Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance (25 page)

An hour later, he rode to the top of a low mesa and swung down from his saddle, scanning the desert terrain stretching out to the east. The sun was above the horizon now, and Longarm was looking right into it, so he shaded his eyes.

He was starting to think he’d lost the man and that he’d
have to go back to the main trail to pick up the rider’s tracks when he spied movement. No larger from this distance than Longarm’s thumb, the rider was galloping at an angle across the desert, heading south.

“There we go,” Longarm said, his heart lightening, and swung up onto the roan’s back.

He followed a deer trail down the sloping side of the mesa. When he reached the flat bottomland bristling with Sonoran chaparral, he put the horse into a hard gallop, keeping his quarry’s bobbing and weaving silhouette in front of him.

Occasionally the Double D rider would gallop up and over a rise, and Longarm would naturally lose sight of him. When this happened, Longarm slowed his pace, resting his horse as his quarry was probably also doing as he rode down the incline. When the man had left his field of vision, Longarm would look keenly around him, listening to every sound, wary for another ambush.

Over the course of the morning, the rider might have spied him and decided to shed the lawman from his trail.

Longarm rode for over an hour. The sun blasted down like liquid coals from the brassy sky unobscured by the smallest cloud. Nothing moved in the bright, shadowless land around him. All the animals were tucked away in their burrows.

Longarm shed his frock coat and wrapped it around his bedroll. He rolled the sleeves of his cotton shirt up his forearms and tipped his hat down low over his eyes.

Still, sweat ran down from his forehead and burned in his eyes. He dragged a handkerchief out of his back pocket, dampened it from his canteen, and dabbed at his eye corners to relieve the sting.

He rode between broad, rounded hills—low mountains, really, tufted with cactus. Beyond the mountain on his right lay another, lower hill on the far side of a crease between the two formations.

Nothing appeared out of sorts. The tracks of the man he
was shadowing continued scoring the red dust before him, leading off in the same direction the man had been heading all morning. Longarm had not seen the man for nearly a half hour.

This fact laid a dry, cool hand of unease between Longarm’s shoulder blades. He’d almost been dry-gulched once on this assignment. He’d be damned if he’d let it
almost
happen again.

Ahead, the side of the second hill was about thirty feet high and steep. Almost straight up and down. The crest of the hill was a jumble of adobe-colored boulders of all shapes and sizes. There wasn’t a living thing around. Just rock.

Plenty of rocks to hide behind and effect an ambush.

Longarm shucked his Winchester from his saddle boot, swung his right boot over his saddle horn, and dropped straight down to the ground, landing quietly flatfooted. He wrapped his reins around the apple. Slowly, gritting his teeth, he levered a cartridge into the rifle’s breech and then tapped the butt plate against the roan’s hindquarters.

The horse gave an indignant whicker as it lurched ahead with a start, trotting on down the trail, obscuring the preceding horse’s tracks with its own.

Dust lifted like tan feathers behind it. Squinting against the dust, Longarm ran behind the horse, letting it slowly outdistance him. He ran crouching, holding the cocked Winchester across his chest with both hands, keeping within a few feet of the steep slope on his right, so he couldn’t be seen from its crest.

Ahead the horse clomped around a slight bend in the trail, following the curving face of the steep slope on its right. Longarm quickened his pace to keep the horse in sight. Just as he rounded the curve in the slope’s face, a rifle belched shrilly.

Dust plumed to the left of the horse and ahead a bit. Longarm knew that if he’d been in the saddle, however, the slug likely would have gone in one of his ears and out the other.

The horse buck-kicked fiercely and lunged into a hard gallop, empty stirrups flapping, bedroll bouncing. One of its reins came free of the saddle horn and bounced along the ground beside it.

Longarm stepped out away from the slope, saw a ribbon of smoke rising above a gently shelving, flat-topped boulder. Beneath the boulder, his quarry stood aiming a rifle and staring down the slope before him, a deep, angry scowl on his face.

Longarm raised his Winchester at the same time that his would-be assassin spotted him. Longarm fired as the man turned.

