by Tabor Evans
Longarm turned his head forward. He saw the shingle for the sheriff’s office and jail ahead and on his right, around a slight bend in the street. Across from the jailhouse, on Longarm’s left, was a three-story hotel of pink brick called the Diamondback Hotel. Just up the same side of the street were a law office and a bank.
Between the two buildings was an alley, and in the mouth of the alley were two well-dressed men—one tall and slender; the other, short and wiry, with pewter hair and matching mustache. They were standing close together talking, but as Longarm passed them the taller man nudged the shorter man, and they both turned to watch Longarm angle over toward the sheriff’s office.
Something told Longarm that one of the well-dressed gents was the lawyer; the other, the banker.
As he pulled the bay to a halt in front of the sheriff’s office—a small, mud-brick affair with a woven-brush roof, set behind a narrow wooden stoop, he glimpsed movement in a third-story hotel window. He narrowed his eyes to scrutinize the window more closely. It was hard to tell in the harsh, midday light, but he thought he saw a woman in a red dress look out at him before drawing her head back quickly behind a white lace curtain.
Longarm swung down from the bay’s back. He glanced again toward the alley in which the well-dressed gents were still standing, staring toward him. Under his return gaze, they both jerked slightly as though startled, and turned to each other. They both muttered a few words and then parted, the shorter man walking into the bank, the taller man disappearing into the law office.
Longarm glanced at the third-story hotel window in which he’d seen what he thought was a pretty woman in a red dress. She was no longer there.
He cleared his throat dubiously. It was still best to not make too much of the reactions his presence had evoked. This was a remote town, and strangers of any stripe were often met with suspicion.
The rangy lawman threw his reins over the lone, weather-silvered pine pole that served as a hitchrack, walked up onto the jailhouse’s front porch, tapped once on the door, and tripped the steel and leather latch. He pushed the door open and squinted into the dense velvety shadows.
The man who’d been sitting in front a rolltop desk on his left jerked his head up so quickly from where it had been tipped toward his chest that he spilled the coffee he’d been holding in one hand and dropped the thin book with a yellow pasteboard cover that he’d been holding in the other hand.
The man jerked his red face toward Longarm, scowling. “What the . . . ?” His right hand slid toward the pearl-gripped revolver holstered low on his right thigh clad in striped broadcloth.
His dark brown eyes glinted angrily, his nostrils flared, and his black mustache twitched. “Just what in the fuck do you think you’re doin’, asshole, bargin’ in here like you own the damn place!”
Longarm watched the man’s right hand close over the pearl grips of his holstered Peacemaker. “If you draw that hogleg, sonny, you best be right good with it.”
He paused as the man continued to glare at him.
“And right sure that that’s what you want to do,” Longarm added, arching his brows and splaying his right hand on his belly, near his own Colt .44.
Chapter 6
The man sitting in the chair with his hands on the pearl grips of his Peacemaker studied Longarm skeptically.
Hesitation touched his mud-black eyes. A slight flush rose in his cheeks, which were covered with a two- or three-day growth of scraggly black beard stubble, over greasy, large-pored skin that didn’t take the sun well. He had a scar on the nub of his left cheek, just above the beard. A sheriff’s badge was pinned to his shabby wool vest.
“Who the fuck are you?” he barked, keeping his hand on his pistol.
“Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis P. Long. I’m here to see Sheriff Des Rainey. Who are you? Deputy?” Longarm knew the man before him wasn’t Rainey. Billy Vail had told him that his old friend was six feet or thereabouts.
The man’s demeanor changed abruptly. Drastically. The scar on his left cheek twitched and the color drained out of his face. He released the handle of his S&W and let his gaze flick around like two bugs trying to find their way through a window.
“No, no,” he said, glancing sheepishly at the badge on his vest. “The sheriff is . . . uh . . . he’s out of town.”
“Where?”
