Longarm and the Devil's Bride, page 10
Marie laughed softly. “My, you are the gallant charmer, aren’t you, Custis?”
“I try.” Longarm grinned.
Without seeming to, she had moved closer to him so that he could smell the tantalizing fragrance of her hair. He almost thought he could feel the warmth coming from her body, but he knew that had to be his imagination.
It was the most natural thing in the world to slip an arm around her shoulders and draw her even closer. She came without hesitation, resting her head against him. She said, “I’m really glad that snake frightened my horse and I fell off. I might not have ever met you otherwise.”
“I was already riding along the trail to the ranch,” Longarm pointed out. “I reckon I’d have run into you either way.”
“In other words, our meeting was fated to be.”
Longarm chuckled. “I guess you could say that.” He paused, then went on, “Sometimes fate ain’t that kind, though. I’m just an old cowpuncher, nowhere near good enough to do any more than look at you in admiration, ma’am. And your brother would about have a stroke if he saw me holding you like this.”
Marie snuggled even closer to him. “To hell with my brother,” she said quietly but fervently. “He’s always acted like he’s in complete control of my life, and he doesn’t have any right to be that way. I can make up my own mind what I want to do . . . and who I want to do it with.”
With that, she lifted her face to his, and her lips were so close and so tempting that Longarm didn’t have much choice except to bend down and kiss them.
Marie turned in his arms so that the whole length of her body was pressed tightly to his. She was soft and warm in his embrace, and her eager lips tasted sweet. Longarm rested one hand on the small of her back and brought the other up behind her head, slipping it into the thick mass of brown hair.
A part of his brain knew she was just rebelling against her brother’s notion that he was in charge of her life. Longarm figured if he hadn’t come along, sooner or later Marie would have found some other fella to throw herself at.
But he sensed an honesty in her as well, a genuine passion. And that passion had both of them a mite breathless when they finally broke the kiss long moments later.
“My goodness,” Marie said when she had recovered her wits. “I . . . I suspected that I would enjoy kissing you, Custis, but I never thought it would be quite so . . . so stimulating.”
The kiss had been stimulating as all hell, Longarm thought. His manhood had perked right up, the shaft lengthening and hardening until she had to be able to feel it poking against her belly. In fact, a mischievous smile suddenly played over her face, and she thrust her pelvis hard against him, making his arousal unmistakable.
“Is that for me?” she asked.
“I reckon you’re the cause of it.”
“Then it’s up to me to do something about it, I suppose.” She reached down, insinuating a slim hand between them so that she could caress him through his trousers. She felt along the shaft, exploring the size of it, and grew breathless again. “Oh, my goodness. I . . . I’m not sure all of it will fit. But I intend to find out.”
“That ain’t going to be easy,” Longarm warned her. “This platform is about the most private place we’ll be able to find on the train, and I don’t reckon it’d be very comfortable.”
Marie laughed. “No, I suppose not. But I happen to know there’s an empty compartment in one of the Pullman cars up ahead.” She sounded a little embarrassed as she added, “I bribed one of the porters to tell me about it.”
“It’s always a good thing to plan ahead, I reckon.”
She lightly thumped a fist against his chest in a mock punch as she laughed again. Then she grew more serious as she went on, “Grant is talking business with his friends. He’ll be so caught up in that for the next hour or so that he’ll never notice I’m gone. Anyway, when he finishes talking, he’ll have Angela waiting for him.”
“She’s staying in his car?”
“Yes.” Marie frowned slightly in the moonlight. “Why should that matter to you, Custis?”
“I didn’t say it did. I just like to know where everybody is, so I can keep track of ’em in case there’s any trouble.”
“That’s right, your job is to look out for us, isn’t it?” Marie seemed satisfied by his explanation. She came up on her toes and kissed him again, but only briefly this time. Still, the kiss packed a punch. “I’ll slip up to that empty compartment first, and then you join me.”
“How will I know which compartment you’re in?” Longarm asked.
