“Cut it out,” Longarm said.
“Hell, some of them stories I heard about you would have stretched the mind of the world’s biggest sucker. But they was told for the truth.”
Longarm gave him a cool look. “I didn’t make the stories up, sonny boy.”
“I’d hope not. Hell, if you’d run down and caught every crook I heard about, there wouldn’t be a horse left alive in the Southwest. You’d have ridden them all to death.”
Longarm smiled slightly. “All right, all right. Let’s get off that. You’re the man on the scene. What do you think this does to our plan?”
Davis leaned back in his chair and took the time to light another cigarillo. After a moment he said, “Well, they know there’s a federal marshal in San Antonio, and folks in Laredo will hear about it and they’ll figure that the marshal will naturally come on down to see them. But there ain’t no reason for anybody in Laredo to suspect that the marshal is you. Not unless you kill another alley robber. I mean, your name is a hell of a lot better known than your face. I can’t see any reason anyone would recognize you. You say there was a dozen men at the jail last night? What’s the odds on them, anyone of them, showing up in Laredo and being there at exactly the wrong time? Pretty slim, I’d say. Naw, I don’t see no reason to alter our plans.”
Longarm said, with feeling, “If there’s a chance it could cause matters to go wrong, I won’t take it amiss if we bring in another man. We can wire Billy Vail and have somebody else on the next train.”
Austin Davis glanced across the table at Longarm, then said evenly, “You really don’t want to work with me, do you?”
Longarm pulled his head back to look at Davis from a greater distance. “I didn’t say that. Where’d you get that idea? You reckon I went out and got in that shooting scrape to get out of working with you?”
“You been passing remarks ever since I picked you up at the train. Ain’t no skin off my nose either way.”
Longarm looked at Davis coolly. “Speaking of skin,” he said, “thin skin don’t go with this job. It don’t turn no bullets. You understand me?”
“I understand you appeared to be looking for a way out of the job. You was quick enough to talk about wiring Billy Vail.”
Longarm sat still for a moment, not speaking, not doing anything. Finally he said, “Davis, I’m the one wrote the recommendation that got you into the U.S. Marshal Service. I don’t do that for men I don’t trust with my life and who I don’t want to work with. Now, you either get this idea out of your mind about me or we will have to figure out something else right here and now.”
The junior deputy stayed his hand as he was about to take a puff on his cigarillo. He was sitting slightly sideways to Longarm. Glancing at him, he said, “You actually wrote me a letter of recommendation?”
“You just heard me say it, didn’t you?”
“Hmmmm …” Davis said. “That kind of puts a whole new light on the matter. Maybe you ain’t all that bad of a feller after all. I reckon I’ll have to take back some of them things I been spreading around about you.”
Longarm cocked his head. “Do you ever plan to get serious? We got us a job to do.”
Davis blew out a cloud of blue smoke. “I’m trying to say I’m sorry and to thank you, you dumb sonofabitch. Yes, I can get serious. Now, if you ain’t going to run out on me and head back to Denver, where you ain’t got no competition for the poontang, I reckon we better settle our bill here, get packed and get out of this hotel and catch a train. You do realize we’re going to Laredo, don’t you?”
Longarm got up. The hot coffee had started his tooth to acting up again and he wanted to get to his room and give it a dose of whiskey. “If I’ve got to go anywhere with you,” he said, “I reckon I’d just as soon it be Laredo. Even you can’t make a trip to that hellhole any worse.”
“Listen,” Davis replied, “don’t put the knock on Laredo. I’ve been hanging around there for two months. With a little help I might be able to make myself go back.”
As they stepped into the lobby, Longarm said, “I’ll meet you back here in half an hour.”
Davis was starting toward the desk. “It’s still two hours till train time,” he said. “You reckon you can go that long without killing anybody?”
Longarm didn’t pause. “So long as you stay out of my sight I can.” But he couldn’t enjoy the banter for the pain in his tooth. It was getting worse and he cursed his luck as he strode down the hall toward his room. The only thing he could think of that was worse than being in Laredo was being in Laredo with a toothache. For a moment he wondered if he had time to go to a dentist while they were still in San Antonio, but he immediately put the thought aside. Better to suffer a little longer than go straight to the sure hell of a dentist’s chair.
As he gathered up his few belongings, Longarm couldn’t stop worrying about the previous night’s experience. He knew it was just an unlucky break but he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was some kind of bad omen. He wasn’t, by nature, a superstitious man, but he wished reverently that the incident had happened some other time. He and Austin Davis were going into a delicate and potentially explosive situation. Anytime you tried to catch officials in a fellow service and not only shut them down but put them in jail, you were taking on an extra load of law work that usually didn’t go with the job. If you made one misstep or didn’t play it exactly by the book, making damn certain you had your evidence cold and in black and white, you could come up against a storm. The Marshal Service was part of government, as was the Customs Service, and anytime you got to messing around with government that meant politics and politicians and beaurocracy and all the back room dealing you could imagine in your worst nightmare. If they didn’t catch Caster and his henchmen clean and sure and square, Longarm hated to think of the trouble they’d be in. It would make being in the middle of a tornado seem like a ride in a front porch swing. so the last thing he wanted was to have inadvertently called attention to himself beforehand. But maybe it was nothing, he told himself. Maybe he was just being over anxious. By the time he’d soaked his tooth in several mouthfuls of whiskey and then swallowed the whiskey, the situation no longer seemed so worrisome. Whiskey, he noted, had a way of giving you that feeling. He also had serious doubts that young Mister Austin Davis really knew what kind of bad country they were heading into. Davis hadn’t been a marshal long enough to have had the pleasure of arresting a well-placed government officer. He probably thought a crook was a crook and handcuffs fitted a circuit court judge just as easily as they did a horse thief. Mister Davis had an education coming.
The train pulled out of the station no more than fifteen minutes late. They had a five-hour ride ahead of them. The coach had not been crowded and they’d managed to get one of the double sets of chairs that faced each other. Longarm took the side facing the engine because he didn’t like to ride backwards. Austin Davis sat down across from him and piled his duffle and some paper parcels in the empty seat at his side. Longarm nodded at the parcels.
