Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance

Chapter 19

Longarm awoke the next morning feeling as though he’d tangled with seven bobcats in the back of a covered wagon.

He slid out from beneath Haven, who slept naked beneath the two wool blankets of his hot roll, and dressed quietly in the predawn darkness. He rummaged around in the brush for more dry wood and laid a new fire.

When he dropped a branch atop the building flames, Haven lifted her head from his saddle with a gasp, clutching her blankets to her breasts, her eyes sharp with fear between tangles of her lustrous brown hair.

“Easy,” he said, holding up one hand, palm out. “Just me.”

She did not blink but continued to stare at him as though he were a bear that had wandered into her camp. The fear was slow to fade. When it did, her pale cheeks were touched with the pink of embarrassment, and then she rose quickly, holding his blankets around her luscious body, and gathered her clothes.

When she had them all, she tramped off into the mesquites to dress in private.

Longarm got out his pot and made coffee, casting speculative glances at the mysterious creature in the mesquites beyond him. He’d never known a girl quite like her, and he had a feeling there was plenty more to her story than what she’d shared last night.

“Looks like it’s going to be another hot day,” she said, throwing her hair out from her shirt collar when she returned from the brush, dressed and carrying his blanket roll neatly tied. She looked around and he saw that the earlier, mysterious fear was gone from her eyes, the old Haven Delacroix returned.

At least, the day one.

Very odd how she could be one person during the day, nearly the opposite one at night.

As they ate jerky and biscuits for breakfast and drank coffee, they said little, and what they did say in no way referenced the night before. They discussed the route to the dead lawmen’s graves, and they discussed the missing gold and who might have taken it, and where they might find water out here, and that was all. It was almost, Longarm thought, as though they had not coupled like wolves only a few hours ago.

As though theirs were only a cool, impersonal, professional relationship.

Which was fine with him. Odd. But fine.

He did, however, feel compelled to say later, as they finished saddling their horses with the sun nearly up, “Since we’re partnered up an’ all, Haven…I mean, Agent Delacroix…you can tell me anything you want, you know. Anything you might want to get off your chest.” He draped his saddlebags over the roan’s back and looked at her over his saddle. “Just so’s you know.”

He meant that she could tell him why she’d had such fear in her eyes when she’d first seen him this morning, after their rare, erotic intimacy of the night before.

She took her steeldust’s reins and swung into the leather, the saddle squawking beneath her, looking at him with a faint, appreciative smile, the smile of a stranger passing on the street. “Why, thank you, Marshal Long. I do appreciate that, I guess…”

She reined away and nudged her horse with her heels.

Longarm chuffed softly, curiously, and swung up onto the roan’s back. He followed Agent Delacroix to the old Indian trail they’d been following, and then she held up to allow him to take the lead. He was the one with the map, and as they rode throughout the morning, he consulted the plat frequently, looking around at the changing terrain. It was hard to tell because of the sketchiness of the map and all the various formations sliding around him, but he believed that they were in, or nearly in, the Black Puma Mountains.

They rode between two low, shelving mesas and then dropped into a broad canyon, and suddenly he reined the roan up beside a trail that curved out of the desert on his left and swept off into the desert to his right, disappearing into the humped shapes of what he took to be the Black Pumas. Off the far side of the trail about a hundred yards appeared to be a wash.

When he and Haven had ridden up to the wash, they swung east and rode along the arroyo’s sandy bottom for another hundred yards when he heard a low growling up the southern bank on his right. He put the roan up the bank, stopped the horse, cursed, and slid his Winchester out of its scabbard.

Ahead, lay five mounded graves backed with wooden crosses constructed of driftwood branches tied together with rawhide. Two of the crosses were tipped over, resting on their sides. One coyote sat a ways back from the graves, shifting its weight between its front paws and watching another that stood beside one of the rock mounds, tugging and growling at what looked like a piece of red cloth, trying to pull it out from beneath the rocks.

