Thunder Over the Superstitions

by Peter Brandvold

  The Apache’s head jerked back and then the man’s arms and rifle came up as he flopped back and down and out of sight. He hadn’t hit the ground before Hawk was up and running, triggering his carbine from his hip as he wove between boulders. One, two, three Apaches hit the dust and then one retaliating slug tore across the rogue lawman’s left shoulder. The peripheral pain was an icy burn.

  He shot the Apache who’d caused the burn but another appeared between two cabin-sized slabs of rock and sailed a slug over Hawk’s left shoulder. He tried to return fire but his Winchester’s hammer pinged on an empty chamber.

  He ran another step then dove behind a wagon-sized boulder and immediately started reloading his carbine. Something moved to his hard left. He dropped the half-loaded Winchester, slid the Schofield from his cross-draw holster and raised the pistol as he clicked the hammer back.

  Hawk stayed the pressure on the Schofield’s trigger. He blinked. Pima Miller was hunkered down behind a boulder only a few yards up the slope from Hawk’s position. The outlaw was hastily reloading Hawk’s Henry, casting quick, sharp, shrewd glances toward the rogue lawman.

  Hawk’s heart thudded.

  Rage welled in him. It was about to explode like a barrel of coal oil, when something moved on the boulder above Miller. Instinctively, Hawk shot the Apache bearing down on Miller. The warrior gave a shrieking cry. His own momentum drove him on over the boulder, dropping his rifle and clamping his hand across the bullet hole below his breastbone just before he turned a somersault and hit the rocky ground beside the outlaw Hawk was hunting.

  Miller glanced at the dead Apache, and grinned. “Thanks, Hawk! ’Preciate that!”

  Then he twisted around, aiming Hawk’s Henry repeater, and fired somewhere upslope beyond Hawk’s position. Hawk clicked the Schofield’s hammer back but before he could aim again at his adversary, he saw another Apache running along the slope beyond the outlaw.

  The brave was bearing down on Miller who just then saw him and triggered an errant round.

  Hawk’s Schofield barked twice. The Apache jerked as he ran, dropped to his knees, his bow and arrow clattering beside him, blood welling from the two holes in his chest, and collapsed facedown. He rolled on down the slope to pile up against a boulder thirty yards away from Miller.

  Miller smiled. Hawk’s heart continued to thud against his ribs as he tightened his grip on the Schofield, boring a hole through Miller with his eyes.

  “Behind you!” the outlaw cried.

  Hawk twisted around and triggered his Schofield. His bullet sailed wide of the Apache storming toward him, but two shots sounded from downslope. The Apache grunted and bounded upslope and then rolled back down past Hawk.

  Hawk looked over the writhing Apache at Saradee. She was crouching behind a rock thirty yards away and on his right.

  The Apache was trying to gain his feet while sliding a bowie knife from behind his deerskin sash. Hawk shot the brave through his right temple and then looked over the dead Indian toward Saradee, who, looking beyond Hawk, said, “I see you found one of your friends, lover!”

  Hawk was only vaguely aware of clouds having moved over the sun as he turned back to Pima Miller, who was on his knees now and aiming Hawk’s Henry repeater over the top of his rock. Miller was looking at Hawk over his right shoulder, grinning that faintly jeering grin of his.

  “We’re in this together, Hawk! You an’ me now! Even your purty friend, if you trust her.” The killer lifted his chin toward the ridge. “I left three saddlebags filled with gold over yonder. Couldn’t get ’em off the mesa. Leastways, not with them redskins houndin’ my heels. The girl’s dead. Died hard!”

  The Indians were still shooting but more sporadically. Saradee was returning fire with her carbine. Miller squeezed off a shot and then looked at Hawk again as he ejected the spent cartridge. It clattered onto the rocks and rolled as he slid another one into the Henry’s breech.

  “Hawk, for chrissakes—get your head down!” Saradee admonished him.

  The rogue lawman ignored her. He was staring grimly at Miller, not bothering to keep his head down any longer. He had killing on his mind. There was nothing else.

  Only killing Pima Miller. That was why he was here.

  Hawk rose stiffly from behind his cover. He did not look up-slope. He was staring at Miller, who suddenly looked fearful. He laughed to try to cover it, but then his eyes grew dark, afraid.

