come to my place and holed up until things blew over.”
“I would have,” Irma said, “but I made a mistake.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” she said, taking a big drink and sighing with regret, “I met a man in Denver who had struck gold up here. He was doing the town and we got along pretty well. He had a damn feed bag of gold to spend, and I figured that he needed someone to help him celebrate.”
“I’ll bet.”
“He was even nice,” Irma said. “I tried to talk him into a share of his gold mine.
“Good for you.”
“He resisted … at first. But you know that I can be pretty persuasive.”
“I do know,” he said, eyes dropping to the lovely swell of her bosom.
“His name was Darin and he begged me to come up here and stay in Jasper Rock with him.”
“And you agreed.”
“Why, sure! He owned a big gold mine. But before I agreed to come, I got him drunk, screwed his brains out, and made him sign an agreement giving me a third of his gold mine. After that, I figured I was finally on my way to riches.”
“Why is it,” Longarm asked, “that I have a feeling this story is not going to turn out well?”
“Because you’re looking at a practicing whore. A very tired one too.”
“What happened to your mining man?”
Irma drained her glass. She poured a refill, then replied, “Darin was shot to death the first night we arrived in this town. The next day, four different men showed up at the courthouse with false titles to his gold mine. My title was just a scrap of paper with his drunken scrawl.”
“And you were left out in the cold.”
“Almost.”
