Read Longarm 245: Longarm and the Vanishing Virgin for Free Online Page A

left hand grabbed the railing of the bridge and he swung himself around it onto the embankment leading down to the creek. The comer of the bridge wasn’t much cover, but it was the best available at the moment. Another shot banged, and this time Longarm got a good look at the muzzle flash as the slug chewed a splinter from the bridge railing a foot from his head. He fired at the flash, responding so quickly that the two shots sounded almost like one.
    Something hit the ground over there, catty-cornered across the road. Longarm crouched by the end of the bridge and waited to see if there were going to be any more shots. In the distance, a dog started barking, and that set off a dozen more mutts. But those were the only sounds Longarm heard.
    Until a moment later when a soft, rasping noise reached his ears. Somebody was struggling to breathe. A few more seconds passed, and the breathing turned into a groan of pain.
    That could have been faked to try to draw him out, but when the breathing resumed, it had a bubbling quality to it. After a moment, Longarm heard a ghastly rattle. He had heard similar sounds many times in the past, and nobody had ever been able to fake one of those.
    He straightened and stepped up off the embankment, holding his Colt ready just in case as he started across the road. When he reached the far side, near where the shots had come from, he dug out a lucifer and held it out at arm’s length in his left hand before snapping his iron-hard thumbnail against the head. The match flared into life. Longarm squinted from the glare as he looked down at the body sprawled at his feet.
    The man was lying face-down in a spreading pool of blood. His gun lay a few feet away, near an outstretched hand. Also lying on the street was a broad-brimmed hat. Longarm pointed the Colt down at the fallen figure as he worked the toe of his boot under the man’s arm. He rolled the corpse over and stepped back quickly.
    The man was dead, all right. Longarm lit another match and saw that his bullet had gone through the right side of the man’s chest, undoubtedly puncturing a lung so that he had drowned on his own blood. Plenty of the crimson stuff had leaked out of him, that was for sure. Longarm saw something else that made him frown.
    The fella had a beard—a bushy, black beard just like the driver of the wagon that had nearly run over him earlier tonight.
    And that hat lying near the corpse ... it was the same sort of hat that teamster had worn, Longarm recalled.
    Of course, there were probably hundreds of hats just like that in Denver, just as there were thousands of men in town who wore beards. Just because this fella had such a hat, and such a beard, didn’t necessarily mean that he was the same man who had tried to crush Longarm beneath the wheels of a heavily loaded wagon.
    Didn’t mean he wasn’t either.
    Longarm knelt beside the corpse and quickly searched the man’s pockets. He drew a roll of blood-soaked bills from inside the coat. Without counting them, he could tell from the thickness of the roll that the man hadn’t been poor. That sort of blew holes in the robbery theory. This gent had pretended to be a holdup man, but his real goal had been something else entirely.
    He had been out to kill Longarm, plain and simple.
    Then why go to the trouble of making it look and sound like a robbery? Longarm asked himself as he stood up. Why not just a shot out of the dark? Then he answered his own questions by realizing that the would-be killer must have been following orders in that respect as well. Someone had told the man to get rid of Longarm, but to make it appear to be a botched holdup, just in case there were any witnesses. Just as the earlier attempt on his life with the wagon would have looked like an accident if anyone had investigated it.
    Interesting. Mighty interesting. So interesting that Longarm thought about it for a long time after leaving the body where it was and returning