Bullets Over Bedlam (7 page)

7.

JULIANA VELASQUEZ

Y
OU'RE a defiant she-male, Juliana Velasquez.”

She looked at him and smiled.

When Hawk had found a whiskey bottle and a glass, he removed his shirt and sat back in his chair. While he rolled a quirley from his makings sack, the girl wrung out a cloth in the pan, sat down beside him, and began dabbing the wound with the cloth.

The kitchen was lit by only the dying fire beneath the javelina, the meat hissing and dribbling grease onto the coals with a smoky sputter. The girl's hands worked gently. Hawk could smell her rose water perfume.

“I didn't know you had left,” she said as she wrung the cloth out in the pan, casting him a sidelong glance before dabbing again at the wound. “I rode up to go fishing, and you were gone. And then . . . a month later . . . you return.”

Hawk splashed whiskey into the glass and winced as the cloth caught at his torn flesh. “I had business up north.”

Truth was, after two months here in the hacienda, enjoying the mountain quiet, he'd gotten antsy and had ridden north to check the Wanted posters in Cartridge Springs. There he'd learned that the freight office and bank had been hit, a young mother and her son left to die on the boardwalk.

No point in informing Juliana of such grisly business, however. She knew nothing of him besides his name and that he used to be a lawman. That was enough. It was best for her that way. Best for him. He probably wouldn't be here long.

He thought he'd take to the peace and quiet, and maybe even decide to stay here forever. But hunting the Shadow Nielsen bunch had whet his appetite for the hunt, and Bedlam was too quiet, too far off the killing trail.

“You should tell me when you go,” the girl gently chided. She looked at him crossly, then rose, dropped the cloth in the pan, and disappeared into a pantry. She reappeared a moment later, holding a long white tablecloth out before her, and ripped it in half. “Will you be leaving again?”

Tossing one half of the cloth onto the table, she folded the other lengthwise and sat down beside him. He sipped the whiskey and looked at her, his agate-green eyes standing out against his Indian-dark face. “I'm not the one, Juliana. Not the one for you.”

She ripped a swatch from the long cloth, balled it up, poured whiskey over it, then touched it to his side. Hawk jumped at the liquid burn, nearly dropping his cigarette. She glanced up at him, a devilish light in her eyes. Holding the whiskey-drenched cloth over the wound, she drew the longer cloth around his waist.

“Do not think I have to go—how do you say?—
soliciting
for a man's attentions. I have had many young men try to spark me. There is one now, a rich prospector's son. He comes down from Vernal Peak once each month for supplies, says he wants to take me to San Francisco in California.” She tied the cloth around Hawk's waist, not looking at her hands, but staring into his eyes, the corners of her mouth turned up slightly. “A very handsome man, big shoulders, broader even than yours.”

Hawk snorted. “Broader than mine. Well, then, that's the boy you wanna hogtie.”

Her brows furrowed slightly with annoyance. “I cannot help it if you are too soft in the head to know a good woman when you see one. If you are more interested in going north and doing God knows what . . .”

Hawk drew deep on the quirley. She was fishing again, trying to find out who and what he really was. She had some vague idea that he was a pistolero, or an outlaw who rustled or robbed or both, staying one step ahead of the law.

Let her entertain her romantic fantasies. Aside from satisfying his natural male cravings, he had no time for women—even a young woman as beautiful as Juliana Velasquez, who'd dressed so alluringly this evening.

As she knotted the cloth around his waist, jerking it taut with more vigor than necessary, she glanced up at him seductively. “Tonight, I would like to stay here . . . with you . . .”

Hawk took her wrists in his hands. “If you get your heart broke, Juliana, it'll be your own fault.”

She dropped her eyes thoughtfully.

After a time, she nodded. She lifted her eyes again to his. Pulling one of her hands from his grasp, she reached up and touched her fingers to his broad, angular face. She rose up slowly, moving her head toward his, parting her lips.

He leaned toward her and closed his mouth over hers. Her lips were soft and ripe, her tongue shyly probing. After a time, she pulled away, lowered her hands to his naked shoulders, stout as wheel hubs, and ran them slowly down his bulging, powerful arms, gently prodding the tough skin with her fingertips.

“If my heart is broke, the fault is mine.” Her brown eyes flashed whimsically. “If
your
heart is broken, the fault is
yours
.”

Hawk laughed. He grabbed her shoulders, kissed her, stood, picked her up, and slung her over his shoulder like a feed sack. She gave a startled cry and laughed, wrapping her arms around him.

