Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance (10 page)

“My father was a rich man from back East. He owned a lot of weapons. He had no sons to teach how to use them, so he taught me. We hunted in the Allegheny Mountains and throughout Appalachia. Deer, bear, turkeys, ducks, geese…”

“Killin’ men’s a special kind of shootin’, Miss Delacroix.”

“Is it, Marshal Long?” Haven looked at him askance. “Oh, but when we’re talking about men, we’re not including those three back in Jerkwater, are we?”

Longarm looked back at her, finding himself growing more and more curious about her. What he saw in her hazel eyes now was a peculiar, unsettling edge. He’d seen it before, when they were fucking like dogs back in her hotel room in Leadville. He’d chalked that up to raw desire. But here it was again after she’d killed three men, having stabbed a stiletto into the balls of one.

Men who’d had it coming in spades, certainly. But she’d killed them just the same. And she was cooler about it than most men would have been.

Yes, there was much that was mysterious about Miss Haven Delacroix. And while she’d proven that she could defend herself against three half-drunk cowhands, she was just too forthright and too damn pretty to be partnered up with on a murder investigation on the mostly untamed frontier, where a good many men would as soon shoot a man, especially a
lawman
, as let him pass in the street.

The same held true for Pinkerton detectives.

A pretty girl was a lightning rod for trouble, and Miss Delacroix’s being a Pinkerton made her stand all the taller against a stormy sky. Likely sooner rather than later, she was going to get herself and probably Longarm, too, in more trouble than either of them knew what to do with.

They rode throughout the afternoon, stopping now and then to rest their horses and drink from springs or muddy streams coursing down from the White Mountains in the northwest. Longarm followed an old wild-horse trail he’d taken through the area before, knowing it was the shortest route between Belen and Broken Jaw though the traveling was often rough. Wild horses knew the best routes between springs, however, so while they had to travel up and around some stony bluffs and steep mesas, water holes were relatively plentiful though a couple were already dry this late in the southwestern summer.

Late in the afternoon, they rode down a crease between slanting mesa walls. The trough was shaded by the west-angling sun, the hot air tanged with cedar. When Longarm rode around a thumb of rock jutting out from the mesa wall on his right, he reined up quickly, reaching a hand across his belly toward the Colt .44-40 holstered on his left hip.

Three men were at the springs he’d been heading for. Two were mounted. One holding a canteen, with a second flask draped over his shoulder, was kneeling near a small trough down which the water trickled as it issued from a crack in the rocks. They’d all heard the clomping of Longarm’s and the girl’s horses, and they all had their hands on
the butts of their own pistols and were gazing cautiously toward the newcomers.

Agent Delacroix rode up beside Longarm and, seeing the men by the spring, jerked back sharply on her own horse’s reins. She looked from Longarm to the strangers and back again. Longarm said nothing but kept his expression mild.

The two mounted men by the spring eyed the lawman and the girl suspiciously. The one with the canteens rose slowly, shoving a cork into the lip of the canteen he held in his left hand, smiling and nodding. “Afternoon.”

“Afternoon,” Longarm said.

“We was just ridin’ on,” said the man with the canteens, flicking his dung-brown eyes from Longarm to the girl and keeping them on Haven for about two beats too long.

“Good water.” He held up the canteen he’d just corked. “Help yourselves, friends.”

He pinched his hat brim to the girl and then turned and mounted a dun while the other two regarded Longarm and Agent Delacroix with cold, calculating expressions. All three were sun-browned and bearded Anglos in long, filthy dusters. They had the wild-eyed look of desperadoes, and the number of weapons they wore did nothing to temper the impression.

When they rode off, Longarm removed his hand from the walnut grips of his Colt. He watched the three ride on down the cactus-bristling hills to the south and into a shaded draw. They grew small beneath the vaulting, slightly darkening sky in which not a single cloud floated.

When they’d disappeared from view, Longarm swung down from the roan’s back. “We’ll fill with water here, ride on a few more miles, and camp.”

Feeling owly, he slipped the roan’s bit from its mouth so it could drink freely, and then unbuckled the saddle cinch so it could move around and get some air. He removed his two canteens from his saddle horn. He could feel the girl watching him pensively as he walked over to the spring.

“What’s eating you?” she said.