  “Hawk, fer chrissakes!” he shouted, glancing nervously up-slope from where suddenly no more rifles barked, as though Hawk suddenly rising from behind his rock had befuddled the Indians to silence. “It’s us against them, now, Hawk. We gotta put the past behind us. I left thousands of dollars in gold up yonder. Next mountain to the north! Hundreds of thousands of dollars!”

  Behind Hawk, Saradee laughed. Hawk only vaguely heard her. He was on his feet now and he was moving toward Miller. He could feel the Apaches’ eyes on him. He could feel their rifles trained on him.

  He didn’t care. Linda and Jubal were beckoning.

  This was as good a day as any to join them. No one here deserved to live, anyway. Not Miller. Not Saradee.

  Not himself.

  He was tired.

  He just kept seeing that poor Indian woman he’d killed with a bullet meant for Miller. He kept seeing that little brown baby that Miller had left behind. He kept seeing in the far, misty background Linda and Jubal waving and smiling and beckoning him home.

  A chill wind rose. Hawk heard it howling among the crags. The red rocks around him had turned gray as death.

  “Hawk!” Miller cried. “You stop right there, goddamnit, or I’ll shoot ya with your own gun!”

  Hawk wasn’t aware that he’d moved so swiftly until he saw his right, moccasin-clad foot lift. Then the Henry was rising up and over the boulder Miller was crouched behind. It turned in the air and then dropped out of sight. Hawk heard it clatter onto the rocks.

  Behind Hawk, Saradee was laughing hysterically.

  “Miller, do you really think Gideon Hawk gives a shit about money?” she cried.

  Silence except for the moaning wind now hovered over the slope. That and Saradee’s bizarre laughter that Hawk could barely hear.

  Miller stared up at the rogue lawman standing over him, staring down at him. Miller’s lower jaw hung. His narrow eyes were dark, terrified.

  “Why, you’re plum crazy,” he rasped.

  And then suddenly Miller was dragging his pistol out of its holster but before he could get it even half raised, Hawk smashed the butt of his carbine against the dead center of the man’s forehead. The blow snapped Miller’s head back against the rock with a crunching thud.

  It stunned the killer, who sat staring dumbly at Hawk’s belly.

  “That there was for the woman,” Hawk grunted.

  He rammed the butt of the carbine against Miller’s head again.

  Miller grunted.

  Hawk said, “That there’s for the boy.”

  Again, he rammed the gun against the outlaw’s bloody forehead.

  “That was for the sawbones in Spotted Horse.”

  He raised the rifle once more, gritting his teeth and narrowing his eyes.

  “This one’s for me.”

  And then he drove the butt against the killer’s head one more time, harder than before. A resounding, crunching blow.

  Miller’s head bounced off the boulder. It jerked forward. The boulder behind him was red, speckled white with brain matter. Miller’s shoulders followed his head over his knees, and then the killer rolled downslope three times before coming to rest on his back, his arms and legs akimbo.

  His bashed-in forehead faced the sky. His lips were stretched back from his teeth in silent agony. His close-set, sightless eyes stared at nothing.

  A horse nickered.

  Hawk lifted his gaze from Miller. His grulla stood a ways downslope, beyond Miller. The girl’s Morgan was there, as well, idly cropping the sparse brush growing around the base of a rock.


  Hawk’s grulla stared at its rider, head down, nose working. It twitched its ears and whickered with quiet urgency.

  Hawk smiled.

  Thunder rumbled.

  He turned toward the upslope. Ten or so Indians had formed a semicircle around him, about twenty yards away. They crouched cautiously over their cocked rifles, all of which were aimed at Hawk’s chest and belly.

  “Sorry, Hawk,” Saradee said behind him. She was no longer laughing. “I done capped my last shell. I’m fresh out. I reckon this is it, you crazy bastard.”

  Hawk looked at the braves. Most were young and clad in green, red, or gray calico headbands. They wore breechclouts and moccasins. Some wore deerskin leggings, the tops turned down.

  They stared at Hawk quietly, mouths open, disbelief in their chocolate eyes. Their long, blue-black hair blew in the chill wind.

  Cold raindrops began spitting down from the gray sky that was tearing on the highest crags.

