by Evans, Tabor
Chapter 2
Longarm gave an inward groan as he turned toward Charlie Embers swaggering toward him heavy-footed and bleary-eyed but managing to twirl his pistols rather adeptly, with obvious threat.
The lawman tried hard to keep his affable grin in place. It wasn’t easy, knowing what these men had done to Case Morgan, not to mention the bank they’d robbed in Stoneville, in western Kansas, then setting the place afire with all the employees and patrons locked inside.
Laughing Lyle May’s bunch had killed several more citizens and a sheriff’s deputy as they’d stormed out of town with sixteen thousand dollars in stolen greenbacks, shooting at anything that moved, Laughing Lyle looking like a moon-crazed hyena. Killing the lawman and crossing state lines was what had made their latest dastardly deed, only one of many, the business of the federal marshals. That’s why Chief Marshal Billy Vail had assigned Longarm to throw in with Case Morgan out of Fort Smith, Arkansas, to try and run the small, deadly gang to ground. Longarm had worked with Case Morgan many times over his long career; he’d come to revere the man like few others, so he was gritting his teeth behind his smile as Charlie Embers stepped up to within one foot of him . . .
So close that Longarm’s nostrils twitched at the nastiness of the man’s rancid smell, as though it emanated from deep within his rotten, kill-crazy soul. Embers smelled like an ear preserved in rotgut whiskey.
“Why you find us so damned fascinatin’?” Charlie said.
“Ah, hell, mister, I didn’t mean to be snoopy and get your neck in a hump,” Longarm said, manufacturing a faintly wheedling, cowardly tone, holding his hands up to his shoulders in supplication. “I was just wonderin’ what kind of a game you got goin’ and if maybe another man could sit in—that’s all.”
Embers’s head only came up to Longarm’s chin, so the killer had to look up at the lawman from beneath his shaggy, black brows, while holding his pistols about six inches from Longarm’s belly. He was faintly walleyed from drink. “Oh, you did, didja, Mister Francy-Dresser?”
Charlie cast his angry gaze across Longarm’s fawn vest, worn over a blue cotton shirt down which a black string tie dangled. Working his nostrils like a gut-sniffing dog, he looked once more into Longarm’s eyes from beneath his black, shaggy brows. “Well, suppose me and my pal don’t want no fancy-dressin’ cardsharp sittin’ in on our game. Supposin’ we don’t play with sharpies?”
Longarm shrugged. “Well, okay, then. I don’t see no reason to get your neck up about it.”
“We work hard for our money, see. That’s why I get my neck up about it.”
The man at the table, Richard Dix, chuckled at that as he stared toward Embers and Longarm. Behind him, Kid McQuade had finally attained full pleasure with the whore and was sitting back, breathing hard with his pants still down around his ankles, knees spread, while the whore remained on her back, groaning miserably and cupping her hands to her snatch. She was plumb worn out, it seemed.
“I’m sure you do work hard for it,” Longarm told Charlie. “And I do apologize if you for some reason got to believin’ I’d think otherwise!”
“I could just shoot you—you know that,” Charlie said, gritting his teeth and ramming his pistol barrels against Longarm’s belly. “I really could. I could just shoot a damn worthless cardsharp that don’t know how to make his livin’ no other way than sittin’ around poker tables and roulette wheels. I’ll be damned if you just don’t make me madder’n an old wet hen, sir!”
Longarm saw in Charlie’s sparking eyes that the killer’s wolf was indeed off its leash. Charlie hadn’t killed in a couple of days, and the lack of fresh blood on his hands, coupled with the whiskey he’d been drinking for the past several hours, was making him ornery.
Apprehension made the lawman’s shoulders tighten as he stared down at the cocked pistols the insane killer held taut against his fawn-colored vest, over the gold-washed chain that connected Longarm’s railroad watch in one pocket to his derringer in the other.
Wouldn’t it just be funny if he’d outsmarted himself here and got himself killed because the gang thought he was a professional poker player? Certainly not to Case Morgan, who was bleeding dry out in the stony hollow yonder.
