by Tabor Evans
Longarm stared at her gravely. He turned to Cynthia, who owned a look similar to her friend’s.
“All right,” he said. “You want blood? I’ll give you blood. Can either of you shoot a rifle?”
Cynthia slid McIntyre’s carbine from the saddle boot beneath her right thigh. Coolly, she said, “I might have been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, Marshal Long, but my uncle gave me a little target practice now and then . . . when Aunt May wasn’t looking.”
Longarm looked at Casey. “What about you, young lady?”
“Ryan knew this country. That meant he knew that women as well as men should know how to handle a revolver and a rifle . . . if things come to that.”
Longarm tossed her the rifle he’d taken from the dead man. “I reckon things have come to that.”
“Yes, they certainly have,” Casey said, gritting her pretty teeth as she racked a fresh cartridge into the action.
“This way,” Longarm said, glancing over his shoulder as he gigged the sorrel up ahead of the women and down the corridor that was about forty yards wide, with tufts of wiry brown grass growing up along the edges. The trail appeared to be used mostly by game and wild horses, maybe the occasional mule-mounted prospector.
At the far end, the where the walls of rubble gradually lowered before disappearing altogether, Longarm reined off the trail’s left side. He swung down and tied his horse in a small grove of aspens, behind some large rocks. The women followed suit and then he led them up into the rocks until all three were overlooking the trail.
“Keep your heads down until I give you the wave,” Longarm said. “I’ll be up there.” He indicated a higher point on their right. “Take your time, pick out a rider, and blow the bastard’s head off!”
“I like the sound of that,” Casey said.
“Oh, I do, too,” Cynthia said. “I do, too.”
Longarm glanced at each woman incredulously.
Their eyes were hard, jaws determined. Their mussed, dusty hair blew around their face. Longarm was, indeed, riding with a pair of hellcats. The prettiest pair of hellcats he’d ever laid eyes on, but hellcats just the same . . .
He gave a wry chuckle, then scrambled up into the rocks above the women’s location and hunkered down behind a tongue-shaped boulder.
He looked down the trail. The four riders were coming down the ridge, their horses lunging forward and digging their hooves into the slope for purchase, dust billowing around them. There was one lead rider, two riding abreast behind him, and one riding about thirty yards behind, a red neckerchief billowing around his neck.
The lead rider was looking at the ground, making sure he was still on Longarm’s and the women’s trail. They were probably trying to figure out why there were three sets of horse tracks instead of two.
Just stay distracted, Longarm thought, pressing his right shoulder up against the side of the boulder and staring into the canyon below him. Just stay distracted . . .
He did not risk another look at the oncoming riders. He judged their distance by the thuds of their horses’ hooves. He looked down the rocks on his left. The women were hunkered low, side by side, squinting up at Longarm. They were awaiting his signal.
The horse clomps were getting louder. The riders were almost directly below, following Longarm’s and the women’s tracks.
“Careful in here, fellas,” one of them said. “Damn good place for . . . . oof!”
Longarm had signaled the women, and they’d quickly aimed and fired, blowing the lead rider off his horse before he’d been able to finish his sentence. Longarm watched the women patiently shooting, saw another man blown off his horse and getting his left boot caught in the stirrup. The horse dragged the man about ten yards before the boot slipped free, and the rider slid and rolled, bellowing.
The girls had aimed well with their first shots, but the next shots were wild. There were two riders left, and they were now swinging down from their saddles and bolting for cover.
Longarm planted a bead on one and drilled the man in his lower back as the gent flew over a boulder on the far side of the gap. Longarm triggered another round at the feet of the other gent, who stopped suddenly, dropped to a knee, and flung a rifle round back toward Longarm.
The slug smashed against Longarm’s covering boulder, the shrill spang setting up a ringing in the lawman’s ears. Longarm had pulled his head back behind the rock. A rifle to his left crashed.
“Got him!” Casey cried.