“Where?” Now he looked peeved. “Well, I ain’t sure that’s any of your damn business.” He rose from his chair and idly brushed at the coffee that had sprayed across his shirt and vest. His belligerence was back. Standing a good six inches shorter than Longarm, he had to look up at him. “What do you want with him, anyway? And how do I know you’re who you say you are?”
“You get a lot of men coming here professing to be deputy United States marshals, do you, mister?”
The man didn’t seem to know how to answer that. He just continued to rake his hand slowly across the coffee stain on his vest and peer up skeptically at Longarm.
“Well, do you?” Longarm said. He did not like this man at all. That he was a son of a bitch was obvious by his demeanor and by the way he dressed and by the pearl-gripped pistol he carried in his holster. The gun didn’t fit him—it was too pretty for him—but he wished it did.
“No, I don’t reckon,” the man said, his eyes working around in their sockets again, gravitating toward a whiskey bottle on the cluttered desk before him. “I’m just sayin’ . . . you know . . . a fella can’t be too careful who he talks to. Who he tells where the sheriff’s at . . . that’s all . . .”
He stared at the bottle.
“Who are you?” Longarm said, removing his hand from his own gun and hooking his thumbs behind his cartridge belt.
“Melvin Little. I’m fillin’ in, you might say.” Little glanced at the badge again, as if he suddenly wished it weren’t there.
“And where’s Sheriff Rainey?”
“Hell if I know,” Little said, jerking his head toward the door. “All I know is I’m replacin’ him here for now. Orders of the town council. Why don’t you ask them where he went?”
Longarm wasn’t satisfied with the answer in the least. He doubted this unshaven, unwashed tinhorn with the expensive gun and the badge he still needed to grow into could tell the truth if his life depended on it.
“You must have some idea.”
Little looked around the room as though for an answer. He was getting even more riled, more impatient. “Hell, I don’t know. North!” He threw his arm at the door. “That’s where he headed. North. There was some beef collared up around Beulah Springs and he rode up there to check it out!”
Longarm kept his gaze hard and commanding as he stared down at the man shifting around uncomfortably before him. “You sure about that?” He pitched his voice with threat.
“Sure enough!”
“Where exactly? Who’s ranch? I’ll ride out and meet him.”
“I don’t know. They didn’t tell me who’s ranch he rode out to!”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“The town council.”
Longarm was even more skeptical, and he was also growing more and more uneasy. “Why wouldn’t Rainey have told you himself? You are his deputy, aren’t you?”
“No, I ain’t his deputy, big man. I’m just sittin’ in for him.”
“The town council gave you the job?”
“That’s right.”
“Who’s on the town council?”
Little blinked up at Longarm, hesitating. “Doc Baker, Charlie Mulligan, and Alexander Richmond.”
Towns as small as Diamondback often had very small town councils, which weren’t really councils at all, but three mucky-mucks who got together to call the shots. “Where can I find these men?”
“What the hell you wanna bother them for? Listen, you got no call to come barging in here stirrin’ up trouble.”
“I didn’t know I was stirrin’ up trouble,” Longarm said, raising his voice. “I was just asking where I’d find Sheriff Rainey, and you got all riled over that. Would you mind telling me why?”
“I ain’t riled. You’re the one who’s riled!”
Longarm looked down. The man’s right hand was once again closed over the pearl grips of his .45. Longarm said nothing. Little followed his gaze to his own hand. He released the pistol, looking sheepish.
He slacked down in his chair, turned toward the desk as though he were about to get back to work, and tossed his hand at the door. “Go on, get outta here! I don’t got time to listen to a bunch of federal blarney! Go on an’ leave me alone. I don’t get paid near enough to put up with this shit.”
Longarm gave a wry chuff as he stared down at Little, obviously a small-time gunslinger whom the councilmen had pinned a badge to. They probably hadn’t been able to find anybody else. The question was, why had they needed to?
“All right. I’ll leave . . . for now. But I’ll be back, Mr. Little. You can count on that.”
