“It worked.” Longarm growled as he had to charge up two flights of steps, cussing himself for a fool, even though he understood how such misdirections worked.
The pretty stage magician who'd explained some tricks of her trade to him, in bed, one friendly time, had confided how magicians hated to perform in front of small children or lunatics because they, and they alone, let their attention and eyes wander aimless whilst the magician was trying to make them watch his right hand instead of his left hand.
When you misdirected right you got natural folk to look in the most logical direction. A lawman in hot pursuit who hadn't chased down a stairwell behind a flung-open exit door would have had to be sort of thick or childish. But as he stepped back into the courtroom, now a more horrible scene with that smoke cleared out, he wistfully wished an armed and dangerous half-wit had chased Devil Dave in a less sensible way. For, try as he might as he stood there staring about in dismay at the dead and wounded in the shot-up courtroom, Longarm still had no idea which way the prisoner and those three or more confederates had moved amid all that smoke and confusion!
As if to prove his point, the main door to the outside corridor was flung wide to admit a trio of uniformed guards and Longarm's own boss from down the hall, U.S. Marshal William Vail.
One of the guards declared, “Nobody saw them leave by any of the regular exits downstairs, Your Honor! That still leaves a mess of first story windows, and they could have rolled over many a sill, in many an unoccupied office!”
“I want the whole neighborhood canvassed for witnesses!” His Honor roared, adding, “Somebody should have noticed grown men jumping out of windows in broad-ass daylight!”
The somewhat younger and stockier Billy Vail called back, “Got my deputies out tending to that chore already, Your Honor and, no offense, it ain't exactly broad day outside. It's raining fire and salt. So the streets would have been clearer than usual just now. I have another team of deputies searching the building, even as we speak. If they're still on the premises, they're good as caught!”
Then Vail spotted Longarm in the crowd and grumped over to him on his stubbier legs, saying, “
Bueno!
I admire a deputy who don't need to be told. What's the story on yonder stairs to the basement?”
Longarm holstered his .44-40 as he replied, “
Nada
. Blind gut. Locked doors barring escape down yonder.”
Vail was younger than the judge but older and more experienced than his senior deputy. He proved this when he asked Longarm, “What about up yonder? That stairwell opens to the roof. So do all the others in this fair-sized building when you study on it!”
Longarm drew his sixgun again as he whirled on one heel to retrace his own steps, muttering, “I wasn't studying. I was chasing 'em the way a kitten chases a string, and I ought to be roped and branded for a greenhorn!”
His boss drew his own sidearm to tag along, declaring, “The other doors at this end of the courtroom lead to the holding cells and the judge's chambers. I have Smiley and Dutch covering the hall exit from the judge's chambers. But the rascal who planned this bust-out had to know this building better than most!”
Longarm headed up the stairwell, sniffing the damp air as he called back, “The prisoner had no way of exploring on his own, betwixt times the court was in session. Must have been one of the three or more the bailiff described as Mexican. I never looked their way before the whole place was too smoked-up to see shit. The only one I can be sure of on sight is Devil Dave Deveruex in the vanished flesh.”
Taking the steps two at a time he tried the door on the next landing with his free hand. It was locked. He kept going, adding, “All I know about Devil Dave is that they were fixing to find him guilty for that murderous holdup down by Pike's Peak. But he looks sort of Mex, talks sort of Tex, and they say he went bad under the Reconstruction, down West Texas way.”
Vail puffed up the stairs after Longarm, gasping, “As a matter of record he's Irish-Mex. His daddy served on the Mexican side with the San Patricio brigade back in '47 before he married up with a Spanish land grant on the Pecos that both sides agreed to recognize under the peace terms that followed. How come I'm telling you all this, seeing you've been attending his trial and, come to study on it, who ordered you to attend his trial, old son?”
Longarm tried another door, found it locked as well and forged onward and upward without answering. Vail waited until they stood side by side at the head of the stairs and he could breathe again before he shot his senior deputy a knowing look and asked, “Is that why we're so pissed off about that dead blonde down yonder, old son?”
To which Longarm felt obliged to reply, “You have my word, as a man, that Miss Elsbeth never gave this saddle tramp one lick of encouragement. Take a look at this barrel bolt.”
