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Karen Jones in A Red Dead Redemption 2 Prequel.	By : Nickamano Category: +M through R > Red Dead Redemption Views: 3084 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Red Dead Redemption 2, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 4
- 5
- 6
When the train pulled into the station at the southern end of Saint Denis, Karen was among the first to disembark. The circular trip had taken over a day but she wasn’t in any particular hurry. Sure, she’d feel better once all her treasure was exchanged for cash being lighter, easier to hide and transport. She retrieved her horse from the rear carriage and took it straight to the Theodore Eckhart stables to be housed and looked after. Then she headed for a hotel.
However, on her way she spotted the church of the Holy Blessed Virgin and realised this was actually part of the Chinese quarter. Strolling along one side of the church, keeping her eyes and, unfortunately, her nose peeled for the market area, she spotted a lushly decorated gunsmiths halfway along the line of stores. It was all painted up in red and gold.
She entered, finding herself facing an old Chinese man standing behind the counter. A skullcap covered his crown and he had long whisker-like moustaches. There was no one else in the shop. His softly spoken English was perfect if slightly accented.
Knowing how to charm old guys, Karen offered him her most alluring and disarming smile.
“Good morning, young miss. I am Kou Chao, proprietor and expert gunsmith with over fifty years of experience and expertise. How might I be of service?”
“A pleasure to meet you, sir. I recently came into possession of a Cattleman revolver. A gift you understand. Though from a gentleman of not the highest renown. Would you perhaps cast your eye over the piece and offer you expert opinion to its quality?”
“Of course, young miss. I might even be able to suggest a few improvements, should the piece require them?”
“Please do.”
She placed her carpet bag on the counter and knowingly keeping her movements slow and careful, reached in and drew the nickel-plated revolver barrel first from the bag. Once it was on the counter top with her carpet bag back on the floor between her feet, the man appeared to relax. He limberly picked up the revolver and with fast and precise movements, very much reminding Karen of DB, he unloaded the five rounds, placing each shell in an exact straight line long the wooden counter, then drew the pistol up close to his nose and looked it over from every angle. He cocked and lowered the hammer numerous times, listening closely, worked the ejector rod and the trigger, examining, assessing.
“First, I would suggest the grips are too wide for small hands such as ours, miss. I would have them replaced, along with the recoil spring, in fact.”
He glanced across the counter at Karen and smiled, his eyes holding hers. His unassuming look felt a little disconcerting. She was used to men undressing her with their lascivious gazes.
“I could also fit you a nice light trigger. To me, this one feels too heavy for the delicate hand of a young lady. Other than that, it is a good piece, well put together. And though it needs a professional clean, it has not been too poorly maintained. Your gentleman, who offers guns as gifts, gave you a quality piece.”
“That’s very reassuring, thank you. And you can go ahead with the improvements you recommend. And, while I’m here, what replacement grips do you have in stock?”
“We have a wide range of wood finishes, birch, mahogany, three kinds of walnut, maple, bocote, mesquite, ebony, wild cherry… there’s quite a list. Then there is ivory and mother of pearl, as well as gutta percha, which is a kind of hard rubber. I can carve any kind of grip-texture you wish or any design you like onto them. Though a lot of the grained wooden grips are too beautiful to cut designs into, in my opinion. It is of course entirely your choice. I will spread our full range of grip finishes across the counter and you can take you time and decide, while I make the improvements to your revolver and give it a good clean.”
It took a while. Karen recognising that sometimes too much choice was a bad thing. Eventually she settled on an ebony grip that was almost black, setting off the mirror-polish sheen of the nickel plating to perfection. And even though it was almost as black as coal, the ebony had a beautiful grain, setting off the water-flow texture of the wood.
She had first narrowed it down to ebony, and the hard rubber, which was also black though with veins of red dancing through it. Along with that she had liked a dark walnut though it was closer to a dark brown than black. However, the rubber grips felt odd in her hand, and on realisation that she preferred the feel of wood, the choice was simple.
She purchased some gun oil and a small toolkit with screwdrivers that would allow her to take the revolver apart and clean it herself. On her way out she asked for directions to the market.
As Karen left the gunsmiths, she found herself walking behind two middle aged men. They did not resemble the usual types who appeared to frequent Saint Denis, the rich and well educated, the gentlemen and ladies. These two looked more like farmers or trappers; from another world entirely. They were dressed poorly and though clean, both their clothes and skin appeared worn almost threadbare. But there was something about them, a sense of excitement, a spring in their step. Both in shirts, trousers, boots and generic flop hats, one had on a pistol belt and by the shaping of the grips he appeared to be carrying a battered looking short barrelled Schofield. The other one had a bowie knife belted to his right hip while on the opposite side was a bulging leather pouch. It appeared heavy, pulling at the leather of the belt.
Not wanting to attracted their attention, Karen slowed her pace to keep them ahead of her but not so much that their conversation was lost in the cacophony of the big city. She cast out a silent prayer that the church bells wouldn’t suddenly start to ring.
“…I still can’t believe it, you know. It must be at least eight or nine ounces.”
“Maybe more.”
“I hope my Daisy kept all the water like I told her too. There might be another ounce worth of dust and flakes and such in there.”
“So why didn’t you pan it all out and bring it along?”
“How could I? Nine, ten ounces? Can’t just leave all that lying around, once word got out… every single one of them bastards would be out to take it from me. Best bet was to come straight here and have it assayed and exchanged before word got out.”
“So, what you’ll use a promissory note to set up credit accounts?”
“Sure, something like that.”
“Not heading to the bank then?”
“Bank? Huh! Banks get robbed my friend. Won’t see me using no bank.”
“Well, I have to. My Mary-Ellen won’t hear of me doing anything but paying off our loan. So, it’s off to the bank for me.”
“Righto. We meeting up at Doyle’s when we’re done?”
“Sure, but only for a quick one. I need to get back home.”

One man suddenly turned and stepped off the sidewalk, heading away from his companion. She stayed with the other man, the one who had been talking about ‘ounces’ and she had caught the word ‘assayers office’ earlier. He started humming a happy little tune as he strolled along.
Karen gambled. She took an alley on her left, running along it as soon as she felt she wouldn’t attract attention. The alley led into a pretty little area with seating, little tables, wooden trellises for climbers and vines and a number of potted plants dotted around the place. It was also deserted. She glanced around quickly and spotted a small cluster of potted plants in a corner deep in shadow.
She took a look around, ignoring the fact that her heart was in her throat. Then she slid her carpet bag of treasures behind those assembled pots, making doubly sure that firstly no one was watching her and secondly that the bag couldn’t be seen in the shadows. She hurried on, found another alley that if she had her directions correct, would bring her out onto the street again.
As she hurried along, she quickly started to step into the mind space of an upset, possibly assaulted, young woman. She allowed herself a short reminiscing of the loss of her best life - with her husband and their ranch, and thoughts of what could have been. And as those thoughts and memories started to develop, she allowed the tears to come, allowed the jitteriness to take her until she was trembling with her sobs. And then she brought herself toward the mouth of the alley, leaning against the painted bricks. And softening her sobs to sniffles. She timed it well, noticing the specific man on approach but keeping her eyes averted. She didn’t want it to seem obvious. He was bound to be on edge and suspicious, carrying what he was. But he was still a man and right now she was a lovely young woman in obvious distress.
“You okay there, young miss?”
“I… mister… oh please, my mama… I don’t know what to do… she’s… oh please help!”
“I could call you an officer…?”
Karen let the tears flow, accelerated the sobbing. Hoping her attractiveness would pull on his heart strings the way she knew it did for men.
He looked about, then looked back. Karen watched him through the long lashes of her teary eyes, looking without appearing to. A smile played across his lean and pockmarked face and his eyes performed that expected slow dip, taking in the pronounced jut of her bosom, the slim form of her waist and the smooth swell of her hips. Of course, due to bodice lacings and whale bone, every figure was hourglass proportioned. It was the waistline that revealed how slender a woman really was beneath her dress. And it took a trained eye to determine the true shapeliness beneath the corset and skirts. Heat flashed across his features physically, as a blush of desire but also in his eyes and in his manner. He stepped into the alley and followed Karen as she ushered him deeper into the obstacles and shadows lining the walls.
As she led him into her web, Karen slipped her right hand into the folds of her skirts, fingering the slit in the edge of her pocket where her Cattleman waited for her. She turned around slightly to make sure he was still at her back, her fingertips grazing the backstrap of the curved handle.
However, she found him already pointing a revolver at her, low, from the hip. It must have been in the waistband of his trousers with the untucked tails of his grubby shirt hiding it. But now it was levelled on her, a short-barrelled Duke Navy, and the hammer was already cocked.
He snatched Karen’s pistol out of her hand. She hadn’t even realised she had pulled it from her pocket. Then he moved in close, the fat octagonal barrel pressing up under her chin, while he purposefully pressed his body up against hers.
“I got a daughter back in Lagras,” he said. “I’d say she’s only a couple of years younger than you and she's uses that performance on me all the time. But I must say, even though I saw through it, it was pretty good. But… way you're shaped? I'd try for a harlot, seduce a guy into an alley then rob him… Now, time for payback, get those skirts up and spread your thighs apart.”
The world felt unreal for a moment. She had pushed her luck too far and failed, and now she was going to be punished for her greed. The revolver pressing into her flesh assured Karen of her need to cooperate. And before she really knew it, before it felt like reality reasserted itself, she was leaning back against the bricks of the alley’s side, her legs spread and her skirts hoisted up around her hips. The man shuffled into position between her thighs, all the while keeping the pistol under her chin. He was finding it hard to unbutton his trousers.
“You do it. Get my piece out and put it in you.” He sneered. “And hurry up about it.”
Karen reached down, feeling the heat of the man’s, filled-out shaft before she felt its actual solid tumescence through the coarse wool of his trousers. When it came to buttons, especially trouser buttons and those on the front of union suits, Karen had a deft, practiced hand. Within a second she had his erection poking out into the open air and was obediently angling it against the tender, warm threshold of her vulva.
Of course, as usual, she was far from prepared. And unlubricated, this was not going to be at all comfortable. And she had no goose fat. She did all she could, she spat on her palm and anointed his swollen crown and between her inner lips. It would ease the initial penetration at least.
She wasn’t mistaken, the crown slid smoothly and easily into her but after that, things quickly became uncomfortable. Karen found herself wincing as she vocally huffed and puffed along with him. Her warm inner flesh clung to his quick stabbing member, his erratic thrusts dragging her tunnel walls with him, friction burning her, it took her back to Rhodes and the bullwhip, but only for a moment. The only good fortune was that though he was long, a two hander as she judged, he was relatively slender in girth, more or less the complete opposite to Sheriff Garonne. Also, her body had quickly started to react, after the first minute, providing its natural lubricant and blessedly easing the physical experience for her.
