Blood money a hawk weste.., p.1
Blood Money (A Hawk Western #2), page 1
part #2 of Hawk Series
The Home of Great
Western Fiction
Dollars are silver—Blood is red!
When Jared Hawk helped the black gunman, Aaron Turner, bring in a wanted man it was one more job—a few more dollars in his pocket. He didn’t know he was riding into the hellfire center of a range war. A fight not just over land. Nor that he’d find himself on the other side, facing Turner over the blazing muzzle of a Colt .45.
But Hawk had a simple code: kill first and ask questions later.
If there was anyone alive to answer…
HAWK 2: BLOOD MONEY
By William S. Brady
First published by Fontana Books in 1979
Copyright © 1979, 2022 by William Stuart Brady
This electronic edition published November 2022
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book / Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Series Editor: Mike Stotter
Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.
Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books.
This is for Tina:
Don’t hesitate
And don’t think (twice)
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
About William S. Brady
Chapter One
THE BIRD HOVERED on the air, its fringed wings moving slightly with the current. The feathers underneath the wings were barred with grey; those at the beginning of the tail were white.
The man rode slowly, watching it. For a moment he lost it against the blistering light of the sun, but then it was there again above the trees at the edge of the wood.
The man saw the bird’s head move to one side and immediately it fell out of the air. Down, down, until there seemed to be nothing beneath it but the ground. As suddenly as it had dropped, the bird began to rise again, a small rodent gripped tight in its talons.
The bird moved off between the trees, short, quick wing beats alternating with long glides.
The man watched until it was out of sight, then turned his head away and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, setting his grey gelding in motion.
He sat tall and lean in his long Denver saddle, his body straight from the hips. Straight and taut, like a bow string that could at any moment move into deadly action.
His face was lean also; hardness had long ago set into its youthful lines and coldness had taken over the eyes. It was a face that some women feared yet felt excited by—that some men saw and stepped away from.
Dark hair curled unevenly round the frayed collar of his faded blue shirt, open almost to the waist. A low-crowned black hat was angled forwards on his head, against the sun. Leather shotgun chaps were fixed over his black pants.
The cutaway holster of his gun belt held a Frontier model Colt .45, its butt smooth with use. Belt and gun were somehow freer from the dust and dirt of the journey than the rest of the man’s gear and possessions. As though they were looked after as being something special—special and important.
If the five and a half inch barrel Colt was a fairly normal weapon for a man to be wearing in that part of the south-west, the one holstered on the other side of his belt was not.
Fitted so that the rounded grip jutted across his body for a cross-draw, the leather holster held a ten gauge Meteor shotgun, its single barrel cut down to twelve inches.
Instantly it marked its owner out as a different kind of man: a man who lived by his guns; a pistoleer, a shootist, a hired gun.
Unlike the bird the man had been watching and which only killed for food, the man himself killed for money, for profit. Jared Hawk was a gunfighter, for sale to the highest bidder.
The sun beat down on him as he rode, the brim of his hat casting a shadow down over his eyes. He had ridden a long way; had been riding east for the best part of two weeks. Hawk had come from Los Angeles, the city of the angels—only the angels had been foul-mouthed and they had tarnished wings.
Hawk had learnt early that was what life was like.
As the sun reached the center of the sky, Hawk turned south, following the course of the Rio Grande. His trail led between the foothills which were the last signs of the mountains of the Jornado del Muerto. Soon there would be nothing but a level plain and in the middle of it the town of Doña Ana.
Hawk smiled inwardly at the thought. Too many days in the saddle and too many nights with a blanket laid on hard ground had left him with a thirst for the pleasures of some kind of civilization. He wanted a drink, a steak, a bed with a mattress and a woman—and not necessarily in that order.
He still had plenty of the money Sarah Lee Garrett had paid him for killing Nathan Bellows out in California and he was intending to make more.
Sarah Lee Garrett.
Her velvet voice with a hint of steel beneath it; the oval face that could shift its expression in an instant from warmth to anger and then back again.
The way her blonde hair framed her face …
The wide, full mouth …
The first time he had met her, she had been wiping her hands on a gingham apron as she stood in the doorway of her uncle’s house. The big, blue eyes had flickered in surprise when she had seen him and she had clutched at the top of her blue cotton dress, hiding the beginnings of her breasts from his sight. When her uncle told her that Hawk was to escort them to California, there had been no hiding her disapproval, her distaste.
It was a feeling that barely changed all the way west, though she surprised Hawk with the strength that lay hidden beneath the warm but forbidden beauty of her body. When her uncle had wanted to turn back, it was Sarah who had urged them to go on—though she could not have known it would mean urging him on to his death.
