Longarm and the Sins of Laughing Lyle (9781101612101) (6 page)

Chapter 10

“Tell me about the marshal here in Nowhere,” Longarm said as, lounging abed with the preacher's daughter, he sipped from his brandy glass. “Tell me about old Roscoe Butter.”

He sat with his back against the headboard, naked beneath the wash-worn sheets and one tattered quilt. Bethany lay against him, her own naked body warm and smooth, her head on his belly. With one hand, she was gently stroking his balls. He could feel the slight prickling of her still-damp crotch against his thigh.

“What would you like to know about him?”

He took another sip from his glass, then groaned at the magic her fingers were working beneath his belly. He drew a calming breath. “When we were supping in the hotel earlier, his deputy came in and fetched him. Said something about a widow needing his help with a fussy child.”

“Hetta Broken Bow,” Bethany said with a fateful sigh. “Everyone calls her the Widow since her husband, Early, got drunk and fell off his mule out front of the Nowhere Saloon. He hit his head on the stock trough, broke his neck. It's common knowledge that, while Butter isn't married to the woman, he fathered the Widow's latest child. The Widow's three children are all from different men.

“She's a half-breed and lives up on the north side of town and raises those urchins with her mother, Rosa. Her mother's sick most of the time, so she calls on Butter often to help with the kids. He goes because if he doesn't, Hetta'll come for him herself and raise holy hell in front of the whole town.”

“Nothin' so scandalous in that, I reckon—aside from them not bein' hitched.” Longarm was aware of many men who'd fathered children out of wedlock.

“Well, there wouldn't be,” Bethany said, closing her rich lips over the side of Longarm's glass, taking a sip, and swallowing, “if Butter wasn't already married to a former percentage gal who isn't all that happy about the setup and complains around town about it when she's drunk on cheap whiskey.”

“Ah, I see,” Longarm said, gently sliding a lock of honey-blond hair back from Bethany's incredibly smooth cheek. As she resumed lightly running the tips of her fingers across his balls, he groaned and added, “Butter has himself wedged between a rock and a prickly pear cactus.”

“I feel sorry for him personally. Just an old cowpuncher off one of the ranches around here; came to town when he got too old to wrestle steers, and someone pinned that badge on his vest.” She looked up at him, hair sliding like silk across his belly. “Why do you ask, Longarm?”

He stared across the room, beyond the sphere of light being thrown by the lamp on the small table beside him. “Just tryin' to figure out who has the most cause to run off with stolen bank money.”

“Honey, I told you,” Bethany said huskily, looking up at him in admonishment from beneath her brows, “Papa and I found no money on Laughing Lyle. If he ever had those saddlebags, he
had
to have buried them somewhere along the trail before we found him.”

Longarm looked down at her smiling up at him angelically, breasts sloping toward his chest, her nipples mashed against him. He could feel the heat in the delicious twin mounds. She was running her hand over the head of his cock, gently tickling, causing it to swell. Amid his growing desire, a question blossomed.

Was she telling the truth about the saddlebags, or was she toying with him? Had tonight been more about pleasing
him
physically and thereby distracting him from his suspicions of her and her father? Or was she really just an overly confined young lady badly in need of having her ashes hauled?

She must have been reading his mind. She pressed her lips to his belly, then scuttled up on top of him, straddling him and sliding her face up close to his, while gently tugging on his ears. “You don't still think
I
have them, do you?”

“Nah, I reckon not,” he lied.

She giggled. He felt her pussy against his member, which, he now realized, was hard and jutting once more.

“You know what I think, Longarm?” she whispered in his right ear, his cock growing even harder as he felt the warmth of her breath and then the wetness of her tongue licking him.

“What's that, Bethany?” he said, watching as she reached between her hips and wrapped her hand around his cock.

“I think you need to take the rest of the night off from thinking about those saddlebags and give me another hard rutting!”

“You think so, do you?” His voice was a ragged growl in his chest. He watched as she rose up on her knees, the lamplight glistening on her snatch. She slid the head of his cock against it a couple of times, opening the folds and breathing hard, pale breasts swaying above him, pink nipples becoming ripe cherries again.

“Yes, I certainly do,” she said, groaning as she dropped her snatch down over his cock.

He felt himself sliding up inside her warm wetness. His heart hiccupped.

