Border Snakes

by Peter Brandvold

  “Need someone to talk to, stranger?” She had a nice voice, vaguely accented.

  “Get away from him, Clara!” a man grumbled behind Hawk.

  Boots thudded on the brothel’s wood floor.

  Hawk had already watched in the back bar mirror the hard case who’d discharged his weapon rise from the fainting couch where he’d been sitting between a black girl and a redhead. Now the man, his thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belt, sauntered up to the bar, gimlet eyes on Hawk.

  “Why should I?” Clara said. “You already got you a girl, Laramie. Two of ’em!”

  “I said, git!” Laramie snarled, grabbing the girl’s arm and swinging her back away from the bar. Clara glared at the hard case but retreated to her chair near the fire.

  The pretty brunette, whom Hawk assumed ran the place, watched Hawk and Laramie from the shadows near a ceiling joist, frowning cautiously.

  Laramie, standing in the same position as that of the girl a moment ago, one elbow resting on the bar, looked at Hawk. The Rogue Lawman lifted his shot glass and tossed back the rest of his drink.

  “Who are you, mister?” Laramie asked slowly.

  He was lean and saturnine, with a black hat and a short, coyote-hide jacket. He wore two pistols on his lean hips, and the handle of another in a shoulder rig peeked out from behind a flap of his open jacket. He had a small, hand-rolled quirley wedged between the first two fingers of his left hand, and the smoke from the cigarette curled up between him and Hawk.

  Hawk refilled his shot glass. “You ask too many questions, friend.”

  “That’s the only one I’ve asked.”

  “That’s one too many.”

  Laramie’s eyes flickered faintly. A corner of his mouth quirked up as he glanced at the men behind him.

  At the same time, the piano player stopped playing, lifting his old, clawlike hands from the keys and turning around to face the bar, sensing the menace as he scowled dreadfully behind his steel-framed spectacles.

  2.

  BEWARE THE PREACHER’S PIG

  “COME on, friend,” Laramie prodded Hawk, feigning a grin. “There’s no secrets in A Thousand Delights. We’ll tell you who we are, if you tell us who you are. Now, that’s fair, ain’t it?”

  Hawk sipped his second whiskey shot. He nodded thoughtfully, set the shot glass back down on the bar, then turned to Laramie.

  “Well, since you asked so damn nice, and since I know who you are, Blaxton, and since I know who all your men are—most of ’em, anyway—I reckon it’s only fair that I tell you that I tracked you over from Trinidad, after your third bank robbery in as many days, and that I’m here to kill every last one of you yellow-livered privy rats. Just as dead as I killed your picket, Willie Dumas, in an alley across the street.”

  Laramie Blaxton’s grin faded. His face darkened, an eye narrowed, and an incredulous cast entered his gaze. “You . . . you think you’re gonna kill all of us?”

  “That’s right,” Hawk said matter-of-factly.

  A hush fell over the room. It was like a held breath. Laramie Blaxton leaned against the bar and stared up at Hawk, who was a good four inches taller than the outlaw leader. Suddenly, recognition slackened the muscles in the outlaw’s raptor-like face.

  “Well, Gideon Henry-goddamned-Hawk,” he said in bemused awe and genuine surprise. “Fellas,” he said to the room while keeping his eyes on Hawk, “look who we been so honored to have shadowin’ our trail. The Rogue Lawman his ownself!”

  The wolflike faces stared at Hawk, expressionless.

  The four poker players were holding their cards tensely. One chomped down hard on the fat stogy wedged in a corner of his mouth. The pretty brunette who ran the place stood stiffly where she’d been standing before, her wide brown eyes wary, skeptical. She didn’t realize it, but she saved Hawk’s life when she lifted her gaze toward the balcony over the bar.

  Hawk grabbed the Henry off the bar top and, thumbing back the hammer, took two quick strides past Blaxton. He’d only taken one, however, before a rifle barked above the bar.

  The bullet cut the air just off Hawk’s left shoulder and made a wet cracking sound as it tore through the crown of Blaxton’s hat. The outlaw leader didn’t make a sound as his head bobbed suddenly, violently, and he staggered forward, arms hanging slack at his sides.

  A girl in the room screamed. An outlaw shouted.

