Longarm #396 : Longarm and the Castle of the Damned (9781101545249) (13 page)

“If it wouldn't offend you, John, I have a little brandy we could use to sweeten that coffee.”

“Have I mentioned that you are my new best friend, Felix?” Longarm said with a grin as he poured their coffee. But not too full. He had to leave room for the brandy, after all.

The two rocked back on their heels, and true to his word, Batterslea began to speak. He did not quiet down again for more than an hour.

The man proved to be almost—almost, that is—as informative as Edgar Spurlock had been.

“Well I'll be a son of a bitch,” Longarm muttered aloud.

The dun's right ear swiveled around in response, and the horse tossed its head.

Longarm had thought Felix Batterslea was gilding the lily more than a little, embellishing the truth in order to make his yarns more interesting. If anything, it seemed, the fat man had been holding back in an effort to make himself more believable.

There, an hour's ride ahead and crowning one of the many flat-topped benches to be found in this brown and arid land, was what looked almost exactly like a drawing Longarm had once seen. An illustration in a book about King Arthur or some such. It was a castle. A fucking castle. Out here in the middle of nowhere.

“In-fucking-credible,” he said, causing the horse's ear to rotate again toward the sound.

Longarm touched his heel to the dun's flank, and the horse obediently resumed its progress toward the castle.

As he came nearer, Longarm could see that this castle was made of adobe brick, but the high walls and battlements were faithfully rendered as if taken from that same illustration. There was even the top of a square tower visible within the walls. He halfway expected to see archers in scarlet livery standing atop the walls.

There were no archers, but a flag of some sort hung limp from a pole extending from the top of the tower. Longarm could not see whose flag it might be, but it was not the stars and stripes of the United States of America. A personal coat of arms? Perhaps.

As he came near, a puff of breeze from the west filled the flag. It was a lion rampant on a field of white.

That made sense actually, as the flag was flying over the home of State Senator Henry Leon Lyon, the very man Longarm had come here to see.

The well-traveled road climbed to the top of the bench where Lyon's castle lay, and from that level Longarm could see that the castle walls were surrounded by a moat, or what was intended to represent a moat, he supposed. This desert moat was dry but deep.

Dry tumbleweed, rusting tin cans, and scraps of this and that littered the floor of the moat, rendering the effect more of a trash heap than a protection against assault, which was what he assumed the purpose of a moat to be.

A bridge made of heavy timbers crossed the moat to an open gate. Longarm guided the dun across the bridge. The horse was nervous about stepping onto it. The animal balked and tried to turn away, but then gave in to Longarm's insistence.

The horse's hoofbeats rang hollow on the planks underfoot.

Longarm passed beneath the spiked iron gate and rode through a short tunnel into a courtyard that was flanked on two sides by low adobe buildings, two of which had smoke coming from their chimneys. The castle tower was directly ahead. He guessed that building to be thirty or more feet tall, with the square tower top rising even higher.

“Hello,” he called, drawing the dun to a halt. “Is anybody here? Hello?”

The response was not exactly what he would have preferred.

Behind him there was a loud clang of iron striking stone. The dun spooked, and for a moment it was all Longarm could do to get the horse calmed and back under control. When he did, he twisted in the saddle to get a look at what caused the noise.

It was the gate, he saw.

Some unseen someone had dropped the damn gate.

Longarm was trapped inside Henry Lyon's castle until or unless Lyon's men raised that gate again.

A man emerged from a small room just to the right of the tunnel entry. The fellow was not wearing livery, but he had the next best thing: He was wearing a badge. He had a holstered revolver on his hip and carried a short-barreled shotgun across his arm.

Longarm swung the dun around to face him and touched the brim of his Stetson. “Afternoon,” he said politely.

“I see you're wearing a sidearm,” the badge-toter said.

“Yes, sir. Is there somethin' wrong with that?”

“Inside these walls there is, yes. Take that gunbelt off and drop it to the ground.”

“Pardon me?”

