Longarm in Hell's Half Acre (11 page)

As he swayed drunkenly at the side of the man who'd just been shooting at him, Pike blubbered, “Yeah, yew long, tall glass of skunk piss. 'At 'ere ain't no real badge. An' you ain't no real lawman. So why doanchew go on back where yew came from and just fuck yerself.”

Longarm slipped the badge back into his jacket pocket, then said, “I'm a deputy U.S. marshal, and you two jackasses need to pitch them pistols on the ground 'fore you hurt somebody, or get hurt. Damned near hit some folks down the street in front of the El Paso Hotel, and that's two blocks away. Thank God you only managed to wound a horse—so far. Now throw them guns aside and put your hands in the air.”

For several seconds the pair exchanged shocked looks and acted confused by the surprising turn of events surrounding their raucous fun. Then, without warning, the weapon in the right hand of the cowboy called Cass went off with a thunderous blast and sent a blue whistler that gouged a massive chunk of wood out of the barrel Longarm stood beside.

Longarm's responding shot caught Cass dead center and pitched him backward. The heavy .45 slug crushed the cowboy's breastbone, bored through his upper body cavity, and exited in a fist-sized gout of blood, bone, and gory spray. He dropped on his side and flopped around like a landed fish for several seconds before coming to a twitching stop.

Pike, stunned and surprised, gazed down at his dead friend for about a second, yelped like a kicked dog, then snatched a second pistol from a holster at his back. Before Longarm could respond, the screeching wrangler hung a curtain of lead in the air that shattered windows in Harlan's Grocery, plowed furrows in the plank boardwalk around Longarm's feet, and blasted holes in the stack of barrels, but failed to come anywhere close to punching a trench in the dodging object of his screaming hatred.

As the wall of blazing slugs moved closer to his position, and appeared about to finally zero in on him, Longarm dropped to one knee, grasped his pistol in both hands, and took careful, steady aim. But before he could squeeze off a death-dealing head shot, a rifle somewhere to his right delivered a chunk of hot lead to Pike's thick noggin that dropped the man in his tracks like a hundred-pound bag of fertilizer kicked off the back of a hoople head's spring wagon.

Longarm darted a glance back toward the El Paso and the White Elephant. Willard Allred stood stock-still in the middle of the street, a smoking Yellow Boy Winchester snugged against his shoulder.

Longarm stood, then strolled over to the bodies lying in the middle of Third Street. Neither man moved. He holstered his weapon, pulled a cheroot from his vest pocket, struck a match on the butt of his pistol, then puffed the tobacco to life. A soul-satisfying cloud of smoke hit his lungs just as Willard Allred ambled up.

“Looked like the feller I put down wuz about to find the right range, Marshal.”

Longarm threw his head back and blew a smoke ring toward a crystal blue, cloudless sky. “Yep. Few more seconds and he'd a found me for sure.” He slipped another cheroot out and handed it to Willard.

In a matter of seconds, both men savored their cigars and wordlessly thanked God for deliverance from the vagaries of hollow-eyed Death's bony grip. Then Longarm fished a Special Deputy badge out of his pocket and pinned it on Willard's coat lapel. “Just to make it all legal. Consider yourself sworn.”

About a minute after the cloud of gunsmoke that hovered over the bloody scene lifted, Sam Farmer and two of his deputies came running up, pistols drawn. “Sweet Jesus, what the hell happened here?” Farmer barked.

As a crowd of inquisitive whisperers and pointers gathered around the dead men, Longarm calmly explained the unfortunate sequence of events that led to one of Fort Worth's busiest thoroughfares being littered with dead bodies. He finished the detailed account with, “Sure hate it, Sam, but me and my special deputy here found it necessary to defend ourselves against a pair of drunken louts who'd have killed us if we had done otherwise.”

Farmer looked stricken. “Christ on a crutch, Long. Waddies travelin' through here fire off their weapons all the time. Ain't usually no need to kill 'em.”

Longarm dismissed the complaint with a wave of his cigar. “Stupid sons of bitches didn't give us any choice, Sam. Just amble over to that stack of barrels yonder and count the bulletholes. The drunken idiot that Willard put down musta ripped off nigh ten shots before either of us fired back.”

Farmer shook his head and toed at the dusty street. “Well, guess it'd be best to have Doc Wheeler conduct a coroner's inquest just to keep things on the up-and-up.”

Longarm placed a reassuring hand on Farmer's shoulder. “I'll sit down tonight and write out a full and detailed report on the whole incident. Kind of document that even the U.S. marshal would accept. Sure Doc Wheeler'll be properly impressed. How's that sound?”

