Gallows Express

by Peter Brandvold

  Hawk hung there, his eyes feeling as though they had filled long ago from all the blood that had rushed to his head. Silently, he cursed. One hand was free. How was he going to get the other one and both ankles free, as well? He had to find a way. Poor Claire. Likely dead. She’d have to be avenged. Hawk hoped he wasn’t too late to save Regan and Cassidy. . . .

  He looked at the shotgun resting across the big man’s lap.

  He almost wished Reb hadn’t cut the left one loose. It only put an even sharper edge on his rage and desperation.

  How he would love to get his hands on that gun!

  The night wore on. Farina remained in the chair, still as a statue, staring straight out from the porch at Hawk. The Rogue Lawman managed to work enough slack into the bindings on his right wrist that more blood seeped into his hand, easing the pain and numbness.

  His feet, however, he could no longer feel. He drifted into semiconsciousness, waking now and then to stare up at the gradually wheeling stars fanned out in a vast bowl above the gallows.

  Waking from one such half-asleep state, he turned toward the Venus. The torches had all gone out and the oil pots merely flickered. Most of the windows were still lit, though an eerie quiet had descended not only over the brothel but over the entire town.

  He could see Farina’s silhouette seated in the chair atop the porch. The man’s head appeared to be dipped toward his chest. Hawk had no sooner made the observation and had begun tugging at the ropes at his right wrist with his free left hand when a shadow moved on the brothel’s far right side.

  Shit. The shaggy-headed Mexican was about to be relieved.

  Hawk watched the silhouette mount the porch and walk toward Farina. Hawk felt scowl lines cut into his forehead when he saw the newcomer lean forward and walk quietly on the balls of his boots.

  The newcomer, a slender figure in a long duster mostly concealed by the porch’s thickening shadows, slipped around behind Farina. Black-gloved hands reached around from behind the man. One hand jerked the man’s head up suddenly. A blade winked in the starlight as the other hand made a quick slicing motion across the shotgunner’s throat.

  There was a garbling sound. Farina tried to stand. He dropped the shotgun, and the slender silhouette managed to grab the gun before it could land atop the porch floor. As Farina half gained his feet, the newcomer gave the man a kick from behind. Farina turned a somersault over the front porch rail and disappeared in the dark street below with a thud and a clipped groan.

  Hawk winced, hoping the sounds hadn’t been heard from inside.

  The silhouetted figure moved nearly soundlessly off the porch, and as the girl walked toward him, Hawk could see starlight silvering the long blond hair on her shoulders and the two pearl-gripped Colts thronged low on her well-turned thighs clad in tight, black denim. Saradee’s long, black leather duster flapped out away from her legs as she not so much walked as floated toward him. She’d removed her spurs, so as she began setting her heels down again, there was only the soft ticks of her light tread in the dust.

  Hawk had never thought he’d be happy to see the blond killer, beautiful as she was. But he had to admit he was happy to see her now. As she approached, he cast quick, anxious glances at the lit windows behind her. The Venus was eerily quiet.

  Saradee walked past him with her long, saucy stride. Keeping her hands on the handles of her twin Colts, she mounted the gallows steps, setting her boots down again lightly. Atop the platform, she came over to Hawk, slipped a bowie knife from a sheath belted behind her back, and squatted beside him.

  She leaned across the left pin, glancing at him briefly, silently, to cut the ropes binding his right wrist to the spike. When she’d freed his hand, she glanced coolly at him once more, her blond hair framing her face and starlit blue eyes, then walked over to where the ropes at the ends of both nooses were tied off, near the handle that would have opened the trapdoors.

  “Catch yourself,” she said tonelessly as, having cut the first noose free so that Hawk was dangling precariously, she cut the second one.

  She cut through only about three-quarters of the second rope, then walked over to where Hawk was slowly falling from the crossbeam as the rest of the strands frayed. She grabbed his buckskin vest in both her fists and drew him toward her. Just then, the remaining strands of the rope broke, and Hawk fell three feet to the gallows floor, landing relatively softly on his back and shoulders.

