Longarm and the Tascosa Two-Step by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Chapter 10

Longarm yawned himself awake the following morning to the smell of freshly brewed coffee. The nose-tingling aroma floated through every nook and cranny of the Oldham County Jail. His fuzzy tongue, which felt about the size of a saddle blanket, tasted like something akin to week-old wallpaper paste. The heavy, sweet bouquet from the stump juice almost deadened the smell coming from Bronson Tull’s cell.

“Jesus, Tull. Why don’t you use your chamber pot? Get rid of whatever crawled up your ass and died,” Longarm called out. He rolled to a sitting position in the narrow, but oddly comfortable cot and noticed all his belongings from the hotel lay in a neatly arranged stack just outside the cell’s open door.

First chance, he’d make certain sure Jesse Perkins got a nice tip for haulin’ his stuff over. In another of the spartan cubicles directly across the open area between the shiny new steel-barred cubicles, Judge Cain slept as though dead behind privacy blankets draped over the bars, and snored like a hibernating grizzly bear.

Longarm attempted to stand. On the third try, he made it to his feet, but came erect in an uncomfortable stoop for several seconds. One by one all the individual segments of his rigid, saddle-abused spine stubbornly snapped into place, like the links in a rusted logging chain. After another minute or so, punctuated by an abundance of farting and manly scratching, he silently stiff-legged his way past Cain’s cot and into the outer office.

Nate Brice sat behind the sheriff’s barely used mahogany desk, holding a cup of steaming, pungent-smelling Arbuckle’s. He motioned toward the potbellied stove in the corner. “Fresh-brewed, Marshal Long. I make a mighty good pot a up-an-at-’em juice, even if I do say so my own self. But you should be warned, up front, it’s strong enough to grow hair on a cavalry saddle. Sheriff Best calls it potent.”

Without comment, Longarm stretched, nodded, then padded his slit-eyed way to the cast-iron stove. He poured a tin cup of the hot beverage, inhaled the fragrant perfume of Nate’s effort, blew on the liquid for a second, then took the first, hesitant, careful sip. He nodded his approval, then ambled back across the room. Still half asleep, he pulled up a ladder-backed chair across the desk from Brice, slumped into it, then propped his socked feet in the only other empty seat.

After another wary swallow, Longarm coughed several times, before saying, “Mighty damned fine, Nate. Stick a spoon in this stuff and it’d stand up on its own. Just the way I take it. Cup or two should go a long way toward makin’ me feel almost human again. You know, got to where, sometimes when I first wake up, feels like a three-hundred-pound stevedore stood over my bed and beat the hell out of me with a barrel stave. Can’t imagine what gettin’ out of bed’s gonna be like in about twenty years. Probably have to be helped up by a nekkid woman.”

Brice snickered at the image conjured up.

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