Border Snakes

by Peter Brandvold

  As he built a smoke, Mrs. Parker rolled toward him, throwing an arm across his waist and staring up at him wonderingly, her cheeks still flushed from their coupling. “You’re a man of many talents, Mr. Hawk. I don’t normally entertain, but you’re making me think I should start to on a regular basis.”

  Hawk glanced over the cigarette paper at her.

  She laughed at his stoicism and shook her head, ran the first two fingers of her right hand down the center of his chest. “Why are you giving me all that money?”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “Who doesn’t need money?”

  Hawk held the open cigarette paper with its line of tobacco in one hand. He took the tie strings of his makings sack in the other hand, gave them a jerk to close the bag, then swung the sack back onto the nightstand. “Me, I reckon. I only need enough to get me from here to there.”

  “Between killings?”

  “That’s right.”

  She narrowed an eye at him. “Why?”

  He twisted the cylinder closed and stuck it in his mouth to seal it. “It’s what I do.”

  “Just born nasty, huh?”

  “I reckon.”

  She lowered her eyes to her fingers, absently playing with a curl of the dark brown hair on his belly. Hawk fired the quirley with a match from the night table and exhaled smoke from his nostrils, setting the spent match on the table. “What’s Mr. Parker doin’ on boot hill?”

  “Fell into the wrong crowd after we came out here from Tennessee.” She kept her eyes on Hawk’s belly, an oblique smile quirking her lips. “We’d settled on a ranch, was out there about a year before he got restless. Chet came from rough stock around Chattanooga. Robbed a mercantile and got shot by a posse up from Alamosa. Deserved it, as he killed a shopkeeper and wounded a deputy town marshal.” She sighed. “He’d found a little gold on our claim, and I used it to put a down payment on this place. At least he gave me that much.”

  “You come up with the name?”

  “A Thousand Delights?” She laughed. “That’s what Chet used to call me.”

  Hawk took a deep drag off the quirley. The wind had died after the sun had gone down, and it was so quiet in the room that he could hear his cigarette burning.

  She looked up at him. “You really that Rogue Lawman Laramie was talking about?”

  Hawk snorted. “I’d just as soon that didn’t get spread around.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I think with men like Day Wiley running around with badges cut out of peach tins on their vests, we need more of you, though . . . uh . . . not in my place.” Mrs. Parker chuckled, then narrowed an eye at him. “What happened to make you so good at killing?”

  Hawk looked at the smoking coal of his quirley, and his jaws tightened slightly. “Watching a guilty man walk away from a murder charge because a county prosecutor got him off on a loose stitch in the law.”

  “Who’d he murder?”

  “My son.”

  Mrs. Parker scowled. “I’m sorry.” She looked away. “How’d your wife take it?”

  “Not too well,” Hawk said. “She hanged herself.”

  Mrs. Parker stared at the wall on the far side of the bed. “I see.” After a time, she dropped her legs to the floor and began to push herself to her feet. “It’s been nice knowing you, Mr. Hawk. Safe travels to—”

  Hawk touched her arm. “You in a hurry?”

  She looked at him across her shoulder, shook her head. She leaned down and kissed his belly, then farther down. “For you, Mr. Hawk, I got all night.”

  Before he’d even realized why, Hawk’s Russian was in his hand and cocked. He was sitting up. Mrs. Parker groaned beside him but continued sleeping.

  Just outside the door of Hawk’s room, which was revealed by bright morning light pushing through the two sashed windows, a floorboard creaked. A shadow moved under the door. Quickly but soundlessly, Hawk threw the blankets back and bounded out of bed. Two long strides, and he was at the door.

  He set his hand on the knob, turned it, and threw the door wide.

  “Whoa!” the man standing on the other side of the threshold said, but not before Hawk had grabbed the collar of the man’s duster and swiveled his hips. Kicking out his right leg, he jerked the man toward him, and the man gave another cry as he stumbled forward, hit the floor of the room on both knees, twisted around, and piled up against the washstand.

  On the bed, Mrs. Parker awakened with a clipped scream and drew the blankets up to cover her breasts, her sleep-mussed hair in her eyes.

