He kicked the door wide and stood crouched over the Henry, which he extended straight out from his right hip, sliding it quickly from right to left and back again. The room smelled like sweat, blood, and whiskey. The lone, brass-framed bed, which nearly filled the small room, was rumpled, sheets bloodstained.
A gray-headed man in a black suit sat in a chair near the bed’s right-front corner, beside an open window. The man’s head was tipped to his chest, as though he were sleeping though he wore spectacles and a stethoscope.
He looked as though someone had splashed him with a full bucket of red paint.
Hawk moved to him in two quick, long strides and pushed his head up and back with his rifle barrel, revealing the wide, deep gash stretching from one ear to the other. The cut was so deep that Hawk could see the man’s spine through pale sinews and liver-colored muck. A bloody scalpel lay on the floor near his blood-splattered shoes.
Hawk let the dead pill roller’s head drop back down to his chest and crouched to look out the window beside him.
A hay wagon was just then making its way along the main street, two beefy mules in the traces. A gray-bearded old man in overalls was shaking the reins over the mules’ backs.
Wind tore at the hay in the wagon box. There was a deep depression in the hay pile. As the wagon passed from Hawk’s right to his left, Hawk saw a murky, black-hatted figure in a light-blue shirt, suspenders, and black neckerchief running down a cross street, bits of hay clinging to his boots.
Hawk grimaced as he raised the Henry to his shoulder, aimed quickly, and fired. The rifle leaped and roared, setting Hawk’s ears to ringing in the close confines of the hotel room. The bullet blew up dust about six inches behind the heel of Pima Miller’s scissoring right boot.
The killer glanced over his shoulder as Hawk ejected the spent cartridge casing. Hawk aimed again, squeezed the Henry’s trigger, and watched his second bullet plume dust about a foot in front of where the last one had, another four inches shy of its mark.
And then Hawk could have sworn that Pima Miller cast him a taunting grin over his left shoulder as the outlaw continued running in a shambling, wounded sort of way, and disappeared around the rear corner of an old adobe church.
Hawk raked out a curse as he swung around and ran out of the room. He dropped down the stairs threes steps at a time, raising a ruckus that sounded like thunderclaps. Vivienne stood by the piano she’d been playing earlier, wringing her hands together in front of her see-through corset and regarding Hawk warily.
“I do apologize,” Hawk grunted as he ran past the girl on his way toward the front of the Laughing Lady.
“What for?” the girl called after him.
“The town’s out a sawbones!”
Hawk tipped his head low against the howling wind and ran up the street to the west. He ran one block and then turned into the cross street and sprinted for the back of the church.
He took his time scouring the area behind the church for Pima Miller, wary of an ambush. But then he crossed a rocky arroyo and found a little adobe shack and a stable and stock pen sitting in a clearing among wind-jostled mesquites and palo verdes. A corral of cottonwood poles flanked the shack, with a half dozen or so horses milling under a brush arbor.
Goats bleated in the stock pen. Dust rose and swirled, peppered with hay as well as the shit from goats, chickens, and horses.
Hawk stopped at the edge of the wash, facing the farmyard. The shack was no larger than the goat pen. It was cracked and discolored and several of the ironwood branches forming its roof lifted in the wind.
As Hawk surveyed the shack, a man stepped out of its front door, ducking his head and then donning his hat. He carried a rifle in his right hand. His long, cream-colored duster blew in the wind.
Another man stepped out behind him, also ducking through the low door and donning his hat. Two more men followed the second one, and a minute later, Hawk was facing five men armed with rifles. Four stood over six feet tall. The second man from the left was a full head shorter and dressed all in black leather except for a billowy red neckerchief whipping around in the gale.
Black mustaches drooped down over his mouth corners. He was the only one of the five not holding a rifle but held his hands over the two .45s on his hips.
None of these men was Pima Miller. Hawk guessed that Miller was holed up inside the shack from which the raucous strains of a baby’s cries were whipped and torn by the wind.
