Longarm and the Cry of the Wolf (9781101619506) (2 page)

T
WENTY YEARS LATER

The generals's daughter felt all funny inside when the tall, dark man in a snuff-brown Stetson and longhorn mustache walked into the roadside saloon.

They were high in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado Territory, and it was winter, so the stranger was clad in a long sheepskin coat, its collar and lapels trimmed with wool. He held a rifle on his right shoulder, and a long, black cheroot stuck straight out of the left corner of his mouth.

The bulky coat did little to hide the fact that the man walking in out of the cold, dark, snowy mountain night was a big, solid, muscular hombre, indeed. The chiseled, rough-planed face beneath the flat-brimmed Stetson was so browned by the sun as to make him appear faintly Indian. His brown eyes set deep in bony sockets bespoke a hard authority and a rugged manliness that caused the nipples of the general's daughter, Catherine Fortescue, to stiffen behind their corset.

His legs were long, slender, and hard as any cavalryman's. His hands in their black, fur-lined gloves were conspicuously large, as were his feet clad in low-heeled, mule-eared cavalry boots, into which his striped, whipcord trousers had been stuffed.

Catherine, sitting at a table with her father and her father's several cronies, sank back in her chair and nibbled her thumbnail, giving a soft chuckle that only she could hear above the low roar of the drinking crowd. Big hands and feet meant only one thing, her lusty aunt Gwendoline had once informed her.
Dear, you want nothing to do with a man outfitted with small appendages . . .

Catherine's nether regions continued to prickle and tingle as the man stood in front of the halved-log door, scanning the smoky room through puffs of his own cigar smoke. Others had seen the stranger, as well, and there had been a gradual decrease in the loudness of the conversations as the crowd appraised the impressive-looking newcomer.

As he looked around as though searching for someone, his penetrating, brown-eyed gaze met Catherine's. They held for a quick second, and she felt her rich lips quirk ever so silently as a thrill rippled through her. She knew with a woman's instincts that the stranger had, however briefly and unconsciously, shared in the same thrill, a primal inner voice informing him that their bodies would respond to each other like bow and fiddle fashioned by the same craftsman.

The stranger glanced to his left and froze, staring at four men playing cards at a table several yards away, all four humbly dressed individuals with long hair and wild-looking, drink-bleary eyes. They held their heads down, as though cowed, one lifting an eye to glance up at the newcomer sheepishly.

The tall, dark stranger strode over, dragged a vacant chair out from the table of the four card players, and hiked his right boot onto it. He rested his rifle—a Winchester '73, Catherine knew—across that knee, sort of half-aimed at the group before him.

Suddenly, the crowd of twenty or so men and two pleasure girls—all taking shelter from the cold night in the Hawk's Bluff Tavern—fell silent as church mice. The stranger poked his hat back off his forehead and said in a menacingly gentle, even drawl around the cheroot in his teeth—“Well, well, Collie and Ulrich—run you down at last. My question is this: Are you gonna come nice and friendly-like or rolled up in your blankets and tied over your saddles?”

The room was so quiet that Catherine could hear the flames in the near woodstove crackling faintly, the stove's iron ticking, as the four seated men stared back at the stranger. Their eyes were hard now, their faces taut with belligerence. Catherine's breath came short, and she felt warm honey pool in the pit of her belly as one of the four said tightly, quietly, “No way we're goin' back to the pen, Longarm. No way in hell.”

The man called Longarm smiled around his cigar. “Have it your way, Collie.”

Silence followed, so thick you couldn't have driven a wagon pulled by galloping mustangs through it.

The four men stared at Longarm. Longarm stared back at them. Collie jerked up out of his chair, screaming, “Fuck you, you law-bringin' son of a—”

Boom! Boom! Boom-Boom! Boom!

Catherine jumped with each explosion of the rifle that Longarm had snapped to his shoulder so quickly that the motion had been a smoky blur. Mostly, she'd seen his broad, murky shadow dancing around the floor and the table before him. The explosions had sounded like detonated barrels of dynamite, making Catherine's ears ring.

