Linda had hanged herself out of grief.
Nan-tee’s face was now Linda’s face, framed in tousled, yellow-blonde hair, staring at him as though pleading with him to forgive her for not being strong enough to live in this world without their boy.
Hawk drew a deep, raspy breath. He raised his hands to his face, raked them down his cheeks, rubbing away the tears.
Then he turned away from the dead woman, and followed Vivienne and the child back across the wash.
As Hawk approached the Laughing Lady, he stopped in the middle of the street, which was empty except for blowing dust and tumbleweeds. Vivienne walked out of the saloon, the child in her arms wrapped in a green army blanket. The whore had changed into baggy denims and a wool shirt, a green bandanna wrapped over her head.
She moved down the porch steps and untied Pima Miller’s horse from the hitch rack. She sidled the horse to the porch steps, climbed to the top step, and stepped into the saddle.
She swung the calico toward Hawk, cradling the child in one arm against her chest. She canted her head toward the Laughing Lady. “Help yourself. I won’t be long.”
She pointed the horse west and rammed the heels of her moccasin-clad feet against the horse’s ribs. The calico lunged forward and galloped out of the windblown town, the girl’s long, black hair blowing out behind her.
Hawk looked at his grulla for a full minute before he actually saw the horse. Practical matters returned to him, washing up behind the patina of the dead Nan-tee in his head, and he led the horse off to the Spotted Horse Livery & Feed Barn, which he’d noticed when he’d first ridden into town.
He paid the young Mexican who ran the place to stable and care for his horse. He paid him an extra eagle to drag away the outlaws lying in the yard outside of Nan-tee’s adobe. He instructed the liveryman to leave them in a draw far enough downwind of town that their scent wouldn’t foul the air in Spotted Horse.
He paid him an extra eagle to bury Nan-tee in the yard behind her cabin.
Whatever the Apache woman had been, she’d been the baby’s mother, as well, and to Hawk’s mind that set her nominally above the carrion feeders.
Then he went back to the Laughing Lady and drained half a bottle of whiskey, sitting out on the porch, watching large, sooty storm clouds roll in from the west. Near nightfall, when the rain had started, the wind howling in earnest and the thunder clapping brutally, causing the saloon’s timbers to creek, Vivienne rode back into town.
The baby was no longer with her.
She stabled the horse, returned to the saloon, and carried a fresh bottle and two glasses out onto the porch. She sat down beside Hawk, wrapped in her blanket, both legs curled beneath her, and they drank together and stared out into the rain-lashed, stormy night.
Neither said a word even after they’d gone upstairs together.
CHAPTER 4
RIDER ON THE STORM
Sitting atop a low hill beneath a wind-lashed palo verde, the coyote watched the figure slowly take shape out of the early darkness and hammering rain.
At first, the coyote thought the rider might be a sick deer or a gimpy burro that had strayed away from some miner’s diggings. He might be able to take down such a beast and chew out the liver and bladder to carry back to his burrow and dine in relative comfort, out of the thundering storm.
The coyote, wet and bedraggled, its tail curled forward around its left back leg, pricked its ears and worked its nose, all senses alert as it stared at the moving figure.
As the silhouette beyond the slanting, white javelins of the rain mounted a low hill about fifty yards from the coyote’s hill, the coyote saw that what he had been watching and hoping would be a meal was, to its dismay, a horse and a human rider. The coyote smelled the horse now, though the beast of human burden was downwind from the coyote, and it smelled the copper smell of blood.
The man’s blood.
The coyote had smelled such blood before, as well as the blood of young wild horses that he and his pack had taken down when the coyote itself was young. The man was injured, but he was mounted safely atop the horse that continued plodding toward the coyote.
As the horse and low-hunkered rider continued plodding toward the coyote, the coyote gave a disgruntled mewl deep in its throat, turned, ducked under a low-hanging branch of the palo verde, and loped off down the backside of the hill.
It faded into the storm, hoping to maybe find a drowned fawn in one of the flooded arroyos.
Pima Miller, dozing in the saddle, had felt the horse stop. Now he looked over the dun’s head to see what had halted it.
