by Evans, Tabor
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Teaser chapter
VAIL STARTED TO SAY SOMETHING DUMB.
Then he nodded soberly and said, “We’d have heard if they’d been busting through any heavy doors in the recent past.”
Longarm muttered, “I wish you’d quit telling me things I already know and let me listen for them right now, dammit!”
So Vail shut up and the two of them waited on the stairwell with their sixguns as the raw, wet winds rattled the unbolted door they were covering. Vail wanted to say he couldn’t see how they’d ever hear cautious footsteps above all that moaning and pattering outside. But he knew his senior deputy had keener ears and seemed to be listening with that tight coiled stillness of a store cat by a mouse hole.
But the two of them stood ready on the stairs for a million years, and when something finally happened, it happened without warning.
A heap of gunfights start that way.
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LONGARM AND THE DEVIL’S SISTER
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY Jove edition / April 1999
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Copyright C 1999 by Jove Publications, Inc.
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Chapter 1
U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long of the Denver District Court was neither the arresting officer nor a material witness at the trial of David Deveruex. So Longarm, as he was better known around the federal building, might not have spent so much time in the courtroom down the hall from his own office if it hadn’t been for golden curls, a Mona Lisa smile, and a well-turned ankle.
Devil Dave Deveruex, as he was better known along the Owlhoot trail, had greasy black hair, a perpetual sneer, and you couldn’t make out his ankles because of his high-priced Justin boots. His trial for Murder in the First had been strung out beyond all human reason by the squad of high-priced lawyers his well-heeled Texas kin had hired to defend the offensive young runt. But Longarm didn’t care.
The golden curls, Mona Lisa smile, well-turned ankle, and other nice things about her belonged to Court Recorderess Elsbeth Flagg, who had recently transferred down from Cheyenne and hadn’t made too many friends around Denver so far.
It was Longarm’s hope that once the pretty little thing got used to seeing his face around the federal building it might be safe to ask her if she’d like to watch the sun go down behind the Front Range from the statehouse steps or, better yet, from a buggy parked out to Cherry Hill.
Neither offer would have sounded tempting that Thursday morning in March, because it was a raw, wet windy day outside and they still had all Friday and half of Saturday to work with. Longarm figured, at the rate things were finally starting to move, Judge Dickerson would charge the jury Friday morning and sentence Devil Dave on Saturday, giving the mean little shit at least one Sabbath to reflect on his mad-dog ways. But what if Miss Elsbeth didn’t recognize him when he moved to join her at the conclusion of this tedious trial, when everyody who hadn’t been condemned to death would be in good spirits because it was over at last?
Deputy Gilfoyle, a young cuss of some charm, had tried in vain to just help the blonde court recorderess with all those legal pads and such she had to tote back and forth from her own office across the hall, and had been frozen in his tracks by that withering look Queen Victoria and other ladies of quality reserved for dog shit and uppity hired help. The trial had dragged on for nigh two weeks and Longarm had been sitting in her line of fire on those rare occasions she’d raised her big blue eyes from her shorthand notes. But he couldn’t say whether she’d been looking at him or sort of through him as she just rested her eyes. He’d tried smiling at her a couple of times or more. He couldn’t tell whether she’d smiled back or not. That faint ghost of a smile on a cool, if not downright prim pair of lips, had made those prints of Mona Lisa popular in many a trail-town saloon, as they encouraged wistful arguments along the bar. For, depending on how a man studied that expression and how much he’d had to drink, Miss Mona Lisa could be fixing to tell everyone to just go away and leave her alone, or fixing to invite one and all to just drop their damned pants and get in line.
A gust of wind rattled the rain-lashed windows and one of the defense lawyers rose in the silence that followed to croak like a frog about a motion Longarm couldn’t follow. The defense team had been forced to pass on logic some time back, as witness after witness put Devil Dave in that bank with a ten-gauge scattergun while refusing to believe the bank vault had a time-lock as those terrified victims had tried to tell him.
The fair but firm presiding Judge Dickerson must have been as weary of senseless motions as Longarm, by then. He banged his gavel and told the lawyer to shut up and sit down as the weary-eyed blonde recording the exchange favored the iron-haired judge with a grateful smile. It was going on noon and it looked as if the judge was about to adjourn for the dinner hour when all hell busted loose.
