by Evans, Tabor
She laughed like a mean little kid and said, “Shut up and do that faster. I’m surprised beyond words. But I seem about to come, and I’m so happy that you’re going to kill that son of a bitch for me!”
Chapter 21
Connie got on top so he could nibble her nipples whilst she talked. Longarm might have felt bad about the two-faced position he was in if the position they were in hadn’t felt so good.
When she asked how much he charged to kill a man, he told her he had to know who she might have in mind. So she said, “His name’s Jim Hogan. He claims to be a friend of my kid brother. But would any friend blackmail your poor old mother, threatening to tell the law where her wayward son was unless she paid him to keep quiet?”
He didn’t think he ought to tell her he’d be willing to make a deal with her Jim Hogan, seeing they had no outstanding warrants on anybody by that handle, once you left out the gunplay in Judge Dickerson’s courtroom. He thrust his hips teasingly and asked, “How come you can’t sic your high-priced law firm on the jasper?”
She clamped down with her vaginal muscles, saying, “I just told you. He told our mother he knows where David is, and he’s warned her he’d be proud to tell anyone she brought in to the case. He says he has nothing to hide. It’s her son the law wants to know about.”
Longarm kissed a bouncing breast thoughtfully and tried, “All I know about your kid brother is what I’ve been told about his wild nature. But didn’t somebody say this Jim Hogan was one of the gents who busted him out of some jail?”
She nodded, bounced, and replied, “It was a federal court-house. David was on trial for his life. They even killed a lawyer on our side and wounded another. But Jim Hogan says nobody can prove who fired at whom or whether they fired at all. I told my mother I thought he was bluffing. She’s too frightened to take that chance. I don’t know how much he’s extorted from her, so far. I’ve only seen him at a distance. Each time he gets word to her and she agrees to meet with him alone he tells her that will be the last hush-money she has to give him. I have told her there is never enough money to satisfy a blackmailer and since she won’t listen, I want Jim Hogan dead. It is not as if I was asking you to shoot a business rival or even a false lover. The man is a wanted outlaw. You won’t get in any trouble if you kill him. They may offer you a bounty on top of mine. How much do I have to offer you to rid us of this pest?”
He’d gotten poker-hard again but resisted the impulse to roll her over and finish right in her juicy little ring-dang-doo. He said he’d have to study on that and asked where her brother might be and why he wouldn’t be willing to keep the business in the family, seeing nobody was after anyone else.
She answered, simply, “I don’t know where David is. If our mother does, she refuses to tell anyone else. Not even me. I haven’t been able to make her take me along when she goes to meet with Jim Hogan. David could be long gone, or my poor misguided mother could be hiding him as she has done in the past.”
He couldn’t hold out any longer. So they came together with her on the bottom in a long mutual miracle, and then he felt calm enough to ask how come she thought her mother was misguided.
She kissed him, sighed, and said, “You’ve surely heard what sort of man my mischievous little brother grew up to be. We’ve tried everything. Nobody can reason with him. I know they say blood’s thicker than water, but David is just plain evil! I don’t know why she’s the only one who’s never been able to see that. But she’s helped him time and time again, no matter what he’s done or who he’s hurt, and now she’s throwing good money after bad, paying off a blackmailer with a bottomless thirst for blood money!”
He propped himself up on one elbow to twist some damp pubic hair thoughtfully as he asked why she couldn’t just cut her mother’s money off.
She moved his hand to a more serious position as she replied in a conversational tone, “It’s her money as much as it’s mine. I run the family business because I’m best suited to the chore, not because I’m the sole owner of the D Bar L.
I can’t stop her from making payment after payment as long as Jim Hogan is alive. On the other hand, she’d have a time paying blackmail to a dead man, and, as I said, there may be extra bounty money posted on him. Can I get on top again?”
