Thunder Over the Superstitions

by Peter Brandvold

  THUNDER OVER THE SUPERSTITIONS

  THUNDER OVER THE SUPERSTITIONS

  ROGUE LAWMAN: A GIDEON HAWK WESTERN

  PETER BRANDVOLD

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, Cengage Learning

  Including a bonus story featuring the Rio Concho Kid: Blood and Lust in Old Mexico

  Copyright © 2015 by Peter Brandvold

  Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Brandvold, Peter.

  Thunder over the superstitions : rogue lawman : a Gideon Hawk western / Peter Brandvold. — First edition.

  pages ; cm “Including a bonus story featuring the Rio Concho Kid: Blood and Lust in Old Mexico.”

  ISBN 978-1-4328-3010-6 (hardcover) — ISBN 1-4328-3010-4 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-4328-3007-6 (ebook) — ISBN 1-4328-3007-4 (ebook)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-3007-6 — eISBN-10: 1-4328-3007-4

  I. Title.

  PS3552.R3236T46 2015

  813'.54—dc23 2015012955

  First Edition. First Printing: October 2015

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN 978-1-4328-3007-6 (ebook) — ISBN 1-4328-3007-4 (ebook)

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  Contact Five Star™ Publishing at FiveStar@cengage.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 19 18 17 16 15

  For who else but James and Livia Reasoner

  CONTENTS

  THUNDER OVER THE SUPERSTITIONS

  BLOOD AND LUST IN OLD MEXICO

  CHAPTER 1

  THE LAUGHING LADY

  The rogue lawman, Gideon Hawk, smelled blood on the howling wind.

  Beneath the wind, he heard the pattering of an off-key piano. The music, if you could call it that, emanated from somewhere ahead in the dusty, wind-battered desert settlement on the outskirts of which he halted his grulla.

  A weathered sign along the road announced SPOTTED HORSE, ARIZ. TERR.

  Hawk slid his big, silver-plated Russian Model Smith & Wesson .44 from its holster positioned for the cross draw on his left hip. He flipped the latch on the top-break revolver with his gloved thumb, breaking it open. He filled the cylinder’s one empty chamber with a bullet from his shell belt, then snapped the gun closed.

  He returned the pistol to its holster and filled the empty chamber in his horn-gripped Colt, which occupied the holster on his right hip, strapped around his waist by a second shell belt. He returned that gun, too, to its holster but did not snap the keeper thong home across the hammer. He let the straps dangle freely, both pistols ready to be drawn.

  Hawk had followed a killer here. A killer carrying one of Hawk’s own bullets in his hide. It was the killer’s blood that Hawk smelled on the wind. The piano’s pattering did not sound like a funeral dirge, but it might as well have been, because Hawk intended for the music, if you could call it that, to be the last notes his quarry ever heard.

  He loosened his Henry repeater in the scabbard strapped to his saddle, the walnut stock with brass butt plate jutting up above his right stirrup fender. Then he nudged the horse ahead down the broad street. Shabby, false-fronted buildings loomed to both sides, obscured by windblown dirt and tumbleweeds.

  Shingles hanging beneath porch eaves squawked on rusty chains. The dirt and sand of the desert ticked against the buildings and porch floors and caused a rocking chair to jounce back and forth jerkily, as though an angry ghost were seated in it.

  As Hawk rode, the piano’s feckless patter grew gradually louder though the moaning wind often obscured it.

  A door opened on Hawk’s left. A lean, gray-bearded man bound to a wheelchair heaved himself over the doorjamb of the Spotted Horse town marshal’s office. A five-pointed star was pinned to his wool shirt, half hidden by his left suspender. He was not only lean but scrawny, his legs appearing withered in his faded denims. He wore a weathered, funnel-brimmed Stetson down low over his eyes. As he came out onto the jailhouse’s narrow stoop, his blue-eyed gaze found the tall rider straddling the grulla in the street before him.

  The old man stopped instantly. He glanced up the street, toward where a lone horse stood at a hitch rack fronting a saloon, and then glanced once more at the tall stranger in the black frock coat, string tie, and low-crowned, flat-brimmed black hat wielding a Henry rifle and wearing two pistols on his hips.

  The town marshal jerked his chair back into the jailhouse and slammed the door.

  Hawk looked at the horse standing at the hitch rack a block beyond him, the wind blowing the calico’s black tail up under its belly. That’s where the piano’s din seemed to be originating. He touched spurs to the grulla’s flanks and, looking around cautiously, wary of an ambush, continued up the street.

  A couple of minutes later, he put his horse up to the right of the calico tied to the hitch rack of the Laughing Lady Saloon, and dismounted. While the two horses touched noses, getting to know each other, Hawk tied the grulla’s reins to the hitch rack and then shucked his Henry from its scabbard.

  He cast his glance once more toward the opposite side of the street, making sure no bushwhackers were drawing beads on him. He noted nothing more portentous than several windows in which “Closed” signs dangled in the mid-afternoon of a business day.

