by Tabor Evans
“Now come in here and meet our guests proper. They got a few questions for you, too.”
“I already answered all the damn questions I’m going to,” the firebrand said, walking into the room, his glowering stare on Longarm, who’d gained his feet and turned to face the man.
He wouldn’t put it past ole Stretch to try to deliver another sucker punch.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Stretch said, holding up his hands in mock innocence. “I don’t roughhouse in Ma’s house.”
He had a cut beneath his chin. It curled up over the outside edge of the chin, and the blood was smeared in his scraggly spade beard, around the beginnings of a scab. Apparently, he’d washed up, for his sandy, wet hair was slicked straight back from his forehead.
“Good to hear,” Longarm said.
“She might take me over her knee,” Stretch said, grinning and glancing at Agent Delacroix sitting on the couch opposite his mother. “Who’s that?” he asked, jerking his thumb at Haven.
“I can speak for myself,” Haven said curtly. “I am Agent Haven Delacroix of the Pinkerton Agency.”
Stretch looked at her, his lower jaw hanging slightly, and whistled.
“Oh, quit,” his mother cawed. “These folks are gonna think I didn’t raise you with a half ounce of manners!”
“You didn’t.” This from Vonda standing in the doorway behind Stretch, arms crossed beneath her breasts again, shoving them up so that they were half-revealed. They were as creamy as fresh milk.
Stretched whipped his head toward the girl. “Who invited you?”
“No one!” Mrs. Azrael said, jutting her arm. “Git back out to the kitchen and help Angelina so we can eat sometime tonight. I’m so hungry I could eat that bronc out in the breaking corral!”
Vonda slid her eyes from her husband to Longarm, gave her bottom lip a sensuous nibble, and then she turned her mouth corners down, dropped her arms from her breasts, and headed back down the hall, bare feet slapping angrily.
“And get some shoes on!” Stretch yelled at her.
“You go to hell, Stretch!” Vonda screeched.
“That girl,” said Mrs. Azrael. “Don’t know what this kid ever saw in her.”
Stretch looked at Longarm, grinning. “You know, don’t ya?”
Longarm dropped back down in his chair.
“She’s very pretty,” Haven said. “But she’s not why we’re here. We’re here…”
“About the dead lawmen,” Longarm said.
“And about the gold,” Haven added crisply.
“Ah, hell—that gold again. Christ!” Stretch walked over to the liquor cabinet. “I don’t think there ever was any gold in the first place. I think that old Santana was full of…” Catching himself, he cast a jeering grin over his shoulder at his mother. “Chili peppers.”
Mrs. Azrael snorted. “Quit tryin’ to charm this woman, Stretch. You’re married. Beside, she’s got too much class for you. Delacroix, Delacroix. Is that French?”
“Indeed, it is,” Haven said proudly.
“I knew it. You got clean lines. I bet you’re of noble birth. I am, too—back in Ireland.”
“Does that make me a nobleman?” Stretch asked, turning and leaning back against the liquor cabinet.
“You’re a cur.” Mrs. Azrael snorted, glancing at her husband, who sat staring out his one good eye at the cold fireplace. “You got ole Whip to thank for that. His blood’s murkier than a flooded gulch!”
She extended her empty glass to Stretch. “Refill,” she said, wagging the glass impatiently, slurring her words slightly. Her black eyes glittered.
Stretch’s big, sunburned face darkened with embarrassment, and as he stepped forward, he glanced sheepishly at Haven, who had her back to him. He took his mother’s glass and stomped back to the liquor cabinet.
“Who found the dead lawmen, Stretch?” Longarm asked the firebrand.
“A couple of the boys,” Stretch said, angrily clanking bottles and glasses.
“I’m going to want to talk to them.”
“They ain’t big talkers.”
“Just the same, we’ll palaver,” Longarm said, not liking the Double D foreman at all. His suspicions were running off their leash about Stretch. As the lanky foreman splashed more liquor into his mother’s water glass, Longarm said, “And you’ve never seen or heard of anyone having found the stolen gold…?”
“You need to ask that again?” Stretch scoffed.
