Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance (31 page)

“They’ll be in Mexico soon, and then I’ll never find ’em again.”

“Custis, there must be twenty of them altogether.”

“I’ve faced long odds before. I don’t expect you to. You’re a detective. This is law work.”

Longarm slitted his good eye at her, knowing that he probably didn’t look very threatening, as beat up as he was. “You go on back to Denver, report to Billy Vail for me. Tell him to send an army, if he has one lyin’ around somewhere.”

Longarm walked over to one of the dead men. The man had three pistols holstered on his body. Longarm took two Colts chambered for the .44 rounds he carried in his shell belt. He also took a bandolier wrapped around the man’s waist, and slung it over his head and shoulder so that it slanted across his chest.

He twirled the Colts on his fingers, liking the weight of the guns, both of them being the older-model Colt Navy with seven-and-a-half-inch barrels and ivory grips. They’d do.

He holstered one, wedged the other behind his
cartridge belts, and took the man’s hat. It was a black slouch hat, not all that different from his own Stetson, which he’d left back in the stable at Holy Defiance. Habitually adjusting the angle of the hat, he walked on down the wash toward the three horses.

The mounts eyed him apprehensively, sidled away as he approached. He cooed to one—a coyote dun with one white front leg—and managed to grab its reins while the others trotted a ways off. Longarm swung up into the saddle, slid the Winchester carbine from its saddle boot, and held it up to inspect it.

An 1869 model. The mine company hadn’t outfitted its guards with the newest model weapons—that much was obvious. Leave it to large, greedy companies to cut corners even at the detriment of the folks on whose shoulders the company stood. But the gun would do.

Longarm levered a round into the chamber, off cocked the hammer, and rested the barrel against his saddlebows.

As far as he was concerned, a war had just broken out in southern Arizona. He’d go down fighting it.

Longarm did not say good-bye to Haven. He didn’t see the point. He knew he’d be seeing the beautiful detective again in just a few minutes.

One, she wasn’t accustomed to taking orders from anyone but Allan Pinkerton himself, much less from Custis P. Long. Two, she wouldn’t leave him out here to go up against twenty cold-blooded killers alone.

It wasn’t in her to do that.

All that Longarm felt when he heard her clomping up behind him on one of the other two horses—a rangy cremello that she, not surprisingly, looked sexily regal on—was a poignant but fleeting sadness that he’d likely gotten her killed now, too. But if he was going to go down fighting beside a woman, he’d just as soon it be Haven Delacroix, who had as much grit or more than most men he knew, including seasoned lawmen.

They rode down the winding wash, following the deep, narrow furrows of the wagon heavily loaded with gold. The tracks of many shod horses shone in the damp sand and gravel along both sides of the furrows. A good twenty riders. It didn’t look as though Leyton and Mercado had lost
even one man in the ambush, which didn’t surprise Longarm, having seen where the bushwhack had occurred.

When he and Haven had ridden hard for a quarter hour, the sides of the canyon dropped abruptly. The main wash disappeared into the greater desert stretching washboard flat toward Mexico, while another, shallower arroyo twisted off to the southeast.

Near where Longarm and Haven reached the shallow gully angling between sparse mesquites, the wagon tracks as well as the accompanying horse tracks swerved from the gold thieves’ nearly due-south course and headed west.

“West?” Longarm said. “What the hell? I thought they’d be headed for Mexico.”

Stopping the coyote dun, he swung down from the saddle and walked around to give the tracks a closer scrutiny. As he did, a horse whinnied nearby, and Longarm wheeled, bringing up the carbine he held in his right hand, thumbing the hammer back.

Two riders were moving toward him and Haven from the east, trotting their horses, dust rising behind them. One was dark skinned but brightly dressed, and with the sensual curves of a female.

She was riding a black-and-white pinto pony. The other rider, a man, had long, gray hair and was riding a mule. Round-rimmed spectacles sagged on Kimble Dobson’s pale, hawklike nose beneath the narrow brim of a tall, black opera hat.

Haven slid, with lightning speed, both LeMats from their holsters.

Longarm said, “Hold on.”

Dobson and Cocheta stopped their horses, and Cocheta slid down from her Apache-style blanket saddle. She strode fluidly toward Longarm, her face expressionless, and placed her hands on his face. Gently, she caressed his torn, scabbed lips with her thumbs, frowning up at him questioningly. The neckerchief concealing the scar at her throat fluttered in the hot breeze.