She remembered that initial hurt well. The first time she had lain with a man other than her husband, once she had buried Luke and then found herself with no other option than to lie down with a man and let him use her.
Before long, even as she had quietly wept, she had felt her body responding to him, her own lubricating juices flowing and then the waves of pleasurable heat flowing through her loins. Afterwards, eventually, she had come to realise it was nothing more than a physical reaction, her body responding to being entered by a man. There was no deeper meaning, and no betrayal, it was simple nature.
This man thrust hard and fast, as they always did when they didn’t care about the woman they were with. He didn’t bother trying to free her breasts, just clawed at her bosom through the fabric of her bodice. Thankfully, though the Navy revolver never left its threatening position under her chin, he did see the sense in gently lowering the hammer.
Without trying to slow him, she put her hands onto his waist, squeezing slightly, pulling him into her a little, stroking his pride. She also thought back to when she had been walking along behind this man and his companion. The leather belt around his waist, the pouch tied to the left side, weighed down and suggestive. And the sheath knife on the right.
She could feel its horn handle rhythmically rapping her knuckles. He was wheezing, his pumping hips accelerating more and more, even as that succulent heat began pleasantly blossoming inside Karen. She took what would almost certainly be her only chance to get out of this alive. While he was distracted, chasing his blossoming climax, she took hold of the knife and drew it from its leather sheath. He hadn’t noticed, his head was thrown back and his eyes screwed shut, groaning throatily. The Navy wasn’t even under her chin any longer, he had let it roll backward around his trigger finger so that it dangled by the guard, while that hand clutched at her bosom through her bodice and the other hooked her waist trying, in vain, to fight through the gathered fabric of her skirts to grab her ass. He gave in on the effort and grabbed her waist instead, pulling her into him to force his way as deep as he could in those last few seconds.
Karen put her other hand around his back, feeling through the thin linen of his shirt. Fingers stroked between his shoulder blades. Two searching fingers covered two of his ribs and then with her left hand she guided the tip of the bowie blade between those two particular ribs and stabbed inward hard. Due to the precision of where the blade pierced him, which was all thanks be to one of the few Annesburg whores who had been kind to her, had told her of the goose fat and how to protect herself, the knife slid smoothly all the way in to the hilt. Puncturing upward through a lung and into his heart.
There wasn’t much blood. She left the knife in place, plugging the wound. His shirt sucked up most of the initial flow. He let out a breathy wheeze, his lung having collapsed, his heart blocked by sharpened steel and unable to pump. Eyes bulging in disbelief, he reached behind him with one hand, the other dropping his revolver onto the ground. Then he hit the ground, probably dead or at the most, seconds away.
Karen hurriedly knelt down, untied the pouch from his belt, sparing a glance inside and seeing the heart-breakingly beautiful gleam of solid gold, and then hurried away with it, collecting her carpet bag as she departed.
She was as certain as she could be that no one had seen her. And all the while she was putting distance between herself and the body, collecting her carpet bag and then continuing onwards across the front of the church, she heard no shouts or police whistles.
She found a hotel room, paid for three nights in advance and then carried her carpet bag upstairs to her room. On the short corridor at the stop of the stair she was accosted by a well dressed gentleman. Though at second glance she noticed his watch chain tarnished, a little fraying of fabric on the edges of his suits and a couple of unmatched buttons.
He actually blocked her progress to her room. Eyes a light, a suave smile cutting across his lower face.
“Ah delightful, wonderous. Mademoiselle! May I paint you? No in fact, I will take no refusal! I absolutely must paint you, simply must! You really have no say in the matter. The muse will not be denied! I which room do you reside? Do you have time for the first charcoal study this very hour? Surely you must. It is of vital importance I capture your unrestricted bounteous vitality, your youthful beauty and your libidinous carnality and vigour, your… your… je ne sais quoi.”
He spoke very quick and with a French accent. Not necessarily unusual in Saint Denis. His eyes took her in, licking his lips hungry obviously but not for food, and more than likely not for the chance to paint her portrait. Karen discarded the obvious, though still pleasing flattery. He was a man and this was obviously his method of trying to get her undressed so he could take her and use her body for his gratification. His dark brown eyes lengthily assailed her figure and the long thin moustache capping his thin upper lip twitched repeatedly.

“You want to paint me?”
“In the nude, of course.” He said flashing the biggest grin ever. “It could be no other way. The youth, the carnal allure of your bountiful physique, the mouth-watering nature of the curvature of your form… Oh you cannot refuse me, it would be sacrilegious, a crime against the arts!”
His hand gently took the line of her jaw and lifted her head so the light from the window at the end of the corridor danced across her soft smooth skin and the golden curls of her hair. The hand released her, idly slide along the line of her throat, the bulge of her breast. He gave her a light squeeze. He winked at her and ran his tongue across his lips, thumbing her half-stiffened nipple.
“How much?”
“Oh, sweet child... I couldn't pay you, not a dime. This would be for the purity of the experience, the joy, the artistry, the romance, the sheer… lasciviousness.”
He actually twirled the tip of his oiled moustache. Karen drew her revolver and thrust it’s muzzle against his chest. Prodding him with the gun iron. She was quietly amused and if there had been money, she might have posed for the smarmy Frenchman, but though in some inexplicable way alluring. She wasn’t about to entertain his unique seduction technique.
“Scoot.” She said.
The way he reacted, Karen was surprised he hadn’t pissed himself as he absconded in as much of a hurry as though the law, or Black Belle herself were on his trail.
Grinning to herself. Karen holstered her pistol and let herself into her room. She unpacked items from her carpet bag that wouldn’t be necessary, changes of clothing and toiletries. Boxes of .45 shells she had accumulated. Then she repacked her bag with the items she would require, locked the door behind her and set off back into the crowded streets of the dangerous French style town.
<><><>
The Chinese quarter’s market was actually a surprisingly small affair. It was located only three streets away from the church, on the opposite side of the gunsmiths. It was down an alley, but it was a wider than average walkway and there were numerous people coming and going, and milling about. Karen kept a tight grip on both her carpet bag and the grips of her hidden Cattleman. The broad alley opened out into a spacious courtyard, surrounded by the backs of buildings, apartments and the rear of shops and other business properties. While the market stalls filled the space, creating a warren of walkways.
Perhaps half of those present were Chinese, while the other half was made up with ex-slaves or the children of ex-slaves, a handful of Mexicans, and a scattering of different Europeans. All nattering away in multiple different languages. It felt a little like a cosmopolitan town meeting. Or perhaps what she expected Philadelphia’s Zoo to sound like.
Karen recognised Klein almost immediately, or at least during her third traversal of the maze-like market. He didn’t notice her at first, being busy with customers ogling the items covering his stall. Though when he did, it was the body that he immediately took note of. His eyes flared; his lips stretched into a wanton smile. And then, finally, his eyes lifted to take in her face and there was the moment of recognition. He faltered, shock, wariness and excitement etching his features all at the same time. She smiled up at him.
“Hello again, Mr Klein.”
“Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.” He grinned, his gaze once again slipping over her figure, like oil. “Never thought I’d see you again, Miss Karen. If that is your name?”
“It is. It’s a pleasure to see you again Mr Klein. I’m hoping to put some business your way… But not these kinds of wares.”
She swept a hand out, indicating the contents of his market stall. It was mostly second-hand articles, framed paintings, ornaments and trinkets, lamps and vases and the like. Household goods, some small items of jewellery. A barrel of walking canes with a few old swords, sabres, small swords. Even an antique rapier. A couple of Indian weapons and accessories with ornamental rivets and beadwork also graced the tabletop. A belt and pouch, a folded horse blanket, a gunstock war club, a tomahawk.
“Might we go somewhere a little more private to do our business?”
“Of course. I have a small warehouse just behind us where I store larger items of furniture, from house clearances, bank foreclosures and the like. Would you come this way?”
Without waiting for a response, he spoke to another stall holder, a middle-aged woman and with a kindly smile she agreed to watch over his stall. With a wave of an arm, he led Karen to the rear of the stalls and then to a nondescript, blue painted door. However, the pale pastel shade was sun-faded and stained by rainfall even worn away to bare, rotten planks around the bottom. He took out his watch chain and singled out one of three keys he kept there. He unlocked the door and stepped inside. Karen followed, drawing her Cattleman as she did so.
There were windows at the opposite end of the long, high-ceilinged warehouse which provided just enough light for her to see Klein as he unhooked an oil lantern from a nail in the wall to the left of the door and use a piece of flint and steel to light the wick. The light intensified suddenly, revealing a whole room full of furnishings and furniture. Beds, armoires, cabinets, bookshelves, side tables, wardrobes, chesterfields, chaise lounges, sofas, wingback armchairs. To Karen it momentarily looked like a vast wooden graveyard. Klein turned and smiled a warm and desireful smile at her, which faded when he saw the revolver.
“It’s just for protection, Mr Klein. I’m not out to rob you.”
“It might not surprise you that I’ve been on the wrong end of a gun before, more than once, in fact.” He said with a shrug.
“Would you be so kind as to put your revolver inside one of the drawers in that desk next to you for the duration?”
He didn’t even complain. Just gave a little nod, slowly drew the all-black Schofield from its tooled and decorated holster rig, pinching its rosewood grips between finger and thumb and slowly transferring it to a shallow drawer in the desk beside him. Once he was unarmed, he turned back to Karen, caressing her hourglass figure with his eyes, before he finally looked into the beauty of her youthful face.
“You have something else to show me?” He asked.
“First of all, I’m sorry about using you to get to Granger. I hope you haven’t lost a customer through it.”
“On the contrary. Mr Granger appeared to like your… benefactor shall we say? I am in better standing with that perverse pig-fancier than ever. Besides, that night on the train was pure bliss.”
“Well, Mr Klein, if you do well by me today. Well… let’s just say I will look on you favourably. And as you know, I can be very favourable to my friends.”
“Ah, the unsaid promise of carnal pleasure… You have not only my utmost attention, Miss Karen, but my most generous heart.”
She returned his smile and then hefted her carpet bag onto another nearby writing desk, which was as well-carved and opulent as it was large. It was thankfully on the opposite side of the makeshift walkway from the desk that contained Klein’s revolver.
“It’s all in the saddlebags in there.”
She nodded at the bag, finally lowering but not pocketing her pistol. Klein turned his attention, slowly as though it was a struggle, away from Karen and over to the carpet bag. It took him a few minutes to take everything out and examine all her items. And much of it was wrapped in its own little parcels, handkerchiefs, leather pouches, canvas sacks. He looked over each piece under the light of the oil lantern, often using a small eyepiece. And arranged each item separately. Jewellery, watches and belt buckles, and then nuggets of gold.