  Hawk sucked air through his teeth as the blood flooded back out of his right hand. The pain was worse than before—both hot and cold and prickling, as though he’d fallen in a cholla patch. His feet tingled painfully, as well, as blood rushed back into them.

  “You ready to pull your picket pins?” Saradee said snootily as she cut his left ankle free of the noose, grunting with the effort.

  “No.”

  Hawk kicked free of the ropes and, sitting up on his rump, legs stretched straight out in front of him, held his right hand across his belly as he flexed it, trying to work blood back into it to regain the feeling. It was swollen and purple, but the nearly unbearable pain meant it was still alive.

  Saradee arched a blond brow at him. “This town hung you out to dry like a pair of washworn underwear on a cold wind.”

  “I’m not finished here.” Hawk looked at the brothel, noting a sudden flash of orange light in an upper-story window, behind the balcony rail. “I still got some rabid dogs runnin’ off their leash that needin’ shooting. When that’s done”—Hawk glanced at her—“then I’ll leave.”

  Inside the brothel, a man screamed.

  A pistol popped once.

  Saradee turned toward the Venus, then glanced again at Hawk. “I used to think I was the craziest person I knew.”

  Hawk used his left hand to draw her toward him. He was too desperate to resist her. He kissed her lips, then pulled back to stare into her eyes that regarded him obliquely. “My right hand’s likely shot. I’m gonna need help in there.” He hesitated. His pride was a large, jagged bone lodged in his throat. He tried to clear it. “You with me?”

  Inside the Venus a girl screamed. Another pistol barked. The window in which the light had flashed was now bright with a flickering orange glow.

  Saradee grabbed a fistful of Hawk’s chambray shirt collar and pulled him toward her. She kissed him hungrily, twisting his collar until it chafed his neck. She turned her head and entwined her tongue with his. As she drew away, she gave his lower lip a nasty nip.

  She gritted her teeth and hardened her eyes as she stared into his from six inches away. “When have I ever not been with you, you son of a bitch?”

  25.

  “THINGS ARE HEATIN’ UP”

  INSIDE the Venus, men were yelling and stumbling around, drunk and wondering what the screaming and yelling on the second floor was about and probably smelling the smoke from the fire that Hawk could see ever brightening the second-story window.

  Saradee handed the Rogue Lawman the double-barreled Greener she’d taken off of Farina after cutting his throat.

  “We best get moving,” she said, nodding at the fiery window. “Things are heatin’ up.”

  Hawk heaved himself to his feet. His right hand was still aching, but he had enough feeling back in it that he thought he could pull a trigger or two.

  “Let’s go.”

  Breeching the double-bore, he limped down the gallows steps. Saradee striding up beside him as he winced and strode tenderly on his swollen feet, he moved across the street to the Venus. Behind the windows, figures were moving, some in the shapes of men jumping around as they dressed. Suddenly, two men pushed out the front door and onto the gallery, coughing. They both had revolvers in their hands.

  As smoke slithered out the door behind them, they swung around to look up at the second-story windows. One caught a glimpse of Hawk and Saradee and turned full around to face them—a slender, curly-haired, bearded gent in checked trousers, suspenders, and underwear shirt. His gun belt was in his left hand, a long-barreled Rem
ington in his other.

  “He’s mine,” Hawk growled to Saradee as she and he continued toward the porch, not slowing their pace a bit though Hawk was limping on both feet.

  “Rather territorial, ain’t ya?”

  “Hey!” the man shouted, raising his Remy as, narrowing one eye, he stared into the dark street at the two coming toward him.

  Hawk triggered the shotgun’s right barrel.

  Ka-booommm!

  The curly-haired man was lifted two feet off the porch and thrown straight back into the Venus’s gaping front door through which more and more gray smoke sifted. The second man had already swung around, bringing up a Schofield and clicking back the hammer.

  Ka-booommm!

  The shotgun’s second barrel blew him back through the window behind him in a screeching clatter of tearing curtains and breaking glass. Hawk tossed aside the empty gut shredder and continued up the porch steps.

  “I want my prisoners alive,” he told Saradee, walking along behind him. “Hostetler’s dead but I want Brazos and One-Eye McGee alive!”

