Longarm 245: Longarm and the Vanishing Virgin Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Teaser chapter

  “HE’S A LAWMAN, A U.S. DEPUTY MARSHAL.”

  Longarm was still hunkered down by the fire. Wallace was only a few feet away, staring at him with a mixture of disbelief, suspicion, and anger.

  “Well?” Wallace said harshly. “What about it, Parker?”

  “His name isn’t Parker,” Nora said before Longarm could say anything. “It’s Long, Custis Long.”

  “Long,” Wallace said, and then his eyes widened in shock as a realization hit him. “Son of a bitch, you’re the one they call Longarm!”

  For an instant, Longarm thought about trying to talk his way out of this, but then he realized he wasn’t going to be able to do that. Wallace was already reaching for his gun. So Longarm did the only thing he could do.

  He threw the potful of scalding coffee right in Wallace’s face ...

  DON’T MISS THESE ALL-ACTION WESTERN SERIES FROM THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  THE GUNSMITH by J. R. Roberts Clint Adams was a legend among lawmen, outlaws, and ladies. They called him ... the Gunsmith.

  LONGARM by Tabor Evans The popular long-running series about U.S. Deputy Marshal Long—his life, his loves, his fight for justice.

  SLOCUM by Jake Logan Today’s longest-running action Western. John Slocum rides a deadly trail of hot blood and cold steel.

  BUSHWHACKERS by B. J. Lanagan An action-packed series by the creators of Longarm! The rousing adventures of the most brutal gang of cutthroats ever assembled—Quantrill’s Raiders.

  LONGARM AND THE VANISHING VIRGIN

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY Jove edition / May 1999

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1999 by Penguin Putnam Inc.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part,

  by mimeograph or any other means, without permission

  . For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17893-5

  A JOVE BOOK®

  Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  JOVE and the “J” design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Chapter 1

  Longarm said, “Just put that gun down, old son. There’s no need for anybody to die here.”

  The Dragoon Colt trembled slightly in the hand of the kid pointing it at Longarm. From where Longarm stood, the muzzle of the ancient percussion revolver looked about as big around as the mouth of a cannon. Longarm wondered if the kid was shaking because he was nervous, or because that blasted Dragoon was so damned heavy. Either way it was worrisome.

  The kid lifted his other hand and wiped the back of it across his mouth and the wispy mustache on his upper lip. The mustache was likely part of an effort to look older than he really was, which was about sixteen, thought Longarm.

  “I know why you’re here,” said the kid. “You’re after me.”

  “Fella, I never even knew you existed until I walked into this saloon a few minutes ago,” Longarm assured him. “And if you’ll put that gun away, I might just disremember you pulling it on me. Maybe. If you’ll put it up right now.”

  The kid shook his head. “Hell, no. You think I’m goin’ to trust the word of a lawman?” He packed all the contempt in the world into the word.

  Longarm sighed and glanced around the room. Nobody showed any signs of wanting to pitch in and lend him a hand. He supposed he couldn’t blame them. After all, he was a stranger in this little town, and a star packer to boot. Could be there were other men in this saloon besides the kid who wouldn’t mind seeing him dead.

  “You’re right about one thing: I’m a United States deputy marshal. But I swear, I’m not after you, kid. Whatever you did that you think has got me on your trail, you’re wrong.”

  The kid snorted in disbelief. “You’re the one they call Longarm, ain’t you?”

  “Some do,” admitted Longarm.

  “I’ve heard about you. You don’t never stop once you go after a man. And you don’t bring in many prisoners alive and kickin’ neither. If I put my gun up, you’ll wind up shootin’ me in the back and claimin’ I tried to get away from you.”

  Longarm’s jaw tightened in anger. One of the bad things about having a reputation of sorts was that folks didn’t seem to mind embellishing on it any time the notion struck them. He’d never shot a helpless prisoner in the back. Never would. But he’d play hob convincing this addlepated youngster of that.

  The bartender, a tall, thick-bodied man with graying hair and a craggy face, put his hands on the bar and leaned forward a little. “Why don’t you light a shuck out of town, kid?” he suggested. “We’ll keep this law dog here for a while, give you a start. No need for any shooting.”

  Clearly, he didn’t want any blood getting on the floor. Longarm could understand that. Bloodstains were hell to get out of wood.

  “I don’t know,” the kid said. “He’ll just come after me later. He knows about that bank I robbed up in Kansas.”

  The bartender sighed. “Well, now he does anyway.”

  “Was it a federally chartered bank or a state-chartered one?” asked Longarm.

  “Huh?” said the kid.

  “If it was a state-chartered bank, then robbing it was a state crime,” Longarm explained patiently. “I’m a federal lawman. A state crime would be out of my jurisdiction.”

  The kid frowned in concentration as he tried to puzzle out what Longarm had just said. Finally, he nodded. “Yeah, it was a state bank. Leastways, that was the name of it. First State Bank of Hugoton.”

