Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance (16 page)

But then, as though catching herself, she stepped back.

Glaring up at him, she gritted her teeth and slapped him. It was a resounding slap. But it didn’t hurt him. It thrilled him. Her passion was intoxicating in whatever form it came in. Flip sides of the same coin.

He had her, he knew. She knew it, too. Now, it was just a matter of time.

He grinned down at her. She wilted under his gaze, stepping back, lowering her tentative eyes to his broad chest. Her throat moved as she swallowed. The idea was hitting home with her now. She was as certain of it as he was, and it scared her as much as it thrilled her.

Just a matter of time…

“Best get our horses and ride out,” he said and continued on down the hall, digging a fresh cheroot out of his shirt pocket.

Only fifty miles lay between Jawbone and Defiance Wash as well as the town that had partly taken the wash’s name, Holy
Defiance, but the trip would require a good two days. Roscoe Sanders had told Longarm he’d be traveling through rugged country, but the word was sorely inadequate for describing the terrain that Longarm found himself heading into.

It was all broken, rocky desert bristling with cactus and greasewood, scored by arroyos and broad canyons carved by ancient rivers long defunct, though their beds might have seen a little water during the summer storm season, or in the spring when the snows melted in the northern mountains. All around the old Apache trail that Longarm and Agent Delacroix followed were deep, shelving mesas and spinelike sandstone dikes.

To the south and west rose jumbled, craggy outlines of a half-dozen different mountain ranges mounded with chalkor clay-colored boulders and spiked with saguaros and nearly every other cactus native to the Sonoran Desert.

Ridges of all angles, heights, and pitches rolled up against each other and extended out away from each other in a cosmic mess of ancient, plowed-up dirt, sand, and rock. Even the most veteran of reclusive, crafty desert rats would have a hard time matching all the peaks with their respective ranges.

Somewhere out here, however, was the Black Puma Mountains in which the lawmen had been murdered. Longarm just hoped Big Frank and Ranger Sanders’s map wasn’t a shovelful of bullshit. As he and Haven rode throughout that first day from Broken Jaw, all the ranges to the southwest appeared to be colored different shades of black or gray.

And none of them as far as he could tell looked anything like a puma.

Or, maybe if you stared at them long enough, they all did…

As what had become the norm for them, he and Haven did not speak much as they rode. They were each bound in testy silence.

Only after they stopped for the night, when the sun was a red ball impaled by a high, arrow-shaped western peak, did Longarm say, “Not much grub. You gather firewood, and I’ll scout around, see if I can’t scare up a jackrabbit, maybe a javelina.”

“Hold on.”

“Huh?”

She’d just finished tending her horse and hobbling it so it couldn’t wander far from the canyon they’d stopped in. Now she swept a flap of her duster back behind the handle of her right LeMat, and strode off through the brush. She walked soundlessly, Longarm noticed. No easy trick if you weren’t Apache.

He scowled after her. Finally, deciding she’d merely drifted off to tend nature, he formed rocks into a fire ring and gathered some mesquite branches, piling them all next to the ring. Dry mesquite burned quickly, so he’d wait and build the fire after he had something beside Arbuckles to cook.

He started to slide his Winchester from the saddle sheath he’d leaned against a tree with his other gear, when a bang-bang! sounded, startling the horses. Longarm snapped his head up and his gun from the boot, looking around as the reports bounced off the rocky ridges.

Tossing the empty sheath aside, he racked a shell into the Winchester’s breech but off-cocked the hammer when footsteps sounded. She was moving toward him through the mesquites lining a small, dry spring at the southern edge of their camp. As she came closer, he saw that she held a snake down low by her side, the diamondback’s rattles trailing along the ground and making a faint rattling sound that always made his short hairs bristle even when he knew the snake was dead.

She held up the snake, still writhing in death, and said without expression. “Supper.”

“Holy shit.”

She glanced at him as she walked over to where she’d deposited her saddlebags and her carpetbag. “You don’t like snake?”

“I got nothin’ against rattler. Tastes like chicken. Just never figured you to like it.” Longarm chuckled as he picked up his rifle sheath. “How’d you know that was out there?”

