Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance

Chapter 20

Longarm took off running toward the wash and the hills beyond.

Haven began firing the Winchester behind him. She was probably a good two hundred yards away from the man, shooting uphill, so the Winchester would be hard-pressed to hit its target even with an expert squeezing the trigger. But her shots blew up dust along the slope below the man, causing him to jerk his head down behind the rise he was lying against.

Longarm ran hard, tracing a zigzagging pattern in case the man opened up on him again. A Big Fifty could shoot upward of a thousand yards, and the .50-caliber cartridges loaded with ninety grains of black powder, designed for penetrating a thick buffalo hide, would punch a fist-sized hole in a man.

Longarm made it across the wash with the ambusher triggering only two rounds well behind him, while Haven was apparently reloading the Winchester. Longarm ran to the base of one of the hills, hunkered low, and looked up over his left shoulder, holding his Colt straight up in his right hand.

He couldn’t see the ambusher from this angle, but the bastard was near. Longarm waited.

The man had stopped shooting. Longarm looked out to where Haven crouched behind the rock. He could see only his rifle barrel poking up from behind the rock, but he knew she was keeping an eye on him.

He waved his gun hand broadly, indicating she should hold fire, and then he slipped into a crease between the hill directly behind him and the next one to the west—the one on which the ambusher lay. The gap was about twenty yards wide, stippled with brush and rocks.

A rattlesnake rattled at him from atop a flat rock, lifting its button tail as well as it flat, diamond-shaped head, sticking out its forked tongue. Longarm swung wide of the rock and turned and began climbing the ambusher’s hill, keeping an eye out for more snakes.

All he needed on top of getting ambushed was a load of the excruciatingly painful viper venom. If that happened, in minutes he’d be begging the ambusher to finish him.

He climbed the steep slope, his boot heels slipping in the chalky soil, using his free hand to grab clumps of short grass and shrub branches to steady his progress. When he gained the crest, he doffed his hat, peered down the opposite side, and cursed.

The ambusher was galloping at a slant up the next hill beyond, his black-and-white pinto working hard against the steep climb, lunging off its short rear legs. The rider was too far away for the Colt, but Longarm couldn’t help squeezing off a desperate round.

The slug blew up rock dust well below the rider, when the man was about twenty yards below the crest of the next hill. Gravel crunched behind Longarm. In the corner of his left eye, a shadow moved.

He swung around to see a big Mexican moving up on him, holding two Schofields in his hands, the barrels aimed at Longarm’s belly.

The man’s face was the texture of ancient, black leather. His eyes were washed-out blue, one more than the other, and his two yellow front teeth were chipped. He wore a black sombrero, but his hat was lower crowned than his friend’s. He was dressed nearly all in black except for a brown-and-red calico shirt beneath his black vest, and he wore bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest, two empty holsters held up high above his hips and positioned for the cross draw.

“Are you prepared for death, mi amigo?” the man said, as he came up level with Longarm and placed his thumbs on his pistol hammers, preparing to rock them back. He squinted his eyes though they didn’t seem to focus. Bad eyesight, Longarm thought.

Suddenly, there was a smacking sound, and the man’s head tipped sharply to his left. His face crumpled in a deep scowl, and he triggered one of his Schofields into the ground. At the same time, the crack of a rifle reached Longarm’s ears, and the would-be assassin staggered sideways, dropping the pistol he’d fired and reaching out with that hand as though to grab something with which to break his fall.

He didn’t find it.

He fell hard and rolled onto his back, eyelids fluttering as life left him.

Quickly, his limbs and lids fell still, and he lay staring straight up at Longarm through his washed-out blue eyes, arms thrown out to both sides, legs slightly bent so that the rowels of his spurs touched. Blood leaked out the ragged hole in his right temple and dribbled onto the gravelly ground. The bullet must have exited the back of his head, behind his left ear, because the ground there was quickly growing red, as well.

Longarm turned back toward the west. The other rider had stopped his pinto on the opposite hillcrest, and he was facing Longarm now, clearly outlined in black against the sky. He stared toward the lawman and his dead partner, and then he swung his horse around and dropped down the far side of the hill and galloped out of sight.

Longarm turned toward where the shot had come from.

Agent Delacroix was walking across the broad, pale wash. She held the lawman’s Winchester on her shoulder. She kept her head down, likely watching for snakes, as she long-strode toward the hill and the man she’d left dead at Longarm’s boots.