Hawk had stood over her while she knelt beside her uncle’s body, her face buried in her hands and her whole body racked with sobs and tears. Garrett had been wrenched apart by a shotgun blast from close range; his stomach and chest and a section of his face had been shredded and blood seeped through the torn flesh and ran on to the ground. Flies buzzed, settled, rose then settled greedily again. Hawk had dug a hole and set the man’s body in it, anxious to be moving on.
‘Move on?’ Sarah had said. ‘Move on to where? More killing? To Los Angeles? Why?’
But move they had and as Los Angeles approached the thought of inheriting her uncle’s business had increasingly appealed to her—and she knew that there was still one man who stood in her way.
‘How much do you get for killing a man, Jared?’
And she had offered him a thousand dollars.
She had been there to see it carried out. A lady in her snug white dress with lace at the wrists; her wide-brimmed white hat and parasol.
Hawk shot him first in the belly, then in the ribs, the slug penetrating the heart and sending forth a shower of brightest blood. As the man lay on the ground, Hawk had fired a third bullet into his face.
Sarah had stood there, her white dress splattered with blood and grey tissue from the man’s brain. Blood on her hands and her face. Laughing and crying at the same time.
When the tears had slowed she spoke: ‘I owe you a thousand dollars.’
Hawk had despised her, admired her, loathed her, felt so strong a lust for her that he nearly took her by force there and then, ripping the bloodied white dress from her body. But instead he had left her there in Los Angeles, a rich and beautiful young woman.
He shifted in the saddle, adjusted the crown of his hat; Doña Ana was forming in front of him, the shapes of the buildings coming slowly out of a haze of heat.
Hawk drew the Colt from its holster and spun the chamber with his gloved hand, enjoying the smooth clicking whir as it turned. He slipped the pistol back into place, his left hand taking the reins. The black leather of the glove was soft and shiny and was tied at the cuff with a cord. It protected his mutilated hand and shielded it from sight. It was a constant reminder of his father … of the pitch-fork the older man had impaled through his palm. Black to remind Hawk of the injury.
Black as a sign of mourning for his father—Jared Hawk was not the kind of man who allowed such things to go unavenged.
He touched his spurs to the gelding and set the animal into a fast trot. His thirst was becoming more demanding.
Doña Ana was at the meeting place of two trails. The one which ran from Santa Fe in the north to El Paso in the south and the trail which led east towards the Guadalupe Mountains and the twists and turns of the Pecos River.
It was a stopping-off place for two stage lines and three freight lines; the center to which every two-bit grafter an
The owners of the three general stores, the four saloons, the five dining-rooms and the one whorehouse sat back at nights and watched the money pouring in and in the long, warm mornings they took out their tin boxes and counted it with a great deal of satisfaction.
No one complained.
The whiskey wasn’t watered down any more than usual and it still gave you a kick at the back of the head when you swallowed it down. The steaks were never less than a couple of inches thick and they never bit back. The girls who worked the rooms at Mama Lil’s would take it any way you wanted to give it and they weren’t any more likely to give you a dose of something nasty than any whores anywhere.
No one complained except the founder and head of the Doña Ana Reform Church of Christ and the Latter-Day Saints and Martyrs. He complained a whole lot until Mama Li sent him a high-yaller girl who came to her from New Orleans by way of Fort Wingate and Tucson and a couple of dozen river boats. After that the founder and head of the Church didn’t complain at all.
No one complained except Jethro Howard, who moved into the territory with the express intention of setting up a school and teaching the ways of good government and civilization to the wilder elements of the youth of Doña Ana. Mama Lil sent him a redhead with an appetite for giving head that knew no bounds. Jethro Howard still complained. Mama Lil sent him a skinny thing from Arizona Territory who loved to be tied to all four posts of the bed at once and laid into with a length of hide. Jethro Howard complained all the louder. Mama Lil thought about the problem for a while, then sent over the young nephew of her oldest and most professional whore. The nephew was slim and firm-buttocked and had fair hair that fell in a wave over his forehead. Jethro Howard was as uncomplaining as a man with things on his mind could be.
Which left Town Marshal Dakins, who complained about everything that was going on the whole time. Fortunately for the good folk of the town itself, the town marshal was shot in the back from close range while he was climbing up into the saddle one dark February morning. Such was Doña Ana’s respect for its peace officer that it was several days before anyone moved his body and then only on account of the smell which was getting so high folk had stopped using the saloon nearest to the scene of the marshal’s demise.
After which no one complained again.
