Tabor Evans - Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance

Outside, a horse whinnied above the pounding rain. Men’s voices rose. One was speaking Spanish with a heavy American accent.

Presently, boots pounded the porch floor. A man’s medium-tall, compact frame appeared in the saloon’s open doorway, clad in a dripping, yellow, India-rubber rain slicker. Rainwater sluiced off his gray, high-crowned Stetson.

The man’s voice resonated above the frequent thunder and driving rain. “Well, if it ain’t my ole friend Custis Parker Long his own mean an’ nasty self!” The man laughed, showing white teeth under a salt-and-pepper mustache and a long, pitted, hawk-like nose. The whiteness of his teeth and his eyes stood out against the old-leather color of his weathered skin.

Longarm turned toward the door, stiffening, sliding his right hand very slowly across his belly toward his gun. “Well, well,” Longarm said, managing a grin despite the cold hand of fear splaying its fingers across his back. “If it ain’t my old pal Captain Jack Leyton.”

Chapter 29

Captain Jack Leyton walked into the saloon. Mercado followed him, glowering angrily at Longarm.

Obviously the Mexican now knew he’d been duped. The big man with the Big Fifty—a tall, beefy man with dark skin but green eyes and dressed much like a vaquero—walked in behind Mercado. He had his Sharps on one shoulder.

The rest of Mercado’s men filed in behind the big man. They were all holding pistols in their hands, and they walked into the room, spreading out in a ragged semicircle to Longarm’s right.

“Custis, get your hand away from that .44, now, damnit!” Leyton said with disgust. “You ain’t gonna shoot your way out of here, and you know it!”

Longarm looked at the men holding pistols aimed at his belly and glowering at him. The Apache girl had stopped playing her guitar now, and she was watching the events unfolding before her with only vague interest, the way one might watch a couple of coyotes fighting in the street.

Longarm lowered his hand to his side. Rage burned in him as he glared at the pompous, self-assured Leyton, who now removed his hat and tossed it atop the bar beside Longarm’s rifle and ran both hands back through his thick, wavy, salt-and-pepper hair.

“Why’d they have to send you, of all people, Custis? Now, I’m most likely gonna have to kill you, and that genuinely grieves me. We was pals !”

“Why’d you do it, Jack? Why’d you kill those men—lawmen, just like you and me?”

Leyton sighed. The rain had let up some but it was still slashing against the sides of the building in the blowing wind, making the ceiling and the walls creak. Thunder pealed occasionally, causing the puncheon floor to vibrate and the bracketed oil lamps to ring.

The ranger said, “Let’s have a drink, and I’ll spell it all out for you. Might as well. You’re here now, and I reckon I’m gonna have to kill you here pretty soon, anyway.” He shook his head again grimly and looked at the barman, Kimble Dobson, who stood tensely behind the counter.

“Bottle of your best whiskey, Dobson. Three glasses. Tequila for my men.”

Leyton glanced at Mercado, who was still glowering indignantly at Longarm, and canted his head toward a near table. The Mexican walked over and both him and Leyton sat down. The others watched Longarm, guns aimed at the lawman’s belly.

When Longarm finally sat down across from Leyton and Mercado, facing the front door, the others, including the man with the Big Fifty—Fuentes—lowered their weapons and sank into chairs around two tables near the front.

No one said anything except Dobson, who said sharply, “Cocheta!” as he looked nervously through the dusty bottles lining the shelves on his back bar.

The girl rose from her chair with a bored, tired expression, set the guitar down against a ceiling support post, and started toward the bar. One of Mercado’s men reached out and pinched her ass. She gave a sharp grunt and turned her fiery eyes on the man who’d pinched her.

The men laughed, but the man who’d pinched the girl soon cowered slightly under her menacing glare. Mercado snickered. Jack Leyton smiled, and then watched as the girl walked around the far end of the bar and came up behind it to help Dobson.

“Pretty, ain’t she?” said Leyton. “A pretty savage. Mercado thinks she’s a witch.”

“She is a witch,” Mercado said, watching her now as she set a couple of trays atop the bar while Dobson filled shot glasses. “Her mother was a sorceress, her father a shaman. Her family is well-known amongst my people south of the border.”

Longarm only hazily wondered how the girl had come to be with Dobson, living here in this virtual ghost town. All eyes, including his own, were on the strangely silent girl as she came out from behind the bar, picked up a tray with a bottle and three filled shot glasses on it, and set it on Longarm, Leyton, and Mercado’s table.

Indeed, she was an Apache beauty, with a smooth, oval face the color of dark honey. There was a wild, unbridled aspect to her that was hard to pin down and a coppery sheen in her otherwise chocolate eyes.

Apparently, she wore no underclothes beneath her red calico blouse, which was unbuttoned to reveal an enticing view of her cleavage. Longarm could see her large breasts swaying behind the fabric, her nipples pushing out the cloth as she bent to distribute the shot glasses. Her blue-black hair, coarse as a horse’s tail, hung down to just above her round ass. A faintly feral musk emanated from her. It smelled like the cooling desert in late fall.

“Mute, they tell me,” Leyton said, looking up at the girl admiringly.

“Oh, but she wasn’t born that way,” Mercado said. He looked up from the girl’s swaying breasts to her face and said commandingly, “Show them, senorita!”

She glowered down at the man. She did not look at Longarm or the others but kept her blandly malevolent gaze on Mercado as she reached up and pulled her neckerchief down to reveal a thick, nasty-looking scar across her throat.

Longarm felt himself inwardly recoil at the grisly wound.

“Christ!” Leyton said.

As the girl swung haughtily away from the table and retreated behind the bar, Mercado said, “Soldiers cut her throat when she was a little girl. Raided her camp, killed her family and all the others in her band. Cut her throat and left her to die. Only, being the demon she is, she didn’t die. Dobson found her and adopted her.”

The Mexican gang leader favored the tense barman with a sly look. “It’s my guess he’s sold his soul to the devil and partakes of his adopted daughter’s lovely wares nightly. Eh, Dobson, you old rapist? But who could blame him—living under the same roof as that?”

The other Mexicans laughed uncertainly, their limited understanding of English preventing them from getting the full gist of their leader’s tomfoolery.

“Enough of that,” Longarm said, casting his wrathful gaze on Leyton once again. “What’s your game, Jack? Why’d you murder those men?”

“Ah, shit, Custis,” Leyton said, looking down at the filled shot glass in front of him. “I didn’t kill those men. That was Vonda’s doin’. Or the doin’ of them stupid killers she has runnin’ with her.”

Longarm still couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea of Vonda being an outlaw much less having had anything to do with the lawmen’s killings. She’d seemed so lazy and sexy and benignly stupid. He’d let it go for now. Eventually, he hoped, everything would become clear.

He waited, holding his acrimonious gaze on Leyton and suppressing his urge to drill six bullets into the man from beneath the table.

Leyton was reading Longarm’s mind. “Yes, Vonda. Smarter than she looks. A saloon girl. A devilish one. Hell, a leader of men albeit a tad on the emotional side. She married that cork-headed Stretch a year ago, but he doesn’t know what she’s up to. Eight of Stretch’s men are hers…and mine, includin’ his segundo , Wade, and Tallahassee Smith. She was in on this thing from the beginning—a whore from Texas with money on her mind. Big money, and a small gang of Texas bank robbers to go along with her aspirations. But to make a long story short, a couple of her men were out looking for the new route for the gold shipment last month when they came upon the rangers and the marshals down from Broken Jaw and drilled all five because our boys thought the lawmen had gotten savvy to our game down here.”