Longarm and the Cry of the Wolf (9781101619506) (9 page)

“Catherine!” Longarm wheeled and ran back in the direction from which he'd come.

There was another snarl and then the girl screamed once more. A pistol popped. He saw the flashes as he bolted out of the break between the buildings.

Catherine was on the ground near the woodpile, a wolf lying a few feet away from her, flopping around, wounded. Two more milled with their heads down, eyes glowing in the shadows on the woodpile's far side. They shifted their heads toward Longarm, and just as he aimed his Winchester, they turned on a dime and ran off into the darkness.

“Shit!” Catherine sat up and looked at her left arm. “Bastard bit me.”

Longarm ran over, drilled another pill through the wounded wolf, killing it, and knelt beside Catherine. “How bad?”

“Not bad.”

“Did it draw blood?”

“Well, yeah, it's bleeding.” The girl looked at him, her brows coming together. “What—you think I'm going to be a werewolf now?”

Longarm didn't like the way his mind hesitated, the way he forwent answering the question to say, “Best get it wrapped and get you inside.” He unknotted his neckerchief, unbuttoned her coat, slid the coat off her shoulder and down her arm.

Blood shone in the light of the moon and stars. Not a lot but enough to give him pause. It had occurred to him that what might have sickened the folks who'd been bit around Crazy Kate was rabies, and that was little comfort.

Quickly, looking around to make sure no more wolves were near, he wrapped the girl's arm then pulled her coat back up onto her shoulder and helped her to her feet. “Get on inside. Take the back stairs and do not—I repeat do not—let anyone know you were bit.”

“Don't worry—I don't intend to end up in the jailhouse cellar.” Catherine kissed Longarm's cheek as he took her good arm and began leading her back toward the saloon. “Thanks, Custis. And don't worry. I'll be fine. We Fortescues have the fortitude of mustangs.”

“The sex drive, too.” He turned her loose at the bottom of the stairs and glanced around again, happy not to see any more wolves lurking near. “Go on. Take a hot bath. Douse that wound with plenty of whiskey.”

“Will you be up soon?” she asked, raising her brows expectantly.

“You'll be the first to know. Go!”

He waited at the bottom of the stairs, keeping watch with his rifle cocked, until she'd slipped into the saloon's second-story door. That bite preyed on him. The wolf that had bit her hadn't looked rabid. Still, it preyed on him.

He found himself glancing at the moon kiting high over the town before he lowered his Winchester's hammer to off-cock and strode around the far side of the Carpathian, heading for the jailhouse. Lord only knew what brand of trouble he'd find over there.

•   •   •

The lamp in the jailhouse's front window was still lit.

Approaching cautiously, Longarm studied the front of the place, probing the shadows for more would-be bushwhackers. He studied the window, as well, but spied no movement inside, which may or may not have been a good thing. Vaguely, he wondered if Calvin and Emil had made it back from their chore. How long could it take to run the wolves to the town's edge and dump them, unless they decided to take them farther so the stench of the rotting carcasses wouldn't bother the villagers.

Or maybe the sheriff and his deputy had themselves been harassed by more wolves.

Longarm aimed the Winchester straight out from his right hip as he approached the jailhouse's front door. Quickly, he jerked the door open, aimed the Winchester inside, index finger taut across the trigger. His eyes skidded across the scarred planks, probing the shadows expanding and contracting with the lantern's flickering light.

The cells at the back of the place were in relative darkness, but he could see no one hunkered there or anywhere else, ready to perforate him. Stepping inside, he drew the door closed behind him and walked over to the trapdoor. Goldie's pals could be down in the Wolf Hold, but he didn't hear anything.

Only one way to find out for sure.

He drew the door up and let it slam against the floor. The small, square hole gaped at him. The hole was about as well lit as the marshal's office—he could see the flicker of a lamp's glow.

Dropping to his knees, Longarm lowered his head into the hole and looked around carefully. Nothing but dirt and the earthen bank in which the heavy, wooden, iron-banded doors to the cells were embedded. He could hear a quiet sobbing—the boy who'd been bit by the wolf earlier. Longarm took his rifle in one hand, grabbed the ladder's top rung with the other hand, and dropped straight down into the hole, hitting the dirt floor with a
thud
.

