Once he came out in the open with his cards on the table he'd be just another lawman looking over the shoulders of all the other lawmen who'd been searching in vain in these parts. Devil Dave and that last sidekick called Hogan would dig in deeper or light out entire. Longarm had no idea what Hogan looked like, and Devil Dave had lit out other times when they crowded him here along the Pecos.
Meanwhile he was wanted in heaps of other places and might stay close to his boyhood surroundings if he wasn't dead certain a lawman he seemed to fear more than most might was nearby. Knowing Longarm knew him on sight, he'd sent Nana to that livery with those questions.
“How come?” Longarm asked himself as he paced the tiny room in the dark, puffing a cheroot in the nude. That one Indian wouldn't have pestered that Indian stable hand at all if they'd been certain. Something or somebody had warned Devil Dave a stranger answering to a description he found ominous had ridden in, giving off mixed signals. Longarm had gone out of his way to manage that. There'd been little or nothing he could do about his overall impression without giving up more of an edge than the shits he was after deserved.
A rider could ride most any mount aboard any sensible saddle and he could only dress so many ways before he stood out more than he wanted.
The West was awash with riders who favored cross-draw or the handy combination of a sidearm and saddle gun chambered for the same common Smith & Wesson Patent .44â40â200 rounds. So he'd have been a chump to pack weapons he was less familiar with, and there was just no way a tall, tanned hombre could make himself get short and pale without serious injury to his health.
“If they're sure, they'll either run for it or come for me,” he told himself as he strode through swirls of smoke in the gloom of his lonely cell-like-hired room.
If they ran they'd be long gone before he'd know they'd left. If they came for him, he knew Devil Dave on sight and those odds seemed to favor his more experienced gun hand. He had no idea how good the mysterious Hogan might be. It was hard to judge a man's chances to win or lose at anything when you had no idea what he looked like!
He blew smoke out his nostrils as he charged the open window with its view of nothing much and decided,
They'll know who they're up against or they won't. If they already know, my saying I'm me won't make no nevermind.If they're not sure about me, leaving them unsure might give me the whisker of anedge. Theyâveboth thrown down on the innocent and unaware before. But they might not draw
as desperate
if there's any chance I'm just some asshole they're out to kill just to stay on the safe side.
Once he'd made up his mind about that, and seeing he'd smoked most of that cheroot down, Longarm flopped atop the rumpled sheets to see if he could catch forty winks. For it was hell to throw down and aim with sleepy eyes. But as soon as his head hit the pillow, it filled up with other puzzles to ponder because as long as he hid his true self from the local folk, he couldn't just ask questions that might have simple answers.
The old lady who'd jumped up and run out of the room around the time they'd be holding vespers, or what some Protestants called Even-song services at that nearby church, could have suddenly got religious, or she might have spoke more English than she let on and had something she'd suddenly wanted to tell somebody else.
He went over the conversation he'd had with the daughter of the house. They'd mostly talked about that Lincoln County War he hadn't ridden in and a suddenly notorious young gun waddie he might or might not have met more recent up New Mexico way on another mission entire. Longarm couldn't think of a thing he'd said about Billy The Kid that might interest Devil Dave or his dear little Mexican momma. She might have just felt tired of trying to follow a conversation in English. An old lady who'd gotten old in Texas without learning to speak English sounded like an old lady who couldn't be too interested in the world around her.
Then how come she'd been off somewhere after dark with that cowled monk, nun, or whatever? And who had they set that shotgun up to blow back out the postern gate?
Longarm didn't see how it could have been himself, no matter how two-faced anybody was. Both Devil Dave's big sister and little mother had him set up inside the house, figuring to leave by the front gate, at the time the older one had scuttled off on her mysterious errand.
That shotgun trap couldn't have been set up to kill her because it hadn't. He'd been watching as she'd opened the postern gate and gone on inside. Had she been worried about somebody following her?
