Longarm and the Cry of the Wolf (9781101619506) (12 page)

Longarm carried his rifle in one hand as he ran, pumping his arms and legs. He didn't worry about tripping. The moonlight was nearly as bright as sunlight, delineating all the rocks and shrubs and piles of discarded lumber in his path.

Ahead, the desperate shooting continued. While the men's shouts and cries dwindled, the yipping and snarling of enraged wolves grew louder. It all was emanating from down a long hill strewn with boulders and spiked with cedars and junipers. On Longarm's right, the black ridge wall jutted against the stars whose light was barely visible amid the incredible, buttery light of the high-kiting moon.

He could hear Catherine running behind him though he was gradually outdistancing her. Ahead, he could see the flashes of the guns, the flames stabbing toward his left, where wolf-shaped shadows flicked this way and that.

Longarm stopped suddenly. Something moved downslope about twenty yards away. Two yellow eyes glowed. A man lay beside the wolf, writhing in pain. The wolf was shaking something in its teeth. An arm. Longarm could see two rings on the pale hand winking in the moonlight as the wolf shook the arm as though it were a rabbit.

Longarm raised the Winchester, planted a bead on the wolf's shoulder, nudged it up and back, and squeezed the trigger. The Winchester screeched loudly, flames stabbing from the barrel. The wolf lurched back and up, yipping before dropping the arm and piling up at its victim's quivering feet.

Longarm snapped a curse. Footsteps and heavy breathing grew louder behind him. He turned to see Catherine approaching. She'd lost her hat, and her hair blew in the wind, her eyes wide with alarm.

“Stay here,” he told her, and then ran forward to drop beside the wolf. He placed a hand in the thick, knotted fur. The beast was still warm, but there was no heartbeat.

He went over to the wolf's victim. Catherine ran up beside him and crouched down over the bloody body.

“Sidney!” she gasped.

Ashton-Green, clothed in a fur coat but missing his hat, a thick scarf around his neck, moved his lips as he tried to speak, but then he gave a long sigh. He sagged back against the ground and lay still.

Catherine sobbed. The shooting and yelling and wolf snarling continued farther down the slope. Longarm leaped over Sidney and continued running toward where, while the guns roared, the shadows jostled around what appeared to be a pile of rocks.

A man screamed. A wolf howled victoriously and snarled especially loudly.

Another man shouted, and then there was only one rifle barking, stabbing flames at the silhouetted wolves surrounding the man.

So he wouldn't get hit by one of the bullets that the shooter seemed to be flinging every which way in his desperate attempt to keep himself out of the jaws of his attackers, Longarm dropped to one knee behind a boulder. Quickly, he slapped his Winchester butt plate to his shoulder and began picking out shadows and firing.

The echoes of the thundering reports hammered off the side of the ridge. Wolves yipped and squealed. The surviviors of Longarm's fussilade, confused and disoriented by the unexpected attack, retreated off down the slope.

Silence.

Longarm quickly thumbed fresh cartridges through the rifle's loading gate as he stared through the powder smoke that wafted like fog around his head, toward the nest of rocks ahead of him.

As he worked, he shouted, “Who's over there?”

The responding voice was weak, breathless. “Gen . . . General Fortescue. Is that you, Marshal Long?”

“Father!” Catherine yelled.

“Catherine! Good Christ—what are you doing out here?”

Longarm waved the girl to silence. “You torn up, General?”

“No. I was bit, but not bad.”

“Then run this way while I cover you.”

Catherine started to run to the general, but Longarm grabbed her arm and pulled her back behind the rocks. “Stay here. He'll make it.”

“Father, hurry!” Catherine cried.

Longarm racked a fresh cartridge into the Winchester's breech then aimed in the general's direction, sliding the barrel left to right and back again, watching for wolves. The general's stocky, slightly stooped figure rose up out of the rocks where he'd sought refuge from the kill-crazy beasts, and began jogging up the grade toward Longarm and Catherine.

“Hurry, Father!” the girl called.

