Border Snakes Page 3

  From the high front porch, he saw his horse standing where he’d left it, facing downwind. A couple of boys in wool coats and cloth caps were milling around the front of the brothel, eyeing with morbid fascination the dead man lying in a pile of blood-splashed broken glass near Hawk’s boots. Hawk flipped them each a quarter to stable, feed, and curry his horse, as well as to fetch his saddlebags, and they ran delightedly down the street, shoving the quarters into the pockets of their patched, wash-worn trousers.

  They were the only people he could see in the windblown dust, but as he turned to reenter the brothel, he glimpsed movement farther down the street and stopped for a closer look.

  Three men were moving toward him out of the dust haze. They all carried rifles. They all wore long coats, hats pulled down low on their foreheads. As they came closer, glancing at the lone horse on the side of the street and which the two boys were approaching now, one reaching for the reins, the other the bridle, Hawk saw badges glinting dully on their coat lapels.

  He smiled and went into the brothel.

  The pretty brunette stood near the door, looking around. The only other person in the room now—living person, that was—was the bartender kneeling beside one of the bloody, staring corpses. He was grunting and bunching his lips as he wrenched a ring off a lifeless middle finger.

  Hawk closed the door and started past the woman. Girl or woman—it was hard to tell. She seemed neither old nor young though obviously older than the sporting girls Hawk had seen earlier. Her figure was full, almost fleshy in the hips. Her eyes were dark with faint red lights in them, and her face was heart-shaped, the nose small and straight, the lips long and plump. Her skin bore no age wrinkles that Hawk could see, not even around her eyes. It was the bold directness of the eyes themselves that betrayed her maturity.

  “You did a wonderful job here, mister,” she said with an ever-so-slight Southern accent. “And who do you think’s going to clean up this mess and pay for the damage?”

  Hawk stopped in front of her but glanced at the bartender. “The apron has the right idea. The Stony Hills Bunch are wealthy men—if you can catch them early enough after a robbery. Let them pay for it.” Hawk pulled a wallet from an inside pocket of his fleece-lined buckskin mackinaw and peeled off five hundred-dollar bills. “But just so there’s no hard feelin’s. . . .”

  He stuffed the bills down into the deep, warm cleavage revealed by her bloodred whalebone corset. Her eyes sparkled, and color rose in her cheeks.

  She parted her lips slightly as if to speak, but said nothing as Hawk turned away from her and strode down the long room, stepping around overturned chairs and tables and over a couple of bodies. He scooped his empty rifle off the table he’d laid it on and set it on his shoulder.

  Amazingly, his whiskey bottle was the only thing around the bar that hadn’t been hit in the firestorm. He grabbed the bottle and his glass, picked up a chair, set it before a table that had only two bullet holes in it, and sat down. Sitting back in his chair, he tripped the Henry’s loading tube free of the stock and filled it with shells from his cartridge belt.

  When he had sixteen in the tube, he racked one into the chamber, off-cocked the hammer, then shoved one more cartridge into the tube before sliding the tube back up into the stock. Setting the rifle on the table before him, Hawk popped the cork from the whiskey bottle and splashed whiskey into his shot glass.

  He looked up when the door squawked open and three men filed in—the three lawmen he’d seen heading toward the brothel. The brunette was picking up a chair, but now she turned to the door with a cool, ironic expression on her pretty, heart-shaped face.

  “Why, Sheriff Wiley—what a surprise. The shooting’s over, but you can help me clean up, if you like.”

  The man who’d first walked in the door and who now stood at the front of the room, roughly flanked by the other two men, looked across the carnage toward Hawk but spoke out the side of his mouth at the woman to his left: “Dewey Wainwright reported a disturbance. Shootin’ disturbance. Me and the boys was waitin’ out the storm in the jailhouse. Didn’t hear a thing.”

  The sheriff was a tall, blond man with a brick-red, clean-shaven face and broad nose. He set the butt of his Winchester on one hip, his gloved fist on the other, spreading the flaps of his duster wide, and looked around the room, whistling. “I’ll be damned.” He canted his head at Hawk. “That the perpetrator of this hoedown?”

