Thunder Over the Superstitions Read online

  That had been before he’d turned to sundry, more nefarious, means of making his living . . .

  Back in the shack, Hawk built a fire in the range and untied the old man from the rocking chair. Using picks and shovels from the cabin, Hawk buried the old man behind the shack, first wrapping his body in a tattered quilt. He had to rush the job because of the storm’s approach, with drumming thunder and a chill, rising breeze, but he was content that he’d ensconced the old man’s body safely from the predators.

  He brewed coffee on the cabin’s range and sipped it outside on the porch, watching the rain come down, feeling refreshed by the chill, damp breeze. Later, he ate one of the two remaining burritos that Vivienne had made, with a pickled chili pepper she’d also packed. For dessert he sipped tequila from the small stone bottle she’d wrapped in heavy burlap, fingering the wooden stallion his boy had carved only a few days before he’d died . . .

  The storm didn’t last half as long as the one the night before, and Hawk was glad. It would make following Miller easier. The thunder rumbled for nearly an hour after the brunt of the storm, lightning flashing in the northeast.

  The air was fresh and cool, perfumed by the desert.

  Hawk slept in one of the beds in the curtained-off area of the cabin reserved for overnight passengers. He slept well, knowing that he was on a warm trail, confident that he would kill another killer soon.

  That morning, just after dawn, he drank coffee and ate his last burrito and pickled chili pepper outside on the porch again. He’d saddled the grulla and tied the horse to the hitch rack fronting the cabin. As Hawk finished the burrito and washed the last bite down with another swallow of coffee, the grulla gave its tail a hard switch and turned its head to peer toward the trail curving out of the desert.

  Its ears twitched as it stood, tensely staring toward the north.

  Slowly, Hawk leaned forward and set his plate and cup on the porch rail. Then he reached behind him for the Henry he’d leaned against the shack. He pumped a live round in the chamber, off-cocked the hammer, and rested the rifle across his thighs.

  Presently, a man’s yell, muffled by distance, pierced the morning quiet and stillness. The faint din of galloping hooves followed, gradually growing louder. Many sets of hooves. As the man’s yells continued, punctuated with what sounded like the pops of a small-caliber pistol but which Hawk recognized as a blacksnake being snapped over a team’s back, Hawk eased his grip on the rifle.

  The yells were those of a jehu haranguing his team.

  A stage was approaching from the north.

  Hawk sat back in the chair and waited, hearing the commotion growing louder until the stage came into view along the trail, the six horses lunging forward against their collars, the jehu sitting on the right side of the driver’s box, whistling now more than yelling.

  The shotgun messenger sat to the driver’s left, cradling the sawed-off, double-bore coach gun in his arms. As the stage drew near, the jehu—a stocky man in a high-crowned, salt-encrusted cream hat and wearing a red neckerchief with white polka dots up high across his mouth and nose—eased back on the ribbons he was deftly plying in his gloved hands. Above his hands, thick leather gauntlets ringed his forearms.

  The team and its trailing coach thundered into the yard. It came around the far side of the windmill and stock tank, and the jehu leaned back in the seat, pressing his boots against the dashboard, as he hauled back on the reins. The shotgun messenger was cautiously eyeing Hawk still sitting on the stage station’s front stoop. The shotgun rider lowered his neckerchief, and Hawk saw that a wad of chaw was bulging his left cheek.

  When the driver had the team stopped, he ripped his own neckerchief down from his nose and yelled, “Zimmerman!” He cast his incredulous gaze from Hawk to the closed station house door and then back toward the barn and pole corral. “Jodi! Zimmerman! Stage from Flagstaff!”

  Hawk said, “They’re not here.”

  He glanced through the door of the coach sitting about thirty feet straight in front of him. He thought there were four or five passengers jostling around inside the Concorde, preparing to de-stage. A woman was coughing and waving a hand in front of her face as though to clear the dust roiling around inside the cramped confines.

  Hawk’s gaze caught on the flash of something shiny.

  A badge, perhaps?

  “Where are they?” the shotgun messenger asked Hawk, looking over the driver who was just then setting the brake and spitting dust from his lips.

