Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance

by Tabor Evans

  “No, thank you,” she said with her customary, strained tolerance as she sat back in her seat and crossed her long, fine legs under her dress.

  Longarm indulged in a quick look, for it was hard not to look and keep on looking at a beauty as radiant as she, despite how much trouble she’d likely turn out to be. He pinched his hat brim to her, turned into the aisle, and left the coach car via its rear vestibule.

  He stopped to stretch on the halved-log platform.

  To his left, the engineers were maneuvering the wood-and-canvas spout into place, swinging it over the locomotive from the water tank that stood on stilts near a scraggly cottonwood that was currently being thrashed by a mean wind. The four crude board buildings that comprised Jerkwater lay straight out from the train, across a wide freight road. The wind was blowing dirt and sand and tumbleweeds every which way, and it was causing shingle chains to dance and squawk beneath porch awnings.

  As Longarm headed on past the little, privy-sized shack that served as a depot here in Jerkwater toward the saloon, Longarm saw that most of the passengers appeared to be heading into the Mexican lady’s café sitting just left of the Swede’s saloon. She was deservedly reputed for her burritos, but she didn’t serve beer or allow it on her premises, so Longarm continued on up the saloon’s porch steps and through the batwings that the wind was flapping raucously.

  “Swede, does the wind ever not blow here?” Longarm asked the big, blond-haired, blond-mustached gent slicing what appeared a deer or possibly an antelope quarter on the cottonwood planks that served as his bar. The lawman batted his hat against his whipcord trousers, causing dust to billow.

  “Every night around midnight it settles down for about five minutes.” The Swede grinned his rosy-cheeked grin as he regarded the big lawman, who always asked the same question as he walked through the Swede’s doors, to the Swede’s customary reply. “You on the hunt for curly wolves again, Custis?”

  “What the hell else would I be doing out here on this blister on the devil’s ass?” Longarm grinned. He always said that, too. The Swede didn’t take offense; he was only here because his wife’s father willed him the store and he’d had his fill of the big city Denver had become since the War Between the States.

  It might be windy and ugly out here, but he was making a living, by God, and it was better than the stench and crowds farther north.

  “Thought maybe you rode out here for my beer, got tired of that swill they serve up on Larimer Street.”

  “Serve it up, Swede.” Longarm gazed at the meat the man had been slicing onto a big tin plate. “Any of that for sandwiches?”

  “You betcha,” the Swede said. “Shot that antelope buck last night just before dark. Good dark meat—dark as a Norwegian’s soul!”

  The Swede guffawed.

  Longarm looked around. There were only two men in the place. He thought he recognized the two—a half-breed and an Anglo—from the group that had been paying such tribute to Agent Delacroix earlier. Vaguely, he supposed the others had gone over to the Mexican lady’s café.

  The Swede drew him a beer, scraped off the cream foam with a flat stick, and set the frothy schooner on the cottonwood planks before going to work on Longarm’s sandwich. The lawman leaned against the planks and sipped the beer slowly. It was room temperature, but the Swede had a special way of making it—thick and malty, with just enough of an alcohol kick—to make it a welcome treat that tempered the tedium of the long, slow ride into New Mexico south of the formidable Raton Pass.

  “Damn, that’s good,” he said. “You know, Swede, you should bottle that and…” He let his voice trail off and turned to gaze through the window left of the fluttering batwings.

  He could see the train stretched out along the far side of the freight road, veiled by windblown grit and the occasional tumbling tumbleweed. He thought he’d heard something beneath the squawking of the shingle chains. The wind peeled a shake from the little depot building’s roof and whipped it southward.

  Deciding he’d only been hearing the wind, Longarm turned back to his beer. A half-formed thought pricked the short hairs beneath his shirt collar, and he turned to the two men from the train. They sat near the batwings, playing cards, but they were grinning at each other from beneath their hat brims.

  The Anglo gave Longarm a furtive glance before dropping his eyes to his cards and whistling with feigned casualness. Longarm’s pulse quickened. He turned full around to the two cardplayers.

