Longarm and the Diamondback Widow (7 page)

The man just scowled down into his beer schooner as though he were both deaf and numb. His ruddy skin behind his gray beard, however, turned crimson.

“Which means that message of Rainey's was likely sent by you or one of your associates,” Longarm persisted.

Now the gray-bearded man with the eyeshade lifted his head and swept the room with his gaze as he said, “Rainey never sent no telegraph from my key.” His voice echoed around the room. He glanced at Longarm darkly and then lowered his gaze once again to his schooner.

Longarm let the man's words hang in the air. They were a lie, and he wanted to let them hang there for a time, silently incriminating everyone in the room.

Longarm's bearded attacker stirred, rolling his head from side to side and moaning into the floor. The mustached man started climbing to his feet. Longarm planted his boot on the man's ass and drove him to the floor.

“Son of a bitch!” the mustached gent said as he piled up at the base of the bar.

He glared up at Longarm. He was now holding his tooth between the thumb and index finger of his right hand as though it were something precious that he wanted to keep.

Longarm knew from all the hard stares being cast his way that no information would be forthcoming. So with a fateful sigh he turned to the bar, finished his drink in four long swallows, set the schooner back down on the bar, and ran a forearm across his mouth and mustache.

As much trail dust as beer rubbed off on his thick, brown arm. He was coated in the stuff.

A bath was due . . .

Picking up his saddlebags and his rifle, he said, “I'll be over at the hotel yonder if anyone wants to talk to me. I'll be there till I hear anything, and since you don't have a bona fide lawman, I'll be acting as the lawman until Des Rainey returns to claim his chair. Mr. Little, that badge is no longer yours. If I see you wearing it again, I'll slap the holy living shit of you.”

Melvin Little's eyes crossed slightly in rage.

“I'll be here till I find out what happened to Rainey. You fellas can rest assured of that.”

The bearded man had climbed to all fours and was wagging his head and groaning loudly as he tried to rise. Longarm kicked the big man over on his back.

“As for you—you best count your lucky stars I don't haul you over to Rainey's jail and turn the key on your ugly ass. Assaulting a deputy U.S. marshal is a federal offense. That goes with you over there, too.”

Longarm winked at the mustached man sitting with one knee up, his back against the bar, still holding his tooth in his hand. The front of his shirt was red with blood from his broken nose. “I see you boys armed in this town again, you'll both be getting more visits from the tooth fairy.”

The bearded man spit blood at him though it merely spewed down his own chest.

Longarm swung around, pushed through the batwings, and left, knowing that he'd drawn one mighty large target on his back just now.

“I'd like a room and I'd like a bath,” Longarm told the big-boned, red-haired, middle-aged woman sitting behind the long, varnished oak desk in the lobby of the Diamondback Hotel.

“What—you all through makin' trouble?” the woman croaked.

She had thin lips and close-set eyes in a fleshy face that might have at one time been mildly pretty, though never beautiful. She wore a puce-colored silk dress with puffy sleeves and a scalloped cream collar. The dress fit her much too tightly, accentuating too many large bumps and rolls.

Behind her, a wooden cuckoo clock ticked on the wall above several roles of shelves and pigeonholes.

“Word sure travels fast,” Longarm said, signing his name in the register book she'd turned toward him. “But there wouldn't be any trouble if the good citizens of Diamondback would just tell me what I want to know.”

“Maybe the good citizens of Diamondback see the value in minding their own business.”

“Is that how you see it?”

The woman only stared at him, her eyes shifting around slightly. She was a wry old bird, not all that worked up about the situation. Living out here in this rough ranch-supply settlement, she'd likely seen it all.

“That's two dollars a night. An extra fifty cents for the bath.”

Longarm flipped some coins onto the open register book and said, “Where can I find the Rainey residence? I understand the sheriff is . . . or was . . . married. I'd like to talk to his wife . . . or his widow,” he added meaningfully.

The woman's stony demeanor cracked abruptly and she made a sour face as she rolled her head on her broad, thick shoulders and said, “Oh, don't bring her into this! Mister, you just leave that poor woman alone. She don't know where her husband is any more than anyone else around here.”

Longarm arched an eyebrow. “Why poor woman?”

