Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance

Chapter 16

One of the two figures standing in the hall outside Longarm’s ruined door laughed raucously as he stepped aside for the man behind him to move forward and lift his own sawed-off double-barreled barn blaster.

By this time, Longarm was airborne, diving across his bed that the double-ought buck had shredded and dusted with slivers from the door. He slammed belly down on the bed, closed his right hand over the grips of his .44, and pulled the revolver from its holster as he rolled to the right, over the edge of the bed.

As he hit the floor on his butt, there was a bright, orange flash against the silhouette of the big man in his doorway. The expansive thundering report filled the room, causing the floor to leap beneath Longarm’s ass.

The full load of buckshot flipped Longarm’s pillow up high against the headboard, instantly turning it into a billowing cloud of feathers stitched with shredded ticking. The man with the shotgun swung the savage popper’s barrels sideways, tracking Longarm and shouting, “Die, you son of a bitch! Die!”

Longarm dropped his head down below the edge of the bed but triggered his pistol over the top, aimed at the door. He fired twice, one shot on top of the other. The Colt’s second belch, sounding little louder than a knuckle pop after the shotgun’s skull-shattering reverberation, was drowned by the ambusher’s detonation of the coach gun’s second barrel.

The man must have dropped the barrel just enough as he fired that the swarm of screaming pellets did not blow Longarm’s Colt and fist off the end of his arm, but blasted into the end of the bed, causing a rain of corn leaves similar to that of the continuing drift of feathers. It also heaved the mattress across the frame and into Longarm’s chest, knocking him back against the wall beneath the room’s sole window.

From here, he watched the shooter stumble back into the hall as the man who’d been so unkind to the lawman’s door swung his own empty shotgun behind his back, where it hung from a lanyard, and reached for one of the pistols on his hips.

Longarm rested his gun wrist against the top of the shredded bed once more, lined up his sights on the man’s chest, and fired. The bushwhacker groaned and stumbled backward, twisting around and ramming his right shoulder against the hall’s opposite wall, knocking a tintype off its nail.

The gunman had unleathered one of his pistols, and as he gave a great bellowing yell of pain and rage, he lifted the weapon.

Longarm fired two more times. One bullet punched through the man’s chest while the second turned his left ear to jelly and painted the wall behind him with it. His head smacked the wall violently, with a thudding crack.

He screamed shrilly, dropped his own gun, and crumpled up on top of his partner, who lay parallel to the base of the wall, jerking as he stared glassily at Longarm, blinking rapidly, blood oozing from a corner of his mouth and pooling on the floor beneath his head.

An angry female scream sounded down the hall.

A man’s scream followed it. A pistol popped.

Longarm scrambled to his feet and ran to the door in time to see a man run out of Agent Delacroix’s room, a knife in his right hand. He was the hombre whom Longarm remembered filling his canteens at the spring that Longarm and Haven had ridden up on two day’s ago. The now-dead men had been mounted on horses behind him.

The pistol popped again in the room behind the man as he glanced at Longarm and gave a snarling scream. He bounced off the hall wall opposite Haven’s room as another bullet plunked into the pine boards beside him. He flung the knife toward Longarm, who ducked. The knife embedded itself into the doorframe behind the crouching lawman.

The attacker wheeled and took off running toward the stairs.

“Demon!” Agent Delacroix screamed.

She fired three more shots from inside her room, and the bullets blasted through the wall, spraying wood slivers behind the fleeing attacker. The man ran hard, elbows and knees pumping, casting horrified looks behind him as yet another slug blasted through the hall wall behind him and into the wall opposite.

Longarm extended his own revolver straight out from his shoulder, and shouted, “Hold it, asshole!”

At the top of the stairs, the man stopped, slapped his belly holster, and brought up a horn-gripped hogleg. Longarm’s triggered slug puffed dust from the man’s brown leather vest up near his left shoulder. He screamed again as he bounced off the rail post, dropped his pistol, and tumbled down the stairs and out of Longarm’s sight, behind the hall’s left wall.

Longarm ran to Haven’s room. She was just climbing up from the floor, wearing a pink robe and holding a hand to her right cheek that matched the color of her robe. She held one of her LeMats in her right fist. Smoke curled from both barrels.

“You all right?” Longarm yelled from the doorway.

She nodded. “Is he dead?”

“I’m about to find out!”

Longarm ran back into his room, stomped into his boots and quickly reloaded his Colt. There was no time to dress in anything but his hat and his boots.

He bounded on out of the room and down the hall to the stairs. In the lobby below, the German, who apparently owned the place, was standing behind his desk and shouting loudly in his mother tongue and wielding a small, nickel-plated pistol, waving it at the man just now stumbling past the desk toward the hotel’s front door.

“Get down behind the desk, friend!” Longarm shouted as he descended the stairs.