He was gracious and careful enough, once he came across the nickel-plated Cattleman, to lift it from the carpet bag by the barrel and offer it grip first.
“Mine perchance?” He asked, though indicating the pistol in her hand. “I had one like it.”
“You can take the cost out of that lot.” She said, taking the nickel revolver from him.
“No need. It was a spare and didn’t cost me a penny, if you take my meaning.”
“Same way it didn’t cost me nothing.” She shrugged, managing to hold back her grin.
He had a last feel around in the saddlebags and finding nothing more, diverted his appraising gaze over to the table top treasures. It took him a few minutes, all the while muttering under his breath. There was even a little finger-counting.
“As for your delightful little stash…” He said, finally.
“I assume you’ll have to make enquiries about some of it…”
“I can get you a good price but it depends how much of a hurry you’re in. The gold will take longer as I’ll have to have it assessed professionally, weighed, you know.”
“I assumed as much.”
“The other stuff… I can take off you for two hundred dollars. Here and now.”
“I’m not taking less than two-fifty.”
“How many fences are you acquainted with, Miss? As it’s you and you’re such a delight to behold, I’ll go to two-ten.
“Two-fifty, I said.”
“Two-twenty is as much as I have on me.”
“Is there anything I can offer to bring you up to my price?”
“…Alright. I have a couple of debts I’m owed. If you can wait a couple of days. I can get you two hundred and forty. But when I say wait a couple of days, I’m referring to in my hotel room, warming my bed and keeping me entertained of an evening. That’s my final offer.”
“This is just for the other stuff. The gold is separate?”
“Absolutely. At a guess, I’d say another hundred, maybe hundred and thirty for the gold.” Which will also take me a couple of days and the buyer will want to see the stuff for himself.”
“So around three-seventy in total?” Karen pretended to weigh up her options. “Alright Mr Klein. I’ll give you two days… but starting now, that gives you one night in my company… but I won’t be letting the gold out of my sight.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less, Miss Karen.”
She finally pocketed her revolver and started to tip the gold nuggets and the eight ounce lump she had just collected, back into the leather pouch. At the same time Klein opened the desk drawer and gently swept the watches, jewellery and belt buckles inside, then locked it and slipped the key into a vest pocket. He paused and glanced over at Karen. She was dropping the tied-up pouch of gold into her saddlebags, which were still her carpet bag. She followed the pouch with her nickel Cattleman. Though she was aware of him watching her, she made him wait. He finally caught her eye then nodded over at the other desk, and its drawer containing his Schofield pistol.
“May I?”
“Go ahead.”
Klein smoothly drew out the revolver and slid it back into the black leather holster on his hip. Then he took off his worsted coat, tossed it over the tabletop and started on the buttons of the dark brown vest and the high collared white shirt beneath it. Karen frowned, noting that under the coat had been wearing a shoulder holster, just like DB wore. Inside which was a second Schofield, though this one had a shorter barrel. Ignoring the revolver, he unbuttoned his shirt enough to slide a hand inside. From beneath his left arm, he drew a billfold which was itself attached to a thin shoulder sling. He opened the billfold and counted out two hundred dollars in twenties.
“You said you had two-twenty on your person.”
“Only after a certain pleasurable obligation is completed.”
“I’ve said I’d fuck you tonight, Mr Klein. And, as we’ll be going to visit your gold fella together, it’s not like I’m going to run out on you. So, I’d like my full two-forty upfront.”
“You make a reasonable point, my dear. And as I said, the other twenty I’ll have to collect from third parties before I can hand it to you.”
He carried on talking as he drew the final twenty dollar note from his leather billfold, passing the folded bundle across to Karen before beginning to redress himself. However, as he worked on his shirt and vest buttons, Karen was busy unbuttoning the neckline of her dress. She unveiled her deep, enticing and, under the lamplight golden, cleavage in order to make safe her newly acquired cash. Her careful and precise actions slowed his own buttoning and utterly distracted him, much to her amusement.
“I’m residing at the Hotel Grand, just around the corner from the gunsmiths. We could meet up at around six and dine together, on me. And then you can join me in my rooms afterwards for dessert, on you.” He grinned. “Tomorrow morning, we shall visit my ‘gold fella’ as you so quaintly put it.”
“Very good, Mr Klein. I have to say, I’ve enjoyed our transaction so far.”
“I hope you ensure my enjoyment of the remainder of our transaction this evening and tonight.”
“I’ll be sure to do just that Mr Klein. Don’t you worry.”
<><><>
He booked a table at the Villeneuve Tea Rooms, which was up the street from the Saint Denis’ Theatre. It was a rather fun meal. The place was a tea room during the day but transformed into a restaurant throughout the evening. Klein was waiting for Karen right outside as she stepped down from her carriage. He ogled her in her low-cut French style dress with bustle, long sleeves and a cute little cap seated in the artfully arranged nest of her golden blonde locks.
“Mr Klein.” She greeted him with a disarming smile.
“Miss Karen, you look ravishing.”
“Thank you, that’ll come later. Do you have my twenty?”
It took him a minute to draw his attention from her lush cleavage, framed in blue silk and taffeta, and almost another minute to clear his lust addled mind enough to understand her question.
“Oh, yes. We should get business out of the way before we settle down to our pleasure.”
He drew his leather billfold from the inside pocket of his frockcoat, drew out a small clasp of notes and handed them over. Karen counted them carefully before slipping the folded bundle into the back of one of the fingerless silk gloves she wore. Klein took her arm and drew her through the glass paned doors into the restaurant.
They enjoyed fresh oysters as a starter and Karen, having to be shown how to eat them, couldn’t help but draw a relation to the act of gulping down the heady and often viscous tribute that invariably resulted from taking a man’s cock into her mouth.
They followed the course with steaks, and roasted potatoes and corn on the cob for main. Apple pie and cream was supplied as a dessert.
They had two glasses of Kentucky Bourbon while they placed their orders and awaited the first course. And then Klein chose a bottle of Carrington’s fine cognac to be served with the meal. After Karen had wolfed down dessert, she tried to talk Klein into getting another bottle of that fine brandy, but he was drunk enough to be horny and Karen had dressed up with her low neckline, cornflower blue dress, showing plenty of bodice augmented cleavage and her hair artfully arranged and framing her lovely young face. He had been drinking her in this way all evening, as usual struggling not to speak to her cleavage, rather than her eyes. He was adamant that they must be leaving the restaurant now in order to return to his hotel room, and Karen realised she wouldn’t be able to talk him around. By this time, he was listening exclusively to his cock.
So, they stepped out of the tea room. As they passed the theatre, they had to manoeuvre around the crowds waiting to pay at the box office for whatever was on. Klein even stepped into the road and found himself having to navigate around an impatient horse rider, so that Karen could remain on the sidewalk. She was quietly impressed with his gentlemanly behaviour.
He led her down the first righthand road they came across and she found herself at the Hotel Grand. Klein took her straight up the marble stairs and onward to the second floor and into his room at the end of the corridor.
Though not, by all accounts the best hotel in town, it was actually quite extravagant. Not dissimilar to the décor of the Bastille Saloon which was only a block to the north of them. Klein tossed his hat onto the stand by the door and then unbuckled his pistol belt. Karen had her hat freed from its pins and her hair loosened to cascade around her face, by the time Klein had unfastened his bowtie, and unbuttoned his vest. She noted he wasn’t wearing the shoulder holster this time.
As he turned his attention back to Karen, he abruptly stopped her from continuing, and instead insisted on undressing her himself.
She felt like she was a Christmas gift being slowly, carefully unwrapped. And of course, he paused continually, to kiss whatever newly uncovered piece of smooth and perfumed flesh he unveiled. All in all, it took close to twenty minutes before they were both naked and sharing his bed.
“So, to clarify.” She said, as he lay beside her, pressed up against her, kissing her throat. “You have me all night tonight. And then tomorrow morning we are both to visit the assayer’s office, which as you say will take a couple of days for them to do their work. But that does not mean you get to have me any more than this night. I won’t be back here tomorrow and we won’t be dining together again.”
“That was the agreement, Karen.” He muttered into her throat. “I’d best make the most of tonight then, had I not.”
“You had.”
Karen lay on her back. Deliberately subservient, showing herself off, a lush banquet for a starving man. Klein knelt alongside her, gazing down with a wide stare, as though gorging himself on the image of her.
She had learned enough as a whore to know to play the seductress, the sultry allure of the young and desirable. While in her youth she knew she still looked as good naked as she did in clothes, and her hair maintained the lush beauty of her earlier efforts for dinner.
She lowered her long lashes and gazed up at him with an alluring half smile while his shaking hands took over from his eyes, the sense of touch adding its dimension to the appearance of her, laid out on the bed entirely for his pleasure. He stroked at her breast, firstly with his fingertips, then gently cupping its weight, assessing its size, the heat and softness of her skin. The puckered disc of her areola distracted him for a moment but the stiff protrusion of her ruddy nipple drew him onward and he pinched it between his fingers and pulled it, rolled it, depressed it with the pad of his thumb.
She enticed him with her tongue, parting her plump lips with it, teasing him, her lips curling up into a tiny smile.
He was snared by her gesture, his fingers slid upward forearm maintaining contact with the soft warmth of her heavy breast. He stroked her bottom lip with the tips of two fingers, touched the tip of her tongue and then followed it into the warm, damp cave of her mouth. He stroked her tongue inside her mouth, pushed in deep, as though testing her ability to deep throat. Not that he didn’t already know, instead he teased himself with what was to come. However, once he had teased himself with the idea of getting sucked, he couldn’t think of anything else he would rather have.
He didn’t bother rearranging her, getting her to sit up or swap places. He simply threw a leg over her upper body and straddled her, knees pressing into the space beneath her armpits and then leaned forward, grabbing the headboard with both hands. He used his hips to push his hard shaft to Karen’s waiting mouth, she offered a knowing smile and then parted her lips for him. Reaching under his legs, she curled her arms around them, pressing her fingers into his inner thighs while her lips tightened around his swollen crown and her tongue lapped at his foreskin, teasing him, probing around and beneath it and then urging the skin backward to unveil his swollen glans, before firmly laving the sensitive underside. Laughing inwardly at the way he twitched and moaned at her fast flicking tongue.
It was too much for Klein and with a long throaty grown he surged forward with his hips and pressed his shaft deep into her mouth. He felt its delightful descent, the wetness and the heat, crossing the texture of her caressing tongue, while she allowed her saliva to lubricate the plump ring of her taut gripping lips, so his shaft could slide smoothly across the snug cave of her mouth.
