Longarm and the Wolf Women (9 page)

The woman was on her knees between the man and Longarm, clutching one hand to her battered throat and gagging, her eyes bulging.

“Get the hell outta the way!” Longarm shouted, waving his arm.

“Ohhhh!” the woman sobbed and threw herself right, crabbing toward the gap between the wall and the lobby's front desk.

Longarm squeezed off another shot, but the man crawled around the far side of the front desk, and Longarm's shot plunked into an upholstered chair behind him.

The man snaked his silver-plated pistol around the end of the desk and fired. The slug barked into a rail pillar to Longarm's right.

He fired again quickly.

Longarm ducked. His right knee slipped off the step.

He reached for the rail, missed it, and a half second later found himself tumbling down the stairs, the stairwell spinning around him and setting up a high ringing in his ears.

He rolled to a sudden halt against the wall at the bottom landing and jerked a look toward the lobby.

Grinning while holding one hand to his bloody ear, the blood dribbling in three separate streaks down his neck and onto his duster's collar, the tall gent scuttled toward Longarm on his hands and knees.

He whooped for joy and raised the pistol.

The old woman bolted suddenly out from the gap behind the desk, raising what appeared to be a hide-wrapped bung-starter in her right hand.

Screaming, she slammed the mallet down hard on the tall gent's pistol. He wailed and triggered the pistol into the floor before dropping the gun and removing his hand from his ear to clutch his arm.

“You fucking
bitch
!” the man screamed.

“Die, bastard, die!” she shrieked, bringing the mallet down once more across his shoulder, then laying it flat against his head. It made a dull cracking sound.

“To hell with you . . . threatening a defenseless lady when her husband's off fishin'!”

Longarm had gained his knees and was trying to draw a bead on the would-be assassin again, but the woman was in the way, pummeling the gent with the bung-starter. The man screamed and cursed and crawled back toward the door, the old lady following him and berating him with both words and the hide-wrapped mallet, the whacks
resounding
across the lobby.

“Get out,” she screamed in rage. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”

Longarm gained his feet and ran around the front desk. The tall gent had the door open. Raising his left arm to shield the old woman's blows, he bolted through the opening and jerked the door closed behind him.

“Lady, get outta the way!” Longarm shouted, shoving her against the desk then slipping outside.

He dropped to one knee on the hotel's stoop and peered into the darkness, the mud puddles in the street before him glistening blue starlight.

The tall gent stumbled off across the street, angling to Longarm's right, one hand to his ear.

A small shadow shot out from the direction of the livery barn, growling and yipping, and digging its teeth into the man's right calf.

“Hold it, you son of a bitch!” Merle shouted from somewhere above Longarm. The porch roof impeded his view.

As the dog clutched the man's leg, growling and shaking its head, the man kicked at it. Unable to dislodge the stalwart little beast, he turned toward the hotel.

Something flashed dully in his right hand.

He kicked at the dog again, still unable to free himself. The dog did a bizarre pirouette on its back legs as the man swung it in a circle, cursing it. Beneath the little dog's steady, vibrating growls, there was the sound of a pistol hammer cocking.

Longarm extended the Colt and fired. One beat later, Merle fired above him, the rifle shot ringing out across the town and echoing hollowly. As the tall man jerked, Longarm fired two more rounds at nearly the same time that Merle fired three more from Longarm's rifle.

The tall man flew straight back, howling and triggering his revolver skyward. He landed on his back in the mud with a dull splash.

The little dog squealed and ran off into the shadows on the other side of the street.

Longarm stood and stepped off the stoop, lowering his revolver and peering up over his right shoulder. On a narrow balcony with a door standing wide behind her, Merle stood in a hat, longhandles, and boots, still aiming the smoking Winchester at the tall gent sprawled in the mud.

“I think we got him,” Longarm said.

Longarm woke the next morning to the marshal of Diamondback's naked breasts pressed against his back and one long, creamy thigh scissored between his legs.

He'd have gone for a morning romp, as it was early still, the first flush of dawn barely pearling the windows, but when he stirred, Merle merely rolled over and drew the blankets up to her neck, groaning as she drifted back toward sleep.