Longarm backed toward the door. He wouldn’t put it past the nervous, angry Little to shoot him between his shoulder blades. Little turned his wicked, deceitful gaze on him once more. “Rainey called you in?”
Longarm stopped at the door. “That’s right. You know why?”
Little turned his head toward the desk. His eyes were as scared as they were nervous and angry. He didn’t say anything, so Longarm walked out across the narrow porch and down the steps to the street.
Frustrated, he looked around. He thought he saw a shadow move quickly away from a window in the bank. He looked up at the Diamondback Hotel and thought he saw a shadow move in the same window in which he’d seen the pretty woman looking out at him before.
He rolled it through his mind.
The sheriff calls on his chief marshal friend for help, but when help arrives, said help finds a nervous, belligerent little man who fancies himself a gunfighter in the sheriff’s position. In the sheriff’s own chair, in fact. And none of the little man’s stories about where Longarm could find the sheriff made any sense. Nor did they sound believable.
In fact, they sounded fishy as hell.
Now the strange looks that Longarm had been greeted with when pulling into town seemed all the more suspicious and ominous, as well.
He looked up and down the street, pondering his next course of action. He’d just decided to start beating the bushes for the three-man town council when he heard the jailhouse door open behind him. He glanced over his shoulder to see Little staring out the partly open door.
He was wearing a funnel-brimmed black hat with a snakeskin band. He hadn’t been wearing the hat a minute ago. Apparently, he was on his way out. Heading where?
The man’s left nostril flared, and he slammed the door.
Longarm reconsidered his notion of seeking out the town council. It might be best to let Little start spreading the word of what Longarm was in town for. Nervous rats always made more noise than contented ones. Of course, that noise might come in the form of gunfire, but that was a risk Longarm was willing to take, since it was more or less his job to take it.
He’d kill some time locating a livery barn and stabling his horse. He’d bet that by the time his tack hit the saddle tree and the bay had started munching oats, word of Longarm’s discussion, if you could call it that, with Melvin Little would be ripping through the town like flames fed by a hot western wind.
He slipped his reins from the hitchrack, swung onto the bay’s back, and reined the horse west along the street, which suddenly seemed even quieter than when Longarm had first ridden into town. He continued riding until, about halfway between the jailhouse and the west end of town, he spied a livery barn sitting on a northern cross street.
As he approached, he saw that a large painted sign stretching over the barn’s second story, above the hayloft doors, announced CASCADE LIVERY AND FEED, BROWN BROS., PROP. A slender young man in dusty, hay-flecked trousers and a white shirt was sitting on a chair outside the barn’s open doors, whittling what appeared to be a horse out of a chunk of pine, and not too handily.
Appearing around seventeen or eighteen, the long-limbed, gangly lad had long red hair and a pimply, pale complexion. He watched Longarm approach and then set the stick and his barlow knife aside and rose from his old kitchen chair, brushing shavings from his pants.
“Help you, mister?” he said, squinting and wincing against the harsh midday light.
“You sure can, son,” Longarm said, trying to sound jovial. “You can house this old cayuse for me. I tell you—I’ll be plenty happy to get us both out of the sun. Damn, it’s hot!”
“It shore is!”
“Tell me—where’s the best place to wet one’s whistle around here?” Longarm said, handing the kid his reins.
“Ah, I wouldn’t know.” The kid took the reins and poked his shabby hat back off his forehead as he gazed toward the main street. “My folks don’t let me drink nothin’ but milk an’ sarsaparilla, but most of the fellas seem to like the Dragoon best.”
“That’s the busiest, usually?”
“Yeah, usually, but you won’t have no trouble gettin’ a drink in there now. On Saturday night is when you’d best get there first thing, I hear.” The kid looked around cautiously, as though to make sure no one else was in earshot, and then leaned toward Longarm, closing one eye deviously. “Old Walter Tattermyer’s got him some girls that I hear . . . well, they’ll do about anything a man wants . . . if you get my drift, mister.”
The kid snickered, showing his long, white horse teeth.
