“I have a hammer and nails in my saddlebags. I’ll reset and be along in a few minutes.” Saradee glanced at the others clumped around her. “You boys go on.”
“Sure you don’t need a hand, Boss?” asked Jimbo Walsh.
“What—because I don’t have balls I can’t hammer a few nails into a horse’s hoof?”
Walsh raised his hands, palms out. “Whatever you say, Boss. See you later!”
He gigged his horse ahead, waving the others on. Kilroy’s gang followed suit. Kilroy himself was the slowest to pull out, casting faintly skeptical glances over his right shoulder. Fifty yards away, he jerked his hat brim down, turned to look over his horse’s head, and urged the horse into a gallop behind the others.
Saradee had busied herself with hammer and nails. Now, as the gang galloped off, hooves clomping into the distance, she turned her head to look after them. She gave a wry snort and picked up the thrown shoe, the nails of which she’d loosened this morning, when the other gang members were making sure their own nails were firmly set in their horses’ hooves.
It took her only a few minutes to reset and hammer the shoe. She swung onto her saddle, turned the chestnut off the trail that she and the gang had been following, and spurred it into a westward, cross-country gallop.
Forty-five minutes later, she reined up before the cottonwoods where she and her mysterious friend had agreed to meet.
Having expected him to be waiting for her, Saradee looked around. No sign of him. Around her, shadows angled out from the shrubs and land formations as the top of the huge, molten sun inched above an eastern rimrock.
She dismounted, glanced toward the federale headquarters hidden behind a jog of purple-pink hills. Pacing back and forth beside her horse, she lit a fresh cigar and peered north toward town.
On the side of a hillock, a small herd of deer grazed the dew-silvered bunch grass.
“Bastard,” she whispered when she’d waited a full fifteen minutes. “Goddamn bastard,” she repeated, louder this time.
She dropped the cigar butt, mashed it out with her boot toe, and her heart hammering, mounted up and digged the chestnut into a ground-eating gallop.
She crossed the hay field in less than a minute. She shucked her Winchester from the saddle boot, cocked it one-handed, and rested the barrel across her saddlebows.
But she met no resistance at the hacienda’s main gate. In fact, she saw no other person in the courtyard—other than a blackened, desiccated human hanging spread-eagled from a large wooden cross near a chicken coop. Horses stared at Saradee over the top rails of a distant corral, and a few chickens pecked in the yard churned with fresh tracks, littered with fresh horse apples.
Saradee dismounted and, holding the Winchester at low port, mounted the same steps she and her “friend” had mounted before, entered the casa by the same door. She stopped, listened, hearing nothing but the muffled buzz of flies in the dank air in which the fetor of unwashed men and spilled booze mixed with the lingering smell of a spicy Mexican breakfast.
Saradee walked along the hall. After three steps, she broke into a run, turning sharply into the room where she and the broad-shouldered hombre had discovered the chained and padlocked cabinet.
Six feet inside the room, she stopped dead in her tracks. She didn’t hear the sharp intake of her own breath. The cabinet padlock hung open, three bullet holes through its steel face. The doors were open a foot.
Saradee walked heavy-footed across the room, opened the doors.
The cabinet was empty.
Not empty.
A large piece of yellowed paper lay on the third shelf from the top. Saradee picked it up, raked her enraged gaze over the sketched likeness of the mysterious stranger and the words GIDEON HAWK, ROGUE LAWMAN in large block letters beneath the even larger letters announcing WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE.
25.
SHOOT-OUT IN ARROYO DEL MOLINA
“I reckon this is where we finally part ways, Lieutenant,” Hawk said an hour after they’d retrieved the payroll money from the federales’ encampment—a relatively easy job, since the three skinny kids Valverde had left to garrison the place had run at the first bullet fired over their heads.
Hawk raised his canteen to Primrose. “Here’s hoping you have a nice ride back Arizona way.”
The Army pouches were draped over the hips of the lieutenant’s Indian pony. “Why don’t you leash that wolf of yours, Hawk, and ride back with me?”
Hawk lowered the canteen from his lips and corked it. “Job to do.”
Primrose dropped his eyes, then stuck out his right hand. “Well, I can’t wish you luck, because I won’t condone what you do, but I will thank you for your help.”
