Longarm and the Sins of Laughing Lyle (9781101612101) (10 page)

He woke later when she stirred. He opened his eyes and saw her standing over him with her rifle in her hands. Loudly, she racked a cartridge into the chamber and aimed the rifle at his head.

Chapter 18

Ah, shit—out of the frying pan and into the fire, Longarm thought, staring into the rifle's bottomless black maw.

Blinking sleep from his eyes, he followed the rifle up past its stock and her well-filled work shirt to Jenny's pretty head, which was not canted toward him but facing off toward the north. The sky above the girl was smeared with the pearl wash of dawn. In the faint light, he saw that she was not aiming the rifle at him, as he'd thought upon waking. She was only standing near him and holding it negligently across her hips, though she had the hammer cocked.

Longarm nudged the barrel aside, wagged his head with relief, and said, “What is it?”

“Something thrashing around upstream.”

Longarm heard it, too—the snorts and snarls and snapping brush of the predators fighting over Jake and his kith.

“Just coyotes,” Longarm said, rising stiffly with a grunt. “They're enjoyin' their breakfast, and I gotta say I'm right jealous. All I have is some jerky tougher than double eagles and some hardtack that redefines ‘hard.'”

Jenny depressed the carbine's hammer and leaned the rifle against a tree. “Longarm?” She looked at him shyly, then swept her mess of long, tawny hair back from her shoulders, arranging it into a ponytail. “About last night . . .”

“Ah, hell,” Longarm said. “You don't need to go feelin' guilty, and I sure as hell . . .”

“No,” she said, lowering her hands and walking toward him, her hair secured with a leather thong behind her head. She placed her hands on his forearms and looked up at him. “Call me wanton or depraved or just a plain old bad girl, but I enjoyed it.” A smile lifted her mouth corners. “And I wanted to thank you for it. For taking my mind off Pa and Lyle and all, when there was nothin' for us to do about 'em anyway. Like I said, it was only my second time, and . . . well, I hope you found some pleasure in it, too.”

“Jenny?” Longarm said, placing his hands on her arms. “How could I not have?”

He pulled her against him, hugging her, and she wrapped her arms around his waist.

“In that case,” she said, pulling away from him and crouching over her saddlebags. “Let's have us some breakfast. Ma packed bacon biscuits and fresh deer jerky. By the time we're finished eating, it should be light enough for us to hit the trail.”

“Well, I'll be damned,” Longarm said as his stomach rumbled. “That Ma's a caution, ain't she?”

*   *   *

Jenny had been right. When they'd built up the fire and heated the coffee, with which they washed down Ma Marcus's biscuits and jerky, the sun had risen enough to make travel possible over the rough terrain ahead. When Longarm had turned the mounts of last night's cutthroats' loose, free to stray off to the nearest ranch, Jenny led the way up out of the gorge and back onto the main trail.

A half hour later, they were following the shortcut she'd mentioned. It was a perilously narrow trail along the shoulder of a high mountain on which very little grew except short, brown grass, low-growing evergreen shrubs, and wiry wildflowers. The incline was nearly vertical, and the slope was covered with slide-rock, but the trail, likely carved out of the mountain by deer and elk, was wide enough to give passage, albeit a sometimes harrowing one. He and Jenny were about a thousand feet above a broad mountain park in which a blue lake nestled in a clearing among firs and lodgepole pines.

The rising sun glittered on the water, from which, as Longarm glanced down, a blue heron took ungainly flight and swept off toward the east, toward a pass that stood among steep, toothy peaks.

The trail wound around the mountain, then dropped down into a park not unlike the one on the other side, and Jenny led Longarm onto a rugged two-track trail that branched off away from the mountain and into a broad valley between humpbacked, fir-forested ridges. As they came out of the trees, Longarm saw a small ranch headquarters nestled at the bottom of the valley's right slope, behind a peeled log portal decorated with elk antlers. A brand was burned into the portal's overhead timber, but Longarm couldn't see it yet from his distance of a hundred yards.

From here, the ranch didn't appear much—just a small, weathered-gray log cabin and a log barn, flanked by a privy and fronted by a windmill and three corrals, including a circular breaking corral. Smoke curled from the cabin's stone chimney, which climbed up the near side wall, nearly as broad as the wall itself.

