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

by Tabor Evans

  Longarm leaned out from behind the boulder and pumped four quick shots up the slope. At least two punched into the dry-gulcher’s chest, jerking him back.

  His knees buckled, and he leaned forward and dropped his rifle to the gravel before him. He fell to his head and his knees simultaneously, and rolled over and over down the slope. He rolled straight past Longarm and piled up at the base of another boulder about ten feet away.

  He lay on his back, blood pumping from three holes in his chest, another from his arm just up from the elbow, and yet another just above his left knee.

  Longarm shook his head and immediately, automatically began to reload his Winchester from his cartridge belt. “You’re in the wrong line of work, old son.”

  He was not reveling in the kill. In fact, it burned him. He’d wanted to follow the man, find out whom he was riding off to rendezvous with and maybe learn from both men why Stretch wanted him dead.

  Now, because the man had spied him on his back trail, Longarm’s plan had been foiled.

  Longarm raked an angry sigh.

  He slipped and slid down the hill to the trail, walked up the trail hoping to see his horse not far ahead. That wasn’t the case. He walked a hundred yards, then another hundred. No sign of the beast.

  He came to where the horse’s tracks angled off to the south, but looking that way he saw nothing but piñon pines, cactus, greasewood, bunchgrass, and occasional cedars cowering beneath the merciless sun. He had to find the horse; his canteen was looped over the saddle horn. If he had to, he’d go back and look for the dead man’s horse, which was likely carrying the dead man’s water, but he’d backtrack only if he couldn’t find his own mount in a half hour.

  He swung right from the trail and began following the horse’s tracks through the chaparral. When he’d walked only twenty yards, a rumbling rose.

  He squinted against the sun, saw riders galloping toward him from nearly straight ahead. Apprehension poked at him. He looked around for cover. There was nothing but the dry, gray-brown shrubs and modest-sized rocks.

  The riders appeared to have seen him, because they were heading for him—five or six men coming fast. The lead rider appeared to be trailing a spare horse. A roan.

  Longarm’s horse.

  A vague, cautious optimism gave the lawman’s overall anxiety a little nudge. Just a little one. He didn’t like the setup. He wondered if this was what the dead lawmen had seen in the minutes before they had died—a blur of riders growing steadily against the brown of distant mountains and trailing a rising cloud of tan desert dust.

  He stood his ground, holding his Winchester in both hands straight across his belly. Neither a defensive nor a threatening stance, but a cautious one. As the group approached to within seventy yards, he saw the gaudy sombreros and neckerchiefs, the bearded, dusky-skinned faces.

  Several wore charro jackets and flared slacks. Cartridge bandoliers flashed in the sunlight.

  Mexicans.

  Banditos.

  Shit.

  The group slowed and then stopped around the lead rider, who was leading Longarm’s roan by its bridle reins.

  The man was short and stocky. He wore a black leather jacket stitched with white thread, and a billowy red neckerchief. His face was round and pockmarked, and it was trimmed with brushy black muttonchop whiskers that formed arrow points near his mouth corners. Mantling his mouth was a brushy, black mustache.

  He and the others sat their horses staring blandly at Longarm. Their mounts snorted and blew, stomping their hooves. Dust wafted around the group. Longarm could smell the hot horses and the man sweat and the leather mixing with the tang of pine and creosote.

  The group was well armed. The lead rider held his right hand down near a six-shooter jutting from a tooled leather holster.

  Longarm waited, saying nothing. There were five of them. Three were holding carbines. He might be able to take one or two before the others cut him down and left him as the other lawmen had been left to swell and rot.

  Finally, the lead rider’s truculent face brightened with an unexpected grin. His black eyes flashed in the sunlight. “Vonda sent you, no?”

  The question rocked Longarm back on his proverbial heels. Vonda?

  He knew he must have frowned dubiously but covered it by spitting to one side and then nodding, keeping his face a stone mask.

  The lead rider raised his fist with the reins in it. “Yours?”

  “That’s right.”

