21.
WITHOUT MERCY
GIDEON Hawk rose up from behind a boulder on the canyon’s northern ridge and, teeth gritted, raised his Winchester to his right shoulder.
He planted a bead on the hat of Deputy Bill Houston riding at the head of the four-man pack clomping along the canyon floor. Hawk let the bead drop into the V-shaped notch on the rifle’s receiver. Houston turned toward him slightly, opening his mouth to speak to Press Miller.
“This one’s for Juliana,” Hawk muttered, and pulled the trigger.
The rifle leapt and boomed, the report echoing.
Houston’s head jerked toward his left shoulder. He dropped his reins, and his horse screamed, rearing. Without a sound from his own lips, Houston sagged back off the dun’s left hip, bounced off a boulder, and piled up in a cholla patch, unmoving.
“Jesus Christ!” screamed Galen Allidore, losing his own adobe-trimmed, bullet-crowned hat as his whitesocked black horse sun-fished sharply.
Hawk grinned tightly. At first, he’d been appalled by the notion of killing lawmen, but it was easier than he’d thought. He hoped Juliana was watching from heaven, as he’d hoped Linda and Jubal had watched him hang Three-Fingers Ned Meade.
He drilled another round into the ground beneath the shifting hooves of Allidore’s black, then grinned as the horse reared, throwing the deputy off its back and into the rocks near Bill Houston.
Lowering the smoking Winchester, Hawk glanced right. Press Miller had dismounted. As his horse scrambled off up canyon, reins trailing, Miller dove behind a boulder and snaked his own Winchester over the top. Hawk jerked his head behind his cover as Miller’s rifle popped and the slug slammed into the boulder in front of Hawk, spraying shards as the bullet ricocheted.
Hawk lifted his head above the boulder, extended his Winchester toward Miller, grunted a curse, and fired two quick rounds a half second after Miller ducked. Another rifle shot exploded to Hawk’s left.
Hound-Dog Tuttle had dropped to one broad knee in the middle of the trail, his horse’s dust still sifting around him as he jacked another round into his Winchester’s breech and aimed the barrel up the ridge.
Hawk ducked, turned, and pressed his back to the boulder. Tuttle’s slug blew up scree on his right.
They were making a game of it. That was all right. He needed all the practice he could get.
He pushed off his heels and ran straight up the ridge, another slug spanging off the rocks to his left. He dodged behind a witch’s finger of sandstone, and another slug blasted the finger, spraying shards on both sides.
Hawk edged his rifle around the finger’s left side. Below, the three surviving deputies were scrambling up the ridge, dodging behind cover.
His death’s-head grin in place, Hawk levered and fired three times. When his smoke and dust were settling, all three deputies had gone to ground behind boulders. Gritting his teeth, rage and fury blending to turn his blood black, Hawk snapped off two more shots, then gave a whoop, dashed out from behind the finger, and scrambled straight up the ridge.
He glanced left and up, where Juliana’s lifeless body lay concealed in the rocks. A fresh wave of rage washed through him, making his heart pound. Switching course slightly, skipping and leaping over stones and holding the Winchester in his right hand, he ran northeast toward the sharply pitched, sun-baked boulder field near the ridge’s notched crest, a good three hundred feet away.
He’d lead these bastards toward the ridge, kill them one by one along the way, and let the buzzards and desert wolves scatter their bones along the rocks.
Two rifles blasted simultaneously, the slugs plowing sand and gravel a good ten feet below Hawk’s heels. He stopped, turned, fired two quick shots toward Allidore, another toward Hound-Dog Tuttle farther down the ridge, then leapt behind a knob from which a spindly cedar grew.
A bullet punched into the cedar, which folded over itself with a crackling sound.
Press Miller’s voice rose from several yards down the ridge. “Galen! Hound-Dog!”
Hawk doffed his hat and, crabbing forward, edged a look over the knob. He saw part of a hat thirty yards below and right, between two rocks. He recognized it as Miller’s Texas-creased, black Stetson, with a braided leather band. The hat jerked to and fro, as though Miller was sending hand signals to the other two men spread out along the ridge to Hawk’s left.
Seconds later, keeping their heads down so that Hawk could see only the tops of their crowns, the men spread out across the ridge, no doubt intending to surround him.
Hawk peered up the rocky, cactus-studded slope turning russet by the westward-falling sun, shadows angling out from the rock formations. A hundred yards up and right, two rock palisades rose from a vast crag of solid, black granite.