Longarm slid his gaze back up to Charlie’s. The lawman felt a slight shudder of rage sweep through him, and he tightened his jaws against it. The three punchers had fallen silent and were staring apprehensively toward Charlie and Longarm. In fact, all eyes in the room were on the pair—even those of the whore as she lay on her side on the fainting couch beside the grinning Kid McQuade, who still hadn’t bothered to pull his pants up.
“Oh, you don’t like that—do you?” Charlie said, ramming the pistol barrels harder against Longarm’s belly and grinning with mockery. “You might be a big nancy-boy poker player, but you’re gettin’ mad. You don’t like bein’ pushed, do ya?” Charlie turned to the man at the poker table and laughed. “Hey, Richard—I’m makin’ Mister Fancy Dresser mad!”
Charlie tensed suddenly. Keeping his head turned toward Dix, he rolled one eye down toward the over-and-under peashooter that Longarm was now holding taut against Charlie’s lower jaw, on the right side of Charlie’s face. Longarm drew the derringer’s hammer back with a ratcheting click that sounded inordinately loud now in the heavy silence.
“You got that right, Charlie,” Longarm said with menacing softness. “You’ve done made me mad.”
At the poker table, Richard Dix’s smile faded, and the card-playing killer stiffened in his chair. Behind him, Kid McQuade, who probably couldn’t see Charlie and Longarm clearly from the far side of the room, merely wrinkled his brows.
Charlie grunted. He showed chipped, yellow teeth beneath his black mustache as he winced against the pressure of Longarm’s gold-chased peashooter.
“So mad, in fact, Charlie,” Longarm continued evenly, “that if you don’t uncock those hoglegs and remove them from my midsection, I’m going to blow a hole through your ugly fuckin’ head.”
Instantly, the mocking anger in Charlie’s eyes turned to fear and befuddlement. He drew the pistols back from Longarm’s belly but kept them aimed and cocked as he said, “H-how do you know my name?”
“How do you think, you cow-stupid fucker?” Longarm paused. “Lower the hammers easy-like, Charlie, or we’ll die together . . . do us a little dance while we’re fallin’ to the floor and lassoin’ the next cloud to Glory!”
Richard Dix bounded to his feet so quickly that his chair tumbled to the floor with a raucous clatter. “Hey, what the shit!”
“Keep still, Richard,” Charlie said in a quavering, high-pitched voice as he stared sidelong at Longarm’s derringer boring a white dent in his cheek. “The man’s mad an’ he’s holdin’ a gun to my gall-blasted jaw!”
He depressed the hammers of his two pistols.
“Go ahead and drop ’em on the floor, Charlie,” Longarm said.
“Ah, hell!” Charlie said, and threw the pistols onto the floor, one on either side of him and Longarm.
The three cowpunchers had moved on down the bar and were tightly bunched, watching the unfriendly proceedings uneasily. They’d come to Finlay’s for a quiet drink out of the wind—and now this?
As Longarm walked Charlie back toward his table, where Dix stood scowling, one hand wrapped around the butt of the Buntline Special riding in his shoulder holster, the whore laughed delightedly from the fainting couch.
“Shit!” said Kid McQuade, standing awkwardly, then stumbling forward over his trousers and balbriggans, and hitting the floor on his knees. He looked up at Longarm, shaking a curly mop of brown hair out of his eyes. “You best holster that weapon, mister. You don’t know who we are!”
Longarm gave Charlie one more hard shove with his derringer. Charlie gave an agonized cry and stumbled into his table. Longarm then flipped his derringer in the air. He caught it in
his left hand while reaching across his flat belly with his right and sliding the Frontier Colt . 44 from the cross-draw holster on his left hip.
He leveled both weapons on the cutthroats. “I know who you are,” Longarm said, glancing past the three waddies on his right toward the stairs, uneasy about Laughing Lyle May, whom he could no longer hear laughing. “I’m Custis Long, deputy U.S. marshal out of Denver, and you fellas done come to the end of your trail.”
“Don’t think so, Long!” came the roaring shout from the stairs.
Longarm swung to his right. As though he’d materialized out of thin air, Laughing Lyle stood a third of the way down the stairs, gritting his teeth and leveling two Colts.
“Down, boys!” Longarm shouted at the drovers, diving straight forward, away from the table, just as Laughing Lyle opened up with his Colts, sending lead screaming around the saloon hall and chewing into the floor behind Longarm’s boots.
