Longarm and the Cry of the Wolf (9781101619506) (6 page)

At the bottom, he turned away from the ladder to see Calvin prodding Longarm's prisoner through one of four heavy timber, iron-banded doors embedded in an earthen wall, on the right side of a narrow corridor that appeared to have partly caved in. The back wall was paneled with heavy pine boards.

There was a small barred window in each heavy door. Calvin's lamp offered the only light. It guttered and flickered and danced shadows around the small dungeon, showing a Windsor chair and a small wooden table with a deck of cards on it about halfway down the corridor.

Furnishings for a guard, most likely.

Goldie put his face up to the barred window in his door. His voice echoed loudly, eerily around the cavern. “Hey, you ain't gonna leave me down here in this hole all by my lonesome, are you?”

“Someone'll be down here later tonight,” Calvin told him. “To see if you turn. If you turn, you won't need to worry about it no more. You won't need to know about nothin' no more. You'll buy a load of silver buckshot an' that'll be the end of ya!”

The town marshal of Crazy Kate tossed a small box through the barred window. “Them's lucifers. To light the torch behind you with. Best keep it lit. Gets mighty cold down here.”

Longarm sighed as he lifted his hat and ran a hand through his hair. “Come on, Calvin. This is craziness. You can't tell me you really expect him to turn into a werewolf. Why, those are just in fairy tales!”

There was a commotion at the top of the stairs. Longarm turned and looked up through the hole. An aged, bespectacled face peered down at him. The glasses glinted in the light from Calvin's torch.

The man who owned the face shook his head darkly. The face disappeared. Presently, a pair of brown half boots appeared on the ladder's top rung, and then a diminutive, older man in a suit and short wolf fur coat gained the cavern floor. He held a black leather kit in his gloved right hand. He looked Longarm up and down before turning to Calvin.

“Where is he?” he said with an air of reluctance.

Calvin canted his head toward the stout door before him, which hadn't yet been latched. The town marshal held a key ring in the hand he'd freed when he placed the lamp on the table. When the doctor walked up to the door, Calvin opened it, ushered him inside, and then followed him, closing the door behind him.

Longarm waited outside the cell while the doctor tended Goldie, Calvin keeping his double-barreled barn blaster aimed at the outlaw's head. Occasionally, Goldie looked up from the doctor's work on his arm to glance darkly, incredulously, at Longarm.

When the doctor had finished, he and Calvin left Goldie sitting on a cot beneath a torch slanting away from its mounting bracket. There were several more torches in a box near the cot. They sent up the odor of the coal oil they'd been soaked in.

“Longarm,” Goldie said, when Calvin had closed and locked the heavy, iron-banded door. “Longarm, you ain't gonna leave me down here, are you?”

“Not much I could do about it even if I wanted to,” the federal lawman said, canting his head toward Calvin. “It's his town and he's doin' me a service, puttin' you up in it.”

Calvin grinned, showing those large, brown teeth of his beneath his ostentatious silver mustache.

“Come on, Long,” Calvin said, canting his head toward where the small, aged doctor was climbing the ladder. “Let's go up and have a drink. Hell, I'll buy!”

A gun blasted in the office above their heads. Dust sifted from the rafters.

“
Oh, Heaven help us!
” came the doctor's passionate plea.

There were two more blasts in the office above Longarm's head. He ran to the ladder, climbed, and poked his head through the hole. The office was all murky shadows, but he could see the doctor sitting on the floor a few feet from the trapdoor, to Longarm's right. He sat with his legs straight out before him. His glasses hung off of one ear.

The old pill roller was staring toward the open front door, which was filled to brimming with the back of Emil, who was extending two six-shooters in his fists and shooting up the street to the west.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The giant turned slowly as he fired, tracking something.