He scrambled out of the hollow and, swinging his gaze behind, catching glimpses of all three deputies spread out and moving toward him, ran straight up the ridge. He zigzagged around barrel cacti and boulders as his pursuers fired from below, most shots either too high or too low, though one carved a notch from his right boot heel.
“Come on, you sons o’ bitches!” he shouted. “You wanted me. Here I am!”
Fifteen minutes after leaving the hollow, he gained the granite crag. He ran a hand along the pitted and fissured stone wall as he cast another glance behind.
He could see only Miller and Tuttle from this angle, crouching and climbing toward him, slipping in scree and dodging behind cover. Tuttle had lost his hat and, in the cool, still air, Hawk could hear his labored, rattling breaths. Hound-Dog was one of the best trackers Hawk had known, but his overindulgence at the supper table made him useless without his horse.
Hawk wheezed a laugh through his own labored breaths, then moved farther up the slope and turned and began climbing the crag, probing the eroded wall for hand-and footholds. He used only his left hand, as the Winchester occupied his right. He was two-thirds to the top of the main scarp when a bullet barked into the wall about six inches to his right, showering his face with granite slivers. Several stung like spider bites.
A wink later, the report echoed from behind.
As small streams of blood dribbled from the rock slivers in his cheeks and forehead, he cast a look over his right shoulder. Fifty yards away, Press Miller crouched behind a greasewood shrub, ejecting the spent shell from his rifle’s breech.
Hawk turned back to the wall and barreled up and over the top as another slug slammed into the wall, the shot reverberating around the canyon, nearly drowning out Miller’s shouted epithet and the metallic rasp of his rifle’s cocking lever.
Hawk moved to the opposite side of the crag, his boots crunching the fine, black gravel and dried bird shit, the sandstone palisades rising on either side and a hundred feet above. At the far side, he dropped to a knee behind one of the towers, edged a look down slope.
Galen Allidore was moving up through boulders and catclaw, crouched over the dusty rifle he held in both hands, his gray duster flapping around his six-shooters and black denims. Allidore was peering sharply to Hawk’s right, a quizzical frown pinching his features.
Hawk snugged the Winchester to his shoulder, aimed down the barrel, waited for the deputy to clear two wagon-sized rocks. “Turn back, Galen,” he shouted. “Go back to your kids. I don’t want to kill you!”
Allidore whipped his head from left to right. Looking up, he spotted Hawk and snapped the rifle to his shoulder.
Hawk pursed his lips and fired. The shaggy-headed deputy screamed as the slug punched through his upper right chest, blowing him off his feet. He landed on his butt, back resting straight up and down against a boulder.
He dropped the rifle, which rolled off his thighs. As he clutched the wound, grimacing, Hawk racked another shell, aimed, and fired.
This round punched through the middle of Allidore’s chest, killing him instantly, his legs jerking as his torso slid slowly groundward.
Before Allidore’s hatless head hit the gravel, Hawk turned and ran back to the other end of the scarp. Both Miller and Tuttle were running toward the crag’s base, hat brims shading their faces. Miller was coming from farther away, so Hawk crouched and shot Hound-Dog Tuttle’s right knee out from under him.
Hound-Dog dropped to both knees and screamed. To his right, Miller switched course and ran toward Tuttle.
One hand to his bloody knee, Hound-Dog raised his head, face etched with pain, bellowing like a poleaxed mule.
“Crawl back behind the rocks!” Miller shouted at him.
When Miller was fifteen feet to Hound-Dog’s right, Hawk cocked and aimed, pulled the trigger. A neat round hole blossomed in the middle of Hound-Dog’s sun-bronzed forehead.
Hawk quickly ejected the spent shell and looked at Miller. The senior deputy had stopped in his tracks, shuttling his exasperated glance from Hound-Dog to Hawk.
Hawk planted a bead on Miller’s badge winking in the fading light. As he squeezed the trigger, Miller dove to his right. He leapt to his feet and dove behind a boulder as Hawk again triggered the Winchester, the slug clipping the boulder’s lip and spraying adobe-colored sand.
Hawk turned, edged around the northernmost palisade, and followed the scarp to where it feathered into the ridge, then resumed climbing. The terrain grew rocky and boulder-strewn, and he hopped from rock to rock.
Reaching the crest, he peered down the opposite side. A deep, brown barranca dropped away, a corduroy landscape much like the canyon Hawk had just climbed out of. There way no way into it from there, however, as the ridge was a sheer rock wall five hundred feet deep.
Hawk turned around. Miller was scampering up the rocks, dropping to his knees as he slipped in talus slides and tripped over cactus, aiming his Winchester uphill in his right hand.
