Chapter Text
The late winter of 1897 brought forth unusually warm weather, the blizzard of 1888 had pressed with heavy thumbs a sense of precaution into the inhabitants of the state of Kansas. Only a decade prior and people could still remember how treacherous the boughs of snow had been as they had been ladened onto the land. The ‘children’s blizzard’ it had been called, killing the new generation of young and freezing cattle where they stood on the land. So they had remained bundled up during the snowfall in January and early February that year, tucked into their homes with fires raging until the moment that the first emerald peaks of grass had peeked their ways out of the lines of snow.
Trepidation had served them well this time because as soon as they emerged from their cocoons in the small working town of Gideon's Rise, only a hearty stone's throw from Wichita city with all its growing bustle, that’s when the first body had been found. Defrosting from the unseasonably agreeable weather. A frozen hand poking up to the heavens as if trying to save himself from the fate that had befallen him.
Clearly whoever had killed the first victim hadn’t thought that the sun could shine in February.
~
The first three drinks that Sheriff Hoffman had sloshed into the back of his throat had been free, that was a given. The first three were always free. Then the barkeeps generally tended to become less hospitable and the rag they meagerly tossed across the bartop to slick away dropped drinks would become more erratic in its cleaning. If the owner of the saloon, a man called Theodore, was serving drinks, then Hoffman would not have a chance in hell of procuring a fourth drink. However, if his son, John, was pouring, then hopes might be looking up with a sharp look and a curl of his lip.
He had once thought that the title of Sheriff was something to beholden.
Now he knew it got him three free drinks. Perhaps that fourth.
His hair lay limply about his face as he eyed Theodore with contempt, glass empty in front of him and he lifted it to rub the edge of the rim around his cracked bottom lip, measuring up how he might go about appeasing the sourpuss who had not a mite of hospitality in his soul for his fellow hard working man of God.
Not that Sheriff Hoffman had visited the church in months. Years, even.
That was by the by.
“Stout.” Hoffman tipped a finger at the bottle ale behind Theodore, “Thank you, Teddy.”
“I don’t care if you’re the sheriff. You going to pay?” Theodore’s nose raised higher than it usually sat in the clouds.
“Keep your hair on.” Hoffman grumbled, digging out a single bit to slap onto the bar in front of him. Smiling politely when Teddy narrowed his eyes and then nodded, sliding the coinage away as Hoffman added, rather bitterly, “They’re looking to raise from single to two bit for a bottle.” He shrugged his large shoulders, “Not that you’d care. More money for the saloon owners, right?” He grinned with his strangely straight teeth.
“If you stop talking to me, Mark. I’ll throw in a small tot of whiskey.” Teddy smiled back in the way that made Hoffman hope he might pack his bags and leave his town someday soon.
“Sounds wonderful, Ted.” Mark said.
“You sell cigarillos?” An elbow elbowed its way onto the bar and the smell of shaving oil wafted around Hoffman, announcing the man’s presence next to him even more than the elbow had.
“I sell cigarettes or cigars. Don’t got anything that might meet in the middle.” Teddy responded, his back to the man and Hoffman.
That made Mark laugh, the sound loud and unusually bright for a man well known as the most ornery member of the townspeople, or at least in the last handful of years since the passing of Angelina.
“No. You don’t do much meeting in the middle of deals, do you, Ted?” Hoffman joked, a large fist around his sweating beer’s bottle.
The saloon’s owner fixed his face and took another bit from the man in return for a weathered packet of cigarettes. Nobody in Gideon's Rise bought anything but food and drink from the establishment out of a self inflicted dedication to only buying produce from the local shopkeeper, a sleepy-looking woman in her mid-thirties who wobbled behind the counter on some days and was perhaps the best dominos player in a three mile radius on others. Hoffman did not trust her. But he did perhaps like her a touch.
“They’d be cheaper from the store a few doors down.” Hoffman supplied to the man, digging out a silver lighter from his overcoats pocket and in the most obnoxious display of peacocking himself, he fluttered his short eyelashes up towards the gentleman fully. Holding out the flickering flame. An invitation that had been pulling his guts around the bottom of his torso for a few moments since he and the man had inadvertently caught eyes.
The joys of being sheriff were that he could proposition men and they either said yes. Or they said no, then were unable to run to any sort of law enforcement about it.
Full of surprises, the man in front of the Sheriff lowered his head in a nod, then stuck the tip of his cigarette into the flame. Hoffman smiled, it grew through his mouth at a sickening rate, spreading them wide across his equally wide face as he watched with a careful curiosity as the man sucked in his cheeks on the cigarette and blew smoke into the air above them. Eyes never leaving the Sheriff’s. Not for a second.
