Legend With a Six-gun (9781101601839), page 48
Reluctantly, Grover slid Longarm’s Colt out of his waistband. He held it out butt-first. The light was dimmer than ever, but Longarm’s eyes were sharp. He saw that Grover had kept his forefinger in the trigger guard of the weapon instead of holding the gun by its muzzle. He lifted his left hand to take the Colt.
Grover started to spin the weapon on the pivot of his forefinger, but before his hand could close around the gun’s butt, Longarm brought the derringer down from Hawkins’s head. The wicked little pistol’s flat splat broke the silence. Longarm caught his Colt in midair as it dropped from the dying sheriff’s suddenly flaccid fingers.
Hawkins and Tatum were caught off guard by the shot. Neither of them reached for his gun when Grover crumpled and folded to the ground. Longarm spun the Colt by its trigger guard, as Grover had planned to do, but his spin was completed and the Colt’s butt was nestled in his palm, the muzzle casually covering the ranchers, by the time Grover’s collapse was complete.
“Your man was a damned fool, Hawkins,” Longarm remarked in a chilled-steel voice. “He ought to’ve known I’ve had that trigger-spin stunt tried on me before, that I’d be watching for it.”
“You didn’t have to kill him,” Hawkins protested. There was no conviction in the rancher’s tone.
“Like hell I didn’t. As long as he was holding my Colt, I couldn’t risk just winging him. Besides,” Longarm added thoughtfully, “There’s two things in my book that’ll draw a bullet for a bad law officer. One’s hitting an unarmed man he’s holding a gun on, like Grover did me a while ago.”
Hawkins waited for Longarm to go on, and, when he didn’t, asked curiously, “What’s the other?”
“Selling his badge, the way Grover sold his to you. By rights, you should’ve got the second slug in this derringer.”
For a moment the three men stood silently, looking down at the body by their feet. Then the Brethren and the cowhands reached them, running to find out what the shot had meant.
Over the excited babble of talk, Hawkins shouted, “You C Bar H and Double Z men have got jobs to do at the shipping pens, don’t forget! Hoist your butts onto your horses and go back to work!”
Longarm holstered his Colt. He saw Mordka Danilov walking toward them, and asked Hawkins, “You think you and Tatum can settle things peaceful now, with Mordka Danilov and his people?”
“We haven’t got much choice, with you looking over our shoulders,” the rancher replied.
“Oh, I don’t intend to do that,” Longarm assured him, “You’re all sensible, grown-up men. All you’ve got to do is act like you are.”
He turned and walked away from them, then. Once, before he reached the spot where the hitch rail had been, he looked back over his shoulder. The ranchers and Danilov were still standing where he’d left them, in sober discussion. The hitch rail was gone and so was the roan, but Grover’s horse was stamping its hooves at the edge of the patch of gray ash that marked the place where the church had stood. Longarm swung into the saddle and started toward town.
* * *
Halfway to Junction, the clouds scudded away and the new moon brought the prairie to life. The Glidden wire fences stood out as black lines around the field where the wheat heads waved in the light breeze. Longarm looked back, but the weaving of the fencelines hid his backtrail.
As he rode on, he thought, There’s nothing that’ll tame a man who thinks he’s tough quicker than showing him you can be a damn sight meaner than he is. Mordka and the Brethren ought to get along all right with the cattlemen for a while, now. And Fedor Petrovsky’ll help when he’s elected sheriff. Which he’s bound to be, because nobody’s going to vote for a dead man, and the ranchers won’t have time before election to pick out somebody else to run.
* * *
He left the horse at the livery stable, walked into town, and pushed through the batwings at the Cattleman’s. He was working down his second shot of Maryland rye when the Santa Fe station agent found him.
“Thought I might run into you if I looked in here on the way to the hotel, Marshal,” the man said. “This wire just came in from your office at Denver. It’s tagged ‘urgent, deliver at once,’ so I closed up to bring it to you.”
“Thanks.” Longarm indicated the bottle on the table. “Help yourself to one while I read it. I might need to send an answer.”
Unfolding the message, Longarm read:
HIGGINS ENROUTE TO COVER ELECTION ASSIGNMENT STOP NEED YOU HERE FOR MORE IMPORTANT CASE STOP REPORT DENVER AT ONCE STOP VAIL
“There’s no answer,” Longarm told the waiting agent. “But you can tell me if you’ve got a cattle shipment rolling to Dodge tomorrow sometime.”
“There’ll be one out about four tomorrow evening. You wouldn’t want to leave earlier anyhow, Marshal. It’ll get you there in time to connect with the westbound limited. The train crew’ll find you a seat in the caboose. I guessed you’d be leaving, as soon as I copied the wire.”
“That’s fine. I’ll have time to tie up a few loose ends, so Higgins won’t be bothered with them.”
