Cold Corpse, Hot Trail Page 2

  Hawk swung onto the grulla and looked at the girl.

  She stood before the hitch rack, staring up at him with terror and pleading etched in her wide, brown eyes. She couldn’t have been much over sixteen. The hands covering her breasts were fine-fingered and delicate. Her straight black hair hung in her eyes.

  “Come on then!” Leaning forward in his saddle, Hawk extended his hand to her.

  She leapt forward and grabbed it. He swung her up easily behind him, then turned the tall horse west, nearly colliding with two saddle tramps riding leisurely along the street, and dug his spurs into its flanks. The grulla sprang off its rear hooves, lengthening out in a wind-splitting gallop, deftly swerving around mine dreys and ranch wagons.

  Pistols popped behind, slugs plunking into the road on both sides of the horse. One ricocheted off a rock with an ear-ringing spang.

  “After ’em!” shouted an Irish-accented voice.

  Hawk urged the horse with another rake of his spurs. The girl wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her head against his back. He could feel her Mexican beads and firm breasts through his black frock.

  “Shit!” he raked out, tipping his hat to the wind.

  2.

  LA PUTA DEL DIABLO

  FOLLOWING the stage road north into the high, desert benches and gaping canyons, the grulla split the wind as only a mountain-bred mustang can. This one was taken from a Colorado outlaw who had no more use for it when Hawk had drilled a .44 slug through his brain plate. The bare-breasted girl behind Hawk’s saddle didn’t slow the mount a hair.

  In spite of the Arizona heat, the beast put its head down and enjoyed the wind in its mane, the fluid pumping of its heart, the grating clomps of its hooves on the red desert caliche.

  Three miles from town, Hawk turned the horse off the trail, rode another twenty yards, then swung his right boot over the saddle horn and slid to the ground.

  “What are you doing?” the girl asked.

  Hawk flipped her the reins, shoved her bare left knee out of the way, and reached into his saddlebag for a small folding hatchet. With three deft blows, he chopped a limb from a piñon pine, then, branch in hand, walked back out to the stage road and began covering his tracks.

  He covered only his own tracks where they began curving off the trail. He left the several overlaid sets of tracks of passing riders, and the four narrow furrows ground by the last stage’s iron-rimmed wheels.

  As he worked, he heard the girl clucking and grunting behind him. Saddle leather squeaked, and whipped reins whistled softly.

  Hawk glanced over his shoulder. She’d slid onto his saddle and was batting her bare heels against the grulla’s flanks, bouncing up and down.

  “Come on, damn you,” she urged, her thin, black brows furrowed with consternation. “¡Vaya! Go!”

  Keeping its feet firmly planted, the horse glanced over its left shoulder at Hawk. It twitched an ear, then turned its head forward, lowered its head to crop grass, and swished its tail at flies.

  Hawk snorted and continued rubbing out his tracks. Finished, he tossed some gravel and bits of dried horse apple over the needle marks in the road, then tossed away the branch and headed back to the horse.

  The girl was still trying to get it moving, grinding her bare heels angrily into its ribs and swatting its neck with the rein ends, her small, round breasts and beads jostling as she bounced.

  Hawk dropped the hatchet under the saddlebag’s flap. “I trained him not to ride off with anyone but me in the hurricane deck.”

  When he’d secured the flap over the bag, he grabbed the girl’s left arm, jerked her back to the horse’s rump, then toed a stirrup, forked leather, and clucked.

  The horse snorted eagerly, sprang off its rear hooves, and leapt forward in an instant gallop.

  Jerked backward, the girl yelped, grabbed Hawk’s coat, and flung her arms around his waist. She pressed her right cheek against his back as the grulla headed northeast through the manzanita grass and creosote, her skimpy skirt blowing back behind her knees.

  “Bastardo,” she snarled.

  A few hundred yards farther, they forded the White Water River, then rode to a shelf halfway up the next sandstone ridge. The vast desert stretched away on three sides, like a rumpled, rust-colored quilt with haphazard patches of lime-green, and the blue of the river stitched through the middle.

