Longarm on the Fever Coast (5 page)

Others along the way seemed to be just screwing, snoring, or in one case arguing in bed about whether they could afford a new carpet in the front parlor. Then he passed the dining salon, shut for the night, and finally he was standing alone in the bows, where the combined air movements made him feel so good he wondered why nobody else was standing there with him. Then, reflecting on the night watch above him on the Texas deck, the black gang down below in the engine room, and most of the folks in the staterooms being the type to call ports on a steamer windows, he realized it only stood to reason a more experienced traveler would get to hog such comfort as there was aboard this tub on such a muggy night.

He finished his smoke, tossed the lit stub over the side to admire its firefly dive to the inky gulf waters, and resisted the temptation to light another. He'd been trying to cut down on tobacco. For some reason he found it tougher than refusing another drink after his legs warned him he'd had enough, or leaving a gal's skirts alone after she'd warned him she was married or, even more dangerous, a maiden pure. Yet anyone could see a man got more pleasure out of strong liquor or weak-willed women than tobacco had ever offered. So why in tarnation did a man on such a modest salary have to spend a whole nickel to smoke only three damned cheroots that neither made him feel like singing or coming?

On the other hand, he was already uncomfortable enough as he leaned on the rail in sweaty duds with half a hard-on. So he lit up some more, muttering, "Just this last one before we turn in for at least a few hours' sleep. Don't want folks thinking a drunk might be coming down the gangplank at 'em come morning."

As anyone who's ever tried to cut down on smoking knows, a smoke seems to burn down faster as soon as you tell it you don't mean to have another in the near future. So maybe a quarter hour later he watched that one diving to the sea as he reached absently for a third, another part of him pointing out, What the hell, may as well spend the whole nickel before we turn in."

But he shook his head firmly and told himself, "A man's word is a man's word. Who in Creation is a man supposed to trust if he breaks his damned word to his damned self?"

He toughed it out another ten minutes or so, then found himself on the move again, aimed for Lenore's starboard stateroom but drifting back along the port side, to windward, if only to postpone the stagnant heat to seaward by taking the long route round the stern.

The moon was shining on the far side. So Longarm moved aft along the darker deck as no more than an inky blur, thanks to passing on that third smoke. Hence they didn't spot him either as they kicked in a stateroom door further down And charged in shooting.

Longarm drew his own side arm and advanced on the confusion, getting there just as two dark blurs were backing out of his original stateroom through their own cloud of gunsmoke. So he demanded they freeze and fired almost in the same moment when neither did. He hit the nearest one and suspected he knew who it was as his target dropped faster than its big hat. He put another round in the son of a bitch before pegging his fifth and last shot at the sound of the other one's thudding boot heels. Then he crouched just inside the open doorway, reloading six in the wheel as he bawled loudly, "Everybody stay put inside in the name of the law!"

Then he asked more softly, "Are you all right, Miss Lenore?"

He got no reply as he sprang back up to chase after the one called Godwynn. Halfway back to the stern he heard a mighty splash, and nobody seemed on deck ahead of him as he rounded the last corner. So he swung back to peer back along the barely visible wake in the moonlight, muttering, "I hope there's plenty of sharks trailing this vessel if that was you I just heard, you bastard!"

By the time he got back to his shot-up stateroom the smoke had cleared and there were others out on deck despite his command to stay inside their rooms. He recognized the white uniform of the purser in the dim light and called out, "Deputy Long here. I reckon you noticed that gunplay just now. I'd be obliged if you'd have a look at the one on the deck betwixt us whilst I see about somebody nicer I was trying to do a favor for!"

He struck a match as he stepped inside. The small space still reeked of the brimstone breath of six-guns. He lit a wall fixture, and felt sorry he'd done so as he saw what lay atop the sheets of the upper berth. Lenore Colbert had taken his advice about flopping buck naked in such ventilation as might get through those jalousies near the head of the berth. So you could see every bullet hole in her willowy naked body, and they'd sure put enough in her. But she was bleeding too much to be sincerely dead. So he holstered his gun to move over to her, snatching up some bedding to rip into white bandages as he wondered, heartsick, where to start.

