Cold Corpse, Hot Trail Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1. - DEAD OR ALIVE

  Chapter 2. - LA PUTA DEL DIABLO

  Chapter 3. - DEAD TO RIGHTS

  Chapter 4. - BUZZARD BAIT

  Chapter 5. - INDIAN TROUBLE

  Chapter 6. - A HOT-BLOODED WOMAN

  Chapter 7. - FLAGG

  Chapter 8. - DEATH IN EL GARABATO

  Chapter 9. - TRYST

  Chapter 10. - PRIMROSE TAKES CHARGE

  Chapter 11. - “BYE, BYE, LIEUTENANT!”

  Chapter 12. - RED DEVILS

  Chapter 13. - HUNGRY VISITOR

  Chapter 14. - “WHY BUY THE COW . . . ?”

  Chapter 15. - EL MOLINA

  Chapter 16. - FLAGG’S MERCENARIES

  Chapter 17. - TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL

  Chapter 18. - A MEXICAN UNDERSTANDING

  Chapter 19. - MOUNTAIN LION TAVERN

  Chapter 20. - BUSHWHACKING BEAUTY

  Chapter 21. - FORAY BY MOONLIGHT

  Chapter 22. - AN EAR FOR WAYLON

  Chapter 23. - THE TRUCE

  Chapter 24. - PRELUDE TO FIREWORKS

  Chapter 25. - SHOOT-OUT IN ARROYO DEL MOLINA

  “A natural-born storyteller who knows the West as well as any of those writing in the genre today.”

  —Bill Brooks

  La Puta del Diablo

  “I know who you are,” Estella said, hugging her knees and eying him accusingly across the fire.

  Hawk returned the coffee pouch to his saddlebags. “You and half of Arizona, seems like.”

  “Lawmen came to the cantina a couple of weeks ago,” Estella said. “They said you were an outlaw lawman. A vigilante. They said that you killed another lawman last winter.” She smiled. “Your friend.”

  A dull blade prodded Hawk’s heart. The pain must have shown in his eyes; Estella recoiled slightly and stopped chewing, the smile fading from her lips.

  “Perhaps . . . they were wrong,” the whore said haltingly, staring at him.

  Chin on her knees, Estella stared at him furtively. Finally, she rose, stretched like a cat, then moved around the fire.

  She had a wild, lusty look in her eyes.

  “Come on,” she crooned, grinding against him. “I make you feel good tonight . . . then we go to Tucson tomorrow. . . .”

  Hawk didn’t lift his hands to her, and he didn’t return the kiss, but he didn’t resist her. He couldn’t deny her pull, and he hadn’t had a woman in a long time. . . .

  Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold

  BLOOD MOUNTAIN

  The Sheriff Ben Stillman Series

  HELL ON WHEELS

  ONCE LATE WITH A .38

  ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN

  ONCE A RENEGADE

  ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER

  ONCE A LAWMAN

  ONCE MORE WITH A .44

  ONCE A MARSHAL

  The Rogue Lawman Series

  COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL

  DEADLY PREY

  ROGUE LAWMAN

  The .45-Caliber Series

  .45-CALIBER MANHUNT

  .45-CALIBER FURY

  .45-CALIBER REVENGE

  The Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet Series

  THE DEVIL’S LAIR

  STARING DOWN THE DEVIL

  THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE

  RIDING WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS

  DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND

  THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ROGUE LAWMAN: COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley edition / April 2007

  Copyright © 2007 by Peter Brandvold.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without

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  of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-04196-3

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  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

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  BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Frank Roderus,

  the straightest shooter in the whole dang posse!

  (And a darn good writer, friend, and mentor.)

  1.

  DEAD OR ALIVE

  THE wind was howling wolflike outside the tiny, smoky cantina, blowing up dust in the main street of Coyote Springs, Arizona Territory. It made the lamps sway and the batwings squawk. A bearded man with a gold eyetooth and shabby bowler hat set a wanted dodger on the table, and turned it toward Gideon Hawk.

  With three greasy fingers, he slid the whiskey-stained parchment through the playing cards and cigar ashes, until Hawk’s own sketched likeness stared up at him—a ghostly specter with dark, deep-set eyes, angular face, and hard, unshaven jaw.

  The image took Hawk aback.

  It couldn’t be his. The face looked like that of a hardened, merciless killer, not unlike those of the men he himself hunted. But there it was, his own name, GIDEON HAWK, and the words ROGUE LAWMAN in large block letters beneath the even larger letters announcing, WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE.

