Longarm 397 : Longarm and the Doomed Beauty (9781101545973) (3 page)

Balancing the gear on both shoulders, he headed on down the steps. He'd walked only half a block before he begged a ride in the back of a coal dray to Colfax Avenue, where he leaped off under the burden of his gear and tramped past the U.S. Mint. It might have only been a few hours since he'd reveled between Cynthia Larimer's spread legs, but he grinned as he admired the female shop clerks and bank secretaries and hash throwers bustling to work in their lightweight summer frocks.

He dragged his gaze away from one such buxom, round-assed little lass, blond as the sun itself, noting that his obvious admiration for the girl was lifting a flush in her chubby cheeks, and hoofed it up the stone steps of the Federal Building.

He rushed through the heavy oak door under the always-closed transom, said, “How's it hangin', Henry?” to the chief's snotty, dapper secretary.

The scrawny, little, bespectacled gent in a three-piece suit did not so much as glance over his shoulder at Longarm, nor slow his pace on the clattering keys of the newfangled typing machine, but merely wagged his head. Longarm dropped his gear on the floor, tossed his hat onto the elk antler rack to the right of the door, and headed toward the door flanking the young secretary's desk and on which CHIEF MARSHAL VAIL was stenciled in gold-leaf lettering.

A shadow appeared in the frosted glass of the door's upper panel. The door opened, and there stood the short, squat, balding, badly rumpled Chief Marshal Billy Vail, plucking a fat stogie from his wet lips and snarling, “Goddamnit, Custis, get the hell in here. You're late again. Twenty minutes late!”

“Ah, hell, Billy—!”

“Ah, hell, Billy—nothin' !” the Chief Marshal bellowed, sliding his eyes toward the clerk still busily—and now with a little self-satisfied grin—playing the typing machine's little round keys. “Henry, are Longarm's orders and travel vouchers ready?”

Without slowing his typing and keeping his eyes on the paper curling up from the machine's roller, Henry said smugly, “They've been ready for nigh on an hour, now, Marshal Vail. I have, in the meantime, gone on to other chores.”

Longarm thought he saw the bespectacled secretary cut a sneering glance at him. As Vail gave an exasperated sigh and turned and strode back into his office and around his cluttered desk the size of a lumber dray, Longarm followed him in, suppressing the urge to stick his tongue out at the typewriting-playing dandy.

“I do apologize, Chief,” Longarm said, “but, holy Christ—I just got back into town last night.
Late
last night!”

“I know when you got back into town. Somewhere south of midnight. But I done cabled you while you were still in Hays and told you I needed you in here by nine o'clock this morning and not a minute later!”

“Like I said, I'm sor—”

“You look like you been through the mill,” Billy said, suddenly lowering his voice with concern. He sagged into his high-backed leather chair, letting his big belly push his wrinkled white cotton shirt and the top of his belted broadcloth trousers out to the edge of the desk.

“Yeah, well, it was a rough one,” Longarm said as he dropped into the Moroccan red leather visitor's chair angled before Billy's desk. He sighed, flopped his arms. “One of the toughest assignments I been through in a long time. Wrote up some notes on the train ride back. I'll give 'em to Henry in a day or two.”

“I would appreciate that,” Billy said, “and cut the bullshit.”

Longarm scowled. “Huh?”

“She was waitin' for you, wasn't she?”

“Waitin'? For me?” Longarm scowled with a little more effort. “Who'd that be, Billy?”

Billy leaned forward, jowls flushing, his washed-out blue eyes pinched to slits. “You know who I'm talkin' about. The Larimer girl. The big-titted, long-haired debutante you been fuckin' seven ways from sundown for the past two years against my dire warnings that, once the cat's out of the bag, the old general himself is gonna fill you so full of holes that the buckshot'll still be rattlin' around inside your casket when they drop ya under!”

Longarm let his scowl dissolve to a genuine expression of wonder. “You got a spy posted outside my boardinghouse, Billy?”

“Hah—I was right!”

“You mean—that was just a guess?” Longarm said indignantly.

