Border Snakes Page 6

  “They try to rob the bank?” Hawk asked the wheelchair-bound gent.

  “That’s right. But the good citizens of Saguaro didn’t like the idea of their hard-earned money goin’ out so easy.” The oldster wheezed a laugh and sniffed.

  Hawk turned to the man. “This dump have a sheriff?”

  “Sure.”

  Hawk hardened an eye impatiently. “Would you mind tell-in’ me where I’d find him?”

  “Wouldn’t mind a bit.” The oldster turned his wheelchair, rocked back, and jutted his chin toward the hill rising behind the high false fronts on the other side of the street—a low, brown, rock-and-cactus-spotted hill sprouting stone markers and crosses among large rocks, cat’s claw shrubs, and barrel cactus. “We planted ole Roy Marquardt on boot hill a little over two years ago last Christmas eve. Never could find another man with the cojones to replace him.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Just said so.”

  “Where’s the best place in town for harvesting a little information?”

  “What kind of information might that be?”

  “The kind not readily available elsewhere.”

  “Oh, that kind.” The oldster tugged on his beard. With another quick maneuver, he aimed his wheelchair up the broad main street, toward the center of the ancient border town. “You’ll find the Dandy Dog Inn on the left side of the street. Across from the main square and the church. I’d think twice about payin’ a visit, though . . . especially if you’re in the market for information.”

  “Oh?” Hawk had removed his hat to mop the sweatband with the tail of his neckerchief. “Why’s that?”

  “’Cause men that go in there lookin’ for anything but hooch and cooch often don’t come out again. Leastways, not walkin’.”

  Hawk set his hat back on his head and plucked a gold piece from his trouser pocket. “Mister, you’ve been a wealth of information. Have a beer on me.”

  The old man caught the coin one-handed as Hawk turned the grulla up the street.

  “Maybe you better tell me your name, friend,” the old man called behind him.

  Hawk said nothing as the grulla clomped along the dusty street, between adobe-brick shacks and the gaudy false facades of business establishments. There were a handful of horseback riders on the street—mostly well-armed Mexicans, a few norteamericanos.

  Scantily clad girls lounged on porches or balconies, plying their wares. There were dogs, chickens, goats, and even a few pigs scrounging the trash-strewn areas between buildings. Somewhere, a baby was crying.

  “You don’t wanna be planted without a name, do you?”

  Hawk only vaguely heard that last yell from the wheelchair-bound oldster. He’d turned his attention to the weathered gray shingle jutting into the street from a left-side boardwalk, its black, blocky letters announcing simply DANDY DOG.

  Six or seven sun-seared hombres lounged about the saloon’s broad gallery speckled with sunlight streaming through the gaps between the branches forming its roof. They were all so darkly tanned and dust-caked that it was hard to tell if they were American, Mex, Indio, or an amalgam, but which side of the law they rode was made plain by the amount of guns and cartridges weighing them down and the sharply penetrating, perpetually sneering casts to their drunken gazes.

  Glasses and bottles in various stages of fill sat along the brush arbor’s cottonwood rail or were held in brown fists, a few seated on leather-clad thighs near jutting pistols.

  The sweet, green smell of marijuana laced the slightly rancid odor of liquor and tobacco.

  As Hawk rode up to the saloon—a long, low building constructed of sandstone blocks but patched here and there with mud adobe brick—he heard a din to the right. He swung his head to see a brown-skinned, round-hipped Indian whore bent forward over a rain barrel, her heavy, bare breasts jouncing, a soiled gray skirt bunched around her waist. A burly, bearded Mexican, pants fallen around his high, black boots, hammered her from behind while holding a bottle in his left fist, her black hair in the other.

  He wore a grand, black, silver-trimmed sombrero, and two thick bandoliers were crossed on his broad chest and bulging belly. He and the whore were both laughing in drunken glory. If they’d noticed Hawk, neither let on.

  As they toiled, water in the barrel sloshed up across the whore’s bouncing bosoms. Behind the two fornicators, another man sat slumped against the next building, legs stretched out before him, chin tipped to his chest. Deep in drunken slumber.

