Border Snakes Read online

  He’d killed the deputy, Luke Morgan, in western Colorado two winters ago, when Morgan had been sent to track him because Morgan, who’d been trained by Hawk, had known the Rogue Lawman best and would supposedly know best how to take him down.

  Hawk turned to Gavin Spurlock sitting back in his chair with that somber, knowing smile on his mouth. “Don’t believe I know those two,” Hawk said.

  “The younker is Jimmy Pfiefer. The older gent is Knut Nicholson. He was a stock detective in Montana before he joined the marshals. Right effective lawman.”

  “I bet he is.”

  “We’re alone now. No gunmen skulking around the balconies or anywhere else. I told the apron to keep the room clear, though I must say that the two girls I saw when I first walked in were right impressive. You chose your lodgings well. Or . . .” Spurlock glanced around at the bullet-pocket, bloodstained furniture and looked over his shoulder at the back bar mirror. “. . . Did the lodgings choose you?”

  “The Stony Hills Bunch,” Hawk said, dropping into the chair the younger deputy had vacated.

  “I know who they were. Following them is how I found you. I’d gotten word you were in this area, and, knowing you—or having gotten to know the man you now are from newspaper accounts and even a few penny dreadfuls based on your exploits—I figured you’d sniff out their trail sooner or later.”

  Spurlock leaned forward to bring his coffee to his lips. “Maybe you’re not as wily as you thought, Gideon.”

  Hawk beetled his brows slightly with self-reproof. “Gettin’ careless.”

  “I’m sure you’ll remedy the problem.” There was a silver coffee service on the table, as well as a stout brandy decanter, a stone mug, and an upside-down snifter. Spurlock glanced at the service. “Coffee and brandy? Or maybe you’re still not imbibing this early in the day.”

  Hawk leaned his rifle against the table, sort of half resting it against his knee, within fast reach. “I changed that, too. Coffee and brandy sound good.”

  Spurlock set his cigar down to pour coffee into the mug and brandy into the snifter. As he did, Hawk studied the man’s aging face, trying to uncover some hint about what the man was doing here. He hadn’t had any contact with his old boss for years; well before Hawk had gone rogue in the wake of his son’s murder and his wife’s suicide, Gavin Spurlock had accepted a presidential appointment to the chief marshal’s office in Santa Fe. He and Hawk had corresponded a few times, but their paths hadn’t crossed . . . until now.

  And now was no accident.

  Spurlock slid the mug and the snifter through the strewn playing cards, then took a long puff from his cigar and leaned back again in his chair. “So, how you been, Gid?”

  “Busy,” Hawk said. “And as long as there’s bronco cutthroats tearin’ down their corrals, I aim to stay that way. So let’s cut to the main camp, Gavin. What do you want from me?”

  Spurlock picked up his brandy glass, swished the brandy around, and lifted it to his lips. “I’d like you to do what you do best, Gideon.”

  Hawk stared at him through the thin tendrils of steam lifting off his coffee mug.

  Spurlock sipped the brandy and lowered the snifter halfway to the table. He lifted his cheeks with a bizarre smile. “I want you to kill a man.”

  6.

  A KILLER CALLED KNIFE-HAND

  HAWK laughed for the first time in years. “No shit?”

  Spurlock said, “I’m gonna reach inside my jacket, Gideon.” Spurlock said, “I’m gonna reach inside my jacket,

  Hawk nodded his approval.

  Spurlock hauled out a quarter-inch-thick sheaf of folded papers and tossed them onto the table in front of Hawk, scattering pasteboards. Hawk let his smile dwindle as he regarded his old boss skeptically. Reaching forward, he slid the packet toward his chest and opened it. It was an assignment file like those he used to be furnished with when he’d been working as a bona fide lawman for Spurlock and Spurlock’s successor in the Yankton office.

  There were about thirty carbon copies of neatly typewritten pages and a few hastily scribbled maps of what appeared to be desert country, though Hawk didn’t give any of the pages much of a look. He riffled through the file quickly and looked up again at Spurlock, who continued to regard him with that off-putting, semi-bemused smile between occasional puffs of his stogy and sips of either coffee or brandy.

