Cold Corpse, Hot Trail

by Peter Brandvold

  He tensed suddenly, tightening all his muscles and throwing his head back on his shoulders. “For the love o’ Jesus!”

  It took nearly a minute for his blood to settle.

  “You must be half-French,” he repeated through a long sigh, his heart slowing gradually. “Christ.”

  She looked up at him from between his knees, smiling coquettishly and running the sleeve of her calico shirt—also stolen from the miners—across her mouth. “Did you enjoy that?”

  Kilroy shook his head and swallowed. He glimpsed something in the corner of his left eye. Twisting his head northward, he lifted the field glasses. He stared through the glasses, adjusting the focus.

  Saradee remained kneeling between his spread knees, his wilting member only inches from her face. A very vulnerable position. She remembered the threat in his voice when he’d rescued her from the Yaqui savages. She glanced at the pistol butts poking up from her holsters, and absently lowered her right hand to the polished grips of a .45.

  “Yeah, it’s him, all right.” Kilroy’s voice broke her reverie. “They took the bait now—headin’ away from us. For now,” he added dryly.

  Rising, she reached for the glasses. “Let me see.”

  “Keep low.”

  “Yeah, yeah, just give me the fuckin’ glasses.”

  Handing over the binoculars, Kilroy rose awkwardly and pulled his pants up. Saradee peered through the glasses, adjusting the focus until a dozen or so swarthy men in dark-blue uniforms galloped around a rocky mesa less than a mile away, heading south, their blond dust rising behind their sweat-lathered horses.

  The lead rider was a big, broad-chested, heavy-gutted man with a flat, pocked face and large, black eyes. He wore two pearl-gripped pistols in shoulder holsters, cartridge belts crossed on his gold-buttoned, epaulette-decorated tunic.

  To his left rode a tall, slender, hatchet-faced Mexican in the same blue uniform with red-striped slacks, but with a gaudy sombrero strapped beneath his chin, and with the sleeves of his tunic removed to reveal his dark, corded arms. Long, grizzled hair streaked with silver flew back in the wind. Saradee counted three knives and three pistols in various visible sheaths.

  When she’d scanned the other riders—all younger versions of the two lead riders, and all armed as if for war—she lifted her cheeks in a scowl. The federales were a good three or four miles away. Still, she could sense their dark, fearless, south-of-the-border savagery that made even her look tame in comparison.

  “Yep,” Saradee said, lowering the glasses and turning a glance to Waylon buttoning the fly of his trousers in the nook behind her. “They’re gonna have to go the way of all bad greasers. I won’t have it any other way.”

  “That might be easier said than done, my flower.”

  She jumped down to the nook’s floor, tawny hair bobbing on her shoulders. She slapped the glasses against Kilroy’s chest, tipped her hat back to offer a mocking grin. “You leave it to me if you’re scared.”

  “As good as you are at French,” Kilroy growled, glaring at her, her wiles having left him still feeling disoriented, “your English leaves something to be desired.”

  Saradee glanced down at the trough in the rocks leading down to the canyon floor. She extended her hand. “After you, my love.”

  “After you, my flower.”

  “I insist.”

  Side by side, hand in hand, they picked their way down the trough, like two young lovers on their first spring outing. Cutting cautious glances at each other, their taut smiles in place, they strolled along the shoulder of a low hill to the base of a rocky scarp, where the rest of the gang—twelve dusty riders—and their horses lounged in the shade of several mesquite shrubs and saquaros. A couple of men stood in the cool opening of a long-abandoned gold mine shrouded in desert willows. The horses were tied together under a sprawling cottonwood.

  “Don’t you two look handsome?” said Kevin Redmond, grinning like a bridesmaid at the happy-looking pair.

  “Hansel and Gretel out fer a stroll,” said Turkey McDade, sharpening his bowie knife on a whetstone. His voice was crisp. “While the rest of us sweat it out here, so damn thirsty we can smell the tequila in El Molina.”

  “Let the bee out of your bonnet, Turk,” said Saradee, releasing Kilroy’s hand and casually swiping McDade’s hat from his head. “We’re within an hour’s ride.”

  “Any sign of the federales?” asked Dog-Tail Bascomb, running a greasy cloth over one of his sawed-off Winchesters.

