Rogue Lawman #3: Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

HAWK walked down the stairs in shadowy moonlight, one hand on his Colt’s butt. At the bottom, he stopped and glanced at the lake.

The moonlight shimmered on its gently rippling surface. The breeze over the water felt cool against his wind- and sunburnt skin. The particular mix of smells—pure water, wet sand, and seaweed—brought back the many afternoons he’d spent fishing with his son along Wolf Creek, which meandered through the prairie grass and cottonwoods not from their house in Crossroads, Dakota Territory.

Hawk glanced over the dark hulks of the adobe houses and stables and boulders rolling up the hill toward the main part of town, from which the sounds of revelry rose faintly among the occasional snaps of gunfire. He turned and walked down to the lake, and looked around.

Seeing no one else along the shore, he kicked out of his boots and stripped off his dusty clothes, which he shook out and piled on a boulder. Naked, he walked across the wet sand, the earth feeling good beneath his bare feet, the breeze combing his dry, dusty skin that hadn’t seen a bath in weeks.

Up the hill in the distance, someone played the guitar faster, and a man sang along, stomping his foot. The sound was nearly covered by the lap of the wavelets against the sand and rocks.

Hawk waded into the water, the coolness inching up his shins and thighs. He plunged in, his heart wrenched by the refreshing chill closing around him, instantly relieving the burn of the dust, wind, and searing desert sun. He’d never been much of a swimmer—hadn’t swum, in fact, since he was a kid—so his strokes were awkward, but he swam out until, looking back, the shore was a thin black line. Above the line, the lights of Reyes’s adobe winked dully.

He turned, took a deep breath, and swam back. When his feet touched the sand and small, sharp rocks, he crawled five yards and lay for several minutes, belly down, on the shore, the water lapping around him. He tried to summon the thoughts and feelings of his child self, swimming in a prairie pothole on a warm summer day.

Then he thought of Jubal, saw a perch burst from a brown-green creek at the end of a fishing line, the cane pole in Jubal’s hands bowing sharply. But the image vanished, replaced in Hawk’s mind by the boy’s body falling, the noose around the boy’s neck drawing taut as the horse galloped out from under him. . . .

“You have good sweem?” It was a woman’s voice—high-pitched and husky at the same time, buoyant with humor, thick from drink.

Heart thudding, Hawk looked up sharply, digging his fingers into the sand. She stood silhouetted before him—a curvy young woman in a thin, multicolored skirt cut well above her knees. She wasn’t wearing a blouse, and her breasts, around which several silver necklaces were draped, were pear-shaped and full, jouncing slightly as she breathed.

Hawk released a silent, relieved breath. Seeing no reason to be modest before a whore, he stood, towering over her, looking down. She was brown-skinned, black-eyed, thick hair curling over her shoulders.

He brushed water from his eyes, the breeze chilling him and drying him at the same time. “Tell Guadalupe I’m happy.”

Hawk was stepping into his underwear. “I’m sure your reputation precedes you, but I’m not interested. Nor in the puta gringa. You might as well go back to the hotel and make ole Guadalupe some money.”

Fists on her hips, she watched him dress. Finally, as he sat down to pull on his boots, she gave an angry chuff, wheeled, and stomped toward the hotel, her silver necklaces jingling faintly, her feet padding softly across the sand.

Hawk’s shirt and hair were nearly dry by the time he reached the town’s main thoroughfare. The street twisted between lantern-lit adobes bustling with activity. Men and women laughed loudly or grunted with animal passion in the whores’ cribs clustered here and there about the street.

Occasional pistol shots resounded. Coins clanked. Roulette wheels ticked. In an alley to Hawk’s right, men were fighting—shadows jostling, knives flashing in stray lamplight. Spanish curses rose on enraged shouts and snarls.

Hawk walked on, duster thrown back behind his pistols, keeping his eyes peeled for a large group of gringos, his ears pricked for English. Occasionally, he peeked through a cantina’s dust-streaked window, but he saw no groups of Americans larger than three or four.

