Eleanor was sympathetic. But no more helpful than she'd already been. “That thing I told you about Mr. Baldwin didn't help?” she asked.
“Not so far. I really don't expect it to. He doesn't seem the type.”
“Oh, dear. And I was so hoping I could be a help to you,” she said, her expression a comic exaggeration of sadness.
He kissed her and said, “Believe me, lady, you're a help.”
“I was hoping for something a little more constructive than a good fuck or two.”
“A good fuck or two?” he asked. “Which times weren't good?”
Eleanor laughed. “I can't say yet, dear. I still need a few more to compare them with.”
“Yes, I reckon you do at that,” Longarm admitted. “Whyn't we do something to get to work on that?” He reached for her.
Along about one o'clock in the morning, when both of them were so sated they were sore, Eleanor licked the limp, shriveled thing that used to be a tall, proud cock. “Good-bye, pretty thing,” she whispered.
“Where're you off to?” he asked sleepily.
“Home, that's where. I can't allow myself to fall asleep here tonight. I have a business to run, you know, and I never even opened my doors yesterday. What will people think?”
“Ah, they'll think you're on the rag. They could think that two days in a row, you know.”
“Don't tempt me, dear.” She smiled. “But seriously, I do have to go home now. I can't hide in here forever. Although now that I think about it, there could be worse things than that.”
She left the bed and began dressing. She looked fine with clothes on too. But best without them. Eleanor liked it when he told her so. “Now where are you going?” she asked as Longarm too crawled off the sheets and began pulling clothes on.
“It's the middle of the night. I'll walk you home.”
“You don't have to do that.”
“No, I expect I don't. But I want to. I'll feel bad about it if I don't.”
“All right then.” She gave him a kissânot too many women could do that without having to go up onto their toesâand picked up her handbag. “We'll go out the back. It isn't far.”
It turned out that Eleanor lived not more than a hundred yards away, in the same block as Norm's house, but facing the street behind his. Convenient, Longarm thought, and wondered which had come first, the choice of houses or the affair. Not that it was any of his business.
He walked with her to her back door, and waited outside until she was safely indoors and he heard the bolt drawn shut against intruders, then ambled back the way they'd come, across weedy backyards that enabled Eleanor to come and go without ever having to go out onto the road. She had to cross the alley that ran through the middle of the residential block, but otherwise was able to stay mostly among sheds and tall shrubbery that would keep her nighttime travels from being obvious to the people who lived nearby.
Longarm found the back of Norm's property, and turned beside the tumbledown shed that he assumed was the one Norm had spoken of where the incriminating evidence was found. It occurred to Longarm that he hadn't yet investigated the site. Not that there was any real likelihood he would find anything there. Sheriff Jonas Brown had already found too much there for Norm's good. Still, it might be something to look into one of these days. God knows he wasn't accomplishing anything doing what he'd been doing so far here.
Longarm yawned. Not tonight, though. It was dark and he was tired, and tomorrow would be along a little too soon for comfort.
He wasted no time stripping and collapsing onto the bed. The sheets still smelled strongly of Eleanor and of sex.
Longarm slept almighty well that night.
Chapter 30
Son of a bitch oughta buy a better grade of cigar than that, Longarm thought. Any man that was going to smoke at least ought to learn how to tell the difference between a good cigar and a piece of used rope. This thing damn sure smelled like rope, all right. Or worse. It ...
It brought him upright in the bed.
Smoke? Why the hell should he be smelling smoke when he was alone in the house. And he himself hadn't been smoking anything for hours. It ...
It was smoke he was smelling, all right.
Lots of it. It ...
It was all around him, dammit.
The whole bedroom was filled with smoke. He could hardly breathe.
Longarm rolled off the bed, grabbing for his britches and gunbelt without thought as he did so.
Not only was the bedroom filled with thick, curiously dark smoke, he could now see fire at the windowâhigh flames already fully developed and beginning to crackle and spread inside the house.
Longarm stabbed his feet into his boots without bothering with such niceties as socks, scooped his carpetbag and Winchester into his arms, and threw them out through the window, taking out frame and all, scattering shattered glass into the fire-bright night out on Norm's lawn.
Longarm thought about jumping through the same window, but the flames were roaring now, the broken window feeding oxygen to the fire and adding to its fury.
He turned and headed toward the kitchen, only to be met there by another wall of flame, this one already fully engulfing the kitchen and back stoop. Heat drove him staggering backward toward the only remaining refuge, the parlor and foyer at the front of the small house.
There too he saw fire. The whole place was ablaze, flames licking at every window in sight.
Longarm bent down and snatched the rag rug off the floor close to the front door. The side wall of the parlor was burning furiously now. Norm's easy chair and reading nook were ablaze, and Longarm could see a sheet of flame licking at the front door as well.
It occurred to him that a fire as sudden and all-encompassing as this one was had to have been deliberately set.
The dark tendrils of smoke coming from the back of the house and a faint but unmistakable stink of coal oil added to that certainty.
This was the work of an arsonist. It could not be mere happenstance, not and be so quick and thorough.
It occurred to Longarm further that standing inside the fucking fire and thinking about shit like that was not going to do much to get him out of it.
And he had damn-all little time to act now. With fire in every direction, and growing by leaps and bounds, it would be but a matter of moments before the interior of Norm's little place became an oven, scorching his lungs and killing him from lack of air to breathe before the flames had time to attack his body.
Longarm had seen it more often than he liked to remember, house fires in which people lay unaware in their beds and died without ever knowing they were dead, their bodies consumed by flame afterward and sometimes not at all. Either way, dead was dead for eternity. It wasn't something Longarm was ready to try out just yet.
