by Evans, Tabor
Chongo shrugged and said, “You must have practiced some on your own to beat Hernando Nana to the draw and nail him with one shot. Were you in that real war, back East?”
Longarm said, “I disremember. Are you writing a book about me?”
“Just curious. Don’t get your bowels in an uproar,” Chongo replied in a too cheerful voice, adding, “Hernando was a heap bad Injun and no friend of me and mine if that’s what you’re worried about. I was only trying to figure the odds on your staying alive long enough to ride on out of here in one piece. I told you young Dave Deveruex tried to fix him up with that job and there’s another bad man called Hogan you want to watch out for, too.”
Longarm said, “I’m watching. What does this Hogan look like and just where might you stand should push come to shove with Consuela Deveruex y Lopez and this younger brother I’ve been hearing so much about?”
Chongo soberly replied, “Me and my boys do as Miss Connie says. She don’t like to be called Consuela. I don’t know how she wants us to cope with her kid brother and his pals. She ain’t told us yet. I only know the sidekick called Hogan by rep. They say he’s mean and wild, too. Did that ranger say anything more about Greek Steve just now?”
Longarm laughed dryly and said, “I was wondering what this was all about. As a matter of fact he never mentioned any Greeks this time. He was the one who identified the man I’d shot and got me out of being arrested. They told me I was likely in the clear but ordered me to stick around.”
They were back on the lantern-lit plaza by now and a pair of ugly gals left over by El Paseo were eyeing them all desperately as Chongo soberly told Longarm, “That was piss poor advice. Nana was an outlaw with a bounty on his head. If I was you I’d ride on and put in for the blood money from, say, San Antone. You’re only going to get your fool self killed if you linger here by the Pecos.”
Longarm quietly asked, “Who’s more likely to kill me, Chongo? You or Miss Connie’s kid brother and his pals?”
Chongo soberly replied, “Like I just told you, it’s up to her.”
Chapter 11
Having had his own siesta through the heat of day, that same Caddo kid was making up for it by sweeping in the tack room when Longarm got back to the town livery. He tipped the stable hand another nickel and explained he wanted the throw rope from the stock saddle he’d left in their keeping.
As he unbuckled the coil of oiled hemp from the swells, the young Indian leaned on his broom handle to observe, “There was another cow hand asking about that saddle and the buckskin we’re boarding for you. He seemed to think you were a lawman, Mister Crawford.”
Longarm held the rope coiled with his left hand as he bought time by buckling the retaining strap with his right hand and some skill left over from his earlier days west of the Big Muddy. He tried not to sound too curious as he replied, “I reckon that’s better than being taken for a hired gun. Nobody seems to believe I never rode for either side in that Lincoln County War. Do you reckon that was Billy The Kid asking about me and old Buck?”
The young Caddo laughed, sort of bitter, and answered without the least hesitation, “I sort of doubt it. This one was dressed like a Mex vaquero and trying to talk like one. But he was as Indian as me, for all his greaser ways!”
The Texas Caddo might not have noticed he was talking with his hands as well as his Texas-twang. A white rider less familiar with the Sign Lingo used by all the plains nations might not have noticed the way the boy seemed to brush two fingers across his own eyes as he called the other customer an Indian.
Longarm turned away from the saddle rack to smile at the stable hand uncertainly as he asked, “You say he was Apache?”
The Caddo blinked and asked, “Did I? Now that you mention it, he sure as shit wasn’t Caddo. I hate it when some damned Kiowa-‘Pache or Yaqui from south of the border tries to cozy up to me with that old shit about us all sticking together. It’s easier to tell where I stand with your kind. I never asked what his nation was, once I saw he wasn’t a Caddo or even a fucking Wichita. But the last I heard, the ’Pache were down in the Candelarias, south of the border.”
Longarm shrugged and said, “So the Tenth Cav hopes, after that big brawl at Ojo Caliente last fall. I don’t think the Indian cowboy we’re talking about could be a Bronco Apache. But I do suspect he caught up with me near the church a little while ago.”