Aside from the howls of the wolf coming from the direction of the convent, which Longarm had become so accustomed to that he now only vaguely heard them, the night was silent. Nothing moved around the general. The man lumbered up the hill. When he was twenty feet from Longarm, the lawman walked out to grab the man's arm. Catherine ran to him then, too, and took the breathless, wheezing man's other arm.

“How bad are you hurt?” Catherine asked.

The man shook his head. “Just my leg. My hand. I'll be all right. We followed them down here from town, and they jumped us. Just like Indians, they surrounded and swarmed all over us.”

“You think any of your boys are still alive down there?” Longarm asked, glancing over his shoulder.

“No,” the general wheezed. “They were jumped immediately. I started firing and so did Sidney. That's how we got away. Sidney said he was going to try to get to town for help.” He looked questioningly from Catherine to Longarm.

“He didn't make it, Father,” Catherine said, grimly. “It's okay. You're all right. We'll get you back to town. What a stupid thing to do in the first place!”

“Yes, yes, well—I've no defense except that I just didn't realize how many there are. How brave they are. I've never seen wolves like this.”

As Longarm and Catherine continued guiding and steering the man up the hill, swinging wide around Sidney Ashton-Green's dark, bloody form, Longarm said, “I never have either. And for good reason. These wolves are being fed. Probably regularly and probably just enough to keep them wanting more. That's why there's so many of them, why they're so big and, likely, why they've become so brave!”

“
Fed?
” The General stopped suddenly and looked in shock at the tall lawman. “
Why? Who?
”

They'd just reached the top of the hill and were heading back in the direction of the farmyard when something flashed in the moonlight and inky shadows ahead. Longarm knew it was a gun before he heard the bullet screech about six inches off his left ear and spang off a rock behind him. A half second later, the rifle's thundering report vaulted around the canyon.

“Down!” he shouted, throwing the general behind a large boulder to his left and then quickly throwing Catherine down after her father. There were two more flashes in a low escarpment just ahead about thirty yards and to his right—a flash on each side of the scarp that appeared as a dark mound trimmed in silvery moonlight, bristling with moon-silvered and -shadowed junipers.

Longarm snapped his rifle to his shoulder and triggered one round where he'd seen each flash, then threw himself sideways behind the boulder. The bushwhackers cut down on him again, their slugs blowing up dust and gravel inches from his heels. He drew his legs behind the cover and pressed his back against the boulder.

Catherine put her hand on his shoulder. “Are you hit, Custis?”

“No. Not that they ain't tryin'!”

“Who's
they
?” asked the general, sitting on the other side of Catherine, with his back against the boulder, holding his bit hand in his lap gingerly. His gray hair and carefully trimmed mustache shone in the moonlight.

Longlarm pumped another shell into his Winchester's breech, gritting his teeth in fury. “Calvin and his big deputy.” He doffed his hat and slid a cautious glance out around the boulder.

A gun on the low scarp's right side flashed. The bullet curled the air off Longarm's right cheek before plunking into the ground with a high, echoing whine behind him.

“Marshal Calvin?” Catherine said, shocked. “But
why
?”

“Ain't exactly sure, but I got a pretty good idea.”

Longarm quickly snaked his rifle around the edge of the boulder and fired two quick shots. He waited until he saw a head-shaped shadow slide out from behind the scarp's right side, and he fired again. Because of the Winchester's momentarily blinding flash and the billowing gray powder smoke, he couldn't tell if he'd hit anything. But the bushwhacker's head was no longer where he'd last seen it.

He thumbed fresh shells through the long gun's loading gate, replacing the ones he'd spent. The general was breathing hard, raspily, on the other side of Catherine, who knelt beside Longarm, regarding him fearfully.

“What are we going to do?”

Before Longarm could respond, Calvin yelled from the other side of the escarpment, “Longarm, come on out of there. We know you got the girl with you. You come out, we'll let her live!”

“I know better than that, Calvin,” Longarm returned, his voice echoing in the still, cold, quiet night. “You know we saw the barn. You'll want to make sure we both can't talk about it!”

“That's a promise, Longarm! You come out, the girl lives! I give you my word!”

