Border Snakes Page 19

  Hawk felt the worm in his belly twitch its tail as he stared up at the house—an obvious perdition teeming with lobos of every stripe. Each one deadlier than the next.

  His right hand began to stray automatically toward his cross-draw holster, but he checked the movement. Both his holsters held only air.

  A rifle barrel was shoved against Hawk’s lower back. The leather-clad Mexican behind him grinned a crooked-toothed grin. “Go on and enjoy yourselves, gringos. Not everyone gets to join Knife-Hand’s party!”

  He glanced at the rifle-wielding Mex beside him, and both men laughed with menace.

  Hawk glanced at Ironside, then crossed the cracked flag-stone gallery, the intoxicating, revolting amalgam of smells growing stronger and the din growing louder until Hawk moved inside. It was like entering a Juarez cantina on a busy Saturday night—so loud that Hawk couldn’t hear his spurs ching on the flagstones or what Ironside had said to him though the sergeant’s mouth had moved and he’d been scowling at Hawk.

  The bottom floor of the barrack was one big, smoky room half filled with more desperadoes of the same type as outside. Wall flares had been lit, and the massive hearths on each side of the building, likely a shadowy ruin of its former self, were adance with sparking flames. Tables of every shape were arranged about the quarters, with an elaborate mahogany bar and mirrored back bar against the back wall and fronting a broad stairs curving down from the second story.

  As Hawk and Ironside followed Monjosa and Saradee, Monjosa tripped over something. He stopped suddenly, incredulous, and looked down.

  At his feet was a corpse—a fresh one judging by the texture of the blood pooled on the flagstones. The dead man, who lay curled on his side as though he were only sleeping, wore a bull-hide charro jacket and bandoliers crossed on his chest. A low-crowned leather sombrero dangled from a chin thong down his back. His arms were crossed over the bloody knife wound in his chest.

  Monjosa lifted his head, shouting shrilly in Spanish, “What I tell you hombres about roughhousing in the casa?”

  Only a few men turned toward him, frowning befuddledly. A Mexican in a brightly striped serape continued strumming his mandolin back near the bar, a girl standing on a chair behind him and wrapping her arms around his neck, her cheek pressed agaist the back of his head.

  Monjosa looked around, scowling, then made a chopping motion with his knife arm, as if to exclaim, “What’s the use?”

  Shaking his head, he gave the dead man a kick, then continued to a long, wooden table with high-backed chairs against a plastered stone wall supported by adobe pillars and that at one time had probably displayed a weathly don’s game trophies, maybe a Spanish tapestry and an antique shield or spear of a long-dead conquistador. Now it wore nothing but bullet pocks and long cracks and dried blood stains.

  The table, ten feet long, with ten or twelve chairs around it, was the only table in the large room unoccupied, so it must have been Monjosa’s traditional perch, left alone by those who knew what was good for them. The bearded contrabandista tramped to the head of the table, made a show of pulling out a chair for Saradee, then indicated the chairs to his left for Hawk and Ironside.

  Apparently the men who’d followed Hawk and Ironside up the stairs weren’t invited. They shouldered their rifles and headed into the smoke clouds to the left, where, amid a clot of men and black-haired women, female groans rose like those of a she-cat in heat, while men whistled, yowled, and stomped the floor.

  Hawk didn’t like giving his back to any room, much less one filled with as many cutthroats as this one was, but he had little choice. Glancing around, his gaze caught on Saradee’s gang whom Hawk had met at Sweetwater—the sullen-faced Indian girl, April, the oily-eyed gunfighter, Melvin Hansen, and the rat-faced, derby-hatted Seymore Lindley, and about seven others playing stud poker a dozen yards away.

  April was ladling a clear liquid into her wooden cup from a pail on the table and smoking a brown-paper cigarette. Melvin Hansen, looking toward Saradee, caught Hawk’s eye. He hardened his own and stretched his lips back from the cheroot in his teeth. Then he turned away to toss some coins on the table.

  Again, Hawk’s hand brushed the holster where he usually kept his Colt as he sank into his chair across from Saradee, to Monjosa’s left. Ironside was still on his feet, looking around like a rabbit that had been tossed into a lion’s cage. He jerked when a pistol popped at the back of the room.