She pulled a lace handkerchief out of the bosom of her dress. “I’ll hang this outside the curtains.”
Longarm nodded. Marie slipped out of his arms and smiled at him as she went into the next car. He waited, giving her several minutes to get ready, and then went after her, striding through the special cars that had been hooked on in Santa Fe. They were empty at the moment, the other members of the group still being in Stockton’s private car.
All the berths had been made up in the Pullmans. The aisle between the compartments was empty as Longarm stepped into it. He spotted the lace handkerchief peeking out from the curtains that closed off one of the berths and started toward it, the floor of the car swaying gently under his booted feet as the train rocked along the rails. He had made love on trains before and always enjoyed it. He hoped Marie would, too.
As he reached the compartment where she was waiting for him, he paused and leaned toward the curtains. He wanted to be sure he had the right one. It would be mighty embarrassing if he crawled into the berth only to find that he was sharing it with some middle-aged matron from Topeka.
“Marie?” he whispered.
A curtain suddenly rustled behind him, and he heard the slap of shoe leather on the floor. Longarm started to turn, just in time for the gun butt sweeping down at him to smash into the side of his head.
Chapter 18
The blow hurt like hell, but it was only a glancing one and failed to do anything more than stun Longarm for a second. He caught hold of the curtain to keep himself from falling and struck out instinctively with his other hand, slamming a fist into the chest of the man who had pistol-whipped him. The man staggered back across the aisle toward the berth from which he had emerged.
Longarm got a look at the man then. He was tall, skinny, had an ax blade of a nose and a drooping black mustache. He wore a derby and a somewhat shabby tweed suit. As he caught his balance, he flipped the gun around in his hand and tried to bring the weapon to bear on Longarm.
The big lawman had recovered his wits by now, though, and he lunged across the aisle to grab the gunman’s wrist. Longarm knew he couldn’t draw his own Colt and start throwing lead in the cramped confines of this Pullman car where heavy curtains were all that closed off the compartments. It would be all too easy for a wild slug to hit an innocent person, maybe even Marie Stockton.
Longarm locked his fingers around the gunman’s wrist and put all the strength of his rangy body into a savage twist. The man cried out in pain as bones grated together inside his arm. The pistol slipped out of his fingers and thumped to the floor of the car.
That wasn’t his only weapon, though. He brought his knee up sharply, causing Longarm to turn aside so that he took the blow on his thigh rather than in his privates. That gave his attacker the chance to reach under his coat with his left hand and pull out a knife.
Longarm let go of the man’s wrist and jerked back to avoid a vicious slash of the knife. Light from the lamp that lit the corridor glittered on the blade as it whipped past his face, only inches away. The missed stroke threw the man off balance. Longarm hooked a toe behind his leg and pulled, yanking the man off his feet. The man grabbed Longarm’s sleeve as he fell, however, and hauled the federal man down on top of him.
Longarm had to writhe like a snake for a second to keep the man from gutting him with the knife. He finally got his fingers on the wrist of that hand and forced it to the side. With his other hand Longarm threw a short, hard punch that smacked into the man’s jaw and caused the back of his head to bounce on the floor. By now, Longarm was vaguely aware of shouted curses and questions as the commotion drew the attention of the passengers in the compartments. Some of those passengers had opened the curtains and looked out to see the two men locked in their deadly struggle.
A gun roared from the front end of the car. The bullet sang past Longarm’s ear with a wicked whine and smacked into the door at the rear end. Longarm jerked his head up and saw another man wearing a suit and a derby standing just inside the car, smoke curling from the barrel of the gun in his hand. The first man clearly had a confederate who also wanted Longarm dead and wasn’t worried about hitting one of the passengers.
The first attacker was still stunned from the punch Longarm had landed. The big lawman flung himself off that man, landing belly down on the floor as the second gunman fired again. Now the air inside the car was filled with frightened but muffled screams as the passengers ducked back into their berths and tried to get as far away from the aisle and as far out of the line of fire as they could.