He ground his fists into the sheets.

She began raising and lowering herself, her hair buffeted, breasts sliding to and fro, nipples raking him gently.

“You know what, Bethany?” Longarm asked her, grunting.

“What's that, Longarm?” she said in a tiny little girl's voice.

“I do believe you're right.”

*   *   *

An hour later, leaving the preacher's daughter sound asleep and sexually sated at last, Longarm slipped out the little house's back door. He didn't want to be seen leaving her house so late at night, as rumors would fly like lava from a spewing volcano. It was late—nearing midnight—and he doubted anyone would be out and about. But there was no point in taking chances with a girl's reputation.

The night was cool and dark and silent, the stars even brighter than before in that clean, dry, autumn sky.

He walked out into the backyard, shouldered up to a cottonwood tree, and dug a cheroot from his coat pocket. He'd just fished a lucifer match from his pants pocket and was about to rake his thumbnail across it, when he heard something.

He froze.

There was the faint, wooden rattle of logs from the small, open shed ahead of him, where he could see two, waist-high rows of split cordwood and another row that was nearly shoulder-high. A cat meowed shrilly. A man said under his breath, “Fuckin'
cat!
”

Longarm stepped back behind the tree and, holding the cigar in his left hand, slipped his Colt from its holster with the other hand and ratcheted back the hammer. He said softly but pitching his voice with menace, “Who's there?”

Foot thuds sounded from behind the largest of the woodpiles. Someone was running back there—jogging rather. The foot thuds dwindled as the man fled.

“What in hell . . . ?”

Longarm stepped out from behind the cottonwood and started jogging forward, careful not to stumble over something in the darkness. He ran around behind the large woodpile, then followed the sounds of the running feet northward and back toward the heart of Nowhere. There were several shacks and pens and wagons out here, and a dog started barking somewhere off to Longarm's left.

Most of the cabins were dark, though a few curtained windows glowed weakly. Longarm walked around behind the Six-Shooter Saloon, a couple of whose windows were also wanly lit.

A silhouetted figure stood outside the closed back door between two low windows. A cigarette glowed between his lips. He had his fists on his hips, which were thrust forward. Longarm could hear the unsteady piss stream he was loosing into the yard just off the back step.

The pissing man grunted. “What the hell's goin' on back here, fellas?”

Just then a shadow moved off the Six-Shooter's far corner. Longarm dove to his left as a gun flashed and bellowed. He hit the ground, hearing the bullet plunk into a dilapidated stable behind where he'd been standing a second before. Longarm rolled over and came up firing once, twice, three times at the silhouetted figure crouched off the saloon's corner.

He thought he saw the shooter's shadow jerk slightly before the man threw himself against the building and out of Longarm's field of vision. Meanwhile, the man who'd been pissing had fallen back against the saloon's door, yelling, “Hey! Hey! Hey! What the
fuck?
” He fell drunkenly, cursing and grunting and trying to tuck himself back into his trousers.

Longarm kept his Colt aimed at the saloon's rear corner, ready.

When nearly a minute passed and the bushwhacker did not show himself again, Longarm heaved himself to his feet, keeping his gun aimed. He began jogging toward the place from which the shooter had fired on him, glancing at the drunk still fumbling with his fly buttons and cursing indignantly.

“Did you see who that was?” Longarm asked.

The man only grunted and cursed. Longarm ran around the saloon corner, extending the Colt straight out in front of him. Nothing there but shadows cast by the adobe brick saloon wall and strewn trash.

In the street beyond the saloon, a shadow moved. Boots thumped in the dirt, and a man was breathing raspily. Longarm ran down along the side of the building and into the street, angling toward a side street in the direction the shadow had gone.

He lost the man in the shadow of another building, but then he caught sight of the shadow again as it swung around the corner onto the main street, heading east. Longarm stopped, breathing hard, holding the Colt straight up in his right hand, hammer cocked. He looked to his right, saw an alley mouth, then headed down it, risking tripping over something in the darkness behind the buildings but wanting to cut the bushwhacker off.

He managed to jog a block eastward along the trash-strewn alley without falling into an exposed privy pit, then made his way back up to the main street by way of a gap between buildings. He dropped to a knee and looked up and down the street.

