Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance by Tabor Evans Page A

and…”
    He let his voice trail off. Henry stared up at him over the tops of his round spectacles, with the expression of a man who hadn’t understood a word Longarm had said, as though the lawman had been speaking Sanskrit!
    Longarm leaned forward, planting both hands on Henry’s desk and lowering his voice for emphasis. “You just wait till you read my next report. Got Marcella over at the Black Cat scribblin’ it all down for me even as I speak. When you read that, Mr. Henry, you’re gonna be seein’ old Custis Long in a little different ligh—”
    The door flanking Henry’s neat desk on the right opened suddenly, and Chief Marshal Billy Vail poked his round head out the door. It was ensconced in a roiling cloud of cigar smoke. “Get your ass in here, Longarm. You’re late again, as usual!”
    Billy pulled his head back inside his office and swung his door wide as he retreated to his desk. Longarm looked at the clock. The minute hand was now at a minute past the twelve.
    “Goddamnit, Henry,” he said, “now you went and made me late!”
    As Longarm moved to the door, he heard the prissy secretary give a snort before the typing machine resumed its raucous clattering. Longarm stepped into Vail’s office and closed the door behind him.
    “I was just tellin’ Henry about what a great job I did over the past few days. Wait till you see my report, Chief, you’re gonna—”
    “Yeah, well, Henry would appreciate it if you’d tell whatever doxie you have writing up your reports these days to go a little easier on the smelly water.” Billy brushed a pudgy fist across his doughy nose. “Irritates the soft tissues in his nose.”
    Longarm scowled indignantly.
    “Have a seat and see if you can shut your pie hole long enough to roll your eyeballs over this file,” Billy Vail said as he sort of floated through the smoke cloud hovering over and around his giant desk, the surface of which Longarm doubted the chief marshal had seen since he’d first been promoted to his esteemed echelon of public service.
    He plucked a manila file folder off one of the several stacks surrounding many small piles of papers hiding his blotter and slid it toward Longarm’s side of his desk. “We’ll be waitin’ on your partner, due to arrive in ten minutes.”
    Longarm jerked the red Moroccan leather guest chair out of its corner near the door and angled it in front of his boss’s desk. “Partner?”
    “Detective from the Pinkerton agency.”
    “Ah, hell, Billy,” Longarm said, sagging into the chair with a sour look. “You know I always work alone. And them Pinkertons are pains in the ass! They think they’re real lawmen and all they do is get in the galldarned way!”
    “Don’t start pissin’ in the Pinkerton well again, Custis. You know as well as I do that the James Gang would still be runnin’ wild up and down the Midwest if it wasn’t for Allan Pinkerton. It’s an old and illustrious company.”
    “Maybe so, but their agents of late are either old men or snot-nosed shavers who haven’t yet taken a piss standing up but think they know everything there is to know about bringin’ owlhoots to bay. Uppity sons o’ bitches. No, sir, Billy, you know I work best when I work alone.”
    “You’re not workin’ alone on this one. And that’s an order. The Pinkertons think they have a stake in what happened to them lawmen down in Arizona, and they’ve sent an agent.”
    Billy leaned forward to read a name scribbled on a coffee-stained, ash-speckled notepad. “A…uh…Mr. Harvey Delacroix. That’s with an ‘o-i-x’ at the end, and if I remember what little I ever knew about French, I believe it’s pronounced ‘oy.’”
    The pudgy chief marshal, once a tough-nut lawbringer himself, sagged back in his chair and brushed cigar ashes from the bulbous paunch threatening to bust the buttons on the wash-worn white dress shirt he wore under a ratty brown wool vest. “As in ‘Oy, oy, oy, Custis, you’re gonna be