Longarm and the War Clouds (3 page)

Longarm hesitated a moment before entering the saloon.

He glanced at War Cloud and Magpie and then looked around for signs banning “Injuns” from the premises. Such signs had once been plentiful around Denver, though Longarm couldn't recollect seeing many in recent years. Denver didn't get a lot of Native visitors these days, since most of the American aboriginals had been confined to reservations far from the West's growing cities.

As he led the War Clouds through the batwings, however, all eyes turned toward them not once but two or three times, and held. Longarm saw the morning bartender, Kenny Dunbar, beetle his red brows as he stared over the polished mahogany, hang his lower jaw, and slowly reach under the bar top no doubt for the hide-wrapped bung starter he kept in the event one of his customers got out of hand.

“Keep your hands above the bar, Ken,” Longarm said, grinning as he sauntered up to the counter. “Do as I say, or you'll lose your topknot.”

“They with you, Custis?”

“Ken, meet my old pal, War Cloud and his lovely daughter, Magpie. They're here on business . . . we just don't know what kind yet.”

The barman studied the two critically. His eyes melted in their sockets when they perused the Apache princess, who'd stopped about halfway between the batwings and the bar, frowning as she appraised the room.

There were about eight other men in the place—five regulars and three sitting back in the shadows that Longarm didn't recognize. The customers' eyes had found the princess, as well, and even old Jefferson Langtry, who'd fought Indians with Custer, relaxed in his chair and drew up his mouth corners, his rheumy old eyes glittering at the girl's comely figure.

“Well, I'll be,” Dunbar rasped.

Longarm ordered a beer for himself and War Cloud. The lawman asked Magpie what she was drinking, and she did not reply but held her gaze on the room, as though every man here was a wildcat about to pounce. War Cloud said, “She doesn't speak much English, Custis. And she doesn't speak to white men, at all. Her mother's blood, you understand.”

War Cloud ordered the girl a beer, since she needed the beer to qualify for the free bread, meat, and cheese arranged on a large, round tray halfway down the bar, and a glass of water. When Longarm and his guests had all built sandwiches and were seated at a table near the front of the place, Longarm dumped his shot of rye into his beer, waited for the foam to subside, and took down a third of the morning elixir in three long swallows.

The girl watched him critically. Longarm didn't think the look was much about the drink. She'd been studying him critically, skeptically, as though she didn't know what to think of him, all morning. But then, she seemed to study the other men in the saloon the same way.

Critically, skeptically, as though she were vaguely suspicious of the intentions of each.

Longarm set the glass back down on the table and tried to ignore her stare. He ran the back of his hand across his lips and longhorn mustache. “All right, now that my thinker box is oiled, maybe I can think straighter about the situation at hand. Any idea why you and Magpie are here, War Cloud?”

“I have no idea, Custis,” War Cloud said, hunched over the table and devouring his sandwich like a coyote on a freshly killed rabbit. “I was hoping you would know.”

Longarm shook his head as he bit into his own sandwich and glanced at Magpie, who was none-too-daintily eating her own meal while keeping her eyes locked on Longarm—when she wasn't nervously scrutinizing the other men in the room, that was.

Longarm swallowed and said, “I got back from an assignment three days ago. Billy Vail gave me a couple days to cool my heels . . . and, uh . . .”

“Entertain that girl who moans so purty?” War Cloud grinned as he chewed.

“Yeah, somethin' like that,” Longarm said, glancing at Magpie and feeling his cheeks burn again.

The truth was, he'd been cavorting with Cynthia against his boss's advice. Marshal Billy Vail thought that it was only a matter of time before the General and sweet Aunt May found out that his senior-most badge toter was “fucking that moneyed little debutante seven ways from sundown,” and Billy would be searching for a replacement for Longarm's job—after the deputy's funeral, of course.

“I haven't seen Billy in several days, but he sent a note to my flat over the weekend, ordering me not to be a minute late to his office this morning, so whatever it is, I reckon we'll find out about it is in about a”—Longarm glanced at the Regulator clock over the bar—“half hour or thereabouts. He must have sent for you while I was out corralling rustlers up around the Wyoming line. When I got back, he was out with a head cold.”