  Hawk looked up, pressing the stock of his Henry against his right shoulder and raising the barrel. The man who’d just killed Blaxton stood in balbriggans and socks atop the balcony, a battered sombrero on his head, looking down with a shocked expression at the result of his errant shot. His rifle barrel dangled over the rail, smoke dribbling from its octagonal maw.

  Hawk planted a bead on the outlaw’s wrinkled, sunburned forehead, and just as the man jerked his eyes toward the Henry’s barrel, Hawk squeezed the trigger. A ragged, quarter-sized hole appeared just above and a little left of the man’s exasperated eyes.

  The man screamed as his head jerked back. His knees buckled. As he fell, he began pulling his rifle back behind the rail. The stock got caught, and he released it.

  The rifle tumbled straight down and smashed against the bar top. The man himself slumped back against the balcony’s spooled rail as though he figured he’d just sit there and collect his thoughts for a while.

  “Good God almighty!” the bartender bellowed, backing against the shelves of the back bar and holding his hands up around his head as if to shield himself from bullets.

  As the echo of Hawk’s blast chased itself around the building’s adobe-brick walls, Hawk levered a fresh cartridge into the Henry’s firing chamber and pivoted toward the room behind him.

  Less than five seconds had elapsed since Hawk had seen the pretty brunette’s eyes lift toward the balcony, but all seven of the hard cases in the saloon hall were on the move. The poker table looked as though a stick of dynamite had been detonated beneath it; as the four players leapt to their feet, the table shot straight up in the air, and the four whores that had been hovering close to the gamblers flew back from around the men in a blur of swirling hair and dancing dresses, their screams rising shrilly.

  Bottles and glasses crashed to the floor.

  “Git that son of a bitch!” one of the gamblers shouted, lifting a baby LeMat in one hand and a brass-chased Colt Navy in the other.

  Calmly, without expression, as though he were merely pinking cans off fence posts, Hawk drew a bead on him and shattered his breastbone.

  Screaming as the bullet exited his body under his left arm and shattered a bracket lamp on the post beside him, the man fired both pistols into the still-jouncing table. As the man stumbled backward, leaking blood badly, Hawk smoothly ejected the spent cartridge from his Henry’s chamber, seated fresh, and lined his sights up on another cardplayer just as his target triggered a black-barreled Colt, the slug of which curled the air off Hawk’s left cheek and crashed into the mirror behind him.

  K-chow!

  Hawk’s finely tuned and regularly cleaned and oiled Henry leapt in the Rogue Lawman’s hands. In his haste, however, he hadn’t gotten a clear picture of his jerking target, and the slug hammered off the man’s Colt, ripped through the face of the man standing three feet to the hard case’s right, and tore into the ceiling with an angry bark.

  Both men screamed.

  The one with the damaged gun dropped the weapon like molten iron while the one with gaping holes in both cheeks staggered back two herky-jerky steps, eyes wide as saucers, and swung his Sheriff’s model Colt toward Hawk, who shot him a second time—this time on purpose and this time for keeps.

  But not before the man’s own slug sliced a burning line across one of Hawk’s right-side ribs. It was a sting like that of an angry wasp.

  Hawk’s narrowly focused mind only vaguely registered the nip. He was too busy levering and firing, levering and firing, seeing smoke puffs from the pistols aimed at him, hearing the barks and the screeches of the bullets careening aro
und him and thumping into the bar or the back bar mirror or annihilating the pyramid of neatly stacked shot glasses to his right.

  Like a man possessed, he dispatched one outlaw after another as he stood before the bar, sidewise to the room, boots spread a little more than shoulder-width apart. Only his pivoting hips and his hands moved, sliding the rifle this way and that in his arms.

  In the roughly twelve seconds it took him to cut each of the gun wolves down and to set them howling like banshees over a fresh kill—those that did not die instantly, that was—Hawk never blinked. If anyone were watching his face—and no one was, as everyone in the room was either shooting or dying or lying facedown on the floor with her arms over her head, wailing—he or she might have seen the right side of Hawk’s long mouth quirk with a faintly amused, bemused, exhilarated grin.

  Hawk levered a fresh round but froze his trigger finger as he aimed the Henry’s long, octagonal barrel through the wafting powder smoke. He looked for movement but saw nothing but the smoke itself.

