Longarm and the Cry of the Wolf (9781101619506) (5 page)

“I don't know who they're comin' for exactly, but I do know that it sounds like a few of 'em. We'd best haul our asses on up the trail.” Longarm went over and grabbed the man's collar, giving him a hard jerk and throwing him against his horse. “Get mounted!”

He didn't bother with the handcuffs. Goldie wasn't going anywhere but where Longarm was heading—to the sanctuary of Crazy Kate.

Longarm swung onto the bay's back and reined the mount up the hill through the pines. The yips and squeals were getting louder, but as he stared down the trail, the fresh snow on which had been ruffled by the passing riders, he saw nothing. There were only trees and rocks and the creek all swaddled in the grayness of the low sky and the lazily falling snow. It was almost as though the wolves, if that's what was out there, were invisible.

Longarm half-scoffed at the thought, but the apprehension dragging cold fingers up and down his back was hard to deny. And he had no explanation for the especially brave, savage wolves he'd encountered in this canyon. Not to mention the disembodied cries he was hearing now.

“Where are they?” Goldie asked, slumped in his saddle, looking miserable, as he booted his dun onto the trail.

“Your guess is as good as mine.” Longarm slid his Winchester from the saddle boot, cocked it one handed while he held the reins taut with his other hand, then set the rifle across his saddlebow. He depressed the hammer but kept his thumb on it. “Let's ride.”

“Yeah, that's been my point all along!”

Goldie touched spurs to his dun's flanks and trotted the mount off Longarm's left flank, grunting against the pain of his jouncing perch. He kept looking back over his bloody shoulder as he and the lawman followed the scuffed tracks of the hunting party.

“How come they don't show themselves?” he asked. “They sound so damn close. But I don't see 'em!”

“Shut up and ride!” Longarm said, feeling a little foolish as well as incredulous.

He glanced behind, as the yips seemed to be originating from only twenty, thirty yards away, but there was not a single yipper in sight. That couldn't be. It defied logic. His lack of an explanation for the odd events offended his sense of rationality, a trait he'd always prided himself on.

What the hell was going on here?

When they crested the pass, they checked their horses down between towering walls of boulder-strewn cliffs, the cliffs' peaks lost in the clouds. Longarm looked back down the trail threading the bottom of the canyon. It wound away until it looked little more than a white thread between the gray boulders and dark green, black-trunked pines.

Suddenly, the yipping, which had not grown any louder since they'd left the spot where they'd entered the trail, fell silent. There was no tapering off, just a sudden and total silence. It was so quiet in the wake of the shrill yipping that Longarm could hear the soft
snick
ing sounds of the flakes landing on the snowy ground around him.

The horses stared down trail, as well, ears twitching as though they, too, were wondering what had become of the wolves. The lungs of the bay expanded and contracted testily beneath Longarm.

“Shit,” said Goldie softly, breathing as hard as Longarm's horse. “What you suppose they're up to?”

“Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, Goldie.” Longarm reined the bay around and started down the other side of the pass, the next canyon shallower than the previous one. “Come on.”

Longarm glanced back at Goldie. The outlaw sat staring into the pass they'd just left. “Don't make me throw the cuffs on you, Goldie. Come on.”

The outlaw shook his head and turned the dun around to follow Longarm down the pass. He rode up to Longarm's left, the snow clinging to his long, greasy, dark brown hair like lice. He looked troubled as he rode along, saying nothing until: “You think I'm one o' them, now?”

“One of what?”

Goldie looked at Longarm sharply. “What do you mean—
what?
A fuckin'
werewolf
!”

“I guess we'll find out later tonight,” Longarm said, slanting a glance at the cloudy sky and continuing to ride.

An hour later, Longarm and Goldie topped the next pass and stared off into another, broader canyon to the west. The clouds had parted and the sun shone through the gaps, but the snow was still falling. It looked like gold dust in the sunshine.

