Longarm 245: Longarm and the Vanishing Virgin (5 page)

The shadowy figure came closer, stepping out onto the bridge itself. “Don't give me that,” the man snarled. He poked something toward Longarm. “Hand over the loot, or I'll blow a hole clean through you, mister.”

Longarm sighed. The would-be robber was about ten feet from him, which was close enough for what Longarm had in mind. “Look, I'll give you my watch, all right?”

“Just make it fast!”

Longarm reached for the chain that looped across his midsection from one vest pocket to the other. At one end of the chain was a heavy gold pocket watch shaped like a turnip. But at the other end, its weight counterbalancing that of the watch and acting as a fob, was a two-shot .44 derringer that had saved Longarm's life on numerous occasions. He wasn't sure how much danger his life was actually in at the moment, but the holdup artist did have a gun. Longarm wasn't of a mind to take too many chances under those circumstances.

But he wasn't going to just gun the man down without warning either. He pulled on the watch chain with his left hand, and as the derringer came out of his vest pocket it slipped nice and natural into his right. He thrust it out, his thumb looping over the hammer and earing it back as he did so. The robber jumped a little and exclaimed, “What the hell!”

“It's called a .44-caliber over-and-under two-shot, old son,” drawled Longarm. “And it'll blow a hole clean through
you
if you don't put up that hogleg and skedaddle out of here.”

“What ... but ... but I've got five bullets in this gun!”

“I don't need but one,” said Longarm.

He was prepared to stand there for however long it took for the standoff to be resolved. The robber had to realize that his intended victim had teeth after all and didn't intend to be held up. The simplest thing would be to fade back into the darkness and be grateful he was still alive.

The gun being held by the shadowy figure began to droop toward the bridge. “All right, all right,” he muttered. “Hell, a man can't even make a dishonest living in this town anymore.”

“Now you're being smart,” Longarm told him.

The robber stuck his gun back in his coat, turned, and trudged away. Longarm watched him go, and kept the derringer trained on him until the shadows reclaimed him.

Longarm put away the derringer, but immediately palmed out his Colt and held it alongside his leg as he started off the bridge. There was a chance the holdup man had really taken his advice and gone home, wherever that was, but it was just as likely that the fella was still lying in wait for him. And there wouldn't be any warning this time, just a shot from ambush.

Well, there was a little bit of warning, Longarm reflected as he reached the end of the bridge. He heard the soft scrape of a footstep nearby.

He threw himself to the left as a gun roared. His left hand grabbed the railing of the bridge and he swung himself around it onto the embankment leading down to the creek. The comer of the bridge wasn't much cover, but it was the best available at the moment. Another shot banged, and this time Longarm got a good look at the muzzle flash as the slug chewed a splinter from the bridge railing a foot from his head. He fired at the flash, responding so quickly that the two shots sounded almost like one.

Something hit the ground over there, catty-cornered across the road. Longarm crouched by the end of the bridge and waited to see if there were going to be any more shots. In the distance, a dog started barking, and that set off a dozen more mutts. But those were the only sounds Longarm heard.

Until a moment later when a soft, rasping noise reached his ears. Somebody was struggling to breathe. A few more seconds passed, and the breathing turned into a groan of pain.

That could have been faked to try to draw him out, but when the breathing resumed, it had a bubbling quality to it. After a moment, Longarm heard a ghastly rattle. He had heard similar sounds many times in the past, and nobody had ever been able to fake one of those.

He straightened and stepped up off the embankment, holding his Colt ready just in case as he started across the road. When he reached the far side, near where the shots had come from, he dug out a lucifer and held it out at arm's length in his left hand before snapping his iron-hard thumbnail against the head. The match flared into life. Longarm squinted from the glare as he looked down at the body sprawled at his feet.

