Longarm and the Diamondback Widow (6 page)

BOOK: Longarm and the Diamondback Widow
7.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Chapter 6

The man sitting in the chair with his hands on the pearl grips of his Peacemaker studied Longarm skeptically.

Hesitation touched his mud-black eyes. A slight flush rose in his cheeks, which were covered with a two- or three-day growth of scraggly black beard stubble, over greasy, large-pored skin that didn't take the sun well. He had a scar on the nub of his left cheek, just above the beard. A sheriff's badge was pinned to his shabby wool vest.

“Who the fuck are you?” he barked, keeping his hand on his pistol.

“Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis P. Long. I'm here to see Sheriff Des Rainey. Who are you? Deputy?” Longarm knew the man before him wasn't Rainey. Billy Vail had told him that his old friend was six feet or thereabouts.

The man's demeanor changed abruptly. Drastically. The scar on his left cheek twitched and the color drained out of his face. He released the handle of his S&W and let his gaze flick around like two bugs trying to find their way through a window.

“No, no,” he said, glancing sheepishly at the badge on his vest. “The sheriff is . . . uh . . . he's out of town.”

“Where?”

“Where?” Now he looked peeved. “Well, I ain't sure that's any of your damn business.” He rose from his chair and idly brushed at the coffee that had sprayed across his shirt and vest. His belligerence was back. Standing a good six inches shorter than Longarm, he had to look up at him. “What do you want with him, anyway? And how do I know you're who you say you are?”

“You get a lot of men coming here professing to be deputy United States marshals, do you, mister?”

The man didn't seem to know how to answer that. He just continued to rake his hand slowly across the coffee stain on his vest and peer up skeptically at Longarm.

“Well, do you?” Longarm said. He did not like this man at all. That he was a son of a bitch was obvious by his demeanor and by the way he dressed and by the pearl-gripped pistol he carried in his holster. The gun didn't fit him—it was too pretty for him—but he wished it did.

“No, I don't reckon,” the man said, his eyes working around in their sockets again, gravitating toward a whiskey bottle on the cluttered desk before him. “I'm just sayin' . . . you know . . . a fella can't be too careful who he talks to. Who he tells where the sheriff's at . . . that's all . . .”

He stared at the bottle.

“Who are you?” Longarm said, removing his hand from his own gun and hooking his thumbs behind his cartridge belt.

“Melvin Little. I'm fillin' in, you might say.” Little glanced at the badge again, as if he suddenly wished it weren't there.

“And where's Sheriff Rainey?”

“Hell if I know,” Little said, jerking his head toward the door. “All I know is I'm replacin' him here for now. Orders of the town council. Why don't you ask them where he went?”

Longarm wasn't satisfied with the answer in the least. He doubted this unshaven, unwashed tinhorn with the expensive gun and the badge he still needed to grow into could tell the truth if his life depended on it.

“You must have some idea.”

Little looked around the room as though for an answer. He was getting even more riled, more impatient. “Hell, I don't know. North!” He threw his arm at the door. “That's where he headed. North. There was some beef collared up around Beulah Springs and he rode up there to check it out!”

Longarm kept his gaze hard and commanding as he stared down at the man shifting around uncomfortably before him. “You sure about that?” He pitched his voice with threat.

“Sure enough!”

“Where exactly? Who's ranch? I'll ride out and meet him.”

“I don't know. They didn't tell me who's ranch he rode out to!”

“Who's ‘they'?”

“The town council.”

Longarm was even more skeptical, and he was also growing more and more uneasy. “Why wouldn't Rainey have told you himself? You are his deputy, aren't you?”

“No, I ain't his deputy, big man. I'm just sittin' in for him.”

“The town council gave you the job?”

“That's right.”

“Who's on the town council?”

Little blinked up at Longarm, hesitating. “Doc Baker, Charlie Mulligan, and Alexander Richmond.”

Towns as small as Diamondback often had very small town councils, which weren't really councils at all, but three mucky-mucks who got together to call the shots. “Where can I find these men?”

“What the hell you wanna bother them for? Listen, you got no call to come barging in here stirrin' up trouble.”