The creek angled away to Longarm's left, running along the base of a high, gray cliff wall devoid of trees. The ground sloped up to the right of the trail, and on a broad shelf, hunkered at the base of the opposite cliff, sat Crazy Kate. It was a shabby collection of dun shacks that were almost indistinguishable from the boulders and thick clumps of brown brush they sat among. If you didn't know a town lay there, you'd have to look carefully before you spotted Crazy Kate.

Up canyon to the west lay the green of more forest behind the hazy white curtain of falling snow. The smell of wood fires touched Longarm's nostrils, bespeaking food and warmth and sanctuary from whatever in Christ's name lay behind them.

Goldie was the first to start down the slope, riding slumped even lower in his saddle. He was eager for a cot even if that cot lay in a six- by ten-foot cell.

Longarm followed him down the gentle grade. At the bottom, the trail forked, with the main tine leading off up canyon and into forested low country, while the right tine angled up the slope through piñon and sage until it became the main street of the village once known as Little Bucharest.

Fifteen minutes later, the shacks and pens and corrals began sliding up around them. Smoke wafted from the stone or brick chimneys of the cabins, most of which sported neat little front porches that were more brightly painted than the usual run of frontier porch. Shutters were painted bright red or spruce green, in the eastern European manner, Longarm assumed. Gardens, brittle and brown with winter, lay in neat rows, some partitioned off from livestock by low stone walls.

As Longarm's bay continued walking into the town, the lawman turned to the north to see the ancient convent sitting precariously atop a flat-topped pinnacle of molded, crenelated rock. The convent was built of native stone, and it resembled the medieval castles that Longarm had seen in pictures of the mountainous, picturesque country the folks who'd originally settled here hailed from—a country that no doubt looked very much like this neck of the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado.

Longarm looked away and then looked back, for just then he realized he could hear the distant, melodic strains of a hymn drifting down from that high, stony perch. The music was so faint that it was nearly lost beneath the clomps of the horses' shod hooves on the snowy street, but it lent an ethereal, mystical air to a snowy village that could have leaped out of a children's storybook.

Longarm and Goldie entered the main business district, which was about a block long, with several large, false-fronted frame shops as well as adobe brick and log ones. Here the village more resembled a customary frontier settlement, though a saloon on the street's left side boasted a sign above its porch announcing
THE
CARPATHIAN MOUNTAIN HOTEL AND SALOON
. The shutters on its second and third floors were painted bright red, and they fairly glowed in sharp contrast to the dingy copper color of the building's adobe bricks. Elk and deer horns adorned the porch posts.

Longarm knew there were no Carpathian Mountains anywhere around here, so the name must have been a nod to a range back in the Old World. From inside came the strains of a fiddle drowning out the hymn emanating from the stony pinnacle above the village. A half dozen or so horses stood hang-headed in front of the saloon, and a young man in a leather immigrant cap was holding the reins while a fur- and buckskin-clad gent on the porch spoke to him, gesturing toward the horses, as though issuing instructions for their keep. Longarm scrutinized the gent on the porch and shaped a rueful smile.

Sidney Ashton-Green.

As Longarm had suspected, it had been the general's hunting party who'd galloped up the hill past Longarm and Goldie. They were all likely enjoying hot toddies inside the Carpathian, warming their regal, moneyed selves swaddled in fancy buckskins in front of a crackling fire. Including Catherine Fortescue, Longarm speculated, with an involuntary throb in his loins.

He'd head that way soon, but first things first.

The stone jailhouse sat kitty-corner from the saloon, on the street's right side. As Longarm headed toward it, he saw a stocky gent in a brown wool coat standing outside, under the brush roof, leaning forward against the porch rail, a quirley smoldering between his lips.

“Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle—Custis P. Long,” said the man whom Longarm recognized as the town marshal of Crazy Kate. The marshal narrowed his eyes with incredulity. “What brings you to this blister on the donkey's ass?” He slanted an eye at the snowy, dull gray sky. “This late in the year . . .”

He had a better memory for names than Longarm did. The federal lawman couldn't remember the local man's handle, just his face. This man had been the lawman when Longarm last pulled through here, three or four years ago. That was a long time for a man to be marshal of the same town. Most either moved on, retired, or were planted in the local boneyard.

