Crossing Fire River Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  PART 2

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART 3

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Teaser chapter

  CLOSE TO KILLING

  “This is Fire River country. It’s ours. You know what they say about fire. . . . Step too close and a fellow can get himself burned down mighty easily.”

  “Let me know where too close is,” Shaw said, taking a deliberate step forward. He stared at Gunnison, his hand hanging at the edge of his poncho. His big Colt stood out of sight beneath the poncho, but only an inch from his fingertips.

  Behind Shaw, Lori Edelman saw things were about to get out of control. “Bo Hewes, how dare you ride in here and let these bullies threaten my guest when I’m trying to bury my husband!”

  Hewes relented. He clenched his jaw tight again and gave a sharp jerk of his head, signaling Gunnison and the others to back off. “This is a funeral. You men step down and help. Take turns with the shoveling,” he said gruffly. To Lori he said, “All right, let’s get Jonathan laid to rest.” He turned to Shaw. “This day belongs to my brother. You brought him here; you’ve been properly thanked for it. Don’t push your luck with me.”

  “Luck was made to be pushed,” Shaw said flatly.

  SIGNET

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

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  First Printing, August 2009

  Copyright © Ralph Cotton, 2009

  All rights reserved

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  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.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-10531-3

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  For Mary Lynn . . . of course

  PART 1

  Chapter 1

  Cresta Alta, the hill country, Old Mexico

  His name was Lawrence Shaw and he was rightly known as the fastest gun alive. . . .

  When his bullet hit the first bandit squarely in the chest, the impact of the shot slung both the man and his tired horse sidelong to the ground. The bandit landed facedown, dead upon arrival, but his terrified horse thrashed and whinnied and managed to struggle back onto its hooves.

  “No, Senor, por favor!” the second bandit shouted immediately as Shaw’s big smoking Colt swung toward him. Yet even as the bandit tried to bring the proceedings to a halt, he managed to cock the French revolver in his right hand. In reflex, Shaw fired. His second shot lifted the man from his saddle and flung him backward to the ground. The bandit lay stretched out, gasping for breath. His horse, the better looking of the two rangy desert barbs, spun with a loud whinny and raced away across the sand.

  Shaw sighed as he slid down from atop his mule and watched the stream of sand dust billow up behind the fleeing horse. The blanket that had served as the bandit’s saddle flew from the horse’s back and drifted to the ground.

  “Looks like it’s you and me,” he said to the first horse, a speckled gelding, as it shook itself off and snorted and stood on spread hooves, staring blankly at him. Beside him the ragged mule raised its muzzle and sniffed the air toward a line of blue hills to the right.

  Shaw punched the two hot, empty cartridges into the gloved palm of his hand and dropped them into his pocket. He replaced them with two fresh rounds from the gun belt draped over his shoulder beneath his dusty poncho. With his Colt hanging in his right hand he walked forward to where the second bandit lay panting, managing to clutch his bleeding chest.

  “You did not . . . have to shoot me . . . ,” the bandit said, struggling to sit up but not making it.

  “Yeah, but I wanted to,” Shaw said matter-of-factly. He let his words hang for a moment, then said with a nod toward the stream of rising dust, “It looks like the best cayuse got away.”

  The bandit managed a weak nod—he understood. But then a look of confusion set in as it seemed to suddenly dawn on him that it was he and his compañero who had come to do the robbing. “You . . . were awaiting us . . . to steal our horses?” he asked.

  “Wasn’t waiting,” Shaw replied, “but I saw you coming.” He reached out a boot and kicked the big French revolver farther away from the man’s reach. “I figured you were up to no good.” He added grimly, “I’m tired of riding this federale pack mule.”

  “Damn . . . I feel foolish,” the man said, his voice failing. His eyes went to his friend’s body on the ground a few yards away. The man had been a young American outlaw known as Claw Shanks. “It was Claw’s . . . idea.”

  “It makes no difference now,” said Shaw. He’d heard of Claw Shanks, enough to realize that his death was no big loss to either side of the border. Then he looked all around and asked quietly, “Have you been to Valle Del Maíz lately?”

  “Si . . . of course,” the man groane
d, “only . . . a month ago.”

  Shaw could see that the Mexican was fading fast. Fresh blood began to trickle down from the corner of the bandit’s mouth, and a circle of darker blood widened on the ground beneath his back. “Did you see an old witch there with a covey of trained sparrows?”

  “A bruja . . . ?” The dying bandit stared at him through dim, waxy eyes. “With trained sparrows . . . ?”

