Longarm in the Lunatic Mountains, page 1
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
The Little Derringer That Could . . .
The man at the coach’s far end shouted something unintelligible above the din of the train’s wheels and hammering connectors, and came running along the aisle.
Longarm slipped his double-barreled derringer from his vest pocket. He had to keep the shooting to a minimum or an innocent bystander was sure to take a bullet; he had to dispatch each of these men as quickly, efficiently, and brutally as he could.
He extended the derringer straight out in his right hand, thumbing both hammers back, his own heart thudding insistently as he steadied a bead on the man’s chest. He couldn’t let the man trigger the scattergun and send several hundred steel pellets screeching through the close, populated confines of the coach car. That meant he needed to make a clean heart shot, stop his ticker with a single .32-caliber slug.
Pop!
The slug tore through the man’s crisscrossed canvas bandoliers just as he stopped and slammed the butt of his Greener against his right shoulder, narrowing one eye. He jerked back, swinging the shotgun up, and triggered both barrels at the same time ...
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LONGARM IN THE LUNATIC MOUNTAINS
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Jove edition / January 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-44596-9
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Chapter 1
Waking up alone was no damn fun.
That was the first thought, half-baked as it was, to enter the lawman’s head as he opened his eyes and sat up in his humble bed in his even humbler digs on the poor side of Cherry Creek.
The room was cold. There was no supple thigh rammed against his own leg to warm him. No well-curved buttock jutting against his crotch, inviting him to some dreamy, half-awake frolic. No cleavage for him to ram his nose down and take a deep whiff of the comforting, milk-and-citrus smell of womanhood that was sure to take the sharp edge off the dawn and the prospect of another long day in the sharp light of the law’s demanding service.
Custis Parker Long, known as Longarm to friend and foe, smacked his lips and stared into the dusty light of dawn emanating through his flat’s three windows over which he’d forgotten to draw the shades when he’d stumbled in late last night. Early this morning, rather. He’d stopped off at the Black Cat Saloon for a few drinks to cut the coal soot.
Shit.
He’d figured on taking the day off. Maybe even two or three days off. His last job had gone two weeks over what he’d expected, and when he’d ridden the Burlington flier into Union Station at ten thirty last night, he’d felt as though he’d been tied to a plank with a rabid bobcat. That’s what finally running down the paper-hanging ring over Nevada way had been like, especially after the counterfeiters had gotten wind the federals were onto them—he was working with two inexperienced deputy U.S. marshals out of Salt Lake—and the owlhoots had lit off from Las Vegas toward Mesquite by way of the Valley of Fire.
That had been a lot of fun, trying to haze three killers out of those hot rocks and hidden canyons under a sun that would have fried an egg atop his head through his hat in under a minute.
“Could have been worse,” he could hear his boss, Chief Marshal Billy Vail, say. “Could have had to chase ’em across Death Valley.” And then, of course, Billy would lean back in his high-backed, overstuffed leather chair and start gassing about his own experience, twenty or thirty years ago, of single-handedly running down the worst killers to draw a breath on the western frontier through Death Valley at high summer with a single canteen only half-filled with tepid alkali water.
Shit.
Yeah, he’d figured on a couple days off ... until last night a ticket agent in Union Station had slipped him a characteristically cryptic, pencil-scrawled note from Billy Vail: My office. Tomorrow. Eight thirty. (Not a minute later!) Billy.
Longarm glanced to his left. His visitor’s pillow was still covered with sheet, quilt, and bedspread. Not a wrinkle on it.
He’d half hoped that Cynthia Larimer would have been waiting for him here, which she sometimes did when her busy world-travel schedule found her in Denver, holing up at her aunt and uncle’s sprawling, opulent digs on Sherman Avenue. Cynthia’s uncle was none other than General William H. Larimer himself, considered by most to be Denver’s founding father. Cynthia, being the apple of the Larimers’ eyes—their own daughters were plain, plump, and dumber than whiskey corks—spent considerable time at the Larimer estate, riding the general’s Thoroughbreds and Tennessee trotters and hauling her easel off to nearby creeks and prairies to paint plein airs in oil, which she often showed in galleries and even sold, though she didn’t need the money.