Or had it simply been customary burglar insurance, followed every night as they locked themselves in against all comers? Most American states had laws against such notions, but Longarm knew that back in some old countries it was lawful to set up man traps designed to kill or maim. A Lime Juicer riding for the Thompson brothers had once told Longarm about this English lord who'd set up dozens of powerful bear traps to catch kids poaching rabbits on his big, old, private woodlot.
Spanish grandees had been known to have wandering gypsies shot on sight as trespassers whether they were acting suspicious or not. So it might be best to set that shotgun trap aside until somebody walked into it, and, as for that gun slinger popping out of the neighborhood church just after those evening vespers... The old lady wouldn't have been allowed to stay after they were locking up, and had she hidden in some nook, as that Mission Apache might have, nobody from said church would have been escorting her home, unless...
“We're going to have to do some confessing to that priest and hope he's good at keeping secrets!” Longarm muttered aloud.
Â
Back in Denver, Miss Morgana Floyd of the Arvada Orphan Asylum and that swamping cathedral on Capitol Hill had told him she went every Saturday to tell her father confessor about the fresh ways he'd been treating her, and so far she'd been given a tedious number of “Hail Mary's” to recite, but not a word about her liking it with the lamps lit had appeared in the Rocky Mountain News. Few Protestants or Jews got to confess their sins and be forgiven before they could die and settle up with a higher authority.
Longarm knew, as a lawman, that many a Mex bandit or Mission Indian had cheerfully confessed to murder, rape, and worse without getting turned in by their priests. But could a West-by-God-Virginia boy who'd dropped out of Sunday school early ask for the same deal? And what was that stuff about the same church offering Sanctuary to outlaws on the run?
Longarm read more than he liked to let on. Reading alone in bed near the end of the month before payday had just being alone beat by a country mile. So he'd read that yarn by Mister Victor Hugo about a big swamping church in Paris, France, where the hunchbacked bell ringer had given sanctuary to a gypsy gal wanted by the law. So what if, all this time, Devil Dave and his pals had been hiding out in the belfry of that church near the family town house?
That priest had said he hadn't known the late Hernando Nana and had no idea what he'd been doing in the hallway, at least, of the rectory. Longarm had heard or read somewhere else that such men of the cloth were allowed to keep secrets from the law but not to lie outright to anybody.
Longarm wasn't supposed to tell fibs in the line of duty, either. Meanwhile, a church in the Mex barrio where rangers seldom prayed made a swell place to meet one's momma when she had some money or information for you, whether you were sleeping on the premises or somewheres else the rest of the time.
He decided he'd just have to risk a man-to-man talk with that boss priest come morning, and having made up his mind, he was soon in another bedâa four-posterâwith the ready and willing Consuela Deveruex y Lopez, but for some damned reason, unable to get it in her tight little ring-dang-doo whilst she pleaded with him to chingate, which meant “Go fuck yourself” as soon as you studied on it, and made no sense in the context she kept saying it, whilst he tried in vain to fuck her. So he decided none of it made much sense and having seen he was in an impossible situation, woke up.
He was glad that had all been a dream. Billy Vail would have had a fit if he'd really gotten it in Devil Dave's sister. Yet it did seem a shame how you could only seem to get so far and never all the way in one of those so-called wet dreams. You probably had to be a determined celibate who never jerked off to have an all-out really wet dream. But a man who dreamed anything sassy about a possible arrest had a dirty mind he'd best keep an eye on.
The sun was not only up but lancing through the one-slit window of his dinky cell. So Longarm washed up at the corner dry-sink with the brown soap, string rag, and
olla
of water provided. But he skipped a fresh shave with cold water lest somebody take him for respectable and put his trail-dusted jeans, shirt, and bolero jacket on over the clean underwear he'd snuck from a saddle bag.
He put those flashy spurs back on his scuffed boots over clean socks nobody could see. He'd naturally cleaned his three guns before turning in the night before. He field stripped and wiped down all the parts of his sixgun, derringer, and saddle gun with a fresh patch, lightly oiled, because once upon a time a wise old ordinance sergeant had told young Private Long that you just never got to maintain a gun worth mention in the middle of a gunfight, and a well-tended Springfield .52 rifled musket had saved his ass at Shiloh by going off just when his trigger finger had wanted it to, during an enemy trooper's hang-fire.
