by Tabor Evans
The conversation stopped as abruptly as the doors had closed.
Five men stood with their backs to the bar. A half dozen or so others sat at three separate tables to the left of the bar. The men at the bar had been joining the conversation—a single conversation, it seemed—of the men sitting at the tables.
One of those men was none other than Melvin Little himself. He sat perched on a chair back, feet on the chair, leaning forward on his knees, a sheepish look on his face. His sheriff’s badge glinted in the light from the windows. He turned his head slowly away from Longarm, like a cowed dog, and looked down at the table before him.
Two big men sat at his table, both watching Longarm with grim, belligerent looks on their faces—one bearded, the other with only a mustache. Both men wore dusters, and they were heavily armed. The one with only the mustache nodded his head slightly at the newcomer and stretched his lips back from his teeth in a menacing grin.
Longarm walked over to the bar, set his rifle and saddlebags on the bartop to his right, and looked at the bartender—a short, thick, muscular man with a bull chest and Indian and Mexican features. His broad, clean-shaven face looked as though it had been used by a blacksmith’s apprentice to practice hammering on. He regarded Longarm blankly, thick, chapped lips pursed.
“I’d like a beer and a shot of Maryland rye,” Longarm said.
“Don’t got none of that stuff,” said the barman.
“The beer or the rye?”
The thick bartender just looked at him.
Longarm smiled and said, “All right, how about a beer and whatever kind of rye you got?”
Keeping his dark eyes on Longarm, the thick man grabbed a beer schooner from a pyramid atop the bar and a shot glass from another pyramid near the schooners. He splashed whiskey into the shot glass, filled the schooner from a spigot, and set both on the bar in front of Longarm.
The room had fallen so quiet that the bartender’s movements and even his heavy, raspy breathing sounded inordinately loud.
Outside, a hot wind blew. Dust ticked against the front of the place and billowed across the scarred puncheon floor beneath the batwings. A horseback rider passed, hooves thumping slowly, tack squawking, the horse’s bridle rattling when the mount shook its head.
The barman said, “Nickel for the beer. Twelve cents for the whiskey.”
Longarm reached into his trouser pocket, pulled out some gold and silver, and tossed three coins onto the bar top. They rattled around until the bartender slapped his hand down hard on top of them and then scraped them off the bar and into a coin box.
Longarm took a long pull from the beer. It was warm and sudsy and the yeast tickled his throat, but it cut the trail dust. He set the beer down. He’d lowered the level a good four inches. He raised it an inch by pouring the whiskey into the beer, causing it to foam.
Sometimes the venomous tangleleg in these backwater settlements was best diluted by beer.
Longarm sipped the drink, glancing into the mirror behind the bartender, who had gotten busy mixing flour and some other things into a mixing bowl to Longarm’s left. The bull-chested man kept glancing owlishly at the stranger as Longarm kept an eye on the back-bar mirror, knowing that something would happen sooner or later.
He wasn’t sure what that would be, but judging by the pregnant, ominous silence and the dead stares being cast his way, he wouldn’t doubt if one or more of the Dragoon Saloon’s clientele were to try to back-shoot him.
At least, he had to be ready for it.
He’d let them make their move, if one was forthcoming. And then maybe he could get down to the business of finding out what had happened to Sheriff Des Rainey.
He didn’t have to wait long. He’d taken one more sip of the whiskey-spiced beer and was sucking the foam from his mustache, when he saw one of the two, big, nasty-looking hombres—the bearded one—rise from his chair. The chair made a loud, raucous sound as the man slid it back from the table. He straightened like a bull in a pasture finding that one of the neighbor’s bulls had wandered into his territory.
He’d no sooner stood than the other big-ugly, with the mustache, rose from his own chair, making even more noise than the first one.
The bearded one walked around the table that he and the other big man and Melvin Little had been sitting at, a half a glass of frothy beer in his fist. He had a big belly pushing out his striped shirt. Sweat was a giant dark tongue staining his shirt from his neck to his bulging belly.