  Hawk swung down from his saddle, shucked his Henry repeater, looped the reins over a hitch rack at which half a dozen mounts stood swishing their tails, and mounted the gallery. His eyes swept the group lounging around him quickly, and then he was pushing through the batwings and striding through the dingy main saloon hall in which someone strummed a guitar just loudly enough to be heard above the rumble of conversation and occasional bursts of roaring laughter.

  The rough-hewn bar stretched along the room’s right wall. Over it ran a balcony upon which whores of every age, shape, size, and color hovered like exotic birds, some calling down to the men in the main saloon hall and giving alluring glimpses of a bare thigh or a breast.

  A stairway climbed the rear wall, half hidden in shadows, and more men and women—some in love’s embrace—lounged across the stone steps. Two girls there were playing keep-away from a snickering, inebriated young firebrand with his high-crowned leather hat.

  “Give me a beer,” Hawk ordered the frizzy-haired, blue-eyed bartender.

  Hawk was dry from the long ride. The odor of marijuana and Mexican tobacco peppered his nose beneath the fetor of ancient, spilled liquor and human filth.

  He threw back the tepid beer in one, long draught. The din in the room had quieted slightly when he’d entered, and several pairs of eyes watched him incredulously—this tall, dark rider with a finely chiseled, green-eyed face, wearing a fleece-lined bull-hide vest, two big pistols on his hips, a Henry rifle propped on his right shoulder.

  When Hawk finished the beer, he pivoted, flung his empty schooner into the air over the room, and raised his Henry.

  Boooommmm!

  The blast echoed off the adobe walls like a ricocheting cannonball.

  The glass shattered as it started its drop from the ceiling into a million glittering shards, raining down on several tables but on one most of all. The broken handle plunked off the brim of a broad-brimmed gray hat with a snakeskin band, and the hat’s wearer jerked his head down with a start, then shot a fiery glance across the room to Hawk.

  He was on his feet in a wink, his right hand shoving back the flap of his spruce-green duster and closing over an ivory-handled Colt.

  “Just wanted to get everybody’s attention,” Hawk said one notch louder than his normal volume, when he saw that he had it.

  The gray-hatted gent stood tight-jawed and glaring, his right hand squeezing his pistol’s grips so hard that his knuckles turned white.

  Loudly, Hawk ejected the spent brass from the Henry’s chamber. It clattered onto the bar top behind him as he levered a fresh round in the breech and regarded the indignant gent mildly.

  “Amigo, if you got something to say, say it, or remove your hand from that hogleg and sit your ass down.”

  Hawk aimed the smoking Henry from his chest. The gray-hatted gent flicked his eyes toward the gun. One hard eye twitched, as did a muscle in his right cheek. His nostrils flared.

  The room had suddenly become so quiet that Hawk could hear the gray-hatted gent’s bitter, raspy breaths as well as a moaning breeze shepherding a dust devil along the street out the Dandy Dog’s front windows.

  Several pairs of eyes shifted back and forth between Hawk and the gray-hatted gent. Finally, keeping his threatening eyes on Hawk, he slowly lowered his tall bulk into his chair, doffing his hat and shaking the bits of shattered glass from the brim and crown.

  “Obliged.”

  Hawk nodded to the man, then swept his gaze across the still, quiet room and the others,
including the sporting girls, glaring at him through the wafting tobacco and gun smoke.

  “Now, I realize you folks are all pretty flush at the moment, but just in case anyone wants to make a little extra spending money—say, five hundred dollars’ worth—here’s how. I’m lookin’ for an hombre who rides under the handle of Kid Reno. You don’t need to know why I’m lookin’ for him, so don’t bother askin’. You can speculate all you want. But I’m offering this five hundred dollars here for information—good information—about his whereabouts.”

  Hawk had plucked a roll of one-hundred-dollar bills—reward money from a recent batch of wanted deadmen he’d hauled to a sheriff and had collected on to keep himself fed, clothed, and dusting the owlhoot trail. He ran his thumb across the end of the bills as he held the wad up for inspection.

  He noticed that several pairs of the eyes fixed on him had turned incredulous. A couple of men sneered and glanced at each other. A blond sporting girl snapped a surprised glance to one of her colleagues in a see-through cream shift adorned with several hoops of fake pearls.