He left the fifteen shot .44â40 Winchester '73 on the bed as he went to breakfast with his sixgun on his left hip and his double derringer in an inside pocket of his jacket, across from his cheroots and watch, with the usual gold-washed chain hidden away with his shoestring tie and other such notions.
He had his fried eggs over a T-bone, with plenty of Tex-Mex black coffee and a slab of tuna pie for breakfast. He always ordered tuna pie when he was close to the border. Up Denver way they tended to look at you funny when you asked if they served tuna pie. They seemed to think you were ordering a pie made out of fish instead of the sweet red tuna fruits off cactus hedges.
As he was washing the last of his tuna pie down, Ranger Travis came in off the street to declare, “I was hoping I'd run across you before we rode out. I don't reckon we could interest you in scouting Indians for us, eh?”
Longarm shoved his plate away and reached for a smoke as he soberly replied, “Not hardly. I told you Judge Dickerson of the Denver District Court wants Devil Dave Deveruex dead or alive. Hogan sounds like a sort of Irish name and Hogan's the last of them three who busted the kid out of Judge Dickerson's courtroom. He might be a breed. I take it you ain't talking about hunting breeds, just now?”
The Texas Ranger shook his head and said, “Victorio, with up to a hundred Bronco Apache who've joined him in the Candelarias. The Mexican
federales
are working with Texas and the U.S. Army for a change. So we have that ornery Apache bouncing around like spit on a hot stove and a hundred Texas Rangers have been detailed to scout for the Ninth Cav. Ain't that a bitch?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “The Ninth and Tenth are both good outfits to fight alongside, despite or perhaps because of their complexions I know some former Union officers refuse to lead colored troops. But a heap of ex-slaves seem anxious to prove themselves, and none of those colored regiments have the desertion rate of some whiter ones.”
The Texican snorted, “Hell, I ain't worried about riding against old Victorio with colored boys who've fit
Comanche
and won. I just don't cotton to the notion of leaving you here on your own. If I was you I'd at least level with the town marshal and have him covering my back.”
Longarm offered a cheroot to the ranger and stuck the other betwixt his own teeth as he said, “You ain't me. I wouldn't have told you who I was or what I was doing here if you hadn't already known. It ain't that I distrust all other lawmen. I've just found it troubles my mind less to worry about myself alone as I wander down dark alleyways, and nobody can betray any secrets you just don't tell them. I've already got more balls in the air than my head can juggle sensible.”
He brought the ranger up to date on his adventures since they'd spoken the night before. Travis allowed that Mexicans often rigged up the hen-house door with a shotgun trap and seemed to feel it cut down on chicken stealing. He said they'd already figured the old widow woman was what his Irish kin called a “Shawlee” or one of those sad little women you saw haunting Papist churches betwixt services, mumbling their rosaries sort of mindless, touched in the head or perhaps just lonesome and afraid.
Longarm said he hadn't known what sort of name Travis might be.
The Texican said, “Travis is the Lancashire spelling of gatekeeper man. My English granther traveled to Texas where he rescued a young lady of the Hebrew persuasion from the Comanche. She was pretty, even in old age, and being the same Comanche had killed the gent of her own faith who'd sent east for her, they got hitched, and so, according to Torah, my daddy, having a Jewish momma, was a Jew named Travis who prayed Episcopalian 'til he married my Irish-Mex momma, who tried to raise us in her two varieties of The True Faith. The most educational part for me was the way the different branches of my family mean-mouthed one another's religions without knowing all that much about any. You might say it left me with an open mind.”
Longarm said, “I've been looking for somebody like you to tell me how much I might be able to trust that priest we met up with last night. Would he be honor-bound to keep it under his hat if I told him who I was, and do you know how Rome feels about that Sanctuary stuff?”