Border Snakes Read online

  Hawk waited.

  The canyon filled with darkness rushing down the steep, copper-colored walls like tar from heaven. Stars kindled. Coyotes screeched. In the heavily shadowed bell tower over the arched front door, a pinprick of light shone intermittently, moving slowing from side to side.

  A picket up there, Hawk thought. The fool had lit a quirley.

  The gang thought it was safe out here in one of likely a good number of their hideouts, with their only known pursuers lying dead in the ancient river bottom.

  Hawk dropped his gaze to the man by the corral—an inky purple shadow in the thickening darkness. A light shone around the man’s figure as he smoked. Soon his shadow slid away from the corral and sauntered toward the stable in which the gang had secured the wagon with the stolen rifles and Gatling gun.

  Hawk climbed down the back of the stone thumb and dropped his field glasses in a saddlebag pouch. He removed his spurs, dropped them into the pouch, as well. Having already slipped the grulla’s bit and unbuckled its saddle cinch, he shucked his Winchester from its boot, patted the horse on the rump, and stole under cover of darkness along the base of the canyon wall until he was about fifty yards from the back of the wagon shed.

  He saw the lookout’s cigarette glow to the shed’s right. The man was milling there amid the boulders and what looked like an old wagon chassis. Impossible to tell what he was doing or which way he was facing.

  Drawing a deep breath, feeling his blood running warm through his veins, Hawk pushed away from the canyon wall and, running nearly soundlessly at a crouch, gained the stable’s left side. He stopped to hunker low and to look around and prick his ears, listening.

  There was a nearly inaudible murmur of voices from inside the church. He could see a window in its right wall, marked by the glow of lantern light. Shifting his gaze to the bell tower, he couldn’t see the guard. He wished Reno hadn’t thought to put a man in the tower. While he couldn’t see the lookout up there, that didn’t mean the man couldn’t see him, though the shadows up along the wagon shed were heavier than out away from it.

  Gravel crackled behind Hawk. A spur trilled. He pressed his back flat against the wagon shed, near the rear corner. The crunching and trilling grew steadily louder. The other picket was moving toward Hawk from around the stable’s rear.

  Hawk held his breath, crouching and waiting, pressing his back hard against the wall, as though to become one with the ancient mortared stone. A tall figure came around the corner. The man smelled like sweat, wool, horses, and harsh Mexican tobacco. Holding his rifle over his right shoulder, partly blocking his own view of Hawk, he angled from the Rogue Lawman’s left to his right.

  Quickly deciding how he was going to make his play, Hawk leaned his rifle against the wagon shed. Just as the man started moving beyond him, Hawk lunged toward him and grabbed him from behind. Clapping his left hand around the man’s mouth and pulling his right arm and rifle down with Hawk’s own, Hawk hauled him straight back the way he’d come.

  The man grunted and groaned, jabbing at the ground with his boots as he fought to regain his balance. His face was bristly and sweaty under Hawk’s left hand, which he closed over the man’s nose as well as his mouth. The man’s rifle clattered to the ground, and the man’s right boot heel and spur clipped it with a raucous, ringing rake.

  Hawk gritted his own teeth, hoping the sound hadn’t been heard in the bell tower. Then, just as he’d pulled the lookout back behind the stable shed, he jerked his head back sharply, hearing the grinding crack of the neck bones.

  The man gave another, shriller yelp under Hawk’s hand, and he stiffened, again desperately grinding his heels into the ground before the tension left his body.

  Hawk hurled the man back away from him. The man hit the ground with a thud. Quickly, glancing toward the dark bell tower, Hawk retrieved his own rifle and smashed its brass-plated butt against the lookout’s forehead. Probably unnecessary, as the man lay unmoving, but Hawk wasn’t taking any chances.

  Hawk stole up to the stable’s rear corner and edged a look toward the church. The pinprick glow of a smoldering quirley shone. It didn’t move. The man seemed to be staring toward the wagon shed.

  Hawk’s gut tightened. Had the bell tower guard heard the rifle hit the ground, or the dead lookout’s groan?

  Hawk looked at the dead man sprawled behind the wagon shed, one leg curled beneath the other. He wore a hat very much like Hawk’s own—black and with a nearly flat brim. He was also close to Hawk’s height—roughly six foot three.

