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Longarm’s face was frozen into a bleak grimace by now. He said, “I reckon they sent for you then.”

“The clerk had already sent another porter for the law. We got here a few minutes later.” Bishop had reached the door of the marshals’ room. He was careful not to step in the blood as he reached for the doorknob. The blood was mostly dry by now, but it would still be sticky. “You ready for this?”

Longarm took a deep breath and wished he hadn’t. The sharp, sheared-copper smell of spilled blood filled his nostrils. He managed to nod.

Bishop turned the knob and swung the door back. Through the opening, Longarm saw the bodies sprawled on the floor of the room. He steeled himself and stepped inside.

Jim Harrelson was the closest to the door. His throat had been cut so deeply that his head seemed to be barely hanging on to his shoulders. Horace Truelove was next. He looked like he had been stabbed at least a dozen times in the chest, and his throat was slashed as well. At first glance, Bud Seeley, who lay curled up beside the bed, didn’t seem to be injured at all. But then Longarm saw the wound in the side of his neck where a knife had gone in.

“All of them were killed quick and quiet,” Bishop said, “by somebody who knew how to use a knife. Looking at it, the blood out in the hall seems to have come from Harrelson. Most of it in here came from Truelove.”

“Son of a bitch,” Longarm muttered. Nobody deserved to come to an end like this, slaughtered like some sort of animal.

He forced his gaze away from the horrible tableau and looked around the room. There was no sign of the valise which had held the counterfeiting plates. That came as no surprise to him. He stepped over to the dresser, checked quickly through its drawers, then opened the doors of the wardrobe that stood against one wall. The meager traveling gear belonging to the federal lawmen was there, but no valise, no package of any sort that could have contained the plates.

“What are you looking for, Marshal?” Bishop asked sharply. “The ‘evidence’ you and Harrelson took out of that warehouse early this morning?”

Longarm didn’t see any point in keeping it a secret any longer. “The printing plates,” he said. “The ones Edward Nowlan used to make that two million in phony currency.”

Bishop let out a low whistle. “I thought it might be something like that. Didn’t you trust us, Marshal?”

“We were just trying to cut down on the chances of something like this happening,” Longarm said with a curt wave at the carnage around them.

Bishop bristled at that comment. “Are you saying you thought my men couldn’t be trusted? You think one of them had something to do with this?”

“No offense, Captain, but when something as valuable as those plates is involved, I don’t trust myself overmuch, let alone anybody else. And I was right to be worried. Somebody knew about those plates and had a pretty good idea where to find them.”

Without saying anything else, he strode over to the connecting door and opened it, stepping into the room he and Harrelson had shared. Bishop trailed him as he searched the room quickly but thoroughly, not turning up a damned thing.

Longarm sighed. “I thought maybe there was a chance one of the boys had put the plates in here. Didn’t think it was very likely, though, and I was sure enough right about that part of it.”

Bishop jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the bodies of the federal men. “Now that you’ve seen everything, is it all right if I get some of my men in here and have those bodies taken out?”

Longarm nodded and said, “Sure. I reckon those poor bastards are long past being able to tell us anything about who did this to ‘em.”

He lit a fresh cheroot to help cover up the smell of the blood and told himself not to feel guilty because he was alive and Harrelson, Seeley, and Truelove were dead. Going to the horse race had been giving in to an impulse, that was all. He’d had no way of knowing that his fellow lawmen would be murdered while he was gone.

Yet a part of him insisted that he should have been here, should have done something to prevent this massacre. He hadn’t known the three dead men very well, but they had all carried a badge. In that sense, they were all his brothers.

Bishop came back from issuing orders to his men and found Longarm smoking gloomily and peering out the window of the hotel room, his back to the corpses. “What are you going to do now, Marshal?” asked the local lawman.

“Don’t have much choice,” Longarm said without looking around. “I was supposed to catch the five o’clock train for Denver, but there wouldn’t be any point to it now. I was supposed to deliver those printing plates to my boss, but they’re long gone.” He rolled the cheroot from one side of his mouth to the other. “Reckon I’ll just have to find ‘em—and the sons o’ bitches who did this.”

“I hope you do,” Bishop said quietly.

Longarm sighed and turned away from the window, still not looking at the corpses. “Guess I’d better send a wire to my boss and let him know what happened. I’d sure hate to be Henry in a little while.”

“Who’s Henry?” Bishop asked with a confused frown.

“The young fella who plays the typewriter in Billy Vail’s front office. He’s the one who’ll have to carry in the telegraph message I’m going to send.”

“Oh.” Bishop seemed to understand now.

Longarm started toward the door, then paused abruptly. Something on the floor had caught his attention. There were plenty of bloodstains, of course, but this seemed to be some other sort of stain.

The door opened and several burly policemen came into the room carrying canvas tarpaulins. Longarm knew why they were there, and he stepped aside so that they could get started on their grim task of rolling up the bodies in the canvas and carrying them out of here. The next stop for Harrelson, Seeley, and Truelove would be the undertaker’s.

Bishop put a hand on Longarm’s shoulder. “Come on, Marshal. Let’s get out of here.”

Longarm nodded. There was nothing more he could do here now. The dead men were far beyond any help he could muster for them.

But as far as vengeance went, once he caught up to the men who had done this … well, that was another story entirely. Longarm figured he could handle that just fine.

Chapter 4

Being a lawman wasn’t all gunfights with sneering desperados and rescuing beautiful damsels in distress, like those dime novel scribblers back East had it. A lot of the work that went with packing a badge consisted of trudging from place to place and asking the same questions over and over again. That was what Longarm did for the rest of the afternoon. Bishop and the local officers could have probably handled this part of the investigation just fine, and truth to tell, they’d likely cover the same ground whether Longarm did or not, but he felt like he had to give it a try. He owed the three dead marshals that much. Not that his legwork did any good. By late that evening, he had talked to all the guests and employees of the hotel, plus everyone he could find in the other businesses along the block. No one had seen or heard anything—or anyone—suspicious coming from the second floor of the hotel that afternoon. The hotel was one of Albuquerque’s best, so there were usually quite a few people coming and going. A few more wouldn’t be noticed unless there was something odd about them. Longarm considered that and decided at least one of the killers must have changed clothes before leaving the hotel. With all the blood that had been spilled, some of it was bound to have splattered on the man or men who had wielded the knife. Plus the killers would have had the valise containing the counterfeiting plates. But who in blazes would find anything strange, or memorable, about several men leaving a hotel and carrying bags? It happened all the time, every day.

Longarm moved to another room, this one on the third floor of the hotel. The murderers had no reason to come back and try for him—they had gotten what they wanted, after all—but it was the sort of precaution he automatically took. That careful nature had kept him alive for a long time in a dangerous business.