Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

by Peter Brandvold

  Beneath the table, she nudged the knife a sixteenth of an inch farther through his jeans. Kilroy’s right eye twitched as ice flooded his bowels.

  “Easy, now,” he rasped.

  “Go ahead,” Saradee said. “Wink at her again.”

  Kilroy tried to slide back slightly in his chair, to ease the blade’s pressure, but Saradee’s hand was firm. “I know her from before you and I threw in,” he said.

  “Reckon I’ll go over there and have a little talk with that puta,” Saradee said.

  She removed her knife from Kilroy’s crotch and, shoving her chair back, stood.

  Kilroy glanced over at the whore, who was staring back at Saradee, her smile gone. Chuckling nervously, he grabbed Saradee’s wrist. “You can’t kill the whores in Mexico. They’re like Mary Magdalene, for chrissakes. Sit down.”

  Saradee was still glaring at the whore. The whore stared back at her, the whore’s eyes apprehensive. The men at her table were talking and laughing, swilling tequila.

  “Please, angel,” Kilroy said, smiling stiffly. “Have a seat, drink your tequila. . . .”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Sit down, Saradee.”

  She looked down at him. Holding her wrist, he smiled up at her. “We don’t need a commotion, my flower.”

  Saradee wrinkled her nose. “I reckon I got my point across. Wouldn’t doubt if she just peed her bloomers—if she’s wearin’ any.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it at all,” Waylon said wryly, releasing her wrist and throwing back his tequila.

  Saradee sat down and slid her chair close to the table. She threw back her tequila, then popped the cork on the aguardiente and splashed several inches into her water glass. She was about to take a sip when, qlancing into the courtyard, she frowned.

  “Uh-oh.”

  At the same time she’d spoken, Kilroy had heard the clomp of hooves on the square’s crumbling cobblestones. He looked over his riqht shoulder, and his gut tightened slightly. The federales he’d spied through his field glasses earlier were riding in two separate groups around both sides of the fountain, heading toward the cantina.

  They rode slowly on sweaty, dusty horses, most of which were smart-stepping Arabians. Major Valverde rode point. Close behind was Lieutenant Juan Soto, known as one of the most sadistic men in northern Mexico. Rumor had it that when Valverde had found his wife in bed with another man—another of Valverde’s lieutenants—he’d had Soto torture her to death slowly, her screams echoing for days around the village in which Valverde kept a sprawling casa outpost housing his men and his whores.

  Valverde had dealt with the betraying lieutenant himself. Another rumor had it that what remained of the man’s body was still hanging from a cross out front of Valverde’s quarters, as a warning to other would-be double-crossers.

  “Señor Kilroy!” Valverde exclaimed, his fat, pocked face cracking a broad, toothy smile, his booming voice echoing around the square. “What an honor it is to see you again!”

  “Major Valverde,” Kilroy said, leaning back in his chair and spreading his hands, as though the joy at seeing the federale again was too great for words.

  Valverde said, “I thought it was you. Oh, but the tracks we found! That many tracks, I tell Lieutenant Soto, must mean that Señor Kilroy has once again blessed our beloved Méjico with his presence.”

  The portly Valverde glanced at the concave-faced Soto sitting to his left. Soto smiled, but his eyes were dull. His teeth were small, tobacco-stained stilettos, and he needed a shave. His bare, corded arms boasted a dozen tattoos.

  “We follow, but somehow you gave us the slip!” said Valverde. He wagged an admonishing finger at Kilroy. “It is not nice to try to trick your friends, Señor.”

  “Trick?” Kilroy said, turning his hands palm up. “What trick? I didn’t know you were back there!”

  “Of course you didn’t.” Valverde laughed. His eyes had found Saradee when he and the others had first ridden up to the cantina. Now they lingered over the buxom, tawny-haired outlaw, and glistened with appreciation. “This one here—she belongs to you, uh?”

  Kilroy glanced at Saradee, who regarded the soldiers without expression. “Major Clarinado Valverde, please meet Miss Saradee Jones.”

  The major lowered his head in a gallant bow. “Miss Jones, I am honored. I would dismount and kiss your hand, but as you see, I am filthy.”

