Longarm on the Fever Coast by Tabor Evans

that story true by the way?"
    Longarm chuckled fondly and declared, "Truer than tales of a blood-sucking lesbian who can turn into a black panther on occasion, I reckon. It ain't polite to talk about screwing ladies who ain't here to defend themselves, and I never thought you were a lesbian to begin with."
    She demurely asked if he was convinced she didn't like to suck, and when he allowed he was, she proved him wrong by sliding her head down his naked belly, long hair trailing, and proceeding to suck like all get out, although it wasn't his blood she was sucking.
    So what with one pleasant surprise and another, Longarm wound up spending the rest of the day in the dark with La Bruja, and while he finally learned her real name and enough to lock her away for years, he never did get her to tell him who those other crooks were, or why they were after him, Lord love her.

CHAPTER 6
    Longarm still would have done it his own way, weather permitting. But when he checked in at the steam line again that night, they told him none of their vessels would be coming or going till that heavy weather let up outside.
    That sounded reasonable. The warm wet wind was blowing harder by the hour, and the heavy air smelled like spent brass cartridges, or a coming hurricane. So there was nobody laying in wait for him around the deserted wind-swept waterfront when he circled in silently from the lee side of some dark and shuttered warehouses with his gun out and his eyes slitted against the gathering storm.
    When he got back to La Bruja's, she naturally wanted him to spend more time with her, and he was tempted. For he could likely come again if she really set her mind and lush lips to it. But he insisted on holding her to that other promise, and so it was along about quarter past midnight, with neither coastal steamers nor paid killers to be seen in the swirling darkness, when Longarm finally left by way of a clamshell-paved wagon trace to the south, driving a team of Spanish mules as he hunkered half sheltered by a flapping canvas wagon cover with old Norma's Saratoga trunk and some trail supplies in the wagon box behind his sprung seat.
    He commenced having second thoughts about the grand notion a mile or less outside of town, when the light got even worse and he had to take the word of the mules and the gritty sounds of the steel-rimmed wheels that he was still following that shell path through what seemed like a mighty herd of wind-whipped palmettos flapping fronds on all sides as they strove to uproot their fool selves and take off like stampeding bats.
    It got too dark to see even that much as the wind howled ever louder, and then the invisible mules out ahead balked at hauling him and old Norma's Saratoga another step, no matter how a man snapped the ribbons on their wet rumps and shouted curses into the gathering storm. So he set the brake, hitched the ribbons around its shaft, and got down to see what had gotten into the fool mules.
    He said he was sorry for calling them foolish as soon as he could make out what they hadn't wanted to get into. The shell road ended in a wind-lashed sheet of muddy water, with no far side in sight. Nobody with a lick of sense would pave the way to the bottom of a river on purpose. So it was safe to assume the gale-force winds had run a high tide further ashore than usual. Winds did that some along the gulf coast. Wind surges along a low swampy shore made for more deaths than getting hit by flying shit in your average hurricane.
    He led the mules back up the wagon trace afoot for a ways as he told them, "I'm wet too. So the question before the house is whether we head back to town and lose Lord knows how much time, or keep going in hopes there's another route and we stumble over it before all three of us drown?"
    The mules offered no suggestions. Once he had them on as high a stretch of wagon trace as there seemed to be for miles, Longarm got back up under the flapping canvas to dig out that soggy map and some