Hart the Regulator 9 Read online

  THE REGULATOR is Wes Hart — ex-soldier, ex-Texas Ranger, ex-rider with Billy the Kid. He’s tough, ruthless and slick with a .45. He’s for hire now and he isn’t cheap.

  Wes Hart had just disposed of a killer with some neatly applied lead poisoning out west in California, when he got the wire from Fowler. Fowler was a detective with two friends in the world. One was a bottle of bourbon and the other was The Regulator. Hired by a gold-rich lady to find her runaway son, he needed some extra muscle to hunt down the boy in the brothels of Frisco.

  Extra muscle was the one service Wes Hart could always be counted on to supply...

  CALIFORNIA BLOODLINES

  HART THE REGULATOR 9

  By John B. Harvey

  First published by Pan Books in 1982

  Copyright © 1982, 2015 by John B. Harvey

  First Smashwords Edition: October 2015

  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. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover image © 2015 by Edward Martin

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book ~ Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Series Editor: Mike Stotter

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.

  For Julie: sooner or later, one of us must know …

  Chapter One

  The coffee was gray and lukewarm, tasted of beans that had been used too many times. Hart swished it round inside his mouth, trying to clear the stale taste of sleep and last night’s whiskey. He threw what remained in the cup wide to his right, stood up and lifted the enamel pot from the side of the fire. When the grounds sprayed across it, the fire sizzled up in abrupt yellow and purple flames. Hart shook the pot a few more times before pushing it down into one of the saddle bags which lay on the ground.

  The gray mare stood patiently as he slipped on the bridle, patting her warm, broad nose. When he dropped the blanket onto her back, she turned her head and nudged him playfully and he raised his hand, pretending anger – a game they played often. Finally, as he tightened the cinch beneath the saddle flap, she snickered nervously and he patted her again and said softly: ‘I know. I know. I seen ’em.’

  The two riders made their way slowly along the southern side of the ridge, zigzagging through the cottonwoods. They rode without bothering to disguise their approach, single file, no more than ten yards between them. Hart recognized the leader from the previous night, a five-handed poker game with low stakes and little enough urgency. The man’s name was Cantrell and he owned a small spread in the Rio Lobo valley fifteen miles to the west. There had been some desultory talk of offering Hart a job of work, but the rancher hadn’t been sure if he was serious or not and Hart hadn’t really wanted to go back to herding cattle and breaking broncs so it had petered out to nothing.

  It had been one of those evenings.

  ‘’Lo, there!’ The rancher raised his hand in greeting and led his mount off the ridge and down an easy diagonal towards where Hart had made his camp.

  Hart acknowledged the greeting and carried on with his business, tying the saddle bags back on the Denver saddle, kicking dirt over the remaining embers of the fire.

  ‘Better’n a room in town,’ said Cantrell pleasantly.

  ‘Cheaper,’ said Hart, his eyes shifting from the rancher to the man who rode behind him. He was younger than Cantrell by maybe ten, fifteen years. The left side of his face was somehow pulled down, the skin stretched tight over the bone and puckering in at the corner of his mouth in a pink scar. He held the reins loose around his right hand and the left never strayed far from the pistol that was holstered at his side.

  Hart noticed that the small safety loop had been flicked back from around the hammer. Could be no more than he was a cautious man.

  ‘This here’s Bennett,’ said Cantrell, glancing over his shoulder.

  Hart nodded in the man’s direction and Bennett flipped his right hand up towards his hat brim. The sorrel he was riding trotted a few paces, unsettled by the hasty movement of the rein.

  ‘Looks like we’re too late for coffee,’ said Cantrell with a glance at the smoldering fire.

  ‘You didn’t miss much,’ said Hart with a shrug.

  The rancher hesitated, uncertain whether to move on or stay and talk. Hart sensed the uneasiness in him and wondered if it had anything to do with Bennett, whose hand was still fidgeting with the air not far above the grip of his gun.