She'd felt their reverberations through the floor beneath her boots and through the chair she was sitting in. They filled her loins with electricity, and by the time the last echo had faded around the room so that the groaning of wounded men could now be heard, she was squeezing her thighs together, squirming in her chair, sweat popping on her forehead.

“Good Lord!” intoned her father, General Alexander Fortescue, retired, heaving himself angrily up from his chair. “What is the meaning of all this cacophony?”

If Longarm had heard the old soldier wearing a long tailored mink coat and a beaver hat and clutching a fat stogie in his beringed right hand, he didn't let on. The lawman merely stared down at the fallen men on the far side of the table from him, and loudly pumped a fresh cartridge into his Winchester's breech. The ejected casing clinked loudly onto the floor and rolled around his boots.

Three of his quarry were down. A fourth sat his chair stiffly, squeezing his eyes closed and extending his arms straight up in the air above his head, palms forward. He had his chin dipped to his spindly chest clad in a billowy green neckerchief over a ragged, calico shirt and silver-trimmed leather vest. He wore a gold spike through his right earlobe.

“Oh, God,” the survivor said, his voice quavering. “Don't shoot me, Longarm. Christ, that was fast.
I don't wanna die!
”

Catherine thought she could smell urine emanating from the man in the room's warm, smoky air, beneath the stench of beer and whiskey and the sickly sweet perfume of the parlor girls. She clenched her fists under the table and stifled a wild laugh. The urine smell was quickly diluted by the rotten-egg odor of powder smoke.

“Stand up, Goldie,” Longarm drawled.

The others in the room were muttering among themselves. Several men sitting nearest the lawman and his prey had thrown themselves to the floor when the shooting erupted, and now they were climbing warily to their feet, quietly gathering hats and coins and playing cards from the floor. One kicked a whiskey bottle; it rolled loudly across the floor before coming to rest against a wood box filled with pine.

“Sit down, Father,” Catherine said to the general standing beside her. “You're making a fool of yourself.”

The old soldier scowled down at his impertinent daughter. He was a big, puffy man with silver-gray hair and a walrus mustache. Catherine arched an admonishing brow at the man, whom she had many years before—even before becoming the heartrendingly beautiful, ivory-skinned, lush-bodied blonde sitting beside him now—wrapped firmly around her little finger.

The general looked a little sheepishly at the other men around the table—his four moneyed hunting companions from Denver, all of whom, Catherine knew, dreamt in vain of making love to his daughter—and then sighed as he sagged slowly back down in his chair, which creaked precariously beneath his considerable weight.

Meanwhile, the lawman aimed his still-smoking Winchester at the hard case he'd called Goldie. “Stand up.”

Goldie stood, keeping his hands raised.

“Toss your hoglegs, knives—everything you got—onto the table right here. Do it slow. One move I think might be just a hair too fast, I'm gonna pop a pill through your ticker.”

“Ah, shit,” Goldie rasped, moving very slowly as he tossed three pistols and two big knives and one smaller one—an Arkansas toothpick, Catherine thought it was called—onto the playing cards before him, among the shot glasses and beer schooners and whiskey bottles.

Everyone in the room watched in hushed silence right along with Catherine as Longarm walked around behind Goldie, cuffed his hands behind his back, then pushed him over to a square-hewn ceiling support post in the middle of the room, only a few feet from Catherine's and the Fortescue hunting party's table. Longarm shoved the outlaw down to his butt and then he got a short length of rope from the burly barman and tied Goldie's ankles together.

“I'm gonna leave him here till I leave in the morning,” Longarm told the room. “Anyone turns him loose, I'll gut you like a fish.”

Wearily, he turned to the bar, set his Winchester down on top of it, and asked for a whiskey. As he doffed his hat, removed a glove, and swept a hand through his thick, close-cropped, dark brown hair, Catherine saw a quarter-sized hole in the side of the lawman's coat. Beneath the coat's hem, blood dropped, drip by slow drip, onto the tip of his left cavalry boot.

The general and his hunting friends were now conversing among themselves in disapproving tones while casting dark looks at the lawman leaning against the bar and sipping a shot of whiskey. Maryland rye whiskey, to be exact. Catherine's eyes were riveted on the brawny man-beast, and they hadn't miss a thing he'd done or said since he walked into the room.

