Chapter 3
Longarm waited until they’d finished breakfast and were on their first smoke and second cup of coffee before he related what had happened the night before. When he was through, Austin Davis raised his eyebrows slightly and whistled. “Well, I’d have to say you done the town up a little better than what I was expecting.”
“Hold the comments to yourself,” Longarm said. “What do you reckon? Am I exposed? I know how tight this country is around here. What do you think? You figure we can proceed as planned?”
Davis thought a moment, then said, “Hell, Longarm, I don’t rightly know. I got to say there is a well-worn path between San Antonio and Laredo. They might be a hundred and eighty miles apart, but I swear you can see a man in Laredo one day and then run into him the next right here in San Antonio. They’ve been hooked together for two hundred years, back when this was part of Mexico. But I hate to abandon the plan we got, because I don’t know of another one. How many you reckon saw you or heard about you?”
Longarm shook his head, remembering. “Like I told you, I went over to the jailhouse. Sheriff wasn’t there, but a couple of deputies were on duty. I told them what had happened, hoping I could get out of the business without declaring myself. But I was a stranger to them and they weren’t about to take me at my word. They insisted on sending for the sheriff, and away we went with all boilers blasting. Sheriff come down, and then me and about half a dozen deputies went around to look at the body. Collected quite a little crowd.”
“But they still didn’t know at that point who you were?”
“Naw,” Longarm said. “I just give my name as Long and hadn’t said anything else. The feller I killed was known to them as a small-time crook around town. But what caused the trouble was they insisted he’d never tried armed robbery before, and kind of took the attitude I might have just shot him for the hell of it. Wasn’t nothing but my word that he’d been holding a gun on me. Naturally I’d turned it in when I got to the jailhouse, but they took the position that that didn’t mean he’d ever been holding the gun and threatening me with it. In fact, they come about as close to calling me a liar as you can get.”
Davis smiled slightly. “I reckon they couldn’t understand how you could kill a man who already has the drop on you and your weapon is in your holster. I can see how they’d wonder about that.”
“Naturally that point got made. The way they were going on I could see it wouldn’t be long before they decided I’d been robbing the dead man and had killed him to keep matters clean.” Longarm shook his head. “Just was bad luck.”
Davis blew a smoke ring into the air. “I reckon the dead man might have been thinking along the same lines if he could have been thinking.”
“Well, I finally had to own up,” Longarm said. “I got the sheriff aside, hoping to limit the publicity, and kind of told him on the quiet and showed him my badge.” He made a disgusted sound. “For all the good that done. We was back in the office by then and it didn’t take ten seconds for word to get around that I was a federal marshal.”
“Did they know you? Recognize the name?”
Longarm looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “Sometimes I don’t think matters shake out fair. I’ve been a very good marshal. That ought to have been enough.”
“I take it they knew you.”
“It’s that damn nickname of mine. I wish I’d never heard the word Longarm. I’d like to find the man that first pinned that on me and do him a great harm.”
“How many you reckon heard about you?”
Longarm grimaced. “No telling,” he said. “I reckon they was a dozen collected together there in the sheriff’s office.”
“All law?”
“Oh, hell no! Bunch of them wasn’t nothing but loungers and busybodies and I don’t know what all. So if a dozen heard it, how many you reckon knows this morning that a U.S. deputy marshal is in this part of the country?”
Davis laughed ruefully. “Enough so if they was voters you could get elected mayor. This is a talking town. This whole part of the country is talking towns.” He shook his head and put his cigarillo out in his saucer.
Longarm looked across the crowded hotel dining room. “Damn!” he swore.
“The famous Marshal Longarm,” Davis said waggishly. “I reckon I’d heard about you for ten years before I finally clapped eyes on you in Mason. I figured you to be nine feet tall.”
“Cut it out,” Longarm said.
“Hell, some of them stories I heard about you would have stretched the mind of the world’s biggest sucker. But they was told for the truth.”
Longarm gave him a cool look. “I didn’t make the stories up, sonny boy.”
“I’d hope not. Hell, if you’d run down and caught every crook I heard about, there wouldn’t be a horse left alive in the Southwest. You’d have ridden them all to death.”
Longarm smiled slightly. “All right, all right. Let’s get off that. You’re the man on the scene. What do you think this does to our plan?”
Davis leaned back in his chair and took the time to light another cigarillo. After a moment he said, “Well, they know there’s a federal marshal in San Antonio, and folks in Laredo will hear about it and they’ll figure that the marshal will naturally come on down to see them. But there ain’t no reason for anybody in Laredo to suspect that the marshal is you. Not unless you kill another alley robber. I mean, your name is a hell of a lot better known than your face. I can’t see any reason anyone would recognize you. You say there was a dozen men at the jail last night? What’s the odds on them, anyone of them, showing up in Laredo and being there at exactly the wrong time? Pretty slim, I’d say. Naw, I don’t see no reason to alter our plans.”
Longarm said, with feeling, “If there’s a chance it could cause matters to go wrong, I won’t take it amiss if we bring in another man. We can wire Billy Vail and have somebody else on the next train.”
Austin Davis glanced across the table at Longarm, then said evenly, “You really don’t want to work with me, do you?”
Longarm pulled his head back to look at Davis from a greater distance. “I didn’t say that. Where’d you get that idea? You reckon I went out and got in that shooting scrape to get out of working with you?”
“You been passing remarks ever since I picked you up at the train. Ain’t no skin off my nose either way.”
Longarm looked at Davis coolly. “Speaking of skin,” he said, “thin skin don’t go with this job. It don’t turn no bullets. You understand me?”
“I understand you appeared to be looking for a way out of the job. You was quick enough to talk about wiring Billy Vail.”
Longarm sat still for a moment, not speaking, not doing anything. Finally he said, “Davis, I’m the one wrote the recommendation that got you into the U.S. Marshal Service. I don’t do that for men I don’t trust with my life and who I don’t want to work with. Now, you either get this idea out of your mind about me or we will have to figure out something else right here and now.”
The junior deputy stayed his hand as he was about to take a puff on his cigarillo. He was sitting slightly sideways to Longarm. Glancing at him, he said, “You actually wrote me a letter of recommendation?”