the back while she took Longarm down the street to their own deputy coroner’s place.
As they strode close together, although not arm in arm in public, Pat told Longarm young Maureen had run off somewhere in tears after viewing what they were about to see.
Longarm was tempted to run off in tears when the Minnipeta Junction sawbones struck a match to light up what could have been taken at first glance as the meat counter in a messy butcher shop.
They’d dusted the chopped up and soggy remains with quicklime to cut the smell and discourage flies. It didn’t help enough to matter.
As Longarm regarded the mess under the coal oil’s glare, he saw someone had used the sharp edge of a shovel to sever the lower limbs at the knee and elbow joints. One forearm and the left hand were missing. The brunette head sat upright on the stump of its neck at that end of the bloated torso. They’d all told him Rose Cassidy had been a good-looking woman in her late thirties or early forties. Longarm had to take their word for that. The mottled and bloated face had been torn up considerably with buckshot. The larger but more widely spaced blue holes in the headless torso’s chest had been made by bullets—.40-caliber seemed about right.
Longarm grimaced and said, “Well, I’ll have to take your word she was Rose Cassidy. I can see she wasn’t the gal who blew me off my feet that time with what could have been the same Le Mat Duplex.”
Pat Brennan softly asked, “Are you certain of that? Her own gang turning on Miss Medusa makes more sense than her killing Rose Cassidy for no reason!”
Longarm shrugged and declared, “Oh, she had a reason. As soon as I figure it out, I’ll have a better notion where to look next! Let’s get out of here. This poor gal’s told us all she can, considering the shape she’s in.”
The deputy coroner, another local merchant who doubled as the undertaker, asked how long he was likely to be stuck with all this spoiled meat.
Pat Brennan looked at Longarm, who said it was up to her, and told the undertaker, “Do the best you can by her, and I’ll see if they’ll let the township bury her over at First Methodist.”
The deputy coroner quietly pointed out, “It was my understanding she was Roman Catholic, ma’am.”
Pat Brennan shrugged and replied lightly, “That makes two of us. But faith and Bejasus, there’s no decent Roman church for a day’s ride, and at least it’s not in Lutheran ground we’ll be after burying her and all and all.”
The only undertaker in town allowed it was jake by him if they didn’t care over at First Methodist.
So Pat and Longarm walked the short distance to the only church in town, where the Reverend Seares agreed any Christian burial in hallowed ground seemed better than a lonely grave out on the prairie.
As they shook on it, the minister added, “As an army chaplain during the war, I was called upon to bury many poor boys of many faiths. So I usually settled for an Old Testament psalm and the Lord’s Prayer.”
Pat agreed a dead Roman Catholic should have no objection to either, and they parted friendly for the moment. Pat allowed, and Longarm had to agree, they were skating on thin ice to bury a Papist in a Protestant churchyard without family permit.
But they had other things to talk about. So they went over to the hotel. He hired the same room as a single, and Pat came up to question him some more with her on top.
She said she’d been waiting for him all this time as hot as hell. He believed her once she’d impaled herself on his shaft so they could take their duds off at a slower pace than she was bouncing.
He’d noticed up in Florence that this old pal was built nothing at all like Red Robin. He’d been sneaking dirty thoughts about a tall tan undersheriff a good part of the time he’d been humping away at a pale and softer piano player. Once he had Pat stark naked, he rolled her on her back to stare down between their passionate bellies as he parted the thatch between her lean thighs with his old organ-grinder. It made her look even leaner and hairier down yonder as he thought about Red Robin’s smooth-shaven crotch while admiring one so different. He never asked Pat who she liked to think about while she moaned and groaned sweet lies about nobody else on earth having such a glorious battering ram and all.
They shared a smoke, did it some more dog-style, and somehow wound up on the rug, half under the bed, before Pat said she had to get back to her desk before somebody got to wondering where on earth she really was.
They got cleaned up and dressed, to leave a few minutes apart and meet up again at her office. It was easy to manage in such a small town. It was up for grabs whether they were fooling anybody.
There was no argument where Maureen Cassidy had been when a couple of Pat’s deputies brought her back to town, crying, in a buckboard.
She’d run back out to the old Nesbit place on foot, looking for her momma, according to the firm but gentle deputies who’d brought her back to town.
Pat took the sobbing kid in her arms to tell her in a motherly tone of her own that they were fixing to bury her momma in a nice place if that was all right with her. Pat had to rephrase it a few times before Maureen seemed to savvy they were planting old Rose for keeps. But by the time they cleaned Maureen up at Pat’s house and got her into a fresh summer frock, Longarm handing her the nosegay of flowers he’d picked up while she bathed, Maureen seemed anxious to get on with a funeral. Longarm had to do some legwork before they had everybody lined up. Rose Cassidy hadn’t known too many folks in Minnipeta Junction, being new to the township as well as a Papist who kept to herself. But there was a respectable crowd gathered around the newly opened grave out in front of First Methodist near yet another sundown. Some of the cowboys old Rose had chased away with that manure fork were good sports about carrying her pine coffin over to the grave for her.
As all the men present removed their hats, the Methodist minister tried to do right by an unfortunate Catholic lady by reciting the psalm about the Lord being their shepherd. Some of the assembled crowd said the Lord’s Prayer aloud with him at the end. Some of the women looked like they had something in their eyes when young Maureen prayed along, loud, in that singsong childish voice.
They’d just finished, and the minister was holding out a spoon full of dirt to the dead woman’s daughter, when things got more exciting.
Longarm saw young Maureen didn’t seem to follow the minister’s drift with that ceremonial dirt. So Longarm moved toward them to help the childish grown woman out. His sudden unexpected shift inspired the bullet aimed at the center of his back to just pluck at one sleeve in passing. It scared the liver and lights out of a couple across the
