“He’s big, strong, and a bully,” Longarm said. “He tried to bully me, but I called his bluff.”
“Sure, but he wasn’t bluffing, Custis. Dean is tough, and he’d have shot you through the gut if given half the chance.”
“I knew that,” Longarm said. “And that’s why I didn’t give him the chance. I hit him first, not after he’d knocked my teeth in. And when I hit him, I made the first blow count. I hit him as hard as I could where I knew it would do the most damage.”
“You booted the hell out of him, too,” Randy said.
“A man can break his hands up real easy on someone’s head or even their face. If he breaks knuckles, he’s in trouble because the pain is so bad he can’t use that hand to fight. And if that is his gun hand, he’s in double trouble. So you see, I used a boot not so much to hurt him as to avoid damaging my hands and putting myself at someone else’s mercy.”
“It makes sense,” Randy said. “So you’re saying the key to winning is to hit hard and hit first.”
“That’s right. When you throw that first punch, don’t telegraph it either. Don’t loop the punch and swing from the rafters or your bootstraps.”
Longarm doubled up his fists and demonstrated. He moved closer to Randy and feigned two quick blows to the man’s gut, then brought an uppercut up to the point of the kid’s jaw that traveled less than six inches.
“Quick, hard, and short punches that start from close to the body and not somewhere out in thin air,” he advised.
“And what happens if you get hit and go down?” Randy asked.
“Roll and keep rolling,” Longarm said. “Get under something and try to come out on the other side. And if you’re pretty sure you’re going to lose the fight, either punch for the throat or kick for the groin or grab ahold of a club and start swinging.”
“You’ve got an answer for everything.”
“No, I don’t,” Longarm admitted, “and I never pick fights the way that Dean picked one with me. I always try to avoid them, but if I have to fight, I fight to win and I don’t worry about the Marquis of Queensberry’s rules. In a bar-room fight, anything goes, and I mean anything short of killing your opponent unless he is obviously trying to kill you.”
“My father and Clyde are hard fighters,” the kid said with no small measure of pride. “My father may look real long in the tooth, but he can whip any man in Helldorado with the possible exception of my brother, who’d never fight him.”
“That’s good,” Longarm said. “I’ve seen sons whip their fathers, but it’s a bad thing and there’s never any good can come out of it, unless the father was one of those sonsabitches that just liked to beat his kids.”
“My father never beat me, but he’ll slap Desiree around a little if she gets mouthy.”
“That’d be a shame,” Longarm said, “as pretty as she is.”
They talked for a little while longer, and then Randy told Longarm to pack his gear over to one of the hotels where a room was waiting. “It ain’t much, but the roof isn’t burned out and the rain won’t leak through it even in a bad storm.”
“That’s good enough for me.”
Randy started to leave, but then he said, “You any good with explosives?”
Longarm blinked. “What makes you ask a question like that?”
“Just wondering,” the kid said. “Are you?”
“I’ve handled dynamite before, and I know how to set and light a fuse.”
“Good,” Randy said. “My father will be happy to hear that.”
“Randy?”
The kid turned, and Longarm sauntered over to him. “Is he thinking of a bank, or another train?”
Randy’s jaw dropped. “What do you know about that?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” Longarm said, “but it’s easy enough to figure that your father isn’t looking for me to use dynamite in the mines, now is he?”
Randy started to say something, then changed his mind and clamped his mouth shut before he walked away.
Longarm moved into a smaller hotel whose exterior rock walls were scorched and blackened. There were eight rooms on the second floor, and Longarm was given one already occupied by a tall, thin young outlaw named Eddie Tabor. Tabor had a jagged knife scar running diagonally across his face. His lower lip was badly scarred and twisted, making him look as if he’d just eaten something very, very bitter. He had thin brown hair and bad teeth. Even worse, he did not look you directly in the eye when you spoke to him, but sort of shifted his gaze from side to side.
“I hope you’re not Dean’s best friend and are planning on cutting my throat tonight,” Longarm said, only half kidding as he spread his bedroll out and collapsed to take his ease.
“The only one you have to worry about is Dean,” Tabor said. “The man didn’t have a friend. He’d whipped most all of us and he had coming what you did to him.”
“Glad to hear you say that.”
“But he’ll gun for you,” Tabor warned. “I expect he’s hanging out somewhere on a rooftop or in an alley waiting to get you in his gunsights. Best thing for you to do would be to kill him first.”
“You mean just hunt him down?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” Longarm said. “In the meantime, what does everyone do around here?”
“What are you driving at?”
“Well,” Longarm said innocently, “I don’t see much going on in the way of people making a living.”
Tabor looked at him strangely. “We make a fine living. Hasn’t Mr. Killion explained things?”
“Some,” Longarm lied. “You know, about the trains and such, but I still expected people to keep busy.”
“We do keep busy,” Tabor explained. “There’s always some of us out scouting up opportunities.”
Longarm understood Tabor to mean that members of the gang were constantly searching for other banks, trains, stages, and individuals to rob, and then reporting their findings to Matthew Killion.
“How many jobs do you do a month?”
“Enough to live right,” Tabor said. “We got good whiskey to drink, as much as we want, and we got some whores, though they’re pretty worn out and not a damn bit lively unless you start to pinchin’ ‘em when they act too lazy.”
“I see.”
Tabor licked his lips and his eyes grew bright. “Some of them whores are from Mexico, and we’ve got some ex-prison girls too. Ones that have been in real trouble.”
“Nevada prison girls, right?” Longarm asked, suddenly becoming nervous.
“Yeah, I expect. One named Lucy is from Arizona, though. Seems to me she was once in that same Yuma prison that they locked you up in. Hell, you might even know her!”
“I doubt it,” Longarm said. “They kept the women and the men inmates as far away from each other as possible and we never hardly even saw one another. Most of the women in Yuma were as hard as nails.”
“Lucy is hard, but she’s also handsome. You don’t pinch her, though. If you do that you’re liable to get a knife shoved up your ass … if she don’t first whack off your balls.”
“I’ll remember that,” Longarm said.
“Good thing if you do.” Tabor was leaving. “I don’t like to hurt the girls anyway. And as for Lucy, she just sort of scares the piss outa me. I’d rather meet up with a cougar in a cave than Lucy in her bed.”
“I’ll stay away from her,” Longarm vowed.
“Best you do,” Tabor advised as he went out the door.
Chapter 14
That evening, Longarm went outside and headed across the street for the saloon. He was hungry and looking for a meal as well as a little sociable conversation. Not that Longarm had any illusions about making friends with anyone who’d ride with Killion’s gang, because he was determined to bring the whole lot of them crashing down. But in his experience, men with whiskey in their bellies tended to open up and reveal secrets that they would never speak about when completely sober. With any luck, Longarm hoped he might even get one of Killion’s men to spill his guts about that big Donner Pass train robbery.