“Just wanted to hear it plain from your gums. Seein’ as how five lawmen got murdered on your land when they came down here to look for it, I’m gonna need a whole lot of other things plain before I leave here.”
“I will, too,” Haven said.
As Stretch delivered the refilled glass to his mother, he scowled at Agent Delacroix. “Should a woman be in your line of work?”
Haven gave him a blank stare.
“You mind your manners, boy!” Mrs. Azrael said. “Forgive him, Miss Delacroix. I tried to raise him right, but you can’t beat sense into a rock. I do hope you find your gold, though. You’re awfully pretty, and I’m pullin’ for you. And I’m just so sick of hearin’ about that gold!”
She looked at Longarm as Stretch resumed his position by the liquor cabinet. He’d already tossed back two shots of busthead and was now sipping his third. “I hope you find whoever killed them lawmen, Marshal. But I don’t hold out much hope. Double D Ranch is home to more than a few outlaw trails stretching between the Mogollon Rim and the White Mountains and Mexico. If you stay out there too long, sniffin’ around, you best be careful you don’t end up the same as them others.”
To Haven, she said, “Maybe you’d best stay here with me, Miss Delacroix. It ain’t safe out there for a man, much less a pretty girl.”
“We’ll protect you here,” Stretch said with a lascivious leer.
“I’m sure your wife would appreciate that, Mr. Azrael.”
Longarm looked at Stretch. “Any of your own men been shot out there?”
Stretch filled his mouth with whiskey, puffed out his cheeks, and swallowed. “Nope. Just lawmen like yourself. Like Ma says, best tread quiet out there.” He gave a cold smile, his eyes glittering now like his mother’s. “Bullets buzz around like blackflies out there, don’t ya know.”
Stretch splashed more liquor into his glass and headed for the door. “I best go see if the girls need more wood split for the stove.” He grabbed his spurs and clomped off down the hall.
“Don’t mind him,” Mrs. Azrael said. “All the whippin’s in the world couldn’t turn him out right, though Lord knows I wore the bark off many a willow sap across that boy’s derriere. Stretch’s got too much of Whip’s blood.” She studied the old, one-eyed rancher who sat in a catatonic stare and shook her head. “Oh, but we did have some good times, though, didn’t we, Whip? Despite the hardships.”
She slapped her hand down on the sofa arm. “My word, you two will want to clean up for supper. Help yourselves to the washtub on the porch. There’s a barrel with fresh water there, and I’ll have Vonda fetch some clean towels.”
“I’d be obliged,” Haven said, throwing back the last of her drink and rising.
“On your way out, help yourselves to another drink. Supper will be ready in a few minutes. I’m just gonna sit here a bit with my husband.”
From somewhere in the house, Vonda screamed, “Stretch, goddamn your ugly hide!” She sobbed, and then a plate crashed to the floor.
Mrs. Azrael pressed the front of her wrist to her forehead and crowed, “Lord, give me strength not to shotgun ’em both!”
Chapter 24
They all ate in the dining room off the kitchen, the shutters over a couple of large, arched windows set in the outside brick wall thrown open to the cool of the desert dusk. Birds tittered in Mrs. Azrael’s garden, a refreshing breeze rattling the leaves of the pecan trees. Occasionally, a horse whinnied in one of the corrals.
Two more guests arrived as Vonda and the pretty, plump Mexican girl, Ange
lina, set several cast-iron pots and plates of tortillas on the long, heavy wooden table. One of the guests was the black man whom Longarm had seen earlier building a quirley on the boulder near the breaking corral.
His name was Tallahassee Smith. The other, Jake Wade, was a cadaver-thin Anglo with a bushy black mustache wearing a yellow-and-black-checked shirt beneath a brown leather vest and suspenders.
Wade was the ranch segundo, second in command behind Stretch, while Tallahasee was apparently next in line, though Stretch didn’t say as much. Stretch didn’t say much of anything after he’d introduced the two ranch hands, and he probably wouldn’t have introduced them at all if his mother hadn’t berated him into doing so, pounding his shoulder with her clawlike little fist.
