Tabor Evans - Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance

“Enough about Dobson’s little witch,” Mercado said, swinging down from his saddle. “Where is Leyton? I have someone he will want to speak with. Upstairs, huh?”

“No,” Senora Concepcion said. “He and Fuentes rode out together this morning. Fuentes came for him, eager to show him something he found. Looking, you men. Always looking for something out in the desert…” The severe-looking old puta smiled cunningly.

“You forget about what we are looking for, puta ,” Mercado warned through a snarl. “When will he back?”

The whorehouse madam shrugged. “How should I know? Tonight, maybe. Everything is a secret around here.

Mercado turned to Longarm and threw his hands up. “Oh, well, I guess we have to wait until tonight to see Leyton.”

Just then thunder rumbled louder, and rain began to fall as though someone had pulled a plug in the sky. White water streaked straight down. “I, for one, am going to go in and warm myself with your girls, Senora! Come on in, Longabaugh. There aren’t enough putas to go around, but my men don’t take long!”

Laughing, Mercado followed the madam into the brothel, leaving Longarm still mounted on his roan and hunched against the rain. The lawman wasn’t worried about getting wet. The cool rain felt good against his hot, sweaty skin caked with several layers of desert grit.

He was relieved to still be alive, which he might not have been if Leyton had been here. He’d have gone down shooting, of course, taking as many killers with him as he could. But he’d have died just the same.

Now, he’d been given a reprieve. A chance to plan another course of action.

He looked across the street at the Black Puma Saloon, being hammered by the white javelins of rain. The bench was now vacant, the Apache girl nowhere in sight.

Two Mexican boys had run out of the brothel in front of Longarm, and were quickly gathering up the reins of Mercado’s men’s horses. The boys had apparently been ordered to stable the beasts.

Longarm swung down from the roan’s back. He slid his Winchester from the saddle boot, slung his saddlebags over his shoulder, and tossed his reins to one of the Mexican boys, who caught them deftly as he gathered up the other sets of reins. As the boys ran around the side of the brothel, leading the trotting horses that arched their tails at the weather, Longarm strode across the bridge spanning the wash.

Back in Denver, Billy Vail had mentioned an old desert rat and his Apache daughter who now ran a saloon in Holy Defiance. Dobson must be him.

From Dobson maybe Longarm could gain some idea about what in hell was going on out here—something apparently so lucrative that a man he’d once known to be as good as they came—Ranger Jack Leyton—had gone over to the other side for it.

As Longarm took the saloon’s porch steps two at a time, he could hear beneath the drumming of the rain on the roof the strumming of a guitar—soft, melodic strains of what sounded like an old, sad song. He stopped at the open door and peered into the dingy place.

The brightly dressed Apache girl sat in a chair near what appeared an ancient player piano and a roulette wheel—both probably relics from the town’s as well as the saloon’s more prosperous and rollicking days. She sat in a Windsor chair at a scarred round table—one of about a half dozen in the entire place.

She had one leg crossed over the other one, and now she looked up at the tall man in the doorway and continued to strum the guitar. Her face showed no interest whatever.

She lowered her face again to watch her fingers slowly raking the guitar strings.

An old Anglo man in Mexican peasant garb and with long gray hair sat straight back in the room’s deep shadows, about halfway down the long, low-ceilinged room. There appeared a dance floor at the far end. A balcony, probably where gambling tables had once been set up, hovered above it. Game trophies limned the front of the balcony over the main drinking hall—a black puma, a cougar, a mountain lion, a couple of wolves, and a grizzly.

The old man was hunched forward over a fat, open book on the table before him. There was a bottle there, a shot glass, and a cigarette sending smoke curling up from an ashtray into the shadows above the table. He looked up at Longarm, squinted his startlingly blue eyes that contrasted the pastiness of his pockmarked face, and then placed round-rimmed spectacles on his nose, and looked again.

“I’ll be damned,” he said in a throaty voice. “I do believe we got us some business, Cocheta.”

The girl kept her eyes on the guitar and continued strumming the instrument that the rain now threatened to drown out entirely.

“Come on in,” the man said, gaining his feet a little awkwardly, a little drunk. He stuck the quirley in the corner of his mouth. His peasant’s pajamas hung on his long, rangy frame as he walked around the far end of the bar and came up behind it.

“Whiskey? Tequila? Come on, name your poison.”

Longarm walked into the room and set his saddlebags and his rifle on the bar. “Tequila.” He removed his hat, tilted it to drain water from the brim, set it on the bar, and ran a hand through his damp hair.

“Tell me, amigo,” the barman said as he splashed liquor into a shot glass, “are you amongst Leyton’s men or are you a lone desert wanderer seekin’ shelter from this welcome desert rain?”

“How ’bout if we say I’m both and neither?” Longarm threw the shot back and held up two fingers to indicate a refill.

The barman chuckled and looked up after he’d refilled the shot glass. “The secretive sort. I don’t blame you. This is the country for it. Loose lips get men killed.”

He chuckled again, swiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

“I’m just glad to have some company over here, not to mention the business. Ever since that Mex bitch, Concepcion, rolled in here with her wagonload of whores and tequila, and set up shot in the old hotel yonder, my income has taken a deep dive. Oh, I get a few freighters and desert rats now and then, but most of the business, like Leyton’s and Mercado’s boys, stay holed up over at Concepcion’s.”

“How long they been holed up over there?”

Leaning forward against the bar, the pasty-faced old man considered Longarm over the tops of his spectacles. “Didn’t I see you ride in with ’em a few minutes ago?”

“So what if I did?”

The man smiled conspiratorially and then splashed more tequila into Longarm’s empty shot glass. “On the house. To answer your question, they been comin’ an’ goin’ for about two months now.”

“Why?”

“I don’t ask that question. No one does unless they want their heart carved out with a dull stiletto.”

“Concepcion seems mighty curious.”

“Yeah, well, that old puta ’s too curious for her own good. Her old ticker’s likely gonna be dried and hangin’ from Mercado’s neck when him and Leyton finally get what they’re here for and ride on south across the border.”

The old man leaned on his arm, shifting his head a little closer to Longarm and lowering his voice though no one was here except the Apache girl strumming the guitar.

“You law?”

Longarm knew he was treading in very shallow water, but he had a feeling he wasn’t going to learn what the outlaws were here for, and why they’d killed the rangers and the U.S marshals, unless he tipped his hand to this man.

“For the sake of argument,” he said, “let’s say so.”

The man nodded once. “Don’t tell no one I said this, because I’ll deny it an’ call you a raving lunatic, but I got it in on fairly good word from an old desert rat who knows this desert as well as most Apaches do that—”