  A funereal silence fell over the room. A silence so heavy that only the snapping of the fire in the hearth penetrated with an eerie, stubborn indifference.

  After a few stretched seconds, the silence was compromised by a man’s grunt.

  Then a groan.

  Hawk spied movement through the shifting smoke cloud, somewhere behind an overturned chair and a small table, near a still-standing palm. A head took shape in the weirdly lighted smoke. It shifted this way and that as a man tried to gain his feet.

  Hawk drew a bead on the head—just a pale oval beneath a line of black hair. He fired, the Henry speaking again loudly. The bullet plunked into one of the front doors with a sharp, wooden thud.

  The head still moved. Hawk fired again.

  “Ohh!”the man said, stumbling backward and hitting the floor with a hollow boom.

  Hawk didn’t bother ejecting the spent cartridge. He lowered the Henry and, having unconsciously counted his shots and knowing he’d capped all sixteen as well as the one he’d had in the breech at the start of the dance, set the long gun on the bar.

  He pulled his silver-plated Russian from the cross-draw holster on his left hip. He slipped his long-barreled, horn-gripped Colt Army from his second holster thonged on his right thigh. Thumbing both hammers back, he strode slowly forward, swinging the guns around, looking for movement out of any of the quarry he’d dispatched.

  The whores lay groaning or wailing. All but the pretty brunette, that was. She sat with her back to the ceiling joist she’d been standing in front of earlier.

  She had her knees up, her hands on them. Her fine-boned cheeks were pale and her sherry-brown eyes were dark as she studied Hawk in pensive silence. Anger and exasperation were in those eyes, both emotions tempered by hushed amazement.

  Six of the outlaws were down and unmoving and, judging by the amount of blood they were spilling, were pounding on hell’s gates. The seventh, however, staggered to a half crouch just as Hawk reached the front of the room.

  “Murderin’ devil!” the man roared as he lifted a snub-nosed revolver in his left fist, his long, brown hair hanging over his face like a tattered screen.

  Hawk killed him easily with a round from his Colt. The man wailed again and triggered his empty pistol at the floor, the ping of the hammer ringing like a cracked bell, and flew backward through a window. When the scream of the breaking glass had died, it was replaced by the howling of the wind outside.

  Beneath the wind, Hawk heard the scrape of a boot somewhere above the brothel’s main saloon hall. Holding both smoking revolvers barrel up, and keeping the brunt of his attention on the balcony obscured by gun smoke above the bullet-riddled bar, he made his way to the back of the room.

  The barman inched his head above the bar top. He had glass in his hair. His eyes were dark.

  “What in tarnation?” he said in hushed awe, sliding his incredulous gaze from Hawk to the smoky room.

  Hawk started up the narrow stairs, taking one slow step at a time, his own spurs ringing softly on the thick, red carpet. When he was halfway to the top, a face took shape in the shadows ahead. A rifle barrel glinted in the room’s wan light. The rifleman bolted forward, to the edge of the stairs, bellowing maniacally and angling the rifle down toward Hawk.

  The Rogue Lawman extended both revolvers at the same time.

  Both guns spoke simultaneously, punching twin holes into the rifleman’s bare chest. Smoke and flames geysered from the rifle’s maw, the bullet clipping the railing to Hawk’s left.

  The rifle dropped to the floor and slid down the stairs as the shooter, clad in only lye-yellowed underwear bottoms, fell to his knees. He gave Hawk a blank stare, then, lids slowly closing over his eyes, he sagged forward, turned a somersault, and continued turning them until he’d piled up atop his rifle at the bottom of the stairs.

  Hawk stared up at the balcony.

  Spying no movement among the smoky shadows shunted this way and that by wan candlelight from somewhere down a dingy hall, he continued climbing the steps. Slowly, he continued across the balcony into a hall that smelled of sex, smoke, and spilled liquor. He set his boots down carefully, but still the floorboards creaked faintly beneath the musty carpet runner.

  Rough-timbered doors stood closed on either side of the hall, the walls of which were constructed of low-grade pine planks. When he was halfway between the stairs and the hall’s end, a door opened suddenly at the end of the hall on the left.