All of this when she wasn’t stealing away to haul her “friend” and “bodyguard” Longarm off to the ballet or opera or some long-winded, mind-numbingly boring symphony he wouldn’t have been caught dead at had he not known that the most delectable piece of female flesh in the western hemisphere and above the tropic of Capricorn was sure to reward him with a long, sexual, no-holds-barred wrestling match that would have withered a weaker a man’s heart and was sure to wrap her lips around his cock and suck with such force as to cause his eyes to pop out of their sockets.
But the second blow of his late homecoming, after the note from Billy, was that she hadn’t been here.
No letters from her had a
That’s when, crestfallen as a brokenhearted birthday boy, he slinked off to the Black Cat for shots of Maryland rye.
He hadn’t seen Cynthia in a long time—several months, in fact—and he was beginning to wonder if on one of her international forays she hadn’t gotten herself hitched to a prince or a count or some such. Likely, she was attending art shows and string quartets in Amsterdam or Paris with a bearded, manacled, moneyed foreigner in full royal regalia, and onlookers were dropping dead at just a glimpse of the full-breasted, stygian-haired temptress. Armies were detonating cannons in her honor, and fleets of warships were hanging flags over their gunwales in the hopes she’d blow their captains a kiss.
Fuck.
Longarm groaned, threw the covers back from his lean, broad frame that, hard and corded and bulging with muscles and the puckering knots of healed bullet and knife wounds, was a testament to his hard-fought years as a federal lawdog. He smacked his lips again, opened and closed his eyes, swept a lock of brown hair back from his forehead, and dropped his bare feet to the floor.
The boards were cold. Cold bed, cold floor. And here it was only August. What a long, cold winter he had in store for him. Of course, there were other women, but once a man has partaken of the best beyond imagining, there just wasn’t much left to hope for.
Marriage to the girl had never crossed his mind. Well, maybe it had crossed, but as briefly as a shooting star across the firmament. He and Cynthia both knew that a union between a lowly, salaried public official and a Larimer heiress would have been akin to wedding a prized, pure-blooded poodle to a mutt that fed from gut wagons.
Besides, marriage likely would have taken all the intrigue and thus the lusty venom from their proscribed trysts in the unlikeliest of places including horseback, Aunt May’s rose garden, and once—and for almost the final time!—under the general’s own desk in his library/office.
Longarm’s heart skipped a beat when he remembered the girl’s lips and tongue working his rock-hard staff while the general and Chief Marshal Billy Vail had walked in on them during a Christmas party at the Larimer estate. Longarm had conversed with both men while lounging back in the general’s chair, his trousers bunched around his boots. Cynthia, unseen beneath the desk and between his naked knees, had continued working him devilishly, thoroughly enjoying the danger as well as his own trepidation while he’d carefully maintained a nonchalant expression in spite of her sucking and chewing him almost raw, as though he were one big, human lollipop.
He chuckled now as he splashed water in his porcelain basin and started a whore’s bath. That had damn near been the end of them. No telling what the general might have done had he come around behind his desk and found Cynthia with Longarm’s cock between her sensuous lips. Might have had a stroke. Or, as pie-eyed as he was from the Christmas punch, he might have grabbed one of his foreign-made hunting rifles or shotguns down from his wall cabinet and filled Longarm so full of holes he wouldn’t have held a teaspoon of his prized Maryland rye.
It had been a horrific, exciting time. He’d relive it on his deathbed, like as not.
Well, all over now. Sure as shit in a stock corral, he thought a half hour later, pulling the door of his flat closed behind him and canting his snuff-brown, flat-brimmed hat at a rakish angle—Cynthia had gone and let someone with as much money as her own family make her respectable.
Leaving Longarm not only unrespectable, but alone and wretched.
Loneliness nipped like rabid lobos at Longarm’s heels as he made his way down the outside stairs of his land-lady’s three-story house and started through the cool of a late August morn for downtown Denver and another assignment—one that, if there was a merciful God in heaven, would be his last.