  Hawk said, “All this for one owlhoot?”

  “That’s not the half of it, but remembering how you used to work, I figured it’s all you’d take the time to read.” Spurlock’s smile brightened slightly, like a low fire fed a twig. “And the information collected isn’t about just any owlhoot, nor is it about even one man but about the movements of an entire gang. A gang of bloodthirsty wolves led by one Wilbur ‘Knife-Hand’ Monjosa.”

  “That’s a hell of a name,” Hawk said. “Why ‘Knife-Hand’?”

  “Lost his left hand to a Mojave Indian’s war ax. The Mojave was tracking him across the devil’s dance floor in southern Arizona Territory . . . after Knife-Hand had broken out of Yuma Pen. He killed the Mojave tracker, so the story goes, with the sharp end of his hacked-up wrist bone and got away. Down in Mexico, he had the hand replaced with a knife blade. Not a hook, but a knife blade. One he’s said to keep razor-edged.”

  “Right handy,” Hawk said. “No pun intended. White man or Indian?”

  “Half Americano, a quarter Apache, a quarter Mex.”

  Hawk glanced at the file, riffled a corner with his thumb, and shook his head. “Damn . . . I thought I’d heard of ’em all.”

  “It’s not so odd you haven’t heard of Knife-Hand, given that he disappeared in Mexico about five years ago and just recently resurfaced in western Arizona. He was once a tracker for the army, helped ’em corral quite a few Apaches onto reservations. He and the army had it out over something or other, and he became a turncoat, organized a group of bronco Lipan Apaches to take down an army payroll shipment. They massacred all thirteen soldiers. Old Wilbur Monjosa—as he was more simply known at the time—got himself wounded, and the cavalry ran him down around Ben-son. That’s when they shipped him off to Yuma, where he spent a year before he and a handful of other wildcats sprang themselves.”

  Hawk had sipped his coffee down, and now he poured his brandy into it and drank. Swallowing the bracing brew, he ran the back of his hand across his mouth, leaned back in his chair, and hiked a boot onto a knee. “I can’t imagine what all this has to do with me, Gavin. I sorta pick my own targets these days—remember?”

  Spurlock took a last drag from his stogy and scraped the smoldering coal into his ashtray. He picked up his brandy glass, slid his chair back, and stiffly gained his feet, his old bones popping faintly. His brows hooded thoughtfully as he strolled casually toward the bar. Hawk could see the man’s darkly troubled face in the back bar mirror.

  Spurlock drew a deep breath. “He’s become a contrabandista , Gid. A very deadly man. The deadliest in the Southwest right now. He runs rifles across the border to a stubborn band of bronco Apaches holed up somewhere in the desert south of Yuma. He steals the rifles from army pack trains that feed the frontier forts down there.

  “Sometimes he even attacks the forts themselves—overruns them with his own band of Mexican as well as gringo cutthroats, including several ex-Confederates with axes to grind against the current American government. With the stolen rifles and even a couple of very troublesome Gatling guns, the Apaches continue to raid along the border and well into both Mexico and Arizona. They raid towns, villages, roadhouses, even mission churches. You name it, they raid it. They raise hob with ranching, stagecoach lines, the U.S. mail, and even railroad lines.

  “Everything’s in chaos down there now. Many, many soldiers have been killed—butchered—in the past three months alone. Countless others—entire patrols—have simply disappeared. Their numbers are nothing compared to the droves of innocent civilians who’ve been brutally cut down by those loco Apaches—ranchers, townsmen, stage and railroad t
ravelers. . . .”

  Spurlock rested an elbow on the bar, crossed one boot over the other, and regarded Hawk, who sat listening patiently at the table, severely.

  “It’s been decided that the dust isn’t going to settle down there until old Knife-Hand is put out of commission. Only after the Indians’ supply line has been breached can the soldiers begin to work on the renegades themselves.”

  Hawk hiked a shoulder. “So, put him out of commission. There must still be enough soldiers down there to do the job, if they’re working with the right trackers.”

  “They’ve tried that. They sent men by tens and twenties, then smaller bands of sharpshooters led by the best Mojave and Apaches trackers in all of Arizona and California. Half of them disappeared. Those were the lucky ones, judging by the ones that were found tortured and killed.”