Longarm looked into the gap below to see the fourth man crouched forward in the trail, crossing his arms on his belly. His rifle lay in the trail at his forehead, which he was grinding painfully into the ground.
Longarm thew up his right arm. “Hold your fire, ladies.”
He looked into the canyon.
All four men were down. The lead rider lay on his back nearly directly below Longarm, a bullet hole tattooing his forehead.
The man who’d been dragged was on his back and writhing in pain, clutching a hand to the right side of his neck.
The third man lay unmoving in the rocks while the last rider just now rolled onto his back, clutching his belly with one hand, pounding the other hand against the ground, and cursing loudly. Longarm decided to go down and take a look. He rose and was about to tell the women to stay put until he told them it was safe, but they were no longer hunkered down in the rocks.
They were both scrambling down through the boulders, heading for the trail!
Longarm ground his teeth. “You two get back here, goddamnit!”
Ignoring him, they both climbed down the rocks until they were standing in the trail. Longarm headed that way himself, wending his way amongst the boulders.
When a man screamed, Longarm leaped atop a boulder near the trail. Casey and Cynthia were standing over the man who’d been dragged by his horse and who was now cupping a hand to the side of his bloody neck.
“Put that rifle down, you little bitch!” the man shouted, glaring up at the pair. “Put it down this instant, or so help me . . . !”
“So help me what?” asked Casey in a sweet little voice that made Longarm’s oysters tighten and draw up into his scrotum.
She cocked a fresh round into her carbine’s breech.
“Hey!” the wounded man shouted. “I’m wounded. You got no call!”
Casey said, “You’re one of the men who shot Ryan.”
Longarm sucked a sharp breath. He remained atop the boulder. He saw no reason to interfere in a private matter. He wasn’t really a lawman here, anyway. Officially, he was on vacation. He would be obligated to write no reports on this matter.
“Ryan? Who the fuck’s Ryan?”
“Ryan was going to be my husband. He was the sheriff in Arapaho. You shot him . . . along with a few others of your gang.”
The wounded man had a broad, freckled face, big ears sticking out the side of his skull. He swallowed. His face was pale. He sat in the trail, his legs bent slightly inward, a fly buzzing around his nose.
“Easy now,” he said, haltingly, shifting his gaze between the two women. “Easy, now, you two. You girls can’t kill me. Neither one of you probably ever done it before. You pull that trigger, it’ll haunt you till the day you die!”
Casey snapped the Winchester to her shoulder, aimed carefully, and fired. The wounded man’s head snapped back so hard that Longarm thought he heard his neck crack.
“We’ll see about that,” Casey said tightly as the man sagged to the ground. Cursing, she cocked a fresh cartridge into her carbine’s chamber.
The two women looked around. The last man Longarm had shot groaned to Longarm’s right, about twenty yards down trail. Casey and Cynthia walked back along the trail toward the man who lay on his back, belly rising and falling sharply as he breathed.
Longarm watched the two women pass below and before him, heading from
his left to his right, both holding their rifles up high across their breasts. Their hair bounced on their shoulders. Their faces were set like stone.
Longarm’s loins grew heavy. He gave a wry snort, and when they’d passed, he leaped from the rock to the ground and walked up trail toward the horses. When he heard the last of the four outlaws scream, he did not stop or look back. He shook his head, chuckled, and kept walking west along the trail.
Behind him, the man screamed again.
And again.
A rifle barked.
The man yelped sharply. “Oh, you fuckin’ bitch! Oh! My knee!”
The rifle barked again.
“Oh, you’ve crippled me bad!” the man bellowed.
His bellowing was cut off by another rifle blast.
Then there was only silence.
Chapter 16
Late that afternoon, the sun nearly touching the tops of the western ridges, Longarm reined the sorrel to a halt and clicked back the hammer of the Winchester resting across his saddlebow.