  “That might be a tall order. Would half alive do?”

  “It’ll do.”

  Hawk crouched to scoop from the porch floor the big Remy of the first man he’d shot. When he’d grabbed the second Remy from the second holster on the man’s shell belt, he strode through the smoky doorway. Saradee had gone in ahead of him and turned through the door opening off the foyer’s left side, into the parlor. Upstairs, several shots had already been fired, and a man was screaming.

  “Downstairs!” shouted a woman’s voice. “Hurry—get downstairs!”

  Hawk stepped over the first dead man and saw a bulky figure on the foyer floor, to his right. The Venus’s madam, Mrs. Ferrigno sat against the wall, stubby legs stretched out before her. Her head was tipped towards one shoulder, and her eyes were open and staring toward the front door as though wishing she could get up and walk through it.

  Dried blood dribbled down from the bullet hole in her forehead.

  As more guns popped in the direction Saradee had gone and more men started shouting and girls screaming, Hawk spied movement on the steps rising at the back of the foyer. A man materialized from the gray smoke gushing down from behind him, running, one hand on the rail. In his other hand he held a pistol.

  When the man jerked his head toward Hawk, he stopped so suddenly that he almost fell and raised his pistol. Hawk raised his own Remy and shot the man through his chest, sending him down and back against the steps. The man dropped his gun with a loud clattering thud and rolled on down the steps to the foyer.

  More screams emanated from upstairs.

  There were more pistol shots and men’s yells from the direction in which Saradee had disappeared.

  Hawk stepped over the dead man and started up the steps just as a blazing fireball blew out of the second story at the top of the staircase, a man screaming inside it.

  Hawk stepped back. The fireball came down the stairs, waving its arms and pumping its knees.

  Inside the leaping flames and swirling smoke, Hawk saw the man opening his mouth and widening his eyes in horror as the flames turned his flesh black. The fireball swept past Hawk, leapt the dead man at the bottom of the stairs and the other dead man near the front door, and bounded outside and into the night, burning.

  “Hawk!” Saradee shouted from the doorway leading to the other half of the house, thumbing shells from her cartridge belt and through the loading gate of one of her pearl-gripped .45s.

  Hawk spun, raising the Remy. At the top of the stairs, Cassidy screamed and held a crooked arm in front of her face, as though to stop a bullet. Two more girls were behind her—all only about one-third dressed.

  Hawk lowered the pistol and beckoned the girls down the stairs. Hawk grabbed Cassidy’s arm. The girl’s face paint was badly streaked from tears.

  “Claire?” Hawk said.

  More tears gushed down the brunette’s face but her voice was low and fateful. “Brazos killed her.”

  When the two doves had hustled out behind Cassidy, Hawk went up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time in spite of his aching feet. As two men stumbled toward him from above the second-story landing, heading down from the third story, a gun barked in the lead man’s hand.

  The slug thwacked into the railing to Hawk’s left.

  Hawk pivoted to look up the second set of stairs, raised the Remy, and drilled one pill through the chest of the first man, whose knees buckled. He pitched forward, hit the stairs facedown, turned two somersaults, and piled up on the landing at Hawk’s boots. Hawk raised the Remy to the man who’d been thundering down the stairs behind the first. The man tossed his gun over his shoulder and lifted his open hands in front of his face in supplication.

  “I give up!”

  Hawk fired three times, watched in grim satisfaction as his bullets punched through each of the man’s palms and into his forehead. Hawk turned into the second-floor hallway as the second dead man rolled down and over the body of the first man, one of his hands brushing Hawk’s left ankle.

  Amidst the thick smoke produced by the flames at the far end of the hall, Hawk spied a body on the floor to his right. A naked man with a fish-belly-white paunch and long, thin, blue-veined legs. Long, gray hair lay in a wild nest beneath Blue Tierney’s head. The man clamped his hands to the wound in his lower left side. Blood oozed through his fingers, dribbled over his hip and onto the floor.

  “Pa?” a man shouted from down the hall.