  Far to the south and west, horseback riders, most dressed in cavalry blues and tan hats, with sunlight winking off their trapdoor Springfields, galloped up a low ridge and disappeared down the other side. Their penny-colored dust sifted slowly.

  “That takes care of them,” Hawk said. He spat and turned his head to the left. “Now, what am I going to do about you?”

  “Take me to Tucson.”

  “I’m not going to Tucson.”

  “Tucson is a nice town. Better than Coyote Springs.” Behind Hawk, she made a disdainful spitting sound. “You take me there, I will make it worth your time.”

  “Enticing,” Hawk said dryly, “but like I said, I’m not going to Tucson. I’ll drop you in Benson and you can take the stage. I’ll lend you the fare.”

  “The next stage doesn’t run for three days!”

  “I’m sure you’ll find a way to occupy yourself.”

  She punched his shoulder with the backside of her fist. “¡Bastardo!”

  Hawk reined the grulla up the ridge, following a faint game trail at a forty-five-degree angle. “So I’ve been called. What’s your handle?”

  “They call me La Puta del Diablo, The Devil’s Whore,” she said proudly, enunciating each word carefully, adding as though with a smile, “but you can call me Estella.”

  Hawk snorted. “The Devil’s Whore, huh? How did you earn that attractive stamp?”

  “Use your imagination.”

  “Had a feelin’.”

  He heeled the grulla over the ridge and down the other side. By the time he reached the dry wash at the bottom, the sun was nearly down, casting deep-purple shadows and dropping a sharp desert chill.

  He vaguely remembered a spring from the last time he’d passed this way. He hadn’t looked for it long when the grulla, smelling the water, jogged over a low ridge stippled with Joshua trees and saguaros. A few minutes later, it sunk its snout into the water bubbling up from the sand and rocks around which Mormon tea, manzanita grass, and yellow brittlebush blossoms grew thick.

  Hawk gave Estella a hand down. While she drank, he unsaddled and hobbled the grulla, then spent a good fifteen minutes rubbing the animal down with a handful of dry grass.

  He shuttled his saddle, rifle boot, saddlebags, and bedroll over to where the girl sat on a rock, between the cottonwoods and a sandy bank. As good a place as any to throw out a bedroll. He dropped the gear, then rummaged around in his saddlebags, tossed the whore a blue-checked shirt.

  Estella caught it, glanced at him under her furrowed brows, and held the shirt out before her. Judging it worthy, she shrugged into it, covering her breasts and beads, throwing her long, black hair out from the collar.

  “Gonna get chilly tonight,” Hawk said, turning and moving off down the cut.

  When he came back with an armload of mesquite branches and began digging a small fire pit, the whore sat where she’d been sitting before, leaning forward, rocking back and forth, the shirt pulled down over her bare legs. She’d buried her feet in the warm sand. There was a pensive, conniving cast to her features.

  The Devil’s Whore. He was liable to get a knife in his back before the night was through.

  Hawk laid a fire, keeping it small, then wandered off to change from his gambling duds to his trail clothes—simple blue shirt, red neckerchief, tan denims, and cream duster. Before returning to the camp, he took a slow look around. This was Chiricahua country and, in spite of the reservations, Bronco Apaches were still raising hell with the white eyes.

  Back at the camp, he set coffee to boil, then tossed the girl a few strips of jerky and hardtack from his saddlebags. Whe
n he’d shoved the gambling duds into his war bag, he leaned back against his saddle to wait for the coffee to boil.

  Chewing the dried meat, he glanced at the sky, where one pale star flickered feebly. The sun bled down behind the purple western crags. “What’d you do to rile those soldiers?” he asked after a long silence.

  Estella had sat down close to the fire, leaning back against the rock she’d been sitting on. She’d pulled her beads out of the shirt, and they glittered in the firelight.

  Inspecting the hunk of jerky in her hand, she said, “I stabbed their friend with a hat pin.” She lifted a shoulder, brushed sand from the meat in her hand, and popped it into her mouth. “He tried to get away without paying . . . after he bit me and slapped me half the night. He was an animal . . . even for a soldado.”

