Hawk 12, page 1
Contents
Dedication
Quotes
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
About the Author
Also by the Author
Piccadilly Publishing
Copyright
For Liz (part two)
Day by day and one by one
We fall like candles in the sun.
John Stewart
… tomorrow we will run faster,
stretch out our arms farther
… And one fine morning—
F. Scott Fitzgerald: THE GREAT GATSBY
Chapter One
THE RIDGE ROAD took them three hundred feet above the nameless lake and high around two of its sides. Over them, making ragged scratches into the blistering sky, tamarack trees and white firs grew tall from the domed summit. Closer, a wall of sometimes sheer granite was studded with coarse shrub and the stunted afterbirth of pine. The ground between where their horses picked their way and the lake was softer, thick with an accumulation of cones and needles. Cedars grew strongly, the strutting height of a ponderosa pine occasionally thrusting above them.
Two riders, trailing three pack horses with heavy boxes roped securely to their sides. The leader was tall, lean; his face deeply tanned and smooth like leather, the skin taut across his cheek bones. Except for the eyes, it was the face of a young man, a few years past twenty. The eyes, blue and cold, seemed to have lived twice that long: even in that wild country they had seen more than most, had seen too much.
He wore a white shirt loose at the neck and rolled high at the sleeves, a red bandanna tied beneath a chin that showed a day’s growth of stubble. A black leather bandolier was slung across his left shoulder, hanging over his black leather vest. Black cotton pants were worn outside low-heeled black boots and a low-crowned black hat with a flat brim was angled right to left across his forehead. The hair that fell haphazardly, thickly down from beneath the hat was a couple of shades lighter yet still black and it settled, curling, on the base of his neck. His left hand was covered by a glove of soft black leather that was secured about the wrist with a cord.
Those were the things you noticed about him—the eyes, the black leather, the glove—those and the guns.
The weapon holstered at his right side was straightforward enough. A Colt Frontier with a five-and-a-half-inch barrel and a dark wood grip that gave off a dull shine, it was held fast by a safety thong that looped over the curve of the hammer from the back of the holster. To the other side, though, the man wore something different. It was a single-barrel scattergun, a Meteor, its barrel sawn down to a mere foot and the stock cut away and rounded so as to form a pistol grip. It sat snug and evil in a specially tooled holster that a lawman called John T. McLain had bequeathed to its present owner as he lay dying on the sidewalk of some half-forgotten town. Set to use like a hand gun and from the right range it would tear a man apart.
The eyes, the glove, the guns—these were the things you noticed about Jared Hawk. Noticed and kept on walking, pretending more often than not that you’d seen nothing. With gunfighters like Hawk it was as well to remain anonymous, keep quiet and give them a wide berth. Of course, there were those who thought differently. Hardened killers with fast guns of their own and reputations to match, men who took a gold piece and an extra slug of whiskey and called Hawk out in the smoky shade of a saloon or the dingy quiet of a back street. Young punk kids who’d spent weeks practicing their draw until they had calluses on the palms of their hands and blisters on their fingers. They faced up to themselves in mirrors and then they went out on to the street and faced up to Hawk, seeking a reputation and finding a snub-nosed slug and an early grave.
Then there were men like the one who rode behind him. Aged and weathered, gritty and full of the kind of savvy and common sense that only a lifetime on the frontier can give to a man. Men like Matthew Dent, who’d worked as a peace officer for maybe twenty-five years and would have been doing so still if folk hadn’t been foolish enough to look at the years that told in his thinning gray hair and the spread of his belly and the watering of his eyes and reckon him as being ripe for pasture. Maybe Matt Dent had even figured that himself for a while. But that had been before he’d met up with Hawk and strapped on his Colt Peacemaker again and worn it with pride.
He rode ten yards back of Jared Hawk, the patched and fading check shirt stuck to his back with the heat. His gray work pants were likewise mended and aging and the boots they were tucked down into were scuffed and near worn through. The pistol in its holster, though, was oiled and cleaned and shone like new.
