Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance (2 page)

The outlaw triggered his Henry into the stone cliff on the train’s right side before falling back off the ladder and out of Longarm’s field of vision.

More women were screaming now in the cars beneath Longarm. More tykes were bawling. Men were shouting. Someone, probably a sky pilot, was reciting scripture from his Bible in a loud but dull monotone that only slightly betrayed the precariousness of his situation.

As the pistol beneath Longarm cracked once, twice, three more times, Longarm ran toward the front of the car, hearing the bullets pop through the ceiling behind him. He saw movement on the vestibule between his car and the next one. He ran harder as he approached the gap and then launched himself into the air, landing on the roof of the next car and having to throw his rifle out to one side to regain his balance lest the train’s violent swaying throw him into the canyon.

When he had a relatively firm purchase, he wheeled, cocked the Winchester, pressed the brass butt plate against his shoulder, and fired twice quickly. The two outlaws looking up at him from the vestibule, trying to plant their sights on him, were sent spinning and bouncing off the front, blood-splattered wall of the car Longarm had just left.

One desperado flew off the cliff side of the train and disappeared in a cloud of dust beside the rail bed. The other gave a terrified scream as he flew off into the canyon, the scream dwindling quickly as he plunged toward the canyon of the Looking Glass River far, far below.

More shouts and cries from inside the passenger cars. Boots thumped as the remaining outlaws ran around, probably trying to figure out how many lawmen they were dealing with.

Longarm knew he probably shouldn’t have tried taking them all down alone, but he’d learned just a few hours before, from a former gang member, of the gang’s intention to rob this narrow gauge spur line running between mining camps in the San Juans, and there’d been no time to throw a posse together. The Arkansas River Gang, as this bunch was called, was known for cold-blooded murder as well as rape and for kidnapping young women to sell as slaves in Arizona and Old Mexico.

For those reasons, he’d opted to risk his own hide as well as those of the innocent passengers who could get caught in the crossfire, and try to take them all down solo.

Hell, according to their former member, Scratch Gillis,
who’d gotten crossways with the gang when its leader shot Gillis’s brother, H. C., when he found H. C. fucking Gillis’s girl in a chicken coop, there were only eight members. Since Longarm had already killed four, that left only four more.

Hell, for a man like Longarm, those were bettin’ odds.

Backing away from the end of the car, Longarm racked a fresh cartridge into his Winchester’s breech. If more men ran out onto the vestibule, so much the better. He’d pick them off one at a time a relatively safe distance from the passengers.

Dropping to his knees, he continued to peer over the edge of the car and onto the blood-splattered wooden platform below. The rushing wind threatened to blow his hat off from behind. Vaguely, because he had more important things on his mind just now, he noted that the train’s speed seemed to be increasing, which meant they were nearing the top of Horse Thief Pass.

A face appeared in the little dirty window in the rear door of the car behind Longarm. It was a round face with little cruel eyes and thin, sandy hair. The gang’s leader, most likely—Rio Hayes. Longarm recognized him from the wanted dodgers that his ugly visage graced throughout the frontier.

When Hayes’s eyes found Longarm, the lawman jerked back behind the roof’s overhang. He heard the gang leader yell,
“On the roof, next car forward!”

Longarm didn’t want to shoot Hayes through the glass and risk a ricochet that might strike one of the passengers. Instead, he decided to buy himself some time and took off running forward along the roof of the car he was on, lunging to each side, setting his feet carefully so he wouldn’t get thrown off. He was halfway to the car’s other end when a pistol popped behind him. The bullet screamed past his right ear and plunked into a stovepipe poking up from the roof of the next car.

The pistol popped again.

Then again.

The shooter cursed angrily as the pistol belched once more, the third bullet kissing the right flap of Longarm’s brown tweed frock coat. Longarm wheeled and fired two hasty shots at the shooter crouched atop the car’s rear end. Then Longarm turned forward again and stepped off the edge of the roof.

As he dropped, he twisted around, aiming the Winchester out from his right hip. The man standing there—a beefy Mexican with bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest and holding a Winchester carbine slackly in both his big, brown hands—stared at the lawman in round-eyed, slack-jawed fascination.

