Cold Corpse, Hot Trail Page 6

  “Jesus Christ!” he barked with fierce indignation.

  The other men, knowing the ways of Saradee Jones, chuckled.

  Schmidt touched his covered holster and inwardly cringed as the woman marched toward him, her men’s undershot boots loudly crunching gravel. He considered drawing the revolver, but then starlight flashed off both barrels of her twin Colts, aimed at his heart.

  He dropped his hand from the holster and stepped back against the whore’s mount, the white-speckled roan stepping away from him as the woman approached with a distinct air of menace.

  He flinched as Saradee Jones stopped before him and lashed out with her right hand. He was surprised when the hand, instead of connecting with his jaw, reached up and grabbed the whore’s left arm.

  As she urged the girl off the horse, Saradee pushed her lovely, angry face up close to Schmidt’s. “I told you before, Sergeant, there will be no rape this trip. The girl is spending the night with me. If I catch you anywhere near her, I’ll drill a hole through your black brain. Understand?”

  “Hey!” Schmidt gruffly objected, taking one step back. “The whore is mine, goddamnit!”

  Schmidt tensed again as one of the pistols jerked toward him. Waylon Kilroy had moved in fast, however, and closed his big hand over the gun, shoving it aside, before the woman could pull the trigger.

  “Saradeel” the tall outlaw barked. “We’re gonna need all the men we got south of the border!”

  “He’s just a fucking soldier anyway. I’m gonna fill his ugly hide so full o’ holes—!”

  “You do, me and my boys are taking our cut o’ the loot and riding out. Right now—tonight.” Kilroy’s voice was hard, uncompromising, his heavy brow ridged beneath his slouch hat’s dipped brim.

  The girl—she suddenly appeared more a girl now than a woman—looked up at him wide-eyed, the hard lines of her face flattening. Her voice was thin. “Y-you wouldn’t really leave me out here, would you, Waylon?” She seemed sincerely surprised and heartbroken.

  He removed his hand from her gun, set it gently along the side of her face, rubbing her cheek with his thumb. “Up to here, we’ve done it all your way, angel. It’s my turn to call the shots.”

  She shook her head slightly, complaining in a little girl’s voice, “But I hate soldiers. You know that, Waylon. Ever since they hanged my brother . . .”

  “Angel,” Kilroy said, gently admonishing, “we do this my way.”

  Schmidt said indignantly, “Let’s not forget you wouldn’t even have this money if I hadn’t set up the ambush from the inside.”

  “Shut up, Schmidt,” Waylon said without looking at him, keeping his eyes on Saradee Jones. To her, he said, “We got us an understanding this evenin’?”

  Saradee lowered her eyes, turning her face against his palm, and nodded. He smiled, ran his thumb across her cheek once more, then lowered his hand.

  It seemed to release the girl from a trance. She turned to the whore, who’d been standing nearby, head down, a blanket across her shoulders, and gave the girl’s arm a brusque tug. “Come on.”

  As she began walking back toward the cabin, jerking the whore along behind her, she paused and turned once more to the sergeant. “You stay away from her, you understand, or all bets are off. I’ll be feedin’ your balls come mornin’ to the camp-robber jays.”

  Schmidt didn’t say anything. He stood frozen, watching both women move up the grade toward the lantern-lit cabin.

  “That girl’s got a way about her,” he said to Kilroy, who’d begun leading his and the women’s horses toward the spring.

  Schmidt had turned his own horse in that direction when the girl’s voice drifted down from the cabin. “Waylon?”

  Schmidt turned toward the trim figure silhouetted by the cabin’s lantern lit doorway, facing the wash.

  Kilroy had paused, the other men continuing to lead their own mounts and the mules toward the spring. “What is it, angel?”

  “Come visit me when you’re done settin’ up.” Saradee paused. “We got . . . things to discuss.”

  The other men chuckled knowingly.

  “I’ll be there, angel,” the tall outlaw said.

  Saradee backed into the cabin and swung the door closed on the night. It latched with a wooden click.

  Schmidt led his horse toward the spring. “Like I said, that girl’s got a way about her.”

  “It’s kinda like makin’ love to a she-griz with the springtime craze,” said Kilroy, moving ahead of Schmidt. Chuckling, the outlaw stopped and waited for Schmidt to catch up to him.

