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

by Tabor Evans

  Then they were gone.

  Longarm took his clothes in his lap and sat down on the bench. Haven’s shadow was still moving around on the other side of the canvas wall. Suddenly, he felt more confounded than amused.

  “Oh, for pete’s sakes, don’t you think this is rather silly? Don’t see no reason why we couldn’t meet up again. What’s it gonna hurt? We’re both professionals. We can have fun and still do our jobs.”

  She was shrugging into her duster. Turning, she grabbed her hat off the peg and carefully set it on her head with both hands, carefully adjusting its angle. She said nothing but was being overly fussy about the hat.

  “You got what I want, and I got what you want,” Longarm said. “Why not admit it? We had fun once.”

  She lowered her hands from her hat and stood staring at him through the canvas wall. He could see her chest rising and falling slowly, heavily as she breathed.

  As she thought it over.

  She was as confounded as he was…

  “No,” she said resolutely. Then louder as though convincing, reprimanding herself. “Not ever again.”

  With that she turned and strode out of the tent.

  “You got nothin’ to be embarrassed about!” Longarm called after her. Then he stuck the cigar back in his mouth and said mostly to himself, because the girl was gone, “Hell, we all got wants. It’s only natural!”

  Chapter 15

  Fully dressed and with his rifle riding one shoulder, his saddlebags slung over the other, Longarm slipped through the tent flap and out into the refreshingly cool air of the late afternoon, early evening.

  The Chinese couple was still tending their laundry. They must wash clothes for nearly the entire town of Broken Jaw.

  The Chinaman was removing dry clothes from one of the lines, folding them neatly, and placing them in a handcart. The woman paused in her stirring a pot of boiling clothes with a long paddle, giving Longarm a speculative, vaguely amorous look, a lock of black hair sliding back and forth above her right eye in the breeze.

  Longarm flipped the woman a three-dollar gold piece.

  “Sorry for the trouble.” He pinched his hat brim to her and then walked on down the street in the direction of the hotel.

  The street was busier than it had been earlier. There were two saloons in town, and cow ponies stood droopy-headed before the hitch racks of each. Horseback riders in the traditionally colorful, billowy neckerchiefs and dusty, weathered sombreros of the Arizona cowpuncher rode back and forth along the street, meeting each other and calling out or pinching their hat brims, laughing with the relief of the end of another long workday in the blazing Sonoran sun.

  They’d have a few drinks, maybe a woman, and buck the tiger or play a few rounds of cards, likely losing every penny they’d made that day, before mounting their ponies again and riding back out to their respective bunkhouses.

  A breeze rose, swirling the dust and bits of straw at Longarm’s feet. It jostled a few of the tumbleweeds that had blown into town earlier that day. The breeze would die soon, as soon as the sun had sunk behind the Rincon Mountains in the west, and then the stars would come out to flash like near beacons.

  Already the colors of the sunset were showing over the brown western peaks and ridges.

  Longarm stopped at the ranger post to get directions to where Big Frank Three Wolves had claimed the cache of stolen gold was buried. With a pencil provided by Ranger Roscoe Sanders, he marked on the map that Big Frank Three Wolves had drawn for him where the dead rangers and U.S. marshals had been found, as well, near a creek about a hundred yards from the general area in which the gold was said to be buried though no one had discovered its exact location and retrieved it.

  At least, no one the ranger or Big Frank knew about. A lot could happen in three years.

  The stolen gold was supposedly on land that was part of the Double D Ranch of Whip Azrael, the headquarters of which was farther on down the streambed known as Defiance Wash, which could have been renamed Dead Man Creek, for it was the same creek around which the dead lawmen had been discovered. Defiance Wash ran through the little ghost town of Holy Defiance as well as the Azrael Double D Ranch eight miles to the west of the town, tucked inside a valley of the Black Puma Mountains.

  Longarm pocketed the map that Three Wolves had scribbled on simple lined notepaper from memory, a copy of which the now-dead lawman had used to find their way twenty-five miles south to what had become the end of their trail in more ways than one. Leaving Sanders playing checkers with Three Wolves through the big half-breed’s cell door, empty supper plates on Captain Jack Leyton’s small, cluttered desk, Longarm headed out for a meal of his own.