  Longarm started forward but stopped when the lead rider lowered his hand clutching the reins and drew it slightly back behind him. He frowned suspiciously. “Why she send you?”

  Longarm kept his expression plain as he shuffled quickly through several options. When he chose one, he’d have to ride it out to wherever it led him. That place might be a shallow grave scratched out right here in the thin desert dirt beneath his boots.

  “Another lawman snoopin’ around,” he said. “Back at the ranch.”

  A man behind the leader said, “Probably the one who Fuentes saw yesterday, Mercado. The one who killed Maximillian.”

  “Si,” said the leader called Mercado, keeping his eyes on Longarm but turning his head slightly back and to one side. “Why does she not kill him? Why tell us? It’s not like we don’t have our hands full looking for that new Bolivar route as it is!”

  “I reckon she figures there’s gettin’ to be an awful lot of lawmen to kill, wonders if this one might be one too many.” Longarm kept his index finger curled through his Winchester’s trigger guard, knowing that, improvising as he was, he might very well say something that could get him blasted to hell in a heartbeat.

  He said, “She thinks maybe Fuentes should try him one more time, take him down out here, away from the headquarters.”

  In Spanish, Mercado asked one of the other men where Fuentes was. The man replied that Fuentes was off scouting the Javelina Buttes—for what, he didn’t say. More lawmen? Or the Bolivar route? Whatever in hell the Bolivar route was…

  Mercado pondered this and then slid his dark eyes back to Longarm. “How did you lose your horse, amigo?”

  “Bastard saw a rattlesnake and threw me.” Longarm gave his best tough-nut glare to the roan, half meaning it.

  Mercado tossed him the roan’s reins. He caught them and asked, “What’re you fellas doin’ out here? You think the Bolivar route is this far east?”

  “Who knows where it is?” the leader said, more frustrated than angry. “All we know is that one payroll shipment was due to pull through here last month, but we saw no sign of it. It passed through somewhere out here—it had to, it’s the only way across the border—but Leyton thinks that after the other lawmen were killed, the company got spooked and switched the route through the buttes southwest of Holy Defiance.”

  The name “Leyton” rocked Longarm back on his heels a second time. Ranger Jack Leyton? How in hell was he tied to this—whatever this was?

  “You look like you could use some tequila,” the gang leader said, winking at Longarm.

  “You know it,” the lawman responded, swinging into the roan’s hurricane deck.

  “We were just heading back to Holy Defiance when we spotted your horse. You can join us. Jack will want to hear about this new lawman. He will need to be dealt with, also.” The Mexican leader held out his gloved hand, suddenly most gracious. “I am Mercado. No doubt you heard of me from Vonda.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Longarm said, manufacturing his best wolfish grin.

  Mercado chuckled proudly. “What is your handle, amigo?”

  “Me?” Longarm hesitated for only an eye blink of time though to him it felt like seven long years. “I’m Longabaugh. Clyde Longabaugh.” He thought he’d seen the surname on a wanted circular offering a reward for a gang of mostly nonviolent, small-time bank robbers from up Wyoming way.

  Longarm shook Mercado’s hand and then followed the gang east through the chaparral toward Holy Defiance and a meeting with Ranger Jack Leyton.

 
Uneasiness rode like a heavy second passenger behind him. Things were either about to become really clear really fast, or Longarm was about to become really dead for a long, long time.

  Chapter 28

  “You like girls, Senor Longabaugh?” asked Mercado, the leader of the small pack of Mexicans who’d rescued Longarm.

  They were riding over a bench and into the little town of Holy Defiance—a handful of dilapidated buildings hunkered down in the sunburned desert between two piles of black boulders that some volcano must have vomited from the earth’s bowels several hundred eons ago.

  Defiance Wash ran through the heart of the town. A rough plank bridge stretched across its twenty-foot width.

  Clouds had moved in, blocking out much of the sun now and painting the town nearly hidden amongst the rocks in dark, gothic hues. Thunder rumbled. A summer storm was in the works.

  “Sure, I like girls all right,” Longarm said, wincing slightly as he became conscious of his still-chafed dick.

