Cold Corpse, Hot Trail Page 5

  Clumsily, he swung into his saddle, adjusted the bandage on his forehead, spat, and turned to Hawk. “We’d better make use of what little daylight we have left,” he said, glancing at the sky and gigging the bay forward. “I know Schmidt will.”

  Hawk stared at the young officer’s back, cursed silently the younker’s mulishness. He slid his own rifle into the saddle boot and urged the grulla into the lieutenant’s sifting, salmon-colored dust.

  He’d ridden only a few yards when movement atop the high left ridge caught his eye. As he turned toward it, he caught a glimpse of a hatted head as it pulled back behind the ridge’s lip. Again, he was too far away to see clearly, but the high-crowned Stetson bespoke a white man.

  He ran his eyes along the sun-pinkened lip, spat, and gigged the grulla ahead, keeping pace with the obstinate Primrose.

  When the sun had fallen so low that they could no longer see the tracks of the fleeing killers, Hawk and Primrose camped in a box canyon, picketing their horses amidst desert willows and Mormon tea.

  Sitting on a rock beside the small, curl-leaf fire, Hawk reached for the coffeepot, intending to refill his tin cup for the second time that night.

  He glanced at the lieutenant leaning back against his saddle on the other side of the fire. Hawk had felt the man’s eyes on him, studying him. Now the lieutenant grinned shrewdly, his brushy, brown mustache forming a straight line beneath his nose.

  Hawk watched as Primrose transferred his own steaming coffee cup to his left hand, and slid his Colt Army from his covered holster. Chuckling without mirth, Primrose aimed the revolver at Hawk, and thumbed the hammer back.

  “I just remembered where I’d seen your face before.”

  Hawk dropped his gaze and continued plucking the pot from the fire, using a blackened leather swatch. He filled his tin cup with the coal-black, piping-hot brew. “You don’t say.”

  “Major Devereaux at Fort Bowie passed a federal wanted dodger around to all us officers. Your face was on it . . . Gideon Hawk.” Primrose curled his upper lip. “Deputy United States Marshal Gideon Hawk.”

  Hawk returned the pot to a hot rock within the fire ring. “I sure never expected to be so famous.”

  “And I never expected to find myself riding with a wanted vigilante. Rumor has it a death warrant’s been issued on you. That true?”

  Hawk sipped the joe, leaned back against his saddle. “That’s what I hear.”

  “By rights then, I should kill you.”

  “I reckon you should.”

  Primrose canted his head to one side. “I don’t understand—what’s in this for you? Surely it’s not just the doxy.”

  Hawk shrugged. “Maybe it’s the money.”

  “I didn’t think that was your style. Maybe you just need an excuse to kill.”

  “Killing killers would be a pretty good excuse, wouldn’t it?” Hawk also wanted to get the girl back, though he wasn’t sure why. Maybe, having sent her off with the doomed soldiers, he felt he owed her something. Certainly, it wasn’t because of the few minutes they’d spent rolling around by the campfire. . . .

  Or was it?

  The lieutenant stared at him, keeping the revolver aimed at Hawk’s chest. The fire danced in his heavy-lidded, brown eyes. Hawk stared back at him stoically, Hawk’s own dark eyes set deep under heavy brows.

  The fire snapped, pine smoke curling toward the stars. The coffeepot chugged. A coyote yammered from a nearby ridge as, to Hawk’s left, one of the horses lay down and rolled.

  The lieutenant tipped up his revolver’s barrel, depressed the hammer, and slowly slid the Colt back into its holster. “When this is over, I’ll have to arrest you, Marshal.”

  Hawk sipped his coffee and crossed his ankles. “I reckon you’ll have to try.”

  6.

  A HOT-BLOODED WOMAN

  AT the same time, and about twelve miles south of Hawk’s and Primrose’s campsite, Rance Jacobs stepped inside a small, knocked-together prospector’s cabin at the base of Las Guijas Ridge in southern Arizona, and closed the rickety door behind him.

  He stood before the threshold, his leather-billed hat in his hands, staring absently into the dimly lit interior, where his partner, Grover Caslin, was preparing javelina steaks and hush puppies on a sheet-iron stove.

  The room was smoky and fetid with wild pig and the rancid grease Caslin was frying it in.

