He said that last loudly enough to catch Henry’s attention. The young, dapper little gent’s long fingers rose all at once from the keys, hovering over them, as the pale, bespectacled face lifted toward Longarm. Henry furled his slender, light brown brows over his pale blue eyes. “What’s that, Marshal Long?”
Longarm smiled at having finally captured the seemingly always distracted little fellow’s attention. “Did you hear about my most recent exploits?”
“Exploits?”
“Yeah, you know—about me takin’ down the Arkansas River Gang. All by my damn lonesome. And then I noticed that train we was on was headed on the downhill side of Horse Thief Pass without brakes, and…”
He let his voice trail off. Henry stared up at him over the tops of his round spectacles, with the expression of a man who hadn’t understood a word Longarm had said, as though the lawman had been speaking Sanskrit!
Longarm leaned forward, planting both hands on Henry’s desk and lowering his voice for emphasis. “You just wait till you read my next report. Got Marcella over at the Black Cat scribblin’ it all down for me even as I speak. When you read that, Mr. Henry, you’re gonna be seein’ old Custis Long in a little different ligh—”
The door flanking Henry’s neat desk on the right opened suddenly, and Chief Marshal Billy Vail poked his round head out the door. It was ensconced in a roiling cloud of cigar smoke. “Get your ass in here, Longarm. You’re late again, as usual!”
Billy pulled his head back inside his office and swung his door wide as he retreated to his desk. Longarm looked at the clock. The minute hand was now at a minute past the twelve.
“Goddamnit, Henry,” he said, “now you went and made me late!”
As Longarm moved to the door, he heard the prissy secretary give a snort before the typing machine resumed its raucous clattering. Longarm stepped into Vail’s office and closed the door behind him.
“I was just tellin’ Henry about what a great job I did over the past few days. Wait till you see my report, Chief, you’re gonna—”
“Yeah, well, Henry would appreciate it if you’d tell whatever doxie you have writing up your reports these days to go a little easier on the smelly water.” Billy brushed a pudgy fist across his doughy nose. “Irritates the soft tissues in his nose.”
Longarm scowled indignantly.
“Have a seat and see if you can shut your pie hole long enough to roll your eyeballs over this file,” Billy Vail said as he sort of floated through the smoke cloud hovering over and around his giant desk, the surface of which Longarm doubted the chief marshal had seen since he’d first been promoted to his esteemed echelon of public service.
He plucked a manila file folder off one of the several stacks surrounding many small piles of papers hiding his blotter and slid it toward Longarm’s side of his desk. “We’ll be waitin’ on your partner, due to arrive in ten minutes.”
Longarm jerked the red Moroccan leather guest chair out of its corner near the door and angled it in front of his boss’s desk. “Partner?”
“Detective from the Pinkerton agency.”
“Ah, hell, Billy,” Longarm said, sagging into the chair with a sour look. “You know I always work alone. And them Pinkertons are pains in the ass! They think they’re real lawmen and all they do is get in the galldarned way!”
“Don’t start pissin’ in the Pinkerton well again, Custis. You know as well as I do that the James Gang would still be runnin’ wild up and down the Midwest if it wasn’t for Allan Pinkerton. It’s an old and illustrious company.”
“Maybe so, but their agents of late are either old men or snot-nosed shavers who haven’t yet taken a piss standing up but think they know everything there is to know about bringin’ owlhoots to bay. Uppity sons o’ bitches. No, sir, Billy, you know I work best when I work alone.”
“You’re not workin’ alone on this one. And that’s an order. The Pinkertons think they have a stake in what happened to them lawmen down in Arizona, and they’ve sent an agent.”
Billy leaned forward to read a name scribbled on a coffee-stained, ash-speckled notepad. “A…uh…Mr. Harvey Delacroix. That’s with an ‘o-i-x’ at the end, and if I remember what little I ever knew about French, I believe it’s pronounced ‘oy.’”
The pudgy chief marshal, once a tough-nut lawbringer himself, sagged back in his chair and brushed cigar ashes from the bulbous paunch threatening to bust the buttons on the wash-worn white dress shirt he wore under a ratty brown wool vest. “As in ‘Oy, oy, oy, Custis, you’re gonna be partnerin’ up with this Pinkerton agent whether you like it or not!’”
Billy guffawed, delighted with himself. He stuck the stub of the fat stogie between his lips, blew more smoke into the already smoggy air over his desk, and laughed some more.
Longarm sighed in disgust. Sometimes, despite his knowing that Vail prized him above all the other deputies in his deputy U.S. marshal stable, he couldn’t help thinking that Billy kept him around just to torture him. He certainly gave him the toughest assignments, and on this one the chief marshal was not only partnering him up with a wet-behind-the-ears Pinkerton agent who no doubt thought himself as skilled or better than Allan Pinkerton himself, but he was sending him to Arizona right smack-dab in the heat of summer.
And the summers in Arizona were second on the heat scale only to Hell itself.
“All right, enough of that,” Billy said with a final snort, sitting up straighter in his chair and brushing his fist across his nose. “This is serious business. Five lawmen dead, fer chriss-fuckin’-sakes!”
“So I heard,” Longarm said, glancing at the file he hadn’t yet plucked off the chief marshal’s desk. “Why don’t you give me the lowdown on it, Billy. You know I don’t read so well until after lunch. I’ll peruse the whole thing on the train ride down to Las Cruces. Who was killed and where?”
“I didn’t recognize the names of any of the dead,” Billy said. “They’re in the file. They were killed outside a little town along Defiance Wash. Town’s called Holy Defiance on account of a stand the locals including a Catholic priest made several years ago against a bronco band of Coyotero Apaches. Not much there now. Some old desert rat and his daughter. Anyway, the lawmen had banded together to go looking for a cache of gold that was stolen off a stagecoach three years ago but was never recovered.
“Everyone thought the gold was lost for good after a passel of border toughs robbed it and the toughs themselves were attacked by a small band of Apaches who’d jumped the reservation. Apparently, the bandits buried the loot when they’d forted themselves up in a nest of rocks in the Black Puma Mountains and then lit out under cover of darkness. They intended to return for it later, but they were all gunned down by a rival gang in Nogales a few weeks later.
“That there is all I know,” Billy said. “There’s a little more in the file there—names and dates and whatnot, the name of the ranch that the money’s supposedly buried on. Some highfalutin rancher down there named Azrael, if I remember. Whip Azrael.”
“How’s this Pinkerton territory, Billy?”
“The Pinkertons had insured the gold shipment. It was headed for the bank in Tucson. Two Pinkerton guards were killed as well as two guards the bank especially hired—two fairly well-known gunmen at the time named Roy Dupree and ‘Cougar’ Charlie McCallum.”