Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

by Peter Brandvold

  Valverde sucked a surprised breath. “Madre Maria, Kilroy, what happened to your face?”

  Chuckles rippled through the dozen or so federales gathered behind Valverde and his scarecrow lieutenant, Juan Soto. Tenderly, Kilroy toed a stirrup, grabbed the horn, and swung onto his horse. He took the reins from Turkey McDade and glanced over the tightly grouped Mexicans.

  At the back of the group lay a wagon, two mules in the traces, and several crates piled in the box and secured with ropes. Two baby-faced federales in baggy uniforms with hats that seemed to swallow their curly heads sat in the driver’s box, sweating and looking edgy. They were no doubt hauling the dynamite for blowing up the bridge.

  Kilroy brought his gaze forward to Valverde and Soto.

  The major’s brown eyes were bright with glee. Beneath the brim of his ratty, straw sombrero, Soto’s eyes were their usual diamondback-flat, but the man’s bony shoulders jerked with silent laughter.

  In spite of the havoc the sore muscles wreaked in his face, Kilroy grinned. “This is my celebration face,” he told Valverde. “Now, why don’t you and your esteemed lieutenant lead us to the party?”

  Chuckling, Valverde glanced at Soto. The lieutenant raised his right hand and twirled it, then swung his horse around. As he and Valverde headed through the group of men behind them, the group parted, half the men backing their horses toward the fountain. They apparently meant for the Americans to ride in the middle of the group, with Valverde’s men at both the front and flank. The wagon, with its deadly munitions and nervous pilots, would bring up the rear.

  Kilroy cursed and gigged his horse after Valverde, Soto, and the half-dozen men riding directly behind the two leaders.

  When they were riding through the mountains east of town, following an old mining trail, Kilroy leaned over to Saradee sitting her piebald off his right stirrup. “I unloaded your pistols earlier, while you were using the thunder mug,” he said quietly. “You might want to go ahead and load them now.”

  “I did,” she said, smiling. “You might wanna take a peek at your own hoglegs. I unloaded them last night while you snored.”

  Kilroy flushed behind the bandages, and shucked a Remy from his right holster. He opened the loading gate and spun the wheel. He glanced at Saradee, and his nostrils flared.

  Plucking cartridges from the loops of his shell belt, he quickly loaded each revolver. When he’d spun the second one’s cylinder and dropped it back in its holster, he stared straight over his horse’s ears at the dusty, blue-clad back of the soldier riding ahead of him.

  He leaned slightly toward Saradee and said through the side of his mouth, “I know you and me have sort of fallen out of trust with each other, but now might be a good time to call a truce.”

  Saradee pooched her lips out and stared at Valverde and Soto leading the group up a low rise through pines. The morning sun burned the green, ankle-high grass growing around rocks and boulders.

  “I’ll spread the word to my boys, if you’ll spread the word to yours.”

  “Consider it done.” Kilroy leaned back and plucked his bottle from his saddlebags. It was already half empty. “If we play this right, you and me could be one hell of a lot richer than we ever thought possible.”

  “What about the major?”

  Kilroy took another pull from the bottle and returned the cork to the lip. He lifted a shoulder. “He’s got us out-gunned by only four men. I’ve played against worse odds than those in Kansas!”

  “Yeah, but did you win?”

  The trail the group followed dropped gradually until two low sandstone walls, spiked with mesquite and piñon, rose on both sides of a rocky arroyo. The ravine’s stony floor was threaded by a thin trickle of springwater. Ahead, two train trestles, supported by stone and wood, arced across the canyon.

  The group rode under the first trestle, the wooden braces smelling of sun-scorched oak and creosote, and continued for a hundred more yards. Valverde held up his right hand in the shadows cast by the second trestle. Kilroy lifted his gaze to the ties and tracks a hundred and fifty feet above.

  A pale-green lizard lodged in the rocks of one of the pilings stared down at the newcomers, flicking its tongue.

  Valverde turned to Kilroy, who’d ridden up off his left flank. “A wonderful place for a horrible accident—wouldn’t you say, Señor Waylon?”

  Kilroy’s eyes were still roaming the stone pilings between which heavy wooden beams were crisscrossed like the flat irons of a jail cell.