  Later, he went on over and paid for a room at the Arizona House, a two-story adobe-brick affair framed in weathered pine no doubt hauled down from the White Mountains when Broken Jaw had still been burgeoning. The hotel sat on the north end of town, nothing but sage and greasewood rolling up toward high, salmon-colored mountains to the north.

  A few years ago, this country had been terrorized by the Coyotero and Lipan Apaches, and Longarm remembered stepping carefully, with a hand on his pistol’s grips, waiting for an attack at any moment. Because that’s how they’d come—hard and fast, anytime, anywhere, the savages wanting nothing more than to rid their territory of the white invader.

  It had been a bloody time across several decades, many ranches raided, stagecoaches run down and burned, men tortured, women raped and murdered. Secretly, Longarm sympathized with the Apache plight, but he was glad that the bulk of those depredations seemed to be over. Now and then, bronco Apaches led by some war chief who couldn’t bring himself to be heeled by some Indian gent and the cavalry, would bust off their reservation and go on a wild, killing tear, but those “red cyclones,” as he’d heard some settlers call them, were happening less and less frequently in these slightly more civilized times, thank God.

  The most formidable war chief of them all, Geronimo of the Chiricahua Apache, had finally surrendered only the year before and had been taken with his family to Fort Perkins in Pensacola, Florida. Just as Longarm sympathized with the Apache plight—no one wanted to be driven away from their homes and plucked from the only way of life they knew; the cavalry was trying to make them farmers, of all things!—he admired the tough, crafty old leader, Geronimo, who, though sorely outnumbered and ill-equipped, had given General Crook and General Miles fits for many long, hard years.

  When Longarm had signed his name in the guest register manned by a stocky German with a tangled bib beard, he headed on up the narrow stairs to his second-floor room. It was nearly dark now, and a couple of candles in wall-bracketed sconces offered a flickering, shadowy light.

  When he was a third of the way down the hall, a door latch click behind him. He turned quickly, ready to snap the rifle down off his shoulder and ratchet the hammer back.

  “Oh,” Haven’s voice said, an eye showing through the three-inch crack between her door and the frame. “I was…”

  Longarm turned half around and arched a brow. “Feels like old times. Need somethin’, Agent Delacroix.”

  Something seemed funny about her. She blinked, opened the door a little wider, poked her head out. She turned to look down the hall toward the stairs.

  Thickly, she said, “I was just…needing some water. I thought you might be Mr. Berger.” She glanced at Longarm coolly, and then stepped out of her room with a stone jug in her hand and strode off down the hall to the stairs. She was walking fine but the thickness of her voice and the shine in her eyes was odd.

  Was she drunk? Assuaging her desires?

  She stopped at the top of the stairs and called down to the German at the desk, her voice echoing hollowly. The man said something back to her and then Longarm heard the man’s boots thumping on the steps.

  Sure enough, Longarm thought—she was in her room, getting drunk alone, needing more branch water to mix with whatever tanglefoot she was imbibing in. He only vaguely realized he was stari
ng back at her incredulously when she turned to him from the balcony rail and said in a typically peeved tone, “Everything is fine, Marshal. Good night!”

  Longarm nodded, still puzzled. “Good night, Agent Delacroix. You need anything tonight, I’ll be just down the hall.” He winked at her. “Room four, just beyond yours.”

  She didn’t say anything but merely handed the jug to the stocky German, who’d climbed the stairs to retrieve it.

  Inside his room, he himself had his own few libations, but just a few. He wanted to get an early start tomorrow, to beat the heat, and he needed to be on his toes. If any sign remained at the spot where the lawmen had been murdered, he had to find it. That was likely his and Agent Delacroix’s only hope of running the culprit or culprits to ground.