Vail did. They both knew nobody worried about burglars landing out on the big flat roof in a hot air balloon. But the fickle winds off the Front Range over to the west could blow serious in most any weather and so the doors leading out on the roof were kept bolted on the inside as a rule.
Vail started to shove past. But Longarm said, “Don't. We've had our differences, Billy Vail, but I'd just hate to have to be the one to tell your old woman you died from a bad case of the stupids!”
Vail allowed himself to be herded a few steps down, but he still protested. “I meant to fling the door wide and crab to one side as I tore out, old son. But to tell the pure truth they've likely run down another flight by this time!”
Longarm grimly answered, “How? All the other stairwells leading up to the roof are barred from the inside, like this one was before they opened it just now!”
Vail started to say something dumb. Then he nodded soberly and said, “We'd have heard if they'd been busting through any heavy doors in the recent past.”
Longarm muttered, “I wish you'd quit telling me things I already know and let me listen for
them
right now dammit!”
So Vail shut up and the two of them waited on the stairwell with their sixguns as the raw, wet winds rattled the unbolted door they were covering. Vail wanted to say he couldn't see how they'd ever hear cautious footsteps above all that moaning and pattering outside. But he knew his senior deputy had keener ears and seemed to be listeing with that tight coiled stillness of a store cat crouched by a mouse hole.
But the two of them stood ready on the stairs for a million years, and when something finally happened, it happened without warning.
A heap of gunfights started that way.
Chapter 2
As old soldiers knew the hard way, you got to be an old soldier by pussyfooting on patrol and charging all-out when they might know you were coming. So the gunslick who'd trapped himself atop the rain swept roof retraced his steps with a vengeance and a Schofield .45 in each fist as he kicked the door in, saw he was not alone at the head of the stairs, and went down noisy, with four sixguns blazing in homicidal intent.
The obvious border Mex in a soaked-through
charro
outfit blew Billy Vail's hat off with one wild round and plucked at Longarm's coat tails with another as he gathered three rounds of more sincerely aimed .44-40 to his breast and fell back out the door to stare up into the falling rain with a sheepish little smile.
Longarm snapped, “Cover me!” as he dashed through their gunsmoke, out the door and across the wet gravel-covered roofing tar to hunker behind the dubious shelter of a skylight frame. When nobody pegged a shot at either of them, Billy Vail broke cover to leapfrog beyond Longarm as far as another shedlike exit to the roof above another stairwell. And so it went until they'd worked their way to the far end to discover they had the whole soggy expanse to their soaking selves.
Down below, the streets of Downtown Denver seemed filled with wet faces staring up at them through the rain. A meat wagon from County General had just reined in by a side entrance with the hides of its team steaming. Billy Vail suggested they get back inside before they wound up in the hospital their ownselves. Longarm glanced off to the west, where the nearby Front Range was lost to view in the shimmering silver curtains of the gullywasher as he wistfully wondered how the late Elsbeth Flagg might have responded to an invite to a sunset view in dryer weather. As he followed Billy Vail over the Mexican sprawled half in and half out of the doorway they'd dashed out of, he quietly said, “I want the rest of 'em, Billy. I got personal reasons.”
Vail had hunkered by the body in the rain and started going through the pockets of the Mex rider's charro outfit as he quietly replied, “I saw her laid out on the floor downstairs, old son. They nailed at least half a dozen others in that wild fusillade and some of them have to be as dead or dying. So I don't see how we could get out of tracking the bastards, serious, whether we wanted to or not. Judge Dickerson was sure pissed off about all this.”
Vail found a wallet and opened the wet leather to add, “I seem to owe Old Mexico an apology. This murderous cock-sucker wasn't no fucking greaser. He was a fucking Indian. A Mimbres off the San Carlos Agency, according to this ration card from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”
Longarm stared soberly down at the man they'd killed as he quietly said, “Ain't no such thing as a Mimbres from the San Carlos Agency, no matter what the BIA tries to tell âem. I reckon only a Mimbres could explain why this is so, but when Washington decided to consolidate all the so-called Apache at San Carlos in '75 the Mimbres who liked things better around Ojo Caliente, well east of Apache Pass, allowed they'd as soon stay put.”