  “Five hundred dollars,” Hawk said, again running his thumb across the bills then stuffing the wad back into his shirt pocket. “Think about it. I’ll be around till tomorrow. Got a feelin’ you’ll know where to find me.”

  He set the butt of his Henry on his hip and strode across the crowded room toward the batwings, the heads around him swiveling as though they and he were connected by hidden strings.

  The men who’d been spread out across the porch had gathered around the batwings when Hawk had shattered the beer schooner. Now as he approached the doors, the small crowd, including the big Mexican and the Indian whore who’d been fornicating over the rain barrel, bulged out away from the doors and split in two.

  Hawk tipped his hat to the whore, who regarded him contentiously as she held her skimpy, unbuttoned dress closed across her breasts, and moved across the porch and slowly down the steps. He’d just started to turn toward his grulla when his well-trained ears heard the faint snick of a pistol being slid from a leather holster.

  He wheeled as a big hombre in a cracked leather jacket, high-crowned hat, and billowy red neckerchief palmed a Frontier model Colt. Before the man could get the gun leveled, Hawk fired his Henry from his hip.

  The man said, “Hu-uh!” and fired his Colt into the porch floor as Hawk’s .44-caliber round hammered his breastbone and punched him straight back against the Dandy’s Dog’s front wall with a loud thud and cracking of bones a quarter second after the whip-crack of Hawk’s rifle.

  To that man’s right, another hard case jerked a long-barreled .45 up from a holster thonged low on a deerskin-clad thigh, and Hawk sent him hurdling, screaming over the porch rail and into the gap between buildings.

  Hawk ejected the spent brass, seated fresh, and looked at the other men on the porch. They all stood hang-jawed and white-faced, by ones and twos slowly lifting their hands above their holsters. One of the sporting girls—clad in nothing more than a man’s wash-worn longhandles and a silk duster, with pink ribbons in her thick blond hair—also raised her hands and jerked back with a start.

  The second man Hawk had shot groaned in the gap off the end of the porch. He rose up on his hands and knees, coughed blood into the rocks and sand beneath him, then dropped with a final sigh.

  Hawk regarded the group facing him distastefully. “Anyone want to try it from the front?”

  They all looked as sheepish as scolded schoolkids.

  “Had a feelin’.”

  Hawk grabbed his reins off the hitch rack and stepped into his saddle.

  Keeping his rifle aimed one-handed at the porch, and casting cautious glances toward the batwings, he backed the grulla away from the hitch rack and the other horses. He turned the horse toward the other side of the street, then, casting one more glance toward the porch where the hard cases and sporting girls only watched him with dubious expressions, hands still raised above shell belts, he booted the horse down the cross street.

  When he’d put a harness shop between him and the Dandy Dog, he depressed the Henry’s hammer, turned his head forward, and looked around. There wasn’t much out here at the north edge of town—a livery barn and a near-empty corral, some sun-blasted shacks nearly buried in tumbleweeds, and a high, narrow, white-frame building with a red front porch and red window trim.

  The shabby shingle hanging over the porch announced simply ROOMS.

  Hawk turned in.

  8.

  JUBAL’S STALLION

  TWO pale eyes shone in the hotel’s dingy shadows, bene ath a narrow, low-slung stairs. There was a potted palm at one end of the plank-board counter; it was only three feet high and there was more brown on its leaves than green.

  Coming in from the harsh light, Hawk couldn’t see who belonged to those eyes until he got right up to the counter. Then he saw the whipcord-lean gent with a witch’s nose and chin and a bulging forehead, gaunt cheeks tufted with patches of gray bristle. He wore a red-and-white-checked shirt buttoned to his prominent Adam’s apple.

  Perched on a high stool behind the counter, fronting a row of small, numbered cubby holes, he rasped, “A dollar fifty fer a double. Two dollars fer a single.”

  Hawk glanced at the stairs slanting over his head. The place was as quiet as a mortuary. “Any other boarders?”

  “Not yet.” The birdlike old gent leaned forward to take a bite from a crusty ham sandwich. “But later, around midnight, they come trampin’ in from the saloons in droves.”

  “I’ll take a single,” Hawk said.

  Fishing coins from his denims’ pocket, he glanced through a dusty window at the livery barn across the street. There were only two horses in the corral, and a mule he hadn’t seen earlier.