  Hawk crouched, extending both pistols.

  A figure bolted out the open door and across the hall so quickly, disappearing in a blur down an intersecting hall, that Hawk had no time to get a shot off. Hearing boots clomping away from him, he bolted forward, then slowed when he reached the open door from which the man had fled.

  Sour air emanated from the dim, cluttered room. Just beyond the open door, a slender Indian girl sat at the edge of a rumpled bed, long hair hanging straight down the sides of her dark-eyed face. She was naked but did nothing to cover herself. Her breasts were small and pear-shaped, with dark brown nipples. As Hawk peered into the room, looking for other gunmen, the girl shook her hair from her eyes and lifted a long, black cheroot to her lips.

  The cheroot’s coal glowed as she took a long drag and leaned back on one outstretched arm, regarding Hawk without expression.

  Hawk swung away from her, quickly trod the ten feet to a dark, rickety back stairs, and ran down three steps at a time. At the bottom of the steps, an unlatched outside door banged against the building’s outside wall in the moaning wind. Hawk bolted through it and slid both cocked pistols around in front of him.

  Straight out from the brothel’s back door, a man ran toward the brown, rocky ridge rising in the south. He wore baggy denims and a battered Stetson, and his cartridge belt was draped over his left shoulder. The flaps of his unbuttoned shirt blew behind him in the wind.

  Beneath the wind, Hawk could hear the soft trills of his hammering spurs.

  Hawk fired two quick shots. Dust puffed around the man’s scissoring boots. He leapt with a start, but Hawk didn’t think he’d hit him.

  He lunged forward, running, his own spurs lifting a raucous clatter.

  Ahead of the running man lay a rickety-looking brick shack, with a wooden stable off the left side. The stable was enclosed by a dilapidated board fence around which sage and scrub willows grew thick. A sign was nailed to the front of the fence, but Hawk couldn’t read it from this distance.

  The fleeing outlaw slowed his pace near the shack, then slithered through the fence, losing his hat in the process. As the hat bounced and tumbled away with the sand and tumbleweeds and flying trash on the chill wind, the cutthroat drew his head back inside the fence, then stuck a pistol out between the slats.

  Smoke puffed from the gun’s barrel.

  It was followed a quarter second later by a hollow crack that was quickly snuffed by the wind. The bullet chewed into the ground several feet from Hawk’s pounding boots.

&
nbsp; Hawk stopped and raised both his pistols. He was about to squeeze the triggers when a bizarre squeal rose from the behind the fence.

  There was the almost inaudible drumming of fast-moving hooves, and then the shooter loosed a scream that tightened the skin between Hawk’s shoulders. He held fire, staring over the barrels of his leveled guns and into the pen from which the screams of the man now rose with the shrill, savage mewls of an enraged pig.

  Hawk could see little from this distance and angle. But between the slats of the fence he caught glimpses of frenzied movement and occasional splashes of dull color—the man’s white shirt, blue denim trousers, and the pig’s pink, mottled-black hide with a little curl of tail rising up from its broad ass.

  Hawk strode forward.

  The pig’s frenzied squeals steadily grew louder while those of the man dwindled, became higher, thinner, more pleading and intermittent.

  By the time Hawk got up to the fence, the man’s cries had died entirely, and Hawk saw why. The pig had him down on his back, unmoving, the man’s arms flung above his shoulders.

  His torso was drenched in blood. The pig’s head, also painted scarlet, thrashed violently from side to side as it dug into the man’s belly with its broad, square snout and snapping teeth.

  Hawk depressed his gun hammers as he lowered both weapons. He stepped back to read the sign hanging from the fence’s top rail by a rusty nail—just a two-foot-by-one-foot scrap of hand-painted lumber: BEWARE THE PREACHER’S PIG.

  Hawk holstered his weapons and peered once more into the pen. The pig was still busily slashing and tearing at the bloody corpse, jerking and dragging the body around violently.

  Hawk turned, pulled his hat down tight, and started back to the brothel, squinting against the swirling, wind-churned grit. “Should’ve learned how to read, friend.”

  3.

  MRS. PARKER

  HAWK strode around the front of the building to take a ga nder at the town in the wake of the dustup in A Thousand Delights.