Nowlan had to be pretty smart, or he wouldn’t have been able to avoid capture for as long as he had, Longarm thought. But nearly every crook slipped up sooner or later, and when they did, Longarm or some other star-packer was usually waiting to slap the cuffs on them—or ventilate them, if need be.
Longarm hoped it wouldn’t come to that tonight, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it did. The counterfeiting gang wasn’t likely to come along peaceable-like. Not with a pile of phony money at stake, not to mention the engraving plates, which were even more valuable.
Longarm’s strong white teeth clenched on the cheroot as he walked along the street, trailing Harrelson. He caught glimpses of the deputy in the derby hat and checked suit as Harrelson moved in and out of the light coming through the windows of the buildings he passed. Harrelson paused at a corner, then turned right, out of Longarm’s sight.
When Longarm reached the same corner, he turned too, and walked a little faster. He couldn’t see Harrelson up ahead. Within a couple of blocks, the street and the boardwalk were a lot darker. Now that he was away from the saloon, and restaurants, Longarm saw that most of the businesses along here were already closed for the night. He knew he wasn’t far from the railroad yards. Large, darkened warehouses began bulking up out of the night around him.
A hand came out of the shadows and touched his arm. Longarm reacted instinctively, pivoting sharply and reaching across his body to snag the walnut grips of the Colt .44 in the cross-draw rig on his left hip. The gun came out smoothly, with the faintest whisper of steel on leather, and Longarm’s finger was tense and ready on the trigger.
“Hold it, Long!” a familiar voice whispered urgently from the darkness of a recessed doorway. “It’s just us, damn it!”
Longarm took a deep breath and tried not to growl in exasperation. “Blast it, Harrelson,” he breathed. “Do you know how close I came to shooting you?”
“Too close. Sorry about that, Long. I just didn’t want you blundering in on Nowlan and warning him that we’re on to him.”
Longarm holstered the .44 and said, “Where is he?”
One of the other men with Harrelson said, “He went into that warehouse right up yonder. I reckon that’s where the gang’s meetin’.” The man stuck out his hand in the gloom. “I’m Bud Seeley.”
“Custis Long,” said Longarm as he shook hands with the man. It looked like there were going to be introductions after all. “Glad to meet you.” He turned to the third man. “You’d be Truelove.”
“Yeah, and I don’t want to hear any comments about it,” the man said in a surly voice.
“Don’t reckon I blame you,” Longarm said mildly. “Would you rather I call you Horace?”
“Can we get on with this?” Harrelson asked before Truelove could answer Longarm’s question. “I’m itching to get my hands on Nowlan.”
“Sure. How do you want to do this?” asked Seeley.
Harrelson glanced at Longarm. This was Harrelson’s bailiwick, and since all four men were deputy marshals, he should have been in charge. But all of them knew Longarm’s reputation as the big skookum he-wolf from Billy Vail’s office, and they were willing to defer to him, although it might be grudgingly.
Longarm took the cheroot out of his mouth and said quietly to Harrelson, “You know the ground better than any of the rest of us, Jim. What do you say?”
Harrelson seemed relieved that Longarm wasn’t going to try to boss the operation. He said, “There’s only one back door out of that place. I figured we’d put one man back there and three in front, and then we’ll all come in at the same time.”
“They’re bound to have some guards out,” Truelove said. “What about them?”
“Well, I reckon we’ll have to spot ‘em and put ‘em out of commission.”
Longarm knew that was going to be more difficult than it sounded, but it didn’t necessarily make the plan a bad one.
Seeley rubbed his jaw in thought, then nodded. “I guess we can do that,” he said. “Who takes the back?”
“Any volunteers?” asked Harrelson.
“I’ll do it,” Longarm said. Coming in from the back would be just as dangerous as busting into the warehouse from the front, so he didn’t feel like he was ducking a bad job. If anything, he would be in even more danger than the others, because he wouldn’t have anybody to watch his back. He would be on his own.
Of course, that was the way he liked it.
Harrelson nodded. “All right. Long goes in the back, the rest of us take the front. In … what, ten minutes?”
“Ought to be enough time,” Longarm said. “where’s the back door?”
“Far left-hand corner of the building,” Harrelson replied. “You can go down the next alley and get to the lane that runs behind the warehouse.”
Longarm nodded. He had already figured out that much, since the warehouse where Nowlan had gone was on the same side of the street as the doorway where this clandestine meeting was taking place.
“Best check your watch,” Harrelson added.
Longarm slipped the timepiece out of his vest pocket and opened the case. On the other end of the watch chain was a two-shot, .44-caliber derringer instead of a fob. The little gun had saved Longarm’s bacon more times than he liked to think about over his years of service as a deputy marshal. Harrelson was still smoking the cigar, so he leaned closer to Longarm and drew on the tightly rolled cylinder of tobacco, making the tip glow a bright red. By that faint light, Longarm saw that the time was twenty minutes past ten.
“I’ll come in at ten-thirty,” Longarm said as he snapped the watch closed and put it away.
“Good enough,” Harrelson said. “We’ll wait until then to make our move. If you run into any guards—and you likely will—dispose of ‘em as quiet-like as you can.”
No, thought Longarm, I figured I’d have a brass band playing while I clout the son of a bitch over the head with the butt of my pistol.
He kept the sarcasm to himself and simply nodded again. Then he slid out of the shadows of the doorway and moved along the boardwalk, staying close to the building. When he reached the alley, he stepped down from the walk and moved into its even deeper shadows.
Longarm kept his left hand on the wall of the next building, using it as a guide in the stygian blackness. His right hand was on the butt of his gun. A part of his brain was counting off the seconds as he cat-footed along the alley. By the time he got to six hundred, he needed to be in position by the rear door of the warehouse.
Less than a minute had passed when he reached the lane that ran along behind the warehouses. It was narrow and filthy—what he could see of it in the dim light that came from a quarter-moon and a sprinkling of stars in the heavens overhead. He would have to be careful as he made his way along it, lest he knock over some of the trash that had accumulated back there.
He moved out of the alley mouth and started toward the back of the warehouse. It was two buildings away, and as he drew closer, he paused and listened intently, hoping that if any sentries were around, they would do something to give away their position. The little voice in the back of his head continued counting.
The tally was at two hundred when Longarm suddenly heard a soft cough from up ahead of him somewhere. He listened some more, and heard a faint scuff of feet, saw a subtle shifting in the shadows next to the back of the warehouse.
Would the gang have put more than one guard on the back door? That was the question Longarm had to answer, and he had to do it quickly. The count was at two-fifty.
He slid along the wall, using every bit of skill he had picked up over the years from various red men who had been kind enough to teach a clumsy-footed white man how to walk without making quite as much noise as a silver-tip grizzly drunk on fermented berries. As a matter of fact, Longarm wasn’t making much sound at all as he approached the warehouse. Even the whisper of his gun coming out of its holster couldn’t have been heard more than a foot away.