Rogue Lawman #3: Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

“DON’T you know it ain’t polite,” the steel-eyed gent growled through gritted teeth, stopping ten feet from Hawk’s table, “oglin’ another man’s woman?”

The steel-eyed gent glanced at the girl still sitting at the table behind him, slumped down in her chair. Her arms were still crossed on her breasts, and her eyes were bright with anticipatory glee.

“He just ordered me a bottle of wine, Waylon,” she said, chuckling. “You can’t blame him for staring at me, can you? All the men stare. I don’t think it was my tits he was staring at, though. At least, not only my tits. That’s why I didn’t take my usual offense.”

“Besides, he looks like one tough son of a bitch. I can’t help admiring a tough man, when they seem so damn scarce these days.” Brazenly she ran her gaze up and down Hawk’s tall, broad frame.

“Tough, you say?” Waylon sneered. He flung his frock’s lapels back from his matched Remingtons. “Let’s judge by how long it takes him to die with two .44 pills in his gut.”

Waylon took one step farther back from the table and spread his feet in the gunfighting stance.

“Will you be comfortable shooting from your position?” he asked Hawk. “Or would you like to move out into the open?” He gestured at a gap between the tables.

The girl was walking up behind the man called Waylon. “No shooting,” she said poutily, moving between Waylon and Hawk. “I want to see you fight like real men, with your fists.”

Hands resting on the butts of her own pistols, she stood sideways between the two men, smiling like a schoolgirl awaiting a fresh glass of sarsaparilla.

“Why, me, of course!” Saradee intoned, twirling on one foot and striking a lusty pose, eyes glittering with a beguiling mix of girlish excitement and danger. Cocking a foot and sticking her chest out, hands on her pistol butts, she said, “Would you like to see exactly what the lucky winner shall enjoy?”

“Keep your shirt on, Saradee!” Waylon snapped, quickly unbuckling his shell belt. “This son of a bitch isn’t going to be enjoying anything but a long, cold snuggle with the snakes.”

The Mexicans who’d been sitting around Hawk had hustled out of the way but remained nearby, drinks in their hands and drunken grins on their faces. Nothing like watching two gringos going at it. The other hard cases who’d been sitting at Waylon’s and Saradee’s table had gained their own feet and come over, eyes bright with interest.

Most of the other drinkers remained at their own tables, only vaguely interested. No one came in from the patio, where a slight din still rose. Fights in El Molina were as common as bedbugs in the mattress sacks.

His eyes holding Waylon’s fixed glare, Hawk unbuckled his own cartridge belt. The girl took Waylon’s belt, then came over and held her hand out for Hawk’s. Hawk turned around and set the belt and both holstered revolvers on the bar behind him.

Holding his gaze with a sly one of her own, she stepped around him and set Waylon’s coiled gun belt at the end of the bar, several feet from Hawk’s. While Hawk removed his hat and duster, and Kilroy removed his hat and frock, the other men from her table cleared the area around the two challengers.

When Kilroy had removed a knife from each boot well, Hawk removed his own bowie from the sheath between his shoulder blades, and set it with his Colt and his Russian. Waylon handed his own knives to Saradee. When she’d put them up with the hard case’s revolvers, she backed away from the makeshift fighting ring and hopped up onto a table. She crossed her ankles, leaned forward, hands on her knees, and grinned with delight.

The man had had too much to drink. He could barely stand, much less sidestep and feint. He should have told the girl to go to hell, and used his guns. He might have had a chance. As it was, Hawk was going to make mincemeat of the man’s face, and he couldn’t help smiling at the prospect.

Waylon stopped suddenly and jabbed his left fist at Hawk. Hawk didn’t bother to dodge; still, the shot glanced off his right cheek, the pain barely noticeable amidst the hate surging in his veins.

In his mind’s eye, he saw Waylon shooting into the Army detail, as though at ducks on a millpond, and he let the man lunge at him again. Hawk felt Estella Chacon fall slack and dead in his arms. He stepped away from Waylon’s right roundhouse, pivoting on the ball of his foot. Waylon’s roundhouse whistled through the air over Hawk’s left temple, and the hard case staggered from his own momentum.