She was bleeding hardest from a wound under one shapely breast. He shoved a twist of cotton sheeting into it before he commenced an attempt to wrap a longer strip around her chest. A gal that skinny lifted easy and he tried to move her gently. But she moaned and said, "You're hurting me. What happened? Is that you, Custis?"

He said, "It is. You've been shot. I got one of 'em and it looks as if the other one dove overboard. Hold still and let me knot this dressing secure till we can find you a sawbones."

She protested, "Oh, Lord, I don't have any clothes on. Please trim that lamp. I can't have you seeing me naked!"

He said, "Already have, and I'm sure glad to see you've neither tattoos nor a tail, ma'am. I reckon that'll hold your left lung in you for now. Let's see about this other round you took under your floating rib."

"Don't look at my privates!" she pleaded as he removed his hat and gently covered her blond pubic hair with it while refraining from telling her he already had. It might have upset her as much to be told no man with a lick of sense had horny thoughts about even a great naked body shot so full of lead.

The purser came in, gasped in dismay at the sight of the bloody nude on the upper berth, and recovered to soberly state, "Our Mister Reynolds outside is beyond any need for medical attention. But I sent for the ship's surgeon in any case. Is the lady still alive and may one ask what she was doing in your stateroom if you weren't in here with her, Deputy Long?"

Longarm said, "For now let's say we swapped berths because she was suffering more than me from your great weather down this way. I got a better question. How did those two killers learn which stateroom I was supposed to be holed up in tonight?"

The purser sighed. "I told them. They were asking about you in the smoking salon a few minutes ago. I allowed that since I'd not seen you on deck and there was nothing else open you were likely in bed. The other one, Mister Godwynn, said he wanted to slip a note under your door and he seemed so friendly..."

"I follow your drift," Longarm snapped. "Now I'd like you to round up some armed and dangerous crewmen and make sure that was Godwynn I just heard going over the taff-rail. I chased him as far as the stern and lost him one way or the other."

The purser stated flatly, "If he went over the side he's done for. We're miles off either shore in a shark-infested lagoon. Even in the unlikely event he might make it ashore, there's nothing there if you get there!"

Longarm said, "I know Padre Island is a desert island with nothing to eat or a drop to drink for farther than any man could hope to walk in this climate. Tell me more about the mainland over to our west."

The purser thought and shrugged. "Not a whole lot for a man on foot and probably unarmed by now, even if he was serious about swimming that far. The marshy shores rise to soggy cattle country. A lot more salt grass than cows can eat, away from the rarer fresh water. His only hope, should he make it that way, would be if he could at least find some shade before high noon. Wherever the soil rises high enough above sea level you 're likely to find squatters of the Mex or Indian persuasion, if your luck holds out. Anglo squatters along the coast this far from anywhere are more likely to be outlaws who'd kill a man for his boots!"

Longarm finished knotting the bandage around Lenore's trim bare waist and growled, "That Godwynn rascal is an outlaw in his own right. So why are you still standing there? Didn't you just hear me tell you to find out which way he went?"

The purser left. Longarm was trying to figure out what needed bandaging next, and how, when Lenore opened her eyes again and said in a conversational tone, "I'm dying, Custis."

He tried to keep his own voice as calm as he told her, "No, you ain't. You're too pretty and we won't let you."

She sighed and said, "I know I'm pretty, and here I lie, naked as a jay with a handsome man, and I'm still fixing to die a goddamn virgin like poor old Olivia Lee back home!"

He removed his hat from her privates to replace it with a numb but friendly palm, not really feeling anything as he told her, "I just now told you there'd be no dying around here, virgin or not. There'll surely be a Coast Guard dispensary when we get to Escondrijo in just a few hours, and then they'll fix you up so's I can make sure you'll never in this world die a virgin, hear?"