For once Karen was allowed to do the work. All too often these dominant men would simply use her, use the slick heat of her mouth and tongue and the tight grasp of her throat muscles to bring themselves to climax. Not once did they consider the active talents that Karen herself might be able to bring to the activity. This time however, Klein gave her the chance to impress him, and Karen threw herself into the opportunity. That being said, he did continue to slowly pump his shaft back and forth between her lips and frequently plunged himself deep enough so that his crown would pop into the tightness of her throat, the orifice pressing in around him from all sides, bathing him in a sudden wash of saliva. Still, Karen took her time and made all her efforts ecstatic, passion filled and memorable for the Fence.
As he started to accelerate his pelvic gyrations, Karen put her hands onto his hips, pulling him into her face, urging him to go faster and deeper, to follow the urging of his desires. Her neck was sore but she knew well that he was only seconds from climax. She had half expected him to pull out and that he would have decided to place his ejaculate elsewhere. But she soon realised that he was too far gone for conscious decision making, and she would be taking his orgasm into her mouth soon enough. He arched backward, arms thrown out, head thrown back. And from the visible straining in his jaw, his mouth appeared to be open too, though she couldn’t lift her view of him high enough to see him clearly beyond his broad, hairy chest.
Feeling grateful for his aid and the fact of her treasures, other than the gold, were all turned to bank notes, she gave him an additional treat. Taking her guiding hands from his hips she reached between his legs, one hand cupping his heavy, swinging testicles while the other probed behind them, found his anus and then penetrated it with her middle finger, pushing further and further upwards.
He was already tensing in pre-orgasm joy and when she entered his anus, he let out a wheezing yelp and his meat engulfed by her mouth tightened considerably. A thick streamer of pre-cum leaped across her tongue like a striking cobra, darting down her throat. And then her finger located whatever it was inside his anus that she had learned could cause men added pleasure and he cried out a feral yell and his climax unleashed itself all over the inside of her mouth and into her throat directed and placed in one location and then the other by sudden, frantic and erratic thrusting.
A minute later and they were lying side by side on the laundered bedding. Karen’s mouth and throat were still filled with the residual essence of his liquid joy, the taste of it, the texture of it, even though she had already swallowed down a stomach full. However, unlike most occasions, it was not altogether unpleasant, there was a hint of fruit and alcohol. And the booze called out to her, making her needy, she considered making a request to Klein for a bottle.
She leaned up, propping herself on her elbows and looked over at Klein. Who seemed to be in a post orgasm stupor. He was stocky though not quite overweight, dark hair swirled over his limbs and chest. His penis, curved over his thigh, as though looking across at her, leaking fluid onto his leg. It looked softened and somehow lazy, though not yet fully flaccid.
His head turned toward her. He was looking across at her breasts, they had taken up their proudly uplifted position high on her ribs. The pride of youth, big, pert yet heavy and alluring wanton. And that allure was already smouldering in Klein’s hungry eyes. Even as Karen, with some amusement, watched, his penis once against started to fill out, straightening and hardening, lifting up from its resting place on his thigh until it stood practically upright, pulsing hypnotically, ready for more.
Klein helped himself to more, he rolled onto his side, free hand filling itself with her soft awesome flesh of a breast. He watched in enraptured silence while his fingertips gently teased the puckered texture of her areola, and Karen sighed in pleasure while her nipples swelled out, stretching forth, twin miniaturised versions of Klein’s own performance of sexual engorgement.
His hand full of her breast, fingers once against playing with her nipple, he leaned over to kiss her full onto the lips. Karen was almost surprised that he was want to touch his mouth to hers after he had emptied his balls in there. Then again, truly she had long since discarded any degree of shock or surprise when it came to men’s desires, perversions or aversions.
She opened her mouth to his tongue and the two organs danced and rolled at first leisurely and then with rising ardour and then rampancy.
She had to admit that the tongue play, as well as his gentle caress of her breast and nipple were infusing her with pleasure of their own. She felt a dampness between her heated thighs along with little vibrations of pleasure spreading throughout her loins, like echoes reverberating inside a freshly chimed church bell.
She allowed herself a little moan of gratification, and pressed her lips more firmly onto Klein’s, kissing him back harder still. Then she rolled onto her side to meet him, her free hand reached down for his erection taking it in her fist and squeezing, as though testing a fruit for its ripeness.
That was as much foreplay Klein was prepared to offer, and it was as much as Karen required. He urged her onto her back and rolled on top of her. Karen reached up and grabbed the bedstead as she spread her legs outside of his hips and hooked her heels into the backs of his thighs. While she considered the possibility of using a heel to gently caress his scrotum from behind, he reached down between them, arranged himself between her lust swollen labia and then thrust fiercely into her body.
Karen moaned and arched beneath him as she was exquisitely stretched and filled, her primed juices enough to make that firm driving thrust a pleasure rather than a discomfort.
He started to thrust. At first, he hammered her slow and deep, with a slamming action that rocked and jerked her on the mattress. As he kept up the powerful fucking, Klein craned his neck and arched his shoulders so he could get his lips to her stiffened nipples again. Her breasts were beautifully shaking and bouncing around, sketching circles across the expanse of her upper chest, at least until he fastened his lips onto one nipple, pinning the orb in place and sucking on it. The nipple trapped and stationary between his pursed lips, so only one pendulous orb shook and quivered, though it bounced upon its ensnared sister and, deliciously, against the side of his face.
Right from the start Karen could feel those sweet waves of sexual pleasure throbbing within her, rolling over each other in rising waves of deliriously lovely heat, each complimenting and building on the last, as though the waves of her ever-increasing passion were stepping stones taking her onward and upward towards sexual heaven.
Moaning and whimpering in time to his deep rutting thrusts, she started to pump her hips back against him, driving herself onto his power fucking. Slamming him harder until the sound of flesh smacking flesh filled the hotel room. Anything to urge him deeper inside her, trying to push those waves to build her further upward toward her own nirvana. The thought of that word abruptly reminded her of Luke. He had been the one to educate her on nirvana, one evening after some conversation with a Chinese man looking for work. Luke had described it as the end to suffering, that it was the Chinese concept of Heaven, though it was not actually a place or an afterlife but a state of mind. To Karen the idea of an end to suffering represented pleasure beyond what she could picture as pleasure, and she had thought of the word in that way ever since.
Klein did something, changed the angle of his thrusts or shifted his weight atop her as, all of a sudden, he was pressing down on her pubic bone and it was causing a delicious friction against her jutting clitoris. Plus at this angle, whenever he drew his shaft backward inside her, the mushroom-like ridge of his cock’s crown scraped divinely against the little spot on the upper surface of her vagina and the friction sent lightning bolts of pleasure to meet and merge with the hot, trembling joy emanating from her clitoris and filling her loins.
Karen climaxed. It was sudden and powerful and made her limbs lock up, muscles tight with ecstatic tension. She writhed, her breath sealed within her, as though her bodily functions were forgotten in her moment of mindless pleasure. Her shoulders lifted away from the mattress, as she threw her head back into the pillow.
Her sudden upthrust mashed her breasts hard against Klein’s face. He grunted, then groaned long and deep in his own pleasure at the feel of her pressing herself fiercely against him the softness, smooth feel and heat of her lovely young body.
Karen was so completely locked up that she was unable to even exhale, let alone scream or squeal out the built-up pressure of her sexual ecstasy. Her eyes were screwed shut in her joy, nostrils flared, mouth gaping, lips drawn back from her gums, and yet she was unable to take a breath. The waves became a crescendo that filled her with hotly pulsing orgasmic conclusion.
Klein’s thrusts continued throughout. He was of course, chasing his own building orgasm. And Karen’s abrupt change in position had thrust her groin even more forcefully against his pummelling hips, her heels digging hard into his rapidly pumping buttocks.
For Karen, it resulted in that delicious pubic bone assault on her clitoris becoming even more pronounced, which intensified the pleasure she was already engulfed in. Something broke in her and she was able to reject the air filling her lungs by letting go, it burst from her in a loud, undulating shriek of intense sexual release.
She felt the wetness erupt from her as though she was voiding her bladder, a great cannonade of pressurised silky fluid bursting out from her and blasting Klein’s driving cock and fat swinging balls. That, and the intensity of her pussy walls clamping down vice tight on his meat was more than enough to bring Klein off for a second time.
She could feel the first hot streamers of his cum unleashing inside her, but then he suddenly jerked himself out of her, somehow over powering the scissored leg lock around his waist and he shot the rest of his sticky, white hot mess all over her body. The ropes raining over her from quaking up thrust tits down her belly to the sweat darkened blonde swirls of her pubic hair.
As she was stretched up, at least her upper body, Karen had managed to slide her arms down to her sides so she was propped on her elbows again. The multiple, thick trails of viscous pearlescent seed trickled down her body to pool in the crevices where they were pressed together. She looked down and grinned euphoric and amused. His cum-iced, wilting erection was jutting up from her groin making her seem like a hermaphrodite.
One thick dollop of his cum had adhered itself to an achingly stiff nipple. And another larger dollop was oozing along the dense under curve of her other breast, aiming to travel south, like the rest of his cream, but moving slow like a snail and bringing a handful of sizeable bubbles and marble-like seams in the silvery fluid along for the ride.
Karen slowly forced herself to unlock her legs from around Klein’s waist and weakly let them relax back onto the mattress, moments before cramp started to kick in. He rolled off her and lay down alongside, hot and panting and sweaty.
They eyed each other, both panting, sweat and cum soaked, exhausted yet euphoric. Klein was admiring the way her delicious tits were so liberally anointed with his second load of the night. They glistened, catching the flickering light from the gas lamps on the wall. Even Karen thought they looked awesome when she followed his gaze and took in her ripe, jutting curves. Then she saw the thick splodge of his cum clinging on to her hard nipple for dear life. They seemed to have the same idea at the same time. Without a word, Klein reached up and cupped her tit from beneath, carefully, so as not to dislodge the cum. He lifted it to her lips while Karen was leaning down to receive it and she took the whole nipple and areola between her lips and sucked and chewed at her nipple then swallowed her second heady sample of his cum.
Klein grinned at the wanton display and Karen felt the unmistakable jolt of his cock attempting a third resurgence. This time however, his vitality failed him and they were soon lying there relaxed and satiated, cooling off and getting their breath back. Pretty soon they were both asleep, post-screwing peace and satisfaction relaxing them into a delighted stupor which soon drew them into a restful slumber.
A few hours later the cold shook them both awake. Klein used the chamber pot and the wash basin while Karen helped herself to a number of heavy swings of a bottle of Prairie Moon gin that was in the room then she followed his lead with the chamber pot before snuggling down in his arms, against the shocking cold, cosy beneath the blankets together.
