Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance (20 page)

The denim-clad figure in a black shirt despite the heat, wearing a straw sombrero, continued to stride a
little gimpily toward Longarm and Haven. The raspy, sexless voice said, “Who in the hell are you, and good Lord—what the hell are you packin’, mister?”

One of the two guides canted his head at Longarm and said, “Law, Mrs. Azrael.”

Missus, huh? Longarm thought he detected a couple of nubbin’ breasts behind the black shirt and knotted red neckerchief, but the rest of the person looked all male. The face beneath the sombrero was like a giant raisin. Black hair was pulled back tight beneath the hat. Longarm thought that her head
might
come up to his cartridge belt, but only because of the high heels of her child-sized stockmen’s boots.

“Who’s he packin’ on the hoss there?” Mrs. Azrael said, scrutinizing the barb with her coal-black eyes.

“Says one’s a ranger.”

“I’ll speak for myself,” Longarm said angrily. “One’s a dead ranger. The other man I got a nagging suspicion is one of yours, Mrs. Azrael. He tried to kill me. The other tried to kill both myself and my partner, Agent Delacroix, with a buffalo gun.”

He looked around the men now facing him from the corral. The bronc rider had dismounted and was watching from over the fence, the bronc standing slouched, reins drooping, its sides moving in and out as it breathed, in the corral’s center.

“I’d like to palaver with the son of a bitch out in your wood shed,” Longarm added. “Your husband, too, since he hired ’em.”

Mrs. Azrael looked at the men standing by the breaking corral and said in her toneless, nasal wheeze: “Stretch!”

One of the men—tall, with a funnel-brimmed hat and pinto-hide vest—stepped away from the corral and walked over to the barb. He pulled the dead men’s heads up by their hair, scrutinizing each slack face, then let the heads slap down against the barb’s ribs.

Stretch turned to Mrs. Azrael and hooked his thumbs
behind the belt of his batwing chaps. “The ranger was here a few days ago. Him and the other one, Leyton. Askin’ about the five we planted over on Defiance Wash. The other one, the Mex, I wouldn’t know from Adam’s off-ox.”

“You never seen him before?” Longarm said skeptically.

Stretch turned his long face toward the lawman, scowling belligerently. “You heard me.”

“Who around here carries a Big Fifty?”

“No one,” Stretch said after a short, menacing pause, holding his glowering stare on the lawman.

Longarm could hear several of the other men speaking amongst themselves to his right. They were getting worked up. The black man sat on the rock, smoking and glaring toward the newcomers and their grisly cargo.

Longarm turned to Stretch, hooking his thumb over his shoulder. “That bastard and the one with the Big Fifty fired on us when we were on Double D range. Now, why would they do that?”

Stretch stepped toward Longarm, letting his arms hang loose at his sides. “You callin’ me a liar?”

“Get your back down, Stretch,” Mrs. Azrael said with an amused air, standing a few feet from Longarm with her fists on her hips. “If you’re a lawman, how come I don’t see a badge?”

“Badges make good targets. I keep mine in my wallet.” Longarm reached into the inside pocket of his brown frock coat and pulled out the black wallet of worn cowhide.

He opened it up to reveal the old, tarnished moon-and-star badge he’d been carrying for years. Mrs. Azrael moved in closer to scrutinize the nickeled tin and then looked at Longarm with her black eyes set deep in leathery sockets. She looked past him at Haven.

“She’s a Pinkerton?”

“That’s right.”

“A girl?”

Haven said affably, “Since gaining the age of twenty-three, I’d prefer to be called a woman.”

That seemed to win the leathery ranch woman’s heart. “Don’t blame ya bit, miss. Don’t blame ya a bit.”

“I’m Long,” Longarm said. “This is Agent Delacroix.”

“You both look hot and dusty. Miss Delacroix, I bet you’d like to freshen up. Marshal Long, you look like you could use a drink.”

Haven might have won the old ranch woman’s heart, but Mrs. Azrael hadn’t won his yet. “Mr. Azrael around?”

“Oh, he’s around. Upstairs napping at the moment. I’ll bring him down later, and you can talk to him for all the good you think it’ll do.” Mrs. Azrael beckoned. “Come on. Light and give them hosses a blow. You’re too far out in the high an’ rocky to head elsewhere this late in the day. You’re welcome to spend the night here at the Double D, and we’ll do what we can to answer your questions, though somethin’ tells me you’re not gonna ride out of here any more satisfied than that dead ranger and Captain Leyton were two days ago.”

