Rogue Lawman #3: Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

HAWK lay belly-down along the north bank of the arroyo, about fifty yards back from the first railroad bridge. His position was concealed by a boulder on his left and a spindly mesquite on his right.

“What’s going on? What are they doing?” Lieutenant Primrose asked, hunkered down behind the boulder off Hawk’s left hip.

“What’re we doing here?” Primrose voice betrayed his frustration. “What the hell has this to do with retrieving the payroll money?”

Through the first trestle’s far-left arch, Hawk watched through the thinning dust veil as the group of American outlaws and Mexican federales made way for the wagon. The wagon stopped in the shade of the second bridge.

Last night after they’d made love—if you could call it love—Saradee had told Hawk the bandits’ plan. So he pretty much knew what was happening now, as she and the steel-eyed gent, Kilroy, and the two federale leaders sat their horses while the fat major berated the wagon drivers, cheeks puffed, his right fist in the air.

The two young drivers scrambled down from the wagon seat, one quickly crossing himself, and ran back to the end of the wagon. As one of the wagon boys tossed a tarpaulin aside and rummaged around in a wooden crate, Hawk lowered the glasses and turned to Primrose.

“At the federales’ camp. Don’t get your underwear all twisted. By this time tomorrow, you and the loot will be on your merry way back to Arizona and the big party Major Devereaux will no doubt throw in your honor.”

“Why wait till tomorrow? Most of the federales must be here. How many could be left at their camp?”

Primrose gritted his teeth as Hawk casually cleaned the field glasses with his shirttail. “While they and those killers are busy out here, I say we go to the camp and secure those greenbacks!”

“Go ahead,” Hawk said, training the glasses again at the commotion at the base of the second bridge. “I got work to do.”

Hawk adjusted the binoculars’ focus until the arches of the second trestle swam sharply into view. Above the heads of the milling Americans and the federales, three men scaled the wooden cross-struts. The men climbed slowly, carefully, carrying small burlap sacks as preciously as newborn babes.

Hawk lowered the binoculars and retreated behind the boulder. As he wound the leather lanyard around the glasses and slipped the glasses into their velvet-lined case, Primrose stared at him, bemused.

“I take it you didn’t ride out here to enjoy the Mexican countryside,” Primrose said, lifting one cheek and slitting one eye. “Kill them. All of them.”

“If you intend to hold the money hostage,” Primrose said, “it isn’t going to work. In spite of how you are, or what you might think of me, I don’t value the money more than life. I won’t help you take them on.”

“Don’t need your help,” Hawk said, pulling a burlap knapsack from his saddlebags. “Got all the help I’ll need right here.”

He carried the sack over to the boulder and sat down beside the lieutenant. He laid the sack beside him, then kicked his boots out, crossed his ankles, and rested his back against the boulder. He tipped his hat brim over his eyes.

Primrose opened the sack and peeked inside. Staring up at him were three bunches of hide-wrapped dynamite, complete with caps and fuses. Four sticks composed each bunch.

“Lady luck,” Hawk said, yawning and crossing his arms over his chest. “I didn’t get much sleep last night, Primrose. Wake me when the hard cases have moseyed, will you?”

Hawk poked his hat brim up and turned to peer down the ravine. Moving much more quickly now, the driver and his partner conversing loudly and laughing, the wagon disappeared around a bend. The hard cases left only dust and the smell of fresh mule and horse plop in their wake.

Hawk stood, removed his duster, shoved his arms through the straps of the knapsack, securing the pack between his shoulder blades, and stepped carefully down the arroyo’s low, steep bank.

It took him a half hour, climbing amongst the beams in the hot sunshine, to attach the dynamite charges to the trestle braces with the thin rawhide ties he’d procured from Guadalupe Reyes’s livery barn. When he finished, he climbed down, jumping the last three feet, his boots kicking up dust amongst the rocks at the arroyo’s floor. His sweat-soaked shirt clung to his back and chest, and sweat dribbled through the dust on his dark, chiseled face.

Primrose stood holding Hawk’s duster in one hand, the reins of both horses, standing hang-headed behind him, in the other. “What now?”

Hawk grabbed the duster and squinted at the sun. “Time for lunch.” He tossed the duster over his bedroll, swung into the grulla’s hurricane deck, and gigged the horse toward town.

In El Molina, they had lunch in a little cantina not far from Reyes’s place, then took a two-hour siesta with the rest of the village, the lieutenant curled up on the floor of their room while Hawk slept on the bed. The shutters were thrown open to the muffled screech of gulls and the fresh breeze off the lake.

The heat and the breeze made Hawk dream about walking along a lake near Crossroads with his wife, Linda, and he woke smiling. As he stared at the cracked adobe ceiling flecked with fly shit and soot, the present returning to him slowly and heavily, the smile faded. He stomped into his boots and went down to the lake for another swim.

Late afternoon found him and Primrose back at the same cantina in which they’d had lunch, drinking tequila and what passed for beer down here—yeasty and warm. When it grew dark and the miners came in from the mines, dusty and jubilant and getting drunk quickly on the cantina owner’s home-brewed whiskey, Hawk and the lieutenant ordered platters of pork with all the trimmings. When they finished eating, they ordered more beer and tequila, sat on the small front veranda, and kicked back in their chairs.

The light faded and the stars kindled. The smell of mesquite smoke and spicy cooking odors grew strong on the breeze. Occasionally, a gull screeched or a distant coyote yammered. Dust from the steady stream of horseback riders and wagons sifted constantly, as did the smell of tobacco and liquor, horse shit and latrines. Pistols popped intermittently all across town.

