Rogue Lawman #3: Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

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.

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?”

“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?”

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.”

The lieutenant sipped from his canteen. “Bending 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 to the young soldier, regarding him soberly, then directed his gaze southward. “See those three ranges yonder?”

“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.”

“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.”

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 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.”

“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.”

“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 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?”

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.”

“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.

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?”

“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.”