  Saradee smiled woodenly. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

  Valverde’s own smile tightened as he kept his eyes on Saradee but spoke to Kilroy. “This one has some—how do you say? Pluck.”

  “I like my women with pluck,” said Kilroy. “They can stay mounted longer.”

  Valverde frowned, uncertain. Understanding flashed in his eyes. He threw his head back, laughing and throwing an arm out toward Soto. Both men laughed as though at the funniest joke they’d ever heard, the lieutenant’s arm flexing long, taut muscles from biceps to wrists.

  Though most of the other men, sitting their own horses behind them, hadn’t heard the joke, laughter began to ripple down the line. Chuckling, Kilroy glanced at Saradee. She returned the glance. She wasn’t smiling. Kilroy glanced at his and Saradee’s men spread out across the patio. They shuttled their own gazes up and down the line of federales, expressions tense, hands not far from their guns.

  When the laughter died, Major Valverde leaned forward, crossing his forearms on his saddle horn. He ran his eyes lustily across Saradee’s well-filled shirt, then licked his lips and turned to Kilroy.

  His eyes hardened. “Now that we have enjoyed a good laugh together, it is time to talk business.”

  “Ah, gee, Major,” Kilroy said, wincing. “I’m afraid it’s gonna have to be a short talk this trip.”

  Valverde glanced at Soto. The lieutenant stared coldly at Kilroy from under the brim of his dusty, gaudy sombrero. His eyes reminded the outlaw leader of tiny, round dung beetles.

  “Oh?” said the major. “And why is that?”

  “Our last venture didn’t go as planned. Turned out the bank we robbed didn’t have near as much money as we figured. Unfortunately, we spent nearly all of the loot just getting down here.”

  Valverde clucked. “That is too bad.”

  “That’s the way it goes sometimes.”

  “A few you win . . .” said Valverde.

  “A few you lose,” said Kilroy. “Just the same, though, I’d like to buy you a drink.”

  “Perhaps it should be me who buys you a drink, Señor.” Valverde smiled.

  Kilroy looked at him. “Oh? You run into a little extra dinero recently, Major? I never knew you to be so generous.”

  Juan Soto spread a smile, showing the small, sharp teeth between his thin, cracked lips.

  “A little extra, you might say,” said Valverde, raising his right hand and snapping his fingers.

  A rider moved up from mid-column, hooves clacking on the cobblestones.

  “Just after we lost your trail, we came to the old mine which Juan’s padre used to work. We found the entrance collapsed.” The major scratched his head. “That seemed odd, because when we rode past the mine just a few days before, it was wide open.”

  Juan Soto’s smile broadened, black eyes closing down to slits. Several of the men behind him and Valverde smiled as well. The rider he’d summoned approached Valverde’s right stirrup.

  Kilroy’s gut tightened. He slid a quick glance to Saradee. Her face had become drawn and pale. A single bead of sweat trickled down her jaw.

  “We suspect something funny is going on,” Valverde continued, “so Juan and I order the men to open the mine back up again. And what do you suppose we find?”

  Kilroy’s face had turned to stone. His heart thudded painfully against his ribs.

  “No,” a small voice said in his ear. “Please, Christ, no.”

  As if through a thick layer of fog, as if time had slowed by three quarters, he sat his patio chair stiffly, hand squeezing his whiskey glass. The young federale turned his hors
e so that its left hip faced the patio. A burlap money sack hung over the hip.

  At the same time that Kilroy’s eyes found the U.S. stamp on the pouch, the major glanced furtively around the square, then leaned toward Kilroy and cupped a fat, brown hand to his mouth.

  “Thirty-six thousand American dollars!” he whispered through wheezing laughter.

  16.

  FLAGG’S MERCENARIES

  NOT long after their reunion, Hawk and Primrose lost the outlaws’ trail in a rain squall. When they came upon a forlorn little prospectors’ cabin along a gurgling stream nestled in cottonwoods, with three dead men lying in the shaded yard, half-eaten by buzzards and coyotes, they figured they’d found it again.

  The prospectors had been shot, probably ambushed from the trees lining the stream. The smallest had been stripped of his shirt and pants. Nothing except food appeared to have been taken from the thatch-roofed casa. The cabin and adjoining barn and stable hadn’t been burned, the bodies hadn’t been desecrated, which told Hawk the killings hadn’t been the work of Indians.

