“Watch the drink man,” Jonah snarled at Two Sleep, his head nodding at the bartender.
Two Sleep leveled one of the pistols at the Mexican behind the bar as Jonah crabbed back to the vaquero, who lay wreathed in blood, his breath coming ragged. He put the tip of his knife blade back against the Mexican’s throat, then gazed up into the flickering candlelight, eventually finding her.
“C’mere!” he ordered her in English. When she did not obey immediately, he called her gruffly in Spanish.
Whimpering, the whore stood over him, tears having streaked the alegría she had used to rouge her cheeks.
“You want me to kill him quick?”
She shook her head, then nodded yes. “Sí. No, no—leave him be.”
“You love him, eh?” Jonah asked as he slowly drew the bloody knife from the vaquero’s throat, wiping it off on the buckskin jacket.
“No—I could not love him. He is trouble to me every time he comes in,” she said quietly in the hushed cantina. “But there would be more trouble for me if you kill him.”
Hook peered down at the Mexican and sighed, then gazed up at the whore. “It doesn’t matter now, Señorita”
“He is dead too?” growled the bartender.
As he rose, Jonah stuffed the second knife away inside his boot. “These others, they should have minded their own business. How about you? Will you mind your own business?”
The man’s puffy black eyes were like a frightened, caged animal’s as they darted here and there, then eventually landed back on Hook’s face. He slid Jonah’s knife down the bar toward the American. “Sí. Just go. Go now and never come back.”
Two Sleep still had his pistols drawn, covering the room as Jonah dragged up the Winchester propped against their table. Hook reached over to clamp his right hand around the woman’s wrist, holding his left forearm protectively in front of him.
“You owe me, Señorita. You better help me stop this bleeding—for saving your life.”
Her eyes climbed from his bloody shirt, softening as they peered into his. “Yes. I owe you, Señor.”
27
Spring 1873
SHE SMELLED MORE of dust than anything else. It wasn’t that the woman was dirty. Just this land, the mud houses, what with the wind that blew night and day—it seemed natural for her to have the same sweet, musky smell of the land.
That, and the slightly damp feel to her sere-colored flesh as she worked herself into a frenzy, throbbing like a steam piston up and down atop him. Her breasts quivered inches from his eyes, the nipples coming rigid and rosy against the dusky hue of her skin. Jonah reached up and brought one round melon to his mouth as she trembled atop her perch in his lap. Throwing her head back, the high Indian cheekbones firing her eyes with an even brighter flame and her long black hair slithering over the curve of her shoulder, she shuddered from chin to toe.
The whore whimpered softly as her mouth came forward toward his, then slid off his lips, tantalizing him as her teeth sought the side of his neck. She bit him, hard enough to make Hook wince.
He hadn’t been bitten like that in … Jonah couldn’t remember a woman ever biting him before. Not in anger. Nor in passion.
Hurriedly leaving the smoky cantina, the whore led the two horsemen across the alameda, a tree-lined walk, then on down the muddy street pocked with the holes cut by recent hooves and streaked with greasy rivulets carved by iron-rimmed wheels, each silvery, moonlit sliver of water afloat with the day’s refuse tossed from most every door leading into the rain-drenched darkness. On she took them to the poorest part of this squalid village, where the houses squatted like colorless mud toads amid the low-hanging smoke of cedar fires.
First she took them to a small stable, where they stripped their horses and pack animals. It was there the woman told the Indian to make himself a bed of straw. When Hook had loosened the lashes that held his bedroll behind his saddle and dropped it atop some hay in an empty stall, the whore shook her head.
“Oh, no, Señor. You will come with me,” she had told Hook, beckoning not just with her finger, but with those black eyes like evil a’light.
Telling the Indian that they would be in the small hut across the muddy street, she led Jonah back into the storm and darkness, dodging puddles and piles of droppings gone cold with spring’s onslaught before ducking out of the rain. In the tiny room she lit a single candle. When he straightened there beside the short doorway, the crude door hung awap on its loose leather hinges, Jonah had to remove his hat to keep it from brushing against the low ceiling, his shadow cavorting across the near wall in the dance of flame thrown out by that tallow candle.
She had turned then, her black hair dripping with rain, catching the flicker of the single flame like a red mirror, hair strands hung in dark tendrils over her eyes as she pulled his coat from his arms, gently nudging him back toward one of the only two chairs in the room. It sat opposite the narrow rope-and-timber bed. She turned away and went to a small table, where he heard her tear a strip of cloth. His eyes danced across the walls—carved in the mud wall over the bed was a niche where stood a small painted saint, hands folded before him, a gilt halo perched on the crown of his head. Beside the door hung a figure he supposed was the Christ—this one fashioned poorly of corn straw and shucks. On its hand-carved head lay a wreath of bramble thorns, drops of bright red blood stained the brow.
She came to him, gently tore open the slash in his sleeve, and dabbed cold water onto the wound. He didn’t think it deep enough to worry over as she snapped a cactus leaf in two and squeezed its milky juice onto his arm, working it down into the long wound. That complete, the woman took the pieces of cloth she had torn from one of her own garments and wrapped Jonah’s forearm. Turning it this way and that, she inspected her work and her knot, then knelt before his knees.
Reaching for his belt, she hurriedly opened his britches. Jonah rose off the chair slightly as she took his flesh in her hands. He was the dry tinder, she the flame licking him into fire. He was rigid by the time she broke away to pull off his boots, then yanked his trail-stiffened canvas britches off his legs. In a damp trail of puddles tracked clear across the clay floor, she carelessly threw his coat and shirt.
His breath came short, in heavy gushes, spiraling in clouds of hot vapor in the cold room as she tucked her arms inside her chemise and pushed it down to her waist, exposing the small, firm breasts. With one hand she again took hold of his rigid flesh, the other hand encircling the back of his neck to pull him toward the dark aureole of her breast.
He hadn’t sucked long when he found the warm, sweetish liquid spilling across his tongue. That unforgettable taste compelled him to draw at the breast harder still, more insistently as she locked him against her, drove her hand up and down the length of him like a ramrod. Jonah moved his mouth to the other breast and found the nipple already dripping in milky readiness.
It was then that she drew away from him and said, “No, Señor. Do not take everything.”
She stood, right before him, pushing the chemise, skirt and all, down over her hips, stepped out of them, and flung it all to the low bed. Now she wore only the crude moccasins that were all most cantina women had to wear—nothing so rich as shoes imported from Madrid or Barcelona. Not even a pair of high-heeled dancing shoes brought up the trade routes from Chihuahua.