Longarm and the restless.., p.1
Longarm and the Restless Redhead, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Teaser chapter
IN HOT WATER
At this time of morning, all the saloon girls were probably asleep after a long night of hustling drinks and servicing drunken cowboys and miners and freighters and townsmen. If he could slip into one of the rooms without waking whoever was inside, he might be able to wait out the manhunt.
Longarm opened the first door he came to and stepped inside with a silent, catlike grace that was unusual in such a big man. Unfortunately, his impressive stealth didn’t do him a bit of good, because the girl inside this room was wide awake.
She was also naked as the day she was born and had just stepped out of a big tin tub full of hot, soapy water. That didn’t stop her from picking up a gun from a chair next to the tub, pointing it at Longarm, and saying, “Take another step, cowboy, and I’ll blow your damn head off.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LONGARM AND THE RESTLESS REDHEAD
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Jove edition / April 2006
Copyright © 2006 by The Berkley Publishing Group
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eISBN : 978-1-101-16600-0
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Chapter 1
Longarm groaned as he rolled over and wondered where he was. This wasn’t the first time in his eventful life that he had awoken from a sound sleep and not known exactly where he as. It hadn’t happened in quite a while, though. Most of the time he held his liquor well enough so his brain didn’t get muddled.
But not on this occasion. His head pounded fiercely, like there was a herd of crazed monkeys beating on the inside of his skull with ball-peen hammers.
He had a bad taste in his mouth, too. It couldn’t have been much worse if a skunk had crawled in there and died. He opened and closed his mouth, trying to work up some spit so he could hang his head off the bed and expectorate into the chamber pot. That might not get rid of the taste, but he had to try it. The problem was, his mouth was as dry as a bale of cotton. His tongue felt like it was swollen up as big as a cotton bale, too.
He let out another groan as he sat up and swung his legs out of bed. Light struck his eyes and made him wince. Sunlight slanted in through a frowsy curtain that moved gently in the breeze coming through the room’s single window. Longarm looked down at his feet. They rested on a thread-bare rug. He was in a hotel room and not a very fancy one, at that.
He was also naked, and as he shifted a little on the lumpy mattress, raising his hands to press the balls of them against his throbbing temples, something rolled against his bare back. He turned his head and saw long, slim, smoothly naked legs stretched out on the mattress.
Even as bad as he felt, a smile touched his mouth under the sweeping longhorn mustache. He didn’t recall climbing into bed with a gal the night before, but obviously he had. The polite thing would be to turn around and say howdy-do.
What he saw when he did so made him leap up from the bed and take a hurried step backward, his eyes widening in surprise. The thin rug under his feet slipped and threw him off-balance. Before he could catch himself, he sat down hard, bruising his bare rump on the unforgiving planks of the floor.
That put his head at just the right level so that he was staring into the sightless eyes of the dead woman in the bed.
She was young and lushly shaped and had a thick mass of auburn curls. She would have been damned attractive if it hadn’t been for the fact that her throat was cut from ear to ear.
Longarm’s face was grim as he climbed back to his feet and kicked the rug aside so that he wouldn’t trip over it again. There was no need to check the woman for a pulse. The wound in her throat and the amount of blood that had leaked out of it and soaked the bed made it clear that she was a goner.
As he stared at her, Longarm absentmindedly reached up and tugged his right earlobe, then ran his thumbnail along the line of his rugged jaw. He thought hard, trying to remember who she was and figure out how in the hell he had wound up in bed with her corpse. No answers came to him.
Suddenly realizing that he was standing there naked as a jaybird, he looked around for his clothes. He found them lying on a ladder-back chair in front of a scarred dressing table with a fly-specked mirror attached to it. When he looked in the mirror he saw a reflection of the dead woman in the bed, and it wasn’t any prettier a picture that way.
