Border Snakes Read online

  Hawk poured a glass of water and sagged into the chair. It creaked uneasily beneath his weight. He stared at her, waiting.

  She returned the stare, trying for all she was worth to be coquettish, sensual, but she was like a little girl playing make-believe in a tree house. She slid off the edge of the bed, dropped to her knees, and crawled toward him, placing a hand on his left knee.

  “Wanna do it first?”

  “Nope. I want you to tell me about Kid Reno, and then I want you to go.”

  “Come on,” she said. “I’m young. Not even fourteen yet. My skin’s really smooth.” With one hand, she nudged her sweater off her shoulders, laying them bare. She leaned a little farther forward, giving him a better look down her shallow cleavage, and shook her hair away from her face. “You can do whatever you want. Might cost you a little more, ’cause I’m so young. . . .” She paused. “I won’t even stay and pester ya afterward.”

  Hawk felt the nip of anger in his head and hardened his jaws. “You don’t know a damn thing about Kid Reno, do you?”

  She frowned. “Sure. But wouldn’t you like—?”

  “No, I wouldn’t like. What I would like is for you to haul your little ass out of here.”

  She winced as though slapped, then pushed up off her knees and sat on the edge of the bed. Anger flashed in her eyes. “What . . . you don’t like girls?”

  “Not as young as you.” Hawk suddenly realized something that he’d only half noticed when he’d first seen the girl. He looked down at her belly. It was slightly swollen in contrast to the rest of her.

  His anger ebbed and he drew a sharp breath. “Where’s your family, Doris?”

  She frowned. “Why?”

  “Where?”

  Her eyes went to the door, and the corners of her mouth pulled down. “Dead.”

  “All of ’em?”

  She nodded slightly and stared at the door. She licked the scar on her lower lip and began to push herself up. Hawk stuck his leg out, resting his boot on the bed, blocking her way to the door.

  “You’re alone. . . .”

  “All right,” she said, her voice hard, shuttling her angry gaze to him. “I don’t know where Kid Reno is. But I seen him once . . . three months ago. He came through town with five other men, and I don’t know why you’re lookin’ for him, but you sure as hell better hope you don’t find him. He’ll kill you deader’n hell, mister!”

  She tried to stand but came up against Hawk’s leg and fell back down on the bed, her glare growing sharper. “Let me go, you son of a bitch!”

  “You got one in the chute, Doris?”

  She looked startled. She dropped her eyes suddenly to her belly and pressed her hand against it, as though caressing the baby inside her.

  “What’re you gonna do—have the kid here?” Hawk jerked his head toward the window, indicating the stinking town.

  The girl just stared at him, incredulous. She needed money. She probably thought that using her body was a good way to get it. After she got it—by rummaging through Hawk’s clothes after he’d fallen asleep, maybe—she’d slip off into the night, five hundred dollars richer.

  Hawk cursed. He reached inside his vest and fished the wad of greenbacks from the breast pocket of his shirt. He peeled off several bills, dropped his leg from the bed, and held the money toward the girl.

  “Take it.”

  Doris glanced skeptically at the money, like a coyote being lured into a trap with scraps of fresh meat.

  “Take it,” he said, waving the bills at her.

  Slowly, she lifted her hand, accepted the money, and inspected it quickly.

  “It’s a hundred dollars,” Hawk said. “Take it and get out of here, Doris. Take it and go have your baby a goddamn long ways from Saguaro. Do yourself and the kid a favor, and don’t come back.”

  Doris was still skeptical, wary. She glanced from the money to Hawk. “You . . . don’t want anything for it?”

  “I want you to hop the next stage out of here.”

  Doris continued to frown at him. From the rooms around them filtered the din of bawdy male conversation. There were several cracks of a distant pistol, and a dog was barking on the town’s far edge.

  Finally, Doris lowered the money to her lap and, keeping her eyes on Hawk, rose and clomped over to the door. She set her hand on the knob and turned it slowly, watching him as though expecting him to stop her and tell her it was all a joke: “I’ll be needing the money back.”

  When the bolt clicked, she jerked the door open, clomped out, closed the door quickly behind her, and clomped off down the hall and down the stairs.