“As an honest man?” Longarm laughed without mirth. “I tell you what—you and that giant come out, and I'll let you both live! You keep sending lead my way, you're gonna piss-burn me bad, and I'm gonna make sure neither one of you sees the next sunrise, let alone the next full moon!”

Silence.

Longarm turned to Catherine. “You stay with your father.”

“What're you going to do?”

“I'm gonna circle around 'em. I want you to keep 'em entertained with this. But don't give 'em a target.” Longarm extended the Winchester to her. “They'll think it's me. Just a shot every fifteen seconds or so oughta do it.”

“You got it,” she said with a resolute nod, pursing her lips. “You be careful. More than one breed of wolf out here, obviously.”

“Yeah, obviously.”

Longarm slid his pistol from its holster, spun the barrel across his forearm, rose, and glanced at Catherine. “All right.”

As she snaked the Winchester around the side of the boulder, while keeping her head safely back behind the cover, and triggered a shot, Longarm ran straight back to the south. When he'd run fifty yards or so—far enough away that Calvin and Emil likely couldn't see him—he turned and followed a shallow, narrow gully west another fifty yards.

As he moved, he could hear Catherine firing his Winchester roughly every fifteen seconds. It kept Calvin and Emil busy, but he knew it was only a matter of time before the two crooked local lawmen tried circling around and flanking Catherine and her father. Occasionally, Calvin shouted something that Longarm couldn't hear above the shooting, but he assumed the town marshal was still trying to convince Longarm his situation was hopeless.

About twenty minutes after he'd left Catherine and the general, Longarm found himself nearly straight north of Calvin and Emil. He was a little higher, as well. Below, he could see the two men's rifles flashing every few seconds as they tried to get “Longarm” to deplete his own ammo and be forced to give himself up.

They hunkered behind the low, sandstone shelf, Emil to Longarm's far left now, Calvin to the shelf's right end.

Longarm moved out from behind a gnarled piñon and, crouching to make as small a target as possible, walked toward Calvin. The man must have spied his moon shadow. After firing another shot with his Winchester, the town marshal stiffened. He pumped a fresh cartridge into his carbine's breech and spun toward Longarm.

“Calvin, drop it!”

The man leveled the carbine. Longarm triggered the .44. Calvin triggered the carbine, but not before Longarm's bullet had punched a hole through the man's right side and knocked him backward. The local lawman's rifle belched groundward, blowing up a dogget of grass, gravel, and dust just off the tip of his right boot.

Longarm turned left as the giant spun with a startled grunt, bringing a rifle around. Longarm fired twice, one bullet crashing into a rock to the right and just behind Emil. The first bullet had found a home in Emil's left shoulder.

The giant cursed, dropped his rifle, then wheeled to his own right and ran off into a wash that trailed eastward from the shelf that he and his boss had been crouched behind.

“Hold it, Emil!” Longarm dropped to a knee to steady his aim, and fired twice quickly. Both bullets blew up dirt in the moonlight as Emil followed the wash into some giant rocks and cedars.

“Shit!” Longarm cupped a hand to his mouth, lifting his voice. “Catherine, hold your fire!”

Longarm bolted off his heels and ran forward, to where Calvin was sitting on his butt and reclining against the sandstone shelf, arms crossed on his belly, head sagging. He was breathing hard. Longarm tossed the man's carbine off into the rocks. He shucked Calvin's six-shooter from the holster under the man's heavy blanket coat and gave it the same treatment as the rifle.

“You bastard!” Calvin spat, looking up from beneath his hat brim, the hat tilted back and right. His face was pinched with fury. “Why the hell'd you have to come here? We had it made!”

“No time for hollow apologies, Calvin.” Longarm ran out from the east end of the shelf and into the wash sheathed in high, mushroom-shaped rock formations stippled with cedars and sage shrubs. The moon had angled far to the west, leaving this narrow wash inky with darkness. Plenty of places for a man to hide in here. Longarm had to be careful.

He slowed his pace. The short hairs pricked under his coat collar. He had a feeling Emil was near, waiting.

Longarm slowed his pace and tried to ease his breathing so he could listen for Emil.

