Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

by Peter Brandvold

  “We done talked about that,” Kilroy said evenly, looking benignly up at the Mexican sitting the tall, dun Arabian. “We said we didn’t know where that third horse come from. But you, Bernal, can rest assured that Miss Saradee Jones will fill us all in, soon as we catch up to her.”

  Montoya glanced off, removing the black cigarillo from his lips, blowing smoke through his nostrils. He glanced meaningfully at one of his compadres, a half-Cheyenne and former gambling-hall bouncer named Jerry “J.J.” Beaver Killer.

  Beaver Killer shook his head and snorted. “I’d like to know how this ever happened in the first place.” He chuckled without humor. “Shit, Kilroy, you know what a goddamn wolverine she is.”

  “That’s what he likes about her maybe, uh?” said Montoya, grinning.

  The others, including a few of Kilroy’s own men, laughed.

  His ears warming, Kilroy turned out a stirrup and swung into his saddle. He cut his eyes between Montoya and Beaver Killer, no longer caring if his voice betrayed his annoyance. “We done talked about all this. She knocked me over the head with a tequila bottle and lit off with Schmidt. The sarge probably threw whiskey off the scarp to get him out of their way.”

  Kilroy adjusted his position on the saddle and leaned forward, crossing his hands on the horn. His blood sizzled. Here he was, being insulted by the men of the outlaw bitch who’d double-crossed and cuckolded him, made him look the fool before the eyes of his own men and hers!

  “Not to turn this into somethin’ ugly,” he said, “but since we’re all so fuckin’ curious—I’d like to know how the hell you boys lost the whore.”

  “Yeah,” said another of Kilroy’s men, laughing. “How do you lose a whore—especially as one as perky and with such nice cajónes?”

  Coloring behind his dark whiskers, Montoya looked over his right shoulder at the second Mexican of Saradee’s group—Alberto Jiminez. The portly, bearded Jiminez sat sheepishly slumped in his saddle, head down, cutting his eyes at Montoya but not regarding the man directly. He’d ridden drag all morning, his features creased with pain from the two deep gashes the whore had torn in his skull with the butt of his own revolver.

  “Why don’t we all just agree that mistakes were made, huh?” said one of Kilroy’s young firebrands, Dog-Tail Bascomb, squatting atop a hill shoulder behind Kilroy. He was training his field glasses southward, where the terrain dropped gently. “’Cause I think we damn near run up the ass o’ the shoat we been trackin’ through the onion field.”

  Kilroy turned to the spade-bearded youngster wearing threadbare Confederate cavalry slacks and a pair of cross-draw, sawed-off Winchesters in custom-cut holsters. “You wanna speak English, Dog-Tail?”

  Bascomb straightened, skitter-stepped down the hill, and leapt off a shelf onto the back of his ground-tied mustang. He grabbed the reins, turned the horse around, and gigged it south. “Follow me!”

  Kilroy glanced around at the other men.

  Seeing that none of Saradee’s boys had tugged iron, he removed his own hand from his revolver’s butt, and kneed his mount into Bascomb’s sifting dust, weaving through the yucca, cholla, and ironwood shrubs. The ground rose gently, then dropped sharply toward a cutbank sheathed in ironwood and curl-leaf.

  Kilroy halted his gelding off Bascomb’s right stirrup, about ten feet from the cut bank’s lip. Holding his hand up to warn the others back, he rose slightly in his saddle to peer over the lip and through the screening brush.

  At the far side of the broad ravine, a half-dozen war-painted Yaqui braves milled around two women sprawled near the opposite bank. The women lay spread-eagle on their backs, their wrists and ankles tied to stakes. They were naked, their clothes strewn about the wash.

  The braves were gathered around the women, obscuring Kilroy’s view. He was pretty sure, however, that they were Saradee and the Mexican whore. When one of the women cursed loudly, he smiled.

  “There’s the lady I’ve come to know and love.”

  “What now?” Montoya asked, sitting his Arab to Kilroy’s right, canting his head to peer between two desert willows.

  Kilroy turned his horse around, jerking his head for the others to follow. He rode a dozen yards back from the wash, dismounted, and shucked his Winchester. “Montoya, Dog-Tail, Reynolds, Landers, and Jimbo. We’re goin’ in. The money’s gotta be around there somewhere.”

