Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

by Peter Brandvold

  “Easy, easy, easy,” Kilroy said, grabbing her arms and smiling up at her nervously. “I was just joshin’. Soon as we get to El Molina . . .”

  “You’ll drill a .44 slug through his big, ugly head?”

  Kilroy nodded. “You got it.” He lifted his head and kissed her. “Now, you think I can get some shut-eye?”

  “Thank you, Waylon.” She kissed him and squeezed his earlobes, shaking his head gently. “You really do love me, don’t you?”

  He lowered his eyes to her amply filled shirt, the deep, suntanned cleavage. “How could a man not love a woman like you, Saradee Jones?”

  She stood, smiling down at him. “Good night, Waylon.”

  “Good night, angel. Don’t you stray too far.” He gave her a wink. “I know you can handle yourself, but you need your shut-eye. We still got a good three-day ride to El Molina.”

  “I’ll just be a minute, “ Saradee said, smiling her heart-wrenching smile, donning her hat, and strolling off through the brush.

  Keeping watch on on a rocky ridge above the arroyo, Sergeant Schmidt stuck his stogie between his teeth, raised his Spencer rifle in both hands across his chest, and turned to his right.

  A young buscadero named Whiskey Thorne sat fifteen feet away, his butt perched on a boulder, staring over the night-choked gorge directly below, and over the star-capped desert beyond. Schmidt looked past the kid’s right shoulder and down the grade from where the sound of a rolling stone had cut the midnight silence.

  There was a quiet rustling, and a cedar branch moved. The kid jerked toward it, snapping his Colt from its holster. “Who goes there?”

  “Who goes there?” said Saradee Jones snidely, letting the cedar branch snap back and moving toward Schmidt and Thorne, swinging her hips, hair jostling about her shoulders. “Who says that anymore?”

  “Sorry, Miss Jones,” the kid said, sticking his cigarette between his teeth and slipping his Colt back into its holster. “You oughta announce yourself, though. Don’t want to get shot by mistake.”

  Thorne turned his head back toward the gorge. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, removed it from his mouth, and exhaling a long smoke plume, cupped the quirley in his palm.

  Saradee marched up behind him as though she were going to walk past him toward Schmidt. Schmidt’s heart chugged, and he raised his rifle slightly, ready to defend himself. Directly behind the kid, Saradee stopped and turned casually toward him as, facing the gorge, he exhaled the cigarette smoke. She raised her right arm toward the kid, planted the heel of her hand between his shoulder blades, and pushed.

  Thorne had been sitting at the very edge of the rock, the gorge yawning beneath his feet. The shove caused him to stand. There must have been a little ledge between him and the gorge. Digging his boots into it, he gave little grunts and ululating sighs as, teetering forward over the canyon, he flung his arms straight out from his shoulders and tried to bring himself back toward the ridge.

  “Oh . . . whoah . . . oah . . . noo . . . ahhhhhhh!”

  He plunged headfirst into the gaping darkness as though diving into a river. There was a smack and a rasping grunt as he hit the first shelf thirty feet below. After that, all Schmidt heard was a slight whooshing sound followed, a second later, by another, quieter thump.

  The sergeant peered disbelievingly into the gorge. Directly below was a pinprick of orange light from Thorne’s cigarette. The glow died slowly, like the expiration of eternity’s last star, leaving the darkness around it even darker than before.

  His heart skipping a beat, Schmidt turned to the woman. He edged slowly around the rock he was sitting on, planting his feet firmly on the ridge and bringing his rifle up warily.

  He had his cigar in his mouth. “What in the hell kinda stunt was that?”

  “At ease, Sergeant,” she said, stopping six feet before him. She cocked a hip, shook her hair behind her shoulders, shoved her hands into her back pockets, and stuck out her chest. The full, twin mounds of her breasts heaved toward him from beneath the flannel shirt. “Just thinning Waylon’s herd, is all. I’ll have to do it sooner or later.”

  Schmidt glanced into the darkness below the ridge, then turned back to her, squinting an eye.

  She shrugged a shoulder. “Once we get to El Molina, there’s gonna be war. Our men can’t stand each other. I see no reason not to even up the sides.”

