by Tabor Evans
His young guide led him not through one of the more imposing oak- or cypress-wood street entrances, but into a slot between what looked like two separate properties. At the far end of the gloomy passageway a smaller but stout-looking door had been deep-set in thick masonry. The kid knocked and the door swung inward, as if they'd been expected. But there was nobody visible in the dimly lit vestibule or on the flight of stairs winding down and lit by one wall sconce. It wasn't too clear which of four possible fort-like properties one was under as the stairs gave way to a long candle-lit corridor that seemed to have been laid out by a drunk trying to build straight.
As they neared a darker archway someone lit a candle on the far side of the beaded curtain across it, as if they'd been waiting up until then in the dark. Longarm smiled thinly at the theatrics of La Bruja. He wondered what the priests at that church near the plaza thought of the spooky way their neighborhood witch carried on. He knew they'd given up, down Mexico way, on trying to wean their simple folk of reliance on an odd mishmash of Roman and Aztec cures for what ailed them. He had more personal respect for the Mexican medicine men who described themselves as curados, who dosed sick folks with weeds and prayed to Christian saints and more pleasant Indian spirits. The ones claiming brujeria or powers of black magic did more harm than good with their love potions and such. But since this old witch said she wanted to help a friend of La Revolucien, the least a man could do would be to listen politely. So he pasted a respectful smile across his face as he followed the kid through the beaded archway, to get smacked in the face with a disturbingly pleasant surprise.
La Bruja, if that was who he was smiling down on as she reclined on a chaise in an outfit of black Spanish lace over velvet, was a breathtaking brunette of indeterminate age and likely pure Spanish ancestry. Her skin was even paler than that ivory shade high-toned Spanish ladies strove for, to show off darker aristocratic blood in their veins. She didn't look sick, but poor young Lenore Colbert hadn't looked that pale the other night slaughtered and drained.
The beautiful but mighty spooky lady waved Longarm to a hassock on his side of a low-slung coffee table, and said coffee and cakes were on their way. As he removed his hat and took his seat Longarm reconsidered calling her a lady. For the hassock was doubtless low-slung on purpose, to make the average guest look up to La Bruja as she held court atop that higher chaise. Longarm was a lot taller than average, and she still managed to sort of look down on him even while she was half reclining on one shapely side.
But Longarm had been sent to see the C.O. a lot in his army days, and he knew the way you got back at them for playing such games was to pay no mind.
So he just sat there, a politely questioning smile on his face, until La Bruja said, "Perhaps I should get right to the point in your own Yanqui manner, El Brazo Largo. I understand we are both on simpatico terms with such leaders of La Revolucien as La Mariposa and El Gato?"
He shrugged. "Nobody with a lick of sense admires the current Administration of Old Mexico, senorita."
She sighed and said, "Senora, porfavor. I am proud of the things my late husband did for the cause of Libre Mexico before los rurales shot him down like a dog against a wall. He and his brave comrades all refused the blindfold and faced their executioners with all of the scorn they deserved!"
Longarm nodded soberly. "I'm sure your average rurale firing squad deserves all the scorn they can get, senora. But didn't you say something before about getting to the point of this visit?"
She didn't answer as a much darker maid with more Indian features came in with a real silver salver piled with almond cakes and a fine old silver service. There was some sort of family crest on the coffee urn. Longarm didn't try too hard to make it out. He didn't know too much about such notions to begin with, and family plate had a way of turning up far from its original family down Mexico way.
La Bruja dismissed her chica with a not unpleasant nod, and swung her satin slippers to the rug to sit properly as she poured a cup for Longarm. When he asked where her cup might be, she softly replied she didn't really care for coffee.
He could see she didn't mean to share the almond cakes with him either. So Longarm left both his coffee and cake untasted as well, murmuring something about just coming from the market and repeating his polite request they get to the point.
La Bruja said flatly, "An Anglo business associate of mine wants you dead. He offered me five hundred Yanqui dollars to have my own muchachos kill you. When I politely declined he raised the offer to a thousand."
