Longarm and the Banker's Daughter (9781101613375) Read online

  “We was getting’ bored, though,” May said as she shoved foodstuffs into a bag on the kitchen table. “We was born bad, Harcourt an’ me. Felix was just naturally born bad, too.”

  The big woman shook her head. “It wasn’t hard for dear Lacy to convince me we should throw in with her, go after the loot she hid from Gunn and Cruz.” She glanced at Harcourt, who was rummaging around in the drawers of a sideboard near the stairs, tossing ammo boxes on top of it, near a pair of open saddlebags. “If we ever get out of here. Gonna be light soon, Harcourt! Where’s that worthless spawn of yours?”

  “I told ya, May—he’s saddlin’ the mounts. Now shut up so I can hear myself think over here!”

  * * *

  “You just lay there and think about it, Longarm. Been nice knowin’ you.” Lacy touched a finger to her lips, then pressed it to Longarm’s. It was wet. Even through the throbbing in his head he could feel the wetness on his own lips and felt a shudder of desire, however slight and eerie.

  It angered him. He gritted his teeth and fought against the ropes, but they only burned deeper into his wrists. He rocked from side to side, but his ankles were tied taut to the chair legs, as well, so he wasn’t going anywhere.

  The struggle kicked up the throbbing in his temple and now in the back of his head, as well, and it nauseated him. So he wouldn’t throw up while lying on his back and choke on it, he lay there, sucking air in and out of his lungs and waiting for the pain to lessen.

  Lacy went out, and then May slung a couple of croaker sacks over her back and went out behind her.

  A few minutes later, Harcourt Greer stood over Longarm, grinning, holding a pair of saddlebags over one shoulder, a Winchester rifle in his hands. On his hips were two pistols—the Smith & Wesson Longarm had seen on him earlier, and a long-barreled Colt in a holster strapped to the man’s thigh. “Like I said, I hate nothin’ worse than a goddamned lawman. Rangers hung my oldest boy and two of his cousins. Hanged my wife, too.”

  “I can certainly understand, then,” Longarm said wryly.

  “I’d put a bullet through your ears if it wasn’t for Miss Lacy and the money. Wouldn’t wanna do nothin’ to get on her bad side.” Greer winked. “Until May and Felix an’ me get the money, that is.”

  He cackled, choked, and spat chaw at Longarm, who turned his head so that he merely felt a wetness on his ear as it splattered onto the floor. Then he stomped on out of the cabin, leaving the door hanging wide behind him.

  Another wave of rage swept through Longarm, like a wildfire through dry woods. He rocked from side to side, trying to loosen the ropes around his wrists and ankles, but again the hemp only bit deeper into his skin. The exertion made bright roses blossom in his eyes. He ground his teeth against the railroad sparks of fiery pain being rammed through his ears.

  He felt like a turtle on its back, unable to right itself. He could only lie here now, hoping the pain died, hoping he could figure a way out of this ridiculous fix she’d gotten him into again. Shortly, he heard horses snorting, hooves clomping, bridle chains jangling. He looked through the open door, saw in the dim, floury light of the predawn three horses and May’s mule clomp past the cabin and head off down the trail toward the river.

  Longarm growled like a wounded wolf. Like a wounded wolf in a leg trap. He had to get after Lacy and her new accomplices. Bring them down before they found the money and lit out for who knew where.

  And he had to get there ahead of Gunn and Cruz. Well ahead. He was outnumbered on both sides, and the last thing he needed was to get caught in a cross fire.

  Resting back against the floor, squeezing his eyes shut against the throbbing in his head aggravated by his frustration, he thought, Why not just let them all kill each other? Then, when the smoked cleared, he could take the loot back to Jawbone, and his troubles would be over.

  But he couldn’t bank on the two factions killing all of each other. One or two could very well make off with the money. And . . . Christ, could he really be thinking this? . . . part of him wanted to save Lacy not only from Gunn and Cruz but from herself. He didn’t want her to die.

  What part of him wanted to save her?

  Stupid question.

