by Evans, Tabor
“Everybody back aboard now,” the jehu called. “We’ll be late as it is so let’s not make this any worse than it’s gotta be.”
Longarm helped the two women into the coach, stood aside for the salesman to board and then climbed inside himself. Up on the driving box the jehu took up his lines and snapped his whip above the ears of his leaders. The Bastrop coach lurched into motion and they were once more rolling toward Belly Fourche.
Longarm sat slouched in his corner again but this time he was not dozing. This time he was pondering, and what he kept coming back to was that he indeed had stopped a robbery. But he more than likely had not stopped the robbers he had come here to find.
Chapter 21
“Marshal, I’m god-awful sorry but I’m already behind schedule. You got to do what you got to do, but so do I. And what I got to do is get on with my route. You can catch the next coach through. That’s all there is to it.”
“When is that?” Longarm asked. They were stopped outside the barbershop in Belle Fourche, where they had just unloaded the body of the dead highwayman for the barber, who also served as the town’s undertaker, to undertake.
“It ain’t but three days, Marshal. That’s our next outfit down.”
Longarm grunted. Three days in Belle Fourche was not exactly what he had planned. But he did want to speak with the local marshal and, if possible, the county sheriff as well. One of them might know more about the robbers. The successful ones, that is, not the poor dead son of a bitch laid out on the undertaker’s slab now.
“Fine then. Hand me down my carpetbag.”
The driver crawled onto the roof of his coach. He retrieved the bag in question and handed it down to Longarm. Then the man took up his driving lines and put the coach into motion again. He looked pleased to be leaving Custis Long behind.
The barber was standing on the boardwalk behind him. “Mind if I leave my bag with you till I figure out what I’m doin’ tonight?” Longarm asked.
“You can leave the bag, Marshal, but who’ll be paying for the laying out and the burying?”
“You’ll have t’ talk with your sheriff ’bout that, I’d think,” Longarm said. “I’d expect the county t’ pay, but that ain’t up to me.”
The barber, a beefy man with thinning hair, reached up to scratch his nose. Longarm noticed that his hands were bloody almost up to the elbows. Very likely, Longarm thought, the fellow had already dug the bullets out of the robber’s body. He probably would sell those to someone as souvenirs. Likely would have photographs taken, too. He might have to split those profits with the photographer but the bullets and anything else he could scavenge off—or out of—the body would be his alone. Longarm always found undertaking to be a damned strange business. Necessary, though.
Longarm set his bag inside the barbershop doorway and thanked the barber for the courtesy, then asked, “Where can I find your sheriff?”
“His office is over in the county courthouse. That’s it over there.” The man pointed toward a sprawling single-story structure two blocks over. “Marshal Bennett is across the street in the city hall. You can’t see it from here but there’s a sign. The sheriff is Ed Hochavar.”
“Bennett,” Longarm repeated, “an’ Hochavar. All right, thanks.”
“Ask them who’s gonna pay,” the barber said.
“I’ll do that, you bet,” Longarm responded, not meaning a word of it. “Oh, one more thing. Where’s the telegraph office here?”
“That would be in the post office. It’s right around the corner from the courthouse.”
“You been a big help. Thanks.” Longarm touched the brim of his Stetson, then turned and headed down the street in the direction of the local government buildings.
He undoubtedly would be asked to fill out some paperwork about the dead man. And if he was going to be stuck here for three days he might as well send a wire to Billy Vail informing the boss about the state of his investigation. Such as it was.
Chapter 22
Ed Hochavar was a big man with a big belly. He was getting on in years, late fifties or early sixties, Longarm guessed. That was old for a lawman. The sheriff was obviously liked by the local citizens, though, or they would not keep voting him into office.
When Longarm introduced himself, Hochavar extended a welcoming hand and said, “You’re the deputy who killed Tom Bowen this morning, right?”
“Bowen,” Longarm said. “I didn’t know the man’s name.”
