Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1. - EXECUTIONER’S SONG
Chapter 2. - BEWARE THE PREACHER’S PIG
Chapter 3. - MRS. PARKER
Chapter 4. - ROSE WATER AND TALCUM
Chapter 5. - DEADLY PREY
Chapter 6. - A KILLER CALLED KNIFE-HAND
Chapter 7. - UNDIVIDED ATTENTION
Chapter 8. - JUBAL’S STALLION
Chapter 9. - DORIS
Chapter 10. - RIDE TO SWEETWATER
Chapter 11. - THE GIRL HE SHOULD HAVE KILLED
Chapter 12. - KID RENO RIDES
Chapter 13. - A FRIEND OF GALVIN WOODS
Chapter 14. - LAST CHANCE RANGE
Chapter 15. - BUZZARD BAIT
Chapter 16. - RECKONING
Chapter 17. - THE DEVIL IN CHURCH
Chapter 18. - IRONSIDE
Chapter 19. - GETTING THE DOG ACQUAINTED WITH ITS LEASH
Chapter 20. - KID RENO’S RIDE
Chapter 21. - VISITORS
Chapter 22. - A HELLUVA SON OF A BITCH TO THROW IN WITH
Chapter 23. - AMIGOS PARA LA VIDA
Chapter 24. - “THAT’S ONE WAY TO CURE THE PONY DRIP”
Chapter 25. - KNIFE-HAND’S HUMBLE SANCTUARY
Chapter 26. - FORBIDDEN FRUIT
Chapter 27. - AMBUSCADE
Chapter 28. - CARRION CRY
The Aftermath
He leaned forward, set his elbows on his hips, and continued to scrub brusquely at his scalp as if to ease the hard tension knots in his skull and the back of his bull neck.
As if to obliterate the echoes of the dead men’s screams in his ears and to erase the images of bloody murder that danced around behind his eyes like snippets from a thousand waking nightmares . . .
Always it was like this after a “job,” as he called his un-sanctioned hunts. A day or two, maybe even a week or two of self-recrimination, isolation, depression. A free fall into an abyss darker than the remotest regions of outer space. Into a world without sound, without color, without taste save the coppery taste of blood, without smell except the sweet, cloying odor of burned gunpowder and death.
Praise for the novels of Peter Brandvold
“Lots of action . . . If you thought they didn’t write ’em like this anymore, this is the book for you.”
—Bill Crider, author of the Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mysteries
“Recommended to anyone who loves the West as I do. A very good read.”—Jack Ballas, author of A Town Afraid
“A natural born storyteller.”
—Bill Brooks, author of Vengeance Trail
“Brandvold writes a lot like L’Amour.” —The Fargo Forum
“Brandvold creates a fast-paced, action-packed novel.”
—James Reasoner, author of Death Head Crossing
“One of the best writers of traditional action Westerns in the business right now. He’s very prolific.” —Bookgasm
“Brandvold’s rousing adventure The Romantics feels more cinematic with every passing chapter.” —Cowboys & Indians
“Action-packed, entertaining read for fans of traditional Westerns.” —Booklist
Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold
The Rogue Lawman Series
BORDER SNAKES
BULLETS OVER BEDLAM
COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL
DEADLY PREY
ROGUE LAWMAN
The Sheriff Ben Stillman Series
HELL ON WHEELS
ONCE LATE WITH A .38
ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN
ONCE A RENEGADE
ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER
ONCE A LAWMAN
ONCE MORE WITH A .44
ONCE A MARSHAL
The .45-Caliber Series
.45-CALIBER FIREBRAND
.45-CALIBER WIDOW MAKER
.45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP
.45-CALIBER MANHUNT
.45-CALIBER FURY
.45-CALIBER REVENGE
The Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet Series
THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS
THE DEVIL’S LAIR
STARING DOWN THE DEVIL
THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE
RIDING WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS
DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND
THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET
Other titles
BLOOD MOUNTAIN
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
ROGUE LAWMAN: BORDER SNAKES
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
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Berkley edition / January 2010
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For my sis, Stacey,
who inspired Saradee
1.
EXECUTIONER’S SONG
THE man known as the Rogue Lawman thumbed open the loading gate of his big Russian horse pistol and shoved a bullet into the chamber that he normally kept empty beneath the hammer. He closed the loading gate and spun the cylinder, the clicks sounding like a low, distant scream beneath the howling wind.
