Rogue Lawman #3: Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

SEVEN days later, Waylon Kilroy sat in a stone crevice on a low rimrock above a narrow, boulder-strewn, sunpummeled arroyo in southern Sonora. He trained his field glasses on the parched valley that he and the gang had traversed a few hours ago.

“Jesus, you do that well,” he said, taking steady, deep breaths. “I swear, girl, you must be part-French.”

Below the ridge’s rocky lip, Kilroy’s jeans were pulled down and bunched around his boots. He was half-sitting on a rock thumb protruding from the nook’s wall. Between his naked knees, Saradee knelt, her gloved hands resting on Kilroy’s thighs. Her straw sombrero—which she’d taken from one of the three Mexican miners she’d killed a few days earlier—bobbed slightly as she worked.

There was a wet sound as she lifted her head, the sombrero’s brim tipping back to reveal her face, which still bore the scabbed abrasions and partial swelling of the Yaquis’ savagery. “Any sign of Valverde?”

Kilroy shook his head. “I know that was him I seen earlier, though. After all these years, I can recognize that ugly bastard from five miles away. I swear he can smell me just as soon as I cross the Rio Grande. Comes runnin’ like a dog with his tongue hangin’, sniffin’ around for a bone.”

“Let’s kill him,” Saradee said, looking up at Kilroy from the shaded nook, his member in her gloved hand. “I don’t want to share our hard-earned money with these damn greasers.”

“He can sure make life miserable down here, but killin’ him might do us more harm than good.” Waylon glanced down at Saradee, frowning. “Snap to it, girl. I’m losin’ my pleasure.”

When she’d gone back to work, Kilroy lifted his gaze above the ridge, stopped as a vagrant thought struck him, and looked back down at her bobbing hat. Crouched there between his knees, she was in a rather vulnerable position. He could draw the big Remy from its shoulder holster and pop a pill through her beautiful, cunning head before she knew what was happening.

He wouldn’t do it now, of course. Not only was she working her sweet bliss on him, but both their gangs were waiting fifty yards down the canyon wall, near the opening of an old mine shaft.

Staring at the girl’s shabby straw hat, around the steepled crown of which a bluebottle fly buzzed, Kilroy lifted the corners of his mustache. It was a good idea. He’d hold on to it for later, when her men were out of the way and he’d finally gotten his fill of the bewitching outlaw princess.

He tensed suddenly, tightening all his muscles and throwing his head back on his shoulders. “For the love o’ Jesus!”

She looked up at him from between his knees, smiling coquettishly and running the sleeve of her calico shirt—also stolen from the miners—across her mouth. “Did you enjoy that?”

Kilroy shook his head and swallowed. He glimpsed something in the corner of his left eye. Twisting his head northward, he lifted the field glasses. He stared through the glasses, adjusting the focus.

Saradee remained kneeling between his spread knees, his wilting member only inches from her face. A very vulnerable position. She remembered the threat in his voice when he’d rescued her from the Yaqui savages. She glanced at the pistol butts poking up from her holsters, and absently lowered her right hand to the polished grips of a .45.

“Yeah, it’s him, all right.” Kilroy’s voice broke her reverie. “They took the bait now—headin’ away from us. For now,” he added dryly.

Handing over the binoculars, Kilroy rose awkwardly and pulled his pants up. Saradee peered through the glasses, adjusting the focus until a dozen or so swarthy men in dark-blue uniforms galloped around a rocky mesa less than a mile away, heading south, their blond dust rising behind their sweat-lathered horses.

The lead rider was a big, broad-chested, heavy-gutted man with a flat, pocked face and large, black eyes. He wore two pearl-gripped pistols in shoulder holsters, cartridge belts crossed on his gold-buttoned, epaulette-decorated tunic.

To his left rode a tall, slender, hatchet-faced Mexican in the same blue uniform with red-striped slacks, but with a gaudy sombrero strapped beneath his chin, and with the sleeves of his tunic removed to reveal his dark, corded arms. Long, grizzled hair streaked with silver flew back in the wind. Saradee counted three knives and three pistols in various visible sheaths.

When she’d scanned the other riders—all younger versions of the two lead riders, and all armed as if for war—she lifted her cheeks in a scowl. The federales were a good three or four miles away. Still, she could sense their dark, fearless, south-of-the-border savagery that made even her look tame in comparison.

“Yep,” Saradee said, lowering the glasses and turning a glance to Waylon buttoning the fly of his trousers in the nook behind her. “They’re gonna have to go the way of all bad greasers. I won’t have it any other way.”

She jumped down to the nook’s floor, tawny hair bobbing on her shoulders. She slapped the glasses against Kilroy’s chest, tipped her hat back to offer a mocking grin. “You leave it to me if you’re scared.”

“As good as you are at French,” Kilroy growled, glaring at her, her wiles having left him still feeling disoriented, “your English leaves something to be desired.”

Saradee glanced down at the trough in the rocks leading down to the canyon floor. She extended her hand. “After you, my love.”

Side by side, hand in hand, they picked their way down the trough, like two young lovers on their first spring outing. Cutting cautious glances at each other, their taut smiles in place, they strolled along the shoulder of a low hill to the base of a rocky scarp, where the rest of the gang—twelve dusty riders—and their horses lounged in the shade of several mesquite shrubs and saquaros. A couple of men stood in the cool opening of a long-abandoned gold mine shrouded in desert willows. The horses were tied together under a sprawling cottonwood.