For his part, Custis P. Long, known far and wide by friend and foe as Longarm, hadn't missed much about the girl, either. In the corner of his left eye, he saw her slide her chair back and rise from her table.

Her father said something too softly for Longarm to hear, and she didn't pay attention to the rotund oldster anyway, as she walked around the table and approached him. Longarm felt the draw of this girl deep in his loins, despite the bullet that had clipped his left side a couple of hours ago, when the escaped prisoners he'd been chasing into the mountains bushwhacked him and left him for dead, though he'd only been feigning it.

He turned to her now, resting an elbow on the edge of the plank-board bar, and let his probing male gaze rake her up and down, just as her eyes had been doing to him since he'd entered the Hawk's Bluff Tavern.

She stopped in front of him, attracting the glances of most of the other males in the place and even the two slightly peeved-looking doxies. Longarm had a feeling this blond, with lustrous hazel eyes and a heart-shaped face right out of an expensive cameo, would attract curious, admiring, longing gazes from both sexes any-damn-where she went.

Her eyes were as cool as shallow water over polished green pebbles as she said just as cooly, “Lawman, eh?”

“Who's askin'?”

Ignoring the question, she glanced at the hole in his coat. “You appear to be lacerated.”

“That?” Longarm glanced down at the blood staining his left boot toe. “I've cut myself worse shavin'.”

“Nevertheless, blood is blood, and we only have so much. You need tending, and I'd like to apply for the job.” She lifted one corner of her mouth as her eyes held steady on his.

“What are your qualifications, Miss, uh . . . ?”

“I have one hell of a bedside manner.”

Longarm glanced behind her at the old, mustached gent in the fringed buckskin tunic under an open mink coat, who was talking with his pals while looking critically at the beauty standing before Longarm. “What's Daddy gonna say?”

“How do you know he's my father?”

“If he was your husband, I'd have had to shoot him by now.”

She blinked slowly. “I've trained Daddy well.” She glanced at the low, soot-stained ceiling. “Shall we?”

Longarm glanced at the barman, who was drawing a beer at the spigot down the bar aways. “Apron, I'll take a room and a bottle of that rye.”

“Ain't got no more rooms,” the burly bartender said in a thick, gravelly voice around the loosely rolled quirley smoldering between his lips. “All taken. Cold damn night.”

“Just the bottle, then,” the girl said to the barman, while staring at Longarm. “I have a room.”

Longarm glanced at the old man again, who was looking toward him and his daughter edgily, squinting his eyes through billowing cigar smoke.

“Like I said,” said the blonde, “I've trained him well.”

Longarm paid for his bottle and grabbed his Winchester.

“Hey, what about them boys you beefed?” asked the barman, nodding his head toward the men bleeding out at the far side of the now-vacant table.

Longarm followed the man's glance and puffed his cigar. “Wolves need feedin', too,” he said. “Haul 'em outside. Take what money they got on 'em for payment. My horse is outside—an army bay. Have someone stable him, tend him good, and haul my gear to the girl's room. Just pile it outside the door.”

He gave the man a wink and was about to continue forward when one of the men from the general's table stood up before him. He was a youngish, sandy-haired man with a thick mustache and a dimpled chin. He might have been handsome if his copper eyes hadn't been set so deep and close together.

“Just a minute, there, mister . . .”

“Outta the way,” Longarm said. “The lady's in a hurry.”

The dimple-chinned gent held his ground, lifting a hand and placing its palm against Longarm's chest. “What do you mean by walking in here and causing so much racket? Don't you know the general or his daughter might have been hit by a ricochet? If you're a lawman, you should have taken your would-be prisoners
outside
and arrested them out
there
.”

Longarm scowled at the man. He looked at the hand on his chest. There was a gold ring on the pinky. The man grew a little pale around the nubs of his cheeks, glanced at his hand, and slowly, sheepishly lowered it to his side.

Looking at the dimple-chinned gent as though he were a gob of dog shit on the floor before him, Longarm said, “Step aside.”

The dimple-chinned gent's eyes blazed, and his jaws hardened. But then, looking up at Longarm's implacable, weather-beaten features, the lawman's head a good three inches higher than his own, he stepped to one side and shrank back down in his chair.