Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance

Chapter 7

Two days later and right on schedule, Longarm climbed the stone steps of Denver’s Federal Building at eight A.M., nodding at his male acquaintances and pinching his hat brim to the office girls.

He climbed the stairs to the cavernous second floor and said howdy-do to a couple of attorneys he’d come to know over the years and who were going over some papers together on a wooden bench outside a federal courtroom. He followed his well-practiced route to the end of the hall that smelled of varnish and cigar smoke as well as the coal used to heat the sprawling building, and pulled open the stout wooden door whose frosted glass panel bore the name of his boss, Chief Marshal William H. Vail, First District Court of Colorado, and went in.

“How’s it hangin’, Henry?” he asked the prissy gent playing typewriter on the desk to his left, while he tossed his freshly steamed and brushed hat on the tree to his right.

Without looking up but continuing to pound the odd-looking contraption’s keys with his long, slim, white fingers, Billy Vail’s secretary said, “The chief marshal is expecting you, Marshal Long. Am I imagining things or are you on time for a change?”

Longarm stared down at Henry’s dancing fingers, amazed as always that each finger seemed to know where each of the two dozen or so keys on the contraption was, and they never seemed to get entangled or miss a beat. And how did each key know where it was supposed to go on the travel voucher Henry was typing on? The world was changing mighty fast, Longarm thought, and he’d better figure out such things or get lost in the dust!

When the secretary’s words finally made their way through his silent musings on the nature of progress and the fast fading of the old frontier, the big lawman glanced at the clock on the wall behind Henry, saw that the hour hand was on the eight and that the minute hand was pointing straight up at twelve.

“Well, look at that,” Longarm said, as amazed as Henry was, planting one fist on a hip. “Henry, you’d better write this down in your work log. Custis Long was on time for a change. Put it on the page where you write down such things as why certain lawmen deserve a raise.” He muttered grumpily and raked a thumb along the line of his freshly shaven jaw. “’Cause such tedious little insignificant happenings as his savin’ a whole trainload of train passengers from being slaughtered by the Rio Hayes Gang or ending up at the bottom of Horse Thief Gorge don’t seem worthy!”

He said that last loudly enough to catch Henry’s attention. The young, dapper little gent’s long fingers rose all at once from the keys, hovering over them, as the pale, bespectacled face lifted toward Longarm. Henry furled his slender, light brown brows over his pale blue eyes. “What’s that, Marshal Long?”

Longarm smiled at having finally captured the seemingly always distracted little fellow’s attention. “Did you hear about my most recent exploits?”

“Exploits?”

“Yeah, you know—about me takin’ down the Arkansas River Gang. All by my damn lonesome. And then I noticed that train we was on was headed on the downhill side of Horse Thief Pass without brakes, and…”

He let his voice trail off. Henry stared up at him over the tops of his round spectacles, with the expression of a man who hadn’t understood a word Longarm had said, as though the lawman had been speaking Sanskrit!

Longarm leaned forward, planting both hands on Henry’s desk and lowering his voice for emphasis. “You just wait till you read my next report. Got Marcella over at the Black Cat scribblin’ it all down for me even as I speak. When you read that, Mr. Henry, you’re gonna be seein’ old Custis Long in a little different ligh—”

The door flanking Henry’s neat desk on the right opened suddenly, and Chief Marshal Billy Vail poked his round head out the door. It was ensconced in a roiling cloud of cigar smoke. “Get your ass in here, Longarm. You’re late again, as usual!”

Billy pulled his head back inside his office and swung his door wide as he retreated to his desk. Longarm looked at the clock. The minute hand was now at a minute past the twelve.

“Goddamnit, Henry,” he said, “now you went and made me late!”

As Longarm moved to the door, he heard the prissy secretary give a snort before the typing machine resumed its raucous clattering. Longarm stepped into Vail’s office and closed the door behind him.

“I was just tellin’ Henry about what a great job I did over the past few days. Wait till you see my report, Chief, you’re gonna—”

“Yeah, well, Henry would appreciate it if you’d tell whatever doxie you have writing up your reports these days to go a little easier on the smelly water.” Billy brushed a pudgy fist across his doughy nose. “Irritates the soft tissues in his nose.”

Longarm scowled indignantly.

“Have a seat and see if you can shut your pie hole long enough to roll your eyeballs over this file,” Billy Vail said as he sort of floated through the smoke cloud hovering over and around his giant desk, the surface of which Longarm doubted the chief marshal had seen since he’d first been promoted to his esteemed echelon of public service.

He plucked a manila file folder off one of the several stacks surrounding many small piles of papers hiding his blotter and slid it toward Longarm’s side of his desk. “We’ll be waitin’ on your partner, due to arrive in ten minutes.”