Billy threw himself back in his chair and jiggled around like a delighted moron. “Yes, it was a guess. Wished I'd have bet money on it. Oh, you're a pistol, Custis. Just a goddamn pistol! I had a feelin' I still smelled the stud musk on you, saw that well-fucked look you always carry in here after you been dippin' your dick in that rich girl's honeypot!”

“Billy, you're a dirty old man. You ought not to be thinkin' about such things as what me and Miss Larimer do beneath the covers of a night.” Longarm let a smile crawl across his broad, scarred, brown-eyed countenance. “Liable to give you a heart stroke, and I'd have to break in a whole new boss.”

“In spite of what you may believe, it does not please me to think of you two together. You got no idea the kind of trouble you're courtin'. My God, man—you're a government employee. A wage earner. That girl is
high fuckin' society
!”

“I don't intend to marry the girl—just screw her. And, believe me, she wouldn't have it any other way.”

Longarm laughed, dug one of his prized nickel cheroots out of his shirt pocket, and stuck it between his teeth as he fished a stove match out of his coat pocket. His mind flashed to last night, and Cynthia lifting both her bare legs over his right shoulder, to give his ax-handle hard-on a change of angle as he thrust it through the silky folds of her trembling, sopping snatch.

He chuckled again.

“Talkin' to you's like talkin' to a brick wall,” Billy said, with a fateful wag of his head. He thumbed his dirty, round spectacles up his nose, plucked a manila file folder off an ungainly stack on the left side of his desk, and tossed it over to Longarm. “No point in tryin' to save your ass, I reckon. No time, neither. You're train's gonna be pullin' out in a bout twenty-five minutes, so we'd best make this quick.”

“I just want you to know I protest this out-of-town assignment so close on the heels of my last one, Billy. Even I need to rest up at least a day before I'm sent back out on the wolf hunt.”

“You could have slept last night. Instead, you chose to fornicate like a back-alley cur.”

“What would you have done—thrown her out?” Longarm struck the stove match to life on his boot heel and touched the flickering flame to the end of his cheap cheroot.

A tad sheepishly, knowing he was lying through his teeth, Billy said with the air of a Baptist preacher addressing his flock, “I would have told her, ‘Thank you for coming, Miss Larimer, but perhaps we could set another time? I just got back from a long, tiresome journey, and my employer has ordered me into his office at nine o'clock sharp tomorrow morning—and I am far too dedicated to my job, my badge, and to the respected chief marshal himself to be even one minute late!' ”

Longarm was choking so hard on his first smoke puff that he couldn't even laugh.

“Anyway,” Billy said, scowling impatiently, “as I was sayin'—you got a train to catch! And this is serious business, Longarm, so I hope you have your brains in order after your love tussle. I need you more focused than ever for this job.”

“What is it?” Longarm said, pounding his chest to work some fresh oxygen into his lungs, his face still flushed from the choking fit. “It best be important, dang it, Billy!”

“Matter of life and death, in fact,” the chief marshal said, taking a quick puff off his fat, wet stogie and blowing a smoke ring over his crowded desk toward Longarm. “Death for one man—a hired Pinkerton bodyguard. Life for an important trial witness, if you can get to her in time.”

“You wanna chew that up a little finer?” Longarm asked his boss as he finally sucked a complete breath down his throat.

“It's all in the folder there. You can read it on the train. Just to give you some sense of where you're going and what you're riding into—remember that cousin of Cole Younger's, Little Babe Younger, who a local town marshal caught up in Snow Mound a few weeks back? The bastard was in the process of robbing a bank there, all by himself while he was waitin' for the rest of his gang, and the marshal somehow managed to throw a loop around him and took Younger into custody. Younger was no doubt drunk. Has a penchant for the firewater.”

“All right—my memory's refreshed, Billy. This Younger worm break out of the hoosegow, did he?”

“Nope. He was held for trial there in Snow Mound. They were holding him on a charge of robbery only. But the town of Pinecone just west of Denver, near the base of Mount Rosalie, had a murder warrant out for the son of a bitch, for a previous bank job and murder. Well, the law bringers up thataway saw no reason to haul Younger down mountain to Pinecone and risk his gang springing him.

