Rogue Lawman #3: Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

“IF you yell, I’ll kill you,” Primrose said tightly, staring down his Spencer’s barrel at the woman’s head. He remembered her, crouched atop the boulder at Piñon Rocks, slinging lead into his men with demonic glee.

The woman glared up at him through the tawny hair in her eyes. She was straddling the unconscious sergeant. Her breasts heaved. She quirked a smile and lifted her hands, palms out, to her shoulders.

The lieutenant’s heart fluttered with anxiety and from the strain of climbing the steep side of the ridge from the shelf where he’d left his horse. He’d spied the gang’s campfires nearly two hours ago, and had decided to sneak into the encampment and retrieve the stolen money. He’d decided he couldn’t wait for Hawk, or count on another chance to secure the currency.

“Get dressed,” he ordered the woman, keeping the rifle aimed at her head. “If you try to run or summon the others, I’ll kill you.”

The annoying smile fixed on her lips, she rose slowly and backed away, keeping her hands raised, proudly exposing her breasts. “Most men prefer me naked.”

Calmly, she squatted down, picked up her jeans, and straightened. She glanced at Primrose, smiled, and poked one foot into the jeans, then the other.

“Did you come for your money . . . or something else?” Buttoning her trousers, she threw her head back, arching her spine and causing her full breasts to bounce.

Primrose followed her movements with the rifle, glancing around nervously but also with a certain glee. In the back of his mind, he imagined the expression on his father-in-law’s face when Devereaux learned that his worthless son-in-law had secured not only the stolen currency but two of the killers who’d stolen it, including the double-crossing Schmidt.

He had rope in his saddlebags. He’d lead them down the scarp and tie them near his horse while he searched for the money.

“Are you sure you want me to cover these?” the girl said, holding her shirt in one hand, indicating her heaving bosoms with the other. “Most men prefer them exposed.”

Behind him, Schmidt gurgled. Primrose glanced toward the sergeant, who remained unconscious beside the rock, his pants and issue underwear bunched around his boots, his heavy thighs appearing inordinately pale in the darkness.

Primrose turned back to the girl. She had dropped the shirt and was bolting toward him, grunting savagely, knocking his rifle wide with her right hand.

Having been a pugilist at West Point, Primrose was fast on his feet. He pivoted sharply right, swung the rifle left, and tossed the girl over his left hip. Hitting the ground hard, hair flying, she raised an angry wail. She got it only half out, however, before Primrose smashed the butt of the Spencer against her right temple.

Raising a hand to the scratch she’d clawed across his left cheek, he said, “Well, that’s one way to skin a cat.”

With neckerchiefs and the girl’s own shirt, he bound and gagged her and the sergeant, then, taking the Spencer in both hands, began walking northward down the scarp. Meandering around boulders and desert brush, he followed the smell of smoke to a gully lip, edged a peek through a notch in the rocks.

At the bottom of the gulley, a small fire was dying down. Around the fire were five men, three asleep, the other two playing a quiet game of cards. Guns and knives were propped about like jackstraws. Spying no moneybags, Primrose scuttled back from the lip, then continued toward the light of the second campfire, another thirty yards down the ravine.

A half-dozen more men lounged about the second fire, snoring or humming or cleaning their guns. One man was trimming his fingernails with a bowie knife. There appeared no money pouches amidst the weapons and camping gear, so Primrose stole on down the cut.

He found the pouches nearly twenty minutes later. The two burlap sacks, stamped “U.S.” and roughly the size of twenty-five-pound feed bags, were leaning against a rock in a narrow neck of the ravine. A saddle and rumpled bedroll lay nearby, as did saddlebags, a rifle, gun belt, and several articles of clothing, including a hat. Between Primrose and the money, the glowing pink ashes of a burned-down fire lay within a stone ring, an open-lidded coffeepot standing on a flat rock near the coals.

As he lay on the ravine’s southern lip, goatheads and clatclaw nipping at his exposed skin, Primrose’s heart raced and his mouth went dry. He was about to raise himself and move forward, when the sound of trickling water rose ahead and right. Looking toward the sound, he saw the silhouette of a man in long gray underwear standing between a barrel cactus and brush growing over a low rock pile.

Primrose returned his weight to his elbows and snugged his right index finger against his Spencer’s trigger, setting that thumb on the hammer. Frustration nipped him.

The man across the gully bent his knees, shaking himself. He crouched slightly then, tucking himself back into his underwear, began shuffling stocking-footed back toward his bedroll. He stopped, swaying slightly, as if drunk. He swung his head around as if looking for something.

Right of the man’s bivouac, a horse whinnied a quiet reply. The lieutenant saw the shapes of two horses in the brush across the ravine, both peering toward the man who’d called for Saradee.

The man staggered around the fire, peering up and down the ravine. He stopped, moved heavy-footed back to his bedroll, knelt down, and picked up a bottle. He uncorked the bottle and took a long drink. Primrose heard several healthy chugs. When the man had recorked the bottle and set it back against his saddlebags, he looked at the money pouches.

“Well,” he said, his voice clear in the silent night, “at least the little bitch didn’t get the money.”

He set both bags against his saddle. Primrose stretched his lips back from his teeth with dismay as the man reclined on his blanket, resting his head in the crack between the two bags. He drew half his blanket over his body, yawned, spat, turned his head this way and that, getting comfortable, and entwined his hands on his belly.