“Slithered across the trail in front of us as we rode into the canyon. You didn’t see it?” She’d pulled a sheathed skinning knife out of her saddlebags, and now she knelt by a flat-topped rock and began cutting the snake’s head off.

Longarm shook his head in amazement. Would she ever stop surprising him? “Well, why don’t I gather that firewood,” he said whimsically and strode off into the brush.

He returned a few minutes later and built a fire over which Haven cooked a right tasty rattlesnake stew with a potato and a carrot she’d bought in Broken Jaw and spiced with jerky and dried chili peppers. They washed the meal down with coffee, and then Longarm gathered a little more firewood, in case they needed it later in the night, and took a short stroll around their camp with his Winchester.

It was good dark, stars offering the only light. When he was relatively certain they were alone out here, and that the pretty woman hadn’t picked up more admirers since they’d ridden out of Broken Jaw, he spread his bedroll and rolled up in it.

She drifted off to tend nature, then came back to sit by the fire and pour herself one more cup of coffee.

She sat back against a boulder near the fire, and stared pensively off into the darkness beyond the sphere of wan, orange firelight. Longarm stared at her from beneath the brim of his hat, which he’d tipped down to just above his eyes.

“Tell me about yourself, Agent Delacroix,” he said as the fire popped and snapped to his left.

She looked at him as though faintly surprised he was still awake.

“Why the interest?”

Longarm sighed and closed his eyes. “Never mind.”

He willed himself asleep but before he could get there, she said softly, so that he could just barely hear her above the fire’s crackling and the sporadic yammering of a coyote. “I was born in Maryland. My family is wealthy. Civilized and wealthy. We’re descendants of the French painter, Delacroix, whom I’m sure you’ve never heard of.”

“He teach you how to shoot rattlesnakes?”

Her voice owned the timber of strained patience. “He’s dead. Long dead.”

“What’s your family’s business?”

“They deal in rare art and antiquities, when they deal in anything. For the most part, they entertain and they travel…and they enjoy the finer things in life. They educate themselves. They’re good people, though. Not spoiled. They give money to the poor.”

Longarm poked his hat brim up onto his head and rose onto his elbows, scowling at her skeptically. “If you came from all that, how in hell did you end up out West, workin’ for the Pinkertons?”

“None of that was enough for me. I’ve always had an adventurous edge. When I completed finishing school, I fell in love with a wonderful young man. But…I just couldn’t marry him. I’m not sure why. My heart fairly boiled with the need to see the world, to experience the world on a grand if often violent scale.”

She looked at him, the fire dancing in her hazel eyes. “I know it probably doesn’t make sense. I wouldn’t expect anyone else to understand. Someday, when I’m ready, I’ll return home and take up life where I left it there…educating myself and entertaining and appreciating art and ancient relics from the Greeks and Romans. I’ll travel to Greece and Turkey, and my beau and I will marry in Paris.”

“You stay in communication with him?”

She studied the fire thoughtfully, shook her head. “No.”

“How do you know he’s waitin’?”

“Oh, I know.” Her mouth corners lifted a confident smile.

Longarm studied her for a time, puzzled by her, fascinated. “Where’d you pick up the habit of invitin’ strange men to your rooms?”

Her cheeks darkened slightly, and her eyes regarding the wavering flames were slightly abashed. But only slightly. “A girl gets lonely.”

“Only strangers?”

She looked at him, vaguely puzzled.

“You only sleep with strangers.” He was playing a hunch, but only a slight one. “Anonymously. Never sleep with men you know. Why is that, Agent Delacroix?”

Her voice hardened a little, defensively. “It’s simpler.”

“Kind of risk-free, too—ain’t it? No risk of you tumblin’ for the fella. No risk of him tumblin’ for you. This way you can sort of stay undercover all the time, even in your real life.” Longarm smiled his perplexity. “What’re you afraid of, Haven? What’re you runnin’ from?”

Her brows stitched. “What’re you talking about? I don’t run from anything! I run
toward
things!”

Longarm nodded thoughtfully as he watched her. “That was you outside my door last night, wasn’t it? Before your admirers showed up with their shotguns.”

She held his gaze. Her lips opened slightly.

