“Sure, don’t you?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” Longarm snapped. “Who are his friends?”
“You’ll find ‘em all at the Champion.” The gunsmith’s nerve was starting to return and his lip curled with hatred. “And whoever you are, I sure hope they got a big welcoming party waiting for you.”
Longarm grabbed the man and bent him back over the work bench. Almost instantly, panic returned to the gunsmith’s eyes as he feebly struggled to break Longarm’s steely grip.
“I’m a U.S. marshal and I’m going to clean this town up,” Longarm told the man. “And when I start sweeping it clean, you’re going to be one of the ones that is going out the door. Is that understood?”
“You can’t throw me out of Bodie!”
“I can if you’re helping to arm my enemies,” Longarm told the man in no uncertain terms.
He spun around and continued on his way. People were coming out of their shops and the other saloons to watch him, and Longarm guessed that the best thing he could do was to go into the Champion Saloon fast and low with his gun in his fist.
That’s exactly what he did. It wasn’t pretty the way he dove in under the swinging bat-wing saloon doors, rolled twice, and came up in a crouch with his gun clenched in his fists. But the welcoming party that awaited his arrival wasn’t pretty either.
Someone must have warned Jack Ramey while Longarm had been momentarily detained in the gunsmith’s shop, because the room looked empty and the little killer was primed and ready to go to war. He had taken refuge behind the Champion Saloon’s long, pine bar, and his first two bullets thundered across the room and ripped apart the swinging bat-wing doors right where Longarm’s body should have been.
Longarm’s first shot was wide, and the back-bar mirror exploded in a shower of glass. Ramey screamed and dropped behind the bar before Longarm could unleash another bullet. The man popped back into view a few feet away and fired twice more. Longarm’s next bullet plugged a case of beer, and foamy brew spewed out of the keg.
“You’re under arrest!” Longarm shouted, knocking over a card table and diving behind it for cover. throw your gun out and stand up with your hands over your head!”
Ramey didn’t answer, but Longarm could hear the killer scuttling over the shattered mirror glass. He heard Ramey knock something over, and then realized that the little gunman was making an escape through the back of the saloon. “Damn!” Longarm hissed, jumping to his feet.
He was just about to start forward when a sudden movement caught the corner of his eye. Longarm threw himself at the sawdust floor just as the twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun ripped across the interior of the saloon. Had Longarm been ten more feet away from the blast, its pattern would have shredded him. But he was close enough that the pattern had no time to expand. Unleashing a slug from the muzzle of his revolver into the gut of the bartender was easy.
The bartender, a fat man with muttonchop whiskers, gaped down at Longarm. His smoking shotgun quivered in his fists and his pudgy trigger finger jerked spasmodically.
“It’s empty,” Longarm explained as he climbed back to his feet and the bartender’s glazing eyes rolled up into his forehead. “Sorry.”
The bartender pitched forward, impaling himself on his shotgun. He grunted, then rolled off the weapon and crashed facedown into the sawdust.
Longarm darted around the bar and ran almost blindly through a storage room. When he burst out into the alley, he caught a glimpse of Jack Ramey as the man rounded a corner.
Longarm went after the little assassin. He had a good seventy yards to make up, but his legs were much longer than Ramey’s and Longarm knew he was a very fast runner. It took him less than ten seconds to reach the corner and when he rounded it, Ramey fired another bullet from across the street.
Longarm saved his remaining bullets. He put his head down and charged across the street. Ramey’s next bullet nicked his sleeve, but Longarm didn’t even break stride. Ramey turned and vanished between two buildings, running for his life.
Longarm plunged into the dim corridor between the buildings. He thought that Ramey might be out of bullets, but there was always that hideout gun and maybe even another Colt revolver to worry about. As he neared the end of the corridor, Longarm skidded to a halt.
“Ramey!” he shouted, unwilling to burst around another corner and risk getting shot at close range. “You’re under arrest! I’m a United States marshal!”
“You are a dead sonofabitch!” Ramey shouted.
Longarm took a deep breath. His lungs were pumping and he batted sawdust from his sweaty face. “Come on out!”
“Go to hell!”
Longarm knew that Ramey wasn’t going to surrender. Why should he do that only to face a certain death from the hangman? This one, Longarm knew, was going to be tough.
He crouched low and then removed his hat. Holding it at arm’s length, he slipped the edge of its brim around the corner of the building. Ramey took the bait. The distinctive sound of a derringer blanketed the alley. Longarm knew that the derringer might have two shots, but he threw caution to the wind and jumped out into the alley to see Ramey trying to run backward in full retreat.
“Halt!” Longarm shouted.
Ramey fired again, the derringer coughing up its last misspent bullet. Longarm raised his pistol as Jack Ramey turned to run, and when he fired, he shot low. Ramey screamed as Longarm’s slug struck him in the back of the thigh. Ramey’s leg buckled and he toppled to the dirt, then jumped up and began to hobble toward the next corner.
“Halt!”