  “Si, me oyó,” said Shaw. You heard me.

  “You . . . kill me, then you ask me this?” the bandit rasped, his voice weakening.

  Shaw only stared at him.

  “You . . . must be loco, Senor . . .,” the man managed with his dying breath.

  That was no answer. . . .

  Shaw stepped over and looked down at the dead man. He’d really wanted to know about the bruja and her sparrows, whether she and her birds had been real or imagined. He had been drunk on mescal, tequila and peyote wine for well over a month when he’d pulled himself atop the lank ragged mule and rode bareback out across the desert floor. The night before he’d left the dusty adobe village of Valle Del Maíz, he had sat watching an old bruja wrapped in a ragged, flowing black cloth as she tossed a covey of paper-thin sparrows upward from her knobby fingertips in a circling glow of firelight.

  Sparrows . . . ? He still questioned himself in reflection, seeing the small birds assembled in a wavering line, suspended in midair, awaiting their command. He’d never seen anything like it, yet there they were, eight or ten of them, perhaps even a dozen. They had spun and fluttered and hovered above her weathered fingertips, dancing on air like playful children.

  “Sparrows . . . ,” he repeated to himself, and he shook his head at the absurdness of it. He looked back down at the two bodies.

  How drunk had he been?

  He considered the question for a moment beneath the narrow shade of a battered top hat he’d scavenged somewhere over the past week. All right, he’d been about as blind drunk as a man could be and still be counted among the upright and breathing. He pictured those small birds chirping and dipping, catching something in the purple night air—crumbs, no doubt sprinkled freely from those weathered mystical fingertips.

  No, he decided as the birds appeared clearly in his mind, being drunk had nothing to do with it. He couldn’t dismiss it as some drunken hallucination. The old bruja and her sparrows had been real, as real as anything he’d ever seen here in this land of black shadow and blinding sunlight. He saw the birds dip and spin and flutter on their tiny wings, sparks from the fire skittering up into the black night around them.

  As real as two dead men in the sand, he told himself, having to force the birds from his mind. For the sake of his sanity, he had to put the incident away, real or not. He gave the dead bandits another passing glance, then gazed out across the endless desert floor. Enough of witches and dancing birds, he told himself. He had lost a month in the grip of heavy drinking. Now he had to finish regaining his rattled wits and get back to business—the grim business of killing.

  His friends Crayton Dawson and Jedson Caldwell were somewhere out there ahead of him. He should have caught up to them a month ago, but the need for drink had come upon him like some terrible, sudden fever, and he’d fallen before he could hang on and stop himself. Dancing sparrows . . . Jesus. He sighed. Would it be like this for the rest of his life?

  He gathered the reins to the tired horse standing spread-legged above its dead rider. He checked the animal over and found nothing wrong with it that some water and a little rest wouldn’t cure. He ran a gloved hand along its wet flanks and loosened its saddle cinch.

  “We’ll pick up your friend along the way,” he said to the black-and-white speckled barb. Lifting a goatskin canteen from its saddle horn, he picked up the dead man’s hat and poured a puddle into its upturned crown. Kneeling, he held the hat by its brim while the animal drank.

  When he had given the thirsty animal two hatfuls of water, he pitched the wet hat aside. He picked up a bandoleer of ammunition from beside the dead man and checked the bullets before draping it over his shoulder. From the man’s deep shirt pockets he pulled out a leather bag and shook seven shiny new gold coins out onto his palm. “Gold from the Sonora depository robbery.” He shook his head knowingly and added, “Shame on you, Claw Shanks.”

  Dawson will want to see this. . . . He pulled a rawhide string, closed the top of the bag and shoved it down behind his gun belt. Seeing a bulge in the man’s other shirt pocket, he reached down and pulled out a battered metal whiskey flask. He sighed. He shook the flask gently, judging its contents as half-full.

  A few days ago he would have given his horse for a deep drink of whiskey—if he’d had a horse, that is, he reminded himself. By then he’d already sold his horse for whiskey—or had he lost the animal somewhere . . . ? He didn’t know. Here goes . . . Unscrewing the cap from atop the metal flask he took a long, deep smell. He waited for a moment, not knowing what to expect. Then he screwed the cap back on with a feeling of satisfaction. He could not have done that a week earlier. The urge had left him. Well, it hadn’t left him, but it wasn’t raging inside him the way it had been. He started to pitch the flask aside. But then he stopped. Don’t get carried away, he told himself. He shoved the flask inside the worn saddlebags behind the speckled barb’s saddle. Whiskey wasn’t the problem. He was the problem, he reminded himself, turning, leading the speckled barb over to the mule.