The Indian kid said, “Somebody was just talking about a shoot-out in the Papist graveyard this evening. Said some Mex had been shot by the Texas Rangers. You say you were there at the time?”
To which Longarm truthfully replied, “Neither passing as a vaquero nor a Texas Ranger. They told me the sport that lost was called Nana. Hernando Nana. You’re turn.”
The Caddo shrugged and said, “The one I talked to never said his name nor signed his nation as he tried to get me to tell his fortune without crossing my palm with silver. I told him I neither knew nor gave a bucket of warm spit who’d left that there saddle with us.”
Longarm could take a hint. He crossed the kid’s palm with another nickel and told him to keep up the good work. Then he left with the forty feet of throw-rope and circled the plaza wide, this time, lest he have to answer more pesky questions, such as where was he bound and did he have a properly sworn-out search warrant.
Longarm was sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution and inclined to treat suspects more fairly than the Bill of Rights required within the letter of the law. But on the other hand he sometimes found the letter bucked the spirit of the law, as anyone with a lick of common sense and a fair mind could see. So, what the hell, he wasn’t calling on anyone in his officious capacity. He was only acting in what Billy Vail, his ownself, called the Process of Eliminating.
The street grids of Spanish-speaking towns tended to hark back to those of the ancient Romans, who’d taught the wild-men of Iberia to build towns in the first place. So the calles were narrow, next to Anglo streets, whilst the blocks between were bigger because of the way ancient Romans and modern Latins built their houses sort of inside out, around their yards instead of in the middle of the same, with the mostly blank outer walls smack up against the neighbor’s, or sometimes the very same wall shared by two families that hardly gave toad squat about one another.
Longarm found a crooked service alley he could follow around to the rear of the Deveruex-Lopez town house, where a postern gate let folk in or out a back way.
He wasn’t surprised. Fancier families didn’t have back entrances just to be sneaky, albeit some might be. The posterns of old-timey Spanish castles had been kept for less romantic reasons than any siege by the Moors. You could run hired help and garbage in and out without tracking up your patio entrance and, instead of needing a servant to let company in or out, there was generally just a latch string hanging in or out and... what the hell?
There was just enough moonlight for Longarm to make out the white maguey braid and brass ring against the nail-studded oak of the alley postern. The string lifted the latch bar on the inside. When you aimed to shut down for the night you hauled the latch string inside, where nobody could use it from the outside. When a latch string was hanging outside, it meant company was welcome whether they knocked first or not.
Unless, of course, it was a trap. Somebody expecting an unwelcome guest could lay in wait or set up an infernal machine in hopes a foe might pull that inviting latch string like a fool.
So Longarm stuck to his first plan. He moved along to where he was just past their property line and shook out a noose and fifteen feet of oiled hemp.
Travel books written by folk who’d never tried to build anything tended to describe the Hispano-Moorish-American-Indian architecture of the Southwest as quainter than intended. Nobody had stuck all those pueblo vigas out through the upper surfaces of ’dobe walls like lined-up cigars for decoration. They were the ends of log rafters, poked on through to the outside of the thick but not-too-solid walls of glorified mud, so’s the flat roofs would be more likely to stay put
. But a viga could serve more than one purpose if a fair roper stood under one in the moonlight and skimmed a loop about the size of a kid’s hoop in much the same way.
Longarm caught a viga with his second throw and went up the hemp hand-over-hand to roll himself over the ’dobe parapet and haul the rope up after himself whilst he gave anybody under him in the rooms below time to decided whether they’d heard something or not.
When nothing happened for what felt like a million years Longarm slowly rose, coil in hand, to ease along the edge of the flat roofing until he was over that postern gate some more. He’d just gotten there when he heard footsteps in the alley below. He hunkered down and took off his Stetson, but risked exposing the top of his skull and two eyes above the eroded ’dobe betwixt the rest of him and whoever that might be at that hour.
