Free Longarm and the Wolf Women by Tabor Evans Page A

shouted the marshal above the bed’s sawing and the man’s grunting and cursing.
    Pyle snorted softly and whispered. “Sometimes this job is just too easy.”
    Giff motioned for the other two men to crab out beside him. At the same time, he took two steps straight back, holding the rifle in his right hand, aimed at the door’s center. He raised his left foot and, swinging his left arm out for balance, slammed his boot against the door, just left of the knob.
    The door banged back against the wall with a thunderous boom, making the whole room jump. Giff grinned wolfishly and shouted, “Message from Amos Falcon, Marshal!” He took two long strides into the lantern-lit room and aimed the rifle with both hands at the bed.
    He froze before he could get the barn-blaster’s stock leveled. His eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.
    On the bed before him stood Marshal Blassingame in all her butt-naked splendor. She’d just risen three feet above the bed, yellow hair and big, round tits rising then falling as her feet plunged back toward the rumpled sheets below.
    She grinned, eyes bright, as she raised a Winchester straight out from her belly.
    Giff’s lower jaw sagged as he brought the rifle to bear. “Shit.”
    Before he could pull the trigger, the marshal’s Winchester’s stabbed smoke and flames, the shot sounding like crashing boulders in the close quarters.
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In his balbriggans and hat, double-action Colt extended in his right hand, Longarm had crouched in front of the dresser. He’d glimpsed two shadows hunkered by the privy when he’d gotten out of bed to light a cigar.
    Now, Merle’s first shot slammed into the black-haired gent with the Henry rifle. Screaming, the man stumbled straight back toward the door, triggering both rifle barrels into the ceiling over the bed.
    The twin blasts rocked the entire building, plaster and wood raining onto the bed in front of Diamondback’s naked marshal, who quickly recocked her Winchester.
    Longarm squeezed his Colt’s trigger a half second after Merle had fired her Winchester, his own slug drilling the man through his right arm. The man fell back into a short, fat gent with long, red hair and wielding a double-barreled Greener. The red-haired gent threw the black-haired hombre to one side, stepped forward, and began raising his Greener.
    Longarm and Marshal Blassingame fired at the same time, the shots ripping through the man’s lumpy chest.
    He screamed, mouth forming a horseshoe-sized O as he stumbled back, tripping over the black-haired gent and slamming against the wall on the other side of the hall. He continued shrieking while trying to raise the carbine.
    Longarm and Merle pumped two more shots into his chest and belly. Blood spurting from the holes and spraying the papered wall behind him, he dropped the Greener and staggered sideways, stumbling out of Longarm’s view behind the wall right of the open door.
    A loud thump said he’d fallen at the same time that the tall gent in the bowler and duster leaped behind the wall on the left side of the door. The tall man snaked a sawed-off ten-gauge around the door latch and settled the barrels on Merle.
    Longarm drilled a round into the door casing, but the rider held the shotgun steady.
    Both barrels of the gut-shredder exploded.
    To Longarm’s right, Merle leaped in a long, high arc off the bed’s right side as the double-ought buck sliced the air where she’d been standing and blew two horse collar-sized holes in the plastered wall at the head of the bed.
    Longarm fired another round, then Merle fired four in a straight line along the wall left of the door. The shotgunner screamed, staying out of sight behind the wall. Longarm triggered his pistol from one knee, then ducked as a long, silver-plated revolver barrel snaked around the door frame and popped twice.
    Longarm threw himself forward and lay belly-flat as a slug shattered a