  Kilroy looked around to make sure none of Saradee’s men were near, then said across Schmidt’s left shoulder, “Just between you and me, I’m gonna have to kill her.”

  He threw his head back, guffawing as he led the horses into the brushy darkness around the spring. “But by God, I ain’t never gonna forget her!”

  7.

  FLAGG

  AROUND noon the next day, Hawk and Primrose found the two prospectors sprawled at the bottom of their own latrine hole, another batch of quarreling buzzards enjoying a succulent feast. The men followed the killers’ sign until a monsoon gully-washer rolled in from the west, forcing them to take shelter in a notch cave. The rain pounded the baked clay like grape fired from two-pounder cannons, the storm’s gray curtain closing down over the mountains. Thunder chased its own booming echoes across the canyons, the horses giving regular, frightened whinnies where they were tied amongst willows.

  For an hour after the storm had lifted, the smell of sage and desert blossoms clung to the brimstone odor of the lightning, and the washes rushed like rivers. The men tended a small fire, roasting a rabbit Hawk had shot when he’d seen the storm approach.

  They slept in the cave, rising at the first wash of dawn and finding the killers’ trail thoroughly obliterated. They didn’t find as much as a cigarette butt or a soggy horse apple along the vague game trace the bunch had been following.

  The lieutenant cursed as much as his tender head allowed, and then he and Hawk continued south, making their own way, trying to anticipate the muddy washes and canyons the killers had followed.

  Late in the afternoon, as the sun tilted purple shadows away from the dusty-green western mesas and rimrocks, they drew rein on a low ridge. They built and smoked cigarettes, staring south toward three separate north/south ranges divided by the same saguaro-stippled chaparral they’d been traversing. Below them, Sonoita Wash cut its deep, narrow canyon between bosquecillos of poplar and sycamore.

  “Well, here it is, Lieutenant,” Hawk said, exhaling cigarette smoke. “The end of the line.”

  Primrose turned to him. He’d donned fresh bandages that morning, and the one around his head showed no blood. At Hawk’s insistence, he’d removed the brass buttons from his tunic and replaced them with leather ties. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Beyond the wash is Mexico.”

  “I know that. I was once stationed at Fort Huachuca.”

  “Last I heard, this country has an agreement with Mexico. Their rurales don’t chase their outlaws to our side of the line, and we don’t chase our outlaws to theirs.”

  Primrose stared at him wryly, shade slicing across the right side of his peeling face. “I suppose you’ll be turning back then?”

  “Not me.”

  “Then consider yourself a scout and a tracker for the United States Army, Mr. Hawk.”

  Hawk turned to the lieutenant with an expression of strained patience. “Fort Huachuca’s about thirty miles the other side of that ridge, Lieutenant. Best you head over there and report what happened. Let the politicians take it from there.” Hawk shrugged a shoulder. “In the meantime, when I run down those savages and turn ’em out with the coyotes, I’ll send back your money.”

  Primrose drew a deep breath and rose up in his saddle. “I’m going with you.”

  “That’d be desertion and cavorting with a felon.”

  The lieutenant sipped from his canteen. “Bendi
ng the rules for a greater cause.” Hawk opened his mouth to speak, but Primrose cut him off. “No one’s going to stop me. Least of all, a kill-crazy vigilante.”

  Hawk studied the young lieutenant through slitted eyes, the man’s insult having as much effect as a stray drop from a distant rain cloud. “The ambush was no fault of yours. Your sergeant’s a traitor, and your men were outnumbered.”

  Primrose looked off, flushing beneath his sunburn. “You see, Major Devereaux at Fort Bowie is my father-in-law.” He blinked into the light, took a deep breath. “He’s always failed to see what Lucy sees in me.”

  Hawk turned away, chuckling dryly and shaking his head.

  “So there you have it,” said Primrose.

  When Hawk didn’t say anything, Primrose put some steel into his voice. “Now, then, shall we head to Mexico?”

  Hawk turned to the young soldier, regarding him soberly, then directed his gaze southward. “See those three ranges yonder?”

  Primrose looked where Hawk was pointing.

  “The killers could have followed either of the two valleys between those ridges. To save time and our horses, I suggest we split up, each take a valley, and meet up again at the other end of the middle range.”