“Gideon!”

“We're off to the ogre's chambers, princess!”

“Oh!” She clutched him tighter. “Your side!”

“You wrapped it so damn tight, one of my lungs is closed!”

Laughing like a drunken lord, Hawk grabbed his rifle in his free hand, then walked out of the kitchen and through the sitting room, running into furniture. The sun had set, and the hacienda's cluttered, high-ceilinged rooms were dark as caves.

In the large bedroom at the top of the seven steps, he tossed the girl onto the bed. She bounced and laughed, breathing hard, the leather springs sighing. Hawk could barely see her; the room was dark as pitch.

“Damn,” Hawk said. “Matches. I'll be right back.”

“Don't leave me—it's dark!”

“Sit tight, princess. The ogre will return.”

He returned to the kitchen, grabbed a whiskey bottle and his saddlebags off a chair back, then, as an afterthought, took a long fork and speared a haunch of the roasted javelina onto a clay platter. His stomach grumbling as the fragrant steam rose to his nostrils, he stumbled back to the bedroom. He threw his saddlebags over a chair, set the meat on a table, and lit a lamp, casting the room in dim light and dancing shadows.

He turned to the bed, and his breath caught in his throat.

Juliana lay naked there upon the multicolored quilt, propped on one elbow, her delicate shoulders awash in her raven hair. Her almond legs were curled, one slender foot resting atop the other, her toes flexing slowly. Her full, brown breasts slanted toward the quilt, the pebbled nipples jutting. Her brown eyes glittered seductively in the lamplight.

Hawk frowned. “You've done this before.”

“Only once,” Juliana laughed. “And it was awful!”

“What makes you think this will be any better?”

“Carmelita.”

Hawk had kicked out of his boots and was unbuckling his cartridge belt. He froze and jerked his head toward her, shocked.
“Carmelita?”

Juliana stretched her long legs out, then brought her knees back to her chest. “She said if I didn't seduce you, she'd give it a shot herself!”

“So much for pious old Catholics.” Hawk unbuckled the cartridge belt and slung it over the same chair on which he'd hung his saddlebags. He slid the chair to within a few feet of the bed, then unbuckled his pants.

Juliana looked at the two large revolvers jutting from their holsters. “Billy the Kid—that's who you are!”

“Close.” Hawk peeled off his long underwear bottoms and kicked them under a table, then turned to the bed. Juliana's eyes dropped to his jutting member. They stayed on it as he climbed onto the bed and knelt beside her.

“You sure about this?”

She shuttled her gaze from his member to his eyes, and back again, then cupped his balls in her hand. Her voice was high and thin, barely audible.
“Por favor?”

 

As the night deepened and lobos called in the hills, a cool breeze pushing through the cracks in the balcony doors, Hawk fed pine and cedar logs to the fired clay-and-brick hearth. He and Juliana ate in bed, smearing their bodies in grease from the meat, and making love over and over again.

After one such bout, the girl lying belly down beneath him, a pillow under her thighs, Hawk pulled away and dropped his legs to the floor. Juliana arched her back and sighed, breathing hard, her skin glistening with sweat and grease.

She turned her head toward him. “Where are you going?”

“Hot in here.” As he moved toward the balcony doors, his right elbow knocked his cartridge belt and saddlebags off the chair. A long, blond braid and a carved wooden horse tumbled out of one flap, along with a dented coffee cup, a tobacco sack, and a box of .44 shells.

Juliana propped her head on an elbow as Hawk picked up the cartridge belt and draped it over the chair. “What are those?”

He glanced at her. She was gazing down at the braid and the wooden horse.

Hawk picked up the braid—a lock of his wife's hair, which he'd clipped after cutting her down from the cottonwood tree in their backyard, before the ladies from their church had prepared Linda's body for burial. The wooden horse—a black, rearing stallion—was the last piece his young son, Jubal, had carved before Three-Fingers Ned Meade had hanged the boy above Wolf Creek, west of their hometown of Crossroads, Nebraska Territory.

Holding the braid in one hand, Hawk scooped the horse off the floor with the other. He ran a thumb over each, then slid both back into the pouch. “Keepsakes.”

When he'd stuffed the other possibles back under the flap, he returned the bags to the chair, keeping the pistols angled toward the bed, and walked naked to the balcony. He threw open the doors, standing in the cool breeze that pushed against him and tousled his dark-brown hair. Turning, he added another small log to the fire, then climbed back into bed, crossing his arms behind his head and staring up at the beamed ceiling.