Longarm whistled softly. "He must really want me dead. I've arrested many a gunslick who'd kill a man for less'n a hundred!"
La Bruja lay back on her chaise as if weary of the whole thing as she replied, "Not El Brazo Largo. I understand you got one of them on that steamer last night and killed the other one here in Corpus Christi this morning."
Longarm shook his head. "A frisky pup of a Ranger put the last fatal round in him. I was out to take him alive. I had an educated hunch they had to be working for somebody higher up, and I'd be much obliged if you'd tell me who that might be, seeing you surely know, senora."
La Bruja smiled reproachfully and sighed. "It was very cruel of God to leave us so far from Him and so close to el gringo. As I was just saying to that other one, your people and mine do not speak the same language even when they are speaking the same language. He was under the impression I was a mere criminal because I am required to bend just a few of your Yanqui laws in my efforts to fund political struggles in my own country. When I told him he would have to employ some other means, we parted on mutually agreeable terms. It would be foolish for wolves to fight in a world of sheep, and he knew none of us would betray his identity to anyone. I don't think he expected me to warn you like this, of course. But please do not ask me to tell you any more about him."
Longarm nodded soberly. "I'm commencing to follow your drift. You don't aim to have either the local Anglo underworld or my old pal El Gato sore at you. So I'll just thank you for the warning and see what I can work out on my own."
But as he leaned his weight forward to rise, La Bruja sat up some more and insisted, "You can't be seen on the streets of Corpus Christi in broad daylight! It's true, as your enemies say, you may be on the alert for typical Anglo riders. But an enemy clever enough to think a chico mejicano might have better luck ought to be able to hire other types you might not take for assassins until too late!"
"The gang's mostly dressed sort of cow, eh?" Longarm mused as he perched undecided on the edge of that low hassock.
To which La Bruja replied with a knowing laugh, "Do not try to get it out of me with a, how you say, process of elimination. I have been questioned by serious policemen and have the scars to prove it. Nobody gets anything out of me that I do wish them to know."
Longarm nodded soberly. "I was sort of wondering about the dim lighting in here, senora. I said I understood the bind you were in. I ain't going to try and beat the identity of that murderous pendejo out of a lady who's offered me food, shelter, and such pleasant company. But I got my own fish to fry, and whether we savvy the same old lingo or not, another lady they shot the other night in my place was pretty as well as innocent. She'd never done them a lick of harm and it's my duty to see they're punished."
La Bruja insisted, "But the men who killed her in your stateroom have been punished! You shot them both yourself! The people they might have been working for never ordered them to kill anyone but you. Can't you see that?"
Longarm smiled thinly. "I see this mastermind told you more than I might have about our earlier transactions. If he wanted me dead before I gunned a couple of his boys, he must have thought I was already after him. So why can't we say who he might be?"
La Bruja laughed lightly, a sort of surprising sound, and archly replied, "You are as clever as they say you are. But it won't work. I will tell you frankly, it does not matter to me and mine whether you are on one Anglo's trail or another's. I only wish to see you leave Corpus Christi ali
ve and well, should anyone south of the border ever ask. As I said, it is still broad daylight outside. You will stay here until dark. After sundown we can send you on your way to anywhere but the waterfront. They will be waiting for you along the docks, expecting you to try and board that midnight steamer."
He grimaced. "I got to board it. It's the only way I can get back down the coast to Escondrijo with a big Saratoga trunk!"
She smiled. "We can lend you a wagon and give you a map you would not be able to buy in any shop. People who deal in stolen goods along these shores do not wish to go through tedious customs declarations. So certain land routes that may appear more devious are somewhat safer. To begin with, nobody who does not know which route a traveler is taking would be in any position to ambush him, no?"
Longarm shrugged. "Your offer would be more tempting if it was only my own hide I was worried about, senora. But I'm the law and I'm paid to worry more about lawbreakers. Since I choose to doubt you and your own gang have busted any laws more serious than those of Texas and Old Mexico, we'll say no more about it. But murder on the high seas, or even a federal waterway, can't be constitutional to begin with, and they were trying to interfere with a federal agent on a government mission in any case."