  When he felt the throbbing in his head begin to abate, he looked around and thought hard on how he was going to separate himself from the chair. The ropes wouldn’t give. He knew that from the slick, oily blood oozing around them. Fighting them had only cause them to tear into his skin, make him bleed. Since he couldn’t get out of the ropes, he had to break the chair apart.

  How?

  He pondered the question. An answer came to him.

  He groaned against it. This is gonna hurt.

  It did.

  Wriggling his shoulders and hips, he managed to roll to the door. He paused there, catching his breath, sweat breaking out all over his body and basting his balbriggans against him like a second, faded-red skin. Then he drew a deep breath and managed to wriggle and roll his way through the open door, then across the stoop and down the porch’s five steps.

  As he boom-boom-boomed down the steps, he thrust all his weight against the chair until, when he ended up in the yard, he’d busted the back off the chair, and he’d busted the bottom of the chair into two ragged parts. His ankles and wrists were free of the chair and each other, though rope was still tied around each.

  Rising, breathing hard through gritted teeth, with that little man busting into his brain in earnest with his angry hammer, he looked around.

  It was full dawn though the sun was not yet above the eastern mountains. So far, Longarm appeared to be alone. The ropes were still cutting into his wrists and ankles, but the knots were too tight to untie, so he stumbled barefoot into the cabin, found a rusty paring knife in a peach crate, and sawed through each of the ropes, ignoring the blood oozing out of the cuts in his wrists and ankles.

  He had bigger fish to fry.

  As quickly as he could in his agonized condition, he dressed and pulled his boots on, wincing at the pain in his ankles as he did. He wrapped his gun belt and holster around his waist, though Greer had taken his pistol. He intended to get it back soon.

  Setting his hat gingerly on his head, Longarm looked around the cabin. He doubted Greer and May would have left any weapons lying around. The only knife he’d seen was the little knife he’d cut the ropes with. Deciding he’d have to head after Lacy and her cohorts unarmed, with possibly Gunn and Cruz on his trail, he wobbled out of the cabin, clamping a hand over the goose egg on his temple and hoping Greer had left a horse behind.

  As he stepped onto the veranda, frustration bit him once more. The gate of the breaking corral left of the cabin hung open, as did the gate of the paddock off the barn to Longarm’s right. Both corrals were empty, and there was no riding stock anywhere in sight.

  He cursed and stumbled down the steps and past the remains of his chair, heading toward the barn, and stopped suddenly. Rumbling sounded. He turned to look past the ranch portal. Dust broiled over the trail in the direction of the river. He could see horseback riders jouncing beneath the dust.

  Longarm cursed again, looked around wildly, closing his left hand over his holster as though trying to conjure his pistol by will alone. He looked back toward the trail. He could see faces beneath the hat now, which meant they could probably see him, too. Wheeling, he ran back up the porch steps and stopped just inside the cabin door, staring up the trail.

  He was almost certain that the hellions thundering toward him were Gunn and Cruz even before he saw Gunn’s top hat and spectacles and Cruz’s sombrero and short leather jacket beneath crisscrossed cartridge belts. He pulled his head back inside and closed the door. His heart thudded, making the goose egg pulse like a miniature heart, making his eyes water.

  He stared out the dusty, grimy window left of the door and watched Gunn and Cruz gallop beneath the portal and into
the yard, a small pack of more riders behind them. Their horses were blowing hard. They’d probably been whipping up a furious pace since the first wash of dawn, wanting to get to the place on the river they’d last seen Longarm and Lacy.

  The tracks from the river had likely led them here.

  Longarm looked around quickly. A poker rested in a box by the cold fireplace. He grabbed it, hefted it. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had. If he had to, he’d give at least one of Gunn’s crew one hell of a headache.

  As the gang drew to a halt in front of the cabin, their dust broiling up around them in the weak morning light, their horses’ breath jetting in the cool air, they all looked around the place before Gunn turned his bespectacled countenance toward the cabin and said, “If anyone’s in there, get the fuck out here now! My name is Heck Gunn, and I’m here on business. Blood business!”