She scuttled up beside him, placed a hand on his chest, and gazed into his face. “Have I convinced you to stay?”

He ran his hand through her hair, caressed her smooth cheek with his thumb. He held her gaze but said nothing.

Her forehead creased with perplexity. “What is it you are searching for?”

“Peace.” Hawk lay his head back and returned his gaze to the ceiling. “A place in this world where my wife and children won't be killed by madmen.”

In the berserk state that had overtaken him in the wake of his family's demise, the irony of trying to find, or create, such a peace with his six-guns was lost on Gideon Hawk.

Juliana stared at him for a time, then glanced at the saddlebags hanging over the chair. Her own gaze darkening as she saw that he was lost to her now, glowering off into space, she gave a shudder.

She drew her body close to his, absorbing his warmth. She wrapped an arm around his waist, rested her cheek upon his chest, and closed her eyes.

8.

AMBUSCADE IN CHARLEY'S WASH

F
LAGG and the six deputies lost Hawk's trail in a torrential desert rain squall, then picked it up again the next day. At noon, the sun burning through their hats and sucking the moisture from their bodies so that their eyes felt like glass marbles in dry, bony sockets, they let their horses draw water at a runoff spring. Stretching their legs, the men filled their canteens and built cigarettes.

Flagg walked the top of a low knoll and stood beside an ancient, gnarled saguaro. He plucked his makings sack and surveyed the trail ahead—an old trace deep-gnawed by iron-shod ore wagons—through a maze of strewn boulders, broken sandstone pillars, and narrow, twisting ravines rising to blue mountains.

Standing with the other men near the horses, Bill Houston studied Flagg's back. Finally, taking a long drag from his cigarette, he strode up the knoll and stood beside Flagg.

The tall, gray-haired, hard-eyed marshal stood staring into the high mountains looming darkly against the western sky.

Houston took another puff from his quirley. Blowing smoke, he said, “Tell me somethin' straight up, will you, Marshal?”

“Haven't I always been straight with you, Bill?”

“Why do you hate Hawk so much? He was a good lawman at one time. Understandable how he went nuts after his family was killed and a crooked prosecutor sprang the killer.” Houston mopped his brow with a blue handkerchief. “I ain't defendin' the man, you understand. He must be stopped. I'm just wondering why you
hate
him so bad.”

Flagg cut a slit-eyed glance at the tall, angular Texan. “What makes you think I hate him so bad, Bill?”

“The way you flush up every time his name's mentioned.” Houston paused, held Flagg's cold gaze. “The harsh . . . measures . . . you've taken to find the man.”

Flagg turned away, slipped his own cigarette between his thin lips. “He's a lawman turned outlaw. Nothing worse in my book, Bill. Every time he deals his own justice, he's making a travesty of the U.S. Constitution—a travesty of my job and my beliefs.” Flagg rose stiffly on the balls of his feet and exhaled a deep breath, smoke streaming from his nostrils. “I'd say a vigilante of his caliber warranted a few harsh
measures
, wouldn't you, Bill?”

Houston stared at him. He smiled woodenly, nodded, then walked back down to where the others stood with the horses. Flagg remained atop the knoll, smoking. Annoyance plucked at him, a parasite squirming deep in his loins.

He hadn't told Houston the truth.

He hated Hawk, all right. But not only for the reasons he'd given the Texas lawman. Several months ago, Flagg had watched Hawk do away with a gang of killers south of the Mexican border. Flagg had had Hawk in his rifle sights, and he hadn't killed him, out of sympathy.

Since then, the rogue lawman had eluded Flagg for nearly a year. And because he hunted and killed known criminals with no regard for any law but his own, he was cheered on by the public. In many towns Flagg had visited while stalking Hawk, he'd come upon local lawmen and express agents who'd refused to post Wanted dodgers bearing Hawk's likeness.

In making a travesty of the bona fide law of the land, Gideon Hawk had become a damned hero.

And bona fide lawmen like D.W. Flagg had become laughingstocks.

Flagg took the last drag off his cigarette and stared at the high, blue mountains. His fury burned anew. He dropped the butt, mashed it out with his boot toe, and walked back down the knoll.

He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Mount up!”

 

That afternoon the lawmen were climbing out of a shallow canyon between two stark, sunburnt ranges when they heard guns popping to the south.

Flagg halted his steeldust, sat staring in the direction of the shots, one eye slitted.

“What the hell you s'pose that is?” said Franco Villard, sitting his own horse to Flagg's right.