The man fired his own carbine and stumbled back against the boulder. Longarm fired again as the man twisted around and ran up the hill. The lawman’s bullet tore up rock dust at his quarry’s heels. The Double D rider turned toward him again and fired his carbine twice from the hip, levering quickly, spent shell casings arcing back behind him.

Longarm fired again, and the man screamed and jerked back. He continued climbing until he was up and over the hillcrest.

Cursing, Longarm ran up the steep slope, grinding his heels in the sand and gravel and using his Winchester’s stock to help hoist him. It was hard going, for the gravel was loose between the boulders, and he had a hard time getting a firm purchase.

Halfway up, he saw his quarry peer around a boulder at the top of the ridge. Longarm jerked back behind a boulder to his right as the man’s rifle thundered twice loudly, both slugs screeching off the side of the boulder near Longarm’s right shoulder.

Longarm leaned out from behind the boulder and pumped four quick shots up the slope. At least two punched into the dry-gulcher’s chest, jerking him back.

His knees buckled, and he leaned forward and dropped his rifle to the gravel before him. He fell to his head and his
knees simultaneously, and rolled over and over down the slope. He rolled straight past Longarm and piled up at the base of another boulder about ten feet away.

He lay on his back, blood pumping from three holes in his chest, another from his arm just up from the elbow, and yet another just above his left knee.

Longarm shook his head and immediately, automatically began to reload his Winchester from his cartridge belt. “You’re in the wrong line of work, old son.”

He was not reveling in the kill. In fact, it burned him. He’d wanted to follow the man, find out whom he was riding off to rendezvous with and maybe learn from both men why Stretch wanted him dead.

Now, because the man had spied him on his back trail, Longarm’s plan had been foiled.

Longarm raked an angry sigh.

He slipped and slid down the hill to the trail, walked up the trail hoping to see his horse not far ahead. That wasn’t the case. He walked a hundred yards, then another hundred. No sign of the beast.

He came to where the horse’s tracks angled off to the south, but looking that way he saw nothing but piñon pines, cactus, greasewood, bunchgrass, and occasional cedars cowering beneath the merciless sun. He had to find the horse; his canteen was looped over the saddle horn. If he had to, he’d go back and look for the dead man’s horse, which was likely carrying the dead man’s water, but he’d backtrack only if he couldn’t find his own mount in a half hour.

He swung right from the trail and began following the horse’s tracks through the chaparral. When he’d walked only twenty yards, a rumbling rose.

He squinted against the sun, saw riders galloping toward him from nearly straight ahead. Apprehension poked at him. He looked around for cover. There was nothing but the dry, gray-brown shrubs and modest-sized rocks.

The riders appeared to have seen him, because they were
heading for him—five or six men coming fast. The lead rider appeared to be trailing a spare horse. A roan.

Longarm’s horse.

A vague, cautious optimism gave the lawman’s overall anxiety a little nudge. Just a little one. He didn’t like the setup. He wondered if this was what the dead lawmen had seen in the minutes before they had died—a blur of riders growing steadily against the brown of distant mountains and trailing a rising cloud of tan desert dust.

He stood his ground, holding his Winchester in both hands straight across his belly. Neither a defensive nor a threatening stance, but a cautious one. As the group approached to within seventy yards, he saw the gaudy sombreros and neckerchiefs, the bearded, dusky-skinned faces.

Several wore charro jackets and flared slacks. Cartridge bandoliers flashed in the sunlight.

Mexicans.

Banditos.

Shit.

The group slowed and then stopped around the lead rider, who was leading Longarm’s roan by its bridle reins.

The man was short and stocky. He wore a black leather jacket stitched with white thread, and a billowy red neckerchief. His face was round and pockmarked, and it was trimmed with brushy black muttonchop whiskers that formed arrow points near his mouth corners. Mantling his mouth was a brushy, black mustache.

He and the others sat their horses staring blandly at Longarm. Their mounts snorted and blew, stomping their hooves. Dust wafted around the group. Longarm could smell the hot horses and the man sweat and the leather mixing with the tang of pine and creosote.

The group was well armed. The lead rider held his right hand down near a six-shooter jutting from a tooled leather holster.

Longarm waited, saying nothing. There were five of
them. Three were holding carbines. He might be able to take one or two before the others cut him down and left him as the other lawmen had been left to swell and rot.