“I didn't know I was stirrin' up trouble,” Longarm said, raising his voice. “I was just asking where I'd find Sheriff Rainey, and you got all riled over that. Would you mind telling me why?”

“I ain't riled. You're the one who's riled!”

Longarm looked down. The man's right hand was once again closed over the pearl grips of his .45. Longarm said nothing. Little followed his gaze to his own hand. He released the pistol, looking sheepish.

He slacked down in his chair, turned toward the desk as though he were about to get back to work, and tossed his hand at the door. “Go on, get outta here! I don't got time to listen to a bunch of federal blarney! Go on an' leave me alone. I don't get paid near enough to put up with this shit.”

Longarm gave a wry chuff as he stared down at Little, obviously a small-time gunslinger whom the councilmen had pinned a badge to. They probably hadn't been able to find anybody else. The question was, why had they needed to?

“All right. I'll leave . . . for now. But I'll be back, Mr. Little. You can count on that.”

Longarm backed toward the door. He wouldn't put it past the nervous, angry Little to shoot him between his shoulder blades. Little turned his wicked, deceitful gaze on him once more. “Rainey called you in?”

Longarm stopped at the door. “That's right. You know why?”

Little turned his head toward the desk. His eyes were as scared as they were nervous and angry. He didn't say anything, so Longarm walked out across the narrow porch and down the steps to the street.

Frustrated, he looked around. He thought he saw a shadow move quickly away from a window in the bank. He looked up at the Diamondback Hotel and thought he saw a shadow move in the same window in which he'd seen the pretty woman looking out at him before.

He rolled it through his mind.

The sheriff calls on his chief marshal friend for help, but when help arrives, said help finds a nervous, belligerent little man who fancies himself a gunfighter in the sheriff's position. In the sheriff's own chair, in fact. And none of the little man's stories about where Longarm could find the sheriff made any sense. Nor did they sound believable.

In fact, they sounded fishy as hell.

Now the strange looks that Longarm had been greeted with when pulling into town seemed all the more suspicious and ominous, as well.

He looked up and down the street, pondering his next course of action. He'd just decided to start beating the bushes for the three-man town council when he heard the jailhouse door open behind him. He glanced over his shoulder to see Little staring out the partly open door.

He was wearing a funnel-brimmed black hat with a snakeskin band. He hadn't been wearing the hat a minute ago. Apparently, he was on his way out. Heading where?

The man's left nostril flared, and he slammed the door.

Longarm reconsidered his notion of seeking out the town council. It might be best to let Little start spreading the word of what Longarm was in town for. Nervous rats always made more noise than contented ones. Of course, that noise might come in the form of gunfire, but that was a risk Longarm was willing to take, since it was more or less his job to take it.

He'd kill some time locating a livery barn and stabling his horse. He'd bet that by the time his tack hit the saddle tree and the bay had started munching oats, word of Longarm's discussion, if you could call it that, with Melvin Little would be ripping through the town like flames fed by a hot western wind.

He slipped his reins from the hitchrack, swung onto the bay's back, and reined the horse west along the street, which suddenly seemed even quieter than when Longarm had first ridden into town. He continued riding until, about halfway between the jailhouse and the west end of town, he spied a livery barn sitting on a northern cross street.

As he approached, he saw that a large painted sign stretching over the barn's second story, above the hayloft doors, announced
CASCADE LIVERY AND FEED, BROWN BROS., PROP.
A slender young man in dusty, hay-flecked trousers and a white shirt was sitting on a chair outside the barn's open doors, whittling what appeared to be a horse out of a chunk of pine, and not too handily.

Appearing around seventeen or eighteen, the long-limbed, gangly lad had long red hair and a pimply, pale complexion. He watched Longarm approach and then set the stick and his barlow knife aside and rose from his old kitchen chair, brushing shavings from his pants.

“Help you, mister?” he said, squinting and wincing against the harsh midday light.

“You sure can, son,” Longarm said, trying to sound jovial. “You can house this old cayuse for me. I tell you—I'll be plenty happy to get us both out of the sun. Damn, it's hot!”

“It shore is!”