Farmer threw Longarm a squinty-eyed glance, then said, “Well, you go right ahead and do that, Marshal. Sure our coroner would be very interested in reading it. Know I would.” With that, Farmer motioned his men over. To a tall, thick-necked policeman with a red face he said, “Best go find Doc and get him over here quick as you can, Buster. Me'n Harry'll stay here with the bodies. Hurry up now—let's get this cleared up quick as we can.”

Willard Allred pulled at Longarm's sleeve, then whispered, “Got some news fer you, Marshal. Let's get on away from here so I can tell you.”

Longarm and Allred moved away from the carnage. Farmer made no effort to stop their departure. They stopped on the corner of Third just outside the White Elephant's entrance. “Well, what's up, Willard?” Longarm said.

Allred glanced around as though he might be overheard, then in a husky whisper said, “Last night I kinda did a drunken crawl from saloon to saloon, down in the worst part of the Acre.”

“Find Quincy Ballentine?”

Allred's face lit up in a radiant smile. “Nope, but I found one of his bully boys.”

A steady stream of Fort Worth locals, dust-covered trail hands, traveling gamblers, whiskey drummers, fancy dressed ladies of questionable occupation, uniformed soldiers, and bleary-eyed railroaders continued to move around Longarm and Willard Allred, who stood rooted to their spots in the middle of Third Street.

Longarm perked up considerably, then said, “Who and where?”

“The one and only Dead Eyed Zeke Cobb. He's been holed up for a day or two playin' poker in a rougher'n-a-wood-rasp joint called the Gilded Lily. It's way down on Front Street and Rusk, not far from the Texas and Pacific Depot. One of the first saloons ever built in Fort Worth. Scruffy waterin' hole ain't exactly in hell, but any man what steps outta the Lily's batwing doors can see the fiery pit and smell the brimstone from its south-facin' veranda.”

“Couldn't find Quincy, huh?”

“Sorry, Marshal. Nothin' firm on the man's whereabouts as yet. But if'n anyone knows where ole Quincy is, I'd bet on Cobb.”

“He still at his cards?”

“Yep. Leastways he was when I left there less than half an hour ago. And he's been drinkin' pretty heavy, as well. Losin' and drinkin'. Ain't a real good combination.”

Longarm glanced up and down the busy street, then scratched his chin. An unescorted but fetching blue-eyed woman, her blond hair set off by a tiny, wine-colored, wedge-shaped hat, offered up a coquettish smile when he tipped his Stetson as she passed. Most likely a demimonde, Longarm thought. Shouldn't be on the street unaccompanied anyway.

“Think I'll go to the room and fetch my shotgun to take along 'fore we brace 'im,” Longarm said.

“Already done 'er. Big popper's under the seat of the wagon.”

“Well, then, Deputy Willard, let's go on down there and throw a net over the skunk, then shake him till his teeth rattle. Ole Zeke's way overdue for a come-to-Jesus meetin'. And I'm just the man to lead the hymn singin' and tithe collectin' at his soul savin'.”

On the south side of Front Street, at the corner of Rusk, Tater Allred reined his team to a stop less than thirty minutes later. Without speaking, he nodded toward a primitive, square, squatty, board-and-batten building. A badly faded sign hung over the sloped veranda's roof. Visitors standing in the street could now barely make out the name—once painted on the facade in vivid reds and bright yellows—even in the dazzling Texas sunlight of midday.

The Gilded Lily looked to Longarm like everything that exemplified the exact opposite of the White Elephant. Half the size of Luke Short's glorious drinking and gambling establishment, this scruffy, cow-country “oasis” had seen much better days. And though he tried, Longarm couldn't imagine how far back in the past those days might have been.

Almost a dozen tired-looking cow ponies, arranged in two groups of five or six, stood hipshot at the hitching posts on either side of the saloon's hard-used front entrance. A plate glass window made up most of the wall on the right side of the off-kilter batwing doors. An extended lack of attention to anything like cleanliness made it virtually impossible to see any of the action going on inside.

Squint-eyed, Longarm surveyed every crack and nail head of the disreputable establishment before making a move. After nearly a minute of careful scrutiny, he climbed down from Allred's well-used wagon, then reached into the box and slid his sawed-off Greener from beneath the seat.

Tater brought his Yellow Boy Winchester out and followed Longarm. He hovered near the marshal's left elbow, like a baby chick being escorted by a mother hen, as they strolled across the empty street.