  Caslin turned from the stove, a bloody apron around his broad waist, curls the color of iron filings hanging in his eyes, and the long scar on his cheek looking unnaturally white against the desert-seasoned skin around it.

  Frowning, he looked his prospecting partner up and down. “What the hell’s nippin’ at your udders?”

  “I hate this time o’ day,” Jacobs said, working his fingers along the brim of his shabby hat as his black gaze burned into the cabin’s back wall. “Suppertime . . . when I got so many long hours ahead to sit here in the cabin or out by the wash before bedtime, thinking of all the pussy I’m missing over to Tombstone.”

  “Jesus Christ!” the portly Caslin admonished, flipping one of the steaks. “I’ve heard enough of your damn complainin’ about missed pussy! Haven’t I staked you to this damn claim? My claim? And ain’t I done told you that when we strike it big out here, we’ll go to Tombstone or Tucson or Prescott or any damn where we please, and dip our wicks to our hearts’ content!”

  Jacobs scowled and slapped his hat against his thigh, moving to the rough-hewn table as though trudging through mud. “Yeah, I’ve been hearin’ your yammerin’ fer the past two months. You an’ the goddamn coyotes are all I got to listen to.”

  Caslin grabbed a bottle from a shelf, took a pull, then set it on the table before Jacobs. “Have you a swallow o’ that, you ungrateful pup.”

  Moving back to the stove, Caslin said over his shoulder, “You don’t get rich overnight. It takes hard work and isolation. A little time off from pussy!”

  Jacobs took a long drink from the bottle, slammed it back down on the table, ran his hand across his mouth. “I’m a young man. I need to have my ashes hauled regular. You know what I mean, Grover? Hell, I’m startin’ to think stage-robbin’ wasn’t such a bad way to make a livin’.”

  Caslin flipped a hush puppy in the sputtering oil, then pointed his greasy tin spatula at his taller, younger partner. “That’s the problem with you young pups nowadays. You want everything, includin’ pussy, to come easy. You don’t think you should have to work fer it. Why, in my day—”

  Caslin cut himself off as Jacobs turned an ear to the door, as if listening.

  “What is it?” Caslin said above the popping of the grease in the iron skillet. “Pussy?” He’d opened his mouth to guffaw, lifting his right knee to slap it, when the door burst open.

  Wood shards sprayed from the latch as the plank door slammed against the wall with a thundering boom, making the whole cabin jump.

  As Jacobs bounded up from his chair with a startled yell, knocking the bottle over, Caslin leapt straight back from the stove, terror etched on his sun-seared features, instinctively thrusting the spatula out like a weapon.

  “What in Christ—?” Jacobs exclaimed, blinking his eyes disbelievingly at the open doorway.

  He and Rance had half-expected a bear to be standing there. Possibly a renegade Apache. Certainly, not the young, high-breasted woman who stood before the open door, feet spread and shuttling her cool, blue-eyed gaze between the two prospectors, gloved hands on the pearl-gripped pistols jutting from the cross-draw, buscadero holsters on both her lean hips.

  She was dressed in a man’s trail garb, long, gold-blond hair falling straight to her shoulders.

  A cigar smoldered between her wide, full lips. Her hickory shirt was unbuttoned far enough to reveal a good bit of deep, suntanned cleavage. Amidst his shock and terror, Jacobs felt the automatic tingle of lust deep in his loins.

  The woman stepped into the room, her face flushed with anger. “Why in the hell are you two sacks of hog crap talking about
pussy?” She ran her disdainful gaze up and down each man in turn, squinting over the smoking cigar in her teeth. “Look at you! What woman in her right mind would spread her legs for two human dung beetles like yourselves?”

  Young Jacobs and old Caslin stood frozen, mouths agape, casting tense, disbelieving glances between them, then back to the beautiful, albeit rough-hewn, young woman standing in their cabin’s open door. Behind Caslin, the javelina continued sizzling, the grease popping and sputtering.

  As she took two menacing steps forward, two men appeared in the doorway and followed her into the room, casting quick, wary glances about the hovel. Jacobs wasn’t as frightened as disappointed that the girl wasn’t alone.

  One man was a big red-bearded gent with small, sharp blue eyes and wearing a cavalry uniform with a tan kepi. The other was tall, lean, long-haired, and flat-eyed, with a shaggy dark-blond mustache dripping down both sides of his mouth. The soldier carried a carbine, the other man a long-barreled Smith & Wesson, the shoulder holster under his open duster hanging free.