Certainly not Jared Hawk, who, within half an hour of arriving in town had put up his horse in the livery stable and settled back into a tin bath full almost to the brim with warm, soapy water. A bottle of whiskey sat on the floor beside the tub and Hawk reached down for it at frequent intervals and swallowed from the neck of the bottle. All that was missing was a woman to lather his aching body, but then although Hawk was a man who did like to have everything, there were times when he would make do…
The bathhouse was at the rear of the barber’s shop and Hawk could see the three empty chairs and the fourth one which rocked slightly back and forth under the weight of a man who must have weighed between a couple of hundred and two-twenty pounds. From the conversation, Hawk learned the man to be the owner of one of Doña Ana’s eating houses. He made up his mind to eat there himself—just as soon as he’d let sufficient dirt float off him to form a grey scum across the surface of the water.
It took approximately half a bottle of whiskey.
Hawk put on a clean shirt and stepped down the street towards Palmer’s Dining Rooms. Like most of the buildings in town, it was made from adobe, long and flat-roofed.
There were a dozen tables inside and only three of them occupied.
Hawk looked the customers over, discounted them as being either dangerous or of any possible interest, and sat at a table at the back of the room, alongside the hatch which led through to the kitchen.
Inside there, someone was whistling off-key while they washed dishes.
After a couple of minutes a woman came out who was no taller than a twelve year old child. She was wearing a striped apron that was too long for her and dragged on the ground in front of her feet when she walked.
She stood beside Hawk’s table and for all the world looked as though she was going to take a bite out of the edge. Instead she closed her mouth, gulped, and asked Hawk what he wanted.
He told her to bring a large steak, with potatoes and beans, a couple of slices of bacon and three or four eggs. He promised to help her carry it in from the kitchen when it was ready.
She frowned and scuttled away.
When she returned she managed to get the plate on to the table without spilling any of the contents. Hawk grunted his thanks and set to work.
He was wiping the last piece of bread round the plate to get up the remains of egg yolk and steak juice when the dining-room door opened and the last vestiges of his hunger suddenly evaporated.
The newcomer stood a good three inches taller than six foot, which made him three inches taller than Hawk. He was well-built, around a hundred and eighty or ninety pounds and most of it bone and muscle.
He wore a white shirt under a black cotton coat, light brown pants tucked into dark brown leather boots. In the holster that was tied down to his left thigh was a Colt Peacemaker, its barrel two inches longer than on the model Hawk favored.
The way in which he stood in the doorway and surveyed the room, the natural balance of his body, the aura of danger about him—all these marked him off as coming from the same breed as Hawk.
Except that he was black.
A fine, light-toned negro with dark eyes set beneath his broad brow. Eyes that met Hawk’s and acknowledged him. Neither man knew the other by name; they had never met before. Yet they recognized each other for what they were.
The black gunman gave Hawk a curt nod and went to a table on the far side of the door. He turned the chair sideways and leaned it back against the wall. Now he could see not only anyone who came in the door, but also whoever walked past the window. He had an unimpeded view of Hawk.
The tiny waitress reappeared and Hawk ordered a double helping of apple pie; he heard the gunfighter ask for meat pie and beans.
When both their orders had been delivered and Hawk had scooped up his dessert, the other customers paid their bills and left. Nc one came in immediately. Hawk got up and walked slowly over to the negro’s table.
‘I got a half bottle of whiskey still waitin’ on bein’ drunk,’ said Hawk easily.
The other man waved his hand at the chair opposite. ‘Sure pleased to meet you,’ he said with a smile.
‘Hawk. Jared Hawk.’
‘Aaron Turner.’
They shook hands across the table, each testing the other’s firmness and force of grip. Then Hawk produced the bottle and called for a couple of glasses.
They drank until the whiskey had almost gone and Turner had finished, eating, all this while saying little. Several others came in, saw the two gunfighters sitting together and sat well away from them.
‘Looks like we could be in the same business,’ said Hawk after Turner had pushed away his plate.
‘Could be,’ replied Turner with an easy smile.
‘You in town on … anything special?’
The smile broadened. ‘Surely reckoned as how I was.’
‘And now?’
The negro didn’t say anything for several moments, picking at his teeth with one of his fingernails.
Then: ‘Tell you, I tracked this feller from down in Texas, wanted for holdin’ up a bank. Reward for his capture if and when he’s taken back there. Five hundred dollars.’
Hawk whistled. ‘That ain’t bad.’
‘Well, this boy, he’d been makin’ a habit of robbin’ banks. Fact, that was his fifth in about as many days.’
‘If he did all that in Texas, he sure must have whipped his horse half to death chasin’ from one to the other.’
The smile flashed on Turner’s face.
‘So where is he now?’ asked Hawk. ‘Here in town?’
‘Uh-uh.’
‘Where then?’
Turner reached for the bottle and tipped the last drops into his own glass. ‘I’ll get us some more later,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, I need it to tell you about this fool, Calhoun.’