  Hawk looked at the man with the gold eyetooth. The man smiled. Hawk glanced at the two other cardplayers, one on either side of him—both hard-eyed, broad-shouldered men clad in greasy trail clothes. Before they’d sat down, Hawk had seen the knives and well-tended revolvers on their hips. The man on Hawk’s right wore a thin, rat-hair coat with the bulge of a shoulder holster under his left arm. When he’d reached forward to toss money on the table, the coat had opened slightly, offering glimpses of a big Le Mat.

  “You think I didn’t know you were
bounty hunters?” Hawk said. “You three smell like an undertaker’s privy.”

  “If you knew we was bounty hunters,” said the man to Hawk’s right, who had a thatch of unruly red hair and one wandering eye, “why you playin’ cards with us?”

  Hawk riffled his cards and puffed the long, black cigar between his lips. “Dead men’s money is as good as any other.”

  The men glanced at each other, an indignant light in their eyes. The man to Hawk’s left snickered nervously. He removed one hand from his fan of pasteboards, and began edging it off the table.

  “I reckon you better keep both hands right where they are,” Hawk advised him, staring straight ahead at the hombre with the gold eyetooth, but aware of the other two in the periphery of his vision. “And I reckon you boys better have another rye, forget about that wanted dodger.”

  The man on his right leaned over the table, growling, “You think we’re scared of you? There’s three of us, one of you!”

  “And there’s a thousand dollars on your head, Hawk.” The man with the eyetooth grinned. “And we’re hungry. If you wanna swap lead, we’ll swap lead. But we ain’t tin-horns fresh from over Alabamy way. You can’t take all three of us. So, why don’t you save yourself and us a lot of trouble and come peaceful?”

  Behind Hawk, a floorboard squawked faintly. He didn’t turn around, but kept his eyes on the man with the gold eyetooth.

  “See,” said the man on the left, pulling at his long, tobacco-stained chin whiskers, “if we mess the place up, get blood on the floor an’ such, the bartender’ll charge us for the cleanup and repairs . . .”

  Out the corner of Hawk’s left eye, a figure moved in the mirror behind the back bar.

  “. . . and there just ain’t no need,” the man with the spade beard added reasonably, his perpetually blood-stained fingers tugging on the whiskers, “when the only thing a lead swap can get you is—”

  Hawk didn’t hear the rest. He dropped his right cheek to the table, the impact knocking over the whiskey bottle and bouncing the scattered coins. A rifle butt sliced the air over Hawk’s head, knocking his hat off and making a loud whooshing sound. Faintly, a man grunted.

  Hawk glanced over his left shoulder. The man who’d swung the rifle stumbled with the violent force of the swing. With his right hand, Hawk slipped his nickel-plated Russian .44 from the cross-draw holster on his left hip, raised it to his armpit, and fired straight out from his side.

  The gun’s pop sounded inordinately loud in the closed quarters. The man with the rifle bellowed, dropped the long gun, and staggered toward the bar, clutching his right hip, into which a neat, smoking hole had been drilled.

  Hawk was only vaguely aware of the indignant cries around him, as the saloon’s other patrons scrambled to safety. His senses homed in on the table before him where his three poker companions, shaking off their surprise at Hawk’s dodge of the rifle butt, reached for their own revolvers.

  Hawk bolted to his feet, throwing his chair back and lifting the table with his left hand. With his right, he extended the Russian at the man with the wandering eye, who was pushing up from his chair and bringing the big Le Mat up from under his arm.

  Hawk drilled a round through his brisket, blowing him back down in his chair. The man sat, gritting his teeth and throwing his head back as the Le Mat slipped from his fingers and blood geysered from his chest. The chair went over, the man’s knees rising above the table, his back hitting the floor with a loud crack and a whap!

  Turning left, Hawk stepped into the table, which he held before him like a shield, driving the other two bounty hunters back in their own chairs. He thumbed the smoking Russian’s hammer back, fired through the bottom of the table.

  The man with the gold eyetooth yowled. His chair barked on the pine boards.

  A shot cracked to Hawk’s left, the bullet splintering the table near his left hand and shattering a whiskey bottle behind him.

  As Hawk continued pushing the table back and over, he drilled two more quick shots through the bottom, one on each side of the hole to his left.

  “Ah, God!” groaned the man with the spade beard as Hawk overturned the table and stepped back.

  Spying quick movement out of the corner of his eye, Hawk turned toward the bar. The man he’d felled with the hip shot had retrieved his rifle. His back to the bar, grimacing and cursing, he jacked the loading lever and raised the barrel toward Hawk.

  Gideon swung toward him, crouching and extending the Russian, popping off two more fast shots into the man’s throat and heaving paunch. As the man screamed and dropped the rifle, collapsing against the floor, Hawk holstered the empty Russian and clawed the stag-butted Army Colt from the sheath on his right hip.

