Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance Read Online Free PDF Page B

the lobby’s fine appointments, having found the young brunette to be as breathtaking as anything that humans could ever construct. Just now the liveried, gray-haired lobby clerk handed her a small parchment envelope, which she opened, slipping out the note tucked inside. She bowed her lovely head to read the missive as she made her way to the wine-red carpeted staircase with its gleaming, polished rails.
    The liveried oldster twisted a corner of his waxed handlebar mustache as he watched her go, dipping his chin just enough to tell Longarm that he was admiring the girl’s ass. Longarm found himself admiring it, too, as hestrode across the polished slate floor, saddlebags over one shoulder, Winchester hiked atop the other.
    As the woman made her way up the stairs, slowly at first as she read the note, then more quickly when she’d read it, turning at the second-floor landing, Longarm set his gear on the desk and said, “Who in the roaring flames of the devil’s hell is that?”
    The oldster gave him a disapproving glance, jerking his black silk waistcoat down. “I do apologize, sir, but I’m not predisposed to give out information about the Grand’s clientele.”
    “Well, excuse me all to hell.” Longarm caught one last glimpse of the charming waif before she disappeared up the second leg of the stairs. “Don’t suppose you’d be predisposed to renting a room to this tired old jake for a night, would you, friend?”
    He hated uppity folks, especially those he knew to be little better heeled that he himself was.
    The middle-aged desk clerk gave the tall, sun-weathered, dusty, rifle-wielding gent before him the critical up and down before saying with a haughty sigh and a slow, reproving blink behind steel-framed spectacles, “If you can pay in advance, such arrangements can be made, I suppose.”
    Longarm plunked the right amount of coins onto the desk, signed the register, gave the nasty old clerk instructions regarding the tending of his horse as well as his own person in the form of a hot bath delivered to his room, then pocketed his room key.
    “Later, amigo,” he said.
    “Of course, sir.”
    “And don’t be skimpy on the roan’s oats,” he said as he crossed to the stairs, not looking behind him. “I need him rarin’ to ride first thing in the mañana.”
    As he made his way to his room, striding along the second floor’s carpeted hall lit with gilded bracket lamps, he stopped suddenly, frowned, and glanced over his rightshoulder. A door latch clicked, as though a door had been opened slightly, quietly, but not so quietly closed.
    As if someone had been spying on him.
    The girl?
    Longarm’s broad face with its late-day beard shadow acquired a wistful expression. “Hmmmm.”

Chapter 5
    Longarm lounged in the hot water that the young porter had filled his copper tub with, sitting back and smoking a three-for-a-nickel cheroot and sipping straight from the bottle of Maryland rye whiskey that the lad had also hauled to his room.
    The lawman, grateful for the rare rye and to be able to sit right here in his nicely furnished digs without having to hammer the boardwalks looking for a tonsorial parlor or bathhouse, flipped the kid a three-dollar gold piece, and the kid—tall and gangly and looking like the sensitive black sheep of a mining family—left grinning.
    When Longarm had scraped his jaws with his ivory-handled razor, he rinsed with a bucket of clean hot water the porter had also provided. Finding himself as hungry as a prisoner working the rock quarries, he scrambled out of the tub. He dressed in clean underwear from his saddlebags and then wrestled into the rest of his duds that he’d given a quick dusting with a horsehair brush. He’d cleaned his low-heeled cavalry stovepipes with a little spit and a gun rag.
    He wrapped his gun and shell belt around his narrow hips, dropped his double-barreled, pearl-gripped derringer into the right pocket of his fawn vest, slid the old turnipwatch into the