  The lieutenant slanted a look at him. “You’re not trying to shake free of me, are you?”

  “It’s a chance you’ll have to take, Lieutenant. If you don’t like it, Huachuca’s that way.” Hawk canted his head eastward, then gave the grulla the spurs.

  A few yards away, he stopped and hipped around in his saddle. “Keep in mind this is Yaqui country. Don’t let your guard down unless, as they say down here, you want to join the blessed.”

  He turned away and urged the grulla south, angling toward the gauzy green range on his left.

  The lieutenant watched him for a time, blinking against the dust. Trying to ward off the unease he always felt at the phrase “Old Mexico”—conjuring, as it did, a barbaric, mythic frontier of frontiers, where many a gringo had disappeared, never to be heard from again—he shucked his Spencer carbine, laid it across his saddlebows, and headed south.

  Deputy United States Marshal D.W. Flagg lay in a ridge notch, following the man in the blue shirt, tan denims, and flat-brimmed black hat with his field glasses.

  Flagg held the glasses near their ends, shading the lenses with his gloved hands. A man like Gideon Hawk, hunted by lawmen and bounty hunters for nearly two years, would detect the slightest flash of reflected light.

  “Is it Hawk?” asked Mooney Gill, one of the two scalp-hunters riding with Flagg. Gill and his Mexican partner, Juan Ochoa, knew the border country as well anyone in the Southwest.

  “No, it’s Natty Bumpo.”

  “Who?”

  Flagg turned his head right. Gill was frowning at him, a short quirley smoldering in his thin-lipped mouth.

  “Of course it’s Hawk,” Flagg grumbled.

  “No need to be insulting to mi amigo,” admonished Juan Ochoa, hunkered down on the other side of Gill. “You are in Mexico now.” Ochoa tapped his chest. “My country.”

  Flagg scowled at the Mexican. The lawman’s gray eyes—the same shade as his close-cropped hair and beard—were hard. A fly buzzed about his head, but he didn’t react to it.

  Flagg’s mouth stretched into a broad smile, his eyes suddenly as warm as they’d been hard. “Come on, Juan. We’re working together now, for chrissakes. Turn your horns in. Mooney, tell your friend to turn his horns in.”

  Gill glanced at Ochoa, still glaring at Flagg. “He has a hard time with that, Flagg, you havin’ fixed his brother with a rope cravat in Tucson and all.”

  “Juan, you know that wasn’t personal,” Flagg said. “Alberto had it comin’. If I hadn’t brought him in, a Ranger sure enough would have. I don’t know what you’re so proddy about. Didn’t he cut one of your ears off?”

  Ochoa automatically raised his small brown hand to the right side of his head, which was covered with straight, lice-flecked strands of dark brown hair. “Sí,” the Mexican allowed. “But I cut off one of his, so we were even. Alberto and me, we had, as you gringos say, buried the hatchet.”

  To Flagg’s left and lying a few feet farther down the ridge, Spade Killigrew laughed his high-pitched, cackling laugh. “Buried the hatchet? What the devil’s mercy are you idiots talking about? That’s Gideon Hawk down there, and he’s riding away from us. Call me a stickler for details, but maybe we should bury the hatchet ourselves and get after him.”

  “I’ve been tracking that son of a bitch for six months, Sheriff,” Flagg told Killigrew, the town sheriff of Coyote Springs. He and his part-time deputies, Gill and Ochoa, had thrown in with Flagg the same day the soldiers had chased Hawk and the whore out of his town and Flagg had ridden in, searching for the vigilante badge-toter. “He’ll keep another fifteen minutes,” Flagg continued. “I think it’s important that I have a good working relationship with all of the men in my employ.”

  “In your employ?” said Gill. “What does that mean?”

  “Who work for him!” Killigrew snapped, removing his black derby and running both his heavily veined hands through his wavy, pomaded hair. He wore an immaculate spade beard and mustache, both clay-caked and sweaty. “Christ, might we get this conversation finished?”

  “We don’t work for you, Flagg,” protested Ochoa. “We signed on for the reward on that hombre loco’s head!”

  “Hell,” said Gill, “after seein’ them soldier-boys slaughtered, I say we forget Hawk and go after the payroll money. Why settle for five thousand dollars split four ways, when two or three times that is right under our noses!”