The Mexican had a blond girl trapped beneath his right boot. She lay belly down, naked and squirming and sobbing against the Mexican’s weight. The Mexican’s pants were down around his knees. His dong jutted at half-mast from under the ragged tails of his red-and-black calico shirt.

Longarm triggered the Winchester once while he was still in the air and a second time just after he landed on the vestibule, near the naked girl’s small, pink feet. Both shots blew dust from the Mexican’s shirt, punching him back against the rear of the car behind him. He slumped there, gritting his teeth and gasping and trying to raise his carbine.

The girl was screaming and kicking. A quick glance told Longarm she couldn’t have been much over thirteen years old. Longarm looked at the Mex, fury boiling up from deep in his belly, and smashed the rear stock of his rifle against the Mexican’s face. The blow turned the man’s nose sideways. The nose exploded like a ripe tomato blasted off a fence post.

Blood flew in all directions, painting the Mexican’s big face. Several large, thick drops splashed onto the naked girl’s smooth shoulders. Longarm stepped back, raised the rifle again.

“You got no manners at all, amigo,” he said, the mildness in his voice belying the hot fury that had turned the tops of his ears red.

There was a thudding crack as the Winchester’s butt plate met the Mexican’s left temple resoundingly and sent the man hurling off the girl and over the side of the train. There was no longer a canyon to accept him, however. Trees and rocks had pushed up along both sides of the rails. The Mexican hit the ground, bounced, and rolled into the pines and boulders and was gone as the train rushed on.

The girl gained her knees, stared after the Mexican, and then half turned toward Longarm. He glimpsed a pair of perfect, peach-colored breasts with tender pink nipples. Her long, lustrous hair was the dark blond of ripe autumn wheat.

“That bastard stuck his filthy cock in me!” she cried, her face a mask of revulsion.

Vaguely noting from both her physical attributes as well as her command of farm talk that she was probably older than he’d at first thought, Longarm said, “You’re all right now, miss. He’s deader’n hell.”

He edged a look through the glass of the coach door splattered with the Mex’s blood. “Now it’s time for the rest of his ilk to join him.” He glanced at the girl once more where she knelt with her arms crossed on her breasts. “You stay here!”

He jerked the coach door open and bolted inside.

There were about ten passengers in the car as Longarm ran inside, loudly cocking his Winchester and aiming straight out from his shoulder, staring down the barrel.

Most of the men were on their feet. A middle-aged woman screamed and clutched a towheaded boy to her bosom, pressing her back against the coach wall to Longarm’s right, about midway down the car, squeezing her eyes closed.

Most of the men—stocky and rough-hewn, with drooping mustaches—appeared to be miners. There were a couple of women in frilly dresses revealing more flesh than customary and whom Longarm pegged as whores likely heading for the mining camps to ply their trade through the summer, now that all the passes were finally open after a hard high-country winter. On the left-side grouping of benches thinly upholstered in thin green canvas, a baby was crying in its mother’s arms.

Longarm was looking for an outlaw, but the only person here apparently not a passenger was a black porter who sat on a bench on the car’s left side, in a small open space in which a black, bullet-shaped stove hunched with a box heaped with firewood. The porter, a young man with
obsidian-dark skin, stared at Longarm with as much wide-eyed fear as the others.

“I’m a U.S. marshal,” the lawman announced, walking slowly down the middle aisle, sliding his rifle barrel from right to left and back again, ready to shoot the first man who poked a gun at him. “Any owlhoots here?”

Aside from the baby’s crying and a woman sobbing, the small crowd was eerily quiet. Several of the standing men’s eyes kept darting toward the rear of the jostling car. When Longarm was ten feet away from the rear door, a thick man in a round-brimmed, black felt hat scrambled up from the floor, holding a young woman in a skimpy, shiny red dress in front of him with one arm. He held a pearl-gripped, black steel Colt against the girl’s head.

The girl was green-eyed and pretty in a hard way, and while she winced against the harshness of the man’s stranglehold on her neck, she didn’t appear overly frightened. She was one of those girls who’d seen it all, and this was just one more thing to see.