Without waiting for his permit she swung a tawny bare leg over him to plant a spurred boot on either side of his naked hips as she braced her hunkered weight under her center of gravity with a naked buttock almost getting spur-raked every time she squatted all the way with him as far up inside her as she went. So he didn’t ask just how she meant to set the treacherous Jim Hogan up for assassination. They had a long and likely mighty pleasant ride back to Sheffield-Crossing ahead of them to work such details out. She must have been thinking along the same because once she’d pleasured herself another time that way she all of a sudden said, “I have to get back to my own room, Querido. My segundo must not know how much I favor you, and I asked him to awaken me early this afternoon so we can meet our buyer at the bank this evening.”
He almost asked a dumb question. But it stood to reason a bank that shut down for la Siesta early in the day would open up again once things cooled off. He asked if she wanted him to tag along and back Slim when they were payed off, seeing they were talking about real money.
She slowly slid off his semi-erection with a dreamy smile and told him, “The less others see us together, the less they may suspect us of what we might be up to. Chongo will be there with us, and we only have to take the money across Military Plaza from that meat packer’s bank to my own. You did not think I meant to ride all the way home with that much cash, did you? My bank in Sheffield-Crossing draws on their main branch here in San Antonio to honor my checks for me. As I keep telling my poor mother, it’s not safe to keep a lot of money around any house.”
Longarm started to ask if the older woman wrote checks or just drew cash from their family account when she met up with that Jim Hogan. But he didn’t want her daughter to wonder why he was so interested in any members of her family.
So he lit a cheroot and watched fondly as she cleaned herself up at the corner stand and dressed with a facility that made a man wonder just how often she might find herself in such situations, whether it was smart to diddle the hired help or not.
Then she was gone, just as he was warning himself to be fair and not hold a sporting horsewoman to more rigorous standards than a rider of the male persuasion.
He rolled up to lock the door after her, had himself his own whore bath at the corner stand, rubbing the soap rag that had washed her old ring-dang-doo over his own organ grinder, and lay back down to smoke and laze as it got ever hotter, and he was sort of glad he lay there in his birthday suit alone.
He caught a few winks of fitful sleep, and then he was jarred back to his senses by a rumble of thunder and sat up to enjoy the sudden cool as little wet frogs seemed to be doing a war dance in the tree branches just outside.
He got up and rubbed a damp rag over himself to peel off another layer of sweat. Then, seeing his pocket watch said it was after four in the afternoon and his stomach said it was feeling empty, he began to slowly dress while the rain came down outside and heat lightning painted the ’dobe walls chalk-white from time to time.
He figured Connie and her boys would be fixing to meet that buyer over to Military Plaza any time, now. The banks would be opening once more and, even better, so would the swell chili joints of San Antone.
He dressed slow to give them time to catch up with him. Standing in a rain storm waiting for a chili joint to open would feel foolish as hell. He considered that cantina just across the way. You could likely see from the posada’s front door whether they were open again or not.
But he didn’t want to be bothered with El Moro, those two other jokers, or that lago Casas playing big bad man from Fort Sumner.
Fort Sumner wasn’t a trail town to be compared with Dodge or even Abilene before they sissied it up. There was little there but a bunch o
f old army buildings converted to saloons, card houses, posadas, and such, with old Pete Maxwell living in what had been the colonel’s quarters back when there’d been call for an army installation there.
Once fully dressed with his hat and gun back on, Longarm moseyed out undecided and drifted down the stairs and as far as the exit to the street as he muttered, “None of Pete Maxwell’s Mex vaqueros played a serious part in that short nasty war up Lincoln County way. To begin with, Fort Sumner and the rest of the Maxwell Grant lie a good eighty miles from Lincoln, which is why owlhoot riders, such as The Kid, spent any time there at all. That lago squirt is likely some Mex who only heard about the famous fight betwixt our own kind, if he ain’t one of them Navaho left over from the time the army had a bunch of Navaho planting peach trees around Fort Sumner.
As he stood there in the doorway, staring out to see the rain was starting to let up, he decided to wait until it quit entire. He lit another smoke and muttered, “Dumb name for a big bad bandito from the headwaters of the Pecos. Iago Casas, meaning James Houses, or perhaps you could translate Casas as Homes if you didn’t look too Mex and had some Anglo blood you wanted to brag about.”
