Bullets Over Bedlam

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

Hawk wasn't sure how much time had passed before he opened his eyes. He'd heard something. The lamp was lit and warm . . . sweet breath pushed against his face. He jerked his head back, snapped a hand toward his gun belt coiled over a bedpost, clawed the Russian from the holster, and clicked the hammer back.

A woman laughed and leapt back from the bed. “Easy, lover! It's me, Saradee Jones.”

When Hawk's eyes focused, he saw her heart-shaped face framed by billowing, copper-colored hair. Her heart-stopping, high-breasted, round-hipped body, clad in only a dusty trail hat and a flimsy chemise . . .

“You must've been riding hard, last few days. Didn't think I could sneak into your room, much less light a lamp while you snored like a drunken sailor.” She leaned down and kissed his cheek. “You're getting careless, Mr. Hawk.”

Hawk aimed the cocked Russian at her. “How in the hell did you get in here? I told you next time I saw you, I'd kill you.”

Chuckling, she leaned forward, her left hand nudging his pistol up into the deep crease between her breasts. She ran her fingertips along the gun's barrel, then down along his hand and wrist, tickling him with her nails. “Why don't you fire?”

 

HELL ON WHEELS
ONCE LATE WITH A .38
ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN
ONCE A RENEGADE
ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER
ONCE A LAWMAN
ONCE MORE WITH A .44
ONCE A MARSHAL

 

 

BULLETS OVER BEDLAM
COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL
DEADLY PREY
ROGUE LAWMAN

 

 

 

.45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP
.45-CALIBER MANHUNT
.45-CALIBER FURY
.45-CALIBER REVENGE

 

 

 

THE DEVIL'S LAIR
STARING DOWN THE DEVIL
THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE
RIDING WITH THE DEVIL'S MISTRESS
DEALT THE DEVIL'S HAND
THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET

 

 

BLOOD MOUNTAIN

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Group Ireland. 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

ROGUE LAWMAN: BULLETS OVER BEDLAM

 

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

 

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / April 2008

Copyright © 2008 by Peter Brandvold.

 

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

 

ISBN : 978-1-1012-2032-0

 

BERKLEY
^®
Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

 

 

 

1.

SOGGY STALKING TRAIL

F
ROM a night sky black as a tar pit, lightning slashed through the rain and knifed into a sprawling cottonwood. Showering sparks sizzled as the storm loosed its wrath upon the world.

Thunder rumbled like cannon fire, shaking the earth.

The gods were angry. That's how it seemed to Gideon Hawk, riding his grulla mustang through a narrow draw, water up to the horse's hocks and sluicing off Hawk's broad-brimmed hat. The sky was dark as a blacksmith's apron, the air silver with the nickel-sized raindrops that had been pummeling him for the past two hours.

Thunder rumbled over the mountains enclosing him on three sides. Like fireworks, lightning lit up the stark, rocky, saguaro-studded terrain nearby.

It had been a long trail—three days' worth of hard tracking six killers and bank robbers from Cartridge Springs. When they'd hit the Stockman's Bank and the Wells Fargo office, the gang led by Shadow Nielsen and Skylar Parks had left town whooping like jackals and triggering lead, taking the banker's daughter hostage and leaving a young woman and her little boy sprawled across the boardwalk before the millinery shop, dead.

Hawk hadn't been in town that day. But news had spread over the telegraph wires.

When he'd heard that the sheriff's posse who'd followed the gang to the Territorial border had lost the trail in the badlands, Hawk rode to Cartridge Springs and quietly, anonymously took up the hunt.

Bona fide lawmen couldn't bring jackals like these to justice. It took a lawman unshackled by civilization's laws and society's rules—who enforced the law of the primitive—to give uncivilized lobos as these, who'd kill an innocent young woman and a child as casually as shooting trash-heap rats, their reckoning.

Earlier in the day, Hawk had lost the trail in the rain. It wasn't hard to figure where the jackals were heading, though. There weren't many trails in this neck of the rocky desert—at least, not many trails a white man dared follow and not end up slow-roasted over an Apache fire.