“Tell me—where's the best place to wet one's whistle around here?” Longarm said, handing the kid his reins.

“Ah, I wouldn't know.” The kid took the reins and poked his shabby hat back off his forehead as he gazed toward the main street. “My folks don't let me drink nothin' but milk an' sarsaparilla, but most of the fellas seem to like the Dragoon best.”

“That's the busiest, usually?”

“Yeah, usually, but you won't have no trouble gettin' a drink in there now. On Saturday night is when you'd best get there first thing, I hear.” The kid looked around cautiously, as though to make sure no one else was in earshot, and then leaned toward Longarm, closing one eye deviously. “Old Walter Tattermyer's got him some girls that I hear . . . well, they'll do about anything a man wants . . . if you get my drift, mister.”

The kid snickered, showing his long, white horse teeth.

“No, shit?” Longarm said. “You mean, even . . . ?”

“Yep, that's what I hear. For only two dollars, too! Me—I'm thinkin' about savin' up and then goin' in the back way one of these nights, so word don't get around.” The boy frowned suddenly and looked up at Longarm skeptically. “Say, you wouldn't tell no one what I just said, would you, mister? If my ma ever found out, she'd crack me over the head with her broom handle!”

“Your secret's safe with me.” Longarm laughed and stuck out his hand. “I'm Custis Long, but you can call me Longarm.”

“I'm Ronnie Brown,” the boy said, jerking his chin toward the big sign nailed to the barn. “My Pa and his brother Wilfred own this place, but I'm about the only one who works here. I bust my butt feedin' horses and shovelin' shit and polishing the rental buggies, and all they do is fish or play horseshoes.”

Quickly, so as to try and catch the kid off guard, Longarm said, “Say, Ronnie, you wouldn't happen to know where my old friend Des Rainey is, would you? I rode all the way out here from Denver, and he doesn't seem to be in his office.”

The kid studied him closely, apprehensively. “You . . . uh . . . mean . . . the sheriff?”

“That's right. Any idea where I might find him?”

Along with bartenders and whores, livery boys were often the best sources of information, as men's lives tended to rotate around drink, sex, and horses. Longarm hated to put the lad on the spot, but he had a feeling it might very well be for a higher cause—namely, the well-being of Des Rainey.

“Sheriff Rainey?”

“That's right, Ronnie—Sheriff Rainey. I bet he stabled his horse with you, didn't he? If he'd lit out anywhere, he'd have picked up his horse here, maybe mentioned where he was going.”

Ronnie looked around owlishly. “I don't know what you're talkin' about, mister. If . . . if Sheriff Rainey ain't in his office, I sure as hell don't know where he is. Now, why don't you leave me alone to tend your horse or you can just tend him yourself!”

Ronnie glared at Longarm, red-faced with anger and fear. His eyes were rheumy, as though he were near tears. Longarm wasn't going to get any more out of the boy than he had out of Little.

Someone had put the fear of God in him.

Longarm raised his hands. “All right, boy. All right.”

The kid turned away and began leading the bay into the barn.

“Hold on,” Longarm said, and walked over and slid his Winchester '73 from the saddle scabbard. When he'd draped his saddlebags over his shoulder, Ronnie looked away from him quickly and continued leading the bay into the barn.

Longarm stared after him, scowling. Finally, he hiked the saddlebags higher on his shoulder, set his rifle on the opposite shoulder, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out a three-for-a-nickel cheroot. When he was this frustrated, he liked to chew some of it out on a smoke.

Swinging around and striding toward the main street, he fired a match on his thumbnail and touched the flame to the cheroot. When he had the cigar burning to his satisfaction, he tossed the match into the dirt. He smoked as he walked. The dirt was so hot beneath his boots that he felt as though he were walking through coals.

But as hot as the sun was, a cold fist had hold of his guts. Something told him that fist was likely to squeeze all the harder before it finally let go.

Chapter 7

The Dragoon Saloon sat kitty-corner across the street from the jailhouse, about three buildings east of the pink brick hotel.

