Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance (15 page)

As he hit the floor on his butt, there was a bright, orange flash against the silhouette of the big man in his doorway. The expansive thundering report filled the room, causing the floor to leap beneath Longarm’s ass.

The full load of buckshot flipped Longarm’s pillow up high against the headboard, instantly turning it into a billowing cloud of feathers stitched with shredded ticking. The man with the shotgun swung the savage popper’s barrels sideways, tracking Longarm and shouting,
“Die, you son of a bitch! Die!”

Longarm dropped his head down below the edge of the bed but triggered his pistol over the top, aimed at the door.
He fired twice, one shot on top of the other. The Colt’s second belch, sounding little louder than a knuckle pop after the shotgun’s skull-shattering reverberation, was drowned by the ambusher’s detonation of the coach gun’s second barrel.

The man must have dropped the barrel just enough as he fired that the swarm of screaming pellets did not blow Longarm’s Colt and fist off the end of his arm, but blasted into the end of the bed, causing a rain of corn leaves similar to that of the continuing drift of feathers. It also heaved the mattress across the frame and into Longarm’s chest, knocking him back against the wall beneath the room’s sole window.

From here, he watched the shooter stumble back into the hall as the man who’d been so unkind to the lawman’s door swung his own empty shotgun behind his back, where it hung from a lanyard, and reached for one of the pistols on his hips.

Longarm rested his gun wrist against the top of the shredded bed once more, lined up his sights on the man’s chest, and fired. The bushwhacker groaned and stumbled backward, twisting around and ramming his right shoulder against the hall’s opposite wall, knocking a tintype off its nail.

The gunman had unleathered one of his pistols, and as he gave a great bellowing yell of pain and rage, he lifted the weapon.

Longarm fired two more times. One bullet punched through the man’s chest while the second turned his left ear to jelly and painted the wall behind him with it. His head smacked the wall violently, with a thudding crack.

He screamed shrilly, dropped his own gun, and crumpled up on top of his partner, who lay parallel to the base of the wall, jerking as he stared glassily at Longarm, blinking rapidly, blood oozing from a corner of his mouth and pooling on the floor beneath his head.

An angry female scream sounded down the hall.

A man’s scream followed it. A pistol popped.

Longarm scrambled to his feet and ran to the door in time to see a man run out of Agent Delacroix’s room, a knife in his right hand. He was the hombre whom Longarm remembered filling his canteens at the spring that Longarm and Haven had ridden up on two day’s ago. The now-dead men had been mounted on horses behind him.

The pistol popped again in the room behind the man as he glanced at Longarm and gave a snarling scream. He bounced off the hall wall opposite Haven’s room as another bullet plunked into the pine boards beside him. He flung the knife toward Longarm, who ducked. The knife embedded itself into the doorframe behind the crouching lawman.

The attacker wheeled and took off running toward the stairs.

“Demon!” Agent Delacroix screamed.

She fired three more shots from inside her room, and the bullets blasted through the wall, spraying wood slivers behind the fleeing attacker. The man ran hard, elbows and knees pumping, casting horrified looks behind him as yet another slug blasted through the hall wall behind him and into the wall opposite.

Longarm extended his own revolver straight out from his shoulder, and shouted,
“Hold it, asshole!”

At the top of the stairs, the man stopped, slapped his belly holster, and brought up a horn-gripped hogleg. Longarm’s triggered slug puffed dust from the man’s brown leather vest up near his left shoulder. He screamed again as he bounced off the rail post, dropped his pistol, and tumbled down the stairs and out of Longarm’s sight, behind the hall’s left wall.

Longarm ran to Haven’s room. She was just climbing up from the floor, wearing a pink robe and holding a hand to her right cheek that matched the color of her robe. She held one of her LeMats in her right fist. Smoke curled from both barrels.

“You all right?” Longarm yelled from the doorway.

She nodded. “Is he dead?”

“I’m about to find out!”

Longarm ran back into his room, stomped into his boots and quickly reloaded his Colt. There was no time to dress in anything but his hat and his boots.

He bounded on out of the room and down the hall to the stairs. In the lobby below, the German, who apparently owned the place, was standing behind his desk and shouting loudly in his mother tongue and wielding a small, nickel-plated pistol, waving it at the man just now stumbling past the desk toward the hotel’s front door.