  “What about the Yaquis we might need to dance with?”

  “When he was thirteen years old, Whiskey Thorne put his ma and pa on trial, and hanged ’em in their own barn. But when you so much as mention the word ‘Injun’ around him, he pisses down his leg. We’ll get by without him.”

  “What’s Waylon gonna say about that?”

  “Whiskey never could hold his whiskey. He got drunk and plunged to his death, poor boy.”

  “Ma’am, you’re somethin’ else.”

  “Has Waylon told you he intends to kill me?”

  Schmidt didn’t say anything.

  She laughed. “Figured he might have. He’s absolutely gone for me, but of course he could never trust me. I don’t hold it against him. I can’t trust him either.”

  “Ain’t this sweet?”

  “What did you think you were getting into, Sergeant? A children’s theater play?”

  “Ah, hell, I don’t want to hear no more. No offense, ma’am, but you’re trouble.”

  Saradee chuckled huskily. “That’s what my grammar-school teacher told me.”

  “I bet he did.”

  “Can you stare at my breasts and think at the same time, Sergeant? I have something important I’d like to discuss with you.”

  Schmidt jerked his eyes back to hers, his heart thudding, his face turning hot. He squeezed the rifle. “Now, hold on . . .”

  “Do you want me?”

  Schmidt’s face got hotter. He didn’t say anything. He stopped puffing the cigar, let it smolder between his lips.

  She gave her head an impatient toss, and cleared her throat. “I said, do you want me?”

  “I don’t mess with other men’s women.”

  She quirked a confident grin and crossed her arms on her breasts. “I have a feeling that’s about to change, Sergeant. You see, Waylon can’t perform worth shit. Pardon my barn talk, but his shaft’s like an overripe banana. Couple that with the fact he’s going to try to kill me, and what do you have? A ghost. ¿Comprende?”

  Schmidt shook his head slowly, feeling as though he too were falling into the gorge.

  “If you kill Waylon,” she said, “you can have me for as long as you want me. We’ll split the money between us and any of my men still kicking after the El Molina hoedown, and head to Juarez.” She paused, ran her tongue across her lips, her eyes across the sergeant’s broad, heaving chest. “We could have us quite a time in Juarez, you an’ me.”

  Schmidt swallowed, saliva leaking out around the cigar and dribbling down his chin. “We have an agreement, me and Waylon. I knew him in the Army, ye see? We fought Injuns . . . side by side. . . .”

  Saradee unfolded her arms and began unbuttoning her shirt. “You probably had an agreement with the United States Army of the Southwest too, didn’t you, Sergeant?”

  Her long, slender fingers moved to the next button and the next, until she had all the buttons undone and she was peeling the shirt off her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing anything beneath it.

  “I was jealous of the whore,” she confessed. “I didn’t want her to have you. I wanted you. We’ll sell the whore down in Mexico.”

  She tossed the shirt to the ground, turned to him, shaking her hair back, her breasts standing proudly out from her chest—round and full. She threw her arms back, arched her spine.

  Schmidt’s blood boiled. His cigar had gone out.

  “Why don’t you kill Waylon yourself?” he growled. “If you want him dead so damn bad . . .”

  She chuckled, stepped toward him, and grabbed the hardness in his pants. “I can kill any man I’ve a mind to . . . except those I�
�ve slept with. It’s just a thing about me. Too bad too, because they’re usually the ones who need it the most.”

  A minute later, against his halfhearted protestations, she’d peeled his as well as her own pants down and leaped onto his lap, facing him and wrapping her legs around his back. “What do you say, Sergeant?” She looked up at him, his face sweaty and flushed, his beard twitching nervously. “Have I convinced you to switch sides, or do you need more time to think about it?”

  Schmidt cursed, dropped his rifle, grabbed her buttocks in his big hands, and slid her onto his organ. He was sliding her up and down, and she was tufting his hair in her hands and raking her fingernails down the back of his tunic, when she heard a sharp smack.

  The sergeant convulsed beneath her, groaned. She’d had her eyes closed; now she opened them as the sergeant fell sideways off the boulder. She gave a clipped, startled cry as he pulled her down on top of him.

