border it’s best to say no more about. I’m going on to that place in town we were talking about. You go on about your unstated business, if you’ve a mind to. I don’t want to know a thing about it. It hurts just as much to lie to my boss as it does to peach on my pals, so …”
“I’m going with you,” she said, turning to a follower or kinsman Longarm hadn’t met before to rattle off some orders in North Italian. Then she scampered after Longarm to grab his one free elbow and demurely ask if he thought they’d let her in the hotel with him if the two of them were wearing pants.
He laughed and said they’d let him in with a sheep, as long as he was willing to pay for a double. So they ambled on along the bank until they were out of earshot of her crew and she could tell him how dirty she meant to treat him the moment she had him in bed behind another locked door.
He said he wasn’t scared, and added they’d have all night before he had to mosey over to the Yuma hall of records and grope through all those musty papers.
Irena sighed and said, “I wish your business here was simple as my own. We only have to unload a modest cargo for some Yanqui fruit growers.”
He warned, “Don’t tell me about your infernal smuggling, querida! I already know you combined business with pleasure by luring that gunboat away from the main channel so’s your own schooner could sneak on by. I’d just have to turn you in if I knew for certain what you just smuggled into these United States!” She asked, “For why? Was Mexico’s unjust export duties we avoided, while we did a favor for El Gato. Is no Yanqui duties on semillas, is there?”
To which he could only reply, “I don’t know. What sort of seeds are we talking about?”
She shrugged and said, “For to grow avocodos, dates, olives, and a dry-climate orange tree. Some Yanqui settlers are most interested in new crops for these irrigated bottomlands. So they pay well for new crops to experiment with, if only El Presidente would let us keep most of the money and … For why are you hugging me, Custis? Can’t you wait?” He said, “I can and I will and I mean to screw you silly, because I suspect you just saved me a whole heap of paperwork, you sweet-smuggling little thing!”
Chapter 15
It took two days, and Irena said she was glad. Longarm never did find anything out about Trader Wolfram and Rosalinda’s other sister. But once he’d settled on the desert claim of a late Doctor Dundee, he got out there just as the hot dry siesta time was commencing, lest he miss one member of the gang he’d run to ground at last.
So Harmony Drake, Centerfire Max, and Goldmine Gloria were enjoying a noonday repast served by Spud Travis, the junior member of the bunch, as Longarm let fly with the Big Fifty outside.
The thunderous report gained the undivided attention of all four crooks, an hour’s ride up the Gila Trail from Yuma, just as Longarm had intended.
He had his peep-sight trained on a gun loop cut through the thick ‘dobe wall beside the stout oaken door of the low-slung ranch house as he heard someone shouting, “Who fired that cannon and where are you at?”
Longarm knew that to those in the house he could be most anywhere along a ragged cactus hedge between their dusty dooryard and the dead and dried-out citrus grove behind him. He let them guess just where as he called back not unkindly, “Who’ve you been expecting, your fairy godmother? I’d be the same U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long you left for dead on that ant pile over by Growler Wash. So now you are all under arrest, and I don’t really care whether you want to come quietly or not. You’ve surely neglected the trees and shrubbery around your late husband’s homestead, Miss Gloria. Didn’t anyone ever tell you irrigation ditches don’t work unless you pump water into ‘em now and again?”
Inside the house a sweaty-faced Harmony Drake shot a thunderstruck look at his doxie and snarled, “You dumb cunt! I might have known you had to brag!
You were only supposed to be buttering him up aboard that train!”
Goldmine Gloria, sweating in her own right, brushed a strand of limp blond hair from her flushed forehead as she protested, “I never did! Nobody in town could have told him either. Are we going to fuss about how he found us or are we going to do something about it?”
Drake turned to the outlaw peering through the gun slit to ask, “Can you make any of ‘em out, Centerfire?”
Centerfire Max, so called for the single-cinched Mexican saddle he’d once ridden up Montana way rather than for the serious rifle rounds in his Winchester Yellowboy, eased the barrel of the weapon further out the gun slot as he tersely replied, “Sun’s in my damned eyes. He likely knew it would be when he chose this hour to come calling, the tricky son of a bitch!”
Across the way, Longarm shouted, “The warrant I have on you says dead or alive, and you’ve never done nothing to endear yourself to me, Harmony. If you ain’t coming out, I reckon we’ll have to come in. For it’s really starting to get hot out here.”
He waited a polite count of a hundred times Mississippi while, in the house, Harmony snarled, “Don’t nobody fall for that. He never up and said any of you others ain’t as wanted as this child. He’s trying that divide-and- conquer shit!”
From over near the fireplace, where he’d hunkered to douse the cooking coals, the kid called Spud looked up to ask just what Harmony meant. So Goldmine Gloria said, “Nothing. Stuff a sock in it, Harmony. He’s doing all right without your help.”
At the slot, Centerfire groused, “I told you all the other night we should have killed the big bastard! It ain’t as if he didn’t have a rep for tracking! But no, we had to slicker the best tracker they got by playing Here We Go ‘round the Mulberry Bush across the damned old desert with him.”
Then Longarm had finished counting and let fly with the Big Fifty. Guessing which opening they might be staring out from, and knowing a right-handed gunslick would be peeking out with his right eye, from the lower corner to Longarm’s right, he aimed at the angle formed by sill and jam, to send a fistful of splinters, a bowlful of blood and bone, and all of Centerfire Max flying back from the gun loop as his dead trigger finger fired an even more frightening shot inside the confines of the little ‘dobe!
“Oh, Jesus!” wailed Spud Travis as, spattered with gobs of blood and brain matter, he leaped to his feet and tore out the back way as fast as he could run.
He got halfway to the corral before he noticed someone had been at those ponies that should have been under the shady toldo above the watering trough. Then he made an even worse mistake and lit out afoot across the flat,
