Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance (22 page)

Stretch splashed more liquor into his glass and headed for the door. “I best go see if the girls need more wood split for the stove.” He grabbed his spurs and clomped off down the hall.

“Don’t mind him,” Mrs. Azrael said. “All the whippin’s in the world couldn’t turn him out right, though Lord knows I wore the bark off many a willow sap across that boy’s derriere. Stretch’s got too much of Whip’s blood.” She studied the old, one-eyed rancher who sat in a catatonic stare and
shook her head. “Oh, but we did have some good times, though, didn’t we, Whip? Despite the hardships.”

She slapped her hand down on the sofa arm. “My word, you two will want to clean up for supper. Help yourselves to the washtub on the porch. There’s a barrel with fresh water there, and I’ll have Vonda fetch some clean towels.”

“I’d be obliged,” Haven said, throwing back the last of her drink and rising.

“On your way out, help yourselves to another drink. Supper will be ready in a few minutes. I’m just gonna sit here a bit with my husband.”

From somewhere in the house, Vonda screamed, “Stretch, god
damn
your ugly hide!” She sobbed, and then a plate crashed to the floor.

Mrs. Azrael pressed the front of her wrist to her forehead and crowed, “Lord, give me strength not to shotgun ’em both!”

They all ate in the dining room off the kitchen, the shutters over a couple of large, arched windows set in the outside brick wall thrown open to the cool of the desert dusk. Birds tittered in Mrs. Azrael’s garden, a refreshing breeze rattling the leaves of the pecan trees. Occasionally, a horse whinnied in one of the corrals.

Two more guests arrived as Vonda and the pretty, plump Mexican girl, Angelina, set several cast-iron pots and plates of tortillas on the long, heavy wooden table. One of the guests was the black man whom Longarm had seen earlier building a quirley on the boulder near the breaking corral.

His name was Tallahassee Smith. The other, Jake Wade, was a cadaver-thin Anglo with a bushy black mustache wearing a yellow-and-black-checked shirt beneath a brown leather vest and suspenders.

Wade was the ranch
segundo
, second in command behind Stretch, while Tallahasee was apparently next in line, though Stretch didn’t say as much. Stretch didn’t say much of anything after he’d introduced the two ranch hands, and he probably wouldn’t have introduced them at all if his mother hadn’t berated him into doing so, pounding his shoulder with her clawlike little fist.

Longarm got the impression that both these men were regulars at the supper table, and most nights they probably discussed ranch business as they ate and then drank and smoked in the study or out on the front veranda. Longarm’s and Haven’s presence had thrown a wrench into the social workings here, because no one said much of anything until Mrs. Azrael piped up with, “Jake an’ Tallahassee was amongst them who found the dead lawmen, Marshal Long. So if you wanna speak to ’em, you got your opportunity right here. Go on—I don’t hold much on meal ceremony. Ask what you want. Jake, you an’ Tallahassee cooperate with this man. He’s here to pop killers out of the brush here at the Double D, and since you yourselves can’t seem to keep my range clear of miscreants, I say it’s about damn time someone does!”

Longarm looked over his plate piled high with a chewy but tasty Mexican stew consisting of venison, garden peas, Spanish rice, and chili peppers. He held a fork in one hand, a tortilla scrap in the other, as he regarded Jake and Tallahassee, both of whom kept their heads down over their plates as though the woman had cowed them.

Likely, they were just shy, Longarm thought. Most cowboys were bashful as well as backward and as dull-witted as the cows they tended. Longarm had spied these two as well as Stretch casting furtive glances of unbridled male interest across the table at Haven.

Vonda, sitting beside Stretch, was just now grinning and sliding her own mischievous gaze between the two men and Longarm. She apparently knew how uncomfortable the men were in the presence of strangers including one Pinkerton beauty whom they were all probably imagining with her panties off and her dress shoved up around her waist.

“What’d you find out there, boys?” Longarm prodded the punchers.

“Dead men,” said Tallahassee. He was bald on top. He wore long, shaggy sideburns and a mustache. His eyes
owned an intelligence and blatant cunning that was missing from the man sitting next to him—Jake—who outranked him. “Five of ’em.”

Tallahassee held Longarm’s gaze with a defiant one of his own. But lots of men didn’t like lawmen; it didn’t necessarily mean they were breaking the law or had paper on their heads. In fact, most of the men Longarm had run into distrusted the law outright. Until they needed them, of course.

