Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance

by Tabor Evans

  The girl pulled her foot out of his hand and rose up on the cot before him. She pressed her bee-stung mouth to his and then pulled her face away, sandwiching his jaws between her hands. Vonda Azrael’s heart-shaped face smiled at him, her blue eyes narrowed to jeering slits.

  “You just fucked a married woman, Marshal Long,” she said with mock castigation. “You just fucked Stretch’s woman, and she’s been needin’ it bad!”

  She laughed like an evil child as she clambered up off the cot, stooped to grab the shift she’d worn into the shack, opened the door, and ran skipping into the night.

  “Holy shit,” Longarm growled when he woke the next morning after a bad night’s sleep, “did I really fuck Stretch’s wife?”

  He sat up on his elbows in the predawn, pearlescent darkness, and looked around the small stone shack. Last night all came back to him. Her mouth on his cock. Her pussy in his face. He smacked his lips. Her tang, like a freshly minted penny, was still on his tongue.

  “Yep, that’s just what I done, all right.”

  He’d been so sure that the woman who’d walked into his shack had been Haven, had been so intoxicated with the prospect, that it hadn’t occurred to him to make sure it was her.

  Who would have thought he’d need to?

  As he dropped his feet to the hard-packed floor and reached for his socks, he couldn’t help chuckling. There was only a little humor in it, however. Fucking the wife of the prime suspect in his current investigation could only complicate things further, and the details of this case were so complicated as they stood, and so damn befuddling, he might never get them all nailed down.

  The very real prospect that he might have to head back to Denver with his tail between his legs and his hat in his hands to detail his failure at finding neither the killers nor the gold to Billy Vail sobered him right quick.

  He couldn’t let that happen. He was the best lawdog in Billy’s stable, by God, and he wasn’t about to let the chief marshal down.

  Remembering why he’d wanted to rise well before the sun—to follow whoever rode out of the ranch yard before first light, ostensibly to rendevous with someone else in the Double D’s conspiracy of killers—he quickly pulled on his socks and then gathered the rest of his clothes from where they hung from wall spikes.

  He rinsed out his mouth with a mouthful of rye, which he swallowed because it was a sin to waste good Tom Moore. He donned his hat, adjusted the angle, and headed on out of the shack with his saddlebags draped over one shoulder, loaded Winchester resting on the other. He paused, adjusted his crotch with a wince. Vonda had chafed him good.

  As he strode up past the main house toward the yard, he brushed his thumb across his right vest pocket. His double-barreled derringer was there, opposite the old, dented railroad watch to which it was attached with a gold-washed chain.

  Out here, not knowing for certain sure that he had a target on his back, he’d needed every weapon close and ready.

  The house was dark though a fire rose from a stone hearth over the kitchen. Longarm knew that the Mexican housekeeper was probably stoking the stove in preparation for breakfast and that she probably had coffee boiling. The thought made his stomach growl, but he ignored it. He didn’t have time for breakfast or even a cup of much-needed coffee.

  He needed to find out who was riding out of the ranch yard this morning and follow him. The gent might just lead him to the man or men who’d killed the lawmen and even, possibly, to some answers concerning the fate of the stolen gold. It might just be that Stretch’s entire payroll was in on the killings, but Longarm needed some hard evidence before he started trying to arrest up to twenty curly wolves.

  That Stretch was the “boss” mentioned by the two men he’d eavesdropped on last night, Longarm had little doubt. Mrs. Azrael might be in on it, too—she seemed rougher than a dry-wash floor bristling with coiled rattlers—but there was little doubt in Longarm’s mind that her son was the one in charge.

  At the moment, whoever was due to ride out of the ranch yard was his first real lead to substantiation of his suspicions. He couldn’t let the man leave without shadowing him to see where he went and whom he visited. To make sure he didn’t miss him, he’d ride out first and keep an eye on the trail to the east, since east was where most of the mischief had been taking place.

  “Sleep well?”

  The female voice rose out of the shadows near the house’s west front corner. It stopped Longarm in his tracks, and he was about to drop his saddlebags and raise his Winchester, heart thudding, when he saw Haven’s slender, duster-clad figure walking gracefully toward him from his left. Her duster flaps were drawn back behind the handles of her matched LeMats, as though she was preparing to wield the savage blasters.

