Free Longarm and the Cry of the Wolf (9781101619506) by Tabor Evans Page B

me you really expect him to turn into a werewolf. Why, those are just in fairy tales!”
    There was a commotion at the top of the stairs. Longarm turned and looked up through the hole. An aged, bespectacled face peered down at him. The glasses glinted in the light from Calvin’s torch.
    The man who owned the face shook his head darkly. The face disappeared. Presently, a pair of brown half boots appeared on the ladder’s top rung, and then a diminutive, older man in a suit and short wolf fur coat gained the cavern floor. He held a black leather kit in his gloved right hand. He looked Longarm up and down before turning to Calvin.
    â€œWhere is he?” he said with an air of reluctance.
    Calvin canted his head toward the stout door before him, which hadn’t yet been latched. The town marshal held a key ring in the hand he’d freed when he placed the lamp on the table. When the doctor walked up to the door, Calvin opened it, ushered him inside, and then followed him, closing the door behind him.
    Longarm waited outside the cell while the doctor tended Goldie, Calvin keeping his double-barreled barn blaster aimed at the outlaw’s head. Occasionally, Goldie looked up from the doctor’s work on his arm to glance darkly, incredulously, at Longarm.
    When the doctor had finished, he and Calvin left Goldie sitting on a cot beneath a torch slanting away from its mounting bracket. There were several more torches in a box near the cot. They sent up the odor of the coal oil they’d been soaked in.
    â€œLongarm,” Goldie said, when Calvin had closed and locked the heavy, iron-banded door. “Longarm, you ain’t gonna leave me down here, are you?”
    â€œNot much I could do about it even if I wanted to,” the federal lawman said, canting his head toward Calvin. “It’s his town and he’s doin’ me a service, puttin’ you up in it.”
    Calvin grinned, showing those large, brown teeth of his beneath his ostentatious silver mustache.
    â€œCome on, Long,” Calvin said, canting his head toward where the small, aged doctor was climbing the ladder. “Let’s go up and have a drink. Hell, I’ll buy!”
    A gun blasted in the office above their heads. Dust sifted from the rafters.
    â€œ
Oh, Heaven help us!
” came the doctor’s passionate plea.

Chapter 8
    There were two more blasts in the office above Longarm’s head. He ran to the ladder, climbed, and poked his head through the hole. The office was all murky shadows, but he could see the doctor sitting on the floor a few feet from the trapdoor, to Longarm’s right. He sat with his legs straight out before him. His glasses hung off of one ear.
    The old pill roller was staring toward the open front door, which was filled to brimming with the back of Emil, who was extending two six-shooters in his fists and shooting up the street to the west.
    Boom! Boom! Boom!
    The giant turned slowly as he fired, tracking something.
    Outside, a girl screamed.
Christ, was the big deputy trying to beef a female?
It wouldn’t have been any crazier than anything else that Longarm had witnessed so far in Crazy Kate. He heaved himself up out of the hole and, taking his Winchester in both hands, strode to the window over the cluttered desk. At the same time, Town Marshal Frank Calvin heaved himself up out of the hole and looked around quickly.
    â€œEmil, what the hell you shootin’ at?”
    Staring out the window, Longarm saw a large, black shadow loping westward up the street, heading for the open country beyond the town. As Emil’s pistols exploded again quickly, dust and snow puffed in the street a few feet behind and to one side of the wolf, whose shiny, black coat glistened in the wintery light.
    â€œWolf!” Emil shouted, and fired two more times before one of his pistols clacked on an empty chamber. He fired the second gun twice more before its hammer, too, clicked empty. “Wolf