The Jackals of Sundown (A Bear Haskell Western Book 2)

by Peter Brandvold

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  US Marshal, Bear Haskell has been assigned to throw the cuffs on a notoriously mysterious and slippery-as-hell regulator named Jack Hyde who’s cunning and devious methods of killing those he’s been paid to kill, has gotten him dubbed “the Jackal.” As the bodies pile up on the west Texas desert, and more jackals rear their ugly heads in Sundown, Haskell finds himself rethinking not only who Jack Hyde might be riding for, and why he’s killing, but also just who he really is ...

  BEAR HASKELL 2: THE JACKALS OF SUNDOWN

  By Peter Brandvold

  Copyright © 2016 by Peter Brandvold

  First Smashwords Edition: July 2016

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover Photograph © Camrocker/Dreamstime.com

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editors: Peter Brandvold and Ben Bridges

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  Chapter One

  Deputy U.S. Marshal Bear Haskell had experienced nightmares this bizarre and horrifying.

  But they’d been nightmares.

  And he’d woken up from them.

  Now, watching the laughing, bearded outlaw hoist the coffin lid over the box Haskell was laid out in—the coffin he was laid out in though he was still alive—he realized with several violent slams of his heart against his ribs that his nightmares were going to have to get a whole lot more bizarre and horrifying if they were going to live up to his present, cold-hard, real-life predicament.

  The lid closed down over Haskell’s battered, beaten body. It was like a giant cloud passing over the sun.

  But then the sun came out again as the grinning, bearded outlaw lifted the lid off the coffin to lower his grinning, bearded face so close to Haskell’s that the lawman could smell the whiskey and chewing tobacco on the man’s sour breath, see the large pores in his ruddy, fleshy face oozing sweat.

  The grinning, bearded outlaw, whose name, if Haskell’s memory could be relied upon at such a taxing time, was Scully Crow, a thief, murderer, illegal whiskey peddler, and rapist wanted in nearly every state and territory west of the Mississippi. Crow gave a devious wink and said, “Nighty-night, lawman. Sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite, now, ya hear?”

  He threw his head back and slitted his eyes, laughing uproariously, as he set the lid down atop the coffin once more.

  Haskell’s heart lurched again, fear and fury exploding inside him. He shoved his elbows down against the bottom of the coffin and lifted his head and shoulders, smashing the lid away, gritting his teeth and snarling like a trapped cougar. He was about to hurl himself out of the wooden overcoat’s tight confines when a rifle butt slammed into his right temple.

  He fell back down in the coffin, hearing above the tolling of cracked bells in his ears the cacophony of mocking laughter all around him. The five outlaws in Scully Crow’s group were having themselves a high old time. A couple of the soiled doves from the Bare Naked Lady Saloon in Hank’s Ford, high in the Colorado Rockies, were laughing, as well, having stumbled out of the saloon to enjoy the festivities.

  All went dark again for Haskell.

  Not just because the lid had been slammed down on the coffin again but because he was hurling downward again ... down ... down ... down into the greasy murk of semi-consciousness. At the same time, he felt blood from the fresh wound in his right temple oozing down that side of his face, joining the blood from the several other gouges, cuts, and scrapes that the gang had inflicted on him after they’d jumped him in the Bare Naked Lady.

  Five against one was steep odds even for Bear Haskell, who towered around six-feet-six inches above ground and whose body looked like something out of a Norse legend—all bulging muscle and strapping sinew laid across a frame stout as a giant blacksmith anvil.

  Little good that frame did him now, beaten as it was, his big body one massive bruise—ribs broken, joints swelling, lips shredded, eyes inflamed. He’d had the shit kicked out of both ends, as the saying went. They’d used their fists first, and when their fists had given out they’d used ax handles and rifle butts.

  Bear was as limp as a frost-burned rose.

  Deafening hammer blows filled the inside of the coffin. Haskell rose up out of the murk of unconsciousness again as he realized that those blows were hammers. Hammers striking nails through the lid and into the sides of the coffin, each blow causing the coffin to lurch around the lawman inside it, each blow a dynamite explosion inside Haskell’s aching head ...

  Each blow sealing him into this dark box squeezing against his broad shoulders, pushing up against his back and down against his chest and belly. Sealing him into this dark box that would likely be his home forever more, once they got him in the ground and he’d sucked up all the air ...

  His heart turned a somersault in his chest at the refreshed nightmare realization of what was happening, the horrific direness of his situation.

  Buried alive!

  “Shit!” Bear rasped, cold sweat oozing out of every pore.

  As the loud hammering continued amidst the muffled laughter, he lifted his hands. He got them about a foot up off the bottom of the coffin, but since the coffin was only a little over a foot deep, he had no room with which to try to push with any real power against the lid. He slid his hands up to his chest, turned his palms toward the lid, and grunted as he pushed upward. But it was no use.

  The lid wasn’t going anywhere.

  The hammering stopped.

  “Let me out of here, you sonso’bitches!” Haskell shouted, pressing his nose up taut against the lid.

