Hawk 08, page 3
The man stared at him blankly. ‘You want to hear that pig swill?’
‘Yeah.’
Hawk drove his fist into the bearded man’s ribs and he staggered back, open-mouthed, the bottle falling from his grasp.
‘Wh—?’
As the shattering sound of glass echoed through the saloon, Hawk unleashed another punch, shorter, that landed under the man’s heart. He stopped in his tracks, head dipping forward. Hawk grabbed him by the shirt and spun him round, clipping him hard on the point of the jaw. The sound of the bare knuckles against the man’s chin was almost as loud as that of the back of his head meeting the wall.
Several flakes of plaster fell away and followed the unconscious body downwards.
Hawk saw the woman start to get up from the piano stool and turn towards him. He stepped back and round and as she faced him and her mouth began to open he heard another sound, someone shifting fast at his back. He dropped into a half-crouch and began to spin back. His right hand unclenched itself and started to curve towards the butt of his gun.
The bouncer had got too good a start on him: even for a man of Hawk’s speed.
His hand was still inches away from his gun when something hard swung into his arm, just below the elbow, making him gasp.
The diving fingers missed their target.
Hawk raised his gloved left hand towards the man and the length of thick, hard wood he’d seen him wielding earlier crashed into the hand and knocked it aside.
Hawk cursed and rounded on his attacker and as he did so he heard the woman scream, ‘Watch out!’ from in back of him.
In spite of himself, his head turned, his eyes angled away. He glimpsed the marshal’s Winchester. The bouncer’s chair leg cracked against his shoulder and Hawk let out a muffled yell of surprise. He jumped back and heard the marshal work the lever on the Winchester. The rifle was more dangerous than the length of wood. He spun front on to the lawman, shouted a warning and went for his Colt a second time. It was inches out of the holster when the bouncer whipped the chair leg up between Hawk’s legs from behind, hard into his crotch. Hawk’s mouth opened wide and his fingers loosed the gun; his eyes watered and blurred. Through the blur he saw the stock of the marshal’s Winchester closing fast on his head. Then he saw nothing but the sawdust-strewn floor coming up to meet him fast.
Chapter Three
THE SHACKS FORMED three sides of a square built on a flat section of land high in the hills south of the Rio Grande. Below them the approach was difficult and rocky, the trail … such as it was … winding and encroached by numerous overhangs of rock. The entrance to the shacks was narrow and could be guarded by one man with a rifle and plenty of ammunition for almost as long as he chose. It usually was: it was now. Behind, the cliff rose sheer for fifty feet.
It was one hell of a difficult place to get into if you weren’t welcome … even more difficult to get out of if you succeeded in getting in.
A rough fence in front of the three buildings corralled the horses; a spring that broke through the ground immediately back of the center shack had never shown signs of running dry.
The Kincaid gang had been there for almost a year and they’d raided both sides of the border more or less at will, chasing back to their hide-out and laughing at any posse that was fool enough to try and hound them down. Any that rode well enough and fast enough to get as far as the hills didn’t get any further.
It was night now and Lance Kincaid was sitting inside the central shack, eating stew and cursing Walsh and One-Eye for being so damned long about their business. He didn’t think too much of the stew, either. It was dark brown, thick, potatoes and vegetables all mashed together and dotted here and there with pieces of meat which were almost all gristle. He banged his spoon and cursed, had a mouthful of soup and spat the unchewable meat into the empty and open fireplace behind him, then cursed some more.
The other men in the room shifted awkwardly, knowing Kincaid’s moods and fearing them, the gang leader’s temper liable to erupt suddenly and violently in any direction. None of the men were strangers to violence, none of them would back down from it given the choice … but Lance Kincaid’s anger was so blindly irrational there was no way of dealing with it. Only keeping clear and trying to mind your own business.
