Free Wild to the Bone by Peter Brandvold Page B

for twenty years, Haskell.” Bear inwardly winced as the main steadied the Colt at his left temple and narrowed one eye.
    A shadow, as though of a very small bird, flicked past Haskell. He heard a faint whistling.
    â€œGnahh!” Magnus cried, stumbling back and sideways as his Colt thudded to the floor, clutching his left hand in his right. From that hand, the slender ivory handle of a stiletto protruded.
    Magnus dropped to a knee, his mouth open wide as he groaned deep in his throat and stared in shock at the fancy little blade sticking out of his hand. Magnus looked around, as did Haskell, to find out who’d thrown the knife.
    The man Haskell had first assumed was a lone drifting cowpuncher reading the newspaper in the room’s rear corner now folded her newspaper on the table and removed her brown stockman’s boots from the chair. Agent York, decked out in skintight pale blue denim jeans and a hickory blouse with vertical red stripes, lifted her tan Stetson from her head, ran a hand through her raven-black hair, tumbling loose down her shoulders, and pushed herself to her feet.
    â€œYou!” Magnus hissed in shock, staring at the girl striding slowly, purposefully toward him on her long, slender legs, brown boots thudding on the floor. “You! You!”
    And then it became a question as she stood over him and he ran his pain-racked gaze up her slender legs, past the pleasing curve of her hips and the pistol belt and the twin uptilted mounds of her breasts, to her regal, blue-eyed face framed by the silky tresses of her Black Irish hair. “You?”
    The man’s impaled hand was quivering, blood dribbling onto his knee and onto the floor.
    Raven crouched over Magnus.
    â€œPardon me,” she said, and then ripped the knife out of the man’s hand, causing him to tip his head back and hurl a blood-freezing scream at the roof.
    She wiped the blade on his shoulder and added, “I seem to have dropped my knife.”

9

    S he disappeared after that, and Haskell didn’t see her again until late that night in Douglas, dining alone in a Chinese eatery sandwiched between a harness shop and a tonsorial parlor.
    He was a little chagrined over her having to pull his fat out of the fire again, after having done so twice before. And besides, she seemed especially snooty and aloof. That was why he did not go into the eatery and invite himself to sit down beside her and strike up a conversation with a girl—his partner, no less—who’d told him in her own haughty way that she wanted nothing to do with him until they reached Spotted Horse and started the job at hand.
    Bear Haskell was many things, but he was not a prideless cur. He wasn’t going to go panting after her, for chrissakes.
    He’d eaten at the only other restaurant in town, so, with a full belly and good dark coming soon—there was only a little cobalt light left over the silhouetted western ridges—he headed over to the hotel in which he’d secured a room. The place had a saloon in a little lean-to addition, and the beer wasn’t half bad, so he enjoyed a bucket and a shot of bourbon.
    A half-breed girl was there, sitting around like part of the furniture and obviously for rent, but, oddly for him, he wasn’t in the mood for a tumble. So when he finished his beer, he patted the old dog that slept on a braided rug near the front door and headed up the rickety stairs to his room, one of only six in the wood-frame, mud-brick building.
    In the narrow, dingy hall outside his room, he stopped and stared at his door. He wrinkled the skin above the bridge of his nose as he stared at the tin-plated number 9 attached to the door panel and felt the light wings of hope lift his heart.
    Back up in the little mining town of Wendigo, during their last assignment together, Miss York had used her considerable sleuthing skills to steal into his locked room one night, and she’d been waiting there, naked