He heard the rasp of a pair of heavy lungs, smelled a sharp sweat stench a half second before two big arms grabbed him from behind, pinning his arms against his sides. His breath left his lungs in a heavy
chuff
of expelled air as the dark ground slid away below and Emil lifted him one, two, three feet off the ground.

The giant grunted as he drew Longarm taut against him, literally trying to squeeze the life out of him. Longarm felt his head swelling from lack of oxygen as he kicked wildly, trying to free himself from the bearlike grip.

He rammed a boot heel against the giant's right knee. Emil grunted again, swung hard to his right, dipped, and drew his arms away suddenly, propelling Longarm to the ground at about sixty miles an hour. At least, that's how fast Longarm felt he'd been traveling when the ground slammed into the top of his head. It felt as though it had hammered his noggin six inches down into his torso.

His ears rang. His neck felt as though three railroad spikes had been hammered into it. Knowing he was in for a lot more, he tried to raise his pistol, but found that his hand was empty. He'd dropped the gun. Emil's huge shadow lunged toward him, the giant's anvil-sized boot connecting with Longarm's breastbone.

The lawman groaned, feeling as though his brisket were splintering around his heart, as he flew straight back against a boulder along the wash's bank behind him. He slumped to the wash's sandy floor, catbirds screaming in his ears. For a minute, sickness flooded him, and his guts convulsed. He thought he was going to throw up.

Knowing that Emil was likely about to pounce on him again made him suppress the urge. He lifted his head.

The giant was moving toward him. Moonlight limned the top of the barrel of the pistol in his hand. It also winked off the giant's big teeth as the man spread his lips in a devilish grin.

Emil's voice was so deep it seemed to be emanating from the bottom of a deep well. “End of the trail, lawman. Wolf bait. That's what you are.”

A gun popped from upwash. Longarm saw the flash. Emil grunted as the bullet smashed into the side of his head. The giant teetered like a windmill in a cyclone, gave a groan and a long sigh, and then fell to Longarm's left with a heavy
thump
. Beneath the screeching in Longarm's ears came the crunching of boots. He glanced up to see a bulky silhouette growing larger as the person walked toward him. He could smell the odor of powder smoke mixing with the spicy fragrance of opium.

The figure stopped. Moonlight angling over the north wall of the wash shone on the side of Zeena Radulescu's face. It limned the brown hair blowing around the scarf wrapped over her head. The tassles of a cape rustled in the slight breeze, as did the hems of her dark wool skirts.

There was a click. Longarm sank back on his heels and watched a smoking pistol come up—the Remington .36 he'd emptied once earlier that evening. She aimed the gun at him. Her face in the milky moonlight looked as though it had been carved out of stone—that's how much expression it had.

Longarm said, “Don't tell me you still got your neck up over Kansas Pete.” He paused while she stared at him, holding the gun steady in her black-gloved hand. “Or you just want Emil and me—and Calvin, of course—out of the way so you can have all that gold for yourself?”

“You knew?”

“I suspected Calvin and Emil . . . were up to somethin', just didn't know what. Now I know. And now I know you were in on it, too, helpin' keep the werewolf legend alive here in Crazy Kate.”

“Who knows?” she said cooly. “It could be true.”

“You don't believe that any more than I do. Oh, maybe some of the locals still do.” Just then, right on cue, the wolf from the northern pinnacle of rock howled. “Obviously Crazy Kate herself still does. But she's likely genuinely crazy, thinks she really is a werewolf. You've just been usin' her like you been usin' the legend—to scare as many people out of town as you can, so you can have the gold for yourself—you, Calvin, and Emil, that was . . .”

“You're pretty smart for a lawman,” Zeena said coolly. “Smarter than Calvin. He thought we could just stake a claim. Only you can't stake a claim on public property, of course. The marshal's office and jail belong to the town . . . as well as everything under it.”

“So you cooked it all up.” Longarm sighed, stared at the dark maw of the gun staring with cold indifference back at him. “You won't get away with it. Even with me dead.”

“We'll see.”