He stared straight ahead at the old ghost town of Open Flat that was a ragged collection of log shanties and frame shacks nestled on this open stretch of high, flat desert, sandwiched between the Laramie Mountains to the south and the Snowy Range to the north. Nothing grew up this high except for bunchgrass, spindly cedars, and sage. And, apparently, tumbleweeds.
The silver-gray old ruin of a mining town was nearly buried in them.
The sky was a vast, pale blue arcing over the broad valley in which Open Flat huddled, gradually being reclaimed by the high desert prairie.
The town had boomed about ten years ago, but when the silver and copper veins pinched out, the boom went bust and the people gradually started to leave the region. Now there might have been a ranch or two in this vast area southeast of Arapaho, but the town itself was nothing but moldering timbers, broken-out windows, and disintegrating boardwalks piled high with tumbleweeds that blew here in the ceaseless wind.
Even now the wind blew, kicking up dust along the broad main street in front of Longarm, shunting miniature cyclones this way and that. A dusty shingle chain squawked, and a loose door tapped against its frame.
Besides the dust and a single tumbling tumbleweed, nothing moved. Longarm touched heels to the sorrel’s flanks, and the horse clomped forward into the town, the lawman turning his head slowly from right to left and back again, appraising all the false-fronted buildings lining the street. Most had boasted paint at one time—the gaudy paint and ostentatious trim of a high-stepping mining camp—but time had long since painted them all dusty gray.
Here and there a swatch of purple or spruce green or sunrise yellow showed through the dust. But for the most part the town was colorless.
Longarm had been through the town a few times when it was booming, and a few times after the mines had played out. Last time he was here, maybe four years ago, an old fellow had been keeping a saloon open for the occasional stubborn prospector or saddle tramp with enough pocket jingle for a glass of stale ale or a venomous whiskey.
As Longarm rode ahead along the dusty street pounded to flour by thousands of ore drays, he looked around for the old watering hole, thinking there was a possibility it might still be open. But then, if he remembered right, the gent who’d run the place—he couldn’t recollect the man’s name nor the name of his place—had been old even then.
He’d be nearly as old as the mountains now. He’d most likely passed on. Longarm was convinced that was so when he’d reached the midway point of the three-block-long main street and hadn’t spied any place that appeared to still be running.
Most of the buildings looked like the rotten teeth in a long-dead skull. And from the way things looked, if there was anyone around but the stray coyote or packrat, he’d be mighty surprised.
That was all right with Longarm. His whiskey was nearly gone, and he could use a drink, but trouble was dogging his heels in the form of the Drummond gang, and he didn’t want to bring the trouble to anyone else’s doorstep. He’d headed here because he’d thought it would be a good place to fort up and wait for the Drummond gang’s arrival.
What was left of them, that was. He and the women had probably whittled the gang’s number down to around ten or so by now. Still stiff odds, but Longarm had thrown dice against higher and lived to tell the tale.
He hipped around in his saddle and waved his rifle in the air above his head. A few seconds later, Cynthia and Casey rode out from behind a clump of rocks along the trail, a quarter mile south of town, and started riding toward him.
“Well, I’ll be a pan-fried turkey buzzard,” a raspy voice said out of nowhere. “If it ain’t Deputy United States Marshal Custis P. Long . . .”
The unexpected voice startled Longarm as well as his horse. The lawman held the sorrel’s reins taut in his left hand while raising his rifle in his right hand.
It took his eyes a moment to pick out the old man sitting under a porch awning against one of the nondescript, age-weathered, wind-blasted buildings. Then he saw the broad, still-intact front window that was relatively clean by Open Flat standards, and the two bat-wing doors. The old man sat in a chair between them, leaning forward on a cane, a funnel-brimmed Stetson on his withered old head.
He cackled, showing maybe two, possibly three tobacco-brown teeth in his gums, and shook his head. “You didn’t expect to find me still kickin’, did you, Longarm?”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“You look like you’re seein’ a ghost!”
“Avriel . . .” Longarm said, lowering the Winchester and frowning at the old gent until his full name returned to his memory. “Avriel Simms.”