Sliding the Russian into the cross-draw holster sitting high on his left hip, and angled so that the gun’s grips nudged his belly, he stared ahead over the twitching ears of his grulla. The town he’d been heading for these past three days lay ahead—unpainted frame buildings and adobe-bri
ck hovels situated among dun boulders between two rocky ridges slumped like long-dead, mineralized dinosaurs.
Blowing dust and tumbleweeds sheathed the town in a tawny gauze. No one appeared on the broad street between the twin rows of shabby buildings and stock corrals. Not even a horse was out—at least, none that Gideon Hawk could see from this distance of fifty yards. There was the caterwauling of shingle chains and the lower, more distant and intermittent clapping of an unlatched door against its frame.
A man’s howl of unbound revelry reached Hawk’s ears. It rose for just a moment above the howling of the wind, the screech of the rusty chains, and the clatter of the door. And then it died, leaving only the wind again, mewling over the spinelike northern ridge like the devil’s demon dogs loosed from hell on a mission of bloody mischief.
Hawk tipped the brim of his black, flat-brimmed hat down low over his eyes, turned up the collar of his sheepskin coat against the chill, autumn gale, and toed the grulla forward. His head swiveled on his shoulders, eyes working back and forth across the trail, as sheds and small stables began moving up around him. He passed a sign along the trail—nothing more than two small planks nailed to a short post with the name MESILLA burned into the wood with a running iron.
Beyond the signpost the trail widened into the town’s main thoroughfare.
The grulla’s steady clomps were drowned by the wind and the screeching chains. Dust, seeds, straw, and small bits of manure pelted Hawk like small-gauge buckshot. He winced against it, making out the business buildings around him, a few with high false fronts, several without. Many of the dwellings were simple frame affairs constructed of whipsawed planks that either had never been painted or had been stripped of their paint long ago by the searing, high-altitude sun of southwestern Colorado.
Among them, one building stuck out like a red dress in a funeral procession.
It was from this building that more whoops and cries of revelry came, along with the faint tinkling of a rapidly played piano. And it was toward this building—large and red and with a broad front porch sitting up high on stilts—that Hawk had started to angle when he saw a man with a rifle step out of an alley mouth on the right side of the street.
The man turned toward Hawk, froze as Hawk rode toward him, then stepped straight backward, turned, and disappeared down the alley between two shabby buildings.
Hawk angled the grulla toward the alley mouth and caught a glimpse of the rifleman just as the man slipped around the rear corner of the drugstore on Hawk’s right. Hawk’s jade-green eyes stared out from leathery sockets set deep in a ruggedly carved, high-cheekboned face.
It was the face of an Indian; in fact, Hawk’s father had been a Ute war chief. His mother, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants. The cold eyes blinked once, and then Hawk gave a wry snort, swung his right boot over the saddle horn, and dropped smoothly out of the saddle, landing flat-footed—an oddly graceful move for a man of Hawk’s large size and breadth of shoulder.
He took long strides through the alley strewn with windblown trash.
As he rounded the drugstore’s rear corner, he drew the big Russian from its cross-draw holster and ratcheted back the hammer. The wind was howling too loudly back here for the man ahead of him—the man facing in the opposite direction, crouched over his rifle as he stole along the rear of the drugstore to the opposite side—to hear the ominous click.
Hawk’s voice froze him. “Willie Dumas?”
The man, who was small and wiry, dressed in a shabby canvas duster and checked wool trousers, their cuffs stuffed into high-topped boots, turned around slowly. His young, whiskered cheeks lost their color, and his colorless eyes glinted fearfully when they’d taken the measure of the big, black-hatted man before him, whose face personified thunder.
“Who the hell are you?”
Hawk set his lips as he raised the Russian, dropping his chin slightly and canting his head as he aimed down the barrel. “Your executioner.”
The Russian roared.
The .44-caliber round plunked through Willie Dumas’s forehead, and drove the young killer straight back off his heels.
For a moment he teetered like a windmill in a high mountain gale, eyes crossing, arms thrown out to his sides. He released his rifle. A second after it hit the ground, Willie Dumas hit the ground, as well, one leg curled beneath the other.
His boots twitched and his eyes danced and his hands opened and closed as though clutching at the last remnants of his life.
Without so much as a second glance at the brigand, Hawk stepped over the near-lifeless body, turned the drugstore’s far corner, and walked up the gap between the drugstore and a shabby two-story brick building to the main street. At the mouth of the gap, he stared at the big, red building on the other side of the street and up a ways, sitting alone on a weed-choked lot behind two broad front galleries—one on the first story, another on the second.