Just after dawn the following morning, well before breakfast, Karen blessed Klein with an animated tit fuck and he dumped his third and final load all over her chest and throat and more than a couple of spurts into her open mouth. Immediately afterwards, he got her to scoop up the left overs and drink them all down. Then he lovingly washed her breasts and throat with the wash cloth. After dressing, Klein escorted Karen back to her own Hotel and waited downstairs for her while she changed and gathered up the items she would need. She put the gold in her saddlebags and the saddlebags into her carpet bag along with the spare revolver. Then she locked up her hotel room and met Klein. They breakfasted in the tea room where they had dined the previous evening and then set off for the assayer’s office. Karen carried the carpet bag while both she and Klein were armed and ready in case of attack. Though with the number of blue uniformed police officers, seemingly occupying every street corner, a broad daylight robbery on a main or even side thoroughfare, was unlikely and they arrived unmolested.
Klein brought her to a big heavy vault-like door of pitch-black steel. He wrapped sharply on the heavily riveted plate and waited. After a few moments, a face-high slot in the door slid open revealing the thin, lined face an older gentleman. He looked carefully at them, and then to the left and right beyond them. Finally, giving a nod, he slid the slot closed again. Another moment filled with the weighty growls of unlocking and the drawing of bolts, and the door swung open and allowed them entry. The man locked the door behind them as they walked past him.
The assay office interior was much more open and down to earth than Karen had expected, it even occurred to her to take in the surroundings with the idea of a possible robbery in mind. Though it was only a casual thought, a mind exercise for want of a better term.
It was a single brick building. Obviously with more rooms through a door in the rear wall to her left. Dead ahead there was a counter, which stretched wall to wall, then continued along the righthand wall beneath a high window and even along the rear wall. The facing counter was almost devoid of features. There was a set of scales, with a stack of iron weights all hexagonal and of decreasing size, each stacked atop its larger brother. There were also a number of accounting books and a jotter, ink bottle and two dipping pens.
Most of the scientific equipment sat under the window on the right of the room. It was a lot of glassware of a variety of shapes and sizes, tubes and beakers and pipes and the like, and there were flexible rubber tubes joining this piece to that piece. Much if the rear wall was taken up by a small furnace. It looked like a cross between a brick baker’s oven and a smithy.
“Oh, it’s Mr Klein! What a surprise, seems like I haven’t seen you in an age. I knew I recognised your face.”
“Mr Moffat. Always a pleasure. Now then, may I present Miss…? Do you know, miss Karen, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you state your surname.”
“Hello Mr Moffat. I’m Mrs Pickett. Second wife of Lieutenant General Jeb Pickett.”
Working behind a thickening of the usually soft flavour of her southern belle tongue, Karen adopted a lady like confidence and demeanour, that had Klein bright eyed and almost smirking.
“I’m here on behalf of my esteemed husband, who had, in his duty as ranking officer of the Ambarino Second Cavalry Division, the good fortune to stumble across certain advantages of his station, which I now bring to you for assessment and interpretation into valid coinage.”
Mr Moffat looked a little confused. Karen then placed her bag onto the counter top and pulled out the leather pouch containing her weighty collection of gold nuggets. She pushed it across the counter and Mr Moffat took the pouch and carefully examined its contents.
“Looks like a mixture of qualities Mrs Pickett. I will have to make a full assessment. In order to judge the carat and purity. Then there is the process of melting and combining these pieces into an ingot, before judging its final weight in order to assess its monetary value.”
“I have been informed by our mutual friend Mr Klein that the process will require no less than two days, Mr Moffat. And he assures me that it is perfectly acceptable to leave the items in your hands. However, what assurances can you offer me that should for example a robbery were to occur that my husband’s property would be well protected or that he would receive fair recompense from this office?”
“I assure you madame that this office is not only backed by our federal government, and our local police force, which is just down the road and always keeps a close eye on us, but also we are privately insured to cover any losses. Your husband’s property is perfectly safe and well protected.”
“Very good. That’s very good to hear you say, Mr Moffat. I feel much more confident. So, shall we say nine on the morning after next?”
“That would be fine Mrs Pickett. I look forward to seeing you then. Of course, you must not go without receiving a receipt of your goods.”
“Thank you, sir. My husband will be most impressed when I tell him of our delightful meeting.”
Moffat wrote out a hand written receipt. And then passed the paper to Karen, who slid it into the back of her left silk glove. Then she offered her hand, which Moffat took and delicately kissed her knuckles through the silk. Karen wasn’t sure it was the correct response for someone of her ‘status’ as the wife of a Lieutenant General but decided to make nothing of it.
“A good day to you, sir.”
“And to you Mrs Pickett, a delight to make your acquaintance. Klein, my good friend. Always a pleasure.”
“Mr Moffat.”
Klein tipped his hat and smiled to the assayer and then followed Karen to the door. Once outside, she gave the receipt a once over, slipped it back inside her glove and then looked up at Klein. He smiled at her, actually lifting his eyes to hers for once.
“Well, Miss Karen. It seems our business is completed. I must say it’s been an absolute pleasure to spend time with you again. I hope we can, perhaps, make this a more common occurrence between us?”
“Well. I am grateful for your aid Mister Klein, but I think I have everything I came for. As soon as I have the cash for my gold, I’ll be leaving Saint Denis. Hopefully for good.”
“Oh? And what plans do you have for the future.”
“I’m not sure. Maybe a small place of my own. Nothing like a ranch, just something I can keep afloat by myself. I’ve grown to like my independence.”
“That’s a real shame. You’re really quite the catch, you know. It would be damned unfortunate to keep yourself to yourself. I would have you consider remarrying.”
“Never say never, Mr Klein, but I feel like I’ve lived that life. And right now, I have the opportunity to captain my own ship, so to speak.”
“Have your hand on your own tiller?”
Klein’s smirk was reflected by Karen, and accompanied with a roll of the eyes.
“And you’ll miss the feel of my hand on yours, Mr Klein?”
“Most certainly, Miss Karen. Most certainly. And you may rely on the fact that you’ll always have an ally here in Saint Denis, should you need one.”
“Though your assistance, I feel will always come with certain provisos?”
“I will admit I think I will always find your charms impossible to resist.”
Karen laughed and offered an accepting nod.
“It has been an experience, Mr Klein, some of it fun too. Perhaps we will stumble across each other at some time in the future.”
“I suppose I had better head over to the market and open up my stall before it gets leased out from under me.”
“Good bye, then Mr Klein.”
“I’ll say but ‘adieu’, mademoiselle. And pray that I shall see you again.”
Like some gallant French gentleman, he gently took her hand and pressed his lips to her knuckles. Unlike with Moffat, it felt natural and pleasant. Then perhaps less like a gallant French gentleman, he slipped his tongue out and circled the middle-finger knuckle as though it was an erect nipple. Karen gave a little laugh, slid her hand out of his and then leaned in and kissed him once on the lips and then the cheek. And then she turned and strolled away.
When she got to the corner, Karen glanced back in the direction of the assayer’s office. Klein was already gone.
<><><>
She made for a smallish savings and loan, a couple of blocks over. She had been thinking overnight that perhaps a safety deposit box might be a clever investment. She had cash aplenty and possibly stealing away her gold as an ingot in a safety deposit box, could be a good rainy-day fund. Luke had often talked about the advantages of having a rainy-day fund in case of emergencies. At the time they hadn’t the funds to spare, saving for their first child had seemed more of a priority. But now she was thinking of the idea all over again, in different circumstances. No Luke, and no prospective children, but still…
The bank was a smallish affair, not much larger than the ones in Valentine or Annesburg. Though the vestibule did have sandstone pillars and dark flintlike tiles as flooring. The counter was dark treated hardwood and the iron gate separating the staff and customer areas was high, with thick, sturdy looking bars, though with twists and spiralling, probably to differentiate it from a jail.
There were a number of potted plants in the near corners. There were a couple of padded couches, leather covered, without backs but with arms, so that people could sit and await appointment times. And standing shelves jutted from beneath the window at the front and side walls with pens and ink pots to allow customers to fill in forms and such.
There was a mood in the vestibule. A state of tension that for a moment Karen was unable to put her finger on. But then she started to notice erroneous evidences, like photographs pinned to the walls to catch the eye and paint a picture of events.
Customers appeared shaky, afraid, a couple of the women, elderly ladies in fine attire, were trembling and sobbing quietly. The counter clerks behind the iron bar covered cubicles all had their hands on their heads, eyes wide with fear. And the wrought iron cage was standing ajar. Karen had never witnessed that before, those things were always locked up tight.
There was also a noise, a wet smacking sound, quick and rhythmic. It was overly familiar and yet she could not see the origin. A man came around from behind two of the pillars, the near pillar overlapping the distant one from Karen’s viewpoint. He had a LeMat revolver in his hand, his lower face was covered with a bandana and his hat was pulled low over his brow.
In his other hand was a fistful of long, straight brown hair. It belonged to a girl even younger than Karen, perhaps as much as a year or two. The hair was loose and glossy with a sheen, and the girl was extremely pretty, though her clothing revealed very little in the way of curvaceousness. She wore a childlike dress of white linen edged in lace, and she had a bodice, but there was neither the jut of breasts nor the swell of womanly hips. She had both hands in her hair, trying to save herself the sharp heat of pain in her scalp as the robber possessively dragged her around with him.
He hadn’t noticed Karen’s entrance, and even as he came into view, he didn’t look her way. Probably because she was standing stock still just inside the doors. He was watching something very intently and muffled laughter came out from behind the face mask.
As he turned his back to her, even putting another of the pillars between himself and Karen, she shuffled a couple of paces to her left. That was when she spotted the masked man’s source of entertainment.
The man covering the room, was obviously feeling the power of his station and was having vicarious enjoyment through the manipulation of his hostages.
There was only one of him, which seemed to Karen to be too few. He still hadn’t noticed her arrival and she was armed. She could have shot him six times over already, and with the almost dozen people she could see in the room, it was a lot to cover for just one man. She guessed four would be a better number, two to cover the customers, one to cover the staff and one to clear the vault. She wondered how many others there were engaged in this apparent robbery.
However, she soon grew distracted by the type of vicarious pleasure the masked man had arranged for himself. Karen could now see it plainly. As she had taken two steps to the left, the pillars had essentially parted, like Moses and the Red Sea, and revealed a woman forced down onto her hands and knees pushed into position over one of those leather padded couches and flanked by two aggressive men.
She was still dressed, but it seemed as though her dress had been slit open down the front from throat to hem. It hung from her like an open morning gown. The layered skirts were bunched up and flipped over the far side of her revealing naked and pale buttocks and legs, from hip to calf. Her boots were still on her feet. Pendulous breasts swung back and forth beneath her, capped by long hard nipples, exposed to everyone who was looking. And everyone was looking. Karen assumed the two men using her at both ends were actually other customers, forced to assault her at gunpoint. They were unarmed, hat less and unmasked.