  Hawk set his bare right foot on the man’s holstered six-shooter and aimed his Russian at Sheriff Day Wiley’s scowling, tomato-red face as the man squeezed his eyes closed and raised a defensive hand, “Don’t shoot, fer chrissakes! Don’t shoot me, goddamnit!”

  “What the hell’re you doing, lurkin’ around outside my room, Sheriff?”

  “I wasn’t lurkin’! If you’d given me time, I was about to knock!”

  “The hell you were.”

  “I was.” Wiley looked up at Hawk’s imposing, naked figure through one slitted eye, keeping his right hand raised in front of his face. “Christ, if I’d been trying to bushwhack you, don’t you think I’d have my gun out?”

  Hawk looked at the holstered gun beneath his bare foot. He removed his foot from the gun but kept his cocked Russian aimed at the sheriff’s head. “Well, if it’s Sunday and you’re wakin’ me for church, you’re wasting your time, Sheriff.”

  The fear in Wiley’s eyes was quickly tempered by fury. He glanced to his right, saw Mrs. Parker scowling at him through the hair hanging down over her eyes, and a deeper flush rose in his cheeks.

  He glanced at the big, silver-plated pistol aimed at his nose and shuttled his angry gaze up past the gun and Hawk’s muscular arm to the Rogue Lawman’s sparking green eyes. “Very funny, you sonofabitch. Get that gun out of my face. Man downstairs wants to see you.”

  “Who?”

  “Muckety-muck from Denver. Flashed a badge at me, told me to fetch you pronto. Three of ’em, matter-of-fact.”

  “Three? All with badges?”

  “Yeah, but they ain’t here to arrest you. Leastways, they said they weren’t. One said he’s an old friend of yours. Said his name was Spurlock, from Denver.”

  “Spurlock.”

  “That’s what he said. Now will you kindly get that iron out of my face? Don’t much appreciate bein’ some three-piece suit’s errand boy, then havin’ your big horse pistol stuck up my nose.”

  As Hawk lowered the Russian, Wiley began climbing to his feet, his voice pitched high with exasperation. “Goddamnit, I’m the sheriff of this county!”

  “You sure the man said Spurlock?”

  “What—you think I made up Spurlock off the top of my head?”

  Hawk went to one of the room’s two windows and looked down into a fifty-yard gap between the brothel and the next building. Nothing there except morning shade, brush, and trash. No badge-toting gunmen.

  Hawk glanced back at Wiley, who was still standing in the middle of the room looking indignant.

  “All right, you did your job, Sheriff.” Hawk waved the Russian toward the open door. “Tell Spurlock I’ll be down shortly.”

  “He said I was to wait for you.”

  Hawk just stared at him.

  “Christ.” Wiley moved to the door, glanced from Mrs. Parker to Hawk, who was still standing naked, his silver-plated pistol in his hand. The sheriff gave a caustic, exasperated chuff, shaking his head, and stomped out.

  “Who’s Spurlock?” Mrs. Parker asked. In spite of last night’s intimacies, Hawk had seen no reason they should get on a first-name basis.

  Hawk closed the door, set the Russian on the dresser, and plucked his balbriggans off the floor. “Old friend of mine,” he said, brows mantled in deep thought. “What the hell he’s doin’ out here—I can’t imagine.”

  She lowered the quilts from her chest and cupped her heavy breasts in her hands, canting her head and squinti
ng an eye at Hawk. “You’re not gonna shoot up my place again, are you?”

  “I told you,” Hawk said, sitting on the edge of the bed to pull his socks on. “Spurlock’s an old friend of mine.”

  “Then what were you looking out the window for?”

  Hawk looked at her as he stood and grabbed his black denim trousers from off a chair back. She was still absently cupping her breasts, rolling her thumbs across the nipples jutting from the large rosettes. Now she arched a brow at him.

  He chuffed ironically as he pulled the jeans up around his hips and buttoned the fly. “I’ll probably head out soon. For what it’s worth, it’s been a long time since I spent the whole night with a woman.”

  “For what it’s worth,” she said, “it’s been a while for me, too.”

  When Hawk had finished dressing and hitching the buckle of his double-rigged cartridge belt, he donned his hat and grabbed his rifle and saddlebags.

  If he were walking into a trap, he likely wouldn’t have time to retrieve his possibles later. Racking a cartridge into the Henry’s breech, he moved to the door, glanced once more at Mrs. Parker, who leaned back against the bed’s headboard with an ambiguous expression on her pretty face, her hair tossed straight back over her head.