Longarm stepped onto the boardwalk out front of the place and under the saloon's front awning, relieved to finally have the sun off his head. Hearing a loud buzz of commotion emanating from inside, he slowed his pace as he headed for the batwings. He stopped. The buzz continued. The men inside seemed to have a lot to talk about.

Their tone was owly, befuddled, angry.

Longarm felt a self-satisfied smile quirk his mouth corners around the burning cheroot in his teeth. That wildfire he'd set earlier had indeed spread as far as the Dragoon Saloon, at least.

He swung through the batwings and stopped just inside, letting the doors swing manically behind him before they scraped to an abrupt stop. That seemed to be the signal for everyone in the long, heavily shadowed room to swing a head toward him.

The conversation stopped as abruptly as the doors had closed.

Five men stood with their backs to the bar. A half dozen or so others sat at three separate tables to the left of the bar. The men at the bar had been joining the conversation—a single conversation, it seemed—of the men sitting at the tables.

One of those men was none other than Melvin Little himself. He sat perched on a chair back, feet on the chair, leaning forward on his knees, a sheepish look on his face. His sheriff's badge glinted in the light from the windows. He turned his head slowly away from Longarm, like a cowed dog, and looked down at the table before him.

Two big men sat at his table, both watching Longarm with grim, belligerent looks on their faces—one bearded, the other with only a mustache. Both men wore dusters, and they were heavily armed. The one with only the mustache nodded his head slightly at the newcomer and stretched his lips back from his teeth in a menacing grin.

Longarm walked over to the bar, set his rifle and saddlebags on the bartop to his right, and looked at the bartender—a short, thick, muscular man with a bull chest and Indian and Mexican features. His broad, clean-shaven face looked as though it had been used by a blacksmith's apprentice to practice hammering on. He regarded Longarm blankly, thick, chapped lips pursed.

“I'd like a beer and a shot of Maryland rye,” Longarm said.

“Don't got none of that stuff,” said the barman.

“The beer or the rye?”

The thick bartender just looked at him.

Longarm smiled and said, “All right, how about a beer and whatever kind of rye you got?”

Keeping his dark eyes on Longarm, the thick man grabbed a beer schooner from a pyramid atop the bar and a shot glass from another pyramid near the schooners. He splashed whiskey into the shot glass, filled the schooner from a spigot, and set both on the bar in front of Longarm.

The room had fallen so quiet that the bartender's movements and even his heavy, raspy breathing sounded inordinately loud.

Outside, a hot wind blew. Dust ticked against the front of the place and billowed across the scarred puncheon floor beneath the batwings. A horseback rider passed, hooves thumping slowly, tack squawking, the horse's bridle rattling when the mount shook its head.

The barman said, “Nickel for the beer. Twelve cents for the whiskey.”

Longarm reached into his trouser pocket, pulled out some gold and silver, and tossed three coins onto the bar top. They rattled around until the bartender slapped his hand down hard on top of them and then scraped them off the bar and into a coin box.

Longarm took a long pull from the beer. It was warm and sudsy and the yeast tickled his throat, but it cut the trail dust. He set the beer down. He'd lowered the level a good four inches. He raised it an inch by pouring the whiskey into the beer, causing it to foam.

Sometimes the venomous tangleleg in these backwater settlements was best diluted by beer.

Longarm sipped the drink, glancing into the mirror behind the bartender, who had gotten busy mixing flour and some other things into a mixing bowl to Longarm's left. The bull-chested man kept glancing owlishly at the stranger as Longarm kept an eye on the back-bar mirror, knowing that something would happen sooner or later.

He wasn't sure what that would be, but judging by the pregnant, ominous silence and the dead stares being cast his way, he wouldn't doubt if one or more of the Dragoon Saloon's clientele were to try to back-shoot him.

At least, he had to be ready for it.

He'd let them make their move, if one was forthcoming. And then maybe he could get down to the business of finding out what had happened to Sheriff Des Rainey.

He didn't have to wait long. He'd taken one more sip of the whiskey-spiced beer and was sucking the foam from his mustache, when he saw one of the two, big, nasty-looking hombres—the bearded one—rise from his chair. The chair made a loud, raucous sound as the man slid it back from the table. He straightened like a bull in a pasture finding that one of the neighbor's bulls had wandered into his territory.