He turned right in time to see a man walk heavily up the steps of the Nowhere Saloon, which was still brightly lit against the dark night, with six or seven horses still tied to its two hitch racks. The man pushed through the batwings and disappeared inside.

The bushwhacker?

Longarm looked around. There was no one else on the street—at least, no one else he could see, though someone could be crouched in a break between buildings or hunkered down behind a stock trough, waiting to finish what he'd started.

Slowly, looking around carefully, Longarm angled across the street toward the Nowhere Saloon. As he approached, the low hum emanating from inside grew slightly louder. At the bottom of the Nowhwere's porch steps, he stopped, took another careful look around, then climbed the steps and stopped in front of the batwings, casting his gaze inside.

A half a dozen men stood along the bar on the room's right side. A few more sat in tables within the glow of the lit lamps hanging near and around the bar. The rear of the place and the room's far left were in darkness.

A fat, fair-skinned barman with a curly mop of hair and a tangled beard was drawing a beer at the bar. He scraped off the foam with a stick, then set the beer in front of a man in a wool-collared denim jacket and brown hat about midway down the bar. Keeping an eye on the man in the denim jacket, Longarm pushed through the batwings.

All eyes turned toward him, and the conversations fizzled. Longarm raked his gaze around the room once more, through a haze of drifting tobacco smoke, then pinched his hat brim to the room in general, said to the fat barman, “Whiskey,” and sauntered over to the bar.

He glanced at the man in the denim jacket, who sipped the freshly drawn beer and looked over his shoulder at Longarm. He was a lean, weathered, middle-aged gent with a neatly trimmed mustache beneath broad, sun-reddened nostrils. He didn't seem all that interested in Longarm. But then, all the faces staring at him regarded him with only idle curiosity. By now, most folks in town likely knew who he was and why he was in Nowhere. None of the faces stood out as unduly tense or otherwise suspicious, but something told him the bushwhacker was here, trying to blend in with the crowd.

When the barman had poured the shot, and Longarm had paid for the drink, he picked it up in his left hand, leaving his right hand free, and walked over to a table. He sagged into a chair facing the bar. The other men had returned to their conversations, though the hum didn't climb as high as it had before.

Did the others know who he was after? Or have their suspicions? Of course, he could inquire with the bartender about who had walked into the saloon ahead of him, but doing so might trigger a lead swap in these close confines and endanger the bystanders. Something told him to let the situation play itself out.

At the same time, however, something told him hell was about to pop.

Chapter 11

Longarm slacked back in his chair and sipped his drink, raking his gaze across the men bellying up to the bar and the three who sat at a round table between him and the batwings over which the cool night air drifted.

He'd just taken another sip of his drink when he spotted something on the floor near the bar. A drop of blood fell. Then another to the left of the first, and then another.

The last one was on the floor just right of a dusty black boot. As Longarm stared at the dime-sized blood drop, another one dropped down the inside of a pants leg and glanced off the boot to land beside it. Longarm's eye moved up the yellow-checked trouser leg nearest the blood drops until he saw the face of the man belonging to the trousers staring at him in the back-bar mirror. He was a wizen-faced gent with a steel-colored mustache and frosty blue eyes, long, silver hair hanging down the back of his charcoal-colored wolf coat.

His eyes were shrewdly sharp, jaws taut. Longarm had just snaked his right hand across his belly for his Colt when the man swung around to face him, a Colt Navy . 44 in his right hand. Longarm's six-shooter spoke first. The bushwhacker's shot overlapped it, the bullet drilling a chair back on the far side of the table from Longarm, throwing splinters.

As a startled roar lifted from the small crowd, and men flung themselves away from the bushwhacker, the shooter groaned and doubled over, triggering another bullet into the floor in front of his right boot. He dropped to his knees, hat tumbling off his shoulder, and started raising the Colt Navy once more.

“Hold it!” Longarm yelled, wanting the man alive.

“Hold this, you son of a—!”

Longarm shot him again, sending him sprawling, flopping around like a landed fish on the floor fronting the bar, blood pumping from a wound in his lower right side and another in his upper right chest. He tried lifting the pistol yet again, but couldn't get it off the floor. He dropped it, and his shaking hand fell on top of it.