This man was blue-eyed, with severely sculpted cheeks the color and texture of raw burger, above a silver dragoon-style mustache. He wore a scarf under his hat, protecting his ears from the cold. He squinted his frosty blue eyes against the smoke drifting up from the cigarette.

“Trouble,” Longarm said. “In the person of this man I have here—one Marion Goldspoon, more commonly known as ‘Goldie.' Escaped from the federal pen near Julesburg. I ran him and his cohorts down in Hawk's Bluff Tavern. Goldie here's the only one who survived the ordeal.”

“Ah, shit,” said the town marshal. “And I suppose you want me to put him up. Feed him. Make him coffee. Empty his piss pot for him.”

“And keep his friends from breaking him out, if it comes to that.” Longarm swung his right boot over his saddle horn, kicked free of his left stirrup, and dropped straight down to the frozen street. “Don't get your neck up—I'll give you a hand. And my office will compensate you for your time an' trouble, Marshal . . . uh . . . ?”

“He take a bullet?” asked the local badge toter, ignoring Longarm's question and scrutinizing the outlaw now slumped low in his saddle, blood staining his coat.

“Wolf bit him.”

The local lawman shifted his severe-eyed gaze to Longarm and then glanced toward the Carpathian Saloon on the other side of the street, from which the kid in the immigrant hat was now leading the general's horses away, likely toward a livery and feed barn. “Folks who rode in ahead of you had the same trouble. Only they lost the man they was bringin' in. A rowdy pack got him, they said. Ripped him right off the travois they was usin' to haul him here. Wanted to know if we had this sorta trouble often around here.” He smiled a little devilishly at that.

Longarm winced as he glanced at the saloon. “I'll be damned.” No wonder they'd been riding so fast up that slope, risking life and limb. Maybe the fact that the wolves had been fed explained why they weren't in such a big hurry to chase down the general's party, as well as Longarm and Goldie.

Longarm turned back to the red-faced, gray-mustached lawman. “What'd you tell 'em?”

“About what?”

“What do you mean—‘about what'? About that sorta trouble,” Longarm said, growing miffed at the man's arrogant, snide demeanor.

“I said it happens around every full moon.” The man smiled again, the same way as before, and then looked at Goldie, who looked as though he were about to tumble out of his saddle. “There'll be a full moon tonight, in fact. That means your wolf-bit prisoner will have to go in the hole.”

“What hole?”

“You'll see.”

Goldie looked at Longarm, who'd walked over to the dun to help the prisoner out of his saddle. “What's he sayin' about a hole, Longarm?”

“He's sayin' you're goin' in one.”

“You want me to do it or shall I take him down there myself. Or maybe we oughta just shoot him right here and be done with it,” suggested the lawman, who seemed to be enjoying himself. “Why waste food and manpower on 'im?”

“Can't argue with your logic, but since I'm a lawman and not a hangman, I reckon we'll have to feed him till I leave here, which I hope is soon.” Longarm helped Goldie out of the saddle. When the man stood slumped before him, sort of leaning against the dun, the federal lawman added, “Don't like the idea of gettin' caught up here for the winter.”

“One good snowstorm is all it'd take to seal the passes,” the local lawman warned.

“Any strangers in town?”

“I ain't seen none but the folks who rode in a half hour ago—the mucky-mucks over yonder. Said they was part of some general's party. Don't recollect the name. Just that one was a right well put together young lady.” The local badge toter grinned, showing large, yellow teeth beneath his mustache.

Longarm gave Goldie a shove toward the porch steps. “Let's go, Goldie. You know the drill. Any fast moves and I blow out your spine.”

“I wanna know what hole I'm bein' dropped into,” Goldie complained as he walked heavily up the porch steps.

The lawman opened the door and stepped back, grinning his malicious grin around the quirley in his teeth. “Come on, son. I'll show you.”

Holding his rifle on Goldie, Longarm followed the outlaw into the dingy, smoky office. As the local lawman stepped in behind him, a man sitting at a desk against the front wall dropped his clodhopper boots to the floor with a
boom!
A big man to go with his boots, he jerked a shotgun up with a start, eyes blazing in deep, fur-mantled sockets.