Dobson spoke the girl’s question. “What the hell happened?”

Self-consciously glancing at Haven, Longarm removed one of Cocheta’s hands from his face, his other hand holding the carbine. To Dobson, he said, “Took a little swim.”

“We seen your horse in the stable this mornin’, after they left. Figured somethin’ was up. Cocheta wanted to ride out here, see if you got tangled up in the ambush on the gold train.”

Haven arched a brow at Longarm, planted a fist on her hip as she sat her fidgeting horse, and slid her eyes to the mute Apache girl staring obliquely up at the tall lawman. “You’ve been even busier than you let on, Marshal Long.”

To Dobson, Longarm said, “I was too late. They got the gold. I figured they were headed to Mexico, but…” He stepped away from Cocheta and walked over to where the two wagon furrows and shod hoof prints drifted off across the desert to the west. “There’s nothing that way, but…”

“The Double D,” Dobson finished for him.

Longarm stared toward the west, across the vast, rolling desert hemmed in on all sides by dun-colored mountains. In the far west rose the black peaks of the Black Puma Mountains, near the base of which sat the Double D headquarters.

“Why go there?” Haven said, echoing Longarm’s own confusion. “Why not just head on across the border?”

“There’s something they want at the Double D, apparently.” Longarm walked over to his coyote dun, picked up the reins, and switched his gaze from Cocheta, who stood near him, to Dobson. “You two go on back to Holy Defiance. There’s gonna be one hell of a dustup out here.”

Dobson shook his head and looked at Cocheta, who stared at Longarm and hardened her jaws, also shaking her head slowly. “You’re only two against twenty,” Dobson said. “We’ll lend a hand. I’m right good with a rifle, as I fought the Sioux up on the Plains. And Cocheta…she’s been waitin’ to get a chunk of Ranger Leyton.”

“Leyton?”

“He was the cavalry officer who led the soldiers into her family’s camp, killed her folks, and cut her throat. He left her to die. Only, she didn’t die. But she harbors one powerful hate. Been bidin’ her time. That’s the way of the Apache. They can wait a long time for just the
right
time to cut a man’s throat.” Dobson’s thin lips stretched a dark smile. “She thinks that time is up.”

Longarm looked at Cocheta, who stared back at him. “Does Leyton know?”

Dobson shook his head. “Don’t have the faintest idea. Don’t recognize her, I reckon. Him and his men were likely too drunk at the time…on
tiswin
. He was known for that—gettin’ drunk on the Apaches’ own brew and killin’ ’em. Cocheta was only twelve. Now, of course, she’s grown up, filled out.”

Longarm moved to her. He saw that she wore a green sash, and behind the sash was a long-barreled Remington revolver and a horn-handled bowie knife.

The lawman placed a hand on her arm and squeezed it. “This is law business. You and Dobson go on back to Holy Defiance. I aim to take down Jack Leyton if I have to die doin’ it.” He shook his head slowly. “It’ll get done. You can rest assured he won’t see another sunrise.”

She shook her head and grinned savagely. She walked back to her pony, swung up into the saddle, and batted her moccasin-clad heels again the horse’s flanks. She and the pony trotted past Longarm, crossing the wash and following the wagon tracks to the west.

“Shit,” Longarm said with a sigh, stepping into the saddle. “Looks to me like a lot of folks are eager to die today.”

He reined his horse around and booted the coyote dun into a gallop, heading after Cocheta, Dobson and Haven putting their own mounts into gallops behind him.

They rode hard, chewing up the ground behind the wagon that Longarm was sure wasn’t far ahead. Haven rode beside
him, Dobson and Cocheta falling in behind but staying close. Longarm kept his gaze on the bristling desert around him, wary of Leyton sending rear scouts and possibly ambushing him.

The wagon couldn’t be moving very fast. He should be able to catch up to it well before the gang reached the Double D headquarters, if that was in fact what they were aiming for.

He slowed his pace, raising his right hand. The others slowed their mounts, as well, scowling at him curiously. He didn’t say as much, because he was going over strategies for taking out Leyton and Mercado in his head, but he knew that with all the brush and rock out here, making it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead, there was a good possibility they could ride right up on the gang before they saw them. That would get them killed for certain sure.

