He shrugged and commenced to fill his plate.
Chapter 30
“You son of a bitch!”
Longarm looked up in time to see a fist coming his way. He took half a step back, and Chief of Police J. Michael Bender’s rather impulsively thrown punch went soaring past without damaging anything more than J. Michael Bender’s pride.
“Is there something you wanta …”
Damned if the man didn’t try it again. A hard jab this time. Longarm swayed to his left.
“Careful now, I just got me some of these little meatball things an’ …”
The chief was nothing if not persistent. He tried it a third time. Unfortunately—or not, depending on one’s point of view—Longarm didn’t pull his plate quite all the way aside with him this time. The police chief’s forearm jostled Longarm’s wrist and somehow—he was awfully sorry about that—a dinner plate nearly full of beans swimming in sticky-sweet, melted brown sugar and molasses wound up decorating the front of Bender’s coat and mighty expensive-looking necktie. The meatballs bounced a few times and ended up rolling around the floor, but those beans had pretty good sticking power.
Three punches. Which Longarm considered to be something in excess of enough.
“Now look, goddammit, if you don’t quit I’m apt t’ get a mite angry here,” Longarm said. Ducking a moment afterward underneath a looping, roundhouse right. Inexpert but intense. Real intense. It actually might have hurt if it had landed.
Bender tried a final blow. And, as the saying goes, that one took the rag off the bush.
Longarm dropped the fork he was still holding onto—the plate by then was long gone, sadly shattered and underfoot by this time—and reached out.
The chief’s momentum was already carrying him forward. Longarm decided there was no sense in wasting a perfectly good advantage. He tugged a bit here and pushed a speck there, and Bender found himself turned clean around and facing in the other direction.
Which happened to be toward the broad doorway leading from the dining room into the entry hall. And on toward the wide-open front door. Not a bad idea, Longarm thought.
At the same time that he took one flailing arm by the wrist and pulled it behind the man’s back, he also got a good grip on Bender’s collar. And lifted, scooting the man forward on tiptoes at the same time.
Worked right nicely if he did say so himself.
Bender tippy-toed right out of the Deel dining room, through the vestibule, and outside to where there wasn’t quite such a crowd. Although by this time one could reasonably say that attention had been diverted from the widow and was now centered on a couple of the grieving guests. Like, for instance, on the two who were scuffling on the porch. But then, distractions like that do tend to add spice to a wake. Or whatever this prefuneral gathering should be called. Longarm wasn’t real sure about that.
What he was sure about was that Chief Bender was hissing and fuming and sounding like a tea kettle that was about to pop its lid.
The man was so purely frazzled and furious that he wasn’t coherent. He was past any ability to form individual words and seemed to be settling for making all possible sounds, all at one and the same time.
Longarm clucked in sympathy. And propelled the man right on across the porch and over the railing.
Turned him plumb upside down in the process. And then gave him a little shove while he was airborne.
The chief of police of Addington, Texas, landed head first in Jessica Deel’s lilacs. About the only thing that could have made it any better—in Longarm’s admittedly prejudiced opinion—would have been if Mrs. Deel went in for native cacti instead of flowery things. But then, after all, a fellow can’t have everything in life. Quite.
Bender landed with a yelp and a great wallowing and thrashing, hung suspended there for a few moments, and then with a crackling and crashing of greenery, sank near out of sight into a bed of dying hollyhocks. It was, Longarm thought, entertainment of the first water.
J. Michael Bender, on the other hand, did not seem amused. The man came sputtering and roaring out of the shrubbery—upright, this time—and looked for half a moment like he was going to make the ultimate mistake and grab for his revolver.
Longarm wasn’t one to find fun in playing with guns. Particularly when they were wielded by irrational assholes. Which Bender was acting to a fare-thee-well.
Bender’s hand had a chance to get just the least bit twitchy, and the next thing he knew, he was looking into the huge, gaping muzzle—only forty-five hundredths of an inch across by careful measure, but at least a yard wide when seen from Bender’s unique angle of view—of Longarm’s Colt.
The chief dropped any notions about appealing to Sam Colt for equality in action and went more than a little pale.
“You … you … I will get you for this, Long. Either get out of my town and out of my jurisdiction or so help me, I’ll … I’ll …”
“If you got a complaint, Chief, you best file it with my boss. I’ll give one o’ your people the address t’ make sure you get it right. But don’t make the mistake O’ trying me, mister. I won’t take but so much. You hear me? Any more stupidity like this an’ I’ll put you in irons for assault on a federal officer. Guaranteed. What’s more, I’ll make it stick. There’s federal judges that owe me some favors, an’ for you I’d call my markers in.”
That was a lie but what the hell, Bender didn’t know it.
“An’ don’t you forget, Chief. Your jurisdiction, such as it is, stops at the city limits. There ain’t no place in this whole country that’s outa mine. You get my meaning? Now get the hell outa here before you go an’ do something you can’t call back after.”
Longarm waited until the chief departed, leaving his dignity behind, then followed. He didn’t think this would
