by Evans, Tabor
A big man with a heavy-footed gait was walking toward the saloon from the direction of the doctor’s office. Just as Longarm was about to rein up in front of the Nowhere and ask what all the commotion was about, the big man came running with surprising speed until Longarm saw Benji’s broad, fleshy face beneath the narrow brim of the shabby bowler hat. The hat nearly blew off the big deputy town marshal’s head before he could grab it and hold it in one fist as he ran.
“Marshal Butter,” the kid cried, breathing hard, his face pinched with anguish. “Somethin’ just awful happened!”
Longarm knew right away it had to do with Laughing Lyle. Before Benji could reach him and Butter, Longarm rammed his boot heels into the gray’s flanks, and the poor, tired creature lunged forward and sort of shambled past the big deputy to Doc Bell’s two-story, adobe-brick office.
“Hey!” Benji cried, wheeling and running back toward the office.
“Oh, no,” Butter said. “Oh, good Lord—don’t tell me . . . !”
Longarm had barely stopped the horse before he lifted his right leg over the animal’s neck and dropped straight down to the ground. He pulled his Colt from its holster and bounded over the roofed boardwalk and through the doctor’s front door. He stopped just inside and lowered the pistol.
It was not Laughing Lyle he saw in the room Longarm had last seen him in, but Ma Marcus from the Organ Range House. She was tending a man laid out on the bed. The man was too big to be Laughing Lyle.
There was a thud to Longarm’s left, and he turned to arch a surprised brow at Laughing Lyle’s half sister, Jenny May, who, regarding him obliquely, dropped a chunk of wood into the potbelly stove that stood in the middle of the room, beside a leather-padded operating table. A pan of water steamed on the stove. Jenny turned her eyes away from Longarm, vaguely sheepish, as Ma Marcus turned toward the federal lawman and said in a scolding tone, “About time you got here.”
Butter limped up onto the boardwalk behind Longarm, flanked by the anguished-looking Benji, and stepped inside. “What the hell happened, Ma?”
“And you!” Ma scolded, wagging a finger at the town marshal. “No offense to Benji, but where in the hell have you been all day? Last I heard you were still the law of this little backwater!”
In four long strides, Longarm was in the room with Ma Marcus and looking down at the writhing, groaning form of Doc Bell himself, fully clothed but covered with a bloody sheet. Only his face was visible. Bell’s eyes were squeezed shut and beads of perspiration stood out across his pale forehead.
As Butter limped into the room behind him, Longarm drew the sheet down from the doctor’s neck. He winced when he saw the blood-matted bandage that apparently Ma Marcus had applied to his belly, about halfway between the man’s belly button and his heart.
“It was Laughing Lyle!” cried Benji, stumbling in behind the town marshal. “He shot the doc and the doc’s wife—damn near blew Mrs. Bell in two!—and then him and that girl took off on horseback, galloping toward the Organ Range!”
“And Laughing as he did it, too,” said Ma, shaking her head in the doorway, holding a wadded up rag in one withered hand. “Whoopin’ and hollerin’, him and the preacher’s girl triggerin’ shots all over town, and then ole Lyle galloped north toward the mountains, Laughing like he was just havin’ the time of his life!”
“The girl?” Longarm said, swinging his gaze toward the spindly hotel owner standing in the doorway. “You mean Bethany Todd?”
“I sure do!”
“Was she riding a calico?”
“She was indeed.”
“Did she have a pair of bulging saddlebags on her?”
“Shore ’nuff!” intoned Benji, beating Ma to the punch.
Ma laughed without mirth, as though at the sickest, darkest joke she’d ever heard. “I knew somethin’ was up around here. I just had a feelin’. Call it my sixth sense. But who would ever suspect it—eh, Marshal? The preacher’s daughter runnin’ off her leash with Laughing Lyle May!”
Chapter 15
“Miss Bethany?” Butter said, aghast, standing there at the end of Doc Bell’s bed, leaning on his Spencer rifle. “Why, she musta shot her poor pa, then . . .” He let his voice trail off as though it were all just too much to fathom. His face was sweat-shiny and white.