He frowned thoughtfully and added, "Now, that's sort of odd as soon as you study on it. Why in thunder would they be so anxious to interfere in such a mundane mission? They surely must have thought I was up to something else. That's happened before. There ain't nothing like a guilty conscience to make some crooks act guilty when it might have been smarter to just let a dumb lawman go on about his own dumb chores!"
La Bruja asked just what his mission might have been, if it hadn't been catching her so-called business associate.
He started to tell her, feeling no call to lie about a simple pickup of a prisoner. But as soon as he'd studied on it, he had to laugh. "Now who's pumping whom for secrets with innocent questions, no offense? It's been grand talking you in the dark, senora. But now I'd best go see if I can shed some daylight on all this skullduggery along the Fever Coast."
She rose with him, pleading, "Please don't go! There are too many of them out there for you or even your Ranger friends to handle! None of you know what you are up against and, look, if this is all some sort of mistake, as you suspect, you ought to be able to carry out your real mission in Escondrijo and be safely on your way home before they know where you've gone!"
He picked up his hat and put it on as she moved to block his way out with her petite pale form. "Stay! Just until sundown! Is there nothing I can do or say to keep you safe down here with me?"
He had to grin as he recalled a mighty similar scene from a swell spooky book he'd read a spell back. He said, "I don't reckon you really mean to offer me a chance at eternal life in odd company, if life is what they call Miss Carmilla's disturbing ways."
"Carmilla?" the pallid brunette demanded with a hurt look. "Are you comparing me to that... creature in that horror Story by that French writer named Le Fanu?"
Longarm shook his head. "Irish, ma'am. I know it's an odd name for an Irishman, but that's what Sheridan Le Fanu is. He's written a heap of swell spooky yarns, and his story about Carmilla, written in '72 or so, is only one of 'em. His story about Uncle Silas is really creepy. You say you've read the one about Miss Carmilla?"
La Bruja suddenly looked even smaller as she sighed. "In a Spanish translation. A vicious woman in one of those endearing attempts to be humorous gave me her copy, asking if it reminded me of anyone we knew. I am called La Bruja by more simple people because I seem to have powers they do not understand. I avoid the sunlight because there is a price on my head and because I suffer a condition that runs in some noble Spanish families. Sunlight hurts my eyes and makes my skin break out in a frightening rash. I assure you I do not enjoy the taste of blood."
She hadn't said she didn't know what it tasted like, and Carmilla had told that young English gal in the book she only wanted to suck out her blood because she really liked her.
He'd read other books, there being little else to do a week or so before payday and the Denver Public Library being so well stocked. So he nodded soberly and said, "I've read about that inherited condition. I reckon it runs in noble families because rich folks don't have to go out and work by broad day whether they can stand it or not. I can see how more fortunate families, nursing their delicate skins indoors all day, and only coming out after dark to attend society doings in maybe a coach with heavy window drapes, might give rise to sillier stories about mysterious society ladies such as Miss Carmilla. But I know you ain't that sort of gal, so..."
"I'm not a lesbian vampire who turns into a black panther at will or sleeps all day in her coffin! I'm not! I'm not! I'm only a poor widow with a delicate skin condition!"
He tried not to laugh. It would have been rude to point out she had a whole gang of Mex border bandits as well. But his eyes must've twinkled, and she must've read his amused, mocking expression wrong. For she was suddenly stepping out of the satin and lace around her trim ankles, in no more than her long black socks and slippers as she grabbed him by both shirtsleeves and stared up wildly demanding, "Do you really take me for some blood-sucking lesbian, El Brazo Largo?"