Hawk leapt onto a boulder then dropped into the hollow on the other side, the sharp, geometrical lines of tumbled boulders surrounding him. There was no comfortable place to sit, so he leaned back and twisted his torso slightly sideways, his legs wedged among the slab-sided rocks. He rested his rifle on a rock edge and ducked his head, so he wouldn’t be seen from down slope.
He waited, thumbing the Winchester’s stock.
He craned his head to stare through a slight gap between two boulders above him. Beyond the gap, a shadow moved, and there was the slight ching of a spur, the rake of a boot heel.
Hawk set his right boot, straightened, and lifted his head above the hollow. Miller stood twelve feet away, on a titled rock slab, crouching and looking to Hawk’s left.
“Right here, Press!” Hawk snaked the rifle over the boulder before him and tripped the trigger.
Miller dodged the bullet, swung his own Winchester toward Hawk. The rifle spoke, tearing up shards before Hawk’s face. Hawk blinked as he cocked the Winchester, tracked Miller, and fired.
Miller sidestepped from the bullet’s path as he cocked his own weapon and fired again.
Hawk ducked, lifted the Winchester, emptied it into the air over and around Miller’s bobbing head. As Miller, who’d clambered into a shallow notch to Hawk’s right, blasted away with his own rifle, Hawk dropped his Winchester and clawed his Russian and his Colt from their holsters.
If anyone had been in the area, they would have thought a small war was being played out atop that ridge. The two men fired without pause, most of their rounds hammering only rock, until Hawk’s pistols clicked on empty cylinders.
He pulled his head back into the hollow, dropped the Colt into its holster, and, choking on his own wafting powder smoke, flipped open the Russian’s loading gate. His ears rang from the din.
He’d gotten only three shells seated in their chambers before a shadow passed over him.
“Put it down, you son of a bitch!” Miller’s taut voice was a decibel higher than the ringing in Hawk’s ears.
Hawk’s hands froze. He looked up. Miller stood over him, a black-gripped Colt Army extended in his right hand, the hammer cocked. Miller’s lips shaped a diabolical smile, one eye squeezed nearly closed.
“Climb on out of there or die like a rat in its hole.”
Hawk stared up at him, his face burning. How could he have let a tinhorn like Press Miller get the drop on him? He should have kept one gun loaded.
For a second, he considered flipping the Russian’s loading gate closed, spinning the cylinder, and taking his chances with the three seated shells. But he’d no doubt be dead before the loading gate had fallen against the pistol’s silver chasing.
“Drop ’em both,” Miller growled.
Hawk cursed silently, squeezed the gun in his hands as he stared up at the deputy. He could put the Russian to his own head, deny Miller the satisfaction. But then, he’d never respected suicide. Miller’s spruce-green duster danced about his scuffed, stovepipe boots.
“Drop ’em both,” Miller repeated, edging his voice with menace.
Hawk shrugged, set both pistols at his feet, grabbed the boulder ledge above, and began climbing out of the crypt-like hollow. Miller stepped back, turning sideways and aiming his Colt straight out from his shoulder.
The deputy was partially silhouetted by the falling sun, but enough light reached his face to show the several bullet grazes and cuts from rock shards. Blood shone on the top of his right shoulder, where his duster was torn.
Hawk stood before him, raised his hands shoulder high. He offered a sinister smile. “Well, you got me, Deputy. I’m all yours.”
“Put your hands down.”
“Don’t you want to cuff me?”
Miller steadied the pistol in his hand, aiming down the barrel at Hawk, one eye nearly closed, the other reflecting the sunset’s copper-lemon glow. “Why would I wanna do that?”
Hawk hiked a shoulder, pulled his lips farther back from his big, square teeth, which glowed against his sun-blackened skin. “You’re gonna take me in, aren’t you? Isn’t that what you law-abiding lawmen do?”
Miller’s revolver shook slightly as he bunched his lips with fury. “You’re gonna die right here, you murderin’ bastard. Just like you killed my partners. Without mercy.”
“That makes you just like me, then, doesn’t it?”
When Miller said nothing, Hawk laughed, throwing his head back. Miller’s dark face turned even darker as he stared down his pistol’s barrel at Hawk, whose guffaws climbed to a crescendo and echoed around the ridge.
Behind Miller, crabbing along the rocks toward the ridge, another person appeared. Saradee Jones approached and stopped about twenty yards down the ridge, extending both pistols toward Miller.
Laughing, Hawk gave no indication he’d seen the girl, but kept his eyes riveted on Miller, watching Saradee in his vision’s periphery.