“Hansel and Gretel out fer a stroll,” said Turkey McDade, sharpening his bowie knife on a whetstone. His voice was crisp. “While the rest of us sweat it out here, so damn thirsty we can smell the tequila in El Molina.”

“Let the bee out of your bonnet, Turk,” said Saradee, releasing Kilroy’s hand and casually swiping McDade’s hat from his head. “We’re within an hour’s ride.”

“Any sign of the federales?” asked Dog-Tail Bascomb, running a greasy cloth over one of his sawed-off Winchesters.

“Does shit run downhill?” said Kilroy. “I told you I sensed their presence. I been down here enough times, I get a belly burn when one o’ them chili-chompers is within ten miles.”

“Cross that bridge when we come to it.” Kilroy moved to the horse over which the money sacks were draped. He opened one of the pouches, dipped out a wad of greenbacks. “Time to part company with the lucre for a few weeks.” He counted out several bills into his right hand, extended the money to Redmond, then moved on to Butch Reynolds, who was lounging against a low hummock near a barrel cactus. “A hundred dollars per man should tide us each till we can make the final divvy and part company.”

“Rein in, fool!” snapped Saradee, rolling a smoke. “We can’t go showing a bunch of money around El Molina without raising Valverde’s suspicion. As long as he thinks our take in the States was small, he’ll ride out and leave us alone.”

She paused and glanced at Kilory still divvying up the cash. “At least, that’s what Waylon thinks. Personally, I think we should kill the son of a bitch. We’re gonna have to sooner or later, and I see no reason to put off for tomorrow what you should do today.”

“There’s plenty snakes from Valverde’s hole,” Kilroy said, slapping a wad of bills against the mulatto’s vest and glancing affectionately at Saradee. “You kill one, they all come slitherin’ out.”

Saradee looked up with a cunning grin, poking the cigarette between her slightly swollen lips and striking a match to life on the buckle of her cartridge belt. “We’ll play it your way, pet.” She touched fire to the quirley, puffing smoke. “For now . . .”

“Look at how sweet they get along,” said Kevin Redmond, cutting his eyes to Kilroy. “Boss, I think you should marry that girl.”

“Keep your bloomers on, boy,” sneered Saradee, taking a deep drag off her cigarette and fixing her gaze on Kilroy. “Why would I buy the cow when I can get the milk for free?”

The others laughed as they stuffed their money into their pockets. Flushing, Kilroy grabbed the money sacks off the packhorse. He slung the sacks over his right shoulder and headed for the mine.

“Hey, where you goin’, Boss?” said Omaha Landers, cuffing his derby hat back on his head. His father was a Lutheran minister, and with a nod to the old man’s honor, he always wore relatively clean broadcloth trousers and suspenders over a nice shirt, which looked a little ludicrous with the sawed-off ten-gauge hanging down his back.

“Can’t think of a better place to hide stolen greenbacks than this mine shaft. Only a couple miles from El Molina, but Valverde’ll never find it.” Kilroy turned toward the group, a smug smile curving his dark-blond mustache. “In a few weeks, when we’re sure we haven’t been followed and our trail’s grown cold, we’ll come back and get it. All of us together”—he grinned from ear to ear, his blue eyes slitting cunningly—“like one big happy family!”

Kilroy turned, lowered his head a few inches, and disappeared into the dark mine portal, the others except Saradee frowning. Saradee eyed each rider, watching her man’s back, ready to shoot if the need arose. It wouldn’t have broken her heart to see Waylon gutted with a .44 slug, especially by his own men, but she needed him now. He’d dealt with Valverde before. She hadn’t. In good time, however, he’d end up the way she’d fantasized up on the ridge, with his pants bunched around his boots, screaming like a nun in the devil’s own whorehouse.

Saradee’s men turned to her, eyes sharp with incredulity. Bernal Montoya, standing near the horses with the other Mex, Alberto Jiminez, was clutching the horn handle of his bowie, snugged in his shoulder sheath.

Saradee gestured for the men to stand down. She shucked her Winchester from her saddle boot and sauntered up to the low, round opening in the rock wall. All the men, including Waylon’s boys, were watching her now. Waylon’s scoundrels shunted their wary, angry gazes between her Winchester and her face, spreading their feet and lowering their hands to the six-shooters.

Saradee turned to the man. She remembered the three Yaquis who’d savaged her, scratching her breasts, grunting like mules, and slathering her face with their sweat and saliva. One had even tried biting her tongue off.

She kept smiling, meeting the half-breed’s gaze. When Waylon was dead, she’d gut this savage with his own Arkansas toothpick. She didn’t think Bunkmeyer had any Yaqui blood, but one red nigger was pretty much the same as another, and this one would pay for the others.

Saradee and the half-breed were still trying to stare each other down when Kilroy walked out of the mine and straightened up. “Safe and sound.”

Jimbo Walsh poked a finger at the opening. “What’s to prevent some drifter from wanderin’ in there to have a look around . . . or—not to be suspicious, ye understand—one of us?”

Saradee hefted her Winchester, turned, and rammed the rifle’s butt against the bottom of a square-hewn entrance joist. The joist was already gray and splintered, its top end leaning precariously out from the mine. Saradee gave it three hard licks, and the bottom end of the timber slid inward with a crack and a groan.

The lintel gave. Saradee and the others backed away as the entranced disappeared in falling rock and billowing dust.

“What do you think?” Saradee said as the others choked on the dust. “We’re gonna leave home without locking the doors?”