He'd no sooner stood than the other big-ugly, with the mustache, rose from his own chair, making even more noise than the first one.

The bearded one walked around the table that he and the other big man and Melvin Little had been sitting at, a half a glass of frothy beer in his fist. He had a big belly pushing out his striped shirt. Sweat was a giant dark tongue staining his shirt from his neck to his bulging belly.

As the man approached, kicking out his legs like he was warming up for a dance, his stench wafted against Longarm, who winced against the sour, rancid odor of a man who hadn't bathed in a month of Sundays and likely slept with wolves in a too-small burrow. He wore two pistols on his hips, as did the other man, with the mustache, who also had a shotgun slung over his shoulder by a thick leather lanyard. An old Spencer .56 carbine leaned against the table he'd left.

Altogether, the two were outfitted well enough to be shotgun messengers or bodyguards of a sort.

The bearded man took a too-casual sip of his beer, smacked his lips, and said to Longarm's left shoulder, “Hey, you.”

Longarm, leaning forward against the bar, had been watching the men in the mirror. Now he looked at the bearded gent over his left shoulder. “Me?”

“Yeah, you.” This from the mustached man, who had coal-black hair and gray eyes and was a little shorter and broader than the bearded gent. He stood just behind and to one side of his friend.

Longarm took another sip of his drink and straightened, sucking the foam from his mustache. “Okay, let's have it,” he said in a droll, patient tone. He'd been in the situation of the unwanted stranger so many times before that it was beginning to be old hat.

“We heard from Melvin yonder that you come into town askin' a bunch of questions that ain't none of your business,” the bearded man said.

“Yeah, that's what Melvin said,” said the mustached man, jutting his dimpled chin at Longarm. He appeared to have lice, tiny miniature rice, clinging to his hair ends. Longarm wasn't sure which man smelled worse but altogether they were making him feel sick to his stomach.

Both pairs of eyes staring at him were glassy from drink.

“I'm sorry, friends,” Longarm said amiably, “but I didn't do any such thing.”

“What?” said the mustached man. “You callin' Melvin a liar?”

“No, not all. I'm calling him a tinhorned, limp-dicked peckerwood, and I'm calling you two the same. Not only that, but you both stink like a sow giving birth, and you're ugly as last year's sin. Now, unless you can answer the question I posed to Melvin, kindly retreat from my air space so I can take another breath without vomiting my guts out on the floor.”

Both men stared at Longarm dumbly, as though neither could quite believe his ears. They looked as though they'd both been backhanded.

Finally, the bearded man, nearest Longarm, bunched his jaws and said, “Friend, I don't care if you're a federal badge toter or not. You just made the wrong pair of enemies, an' you're about to pay dearly for it!”

He hadn't finished that last before he swung his beer schooner back toward his shoulder and then launched it toward Longarm's head. Longarm had seen that coming two weeks ago. He merely stepped into it, raised his left arm, deflecting it, and got a little beer splashed across his back as he smashed his right fist hard against his attacker's bearded jaw.

He smashed him twice more before the big man knew what was happening.

The bearded man stumbled backward, eyes rolling back in his head, as his partner launched himself at Longarm, throwing his arms around the lawman as though he were just so happy to see him he couldn't contain himself.

“You dirty dog—you're gonna die, lawman!” he bellowed as he tried to toss Longarm to the floor.

It didn't work. Longarm was five inches taller than the mustached gent.

Longarm head-butted the man, and when the man released his hold on him, Longarm smashed him once with a right cross and once with a left uppercut. He stepped on the man's right boot to hold him in place and then let him have two more of the same before the mustached gent, nose exploding like a ripe tomato, stumbled backward and onto a table, sending the table's three occupants quickly grabbing their drinks and scattering in all directions.

The table tipped over and the mustached gent and the table hit the floor with a loud, thundering bang! The mustached gent bellowed like a poleaxed bull.

“Son of a bitch!” raged the bearded gent, heaving himself to his feet and hurling himself at Longarm from six feet away.

His intention apparently was to bull into Longarm and pin him against the bar. Longarm had seen that one taking shape a month ago.