Longarm swallowed a bite of his sandwich and washed the bite down with a slug of his drink. “In the meantime, how's Buffalo Bill been treating you, you old coyote?”

War Cloud thought about that gravely while he chewed, hunkered over the thick sandwich he held in both his large, leathery dark hands. “To be honest with you, brother, I was glad to get Billy's telegram. Starting to feel like one of Wild Bill's monkeys. I'm a full-blood Coyotero, but Wild Bill kept making me play a Sioux with a full headdress. General Custer always guns me down at the end of our ‘battle.'

“You don't know how tired I was getting of clutching my chest and falling over my horse and having to lay there with his boot on my belly while he makes a big, windy speech about how times are changing. That the Red Man's time is over and now it's time for the White Man to bring civilization to the New Frontier.

“And what's with that big eagle-feather headdress he makes me wear? Do white people really think we wear those gaudy things when we ride into battle?”

Longarm chuckled. “I reckon they might get in the way a tad.” He glanced at Magpie. “She play in the show, too?”

“Magpie was a trick rider. She was good. But she didn't get along with Wild Bill or the other players, and she didn't like having to play Pocahontas. Magpie has no idea who in hell Pocahontas was. Since she won't speak English or talk in any tongue to a white man, the others made fun of her. Wild Bill tried to get frisky with her a time or two.” War Cloud kicked Longarm under the table and grinned with half of his broad, dark face. “At his own risk. You understand, amigo?”

Longarm glanced at the girl to his right, who was slowly eating her sandwich and staring at the table. He wondered if she always looked like a wildcat about to snarl and pounce, or if she was nervous about being in a city.

“I take it Wild Bill managed to keep all his body parts?”

“It was close a time or two, brother. I warned the old man. I think the last time he finally got the message.” War Cloud shook his head and took a long drink from his beer. “I had to get her out of there. When we're finished up with whatever Billy wants us to do, I'm going to take her back to the mountains in Arizona, stake a claim, maybe build up a ranch somewhere amongst our Coyotero brothers and sisters.”

War Cloud looked at his daughter and spoke as though she weren't present though Longarm sensed she understood what her father was saying. “Magpie—she's never had a man. She's a woman now—nineteen years old. Back home, she would have been married years ago. She needs a man. A good Apache warrior. That will take some of the—what is the white man saying? Starch out of her drawers?”

War Cloud chuckled.

Longarm glanced at the black-eyed beauty again. Her eyes met his gaze briefly and then she jerked her eyes back down to the table and buried her teeth in her sandwich. Longarm thought a slight blush touched her fine, smooth, cherry-tan cheeks.

Longarm cleared his throat, ignoring the pull of lust in his groin. “Yeah, that oughta take care of it.”

“Hey, brother, you catch this?” War Cloud said in voice so low that Longarm had barely heard it.

“Uh . . . yup.”

He'd been aware of the three men at the back of the room since he and the War Clouds had entered the saloon. Now those three men had gained their feet and were donning their hats.

One was strolling along the bar toward Longarm and the War Clouds a little too slowly, with a little too much ease. Feigned ease.

He was whistling softly and checking the time on a pocket watch. Another of the three was just now leaving their table and walking slowly toward the far side of the room, also whistling and pretending to be staring at a large oil painting of a naked woman sprawled on a red feinting couch hanging on the wall opposite the bar.

“Who you think they're after,” Wolf Cloud said, chewing the last of his sandwich, his dark eyes dancing delightedly. “You . . . me . . . or Magpie?”

“I don't know—should we draw straws?”

“I'm guessin' you since this is your town.”

“If you keep your eyes on the one behind me, I'll keep my eyes on the one behind you.”

“Okay.” War Cloud polished off his beer while keeping a dark eye on the man appraising the canvas hanging from the wall behind Longarm and to the lawman's right. “Magpie is watching the third man.”

Longarm had glimpsed the third one, who now had his foot up on the chair he'd been sitting in, frowning down at the toe of his right boot, which he was rubbing with a red neckerchief, as though to remove a stain. He wasn't making a very good show of it. He kept rolling his cunning gaze toward Longarm's table.