  “The barn open for business?”

  The birdlike man nodded as he chewed with his mouth open, his tongue flapping like a wing inside. “That’s mine, too, and it is open.” His thin, colorless brows hooded his eyes. “Say, what was the shootin’ about? I keep attuned to the killin’s. My brother’s the undertaker.”

  Hawk scratched a fake name in blue-green ink in the ragged register book. “Two men dead over to the Dandy Dog.”

  The birdlike gent’s cheeks dimpled with either joy or dismay—it was impossible to tell. “Who shot ’em?”

  “I did.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “They’d been needin’ it fer a long time,” Hawk said, tossing the pen against the spine of the register book. “Since they were out of rubber pants, most like.”

  The old man croaked a chuckle.

  “You got a man over there?” Hawk said, canting his head at the barn.

  “I do.”

  “Will you have him take my horse? Give him a good rub-down and feed, plenty of water. And I’d like a bath in my room, if you’re set up for it.”

  “I am set up for it,” the birdlike gent said, sliding stiffly off his stool. “The barn and the bath will cost you one dollar extra . . . if you’re only staying the night. . . .”

  Hawk went back outside to retrieve his saddlebags from his horse. He picked up the key that the birdlike old man had left on the lobby counter, then tramped up the rickety stairs to room number three and tossed his saddlebags on the bed.

  The room wasn’t much bigger than a broom closet—boasting only a sagging bed with a tarnished brass frame, a dresser with a cracked mirror, and a wooden washstand with one broken leg leveled with a box of playing cards. There were a few wall pegs behind the door for hanging clothes.

  When the old man hauled a copper tub up the steps and filled it with water, Hawk undressed and crawled in. He was running a cake of lye down an arm when the old man returned with another bucket of steaming water.

  “What was the shootin’ about?” The stoop-shouldered old gent poured the hot water into the tub, sending steam into the stale, dingy air. He’d rolled a quirley, and it sagged from the right side of his thin-lipped mouth. “If you don’t mind my askin’, I mean.
. . .”

  “Well, first,” Hawk said, resting his elbows on his upraised knees and cupping water over his head and face, “I needed to get their attention. I had a question, you see, and figured it was the best place in town to ask it.”

  The old man held the empty but still-steaming bucket straight down by his side. He plucked the quirley from his mouth, letting smoke trickle out his broad nostrils. “What question was that?”

  “About a killer named Kid Reno. I heard he used to run with another killer called Wilbur ‘Knife-Hand’ Monjosa down Arizona way.”

  The old bird was laughing so softly and hoarsely he was almost silent. His slumped shoulders shook. Finally, he sucked a sharp breath and shook his head.

  Scrubbing his hair with the soap, Hawk glanced up at the man. “You’ve either heard of Kid Reno or Knife-Hand, or both. . . .”

  “Hell, mister,” the old bird croaked, “once you get down south of the Colorado-Utah line, most folks you run into have heard of Kid Reno. He’s been runnin’ afoul of the law in these parts for the better part of ten years. Can’t say as I ever heard of this . . . this, uh . . . Knife-Hand fella, though.”

  “Figured,” Hawk said. “Knife-Hand’s been in Mexico. Just surfaced in the southwest corner of Arizona Territory about a year ago. You’ll hear about him soon, most likely.”

  “Kid Reno,” the old bird said, giving his bony head another shake. “Land sakes, the Dandy Dog sure ain’t the place to go whisperin’ his name, much less sayin’ it up loud and clear.”

  “Know where he is?”

  “Hell, no, not me!” The old man jerked with a start and wheezed another laugh. “But a few of them curly wolves over to the Dandy Dog just might!”

  “That’s kinda what I was hopin’.”

  “And you really think they’re gonna tell ya?”

  “That’s kind what I was hopin’,” Hawk repeated.

  The old man was exasperated as he headed for Hawk’s open door. “The only thing you’re gonna get out of askin’ questions around the Dandy Dog is a bullet.”

  “They done tried that. Those were the last two shots you heard.” Thoroughly lathered, Hawk rested his elbows on his knees. “I’m ready for a rinse. And if you got any cigars downstairs, I’ll take two.”