Rio Matanza (Bodie Kendrick - Bounty Hunter Book 2)

by Wayne D. Dundee

  While Doc was keeping his man pinned down, Kendrick walked over to Chulla, who’d managed to smother the flames that had caught his clothing and was now rolling back and forth on the ground, mewling in pain. Kendrick paused long enough to kick him nonchalantly in the head, knocking him unconscious and putting him out of his misery. That done, he drew his Colt and turned to Turpin, saying, "Lend a hand there, Doc?"

  "Join in if you like," Turpin answered. "Workin' on flushing out a yellow dog."

  But before Kendrick got off even a shot, Bedney called from behind the tree: "Wait a minute! Hold it! Hold your fire. I ain’t no match for the two of you, not no how. I’ll throw my guns out … I’ll do anything you say."

  "Talk is cheap," Turpin said. "Let’s see those guns come out."

  Bedney hesitated. "How do I know you won’t shoot me anyway?"

  Kendrick said, "If we’re of a mind to shoot you, then shot is what you’ll get, regardless. Comin' out unarmed with hands high is your best chance. Believe it."

  After several clock ticks, Bedney’s Colt sailed out and landed on the ground seven or eight feet from the tree. "That’s it. That cleans me out."

  "Haul yourself out from behind that trunk then, where we can see you," Turpin said. "Hands high, like you were told."

  Bedney emerged, visibly shaken. His bug-eyed stare swept over his fallen comrades. "My God, look at ‘em … all my pards … every one cut down." His eyes found Kendrick and Turpin, danced nervously back and forth between them. "You two are a couple of holy terrors, you know that?"

  Turpin blinked away some of the blood dripping down off his left brow and said, "Not a damn thing holy about us, old man…we’re just doing a job."

  RIO MATANZA

  Wayne D. Dundee

  RIO MATANZA

  e-Book edition ©2012 Wayne D. Dundee

  Cover: Keith Birdsong

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part

  by any means without permission.

  This book is dedicated to my "running pards"

  from days gone by:

  Dick Dundee, Bill Smith (cousins)

  Craig Welch, Dave Miller

  and Sam Rucker

  — WD —

  Chapter One

  The man in black made his way down the back slope of the giant boulder in a barely controlled slide. Near the bottom, where the slope broke off sharply, he pushed away and dropped lightly the rest of the way to the ground.

  A second man waited there, crouched patiently on his haunches, rolling a handful of smooth pebbles in his right palm. Some feet away, two saddled horses stood ground-reined in the lengthening shade thrown by a strand of scraggly juniper.

  The climber took a minute to catch his breath, at the same time removing his broad-brimmed hat and using it to swat the fresh streaks of boulder dust from his clothes. When he was finished, he swept back his shock of gray-flecked dark hair with his free hand and replaced the hat.

  The second man straightened up, tossing aside his pebbles. "Well," he said, "are they over there?"

  The black-clad man nodded. "They are for a fact. Just like we figured."

  "All of 'em?"

  "All seven, by my count. Regrouped from the different directions they scattered. Act like they don’t have a care in the world now. Camped right in the middle of a clearing, cooking coffee over a fire. Don’t even have a lookout posted."

  "Seven. Makes the odds just like we figured, too.” The second man sighed. "Not like I haven’t bet my hide on worse, though, I reckon."

  "Yeah, ain’t that the truth. The rotten apples always seem to come in bunches, don’t they?"

  Standing against the backdrop of sun-blasted rock, discussing the matter at hand in calm, quiet voices, the two men presented a number of visual contrasts. The climber was tall and gaunt, the slenderness of his long legs and arms suggesting the kind of gawkiness common to that physical type, perhaps even a certain degree of frailty. Suggesting such things, that was, to any who failed to observe the self-assured grace with which he carried himself or who had not witnessed his deceptive strength.