  He sat up straight in his saddle. “Tomorrow morning, huh?”

  “The train is due to pass at six A.M.,” said Juan Soto.

  “Although you probably know our trains here in Méjico tend to run not always on time,” added Valverde. He shrugged. “Still, we will be here by six, just in case.”

  “How do you know it’s going to cross the arroyo on this trestle,” said Saradee, more to look interested than for any other reason, “and not the one we just passed?”

  Valverde looked at her, his eyes dropping momentarily to her shirt, then back up to her face. “A very good question, Miss Saradee, which shows you are much more than just muy bonita, uh?” He grinned from ear to ear, his lips showing red against his broad, pockmarked brown face. “In their haste, the railroad built the original trestle on a fault line. Very bad. So, last summer, they had to reroute. This is now the trestle that is used to cross the arroyo.”

  He turned southward, pointing. “As you can see, the tracks climb a medium-steep hill as they approach the trestle, so the train will be going very slow, just creeping along. For that reason, I wish to blow the bridge only when the locomotive has crossed. That way, we can be assured of as many casualties as possible. Still, since the rear cars will be far from the bridge when it blows, many of the guards will jump to safety.”

  “And put up a fight,” Kilroy said, casting his gaze toward the south end of the bridge. “Just how many guards are we talking about?”

  “My informant has told me between fifty and sixty. Half will no doubt die when the bridge blows. The others will be disoriented and, as you can see, there isn’t much cover on that side of the arroyo. With as many men as we have, they should give us little problem.”

  “Peek them off,” said Juan Soto, grinning around a small, black cigarette, “like dooks off the meal pond.”

  “Pretty as a picture,” said Saradee. “What happens when we’ve killed all the guards?”

  “We dig through the wreckage, of course,” replied the major. “When we have found the gold, we take it back to our headquarters for a big fandango—the largest in the land! The next morning, when we are clear-eyed, we will split up the gold and the money we, uh”—placing the end of a fist to his mouth, he gave a dry cough—“found stashed in the mine of Juan’s father, Pedro.”

  Soto curled a lip at Kilroy.

  “Then we’ll be wanted on both sides of the border,” said Turkey McDade, sitting his pinto behind Kilroy, sucking a quirley. He laughed dryly, as did several other Yankees.

  Valverde feigned surprise as he turned his white-ringed eyes to Kilroy. “You are wanted on the americano side of the border? Oh, my God—you did not tell me this! For what?” He laughed heartily and punched Kilroy’s right shoulder.

  The wagon clattered along the arroyo behind them. Valverde turned his head to look back the way he’d come. “It is about time!” he shouted in Spanish. “What have you drivers been doing—playing with yourselves? Hurry, we have a bridge to blow!”

  Behind the dust veil lifted by the wagon, Gideon Hawk watched the Mexican and American bandits through field glasses.

  24.

  PRELUDE TO FIREWORKS

  HAWK lay belly-down along the north bank of the arroyo, about fifty yards back from the first railroad bridge. His position was concealed by a boulder on his left and a spindly mesquite on his right.

  “What’s going on? What are they doing?” Lieutenant Primrose asked, hunkered down behind the boulder off Hawk’s left hip.

>   “Don’t get impatient, Lieutenant.”

  “What’re we doing here?” Primrose voice betrayed his frustration. “What the hell has this to do with retrieving the payroll money?”

  “Nothing.”

  Through the first trestle’s far-left arch, Hawk watched through the thinning dust veil as the group of American outlaws and Mexican federales made way for the wagon. The wagon stopped in the shade of the second bridge.

  Last night after they’d made love—if you could call it love—Saradee had told Hawk the bandits’ plan. So he pretty much knew what was happening now, as she and the steel-eyed gent, Kilroy, and the two federale leaders sat their horses while the fat major berated the wagon drivers, cheeks puffed, his right fist in the air.

  The two young drivers scrambled down from the wagon seat, one quickly crossing himself, and ran back to the end of the wagon. As one of the wagon boys tossed a tarpaulin aside and rummaged around in a wooden crate, Hawk lowered the glasses and turned to Primrose.