  Hawk looked at the saloon before him, a shabby adobe-brick affair with a brush-roofed gallery. It was indeed from inside this place that someone was trying to play the piano. They’d switched songs now. This one Hawk couldn’t recognize. He doubted if anyone could, except possibly the girl who was humming along with it.

  Hawk climbed the three steps to the gallery, his spurs trilling. He pushed through the batwings, and stepped to the right quickly so as not to backlight himself. Loudly, he racked a shell into the Henry’s breech as he looked around, his eyes accustomed to quick adjustments from light to dark.

  The piano stopped caterwauling. The girl sitting in front of it, on the far side of the bar running along the wall’s right side, turned to him. She was clad in a black corset and bustier, with sheer black stockings attached to frilly red garter belts.

  She was a pretty, round-faced Mexican with flashing eyes and black feather earrings partly concealed by her long, straight black hair. Her hair was dark enough to make her at least half Indian. Part Apache or Pima, judging by the symmetry of her face, the boldness of her eyes. She had a long, knotted, pink scar running down from the middle of her cheek and ending just beneath her jawline. Its contrast accentuated her beauty.

  When the piano’s
last raucous notes had finished reverberating, Hawk could hear only the wind’s keening and muffled voices coming from the ceiling.

  The girl was the only one in the long, dingy saloon outfitted with a dozen or so tables and rickety chairs. She rose from the piano bench and, keeping her oblique, dark gaze on Hawk, strolled behind the bar, her high-heeled black shoes tapping on the floor puncheons. The feather earrings danced along her neck.

  She stopped about halfway down the bar. She leaned forward on her elbows, giving Hawk a good look at her cleavage, and absently traced the scar with her finger. “Drink?”

  Hawk glanced around once more, at the wooden staircase rising at the rear of the room, just beyond the piano. There was a colorfully woven rug at the foot of it, an unlit bracket lamp hanging on the wall over the rug. Above the lamp was the snarling head of a mountain lion.

  Hawk glanced at the low ceiling through which the voices continued to filter—one high and shrill, the other low and even.

  “That him up there?”

  “Him,” the girl said, frowning curiously and thoughtfully tapping her right index finger against her lower lip. “Hmmmm. By ‘him’ do you mean the owner of the calico?”

  She may have looked half Indian, but she did not speak in the flat tones of most Natives annunciating English. This girl’s English was easy and lilting though touched with a very slight Spanish accent. Raised on the border among several races, most likely.

  Hawk stared at her without expression on his severe-featured, mustached face that betrayed his own mixed bloodline. His father had been a Ute, his mother a Scandinavian immigrant. It was the jade of her eyes that made his own such a contrast to his otherwise aboriginal appearance with beak-like nose and jutting, dimpled chin. Unlike most Indians, however, Hawk’s sideburns were thick, and his brushy mustache drooped toward his mouth corners. He kept his dark-brown hair closely cropped.

  The girl’s mocking half smile faded, and she blinked once slowly as she said, “Doc’s with him. Diggin’ that bullet out of him. Yours, I take it?”

  A shrill cry came hurling down the stairs: “Ow! Oh, Christ—that hurt like hell, you old devil!”

  The low voice said something Hawk couldn’t make out.

  The shrill voice said, “Bullshit, you take it easy with that thing or I’ll . . .”

  The shrill voice trailed off as the other, lower voice said something in calming, reassuring tones.

  The girl said, “You’d swear he never took a bullet before.”

  Hawk moved into the room, loosened the string tie around his neck, and set his rifle down on the table nearest the batwings. “Doesn’t sound like I’ll be goin’ anywhere till that bullet’s out of him. I’ll take that drink if the offer’s still good.”

  “Offer’s good if your money’s good.”

  Hawk kicked out a chair, dug a coin out of his pants pocket, and flipped it off his thumb. It flashed in the window light as it arced toward the girl, who snatched it out of the air with one practiced hand.

  She looked at the coin and arched a brow. “For that, you can have a drink, and”—her cheeks dimpled as she offered a lusty smile—“pretty much anything else that ain’t nailed down.”

  “Just the drink will do me for now.”

  “Whiskey?”

  Hawk nodded and doffed his hat as he sagged into his chair. He set the hat down on the table, over his rifle, and raked a hand through his close-shorn hair. He continued to hear the voices in the second story, with an occasional curse and boot stomp, but the hysterics were apparently over.

  The girl filled two shot glasses and set them on a wooden tray. She folded a newspaper and set that on the tray, as well, glancing at Hawk and smiling. “Like something to read?”

  Hawk shook his head. “Just the drink. Be pullin’ out soon.”

  “Well, just in case,” she said, and moved out from around the bar. As she approached his table, he saw that the corset and bustier were damned near sheer enough to reveal every inch of her nice, full-busted body.

  She kept her eyes on him as she set the whiskey in front of him. She set the change from his half eagle down beside the shot glass. She kept the other shot glass on the tray with the folded newspaper as she sat down in a chair across from him.