Outside, a girl screamed.
Christ, was the big deputy trying to beef a female?
It wouldn't have been any crazier than anything else that Longarm had witnessed so far in Crazy Kate. He heaved himself up out of the hole and, taking his Winchester in both hands, strode to the window over the cluttered desk. At the same time, Town Marshal Frank Calvin heaved himself up out of the hole and looked around quickly.

“Emil, what the hell you shootin' at?”

Staring out the window, Longarm saw a large, black shadow loping westward up the street, heading for the open country beyond the town. As Emil's pistols exploded again quickly, dust and snow puffed in the street a few feet behind and to one side of the wolf, whose shiny, black coat glistened in the wintery light.

“Wolf!” Emil shouted, and fired two more times before one of his pistols clacked on an empty chamber. He fired the second gun twice more before its hammer, too, clicked empty. “Wolf on a full moon night!”

As Calvin exchanged his shotgun for a Winchester rifle at the gun rack on the wall near his desk, Longarm walked over to the door and stepped outside, moving around the giant Emil and out into the street. The wolf was little more than a jouncing black speck from this distance of a hundred yards, and it was fleeing fast.

There were several more blasts from up the street, and Longarm saw at least two more men wielding rifles—shop owners, they appeared to be, in aprons and sleeve garters. A few seconds later, the wolf swung to the right and disappeared in the rocks and sage, heading in the general direction of the towering, black northern ridge that held the brooding stone convent aloft as though in offering to Heaven.

Calvin burst out of the office, shoving the giant aside with a snarl and loudly racking a shell into his Winchester's breech.

“Gone,” Longarm said.

“Ran right past here!” Emil said, grunting the words as though his tongue were as thick as his hands.

Calvin lowered the rifle and looked around the street both ways, as did Longarm, noting several small pockets of folks—men and sporting women, mostly, wearing skimpy, frilly dresses—standing around outside of a couple saloons and pleasure parlors. One such group stood outside the Carpathian Mountain Saloon, kitty-corner from the marshal's office.

The general's party was there, holding drinks and cigars. Catherine Fortescue stood to one side, her fur coat hanging open to reveal her long, slender, denim-clad figure, a pistol angling up from a wide brown belt. She wasn't wearing a hat, and her rich, honey-blond hair was blowing in the chill breeze as she looked around, as wary as all the others.

Marshal Calvin stepped out into the middle of the street, swinging his head this way and that. “Did anyone get bit by that beast? Anyone?” He turned to stare eastward toward where four parlor girls stood out on the second-story balcony of an unpainted frame house on the same side of the street as the Carpathian Mountain Saloon. Three of the girls had blankets wrapped around their shoulders. They all glanced around at one another, shaking their heads.

Just then a woman yelled hoarsely, “Help! Oh, God, help—it's my little
David
!” As the woman came from around the far side of a goat pen, a black-and-white dog trailing and sniffing concernedly up at the little boy she carried in her arms, she cried, “That beast bit him in the stable! Oh, Dr. Solomon, where
are
you?”

“Here,” the doctor said, walking out of the marshal's office. “I'm here, Muriel!”

Longarm followed the doctor and Marshal Calvin eastward along the street to meet the woman staggering toward them under the weight of the nine- or ten-year-old child in her arms. Emil stood in the street outside the jailhouse, reloading his pistols and looking around warily, as though for more wolves.

A frightened murmur rose, and while most people remained close to the buildings, or swung back inside them, a few walked from various quarters toward Muriel and the boy. One of these was Catherine Fortescue. She walked with long strides, swinging her arms stiffly at her sides, concern showing in her hazel eyes, the open flaps of her fur coat jostling about her legs and the tops of her black stockman's boots.

Longarm held back from the child and the boy, keeping his rifle raised in case more wolves descended on them and the group growing around them. As Catherine brushed past him, she said, “What in God's name is happening in this country?”

Longarm didn't know how to respond to that. He was as puzzled as she obviously was, so he merely caressed his Winchester's hammer and probed the breaks between the buildings up and down the street with his keen lawman's gaze. If there was one wolf, there were certainly more.