  “I didn’t see the sergeant,” Montoya said, dismounting and tossing his reins to the rider beside him. “Maybe he slipped away from the red devils . . . with the lucre.”

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  “How you want to do this?”

  “Us six’ll circle around, slip up on ’em from the west.” Kilroy turned to the bulk of the men still saddled. “You boys keep an eye on our backsides. There only appears to be six or seven, but there might be more hidden or on the scout.”

  Kilroy and Montoya headed west behind the brush screening the wash, the other four men hustling along behind. Jimbo Walsh slipped shells into the pepperbox revolver he carried in a deer-hide sheath just above his left knee.

  Kilroy glanced at Montoya, then angled the look behind. “No one kills Saradee. I want her alive.”

  “She’s our ramrod,” said Jimbo Walsh, closing the pepperbox and slipping it into the sheath. “I’d say she double-crossed us as bad as she double-crossed you. You just look dumber ’cause you could have prevented it.”

  Kilroy stopped and wheeled, rammed the barrel of his Winchester to the underside of Walsh’s fleshy jaw, thumbing the rifle’s hammer back. Walsh stopped, tensing and wincing, tipping his head back on his shoulders.

  “I’ve had about enough o’ that horseshit,” Kilroy spat through gritted teeth. “Now, the girl’s mine. You see? You got that?”

  Cheeks balled with pain, Walsh nodded.

  “You sure?”

  Walsh nodded again.

  “It sure would be foolish for us to get into a lead swap out here in Injun country.” Keeping the rifle barrel snug against Walsh’s jaw, Kilroy glanced at Montoya. “But if I hear any more of the bullshit I been hearin’, that’s just what’s gonna happen. May the last man standing get the loot . . . and try to get to El Molina alive.”

  Kilroy lowered his rifle’s barrel, wheeled, and continued west along the wash, knowing his own man, Dog-Tail, would watch his backside if Montoya’s boys were crazy enough to start something with the money and the red devils a hundred yards away.

  When they’d followed a bend halfway through its curve, they crossed the wash, mounted the opposite bank, and headed back toward the Indians. The red devils were chattering like churchwomen at an ice-cream social, their guttural tongue sounding like total nonsense to the outlaws’ monolingual ears.

  Kilroy and the other men hunkered down in the brush on the wash’s southern bank and stole peeks through the rocks. Below, a small, Yaqui-style fire crackled in the shade of several boulders and desert willows jutting around a spring. Several Indians were cutting strips of meat from the hip of a dead horse and laying it over a makeshift spit. One man—short and muscular, with ochre paint making a ghoulish mask of his face—rose from between the whore’s spread legs.

  Looking down at her and grinning savagely, he pulled his loincloth up to his waist. Beneath him, the whore’s head was turned to one side, her lips puffed and bleeding. Her closed eyes were purple and swollen. Kilroy couldn’t tell if she was breathing. He’d heard that Yaquis, like Apaches, would as soon ravage a dead woman as a living one.

  Another Indian was still working away between the spread legs of Saradee. She was spitting and cursing at him, raging like a demon. Kilroy chuffed a laugh. She was spewing more filth than he’d heard even her utter before. The girl could write a dictionary.

  The Indian between her legs stopped thrusting his hips and gave her a dirty look, barked a warning. She jerked her head up, spat in his face. He laid the back of his right hand across her jaw, hard enough for the crack to reach Kilroy’s ears. A half second later, the brave h
ad a knife in his hand.

  “No, you don’t,” Kilroy heard himself shout as he stood and raised his Winchester. “That bitch is mine, you gut-eatin’ son of a sow!”

  Kilroy’s rifle barked before the last word had left his mouth. The Indian atop Saradee had lifted his head toward the cut bank’s lip, as if purposely giving Kilroy a better target. The bullet plunked through his left temple with an angry thwunk, brains and blood spewing onto the sand and gravel behind him.

  As the other outlaws rose to their knees or feet, several yipping like lobos as they snapped their rifles to their shoulders, Kilroy drew a bead on the Indian who’d just finished with the whore. The brave dropped to a crouch, cutting his own black-eyed gaze at the cut bank. As he bolted right, toward a sheltering boulder, Kilroy drilled him through the stomach, punching him back and sideways. The brave dropped to his knees and threw his head back, screaming like a mountain lion in heat.