As the man approached, kicking out his legs like he was warming up for a dance, his stench wafted against Longarm, who winced against the sour, rancid odor of a man who hadn’t bathed in a month of Sundays and likely slept with wolves in a too-small burrow. He wore two pistols on his hips, as did the other man, with the mustache, who also had a shotgun slung over his shoulder by a thick leather lanyard. An old Spencer .56 carbine leaned against the table he’d left.
Altogether, the two were outfitted well enough to be shotgun messengers or bodyguards of a sort.
The bearded man took a too-casual sip of his beer, smacked his lips, and said to Longarm’s left shoulder, “Hey, you.”
Longarm, leaning forward against the bar, had been watching the men in the mirror. Now he looked at the bearded gent over his left shoulder. “Me?”
“Yeah, you.” This from the mustached man, who had coal-black hair and gray eyes and was a little shorter and broader than the bearded gent. He stood just behind and to one side of his friend.
Longarm took another sip of his drink and straightened, sucking the foam from his mustache. “Okay, let’s have it,” he said in a droll, patient tone. He’d been in the situation of the unwanted stranger so many times before that it was beginning to be old hat.
“We heard from Melvin yonder that you come into town askin’ a bunch of questions that ain’t none of your business,” the bearded man said.
“Yeah, that’s what Melvin said,” said the mustached man, jutting his dimpled chin at Longarm. He appeared to have lice, tiny miniature rice, clinging to his hair ends. Longarm wasn’t sure which man smelled worse but altogether they were making him feel sick to his stomach.
Both pairs of eyes staring at him were glassy from drink.
“I’m sorry, friends,” Longarm said amiably, “but I didn’t do any such thing.”
“What?” said the mustached man. “You callin’ Melvin a liar?”
“No, not all. I’m calling him a tinhorned, limp-dicked peckerwood, and I’m calling you two the same. Not only that, but you both stink like a sow giving birth, and you’re ugly as last year’s sin. Now, unless you can answer the question I posed to Melvin, kindly retreat from my air space so I can take another breath without vomiting my guts out on the floor.”
Both men stared at Longarm dumbly, as though neither could quite believe his ears. They looked as though they’d both been backhanded.
Finally, the bearded man, nearest Longarm, bunched his jaws and said, “Friend, I don’t care if you’re a federal badge toter or not. You just made the wrong pair of enemies, an’ you’re about to pay dearly for it!”
He hadn’t finished that last before he swung his beer schooner back toward his shoulder and then launched it toward Longarm’s head. Longarm had seen that coming two weeks ago. He merely stepped into it, raised his left arm, deflecting it, and got a little beer splashed across his back as he smashed his right fist hard against his attacker’s bearded jaw.
He smashed him twice more before the big man knew what was happening.
The bearded man stumbled backward, eyes rolling back in his head, as his partner launched himself at Longarm, throwing his arms around the lawman as though he were just so happy to see him he couldn’t contain himself.
“You dirty dog—you’re gonna die, lawman!” he bellowed as he tried to toss Longarm to the floor.
It didn’t work. Longarm was fi
ve inches taller than the mustached gent.
Longarm head-butted the man, and when the man released his hold on him, Longarm smashed him once with a right cross and once with a left uppercut. He stepped on the man’s right boot to hold him in place and then let him have two more of the same before the mustached gent, nose exploding like a ripe tomato, stumbled backward and onto a table, sending the table’s three occupants quickly grabbing their drinks and scattering in all directions.
The table tipped over and the mustached gent and the table hit the floor with a loud, thundering bang! The mustached gent bellowed like a poleaxed bull.
“Son of a bitch!” raged the bearded gent, heaving himself to his feet and hurling himself at Longarm from six feet away.
His intention apparently was to bull into Longarm and pin him against the bar. Longarm had seen that one taking shape a month ago.