  Hawk threw the last of his water back and set the glass on the dresser. With a ragged sigh, he rose from the creaky chair, went over to the window, and stared out at the raucous night.

  10.

  RIDE TO SWEETWATER

  HAWK’Sgun was in his hand before his head had risen from his pillow. The ratcheting click as he cocked the hammer echoed around the shabby room that was lit with bloodred light washing through the single, drawn window shade.

  He looked at the door.

  He’d heard something in his sleep. Probably someone in the hall, possibly another bushwhacker hoping to catch him snoring. He’d been expecting it all night, slumbering the way in which he’d become accustomed—light as a long-lived bobcat.

  The hall floor creaked. A spur trilled faintly. Beneath the door, a shadow flickered. There was a soft scraping sound, and then a small slip of paper slid into view through the crack beneath the door.

  A sliver of morning light burnished a corner of the paper. It was a small, manila-colored envelope with writing on it. The writing was in shadow, and Hawk couldn’t make it out from the bed.

  He waited, keeping his big, silver-chased Russian aimed at the door. When the shadow beneath the door vanished and soft footsteps began to retreat, Hawk pushed out of bed, crossed the room barefoot, and pressed his left shoulder against the wall beside the door. He turned the key in the lock, drew the door open quickly, and thrust the Russian through the opening.

  The hall was empty. Men snored behind closed doors on both sides. Soft footsteps faded down the stairs, with the occasional soft chimes of a spur.

  Hawk looked down. His last name was penciled on the envelope—large, blocky letters. He picked it up and strode down the hall to the top of the stairs, arriving just in time to see a long-haired girl turn at the bottom toward the hotel’s outside door.

  She stopped with her hand on the latch, and turned an Indian-dark face toward Hawk, glancing at him sidelong, expressionless—a round-faced girl in a cream-and-brown calico blouse under a wool vest and beaded necklace. She wore a bullet-crowned brown hat, and a gun and shell belt on her hips. Before Hawk could say anything, she moved on out the door and latched it behind her.

  His eyes heavily mantled by his dark brows, Hawk depressed the Russian’s hammer, tore open the envelope, and removed a scrap of plain, lined notepaper. He shook it open, and held the dark-penciled words up to the light.

  RIDE TO SWEETWATER

  He recited the words aloud and lowered the paper.

  “What’s in Sweetwater?” A moment later, staring blankly into space, he said, “And who in hell are you, girl?”

  He hurried down the stairs and looked through the window right of the door. The late-dawn light showed the back of the long-haired girl riding away on a brown-and-white pinto pony, heading back toward the main part of town. As Hawk watched, she booted the pinto into a trot, and a moment later she disappeared behind some falling-down mud huts and dilapidated stables.

  Gone.

  Hawk turned toward the hotel’s front desk. The long-haired gent who’d been lounging behind the desk last night, asleep, was lounging there now in much the same position as he had last night, asleep, his arms crossed on his chest. He snored softly, chin lifting as he inhaled, lowering as he exhaled. He probably wouldn’t know who Hawk’s messenger girl was, anyway. Something told Hawk she was a stranger
around here.

  He looked at the front of the small envelope in his hand, on which had been scrawled: HAWK.

  But she, or someone she knew, knew him. . . .

  He went upstairs and dressed.

  At the livery barn across from the hotel, Hawk had to saddle his own horse, as there wasn’t a hostler to be found. He led the grulla out through the barn’s double doors, and stepped into the saddle, reining the horse south—the direction his caller had ridden.

  It was after seven, but the town owned a funereal silence in the wake of last night’s frenetic revelry. Hawk was glad he’d awakened the desk clerk for directions to Sweetwater, an abandoned stage relay station in the hills about six miles south of town.

  He’d have gotten no such help in the streets of Saguaro. He didn’t see a single soul out and about even as he headed back through the business district, and on the southern outskirts he saw only a couple of mangy coyotes and one skittish rabbit.

  The only man he saw on the street was dead—a scrawny half-breed sitting against the porch of a run-down cantina, his hands cupped around the knife in his guts, chin dipped to a shoulder.

