Longarm and the Cry of the Wolf (9781101619506)

by Evans, Tabor

  “Come on, Marshal,” Catherine said, standing in the open saloon door, her pistol in her hand. “You don’t really believe this werewolf legend, do you?”

  “Sure enough I do. I’ve seen a man turn, had to put him down like a rabid . . . well, wolf. This didn’t just start, neither. The Wolf Hold under the jailhouse was built nigh on twenty years ago, when a boy named Anatol Moldova was killed by a werewolf. That wolf bit someone else that same night—a prospector named Henri Conanda. Conanda came to town sick as hell. The doc fixed him up, sent him home, and the next full moon old Conanda returned to town, demanding to be locked up. He said the moon was makin’ him crazy.”

  Longarm stood off the saloon’s east front corner, his pistol down, watching the silver-mustached lawman, who stood now over the dead barman lying near the wolf that, in turn, lay against the porch rail.

  Calvin said, “The marshal at the time locked him up, had to kill him that night. He said Conanda turned, all right, and was about to break out the jailhouse door. The marshal shot him with a silver bullet.”

  “Just had a few of those layin’ around, did he?” Catherine asked.

  “Yep. The marshal himself was from the Old Country, and suspected that he and the others who’d settled here had brought the werewolf curse with them from the Romanian mountains. He was ready. Good thing he was. After that night, he set to work digging that Wolf Hold and installin’ them cells. Since then, anyone bit by a wolf around here is locked up over the time of the full moon . . . just in case they turn.”

  Longarm and Catherine shared a look.

  He asked Calvin, “How many have turned?”

  “Enough to make me not wanna fuck around, time o’ the full moon.” Calvin glanced at Catherine standing behind him. “Do pardon my French, miss.”

  “Of course.”

  “You’d best get on inside,” Calvin told her, closing the front door on her and then going over and closing the large shutter over the broken front window. He looked down at the dead barman. “Mr. Korga got careless. Damn careless. Most folks around here don’t forget when there’s a full moon.”

  “I reckon they wouldn’t,” Longarm said, scratching his head, thoroughly befuddled. He didn’t know what to believe or not to believe. But he couldn’t believe in werewolves until he actually saw a man turn into one, and that hadn’t happened yet.

  A loud rattling sounded up the street. Longarm looked that way, to see Emil hoorawing a horse pulling a box wagon toward him and Marshal Calvin.

  When Emil had reined the wagon to a stop in front of the saloon, the giant climbed down. Longarm stood watch in the street while the local lawmen carried the dead barman, Korga, down off the porch and set him in the wagon. They then dragged the two wolves out of the saloon and tossed them into the back of the wagon, as well. When they’d loaded the one from the porch, Emil climbed back into the driver’s boot, causing the carriage to jerk and squawk under his enormous weight.

  Calvin turned to Longarm. “We’ll take Korga over to the undertaker then haul these dead critters off a ways. Seein’ what happened to these three might warn the others. Likely not, but hell, who knows?”

  “Yeah, who knows?”

  “Will you watch over the jailhouse till I come back?”

  “Why not?”

  Calvin offered a grim smile. “Just in case you feel like turnin’ that boy loose”—the town marshal patted his coat pocket—“I got the key.”

  He pinched his hat brim and glanced at Emil. The giant shook the reins over the horse’s back, and they rocked and rattled eastward along the main street, disappearing into the quickly thickening night.

  Longarm looked up at the rising moon. He felt himself grimace.

  Were Goldie and the boy about to turn into werewolves?

  He scoffed at the notion. He didn’t like that it didn’t seem a genuine, heartfelt scoff.

  Chapter 11

  Longarm retrieved his rifle from his room and came back downstairs, where the drinkers were reveling as they had been before the wolves had come knocking. He had a feeling the revelry was a full moon tradition—a time when everyone in town got together for safety and to distract themselves from the savagery.

  It was a dark festival time . . .