Longarm rolled onto his side so that he could get at his Colt. The revolver seemed to leap from its holster into his hand. It bucked against Longarm’s palm as he triggered a shot. The bullet caught the second gunman in the chest and drove him back against the half-open door behind him. He grunted in pain and tried to get off another shot, but the gun in his hand seemed too heavy for him to hold it up. The barrel dropped toward the floor, and when the man’s finger finally managed to squeeze the trigger as the result of a dying nerve impulse, the bullet went into the planks at his feet. A trickle of blood ran from the man’s mouth as he pitched forward onto his face.
The sound of someone clambering awkwardly to his feet made Longarm swing his head around. He saw the first man diving toward the rear door of the car, obviously giving up on the assassination attempt. Longarm twisted around and tried to draw a bead on him, but the rear door slammed and the man was gone. Longarm scrambled up and went after him.
A part of him wanted to stay and make sure Marie was all right, but he also wanted to catch the surviving bushwhacker and make him talk. He remembered now seeing the two men sitting together in one of the coaches earlier in the day, but they had seemed harmless enough and he had taken them for traveling salesmen. That just went to show that he’d been right about not always being able to tell by looking whether someone was dangerous. Longarm knew the two men didn’t have any personal grudge against him—he had never seen them before today—so the question was who had hired them to kill him.
The mysterious Lucius Thorne . . . or Grant Stockton?
That last idea didn’t make much sense, Longarm thought fleetingly as he rushed out of the car after the gunman. If Stockton still wanted him dead, there had been plenty of opportunities to arrange that while Longarm was on the Trident Ranch. On the other hand, he realized, maybe Stockton didn’t want to have somebody murdered right there on his own land.
Maybe the gunman could give Longarm some answers.
Unfortunately, he seemed to have vanished.
There was no sign of the man on the platform between cars. The next one back was the first of the special cars. Longarm jerked the door open and looked inside. This was a Pullman car, too, but with larger, more luxurious compartments and a small sitting room. Edward Wilcox was just entering the car from the other end. He stopped short, eyes widening as he saw Longarm standing there with a gun in his hand.
“You see anybody come in here?” Longarm asked sharply.
“No, but I just got here,” Wilcox replied. “What’s wrong, Parker?”
Longarm bit back a curse and used the barrel of the Colt to rip aside the curtains over the berths on both sides of the car. They were empty. The gunman hadn’t come this way.
That left only one way for him to have escaped—up.
Longarm holstered the revolver and grabbed the rungs of the ladder that led to the roof of the Pullman car where Marie supposedly had been waiting for him. As he climbed, an awful thought crossed his mind. What if Marie had set up the ambush? She was the one who had asked him to come to that Pullman car and told him to look for that lace handkerchief, and the gunman had been waiting right across the aisle to jump him.
Grim-faced, Longarm shoved that possibility out of his mind for now. He could investigate it later, once he had his hands on that skinny, derby-hatted son of a bitch.
He paused before poking his head up when he reached the top of the ladder. He didn’t want to make himself too easy of a target. Sure enough, when he risked a quick look, a gun blasted at the far end of the car and the bullet ricocheted off into the night, kicking up splinters from the roof as it did so. Longarm ducked, then looked again and saw the gunman leaping from that car to the next one. It was a daring move, jumping from car to car on a swaying train, but clearly he was a desperate man.
Longarm pulled himself onto the roof and came up in a crouch. His jaw was clenched tight. He had found himself in this situation before in his career as a lawman, chasing a man who wanted to kill him on top of a moving train. It was hell on the nerves. But he had no choice except to go ahead.
The man twisted around, saw Longarm coming after him, and snapped off another shot. Longarm crouched lower as Colt flame bloomed in the darkness. This bullet didn’t come close enough for him to hear it, though. Accurate shooting was almost impossible under these conditions. That was one reason he left his Colt in its holster. Another was that he wanted to capture the gunman, not kill him. In the exchange of shots down below, he hadn’t had any choice. He had been forced to shoot to kill then, because of the possibility that the second gunman might hurt someone else.
