either.”
He strummed a faster banjo jig on her half-swollen clit as he shook his head and insisted, “They’re expecting trouble as well as a heap of business in a crowded, really crowded little bank. They told me they have the extra cash they’ll need coming down from Kansas City under a heavy guard. By rail as far as Emporia, up the line from here, and by armored wagon, escorted by flank riders, down to the Junction.”
She spread her thighs absently as she dreamily remarked that many a train and many a galvanized prairie schooner had been held up at gunpoint in the past.
He found his own half-sated flesh responding to her rekindled lust as he objected, “Miss Medusa Le Mat ain’t leading a bunch like Frank and Jesse, and even they ran into more than they could handle when they rode into a town that was on the prod for trouble. The bitch we only know by her nickname has always hit easy targets with a pick-up crew of aspiring outlaws Frank and Jesse would likely turn away. The wicked lady who’s been recruiting ‘em has done more killing than the whole bunch combined.”
Then, since Red Robin was moving her hips and breathing sort of funny, Longarm rolled her over on her pretty face and shapely tits. He rose from the mattress as he hooked a hip-bone with either hand to lift her handsome hind-end high while she, following his drift, moved into a less awkward position athwart the bed.
She gasped with pleasure as he let his freshly inspired erection find its way home between the marshmallow buttocks and braced white thighs she thrust up at him.
As he slid it in deep to lubricate it for the casual, steady thrusts he knew they both wanted, Red Robin sighed and said, “I swear that if they put a gun to my head and told me I had to settle on just one man for the rest of my days, it would likely be you I’d choose, you mind-reading long-donging darling!”
To which he modestly replied, “I have to make the third or fourth one last. I must be getting old. There was a time I could come thrice in a row without stopping.”
She arched her back and reassured him, “Kids love to show off. But that’s why I prefer a grown man at times like this. It’s better when you make it last as long as you can hold your love juice back, and we were talking about that other woman’s lethal ways with a Le Mat ten-shooter.”
Longarm admired the sight of his wet shaft sliding in and out of her in the mellow lamplight as he shrugged his bare shoulders and said, “I wired my boss—you remember Billy Vail—the gang might have been sniffing around but then probably gave up. I just told you why. What I’m having trouble with is just turning the picture to the wall. If Miss Medusa Le Mat is anywhere in these parts, I sure haven’t been able to cut her trail. Yet there’s other signs aplenty. Three known local toughs at large but not accounted for, along with that missing whore they called French Barbara.”
Red Robin wagged her ample hips thoughtfully and suggested, “You couldn’t have covered every possible hideout in the Flint Hills and as horny as you are, Lord love you, you couldn’t have possibly seen every woman in these parts. Didn’t you just tell me you’d be able to recognize that murderous Miss Medusa on sight, honey?”
He thrust in and out faster, as most men would have by then, and told her, “I’ve been following what Billy Vail calls the process of eliminating. I figure we don’t have to concern ourselves with hideouts more than one dead run out of town, and you’d be surprised how few such spots there are on rolling but mostly open prairie.”
She gasped that she wanted to turn over and finish romantically. So he let her and they did, wondering what else in the world could possibly be half that interesting as her warm wet innards pulsed lovingly around his throbbing shaft.
Then Red Robin asked in a surprisingly conversational voice, “If and when you do meet up with her, Custis, do you think you’ll be man enough to do it to her?”
Longarm blinked, kissed her soft ivory throat, and assured her this was the last thing he intended to do to Miss Medusa Le Mat.
Red Robin chuckled and said, “From what you’ve told me, she hardly deserves this! I was talking about you doing her in with your six-gun, Custis. You told me the last time you met she got the drop on you and blew you over a desk with buckshot.”
He sighed sheepishly and confessed, “I wasn’t expecting a pretty lady to shoot anything at me.”
Red Robin insisted, “But she did and, like you say, she was pretty and, worse yet, a woman. So do you think you’ll be able to do it to her, Custis? Do you think you’ll be able to throw down on a pretty girl in summer-weight skirts in the time she’s likely to give you?”
He didn’t answer.
Red Robin held him closer and almost sobbed as she told him, from having been there more than once, “Time, and knowing how to use it, is all that separates the winners from the losers in most gunfights, as if anyone had to tell you!”
He quietly said, “I’ve been in a few gunfights, Miss Robin.”
She said, “With other men, who gave you little time to spare from the first shock of realization to that one well-aimed shot that sets the final score. The only edge you’ll have over all those other men she’s gunned is that you’ll know, next time, who you’re facing and how much time you have to kill or be killed, without hesitation, on sight!”
Longarm soberly replied, “I’ve already figured that more than once.” He could only hope, when he had to do it, he’d be man enough to gun a sweet-faced pretty lady.
Chapter 16
Since she worked from supper time to midnight, Red Robin liked to laze slugabed well after sunrise, and Longarm, being a natural man, was not about to leave a friend in that predicament alone. But it did a lot for his conscience around noon when one of Hard Pan Parson’s junior deputies caught up with him near the livery to report they’d scouted all the likely outlets in Florence for word on a sidesaddle being traded in recently for a center-fire roper.
The deputy suggested the missing Rose Cassidy might have been on her way in to Florence astride. Longarm said he’d considered that, and added, “Those who saw her ride as far as that wooded draw described her as wearing her usual riding habit. Nobody seems to have said right out she was riding sidesaddle, but folks notice when a gal in skirts rides astride. There’s no way to do that without showing an unseemly amount of unmentionable extremities in broad-ass daylight.”
