by Tabor Evans
Longarm looked at him and saw a fist-sized exit hole on the near side of Rance’s head oozing brains and liver-colored blood.
The knife cut through the last rope strand, and Longarm’s wrists came free. As the shooters continued running toward him, fanning out as they came, he made a mad dash to the dead man’s saddle and slipped Rance’s carbine from its scabbard. Pumping a cartridge into the chamber, he swung around and ran toward the rock behind him. A slug carved a shallow trough across the back of his left thigh, setting up a burning in his leg.
Another slug hammered the rock as he dropped behind it. Another thumped into the ground an inch beyond the toe of his right boot.
The shooters were moving too fast, and they were too anxious, for accurate shooting. They were near enough now that Longarm could hear their foot thuds and spur chings.
“Get around him, Lonigan—all the way right!” shouted Muehler. “I’ll swing left!”
As soon as they got around him, they’d have him.
Time to make his move.
Longarm pushed off the rock and swung to his left, dropping to his left knee and firing the Winchester twice quickly, his first shot hammering the dead center of Lonigan’s chest. His second shot had missed the man running behind Lonigan by a hair, but it had forced the man to stop and drop to a knee.
Longarm pumped and fired, painting a dark circle in the nub of the man’s right cheek. The other two shooters—Muehler and the third Tanner rider—had been taken by surprise. They shouted and swung toward Longarm, but neither got off another shot before Longarm’s dancing, smoking carbine sent them stumbling straight back and down, where they both flopped as the blood pumped out of them.
A heavy, dark wave of fatigue washed over Longarm. He dropped as though he’d been felled by a sledgehammer, and lay on his back, catching his breath. After he caught it, he continued to lie there. Muehler was moaning and groaning, but his moans and groans grew gradually quieter.
After about twenty minutes, they stopped altogether.
Longarm dozed, every bone, muscle, and tendon in his body calling out for mercy. His clothes hung on him in tatters. His bloody knees and elbows shone where his sleeves and pants had been entirely ripped away. His lips were cut. One eye was swollen partly shut.
But he had one more man to see to.
Then he’d head for Diamondback to continue the investigation, though in his current condition the idea felt like an anvil on his shoulders. So far, he’d found out who’d killed the Bear-Runner family and why, but he had no idea who’d killed Sheriff Rainey, and that’s what he’d been sent out here to find out in the first place.
It had to have been Richmond. Had to.
The battered lawman heaved a weary sigh as he stepped around the body of the man who’d dragged him half to death, and made his way down the gradual slope toward the creek and, he hoped, Mulligan.
Chapter 17
As Longarm walked down the slope toward the creek, he saw Mulligan sitting by the tree, back erect, nervous eyes staring at the bedraggled man walking toward him. The attorney blinked, incredulous, and then, realizing that Longarm was the only one walking out of the dustup alive, he gave a startled, enraged bellow and began struggling to unsheath the pistol on his hip.
Longarm stopped, raised the carbine, which he’d reloaded from the cartridges on his own belt, aimed, and fired. The slug slapped the attorney back against the tree. The man looked startled. He dropped the pistol he’d just clawed from its holster, and looked at his right arm.
He gave another bellowing cry, rolled to his left, his wounded arm hanging uselessly at his side, and began to crawl wildly, awkwardly down the slope toward the creek.
Longarm walked over to his bay standing a ways upstream and fished a set of handcuffs and a set of leg irons from his saddlebags. He led the bay over to where Mulligan was trying to fight his way on his hands across the stream, yelling, and the lawman tied the bay’s reins to a branch. He walked into the stream and planted a boot on the attorney’s ass. He drove Mulligan forward into the two-foot-deep stream and then cuffed his hands behind his back.
The man was helpless, in miserable pain. All he could do was curse and berate Longarm almost incoherently as Longarm closed the shackles around his ankles.
Longarm turned and walked back up onto the bank. Behind him, Mulligan slumped back in the water, shouting, “I need a doctor!”
“Tomorrow,” Longarm said without turning around. “We’ll be spending the night here.”
