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

by Tabor Evans

  “I gave him the chance to throw in with us, Custis. He wouldn’t take it. Young and brimmin’ with honor, that kid.”

  “Too yellow to do it yourself?” Longarm said, wrinkling a nostril at the ex-ranger whom he now wanted to kill as much or more than he’d ever wanted to kill anyone.

  “It grieves me; it really does, but he would have thrown a wrench into everything we had going down here.”

  “You bastard.”

  Leyton shrugged that off. “I got a proposition for you, Custis. Don’t make Matt’s mistake. Throw in with us.”

  Longarm laughed, flabbergasted. “You think I’d switch sides now, after all these years. What kind of a man do you think I am, Jack?” He slitted his eyes, felt the fire of fury searing his cheeks. “A man like you? A gutless turncoat coward?”

  He said to hell with it and started to come out of his chair, sliding his hand toward the walnut grips of his Colt. The Apache girl, replacing a new bottle with an empty one on the table of Mexican cutthroats to Longarm’s right, gasped amidst a shrill tearing sound.

  Longarm whipped his head around to see one of the men at that table holding her torn shirt in his hands and grinning lasciviously. She swung around, dropping the empty bottle and cupping her heavy, brown breasts in her hands, her brown eyes firing copper spears of hatred at her aggressor.

  Longarm’s boiling rage suddenly targeted the man who’d ripped the girl’s shirt off. But as he bounded up from his chair, he heard the ratcheting clicks of two gun hammers—one right after the other. He looked down to see both Leyton and Mercado aiming pistols at his belly.

  He had his own Colt only half out of its holster.

  Leyton said in the heavy silence that followed the tearing of the girl’s shirt, “Custis, you set that hogleg on the table. The derringer in your vest pocket, too. Or I’ll kill you right here, right now, and let Mercado’s brutes do what they want to that savage.”

  He spread his lips away from his teeth and wrinkled his leathery hawk nose. “And I think you know what that is.”

  Chapter 30

  Longarm knew that Mercado’s men would have the girl naked and on a table with her legs spread if he didn’t do what the ex-ranger had ordered. They were a superstitious lot, but drink trumped superstition, and over the course of the past half hour, they’d each had a snootful of busthead.

  They’d probably do it, anyway, but as he looked around the room at the men switching their hungry gazes between Longarm and the girl standing before them with her hands on her breasts, he decided he had little choice but to comply.

  Longarm turned to the short, stocky man holding Cocheta’s torn shirt and barked, “Give her the shirt back!” His voice pealed like the thunder that was now starting to roll off to the east.

  The man looked at Mercado, who nodded once, his own lusty eyes on the girl, whose shoulders looked so bare and vulnerable there to Longarm’s right, her shirt in the stocky Mexican’s hand. The man tossed her the shirt. She clamped the shirt to her chest and glanced sidelong at Longarm. He canted his head toward the bar, and she strode past him, flaring her nostrils, her jaws tight, and then climbed the stairs at the back of the room.

  Knowing the men could still do what they wanted to the girl, Longarm tossed his Colt onto Leyton and Mercado’s table. He followed it up with his derringer along with the watch to which it was attached.

  “We could use you, Custis.”

  “Kindly fuck yourself, amigo.”

  “That’s no way to talk to a friend tryin’ to help a friend. How long you been in the service? Too damn long. You ain’t as young as you used to be, Longarm. And I bet you’re making little more money than a thirty-and-found cowpuncher. Shit, I sometimes wasn’t even making that much. Didn’t even always get paid. And I put in seventeen years!”

  “We don’t do it for the money,” Longarm said, balling his fists at his sides. “At least I don’t. And I know there was a time when you didn’t, either, Jack.”

  Leyton paused. The others drank and glowered owlishly at the tall U.S. marshal standing before them, glaring hard at Leyton and Mercado, who still had that sneering, self-satisfied grin on his face, his pistol on the table before him.