“Tom has…had, I should say…a hardscrabble farm north of town. Dumb son of a bitch left a widow and half a dozen kids out there. I’ve already sent a man to tell Jeanine about her husband.” He shook his head. “Tony Conseca over at the barber shop is going to be pretty pissed off. Jeanine won’t be able to pay for the burying.”
“What about the county?” Longarm asked.
Hochavar shrugged. “Wasn’t our kill nor capture so I don’t see as how the county should be on the hook for it. I suppose we’ll just have to pass the hat around our saloons and maybe Sunday morning at church services. We’ll manage, of course. Folks always do, one way or another.”
“I can kick in a little, too,” Longarm offered.
“That’s good of you, Deputy.”
“T’ tell the truth though, Sheriff, Bowen isn’t why I wanted t’ talk to you.”
Hochavar’s eyebrows went up. “Oh?”
“What I’m here about, sheriff, is your successful highway robbers. We both know that Bowen didn’t pull those jobs. I’d like you t’ tell me whatever you know about them.”
“I know they were committed across the line into Montana Territory. Out of my jurisdiction, you know.”
“Of course. Right now I’m looking for information, that’s all.”
Hochavar harrumphed and reached into a pocket for a meerschaum pipe that had passed through the golden color to a dark, glossy brown. “No offense taken, young fellow. I just want to be clear about this.”
“I assume you’ve spoken with the drivers and maybe some passengers who were robbed.”
“Now that’s one thing,” the sheriff said. “They all say the same. The robbers were quiet. Not a peep out of them during the holdups. And the passengers weren’t bothered. All they wanted was the cash box. And every time those boxes were full of currency and coin. They don’t hit every shipment of cash but whenever they hit there was plenty of cash in those boxes to be had.”
“Have details of the robberies been made public?” Longarm asked.
Hochavar nodded. “Of course. We don’t have a newspaper of our own, but there are papers in Lead and Deadwood and Miles City, too. We get all of them and they all had stories in them about the robberies.”
“Including the story by Jennifer Wiley? She’s the Englishwoman who…”
Hochavar waved his hand dismissively. “Oh, I know Jen, all right, but she’s no more an Englishwoman than I am. She came out here as kitchen help in Lord Banfield’s hunting party. Her real name is Jennifer Vaughn and she is from the Bowery in New York City. Yeah, I know Jen, all right.”
“Is she still here? Can I interview her?”
“Sorry. She’s long gone. I don’t even know if she went back East or traveled on to California like she talked of doing.”
“Was she telling the truth in that article?” Longarm asked.
“Who knows. It could be, I suppose,” Hochavar said, “but I wouldn’t bank on it. She liked a tall tale as well as anybody.” The sheriff winked. “Liked her whiskey as good as anybody, too. Could have been whiskey talking in that story. Or she could have stumbled into something when she was passing herself off as a newspaperwoman. Which is what she wanted to be. The chance to travel and to see strange sights is probably why she took that job to begin with. That and to escape from the Bowery. She never admitted to me what she had done back there but I got the idea that it was something pretty bad.”
“How’d you come to know her?” Longarm asked.
The sheriff laughed. “Jen acted almost like a
man. Her and me played cards together and drank some together. She isn’t a bad-looking girl and I think she liked me because I wasn’t always trying to get in her knickers the way most of the fellows did. With me it was just the cards and the liquor. And talk. Jen likes to talk.”
“But she’s gone now?”
Hochavar nodded. “Weeks ago.”
“Damn. I’d hoped to talk to her,” Longarm said.
“Sorry.”
“In your honest opinion, was she telling the truth in that article?”
“I just don’t know, Long. I just can’t help you there.”
“One more thing, Sheriff.” Longarm grinned. “Is there a decent hotel in town? It looks like I’ll be here for a few days until the next coach comes through.”
