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    Longarm #427: Longarm and the Coldest Town in Hell
    Longarm #427: Longarm and the Coldest Town in Hell
    Longarm #427: Longarm and the Coldest Town in Hell
    Ebook173 pages2 hours

    Longarm #427: Longarm and the Coldest Town in Hell

    By Tabor Evans

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    About this ebook

    Longarm’s in for a chilly reception from cold-blooded killers…

    Like most folks, Longarm has always been fond of his extremities—you might even say he’s attached to them. So after he’s coldcocked following an ill-advised liaison with a gorgeous grifter on a train and tossed buck-naked into the snowdrifts of the Dakota Territory, he’s more than a little worried about frostbite…not to mention death.
     
    But after he’s saved and nursed back to health by a ravishing Russian deaf mute, the deputy marshal is soon ready to brace a trio of hard cases who are whiling away the winter murdering lawmen and terrorizing anyone unlucky enough to cross their path. Santa may have filled their stockings with coal, but Longarm aims to fill their cold hearts with hot lead…
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateMay 27, 2014
    ISBN9781101634981
    Longarm #427: Longarm and the Coldest Town in Hell
    Author

    Tabor Evans

    More information to be announced soon on this forthcoming title from Penguin USA.

    Read more from Tabor Evans

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      Book preview

      Longarm #427 - Tabor Evans

      Chapter 1

      Three days before Christmas, Jenny Tallant, owner of the Blue Dog Saloon in Little Missouri City, which lay like a snow-buried trash heap in the bluffs of western Dakota Territory, had been nervous all day long. Why that was so, she wasn’t certain.

      It could have been that she was sixty-two years old and her bursitis was acting up again in her left shoulder. Or that she was sixty-two years old and she’d been living alone too long in her two-room shack behind the saloon, which was on the other side of the river and obscured by a fringe of ancient cottonwoods.

      Jenny’s life mate, Abigail Landry, with whom she had run the Blue Dog for over twenty years, had been swaddled in a six-foot-deep hole on the side of Indian Butte for the past five years. When you were sixty-two and you’d been living alone for five years in a town of two hundred, in a town that was frozen up solid and buried under three feet of snow for five months every year—a town that was a good two days’ ride from anyplace of any significance whatever—you were bound to get spooked now and then.

      Downright nervous for no apparent reason.

      Cabin fever was likely all it was, Jenny silently opined as she ran a damp cloth across her oak bar, though she’d performed the same maneuver three times in the past hour despite the fact that the bar was as clean as a parson’s prayer. Jenny looked at the old Regulator clock hanging above the back bar mirror over her left shoulder.

      Two thirty-three.

      She hadn’t had a customer since twelve thirty, and then it had only been the town constable, Emmitt Grassley, who’d come in for his noon beer and to build a ham sandwich from the free lunch platter Jenny usually kept to lure in customers, few as there were in these parts in the middle of another gall dang, cold-assed Dakota winter. Fairly frequently, the town’s most recent widower, Franklin Talbot, who ran Talbot’s Tack and Feed, came in to pony up a dollar to spend with Jenny’s only doxy, Miss Evangeline Van Dyke.

      That was the doxy’s real name, and she’d even grown up in these parts and been a schoolteacher before the school closed from lack of interest. Her family was dead—they’d dropped one by one over the years, like flies at the first frost. As practical as she was pretty, rather than leave Little Missouri City to brave what could possibly have been a harsher life somewhere out in the vast unknown, Miss Evangeline came to work for Jenny for an 80/20 percent split of her profits and for free room and board in one of Jenny’s stark upstairs rooms.

      It beat a life in Minot or Bismarck, Jenny figured, where the pretty young woman would likely be spreading her legs for less money and a lower breed of john who’d probably give her the clap or something even more wretched. She was likely better off here in most ways, but Jenny wasn’t sure how Miss Evangeline stood the boredom.

