Coffin looked up from the chair where he was slouched and said, “Don’t send me back in there with that little Eye-talian fella, Long. I ain’t a man to beg, but he like to drove me to distraction with all that jawin’.”
Longarm took out a cheroot. Before he could say anything, the doors of the dining room opened, and Barton and Don Alfredo emerged, smiling and laughing. It looked as if the meeting had gone well.
“We’re finished for the day, Mr. Long,” Barton told Longarm, “and we’re going up to our suites. Can you have some dinner sent up for us?”
Longarm nodded. “I’ll see to it,” he said. That would mean dealing with the talkative little Italian, but he figured he could manage that much.
“You boys get everythin’ straightened out?” Coffin asked hopefully.
“We made a good start, senor,” replied Guiterrez. “But there is much yet to discuss before a final agreement is reached.”
Coffin did a poor job of suppressing a groan. Longarm felt the same way. But it was too much to hope that a few hours of talking could settle anything between two countries. Even if things had been that simple, no diplomat worth his salt would ever admit such a thing.
Barton and Guiterrez led the way upstairs, followed by their associates. Longarm told Coffin to station himself on the second-floor landing so that he could keep an eye on the corridor, then went back to the kitchen to see about getting some food for the diplomatic parties.
An hour later, when everyone had eaten, Longarm and Coffin found themselves standing alone on the landing. “Reckon they’re down for the night,” said Coffin. “Let’s you and me go over to Kilroy’s and get us a drink, Long.”
Longarm shook his head. “One of us has to stay here all night. We’ll trade off shifts, just like we were standing watch on the trail.”
Coffin glowered at him and demanded, “You mean we got to ride night herd on these rannies too?”
Longarm shrugged and nodded. Coffin sighed heavily. “You go ahead,” he told Longarm. “I reckon I can wait.”
“I’ll relieve you at midnight.”
“Don’t you forget,” Coffin warned.
Longarm gave him a grin and a casual wave as he strode down the stairs. A moment later he stepped out onto the boardwalk in front of the hotel and took a deep breath. The air was still hot from the day just past, and wouldn’t really start to cool off until well after midnight. But at least he wasn’t cooped up inside any longer.
The saloon was busy, with most of the tables occupied and men standing two deep at the bar in places. Most of the talk that Longarm heard as he made his way across the room was about the bandit raid on the town that morning. After dealing with Barton, Don Alfredo, and the others all day, the battle with El Aguila’s gang seemed further in the past to Longarm than a mere fourteen hours or so. He spotted a gap at the bar and slid himself into it smoothly.
“Rye,” Longarm said to the bartender, who came over to see what he wanted. “Tom Moore, and don’t tell me you ain’t got any, because you did last night.” The words came out sharper than he intended, but he had a powerful thirst.
“Sure, Mr. Long,” the bartender replied as he reached for a bottle and a glass. “You’re a man who knows what you want.”
The deep, resonant voice came from beside Longarm. He glanced over and saw a man about the same height as he was, with the broad shoulders and narrow hips of a horseman. The stranger wore a broad-brimmed black hat and had a bright red bandanna tied around his tanned throat. A blue work shirt, denim trousers, scuffed boots, and chaps that bore the scratches of a lot of brush completed his outfit—along with crossed cartridge belts that supported a pair of holstered Colts with black grips. The man’s face was too rugged to be called handsome, but there was power in the smoky-eyed gaze he turned toward Longarm. His wide mouth, which relieved slightly the prominence of his nose and jaw, was grin-quirked at the corners.
“I’ve got a fondness for Maryland rye,” Longarm admitted. He felt a grudging respect for this stranger, but no liking.
“Man who knows his priorities has a leg up on the rest of us,” said the stranger. He drained the last of the beer in the mug in his left hand, then set it down and used the same hand to take a coin from the pocket of his shirt. His right hand, with long, slender fingers, rested easily on the bar, not far from the butt of the gun on that side. The way the man used his left hand was enough to tell Longarm a great deal. Longarm had sort of the same habit himself.
This was a gent who knew how to use a gun—and quite frequently did just that.
But as long as he was peaceable, that was all that mattered to Longarm tonight. He sipped the drink that the bartender placed in front of him, then said to the stranger, “Buy you another beer?”
The man shook his head. “’Fraid I’ve reached my limit. Adios, amigo.” With that, he turned and headed for the batwing doors of the saloon. Longarm watched him in the long mirror behind the bar. The stranger didn’t shoulder anybody out of the way, but a path seemed to clear for him through the crowd anyway.
When the man had stepped out into the night and disappeared, Longarm inclined his head toward the door of the saloon and asked the bartender, “You know that fella?”
The bartender shook his head. “Never saw him before tonight. Looked to me like he might have been trouble, though, so I’m glad he’s gone. We don’t need no gunfighting drifters in here.”
Before Longarm could say anything else, a soft hand laid itself on his arm, and he felt the unmistakable pressure of a woman’s breast against his side. “Hello, Custis,” said the redheaded Anna Marie.
Longarm turned his head and grinned down at her. “Hello, darlin’,” he said. “You miss me?”
Her fingers squeezed his arm, and Longarm could feel their warmth through the sleeve of his shirt. “Of course I did. I thought about you very much today, Custis.” She tilted her head, and her green eyes looked quickly around the room. “Lazarus, he is not with you?”
“Nope,” Longarm said with a shake of his head. “He’s over at the hotel.” He stopped short of explaining that Coffin was working at the moment. That was none of Anna Marie’s business—though no doubt most of the townspeople were already gossiping about the arrival of the strangers from north and south and the closing down of the hotel dining room. The citizens of Del Rio might not know exactly what was going on, but by this time they knew that something was.
Anna Marie leaned closer to Longarm, molding her body to his in places. And soft, enticing places they were too, thought Longarm. Anna Marie said, “Good. Then we can finish what we started last night when Lazarus interrupted us, no?”
“Seems to me like we finished, all right, just elsewhere,” Longarm pointed out.
“Do not make fun of me, Custis,” Anna Marie said sternly. “Just come with me now.” Once again, she tugged him toward the stairs.
Longarm tossed off the drink of rye and put the empty glass on the bar, then allowed her to lead him over to the staircase. No one stopped them this time as they climbed to the second floor. Anna Marie took him down the hall and stopped in front of a closed door.
“This is my room,” she said unnecessarily.
“I’d like to see it,” Longarm told her.
She hesitated. “It is not a fancy place.”
“Neither was my hotel room. It’s what two people do there that makes a place special.”
She smiled at that, and came up on her toes to press her mouth against his. Longarm felt her tongue darting against his lips, and opened them so that she could probe wetly into his mouth. His arms went around her waist and pulled her to him. The softness of her belly pressed against his groin, and she wiggled a little as she felt the prod of his stiffening shaft.