  “Does shit run downhill?” said Kilroy. “I told you I sensed their presence. I been down here enough times, I get a belly burn when one o’ them chili-chompers is within ten miles.”

  McDade stooped to retrieve his hat, grumbling, “What’re we gonna do about Valverde?”

  “Cross that bridge when we come to it.” Kilroy moved to the horse over which the money sacks were draped. He opened one of the pouches, dipped out a wad of greenbacks. “Time to part company with the lucre for a few weeks.” He counted out several bills into his right hand, extended the money to Redmond, then moved on to Butch Reynolds, who was lounging against a low hummock near a barrel cactus. “A hundred dollars per man should tide us each till we can make the final divvy and part company.”

  “A hundred dollars?” said Bunkmeyer. “Shit, I can go through a hundred dollars in one night, Boss!”

  “Rein in, fool!” snapped Saradee, rolling a smoke. “We can’t go showing a bunch of money around El Molina without raising Valverde’s suspicion. As long as he thinks our take in the States was small, he’ll ride out and leave us alone.”

  She paused and glanced at Kilory still divvying up the cash. “At least, that’s what Waylon thinks. Personally, I think we should kill the son of a bitch. We’re gonna have to sooner or later, and I see no reason to put off for tomorrow what you should do today.”

  “There’s plenty snakes from Valverde’s hole,” Kilroy said, slapping a wad of bills against the mulatto’s vest and glancing affectionately at Saradee. “You kill one, they all come slitherin’ out.”

  Saradee looked up with a cunning grin, poking the cigarette between her slightly swollen lips and striking a match to life on the buckle of her cartridge belt. “We’ll play it your way, pet.” She touched fire to the quirley, puffing smoke. “For now . . .”

  “Look at how sweet they get along,” said Kevin Redmond, cutting his eyes to Kilroy. “Boss, I think you should marry that girl.”

  “Keep your bloomers on, boy,” sneered Saradee, taking a deep drag off her cigarette and fixing her gaze on Kilroy. “Why would I buy the cow when I can get the milk for free?”

  The others laughed as they stuffed their money into their pockets. Flushing, Kilroy grabbed the money sacks off the packhorse. He slung the sacks over his right shoulder and headed for the mine.

  The others frowned as they watched Kilroy push through the shrubs before the mine portal.

  “Hey, where you goin’, Boss?” said Omaha Landers, cuffing his derby hat back on his head. His father was a Lutheran minister, and with a nod to the old man’s honor, he always wore relatively clean broadcloth trousers and suspenders over a nice shirt, which looked a little ludicrous with the sawed-off ten-gauge hanging down his back.

  “Stand down, Omaha.”

  The slender, well-dressed outlaw flushed with fury. “Stand down, my ass!”

  “Can’t think of a better place to hide stolen greenbacks than this mine shaft. Only a couple miles from El Molina, but Valverde’ll never find it.” Kilroy turned toward the group, a smug smile curving his dark-blond mustache. “In a few weeks, when we’re sure we haven’t been followed and our trail’s grown cold, we’ll come back and get it. All of us together”—he grinned from ear to ear, his blue eyes slitting cunningly—“like one big happy family!”

  Kilroy turned, lowered his head a few inches, and disappeared into the dark mine portal, the others except Saradee frowning. Saradee eyed each rider, watching her man’s back, ready to shoot if the need aro
se. It wouldn’t have broken her heart to see Waylon gutted with a .44 slug, especially by his own men, but she needed him now. He’d dealt with Valverde before. She hadn’t. In good time, however, he’d end up the way she’d fantasized up on the ridge, with his pants bunched around his boots, screaming like a nun in the devil’s own whorehouse.

  Saradee’s men turned to her, eyes sharp with incredulity. Bernal Montoya, standing near the horses with the other Mex, Alberto Jiminez, was clutching the horn handle of his bowie, snugged in his shoulder sheath.

  Saradee gestured for the men to stand down. She shucked her Winchester from her saddle boot and sauntered up to the low, round opening in the rock wall. All the men, including Waylon’s boys, were watching her now. Waylon’s scoundrels shunted their wary, angry gazes between her Winchester and her face, spreading their feet and lowering their hands to the six-shooters.

  Rufus Bunkmeyer said, “What are your intentions, Miss Saradee?”