  The second man was equally tall, much thicker through the chest and shoulders and neck, his forearms, exposed by the rolled cuffs of his shirt sleeves, sun-bronzed and corded with muscle. His strength was obvious, the deceptive part in his case being the speed and agility with which that big frame was capable of moving. Where the gaunt man was decked out entirely in black from head to toe, the big man wore faded denims and a buckskin vest beneath a flat-crowned Stetson bleached colorless by the sun except for its sweat stains and many miles’ accumulation of trail dust. The abused Stetson rode atop a square, weathered, ruggedly handsome face as opposed to the gaunt man’s narrow, pale, saturnine features brooding beneath the sweep of his broad, black brim.

  More telling than their differences, however, were the similarities to be noted about the pair: the steeliness in their eyes, the casually confident way they moved under the weight of the guns riding low on their hips, the always-close proximity of their varied other weapons. In truth, both were bounty hunters of considerable reputation. Their partnership was only a few days’ old, but each had worn the brand of manhunter for several years.

  The gaunt man was called Doc Turpin. If he had a first name he never used it, and no one could remember having ever heard it. Furthermore, since he evidently wanted it that way, no sensible person—considering his reputation for having a lightning draw and temper to match —was in a hurry to ask. Turpin plied his trade for the most part in Texas, making his current appearance in the border­lands of the Arizona Territory something of a rarity.

  For Bodie Kendrick, the big man in the buckskin vest, it was just the opposite. The territories of Arizona and New Mexico were mainly where he did his hunting, with only infrequent forays into the lone star state.

  "As far as this bunch," Kendrick said now, replying to Turpin’s observation, "I guess you’d have to say they’ve managed to scrape together just about the rottenest collec­tion of apples to be found anywhere."

  "That’s a pure fact," Turpin allowed. "This poor old world sure as hell never needed the likes of the Klegg gang and the Harrup Brothers to throw in together. The way they hit that bank in New Gleanus makes it clear enough what they add up to: they’re going to flat try and outdo each other when it comes to spilling blood along with whatever jobs they pull."

  Mention of New Gleanus and the slaughter that had taken place there only three days earlier made Kendrick grimace with recollection of the scene. He’d ridden into the dusty territory town barely an hour after the robbers had struck—struck with a cold-blooded viciousness that marked them as something more akin to rabid beasts than to even the fringe element of civilized mankind. Of course Kendrick had known for some time that there was little civilized about the Harrup brothers, Clem and Darrel; or the wild-eyed cousin, Huck Mather, who rode with them. And while Kendrick had heard a few stories about Otis Klegg and his marauding band over in West Texas, he’d had no first hand feel for how bloodthirsty they, too, could be.

  Until New Gleanus.

  The joining of the two outlaw groups had come as a surprise and something of a shock. The common link apparently was a man known as Paris, who now rode with Klegg’s bunch but had once outlawed with the Harrups. The exact details of the joining were still obscure. All Kendrick knew for sure was that he’d been dogging the Harrups for nearly a week when all of a sudden, in the middle of some barrens to the no
rth of New Gleanus, their tracks had increased fourfold.

  By all reports, the New Gleanus bank money, its total abnormally swollen to meet the payroll of the railroad crew approaching with gleaming new track from the east, had been handed over obediently under gunpoint. It was then that it became clear the robbers had an appetite for more than just booty. Fattened by their take, having met no serious resistance, in a position to ride away fast and clean before an alarm could be sounded or responded to, the Harrup-Klegg kill-crazies had opted instead to blast their way out of town for no reason other than to dish out a measure of death and destruction. In the storm of gunsmoke and sizzling lead that ensued, windows were smashed, wagons and livestock stampeded, fences flattened, yards trampled, fires sparked by broken lamps, a score of inno­cent citizens—including women and children—wounded or injured, and half a dozen others killed.

  The spilled blood had still been fresh and red on the boardwalks and in the dust of the street when Kendrick rode in. The moans and lamentations of the survivors still quavered in the rapidly warming morning air. It made Kendrick think of crossing a landscape in the wake of a battle, the way he’d done more than once as a fuzz-chinned young soldier during the War Between the States, his baptism to man’s capacity for violence toward his own kind.