A couple of pleasure girls holding blankets or housecoats around their shoulders had gathered with Catherine and Calvin around Muriel and the boy, who was laid out on his back in the street now while the doctor checked him over. Longarm could hear the boy whimpering. He couldn't see much of the child through the people around him, but he saw his worn, manure-crusted boots moving. He was alive, anyway.

An old, gray-haired couple stood over Muriel, who knelt beside her boy, opposite the doctor and Catherine. The man and his wife both wore aprons, which likely meant they owned one of the near shops. There was an Old World air about them. Suddenly, one of the doxies, a pale, pudgy redhead swaddled in several ratty blankets, turned to the old folks and said, “See what you've done now? This is all your fault—I hope you know that! Now you've gone and killed Muriel's boy! You and that damn curse you brought with you from wherever in hell you come from!”

“
Opal!
” One of the other pleasure girls admonished her, shocked.

“Oh, God!” Opal cried, pressing her hands to her face. “Why didn't I get the hell out of here while I had the chance? Oh, Christ—now it's winter and I'll be here till spring with these crazy, evil people!”

Something moved in the corner of Longarm's right eye. He swung around to see a gray wolf sticking its head out of a break between the whorehouse and a feed store. Longarm raised the Winchester, raking back the hammer, aimed, and fired just as the beast pulled its head into the break.

The lawman's bullet plowed up sand and gravel a few feet inside the break as the rifle's report flattened out across the street and echoed off the steep canyon walls. The echo hadn't died before a long, mournful, menacing wolf's howl replaced it. Only half-aware of doing it, Longarm ran across the street and into the break between the buildings.

Beyond the other end of the alley, he could see the wolf running off through the sage and rocks, swerving to avoid a small log cabin to which a stable was attached. The animal disappeared in a gully for a few seconds, and then Longarm saw the beast again, climbing a low, rocky hill. There was another one with it now, just a little lighter gray than the first one.

Several yards beyond the cabin, Longarm stopped. The two wolves stopped at the top of the hill and looked back at him, their tongues hanging. They seemed to be smiling. Longarm raised the rifle though he knew they were too far away now for an accurate shot, and he fired once anyway.

The bullet merely snapped a branch from a small sage shrub as the two wolves continued running and dropped out of sight down the hill's opposite side. Longarm cursed as he ejected the spent cartridge, heard it clink off a rock behind him, then levered a fresh round into the Winchester's breech.

He'd just set the hammer to half cock and was turning back toward the main street when he saw a figure standing in the open back door of the whorehouse—a woman with rich, dark hair piled atop her head. Longarm thought she was in her late twenties, early thirties. She wore a gold-speckled red vest over a loose white blouse, and several pleated wool skirts. She leaned against the door frame, arms crossed as she smoked a long, thin cigar. Her brown-eyed face owned an open, earthy beauty. She didn't seem worried about the wolves, but merely amused by them.

Smiling at Longarm, she shook her head dubiously and drew deep on the cigar.

Longarm lowered the rifle and walked slowly toward her. When he was a few feet away, he saw that she was pretty, though not in a painted-girl kind of way. This woman might run the place, but she herself wasn't for sale. She wore no face paint. There were a few strands of gray in her brown hair. Her frank, amused gaze seemed to communicate more than Longarm could understand, as though she had a secret she was fond of not sharing. It troubled him.

“Who're you?”

The woman shook her head, let her eyes rake him up and down. Her breasts were full behind the loose cotton blouse that she wore open to the top of her deep cleavage. “Who're
you
?”

“You first.”

The woman laughed raspily at his response and then changed the subject. “How's Mrs. Leonard's boy?”

“I—”

“Longarm?”

He turned to see Catherine standing at the mouth of the alley through which he'd followed the wolf. She looked harried, worried. “Custis, please don't let Marshal Calvin lock that poor boy up in his cellar! For Christ's sake, that's what he
intends
!”