  “Where’s your friends?” he asked.

  “Huh?” replied the half-breed. He looked more Indian than white though he was dressed in a long, tan duster, black Stetson, and black batwing chaps. “What friends, brother?”

  “Don’t ‘brother’ me,” Longarm muttered as he pushed away from the bar and started for the doors.

  He was six feet from the batwings when the Anglo bounded up from his chair facing the table and the wall, wheeled, and threw himself violently into Longarm, slamming the lawman against the saloon’s south wall. Longarm managed to stay on his feet and get turned to face his attacker, but then the short, solidly built gent punched him twice in the face.

  Fortunately, Longarm had a big, thick face that was accustomed to such abuse. It took a lot of it to affect him overmuch.

  He shook off the blow and then head-butted the stocky Anglo, who sagged back on his heels, dazed, before Longarm grabbed him by the collar of his denim jacket and hammered him twice against the wall, hard. The reverberating blows caused dust to sift from between the wall’s whipsawed pine planks.

  The stocky gent groaned and dropped straight down the wall to his knees before leaning forward against the wall as though in prayer.

  Longarm turned toward the room in time to see the flash of the wan sunlight off steel. He jerked his head to the right, and the big bowie knife that the half-breed had thrown embedded itself in the wall behind Longarm with a dull thud. The half-breed stood crouched about six feet from Longarm, in front of the jostling batwings, his boots spread in the fighter’s stance.

  He had another big knife in his right hand, and he flipped it dexterously between his thumb and index finger.

  The savagely upturned tip glinted in the sunlight.

  “We just give them a few minutes in the train—okay, brother?” the half-breed said, his malicious grin revealing chipped, yellow teeth between weathered pink lips. “Just a few minutes with your girl. Then it’s my turn.” He grabbed his crotch with his free hand. “Don’t worry, I’ll leave some for you, but you might have to sew her back together before you can fuck her again!”

  The half-breed laughed, squinting his large, evil black eyes.

  He flipped his bowie knife in the air, tauntingly, and just as he caught its handle, there was an enormous cracking boom that sounded like a barrel of dynamite exploding inside a one-hole privy. Longarm was staring at the half-breed’s menacing face one second. The next half-second there was nothing but the man’s shoulders and the ragged hole where his hat had been, the head itself with its remaining evil leer and long, black hair flying out over the batwings in a hail of buckshot.

  The man’s black hat left the head to tumble against the batwings and fall to the floor.

  The man’s headless body staggered bizarrely back against a chair, his hand still wielding the knife until both his arms fell and the headless corpse dropped back against the chair, knocking the chair to one side and then falling to the floor and rolling up beneath the table.

  Longarm looked to his right. The big Swede grinned down the double-barreled shotgun he still held to his shoulder, aiming over the top of the bar. Slowly, he lowered the smoking weapon.

  “There ya go, Custis. Compliments of the house. He was a good bit Norwegian. I’ll bet you anything!”

  “Thanks, Swede.”

  Longarm gave the headless corpse a dubious glance where it lay quivering beneath the table and then, as he ran through the batwings, he looked at the half-breed’s head lying out in the street in front of the porc
h, at the end of a long blood trail.

  The half-breed still had the same leer on his face as in the seconds before he’d lost his cap. Longarm leaped the grisly object that looked like a coffee can that had been used too long for target practice, and broke into a sprint toward the train, angling toward the coach car in which he’d left the girl.

  A scream sounded beneath the wind’s keening.

  Longarm stopped suddenly about twenty feet in front of the train, left of the little wind-battered depot building.

  A man flew out the rear door of the coach car. The round-faced Mexican with the drooping mustache bounced off the front of the next car back and then tumbled down the vestibule steps to the rail bed. He lay groaning and writhing and clutching both hands to his bloody crotch from which a knife handle protruded.

  There was a loud boom, almost as loud as the thunder of the Swede’s barn blaster.

  Another scream.

  A clattering rose inside the coach car, and then another man—this one the Anglo with the squash-yellow hair—flew out the coach’s rear door backward and slammed against the front of the next car back. He hit the car so hard that Longarm heard the car’s door crack in its frame, its window glass breaking.