  “Prints down here,” Primrose called from the trees along the stream. “A dozen or so.”

  Hawk looked at the youngest of the three dead prospectors. Shot twice in the head so the clothes hadn’t been torn by bullets. Damn practical. He’d been carrying a shovel, which lay nearby.

  “Prints down here,” Primrose called again, louder.

  Hawk glanced back at the young lieutenant, standing at the edge of the yard, holding his horse’s braided rawhide reins.

  “I heard you.”

  “Well, what’re we waiting for?”

  “We’re gonna bury these men.” Hawk stooped to pick up the shovel.

  As he stepped the blade through the thin sod pocked with yucca and sage, Primrose walked up and stood beside him. “I don’t understand you. Why bury them, when you wouldn’t let me bury my detail?”

  “We have time.” Hawk tossed a shovelful of sod aside and again stepped the shovel into the ground. “I know where they’re heading now. We’re not far from a village rumored to be a haven for gringo outlaws—as long as they pay a tribute to the local federale troupe, that is. We’re only about a day away.”

  He was breathing hard as he dug. “These poor bastards were killed through no fault of their own. We have time, so we’ll bury them, and then we’ll ride.”

  Primrose watched him, incredulous. He shook his head, then tied his horse to a sycamore and tramped off to the stable in search of his own shovel. “You’re an odd one, Hawk. Damn odd . . .”

  They dug three shallow graves and covered each with rocks from the creek. Into the rocks they poked oak branches resembling crosses. Hawk stood before the graves, removed his hat, and bowed his head. Watching Hawk with a vaguely bewildered expression, the lieutenant followed suit.

  After a minute, Hawk donned his hat, spat, and turned to where the horses were tied in the trees.

  “Hawk.”

  He stopped and turned to Primrose. The lieutenant glanced at the rocky ridge behind the casa, golden brown in the mid-afternoon light, each rock and piñon standing out clearly against the slope. Primrose lowered his head with feigned casualness, hooked a finger across his nose.

  “In the past hour I’ve seen three sun flashes off that northern ridge. Something tells me we’re been spied upon through field glasses.”

  “We are.” Hawk moved toward the horses.

  Primrose hurried up beside him. “You’ve seen?”

  “For the past three days we’ve been followed by eight men.”

  Primrose stared at him, jaw hanging. “Who?”

  Hawk stopped before the tree to which the grulla was tied. “When we split up, I had my own little adventure. A deputy U.S. marshal by the name of D.W. Flagg and a sheriff named Killigrew tried to blow out my candle. I warned them to go on home, but I reckon they haven’t cleaned their ears in a while. Somewhere, somehow, they found a dozen or so men—scalp-hunters, by the looks of them—to help hunt me down.” He slipped the reins loose from the sycamore branch and swung onto the saddle. “I glassed them day before yesterday. They’ve been gaining on us steadily . . . by my design.”

  Primrose stared up at him. His face was now more brown than red, his goatee sun-bleached, but the peeled skin made him look diseased. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  “To tell you the truth,” Hawk said, “I’ve been riding alone so long, it never really occurred to me.” Chuckling wryly, he gigged the grulla southward along the stream.

  Primrose jogged over to his Indian pony. “What’re we going to do about it?”

  “Fork leather, Lieutenant,” Hawk called without turning around, walking the grulla downstream. “And fill that empty chamber you’ve been keeping under your pistol’s hammer. You’re gonna need it pretty soon.”

  An hour later, Hawk and Primrose dropped over a jog of rocky hills and into the yard of a combination store and saloon.

  The pulperia’s main building was a barrackslike, two-story adobe with a second-story balcony wrapping around the front and both ends. The owner probably rented out the upstairs rooms to freighters. Two heavy-axled wagons sat, tongues hanging, ash bows exposed, before the low adobe wall fronting the main building.

  As Hawk and Primrose rode into the hard-packed yard, cleaving the small herd of goats and chickens, a skinny, stoop-shouldered Mexican sauntered out of a stable, smoking a brown-paper cigarette and glancing up at the riders beseechingly.

  “Getting late. You spend the night?” he asked in broken English.