Longarm had run off to war as a schoolboy and lived through many a gunfight since by never standing tall and staring about like a big-ass bird while he figured out where shots were being fired from. So he hit the courtroom floor and rolled under a heavy oak table between him and the recording blonde as he drew the double-action Colt .44—40 he carried cross-draw under the coat of his tobacco tweed suit. He lost his pancaked coffee-brown Stetson along the way as he rolled on toward Elsbeth Flagg on the far side. He saw to his relief that she’d already hit the floor on her own to sprawl face down amid her scattered pads and pencils.
Then he saw how still she lay as he ge
ntly took her by one shoulder to let her know he was there. It would have been pointless to say much with that gunfire going on all around.
Then the fusillade stopped as suddenly as it had begun, to be replaced by screaming, moaning, and groaning amid the swirling clouds of gunsmoke filling the courtroom from waist-high to the ceiling.
Somebody yelled at the bailiff to fling open some damned windows. It sounded a lot like Judge Dickerson.
Longarm shook the prone blonde for attention and warned, “Stay down. I’ll see if I can figure things out better!”
He rose gingerly between the massive table and the judge’s shellacked oak bar to find that once he was standing tall he couldn’t see shit in all that smoke. He dropped down to one knee, where he could get a better look at Elsbeth Flagg. He didn’t like what he could see. The stain in the back of her dark blue bodice looked darker than blood usually seeped from a bullet hole. But the dyes of her new dress were likely bleeding some, too.
“Miss Elsbeth?” Longarm quietly but urgently asked as he took her by the shoulder some more.
She didn’t answer. When he moved her fine-boned head enough to see her pretty face, her big blue eyes were open and she still wore that Mona Lisa smile on her pretty lips. She was dead as a turd in a milk bucket. He could only hope she’d never known what hit her.
He sprang back to his considerable full height, growling low in his throat as he closed in on the defense table through the smoke, letting his gun muzzle lead the way. But when he got there, the smoke now just a tad thinner, he saw one of Devil Dave’s lawyers sprawled face down across that table. Two witnesses were down as well. One looked dead. The other was clutching his chest and babbling like a brook about double crosses as bloody foam bubbled out of his nose and mouth.
“What in the fuck is going on!” thundered Judge Dickerson in all his majesty from somewhere in the noisy fog. Another voice Longarm recognized as the bailiff’s plaintively replied, “There was three of them. They looked like Mexicans. They was standing in the rear against the wall when they suddenly whupped out their guns and commenced to empty the same into everybody! We have Lord knows how many dead and dying in here at the moment, Your Honor!”
The judge roared, “I could see that much brewing up before the smoke got so thick! I meant how come, and what about the infernal accused?”
A deputy bailiff called out from another corner, “I fear Devil Dave has escaped on us, Your Honor! This exit here stands wide open now. It was supposed to be shut and barred!”
The judge commenced to call down the wrath of Jehovah on one and all as Longarm, not having the time to take it all in, was already out the same exit and running down the service stairs that led, he knew, to the doors leading out to the ground floor or basement, with neither open to the public as a rule.
He got to the first story door, tried it, and found it locked, as it was supposed to be, with a damned murder trial going on upstairs.
He found the door leading into the basement locked as well. So the prisoner hadn’t escaped into the file rooms and such beyond.
That left the sub basement or no-shit cellar where the coal bins, furnace room, and such were never supposed to be entered by anyone but the janitorial staff. Longarm wasn’t sure how many other exits there’d be and he wasn’t looking forward to meeting up with anyone as mad-dog mean as Devil Dave and who knew how many henchmen in a dark cellar! But he tried the latch anyway.
He found it locked. The murderous little shit hadn’t escaped by that route. The courtroom exit had simply been flung open by accident or as what stage magicians and con men knew as “misdirection”.
“It worked.” Longarm growled as he had to charge up two flights of steps, cussing himself for a fool, even though he understood how such misdirections worked.
The pretty stage magician who’d explained some tricks of her trade to him, in bed, one friendly time, had confided how magicians hated to perform in front of small children or lunatics because they, and they alone, let their attention and eyes wander aimless whilst the magician was trying to make them watch his right hand instead of his left hand.
When you misdirected right you got natural folk to look in the most logical direction. A lawman in hot pursuit who hadn’t chased down a stairwell behind a flung-open exit door would have had to be sort of thick or childish. But as he stepped back into the courtroom, now a more horrible scene with that smoke cleared out, he wistfully wished an armed and dangerous half-wit had chased Devil Dave in a less sensible way. For, try as he might as he stood there staring about in dismay at the dead and wounded in the shot-up courtroom, Longarm still had no idea which way the prisoner and those three or more confederates had moved amid all that smoke and confusion!
