His loins exploded. He gasped, sucking great breaths of air. He wasn’t prepared for the intensity—as if great throbbing waves burst from his cock, shot up his spine and down his legs.
He seemed to hang in midair, all of his body electric.
Slowly he came to. Sagged flat. A weight was pressing limply down onto his still tingling body.
“Damn,” he said between sucking breaths.
Had he done it? Had he killed the demon?
He blinked at the mass of black hair tickling his face. Not blond. Not the Sarah demon. Margarita. The little Mexican whore. She’d done it. Helped free him from the nightmare demon.
He chuckled, saying, “By damn, girl. I’ll give you a twenty-dollar gold piece extra. Maybe two, given how good that was. I never popped my cork like that before.”
She remained limp as he relaxed his hands from around her throat.
“Come on, girl. Let me catch my wind, and we’ll see if we can’t ride that bronco again.”
He reached down and slapped her skinny round ass.
“What the hell?”
When he shoved her to the side, she flopped loosely against the wall, arms akimbo, one of her legs like deadweight across his thigh.
“Hey, Margarita! Wake up!”
Through the tangle of her black hair, he could see her eyes, half-lidded and dull, gleaming in the lamplight. The girl’s tongue protruded between her lips, giving her a foolish expression. On her bare throat he could see the bruises, her skin broken where his nails had cut deep.
“Hey!” He jerked her up, propped her flopping head, and slapped her hard across the face. “Wake up, damn it!”
He slapped her harder.
The eyes remained half-lidded, pupils wide. No change of expression.
He let her go, watched her sag onto the rumpled bedding.
“Dear God in heaven,” he whispered as he swung his feet to the dirt floor. “What the hell did she do to me?”
He studied the dead girl, her limbs still tangled, her small breasts flaccid, the round curve of her hip dropping to such a thin waist.
Shit. I killed her.
But what to do? Danny was next door, dipping his pizzle in the sister. The mustachioed pimp would be around in the morning, looking for his whore.
I could just walk in, kill every living soul in the place.
And that would have half the law in the territory riled enough to come looking.
Cursing himself under his breath, Billy dressed, checked his Remington, and slipped to the door. Dark as the night was, he had an idea.
Back at the bed, he fought with Margarita’s limp arms and legs as he slipped the skirt back up over her hips and buttoned it. Then he pulled the blouse around her shoulders and got her arms through the sleeves.
The next couple of hours were some of the longest waiting he’d ever endured.
Finally, long after midnight, he led his horse around, tossed the dead girl over Locomotive’s withers, and stopped at Danny’s jacal just long enough to knock.
“Who’s there?” Danny asked groggily.
“Me an’ Margarita. We’re headed for Santa Fe. Says she’s never been to the city and wants to see the fandango. I’ll meet you there in a couple of weeks. Look for me at La Fonda on the square.”
“Are you outta yor mind?”
“I’m taking a couple of weeks by myself with a woman, Danny. Never done that afore. Hell, stay and screw this one for a while if you like. She’s cheap. Don’t you rile me by following along and trying to track me down. See you in two weeks.”
Then he was in the saddle, spurring Locomotive north along the Rio Grande trail. Come morning he could turn up into the Magdalena Mountains and find an arroyo to leave the dead girl in, or stuff stones into her dress and blouse and sink her in the river.
“What the hell possessed you, Billy?” he kept asking himself.
Had to be the devil, just dragging him down deeper and deeper.
73
September 4, 1866
Butler crouched behind Doc, elevating the lamp so that it shone onto the woman’s privates. He’d been amazed at the variety of shapes that the female vulva came in, and had blushed once when Corporal Pettigrew wanted to discuss it. The cramped room was also illuminated by a single, small window that looked out over the trash-filled alley.
“I need the Sims’ speculum, please,” Doc told him.
Butler reached to the open medical case and retrieved the device, one that Philip had just managed to obtain—at great expense—from back East. Just working the duck-billed device had filled his brother with delight.
“Gina, I’m sorry, this is going to be uncomfortable.”
“Christ, Doc, it ain’t the first uncomfortable thing ever shoved in down there,” she told him.
Butler watched the woman tense as Philip slowly inserted the speculum. As Doc had said the first time he laid eyes on the device, it beat the living hell out of his old bent-up serving spoon.
“Could you raise the light a little higher, Butler?” Doc asked as he spread the woman’s privates and began his examination. Butler extended the lamp over Doc’s shoulder.
“Don’t burn my ear,” Doc countered.
“Y’all’d think he didn’t trust the cap’n’s steady hand,” Pettigrew muttered.
“I’m paying attention,” Butler told the men who crowded around the room’s confines.
The woman, who called herself Gina, reclined on her back, legs spread wide, her hands gripping the wooden headboard over her head. She might have been in her early twenties, but exhaustion and weary acceptance lay behind her light brown eyes. Her cinnamon-colored hair had been tightly curled, and she wore a white cotton pullover, now wadded up above her hips.
After peering inside her, Doc said, “I don’t see any sign of disease. No discharge or odor. But you say you feel a fullness down here?”
“Like a slight ache, Doc,” Gina told him. “Sort of like something’s built up. Kind of a pressure.”
“Been working a lot?”
“Eight johnnies last night. Five or six during the day. I been pulling more’n my share.”
“New, aren’t
