Bullets Over Bedlam

by Peter Brandvold

  Hawk ripped another hunk of meat from the knuckle, washed it down with whiskey. Let Parks make the first move. Hawk could use the rest and the nourishment. Besides, he had all the time in the world.

  Hawk finished the knuckle and dug in his shirt pocket for his makings sack. He’d begun rolling a smoke when Parks snorted and slid his chair back, the legs barking against the puncheons. Parks glanced at the other men, hitched up his gun belt, picked up his shotgun, and, holding the shotgun in one hand, sauntered toward Hawk.

  Parks stopped as the headboard slammed one last, furious time against the wall, and the girl upstairs gave a shrill, deathlike exultation. The man groaned as though he’d run a mile to find the stage had already left the station.

  Silence.

  Parks continued toward Hawk, stopping five feet from Hawk’s table. His sandy brows mantled his small, cobalt-blue eyes, and the mole to the left of his nose turned brick red. Hawk could smell the sweat-stink on him, the whiskey.

  One hand on his pistol, the other holding the shotgun down near his thigh, finger on one of the two triggers, Parks spoke slowly. “Why the hell are you starin’ at us?”

  Hawk finished rolling his cigarette. When he licked it closed, he struck a match on the table, touched flame to the quirley. He took a deep drag.

  Blowing smoke, he dipped his thumb and index finger into his shirt’s left breast pocket, tossed a heavy copper star onto the table. It clanked and rolled, fell pin-down so that the words “Deputy U.S. Marshal” stared straight up at Parks.

  “I’ve been sitting here trying to come up with a reason why I should take you boys in alive,” Hawk said slowly, cigarette smoldering in his left hand. “And you know what?”

  Parks’s pupils expanded and contracted. “What?”

  “I couldn’t do it.”

  2.

  HULLABALOO

  PARKS blinked.

  The air seemed to be sucked straight back behind him, as if the other coyotes were holding their collective breath.

  Parks’s upper lip curled as he took one step back. Raising the shotgun, he reached across his waist with his right hand, clawed the Remy from its holster, and, thumbing the hammer back, began swinging the barrel toward Hawk.

  A revolver barked.

  Parks winced and his right leg appeared to be jerked back as if by an unseen puppet string. The outlaw’s face bleached as he screamed and, half-turning to his right, fired the shotgun and Remy into Hawk’s table. The shotgun blast blew Hawk’s whiskey bottle to smithereens, while the .44 slug plowed through a corner of the table and into the puncheons.

  Having dived to his left after he’d fired his big Russian from under the table, Hawk lay on the floor on his left hip. He peered beneath the table at Parks’s legs on the far side. Parks’s right knee was smoking as blood filled the .44 hole Hawk had drilled through the joint.

  As Parks stumbled back, shrieking and cursing, Hawk loosed another shot from the silver-plated Russian, which sounded like a howitzer in the close quarters. A ragged .44 hole appeared in the inside of Parks’s right thigh, sending his shrieks higher as he danced and pirouetted before the bar.

  A pistol and a rifle barked at the same time as the other outlaws, gaining their feet, began flinging lead toward Hawk. Both slugs plowed into a chair on the far side of Hawk’s ruined table. As another shot curled the air over his right ear and plunked into the wall behind him, Hawk threw the table over and ducked behind it.

  Three shots popped through the flimsy pine, one tearing the nap from Hawk’s right sleeve, one creasing the soft skin between the index and middle-finger knuckles of his right hand.

  Hawk snaked his Russian and his Colt over the top edge of the table, peered into the shadows where the outlaws milled, sidestepping and aiming their revolvers and rifles, squinting through the smoke. As several more shots pealed around him, Hawk cut loose with both revolvers, pulling the triggers, cocking the hammers, pulling the triggers again. He sent two men dancing back and falling over tables, while another dropped his Colt Navy and clutched his arm.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  As the man lowered his head toward his chest, another slug plunked through the top of his hat. He jerked and collapsed.

  Hawk lowered his head but continued firing the Russian and the Colt until both hammers clicked empty. Then he dropped both guns, bolted to his feet, and leapt the overturned table. As he scooped his Henry off the floor, he cast a glance into the smoky shadows, where the surviving outlaws milled, out of sight behind chairs and their own overturned tables.