  The ex-ranger said, “I’d hate to kill you, Custis. You’d be hell on hooves, ridin’ with us. Tell you what, I’m gonna give you tonight to let you think about it. In the meantime, you might think better if we take that hump out of your neck.”

  Leyton glanced at Mercado, who laughed and snapped an order in Spanish to his men.

  Almost instantly, they were all on their feet and unbuckling their shell belts. Longarm looked at his gun just as Mercado, grinning so broadly that he showed the gaps where his eyeteeth had once been, swept it along with his own from the table.

  Longarm stepped back and into a broad space between the room’s few tables. The Mexicans moved toward him quickly from around both sides of Leyton and Mercado’s table.

  Eagerness was bright in their eyes. These were men who loved using their fists almost as much as using their pistols, especially on a man who had made fools of them. The big man, Fuentes, came harder and faster than the others, stopping just a few feet away and regarding Longarm blandly but with a dark flush in his broad cheeks, his green eyes crossing with malevolence.

  The others moved up on both sides of him.

  Longarm saw no reason to wait around for these men to make the first move. He was badly outnumbered. Fuentes was just bunching his thin lips and starting to bring up his right fist when Longarm delivered a savage, flashing right jab to the man’s face. The slug surprised Fuentes, who howled angrily as he stumbled back and into one of the others behind him.

  The other man righted Fuentes, who gave another howl and, his face swollen with fury, bulled toward Longarm.

  The lawman stepped sideways, grabbed Fuentes by the collar of his leather charro jacket, and rammed his head so hard against a ceiling support post that the unlit lantern hanging from a nail fell from the post to smash on the floor, instantly filling Longarm’s nostrils with the sooty smell of coal oil.

  Fuentes dropped to his knees without a sound other than the thud his head had made against the post, clamping both hands over his ears and bowing as though in prayer.

  Longarm had just swung back toward the room when one of the others buried his fist in Longarm’s belly. It was a powerful punch, doubling the lawman up with a great whuff of expelled air. He couldn’t draw any air back in—not with his lungs feeling as though they’d been hammered flat against his spine—but he couldn’t go down. If he did, he was finished.

  He lunged forward off his heels, burying his head in the belly of the man in front of him, bulling the man straight over on his back and smashing the back of the man’s head into a chair with a wicked crack!

  Longarm tried to suck air into his mouth but it was a stillborn gasp—his battered lungs weren’t having it. They felt shriveled to the size of prunes, filling the lawman with a natural panic at not getting oxygen. He didn’t have to dread long what was coming next, because then a boot toe was rammed into his ribs on one side.

  As he fell to the opposite side, another boot toe was buried in his ribs on that side.

  And then they were all on him at once, someone lifting him from behind so the others could punch his face. After several nasty blows that lifted a steady screech in his ears and filled his head with a hammering pain, he fell to the floor and rolled onto his back.

  Boots kicked him several times and then he was on his feet again, someone holding him upright from behind this time while the others worked him over, taking turns. They hammered with lefts and rights and haymakers until he could no longer feel his jaws or his cheekbones and he vaguely detected the heavy pressure of one eye swelling shut.

  After a time, he found himself being flung in a circle, being propelled from man to man by fists to his face, head, and body. Just when he’d start to fall, another fist would lift him and turn him until he rammed into another.

  Du
ring one such pirouette, he saw through the one eye that was not swollen shut as badly as the other one the Apache girl standing halfway down the stairs. She wore a striped poncho now. At least, Longarm’s dull, battered brain thought it was a poncho.

  All he could really tell in the second or so he had to peer at her was that she had a look of silent, wide-eyed horror on her pretty, coffee-colored face with those strange copper eyes of hers.

  Her face was the last thing he registered before he felt the floor slam against his knees, and then a warm, soupy, pain-filled blackness washed over him and dragged him into an unconsciousness filled with misery.

  It was her whom he again saw when he managed to open one eye—the one that didn’t feel as though an elephant were standing on it. Her face hovered over him, and those strange eyes had a strange, otherwordly glassy cast.

