“Serve it up, Swede.” Longarm gazed at the meat the man had been slicing onto a big tin plate. “Any of that for sandwiches?”
“You betcha,” the Swede said. “Shot that antelope buck last night just before dark. Good dark meat—dark as a Norwegian’s soul!”
The Swede guffawed.
Longarm looked around. There were only two men in the place. He thought he recognized the two—a half-breed and an Anglo—from the group that had been paying such tribute to Agent Delacroix earlier. Vaguely, he supposed the others had gone over to the Mexican lady’s café.
The Swede drew him a beer, scraped off the cream foam with a flat stick, and set the frothy schooner on the cottonwood planks before going to work on Longarm’s sandwich. The lawman leaned against the planks and sipped the beer slowly. It was room temperature, but the Swede had a special way of making it—thick and malty, with just enough of an alcohol kick—to make it a welcome treat that tempered the tedium of the long, slow ride into New Mexico south of the formidable Raton Pass.
“Damn, that’s good,” he said. “You know, Swede, you should bottle that and…” He let his voice trail off and turned to gaze through the window left of the fluttering batwings.
He could see the train stretched out along the far side of the freight road, veiled by windblown grit and the occasional tumbling tumbleweed. He thought he’d heard something beneath the squawking of the shingle chains. The wind peeled a shake from the little depot building’s roof and whipped it southward.
Deciding he’d only been hearing the wind, Longarm turned back to his beer. A half-formed thought pricked the short hairs beneath his shirt collar, and he turned to the two men from the train. They sat near the batwings, playing cards, but they were grinning at each other from beneath their hat brims.
The Anglo gave Longarm a furtive glance before dropping his eyes to his cards and whistling with feigned casualness. Longarm’s pulse quickened. He turned full around to the two cardplayers.
“Where’s your friends?” he asked.
“Huh?” replied the half-breed. He looked more Indian than white though he was dressed in a long, tan duster, black Stetson, and black batwing chaps. “What friends, brother?”
“Don’t ‘brother’ me,” Longarm muttered as he pushed away from the bar and started for the doors.
He was six feet from the batwings when the Anglo bounded up from his chair facing the table and the wall, wheeled, and threw himself violently into Longarm, slamming the lawman against the saloon’s south wall. Longarm managed to stay on his feet and get turned to face his attacker, but then the short, solidly built gent punched him twice in the face.
Fortunately, Longarm had a big, thick face that was accustomed to such abuse. It took a lot of it to affect him overmuch.
He shook off the blow and then head-butted the stocky Anglo, who sagged back on his heels, dazed, before Longarm grabbed him by the collar of his denim jacket and hammered him twice against the wall, hard. The reverberating blows caused dust to sift from between the wall’s whipsawed pine planks.
The stocky gent groaned and dropped straight down the wall to his knees before leaning forward against the wall as though in prayer.
Longarm turned toward the room in time to see the flash of the wan sunlight off steel. He jerked his head to the right, and the big bowie knife that the half-breed had thrown embedded itself in the wall behind Longarm with a dull thud. The half-breed stood crouched about six feet from Longarm, in front of the jostling batwings, his boots spread in the fighter’s stance.
He had another big knife in his right hand, and he flipped it dexterously between his thumb and index finger.
The savagely upturned tip glinted in the sunlight.
“We just give them a few minutes in the train—okay, brother?” the half-breed said, his malicious grin revealing chipped, yellow teeth between weathered pink lips. “Just a few minutes with your girl. Then it’s my turn.” He grabbed his crotch with his free hand. “Don’t worry, I’ll leave some for you, but you might have to sew her back together before you can fuck her again!”
The half-breed laughed, squinting his large, evil black eyes.
He flipped his bowie knife in the air, tauntingly, and just as he caught its handle, there was an enormous cracking boom that sounded like a barrel of dynamite exploding inside a one-hole privy. Longarm was staring at the half-breed’s menacing face one second. The next half-second there was nothing but the man’s shoulders and the ragged hole where his hat had been, the head itself with its remaining evil leer and long, black hair flying out over the batwings in a hail of buckshot.
The man’s black hat left the head to tumble against the batwings and fall to the floor.
The man’s headless body staggered bizarrely back against a chair, his hand still wielding the knife until both his arms fell and the headless corpse dropped back against the chair, knocking the chair to one side and then falling to the floor and rolling up beneath the table.
Longarm looked to his right. The big Swede grinned down the double-barreled shotgun he still held to his shoulder, aiming over the top of the bar. Slowly, he lowered the smoking weapon.
“There ya go, Custis. Compliments of the house. He was a good bit Norwegian. I’ll bet you anything!”
“Thanks, Swede.”
Longarm gave the headless corpse a dubious glance where it lay quivering beneath the table and then, as he ran through the batwings, he looked at the half-breed’s head lying out in the street in front of the porch, at the end of a long blood trail.
The half-breed still had the same leer on his face as in the seconds before he’d lost his cap. Longarm leaped the grisly object that looked like a coffee can that had been used too long for target practice, and broke into a sprint toward the train, angling toward the coach car in which he’d left the girl.
A scream sounded beneath the wind’s keening.
Longarm stopped suddenly about twenty feet in front of the train, left of the little wind-battered depot building.
A man flew out the rear door of the coach car. The round-faced Mexican with the drooping mustache bounced off the front of the next car back and then tumbled down the vestibule steps to the rail bed. He lay groaning and writhing and clutching both hands to his bloody crotch from which a knife handle protruded.
There was a loud boom, almost as loud as the thunder of the Swede’s barn blaster.
Another scream.
A clattering rose inside the coach car, and then another man—this one the Anglo with the squash-yellow hair—flew out the coach’s rear door backward and slammed against the front of the next car back. He hit the car so hard that Longarm heard the car’s door crack in its frame, its window glass breaking.
The man with the squash-yellow hair bounced off the door, dropped to the vestibule, and tumbled down the steps to pile up beside his amigo still writhing on the ground beside the rail bed. Longarm looked again at the knife protruding from the Mexican’s bloody crotch.
Slow footsteps sounded in the coach car. Haven Delacroix stepped through the door and onto the blood-splattered vestibule. As she turned toward the dead or dying men lying beside the rail bed, she held two smoking revolvers in her hands, down low by her comely legs clad in the silvery-green traveling frock.
The pistols were LeMats—five-shot revolvers with a stubby, dark-mawed shotgun barrel situated beneath the main .45-caliber one. Both guns were silver-chased and fancily scrolled. Longarm could see the pearl grips showing between the girl’s fingers wrapped tightly around the handles.
Agent Delacroix stood staring down at the dead or dying, her dark brown hair blowing around her lovely head in the wind. Her lips were pressed tight together, her eyes narrowed in disgust.