Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance
Page 1
Duck, You Sucker!
Something dark appeared on Longarm’s right, ahead of the train but moving toward Longarm fast. It was a tunnel carved into the side of the mountain.
Longarm, hunkered low atop the coach car, stared in awe—could he get this lucky?—as the dark tunnel mouth flew toward him and the day coach he lay prone upon, both boots dangling down over the side. The peak of the arching portal was only about four feet above the coach car roof.
Longarm looked at Rio Hayes and smiled.
Hayes had just gained his feet and grabbed another bowie knife from somewhere on his scruffy person, and had turned toward Longarm, a savage scowl that, coupled with his broken jaw hanging askew, made his entire face look horsey and crooked and even more demented than usual.
Hayes hadn’t seen the tunnel when Longarm had. But now he saw that gaping, black portal rushing toward him like a gigantic black bird from some hellish underworld intending to scoop him up in its stygian wings.
Hayes had about one second to widen his eyes in awe and dismay before the tunnel turned the world dark. About one eye wink later, following a clipped scream, Longarm heard a resounding, crunching thump!
Just like that, Rio Hayes was gone.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LONGARM AND THE AMBUSH AT HOLY DEFIANCE
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Jove edition / February 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Cover illustration by Milo Sinovcic.
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ISBN: 978-1-101-60184-6
ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
Chapter 1
The deputy U.S. marshal known to friend and foe as Longarm took a final drag from his three-for-a-nickel cheroot. He blew the smoke out his nose and then tossed the cigar away on the hot wind blowing past the stony escarpment he was perched on, in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado Territory.
He drew the flat brim of his flat-crowned, coffee-brown Stetson down low on his sun-leathered forehead and tightened his grip on the forestock of his Winchester ’73.
Longarm stared down at the roofs of the train cars passing about fifteen feet below him. The train was moving only about ten, maybe twelve miles an hour as it climbed the steep slope from his left to his right. Still, one misstep, and a second later he’d be rolling off the train and into the deep, salmon-colored canyon yawning on the far side of the tracks.
“Billy, you don’t pay me near enough,” the big lawman in the tobacco tweed suit grumbled aloud, though not so loudly that the outlaws he knew to be aboard the train could hear him.
The Billy of topic, of course, was Longarm’s boss, Chief Marshal Billy Vail of Denver’s First District Court, who no doubt at this moment was safely ensconced behind his cluttered desk in the Federal Building on Denver’s Colfax Avenue, not far from the Mint.
Billy’s prissy male secretary was probably contentedly playing his typing machine in the outer office. The pretty, young, unattached girls of Denver were likely strolling along the cinder-paved streets around Union Station in their summer-weight frocks, breasts jostling enticingly against their stays and trusses, cheeks rouged from the pure, fresh, high-altitude air and sun.
“Well, let’s unleash the wolves,” Longarm said and stepped off the stony escarpment into thin air.
The roof of the second-to-last car in the combination widened beneath his boots, rising so quickly that he could clearly see several rusty rivets
in the car’s tin roof a second before his heels struck the roof with a heavy, tinny thump! Longarm threw his free arm and rifle out to each side for balance, spreading his boots a little more than shoulder-width apart.
He sucked a sharp, anxious breath.
Had the rough landing been heard inside the car?
He got his answer a second later, when a funnel-brimmed hat appeared just beyond the front of the car, on the car’s right side, where the ladder must have been. As the hat rose higher, a face appeared beneath it—a broad, flat, tan face with blue eyes and a shaggy, red-blond mustache drooping down over the man’s mouth. The man’s right cheek had a deep, puckered scar, identifying him instantly as Oklahoma Charlie De Paul, who’d gotten the scar when a Lipan Apache had pierced it with an arrow back when Charlie had first started running guns along the Arizona-Mexico border.
When Charlie’s eyes found Longarm, they snapped wide in mutual recognition. Longarm flung himself onto his butt and spun, raising his rifle at the same time that Oklahoma Charlie brought a pistol to bear.