Longarm rose from his chair, keeping his pistol extended. A hush had fallen over the place, all the other customers crouched and shifting their shocked gazes between Longarm and the man on the floor, who was still flopping his arms and kicking his legs, spitting curses out with the blood issuing from his mouth.

Longarm walked over to him and kicked the Colt out of his reach. He glanced at the others, one group clumped to his left, one to his right, with the three men who'd been sitting at the table now standing behind it. Longarm didn't know if any were friends of the shooter's, but he wasn't going to take any chances.

He glanced at the group to his left, and wagged his gun toward his right. “Get on over there with the others, and don't anyone let a hand stray to a pistol, understand? Or you'll get what he got.”

When he had all the other patrons grouped near the batwings—except for the barman, who stood behind his bar, fists on his hips and looking none too pleased—Longarm dropped to a knee beside the writhing shooter. The man's long, coarse gray hair slid around his face as he wagged his head from side to side.

“Who sent you to beef me?” Longarm asked him.

“Fuck you!” the dying man roared.

Then he coughed up another gob of blood. His body fell still. He gave a gurgling sigh, and his pale blue eyes stared opaquely up at the saloon's low rafters.

Longarm cursed and straightened, holding his own Colt straight down at his side. He hadn't been sure the man was after him and not just skulking around the Todd house, trying to get a look at Bethany naked. But now he knew. He'd heard it in his words, seen it in his eyes.

Longarm slid his gaze around the onlookers, then gestured at the dead man with his gun. “Who was he?”

No one said anything. They just stared at the dead man.

“Who was he?” Longarm asked again, louder, his patience growing thin.

“Dave Ross,” one of the three onlookers who'd been at the table blurted out. “What the hell you kill him for?”

“In case you didn't notice, he tried to kill me. And that's the second time tonight! What I want to know is who's he workin' for?”

The men looked around at one another, and a dull hum of conversation rose. They all just shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders until the barman said, “Ross is a wolfer. Works for the area ranchers. If he had a beef with you, mister, it musta been personal.”

“Personal, bullshit. You men all know why I'm here and what I'm looking for. Saddlebags filled with loot stolen from a bank in Stoneville, Kansas. Don't aim to leave without it.”

Longarm's impatience had turned to a burning anger that tightened his shoulders and jaws. Getting bushwhacked just naturally had that effect on him. “Now, anyone else want to try to keep me from locating said loot, make your play.” He shoved his six-shooter down tight in its holster and held his hands out away from his hips. “There—I'll even give you half a chance!”

They all just looked at him, as though at a mountain lion hunting too close for comfort. A hush had once more fallen over the room. Obviously, no one was going to try making that play. Reading their eyes, Longarm realized he might have let his temper get away from him. Maybe Dave Ross really had been working on his own, or at least he might not have been working in cahoots with anyone here.

Longarm's head so reeled from frustration that he was late hearing the sound of heavy, running feet and the loudening rasps of labored breath. Boots pounded the gallery fronting the saloon, and then the face of Butter's deputy, Benji, appeared over the batwings. The big kid's face beneath the narrow brim of his beat-up bowler was swollen and red from exertion. His anxious blue eyes raked the room and then his mouth opened slightly when he saw the dead man flanking Longarm.

Benji pushed through the batwings and moved forward slowly, heavily. “I heard the shootin'.” He kept walking toward the dead man, stopped, and turned to Longarm, his voice mild with surprise. “That's Dave Ross.” He looked at the gun in Longarm's cross-draw rig. “You shoot him?”

Longarm nodded.

“H-how come?” Benji asked, tilting his hat forward as he scratched the back of his head, staring down at the dead man.

“He tried to beef me earlier outside.” For obvious reasons, Longarm didn't want to tell just
where
Ross had tried to beef him the first time. “I followed him here, and he tried it again.”

“Why?” Benji said. “What for?”

Longarm scrutinized the big, slightly simple-minded kid—a deputy who wore no gun. “You tell me, son.”

Benji swung his big head slowly toward Longarm, scowling in befuddlement—or at least what looked like befuddlement. “How'd I know, Marshal?” Benji's face swelled up even more and turned even redder as he half-sobbed and half-yelled, “Honest to the Lord Jesus, Marshal, I don't know no goddamn thing about
nothin'
around here!”

Then he swung around and ran through the batwings so fast and hard that he nearly tore the doors off their hinges.

