Longarm and the Diamondback Widow Read Free

breath. His chest ached and his throat was dry.
    Good Lord, he hoped he wasn’t about to have a heart seizure!
    He drew a deep breath and continued climbing until he was within a few feet of the top of the ridge. He slowed his pace, breathing hard and holding the S&W straight out in front of him, edging a cautious look over the brow of the hill.
    Seeing nothing but the few shrubs and yucca plants capping the slope, he continued to the top. From somewhere ahead, a horse whinnied. As hooves began thudding hard, Rainey ran straight south along the bluff and stopped, casting his gaze down the far side.
    A rider was galloping away on a dun horse through a crease in the buttes, his elbows and saddlebags flapping like wings. Crouched low over his horse’s neck, the bushwhacker held a rifle in his right hand.
    â€œHold it!” Rainey shouted, dropping to one knee.
    The rider kept galloping away.
    Rainey extended the pistol in both hands, taking hasty aim at the jostling figure, and fired twice. Both slugs landed far short of the quickly receding rider.
    He fired once more. The bullet spanged benignly off a rock well behind the man.
    Rainey cursed and lowered the weapon, holding his gaze on the rider, unable to make out much more about him than that he wore denims, a cream hat, a cream shirt, and a brown vest. He had short hair—hard to tell what color from this distance. He rode a dun horse with three white stockings. Nothing else he could see of the man distinguished him. Rainey did not recognize the horse.
    When he was a hundred yards away, the bushwhacker looked back over his shoulder toward Rainey, but he was too far away for the sheriff to tell anything about his face. Frustrated, Rainey looked around carefully, making sure there were no other bushwhackers out there, and then he holstered his weapon and walked back down the ravine to where Dan Garvey was on one knee, looking nervous.
    â€œYou get him, Sheriff?”
    Rainey shook his head and looked up at the dead Bear-Runner boy, who was partly turned away from him. The boy’s long, blue-black hair blew in the breeze that funneled down the ravine. The rope creaked softly.
    â€œYou see who it was?”
    â€œNo.”
    Garvey straightened, adjusted his funnel-brimmed Stetson on his head, and brushed his wrist across his short, blunt nose. “Why the hell you suppose he was shooting at us?”
    Rainey felt the frustration well inside him. “Dan, you’re askin’ too many questions—you know that? Just too damn many questions.”
    The truth was, Rainey himself was asking himself all the same questions, only he wasn’t giving himself any answers.
    He walked over to where the hanging rope had been tied off around a low branch, and said, “Let’s get this poor boy down and dig us some graves.”
    * * *
    It was late in the day when Rainey tossed the last shovelful of dirt on the grave of the elder Bear-Runner.
    All four bodies were buried side by side on a little knoll north of the burned cabin, overlooking the creek. The sheriff thought the Bear-Runner family would have a nice rest there. At least, as nice a rest as anyone could have, having been shot and burned in their own cabin.
    Or hanged from a tree in their backyard . . .
    Rainey sighed as he leaned on his shovel and looked toward the burned out, still-smoldering hovel. Garvey was sitting on a nearby rock, smoking and looking as tired as Rainey felt after pulling the bodies out of the rubble and digging four graves on a hot, late-summer day in the high desert country of central Wyoming.
    Clouds were building, as they often did in the afternoon this time of year. Large, angry, brooding clouds moving in fast on a cooling western breeze that rattled the leaves of cottonwoods and aspens down along Diamondback Creek.
    â€œWho do you think done it, Sheriff?” Garvey asked, sweeping his gray-flecked sandy hair back from his sharp widow’s peak and