  He wriggled around from left to right—as much as he had room for, which wasn’t much—but the wooden overcoat had been solidly nailed together. There was no way he was going to break it apart. All his yelling and cursing got him was more jeering laughter from the men who’d nailed him in here.

  Through the cracks between the pine boards comprising the coffin lid, he could catch glimpses of the curly wolves standing around the coffin—at least, he caught glimpses of their brightly colored shirts and neckerchiefs and the duns and blacks of their hats, bright in the late day, high-mountain sunshine.

  There was a soft tapping sound on several places on the coffin lid. Almost like someone tapping his fingers.

  Haskell stopped yelling. The tapping continued. No, it wasn’t a tapping sound so much as a dribbling sound. Then he smelled it: urine.

  The sons of bitches were peeing on the coffin!

  “I’m gonna kill every one of you hog-wollopin’ sonso’bitches!” Haskell shouted shrilly against the underside of the lid. I’m gonna gut you before I kill you, and then I’m gonna kill you hard and bloody!”

  A few drops of piss dribbled through a crack between the pine boards of the coffin lid and onto his left cheek. Haskell bellowed raucously, so enraged that he thought his brains were going to boil out his ears.

  A girl tittered a laugh and said, “You boys got you a big, old, angry bear in that coffin!”

  Another girl screeched a crackling laugh.

  “Piss on you, Mister Lawman, sir!” yelled one of the outlaws. Tiny Titterman, it sounded like—a no-account from Oklahoma. (But then, they didn�
�t raise anything except no-accounts in Oklahoma.) “And we mean that sincerely, Bear!”

  Tiny and Scully Crow and the other three outlaws roared at that, and so did the girls who were standing around Haskell’s wooden overcoat, no doubt grateful for the distraction from the boredom and tedium of earning their livings on their backs in a jerkwater mountain boomtown that had gone bust two or three years ago.

  It was Haskell’s opinion, based on ten years’ experience living and riding for law and order on the frontier after four years fighting for the Union in the War of Southern Rebellion, that a bored whore could be as mean and nasty as any gun-toting scalawag with a pecker.

  “You ready for a little ride, Bear?” asked Curly, leaning down to stare at Haskell through a crack between the lid boards. His eye was as large and blue as a baby’s—albeit, a drunken baby’s.

  “Ride?” Haskell raked out, still trying to burst the box apart with his shoulders, heart kicking up a frantic rhythm in his chest.

  “Come on, fellers!” Curly said. “Let’s get this sailor to the sea!”

  “Sea?” Haskell bellowed.

  They all laughed again as they lifted the coffin by the leather straps built into its sides. Several men grunted, cursed. Haskell felt the coffin lifted up off the ground then jerked to each side.

  “Christalmighty, this federal badge-toter weighs a ton!” one of the outlaws yelled.

  Inside the coffin, Haskell sweated, panicking, rolling his shoulders right to left and back again, trying with every ounce of his remaining strength to break open the consarned box. To no avail. It must have been one of the undertaker’s luxury models. Built to weather the ages!

  As the outlaws grunted on both sides of the big, angry and frightened lawman—carrying him only they and God knew where!—the tang of raw pine mixed with the smell of his own sweat and blood, the leather of his cartridge belt and empty holster.

  He could feel his five-shot, “Blue Jacket” .44-caliber pocket revolver, manufactured by Hopkins & Allen, snugged into the small hideout holster he’d personally sewn into the well of his right boot. He hadn’t been able to reach for the gun during his beating. There hadn’t been time. Little good it did him now. He couldn’t bend enough of his body to reach for it.

  He continued to fight the box, heart racing, bells of sheer panic clanging in his ears. He thought he could smell the pungent, gamey odor of water. A low roaring lifted. Sure—they were taking him to the river. The Arkansas ran along the east edge of town, in a shallow canyon behind the furniture shop, which was also an undertaking parlor, which is where they must have found the wooden overcoat though this was conjecture, for Haskell had been unconscious at that point.

  Haskell stopped fighting the box when he felt the box itself stop moving. The river’s roar was louder now. He could smell wet rock and moss.

  “Have a good trip to the Gulf of Mexico, Bear!” yelled Scully Crow just before he and the rest of the raggedy-heeled brigands broke into another burst of ribald laughter.

  “On three, fellers,” one of the others shouted above the river’s roar.

  The box swung backward, then forward.

  “One!”

  The box swung backward again, then forward again.

  “Two!”

  The box swung backward.

  Forward.

  “Oh, fuck!” Haskell shouted inside the coffin, his nose pressed up taut against the lid.

  “Three!”

  The box continued forward.

  Forward ... and down.

  Haskell was falling. If the box hadn’t been snug around him, he would have been standing straight up and down in mid-air. He could see himself plunging boots first toward the Arkansas.

  Horror was a coyote wailing in his head.

  What was worse than being buried alive? The only thing he could think of on such short notice was being drowned in a box.

  The box hit the water with a sudden, violent impact, smashing his feet down against the far end, his head slamming against the underside of the lid. His organs felt like dice shaken in a cup.

  Inside, Bear screamed as the wooden overcoat bounced off the water then, as though shoved up by a giant hand from the river’s bottom, the box pitched forward.