Zeena took one step forward, jutting the pistol at Longarm. There was another sharp pop. Only Zeena's gun didn't flash until a second after the pop. The flame stabbing from the .36's maw flew over Longarm's right shoulder, the bullet squealing off a rock high above his head.

The first pop had come from down the wash.

Zeena flew back in the direction she'd come, disappearing in the stygian darkness as she hit the floor of the wash with a thump. She groaned and struggled to rise—Longarm could hear the gravel crunching as she ground her heels into it. Then she gave a sigh and fell silent.

“Custis?” Catherine called. He could hear the girl running toward him. Now he saw her shadow jostling in the darkness.

“Look out!” Longarm said, his voice raspy from the pain shooting through his head, neck, and shoulders.

Too late, Catherine tripped over Emil, flew over the unmoving giant, and landed in front of Longarm, dropping the pistol with which she'd shot Zeena. She shook her head and climbed to her hands and knees, looking at what had taken her boots out from under her.

Turning to Longarm, she shook her head in wonder and said, “What's going on? I stopped back there a ways when I heard you and . . . him . . . fighting. But then she came . . . and I saw the pistol, heard your conversation . . .”

“Well, that about said it—a simple matter of greed,” Longarm said, heaving himself to his feet and then pulling Catherine up, as well. “Where's the general?”

“I left him holding your rifle on Marshal Calvin, though I don't think the marshal's going anywhere or trying anything in his condition.”

“Come on, then. Let's fetch 'em and get back to town before the wolves come back for another meal. I'll send someone out for Zeena and Emil tomorrow, if there's anything left of 'em by then.” He gave a deep sigh. “Most likely, they'll be feedin' 'em one last time.”

•   •   •

Later, when they'd made their way to town, Longarm half-dragging, half-carrying Calvin, with the man's left arm slung over the federal lawmen's shoulders, Longarm glanced at Catherine. “You best get your pa over to the doc's place—if he's there and not at Zeena's. I'll lock up Calvin in one of his own cells. The doc can tend him later.”

Calvin grunted something under his breath that Longarm assumed was an unfavorable estimation of his, Longarm's, family history.

“I'll be all right,” the general said. “I'm very curious to see this gold you're talking about, Marshal. The stuff you think motivated this entire dastardly charade.”

They were mounting the porch fronting the marshal's office, the general limping on his wolf-bit leg, Catherine beside him, her arm around him, Longarm and the half-conscious Calvin leading the way.

When Longarm had unceremoniously dumped the bloody town marshal onto the cot in the jailhouse's middle cell, he fished the keys to the Wolf Hold cells out of the man's coat pocket. At the same time, Catherine lit the lamp on the marshal's desk. Longarm walked out of the cell and over to the trapdoor leading to the Wolf Hold. He was mildly surprised to find the trapdoor open.

“Come on down if you can make it, General. I'll let Mrs. Jacobs and the boy out of their cell and show you what I'm talking about.”

Longarm dropped into the hole. As the General and Catherine followed on the rickety wooden rungs, Longarm started down the corridor, and froze. The door to Goldie's cell was not only open, it lay on the floor in front of his cell, as though it had been blown out from inside. It was illuminated by a torch leaning out from a bracket in a paneled wall on the corridor's left side, on the other side of a small table.

“Who's there?” called Mrs. Leonard, her voice echoing around the cavern. The boy murmured and sobbed quietly.

“Marshal Long, Mrs. Leonard.” Staring at the door in shock, Longarm turned to the door behind which the woman stood, staring through the small, barred window. “Gonna get you outta there.”

He shoved the key in the lock, turned it, and opened the door. The woman stood there, looking terrified. The boy lay curled on the cot behind her, under the blankets, sobbing quietly.

“What . . . what happened?” Longarm said, turning away from the woman and continuing toward Goldie's cell. “Did you see, ma'am?” As he looked inside, none too surprised, given the condition of the door, to see that Goldie wasn't there, the woman stepped up behind him.

“He went crazy,” the woman said in a high, thin voice, wringing her hands together. “And broke out and ran through the hole and that was the last I saw of him. He . . . it . . . was horrible. Oh, the noises he made!”