  “Senora Concepcion has turned her old hotel into a brothel and brought in three pretty girls from Tucson.” Mercado raised a hand to his chest and pantomimed the hefting of a succulent female breast. “All with big tits, too!”

  “Is that right?” Longarm liked tits as well as the next man, but between his chafed dick and the prospect of soon meeting up with Ranger Jack Leyton, who had apparently wandered over to the wrong side of the law, he was having trouble working up much enthusiasm.

  Mercado laughed as they trotted on into the town, obviously a ghost town—probably one that had boomed due to gold or silver and promptly went bust when the minerals had played out. The brothel was a humble, two-story mud-brick affair with a wooden front veranda as well as wooden second-floor balcony. The wood was old and gray. Originally, the building had probably been a hotel.

  A couple of scantily clad girls were on the balcony, leaning forward against the splintering rail, one smoking as Mercado and Longarm approached. A couple of Mercado’s men called out lustily to the girls, who smiled and fluttered their lashes. One—a plump, pretty, green-eyed blond—caressed her breast, pushing it up out of the thin, cotton nightgown she wore, one strap hanging off her near shoulder.

  She flicked her tongue across her nipple and laughed enticingly.

  The men riding behind Longarm and Mercado whooped and hollered and galloped on past their leader and the man calling himself Clyde Longabaugh. They swung down from their saddles in front of one of the brothel’s two hitch racks. The five men ran up onto the porch, yelling and calling to the whores, and filed quickly through the brothel’s open front door.

  When the last man had gone in, and their boots and spurs could be heard thudding and chinging from inside, a severe-looking woman in a flowered blue dress stepped out. She had brown hair pulled back in a tight bun, and while she was pale-skinned, her almond-shaped eyes were large and brown. A brown mole sat just off the corner of the right one.

  Mercado leaned forward on his saddle horn and spoke in Spanish, grinning. “Senora Concepcion, as you can see, my men and I are back.”

  “So soon?” the woman answered in Spanish, arching one severe brow and ignoring the buoyant din rising from the brothel behind her. The two whores had gone into the building to welcome their eager clients. “I expected you to be gone for longer than a couple of days, Senor Mercado. Your business seemed so important!”

  “It was, it was,” said Mercado. “But enough about my business, senora.” The Mexican gang leader’s smile hardened, and he pitched his voice with mild but unmistakable menace. “My business is not something for old ladies to concern themselves with. Your only concern is to please my men with your women. And for that we pay you very well, do we not?”

  The old woman just stared at Mercado, her brown eyes betraying little motion though there was a hesitancy in the rigid set of her shoulders.

  Mercado glanced across the street and the deep, gravelly wash running down its center, toward another building whose sign over its porch roof announced: BLACK PUMA HOTEL, SALOON, AND DANCE HALL. On the saloon’s front porch, to the right of the open plank door, sat a solitary, dark-skinned female dressed in a long, flowered purple skirt and a red blouse with a matching red neckerchief knotted at her throat.

  Longarm had spied the saloon and the young woman a minute ago, and he’d been keeping a curious eye on the girl, who sat unmoving on a long bench against the saloon’s front wall.

  Her Indian-featured face was stoic as she stared toward the brothel on the other side of the wash from her. She had one moccasin-clad foot propped on the bench, and one arm draped casually over her upraised knee. The cinnamon-skinned girl, obviously an Apache, though possibly Pima, wore a thin bandana around her forehead. Coarse, black hair fell straight down her back.

  Mercado looked back at Senora Concepcion. “It is too bad the silent one does not work over here, on this side of the wash. I find Dobson’s girl somewhat intriguing.”

  “If that mute was working over here, Mercado, you know as well I do that you would probably get a night’s fun out of her but then wake up with a knife in your balls the next morning.”

  Mercado laughed at what the woman had told him so matter-of-factly, in uninflected Spanish. Longarm was slow to translate it, but when he did, a few seconds after Mercado started laughing, the lawman looked across the wash again. The girl sat as before, one foot on the bench, before her.