  Someone had run off with his boots, half removing one filthy sock in the process.

  The ragged shacks at the town’s edge fell back behind Hawk as he followed an old freight trail and stage road over the rocky southern hills. He assumed that the freshest horse tracks in the trace’s finely churned powder were those of the girl who’d delivered the note.

  They were easy to pick out, as there were none even two days fresher, and there weren’t that many to begin with. The trail obviously wasn’t used much—probably only by saddle tramps and, a couple of times a month, by freighters delivering supplies to the small army outpost that straddled the Arizona /California border.

  Hawk wasn’t far from town before he slipped the Henry from its sheath and rammed a live round into the chamber. He knew he could very well be riding into an ambush. A man with as many enemies as Hawk should have burned the note and forgotten about it. A normal, cautious man. Hawk was neither.

  Besides, someone might be genuinely looking to collect on the five hundred dollars he’d offered and didn’t want to be seen with Hawk in town.

  He’d followed a sign for the Sweetwater Station down a left tine in a trail fork and was about to leave that secondary trail and circle the station to approach from the opposite direction when he spied a man standing in the high rocks off the trail’s right side. A lone gunman with a rifle and a hat with its brim curled sharply on both sides.

  Hawk tightened his grip on the Henry, jerking the grulla to a halt. Before he could raise the rifle, the lookout turned to face in the direction of the station. He waved his arms above his head broadly—a signal wave. Hawk considered the man for a moment, then, resettling the Henry across his saddlebows, booted the grulla forward.

  Ten minutes later he came upon another lookout standing in cactus-studded rocks not far from the trail, on its left side. This was a burly gent with a red bib beard and dressed in black bull hide, bandoliers crossed on his stout chest.

  The man held a Sharps rifle across both shoulders. He grinned toothily as Hawk approached, then lowered the rifle and gave a mock, graceful bow, throwing a pale, freckled arm out to indicate the trail ahead.

  Again, Hawk booted the grulla forward, and presently the Sweetwater Station appeared among large red boulders strewn like the toys of a giant, temperamental child on both sides of the trail, in a depression lime green with creosote, cat’s claw, and time-worn saguaros. A windmill and a brush arbor fronted an adobe stable and a couple of corrals formed from woven ironwood and ocotillo branches. The station itself—a long, L-shaped, adobe-brick structure with a brush roof and a wide front veranda—nestled in the chaparral on the left.

  A large sign above the veranda, so faded that most of the letters had disappeared, announced SWEETWATER STATION.

  A half dozen men milled under the arbor of cottonwood poles, around a smoky coffee fire. A dozen or so saddled horses were tied to cottonwood-rail hitch racks fronting a stock trough over which the wooden blades of the windmill turned, squawking like a dying chicken.

  Some of the mounts ate from feedbags draped over their ears. Others lazed in the sun, their hides dusty and sweat lathered, saddle cinches hanging free beneath their bellies. The men beneath the brush arbor watched Hawk with mute interest.

  They were all well armed with pistols and knives, some carrying rifles, but no offensive moves were made. It was almost, Hawk mused, as though they’d been warned not to make any, or to even seem to make any.

  Another man, closer to Hawk and acting as a third lookout, leaned his butt against a boulder fronting an armless saguaro. He was a little, craggy-featured man with longish, light-red hair spilling down from a shabby derby hat, and holding a Winchester across his thighs, aimed away from Hawk. As Hawk approached, the man tipped his head to one side and gave the newcomer a slit-eyed, dimple-cheeked smile against the sun.

  It occurred to Hawk, as he rode past, who the hard case was: Seymore T. Lindley. A slippery desperado from far west Texas, and wanted in nearly every frontier territory from Dakota to Texas.

  Hawk allowed himself a bemused grin as he angled toward the station house, in front of which three saddled horses stood, tied to one of the two hitch racks, idly swishing their tails. One of the mounts, a sleek buckskin, turned its head toward Hawk, flicked its ears, and whinnied.

  The grulla responded in kind.

  Hawk’s eyes were on the cabin, in the open front door of which a tall, rangy young woman appeared. She stood with both hands on the door casing, her long, straight blond hair sliding around in the wind, a thin cigar clamped between her white teeth as she appraised the newcomer with a cool, faintly haughty expression.

