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

partnerin’ up with this Pinkerton agent whether you like it or not!’”
    Billy guffawed, delighted with himself. He stuck the stub of the fat stogie between his lips, blew more smoke into the already smoggy air over his desk, and laughed some more.
    Longarm sighed in disgust. Sometimes, despite his knowing that Vail prized him above all the other deputies in his deputy U.S. marshal stable, he couldn’t help thinking that Billy kept him around just to torture him. He certainly gave him the toughest assignments, and on this one the chief marshal was not only partnering him up with a wet-behind-the-ears Pinkerton agent who no doubt thought himself as skilled or better than Allan Pinkerton himself, but he was sending him to Arizona right smack-dab in the heat of summer.
    And the summers in Arizona were second on the heat scale only to Hell itself.
    “All right, enough of that,” Billy said with a final snort, sitting up straighter in his chair and brushing his fist across his nose. “This is serious business. Five lawmen dead, fer chriss-fuckin’-sakes!”
    “So I heard,” Longarm said, glancing at the file he hadn’t yet plucked off the chief marshal’s desk. “Why don’t you give me the lowdown on it, Billy. You know I don’t read so well until after lunch. I’ll peruse the whole thing on the train ride down to Las Cruces. Who was killed and where?”
    “I didn’t recognize the names of any of the dead,” Billy said. “They’re in the file. They were killed outside a little town along Defiance Wash. Town’s called Holy Defiance on account of a stand the locals including a Catholic priest made several years ago against a bronco band of CoyoteroApaches. Not much there now. Some old desert rat and his daughter. Anyway, the lawmen had banded together to go looking for a cache of gold that was stolen off a stagecoach three years ago but was never recovered.
    “Everyone thought the gold was lost for good after a passel of border toughs robbed it and the toughs themselves were attacked by a small band of Apaches who’d jumped the reservation. Apparently, the bandits buried the loot when they’d forted themselves up in a nest of rocks in the Black Puma Mountains and then lit out under cover of darkness. They intended to return for it later, but they were all gunned down by a rival gang in Nogales a few weeks later.
    “That there is all I know,” Billy said. “There’s a little more in the file there—names and dates and whatnot, the name of the ranch that the money’s supposedly buried on. Some highfalutin rancher down there named Azrael, if I remember. Whip Azrael.”
    “How’s this Pinkerton territory, Billy?”
    “The Pinkertons had insured the gold shipment. It was headed for the bank in Tucson. Two Pinkerton guards were killed as well as two guards the bank especially hired—two fairly well-known gunmen at the time named Roy Dupree and ‘Cougar’ Charlie McCallum.”
    Billy puffed his cigar, staring pensively down at his desk. “Them two names I do remember, ’cause when I was ridin’ for the Texas Rangers back in them days, them two were a couple of the most wanted curly wolves in all of Texas and half of Louisiana. Cold-blooded killers, both. Cougar Charlie cut down a good partner of mine back in Alpine, just north of the Chisos Mountains, after we’d run ’im down after a saloon robbery. Walked up to my partner, H. C. Boyle, in an alley and blew him in half with a double-barreled shotgun from point-blank range.”
    “Cougar Charlie and the other gunman…?”
    “Dupree.”
    “They’re both dead?”
    “Killed during the robbery.”
    Longarm was thinking over what he’d heard. In the meantime, he’d plucked a cheroot from his shirt pocket and bit the end off. Now he struck a match on the edge of Billy’s desk, touched the flame to the stogie, and said between smoke puffs, “How did the Arizona Rangers and the two U.S. marshals get wind of all this and start thinkin’ they had a