As Haven rode up behind him, Longarm levered a cartridge into the Winchester’s breech, and planted a bead on the coyote tugging on the cloth. He dropped the sights and fired, pluming rock dust up from in front the coyote. Both carrion eaters wheeled and ran off through the brush, casting worried, angry looks behind them.

“Good God,” Haven said as Longarm swung down from his saddle.

There’d been no point in killing the beasts, for they were only doing what they were naturally inclined to do. As he walked up to the five graves, he saw that what the coyote had been tugging on was a red calico shirtsleeve. What appeared to be a hand protruded from above the sleeve, two of the fingers missing, leaving a thumb and the body’s ring finger on which was a gold wedding band ground deep into the swollen flesh around it. The sleeve was badly torn, held together by threads.

Longarm heaved a sigh as he inspected the graves. He wished he had a shovel with which to properly rebury the hand, but he did not. Besides, there was little point. The ground around the graves was a maze of padded footprints, and a foot-deep hole had been dug along one of the graves. There was a hungry pack of brush wolves around here, and they’d probably eventually get to the carrion slouched beneath the rocks.

The men were dead. Now they were food. Just the way it worked.

Longarm looked around at the rocky desert tufted with Spanish bayonet and greasewood, the occasional saguaro and pipestem cactus, as though probing the terrain for the ghosts of the dead men who might be able to suggest who had killed them and why. Haven reined her steeldust around the graves and stopped a few yards away.

“Where were they killed?” she asked.

“A few yards east of where they’re buried.”

As Haven dismounted, he rode over and joined her, swinging down from the roan’s back. She was down on one knee, swinging her head from left to right, scanning the scuffed ground.

There were more coyote tracks here, bird tracks, as well as several shod hoofprints and men’s boot impressions. The men from Whip Azrael’s Double D Ranch had been here, as well as the dead men themselves…when they were still alive…and the killer or killers.

Impossible to separate the tracks of the killers from the killed and then from those of the men who’d buried the fallen. There were several brown patches that were likely blood.

Haven dropped her horse’s reins and walked around for a time, quietly scanning the terrain, the breeze blowing her duster out away from her hips. Finally, at the southern edge of the tracks and scuffmarks, she turned to Longarm and hooked her gloved thumbs behind her cartridge belt. “If only the rocks could talk.”

Longarm was feeling the same frustration, realizing the long odds of ever finding answers to the questions that had driven him and her down here.

Five men were dead. He’d known none of them, but Sanders had told him they were all good lawmen. The marshals had just happened to be visiting the ranger post when Big Frank Three Wolves had told his story, so they’d ridden down here on a whim with the rangers.

Apparently, there were no witnesses to the killings. There was some stolen gold buried around here. Whether it was still here was anyone’s guess. The gold might or might not be the reason the three rangers and two federal lawmen had been murdered—gunned down where they’d been riding, apparently. Ambushed.

Yet another question pecked at Longarm’s brain.

Where were Captain Jack Leyton and Ranger Matt Sullivan, who’d ridden down here after the murders to investigate? So far, he’d spied no sign of them.

Had they gotten this far?

“Where did Big Frank say the gold was buried?” Haven asked, addressing her main concern.

Longarm looked past her to a rise of chalky hills to the south, on the other side of what appeared another rock-strewn dry wash. “Over there. In one of those creases between the camelbacks. Santana told Big Frank it was between the two biggest humps, near a saguaro and a flat-topped boulder. Atop the boulder, one of Santana’s bunch carved a large ‘X,’ though that ‘X’ might be worn away by now, since they were here all of a decade ago.”

She turned to appraise the bluffs that looked bleached out in the midday light, then turned to Longarm and extended a hand toward the hot, dry-looking formations. “Shall we?”

“Why not?”

He stepped into his saddle and booted the roan across the rocky flat toward the broad wash running along the base of the far buttes. The wash was only slightly lower than the ground he now crossed, and delineated by a few ragged, dusty mesquites and cottonwoods, a few wind-twisted paloverdes. Haven’s horse clomped up from behind him, and she rode up beside him on his left.