Forcing himself not to look at her for a moment, he pulled on the bottom half of a pair of long underwear and some denim trousers. A butternut shirt lay on the chair as well, and a denim jacket was draped over the back, along with a gunbelt and holstered Colt. A flat-crowned, snuff-brown Stetson sat on the dressing table, and a pair of high-topped black boots stood beside the chair. It was the sort of get-up a drifting cowboy might wear . . .
But he wasn’t a cowboy. Was he?
For a disconcerting second or two, Longarm wasn’t sure. His mind was even more muddled than he had imagined.
But his thoughts cleared rapidly, and even though there were gaps in his memory, he knew good and well who he was: Deputy United States Marshal Custis Long, assigned to the Denver office of Chief Marshal Billy Vail.
He wasn’t in Denver now. He didn’t know exactly where he was, but he was sure of that much, anyway.
Taking a deep breath, Longarm picked up his shirt and shrugged into it, buttoning it quickly and tucking it in his trousers. He knew he would feel better if he was dressed, and the delay wasn’t going to hurt the woman in the bed. She couldn’t get any more
The gunbelt seemed the next most important thing. Longarm strapped it on. The Colt rode easily on his left hip, butt forward, in a cross-draw rig. Longarm took the gun out of the holster for a moment, somehow reassured by the familiar feeling of the smooth walnut grips against his hand. Then he pouched the six-shooter and sat down to pull on his socks and boots.
When that was done, he stood and picked up his jacket. So far he hadn’t come across the little leather folder that contained his badge and identification papers. Without those bona fides, he couldn’t prove that he was a lawman.
But the jacket’s inside pocket was empty. So were the outside ones, and the pockets in Longarm’s shirt and trousers as well. Feeling his pulse start to pound a little harder, he stepped over to the dresser and picked up his hat.
Nothing stashed in there, either.
Where the hell was his badge?
The sight of the redheaded corpse had sort of shocked him sober, but he still felt rotten. The feeling grew stronger as he realized that he didn’t have any identification of any sort. He could explain to the local star-packers who he really was, of course, but would they believe him?
It never entered his mind that he might have been responsible for the woman’s death. He upheld the law; he didn’t break it. Well, not too much, anyway, and then he usually just bent it a mite whenever it got in the way of him bringing some varmint to justice.
But if he wasn’t able to prove his identity, the local law might blame him for this killing and try to throw him in the juzgado. Longarm couldn’t allow that to happen. He had to find out who had killed the redhead and how she had wound up in bed with him. While he was at it, it would probably help if he figured out where he was and why he had come here.
Those were all damned good questions, but the sudden thudding of boots in the corridor outside warned Longarm that he wasn’t going to have time to answer them right now. Something about the hurried sounds told him the footsteps were on their way here, to this room, where he was standing beside a bed containing a beautiful but very dead redhead, and him without any identification or excuses.
There was, however, the handle of a knife sticking out from under the bed. He noticed it when he glanced down. Stooping quickly, he peered under the bed and saw the sticky red coating on the blade. Yep, that was the weapon that had done the job, all right. One more nail in his coffin.
Running away from trouble went against the grain for him. He was a lawman, after all, and had been one for a long time.
But this was as neat a frame-up as he had ever seen, and he knew that if he allowed himself to be arrested, he might never see the outside of a jail cell again . . . until the lynch mob came to drag him out and string him up. There would be a lynch mob. He was sure of that. Whoever had put him in this hole would see to it.
Those thoughts flashed through his brain in an instant, as the heavy footsteps came on down the hall toward the door of this room. Longarm snatched up his hat and jammed it on his head, then pulled on his jacket as he stepped over to the window.
The footsteps stopped outside the door as he swept the curtain aside and looked out. This room seemed to be at the back of the hotel—whatever hotel this was—and the window looked out on an alley and the blank rear wall of another building. The pane had been raised about six inches. Longarm put his hand under it and shoved it up the rest of the way as a fist began to bang on the door.
“Open up in there! There’s been a report of trouble! Open the damn door!”