  He lowered his gaze slightly, and he saw that she was no longer wearing the poncho. Her breasts were bare and slightly slanting down toward him, heavy and brown-nippled, as she leaned toward his chest on her knees.

  Her legs were bare. In fact, she wore nothing at all. He could see the long, pink gash across her throat, but all it did was complement the fire in her eyes, add an erotically savage aspect to her elemental beauty. Her legs were tucked under her, and he could see the black tuft of her groin hair up high between her thighs.

  He groaned. It was a groan of pain as well as pleasure, he suddenly realized. Looking down, he saw where the pleasure was coming from.

  His cock rose straight up out of his balbriggan fly, red and fully engorged. Her right hand was wrapped around it, pumping it slowly, gently, bringing the foreskin up over the head and then back down again. There was a crackling sound of whatever grease she had lubed her warm hand with.

  Lard, his nose told him.

  It felt delightful.

  Her hand rose, pushing the skin up with it, and fell again, making the grease crackle softly. The fat glistened in the candlelight beween her hand and the hard flesh it was wrapped around.

  He groaned again, sighed.

  He was dressed only in his longhandles and socks. He lay on a bed in a dimly lit room somewhere, he assumed, in Dobson’s saloon. He lay on the bed, dreaming the girl was here, naked on the bed beside him, stroking his cock and gazing at him with those peculiar, copper-irised, erotically charged eyes.

  At least, he thought he was dreaming. He would have to be dreaming, wouldn’t he?

  In fact, going a step farther, maybe he was dead and these images and sensations were merely the last vestiges of his consciousness firing like miniature rockets in his dwindling soul as said soul was being hurled off to wherever souls went when the body dies.

  She tilted her head slightly to one side, brown-copper eyes crossing slightly. A fine sheen of sweat glistened above her lip. Her oiled breasts sparkled in the candlelight, as well. She followed his gaze to one of the orbs and then with her free hand she lifted one of his and placed it on the tip of the breast he was staring at it.

  And then, feeling the firm, rounded flesh beneath his palm, he realized that he was not dreaming. He wasn’t dead, either.

  He’d been hauled up here to this cozy little room lit by a dozen candles on a near dresser, and this Apache witch had undressed him and was now massaging his cock with excruciating slowness and gentleness, so that he was only vaguely aware of the sundry other miseries squealing in the rest of his body.

  She swallowed and parted her lips, her breasts rising and falling heavily as she breathed and massaged him. His aches and pains were dulled by the wild, warm pulsing in his loins. Even the ringing in his ears and the steady pounding in his brain dulled when, keeping her hand on his engorged member, she straddled him, rose up over his belly on her knees, and positioned her black-furred pussy directly over the head of his shaft.

  Slowly, she lowered her crotch over the head of his swollen organ. He stared down his belly at his cock and her snatch and groaned when he saw the pink folds of her pussy opening as the bulging head of his purple mushroom head slid into her.

  He sighed as the pink petals closed around him, warm and slick with her own warm honey.

  She gritted her teeth and stared at the ceiling as she slowly lowered her pussy over his cock until her ass was on his hips. She pivoted at the waist, twisting and turning, corkscrewing around on him and tipping her head back, making animallike sounds deep in her chest.

  She got her heels under her, squatting, and then began bouncing up and down on him, making the bed’s leather springs complain like rusty door hinges. She growled and snarled as she bounced up and down on him, increasing her pace until she was a dark-skinned blur before him, her long hair sliding across her face and hiding it.

  Longarm’s blood churned. His ears were so hot that he thought smoke must be curling out of them. His balls throbbed deliciously, tingled as though little firecrackers of sheer ecstasy were exploding in them. He felt like he was being fucked by some rabid beast of the Arizona wild.

  The lard crackled as she rode him.

  Her hair danced wildly, the ends brushing his chest.

  His blood sang in his veins.

  Finally, after he thought he couldn’t take another moment of the sexual pummeling she was giving him, she leaned back toward his feet, placing her hands on his knees. Her brown breasts flatted slightly against her chest, bouncing, hard nipples lengthening to the size and shape of .45-caliber slugs.