  “Where’n the hell did you come from?” he asked through a growl. He didn’t like being spooked.

  “Got up early, took a walk around. Never know what you’ll turn up if you keep your nose to the ground.” She stopped and stood with her boots spread wide, hands in her duster pockets. “I asked you if you slept well.”

  “The cot was a little hard,” he said, wobbling his head around. “Got a stiff neck.”

  “Maybe that’s from wrestling with the little catamount known as Vonda Azrael. You know—Stretch’s wife?”

  Longarm glowered at her.

  Haven said, “I saw her heading back to the house after midnight. Skipping.”

  Longarm gave a sidelong look. “You were keeping an eye on me.”

  “Not a chance. Couldn’t sleep. Needed a little air.”

  Longarm felt genuinely chagrined. His shoulders slumped beneath the weight of his saddlebags, his rifle, and his guilt. “I thought she was you.”

  She wrinkled her brows skeptically, as though he’d just told her that he and Stretch’s wife had spent their time together reading Bible verses.

  “That’s a steel-tight, copper-riveted fact,” he insisted, keeping his voice down. “Only, when we was done—”

  “Look, it doesn’t matter. Congratulations. Another conquest. I’d just hoped you were smarter than to get yourself involved with the woman of the man we’re most likely…” She stopped and looked around at the dark house and shadowy yard, as though to make sure they were alone. “Most likely after,” she finished.

  Her tone burned him. Who the hell did she think she was? His boss?

  “It was after hours. She threw herself at me.” Longarm continued around the house’s garden wall, heading for the main yard and the barn. “You stay here today. I’m headin’ out alone.”

  “Do you think that’s wise?”

  Longarm turned to her. “Lady, I always work alone. I shoulda come down here alone. Women are trouble. Always have been, always will be.”

  “Only because you have a tendency to make us trouble.”

  “I’d love to palaver, but…”

  He started to turn away again, but she stopped him with: “What am I supposed to do?”

  “What you do best, Agent Delacroix. Investigate. Watch your back, ’cause someone’s done etched a bull’s-eye on mine.” He continued striding toward the barn in which his horse was stabled. “Don’t wait up, hear?”

  He continued on into the barn, where he found the hostler, a middle-aged man in suspenders, denim jacket, and floppy-brimmed black hat, forking hay to the stabled horses.

  “You’re up early,” he muttered, giving Longarm the suspicious eye as he forked another bunch of hay from a pile beneath a door to the upper loft.

  “Figured I’d give the roan a little run.”

  “You think you’re gonna find that stolen gold,” the hostler said.

  “Don’t you?”

  The roan was enjoying breakfast, so Longarm decided to smoke a stogie and wait. The man wasn’t that old, but he had gnarled, arthritic fingers, which was why he’d likely been relegated to barn chores. “Nope. That gold ain’t there. If it ever was there, it’s gone by now.”

  Longarm bit the end off his cigar. “How’re y
ou so sure?”

  “’Cause I ain’t an idjit. Santana didn’t have time to hide it that well. Them draws where the Apaches pinned him down done been scoured by every ranch hand who ever worked for the Double D. I for one have been out there…oh…a good fifty times or more. Every free day over the first couple of years after the holdup.”

  The hostler chuckled as he scraped hay off his fork with a stall partition behind which two matched sorrels—likely buggy horses—ground their breakfast and snorted eagerly for more. Longarm’s roan was still munching oats from a trough and nudging the tin water vessel hanging from a nail, making tinny scraping sounds. The barn, in fact, was filled with the sounds of horses eating and switching their tails contentedly.

  “If it was there, I’d have found it. Or one of the old desert rats who also scoured them draws.”

  “I suppose you were going to turn it in for the reward money,” Longarm said, standing in the barn’s open doorway and looking out at the yard as he smoked. He smiled foxily over his shoulder at the hostler.

  “Somethin’ like that,” the man said with another wry chuckle.