  The only difference was the dead man’s gray serape.

  Hawk quickly ripped the serape over the man’s head and dropped it over his own shoulders. Nearly as quickly, he rolled a quirley from his makings sack, then, clamping the lit cigarette between his teeth, he set his rifle barrel on his right shoulder and walked out from behind the wagon shed. Moving slowly, taking short strides, he swung his hips with a desultory air, kicking an occasional stone.

  His heart thudded anxiously.

  Puffing the quirley between his teeth, he headed toward the church, keeping his hat brim low but rolling his eyes up toward the bell tower in which the cigarette still glowed. He couldn’t tell for sure but the quirley seemed to dip lower as Hawk approached the church, as though the man were following him closely with his eyes.

  Hawk’s heart thumped in hard, measured beats.

  In the bell tower, the quirley glowed, died, and glowed as the man puffed. Hawk saw the gray smoke billow in the darkness around the man’s hatted head.

  Only a few more feet, and Hawk would be too close to the church to be seen from the bell tower. . . .

  “Hey, Rance—how ’bout sharin’ some o’ that Mex tobacco with your old pal, Rollo?”

  The man’s quirley sparked as he flicked it out of the bell tower. It showered sparks as it arced out from the church and then landed with a dull thump in the dirt five feet to Hawk’s left. The wet, two-inch, brown-paper cigarette stub glowed briefly in the red gravel, and died.

  Hawk caressed the Winchester’s hammer with his thumb. Should he shoot the man out of the bell tower? Might be better to wait until Hawk had gotten inside. No sense tipping his hand before he needed to.

  He kept his head down, wagged it slowly with feigned disgust, and continued toward the church’s stout, weathered front door.

  In the bell tower, Rollo chuckled.

  As Hawk reached the door, he looked up. From this angle, he couldn’t see Rollo and Rollo couldn’t see him. Hawk took his Henry in his right hand, placed his left on the door’s stout wooden handle, and pulled it slightly. It wasn’t locked. The cords in Hawk’s neck stood out, and his nostrils flared.

  Here we go. . . .

  He gave the door a hard tug, and as it opened, he stepped quickly inside and left the door standing open behind him.

  The church lay before him—not large, only about twice the size of a modest-sized cabin, and longer than it was wide. Its wall were chipped and cracked, its ceiling high and also cracked, and where the worshippers once sat was a mess of gear and trash strewn by Reno’s bunch and likely other passing wayfarers. Stone steps from the bell tower ran down along the wall to the right.

  The nave fronting Hawk was lighted by several lanterns guttering here and there among the gang members scattered around tables and richly upholstered but badly worn armchairs and a few short, wooden pews. A couple of men slept in the pews. A couple more lounged on the floor, one resting against his saddle and trimming his toenails with a skinning knife.

  At the back of the nave, near the low rail separating the nave from the chancel area and the altar, four men sat in richly upholstered, high-backed chairs around a low, rectangular table—probably an old packing crate—smoking cigars and arguing impassively as they tossed cards and coins around.

  Another man lay atop the altar near the church’s back wall, behind the pulpit and the lectern. His head with its several silver-gray braids rested back against his saddle, and Hawk recognized th
e hooked eagle’s beak of Kid Reno poking out from under the down-canted hat brim. The Kid’s boots were crossed, and his hands were folded as though in silent worship on his belly.

  Hawk loudly racked a shell into his Henry’s breech, holding the rifle up high across his chest and grinning darkly. The metallic rasp echoed cavernously off the high ceiling and the cracked walls.

  All heads turned toward the front of the nave. One of the poker players looked at Hawk briefly, then looked down again at the cards in his hand, smoke puffing from the fat stogy wedged in a corner of his mouth.

  He sniffed and growled around the cigar, “What the hell you doin’ in here, Rance? You’re s’posed to be . . .”

  He looked up at Hawk again from beneath his bushy brows. His eyes widened slightly, and his cigar slipped from his lips to drop to the poker table with a wet plop and roll.

  The others had looked away from Hawk, as well, and turned back.