The Mountain Lion Tavern sat kitty-corner across the square. Hawk and Primrose watched and listened as the gringo outlaws openly celebrated their coming fortune. They were only silhouettes from this distance—jostling shadows against the candles and lantern light—but Hawk could make out the long-haired Saradee gambling with a group near the square. She was the loudest of the revelers and, of course, at the center of the celebration.

Kilroy’s tall, lean frame with his Colorado hat sat relatively quietly, kicked back in a chair. He was no doubt mentally licking his wounds, his bandages glowing in the shadows.

Hawk finished his beer and turned a glance through the open, glassless window behind him. Amidst all the brown Mexican faces and straw sombreros was that of a tall American in a cream Stetson, moving toward the cantina’s crude bar from a back door.

Flagg carried a Winchester in his right hand. Raking the room, his nervous eyes met Hawk’s on the other side of the open window. Flagg stopped, took one fluid step behind an adobe post from which a lantern burned. Hawk’s right hand strayed to his Russian’s butt, froze when he saw Flagg trying to keep the post between him and Hawk as the lawman retraced his steps to the back door and ducked outside.

Hawk looked at the lieutenant, the young officer’s brows arched with curiosity, his eyes glassy from drink.

The next morning, Saradee awoke in the predawn dark, got up, threw her shirt around her naked shoulders, and lit a lamp. She dropped the mantle over the flame. Before she waved out the match, she used it to light a half-burned cheroot lying with several others in the ashtray on the bedside table.

Puffing smoke, she regarded Waylon still snoring on the bed, the fresh bandages Saradee had used to dress his wounds glowing in the guttering lamplight. If anything, his nose was even bluer than it had been yesterday, the bridge expanding into his swollen eyes, giving his face a bearlike appearance.

Saradee stuck the cheroot in her teeth, went to her cartridge belt draped over a chair back, and made sure both pistols were loaded. Satisfied, she climbed onto the bed and walked her fingers up the outlaw’s battered face, lightly flicking his lips.

A half hour later, she and Waylon were riding at the head of the gang, trotting their horses into the lightening eastern horizon. They were riding in the direction of the two train trestles, where they’d agreed to meet Valverde, Soto, and company.

A metallic clang sounded beneath Saradee’s horse. The horse lunged sideways, dropping its right shoulder. “Damn—look at that!” Saradee said as the chestnut limped forward and stopped.

“You didn’t check your shoes before we pulled out?” Saradee snapped a sharp look at him, an angry flush rising in her cheeks. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. Kilroy knew that look, wished he could take that last question back. After all, he had been the one who’d called the truce.

“I have a hammer and nails in my saddlebags. I’ll reset and be along in a few minutes.” Saradee glanced at the others clumped around her. “You boys go on.”

He gigged his horse ahead, waving the others on. Kilroy’s gang followed suit. Kilroy himself was the slowest to pull out, casting faintly skeptical glances over his right shoulder. Fifty yards away, he jerked his hat brim down, turned to look over his horse’s head, and urged the horse into a gallop behind the others.

Saradee had busied herself with hammer and nails. Now, as the gang galloped off, hooves clomping into the distance, she turned her head to look after them. She gave a wry snort and picked up the thrown shoe, the nails of which she’d loosened this morning, when the other gang members were making sure their own nails were firmly set in their horses’ hooves.

It took her only a few minutes to reset and hammer the shoe. She swung onto her saddle, turned the chestnut off the trail that she and the gang had been following, and spurred it into a westward, cross-country gallop.

Forty-five minutes later, she reined up before the cottonwoods where she and her mysterious friend had agreed to meet.

Having expected him to be waiting for her, Saradee looked around. No sign of him. Around her, shadows angled out from the shrubs and land formations as the top of the huge, molten sun inched above an eastern rimrock.

She dismounted, glanced toward the federale headquarters hidden behind a jog of purple-pink hills. Pacing back and forth beside her horse, she lit a fresh cigar and peered north toward town.

“Bastard,” she whispered when she’d waited a full fifteen minutes. “Goddamn bastard,” she repeated, louder this time.

She dropped the cigar butt, mashed it out with her boot toe, and her heart hammering, mounted up and digged the chestnut into a ground-eating gallop.

She crossed the hay field in less than a minute. She shucked her Winchester from the saddle boot, cocked it one-handed, and rested the barrel across her saddlebows.

But she met no resistance at the hacienda’s main gate. In fact, she saw no other person in the courtyard—other than a blackened, desiccated human hanging spread-eagled from a large wooden cross near a chicken coop. Horses stared at Saradee over the top rails of a distant corral, and a few chickens pecked in the yard churned with fresh tracks, littered with fresh horse apples.

Saradee dismounted and, holding the Winchester at low port, mounted the same steps she and her “friend” had mounted before, entered the casa by the same door. She stopped, listened, hearing nothing but the muffled buzz of flies in the dank air in which the fetor of unwashed men and spilled booze mixed with the lingering smell of a spicy Mexican breakfast.

Saradee walked along the hall. After three steps, she broke into a run, turning sharply into the room where she and the broad-shouldered hombre had discovered the chained and padlocked cabinet.

Six feet inside the room, she stopped dead in her tracks. She didn’t hear the sharp intake of her own breath. The cabinet padlock hung open, three bullet holes through its steel face. The doors were open a foot.

A large piece of yellowed paper lay on the third shelf from the top. Saradee picked it up, raked her enraged gaze over the sketched likeness of the mysterious stranger and the words GIDEON HAWK, ROGUE LAWMAN in large block letters beneath the even larger letters announcing WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE.