“He’s their lookout,” Longarm explained.
“How did you know he was here? I couldn’t see anything back here.”
“Hell, I couldn’t either,” Longarm admitted. “That’s what ears are for. Mighty useful in the dark, I heard him moving around.”
Henry stepped over the guard and paused. “Now where?”
“There’s light showing behind that cellar door down there. That must be the place.”
“And if it isn’t?”
“Then don’t shoot nobody. We can always apologize later.”
Henry frowned and dragged a revolver from his pocket. Henry did not normally carry a weapon. It was not that he couldn’t use one. He could, and could use it well when he had to, but it was not his habit. They’d had to stop in Billy Vail’s office after they left the U.S. attorney’s offices so Henry could open the marshal’s safe and arm himself. Longarm drew his own ever-present Colt and edged forward. He wanted to get inside the cellar hideaway before that guard woke up and shouted an alarm.
“Ready?” he asked over his shoulder.
“I hope you are right about this,” Henry said.
“That’s two of us. All right now. Stay with me.” Longarm inched down the stone steps and listened outside the closed door for a moment. He could hear voices inside, but could not make out what was being said.
Longarm raised his leg high, boot heel first, and kicked the door just above the lock.
Wood splintered and gave way, and the door slammed open, flooding the steps and alley with yellow lamplight.
Longarm bounded inside, Colt held at the ready.
The sight that greeted him there was enough to make a man’s blood run cold.
Chapter 38
Why, these good folks—there seemed to be four of them at least, three men and a very pretty young woman—had themselves a dandy little factory set up in this rundown cellar beneath a crumbling tenement.
Not that there was anything wrong with that in itself. Longarm appreciated enterprise as much as the next fellow. The problem was with the product, not the effort. These assholes were making bombs. Lots of bombs.
One sweeping glance around the place showed two kegs of blasting powder and a box of high-grade dynamite. A workbench was hard against one wall. Its surface was covered with bits of this and that, which appeared to be bombs either already built or in the process of being built.
Some of them looked ordinary and innocent. Until Longarm noticed fuse cord poking out of them. There were glass bottles that had been converted into bombs. Plain old red bricks that had been hollowed out and stuffed with gunpowder, again with detonating caps and fuses attached, even two china dolls with bright blue eyes and golden yellow yarn for hair … and their bellies apparently full of death and destruction.
Longarm felt more than half sick when he took it all in. These sons of bitches were planning some serious mayhem, and God knows how many people—perhaps even small children judging from those dolls—were the potential targets of these animals.
“United States deputy marshals!” Longarm announced. “Move, damn you, an’ you’re dead!”
All four obligingly threw their hands up and stopped where they were, which was immediately in front of the workbench.
Behind them, closer to the door where Longarm and Henry now were, he could see several wooden crates partially filled with completed bombs.
All told, he guessed, there must have been forty, fifty bombs either already built or in various stages of assembly. Whatever these people planned, they were damned ambitious about it.
It was the woman who recovered her wits and spoke first. By that time Longarm already noted that Carl Beamon had been right; she was mighty nice-looking, if a bit on the skinny side. She was extraordinarily pale, like she rarely allowed sunlight to reach her, and had huge, liquid eyes. Her hair was black and long and glossy, although this woman—Longarm guessed she had barely reached her twenties—in no other way could ever remind him of Spotted Fawn or any other Indian maiden. The Indian women Longarm had known in the past were earthy, laughing creatures, filled with a zest for life and living that Longarm admired and appreciated.
This one—there was something about her. Something that made him think of vipers and scorpions. Something deadly and evil. He doubted she knew how to laugh or how to enjoy life. Take it perhaps, but not appreciate or enjoy it.
She turned and said something to her companions in a language Longarm neither knew nor recognized.
“I said don’t move,” Longarm told them firmly.
“Don’t say nothing either. You’re all under arrest on a charge of murder and-“
“You have no authority to arrest us,” the young woman said in a cool, perfectly controlled voice.
“I’m a United States deputy marshal and-“
“We do not recognize the United States or any other government,” she said.
“That’s okay. You don’t have to, honey. I reckon it’ll be enough that the government recognizes you.”
“Do not call me by any of your disgusting pet names. May we put our hands down now? It is tiring to stand so long like this.” She continued to look at Longarm, but said something more in her own language, and the men began to fidget and shift from foot to foot.
“Stay just like you are, each of you,” Longarm told them.
The woman barked out a sharp command, but none of the men moved. She repeated it, whatever it was, and looked plenty annoyed that they weren’t doing whatever it was she told them.
“Longarm, I think we better put these people in manacles, then call for the local police to take them off our hands. We need to inventory everything here and start the paperwork on them,” Henry told him.
“Yeah, I s’pose. Look, Henry, you go back out in the alley. Put some cuffs on that guy up there to make sure he don’t cause any trouble, then go see if you can scare up some Denver cops to help us clean this mess up.”
“Are you sure you won’t need me?”
“None of us here is goin’ anyplace until you get back,” Longarm told him.
“I won’t be long.”
Longarm heard Henry take the steps two at a time behind him. Then he used his left hand to reach into his pocket for a cheroot. The Colt revolver in his right hand did not waver. “I want the four of you to move just a couple feet to my right. Over there by that wall, please.” He gestured with the barrel of the .44 to enforce the suggestion. “But slow, please. Everybody go nice an’ slow an’ nobody will have to get hurt.”
The man on the right moved obediently in the direction Longarm wanted.
“That’s fine. Now you.” Longarm motioned with his revolver again and the second man, a young fella with greasy hair and a scrawny, wispy little excuse for a mustache, began sidling away from the workbench too.
“You’re next, lady. Slow an’ easy if you please.”
The woman said something and seemed to stumble, then in a blur of motion grabbed at one of the lamps hung on the wall beside the work bench.
“Oh, shit,” Longarm had time to mutter.
The woman had the lamp in one hand and a brick in the other, except the brick was no innocent chunk of fired red clay, but a completed bomb. Longarm could see the fuse cord dangling limp out of one end of it.
And he could imagine the sort of damage a bomb like that would do when it went off. Not only would there be the force of the explosion to contend with, there would also be a virtual storm of shards of brick flying in all directions, as deadly effective as the splinters of steel shrapnel from an artillery shell. Anyone within probably ten yards or so was sure to be injured at the very least, and anyone close to the blast would surely be killed.
“I don’t know what you think you’re gonna accomplish with that thing, lady, but let me tell you something. If you think you can bluff me …”
“Bluff, lawman? I do not bluff, never,” the woman hissed.
One of the men said something to her, and she gave him a short, sneering answer. The man went pale.