He put the grulla up a saddleback ridge and peered out through the separate streams funneling off his hat brim.

He wouldn't have to ride much farther.

Below, in a barren valley, on a low shelf under a high, anvil-shaped ridge, sat a small, two-story roadhouse, its two front windows and one side window lit against the stormy night. The frequent lightning flashes showed a pine-log hitching post out front, a sign over the brush arbor that Hawk couldn't read from this distance, and a small barn and corral on the right side of the trail.

Hawk reached back and shucked his Henry rifle from the saddle boot. The gun wolves had stopped here for the night. It was too wet to continue. Besides, they were wealthy men. Well-heeled hombres didn't sleep on the ground when they didn't have to. Especially when they had a pretty girl with them, and it was raining bear cubs and wolverines.

Hawk broke open the rifle's chamber, made sure he had a fresh shell seated, then raised the lever against the stock. He rested the Henry over his saddle bows, lifted the collar of his yellow slicker, clucked to the horse, and headed slowly down the hill through the dripping saguaros that flashed like crucified martyrs on Cavalry Hill.

The wind and rain surged harder, turning the trail into a river, as he splashed down the ridge and halted the grulla between the corral and the barn. No horses milled behind the rails. They'd be in the barn for the night. In the roadhouse beyond, which the sign identified as Leo's Place, figures showed beyond the sashed, rain-streaked windows.

Hawk slid out of the saddle, opened the barn doors, and led the grulla inside. The trapped air was musty and warm with the smell of horses, hay, and manure. He closed the doors, found a lamp hanging with collars and harnesses on a four-by-four post, lit it, and held it aloft.

Copper eyes glistened in the lamplight, staring back at him from the rear shadows. Upon closer inspection, Hawk saw six stalled horses, all still damp. The tack piled on the stall partitions was also wet, the wool blankets hanging heavy on the pine planks.

Hawk tended the grulla, then checked the loads in his two pistols—a big Russian .44 positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip, and a stag-butted Colt on his right. He spun the Colt's cylinder, dropped the revolver in its holster, lowered his slicker over it, and grabbed his Henry, off-cocking the hammer.

He moved to the front of the barn, blew out the lamp, and opened the doors. He stood, letting his eyes range over the two-story cabin and stoop. The tang of burning mesquite cut through the slashing rain.

Thunder crashed like boulders. Lightning flashed ghostly blue.

Hawk pushed the doors closed and slogged through the mud to the front porch. He climbed the steps, setting each boot down softly, and tripped the door latch. The Z-frame door squawked inward, and he moved through it casually, doffing his hat and swiping it against his thigh.

The others in the room—five men playing cards or checkers at two tables to his right, and the apron standing behind the bar reading an illustrated newspaper spread open on the pine planks to his left—shifted their eyes to him.

Hawk didn't slip into even a crowded room unnoticed. He was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and powerful through the arms and shoulders. His father was a Ute warrior, his mother, a Norwegian immigrant's daughter. He owned the thick, dark-brown hair and red-bronze skin of his father, while his green, slanted eyes and high, tapering cheekbones bespoke the Viking blood of his mother.

Under the slicker he wore a blue chambray shirt, red neckerchief, sheepskin vest, and tight-fitting black denims. His bench-made boots were plain brown and high-heeled, the spurs unadorned.

The eyes stayed with him as he casually scraped mud from his boots on the flour-sack rug inside the door, then moved to the bar, his boots thumping hollowly against the puncheons, spur chains ringing. He cast a quick glance over the two groups of men sitting at two separate tables—three at one table halfway down the room, two at another a little farther back. The group of three was playing cards, while the other two sat hunched over a checkerboard.

None had apparently scraped their boots, and dried mud marked the floor around their chairs, telling Hawk they'd been here a couple of hours.

One of the men at the first table, staring so hard at Hawk as to bore holes through him, had long, stringy blond hair, a red weasel face, and a big, hide-wrapped bowie hanging down his chest from a leather lanyard.

The gang's segundo, Skylar Parks.

Upstairs, a man and a woman were talking. Must be the top coyote himself, Shadow Nielsen. The woman must be the banker's pretty daughter the gang had taken as a hostage.

