the roof holding on to the reata with the other. He’d never have been able to slide down so easily if it hadn’t been oiled and braided rawhide. As it was, he almost slid past the sixth-story sill, and caught it with his boots just in time. This left him hanging just outside the window. It was lucky the window wasn’t nailed shut, and even luckier that the only man inside was Don Julio. The Mexican politician looked mighty surprised when Longarm tapped on a bottom pane with his toe. But he was too smart to shout out loud as he rolled off the bed, came over, and opened the window inwards, whispering, “Who are you, aside from an obvious lunatic, I mean?”
Longarm swung on in, mirror and all, and as he dropped to the rug, whispered back, “I’m glad your English is so much better than my Spanish. We ain’t got time to talk. Do just what I say, even if you think it’s crazy, and there’s a hundred-to-one chance we’ll get you out of this fix, alive.”
The older man said, “That’s a better chance than they will offer at my so-called trial in Ciudad Mejico. What is it you wish for me to do?”
Longarm glanced about for a handy closet, spied a tall but skinny cedar wardrobe he liked even better and told the Mexican to climb in.
Then he wedged Don Julio in one corner, standing atop the bottom drawers under the hang-up space, and offered a few words of terse explanation as he wedged the mirror in between them at an angle. He said, “You’ll have to grip the top edge with your fingertips to hold this steady. But they ought to be shaded by the hanger-rod along with the top edge. Now hold that pose and not a peep out of you until I come back to haul you out of there personal.”
He stepped back to view his handiwork and muttered, “Shit.”
Don Julio asked what was wrong. Longarm said, “That was a peep. I told you not to do that.” Then he shifted the mirror until it was only bouncing the image of dark cedar-wood out at him, and got rid of the clothes hanger that was messing up the illusion with an oddly angled twin. He said, “I’m going to leave this door wide open and shut the closet. There’s more call to peer sharp into something you have to open. Pay no attention to all the noise you’re about to hear, and remember nobody can see you no matter how much they’re yelling at YOU.”
He turned away, shut the closet door, and trimmed the only lamp in the room low and shadow-casting, but not all the way out.
He’d no sooner done so when a side door opened and a rurale came in muttering something, then froze with his jaw hanging open when he saw how Don Julio had suddenly grown so tall. It was not the best way to be standing when anything as big as Longarm was throwing a left hook.
He nailed the rurale on the button. His victim dropped with no more fight in him, and little more noise than a wet dishrag. Longarm left the door ajar beyond the rurale’s boot heels and ran over to the window to grab the reata in both hands and start climbing. The height didn’t bother him as much now, as he considered what it might feel like to get shot right up the ass.
But he made it to the roof, rolled over the parapet, and made it to the stairwell just as somewhere in the distance a tinny bugle blew an after-midnight invitation to the bullfight. Then the skies above Ciudad Juarez began to light up red, white, green, and purple as the first skyrockets commenced exploding.
From the point of view of the rurales who thought they were holding Valdez overnight in a safe place, the festivities seemed even more confusing. Attracted by the noise outside, three of them ran into the prisoner’s murky room, almost tripped over their unconscious comrade, and added to the confusion by yelling a lot and bumping into one another as they tried to cover all bets at once. Their sergeant joined them, demanding to know what in the hell they were fussing about, in the harsh tones only a topkick with a parade-ground roar could muster. The rurale who’d opened the closet door roared back, “The cabren is not here!” just as the one peering under the bed got back to his feet to groan, “Nada! But where could he have gone?”
The sergeant swept a casual eye around the dimly lit but all too obviously vacated premises, including the gaping door of the obviously empty wardrobe, and snapped, “The window is open!”
The rurale closest to them stuck his head out and said, “I found it! He used a rope for to climb down!”
The smarter sergeant shoved him out of the way, stared morosely down at the milling crowd in the street far below, and shouted, “Not down, up! The line is only hanging a few meters below this sill. Get out to the stairs before he makes it down from the roof!”
All of them but the one helping the dazed man on the rug tore out of the room, guns drawn. The one Longarm had knocked galley-west was muttering, “What happened? I remember coming in to check on the prisoner and then everything went black. I think I am going to puke.”
His buddy replied, “Not if you do not enjoy standing against walls you won’t, Heman. The prisoner has escaped. On your feet and help us find him if you value your life! Someone shall have to pay for this if he gets away, and between you and me, Heman, I’d say you were it!” He helped his dazed comrade to his feet and hauled him in the wake of the others. By this time they were on the roof, but all they could see up there was a fireworks display. They could hear it as well. Above the noise of exploding skyrockets the sergeant roared, “That makes no sense. I have lived more than forty years and in all that time I never heard of a bullfight at night.”
One of his men said, “Just the same, they’re shooting off all that stuff near the bullring, if not in it.”
Their leader snapped, “That’s what I just said. Corporal Gomez, take half the detail over to the Plaza del Toros and arrest whoever you find there. The rest of you follow me. We must search this hotel from top to bottom!”
They did, with the rough skills los rurales were notorious for, albeit without their usual needless brutality.
Longarm, El Gato, and the Great Costello were expecting to get caught in bed with red-faced women, in three separate beds. Other hotel guests were more surprised, made more of a fuss, and some of them wound up naked on the floor, with bruises, as los rurales looked under every bed and in every closet. But they didn’t have time to rape even the pretty female guests during their frantic sweep of so many rooms.
Downstairs, they slapped the hotel help around just enough to determine they had no sensible suggestions to offer. The sergeant clanged his spurred boots out the front entrance, stared in bewilderment at the passing crowd, and grabbed an excited youth to ask where everyone was going. The kid laughed and said, “I don’t know. They seem to be holding a fiesta over that way. I want to see if any pretty muchachas will be there.”
The burly rurale leader let him go with a cuff across the back of his head and stomped back inside, roaring, “The whole town has gone loco en la cabeza, or perhaps some friends of Valdez are trying to be clever. Heman and Quico, stand guard here and make sure the old fox can’t get out the front way. Robles and Castro, get to the back exit on the double and make sure it is locked as well as guarded.”