It looked to be the little old Widow Deveruex and a spookier figure in the habit of a Papist monk or nun. Before the two of them could get close enough for Longarm to tell, they stopped in an archway, back-lit by a street lamp beyond, and whispered at one another for a spell before the little old Mexican lady came on alone as her sort of spooky escort headed back into the mysterious night some more.
As Longarm watched, the sparrowlike older woman in black let herself in down below without disturbing any of her help, simply by pulling the latch string she’d left off for her ownself.
Thinking about that, Longarm muttered, “All right, you lit out on us, unexpected, and I bought your daughter’s story you were feeling poorly. Miss Connie might have thought you’d gone to your room, too. We’ll set that on the back of the stove for now.”
He moved over to their rooftop water tank, knowing it’s legs had to be stronger than even a thick ’dobe chimney and blessing whoever it had been downstairs who’d added modern indoor plumbing to this old mud pie.
Securing his noose around a steel valve wheel he payed out his rope inward to the patio side, uncoiling with care as he silently asked the old lady in black where she’d lit out for in such a hurry. As he judged the time, she could have left the house by way of that postern gate before or after he’d parted with her daughter, earlier than they might have expected, to catch that known associate of Devil Dave’s by surprise in that churchyard. Had the plan been for the late Hernando Nana to lay for somebody coming out the patio gate down yonder?
Longarm dropped the end of the throw rope over the edge, waited to see if anybody cared, and when he saw or heard nothing from below but the soft whisper of that water fountain, he let himself over the edge with his knuckles whiter on the rope than a two story fall might call for. He wasn’t worried about falling to the fig trees and ferns below. But it made one’s asshole pucker when you had to expose most of your own dangling body to anyone on the top balcony before you could see if there might be anybody on the top balcony!
There wasn’t. Longarm was glad, as he swung himself in over the oak railing of the second story balcony that wrapped clean around the open patio. There was a lantern shedding its soft light on that central fountain and some of the surrounding tiles and potted plants. But the balcony he found himself alone on was dark as he’d hoped for, save for a few lamp-lit windows here and there all around. So he drew his .44—40 and eased forward a few paces. Then he hunkered down to take off those noisy spurs he’d bought for show in Denver. He didn’t want anybody looking at his boots at the moment. He didn’t want them to mistake him for a sneaky Santa Claus checking up on good little boys and girls, either. So he stuffed the spurs in a hip pocket with the rowels in too tight to clink at all.
He moved on toward a dark but open window to hear some gal moaning, “iAy, chinge me, Querido, chinge me mucho!”
He somehow doubted either his mother or his sister would be begging Devil Dave to screw them a heap. But the place seemed to be crawling with serving gals and... Then the man inside was begging for mercy and another Maria Juana que fumar in a tone Longarm recalled as that of a snooty butler in high-toned livery, earlier. Which only went to show you couldn’t tell a dope-smoking fornicator by his outfit.
All the bedrooms, as usual, were on the second floor to catch the cooler summer breezes. Those of the household help seemed to be over the stables and kitchen to either side of that postern gate below. As he got around toward the front he spied lights inside and managed to dismiss most of those rooms as empty or hardly occupied by Devil Dave and the last of his gang.
That figured to be the one they called Hogan, unless they’d picked up new members since shooting their way out of Denver. Meeting up with anybody along the owlhooot trail could be tough, since riders of the owlhoot trail by definition didn’t want to meet up with anybody. So it was possible they’d beelined for Devil Dave’s home range with fresh blood in mind. They wouldn’t have planned on losing one quarter of the quartet before they could get out of the federal building. They’d just been reduced by a full half, over to that churchyard. So Devil Dave and his pal Hogan ought to be feeling lonesome as all get-out and... What might that inspire? Suspecting a stranger on a pale horse and sending old Hernando after him hadn’t worked too well.
As he risked a peek around the edge of a larger lamp-lit window he saw Consuela Deveruex y Lopez and her mother sitting on a four-poster bed made up with maroon silk covers. The daughter of the house was holding the sobbing older woman in her arms, as if she was the momma and her mother was the hurt or frightened girl-child. Longarm wanted to barge on in and comfort the two of them, but he doubted that would be the way to get a lick of truth out of them and, what the hell, with any luck the old lady was dying of some female complaint instead of sheltering her wayward youth, Devil Dave.