“Sure thing. You just go three blocks that way and…”
Chapter 23
It was a hotel, all right. As for how good a hotel it was, well, Longarm was reserving judgment about that. It seemed a little on the seedy side but he could have been wrong about that. And it did have a bed and a door that could be bolted shut. Beyond that it did not much matter.
He looked through his carpetbag to make sure there was nothing contained in it that could not be easily replaced—just in case the mice in the hotel had sticky fingers—and deposited the bag underneath the rumpled bed, the appearance of which made him suspect that the sheets were not changed very often.
For whatever it was worth he locked the hotel room door behind him—the lock could be jimmied with a butter knife—and went downstairs.
“Where can I find a good café?” he asked the desk man.
“There’s a café in the next block over,” the fellow told him. Then he grinned and added, “Or there’s a good café in the next block after that one. Dud’s place. And it would be a kindness if you’d mention that I sent you.”
“Dud?”
“Short for Dudley.”
“Thanks.” He left the hotel and went to the closer café, not the one that would give a kickback to the hotel clerk, figuring that his recommendation had nothing to do with the quality of either place.
The meal he got there was tasty and inexpensive and the place was clean. Longarm figured a fellow couldn’t ask for much better than that. Not in a town he was just passing through. He ate, paid, and grabbed a toothpick on his way out the door.
As he was passing a store on his way back to the hotel he heard a loud crash and an even louder yelp of “damn you, Larry” coming from inside. The voice was a woman’s, and she sounded both angry and scared.
On an impulse Longarm turned and stepped inside.
The store proved to deal in ladies’ ready-to-wear, hats and dresses and unmentionables. Toward the back of the display space a woman was trying to fend off a tall, rangy man with blond hair and a mustache so pale it was difficult to see. The man wore a boiled shirt but no collar. He had garters on his sleeves.
The woman was a good foot shorter than the man and he probably outweighed her by fifty pounds. She was backed into a corner, spitting and clawing but quite obviously was losing this battle.
It hardly seemed a fair contest so Longarm crossed the small room and politely tapped the gent on his shoulder.
The fellow did not respond to the first light tap so Longarm tried again. Harder.
And when that did not work he grabbed the fellow by the arm and yanked him around so the two were face-to-face.
“Par’n me, ma’am,” Longarm said with a nod toward the lady.
Then he punched the man in the face.
That got his attention just fine.
The man let go of the woman and threw a quick left at Longarm.
Longarm swayed aside just enough to let the punch fly harmlessly past then dug a hard blow to the fellow’s ribs.
Had his attention? And then some. The man turned pale with pain but he was game. He moved in closer to Longarm and threw a left, which Longarm ducked, and followed it with a sharp right that connected with Longarm’s jaw.
Longarm’s face went numb. And he was pissed. He pummeled the SOB with a flurry of lefts and rights and lefts again.
With his back against the wall there was nowhere for the man to retreat toward. He tried to duck but to no avail. Within seconds his face was running with blood from a split lip and a smashed nose. A cut over his right eye must have nearly blinded him because he was no longer able to see to even try to block Longarm’s rain of fists.
“Enough!” he cried out, leaning back against the wall with his forearms guarding his battered face. “Enough.”
Longarm stopped punching, and the man ducked between Longarm and the woman to make his escape at a run, his shoe soles pounding across the floor. He slammed the shop door so hard it was a wonder he did not break the glass.
“Are you all right?”
Longarm looked down to see a very pretty, middle-aged woman. Until then he had paid little attention to her, being somewhat busy elsewhere.
She was small and lightly built. She had dark hair except for a few strands of gray showing at her temples. Her hair was pulled back in a severe bun. She wore a starched white shirtwaist and a black skirt.
She reached up and touched his cheek. He winced. He really had not realized that he was hit that hard in that brief dustup.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
Longarm harrumphed. “Not half as bad as that son of a…uh, as that other fella.”
