by Tabor Evans
Longarm ran to Haven’s room. She was just climbing up from the floor, wearing a pink robe and holding a hand to her right cheek that matched the color of her robe. She held one of her LeMats in her right fist. Smoke curled from both barrels.
“You all right?” Longarm yelled from the doorway.
She nodded. “Is he dead?”
“I’m about to find out!”
Longarm ran back into his room, stomped into his boots and quickly reloaded his Colt. There was no time to dress in anything but his hat and his boots.
He bounded on out of the room and down the hall to the stairs. In the lobby below, the German, who apparently owned the place, was standing behind his desk and shouting loudly in his mother tongue and wielding a small, nickel-plated pistol, waving it at the man just now stumbling past the desk toward the hotel’s front door.
“Get down behind the desk, friend!” Longarm shouted as he descended the stairs.
He was halfway down when the ambusher swung around toward the hotelier, a second revolver in his hand. He fired a round toward the hotelier, but he was so wobbly that the slug plowed into the rack of pigeonholes behind his target.
The German screamed louder and triggered his own pistol over the desk, his slug punching into the door just as the bushwhacker opened it.
“Hold it!” Longarm shouted from the bottom of the steps.
But the ambusher pushed on out the door and into the dark night. Longarm didn’t want to fire because someone might be in the street beyond him. Instead, he grabbed the hotelier’s pistol out of the man’s hand, so the man couldn’t shoot Longarm in his wild rage, and tossed the pistol across the lobby. He ran out the front door and onto the gallery.
The night was cool and dark though stars glittered in the velvet sky. There were few lights on this end of Broken Jaw, so it took Longarm’s eyes a few seconds to adjust. He could hear the would-be killer running away from him, and then he saw his jostling shadow angling across the street and to the left, toward a small, cream-colored adobe cantina.
The man was limping on his left ankle and wheezing shrilly.
There were a half-dozen horses tied to the lone hitch rack fronting the cantina. The gunman seemed to be heading for one of them—likely his own mount.
Longarm ran down the three gallery steps, stopped, and aimed the pistol straight out from his right shoulder. “Turn around and drop the gun or take it between the shoulder blades!”
The man had just reached the hitch rack. He stopped so suddenly that he nearly fell and swung back toward Longarm. Starlight flashed on the revolver in his fist.
Longarm’s .44 spoke once, twice, and then a third time. Each shot was followed by a grunt from the man the slugs punched through, until he breathily said, “Fuck!” and triggered his pistol once toward the stars. He fell backward into the stock trough fronting the hitch rack with a loud splash that caused the already jostling horses to whicker and sidestep away from the tank.
Longarm lowered his pistol halfway and walked toward the man lolling in the stock trough, the water spilling over the sides glittering in the starlight. Two men walked out of the cantina behind the bushwhacker. Around here, men were accustomed to hearing gunshots any time of the day or night. Hooking their thumbs behind their cartridge belts, they sauntered along the cantina’s slim boardwalk and looked down at the man in the trough.
They both lifted their faces in unison, regarding the man dressed only in red balbriggans, a hat, and boots walking toward them. One half turned to the other, dipped his chin toward the trough, and said, “That’s Jim Winter.”
“No shit?” said the other, poking his hat brim back off his forehead.
Longarm stopped at the stock trough, looked down at Jim Winter staring up at him, legs dangling down the end of it, arms hooked over the sides.
“Who’re you?” one of the two others asked Longarm.
The lawman scratched his cheek with his Colt’s front gun sight. “The hombre who just killed Jim Winter, I reckon.”
“Jim owed me twenty dollars,” said the man who’d identified the bushwhacker.
Longarm shrugged. “You can have whatever’s on him as long as you haul him out of here and bury him; same with his two pards in the hotel.”
The two men looked at each other, shrugged, and came on down the boardwalk to pull Jim Winter out of the stock tank. Longarm walked back toward the hotel. Footsteps rose on his right and a familiar voice called, “Who’s shootin’ over here?”