Hawk recognized a couple of the hard-eyed, bearded faces from the wanted dodgers residing in his saddlebags. Two of these men he knew for sure had prices on their heads. They probably all did. But that didn’t matter to Hawk. He’d take the bounty money; he’d be foolish not to. He and his horse had to eat, same as everyone else.
But mostly these men needed killing and Gideon Hawk believed he’d been placed on this earth to do just that—kill men who needed killing. It was as if some judicious spook whispered in his ear which ones needed killing and which ones did not.
Rare it was that Hawk’s trail led to a man who did not need a bullet in his head, however. Some needed two, just to be sure. And none needed proper burials. If such men had been placed here for a reason at all, it could be only to feed the carrion eaters.
The man standing to the right of the short, black-clad hombre stared incredulously at the rogue lawman, and said, “Gideon Hawk . . . ?”
Hawk said, “You had to know our paths would cross sooner or later, Frye.”
Leonard Frye—wanted for sundry offenses including bank robbery and murder. He’d also raped a young schoolteacher near the creek by which she’d taken her class for a picnic.
“Why’s that?” Frye asked.
“ ’Cause when a man needs killing as badly as you do, and for as long as you have, it’s what I’d call inevitable.”
The short man glanced at Leonard Frye and said something out of the corner of his mouth. Hawk couldn’t hear the words but he did hear Frye’s response: “Shut up.”
The last man to the right of the group scrunched up his face and said, “What—you think you’re God or somethin’?”
“Yeah,” Hawk said. “Somethin’ like that.”
Inside the shack, the baby continued to cry. Hawk kept one eye on the open door and the shuttered windows, wary of Pima Miller flinging a shot at him.
Leonard Frye opened and closed his hands around the Winchester he held across his chest. He shaped a cockeyed grin, narrowing one eye. “Five against one, Hawk!”
As Hawk snapped his rifle to his shoulder, he said, “Nope—just four, Leonard!”
He drilled a round, black hole in the middle of Leonard Frye’s forehead. Frye didn’t make a sound as Hawk’s bullet snapped his head back sharply and sent him staggering, hang-jawed, dead on his feet, dropping his rifle. The others jerked to immediate life, but Hawk dropped the short man before the little man could snap off a single round with his fancy .45s.
And then, as the others opened up on him, Hawk pivoted to his right and dove behind a dilapidated handcart moldering at the base of a barrel cactus. Slugs splatted into the side of the handcart and plowed up dirt and sand around Hawk. One bullet tore through the rotten handcart to sear a short line across his right cheek.
Hawk rolled away from the handcart to the other side of the barrel cactus. The three remaining shooters stood crouched and firing their rifles from their hips.
They’d lost track of Hawk for three vital seconds. The rogue lawman took advantage by shooting out from the right side of the barrel cactus. His aim was muddy from this position, however, and he managed to clip one man only in the knee. By the time he’d emptied the Henry, he’d wounded only one more. Tossing the empty rifle aside, he pulled both pistols.
Lead hammered the ground in front of him.
The smell of cordite was pepper on the breeze.
Hawk pulled his head back behind the cactus as two bullets plunked into it, spraying pulp and thorns. Hawk triggered his Russian around the cactus’s left side
. The bullet clanked off a rifle and plowed into the jaw of one of the shooters, who screamed and dropped his weapon as he buried his face in his hands.
The two others were backing up, eyes bright with anxiety, apparently looking for cover behind them.
Hawk aimed his Colt carefully around the right side of the cactus, and drilled one of the retreaters in the belly. As that man folded like a jackknife, bellowing curses, Hawk drilled the other one in the left shoulder. As the man screamed and jerked back, Hawk’s Colt leaped and roared again. The bullet slammed into the man’s neck, just right of his Adam’s apple.
The shooter dropped his rifle and twisted around and fell. He rolled over onto his back, rose to a half-sitting position, and tried bringing his rifle up once more.
Hawk gained a knee, aimed the Colt carefully. The wounded shooter stared at him, terror in his wide-open eyes. He opened his mouth to scream. The rogue lawman’s next shot shattered the man’s front teeth and shredded his tongue before blowing out the back of his head.