  The man with the squash-yellow hair bounced off the door, dropped to the vestibule, and tumbled down the steps to pile up beside his amigo still writhing on the ground beside the rail bed. Longarm looked again at the knife protruding from the Mexican’s bloody crotch.

  Slow footsteps sounded in the coach car. Haven Delacroix stepped through the door and onto the blood-splattered vestibule. As she turned toward the dead or dying men lying beside the rail bed, she held two smoking revolvers in her hands, down low by her comely legs clad in the silvery-green traveling frock.

  The pistols were LeMats—five-shot revolvers with a stubby, dark-mawed shotgun barrel situated beneath the main .45-caliber one. Both guns were silver-chased and fancily scrolled. Longarm could see the pearl grips showing between the girl’s fingers wrapped tightly around the handles.

  Agent Delacroix stood staring down at the dead or dying, her dark brown hair blowing around her lovely head in the wind. Her lips were pressed tight together, her eyes narrowed in disgust.

  “Teach you to trifle with defenseless women,” she said in a cold, hard, razor-edged voice.

  She dropped the LeMats into soft, leather holsters belted to her slender waist and which she must have donned after Longarm had left the day coach, because she hadn’t been wearing the guns before. She must have anticipated a move by the cutthroats.

  She tugged her shirtwaist down and looked at Longarm. “I could go for that sandwich now. Fetch it for me, will you, Deputy Long? This wind wreaks havoc on a girl’s hair.”

  She turned back through the coach car’s open door.

  Longarm stood staring, dumbfounded, at the space she’d vacated. Footsteps rose behind him, and he turned woodenly to see the stage passengers approaching from the direction of the Mexican lady’s café, both men and women holding their hats on their heads and looking wary.

  The spindly, gray-haired depot agent stood staring hang-jawed through the open door of his little shack. The two engineers and the fireman were walking slowly, cautiously toward Longarm from the direction of the engine, staring down at the dead man and the slow-dying Mexican rolling from side to side and clutching at the knife in his crotch.

  He was sobbing now and begging for mercy as he died.

  Longarm looked up at the coach car again, his rugged face creased with amazement. He scratched the back of his head. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Chapter 10

  The dead man wore only a ratty Stetson with a braided rawhide band and a bullet hole in its crown.

  He was about halfway from being dead to being a skeleton. Bits of sun-cured skin clung to the pale bones where the birds hadn’t yet finished pecking it away. Long, thin, grizzled strands of hair dangled from the cadaver’s eyeless skull to its spindly shoulders.

  Where the man’s clothes had gone was anyone’s guess. Longarm was sure he hadn’t died up there on the boulder towering beside the narrow, jagged entrance to a canyon deep in an unnamed jog of rocky bluffs and sloping mesas, somewhere north of Broken Jaw in the northeast Arizona Territory. The dead man had been placed atop the rock as though he’d climbed up there to look out across the sloping desert hills to the south and gone to sleep and expired.

  “What on earth?” Haven said, sitting a rented steeldust gelding to Longarm’s right. “Someone’s idea of a joke, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of a joke,” Longarm said. “Mostly, a warnin’ to posses, lawmen, anyone with their hats set on scoutin’ that chasm.” His own mount was a strawberry roan with a cream-speckled hindquarters that he’d rented in Belen, New Mexico, when he and Haven had ended their train journey. The sure-footed mount cropped gama grass growing up around the rocks strewn out in front of the canyon mouth.

  “Outlaw hideout?”

  “Most likely. One of their amigos likely took a bullet some months back, and they decided to put his carcass to good use. An old tradition in these parts.”

  Longarm glanced once more at the grisly totem. He reined his horse away from the canyon and touched heels to its flanks. “Well, we got other matters to tend to, but I’ll keep that old boy in mind. His friends might prove to have some federal paper on their heads. Every other rascal in these parts does.”

  “How many times you been through here, Marshal?”