Together they’d ridden into the ghost town of Cathay’s Lake, in amongst the tumbledown ruins of what had once been one of the busiest mining camps in the Central Mother Lode. Ridden in against the odds and the waiting guns of a bunch of thieves and killers and come out again leaving nothing but more ghosts behind them.i
Now Matthew Dent turned his head and squinted through the harsh light at the pack horses strung back along the trail. He screwed up one side of his lined face in a scowl and thrust up an arm. ‘Jared! Hey, Jared! Got us a little trouble here.’
Hawk spun fast and his fingers were already covering the butt of his Colt only the old man didn’t mean that kind of trouble.
Hawk held the animal’s bridle while Matt Dent went down on to one knee and made careful use of the small-bladed knife he’d kept with him for more years than he usually cared to remember. The stone was no larger than a pea, almost exactly round and hard as the hardest rock. Dent exaggerated the pain in his back as he straightened up, throwing in a couple of groans for the younger man’s benefit and then holding up the stone for Hawk to see. Finally he pitched it away, out of sight between the scarlet monkey flowers and the bright yellow lotus that grew close to the southern edge of the trail.
‘Drink?’ Hawk pointed to the water canteen close by his hand.
‘Sure.’
Hawk lifted the canteen free and uncorked the top, passing it over to the older man before himself. Dent drank in quick, economical swallows, wiping the lip with his shirt front before handing it back. Hawk set the canteen to his mouth and drank deeply enough to quench his thirst until they stopped again, which wouldn’t be until they were at the western end of the ridge road.
‘I was thinkin’ …’ began Dent as they hauled themselves back into the saddle.
‘Yeah?’
Dent half-grinned. ‘Thinkin’ we could pass through Hollister on our way to Sacramento.’
‘Be kinda hard not to,’ smiled Hawk.
Hollister these past couple of years had been as close to a home as Matthew Dent had had. Folks there liked him and respected him—even if they did have a lazy and pretty cowardly sheriff holding down a badge that should have been Dent’s according to any sort of right. Hawk had only been there once but it was enough to give him pretty pleasant memories.
‘See the boys …’ Dent was saying.
Hawk’s smile broadened. The boys Dent was referring to would none of them see fifty again, most of them not sixty.
‘… fill up on grub at Lizzie James’s place.’
Now it was Dent’s turn to smile.
‘Remember her, don’t you, Jared?’
Hawk nodded, grinned a shade wickedly and turned in the saddle. He remembered Lizzie right enough. Reddish-brown hair and shiny leather boots and the kind of woman who knew what she wanted and didn’t let anything stand in her way of getting it. Hands that were soft and firm at the same time, a body that had startled him with its smoothness and its speed, a mouth that could kiss and cuss and talk dirty so that it seemed to be saying some of the sweetest things he’d ever heard.
‘Yeah,’ Dent was mumbling to himself, ‘I reckon you remember her pretty good.’
Hawk wasn’t saying anything; his pulse just quickened a mite as he got down to some serious thinking.
After a while Matt Dent got to thinking, too, but not about a woman. Not even as fine a woman as Lizzie. Dent was thinking back to Cathay’s Lake. It had been the turn of the day and evening had been setting in; it would have been settling towards darkness slowly except that a mist had been pouring down off the hills all afternoon and everything was immersed in shadow. The broken planks of wood which fell away from the fronts of buildings all along the deserted street, the bare and empty doors and windows through which the wind whistled, the saloon inside which Slattery and what remained of his men were waiting.
Pride tugged at Dent now, just as the wind and the mist had tugged at him then: the lamp had been lit inside the saloon and someone inside was picking out a tune with painful slowness on an old banjo …
‘Give us three minutes,’ Hawk had said and slipped from sight.
Three minutes.