Then, as if lightning had flashed inside his skull, Longarm stared goggle-eyed at the damp adobe across the way to exclaim, “That’s it! I ought to be sat in a corner with a dunce cap on, but they say it’s better later than never, and it may be later than we think!”
He started running, splashing through puddles and paying no mind when his cheroot got put out. He was blocks from Military Plaza and feeling dumber by the minute as he ran, with the damp cheroot gripped in his bared teeth until, at last, he burst out of a side street just in time to see Connie Deveruex coming out of that bank near the big cathedral with Chongo and Slim. Slim Gonzales was the one packing the big canvas money bags.
The three of them froze in place in the last of the rain as Longarm called out, “Get back inside! Do it now!”
But they just stood there as Longarm charged across the plaza. Then El Moro and his two pals were running to join Connie and her older riders from a closer doorway, and El Moro was grinning like a shit-eating dog as he called out, “¿Que pasa, me patrona?”
Connie called out, “No se!” and Longarm wanted to kick her when she added, “Pero ayúdame”. So the three of them ran over to cover her as Longarm slid to an awkward halt in front of them all, his sixgun drawn, to warn El Moro, “It ain’t going to work. I got it figured. So where’s your compadre, Iago? Or should I call him your mastermind?”
Slim handed a money bag to Chongo and dropped a thoughtful hand to his gun grips as he demanded, “Que cono te pasa? What are you up to, Crawford?”
Longarm had El Moro and his pals covered with their gun hands frozen as he snapped, “I’m working on it! A holdup works better than anything else they might have had in mind!”
El Moro protested, “Pues ... tu eres un vero cabron, gringo. We buy you a drink and call you amigo and you pay us back by saying such rude things about us?”
Turning to his nominal boss, El Moro added, “Do you see us trying for to rob anybody, me Patrona? First this gringo yells at you. Then I yell for to ask what is wrong, and you order us to come and help you! How do you know it is not he who is out for to rob you? He is the one with the gun in his hand! He is the one who makes no sense as he yells at us about masterminds!”
Grinning at Longarm, El Moro added, “What is a mastermind? Who are we talking about? Have you been drinking since you had that tequila with us earlier?”
Longarm told Connie and the others, “He told me he had something good lined up. He said it all depended on whether a knock-around hombre who’d set it up wanted to let me in on it. He said this man of action was called Iago Casas. Add it up!”
“Add it up to what?” asked Slim as Longarm saw to his dismay that in spite of the drizzle others were drifting over with puzzled smiles.
Worse yet, a nun had come out of the cathedral now to come their way with her cowled head held shyly down and her hands up her sleeves like a Chinese mandarin. That was all they needed with things fixing to break out in a rash of bullets any second!
He called out, “Circle wide of this, sister! You gents with the money bags take Miss Connie back in the bank and I’ll explain it all later!”
But Connie, Slim, and Chongo never moved anywhere as that blamed nun kept coming their way, as if she aimed to invite them all to the vesper mass in her cathedral. That had been what that priest back in Sheffield-Crossing had called the last services of the evening, hadn’t he?
Then, as El Moro and his two sidekicks stood their ground, looking like butter wouldn’t have melted in their mouths, Longarm swung the muzzle of his .44-40 to cover the innocent-looking nun, who in turn seemed to be whipping an old Merwin & Hulbert .41 out of one sleeve just as Longarm fired, point blank, to blow the nun’s whimple and a gob of blood and brains away, to start the fun and games!
It was just as well the slower and not-too-bright Chongo had that money bag in his gun hand. The quicker-thinking Slim spied the Justin boots and denim jeans under the swirling black skirts of that “nun” as the head-shot imposter landed spread eagle on the damp paving blocks with that other sixgun. So he slapped leather as El Moro and his two pals went for broke and Longarm felt free to shoot El Moro next instead of the lean- and hungry-looking segundo!
