Billy puffed his cigar, staring pensively down at his desk. “Them two names I do remember, ’cause when I was ridin’ for the Texas Rangers back in them days, them two were a couple of the most wanted curly wolves in all of Texas and half of Louisiana. Cold-blooded killers, both. Cougar Charlie cut down a good partner of mine back in Alpine, just north of the Chisos Mountains, after we’d run ’im down after a saloon robbery. Walked up to my partner, H. C. Boyle, in an alley and blew him in half with a double-barreled shotgun from point-blank range.”
“Cougar Charlie and the other gunman…?”
“Dupree.”
“They’re both dead?”
“Killed during the robbery.”
Longarm was thinking over what he’d heard. In the meantime, he’d plucked a cheroot from his shirt pocket and bit the end off. Now he struck a match on the edge of Billy’s desk, touched the flame to the stogie, and said between smoke puffs, “How did the Arizona Rangers and the two U.S. marshals get wind of all this and start thinkin’ they had a handle on where the gold was buried?”
“I’m told that one of the rangers heard from a man named Three Wolves a few weeks ago. Three Wolves apparently had known a couple of the killers, including the leader of the gang that robbed the stage—Rafael Santana. Three Wolves and Santana played poker together one night in Nogales, the night before Santana and his bunch were killed.
“Three Wolves claimed that when Santana was about to lose his shirt to Three Wolves, Santana told him he knew where some gold was buried. When Three Wolves pressed the matter, Santana gave him some details about where exactly Santana’s bunch had buried the gold. Three Wolves kept what Santana had told him under his hat, only half believing it was true, I reckon. But he never did go looking for the gold himself. Don’t ask me why. Maybe you’ll find out when you get down there.
“In the meantime, Three Wolves ran his own freighting service until about six weeks ago when he ran afoul of the rangers. Killed a man in a jealous rage, it seems. The rangers tracked him down and arrested him. Three Wolves exchanged the information about where the loot was buried for a promise of a possibly lighter sentence, and three rangers and two deputy marshals out of Prescott ended up deader’n last year’s Christmas goose for their trouble.”
Longarm scowled dubiously as he exhaled smoke through his nostrils. “Where’s this Three Wolves feller now?”
Chief Marshal Vail nodded his approval at his prized deputy’s instincts. Since Three Wolves apparently knew, or said he knew, where the loot had been buried, he might also know who killed the lawmen who’d ridden out to find it.
“He’s being held at the Arizona Rangers post in Broken Jaw in the Arizona Territory, about fifty miles across the line from New Mexico. Holy Defiance is another fifty or so miles southwest of Broken Jaw, west of Tombstone and Bisbee.”
“I’ll stop in at Broken Jaw and have a little palaver with this gent before heading on down to Holy Defiance.” Longarm rolled the cheroot around between his lips and bounced his fists off the arms of the red Moroccan leather chair. “When’s my train leave, Billy? Don’t reckon it’s gonna get any cooler down Arizona way. Sooner I get this job started, the sooner it’ll be over with.”
Billy grinned devilishly. “You mean, when does your and your partner’s train leave?” The chief marshal glanced at the banjo clock on the wall to his left. “In about one half hour.”
“Ah, dangit, Billy.”
Just then a knock sounded on the chief marshal’s door.
“Must be him now,” Billy said, raising his voice as he cast his gaze at the door. “Come in, Agent Delacroix!”
Longarm heard but did not see the door open behind him. He’d be looking at the Pinkerton agent’s no doubt pimple-scarred face long enough on the journey down to Arizona.
He did, however, look at Billy and wrinkle his brows curiously when Billy’s lower jaw dropped nearly down to his cluttered desk. Billy’s eyes opened nearly as wide as his mouth, and a rosy flush colored his otherwise pasty cheeks.
“Uh…” Billy said around an apparent frog in his throat, rising slowly from his chair. “Uhm…Harvey…Dela…Delacroix?”
Longarm smelled a subtle, cherrylike fragrance at the same time he heard a raspy, vaguely female voice behind him say, “No, it’s Haven. Haven Delacroix, Chief Marshal Vail. I’ve been sent here by the Pinkerton Agency, to join your deputy on the Arizona murder investigation. The one involving the stolen gold?”
Longarm jerked his head around. His heart turned a somersault in his chest.
The tall brunette whom Longarm had last seen lounging like a satisfied cat on her bed in the Grand Hotel in Leadville, naked as a jaybird, took two steps forward, extending her right hand toward Billy Vail. “I hope I’m not overly late. The stage from Leadville, where I was investigating a possible counterfeiting ring, got held up at a bridge failure around Conifer.”
Billy shook the young woman’s hand woodenly, staring at her as shiny-eyed as a love-struck schoolboy. Longarm stood slowly, feeling a grin like that of the cat that ate the canary flashing in his eyes and quirking his mouth corners.
“How do you do, Miss Delacroix?” Longarm said, taking his cigar in his left hand and extending the right one to the girl. “I’m just pleased as punch to make your acquaintance.”
She turned to him. Her eyes widened in mute horror. She gave a silent gasp. As she stared up at him, likely trying to convince herself that her imagination was playing a nasty trick on her, her exquisite face turned as frosty white as new-fallen snow on Christmas morning.
Longarm tensed himself to catch her if she fell, because Miss Haven Delacroix looked like she was about to drop dead right there at his feet in Billy Vail’s office.
Chapter 8
“Yes, sir…er, I mean, ma’am,” Longarm said, chuckling. “I thought for sure you was about to drop dead right there in Bily Vail’s office.”
“Shut up, you clod.”
She glowered at him from the seat facing him in the coach car of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe flyer heading through the rolling buttes south of Denver, climbing slowly toward Monarch Pass.
“God, I’ve never been so humiliated in all my life,” she said, hardening her delicate lower jaw and turning to stare out the window at the as-yet snow-tipped Front Range looming in the west. “What a sour bucketful of luck, that was.” She turned to him again, smoke fairly curling from the corners of those beautiful, crystal-clear hazel eyes. “Finding you in Chief Marshal Vail’s office, waiting for me! To travel to Arizona with you. My partner!”
She ground her jaws and groaned, turning her sharp gaze to the mountains once more.
“Well, hey,” Longarm said, thoroughly enjoying himself, “at least we broke the ice back in Leadville.” He chuckled.
She wasn’t listening. Turning to him, the nubs of her tapering cheeks flushed with horror, she said, “Do you think he knew? Do you think Chief Marshal Vail sensed that we’d met before?”
“You mean do I think he sensed that we rutted like a couple of horny old dogs two nights before our meeting in his office—two professionals about to be partnered up together on an official assignment?” He knew it was not to his credit that he so enjoyed how horrified she was having her nasty secrets known to those who knew her not only by name but were about to work with her. “Nah, I don’t think so. He was too busy starin’ at your tits. Besides, we weren’t there long. Shit, we got out of the Federal Building just in time to meet the train.”