“Fuck you, Longarm!”
The pistol flashed and roared, the slug screeching past Longarm’s left ear as the rangy lawman flinched and then yelled, “I take it that mean you don’t intend on givin’ yourself up, eh, Charlie!”
The outlaw opened his mouth to respond at the same time that he laid his pistol’s sights on Longarm again, squinting down the barrel. Longarm lined up his own sights, squeezed the Winchester’s trigger. As the stock kicked back against his right shoulder, he saw the top of Charlie’s head turn red.
Charlie’s revolver stabbed flames skyward. His hat blew away in the wind a half second before Charlie’s head slipped abruptly down out of sight below the roof of the jostling train car. At the same time, a roar of panic erupted in the combination’s three passenger cars, including the one beneath Longarm.
A woman screamed. A baby cried.
Beneath the din, Longarm heard someone he assumed was one of the outlaws yell, “Son of a bitchin’ law!”
“On the roof!” another outlaw shouted.
Longarm gained his feet and moved toward the front of the car.
A pistol cracked twice in the car beneath him, causing another woman to scream and two ragged holes to appear in the tin roof about two feet behind Longarm. A hatted head appeared at the rear end of the car, and the black-bearded train robber flared his nostrils and brought up a Henry rifle, planting the brass maw on Longarm, who, planting his feet against the pitch and sway of the coach roof, fired his Winchester twice from his right hip.
The outlaw triggered his Henry into the stone cliff on the train’s right side before falling back off the ladder and out of Longarm’s field of vision.
More women were screaming now in the cars beneath Longarm. More tykes were bawling. Men were shouting. Someone, probably a sky pilot, was reciting scripture from his Bible in a loud but dull monotone that only slightly betrayed the precariousness of his situation.
As the pistol beneath Longarm cracked once, twice, three more times, Longarm ran toward the front of the car, hearing the bullets pop through the ceiling behind him. He saw movement on the vestibule between his car and the next one. He ran harder as he approached the gap and then launched himself into the air, landing on the roof of the next car and having to throw his rifle out to one side to regain his balance lest the train’s violent swaying throw him into the canyon.
When he had a relatively firm purchase, he wheeled, cocked the Winchester, pressed the brass butt plate against his shoulder, and fired twice quickly. The two outlaws looking up at him from the vestibule, trying to plant their sights on him, were sent spinning and bouncing off the front, blood-splattered wall of the car Longarm had just left.
One desperado flew off the cliff side of the train and disappeared in a cloud of dust beside the rail bed. The other gave a terrified scream as he flew off into the canyon, the scream dwindling quickly as he plunged toward the canyon of the Looking Glass River far, far below.
More shouts and cries from inside the passenger cars. Boots thumped as the remaining outlaws ran around, probably trying to figure out how many lawmen they were dealing with.
Longarm knew he probably shouldn’t have tried taking them all down alone, but he’d learned just a few hours before, from a former gang member, of the gang’s intention to rob this narrow gauge spur line running between mining camps in the San Juans, and there’d been no time to throw a posse together. The Arkansas River Gang, as this bunch was called, was known for cold-blooded murder as well as rape and for kidnapping young women to sell as slaves in Arizona and Old Mexico.
For those reasons, he’d opted to risk his own hide as well as those of the innocent passengers who could get caught in the crossfire, and try to take them all down solo.
Hell, according to their former member, Scratch Gillis, who’d gotten crossways with the gang when its leader shot Gillis’s brother, H. C., when he found H. C. fucking Gillis’s girl in a chicken coop, there were only eight members. Since Longarm had already killed four, that left only four more.
Hell, for a man like Longarm, those were bettin’ odds.
Backing away from the end of the car, Longarm racked a fresh cartridge into his Winchester’s breech. If more men ran out onto the vestibule, so much the better. He’d pick them off one at a time a relatively safe distance from the passengers.
