Someone must have warned Jack Ramey while Longarm had been momentarily detained in the gunsmith’s shop, because the room looked empty and the little killer was primed and ready to go to war. He had taken refuge behind the Champion Saloon’s long, pine bar, and his first two bullets thundered across the room and ripped apart the swinging bat-wing doors right where Longarm’s body should have been.
Longarm’s first shot was wide, and the back-bar mirror exploded in a shower of glass. Ramey screamed and dropped behind the bar before Longarm could unleash another bullet. The man popped back into view a few feet away and fired twice more. Longarm’s next bullet plugged a case of beer, and foamy brew spewed out of the keg.
“You’re under arrest!” Longarm shouted, knocking over a card table and diving behind it for cover. throw your gun out and stand up with your hands over your head!”
Ramey didn’t answer, but Longarm could hear the killer scuttling over the shattered mirror glass. He heard Ramey knock something over, and then realized that the little gunman was making an escape through the back of the saloon. “Damn!” Longarm hissed, jumping to his feet.
He was just about to start forward when a sudden movement caught the corner of his eye. Longarm threw himself at the sawdust floor just as the twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun ripped across the interior of the saloon. Had Longarm been ten more feet away from the blast, its pattern would have shredded him. But he was close enough that the pattern had no time to expand. Unleashing a slug from the muzzle of his revolver into the gut of the bartender was easy.
The bartender, a fat man with muttonchop whiskers, gaped down at Longarm. His smoking shotgun quivered in his fists and his pudgy trigger finger jerked spasmodically.
“It’s empty,” Longarm explained as he climbed back to his feet and the bartender’s glazing eyes rolled up into his forehead. “Sorry.”
The bartender pitched forward, impaling himself on his shotgun. He grunted, then rolled off the weapon and crashed facedown into the sawdust.
Longarm darted around the bar and ran almost blindly through a storage room. When he burst out into the alley, he caught a glimpse of Jack Ramey as the man rounded a corner.
Longarm went after the little assassin. He had a good seventy yards to make up, but his legs were much longer than Ramey’s and Longarm knew he was a very fast runner. It took him less than ten seconds to reach the corner and when he rounded it, Ramey fired another bullet from across the street.
Longarm saved his remaining bullets. He put his head down and charged across the street. Ramey’s next bullet nicked his sleeve, but Longarm didn’t even break stride. Ramey turned and vanished between two buildings, running for his life.
Longarm plunged into the dim corridor between the buildings. He thought that Ramey might be out of bullets, but there was always that hideout gun and maybe even another Colt revolver to worry about. As he neared the end of the corridor, Longarm skidded to a halt.
“Ramey!” he shouted, unwilling to burst around another corner and risk getting shot at close range. “You’re under arrest! I’m a United States marshal!”
“You are a dead sonofabitch!” Ramey shouted.
Longarm took a deep breath. His lungs were pumping and he batted sawdust from his sweaty face. “Come on out!”
“Go to hell!”
Longarm knew that Ramey wasn’t going to surrender. Why should he do that only to face a certain death from the hangman? This one, Longarm knew, was going to be tough.
He crouched low and then removed his hat. Holding it at arm’s length, he slipped the edge of its brim around the corner of the building. Ramey took the bait. The distinctive sound of a derringer blanketed the alley. Longarm knew that the derringer might have two shots, but he threw caution to the wind and jumped out into the alley to see Ramey trying to run backward in full retreat.
“Halt!” Longarm shouted.
Ramey fired again, the derringer coughing up its last misspent bullet. Longarm raised his pistol as Jack Ramey turned to run, and when he fired, he shot low. Ramey screamed as Longarm’s slug struck him in the back of the thigh. Ramey’s leg buckled and he toppled to the dirt, then jumped up and began to hobble toward the next corner.
“Halt!”
When Ramey cursed and kept moving, Longarm coolly shot the man’s other leg out from under him. Ramey’s scream filled the alley and he collapsed, spitting curses.
Longarm trotted over beside the fallen killer. Ramey was writhing around on his stomach and seemed to be mindless in his pain. But when Longarm grabbed his arm and tried to turn him over, the little gunman had one last card to play and took a vicious swipe at Longarm with a short-bladed pocket knife.
“You’re harder to finish than a damned rattlesnake,” Longarm grunted, after jumping back with the knee of his pants sliced open.
Ramey tried to lunge at him with the pocket knife and Longarm, having had more than enough from this little assassin, simply booted Ramey in the side of the head. Ramey grunted and his body quivered into stillness.
Longarm searched the man and found that he was carrying almost a thousand dollars cash. “Blood money, I’ll bet,” Longarm muttered, taking the knife and then the empty derringer and Colt.
He used Ramey’s pretty red silk bandanna as a tourniquet on the man’s right leg, and Ramey’s gunbelt served the same purpose for the left leg. But that didn’t completely stop the bleeding.
“I’d like nothing better than to let you bleed to death in this alley on account of what you did to Kane and Ward, but I’m going to make sure that you tell me the whole story and that we get to the bottom of who paid you all this blood money,” Longarm told the still figure.
Longarm heard a commotion behind him, and spun around to see men crowded at the entrance to this alleyway. “Hey!” he yelled. “Come give me a hand!”
They hurried forward, and Longarm ordered them to pick Jack Ramey up and carry him over to the jail.
“Don’t he need a doctor awful bad first?” a puffing man said as they carried Ramey back to the main street.
“I suppose,” Longarm said, noting the condition of Ramey’s legs. “Probably at least one of his leg bones is shattered. Dr. Blake is going to hate me for all the work I’m bringing him, but someone had better go find him anyway if he’s already left the jail.”
As it turned out, Thaddeus Blake had not yet left the jail and the bodies of Marshal Kane and Deputy Ward.
“He the one that shot ‘em?” the doctor asked when they carried the unconscious and badly wounded gunman into the jail and laid him on a straw mattress.
“Yeah,” Longarm said, “that’s Jack Ramey.”
“Thought it might be,” the doctor said. “He never showed his face much around Bodie. Spent all his time in the Champion Saloon, when he wasn’t off raising hell.”
“His hellin’ days are over,” Longarm said. “And so are those of the bartender who works at the Champion.”
Blake, who had been about to tear open the pants leg so that he could get at the bullet wounds, looked up suddenly. “You mean you killed another one!”
“No,” Longarm said, “he was the first man I’ve killed in Bodie. This little bastard is the one that killed Marshal Kane and his deputy, remember?”
“Yeah,” the doctor said. “I just meant … well, I just meant that a lot of people have gotten lead poisoning today.”
“I know,” Longarm said, his mind turning to Megan as he started toward the door, “and a lot more could get the fatal disease before things finally improve.”
“Hey!”
Longarm turned at the doorway, suddenly feeling old and tired and in need of a drink. “Yeah?”
“What do we do with Ramey if I can keep him from bleeding to death?”
Longarm thought about that for a moment, then said, “I don’t think you have to do anything, Doc. I mean, it’s not like he is going to get up and walk out of here.”