  Having shucked down to his longhandles, he corked his bottle, stuffed it into a saddlebag pouch, and hung the saddlebags on a peg by the door. He wrapped his shell belt around a post at the head of his lumpy bed, which sagged in the middle, beneath a motley patch quilt that bore a Christmas design though it was not yet the Fourth of July, and then shucked the Colt from its holster.

  He spun the cylinder, liking the familiar click of the well-oiled and fully loaded revolver. Returning the gun to its sheath, he blew out his bedside lamp and stared at the door for a while, trying to get his comely partner out of his head.

  His lovely partner was drinking alone to quell her own heated cravings…

  Longarm’s cock still ached the heavy, dull ache of lust—not a comfortable sensation. He was not accustomed to not having his desires satisfied, and oh, what he wouldn’t give to have Haven Delacroix’s sweet mouth wrapped around his cock again tonight, satisfying that desire the way she had a few nights ago in the Colorado mountains.

  Maybe he should have gone ahead and taken a tumble with the puta over at Slim’s.

  Well, he was here now, and he needed a good night’s rest, so he’d turn his mind to the case at hand until he drifted off to sleep. And that’s what he’d nearly done, his face in the pillow, opening his mouth to begin snoring, when he snapped his eyes suddenly wide in response to something his half-asleep lawman’s senses had picked up in the building around him.

  The click of a door latch?

  Hinges squawked quietly. A door just down the hall was being drawn open slowly. Which direction?

  In Haven’s direction.

  Longarm rolled eagerly onto his back and then sat up, like a boy listening for Santa Claus.

  His dong immediately began aching again, though it was a pleasantly expectant sensation this time, like the thrill he always felt when he knew he was going to soon be “visiting” his old pal, the moneyed, young, and beautiful Miss Cynthia Larimer. He and the scrumptious daughter of General Larimer, Denver’s founding father, rarely visited, however.

  What they did do more than anything was fuck in nearly every position humanly possible and a couple of poses that required the often bittersweet strain of several obscure tendons, muscles, and joints.

  Thinking about Cynthia now and an imminent visit from Haven Delacroix, who obviously hadn’t been able to get him out of her craw, caused Longarm’s heartbeat to quicken and his hands to slicken. Already, he felt his manhood pushing against the wash-worn fabric of his longhandles.

  He breathed through his mouth so that he could hear better beyond his door. There was that click again. Had she gone back into her room?

  No. A floorboard squawked. It was followed by another squawk slightly louder than the first.

  Longarm fairly licked his chops. She was heading this way!

  He heard the girl’s soft tread in the hall, but he stayed where he was. He wasn’t going to go running to greet her and make a fool of himself, by God. Let her knock and ask to be let in.

  The soft footfalls grew louder until he saw a shadow move under the door. He grinned as he stared at the shadow, waiting. The shadow remained in one place directly beneath the door. Longarm frowned.

  Go on and knock, galldarnnit…

  Suddenly, the shadow moved back to the right. It disappeared. He could hear Haven’s footsteps again, but they grew quieter now as she retreated.

  “Shit!” he muttered, flopping back down against his pillow.

  He stared at the ceiling. Should he go after her? If he did, she might only give him the sharp chin again, frustrating him even more. Nah, he’d better stay right here and get rested for the trail tomorrow.

  His cock was heavy, however. It yearned for the girl’s soft lips and wet tongue, the expanding and contracting of her throat against its swollen head.

  He chewed his cheeks as he stared at the ceiling in frustration. In the hall, a floorboard squawked.

  Longarm jerked his head up, eyes wide in renewed anticipation. Again, a shadow appeared beneath his door. He stared at it. He lifted his gaze to the dark door panel.

  “Come on,” he whispered. “Knock. Go ahead. You know you want to.”

  The shadow wavered as though Haven herself was wavering, about to tramp on back to her own room again.

  “Ah, for chrissakes!”

  Longarm threw his covers back and rose from the bed. He was halfway to the door, making his way through the darkness, when a loud roar caused him to leap a foot in the air with a start. It also caused his door to blow open and swing within two inches of his nose before it slammed against the wall.

  Or what was left of the door after two loads of double-ought buck had blown two watermelon-sized holes in it.