Hoffman loved to win. He loved to see the way that a man’s eyes would grow black in deep lamplight when he raised his hand and offered something that they either might not understand, or would spend their lives wanting and searching for endlessly. Ignorance stoked his innocence and understanding fuelled his means to an end, usually with someone’s face pressed into the slats of an empty barn and Hoffman’s fingers inside of them.
“You’re the Sheriff?” The man asked, cigarette hanging off his fingers.
“Yes.” Hoffman eyed him, “That a problem?”
The man grinned, unnatural. As if the action did not come easily to him. As he did so, Hoffman could see that one of his exposed canine teeth was silver, sharp and bright, and it beckoned the Sheriff in as the stranger kept that menacing grin about him, even as he spoke, “No problem. Interesting. That’s all.” He then tapped the bartop with a finger and said, “‘Scuse me, gentlemen. I’ll take this outside.”
Hoffman followed forty-nine seconds after.
~
The most wonderful thing, Hoffman thought, was that the wandering supply of gentlemen and vagrants that passed through their town that bowed before his quivering hand as it held aloft its lighter, did not see fit to find it necessary for any sort of preamble to his mouth being shoved up against theirs. Hoffman was not versed in courting. He was not interested in it either. He had, around the age of twenty, taken a friend of his sister’s riding in the attempt to lessen the whispering passed behind hands. It had been passable enough, then the woman had died of typhoid suddenly and Hoffman had not been interested in any more riding.
The encounters he had lusted over ever since did not need to be puffed with the artificial airs of courtship or decent human interaction. Instead, they were buoyant with the visceral grab and pull of indecency, or rather, what was seemingly indecent to the general populus. But, to Hoffman, they were electric. Buzzing with righteously wrong energy as the hand of God in the town fucked his way through endless beautiful men and then never thought an iota about them when they rode on out of town.
The stranger with the cigarette was no different. Aloof and sly until Hoffman rounded him about a hundred yards past the saloon, all the way to the remains of what was a widower’s shack, now left abandoned and used for miscreants to sit and drink themself stupid in. The puffs of smoke had alerted him to the man to begin with, then as he moved closer, the man angled himself to show the curl of his hand around the cigarette. Knuckles bruised, dimly scarlett even under the soft glow of a waning moon, and Hoffman wanted to suck his mouth around those fingers until the bumps of bone touched his lips.
They didn’t speak, not to begin with, their eyes met and the man nudged his head downwards with a small curl of his lip. Enticing Hoffman to plant himself on the crop of icy grass that lay below their boots, but he shook his head in return leaning towards the man’s mouth just as he scurried back. Head bowing away from the Sheriff in a rapid move to leave their lips untouching. So be it , Hoffman thought. He didn’t care how it came. He’d take it.
“I’ll stand.” Were the words that broke the silence, and as soon as they had left Hoffman’s mouth the man had him spun up against the siding of the house, face pressed mercilessly into old, callous wood. A hand sifted down until it could press up against the front of Hoffman’s work pants, and when the man found him mostly hard he groaned and nosed into the Sheriff’s neck. His breath hot and strangely soothing as he palmed Hoffman, fumbling to undo the buttoning and when he freed his semi-erection it sent a shudder through the both of them. Not just from the cold that whipped around them like a clinging blanket.
No more clothes were shed than were necessary because of that cold, buttons unbuttoned and fabric pushed to the side as the stranger’s fingers slid to and fro. In and out of Hoffman as he ground his forehead into the beams in front of him and attempted to hold back from shaking the groans out of him that begged to be let loose. The man had done this about as much as he had, it appeared. From the way that he had peeled open a satchel and merely had the supplies that was needed, to the way that he dipped his fingers into Hoffman’s hole and spread them wide, just to hear the relished suck of air from him. They even curled into him, as the stranger’s wrist bent in such a way that couldn’t have been pleasant for him but made sweat bead at the line of Hoffman’s hair until he couldn’t help but gasp in between the cracks of the wood slowly splintering into his cheek.
When the man pushed into him, it knocked the wind out of the both of them. So much so that Hoffman had to grasp onto the cladding with ragged fingers, nails already broken and not faring much better as the stranger gave no mind to whether he was comfortable or not before he started moving. Not that Hoffman cared, not with the way that the man’s hands felt tight and blazing hot around his hips, dragging him back onto his cock and rendering him unable to do anything but gaze into the black behind his eyelids as he squeezed his eyes shut and took it.
Then, the man’s mouth snapped closed around his neck, unusually bare of the neckerchief he often wore to be able to tug it off and dab at his brow or upper lip if the sun rose high enough to scorch the sweat bubbling on his skin as he walked what he considered his beat. That silver tooth, the one he had seen glinting in the saloon, found its way to dig itself into the taut flesh of his neck and it could have broken skin for all Hoffman knew. From the force of the bite as the stranger held Hoffman against himself and fucked his hips into him, it very may well have done. A silent and precise incision that Hoffman would gaze at in the mirror at his home and wonder if the man might stumble back into town one day. Hopefully, he would.