  Not all of the Chiricahuas facing Hawk were young. One was older, maybe late fifties, early sixties. Short and stocky, bandy-legged, streaks of silver in his long hair, he stood atop a boulder upslope from the others. His face was the nut-brown of old, worn leather, the skin drawn taught over high, knobby cheekbones. He wore a calico shirt and high-topped moccasins, a red sash around his lean waist.

  A medicine pouch and a talisman of porcupine quills hung from his neck. His silver-black eyes were set deep in craggy sockets. He held a Spencer repeater down low by his side, the rifle’s rear stock trimmed with brass rivets.

  The wind swirled, carrying the older Chiricahua’s distinct scent down toward Hawk. He smelled like the old, wild things of the desert.

  The older Apache stared at Hawk. Hawk stared back at him. They stood silently regarding each other for nearly a minute.

  And then Hawk turned his face a little to one side, quirked his lip corners with the respect due a formidable fellow warrior. And then he dropped his own carbine and held his arms out from his sides, palms raised slightly.

  Opening himself to a life-ending hail of lead.

  He waited.

  The old warrior chief continued staring obliquely down at the rogue lawman.

  Thunder crackled quietly at first—a long, ripping tear that grew louder and louder. When it finished echoing around the crags, the old man shouted something skyward, as though to his own Apache god.

  And then all the young warriors turned and scrambled back up the slope. When they were out of sight, the old warrior dropped down off his boulder, glanced once more at Hawk, and then ambled in his lurching, crouching, bandy-legged gait up the slope. He held his carbine down low at his side, the lanyard swinging free.

  The rocks at the top of the ridge seemed to swallow him up.

  Thunder pealed.

  Hawk lowered his arms. Rain lashed down at him. Still, he continued staring at where the old warrior had disappeared.

  “Sorry, Hawk,” Saradee said, coming up to stand beside him. They were both soaked, the rain hammering them.

  Saradee patted the rogue lawman’s chest. “Maybe some other time, lover. Come on,” she said. “I’ll buy ya a drink . . . somewhere warm. I know a place in Phoenix.”

  She slogged off down the rain-washed, rocky slope, thunder clapping, lightning dancing around her.

  And still Gideon Hawk stared up the slope toward the misty crags. He squinted his eyes against the rain. He was looking for Linda and Jubal. He wanted to see them there, beckoning.

  But they were gone.

  Hawk dropped to his knees, sobbing.

  The wind and rain lashed him.

  Thunder was a giant war drum exploding in his head.

  He didn’t see the old Dutchman, Jacob Walzer, smiling down from his relatively sheltered hiding place among the crags not far from where Geronimo and his Chiricahuas had disappeared.

  BLOOD AND LUST IN OLD MEXICO

  CHAPTER 1

  RAINY NIGHT IN SONORA

  The Rio Concho Kid sagged back in his rickety chair and listened to the soft desert rain drum on the cantina’s tin roof while a lone coyote howled mournfully in the Forgotten Mountains to the south.

  The Kid was pleasantly drunk on bacanora, a favorite drink of the border country. He smiled sweetly as he reflected on happier times, hopeful times when he and his reputation were still young and, if not innocent, at least naive.

  Mercifully, just when his thoughts began to sour, touching as they did on the smiling visage of a fresh young Apache girl named Elina, who was so long dead that he could just barely remember the texture of her hair but no longer recall the timbre of her voice, hooves hammered the muddy trail outside the remote cantina’s batwing doors.

  For an instant, a single owl’s cry, like a fleeting call of caution, drowned that of the coyote.

  Over the doors, out in the dark, rainy night, a large shadow moved. The smell of wet horse and wet leather, as well as the faint fragrance of cherry blossoms, wafted in on the chill damp air.

  Leather squawked and a horse chomped its bridle bit.

  Boots thumped on the narrow wooden stoop, and then a shadow appeared and became a young, red-haired woman as she pushed through the batwings and stopped, letting the louver doors clatter back into place behind her. Hunted brown eyes quickly scanned the long, dark, earthen-floored cantina, finding its only customer, the Kid, lounging against the wall opposite the bar consisting of cottonwood planks laid across beer kegs.

  The barman, Paco Alejandro Dominguez, was passed out in his chair behind the clay bacanora bowl, snoring softly, his thick gray hair tumbling down over his wizened, sun-blackened face. His leathery, hawk nose poked through the hair, nostrils expanding and contracting as he snored.