The piano could no longer be heard from inside. Just as Hawk noted this, a pistol popped behind the building’s walls. A girl shrieked. A few seconds later, a man laughed and another woman yelled, her voice pitched in admonishment.
Hawk glanced to his left.
The grulla stood where he’d left it, ground-tied. The well-trained mount had moved only far enough to face downwind, and its tail blew up between its legs in the steady, sand-swirling gale.
Staring at the red building, part adobe brick and part wood, and which large letters painted across the front identified as A THOUSAND DELIGHTS SALOON AND SPORTING PARLOR, Hawk whistled. The grulla trotted over to him.
Hawk took his eyes off the sporting parlor only long enough to shuck his sixteen-shot Henry repeating rifle from his saddle scabbard. He levered a cartridge into the rifle’s firing chamber, off-cocked the hammer, and set the rifle atop his right shoulder, his black-gloved hand wrapped around the neck of the rifle’s stock.
Taking his customary long, confident strides, black hat tipped low, Hawk angled across the street to the sporting parlor. He mounted the front steps, crossed the broad front porch, and pushed through one of the two stout wooden doors adorned with brass knockers in the shapes of naked women.
As he stepped inside, a pretty brunette in a long, red dress was admonishing a man sitting on a brocade sofa with a little, scantily clad blonde for discharging firearms on the premises. The man—bearded, wearing a checked shirt, and with a battered Stetson tipped back off his forehead—was telling the woman she ought not to have rats on her premises if she didn’t “want men discharging guns at ’em.” The pistol in his hand was still smoking.
The argument died unresolved as all eyes in the room, including those of the arguers, turned toward the newcomer just now shutting the door on the cold wind.
Hawk let his eyes rake the room quickly, taking in the ornate furnishings, which included varnished tables, richly upholstered chairs and fainting couches with here and there a flimsy privacy screen and heavy, elegant drapes hung across shadowy alcoves. There were potted palms and ferns hanging from ceiling beams.
A fire popped in a large hearth in the room’s right wall, smoke billowing when the wind gusted down the chimney. A long, mahogany bar with a mirrored back bar ran across the room’s rear, beneath a second-story balcony and flanked by a carpeted staircase. In the bright light of lanterns, candles, and leaping flames, the glasses pyramided on the bar and stacked on the shelves behind it gleamed like jewels.
A man stood behind the bar, filling three shot glasses while a girl with a serving tray waited. The girl had turned to glance over a bare shoulder at Hawk. The bartender regarded him from beneath bushy black brows.
The piano had stopped when Hawk had walked in.
Now he strode toward the bar, following a path between the tables, his rifle on a shoulder and his boots clomping loudly upon the scarred puncheons. The piano player—a lean old gent in a top hat—began playing again, with less vigor than before. Most of the heads in the room swiveled to follow Hawk to the bar.
There were seve
n men visible, he half-consciously counted. Four were playing cards at a table while the other three were scattered about the room. All were with women. They all bore the faces of human wolves. Several Hawk recognized from wanted dodgers.
As the serving girl removed her tray from the bar top and shambled off to the table at which the cardplayers sat in sudden, moody silence, Hawk laid his rifle on the bar and said, “Bourbon.”
The barman likely doubled as a bouncer. He was nearly as tall and broad-shouldered as Hawk. His left brow and his nose were badly scarred. As he reached under the bar for a bottle, Hawk said, “I’ll take the good stuff—not what you’ve been serving these border snakes. Been a long trail.”
The bartender arched a brow at the pretty brunette who’d been reading the riot act to the man who’d discharged his pistol. In the back bar mirror, Hawk saw the woman dip her dimpled chin. The barman lifted a labeled bottle from beneath the bar, swept a glass off the pyramid to his left, and filled it.
Hawk tossed a half eagle on the bar. “Leave the bottle.”
The piano spoke a little louder, and voices sounded behind Hawk as a couple of conversations resumed. He could see in the mirror that the four cardplayers had continued their game, albeit haltingly and continuing to cast skeptical glances toward the rangy, rifle-packing newcomer at the bar.
Hawk threw back half his drink. A girl who had been sitting alone and looking bored near the fireplace got up and strolled over to him, resting one elbow atop the bar. She was a willowy honey blonde with pale blue eyes and a sharp nose, wearing a dress of pink taffeta. What there was of it. Her white shoulders were bare, as was most of her cleavage. A black choker encircled her thin neck.
Border Snakes Page 1
