Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

by Peter Brandvold

  A man yelled something through one of the second-story windows—Hawk couldn’t make out the words—and the men in the yard laughed harder.

  Flagg and Killigrew were probably in the bar drinking or upstairs getting their ashes hauled. Hawk wasn’t so much concerned about them as the scalp-hunters. Fighting men, they wouldn’t be easy to take down. Let them keep drinking. Let the light fade, and he’d have the drop. . . .

  Hawk made a thorough reconnaissance of the place, noting the arroyo behind it, then scuttled a few feet down the ridge, rose, and jogged to the bottom, taking long strides, his spurs chinging, boots lifting sand. He stowed the field glasses in his saddlebags, sat down to remove his spurs, shucked his rifle, tugged his hat brim low, and jogged west along the base of the ridge.

  By the time he’d stolen around behind the main building and dropped into the ravine, the sun was down, but the sky remained pale. The brown ridges were mantled in umber. There’d be enough light for another forty-five minutes or so.

  The Henry in his right hand, keeping his head low, he jogged through the ravine, the low sides canting shadows onto the sandy bottom and swallows wheeling over his head. The ravine’s sides dropped, the cut rising to level, brushy ground about thirty yards behind the pulperia, a few barrel cactuses and pecan trees towering over the blocky shapes of disintegrating chicken coops and abandoned shacks. The place at one time had probably been an abbey or a monastery.

  To Hawk’s left were the corrals in which the horses ate and drew water, a couple rolling in the dust, the dust rising in a soft brown cloud above the corral. On his right, a girl cried out softly. There was the wooden clatter of logs tumbling. Beyond the chicken coop, grown up with brown scrub, stood another tin-roofed structure resembling a stable. From there, a man’s guttural voice warned the girl in Spanish to be quiet and pull her bloomers down.

  Hawk moved right through the knee-high brush, crouched over his Henry, until he’d gotten the chicken coop and scattered pecan trees between him and the main building. As he continued across the yard and through the pecans, the building, resembling a stable, slid up before him.

  It wasn’t a stable, but a simple, roofed shed. The side facing Hawk was open. Inside, split logs were stacked. Sitting on the stack, half-reclining, was a dark-haired girl. Between her flailing legs was a man in a short leather jacket and buckskin breeches, a steeple-crowned sombrero hanging down his back. On the back of his wide cartridge belt was a black knife sheath trimmed in silver.

  The girl kicked feebly at him, struggling, as he pulled her underwear down her thighs. Hawk’s Spanish was poor, but the girl seemed to be telling the man she wasn’t one of the putas, but a simple errand girl. If he took her like this, her mama would have to send her to a convent.

  “Please don’t ruin my life!”

  The man ripped the underwear with one enraged jerk, and tossed it into the brush. The girl sobbed and continued pleading as he bent his knees, opening the fly of his breeches. He thrust himself at the girl once, twice, grunting savagely.

  As he thrust the third time, Hawk’s knife careened end over end and buried itself hilt-deep in the man’s back, cleaving bone with a crunching thump.

  17.

  TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL

  THE girl must have thought the man between her legs was leaning down to kiss her. She turned away, pursing her lips and punching his head with her fists. Arching his back and breathing sharply through gritted teeth, he stepped back from her, turning slowly as he reached around with his right hand, clawing for Hawk’s bowie.

  Hawk bolted into the shed, raised his rifle barrel over his right shoulder, and brought the butt soundly against the sighing man’s face. He heard the nose snap. Lowering the Henry, he jerked the man into the brush behind him and looked at the girl.

  She’d risen onto her elbows, her face a brown oval framed by straight black hair in the weak light. She was breathing loudly, brows furrowed with shock and confusion.

  Hawk pressed a finger to his lips. In halting Spanish, he told her he was a friend here to rid the pulperia of the others like this one. He jerked his head at the man lying un-moving in the brush. He could hear the man breathing, but barely.

  “Sí,” the girl said quickly, raking a deep breath.

  She jumped off the woodpile, her dress dropping over her bare thighs, and dropped to her knees beside her attacker. She plucked the man’s facón from its sheath at the back of his cartridge belt, held the blade up before her face, then looked at Hawk.

  “El perverso es el mío!” she hissed. The pervert is mine!