Longarm got the impression that both these men were regulars at the supper table, and most nights they probably discussed ranch business as they ate and then drank and smoked in the study or out on the front veranda. Longarm’s and Haven’s presence had thrown a wrench into the social workings here, because no one said much of anything until Mrs. Azrael piped up with, “Jake an’ Tallahassee was amongst them who found the dead lawmen, Marshal Long. So if you wanna speak to ’em, you got your opportunity right here. Go on—I don’t hold much on meal ceremony. Ask what you want. Jake, you an’ Tallahassee cooperate with this man. He’s here to pop killers out of the brush here at the Double D, and since you yourselves can’t seem to keep my range clear of miscreants, I say it’s about damn time someone does!”
Longarm looked over his plate piled high with a chewy but tasty Mexican stew consisting of venison, garden peas, Spanish rice, and chili peppers. He held a fork in one hand, a tortilla scrap in the other, as he regarded Jake and Tallahassee, both of whom kept their heads down over their plates as though the woman had cowed them.
Likely, they were just shy, Longarm thought. Most cowboys were bashful as well as backward and as dull-witted as the cows they tended. Longarm had spied these two as well as Stretch casting furtive glances of unbridled male interest across the table at Haven.
Vonda, sitting beside Stretch, was just now grinning and sliding her own mischievous gaze between the two men and Longarm. She apparently knew how uncomfortable the men were in the presence of strangers including one Pinkerton beauty whom they were all probably imagining with her panties off and her dress shoved up around her waist.
“What’d you find out there, boys?” Longarm prodded the punchers.
“Dead men,” said Tallahassee. He was bald on top. He wore long, shaggy sideburns and a mustache. His eyes owned an intelligence and blatant cunning that was missing from the man sitting next to him—Jake—who outranked him. “Five of ’em.”
Tallahassee held Longarm’s gaze with a defiant one of his own. But lots of men didn’t like lawmen; it didn’t necessarily mean they were breaking the law or had paper on their heads. In fact, most of the men Longarm had run into distrusted the law outright. Until they needed them, of course.
“Shot?”
“Uh-huh.”
“From close up or far away?”
“Medium range,” the black man said, then added with a peevish air, “How’m I supposed to know?”
“How many times were they shot?”
The black man had resumed eating. Now he looked up at Longarm with an impatient sigh. “Don’t recollect. They was all bad bloody. Some was prob’ly shot once, others twice.”
“One got it in the head,” the cadaverous Jake said, not looking at Longarm but continuing to shovel food into his mouth, leaving a lot of it on his brushy, dark brown mustache.
Haven cleared her throat. “Would anyone here at the Double D have any idea why someone might want those lawmen dead, including the one that was killed earlier today, possibly yesterday?”
Both men looked at her as though it was the first time they’d seen her. They seemed especially interested in her, and also especially suspicious of her for no other reason than she was a female in authority.
Jake’s light brown eyes acquired an amused air as he said, “Why, no man, I don’t believe so.”
He wasn’t taking Haven seriously, and she knew it. She continued looking at Jake while the segundo continued eating with an annoyingly mocking smile lifting his mouth corners, and Longarm felt as though he were sitting beside a coiled rattler.
Finally, Haven drew a deep breath, released it, and picked up her fork.
Longarm reached for his coffee cup and saw Vonda staring at him, a smile on her bee-stung lips. She chewed slowly, staring at him, and he held her gaze curiously—was she as horny as she seemed?—until Stretch glanced at her. He turned away, then turned back to her and followed her gaze to Longarm, and then back to his wife again.
He rammed his elbow into her side, hard, and said, “Eat!”
Vonda yelped and jerked back in her chair, dropping her fork and slapping a hand to her ribs. “Goddamn you, Stretch Azrael!”
She climbed to her feet, sobbing, and yelled, “That hurt!” and ran out of the room. No one else said anything. Stretch chuckled as he continued eating. His mother gave him a cold-eyed stare as she chewed her food. “Was that necessary?”
Stretched hiked a shoulder. “She’s my wife. I can do what I want to her.”
He looked up at Haven as though to see how that last comment had registered. Agent Delacroix kept her eyes on her plate. Stretch looked at Longarm, and his eyes hardened and the tips of his ears turned red.