  The man who’d been trimming his nails against the stone staircase running down the nave’s right wall inhaled loudly and dropped his skinning knife. It clattered against the stone floor. The stocky, black-mustached gent lifted his head, placing both hands on the floor beside him, and dropped his lower jaw to nearly his chest.

  “Holy shit!”

  17.

  THE DEVIL IN CHURCH

  ONE of the cardplayers, a scrawny little gringo with a mousy face and billowing green neckerchief, rasped, “My God—it’s a devil!”

  He’d been sitting with his back to the front door, peering at Hawk over his shoulder. Now, eyes wide, he bolted to his feet, kicking his chair back and twisting around. Before he could get his long-barreled Smith & Wesson raised, Hawk aimed the Henry quickly and shot the little turd through his chest. He gave another rasp, flew back against the baptismal font, and sagged to the stone floor, gurgling, blood staining his loosely woven tunic.

  Grinning, Hawk ejected the smoking shell casing. The brass jacket hit the floor and rattled around as Hawk rammed a fresh one into the rifle’s breech, the metallic scrape again echoing loudly.

  All faces in the room were pinned to him, expressions ranging from shock and horror to befuddlement and fury.

  Still reclining atop the altar at the back of the church, Kid Reno slowly lifted his head from his saddle. He didn’t look either fearful or angry. Mainly bemused, as though he’d just spied an old, long-lost friend.

  Slowly, he sat up.

  Hawk swept the other faces with his gaze and flexed his fingers on the Henry’s stock with mute challenge.

  Silence.

  The men’s eyes narrowed. Muscles in their cheeks or temples quivered. They swallowed or licked their lips or slid their gazes to each other in silent complicity.

  One of the other cardplayers lurched to his feet. He already had a side-hammer Bisley out, and he ground his teeth as he raised it above the table.

  Hawk’s Henry roared.

  The slug took the cardplayer through his leathery right cheek, just below his eye. He stumbled backward, triggering his Bisley through his fanned-out poker hand on the packing crate, causing greenbacks to fly and coins to rattle.

  He grunted, turned, and dropped to his knees before falling flat on his face and lying there, shaking, spurs ringing as though attempting a little song.

  The song hadn’t died before one of the men in the pews made a sudden play, which Hawk’s Henry rendered stillborn. Then a man on the other side of the room jerked into action, then a cardplayer, then another cardplayer, until the church was fairly filled with crashing echoes, billowing smoke, clipped screams, and bitter groans.

  Rollo from the bell tower ran down the steps on the right side of the nave, raising a Spencer carbine in both hands, his boots and spurs ringing on the cracked stone. He got off a shot as Hawk turned toward him, the lookout’s .44-caliber round sizzling across the side of the Rogue Lawman’s neck.

  Hawk fired twice from the hip, and as his spent brass jackets rattled around on the stone floor behind him, Rollo screamed and flew down the steps, dropping his rifle and piling up between the first riser and the front wall with a thud and a crunch of snapping back and neck bones. He sighed, sobbed once, miserably, and then his cheek smacked the floor.

  Hawk cocked the Henry and swung the barrel toward Kid Reno, who had sat up to dangle his legs clad in checked wool trousers over the side of the altar. His expression was slightly more animated than it was before all his men were dead. But only slightly. He slid his eyes around the smoky room, almost as though he were hoping at least one man still had some life left in him. His gaunt, parchment-pale cheeks were flushed.

  He glared at Hawk, his lips forming a knife slash across his lower face. Though he wasn’t armed—at least, not that Hawk could see—he raised his hands chest high, slowly opening his long, thin fingers. Faint mocking shone in his eyes.

  “Pinkerton’s boys don’t shoot unarmed men, now, do they?”

  Hawk’s Henry roared. The bullet sliced across the outside of Kid Reno’s upper right arm before it ricocheted off the back wall with an angry screech. Reno yelped and, clapping a hand to his torn shirtsleeve, gritted his teeth so hard that Hawk thought he could hear the man’s molars cracking.

  “You son of a bitch!” Reno growled, an eye twitching miserably.

  “I’m not one of Pinkerton’s boys.” Hawk waved his still-smoking Henry around the room. “This all of ’em?”

