Longarm and the Wolf Women (4 page)

It was a cautious Longarm, puffing his cigar and keeping his .44 loose in the cross-draw holster on his left hip, who made his way down Sherman Avenue to the heart of the waking city, hearing the meadowlarks pipe, the black-birds caw, and the coal wagons squawk and rattle over the cobbles.

The smell of wood and coal smoke tinged the damp breeze blowing in from the prairie. As he made his way to a bathhouse not far from the Federal Building, the sun rose from the prairie to set fire to the snow-tipped peak of Mount Evans rising above of the Front Range in the west.

After a bath and a shave, and pleased as punch no one had tried to clean his clock this morning—having to parry lead after lovemaking was no way to start a day—he strode up the broad stone steps of the Federal Building. He wove his way among the pretty young office clerks in their summer-weight frocks and shining hair, and climbed to the building's second floor.

“Mornin', Henry!” Longarm stepped through the oak door on which the words “U.S. MARSHAL WILLIAM VAIL” were stenciled in gold-leaf lettering, and tossed his hat on the rack.

The pimple-faced clerk pounding a sandwich of onion skins and carbon paper with his typewriter keys kept his nearsighted eyes on the newfangled machine and continued pecking away with the practiced ease of a true paper pusher.

“Go right in. Marshal Vail has been waiting for you, Deputy Long.”

Longarm paused before the secretary's tidy desk. He was about to mention that he was exactly two minutes early—some time ago he'd turned over a new leaf of punctuality—but what was the point? Reputations were as hard to reconfigure as the planets and stars.

He merely chuckled, knocked once on Billy's door, and went in. “Mornin', Chief!”

“Jesus Christ, you're early!” The pudgy, balding man behind the desk, swathed in cigar smoke, turned to the banjo clock on the wall to his left. “A full two minutes!”

“Billy, you noticed!”

“Are you all right?” With the stubby cigar in his right hand Vail gestured at the red Moroccan leather chair. “You better have a seat.” He beetled his sandy brows, inspecting Longarm ironically. “But, hell, you look all right. Don't appear fever-flushed. In fact, I swear, Custis, you're looking even lighter on your feet than usual. And your eyes are dancing like those of a carnival barker who's just spied a whole gaggle of wealthy tinhorns!”

Longarm angled the chair before the chief marshal's desk and sat down. “They are?”

Vail sat back in his own swivel chair, voice booming around the sparsely furnished office. “Don't tell me you're fucking General Larimer's niece again!”

“I don't much like to call it fucking,” Longarm said, grinning. “Much too crass. I prefer lovemaking, Chief.”

“It's fucking, and you know it. You two have been goin' at it like a couple of back-alley dogs. What—the general's out of town again, so you two have that big old house to your nymphomaniac selves?”

Longarm opened his mouth to object, but Vail cut him off. He poked the cigar at Longarm for emphasis. “If the general ever finds out you and that niece he prizes almost as much as his Thoroughbred racing horses are using his house for a stud barn, he's liable to come in here with a double-barreled shotgun. I just hope for my sake and Henry's that the old bastard can aim straight.”

“Don't worry, Chief. I don't think the general's weak heart would make it up the Federal Building steps.”

“No, he'll probably wait and ambush you from his carriage house some early morning while you're walking out his back door buttoning your fly.”

“He might as well join the club.”

“Anyway, enough chatter about your infamous sex life. We got trouble.”

Longarm set his right cavalry boot on his left knee and flicked coal ash from his trousers. “Trouble's our bread and butter, Chief.”

“You remember Deputy Parsons?”

“Deputy Johnny Parsons. Of course. You've made me work with the little privy rat a time or two, and I do believe I told you he'd been promoted way before his time. Say, about
twenty years
before his time. Why, that younker can't even . . .”

“He's dead,” Vail said, sitting back in his chair.

Longarm stared at his boss, chagrined.

“Killed up north last week,” Billy said. “I just got word yesterday. His body's coming in today on the flier.”

“Can't say as I'm surprised. That kid was a corpse waiting to get cold. Who cooled him down, Chief?”

