“Whoa, goddammit, whoa,” Jesse shouted. Not that there was much of anything the mules could do about the slide.
Longarm grabbed hold of the arm of one of the women to keep her from landing on the floor atop a salesman of medicinal products. Which earned him a grunt of thanks from the woman and a glance of sharp annoyance from the salesman, who obviously wouldn’t have minded having the lady on top.
The coach wheels hit something solid and rebounded sharply back the other way, the sudden change of direction accompanied by the sound of wood splintering.
“Ah, shit, dammit, whoa,” Jesse moaned loudly into the night.
The coach lurched again, slithered back and forth like a gigantic dog shaking its tail, and then finally came to a rocking stop on its creaking thoroughbraces.
“Jesus Christ,” Jesse said.
“I wisht he wouldn’t talk like that,” one of the passengers complained. “He’ll bring the wrath down on us.”
“I don’t think he was cussing,” one of the whores suggested. “I think he was praying.”
“What I think,” Longarm said, “is that we all better get out and see if we’re needed for anything.”
Lawyer Overton was the first one out the door. He stepped down to the ground. And promptly disappeared. “Damn!” he yelped.
“What’s the matter?”
“Be careful when you step down. Hang onto something.” There was a low grunt and Overton’s voice was strained. “It’s slick as snot on ice out here. Mud. My feet went right out from under me soon as I stepped on the ground.”
It helped that someone, either George or Jesse, scratched a match afire and lighted a lantern that he hung from one of the side curtain hooks above the window.
Tyler Overton’s suit was liberally smeared with bright red mud, Longarm could see by the light of the lantern. So were the lawyer’s hands. Obviously he hadn’t thought before he’d tried to brush himself off. It looked like the only thing he had accomplished was to rearrange the mud into broader smears that covered most of his back and butt and right side. Longarm managed to keep from chuckling, mostly because he knew he could end up looking just as grimy if he wasn’t careful when he got out of the coach himself.
“You gents go ahead,” the woman nearer the door said as she pulled back and resumed her seat. “I ain’t moving.
You, Ada?”
“I didn’t lose nothing out there, honey.”
Longarm stepped down—very carefully—and immediately reached for a cheroot.
George produced a second lantern and climbed down. Jesse was already on the ground fussing with his mules, soothing them with soft mumblings and going from one mule to the next while he scratched their polls and rubbed the sensitive hollows beneath their jawbones. He did seem fond of those animals.
“Shit,” George grumbled.
The lantern light showed the cause of the comment. The coach had skidded off the crown of the road—they were long since out of the mountains and traveling across the broad expanse of sage flats here—and managed to bang sideways into an old rut in the road. It wasn’t even a rock that had done them in; there wasn’t anything that solid in sight, just a narrow, mud-filled rut.
That rut had been quite good enough to cause a problem, though. The left rear wheel had two broken spokes.
“Shit,” Jesse echoed when he finished calming his mules and came back to see to the trouble on his coach.
“Do we have a spare?” the medicinals salesman asked.
“Did your mama change your diddies for you?” Jesse snapped back, his voice testy.
“Dammed if I can remember,” the salesman shot back with a grin, not at all put off by the driver’s annoyance. “Did yours?”
“No, and I think maybe that’s why I got the red-ass now,” Jesse said, conceding defeat pleasantly enough. “Anyway, yeah, of course we got spares. A couple of ‘em. We also have a bitch of a deal to make the change.”
That was true enough. It was night. In the middle of absolutely nowhere. And the ground here seemed to be solid mud. Cold as a witch’s tit but gooey, gummy, slick, and slippery mud nonetheless.
And some poor sonuvabitch was going to have to crawl underneath the coach in order to set the screw jack— and somehow find a way to keep the damn thing from sinking into the muck once weight was applied—so they could get the busted wheel off and a new one bolted on.
Longarm puffed on his cheroot and kind of faded off behind the coach where he wouldn’t be noticed if Jesse commenced to looking for volunteers. Like that whore had said when it came to getting out of the coach, he hadn’t lost anything underneath the son of a bitch and there was nothing down there that he was going to go look for.
This was, he was beginning to suspect, gonna be a very long night.
Chapter 20
“Screw it. I don’t care. They’re nothin but a couple whores. They can pull their own weight or get out. That’s what I say.”
The other men gave the salesman—his name was Leonard—an uneasy glance. But it was apparent that they had been thinking pretty much along those same lines.