  When the urge was not upon him, he could swim in a sea of whiskey with no desire to drink a drop of it. Or he could have a drink, two drinks, three or four, and push the bottle aside. But when that drinking urge hit him hard the way it had over a month ago, and those painful memories came flooding in at the same time, he was powerless. He didn’t know which one brought on the other, but once the drinking urge and the bad memories got together, he became a man helpless atop a wild, raging beast. All he could do was hang on and ride it out.

  Did that make him a drunkard? Well, yes, he expected it did at that. . . . He swung atop the mule and led the horse, letting it rest for a while without a rider on its tired back. He’d have to give the drinking matter some more thought, but not right now. Soon though, he told himself. He looked off at a dark boiling sky far east of him, and rode on.

  A thousand yards from where he’d left the bodies lying on the ground, Shaw found the spooked horse that had run itself out. When he reached the animal he didn’t stop. He simply stretched out from his saddle and gathered its dangling reins. The little bay fell in alongside the other horse in tow and walked along easily, drawn toward the smell of rain on the eastern horizon.

  When the three riders reined down at the sight of the two men lying dead in the sun, a young gunman named Bobby Freedus pointed at Claw Shanks. “That’s ole Claw, deader than hell, sure enough,” he said. “Damn, there’s Paco too!” he added, pointing toward the Mexican.

  “Yeah,” said Merle Oats, the older of the three dusty, trail-bitten bounty hunters, “careful your loud mouth don’t cause us to join them.” His eyes searched the barren sand with suspicion.

  The third man, a half French, half Sioux called Iron Head, said under his breath, “I said those shots meant trouble.”

  “Yeah?” Oats spit and replied gruffly, “When was gunshots out here ever a good sign?”

  Iron Head didn’t answer.

  “Free Boy, shake them bodies out,” Oats said to Bobby Freedus. “See if whoever killed them overlooked them German coins.”

  “Hell, it ain’t likely,” said Freedus. Instead of stepping down from his saddle, Freedus crossed his wrists on his saddle horn.

  Oats stared at him coldly. “Humor me.”

  Freedus let out a breath. He didn’t like being told what to do, but he stepped down anyway and walked forward, leading his horse. “I never liked being near these two when they were breathing in and out. Dead ain’t going to be no better.”

  “Help him,” Oats said to Iron Head in a short tone of voice.

  The half-breed glanced at
him crossly, but stepped down and did as he was told, catching up to Freedus.

  In a lowered voice, Freedus asked Iron Head, “Is he getting on your nerves as much as he is mine?”

  “More,” the half-breed replied.

  “Think I ought to kill him for us?” asked Freedus with a dark grin.

  “I don’t think you can,” Iron Head said flatly.

  “Any-damn-body can kill any-damn-body,” Freedus said with a swaggering confidence, nodding toward the two bodies. “There lays cold proof of it. All it takes is guts to get the job done.”

  “I know,” Iron Head said, leaving his meaning open to Freedus’ interpretation.

  Freedus gave him a stern look from beneath his lowered brow. “Don’t smart-mouth me, injun. I got the guts for the job.”

  “Then do it, or shut up about it,” said Iron Head.

  Freedus stalled for a second, wishing he’d never mentioned the matter. “Aw, forget it, injun,” he said finally as they stopped and stood over the bodies. “I was just making conversation.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” said Iron Head in a sarcastic tone.

  From his saddle Merle Oats watched closely, making sure he saw their every move as the two rifled through the pockets of the dead bandits. Lousy sonsabitches . . . He didn’t trust either man as far as he could spit. Seeing the half-breed lift something from the dead Mexican’s pocket, he called out quickly, “Hey, what’s that? What have you got there? Bring it on over here!”

  Iron Head gave Freedus a disgusted glance and growled under his breath, “What a suspicious turd.” Then he straightened up from over the Mexican and held up a gold coin. “It’s one of the stolen German coins, sure enough,” he called out to Oats. “But there’s no more on him.”

  “On neither one of them,” Freedus added, straightening up beside Iron Head.

  Sonsabitches . . . He’d have to see for himself, Oats thought. He urged his horse forward with his boot heels, then stepped down and jerked the coin from Iron Head’s upheld fingertips. “Yeah, that’s one all right,” he said gruffly. “Where the hell’s the rest of them?” His voice took on an accusing tone.