  One man fired from behind the woodstove, but the slug plowed through the room’s center post a good five feet ahead and to the right of Hawk. Hawk dropped to a knee, thumbed the Henry’s hammer back, and fired. The broad forehead of the man peeking around the stove turned pink as he gave a startled grunt and fell back against the wall, flapping his arms as if trying to fly.

  A big bear of a man with two salt-and-pepper braids and an eye patch heaved to his feet from behind a table, and fired a Starr .44 in each hand. Hawk threw himself right and rolled off his right shoulder as both slugs plunked into the pail of hog knuckles atop the bar.

  Hawk rose to a crouch, levering a fresh shell into the Henry’s breech, snapping the butt to his shoulder, and firing two quick rounds.

  The man screamed, eyes snapping wide as, both smoking pistols held straight out before him, he glanced down at the two holes in his chest—perfectly parallel and spaced three inches apart, directly over his heart.

  In the corner of Hawk’s left eye, someone moved. A fierce, defiant shriek rose as a pistol flashed through the smoke and murky lantern light.

  Hawk swiveled right and ran, taking three strides and then lofting himself over the bar. Three bullets, fast as wind-driven hail, popped into the cracked mirror behind the bar above his head. Hawk smashed into the back wall and hit the floor on his right shoulder and hip.

  Ahead, the barman crouched, knees drawn to his chest. He lifted his head from his arms, hair hanging like strings around his face, eyes bright with fear. “What a goddamn hullabaloo—look what you done to my place!”

  Hawk raked another shell into the Henry. “Not finished yet.”

  The scream came again, followed by a string of Spanish epithets. Peering out from under the bar, Hawk saw a swarthy man in a steeple-crowned, straw sombrero stagger toward him, kicking fallen chairs and tables out of his way. To Hawk’s right, half under a table, Parks grunted and groaned, a pool of blood growing beneath his ruined legs.

  The Mexican emerged from the smoke and shadows, a bracket lamp revealing a round, mustachioed face with bright, black eyes set beneath sloping brows. The man held a hand to his bloody belly. Blood dribbled down from the left corner of his mouth and between the three or four teeth in his lower jaw.

  “Sangre de Cristo, usted me mato!” Blood of Christ, you killed me.

  He raised the pistol, cracked off another shot. The slug barked into the floor a foot in front of Hawk. The shooter triggered the gun again but the hammer clicked, empty.

  As the Mexican tossed away the spent Schofield and grabbed a second gun from behind his horsehide sash, Hawk scurried over to the beer keg to his right, which held up one end of the three cottonwood planks composing the bar. The second Schofield popped twice, one shot chunking into the floor in front of the keg, the other into the keg itself, which jerked against Hawk’s left shoulder.

  The Mexican’s boots thumped toward the bar, spurs chinging. The Mexican was sobbing and cursing in Spanish.

  “Shit,” the barman said, throwing himself flat on the floor. “Ah, shit, shit, shit . . .”

  Hawk glanced at him. “You’re awfully grim.” He threw himself right, out from behind the keg, and onto his elbows, raising the Henry in both hands. The Mexican stood five feet from the bar, lifting his enraged eyes to peer over the top.

  Hawk fired. The Mexican jerked toward him, and the slug merely sliced the lobe from the Mexican’s left ear.

  The
Mexican fired the Schofield. The bullet sliced through the top of Hawk’s left arm. Gritting his teeth, Hawk rose to his knees.

  As the Mexican raised his Schofield’s barrel and thumbed the hammer back, ignoring the blood pouring from his ear, Hawk rammed another shell into the Henry’s breech, the spent casing smoking across his right shoulder and hitting the floor with a ping.

  Teetering like a windmill in a prairie twister, the Mexican canted the Schofield toward Hawk and fired a half second before Hawk levered two rounds through each of the man’s sun-seared cheeks, and one through his heart. The Mexican’s own slug plowed into the base of the wall behind Hawk.

  The Mexican—punched straight back and lifted off his feet—was dead before he hit the floor.

  Hawk levered another round and peered through the wafting smoke. The smell of cordite was tempered by the smell of brine still dribbling to the floor in two streams from the bucket of hog knuckles. Around the demolished room, nothing moved. The five men were down, twisted amidst the rubble.