Oh, boy, Longarm thought. Here we go.
He was beginning to wish he hadn’t ridden over to the Double D. About all he’d gotten out of it so far besides a meal was another target drawn on his back. Between the dustup earlier and the incident just now, he’d gained another enemy in Stretch Azrael.
“You have a real talent for making friends,” Haven told Longarm later, when they’d slipped out into the rear-walled garden and patio for a private conference away from the rowdy, bickering Azraels.
It was good dark, the dry air silky. All was quiet now that the ranch hands had shut themselves into their bunkhouse for the night.
Mr. and Mrs. Azrael had gone to bed. She’d assigned a room with a door onto the garden for Haven, not far from where Stretch and Vonda slept. Longarm had been allocated the headquarters’ first segundo’s shack, a one-room stone cabin behind the main house. He’d deposited his gear there a few minutes ago and killed a few of the black widow spiders, though a scorpion crawling on one of the old tomato-crate shelves had been too fast for him and scuttled out a crack in the stone wall.
“You try to make friends with ole Stretch.” Longarm winked at Haven as they strolled along the garden’s brick paths lit by soft blue starlight. “Without gettin’ flat on your back, I mean.”
“That’s disgusting. The way you were ogling that crazy wife of his was just as disgusting. Don’t you men have any pride at all? No sense of civility or moral integrity? Is every potential unwashed thought welcome fodder for your depraved minds?”
“This is obviously somethin’ that’s been eating you.”
“We’re out here to investigate murder and stolen gold, and you’re making eyes at the wife of one of the suspects.”
Longarm stopped and swung toward her. “Hey, just remember how we first met, Miss Santy Maria!”
She wagged her finger at him and narrowed a reproving eye. “I told you not to bring that up ever again.”
“How ’bout last night? I shouldn’t bring that up, either?”
“We were two mature, unattached adults enjoying each other’s company after hours. I saw nothing wrong with what we did, though I see no reason to be so uncouth as to discuss it in the light of day.”
Longarm scowled at her, felt himself wagging his head again in utter befuddlement. He’d never understand how her mind worked. It was even more complicated and vexing than most of her sex. She must have been raised pious as hell, her earthly soul riddled with holy guilt yet incapable of keeping her from falling prey to her own female cravings over and over.
“What do you got to be embarrassed about? We threw the blocks to each other, and we’ll probably do it again tonight.” Longarm grinned. “Got a room key?”
“Don’t you think we should discuss what we’ve learned from our visit so far, and what each of us thinks about these people and their possible involvement in the murders as well as the gold?”
“Shit, I don’t know nothin’ more than I did before we got here.”
Haven glanced back at the house. They were near the garden’s stone wall, and the house was about fifty yards away. No windows facing the garden showed light. Longarm thought that Stretch and Vonda had gone to bed, though he wasn’t sure about the quiet, plump, long-suffering housekeeper Angelina, who toiled tirelessly and apparently without complaint.
Haven kept her voice low as she said, “I, for one, am very suspicious of Stretch. I think he has the gold. Or he had it.”
“If Stretch had the gold,” Longarm said, firing a lucifer to life on the wall and touching the flame to a fresh three-for-a-nickel cheroot, “I doubt he’d still be here at the Double D. He’d have left a long time ago and been livin’ high on the hog.”
“Not necessarily. A fool like that might have spent it already. Frittered it away on cheap women like his wife, and on expensive whiskey and cards.”
“Jesus,” Longarm said with a dry chuckle, blowing smoke out over the wall toward his little shack hunched in the darkness amongst some still mesquites and Spanish bayonet. “It’s frightening how well you know the male way. I have to say, you have a point. But if the gold’s been spent, there ain’t no way to find it.”
“If the gold’s been spent, why were those lawmen killed?”
“Maybe ole Stretch and his dear old ma are right, and they were killed by banditos. We could ride out and within a half hour we’d probably flush a half dozen out of the first wash we came to.”
Longarm stared into the darkly bristling desert toward the steep peaks forming a black, jagged-topped wall beyond, blocking out the stars.
“What is it?” Haven said, standing just off his right shoulder, looking up at him curiously.