“So they sent a willing witness up from Pinecone to Snow Mound, to testify at Younger's trial that she watched from two feet away as the kill-crazy little rapscallion shot the Pinecone bank's vice president in the right eye from a distance of six inches. Blew the poor man's brains all over the bank vault gaping behind him. For no other reason than Younger didn't seem to care for the smell of the pomade with which the vice president oiled his hair.”

“Okay, I'm with you so far, Billy. Younger got tried for murder up in Snow Mound. And the witness from Pinecone testified, did she?”

“Yes, she did. Very willingly, I might add. And Babe Younger was hanged all legal and proper for his murderous ways, on the main thoroughfare of Snow Mound, with a whole crowd gathered and clappin' their hands and hootin' and hollerin' and fireworks poppin' and kids and dogs runnin' wild.”

“Typical small-town hangin', in other words.” Longarm blew a smoke plume toward the banjo clock near the window in Billy's east wall. “So, what's the problem?”

“The witness is in trouble. Seems the gang got there too late to stop the hanging, but they're out for revenge. She's due to head back to Pinecone on the next train, only the next train is late due to a rockslide on the tracks. A crew of Denver and Rio Grande boys is working on clearing the rocks, but, in the meantime, the witness is stranded there in Snow Mound—with one of her bodyguards dead.

“She has one other man with her—apparently a Pinkerton hired by the president of the bank she works for in Pinecone. But there were two bodyguards at the start of the dance. Got a cable three days ago from the marshal up there in Snow Mound. One of the men he hired to protect the woman was shot by a sniper through the window of the café he was eating at—with the witness and the other bodyguard sitting across from him.”

“Ouch.”

“The killer didn't show himself, but the marshal's sure it's one of Younger's gang, which means the gang is likely hovering around the edges of Snow Mound, waiting for the witness to head to the train depot, once the narrow gauge arrives to haul her back to Pinecone. They warned her against testifying, and now that she has testified to great and irreversible detriment to one Babe Younger, Babe's friends aim to make her pay.”

“You want me to go up and lend a hand with said witness, get her to the train on time,” Longarm said, glancing at the banjo clock once more, then leaning forward to rub his cheroot out in Billy's overflowing ashtray. “All right, I ain't sure how this is a federal matter, but if you think it's so dang important . . .”

A little irritably, Billy said behind a cloud of roiling cigar smoke, “It's federal in a pinch because Younger had several federal warrants on his head. And you know how we always like to help out the local law bringers, Custis—especially when they're under siege by snarling trail wolves and cold-steel artists intent on mayhem. Most of whom are also wanted on federal warrants, I might add.

“The Younger gang's been pestering the mail trains for years now, but no one's been able to get close to'em. Don't really even know who else is in the gang besides their now dearly departed leader, Babe his own vile self. They're a slippery bunch, holin' up in one damn mountain range or another up there above the clouds. It's rumored they have a main hideout over in Utah somewheres.”

Longarm heaved himself out of his chair. “Two-, three-day trip up there, ain't it? The train has to wind way down through Pueblo and then through the Royal Gorge . . .”

“It's a long shot, you gettin' up there in time to help out. But I promised Webb Scobie—he's the marshal of Snow Mound and an' old friend of mine from my wild-'n'-wooly Texas Rangerin' days—I'd send a man to try to hold Younger's wolves at baby. And that's you. Oh, and one more thing,” Billy added as Longarm turned to the door.

Longarm glanced back at his boss. A sneer cut its way across Billy's pudgy face.

“If you're thinkin' what I know you're thinking—that the female witness might be a real looker, and young, to boot—let me relieve you of your randy anticipation.”

“Oh, don't tell me she's a crone, Billy!”

Chief Vail adjusted his glasses as he slid a telegraph flimsy before him on his desk, and said, “It appears here from Webb's missive that the woman you're looking for is one Mrs. Josephine Pritchard. Early fifties. Light gray hair, a tad on the portly side.”

Billy snickered as he sat back in his chair and gave another little shiver of boyish delight.

“And sporting one wooden leg. The left one.” He tapped his knuckles against the top of his desk. “Solid oak, I'd s'pect. Ha!”