  Silence except for the twin streams of brine dribbling onto the floor, and the sharp, anguished breaths of Skylar Parks, lying under a broken table ten feet away from Hawk and staring at the ceiling. Rain still lashed the walls and windows, and wan lightning flashed, but the storm’s fury had passed.

  Behind Hawk, wood creaked. He threw himself right as a pistol popped twice.

  He hit the floor on his butt and raised the Henry toward the stairs at the back of the room. A mustachioed face peered out through the rails near the top of the staircase. A silver-plated gun barrel angled toward Hawk, who fired two rounds. The slugs hammered through a rail support on both sides of the mustachioed gent’s face.

  Shadow Nielsen cursed, withdrew the gun, and bolted the three steps to the top of the stairs.

  Hawk turned toward the bar. The barman was still down on all fours, hands laced across the back of his head, his forehead pressed to the floor.

  “There a back way out of this place?” Hawk asked.

  The barman lifted his head, looked around warily, then slid his gaze to Hawk. He shook his head.

  Hawk stood and set his rifle atop the bar. He probably had two or three rounds left in the long gun. He walked back to his broken table, picked up the Russian and the Colt, and loaded both at the bar, thumbing cartridges from the leather loops on his shell belt.

  The ceiling creaked. Hushed, agitated voices rose in the second story.

  Hawk spun the Russian’s cylinder, then picked up the Colt. Holding each gun down low at his sides, he started toward the stairs. He paused over Skylar Parks.

  The outlaw’s rheumy blue eyes, glazed with shock from blood loss and fear, met Hawk’s. “I’m gonna . . . I’m gonna need a doctor real bad,” he croaked.

  Hawk stared down at him, shook his head. “Undertaker, you mean.”

  Hawk aimed the Colt at Parks’s forehead. Parks stared up at the revolver’s barrel, eyes crossing. He’d started shaping his mouth for an exclamation, his eyes snapping wide, when the Colt barked.

  The slug drilled through the middle of Parks’s forehead, where the veins above his nose forked. His mouth opened and closed several times, his boots shaking. Then his open eyes turned to marbles, and he lay still.

  “Christ!” exclaimed the bartender, standing at the far end of the bar, shaking his head.

  “Dirty job,” Hawk said, moving toward the stairs. “Somebody’s gotta do it.”

  Hawk stopped at the bottom of the narrow stairs, peering up to the second-story landing. Nothing up there but a framed print of a plump, naked blonde spread out like a female smorgasbord on pink satin sheets in a jungle. A lantern guttered on the wall above the railing.

  Hawk climbed the stairs slowly, his boots making the steps squawk, the spurs chiming softly.

  Two steps from the top, he stopped, thumbed the hammers of both revolvers back, and edged a peek around the corner. The dim hall was empty.

  Hawk turned into it. A musty runner ran the length of the hall. It cushioned Hawk’s heels as he strode slowly between the walls of bald, vertical cottonwood planks. Two bracket lamps shunted circular shadows across the walls. Their wicks had not been trimmed, and the black smoke hung like fog beneath the ceiling. The air smelled like coal oil and sex.

  The door of the last room on the left was open. Soft, red light angled from it.

  A man stepped out of the room, blocking the light. Holding a woman before him, he stood facing Hawk at the end of the hall, before a low, sashed window through which distant lightning flashed.

  Hawk stopped, aiming both pistols straight out from his shoulders.

  Shadow Nielsen had dressed hurriedly. His hair hung uncombed from beneath his big plainsman hat, and his shirttails hung over his cartridge belt and black denim trousers. Two sets of saddlebags, two pockets stuffed with clothes, were looped over his left shoulder.

  The girl before him—a small, thin brunette—was clad in a see-through nightgown, her arms and legs bare. She stood stiffly before Nielsen, brown eyes riveted on Hawk, as Nielsen held his silver-plated .45 to her jaw.

  “Drop it,” Nielsen barked. “Or she dies.”

  Hawk blinked, kept the revolver leveled. “Kill her.”

  Nielsen squinted one eye. The girl frowned slightly.

  “I’m warnin’ you,” Nielsen said. “I ain’t just dancin’ with this pretty little banker’s daughter. I will kill her if you don’t put those guns down and back away.” He cocked the .45’s hammer. “You wanna take her pretty little carcass back to her daddy?”

  “Why not?” Hawk growled. “I don’t reckon her daddy would have much use for a little tramp that ran off with the men who robbed his bank.”

