Longarm dropped his head down below the edge of the bed but triggered his pistol over the top, aimed at the door. He fired twice, one shot on top of the other. The Colt’s second belch, sounding little louder than a knuckle pop after the shotgun’s skull-shattering reverberation, was drowned by the ambusher’s detonation of the coach gun’s second barrel.
The man must have dropped the barrel just enough as he fired that the swarm of screaming pellets did not blow Longarm’s Colt and fist off the end of his arm, but blasted into the end of the bed, causing a rain of corn leaves similar to that of the continuing drift of feathers. It also heaved the mattress across the frame and into Longarm’s chest, knocking him back against the wall beneath the room’s sole window.
From here, he watched the shooter stumble back into the hall as the man who’d been so unkind to the lawman’s door swung his own empty shotgun behind his back, where it hung from a lanyard, and reached for one of the pistols on his hips.
Longarm rested his gun wrist against the top of the shredded bed once more, lined up his sights on the man’s chest, and fired. The bushwhacker groaned and stumbled backward, twisting around and ramming his right shoulder against the hall’s opposite wall, knocking a tintype off its nail.
The gunman had unleathered one of his pistols, and as he gave a great bellowing yell of pain and rage, he lifted the weapon.
Longarm fired two more times. One bullet punched through the man’s chest while the second turned his left ear to jelly and painted the wall behind him with it. His head smacked the wall violently, with a thudding crack.
He screamed shrilly, dropped his own gun, and crumpled up on top of his partner, who lay parallel to the base of the wall, jerking as he stared glassily at Longarm, blinking rapidly, blood oozing from a corner of his mouth and pooling on the floor beneath his head.
An angry female scream sounded down the hall.
A man’s scream followed it. A pistol popped.
Longarm scrambled to his feet and ran to the door in time to see a man run out of Agent Delacroix’s room, a knife in his right hand. He was the hombre whom Longarm remembered filling his canteens at the spring that Longarm and Haven had ridden up on two day’s ago. The now-dead men had been mounted on horses behind him.
The pistol popped again in the room behind the man as he glanced at Longarm and gave a snarling scream. He bounced off the hall wall opposite Haven’s room as another bullet plunked into the pine boards beside him. He flung the knife toward Longarm, who ducked. The knife embedded itself into the doorframe behind the crouching lawman.
The attacker wheeled and took off running toward the stairs.
“Demon!” Agent Delacroix screamed.
She fired three more shots from inside her room, and the bullets blasted through the wall, spraying wood slivers behind the fleeing attacker. The man ran hard, elbows and knees pumping, casting horrified looks behind him as yet another slug blasted through the hall wall behind him and into the wall opposite.
Longarm extended his own revolver straight out from his shoulder, and shouted, “Hold it, asshole!”
At the top of the stairs, the man stopped, slapped his belly holster, and brought up a horn-gripped hogleg. Longarm’s triggered slug puffed dust from the man’s brown leather vest up near his left shoulder. He screamed again as he bounced off the rail post, dropped his pistol, and tumbled down the stairs and out of Longarm’s sight, behind the hall’s left wall.
Longarm ran to Haven’s room. She was just climbing up from the floor, wearing a pink robe and holding a hand to her right cheek that matched the color of her robe. She held one of her LeMats in her right fist. Smoke curled from both barrels.
“You all right?” Longarm yelled from the doorway.
She nodded. “Is he dead?”
“I’m about to find out!”
Longarm ran back into his room, stomped into his boots and quickly reloaded his Colt. There was no time to dress in anything but his hat and his boots.
He bounded on out of the room and down the hall to the stairs. In the lobby below, the German, who apparently owned the place, was standing behind his desk and shouting loudly in his mother tongue and wielding a small, nickel-plated pistol, waving it at the man just now stumbling past the desk toward the hotel’s front door.
“Get down behind the desk, friend!” Longarm shouted as he descended the stairs.
He was halfway down when the ambusher swung around toward the hotelier, a second revolver in his hand. He fired a round toward the hotelier, but he was so wobbly that the slug plowed into the rack of pigeonholes behind his target.
The German screamed louder and triggered his own pistol over the desk, his slug punching into the door just as the bushwhacker opened it.
“Hold it!” Longarm shouted from the bottom of the steps.
But the ambusher pushed on out the door and into the dark night. Longarm didn’t want to fire because someone might be in the street beyond him. Instead, he grabbed the hotelier’s pistol out of the man’s hand, so the man couldn’t shoot Longarm in his wild rage, and tossed the pistol across the lobby. He ran out the front door and onto the gallery.
The night was cool and dark though stars glittered in the velvet sky. There were few lights on this end of Broken Jaw, so it took Longarm’s eyes a few seconds to adjust. He could hear the would-be killer running away from him, and then he saw his jostling shadow angling across the street and to the left, toward a small, cream-colored adobe cantina.
The man was limping on his left ankle and wheezing shrilly.
There were a half-dozen horses tied to the lone hitch rack fronting the cantina. The gunman seemed to be heading for one of them—likely his own mount.
Longarm ran down the three gallery steps, stopped, and aimed the pistol straight out from his right shoulder. “Turn around and drop the gun or take it between the shoulder blades!”
The man had just reached the hitch rack. He stopped so suddenly that he nearly fell and swung back toward Longarm. Starlight flashed on the revolver in his fist.
Longarm’s .44 spoke once, twice, and then a third time. Each shot was followed by a grunt from the man the slugs punched through, until he breathily said, “Fuck!” and triggered his pistol once toward the stars. He fell backward into the stock trough fronting the hitch rack with a loud splash that caused the already jostling horses to whicker and sidestep away from the tank.
Longarm lowered his pistol halfway and walked toward the man lolling in the stock trough, the water spilling over the sides glittering in the starlight. Two men walked out of the cantina behind the bushwhacker. Around here, men were accustomed to hearing gunshots any time of the day or night. Hooking their thumbs behind their cartridge belts, they sauntered along the cantina’s slim boardwalk and looked down at the man in the trough.
They both lifted their faces in unison, regarding the man dressed only in red balbriggans, a hat, and boots walking toward them. One half turned to the other, dipped his chin toward the trough, and said, “That’s Jim Winter.”
“No shit?” said the other, poking his hat brim back off his forehead.
Longarm stopped at the stock trough, looked down at Jim Winter staring up at him, legs dangling down the end of it, arms hooked over the sides.
“Who’re you?” one of the two others asked Longarm.
The lawman scratched his cheek with his Colt’s front gun sight. “The hombre who just killed Jim Winter, I reckon.”
“Jim owed me twenty dollars,” said the man who’d identified the bushwhacker.