Tabor Evans - Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance

“Who knows where it is?” the leader said, more frustrated than angry. “All we know is that one payroll shipment was due to pull through here last month, but we saw no sign of it. It passed through somewhere out here—it had to, it’s the only way across the border—but Leyton thinks that after the other lawmen were killed, the company got spooked and switched the route through the buttes southwest of Holy Defiance.”

The name “Leyton” rocked Longarm back on his heels a second time. Ranger Jack Leyton? How in hell was he tied to this—whatever this was?

“You look like you could use some tequila,” the gang leader said, winking at Longarm.

“You know it,” the lawman responded, swinging into the roan’s hurricane deck.

“We were just heading back to Holy Defiance when we spotted your horse. You can join us. Jack will want to hear about this new lawman. He will need to be dealt with, also.” The Mexican leader held out his gloved hand, suddenly most gracious. “I am Mercado. No doubt you heard of me from Vonda.”

“Oh, yeah,” Longarm said, manufacturing his best wolfish grin.

Mercado chuckled proudly. “What is your handle, amigo?”

“Me?” Longarm hesitated for only an eye blink of time though to him it felt like seven long years. “I’m Longabaugh. Clyde Longabaugh.” He thought he’d seen the surname on a wanted circular offering a reward for a gang of mostly nonviolent, small-time bank robbers from up Wyoming way.

Longarm shook Mercado’s hand and then followed the gang east through the chaparral toward Holy Defiance and a meeting with Ranger Jack Leyton.

Uneasiness rode like a heavy second passenger behind him. Things were either about to become really clear really fast, or Longarm was about to become really dead for a long, long time.

Chapter 28

“You like girls, Senor Longabaugh?” asked Mercado, the leader of the small pack of Mexicans who’d rescued Longarm.

They were riding over a bench and into the little town of Holy Defiance—a handful of dilapidated buildings hunkered down in the sunburned desert between two piles of black boulders that some volcano must have vomited from the earth’s bowels several hundred eons ago.

Defiance Wash ran through the heart of the town. A rough plank bridge stretched across its twenty-foot width.

Clouds had moved in, blocking out much of the sun now and painting the town nearly hidden amongst the rocks in dark, gothic hues. Thunder rumbled. A summer storm was in the works.

“Sure, I like girls all right,” Longarm said, wincing slightly as he became conscious of his still-chafed dick.

“Senora Concepcion has turned her old hotel into a brothel and brought in three pretty girls from Tucson.” Mercado raised a hand to his chest and pantomimed the hefting of a succulent female breast. “All with big tits, too!”

“Is that right?” Longarm liked tits as well as the next man, but between his chafed dick and the prospect of soon meeting up with Ranger Jack Leyton, who had apparently wandered over to the wrong side of the law, he was having trouble working up much enthusiasm.

Mercado laughed as they trotted on into the town, obviously a ghost town—probably one that had boomed due to gold or silver and promptly went bust when the minerals had played out. The brothel was a humble, two-story mud-brick affair with a wooden front veranda as well as wooden second-floor balcony. The wood was old and gray. Originally, the building had probably been a hotel.

A couple of scantily clad girls were on the balcony, leaning forward against the splintering rail, one smoking as Mercado and Longarm approached. A couple of Mercado’s men called out lustily to the girls, who smiled and fluttered their lashes. One—a plump, pretty, green-eyed blond—caressed her breast, pushing it up out of the thin, cotton nightgown she wore, one strap hanging off her near shoulder.

She flicked her tongue across her nipple and laughed enticingly.

The men riding behind Longarm and Mercado whooped and hollered and galloped on past their leader and the man calling himself Clyde Longabaugh. They swung down from their saddles in front of one of the brothel’s two hitch racks. The five men ran up onto the porch, yelling and calling to the whores, and filed quickly through the brothel’s open front door.

When the last man had gone in, and their boots and spurs could be heard thudding and chinging from inside, a severe-looking woman in a flowered blue dress stepped out. She had brown hair pulled back in a tight bun, and while she was pale-skinned, her almond-shaped eyes were large and brown. A brown mole sat just off the corner of the right one.

Mercado leaned forward on his saddle horn and spoke in Spanish, grinning. “Senora Concepcion, as you can see, my men and I are back.”

“So soon?” the woman answered in Spanish, arching one severe brow and ignoring the buoyant din rising from the brothel behind her. The two whores had gone into the building to welcome their eager clients. “I expected you to be gone for longer than a couple of days, Senor Mercado. Your business seemed so important!”

“It was, it was,” said Mercado. “But enough about my business, senora.” The Mexican gang leader’s smile hardened, and he pitched his voice with mild but unmistakable menace. “My business is not something for old ladies to concern themselves with. Your only concern is to please my men with your women. And for that we pay you very well, do we not?”

The old woman just stared at Mercado, her brown eyes betraying little motion though there was a hesitancy in the rigid set of her shoulders.

Mercado glanced across the street and the deep, gravelly wash running down its center, toward another building whose sign over its porch roof announced: BLACK PUMA HOTEL, SALOON, AND DANCE HALL. On the saloon’s front porch, to the right of the open plank door, sat a solitary, dark-skinned female dressed in a long, flowered purple skirt and a red blouse with a matching red neckerchief knotted at her throat.

Longarm had spied the saloon and the young woman a minute ago, and he’d been keeping a curious eye on the girl, who sat unmoving on a long bench against the saloon’s front wall.

Her Indian-featured face was stoic as she stared toward the brothel on the other side of the wash from her. She had one moccasin-clad foot propped on the bench, and one arm draped casually over her upraised knee. The cinnamon-skinned girl, obviously an Apache, though possibly Pima, wore a thin bandana around her forehead. Coarse, black hair fell straight down her back.

Mercado looked back at Senora Concepcion. “It is too bad the silent one does not work over here, on this side of the wash. I find Dobson’s girl somewhat intriguing.”

“If that mute was working over here, Mercado, you know as well I do that you would probably get a night’s fun out of her but then wake up with a knife in your balls the next morning.”

Mercado laughed at what the woman had told him so matter-of-factly, in uninflected Spanish. Longarm was slow to translate it, but when he did, a few seconds after Mercado started laughing, the lawman looked across the wash again. The girl sat as before, one foot on the bench, before her.

She sat as still as if she’d been carved out of wood.

Mercado glanced at Longarm and slitted his eyes like a wily coyote. “A witch, they say. A mute Chiricahua. Her father was a shaman. If a man looks too long at her, his cock shrivels up like dried leather and falls off!” He shook his head sadly as he glanced once more at the girl. “It is too bad. What I wouldn’t give, just once, to…”

Senora Concepcion shook her head darkly and turned her mouth corners up knowingly. “That is all it would take.”