  The coffeepot boiled. Hawk grabbed a handful of Arbuckle’s from a burlap pouch, tossed it into the pot.

  “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.” That’s why he’d decided to head for Mexico.

  “Lawmen came to the cantina a couple of weeks ago,” Estella said, chewing another hunk of jerky. “They said you were an outlaw lawman. 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.

  He hadn’t killed Luke Morgan, but he might as well have. Morgan, a young deputy United States marshal whom Hawk himself had trained, had been gunned down by a county sheriff, Wick Haskell, who’d been trying to save Hawk’s life.

  The joke had been on both Hawk and Haskell.

  Hawk hadn’t wanted his life saved, and Haskell hadn’t known he was killing a legitimate lawman who’d been trying to carry out a death warrant on a rogue—a death warrant signed by four territorial governors.

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

  The coffee had started boiling again, brown bubbles churning up around the lip of the pot. With a leather swatch, Hawk removed the pot from the fire, set it on a cold rock, then fished two tin cups from his saddlebags. He filled both from the pot.

  “If you want a cup of this mud, fetch it yourself. I don’t deliver.”

  He took his own cup and sat back against his saddle, staring darkly into the brush, remembering.

  Chin on her knees, Estella stared at him furtively. Finally, she rose, stretched like a cat, then moved around the fire. He turned to his left. The girl knelt beside him. She’d taken off the shirt again, revealing her small bare breasts encircled by the beads. Her tangled hair hung sensuously along both sides of her face.

  She had a wild, lusty look in her eyes.

  “I take your mind off . . .” She took his coffee cup, set it on a rock by the fire, and straddled his outstretched legs.

  “No,” Hawk said.

  She planted her hands on either side of him and lowered her face to stare bewitchingly into his eyes. She smelled slightly salty, gamy. Her body radiated an intense heat. Her nipples stood out from her breasts, firm as rubber posts.

  Goose pimples rose on her skin. She gave a little shudder, making her breasts sway, the beads clacking together, then lifted the corners of her mouth in a smile of sorts.

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

  She lowered her head closer, pressed her lips to his, parting them, sticking the tip of her tongue in his mouth. He 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.

  Kissing him again, the young whore pushed her breasts against his chest. She clamped her mouth over his, drew his hands up the backs of her smooth thighs. Hawk closed his fingers over the twin, round globes of her buttocks, kneading them, the girl groaning softly as he squeezed. He opened his mouth, sucked at her tongue, turned his head to fit his mouth over hers.

  A sudden image of his young wife, Linda, flashed in his mind. She was scooping eggs from a hot skillet to the plate of their son, Jubal, who bounced a small wooden horse across their kitchen table in Crossroads.

  At the same time that Hawk brought his hands up to the girl’s shoulders and thrust her away with an angry grunt, a rock thudded down the ridge to his left. He jerked his head that way. The rock tumbled a few yards west of the fire, bulled through the brush, and came to rest at the base of a low hummock.

  The whore leapt off Hawk, sitting back on her heels as she grabbed the shirt and drew it across her breasts. “They’ve found us!”

  “Get away from the fire,” Hawk ordered, grabbing his rifle and ramming a shell into the breech.

  Hunkered on his haunches, he peered up the ridge, the eroded sandstone face copper in the dwindling light. At the lip, a shadow moved.

  “Keep your head down,” Hawk told the whore, then sprang off his haunches and ran to the base of the ridge.

  When he found a trough, he cast another look above, then took the rifle in his left hand and began climbing. Boulders were strewn halfway to the top, making the climbing relatively easy. The last twenty yards were the hardest, his boots slipping on the slippery, grooved face of the sandstone as he cast cautious looks above, ready to dodge a rifle shot.

  He hoisted himself over the lip and knelt on one knee, taking the Henry in both hands and looking around, breathing slowly through his nose as he listened above the pounding of his heart.

  Faint thuds rose from the other side of the ridge.