Longarm threw a leg over the sill. The room was on the second floor, with no fire stairs or anything else below the window except empty air.
Whoever was in the hall grabbed the knob and rattled it loudly, then shouted again, “Open up!”
The voice was vaguely familiar to Longarm, but he couldn’t place it. The knowledge of who it belonged to was just one more thing that had fallen through the cracks of his memory. He climbed the rest of the way out of the window and hung from the sill by his hands.
He was tall enough so that the drop to the ground in the alley wouldn’t be too bad. He let go as a shoulder slammed against the door. Whoever was in the hall was trying to break it down now.
Longarm bent his knees as he landed, going down in a crouch to rob the fall of some of its momentum. The impact was still enough to rattle his teeth and jar his bones a little. His hat came off and landed in the dust. As he bent to pick it up, a gun cracked somewhere nearby and an ominous hum told him that a bullet had just passed close above his head.
Since he was already bent over, he kept going forward into a roll that took him behind a water barrel sitting against the wall of the building across the alley from the hotel. He snatched up his hat as he dove for cover, and as he fetched up behind the water barrel his Colt fairly leaped into his right hand. A second shot blasted and a slug thudded into the barrel.
Up on the second floor of the hotel, the door of the room containing the redhead’s corpse smashed open. Longarm heard the sound through the open window. He didn’t have time to glance in that direction, though, because he had the bushwhacker to deal with. He had already spotted the man crouched at the corner of the building, firing around it at him.
Catching a glimpse of shoulder, Longarm snapped a shot over the top of the water barrel and was rewarded by a splash of blood and a yelp of pain. The gunman staggered into view, his left arm dangling uselessly from a bullet-smashed shoulder. Yelling curses he charged at the barrel where Longarm knelt, triggering the gun in his other hand as he rushed forward.
The flurry of bullets smacked into the water barrel. A couple of them punched through it, and water began to spurt through the holes. Longarm rolled out from behind the barrel and wound up on his belly in the middle of the alley. He tipped up the barrel of his Colt and fired twice.
The slugs tore into the bushwhacker’s chest and drove him backward off his feet. Longarm would have preferred to take him alive and question him, but that wasn’t an option at the moment. The motive for this ambush would have to remain a mystery for now.
Longarm had gotten a pretty good look at the gunman’s hate-crazed face before the bullets knocked him sprawling, and the big deputy marshal knew he had never seen the man before—at least not that he remembered. The man looked like a typical hard case, with a blunt, beardstubbled face and worn range clothes.
“Hey! Drop that gun!”
The shouted command came from the second-floor window in the hotel. Longarm looked up and saw a man standing there, the sun glinting on the star pinned to his vest. There was no way in hell Longarm was going to gun down a fellow lawman who was just doing his job.
So he threw a shot up there that chewed splinters from the side of the window and made the local badge-toter cuss and jump for cover. Longarm took advantage of the opportunity to surge to his feet and race down the alley, away from the window and the body of the bushwhacker, who hadn’t moved since he went down.
Alert for more trouble, Longarm ducked around a corner and found himself in a narrow space between buildings. No one was in it at the moment, so he hurried along it toward a door in the side wall of the building to his right.
All those shots were bound to draw quite a bit of attention and soon. When he reached the door he tried the knob. It turned easily, so he opened the door and stepped through.
A little light came through a grimy window, enough to show him a stack of several empty whiskey crates and a couple of dusty tables, each with a cracked leg. This was some sort of storeroom in a saloon.
There was a door on the other side of the room. He crossed to it, listened for a second and didn’t hear anything. His hand closed around the knob and turned it. He stepped out into a deserted hallway.
A narrow flight of stairs led up at the end of the hall to his right. Faintly, he heard shouting from outside somewhere as he walked toward the stairs. They were uncarpeted, just bare plank risers and steps. He went up them quickly, knowing that he needed to find a place where he could lie low until all the commotion died down. Then he could set about trying to find out what was going on here, so that he could clear his name.