“Think I'm gonna snore some more,” she muttered. “Big day yesterday. You'll probably find Comanche John over to the German Café. You two be careful up there in that canyon. Don't fall prey to any big-titted damsels in distress.”

Longarm dropped his legs to the floor and was about to respond, when she stirred once again.

“If you see Mrs. Grassley, tell her she better not spread it around that you and me spent the night together or I'll set the ball rolling about her and the preacher's wife swimming naked in the river together.”

With that, she snuggled down under the covers. Within seconds, her breaths were long and regular.

Longarm snorted, rose, and took a whore's bath at the washstand. He didn't bother to shave, as most prospectors went around with furred jaws, and it was a prospector he'd be impersonating up canyon.

When he'd dressed in his miner's denims, green wool shirt, red neckerchief, sheepskin vest, and the battered plainsman hat he'd bought secondhand, he wrapped his Colt around his lean waist and gathered his saddlebags and rifle.

He leaned down and planted a long kiss on Merle's warm, butter-smooth cheek. She groaned and turned her head to kiss his lips. “Good-bye, Custis. Hurry back.”

She chuckled and settled her head back down against the pillow.

Longarm glanced at the full-bodied, big-breasted form beneath the sheets and quilt, and the blond hair cascading over the pillow, and shook his head. “Don't you worry, Marshal. No, sir . . .”

With that, he snugged the covers up around her neck, hiked the saddlebags over his left shoulder, and slipped out of the room. Glancing at the dark bloodstains on the wall and floor, and the bullet holes in the wall and door, he plucked a cheroot from his shirt pocket, stuck it between his lips without lighting it, and headed down the stairs.

Halfway down, he noted the bullet-chewed stair rail.

Since the shooters had been after Merle instead of him, the damage couldn't be construed as federal, and for that he was glad. He hated having to fill out pay vouchers every time he discharged his firearm, and then having to justify each voucher to Billy with that typewriter-playing weasel Henry staring at him reprovingly over his spectacles.

No, compensation for last night's fandango would be up to the Diamondback City Council.

Longarm had hoped in vain to get out of the place without seeing Mrs. Grassley. The henlike, curly-haired woman was on her hands and knees in the lobby, scrubbing the rug in front of the door.

“Blood of the devil,” she remarked, glancing up at Longarm, mouth pinched like a puckered asshole. “That must be why it's so hard to get it up!”

Longarm sidled on past her and reached for the door, sucking on his unlit cigar. “That must be it.”

“The devil's goin's-on around here,” she wheezed, “and I don't just mean the shootin', neither!”

Longarm chuckled. He opened the door and was about to step out, when he remembered Merle's instructions. He looked around the half-open door at the persnickety old woman staring up at him owl-eyed. “Merle mentioned as how she could keep a secret if you could. Um . . . you and the preacher's wife, that is . . .”

He left the woman kneeling there in the foyer, the blood draining out of her face, and headed outside, shivering a little in the early morning chill and hitching the saddlebags higher on his shoulder. The air still smelled like sage and rain. He peered into the cool purple shadows, the false fronts of Diamondback's main drag rearing back against the violet sky, in which a couple of stars still sparkled faintly.

About fifty yards to his left, a white shingle with black letters forming the words “GERMAN CAFÉ” hung over a narrow boardwalk. Smoke streamed from the stone chimney jutting up from the log hovel's shake roof. That and one lone horse hanging its head before a hophouse to Longarm's right were the only signs of life so far.

Longarm fired a match on his thumbnail, lit the cheroot, tossed the match into a mud puddle lingering from last night's gully washer, and angled toward the restaurant, weaving around more puddles.

He was only halfway to the restaurant when a woman's boisterous laugh rang out from inside the hovel's log walls. Adjusting his saddlebags and saddle on his shoulder, and taking another deep drag off the cheroot in his teeth, he pushed through the timbered door, nudging the door back with his Winchester's barrel, and looked around.

