that bad?”
Longarm worked his head around on his shoulders for a few seconds and picked a piece of lint off his pressed, starched jeans. Then, looking away, he acknowledged grudgingly, “Aw, he ain’t that bad. Fact is, he’s all right. I wouldn’t be one to go around damaging a fellow marshal’s reputation. But he’s got his ways, I’ll tell you that. Just so long as he don’t come on with he’s the expert down along the border. I ain’t going to abide that. Last time I looked, there was seven or eight agents working out of this place could draw assignments on the border, but I always seem to get that card. So I want the smart aleck to understand this ain’t my first stampede when it comes to matters down along the Rio Grande.”
Billy Vail was fighting to suppress a smile. Putting concern in his voice, he said, “Well, Custis, I hate like hell to send you off unhappy. Like you said, there are other deputies I could send.”
Longarm sighed. “No, no. Ain’t no point in that. I’d never ask another man to do work I wouldn’t do myself.” He looked off across the room again. “I swore an oath to do my best at whatever duties come my way and I ain’t backing down on that. No, I’ll go. I’ll make the best of it. Maybe Marshal Davis might learn a thing or two. Though you’ll never get him to admit it.”
“is he really a better poker player than you, Custis?”
Longarm’s eyes flared as he replied, a little louder than necessary, “Hell no! Double hell no!”
“Then how come he claims to have taken your money? Is he lying? I need to know if I got an agent here who lies.”
Longarm still looked outraged. “He might have got away with a little of mine, but he is the most uncommon lucky man you ever saw in your life. But, like I told him, he sits in that chair long enough, that luck will even out and then it will come to skill. Then we’ll see who takes the money home.”
The chief marshal was still fighting a smile. “And is he better with the ladies than you, Custis?”
For a second, Longarm straightened as if he was going to come out of his chair. Finally he subsided and studied the same corner of the room he’d looked at before. He flicked at his trousers. “I ain’t even gonna answer that.”
“I asked,” Billy Vail said, “because, if he is, you better get your ashes hauled tonight. You’ve got to be on a train tomorrow, and I wouldn’t want to see you down there doing without for a long haul.”
Longarm slowly swung his eyes around to his boss. He studied him for a second, realization slowly dawning. “Billy Vail,” he said, “you are a mean old man. You’ve been sitting there, spurring the hell out of me and having yourself a quiet laugh. Well, I reckon you got some chickens going to come home to roost one of these days. I’ll just file this little incident away for future reference.”
Billy Vail smiled big. “Either way, you still got to be on a southbound train in the morning,” he said.
Mrs. Spinner, Longarm thought, was about the most aptly named woman he’d ever met, even if she was still carrying the name of a former husband. She could set your mind spinning, your body spinning, your senses spinning, and even cause the hands of a clock to spin slower or faster depending on her whim. When she put her mind to it, she could get the both of them spinning and that included the bed and the walls and ceiling of the room. She was a lady of short acquaintance, relatively speaking, but one he intended to maintain good relations with as long as she was willing. She had moved into his boarding house a month previous and Longarm had immediately set out on a deliberate plan of seduction. Which was when he discovered that Mrs. Spinner—Lila was her given name—was also one of the most forthright people he’d ever encountered. As he’d begun his early foundation work, she’d suddenly rounded on him and said, “Marshal, are you trying to get me in bed? If that be the case, then let us dispense with these walks in the moonlight and talks in the porch swing and meals in expensive restaurants and get right to the business at hand.”
The “business at hand” had left him breathless and drained, and longing for more strength and stamina, anything to keep up with Lila. She was a woman of thirty but she had the body of a girl. In her tight-fitting bodice and corsets she looked slim, almost boyish. But when she took off the restraints, her hips bloomed and her breasts blossomed in a way that left Longarm short of breath before the actual “business at hand” ever got started. But even with her ample breasts and the wonderful flare and curve of her buttocks and hips, she was still as smooth and firm as a satin doll. She worked as a chorus dancer at one of the theaters in Denver that furnished popular entertainment, but, before that, she had been an acrobat in a flying trapeze act in the circus. The main performer in that act, the “catcher,” had been her husband. She had left both him and the act when the drink he’d taken to had taken him over. She’d said to Longarm, “Marshal, I can tell you that a drunken acrobat is not a laughing matter. No, sir. Not fifty feet in the air. I never cared for the stuff myself and I can see where it might not cause much harm to, say, a banker or a cowboy or a storekeeper, but I do not believe it has any place in a trapeze act and I told my ex- husband that very thing. It was a wonder that none of us were killed.”
Part of Longarm’s irritation at being sent off on assignment, with or without Austin Davis, was that his affair with Mrs. Spinner had only been in progress for about a week and he was far from satisfied. To suddenly be told that he had to leave at once had left him with an almost physical ache. He reckoned that Austin Davis was going to feel a little of that dissatisfaction.
But Mrs. Spinner had given him a very memorable sendoff the night before. He had never, he was sure, been involved with a woman who was more inventive, or willing to be inventive and certainly none more supple. They had begun last night by facing each other, both naked. He had taken her around the waist, lifted her straight up, and then lowered her on his erect member. She had wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and they had walked all over his room at the boarding house while she writhed and gyrated and pumped against him. Because she knew how to distribute her weight, she had felt light as a feather and he’d had no trouble carrying her even with her wild movements. She had climaxed very quickly, as she often did, clawing his neck and kissing him with deep, sucking kisses. He had held off until he’d felt her rising again, and then they both went off almost simultaneously. He had been near the bed and he fell on it with her as his own explosion began. It had given him the strange sensation of floating for a long time in midair while thunder and lightning and fireworks exploded all around him. He had not been aware of hitting the bed until some moments later when she moved in his arms, freeing herself so she could move down his body and bring him back to arousal.
The amazing thing about Lila Spinner, he thought, was how she could look so hard and smooth and then, when he took her in his arms, she just seemed to melt into him and around him. She could go from a marble statue with beautifully formed breasts with upturned tips, flat belly above a wheat-colored thatch of hair that protected the warm, pink, soft flesh within, softly rounded hips, straight legs, and small feet, into a flashing body of flesh, which was like warm dough in the way it could envelop him and suck him into her.
He sat on the train seat in the back of the car, thinking about last night and about Lila Spinner. She was so formal, so serious out of bed. So dignified. But once the shades were drawn there were no holds barred. The memory made him shake his head. He did not believe he had ever been in more intimate positions, not just with any other woman, but maybe with the sum of half of the women he had been with. And all that in just a week.
