Rogue Lawman #3: Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

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.

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.

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.

As the horse plodded slowly along the street, an aroma of sweet Mexican tobacco smoke touched Hawk’s nostrils. He halted the grulla before a dry stone fountain fronting the church, and looked around.

Movement before and above him caught his attention, and he lifted his gaze to the church’s bell tower. A gray-bearded man in a low-crowned straw sombrero stood in the tower, waving his right arm slowly above his head. As Hawk watched, the man extended the arm left, indicating the boulder- and hovel-strewn hillside to Hawk’s right.

Catching only a half glimpse of a rifle barrel, Hawk released his reins and threw his body hard down the grulla’s left hip. The rifle exploded the same instant Hawk’s right shoulder hit the ground, the slug whistling over the grulla’s saddle and plunking into a wall on the other side of the street.

The toe of Hawk’s left boot caught in the stirrup, and the bolting horse dragged him several feet, saving his life as a shooter behind him popped three quick pills into the dirt where he’d fallen. His boot slipped free, and he rolled up against the fountain’s bowl, which partly shielded him from the hillside and the first bushwhacker.

He cast a look back the way he’d been dragged. His Henry lay in the street, cocking lever extended. Lifting his gaze above the rifle, he saw a tall, red-faced man with a thin silver beard step out from behind the rurales office, levering a fresh round into his Winchester. Another, indistinguishable face appeared in the office’s front window.

Hawk bolted to his knees, clawing both pistols from their holsters. He triggered his first shot at the red-faced man, whose eyes snapped wide beneath his hat brim as he jerked back behind the wall. The Russian’s hammer had barely dropped before Hawk triggered the Colt toward the movement he’d spied on his right.

As Hawk swung back toward the rurale headquarters, the hillside shooter burned a bullet across his right cheek. Hawk trained both pistols on the red-faced gent, who had just stepped out from behind the rurale building, raising his Winchester. Hawk and the furry-faced bushwhacker fired at the same time, Hawk’s slug nipping the right shoulder of the man’s duster, the man’s bullet winging six inches left of Hawk’s face.

Hawk fired two more quick rounds, both slugs carving adobe from the rurale office as the red-faced gunman withdrew behind it, a badge glinting on the right lapel of his long, gray duster.

The gunman on the hillside fired another shot, simultaneous with the man behind the rain barrel, both shots flying wide as Hawk ran a zigzagging course back the way he’d been dragged, firing his pistols from both hips.

Ramming the loading lever home, he fired a round where the red-faced man had been standing, but the slug shredded only air. The red-faced man was gone.

Wheeling, slugs thumping into the street around his boots, Hawk ran to the other side of the street, leapt a one-wheeled hay cart, and sprinted through the weed- and rock-choked gap between the alcalde’s office and a harness shop. The shooting died off, the echoes bouncing around the hollow, as Hawk ran into the alley and straight on past a series of plank and rock shanties. Hearing disgruntled voices shouted from the street and from the hillside near the church, Hawk jogged a serpentine course through the rocks and shanties to the back of the hill.

A muffled, echoing voice rose from the street. “Keep an eye on your backside, Juano, he might be tryin’ to flank ya!”

Hawk moved around a rocky knob about halfway up the hill. On the other side of the knob, a wiry, long-haired Mexican in a short leather jacket leapt back with a start, swinging his Winchester barrel toward Hawk.

The man didn’t get the long gun leveled before Hawk’s Henry barked twice. The .44/40 slugs, fired from two feet away into the Mexican’s gut, just below his crossed cartridge belts, blew him up and back, his own rifle discharging when it bounced off a rock. The man’s eyes rolled around in their sockets. Blood and viscera spilled from the twin smoking holes in his belly.

As his eyes focused on Hawk towering over him and extending the Henry straight out from his shoulder, the barrel angled down, the Mexican’s eyelids snapped wide, brows rising into his forehead, his lower jaw falling to his chest.

Before the man could scream, Hawk’s Henry spat smoke and fire, and a ragged hole appeared in the Mexican’s forehead, slamming his skull against a rock with a loud crack. The man’s eyes fluttered. His high-heeled, black boots jerked. Blood welled onto the rock behind his head, dribbling down his shoulders.

Hawk lifted his head from the dead Mexican, stared thoughtfully up the rocky slope nearly completely shrouded in darkness.

Flagg. That’s who the red-faced, silver-bearded lawman was. D.W. Flagg. His friends called him Dutch. Hawk had never met him, only heard of him. Union Civil War veteran. He was said to be nearsighted, which would account for his lousy shooting in the street.

In spite of the bravado Flagg showed in saloons and brothels, he was also known to run from tight spots, to wait for a more opportune time to reintroduce himself to his quarry.

Hawk stepped over the dead Mex and moved slowly toward two rectangular boulders at the top of the hill, over the top of which the Mexican had fired down on him.

When he’d hunkered down in the V-notch where the two boulders joined, he took his rifle under his right arm, tipped his head back on his shoulders, and cupped his hands around his mouth.

The sun was well down, filling the hollow with dense shadows. The breeze stirred the brush slightly. Otherwise, it was so quiet that Hawk could hear the dead Mexican break wind down the hill behind him.

The man was a vague silhouette crouched to the right of the fountain, his face a pale oval beneath his funnel-brimmed Stetson. Hawk snapped the shot. As the man began to rise with a start, bringing his pistol up, Hawk’s bullet punched through his chest. He stumbled backward, throwing his pistol over his head, and hit the street with a grunt.