  Hawk’s grave eyes belied the recognition behind them.

  He said her name to himself silently, and his loins heated instantly, aching. His gut tightened in revulsion against the sudden, physical response, denying it.

  Saradee Jones.

  Christ.

  “Well, look what the old bobcat dragged in.”

  The girl sauntered out the door, spurs ringing, in men’s dusty trail garb including a low-cut, pin-striped shirt showing the lacy edge of a camisole beneath, and a small silver cross dangling from a rawhide string to nestle in her deep, tan cleavage. She wore tan chaps over blue denims, a cartridge belt from which a hand-tooled black holster hung, thonged low on her right thigh, a pearl-gripped Colt jutting above its keeper thong.

  She kicked out her worn brown boots with undershot heels, tucked her thumbs behind her cartridge belt, and favored Hawk with a knowing, smoldering smile around the cheroot in her teeth. “Been a while, lover.”

  “Not long enough.”

  “Don’t be that way.” Sunlight angled under the brim of her tan Stetson and flared across her lilac-blue eyes. “We got history, you an’ me.”

  “I take it you were on the prowl in Saguaro last night.” Funny he hadn’t seen her, though. Tall, buxom blondes dressed like male gunnies stuck out in crowds like red silk in a funeral procession.

  “Nah, not me. Some of the boys.” She lifted her chin slightly, to indicate the men behind Hawk.

  Hawk glanced over his shoulder toward the hard case guarding the trail at the edge of the yard. “Like Lindley.”

  “Can’t keep Seymore from a party. I’ve done tried. Towns—even one as wide open as Saguaro—ain’t no place for wanted killers. But some men just won’t listen to reason.”

  Just then a figure moved behind Saradee Jones, and Hawk saw the girl who’d delivered the note to his hotel room slip through the station house door, sort of slither around the casing as though she were making brief love to it. Her big, brown, Indian eyes were on Hawk, and they bespoke as little emotion as her broad, dark red lips.

  As she flanked Saradee, another figured moved out of the cabin—a man dressed in an expensively cut black suit with a crisp white shirt and a ribbon tie blo
wing around his neck. He was a dark-haired, dark-mustached gent—not a Mexican, maybe a Scot—with oily black eyes and a grim smile. His pale skin was sun-blistered beneath the shade line of his hat. Three pistols, including a belly gun, bristled around his hips and breeze-whipped flaps of his black frock coat.

  Hawk’s busy mind flipped through the sheaf of names in his brain, and clicked like a roulette wheel making a sudden stop on a winning number. Melvin Hansen.

  Not a Scot. A dark Swede from Wisconsin.

  Hawk’s eyes must have betrayed his recognition. Saradee chuckled, spreading her lips, removing the cheroot from her teeth, and spitting a fleck of cigar skin from her lips. “Melvin, meet Gideon Hawk.”

  Hansen dipped his chin slightly.

  Saradee jerked her left thumb over her shoulder at the Indian girl. “This is April. I sent her with the note after my boys got back and told me a tall stranger with two big pistols, a Henry rifle, and five hundred greenbacks was makin’ fast friends with the local undertaker. I figured you were less likely to shoot a girl skulking around your room than a man . . . and you wouldn’t know April’s deadlier’n a coiled rattlesnake.”

  Saradee smiled flirtatiously. “I would have come myself but there’s folks there who might recognize me—folks whose fur I rubbed in the wrong direction, time or two.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “The way I remember it . . . you sorta liked the way I rubbed your fur . . . when I’d come skulkin’ about your room.” Saradee took a long drag from the cheroot and let the wind tear it away from her red lips. “Remember?”

  Hawk’s throat grew heavy. His undeniable lust for this woman made his anger flare. He should have killed her when he’d first met her down in Mexico, where he’d chased her and another, now-deceased gang after she’d murdered and robbed an army payroll and kidnapped a Mexican whore Hawk had rescued from an overzealous posse. He should have put a bullet between those big, saucy breasts she was shoving toward him now and kicked her out cold with a shovel.