Dent recalled clear as if it were happening now the way the adrenalin had driven through him and the sweat had run over his body as those minutes ticked away inside his head, slower and faster at the same time than almost any he’d ever lived through. And then he’d drawn air down deep into his lungs and strode towards the saloon door …
Slattery had been playing blackjack inside, him and two others over to one side; the banjo picker off to the other, straddling a chair. Dent had used his boot to push back the door and he’d stepped in nice and easy, confident enough not to hurry. His thumbs were hooked inside his belt at the front and clear enough from the Colt at his hip. He didn’t want to startle the boys any too quickly.
His own first glimpse of Slattery was startling enough. Pure albino, pink eyes and white hair and hardly a speck of color all over his body. The moment Dent entered, Slattery started up from his chair, pulling his pistol like it might have been trouble. But he’d seen it was just an old man and let the gun slip back through his fingers and sat back down.
Dent had stood there and waited; stood and waited for Hawk to get in position to make his own move.
‘How the hell d’you get in here?’ the albino had demanded.
‘Walked.’
‘Past three guards?’
‘Ain’t no guards.’
‘Like hell there ain’t! There’s …’
By then the beginnings of a smile must have been tugging at the side of Dent’s thin mouth as he stood safe in the certain knowledge that Hawk and himself had disposed of the guards already. The same understanding came to Slattery but it came too late. Dent rocked backwards and his hand moved towards the grip of the Colt Peacemaker at his side.
‘Shoot the old bastard!’ Slattery had yelled as he jumped to his feet, the chair spinning out from under him.
The albino’s fingers were grazing his gun butt as the loose and rotting boards that formed the rear wall of the saloon came crashing in and Hawk leapt through in a whirl of action. Slattery tried to change direction as he dragged his gun up from his belt but he was never going to make it. As Hawk’s slug hammered through the albino’s shoulder and sent him thrashing across the card table, Dent calmly swiveled sideways and sent a .45 tearing through the back of the arm of one of the men crawling behind cover. Dent tightened his mouth, angled the weapon a fraction to the right and tried again. As he fired the man toppled heavily and the slug ricocheted off the floor.
Dent glanced quickly over his shoulder: Slattery was clutching his shattered shoulder, a second man was dead close by Hawk’s feet and the banjo picker was staring up at Hawk with fear etched deep in his face.
Dent aimed along the barrel of his Colt and waited until he saw the eyes of the man he’d wounded blink—he shot him below the jawline, ripping a large hole from his neck, showering blood over the immediate area of the saloon.
Later they had shaken hands, Hawk and old Matt Dent, standing face to face in the dilapidated old saloon with its stink of blood and death and decay. Pretty soon they’d been hitting the trail west together, like it was the most natural thing to do. Dent looked now at the tall figure up ahead of him, erect in the saddle, and felt proud to have stood alongside him, side by side in a blaze of gunfire. Three minutes Hawk had asked for and Dent had given him that and a whole lot more.
Hawk was thinking too, his mind running over the events of the past few weeks since he’d first ridden into Cathay’s Lake and Slattery with his pink eyes and white hair and jackal laugh. He’d found out that Slattery had been tied in with a man called Jack Shade, helping him to get guns from the Army and sell them down on the Mexican border at a high profit. But gun-running wasn’t the only illegal operation Jack Shade was involved in and Shade kept quantities of money in small banks threaded through California where he could get to it as and when he wanted. Not many folk knew about Jack Shade’s bank drops, but Slattery was one and the albino’s greed got the better of him. He took the bank at Hollister and five thousand dollars’ worth of Shade’s money along with it.
Now Hawk had most of that five thousand and six cases of US Army rifles as well. It was Jack Shade’s property and Jack Shade’s money—if you reckoned a thief had those kind of rights. Hawk was certain that’s what Shade was thinking. At least, he hoped so. Jack Shade interested Hawk: he wanted to meet him and take him—take him for everything he was worth.
Hawk grinned and turned his head, acknowledging Matt Dent’s nod with a quick wave of his hand.