An arroyo stretched across the desert path about twenty yards ahead. Through the thin line of storm-beaten willows and mesquites, Miller saw the butterscotch water sliding between the banks that appeared to have a twenty-, maybe thirty-yard gap between them.
Occasional leafy branches went bobbing past, twisting and turning with the current.
In the stormy sky, lightning flashed. Thunder peeled like a malevolent god slapping his hands together and laughing.
Miller looked down at his left side. Just above his hip, blood mixed with the rain. It was oozing out of the hole in his shirt. The wound, two days old, felt like a rat was trying to chew its way out of him.
He’d had no idea who’d been dogging him until Frye had identified him back at Nan-tee’s place.
Gideon Hawk, otherwise known as the rogue lawman.
Persistent damned son of a bitch!
Miller lifted his head, and water sluiced off the brim to tumble down his back and onto his saddle, soaking him further though he probably couldn’t get much wetter than he already was. He’d left Spotted Horse two hours ago, and the rain had started soon after. A summer monsoon. It could rain all night.
Miller needed shelter.
The sawbones in Spotted Horse had dug the bullet out of his hide, but he hadn’t sewn the wound closed. Miller hadn’t time for that. The son of a bitch who’d been dogging him for the past four days, killing Wayne and Pierson and T. J. and then Dick Overcast, was warming his heels.
Now the outlaw needed a ranch cabin or a goat herder’s shack. Even a cave would do. Anywhere he could hole up out of the weather and catch a couple hours of shut-eye.
Miller straightened his back, clamping his left hand to the wound in his side, and rammed his spurs into the dun’s flanks.
“Come on, you ewe-necked hammerhead!” the outlaw bellowed savagely into the wind. The horse leaped ahead at the man’s sudden, angry onslaught. “Let’s get across that arroyo!”
The horse trotted through the trees and stopped at the edge of the water, furiously shaking its head.
“He-yahhh!” Miller bellowed.
He hadn’t needed to. A sudden thunder burst, sounding like that dark god pounding an empty, giant steel barrel with an ax handle, nudged the frightened beast on into the stream. Almost instantly, the horse was in up to its neck, the cold, dirty water closing up over Miller’s legs. As it reached his crotch, he sucked a breath through gritted teeth and shuddered.
He felt the horse working furiously beneath him, grunting and whickering, trying to keep moving, to keep its head above the water.
“Come on, goddamnit!” the outlaw shouted, half the sentence drowned by another thunderclap, which came about two seconds off the heels of a lightning flash so close that Miller thought he could smell brimstone above the fresh, muddy scent of the sodden desert.
The horse was sliding downstream faster than it was moving forward. Fury burned through the pain-racked outlaw. He whipped his rein ends against the mount’s right hip. That caused the horse to lurch beneath him.
Miller was about to lash the beast again but stopped when three crossed witches’ fingers of lightning flashed just ahead and left. The pink, blue-limned strike was so near, it lit up the roiling stream for one full second—long enough for Miller to see that the arroyo was at least twice as wide as he’d first thought it was.
“Holy shit!” he yelled, fear e
nsconcing him in its large, chill hand.
This wasn’t no average wash. A wash out here that wide had to be Jackass Gulch—a killer when it came to gully washers like the one Miller now found himself in the midst of.
“Come on, you cayuse!” the outlaw bellowed, whipping the horse’s left hip without mercy, grinding his spurs against the mount’s flanks.
The horse lunged forward once, twice, three times. Then Miller heard it give what sounded like a giant yawn. Only he knew it was a groan that meant the horse was done for.
“Shit!” Miller cried as the horse, too weak to swim any longer against such a raging current, began sliding nearly straight down the center of the stream.
The horse sort of fluttered in the water. It dropped a good foot, and then suddenly Miller found himself floating on top of the saddle, his boots slipping free of the stirrups and his legs sliding out from beneath him.
He fought for the saddle horn, but suddenly the horse dropped farther beneath him. It turned onto its side, and Miller flailed with all his limbs, trying desperately to stay above the current. Then, like a helping hand, something solid and black swept toward him. He’d barely glimpsed it, whatever it was, riding low in the water before him, and he gave a soggy grunt as he threw both arms up.