“Huh?”

“You called her a ‘poor' woman. Why poor? Has she become a widow recently?”

The stony mask returned to the woman's face. “Mister, you need to mind your own business just like the good folks of this town do. Mrs. Rainey don't wanna talk to you any more than anyone else does. In Diamondback, we take care of our own—private-like. We don't need any help from the likes of you and your government badge!”

“What happened to Sheriff Rainey, Mrs . . . ?”

“Fletcher. Missus Fletcher. And your guess is as good as mine!” She swung around to pluck a key from one of the pigeonholes behind her and slapped it down on the register book. “Room fourteen.”

“Does room fourteen face the street?”

“It does.”

“Good. Since I'm takin' over the lawdoggin' duties in this little perdition, I'll be needing a room from where I can keep an eye on things.” Longarm saw no reason to hide his frustration. He swept the key off the register book with an angry flourish, grabbed his rifle, and headed for the stairs carpeted in a rich, deep burgundy floral pattern at the lobby's rear.

His room was sparsely furnished but clean. He closed the door, set his rifle against the wall near the dresser, and set his saddlebags on the bed. He fished his bottle out of one of the pouches and poured several fingers into one of the two water glasses upended on the side of the marble-topped washstand.

He hung his dusty hat on a brass peg by the door and then walked over to the room's single window, flanking the bed. He opened the window a foot to get some fresh air into the hot, musty room and sipped the good rye as he looked down into the street.

The bearded man and the mustached man were just now being helped across the street toward a little, white-painted frame building with a large sign near its roof announcing:
DOCTOR SIMON BAKER, M.D
. A smaller sign near the door read:
SUNDRY COMPLAINTS AND TOOTH EXTRACTIONS
.

Each injured man was being guided by another—first the bearded gent and then the mustached gent. Both were limping, hatless heads hanging. A short, older, potbellied man in a vest and white shirt, likely Baker, came out of the doctor's office to stand on the stoop, watching the men angling toward him.

Longarm's keen memory reminded him that Baker had been one of the names that Melvin had mentioned when Longarm had asked the fill-in sheriff who made up the Diamondback town council. The doctor shook his head as the two injured men approached. Longarm heard him say in the otherwise quiet street, “I hope you boys got money, 'cause I don't work for free.”

The bearded man was in no condition to say anything. The man guiding him led him past the sawbones and into the shack. The mustached man spat a gob of blood to one side and said, “Send the bill to Richmond.”

Then he, too, was led past the doctor and into the office. The doctor followed him inside and closed the door behind him.

“Richmond,” Longarm said as he lifted the glass to his lips again. That was another name that Little had mentioned.

The lawman looked around the street. Still not many folks out in the heat of the day, though shadows were beginning to bleed out from the buildings as the sun angled toward the brooding Wind River Range in the west. There were more people outside than before, however—a few clumps of men out front of the saloons, talking and drinking and casting glances toward the hotel.

Longarm threw back the last of the whiskey, set his glass on the dresser, and slid his Colt from its cross-draw holster. He flicked open the loading gate and turned the cylinder until he could see the black maw of the single empty chamber.

He always kept that chamber beneath the hammer empty so he didn't shoot himself in the leg or somewhere even more crippling. He slipped a brass-cased .44 cartridge from his shell belt, thumbed it into the chamber, flicked the loading gate closed, and spun the cylinder.

He heard voices and footsteps growing louder in the hall. Someone threw his door open without knocking. It was Mrs. Fletcher and a chubby, young Indian woman in a white apron.

Mrs. Fletcher was carrying a copper tub. She came in, announcing, “Here's your bath! Hope you're decent!”

Sitting the tub down near the door, she looked at the pistol in the lawman's hand and shook her head, her face flushed from exertion.

“You can put that away, mister. I don't care if you are calling yourself our new lawman, you won't be shootin' that hogleg in here. You do an' you can sleep out in the livery barn!”

Mrs. Fletcher turned around and walked past the portly, round-faced Indian woman, who set her steaming water buckets down and then, not looking at Longarm, her face barren of any expression whatever, dragged the tub deeper into the room. She filled it with both buckets and left, closing the door behind her.