Longarm looked at Magpie. She'd finished her sandwich nearly as quickly as her father did. Now she sniffed and swiped the back of her left hand across her mouth and nose and tossed one of her braids back behind her shoulder.

She kept her right hand beneath the table. She had not touched her beer, but now she picked up her water glass between her thumb and index finger, curiously extending her pinky, and took two swallows. She rolled a fleeting glance at Longarm.

Longarm was afraid for the girl. The last thing he wanted to do was get War Cloud's daughter killed because three curly wolves had recognized him as a lawdog who'd done them wrong sometime in the past. It wasn't an unusual situation. Longarm had been in the man-hunting business long enough to have piss-burned quite a few men.

The third man, to Longarm's left, set his right boot down on the floor with a grunt and said casually, “All right, fellas—I'm ready now!”

“Sounds good to me, Buford,” said the man behind War Cloud, turning from the bar that he'd been facing as though perusing the bottles lined up on the back bar shelves.

Just then, Longarm recognized his bearded face with its too-close eyes and scarred lower lip. Chet Fordham grinned at the man behind Longarm and said in a voice that echoed around the cavernous drinking hall, “You ready, Willie?”

“Everybody down!” Longarm shouted as Fordham swept up two long-barreled Smith & Wessons and squinted down both barrels at Longarm.

As the bushwhacker shouted, “Die, you son of a bitch, die!” Longarm threw himself left out of his chair, noting in the periphery of his vision that the other customers in the room, having sensed trouble, flung themselves to the floor.

Fordham's Smith & Wessons roared, lapping flames toward Longarm's now-empty chair. At the same time, the man behind Longarm fired his own pistols at the chair that had just been vacated by War Cloud.

Longarm hit the floor behind a table and rolled up off his left shoulder, rising to a crouch and extending his double-action Colt Frontier .44 at Fordham. Grimacing, he cut loose with three quick shots.

He watched through his own geysering orange flames and puffing powder smoke the outlaw he'd once put away in the Wyoming Territorial Prison for selling poison whiskey to the Arapahos, screaming and stumbling back against the bar, shooting his matched Smithies into the pressed-tin ceiling over Longarm's table.

Longarm shot him again. The cutthroat screamed again, dropped his shooting irons, turned to grab the edge of the bar, couldn't hold himself, and collapsed to the floor with a thud.

Longarm wheeled in time to see the second shooter dancing back against the naked lady he'd been ogling, triggering both of his own pistols into the floor. He dropped to his knees, loosed a bellow at the ceiling, blood pumping from the two holes over his heart, and fell face forward without even cushioning his fall with his hands.

Two cutthroats were down.

Longarm wheeled to face the third man, aiming his cocked revolver straight out from his shoulder. The man stood near the table at which all three had been sitting. Longarm didn't think the man had gotten off a shot. At least, Longarm hadn't heard a report from the third man's direction.

Longarm eased the tension in his trigger finger. The man was slowly loosening his hold on the Colt .45 in his right hand. He was blinking rapidly and crossing his eyes slightly as he stared up, aghast, at the horn handle of the thick bowie knife protruding from the dead middle of his forehead. Blood oozed from the deep cut made by the knife blade driven into his skull and shone darkly in the morning light pushing through the saloon's front windows.

He fell straight back as though all his bones had turned to jelly, then slammed onto the table behind him with a loud, crunching thud.

Lowering his Colt, Longarm turned to rake his gaze across War Cloud to Magpie, who still crouched about five feet back in the same crouch as when she'd whipped the savage blade out of its scabbard and sent it careening into the third man's head. Her jaws were hard, lips pursed, eyes sharp. Her cheeks were beautifully flushed.

Slowly, she straightened. Longarm stared at her, his lower jaw hanging.

She glanced at him, glanced at her father. War Cloud gave her an approving nod. Magpie strode forward, weaving around the tables. She leaped catlike onto the table on which the third man lie, his arms and legs hanging over the sides, glassy eyes staring at the ceiling.

She stared down at the dead man and then reached down to wrap both hands around the bowie knife's stout horn handle. She set her left moccasin against the man's chest and used it for leverage as, with a loud grunt, she pulled the blade out of the man's skull. It made a wet grinding, sucking sound.