“Yes, at the Grand Hotel.”
He looked off in the distance. “When I get back, there’s going to be one less clerk in the U.S. marshals service.”
“Oh, you mustn’t mind. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had this chance to see you.”
Longarm said, “How come you wouldn’t come back to my room, Lily Gail?”
She gave him an amazed look. “Well, what kind of girl do you think I am, Marshal? Go to a gentleman’s room? In the middle of the day?”
“Oh, I might have known. Of course. The middle of the day. That makes sense to me, too. If it had been night, that would have been different.”
She said, “Well, I certainly am not going to answer that, but it certainly would have seemed more seemly. But to visit a gentleman’s room in the middle of the afternoon like I was coming to bring his laundry or something.”
Longarm shook his head. “Lily Gail, you beat anything I have ever seen in my life. What are you doing these days? Are you still working for the Gallaghers?”
She said, “Marshal Long, I resent you saying such a thing about me. The Gallaghers are outlaws. They’re misunderstood, and yet they are still considered outlaws. I resent you accusing me of having a formal association with them. The very idea!”
He gave her a frank look. “Are you here because of the Gallaghers?”
“As it happens, I do have a message to you from them.”
Longarm said, “I wonder why that doesn’t surprise me, Lily Gail. And by the way, where did you get the new name Baxter? Did you make that up?”
She folded her arms. “I’ll have you know, that’s my married name.”
“So you got married again. Who did you marry this time?”
“A Mister Baxter. A Mister Jonas Baxter. A gentleman in trade back in Enid, Oklahoma.”
“What kind of trade? Does he sell dynamite to the Gallaghers?”
“He was in the haberdashery trade, if you must know.”
“Where is Mister Baxter?”
She cast her eyes down. “Unfortunately, Mister Baxter is no longer with us. He met an untimely end.”
Longarm laughed. “Being married to you is about like being married to a black widow spider. Your husbands don’t seem to last very long, Lily Gail. And I can testify that being one of your lovers ain’t all that much safer.”
Lily Gail said, “Oh, you’ve grown cold, Custis Long. You’ve grown cold and hard.”
Longarm had to laugh again. “You hang around with the worse bunch of cutthroats and murderers and back- shooting sonofabitches that this part of the country has ever seen and you call me cold?”
She said, “Longarm, that’s what I’m here to talk to you about. You know, the Gallagher brothers have been done a terrible injustice. They were misunderstood. They’ve been prosecuted and persecuted by the law and it hasn’t been fair. You even killed poor Vern, and he meant you nothing but the best.”
Longarm said, “Wait a minute. Let’s get the record straight, Lily Gail, before you go off on another one of your dreams while you are still awake. Now, the way it was, you lured me out to your ranch north of Wichita Falls, Texas, and then you doped me by putting laudanum in my whiskey. After I had passed out, your hired hand or your lover, whoever he was, chained me out in the barn before he went off to get the Gallaghers, who had every intention of killing me. The fact is that I happened to get loose and set that dynamite off, in which explosion Vern Gallagher got killed. Now, do not represent the Gallaghers to me as anything but what they really are. By the way, where are you staying?”
She said primly, “I have just a short while ago come into town. I have not as of yet taken accommodations. My mission has been to deliver this invitation to you from the two remaining Gallagher brothers.”
Longarm gave her a guarded look. “And just what would that invitation be?”
“They want to meet with you. They want to try to put an end to this terrible persecution that the law has seen fit to visit upon them. They think that perhaps ya’ll can make some kind of a deal. They admit that, from time to time, they have had some terrible people working for them and that they have done some terrible things, and they are willing to surrender these people to the law if ya’ll would just give them a good letting alone.”
Longarm burst out laughing. He couldn’t help himself. He said, “You mean, they’ve found some poor saps that they are going to turn in so as to save their own skins? Isn’t that about the size of it? Where are the Gallaghers right now?”
“They are camped on the Cimarron Strip, not even seventy miles from here.”
Longarm knew she was talking about that part of Oklahoma that bled off at the top of the territory like a string of spilt milk, running across the panhandle of Texas and below western Kansas and eastern Colorado, ending at the New Mexico border.
For a second, it shocked him to realize they were so close. He looked quickly around the hotel lobby to see if there might be any strangers who could be allowing Lily Gail to lead them to him, but the lobby was mostly deserted except for a few familiar faces. Nevertheless, Longarm said, “I don’t much care to be sitting out here in the open with you, Lily Gail, with the Gallaghers anywhere near.”
“You don’t have to worry about that. They have sent me in to see if I couldn’t persuade you to take a trip over the line to meet with them and see if something couldn’t be worked out.”
Longarm looked at her with amazement. “Lily Gail, have you lost what little mind you ever had? I can’t make any deals with the Gallaghers, even if I wanted to, which I damn sure don’t. The only way I would meet with them is if I had a troop of calvary behind me. The Gallaghers could raise half a hundred men at a moment’s notice. If you think that you’re going to lead me into some trap out in the flatlands of the Cimarron Strip, you’ve got another think