  Chapter 16

  One of the two figures standing in the hall outside Longarm’s ruined door laughed raucously as he stepped aside for the man behind him to move forward and lift his own sawed-off double-barreled barn blaster.

  By this time, Longarm was airborne, diving across his bed that the double-ought buck had shredded and dusted with slivers from the door. He slammed belly down on the bed, closed his right hand over the grips of his .44, and pulled the revolver from its holster as he rolled to the right, over the edge of the bed.

  As he hit the floor on his butt, there was a bright, orange flash against the silhouette of the big man in his doorway. The expansive thundering report filled the room, causing the floor to leap beneath Longarm’s ass.

  The full load of buckshot flipped Longarm’s pillow up high against the headboard, instantly turning it into a billowing cloud of feathers stitched with shredded ticking. The man with the shotgun swung the savage popper’s barrels sideways, tracking Longarm and shouting, “Die, you son of a bitch! Die!”

  Longarm dropped his head down below the edge of the bed but triggered his pistol over the top, aimed at the door. He fired twice, one shot on top of the other. The Colt’s second belch, sounding little louder than a knuckle pop after the shotgun’s skull-shattering reverberation, was drowned by the ambusher’s detonation of the coach gun’s second barrel.

  The man must have dropped the barrel just enough as he fired that the swarm of screaming pellets did not blow Longarm’s Colt and fist off the end of his arm, but blasted into the end of the bed, causing a rain of corn leaves similar to that of the continuing drift of feathers. It also heaved the mattress across the frame and into Longarm’s chest, knocking him back against the wall beneath the room’s sole window.

  From here, he watched the shooter stumble back into the hall as the man who’d been so unkind to the lawman’s door swung his own empty shotgun behind his back, where it hung from a lanyard, and reached for one of the pistols on his hips.

  Longarm rested his gun wrist against the top of the shredded bed once more, lined up his sights on the man’s chest, and fired. The bushwhacker groaned and stumbled backward, twisting around and ramming his right shoulder against the hall’s opposite wall, knocking a tintype off its nail.

  The gunman had unleathered one of his pistols, and as he gave a great bellowing yell of pain and rage, he lifted the weapon.

  Longarm fired two more times. One bullet punched through the man’s chest while the second turned his left ear
to jelly and painted the wall behind him with it. His head smacked the wall violently, with a thudding crack.

  He screamed shrilly, dropped his own gun, and crumpled up on top of his partner, who lay parallel to the base of the wall, jerking as he stared glassily at Longarm, blinking rapidly, blood oozing from a corner of his mouth and pooling on the floor beneath his head.

  An angry female scream sounded down the hall.

  A man’s scream followed it. A pistol popped.

  Longarm scrambled to his feet and ran to the door in time to see a man run out of Agent Delacroix’s room, a knife in his right hand. He was the hombre whom Longarm remembered filling his canteens at the spring that Longarm and Haven had ridden up on two day’s ago. The now-dead men had been mounted on horses behind him.

  The pistol popped again in the room behind the man as he glanced at Longarm and gave a snarling scream. He bounced off the hall wall opposite Haven’s room as another bullet plunked into the pine boards beside him. He flung the knife toward Longarm, who ducked. The knife embedded itself into the doorframe behind the crouching lawman.

  The attacker wheeled and took off running toward the stairs.

  “Demon!” Agent Delacroix screamed.

  She fired three more shots from inside her room, and the bullets blasted through the wall, spraying wood slivers behind the fleeing attacker. The man ran hard, elbows and knees pumping, casting horrified looks behind him as yet another slug blasted through the hall wall behind him and into the wall opposite.

  Longarm extended his own revolver straight out from his shoulder, and shouted, “Hold it, asshole!”

  At the top of the stairs, the man stopped, slapped his belly holster, and brought up a horn-gripped hogleg. Longarm’s triggered slug puffed dust from the man’s brown leather vest up near his left shoulder. He screamed again as he bounced off the rail post, dropped his pistol, and tumbled down the stairs and out of Longarm’s sight, behind the hall’s left wall.