The preacher’s daughter killing her father and throwing in with Laughing Lyle . . .
Longarm himself still hadn’t wrapped his own mind around the entire sordid thing, but he knew now it was Bethany who’d ambushed him and Todd. She’d probably gone out to retrieve the saddlebags from wherever she’d stowed them along the trail the night she’d found the wounded Laughing Lyle and her father, and had seen Longarm and Butter riding out from Nowhere. She’d probably figured they’d find the reverend’s body, so she followed them and tried to beef them both when it seemed convenient, in hopes of saving her and Laughing Lyle from having to do it later. Or being prevented from getting out of town.
The girl wasn’t half-bad with a rifle. Almost too good.
Longarm moved now to Ma Marcus, who was flanked by both Benji and Laughing Lyle’s half sister, Jenny.
“Ma, where did Bethany come from? Did she ride into town from the east a couple of hours ago?”
“I don’t know where she come from,” Ma said in her gravelly voice. “I just know I heard gunfire and the doctor yellin’ and his wife screamin’ and Laughing Lyle whoopin’ and hollerin’, and I ran out of the hotel to see her, Miss Bethany, sitting her calico in front of the place. She had the reins of another saddled horse in her hand, and she threw the reins to Lyle as he came limpin’ out of the doctor’s office. Before he mounted up, he swung around and fired two more shots into the office.”
Benji yelled, “Ain’t that some way to treat a man who saved your life?”
“He’s gotta be a devil,” Butter said, staring at Longarm. “To do that, shot up as bad as he was.”
“Are you sure he was shot up as bad as you thought?” Longarm asked the town marshal.
“Well, yeah . . . of course.” Butter slid his stricken gaze toward the writhing Doc Bell. “You heard the doc. Said your bullets tore him all up inside.”
Benji gave a yelp, like a coyote peppered with buckshot, and went running out of the office, his heavy hoof thuds rocking the entire building. He whipped past the window and was gone.
Longarm returned his gaze to Butter. The town marshal looked away. Longarm walked back over to the side of the bed and stared down at Bell. The doctor’s eyes were open, haunting in their directness.
He stretched his lips back from his teeth as though in agony then lifted his head, grunting and muttering. He lifted his hand, weakly wagging his fingers. He seemed to be trying to say something.
“What is it, Doc?” Longarm crouched low and squeezed the dying man’s shoulder. “What do you want to tell me?”
Doc Bell stared at Longarm, gritting his teeth, sweat oozing in several rivulets down his cheeks. He grabbed Longarm’s forearm and squeezed, stretched his lips back farther, gurgling, saliva bubbling between his teeth.
“What is it, Doc?” Longarm said. “What’re you tryin’ to tell me, goddamnit?”
Bell’s grip on Longarm’s forearm loosened. The hand dropped away. The man’s eyes fluttered closed and his head sagged back against his pillow. His breath rattled, and his chest and belly fell still.
“Dead,” Butter said. “How do you like that?”
Longarm looked at the town marshal, who shook his head, holding his hat down low by his side as he leaned against his rifle. Did he really appear relieved or was it just Longarm’s fevered imagination?
How much, if anything, did Butter know about Laughing Lyle’s ploy?
“Poor man,” Ma said, shaking her head slowly before turning to Jenny. “There’s no need for the water, I guess, dear. Thank you f
or helping.”
Longarm looked beyond the woman at Jenny, who stood holding the tin pan of steaming water. The girl stared back at Longarm, but it was as though she were staring right through him, shaking her head.
“What is it, Miss May?”
Her vision suddenly cleared. She flushed slightly, frowning. “What? I . . . was . . . just thinking what a horror my brother is, of course.” She glanced at the dead doctor. “More blood on the May name.”
Her eyes glazed with tears, and her upper lip quivered. Ma went to her, wrapped an arm around the girl’s shoulders. “We can’t pick our own kin, child.”
