Free Longarm on the Fever Coast by Tabor Evans

wants you dead. He offered me five hundred Yanqui dollars to have my own muchachos kill you. When I politely declined he raised the offer to a thousand."
    Longarm whistled softly. "He must really want me dead. I've arrested many a gunslick who'd kill a man for less'n a hundred!"
    La Bruja lay back on her chaise as if weary of the whole thing as she replied, "Not El Brazo Largo. I understand you got one of them on that steamer last night and killed the other one here in Corpus Christi this morning."
    Longarm shook his head. "A frisky pup of a Ranger put the last fatal round in him. I was out to take him alive. I had an educated hunch they had to be working for somebody higher up, and I'd be much obliged if you'd tell me who that might be, seeing you surely know, senora."
    La Bruja smiled reproachfully and sighed. "It was very cruel of God to leave us so far from Him and so close to el gringo. As I was just saying to that other one, your people and mine do not speak the same language even when they are speaking the same language. He was under the impression I was a mere criminal because I am required to bend just a few of your Yanqui laws in my efforts to fund political struggles in my own country. When I told him he would have to employ some other means, we parted on mutually agreeable terms. It would be foolish for wolves to fight in a world of sheep, and he knew none of us would betray his identity to anyone. I don't think he expected me to warn you like this, of course. But please do not ask me to tell you any more about him."
    Longarm nodded soberly. "I'm commencing to follow your drift. You don't aim to have either the local Anglo underworld or my old pal El Gato sore at you. So I'll just thank you for the warning and see what I can work out on my own."
    But as he leaned his weight forward to rise, La Bruja sat up some more and insisted, "You can't be seen on the streets of Corpus Christi in broad daylight! It's true, as your enemies say, you may be on the alert for typical Anglo riders. But an enemy clever enough to think a chico mejicano might have better luck ought to be able to hire other types you might not take for assassins until too late!"
    "The gang's mostly dressed sort of cow, eh?" Longarm mused as he perched undecided on the edge of that low hassock.
    To which La Bruja replied with a knowing laugh, "Do not try to get it out of me with a, how you say, process of elimination. I have been questioned by serious policemen and have the scars to prove it. Nobody gets anything out of me that I do wish them to know."
    Longarm nodded soberly. "I was sort of wondering about the dim lighting in here, senora. I said I understood the bind you were in. I ain't going to try and beat the identity of that murderous pendejo out of a lady who's offered me food, shelter, and such pleasant company. But I got my own fish to fry, and whether we savvy the same old lingo or not, another lady they shot the other night in my place was pretty as well as innocent. She'd never done them a lick of harm and it's my duty to see they're punished."
    La Bruja insisted, "But the men who killed her in your stateroom have been punished! You shot them both yourself! The people they might have been working for never ordered them to kill anyone but you. Can't you see that?"
    Longarm smiled thinly. "I see this mastermind told you more than I might have about our earlier transactions. If he wanted me dead before I gunned a couple of his boys, he must have thought I was already after him. So why can't we say who he might be?"
    La Bruja laughed lightly, a sort of surprising sound, and archly replied, "You are as clever as they say you are. But it won't work. I will tell you frankly, it does not matter to me and mine whether you are on one Anglo's trail or another's. I only wish to see you leave Corpus Christi alive and well, should anyone south of the border ever ask. As I said, it is still broad daylight outside. You will stay here until dark. After