He merely stepped to one side, spreading his boots wide and grabbing the back of the big, bearded man's shirt collar and heaving him in the same direction he'd been headed.

Only harder.

He slammed the man's head against the edge of the bar with a resounding, cracking thump.

When he released the man's collar, the bearded gent dropped straight to the floor like a fifty-pound sack of seed corn hurled from a second-story loading door.

The mustached man was cursing and snarling like a wounded wolf on the floor, trying to pull his shotgun around in front of him. When he finally did so, aiming the double-bored popper at Longarm, the federal lawman stepped toward the man, swinging his right foot up savagely. The square toe of his cavalry boot connected soundly with the underside of the barrel as well as the mustached gent's left hand just as the man triggered the weapon.

Ka-booommmm!

Orange flames and gray smoke knifed at the ceiling. The double-ought buck punched a deep gouge out of the wainscoting, causing slivers and dust to rain. A floor above the saloon, a girl screamed shrilly, “Stop it! Oh, god, stop it!”

Longarm stepped back and looked from the bearded man, who lay unconscious at the base of the bar, head resting on his arms, to the mustached man, who leaned back on his elbows on the floor, his face swollen and bleeding, one bloody upper tooth embedded in his thick lower lip.

Longarm shrugged. “You heard the girl. I'm game if you are. You boys had enough?”

He toed the bearded gent's bulging belly. “Looks like he has.” He relieved the unconscious man of his weapons, tossing both pistols across the room, and then he did the same to the mustached man, asking him, “How 'bout you?”

The man nodded and, wincing, touched the index finger of his right hand to the tooth embedded in his lower lip and sucked a sharp breath that sounded funny through his broken nose.

Longarm picked up the mustached gent's shotgun, which had skidded down along the base of the bar. He picked it up and set it on his shoulder as he faced the room.

The men who'd been standing at the bar had all gathered toward the end of it, clumped together and staring toward Longarm. They looked hesitant, nervous, like they suddenly wanted to go home and visit with their wives.

“This is how it lays out,” Longarm said, narrowing one eye with threat. “Like Melvin there probably told you, my name is Custis P. Long, Deputy United States Marshal. Your sheriff, Des Rainey, sent a telegram to my superior, Chief Marshal Billy Vail, a few weeks back, asking for help with some undisclosed situation up here in Diamondback. I was sent to investigate, so that's what I'm doin'.

“Naturally, the first person I looked for was Sheriff Rainey himself, only that's not who I found in his office. I found Melvin there, sound asleep with a cold cup of coffee in his hand. A badge way too big for him was pinned to his vest.”

Little glowered at Longarm. A few of the others in the room chuckled softly, but most of them merely sat or stood glaring at Longarm.

“I asked Melvin where I could find Sheriff Rainey and he gave me a look like a mule chewing cockleburs. Didn't learn nothin'. And that makes me right owly, not to mention suspicious as holy hell. It makes me suspicious of every one of you gents. Every person in this entire town, in fact. And I'm gonna set my boots right here in Diamondback, probably right here in the Dragoon Saloon, as well as over at that purty pink hotel yonder, until such time as I can either speak to Sheriff Rainey in person or learn exactly where he is and what he's doin' and why he requested assistance.”

Longarm saw the man he'd seen earlier standing outside of the stage depot now sitting in the shadows with two other men, at a table three-quarters down the long room. He wore his green eyeshade and sleeve garters, and he stared down glumly into his nearly empty beer schooner, which he held tightly around the base with both hands.

If it were a chicken, the glass would have been dead of a broken neck by now.

“You there—what's your name?” Longarm asked the man.

The man kept staring down at his glass.

“I say, you there in the eyeshade. I take it you're the depot agent for the stage line. The telegrapher, as well—am I right?”

BOOK: Longarm and the Diamondback Widow
7.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

15 Targeted by Evangeline Anderson
The New Year's Party by R.L. Stine
Dangerous Offspring by Steph Swainston
Pain and Pleasure by Harlem Dae
Numbered Account by Christopher Reich
False Future by Dan Krokos
Gilgamesh by Stephen Mitchell