  The brunette, inspecting a bullet hole in a brocade-upholstered chair, narrowed an eye at Sheriff Wiley. “Well, I didn’t do it.”

  Wiley gave a caustic chuff as he started walking toward Hawk, keeping his rifle on his hip, the barrel aimed at the ceiling.

  “For what it’s worth,” the brunette said to his back, “they started it.”

  Wiley slowed his step for a second before continuing toward Hawk’s table. He glanced at the barman, who was dragging one of the dead men outside by his stockinged feet—he’d removed the man’s boots and set them with the rest of his loot on a bloodied fainting couch—and glanced at his deputies, “Louis, Joe—give Ingram a hand.”

  He stared at Hawk, who held the stare, as he crossed the room. Stopping a few feet from Hawk’s table, he glanced at Hawk’s Henry and narrowed one eye.

  “Why don’t you slide that rifle a little farther across the table?” he growled. “And to the left. Your left.”

  Hawk leaned forward and, with his left hand, slowly slid the rifle in the direction the sheriff had ordered. “How’s that?”

  “That’ll do just fine . . . long as you keep both hands where I can see ’em.”

  “All right.” Hawk lifted his shot glass and looked at the dead man slumped in front of the bar to his left. “That there is Laramie Blaxton. Lead rider of the Stony Hills Bunch out of Wyoming. Robbed two banks in the Texas Panhandle last week, another in New Mexico, just north of Taos, last Saturday. Four townsfolk killed. And, like the lady said”—Hawk glanced at the brunette, who was holding the door open while the two deputies carried another dead man outside—“they busted the first cap here today.”

  The sheriff narrowed his eye again at Hawk. “Who are you?”

  Hawk ignored the question. “If you look through your files, you’ll likely find paper on ’em. A sizeable reward for each. I’d like for the lady to have it.”

  The woman looked at Hawk as she closed the door on the gritty, gnawing wind.

  “Right neighborly,” the sheriff said. “You a lawman?”

  Hawk’s eyes flickered. He glanced at the woman, who now walked past him to the bar. He threw back the last of the whiskey in his glass and set the glass on the table. “Some would say so. Some might have a bone to pick.”

  “What the hell kind of an answer is that?”

  “The only one I got.”

  “How ’bout a name? You got one of those, don’t you?”

  “Yep.” Hawk was slowly turning his glass around between thick, brown fingers on the table, and his lips were forming a cryptic half smile.

  Wiley’s red face turned redder, and his broad, pitted nostrils flared with exasperation. “You want me to guess? Or maybe I’ll just throw you in the lockup till I can find out who you are my own self.”

  Hawk lifted his eyes from his glass. “Gideon Hawk.”

  The sheriff held his gaze before glancing at Hawk’s rifle on the table, as though it had suddenly transformed into a coiled rattlesnake. His eyes returning to Hawk’s, he grunted, “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  Wiley’s eyes flicked across Hawk’s rifle once more.

  Hawk stared up at him, that ambiguous half grin quirking a corner of his mouth. “I know what you’re thinking, Sheriff—take down the crazy Rogue Lawman and maybe get promoted to mayor or even U.S. marshal. But the only name you’ll make for yourself will be chiseled on a tombstone.”

  Wiley continued holding Hawk’s gaze, his own eyes widening ever so slightly, anxiously, while a vein in his temple expanded and contracted.

&nb
sp; “Don’t do it, Day,” warned the woman behind the bar. “You didn’t see him shoot, but look around.”

  Wiley glanced at her, the skin above the bridge of his nose wrinkling. He flexed his fingers around the stock of the rifle still snugged against his hip, then gave a startled jerk as the saloon door opened behind him. He tossed a quick glance over his shoulder to see his two deputies and the bartender file back into the saloon, all three wearing owly looks, blood staining their clothes.

  As they looked around grimly, trying to decide which stiff to haul out next, Wiley returned his frustrated gaze to Hawk and kept his voice low and taut. “Come sunup tomorrow, you make yourself scarce. You hear me, mister?”

  Hawk saw no reason to argue. The man was just trying to do his job, keep a little self-respect. “Whatever you say, Sheriff.”