They did that now. Five of them sitting round a rickety table playing poker with a dog-eared and greasy deck of cards. Bull Lawson was a two hundred and forty pound former wrangler from Wyoming who had lived a decent and honest life until his thirty-third birthday, to celebrate which he had drunk four bottles of red-eye and then run amok in the main street … at the end of a brief fifteen minutes of mayhem he had managed to strangle to death two dogs, had killed a one-year-old horse with a blow of his fist to the animal’s head, raped a sixty-nine-year-old woman across a water trough and finally taken the sheriffs pistol from him and broken it over his head. The sheriff’s skull had broken as well. Bull Lawson had sobered up sufficiently to realize he ought to quit town. When he came to the next morning his guts were in some kind of tortured agony, his head felt like a sack of sawdust and he knew he had to keep riding. That he did until one day he met up with Kincaid.
The man sitting opposite Lawson was a Mexican called Carlos who had deserted from the army when he’d been facing court martial for stealing supplies from the camp stores and selling them in the nearest town market at a large profit. Carlos had found it necessary to kill three men in order to escape from the guardhouse: the first he bludgeoned to death against the bars of the cell; the second he finished off by the simpler means of firing a pistol into his face at point blank range; the third died forty-eight hours later as a result of seventy-nine pieces of 00-gauge shot in his shoulders and back, his buttocks and the backs of his legs. By the time he was dead Carlos had robbed an armory, a general store and a bank. He hadn’t looked back.
The man sitting with a pair of queens on Bull Lawson’s left was the oldest member of Kincaid’s gang. His name was Willis Alexander Seymore Patterson, as he’d tell anyone interested enough to listen … after the first bottle of whiskey had been emptied. Before that, he wasn’t the kind of man who said a great deal, and never to strangers. Those who knew him called him plain Willis and that seemed to suit him well enough.
Willis had a checkered career that stretched back to well before the War Between the States, when he had been a civilian scout for the military in the north-west. At the outbreak of the war, he joined the Army of the Confederacy and survived two years of bloody fighting, malaria and dysentery before deciding that a man could have just enough of a bad thing. He lit out for the middle west and found that roping other men’s cattle and changing their brands was as easy a way of making a living as most others he could imagine. Watching three of his friends kick and gasp out their lives at the end of three lengths of hemp did a lot to change his mind. After that Willis worked as a deputy marshal in a whole lot of towns, spending ten days under Bat Masterson at one point before Masterson fired him for being drunk on duty. He drifted into the south-west and took up with a woman rancher who offered him her bed and thirty dollars a week to be her top hand. When she told him he’d quit, she gave him the knife scar that was now a white line down his left cheek, finishing at the corner of his mouth. Willis had respected the woman enough to take that from her. He also went back with some riders a week later and took her remuda and a couple of hundred head of cattle. He was getting drunk on the proceeds of that escapade when he met up with Kincaid and told him that he was the greatest rustler in the whole of Texas and his name was Willis Alexander Seymore Patterson.
Willis changed two cards and the man on Bull Lawson’s other side threw in with a snarl. The snarl didn’t mean too much … it was just Shotgun Charlie’s way of being friendly. The closest he ever came to it, anyway.
Charlie had ridden for two years with the Comancheros, most of whom were half-breeds like himself, sprinkled with a few Mexicans, some American whites and some who were such a mixture of races it wasn’t possible to pick them out for anything except mongrel. They’d traded with the Comanche and the Kiowa on the southern plains, buying their stolen horses and livestock in exchange for rot-gut whiskey and beads and, once in a while, old rifles which had a tendency to jam or even to explode in the firer’s face. That was the respectable side of their business. They burned and raped and looted and sold white girls to the Indians after they’d had full use of them themselves. There might be something the Comancheros wouldn’t stoop to but whatever it was, no one had thought of it yet.
Charlie left after an internal argument which he ended abruptly by belly-shooting one of the leaders of the band with a sawn-off American Arms shotgun. After which it seemed prudent to leave, taking the shotgun with him. It was resting now against the back of his chair. It would have been a rumor that Charlie took his shotgun to bed with him, if it wasn’t a known and proven fact.