“That's Charley's Wash yonder. When I was deputy sheriff of Tucson, mule trains were always getting am-bushed in there.”

Flagg paused, frustrated. He looked ahead along the trail, ran a gloved hand across his mouth, cursed. “We'd better check it out.”

By the time Flagg reached the base of the ridge, the shooting was growing intermittent, the sporadic shots spanging off rocks and drowning the muffled pleas of wounded men.

As the deputies caught up to him, Flagg swung down from the saddle. He slid his Winchester from the boot, angrily rammed a shell into the breech, and started up the ridge. “Watch your heads. I need every man for Hawk!”

He jerked sideways to avoid a coiled rattler, leapt over a clump of Mormon tea, and spurred himself into a jog.

The shots grew even more sporadic, as if the fight on the other side of the ridge were winding down.

Press Miller squinted against the sun glare. “Mescins, you think, Marshal?”

Flagg was breathing hard, watching where he planted his boots. “No doubt. They kill each other for farting upwind around here.”

“Damn,” Garth said. “I'd like to shoot a Mexican, take his ears home to a whore I know.” He hurried to add, “But only if they're breakin' the law, of course.”

Flagg cocked an eyebrow at him.

“She hates Mexicans,” Garth explained. “One gave her a vicious knife scar a few years back in Abilene. Keeps askin' me if I shot any Mescins. She wants to wear the ears around her neck.”

“If you're gonna bring Mex ears to a whore,” asked Miller through a grin, leaping a barrel cactus, “what're you gonna bring your wife?”

A shrill cry rose from the other side of the ridge.
“No!”
The seven lawmen stopped, raised their rifles, and peered toward the ridge top.

“Please, don't . . . don't shoot me!”

The last word hadn't died on the man's lips before a pistol spoke twice. From this distance the shots sounded like snapping matchsticks.

Flagg hurried up the ridge, muttering, “Spread out and stay low. I want to know what the hell's going on before we show ourselves.”

As the others fanned out toward the rocks to his right and left, Flagg doffed his hat and knelt behind a split boulder, peering through the rock's V-shaped notch. Charley's Wash—a deep, rocky, brushy cut—lay on the other side of the ridge, choked with boulders washed down by an ancient river.

At the bottom of the wash, the bodies of a handful of soldiers lay sprawled across the rocks, their dark-blue uniforms torn and bloodstained. A dozen men in dusty trail garb milled about the bodies, tearing rings from fingers and peering into mouths for gold fillings. The gunfire had died, but the smoke still ebbed along the arroyo's floor.

One of the bandits held a pair of saddlebags over one shoulder, the large U.S. markings on both flaps flashing in the sunlight as the bandit stooped to pick up a Springfield trapdoor carbine.

A low whistle sounded on Flagg's left.

Flagg turned. Galen Allidore stared at him, bushy red brows furrowed. “Army payroll?”

Flagg nodded. The soldiers, probably out of Fort Huauchuca, had no doubt been hauling payroll coins to a remote outpost when the bandits had attacked.

Shouting erupted below, and Flagg returned his attention to the wash. A blue shirt slid through the brush—a soldier making for a nest of rocks and saguaros to the marshal's right. Behind the man, several bandits yelled and pointed. One raised a rifle, and fired.

The blue shirt dropped behind a paloverde, then reappeared as the soldier continued forward on his hands and knees. Above the incessant whine of cicadas, Flagg heard the man's sharp grunts and anxious pleas.

The bandit who'd fired the rifle, and two others, descended on him quickly. The man with the rifle kicked him flat. He clamped his boot down on the soldier's back as he spoke to the other two bandits, one of whom threw his head back and laughed.

The bandit raised the rifle to his shoulder, aiming at the soldier's head.

Bunching his lips, Flagg snapped his own Winchester up. He aimed quickly and squeezed the trigger.

A half second after the bark, the hard case with the rifle jerked his head up. His rifle came up, as well, the pop reaching Flagg's ears a full second after the barrel puffed smoke. Dirt and gravel sprayed two feet from the wounded soldier's head.

The other two bandits snapped their own heads to the man with the rifle, who stumbled forward, tripping over the wounded soldier and dropping to his knees.

“Open up on the sons of bitches!” Flagg barked.

He ejected the spent cartridge, rammed a fresh round into the breech, then slid the barrel to one of the two other men near the soldier.

As the man faced Flagg, crouching and spreading his feet and grabbing the six-shooter from the holster on his right hip, Flagg sent him tumbling into the brush, the wounded outlaw inadvertently triggering his revolver into the head of his dead cohort.