Before him was a small, smoky, earthen-floored room, the smell of bacon and heavily spiced sausage wafting on the pine smoke. There were three long wooden tables shrouded in oilcloth and trimmed with fresh-cut flowers poking up from glass vases of various fashions—the only color in the room.

In a rocking chair near the woodstove in the middle of the room, flanked by a wood box, kindling crate, and a stack of yellowed newspapers, a big man in buckskins sat with a chubby brunette in his lap. The woman appeared in her mid-to-late twenties, her rich hair piled atop her head, pale, fleshy cheeks flushed with exertion, brown eyes sparkling as she smiled.

The big man was nuzzling her neck and hefting her breasts through her sackcloth dress, the big orbs the size of watermelons in his roast-sized paws. The woman was halfheartedly struggling against him, laughing and kicking her legs, the hem of her dress and bloodstained apron fluttering around her thick, pantaloon-clad shins and stout black shoes.

“You a very bat old dog, Comanche John!” she scolded, her German accent thick enough to pummel stone. “Look vhere your hands are! That's very bat boy! Very bat—!”

Her eyes discovered Longarm standing in the open doorway, regarding her and the big man wrly, and she quickly feigned an angry expression. “You very bat man, Comanche John! Keeping a girl from her vork!” She planted her feet on the hard-packed floor and wrestled away from the guffawing gent in buckskins. “Vhat if I report you to your niece the marshal, and she
throw
you in chail?”

Comanche John sobered a little, as well, a wry expression stealing over his single lake blue eye, contrasting with his thin gray beard as he grimly studied Longarm. “As trigger-happy as ole Merle has gotten of late, she'd just drill me to save on her feed bill.”

The brunette had gained her feet and turned to Longarm. She smoothed her apron over her heaving bosom with one hand and patted her hair with the other, blushing as she smiled demurely at the lawman. “Goot morgan. You are here for to eat?”

“Don't fall all over yourself, Greta,” said Comanche John, adjusting the eyepatch over his left eye socket, which was spoked with knife scars and gave his face a ghoulish aspect. “That's the federal I was talking about. Those boys have ice in their veins. They don't trifle with café girls—not when they're on a job, they don't. Bring us both a plate of your best surroundin's. I'll have a glass of goat milk with mine.” He touched his flat belly through his buckskin shirt, the wang strings on his beaded elk-hide vest jostling. “You done riled me, set my gut to burnin' . . .”

“Coffee for me,” Longarm told Greta, dropping his leather on the nearest bench and leaning his Winchester against the table. He added with a grin around the cheroot in his teeth, “And, while Comanche John done pegged me correct for a federal, I don't have all that much ice in my veins, and I list trifling with café girls as one of my better vices.”

“Oh!” the girl cooed, her facing turning red as a western sunset.

She wrinkled her nose at Comanche John then wheeled, skirt and apron tails fluttering about her broad butt and thick legs, and disappeared through a curtained door behind the pine-plank bar.

Longarm stood studying the big, buckskin-clad gent from across the table. He plucked the cheroot from his teeth. “So you be Comanche John. Can't say you favor your niece overmuch.”

Comanche John guffawed and struggled up out of the rocker, rising nearly to Longarm's height—a big, slab-chested, flat-bellied, bull-legged gent who looked as though he'd been carved from knotted hickory. As the gray window light angled across him, Longarm saw that he bore the hacked-up stub of an ear on the same side as his deer-hide eye patch.

“Nah, she don't favor me much,” said Comanche John, moving toward Longarm, lips stretched back from a surprisingly full set of white teeth. “Poor girl got hit with the ugly stick, she did!”

He wheezed another laugh and thrust his broad hand across the table. “Longarm, a pleasure. I done heared a lot about you. And it just happens to be your good fortune that the man with the most knowledge of the canyon country just happened to be in these very environs when you needed him the most!”

“Know a lot about the canyon, do you?” Longarm said, lowering himself to the bench.

“Shit, I was born and raised in that goddamn canyon. Me and Merle's pa.” Comanche John lifted his legs over the bench across the table from Longarm, and sat down, wincing as though from creaky bones.