  Raising it, he saw the man with the gold eyetooth crawl out from beneath the table, run crouching toward the batwings, then turn, blood pumping from a wound in his left shoulder.

  Eyes spitting flames of fury, he bellowed, “You son of a locoed shoat—!”

  Hawk popped a round into Mr. Eyetooth’s forehead. As the man staggered straight back toward the batwings, firing his pistol into the low, smoke-blackened ceiling, Hawk turned to the man with the long whiskers.

  He was pushing himself up from a broken chair, grunting and cursing, sweat running down his cheeks and into the tobacco-stained beard.

  His voice brittle with exasperation, he panted, “I’ll . . . I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”

  He was halfway up and turning toward Hawk when Hawk’s Colt roared, plunking a .44 pill above the man’s left ear. As the man gave a clipped sigh and hit the floor as though felled by a pugilist’s haymaker, Hawk swung his gaze around the room, rife with the rotten-egg odor of cordite. In a situation like this, you never knew who else, compelled by the prospect of a thousand-dollar reward, might decide to throw in with the bounty hunters.

  But all the seven or so other customers were cowering at the room’s perimeters, under tables, or behind overturned chairs. A little Mexican whore, clad in only a spangled burgundy skirt and with several strands of bright Mexican beads looped around her pert, brown breasts, looked up from behind a large rain barrel mounded with empty bottles. Hawk looked twice, was surprised to see no cocked derringer in her hand, ready to earn the whore more money than she’d ever made in the mattress sack.

  Hawk lowered the Colt and, swinging another cautious glance about the room, stooped to pluck a handful of greenbacks off the floor. He left several dollars for the bar-keep and undertaker, then started toward the batwings. Movement out the dusty front window caught his eye.

  He stopped.

  Four soldiers in blue tunics, black pistol belts, and tan kepis were heading this way from the livery barn. A short, pudgy man wearing a marshal’s star ran to join them, pointing at the cantina. Above the din of wagons, clomping horses, and barking dogs, Hawk heard only snippets of the marshal’s words. “. . . four bounty hunters . . . they was gonna . . . rogue lawman . . . pshaw! . . .”

  As the soldiers and the marshal strode toward the batwings, Hawk cursed. He wheeled, peered into the shadows at the back of the room. A low door was in the back wall, just beyond the bar. Hawk made for it, stepping over bodies and around the shattered table and chairs.

  To his right, the Mexican apron moved suddenly, raising a double-barreled barn-blaster up from under the bar planks. Hawk crouched as the shotgun boomed, the flash lighting up the entire room. The double-ought buck careened over Hawk’s head and smashed into the support post to his left, gouging a gourd-sized hole and splitting the post in two with a thunderous crack.

  As part of the ceiling fell to his left, raining dirt and grass from the sod roof, Hawk straightened and emptied his Colt into the apron, smashing the man against the back bar, bleeding and screaming and shattering bottles as he fell.

  Hawk opened the back door and glanced behind him. The soldiers bolted through the batwings, Army-issue pistols drawn and raking their gazes across the room.

  “There!” a sergeant shouted, pointing at Hawk.


  Hawk had turned to slip through the door when a small figure brushed past him and through the door ahead of him. It was the topless whore. Frowning, Hawk bolted through the door, closed it, then rammed a trash barrel under the knob.

  He turned to the girl standing in the alley before him, arms crossed over her breasts, eyes slitted with fear. Barefoot, she leaned toward him beseechingly.

  “Please, you must take me with you. The soldiers, they are very bad. They don’t pay, only take. ¿Comprende?”

  “Beat it!” Hawk shouted as the soldiers pounded the door from inside, jolting the barrel back from the jamb.

  He turned and ran along the alley, hurdling trash and logs fallen from woodpiles. He turned on the other side of the post office and ran through the gap between the post office and a harness shop.

  Hearing shouts and running feet behind him, he turned to see not only the soldiers and the marshal, but the girl. Running surprisingly fast on her dirty, bare feet, cupping her breasts in her hands, she was right on his heels.

  “Goddamnit, I told you to get the hell out of here!” Having circled around the saloon, Hawk approached his horse, tethered with a handful of others to the hitch rack before the batwings. “You’ll be a hell of a lot safer on your own than you ever will with me!”

  “On my own, I’ll be dead before nightfall!”

  Hawk slipped his reins from the rack and cast a glance behind him. The soldiers were sprinting toward him. Several had lost their hats. A red-bearded sergeant was snarling like a rabid cur. He paused to aim his .44. The gun popped, the slug drilling into the awning support post six inches right of Hawk’s shoulder.

  “Hey, that goddamn whore’s with him!” one of the other soldiers shouted as he and the others passed the sergeant, boots thumping the boardwalk in front of the post office.