  The girl glanced behind her, nervous as a doe that had just dropped a fawn, and then strode forward to the Kid’s table.

  She was a well-set-up girl, twenty at the oldest, her thick, wavy, rust-red hair falling down over her shoulders and onto her plaid wool shirt that she wore open to the top of her cleavage. Between her breasts, a small, silver crucifix winked in the salmon light of the mesquite fire crackling near the bar’s far end and in front of which a kitten snoozed in a straw basket.

  The girl wore black leather slacks held snug to her comely hips by a leather belt trimmed with hammered silver, five-pointed stars. Black boots with silver tips rose to her shapely calves. There were no spurs. This was a girl who could ride—she had the hips and the legs for it—but who had a soft spot for horses.

  Her hair was damp, as was her shirt, which clung to her full bosom, and her eyes were just wild enough to make the Kid’s trigger finger ache.

  “Buy a girl a drink?” she said quickly in a thick Spanish accent.

  The Kid looked her over one more time, from the tips of her boots up past her breasts pushing out from behind the damp wool shirt, to her eyes that flicked back and forth across him with a faint desperation. The Kid smiled, shook his head. His dark eyes looked away from the young girl, no more than a child.

  She slammed her fist on the table. “Bastardo!”

  “I ain’t gonna contest it,” the Kid said mildly and casually lifted his gourd cup to sip his bacanora.

  She lifted her mouth corners, leaned forward against the table, giving him a better look down her shirt, and said in a smoky, sexy rasp: “I could make you a very happy hombre tonight, amigo.”

  The Kid looked at her well-filled shirt. A few years ago, when he was as green as a willow sapling, such a sight would have grabbed him by the throat and not let go for several hours. “And a dead one. Oh, true, there’s worse things than dyin’, but I’m enjoyin’ this evenin’ here with the rain and my drink and the prospect of a long sleep in a deep mound of straw out in the stable with my mare, Antonia. Run along, chiquita. Spread your happiness to someone who needs it more than I do tonight.”

  The Kid reached into the breast pocket of his buckskin shirt for his tobacco makings, but stopped suddenly and pricked his ears. Hooves drummed in the distance,
beneath the patter of the rain on the tin roof and the cracking and popping of the pinyon fire in the mud-brick hearth.

  The girl wheeled toward the batwings with a gasp.

  The hoof thuds grew quickly louder. The girl’s horse whinnied. One of the newcomers’ horses whinnied a response. Over the batwings, large shadows moved, and then boots thudded on the porch and a big man in a wagon-wheel sombrero pushed through the batwings.

  Two men flanked him, turning their heads this way and that to see around him, into the cantina.

  “No, Chacin,” the girl said in a brittle voice, backing away from the door, brushing the tips of her fingers across the Kid’s table. “I won’t . . . I won’t go with you. I’d rather die!”

  All this had been in Spanish, but the Kid, who’d been born Johnny Navarro in the Chisos Mountains of southern Texas, near the Rio Grande, though he’d acquired his nickname while riding the long coulees along the Rio Concho, knew the rough and twisted border tongue as well as he knew English.

  The big man, dressed in the flashy gear of the Mexican vaquero, complete with a billowy green silk neckerchief, moved heavily into the room, bunching his thick, mustache-mantled lips in fury. His chocolate eyes fired golden javelins of rage as water dripped from the brim of his black-felt wagon-wheel sombrero.

  “Chiquita, my orders are to bring you back to the General! You’re lucky you didn’t kill him—at least not yet!”

  Suddenly, moving with more agility than the Kid would have thought possible in a man so ungainly, he swiped one of his big paws at the girl and caught her shirt just as she’d turned to run. The shirt tore with a shrill ripping sound, buttons popping, exposing a good portion of her pale left breast behind her partially torn chamise.

  She screamed, “No!”

  The big man reached for the silver-plated Colt Navy conversion pistol holstered high on his right hip.

  “Oh, now, dangit,” the Kid said with an air of great despondency, rising heavily from his table and brushing his right hand across the Smith & Wesson Model 3 Schofield revolver holstered high and for the cross draw on his left, denim-clad hip, “that ain’t no way to treat a lady, an’ you know it!”