Longarm and the Banker's Daughter (9781101613375) (12 page)

“I reckon I'll be here,” she said with another fateful sigh, looking toward the Sangre de Cristo warily. “As long as ole Heck Gunn don't get me.”

Chapter 18

Longarm walked down the steep slope, loosing slide rocks behind him, and crossed the shallow creek. Looking around him warily, expecting guns to start roaring at him from any quarter at any time, he climbed the rise to the pine that had torn its root out of the bank and angled down toward the water. The tree had no bark or needles on it, dead a long time.

He glanced back up the dike behind him. Lacy knelt atop the ridge, staring toward him, cuffed hands before her. Stared toward him with a hopeless air. Longarm turned to look into the ragged cavern where the dead pine's nestled inside the slope. He couldn't see anything, but when he reached into the hollow, pressing his left shoulder against the bank, his gloved hand touched leather. He closed it over the saddlebags and gave a grunt as he dragged them out from behind the weblike roots.

He hauled them out onto the bank before him. The cracked brown leather shone in the sunlight. Both pouches bulged. Longarm unbuckled the flap of one, opened it, saw the green of the paper bundles stuffed inside.

Relief washed through him. He was almost giddy with it. He'd thought for sure the girl would have kept playing games and he'd have to pistol-whip her before he finally found the money bags.

He glanced back at the dike. Lacy knelt as before but she was no longer staring toward him. She was looking behind her, hair blowing in the breeze. Slowly, stiffly, she rose to her feet and turned to stare toward the San Juan valley, then turned her head quickly back to Longarm, snapping her eyes wide.

“It's them!” she yelled. “Oh, God—it's
Gunn
!”

Just then gunfire crackled. Lacy screamed and jerked her head to one side and fell on her side at the top of the dike.

“Ah, shit!”

Longarm threw the bags over his shoulder, picked up his rifle, and ran back across the creek. He climbed the steep slope of the dike hearing the distant whooping and hollering of revelrous riders, the pounding thuds of their horses. When he gained the lip of the dike, he bounded up and over it, and dropped to a crouch beside Lacy writhing on the ground and holding her cuffed hands against her bloody temple.

The riders were pounding toward him up the gentle incline, seventy yards away and closing fast. They were triggering their rifles, and the slugs were hammering the slope around Longarm and the girl, some shrieking off rocks.

“Keep your head down!”

Longarm ran forward and dropped to a knee, firing the Winchester quickly, until the gang of seven riders drew sharply back on their horses' reins and began leaping out of their saddles. Longarm triggered another round, causing one rider to jerk back and yelp. He ran forward to where the dun and the claybank were whinnying and dancing and straining against their reins tied to the branch of a fallen log, in front of the rock mound that sheltered them from Gunn and Cruz's fire.

The cutthroats were shouting wildly, angrily, Gunn yelling, “End of the trail, star packer . . . for both you
and
that little whore!”

Lacy screamed as several bullet plowed into the ground around her, spraying her with torn grass and gravel.

Longarm tossed the saddlebags over the dun's back, then swung into the leather saddle. He shoved his rifle down into the boot, then triggering his pistol to hold the angry horde at bay, he galloped over to where Lacy lay on the ground and swung down, keeping the horse between him and the shooters.

Slugs whined around him. The horse screamed and danced as one bullet tore into a saddle stirrup and another clipped one of the dun's rear hooves.

“Get up there!” Longarm shouted, jerking the girl to her feet, then tossing her up onto the dun's back. He swung up in front of her.

“Hy-ahhhhh!” he shouted, ramming his heels into the dun's flanks and sending the beast flying down over the top of the dike.

The horse hit the slope with another shrill whinny and nearly lost its footing against the momentum of its sudden plummet. Lacy screamed. Bullets sawed the air over Longarm's head. Then he and the girl and the horse were below the ridge crest, the dun barreling hard, grinding its front hooves into the shale and trying with all its might to stay upright as its rear legs scissored, propelling it down toward the creek.

Longarm held the girl between his arms, keeping a light hand on the reins, giving the dun its head. Lacy screamed wildly and flopped forward against the horse's neck, clinging to is mane. As they splashed across the creek and swerved to gallop west along its sandy shore, Longarm glanced behind him.

He couldn't see any of Gunn and Cruz's men, but they continued to trigger lead and shout furiously. He looked forward, swung the dun up the bank, following a game trail that appeared to slant up the slope and into some piñon pines and firs.

“That's my hoss, you son of a bitch!”
came a shout from behind Longarm as the dun started up the slope toward the relative sanctuary of the forest.

Longarm looked back to see Gunn and Cruz plunging their horses over the crest of the dike, their riders following in a shaggy line behind them.

“And that's our
dinero
, amigo!” Cruz shouted in his Spanish accent as his sombrero flew off his head to buffet down his back to which it clung by the brigand's chin thong.

“I knew they were near! I just knew it!” Lacy wailed as the dun continued to dig its front hooves into the slope, pushing up with its rear ones. “They're gonna kill us both!”

“Not if I can help it!”

“How can you help it? There's five of 'em, you damn fool!” she said through a sob.

Longarm glanced behind once more. The killers were galloping toward him, Gunn and Cruz out front and triggering their pistols. The girl had a point. He'd faced longer odds before, but Gunn and Cruz and their men were well-seasoned cutthroats.

The deer path climbed to a wagon trail. Longarm swung the dun westward along the trail and whipped its right hip with the rein ends, urging as much speed as he could. The horse lunged ahead, blowing, the air racking in and out of its tired lungs. Longarm gritted his teeth against the sound. The horse had had a tough descent down the slope of the dike and a tough ascent up the opposite hill. Riding double, even with Lacy, who didn't weigh much over a hundred pounds, would be too much for it soon.