  Hawk opened the door, looked both ways along the hall, and went out.

  5.

  DEADLY PREY

  HAWKstopped at the top of the brothel’s rear stairs and removed his spurs. He dropped the spurs into a saddlebag pouch, then started down the steps, moving quickly but quietly in spite of an occasional squawk of a loose riser and a belch from the rickety railing along which he ran his left hand.

  The stairwell was still dark, but the window in the door at the bottom shone with intensifying morning light. He stopped before it and peered out. Seeing nothing more than freshly scalloped sand and a thick pile of tumbleweeds blown in on yesterday’s wind, he opened the door and went out.

  Holding his rifle straight out from his hip, he gave the area around the brothel a careful scouting.

  Satisfied for the time being that he wasn’t about to be dry-gulched by federal marshals armed for bear and packing a death warrant like the one four territorial governors had recently armed a U.S. marshal named Flagg with—a man whom Hawk had dispatched along with six others in southern Arizona—he made his way to the front of A Thousand Delights. He peered in a window to the right of the door, then opened the door quickly but quietly and stepped just as quietly inside and drew the door softly closed behind him.

  The sun blazed in the front windows, leaving the area directly in front of the windows in inky purple shadow.

  Keeping to those shadows and stepping around the furniture that had all been properly arranged though bearing the bloodstains and bullet holes of yesterday’s dustup, Hawk made his way toward the rear of the room, toward the bar and the stairs, where three men sat playing cards and sipping coffee from large stone mugs and liquor from large snifters.

  Two had their backs to him. The one who sort of faced him from the other side of the table—a well-set-up gent with a clean-shaven though deeply lined, blue-eyed face under a cap of wiry, silver hair—he recognized.

  Gavin Spurlock had given Hawk his first job as a deputy U.S. marshal out of Yankton, Dakota Territory, nearly fifteen years ago, when Hawk had returned west from the battle-fields of the Civil War. Hawk’s own father, an old war chief who had fallen in love with Hawk’s mother, a pretty blond Scandinavian girl named Ingrid Rasmussen, had died when Hawk was still a child. The chief had many wives, and Hawk had been one of many children, so the chief hadn’t paid much attention to his half-breed offspring.

  For all practical purposes, Hawk had been fatherless . . . until Gavin Spurlock had taken him under his wing, given him a job, and made him an expert at it. He’d also given the young veteran cavalryman a place to call home, a place to, as Spurlock had once said, “sink a taproot,” which Hawk had done when he’d married Linda and fathered Jubal.

  Gavin Spurlock.

  The name burned on a wand of fiery guilt across Hawk’s brain. When he’d turned rogue, he’d become in essence a traitor to the one man he’d respected most in the world—a venerable chief marshal who held no laws more sacred than those laid out by the Constitution of the United States of America. A man in whose house on the outskirts of Yankton hung portraits of both Washington and Jefferson, and whose supper prayer consisted of four simple words, “God bless this land.”

  His guilt for the past three vigilante years now swept through Hawk to his belly, where it boiled like water, as he stole quietly up to the table where Spurlock perused the cards in his hand while puffing a long stogy angling down from one side of his short, resolute mouth, beneath the straight, broad line of his judicial, lightly veined nose. As Hawk stole up behind a brick ceiling joist ten feet from the table, one of the men sitting with his back to Hawk slammed his cards down on the table and looked up at the second-floor balcony.

  “Where is he, damnit? Who in the hell does he think he is, keepin’ us—?”

  “Oh, I think he knows exactly who he is,” Gavin Spurlock said, not raising his eyes from his cards, which he was shifting around in his hands. “And as far as where he is, I believe he’s right behind you, Deputy Stuart.”

  Both men who had their backs to Hawk jerked their heads around. Finding that the Rogue Lawman had, indeed, flanked them, their eyes snapped wide, then hooded with incredulity. Both had automatically slapped their hands to their holsters but froze when they saw Hawk’s rifle extending straight out from his right hip.

  “At ease, gentlemen,” Spurlock said, casually shuttling his cool gaze from his cards to Gideon Hawk standing in the shadows beside the brick pillar. “You didn’t think such a savvy hunter . . . and such deadly prey . . . would actually enter the room with the turgid predictability of taking the main stairs, did you?”

