“I tell you what,” Longarm suggested. “I need to stop at the telegraph office, so why don’t I do that while you’re taking care of whatever-all you have to do. I’ll get my business out of the way and meet you at Travis’s shack. I take it you know the way.”
“Surely do, Marshal. Darby Travis is a bachelor too, you see. He and I have spent many a night out there at his place playing chess or dealing hands of rummy. And as often we’ve gathered here under this roof too, Darby and me and a few of the other crotchety old farts in town. Not so much fun as going over to Norma’s, of course, but a sight less expensive. Anyway, that sounds just fine. You go on and do whatever you have to. I’ll meet you at Darby’s in, oh, say, an hour or thereabouts. Is that long enough for you?”
“Just fine, thanks.” Longarm went back out into the storm. He was halfway to the railroad depot when it occurred to him that he hadn’t ever gotten the barber’s name. Nice fellow, though.
Going with the wind on his way back, Longarm practically flew down the deserted streets. If he’d had boards to slide on, he figured he could have spread his coat wide and sailed the rest of the way. As it was, he made mighty good time despite the lousy conditions.
Chapter 25
Damn telegraph operator still wasn’t in. The office was cold and dark. Longarm could have gone inside and opened the key himself. He was more than capable. But he could not honestly claim that this was an emergency. What it was was a nuisance, but that did not give him license to break and enter. God knows he was taking liberties enough by assuming jurisdiction in the girl’s death. That sort of thing Billy Vail would let slide should the mayor or anyone else in Kittstown complain. But breaking into the telegraph office might be seen as an excessive sort of zeal and make Billy mad. Longarm just hated it when the boss got all huffy and red in the face.
Of course, the thing that was really peeving him here was that he’d come back all this way in the wind and the snow and accomplished not a damn thing by it. Now he had to turn around and head back into the wind again so he could meet the undertaker at Darby Travis’s shack.
There wasn’t much for it, he supposed, but to go ahead and get it done. He took a moment to step into a recessed doorway so as to get out of the full force of the wind while he lit a cheroot. Then it was back out into the ball-clanking cold.
Longarm made his way along the storefronts two blocks past the turn toward the barbershop, and recognized the street he wanted by the small, brick bank building on the corner. He braced himself for an instant, squared his shoulders, ducked his head, and stepped out from behind the protection of the bank.
Lordy, it was bitter-nasty. The wind found every gap between his buttons, funneled down the neck of his coat, and likely would have snapped the tip of his nose clean off if he’d blundered head-on into anything solid. Longarm felt frozen right down to the cods, and wasn’t sure he would be able to recover from this even if he had a pair of buxom twins and a feather bed to enjoy them in for the next week and a half. Of course in the interests of science he might be willing to try, but …
He was thinking along those lines, warming himself through the artifice of fancy since there wasn’t anything better to hand, when he got himself distracted away from the thoughts of imaginary twins with big tits.
But then the sound of a gunshot has a tendency to do that sort of thing.
The muzzle report sounded thin and hollow on the wind, and wherever the bullet went, it wasn’t close enough to be heard over the whine of the gale.
At first Longarm wasn’t even sure the shot was intended to come his way.
A second report convinced him.
First there was a faint but unmistakable thupp as the bullet sped by to the left of his head, then a louder, wind-distorted sound of a short-barreled gun being fired.
This time Longarm ducked. There was no point, of course. Once you heard the bastard go by, it was already way the hell too late to move aside. Which was one thing to know, but another to convince your body to act upon. The simple truth was that even with flying bullets, a fella was just plain going to duck and never mind the logic of the situation.
Longarm ducked and fumbled inside his coat, cold-numbed fingers groping for the butt of his .44 Colt.
This time he managed, eventually, to get the thing out without ripping any more buttons off. By then he was hunkered low against the wall of a … some damn building or other. He had no idea what the place was and didn’t much care. His attention at the moment was out in front. Out there where those gunshots came from.
Longarm didn’t know where the asshole was. Disgruntled George again? Likely so, he figured. The son of a bitch was hell for persistent. Dumb too, of course. But persistent.
At this point Longarm would quite cheerfully have put a slug into the idiot. If he’d only known where to fire. As for that …
Help came in the form of a flash of yellow fire barely visible through the blowing snow.
There was a dark, looming presence out in front of Longarm, maybe fifteen or twenty yards off. And somewhere in the middle of that he saw the muzzle flash of a third gunshot.
The bullet slammed loudly into the hardwood siding that sheathed the building Longarm was leaning against. The sound of it was dull and hollow. Longarm hoped the slug hadn’t penetrated the wall and hurt somebody inside.
Longarm snapped a shot of his own in the direction of the muzzle flash and then, while good old George should be busy doing some ducking his own self, scuttled low and fast to his left and then charged straight forward, directly at the spot where the bullets were coming from.
Chapter 26
A solid hit, hard and painful, took Longarm’s right leg out from under him. He fell, rolled, ended up half buried in drifted snow. His leg was more numb than not. He couldn’t see any blood, couldn’t tell if the leg was broken, didn’t have enough feeling above the combined numbness of cold and injury to decide, couldn’t tell how much damage the slug had done or … slug? It occurred to him that he’d neither heard a shot nor seen a muzzle flash. So why the hell not?
He quit staring toward the tall, gray building where the gunman was, and looked back to where he’d been running when he went down.
Shit! He hadn’t been shot. He’d run straight into the side of a water trough lying low to the ground and almost completely buried by the snow. That was what had taken his leg out from under him. All he had wrong with him was a hard whack on the shin. Which didn’t make it hurt any less, but was not altogether bad news, considering.
Longarm rubbed his leg and climbed back onto his feet, heading out again at a brisk limp.
It was a water trough he’d fallen over. And now he was close enough to recognize the profile of the tall building in front of him. Apparently George was holed up inside the Kittstown livery barn. Longarm had passed the place a number of times before, although he’d never had occasion to enter it in the past.
No time like the present, he decided. He dropped to the ground to study the structure in front of him.
There was the usual set of large sliding doors paired at the front of the place to give access into the customary center aisle, where feed wagons could be drawn through and where teams of horses could be harnessed indoors when the weather was bad.
Probably there would be a work area to one side of the entry and an office and/or tack room on the other. Back of those and on either side of the aisle there should be stalls where horses or mules could be kept. And overhead there should be a loft for the storage of hay, and perhaps feed grain in bins as well.
That, however, was guesswork based on what was common and ordinary. Longarm wished to hell he knew for certain sure what the layout of this particular barn would prove to be.