  ‘Seems last night,’ Cantrell began, shifting his weight in the saddle, ‘we was talkin’ ’bout you comin’ out to the ranch. Maybe workin’ a spell.’

  ‘We talked some.’

  ‘You still feel that way?’

  ‘I didn’t say nothin’ for sure.’

  ‘I know an’ I ain’t fixin’ to hold you to …’

  ‘All the same with you, I’ll let it pass. It’s not that I ain’t grateful, only … I ain’t sure ’bout goin’ back to ranch work.’

  ‘Not when you can earn more money with a gun,’ broke in Bennett, his sorrel shifting sideways so that the angle between Bennett and Cantrell was wider and more difficult for Hart to cover. He wondered if it had been done on purpose and there wasn’t any way of being sure.

  Hart moved a pace back and faced Bennett more or less square. ‘I worked with a gun, yeah.’

  ‘Kinda good, too,’ said Bennett grudgingly, the scarred side of his mouth twisting inwards as he spoke.

  Hart shrugged, non-committal.

  Bennett’s mount edged a yard or so back in the other direction and tossed its head. ‘Folk say you’re a man as likes his work.’

  Hart nodded: ‘Man don’t do that, what’s he doin’ it for?’

  ‘Not everyone has that kind of choice,’ put in Cantrell.

  ‘Not everyone likes killin’,’ said Bennett, his voice taking on an edge that cut hard across the morning.

  Light was lifting through the trees and the birds were at full-throat. A blue jay chased through the air and landed for no more than a moment on the ground between the two mounted men. Hart wondered whether Bennett was harboring some kind of grudge against himself in particular or if it was no more than his way.

  ‘You’re right,’ Hart said, ‘No man likes killin’. Not without good reason.’

  ‘That weren’t what I said.’

  ‘It’ll do.’

  Cantrell looked as if he was ready to turn his horse back up towards the trail, but Bennett held his ground, tightening the grip on his reins by giving them another turn around his wrist.

  ‘You said it yourself,’ Bennett said after a few seconds, ‘man makes a choice. You made yours. You hire that fancy gun.’

  He nodded towards the pearl-handled Colt Peacemaker holstered at Hart’s side, the design of an eagle and snake clear upon the grip.

  Hart willed his body to relax, falling into a slight crouch.

  His eyes narrowed and his arm arched. Cantrell read the signs clearly enough and half-turned his mount away, called for Bennett to follow.

  But Bennett stood his ground.

  ‘I ain’t crossed you before?’ asked Hart.

  Bennett shook his head.

  ‘Your kin?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then either you better spit out what it is that’s gripin’ at your craw, or ride on out.’

  ‘What puts you in mind you can give orders?’ Bennett’s voice was harder, shriller.

  The blue jay seized on the ri
sing tone and mimicked it back.

  ‘Seems to me like you’re gettin’ awful pushy for a feller without reason. Either that, or there’s things you’re holdin’ back.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be sayin’ I’m a liar, would it?’

  ‘An’ you wouldn’t be edgin’ me into a fight just so’s maybe you can get yourself a reputation?’

  Bennett threw back his head and laughed aloud, blackened stumps of teeth showing clear. ‘Reputation? For takin’ trash like you?’

  Hart’s body swayed almost imperceptibly and his fingers grazed the mother-of-pearl of his Colt. The faded blue of his eyes gripped Bennett and held him fast. ‘Reputation or not, you let that hand of yours toy with that gun five seconds longer and I’m goin’ to have to blow you out the saddle!’

  Bennett’s face twisted and his mouth sucked in the pink of his scar. But there was sweat standing out clear now on his forehead and the fingers of his hand closed into a fist and lifted slowly away from his holster.

  ‘Come on!’ called Cantrell. ‘We got time to make up.’

  Bennett’s tongue pushed between his lips and wet them nervously, like a snake. The fist rested on the curved pommel of his saddle and he continued to stare at Hart but now both of them knew it was over and all that was happening was that he was saving as much face as he could.

