Longarm 244: Longarm and the Devil's Sister (10 page)

Devil Dave's older sister was about the same height as the mean little shit, making her taller than average for a gal. Her English was as natural and a tad more refined than his own. Longarm wondered idly whether her kind felt more Tex or Mex most of the time. There were a lot of her kind in West Texas and even more up New Mexico way these days.

Still another maid came in to serve them all red wine with cheese and tortillas. The daughter of the house said he had their permit to smoke if he liked. When Longarm allowed he was trying to cut down on tobacco, she suddenly blurted, “Chongo tells us you said you'd ridden for a Diamond K in
New Mexico?”

Longarm had already had time to reconsider that whopper. So he met her eye and smiled easily as he explained, “That ain't exactly what I said, ma'am. Leastways, it wasn't exactly what I meant. Diamond K was the trail brand on some ponies I rode herd on betwixt Fort Union and Roswell. I can't tell you where that remuda started out from.”

She said, “I can. The Diamond K is a horse-breeding spread south of Denver, Colorado. You say you only signed on at Fort Union?”

Longarm washed down some tortilla-wrapped cheese with the mighty fine dry wine and replied, “A couple of hands had quit along the way. I'd just run some army beef up to Fort Union and—”

“Do you know
El Cabrito?”
she suddenly cut in, to his considerable relief. But he made himself sound slightly pissed as he soberly replied, “If you mean that wild youth some of your folk translate
El Cabrito or Chivito
from The Kid, I sure wish you'd tell me why everybody asks me that the minute I say I hail from New Mexico territory. I hate to brag, but I do ride Top Hand, which is more than any Henry McCarty, William Bonney, Kid Antrim, or Billy The Kid can say. He may be handy with a shovel or gun. Such fame as he deserves comes from his having outlived most of the gun hands of the Chisum, Tunstall, McSween side. He was riding under the late Dick Brewer and taking his orders from Lawyer McSween during most of that religious argument, Miss Connie.”

The dusky blonde blinked and allowed she'd never heard the Lincoln County War described as a religious argument before.

Longarm shrugged and replied, “There wasn't much else for grown men to get so wild about, Miss Connie. The whole sorry mess lasted a mere six months and left the leaders on both sides dead or a lot less prosperous than they'd started out.”

He sipped some wine and continued, “On the one side was Major L.G. Murphy, Jim Dolan, and Sheriff Bill Brady, Irish Catholics who'd got there first. The side favored by a mostly Protestant national press were either out to break a business-ranching monopoly or horn in on a mostly Catholic Tex-Mex community, depending on who you ask. They were funded by their rich Uncle John Chisum. Stockman Hank Tunstall and a side-switching Lawyer McSween set up their own general store, hotel, and bank across the street from the Murphy-Dolan premises in Lincoln. Chisum, Tunstall, and McSween were a mixed bag of Protestants. So the Irish Catholic Sheriff Brady sided with Murphy and Dolan and the fun and games began.”

She frowned thoughtfully and said, “I was told The Kid followed our own
Santa
Fe and gets on well with Mexicans.”

Longarm shrugged and said, “You're speaking of a teenager who doesn't spend much time in any church. A heap that's been written about his earlier boyhood seems to be total twaddle. He started out riding for Jim Dolan. He changed jobs and sides when Hank Tunstall's foreman, Dick Brewer, made him a better offer. Despite what's been said about him avenging the death of a man who'd been a father to him, The Kid had been on Tunstall's payroll three weeks when Sheriff Brady's deputies shot old Hank in February of '78. Brady got shot in the back in April. A few days later Buckshot Roberts and Dick Brewer killed each other in the same shoot-out. By July the Murphy-Dolan faction had their new sheriff, Dad Peppin, surround the McSween-Tunstall property across the street from them and burn it out, killing McSween and four or five others to end the so-called war, six months after in began, with both sides ruined and hardly anybody hiring since. That's why I ain't still up yonder, riding for anybody.”

The old lady suddenly jumped up to run from the room as if she had the trots. She was gone before her daughter and Longarm could rise politely. Connie said, “You must excuse my mother. She doesn't speak English and she hasn't been well lately.”