      At the moment the ex-schoolteacher was laying out a game of solitaire at a table near the fully stoked woodstove and a piñon pine sporting five silver strands of Christmas tinsel. Miss Evangeline was attired in a metallic green dress with a shawl that Jenny had knit for her draped about her otherwise bare shoulders. Her thick brown hair was pulled back behind her pretty, finely featured face and wound into a near-perfect French braid. She’d painted her lips a lush crimson, though she otherwise needed little face paint.

      Beautiful woman, Jenny thought, tapping her thick, callused fingers on the bar. Oh, to be twenty, thirty years younger . . .

      Jenny sighed and glanced at the clock again. Two minutes later than the last time she’d looked. You knew it was a slow day when Miss Evangeline couldn’t even pull in Franklin Talbot or one of the least bashful of her ex-students who enjoyed the novelty of fucking their teacher.

      Jenny heard the muffled drum of hooves in the snow.

      Miss Evangeline looked up from her card game, frowned speculatively at Jenny, and then both women turned their gazes to the brightly lit front windows on either side of the saloon’s closed winter doors. The light off the snow was so brilliant that Jenny not only had to squint but shade her eyes with her hand. As she did, the drumming grew louder until three riders swaddled in heavy furs, their breath steaming whitely in the dazzling sunshine, appeared on the street, heading from left to right, south to north. They didn’t continue heading north, however, but swerved their horses up to the hitchrack fronting the Blue Dog.

      Well, I’ll be, Jenny said, her heart lightening. We might just turn a couple of dimes or even quarters yet today, Miss Evangeline!

      But then that pain in Jenny’s shoulder reared its ugly head again. She winced. Her strange sense of unease returned, and she thought it was no coincidence that it had intensified the moment she saw the three riders, their faces concealed by heavy black, red, or blue scarves wrapped around their heads against the near-zero cold, pull their horses up to her hitchrack.

      They were all big men, she saw as they swung down from their saddles. Big men in rough, heavy winter clothing. Ominous bulges in their coats showed where they were carrying guns. At nearly the same time, all three shucked rifles from their saddle scabbards and rested said rifles on their shoulders as they climbed the porch’s three steps single file, boots thumping on the cold, half-rotten boards that complained loudly against the sudden weight.

      Jenny shared another glance with Miss Evangeline. The former schoolteacher’s expression was hopeful, but then, apparently seeing the unease in Jenny’s eyes, Miss Evangeline frowned. Jenny wanted to hurry the young woman upstairs, to get her out of possible harm’s way. But then the cowbell over the door jangled and the door scraped and rattled open, letting in a blast of cold air as the three rough riders stomped into the room. They all smelled of the sour scents of unbathed men and horses and fetid hides and furs and cold leather and steel.

      The first man in the three-man group was shorter than the other two. As he walked to the bar, holding his rifle in one hand and unwrapping the scarf from around his face with the other hand, Jenny’s guts clenched. The face suddenly exposed to her was the face of a wild animal more than that of a man. A degenerate. Vermin. She’d lived out here long enough to have known her share of gut wagon–prowling human dogs, but this man was the leader of the pack.

      It wasn’t so much the flatness and evilness fairly radiating from his yellow eyes; it was the aura he emanated. Like a stench even stronger than his sweat and wet hide smell. That aura caused the hair on the back of Jenny’s neck to stick straight up in the air and for gooseflesh to rise between her shoulder blades.

      She suppressed a shudder as the man set his rifle loudly down atop the bar, tossed his muffler onto the rifle, and said, looking right at Jenny, My, my—that’s a big, ugly woman.

      The man directly behind him laughed. The other one snorted as he, too, set his rifle onto the bar and said, Set us up, princess. Bottle of your best stuff. And how ’bout a deck of playin’ cards?

      You got it, Jenny said, not reacting to the slight. She wasn’t accustomed to such direct insults, but she’d read the insults in many a man’s eyes too many times over the years not to have acquired a thick skin concerning her looks.

      The first man, the truly evil-looking one with his yellow eyes and frost-rimed, light red mustache that drooped down over the corners of his knife-slash mouth, turned toward Miss Evangeline. He pointed to the young woman, who was tensely staring down at her cards, and said, Hey, that’s the teacher who took up whorin’, ain’t it? We done heard about her all the way over Wyomin’ way—purty-assed schoolteacher who started spreadin’ her purty legs when her school closed down.