  Cantrell raised a hand towards Hart and set his mount to climb back towards the line of cottonwoods. Bennett backed his horse away and then swung its head violently, kicking hard into its flanks with spurred boots. Hart turned and straightened, watching the two men as they hit the ridge, watching them until they were almost out of sight. Hart felt the tenseness begin to clear from his body and slowly he uncurled the fingers of his gun hand, the center of his palm dry as bone, the skin around it damp with sweat.

  He was already remembering a time back in Indian Territory when he’d been crossing the street of a place no bigger than a dozen ramshackle buildings and as many tents. He’d been talking in the general store that served as a saloon, swapping yarns with a couple of old-timers and recalling days down in Arizona when he’d been pretty wild and wearing the badge of a deputy marshal in Tucson.

  The evening had drifted to some kind of an ending the way those kind of evenings do and Hart had bade everyone goodnight and set off towards the barn where he’d stabled his horse and was intending to throw down his bed roll in the hay.

  The street was pretty dark, just the dim light from the kerosene lamp that hung from the ceiling of the store and a vague glow from the canvas of a few tents. He’d heard footsteps behind him and thought nothing special of them – no cause for alarm, simply someone else seeking some place to stretch out and wait for morning.

  It was the voice that did it: high, edgy, a shriek that cut through the stillness like a night bird’s wing.

  ‘Draw, you bastard!’

  He’d spun fast, body ducking, swerving low as he moved left to right. His arm, hand, fingers – all had worked as fast, as smoothly as they were trained. Worked without conscious thought. The hammer had come back, the triple click clear in the almost deserted street. The man facing him with his back to the door of the general store not more than a dark shape, a glint of metal for an instant at his side.

  Hart’s first shot had sent him staggering backwards, five, six faltering paces that lodged him against the uneven boards of the store wall. The second bullet had burst his left side apart, splintering the ribs above the heart.

  Voices, loud and fast, feet running on boards, and then it was the lamp swinging above the store owner’s head, edges of its shadow shifting back and forth over the slumped body.

  Man! Hart’s stomach had knotted when he gazed down at the face for the first time. He was little more than a kid. Fifteen. Sixteen at most. The first few fair hairs curling from his soft, slack jaw. Blood splattering his cheek.

  Hart watched as one of the bystanders bent down and lifted the old Colt Navy from where it lay, some dozen feet from the boy’s spread hand.

  Hart’s guts turned cold.

  Questions and accusations rose about him and he could do nothing but stand and stare down. Not for minutes, and then he gulped air into his lungs and slid the Colt down into its holster and turned away. He’d never seen the kid before in his life, hadn’t seen him then, not properly – just a shadowy shape coming at him out of the dark with a gun in his hand and a threat on his lips.

  ‘Draw, you bastard!’

  And that was what Hart had done.

  And the kid who’d been out to make a name for himself, who’d squatted down outside the store earlier that night, even hovered around the edges of the small crowd and heard the tales about guns and death down near the Arizona border, had sneaked home and found the gun some kinfolk had likely used in the War Between the States and pushed it down into his belt like a real gunfighter.

  Fifteen and growing up in a shanty in the middle of Indian Territory, no way out except you made yourself special, got noticed, acquired a reputation. But it came harder than that unless you were born lucky. And that kid laying back there propped up against the wall with blood leaking from his already dead body, he hadn’t been born lucky at all. Maybe, best if he’d never been born at all. In the morning that followed, Hart had risen and walked early into a northerly wind and dared the sullen and accusing eyes of the kid’s family while he tossed down ten dollars to pay for his burial. Knowing as he did so that the father would carry the boy out towards the foothills on the back of a mule and dig a deep hole himself, throw the body down and finally set stones over the covered earth to keep the coyotes and wolves away from his son’s bones. The ten dollars would be spent on food and corn liquor and maybe some nails or rope and they’d be well spent. Whatever they went on, they wouldn’t go any way towards helping Hart forget what he’d done, nor the first shock of seeing the kid’s face as it came out of shadow into the swing of light.