  Kilroy levered a fresh shell and gazed into the wash. His and Saradee’s men were triggering their own Winchesters, one shot after another, shredding several Indians where they stood, sending the others either diving for the sheltering rocks and their weapons, or running up the arroyo, toward their horses picketed in the shade of an overhanging scarp.

  The outlaws had caught the Indians with their pants down, both literally and figuratively. In less than a minute, all were down, only one having managed to fling an arrow toward the outlaws. Kilroy and the others held their fire, peering through the wafting powder smoke as they scrutinized the bodies strewn about the wash.

  “Never thought it’d be so easy to kill Yaquis,” muttered Montoya.

  Kilroy ordered the men to spread out, to scour the wash and surrounding ridges for more of the red devils. He doubted they’d find any. The Yaquis were known to travel in small, coyotelike packs, thus raising little dust or noise as they snuck up on their prey, which included virtually anyone not from their band.

  When the men had drifted off, Kilroy and Montoya stepped from boulder to boulder as they descended the wash. Kilroy had gained the bottom, and was moving toward the staked women when something moved in the corner of his right eye. One of the braves had been playing possum. Now he bolted to his feet and ran, limping slightly, toward the horses.

  Kilroy casually raised his Winchester, dropped the kid with one shot between the shoulder blades. The Indian flew straight forward and hit the ground belly-first, dust puffing.

  “Waylon.” Saradee’s pinched voice rose on his right. He turned to the woman. Straining at her ties, she canted an awkward glance at him. Her face was bloody, wisps of her filthy hair stuck to her cheeks. “Oh, Waylon, thank God it’s you.”

  Kilroy stood over her, his shadow angling across her naked body. He glanced at the whore. She appeared unconscious, but her chest rose and fell slightly, and her eyelids fluttered.

  “It’s me, all right,” Kilroy said, returning his gaze to Saradee. “Your loyal Waylon.”

  “The lieutenant,” she rasped, moving her puffy lips. “He caught me in the brush . . . forced me to go with him.”

  Kilroy squatted down, holding the rifle barrel up between his knees. “The lieutenant?”

  “The one from the detail. We didn’t kill him.”

  Kilroy frowned, but before he could ask his next question, a voice rose. “Boss, lookee here!”

  Kilroy looked up the wash to his right. The half-Delaware with Negro blood, Rufus Bunkmeyer, held up one of the money sacks in one hand, his sawed-off shotgun in the other, a big grin on his cherry-red face. His green eyes flashed in the sun.

  Kilroy straightened. “Praise the Lord and whistle ‘Dixie.’ ”

  “There’s moah,” Bunkmeyer said, jerking his head up wash. “Betta come have a look, Boss.”

  Kilroy glanced down at Saradee. She frowned up at him, bending her right knee, pulling at the ties. “Untie me, please, Waylon.”

  Kilroy turned and walked toward Bunkmeyer. The woman called his name, her voice gradually acquiring an edge until she yelled, “Goddamnit, you limp-dicked fuck, untie me or I’ll gut you like a fucking pig!”

  “That’s my girl,” Kilroy muttered, giving his head a single shake as Bunkmeyer turned and led him around a bend.

  As he stepped out of the shade of two towering cottonwoods, he saw what appeared to be two oval, sun-blasted rocks in the middle of a sand wash. When he walked closer, however, he saw they were human heads—men’s heads, one with a trimmed cap of brown hair parted on one side, the other with thick red hair and matching mustache and beard.

  The latter belonged to Sergeant Schmidt. The former, apparently, belonged to the lieutenant whom Saradee had mentioned.

  Both were cut, scraped, bloody dirty, and sunburned. If they hadn’t been wincing and squinting their eyes and gritting their teeth, Kilroy would have thought the heads had been hacked from bodies and thrown to the buzzards.

  “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.” Kilroy laughed, jerking his pants up his thighs and hunkering down between the two men. “Schmidt, you son of a bitch, where’s the rest of ya?”

  Schmidt stretched his lips back from his teeth, grunted, groaned, sighed. “Get me outta here, Waylon. For the love o’ God . . .”

  Kilroy laughed. “Those devils sure had a time with you. You got all your parts down there? Damn idiot!”

  “Come on, Waylon. This weren’t my fault. It’s the goddamn lieutenant. He tracked us down, took me by surprise.” Schmidt blinked sharply, licked his chapped, sandy lips, and rolled his gaze to the soldier beside him. “Dig me up and put a bullet in his head. Let’s get outta here.”

