Longarm nodded curtly and said, “To silence and collect on him! I hope you’ve grasped by now that a man who’d mess with a pal’s wife and put in for bounty money under false pretenses is hardly a paragon of virtue!”
She lay back down and began stroking again as she replied, “I suppose not. He sounds awfully wicked. Who was that married woman you mentioned? Was I right about Prunella Thalman?”
Longarm chuckled and said, “I don’t talk about ladies who’ve done me no harm. The one they had locked up in that patent cell got all spooked after guns commenced to go off all around her. So she wanted out. She likely told old Amos she did before she wrote me a desperate message saying she was ready to talk.”
Constance asked, “Was that when somebody came to break out someone who they took to be Bunny McNee? Wait a moment. That won’t work if her own pals knew she wasn’t him, and the real Bunny McNee’s pals were nowhere around here!”
Longarm hugged her closer and said, “You ought to be their new constable. Nobody was out to bust her out. Amos Payne had to shut her up. But she was locked up for the night, guarded by a kid called Tim Keen. But Amos was his boss. So Tim naturally opened up and went back to the cell block with him when he offered some fool excuse for seeing the prisoner. Once the three of them were alone back there, Amos Payne simply drew his .45 short and shot Tess Jennings and Tim Keen in cold blood. But his twenty eight grains of powder hadn’t done a tough kid all the way in yet. So as Constable Payne turned to dash out into the dark so’s he could come running the other way a few moments later, the boy he’d put on the floor got his own gun out and blazed away with his .45 long. The more powerful fire blew the front door open as well. So the picture we found as the smoke was clearing fit together wrong. I might have been smarter, sooner, if those other crooks hadn’t been throwing their own grit in my eyes. Nobody involved had all that much common sense. But I’ve noticed in the past how two dumb rascals, working at cross-purposes, can make a confounded lawman think he’s up against something really slick, and speaking of slick, you’re fixing to get that hand all slick and wet if you don’t let me put the fool thing where it wants to finish!”
So she let him, and it felt so good he decided he might as well come in her again.
Chapter 19
Sometime later down in Denver, Longarm watched and waited in Billy Vail’s office as the crusty old cuss took forever to read a lot more paper than Longarm had ever handed in. Vail finally lowered it to his cluttered desk, snorted blue smoke at the younger man seated across from him in the oak-paneled back room, and declared, “I am mad as hell and you’d better not never do it again. But fair is fair, and had Smiley and Dutch gone up yonder to transfer that fool female prisoner, we might have wound up looking awfully silly. That crooked lawman never would have ordered them killed, nobody would have felt the need to kill that runaway wife and the kid deputy, and she’d have let us put her on trial and convict her before she just laughed in our faces and bared a pair of tits the real Bunny McNee has never been accused of having!”
Longarm cocked a brow and asked, “We know that much about the late Tess Jennings now?”
Vail nodded his bullet head. “You didn’t. I was the one who finally trailed her back to Arkansas on paper. She ran off on a hog farmer and two bitty kids with a tinhorn gambler who might or might not have been the drifter who stranded her up in John Bull. Forget about her. This wicked world is as well off without the likes of her and that two-faced housemaid who almost got you killed.”
Vail blew more smoke out both nostrils and added, “Thanks to the way some deputies from this office like to duck out on paperwork, that new young Constable Rothstein is taking the credit for solving both their murders in an election year.”
Longarm shrugged and replied, “Hell, I’d have had to go back for the trials of them cattle thieves if I’d been any less generous with old Nate. May I please light my own smoke?”
Vail snapped, “No. I told you that was an order and I meant it. That’ll learn you to spill tobacco ash on my rug and grind it in with a boot heel, as if I wasn’t watching!”
He glared down at the papers on his desk and said, “Where was I? Oh, right, you say in your report to me that you’re only alleging a mess of stuff instead of charging it because none of it seemed to be federal and you didn’t know how the locals wanted to phrase some of it to the newspapers.”
Longarm shrugged. “Like I said, I had no call to get myself embroiled in a stupid shouting match. All the really wicked ones had wound up dead. So justice had been served, in a sort of rough and ready fashion.”
Vail grimaced, blew more smoke, and said, “You could have taken a tad more credit for yourself and this office without causing all that much of a fuss. The powers that be around John Bull have decided on honesty as the best policy in an election year, with justice served, the way you just said. The late Constable Payne’s position ain’t no political issue this coming November, and they thought they owed it to young Tim Keen’s memory to record him as a hero who died at the hands of a total son of a bitch but managed to take his killer with him. Nobody up that way gave a shit about a double-dealing foreman or a windy old mountain man. So they decided that cowboy, Will Posner, might as well get the credit for killing the two of them in another desperate gunfight.”
Longarm blinked, started to object, then said, “Why not? The kid was a love-struck asshole, not a crook. Before I left I heard he had kin in the county, and he’d have been pleased as punch to see a pretty gal called Flora at his funeral in a new hat. She told us later she’d always thought him sort of dumb. But at least she was there.”
Vail grumbled, “We’ll get to all them social functions you seem to have attended up that way in a minute. Having buried them two heroic local boys with honors, and not feeling it worth their while to dig Amos Payne up and replant him where he belongs, in potter’s field, they planted Oregon John there and sent Buck Lewis back to Texas as per request by his kin. The nicest thing about all this blood and slaughter this time is that hardly anyone is sore at you personally. Nobody but that French Sarah seemed to feel it was cruel and unusual of you to win a fair fight with Quicksilver Quinn in a reading room. Everyone else who got killed, fair or foul, got killed by somebody else. What was that about you telling them to send the bounty on Quinn to the John Bull Public School?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “I know you frown on us federal riders putting in for bounty money, but there was a handsome reward posted on Quicksilver, dead or alive. He did die on school property, and I happen to know the school’s strapped for cash. Can I go now? Or at least open the damned window, Boss?”
Vail cackled. “You’re one to talk, smoking them cheap cheroots like a Mexican! I ain’t done with you yet. I’ll allow that all in all things worked out better when you changed places with the deputies I had ordered up to John Bull. All’s well that ends well, and we’ll say no more about your report, save for the simple fact that all the events you reported transpired last week. Not this week. Last week. So how do you account for all them social gatherings and such you’ve been going to on our time for damn near a full week?”
Longarm said, “Damn it, Billy, if you won’t let me light up in self-defense, the least you could do would be to blow that stink the other way!”
Vail took a deep drag, enveloped Longarm in a pungent cloud, and insisted, “I’m waiting!”
Longarm replied with an innocent smile, “I was stuck up in the high country waiting on a train out. Did I mention on paper how that first victim, Stanwyk, had gone up yonder to show them how to fix a mess of narrow-gauge tracks? Well, somebody else told ‘em how to do it, and so the track workers had to just about take the whole railroad apart and put it back together. I told the owner of the line I ought to be getting on back to Denver. But I was told the trains just wouldn’t be running until the owner was good and ready to start ‘em up again. So there I was with no way to get home. But at least you’ll see I never charged for them to my expenses. The owner of the railroad said I could stay up there as a guest of the same, seeing it was their fault.”