  Hawk lifted his left cheek as she pulled the man onto his back and jerked his shirt away from his crotch, but turned away when she went to work with the knife. Crouching, he glanced around the yard, then ran to the main building’s heavy-timbered back door.

  He turned his head to the gray wood, listening. Inside, glasses thumped on tables and men spoke loudly in Spanish. Spurs chinged on the floorboards. A cork was popped from a bottle. Coins clinked. Someone sneezed; someone laughed and blessed him.

  Hawk didn’t think about his next move. In such a situation, when he were badly outnumbered, spontaneity and lightning force were the best courses of action.

  He turned the doorknob, shoved the door open an inch, then kicked it inward with savage force and took two long strides inside, his green eyes raking the room from the sun-seared planes of his implacable face.

  He lowered his rifle, his left hand caressing the fore-stock while his right thumb raked back the hammer. At the same time, his brain registered the bar to his right, the round tables before it, positioned around ceiling joists, and the stairs rising on his left.

  A half second after the door had slammed the back wall, startling one of the half-dozen men up from his table, a frown crumpling the near-black skin between the man’s eyes, Hawk squeezed the Henry’s trigger. The gun boomed. A man sitting near the stairs, who had bolted to his feet clawing a Navy Colt from a shoulder holster trimmed with shiny black Apache scalps, howled and goose-stepped backward, chest geysering blood.

  The man hadn’t hit the floor before Hawk, taking two more steps into the room and calmly levering the Henry, slid the barrel right and continued firing until seven cartridge casings danced on the floor around his boots. Gun smoke webbed before him. Inside the cloud, the scalp-hunters groaned and grunted and cursed, tumbling like cans shot from fence posts.

  Only one of the Mexicans fired a return shot, the bullet plunking into the bar as he fell facefirst into his table, man and table going down together in a thundering roar of breaking wood and glass and splashing liquor.

  Holding the Henry’s barrel straight out before him, Hawk looked left. The stoop-shouldered Mexican he’d seen earlier lay facedown on the floor, hands on his head. Before the bar, one of the scalp-hunters gave a death rattle; another rolled over, and a boot thumped the floor. Voices rose from outside and upstairs.

  Hawk wheeled and took the stairs two steps at a time. Outside, men shouted and pistols popped as boots clacked on flagstone.

  Hawk gained the top of the stairs and dropped to a knee as a gun flashed before him, barking loudly, the slug whistling past Hawk’s left ear and thumping into a ceiling beam. Fifteen feet down the hall, a pale, stocky figure moved behind the wafting powder smoke, the wan candle-light glinting off a silver-plated pistol and off the heavily pomaded hair of Flagg’s partner, Sheriff Spade Killigrew.

  Hawk fired in the general direction of the glints—two quick pops of the Henry. The shooter groaned and stumbled through an open door.

  Shouting curses through bared teeth, Killigrew thrust his pistol out the door and fired another stray shot. Hawk triggered the Henry, the hastily aimed round hammering through the sheriff’s forehead, just above his right eye and thick, black brow. The man grunted and fell into the room with a heavy thud. A girl’s shrill screams rose from the room as Hawk ejected the spent cartridge, which clattered down the steps behind him.

  At the end of the hall, a d
oor slammed. At the hall’s left side and about thirty feet from Hawk, another door opened and a big man stormed out, bearlike and naked, wearing only a sombrero and a neckerchief, extending a sawed-off shotgun in one hand, a sawed-off rifle in the other.

  As the man, raging like a bull stampeded off a cliff, triggered the shotgun and rifle at the same time, the rifle’s crack barely audible beneath the barn-blaster’s cannonlike roar, Hawk dropped. His chest slammed the floor.

  He rolled left into an alcove. The shotgun roared again, the rifle booming a half second later. The .00-buck and .44 slug blew a small crater out of the floor where Hawk’s chest had hit.

  Hawk rolled back out into the hall, propping himself on his right shoulder, and levered five quick rounds into the big naked bear’s chest and belly. The man threw his arms out, dropping the shotgun and triggering the rifle into the rafters, as he staggered backward, his enraged bellows growing louder, mouth forming a big, pink O in the lower center of his square, bearded face.