Hawk thrust his left fist at the man’s right shoulder, to straighten him, then broke Waylon’s nose with a short, crisp jab.

The nose lay flat against the man’s hard face, blood gushing like wine from a cut flask. The man grunted and, stumbling backward, limbs akimbo, sucked air into his mouth. When he released it, frothy bubbles sprayed from both his nose and his lips, frothing his mustache and painting his shirt front.

“Jesus Christ!” exclaimed an observer to Hawk’s right, leaping toward Waylon.

The hand held the man as though by puppet strings; he stopped, retreated to where he’d been standing with his compatriots. Waylon caught himself, straightened, and lowered his hands from his face, spraying blood with each exhalation.

His gaze found Hawk’s. A faint smile touched his lips, and his eyes narrowed. He flicked his right wrist as though snapping out a handkerchief. Into that hand, a steel stiletto appeared from a sleeve slide, the razor-sharp blade flashing in the room’s torch and lantern light.

He hadn’t even started to move it toward Hawk before Hawk was on him, lashing out with his right boot. The boot smashed the hand; the blade flew and clattered off a wall. Hawk punched the dumbfounded hard case low in the man’s gut. As Waylon folded, Hawk smashed his right fist into the man’s left ear, and Waylon’s breath whoofed out in a fresh spray of blood and spit.

Hawk lifted him by his shirtfront and, his face a grinning mask of fury, assaulted the man with a combination of brain-numbing blows to his face and temples. The blows didn’t continue long. In less than a minute, Waylon’s back hit the floor with a wooden boom.

Hawk stood over him, opening and closing his skinned fists at his sides, his chest rising and falling sharply. He silently commanded the man to get up, but in a few seconds, it was obvious Waylon was finished.

Suddenly, Hawk was aware of the other men moving toward him, enraged snarls reddening their faces. Chairs and tables scraped the floor.

Hawk turned to face them. He glanced at his cartridge belt on the bar. He started moving forward, but stopped when Saradee yelled, “Fair fight, boys! Don’t get your backs up!”

Two of the men only slowed their steps, but they kept moving toward Hawk. One slid his long-barreled revolver from his holster. He stopped when Saradee blew a hole in the floor, nipping his right boot sole. The man hopped on the other foot, cursing.

The girl ordered him and the other more aggressive hombre to haul Waylon up to his room and tend to his injuries. Reluctantly, staring coldly at Hawk, they obeyed. When they were gone, she told the other three men—more closely aligned with her than Waylon, it appeared—that she wanted some privacy. They got a bottle from the bar and headed upstairs, chuckling and glancing back at her and Hawk over their shoulders.

Saradee bought a fresh bottle of tequila and, balancing two shot glasses in her other palm, turned to Hawk. She gave him the cool up-and-down again, said, “It smells like blood in here. Let’s go outside and have a drink.”

Adjusting his cartridge belt on his hips, Hawk watched her turn and walk away. He wasn’t sure why, but he followed her. When they sat across from each other at a small table by the square, she splashed tequila into each shot glass and sat back in her chair.

She dug a cigarillo from her shirt pocket, poked it in her mouth. Hawk held up the candle burning in the middle of the table, and she leaned forward, dipping the cigarillo’s end in the flame. She puffed smoke, sank back in her chair, blew a lungful at him.

The tip of her wet, pink tongue touched the right corner of her mouth, where it found a tobacco crumb. She licked the crumb into her mouth, bit down on it gently, a curious cast to her penetrating gaze. “Where are you from?”

“Here and there.” Hawk sipped his tequila. From the shadows around the patio, the girl had attracted several lascivious stares. “You?”

“Look, it’s getting late. If we’re going upstairs, let’s get a move on. If not, I’ll buy another bottle and head back to my pallet.”

The girl chuckled huskily, blowing smoke. Suddenly, the laughter was gone, and so was her smile. Curling her upper lip angrily, she snarled, “Listen, you uncouth dog, I’m not a whore. If you want me, you’re gonna have to romance me a little. Is that asking so goddamn much?”