Longarm turned to see a skinny, stoop-shouldered figure tramping toward him. For a few seconds, he couldn’t place the bull-legged gent in a long nightshirt dangling to his bony knees, and a night sock, the tail of which hung down over his right shoulder.
“Custis, that you?”
Then Longarm saw the mule-eared boots not unlike his own, though far older, and he lifted his gaze to the drooping salt-and-pepper mustache brushing down past the old ranger’s chin. The last time Longarm had passed through Broken Jaw, there’d been no local lawman. It was up to the rangers manning the outpost to keep the town in trim. That must still be the setup. Longarm couldn’t help chuckling at Sanders’s costume, but then he remembered that his wick had nearly been trimmed.
“What kind of a town you runnin’, Roscoe?” he said. “A man can’t get a good night’s rest without three men tryin’ to beef him through his door!”
“Huh? Whuh?” Sanders stopped and looked around, befuddled, indignant. His craggy cheeks darkened, and he spat to one side as he poked an accusing finger at Longarm, who continued walking toward the hotel. “Custis, you’re trouble. Always have been, always will be! You pack it like most men pack tobacco!”
Longarm stopped at the bottom of the Arizona House’s front steps and stared up at Haven Delacroix standing atop the gallery, dressed in her thin pink wrap, her hair down, her LeMats in her hands.
Longarm shook his head and climbed the steps, growling, “Nah, the trouble’s right here.”
He glanced at her as he brushed past her. He vaguely noted the smell of booze on her but she looked sober enough now in the wake of the dustup. She arched a peevish brow. “You think I’m to blame for this?”
Longarm walked through the open door and into the hotel, not looking back as he said, “It wasn’t me they wanted to fuck.”
Chapter 17
Despite having his sleep so rudely interrupted, and not in the way he’d expected after hearing Haven’s footsteps in the hall outside his room, Longarm woke at the first flush of dawn. He was sure those first footsteps had been hers. She just hadn’t had the courage to knock on his door and ask him to let her in so they could carry on as they’d carried on in Leadville.
Too prideful. Typical of the moneyed class. Cynthia Larimer, of course, was the exception to the rule. Cynthia wouldn’t have knocked. She’d have broken the door down and taken him by force.
Longarm snorted at the thought, shaving in the cracked mirror propped atop his dresser. But it was probably a good thing that he and Haven hadn’t gotten together last night. They’d likely both have been filled full of buckshot.
He figured the three bushwhackers had learned which rooms they were both in by peeking at the hotel register while the stocky German had snoozed in his rocking chair behind the lobby desk. Their plan had likely been similar to the Jerkwater bushwhackers—get Longarm out of the way so they could have some uninterrupted time with the girl.
Yep, probably lucky that Longarm and Agent Delacroix hadn’t both been in his room. They would have died in each other’s arms. He shook his head and then lifted the razor once more to his left cheekbone. But what a way to go!
She was a danger, though, he reminded himself, as he continued scraping his face. He couldn’t let his guard down again. Men of nearly every stripe on the frontier would be tempted by such a prize as Agent Delacroix, and that made him, Longarm, a target.
There was nothing he could do about that now. He was stuck with her, so he might as well make the most of it. Wha
t had happened last night—at least, last night before he’d nearly got sent to Glory in a hail of buckshot—indicated that sooner or later she was going to cave under the wave of her own desires.
He grinned at the prospect as he dressed and set his hat on his head, adjusting it carefully over his left eye. With his rifle on one shoulder, his saddlebags slung over the other shoulder, he strode into the hall and closed the door behind him. She was just then emerging from her own room, her carpetbag and saddlebags slung over her shoulder, her LeMats holstered on her tautly curving hips.
Haven looked at him coolly, but he thought he detected an ever-so-slight bleariness at the edges of her eyes.
The bleariness of drink?
“Sleep well?” he asked her.