  Hawk stared through the window of the stage door. Sure enough, one of the passengers wore a badge. From Hawk’s position, it looked like the moon-and-star badge of a federal.

  “Did you hear me, mister?” the bellicose shotgun messenger said, scowling at Hawk. “Where’s Jodi and the old man?”

  Hawk said, “The old man’s dead. Buried behind the station house. Jodi—does that happen to be a male or a female?”

  The driver was glowering at Hawk, apparently not certain he’d heard correctly. “Female! What’s this about Zimmerman?”

  “Dead,” Hawk said.

  The driver and the shotgun messenger glanced at each other skeptically. Then they both started to climb down off their perch.

  At the same time, the stage’s near door opened, and a tall man in a three-piece suit so dusty that it appeared gray stepped down into the yard. A badge was pinned to his wool vest. He cast Hawk a dark, critical stare and then he turned to help down from the stage a middle-aged woman in a green traveling frock and small straw hat trimmed with fake berries and flowers.

  The next man out, also middle-aged and wearing a shabby suit and wool shirt with attached collar, appeared to be the woman’s husband. His corduroy trousers were patched at the knees. The man and the woman stepped to one side, looking around with the typically harried, disoriented expressions of stage travelers—especially those who’d likely been held up on account of the weather. The man beat his bowler hat against his leg, causing more dust to billow.

  As the lawman continued to regard Hawk skeptically, his eyes flicking between the Henry resting across Hawk’s knees, and Hawk’s face, two more men climbed heavily, wearily down from the stage behind him. These two were dressed similarly to the first man, and they also wore deputy US marshal’s badges. Ever so slightly and slowly, Hawk used his left middle finger and the heel of that hand to slide his coat across his own upside-down badge, concealing it.

  He didn’t know if the others had noticed. He hoped not. He was not in the business of killing lawmen. Unless they got in his way.

  Then they were as fair game as men like Pima Miller.

  The stocky driver strode up the porch steps, batting his own hat against his thigh, and said, “You pullin’ some kinda funny, mister?”

  “About what?”

  “About Zimmerman bein’ dead?”

  “Nope,” Hawk said. “I never joke about death. I found him in there yesterday, tied to his rocking chair. Someone had drilled a bullet through his forehead. He was getting cold and starting to swell, so I buried him.”

  The driver tripped the latch, opened the door, and stepped inside, yelling, “Zimmerman?” He waited. “Miss Jodi?”

  “I told you,” Hawk said, gaining his feet. “He’s around back.”

  The driver stepped back out of the station house. He and the shotgun messenger shared a look, and then the driver hurried back down the porch steps and walked swiftly around the corner of the cabin, heading for the rear. The shotgun messenger gave Hawk an owly look as he rested his shotgun on his shoulder, spat a dark stream of chaw onto a prickly pear, and followed the older man toward the back of the cabin.

  The lawmen all looked at each other, and then two followed the jehu and the shotgun messenger around the cabin, while the third lawman and the two civilian passengers stood regarding Hawk skeptically in the morning’s dwindling shadows.

  Hawk stepped down off the porch. Heading for his horse, he glanced at the middle-aged man and woman, and said, “There�
�s coffee inside.”

  The man and the woman both glanced expectantly at the deputy US marshal. The federal canted his head toward the station house. He waited until the couple was inside, and then he said, “Hold on, friend.”

  He stepped toward Hawk, his fingers in the pockets of his butternut wool vest from which a gold-washed watch chain dangled.

  He was tall and lean, fair of skin and sunburned at the nubs of his cheeks. His long, slender nose was peeling. Hawk guessed he was in his early thirties. Curly blond hair hung down beneath the flat brim of his coffee-colored Stetson, which boasted a band of rattlesnake skin.

  His mouth was long and thin beneath a dragoon-style mustache. His relatively smooth cheeks showed a day-old trace of beard stubble to which dust clung. He carried himself with an air of self-importance as he sauntered toward Hawk, and stopped just off the grulla’s right hip.

  Hawk was standing on the horse’s left side, resting his rifle across the seat of his saddle and then reaching down to tie the latigo strap beneath the horse’s belly.

  “If what you say is true, friend,” the lawman said with a taut smile, “then you’re gonna need to hang around and answer a few questions.”