“Nice shot,” he told her as she climbed the hill.

As she approached the crest of the hill, between strained breaths, she said, “The other one?”

“Gone.” Longarm knelt beside the dead man, patted his pockets, finding nothing but a small roll of Mexican greenbacks, a sack of chopped Mexican tobacco that smelled like pepper, stripped corn shucks for rolling, two knives in small sheaths, and ammunition.

Lots of ammunition.

There was nothing that identified him personally.

“A killer,” Longarm said. “A hired one, most likely. Wonder if whoever hired him knew his eyes were bad?”

“What would he be doing out here? He couldn’t have known we were coming.”

“Maybe he works for this Azrael feller who owns the ranch he’s on. Nothin’ to do but to ask him.” Longarm rose and looked around. “His horse must be around here somewhere. When we find it, we’ll tie him to it and haul him over to the Double D headquarters.”

Haven stood looking around, her hair and her duster billowing in the hot breeze. “While there’s still some light left, I’d like to look around here for the gold.”

“Might as well, though I doubt we’re gonna find it.”

“You never know. Big Frank might have it right.”

Longarm had just found too many holes in the story about the gold to believe that was true. Not that Big Frank had been lying. Santana was likely the liar. If the Mexican really had hid the gold here, the chance of it still being found here was damn slim.

Longarm found himself scrutinizing his partner admiringly. “That was a damn tough shot from that distance,” he said. “How’d you make it, anyways?”

“Why are you so surprised?”

“’Cause you’re a girl.”

He’d meant it as a joke, because she could obviously shoot her LeMats as well, and as willingly, as most men. She hadn’t seen the humor in the remark, however, and brandished a narrow-eyed look as she shoved his rifle at him, barrel-first. He took it, and watched her walk down the hill and into the crease in which Big Frank said that Santana’s gang had buried the gold.

Longarm mentally kicked his own ass. “When are you gonna learn to keep your whiskey funnel closed, old son?”

After looking around carefully to make sure the first shooter hadn’t circled back around to wreak more havoc with his Sharps Big Fifty, Longarm followed his partner into the crease between the hills. The bottom was a dry watercourse dropping from a high ridge, the top of which he couldn’t see from his vantage, for the chasm twisted between high, stony walls.

He could see why Santana had led his men in here when the Apaches had attacked them—there were plenty of strewn boulders offering cover. They’d likely buried the gold in one of the many nooks and crannies amongst the rocks, and then either fought their way out of the chasm or rode on up and over the pass to safety on the eastern side.

“Remember, you’re looking for a boulder with a large ‘X’ scratched into it.”

“I remember,” the girl said with her customary strained tolerance.

“Just remindin’ ya.”

“Thank you,” she said as she continued walking up the watercourse, swinging her head from right to left and back again, scrutinizing every half-concealed pocket.

“Don’t mention it.” Longarm looked behind and between several boulders. “Where did you say the gold was headed when the stage was hit?”

“A bank in Tucson.”

“For what?”

“I don’t believe it’s in the report, was it?” she asked. “You read the same one I did. If my superiors know, they didn’t share the information with me.”

Longarm kept walking up the draw. “You sound testy. Was it the girl comment?”

She stopped and gave him a sidelong look, her eyes shaded from the blazing sun by her hat brim. “I could have told you that you have mighty poor hearing for a lawman, but I didn’t, did I?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You couldn’t hear that killer walking up behind you?”

Longarm felt a colicky burn in his gut. “He musta been particularly quiet. Besides, I was hearing the thuds of the horse of that first hombre—the one with the buffalo cannon.” He felt injured by her insult mostly because he knew she was right—he should have heard the second man walking up behind him, and he was damn lucky the man hadn’t just shot him from a distance. “Remember, Miss Fancy Britches, I’ve saved your hide a time or two myself.”

She stopped and looked back at him again, blinking slowly. “Once.”

“Twice. Once in Jerkwater, once in Broken Jaw.”

She laughed caustically. “I handled myself well both times!”

“Sure, but only because I culled the herd o’ them that was gunnin’ for ya. Only they wouldn’t have gunned ya till they’d had their fun with you.”

She turned to face him straight on from several yards up the rocky wash, between two boulders slanting like tables with missing legs. “Those were not the only two times men have tried to have their ways with me out here, Marshal Long. I’m accustomed to it. I expect it and am always prepared for it.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re always prepared to take on so many by your lonesome. Next time that many decide to skin your panties off your purty legs, I’ll just let ’em!”

