Free Longarm 242: Red-light by Tabor Evans Page A

meant the alley was shadowy, but Longarm could see well enough to be sure that no one was in there except Dupree. This certainly didn’t look like an ambush, he told himself. He decided to see what the newspaperman wanted.
    Longarm stepped into the alley and nodded to Dupree. “Howdy,” he said around the cheroot clenched between his teeth. “You were right about the Chinaman’s place. The food was good.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you just eat it and keep your mouth shut, then?” asked Dupree. Before Longarm could answer, the newspaperman went on. “I heard about what you just did in there. That’s why I scrambled around here to talk to you. What are you trying to do, mister, get this town burned down around us?”
    â€œMallory’s got you that scared, huh?” Longarm asked bluntly.
    Dupree swallowed hard. “Who are you? Some kind of bounty hunter, maybe?”
    Longarm glanced around. There were no windows nearby in the buildings, and even if there had been, they would have been closed to keep the chill out. He decided to take a chance and reveal who he really was to Dupree. He reached up, took the cheroot out of his mouth.
    At the far end of the alley, a gun blasted. Something whined past Longarm’s ear with a sound like an angry bee.
    A .44-caliber bee, more than likely.
    Longarm reacted instinctively. He dropped the cheroot and twisted around in the direction the shot had come from, and his hand flashed to the Colt in the cross-draw rig on his left hip. As the gun slid smoothly from its holster, another shot rang out. Longarm heard that whining sound again, followed by an ugly thud and a grunt of pain. He threw himself to the side, sprawling out flat on the ground next to one of the buildings, as he brought up the Colt and started triggering.
    Three shots thundered out of the revolver, deafening in the close confines. The shadowy figure Longarm had spotted at the far end of the alley jerked back. As the echoes of Longarm’s shots died away, he heard the sound of rapid footsteps on hard-packed dirt. The bushwhacker was getting away. Longarm thought he might have wounded the man—or maybe the ambusher had jerked because he was just getting out of the way of the lawman’s bullets as fast as he could.
    Someone moaned, and Longarm looked back over his shoulder to see J. Emerson Dupree lying in the alley. The newspaperman was on his back, and there was a large stain on his shirt that wasn’t ink this time.
    Longarm scrambled to his feet and then knelt beside Dupree. He pulled the man’s coat and shirt back and saw the ugly, red-rimmed hole just below Dupree’s left shoulder. There was probably a matching hole in Dupree’s back, Longarm knew, where the bullet had come out. The wound was messy, but with any luck, it might not be fatal. From the looks of it, the slug had missed anything vital.
    That knowledge didn’t make Longarm feel any better. He knew the bullet had been meant for him. Dupree had been hit by accident. And Longarm was fairly confident that the ambush wouldn’t have taken place if he hadn’t ridden into town and started asking questions about Ben Mallory.
    That was one more mark against the outlaw leader, Longarm told himself.
    â€œHang on, Dupree,” Longarm told the newspaperman. He looked up at the sound of more running footsteps. “Folks are on their way to see what happened. Somebody will be here in a minute to help you.”
    Dupree couldn’t hear him. He was only half-conscious, muttering and groaning in pain. Longarm glanced toward the far end of the alley where the bushwhacker had disappeared. The gunman didn’t have a big lead on him, and if the man really was injured, that would slow him down even more. Besides, Longarm didn’t much want to hang around here and have to answer questions about what had happened. He probably would have, if Galena City had had a real lawman, but under the