  “Mooney.” Flagg gave Gill a fatherly expression of disgust. “You’re a part-time lawman, for the love of Pete. Are you suggesting we hunt down stolen money and keep it for ourselves?”

  Mooney Gill frowned, his eyes uncertain, then glanced at Juan Ochoa on his other side, who merely lifted his left shoulder and stared after Hawk, only the man’s dust scarf now visible in the southeastern distance.

  “Flagg’s right,” Killigrew said. “If we go after the payroll money, we gotta turn it in. Keepin’ all that money for ourselves . . . hell . . .” He shook his head as if trying to convince himself of a hard truth. “That just wouldn’t be right.”

  “Good man,” Flagg said, slapping the sheriff’s right shoulder. “Our business out here is to hunt down and kill Gideon Hawk. Are we all of similar sentiment? I’d hate to think I was hunting down one rogue lawman with three more of the same ilk.”

  “Shit, Flagg,” Gill sneered. “You just want your name in the papers.”

  “More than that,” Killigrew said as Flagg, flushing, slipped his field glasses back into their felt-lined case. “He wants to be the chief U.S. marshal of Arizona Territory.”

  “I bet the hombre with that job gets mucho free pussy,” Ochoa chuckled.

  “I get all the free pussy I need,” Flagg said, and spat. Wiping his mouth, he added, “But you wouldn’t fault a man for aspirating to a higher echelon, would you, boys?”

  Ochoa looked at Gill. “Now what does he say?”

  Before Gill could speak, Flagg added as he climbed to his feet, “I’m not going to promise anything, but if you boys help me take down Hawk, I might . . . and I said might . . . help you track the payroll money.”

  Killigrew looked at him. “And?”

  “And,” said Flagg, “if the thieves have hidden that money where, after a thorough, time-consuming search, we weren’t able to find it . . . well, that’s just the curse of Viejo Méjico.” Flagg dropped his hands to his thighs, slapping dust from his whipcord trousers.

  They all had a good laugh.

  As they headed down the slope to where their horses were ground-tied in the ridge’s shadows, Flagg draped an arm across Juan Ochoa’s shoulders. “We got us a good workin’ relationship now, Juan? In spite of my history with Alberto?”

  Ochoa chuckled, then looked around with a mock expression of bewilderment. “Alberto . .
. ¿quién es ese?”

  Who is that?

  Ochoa laughed. “And I have good news for you, Señor Flagg.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Señor Hawk appears to be heading for El Garabato, an abandoned mining village not far from here. I know a shortcut through a rimrock. We should get there well ahead of him. Prepare a little surprise maybe, yes?”

  “Juan,” Flagg said, squeezing the smaller man’s shoulders as they approached the horses, “I’m growing right fond of you.”

  8.

  DEATH IN EL GARABATO

  THE sun had nearly set when Hawk halted his horse on the crest of a low hill and looked down on the thirty or so hovels scattered at the bottom of a rocky hollow. Private dwellings encircled a small business district and central square, the main feature of which was a stout, brown church.

  Except for wheeling birds, there was no more movement in the pueblecito than there was in the three mines gaping in the southern ridge towering over it. The only light was the sun’s dying rays receding across the cracked red roof tiles and buckling adobe walls. The only sounds, the dusky breeze rustling the brush and the tinny mutter of the sulfur-fetid creek curving around the town’s western edge.

  An old mining village, no doubt abandoned when the gold and silver pinched out on the ridge.

  Hawk slipped his Henry from his saddle boot, levered the rifle one-handed, depressed the hammer to half-cock, and laid the barrel across his saddlebows. He kneed the grulla slowly down the hill and into the eerily quiet pueblecito, raking his gaze from right to left across the narrow street grown up with sage and cluttered with tumbleweeds.

  A thud sounded on his right.

  Reining the grulla down, he swung the rifle barrel toward a two-story hovel with a balcony sagging down its west wall. The breeze caught one of the hanging shutters and knocked it gently against its frame.

  Hawk continued past the alcalde’s, mayor’s, office . . . past a cantina with a small front courtyard under a crude brush arbor, past a livery barn and public corrals grown up with wild oats and yucca, and past a tall, narrow structure identifying itself in Spanish as the headquarters for the local rurale troupe.