Three punches. Which Longarm considered to be something in excess of enough.
“Now look, goddammit, if you don’t quit I’m apt t’ get a mite angry here,” Longarm said. Ducking a moment afterward underneath a looping, roundhouse right. Inexpert but intense. Real intense. It actually might have hurt if it had landed.
Bender tried a final blow. And, as the saying goes, that one took the rag off the bush.
Longarm dropped the fork he was still holding onto—the plate by then was long gone, sadly shattered and underfoot by this time—and reached out.
The chief’s momentum was already carrying him forward. Longarm decided there was no sense in wasting a perfectly good advantage. He tugged a bit here and pushed a speck there, and Bender found himself turned clean around and facing in the other direction.
Which happened to be toward the broad doorway leading from the dining room into the entry hall. And on toward the wide-open front door. Not a bad idea, Longarm thought.
At the same time that he took one flailing arm by the wrist and pulled it behind the man’s back, he also got a good grip on Bender’s collar. And lifted, scooting the man forward on tiptoes at the same time.
Worked right nicely if he did say so himself.
Bender tippy-toed right out of the Deel dining room, through the vestibule, and outside to where there wasn’t quite such a crowd. Although by this time one could reasonably say that attention had been diverted from the widow and was now centered on a couple of the grieving guests. Like, for instance, on the two who were scuffling on the porch. But then, distractions like that do tend to add spice to a wake. Or whatever this prefuneral gathering should be called. Longarm wasn’t real sure about that.
What he was sure about was that Chief Bender was hissing and fuming and sounding like a tea kettle that was about to pop its lid.
The man was so purely frazzled and furious that he wasn’t coherent. He was past any ability to form individual words and seemed to be settling for making all possible sounds, all at one and the same time.
Longarm clucked in sympathy. And propelled the man right on across the porch and over the railing.
Turned him plumb upside down in the process. And then gave him a little shove while he was airborne.
The chief of police of Addington, Texas, landed head first in Jessica Deel’s lilacs. About the only thing that could have made it any better—in Longarm’s admittedly prejudiced opinion—would have been if Mrs. Deel went in for native cacti instead of flowery things. But then, after all, a fellow can’t have everything in life. Quite.
Bender landed with a yelp and a great wallowing and thrashing, hung suspended there for a few moments, and then with a crackling and crashing of greenery, sank near out of sight into a bed of dying hollyhocks. It was, Longarm thought, entertainment of the first water.
J. Michael Bender, on the other hand, did not seem amused. The man came sputtering and roaring out of the shrubbery—upright, this time—and looked for half a moment like he was going to make the ultimate mistake and grab for his revolver.
Longarm wasn’t one to find fun in playing with guns. Particularly when they were wielded by irrational assholes. Which Bender was acting to a fare-thee-well.
Bender’s hand had a chance to get just the least bit twitchy, and the next thing he knew, he was looking into the huge, gaping muzzle—only forty-five hundredths of an inch across by careful measure, but at least a yard wide when seen from Bender’s unique angle of view—of Longarm’s Colt.
The chief dropped any notions about appealing to Sam Colt for equality in action and went more than a little pale.
“You … you … I will get you for this, Long. Either get out of my town and out of my jurisdiction or so help me, I’ll … I’ll …”
“If you got a complaint, Chief, you best file it with my boss. I’ll give one o’ your people the address t’ make sure you get it right. But don’t make the mistake O’ trying me, mister. I won’t take but so much. You hear me? Any more stupidity like this an’ I’ll put you in irons for assault on a federal officer. Guaranteed. What’s more, I’ll make it stick. There’s federal judges that owe me some favors, an’ for you I’d call my markers in.”
That was a lie but what the hell, Bender didn’t know it.
“An’ don’t you forget, Chief. Your jurisdiction, such as it is, stops at the city limits. There ain’t no place in this whole country that’s outa mine. You get my meaning? Now get the hell outa here before you go an’ do something you can’t call back after.”
Longarm waited until the chief departed, leaving his dignity behind, then followed. He didn’t think this would work out to be a real good time now to try and interview the widow Deel. Those sure as hell had been good beans, though.
Chapter 31
“Must talk. Be in your room 7:30.” Longarm looked at the sloppy scrawl on the note the desk clerk had handed him. He did not recognize the handwriting but figured it pretty much had to be Amos who wanted to meet.
That being the case he first checked his Ingersoll to make sure of the time, then went down the block to find a saloon where he could lay in a bottle of corn whiskey. He had a little rye left in his bag, but why waste the good stuff on a man who preferred spiked dishwater to the nectar of Maryland’s finest distillers?
Well before the appointed hour—he didn’t need any supper thanks to the late and huge lunch he’d had at the Deel house—Longarm was in his hotel room.
Promptly at 7:30 there was a soft tap-tap-tap on the hotel room door.
“Amos?”
The tapping sounded again.
Longarm swung the door open. And without much in the way of either warning or preamble found his tongue being sucked out of his mouth. The widow Jane Webster Sproul had arrived.
“I’m so glad you got my message,” she said when she paused for breath. Then she grabbed him again and put a lip lock on so hard, he was afraid she would bruise her tonsils on his front teeth. The woman was nothing if not energetic.
“Whoa, Janie, what’s this all about?”
She grinned at him. And began flinging clothes toward the four corners of the room. “This, sweetie. I just couldn’t stand being without you. Not for another minute.”
Longarm didn’t have the heart to tell her that he was already too worn out from his morning of playing with Clarice to possibly be able to get it up again. Maybe not for days to come, judging from the way he felt right now.
And in truth he couldn’t much claim to being interested in Jane’s floppy, flabby figure. Not after being with a slim and vibrant little slip of a thing like Clarice. The differences between the two were just too startling to ignore.
Besides, dammit, he was tired. He didn’t want to be the object, no matter how affectionately, of some crazy woman’s fantasies. And besides that
…
Too late. Janie was naked by then—and if he ever wanted an enemy for life he was sure he knew how to get one: just let a woman, any woman, get naked and offer herself to him, then reject the offer; that would do the job all right—and she was on her knees, busily unfastening the buttons at his fly.
Longarm smothered a sigh and let the fool woman go ahead with what she was doing, She would find out for herself soon enough that she was pursuing a lost cause. He just plain didn’t have anything left down there to give her.
“Oh. Beautiful. This is just so pretty, sweetie. So nice.”
She had his shorts down around his ankles now, leaving only a middling growth of pubic hair in place to defend his modesty.
“If I could paint, honey, I’d do a drawing of this thing,” she cooed. “Better yet I wish I could sculpt.” She laughed. “That way I’d have a little something to fall back on whenever you weren’t around.”