  Longarm had been keeping his hands in plain sight, just so the kid wouldn’t get more nervous than he already was. Now he spread the fingers a little and said, “Well, there you go. I got no cause to arrest you. Just don’t go back to Kansas.”

  “See,” said the bartender, “no need for any shooting. I was right.”

  The barrel of the old Dragoon Colt started to dip toward the saloon’s sawdust-littered floor. “Yeah, I reckon....” the kid began. Then suddenly, his face twisted, and he jerked the gun up again. “I reckon I’ll kill you just to make sure, lawman!”

  The young would-be desperado talked too much, a common problem among those his age who wanted to make a name for themselves. By the time the last word was out of his mouth, Longarm had already thrown himself into a rolling dive that carried him behind an empty table. The kid jabbed the gun in his direction and pulled the trigger. Noise and flame and smoke geysered from the barrel of the Dragoon. The heavy lead ball it fired slammed into the top of the table, chewing up a long, ragged splinter.

  Longarm palmed h
is own Colt from the cross-draw rig at his waist and fired twice over the table. The first bullet hit the kid halfway between his belly button and the hollow of his throat, and as he bent over a little in response to the hammer blow of the slug, the second shot tore through his heart. That one drove him back against the bar. He bounced off and fell facedown on the floor. He didn’t move after he landed.

  “Son of a bitch!” Longarm said fervently.

  He hadn’t wanted to kill the kid. He had meant every word he’d said about letting the boy put the gun away and move on. But once the shooting started, Longarm’s instincts had taken over. Well-trained nerves and muscles had drawn and aimed and fired the two shots, either of which would have been fatal. That was a legacy of the years Longarm had spent as a deputy marshal, years full of armed confrontations in which he’d had no choice but to kill or be killed.

  With the smoking Colt still in his hand, Longarm looked around the room. The saloon was long and narrow, ugly on the outside with unpainted walls and a tin roof, and it wasn’t much prettier inside. The customers consisted of half-a-dozen cowboys, a couple of men who were probably buffalo hunters who didn’t know or didn’t care that most of the buffalo were gone, and a pasty-faced gambler in a stained and threadbare frock coat. The bartender probably owned the place too, and the only other person in sight was a soiled dove with a pale, heavily painted face and a flabby body in a too-tight spangled dress. None of them seemed overly concerned about the dead young man lying bleeding on the floor.

  “I told him to ride on,” the bartender said with a sigh.

  “That you did,” agreed Longarm. He gestured at the body with the gun in his hand. “There going to be any trouble about this?”

  “Who from? There’s no sheriff hereabouts. I’d say you’re the only law within fifty miles, mister. And the kid didn’t have any friends or relatives around here either. He just drifted in a couple of days ago, spent all his time either drinking or poking Maggie over there. He seemed to have plenty of money to spend, so I wasn’t in any hurry to run him off.”

  Longarm nodded, satisfied with the barkeep’s answer. He raised his voice a little and asked, “Anybody know the kid’s name?”

  “He called himself Billy,” offered the whore. “That’s all I know.”

  Billy, thought Longarm. Probably wasn’t his real name. Likely he’d taken it because of that other Billy who was famous here in New Mexico Territory, the one who helped raise hell and shove a chunk under the corner over in Lincoln County. He’d become a hero to every youngster with a gun and a dream of being a big man.

  Longarm holstered his Colt. “You can carve that on his marker,” he said, “or just leave it blank if you want.”

  “That’s assuming that somebody’ll pay for the burying,” the bartender pointed out.

  Longarm dug in his pocket and brought out a gold piece. He dropped it on the bar disgustedly. “There. That ought to cover it.” He’d turn in an expense voucher for the money when he got back to Denver, and if Billy Vail didn’t want to approve it, Longarm supposed he could cover the debt himself. He’d killed the kid, after all.

  The bartender scooped up the coin and said, “That’s enough, I reckon, with some left over for a drink. What’ll you have?”

  “I suppose it’s too much to hope you’ve got some Maryland rye back there.”

  The bartender shook his head. “We’re plumb out. Bar whiskey or beer, that’s all.”

  The beer was probably watered down within an inch of its life, and the bar whiskey was likely brewed up in a galvanized washtub out back. But since those were his choices, Longarm said, “Whiskey,” and hoped the stuff wouldn’t give him the blind staggers.

  The bartender poured the whiskey from a bottle with a peeling label into a glass that only had about a dozen fingerprints on it. He pushed the glass across the bar to Longarm and asked, “What brings you to Ashcroft?”

  “Looking for something,” said Longarm. He tasted the whiskey and tried not to make a face.

  “And what would that be, that you’re looking for, I mean?”

  Longarm set the glass down, looked across the bar at the man, and said, “A bride.”

