But there wasn't. Longarm had only moved in about as far as where he'd backed Ruby's shay before he spotted Doyle, further back among the supple saplings than he'd have thought possible. But Doyle had been sort of wiry as well as desperate. So there he stood, still on his feet, staring blankly as the blood still oozed from a good two dozen gunshot wounds.
Longarm propped his Winchester against two closely grown trunks and reached into the tangle, with some effort, till he had a grip on one of the dead man's sleeves. It was still a chore to wriggle Doyle out, even dead as the snows of yesteryear and limp as an old man's dick after a whole night in a whorehouse.
Devereaux joined him in the sun-dappled grotto, holding Longarm's Stetson in his free hand as he said, "One of my men just found your hat across the way. Is he dead?"
Longarm picked up his Winchester and took back his Stetson as he replied, "Yep. Didn't get much out of him as he breathed his last in a mishmash of English and that odd lingo... Gaelic, you say?"
Devereaux said, "Don't look at me. We were part of the Protestant gentry in the old country, to hear my grandmother go on. It could have been Gaelic. Or it could have been Greek, for all I know."
Longarm said, "I've known some Irish gals who burst into Gaelic when they were feeling sore at me, or vice versa. It may as well have been Greek to me, but I think Doyle's a Scotch or Irish name."
Devereaux asked, "What about Pryce, his late partner's handle?"
Longarm said, "Welsh, I think. His other pals, Godwynn and Reynolds, sound like they had plain English names to me. In the meanwhile, we ain't going to get much more than bug-bit hanging about in this baby jungle!"
Devereaux agreed, and said he'd deal with the cadaver. So Longarm stepped back out in the sunlight, where Flynn asked much the same questions and got about the same answers. While everyone but the big cheese on the bay got to walk the short distance to the nearby Coast Guard station, Longarm asked how Deputy Gilbert and their prisoner, Baldwin, might be making out.
Flynn said, "They both seem on the road to recovery. I'm not sure I see how the outlaw they sent you and Gilbert after might fit into this wild whatever that Pryce & Doyle were up to."
Longarm said, "Baldwin don't fit at all, Lieutenant. He was wanted on other charges entirely, and got his fool self arrested when he tried to sell stock he'd stolen close by to other crooks who'd picked this nice quiet stretch of coast to ship cold-storage meat from. Escondrijo's close enough to Old Mexico for a crooked outfit to pick up quarantined beef, at a considerable bargain, but far enough from the border to avoid suspicion as to where in this world they ever came by it."
Devereaux, walking on the other side of Longarm, asked how they'd ever managed to move cold-storage beef by the ton across more than a hundred miles of Texas cattle country.
Longarm said, "They couldn't have. So they never did. I figure they smuggled the forbidden Mex beef in from some Mex port such as Matamoros. No Mex officials would have call to worry about an outward-bound cargo and even if they did, you can buy most anyone working for El Presidente Diaz cheap."
Devereaux frowned thoughtfully and said, "That sounds needlessly complicated to me! Once a vessel put safely out from Matamoros with a load of refrigerated beef, what was there to prevent it from going on up to, say, Galveston or New Orleans to unload?"
Longarm said, "You boys. The U.S. Coast Guard can't watch every tub leaving Old Mexico or even plying these coastal waters, as long as it acts natural. But how would you go about putting in to some major seaport with a valuable load and no proper bill of lading?"
From the far side, Lieutenant Flynn almost snapped, "It's all so obvious now that the scheme's been exposed, Mister Devereaux. Pryce & Doyle simply acted as a way station for their seagoing confederates. Probably putting in from the open sea through Corpus Christo Pass in one of those innocent-looking fishing luggers we only occasionally check now and again. With their own more elaborate ice plant they could afford to amass a respectable cargo, which they'd then load aboard one of those coastal steamers that had already passed through U.S. Customs down by the mouth of the Rio Grande. Delivered with proper papers up the coast as Texas beef, nobody would have been the wiser had only they had the sense to leave Deputy Long here free to carry out his own less complicated mission. What was the name of that Mexican crone who's said to smuggle contraband in from the high seas, Mister Devereaux?"
The J.G. said, "La Bruja, sir. That means The Witch in Spanish, and I must say she and her gang have been a bitch to intercept on land or sea. The Rangers say she runs small but valuable cargoes past us in a splinter fleet of shallow-draft luggers with black sails, at low tide in the dark of the moon."
Longarm didn't see how he could object that La Bruja ran guns, not sides of beef in unrefrigerated holds, unless he wanted to answer more questions about a lady than he really needed to. So he let them gab on and on about all the ways one might smuggle beef on ice in a hot, humid clime. And then they'd made it back to the Coast Guard station, where a lawman juggling a whole drawer full of knives might be able to set at least a few of them aside, for the moment.
CHAPTER 14
Both Doyle's roan and the bay packing Longarm's personal saddle had passed through the gate before them, to be rounded up and put away with the water they'd likely had in mind when they bolted. Longarm found young Deputy Gilbert dressed as well as back on his feet, although still a mite green around the gills. Clay Baldwin seemed in fair shape to travel as well, having had a heap of fight knocked out of him by that long siege of off-and-on chills and fever. But Longarm decided a few more hours' rest wouldn't matter either after he carried Doyle's scrawny cadaver back to town to be photographed, buried, or stuffed, for all the federal government really cared. Flynn seemed to feel both crooked meat packers ought to go in the files as solved smuggling cases. But Longarm pointed out, "Texas will want to file 'em for murder for certain, and thanks to your love of noise, I ain't sure how I'd ever prove either guilty of anything else in a court of law, Lieutenant."
Flynn said stubbornly, "I did what I thought best. You said yourself he was trying to eel his way back through those springy saplings when only a small part of our volley stopped him. Didn't he say anything the federal government could use against him, Deputy Long?"
Longarm shrugged and said, "I'm still working on that. It's tough to say just what a shot-up cuss is trying to tell you when he gets to blowing bloody bubbles and a mishmash of English and Gaelic at you. Might you have anyone in your outfit who follows the drift of Ancient Irish, Lieutenant?"
Flynn thought. "Chief Tobin's people were from Galway, still considered Apache country by Queen Victoria. I could send for him, if you like."
Longarm considered, shrugged, and decided, "Maybe later. If he wasn't with us out yonder, I ain't sure I could reproduce the funny noises for him. Like I told this circus lady who swallowed swords and cussed in Gaelic, it sounds like a mishmash of Church Latin and Dutch, neither of which finds me at all fluent. Can you recall one word he yelled back when you ordered him to surrender?"
Flynn shook his head. "My people came over from Cork three generations ago. I understand my great-grandparents had been speaking English some time before they got on the boat."
The dapper Coast Guard officer seemed even smugger than usual as he added with a lofty sniff, "We Flynns arrived with shoes on. Nobody in my family was still there when the potato crop failed in '46."
Longarm allowed he'd heard a General Sullivan had led Continental troops up the Mohawk Valley during the even earlier American Revolution, and suggested they worry about old Doyle's family tree farther along, like the old hymn said.
He told Flynn and the other officers assembled in the wardroom he had other chores in town, but hoped to bring Norma Richards back that evening so she could give his deputy and their surviving prisoner a final examination. When Devereaux asked what might keep him that busy the rest of the day in town, Longarm explained, "Aside from signing a statement on two dead residents for the local law, I got to see that packing plant is sealed, with all that uncertain beef refrigerated as well as impounded. We're pretty certain now that that outbreak of Malta fever was occasioned by the milk of sick local goats. But Lord knows what all they might have smuggled in with the carcasses of Mex stock butchered and cooled inhoof-and-mouth country!"