Jack Shade wasn’t the only concern he had to worry about. There was still the question of the old man back there and his former partner, the pair of them and someone else’s gold. Dent and Jack Emery had been hired by a mine owner called Prior to guard a shipment of gold from one of his mines over towards Sacramento. Emery had somehow persuaded Dent to take the gold for themselves; Prior had paid Hawk to fetch it back.
It had been easy enough to pick up Dent’s trail. Bound down by guilt at the first wrong thing he’d done in all his long years, the former lawman had gone no further than back to Hollister where he lived and he’d never been able to spend a cent of his share of the gold. When the two men had met, Dent had persuaded Hawk to let him go after Emery himself and get the rest of the gold back. They’d finally worked out a deal: together they’d tackle Slattery and afterwards Jack Emery.
Hawk knew what that arrangement had done for the old man’s pride, his sense of himself. He’d seen the way he’d looked when they’d first met and how he’d been after the shoot-out back in that ghost-town saloon. Matt Dent might be a whole lot slower than once he’d been, but his nerve under pressure was just as steady as he supposed it ever was. If Hawk wanted someone to guard his back, he doubted if he’d find many better than Matthew Dent. Ever since the death of John T. McLain it had been Hawk’s way to ride alone. That meant you didn’t have to look out for others and you didn’t have to pay the penalty for their mistakes. He figured that was how it was usually going to be. But like most things, you had to allow for exceptions—and that old man, he sure was an exception and a half.
‘Jared!’
‘Yeah?’
Hawk slowed his mount and waited for Dent to move up closer along the narrow trail. He could read the effects of the heat and natural tiredness in the older man’s eyes, yet he still sat tall and pretty straight in the saddle.
‘We makin’ a stop overnight or carryin’ on through?’
‘What d’you reckon’s best?’
Dent shrugged. ‘Carry on through the night we could be there maybe an hour after sunup.’
Hawk had been thinking about just that a while back; now he thought about it some more. ‘Ain’t no urgency. We’ll camp past the ridge.’
‘You sure that’s what you want to do?’
‘It’s what I said, ain’t it?’
Dent pushed his hat back on his head and eyed the younger man keenly. ‘You ain’t doin’ this on account of me? Some fool idea about my achin’ old bones?’
‘You!’ Hawk laughed. ‘Hell, no! You think I’d waste my time worryin’ about you? You’re old enough to look after yourself. I was thinkin’ about these mounts. They’ll be fresher for a break. We got a lot of miles to make after we leave Hollister.’
Dent nodded, clicking his tongue to move his horse along. ‘Lot of miles,’ he repeated, as much to himself as anyone. ‘Lot of miles to go.’
Hawk shook his head and moved ahead up the trail, the opaque blue of the lake holding the tops of the cedars tight inside it like a painting in a frame.
Chapter Two
MATTHEW DENT GROANED a little as he rolled over on to his side, freeing himself from his blanket. A couple of bones clicked and creaked as he shifted into a hesitant sitting position. Both hands pushing into the small of his back, he arched his neck and swiveled his head from side to side. On his feet less than steadily, fingers rubbed the remaining sleep from his eyes and rubbed at the corners of his mouth. Something in his side told him he’d been sleeping on rocks and a dull throbbing pain high in his left thigh suggested rain, though that was less than likely. He rubbed vigorously at his chest and after a few moments hawked up several gobs of bitter phlegm, which he spat out with evident distaste. Only after he’d cleared his nostrils alternately could he smell the last remnants of salted bacon that Hawk had set in the pan. He could see the blackened coffee pot close alongside, slanted across the smoldering branches. The need to relieve himself stung with a sudden burning.
As he was walking slowly back up the slope several minutes later, he saw Hawk approaching the fire, shirt flung across his shoulders, otherwise bare to the waist.
‘Mornin’!’ Dent called, his voice still thick with sleep and little more than a croak.