He wrapped the gritty, mud-smeared rug tight around his head as a protection against the flames, then pointed himself at the front door and made a blind, bull-like charge.
Longarm's shoulder smashed into wood. He heard glass break, and felt heat wash across his bare shoulders and his upraised arms.
Something, the remnants of the door he supposed, held him back for a moment. He drove forward with his legs, forcing his weight through the obstruction.
Trying not to breathe, above all not to inhale the deadly flames, Longarm bulled his way outdoors.
He fell, losing his footing as his headlong dash drove him across the porch and off it.
Pain shot through his left shoulder as, twisting, he landed on the flagstones laid as a walkway at the front of Norm's place.
He could smell scorched grass and overheated earth ... and fresh, clean, mercifully smoke-free air.
Behind him the fire roared, taking on a life of its own as it continued to intensify, continued to consume every flammable scrap of the house.
But that was behind him. Cool, sweet air surrounded Longarm now. He crawled forward, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, breathing deep of the untainted air, trying to pay no mind to the heat that baked through the cloth of his trousers from the fire so close behind him.
He threw the rug aside and staggered to his feet.
Several blocks away, from the direction of the business district, Longarm could hear the strident clang of alarm bells and, almost immediately afterward, the higher-pitched small bells of the fire company's hand-pulled pump and wheeled barrels of water.
Someone had seen. The community was coming to fight the pestilence that could destroy an entire town in one greedy gulp if allowed to go unchecked.
Longarm looked at the flames rising twenty, thirty feet above the level of Norm's roof. Experience told him that the fire company need not hurry. Not so far as Norm's place was concerned. When they arrived their emphasis would properly be placed on drenching the roofs and facing walls of nearby structures to save them and keep the fire from spreading any further.
It had been ... Longarm could not be certain. Only a scant few minutes, he thought, from the first whiff of smoke to this gigantic conflagration that now engulfed virtually everything Norm Wold owned in this imperfect world.
Only minutes, perhaps not more than moments. Someone, damn them, had done one hell of an efficient job of starting this blaze.
They'd set fires on all sides of the house, concentrating on the window openings and back door.
If there was any one area less affected, Longarm saw, it was at the front.
Thank goodness. It was that slightly less intense area that had permitted him to escape through the lone gap in what was otherwise a solid ring of fire.
Was that a result of the arsonist's fear of being observed? Longarm suspected so. The murderous son of a bitchâassuming he knew Longarm was sleeping insideâhad been able to take his time at the back and sides, but must have been in much more of a hurry to splash and run when setting his fires at the front.
Longarm considered how the job likely was done. First splash the coal oil, and perhaps add some flammable material like straw, then prepare a torch. Race around the house touching off the oil-soaked piles of ready straw or other kindling.
And then quickly away into the night before anyone could see who the fucker was.
Longarm had no doubt that the job had gone unobserved by the neighbors.
He would ask. Of course he would. But he had little hope that he would turn up any witnesses. The arsonist had....
Had done this before? Longarm wondered. Norm was in jail now on a charge of arson. Would this help convince the local justice of the peace that Norm was innocent of the accusations? Perhaps there was a bright side to this after all. Perhaps it would help get Norm out of that jail and on the street where he could help with his own defense.
The volunteer firefighters began to arrive. Longarm recognized a surprising number of them, including the mayor and Pete Hankins, and there was Luke Baldwin too, puffing and wheezing from the effort of running full out while he and three other men dragged a hand pump behind them.
The first folks on the scene brought buckets with them, some having had the presence of mind to fill their buckets before charging off into the night. Those few futilely tossed water onto one side of the charred skeleton of what minutes earlier had been a tidy little home. Others hurried to haul a hand-pulled water trailer into place at the side of the road and hook a pumper hose to it. Within minutes a thin stream of water, sparkling in the light of the flames, spewed from the pump into the heart of the fire.
“Let it go,” Longarm advised the mayor, who seemed to be more or less in charge. “The house is finished. All you can do now is make sure the fire don't spread.”
Chesman reluctantly, grumpily nodded. “I hate this, Long. We've never lost a house before. Couple barns and outbuildings, but never a whole house.”
“I bet you don't hate it half as bad as Norm will when he's told,” Longarm said, reaching for a cheroot only to realize that his coat and vestâand his smokes along with themâwere still inside the inferno that used to be a house.
All in all, he was just as glad he hadn't stayed any longer trying to gather up stuff that was replaceable.
Possessions seemed mighty unimportant to him right now, he decided.
Longarm felt someone at his elbow. It was Sheriff Jonas Brown. “Want to tell me about this, Long?”
Longarm grunted. “I'll be glad to tell you everything I know. I just wish that was a helluva lot more'n it turns out to be.”
Somehow, Longarm suspected he was done sleeping for this night.
He sure did still want a smoke, though, in spite of all of it that he'd accidentally inhaled. That wasn't quite the same thing.
“Reckon this is gonna turn into a criminal investigation, Sheriff, so if you like, I can write this down in a proper report for you.”
“Give me the quick version first if you don't mind.
I'll get you to make out a formal statement when we open up come morning.”
Longarm nodded. “All right, Jonas. To begin with, I was inside there, sound asleep an' minding my own business when ...”
Chapter 31
Norm Wold looked like he'd just been kicked in the teeth. Well, he kinda had been, Longarm conceded. It wasn't an easy thing for a man to learn he'd just been wiped out. And through no fault of his own at that.
“I'm sorry,” Longarm said, the words sounding as lame and empty to him as he knew they would. But what the hell else could a man say? Weak as it was, sorry was all you had when something terrible happened to a friend. “If I coulda done something ...”
“I know, Longarm, I know.”