  Just that slight repositioning, the shifting of the angle of her rising and falling pussy, was too much for him. He couldn’t hold back the dam of his desire for another second.

  He spasmed hard and violently, rising up on his elbows and bucking into her. The girl flung herself straight up and forward, grinding against him so that he could feel the coarse hair of her snatch scratching his belly.

  She mashed her nose against his left cheekbone and he could smell the sweet musk of her hot breath as she grunted and panted and snarled, pummeling him harder and harder and more violently with her hips, shuddering wildly as she succumbed to her own craving.

  He must have passed out after that.

  When he woke, she lay twisted beside him, half-covered by a twisted sheet. She was snoring softly. Her round ass shone in the starlight slanting through an open window over the bed. The candles were out but their scent as well as that of the lard she’d lubricated him with lingered.

  He stared at the ceiling. Aside from her quietly raking snores, silence. He took inventory of his aches and pains. The eye that had been swollen shut was now open a slit. The other was sore, but he could open it fairly wide. His ribs and jaws ached, and he could feel the jelled blood on his cut lips with his tongue.

  He rose up on his elbows, slid his legs over the side of the bed, and dropped his feet to the floor. His ribs barked at him, but he couldn’t feel any splintering or grinding around inside him. They were badly bruised but he didn’t think that any were cracked or broken.

  Leyton’s cutthroats had given him a good pummeling, taken the “hump” out of his neck. But they’d left him alive because Jack Leyton was genuinely mad enough to think that Longarm would actually join him.

  Longarm had to find his horse and ride the hell out of here. He was in no condition to even attempt to do anything more about Leyton and Mercado’s plans beyond locating the wagons hauling the gold and alerting the drivers and outriders to the imminent ambush. Then he’d have to get help from the army in running Leyton and Mercado to ground.

  He doubted he’d be able to accomplish even half of that, but he had to try. As he heaved himself to his feet and managed not to pass out though it was close there for a minute, he thought he was well enough to ride…if he could stand the agony of it, that was…

  The girl really must be some kind of witch. Taking a tumble with her was like soaking in a mineral spring.

  He could sure do with a gun, though.

  As if in response to his thought, the girl grunted. He turned to her. She was kneeling on the bed—a vague, brown for
m in the darkness, black hair hanging over her shoulders.

  Something glistened in her hand. Longarm frowned. He reached out and wrapped his hand around the cold steel of a pistol.

  He held it up to his good eye. “I’ll be damned.”

  The girl grunted.

  Chapter 31

  Longarm took about ten minutes to dress, stumbling around as though drunk.

  He couldn’t see well in the darkness through only one good eye; the other was still swollen and a little blurry, likely from caked blood. Finally, he wrapped his cartridge belt and holster around his waist, and donned his hat. He plucked the girl’s gun off the dresser and spun the wheel.

  Loaded. A .44, which meant he had extra loads for it in his cartridge belt.

  Things were looking up even higher than right after the beating, when he’d awakened to find the girl with her larded-up hand around his cock. He walked over to the bed. He’d intended to kiss Cocheta good-bye and thank her for the help, but she was lying on her side, her back to him, snoring again.

  Longarm gave a wry snort. Apaches weren’t the most sentimental of folks.

  He limped over to the room’s door, opened it quietly, and stepped into the dark, quiet hall. He drew the door closed softly behind him and looked around in the darkness.

  A wall appeared at the end of the hall on his left. He moved to his right, the rotting floor puncheons creaking loudly beneath his weight.

  A door latch clicked to his left. He stopped, closed his right hand over the Remington’s grips. The door on his left opened a foot. Dobson appeared, a lantern burning behind him. He wore a frayed plaid bathrobe over a dirty gray undershirt. He held an open book and his steel-rimmed glasses low against his leg. The front of the book was tipped slightly forward so that Longarm could make out the title: The Monk by Matthew Lewis.

  Dobson kept his gravelly voice down as he said, “Cochilo Gulch.”