  Disoriented, she climbed to her elbows and looked down. The sergeant was out, chin tipped to his left shoulder. Blood trickled down the side of his head, glistening in his thick red hair.

  Blinking, Saradee saw a figure to her right, turned her head that way. A man in a blue uniform and tan kepi stood over her, feet spread, aiming a Spencer rifle at her face.

  10.

  PRIMROSE TAKES CHARGE

  “IF you yell, I’ll kill you,” Primrose said tightly, staring down his Spencer’s barrel at the woman’s head. He remembered her, crouched atop the boulder at Piñon Rocks, slinging lead into his men with demonic glee.

  The woman glared up at him through the tawny hair in her eyes. She was straddling the unconscious sergeant. Her breasts heaved. She quirked a smile and lifted her hands, palms out, to her shoulders.

  “Well, well,” she said. “An officer.”

  “Be quiet.”

  The lieutenant’s heart fluttered with anxiety and from the strain of climbing the steep side of the ridge from the shelf where he’d left his horse. He’d spied the gang’s campfires nearly two hours ago, and had decided to sneak into the encampment and retrieve the stolen money. He’d decided he couldn’t wait for Hawk, or count on another chance to secure the currency.

  “Get dressed,” he ordered the woman, keeping the rifle aimed at her head. “If you try to run or summon the others, I’ll kill you.”

  The annoying smile fixed on her lips, she rose slowly and backed away, keeping her hands raised, proudly exposing her breasts. “Most men prefer me naked.”

  “Shut up.”

  Calmly, she squatted down, picked up her jeans, and straightened. She glanced at Primrose, smiled, and poked one foot into the jeans, then the other.

  “How long were you watching?” she asked.

  “Shut up.”

  “Did you come for your money . . . or something else?” Buttoning her trousers, she threw her head back, arching her spine and causing her full breasts to bounce.

  Primrose swallowed. “One more word, and you’ll get what the sergeant got.”

  She sighed melodramatically and stooped to retrieve her shirt.

  Primrose followed her movements with the rifle, glancing around nervously but also with a certain glee. In the back of his mind, he imagined the expression on his father-in-law’s face when Devereaux learned that his worthless son-in-law had secured not only the stolen currency but two of the killers who’d stolen it, including the double-crossing Schmidt.

  He had rope in his saddlebags. He’d lead them down the scarp and tie them near his horse while he searched for the money.

  What then? He had only one horse. . . .

  “Are you sure you want me to cover these?” the girl said, holding her shirt in one hand, indicating her heaving bosoms with the other. “Most men prefer them exposed.”

  “I told you to—”

  Behind him, Schmidt gurgled. Primrose glanced toward the sergeant, who remained unconscious beside the rock, his pants and issue underwear bunched around his boots, his heavy thighs appearing inordinately pale in the darkness.

  Primrose turned back to the girl. She had dropped the shirt and was bolting toward him, grunting savagely, knocking his rifle wide with her right hand.

  Having been a pugilist at West Point, Primrose was fast on his feet. He pivoted sharply right, swung the rifle left, and tossed the girl over his left hip. Hitting the ground hard, hair flying, she raised an angry wail. She got it only half out, however, before Primrose smashed the butt of the Spencer against her right temple.

  Her head hit the ground with a thud. She lay still, on her right shoulder, hair shrouding her face.

  Raising a hand to the scratch she’d clawed across his left cheek, he said, “Well, that’s one way to skin a cat.”

  With neckerchiefs and the girl’s own shirt, he bound and gagged her and the sergeant, then, taking the Spencer in both hands, began walking northward down the scarp. Meandering around boulders and desert brush, he followed the smell of smoke to a gully lip, edged a peek through a notch in the rocks.

  At the bottom of the gulley, a small fire was dying down. Around the fire were five men, three asleep, the other two playing a quiet game of cards. Guns and knives were propped about like jackstraws. Spying no moneybags, Primrose scuttled back from the lip, then continued toward the light of the second campfire, another thirty yards down the ravine.

  A half-dozen more men lounged about the second fire, snoring or humming or cleaning their guns. One man was trimming his fingernails with a bowie knife. There appeared no money pouches amidst the weapons and camping gear, so Primrose stole on down the cut.