Spying movement near the cabin, Hawk jerked his head toward the door to see Pima Miller grinning at him over the Remington he was aiming straight out in his right hand. Miller’s gloved left hand was clamped over the bloodstain just above his left hip.
Hawk pulled his head back behind the cactus, and Miller’s slug went hurling through the air where Hawk’s face had been a quarter second before.
Hawk fired both his pistols toward the cabin.
Miller gritted his teeth as he jerked back inside, and then he was gone, nothing but dark doorway where he’d been.
And then Hawk was running toward the open door with both pistols cocked and raised.
Inside, the baby was screaming louder.
CHAPTER 3
MOTHER AND CHILD
Hawk bolted through the open door, threw himself to the right, and pressed his back against the wall. He knocked a shelf loose of its moorings, and the shelf and several clay containers and airtight tins crashed to the floor.
Ignoring the din, the rogue lawman shifted both his aimed pistols around, looking for a target in the shack’s rough-hewn, sparsely furnished, dingy interior. The shack was long and deep.
At the rear were two windows. The right window’s shutter was open. In the yard beyond it, Miller was gaining his feet, looking back through the window at Hawk. He was smiling but his unshaven cheeks appeared drawn and haggard. His long, cinnamon mustaches beneath the beak-like nose and close-set eyes were buffeting in the wind.
The wounded killer raised his Remington, and Hawk ducked as the pistol stabbed flames toward him, popping flatly. The slug slammed into the wall over Hawk’s crouching body.
Hawk rose, raising his pistols to his shoulder. He held fire. Pima Miller was no longer in the window.
Hawk bolted forward. He ran between a cluttered wooden eating table and the wall on the right, past what he thought was a person slumped on a sofa and a crate hanging from the ceiling by ropes. This crate was where the baby’s cries seemed to be originating.
None of these messages that Hawk’s senses were sending to his brain seemed very significant at the moment. His gaze was riveted on the window beyond which he’d seen Pima Miller.
As Hawk reached the window, he stopped and aimed his Russian out the opening. A small adobe barn and corral lay about sixty yards away, amid low shrubs, cacti, and blowing grit. The horses were standing beneath the brush arbor, their tails blowing in the wind.
Another horse—this one saddled—was tied to the corral gate. A burlap feed sack hung from its ears. Another horse was galloping off through shrubs flanking the corral’s right side. As the horse and rider—Pima Miller in his blue shirt and black hat—swung to the right, following a shallow wash, Hawk aimed quickly at the obscured figure, and fired.
Miller and the horse were twisting and turning too violently down the wash for accurate shooting. Hawk’s slugs plumed dust, spanged off rocks, and snapped mesquite branches.
Hearing himself curse loudly, Hawk continued firing, with both pistols now leaping in his hands, until the hammers clicked benignly against the firing pins.
He loosed another bellowing curse as he stared off toward where Pima Miller had been only a few seconds before and where there was only blowing grit and jostling branches. The horse tied to the corral gate shook its feed sack free of its ears, shook its head again, and whinnied.
Behind Hawk, the baby was crying loudly, shrilly.
He remembered the slumped figure.
He walked back along the table cluttered with all manner of weapon—pistols, rifles, and knives—as well as ammunition of several calibers. There were plates with food on them, a board with a half a loaf of crumbly brown bread, a pot of beans, a saucer bearing goat cheese.
But Hawk’s attention wasn’t on the cluttered table but on the figure slumped across the red velvet fainting couch which, with its scrolled arms and legs, looked as out of place here as would a zebra in the corral out back.
The girl was hanging half off of the couch’s left side, her head on the floor, arms dangling. She wore a cheap, green dress of embroidered cotton. Her feet were bare, brown legs dirty. Hawk dropped to a knee beside the girl hanging off the arm of the couch, and cleared his throat tentatively.
“Miss . . . ?”
When he received no response, he took her arms and pulled her to a sitting position atop the couch. He immediately saw why she hadn’t responded. There was a ragged-edged hole in her forehead, sort of centered between the bridge of her nose and her left eye.
