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“First you must do three things, Marshal,” the woman said.

“Three?”

“Yah, three.” First he’d thought the hint of accent was Slavic, and then maybe French, and now it sounded more like low German, or it could be Polish. Weird.

“So tell me-“

“Three things, Marshal. First you must promise absolute secrecy. No one must know from whom you obtain this information. You do promise?”

“I reckon. I’ll keep your name outa it so far as I can.” He smiled. “Which oughta be pretty easy since I have no idea what your name is or what you look like.”

If she smiled back at him he couldn’t tell it because of the thick veil that shielded her features from view.

“The next thing, Marshal, is that your government must agree to pay me for this information. Twenty—no, we make it twenty-five thousand dollar. Is this agreed?”

“Ma’am, I don’t know what it is you expect from me, but I’m just a deputy marshal. I got no authority to commit the government to payin’ rewards or anything like that.”

“But you will agree to tell your government what I ask? You will do that much?”

“I reckon I can promise that. I’ll bring it up if I think your information warrants it. I just won’t make you no promises that I can’t be sure will be kept.”

“Yes, that is honest. I respect this. It is good enough, I think.”

“And the third thing?” Longarm asked.

“This is the third request, it is a matter of some delicacy. Very personal. This I do not want to talk about until everything is done.”

“I can’t very well make you promises without knowin’ what it is you want.”

“I will trust your integrity, Marshal.”

He shrugged. “If you’re willin’, ma’am, I reckon I am too. So, uh, what is it you want t’ tell me?”

She leaned forward, glancing over her shoulder as if to see there was no one eavesdropping even though the two of them were standing belly to belly inside a one-holer with barely room enough to turn around. And then only if the other was careful to stand clear.

The woman in blue put her mouth close to Longarm’s ear. He could feel the brush of rough mesh against his flesh and the heat of her breath coming through the veil.

She whispered hoarsely. Longarm blanched a pale, shocked white.

Without thinking of what he was doing he balled his right hand into a fist and sent it wrist-deep into the veiled woman’s gut.

As she doubled over in agony he shoved her down onto the toilet seat so as to get her the hell out of his way and bulled past her into the clean air outside.

The door hadn’t more than had time to slap shut behind him when he heard the woman begin to laugh, the sound of it like a donkey’s braying in the morning stillness.

“You’re sick. You know that? Sick,” he threw over his shoulder as he stormed out of the shitter.

He turned, intending to say more to the stupid cunt in blue, but was rudely interrupted by the sharp bark of a small-bore gunshot and the virtually simultaneous slap of a bullet striking the left side of his chest.

Longarm reeled back against the outhouse door.

Chapter 32

Slumped against the door to a women’s crapper was not his idea of a properly dignified place for a man to die. If, that is, any place could be so considered. But even so … He frowned. Dignified or not, if he was standing here dying why was it taking so long? And for that matter, why didn’t it hurt where he’d been shot?

After all, he had been known to take lead before. And it sure hadn’t felt like this ever before.

Was that because this wound was mortal and those others had been picayune in comparison?

That could be, he supposed, but shit, this time it didn’t even hurt.

Oh, he’d felt it, all right. But the poke hadn’t been very hard. Something on the order of a playful jab. Or the tap of a kid playing tag. But nothing serious.

Yet a gunshot in the chest, that was just about as serious as things got. Wasn’t it?

Longarm straightened, abandoning the support of the outhouse door he’d been leaning against, and stood upright. He slid a hand inside his coat and felt for the warm, sticky wetness of fresh blood. Or for the pain of an entry wound. Or … something.

All he found inside his coat was his shirt. No longer fresh, but dry and apparently unperforated.

He frowned a little more, this time in puzzlement, however, and not with any trace of disappointment. It came as something of a surprise to him—but definitely not a disagreeable one—to discover that the gunshot seemed to have done no damage.

He felt around a little more and then, comprehension commencing to dawn, pulled his wallet out.

There was a small hole in the front of his coat and a corresponding hole in the leather of his wallet. But no holes through the inside liner of the coat nor, most importantly, through Longarm himself.

When he opened the wallet it was to disclose his badge, the shape of the metal slightly altered from behind, a small bulge as it were. And when he unpinned the badge from the leather flap inside his wallet, a small, flattened lead projectile dropped into his palm.

Sheeit, he mumbled softly to himself. And then, aloud, he said, “Stay inside there, lady. Don’t come out.”

“Are you all right, Marshal? Did I hear-?”

“I said you’re to stay inside an’ I mean it. If you poke your head out I might go an’ misunderstand what’s happening an’ put a .44 slug through the bridge o’ your nose. You understand me?”

“Was that a shot that I heard, Marshal?”

“D’ you understand me?” Longarm insisted.

“Yes, of course, but …”

He was no longer paying attention to the bitch in blue. She could wait.

Right now he had other things to think about. He palmed his Colt and began a slow drift in the direction the gunshot had come from.

Chapter 33

The back wall of Burdick’s station was windowless. Plain and blank and with no defensive firing slits or other openings where a gun and gunman might be concealed. Which meant whoever had fired the shot that hit with deadly accuracy—albeit with fortuitous result for Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long—had to have been hiding at one corner or the other of the longish structure.

As close as Longarm could recall when he tried to bring the exact sound of the shot back to mind, the would-be assassin must have been on the south or right-hand side of the place.

Staying well clear of the building on the theory that the guy had had an aimed shot from rest at a stationary target, but that he couldn’t be that accurate again if his quarry was at a distance and at the same time was in motion, Longarm skirted wide around the back of the place until he could get an unobstructed view of that side of the building. As he pretty well expected, there was no one in sight.

Once again his small-bore attacker had made a swift, single attempt at murder and then … disappeared.

This was the fourth time the same man had taken a crack at him, Longarm reflected sourly, and he had not yet gotten so much as a glimpse of the sonuvabitch.

The man might as well have been a ghost. A will-o-the-wisp. What he most assuredly was not was imaginary.

Longarm had the misshapen lead slug in his pocket to prove that, the bit of distorted metal that had been stopped by the thickness of his leather wallet and the barrier of his badge of office.

Except for those—except for the accuracy of the gunman’s aimed fire—Longarm could well be lying dead or dying at that very moment.

Whoever this bastard was, Longarm acknowledged, he was uncommonly good at his job.

And for him it was a job. Longarm would have willingly bet the farm on that assumption. Who except a paid professional, and a damned good one at that, would keep coming back for repeated tries after the first few failed. Most especially, who but a very confident professional would make this last attempt in broad daylight and from such a distance.