Longarm and the Cry of the Wolf (9781101619506) (4 page)

“Of several breeds,” Longarm muttered, turning away from the girl reluctantly and shoving Goldie out the winter door and onto the porch.

“Damn, did you fuck that little fillie?” Goldie asked, widening his seedy eyes with open veneration and not a little envy as he and Longarm stepped onto the porch. “Holy shit, lawman, that's a load o' fine woman there. Maybe, on the way to Kate, you could tell me how it was. Come to think of it, you're lookin' right tired.”

Goldie snickered.

Longarm used his rifle butt to prod the outlaw down off the porch and into the roadhouse yard, wincing as pellet-sized snow clawed his cheeks as it fell from an iron-gray sky. Yips and snarls rose from across the stage road that curved along the perimeter of the Hawk's Bluff Tavern, which doubled as a stage relay station. Tall pines and dark crags stood formidably all around the station, and beyond the trail to the southeast, murky shadows of four-legged figures jostled in a tight pack.

“Ah, shit,” Goldie said. “You know what that is?”

“I suspect the coyotes are enjoying a breakfast of your friends, Goldie.” Longarm gave Goldie a hard shove that sent the man stumbling off toward the barn and corral that hulked on the yard's north side. “Quit dawdlin' or you'll be joinin' 'em.”

“You sure that's only coyotes?” Goldie asked as he walked toward the barn, lifting the collar of his blanket coat up high against his jaws. “Some o' them shadows look too big for coyotes. You know, wolves are known to be partic'larly big an' mean in the San Juans. Lots o' food for 'em, folks say, with all the minin' camps.” He glanced meaningfully back at Longarm. “I'm talkin'
human food
.”

“Don't worry,” Longarm said. “I'll protect you, Goldie.”

Goldie told Longarm to fuck himself. Longarm told Goldie to get on inside the barn and saddle his own horse. “I sure as hell am not gonna do it for you. One wrong move, though, and I'm gonna shoot you and put you out of my misery.”

Fifteen minutes later, Longarm and Goldie had saddled their horses and were riding them out of the barn, when Longarm cast a quick glance into the forest on the far side of the stage road from where the yips and snarls still rose. He'd started to turn his horse to kick the barn door closed behind him, when he swung his gaze back to the forest.

At least one of the creatures tearing and pulling and burrowing into the cadavers of Collie and Ulrich and the other man, a half-breed named Norman Two Moons, were just as Goldie had noted—larger than your average coyote. One swung his head toward Longarm, as though he'd read the lawman's thoughts, and Longarm saw the two yellow eyes fairly burning there in the night-like darkness of the woods that the growing dawn light had not yet touched. It was hard to tell because of the dense shadows, but the wolf not only looked as large as a small bear, though much more willowy, he also looked black.

“See there!” said Goldie, nodding his head at the beast. “You see that big son of a bitch? That ain't no coyote. Shuck your rifle an' shoot him, Longarm!”

Longarm stared at the wolf staring back at him, the yellow gaze flickering when the animal blinked. Suddenly, the wolf turned its head forward and lowered it to resume ripping and tearing. The growls and angry, competitive snarls grew louder.

“Shoot him, Longarm!” Goldie encouraged, bouncing up and down in his saddle, his wrists cuffed behind his back. “You see the way he was lookin' at us? Like we was next on the menu?
Shoot him!
”

Longarm kicked the door closed, then curveted his horse and jerked on the reins of Goldie's coyote-dun gelding. “He's got plenty to eat right there,” he said, pointing his own army bay westward along the trail that hugged the trees and a creek rippling between ice-scalloped banks. “No point in comin' after us.” Longarm believed in killing no beast unless he needed the food or he was under attack. Live and let live, was how he saw it, an attitude he'd acquired from having witnessed and partaken in way too much bloodshed.

“He's a devil, that one,” Goldie said as they rode, Longarm leading his prisoner's horse up the trail along the forest and the half-frozen creek, tall, rocky crags rising around them. “You know legend tells there's werewolves in these mountains. Came over with the Romanians who settled around Crazy Kate—right where we're headed!”

Goldie cast a haunted glance behind him, his breath vapor puffing around his head in the cold mountain air. He wore a Stetson tied to his head with a thick, blue muffler. Longarm glanced back at him and grinned, puffing his three-for-a-nickel cheroot. “Don't worry, Goldie—I'll protect you.”

Goldie glared at him, bunching his unshaven, pugnacious face, his dark eyes set deep beneath thin, dark brows. “Fuck you, Longarm. My old man trapped in these mountains back before the war, and he said he seen 'em. Even lost a partner to one. He himself had to shoot said partner when, during a full moon, he turned into a man-wolf. A fucking
werewolf
!”