Slowly, Saradee lowered her matched Colts, a strange, haunted look in her eyes as she slid her gaze to Hawk. He cast a casual, fleeting glance at her, and could tell by her expression that she wasn’t going to shoot Miller.
She was waiting for Miller to shoot.
Hawk didn’t blame her. She knew that, sooner or later, when the exhilaration of the cat-and-mouse game ended, and the thrill of their bizarre couplings diminished, it was going to come down to either him or her.
This way, she didn’t have to kill him herself.
Hawk felt nothing. No emotion whatever save a hilarious irony and a vague relief that it was all over. He wished he’d been able to kill Miller for Juliana and the hypocritical law Miller represented. Shit, Flagg and this tinhorn would probably return to Denver heros.
But Hawk had known going in that taking them all down was a long shot.
Hawk laughed at the vast mirth of it all.
A muscle in Miller’s cheek twitched. He squeezed the Colt’s trigger. The hammer clicked against the firing pin.
Hawk’s laughter ceased, the echoes continuing to chase themselves around the canyon as Miller stared, horrified, at the empty pistol in his hand. He thumbed back the hammer, pulled the trigger.
Click.
He tried again, gritting his teeth.
Click.
Hawk chuckled.
Finally, Miller tossed the revolver away and charged, bellowing like an enraged bull buffalo and swinging his right fist back behind him. As he neared Hawk, he brought the fist forward, spittle spraying from his gritted teeth.
At the last second, Hawk bent forward. Miller’s fist whistled over his head. Hawk shoved his right shoulder into the man’s belly, wrapping his arms around Miller’s waist. He straightened, pivoting back toward the ridge, flinging Miller over the lip, the deputy’s boots kicking stones and brush.
“Noooo!”
Miller’s shrill cry joined the screech of a golden eagle as the deputy sailed into the vast emptiness over the canyon. Falling, arms and legs spread wide, he stared at Hawk with terrified eyes, his mouth forming a dark, horrific circle. He grew smaller and smaller until, only a brown speck, his body was engulfed by the canyon’s murky shadows.
Stitched deep in the growing evening breeze, Hawk heard the soft, crunching thud of Miller’s body.
He stared into the yawning chasm for a moment, then slowly turned around.
Saradee stood where she’d been standing when she’d lowered her pistols. They were still in her hands. She stood with one hip cocked, regarding Hawk with a half sneer on her lips.
Hawk opened his hands. “Since you went to all the trouble of climbing up here, you might as well have shot him.”
“Intended to,” she said, her blond hair wisping about her face and toying with the brim of her man’s hat pulled low. “But when I saw him with his gun on you, I thought, why not let him solve my problem for me? I’d have killed him right after.”
Hawk spread his arms. “I’m unarmed. It’s not too late.”
“I’m tired of fogging your trail,” she said, dropping her chin and pursing her lips. He thought he detected a slight sheen over her eyes. “I’m tired of trailing you around like a damn lovesick girl in pigtails, not knowing whether to fuck you or gut you with a pigsticker.”
Hawk spat to one side and squinted at her. He’d gotten used to the idea of his death, and felt a vague disappointment that he was still here with his memories and his rage. “If you don’t kill me now, eventually, I’ll have to kill you. You’re no better than any of the others I hunt.”
Saradee smiled proudly, and raised her Colts. Aiming them both at Hawk’s head, she thumbed the hammers back and slitted her eyes while her wide, rich lips formed a pantherlike smile. “That’s a bonded fact, Gideon Hawk. Don’t you forget it. Only problem is I’m prettier, and a hell of a lot better in bed.”
She moved toward him, lowered the pistols, but kept them pointed at Hawk. She stabbed his belly with both barrels, leaned forward, and kissed him.
She sucked at his tongue, nibbled his lips. He didn’t return the kiss, but, as she rubbed against him, groaning softly, keeping the Colts pressed to either side of his navel, he could not deny the animal pull of her.
His cheeks burned; his pulse throbbed. Part of him wanted to step forward and rip her blouse off her shoulders, exposing those magnificent breasts, then throw her down and set her to writhing beneath him once more.
Another part of him wanted to smash her with his fists, to blow her brains out with his .44s.
Chuckling knowingly, she kissed him once more, tenderly, then pulled away. She kept the guns snugged against his belly. “Until next time, lover.”
She depressed the hammers, gave the guns a twirl, dropped them into their holsters, wheeled, and headed back down the ridge.
Hawk stared after her, until the southern canyon’s shadows had swallowed her, and he was left alone with the wind and the gathering darkness.