Longarm allowed most folk found the Lincoln County War tedious in any lingo. She said she had a morbid interest in young gunfighters and asked what he'd heard about her family problem.

He said he'd heard her dad had died and left her in charge of things.

“Nothing about my younger brother, David?” she insisted.

He made himself go through the motions of trying to remember before he brightened and tried, “Oh, was that your brother that Texas Ranger was asking me about, earlier? He did ask me whether I knew some local boy called Devilish Dave and I told him true I had no idea where such an oddly described cuss might be found. You say Devilish Dave is your kid brother, Miss Connie? How come they call him Devilish Dave?”

She sighed and said, “They don't. They call him Devil Dave Deveruex and I fear he has some... mental condition. He had a bad bout of scarlet fever when we were little. They say that can leave a body... touched.”

Longarm allowed he's heard as much and didn't press her to explain further. He knew exactly how crazy-mean Devil Dave was. The reasons he preferred the owlhoot trail to running the family business were moot, as far as that murder warrant signed by Judge Dickerson read.

He tried to change the subject before she could ask him something he might not be set for. He said, “To tell the pure truth I was way more interested in something else they told me about you, Miss Connie. They said you were fixing to drive some beef to market and I couldn't help noticing you'd lost one of your regular riders.”

She nodded absently and said, “Jesus Robles. He was a good man but a poor rider. I shall be driving a few hundred head to the railhead at San Antonio in a few days. If you're asking for a job, I fear I have all the help I need at the moment. Do you know how much it costs to hire a professional gunfighter, such as Billy The Kid?”

As a lawman, Longarm did. Five-hundred dollars a month was the going price for a gun hand willing to kill most anybody for you, while you could hire a bodyguard way cheaper. Bodyguards hardly ever got hung for gunning paid assassins. He said, “I've no idea what Billy The Kid was paid by John Tunstall the one payday he got anything. Lawyer McSween swore Dick Brewer, Billy, and others in as private range detectives and they called themselves Regulators for all of three or four weeks before the county told them they couldn't. I suspect that you could hire The Kid right cheap, right now, Miss Connie. But I don't know where he is, and anybody else who did might just as willingly turn him in for the price on his head. I think it was over a hundred dollars, the last time I'd heard.”

She said, “I don't want to hire any young killers. I only wish I knew what made them like that. My brother, David, has gotten in with bad company. We've tried to calm him more than once. A lawyer we'd sent to help him just wound up dead in another silly shootout! It wasn't David who shot his own lawyer. It was one of those crazy-mean breeds he's been riding with since our father died!”

Longarm knew he'd better flutter away from the candle flame before he burned his wings by showing too much interest. He could see how upset she was in spite of her calm outside. Worries were running around in those big brown eyes like trapped rats dying to bust out. He sipped the last of his wine, set the glass down next to some cheese he hadn't eaten, and quietly asked, “Do you mind if I make a personal observation, ma'am?”

She dimpled at him to ask what he had in mind.

He said, “You're looking poorly, no offense. I can't tell what you might be coming down with. But if you ain't coming down with something you have too much on your mind to cope with the likes of me tonight. Your momma was upset about something, too. So why don't we call off that supper invite and set you both free to deal with whatever might be ailing the two of you?”

She stared owl-eyed to demand, hopefully, “Do you mean that? Are you sure you won't feel insulted?”

He got to his feet, hat in hand, to reply with a sporting smile. “There's nothing to get sore about, ma'am. You ladies invited me over for supper before something else came up and unsettled you. If I eat somewhere's else this evening I'm no worse off than I would have been to begin with.”

She rose, too, saying, “But I feel so awkward, sending for you, only to send you away with nothing!”

He said, “I enjoyed that wine tremendous, and the cheese wasn't half bad, ma'am. So I got more out of you than you got out of me. I'm sorry I ain't the gun hand you may have took me for, Miss Connie. That's just the way things go sometimes.”