Longarm stared after him. Well, if it wasn't one damn puzzling thing after another. He suddenly wanted to do just what Benji had done, and just keep running.

Instead, he turned back to the dead man, knelt beside him, and went through his pockets. He found nothing at all except a receipt for .44 shells and strychnine, a pencil stub, a short grocery list, some pipe tobacco, a corncob pipe, and six dollars in paper money as well as six bits in coin. The man wore another pistol—a Volcanic .30-caliber six-shooter—in the well of his boot, and a little derringer hung inside his shirt from around his neck.

There was nothing that might have told Longarm who had hired the man to bushwhack him—if he'd been hired, that was. If he was working alone, why had he wanted Longarm dead? What had he known about Laughing Lyle's saddlebags?

Longarm doubted very much that Dave Ross was just another owlhoot who harbored a grudge against him as a lawman, because he didn't remember ever having crossed paths with the man before. No, it had to have something to do with Laughing Lyle and the Stoneville loot . . .

He straightened, looked around at the other men in the place regarding him sheepishly in their two separate clumps, the bartender regarding him with disgust from the other side of the bar. Longarm tipped his hat to the barman and headed for the batwings.

“As you were, fellas,” he said.

“What about him?” the barman asked.

Longarm glanced back at the dead man, and shrugged. “Send him over to Humperdink's with my regards.”

*   *   *

Longarm tramped heavily over to the Organ Range House next door to the saloon. He tipped his hat to Ma Marcus sitting behind the front desk, crocheting, as he crossed the lobby to the stairs. A mug of coffee smoked on the desk in front of her.

“I heard the shootin' next door,” she said. “Not that it's all that uncommon, but I started wondering if I was gonna see you again, Marshal.” She chuckled and wagged her head as she continued clicking her needles together.

“Good night to you, too, Ma.”

Longarm continued on up the stairs. He slowed as he approached his room, seeing a shadow move under the door just up from it and on the other side of the hall. He was not surprised when the door's latch clicked. Longarm reached across his belly and closed his hand over his Colt's walnut grips and kept his cautious gaze on the door.

There was a slight squawk as the door opened about two inches. An eye appeared in the crack, glittering in the dull light of the flickering bracket lamps. The eye found him, widened. He heard a gasp, and then the door closed.

The latch clicked.

Longarm growled, grinding his teeth, and strode up to the door. He rapped twice on it with his fist, then stepped to the far side lest he should be met with a bullet through the door. “Open up, goddamnit! You wanna get a look at me so goddamn bad, then open up and take your look!”

He slid the Colt from its holster, held it straight up in front of him, and waited, listening.

A floorboard complained on the other side of the door. The latch clicked. The hinges squawked their familiar squawk as the door drew open a foot. Nothing happened for a moment. Then a gun appeared, slowly being thrust through the opening. An old-model Remington .44. When Longarm could see the hand holding it, he smashed his Colt down hard against the barrel.

The hand released it as the owner of the hand screamed. Longarm stepped in front of the door, shoving it farther open with one hand while thrusting his hand against the chest of the person he found before him. He was vaguely surprised to feel the twin mounds of what could only be breasts under a rough work shirt, and that the person flying back away from him and hitting the floor with an indignant groan was a well set-up, tawny-haired girl.

“Goddamn your eyes!” the girl cried, lifting her head and tossing the tangle of hair away from her tan, copper-eyed, heart-shaped face. “You leave me alone, you son of a bitch!”

Longarm figured she was about Bethany's age.

He stood in the doorway, scowling at her, incredulous. “Who in hell are you, missy?” His brain was fatigued from all the questions he'd found himself having to ask. “And what in the hell were you tryin' to do with that gun?”

“I was trying to defend myself,” she yelled, gritting her teeth, eyes blazing furiously. A scar across her lower lip did nothing to temper her earthy, dusky-skinned beauty. There was a frank, tomboy quality about her, and a faint, husky rasp in her voice.

“Don't know if I buy it, but that's one answer. Now, who in the hell are you?”

She stared at him, her well-filled dark-blue work shirt rising and falling heavily as she breathed. She swallowed, licked her lips. Her eyes flicked around uncertainly before returning to Longarm. “I'm Jenny May.”

When Longarm just stared at her, saying nothing, she added, “I'm Lyle May's sister.”