As if to prove his point, the main door to the outside corridor was flung wide to admit a trio of uniformed guards and Longarm’s own boss from down the hall, U.S. Marshal William Vail.
One of the guards declared, “Nobody saw them leave by any of the regular exits downstairs, Your Honor! That still leaves a mess of first story windows, and they could have rolled over many a sill, in many an unoccupied office!”
“I want the whole neighborhood canvassed for witnesses!” His Honor roared, adding, “Somebody should have noticed grown men jumping out of windows in broad-ass daylight!”
The somewhat younger and stockier Billy Vail called back, “Got my deputies out tending to that chore already, Your Honor and, no offense, it ain’t exactly broad day outside. It’s raining fire and salt. So the streets would have been clearer than usual just now. I have another team of deputies searching the building, even as we speak. If they’re still on the premises, they’re good as caught!”
Then Vail spotted Longarm in the crowd and grumped over to him on his stubbier legs, saying, “Bueno! I admire a deputy who don’t need to be told. What’s the story on yonder stairs to the basement?”
Longarm holstered his .44-40 as he replied, “Nada. Blind gut. Locked doors barring escape down yonder.”
Vail was younger than the judge but older and more experienced than his senior deputy. He proved this when he asked Longarm, “What about up yonder? That stairwell opens to the roof. So do all the others in this fair-sized building when you study on it!”
Longarm drew his sixgun again as he whirled on one heel to retrace his own steps, muttering, “I wasn’t studying. I was chasing ’em the way a kitten chases a string, and I ought to be roped and branded for a greenhorn!”
His boss drew his own sidearm to tag along, declaring, “The other doors at this end of the courtroom lead to the holding cells and the judge’s chambers. I have Smiley and Dutch covering the hall exit from the judge’s chambers. But the rascal who planned this bust-out had to know this building better than most!”
Longarm headed up the stairwell, sniffing the damp air as he called back, “The prisoner had no way of exploring on his own, betwixt times the court was in session. Must have been one of the three or more the bailiff described as Mexican. I never looked their way before the whole place was too smoked-up to see shit. The only one I can be sure of on sight is Devil Dave Deveruex in the vanished flesh.”
Taking the steps two at a time he tried the door on the next landing with his free hand. It was locked. He kept going, adding, “All I know about Devil Dave is that they were fixing to find him guilty for that murderous holdup down by Pike’s Peak. But he looks sort of Mex, talks sort of Tex, and they say he went bad under the Reconstruction, down West Texas way.”
Vail puffed up the stairs after Longarm, gasping, “As a matter of record he’s Irish-Mex. His daddy served on the Mexican side with the San Patricio brigade back in ’47 before he married up with a Spanish land grant on the Pecos that both sides agreed to recognize under the peace terms that followed. How come I’m telling you all this, seeing you’ve been attending his trial and, come to study on it, who ordered you to attend his trial, old son?”
Longarm tried another door, found it locked as well and forged onward and
upward without answering. Vail waited until they stood side by side at the head of the stairs and he could breathe again before he shot his senior deputy a knowing look and asked, “Is that why we’re so pissed off about that dead blonde down yonder, old son?”
To which Longarm felt obliged to reply, “You have my word, as a man, that Miss Elsbeth never gave this saddle tramp one lick of encouragement. Take a look at this barrel bolt.”
Vail did. They both knew nobody worried about burglars landing out on the big flat roof in a hot air balloon. But the fickle winds off the Front Range over to the west could blow serious in most any weather and so the doors leading out on the roof were kept bolted on the inside as a rule.
Vail started to shove past. But Longarm said, “Don’t. We’ve had our differences, Billy Vail, but I’d just hate to have to be the one to tell your old woman you died from a bad case of the stupids!”
Vail allowed himself to be herded a few steps down, but he still protested. “I meant to fling the door wide and crab to one side as I tore out, old son. But to tell the pure truth they’ve likely run down another flight by this time!”
Longarm grimly answered, “How? All the other stairwells leading up to the roof are barred from the inside, like this one was before they opened it just now!”
Vail started to say something dumb. Then he nodded soberly and said, “We’d have heard if they’d been busting through any heavy doors in the recent past.”
Longarm muttered, “I wish you’d quit telling me things I already know and let me listen for them right now dammit!”
So Vail shut up and the two of them waited on the stairwell with their sixguns as the raw, wet winds rattled the unbolted door they were covering. Vail wanted to say he couldn’t see how they’d ever hear cautious footsteps above all that moaning and pattering outside. But he knew his senior deputy had keener ears and seemed to be listeing with that tight coiled stillness of a store cat crouched by a mouse hole.