“Shot?”

“Uh-huh.”

“From close up or far away?”

“Medium range,” the black man said, then added with a peevish air, “How’m I supposed to know?”

“How many times were they shot?”

The black man had resumed eating. Now he looked up at Longarm with an impatient sigh. “Don’t recollect. They was all bad bloody. Some was prob’ly shot once, others twice.”

“One got it in the head,” the cadaverous Jake said, not looking at Longarm but continuing to shovel food into his mouth, leaving a lot of it on his brushy, dark brown mustache.

Haven cleared her throat. “Would anyone here at the Double D have any idea why someone might want those lawmen dead, including the one that was killed earlier today, possibly yesterday?”

Both men looked at her as though it was the first time they’d seen her. They seemed especially interested in her, and also especially suspicious of her for no other reason than she was a female in authority.

Jake’s light brown eyes acquired an amused air as he said, “Why, no man, I don’t believe so.”

He wasn’t taking Haven seriously, and she knew it. She continued looking at Jake while the
segundo
continued eating with an annoyingly mocking smile lifting his mouth
corners, and Longarm felt as though he were sitting beside a coiled rattler.

Finally, Haven drew a deep breath, released it, and picked up her fork.

Longarm reached for his coffee cup and saw Vonda staring at him, a smile on her bee-stung lips. She chewed slowly, staring at him, and he held her gaze curiously—was she as horny as she seemed?—until Stretch glanced at her. He turned away, then turned back to her and followed her gaze to Longarm, and then back to his wife again.

He rammed his elbow into her side, hard, and said, “Eat!”

Vonda yelped and jerked back in her chair, dropping her fork and slapping a hand to her ribs. “Goddamn you, Stretch Azrael!”

She climbed to her feet, sobbing, and yelled, “That hurt!” and ran out of the room. No one else said anything. Stretch chuckled as he continued eating. His mother gave him a cold-eyed stare as she chewed her food. “Was that necessary?”

Stretched hiked a shoulder. “She’s my wife. I can do what I want to her.”

He looked up at Haven as though to see how that last comment had registered. Agent Delacroix kept her eyes on her plate. Stretch looked at Longarm, and his eyes hardened and the tips of his ears turned red.

Oh, boy, Longarm thought. Here we go.

He was beginning to wish he hadn’t ridden over to the Double D. About all he’d gotten out of it so far besides a meal was another target drawn on his back. Between the dustup earlier and the incident just now, he’d gained another enemy in Stretch Azrael.

“You have a real talent for making friends,” Haven told Longarm later, when they’d slipped out into the rear-walled garden and patio for a private conference away from the rowdy, bickering Azraels.

It was good dark, the dry air silky. All was quiet now that the ranch hands had shut themselves into their bunkhouse for the night.

Mr. and Mrs. Azrael had gone to bed. She’d assigned a room with a door onto the garden for Haven, not far from where Stretch and Vonda slept. Longarm had been allocated the headquarters’ first
segundo
’s shack, a one-room stone cabin behind the main house. He’d deposited his gear there a few minutes ago and killed a few of the black widow spiders, though a scorpion crawling on one of the old tomato-crate shelves had been too fast for him and scuttled out a crack in the stone wall.

“You try to make friends with ole Stretch.” Longarm winked at Haven as they strolled along the garden’s brick paths lit by soft blue starlight. “Without gettin’ flat on your back, I mean.”

“That’s disgusting. The way you were ogling that crazy wife of his was just as disgusting. Don’t you men have any pride at all? No sense of civility or moral integrity? Is every potential unwashed thought welcome fodder for your depraved minds?”

“This is obviously somethin’ that’s been eating you.”

“We’re out here to investigate murder and stolen gold, and you’re making eyes at the wife of one of the suspects.”

Longarm stopped and swung toward her. “Hey, just remember how we first met, Miss Santy Maria!”

She wagged her finger at him and narrowed a reproving eye. “I told you not to bring that up ever again.”

“How ’bout last night? I shouldn’t bring that up, either?”

“We were two mature, unattached adults enjoying each other’s company after hours. I saw nothing wrong with what we did, though I see no reason to be so uncouth as to discuss it in the light of day.”