He merely stepped to one side, spreading his boots wide and grabbing the back of the big, bearded man’s shirt collar and heaving him in the same direction he’d been headed.
Only harder.
He slammed the man’s head against the edge of the bar with a resounding, cracking thump.
When he released the man’s collar, the bearded gent dropped straight to the floor like a fifty-pound sack of seed corn hurled from a second-story loading door.
The mustached man was cursing and snarling like a wounded wolf on the floor, trying to pull his shotgun around in front of him. When he finally did so, aiming the double-bored popper at Longarm, the federal lawman stepped toward the man, swinging his right foot up savagely. The square toe of his cavalry boot connected soundly with the underside of the barrel as well as the mustached gent’s left hand just as the man triggered the weapon.
Ka-booommmm!
Orange flames and gray smoke knifed at the ceiling. The double-ought buck punched a deep gouge out of the wainscoting, causing slivers and dust to rain. A floor above the saloon, a girl screamed shrilly, “Stop it! Oh, god, stop it!”
Longarm stepped back and looked from the bearded man, who lay unconscious at the base of the bar, head resting on his arms, to the mustached man, who leaned back on his elbows on the floor, his face swollen and bleeding, one bloody upper tooth embedded in his thick lower lip.
Longarm shrugged. “You heard the girl. I’m game if you are. You boys had enough?”
He toed the bearded gent’s bulging belly. “Looks like he has.” He relieved the unconscious man of his weapons, tossing both pistols across the room, and then he did the same to the mustached man, asking him, “How ’bout you?”
The man nodded and, wincing, touched the index finger of his right hand to the tooth embedded in his lower lip and sucked a sharp breath that sounded funny through his broken nose.
Longarm picked up the mustached gent’s shotgun, which had skidded down along the base of the bar. He picked it up and set it on his shoulder as he faced the room.
The men who’d been standing at the bar had all gathered toward the end of it, clumped together and staring toward Longarm. They looked hesitant, nervous, like they suddenly wanted to go home and visit with their wives.
“This is how it lays out,” Longarm said, narrowing one eye with threat. “Like Melvin there probably told you, my name is Custis P. Long, Deputy United States Marshal. Your sheriff, Des Rainey, sent a telegram to my superior, Chief Marshal Billy Vail, a few weeks back, asking for help with some undisclosed situation up here in Diamondback. I was sent to investigate, so that’s what I’m doin’.
“Naturally, the first person I looked for was Sheriff Rainey himself, only that’s not who I found in his office. I found Melvin there, sound asleep with a cold cup of coffee in his hand. A badge way too big for him was pinned to his vest.”
Little glowered at Longarm. A few of the others in the room chuckled softly, but most of them merely sat or stood glaring at Longarm.
“I asked Melvin where I could find Sheriff Rainey and he gave me a look like a mule chewing cockleburs. Didn’t learn nothin’. And that makes me right owly, not to mention suspicious as holy hell. It makes me suspicious of every one of you gents. Every person in this entire town, in fact. And I’m gonna set my boots right here in Diamondback, probably right here in the Dragoon Saloon, as well as over at that purty pink hotel yonder, until such time as I can either speak to Sheriff Rainey in person or learn exactly where he is and what he’s doin’ and why he requested assistance.”
Longarm saw the man he’d seen earlier standing outside of the stage depot now sitting in the shadows with two other men, at a table three-quarters down the long room. He wore his green eyeshade and sleeve garters, and he stared down glumly into his nearly empty beer schooner, which he held tightly around the base with both hands.
If it were a chicken, the glass would have been dead of a broken neck by now.
“You there—what’s your name?” Longarm asked the man.
The man kept staring down at his glass.
“I say, you there in the eyeshade. I take it you’re the depot agent for the stage line. The telegrapher, as well—am I right?”
The man just scowled down into his beer schooner as though he were both deaf and numb. His ruddy skin behind his gray beard, however, turned crimson.
“Which means that message of Rainey’s was likely sent by you or one of your associates,” Longarm persisted.