  Saradee turned to the man. She remembered the three Yaquis who’d savaged her, scratching her breasts, grunting like mules, and slathering her face with their sweat and saliva. One had even tried biting her tongue off.

  She kept smiling, meeting the half-breed’s gaze. When Waylon was dead, she’d gut this savage with his own Arkansas toothpick. She didn’t think Bunkmeyer had any Yaqui blood, but one red nigger was pretty much the same as another, and this one would pay for the others.

  Saradee and the half-breed were still trying to stare each other down when Kilroy walked out of the mine and straightened up. “Safe and sound.”

  Jimbo Walsh poked a finger at the opening. “What’s to prevent some drifter from wanderin’ in there to have a look around . . . or—not to be suspicious, ye understand—one of us?”

  Saradee hefted her Winchester, turned, and rammed the rifle’s butt against the bottom of a square-hewn entrance joist. The joist was already gray and splintered, its top end leaning precariously out from the mine. Saradee gave it three hard licks, and the bottom end of the timber slid inward with a crack and a groan.

  The lintel gave. Saradee and the others backed away as the entranced disappeared in falling rock and billowing dust.

  “What do you think?” Saradee said as the others choked on the dust. “We’re gonna leave home without locking the doors?”

  15.

  EL MOLINA

  AN hour after leaving the mine, the Kilroy/Jones Gang topped a rocky shelf and rode down into the pueblo of El Molina, sprawled along a hillside and bordered on the south by a small lake sparkling in the afternoon sunshine.

  “Easy, boys,” Kilroy warned, sweeping his gaze from left to right along the curving cart trail and noting the several slamming window shutters. “The good folks of El Molina take some warmin’ up to. They ain’t used to strangers. Don’t let your guards down.”

  “We won’t let our guards down, Boss,” said Turkey McDade. “How ’bout our pants?”

  Riding just behind Kilroy, the skinny hardcase was watching a full-hipped young woman stroll through a narrow door onto a second-story balcony of a run-down saloon and throw her thick hair out enticingly. She wore only a corset and frilly pantaloons buffeting in the cool wind off the lake.

  Dogs barked and seagulls screeched. The ungreased wheels of several carts and ore wagons squawked, maneuvering to and from the few mines still showing color in the area. Mexican as well as American miners lounged about outside the cantinas, smoking and laughing. The air smelled like fish and spicy meat and tortillas.

  “You come down with a bad case of the pony drip, don’t beg me to shoot you,” Kilroy told McDade. “I won’t waste the bullet.”

  High-pitched voices rose suddenly, and sandals slapped the ground. Kilroy reined his horse up, his right hand closing around his pistol butt, jerking his eyes to the left. Two boys, both under six, one considerably smaller than the other, ran out from a crumbling, sod-roofed shack. Their fists were filled with bright red wildflowers.

  They ran past Waylon and stopped beside Saradee’s horse, yelling and extending the flowers in their dirty brown hands.

  Saradee had drawn her own pistols. As she looked down at the boys, a celestial smile spread across her face. She sheathed her revolvers, fished out a coin from the trousers she’d stolen from the prospector she’d killed, and bought all the flowers for a dollar.

  As the boys ran off, fighting over the silver, Saradee stuck several flowers in her hair, trimming her horse’s bridle with the rest. She reached over and punched Kilroy’s arm.

  “Even the little ones know how to treat a woman down here, you cheap son of a bitch.”

  They’d ridden only twenty more yards when the gang checked down their horses again, this time at the snap of a small-caliber pistol.

  Guns drawn, they watched a stocky, red-haired Yanqui with an upswept mustache run bare-chested and stocking-footed from a cantina on the right side of the street. His lips stretched back from his teeth, his blue eyes flashing fearfully, he bolted across the street, heading at an angle for an alley on the other side.

  Inside the cantina the man had just vacated, a woman shrieked and cursed in Spanish. A moment later, the batwings burst open and out she ran, bare breasts jiggling, thin cotton skirt buffeting about her legs. She was barefoot, and she held a pearl-gripped .36.

  “¡Bastardo!”

  The following stream of Spanish was too fast and garbled for Kilroy to fully understand, but he gathered the Yanqui hadn’t paid her for services rendered. She stopped just outside the cantina, extended the pistol in her right hand. The gun snapped and smoked. The whore’s full brown breasts bounced from the kick.