  Impossibly, the man got his feet under him. Blood painting his torso and spraying the walls and doors to either side, he lowered the short-barreled Winchester, clumsily levered a shell.

  “¡Muero, tú mueres, amigo!” I die, you die, friend! Hawk held his own rifle steady on the man’s face. His shot echoed the big man’s own. As the man’s slug sang over Hawk’s head, Hawk levered another round, fired again as the big man stumbled back, falling, the second shot taking the man through the soft underside of his chin.

  As the man fell, Hawk’s bullet ripped out the top of the man’s shaggy head, thumping into the door at the end of the hall, spraying the panels around the hole with blood and brains. Outside, a rifle cracked and a pistol popped, the last shot ricocheting with an angry zing.

  The big man had no sooner hit the floor than Hawk was up and running, leaping the quivering, bloody mass of the big Mex’s naked body, and smashing his foot against the blood-washed door. As the door exploded inward, shards of frame flying around the dim room pungent with marijuana smoke and sex, Hawk sidestepped right and dropped to a knee, snapping the Henry up and snugging his finger against the trigger.

  To his right, a naked whore sat up in one of the room’s two beds. Her russet hair was piled atop her head, sheet drawn up to cover her breasts. Straight across the room, a tall man, shirt untucked and in stocking feet, was halfway through the shuttered window. He carried a gun in his right hand; his cartridge belt dangled from the other.

  “¡Por favor!” the whore cried, extending her right hand beseechingly.

  “Stop, Flagg.” Hawk aimed his rifle at the back of the man’s head.

  Flagg froze. He faced the balcony, his shoulders tensing.

  Hawk drilled a round into the window casing. Flagg jumped with a start and turned around slowly, his eyes lighting on Hawk’s Henry. The lawman dropped his revolver and cartridge belt.

  “You got me, Gideon.”

  “Thought I told you to go home.”

  Flagg shrugged, lifted a corner of his mouth. “You got me.”

  Hawk waved the Henry’s barrel. “Get over here.”

  Flagg’s broad right cheek twitched. His patchy silver beard stood out against his red face. “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Get over here.”

  Slowly, holding his hands up, palms out, Flagg walked toward Hawk.

  “Por favor,” the whore kept begging Hawk thinly, holding the sheet up to her breasts with both hands.

  Hawk stepped sideways and jerked the Henry toward the door. “Out. Down the hall.” He’d use Flagg as a shield against the men who’d been milling around outside when he’d entered the building. He could have killed Flagg and leapt off the balcony, but the gunfire told him several men were still out there. Since they were here for him, he didn’t have much of a chance.

  He strode up behind the lawman, rammed his rifle’s butt between the man’s shoulder blades, throwing him brusquely forward. “Move!”

  Continuing to prod Flagg’s back with his rifle, Hawk followed the lawman down the dim hall to the stairs, candles smoking and sputtering around them, the smell of blood hanging heavily. Flagg was five steps down the dim staircase, Hawk two steps behind him, when a figure appeared at the bottom of the stairs, silhouetted against the main room’s back wall.

  Hawk stopped, snapped his rifle to his shoulder, aiming over Flagg’s left shoulder, tightening his trigger finger.

  The figure he’d drawn a bead on flung a rifle out from his side, opening the palm of his free hand. “Gideon, it’s Primrose!”

  As if through a spyglass, the lieutenant’s shape took form—the sun-seared, pink-splotched face, auburn goatee and sideburns, tan kepi shoved back on his head. He no longer wore the bandages around his forehead, or his blue tunic, which he’d replaced with a deer-hide poncho he’d bought from a trader he and Hawk had met along the trail.

  Incredulity spiked Hawk, evoking a skeptical chuff. So the lieutenant had been what all the shooting was about. . . .

  “Well, well,” Hawk said, poking the Henry’s barrel into Flagg’s back, getting him moving again. “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “Thought you could use a hand,” Primrose said, taking a step back from the stairs.

  Hawk studied the lieutenant, smoke still trickling from the barrel of the soldier’s carbine. At the bottom of the stairs, keeping his Henry’s barrel snug against Flagg’s back, Hawk turned his head, swept his gaze around the room.

