birds we have in the hand. We can’t tempt her with what was posted on those two more serious killers, now that they’ve been killed. I’ve told Martin Link and Trooper O’Donnel how to put in for the rewards on both those bad apples. My boss doesn’t approve when we do it, and somebody ought to collect on their otherwise worthless hides.”
She began to stroke him faster as she coyly decided there might be some value left in his hide down yonder.
He said, “Let me get rid of this smoke and position you a mite strategically then. It ain’t that I don’t enjoy swapping spit with you, pretty lady. But now and again it inspires a man to new heights when he enters at a new angle.”
She pouted that she liked to be kissed at the same time a lot, and bitched about a mean boy she’d almost married before she found out he had unnatural vices.
As he rolled her on her side with her smooth soft back to him, she gasped, “Nein! I will not in the Greek manner hear of it!”
Then she arched her spine and gasped, “Ach du Lieber!” as they both enjoyed the way his semi-erection slid into her smooth wet womanhood with her behind against his belly. So a good time was had by all as she decided that that seemed to be another proper position, although vulgar enough to feel wickedly exiting, like Gypsy music in church.
In the end he had her on her hands and knees, taking his full thrusts dog style, as she swept the rumpled bedding with her wildly tossed blond hair and moaned and groaned in High Dutch that sounded awesomely dirty. The room was almost dark by then. So he kept catching flashes of sweeping hair and pale bare buttocks as, outside, summer lightning proceeded to flash regularly. Then, as he was pounding her to glory, hail started pounding on the roof right over them. So he was mighty surprised when the buxom blonde suddenly shot forward, spitting him out like a big watermelon seed, and gasped, “Ach! Someone is coming!”
Longarm grunted, “Yep, me,” as he dropped down atop her to ram it back in—he thought. She sobbed, “Not in me there! Can’t you hear it? Someone in the shop is around fucking!”
Longarm was already off her and listening, hauling on his jeans as he decided, “She’s got good ears too. Or mayhaps she’s better at the night creaks of familiar surroundings.”
She groped for him in the gloom, saying, “Don’t go. I have angst and do not now hear anything!”
Longarm said, “That’s because he’s already busted off enough of that window boarding to get in. It’s likely a thief. I was afraid my hasty carpentry would be tempting.”
He strapped on his six-gun and then, since she’d started to cry, he groped in the duds on the floor for his watch c am, hauled out his watch and attached derringer, and placed the wicked little gun in her frightened right fist, saying, “Make sure it’s somebody you’d like to see dead before you even point this bitty thing. For it may seem small, but it packs two awesome punches.”
Then he rose on his bare feet and said, “Hold the thought. I’ll be right back if we’ve been imagining things. Where’s that key ring, honey?”
She said, “On that table near the door. Don’t leave me here so scared to feel! We can try it in the Greek manner if you will stay here only!”
He groped his way to her key ring, and headed down the steep steps and across the yard through the storm, grateful to the Ruggles gals if this was their doing. For while it had to be playing hell in the wheat fields all around, the widely spaced but seriously thudding hail served to mask any footfalls of a barefoot boy with a key ring in one hand and a six-gun in the other.
He crouched in the storm on the back steps as he slowly turned a key in the backdoor lock, braced for nasty surprises even though he knew that the big vault hadn’t been visible from the kitchen.
As he cracked the door open he heard someone whisper, “What was that?” deeper in the darkness. A louder, more assured voice replied, “Stray draft from somewheres. Told you it was going to rain fire and brimstone tonight. Knew Heger never gave them the money. Got the soap in place. So hand over that dynamite juice and … Careful, you butterfingered … Jesus!”
Longarm threw himself out of line with the doorway and hit the kitchen floor as the darkness was rent by a thunderous blast! His breath was sucked out of him by the shock wave through the air as the whole building bucked on its foundations. Then it got deathly quiet, save for the soft steady dripping of something soggy stuck to a wall somewhere in the smoke-and-nitro-fume-filled darkness.
Longarm gingerly raised his cheek from the waxed floorboards and softly muttered, “He told you to be careful, you poor butterfingered bucket of blood and guts!”
Chapter 13
It wasn’t easy and some buttons were still loose, but Longarm was coming in through the back door again as Wemer Sattler and some of his deputies were climbing through the busted-out front of the shop with more light to shed on the subject.
Longarm joined them, Winchester down at his side, as one of them held a lantern high and retched in the side room just behind the front shop. Longarm swallowed hard. He’d seen worse in the war, but there was little more than two pairs of bloody boots and blood all around to show where at least two men had been standing. The naked and partly skinned cadaver jammed in a far corner, stuck to the walls in a seated position, had apparently been a fat woman with gray hair.
Longarm said, “I heard. Sounded like dynamite, or nitroglycerine. The laundry soap wedged in the door grooves of yonder vault tells a tale of tinhorn safecrackers who didn’t know what they were doing!”
Sattler pointed at the fat cadaver in the corner and said, “That was Brunhilda Maler, the washerwoman those other dead crooks had holed up with down by the creek. I remember when she got that gold tooth in the front.”
The younger deputy holding the lamp gasped, “Lieber Gott! That pair of Texas boots with Mexican stitching I remember Hans Decker away for sending!”
Sattler swore softly under his breath and told another deputy to go check on another deputy named Decker. He added as an afterthought, “See if Josef Lehrer is all right. The last time I saw him today, he was wearing a striped shirt that matches a rag I see stuck to that other wall!”