“Want a drink, Longarm?”
Longarm surveyed the building behind the old man. Now that he looked more closely, he could see the badly faded sign announcing AVRIEL SIMMS OPEN FLAT SALOON in large letters that had once been green but now looked gunmetal gray behind their coating of dust and grit.
“Your place still open, Avriel?”
“Why, sure it is. You’re my first customer of the day.” The old man chewed on that, leaning forward on his cane and making a pensive expression. “Matter o’ fact, you’re my first customer of the whole week. The only one I had last week was ole Rowdy McNamara. He owns a ranch out on Bitter Creek, and when him and the old lady get to goin’ at it . . .”
The oldster let his voice trail off as he turned his gaze toward Longarm’s back trail. The two women were approaching now, holding their horses to slow walks, heads turned to regard the old man whose thin lips were shaping a slow, delighted smile. “Say,” Simms said, “what in the name o’ Sam Hill is that.”
Longarm glanced behind and chuckled. “Those are called women. Surely you remember the breed, Avriel.”
“Sure, sure—I remember. Don’t remember ever seein’ a pair as ripe as them two there, though. Holy moly!” The old man leaned forward harder, using the cane to hoist himself to his feet. He was so stoop-shouldered that even standing he appeared to be half sitting. “My, my.”
“Ladies, meet Avriel Simms. He runs the saloon here in Open Flat. Avriel, meet Cynthia Larimer and Casey Summerville.”
The old man shifted his weight from one old boot to another and grinned lasciviously, his washed-out blue eyes glinting copper in the severely angling sunlight. He removed his hat from his bald, age-spotted head and clamped it over his heart. “Miss Larimer, Miss Summerville, it is a privilege and an honor, and rest assured you’re a sight for these sore, old eyes.”
Cynthia swept a hand back through one side of her mussed hair. “I doubt that, Mr. Simms, but thank you for saying so.”
“I doubt we’re much of a sight for any eyes,” said Casey, “but we do appreciate your saying so.”
“Come on in!” Avriel said, beckoning
with his hat. “Come on in and . . .”
Just then a figure appeared over the bat-wings—a woman’s craggy face capped with coal-black hair that hugged her withered head like a cap. The old woman looked around, blinking, and croaked, “Who on earth are you talkin’ to, you old goat?”
“Company, Gerta!” Simms said. “Come on out here and meet Longarm and his two young wimmen friends—Miss Cynthia and Miss Casey!”
The old woman seemed to flush as she stepped through the doors haltingly, brushing at her hair that was pulled tightly back and wound in a fist-sized bun behind her head. She wore what appeared a pink velvet ball gown, ratty around the edges, and a gossamer blue stole. “Well, well . . .” she said, glancing around. “Two purty girls and . . . why . . . look there . . . who’d you say the big man there is, Avriel?”
“That there is Custis P. Long—deputy U.S. marshal. Most folks call him Longarm.”
“And you’re welcome to, as well, Miss Gerta,” Longarm said, lifting his hat straight up from his head and dipping his chin in a courtly bow.
Gerta smiled shyly, slitting her long, dark brown eyes that no doubt had been quite ravishing in their day, revealing that nowadays she had a few more teeth than Simms, but not by much. “Oh,” she said. “Oh . . . how nice.”
Avriel said, “This here’s Gerta Breckenridge.”
“Holy shit,” Longarm heard himself say though he didn’t think he’d said it loudly enough for anyone except him and possibly the young women to hear.
“Yessir, Gerta Breckenridge,” Simms said. “Opera Queen of the New Frontier . . .”
“Sister of God with a voice like Mother Mary,” Longarm finished for the man, remembering the famous line penned by a newspaper writer sometime just before the Civil War had broken out, and Gerta Breckenridge had been singing in saloons and beer tents from Texas to the northern Rockies.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am,” Longarm said, covering his chest with his hat. “Didn’t know you were . . . were still in the, uh . . . profession . . .” he added, haltingly.