Goldie threw his head back and howled. It was such an authentic-sounding howl, echoing off the jagged-topped, towering crags, that Longarm felt the skin beneath his shirt collar tighten. When the howl had finished echoing around the deep canyon they were riding through, Goldie laughed.

“Ah, hell, I don't believe that shit any more than you do. But you've heard the legend, haven't you, Longarm?”

Longarm had ridden through this part of the San Juans a couple of times before, and it was hard to pass through even once without at least hearing that there
was
a legend—having to do with a young woman from Little Bucharest, the mining and hide-hunting camp now known as Crazy Kate on account of the legend itself, but he'd never heard the particulars.

He supposed he was going to hear them now. Goldie was one gassy cuss. Likely facing a hangman's rope made him nervous and extra chatty.

Longarm knew he didn't have to respond to the question, so he merely relit his cheroot that the falling snow had put out, and half-listened in a bored sort of way as they rode and Goldie said, “Yessir, I reckon them folks from Romania brought the curse of the werewolves with 'em. An old curse, to hear to tell it. Started way back with Attila the Hun—can you believe that, Longarm?”

Half-listening, Longarm sucked the rich smoke deep into his lungs, and when he had his cheroot drawing again to his liking, he flicked the match into the snow along the trail. It snuffed out with a slight
phfft
that the lawman could hear in the dense silence.

They were climbing a gradually steepening grade toward a pass, so he had to hold the horses to a leisurely pace. Besides, while the stage road had been graded a few days ago, there were a good ten inches of fresh down on it, and that could mean unseen ice patches beneath. The last thing he needed out here was a horse with a thrown shoe or, worse, a broken leg.

“Anyways,” Goldie continued, his voice obnoxiously loud in the silence, “a group of Romanians came here to the San Juans and built 'em their own special town, and took up minin' and hide huntin', an such. Queer mountain folks who didn't much like livin' amongst others 'cause they were so accustomed to keepin' their own company back in Eastern Europe, they say. Anyways, as soon as they came, these mountains started attracting wolves. More than usual. And folks started gettin' attacked, eaten. I ain't shittin'—more than a few folks became wolf bait. That caused more than a few of the non-Romanians in the area to light a shuck.” Goldie chuckled. “I reckon I can understand lightin' a shuck under such circumstances as those. Anyways, like I was sayin', wolves kinda got a stranglehold on the place, but the Romanians just sorta learned to put up with it. But then somethin' really terrible happened.”

Goldie had slowed his voice down, spreading the words out for dramatic effect. Now, peevishly, he called behind Longarm, “Hey, you listenin', Lawman? You really oughta listen to this. Give you more of an appreciation and healthy respect for these wolves, one of which you coulda shot and did not, I might add. That very easily coulda been a fuckin' werewolf!”

“Don't piss down your leg, Goldie. That wasn't no werewolf.”

“
Any-ways
,” Goldie continued with an air of acutely strained patience, “there was this purty, young schoolteacher named Katarina Barkova. She was spreadin' her legs for one of her boy students out in the woodshed behind the school one sunny autumn afternoon, when—what do ya know—a wolf attacks the boy. Tears him apart bad an' bloody right there in front of the girl. Tears his arms and legs off. Chews out his heart and his liver. The girl herself? Well, she goes mad from the horror of what she sees. Her family locks her up with the nuns in the convent in the mountains overlooking the town, and after they done that, locked her up in there with them nuns, know what she did?”

Goldie stared at Longarm as though actually awaiting a response. Longarm just stared back at him.

“They said she started howlin' with every full moon,” Goldie said.

“Of course, she became a werewolf, too,” Longarm said, finding himself sort of half-enjoying the entertainment, since he had nothing else to think about and they still had a two-hour ride over the pass to Crazy Kate. These local legends were colorful, if nothing else.

“I didn't make up one word of that, Lawman,” Goldie intoned with haughty defensiveness. “Just wanna make that clear. That story there is told an' retold in these here mountains, and they say that to this day, that Crazy Katarina—or Kate, as the locals call her now, there bein' a fairly big mix of folks in Little Bucharest these days—howls like a damn she-wolf in season, puttin' the whole town on edge.”

“Suppose she was bit?”

“Musta been. You figure it out.” Goldie jerked in his saddle, looking first to one side of the trail and then to the other. “You hear that?”

“Hear what?” Longarm said, glancing over his shoulder.

Goldie looked worried as he scanned the slope rising on their right side, his dark, deep-set eyes probing every nook and hollow of the boulder-strewn, forested mountainside.

