Rage Under the Red Sky Read online

  RAGE UNDER THE RED SKY

  By

  CARL DANE

  A Hawke & Carmody Western Novel

  Also by Carl Dane:

  Hawke and Carmody Western Novels

  Valley of the Lesser Evil

  Canyon of the Long Shadows

  Rage under the Red Sky

  Rapid Fire Reads (short books)

  Delta of the Dying Souls

  The Mountain of Slow Madness

  Copyright © 2019 Carl Dane

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Raging Bull Publishing

  www.ragingbullpublishing.com

  First edition

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Dedication

  To Cathy, Mark, and Carl.

  With love.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  A man holding a revolver a foot away from my nose can’t react to my movement and fire faster than I can swat the gun away.

  That was my theory, anyway, and I hoped it would hold up because it looked like I would have no alternative but to test it. Hollis Carpenter was convulsing with rage or fear or some other emotion I could not explain at the moment. His entire body was quaking, and that included the hand holding the Smith and Wesson, a sleek two-tone .44 that I’d come to admire, though not necessarily from the present angle.

  Carpenter’s thumb turned a little white under the nail, the tell-tale that he was pressing down on the hammer and I was in imminent danger of having most of my head detached from my body.

  I dislike the idea of dying as much as the next man, but I am particularly opposed to that fate when I don’t understand the motive behind it. I knew Carpenter was something of a slimy creature – I’d deposited him in my local iron bar hotel a few times for theft, and he was from a large family of criminals who infested a broad swath of my little slice of Texas Hill Country – but I hadn’t come to arrest him or cause him any trouble.

  In fact, the only reason I’d appeared at his doorstep was to return his watch, or at least a watch that was engraved “HC.” I couldn’t think of anyone else with those initials within a day’s ride of Shadow Valley, so on the way back from serving a warrant a few miles north I took a short detour and in the process verified another of my theories – that no good deed goes unpunished.

  I had the watch in my hand when he came to the door. I was going to explain that I’d found it while cleaning up the aftermath of the weekly brawl at the Silver Spoon, the bar and bordello owned by my girlfriend, Elmira Adler. I knew that Carpenter hadn’t been there, and I assumed it had been stolen from him and dropped by the thief during the melee, and I was going to say as much. But I never had a chance.

  Carpenter spotted the watch and in quicksilver instant his lips drew back and he snarled with a mouthful of teeth as yellow and stubby as kernels of corn. He opened the door a few more inches to expose the gun he’d been holding in his right hand and then stuck it in my face.

  The man certainly was on edge. Maybe it was the strange electricity in the air.

  I could feel it, too: a sensation like ants on my skin, and in between the rumbles of thunder there were brittle snapping sounds in every direction and the air was sharp with that coppery smell you detect right before a lightning strike.

  And then a bolt of lightning snaked across the scarlet morning sky to my left, low, maybe a couple miles away, and I knew there would be a violent crack of thunder in a second or two, maybe loud and sudden enough to push him over the edge.

  So that’s when I struck.

  I brought up my left hand and wiped it from right to left across my face, knocking the barrel aside, and I grabbed the body of the revolver with my right.

  In a situation like that you never try to tug or wrestle because you’re likely to make the gunman shoot you whether he wants to or not. Instead, you bend the gun back against his fingers, which causes a great deal of pain and puts the business end of the weapon in worrisome proximity to your opponent’s face, giving him a powerful incentive to let loose.

  Of course, that assumes your opponent’s brain is functioning. Carpenter’s mind was apparently the size of a raisin and functioning at the level of a raging reptile. He responded, against all normal human instincts, by clenching tighter as I twisted harder.

  The thunderclap was concussive, like the wave that hits you when you stand near an artillery piece, so impossibly loud that I didn’t even hear the gun go off.

  For a second I thought he’d tried to head-butt me, but his head had been driven forward by the explosion of brain, blood and skull from the rear.

  It’s an odd phenomenon. If you shoot a pumpkin off a fencepost it falls toward you because of the propulsion of matter exiting the big hole in the back. Shoot a man in the head and the same thing happens.

  The entry wound, square in the middle of Hollis Carpenter’s forehead, was smaller than a dime and neatly rimmed by glowing embers of burning powder and flesh. But the back of his head, for all intents and purposes, was now somewhere – everywhere – inside his front parlor.

  The light left his eyes a heartbeat before the scene was frozen in an explosive flash of pure white as lighting leaped into a live oak not more than fifty feet away.