Her large, brown eyes were open and staring at Hawk’s chest. Long, straight, raven hair hung down past her shoulders and along her slender, brown arms. An Apache girl, judging by her skin color and the broad flatness and rounded cheekbones of her pretty face.
She wore a doubled necklace of .45-caliber cartridges strung with braided horsehair around her neck. The cartridges winked dully in the dull light from the window at the end of the room—the window through which Hawk had let Pima Miller flee.
The baby continued to cry loudly, stridently. So loudly at times that Hawk’s eardrums rattled and ached. Feeling as though someone had stuck a stiletto in his guts, the rogue lawman stepped over to the crate hanging by ropes from two rusty hooks in the ceiling.
The peach crate was padded with a folded, striped blanket—part of a horse blanket. The little brown child inside the crate lay crying up at Hawk, its tiny, round, brown face crumpled in misery. The child—a boy, Hawk thought—squeezed his eyes shut with every bellowing scream. There was a momentary pause in the screams as the child filled its tiny lungs, and then the screams resumed.
The boy’s tiny hands, each little larger than the tip of Hawk’s own fingers, flailed in the air between the boy and Hawk.
Flailed for the comfort of its mother . . .
“Nan-tee.”
The voice sounding just off of Hawk’s right shoulder caused him to jerk with a start. He turned to see Vivienne standing beside him, staring at the dead woman sitting on the fainting couch. The saloon girl held a blanket around her bare shoulders.
“Nan-tee,” Vivienne said. “Miller’s woman.”
“That his, too?” Hawk nodded toward the child in the peach crate.
Vivienne nodded. She reached into the peach crate, wrapped her hands around the child clad in an oilskin diaper, and lifted him out of the box. She pressed the boy’s tear-streaked cheek to her own scarred cheek and then held him fast against her breast, rocking him gently.
Hawk tore his beleaguered gaze from the child to the boy’s dead mother.
“Miller?” Vivienne said.
“Out the window,” Hawk said tonelessly.
The child had stopped crying. The silence now on the lee side of the gunfire and the infant’s wails was funereal. Outside, the wind howled and moaned like a hungry, stalking animal.
“He left her here,” Hawk said. “Left the boy here.”
“That is understandable,” Vivienne said, continuing to rock t
he child gently. “He is a bastard. A pendejo. I never knew what she saw in him—Nan-tee. She was always fond of the outlaws, though. The rest of the town was scared of her . . . because of them.” She looked around at the small shack cluttered with food, guns, tack, and ammunition. “Scared of this place.”
“This where they holed up—Miller’s bunch?”
“For two, three weeks at a time,” Vivienne said, and then cooed to the child who had taken comfort in the saloon girl’s touch.
“They would ride in, and business would dry up in Spotted Horse, just as it has done for the past week, since they last rode in.” Vivienne stared at him for a time, frown lines cut across her light-brown forehead, above her curious brown eyes.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
“The man who killed the child’s mother,” Hawk said again in the same hollow, toneless voice as before, as he continued to stare at the child nuzzling Vivienne’s breast, trying to get to the nipple behind the see-through corset. Some invisible specter was turning that stiletto in his guts, probing around inside him as though fishing for his heart.
Wretched damned world . . .
“I know a woman who will care for him,” Vivienne said as thunder rumbled in the distance, beneath the wind. “He will be better off without her and Miller.”
“No child is better off without his ma,” Hawk said.
Vivienne turned and walked out of the shack, gently rocking the child against her chest.
Hawk stared down at Nan-tee. As the dead woman, her hair blowing in the wind funneling through the shack, stared blindly across the room, he had a vision of his own wife’s face as Linda had dangled from that big cottonwood in their backyard in the little, Midwestern town of Crossroads, in the miserable hours after they’d buried their son who too had been hanged.
Only Jubal had been hanged by Three-Fingers Ned Meade as payback against Hawk. Before he’d gone rogue because of Meade and the crooked county prosecutor who had turned Meade free on a technicality he’d found in the law, Hawk had brought Meade’s perverted younger brother to justice.
Thunder Over the Superstitions Page 2
