She’d dropped her expected modesty completely now and was responding like a she-cougar in heat, digging her nails in and raising her knees until her heels were crossed behind Longarm’s neck. He was hitting bottom with every stroke, and eased off a bit, aware that he could be hurting her, but she pumped hard to meet his thrusts and growled, “All of it! I want it all inside me! Oh, Jesus, it’s coming again!”
He didn’t know which of them she meant, but it didn’t seem important as, this time, they had a long, shuddering mutual orgasm and she suddenly went limp. Longarm knew he was heavy, so after lying there long enough to catch his breath, he shifted his weight to his elbows and eased off a trifle.
She sighed, “Don’t move. Just let it soak inside me till we can do it some more. You’re still nice and hard. My, there certainly is a lot of you, isn’t there?”
“It’s been a while for me, too, Mabel.”
“I’m so happy, darling. I know you think I’m an absolute hussy, but I don’t care. I don’t care if you think this is what I had in mind all the time!”
“Didn’t you?”
She hesitated, then answered roguishly, “You know damned well I did, dear heart. Women may not be supposed to want such things, but I was married for nearly eight years and, well, I don’t care if you think I’m bawdy!”
“Hell, gal, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. We just done what’s natural.”
“Can we do it again? This time I want to do it naked with me on top!”
Longarm rolled off her, slipped out of his shirt, and lay back, spread-eagled, as she tore off her last shreds of silk, and giggling like a naughty schoolgirl, climbed above him, with a knee by each of Longarm’s hip bones. She toyed with his moist erection, guiding herself onto it with her hands. He sighed with pleasure as she suddenly dropped her pelvis hard, taking it deep with a breathless hiss of her own.
And then she was moving. Moving up and down with amazing vigor as she leaned forward, swinging her nipples across Longarm’s face as she almost shouted, “Suck me! Suck my titties!”
He did, but not before he softly warned, “Take it easy You’ll wake the kid! That partition between our rooms is paper-thin!”
“I don’t care. He’s too young to know what we’re doing and he’s a sound sleeper anyway. Oh, dear God, isn’t this lovely?”
Longarm allowed that it was, but as he lay there, holding a nipple between his lips as she went wild, he heard a soft plop above the louder creaking of the bed springs. Longarm’s keen ears were educated. So he knew what it was. The key he’d left in the door had just fallen on to a sheet of paper!
Longarm ran a big hand under each of Mabel’s thighs and heaved, catapulting her up over him to crash, screaming, against the plywood partition at the head of the fold-down bed. At the same time, Longarm rolled off the mattress, grabbed the bed frame, and lifted hard, folding the bed, with Mabel in it, up into the wall.
Stark naked, he moved toward the door, snatching his.44 as he passed his gunbelt hooked over a chair. He heard running footsteps from the other side of the door, so he opened it and leaped sideways into the hallway, facing the stairwell in a low crouch for a split second to see nothing there, then pivoting fast to train his gun down the other end of the hallway. He saw that the door to Mabel Hanks’s room was ajar, spilling candlelight across the shabby carpeting. Longarm made the door in two bounds, hit it with a free elbow, and landed in the center of the room, back to the wall and facing the other fold-down bed. The bed was empty. It figured. Longarm grabbed the metal footrail of the bed and slammed it up into the wall. Then he covered the small, froglike figure who’d been hiding under it with the muzzle of his sixgun and said, “All right, you little son of a bitch, on your feet and grab some sky!”
Little Cedric without his blond wig was even uglier, and his voice was deeper as he got to his little feet, saying, “Take it easy, Longarm. I’m a lawman, too!”
“Let’s talk about it in my room. Your… mama is standing on her head against the wall. She’s likely got something to tell me, too!”
He frog-marched the midget out to the hall as the hotel’s desk clerk appeared at the far end, asking, “What in hell’s going on up here?”
Then he saw a full-grown naked man holding a.44 on what looked like a little boy in a velvet suit and decided to go away.
Longarm herded the creature called Cedric inside and slammed the door. Covering his odd captive as he bent to retrieve the door key from where it had landed on a sheet of newspaper, he shook his head and said, “Serves me right. I should have known better. Anybody can fox a key out of the inside keyhole to land on a paper shoved under the door. What were you fixing to do once you pulled it through on the paper, Cedric? You don’t look big enough to whup me with your fists. No offense, of course.”
“How’d you get on to us, Longarm?”
“Let’s see what you’re packing in that sissy little suit before we talk. Unless that’s a cow I hear bellowing inside the wall, your partner’s likely anxious to rejoin us.”
He frisked the midget, relieving him of a man-sized S&W Detective Special .38 and saying, “Shame on you, sonny!” before he motioned the dwarf to a seat in a far corner and, still covering him, relit the room’s candle. Then he went over to where Mabel Hanks was yelling curses through the mattress and pulled down the folding bed.
The naked woman rolled out of the wall and sat up, staring wildly around through the hair hanging over her face as she gasped, “What in the hell’s happening?”
Then she spotted the midget in the corner and sighed, “Oh, shit!”
“Let’s talk about it,” Longarm suggested. He saw the girl moving as if to get to her discarded nightgown and said, flatly, “You just stay put, honey. It ain’t like we’re strangers and have to be formally dressed. Either one of you can tell me who the hell you are, as long as somebody says something sudden.”
The one called Cedric said, “We’re private detectives. Our badges are in the other room. You want to see them?”
“I’ll take your word for it. Why were you detecting me? I don’t remember being wanted anywhere. Last time I looked, I was toting my own badge for Uncle Sam.”
Cedric said, “Hell, we know that. We’re out here after the reward.”
“What reward would that be, friend?”
“The one on Frank and Jesse James, of course. Our agency works for the railroad and the James-Younger Gang has been playing hell with their timetables. We was on our way to Crooked Lance, same as you, to fetch that Cotton Younger back to Missouri.”
“Don’t you mean to make a deal with him? Maybe a deal to spring him loose in exchange for Jesse James’s new address?”
The midget detective shot a weary glance at his naked female partner and sighed, “I told you they said he was a smart one, Mabel. Look what your hungry old snatch has gotten us into, this time!”
“Oh shut up, you little pissant! It’s not my fault! I told you you were overplaying your part!” She smiled timidly at Longarm and added, “You might as well know the truth. I’ll admit I did try to find out what you might know about Cotton Younger and the odd situation up in Crooked Lance. You see, one of our agents came out here a week ago and…”
“Spare me the details. I know something in Crooked Lance seems to eat lawmen for breakfast. As to overplaying parts, I’m sort of interested in why Cedric, here, was trying to creep in on us just now.”
“I done no such thing!” the midget protested, adding, “I had my ear against the plywood when all hell busted loose out there! I can see someone was using the old paper trick, but, honest Injun, you are barking up the wrong tree.”