  Hawk swung his head around as the pistol popped a second time.

  A big, blond Americano with an eye patch stood at the top of the stairs, holding a putabehind him, extending a silver-chased .44 with his other hand. Smoke licked from the pistol’s maw as another man, standing about five steps down the stairs, screamed suddenly in Spanish and, clutching his chest, dropped to his knees.

  He screamed again and fired his own pistol into the steps between his knees. His own forehead caught the ricochet, and his chin jerked sharply up. He gave a mewling screech before twisting around and tumbling down the stairs, then piling up with a cracking thump at the bottom.

  There was barely a letup in the din, and the killing seemed to warrant only a couple of looks from the main drinking hall. A few men laughed, another whooped, and the festivities continued, complete with mandolin strains. The woman sleeping against the mandolin player didn’t even lift her head.

  Monjosa had twisted around in his chair to view the killing. Scowling, he turned toward Hawk with an expression like that of a father of incorrigible boys.

  Throwing up his knife-hand and his real hand in a show of defeat, he reached for the jug already on the table, keeping the jug he’d been carrying on his shoulder close to his chest, as though afraid someone might try to swipe it from him.

  “As you can see, Señor Hawk,” Monjosa said, just loudly enough to be heard above the din, “despite my precautions, I have been overrun by bad dogs.”

  Monjosa laughed through his teeth and plucked several cigars from his coat pocket. He extended the hand holding the cigars to Saradee, who leaned forward and took one with a girlish grin of delight. Monjosa leaned forward to extend that hand to Hawk and Ironside, and when each had taken a cigar, Monjosa leaned over to light Saradee’s.

  Hawk and Ironside lit their own cigars.

  Hawk kept glancing cautiously over his shoulder. His back was crawling with dread. He’d given up on the possibility of making it out of here alive, but he had to get his hands on a gun and kill Monjosa before he himself was turned out with the snakes.

  Too bad about Ironside. The sergeant was a good man, but he shouldn’t have insisted on coming. It wasn’t his game.

  When Monjosa had his own cigar going, he plucked the cork from the fresh jug with his teeth and tipped the jug to his lips. Two streams of clear liquid ran down the corners of his mouth. Monjosa’s eyes acquired a new sheen of drunkenness as he lowered the jug, smacking his lips, and slid it across the table to Saradee.

  The girl hooked a finger through the handle and lifted the jug as easily as any man. Her throat worked. Hawk saw a trickle of the bacanora dribble down from the corner of her rich, ripe mouth. It traced a line down her chin and neck. As it headed for her deep, alluring cleavage beneath the silver cross hanging around her neck by a rawhide thong, Hawk glanced away.

  Saradee grinned at him, blue eyes sparking amusingly. She slid the jug across the table to him. “Firewater,” she said, poking her cigar between her lips and favoring the Rogue Lawman with a lusty sidelong glance as she drew on it. “Try it. It’ll loosen you up a little.”

  Hawk lifted the jug. Firewater was a good word for the Mexican whiskey that must have been nearly a hundred proof alcohol. Tasting like coal oil modestly flavored with corn squeezings and a liberal dose of strychnine, it burned off a good layer of Hawk’s esophagus and sizzled down into his chest before hitting his belly like the molten head of a sledgehammer.

  At the same time, cool fingers slithered up over his brain, caressing the tension knots. He cleared his throat and sli
d the jug to Ironside, who was regarding Monjosa through a slitted eye.

  When Ironside had taken a drink and sleeved the excess panther juice from his brushy mustache, Monjosa crossed his arms on the table—a bizarre arrangement, given the knife hand running down out of his bloodstained, blue sleeve.

  “Now, then, Señor Hawk—let us now get down to the beans and tortillas, uh? Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you and confiscate your wagon?” He smiled, flicking his eyes quickly to Saradee, who merely blew cigar smoke at the high ceiling on which painted angels had long since faded behind smoke soot.

  Hawk thought fast while keeping his eyes emotionless. If his fib wasn’t convincing, he might very well be the next man to die here in Knife-Hand’s humble sanctuary.