  “Not tonight,” Hawk said, looking the place over, eyes picking out every object behind which a man might seek cover during a lead swap. The pine smoke drifting from the main building’s big fieldstone chimney was laced with the smell of grilled chicken.

  “Business, she’s slow,” the Mexican drawled, removing the cigarette from his lips, turning his head to follow Hawk and Primrose across the yard. “I give you special deal, uh? Free pussy!”

  “Not tonight,” Hawk repeated, and spurred the grulla into a trot.

  Riding to his right, Primrose said, “What’re you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking Flagg and his boys will stop there for the night. Flagg’s getting old. I’m guessing he won’t be able to pass up a real bed and a free female.”

  They rode for a while.

  “I know him,” Primrose said.

  Hawk looked at him, silhouetted against the sinking sun. “What’s that?”

  “Flagg was a guest of Major Devereaux’s at Fort Bowie a few times. Apparently, he and Devereaux were at West Point at the same time. I’ve played cards with the man. He has political ambitions. Rumor has it he could very well be the next territorial governor.”

  Hawk lifted a shoulder and looked over his horse’s head.

  “You can’t kill him, Hawk.”

  “The man’s been warned, but he still intends to kill me.”

  Primrose didn’t say anything for a time. He glanced at the falling sun to his right, then turned to Hawk. “I can’t help you kill him. He’s just doing his job.”

  “And he’s a friend of your father-in-law’s.” Hawk grinned. “That’s okay. I’ll kill the son of a bitch myself.”

  When he looked over at Primrose riding along beside him, the lieutenant, sagging forward in his saddle, appeared pale, as though he were having a bout of the ague.

  “Just stay out of my way,” Hawk warned, “or I’ll kill you too.”

  They rode for another twenty minutes, traversing a jog of mesquite-covered hills rising to steeper mountains in the southern distance. Hawk dismounted, climbed a knoll, and glassed his back trail. Seeing no sign of Flagg or Sheriff Killigrew and their six mercenaries, he turned to Primrose, who was sitting a square, flat-topped rock lower down the slope. Hands on his spread knees, the lieutenant studied the ground as if looking for something he’d lost.

  “This is where we part company, soldier. “ Hawk gained his feet and walked past the lieutenant toward
the two horses ground-tied at the bottom of the hill, their tails swishing in the early evening light, flies buzzing around their heads.

  “Do you have to do this?” The lieutenant’s voice was somber.

  Hawk returned his field glasses to his saddlebags. “I see no other way to get them off my trail.”

  He mounted up and looked at Primrose. He looked young and miserable, sitting on that rock.

  “What’re you going to do?” Hawk asked.

  Primrose had slipped his Army Colt from its holster. He brought it up as if it weighed a ton, aimed it at Hawk. He curled his lip with savage resolve as he ratcheted back the hammer. “I can’t let you do it, Hawk.”

  “I know you can’t,” Hawk said, feeling genuine sympathy for the kid. “But you don’t have a choice.”

  He reined the horse around so hard that the grulla pawed the air. He put the steel to him, and the horse lunged off its rear hooves into an instant gallop, thundering around the hill and heading back the way he’d come. Hawk didn’t look back, didn’t see the lieutenant sitting his rock, stewing, staring at the empty place Hawk had just vacated, cocked revolver aimed at nothing.

  Fifteen minutes later, Hawk was glassing the pulperia from a notch in the basalt ridge just south of it. The grulla was tethered in a hollow at the bottom of the ridge. As he peered through the lenses, Hawk curled his upper lip in a grim smile.

  The pulperia’s owner was no doubt very happy this night. Ten horses milled in the corral flanking the main building. A skinny Mexican boy in white slacks, sandals, and a dark brown poncho was hauling water from the well. Another, shorter kid was forking hay through the fence slats.

  Smoke puffed in earnest from the building’s rock chimney, while five men milled on the front ramada, spilling into the yard—laughing and smoking, glasses in their hands. They were rough-looking Mexicans, revolvers and long-bladed facóns jutting from sheaths on their hips, thighs, and from shoulder rigs under their arms. One man, hearing something from the second story, looked up and, cupping a hand around his mouth, shouted encouragement in Spanish. He and the other men in the yard laughed.