“Sounded like something prowling around in the woods”—Goldie turned to stare into the trees on the downslope, toward the creek that was rushing more loudly here, where it was dropping faster—“all around us.”

“You're just hearing the stream.”

“Fuck the stream. That ain't what I'm hearin'.”

Longarm drew his bay to a stop and pricked his ears to listen, raking the area around him with his gaze.

“I sure don't like sittin' this saddle with my hands cuffed behind my back, lawdog. I'm defenseless here. Hell, I couldn't run if I had to!”

“You should have thought of that before you robbed that harness shop in Cisco, and raped the harness maker's wife. And then killed those guards when you escaped the pen.”

Goldie cursed the lawman as he looked around warily.

“Well, I don't hear or see nothin',” Longarm said. “Let's get a move on. I'm hungry.”

He turned forward and touched heels to the bay's flanks.

“Ah, shit, so's he!” Goldie squealed.

“So's who?” Longarm had barely gotten the question out before a loud snarl rose and he turned around just in time to see a large, charcoal-black creature leap off a boulder on the upslope and swoop Goldie from his saddle with a shrill scream.

Goldie and the wolf hit the ground with a snarl, a thump, and another shrill, beseeching squeal, the wolf chomping into Goldie's upper right shoulder. Quickly, as the two rolled together down the slope and between two fir trees, Longarm shucked his Winchester from his saddle boot, racked a cartridge into the chamber, aimed, and fired.

His bullet ruffled the charcoal fur on the beast's hindquarters just as it prepared to bury its fangs into the outlaw's neck that was protected by nothing more substantial than a knotted, dirty, blue muffler. The wolf yipped with a jerk, glanced angrily back at Longarm, yellow eyes glowing in the morning's dullness, then leaped into the air, twisted around, and dashed off down the slope through the trees, snarling.

Longarm's Winchester leaped and roared twice more, but his slugs merely chewed bark from pine boles.

Goldie groaned and grunted as he writhed in the snowy brush between the two firs, hands cuffed behind his back. Longarm swung down from the leather and walked over to the man, dropping to a knee.

“Goldie, you poor bastard. How bad he get you?”

The outlaw rolled onto his back with an especially loud grunt, writhing in pain and fear, his face twisted, lips stretched back from his tobacco-grimed teeth. “What'd I tell you, damn your lawdoggin' hide? See what happened?
See?
Why in the hell didn't you listen to me, lawman? Now look what he done! Damn near tore my arm off!”

Longarm glanced toward where the wolf had hightailed it, then set his rifle against a fir. He leaned down over Goldie once more, inspecting the tear in the shoulder of his blanket coat through which blood oozed. “Ah, hell, he didn't get you that bad. Quit carryin' on; you're embarrassin' yourself. What kind of a hard case are you, anyways—can't take a little nip from a puppy dog?”

“
Puppy dog?
” Goldie squirmed from side to side as he hoisted himself to a sitting position with his hands cuffed behind him. He jutted his enraged red face at the lawman, his gold ear spike glinting dully in the gray light. “That wasn't no goddamn puppy dog, you idjit. That was a wolf. Possibly a fuckin' werewolf. And you know what that means?”

“Yeah, I know—you'll be howlin' along with Crazy Kate at the full moon.” Longarm stood and looked around. He'd better find a place to build a fire and get the outlaw's shoulder cleaned out and the blood stopped. The killer and rapist didn't deserve it, but Longarm would have some explaining to do to Billy Vail if he let him die from a wolf bite before Billy and a federal judge could get his neck stretched.

“No!” Goldie intoned, his shrill voice echoing. “We can't stay here. They might be all around us. A whole pack of 'em! And, if I remember right, tonight the moon'll be full!”

Longarm looked around carefully. He didn't see anything moving among the trees and rocks—only a few chickadees and nuthatches performing acrobatic feats among the branches as they pecked for grub. His not hearing anything didn't mean much, the lawman realized.

He hadn't heard the wolf that had swooped Goldie out of his saddle. Apprehension and befuddlement weighed heavy on him. He didn't believe any of that gothic shit about werewolves, but these woods were obviously home to a ferocious pack of
real
wolves, just as he'd heard they were. It was strange for a single wolf to attack a man in the daylight, but maybe the beast was especially hungry and had seen that Goldie was defenseless, having his hands cuffed behind him.

“Demons is what these wolves around here are,” Goldie said in a low growl, as though offering an alternative explanation, looking around and gritting his teeth. He was still breathing hard, still terrified from the attack.

“Hogwash.”

“You could at least uncuff me, goddamnit!”