The lawmen stepped up on the Gilded Lily's warped-plank porch about the same time several cowboys stumbled from inside through the swinging doors. Someone in the rowdy group laughed, another whooped and shouted. A third leather pounder cut loose with a string of unintelligible epithets at anything handy—his horse, an uncooperative chippy, a surly bartender, and the uncommon prevalence “of cheap, rot-gut whiskey in Fort Worth's Hell's Half Acre.”

Two men in the disorderly group got into a loud argument over who'd fucked the ugliest whore. The others pulled them apart. Then the entire party finally headed for their tough-looking little cow ponies, saddled up, and rode north along Rusk Street like a cloud of rolling thunder, punctuated by firing their pistols into the air.

Longarm propped his big-bore Greener against a porch pillar, pulled out two nickel cheroots, and handed one of them to his brand-new special deputy. Once they got lit up, he said, “Tell me what the inside of this place looks like, Tater. Give me as complete a layout as you can, and say where you saw Cobb seated when last you were here.”

“Well, Marshal, the Lily ain't nothin' more'n a single oblong room. When we step inside, the bar, what there is of it, is on the right. Stretches from a few feet past the window yonder and runs almost all the way to the back wall. Six or eight tables along the left for them as want to drink. Area at the back is for gamblin'.”

Longarm gave the information careful thought, glanced at the dram shop's batwing doors, then nodded.

Motioning with his cigar, Willard said, “Zeke's a-sittin' at the farthest table from the entrance, right in the back corner not far from the only exit on that end of the buildin'. Tell the truth, Marshal Long, might be somewhat problematic to get at 'im, 'less maybe we can surprise the evil bastard.”

Longarm snatched his ten-gauge blaster up, broke it open, and checked the brass-jacketed shells inside. He snapped the gun shut with a loud click, lowered the weapon's muzzle, and pressed it against his leg, then said, “Well, Tater, why don't we just stroll on in and see what's happening. Maybe we can surprise ole Zeke.”

A dense, wall-like cloud of smoke, from nigh fifty different kinds of twisted tobacco, wafted though the room on the stuffy interior air. It made it difficult to see in the dimly lit joint. Almost every table had six or eight cowboys crowded around, puffing away as they played poker, drank, or just enjoyed the society of their fellows. Several desperately haggard, rough-looking women apathetically shuffled from one table to the next, made halfhearted efforts to interest one man or another, then moved on.

Longarm made his way down the entire length of a coarse bar that consisted of little more than one-by-twelve rough-cut, pine planks sitting atop a series of empty whiskey barrels. Here and there, battered spit-toons decorated with splattered gobs of greasy spittle occupied easy-to-hit spots. But even a perfunctory examination of the filthy floor revealed that most men didn't bother much with their aim when it came time to cut loose.

Longarm stopped at the corner of the crude counter farthest from the door and stared at the empty poker table in the corner. “Looks like we musta missed him, Tater.”

The words had barely fallen from his lips when a toothless crone, who could have easily been Longarm's grandmother, pushed her way into his face and grabbed his crotch. In something close to a nightmarish screech, she yelped, “Goddamn, but you are one big, good-lookin' sumbitch. Ain't seen nothin' like you 'round here in more'n a year. Bet you'd give a gal one helluva romp.”

Longarm made a bit more than a halfhearted effort to push the woman away, but couldn't break her talon-like grip on his cock. “Sorry, miss, uh ma'am, uh madam, uh granny, but this just ain't the right time.”

“Granny? Come on, honey. I'll show you what ole Granny can do. Plenty a empty rooms out back. Just walk me through 'at 'ere door over yonder, and in ten minutes I'll suck on this big ole wanger of yer'n till your Stetson caves in flatter'n a cow flop. Won't cost you but two dollars. Whatta ya say, big boy?”

Willard said, “Get away, Mabel.”

The woman ignored him. She snatched out the top portion of her false teeth, made a disgusting slurping noise, then said, “How 'bout a dollar, honey. Garn-damntee it'll be the best blow job you've ever had. Ole Mabel's known from Amarillo to Laredo, from Longview to El Paso for her ability to suck the bluin' off'n a rifle barrel.”

In spite of his discomfort with the hag's sour-smelling proximity, an uneasy, slightly amused smile split Longarm's face. “Now you know that's one hell of an offer, miss, I mean ma'am, or whatever. But I'm afraid I can't accommodate you right at the moment. Have other far more important business to conduct, you see.”