He was halfway down when the ambusher swung around toward the hotelier, a second revolver in his hand. He fired a round toward the hotelier, but he was so wobbly that the slug plowed into the rack of pigeonholes behind his target.

The German screamed louder and triggered his own pistol over the desk, his slug punching into the door just as the bushwhacker opened it.

“Hold it!” Longarm shouted from the bottom of the steps.

But the ambusher pushed on out the door and into the dark night. Longarm didn’t want to fire because someone might be in the street beyond him. Instead, he grabbed the hotelier’s pistol out of the man’s hand, so the man couldn’t shoot Longarm in his wild rage, and tossed the pistol across the lobby. He ran out the front door and onto the gallery.

The night was cool and dark though stars glittered in the velvet sky. There were few lights on this end of Broken Jaw, so it took Longarm’s eyes a few seconds to adjust. He could hear the would-be killer running away from him, and then he saw his jostling shadow angling across the street and to the left, toward a small, cream-colored adobe cantina.

The man was limping on his left ankle and wheezing shrilly.

There were a half-dozen horses tied to the lone hitch rack fronting the cantina. The gunman seemed to be heading for one of them—likely his own mount.

Longarm ran down the three gallery steps, stopped, and aimed the pistol straight out from his right shoulder. “Turn around and drop the gun or take it between the shoulder blades!”

The man had just reached the hitch rack. He stopped so suddenly that he nearly fell and swung back toward Longarm. Starlight flashed on the revolver in his fist.

Longarm’s .44 spoke once, twice, and then a third time. Each shot was followed by a grunt from the man the slugs punched through, until he breathily said, “Fuck!” and triggered his pistol once toward the stars. He fell backward into the stock trough fronting the hitch rack with a loud splash that caused the already jostling horses to whicker and sidestep away from the tank.

Longarm lowered his pistol halfway and walked toward the man lolling in the stock trough, the water spilling over the sides glittering in the starlight. Two men walked out of the cantina behind the bushwhacker. Around here, men were accustomed to hearing gunshots any time of the day or night. Hooking their thumbs behind their cartridge belts, they sauntered along the cantina’s slim boardwalk and looked down at the man in the trough.

They both lifted their faces in unison, regarding the man dressed only in red balbriggans, a hat, and boots walking toward them. One half turned to the other, dipped his chin toward the trough, and said, “That’s Jim Winter.”

“No shit?” said the other, poking his hat brim back off his forehead.

Longarm stopped at the stock trough, looked down at Jim Winter staring up at him, legs dangling down the end of it, arms hooked over the sides.

“Who’re you?” one of the two others asked Longarm.

The lawman scratched his cheek with his Colt’s front gun sight. “The hombre who just killed Jim Winter, I reckon.”

“Jim owed me twenty dollars,” said the man who’d identified the bushwhacker.

Longarm shrugged. “You can have whatever’s on him as long as you haul him out of here and bury him; same with his two pards in the hotel.”

The two men looked at each other, shrugged, and came on down the boardwalk to pull Jim Winter out of the stock tank. Longarm walked back toward the hotel. Footsteps rose on his right and a familiar voice called, “Who’s shootin’ over here?”

Longarm turned to see a skinny, stoop-shouldered figure tramping toward him. For a few seconds, he couldn’t place the bull-legged gent in a long nightshirt dangling to his bony knees, and a night sock, the tail of which hung down over his right shoulder.

“Custis, that you?”

Then Longarm saw the mule-eared boots not unlike his own, though far older, and he lifted his gaze to the drooping salt-and-pepper mustache brushing down past the old ranger’s chin. The last time Longarm had passed through Broken Jaw, there’d been no local lawman. It was up to the rangers manning the outpost to keep the town in trim. That must still be the setup. Longarm couldn’t help chuckling at Sanders’s costume, but then he remembered that his wick had nearly been trimmed.

“What kind of a town you runnin’, Roscoe?” he said. “A man can’t get a good night’s rest without three men tryin’ to beef him through his door!”

“Huh? Whuh?” Sanders stopped and looked around, befuddled, indignant. His craggy cheeks darkened, and he spat to one side as he poked an accusing finger at Longarm, who continued walking toward the hotel. “Custis, you’re trouble. Always have been, always will be! You pack it like most men pack tobacco!”

Longarm stopped at the bottom of the Arizona House’s front steps and stared up at Haven Delacroix standing atop the gallery, dressed in her thin pink wrap, her hair down, her LeMats in her hands.

Longarm shook his head and climbed the steps, growling, “Nah, the trouble’s right here.”

He glanced at her as he brushed past her. He vaguely noted the smell of booze on her but she looked sober enough now in the wake of the dustup. She arched a peevish brow. “You think I’m to blame for this?”

Longarm walked through the open door and into the hotel, not looking back as he said, “It wasn’t me they wanted to fuck.”