  “Si!” said his amigo Orlando Cruz, chuckling devilishly beneath his bowler hat and drawing a long-barreled Colt from a holster thonged low on his thigh.

  Chapter 15

  Longarm stayed back away from the window while edging a look around the corner of it, squeezing the iron poker in his hand, pondering the grim situation.

  One thing was for sure—he couldn’t allow Gunn and Cruz to trap him in the cabin. He had to get outside and find a good place to hide, though in the back of his shrewd mind he was also trying to come up with a way of securing one of their horses.

  How in the hell was he going to accomplish that without getting himself killed? As he stared out the window at the milling gang, a wry grin quirked his mouth corners as the seed of an idea blossomed. Likely a foolish idea that would get him killed, but at least he wouldn’t die like a rat in a cage . . .

  When Gunn glanced back at the men behind him, and they began dismounting, Longarm ran to the back of the cabin. He opened the back door behind the stairs, stepped outside, and pulled the door closed behind him. He looked around. There was about sixty yards of rocks and scrub pines between the cabin and the mountain wall behind it. About forty yards out from the cabin was a privy.

  He ran for it, hearing himself groan as a meat cleaver of pain stabbed through his head. He glanced over each shoulder, spying two of the gang members walking from the front of the cabin toward the barn just north of it, both holding rifles up high across their chest. He fairly salivated at the prospect of getting his hands on one of those long guns.

  He came to the privy and dashed behind it, pressing his back to the back wall and turning his head to one side. Two sets of boot thuds rose on the other side, in the direction of the cabin. He could hear someone—it sounded like Gunn—yelling inside the cabin itself, boots pounding the puncheons, spurs rattling raucously.

  “Anything?” a man said.

  “Nothin’ so far,” said another. Longarm did not look around the privy but from their voices he knew they were at the back of the cabin, probably between it and the privy.

  Silence.

  The sun just now rose above the eastern ridge, spreading a warm, buttery light over the forest, thinning the shadows of the pines and firs. Birds began peeping and chortling.

  Longarm heard the grind of pebbles under boots, the soft ching of spurs. “Tracks here, Cooter,” said one of the men behind the cabin.

  The other man didn’t say anything. The grinding of boots on gravel grew louder as both men moved toward the privy. One of them whispered just loudly enough for Longarm to hear: “Stay here—cover me. I’m gonna check it out.”

  Longarm pressed his back against the privy, squeezing the handle of the poker in his right hand. His heart beat regularly. He could feel it like a needle prodding the lump on his temple courtesy of May. One of the men was moving toward him, then stopped. There was the scrape of the privy door opening quickly, leather hinges creaking. Through the planks behind him, Longarm could hear the cutthroat breathing.

  “Nothin’ in here,” he said, voice echoing hollowly inside the privy. “Gonna check around the back. Stay here so he don’t try to slip around on me.”

  “Got it,” said the other man.

  Longarm listened to the soft foot thuds. They were coming from the opposite side of the privy from where he was standing. Slowly, he walked toward that side, raising the fireplace poker above his head.

  He stopped at the very edge of the privy, holding his breath. As he heard the faint crunch of gravel from just around the corner, he squeezed the poker, tensed both arms. He heard the faint whistling of the approaching man’s breath leaving his nose, and then he saw the very front of his black hat brim. When he saw the Indian-beaded band around the hat’s crown, and the barrel of the Winchester, he swung the poker down hard.

  It crushed the hat and plowed into the skull beneath it with a soft crunching sound.

  “Uh,” said the man with the crushed skull as Longarm released the poker, grabbed the Winchester’s barrel, and jerked it free of the dying man’s hands.

  As the dying man’s knees buckled and hit the ground with a loud thump, the other man shouted, “Langen!”

  Longarm pulled the Winchester back behind the outhouse. The gun was cocked and ready. Hearing the other man’s running footsteps, Longarm stepped out from behind the outhouse and over the dead man. Aiming the rifle straight out from his right hip, he fired just as the other man—short and beefy and with a naked girl tattooed on his forehead—ran up to the privy’s opposite corner. The man gave a grunt as he stopped suddenly, eyes widening, and brought up his own carbine but not before Longarm blasted out his heart with two well-placed .44 rounds.