“How’s it hangin’, Henry?” Longarm asked fifteen minutes later as he pushed through the door into Chief Marshal Billy Vail’s office to see Billy’s prissy assistant hammering away as usual at his newfangled typing machine.
The clattering stopped as long, pale fingers lifted from the keys. The bespectacled young man, who appeared as though the sun had never once caressed his tender skin, leaned back in his chair and craned his neck to look at the clock on the wall above the door of Billy Vail’s inner sanctum.
“Let’s see ... you’re three minutes late. But that’s early for you, isn’t it, Deputy Long?”
“This ain’t the mornin’ to start givin’ my shit back to me, Henry.” Longarm kicked the door closed behind him, dropped his saddlebags onto a chair, leaned his Winchester ’73 against the wall, and sailed his hat onto the hat rack to his right. “I’m as wrung out as a cat in a cyclone. What’s that you’re typin’ there? That for me?”
“Yes. I’m almost through.”
“Where’s he sendin’ me this time? Let’s see, it’s getting kinda late in the year. Dakota Territory? Billy always likes sendin’ me way up north when the snow’s about to—”
The door to Billy Vail’s office opened with the chief’s titles stenciled in gold leaf on the frosted glass panel, and Billy poked his pudgy-faced, balding head out. “Longarm, get your ass in here pronto!”
Billy pulled his head back in but left the door standing half open behind him. His bespectacled secretary gave a humorous snort as he resumed hammering away on the infernally loud typing machine, the clattering of which always caused Longarm to grind his molars. Longarm shoved Billy’s door wide and stepped into the office nearly filled with a leather-upholstered desk the size of a wagon bed and which was buried under reams of paper and cloth-covered ledger books, as well as carbons, envelopes, federal Wanted circulars, old letters, hidden or disarranged tintypes of Billy’s wife and kids, pencils, and pens—all covered by cigar ash so evenly sprinkled that it appeared to be lying there on purpose, as though spewed by some nearby miniature volcano.
Near Billy’s green-shaded Tiffany lamp, pen holder, and inkwell was a wooden ashtray filled to overflowing with more ashes as well as mashed cigar stubs resembling shriveled banana worms. A lit cigar perched there now, sending up a thick web of smoke that started curling about halfway between the desk and the lamp’s green shade.
“Ah, fuck, Billy,” Longarm said. “You must have mistaken me for one of your rookie deputies like Pendleton or Murray. Damnit, I’m one of the old hosses in your friggin’ stable, and if you keep workin’ me like this, you’re gonna have to either shoot me in a few months or send me off to the glue factory!”
Longarm plopped down into the red Moroccan leather guest chair angled in front of the desk, stretched his long legs clad in his customary skintight whipcord trousers out in front of him, and crossed his cavalry boots at the ankles.
“I got in last night at ten thirty!” he added, irked that Billy had distracted himself with the papers he was busily shuffling while completely ignoring his senior-most deputy’s reasonable protestations. “I know the wild and wooly ones are runnin’ amok across the West in spite of my own constant yet futile efforts, but holy shit, I need a few days off. Hell, how long’s it been since I’ve had a vacation, Billy?”
“Oh, quit your infernal whining.”
Billy tossed a brown cardboard folder across his desk. Longarm lurched forward to grab it. There was a Wanted circular secured to the top of the folder with brown office string.
“You recognize that gentleman?”
“That’s no gentleman,” Longarm said, scowling down at the inked visage staring back at him with eyes like miniature charcoals beneath the slightly curved brim of a high-crowned, Montana-creased hat. “That’s Henry ‘the Hammer’ Beecher out of Canada. Ah, shit. He’s out?”
Longarm had delivered Henry “the Hammer”—so named because he’d used a ball-peen hammer to murder a parson’s wife teaching him Sunday school when he was only twelve—to the Canadian Mounties seven months ago. The Hammer had been wanted in Canada though he’d been arrested here in Colorado Territory on the less severe charge of selling whiskey to Indians, and an extradition treaty had been negotiated.