Longarm glanced at the dark-eyed woman, who was still smiling condescendingly at the federal lawman. “Yes, that's what he intends, and that's what he'll do,” she said with a nod. “It's a full moon night, don't ya know!”

Longarm still wanted to know who she was, but she could wait. He turned away from her and walked over to where Catherine waited for him, glancing curiously behind him at the dark-eyed woman in the gold-speckled vest. “Who's she?”

Longarm shook his head as he continued past Catherine to stride through the break between buildings toward the main street. He was aware again of the long, mournful, menacing cry of the wolf—the same one he'd heard just after he'd taken the shot at the gray wolf earlier. It seemed to be originating high above the town, from either the southern or the northern cliff. From the echoes, it was hard to tell.

The convent?

He shook his head at the half-formed, half-conscious question and walked out of the break and into the street, where Marshal Frank Calvin was holding the wolf-bit boy in his arms. The boy's mother, Muriel Leonard, knelt before Calvin, steepling her hands in front of her chest, begging. She and Dr. Solomon were the only people with the town marshal now—besides the giant Emil, of course, who stood awkwardly near Calvin, holding his two pistols straight down at his sides. The pistols looked little larger than derringers in his huge brown hands.

The doctor stood behind the woman, his hands on her arms as though trying to help her rise.

“You know the rules, Mrs. Leonard,” Calvin was saying in a loud but patient voice, the boy sobbing and stretching a mittened hand out toward his mother. There was a splotch of blood across his belly, inside the right flap of his brown wool coat. He wore wool trousers the same color as the coat and the worn, manure-crusted boots.

“Please, Marshal Calvin—I beg you!” Muriel Thompson was howling. “Don't take my boy to that cellar. Don't take him! Oh, don't take him!
Pleeeease!
”

“Oh, for Christ sakes,” Catherine said, moving up to stand beside the pleading woman, glaring at Calvin, her fists on her hips. “How can you possibly throw an injured little boy in a
cellar
?”

Calvin parried the woman's hard stare with a hard one of his own. “You stay out of this, Miss whoever-the-hell-you are!”

“Calvin!” Longarm said. “Have you gone
mad
?”

“You, too, Mr. Federal Lawman! You two ain't
from
here. You got no business pokin' your noses in!”

Mrs. Leonard looked at Longarm, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Oh, please, Marshal—please don't let him take my David to the Wolf Hold!”

“Wolf Hold?” Longarm said, unbelievingly. “That's what you call that hole in there?”

“Long,” Calvin said, tightening his jaws and flaring his nostrils, “I'm warnin' you to stay out of this town's business!”

Just then the giant Emil lifted the two guns in his hands and aimed them at Longarm. The giant curled one corner of his thick-lipped mouth, and his eyes went hard as granite. The pistols held unwaveringly on Longarm.

“Step back,” Calvin said, glancing at Catherine. “Both of you.”

Longarm glanced once more at the giant's pistols aimed at his belly. Catherine looked up at Longarm, her hazel eyes stricken. Longarm held his rifle in his right hand on his shoulder. He wrapped his left hand around Catherine's arm and pulled her a couple of steps back behind him.

Meanwhile, the boy continued crying for his mother, while Mrs. Leonard lowered her head and sobbed.

“He'll be all right, Muriel,” the doctor said to her gently. “I'll see to that. I'll see that his wound is tended and that he's fed and kept warm. It's only for a few hours, until the moon has set.”

Calvin began turning toward the marshal's office, cutting a sharp glance at his big deputy still aiming the pistols. “Stay here and guard the door, Emil,” Calvin ordered. “Anyone tries to get into my office without my permission, shoot him.” He looked at Catherine. “Or her.”

To Mrs. Leonard, he said, “As soon as I have David secured, you can come down and see him. Hell, I'll even let you stay with him.” Then he looked at the doctor and canted his head toward the door. “Doc!”