Sitting between Shotgun Charlie and Carlos was a black former slave called Darkie Winters. Winters had been the name of the plantation owner who’d used him as his property up till his fourteenth birthday when he’d run off, three days before the War Between the States. Darkie was the nickname that white folk had strung him up with, thinking that it made him sound less harmful than he looked. It helped some, but not a great deal. Darkie had kept growing way past fourteen, just as he’d kept running till he got to the Texas-New Mexico border. He was seven inches over six foot and had muscles like a prize stallion; his head was totally bald and the skull was so thick that he could kill a man with it and on several occasions he had. Inside, there was nothing thick. Darkie was one of the brightest in Kincaid’s bunch. He was also the only one that Kincaid’s temper never seemed to turn on. As though however enraged Kincaid became some thread of sanity kept him from going up against Darkie Winters.
Apart from those five card players and Kincaid himself, the only other man in the shack was Ironmouth Cody, who was standing by the stove chopping up blood-streaked chunks of rabbit carcass. Ironmouth was the gang’s cook and he was so called on account of the temperature at which he served everything. What would give a normal man blisters and burn his tongue, Ironmouth would gulp down and grin and splutter, ‘’Tain’t hot.’
Somewhere in the other two buildings were eight more men: two Mexicans that no one could tell apart and to whom the names Luis and Jose were applied with more luck than judgement; a six-part Apache called Yellow Sky but answering to Sky; a youngster with a cleft palate called Jingo; High-Hat Fitzgerald, who’d been a silver miner out in California and who’d struck it rich when he was young and lost it all before he got old; Nate West, who’d thought his calling was to be an itinerant preacher for the Church of Christ until he found that liquor and women called him louder; a stocky ex-railroad man by the name of Ernie who’d always dreamed of going over the border into Mexico and fighting prize bulls but so far hadn’t made it into the arena; a lanky bronc buster called Jude who got himself into trouble with the Texas Rangers for breaking other folk’s horses instead of his own.
That accounted for all of Kincaid’s gang except for one.
The one was Kansas John Longbaum and he was hugging his Winchester ’73 to himself up on the look-out post on the rock. He had a blanket pulled up over him and a pair of old wool gloves on his hands, a scarf wrapped round his neck. He was still cold. The last mug of coffee Ironmouth had brought him out was long empty.
With a lot of men in the bunch you didn’t get to draw night guard too often, but that didn’t seem to make it any better when you did.
Kansas John ground his teeth together and thought about morning.
Lance Kincaid smashed his knife down on his plate so hard that the plate broke clear across and what was left of his stew splashed up all over the table, over Kincaid’s shirt front and up into his face.
‘Damn hogwash!’
He stumbled up, one arm knocking the chair from behind him and sending it into the wall.
‘Wouldn’t feed it to a passle of hogs!’
The poker players caught hold of their cards and held their breaths. Ironmouth set down his butcher’s knife, gulped air, thought to pick up the knife again, but didn’t think to move. Not fast enough, anyway.
Kincaid threw the biggest piece of broken plate at him and his aim was good enough to catch the cook at the back of his right ear and cut the skin open.
Ironmouth shouted and grabbed at his neck, turning as he did so.
Kincaid saw the long-bladed knife in the cook’s hand and thought it might be intended for more than rabbit. He pushed the table away with his left hand and lunged in the opposite direction. His right hand closed over Ironmouth’s wrist and started to turn it, trying to force him to drop the knife. Ironmouth threw a couple of punches towards Kincaid’s head, but only one of them landed and that wasn’t enough to stop him.
Kincaid ground his knee up into the cook’s groin and then jumped away, keeping hold of the arm. He turned Ironmouth round and rammed his arm up high behind his back.
Ironmouth shrieked and the butcher’s knife clattered from his grasp.
Kincaid lifted the cook backwards and set his knee in the center of his spine. Then he propelled him forward fast into the stove. A large black cooking pot was sent flying, the scalding contents splashing up into Ironmouth’s face.
He shrieked all the louder and fell heavily against the side of the stove.
At the other side of the room, Shotgun Charlie was on his feet, the American Arms hooked over the crook of his left arm.
Bull Lawson had his hand resting on the butt of his favored Smith and Wesson .44.