“Well enough.” She shook her hair back from her eyes. “You?”
“Like a log after your friends died.”
“No friends of mine.”
Longarm snorted and brushed past her, heading for the stairs. She grabbed his arm suddenly and pulled. She was no match for his strength. Instead of jerking him around, his static weight ended up pulling her up against him. Her cheeks flushed slightly, and she stepped back, glaring up at him, a little breathless.
“I’d just like to know what you’re problem is with me, Marshal Long. Come on. Out with it! Let’s clear the air before we continue this investigation!”
He stared down at her. She squinted up at him, fire in her eyes. Her breasts pushed out from behind her shirt, which she wore with one more button open than she’d had open the day before. He was sure of that, because he noticed such things about women.
Her bosom swelled as he gazed at it, not for a second trying to conceal his lust for her. Her lips were full and rich. She looked so damn tempting that he could find no words with which to respond to her demand. And then there was no way he could have said anything even if he’d found the words, because suddenly he’d grabbed her with his free arm, drew her to him brusquely, and closed his mouth over hers.
At first, she squirmed a little, tried to pull away. He held her fast, kept his mouth over hers, mashing his lips against hers, his tongue probing hungrily. She closed against him and started to return the kiss, opening her lips slightly.
But then, as though catching herself, she stepped back.
Glaring up at him, she gritted her teeth and slapped him. It was a resounding slap. But it didn’t hurt him. It thrilled him. Her passion was intoxicating in whatever form it came in. Flip sides of the same coin.
He had her, he knew. She knew it, too. Now, it was just a matter of time.
He grinned down at her. She wilted under his gaze, stepping back, lowering her tentative eyes to his broad chest. Her throat moved as she swallowed. The idea was hitting home with her now. She was as certain of it as he was, and it scared her as much as it thrilled her.
Just a matter of time…
“Best get our horses and ride out,” he said and continued on down the hall, digging a fresh cheroot out of his shirt pocket.
Only fifty miles lay between Jawbone and Defiance Wash as well as the town that had partly taken the wash’s name, Holy Defiance, but the trip would require a good two days. Roscoe Sanders had told Longarm he’d be traveling through rugged country, but the word was sorely inadequate for describing the terrain that Longarm found himself heading into.
It was all broken, rocky desert bristling with cactus and greasewood, scored by arroyos and broad canyons carved by ancient rivers long defunct, though their beds might have seen a little water during the summer storm season, or in the spring when the snows melted in the northern mountains. All around the old Apache trail that Longarm and Agent Delacroix followed were deep, shelving mesas and spinelike sandstone dikes.
To the south and west rose jumbled, craggy outlines of a half-dozen different mountain ranges mounded with chalkor clay-colored boulders and spiked with saguaros and nearly every other cactus native to the Sonoran Desert.
Ridges of all angles, heights, and pitches rolled up against each other and extended out away from each other in a cosmic mess of ancient, plowed-up dirt, sand, and rock. Even the most veteran of reclusive, crafty desert rats would have a hard time matching all the peaks with their respective ranges.
Somewhere out here, however, was the Black Puma Mountains in which the lawmen had been murdered. Longarm just hoped Big Frank and Ranger Sanders’s map wasn’t a shovelful of bullshit. As he and Haven rode throughout that first day from Broken Jaw, all the ranges to the southwest appeared to be colored different shades of black or gray.
And none of them as far as he could tell looked anything like a puma.
Or, maybe if you stared at them long enough, they all did…
As what had become the norm for them, he and Haven did not speak much as they rode. They were each bound in testy silence.
Only after they stopped for the night, when the sun was a red ball impaled by a high, arrow-shaped western peak, did Longarm say, “Not much grub. You gather firewood, and I’ll scout around, see if I can’t scare up a jackrabbit, maybe a javelina.”
“Hold on.”
“Huh?”