  Another bartender had been called up from one of the whorehouses, on his day off, to fill in for the one who’d nearly been devoured by the wolves. This one was a rangy, retired ranch foreman with coal-black hair and mustache but with a face as wizened as an ancient, work-worn glove. He also had a limp, and he was limping up and down the bar now, filling drink orders, as Longarm wended his way through the crowd to the front.

  Catherine intercepted him, putting a hand on his arm and glancing back at her father and the other men in their hunting party. “Custis, you have to do something. You heard what my father said earlier—about hunting down the wolves? Well, it turns out he means it. I thought he was just drunk, but I can tell now they’ve worked themselves up over this.”

  “You don’t think after the drinks wear off and the hangovers kick in they’ll have a change of heart . . . and head?”

  Catherine shook her head at the men now playing cards at their table. The Indian girl was sitting on the lap of one of the other men, and she was casting fearful looks toward the front of the room. She was one of the few for whom the wolves had seemed to temper the evening’s pleasure.

  “No,” Catherine said. “These are prideful men. They intend to ride out and hunt down the wolves, because they boasted they’d do so to the whole town. The fools. They’re underequipped. All except father are underskilled. Father’s just too damn old to be out there. By morning, they might want to call the hunt off, but they won’t.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Try to reason with them. They might listen to you, you being a man. They won’t listen to me. They think I’m insulting their manhood.” Catherine made a disgusted face, crossing her arms on her breasts and shaking her head. “Men.”

  “Yeah, well, I have to go watch the jailhouse while Calvin and his deputy dump the dead wolves somewhere. When I come back, I’ll have a talk with the general, though I don’t know what good it’ll do.”

  “Thank you.” Catherine kissed his cheek, gave him a smoky, sexy look. “Be careful out there. When you come back, I’ll try to have a bath waiting for us. Going to be a cold night.”

  Longarm grinned and glanced at the ceiling. “Not up there.”

  She lowered her perfect chin and winked. “Nope.”

  Longarm went out, closing the doors tightly behind him. He stepped over the blood left by the barman Korga and the wolf. The moon was on the rise in the southeast, flashing dully behind scudding clouds.

  He glanced over at the jailhouse. A lamp shone in the window. He was reluctant to go over there, as he knew he was going to feel like an accessory to jailing the poor Leonard boy, and he had no way of springing him.

  He sighed and reached inside his sheepskin to dig a three-for-a-nickel cheroot out of the breast pocket of his frock coat. He lit up, glanced at the moon again, and looked up and down the street through the wafting smoke, wondering what all this meant—the wolves, the Wolf Hold, the idea that at least some of the wolves were supernatural. He knew such talk was blarney, but he also knew he couldn’t entirely reject the idea.

  Someone had gone to a lot of work to dig that hole beneath the jailhouse floor. And Calvin and at least several of the locals here in Crazy Kate just seemed so damned convinced.

  The howl from high above dropped down like some mournful call from Heaven. It was a long, slightly high-pitched cry, the lament of a lonely she-bitch, maybe, and it echoed for a long time around this deep canyon, around the town, before it died slowly. When silence had returned once more, Longarm realized that his knees were warm. Sort of spongy. He felt a little like he’d felt back home in West-by-God-Virginia, when he’d b
een listening to the old people gathered around telling stories about the mountain hoodoo spirits.

  Damn, this town was getting to him.

  He drew deep on the cigar and then removed it from between his lips, blew out the smoke, and, holding his rifle low but ready in his right hand, dropped down off the porch steps and into the street. He angled toward the jailhouse and the dull light in its uncurtained window. He was halfway there when something ripped into the street just right of his right boot, lifting an angry whomp!

  The rifle’s report banged out from above and behind Longarm a half second later. In the corner of his right eye, he’d seen the flash. Now he hurled himself left, hit the ground on his right shoulder, raised his own Winchester, and fired twice quickly at a man-shaped silhouette perched atop the hardware store directly behind him.

  The silhouette pulled back behind the roof’s lip as Longarm’s first slug clipped the edge of a shake shingle, ripping it out of the roof, and his second bullet sailed toward a star flickering behind scudding clouds.