  Longarm drew deep on his cigar and watched a couple of men stirring out front of the bunkhouse on his right. They were yawning and stretching. One was strapping his spurs on while another wrapped two holstered six-shooters around his waist.

  Without looking at the hostler but keeping his gaze on the bunkhouse, Longarm said, “Who do you think killed the lawmen?”

  “Mescins,” the man said matter-of-factly. “Banditos up from Mexico to haunt the stage trail. The stage line through there has suffered holdups for nigh on twenty years. Same for the freighting outfits. I don’t really see what keeps ’em in business. I guess just enough coaches get through between Las Cruces and Nogales or Tucson to make it worthwhile.”

  “Well, I reckon I’ll just go out an have a sniff around, anyway, if you don’t mind.”

  “Hell, I don’t give a shit. You ride out alone, though, you’ll likely end up as dead as them others.”

  “Well, riding together didn’t do them a whole lot of good, did it?”

  The hostler chuckled. “You got a point there, lawdog.”

  Chapter 27

  While the hostler continued talking, Longarm watched one of the men from the bunkhouse walk toward him. The man was smoking a quirley, and he wore a long, gray duster. He wore two big Colts over his belly, butts facing each other. The spurs on his high-topped boots rang as he walked, glowering beneath his high-crowned Stetson at Longarm.

  “Well, look—that lawman’s up with the birds,” he said snidely to no one in particular. Thick wavy hair curled over his collar as he approached the barn.

  “Mornin’ to ya, friend.” Longarm smiled and pinched his hat brim.

  The man stopped in front of him, gave him a hard, belligerent stare, and then brushed past Longarm, sliding his elbow very lightly but with brash menace across Longarm’s belly, and headed into the barn. There was his quarry, the lawman thought as he remained outside, smoking, hearing the hostler and the newcomer talking desultorily inside the barn as the newcomer saddled a horse.

  He was the one Longarm would follow. There was a chance the man was heading out on ranch business, but doubtful. The sun wasn’t even peeking above the eastern horizon yet. Besides, this man was better armed than most ranch hands, who didn’t weigh themselves or their horses down with excess iron.

  Longarm was just finishing up his cigar when the man led his horse—a big Appaloosa—out of the barn and into the yard. He gave Longarm another cold look as he swung into the saddle to which a rifle scabbard was attached and cast yet another hostile look over his shoulder as he rode away. At the east end of the yard, he touched spurs to the Appy’s flanks, and the horse bounced into a trot and then lunged into a gallop.

  Horse and rider disappeared around a bend in the trail twisting through the desert.

  Longarm took the final drag from his cigar, wanting to appear in no hurry though he was genuinely eager to get after the man. Not wanting to tip his hand, he dropped the cheroot into the dust and ground it out with his boot. He went into the barn and saddled the fed and watered roan with painstaking casualness, humming under his breath while the hostler went about his chores.

  Finally, he shoved his Winchester down into its saddle boot, and bid the hostler good day. The man only grunted as he climbed wall rungs into the hayloft.

  Longarm led the roan outside, stepped into the saddle, and booted the horse westward across the yard at a fast but unhurried walk. He figured eyes were on him, so he’d ride west, the opposite direction from the other man, so as not to evoke too much suspicion. Later, when he was a couple of hundred yards west of the ranch yard, he turned off the trail that appeared to rise higher into the craggy, menacing Black Pumas, and made a broad circle around the headquarters.

  An hour later, he rode to the top of a low mesa and swung down from his saddle, scanning the desert terrain stretching out to the east. The sun was above the horizon now, and Longarm was looking right into it, so he shaded his eyes.

  He was starting to think he’d lost the man and that he’d have to go back to the main trail to pick up the rider’s tracks when he spied movement. No larger from this distance than Longarm’s thumb, the rider was galloping at an angle across the desert, heading south.

  “There we go,” Longarm said, his heart lightening, and swung up onto the roan’s back.

  He followed a deer trail down the sloping side of the mesa. When he reached the flat bottomland bristling with Sonoran chaparral, he put the horse into a hard gallop, keeping his quarry’s bobbing and weaving silhouette in front of him.