They caught the tree, hooked around the trunk that was about as large around as his own torso. It stopped him abruptly. Wet bark ground into his nose and forehead. A broken point of the tree stabbed his side about six inches beneath his armpit. He smiled at the pain because it only meant that he had something solid to hold onto, something he could ride down the arroyo until he could find his way to one of the banks.
As he clung to the tree, however, he realized he wasn’t moving. He glanced to his left. Another lightning flash revealed the muddy bank out from which the tree extended. Apparently, the wind had torn it out of the ground by its roots.
He’d been thrown a buoy!
Grinding his teeth against the pain in his left side, Miller walked his hands along the side of the fallen cottonwood, slowly making his way, handhold by handhold, to the bank. As he did, the rain continued to pour down on him. The skies rumbled and clapped demonically. Lightning flashed so brightly that at times he was blinded. The darkness between flashes was surreal.
His boots scraped against the bank beneath the water. Continuing to crawl along the side of the tree, Miller made his way up the bank. When his legs were nearly out of the water, he climbed the rest of the four feet through the mud and sodden gravel to the top and lay there for a time, cheek to the earth, catching his breath and sending a silent prayer to whatever dark god had saved his worthless hide.
He chuckled.
The chuckle died on his lips, however, when he remembered the cold-eyed bastard who’d been dogging him. He looked behind and out beyond the tree extending into the wash, which was narrower here than it had been upstream, and probed the rainy night for signs that Gideon Hawk had followed him.
Nothing moved but the wind and the rain and the water sliding behind him, occasionally whipped to a creamy froth.
Most men wouldn’t follow in weather like this. But Miller had heard Hawk’s reputation. Most men on the frontier, especially outlaw men, were well aware of the green-eyed half-breed who wore the deputy US marshal’s badge upside down on his vest.
The crazy-loco son of a bitch who went around killing outlaws like they were rats scurrying around a trash dump. The man was worse than the lowest of bounty hunters.
Hawk didn’t hunt men for the bounty on their heads. He hunted them to kill them for his own demonic satisfaction.
It was said that the loco son of a bitch, in his own messed-up mind, was still killing the man who’d hanged his boy. Over and over again, with each outlaw Hawk murdered, he was killing “Three-Fingers” Ned Meade.
Over and over and over again . . .
Miller shuddered from an extra chill, just thinking about the rogue lawman out there somewhere in the murky darkness, hunting him with the sure-footed, cold-blooded, razor-edged senses of a stalking puma.
Miller filled his lungs and yelled across the wash behind him, “I ain’t Three-Fingers Ned, you son of a bitch! He’s dead! You done killed him, for chrissakes!”
Miller sucked a damp breath, chuckled again. He himself was getting crazier than a tree full of owls. Hawk wasn’t out here. He was probably still holed up in Spotted Horse, waiting for the storm to break.
“Damn fool,” Miller admonished himself, groaning against his sundry miseries as he heaved himself to his feet.
He looked around and then slogged off through the willows and cottonwoods, the storm-tossed trees and shrubs dancing around him like drunken witches. He didn’t know how long he’d walked, practically dragging his boot toes, before he came to a trail.
He studied the trail beneath his boots carefully for a time. It was a graded trace scored with deep wheel furrows. Many of them. Of course, the furrows were filled with water now, and the rain was splashing into them like bullets fired from heaven, but they were furrows, just the same.
Miller’s heart quickened hopefully. He’d come to the Butterfield stage road. At last, he had a trail to follow. Trails lead somewhere. This trail would lead to a settlement, eventually.
He’d taken only twenty or thirty steps before he stopped again. He’d spied something off the trail’s left side.
Lights.
The silhouettes of buildings shifted amid the lights. Then Miller heard what sounded like the clattering of a windmill’s blades.
He saw the sign slanting in the mud along the trail, beside a tall saguaro: SUPERSTITION RELAY STATION.