  Keeping his eyes on the hardware store roof, Longarm heaved himself to his feet. The silhouette appeared once more—a hatted head, a pair of shoulders, and a rifle—and Longarm swung to his left and ran full out toward a stock trough fronting a barbershop. The bushwhacker’s rifle ripped two more chunks of dirt and horseshit out of the street perilously close to Longarm’s scissoring legs, and one more hammered the stock trough as the federal lawman bounded off his heels and vaulted over the trough to hit the frozen ground behind it hard enough to rattle his brains and lift a cat squeal in his ears.

  Longarm chomped down hard against the pain in his right shoulder, hipped around, and edged a look over the top of the stock trough. The silhouette was still visible above the lip of the hardware store roof. The man had his cheek pressed up taut against his rifle stock.

  Longarm jerked his head down in time for the bushwhacker’s next bullet to miss his skull by literally a hairsbreadth—he felt the bullet’s hot breath across the top of his scalp, parting his close-cropped hair, before it hammered an upright of the hitch rack behind him.

  Longarm glanced over the stock trough. The bushwhacker had raised his rifle to cock it. Quickly, Longarm raised his own Winchester once more, resting the barrel atop the trough, and fired three quick rounds, triggering and levering, hearing the spent casings clinking against the barbershop’s stone porch pylons behind him.

  He held fire, squinted through his own wafting powder smoke as the ambusher’s silhouette sort of jerked back from the roof’s lip, threw an arm out for balance to keep from falling, and then scrambled back away from the edge.

  “You think you’re runnin’ away, now, eh, you son of a bitch?” Longarm ground his jaws in rage as he scrambled to his feet, replacing the cartridges he’d fired with fresh from his cartridge belt. He ran straight across the street and into an alley mouth, hoping to catch the bushwhacker climbing down off the roof of the hardware store. He kicked an empty airtight tin, cursed, and kept on running before he slowed as he approached the store’s rear.

  Holding the Winchester high and barrel-up, he edged a look around the corner just as a figure dropped down from the roof and toward a loose, cone-shaped pile of split firewood. When the ambusher was six feet from the ground, he triggered his rifle, the gun stabbing a knife-shaped flame toward Longarm, the slug plowing into the rear of the hardware store, six inches from Longarm’s nose.

  The lawman lurched back, raking out a curse but also impressed by the killer’s instincts, knowing where Longarm would be and when.

  The bushwhacker landed atop the woodpile with a clattering thump and a grunt. Longarm stepped out away from the building’s corner, aiming the Winchester straight out from his right hip. The bushwhacker was scrambling down the far side of the woodpile, throwing one arm and his rifle out for balance.

  Longarm’s Winchester roared, but the bushwhacker bounded behind a low shed on the far side of the woodpile, and Longarm’s bullet barked into the shed’s near wall. Longarm racked a fresh round and paused, holding his position, aiming the rifle at the shed.

  Silence.

  Nothing moved.

  The man must be holed up on the far side of the shed.

  The shed was a chicken coop with a steeply pitched roof, the low part facing Longarm. He looked at the woodpile and then at the chicken coop roof, judging the distance. He drew a deep breath, ran forward, climbed the woodpile in two swift bounds, and propelled himself from the top and onto the roof of the coop. He landed on his hands and knees then lurched forward, two more strides taking him to the steepest part of the roof, where he could look down over the opposite side.

  The man-shaped shadow holding a rifle lurched back away from the wall, the rifle barrel jerking up toward Longarm. The federal lawmen yelled, “Halt!” only cursorily, because his trigger finger knew that if it didn’t draw the trigger back pronto, he himself would take a half-ounce chunk of lead through his brisket.

  He heard the man grunt beneath the loud belch of Longarm’s own rifle, saw him stumble backward. The bushwhacker got his feet beneath him and tried bringing the rifle up once more, and Longarm reluctantly drilled him again.

  He’d wanted to take him alive. How else would he find out what in hell had gotten his neck in a hump?

  The man twisted around, stumbled forward, dropped his rifle, and fell to his knees, crouching forward.