Connie was screaming at everybody to stop as Slim nailed the one called Pablo. Latigo yelled, “iYo rendicio!” and grabbed for the rain clouds. But it was tougher to surrender after you’d chosen to be known as “Lash” in Mex, and Slim dropped Latigo to the pavement along with his pals before Longarm could ask him not to.
A police whistle was tweeting, and, as the survivors stood there in the drizzle and drifting gunsmoke, nobody but a couple of copper badges in blue uniforms seemed to be coming any closer. But the Texas lawmen were coming fast, with drawn guns, so Longarm called out, “It’s all right! I’m the law and these are the law-abiding folk! I left my own badge in Stockton, but I’m still U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long of the Denver District Court!”
Connie Deveruex blanched and gasped, “Ay, Querido! How could you?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “It wasn’t all that tough, ma’am. We only done what we both thought best at the time and you wanted me to gun Jim Hogan for you. So there the rascal lies in that nun’s habit he surely stole somewheres. El Moro, yonder, knew him as Iago Casas. But James Hogan means roughly the same thing if you’re a Navaho breed. Hogan can be an Irish surname or the Navaho word for a casa, or house. I just now said old Jim thought he was a mastermind. Now look where all his slick sarcastic notions got him!”
Chapter 22
It was just as well one of the San Antone lawmen knew Longarm of old on sight. As they joined him and the others, Longarm began to reload and explain, “This lady would be Miss Connie Deveruex, owner and operator of the D Bar L on the Pecos. This here’s her segundo, Slim, and her boss wrangler, Chongo. They were fixing to carry them two money bags across the plaza to another bank. Them three cadavers to the south rode for Miss Connie as well. They’d just helped her herd a heap of beef here to San Antone, and they wanted all the money she sold them for.”
“Damn it, Dunk, I trusted you!” wailed the dusky blonde who fucked with her spurs on.
Longarm told the copper badges, “Them three two-faces figured she’d trust them, too. So the plan, as I see it, was for them to break cover and join Miss Connie and these honest riders as they crossed over to the far side. Neither Slim nor Chongo are sissies, and as you can see they are both wearing their own hardware. So Jim Hogan in yonder nun’s habit was to circle in smiling saintly with that Merwin & Hulbert .41 to start the music, so’s El Moro and them others could back-shoot Miss Connie and the guns she’d invited to the party in their backs!”
The folk he’d just saved were staring owl-eyed as he continued with, “They couldn’t have planned on leaving three witnesses who knew them on sight alive. Dead men tell no
tales and so we’re going to have to guess some details. But I somehow doubt our vanquished quartet meant to spend all that money here in Texas. It ain’t that far to Chihuahua, and you can see they could all pass for Mex.”
The cops didn’t see fit to argue. It was Slim who waved his own gun muzzle at the oddly costumed corpse of Jim Hogan to demand, “How did you know? Before that sweet old nun drew from her sleeve, I mean? She’d have had the drop on me for certain!”
Chongo said, “Amen to that! Are you a naturally suspicious anti-Catholic, Dunk? I mean Deputy?”
Longarm shook his head and said, “Not hardly. But I had the natural advantage of being more curious about the trimmings of your faith than somebody raised to accept ‘em without thinking much about ’em. There’s this big old cathedral in Denver atop Capitol Hill, and they naturally have droves of nuns going in and out at all hours. But always in pairs. I mind one time I asked this Irish maid who works on Capitol Hill how come you never see a nun in public alone. She told me it was against rules set in Rome a long time ago.”
It was Connie who gasped, “I knew that! I’d forgotten that! I’d seen my mother talking to a lone nun near our church in Sheffield-Crossing and ... You mean it was ... Jim Hogan, there?”
Longarm nodded and said, “He was wanted serious by the law in his Justins and jeans. Your priest back home said something about an altar boy and that other outlaw of Mission Indian extraction, Hernando Nana, had made himself might familiar with that same church and its grounds. The bunch of them must have been slipping in and out, dressed natural or nunnish, when the priest and his crew weren’t paying attention. Rangers hardly ever search church lofts, whether they’re Papists or not.”