Hawk arched an eyebrow, glanced around at the Mexicans smoking and drinking in the wavering shadows. Several were passed out on the floor. One sprawled across a table. Several more ogled Saradee and whispered.

“They’ve got something of mine.” Her eyes flicked across his arms and shoulders again, his bloody hands on the table. “You’re gonna help me get it back.”

“You’ll stay a poor, wandering bandit, only one step ahead of the law, for the rest of your life.” Saradee sank back in her chair and puffed the cigarillo. “And you’ll never know the sweet bliss of me.”

Hawk gave her an up-and-down similar to the ones she’d given him. He felt only hatred for the bushwhacking beauty, but he managed a lusty grin. “Mierda.”

“The night is young,” she said, throwing back the tequila. “Let’s have some fun.” She stood, set her right hand on the rail separating the patio from the street, and leapt as if her feet were springs. A moment later, she was jogging across the square.

Since their own mounts were spent, Hawk and the girl secured two horses from a livery stable near the square—a couple of long-toothed nags typical of the liveries in this neck of the woods—and rigged them out with ancient Mexican saddles with big, dinner-plate horns.

The poor horses and even poorer tack didn’t matter, Saradee assured him. They didn’t have far to ride, and if they implemented her plan the way she intended, they wouldn’t need speed either.

Hawk followed her over some dark hills and across a trickling stream. For a short time, they seemed to be following the fresh trail of a full dozen horses. Then they left the road the previous riders had followed, and cut cross-country.

About four miles from the village, they drew rein on the shoulder of a low rimrock. Hawk followed the girl’s gaze to several pinpricks of flickering orange light a good mile south, on the low slope of a high, serrated ridge silhouetted against the moonlit sky. Squinting, Hawk made out the pale walls of a fortlike adobe structure sprawled across the base of the slope.

The girl gigged her gray nag forward, and Hawk followed her across the narrow valley, making a beeline for the lights. They tied the horses to cottonwoods on a wash bottom, and walked over another rise to the base of a low rock wall at the southeast edge of the hacienda. They hunkered down, their backs to the wall.

The girl opened her mouth to speak, but Hawk cut her off. “My turn to play the leader.”

She closed her mouth, stared at him, her face nearly invisible against the wall’s shadows. He could feel the crazy, passionate heat of her. “I want only to know where the greasers are keeping the money,” she whispered. “So we can return for it later . . . when the pigs have left the pen.”

“They’ll leave. And for the job they and Waylon intend, they’ll need every man they have. I doubt they’ll leave many behind. But I want to be able to get in and out quick, so I need to know the layout of the place. Tonight, they’re all probably drunk, most probably passed out.”

She grabbed his arm, dug her fingers into the flesh. “You help me get the money, we’ll split it between us.” She smiled, white teeth standing out against the dark oval of her face. “With thirty-six thousand dollars split two ways, we’ll have one hell of a high-stepping time in Juarez!”

“Later this evening, you’re going to like me even better.” Saradee threw herself forward, ramming her breasts against his chest, and kissed him hungrily. “And tomorrow, when we’re on the trail out of here with more money than you’ve ever made in your life . . . even better!”

Hawk rose slightly, peered over the top of the stone wall. The hacienda’s torches flickered beyond an old, once-irrigated hay field grown up with piñons, junipers, and greasewood shrubs. At either end of the big casa, the federales had erected two tall, wooden guard towers. The towers were little more than vertical silhouettes against the starry, moonlit sky.

Hawk couldn’t tell if they were manned. Probably. This was, after all, Yaqui country.

The towers weren’t the only obstacles. The casa was surrounded by a half-dozen outbuildings of various shapes and sizes, any or all of which could be housing men. True, a good many of the major’s men might be drunk, but probably not all of them.

To try something like this, Hawk had to be as crazy as the girl. Then again, from her he might get some clues on how to take down the rest of the gang, not to mention the money Primrose was in such a fever about.