He aimed the rifle out from his hip again, looking around, pleasantly surprised to see that there was no one down here, either. Unless they'd already taken what they'd come for. But Goldie's cell door was closed.

Longarm walked down the narrow corridor, noticing that a ceiling beam lay on the floor to his left, at the base of the hole's left wall. One end was rotted and likely had to have been replaced with the newer looking one running across the ceiling, perpendicular to the cells on Longarm's right. The wall at the end of the narrow corridor was paneled in heavy planks, likely to keep the bank from falling into the hole, as it appeared to have done at one time. An earth tremor, no doubt. Such shifts happened occasionally in the San Juans.

Apparently, the Wolf Hold had been hastily dug, fear having been the primary motivation, and it hadn't been braced as well as it was now.

Sobs emanated from the second door beyond Goldie's, but the brunt of Longarm's attention was on the outlaw's cell. He looked through the small, barred window to see the outlaw sitting on a cot inside, beneath the flaring torch angling out from a wall bracket.

The man was awake. He looked grim, sitting there with a knee up, one arm resting across it, a cigarette smoldering between his fingers. Goldie looked at Longarm and said in a deep, raspy, tired voice, “Would you tell that little peckerwood yonder to shut up? I'm in pain in here, with no fuckin' whiskey to ease it, and I gotta listen to him and his ma?”

“Nice to see ya again, Goldie.”

Longarm continued on past the outlaw's cell, stopped in front of the next one, and peered inside. The boy, David, was there, and his mother, a pretty sandy-haired woman in her thirties, sat with her child on the cell's sole cot. The boy lay under a single quilt and what Longarm figured was the woman's ratty coat, jerking as he sobbed, tears running down his pale, red-mottled face. Mrs. Leonard sat as though chilled, staring miserably up through the window at Longarm.

“This is no way to treat a boy,” she said, tears oozing from her eyes. “Locking him up when he's injured!”

“I do apologize, ma'am. If I had the key, I'd turn him loose.” Longarm paused, and when she turned to smooth the boy's hair back from his forehead with her hand, he added, “You look cold. You oughta have a few more quilts in here.”

“Don't do us any favors, mister,” the woman said without looking at Longarm, her voice forlorn.

“Yeah, don't do 'em any favors, Longarm.” This from Goldie standing in the window of his own cell door, looking out. “Me, though, I could use a woman and a bottle of whiskey. If I'm gonna turn into a werewolf and be fed a silver bullet, I should be allowed that much first.”

“Shut up, Goldie.”

“Shut up yourself, Lawman!” Goldie yelled as Longarm started toward the ladder.

Longarm glimpsed something from the corner of his eye, and he turned back around and walked down to the end of the corridor. Frowning, he crouched to peer between the boards lining the earthen wall at the end of the hall. He poked his finger between the boards, withdrew the thing that had caught his eye, stared at the tip. Shrugging, he wiped his finger on his pants.

“What you doin' over there, Longarm?” Goldie said. “Lose your way?”

Longarm walked past Goldie's door.

“Hey, bring me a bottle, will ya?” the outlaw shouted.

“If you promise to shut up.”

“Oh, I promise, Longarm. Honest!”

When he'd climbed up into the marshal's office, Longarm looked around for some more blankets. He found a couple on the jail cots, but they were so sour with the smell of man sweat and urine that he decided to look elsewhere. Closing the jailhouse door, he headed back across the street to the Carpathian House. He'd just stepped up on the boardwalk when he saw someone moving toward him on his right—a woman in a long fur coat crossing the side street. She had a scarf over her head.

“Don't worry—you won't need that, Marshal Long.”

Longarm looked down at the rifle he was aiming at her, and lowered the piece. He recognized the brown eyes inside the red scarf. They belonged to the handsome woman he'd seen in the rear door of the whorehouse, who'd come to the aide of the wolf-bit boy and his mother. “You have me at a disadvantage, Miss . . .”

“
Mrs.
,” she said, stopping before him, the wind nipping at her scarf, blowing the fur coat about her legs. “Mrs. Zeena Radulescu. Was that you making all the gun racket earlier?”