The man he was after now hurried on toward the front of the train. Longarm ran after him, timing his jump and then leaping the gap between cars just as the gunman had. He wondered if the hombre intended to try to reach the locomotive.
The answer to that was no, Longarm saw as his quarry started climbing down the ladder at the far end of the next car. Longarm grabbed the ladder at the end where he was and swung down recklessly, his legs hanging out over empty air for a second before they arched in and his feet landed on the platform. He yanked his gun out and threw the door open.
This was a coach car filled with wooden benches, cheaper seats where folks had to sleep sitting up, if they slept at all. It was full of families, and there were quite a few startled shouts as Longarm charged past them toward the front of the car. “Get down!” he called to them in case more shooting broke out. “Down!”
The front door of the car flew open. The gunman lunged inside, but he didn’t go far. His left arm shot out and looped around the throat of a startled boy about twelve years old. As the boy’s mother screamed, the gunman jerked the youngster in front of him to use as a shield. The gun in his hand roared deafeningly as he fired at Longarm.
Longarm felt as much as heard the wind-rip of the bullet past his head. He couldn’t risk a shot, and now the car was plunged into chaos as women screamed, men cursed, children cried, and everybody tried to scramble out of the way of the flying lead. Longarm dropped to a knee and lifted the Colt, but he didn’t have a clear shot. The boy was in the way.
Had to give the youngster credit for quick thinking in a crisis. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a Barlow knife, yanked it open with his teeth, and brought the knife back to plunge the blade into the gunman’s thigh. The man yelled in pain and loosened his grip enough for the boy to twist away from him. As the boy dived out of the line of fire, Longarm aimed for a split second and then squeezed the trigger.
The shot went where he wanted it to, smack-dab through the right shoulder of the gunman. He dropped his revolver as the impact of the slug sent him flying backward through the open door. He sprawled on the platform between cars.
Longarm leaped up and ran toward the front end of the car. He had just wounded the gunman. The bastard would live to answer some questions, the most important of which would be who had hired him and his partner to bushwhack Longarm.
But as Longarm closed in, he saw the wounded man trying to struggle to his feet. He wasn’t going to give up, despite having a bullet-smashed shoulder. He came to his feet, reeled, lost his balance. . . .
And plunged right into the gap between cars.
Longarm stopped short, horror etched on his face as he heard the man’s scream and the way it was abruptly cut off. “Somebody pull the emergency cord!” he snapped at the passengers, but even as he said it, he knew the gesture was too late. The gunman hadn’t had a chance. He wasn’t going to be answering any questions, either, not after the wheels of the train had probably cut him plumb in two.
The train screeched and jolted and lurched to an abrupt halt as one of the passengers did as Longarm had said and yanked the emergency cord. Longarm grabbed the back of one of the benches to brace himself while the train shuddered and finally stopped.
Then he turned and headed for the rear of the train, ignoring the frightened and angry questions of the passengers he passed. He still had to find out what had happened to Marie Stockton.
Chapter 19
To his relief, Longarm saw that Marie seemed to be all right. She was standing in the aisle of the Pullman car where the ambush attempt had taken place, along with a dozen or more of the other passengers and the harried-looking conductor. The conductor was trying to calm the fears of the frightened mob. When Marie spotted Longarm coming toward them, she called out, “Custis! Are you all right?”
She rushed into his arms as he walked up. She wore a silk dressing gown belted tightly around her waist. The fabric clung to her body, revealing its supple curves. Longarm enjoyed the feel of her as she hugged him, but he hadn’t forgotten his earlier suspicions. He could delay confronting her about them, however. He didn’t want to get into that with the conductor and the other passengers standing right there.
“I’m fine,” he assured Marie. “How about you? You’re not hurt?”