Vail got up to step inside, still waving the dead man's ID as he demanded, “How come this here late Ramon Kayitah was registered as a Mimbres with the San Carlos Agency if he wouldn't live there?”
Longarm stepped in out of the rain as well, dryly observing, “He wasn't living there. We just now killed him in Denver. Victorio is off the San Carlos Agency this spring with his own Mimbres and a whole lot of pissed-off Mescalero from New Mexico as well. The BIA resettled some few Mountain Apache or NaDéné over in the Arizona Desert, as long as they had young Johnny Clum as an agent they could get along with. Sort of. Since Clum was forced out by sterner politicos who found him too flexible, they've had a tougher time controlling NaDéné. That's what Washington calls it when they get to pick the color of your shit and tell you where to shit it. Controlling.”
Vail found his wet hat on the stairs and bent to pick it up and put it back on as he decided, “Well, nobody had the late Ramon Kayitah all that controlled and for all we know the others could have been Indians as well. I keep telling you children not to leap at conclusions. But I just did it my ownself, knowing Devil Dave Deveruex was half Mex from the Pecos Valley and assuming his pals were from down home.”
Longarm followed him down a stairwell still reeking of gunsmoke as he reloaded along the way, observing, “You could be doing it some more, no offense. One full-blood running with
mestizo vaqueros
works as well as an Irish-Mex off a Tex-Mex land grant running with a whole tribe of Indians. There's this Denver bakery I stop by on the way home, now and again, owned and operated by full-blooded Arapaho. The name they're going by, these days, would be Plimmons. They didn't have to move to the east with the more feathersome Arapaho in '75 because they chose to be self-supporting and law-abiding residents of this here state capital.”
Vail snorted, “Are you saying that son of a bitch we just had to gun down like a mad dog could be defined as law-abiding?”
Longarm shrugged and answered, simply, “We both accepted him as a Tex-Mex rider until he lay dead on the roof, didn't we? My point is that there's more than one way to leave an Indian reserve. For every Victorio or even Chief Joseph there must be a dozen disgusted Indians who just get a haircut, dress up more natural, and find something else to do. Like baking bread, herding cows, or riding the owlhoot trail with other outlaws of uncertain ancestry.”
Vail led the way back into Judge Dickerson's cleared court, where a smell of gunsmoke and spilled gore still lingered as the last of the bodies were being carried out.
His Honor came toward them, still wearing his black cotton robes and the expression of a man who'd just caught his wife in bed with a hired hand. Before Vail could tell him they'd nailed at least one of the gang, His Honor roared, “Why are you both fucking the dog here at the scene of the crime? The bastards are long gone! Why haven't you gone after them?”
Vail growled, “We just come down from gunning the one who run up on the roof. What was Your Honor thinking of when them three gun-toting strangers entered his courtroom all dressed up like border
buscaderos?
Weren't you fixing to sentence Devil Dave to any time at all?”
The iron-gray hanging judge declared, “All right. There's blame to go around, and you say you got at least one of them, Billy?”
Vail smiled modestly and confessed, “Longarm, here, put just as many rounds in him. His name was Ramon Kayitah. Assimilated Mimbres Apache, living white. Living Mex, least ways. We're still working on who or what the other two might have been. Their
charro
riding outfits and buscadero gun rigs fit the escaped prisoner's home range in the lower reaches of the Pecos Valley. We now know that Frank and Jesse James lit out for Clay County and their Missouri kith and kin when that Northfield raid went sour on them, so ...”
Longarm pointed out. “Frank and Jesse rode west into the Dakota Territory when they ran into all that trouble in Minnesota.”
Vail shrugged and said, “Whatever. The point is that Frank and Jesse finally wound up back home with their momma and we know Dave Deveruex grew up on a land grant his own widowed momma still grazes a swamping herd on, with a shithouse full of Tex-Mex help a growing boy with Tex-Mex features could blend into pretty good. So just in case we fail to find him and his other pals holed up here in Denver I mean to wire a ranger captain I used to ride with before the war and...”