The man using the woman’s mouth was a distinguished gentleman perhaps in his late thirties, with a long thick moustache, short greased hair that appeared black. He wore a grey suit with black trim and a black plush tie. The man pummelling the woman’s plush buttocks, hands digging into her pale flesh like eagle talons, was younger, barely senior to Karen. He wore a lower quality black suit over a white shirt with a tie, and was clean shaven. He was a full head shorter than the other man. Innocent customers at gunpoint or not, they were both going all out on the poor woman, apparently making the most of this guilt-free use of sexual violence on the older woman.

Oddly, she wasn’t the finest choice of woman in the bank. She was on the wrong side of middle age. Her pinned up wavy hair, now dishevelled and unkempt, no doubt due to the frantic use of her body, was mostly grey, though the waves were silky and with an attractive sheen. Her round face had plump cheeks, currently beetroot red. Her eyes were screwed shut, tears running freely. Her nose was long and slightly hooked. Her rouged lips were spread wide around the girth of the older gentleman’s cock. Fifteen, even ten years ago, she might well have caught the eye and attention of men as she walked down the street. The evidence of past beauty remained, though tainted by added weight and stretch marks and wrinkles. Karen wondered why the bank robber had chosen her to victimise. Of course, the reasons could be infinite.
She could tell easily that the younger man, either through his own choice or instructions was pounding brutally inside poor woman’s rectum. While the older gentleman was driving his lengthy looking shaft deep and roughly beyond her slick lips and making her take him right down to the balls every time. There wasn’t the slightest hint of sympathy for her discomfort, or even her ability to breathe. He held her head up with both hands straightening her mouth and throat so he could hammer his entirety as deep as possible, and as fast as he could. In fact, he was hammering her so brutally that she suddenly vomited a gullet full of creamy fluid all over him, and herself. But still he wouldn’t let up. The robber laughed at the sudden volley of bile and liquid breakfast, and the gentleman responsible joined him, though perhaps a little embarrassedly, yet still he didn’t let up. The woman abruptly regurgitated a second time and a pathetic sobbing groan slipped out from around his throat invader, he withdrew for the space of a heartbeat letting her gasp a quick breath, before he jammed it in deep again and went at her with renewed vigour.
“That’s it, sir! Go on, go on!” The robber said, laughing. “You too boy, rip her up!”
Continually distracted by the performance, the robber shifted across to the far side of the vestibule, stood at the floor to ceiling iron bars and tore his eyes away from the two on one rape, just quickly enough to peer between them into the rear of the bank.
“How’s it coming in there?”
“Two left! You go me mine picked out? Make it a good un, not that Mrs Hartman for the last time.”
“C’mon I remember you really enjoyed Mrs. Hartman once we stopped for refreshment, you corn holed her good, and then made her suck you off afterward. Made her suck us both off. And she was good at it too!”
“Sure, she was pretty damned talented I grant you, and she could take some punishment. But she was fifty if she was a day! Get me something younger this time.”
“Hold on…”
The robber turned around and cast his gaze around the customers, all of whom were up against the walls with their hands on their heads. All except the enforced threesome. And Karen. He saw Karen, frowned and then whipped his LeMat up and pointed its double muzzle at her.
“So? You got one for me?” Came a shout from the vault.
“Yeah. A little girl. She just walked in!”
The robber walked up to Karen and pressed the revolver barrel against her lips.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss. Welcome. Your being given the role of a moving hostage. For when we get out from here. Which should be any time now.”
It all seemed to happen at once. The other robber, there were only the two of them, which Karen considered very irresponsible or dauntless, appeared with four canvas sacks, she assumed filled with cash. Both pairs hung around his neck, bouncing off his shoulders. He also carried a drawn revolver. A Duke Navy, though this one had been converted to fire cartridges. He also wore a hat, a rolled derby, and like his partner, masked his nose and mouth with a bandana.
He came to a sudden stop, looking off to his right at the threesome. The younger guy was moaning, clawing at the older woman’s ample buttocks as he reamed her rectum for the last few seconds. Everyone could plainly see his climax was imminent, and then it was upon him.
He let out a deep animalistic growl as he drained his balls inside her pummelled rectum. His blatant, palpable degree of pleasure brought the older man to his own climax. With gritted teeth and a raw snarl, he drove his hips forward hard, pulling her face against him at the same time and then started to tense and tremble, rising up onto his tiptoes as he dumped his own load into her throat.
The woman issued a slick, muffled wail of sorts. He pulled back halfway and then a great burst of his cream shot out of her nostrils to coat his slimy gleaming meat. He didn’t care that she was gagging and choking. He thrust home a couple more times, she slapped at his hands, pulled at his forearms but he released her in entirely his own time. And once she was freed, she collapsed face down onto the padded bench in a dead faint. Awash with fluids, spunk liberally leaking out of her at both ends.
The two robbers laughed. The vault man even offered the two ‘innocents’ a little round of applause. But then he turned his attention to Karen.
“This one mine? Great choice. Look at the teats on her! And only a young thing too.”
“Right, time to go. Girls, pay attention. You’re getting on the horses behind us. Behind, got it? And you'll wanna be holding on tight, cause the speed we'll be moving, you fall off you'll split your head wide open on the cobblestones.”
The two men grabbed Karen and the other girl by the scruff of the neck and turned them to face the doors, pistols out and pointed forward over their shoulders.

“We’re going out and left but you keep facing this way, sidestep to the corner of the building then were backing up down the alley to the horses. Got it?”
Karen and the girl both nodded. The girl was shivering and sobbing. Karen was figuring out the best opportunity to use her hidden Cattleman. They obviously weren’t expecting any trouble from her, and would only be looking out for those blue coated policemen. She could probably pull her pistol from her pocket and hold it in her hand and they wouldn’t even notice.
But then they were shoved forward and out through the doors.
The sun was high and warm, and there were plenty of people out and about. All coming and going, all minding their own business. They started to sidestep. It was another idea Karen didn’t think well of. This unusual way of walking would draw attention to them, in fact so would the bandanas over their faces. She would have just strolled out calm and casual, as though she had just completed her business at the bank and been heading to her next appointment. That way no one would pay her much heed.
They backed down the alley and then the men hauled themselves up into the saddle. Karen was interested and quietly excited that the robber she had been partnered with was still holding all four linen sacks. And casual thoughts of shooting this man and taking his horse and all the takings from the robbery, just like she had managed to do back in Valentine, danced enticingly in her head. Her fella reached down for Karen so he could pull her up and plant her behind him. But the other man was staring over at his compadre.
“Throw me two of them bags then.”
“Let’s just get the hell out of here first. Then we can divvy up our earnings.”
“No, now. You’re wasting time. Just toss ‘em over.”
There was a five second staring match, and then Karen’s fella shrugged, unhooked two of the bags, connected by their tied together drawstrings, and tossed them to his partner. Ignoring the dark look he received, he reached down for his girl hostage and hauled her up off her feet.
Soon enough they both had a pair of sacks hooked around their necks and a girl at their backs and were turning their horses toward the mouth of the alley.
“Remember what I said you young whores. Keep a tight hold or you’ll fall right off and crack your heads open like they’re chicken eggs.”
Karen obediently wrapped her arms around the robber, pressing into his lean back and interlocking her fingers. The younger girl copied her. The horses were turned and then harshly spurred into an immediate gallop. Only then did Karen realise she wouldn’t have the opportunity to draw her pistol and shoot her fella for fear of loosening her grip and being thrown from a galloping horse.
She actually got off her first shot once the two men had finally slowed their horses and pulled into the shadow of an abandoned warehouse or factory on the banks of a Lannahechee tributary.
She realised it was the best opportunity, having finally stopped the exhausted horses and were out of sight. There wasn’t anyone in view on the other side of the river, just a thick backdrop of marsh and swamp land, smoke stacks from the Saint Denis industrial district and the train station, visible above the tree canopy.
She quietly slid the Cattleman out of its holster via the slit behind her skirt’s pocket, quickly cocked it and pressed the barrel against the edge of his jaw. She squeezed the trigger without hesitation. The gun went off with an almighty boom, the upper left quadrant of the man’s skull, including his hat and scalp took to the air and splattered against the mouldy bricks of the warehouse.
Unfortunately, the shot was so sudden and loud, the sound bouncing off the old bricks of the wall to their left, that the horse screamed and reared up in sudden terror.
Karen managed to slide safely off the back of the horse and landed on her feet, though instantly stumbled backward onto her ass. The rearing horse unseated the mostly headless bank robber and due to it wheeling desperately on its hind legs and thumping its head against the wall, the corpse was flung off to the right and straight into the murky waters.
He sank into the green mucus-like covering layer and by the time Karen had skittered backward out of the way of the bucking horse, the body and his two bags of treasure had disappeared into the heavy, stinking murk.
The horse managed to back itself out of the tight corridor between wall and water, and Karen had managed to whip around the corner of the side of the abandoned building out of its way.
“Bitch! You fucking whore! I’ll fucking kill you!”
The other girl was screaming. Karen froze, she couldn’t bring herself to step out from that corner, not with the expectation of looking down the waiting dual barrels of the fella’s LeMat. She had four bullets compared to his nine, plus a waiting scattergun barrel as back up.
“Get off me! Get off you fucking whore. I’ll put a slug in you too!”
With shaking hands and a poised ear to try and detect his approach, she half-cocked her pistol, flicked open the loading gate, replaced the fired cartridge and added the sixth. Carrying safety was no longer the priority.
“I said, get the hell off!”
Karen couldn’t picture what was happening. Was she fighting with him or just refusing to let go and give him room to dismount? Either way her fear of being caught out doing nothing pushed her straight around the corner and into his firing line.
He was struggling with his hostage. The terrified girl was still pressed up against his back with her arms wrapped around him and her head down, screaming in panic. It could have been panic or pain as he was twisted around on the saddle, slamming at her back and shoulder with the elbow of his gun hand, trying to dislodge her.
Karen took the opportunity. The .45’s kick was harsh but she now had a degree of practice under her belt and it no longer surprised her, her shot missed its target but struck the man in the raised elbow, the joint shattered and the weight of the gun in his hand along with the pressure of the bullet slamming into his flesh and bone whipped his arm off. Blood arced in the late morning air, a dance of crimson amongst the heat haze.
The man gaped soundlessly at the free air where his arm should have been. Karen took a breath, aimed carefully and took a second shot. She had to aim high. She didn’t want to hit the girl and she wanted another kill shot, even though she had disarmed him.
Interference again came from a horse, this time rather than bucking like hers had, this one tossed its head downward, half throwing its unbalanced deathly pale rider forward in the saddle. Karen’s shot missed, instead taking out a chunk of the wall. Maybe a piece of brick struck the horse or maybe it was just the din going on around it, but it bolted.