Miller swerved from the trail and entered what he now saw was a broad yard. The windmill lay just ahead and right, clattering raucously beneath the storm’s din. Just beyond lay a long, low cabin, its lamp-lit windows beckoning.
Miller grinned. He brushed his hand across the holster thonged on his right thigh. His Remington was still snugged down in the sodden leather. The cartridges were likely so damp they wouldn’t fire, but the people in the cabin wouldn’t know that.
“Halloo the cabin!” Miller laughed, his words swallowed by the thunder. “Wet and weary traveler out here!”
CHAPTER 5
THE GIRL AT SUPERSTITION STATION
Miller was glad there was no dog in the station yard.
If there had been, he’d no doubt be aware of it by now, as he quietly mounted the steps of the front stoop that sat on stone pylons. The dog would likely be nipping at his heels and raising one hell of a ruckus, ruining the outlaw’s chance at surprising those within.
Miller didn’t hate dogs, but dogs were almost never an outlaw’s friend.
His Remington in his right hand, Miller moved to the window to the right of the front door. There was a thin red curtain that Miller could see through. Staring through the sashed pane, he grinned. And then he moved back to the door.
He opened the screen door, held it open with his right boot, and then tripped the metal latch of the inside door with his left hand.
When the latch clicked, he cocked the Remy, drew the door open, and stepped inside quickly, pulling the door closed behind him.
The girl sitting at the long, wooden table to Miller’s left jerked her head toward him, and gasped. She’d been wrapping wet rawhide around a pick handle, but now she raised both hands from the table as she started to rise from the bench.
A long-haired old man had his back to Miller. He must have been hard of hearing. He apparently hadn’t heard the door open or the trill of Miller’s spurs as the outlaw had stepped over the doorjamb. Only when the girl, crouched over the table and staring wide-eyed at the intruder, said, “Uh . . . um . . . old man—I think we got company!” did the oldster turn his head to look over his left shoulder.
He dropped the coffee mug he’d just refilled from a black pot. As the mug hit the braided rug beneath the old man’s boots with a dull thunk, the oldster reached for a double-barreled shotgun leaning against a
ceiling post.
“No, no, no,” Pima Miller said, wagging his head and trying not to shiver against the cold that had penetrated his bones. “Now, why would you want to go and shoot a weary traveler on such a cold, wet night?”
The old man forestalled his movement toward the shotgun, and turned full around to face Miller. He had a big, craggy, warty face, with a blue-gray Vandyke beard that accented the ruddiness of his sun-seared cheeks. His pale-blue eyes flashed angrily as he said, “Maybe on account o’ that weary traveler comin’ in here unannounced and holdin’ a pistol on me!”
His voice was hoarse, raspy with age and tobacco smoke. He had a coal-black wart, large as a coat button, beneath his right eye.
A hissing sounded.
At first, Miller thought the girl had made it. But then he saw on the other end of the table, beyond a pile of miscellaneous leather and burlap pack gear, a large cat. It was standing on the table, its back humped, and it was glaring at Miller and hissing raucously.
It was no ordinary cat. This one was twice the size of your average larger-than-average kitty, and its ears were tufted. It head was large and round, eyes glowing like copper pennies.
“Christ!” Miller said, swinging the Remy toward the beast. “You got a damn bobcat in here?”
The girl said, “Don’t shoot, ya damn fool. He’s friendly!”
“Don’t look friendly to me!”
The girl looked at the cat. “Claws, pipe down!”
“Yeah. Pipe down, Claws!” Miller said through gritted teeth—or he would have gritted them if they hadn’t been clattering so violently—“or I’ll drill a forty-four round through your mangy hide!”
“Claws!” the girl yelled, hooking her thumb over her left shoulder.
The cat leaped down from the table with a solid thump and dashed up a narrow wooden staircase beyond a fieldstone fireplace in which flames danced. The stairs led to a loft. The cat dashed into the loft and plopped down to stare through the cottonwood-pole rail above the kitchen.
The cat’s copper eyes glowed menacingly beneath the silhouettes of its tufted ears.
Thunder Over the Superstitions Page 3