  Wiley flexed his fingers on his rifle again, seemingly regaining some confidence, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “And we got a law here against the dischargin’ of firearms inside the town limits.”

  Hawk splashed more liquor into his glass. “Now you tell me.”

  Wiley’s nostrils flared. He glanced once more at the woman behind the bar, then wheeled and strode back to the front of the room. He opened the door, and the wind nearly blew his hat off as he ducked into it, and instead of holding it open for his deputies who were half carrying, half dragging another dead man toward it, he pulled the door closed behind him.

  Hawk threw back his whiskey shot, grabbed the bottle in one hand, his rifle in the other, and heaved himself to his feet with a low, weary groan. He turned toward the stairs, glancing at the woman, who’d started sweeping the floor behind the bar.

  She returned the glance. “You always make so many friends?”

  Hawk hiked a shoulder and started up the stairs. “Does it matter which room I take?”

  “Take any one of theirs you want,” she said, tossing a glance across the disheveled room. “The girls’ rooms aren’t numbered.”

  “Obliged.”

  He was halfway up the stairs when he stopped again. “You got a kitchen?”

  The woman stopped sweeping again and nodded.

  “Send me up a plate. I’ll pay for the service.”

  “Anything else?”

  “A girl.”

  The woman nodded. “Got a preference? Blonde or—?”

  Hawk looked at her quickly, angrily. “Not a blonde!” His voice echoed around the room. The woman gave a slight start, and the bartender, going through the pockets of another cadaver, looked up at Hawk in surprise.

  “Not a blonde,” Hawk repeated, more quietly, looking at the stairs again as he resumed climbing. “Anything else.”

  Hawk stepped over the dead man in the upstairs hall and pushed open the door of the room just beyond him. There was a saddle on the floor and an open war bag on the dresser. The bed was rumpled, obviously having been slept in, but Hawk didn’t care. With the barrel of his Henry, he nudged the war bag onto the floor beside the rifle, then set his own rifle against the dresser, and sagged down on the edge of the bed.

  He gave a long, weary sigh, doffing his hat, letting it fall to the floor and running his hands through his thick, dark brown hair that curled over his ears and his shirt collar and that was faintly streaked with gray. He leaned forward, set his elbows on his hips, and continued to scrub brusquely at his scalp as if to ease the hard tension knots in his skull and in the back of his bull neck.

  As if to obliterate the echoes of the dead men’s screams in his ears and to erase the images of bloody murder that danced around behind his eyes like snippets from a thousand waking nightmares. . . .

  Always it was like this after a “job,” as he called his un-sanctioned hunts. A day or two, maybe even a week or two of self-recrimination, isolation, depression. A free fall into an abyss darker than the remotest regions of outer space. Into a world without sound, without color, without taste save the coppery taste of blood, without smell except the sweet, cloying odor of burned powder and death.

  No sounds but his own remembered screams as he’d ridden up a hill in the driving rain trying to reach his son’s hanging body while there was still a flicker of life left in it.

  Worst of all was the knowing that no matter how many men he tracked and killed, his wife and son would still be dead. And that he would not, could not, stop tracking and killing—even though he’d tracked and killed those responsible for the murder of his family—because it was the only thing that tempered the images in his mind’s eye of his young son’s corpse hanging from that cottonwood atop that Nebraska hill in that hammering rainstorm, and the overexposed photograph image of his pretty blond wife hanging from another cottonwood in Hawk’s own backyard.

  Linda’s blue, sorrow-racked eyes wide and staring.

  Images of death replaced by more death. . . .

  Of course, it didn’t make sense. But in a world where little made sense, hunting outlaws that other lawmen had given up on or were afraid of made as much sense as anything else.

  He was glad when a knock on his door plucked him for the moment from his morbid dwellings. The two boys he’d sent to unsaddle his horse stood in the dim hall. They’d brought his saddlebags and his supper—a steaming plate of beef stew and a schooner of frothy beer.

  Hawk tipped the boys, tossed his saddlebags onto the bed, and ate hungrily, washing the stew down with the beer. He’d finished and was taking a sponge bath at the washstand when another knock brought him, bare-chested, wearing only his balbriggan bottoms and socks, a cocked revolver in his hand, to the door.