  He drew deep on the cigar, then sat back in his chair, ignoring the danger behind him, and hiked a boot on a knee. “You blow my lamp, that’ll be all the gold you’ll mine from a rich vein.” He lifted the hand with the cigar in it to indicate the room. “And it looks like you have enough customers to make several wagonloads feasible. Especially if you’re supplying rurales like the ones on your gallery, in addition to the Apaches and anyone else with shooting on the brain.”

  “How you have such a steady supply?”

  “None of your business.”

  Monjosa wrinkled a pockmarked cheek with incredulous anger.

  “What Hawk means is,” Ironside growled, taking another pull from the jug, obviously warming to the contrabandista’s firewater, “we got connections at Bowie. Especially since I’m the quartermaster sergeant in charge of all shipments of all guns and ammo between Forts Bowie, Chihuahua, and Apache, and I know the timetables of all the freight lines including those of the railroad that ships everything into the territory from El Paso. When I don’t want guns to make it to me, I inform my men, and they see that they don’t. We have our own private depot, my associates and me, and we hold everything there and sort of . . . uh . . . watch the market.”

  Ironside grinned wolfishly around his cigar. He gestured at the crock jug in the middle of the table. “That’s damn good javelina piss. Mind if I have another pull?”

  Hawk glanced at Ironside, impressed. He’d have never have been able to come up with a story as convincing as the quartermaster sergeant’s. He looked at Monjosa, wondering if the contrabandista was equally impressed.

  Monjosa stared dully at Ironside from beneath his bushy brows. After a time, he pooched out his lips and nodded, letting a slight grin quirk his mouth corners. “Ahhh. I see why guns have been in such short supply lately. Someone has been stockpiling them.” The smile grew, dimpling Monjosa’s sweaty, sooty cheeks. “Now I know who.”

  Ironside grunted a self-satisfied laugh and helped himself to another pull from the jug. Hawk was so relieved, he decided to have another pull himself.

  “Hey, quit hoggin’ that stuff,” Saradee chided him.

  Hawk slid the jug across the table to her, and she hiked it to her shoulder.

  “Okay,” Monjosa growled at Hawk. “How much for the wagonload?”

  “I don’t know—that’s seven cases of rifles, ten rifles a case—and a brass-canistered Gatling gun. How ’bout we say two thousand dollars?” He’d pulled the number out of the air, but a glance at Ironside told him it wasn’t out of line.

  Saradee lowered the jug and turned to Monjosa, her eyes cool and faintly bemused. “I told you you boys would come to a lucrative understanding.”

  “Hokay,” Monjosa said, the corners of his mouth pulled down. “I will pay you tomorrow. Then you go back and you bring me three. . . .” He held up three dirty, blood-splattered fingers. “Three wagonloads of Winchesters. And I want a Gatling in each one. Hokay?”

  Ironside seemed to be enjoying the drama. Likely the bacanora was helping. He hiked a shoulder and raised his hands. “Three wagons, three times the risk. The price will go up two hundred dollars a wagon. But it can be done.”

  “It can be done, but only if I send an escort of my own wolves. Not that I don’t trust you, but . . . well, I don’t trust anyone.” Monjosa looked at Saradee’s breasts and leaned toward them slightly. “Not even friends of those with pretty chiconas. Or, maybe I should say . . . especially not friends of those with pretty chiconas?”

  “Slow down, amigo,” Saradee said, hiking a boot onto her chair and resting an elbow on her knee. “It’s early yet. You fall down there, you might not get back up again, uh?”

  She laughed. And then Monjosa did, as well.

  26.

  FORBIDDEN FRUIT

  THE bacanora flowed freely, and Hawk couldn’t keep himself from indulging.

  The raw Mexican liquor lost its sting after the first few gulps, and then it went down like nectar, swathing Hawk in warm gauze. It did not dull the knife edge of danger he sensed around him in every man and every woman, however.

  His senses grew more and more acute. He heard the tinkle of a whore’s bracelet from across the room and detected the movement of every hand toward a gun or jutting knife handle. Amid the smell of burning mesquite, sweat, leather, horses, marijuana, and fragrant perfume, he sniffed the spicy, cloying aroma of opium.

  The smell grew stronger as the night wore on, and he saw its effect in bloodshot eyes, dreamy smiles, and the lovemaking, if you could call it that, occurring on tabletops and on the stairs angling down from the second story at the back of the room, men bucking against women and grunting while the speculators cheered and the women screeched like lovefevered panthers, their tan Mexican legs flapping like wings.