  Occasionally the Double D rider would gallop up and over a rise, and Longarm would naturally lose sight of him. When this happened, Longarm slowed his pace, resting his horse as his quarry was probably also doing as he rode down the incline. When the man had left his field of vision, Longarm would look keenly around him, listening to every sound, wary for another ambush.

  Over the course of the morning, the rider might have spied him and decided to shed the lawman from his trail.

  Longarm rode for over an hour. The sun blasted down like liquid coals from the brassy sky unobscured by the smallest cloud. Nothing moved in the bright, shadowless land around him. All the animals were tucked away in their burrows.

  Longarm shed his frock coat and wrapped it around his bedroll. He rolled the sleeves of his cotton shirt up his forearms and tipped his hat down low over his eyes.

  Still, sweat ran down from his forehead and burned in his eyes. He dragged a handkerchief out of his back pocket, dampened it from his canteen, and dabbed at his eye corners to relieve the sting.

  He rode between broad, rounded hills—low mountains, really, tufted with cactus. Beyond the mountain on his right lay another, lower hill on the far side of a crease between the two formations.

  Nothing appeared out of sorts. The tracks of the man he was shadowing continued scoring the red dust before him, leading off in the same direction the man had been heading all morning. Longarm had not seen the man for nearly a half hour.

  This fact laid a dry, cool hand of unease between Longarm’s shoulder blades. He’d almost been dry-gulched once on this assignment. He’d be damned if he’d let it almost happen again.

  Ahead, the side of the second hill was about thirty feet high and steep. Almost straight up and down. The crest of the hill was a jumble of adobe-colored boulders of all shapes and sizes. There wasn’t a living thing around. Just rock.

  Plenty of rocks to hide behind and effect an ambush.

  Longarm shucked his Winchester from his saddle boot, swung his right boot over his saddle horn, and dropped straight down to the ground, landing quietly flatfooted. He wrapped his reins around the apple. Slowly, gritting his teeth, he levered a cartridge into the rifle’s breech and then tapped the butt plate against the roan’s hindquarters.

  The horse gave an indignant whicker as it lurched ahead with a start, trott
ing on down the trail, obscuring the preceding horse’s tracks with its own.

  Dust lifted like tan feathers behind it. Squinting against the dust, Longarm ran behind the horse, letting it slowly outdistance him. He ran crouching, holding the cocked Winchester across his chest with both hands, keeping within a few feet of the steep slope on his right, so he couldn’t be seen from its crest.

  Ahead the horse clomped around a slight bend in the trail, following the curving face of the steep slope on its right. Longarm quickened his pace to keep the horse in sight. Just as he rounded the curve in the slope’s face, a rifle belched shrilly.

  Dust plumed to the left of the horse and ahead a bit. Longarm knew that if he’d been in the saddle, however, the slug likely would have gone in one of his ears and out the other.

  The horse buck-kicked fiercely and lunged into a hard gallop, empty stirrups flapping, bedroll bouncing. One of its reins came free of the saddle horn and bounced along the ground beside it.

  Longarm stepped out away from the slope, saw a ribbon of smoke rising above a gently shelving, flat-topped boulder. Beneath the boulder, his quarry stood aiming a rifle and staring down the slope before him, a deep, angry scowl on his face.

  Longarm raised his Winchester at the same time that his would-be assassin spotted him. Longarm fired as the man turned.

  The man fired his own carbine and stumbled back against the boulder. Longarm fired again as the man twisted around and ran up the hill. The lawman’s bullet tore up rock dust at his quarry’s heels. The Double D rider turned toward him again and fired his carbine twice from the hip, levering quickly, spent shell casings arcing back behind him.

  Longarm fired again, and the man screamed and jerked back. He continued climbing until he was up and over the hillcrest.

  Cursing, Longarm ran up the steep slope, grinding his heels in the sand and gravel and using his Winchester’s stock to help hoist him. It was hard going, for the gravel was loose between the boulders, and he had a hard time getting a firm purchase.

  Halfway up, he saw his quarry peer around a boulder at the top of the ridge. Longarm jerked back behind a boulder to his right as the man’s rifle thundered twice loudly, both slugs screeching off the side of the boulder near Longarm’s right shoulder.