His Ragged Company by Rance Denton

Author:Rance Denton [Denton, Rance D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rance Denton

Before my second knock, the door flew open, and Grady Cicero stared at me with his cheeks all flushed. His mutton-chops stood straight like a cat’s hackles. He was breathing really hard, peering at me from around the door. Several candles flickered behind him, some shorter than my thumbs and skirted with melted wax. “I’m a little hurt you didn’t invite me to your shindig,” I said.

The door swung all the way open, and there stood Grady Cicero in a pair of short pants, shirtless enough just to show me how insignificant my own physique really was. He held his pistol and a cigarette. A short woman with yellow hair latched onto him like some kind of leech, sucking up and down on his chest. “Miss Lawson,” I said.

“Elias Faust,” she said, standing from the floor to lean back against Cicero’s bear of a body, giving me full view of everything from the waist up. “Thought you might want to see what you interrupted.”

“Something you need, Faust?” asked Cicero, easing the hammer down before he stuffed the .44 Russian into his pants.

Miss Lawson giggled and bit a small tag of Cicero’s skin. “How ‘bout you invite him on in, Cissy? We can put on a show for the marshal, then give him a drink and some smoke.”

“Something you need, Faust?” asked Cicero.

“Who shit in your boots, Cicero?” I said.

“Cute boots,” Miss Lawson said.

“Miss Lawson, you mind giving Cicero and me a few minutes?”

“Ain’t nothing you can say to him you can’t say to me, Marshal.”

“Maybe not, but I’d prefer the illusion of privacy.”

“I could just suck your dick while you talk,” she offered. She reared up and slapped one of her long-nailed hands across Cicero’s ass. Her feet tangled themselves drunkenly in her discarded blouse as she staggered toward the bed. She tried to pour a drink on the bedstand. She spilled half the brandy on the sheets.

“Class act,” I said.

“I’m not marrying her, Faust.”

“Quality kind of man,” I said.

“You’re a quality pain in my ass,” Cicero said, pulling the door almost all the way closed behind him as we stood in the hall. “Faust, can it wait until the sun?”

“Not for me. For you, maybe. Striking out for a few days. Don’t know when I’ll be back exactly,” I said. “How’s Marshal Grady Cicero sound for the next several days?”

“Fits,” he said. “Just not permanently.”

“Need you to watch over things for awhile, sling lead if lead needs slinging, keep Poindexter’s bar from getting too much blood on it.”

Miss Lawson shuffled around inside Cicero’s room. “Cissy?”

“What?”

“Get done out there,” she said. “You ain’t paying me just to drink.”

He said to me, “I’ll handle Blackpeak, but I don’t have it in me to do it too long.”

“Even if you’re getting paid?”

“You know what I mean, Faust.” He leveled his eyes at me over the rims of his spectacles. “If you wanted help, I know you’d ask me. You come back in a pine crate dragged on a horse’s ass, though, and I might just celebrate.

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