Birds cheeped in the chaparral around them. There was a streak of red as a roadrunner dashed out from behind a barrel cactus to cross in front of the riders and then disappear in a nest of bone-white boulders piled like a fallen house of cards.

Longarm’s attention was drawn to a dark speck atop one of the hills growing larger before him, on the other side of the wash. Squinting, his keen vision revealed what appeared a steeple-crowned sombrero hovering over a rifle barrel extended in Longarm’s and Agent Delacroix’s general direction.

Longarm threw himself to his left, turning enough that his chest rammed Haven’s right shoulder as he kicked free of his stirrups. Sweeping the girl out of her own saddle, they flew down her horse’s left stirrup at the same time that what sounded like a distant cannon thundered.

Twisting yet again, Longarm landed on his back, drawing Haven down on top of him, cushioning the girl’s fall, and saw dust blow up about twenty yards straight behind them, the heavy slug screeching as it ricocheted off a rock.

The horses continued walking straight ahead and then, realizing they were without riders, stopped and sort of half turned, reins dangling.

Longarm pushed Haven away from him, yelling, “Take cover!”

She wasted no time scrambling to her feet and then running toward a table-sized rock. Wincing at the ache in his back from his hard tumble to the ground, Longarm scrambled to his own feet as the rocketing blast of the heavy-caliber rifle sounded again, this slug tearing up rocks and sand only a foot in front of him. He jerked to his right and lunged for his horse, which was fiddle-footing nervously now, and shucked his Winchester from his saddle boot.

“Get outta here!” he yelled at the horse, smashing the rifle’s butt against its left wither.

He sent the horse running off in similar fashion, both sets of reins bouncing along the ground, and then ran toward where Haven was hunkered down behind the rock.

The big gun thundered again, the slug hammering the ground about two feet from Longarm’s pounding boots. Haven triggered one of her LeMats twice over the top of the rock, and Longarm hunkered down beside her, doffing his hat and edging a look over the rock toward the shooter.

“Don’t waste your bullets,” Longarm told the girl. “He’s way out of range of a handgun.”

“I know that,” she said snidely. “I was just trying to distract him so he wasn’t as likely to blow your head off.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention—”

The thunderous whonk of another heavy chunk of lead crashing into the ground a few feet in front of their boulder cut her off. It was followed a half second later by the explosion of the rifle.

“A Big Fifty, you think?” she asked.

“I think.” Longarm peeked over the top of the rock, saw the silhouetted figure on the bluff eject the spent shell casing from the Sharps’ breech.

He nudged her arm with the butt of his Winchester. “You know how to shoot one of these?”

“Of course. I just don’t carry one because I like to travel light and I usually have more use for my brains than bullets.” As the Big Fifty boomed again, she flinched and pulled her head down lower behind the rock. “In the future, I might reconsider.”

He held the long gun out to her. “Cover me. I’m going to try to run on up on him, get around him, find out what in the hell he’s so hot about.”

Haven holstered her LeMats, took Longarm’s Winchester, and smoothly racked a fresh cartridge into the breech.

He paused to wonder vaguely she’d acquired her facility with the weapon, and then handed her five extra cartridges from his belt loops. He slid his Colt from its holster. Looking over the top of the boulder once more, he saw the rifle-wielding, sombrero-clad ambusher hunkered low over his Sharps. Longarm pulled his head down as the big gun hammered another round, this one smashing into the rock behind which Longarm and Haven were hunkered.

Longarm felt the vibration through his shoulder.

Knowing the man had to eject the spent casing and slide a fresh .50-90 cartridge into the breech, he rose quickly and donned his hat.

“Keep him busy, but don’t get your head shot off!”

She cast him a faintly worried look through the dark brown hair blowing around her face, and this gave him pause. He’d never seen her worried before—only frustratingly forthright and headstrong.

“Be careful, Custis,” she said. “That’s a big damn gun.”