She smiled wanly and softly asked, "Are you threatening to seduce me while I'm helpless, you great-looking brute?"

He chuckled fondly. "Nope. Only when you're well enough to get on top. For once you can, I mean to come in your sweet flesh till all our bones ache."

He was suddenly aware they had company as the dying girl smiled radiantly up at him, or maybe through him, to say, "Why, Custis, that was the nicest thing any man's ever said to me!"

Then she was dead. The white-clad figure that moved around him to feel Lenore's throat looked more like a nurse than any ship's surgeon. Longarm gulped and said, "I know what you just heard must have sounded disgusting, ma'am, but..."

"I know what you were trying to do," the plump and motherly gal said. "Few men would know how to be that comforting to a dying woman. It was very gallant of you, Deputy Long."

CHAPTER 4

Longarm had lived through a war or more. So unlike some peace officers, he was inclined to let less-than-lethal confusion simply pile up while he tried to grasp the overall pattern and watch for snipers. So as soon as the ship's surgeon, red-eyed and three sheets to the wind, joined them in his stateroom, Longarm left the dead Lenore to a drunk who couldn't hurt her and that nursing sister or whatever as he joined the search for her surviving killer--if the son of a bitch was still on board.

The purser led Longarm down to the cargo deck, where an officer had his deckhands poking about with bull's-eye lanterns. The officer was called a supercargo because he supervised the cargo, the way the purser supervised the passengers.

The partly open-sided cargo deck, like those of most coastal steamers and all riverboats, lay just above the waterline over the hollow-egg-crate construction of the shallow-draft hull. The supercargo said they'd already swept the mostly empty barn-like space. Longarm wanted to make certain, having found a life preserver missing. Longarm's first impression of the bulkhead further aft was that the steamer's boilers and machinery lay just beyond. But as the supercargo's gang went through the motions forward, Longarm paced from port to starboard and saw he was right about that companionway near his stateroom being longer. So he rejoined the gruff and somewhat older supercargo and said, "As big as this open cargo deck may seem, this vessel gets wider back behind that bulkhead, meaning you got more than half this level all filled up with coal bins and machinery?"

The supercargo shook his head, billed cap and all. "We've already checked the coal bins, and there's no way he could have gotten into the boiler room or engine compartment without the black gang noticing. There's not as much space for him to work with aft as you seem to imagine. Less than a third of this level holds anything besides cargo. More than a quarter of our length, beyond that bulkhead, is cold storage. We have what amounts to a swamping ice house, refrigerated with those newfangled ammonia and brine pipes. Didn't you know we picked up lots of fresh meat and produce along the way that would never make it to New Orleans or even Galveston in this heat without spoiling?"

Longarm said, "I do now. How do you get inside with, say, a lantern as well as a six-gun?"

The supercargo looked surprised, but pointed at a sort of icebox door off to one side. "That's the only inspection port at this end. Cargo's loaded into the refrigerated hold from the side, from the docks. So there's no way he could have-"

"You just said that smaller entrance allowed an inspector to get through," Longarm noted. "I'd surely be obliged if someone would lend me a lantern and show me how to open that latch. I got my own gun."

The supercargo insisted, even as he was leading the way over with his bull's-eye beam on the oaken port and its stout brass fittings, "Nobody could hide in there with the half-frozen fruit and crates of salad greens we've already cooled to just above zero centigrade."

Longarm shrugged and said, "I've been in colder places, in just my shirtsleeves, and it never killed me. Zero centigrade is a lot hotter than zero Fahrenheit. How come you keep your cold-storage cargo just above freezing?"

The supercargo handed Longarm his lantern. "Hold the beam on the latch while I unlock her, will you? If you freeze meat or produce all the way, the ice needles forming inside turn it all mushy and sooty-looking as it thaws. But ice don't form and stuff don't rot too much just above the freezing point of water."