“Help me, you son of a bitch!” Mulligan shouted. “You can’t leave me trussed up out here in this cold water!”
Longarm pulled his Maryland rye bottle out of his saddlebags and took a long, pain-stemming pull. “Can’t I?”
* * *
When he figured the attorney had taken a long enough bath, Longarm hauled him out of the stream and tied him to a tree. He wrapped a neckerchief around the man’s wounded arm so he wouldn’t bleed to death, cheating the hangman. Then the lawman cleaned his many scrapes and abrasions in the stream before building a large fire and suppering on beef jerky, coffee, and rye.
He shared with Mulligan no more of the grub than a single strip of jerky and some creek water. The way Longarm saw it, the cold-blooded killer deserved merely enough nourishment to sustain him until he could hang. Mulligan complained vociferously but not at length.
Apparently, the attorney wasn’t fond of the idea of spending the night with a rock stuffed in his mouth and secured behind a knotted neckerchief.
After good dark, Longarm built up the fire, finished his bottle, tossed the empty at Mulligan, and then rolled up in his blankets. He slept like a dead man until well after dawn.
He built up the fire again, made coffee, sharing half a cup and a single jerky strip with the attorney, who was weakened from blood loss, and then saddled the bay and Mulligan’s white-socked black. He removed the attorney’s leg irons, helped him into the saddle, and tied his hands to the horn.
Mulligan looked gaunt and pale. Longarm didn’t care.
Longarm kept the pace slow as he and Mulligan headed east. The sun climbed, raining heat. Mid-morning, Longarm caught a slight flicker of movement off to his right, around the base of a small, cone-shaped butte. He reined the bay to a sudden stop. Good thing he did, because he otherwise would have ridden headfirst into the bullet that sang past his face to plunk into the bluff standing off the trail on his left.
The rifle’s crack echoed a second later.
“Oh, Lord!” screamed Mulligan, sagging in his saddle. “Oh, Lord—now what the hell is going on?”
As another slug spanged off a rock several feet short of the trail, the attorney shouted weakly, “Stop shooting, you fools! It’s Mulligan! Stop shooting this instant!”
The lawyer’s voice cracked.
Longarm had swung down from his saddle as quickly as he could in his tender condition, and dropped to a knee in the trail. He aimed at where he’d seen the movement and the brief smoke plume, and fired two quick shots. Then he saw a figure scramble up the side of the bluff several feet, and disappear around its eastern shoulder.
Quickly, he tied Mulligan’s horse to a shrub beside the trail. He swung up onto the bay’s back. He ground his heels into the horse’s flanks and bounded off across the flat between the trail and the bluff, slanting toward the position from which the dry-gulcher had been shooting.
His heart hammered eagerly. He was beaten to a frazzle, but hope yawned in him. Maybe he finally had Rainey’s killer . . .
He closed the hundred-yard stretch of ground and leaped from the bay’s back near the bluff’s rocky base. He dropped to a knee, racking a shell into his Winchester’s breech and aiming toward the eastern shoulder.
No movement.
No sounds.
Then there was the rataplan of distant hoofbeats.
Longarm bounded off
his heels, ran up the side of the bluff, and peered off its eastern slope. A rider in a cream shirt and brown vest was galloping away toward some trees and another bluff a hundred yards southeast. Longarm cursed, raised his rifle, drew a bead on the man’s back. He held fire as the rider bounded into the trees and around the far side of the bluff, gone.
Longarm cursed. He’d been too far away to get a good look at the man. All he knew was that the bushwhacker wore a cream shirt, a brown vest, and a cream hat. The horse was a nondescript dun.
There was no use trying to follow him. Whoever it was likely knew this country better than Longarm did and would be almost impossible to find before nightfall. Besides, Longarm had Mulligan to throw in jail.
He rode back to the trail, to find Mulligan where he’d left him, sitting slump-shouldered in his saddle. The attorney wagged his head, crestfallen. “I declare, you got more lives than a cat.”