  “Easy now,” Caslin beseeched the interlopers. “I don’t know who ya are, but—”

  “The only woman who’d spread ’em fer the likes of you two’s a whore—ain’t that right?” the woman snarled, her eyes glassy with rage. “You slip them a few dollars, or you slip their pimp a few dollars, then you climb out of those grimy duds that have never been cleaned, and crawl between their bought-and-paid-for legs. ’Cause that’s all either of you could ever get . . . lookin’ like you do . . . smellin’ like you do . . . is a poor, down-on-her-luck frontier whore!”

  “Come on, Saradee,” complained the tall man with the gray eyes and mustache, who’d taken a position right of the door, his Smithy held out before him. “Let’s not start sawin’ on that old fiddle.”

  “As if that’s what she was born to do,” the woman said, continuing her tirade, shuttling her furious gaze between the two prospectors, both standing tongue-tied and frozen before her. “As if they weren’t nothin’ more but a warm hole to stick your dicks in . . . you pathetic piles of sunbaked dog shit!”

  As she swung around, sauntering toward Jacobs, the younger prospector held both hands up, palms out. “Please, miss . . . now . . . we didn’t mean no ha—”

  “Didn’t mean no harm?” the woman mocked. “Treating women like rented mules you can whip to your heart’s content, and you didn’t mean no harm?”

  “Come on, Miss Saradee,” said the big, red-bearded soldier standing on the other side of the door from the tall gent in the duster. “It’s gettin’ late and I’m hungry—” The other man reached across the doorway, slapped him with his hat, cutting him off.

  As if she hadn’t heard, the young woman called Saradee swung back toward Caslin. “You see, I know what it’s like to be one of those rented mules. I was one for two long years.” She threw her head back, holding her hair behind her ear with her right hand. “That’s how I got this.” When she’d given old Caslin a good look, she turned that side of her head toward Jacobs. A long, knotted pink scar angled down from just in front of her ear to her shoulder.

  “Almost bled to death,” she said, “lyin’ in the middle of a fuckin’ saloon floor with a broken bottle in my neck . . . left to die . . . like a rented mule that just couldn’t take it anymore.”

  Jacobs winced at the ugly scar, took another step back toward the far wall. He kept his hands up before him. “I bet you’re claim-jumpers, huh? That it? Well, hell, me and old Grover had enough of this isolated livin’ anyways. Tell you what . . . you can have our claim. Right now, tonight.” He glanced at Caslin. “Ain’t that right, Grove?”

  Caslin’s eyes were bright as he nodded. “Sure as skunk shit under a—”

  “We don’t want your goddamn claims.” Saradee moved toward the old prospector. “We just want a place to bed down tonight. And I’ll be goddamned if I’ll bed down anywhere near two stinky, greasy, ugly, limp-dick rock farmers like the two of you.”

  She crossed her arms before her belly, slid both silver-plated pistols from the cross-draw holsters, and thumbed back the hammers. Jacobs stared at her, wide-eyed, his jaw hanging.

  “Look at that,” she said disgustedly as she glared at Jacobs. “Your life is hangin’ by a thread, but you’ve still got time to look at my tits.”

  “N-no,” Jacobs said, backing against the far wall, sweat dribbling down his cheeks, hands held to his shoulders. “I just dropped my eyes a second. I wasn’t lookin’ at anything.”

  “You looked at my tits, you horny little weasel!”

  Jacobs looked at the men standing on both sides of the door watching the woman as if observing a theater play from behind the curtain, their expressions flickering between amazement and amusement.

  “For the love o’ Christ!” the young prospector shrieked. “Can’t you stop her?”

  “You’re the one starin’ at her titties,” said the tall man with a laugh, keeping his pistol trained on the room.

  He hadn’t finished the sentence before the woman had extended her left gun and fired, drilling a slug through Jacobs’s right shoulder.

  As the young prospector screamed and clapped his hand to the bloody hole, and began sliding down the wall toward the floor, the woman turned her right gun to Caslin.