Primrose stared at the prostrate figure, the U.S. Army pouches pale lobes behind the man’s head. The lieutenant’s heart had slowed, but it quickened again as he considered his course of action . . . as, to his own surprise and horror, he found himself pushing off his elbows and knees, crawling forward until he was free of the brush, then slowly gaining his feet.

He stood, heart thudding, hands clammy, peering up and down the ravine. Steeling himself, he stepped forward. He didn’t realize he’d stepped on a stone that floodwaters had left hanging over the lip’s edge. It gave way beneath his right foot. He and the rock dropped two feet straight down with a sudden, crunching thud.

The jolt shook his innards around, but the lieutenant remained on his feet. Gritting his teeth, he looked at the man on the other side of the ravine. The outlaw threw his right arm out lazily, muttered several garbled words. He smacked his lips and resumed snoring.

Holding the rifle straight out before him, he crossed the ravine, swinging around the near-dead fire, and hunkered down on the man’s right side. He looked at the moneybags. The man was snugged up against them. There was no way to lift the bags without raising the man’s head. Surely, even as drunk as he was, that would wake him.

Primrose winced and ran a gloved hand over his goatee. He should cut the man’s throat, but that would be cold-blooded murder. Besides, there was always a chance the man would call out and signal the others.

Looking around, he saw the man’s saddlebags. Quietly, he picked up the bags, moved to the middle of the ravine, emptied both pockets, and refilled them with sand. Returning to the sleeping man, he squatted down, set the bags beside him, then unsheathed his knife and set it on a rock to his left.

The outlaw continued snoring, mouth open, a wing of black hair in his eyes. His head was canted slightly toward the lieutenant. His pockmarked right cheek twitched.

Primrose stared at him, his pulse drumming in his ears, rubbing his sweaty hands on his trousers. Finally, uttering a silent prayer, he placed his left hand on the back of the man’s head and, wincing, shoved it forward.

The man grunted, his breath catching in his throat, both arms falling to the ground beside him. Quickly, with his right hand, Primrose jerked both money sacks out from behind the outlaw.

He grabbed the saddlebags by the broad middle strap, but they were too heavy to lift with only one hand. Standing quickly, he propped the man up with his left knee, then picked up the bags with both hands, and slipped them between the man’s shoulders and the saddle.

“You lynx!” the man said, suddenly shaking his head. “Where’d you learn how to do that?”

Head lolling back against the rounded saddlebags, the man grinned. His cheek twitched. The grin faded, his jaw dropped, and another gurgling snore rose up from deep in his chest.

Primrose sheathed his knife. The money pouches were joined by a four-foot rope. When he’d draped the pouches over his shoulders, he picked up his rifle, a lariat, and two bridles. Moving slowly and glancing back at the snoring outlaw, he walked around the fire and turned toward the two horses.

Ten minutes later, he’d bridled both mounts, draped the money pouches over the neck of one, and led them across the ravine. It took him nearly an hour to find his way back up the scarp, via a route wide of the other two outlaw encampments.

At the top, he tied the horses to ironwood saplings and looked around. The sergeant was where Primrose had left him, belly down, bare ass in the air, hands tied behind his back. He appeared to still be out.

The girl had crawled about twenty yards from where Primrose had dropped her. She lay on her side, lifting her head toward him, gagging against the neckerchief he’d tied across her mouth. Her breasts bounced and jostled as she kicked her tied ankles, trying to free them.

“That will do you no good at all,” Primrose told her, leaning down and pulling her over his shoulder. “I was the knot-tying champion of Albany for three years in a row.”

He threw her, belly down, over the back of the horse with the moneybags draped around its neck. She arched her back and thrust her head at him, grunting furiously, resisting. Primrose swung the back of his right hand across her left cheek. That took the starch out of her; her head sagged down against the roan’s ribs.

Cutting two short lengths of rope from the lariat, he tied her hands to her ankles beneath the horse’s belly. That done, he went to work wrestling the half-conscious Schmidt onto the back of the other horse—not an easy task with a man Schmidt’s size. To keep from breaking his own back, Primrose led the dun over the ridge’s lip, then dropped Schmidt over the lip and onto the horse below.

He led the horse back to the ridge crest, and was tying the sergeant the way he’d tied the girl when footsteps rose behind him. He turned, heart hammering, reaching for his rifle. Had he gotten too greedy, taken too much time?

Primrose cocked the Spencer, aimed, and waited. Behind him, the girl gave a long, fierce groan from beneath her gag. The horse blew and shuffled sideways.

“Gringo bastard,” a woman’s voice snapped in front of him. The shadow moved toward him—a small, dark, long-haired figure taking shape, wearing a man’s blue-checked shirt. “You were going to leave me?”

Primrose blinked. The prostitute, Estella Chacon, marched toward him. He lowered the rifle. Guilt pricked at him. “I . . . I’m sorry, miss, I—”

She stopped and scowled up at him. “One of the men took me off in the brush. While he was trying to stick it in, I grabbed his pistol and beat him over the head with it.” She held up the Starr .44, which appeared ridiculously large in her small brown hand. “I was hiding in the brush, waiting for the others to go to sleep, so I could steal a horse. Then, I saw you.”

Primrose felt a proud thrill travel through him. Not only had he secured the money, and two thieves, but a hostage!

Primrose helped her onto the bareback horse, behind the other woman, whose body fairly rippled with rage. “They were . . . otherwise disposed . . .”