figured to spin his windy tale not just for these happy-go-lucky—and hopefully loose-lipped—cowboys but for every bartender, rummy, or talkative salesman whose ear Longarm could find and bend.
Yes, sir, before long he expected most of the population of Kittstown to know that a brand-new advance in science would be applied come daybreak and that tomorrow there would be arrests made for the murder of the pretty little whore named Nancy.
Chapter 36
Shit, he wanted a smoke. Bad. It was bad enough being cramped and cold and miserable. But the worst thing was not being able to smoke. Dammit.
He’d been huddled inside a nest of blankets borrowed from the Jennison Arms for—what? Three hours maybe? Two at the very least. And it was getting to him that he couldn’t risk the smell of the smoke or the bright pinpoint of light that the coal would give off. Not if he wanted his prey to come to the bait.
Longarm was situated well inside the wispy, ghost-like screen of winter-naked crackwillows that grew near Darby Travis’s cabin.
From this hiding spot he could see both the front and the rear of the place. And one of those, he figured, should pay dividends before the dawn.
His reasoning when he made up that wild tale about a newly developed scientific technique was that he probably could rely on Nancy’s killers to run true to form.
And what little he knew about them so far included, along with a willingness to commit murder, a penchant toward arson as a means of resolving their difficulties.
So what better method of destroying the “evidence” Longarm claimed would be collected at daybreak than to burn down the cabin where that evidence was to be gathered.
Longarm figured he had way the hell better than even odds that sometime before first light his killers would mosey by and torch the Travis place.
Or try to.
Longarm might have something to say about their likelihood of success.
But then they wouldn’t know that.
In the meantime, though, well, it was pretty damned uncomfortable sitting motionless through the night, surrounded by snow and with air temperatures somewhere south of zero.
Worth it, however, if Nancy’s killers dropped by as planned.
Longarm stifled a yawn, and made some faces to try to keep himself awake. It would have been a hell of a lot more convenient, he bitched and groaned to himself, if the sons of bitches had been considerate enough to put in an early appearance.
Longarm sat bolt upright, jarred wide awake by the presence of a new sound. Then, grumpy and frowning, he slumped back low to the ground once again. He could hear footsteps approaching, all right, but not from town. Something was wandering slowly along to his right, toward the empty plains north of Kittstown.
The sounds of snow crust crunching underfoot were clear as bells ringing in the snow-muffled silence of the night. Step-step, pause, step, pause, step-step. It was most likely a deer browsing the willow shoots for bark, he suspected. Not likely an elk, not down this low and this far from the safety of the high country. And not likely a strayed horse or cow either. Either one of those would be smart enough to stay close to home and a feed trough in weather like this.
Longarm shifted in search of a more comfortable seat—but not a warmer one; he’d long since forgotten what warmth felt like—and worked up some spit to swallow in the hope he could ease his scratchy throat and avoid coughing. A cough would be as bad as a cigar to warn off the killers—or spook passing deer—and alert the whole damn neighborhood to the fact that things in this vicinity were not as lonesome as they seemed.
He ducked his head and rubbed the tip of a nose that had lost feeling more than an hour ago. Before long, dammit, he would have to start worrying about the first blush of dawn creeping up behind his back.
If this made-up ploy of his didn’t work, what the hell was he going to do next to try to work out who it was that murdered the girl?
The sad truth was that he didn’t have the least idea what to try if this failed.
Damn it!
He scratched his nose again, tried to rub some feeling back into his ears … and stared open-mouthed and incredulous when he realized that it wasn’t some wandering buck he’d been listening to for the past couple minutes.
Under the black velvet canopy of the night sky, lighted almost to brightness by the wide and gleaming swath of the Milky Way and with the three jewels in Orion’s belt sinking low to the horizon, he could see dark shadows moving over the stark white of the snow to his right.
And it wasn’t any deer he was looking at.
There were two distinct forms. Man-shapes both of them. Skulking along slow and coming from the exact opposite direction from what Longarm would have expected.
If he had set himself to guard the front of the place he never would have been able to see them.
As it was, however, they were clearly outlined in silhouette against the pale background.
Two men, he saw.
One of them, the one in the lead, carried a stubby weapon that had every appearance of being a short, double-barreled shotgun. Now where had he encountered anything like that before, eh?
And the other man, following close behind and moving in virtual synchrony with the other, as precisely as infantry marching at drill, was burdened with something that surely did look like a two-gallon coal-oil can.