He hauled her in and kissed her good, as most men would have, before he recalled how someone in that book had been about to do just the same to Miss Carmilla when he noticed the graveyard mold on her breath. La Bruja's soft parted lips smelled more like the almond cakes she'd doubtless had enough of before he'd arrived. It didn't hurt a bit to have her tonguing him so teasingly. So he tongued her back, and cupped a bare buttock in each big palm to hug her tighter to his jeans as she rubbed her small proud cupcakes over the front of his thin shirt. But once they'd come up for air he felt obliged to ask about that chica coming back for the coffee service neither one of them had bothered with.
La Bruja puffed reassuringly that nobody ever pestered her and her guest unless she wanted them to, and asked him to follow her lead from such faint light as there was by her coffee table.
He was able to make out her pale hourglass form, floating ghostly above the frilly lace garters of her black thigh-length socks of jet-black lisle. Then she led the way to what looked more like a bed than that coffin Miss Camilla had favored, and the next thing they knew he was driving something kinder than a wooden stake into her, further down, and she wasn't acting like Miss Carmilla at all.
The spooky lady in that story had spit blood and carried on just awful as she was getting penetrated in her coffin. But La Bruja kissed mighty sweet and moved her hips just right as he got her to come a good dozen hammerings ahead of him.
Once they both came, she agreed it would be even nicer if they both stripped down completely and started over with a black silk pillow under her ghostly but mighty warm little rump. So he didn't get to ask her about those Anglo crooks until he'd made them both come some more.
She still refused to tell him as they shared a cheroot with her disheveled head on his shoulder and free hand on his semierection. As she gently stroked his manly organ-grinder she pleaded, "Please don't try to take advantage of my weak nature, El Brazo Largo. I am already so ashamed of giving in to my own curious nature."
He hugged her bare flesh closer with the smoke gripped in bared teeth as he said, "I'm still curious about them rascals out to kill me. What were you so curious about, senora?"
She giggled and confided, "You, senor. They say La Mariposa still brags insufferably about the many times she made El Brazo Largo come in her, down in Ciudad Mejico when they were hiding from los rurales in a railroad signal tower. Is that story true by the way?"
Longarm chuckled fondly and declared, "Truer than tales of a blood-sucking lesbian who can turn into a black panther on occasion, I reckon. It ain't polite to talk about screwing ladies who ain't here to defend themselves, and I never thought you were a lesbian to begin with."
She demurely asked if he was convinced she didn't like to suck, and when he allowed h
e was, she proved him wrong by sliding her head down his naked belly, long hair trailing, and proceeding to suck like all get out, although it wasn't his blood she was sucking.
So what with one pleasant surprise and another, Longarm wound up spending the rest of the day in the dark with La Bruja, and while he finally learned her real name and enough to lock her away for years, he never did get her to tell him who those other crooks were, or why they were after him, Lord love her.
CHAPTER 6
Longarm still would have done it his own way, weather permitting. But when he checked in at the steam line again that night, they told him none of their vessels would be coming or going till that heavy weather let up outside.
That sounded reasonable. The warm wet wind was blowing harder by the hour, and the heavy air smelled like spent brass cartridges, or a coming hurricane. So there was nobody laying in wait for him around the deserted wind-swept waterfront when he circled in silently from the lee side of some dark and shuttered warehouses with his gun out and his eyes slitted against the gathering storm.
When he got back to La Bruja's, she naturally wanted him to spend more time with her, and he was tempted. For he could likely come again if she really set her mind and lush lips to it. But he insisted on holding her to that other promise, and so it was along about quarter past midnight, with neither coastal steamers nor paid killers to be seen in the swirling darkness, when Longarm finally left by way of a clamshell-paved wagon trace to the south, driving a team of Spanish mules as he hunkered half sheltered by a flapping canvas wagon cover with old Norma's Saratoga trunk and some trail supplies in the wagon box behind his sprung seat.
He commenced having second thoughts about the grand notion a mile or less outside of town, when the light got even worse and he had to take the word of the mules and the gritty sounds of the steel-rimmed wheels that he was still following that shell path through what seemed like a mighty herd of wind-whipped palmettos flapping fronds on all sides as they strove to uproot their fool selves and take off like stampeding bats.