picking up nits as she bummed around from one boom town to another, she’d told Longarm the last time he’d asked.
It was Red Robin’s sixth sense for boom times that inspired Longarm to part the swinging doors and mosey over to her end of the bar, or so he tried to tell himself. Undersheriff Brennan, just up the road a piece, was communicating by wire regularly with the town law of Florence, and a stranger in town just never knew how many local deputies might be keeping an eye on him.
But what good old Pat didn’t know for certain about good old Red Robin wasn’t likely to hurt either gal, and Longarm really had a good reason to question Red Robin about her sudden appearance in a dinky cow town between roundups.
She went on playing, or trying to, as Longarm quietly ordered plain beer and admired a cameo profile for the moment. They’d met a spell back down Texas way, and screwed one another silly in many a boom town since. For Red Robin followed the clinking of glasses and the jingle of money, playing piano with much the same smoothness but still getting handsome tips for her efforts, considering her reluctance to put out for born suckers.
As he sipped his own beer schooner, Longarm saw Red Robin had placed an empty one at one end of the piano. It was a quarter full of coins, with a couple of silver certificates dropped in by big spenders.
Longarm waited for Red Robin to pause, and then he waded through all the applause to circle round and drop a silver cartwheel of his own in her glass.
As he’d hoped, Red Robin caught the sound of silver on glass with considerable skill for a tone-deaf gal, and smiled sweetly up to thank him. Then she saw who it was and grinned like a mean little kid, adding, “I’ll get you for that!”
Longarm moved back to the bar on her far side as Red Robin forged ahead, trying in vain to play “Peggy Gordon” as per a shouted request from the crowd.
Longarm tried to get her back on the tracks by moving closer to sing softly but correctly:
Oh, Peggy Gordon, thou art my true love. Come sit diee down upon my knee. Come tell to me the very reason, Why I’ve been slighted so by thee.
Then a gent in an undertaker’s suit and brocaded red vest stomped over to shove his red face closer than polite as he snarled, “I don’t want your rendition of ‘Peggy Gordon,’ you son of a bitch!”
Red Robin stopped playing as if someone had slammed the keyboard cover shut, and quietly but urgently said, “Don’t bite off more than you can chew, Johnny. You just now called the one and original Longarm a son of a bitch.”
Then she sweetly added, “Custis, I’d like you to meet Johnny Behind the Deuce, and please don’t kill him. I know he’s an asshole, but I owe him money and how would it look if an old flame gunned him before this child had made good on her word of honor?”
Longarm smiled thinly at the tinhorn, who seemed to have gone pale as a frog’s belly for some reason. Longarm held out a hand. When the tinhorn didn’t take it, Longarm quietly said, “In that case you’d be well advised to be out of my sight before Miss Red Robin and me finish our duet.”
Johnny Behind the Deuce started to bluster, then quietly turned for the door as Red Robin murmured, “Damn it, Custis. He just loaned me a double eagle!”
Longarm fumbled in his jeans, got out a twenty-dollar piece, and let her see it before he dropped it in her beer schooner, saying, “Pay him back if you’ve a mind to. I offered to be friendly until he’d acted the sore loser twice. Might you know what was eating him?”
Red Robin sighed and said, “You just called him a sore loser. I got here from Holy Cross broke, and had to borrow room-and-board money off the first cuss in town I knew.”
She struck a chord as if to make sure the keys were still there, and added, “I told him I’d pay him back as soon as I got that beer glass going. I suspect he had some other payoff in mind, from the way he’s been discouraging any sing-alongs.”
Longarm said, “Before we gather the boys around, you said that tinhorn was the first one you met up with here?”
Red Robin said, “Joker Joyce and the Faro Kid just blew in, along with Deacon Ellison and Pop Kenton. But we can talk about them high rollers later. I get off just after midnight and we got a lot of things to talk about, lover man!”
So Longarm finished his beer and ordered another, knowing it was going to feel like a million years, standing there watching a mighty nice sure lay with the answers to a whole new bag of questions.
For it was only a little after ten, he already had a hard-on, and what in thunder could all those professional gamblers have in mind at this time of the year in cattle country, for Pete’s sake?
Chapter 15
It sure beat all how two gals could be so different without one of them being uglier or a lousy lay. For old Pat, back in Minnipeta Junction, had been bigger and wider across the hips, but much firmer all over, than the paler and marshmallow-soft Red Robin, who moved as great, but differently, as Longarm parted the hairless lips of her smooth-shaven ring dang doo with his old organ-grinder.
Old Pat’s full bush had parted about as pleasingly, and hadn’t she been as warm and wet inside? It was hard to be certain as the sheer novelty of strange pussy enveloped a fresh erection. That was the nice thing about strange pussy, even though, in truth, he’d done this more to Red Robin, in more positions, than he and that undersheriff had gotten around to yet.
He thought about that, with a fond smile, when Red Robin locked her ankles around the nape of his neck with two pillows under her round white rump in the privacy of her hired hotel room. He’d had her in that position before, although never in the exact same surroundings, and not all that recently. As he considered teaching Pat to screw the same way with her longer, more muscular legs, his erection grew stiffer in Red Robin, inspired by the mental image of another gal as it slid in and out of the one at hand. For that was the way rutting flesh seemed to work.
As if she’d been thinking dirty underneath him, Red Robin suddenly said, “I suppose you think I owe you some explanation about that other man back in Colorado. I didn’t want to hurt either of you, Custis. But as I told you at the time, we’d made plans to ride over the Front Range together before you blew into town.”
Longarm thrust all the way in, ground it around teasingly, the way he knew she liked it, and calmly replied, “I