Longarm got undressed, piled his clothes by the door, and stepped into the tub. The water was hot but not scalding, though it had promptly fogged the dresser mirror. He sat down in the water, sucking a sharp breath through his teeth as the steaming liquid seared him.

He could also feel it cut through the sweat and grit coating him. When he was good and wet, he stood, grabbed a cake of lye off the washstand, sniffed it—not overly scented, good—and lathered himself from head to toe.

In the hall, footsteps approached his door.

“Hold on a second,” he said, still standing in the tub.

Too late. The Indian woman opened the door and came in with two more buckets, one steaming, one not. Longarm looked at her. She stopped in the doorway, looked at him, her almond-shaped, chocolate-dark eyes flicking up and down his brawny, soapy frame. Her eyes lingered at his crotch and then rose to his, her mouth corners quirking slightly as she set one bucket down.

She brought the other one forward and said, “Sit.”

Longarm sat down in the tub.

The Indian woman poured the water over his head.

He cursed through his teeth as what felt like three layers of skin peeled off his bones.

“Mrs. Fletcher—she said to make it good an' hot,” the Indian woman said. Longarm didn't look up at her, but he thought she was enjoying this. “Get the soap off. Hold on.”

Longarm braced himself for the next bucket. This one was as cold as snowmelt. It must have come from one hell of a deep well.

It felt like an ice pick driven through the top of his head. It squeezed his heart like a strong, clenched fist. The ticker seemed to stop for about five seconds. When he could feel it beating again, he slid lower in the tub. The water was about right now—not too cold, not too hot.

He turned to the Indian woman, who was picking up the bucket and heading for the open door.

“Much obliged,” he said through a growl.

She pointed at his clothes on the floor by the door. “Wash?”

“Please but don't let Mrs. Fletcher get her hands on 'em. She'll likely shred 'em an' that's my favorite shirt.”

The Indian woman glanced over her shoulder at him, quirked another grin, and went out.

Longarm reached into the saddlebags on his bed, hauled out a little deer-hide sack containing extra smokes, and withdrew a three-for-a-nickel cheroot and a box of matches. He ran the cheroot beneath his nose, giving it a sniff, and then lit the cigar. He sagged back in the tub, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs and blowing it out at the door over his raised knees.

Smoking and lounging in the gradually cooling water, he considered the situation here in Diamondback.

It was a vexing reflection. Longarm had been sent here in response to a call for help, and the man who'd sent the missive was nowhere to be found. And no one in Diamondback would tell Longarm where he was or what had happened to him.

That meant the very worst had likely happened to Sheriff Des Rainey. The man was probably dead, and whoever had killed him had the entire town in his iron fist. No one wanted to speak out against him. Or them.

That mean the killer had to be someone with power.

Usually, members of town councils were the most powerful men in any given town. Longarm had learned the names of the three men who sat on the Diamondback council, and he'd seen one of them a few minutes ago—Doc Baker. The others were Mulligan and Richmond. He'd look both up tomorrow. Something told him that if he sought them out today, he'd be favored with the same cold stares he'd been given since he'd first ridden into town.

All three council members likely knew Longarm was here and why. Let them stew in that for a while. Then, if Longarm was still alive in the morning—it did seem as though he was up against the whole damn town—he'd run all three men down and see what oozings he could squeeze from their hides.

Maybe nothing, but he had to try. So far, he had absolutely no clue as to why Rainey had sent that telegram to Billy Vail, or what had happened to the sheriff after he'd sent it.

That decided, Longarm reached over and grabbed his bottle off the dresser. He took a pull from the bottle, set the bottle down beside the tub, and continued to loll in the water as he smoked his cigar. The lolling must have been a soporific, because he suddenly realized that his eyes were closed.

He opened them. The room was darker, the water considerably cooler. He raised his right hand from where it had dropped down over the side of the tub.

No cigar.

He looked over the edge of the tub. The cigar had dropped onto Mrs. Fletcher's rug. It had gone out, leaving a half inch of gray ash at its tip and a small, oval-shaped charred spot in the rug.

Damn, the old biddy would likely make him pay for that—in more ways than one.

Something by the door caught his eye. Something white lay on the floor in front of it. A small scrap of paper must have been slipped beneath the door while he'd slept.

A note?