He came to the main square and paused near the stone fountain. Somewhere off to his right, a priest was crouched over a prone, writhing figure, offering last rites. A recipient of one of the fired bullets, no doubt. But it wasn’t the dying man who held Hawk’s interest. Standing just right of the fountain’s stone angel, his reflection angling across the shallow, murky, straw-flecked water within the large, stone bowl, he stared at a cantina on the left side of the square, alone on a trash-littered lot.

A shingle hanging beneath the patio’s brush arbor, and flanked by post-mounted torches, announced TABERNA DEL LEÓN MONTAÑA.

It was a big, sprawling place, busy as an anthill slathered in honey. Amidst the din, Hawk’s ears picked up several bits of shouted English.

Hawk turned away from the fading sighs of the dying man and the whispered prayers of the priest, and strode toward the cantina. As he passed between the torches, heading for the front door, he raked his gaze across the dimly lit front patio. Seeing only drunk Mexican miners, border banditos, vaqueros, and a couple of near-naked whores, he pushed through the batwings and stepped inside.

A few steps beyond the door, pushing through the crowd and swinging his gaze around, he stopped suddenly, his heart catching, his eyes narrowing.

Near the back of the big, wooden-floored room were nearly a dozen well-armed Americans in dusty trail garb. They sat at several tables near the room’s back left wall, not far from a beehive fireplace. They seemed to be associating with the dozen federales spread about the square or round, rough-hewn tables. In fact, five of the Americans, including a honey-haired girl in a calico shirt and overlarge canvas trousers secured with a rope belt, were sitting with three federales. Laughing and drinking and smoking fat cigars, they seemed to be having a good time.

Anticipation tingling, Hawk pushed on down the pine bar, jostling and being jostled, and found a vacant spot to stand near the far end. It took nearly a minute to catch the harried apron’s eye; he gestured for two tequila shots.

He threw back one shot and turned sideways, facing the doors across the room but watching, from the corner of his right eye, the American border toughs and the federales they were mixing with. He turned his attention to a curly-headed little Mex who’d leapt onto the counter about ten feet away. Swaying drunkenly, the man acted out a story Hawk couldn’t make out from this distance, triggering finger pistols and laughing.

Someone pushed against Hawk’s right shoulder, and he turned to see the girl from the bandits’ table trying to squeeze between him and a bulky Mexican miner, to get to the bar.

“Move your ass!” she grumbled. Her angry eyes met Hawk’s. They slid away, slid back. Her brows straightened out, and she gave him a quick, female study, a faint flush rising in her cheeks.

She continued to study him. Her hair was lushly tangled about her head, hanging like corn shucks to her shoulders. She was dusty and sunburned, she smelled like leather and horses, and her clothes sagged on her slender frame.

Still, she was one of the most beautiful women Hawk had ever seen. Beautiful and—judging from what Primrose had told him about the lovely bushwhacker who’d expertly flung lead at his unsuspecting men—deadly.

She blinked slowly. “Order me a bottle of wine, and tell the greaser to hurry the hell up. I’m thirsty and tired of their tequila and that sow piss they call whiskey down here.”

Hawk turned and gestured for the wine. The girl tossed him a coin, and he tossed it to the apron, who set the strawbasketed bottle on the bar. Hawk gave it to her.

She stared at him, tipping her head back, her straw sombrero dangling between her shoulder blades. The corners of her full mouth rose slightly and her eyes slitted. “Gracias.”

Hawk sipped his shot. It being a weekniqht, the crowd slowly dispersed, tables gradually opening up, the din softening.

Hawk ordered another shot and sat down at a table near the bar. He angled his back to the northeast corner, half-facing both the door on his left, and the gringos and the federales on his right. The crowd’s roar had softened enough that he could hear the federale commander—a fat major with a flat, pockmarked face and with his leather-billed hat pushed back on his thick, black curls—when he stood and gathered two large money sacks about his shoulders.