  Hollis Carpenter toppled forward the same moment the tree fell backward, and thus began a week of fury wrought by vengeful men, raging nature, and the nightmare world that evolves when the two forces combine to strip way the fragile veneer of civilization.

  Chapter 2

 
Tom Carmody, my deputy, rode back to the Carpenter place with me. I needed to pick up the body and then figure out what to do with it. Our local undertaker died and we never could find a replacement. So it’s up to the marshal to find a claimant for dead bodies or to bury the bodies himself.

  As of late, I’d been responsible for producing the bulk of the supply, so I suppose that’s only fair.

  Carpenter was a fairly big man, about my size, a little over six feet and maybe one-ninety. I probably could have hoisted him up by myself and slung him across a horse – I’d done as much with wounded men on the battlefield – but lifting a lifeless body is harder than most people think.

  Besides, Carmody is freakishly strong and I hate to waste talent. So when I got back to town we borrowed a sorry little wagon pulled by two sorry and surly little horses and immediately headed back to Carpenter’s place.

  The horses didn’t like the stinging rain any more than I did. I don’t know if horses can actually feel resentment, but these two eyed me with such somber horse-faced reproach that I almost apologized out loud as I hitched them up.

  Carmody, who is constructed primarily out of leather and scrap iron, doesn’t much notice rain or cold or heat or any sort of discomfort, for that matter. Especially when his attention is diverted to the task of lecturing me.

  “You let him get the drop on you,” he said. His Eastern Tennessee twang thickens a bit when he’s carried away with his moments of high drama. It came out: Ye lettim git the drop on ye.

  He made a clucking noise with his tongue. Three times. He always does it three times, at precise intervals. Like a precision-engineered scolding machine.

  “And you being an officer and famous fighting man and all,” he lamented.

  I knew what was coming next. He shook his head from side to side. Twice. More slowly the second time, portraying an infinite, long-suffering weariness.

  Now, in case you’re wondering, part of what he said was true, and part of it’s not, so let me set the record straight.

  First, yes, I’d let Carpenter get the drop on me. I’d known Carpenter to be a hothead and career lowlife, but I got caught up in congratulating myself on what a nice helpful man I was. As a result, I stood there smiling, right in front of his door, like I was an old lady dropping off a basket of chicken for the church social. When I’m thinking straight I always approach a door by keeping my hand on my revolver and standing to the side, keeping wood between me and anyone of whom I am slightly suspicious until I can see his hands and who’s behind him.

  As to the rest of the information I want to put on the record: My name is Josiah Hawke, and I’m the town marshal in Shadow Valley, Texas. I came here a couple years ago on the invitation of Elmira, whose place was being put out of business by goons who, among other acts of goonery, killed the previous marshal, Billy Gannon. Billy was the captain my unit, and like a lot of us who’d picked up the appropriate skills of warfare, he found employment in gunwork, generally but not always on the right side of the law.

  Billy had left word with Elmira to wire me if something happened to him, and something did, and it involved four bullets in the side of his head.

  It would have taken a very dangerous and tough man to kill Captain Gannon.

  I found him. His name was Purcell and he was dangerous and tough and it wasn’t easy to kill him but I did.

  It turned out that Purcell was only hired help for a criminal enterprise as hardy as a family of cockroaches, and I’ve been busy stomping on them ever since. But that’s a story for another time.

  As to the war. Carmody was a sergeant. I was a lieutenant, an injustice for which he will never forgive me. We didn’t know each other during the war and as far as I know we never crossed paths. Carmody, who grew up eating squirrels in mountains so remote even non-native squirrels shunned the place, served mainly as a Union scout in the Appalachians. The man can read terrain the way anyone else reads a newspaper.

  While I was technically an officer, I wasn’t the type with schooling in the niceties of formations and grand strategy and protocol for drilling troops. I was part of a unit that carried out “special tactical operations,” which is what I liked to call them.

  The people we inflicted them on called them dirty tricks. I guess in a way we were both right; it’s a matter of perspective.

  Carmody, who had been saving his exasperated sigh for the right dramatic moment, delivered it with appropriate pathos, and snapped the reins to spur the reluctant horses.

  The wind had abruptly shifted and the rain was driving directly into our faces in a nasty, alive, aggressive way, like angry swarming insects turning on us. Carmody surreptitiously tugged down the brim of his bowler and gathered together the collar of the oiled leather pommel slicker he favored. For him, the tacit admission that the rain stung his eyes enough to make him lower the brim of his hat was equivalent to a lesser man breaking into tears.