Longarm stood before Jenny, gently took the steaming pan of water from her, and set it on the doctor’s desk. He turned back to the girl, frowning down at her. “Do you know where’s he’s headed? Your ranch, maybe?”
Jenny gasped. Her dark eyes acquired a sudden, stricken cast. “Lyle might head there for fresh horses. If so, my father is there alone. There’ll be trouble.”
“How so?”
“They don’t get along, and with Pa drinkin’ the way he does . . .”
The girl ran her hands back through her hair and stared at the floor, eyes wide with worry. “The problem, you see, is they’re cut from the same cloth.” She shook her head. “I should have ridden after them right away, but I wanted to help Ma with the doctor. Oh, God!” She sobbed, tears, dribbling down her cheeks.
Longarm glanced at Ma. “Best help get her back to her room.” As the old woman turned Jenny around and walked her toward the door, Longarm turned to Butter. “You know the way out to the May ranch?”
“Of course.”
“Well, follow me over to the livery barn and tell me while I saddle a fresh horse.”
“You ain’t goin’ after ’em in the dark, are ya, Longarm?”
Longarm headed out the door. “I sure as hell am.”
He’d been after those saddlebags too long and hard to let a little darkness stop him now. And Bethany Todd had played him for a fool. Besides, there would be a moon tonight. That should help keep him from killing his horse.
Butter said, “Well, I’ll go with you, for chrissakes.”
“No, you stay here in case they circle back.”
Longarm didn’t figure Laughing Lyle would do that. The real reason he didn’t want Butter riding with him was because he wasn’t sure he trusted the man, not to mention he was injured. Laughing Lyle’s sudden recovery had thrown Butter and Bell under a heavy blanket of suspicion in the federal lawman’s eyes.
As he led the horse over to the livery barn, Butter hobbled along behind him, warning him about all the hidden dangers in that mountainous terrain north of town. But Longarm was only half-listening. His ears were burning over Bethany Todd. He could still see those breasts in the darkness, feel those delicious lips on his, her sleek snatch grinding against his throbbing hard-on.
All the time they’d frolicked she’d likely snickered to herself over the ruse she’d pulled, her father turning cold on the trail east of Nowhere. Maybe Laughing Lyle was a devil. But he’d teamed up with a girl just as devilish, though you sure as hell wouldn’t know it to look at her. Or to fuck her!
“If that ain’t enough business for you, Doc Bell will be here shortly,” Longarm told Humperdink as he glanced at the body of the middle-aged, portly woman, Doc’s wife, stretched out on sawhorses just inside the barn’s double doors. She was only partly covered by a sheet, and Longarm saw a mess of blood matting her flowered dress. Her puffy, pale face and curly gray hair were liberally splattered, as well. Her eyes were halfway open, and her tongue drooped from one corner of her mouth.
“Jeepers!” Humperdink cried, looking up from the casket he was hammering together and removing the two nails he had clamped between his lips. “If I get any more business, there ain’t gonna be nothin’ left of Nowhere! You goin’ after him, Marshal?”
“What do you think?”
Longarm had stopped the gray just outside the barn’s double doors and was unbuckling the McClellan’s belly strap. “I guess you didn’t actually see the preacher the other night, did you? In the buggy with Bethany and Laughing Lyle?”
“No, I was in back sleepin’, as I tend to do that hour of the night.” Humperdink snorted sheepishly and hiked his blue coveralls higher across his sagging belly. “But when I got out here, she said he was feelin’ poorly and had tramped on home.”
“You didn’t think that sounded funny—the reverend leaving his daughter here with Laughing Lyle?”
Humperdink looked around uncertainly, shrugging his heavy shoulders. “Well, I don’t know. I was half-asleep! But I called for Marshal Butter pronto.” He glanced at Longarm as the federal lawman carried his saddle and blanket past him into the barn. “Say, what’s this about? The reverend’s all right, ain’t he?”
“Forget it,” Longarm said, dropping the saddle over a buggy wheel and heading for the rear paddock. “I need a good horse, Humperdink. Come on back here and point out your best one for hard and fast mountain travel!”