Now the gray-bearded man with the eyeshade lifted his head and swept the room with his gaze as he said, “Rainey never sent no telegraph from my key.” His voice echoed around the room. He glanced at Longarm darkly and then lowered his gaze once again to his schooner.
Longarm let the man’s words hang in the air. They were a lie, and he wanted to let them hang there for a time, silently incriminating everyone in the room.
Longarm’s bearded attacker stirred, rolling his head from side to side and moaning into the floor. The mustached man started climbing to his feet. Longarm planted his boot on the man’s ass and drove him to the floor.
“Son of a bitch!” the mustached gent said as he piled up at the base of the bar.
He glared up at Longarm. He was now holding his tooth between the thumb and index finger of his right hand as though it were something precious that he wanted to keep.
Longarm knew from all the hard stares being cast his way that no information would be forthcoming. So with a fateful sigh he turned to the bar, finished his drink in four long swallows, set the schooner back down on the bar, and ran a forearm across his mouth and mustache.
As much trail dust as beer rubbed off on his thick, brown arm. He was coated in the stuff.
A bath was due . . .
Picking up his saddlebags and his rifle, he said, “I’ll be over at the hotel yonder if anyone wants to talk to me. I’ll be there till I hear anything, and since you don’t have a bona fide lawman, I’ll be acting as the lawman until Des Rainey returns to claim his chair. Mr. Little, that badge is no longer yours. If I see you wearing it again, I’ll slap the holy living shit of you.”
Melvin Little’s eyes crossed slightly in rage.
“I’ll be here till I find out what happened to Rainey. You fellas can rest assured of that.”
The bearded man had climbed to all fours and was wagging his head and groaning loudly as he tried to rise. Longarm kicked the big man over on his back.
“As for you—you best count your lucky stars I don’t haul you over to Rainey’s jail and turn the key on your ugly ass. Assaulting a deputy U.S. marshal is a federal offense. That goes with you over there, too.”
Longarm winked at the mustached man sitting with one knee up, his back against the bar, still holding his tooth in his hand. The front of his shirt was red with blood from his broken nose. “I see you boys armed in this town again, you’ll both be getting more visits from the tooth fairy.”
The bearded man spit blood at him though it merely sp
ewed down his own chest.
Longarm swung around, pushed through the batwings, and left, knowing that he’d drawn one mighty large target on his back just now.
Chapter 8
“I’d like a room and I’d like a bath,” Longarm told the big-boned, red-haired, middle-aged woman sitting behind the long, varnished oak desk in the lobby of the Diamondback Hotel.
“What—you all through makin’ trouble?” the woman croaked.
She had thin lips and close-set eyes in a fleshy face that might have at one time been mildly pretty, though never beautiful. She wore a puce-colored silk dress with puffy sleeves and a scalloped cream collar. The dress fit her much too tightly, accentuating too many large bumps and rolls.
Behind her, a wooden cuckoo clock ticked on the wall above several roles of shelves and pigeonholes.
“Word sure travels fast,” Longarm said, signing his name in the register book she’d turned toward him. “But there wouldn’t be any trouble if the good citizens of Diamondback would just tell me what I want to know.”
“Maybe the good citizens of Diamondback see the value in minding their own business.”
“Is that how you see it?”
The woman only stared at him, her eyes shifting around slightly. She was a wry old bird, not all that worked up about the situation. Living out here in this rough ranch-supply settlement, she’d likely seen it all.
“That’s two dollars a night. An extra fifty cents for the bath.”
Longarm flipped some coins onto the open register book and said, “Where can I find the Rainey residence? I understand the sheriff is . . . or was . . . married. I’d like to talk to his wife . . . or his widow,” he added meaningfully.
The woman’s stony demeanor cracked abruptly and she made a sour face as she rolled her head on her broad, thick shoulders and said, “Oh, don’t bring her into this! Mister, you just leave that poor woman alone. She don’t know where her husband is any more than anyone else around here.”