Longarm leaned out to grab the reins of Mulligan’s black gelding off the branch. “Yeah, well, you only got one. And you’ve about come to the end of your rope.”
“The people of Diamondback won’t hang me.”
“No, but a federal judge will. Come on, you’re a law-reader, ain’t ya?” As Longarm put the bay back on the trail, he glanced over his shoulder at Mulligan. “Trying to kill a deputy U.S. marshal is a federal offense.”
Mulligan stared back at him blandly. Though it hurt like hell, straining his cracked and swollen lips, Longarm grinned and then booted the bay on up the trail.
Diamondback arranged itself in the sage and rocks ahead of them about forty-five minutes later, a little after noon. A hot, dry wind had come up, blowing dirt around. As Longarm led Mulligan’s black into town, squinting against the dust, he saw Alexander Richmond and his son, Jack, both in vests and shirtsleeves and puffing cigars, talking with an aproned gent on the front porch of the mercantile on the street’s right side. Jack Richmond spied Longarm and his prisoner first, and nudged his father, who turned toward the street, as did the man in the apron, all three scowling.
“What in god’s name?” croaked Richmond as the horses clomped past the mercantile.
“The Almighty had nothin’ to do with it,” Longarm said, staring straight ahead. “It was Mulligan and a few wolves he lured into his pack. Best fetch the doc for your friend here, Richmond. Feelin’ poorly, don’t ya know. He’ll be over at the jail . . . before headin’ back to Denver with me.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “And you an’ me’ll be talkin’ soon. I still need answers.”
Longarm turned his head forward as he angled toward the sheriff’s office sitting on the left side of the street, across from the bank and the Diamondback Hotel.
Richmond had to have killed Rainey. He’d known the sheriff would be after Mulligan, and he’d felt compelled to rescue his business partner . . . as well as his business. He’d probably hired another of Tanner Webster’s men to pull the trigger.
Longarm swung down from the bay’s back in front of the jailhouse. He glanced at Mulligan sitting slouched in his saddle, dozing, his face ashen around his large, red nose.
“Sit tight,” Longarm said.
Intending to open a cell door before cutting the attorney free of his saddle, Longarm walked up the three porch steps and reached for the door handle. He stopped. He wasn’t sure why. Rainey had been killed here. Chicken flesh rose across the back of Longarm’s neck.
He stared at the handle that was an inch off the end of his extended hand. He stepped to one side, pressed his shoulder against the door frame, and then reached out in front of him and whipped the door wide.
The blast set up what sounded like a dozen little girls screaming in his ears. The buckshot had ripped a chunk out of the side of the door and pelted the frame near Longarm’s head. The rest of the shot went careening through the opening and into the street.
Before the echo of the blast had died, and before the door could swing back toward the frame, Longarm took his .44 in his left hand, angled inside the jailhouse, and, gritting his teeth furiously, emptied the double-action popper in less than five seconds.
His slugs tore into the office’s dingy shadows, the red flames lunging through the powder smoke to reveal a murky image bounding backward, bouncing off the door of one of the cells with a clang, and collapsing.
Longarm lowered the smoking pistol and stepped inside the jailhouse. He blinked against the wafting smoke that burned like pepper in his eyes and nose, and crouched over the slender figure lying belly-down in the middle of the room. He saw the gold-blond hair knotted behind the fine head and, with a shaking hand, rolled her over onto her back.
Meg Rainey convulsed, blood slithering down from one corner of her mouth. Her hazel eyes stared up at Longarm, pain-racked. She sobbed. Blood matted her cream shirt, brown vest, and man’s twill pants. The cream hat was on the floor in front of a cell door.
Longarm just stared down at her, shock turning all his muscles to stone.
Running footsteps rose behind Longarm. He glanced behind to see Jack Richmond poke his head in the door.
“Who . . . what . . . ?”
Then he saw Meg Rainey, and his lower jaw loosened. As he moved slowly into the room, his father came up behind him, red-faced, breathless, staring incredulously down and around his son and Longarm.
“What’s all the shooting?” Richmond demanded.