  I didn’t have much sympathy for him. The brim of his rakish bowler was no more than an inch wide, so rain in his eyes was the price of vanity. When I hired Carmody – I’d found him languishing in the jail I’d inherited from Billy Gannon, and upon learning he’d personally beaten up a dozen of Purcell’s men, all at the same time, I told him he could opt to finish his sentence or take up lawing on my side – he’d not been what you’d call a fashion plate.

  In the intervening time he’s supplemented his ten-dollar-a-week deputy’s salary with the proceeds of exceptionally smart horse-trading and downright brilliant dealing at the Faro table and has thus evolved to vested suits and elegant English-style bowlers with narrow brims.

  But somehow, on him, his fancy clothes still look like overalls and straw hats.

  Personally, I favor a round, very wide-brimmed hat called the Boss of the Plains. It’s not particularly stylish. In fact, it looks like something you’d wear while plowing a field, and has a conspicuous hole on the front and back, but it’s high quality and I’m attached to it.

  Elmira bought it for me and it cost her a lot of money. A few months ago I managed to lose it when it was shot off my head during an ambush. I know that sounds like a plot device out of one of those dime novels but it does happen. I’ve seen hats shot off men’s heads many times in battle and have managed to have several of mine detached in that precise manner.

  In any event, Elmira and Carmody went back to the scene a week later and retrieved it while I was home healing up from a shoulder wound. Carmody had told her that after I’d passed out from delirium I’d kept him awake all night mumbling about losing my hat, and of all the people in the world, only Elmira would go to such lengths to locate something she knew I missed. And only Carmody could find a hat in a miles-wide swath of rugged terrain.

  I jammed the hat down and tightened the collar of the rubber poncho that I’d both worn and slept on during the war.

  The Boss of the Plains has a nice tight headband and is great for keeping out the sun and the rain, and the bullet holes don’t leak much.

  I leaned forward and was actually quite dry and comfortable until a bullet tore the damned hat off my head again.

  Chapter 3

  We heard the report of the rifle a split second later. The lag between the time the bullet hit my hat and when the sound reached us led me to believe that the gunman was about 200 yards away.

  That was mostly guesswork, of course, as I didn’t know anything about the load or bore of the weapon that was turned on us but it sounded like a big-bore slug when it buzzed past and the report was in a deep-throated bass typical of what we called buffalo guns. I’d had a major who had drilled us relentlessly in the particular skill of estimating the distance of gunfire based on the timing of the sounds, and while it’s a great subject to talk about over a beer it’s far from an exact science, especially in a hilly range where sound can bounce and echo.

  But a good guess is better than no guess – which I admit is yet another guess on my part – so I drew my revolver and fired two rounds in what I ascertained was the
general direction of the ambusher. I didn’t have any expectation of coming close, but just wanted to give whoever had almost parted my hair something to think about.

  Carmody and I grabbed our rifles and rolled off the left side of the wagon. I put my shoulder under the edge and heaved upward.

  The wagon was heavier than it looked and I wasn’t able to tip it on its side. Carmody caught on to what I was doing and pushed up with his left hand while firing his rifle one-handed with his right hand, which happened to be poised about a foot from my left ear.

  The wagon settled on the sides of the wheels and the bed provided us a wall of sorts, maybe five feet tall by eight feet wide.

  It rocked contentedly while we fired over the top.

  Carmody was mumbling something.

  Actually, he was shouting. I swiveled my head so I could use the ear that hadn’t been concussed by that cannon he carried.

  “I said,” Carmody yelled, mouthing the words expressively, as though he were speaking to a dull-witted child, “that your dumb farmer hat is jinxed.”

  I didn’t know what else to do but shrug.

  “Like a fucking bullet magnet,” he said.

  About then I heard the buzz of rounds above our heads and twin claps of rifle fire punctuated by a hair’s breadth between.

  “Yep,” Carmody said, following my thoughts. “Two shooters. That ain’t no echo.”

  “Do you think the wagon bed will stop the bullets?

  As if on cue, splinters of wood blew between us and a hole appeared, so wide that the rain blew through it.

  “Nope,” Carmody said.

  “Then I’ll draw their fire and flank them.”

  If Carmody said something after that I didn’t hear it because I had to turn my throbbing left ear back to him as I sprinted for the nearest tree.

  Chapter 4

  The tree was about the diameter of my leg and wouldn’t have provided cover for an underfed groundhog but it was a distraction. One of the things you learn when being shot at, assuming you survive – which, if you did, means that you actually learned something useful – is that anything that interrupts your assailant’s line of sight can throw off his aim or cause him to miscalculate your movement. Maybe not by much and maybe not at all, but on the battlefield survival is an accumulation of small maybes.