The woman laughed. “The son of a bitch you refer to is my ex-husband, Larry.” She had a good laugh, light and delicate and pleasing to the ear. “I have to agree that he got the worse of the bargain. Come into the back with me for a minute. I have some water there. I’ll bathe that cut.”
“Cut?”
“It’s just a little one, but we wouldn’t want it to get infected, would we?”
“No, uh, we wouldn’t want that.”
Smiling, she went to the front door and threw the bolt to lock it, then fetched a closed sign from behind a rack of hats and set that in the window. Then she returned to Longarm and took him by the hand.
Chapter 24
The back room was obviously a storeroom, but she had a bed there, too. A double bed, curtained off from the storage part of the room. The little woman held out her hand to shake and introduced herself. “My name is Angela Morris.” She grinned. “But I am no angel.”
Longarm completed his side of the introduction.
“A marshal,” she said. “I hope you are no angel, either, Marshal Long.”
“Now that is one thing I never been accused of, Miss Morris.”
“Please call me Angela.”
“All right. Angela it is.”
She gave him an impish smile. “And now, Marshal, you know why my husband left me.”
“I do?”
“Yes. It is because I have this insatiable desire to fuck every man I meet.” She tilted her head to the side and smiled again. “Right now, for instance. Do you mind?”
“Are you serious?”
“Very.” She began removing her clothes, the shirtwaist first, then her skirt and the blouse.
“Reckon,” he said, “I don’t mind.”
Angela Morris was small, with a compact body. Thin legs. Tiny tits that lay flat against her chest. Dark nipples that stood erect and proud. A bushy vee of hair at her crotch.
“Hurry,” she whispered, her voice low and throaty now. “Hurry, please. I need it. Please.”
Longarm hurried. It would have been rude to turn away now. He stripped as quickly as he could, his cock standing tall and eager.
Angela grabbed his hand and pulled him to the bed. She lay down, spreading herself open to him.
Longarm practically threw himself onto her. And into her.
She was already wet in anticipation of what was to come. “All of it. Yes. Give it to me.”
Incredibly, she began to shudder in a hard climax almost before he could fill her. She was as quick to come as he could ever recall knowing, and she continued
to come time after time while he stroked into her and built to his own powerful climax.
When he tried to roll off of her, thinking his weight might be too much for her small frame, Angela stopped him, wrapping her arms around him and asked, “Stay. Please. I love to feel you inside of me, so big and warm and nice. You fill me. Not every man can do that.”
He stayed. He kissed her, her tongue probing inside his mouth. After a moment he began to grow hard again and the stroking resumed, more slowly this time though. Angela closed her eyes and lifted her hips to him, timing her thrusts to his. She began to come again, spasming time after time.
“Nice,” he said.
Eventually—he had no idea how much time might have passed—she said, “We have to stop now.” She laughed. “I’m too sore to go any longer. I’m sorry.”
The truth was that he was not a bit sorry. He was damn near worn out by so much of a good thing.
Angela got a hand towel and wiped him off, then cleaned herself while Longarm dressed.
“Will I see you again?” she asked.
He shrugged. “That depends on things that ain’t all in my control.”
“Come by if you find the time,” she offered. “My door is always open.” She laughed and cupped her pussy in one hand. “So are other things, too.”
Longarm put on his hat and started for the door.
“One more thing,” Angela said.
He stopped, his hand on the doorknob.
“It’s my husband. Watch out for him. Larry is…excitable. And a sneak. So be careful.”
“Thanks.” He let himself out the door. Angela was naked and in no condition to be seen. He would have locked it behind him except he did not have a key, so he settled for leaving the closed sign in the window and making sure the door was latched behind him when he left.
Chapter 25
The sun was disappearing somewhere beyond the buildings on the other side of the street when Longarm left Angela’s Ladieswear. He had already had his supper earlier but he was feeling a mite puckish after his wrestling match with Angela Morris. And anyway he had no desire to spend the evening in that drab little hotel room.