  A low grunt sounded behind Hawk. He swung around, his cocked Henry extended from his hip. A big man with a Fu Manchu mustache and a shabby, feathered derby hat faced Hawk, the pistol in his right hand sagging as he staggered forward, his head falling back on his shoulders.

  He turned right and, groaning, dropped to his knees. In the open doorway behind him, a broad, scowling face appeared under the leather brim of a dark blue forage hat, and the sergeant from the ambushed Cavalry patrol snarled, “No, it ain’t, but this one is!”

  The sergeant took one quick step to the big man on his knees, who was reaching around to grab the bayonet blade from his bloody back, and slammed the butt of a Spencer rifle against the back of the man’s head. There was a cracking smack of splitting bone beneath the smashed derby hat. The big man jerked as though he’d been slapped across both cheeks.

  Slowly, he sagged to the floor and expired with a loud fart.

  Hawk scowled in surprise at the broad-shouldered, big-bellied, red-haired sergeant whose yellow neckerchief was wrapped tightly around his forehead, then swung his Henry back to Kid Reno who was still sitting on the edge of the altar clutching his upper arm, from which blood now oozed, and glared toward the front of the church.

  “I take it you found a horse,” Hawk said to the sergeant while keeping his eyes on the Kid, who looked even less like a kid now than he had before his gang was dead and he was nursing a wound inflicted by a man he’d left for dead.

  The sergeant dismissed the question as, placing a boot on a shoulder of the derby-hatted gent and jerking his bayonet blade from the man’s back, he looked in awe around the smoky, bloody room.

  “Shit . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who the hell are you, mister? Lawman?”

  Hawk only shrugged.

  The sergeant gave him a skeptical glance. He used the derby-hatted gent’s ratty suit coat to clean his bayonet blade before pointing the blade toward Reno. “That him? That Reno?”

  Holding his arm, Reno dropped down off the altar, stepped over the low railing, and strode toward Hawk. “What now, amigo? If you’re gonna kill me, get it over with.”

  Ten feet from Hawk, he swerved right and reached toward one of the short pews in which a dead man lay in a thickening blood pool.

  “Uh-uh,” Hawk warned, following the outlaw leader with his rifle barrel.

  Reno stopped with his arm extended toward a pair of saddlebags and a pistol belt on the pew, near the dead man’s legs. “I’m reaching for a bottle.”

  “Reach careful, and reach slow. You wrap your hand around anyth
ing but a bottle, I’ll gut shoot you and leave you to die slow . . . like you left me.”

  Reno grinned. Shoving his hand into a saddlebag pouch, he raised a corked bottle labeled McCullough’s Tincture of Zinc. The sergeant was moving around the room slowly, inspecting each of the dead men, angling his Spencer barrel low.

  Glancing over his shoulder at Hawk, he said, “He bushwhack you, too?”

  Anger liberally tinged with chagrin burned through Hawk. “Best head on back to Fort Bowie, Sergeant. Reno and the guns are stayin’ with me.”

  Simultaneously, both the sergeant and Reno said, “What?”

  Hawk looked at Reno, who was wincing again, having doused his arm with the zinc and taken a couple of pulls from the bottle. “You,” Hawk growled, gesturing toward the door. “Get outside.”

  “Why outside? It’s dark and it’s gonna get cold.” Reno curled his upper lip. “I ain’t in the best o’ health. Besides, I sorta feel like sendin’ up a prayer for my boys.”

  Hawk glared at him. Reno glared back. Finally, the leader of the gunrunners ripped his neckerchief off his neck and began wrapping it around his bullet-burned arm, sauntering toward the door. Hawk followed, hearing the sergeant’s footsteps behind him.

  “What the hell’s your game, mister?” the sergeant asked. “This here hombre bushwhacked my patrol. Now, I’ll be takin’ him and the wagonload of guns back to Bowie.”

  Hawk was only half listening to the sergeant’s angry protests. He was watching Reno’s back, noting the furtive movements of the man’s left arm. Anticipating the gunrunner’s play, Hawk stopped. Reno took two more steps into the dark yard fronting the church, ten feet in front of the door, then wheeled suddenly toward Hawk, crouching and snarling.

  Starlight careened off the steel blade in his fist.

  Reno froze, and his eyebrows lifted in surprise to see Hawk standing farther behind him than the gunrunner had expected.