“Do it. Do it now. I have three rifles trained on you.” He nodded toward the wall, where suddenly three men had indeed materialized. And the three did indeed have rifles aimed down at Longarm.

“Happy t'oblige,” Longarm drawled. He carefully unbuckled his gunbelt, held it out to the side, and let it drop to the hard-packed earth underfoot.

The guard—Longarm could not think of any properly chartered town or township out here that could authorize the lawful issuance of a badge—smiled. “Fine. Now ride away a few steps while I pick that shooter up, please.”

Longarm did as he was asked, and the guard moved in behind him to retrieve Longarm's Colt and gunbelt.

“All right. State your business here in Camelot.”

“Camelot?” Longarm asked. “Wasn't that . . . ?”

“Never mind the history lesson. Just tell me what you're doing here,” the guard demanded, his tone and demeanor suggesting the man was becoming impatient.

Longarm did purely hate the thought of irritating anyone who was holding a shotgun on him. All the more so when Longarm himself happened to be unarmed. “I'm passin' through,” he said. “I saw this place. Reckoned I could find water here and maybe something to eat. This horse and I been on short rations for both since sometime yesterday.”

The guard nodded. “Fair enough. You can have your fill of food and water and spend tonight. Are you looking for work?”

“Well I ain't looking for a career, but I might could use a few days' pay. Enough to buy some supplies with, say.”

The guard grunted. “Tell you what then. I'll take you over to the cookhouse for something to eat, then introduce you to the boss. Any hiring would be up to him, but we always need guards in the mines.”

“That sounds good to me,” Longarm said, wondering at the same time just what mines the man could be talking about. He did not know of any. Which did not mean there could not be mines here, but it was a curious thing anyway.

“You can tie your horse over there. Follow me and I'll show you where we eat.”

“Thanks.” Longarm stepped down off the dun and led it to a hitching post at the corner of one of the low-roofed adobe buildings. The guard had not bothered to introduce himself. Nor, come to think of it, had he asked for Longarm's name.

“This way.” The guard led him to another of the buildings, one of those with smoke issuing from a short chimney, and motioned Longarm inside.

The vigas, or ceiling timbers, were not yet gray with age, Longarm noticed. The poles, lodgepole pine he supposed, looked almost freshly peeled, suggesting that these buildings had not been here terribly long. A few years at best.

Inside the long room there was a table flanked by benches along each side. The table would accommodate probably eight men or thereabouts. One end of the room held a cast iron stove, where a gray-bearded cook held forth.

“Customer for you, Johnny. Fill him up, will you?”

Unlike the guard, Johnny looked friendly enough. He smiled and motioned Longarm toward the table. “Set down, son. I have an antelope stew cooking here. Ought to be just about ready for a man to eat. I'll bring you a bowl and you can give me your opinion.” He flashed a grin and added, “But keep in mind whatever you say, I'll be the one feeding you as long as you stay here.”

Longarm laughed and said, “Oh, I learned a long time ago that it never pays to piss off the cook.” He took a seat close to the stove.

The guard, he noticed, had disappeared, taking Longarm's double-action Colt with him.

Johnny served him a bowl of aromatic stew rich in meat and potatoes, with globules of fat floating on the steaming surface. He brought coffee, a plate of cold biscuits, and a pot of jam as well.

“You do know how to feed a man,” Longarm said. “This smells better'n my old mama's cooking.”

“Dig in. There's more where that comes from.”

The stew tasted every bit as good as it smelled. Longarm barely had time enough to finish his third bowl of the stuff before the guard was back. This time there was no sign of Longarm's revolver and gunbelt.

“You done, mister?”

Longarm nodded.

“Then come with me. You can meet the boss. If he likes you, you can have that work I told you about.”

Longarm got up from the table, thanked the cook, and followed the guard across the courtyard to the tower. Which was, he noticed when they came close, built of quarried stone rather than adobe brick. Someone had put a hell of a lot of work into this latter-day castle.