Around Flagg, the deputies' rifles sent a crackling fusillade into the wash. Like Flagg, all six were expert marksmen, and in that first volley a half dozen bandits were sent sprawling into the chaparral around the soldiers they'd am-bushed.

Several others returned fire, shouting and arguing, then turned and ran. The man with the payroll money leapt a rock as he scrambled south along the wash.

Flagg had run halfway down the ridge, snapping shots with his carbine. Now he stopped, aimed at the retreating back of the man with the loot, and planted the rifle's sights on the fancy stitching adorning his bullhide vest, between his shoulder blades.

He fired as the outlaw dodged behind a saguaro. The shot plunked into the cactus, spraying dust and cactus bark. Continuing down the wash, the man edged a look behind, then disappeared over a rise. Several of the deputies' shots kicked up caliche and snapped mesquite branches as the last of the outlaws disappeared over the rise and was gone.

Flagg continued down the rise, thumbing cartridges from his belt and feeding them into his Winchester's loading gate. He glanced at Press Miller. “You and Hound-Dog fetch the horses.”

Hound-Dog glanced at him. “What about Hawk?”

“Hawk can wait. I know where he's heading. We're going after those bushwhacking sons of bitches!”

Flagg repressed a smile. Not only would he bring Hawk to justice, he'd secure the Army payroll. He'd have his name in all the papers. A candidate for the territorial governor's office couldn't ask for better publicity.

Shit, he'd be a hero.

“These bushwhackers need to be taught a lesson,” Flagg said, lowering his rifle toward an outlaw writhing in the brush at the base of a saguaro. “And I'm just the teacher.”

The outlaw, bleeding profusely from two holes in his chest, looked up at Flagg, his gray-green eyes pinched with pain. One-handed, Flagg pressed his carbine's barrel against the man's sweat-glistening forehead.

The wounded man's jaw tightened, and his eyes flashed horrifically.

Villard, kicking over a dead outlaw to Flagg's right, glanced at the man before Flagg, and frowned. “Hold on, Marshal.”

“Deputy Villard, this man appears to be reaching for a pistol—wouldn't you agree?”

Villard looked at the man. The outlaw stared back at him, his eyes beseeching. He couldn't be much over seventeen, with jug ears, hollow jaws, and close-cropped, sun-bleached hair. His hands were nowhere near a gun. In fact, both his holsters were empty.

Villard's eyes returned to Flagg. “We playin' by Hawk's rules, now, Marshal?”

Flagg pressed his rifle barrel hard against the kid's head. “Trying to keep this man alive, when he is obviously mortally wounded, would be a waste of our time. Time better spent hunting that travesty of justice, Gideon Hawk.” Flagg's pinched eyes flicked toward Villard. “Wouldn't you agree, Deputy?”

Villard didn't say anything for a moment. He glanced at Houston and Allidore, who'd both stopped their survey of the wash to regard Flagg incredulously. Villard looked again at the wounded man, bleeding out in the rocks and cactus.

Slowly, the deputy nodded his head. “Appears that way to me, Marshal.”

Flagg squeezed the Winchester's trigger. The outlaw's head exploded. The young man slumped onto his right shoulder, kicking his legs and clenching his fists, as if furious at having been killed.

“We got two more over here,” Bill Houston called to Flagg, nodding at two men writhing on the ground between him and Allidore.

“They're both going for weapons,” Flagg said. “Kill them.”

Houston glanced at Allidore, shrugged a shoulder, then shot his man in the head. Allidore's rifle spoke two seconds later, drilling a rangy half-breed in a red bandanna through the heart.

Houston and Allidore glanced at each other and chuckled.

Flagg heard screeching and looked up. Already, the shaggy black crosses of buzzards winged in lazy circles over the draw. He turned away from the man he'd shot and walked around the wash, inspecting the other bodies.

The eight soldiers were dead. Flagg found one more living outlaw, the man's back rising and falling faintly as he lay facedown in a cactus patch. He'd been shot in the side and through one leg.

Flagg shot him in the back of the head.

A horse whinnied, and Flagg turned to see Miller and Hound-Dog Tuttle riding their own mounts down the ridge, trailing the outlaws. As they approached the bottom of the wash, Flagg reached for his reins.

“What about the soldiers?” asked Bill Houston.

“We'll bury them later,” Flagg said, swinging into the leather. “
After
we've retrieved the payroll money.”