  He opened it.

  The brunette stood in the hall before the door.

  Her hair was down, splayed across her naked shoulders. For a time she didn’t say anything but just stood in the open doorway, staring at Hawk’s broad chest and flat belly, both of which, bearing the grisly white knots of a dozen bullet and knife scars, were like a contour map of these past few savage years.

  Finally, she lifted her eyes to his and arched a brow. Her eyes said nothing, but a faint, pink blush rose in her cheeks. “You said you didn’t want a blonde.”

  Hawk studied her with barely concealed bemusement. Finally, he nodded. “You got a name?”

  “Folks around here call me Mrs. Parker.”

  Hawk stared at her.

  “My husband’s on boot hill,” she said.

  The half smile faded from Hawk’s rugged features. He drew the door wider and stepped back. “Come in, Mrs. Parker.”

  4.

  ROSE WATER AND TALCUM

  HAWKclosed the door, set his revolver on the dresser, an d moved toward the woman standing before him.

  Her hair was slightly damp from a recent bath, and she smelled faintly of rose water and talcum. She wasn’t wearing the frilly, corseted affair she’d been wearing earlier, but a sheer, sky-blue wrapper over a nightgown of lighter blue. The gown was sleeveless and low cut, and it revealed nearly all of her cleavage while clinging alluringly to the full swell of her heavy breasts.

  She frowned as Hawk moved toward her. Her eyes dropped to his belly then slightly lower—and apprehension flashed in her red-brown eyes as she stepped backward.

  “Wait.”

  Hawk grabbed her arms and drew her toward him. “No. There’s no waiting.” A muscle beneath his right eye twitched, and his green eyes blazed like agates set in tarnished copper. “If you wanted a gentleman this evening, you came to the wrong room. What I need, I need now.”

  She looked up at him. Her lips parted slightly. Her breasts swelled and she nodded.

  Hawk leaned forward and kissed her. At first she was stiff in his arms, but gradually her body relaxed, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and rose up on her toes to return his kiss.

  Kissing her, he lifted her hair in his hands, then set his hands atop her naked shoulders and slid the straps of her nightgown down her arms. It and the wrapper fell with a sibilant whisper, and then she was naked and supple in his firm embrace, runnin
g her hands across his shoulders and pressing her breasts against his chest.

  Finally, he pulled back away from her. Reluctantly, she let him go and stood, her chest rising and falling sharply, staring at him from between the mussed tresses of her hair framing her face as she crossed her arms beneath her breasts. Chicken flesh rose on her arms.

  Hawk tossed his head toward the bed. He slid his fingers behind the waistband of his balbriggans, and slipped the wash-worn garment down his legs.

  The woman turned to the bed, brusquely threw the covers back, and crawled in. Her heavy breasts, with their large, dark rosettes, sloped toward the mattress, the nipples pebbled. She flattened her left hand on her rising and falling belly, and when he came to her, his manhood jutting, she took it in her hand. She rolled onto her back, spread her legs, lifted her knees, and guided him without further ado inside her.

  Hawk grabbed the spools of the bed’s headboard and, propped on his elbows, thrust his pelvis against hers. She groaned, threw her head back on the pillow, and ground her fingers into his buttocks as her bent knees flapped like wings, and the bed shuddered and creaked like a sloop on choppy seas.

  “Oh,” she said breathily. “Oh . . . Christ. . . .”

  The first time, Hawk took his pleasure quickly, almost violently, and without apology. The second time was slower, less desperate, and while he held her hips in his hands and ground against her from behind, she tossed her hair back from her shoulders so that it slid in rich, brown cascades across her curving, creamy back. It dropped all the way to her full, sweat-glossy rump when she lifted her head and arched her back and moaned loudly, half laughing, half sobbing, at the height of her passion.

  Himself spent, Hawk pulled away from her and leaned back against the headboard, stretching his long, lean, muscled legs down the length of the rumpled bed, and crossed his ankles. Sweat shone on him. His flat belly, taut as braided rawhide, rose and fell as he breathed. He fingered his shaggy hair back from his face and reached for his tobacco makings on the small table beside the bed.