Both riders fell off suddenly, the girl falling clear, bashed her back against some discarded rubble, half hidden by overgrown weeds. The bank robber kept on for a while, leaning low over the horse, feet jammed in the stirrups, one hand clutching the bicep of the other. Karen watched the horse ride away with the rest of the stolen cash. It only occurred to her to have tried to shoot the horse when it was no more than the size of her little finger, and rapidly disappearing into the lush, swampy growth of the surrounding country.
“Shit.”
She rubbed at her behind. Looked into the glom of the river’s edge where her robber had fallen in. Then she reminded herself of the alligators, or maybe crocodiles, that occupied the swamp waters west of Saint Denis. She told herself not to be stupid.
The girl seemed okay, hurt, terrified and sore but nothing seemed to be broken. Both of them were aching, shocked by the morning’s unexpected events, and feeling more than a little worse for wear. Karen and the girl walked together back into Saint Denis. It took them an hour. In the heat and humidity. The girl seemed to be in shock and had not said more than two words all the trip home. Which was fine as far as Karen was concerned.
<><><>
She had left the carpet bag with her empty saddlebags and the nickel Cattleman on the floor in the bank and wasn’t about to go back there. She would have to answer questions, maybe get called as a witness. She didn’t want to remain in Saint Denis any longer than necessary. She waited until she and the girl were in amongst the crowds and then allowed herself to be separated from the girl and then disappeared down an alley.
She didn’t know the town very well, but spotted the Church steeple from the skyline and made her way to it. From there, she easily found her way back to her hotel room. She bathed and changed clothes, then went out to a restaurant for a heavy luncheon. On her way back to the hotel, she spotted a saddler’s. She walked in and bought herself a new pair of saddlebags. She also bought herself a bottle of Old Blood Eyes bourbon from the nearest general goods store and then lay back on her bed and drank herself unconscious.
While awaiting for sleep to take her, Karen dreamed of Saint Denis being over and done with, buying back her freedom from DB, getting his blessing then finally getting her gold from the assayer and riding off into the free wilderness.
She awoke with the morning sun in her eyes; sweaty, aching all over with her head spinning like a child’s toy.
A breakfast of eggs, bacon and coffee helped, though it was a struggle to get the stuff down, and to keep it down. She headed over to the assayer’s offices again at nine.
As the previous occasion she knocked on the heavy steel door and after a few seconds the slot open and Karen recognised the kindly and allure-filled face of Mr Moffat the assayer. He unlocked the door and let her inside then relocked the door behind her, just like on her previous visit, before making his way back around to his side of the counter.
“There seems to have been some kind of misunderstanding, Mrs Pickett. I assumed your husband or Mr Klein would have made it clear to you.”
“No, sir. Made what clear exactly?”
Karen felt a twisting in her gut. She clenched her teeth and the hand, curled around the rude grips of her revolver tightened, until their joints ached. Mr Moffat looked a little green and was nervously fiddling with one of the dipping pens on the counter.

“That we don’t buy the gold that’s brought to us. We’re not an exchange, Mrs Pickett. If we were, we’d have to be equipped like a bank with metals bars and armed security guards around the clock.”
“Very well. What do you offer?”
“What we do is take your mined gold, assess its purity and weight and provide a document of authenticity that can be presented to a bank or licenced gold purchaser, along with your gold, of course. When possible, we are able to transform your ‘raw gold’ into an ingot or bar, which can then be exchanged in most banks and bullion purchasers for cash. This costs five percent of our assessed value of the gold you have entrusted to us. In your case the sum amounts to thirty dollars. As the bar we have cast from your gold amounts to six hundred dollars in total. I honestly assumed Mr Klein or your husband would have informed you of this?”
Again, trying to keep herself calm and polite, Karen shook her head.
“So, I get a gold bar?”
“Once you have paid the thirty-dollar fee, yes I hand you an ingot.”
“And if I don’t have the thirty dollars?”
“I’m afraid the ingot has already been cast, Mrs Pickett. The work is done. As I said, I believed you understood.”
“Isn’t you who has the responsibility to make certain I understood before I left this office the last time I was here?”
“I’m sorry Mrs Pickett, there is nothing I can do.”
“How about you give me my ingot, I take it straight to the back, get it exchanged and then come back and pay the thirty dollars.”
“I’m afraid, Mrs Pickett, that it’s more than my job’s worth to let the gold leave these offices without payment for services rendered.”
“How about you come with me to the bank, stand beside me while I make the swap and hand you the cash then and there?”
“I’m… I’m not allowed to leave, the office. I’m truly sorry.”
Karen stared at the man in silence for a moment. His was ruddy cheeked and his eyes darted anywhere but toward her. He wouldn’t even look at her breasts. She considered her options. A threat with the pistol or the promise of making use of her body were all that sprang to mind. She decided to hold back on those two options a little longer.
“What would you suggest, Mr Moffat?”
“The only option that springs to mind is a short-term loan at the bank. If we were to call the manager and explain the situation, I’m sure with the gold as collateral, he would offer you a reasonable rate of interest.”
“So, I’m to pay the bank interest for a loan in order to give you thirty dollars so you can return to me property that is mine by law? That wouldn’t happen to be some kind of swindle between yourself and the bank manager, would it Mr Moffat?”
“What? No! Mrs Pickett, I assure you! I’m merely trying to offer you an alternative… a solution to your problem.”
Karen sighed. It was the gun or the cunt. And to threaten a man of the assayer’s office was not much of a plan.
“Do you have a break for luncheon, Mr Moffat?”
“I close the office for a half hour at one o’clock, Mrs Pickett.”
“We can go to the bank together then, with my gold ingot and you can have your thirty dollars in your hand then and there.”
“Mrs Pickett, if anyone were to find out, I would lose my job… and, to be frank, I am not in a good financial position. To lose my job could literally be my demise.”
Holding his wide gleaming eyes with her warm hazel ones, Karen began to work at the small buttons at the throat of her gown. He literally gulped, his eyes bulging wider and wider as each button revealed more and more of her impressive cleavage.
“I am willing to buy your half hour luncheon in another way Mr Moffat… if you’ll indulge me…”
The line of deliberate unbuttoning reaching the lip of her bodice, she pulled at the neckline, stretching both it and the cotton chemise underneath wide enough to show off as much of her tantalising cleavage as she could bare.
“I’ll be completely frank with you Mr Moffat. To hold off my husband’s wrath, which can be considerable, I require the cash for my gold today. And therefore, am willing do whatever it takes for you to help me with this particular problem. Whatever demand you might make of me, Mr Moffat, I am bound to accede to. Whatever demand… Perhaps something your own lovely wife will not offer you?”
He swallowed, audibly. And then staring into her cleavage, gave a hurried nod of the head. He started around the side of the counter. As he passed the closed door that led through to the rear of the office, he waved a hand to indicate it.
“Please go through there, Mrs Pickett. I’ll double secure the door.”
Mr Moffat revealed himself to be huge, like a donkey, sizeable in both length and girth. And Karen felt an anxious shiver dance down her spine and her shaking hands made the lacings of her bodice that bit trickier. Though the uncontrollable shivering was hardly a surprise, due to the specific attention he demanded, the one his wife had always refused, declared sinful in fact. He wanted to put it in her ass.
The only positives were that men never lasted long during sodomy, and that Mr Moffat had a small jar of animal fat among the items in the pantry located just beyond the small parlour, which they were inside, and revealed to be the room directly behind the office.
Moffat himself was perhaps around fifty, tall and slender, no visible pectorals, visible ribs through his pale flesh, though his shoulders and arms were more pronounced than Karen had expected. While his long lean legs were also surprisingly muscular. Perhaps it was due to the use of the furnace and the physicality of melting down of gold into ingots and bars?
She stripped naked and then knelt over a low chaise longue while Mr Moffat anointed his considerable member and then slicked up the inner cheeks of Karen’s perky young ass, before anointing the puckered star of her anal entrance with more of the grease. However, before taking up position in order to penetrate her, he requested she place herself on her back, to raise and spread her legs and take hold of her ankles.
“Oh! Fuck! Goddamn it!” Karen squealed. “Oh, you son of a bitch! Fucking Jesus!”
The experience was far too excruciating for Karen to pay any attention to maintaining the semblance of the made-up identity of the classy young wife of a high-ranking military officer. While Mr Moffat either didn’t concern himself or was actually excited by her outbursts. Of course, Karen knew well that colourful outbursts of sexual discomfort, shame and the like could encourage men to enjoy the experience of dominance, as well as feelings of being accomplished in the arts of sexual congress.
His initial technique hadn’t been in the least bit impressive to Karen. Impatient, he had used urgent pressure and brute strength to overwhelm her anal sphincter’s defences. His mammoth length hadn’t quite the solidity of most erect members she had encountered, perhaps something like a thinning of the blood did not allow for true rigidity.
It had taken all of Karen’s experience and skill to ease the entry of his donkey cock into her narrow channel. She had relaxed the natural clench, kept her breaths deep and controlled, all the while pushing with her internal muscles to allow him access. In fact, the not-quite full hardness had allowed a little more give and take between invader and orifice, and finally the spongy head had popped in.
The sudden flare of hot gut-wrenching pain was bookended by pained groans and whimpering from Karen along with a deep and loud sigh of gratification from Moffat.
At once, he started little shuffling forward and backward motions, working an inch, then two inches within her gripping ass. Karen squirmed under him, trying to get used to the full, over-stretched over-loaded feeling and the hot waves of pain that continued to spike in her loins. Groaning, his eyes aflame as he stared down at her naked splendour, he reached up and cupped her big breasts, thumbing her nipples, and squeezing her orbs firmly.
Karen grunted at the increase of that stabbing heat, now pulsing in both loins and breasts. At least the animal fat eased the remainder of his penetration and the long, deep thrusts that followed. He spent all his attention on getting his whole length to disappear up her anal tract, forgoing speed in favour of depth and eagerness. It didn’t matter, the tight grip of her hot tunnel around his girth would not allow him to go on for an age without climax.
“My compliments …ma’am… your husband must… truly… appreciate you. My wife always… complains about… my size. And physical… intimacy is as… rare as the… coming of Christmas… or my birthday. I am constantly aggrieved and… left wanting… Oh my word!”
“I commiserate, sir… to possess such a, gift, and then… not be allowed to make… proper use of it. It must… disturb you greatly.”
“It does! Oh, truly it does Ma’am. But this almost… makes up… for my disappointing marriage! Oh! And you’re so… young and beautiful! Ahhhh!”
Amid a flurry of increase to his panting moans, a glut of no doubt pent up semen abruptly gushed into Karen’s anal channel as the man rutted atop her, fingers clenched fiercely on her breasts, whole body vibrating in his explosive euphoria.