  “Son of a bitch!” he raked out.

  Longarm turned and crabbed down to the low side of the roof. He dropped to the ground, ran around to the other side of the coop, and dropped to a knee beside the buckwhacker, just as the man’s face smashed against the ground.

  “Who are you and why’d you try to beef me, you son of a bitch?” Longarm jerked the man by the collar of his wool coat.

  The man only shook his head and sighed. He puffed his cheeks out. He released the air, quivered, and lay still.

  Dead.

  “Goddamnit.” Longarm ran a gloved hand across his mouth in frustration, staring down at the dead man. He frowned at the cheek facing him then used his rifle to shove the man onto his back. He leaned over him and saw the round, fleshy face of Kansas Pete Durant.

  “I’ll be damned,” Longarm said. “Pete, what the hell are you doin’ way up here?” The dead man did not answer but merely stared up at the lawman through half-closed lids. He seemed to wear a faint smile, amused by taking his story to the grave.

  Longarm didn’t wonder why the man would want to kill him. Kansas Pete was a federal criminal, with a hefty price on his head. Maybe that’s what explained what he was doing here—avoiding lawmen as well as bounty hunters.

  Still, Longarm couldn’t help thinking there was another reason why Kansas Pete had tried to trim his wick this night.

  Catherine’s voice called from behind him, “Custis?”

  He turned to see her shadow moving slowly up in back of him, the pistol in her hand winking in the star- and moonlight peeking through the clouds.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I figured if there was shooting, you’d be in the middle of it.” She stopped a few feet away from him, looked down at the dead man, and then frowned curiously up at Longarm again.

  “Catherine Fortescue, meet Kansas Pete Durant.”

  “Rather ugly,” Catherine said, nudging the man’s nearest foot with her boot toe. “That why you shot him?”

  Longarm stared down at Kansas Pete. “What I wanna know is—why was he gunnin’ for me? He couldn’t have figured I was gunnin’ for him ’cause I wasn’t. Hell, I got my hands full with ole Goldie and the wolves and whatnot.”

  “I prefer to be called Catherine,” she said, giving him a devilish glance.

  Longarm got serious. “What the hell are you doin’ out here? Wolves on the prowl, and not just the four-legged kind.”

  She hiked a shoulder. “I heard the shooting, figured
you might need a hand. The general has passed out with his head in the lap of Blue Feather—that’s his courtesan—and the others are all in their cups, as well.”

  “You go back inside where it’s safe,” Longarm said. “I still haven’t made it over to the jailhouse yet.” He froze, staring at her, a thought dawning on him. “Ah, shit!”

  “What?”

  Longarm started running through a break between the hardware store and another building left of it. “I got me a feelin’ Kansas Pete’s part of a bunch here to spring Goldie! You get inside the saloon an’ stay there, girl!”

  He’d taken two more strides before a wolf snarled behind him, freezing his blood.

  Catherine screamed, “Custis!”

  Chapter 12

  “Catherine!” Longarm wheeled and ran back in the direction from which he’d come.

  There was another snarl and then the girl screamed once more. A pistol popped. He saw the flashes as he bolted out of the break between the buildings.

  Catherine was on the ground near the woodpile, a wolf lying a few feet away from her, flopping around, wounded. Two more milled with their heads down, eyes glowing in the shadows on the woodpile’s far side. They shifted their heads toward Longarm, and just as he aimed his Winchester, they turned on a dime and ran off into the darkness.

  “Shit!” Catherine sat up and looked at her left arm. “Bastard bit me.”

  Longarm ran over, drilled another pill through the wounded wolf, killing it, and knelt beside Catherine. “How bad?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Did it draw blood?”

  “Well, yeah, it’s bleeding.” The girl looked at him, her brows coming together. “What—you think I’m going to be a werewolf now?”

  Longarm didn’t like the way his mind hesitated, the way he forwent answering the question to say, “Best get it wrapped and get you inside.” He unknotted his neckerchief, unbuttoned her coat, slid the coat off her shoulder and down her arm.