“In here.”

He followed the guard into a large room where a bearded gentleman in a handsome suit was talking with a tall man, thin as a rawhide whip and looking just as tough as one, both men standing beside a cavernous fireplace, which at the moment was cold.

“Over here,” the guard said, motioning Longarm to a settee or sofa that was covered with a spotted cowhide cured with the hair still on. A pair of large chairs matched the sofa, all three brown and white.

Longarm took the indicated seat and waited for the master of the manor to acknowledge his presence.

Lyon—the gentleman almost surely would be Henry Lyon—started toward Longarm, but the thin, deadly looking man stopped him with a touch on the elbow.

Longarm was staring at the thin fellow, thinking he should know that one. From a wanted poster perhaps. Or had he seen this man somewhere before? If so, he could not place him.

The thin man leaned over and whispered something to Lyon. Whatever was said caused Lyon to stiffen, then whisper something in response.

Lyon abruptly left the room, taking a staircase to an upper floor, while the thin man smiled and sauntered across to stand in front of Longarm.

“Welcome to Camelot, Deputy,” he said, a six-gun sliding into his hand. The smile he gave Longarm was one of triumph, definitely not of welcome. “Long, isn't it? Deputy U.S. marshal?”

“Well shit,” Longarm said aloud.

So much for the idea of passing himself off as a drifting stranger.

“On your feet, Deputy.” In a louder voice he said, “Jake. Come inside here. I have one for you but put him in the pit first. I think the boss is gonna want to get some information from him before he goes down below.”

The guard, presumably named Jake, reappeared in the doorway. This time he also had a revolver in his hand.

“Shit,” Longarm repeated, raising his hands and meekly surrendering to the inevitable.

What they called the pit was just that. A long, fairly deep pit dug into the dense earth on the top of the mesa where Camelot had been built. There were four iron grates laid across the top of the pit. Longarm was mildly curious why there would be four. That was until the second grate from the end was lifted and he was flung bodily into the pit beneath it. Then he discovered that the one long pit was divided into four sections, each section separated from the others by sets of steel bars.

Longarm recognized the bars as being the kind sold to towns to construct prefabricated jail cells. Longarm had seen plenty of those in his time. Although not from the inside. All in all he would rather look at them from the other side. Obviously in this case Henry Lyon bought himself one jail cell and used those bars to make four underground cells.

Overhead the heavy iron grate clanged shut and Jake's footsteps receded.

Longarm stood, brushed himself off, and looked at his surroundings. There were no furnishings, not even a cot to lie on. There was a crumpled blanket tossed in one corner. He assumed that was to be his bed while he was confined in the pit. And there were two buckets. One held water, but no dipper or cup to drink from. The other . . . One sniff told him what that bucket was expected to be used for. At the moment it was, fortunately, empty.

He could see through the bars to the other cells. The pit to his left held a thin, bewhiskered figure who was either sleeping or passed out. The pit to his immediate right was empty. And at the far end he could see a small figure crouching in a corner, although the intervening bars made it impossible for him to get a good look at that person.

At least, he told himself, he got a good meal out of them before the bastards threw him in here.

He heard footsteps above and looked up to see the thin fellow standing over the pit. The man looked pleased with himself.

“You are one lucky son of a bitch,” the man said. “I missed you that one time I got a shot off at you.”

“You shot . . .” Longarm scowled. “That was you? Up in Wyoming?”

“I thought I got you. You dropped and I thought I hit you.”

“You got the horse, not me.”

The fellow grunted. “That explains it, doesn't it? Like I said. Lucky.”

“Mind telling me who you are?” Longarm asked.

“So you can sic your dogs on me?” He laughed. “Not that I suppose it makes any difference. You won't be leaving here alive anyway. So sure, I'll give you my name. Even tell you my right name. It's Carlton Bannister.”

“Bannister,” Longarm repeated with a shake of his head. “I don't know the name. Can't recall ever seeing any flyers on you.”