Longarm scowled at her, felt himself wagging his head again in utter befuddlement. He’d never understand how her mind worked. It was even more complicated and vexing than
most of her sex. She must have been raised pious as hell, her earthly soul riddled with holy guilt yet incapable of keeping her from falling prey to her own female cravings over and over.

“What do you got to be embarrassed about? We threw the blocks to each other, and we’ll probably do it again tonight.” Longarm grinned. “Got a room key?”

“Don’t you think we should discuss what we’ve learned from our visit so far, and what each of us thinks about these people and their possible involvement in the murders as well as the gold?”

“Shit, I don’t know nothin’ more than I did before we got here.”

Haven glanced back at the house. They were near the garden’s stone wall, and the house was about fifty yards away. No windows facing the garden showed light. Longarm thought that Stretch and Vonda had gone to bed, though he wasn’t sure about the quiet, plump, long-suffering housekeeper Angelina, who toiled tirelessly and apparently without complaint.

Haven kept her voice low as she said, “I, for one, am very suspicious of Stretch. I think he has the gold. Or he had it.”

“If Stretch had the gold,” Longarm said, firing a lucifer to life on the wall and touching the flame to a fresh three-for-a-nickel cheroot, “I doubt he’d still be here at the Double D. He’d have left a long time ago and been livin’ high on the hog.”

“Not necessarily. A fool like that might have spent it already. Frittered it away on cheap women like his wife, and on expensive whiskey and cards.”

“Jesus,” Longarm said with a dry chuckle, blowing smoke out over the wall toward his little shack hunched in the darkness amongst some still mesquites and Spanish bayonet. “It’s frightening how well you know the male way. I have to say, you have a point. But if the gold’s been spent, there ain’t no way to find it.”

“If the gold’s been spent, why were those lawmen killed?”

“Maybe ole Stretch and his dear old ma are right, and they were killed by banditos. We could ride out and within a half hour we’d probably flush a half dozen out of the first wash we came to.”

Longarm stared into the darkly bristling desert toward the steep peaks forming a black, jagged-topped wall beyond, blocking out the stars.

“What is it?” Haven said, standing just off his right shoulder, looking up at him curiously.

“I don’t know.” Longarm rolled the cigar around between his lips. “Somethin’ tells me you might be right. Somethin’ also tells me that them two that ambushed us are part of Stretch’s roll.”

“That would mean the one with the Big Fifty is here somewhere.”

“Possibly, unless Stretch told him to make himself scarce till we left.”

Haven groaned in frustration. “What is going on here? Why would his men have ambushed us? Ambushed the other lawmen? Where is Captain Leyton? Could all those killings and attempted killings have happened because Stretch
thinks
the gold is buried up that canyon, and he doesn’t want anyone else finding it
first
?”

“You said it yourself,” Longarm said. “Stretch ain’t all that bright. Why, you can see the rocks rollin’ around behind his eyes. And we seen how impulsive he is. You go on in and get some sleep. I’m gonna take a walk around, see if I can flush up some secrets. Sometimes the dark of night is the best time for that.”

“What out for Stretch. He might jump you again with a few of his men to back his play.”

Longarm chewed his cigar. “Worried about me?”

“I’m worried about ending up alone out here.”

“Don’t worry.” Longarm placed his hands on her shoulders. He was surprised that she let him kiss her forehead.
“This ain’t my first rodeo. Give me an hour, and then…” He canted his head toward his dark shack. “You’ll know where to find me.”

“I’m tired,” she said dryly. “You need your sleep, too. Big day tomorrow. And probably the next day.” Primly, she added, “Good night, Marshal Long.”

She turned and strode off in the darkness.

Longarm gave a sardonic snort and whispered loudly, “Knock twice quick so’s I know it’s you!”

Longarm left the garden through a wooden gate and strolled over to his shack.

He went inside and lit a lamp, throwing a shutter open so that anyone around and watching would see the light. He took a long drink of water from the jug that the housekeeper, Angelina, had provided, and then swept a hand through his hair beneath his hat. He slipped back outside and stole around the front of the shack to the far side, out of sight from the house.

Stepping carefully in the darkness, he walked back past the rear of the shack and kept striding, threading his way through the sage and greasewood. After a time, he arced back toward the main yard and found himself on the south end of it, gazing back toward the yard proper that was bathed in cool, blue starlight.