  Hawk moved slowly forward and peered northward. The thin shadow of a horseback rider galloped a serpentine route through the chaparral, obscured by distance and the shadows leaning out from the rimrocks and saguarros.

  The horse dropped into a shallow ravine shrouded in spindly brush, and was gone.

  Hawk made his way back down the ridge face, half-sliding the first twenty yards, then climbing carefully down the boulders one rock at a time, turning his face to the ridge and feeling his way with his free hand and his feet.

  Near the bottom, his right boot caught in a crevice between two boulders.

  Cursing, he fell, his back smashing the ground. Wincing at the pain in his twisted ankle and his back, he looked up.

  Two black rifle maws yawned down at him, close enough that Hawk could see individual scratches in the bluing. He ran his gaze back along the barrels, past the Springfields’ receivers and cocked hammers, to the two young men clad in cavalry blues cheeked up to the rifle stocks.

  Behind and between them stood another bluebelly—a slender young man with lieutenant’s bars on the shoulders of his blue wool tunic. To the lieutenant’s right, a big, broken-nosed sergeant was bear-hugging the girl from behind, holding her off the ground and muffling her cries with his meaty left paw.

  3.

  DEAD TO RIGHTS

  HAWK reached for the Russian on his left hip. “Don’t do it, mister,” the lieutenant said, holding an Army-issue .44 straight out from his shoulder. “We have you dead to rights.”

  Hawk froze, slid his gaze from the young lieutenant to the two rifle-wielding soldiers, both wearing privates’ stripes and holding the rifles a foot from Hawk’s face. The campfire was behind them, so Hawk couldn’t see them clearly, but he could tell that they were frowning under the pinned-up brims of their tan kepis.

  They weren’t the same soldiers that had chased Hawk and the whore from Coyote Springs.

  The one on the right took one step back. “He’s got a badge, Lieutenant.”

  The lieutenant stepped forward. He glanced at the ground. Hawk’s deputy U.S. marshal’s badge had fallen from his vest pocket, where he carried it when he wasn’t hunting men. It lay faceup in the red desert caliche a few feet from Hawk’s bell
y, the firelight playing across its polished, dusty surface.

  With his left hand, the lieutenant plucked the badge from the dirt, inspected it between his thumb and index finger. He dropped it onto his palm and held it out toward Hawk.

  “Sorry about the intrusion, Marshal. The spring there is about the only water in twenty square miles. I hope you don’t mind if we share it with you this evening?”

  “I don’t own the water,” Hawk said, taking the badge and slowly climbing to his feet.

  “Are you hurt?”

  Hawk worked his jaw, glanced at the girl still thrashing in the sergeant’s arms, and shook his head. The lieutenant glanced over his left shoulder. “She’s with you, I take it?”

  “My . . . associate.”

  “Put her down, Schmidt.”

  When the sergeant complied, the whore spat at him, swore at him in Spanish. The sober lieutenant turned back to Hawk. “We thought she was with an outlaw gang. We’re carrying payroll money to the Sibley outpost. Can’t be too careful, you understand.”

  “I understand,” Hawk said. He glanced at the girl again, still spitting Spanish epithets at the sergeant and the two privates walking into the gathering darkness south of the camp. “She, on the other hand, is probably gonna take some time.”

  The lieutenant studied her. “What brings you two out here, Marshal? She a prisoner or something?”

  “An informant.” Hawk picked up his rifle, brushed dust from the barrel, then turned back to the lieutenant. “You’re heading to the Sibley post, you say?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Near Craigville?”

  The lieutenant nodded, frowning.

  “Mind if she rides along? I got business over east, don’t have time to take her there.”

  The lieutenant hesitated, watching the girl sit grumpily down beside the fire, throw her hair out, and drape her shirttails over her bare knees.

  Hawk added, “Her being an informant, and me needing to get to other chores, it would be official business.”

  The lieutenant tugged on his chestnut goatee, the firelight dancing in his brown eyes. Bemusedly, he said, “Rather distracting official business, though.” He jerked slightly, adding, “To my men, I mean.”