Hawk shook the lieutenant’s hand. “Don’t mention it.” He reined the grulla eastward, stopped, and turned back. Primrose hadn’t moved. “Remember to watch your backside, and stay off the main trails. You’re carrying a heap of money in a very poor country.”
Primrose smiled with half of his mouth. “Don’t tell me you’re worried about me.”
“Just don’t want all my work to go for nothing.” Hawk pinched his hat brim, then reined the grulla around and gigged it into a gallop.
He stopped the horse a half hour later, as the sun rose above the horizon. Looping the reins over a mesquite branch, he shucked his rifle and climbed a hillock. Near the crest, he hunkered down and cast his glance over the other side.
Fifty yards from the base of the hill, the arroyo snaked through spindly cottonwoods and willows. Southeast, the two trestle bridges stood silhouetted against the brightening eastern sky. Man-shaped shadows milled around the base of the one to which Hawk had attached the dynamite.
Directly south, on the other side of the arroyo, the outlaws’ horses stood swishing their tails and grazing at the edge of the arroyo’s southern fork. One man-shaped shadow stood crouched near one of the horses, no doubt hobbling its feet. Another horse shook its mane and whinnied.
Hawk gritted his teeth, hoping the grulla didn’t answer. It didn’t.
Hawk waited, watching from the hillock’s brow with only his naked eyes, not wanting to risk a sun flash off his binoculars. In the quiet morning air, he could hear the outlaws’ muffled conversations. Occasionally, someone chuckled. Rifles were cocked with metallic scrapes, and then boots barked on wood as the outlaws began spreading out upon the unused train bridge.
No one, apparently, had noticed Hawk’s dynamite fixed to the trestle’s wooden braces. If the sun was higher, they no doubt would have.
Slowly, quietly, he slid a fresh shell into his Henry’s breech. He waited until the men hobbling the horses had joined the others on the bridge, then backtracked down the hillock. Holding the Henry in his right hand, he ran crouching across a sage-stippled flat to the boulder that he and Primrose had hidden behind yesterday.
He pressed his left shoulder against the rock, peered around it to the bridge. A fat man dressed in federale blue and a tall man in a black duster stood in the center of the bridge, over the others kneeling or lying prone, facing the other bridge, rifles in their hands. The fat man was Valverde. The tall man in the black duster, Waylon Kilroy. The American outlaw kept turning his bandaged face toward the arroyo, no doubt looking for the girl.
At the moment, she was probably discovering the message Hawk had left in the federales’ makeshift safe. Which meant she could be along anytime.
Hawk hoped the train would be along sooner. He didn’t want the crazy girl throwing a horse apple into his rain barrel, and he couldn’t take a shot at his dynamite charge until the outlaws’ attention was on the oncoming treasure train.
Involuntarily, Hawk followed Kilroy’s glance along the arroyo. Yep, Saradee’s arrival here before the train would be damned unfortunate.
Hawk hunkered down with his back to the boulder, settling in, waiting.
The sun climbed steadily, the day heating up, shadows slowly dissolving. Hawk’s anxiety increased as well. Mexican trains were notoriously lat
e, but by his calculations, this one was nearly an hour behind schedule.
The thought had no sooner passed than a distant whistle sounded. The raspy wail rose again, following by the distinctive chug of a steam locomotive. Atop the trestle bridge, Valverde shouted orders in Spanish.
Hawk glanced around the boulder. The bridge’s rock and adobe arches glowed in the brightening sunlight. Atop the bridge, all the men were facing up the arroyo, away from Hawk. All, that is, except Kilroy, who remained standing on Hawk’s side of the bridge, raking his anxious gaze across the country down arroyo and over Hawk’s head.
Hawk ducked back behind the rock. Shit.
The train whistle rose louder, echoing. The steam locomotive rasped, chugged, couplings jostling as the train snaked around a slow, curving incline. The wheels screeched upon the morning-cool rails.
Keeping his head low, Hawk glanced around the right side of the boulder, a foot above the ground, brown brush and a sage clump shielding him from the bridge.
The train came into view, climbing the slight grade toward the far bridge—a hundred yards away and closing, little more than a dark, rectangular centipede from this distance, a shadow creeping through the clay-colored hills.
