LONGARM AND THE MAIDEN MEDUSA [066-066-5.0]
By: Tabor Evans
Synopsis:
Longarm doesn’t like getting shot. It hurts. And so far, no one’s been kind enough to kill him. Now he’s got a body full of Number Nine Buckshot, and a score to settle with the shooter: a woman they call Medusa Le Mat. The only thing blacker than her hair is her heart. And the only thing more desirable than her beauty would be a reason not to kill her. 224th novel in the “Longarm” series, 1997.
Jove Books New York Copyright (C) 1997 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: 0-515-12132-0
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 1997
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.”
DON’T MISS THESE ALL-ACTION WESTERN SERIES FROM THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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.
SLOCUM by Jake Logan Today’s longest-running action Western. John Slocum rides a deadly trail of hot blood and cold steel.
BUSHWHACKERS by B. J. Lanagan An all-new series by the creators of Longarm! The rousing adventure of the most brutal gang of cutthroats ever assembled—Quantrill’s Raiders.
Chapter 1
The gang hadn’t ridden in for a shootout with Longarm. They’d come to rob the bank. Longarm wasn’t in the Bitter Creek Savings & Loan to foil any robbery. He just needed to cash a check because a flash flood to the east had washed out a quarter mile of U.P. track and the infernal trains wouldn’t be running for a good three days or more.
U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long, as it read on the check, had been told more than once he was too good-natured for his own good. He could have marched his federal want back to the local jail and let him live on bread and beans until they were fixing to head on back to Colorado. But his prisoner, the soon-to-be-late Hamilton Ingram, seemed a tolerable cuss when he wasn’t drinking. He’d turned himself in for shooting that Indian agent in Fort Collins once he’d found himself broke and sober in Wyoming Territory.
So, seeing that Longarm had signed all the papers and checked his want out of the Bitter Creek Jail before they’d told him about the fool railroad, the lawman had hired a room for the two of them near the U.P. station, and announced that he’d only cuff his prisoner to one bedstead after they were ready to turn in, subject to Ingram’s continued sobriety and a civil tongue at all times.
A mean drunk, but a man of common sense when sober, Hamp Ingram, as he preferred to be called, had agreed to Longarm’s generous terms, and that was how come they were standing in line at the bank when all hell busted loose.
Longarm hadn’t been expecting hell to bust loose. That was how come he was caught flat-footed with his check in one hand and that sack of fixings he’d spent the last of his ready cash on, to feed both himself and his prisoner, in the other. A pretty little brunette wearing a wool coat and veiled spring bonnet was between the two men and the teller’s cage, but she seemed to grasp the intent of the trio barging through the front entrance before anyone else did. For she threw up both hands, one still enclosed in a rabbit-fur muff, and wailed, “Oh, please don’t hurt us!” before even one of the wild and woolly gents with bandannas over their faces and six-guns in their hands declared their full intent.
When their obvious leader shouted, “Hands up, one and all, or I’ll shoot!” Longarm raised his gun hand, but hung on to his heavy load of fixings as he murmured to Ingram, “Get that lady and yourself into the corner behind me, Hamp.”
But as Ingram tried to herd the scared-looking brunette out of the line of fire, she flinched away and sobbed she was too young to die. Then one of the bank robbers told Longarm to leave her be and get both damned hands up.
Longarm moved toward a nearby vacant banker’s desk, replying in a calm voice of sweet reason that there were eggs in the sack as he got both hands down a piece, as if to balance the load on the desk before he obeyed.
He actually had the grips of the cross-draw Colt .4440 under his tweed frock coat in mind, but the scared and innocent-looking little brunette never gave him time to set his load down and go for his gun. The gun she’d been holding in that innocent-looking muff was a Le Mat Duplex, the only revolver on the market that fired shotgun rounds, and the 20-gauge charge of Number Nine Buck, fired dead level at point-blank range, blew Longarm out from under his dark Stetson to roll ass-over-teakettle across the desk. Then the smoking Le Mat swung to cover the wide-eyed Ingram.
“Hold on, ma’am! I’m a crook my ownself!” the befuddled prisoner of a gunned-down lawman blurted out as the brunette finished him off, yelling, “Do them all! For now they know my pretty face and we don’t want them blabbing about our winning ways!”
So that was the end of the other two customers and three bank employees, two of the victims women, as the three masked men and their petite advance scout made a hasty as well as substantial withdrawal from the Bitter Creek Savings & Loan.
The smoke was still clearing, and Longarm was still numbly wondering who he was and where he might be, as the first townsmen and local lawmen tore in, their own guns drawn, to view the scene of carnage with dismay.
“Jesus H. Christ!” exclaimed a more literate Wyoming rider. “It looks like the last act of Hamlet, save for the blood being real! They gunned Banker Nelson, and ain’t that Miss Rumford from the schoolhouse laying yonder with her skirts up scandalously and half her face blown off?”
Another local peered down through the clearing smoke and exclaimed, “This here looks like that Colorado boy who turned hisself in to us a few days ago. He was supposed to be headed back to Denver to stand trial for shooting some Indian agent. Now somebody has shot him dead as a turd in a milk bucket, and where’s that Colorado rider who took him off our hands this morning?”
Another Bitter Creek lawman responded to some funny noises coming from behind an apparently vacant desk, and called out, “Here he is, alive but not at all well, covered with blood and busted glass from this brown paper bag he must have been packing when they gunned him!”
So the supine Longarm was soon the center of attention as he tried to talk, and found it nigh impossible to breathe for the better part of the next five minutes.
By the time he was able to tell them what had happened and give his description of the killers, the three masked men and their sidesaddle leader had galloped out of town, doubled back along a wooded draw the leader had scouted in advance, and holed up for the moment in the sod house of an old loner they’d buried out back beneath his henhouse.
Out of sight for the moment, but knowing full well they’d hardly be out of mind in the nearby settlement, the quartet changed clothes to go with the fresh mounts they’d left there in the care of a skinny ash blonde called Pinkie. As the man who’d appeared the leader at the bank changed into what might have been a traveling salesman, he confided to the gal they’d left holding the fort, “You should have seen this other sweet little thing blazing away back there! Blowed this one tall drink of water clean off his feet with that bodacious Le Mat!”