  “Business got slow after he arrived,” she said. “It was like the wind blew him in. All the hombres who took shelter in here from the wind blew on out like the trash being scattered around town.” She shook her head once and sipped her whiskey. “Who is he?”

  “Clyde Leroy Miller,” Hawk said. “Otherwise known as Pima.”

  “Pretty bad fella, this Pima Miller?”

  “About as bad as they come.”

  She chuckled incredulously. “How bad? Just for conversation’s sake and all, since you don’t seem to care to take me upstairs and let me earn the rest of that half eagle, which I’m rather good at, if I may say so myself.”

  Hawk threw back half of his own whiskey, set the glass back down on the table, turned it between his thumb and index finger. Pima Miller and the sawbones were still talking, so he didn’t mind sitting here chinning with the whore. He had a mind to take her upstairs.

  His loins were heavy, for he hadn’t been with a woman in weeks. But he couldn’t chance losing his edge.

  Not this afternoon, with his quarry near.

  Hawk said, “He and his gang robbed the bank in Kingman. Shot the president, vice president, locked the customers inside, and burned the place to the ground. They shot the Kingman marshal on their way out of town, dropped two posse members the next day.”

  “You’re the posse now?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Lawman?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where’s your badge?”

  Hawk slid the lapel of his black frock coat to one side, revealing his sun-and-moon deputy US marshal’s badge. The whore leaned forward slightly in her chair, frowned as she studied the three ounces of tin-plated copper.

  “I hate to tell you this,” she said with a dubious look. “But you’re wearin’ it upside down.”

  “Yep.”

  Her look was skeptical. “May I ask why?”

  “It’s an upside-down world . . . full of upside-down laws.”

  “And you’re an upside-down lawman . . . ?”

  “Houndin’ upside-down owlhoots.” Hawk grinned as he threw back the last of his shot.

  She studied him, nodding slowly, tentatively. Of course, she’d spied the glint of madness in his keen, jade eyes. Most did eventually. Some sooner than others.

  Hawk was well aware it was there, for he’d seen it while shaving in a looking glass and hadn’t been one bit surprised or bothered. It had come with the black territory he’d begun riding in the forever-dark days in the wake of his son’s murder and his wife’s self-hanging. Linda had hanged herself from the tree in their backyard right after Jubal’s funeral.

  The whore glanced at the stairs to her right. “Where’s the rest of his bunch?”

  “Feedin’ mountain lions and coyotes along the trail between here and Kingman, Miss . . .”

  “Vivienne.”

  “Wildcats gotta eat, too, Miss Vivienne.”

  “And you’re . . . ?”

  Hawk dipped his chin, narrowed his jade eyes. “The upside-down lawman who’s about to drill a bullet through your pretty head, Miss Vivienne.”

  CHAPTER 2

  SAWBONES WANTED

  Hawk stared at the whore sitting across the table from him.

  Vivienne stared back at him, her eyes intense. Hawk glanced down at the tray sitting just right of her half-empty shot glass. She had her hand beneath the folded newspaper atop the tray.

  “Shoot me?” she said, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her nose. “Why on earth would you do such a nasty thing, Mister Upside-down Lawman?”

  “Slide your hand very slowly out from beneath that newspaper.”

  “What?”

  Hawk waited. Her eyes flickered slig
htly. Color rose in her pretty cheeks, the scar turning paler, as she slid her hand slowly out from under the newspaper. She slid the hand over the lip of the tray and over the edge of the table to her lap.

  Hawk reached across the table and flipped the newspaper off of the tray. A small, black, double-barreled pocket pistol with ivory grips glared up at him—a very small but very deadly coiled snake.

  The girl grabbed her right forearm with her other hand and sort of scrunched her shoulders together, pooching her lips out and averting her gaze from Hawk’s.

  Hawk picked up the gun. He flicked the loading gate open and spun the cylinder, letting all five cartridges plunk to the table, where they rolled. Then he tossed the gun over the batwings, which the wind was jostling, and into the street.

  “How much did he pay you?”

  Vivienne shrugged, smiled bashfully, and again traced the scar with her finger. “A half eagle.”

  Hawk gave an ironic chuff. Then he turned toward the stairs, and frowned.

  No more sounds were coming from the second story.

  Apprehension was a cold finger pressed to the small of the rogue lawman’s back. He stared at the ceiling, ears pricked. No sound except the wind’s moaning and the ratcheting clicks of the batwings.

  “What room’s he in?” Hawk asked Vivienne.

  “Three.”

  Hawk picked up the Henry, glanced at the girl staring up at him gravely. “One peep out of you . . .,” he said softly, menacingly.

  Vivienne turned her mouth corners down.

  Hawk strode quickly to the stairs. He climbed the steps two at a time, stopped at the landing and, holding the rifle up high across his chest, looked up toward the second floor.

  Nothing.

  He climbed the second landing and stopped at the top. To his right and on the left side of the dim hall carpeted with a soiled red runner, a door stood partway open. He moved slowly, one step at a time, wincing at each creak of the floor beneath the runner, to the half-open door.