Hell Up North by Tabor Evans

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

Chapter 10

Longarm was wonderfully, graciously pie-eyed by the time the sawbones, who’d sent down for another bottle to split between him and his patient, had finished cleaning out and sewing up the wound. The man staggered out of the room with his medical kit, and before he’d latched the door behind him, Longarm was asleep.

He awoke in a semi-stupor when someone entered his room, now dark with snow ticking against the window-panes, to drop his tack and rifle on the floor beside the dresser. He was vaguely aware of a young boy’s voice muttering, “And I’ll take that tip in the mornin’, you lousy snipe . . .”

Then the door clicked shut, boots scuffed off down the hall, and Longarm’s eyelids closed once again.

He stirred slightly after that, to the pounding and scraping of drunken feet in the hall outside his room, to bodies thumping against the wall, and raucous drunken bellows. Even in his sleep, anxiety bit down on him hard. In his condition, he was defenseless against the Mantooth Bunch, should they decide to get shed of the stranger, or if one of them recognized him. He’d been a lawman long enough to have acquired an extensive reputation, and he’d rubbed shoulders with a lot of hombres, most of them bad.

When his door opened suddenly, and he heard a girl cry—“Same to you, ya fuckin’ limp-dicked weasel! I wouldn’t spread my legs for your mangy noodle if it was the last dick in the territory!”—he groaned and flung a hand toward the right bedpost, where he normally would have hung his gun and cartridge belt. He clawed only air, however. In his agonized, drunken state, he’d dropped his gun rig somewhere on the dark floor below the bed, well out of his reach in his current condition, unless he wanted to open up the stitches and bleed his life out on the sheets.

The door slammed so loudly that the bed jumped and the walls shuddered. The hall’s dim candlelight bled through the cracks around the frame and through the keyhole, silhouetting a slender figure in front of it.

“Who’s there?” Longarm drawled. All the hooch he’d tossed down his gullet, on an empty stomach and low on blood, made the room pitch and sway around him, and small flares burst in his eyes.

Alma giggled. There were several scrapes and clomps as she staggered around the room, and then a solid thump, like a boot hitting the floor. That was followed by a hollow bang and a thump, as though a boot had bounced off the wall before hitting the puncheons. A spur rang softly.

“Go ’way,” Longarm choked. “This is a private goddamn room. I paid fer it . . . and I demand my piracy.”

The girl laughed huskily amidst the sibilant sounds of jostling clothes. “Piracy?”

She laughed again.

Longarm was propped on his elbows, feeling as defenseless as a toddler in a bassinet amongst a raiding party of drunken Kiowa.

“Ran into the doc,” the girl said, breathless, still staggering around and shedding clothes.

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