Willard grabbed the woman by the elbow, pulled her around to face him, then said, “Go on now, Mabel. Put your damned teeth back in. Give it a rest. Get away from here. This man don't want nothin' you're a-sellin'. Take your scrawny old ass on back to the cow chasers and leave 'im be.”

The ancient whore flashed both men a hellish, gummy smile, and finally released her viselike grip on Longarm's equipment. She ran a snaky tongue across still empty gums, poked Longarm in the chest with a knob-knuckled, witchy finger, then said, “Now that's really too bad, honey. You don't know what you're a-missin'. Two bucks ain't nothin' for the kinda blow job I can give you. Might as well be givin' it away, for a measly fuckin' buck.”

“Tell your story a-walkin', Mabel,” Allred snapped.

The ancient whore slapped her teeth back in her mouth, wrestled them into place, then said, “Need to stop listnin' to old farts like Willard, mister. He ain't been able to get it up since the Big War ended back in sixty-five.” She cackled like one of Satan's imps, staggered back into the swirling bank of tobacco smoke, and disappeared as quickly as she'd first materialized.

Allred watched until the most hideous mattress back in Hell's Half Acre vanished. Then he motioned to a short, rat-faced bartender, who sported a greasy head of thinning black hair and a moustache the size of a trail cook's camp skillet. The drink slinger hustled over as quickly as a gimpy, dragging foot would allow. He snapped a nasty rag at some trash and a pile of dead flies on the bar, then cast darting, edgy glances at his new customers.

“What's up, Tater?” the bartender said.

Allred cast guarded glances around the room, then, under his breath, said, “Louis Boucher, this here gent's Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long. I'm here as his specially appointed deputy. We're a-lookin' for Zeke Cobb. I seen ole Zeke in here a-sittin' at that table yonder, my very own self, not more'n a hour ago.”

Boucher leaned forward. He spoke as though telling a well-kept and dangerous-to-know secret. “Fellers a-playin' poker at that table took a break. All of 'em should be back soon. They've been a-goin' at it now for almost two days. Some of 'em is gettin' kinda wore down. Heard Cobb say he's gonna have a bite to eat, then be on back shortly.”

Longarm cast a quick glance at the empty table. All the chairs were leaned forward to discourage anyone from attempting to sit. “Any reason to believe he might not return, Mr. Boucher?” he asked.

Boucher shook his head. “None a'tall. I done been waitin' that table damn near the whole time. Zeke's a big loser in the game. Wants to get some of his money back, I'd imagine. The stupid son of a bitch cain't play cards for spit, but he hates to lose worse'n anybody I've ever seen.”

Longarm did another quick assessment of the busy saloon, then turned back to Boucher. “Tell you what, Louis. I think me and Willard will stake out a claim to this corner of the bar and wait. Zeke don't know either of us. Leastways, don't believe he does. Anyway, we'll take him down, then move him out through the back door as quickly and quietly as we can. Rest of your payin' customers shouldn't even know anything's happenin'.”

Boucher arched an eyebrow, tilted his head like an inquisitive dog, then said, “Gonna look forward to seein' that trick. Have to take the man by surprise. He won't go any other way. Hell, ole Zeke don't do nothin' 'less he wants to. You boys best be prepared for trouble aplenty.”

“Ain't no big problem, Louis. We can whack him across the noggin with a gun barrel, then drag his ass out the back door,” Allred said. “Hell, he's damn near a-sittin' in the door as it is. Won't have to haul him more'n a dozen steps to the alley and away from everyone else.”

A crooked grin creaked across Boucher's deeply lined face. “Yeah, if'n you can get close enough to pull it off. 'Course, he just might gun down both of you 'fore you're able to get within ten feet.” He slapped at the splinter-laden countertop with his rag again and said, “You boys want anything? Might look better if'n you got somethin' in front of you.”

Longarm and Allred loitered at the end of the bar and nursed their drinks for nearly an hour before the poker klatch at the back table finally began to regroup. Dead Eyed Zeke Cobb was the last participant to show up. Willard elbowed Longarm, who had the spot nearest the gathering, and pointed with a single finger. The inebriated outlaw wobbled into the room and headed for the game.

Dead Eyed Zeke Cobb was the size of a grizzly. A ragged suit coat worn over a brown, collarless shirt added to the image of a prowling animal. His right eye had no color. An ugly slash mark of angry, pink flesh ran from a butchered brow, down the man's cheek, and disappeared into his thick, unkempt beard.

In a coarse whisper, Longarm said, “If he passes close enough, I'll jump the evil fucker. We'll play it exactly the way you described. Put him down quick, then get him the hell outta here, fast as we can.”