  It was while strolling the bloodied streets of the stunned town, eavesdropping on near-hysterical accounts of what had happened, softly asking an occasional ques­tion, that Kendrick first made eye contact with the man in black whom he promptly recognized as Doc Turpin. Even partially stripped of his trademark garb as he pitched in to try and help the frantic town doctor deliver aid to the wounded, Turpin was unmistakable. And the faint narrowing of the man's eyes when he met Kendrick's gaze told plainly enough that the recognition cut both ways.

  Later, after a posse of outraged, well-intentioned, but woefully inadequate clerks, shop keep­ers, and laborers—hurriedly sworn in as deputies by a town marshal who was himself twenty years too old and forty pounds too soft for the task at hand—rode out on the trail of the animals who had shattered their community, Kendrick and Turpin once again locked gazes in the back-bar mirror of a saloon, all but deserted and eerily quiet in that troubled hour. They were its only two customers. The bartender, a balding, grotesquely fat man, was busy picking the remaining shards of broken glass from around the framework of what had once been the establishment’s gaudily painted front window, sweating profusely and mut­tering obscenities under his breath at having to perform the chore in the middle of the morning’s heat. He seemed to have little inclination for serving his patrons or for grieving the town’s wasted lives, only for bemoaning his own plight and the loss of the precious glass.

  It had been Turpin who finally broke the silence between the two manhunters. Tossing back a shot of rye, he slowly turned and, in measured strides, walked the stretch of bar front that separated him and Kendrick until he paused at a new distance of three paces. At all times he carried his lean body with a subtle poise under never-still eyes, balanced, ready, hand dangling close to the brightly polished hogleg at his hip. Just as Kendrick, even in a supposedly relaxed position, elbows resting on the bar, out of habit held his torso with a certain rigidity, waist cocked slightly so that neither the big fighting Bowie on his left nor the Colt on his right were in any way blocked from quick access.

  Having made his approach, Turpin said evenly, "By the height and the span of those shoulders and the rest, I make you for Bodie Kendrick out of New Mexico Territory."

  Kendrick had nodded. "Guilty as charged," he allowed. "And by the all-black outfit and the way you carry yourself coiled like a diamondback inside that gunbelt with the pearl-handled Smith and Wesson, you’d be the famous bounty hunter, Doc Turpin, from over Texas-way."

  "I don’t know about the ‘famous’ part … but I’m Turpin."

  "I’ve heard of you, you’ve heard of me. Maybe we’re both famous. "

  "In our line of work, being too well known isn't necessarily a good thing."

  Kendrick had reached to snag a fresh whiskey tumbler from behind the bar, filled it from the bottle in front of him, held it out to Doc. After they’d bent elbows together, Kendrick said, "Speakin' of our line of work—what was done out there on the street a little while ago bears the stamp of the kind of men our business is all about. I don’t reckon it’s coincidence, Doc, the both of us showing up here just now."

  Turpin had sighed with an air of weariness, per­haps a touch of sadness. "No … I don’t reckon it is."

  They’d stood there together for a spell, sipping whiskey, talking, comparing notes.

  Turpin told of following Otis Klegg and his bunch out of Texas after they’d botched an attempt to rob a payroll wagon, leaving behind two of their own mortally wounded and getting away with only a fraction of the money they’d been after, yet still managing to kill three guards and the driver of the wagon during the confrontation. The episode had resulted in the price on the heads of the Klegg gang being raised to a level that renewed Turpin’s interest and held it even to the point of going out of state after them. Somewhat sheepishly he admitted to losing their sign for the better part of a day in a rugged stretch of unfamiliar territory and then, after picking it up again, recognizing that a rendezvous had taken place with three new riders whose identity he had no way of knowing at the time. He also spotted sign of Kendrick, doing his own tracking, and the whole thing made him that much more curious and cautious in his pursuit. Like Kendrick, Doc had arrived in New Gleanus too late to do anything about the bloody robbery.