Longarm walked over and freed the outlaw's wrists from the cuffs. As afraid as Goldie was of the wolves, he wasn't going to try anything against Longarm, who slipped the key back into his coat pocket and walked off down the slope. When he'd found a good place to set up a camp for a short time, he retrieved his horses and gathered wood. Goldie gathered a few sticks halfheartedly, favoring his right side and continuing to look around as though another attack were imminent.

When Longarm had gotten a fire going and had set a pot of coffee to boil with water he'd fetched from the creek, he told Goldie to take his coat off. “I'll see to that wound. Wouldn't want you to die on me, an' cheat the hangman.”

“That's real nice of you,” Goldie said, unbuttoning his coat. “I'm so mighty pleased to hear your sympathy, lawdog. Fuckin' bastard.”

“Goldie,” Longarm said, helping the man pull his coat off his right arm, exposing the bloody wound at the top of the arm. He was trying to settle him down, as the outlaw's fried nerves were beginning to singe his own. “Where'd you ever get a name like Goldie? Your hair's brown.”

“Goldspoon,” Goldie said. “Last name's Goldspoon.”

“Oh, that's right—I remember now.” Longarm used his pocketknife to cut the man's bloody shirt around the wound that kept pushing up liver-colored gobs of blood, which dripped over Goldie's shoulder and down his chest, staining his wool shirt and his vest. “From the warrant the prison sent out. Marion Goldspoon.”

“I don't go by Marion, so I'll thank you not use that handle.” Goldie slanted a look up the wooded mountain on the far side of the creek that ran darkly between snowy, icy banks. “It's Goldie, plain an' simple. How bad's it look?”

“Shit, you've cut yourself worse shavin'.” It was a lie. The puncture wounds were deep and widely spaced, the top teeth having laid open the back of the man's shoulder worse than the bottom ones had dug into the top of it. No point in telling Goldie that. Longarm was tired of the outlaw's mewling. “I'm just gonna cauterize it, an' you'll be good to go.”

“Ah, shit—you're just gonna love that, ain't ya? Let me get all chewed up, and then burn me with a knife.”

Longarm chuckled. He cut it off when a wolf's howl sounded from a ridge up the mountain to the north, on the far side of the trail.

Goldie stiffened. “Shit!”

Longarm scrutinized a jagged crag towering far above the tree line. The black rocks were dusted with snow, the very top of the crag fuzzed with low clouds from which snow continued to fall—large, woolly flakes falling slow. Again, the wolf howled, shrill and echoing, half-mournful, half-menacing.

“Give me my gun, Longarm.”

“No.”

“What happens if they come? Turns out you ain't as good at protectin' your unarmed prisoner as you claimed to be!”

“You got me there, Goldie,” Longarm said, reaching into his saddlebags and withdrawing a small burlap bag. He tossed the bag to Goldie. “You'll find a coupla roast beef sandwiches in there. Help yourself. A saloon girl made 'em for me back in Crestone yesterday.”

Goldie raked his gaze from the towering crag that was now suddenly completely lost in the clouds, and then looked into the bag. He withdrew a small waxed paper bundle and unwrapped the sandwich. “Frozen,” he said in disgust.

“Might break a tooth, but it'll fill your belly.” Longarm had tossed a handful of coffee into the boiling pot and was heating the blade of his Barlow knife in the leaping flames. The blade had turned black and was beginning to glow when the coffee frothed around the pot's rim, the tan bubbles dribbling down the sides.

He set the pot on a rock away from the flames and then went over and knelt down beside Goldie, who slowly tore bits of the sandwich off with his teeth, chewing as though the cold bread and meat hurt his choppers.

He looked at the smoking blade in Longarm's gloved hand. “Ah, shit, this ain't my day. Wasn't my night, neither. I was winnin' big till you showed up and shot the hell out of the boys I was playin' with.”

“Bite into that sandwich hard,” Longarm said. “This is gonna hurt like hell.”

Goldie cursed again then leaned back against the log behind him, braced himself, and stuck one half of the sandwich in his mouth. “Okay,” he said around the food.

Longarm pressed the blade against the front part of the wound. The skin melted like wax, and white smoke curled up from the blade, smelling like something dead. Goldie jerked and grunted, grinding his spurs into the ground. Quickly, Longarm removed the blade from the front part of the wound then laid it over the half that angled down over his shoulder, making sure the cauterizing encompassed each of the bloody puncture marks.

Goldie bit the sandwich in two, and half of it dropped to his lap as he threw his head back and groaned, continuing to rake the ground with his spurs.