The man was lying face-down in a spreading pool of blood. His gun lay a few feet away, near an outstretched hand. Also lying on the street was a broad-brimmed hat. Longarm pointed the Colt down at the fallen figure as he worked the toe of his boot under the man's arm. He rolled the corpse over and stepped back quickly.

The man was dead, all right. Longarm lit another match and saw that his bullet had gone through the right side of the man's chest, undoubtedly puncturing a lung so that he had drowned on his own blood. Plenty of the crimson stuff had leaked out of him, that was for sure. Longarm saw something else that made him frown.

The fella had a beard—a bushy, black beard just like the driver of the wagon that had nearly run over him earlier tonight.

And that hat lying near the corpse ... it was the same sort of hat that teamster had worn, Longarm recalled.

Of course, there were probably hundreds of hats just like that in Denver, just as there were thousands of men in town who wore beards. Just because this fella had such a hat, and such a beard, didn't necessarily mean that he was the same man who had tried to crush Longarm beneath the wheels of a heavily loaded wagon.

Didn't mean he wasn't either.

Longarm knelt beside the corpse and quickly searched the man's pockets. He drew a roll of blood-soaked bills from inside the coat. Without counting them, he could tell from the thickness of the roll that the man hadn't been poor. That sort of blew holes in the robbery theory. This gent had pretended to be a holdup man, but his real goal had been something else entirely.

He had been out to kill Longarm, plain and simple.

Then why go to the trouble of making it look and sound like a robbery? Longarm asked himself as he stood up. Why not just a shot out of the dark? Then he answered his own questions by realizing that the would-be killer must have been following orders in that respect as well. Someone had told the man to get rid of Longarm, but to make it appear to be a botched holdup, just in case there were any witnesses. Just as the earlier attempt on his life with the wagon would have looked like an accident if anyone had investigated it.

Interesting. Mighty interesting. So interesting that Longarm thought about it for a long time after leaving the body where it was and returning to his room to try to get some sleep that wouldn't come.

“The Denver police found a body down by the Cherry Creek bridge last night,” Billy Vail said as he looked across his desk at Longarm the next morning.

Longarm didn't look up at his boss until after he finished lighting his first cheroot of the day. Then he said casually, “Is that so?”

“Yes, it is. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you, Custis?”

He should have waited with the body for a policeman to show up, thought Longarm. But he hadn't been in any mood for a bunch of questions and paperwork. The bearded man was just as dead either way.

“Why would I know anything about a corpse, Billy?” he asked blandly.

“Because this fella was a friend of an old friend of yours. A former cell mate, in fact. You remember Bob McGurk?”

Longarm's eyebrows arched in surprise. “Badger Bob?”

“One and the same,” said Vail. “The dead man's name was Ross. He spent three years in Leavenworth with McGurk. Ross was in for mail robbery. Got out about six months ago.”

“Badger Bob's still in there, ain't he?”

“He's supposed to be.” Vail looked intently at Longarm. “He escaped two weeks ago when he was out on a work detail. Killed two guards doing it.”

“Damn it!” Longarm leaned forward. “Didn't those folks at Leavenworth have sense enough to know not to ever let Bob out of his hole?”

“Evidently not.”

Longarm sat back in his chair and took a deep draw on the cheroot as he remembered his first run-in with Badger Bob McGurk. It had happened not long after he'd gone to work for the Justice Department. McGurk had held up an army payroll wagon all by his lonesome, had killed four soldiers and wounded four more in the process. Then, while Longarm was trying to track him down, he had gone on a killing spree, murdering six more people before Longarm caught up with him in an isolated Idaho canyon. The two dead guards at Leavenworth brought his total number of victims to an even dozen, assuming that Badger Bob hadn't killed any other prisoners while he was there. Given the man's record, it was a wonder he hadn't been hanged, but he'd been lucky and drawn a judge who decided to sentence him to life in prison instead. Longarm had a feeling that was because the army payroll Bob had stolen had never been found, and the government probably still held out faint hopes of getting him to talk someday so that they could recover the money.