  She sat as still as if she’d been carved out of wood.

  Mercado glanced at Longarm and slitted his eyes like a wily coyote. “A witch, they say. A mute Chiricahua. Her father was a shaman. If a man looks too long at her, his cock shrivels up like dried leather and falls off!” He shook his head sadly as he glanced once more at the girl. “It is too bad. What I wouldn’t give, just once, to…”

  Senora Concepcion shook her head darkly and turned her mouth corners up knowingly. “That is all it would take.”

  “Enough about Dobson’s little witch,” Mercado said, swinging down from his saddle. “Where is Leyton? I have someone he will want to speak with. Upstairs, huh?”

  “No,” Senora Concepcion said. “He and Fuentes rode out together this morning. Fuentes came for him, eager to show him something he found. Looking, you men. Always looking for something out in the desert…” The severe-looking old puta smiled cunningly.

  “You forget about what we are looking for, puta,” Mercado warned through a snarl. “When will he back?”

  The whorehouse madam shrugged. “How should I know? Tonight, maybe. Everything is a secret around here.

  Mercado turned to Longarm and threw his hands up. “Oh, well, I guess we have to wait until tonight to see Leyton.”

  Just then thunder rumbled louder, and rain began to fall as though someone had pulled a plug in the sky. White water streaked straight down. “I, for one, am going to go in and warm myself with your girls, Senora! Come on in, Longabaugh. There aren’t enough putas to go around, but my men don’t take long!”

  Laughing, Mercado followed the madam into the brothel, leaving Longarm still mounted on his roan and hunched against the rain. The lawman wasn’t worried about getting wet. The cool rain felt good against his hot, sweaty skin caked with several layers of desert grit.

  He was relieved to still be alive, which he might not have been if Leyton had been here. He’d have gone down shooting, of course, taking as many killers with him as he could. But he’d have died just the same.

  Now, he’d been given a reprieve. A chance to plan another course of action.

  He looked across the street at the Black Puma Saloon, being hammered by the white javelins of rain. The bench was now vacant, the Apache girl nowhere in sight.

  Two Mexican boys had run out of the brothel in front of Longarm, and were quickly gathering up the reins of Mercado’s men’s horses. The boys had apparently been ordered to stable the beasts.

  Longarm swung down from the roan’s back. He slid his Winchester from the saddle boot, slung his saddlebags over his shoul
der, and tossed his reins to one of the Mexican boys, who caught them deftly as he gathered up the other sets of reins. As the boys ran around the side of the brothel, leading the trotting horses that arched their tails at the weather, Longarm strode across the bridge spanning the wash.

  Back in Denver, Billy Vail had mentioned an old desert rat and his Apache daughter who now ran a saloon in Holy Defiance. Dobson must be him.

  From Dobson maybe Longarm could gain some idea about what in hell was going on out here—something apparently so lucrative that a man he’d once known to be as good as they came—Ranger Jack Leyton—had gone over to the other side for it.

  As Longarm took the saloon’s porch steps two at a time, he could hear beneath the drumming of the rain on the roof the strumming of a guitar—soft, melodic strains of what sounded like an old, sad song. He stopped at the open door and peered into the dingy place.

  The brightly dressed Apache girl sat in a chair near what appeared an ancient player piano and a roulette wheel—both probably relics from the town’s as well as the saloon’s more prosperous and rollicking days. She sat in a Windsor chair at a scarred round table—one of about a half dozen in the entire place.

  She had one leg crossed over the other one, and now she looked up at the tall man in the doorway and continued to strum the guitar. Her face showed no interest whatever.

  She lowered her face again to watch her fingers slowly raking the guitar strings.

  An old Anglo man in Mexican peasant garb and with long gray hair sat straight back in the room’s deep shadows, about halfway down the long, low-ceilinged room. There appeared a dance floor at the far end. A balcony, probably where gambling tables had once been set up, hovered above it. Game trophies limned the front of the balcony over the main drinking hall—a black puma, a cougar, a mountain lion, a couple of wolves, and a grizzly.