Longarm ignored the question. “You shouldn't be out here.”

“I'm probably better equipped to be out here than you are.” Zeena pulled a small, pearl-gripped, .36-caliber Remington from a deep pocket of her coat, and let it flash in the moonlight before returning it to her pocket. “Loaded with silver bullets.” She glanced at Longarm's Winchester, which he held straight down along his right leg. “Is yours?”

“Nope. I don't believe in all that fairy tale stuff.”

“By the time you leave here . . .
if
you leave here . . . I'm betting you will.” She turned and opened the saloon door, mentioning over her shoulder, “I came for some booze. The moon and the wolves have me doing a booming business. No one wants to be alone, especially the old prospectors in the less secure shacks down by the creek.”

Longarm followed her into the saloon and closed the door. Heads swung toward them, everyone startled by the door opening on this wolf-haunted night. He followed her through the thick smoke to the bar, and when she'd bought her three bottles of whiskey, Longarm asked the rangy bartender for some blankets for David Leonard and his mother. “Some food would be nice, too,” he added.

“How nice of you,” Zeena said, her lustrous brown eyes giving him a faintly quizzical appraisal. “A lawman with a heart—imagine.” He'd noticed that she spoke with an accent—one that he supposed harkened back to her home country of Romania or Transylvania, or one of those other mysterious Eastern European countries some of the folks around here hailed from.

The barman canted his head toward what was left of the free lunch atop the bar to Longarm's right. “That's all I got,” he said. “S'pose you could make 'em a coupla sandwiches. I'll see if I can rustle up some blankets.”

When the barman had disappeared through a door flanking the stairs, Longarm walked over and began building a sandwich with ham and cheese and what appeared to be a cold elk roast. There wasn't much of anything left, but it would have to do.

Zeena set her bottles atop the bar then came over, picked up a tin plate, and started building a sandwich. “I'll help you with these,” she said. “Does Calvin have coffee over there?”

“None on the stove.”

“No, he wouldn't—the cheap bastard.” Zeena set a slender slice of elk meat on a slice of bread, covered the meat with another slice of bread, and added a pickled egg to the plate. “I'll fetch some from my place and meet you over there.” She set the plate down near the lawman's left elbow, swiping her hands together to dislodge the crumbs.

“What is your place?” Longarm asked, though he thought he knew.

“A whorehouse,” she said as she picked up her liquor bottles, her eyes flashing like varnished oak in the sunlight as she regarded him with amusement. “Don't I look like a madam, Marshal Long?”

Longarm glanced at her as he set the food on a single plate to make it easier to carry to the marshal's office with the blankets. “Most of them are old, fat, and ugly,” he said, appreciating the woman's beauty despite the crow's-feet around her eyes.

She was likely approaching middle age, but while her body was lush and full, with round womanly hips, she was nothing near fat. She radiated an earthy energy. Her mouth was wide and sensuous, accustomed to smiling, albeit wryly; her long nose bespoke assurance, her eyes faintly jeering in a bawdy sort of way.

Longarm had a feeling she'd be every bit as much a catamount in the mattress sack as Catherine Fortescue.

“And they ain't married,” he added, running his eyes back up from her legs to her face.

“I'm a widow.” She continued to the door, cradling the bottles in her arms and glancing at him—coquettishly?—over her shoulder. “I'll see you at the marshal's office shortly.”

The rangy barman came back with a heavy quilt and a blanket. “This is all I could find,” he said, squinting through the smoke of the quirley drooping from between his lips.

“They'll do. Give me a bottle of something cheap, too, will you?”

When he'd paid the man for Goldie's bottle, Longarm wrapped the bottle inside the blankets. He set the plate on top of the bundle, scooped his rifle off the counter, and headed back out into the chilly night.

He paused on the porch and surveyed the shadow-ensconced street. The moon was a couple of hours away from its zenith. It appeared to be getting bigger and brighter.

The wolf's forlorn cry cut through the night once more. Longarm looked above the false-fronted buildings on the opposite side of the street, toward the dark cliffs rising in the north. The convent was up there. It was hard to tell because of the echoes, but he thought the wolf's call was originating up there somewhere.