“Get down behind the desk, friend!” Longarm shouted as he descended the stairs.

He was halfway down when the ambusher swung around toward the hotelier, a second revolver in his hand. He fired a round toward the hotelier, but he was so wobbly that the slug plowed into the rack of pigeonholes behind his target.

The German screamed louder and triggered his own pistol over the desk, his slug punching into the door just as the bushwhacker opened it.

“Hold it!” Longarm shouted from the bottom of the steps.

But the ambusher pushed on out the door and into the dark night. Longarm didn’t want to fire because someone might be in the street beyond him. Instead, he grabbed the hotelier’s pistol out of the man’s hand, so the man couldn’t shoot Longarm in his wild rage, and tossed the pistol across the lobby. He ran out the front door and onto the gallery.

The night was cool and dark though stars glittered in the velvet sky.
There were few lights on this end of Broken Jaw, so it took Longarm’s eyes a few seconds to adjust. He could hear the would-be killer running away from him, and then he saw his jostling shadow angling across the street and to the left, toward a small, cream-colored adobe cantina.

The man was limping on his left ankle and wheezing shrilly.

There were a half-dozen horses tied to the lone hitch rack fronting the cantina. The gunman seemed to be heading for one of them—likely his own mount.

Longarm ran down the three gallery steps, stopped, and aimed the pistol straight out from his right shoulder. “Turn around and drop the gun or take it between the shoulder blades!”

The man had just reached the hitch rack. He stopped so suddenly that he nearly fell and swung back toward Longarm. Starlight flashed on the revolver in his fist.

Longarm’s .44 spoke once, twice, and then a third time. Each shot was followed by a grunt from the man the slugs punched through, until he breathily said, “Fuck!” and triggered his pistol once toward the stars. He fell backward into the stock trough fronting the hitch rack with a loud splash that caused the already jostling horses to whicker and sidestep away from the tank.

Longarm lowered his pistol halfway and walked toward the man lolling in the stock trough, the water spilling over the sides glittering in the starlight. Two men walked out of the cantina behind the bushwhacker. Around here, men were accustomed to hearing gunshots any time of the day or night. Hooking their thumbs behind their cartridge belts, they sauntered along the cantina’s slim boardwalk and looked down at the man in the trough.

They both lifted their faces in unison, regarding the man dressed only in red balbriggans, a hat, and boots walking toward them. One half turned to the other, dipped his chin toward the trough, and said, “That’s Jim Winter.”

“No shit?” said the other, poking his hat brim back off his forehead.

Longarm stopped at the stock trough, looked down at Jim Winter staring up at him, legs dangling down the end of it, arms hooked over the sides.

“Who’re you?” one of the two others asked Longarm.

The lawman scratched his cheek with his Colt’s front
gun sight. “The hombre who just killed Jim Winter, I reckon.”

“Jim owed me twenty dollars,” said the man who’d identified the bushwhacker.

Longarm shrugged. “You can have whatever’s on him as long as you haul him out of here and bury him; same with his two pards in the hotel.”

The two men looked at each other, shrugged, and came on down the boardwalk to pull Jim Winter out of the stock tank. Longarm walked back toward the hotel. Footsteps rose on his right and a familiar voice called, “Who’s shootin’ over here?”

Longarm turned to see a skinny, stoop-shouldered figure tramping toward him. For a few seconds, he couldn’t place the bull-legged gent in a long nightshirt dangling to his bony knees, and a night sock, the tail of which hung down over his right shoulder.

“Custis, that you?”

Then Longarm saw the mule-eared boots not unlike his own, though far older, and he lifted his gaze to the drooping salt-and-pepper mustache brushing down past the old ranger’s chin. The last time Longarm had passed through Broken Jaw, there’d been no local lawman. It was up to the rangers manning the outpost to keep the town in trim. That must still be the setup. Longarm couldn’t help chuckling at Sanders’s costume, but then he remembered that his wick had nearly been trimmed.

“What kind of a town you runnin’, Roscoe?” he said. “A man can’t get a good night’s rest without three men tryin’ to beef him through his door!”