  The reports screeched around the ranch yard.

  The other man triggered his carbine wide as he stumbled backward, dropped the Winchester, and fell hard on his ass, dead before the back of his head hit the ground. Wasting no time, Longarm leaped over the spasming stocky gent and ran around the cabin’s left rear corner. He jacked a fresh shell into the carbine’s breech as he bolted up the side of the cabin. He ran out into the yard fronting the stoop, to where one bearded man stood holding the horses’ reins. The man tensed when he saw the lawman, and he started to raise the carbine he held down low in his right hand.

  Longarm fired from the hip once more. The bearded gent dropped the horse’s reins and stumbled straight backward, both eyes rolling up in their sockets as though to inspect the quarter-sized hole in the middle of his forehead. Even before he dropped, Longarm lurched forward to grab the reins of a prancing coyote dun.

  As he poked his boot through a stirrup, he looked around quickly to see several men running toward him from various points around the yard. Boots thundered inside the cabin, and Longarm jerked a look over his shoulder to see a man with long, curly red hair and a red bowler hat bolting out the cabin door and onto the stoop, wielding two silver-chased Buntline Specials.

  “What the fuck?” he shouted, eyes finding Longarm and blazing as he raised both poppers.

  Longarm set the barrel of his carbine across his left forearm and fired once, twice, three times, blowing the red-haired man back inside the cabin and triggering the Buntlines into the ceiling. The eight horses scattered in all directions, trailing their reins, as Longarm threw down on one cutthroat running at him from his left and ground his heels into the coyote dun’s flanks. The dun gave a shrill whinny, buck-kicked, and lunged into a long-legged gallop toward the ranch portal.

  Longarm’s two rounds blew up dirt to either side of the man running from his left, causing the man to wheel, run back in the direction he’d come from, and dive over a stock trough just as Longarm’s third round blew up water inside it. As the lawman crouched low in the saddle and gave the angry dun its head, he shoved the carbine into the dun’s saddle boot and glanced over his shoulder. Gunn and Cruz’s men were running in circles in front of the cabin, shouting after their fleeing horses.

  Gunn himself ran toward Longarm, shouting something that the l
awman couldn’t hear above the thudding and blowing of the galloping dun, but the man’s tone told Longarm that he must have confiscated Gunn’s own horse. The man snapped off several rifle rounds, but the bullets blew up dust short and wide. And then Longarm and the dun were hustling around a broad bend in the trail, and the pines closed off his view of the ranch and the enraged outlaws.

  “Whew!” he said, glad to be out of there.

  But tempering his relief was the continuous ache in his head. The pain spasms were in time with each lunge of the dun, and while he wanted to slow the mount to save them both, he had to put some distance between himself and the gang and then try to cover his trail so they couldn’t follow him. He needed to lose them and catch up to Lacy and the Greers, but that would be all the more problematic with the enraged Heck Gunn breathing down his neck.

  When he got to the river, he checked the dun and looked around. Obviously, he couldn’t return to the San Juan valley, where Lacy had hid the loot, the same way he’d come. But there must have been a horse trail through the rugged peaks along both sides of it, because Gunn and Cruz had managed to follow them and even get ahead of them. Maybe if he rode upstream along the southern bank, he’d run into a trail. He let his voice trail off as he stared down at the ground. His dun picked up an optimistic rhythm when he saw the prints of several shod mounts etched in the forest duff along the river, heading upstream.

  He’d just run into Lacy and the Greers’ prints.

  “Hyahh!”

  He whipped the rein ends against the dun’s flanks and tore off along the river. He followed the tracks that he lost a couple of times due to his speed and when the trees and brush thickened, but he picked up the sign once more along a faint game trail. The trace rose and fell through the rugged country that lifted steadily, sometimes steeply, back toward where he and Lacy had put in the river.

  Several times he stopped to wave leafy branches across his and Lacy and the Greers’ trail, trying to make it as hard as possible for Gunn and Cruz to follow.