  “Ahh, shiiiit!” he yelled only to himself and the blackness inside the box.

  The box hit the water upside down with a splash. The box spun wickedly, rolled, until Haskell found himself belly up again. The coffin wobbled wildly, floating as the current carried him downstream. Bear felt the chill of water beneath him, the wetness bleeding between the boards of the box to instantly soak his clothes.

  The coffin rocked and swayed. The current caught it and Bear, panting in the tight confines, in the hot, humid darkness, his hands pressed up flat against the coffin lid, felt himself being hurled downstream as though dragged by a hundred frightened horses.

  Buried alive in a watery grave.

  Ah, hell!

  The coffin pitched and plunged. Haskell’s belly lurched into his throat as the coffin tipped up. He was suspended for a moment straight up and down before tipping forward and plunging over a short falls. The end housing Haskell’s head smashed against a rock with another sound like a gunshot. The end with his feet flew up over his head.

  Then he was horizontal again, rocking on down the stream—belly down in the cold, wet box.

  A back eddy caught him, ground against the box, swallowed one side, lifted the other side, and suddenly he was belly up again.

  There was another sound like a gunshot.

  Only, this time it was a gunshot. Haskell winced at what felt like a bee sting in his right ear. He looked up to see the blue sky showing through a ragged oval hole in the coffin lid.

  The outlaws had pissed on him.

  Now they were giving him an even grander send off by shooting at him, as well.

  Chapter Two

  As the coffin was hurled down the narrow but fast-flowing stream, Bear Haskell, lying face down in the overturned coffin, pressed his hands against what was now the coffin’s bottom and humped his back against the top, trying again to break the thing apart.

  Or to at least pry off the lid.

  As the coffin spun suddenly, causing the lawman’s guts to spin as well, he gave up and merely tried to brace himself, gritting his teeth through which he could hear his own panting breaths raking. He could hear the water rushing and gurgling around him. He could smell the piney odor of the green wood. But he knew he wouldn’t be smelling anything soon if he continued down Lucifer Falls into Devil’s Canyon—a deep gorge about three miles south of Hank’s Ford.

  Or if ice-cold water kept oozing through the cracks in the lid and through several other cracks between the coffin’s pine boards. Haskell was soaked. Soaked and confined in horrifying blackness, brains and guts churning as the angry stream hurled him down its steep-walled canyon, bouncing off rocks, the violent collisions causing the ringing in Bear’s ears to grow louder.

  The coffin slammed against what he assumed was the stream’s stone bank. It must have gotten hung up between rocks, because more water poured into it, and he could feel a fluttering in the end housing his feet.

  As suddenly as he’d gotten hung up, the coffin jerked free. It spun wildly. Haskell groaned and gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes closed against the water oozing up around him, threatening to cut off his air.

  The foot of the coffin dropped downward. Haskell’s head and torso rose, twisted around, and then plunged.

  The water in the coffin gurgled as it sloshed this way and that.

  Bang!

  Another gunshot?

  No.

  The bottom of the coffin had smashed against the stream’s rocky bottom. Haskell could hear the crack, feel wood slivers gouging his left thigh. Now he was face up once more, but the water was coming in fast and furious, filling his nostrils and mouth. He made the mistake of trying to breathe. The water hit his lungs and burned like coals in a blacksmith’s forge.

&nb
sp; Only a few seconds left now.

  His entire body was submerged.

  He was vaguely aware of the coffin spinning around him once more.

  Then another bang!

  Both the side and the floor of the coffin gave way. Haskell’s feet dropped. His knee smashed against a knobby black rock that he glimpsed amongst a feathery spray of tea-colored water. He rolled sideways, the frenzied current sweeping him along.

  Air brushed his face. Instinctively, he drew a breath and got part of it down before the water in his lungs exploded outward. He heard himself choking and gagging. His lungs felt as though they’d burst at the seams. While the current swirled him and pushed him downstream, he tried to gain another breath of the refreshing air washing over him between waves of the rushing rapids.

  He managed only a teaspoonful as he continued to cough and choke and vomit the water he’d inhaled when he’d been inside the wooden overcoat.

  Ahead, a bird winged out over the frothing stream.

  No, not a bird. Bear had caught only a glimpse of the object, but he looked again now, turning his head one way while the river turned him another, and saw a rope.

  Yes, a rope!

  It extended out from the right bank and was looped over the end of a black log poking up out of the stream.

  A pounding sounded from somewhere atop the bank.

  A man’s voice, high-pitched and womanish, shouted, “Grab the rope, ya big galoot. Grab the rope!”

  The rope grew in Haskell’s eyes until he could see the individual hemp strands twisting and straining as the man took the slack out of it. Haskell threw up his left arm. He hooked it over the rope that cut into his ribs just beneath his armpit.

  He groaned. Every rib barked out in pain. But he clung to the rope for all he was worth.

  Staring at the rope and only at the rope, praying the log didn’t break free, Haskell used his hands to follow the rope toward the right bank. The whitewater beat against his legs and hips. He had little remaining strength. He used every ounce of it to walk his hands along the rope to the bank.