Longarm jerked the red Moroccan leather guest chair out of its corner near the door and angled it in front of his boss’s desk. “Partner?”

“Detective from the Pinkerton agency.”

“Ah, hell, Billy,” Longarm said, sagging into the chair with a sour look. “You know I always work alone. And them Pinkertons are pains in the ass! They think they’re real lawmen and all they do is get in the galldarned way!”

“Don’t start pissin’ in the Pinkerton well again, Custis. You know as well as I do that the James Gang would still be runnin’ wild up and down the Midwest if it wasn’t for Allan Pinkerton. It’s an old and illustrious company.”

“Maybe so, but their agents of late are either old men or snot-nosed shavers who haven’t yet taken a piss standing up but think they know everything there is to know about bringin’ owlhoots to bay. Uppity sons o’ bitches. No, sir, Billy, you know I work best when I work alone.”

“You’re not workin’ alone on this one. And that’s an order. The Pinkertons think they have a stake in what happened to them lawmen down in Arizona, and they’ve sent an agent.”

Billy leaned forward to read a name scribbled on a coffee-stained, ash-speckled notepad. “A…uh…Mr. Harvey Delacroix. That’s with an ‘o-i-x’ at the end, and if I remember what little I ever knew about French, I believe it’s pronounced ‘oy.’”

The pudgy chief marshal, once a tough-nut lawbringer himself, sagged back in his chair and brushed cigar ashes from the bulbous paunch threatening to bust the buttons on the wash-worn white dress shirt he wore under a ratty brown wool vest. “As in ‘Oy, oy, oy, Custis, you’re gonna be partnerin’ up with this Pinkerton agent whether you like it or not!’”

Billy guffawed, delighted with himself. He stuck the stub of the fat stogie between his lips, blew more smoke into the already smoggy air over his desk, and laughed some more.

Longarm sighed in disgust. Sometimes, despite his knowing that Vail prized him above all the other deputies in his deputy U.S. marshal stable, he couldn’t help thinking that Billy kept him around just to torture him. He certainly gave him the toughest assignments, and on this one the chief marshal was not only partnering him up with a wet-behind-the-ears Pinkerton agent who no doubt thought himself as skilled or better than Allan Pinkerton himself, but he was sending him to Arizona right smack-dab in the heat of summer.

And the summers in Arizona were second on the heat scale only to Hell itself.

“All right, enough of that,” Billy said with a final snort, sitting up straighter in his chair and brushing his fist across his nose. “This is serious business. Five lawmen dead, fer chriss-fuckin’-sakes!”

“So I heard,” Longarm said, glancing at the file he hadn’t yet plucked off the chief marshal’s desk. “Why don’t you give me the lowdown on it, Billy. You know I don’t read so well until after lunch. I’ll peruse the whole thing on the train ride down to Las Cruces. Who was killed and where?”

“I didn’t recognize the names of any of the dead,” Billy said. “They’re in the file. They were killed outside a little town along Defiance Wash. Town’s called Holy Defiance on account of a stand the locals including a Catholic priest made several years ago against a bronco band of Coyotero Apaches. Not much there now. Some old desert rat and his daughter. Anyway, the lawmen had banded together to go looking for a cache of gold that was stolen off a stagecoach three years ago but was never recovered.

“Everyone thought the gold was lost for good after a passel of border toughs robbed it and the toughs themselves were attacked by a small band of Apaches who’d jumped the reservation. Apparently, the bandits buried the loot when they’d forted themselves up in a nest of rocks in the Black Puma Mountains and then lit out under cover of darkness. They intended to return for it later, but they were all gunned down by a rival gang in Nogales a few weeks later.

“That there is all I know,” Billy said. “There’s a little more in the file there—names and dates and whatnot, the name of the ranch that the money’s supposedly buried on. Some highfalutin rancher down there named Azrael, if I remember. Whip Azrael.”

“How’s this Pinkerton territory, Billy?”

“The Pinkertons had insured the gold shipment. It was headed for the bank in Tucson. Two Pinkerton guards were killed as well as two guards the bank especially hired—two fairly well-known gunmen at the time named Roy Dupree and ‘Cougar’ Charlie McCallum.”

Billy puffed his cigar, staring pensively down at his desk. “Them two names I do remember, ’cause when I was ridin’ for the Texas Rangers back in them days, them two were a couple of the most wanted curly wolves in all of Texas and half of Louisiana. Cold-blooded killers, both. Cougar Charlie cut down a good partner of mine back in Alpine, just north of the Chisos Mountains, after we’d run ’im down after a saloon robbery. Walked up to my partner, H. C. Boyle, in an alley and blew him in half with a double-barreled shotgun from point-blank range.”

“Cougar Charlie and the other gunman…?”

“Dupree.”

“They’re both dead?”

“Killed during the robbery.”