Longarm lifted the blade, wrinkling his nostrils at the stench of scorched skin and blood, then reached into his saddlebags for a bottle. He popped the bottle's cork, took a pull of the rye, then splashed a little over each cauterized area of the outlaw's shoulder.

It was a sad waste of good whiskey, but it was all he had. By the time the smoke stopped rising from Goldie's shoulder, the outlaw had passed out, sagging back against the log with a ragged half of sandwich clamped in his jaws.

“Ah,” Longarm said, “quiet at last.”

He took another pull from the bottle then hammered the cork back in with the heel of his hand. Setting the bottle aside, the lawman cleaned the Barlow's blade off in the flames, wiped it with a handkerchief, and returned it to his pocket. He then took the other sandwich out of the burlap pouch, poured himself a cup of black, piping hot coffee, and sat back against a rock on the far side of the fire from the unconscious Goldie.

He looked around as he ate and washed the sandwich down with the coffee. There was no movement except for the dark water of the stream sliding between its banks, and the lazily falling snow, flakes of which sizzled softly on the hot rocks around the fire. The only sounds aside from the cracking flames were the occasional bits of ice cracking off the fingers protruding into the stream, or the soft thud of a branch getting pinned up against the bank.

The silence was dense, almost funereal. He glanced again toward the crag that had been decapitated by a low, heavy ceiling of goose down. Had the wolf really been standing up there?

Was there any possibility that they could be more than just . . . well . . .
wolves
?

Longarm pondered that for about five seconds and then, catching himself, gave a caustic snort. “Christ, I'm gettin' as cork-headed as Goldie.”

They might be rabid, but they sure as hell weren't haunted, though now that he thought about it, he wasn't sure which would be worse.

He finished his sandwich and washed down the final bite with the last of the coffee. He was about to toss the grounds into the fire, when he stayed the movement, lifting his head and frowning, staring downstream. The skin on his lower back began tingling as the faint yipping of a half dozen or so coyotes—or wolves—reached his ears. The gradually loudening cacophony echoed around the canyon, so that it was hard to tell exactly where it was coming from. It seemed to be coming from everywhere down canyon.

The source of the commotion seemed to be gradually growing nearer.

Beneath the yips and occasional howls, hooves thudded. The thudding, too, grew in volume and then it was coupled with men's harried voices. Longarm looked up the slope to see riders coming along the trail, showing glimpses of themselves between the trees. They were jouncing in their saddles, leaning forward, their horses' heads bobbing as they galloped up the slope toward Longarm's position. The riders were all clad in furs—good quality furs, it appeared from Longarm's vantage point.

The general's hunting party?

The yipping continued getting louder in small increments, but judging by how the riders galloping up the trail kept casting wary looks behind them, toward the coyotes—or wolves—they believed the madly yipping creatures were chasing them.

Longarm rose and grabbed his rifle. He looked at Goldie, who must have heard the noise in his sleep. As the outlaw leaned to one side, head sagging toward the ground, he muttered and blinked and moved his lips like a dreaming dog. A dog dreaming about being chased.

Longarm walked over and kicked the man's left boot. “Goldie, get up.” He heard the tautness in his own voice. The apprehension. If the yips were coming from wolves, there must have been at least a small pack of the creatures. And from what he'd seen of them so far, he and Goldie had best get on up the trail toward Crazy Kate.

“Goldie,” he said, louder, above the thundering of riders' hooves on the trail above him. He turned to see the shaggy line of them galloping on upstream and upslope beyond him, none looking toward him, their attention riveted on the trail ahead or the trail behind.

Longarm's and Goldie's horses snorted and stomped and tugged at their reins tied to pine branches.

Longarm grabbed Goldie's coat collar and pulled the man to his feet and held him there. Goldie stumbled around as though drunk. “Wha—what is it?”

“We're pullin' foot, so get your damn land legs, and get 'em fast!”

Longarm emptied his coffeepot on the steaming flames, kicked dirt, snow, and rocks on the fire, and stowed the pot in his saddlebags. As Goldie looked around, blinking and wincing against the pain of the wolf bite, Longarm brushed past him as he headed for their horses. He slung his saddlebags over the bay's back, behind the saddle, and then slid his rifle into its scabbard.

Meanwhile, the yips and howls and occasional snarls continued to grow louder, but the wolves seemed to be hanging back for some reason. If they were giving chase, it was a slow, cautious chase. Why? Were they aware in the wolfish, cunning brains that their prey had weapons that could hurt them?

Goldie had stopped near the horses and was staring down canyon through the snowy brush and over-arching pine boughs. “Shit, that's wolves, ain't it? They're comin' fer us!”