  “I told you to stay in the village, Lieutenant. Nasty habit you’ve developed—followin’ me.”

  “Where’s the money?”

  “At the federales’ camp. Don’t get your underwear all twisted. By this time tomorrow, you and the loot will be on your merry way back to Arizona and the big party Major Devereaux will no doubt throw in your honor.”

  “Why wait till tomorrow? Most of the federales must be here. How many could be left at their camp?”

  “There’ll be even fewer there tomorrow.”

  Primrose gritted his teeth as Hawk casually cleaned the field glasses with his shirttail. “While they and those killers are busy out here, I say we go to the camp and secure those greenbacks!”

  “Go ahead,” Hawk said, training the glasses again at the commotion at the base of the second bridge. “I got work to do.”

  Hawk adjusted the binoculars’ focus until the arches of the second trestle swam sharply into view. Above the heads of the milling Americans and the federales, three men scaled the wooden cross-struts. The men climbed slowly, carefully, carrying small burlap sacks as preciously as newborn babes.

  Hawk lowered the binoculars and retreated behind the boulder. As he wound the leather lanyard around the glasses and slipped the glasses into their velvet-lined case, Primrose stared at him, bemused.

  “How do you plan to do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “I take it you didn’t ride out here to enjoy the Mexican countryside,” Primrose said, lifting one cheek and slitting one eye. “Kill them. All of them.”

  Hawk rose and carried the glasses back to their horses ground-tied at the base of a knoll.

  “If you intend to hold the money hostage,” Primrose said, “it isn’t going to work. In spite of how you are, or what you might think of me, I don’t value the money more than life. I won’t help you take them on.”

  “Don’t need your help,” Hawk said, pulling a burlap knapsack from his saddlebags. “Got all the help I’ll need right here.”

  He carried the sack over to the boulder and sat down beside the lieutenant. He laid the sack beside him, then kicked his boots out, crossed his ankles, and rested his back against the boulder. He tipped his hat brim over his eyes.

  Primrose opened the sack and peeked inside. Staring up at him were three bunches of hide-wrapped dynamite, complete with caps and fuses. Four sticks composed each bunch.

  “Christ,” Primrose said. “Where in God’s name did you get that?”

  “Lady luck,” Hawk said, yawning and crossing his arms over his chest. “I didn’t get much sleep last night, Primrose. Wake me when the hard cases have moseyed, will you?”

  Eyes closed, half-dozing, Hawk heard the horses and the wagon clatter away down the arroyo.

  Primrose tugged on his sleeve. “They’re gone.”

  Hawk poked his hat brim up and turned to peer down the ravine. Moving much more quickly now, the driver and his partner conversing loudly and laughing, the wagon disappeared around a bend. The hard cases left only dust and the smell of fresh mule and horse plop in their wake.

  In the brush of a nearby hillside, a wild pig squealed. The sun beat down like a glowing hammer.

  Hawk stood, removed his duster, shoved his arms through the straps of the knapsack, securing the pack between his shoulder blades, and stepped carefully down the arroyo’s low, steep bank.

  “For Christ sakes,” Primrose said behind him.

  “You must be half-Mex,” Hawk said, striding toward the trestle, “all your talk about Jesus.”

  It took him a half hour, climbing amongst the beams in the hot sunshine, to attach the dynamite charges to the trestle braces with the thin rawhide ties he’d procured from Guadalupe Reyes’s livery barn. When he finished, he climbed down, jumping the last three feet, his boots kicking up dust amongst the rocks at the arroyo’s floor. His sweat-soaked shirt clung to his back and chest, and sweat dribbled through the dust on his dark, chiseled face.

  Primrose stood holding Hawk’s duster in one hand, the reins of both horses, standing hang-headed behind him, in the other. “What now?”

  Hawk grabbed the duster and squinted at the sun. “Time for lunch.” He tossed the duster over his bedroll, swung into the grulla’s hurricane deck, and gigged the horse toward town.

  In El Molina, they had lunch in a little cantina not far from Reyes’s place, then took a two-hour siesta with the rest of the village, the lieutenant curled up on the floor of their room while Hawk slept on the bed. The shutters were thrown open to the muffled screech of gulls and the fresh breeze off the lake.