  Besides the six men he’d killed himself, two others lay near the front door. The stoop-shouldered barman had risen from behind the bar planks. Crouching, one hand on the bar top, he stared at the three men gathered at the bottom of the stairs, his expression switching back and forth between fear and derision.

  Hawk grabbed the collar of Flagg’s shirt, thrust the man brusquely toward the front door, prodding Flagg’s back with his rifle as he crossed the blood-washed room, stepping over bodies and raking his gaze around cautiously. He stepped over one of the dead men lying near the front of the room, and followed Flagg out the door and onto the patio.

  More dead men out here, two lying atop one another as if dropped from the sky. To his left, a groan lifted. Keeping the Henry trained on Flagg, Hawk slipped his Russian from its holster and sidled over to the wounded man lying near a potted orange tree beside an adobe balcony pile. The man was sliding his hand toward a revolver in blood pooling on the patio’s cracked flags.

  Hawk stopped the hand’s movement with a shot through the man’s head, the flat crack of the Russian sounding like a cannon in the silence that had followed the fusillade.

  “You left one alive,” Hawk said as the lieutenant’s gaunt frame appeared in the doorway.

  Primrose glance around. His gaze lighted on Hawk. “You owe me, Gideon. You’d be dead by now if I hadn’t followed you here.”

  “I’m fresh out of medals, soldier.” With his left hand, he shoved Flagg out into the darkness of the yard. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got one more bit of business.”

  “You owe me, Hawk,” Primrose repeated, grabbing Hawk’s right sleeve. “Let him live. I’ll take him back to Arizona. Till then, we’ll keep him bound.”

  Hawk studied the lieutenant, his green eyes flashing angrily in the wan lamplight slicing through the door. Hawk opened his mouth to object, but said nothing. He closed his mouth, his chest rising and falling. He looked at Flagg, who regarded the lieutenant as though trying to place him. Then Hawk returned his eyes to Primrose.

  “He’s your pet, Lieutenant. You tend him close, or I’ll put him down in a heartbeat.”

  With that, Hawk lowered his rifle and strode off in the night.

  18.

  A MEXICAN UNDERSTANDING

  “SO, let me get this straight, soldier,” said D.W. Flagg when they were riding later that night under a sky full of stars. “You came down here to retrieve the payroll money you lost, and entangled yourself with a kill-crazy ex-lawman.”

  Hawk rode point along the deep-rutte
d wagon road cleaving the rocky, desert terrain. Flagg and Primrose rode behind him, Flagg’s wrists locked with his own metal cuffs, his ankles bound to his stirrups. He’d obviously had his share of aguardiente and marijuana back at the pulperia, and he hadn’t yet sobered. In fact, he’d gotten more and more talkative the longer they’d ridden through the dark Mexican hills.

  More and more brash.

  “Didn’t know who he was till we’d been traveling together for a spell,” Primrose said grimly, staring into the night beyond Hawk. “Besides, we have similar objectives.”

  “Oh?” Flagg laughed. “Your objective is to get the money back, show your father-in-law what a great soldier you are. Command material! What’s Hawk’s objective?”

  “Killing,” Hawk said, glancing over his shoulder at Flagg riding off his grulla’s right hip. “And I’m beginning to think I made a big mistake, not killing you back at the roadhouse.”

  “See what I’m talking about?” Flagg said to Primrose. “Only man who could take down all those scalp-hunters—and Sheriff Killigrew—single-fucking-handed, is a kill-crazy son of a bitch like Hawk.”

  “The lieutenant didn’t do half bad himself,” remarked Hawk, swaying easily in his saddle. They’d been holding their horses to walks to avoid trail hazards concealed by the darkness, but there was no need to hurry. They had only another hour or so to El Molina, and it was relatively early.

  Primrose felt his ears warm slightly from chagrin. “I had only four men to contend with,” he said. “And they were all heading inside to deal with you.”

  Flagg turned to the young lieutenant, the lawman showing his white teeth in the darkness. “He’s teaching you right well, eh, Lieutenant?”

  Primrose turned to the lawman, his calm voice belying his irritation. “I was only trying to get to you before he did, Marshal. Are you wishing I’d lingered?”

  Flagg turned his head away and spat. He pulled back on his reins, stopped his dun. The lieutenant did likewise, glancing at Flagg curiously.