The barman, leaning on the pine planks, looked at the five men at the tables, then shifted his brown eyes to Hawk. His long, greasy hair hung down both sides of his pitted, blue-jowled face.

Straightening, he shook his hair back from his eyes. His voice betrayed a slight Irish accent. “Wet night to be out.”

“I was glad to see your lights.”

Hawk set the Henry's barrel on his right shoulder and turned sideways to the bar, glancing again at the unshaven, well-armed coyotes still regarding him sullenly through their tobacco smoke. Aside from the rain pounding the roof, the room was so quiet that Hawk's resonant voice sounded sepulchral in the close quarters.

“Got any coffee?”

“Not made.”

“Whiskey, then. A bottle of something besides what you brew in the barn.”

Before he'd finished the sentence, a sharp slap sounded above his head, in the second story. A man chuckled. Two seconds later, a girl giggled. Bedsprings squawked loudly.

Casting a furtive glance at the other customers, the barman chuckled as he reached under the bar. He set a brown, unlabeled bottle and a shot glass on the scarred planks. “Dollar and a quarter.”

Hawk canted his head toward the five-gallon bucket at the end of the bar. “I'll take a couple of those hog knuckles, too.”

As the bedsprings upstairs began squawking again, the man forked a couple knuckles out of the brine and set them on the planks before Hawk. The pork and vinegar smell made Hawk's stomach growl. He hadn't eaten since breakfast, and then only cold jerky and water.

“Three bits,” the barman said.

Hawk flipped several coins onto the planks. Taking the knuckles in one hand, the bottle and his rifle in the other, he turned toward the room.

The coyotes were still staring at him through puffs of cigarette and cigar smoke. The second-in-command, Parks, sat back in his chair, holding a quirley between his thin, pink lips. He squinted through the smoke. His other hand rested negligently atop an ivory-butted Remington in a cross-draw holster. A sawed-off shotgun leaned against his chair.

His pinched face showed no expression.

The poker and the checkers had stalled. No one said anything. They smoked and stared at Hawk.

Upstairs, the bed squawked faster now, and the lovers groaned and sighed.

When Hawk's eyes had ranged across the room, his own face like granite, he moseyed over to a table near the smoking woodstove, set the bottle, knuckles, and glass on the table, then kicked out a chair. He laid the Henry across the table, angling it so the barrel pointed toward the middle of the small crowd before him, and shrugged out of his slicker.

He shook water from the oilskin, hung it over the back of a chair to his left, tossed his hat over the rifle's brass receiver, and sank down in the seat. It creaked loudly in the quiet room. A log in the woodstove fell.

Hawk sighed deeply and tipped the bottle over his shot glass, filling the glass to the brim. He set the bottle on the table and cast his gaze around the room, the coyotes still regarding him like a rabbit at a rattlesnake convention. The thought made the corners of his broad mouth twist up slightly.

He lifted the glass to the room, tossed it back.

The whiskey burned, instantly warming his chest and belly. Not bad coffin varnish for these parts.

Still keeping one eye on the glowering faces before him, Hawk lifted a hog knuckle, sniffed it, and took a bite. Vinegary and tough. It had sat in the brine too long and the hog had been old. Still, it tasted good to a hungry man just in from the rain.

He sat back in the chair, sipping his second shot and chewing the hog knuckle, staring blandly at the men glowering at him. The barman stood with his hands on the bar, a wing of hair hanging over one eye. The other eye was sharp with anxiety. He breathed heavily through his open mouth.

Hawk paid little attention to him. Hawk had never visited this corner of the Territory, but the place smelled and looked like an outlaw haunt. The barman, probably an old owlhoot himself, was no doubt in the habit of offering beds and whiskey to jaspers on the run.

Nevertheless, the barman was not Hawk's primary concern. Trouble, when it came, would come from the weasel-faced Skylar Parks, wanted in three territories and in Old Mexico for armed robbery and murder.

Upstairs, the mattress was getting a good workout, the headboard hammering the wall. It sounded like angry pistol shots. The man grunted and the woman sighed. Above Hawk's head, the ceiling creaked and groaned.

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.”