  The heat and the breeze made Hawk dream about walking along a lake near Crossroads with his wife, Linda, and he woke smiling. As he stared at the cracked adobe ceiling flecked with fly shit and soot, the present returning to him slowly and heavily, the smile faded. He stomped into his boots and went down to the lake for another swim.

  Late afternoon found him and Primrose back at the same cantina in which they’d had lunch, drinking tequila and what passed for beer down here—yeasty and warm. When it grew dark and the miners came in from the mines, dusty and jubilant and getting drunk quickly on the cantina owner’s home-brewed whiskey, Hawk and the lieutenant ordered platters of pork with all the trimmings. When they finished eating, they ordered more beer and tequila, sat on the small front veranda, and kicked back in their chairs.

  The light faded and the stars kindled. The smell of mesquite smoke and spicy cooking odors grew strong on the breeze. Occasionally, a gull screeched or a distant coyote yammered. Dust from the steady stream of horseback riders and wagons sifted constantly, as did the smell of tobacco and liquor, horse shit and latrines. Pistols popped intermittently all across town.

  The Mountain Lion Tavern sat kitty-corner across the square. Hawk and Primrose watched and listened as the gringo outlaws openly celebrated their coming fortune. They were only silhouettes from this distance—jostling shadows against the candles and lantern light—but Hawk could make out the long-haired Saradee gambling with a group near the square. She was the loudest of the revelers and, of course, at the center of the celebration.

  Kilroy’s tall, lean frame with his Colorado hat sat relatively quietly, kicked back in a chair. He was no doubt mentally licking his wounds, his bandages glowing in the shadows.

  Hawk finished his beer and turned a glance through the open, glassless window behind him. Amidst all the brown Mexican faces and straw sombreros was that of a tall American in a cream Stetson, moving toward the cantina’s crude bar from a back door.

  Flagg carried a Winchester in his right hand. Raking the room, his nervous eyes met Hawk’s on the other side of the open window. Flagg stopped, took one fluid step behind an adobe post from which a lantern burned. Hawk’s right hand strayed to his Russian’s butt, froze when he saw Flagg trying to keep the post between him and Hawk as the lawman retraced his steps to the back door and ducked outside.

  “What is it?”

  Hawk looked at the lieuten
ant, the young officer’s brows arched with curiosity, his eyes glassy from drink.

  Hawk drained his beer, stood, and stretched. “Time for bed.”

  The next morning, Saradee awoke in the predawn dark, got up, threw her shirt around her naked shoulders, and lit a lamp. She dropped the mantle over the flame. Before she waved out the match, she used it to light a half-burned cheroot lying with several others in the ashtray on the bedside table.

  Puffing smoke, she regarded Waylon still snoring on the bed, the fresh bandages Saradee had used to dress his wounds glowing in the guttering lamplight. If anything, his nose was even bluer than it had been yesterday, the bridge expanding into his swollen eyes, giving his face a bearlike appearance.

  Saradee stuck the cheroot in her teeth, went to her cartridge belt draped over a chair back, and made sure both pistols were loaded. Satisfied, she climbed onto the bed and walked her fingers up the outlaw’s battered face, lightly flicking his lips.

  “Wakey, wakey, little one,” she sang. “It’s moooorninggggggg.”

  A half hour later, she and Waylon were riding at the head of the gang, trotting their horses into the lightening eastern horizon. They were riding in the direction of the two train trestles, where they’d agreed to meet Valverde, Soto, and company.

  A metallic clang sounded beneath Saradee’s horse. The horse lunged sideways, dropping its right shoulder. “Damn—look at that!” Saradee said as the chestnut limped forward and stopped.

  Kilroy checked down his own mount and turned toward Saradee. “What is it?”

  “Threw a shoe.”

  “You didn’t check your shoes before we pulled out?” Saradee snapped a sharp look at him, an angry flush rising in her cheeks. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. Kilroy knew that look, wished he could take that last question back. After all, he had been the one who’d called the truce.

  Chagrined, he began to swing down from the saddle. “I’ll have a look.”