“Goddamndest thing I ever heard of,” Vail said, wagging his head and taking a couple of big, shallow puffs off his cigar. “There's a crazy mountain man up in the bluffs and canyons west of Diamondback, just north of Fort Collins. Magnus Magnusson's the name. Lived with a couple squaws up near Ute Peak back in the old days, when there was still a market for beaver furs.

“Anyway, this Magnusson is crazier than a tree full of owls. He's got two daughters just as crazy and wild as he is. They're preying on the miners around the Diamondback River, up around the Neversummer Range and the Mummies. The girls sort of act like sirens, getting the prospectors' guard down with their feminine wiles—apparently they're both prettier'n a coupla speckled pups, with jugs the size of watermelons—and just when they're at their most vulnerable, Magnusson comes in and shoots or stabs 'em. Him and the girls make off with the prospectors' pokes or any other valuables.”

“How did Johnny Parsons end up toe-down, Chief? I wouldn't think old Magnusson and his daughters are even a federal problem. Sounds local.”

“I'm getting to that.” Vale took another puff from his cigar and waved the smoke away, squinting. “The trouble all started about six months ago. Finally, when seven or eight miners had been murdered, the sheriff, Merle Blassingame, wired me for help. He just didn't have the manpower to put a stop to it.”

“So you sent Parsons.”

“Yes, I sent Parsons, goddamnit!” Billy yelled, slamming his fist on his broad, mahogany desk, knocking the first couple inches of a two-foot stack of papers onto the floor. Ignoring the mess, he jerked his chair toward the window. “Didn't sound like a job for a real lawman. I figured, hell, how hard could it be for the kid to go up there and hire a guide to take him up that canyon and haul an old mountain man and his two daughters down to the local hoosegow?”

“Sounds easy enough, Boss, but you know Johnny.”

“Yeah, I
knew
Johnny. Fancied himself Custis Long in his brown hat and cavalry boots. Shit, I think he smoked the same cigars as you.”

“The kid was downright frightening. Whenever I seen him, I thought I was seein' myself in the mirror about fifteen years ago.” Longarm shrugged. “Didn't care for me much, though.”

“Shit, he idolized you. But he didn't
like
you because he knew you didn't respect him. It was his old man's political connections that got him the goddamn deputy's job in the first place. His only training was the Army. Well, now he's dead and his old man, Julian Parsons, is demanding justice.”

“You want me to go up there and hunt down old Magnusson and his sirens, Chief?”

Vail was staring out the window, a pensive expression on his fleshy, clean-shaven face. His cigar smoldered in his right hand, that elbow propped on the edge of the desk.

Longarm felt sorry for his boss. He wouldn't have taken on the pressure of the chief marshal's job for all the money in the world. To think that a leaner, tougher Billy Vail had once been a Texas Ranger, a cap-and-ball blazing in each fist . . .

Suddenly, Billy swung toward Longarm, scowling, his chair squawking loudly. “Does a bear shit in the woods? Of course I want them brought in. And make it fast! I just got two cables—one from Parsons's old man and one from the governor, both urging me to spare no expense in avenging the kid's death.”

Billy leaned forward to regard Longarm with vehemence. “Now, neither you nor I, Custis, give a diddly goddamn about that little make-believe badge-toter, but, political pressure or not, I
did hire him
. So my ass is over the fire here, you understand?”

“Personally, Chief, I'm more concerned about the prospectors those three are preying on than avenging that rich little privy snipe, but I get your drift.” Longarm dropped his right foot to the floor and sat up in his chair. “Henry's working on my pay vouchers, I take it?”

Vail nodded. “He's got your train ticket, too. The flier leaves at noon. Rent a horse at Longmont, then head for Diamondback. Your contact there is Sheriff Blassingame. Merle Blassingame. I've never met him, but you'll know where to find him. He'll know someone who can guide you up the canyon. After killing Parsons, Magnusson and his two heifers are probably holing up pretty deep in the mountains. You'll need a good guide to root 'em out, most likely.”

“Got it, Chief.”

Longarm stood and headed for the door. He'd set his hand on the knob when Billy's voice turned him back around.

Vail was grinning but there wasn't an ounce of humor in it. “And, Custis . . . please remember that, while Magnusson's daughters are both right pretty and, I understand, built like a choirboy's wet dream, they're also deadly.”