Muffled clicks sounded behind Hawk, almost inaudible behind the train’s whistle and its rushing wheeze as it climbed the hill. Frowning, Hawk looked behind him. He saw nothing at first, but the clicks became soft thuds. Hoof falls.
Dread pinched his lower gut as his eye found a shadow moving through a crease in the sun-parched, yucca-stippled knolls in the northwest. Horse and rider were moving toward him—galloping toward him.
Saradee’s hair bounced upon her shoulders, her straw sombrero showing bright tan in the sun’s intensifying light, stirrups winging out from her horse’s ribs. Riding low in the saddle, she lashed the horse’s hips with her rein ends.
Hawk raked out a curse, thumbed back the Henry’s hammer, and turned toward the bridge, snaking the rifle around the right side of the rock and resting his elbows in the brush. He doffed his hat, snugged his cheek to the stock.
As he slid the barrel over the rightmost dynamite pack, four feet from the top of the bridge, a voice called, “Hey!” In the upper periphery of his vision, he saw Kilroy bolt toward the side of the bridge, snapping a rifle to his shoulder.
Hawk steadied his aim, took a slow, deep breath, released it, and squeezed the trigger. Dust and wood splinters puffed six inches right of the dynamite.
The locomotive shrieked, chugged, its funnel-shaped stack lifting sooty black smoke skyward.
A half second after Hawk’s rifle had barked, Kilroy triggered his Winchester. The slug cracked into the boulder a foot left of Hawk’s head. Ignoring it, ignoring Kilroy’s exasperated shouts and the other men beginning to rise from the bridge floor, ignoring the sound of the approaching rider behind him, Hawk levered another round into the Henry’s breech, and planted the bead on the dynamite. A quarter second before he fired, Kilroy drilled the rock beside Hawk, and Hawk nudged his own slug two inches wide of the explosives.
Cursing under his breath, he quickly ejected the spent shell, snapped the stock to his cheek. Kilroy fired again, the slug spanging off a small rock two feet in front of Hawk.
As Hawk laid the bead on the dynamite, adjusting for distance, the hoof thuds behind him grew louder, and he could hear the jangle of bit chains.
Kilroy fired another round, blowing up dust before and to the right of Hawk, who lowered the Henry slightly and blinked dust from his eyes. As more men began shouting in English as well as Spanish, and as the train’s engine was twenty feet from the farther bridge, Hawk aimed quickly, squeezed the Henry’s trigger.
The dynamite detonated with the boom of a ten-pound howitzer.
Kaa-booooom!
The sound was multiplied twice in the next second as the other two packs of dynamite exploded into angry red flame, blowing the braces apart and shredding the railroad ties above.
Hawk had positioned two packs on either side of the arch. Now, as the packs blew in a chain reaction started by the first explosion, blowing the floor of the bridge skyward, the fault lines in the middle arch separated. Sounding like giant eggs cracking, they yawned.
The middle arch collapsed, and the entire bridge fell like a house of cards. Men, rifles, and railroad ties from above tumbled with the falling rock and adobe and burning wooden braces, to the rocky floor of the arroyo. Debris rained into the wash, blowing up dust and rocks and causing the ground beneath Hawk to lurch and roll.
Ammo popped in the fire. Men who’d survived the fall, only to burn in the flames, screamed.
The locomotive and wood-mounded tender car chugged onto the second bridge, bugling shrilly, black smoke puffing skyward.
Two federales had survived the fall and the flames. One hobbled toward the far side of the arroyo, toward a rifle lying in the dust.
Hawk glanced over his right shoulder. Seeing no sign of the girl, he jacked a fresh shell and shot the wounded federale, then turned the rifle back to his left, to one of the American hard cases crawling toward Hawk, dragging his broken legs, his face a circle of smeared red.
The man raged, awkwardly aiming a pepperbox revolver. Hawk drilled a round through his chest, blowing him back against the bloody, twisted corpse of Major Valverde.
Behind Hawk, a boot crunched grass and gravel.
Hawk rose, spun around. The girl was six feet behind him, standing sideways and extending one of her beautiful Colts straight out from her shoulder. Hawk dropped his Henry and drew his Russian.
He figured he’d die before he could raise the pistol.
