Read Online Longarm and the Wolf Women by Tabor Evans - Free Book Online Page B

nipples pointing toward the ceiling. As she exhaled the smoke straight up, Longarm took the cigar back and set it on the washstand beside the bed, with the coal hanging over the edge; then he leaned down and nuzzled her breasts.
    â€œDuty calls, I reckon.”
    She chuckled, rolling onto her back and spreading her knees, and ran her hands threw his hair. “Jesus, you fuck good, Custis!”
    Â 
At the same time, in the dark, wet alley behind the hotel, two men were hunkered down on their knees beside the privy, staring up at the single lighted window on the hotel’s second story.
    It was the room from which they’d been hearing the muffled sounds of rapturous lovemaking and in which they’d been watching the girl’s long-haired silhouette bouncing up and down in the window. The tall gent had gotten out of bed for something and returned, and the sounds of lovemaking had resumed, but this time there wasn’t anything to see as the man was on top and they were both below the window line.
    The man with the black hat and black sideburns framing his broad, harsh face nudged the other man, who was slightly shorter, with a large, hard gut and greasy red hair spilling down from his cream plainsman. The black-haired hombre jerked his head toward the front of the hotel. The red-haired gent nodded and hefted his double-barreled Greener in both hands across his thick chest.
    The black-haired gent quietly raked a shell into the breech of his Henry rifle and straightened. With a last cautious glance at the window from which passionate sighs and groans emanated, above the wet ticks of the raindrops dripping off the roof of the hotel and the privy, he moved off at an angle toward Diamondback’s main street.
    The red-haired gent followed, taking quick, mincing steps with his stubby legs, his small, booted feet making sucking sounds in the mud.
    They tried to avoid the largest puddles as they approached the hotel’s west front corner and mounted the boardwalk. As the black-haired gent reached for the front door, a face appeared in the shadows on the other side of the building, at the far end of the boardwalk.
    The black-haired gent stopped suddenly, turning his head and tensing.
    The figure walked into the light emanating from the curtained front window, upon which gold-leaf letters formed the words “THE RUTHERFORD B. HAYES HOTEL.” The third man was tall and lanky in his spruce green duster and bowler hat, a long, thin cheroot protruding from between his teeth.
    He held a sawed-off ten-gauge in one hand, a Buntline Special in the other. A grin twisted his lips around the cheroot.
    â€œGonna get yourself shot, Pyle, you son of a bitch,” the black-haired gent said.
    â€œTry it someday, Giff. I want you to.”
    â€œShut-up, both of yas!” intervened the red-haired hombre, who’s name was Sloan, as he stepped between them both and opened the hotel’s front door. “We got a job to do, and I’m thirsty.”
    As the men stepped inside the hotel’s small, carpeted lobby, where a fire smoked in the hearth, they turned to the front desk at the right side of the room. A birdlike woman with a tight cap of red gray curls and small, round spectacles sat behind the desk, reading a Bible spread open before her, beside the hotel register, a pen, and an ink bottle.
    She was shaking her head, lips pursed with disgust.
    As the three men approached the desk, she placed a finger on the page she’d been reading, to hold her place, and looked up.
    As her eyes took in the three gun-packing hard cases before her, her hazel eyes sharpened and her paper white cheeks colored.
    The squawking of the bed upstairs could be heard as if from far away, the ceiling timbers complaining faintly, the chandelier at the base of the stairs jostling, the cylinders chiming.
    Sloan smiled, his small eyes slanting wickedly, as he aimed his shotgun at the woman’s sparrow chest, her pointy nubbin