There appeared to be a dozen or so horses inside one of the corrals, and two figures were moving toward it from the direction of the cabin. Something was wrong with one of the figures. The man seemed to be staggering, falling, then heaving himself back to his feet uncertainly.

Angry voices rose on the cool, mid-morning air—one shriller, more pinched than the other.

“Oh, no,” Jenny said softly as, holding her reins up high against her chest, she stared straight ahead toward the ranch.

The pinched voice rose again, more clearly now:
“No, you don't, damn your worthless hide! I don't care if you are kin of mine—you ain't takin' no more of my hosses, you gutless, low-down dirty dog!”

The stumbling figure now lurched up off a knee and dove toward the other man, who was in front of him and striding slowly, arrogantly toward the corral with the horses in it. As Longarm and Jenny continued riding, the headquarters growing larger before them, Longarm saw Laughing Lyle's pinto vest and the long, stringy, straw-colored hair hanging straight down from his flat-brimmed hat.

Behind the men, another figure, who wore brown pants and a black vest, stood in the yard before the cabin, facing them, one foot cocked forward, a hand on a hip, taking in the skirmish with a casual, jeering air. Longarm recognized the supple, long-legged figure of Bethany Todd. She appeared to be holding a mug in her hand. Behind her, the cabin's front door was open.

“Pa, no!” Jenny screamed as Laughing Lyle spun suddenly and hammered the older man's face with his right fist.

Longarm could hear the smack of the killer's fist against his father's face even as Jenny ground her spurs into her horse's flanks and set off at a gallop.

“Jenny, goddamnit, hold on!” Longarm yelled, reaching forward to slide his Winchester from his saddle boot.

He rammed his heels against his buckskin's loins and lunged on up the trail behind Jenny, seeing her father hit the ground hard with a loud yell as Laughing Lyle swung back to face the oncoming riders. Lyle clawed one of his two six-shooters from its holster, strode forward several steps, and raised the pistol straight out from his right arm.

“Jenny!” Longarm shouted, cocking his rifle one-handed. “Get your damn head down!”

The girl kept barreling straight ahead, hunkered low over her horse's neck but not low enough to keep from getting herself drilled if Laughing Lyle's aim was keen, and if he'd actually sling lead at his own half-sister. Longarm wasn't all that surprised when, a half a second after Laughing Lyle's pistol puffed smoke from its barrel, dust blew up only two feet away from Jenny's lunging sorrel mare.

Too close to be merely trying to scare her off.

Longarm urged more speed from the buckskin and began to overtake Jenny's sorrel as he aimed his Winchester one-handed and squeezed the trigger. The rifle shrieked, but the bullet was thrown wide by the shooter's jostling perch, and dust puffed a good six feet to Laughing Lyle's right, near the base of the breaking corral's gatepost.

“Jenny, get back,” Longarm shouted again, galloping five feet behind her as she tore under the portal and into the ranch yard.

Longarm galloped into the yard behind her, just as Laughing Lyle's pistol smoked once more. Jenny gave a shriek and went tumbling off her sorrel's left hip, hitting the ground in a thudding pile only a few feet from Longarm's buckskin. Longarm levered another shell one-handed into the Winchester's breech, aimed the same way as before, and fired as he continued lunging toward Laughing Lyle, who'd turned his pistol on Longarm.

The lawman's next shot must have creased him, because the killer's own shot spanged off a rock far wide of its fast-closing target, and then he yowled and spun around, grabbing his ear. Longarm barreled toward the man, triggering the Winchester twice more before Laughing Lyle snapped a shot at his father and took off running toward the cabin.

Bethany stood in the doorway, pumping a Winchester. One shot blew the lawman's hat off his head a half second before the next one punched into the buckskin's brisket.

The horse screamed and dropped its head and withers.

“Shit!” the lawman cried, throwing his rifle wide and then flinging himself free of the saddle.

The heart-shot horse turned a complete somersault before landing with a crunching thud in the yard, making dust roil about ten feet from where Hy May sat up on one hip, clutching his other knee with one hand and shouting, “
Jen-neeee!
”

Three more slugs triggered from the cabin's doorway blew up dirt and ground horse shit in front of Longarm as he rolled onto his belly and brought up his Colt. He triggered three quick shots toward the cabin, blowing slivers from the casing and evoking a clipped shriek from Bethany, who lowered her carbine and ducked inside just as Laughing Lyle dove past her into the cabin.