  Spurlock sipped his brandy, smacked his lips, and hooked a thumb behind the waistband of his tailored gray trousers. He wasn’t wearing a gun or a cartridge belt—just a simple black belt for keeping his pants on his narrow hips.

  He said darkly, “Wilbur ‘Knife-Hand’ Monjosa is one slippery man. He has a series of hideouts somewhere out in those wild volcanic mountains of western Arizona, eastern California. North of Yuma, along the Colorado River. The army intelligence boys figure he ventures as far into Mexico as the Sea of Cortez, as far north as Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s believed he has a half dozen mountain hideouts, but in the three years he’s been running like a wild, bloodthirsty lobo across that devil’s playground, not one of his hideouts has ever been discovered. At least, not by anyone who’s lived to tell about it.”

  Hawk was more than a little puzzled. “So, how is it you’re trying to involve me—a man who’s wanted by the law his own self. And what does this have to do with you, Gavin? Your office is in New Mexico Territory—not Arizona.”

  “One question at a time, Gid. Your name came up during a meeting of the four territorial governors of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. You see, the trouble in Arizona and California has long tendrils, reaching far up into the surrounding territories.”

  Hawk was smiling without humor. “Those are the four governors who issued a death warrant on me two years back. The death warrant that got my good friend, Deputy Luke Morgan, killed.”

  Spurlock nodded soberly. “The irony isn’t lost on me, Gideon. Of course, they’re the same men. I reckon they figure if they can’t beat you, they might as well employ you . . . when there’s no one else qualified for the job.”

  “Qualified?”

  “By that I believe they mean a professional, well-seasoned tracker and killer. Someone so reckless, so careless of his own fate, that he’d have a better chance of accomplishing his objective than would a man who gave a good goddamn about his own hide. A man who cared about nothing so much as he cared about the hunt and the kill. Not even the law.”

  Hawk drew a deep, woeful breath.

  “You see, they want Knife-Hand killed. Not captured. Not taken into custody. Dispatched. Sanctioned. Turned toe down and inside out.” Spurlock’s lips spread. “That would be another of your areas of expertise, would it not? Vigilante justice?”

  “I prefer to call it effective law enforcement.”

  “Call it what you will. The governors figure that by killing Knife-Hand you’ll be for all intents and purposes cutting off the snake’s head. The gang that surrounds him won’t know what to do without him, and they’ll disperse into smaller, poorly organized groups that the army will be able to run to ground themselves later on.”

  Hawk took another sip of his coffee and brandy, slid his chair back, grabbed his rifle, and stood. “Tell the governors to go to hell, Gavin.”

  Hawk stooped to retrieve his saddlebags from the floor.

  “That was my response to your first question,” Spurlock said. “You haven’t heard why they sent me to talk to you.”

  Hawk froze, glanced over his shoulder.

  Spurlock lowered his eyes to his glass and swirled the brandy around in front of his belly. His voice was low and suddenly very thick. “Knife-Hand killed Andrew.”

  Hawk felt a quickening pulse beat in his temples. He wanted to say something, but no words would come.

  Spurlock’s jaws tightened. He glowered into his brandy snifter. “He wanted to be a soldier, get some dust under his nails before reading for the law. Wouldn’t go to military school; wanted to go in as an enlisted man—a grit-chewing, shitshoveling private. I couldn’t talk him out of it. He was stationed at Fort Colorado, north of Yuma, and was on one of the patrols searching for Knife-Hand’s group. They were ambushed, everyone killed but one lone soldier who managed to survive by playing possum. Andrew had survived the initial attack, and when he was crawling off for sanctuary in a ravine, Knife-Hand himself rode his horse in front of him. That killer stepped down from his horse. . . .”

  Spurlock’s voice grew thicker, and his Adam’s apple swelled. He ground his teeth, trying to compose himself, and then continued in a voice raspy as a file blade. “He grabbed Andrew’s head by his hair, pulled him up, and sank that knife in Andrew’s belly. Gutted him like . . . like a damn . . .”

  Spurlock’s jaw hinges dimpled, and he tossed back the last of his brandy with a desperate air.