  Chapter 2

  As he had climbed up the steps to enter the Federal Building in Denver a few days earlier, Longarm had been in a sour mood despite the beautiful June morning. The widow woman with whom he regularly kept company had chased him off for a spell. She’d gotten her back up because he had forgotten the anniversary of the first time they’d ever gone to bed together. Longarm couldn’t quite understand what was so bad about that. To him, the next time was more important than the first time.

  He paused just outside the pillared entrance of the building to light a cheroot and reflect on the matter. It wasn’t like she was the only woman in Denver who would welcome him into her bed. There was a lady faro dealer in one of the saloons who was fond of him, not to mention that gal at the public library who’d let her hair down and taken her spectacles off a few times with him. It’d serve that widow woman right if he just went and found somebody else.

  None of which thoughts improved his mood any, for some reason. He drew deep on the cheroot, and blew out a cloud of smoke.

  What he really needed was something to do. It wasn’t good for a man to sit around and brood over his personal dilemmas all the time. He’d been stuck here in Denver for nearly a month, and in that whole time, not one person had taken a shot at him or tried to stab him or trample him under the hooves of a horse. No wonder his nature had turned foul. He was bored.

  Maybe this was the day Billy Vail would have something for him to do.

  “Mornin’, Henry.” Longarm tried to make himself sound cheerful as he came into the outer office of the chief marshal and greeted the pasty-faced clerk who played the typewriter. He added hopefully, “I reckon Billy wants to see me.”

  “As a matter of fact, he does,” said Henry. “He told me to send you right in whenever you got here.” Henry frowned a little. “That was over half an hour ago.”

  Longarm bit down on the smoldering cheroot to keep from snapping back at Henry. You couldn’t blame a fella for coming in late some mornings when he hadn’t had anything to do for so long.

  The big lawman’s long strides carried him across the outer office to Vail’s door. He opened it without knocking and stepped into the chief marshal’s inner sanctum. “Howdy, Billy,” Longarm said. “I hear you want to see me.”

  Vail’s desk was cluttered with papers, as usual. Without looking up from shuffling them around, he waved a hand at the red leather chair in front of the desk and said, “Sit down, Custis. Be with you in just a minute.”

  Something about his voice told Longarm that Vail’s casual pose was just that—a pose. Billy had a burr under his saddle.

  After a moment, Vail shoved some of the papers aside and glanced at the banjo clock on the wall. “Well, I had hoped to tell you a little about this case before our visitors got here,” he said peevishly, “but there’s no time for that now. They’ll be arriving any minute.”

  Longarm frowned. “Company coming, Billy?”

  “Important company. I want you to mind your manners, Custis.”

  “Hell, I’m always polite—”

  The door opened before Longarm could finish his sentence. Henry stuck his head in and said in a loud whisper, “They’re here, Marshal Vail.”

  Vail stood up and motioned for Longarm to do the same. “Show them in,” he said to Henry.

  Henry retreated, then reappeared quickly, leading two men. Both of them wore expensive suits, boiled shirts, and silk ties fastened down with gem-encrusted tie clasps. The main difference in them was their ages: one was in his late thirties, the other probably twenty years older.

  “Gentlemen, good to see you again,” Vail said heartily. “Come in, come in. Have a seat.” He waved Longarm over to one of the other chairs, leaving the one directly in front of the desk vacant for the older of the two visitors.

  Longarm
recognized both of them, and only his years of experience at not immediately revealing his emotions kept the surprise off his face. He wondered what a United States senator and one of the wealthiest railroad barons in the country wanted with a couple of civil servants like him and Billy Vail.

  The older man, whose name was Bryce Canady, sat down in the red leather chair and folded his hands on the silver head of the walking stick he carried. He had a shock of crisp white hair, and his weatherbeaten features showed that he hadn’t spent his entire life in an office, not by a long shot. In fact, he had started out swinging a sledgehammer on a crew building a railroad in Virginia more than thirty years earlier, if Longarm recalled correctly the newspaper articles he had read about the man. From there he had worked his way up to a position of riches and power as one of the top men in the cartel that controlled many of America’s railroads.

  The other man was one of the youngest to ever be elected to the United States Senate. Jonas Palmer was strikingly handsome, with dark hair and muttonchop whiskers framing a face that had the hearts of Denver’s single women—and their mothers—fluttering to beat the band. But Palmer was no longer one of the most eligible bachelors west of the Mississippi, Longarm recalled. He was either about to be married, or perhaps already was. Longarm wasn’t sure which because he didn’t keep up that well with society goings-on. But he remembered the name of the young woman that Senator Palmer was going to marry.

  Nora Canady. The daughter of the man sitting here in Billy Vail’s office.

  What in blue blazes was going on?

  “Thank you for seeing us on such short notice, Marshal,” Bryce Canady said in a deep, slightly hoarse voice.

  These days, since he was riding a desk instead of a horse, Vail frequently had to be as much a politician as he was a lawman. He nodded solemnly and said, “We could have come to your house, Mr. Canady—”