“You don't mean to say he . . . he turned into a werewolf—do you, Mrs. Leonard?” This from Catherine, who stood with her father near the ladder.

“
Yessss!
” the woman said, turning to face Catherine and her father, still wringing her hands. She had a blanket draped over her shoulders. “Oh, Lord—it is true, after all! I mean . . . I didn't see him. Only heard that awful, terrible roar. A wolf's roar! Why, Davy and I will remember it for the rest of our lives. Then he just dashed past our cell . . . and was gone!”

Longarm peered into the empty cell. He looked down at the door that had been ripped off its hinges. Likely the hinges had been weak to begin with. Old and rusty. Goldie just got fed up with being down here, wanted to get away, and managed to break the hinges and make a run for it.

Longarm placed his hands on the woman's shoulders. “You best take your boy and go home, ma'am,” he said gently. “Rest assured, Goldie didn't turn into any werewolf. You've just had a terrible past few hours, and you're overwrought. You go on home and get some sleep. I'll fetch the doc for you.”

The woman's voice was weak. “Yes, yes, I suppose you may be right, Marshal.”

Mrs. Leonard moved into the cell, lifted her boy off the cot, and carried him over to the ladder. Longarm took the boy from the woman while she climbed, and then, when she'd reached the office above, he handed the child up to her through the hole. He turned to Catherine and the general, both staring at him skeptically.

Longarm chuckled. “Goldie ain't no werewolf. He just had an itch to be free after bein' incarcerated for three long years in the federal pen. Might even have a case of the rabies, poor bastard. But he's not a werewolf.” He stepped past the pair, walking back down the corridor, past the smoking, flickering torch. “Come on. Let's see if my suspicions are right.”

He stepped across the door to the end of the corridor. The wall at the hall's end was paneled in pine planks. As he'd seen before, between the cracks in the planks, something glittered brightly. Using his gloved hands, he ripped a plank from the wall frame, then another. He stepped back and set his hands on his hips, his breath catching in his throat.

“
Whoa!
” said the general.

“You can say that again, Father.” Catherine stepped up beside Longarm in the narrow hall. “Is that really . . .
gold
?”

“I got me a feelin' it's not only gold but good quality gold, judgin' by the color.” Longarm brushed a hand across the small chunks that shone in the wall. In some places, the wall was pitted, which meant that Calvin and Emil, possibly even Zeena, had pried some of the gold out.

“As you can see,” Longarm said, “that beam up there has been replaced. That there is the old one. I got a feeling the earth shifted a little, and when it did, it exposed that big, fat, wide vein of gold. Calvin discovered it, and after his heart quit beatin' so fast and he'd hauled out some of the rubble, he decided to make full use of the werewolf legend to drive everyone he could out of town. The fewer folks here, the fewer he'd have to share the gold with.

“Or maybe he figured that with all the wolves he could lure in with dead deer an' such, he could drive everybody out. Hard to say. If he survives the night, we'll ask him. But that there is the werewolf legend, folks, and the reason there's so many big, hungry wolves in these parts.”

They all stood staring at the gold chunks showing through the dirt in the earthen wall.

The general said, “When did you start to suspect . . . ?”

“When Calvin and Emil hauled the dead wolves off. They were gone a long time. I saw the gold showing between the planks when I threw Goldie into his cell, and then it hit me that they might be up to somethin'.

“I wasn't sure what that somethin' was, but now I realize they were off feedin' the wolves. I don't doubt they had a stash of dead deer somewhere outside of Crazy Kate. They wanted to take full advantage of the moon tonight, so they hauled some fresh meat over to the barn, to work the wolves into a frenzy. They followed Catherine an' me out from town. When they saw that we saw the barn, they knew they had to get rid of us fast.”

Catherine shook her head in disgust. “He locked that poor, injured boy up down here just to help maintain the ruse. He knew he wasn't going to turn into a werewolf.”

“That's about the size of it.”

“What about the gold?” the general wanted to know, staring at it lustfully.

“Belongs to the town. Mrs. Leonard and everyone else around here is going to be rich right fast.”