  Both men were well dressed, one in his middle thirties, the other early forties. Cold weather coats hung over the backs of their chairs. They continued glowering up at Hawk. The one on the left, the older one, removed his hand from his six-shooter first. The other glanced at his older partner, skepticism flashing faintly in his brown eyes, then followed suit.

  Both men held their hands up where Hawk could see them. Moon-and-star badges of deputy U.S. marshals shone on their wool vests.

  Hawk glanced behind him at the door, then at the windows, again making sure he wasn’t walking into a trap.

  He vaguely, absently realized that some small component inside him had, surprisingly, been untouched by the wildness that had otherwise reshaped his character in recent years. This throwback trait to a more civilized time made him want to trust the older man before him now. But the dominant feralness, cultivated by his overwhelming urge to track and kill killers while dodging bona fide lawmen so that he could continue to track and kill, would not allow it.

  At least, not yet.

  He let his saddlebags and coat slide down his arm. As they hit the floor he stepped forward and crouched slightly, keeping his rifle aimed at the men at the table while his eyes scanned the second-floor balcony for ambushers.

  “Gideon,” Spurlock said sadly. “You know me better than that.”

  Hawk looked at the man. Spurlock’s face was a little more lined, his gray hair perhaps a little grayer and thinner, his shoulders a little sharper and more pronounced beneath his black, broadcloth coat. But he was still the man Hawk remembered, right down to the genuine warmth and affability spoking his clear, intelligent eyes.

  Guilt bubbled in Hawk again, but he didn’t let it show on his face. He took another step forward, keeping his rifle aimed between the two younger lawmen while looking at their older, more seasoned and time-tempered superior. “What’re you doin’ here, Gavin?”

  Spurlock set his cards down on the table carefully, as though he intended to pick them up again and resume play a little later. He crossed one arm on his broad chest and, with his other hand, plucked the stogy from between
his lips and held it close to his face, narrowing his eyes slightly as he stared through the smoke at his one-time apprentice.

  “I didn’t come to kill you, Gid. And I didn’t come to bring you in.”

  “That’s good. Because I wouldn’t let you do either.” Hawk glanced at the older deputy, who had a thick dragoon-style mustache, and then at the younger one, who had a week’s growth of sandy beard on his pale cheeks. “But since you got two gun-hung coyotes tagging along, I figure you’re not here for tea and pound cake.”

  “They’re merely my escorts,” Spurlock said. “You wouldn’t expect a man of nearly sixty-five years . . . one who’s put away as many red-tailed, shaggy-faced lobos as I have . . . to make the trip from Denver alone, would you? No one to back my play . . . ?”

  He indicated the chair to his right. “Sit down.”

  “I’ll stand.”

  Spurlock smiled bemusedly as he studied Hawk for a moment before glancing at the two lawmen across from him. “Gentlemen, why don’t you go out and get some air?”

  The older deputy glowered up at the Rogue Lawman, then turned to his boss. “You sure about that?”

  Spurlock nodded as he returned his eyes to Hawk. “Go on. I’ll be out shortly.”

  The deputies shoved their coins and bank notes into their pockets. The older man plucked a loosely rolled quirley from an ashtray, and then he and his young partner slid their chairs back and gained their feet. The older man stepped in front of Hawk and furrowed his bushy black brows. His soup-strainer mustache was a straight line across his mouth.

  His voice was a low growl. “You’re damn lucky I was never assigned to your trail, Hawk. If I had been, you wouldn’t have been runnin’ off the leash half as long as you have.”

  Hawk smiled grimly. “I don’t doubt it a bit.”

  The older lawmen held Hawk’s gaze for a moment, then hitched his gun belt up his hips, straightened his ribbon tie, took a drag from the quirley in his right hand, and turned away.

  He and the younger deputy, who was a little flushed with apprehension but taking all his cues from the older man, strode off toward the front of the room. Glancing over their shoulders, they headed outside. Seeing the two of them together—a mentor and an apprentice—sparked a memory of the young deputy he himself had trained and gotten to know like he and Spurlock had known each other once, and Hawk silently ground his teeth against the pain of it.