  “Whoa there!” he cried, holding his hands and spatula before his face, as if to shield himself from a bullet. “You got no cause to—”

  The second gun cracked, flames stabbing from the barrel, the bullet plunking into the old man’s belly where the bulge split the shirt open to reveal his wash-worn balbriggans. The slug exited his back, blowing a good portion of guts and blood against the wall behind him.

  “Holy shit! “ shouted the red-bearded gent left of the open door, wide eyes bright with amazement.

  As Caslin was punched backward, cursing and bending forward, cupping both hands to the wound, the woman spun again to Jacobs, who had dropped to his knees. Taking careful aim, she raked a bullet across the younger miner’s right cheek and ear.

  Again, he screamed as he fell back against the wall.

  “Here she goes again,” the tall man observed aloud, shaking his head.

  The woman turned to Caslin, who was crawling toward a rifle leaning beside a nearby cot. She drilled him once through his right kidney and, as his spine arched and his head fell back between his shoulder blades, drilled him again through the back of his head.

  The soldier clapped his hands and stomped a foot. “Gawd-damn, that had to hurt!”

  Meanwhile, Jacobs was screaming and bleeding against the wall to her left. As he dropped forward and scrambled, crawling, toward the door, the woman shot him through his left arm. He grunted but kept moving, the other two men in the room scrambling from the line of fire.

  When Jacobs was a foot from the door, the woman fired two more quick shots, one from each pistol. One slug drilled splinters from the door frame; the other took Jacobs in his left hip.

  Sending up another scream and dragging his left leg, he pulled himself through the door. Adjusting her position and aiming down the barrel of her right-hand pistol, Saradee Jones drilled a neat round hole through the young prospector’s right butt cheek. The shot threw him onto his elbows just outside the cabin.

  She walked slowly toward the door, holding both smoking pistols down against her thighs.

  Grinning as though at the most bewildering spectacle he’d ever seen, Sergeant Schmidt glanced at the tall man on the other side of the door.

  Waylon Kilroy shook his head, as if to say, “What can you do?”

  Schmidt looked at Saradee, standing in the open doorway, staring out at the dying prospector. Walking slowly toward the man, she lifted her left gun and fired. When Schmidt followed her out, he saw the younger prospector lying belly-down, ten yards beyond the door. Blood glistened from the hole in the back of his head.

  Beyond Saradee, the other gang members were walking slowly, cautiously up from the dry wash—vague silhouettes wielding pistols or
rifles. The horses and the two mules nickered and blew behind them.

  “Everything all right, Miss Jones?” one of them called.

  Saradee stared at them, bunching her lips, her heart still hammering raw fury. “Men!” she raged. “Everywhere I look, I see men!”

  As she seethed at the men standing frozen a dozen yards down the gentle grade toward the wash, Schmidt and Kilroy moved past her toward the others. Giving her a wide berth, Schmidt muttered to Kilroy, “That’s one hot-blooded woman, my friend. How do you put up with her?”

  “When it comes to Saradee,” Kilroy whispered, “you gotta take the horns with the hide.”

  “I heard that!” Saradee barked as they walked toward the others.

  “Just joshin’, my angel,” Kilroy said, turning and throwing his arms out, then taking his reins from one of the other riders. “We’ll go picket our horses by the spring yonder, then set up camp here in the wash.”

  “Who’s sleepin’ in the cabin tonight, Kilroy?” a spidery little firebrand named Gavin Childress yelled, his voice pitched with mockery. He was holding the reins of the two pack mules on the other side of the wash.

  He and all the other gang members figured Kilroy would be sharing the cabin with Saradee Jones, as per their arrangement since, six months ago, Saradee’s bunch had thrown in with Kilroy’s gang and the cavalry sergeant, Arvo Schmidt.

  Before Kilroy could answer, Saradee Jones called down from the cabin yard, “Me and the puta—and only me and the puta!”

  “Hey,” Schmidt growled, turning from the horse carrying the Mexican whore, her hands tied to the saddle horn, “she keepin’ me company tonight. I’m the one that found her.”

  Schmidt’s voice had stopped echoing around the wash before guns flashed on either side of Saradee’s long-haired silhouette. The twin cracks followed a quarter second later. The .45-caliber rounds tore up sand and gravel on both sides of the big sergeant’s mule-eared cavalry boots.

  The startled horses skitter-stepped as Schmidt jumped higher than he’d jumped since he was twelve years old back in Pennsylvania.