The three waddies hurled themselves, chaps flapping, up and over the bar, to hit the floor on the other side with heavy slapping thuds. Laughing Lyle cut loose with a tooth-gnashing yell as he continued triggering his six-guns. At the same time, Longarm hit the floor to the left of Dix and Charlie Embers, and Laughing Lyle shouted at his two cohorts, “Get outta the way, you stupid bastards, or I’ll turn you both into stew!”
Longarm rolled and came up on his butt, extending his Colt and derringer as Laughing Lyle triggered a round into the table about four feet ahead of the lawman, blowing up splinters and playing cards between Dix and Charlie Embers. Longarm fired twice quickly at Laughing Lyle, hammering adobe out of the wall behind him and causing the outlaw to wheel drunkenly and fall to the stairs.
Meanwhile, Dix had fallen atop a chair but was scrambling back to his feet red-faced and pulling the long-barreled hogleg out of its shoulder holster. Before he could level the big popper, Longarm drilled him with his derringer, the .32-caliber slug taking the tall, lanky killer through his prominent Adam’s apple. The slug ricocheted off his spine, exited the left side of his neck, and screamed into the wall over the naked whore cowering with her arms over her head on the fainting couch.
Dix threw his head back and tried to scream, but nothing came out except a shrill choking noise, as he triggered the Buntline Special into the ceiling before he fell and expired. Longarm fired two more shots at Laughing Lyle on the stairs, and then, as Charlie Embers scooped his two pistols off the floor, Longarm shot the black-haired, poison-mean owlhoot twice in the chest.
The slugs picked Charlie straight up off the floor and threw him up and over the bar, behind which he disappeared with a smacking bang, evoking indignant cries from the waddies.
A pistol barked to Longarm’s left, one slug tearing into the floor near his left knee, the other drilling a table leg and throwing splinters in all directions. The lawman turned to see that Kid McQuade had finally gotten his pants up and grabbed a hogleg. He was triggering the pearl-gripped Remington as he sidestepped toward the bar, about fifteen feet away from Longarm, and screaming, his mouth and eyes wide.
The lawman rolled beneath a table. Two slugs chewed through the table and into the floor.
Longarm rolled out from under the table and triggered both his Colt and his derringer. The Colt’s .44 round hammered the kid’s forehead above his left eye, while the derringer’s .32-caliber slug drilled a neat, marble-sized hole through his left cheek, just beneath the same eye.
The kid took one more side step toward the bar, nodding his head sharply as though he couldn’t agree more with something that had been said, then stopped and dropped straight down to his knees. He nodded once more, thick curly hair bouncing about his neck and shoulders, then flopped onto his back, arms spread out to both sides and flapping like wings. His spurred boots clicked madly on the wooden floor.
Suddenly, that was the only sound. It died quickly, and the Kid lay still.
Longarm looked around. The half-breed barman, Charlie Embers, and the three innocent waddies were out of sight behind the bar. Longarm could see only the Kid and Dix, both dead, and the whore, who lay slumped forward over her knees, head beneath her arms, her pale naked rump pointing at the ceiling.
Longarm looked at the stairs. Laughing Lyle was gone.
“Everyone stay down!” Longarm yelled as he stuffed his empty derringer into his vest pocket, then quickly knocked the spent loads out of his Colt’s wheel. The smoking brass casings clinked onto the floor and rolled.
Quickly, he reloaded the pistol from his shell belt and ran to the stairs.
Chapter 3
Longarm took the stairs three steps at a time and hurled himself onto the floor of the second-story hall. There were three doors on each side. At the end was a dirty window through which the gray light of dusk pushed through a torn red curtain.
Longarm shifted his gaze from one side of the hall to the other, from one closed door to the next. There appeared no way out of the second story save the stairs behind him. Laughing Lyle had to be up here somewhere, behind one of the six doors.
Longarm pushed slowly to his feet, straightening his long legs. Holding the cocked Colt out in front of him, he moved forward. He glanced at the first door on his left but then shifted his gaze back to the right. A smear of blood shone on the wainscoting on that side of the hall. There was another smear near the last door on the right, which opened suddenly.