  Hawk stared at him.

  Andrew. Spurlock’s only offspring. The boy’s mother had died of an infection the week after the boy was born and, as far as Hawk knew, Spurlock had never remarried.

  Hawk remembered a rawboned, sandy-haired younker around twelve when Hawk knew him, who spent most of his time either tending his father’s three prized Thoroughbreds or reading a book from his extensive, eclectic library. A good-natured kid, bookish and smart as a whip without being cocky or exclusive. A loner without being reclusive. Shy but affable. Andrew had been good with a whittling knife, too, and had even taught Hawk’s boy, Jubal, how to carve figures out of cottonwood and pine.

  A well-grounded kid on the path of building a good life for himself.

  Hawk turned full around to face Spurlock and rested his rifle on his shoulder. He still didn’t know what to say to the man. His heart was heavy for any man who lost his son. He knew the toll it took on the emotions, the soul. The yoke-heavy weight that forever resided in the shoulders. Nothing could ever again be right after such a loss.

  Spurlock mistook Hawk’s silence for something else. “So I lost my boy, too, and I came here to ask you to kill the man who killed him. Go ahead and gloat. It doesn’t justify what you did, and I can’t say as I’m proud to make the request. But goddamnit, I want Andrew’s killer dead!”

  Spurlock set his glass down on the bar and strode toward Hawk. He stopped two feet in front of him. His mouth was a knife slash across his lower face, and his eyes were as hard polished as two stones at the bottom of a fast-running stream. “The governors sent me because they figured you’d trust me. And because, after what Knife-Hand did to Andrew, they knew I’d agree to make the offer. And that you’d likely agree to do it. Now, will you accept the assignment?”

  An inexplicable sadness had filled Hawk like a poison quickly replacing the blood in his veins. It was sadness for Spurlock’s loss, but it was caused by something else, too. If he could have put his finger on it, he would have said that it was the loss of what he’d admired most about the man—his integrity.

  But he couldn’t probe himself that deep. Not after learning what he’d learned about Spurlock’s boy. Hawk loved Spurlock like a father, and, in light of the reason, there was nothing that would keep him from doing what the man wanted him to do.

  Despite the cost to them both and to Spurlock most of all.

  Hawk picked his saddlebags off the floor, set them on his shoulder. “I’ll do it.”

  He glanced at Spurlock standing red-faced before him, tears dribbling down the man’s cheeks. Unable to bear the man’s keen sorrow, Hawk turned away quickly and began striding for the door.

  “Don’t you want to know about payment, Gideon?” his former boss as
ked quietly behind him.

  “No.”

  Hawk went out.

  7.

  UNDIVIDED ATTENTION

  “I sure wish somebody’d bury those sons o’ bitches before they smell up the whole town!”

  Sitting the saddle of his grulla, Gideon Hawk turned to see a wheelchair-bound old man in the dusty, rutted street behind him. The oldster had only one leg, and he couldn’t have weighed much more than a sack of flour. He wore threadbare Confederate-gray trousers, a wolf coat, and a soiled, funnel-brimmed Stetson, which sat back off his bulging, age-spotted forehead. A sawed-off shotgun jutted from a leather sheath dangling from an arm of his chair, and he wore a big knife on his waist. The knife looked inordinately large on his wasted frame.

  Hawk shuttled his gaze from the oldster to the three corpses he’d been studying in bitter bemusement.

  He’d just ridden into the little town of Saguaro, in southern Arizona, having hopped the train from Durango over a week ago. A scrap of information he’d picked up in Las Cruces had brought him here. The corpses were no clue to the whereabouts of Wilbur “Knife-Hand” Monjosa, but Hawk looked them over just the same.

  They were three Mexican men and a woman reclining against pine planks that had been propped against the wall of the town’s adobe-brick bank. The woman’s long, black, gray-streaked hair blew in the breeze. She was dressed like the men around her in dusty, bedraggled trail clothes bloody from the bullet wounds that had torn her body and theirs.

  The corpses wore cartridge belts and holsters, but their guns and ammunition were gone. The dead woman stared up at Hawk through half-shut eyes, and an oblique death smile twisted her lips, showing a glimpse of the front teeth behind them.