* * *
Longarm had taken his seat in the coach and the whistle had signaled that the limited was about to roll when the veiled woman hurried along the aisle and disappeared into the Pullman car ahead. He hadn’t seen her face behind the veil that swathed it, but the figure was familiar enough, and there wasn’t any mistaking that heavy, musky perfume.
It’s a long ride to Denver, Longarm thought, and a day coach seat’s going to get right hard.
He stood up and followed the woman into the Pullman as the train started moving. He got there just in time to see the woman disappear into the forward stateroom. He walked up the aisle and tapped at the stateroom door.
“Come,” the woman called through the closed door. Longarm entered.
Ilioana Karsovana was standing with her back to the door, her arms raised, taking off her veil. Without turning around, she said, “Put my bags—” then she stopped short when she looked over her shoulder and saw that it wasn’t the porter.
“Longarm!” she gasped. Dismay spread over her face. “How did you track me? I was so careful to leave no traces—”
“Hell, Ilioana, I’m not tracking you. I just happened to see you go up the aisle in the coach where I was sitting, and thought it’d be neighborly of me to come in and say hello.”
“You—you have not come to arrest me, then?”
“Why’d I want to do that? Far as I know, you ain’t broken any laws.”
“But . . . I was so sure you had deduced that I am—” She stopped and covered her mouth with her gloved hand.
“That you’re a Russian government agent?” Longarm smiled and tilted his Stetson back. “I figured that all along. I guess I’d’ve tumbled to it, even if Mordka Danilov hadn’t told me that he suspected you and that servant of yours were there in Junction to check up on the Brethren. That yarn about your brother just didn’t square with the way you two behaved.”
“Your government does not care that we are here? In Russia, agents are imprisoned without trials as soon as they are detected.”
“It’s different here, I guess.”
There was a tapping at the door. Longarm looked at Ilioana. She shrugged and called, “Come!”
It was the porter with the bags. As the man started to leave, Longarm stopped him. “Has the barkeep in the parlor car got any vodka?”
“Vodka, sah?” The immaculately clad black man scratched his head. “Is that some kind of whiskey?”
“I guess you could call it that.”
“Then he ain’t got none, sah. Bourbon and English whiskey and Maryland rye’s about all he runs to, ’less you fancies brandy.”
“Maryland rye’s good enough.” Longarm flipped the man a half-eagle. “Bring us two bottles, and keep the change.” When the porter had gone, he said to Ilioana, “I guess you’ll just have to get along with sipping whiskey for a while.”
“It will not be the first time I have learned to like something new.” She smiled. She’d taken off her hat and veil, and now she slipped out of her traveling coat. “I will wait until the porter has brought our refreshments before I put on something more comfortable.”
Longarm looked around the compartment. “I must say, you travel in pretty good style. I guess your coachman’s riding a day coach?”
“Gregor? No. Gregor is not with me.”
“Are you meeting him in Denver, then?”
“I hope not.” Ilioana hesitated. “If you are not going to arrest me, it will do no harm to tell you the truth. Gregor was my superior, in charge of our mission. When I was sure you had discovered what we were really doing, I decided I must run. But not only from you, Longarm. I have tired of an agent’s life. So . . .”
She went to the luggage the porter had lined up against the stateroom wall and picked up one of the bags. Putting it on the divan, she opened it. Banded packets of U.S. currency and rolls of gold filled the bag.
“This was the money Gregor was given by the Okhrana to finance our mission. It occurred to me that I needed it more than he did.”
“Looks to me like that’ll do you for a while. But won’t Gregor be chasing after you, to get it back?”
“No, no. When we send no new reports, the Okhrana will send men to look for both of us. Where Gregor will hide, I do not know or care. As for me, your West is big, and there are many places where I can disappear.” She smiled. “Denver is big enough, no?”
“Wouldn’t be too hard for you to keep hid there, I imagine.”
Ilioana came closer to Longarm. “This is what I think, too. You understand, Longarm, what I have done before was in the service of my motherland, to please the Tsar. Now, what I do will be what pleases me only.”
* * *
When Longarm walked into his chief’s office early the next afternoon, Billy Vail looked up from the papers heaped on his desk. His face wore its usual disapproving frown as he looked at the clock.
“Godamighty!” he grunted. “Can’t you ever get here on time?”
“Now, Billy, the limited just pulled in from Dodge. I got here as fast as I could.”
“Like hell.” Vail sniffed the heavy scent of musky perfume Longarm had brought with him into the office. “You took time to stop at a barbershop. Well, tell that barber of yours to change his brand of macassar oil. You smell like you just left Mattie Silks’s place.”
“Now, you know I don’t play the sporting ladies, Billy. All a man’s got to do is be patient, and a filly comes along who doesn’t set a price on what she’s got. And that kind knows how to pleasure a man better, too.” Longarm smiled, then suddenly grew serious. “Now then. I sure hope this new case you wired me about ain’t watching an election. Like I said, that’s a job for a nursemaid, not a lawman.”
Evans, Tabor, Legend With a Six-gun (9781101601839)