  He found the pouches nearly twenty minutes later. The two burlap sacks, stamped “U.S.” and roughly the size of twenty-five-pound feed bags, were leaning against a rock in a narrow neck of the ravine. A saddle and rumpled bedroll lay nearby, as did saddlebags, a rifle, gun belt, and several articles of clothing, including a hat. Between Primrose and the money, the glowing pink ashes of a burned-down fire lay within a stone ring, an open-lidded coffeepot standing on a flat rock near the coals.

  As he lay on the ravine’s southern lip, goatheads and clatclaw nipping at his exposed skin, Primrose’s heart raced and his mouth went dry. He was about to raise himself and move forward, when the sound of trickling water rose ahead and right. Looking toward the sound, he saw the silhouette of a man in long gray underwear standing between a barrel cactus and brush growing over a low rock pile.

  Primrose returned his weight to his elbows and snugged his right index finger against his Spencer’s trigger, setting that thumb on the hammer. Frustration nipped him.

  The money was less than thirty feet away, and only one man was guarding it. But that man was awake.

  The lieutenant uttered a silent curse.

  The man across the gully bent his knees, shaking himself. He crouched slightly then, tucking himself back into his underwear, began shuffling stocking-footed back toward his bedroll. He stopped, swaying slightly, as if drunk. He swung his head around as if looking for something.

  “Saradee?” he grunted. “Angel, where the hell are you?”

  Right of the man’s bivouac, a horse whinnied a quiet reply. The lieutenant saw the shapes of two horses in the brush across the ravine, both peering toward the man who’d called for Saradee.

  The man staggered around the fire, peering up and down the ravine. He stopped, moved heavy-footed back to his bedroll, knelt down, and picked up a bottle. He uncorked the bottle and took a long drink. Primrose heard several healthy chugs. When the man had recorked the bottle and set it back against his saddlebags, he looked at the money pouches.

  “Well,” he said, his voice clear in the silent night, “at least the little bitch didn’t get the money.”

  He set both bags against his saddle. Primrose stretched his lips back from his teeth with dismay as the man reclined on his blanket, resting his head in the crack between the two bags. He drew half his blanket over his body, yawned, spat, turned his head this way and that, getting comfortable, and entwined
his hands on his belly.

  In less than a minute, his jaw dropped and grumbling, liquid snores rose from his throat.

  Primrose stared at the prostrate figure, the U.S. Army pouches pale lobes behind the man’s head. The lieutenant’s heart had slowed, but it quickened again as he considered his course of action . . . as, to his own surprise and horror, he found himself pushing off his elbows and knees, crawling forward until he was free of the brush, then slowly gaining his feet.

  He stood, heart thudding, hands clammy, peering up and down the ravine. Steeling himself, he stepped forward. He didn’t realize he’d stepped on a stone that floodwaters had left hanging over the lip’s edge. It gave way beneath his right foot. He and the rock dropped two feet straight down with a sudden, crunching thud.

  To Primrose, it sounded as loud as a rifle shot.

  The jolt shook his innards around, but the lieutenant remained on his feet. Gritting his teeth, he looked at the man on the other side of the ravine. The outlaw threw his right arm out lazily, muttered several garbled words. He smacked his lips and resumed snoring.

  Primrose blinked. A drunk, sound-asleep outlaw. What luck.

  Holding the rifle straight out before him, he crossed the ravine, swinging around the near-dead fire, and hunkered down on the man’s right side. He looked at the moneybags. The man was snugged up against them. There was no way to lift the bags without raising the man’s head. Surely, even as drunk as he was, that would wake him.

  Primrose winced and ran a gloved hand over his goatee. He should cut the man’s throat, but that would be cold-blooded murder. Besides, there was always a chance the man would call out and signal the others.

  Looking around, he saw the man’s saddlebags. Quietly, he picked up the bags, moved to the middle of the ravine, emptied both pockets, and refilled them with sand. Returning to the sleeping man, he squatted down, set the bags beside him, then unsheathed his knife and set it on a rock to his left.

  The outlaw continued snoring, mouth open, a wing of black hair in his eyes. His head was canted slightly toward the lieutenant. His pockmarked right cheek twitched.