  “I’m not your friend,” Hawk said, pulling the end of the latigo through the saddle’s D ring. “And I don’t like it when folks get too friendly.”

  “You said Old Man Zimmerman was dead, friend. And I, bein’ a federal lawman an’ all, would like to know who killed him.”

  “Pima Miller killed him. But, again”—Hawk smiled at him over his saddle—“I’m not your friend.”

  The lawman frowned. “Miller’s who we’re after. Chief marshal sent us down from Prescott. Miller and his gang robbed the bank in Kingman and are said to be meeting up with the rest of their gang somewhere south of Phoenix.”

  “No shit?”

  “How do you know Miller killed Zimmerman?”

  “I just know.”

  “Hold on, friend!”

  The federal walked around the rear of the grulla. Hawk had turned out his left stirrup and was preparing to toe it and mount, when the federal lawman grabbed Hawk’s arm. As Hawk turned to face him, the lawman’s eyes dropped. Hawk followed the man’s glance to Hawk’s upside-down badge, which his coat had opened to reveal.

  The lawman slowly lifted his chin. When his eyes finally met Hawk’s, his brows were beetled with incredulity. “What the . . . ?”

  Hawk heard the voices of the other lawmen as they strode back toward the yard from the cabin’s rear.

  “Let it go, friend,” Hawk said, his lips quirking a frigid smile beneath his brushy mustache. “Just let it go.”

  The lawman’s disbelieving gaze flicked from the badge again to Hawk’s emerald-hard eyes. “You’re . . .”

  “They don’t have to know,” Hawk said mildly. “If they do know, it ain’t gonna go well. You know that. You’ll just be three dead men with no yesterday, no tomorrow.”

  Hawk held the lawman’s gaze. The man’s lower jaw sagged. His eyes were dark with fear, frustration.

  “Step away. Be our secret. You boys just keep ridin’ on down to Phoenix in the stagecoach there, and you see about Miller and his gang down there . . . and you just think about how you might have died today but didn’t because you were smart enough to keep your mouth shut.”

  “There’s a grave back there, sure enough,” said one of the other two lawmen as they both rounded the cabin’s far front corner. He stopped and nodded toward Hawk. “Have you checked him out, Alvin?”

  Alvin stared uncertainly at Hawk. And then he took one step back, saying haltingly, “Yeah, I checked him out. He seen Miller in the area.” He took another step straight back away from Hawk, the grulla between Hawk and the other two lawmen now approaching, the jehu and shotgun messenger behind them.

  “He thinks Miller and his bunch is headed for Phoenix . . . just like we thought,” Alvin said.

  “What about Miss Jodi?” This from the jehu, who’d stopped with the other men near the porch steps.

  “I figure they must have taken her,” Hawk said, sliding his coat closed and stepping into the leather. He rested his Henry across his saddlebow and backed the grulla away from the hitch rack.

  He smiled at Alvin, nodded to the other lawmen and the jehu and shotgun rider, and then swung the grulla around the cabin and put it into a jog across the yard, heading south toward the trail he’d scouted the evening before. For a time, he could hear the lawmen talking behind him. He hoped Alvin kept his mouth shut.

  Hawk didn’t want to kill lawmen, though he knew from experience that many were no better than the men they were paid to hunt. Some were worse.

  Still, he didn’t want to kill the lawmen from Prescott.

  But if they trailed him, tried to impede him, he would blow them all to hell.

  CHAPTER 9

  DEADLY COMPANION

  Miller reined his brindle bay to a halt under a lip of rock that rose out of the canyon floor like a shark’s fin, and glanced behind him. He could see no movement down toward the broad neck of the canyon they’d been riding through for the past hour, so he glanced at the girl riding off his left stirrup.

  “Get down and start a fire. We’ll rest the horses and have lunch here.”

  “I’m gonna have to gather wood for that fire,” Jodi said, climbing off the back of her Morgan mare. “Sure you trust I won’t skin off on ya?”

  She cast him a devilish grin over her shoulder.