The man lifted a glass to one of the Americans—a tall, steel-eyed hombre with wavy, sandy hair and matching mustache. “To our mutual endeavor, Señor Waylon.”

The steel-eyed gent, with a slightly skeptical cast to his gaze, raised his glass and nodded. The major tossed back his shot and dropped his empty glass on the table, picked up another full glass amongst the myriad empties, held it up to the girl.

“And to the beautiful gringa, Señorita Saradee, who has found fit to bless our humble country with her presence.”

The other federales, bleary-eyed from drink, hair hanging in their eyes, yelled their appreciation as they raised their own shot glasses, and joined the major in tossing back a drink in the pretty bandit’s honor. The girl herself puffed out her cheeks like a bored kid in her teens, and sank down in her chair. She tipped the wine bottle to her lips, taking a liberal swig, scarlet liquid streaming down her chin.

“And do not worry about your dinero,” the major continued to the steel-eyed gent sitting beside the girl. The major patted the money sacks hanging down his chest from the rope around his shoulders, the U.S. markings clearly visible on the face of each pouch. “I will stow it safely away, to be divided later with the rest. You are in a very dangerous part of Mexico, the hills honeycombed with thieves. We wouldn’t want all your work to come to nothing!”

Guffawing, the major tugged his hat bill down, gestured to his underlings, and swaggered drunkenly across the room toward the front doors.

The other federales gained their own feet clumsily, scraping their chairs back and donning their hats, taking up their rifles and adjusting their cartridge belts on their hips. They bent their own drunk-weary legs for the front door, the dozen or so remaining customers suddenly falling silent and watching the staggering, well-armed soldados with expressions of dread and disdain.

The batwings hadn’t stopped shuddering in the Mexicans’ wake when the other gringos, scattered about the back of the tavern, got up from their own tables and converged on the larger table, where the steel-eyed gent and the girl sat side by side, smoking and scowling down at the scarred planks.

The group had a private conference, most of which Hawk couldn’t hear. It seemed as though the gang had been double-crossed, but intended to even the score in the near future. When the steel-eyed gent had settled the others down, including the girl, who seemed the most discontent of them all, several of the hard cases made for the stairs at the back of the tavern, yawning and grumbling.

When the majority of the men had climbed the stairs, no doubt repairing to rooms they’d rented earlier, leaving only five men at the table with the girl and the steel-eyed gent, Hawk felt a sudden quickening of his pulse and an itch in his trigger fingers.

Through the fatigue of the long day’s ride, his mind was slow to work through the problem. He was about to throw the rest of his third tequila back when he glanced over at the girl’s and the steel-eyed gent’s table. The pretty bushwhacker was sitting back in her chair, arms crossed on her breasts, staring at Hawk with a faintly coquettish smile.

The steel-eyed gent was turned toward her, talking quietly but vehemently, gesturing with his hands, his big face flushed with anger.

Ignoring the man beside her, the girl suddenly reached forward and picked up her wine bottle. She held it out toward Hawk in salute.

Holding up his shot glass, he returned the salute. At the same time, the steel-eyed gent stopped talking and slitted his eyes at the girl. He followed her gaze to Hawk, and the steel-eyed gent’s face flushed crimson.

Hawk threw back his tequila, set the glass on the table. He didn’t look directly at the steel-eyed gent, but held the girl’s gaze as she tipped back the wine bottle, taking another long pull, wine dribbling down her chin. She set the bottle on the table, smacking her lips and wiping her chin with her left hand.

As the steel-eyed gent sat stiffening beside her, staring coldly at Hawk, she said loudly enough for Hawk to hear, “I bet he wouldn’t have let himself get hornswoggled by those greasers.”

The steel-eyed gent stared at Hawk, lips bunched beneath his mustache. The other five men at the table had turned to regard Hawk as well, frowning.

Suddenly, the man stood, his chair flying ten feet out behind him before catching a floor knot and overturning with a wooden bark. As the man wheeled from the table and sauntered toward him, Hawk gained his own feet slowly, sliding his duster flaps behind his revolvers.