She gasped, “Good heavens! Did you think I wanted to hire you as a gunfighter, ah, Duncan?”

He said, “We've established you ain't hiring at all, Miss Connie. It's been nice talking to you. But I reckon I'd best get it on down the road, and I sure hope you and your momma get to feeling better real soon, hear?”

She didn't argue further. She led him part way and then that butler showed him out the front gate to the
calle.
It was still early, and the
paseo
tended to get more interesting near the end, as couples paired off after all that strolling and smirking. He still felt no great awakening in his loins, thanks to good old Perfidia, but the more a stranger showed his face around a small town the less strange it got.

 

So Longarm circled the big church to get back to the plaza, cutting through the graveyard, shaded night and day by ancient blackjack oaks. As he did so a Mex in a
charro
outfit, big sombrero, and a brace of Remington sixguns stepped out of a side door of the church rectory. Longarm dismissed him as likely a pal of that D Bar L rider they'd buried earlier that same day. The Mex was headed his way, away from the plaza and
El Paseo
as if heading home for his own late supper. So Longarm nodded as they met in a puddle of lamplight and then, just as Longarm murmured,
“Buenoches,”
the strange Mex grabbed for both his sixguns, gasping,
“Ay
,
caramba! No es posible!”

He might have caught Longarm more off guard if he'd slapped leather without yelling like that. But he had yelled, and so Longarm got his own gun out and threw down as the both of them fired.

Hot lead whipped by Longarm's shoulders on either side as his own two hundred grains of the same split the other man's breast bone and chewed up the heart inside.

Then Longarm was off the path and waist deep in tombstones whilst the stranger he'd shot flopped like a hauled-in trout in a spreading pool of blood, with his hat and guns far-flung on the brick pavement.

As Longarm reloaded a distant voice called out,
“¿A 'onde, que pasa?”

He yelled back,
“¡Aqui! ¡Quiero ver al policia!”

So there he was when an older Anglo lawman wearing a pewter star came tearing along the path with his own gun drawn, saw Longarm, and called out in English, “What's up? Do you know who fired all them shots just now, stranger?”

Longarm soberly replied. I fired one of 'em. I'm still working on why this dead cuss over here fired the others. I'd be Duncan Crawford out of New Mexico Territory. I've no idea who he might have been.”

The town law moved closer, nudged the limp body with his boot tip, and said, “Whoever he was, you surely cleaned his plow. So I'm asking you, polite, to hand over that sixgun and come along with me.”

Longarm saw no better course than to comply. He still had his ace-in-the-hole double derringer, and if push came to shove he could still tell them who he really was. The graveyard was crowding some as he got back on the path and surrendered his sixgun. He'd just told the old coot he'd fired the blamed weapon. But the town law sniffed at the muzzle anyhow. They'd likely stolen him away from Scotland Yard.

He had enough sense to wave some Mex kids back as an even older man of the cloth came out that same rectory door. He turned out to be their priest. When he saw what Longarm had wrought he knelt by the body to see if Extreme Unction might help. Longarm got the town law to wait until the priest had finished his Pater Noster before he respectfully said, “He was out to kill me. He came out of your rectory just now, Padre.”

The elderly Mex priest looked up at them, confused, to reply, “I do not know this
pobrecito.
He looks like an
Indio puro.
You say he was inside our
rectorio
earlier?”

Longarm said, “He must have been. That's where he was coming from when we met in this path, I howdied him, and he went for his guns. Is it possible he was wandering about, inside, without you folk knowing?”

The priest bent lower for a better look at the dead man in the dim light before he decided. “I have never seen him before. He must have hidden in the church beyond until after vespers. A door from behind the altar is not locked. If he hid in one of the pews until after we held our evening services... But for why? We are a poor parish. There is nothing worth stealing anywhere on the
premisas!
”

Longarm felt better about the old gun sniffer when he told the priest, “He was likely hiding from this ranger who's come to town, looking for the Deveruex boy and some Mexican pals. He might have mistook this other stranger for that ranger, just now. They don't look alike. But they're both Anglo strangers, and you know what they say about a guilty conscience.”