Longarm fired two more shots, but they only hit more wood as Bethany kicked the door closed. He could hear them both yelling inside as he glanced at the old man now calling for Jenny and crying as he lay on his side, legs curled beneath him. He'd obviously been badly beaten, for both eyes were swollen nearly shut and there were deep bruises and cuts on his patch-bearded face.

“Gotta get you to cover,” Longarm told the old man as he quickly hooked his arms under May's. The old rancher wore a ratty undershirt and patched canvas trousers and suspenders, and he smelled like old sweat and an entire vat of forty-rod. His hair was long and greasy, and it clung to his withered yet not unhandsome face.

“He's a devil, that one,” Hy May said in a gravelly voice thick from drink. “Pure-dee evil. Came here last night, beat hell out of me with a chunk of cordwood while that girl used my possibles to cook 'em supper. Left me piled up in my own livin' room, detailin' all the torment they've inflicted!”

May cursed his son roundly.

“Go to Jenny! Go to my daughter!” he sobbed as Longarm dragged him around behind the nearest corral.

“Sit tight,” Longarm told him, as he ran back out from behind the corral, toward where Jenny lay on her side on the ground where her half-brother's shots had deposited her.

Longarm was halfway to Jenny, flicking glances back toward the cabin, knowing that its two devilish occupants would be throwing lead at him soon, when they did just that, two rifles cracking, the slugs hammering the ground just behind Longarm's thudding heels.

“Hey, Longarm!” Laughing Lyle shouted from the window. “How'd you like my little ruse in town, lawdog?” He laughed raucously, jeeringly. “Not a bad way to hole up for a time and heal from them pills you gave me back at Finlay's, eh?”

Another bullet spanged off a near rock as Longarm crouched over Bethany. He raised his rifle and snapped off three shots toward the cabin, watching splinters fly from the casings of the two windows in which he'd glimpsed the faces of both Laughing Lyle and the preacher's daughter. Inside, Laughing Lyle laughed wildly, tauntingly, as Longarm set his rifle down, grabbed one of Jenny's arms, and pulled her up and over his left shoulder.

She groaned and shook her head. Blood spotted her temple where her half-brother's bullet had creased her.

Longarm adjusted the girl on his shoulder, then grabbed his rifle. Bullets began flying once more from the cabin, puffing dust around him, screeching off rocks. As he ran as fast as he could toward a shallow wash about seventy yards from the cabin and straight across from the corrals, one of the bullets burned across his right thigh.

He growled deep in his chest, flaring his nostrils. His brown eyes were hard as granite.

The burn in his leg stoked the already blazing fires of rage in his belly to a white-hot conflagration.

He dashed down into the wash, and as several more slugs kicked up dirt from the lip of its bank, he lowered Jenny to the gravelly ground.

“What you gonna do now, Longarm?” Laughing Lyle shouted, laughing, from the cabin. “We're in here, with plenty of ammo, and you're out there with likely damn little by now!”

Bethany's voice yelled, “Best call it quits, lawman. Best go on back to town and lick your wounds. Me an' my man are gonna take that Stoneville loot, grab us some horses from the corral yonder, and head for Mexico.
And there ain't one blasted thing you can do about it!
”

They both laughed raucously—human jackals kicking up dust at some unholy fandango thrown by the devil himself.

Longarm grabbed his rifle and punched fresh lead through the loading gate. He shouldered up against the wash's bank and edged a look over the lip toward the cabin.

“That's where you're wrong,” he said, punching the ninth cartridge into the rifle's receiver, then levering a round into the chamber. “I'll tell you two sons o' rotten, bitter bitches what I'm gonna do about it. I'm going to kill you both!”

“What's that, Longarm?” Lyle called.

“I said you'd best say your prayers, Lyle. Bethany, I'm talkin' to you, too!” Longarm climbed to his feet. “Say 'em now, 'cause you both got about one more minute to live!”

He fairly hurled himself up and over the bank and set off running toward the cabin, snarling like a rogue griz with fresh meat on the wind.