Longarm 397 : Longarm and the Doomed Beauty (9781101545973) by Tabor Evans Page A

dribbling in several rivers down his forehead and pumping out from the ragged hole in his chest.
    The other man had burned down to the size of a modest trash fire. A big collie dog had appeared in the street nearby, tracing a broad circle around the burning man and whining with its head down.
    Longarm turned toward the large, white hotel directly across the street from the saloon. The front door was closed, but its window as well as the rest of the glass in the building’s façade had been blown out. Only ragged shards remained. Most of the windows in the two upper stories had also been blown away, their curtains hanging in tatters.
    The man in the gray suit lay slumped and unmoving on the boardwalk fronting the place. A breeze had come up, however, and blown his hat beneath a loafer’s bench and pushed it snug against the hotel’s white clapboard wall where it remained, its crisp brim bending.
    Longarm cupped a hand to his mouth, and yelled, “Marshal Scobie? Federal lawman, here. It’s peaceable out here now!”
    Silence. The sun hammered the front of the hotel, reflecting off the broken windowpanes.
    â€œI’m comin’ in,” Longarm said and started forward.
    He stepped onto the broad, roofed boardwalk, pulled open the screen door, and tried the knob of the inside door. Locked. Letting the screen door slap shut, Longarm walked over to the window left of it and crouched to peer inside the hotel’s saloon.
    Dark in there, with several webs of powder smoke. Lots of bullet holes in tables and chairs and the mahogany bar and back bar to Longarm’s left. The back bar mirror was shattered, as were most of the bottles and glasses on its shelves. In the dinginess, near an overturned, bullet-riddled table, an old, gray-haired man in baggy duck trousers and suspenders lay facedown on the floor, in a broad pool of brown blood.
    A Henry rifle lay on the floor to his right, amidst countless empty shell casings.
    Longarm used his rifle barrel to break out a sharp, triangular glass shard from the window’s lower frame, then stepped through the window and inside the saloon. His boots crunched the broken glass on the floor. Holding his rifle straight out from his right hip, he looked around carefully.
    Something moved on his left, and he swung his rifle toward the bar. A head ducked down.
    â€œCome on outta there!” Longarm ordered.
    â€œDon’t shoot!” came the tremulous reply.
    The head reappeared—just a cap of black hair and two brown eyes. Then the entire, black-mustached face rose from behind the bar, and the portly, round-faced man stood with his arms raised, his eyes dancing between Longarm’s rifle and the copper badge pinned to the lawman’s vest.
    â€œWho’re you?” Longarm said with a flint-eyed snarl.
    â€œFlorin. I own this place.” The barman’s gaze flicked across the bullet-riddled room toward the broad, carpeted staircase rising at the rear. “What’s left of it . . .”
    â€œThat Scobie?”
    The man nodded. “I’d appreciate it if you’d put that rifle down.”
    â€œYou see the badge?”
    â€œI could find a badge. If I wanted one badly enough.”
    â€œWhere’s Mrs. Pritchard?” Longarm said.
    â€œUpstairs.”
    Poor woman, Longarm absently mused. Because of the wooden leg, she’d probably had trouble finding a husband. On top of that misery, all this . . .
    â€œAnyone else here?”
    As if in reply to Longarm’s query, boots thumped in the ceiling, making their way across the second story over Longarm’s head, toward the stairs. Longarm raised his rifle to his shoulder and aimed at the top of the stairs.
    â€œWho’s that?”
    â€œThat’s Leroy,” the barman said just as a young man with longish, curly blond hair appeared at the top of the stairs, starting down and holding a pistol in his right hand.
    â€œFound Kirby’s old