Longarm didn’t want to encounter them before he was ready. Even then he was likely to get himself, Haven, Dobson, and Cocheta killed deader than hell…

Longarm reined in the dun as he studied the terrain ahead of him. The others stopped around him. He dismounted, rummaged in a saddlebag pouch until he found a spyglass. He carried the spyglass to a knoll capped in rock and gingerly climbed to the top of the rock pile, moving slowly and stiffly.

At the top of the formation, he stood tall and extended the glass. A couple of miles ahead, several rocky bluffs stood like a jumble of adobe-colored dominoes. He looked around and then returned his attention to the rocky bluffs. He couldn’t be sure from this vantage, but they appeared to be the same bluffs in which Vonda’s man had tried to ambush him yesterday morning—sent out by the woman after she’d enjoyed his bed.

Lusty bitch.

If so, maybe Longarm could use them in a similar fashion. If he and his small band could reach them before the gold wagon did, that was.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

Longarm looked over to see Haven atop a hill on the other side of Dobson and Cocheta from him. She stood staring in the same direction he was, holding one hand up near her hat brim, shading her eyes. Longarm said, “What am I thinking, if you’re so smart.”

She turned to him, cocked her mouth in a lopsided smile, and nodded slowly. “I know what you’re thinking.”

Dobson shuttled his incredulous gaze between them. “What’s he thinking?”

“He’s much cleverer than he looks,” Haven said.

Longarm climbed slowly, carefully down from the ancient pile of boulders that had been dropped there by some long-defunct volcano. “Come on,” he said, returning his spyglass to his saddlebags and the stepping up into the leather. “I’ll show you.”

Galloping hard despite the thunderclaps that the rough ride evoked in his tender head, Longarm led his riders in a broad semicircle around the gold train and its escort of armed killers.

Of course, he didn’t know where the wagon was exactly, because he couldn’t see it for all the brush and low buttes, but he rode far enough south of where he thought it was that his chance of running into it was minimal—and then only if the outlaws made a radical course change.

He and the others came up on the rocky bluffs from the south, heading straight for the rugged formation. A narrow arroyo led into them, and he followed it until the arroyo became little more than a rock- and cactus-strewn gulch, impassable by horseback.

The small party left its mounts in the shade of a couple of paloverde trees, then grabbed their canteens and arms and walked up into the bluffs. When he came to the north side of the formation, he stopped on a flat-topped boulder about halfway up the bluff from the ground and stared down
at the gap through which he’d been riding when Vonda’s man had ambushed him.

Below and to his left was where his .44 rounds had deposited the dead man. The man himself was gone, though his hat remained hung up on a tuft of Spanish bayonet, and the rocks around were splattered with his blood. The man himself had likely been dragged off by a mountain lion.

Longarm inspected the crease below and the rocky bluff face rising on the other side of it. The gap was about seventy yards wide, and it was the only way through this rocky neck of the desert. Leyton and the other outlaws had to be headed for it.

“Ambush, eh?” said Dobson.

Longarm nodded. He studied the desert to the west, saw what appeared a murky mirage, but there was enough color in it to tell him it was most likely the wagon and its escorts heading toward him.

He regarded Dobson and Cocheta standing to his far left. They looked at him with grim expectance. Haven stood just off his left shoulder. “You all spread out along the side of this bluff. Hide good in the rocks. Don’t let them see you until the wagon’s straight below you.”

“We just gonna start shootin’?” Dobson asked. “Shoot ’em like ducks on a millpond?”

“Just like they did the mine company guards, that’s right.”

Dobson racked a round in his Henry rifle. “I like that.”

Cocheta’s copper irises glinted hungrily.

Longarm said, “I’m gonna go on over to the other side. We’ll catch them in a cross fire. No one shoot before I do. But after that, cut loose—tear down as many of those sons o’ bitches as you can.”

“You stay here, Custis,” Haven told him. “No point in you moving around any more than you have to. No offense, but you look half dead.”

She started down the slope with the rifle she’d taken
off one of the dead gold guards. She stopped and turned back to Cocheta. “We’ll
both
go over there, we women,” she said with a cold, snide smile.

Cocheta looked at her. The Apache girl glanced at Longarm, turned back to Haven, hiked a shoulder, and canted her toward it, as if to say, “Why not?”