“You liked that.” The stranger said, voice low and it all but wormed its way into Hoffman’s ear, stunning his body into going lax in the man’s grip. Allowing him to forcibly shove a hand into the small of Hoffman’s back and arch him into the drive of his hips as he pushed his nose into the skin beneath the Sheriff’s ear and murmured, “They let you be Sheriff?” It was stupid, and childish, a taunt that barely held any true venom and about as much merit as the man had just met him and knew nothing about him past what they were doing together. But, even so, the nasty curl of the words and the implication of it all had Hoffman rattling back onto the man’s cock. Attempting to stuff as much of it into himself as he could before the meeting was ended, something that was hurtling startlingly close by as the man fit his hand around Hoffman’s own erection and squeezed hard. Too hard to feel entirely good, but the roughness of the action and the blatant disregard for whether it felt gentle made Hoffman’s ears ring with arousal.
“Fuck off.” The sheriff ground out, glancing behind him with an awkward shift of his neck to find that the stranger was observing his own cock pressing in and out of Hoffman, to which was joined by the stranger’s thumb as he smoothed it around where the two of them met.
“Be quiet.” The man muttered, but the words were softer than expected. No bite. So, supposedly there to serve the people as Sheriff, Hoffman quietened himself. Only allowing huffs of breath to leave him as the Stranger rocked back and forth, hand just about moving on Hoffman to allow a little relief. Their boots shuffled in the cool dirt beneath them, slick with the melting ice as the man pulled himself out until the head of his cock slicked across Hoffman’s wet hole, then with his thumb pulling him open by the meat of his left cheek, he slid all the way back in again. All the way until Hoffman could feel the bristle of the small part of the man’s exposed pubic hair brushing against the top of his ass. The small interlude a segue to the finale as his fist finally began moving on Hoffman’s aching cock, beaded with pre-cum and twitching as the man’s other hand wrapped around the Sheriff’s throat. Holding him stiffly against him as he smothered him into the house’s side. No way to run as he trapped him against the way his cock was thrusting quick and sharp inside of him and the slow, tight spiral of his hand fisting his erection.
Hoffman sighed, a long, low sound that made the man make a noise of annoyance against his ear lobe.
“Quiet.” The stranger brushed his mouth against his ear, lips softer than Hoffman expected, then asked with too much sincerity, “You going to come, Sheriff?” It was posed as a question, but to Hoffman’s ears and insides, it was a command. Something that delved into the very centre of him and dredged up all the sticky, disgusting needs and wants that he had as a man living on the outskirts of what society deemed necessary from him. He formed his mouth around a moan, unable to work out what he wanted to press against first, the man’s cock or his hand. So, Hoffman settled for writhing against both, allowing the man to take what he needed and give what he thought Hoffman deserved.
It culminated in Hoffman wrenching his head back to rest the back of his skull against the man’s shoulder, one hand on the fist around his gullet and the other propping the both of them up against the shack. The man’s thumb snuck its way to press against the underside of his erection and Hoffman’s insides pulsed around the prick inside of him, feeling the way it stretched him out. When the man departed, the Sheriff would be left bare and open, dripping down his thighs as he plodded back to his homestead. No longer used for any sort of ranching, but the largest building that Hoffman could nestle himself into after the incident. The empty corners of it provided an ability to cram it full of things that distracted him from what had happened to his sister.
“ Good dog .” The stranger muttered and Hoffman managed a strangle yelp before coming over his fingers and the side of the abandoned house. His forehead thumping against it as he bent at the waist, the man’s hand having slipped away from his throat, a movement of acquiesce. A humble shift to allow Hoffman a second to enjoy the way that his body fell apart, shaking as the man pushed himself into him a handful more times. An arm stretched around Hoffman’s middle to keep him tight to his front, something that struck a match in the Sheriff’s mind, the flame licking into the empty spots of his soul that knew he would always be alone in the ways that were most important to humans. No friends. No wife. No family.
“In me. Do it in me.” Hoffman grunted, wishing he could see the man’s face as the stranger swallowed loudly enough to be heard above the sound of his hips smacking into Hoffman’s exposed behind, the words apparently rocketing up his spine. The stranger’s arm went infinitely tighter around his middle, dragging Hoffman’s boots through the dirt beneath them, leaving a smear in the ground as he went. The man moaned quietly in the back of his throat, eyes squeezed shut as he tried his best to keep the noise inside of him but failed miserably as it tunnelled out of his mouth. The moan met Hoffman’s ears the moment that the man’s face planted into his neck, his hips stuttering as he came inside of the Sheriff. Hoffman’s body clenching around him, hot and tight until the noises that left the man were closer to whimpers than anything he might have wanted to be heard.