“Come on, horse!” Longarm shouted, ramming his heels into the horse's flanks. “Let's
mo-seeeey
!”

Shots grew louder behind him. He glanced back and with a sinking feeling he saw the entire pack of cutthroats galloping along the trail behind him. Their slugs blew up dust on either side of the trail, chewed into trees trunks, snapped branches. They were gaining on Longarm fast.

Ahead, the trail curved. As the dun followed it, Longarm could feel its lunging strides shortening, the mount's knees weakening. He'd decided to stop the horse and make whatever stand he could right here in the trail, when he saw the stone escarpment rising to the right of it. His pulse quickened. He knew without thinking what he was going to do.

As soon as he was around the bend, the gang momentarily out of sight, he gave the reins to Lacy and yelled in her right ear, “Keep going as far as the dun'll take you!”

She'd started to respond when he shucked his Winchester and kicked free of the stirrups, lifted both feet to the horse's back behind the cantle, and threw the rifle onto the scarp. Then he threw himself onto the scarp.

“Longarm!” the girl screamed as she sped on up the trail with the faltering dun, looking wild-eyed over her shoulder.

Longarm grabbed an arrow-shaped point of rock, wrapping both arms around it, hugging it like a lover. His rifle was on the crest of the scarp above it. He gritted his teeth and hoisted himself up and over the rock, rolling onto the top of the scarp, breathing hard, all his sundry aches and pains screaming at him, the pain in his head kicking up again wickedly. Suppressing it, he picked up the Winchester.

Just now, Heck Gunn and Orlando Cruz came into view from around the bend, both men hunkered low in their saddles, Gunn holding a carbine, Cruz wielding two pistols as he cursed in Spanish and batted his heels against his palomino's flanks. The other riders formed a ragged, single-file line behind their enraged leaders.

Longarm dropped into a nest in the rocks about six feet below the crest, raised the carbine to his shoulder, rested the barrel on a stone thumb jutting in front of him, and lined up the Winchester's sights on the jostling figure of Heck Gunn.

He squeezed the trigger.

Gunn's horse—a brown-and-white Indian pony—screamed above the Winchester's roar as its rider gritted his teeth beneath his top hat and flew straight back against the pony's rump. As Gunn tumbled over the pinto's tail, Longarm threw lead at the stunned Orlando Cruz, who had just turned to his partner as Longarm's bullet smashed into Cruz's face. Blood shone like a smashed tomato beneath the Mexican's right eye, and the desperado screamed shrilly as he, too, was thrown off his horse's jouncing ass.

Longarm ejected the spent cartridge casing and lined up his sights on another rider and fired.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Two more riders were sent screaming back to the hell they'd ridden out of while their horses continued lunging on up the trail, one dragging its rider by a boot hung up in a stirrup.

Boom! Boom! Boom-Boom!

As two more cutthroats were sent to their dusty deaths, one of the horses pitching wildly, eyes white-ringed, Longarm swung around to track the last rider as he galloped up the trail in the direction of Lacy. Longarm seated a fresh shell, lined up the sights between the rider's shoulders clad in black leather, and—ping!

The Winchester's hammer slammed onto an empty chamber.

“Shit!” Longarm bit out.

Boom!

He jerked his eyes to the rider who'd gotten away from him. The man's horse had turned sideways in the trail and was just now lifting its front hooves high off the ground and clawing at the sky, whinnying shrilly. Its rider tumbled straight back to hit the trail with a thud that Longarm could hear from sixty yards away.

Dust wafted. The horse dropped down to its front hooves and ran off the trail's south side, trailing its reins.

Another thirty yards farther up the trail, Lacy stood in the trail near the splay-legged dun, lowering a pistol she held in her right hand. In her other hand she held the reins of the horse that had only a minute before dragged its rider up the trail. The pistol she held must have been that hombre's, who lay unmoving in the trail to her right.

Scowling in befuddlement, Longarm climbed down out of the rocks and onto the trail. He looked around at the unmoving gang members lying where he'd dropped them, blood pooling in the dust and tough, wiry blond grass beneath them. Gun smoke and dust wafted.

He walked up the trail past the man Lacy had shot out of his saddle and stared at the girl standing between the blowing, sweat-silvered horses. She held the Remington .44 straight down across her bent knee.

“You had the money, two horses, and a pistol,” he said, shaking his head, genuinely puzzled. “Why didn't you just keep riding?”

She looked as befuddled by her own behavior as he did. “I don't know,” she said tonelessly, hiking a shoulder. “I reckon you could have left me back there, at the mercy of Gunn, and taken the money back to Jawbone.” She gave the puzzled lawman a poignant look. “But you didn't.” She shook her head. “After all the bad things I'd done . . . you didn't.”

Longarm studied her, still not sure what to make of the girl. He stepped forward, wrapped his hands around her waist, and drew her toward him. She stood meekly, almost serenely before him.

“Miss Lacy,” he said, sliding her hair back from her neck with the backs of his hands, “you might just make a woman, after all.”

“On account of you.” She returned the smile, tossed the pistol in the dirt, wrapped her hands around his wrists, and squeezed. “I'd like to be your woman tonight, Longarm.” Her direct gaze was serious and genuine, owning a naked sincerity he'd never seen in it before. “Just one more time before you take me back to Jawbone. If that's all right . . .”

Longarm smiled and brushed his thumb against her chin. She looked more beautiful now than she had the first time he'd seen her. “Why the hell not?”

Watch for

LONGARM AND THE DEADLY RESTITUTION

the 410
^th
novel in the exciting LONGARM series from Jove

Coming in January!

 

And don't miss

SWEET REVENGE

Longarm Lone Star Omnibus

Available from Jove in January!