Longarm swung down from his saddle, and Mrs. Azrael called for a few of the other men to tend the horses and to bury the two cadavers. The lawman had just started to follow Mrs. Azrael and Haven toward the ranch house, when Stretch stepped up to Longarm and said tightly, “Just so’s you know, lawman or not, I don’t like bein’ called a liar.”

Longarm half turned in time to see a fist arcing toward his face. He ducked, and Stretch’s right fist swiped Longarm’s hat from his head.

Stretch grunted, his pugnacious face acquiring a surprised look. It grew even more surprised when Longarm buried his own right fist in Stretch’s belly and then smashed an uppercut against the underside of Stretch’s chin that was carpeted in a light brown spade beard to match the mustache mantling his long, thin-lipped mouth.

Stretch toppled like a windmill in a midwestern twister, dust billowing.

Mrs. Azrael laughed behind Longarm. She sounded like a whipsaw chewing on a horseshoe. “There you go, Stretch! Now look what you done!”

The ranch woman laughed again, thoroughly satisfied, it appeared, with the state of the man whom Longarm assumed was her foreman. “I told you to get that hump out of your neck, ya damn tinhorn!”

On his ass in the dirt and ground horse shit of the ranch yard, propped on his elbows, Stretch glowered up at Longarm. Bright diamonds of threat danced in his eyes.

Mrs. Azrael laughed and said, “Come on inside, Marshal. I do apologize for my ramrod’s inhospitality. He’s a firebrand, that one!”

Longarm picked up his hat and glanced once more at Stretch. The other men had moved up closer to the house, some of them taking fighting stances in case the dustup between Longarm and Stretch wasn’t finished. Stretch stayed where he was, however, his glaring gaze filled with both shock and a promise of retribution.

Longarm pinched his hat brim to him and then turned toward the house. Haven stood just outside the entrance portal to the garden, scowling up at Longarm, like a schoolmarm silently chastising an unruly student. He merely hiked a shoulder, and then Haven turned through the portal and followed Mrs. Azrael along a stone walk through the garden.

Longarm followed them both, noting the colorful flowers arranged in flower beds, transplanted shrubs, cacti, and a flowering crabapple tree. The garden appeared to ring the house. As Mrs. Azrael silently walked along the stone path,
she stopped and tipped her head back to look up at the tall lawman, who towered over her. She placed a hand on her sombrero’s crown to keep it from falling off.

“You’re a big man, Marshal. Bigger than Stretch.” Her high cheeks covered in wrinkled and dimpled leather, stretched an admiring smile. “Takes one your size to give him his due, which he’s never had, as far as I know. If so, he’s never told his ma about it.”

“Ma?” Longarm said.

“Sure, sure. Stretch is my boy. Favors his father more than his black-Irish ma, don’t he?” She called through the portal where Stretch was swiping dust from his leather leggings with his hat. “Stretch, get cleaned up. Supper in an hour!”

The tall ranch foreman threw an indignant look over his shoulder and dragged his boots in frustration toward the corral, where the bronc rider was just now climbing back into the hurricane deck.

As Mrs. Azrael started climbing the steps to the house’s front gallery, she stopped again and said, “And this here is Stretch’s wife, Vonda.”

Longarm hadn’t seen anyone standing there before, but he saw her now, hovering near a whitewashed stone piling that supported the gallery’s red-tiled roof. He hadn’t seen the girl because, being ash-blond and dressed in a white, low-cut cotton dress, her pale shoulders bare, she’d blended in to the piling and the white clapboard house front.

Longarm’s heart twisted a little, when he saw the heavy-lidded stare the girl gave him, crooking one corner of her full rich mouth that was just the right size for her delicate, heart-shaped face. Her flawless skin told Longarm she probably wasn’t much over sixteen years old, if that, but her body was full-busted, with long legs and ripe hips.

Her eyes behind the heavy lids were the blue of a high-mountain lake at the height of spring. She was barefoot, and now she mashed the toes of one foot down on the other foot—
an achingly sexy gesture. Her toes were pink and plump and somehow as alluring as the pale breasts that were half-revealed by the thin, cotton dress. The big lawman’s keen male eye told him this woman-child’s breasts would not be as large as Haven’s, but they’d be full and succulent beneath his tongue.

Had Mrs. Azrael said she belonged to Stretch?

Longarm knew an instant’s fleeting jealousy, which he thought he concealed well as he nodded once to the girl, giving a cordial, professional smile. “I’m Deputy United States Marshal Custis P. Long, and I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Vonda.”