“Christ,” The man panted, face in Hoffman’s neck, his breath jostling the fine hairs that grew there, “I’m going to pull out. You should get home. Quickly.” Hoffman wasn’t going to argue, he’d done it enough times to know that he wasn’t going to hang around for another drink while leaking into the seat of his pants. But then, the man did something that confounded Hoffman, a feeling which then skidded and fell into a sense of deep seated adoration as the stranger slipped himself out of the Sheriff, tucked himself away, and then knelt behind him. Spreading open his cheeks as Hoffman shivered and allowed a man he had no knowledge of past that he smoked cigarettes and had a snide gaze, to press his tongue against his used hole and clean his own spend from him. Sucking and kissing over him like a man would a wife in the confines of their private sheets.
By the time the man had deemed himself finished with Hoffman, the Sheriff’s prick was twitching again, now way near able to get hard again that quickly but interested nevertheless. The stranger pried himself away, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as he buttoned up his pants, tone decidedly unphased as he said with borderline boredness, “Thank you, Sheriff. An insightful night.” Hoffman had no idea what to make of, so he grunted in response, hitching up his own pants as he leaned his body weight against the house and waited for the man to leave. They had no other business together after all.
The air behind him didn’t shift though, the man wavering as he straightened his jacket and stuffed his hands into his pockets and for a terrible moment, Hoffman thought that he might toss him some coinage, like he were a working girl. Instead, the man drew out a cigarette, hand steady and eyes worryingly mellow as it was jutted towards the Sheriff. A peace offering as the man’s spend and saliva clung to the dusting of dark coiled hair at the join of where Hoffman’s fat thighs met the curve of his ass. He took it, not much of a smoker himself but it would be doggedly rude to say no and he let the man light it before watching his eyes dance between his own and his lips. He had dodged the kiss before, an almost wretched need to be spared the affection, but Hoffman could see clear as day that he wanted it. Deep down within the pit of the man, he wanted it just as much as the Sheriff did.
They did not fulfil that want. The kiss went undone and when Hoffman fell into his bed that night, the wood groaning beneath him, he could smell cigarette smoke as he dreamt of rough hands and a silver tooth.
~
The next morning the sun rose with a weak need to splutter short, pusillanimous spurts of light beneath a heavy cloud that didn’t shift until the mid-afternoon. Hoffman had waned his way to the law house, eyes rimmed with bruised, tired rings of grey. A match for his outfit and mood, sick with a trepidation that the choices he were making would soon creep up and gut him like a wriggling fish on a hook. He had dozed most of the day as a result, no misdemeanours or crimes to be accounted for as he leaned back in his chair and thought about the pleasantly handsome face of the man who had taken him the night prior.
Good dog. He had said.
Hoffman smiled, thumbing his lip as he nodded. Good dog.
A heavy boot thumped against the wood of the desk’s leg in the back end of the Sheriff’s office, baubles of dust dancing in the blade of sunlight that sliced through the sheriff’s face from the force of it as he crossed his legs atop the table. Face dark and unpleasant as he frowned at the man in front of him for having disturbed his foray into an afternoon daydream in place of any real work that he might have been able to do.
“Sheriff.” The stranger was dressed in finer garb than the previous night, no casual pants and jacket now as he stood before a gaping Hoffman. Now he was dressed in a smart shirt and waistcoat, coat slung over his shoulder and although he was dressed in the jeans of a rancher, they were pressed and neat. No dirt. No rips. Clean and blue as anything. He’d shaved too, face smooth and when Hoffman allowed his eyes to roam further up his face, the smear of a scar lined the underside of the man’s left eye. Old and sunken into the flesh. A war wound from a long time ago.
“I—” The Sheriff began, then held his tongue once he realised it would be a fool’s errand to begin speaking about the previous night. Both of them would deny it where they stood, in public. In the jailhouse of all places.
“Marshal Peter Strahm.” The man supplied. Strahm supplied.
Hoffman eyed him for a moment. He towered above him where he stood, handsome and innate with power.
The Sheriff submitted, if only for procedure.
“Markus Hoffman. And you’re correct. Sheriff.” Then stuck out his hand for the Marshal to shake, to which he clasped diligently and shook with the force of a man who knew he was the one in charge here.
Strahm smiled in a way that suggested he didn’t want to be smiling, then said,
“I understand that you’ve had murdered folk turning up in your town.” He shook his head as if this was a great woe to him personally and it set Hoffman’s hair on end with annoyance, “They’ve sent me to assist the search. Since your Sheriff’s department seems to have been unable to catch the feller who’s done it.”
The handshake had not ended.
Strahm squeezed Hoffman’s hand, testing the waters for a dogfight. Hoffman squeezed right back, welcoming him to try.
“Of course, Marshal .” Hoffman said.