  “Well, now wait a minute. I know the whore got away on her own. But how in the hell did the bluebelly here end up with you and Saradee?”

  Schmidt blinked. It was hard to tell under his sunburn and patches of peeling skin, but Kilroy thought blood rushed to the man’s face. “Hell, I don’t know. Dig me up, damnit. We got us a deal, you and me!”

  The lieutenant cleared his throat and lifted his head slightly at Kilroy, slitting one eye. “Before you do that,” he rasped, swallowing, “you might want to consider the fact that I found the good sergeant and the lady copulating atop a boulder.”

  “Now, whoah!” Schmidt interrupted. “Just wait a goddamn minute!”

  “That’s how I was able to sneak up on them so easily,” the soldier added.

  Schmidt spat. “He’s lyin’!”

  Kilroy slid his gaze to the sergeant. “Why would he lie?”

  “He’s lyin’, I say! Goddamnit, Waylon, I wouldn’t do somethin’ that low. Why, that’s . . . that’s . . . low!”

  “Just about as low as double-crossin’ your own soldier boys,” Kilroy said, giving his head a quick, wistful shake.

  “He’s just tryin’ to turn you against me, Waylon. Don’t you see?”

  “Yeah, I see,” Kilroy said, straightening. “He’s doin’ a good job.”

  “Waylon, please. For the love o’ Christ, get me outta here. I can’t breathe!”

  The mulatto, Bunkmeyer, chuckled behind Kilroy and extended his sawed-off shotgun toward Schmidt’s head. “Want me to shut him up, Boss?”

  “No,” Kilroy said. “Leave ’em. We’ll leave them both here to fry and for the buzzards to pick at. Buzzards gotta eat too.”

  Bunkmeyer shrugged and lowered the shotgun. Most of the other men—including those who’d remained on the opposite side of the ravine—had gathered around Kilroy, the mulatto, and the two buried men.

  Montoya said, “And the women?”

  Kilroy looked at him. He bunched his lips angrily, pushed past Montoya and the others, heading back toward where Saradee was staked out with the whore. “Mount up and move out!”

  Behind him, Schmidt shouted, “Waylon, don’t leave me here, ya son of a bitch!”

  As the other men headed back to their horses and the sergeant continued screaming until his voice cracked, Kilroy squatted down beside Saradee. She looked up at him uncertainly, glancing at the knife in his
hand. “Waylon . . . ?”

  “You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you, angel?”

  She watched the knife blade wink as it moved past her face, within an inch of her nose—so close that even through her swollen eyes she could see its razor edge—then down past her belly and legs, to the rawhide thong binding her left ankle. It slit the thong as though it were no more than a thin string.

  “I sure have,” she sniffed.

  He grunted slightly as he cut the thong on her right ankle. “I’m just gonna have to treat you extra special for the next few days, ain’t I?”

  As he moved the knife up slowly past her face again, and cut the thong binding her left wrist, she watched him apprehensively, her bare breasts rising and falling sharply. “That’d be nice.”

  When he’d freed her other wrist, Kilroy ran his thumb across the knife blade, checking its edge. He sheathed the knife, bent down, and scooped Saradee up in his arms. “Let’s head south, angel. I’m gonna arrange a very special treat for you in El Molina.”

  “A treat?”

  “Why, of course, a treat.”

  As he carried her across the draw, she draped her arms around his neck. “Waylon, you ain’t mad about nothin’, are you?”

  He didn’t look at her. “What would I have to be mad about, angel?”

  She didn’t say anything. Her shapely legs flopped over his arm as he climbed the ravine’s opposite bank.

  She stared at him uncertainly.

  She had a feeling that, sometime in the very near future, she was going to wish he’d left her staked out with the whore.

  13.

  HUNGRY VISITOR

  TWO hours after the outlaws had left, Lieutenant Primrose licked his lips. He’d been so long without water that his tongue had no moisture in it. The maneuver only burned the cracks and scrapes, reminded him how sore his eyes were. They too were dry as stones.

  At least, the Indians hadn’t gotten around to cutting off his lids. He’d seen that before, and it wasn’t pretty. Men’s eyes turned to charcoal.

  The sun had angled westward, canting shade out from the brush and rock scarps at the ravine’s western edge, giving him and Schmidt some relief from the blinding rays that had made the lieutenant’s eyes feel as though they’d been rubbed with sandpaper.