She’d just finished tending her horse and hobbling it so it couldn’t wander far from the canyon they’d stopped in. Now she swept a flap of her duster back behind the handle of her right LeMat, and strode off through the brush. She walked soundlessly, Longarm noticed. No easy trick if you weren’t Apache.
He scowled after her. Finally, deciding she’d merely drifted off to tend nature, he formed rocks into a fire ring and gathered some mesquite branches, piling them all next to the ring. Dry mesquite burned quickly, so he’d wait and build the fire after he had something beside Arbuckles to cook.
He started to slide his Winchester from the saddle sheath he’d leaned against a tree with his other gear, when a bang-bang! sounded, startling the horses. Longarm snapped his head up and his gun from the boot, looking around as the reports bounced off the rocky ridges.
Tossing the empty sheath aside, he racked a shell into the Winchester’s breech but off-cocked the hammer when footsteps sounded. She was moving toward him through the mesquites lining a small, dry spring at the southern edge of their camp. As she came closer, he saw that she held a snake down low by her side, the diamondback’s rattles trailing along the ground and making a faint rattling sound that always made his short hairs bristle even when he knew the snake was dead.
She held up the snake, still writhing in death, and said without expression. “Supper.”
“Holy shit.”
She glanced at him as she walked over to where she’d deposited her saddlebags and her carpetbag. “You don’t like snake?”
“I got nothin’ against rattler. Tastes like chicken. Just never figured you to like it.” Longarm chuckled as he picked up his rifle sheath. “How’d you know that was out there?”
“Slithered across the trail in front of us as we rode into the canyon. You didn’t see it?” She’d pulled a sheathed skinning knife out of her saddlebags, and now she knelt by a flat-topped rock and began cutting the snake’s head off.
Longarm shook his head in amazement. Would she ever stop surprising him? “Well, why don’t I gather that firewood,” he said whimsically and strode off into the brush.
He returned a few minutes later and built a fire over which Haven cooked a right tasty rattlesnake stew with a potato and a carrot she’d bought in Broken Jaw and spiced with jerky and dried chili peppers. They washed the meal down with coffee, and then Longarm gathered a little more firewood, in case they needed it later in the night, and took a short stroll around their camp with his Winchester.
It was good dark, stars offering the only light. When he was relatively certain they were alone out here, and that the pretty woman hadn’t picked up more admirers since they’d ridden out of Broken Jaw, he spread his bedroll and rolled up in it.
She drifted off to tend nature, then came back to sit by the fire and pour herself one more cup of coffee.
She sat back against a boulder near the fire, and stared pensively off into the darkness beyond the sphere of wan, orange firelight. Longarm stared at her from beneath the brim of his hat, which he’d tipped down to just above his eyes.
“Tell me about yourself, Agent Delacroix,” he said as the fire popped and snapped to his left.
She looked at him as though faintly surprised he was still awake.
“Why the interest?”
Longarm sighed and closed his eyes. “Never mind.”
He willed himself asleep but before he could get there, she said softly, so that he could just barely hear her above the fire’s crackling and the sporadic yammering of a coyote. “I was born in Maryland. My family is wealthy. Civilized and wealthy. We’re descendants of the French painter, Delacroix, whom I’m sure you’ve never heard of.”
“He teach you how to shoot rattlesnakes?”
Her voice owned the timber of strained patience. “He’s dead. Long dead.”
“What’s your family’s business?”
“They deal in rare art and antiquities, when they deal in anything. For the most part, they entertain and they travel…and they enjoy the finer things in life. They educate themselves. They’re good people, though. Not spoiled. They give money to the poor.”
Longarm poked his hat brim up onto his head and rose onto his elbows, scowling at her skeptically. “If you came from all that, how in hell did you end up out West, workin’ for the Pinkertons?”
“None of that was enough for me. I’ve always had an adventurous edge. When I completed finishing school, I fell in love with a wonderful young man. But…I just couldn’t marry him. I’m not sure why. My heart fairly boiled with the need to see the world, to experience the world on a grand if often violent scale.”