“Nothin’.” He didn’t want to talk about it. She was here now, and he had to shoot with the loads he’d been given.

Kneeling beside the spring and plucking the cork from one of the canteens, he lowered the flask to the pencil-thin stream trickling out of the rocks.

“You think I’m trouble,” she said.

Longarm gave a caustic snort.

“Well, I’m here now, and you’re just going to have to get used to it. Mr. Pinkerton has assigned me to represent the interests of Wells Fargo in this matter, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. If at all possible, I intend to see that the stolen gold is returned to its rightful owners.”

Longarm said nothing. There was no point arguing with the girl. Arguing with females of any stripe only got a man a headache. A bad one.

Standing over him, looking down at him with her fists on her hips, a canteen hanging from each shoulder, she tapped her right boot impatiently. “Oh, I see.”

Longarm glanced up at her. “See what?”

“I was just fine to have around as long as I could amuse you with my embarrassment. I was even finer to have around the other night in Leadville, wasn’t I?”

Longarm corked his filled canteen. “I’ll say you were!”

“But out here where I have a serious job to do, I’m trouble. Is that it?”

Despite knowing he was wasting his breath, Longarm glared up at her through one narrowed eye. “Yeah, that is it, Agent Delacroix. Women don’t belong out here. Especially ones as pretty as you. A lawman has enough trouble out here with the additional trouble of a pretty girl!”

“Is that really what has your longhandles in a bunch?” she asked.

Longarm didn’t say anything as he finished filling his second canteen.

“Or maybe it’s because you’re having such a hard time
keeping your eyes off of my shirt?” Her smile had as little humor as an icicle hanging from a Dakota porch roof in February. “Maybe you’re not so afraid of the trouble I might attract from other men, but of the distraction I am to
you.
That’s why you suddenly think I shouldn’t be here, isn’t it? Because you can’t keep your eyes off of me, or stop thinking about the other night!”

Longarm felt his face heating up. His hands shook as he corked the second canteen and rose, trying hard to keep both his chagrin and his anger on a short leash. “Yeah,” he said, honestly, “maybe that is it!”

He stared down at her. She had him so damn worked up that he was having trouble finding the right words with which to defend himself.

Hell, truth be told, now that she’d laid out her view of it, he was having trouble understanding what it was he himself thought about the whole matter. His own embarrassment over her having read him so clearly, however, made him even angrier than her presence did.

She gave him a mock smoky look, half smiling as she turned her head to one side, drew her shoulders back, pushing her breasts out, and dropped her eyes to the buckle on his cartridge belt. Her gaze was brashly jeering. “Would you feel differently if I promised to sleep with you tonight?” Her lips broadened her smile, and she shook her head slowly. “And I don’t mean
sleep.
”

Longarm felt an instant, involuntary pull in his crotch. It was followed by a sharp burn of anger. At what, he wasn’t sure. He only knew that his knees felt far weaker than they’d ever felt when he was facing a whole passel of long-coulee riders, and his ears were fairly scalding the sides of his head. He wheeled and stomped over to his horse, hanging the canteen lanyards over his saddle horn.

“Fill your goddamn canteens,” he said through gritted teeth. “Then we’ll water the horses and hightail it before
those three come back to get what they were thinking about getting when they saw you ride out from behind that rock.”

Digging a cheroot out of his shirt pocket with an angry-shaky hand, he added, “I don’t think they were just thinkin’ about
sleepin’
with you, either, Agent Delacroix. They’re no doubt swinging back around us right now, chucklin’ about how they’re gonna skin them nice tight denims down your purty legs and hoist your knees up around your ears!”

That didn’t seem to faze her a bit. She uncorked her canteen. “I can take care of myself very well, Marshal Long. You saw how well back in Jerkwater.”

“You got damn lucky back in Jerkwater, lady. If I hadn’t been there, all
five
of ’em would have been on you, and I doubt even Annie Oakley could have kept her legs together against those odds.”

Hazel eyes fired javelins of hatred at him. “If you think I need your protection, Marshal Long, you’re badly mistaken.”

“Hah!”

Agent Delacroix’s pretty face turned as red as a rose. “Next time, you just sit still and leave it all up to me. Hell, you might even learn something about how to handle yourself out here!”