Karen gave a long easy sigh of her own now that the ordeal was over. Those brutal stabbing pains were subsiding and she could feel his member already beginning to shrink inside her lessening the raw stinging suffusing her overburdened anal tract.
The clean-up was quick and silent. Moffat offered Karen a washcloth and bowl of cold water, while he nipped outside to emptied his bladder in the outhouse then he came back and made use of the same washcloth.
“We don’t have much time. I’m afraid I’ll have to forego luncheon entirely if we’re to complete your transaction and be back here in time to reopen.”
“I would assume what you have received should make up for an empty belly until suppertime, Mr Moffat?”
“Oh, more than make up for, good lady. More than make up for. I am forever yours in deepest gratitude.”
“You’re too kind. May we be off?”
“Whenever you’re ready, Mrs Pickett.”
With five hundred and seventy dollars in her pocket, secure in an envelope, Karen set off for her next port of call.
<><><>
She didn’t know which hotel DB would be staying at, and she had had enough of bribing employees for assistance for one day, though that remained a back-up plan. However, she remembered the name and address of DB’s publisher and went straight there, remembering that he had mentioned having meetings at that location.
The Wilder Publishing Company was a small grey fronted building situated almost directly behind Saint Denis’ main police station. There was a small paved area facing the front of the publishers. Karen thought about sitting on one of the benches there and watching the publisher’s entrance to see if she could catch him arriving or leaving. However, with consideration, she decided she could well be wasting her time, he might have completed his business already and not return. Or not have an appointment due for a number of days.
Instead, she walked in through the glass-fronted entrance door and found herself facing a young man in shirt sleeves with leather forearm bracers. His fingertips were all covered in a thick layer of ink. Behind him was a printing machine, to the left partly partitioned off was a line of desks with a number of men of varying degrees from middle to old age seated imperiously behind them.
“Hello, young man.” Karen said, though he was no doubt older than her.
“How can I help you, Miss?”
“I won’t shake your hand, eh?”
She grinned, putting on Mrs Pickett’s accent again, though it was really for fun this time. She could feel the end coming up closer and closer, each of her list of necessities was shortening by the minute now. The end was nigh. The end and freedom.
“I am Miss Jones. Research assistant to Mr DB Gould. I was told to meet him here in Saint Denis, but the foolish man did not think to supply the name of the hotel he will be staying at.”
“Oh, he’s at the Bastille, Hotel and Saloon. Which, if you don’t know, is in the very centre of our beloved town. Pass the church turn left, then first right and it’s on the corner where the tramline passes. In fact, Miss Jones, you just missed your employer. He was here all morning and only left for luncheon, perhaps an hour ago. Though I was not partial to his affairs with Mr Evans, I believe he will be remaining in his hotel room for the rest of the day, working on his manuscript. So you should be able to find him presently.”
“Thank you very much, young man.”
It started to rain as she passed the church and Karen hurried. However, the sultry downpour did somewhat clear the streets and it was easy enough to find the Bastille Saloon. There were a number of women inside and a handful may have been painted ladies but certainly not all. She got the room number from the bartender and headed straight upstairs.
Her knock on the door resulted in a called out “Enter!” from within. Karen’s heart was pounding, her nerves causing her to quiver uncontrollably. She didn’t know quite how to make this happen the way she wanted it to. It was all she could do to grip the brass door handle and push open the door.
It was a large suite, very French in style and trappings, gaudy colours, gold and blue with lace. Though there was more furniture present than Karen had ever seen in a hotel room, the chamber was so spacious that the furniture seemed too minimal.
DB sat at a desk to the left of the large four poster which took up much of the right side of the room. Opposite Karen was a pair of floor to ceiling glass paned doors, leading onto a balcony. It reminded her of the place in Rhodes where they had eaten their meal before she had been shoved into the company of Sheriff Garonne, though this place appeared to have class and real money spent on it. Like the saloon downstairs, this room was like being transported into another world, across the Atlantic to some high-class Parisian home.
It took DB a few seconds to finish the line on his typewriter and look across at her. It was enough time for Karen to draw her revolver from her pocket. She kept it lowered, hidden by the folds of her lavish green skirts. She could see his Cattleman in its rig laid across the end of the bed. And the shoulder holster containing his prize Schofield was across the top of his satchel which was at the side of the desk by his left boot. Those were the only two pistols she was aware of. But there might be a Derringer in a vest pocket or even up a sleeve. She would have to watch him like a hawk. She wasn’t expecting him to simply shoot her dead, but she was uncertain of how he was going to react.
His initial surprise when he turned to the door and recognised her, quickly melted into a look of elation and desire.
“Young Karen! A true sight for sore eyes! Though a little damp. I thought you'd been waylaid!”
Without moving too much, she used her heel of her boot to kick the door closed behind her, she didn’t come any further forward into the room.
“I had to escape that madman you made me lie with. He was a real piece of work, that bastard Sheriff. Took to me with a goddamn bullwhip!”
He blanched. Visibly paling, apparently taken aback but it didn’t last long.
“I’m sorry to hear that, I didn’t realise he would cause you such a problem. But at least my mission was a success, I sprung Midnight and managed to get some useable quotes. Now I have a lead on Otis Miller. And I hear the Bell brothers are somewhere around the Mount Shann area.”
“You really aren’t concerned with my welfare are you Mr Gould? What if your Sheriff had beaten me to death?”
“I probably would have ridden back to Rhodes and shot the man.”
It was an entirely casual reply that it felt like nothing to Karen, as though he’d be happy to avenge her in death but not protect her in life.
“This book of yours really does mean everything to you doesn’t it, Mr Gould.”
“Absolutely! I believe with its anecdotes from the mouths of actual real-life gunfighters, men with actual notoriety, that its sales will transcend the usual market and may fall into the hands of those lovers of pulp adventure and the more romanticised accounts of the west. I could sell thousands. It would be my opus.”
Karen sighed. She felt offended and hurt by the lack of understanding from this man who only a few months ago she had liked, enjoyed the company of, even looked up to. But he was really a one trick show. There was nothing of him beyond his book, and no feeling for her other than how she could forward his writing of it, and what she could do for him between the sheets of course. He could easily lead her straight into the end of her life, which had come close more than once already, and he would do little more than shrug his shoulders.
“I’ve decided. I want to be able to choose who I spread my legs for, and I can see that while I’m under your employ I don’t have that choice. I have no problem letting you have it when you fancy. You’ve been good to me. You pulled me out of a bad spot and paid off my debt. I’ll always be grateful to you for that. But with respect Mr Gould, I’ll have no more of this.”
“That, Miss Karen, is precisely why I hired you. Why I took on your debt. Your debt is now to me, but it is still a debt.”
“That’s exactly why I’ve come. To pay off my debt in full. And then we can be free to go our separate ways in peace and without bad blood between us. I don’t want to walk away from you with bad blood DB, like I said, I’ll always be grateful for you saving my life like you did, but I will be walking away from you.”
She slowly levelled her Cattleman on DB. He frowned but didn’t move or speak. Slowly and carefully, not taking her eyes off him, she switched the revolver to her left hand while with her right she reached into her pocket felt the wad of banknotes. By touch, she split them into about half and then pulled forth one of those halves. Her heart was pounding and she was fighting for calm and for the tears not to flow, as she took three steps to the edge of his large desk and laid the cash on its corner before backing quickly to the door. She put the revolver back into her shooting hand as his eyes wandered over the bills, this time she didn’t lower it.
“There’s around three hundred there. That more than my debt to those guys in Annesburg, it’ll cover train fares and the cost of my horse and I’ll bet any other expenses you spent on me, food and clothes and the like.”
He looked away from the stack of notes, turned in his chair to face her full on, one hand on the desk the other across the back of the wooden chair. His jacket was hooked over the chair back and Karen wondered if perhaps he had another gun in a pocket he might have been surreptitiously going after. Her thumb found the hammer spur of her pistol and rested there. DB sighed, looked down and then looked back up into her eyes.
“Where…?” He paused and gave another sigh. “I see you are determined. But the simple fact, young lady, is that we made a contract, a contract you agreed to. You’re mine to do with as I wish until my book is finished. That was what we both agreed.”
“What choice did I have?”
“That’s beside the point, Karen.”
“Well, I don’t want to do it anymore. Like I’ve said, I’m grateful and I always will be. You saved my life, absolutely you did. And you’ve put me in a position when I can make something of myself. But I feel like I’m being held back now, in constant danger, and will continue to be until your book’s done. You don’t really need me for that. So I’m here paying you back...”
She used the barrel of her gun to point out the money again. DB’s eyes never left hers.
“…And then we can part on friendly terms and get on with our lives. Please count it. And I have more, if you insist. I can go as high as five hundred.”
“It isn’t about the money, Karen. It’s the principle of the thing. I made an offer which you accepted. Paying me back financially was not part of the agreement, the agreement was of a duration of servitude. Of time. And that duration has not yet expired.”
“So, you ain’t gonna let me go? You ain’t gonna take the money?”
“I am, of course I am. As soon as my book is finished. And on that day, you can take all of the money and valuables you have somehow managed to acquire with you. You won’t have to pay me a cent.”
“I’m sorry but that ain’t good enough.”
“I’m sorry too…”
He nodded to her Cattleman his eyes not moving from hers. Karen knew her gun hand was shaking. She gritted her teeth and steadied her aim.
“Do you plan to kill me, Karen?”
“No, I don’t want to and I don’t plan to. But I do plan to walk away. Today. And start a new life, without you.”
Karen heard herself, she sounded like she was pleading, rather than asserting her intent. Did she require his acceptance that much? Even his blessing?
DB remained silent, his eyes on hers. He never once looked at the gun.
“So…” She pressed. “If I walk out of here, am I going to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder for you? Or are we gonna let bygones be bygones, and just forget about each other?”
He merely gave a shrug.
“That, my girl, we shall have to wait and see…”
She felt her shoulders slump, the knot behind her ribs grew bigger still, his skin felt tingly and she felt light headed and panicky. Without taking her eyes of her ex-boss, she felt behind her for the doorhandle. Found it, turned it and swung the door open, into her back.
“Take that with you. I don’t want your money.”
“No. If I take it, I’ll feel indebted to you still. Toss it if you want, give it to the poor, but I won’t take it back. I’ve paid my debt.”
“You’re mistaken, Karen. You’ve welshed on it. ‘Mine until my book is done’. That is the debt to be paid.”
“There, we’ll have to agree to disagree.”
DB shrugged but otherwise didn’t move. Karen stepped forward swung the door across her back until it was out of her way and then retreated into the doorframe. She stepped back into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind her.
By the time she was descending the stairs she was stumbling blindly, tears flooding her eyes and running down her pale cheeks. Her gun was back in her concealed holster. If he came out and shot her now, so be it.
He didn’t.
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Karen Jones in A Red Dead Redemption 2 Prequel.