  On the street, the red-haired Yanqui dodged the slug. He slipped in fresh horse plop, hit the ground on his right hip. As he heaved himself up and resumed running toward the alley mouth, the whore stepped off the boardwalk and triggered another shot. The slug plunked through the Yanqui’s left shoulder blade, blood spraying as the bullet exited his chest and broke the window of a dry-goods shop.

  The man groaned and dropped to his left knee, slapping his right hand to his shoulder. The pajama-clad men loafing on a bench before the store scrambled for cover.

  As the red-haired man began to rise once more, the whore strode toward him, holding the pistol straight down at her side. She angled past the gang, Saradee and the men watching with bemused grins on their faces. They held the reins of their frightened mounts taut.

  “¡Bastardo barato del yanqui, dado!” she cried, raising the pistol, thumbing back the hammer, and squinting down the barrel.

  The man had run another six feet and was entering the alley’s mouth when the pistol popped in the whore’s hand. His head flew back on his shoulders as he stumbled forward, then dropped to both knees.

  “Puta bitch!” he wailed, the words echoing hollowly off the adobe walls lining the alley. A fresh bullet hole had appeared in his sun-browned back, just right of his spine.

  As the bare-breasted whore walked up to him, he dropped to his hands, sobbing and cursing. “You shot me, you bitch! I was gonna pay you next week.”

  “Sí, amigo.” She smiled, aiming the pistol at the back of his head, clicking the hammer back. “But I don’t extend credit to assholes!”

  The gun popped once, twice, the man’s head jerking with each round. It sagged between his shoulders. His arms collapsed, and his chest hit the dirt.

  The whore lowered the pistol, spat on the dead man’s back, wheeled, and retraced her steps to the cantina, before which several customers from inside now stood—a handful of rugged-looking Mexicans in dirty denims and hob-nailed miners’ boots—laughing and cheering and saluting the whore with their beer mugs and tequila glasses.

  Ignoring them, the whore proudly pushed through the batwings. The miners staggered in behind her.

  In the street, the male gang members sat their glassy-eyed mounts in stunned silence. Gigging her horse forward, Saradee turned to Waylon, and winked. “I like that girl.”

  Saradee led the gang
around a bend in the narrow street and entered the main square encircled by the Banco National, the local rurale headquarters, the blocky beige church with bell tower and looming wooden cross, and several more saloons and brothels.

  A couple of local rurales lounged on a dilapidated wicker sofa before their tin-roofed office, one smoking a corncob pipe, the other with a clear bottle in his fist. Both were hatless.

  The one with the bottle was shirtless. His suspenders hung slack from his shoulders. Behind them, fishing rods and tackle hung from the office’s buckling front wall. The rurales watched the gang with grim interest, but did not rise from the sofa.

  Tipping their hats to the local policemen, the gang drew up to the largest saloon in the square. The tavern had a broad, brush-covered patio furnished with a dozen wooden tables. The gang’s men hit the ground running and whooping like desert horses smelling water, several leaping the low wall onto the patio while others jogged through the building’s main entrance. Saradee rode Waylon piggyback through the front door.

  When Kilroy had sent two tavern boys outside to lead the mounts off to a livery stable, he and Saradee sat on the patio, at a table by the square. The skinny, turkey-necked bartender brought their drinks—two tequila shots and a bottle of the local aguardiente—on a wooden tray. He was setting the glasses and the bottle on the table when Saradee caught Waylon winking at one of the three whores sitting with Bascomb, McDade, and Montoya.

  McDade had a hand in her blouse, massaging her right breast. Giggling and lolling her head against Montoya’s shoulder, she winked back at Waylon, blushing, then cracking a quick, sneering grin when her eyes met Saradee’s.

  Kilroy paid the waiter, tipping him generously and instructing him to keep the tequila coming. He glanced at the whore again, then looked across the table at Saradee. The moment his eyes met hers, what felt like a blade tip poked through his jeans, pricking his balls. The sting and the threat of what the blade could do down there brought tears to his eyes.

  Saradee leaned toward him across the narrow table, her chin about six inches above the scarred planks. She smiled icily. “Go ahead, wink at her again.”