Longarm was thinking over what he’d heard. In the meantime, he’d plucked a cheroot from his shirt pocket and bit the end off. Now he struck a match on the edge of Billy’s desk, touched the flame to the stogie, and said between smoke puffs, “How did the Arizona Rangers and the two U.S. marshals get wind of all this and start thinkin’ they had a handle on where the gold was buried?”

“I’m told that one of the rangers heard from a man named Three Wolves a few weeks ago. Three Wolves apparently had known a couple of the killers, including the leader of the gang that robbed the stage—Rafael Santana. Three Wolves and Santana played poker together one night in Nogales, the night before Santana and his bunch were killed.

“Three Wolves claimed that when Santana was about to lose his shirt to Three Wolves, Santana told him he knew where some gold was buried. When Three Wolves pressed the matter, Santana gave him some details about where exactly Santana’s bunch had buried the gold. Three Wolves kept what Santana had told him under his hat, only half believing it was true, I reckon. But he never did go looking for the gold himself. Don’t ask me why. Maybe you’ll find out when you get down there.

“In the meantime, Three Wolves ran his own freighting service until about six weeks ago when he ran afoul of the rangers. Killed a man in a jealous rage, it seems. The rangers tracked him down and arrested him. Three Wolves exchanged the information about where the loot was buried for a promise of a possibly lighter sentence, and three rangers and two deputy marshals out of Prescott ended up deader’n last year’s Christmas goose for their trouble.”

Longarm scowled dubiously as he exhaled smoke through his nostrils. “Where’s this Three Wolves feller now?”

Chief Marshal Vail nodded his approval at his prized deputy’s instincts. Since Three Wolves apparently knew, or said he knew, where the loot had been buried, he might also know who killed the lawmen who’d ridden out to find it.

“He’s being held at the Arizona Rangers post in Broken Jaw in the Arizona Territory, about fifty miles across the line from New Mexico. Holy Defiance is another fifty or so miles southwest of Broken Jaw, west of Tombstone and Bisbee.”

“I’ll stop in at Broken Jaw and have a little palaver with this gent before heading on down to Holy Defiance.” Longarm rolled the cheroot around between his lips and bounced his fists off the arms of the red Moroccan leather chair. “When’s my train leave, Billy? Don’t reckon it’s gonna get any cooler down Arizona way. Sooner I get this job started, the sooner it’ll be over with.”

Billy grinned devilishly. “You mean, when does your and your partner’s train leave?” The chief marshal glanced at the banjo clock on the wall to his left. “In about one half hour.”

“Ah, dangit, Billy.”

Just then a knock sounded on the chief marshal’s door.

“Must be him now,” Billy said, raising his voice as he cast his gaze at the door. “Come in, Agent Delacroix!”

Longarm heard but did not see the door open behind him. He’d be looking at the Pinkerton agent’s no doubt pimple-scarred face long enough on the journey down to Arizona.

He did, however, look at Billy and wrinkle his brows curiously when Billy’s lower jaw dropped nearly down to his cluttered desk. Billy’s eyes opened nearly as wide as his mouth, and a rosy flush colored his otherwise pasty cheeks.

“Uh…” Billy said around an apparent frog in his throat, rising slowly from his chair. “Uhm…Harvey…Dela…Delacroix?”

Longarm smelled a subtle, cherrylike fragrance at the same time he heard a raspy, vaguely female voice behind him say, “No, it’s Haven. Haven Delacroix, Chief Marshal Vail. I’ve been sent here by the Pinkerton Agency, to join your deputy on the Arizona murder investigation. The one involving the stolen gold?”

Longarm jerked his head around. His heart turned a somersault in his chest.

The tall brunette whom Longarm had last seen lounging like a satisfied cat on her bed in the Grand Hotel in Leadville, naked as a jaybird, took two steps forward, extending her right hand toward Billy Vail. “I hope I’m not overly late. The stage from Leadville, where I was investigating a possible counterfeiting ring, got held up at a bridge failure around Conifer.”

Billy shook the young woman’s hand woodenly, staring at her as shiny-eyed as a love-struck schoolboy. Longarm stood slowly, feeling a grin like that of the cat that ate the canary flashing in his eyes and quirking his mouth corners.

“How do you do, Miss Delacroix?” Longarm said, taking his cigar in his left hand and extending the right one to the girl. “I’m just pleased as punch to make your acquaintance.”

She turned to him. Her eyes widened in mute horror. She gave a silent gasp. As she stared up at him, likely trying to convince herself that her imagination was playing a nasty trick on her, her exquisite face turned as frosty white as new-fallen snow on Christmas morning.

Longarm tensed himself to catch her if she fell, because Miss Haven Delacroix looked like she was about to drop dead right there at his feet in Billy Vail’s office.