  “Ran off?” the girl said, indignant. She shifted her bare feet on the runner, her breasts jouncing behind the nightgown. “I didn’t have a choice. They took me out of my father’s office.”

  “Maybe you were in your old man’s office because you knew Nielsen was comin’. Maybe you figured your old man would be more likely to turn over the combination to the safe if he thought his daughter’s life was imperiled.” Hawk paused and leveled his gaze at Nielsen. “Go ahead and kill her. Then face me like a man.”

  Nielsen’s chest rose and fell sharply. The girl beetled her brows, and her cheeks turned crimson.

  “I’m warnin’ you, lawman.” Nielsen pressed the .45’s barrel hard against her jaw. “I’m callin’ your bluff!”

  The girl winced and slid her fearful eyes toward Nielsen as he gripped her tighter around the neck. “Shadow . . . don’t . . .”

  Hawk smiled down the long barrel of his Russian .44.

  “I’m gonna kill this little bitch!” Nielsen’s voice boomed around the hall. “I ain’t gonna warn you again. You don’t drop those hoglegs in three seconds, I’m gonna blow her fucking head off !”

  The girl’s eyes snapped wide. She bunched her lips and squirmed, trying to wrench herself free of the big man’s grasp. “Shadow, let me go!” She bit his left hand.

  “Ouch!” Nielsen’s thick arm jerked away from the girl, and she spun toward the wall, getting her feet entangled with Nielsen’s boots and falling, hands slapping the cottonwood planks. “Ivy, you fuckin’ bitch!”

  The saddlebags tumbling from his shoulder, Nielsen lashed out at her, stopped, and turned to Hawk grinning down the Russian’s barrel at the outlaw leader. Nielsen’s eyes flashed fear as he jerked his Colt up.

  Hawk’s Russian leapt in his hand. Pop!

  The Colt spoke. Ka-paw! Ka-paw!

  Then the Russian again: Pop, pop, pop!

  The thick powder smoke wafted around Hawk’s head, making his eyes burn. He slitted his lids and peered at the end of the hall. Nielsen stood straight back against the wall, against the window, arms hanging slack at his sides. Blood fountained from the four holes in his chest, spraying the girl cowering on the floor to his right.

  She screamed and hid her face in her arms and raised knees.

  Nielsen’s Colt slipped o
ut of his hand, hitting the floor with a thud. He sighed, eyes rolling back in his head. Then he sagged down to the floor and lowered his chin to his chest. After a few seconds, he rolled onto a shoulder, his blood pooling around him.

  Hawk lowered his revolvers and strode down the hall. He glanced at the girl sobbing into her blood-splashed arms. He picked up Nielsen’s pistol from the blood pool, emptied it, letting the cartridges clink to the floor, then tossed the revolver into the darkened room, skidding it under the bed.

  He fished around in Nielsen’s saddlebags. When he found the set with the money the gang had stolen from the bank and the Wells Fargo office—over ten thousand dollars of bundled greenbacks—he slung the bags over his shoulder and turned again to the girl.

  “You best split ass for home.” Hawk adjusted the saddlebags on his shoulder. “Before I take you over my knee.”

  She lifted her head, her cheeks tear-streaked. “I’ll never go back there. I hate that town and those boring people!”

  “Well, you best go somewhere. You’ve worn out your welcome in these parts.”

  The girl cried in her arms as Hawk walked away down the hall and descended the stairs.

  3.

  TWO HALVES OF A DEAD RAT

  DOWNSTAIRS, Hawk slung the Henry and the saddlebags onto one of the few standing tables. The bartender stood trimming the wick of a coal-oil lamp that hadn’t been shattered in the hullabaloo, sweat glistening on his cheeks.

  His anxious eyes followed Hawk. “All in a night’s work, huh?” he groused.

  Hawk moved behind the bar. He took a bottle and a beer mug from separate shelves and half-filled the mug with whiskey. He corked the bottle, returned it to the shelf, then picked up the mug and walked back to his table.

  He sat down heavily, taking a deep drink from the mug.

  On the other side of the room, the barman cursed as he looked around the room littered with ruined furniture and mangled bodies. He sighed, opened the front door, and walked over to where Parks lay beneath an overturned table, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling. The barman stooped, grabbed Parks’s ankles, and began dragging the dead outlaw toward the front door.