“No, shit?” Longarm said. “You mean, even . . . ?”
“Yep, that’s what I hear. For only two dollars, too! Me—I’m thinkin’ about savin’ up and then goin’ in the back way one of these nights, so word don’t get around.” The boy frowned suddenly and looked up at Longarm skeptically. “Say, you wouldn’t tell no one what I just said, would you, mister? If my ma ever found out, she’d crack me over the head with her broom handle!”
“Your secret’s safe with me.” Longarm laughed and stuck out his hand. “I’m Custis Long, but you can call me Longarm.”
“I’m Ronnie Brown,” the boy said, jerking his chin toward the big sign nailed to the barn. “My Pa and his brother Wilfred own this place, but I’m about the only one who works here. I bust my butt feedin’ horses and shovelin’ shit and polishing the rental buggies, and all they do is fish or play horseshoes.”
Quickly, so as to try and catch the kid off guard, Longarm said, “Say, Ronnie, you wouldn’t happen to know where my old friend Des Rainey is, would you? I rode all the way out here from Denver, and he doesn’t seem to be in his office.”
The kid studied him closely, apprehensively. “You . . . uh . . . mean . . . the sheriff?”
“That’s right. Any idea where I might find him?”
Along with bartenders and whores, livery boys were often the best sources of information, as men’s lives tended to rotate around drink, sex, and horses. Longarm hated to put the lad on the spot, but he had a feeling it might very well be for a higher cause—namely, the well-being of Des Rainey.
“Sheriff Rainey?”
“That’s right, Ronnie—Sheriff Rainey. I bet he stabled his horse with you, didn’t he? If he’d lit out anywhere, he’d have picked up his horse here, maybe mentioned where he was going.”
Ronnie looked around owlishly. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, mister. If . . . if Sheriff Rainey ain’t in his office, I sure as hell don’t know where he is. Now, why don’t you leave me alone to tend your horse or you can just tend him yourself!”
Ronnie glared at Longarm, red-faced with anger and fear. His eyes were rheumy, as though he were near tears. Longarm wasn’t going to get any more out of the boy than he had out of Little.
S
omeone had put the fear of God in him.
Longarm raised his hands. “All right, boy. All right.”
The kid turned away and began leading the bay into the barn.
“Hold on,” Longarm said, and walked over and slid his Winchester ’73 from the saddle scabbard. When he’d draped his saddlebags over his shoulder, Ronnie looked away from him quickly and continued leading the bay into the barn.
Longarm stared after him, scowling. Finally, he hiked the saddlebags higher on his shoulder, set his rifle on the opposite shoulder, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out a three-for-a-nickel cheroot. When he was this frustrated, he liked to chew some of it out on a smoke.
Swinging around and striding toward the main street, he fired a match on his thumbnail and touched the flame to the cheroot. When he had the cigar burning to his satisfaction, he tossed the match into the dirt. He smoked as he walked. The dirt was so hot beneath his boots that he felt as though he were walking through coals.
But as hot as the sun was, a cold fist had hold of his guts. Something told him that fist was likely to squeeze all the harder before it finally let go.
Chapter 7
The Dragoon Saloon sat kitty-corner across the street from the jailhouse, about three buildings east of the pink brick hotel.
Longarm stepped onto the boardwalk out front of the place and under the saloon’s front awning, relieved to finally have the sun off his head. Hearing a loud buzz of commotion emanating from inside, he slowed his pace as he headed for the batwings. He stopped. The buzz continued. The men inside seemed to have a lot to talk about.
Their tone was owly, befuddled, angry.
Longarm felt a self-satisfied smile quirk his mouth corners around the burning cheroot in his teeth. That wildfire he’d set earlier had indeed spread as far as the Dragoon Saloon, at least.
He swung through the batwings and stopped just inside, letting the doors swing manically behind him before they scraped to an abrupt stop. That seemed to be the signal for everyone in the long, heavily shadowed room to swing a head toward him.