Jack stood staring down at Mrs. Rainey, who stared up at him. Young Richmond shook his head and dropped to a knee. “Meg . . . ?”
She convulsed again, shuddered, more blood oozing out the corner of her mouth. Her lips quirked a painful smile. “I . . . did it . . . for us, Jack.”
“You . . . you killed the sheriff?”
“Sure.” Her pretty face wore an almost celestial smile as she stared up at the young banker. “Had to. Couldn’t div . . . divorce him. Not an’ stay in Diamondback. It was . . . the . . . only way . . . we could have been . . . together.”
She’d just barely gotten the last word out before the light left her eyes. Her chest stopping rising and falling. Dead, she stared past Longarm and Jack Richmond at the jailhouse ceiling.
“Oh, good God!” Alexander Richmond exclaimed, swinging around and striding angrily out the door.
Longarm looked at Jack. The young man’s handsome face was bleached out and gaunt as he stared down at Meg Rainey. He colored slightly when he slid his gaze to Longarm. “We . . . we had a . . . minor dalliance, I guess you’d call it. I had no idea she thought . . .”
Longarm doffed his hat and ran a hand down his face. He felt cored out like an apple. Weary and heartsick.
As much to himself as to anyone else he said, “So she took advantage of the killings of the Bear-Runners to kill her husband. Probably knew about Mulligan’s daughter and the Bear-Runner boy. Probably figured it would make a big scandal and that her husband would be at the center of it. And you two would live happily ever after—her the wife of a young banker.”
Jack shook his head, placed his hand on his temple. “Oh, Christ, I had no idea she was entertaining such a fantasy.”
“Neither did her husband, I reck—”
Outside, a pistol popped. Longarm lurched to his feet and ran to the door.
Alexander Richmond stood at the bottom of jailhouse’s porch steps. Mulligan sat on the top step, his back to Longarm. Blood and white brain tissue oozed out the palm-sized hole in the back of his head. As he sagged straight back against the porch, Longarm saw the ivory-gripped, top-break Iver Johnson pocket pistol drop from his hand and into the dirt beside the steps.
Mulligan stared up at Longarm, blood filling his mouth and tricking out his nostrils.
The elder Richmond glanced at Longarm. His bespectacled face framed by gray, well-trimmed sideburns, was stony. He walked over and picked the little .32 out of the dirt and brushed it off.
“We’ve been
in business together for a long time,” he said, staring down at Mulligan. “It was the least I could for him. Poor bastard.”
Richmond shoved the pistol into his vest pocket and strode in the direction of his bank. Several people had gathered in the street fronting the jailhouse. One was young Ronnie Brown from the Cascade Livery and Feed.
Longarm said, “Ronnie, take these horses back to the barn, will you? Give mine a few extra oats. I’ll be pulling out of here first thing in the morning.”
The young man lurched forward, gathered up the horses’ reins, and led them off down the street.
Longarm looked down at Mulligan and then he looked behind him at Jack Richmond standing ghostly pale in the jailhouse’s open door, staring down at the dead attorney.
“Ah, hell” was all Longarm could say concerning the trouble in Diamondback.
He stepped around the dead attorney and strode wearily toward the Dragoon Saloon. He’d get good and drunk, and then he’d get some food and some sleep. First thing in the morning, he’d ride the hell out of here.
Epilogue
Longarm took an extra day to heal in Diamondback. He was just too beaten up to head out the very next morning like he’d wanted to.
But the morning after that, he lit out before dawn. And he wasn’t at all unhappy to put the crazy town behind him. He spent the morning trying to figure out what he was going to say in his report to Chief Marshal Billy Vail. When he thought he had it all sorted out, he sat back in the saddle and smoked a cheroot, letting the bay make its slow, leisurely way along the trail.
Longarm didn’t feel all that much in a hurry now that he finally had Diamondback behind him. He’d take his time getting back to Denver. He was too beaten up to do anything else.
Late the next afternoon he found himself in the next valley to the east of the basin in which Diamondback lay. It was then that he remembered the girl he’d frolicked with on his way to Diamondback a week or so ago.