  She put her horse up beside him, her steeldust keeping pace with his roan. In Belen, she’d exchanged her fancily stitched traveling dress for more practical trail gear, and while the men’s shirt, slacks, and suspenders worn beneath a long, tan duster and the light brown Stetson made her resemble a typical thirty-a-month-and-found cowpuncher from a distance, from close up she was as beautiful as ever. Maybe prettier, even more alluring, for the form-fitting albeit rough riding gear revealed more of the swells and curves than the dress had.

  Her full breasts, which Longarm couldn’t help remember fondling, rolling the nipples between his thumbs and index fingers, pushed out from behind her striped shirt, straining the buttons, jiggling enticingly as she rode.

  “Too many times to count, I reckon.”

  “I haven’t traveled this far south.” She was looking around, taking in the high-desert landscape with a fascination that made her otherwise cool eyes glow. “Most of my work has been done in cities.”

  “What kind of work has that been, Miss Delacroix?” Longarm still had trouble addressing the girl so formally. He couldn’t remember ever having tumbled with a woman, especially with such abandon, and her still not letting him call her by her first name. That was a first, but then, Agent Delacroix was many firsts for Longarm.

  Including the first woman he’d ever seen so expertly dispatch three would-be rapists like those she had dispatched back in Jerkwater.

  She swung her head toward him, her hair flying about her shoulders. “You mean, where did I learn how to shoot so well—isn’t that what you meant, Marshal Long?”

  After the bodies were hauled off and the train had resumed its journey southward, they hadn’t discussed the killings in Jerkwater. Longarm had thought it her place to broach the subject. Obviously, Miss Haven Delacroix was a girl of many mysteries, and he doubted she’d tell him a damn thing about anything until she was good and ready, and she may or might not be ever be ready.

  “Well, now that you mention it…”

  “My father was a rich man from back East. He owned a lot of weapons. He had no sons to teach how to use them, so he taught me. We hunted in the Allegheny Mountains and throughout Appalachia. Deer, bear, turkeys, ducks, geese…”

  “Killin’ men’s a special kind of shootin’, Miss Delacroix.”

  “Is it, Marshal Long?” Haven looked at him askance. “Oh, but when we’re talking about men, we’re not including those three back in Jerkwater, are we?”

  Longarm looked back at her, finding himself g
rowing more and more curious about her. What he saw in her hazel eyes now was a peculiar, unsettling edge. He’d seen it before, when they were fucking like dogs back in her hotel room in Leadville. He’d chalked that up to raw desire. But here it was again after she’d killed three men, having stabbed a stiletto into the balls of one.

  Men who’d had it coming in spades, certainly. But she’d killed them just the same. And she was cooler about it than most men would have been.

  Yes, there was much that was mysterious about Miss Haven Delacroix. And while she’d proven that she could defend herself against three half-drunk cowhands, she was just too forthright and too damn pretty to be partnered up with on a murder investigation on the mostly untamed frontier, where a good many men would as soon shoot a man, especially a lawman, as let him pass in the street.

  The same held true for Pinkerton detectives.

  A pretty girl was a lightning rod for trouble, and Miss Delacroix’s being a Pinkerton made her stand all the taller against a stormy sky. Likely sooner rather than later, she was going to get herself and probably Longarm, too, in more trouble than either of them knew what to do with.

  They rode throughout the afternoon, stopping now and then to rest their horses and drink from springs or muddy streams coursing down from the White Mountains in the northwest. Longarm followed an old wild-horse trail he’d taken through the area before, knowing it was the shortest route between Belen and Broken Jaw though the traveling was often rough. Wild horses knew the best routes between springs, however, so while they had to travel up and around some stony bluffs and steep mesas, water holes were relatively plentiful though a couple were already dry this late in the southwestern summer.

  Late in the afternoon, they rode down a crease between slanting mesa walls. The trough was shaded by the west-angling sun, the hot air tanged with cedar. When Longarm rode around a thumb of rock jutting out from the mesa wall on his right, he reined up quickly, reaching a hand across his belly toward the Colt .44-40 holstered on his left hip.