As far as Longarm could tell, the rangers were right about his want not being hidden on the premises. That big land grant they owned made way more sense, even though the rangers did say they’d patted it down for escaped killers. A remote line-shack or, hell, an unmapped gulch or patch of bottomland swamp made more sense than the known address of his momma’s town house!
Longarm worked his way back to the hanging rope and hauled himself up to stand on the railing, fixing to roll over the edge to the flat roof, let himself back down to the alley and so on. Then he had a better notion.
By standing on the balcony rail and whipping the heavy oiled hemp in a series of waves with his free hand, Longarm managed to work the noose up, then off that valve fixture up above.
Once he had, he simply recoiled his throw rope, dropped lightly to the balcony’s thick planks with his sixgun back in its holster, and moved quietly but boldly down the stairs, hoping to be taken for a man who belonged there if anybody heard him at all.
Folk half asleep, tearing off some ass or reading in bed would be more likely to perk up at the sneaky sounds of somebody pussyfooting in the dark, whilst a big house staffed with a heap of help was likely to have all sorts of coming and goings through the early half of any night.
He saw he’d guessed right when he passed a lamp-lit window and the stable boy inside, mending harness at a work bench, never looked up.
There was nobody at all in the kitchen. That reminded Longarm he hadn’t ever had his damned supper. But he resisted the temptation and eased past the open kitchen doorway, ignoring the smells from the banked ovens inside. You could smell Mex cooking long after they’d cleared the table and washed the dishes. But he knew, now, he wanted some beef tamales smothered in chili con carne to go with that hearty bowl of sopa menuda.
He found the archway leading to the rear postern gate. He was still thinking of his stomach as he almost stepped blithely into the trap set to blow his ass off.
Then, as he soberly examined the double-barreled shotgun latched to a chair with its back to one wall of the ’dobe archway, he saw it was set up to blow the nuts and guts out of anyone pulling the postern gate open from the far side. The string running from the two triggers, through an eye bolt, to that nailhead of the postern gate, had just enough slack in it to allow the intended victim to open the gate wide before the gun went
off in the dark.
Longarm decided he might as well leave by the street entrance. As he eased around the dark edges of the patio he muttered, “Don’t stop what you’re screwing for me. I’ll let my ownself out and I take back what I just said about comforting those two sad-eyed gals. Both Devil Dave’s big sister and his little weepy momma seem perfectly capable of taking care of themselves!”
But as he slipped out the front gate and moved away in the night he still had no idea just who they’d planned such a nasty surprise for!
Chapter 12
Longarm holed up in his hired room for the rest of a mighty long night whilst his mind ran around in tight circles. They’d beaten him to Devil Dave’s home range and whether they knew who he was or not they seemed to suspect something, and he seemed damned if he did and damned if he didn’t drop his fool act.
Once he came out in the open with his cards on the table he’d be just another lawman looking over the shoulders of all the other lawmen who’d been searching in vain in these parts. Devil Dave and that last sidekick called Hogan would dig in deeper or light out entire. Longarm had no idea what Hogan looked like, and Devil Dave had lit out other times when they crowded him here along the Pecos.
Meanwhile he was wanted in heaps of other places and might stay close to his boyhood surroundings if he wasn’t dead certain a lawman he seemed to fear more than most might was nearby. Knowing Longarm knew him on sight, he’d sent Nana to that livery with those questions.
“How come?” Longarm asked himself as he paced the tiny room in the dark, puffing a cheroot in the nude. That one Indian wouldn’t have pestered that Indian stable hand at all if they’d been certain. Something or somebody had warned Devil Dave a stranger answering to a description he found ominous had ridden in, giving off mixed signals. Longarm had gone out of his way to manage that. There’d been little or nothing he could do about his overall impression without giving up more of an edge than the shits he was after deserved.