“Emil!” The local lawman admonished the man, his deep voice echoing off the office's rock walls. “Put the greener down and fetch the doc!”

The big man in the chair eyed Longarm and Goldie suspiciously. His eyes were as gray as the window above the cluttered desk before him. He wore a fur hat from which curly, light brown hair curled. His face was the size of a serving tray and weathered as raw as the local lawman's. This man's was also bearded, with strands of gray showing among the sandy brown. Still awakening from the nap he'd apparently been enjoying, he set the greener across the desk and rose from the chair.

He kept on rising until his head would have smacked the seven-foot ceiling if he hadn't stooped. Longarm had seen smaller bears. This man smelled like a bear, too—fresh from his den in his ratty bear coat that hung to the tops of his worn black boots.

The giant again scrutinized the newcomers, his nostrils working as though sniffing prospective prey.

“Guests, Emil,” the local lawman said wryly. “We have guests.”

Emil pointed at Goldie's bloody shoulder. “What happened?” he said in a voice deeper than the local lawman's. It came out like a growl, the giant sort of grunting the oddly accented words. He was likely one of the original Romanian settlers.

“Wolf-bit,” Longarm said.

The giant's anvil-sized lower jaw started to sag before he caught it, his eyes brightening with apprehension as he looked at the town marshal flanking Longarm and Goldie.

“The doc, Emil!” his boss repeated.

Emil jerked with a start. He was like a mountain moving in an earthquake. He stepped wide around Longarm, Goldie, and the town marshal, keeping his eyes on Goldie as though afraid the outlaw would try to tear his throat out. He fumbled the door open and went out, drawing it closed behind him.

“What the hell is his problem?” Goldie said.

The local lawman curled his nose at the outlaw as he stepped around him and Longarm. “Shut up.” Then he pulled a trapdoor up out of the floor by a metal ring. He let the door fall back flat against the floor then went over to his desk for a lamp, which was already lit.

Longarm glanced at the three- by three-foot hole in the floor and then at the three empty jail cells at the back of the room. All the cages were empty.

“Hold on there, pard,” he said to the marshal.

“It's Calvin,” the man said in his rumbling, faintly raspy voice that owned not a note of conviviality. “Frank Calvin. Like I said, there'll be a full moon tonight. And this hombre's been bit by a wolf.” He shook his head tightly, showing his teeth below his mustache. “There ain't no ifs, ands, or buts about it, he's goin' in the hole, like everybody else whose been wolf-bit around here. I'll let him out tomorrow morning . . . if he hasn't turned.”

Goldie turned to Longarm, who'd found himself staring in hang-jawed disbelief at the town marshal of Crazy Kate, his brain slow to reassure him that his ears had indeed picked up what he thought they had. Goldie said, “He thinks I'm a fuckin' werewolf!”

Calvin stepped up beside the hole in the floor. He held the lamp in one hand. With his other hand, he held Emil's Greener, the double bores aimed at the outlaw's belly. Loudly, he clicked back one of the rabbit-ear hammers. “Get down in the hole, mister, or I'll blow you in two with both wads, which I've filled with crushed silver ore.”

“Come on, Calvin,” Longarm said, chuckling. “You don't really believe that shit, do you?”

Calvin looked at Goldie and wagged the barn-blaster at the hole. “Down.”

“Holy shit!” Goldie said, edging up to the hole and staring into the black earth below.

When Calvin held the lamp close enough to the hole that the outlaw could see a ways down a crude wooden ladder, Goldie stepped into the hole, turned to look up at Longarm fatefully, then dropped his head and began climbing down. When Goldie was out of Longarm's sight, Calvin crouched down and ordered Goldie to step away from the ladder. Calvin started down, facing away from Longarm and aiming his shotgun past his feet at Goldie.

When Calvin had disappeared into the earth beneath the marshal's office, Longarm climbed down the rickety ladder, as well. Cool air rife with the smell of dank earth, stone, and mushrooms slid over him.