LONGARM AND THE KANSAS KILLER
By Tabor Evans
Jove Books New York Copyright (C) 1995 by Jove Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.
ISBN: 0-515-11681-5
Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.
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A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
Printing history Jove edition / August 1995
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
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THE GUNSMITH by J. R. Roberts Clint Adams was a legend among lawmen, outlaws, and ladies. They called him … the Gunsmith. LONGARM by Tabor Evans The popular long-running series about U.S. Deputy Marshal Long—his life, his loves, his fight for justice. LONE STAR by Wesley Ellis The blazing adventures of Jessica Starbuck and the martial arts master, Ki. Over eight million copies in print. SLOCUM by Jake Logan Today’s longest-running action Western. John Slocum rides a deadly trail of hot blood and cold steel. McMASTERS by Lee Morgan The blazing new series from the creators of Longarm. When McMasters shoots, he shoots to kill. To his enemies, he is the most dangerous man they have ever known.
Chapter 1
No sober soul with a lick of common sense would have breezed through the entrance of the wildest whorehouse in Denver without a certain wariness. So the gun-muzzle gray eyes of the tall lawman in a tobacco tweed suit stared thoughtfully from under the brim of his dark telescoped Stetson, and the tail of his coat hung clear of the .44-40 riding cross-draw on his left hip as he wondered why things seemed so quiet on a Saturday night in the greenup time in cattle country.
There were no customers at all in the downstairs taproom as he entered it. The soiled doves who’d usually be prancing and dancing moped all about with long faces. Some of them were crying. When a frightened-looking young colored gal in a French maid’s outfit timidly approached to tell him they’d just closed for the night, their tall tanned visitor explained, laconically but not unkindly, “I ain’t here for fun. I’d be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long. I’ve been told your madam, Emma Gould, was after me for some service she’s unable to provide.”
The whorehouse maid tried to take his hat, and when that didn’t work, she scampered out of the taproom as one whore murmured to the one seated next to her, “That’s him, the one they call Longarm! Ain’t he good-looking, though?”
Before the object of this professional appraisal could feel all that silly, the madam herself was waving him into the back with a pint or so of diamonds wrapped around a plump wrist. So he went to join her, looking neither to his right nor left as half-clad gals who should have been ashamed of themselves made rude observations about what they could see of him and crude speculations as to what a strange gent might have concealed under his own private duds.
The madam told him to pay the sassy things no mind, and hauled him into her businesslike office to sit him down as she hauled out a bottle of Maryland Rye. Then she asked if he recalled the time he’d said he owed her.
Longarm smiled up at the once pleasantly plump and now just fat old pal. “I sure do, Madame Emma. For it was not long ago on the slopes of Capitol Hill that you saved my bacon. I was just across Colfax Avenue without a care in the world when your dulcet scream rent the air and that backshooter you’d spotted shot an old shade tree instead.”
“I just wanted you to say you still owed me,” the most prosperous madam in Denver told him. “One of my girls is laying on a cold zinc table in the county morgue, and who’s going to take a colored kid’s word against those of two mining magnates, backing one another up, the murderous high-toned bastards!”
Longarm held up a weary hand and pleaded, “Rein in, back up, and start at the beginning.”
So Emma Gould began. “It commenced about eleven this evening. A couple of mining magnates called Carbonate Ned Cartier and Telluride Tommy Gordon blew in, well oiled, after the management had asked them to leave a fussier establishment. They drank some more out front, and then they naturally went upstairs with a couple of my girls to enjoy some unnatural acts. Neither was sober enough to enjoy a woman the old-fashioned way.”
Longarm reached for a smoke, but held the three-for-a-nickel cheroot aloft for her silent permission or denial. “I was wrong. I didn’t want you to start too far back. Get to how one of your gals wound up in the morgue.”
Emma Gould nodded at the cheap but not too pungent cheroot. “I’m getting to that, dammit. As I said, the only witness was our colored maid, Willow. Frenching Ann and the aging but tidy Telluride Tommy seemed to be getting along all right in her crib. Willow says most of the ugly talk was coming from Baltimore Barbara’s crib as she was trying in vain to pleasure that unpleasant Carbonate Ned. Willow can’t say what the trouble in there might have been. I promised her family when they let her come to work for me that I’d never use their virgin child for such services. How was I to know she’d fill out so tempting? But I’d given my word, and Willow doesn’t know enough about such things to say just what might have gone wrong. She can say, however, she was standing right there in the doorway with the drinks the brute had ordered when he simply rolled off poor Baltimore Barbara and threw her headfirst out a side window as if she’d been a rag doll some vicious child was tired of playing with!”
Longarm finished lighting his cheroot before he grimaced and remarked, “We are talking about a second-story window over an alley, right?”
The madam nodded grimly and explained, “She landed on her head and broke her neck. She looked so innocent—all right, peaceful—lying there with her eyes half open and a dreamy smile on her painted lips. We naturally called the Denver P.D. Lord knows they make us pay the machine enough. So our neighborhood roundsmen took both of the surly drunks in. Sergeant Nolan, on the desk tonight, says they’re good for at least the rest of the night in jail.”
Longarm nodded thoughtfully at the glowing tip of the cheroot in one hand and declared, “I know Sergeant Nolan. He’s a good man. He’ll show them both as hard a time as they deserve. Or as hard a time as he can manage leastways.”
The irate Emma Gould scowled and said, “Nolan suggested I get in touch with you when I allowed I knew you as well. He seems to think you’re good too, Custis.”
Longarm protested, “Hold on! I ride for Marshal Vail and a federal district court, Madame Emma. I don’t have jurisdiction over a local whorehouse killing, no offense. If I did, I fail to see what I could do any better than your local copper badges. They arrested the both of them when only one threw that gal out the window, right?”
Emma Gould sighed and softly replied, “I wish you wouldn’t try to bullshit an old whore who’s been lied to by slick-talking men all her misspent life! Carbonate Ned is backing Gordon’s tale that neither one of them had anything to do with the demise of some drunken doxie. They’re willing to swear in court that they’d both enjoyed the dubious charms of two other drunks and were fixing to leave when, for whatever reason of her own, Baltimore Barbara just decided she was a real dove with the wings to fly her up to the statehouse and once around the dome. When Sergeant Nolan asked Cartier why he didn’t try to stop her, the sarcastic bastard just laughed and said they were all so drunk he’d thought she might make it.”