Dropping to his knees, he continued to peer over the edge of the car and onto the blood-splattered wooden platform below. The rushing wind threatened to blow his hat off from behind. Vaguely, because he had more important things on his mind just now, he noted that the train’s speed seemed to be increasing, which meant they were nearing the top of Horse Thief Pass.
A face appeared in the little dirty window in the rear door of the car behind Longarm. It was a round face with little cruel eyes and thin, sandy hair. The gang’s leader, most likely—Rio Hayes. Longarm recognized him from the wanted dodgers that his ugly visage graced throughout the frontier.
When Hayes’s eyes found Longarm, the lawman jerked back behind the roof’s overhang. He heard the gang leader yell, “On the roof, next car forward!”
Longarm didn’t want to shoot Hayes through the glass and risk a ricochet that might strike one of the passengers. Instead, he decided to buy himself some time and took off running forward along the roof of the car he was on, lunging to each side, setting his feet carefully so he wouldn’t get thrown off. He was halfway to the car’s other end when a pistol popped behind him. The bullet screamed past his right ear and plunked into a stovepipe poking up from the roof of the next car.
The pistol popped again.
Then again.
The shooter cursed angrily as the pistol belched once more, the third bullet kissing the right flap of Longarm’s brown tweed frock coat. Longarm wheeled and fired two hasty shots at the shooter crouched atop the car’s rear end. Then Longarm turned forward again and stepped off the edge of the roof.
As he dropped, he twisted around, aiming the Winchester out from his right hip. The man standing there—a beefy Mexican with bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest and holding a Winchester carbine slackly in both his big, brown hands—stared at the lawman in round-eyed, slack-jawed fascination.
The Mexican had a blond girl trapped beneath his right boot. She lay belly down, naked and squirming and sobbing against the Mexican’s weight. The Mexican’s pants were down around his knees. His dong jutted at half-mast from under the ragged tails of his red-and-black calico shirt.
Longarm triggered the Winchester once while he was still in the air and a second time just after he landed on the vestibule, near the naked girl’s small, pink feet. Both shots blew dust from the Mexican’s shirt, punching him back against the rear of the car behind him. He slumped there, gritting his teeth and gasping and trying to raise his carbine.
The girl was screaming and kicking. A quick glance told Longarm she couldn’t have been much over thirteen years old. Longarm looked at the Mex
, fury boiling up from deep in his belly, and smashed the rear stock of his rifle against the Mexican’s face. The blow turned the man’s nose sideways. The nose exploded like a ripe tomato blasted off a fence post.
Blood flew in all directions, painting the Mexican’s big face. Several large, thick drops splashed onto the naked girl’s smooth shoulders. Longarm stepped back, raised the rifle again.
“You got no manners at all, amigo,” he said, the mildness in his voice belying the hot fury that had turned the tops of his ears red.
There was a thudding crack as the Winchester’s butt plate met the Mexican’s left temple resoundingly and sent the man hurling off the girl and over the side of the train. There was no longer a canyon to accept him, however. Trees and rocks had pushed up along both sides of the rails. The Mexican hit the ground, bounced, and rolled into the pines and boulders and was gone as the train rushed on.
The girl gained her knees, stared after the Mexican, and then half turned toward Longarm. He glimpsed a pair of perfect, peach-colored breasts with tender pink nipples. Her long, lustrous hair was the dark blond of ripe autumn wheat.
“That bastard stuck his filthy cock in me!” she cried, her face a mask of revulsion.
Vaguely noting from both her physical attributes as well as her command of farm talk that she was probably older than he’d at first thought, Longarm said, “You’re all right now, miss. He’s deader’n hell.”
He edged a look through the glass of the coach door splattered with the Mex’s blood. “Now it’s time for the rest of his ilk to join him.” He glanced at the girl once more where she knelt with her arms crossed on her breasts. “You stay here!”
He jerked the coach door open and bolted inside.
Chapter 2
There were about ten passengers in the car as Longarm ran inside, loudly cocking his Winchester and aiming straight out from his shoulder, staring down the barrel.