Duck, You Sucker!
Something dark appeared on Longarm’s right, ahead of the train but moving toward Longarm fast. It was a tunnel carved into the side of the mountain.
Longarm, hunkered low atop the coach car, stared in awe—could he get this lucky?—as the dark tunnel mouth flew toward him and the day coach he lay prone upon, both boots dangling down over the side. The peak of the arching portal was only about four feet above the coach car roof.
Longarm looked at Rio Hayes and smiled.
Hayes had just gained his feet and grabbed another bowie knife from somewhere on his scruffy person, and had turned toward Longarm, a savage scowl that, coupled with his broken jaw hanging askew, made his entire face look horsey and crooked and even more demented than usual.
Hayes hadn’t seen the tunnel when Longarm had. But now he saw that gaping, black portal rushing toward him like a gigantic black bird from some hellish underworld intending to scoop him up in its stygian wings.
Hayes had about one second to widen his eyes in awe and dismay before the tunnel turned the world dark. About one eye wink later, following a clipped scream, Longarm heard a resounding, crunching thump!
Just like that, Rio Hayes was gone.
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 Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis 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 action-packed series by the creators of Longarm! The rousing adventures of the most brutal gang of cutthroats ever assembled—Quantrill’s Raiders.
DIAMONDBACK by Guy Brewer
Dex Yancey is Diamondback, a Southern gentleman turned con man when his brother cheats him out of the family fortune. Ladies love him. Gamblers hate him. But nobody pulls one over on Dex…
WILDGUN by Jack Hanson
The blazing adventures of mountain man Will Barlow—from the creators of Longarm!
TEXAS TRACKER by Tom Calhoun
J.T. Law: the most relentless—and dangerous—manhunter in all Texas. Where sheriffs and posses fail, he’s the best man to bring in the most vicious outlaws—for a price.
JOVE BOOKS, NEW YORK
Chapter 1
The deputy U.S. marshal known to friend and foe as Longarm took a final drag from his three-for-a-nickel cheroot. He blew the smoke out his nose and then tossed the cigar away on the hot wind blowing past the stony escarpment he was perched on, in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado Territory.
He drew the flat brim of his flat-crowned, coffee-brown Stetson down low on his sun-leathered forehead and tightened his grip on the forestock of his Winchester ’73.
Longarm stared down at the roofs of the train cars passing about fifteen feet below him. The train was moving only about ten, maybe twelve miles an hour as it climbed the steep slope from his left to his right. Still, one misstep, and a second later he’d be rolling off the train and into the deep, salmon-colored canyon yawning on the far side of the tracks.
“Billy, you don’t pay me near enough,” the big lawman in the tobacco tweed suit grumbled aloud, though not so loudly that the outlaws he knew to be aboard the train could hear him.
The Billy of topic, of course, was Longarm’s boss, Chief Marshal Billy Vail of Denver’s First District Court, who no doubt at this moment was safely ensconced behind his cluttered desk in the Federal Building on Denver’s Colfax Avenue, not far from the Mint.
Billy’s prissy male secretary was probably contentedly playing his typing machine in the outer office. The pretty, young, unattached girls of Denver were likely strolling along the cinder-paved streets around Union Station in their summer-weight frocks, breasts jostling enticingly against their stays and trusses, cheeks rouged from the pure, fresh, high-altitude air and sun.
“Well, let’s unleash the wolves,” Longarm said and stepped off the stony escarpment into thin air.
The roof of the second-to-last car in the combination widened beneath his boots, rising so quickly that he could clearly see several rusty rivets in the car’s tin roof a second before his heels struck the roof with a heavy, tinny thump! Longarm threw his free arm and rifle out to each side for balance, spreading his boots a little more than shoulder-width apart.
He sucked a sharp, anxious breath.
Had the rough landing been heard inside the car?
He got his answer a second later, when a funnel-brimmed hat appeared just beyond the front of the car, on the car’s right side, where the ladder must have been. As the hat rose higher, a face appeared beneath it—a broad, flat, tan face with blue eyes and a shaggy, red-blond mustache drooping down over the man’s mouth. The man’s right cheek had a deep, puckered scar, identifying him instantly as Oklahoma Charlie De Paul, who’d gotten the scar when a Lipan Apache had pierced it with an arrow back when Charlie had first started running guns along the Arizona-Mexico border.
When Charlie’s eyes found Longarm, they snapped wide in mutual recognition. Longarm flung himself onto his butt and spun, raising his rifle at the same time that Oklahoma Charlie brought a pistol to bear.
“Fuck you, Longarm!”
The pistol flashed and roared, the slug screeching past Longarm’s left ear as the rangy lawman flinched and then yelled, “I take it that mean you don’t intend on givin’ yourself up, eh, Charlie!”
The outlaw opened his mouth to respond at the same time that he laid his pistol’s sights on Longarm again, squinting down the barrel. Longarm lined up his own sights, squeezed the Winchester’s trigger. As the stock kicked back against his right shoulder, he saw the top of Charlie’s head turn red.
Charlie’s revolver stabbed flames skyward. His hat blew away in the wind a half second before Charlie’s head slipped abruptly down out of sight below the roof of the jostling train car. At the same time, a roar of panic erupted in the combination’s three passenger cars, including the one beneath Longarm.
A woman screamed. A baby cried.
Beneath the din, Longarm heard someone he assumed was one of the outlaws yell, “Son of a bitchin’ law!”
“On the roof!” another outlaw shouted.
Longarm gained his feet and moved toward the front of the car.
A pistol cracked twice in the car beneath him, causing another woman to scream and two ragged holes to appear in the tin roof about two feet behind Longarm. A hatted head appeared at the rear end of the car, and the black-bearded train robber flared his nostrils and brought up a Henry rifle, planting the brass maw on Longarm, who, planting his feet against the pitch and sway of the coach roof, fired his Winchester twice from his right hip.
The outlaw triggered his Henry into the stone cliff on the train’s right side before falling back off the ladder and out of Longarm’s field of vision.
More women were screaming now in the cars beneath Longarm. More tykes were bawling. Men were shouting. Someone, probably a sky pilot, was reciting scripture from his Bible in a loud but dull monotone that only slightly betrayed the precariousness of his situation.