“What happened?” Longarm asked.
“Big J punched me! For no damned reason, he just hauled back and hit me in the face.”
“Well,” Longarm said, dragging out his handkerchief, “when you wallow with hogs, you’re bound to get dirty.”
“Can I have a drink?” she asked, dabbing her handkerchief to her lip.
“Sure.” Longarm gave her the bottle. “Help yourself.”
“You’re a real gentleman,” she said, upending the bottle and drinking like a draft horse.
“Whoa!” Longarm said. “I might want a little nightcap up in my room.”
“Where are you staying?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, I thought me and Big J were going to celebrate, but now …”
“I’m a little tired,” Longarm hedged.
She was persistent and thirsty. “Strangers in Cheyenne shouldn’t drink alone.”
“Is that right?”
They were standing near one of the city’s new street lamps, and he thought she looked quite pretty, even with teary eyes and a puffy lip. “How old are you?”
“Twenty. How old are you?”
“Older.”
“You got a handsome face.”
“Thanks. My boss said I don’t look so good.”
“Your boss is probably jealous,” she told him. “I think you’re a lot handsomer than Big J, that ornery sonofabitch.”
“Yeah, but he has a hundred dollars, which is a lot more money than I have to spend in a saloon on whiskey and pretty women like you.”
The girl loved flattery and smiled. “You dress nice and I’ll bet you have lots of money.”
“You bet wrong,” Longarm told her.
“I don’t care,” she said after a minute. “I need a few drinks and it’d be nice to talk to an honorable man for a change.”
Longarm glanced up at his second-story hotel room window. It was dark and the night was going to be cold. “Maybe you could come up and we could share the rest of this bottle.”
She brightened. “My name is Irma. What’s yours?”
“Custis.”
“Nice name. Nice clothes. Nice body.”
“Come on, Irma,” he said, slipping his arm around the girl’s slender waist. “Let’s go to bed.”
She pulled back, but not hard. “But what about the drinking and talking?”
“We can do that too, later.”
Irma giggled. She took his bottle and had another pull, and then she wiped her lip again with his ruined handkerchief. “All right,” she said, “first we screw, then we get acquainted, all right?”
“That’ll be fine, Irma.”
Longarm found that he wasn’t as tired as he had thought. The minute Irma undressed and slipped into bed, he was on her like an animal. She had nice, lush breasts, and he licked them until the nipples stood up like dark little peaks. Very soon she took his stiff rod and guided it into her moist honeypot, and then wrapped her powerful thighs around his hips.
“Nice, real nice,” she moaned as Longarm began to thrust into her hot wetness.
Longarm didn’t hurry himself. He hadn’t had a woman in several weeks, and Irma was skilled enough to know how to stretch a man to the breaking point, then ease back and leave his body tingling. Longarm was able to handle that about three times before fire flowed through his big rod and into Irma’s body, causing her to buck and squeal when her passion exploded like a Chinese rocket.
“We were really good together, Custis,” she panted when he rolled off her and reached for the whiskey. “You’ve been with a lot of women, haven’t you?”
“I guess.”
“What do you do?”
He decided to tell her the truth. “I’m a United States marshal.”
Irma sat bolt upright. “No!”
“It’s the truth,” he said. “I could climb out of this bed and show you my badge.”
“Holy shit!” she exclaimed. “I never gave to no lawman before.”
Longarm offered her the bottle. “Have a drink, honey. The world is just full of surprises, and worse things could