Finally, the lead rider’s truculent face brightened with an unexpected grin. His black eyes flashed in the sunlight. “Vonda sent you, no?”

The question rocked Longarm back on his proverbial heels. Vonda?

He knew he must have frowned dubiously but covered it by spitting to one side and then nodding, keeping his face a stone mask.

The lead rider raised his fist with the reins in it. “Yours?”

“That’s right.”

Longarm started forward but stopped when the lead rider lowered his hand clutching the reins and drew it slightly back behind him. He frowned suspiciously. “Why she send you?”

Longarm kept his expression plain as he shuffled quickly through several options. When he chose one, he’d have to ride it out to wherever it led him. That place might be a shallow grave scratched out right here in the thin desert dirt beneath his boots.

“Another lawman snoopin’ around,” he said. “Back at the ranch.”

A man behind the leader said, “Probably the one who Fuentes saw yesterday, Mercado. The one who killed Maximillian.”

“Si,”
said the leader called Mercado, keeping his eyes on Longarm but turning his head slightly back and to one side. “Why does she not kill him? Why tell us? It’s not like we don’t have our hands full looking for that new Bolivar route as it is!”

“I reckon she figures there’s gettin’ to be an awful lot of lawmen to kill, wonders if this one might be one too many.” Longarm kept his index finger curled through his Winchester’s trigger guard, knowing that, improvising as he was, he
might very well say something that could get him blasted to hell in a heartbeat.

He said, “She thinks maybe Fuentes should try him one more time, take him down out here, away from the headquarters.”

In Spanish, Mercado asked one of the other men where Fuentes was. The man replied that Fuentes was off scouting the Javelina Buttes—for what, he didn’t say. More lawmen? Or the Bolivar route? Whatever in hell the Bolivar route was…

Mercado pondered this and then slid his dark eyes back to Longarm. “How did you lose your horse, amigo?”

“Bastard saw a rattlesnake and threw me.” Longarm gave his best tough-nut glare to the roan, half meaning it.

Mercado tossed him the roan’s reins. He caught them and asked, “What’re you fellas doin’ out here? You think the Bolivar route is this far east?”

“Who knows where it is?” the leader said, more frustrated than angry. “All we know is that one payroll shipment was due to pull through here last month, but we saw no sign of it. It passed through somewhere out here—it had to, it’s the only way across the border—but Leyton thinks that after the other lawmen were killed, the company got spooked and switched the route through the buttes southwest of Holy Defiance.”

The name “Leyton” rocked Longarm back on his heels a second time.
Ranger Jack Leyton?
How in hell was he tied to this—whatever
this
was?

“You look like you could use some tequila,” the gang leader said, winking at Longarm.

“You know it,” the lawman responded, swinging into the roan’s hurricane deck.

“We were just heading back to Holy Defiance when we spotted your horse. You can join us. Jack will want to hear about this new lawman. He will need to be dealt with, also.” The Mexican leader held out his gloved hand, suddenly most gracious.
“I am Mercado. No doubt you heard of me from Vonda.”

“Oh, yeah,” Longarm said, manufacturing his best wolfish grin.

Mercado chuckled proudly. “What is your handle, amigo?”

“Me?” Longarm hesitated for only an eye blink of time though to him it felt like seven long years. “I’m Longabaugh. Clyde Longabaugh.” He thought he’d seen the surname on a wanted circular offering a reward for a gang of mostly nonviolent, small-time bank robbers from up Wyoming way.

Longarm shook Mercado’s hand and then followed the gang east through the chaparral toward Holy Defiance and a meeting with Ranger Jack Leyton.

Uneasiness rode like a heavy second passenger behind him. Things were either about to become really clear really fast, or Longarm was about to become really dead for a long, long time.

“You like girls, Senor Longabaugh?” asked Mercado, the leader of the small pack of Mexicans who’d rescued Longarm.

They were riding over a bench and into the little town of Holy Defiance—a handful of dilapidated buildings hunkered down in the sunburned desert between two piles of black boulders that some volcano must have vomited from the earth’s bowels several hundred eons ago.

Defiance Wash ran through the heart of the town. A rough plank bridge stretched across its twenty-foot width.