It didn’t work. The portly Inspector Gomez smiled thinly as he shook his head and then said, “I have a better idea. I think I shall run you both over to la crircel for to wait until we hear from higher authorities. We shall take photographs of the two of you and try for to make you comfortable in our most modern cells until it is decided who is to go free and who is to be shot, eh?”
Ferris protested he didn’t want his pals to leave town without him.
Longarm said, “For once I agree with this son of a bitch! I got me a steamboat to catch this evening!”
But Gomez just smiled and said, “I noticed the ticket. If you are really who you say you are, it will still be good for passage to Yuma when we let you go. If you are El Brazo Largo, you will not be going anywhere but up against the wall, comprende?”
Chapter 11
When Inspector Gomez had bragged about the local jail being so modern, he’d meant the original oaken doors of the stone-walled cells had been replaced by iron bars, painted blood red. Prisoners still got to sleep on a floor mat and relieve themselves in a honey bucket. Their captors had prudently placed Longarm and Sam Ferris side by side in adjoining cells, separated by a thick slab of basaltic masonry. From their side of the bars, neither could see the modern Bell Telephone speaker that dangled between cells at face level.
But Longarm knew that old bromide about walls having ears had been inspired by ploys of the Spanish Inquisition. So when Ferris moved to the front of his own cell and called to him as “Longarm,” the tall prisoner who’d given his name as Crawford repeated his alias as he ambled over, asking in a sincerely puzzled tone, “Who might you be performing for, old son? It’s siesta time and I doubt that guard with his head on the desk out front speaks English, whether he’s awake or not.”
The outlaw picked up with Longarm’s badge and gun insisted, “Come on, you know what I’m talking about, Longarm. They took both of our pictures in the office. It’ll only take a few days for the Mex mails to put that fat greaser straight, and then where will you be?”
“Likely free as a bird, Longarm,” the real Longarm declared with as happy-go-lucky a tone as he could muster. It would have been sort of dumb to say anything else, whether the walls were listening or not.
As if he could read minds, Ferris said, “All right. I don’t owe you any favors neither. But I’d like to get out of here long before those photographs convince everyone you’re a big fibber. So what if we let one hand wash the other? I might be able to get you out of here alive if you saw fit to spring me early.”
Choosing his words carefully, Longarm asked, “How do you figure I can get you out of here early, Longarm? You may not be able to tell from where you’re standing, but this cell door seems locked secure and I just can’t seem to reach that key ring on the desk out front without stretching considerably.” Ferris said, “You could confess to being who we both know you are. They ain’t going to let you go in any case. But if you told ‘em I was me instead of you, they’d turn me loose and then I could see if I could get you out on one of them writs of habitual corpses, see?”
Longarm laughed for real, and declared, “You’re all heart. First you accuse me of being a lawman who shot your pal, and now you want to bail me out? I heard about you during a similar stay in the Yuma jail, Longarm. They said you could lie like a rug and talk the horns off a billy goat. But I have to allow I expected you to be more good looking …”
Ferris swore and almost sobbed, “Lying to me ain’t going to help you, Longarm. Look at my offer another way. Even if you figure it’s a mighty slim chance, at least it’s a chance. The greasers ain’t fixing to offer you shit. You heard what that slob Gomez said about shoving the famous Longarm up against the nearest wall.”
The famous Longarm shrugged and replied, “I heard. I can see why you’re so anxious about getting out of here before they can pin you down for certain. Old Gomez could have acted meaner. He let us both hang on to our smokes and matches. He didn’t stick hot irons up your ass or mine. I thought that was pretty slick of him to have us both pose for our portraits instead. The trouble with beating answers out of prisoners is that they tell you what they think you want to hear instead of the truth. Is that why you keep trying to get out of this bind by accusing me of being you, Longarm? What if you were to own up to your own badge and identification so’s I could see about getting you out?”
Ferris snorted in disbelief, and told Longarm to try something that was not only a physical impossibility but mighty undignified.
Longarm persisted. “You were the one who mentioned contacting a local lawyer and all. If you have pals here in Puerto Periasco, I’d be proud to look them up for you.”
Ferris snorted,. “I’ll bet you would. I saw what you did to old Jake with that buffalo gun. So all in all, I’d as soon give any pal of mine the galloping clap than an introduction to you!”
One story above them, Inspector Gomez removed the Bell receiver from his ear and wiped his face with a kerchief as he sighed, “One of them would seem to be on to us. Is a waste of time in this heat for to listen in on such guarded fencing with words.”
He nodded at the worried-looking woman with auburn hair his men had brought from that posada. Consuela O’Hara y Mendez was guarding her own words as well. She had no idea what was going on, but as a woman of means on the run from a wayward husband, she sensed this was no time to confuse Inspector Gomez with her Father Confessor.
Gomez nodded to her pleasantly and said, “We are satisfied you are who you say you are, senora. Both your banker and the lawyer you named before as references have vouched for you and your family. I believe you when you say you and your, ah, associate down in the cell block met along the post road and arrived here after exciting but hardly unlawful adventures. I am sorry about the uncle you lost, killed by rebels against our beloved Presidente. But is it not possible this gringo you know as Crawford was lying to you?”
Consuela had no trouble sounding sincere as she replied in a poised tone, “For what reason? From the two photographs you just showed me, I can say the nicer-looking of the two men you hold identified himself to me as a Senor Crawford. And he got me out of the desert alive, after I had been abandoned to the mercy of heat, thirst, and Ya qui!”
“I said I believed all that,” Gomez told her. There was no way a man with a political appointment could ask a young woman of good family and sensitive political connections whether she’d been serviced in any other way by a handsome gringo. So Gomez quietly asked, “Did not your fellow adventurer give you any first name as the two of you rode all those miles together?”
Consuela naturally recalled Longarm’s slip. She had no way of knowing it had been a slip. But she’d learned in her short adventurous life that men with oily smiles were seldom out to do her any favors, and Custis had been a dear about letting her get on top when she’d found his weight a bit too much for her on firm soil. So she shrugged
