Longarm and the Val Verde Massacre by Tabor Evans

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

Chapter 10

Halfway across Val Verde’s main thoroughfare, Longarm could hear the rambunctious commotion going on in Marshal Hamp Forbes’s office. Sounded as though several different people were shouting at the same time. Couldn’t tell exactly what was being said. Noticed that the racket had pedestrians nervously moving off the boardwalk and into the street. Appeared as though anyone who got near the jail’s front door decided they had best get away from a noisy disagreement that could well turn into violent action. Longarm stomped onto the boardwalk, bulled his way inside, then slammed the jail’s heavy door behind him with an authoritative thud.

Jennings Bugg, leaning over the red-faced city marshal’s desk and shaking his finger, abruptly stopped yelling and came to full height. After a quick glance in Longarm’s direction, his face lit up with the flash of surprised recognition. Ropy veins still bulged from his thick neck as he tapped the top of Hamp Forbes’s desk with the finger most recently used in an attempt to intimidate Val Verde’s marshal.

A twisted, repellent grin bled onto Bugg’s chapped, cracked lips. He knifed a squint-eyed, fleeting look at the girl. Good-looking woman sat slumped down in one of the city marshal’s guest chairs like a two-bit hooker in a Dodge City whorehouse waiting for a cowboy to pick her out for a ride.

With one hand, the attention-grabbing, black-haired, blue-eyed beauty smacked a braided, silver-handled quirt against the stacked-leather heel of her knee-high riding boot. Clicked a nervous fingernail against the textured, rubber grip of the cross-draw Peacemaker Colt lying against her taut, table-flat belly with the other. Her smoldering, icy-pale gaze swept Longarm from toe to crown, then, ever so briefly, hesitated on his still-bulging crotch. A twitching grin curled the edges of full, pouty lips. Lips that had no earthly need of enhancement with a coating of painted-on rouge.

Fast Eddie Bloodsworth skulked in a corner on the farthest side of the crowded office. Near the barred cell block entrance in the back wall, the deadly gunny was decked out in nigh on totally black garb. His outfit was highlighted with a hammered silver hatband, elaborate matching belt decorations, and twinkling, silver-plated pistols. Worn butts-first, the weapons were ensconced in holsters mounted on a pair of belts draped across the man’s narrow middle.

Longarm couldn’t help but note that Bloodsworth bore a striking resemblance to a big-pincered Sonoran desert scorpion backed into the corner of some college-educated, bug collector’s capture box. Brooding skunk picked at already clean fingernails with a ten-inch, buffalo-horn-handled bowie knife. Scowled when he and Longarm locked eyes, then spit a gob of gooey brown tobacco juice onto Hamp Forbes’s near-spotless floor.

The glimmer of stunned recollection still played across Jennings Bugg’s deeply scarred countenance when he tilted his head to one side like an inquisitive wolf and growled, “Well, I’ll just kiss my very own big, nasty, hair-covered ass. If’n it ain’t Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis By-God Long—widely known to all and sundry as the long arm of the federal fuckin’ law, I’ll eat a raw porcupine, quills and all, by God.

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