She protested, 'Oh, Lord, I don't have any clothes on. Please trim that lamp. I can't have you seeing me naked!'
He said, 'Already have, and I'm sure glad to see you've neither tattoos nor a tail, ma'am. I reckon that'll hold your left lung in you for now. Let's see about this other round you took under your floating rib.'
'Don't look at my privates!' she pleaded as he removed his hat and gently covered her blond pubic hair with it while refraining from telling her he already had. It might have upset her as much to be told no man with a lick of sense had horny thoughts about even a great naked body shot so full of lead.
The purser came in, gasped in dismay at the sight of the bloody nude on the upper berth, and recovered to soberly state, 'Our Mister Reynolds outside is beyond any need for medical attention. But I sent for the ship's surgeon in any case. Is the lady still alive and may one ask what she was doing in your stateroom if you weren't in here with her, Deputy Long?'
Longarm said, 'For now let's say we swapped berths because she was suffering more than me from your great weather down this way. I got a better question. How did those two killers learn which stateroom I was supposed to be holed up in tonight?'
The purser sighed. 'I told them. They were asking about you in the smoking salon a few minutes ago. I allowed that since I'd not seen you on deck and there was nothing else open you were likely in bed. The other one, Mister Godwynn, said he wanted to slip a note under your door and he seemed so friendly...'
'I follow your drift,' Longarm snapped. 'Now I'd like you to round up some armed and dangerous crewmen and make sure that was Godwynn I just heard going over the taff-rail. I chased him as far as the stern and lost him one way or the other.'
The purser stated flatly, 'If he went over the side he's done for. We're miles off either shore in a shark-infested lagoon. Even in the unlikely event he might make it ashore, there's nothing there if you get there!'
Longarm said, 'I know Padre Island is a desert island with nothing to eat or a drop to drink for farther than any man could hope to walk in this climate. Tell me more about the mainland over to our west.'
The purser thought and shrugged. 'Not a whole lot for a man on foot and probably unarmed by now, even if he was serious about swimming that far. The marshy shores rise to soggy cattle country. A lot more salt grass than cows can eat, away from the rarer fresh water. His only hope, should he make it that way, would be if he could at least find some shade before high noon. Wherever the soil rises high enough above sea level you 're likely to find squatters of the Mex or Indian persuasion, if your luck holds out. Anglo squatters along the coast this far from anywhere are more likely to be outlaws who'd kill a man for his boots!'
Longarm finished knotting the bandage around Lenore's trim bare waist and growled, 'That Godwynn rascal is an outlaw in his own right. So why are you still standing there? Didn't you just hear me tell you to find out which way he went?'
The purser left. Longarm was trying to figure out what needed bandaging next, and how, when Lenore opened her eyes again and said in a conversational tone, 'I'm dying, Custis.'
He tried to keep his own voice as calm as he told her, 'No, you ain't. You're too pretty and we won't let you.'
She sighed and said, 'I know I'm pretty, and here I lie, naked as a jay with a handsome man, and I'm still fixing to die a goddamn virgin like poor old Olivia Lee back home!'
He removed his hat from her privates to replace it with a numb but friendly palm, not really feeling anything as he told her, 'I just now told you there'd be no dying around here, virgin or not. There'll surely be a Coast Guard dispensary when we get to Escondrijo in just a few hours, and then they'll fix you up so's I can make sure you'll never in this world die a virgin, hear?'
She smiled wanly and softly asked, 'Are you threatening to seduce me while I'm helpless, you great-looking brute?'
He chuckled fondly. 'Nope. Only when you're well enough to get on top. For once you can, I mean to come in your sweet flesh till all our bones ache.'
He was suddenly aware they had company as the dying girl smiled radiantly up at him, or maybe through him, to say, 'Why, Custis, that was the nicest thing any man's ever said to me!'
Then she was dead. The white-clad figure that moved around him to feel Lenore's throat looked more like a nurse than any ship's surgeon. Longarm gulped and said, 'I know what you just heard must have sounded disgusting, ma'am, but...'
'I know what you were trying to do,' the plump and motherly gal said. 'Few men would know how to be that comforting to a dying woman. It was very gallant of you, Deputy Long.'
CHAPTER 4
Longarm had lived through a war or more. So unlike some peace officers, he was inclined to let less-than-lethal confusion simply pile up while he tried to grasp the overall pattern and watch for snipers. So as soon as the ship's surgeon, red-eyed and three sheets to the wind, joined them in his stateroom, Longarm left the dead Lenore to a drunk who couldn't hurt her and that nursing sister or whatever as he joined the search for her surviving killer--if the son of a bitch was still on board.
The purser led Longarm down to the cargo deck, where an officer had his deckhands poking about with bull's- eye lanterns. The officer was called a supercargo because he supervised the cargo, the way the purser supervised the passengers.
The partly open-sided cargo deck, like those of most coastal steamers and all riverboats, lay just above the waterline over the hollow-egg-crate construction of the shallow-draft hull. The supercargo said they'd already swept the mostly empty barn-like space. Longarm wanted to make certain, having found a life preserver missing. Longarm's first impression of the bulkhead further aft was that the steamer's boilers and machinery lay just beyond. But as the supercargo's gang went through the motions forward, Longarm paced from port to starboard and saw he was right about that companionway near his stateroom being longer. So he rejoined the gruff and somewhat older supercargo and said, 'As big as this open cargo deck may seem, this vessel gets wider back behind that bulkhead, meaning you got more than half this level all filled up with coal bins and machinery?'
The supercargo shook his head, billed cap and all. 'We've already checked the coal bins, and there's no way he could have gotten into the boiler room or engine compartment without the black gang noticing. There's not as much space for him to work with aft as you seem to imagine. Less than a third of this level holds anything besides cargo.