  That was Bennett’s answer if he’d ever wanted to hear it, which of course he hadn’t. Killing didn’t come easy to a man like Hart – easy in the doing, all right, but not more than that. Sure, there’d been men enough at the raw end of his guns who’d needing killing. Hart hadn’t been sorry for their deaths but neither had he enjoyed it. It had been something to be done, more often than not something he had been paid to do and on occasion he’d been wearing a lawman’s badge and on others he had not but that hadn’t mattered at all.

  Then there’d been those like the kid in that dark street whose deaths haunted him, waiting for the least chance to filter back towards the front of his mind. Blood and broken bone and life shot out.

  Hart’s thoughts shifted for a moment, far back beyond Indian Territory, back beyond Tucson to when he was no more than fourteen himself and leaving home. Three sisters and a brother, the brother not yet four years old. Hart hadn’t thought of him in years.

  If he’d lived Sean would be in his twenties, farming somewhere, prospecting like his father, Hart’s own step-father. In his twenties if he hadn’t stepped out in some dirty, dark street with a gun clutched heavy in his hand and words on his lips that would bring some stranger spinning round …

  Hart slotted his boot into the stirrup and pulled himself up into the saddle. Cantrell and Bennett had had plenty of time to get a good start down the trail that he too was going to follow. The sun was beginning to break and the day was his own. He’d let the gray take her own time and watch the land slowly change as he rode west, waiting for the first signs of snow on the far hills.

  Chapter Two

  At roughly the same time that Wes Hart was tracking Cantrell and Bennett along the cottonwood ridge, R. G. Fowler was lurching from sleep and hurling back a sprawl of sweat-sodden clothes in an urgent need to get his feet to the floor. The shock of impact jarred him and he set both hands to the sides of his burly head and groaned. Despite the discomfort he swayed to his feet and started to negotiate his way, bleary-eyed, across the room. A stack of fliers and magazines went flying as he struck it with
a flailing arm; a pile of law books stuttered as he floundered past and two volumes upended themselves onto a plate thickly coated with congealed gravy flecked gray with cigar ash.

  He had to piss even though taking a piss caused him considerable discomfort, even though the releasing of the deep yellow fluid made him wince and grit his teeth and rock backward and forward above the rising steam.

  Fowler groaned with a mixture of consternation and delight and fingered himself sloppily back into his long Johns, ignoring the fresh pee stain which was spreading in a loose circular shape over the others. He shook his pudgy fingers and wiped them down the sides of his vest, cleared his throat, spat down into the steadying swirl of piss at the bottom of the brimming chamber pot, and stumbled to the window.

  Three shots of fresh air and he closed it again and reached over for the bottle and uncorked his breakfast.

  In less than half an hour Fowler had dressed himself in the least shabby of his two dark suits, that with only one cigar burn on the vest and without frayed cuffs. His shirt was creased but clean and there was a perfunctory shine on his boots from where he’d brushed them up against the backs of his suit pants while leaning against the wardrobe. His dark, thinning hair looked, rightly, as if he’d managed to poke his fingers through it and rid it of the worst of the tangles; his beard and moustache – also dark but lighter, almost ginger, about the mouth – were less unkempt than was usually the case and free from traces of food for the sole reason it had been some time since Fowler had sullied his stomach with solids.

  The left side of the suit jacket bulged somewhat on account of the shoulder rig that his fingers had succeeded in securing at the third, or was it the fourth, attempt. A Smith and Wesson .44, its barrel shortened from the regulation six and a half inches to five, sat snug in the holster, hammer resting on an empty chamber.

  Fowler had woken once in the middle of the night with a start, sure that someone had come into the room where he’d fallen asleep on the floor with his street clothes still on and smeared with vomit. In his urgency, he’d grabbed the .44 and came very close to shooting off his left foot.