Haven stepped up beside him and dipped her chin to the girl. “I am Haven Delacroix of the Pinkerton Agency.”

The girl kept her sultry, blue gaze on Longarm, continuing to mash her pink toes into the top of her opposite foot and lean beguilingly against the piling, as though she were imitating a cat pressing its body against a man’s ankle.

Mrs. Azrael said in her brusque, raspy tone, tossing her clawlike hand in an urgent wave, “Go on up and tell Angelina to bring ole Whip down. The marshal and Agent Delacroix want to talk to him. We’ll be in the parlor. When you’ve done that, fetch us a jug of fresh water from the well.”

The girl smiled at Longarm, who didn’t think she’d given Haven so much as a passing glance yet, and then pushed away from the porch post, did a fleet, little, dancer’s pirouette, her blond hair flying out from her neck, and then ran through the stout open door and into the house. Longarm heard her bare feet slapping on what he assumed were stone tiles.

“Please, come in,” Mrs. Azrael said, entering the house herself and doffing her straw sombrero. “And don’t mind Vonda. She’s cork-headed and lazy as a rich widow’s cat. Why on earth my son chose to marry her of all the girls he’s had at his beck and call is beyond my fathoming!”

Walking through the doorway behind Haven, Longarm reflected that it sure as hell wasn’t beyond his fathoming.

As he and Haven followed Mrs. Azrael through the cool, dark house, he got the impression that the place had once been much smaller—probably a settler’s cabin. Since then, it had been added onto in various fashions until now it was a sprawling maze.

In some parts, the floors were stone; in others, oak. The walls were adobe brick or fieldstone, a few consisting of vertical wood panels. Most were dark with soot from candles, coal oil, and wood smoke from several iron stoves and brick fireplaces.

The little woman led them into a large room with couches and large comfortable chairs, a desk in one corner. There were a few small bookcases, old-model rifles, an oil painting, and hunting trophies on the walls.

There was also a stout liquor cabinet made of oak, Longarm noticed. He was glad to see the rangy woman amble over to it, curling both feet in a little, as though her ankles were sore.

“Drinks all around?” she asked. She’d hung her sombrero on a peg somewhere in the dark house, and Longarm saw that she wore her coal-black hair very short, with a tortoiseshell comb holding it down in back.

“Why not?” Longarm looked at Haven, who stood with her hat in her hands.

She hesitated for a second then, giving Longarm a vaguely defiant look, said, “Sure.”

“I got some purty good busthead here,” said Mrs. Azrael. “How ’bout some bourbon? Whip used to order it by the case from Kentucky. No doubt played a part in his…”

She let her voice trail off as she looked over her shoulder at the study’s open doorway, through which a young, plump Mexican woman was pushing a wiry, little gray-haired man in a wheelchair.

“Accident,” Mrs. Azrael finished.

The young Mexican woman kept her eyes down as she rolled the little gray-haired man up to the striped rug
fronting the cold fireplace and around which most of the chairs and one of the couches were arranged. “Obliged, Angelina,” Mrs. Azrael said. “Start supper, will you? There’ll be two more this evening.”

The Mexican girl did not respond but, keeping her cool, dark eyes lowered, merely turned and strolled back out the study door, leaving the little man in his chair facing the fireplace with all the expression of a blank adobe wall. He was almost as small as Mrs. Azrael, and he wore a black patch over one eye. His skin and his hair was as dry, thin, and as colorless as that of a corpse.

Mrs. Azrael continued pouring drinks at the cabinet. “Marshal Long, Agent Delacroix, meet my husband, Whip Azrael. Don’t take it personal if he don’t say howdy or shake hands.”

Longarm gazed down at the poor old hombre in the wheelchair, both the man’s knees together and leaning to one side. In his stockmen’s boots, gray suit, and a black string tie, he looked as though he were about ride into town for a night of card playing with his moneyed cronies.

But Longarm doubted Whip Azrael ever left the house much anymore. Or, if he did, he likely didn’t know it.

“What happened?” Longarm asked as Mrs. Azrael handed him and Haven their water glasses half-filled with bourbon.

The old woman turned to the door and croaked out, “Where’s that water, goddamnit, Vonda!” To her guests, she said, “Have a seat. Anywhere. Please!”

Longarm chose a leather chair near Whip Azrael, facing the unlit hearth. Haven lowered her fine body into the brocade-upholstered sofa on his left, a low wooden table between them. Mrs. Azrael sat on the couch’s opposite end, her glass in her clawlike hand.