* * *
For two hours, Longarm pushed the fleet-footed, wide-barreled buckskin as hard as he dared. The three-quarter moon kited high over the jagged, black-velvet ridges in the southwest, fairly well lighting the narrow horse trail he climbed into the perilous reaches of the Organ Range.
For most of those two hours he’d ridden up and over the rock-strewn hogbacks that rolled down from the severe southern ridge like frozen ocean swells. But now, following the trail up a canyon that twisted higher into the mountains, the going was more treacherous. At times, the moon was hidden by towering crags, and he had to walk the horse. In a few cases, he slipped down out of the saddle and led the mount by its reins, not wanting it to kick a rock and lose a shoe or tumble down a boulder-strewn crevasse.
Occasionally, when the moon lit the trail, he spied a print left by a recent horse, and he knew that he was on the right path. As far as he could tell, there was no one else out here, and all the inhabitants of these remote reaches were likely holed up in ranch cabins or huddled around fires in dark canyons. The print had to belong to Laughing Lyle or Bethany’s horse.
Finally, when he’d ridden for three hours, he realized it was time for him to make camp. He’d come to where several trails branched off the main one, and he couldn’t remember which one Butter had told him led to the May ranch. Slide rock littered the trails, making it impossible to tell if any horses had recently passed.
Grumbling to himself, wanting desperately to have caught up to Laughing Lyle and that killing bitch of his before they reached the May ranch, Longarm led the buckskin down off the main trail through piñons and balsam pines. A creek ran through the bottom of this gorge, nestled between bulging granite walls and steep, forested slopes sparsely tufted with brush. The ridges vaulted around Longarm, two or three thousand feet high in some places. He could see a few stars between the stygian peaks, but the moon had sunk behind a particularly large stone pinnacle.
It was cold at night this far above sea level. Longarm could see his and his horse’s breath. When he’d tended the animal and tied him to a short picket line between trees, he donned his mackinaw, which he’d carried over his hotroll, and tramped around the shore of the gurgling creek, gathering firewood.
He piled the small pine and fir sticks beside a hastily prepared stone ring and touched a match to a tinder mound of crushed pinecones and dead leaves. Gradually, he added more and larger branches to the growing blaze. He’d need a good fire to keep the chill out of his bones.
He filled his coffeepot at the creek, first taking a long drink of the toothachingly cold water. When he’d set the coffeepot in the fire, he fished around in his saddlebags but found only a few bits of old jerky and stony hardtack. Sitting against a tree bole, he poked up his hat brim and lifted his eyes to the nearby creek flashing red in the light of his
fire.
There might be fish in there. And he had nothing else to do while his coffee boiled . . .
He took his small canvas sewing kit out of his saddlebags, removed the fishhook pinned inside of it, and produced a small roll of fishing line from a side pouch. Finding a nice-sized worm under a rock, he impaled the bait on the hook and tied a .44 cartridge just above the hook for weight and reflection. He knelt down beside the stream and dropped the hook in the water.
To his surprise, in less than two minutes, there was a tug on the line, and he pulled in the wriggling red-throated trout that was about eight inches long and packing just enough meat to keep him from going to bed hungry.
Longarm felt better about everything now, occupied with gutting the fish and roasting it on a stick over the fire while he sipped his piping black Arbuckles. The only thing missing was a shot of Maryland rye. He’d left Alva’s bourbon back in his room at the Organ Range House.
He’d just finished the deliciously fresh and tender fish when he noticed that the coyotes that had been yammering from one ridge and the lone wolf that had been crying from another ridge had suddenly fallen silent. There was only the breathy snapping of his fire, the frequent pop of pine resin.
Somewhere back in the direction from which he’d come, a horse whinnied. The sound was muffled by distance and by jutting ridges rising between him and the horse.
Longarm jerked with a start when his own horse lifted an answering whinny from just behind him. He jerked again when another horse, not far beyond the far side of the stream, also loosed a shrill reply. Hooves clacked on rock.
“Hallooo the fire!” a man’s voice called. “Don’t get touchy or nothin’, fella. We’re friendly!”