“Don't worry, Billy.” Longarm grinned. “They won't be catching me with
my
pants down!”

With a parting salute and a wink, Longarm opened the door and went out.

Longarm enjoyed a corned beaf sandwich and two beers at the Black Cat Saloon before heading to his rented flat to pick up his rifle, saddlebags, and McClelland saddle. He informed his persnickety landlady he'd be gone for a few days, then hitched a ride on a firewood dray angling toward the Union Depot in Denver's bustling heart.

The north-headed flier wasn't crowded, so Longarm managed a nap on the worn cowhide seat, compensating himself for his lack of rest and his overindulgence in both drink and Miss Larimer the night before. The train chugged through the blond-grass prairie in the shadow of the Rockies' magnificent Front Range, the wheels clacking somnolently beneath his head, the smell of steam and coal smoke in his nose.

When the train stopped halfway between Denver and Cheyenne, at the little mining and ranching berg of Longmont, over which Long's Peak towered like a giant, snow-tipped sentinel, it was a better-rested if still-groggy federal lawman who gathered his gear from the overhead rack and stepped down into the village's dusty, golden sunlight.

Longarm rented a fine, broad-chested sorrel gelding at the Federated Livery and Feed Barn and trimmed out the horse with his own McClelland, preferring the lightweight cavalry pad to the more cumbersome stock saddles found throughout the frontier. He snugged his Winchester into the boot, then secured his bedroll and saddlebags behind the low cantle.

With a wave to the beefy hostler eyeing him skeptically from the paddock, he left the sleepy town in its grove of cottonwoods and aspens, crossed the St. Vrain River, and jogged northwest through the clay-colored shelves and pine-studded rimrocks rolling up toward the grand, fir-studded peaks he could no longer see from this low angle.

He made Diamondback in the late afternoon.

The town was a forlorn little collection of sun-baked hovels strewn about the prairie where the Diamondback River curled out of its canyon to arc southward toward its confluence with Crow Creek and the South Platte River. The village was wedged between rimrocks and surrounded by prairie dog towns and cedar-studded knolls. Its main street, called Diamondback Avenue, was two blocks long, with about a hundred feet of open, sun-scorched broom grass, rabbit brush, and sage between its false-fronted business buildings—most constructed of brick or logs or both.

As Longarm rode through town, three pudgy boys in knickers were playing cowboys with stick rifles in the middle of the wide, rutted street, a black-and-white collie nipping at their heels and barking. Two bearded men in prospectors' garb stood before an overloaded mountain wagon, passing a bottle and conversing with a rangy bald man in a long, green apron and armbands. A two-story building with a long loading dock and announcing itself as the “Occidental Mercantile” heaved purple shade over the men and the wagon.

Longarm reined up at the edge of the shade, and the three men eyed him with guarded speculation. He rarely wore his badge anywhere but in his wallet, feeling it made too shiny a target for would-be bushwackers. “Can someone direct me to the marshal's office?”

The prospectors just stared at him, the one with a silver-streaked bib beard holding the uncorked brown bottle protectively against his frayed coveralls.

The bald man—the mercantile owner, no doubt—jerked a thumb behind him. “It's the stone shack tucked away in the rabbit brush back behind my store. You won't find the marshal there, however.” He acquired a strangely sheepish expression and bowed his head at the Horsetooth Saloon west one block and on the other side of the street.

Longarm pinched his hat brim at the bald man, then neck-reined the sorrel toward the saloon—a broad log building with a brush awning over its wide front porch. The lawman drew the sorrel up to the hitchrack, left of the six other mounts standing before the stock tank, hang-headed and tail-swishing, and swung down from the saddle.

As he looped the reins over the rack, he glanced across the street. Three men in dusty trail garb sat on the boardwalk before Alfonse's Tonsorial Parlor, their boots in the street, staring at Longarm from beneath the broad brims of their hats. The three wore pistols in tied-down holsters. One held a sawed-off shotgun across his thighs.

Longarm's instincts told him the men weren't merely waiting around for a friend to get a shave and a haircut. What they were doing, he had no idea, but he didn't like their looks. If he'd been the local law, he'd have encouraged them to mount up and spread their cheer elsewhere.