Longarm could have told them that wasn't going to happen. Badger Bob was one of the craziest bastards Longarm had ever run across. He would have gnawed off his own arms before he'd cooperate with the law about anything.

“I didn't know McGurk was on the loose,” Longarm said slowly.

Vail nodded. “And you're one of the men he swore he'd get even with, Custis.”

“You say this fella Ross used to be his cell mate?”

“That's right. Ross—the man who was killed last night down by Cherry Creek.”

Longarm chewed on his cheroot, shifting it from one side of his mouth to the other. This bit of information might put things in a whole new light. He had formed a hazy theory as to why the bearded man might have wanted to kill him, but knowing that the fella was connected to Badger Bob McGurk provided Longarm with a much simpler explanation for the attempt on his life. And the simplest explanation, he had learned over the years, was usually the best.

“This gent Ross ... had he been on the straight and narrow since getting out of prison?”

“Not hardly,” said Vail. “He'd been picked up several times by the Denver police for getting drunk and starting fights, and he was a suspect in a handful of robberies and assaults. They even thought he might have killed a couple of folks, but nobody had any proof.”

“Well, it sounds like whoever ventilated the bastard did the world a favor. No need for him to be wasting perfectly good air by breathing it.”

Vail inclined his head. “You could look at it that way.”

“Then why don't we?” suggested Longarm.

Vail sighed in defeat. “All right, if that's the way you want it. Anyway, the real problem is McGurk. He's liable to be after you, Custis.”

Longarm shook his head and said, “I'm not afraid of ol' Badger Bob.”

“Well, you should be,” snapped Vail. “You ought to be worried a little anyway. The man's murdered at least a dozen people, and he's about as vicious a killer as I've ever seen.”

“He is all of that,” agreed Longarm.

“I've put the word out to all of our men to keep an eye open for McGurk, and I've warned the Denver police too.” The chief marshal shrugged. “I don't know what else I can do.”

“There isn't anything else.” Longarm stood up, stretching his rangy frame. “If McGurk comes after me, I'll deal with him then.”

“Just be careful.” Longarm started to turn away, and Vail added hurriedly, “Hey, what about that Canady girl? I figured that was why you came in this morning, to report on that investigation.”

Longarm nodded. “I went to Canady's house last night, had a look around the place. It doesn't seem likely to me that somebody could have gotten in there and snatched the gal, Billy. I have to agree with Canady and Senator Palmer that she probably left on her own. Seems to me that even that would have been hard, though, with the guards Canady has around the place.”

“Then you haven't located any sign of her?”

“Nary a one. I checked some of the hotels last night, figured I'd hit the rest of them and the boardinghouses this morning. If that doesn't turn up anything, I'll start looking into the possibility that she left Denver altogether.”

“Hell, if she did, she could have gone anywhere,” Vail grumbled.

Longarm nodded. “I'm afraid you're right, Billy. That's what makes this one bitch of a job.”

And now he had to worry about a lunatic like Badger Bob McGurk on top of it.

 

The morning was as unproductive as the night before had been. He checked the rest of the hotels, including some dives that Nora Canady likely wouldn't have been caught dead in, and moved on to the boardinghouses. No one had seen a young woman matching Nora's description.

But at least nobody tried to kill him, and Longarm was thankful for that.

After eating lunch in a hash house, Longarm headed for the railroad depot. He was friends with several of the ticket agents, and by talking with them, he discovered that, again, no one answering Nora Canady's description had purchased a ticket during the past few days. “But that doesn't mean she couldn't have boarded a train and bought a ticket from the conductor after it pulled out,” one of the agents advised Longarm, which nearly brought a groan of despair from the big lawman. Without a good starting place, Denver—and the whole sweep of the frontier beyond it—made for a mighty big area in which to be searching for one young woman. Longarm had heard the old saying about the needle and the haystack, and he was starting to understand just what it meant.