  “You stay away from that horse while you’re gatherin’ that wood, and you stay where I can see you. You try to run off, I’ll—”

  “Yeah, I know,” Jodi said, tying the Morgan to an ironwood shrub in the shade of the shark’s fin. “You’ll run me down and tan my bare ass and then you’ll hobble me and I’ll ride belly down over my mare’s back for the rest of our wonderful time together.”

  She snickered as she kicked a chunk of ironwood free of the ground, and then stooped to pick it up.

  “Think it’s funny, do you?” Miller snarled. “You’ll see how funny it is if you try to run out on me.”

  He reined the bay around and rode back down the old Indian trail they’d been following into the mountains. The trail climbed a low bench overlooking the canyon mouth. Several yards from the top of the bench, Miller stopped the bay, fished old Zimmerman’s spyglass out of his saddlebags, and then got down and crawled to the lip of the bench.

  He telescoped the glass and stared off across the desert toward the stage station that was lost in the heat haze of the northwestern horizon. All that he could see were low, rocky bluffs, hogbacks, swales and mesas sprinkled liberally with palo verdes, saguaros, mesquites, and clay-colored rock.

  Miller carefully scrutinized the desert flanking him. From time to time he glanced over his shoulder at the girl, who appeared to be dutifully gathering wood and building a fire. As the outlaw studied a low mesa rising in the northeast, movement caught his eye closer in and on his right. His heart hiccupping, he jerked the spyglass in that direction, followed a gray-brown blur of movement until the object stopped atop a flat rock.

  Miller stared through the glass, adjusting the focus.

  His heartbeat slowed. The outlaw shaped a wry smile. What he was looking at was none other than the girl’s bobcat, Claws, who just now leaped down off the rock to lie in a wedge of shade leaning out from it.

  The bobcat stared toward Miller, flicking its bobbed tail.

  Miller chuckled. Then he reduced the spyglass, slipped it back into its deerskin poke, rose, and tramped down the slope to his horse. He looked back toward their noon camp. The girl had a small fire going, thin tendrils of gray smoke rising from orange flames. She was on one knee, pouring water from a canteen into a small, black coffeepot.

  She glanced over her shoulder at Miller. He was too far away to see her face clearly, but he’d gotten to know her well enough to know she was smirking. Something inside him wanted to wipe that smirk off her face, to bring her to heel like a dog. H
e didn’t care for women thinking they were better than him.

  But he needed her to get him through the mountains after he bushwhacked Hawk, so he had to keep his temper on a short leash. Besides, he couldn’t beat her up too badly. He needed her in good health to quell his natural male desires.

  “You don’t care one bit that I killed the old man, do you?” Miller asked her when he’d ridden over to the fire. He’d dismounted and was loosening the bay’s latigo strap, so the horse could rest easy.

  She was sitting on a rock near the fire, leaning forward, elbows on her knees, gloved hands together. She was giving him that look again. That look like she knew more than he did about something, or that she was better than he was.

  Or maybe she found him funny to look at. He knew he wasn’t the best-looking gent, but he had a way with women, and he’d had none too few, neither. And that kid he’d left at Nan-tee’s wasn’t the only son he’d sired, neither.

  When she didn’t say anything but merely continued to give him that faintly jeering look through those bold, hazel eyes of hers, he said, “What in the hell you lookin’ at, goddamnit? What you thinkin’ about?”

  She hiked a shoulder and glanced away. “I’m just thinkin’.”

  “Why don’t you answer my question?”

  “What question?”

  “Old Zimmerman. Your grandpaw!”

  “Oh, him,” she said, shrugging again and then lifting her boot toes and staring down at them. “Well, he’s dead now and I never really cared for him. The old bastard was in my way, if you want the truth. So, you killed him. You shouldn’t have, but you did. I didn’t have no part in it, and there wasn’t nothin’ I could do to stop you, so I reckon I got a good story for old Saint Pete when I see him. About that, anyways.”

  Miller stared at her, incredulous. Then he chuckled and dug his horse’s feed sack out of a saddlebag pouch. “You’re a piece of work, girl. Yes, ma’am, you purely are!”

  When he’d hung a feed bag of oats over the bay’s ears, he started to sit down on a rock near the girl. He stopped when the stitches in his wound pulled, feeling that rat gnawing on him again. Then he eased himself down on the rock, pressing a hand over the wound and wincing.