Free Longarm and the Sins of Laughing Lyle (9781101612101) by Tabor Evans

build if they didn’t think the town they were buildin’ it in had a future. If they didn’t think the town wouldn’t be
nowhere
for long.” Longarm looked around at the lushly if sparsely appointed room, looking past the aged, ragged edges, including the faded quality of the Oriental rug at his feet and the faint coffee stains on the tablecloth before him. “If they didn’t think the town would someday be
somewhere.
You get my drift?”
    Butter leaned forward, slid his chair up closer to the table, and lifted the whiskey shot the serving girl had just set on the table before him, alongside a frothy, butterscotch-colored ale. He glanced over his left shoulder, then sipped the whiskey, showed his teeth, and said, “See those three men over there?”
    Longarm glanced at the three hunkered over their plates and conversing in dry tones, and nodded.
    â€œRailroad surveyors,” Butter said, keeping his voice down. “On a survey run for some third-rate railroad that
might
be laid fifteen miles south of here, along Sandy Wash, to connect Albaquerk to the mining camps in the Black Range.”
    â€œI’m with you so far.”
    â€œAbout five years ago we had a survey crew moving through Nowhere, and the word was that we were about to have a major line run through here—a line that would connect Albaquerk to us and the mining camps that were just then cropping up in the Organ Range. The line would then head off to the southwest and reach all the way down to Phoenix in the Arizona Territory. So, after all was said and done, Nowhere—this little joke of a town that started out as a cavalry outpost twenty-two years ago and never grew into much since but a supply camp for a handful of small ranches—would be connected to the entire country and the whole Pacific Ocean!”
    Butter grinned exaggeratedly, eyes flashing, as he stretched his arms wide, as though to indicate the breadth of the entire planet.
    â€œBut it never happened,” Longarm said, tapping his cheroot against an ashtray.
    â€œNope, it sure didn’t.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œNo one found enough gold or silver to make the mining camps in the Organ Range profitable, and the rail line that had such big plans and got us all steamed up for wealth and prosperity fell apart on account of a bunch of crooks in their main office in Kansas City. Several o’ them mucky-mucks were hauled off to jail. And Nowhere . . .”
    Butter scowled down at his shot glass, threw back the rest of the whiskey, and set the glass back on the table, turning it broodingly between his fingers. “Well, the name was just so damn fittin’ that we kept it. Now the only surveyors we see through here are workin’ for a little narrow-gauge spur line to the south, and those fellas just remind us what could have been.”
    â€œSomewhere,” Longarm said.
    â€œYou got it.” Butter laughed gratingly. “So we make a joke out of the name. Why not laugh about it?”
    He removed his arms from the table, as did Longarm, for the serving girl had just brought a steaming plate of elk roast for each. She took their beer glasses away for refilling, and the two men dug into the food hungrily.
    They’d gotten only halfway through the meal before Longarm saw Benji Vickers’s broad, bulky frame fill the doorway that opened onto the hotel’s lobby. The big man held his age-silvered bowler in his paws up close to his chest, kneading the brim uncertainly, fidgeting and looking around before he moved forward into the dining room, setting each foot down and wincing, reminding Longarm of nothing so much as the bull in the proverbial china shop.
    Butter heard the big deputy’s heavy footfalls and looked up, chewing. “What is it, Benji?”
    Benji stopped before the table, shifting his deep-set, anxious gaze from the town marshal to Longarm and back again before saying