      That her? said the man to his right, staring at Miss Evangeline. He’d just set his rabbit fur hat with earflaps onto the bar, and his black hair was matted to his long, narrow head except for a rooster tail at the crown. That the one over there?

      Miss Evangeline raised a brow and spread her crimson lips with a friendly but guarded smile. Hello, fellas. Yes, I’m the one, all right. She set a card down atop another one, and as she did so, she said, You fellas heeled enough for a poke?

      That made Jenny’s stomach tighten even more. She had a bad sense about all three of these men, and she didn’t think it would be a good idea for Miss Evangeline to take one of them upstairs.

      How ’bout it, Drake? the man with the black rooster tail asked the yellow-eyed evil one. We got time?

      Sure, we got time, Drake said, glancing back behind the bar at the Regulator clock. The rest of the boys won’t be here for a coupla hours. With all this snow, it might take ’em even longer—coupla days, maybe. He threw back the entire shot that Jenny had just poured for him, then slammed the glass back down on the counter. But I do believe I’ll be first. Don’t like goin’ after you, Vincent. Hell, you’re liable to get so excited you’ll cut the purty teacher’s throat. What would that leave me?

      As he lifted his Stetson, the short, stocky Drake, with thighs the size of tree trunks, strode in his heavy, stomping way between the tables toward Miss Evangeline and ran a hand through his oily, sandy-colored hair. He set his hat back down on his head and then he reached down, lightning quick, and grabbed Miss Evangeline’s right arm, jerking her rudely to her feet.

      Hey, stranger, intoned the former teacher, scowling at the man, her pretty cheeks flushed red with fear and anger. Turn your horns in right now, or I’ll be rescinding my invitation!

      Drake drew her toward him, laughing, and said, "You’ll do what to your invitation? He laughed and slid a slit-eyed, lewdly bright glance toward his pards at the bar. Oh, I can see I’m gonna have me a grand old time fuckin’ the teacher! Come on, teacher, get on upstairs and get out o’ them duds. Why, I’m so horny I’m liable to rip ’em off and take you right here! Nothin’ makes me hornier than a big-talkin’ whore!"

      Fury overwhelming Jenny, she slammed a bottle down hard on the bar and shouted, "That’s enough! I will not have Miss Evangeline treated that way! Out! Out—all of you!"

      Drake kept an iron grip on Miss Evangeline as he whipped around, a pistol instantly in his hand.

      Bam!

      The bullet shattered a shot glass sitting atop the pyramid to Jenny’s right, within a foot of her right arm. Now, Jenny had had lead directed her way before. But not that close. At least, not that close on purpose. She could tell that Drake—and just then she recognized him from the wanted dodgers that had been hanging over in the post office for the past year as the outlaw Emory Drake—had put that bullet right where he’d wanted to.

      And she could tell by the flat, mean light in those hard yellow eyes as well as by the direction he was aiming his smoking six-shooter, sort of half-out from his belly, that he’d place the next one in Jenny’s tired old ticker. Fear gripped her. She was accustomed to the sensation, which made it all the more powerful. She gasped and, hating herself for the way her knees had suddenly turned to mud, she raised her hands up by her shoulders, silently beseeching the notorious killer from over Wyoming way not to kill her.

      At the same time, Miss Evangeline’s own eyes were beseeching Jenny for help, which made Jenny feel all the more fearful, wretched, and helpless.

      Anything else out of that fat old cow, Drake snarled at the other two men, who were standing and grinning in delight at the recent events, shoot her through that big ugly face of hers. Understand?

      You got it, Drake, said the one who had not yet spoken. He was a redhead with a mess of freckles across his face and one wandering eye. That would be Curly Jenkins. Jenny recognized him now, too. His poster was also hanging in the post office, between Emory Drake’s and the third man’s, the one with the long, narrow head and the rooster tail, whose name eluded

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