  For his part, Kendrick told of dogging the Harrups down from the north but not being able to close the gap on them before they unexpectedly threw in with four additional men and proceeded to hit the bank and the unsuspecting town with their combined savagery. Upon learning the identity of who the Harrups had joined with, Kendrick recalled the fact of Klegg’s man Paris having once ridden with the Harrups and from there it seemed logical to figure him for the one who’d acted as the go-between in somehow bringing the two forces together. At any rate, both bounty hunters now agreed the New Gleanus posse that had assembled and gone after the robbers had about as much chance against them as a flock of sage hens thrown in front of a buffalo stampede.

  Neither of the two men probably could say exactly how the idea of them teaming up came about. On the one hand it might be considered a fairly natural evolvement out of the way preceding events had unfolded, on the other it was a prospect practically unthinkable to two independent sorts. Nevertheless, abetted in no small way by previously formed respect for each other’s reputations, by the time they’d wrapped up their saloon palaver they’d also wrapped up plans to unite their individual hunts and ride out together after the seven wanted men.

  With the sun beginning its descent in the afternoon sky, re-provisioned, horses grained and watered and rested, Kendrick and Turpin had put the unfortunate town of New Gleanus behind them. Their way was at first clearly marked by the chewed ground that had been ridden over by both fleeing robbers and pursuing posse. On the second day, tracking started to get more difficult; the terrain changing, growing rockier, more barren and sun-blasted. The outlaws had waited for this rugged flooring to pull the tactic of splitting up, each rider branching off in a different direction, and the posse had been foolish enough to split their force as well. The one chance they’d had going for them was sheer weight of number and by dividing what had originally been a small army into seven separate handfuls of anxious amateurs they dramatically increased the odds against their success, possibly even their survival.

  Kendrick and Turpin stayed with the distinctive track of a horse with a slightly crooked shoe on its right front foot, a mark Turpin knew well, having followed it all the way from Texas. "Belongs to Otis Klegg’s own black gelding," he’d explained. "We lock on this, I’m willing to guarantee the others will fall back in with it. I don’t know much about your Harrup boys, but I know old Otis is bull enough to make that kind of demand, that the rest
converge on him when the time is right. ’

  "I’ll buy that line of reasoning," Kendrick had agreed. "The Harrups are a little young, a little green at what they’re doing still. Klegg’s been around longer, got a bigger reputation. Clem and Darrel and for sure their crazy cousin Huck would be impressed by that. They’d let him do most of the bossing … for now, anyway."

  So they’d locked on the track of the horse with the crooked shoe, following it deeper into the rugged sprawl of badlands.

  On the morning of the third day, just before full sun­up, they’d heard a series of gunshots in the distance. After covering a cautious mile and a half, they’d come upon the four posse deputies who’d been unlucky enough to draw Klegg’s trail and found them shot to pieces. Two dead, one badly wounded, one creased less seriously but still not without blood loss and pain. The crafty old bastard had doubled back on them and when he saw how few they were he’d cut them down from ambush.

  The bounty hunters had dressed the wounds of the living as best they could before directing them back the way they’d come, throwing in a warning for the two still alive to do everything in their power to call their posse together again into full force before others were picked off in the same manner. Temporary graves were dug for the pair of dead deputies and marked well in order to be easily found by those who would return to take the bodies home for a proper burial.

  Kendrick and Turpin had then taken up the hunt once more, faces set in even grimmer expressions, resolve burning hotter in their guts to take down the animals running somewhere out ahead of them—and for more reasons than could be measured in dollars and cents.

  By afternoon, exactly as Turpin had predicted, tracks of the other robbers who’d branched off the previous day began re-converging on those of Otis Klegg. And now, with evening drawing near on this far edge of the badlands, all seven had returned to the fold and were snugly gathered in the camp in the clearing on the other side of the massive boulder. The way they saw it they had good reason to be smug, believing the posse that had been chasing them to be disorganized and riddled (there almost certainly having been other ambushes sprung in the same manner as Klegg’s) and likely turned tail for home. The thing they had no way of knowing yet was that a separate kind of posse, a two-man version that was the last thing they would want to encounter anywhere or anytime, had finally closed the gap on them and was getting ready to drop the bolt across the door.