“Huh? Whuh?” Sanders stopped and looked around, befuddled, indignant. His craggy cheeks darkened, and he spat to one side as he poked an accusing finger at Longarm, who continued walking toward the hotel. “Custis, you’re trouble. Always have been, always will be! You pack it like most men pack tobacco!”

Longarm stopped at the bottom of the Arizona House’s front steps and stared up at Haven Delacroix standing atop the gallery, dressed in her thin pink wrap, her hair down, her LeMats in her hands.

Longarm shook his head and climbed the steps, growling, “Nah, the trouble’s right here.”

He glanced at her as he brushed past her. He vaguely noted the smell of booze on her but she looked sober enough now in the wake of the dustup. She arched a peevish brow. “You think I’m to blame for this?”

Longarm walked through the open door and into the hotel, not looking back as he said, “It wasn’t me they wanted to fuck.”

Despite having his sleep so rudely interrupted, and not in the way he’d expected after hearing Haven’s footsteps in the hall outside his room, Longarm woke at the first flush of dawn. He was sure those first footsteps had been hers. She just hadn’t had the courage to knock on his door and ask him to let her in so they could carry on as they’d carried on in Leadville.

Too prideful. Typical of the moneyed class. Cynthia Larimer, of course, was the exception to the rule. Cynthia wouldn’t have knocked. She’d have broken the door down and taken him by force.

Longarm snorted at the thought, shaving in the cracked mirror propped atop his dresser. But it was probably a good thing that he and Haven hadn’t gotten together last night. They’d likely both have been filled full of buckshot.

He figured the three bushwhackers had learned which rooms they were both in by peeking at the hotel register while the stocky German had snoozed in his rocking chair behind the lobby desk. Their plan had likely been similar to the Jerkwater bushwhackers—get Longarm out of the way so they could have some uninterrupted time with the girl.

Yep, probably lucky that Longarm and Agent Delacroix
hadn’t both been in his room. They would have died in each other’s arms. He shook his head and then lifted the razor once more to his left cheekbone. But what a way to go!

She was a danger, though, he reminded himself, as he continued scraping his face. He couldn’t let his guard down again. Men of nearly every stripe on the frontier would be tempted by such a prize as Agent Delacroix, and that made him, Longarm, a target.

There was nothing he could do about that now. He was stuck with her, so he might as well make the most of it. What had happened last night—at least, last night
before
he’d nearly got sent to Glory in a hail of buckshot—indicated that sooner or later she was going to cave under the wave of her own desires.

He grinned at the prospect as he dressed and set his hat on his head, adjusting it carefully over his left eye. With his rifle on one shoulder, his saddlebags slung over the other shoulder, he strode into the hall and closed the door behind him. She was just then emerging from her own room, her carpetbag and saddlebags slung over her shoulder, her LeMats holstered on her tautly curving hips.

Haven looked at him coolly, but he thought he detected an ever-so-slight bleariness at the edges of her eyes.

The bleariness of drink?

“Sleep well?” he asked her.

“Well enough.” She shook her hair back from her eyes. “You?”

“Like a log after your friends died.”

“No friends of mine.”

Longarm snorted and brushed past her, heading for the stairs. She grabbed his arm suddenly and pulled. She was no match for his strength. Instead of jerking him around, his static weight ended up pulling her up against him. Her cheeks flushed slightly, and she stepped back, glaring up at him, a little breathless.

“I’d just like to know what you’re problem is with me,
Marshal Long. Come on. Out with it! Let’s clear the air before we continue this investigation!”

He stared down at her. She squinted up at him, fire in her eyes. Her breasts pushed out from behind her shirt, which she wore with one more button open than she’d had open the day before. He was sure of that, because he noticed such things about women.

Her bosom swelled as he gazed at it, not for a second trying to conceal his lust for her. Her lips were full and rich. She looked so damn tempting that he could find no words with which to respond to her demand. And then there was no way he could have said anything even if he’d found the words, because suddenly he’d grabbed her with his free arm, drew her to him brusquely, and closed his mouth over hers.

At first, she squirmed a little, tried to pull away. He held her fast, kept his mouth over hers, mashing his lips against hers, his tongue probing hungrily. She closed against him and started to return the kiss, opening her lips slightly.