Then she sat back a little, crossed her arms on her belly, and leaned toward the fire as if she’d suddenly become chilled, though the day’s heat lingered. Her cheeks had flushed again, and he thought her chest rose and fell more heavily.

“Ain’t no doors out here, Haven.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked crisply.

“No doors, no walls.”

“You believe in mixing business and pleasure?” Now her voice was haughty with reprimand.

“When the sun goes down, I figure I’m off duty.”

She sighed and raised her knees. She wrapped her arms around her legs, rested her chin on her knees, and stared into the fire. Since the conversation appeared to be over, Longarm pulled his hat brim down over his eyes and drew a deep breath to try to rid his mind of the image of her naked and writhing beneath him.

But then she said just as softly as before, “I’d like to suck your cock again, damn you.”

Just then one of the horses whinnied.

If at anytime in his life Longarm would have done something as melodramatic as to shake his fist and scream at the cosmos, it would have been then. Haven gasped and turned toward where they’d hobbled the beasts in the near wash, to her right and behind her.

Longarm bit out a curse and gained his feet, his Colt already in his right fist, the hammer cocked. His heart thudded not from fear but from the soft echo in his head of her last words to him, just before she’d started to crawl toward him.

And then the fucking horse had whinnied.

“Stay here,” he said softly, stepping wide around the fire, careful not to kick their gear.

Quietly, he stepped through some scraggly mesquite and willows lining the wash and saw the dark shadows of the horses standing before him, head to toe, both switching their tails. Longarm’s own horse faced him, but it was craning its neck to look behind, in the direction in which Haven’s steeldust was staring, twitching its ears.

“Easy,” Longarm whispered, running a hand down along
roan’s back as he moved up past it and into the mouth of a smaller feeder wash angling off to the south.

He pricked his ears, listening closely to what the night had to tell him. There was nothing but the yammering of distant coyotes, the hooting of an owl, and the occasional murmur of a vagrant breeze scratching branches together, buffeting slim desert leaves.

He walked several yards into the narrow wash and stopped when he was halfway around a bend. A mewling sounded before him, startling him and causing him to tighten his trigger finger, but he stopped short of firing.

Two coyote-shaped shadows were milling around before him.

One turned its head toward him. Longarm could see the pointed ears and the starlight glistening in one of its eyes. The coyote gave a deep, feral growl and then yipped sharply, frustrated, and wheeled and thrashed some mesquite branches.

Both night hunters were both gone just as suddenly as Longarm had come upon them.

He moved forward and found what had lured them here. A dead fawn. Or what was left of it. They might have dragged it here or found it here, likely carried here by the spring floodwaters.

Longarm walked back the two, still-edgy horses, patting them both to silence, and then returned to the camp. Haven stood at the edge of the firelight, looking toward him, her arms crossed on her chest, her LeMats in her hands, their barrels resting against her shoulders.

“Anything?”

“Coyote.” Longarm had holstered his own Colt. He stopped in front of her, looked down at her. “Now, where were we?”

She stared up at him. As far as he could tell in the darkness, with the fire behind her, her face wore no expression whatever.

Slowly, she uncrossed her arms, shoved her LeMats down into their holsters slung low on her curving, slender hips. She unbuckled her cartridge belt and set it down with her gear near the fire, and then turned to him and kicked out of her boots before beginning to unbutton her blouse.

Longarm stood staring at her, his muscles having turned to stone. His heart thudded. And then as she removed her blouse to show a thin, pink chemise beneath, her nipples poking hard against the sheer fabric, he quickly unbuckled his own cartridge belt, swiped his hat off his head, and kicked out of his boots.

He was naked in under a minute. She was a little slower, more methodical, but she soon stood naked before him, beside the fire, which burnished the near side of her body with copper, casting shadow over the other half. Her breasts were dark cones jutting toward him.

Longarm walked toward her, his cock hard and angling nearly straight up.

He stopped before her, until the head of his cock was touching her warm, flat belly. The feel of her flesh against his shaft caused excitement to ripple up the backs of his legs. She wrapped both hands around it lightly.

“Wait,” she said in a soft, raspy voice.