  Now that the business conference was finished, Monjosa called more men over to the table until it was possible for Hawk to slip away, drifting through the crowd. The room swiveled about him as though between him and it lay a smoky filter. Several times female hands grabbed him, tried to pull him down. He jerked away and kept moving though the liquor and, likely, the room’s intoxicating vapors made it hard to resist the carnal delights being waved at him.

  Fights broke out.

  Guns barked outside as well as inside.

  There were the clash of knife blades, shrill screams, shrieks, groans, and thundering guffaws. At one point Hawk saw Ironside disappear up the curved stairs, a waifish little whore pulling him along behind her, the sergeant leaning forward to lift the girl’s flowered silk skirts above her knees.

  Hawk leaned against a cracked plaster wall and ran a hand down his face. Well, there went his partner. The sergeant would be no help if and when Hawk needed it. Hawk would lay low tonight. He was in no condition to start anything. He’d find Ironside in the morning and, before all the revelers stirred from their deep, drugged slumbers, he’d see about assassinating Monjosa and hightailing it with the wagon and the guns.

  A big half-breed Apache moved from left to right in front of Hawk, revealing the glowering, oily-eyed face of Melvin Hansen. The gunslick had lost his hat, and a wing of black hair hung in his eyes, near a smudge of purple rouge. Staggering from drink, guns bristling on his hips and from a shoulder holster, and leaning on a red-haired puta who seemed in little better condition than Hansen, he moved up in front of Hawk.

  He wagged an admonishing finger and glanced over his shoulder toward where Saradee was sitting on a chair back, playing dice at a round table with Monjosa and several others who appeared more interested in the blond desperado than the game.

  “Hawk, you lay off, hear?” Hansen drawled. “I got my brand on that wildcat.”

  “Wildcats are hard to brand,” Hawk grunted. “Tonight, she appears Monjosa’s trophy.”

  Hansen glanced again at Saradee, who was smoking another of the contrabandista’s good cigars.

  “She’s playin’ the son of a bitch.” Hansen dropped his chin, grinning, his head wobbling on his shoulders. “Not unlike yourself.”

  “I didn’t think she was after that knife-hand of his in marriage.”

  Again, Hansen wagged his finger in Hawk’s face. “Keep away from her . . . or I’ll gun you down like a tin can off a fence post
. Understand?”

  Without hesitation, Hawk said he did. Then, when Hansen wheeled, him and the puta entangling feet and nearly falling, Hawk reached forward and grabbed a pistol out of one of the man’s holsters. He shoved the Colt down in his vest pocket, doubting that anyone in his inebriated state would notice a couple inches of exposed walnut handle, and leaned casually back against the wall.

  Hansen and the girl disappeared in the chaotic crowd and wafting, webbing smoke.

  Hawk decided to head outside for some fresh air and to get away from the crowd. He seemed to have the run of the place. He’d just started toward the front doors thrown open to the cool, starry night when he suddenly felt a tug on the right side of his vest. He looked in that direction.

  Saradee stood a foot away from him. In her hand was the gun Hawk had swiped from Hansen. She jammed the barrel against his ribs, a smoldering smile on her long, full lips. Her breasts swelled.

  Hawk’s ears warmed. “Now what?”

  She waved the gun. “Outside.”

  Hawk continued through the crowd. None of the loud, liquor-swilling revelers saw the gun Saradee kept shoved up against Hawk’s ribs as they walked together, as close as lovers, through the arched front doors.

  On the gallery, flares cast sparks into the night. Dark shapes slumped here and there in the shadows, some sitting over card games, others humping like dogs in the shrubs at the edge of the light.

  Hawk glanced at Saradee. She jerked her head to the far end of the gallery, and Hawk headed that way. She prodded him out to a small shack surrounded by dead, spindly pepper trees and flanked by an empty stock pen, about sixty yards from the howling casa. An old peon hovel.

  “Inside.”

  Hawk pushed open the unlatched wooden door. Light from the main house spilled over the brush-roofed, earthen-floored shack, showing a simple cot against the far wall, a niche in one wall for a shrine, a saddle on the floor with a saddle blanket and bridle. A rifle leaned against the wall beside the shrine.