“Quit calling my legs ‘purty’.”

“Pretty, then. What’s the difference?”

She raised her voice, and despite her usual restraint, it trembled slightly with barely controlled emotion. “I wasn’t mocking your uncultivated mode of speaking just then. What I meant was, I’d rather you stopped speaking about my legs or any other part of my body.”

“Your legs are damn purty, and I’ll mention ’em any time if I feel I need to in the course of defending myself from your harangues, Agent Delacroix!”

Longarm stared down his arm and extended a finger at her, as though he were aiming a rifle barrel. His face was flushed. He felt it grow even hotter when she just stared at him with mild amusement and then chuckled with even more hilarity.

Shaking her head, she turned away and continued walking up the wash.

Longarm lowered his arm, feeling ridiculous. He’d let himself be lured into her female trap, had been made to look foolish. And, somehow—he wasn’t quite sure how—she’d won the argument.

No wonder he had no intention of ever letting himself get hitched.

Well, since he couldn’t get any more trapped than he was: “And your tits are mighty nice, too!”

She ignored him and kept walking. He stood in place for a time, let himself cool down despite the stifling heat burning through his hat to seer the top of his head, and then continued looking around at the rocks and boulders and clumps of tough, wiry brown brush.

He’d just inspected the purple shadows between two stacked boulders at the ravine’s stony southern ridge, and was about to continue on up the wash, when he stopped suddenly. Haven stood at the far end of the stacked boulders, looking at him with a grim, meaningful cast to her gaze. She held her hands straight down at her sides.

“You come back to thank me for the compliment?” he asked her snidely.

She shook her head, took a step back, and half turned to indicate the wash beyond her. Longarm automatically brought his rifle down from his shoulder as he brushed past her and continued on up the draw, letting his right arm brush the side of the stacked boulders, and looked across their updraw side.

A man lay in the shadows, arms stretched nearly straight above his hatless head. His ankles and boots, worn to the color and texture of older moccasins, were crossed.

Longarm moved closer to the body, saw the thin, dark brown hair combed to the left, the ginger-colored eyes staring through half-closed lids. The man wore a grim smile on his mouth mantled with a brown, dragoon-style mustache. Around his neck was a bloody green neckerchief.

Behind the tightly wound cloth, a long, gaping wound shone. His throat had been cut. There didn’t appear any other wounds.

Longarm heard Haven’s boots on the gravel behind him, saw her shadow in the corner of his left eye. She came up beside him and stared down at the dead man.

Longarm looked at the Arizona Ranger’s badge pinned to the man’s cream cotton shirt, partly concealed by a suspender strap. “Matt Sullivan.”

“Captain Leyton’s likely around here somewhere, too.”

Longarm doffed his hat and ran a weary, frustrated hand down his face. “Likely.”

Haven dropped to a knee beside the dead man and pressed the back of her hand against his cheek with surprising tenderness. Her voice was matter-of-fact, however, when she said, “He hasn’t been dead for more than an hour. Wasn’t bushwhacked, though. Disarmed first, then killed. Your dead blind man must have slit his throat with one of those knives of his.”

Longarm shook his head. “Damn. If we’d gotten here an hour earlier…”

Haven straightened. “Someone doesn’t want anyone looking for that gold. Which must mean it’s still here.”

“Yeah, well, you worry about the gold. Me—I’m gonna worry about findin’ out who killed Sullivan and the others. Jack Leyton, most likely, too.”

“Since we’re on Double D land…”

“Yeah, we’d best load up these dead men. I’m gonna go pay a visit to the Double D headquarters.”

She scowled. “And me?”

“You best hole up out here. Not right here, but out here somewhere safe.”

“I’m riding to the Double D headquarters with you, Marshal Long.”

“No place for a woman. Specially one such as you.” Longarm let his eyes flick to her breasts.

She gave him a blandly stubborn look, her eyes faintly smiling.

Longarm blew a long sigh, switching his gaze to the dead Matt Sullivan and then back to his partner.

There was no point in arguing with such a woman. “Then I hope you’re ready for another fight, Miss Delacroix. A pitched battle, too, since ole Whip Azrael likely has a dozen or so men on his roll. Well-armed ones, too, judging by those we’ve met so far.”