The noise had brought several of the other men running across and now they burst into the room. Jude, Sky and High-Hat were first, after them either Luis or Jose and Ernie.
Kincaid wiped his arm over his face, breathing heavily; he spat a mouthful of phlegm down on to Ironmouth’s chest and then drew his pistol. He started to curse Ironmouth and as he did so he thumbed back the trigger.
Ironmouth’s eyes widened and he glanced round the room, mutely appealing for help.
Darkie was the only one who might have stood up against an enraged Kincaid but he was no great lover of Ironmouth’s cooking either.
‘No, boss, no, you can’t … it ain’t … I’m sorry ’bout—’
There was a low grumbling from the base of Kincaid’s throat and a sliver of wet ran from one side of his mouth; his eyes were bright and the dark pupils seemed unnaturally small. His finger started to tighten on the trigger.
Ironmouth tried to squeeze his body behind the stove but there was room only for his head and part of one arm.
The saliva running from Kincaid’s mouth dripped on to the front of his shirt; his tongue flicked out, snake-like, and licked some of it away from his lips.
A man came running across the corral, shouting.
The men in the doorway turned their heads.
‘They’re back! Walsh an’ One-Eye. They’re back!’
‘Hey, boss!’
‘The boys’re back.’
‘One-Eye’s in from town.’
‘Boss!’
Darkie stepped forward and set his hand strongly on Kincaid’s shoulder. Kincaid whirled fast, the pistol coming level with Darkie’s stomach. Darkie stared into Kincaid’s face, the grip of his fingers tightening on his shoulder until they bit the bone.
‘It’s Walsh and One-Eye. They’re ridin’ in. They’ll have news about the bank.’
Kincaid blinked; his finger shifted inside the trigger guard; his thumb released the hammer slowly and he stepped back, Darkie removing his hand.
‘Get ’em in here,’ Kincaid snapped. ‘Where the hell they been all the damned night?’
It took three men to prize the shivering Ironmouth out from behind the stove.
Walsh stood in front of Kincaid and took the butt of his thin cigar from between his lips and looked at the end. It had gone out. He fingered out a match and struck it on the edge of the table. Lit the cigar. One-Eye blinked his one eye.
Kincaid spat sideways on to the floor and said, ‘Well?’
‘It’s a cinch,’ said Walsh, teeth clenched into the cigar butt.
One-Eye nodded agreement.
Behind them Ironmouth picked up a pan and dropped it to the floor through shaking hands. Kincaid cursed him without bothering to turn his head.
‘You sure?’ he demanded.
‘Ain’t no one in town lookin’ to use a gun worth shit exceptin’ the marshal.’
‘An’ the feller with the glove,’ added One-Eye quietly.
‘What feller?’ asked Kincaid, voice rising. ‘What glove?’
One-Eye blinked. ‘Some gunslinger rode into town, leather glove on his left hand all bunched as if somethin’s wrong with it. Sawn-off shotgun in a fancy holster to the left side.’
Kincaid’s eyebrow rose, his mouth opened a little, then closed.
‘Him an’ the marshal, they had a run-in most as soon as this feller arrived. Same evenin’ the marshal near stove his head in with a Winchester an’ threw him in jail. Doubt he’s come round yet.’
Walsh nodded and laughed.
‘You sure it weren’t no put-up job? Those Rangers are tricky bastards.’
‘Sure, boss,’ said One-Eye.
‘Sure,’ nodded Walsh, grinding the last vestige of the cigar under his heel.
Kincaid grunted, ‘You damn well better be,’ and pushed between them to the door. There, he turned: ‘We’ll hit the bank tomorrow. We’ll take that place apart like there was no tomorrow!’
With a harsh laugh he stomped out into the night.
Chapter Four
THERE WAS NO bed in the cell, no bedding. An old iron bucket in the corner stank of urine and excrement. The bars were rusted in places but more than an inch thick. The window was over seven foot high and covered across with a wire grille with more bars behind. The door was padlocked twice. It had been built to last, built to do its job, built to keep a man in.