Hawk kept the rifle on him for a moment. Raising it toward the bell tower, he saw the slender silhouette of the old man, sombrero tipped toward the ground before the church. The old man shook his head, his snickers sounding like the wheezing of an old burro.

Hawk stayed where he was for several minutes, watching and listening for Flagg. True to his reputation, the good marshal appeared to have beaten a hasty retreat.

Hawk moved down the hill and around the church, trying to sniff out any more shooters in the thickening darkness. When he rounded the church’s northeast corner, heading back toward the fountain, the stoop-shouldered, gray-whiskered gent from the bell tower was hunkered down beside the dead man, going through his pockets.

As Hawk approached, the man turned his head sharply toward him, a cigarette stub smoldering between his lips. Hawk held his left hand up, laid the Henry’s barrel over his right shoulder.

“When the Yaquis aren’t on the prowl.” Weber looked at the dead man and continued feeling around in his pocket. He looked up at Hawk again. “You don’t mind, do you? It ain’t so much lucre I’m lookin’ fer as tobaccy.”

“Dry-gulchers.” He’d recognized the sheriff’s deputies from Coyote Springs—gut-sack vermin who should have been thrown to the hogs before reaching maturity.

Hawk’s tall, dark figure was disappearing into the darkness, his Henry resting on his shoulder. He didn’t turn back around, and he didn’t say anything. The darkness enveloped him, his boots crunching gravel.

D.W. Flagg and Spade Killigrew beat a shambling retreat through the desert night, Flagg cursing under his breath and pressing his right hand over his bullet-burned left shoulder. They rode through two short canyons, then turned into a piñon-sheathed box canyon, having to rely on God’s grace and sheer luck to keep their horses from breaking a leg in the rough terrain, and to keep themselves from running into Indians.

Fortunately, the box canyon proved empty, though the scat smells told Flag that a bear had holed up there in recent days. The marshal sat down, resting his back against a ridge, while Killigrew turned out the horses and built a fire, over which he set water to boil for coffee.

When the firelight reflected off the red rocks behind him, Flagg shrugged out of his duster and peeled his bloody shirt down his bullet-burned shoulder. Killigrew’s hands shook as he fed more branches to the fire, his pockmarked, elegantly furred features glistening wet in the firelight.

“You think the fire’s a good idea?” he said, looking warily into the darkness. “What if he tracks us here? There’s no way out.”

“Hawk’s a different breed, I’ll give him that,” Flagg rasped, dropping his jaw as he angled a sharp look at his shoulder. “But not even he can track in the dark.”

“You tell me, Sheriff.” Peeling the shirt from the bloody gash, Flagg winced and ground his right heel into the rocky soil. “Why didn’t you shoot?”

“My rifle jammed. Brand-new repeater, just got it in from Lordsburg. Had it sighted in and everything, and I bear down on Hawk’s head—had him right in my sights— and it jams!” He sat back on his haunches. “What happened to you?”

“Well, for starters, your goddamn bean-eater missed his shot. I thought he was supposed to be a sharpshooter.”

“If you miss your first shot with Hawk, the kettle’s gonna boil right quick. I heard it said he moves around like a boxed cougar.”

“You don’t box in Gideon Hawk, Sheriff,” Flagg spat. “You rile a rogue bear like Hawk, you pull out and try again later, when you can get another long, clear shot. Wipe that look off your face. It isn’t cowardly. It’s using your head!”

“I was going to exchange my jammed gun for a good one. I intended to go back and get Hawk, not run away!”

The sheriff dumped coffee into the pot, then sat back against a fir tree, glancing into the night, nervously smoothing his sweat-drenched mustache, the waxed ends of which now sagged to his chin whiskers. “I reckon I can assume my deputies are dead.”

“You know,” Killigrew said, crossing his arms on his chest and dropping his chin, chuckling, “I think they were funny boys. Caught ’em one afternoon—”

He stopped and dropped his eyes to the coffeepot. The coffee was bubbling out from beneath the lid, steam rising noisily.

Padding his hand with a folded scrap of burlap, Killigrew grabbed the pot’s handle. He’d lifted the pot six inches above the flames when his hand opened suddenly. A rifle cracked. The pot dropped back to the coals, the coffee splashing onto the flames with a whooosh.

Killigrew cried shrilly, clutching his bleeding hand to his chest, face bunched with pain as he glared fearfully into the shadows.

Flagg reached for the big, ivory-gripped Remington on his hip. Before he could begin to slide the gun from its holster, the rifle cracked again, the slug drilling the overturned pot with a tinny clang, lifting it up out of the fire and bouncing it off the scarp between Flagg and the cursing Killigrew.

His fearful eyes searching the box canyon’s tarlike darkness, Flagg eased his hand away from the gun. Killigrew grunted and sighed, blood dripping from his clenched hands and puddling on his white shirt and vest. The flames lifted as the coffee evaporated from the branches, the steam’s hiss slowly dying.

Flagg’s eyes slitted as he probed the dark, wavering curtain beyond the fire, trying to see the tall, broad-shouldered figure he knew was there, no doubt on the opposite ridge, training his rifle on the bridge of Flagg’s nose. Flagg felt like a butterfly on the end of a pin. Still, a part of him couldn’t help admire the rogue lawman’s stealth, and envy his sand.

“That cocksucker!” Killigrew snarled, glancing from his bleeding hand to the shadows, sweat streaming off his chin.

While Killigrew cursed and squirmed, fishing in his saddlebags for a bandage, Flagg stared into the darkness, half his upper lip curled above his teeth in a snarling grin.