He was wrong.
The girl stared down the barrel of her own revolver, thumb on the cocked hammer, but she did not fire. Her eyes were stony, and her nostrils flared slightly, tawny hair winging out in the breeze.
Hawk extended the Russian beside the girl’s own extended Colt—an unmatched set, with the barrels pointed in opposite directions. He ratcheted back the hammer and stared into her eyes.
Nearly a minute passed, and neither fired.
Behind Hawk, dying men groaned. The fire cracked and popped. Saradee’s horse milled in the arroyo to Hawk’s left, nickering and shaking its head at the flames.
“You double-crossed me, lover,” Saradee said.
“That’s assuming we ever had an alliance.”
“We had one hell of an alliance. Don’t you remember?”
Beneath the grime of his flat-brimmed hat, Hawk’s eyes were hard. She adjusted her grip on her gun. “Where’s the money?”
“Where it belongs.”
She curled her lip. “You and me could have had a hell of a good time with that lucre.” She glanced at the yawning maw of Hawk’s Russian, and the corners of her mouth rose further. “Reckon we got us a Mexican standoff, lawman.”
“I reckon.”
Depressing her Colt’s hammer, she lowered the gun to her side.
She stepped forward, turned her head slightly, and kissed the barrel of Hawk’s revolver. A gentle, lingering, open-lipped kiss. She glanced along the barrel at him, her eyes sharp with challenge.
Hawk’s finger tightened on the trigger but, as if a pebble were lodged between the trigger and the steel band of the trigger guard, it locked just short of firing.
Saradee’s smile broadened, her eyes sparkled knowingly. “Some other time, lover.” She stepped back, turned, and walked westward along the arroyo bank, hips swaying deliciously, round bottom straining the seat of her black denims. She turned into the arroyo, mounted her horse, and rode off down the ravine.
Slowly, Hawk lowered the Russian.
On the other side of the arroyo, enraged voices rose. Hawk looked that way. Two other survivors of the bridge explosion were scrambling up the butte at the far end of the now-demolished bridge.
Hawk holstered the Russian, picked up his rifle, and ran across the arroyo and up the other side. He caught the two federales, both carrying two of the new Winchester rif
les Hawk had seen in the headquarters basement, at the bottom of a brushy swale.
As they began scrambling single-file up the swale’s far, low bank, Hawk held his Henry straight out from his right hip. “Turn around and die like men!” he shouted in Spanish.
They froze. As one, they jerked around, fumbling with their rifles.
After levering two quick shots, the federales tumbling back down the rise, Hawk turned and walked back across the arroyo littered with burning bridge debris and bodies. Movement to his right caught his eye.
Between two piles of burning lumber, a tall, hatless, soot-covered figure staggered toward Hawk. Kilroy tripped over one of his fallen gang members, regained his balance, and raised a pistol toward Hawk.
Dropping to one knee and snapping the Henry to his right shoulder, Hawk levered three quick shots to Kilroy’s one, the outlaw’s slug slicing across Hawk’s raised left elbow. Hawk’s own slugs formed a tight, three-point star above the bridge of the outlaw’s broken nose.
Dropping his pistol and loosing a clipped scream, Kilroy staggered straight back and fell on a burning timber. The fire instantly engulfed him, his face melting like wax behind the wild, crackling flames, the man’s black boots jerking spasmodically.
The fire wind was fetid with the smell of burning flesh and creosote.
Hawk lowered the rifle, peered through wavering heat toward the far bridge. The train chugged northeastward, climbing another dun-colored rise as the black line of it thinned with distance.
Hawk climbed the arroyo’s northern bank and, resting the Henry’s barrel across his right shoulder, tramped back toward his horse.
Keeping his rifle in his right hand, Hawk mounted the grulla. He was about to tap his spurs to the mount’s flanks, when a figure stepped out from behind a cottonwood tree. The man held a rifle over his shoulder. He wore a big, cream Stetson. His silver-flecked mustache stood out against his lean, lined face.
Hawk swung the barrel toward Flagg.
The lawman’s eyes dropped to it. “Had you in my sights, Hawk. All the time you were shooting at the bridge, I could have drilled you.”
Cold Corpse, Hot Trail Page 20