Free Longarm and the Banker's Daughter (9781101613375) by Tabor Evans Page A

off.”
    â€œOh, God—it’s Gunn and Cruz, isn’t it?”
    â€œI said shut up!”
    â€œFuck you, you bastard!” she whispered.
    â€œI’m dyin’ over here,” Ryan said in a low, mild voice. “If anyone cares . . .”
    â€œKeep him quiet, too,” Longarm told Lacy. “If you have to beat him over the head with a log.”
    Longarm opened the door wider and stepped out quickly. Drawing the door closed behind him, he put his back to the cabin wall right of it, hoping the wall’s shadow concealed him. He stood there looking around and listening for several minutes, hearing nothing more than a couple of the gunmen’s horses nickering and milling inside their corral.
    Cautiously, Longarm moved out away from the cabin and started walking across the clearing. The moon had angled off behind the mountains to the west, and the clearing was dark. He held his Colt straight out in front of him, wishing he had his rifle, wondering if Gunn’s men were out here somewhere, maybe surrounding the cabin.
    If they were, they were damn quiet.
    Twice he paused and dropped to a knee, tension rippling up and down his spine as he looked around carefully. Both times, however, he decided that it had been some burrowing creature rattling dead leaves and brush in the black forest around him that had stopped him.
    When he reached the edge of the forest, he continued into the gap in the trees that marked where the trail entered the clearing, and found his grullo standing where he’d left it. But the horse’s tail was arched slightly, and it was twitching its ears. As he walked up, the horse lurched with a start and whinnied.
    â€œShhh!” Longarm said, grabbing the bridle and placing a calming hand on the horse’s sleek neck. “Easy, boy. Easy!”
    He slipped the bit back into the horse’s mouth, then buckled the belly strap. That seemed to settle the horse some. It stood, raking air in and out of its big lungs like a bellows, and its eyes were shiny, but it didn’t look like it was going to kick up another fuss, so Longarm stepped away from it quietly. He moved back out to the trail he’d followed here. In the shadow of a tamarack, he stood still, looking around, pricking his ears.
    His breath jetted from his nostrils, waftng like smoke in the frosty air.
    There was a flash from the darkness off the trail’s opposite side and at a slightly higher elevation. As the slug slammed into the tree about six inches above Longarm’s head, the gun’s clap reached his ears, echoing flatly between the ridges. He jerked into a crouch and automatically triggered the Colt at the place where he’d seen the gun flash.
    Knowing the shooters would aim at his own flashes, he stepped sideways, fired twice more, then, as several more guns flashed and popped from the other side of the trail, he dove sideways and rolled behind a fir.
    â€œHey, lawdog—that you?” a man yelled when the shooting dropped off.
    Longarm waited, breathing hard as he shoved fresh brass through his Colt’s loading gate.
    â€œThis is Heck Gunn. You send that double-crossing little bitch out here, and we’ll let you go—got it?” the man yelled.
    Longarm paused for a split second, then punched the last cartridge into his pistol and spun the cylinder. “I don’t get it,” Longarm yelled. “How’d she double-cross you, Heck?”
    A pause.
    â€œShe knows how,” Gunn said darkly.
    Longarm thought about that. The statement didn’t surprise him, but he couldn’t help wondering how—in what sordid way—did Lacy double-cross the crooked bunch she’d thrown in with back in Jawbone. Slowly, he began to step straight back away from the fir, keeping his Colt extended, intending to get back to the grullo and hightail it for the cabin.
    â€œHey, lawdog,” another man said, this one with a Spanish accent.