  The smoke was so thick that Hawk could just barely make out the outline of a man’s head in a half-open doorway on the hall’s left side, opposite the open door from which flames leapt and smoke gushed.

  “Hep,” Blue Tienry groaned, just loudly enough for Hawk to hear. The man’s pale eyes stared up at Hawk with dire pleading. “Hep . . . hep me.”

  “The crazy bitch gutted Willie Wilbur and set him on fire!” Brazos shouted from the half-open door. “Brained me from behind. I can’t see nothin’, Pa. You out there?”

  Blue Tierney lifted his head and tears dribbled down his cheeks. “She kilt me, boy! That goddamn schoolteacher . . . she done kilt me!” He squeezed his eyes closed and arched his back as he shouted at the ceiling. “Avenge me, boy! If it’s the last thing you do—avenge me!”

  “I can’t see!” Brazos screamed, stumbling out into the hall. He was ass naked. His pale skin glistened from the sweat of the heat in the place. He held a gun low down in his right hand. He held his other hand to the back of his head. “She clubbed me . . . bitch wrecked my vision! I’m blind, Pa!”

  “Avenge me, Brazos, you chickenshit son of a bitch!”

  Brazos stumbled toward Hawk. “Where is she?” “Avenge me, boy!” Blue screamed at the ceiling, arching his back and making the cords in his neck stand out like steel cables.

  He looked up at Hawk, slid his hand toward a Smith & Wesson pocket pistol on the floor beside him. When he had his hand on the gun, Hawk set his boot down on top of it hard, grinding the man’s hand into the weapon.

  Blue Tierney screamed.

  Brazos Tierney stopped six feet from Hawk, and raised his pistol, his eyes wide and unseeing. “Who’s there?”

  Hawk moved up in front of Brazos. “Your executioner.”

  Brazos’s chin fell as his mouth opened in shock and horror, and as he fumbled with the hammer of his uncocked pistol, Hawk grabbed the gun with his left hand, jerking it out of the killer’s grip.

  He stepped to one side, placed his hand on the back of the man’s bloody head, and gave him a savage thrust down the hall and onto the landing, where Brazos piled up on top of the two dead men already sprawled there.

  Brazos screamed, flailing with his hands while Blue Tierney continued to demand that his son avenge him. Glancing back at the flames that were chewing along the walls on both sides of the hall and leaving very little oxygen, Hawk started up the stairs, heading for the third floor.

  “Regan?” he shouted, taking the steps two at a tim
e.

  At the top of the stairs, he stopped suddenly. Regan stood before him. She wore only a torn, bloodstained camisole. Her disheveled hair was streaked with blood. There were scrapes and bruises on her face, and her lips were cracked and swollen.

  She held a cocked Colt pistol straight out in her left fist, the barrel aimed at Hawk’s head. Her teeth were gritted, her eyes hard, savage in their determination.

  “Regan?” Hawk said, softer.

  Glancing behind her, he saw two more men lying dead in the hall.

  She stared at Hawk, the light of recognition gradually growing in her eyes. The gun sagged by inches, and then she lowered it.

  “They’re all dead up here,” she said, pausing before adding in the same matter-of-fact tone. “I killed them all.”

  Hawk extended his hand to her. She did not take it but only stepped around him and started down the stairs, one hand on the rail to her left. In the other hand she carried the cocked Colt.

  She went down gradually, lifting each bare knee in turn, setting her feet down gently on each step. Hawk followed. When she came to the landing where the dead men lay one atop the other—Brazos was no longer there, but Hawk could hear him screaming out on the street—she found a small, clear spot between them and stepped onto it.

  She stopped and turned her head toward Blue Tierney still lying where Hawk had left him. The outlaw leader was no longer screaming, but his chest continued to rise and fall sharply as he cupped his hands over the bloody wound in his side.

  Regan slowly raised the pistol, aimed, and fired.

  The bullet tore the tip of Blue Tierney’s nose off.

  He’d begun screaming again before Regan cocked the pistol, fired again.

  This time her bullet punched through the side of the man’s head, whipping his face toward the wall. His long hair covered his cheek like the wing of a scruffy white dove.