The outlaw dragged the girl to the car’s rear door, shouting, “One more step, lawdog, and I’m gonna give this doxie an extra ear!”

“Drop it!”

“Uh-uh.” The hard case grinned and shook his head. He had little pig eyes and a double chin, two holsters hanging low on his hips, one empty. “
You
drop it. You got three seconds, or I’m gonna blow her head off!”

Running footsteps sounded on the coach roof above Longarm’s head. Two men were up there. They were shouting as they ran from the rear of the car toward the front.

Longarm’s glance only flicked toward the hammered-tin ceiling before leveling on the hard case grinning before him and holding the cocked pistol to the whore’s head. He wore a greasy, mocking smile.

Quickly, Longarm lined up his sights on the man’s left temple. He knew it was a risky shot, and that the hard case
would likely drop the hammer on the whore as he died, but it was a shot Longarm had to take to try to save the other passengers.

The hard case must have seen the flinty, flat cast in Longarm’s brown eyes as he arranged the sights on the man’s head, just above his right eye. The hard case’s own eyes snapped wide in horror, and just as he dropped his lower jaw and opened his mouth to scream, Longarm squeezed the Winchester’s trigger.

The rifle’s blast echoed around the inside of the rumbling car like a Fourth of July rocket detonated inside an empty tin rain barrel. The hard case smashed his ruined head back against the door so hard he broke the window, painting the sharp-edged shards with his own blood and white bone and brain matter. At the same time, he triggered his pistol, and somehow the bullet sliced up in front of the girl’s face to plunk harmlessly into the ceiling.

As the dying man released his hold on the girl’s arm, she dropped straight down to the floor on her knees, looking more relieved than terrified, and cast her green-eyed gaze on Longarm. “Thanks,” she said raspily, breathing hard and rubbing her neck.

The double-chinned hard case was slowly sagging to the floor, glass raining down from the door around him, his little pig eyes flat and lightless. His arms jerked as he died.

Longarm ejected his spent shell casing. As the cartridge clattered to the wooden floor and rolled, he wheeled toward the front of the coach, where two figures shone in the door’s small window, one man looking inside. As the outlaw brought a pistol up, all the women in the car gasped in unison, and one of the miners said, “Good
Lord
!”

Longarm ran toward the front of the car.
“Everyone down!”

They all cowered at the same time, and as the outlaw backed up, grinning, and aimed his pistol at the window
to shoot into the car, Longarm stopped and fired three quick rounds—boom! boom! boom!—through the door. One bullet blew out the glass still splattered with the Mexican’s blood, while the other two punched through the wood. All three must have ripped into the outlaw with the pistol, because he suddenly flew up and back, bouncing off the rear wall of the next car forward.

His pistol popped into the air above his head. Beneath the rumble of the train, which seemed to be picking up more and more speed and angling slightly downward now, the report sounded little louder than a twig snapping. The baby wailed louder, and the sobbing around Longarm grew more frantic as he ejected the last spent cartridge, levered a fresh one into the breech, and prepared to shoot the second shooter on the platform.

Foot thuds sounded atop the coach. Longarm lowered his Winchester. Apprehension caused the short hairs along the back of his neck to bristle. The man on the roof shouted, “You made a big mistake, lawdog!”

The train robber triggered two rounds through the roof—one hole after another appearing in the middle of the car, just behind Longarm. One bullet plowed into an empty bench while the other kissed the nap from the wool coat of one of the miners, causing the man to curse sharply as he grabbed that arm and lurched toward the side of the car. Heart thudding, knowing he might have a bloodbath involving innocent bystanders on his hands, Longarm fired three rounds into the ceiling, around where the shooter on the roof had fired.

Longarm ejected the last spent casings and stared at the ceiling, pricking his ears. The shooter laughed tauntingly, and fired three more rounds through the ceiling, these three bullets tearing harmlessly into the coach’s floor or thumping into the wood box near the stove, thank God.

Longarm fired three more rounds desperately, gritting
his teeth and narrowing his eyes. He lunged to his left, and grabbed the brake chain. A sudden slowing of the train would likely knock the owlhoot off the coach.

He jerked hard on the chain four or five times. The train didn’t slow an iota. He cursed.