A fist clenched around a gun handle was thrust through the opening, and then Laughing Lyle’s snarling countenance appeared above and behind it. The killer had Longarm dead to rights. The lawman threw himself sideways into the nearest closed door as Laughing Lyle’s pistol roared, stabbing smoke and flames.
The door gave easily beneath the lawman’s muscular bulk, and Longarm’s momentum hurled him into the room. He hit the floor and rolled up against a brass-framed bed upon which a young blonde was cowering, bedcovers pulled up to her chin. Her eyes were wide as saucers.
“Get out!” she screamed. “Get out, you brigand! Leave me alone!”
Longarm pushed up on an elbow and swung his head toward the door just as Laughing Lyle appeared, long, thin blond hair dancing around under the killer’s bald, bullet-shaped pate, thick pink lips peeled back from large, square, grime-crusted teeth as he extended the Smithy once more.
Longarm raised the Colt. It danced and thundered twice. Laughing Lyle jerked back and fired his Colt into an oil painting on the wall to Longarm’s right, knocking the picture askew while the blonde screamed and writhed beneath her bedcovers. Laughing Lyle stumbled back out of sight, boots thumping on the hall floor.
Longarm pushed up off his right elbow, then winced as a throbbing pain lanced his arm. He fell back against the bed and looked at the aching wing. The sleeve of his frock coat was torn about six inches down from the shoulder, and blood oozed from the wound. One of Laughing Lyle’s bullets must have pinked him in the hall.
The loud boot thuds fell silent, only to be replaced by a bellowing laugh and the screech of breaking glass. Longarm scrambled to his feet and dashed into the hall just as a heavy thud and a grunt sounded outside the broken window. The red curtains fluttered in the breeze ebbing around the ragged shards.
Longarm ran to the window and looked down past a small, shake-shingled awning to see Laughing Lyle heaving himself to his feet in the yard, hefting a pair of bulging saddlebags over his shoulder.
The brigand lifted his chin toward Longarm. A shrewd smile plucked at his fat lips as he raised the pistol. Longarm jerked his head back behind the window as Laughing Lyle’s Colt barked twice, flinging lead through the broken window and into the hall ceiling over Longarm’s head.
Foot thuds sounded. Longarm looked out once more to see Laughing Lyle running, limping and holding his right arm close against his side, toward the front of the roadhouse. The outlaw’s thin, straw-colored hair danced around the bald top of his head.
Longarm threw himself to the left side of the window, and started to raise the Colt in his right hand, but the wounded arm felt as though a rabid cur were tearing into it. He couldn’t get the pistol aimed even chest high. He took the gun in his left hand, but by the time he got it aimed, Laughing Lyle had disappeared around the front of the roadhouse.
“Shit!”
Longarm wheeled and, clutching the Colt in his left hand and letting the wounded right arm hang straight down at his side, ran down the hall. He dropped down the stairs two steps at a time, wincing as each jarring step caused the rabid dog to take another hungry bite out of the wounded wing.
The half-breed barman and the three waddies were standing around behind the bar, looking like scolded schoolboys. One ducked with a start when he saw Longarm, who yelled, “Stay where you are, fellas!”
The whore had begun to dress but now lurched back against the fainting couch, holding a corset bustier across her pillowy breasts. “You, too, miss!” Longarm added as he sprinted along the bar.
“What in tarnation!” shouted one of the punchers.
Longarm heard hoof thuds in the yard as he approached the closed winter doors. He pulled the doors open and bulled through the batwings in time to see Laughing Lyle galloping westward out of the yard on a white-socked chestnut, bulging saddlebags that contained sixteen thousand dollars in Stoneville loot draped across the horse’s hindquarters.
The lawman leaped down the porch steps into the yard, cursing at the ache that the move kicked up in his arm, and raised the Colt in his left hand. He eased the tension in his trigger finger, however. Laughing Lyle was a good seventy yards away and galloping fast, horse and rider silhouetted against a colorful western sunset, behind the shadows of sawtooth mountains.
Boots pounded the porch behind Longarm, who glanced behind to see one of the waddies step cautiously out of the roadhouse, looking toward the dwindling hoof thuds. He swung his gaze to the horses, including Longarm’s gray, prancing around nervously at the hitch rack.