She wheeled from him angrily, adjusting the Lemats holstered on her hips, and dropped to one knee beside the spring to fill her canteens. As she filled the first one, she narrowed her eyes over her shoulder at him. “You know what I think has you madder than an old wet hen, Marshal?”

Longarm fired a lucifer to life on his cartridge belt. “I know you’re gonna tell me.”

“You feel challenged after having witnessed how capable I am. A strong woman out here in this
man’s land
threatens you.”

Longarm removed his cheroot from his mouth and
pointed at the girl, dipping his chin and narrowing his eyes once more. “I ain’t threatened by no woman, Agent Delacroix. Never have been, never will be.”

“Oh, you’re threatened, all right,” she said, her self-assured smile vexing him further. “I threaten your manhood because I can take care of myself and because the only thing you know to do with a woman like me is to fuck me. But you’ll never, ever do that again as long as I live!”

Longarm ground his molars as he glared at her from beneath his down-canted hat brim and blew smoke out his nostrils. Now, she genuinely had his goat, and they both knew it, and the only words he could find with which to respond were: “Wouldn’t want to!”

He wheeled and stomped off into the brush. Seething and chewing his cigar, he took a piss. She had some goddamn nerve, telling him that
he
was threatened by
her
when they both knew it was the other way around.

Didn’t they?

Angry and confused, he pissed in a complete circle around a square rock and then stomped back over to the springs. Both horses had wandered over to the water and were drinking while she stood beside the steeldust, adjusting a stirrup on the other side of the mount from Longarm. He sat on a rock in the relative shade of a large boulder and energetically smoked his cigar.

He didn’t look at the woman.

Anger burned in him.

He wished like hell he’d never met her even the first time in Leadville. Never met her at all. What particularly burned him, he realized as he smoked, was that he couldn’t keep those devilish little images from their night together in the Grand Hotel from creeping into his brain and causing his balbriggans to pinch.

Had she been right? Was his real problem with her the fact that he couldn’t get the sexy memories out of his craw? That he wanted—
needed
—her again?

Well, if it
was
true, and he had to admit that that might be a
small
part of it, she sure as hell wasn’t going to find out about it. From now on, he wasn’t going to see her nor treat her any differently than he would a man trailing along with him. If she got herself in trouble for wagging those pretty tits in men’s faces, she could get herself out of it.

He took the last puff from his cigar, toed the butt out in the dirt, and stomped over to his horse.

“All right, goddamnit,” he said through a growl, pulling the mount’s head up from a patch of grass growing along the spring. “Time to get a move on.”

“That’s just fine with me,” said Agent Delacroix, slipping the steeldust’s bit through its teeth. She flashed her wrathful eyes at him. “The sooner we get this assignment over, the better.”

“Ain’t that a coincidence,” he said, chuckling as he swung up into the leather. “That’s just how
I
feel about it!”

“Oh, and another thing.”

Longarm looked at her.

“I didn’t have half as much fun the other night as I was letting on.”

Longarm laughed. “The hell you didn’t!”

He booted the roan on down the southern hills in the direction of Broken Jaw, laughing.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in! If it ain’t ole Custis P. Long his own mean an’ nasty self!” said Arizona Ranger Roscoe Sanders the next afternoon as Longarm and Agent Delacroix rode up to the squalid-looking ranger outpost in the desert town of Broken Jaw.

“You keepin’ out of trouble, Roscoe?” Longarm asked the ranger kicked back in a hide-bottom chair on the outpost’s front porch that was missing as many floorboards as it boasted.

Ranger Sanders was a small, compact, middle-aged gent with a horsey face trimmed with a long, Mexican-style mustache and one wandering eye. He wore a shabby wool vest over a grimy, cream shirt with blue pinstripes, a tarnished silver watch chain dangling from his vest pocket. His baggy wool trousers were patched in several places, their cuffs stuffed down inside his ancient stovepipe boots that were as worn as Apache moccasins.

Apparently, Sanders hadn’t heard Longarm’s question. He was squinting his good eye at Agent Delacroix riding up beside Longarm and facing the crumbling adobe shack that served as a ranger post, and he was slowly sitting
up straighter in his chair. He poked his battered, old sombrero up off his pale forehead and widened his good eye.