Bodie 6 Read online

  Issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

  The day a Kiowa Indian saved Bodie’s life was one that neither of them would forget. In Long Walker, Bodie found the nearest thing to a partner he’d ever need. They were both hunters, outcasts, loners — and they were both on the trail of a bible-spouting killer called Parson Kane. However, they discovered that even as a team they may have bitten off more than they could chew…

  DAY OF THE SAVAGE

  BODIE THE STALKER #6

  By Neil Hunter

  First Published in 1980 by Star Books

  Copyright © 1980, 2013 by Neil Hunter

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: December 2013

  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.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading the book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  This one is for my parents: with a special thank you

  Chapter One

  Hector Diaz came out first. The battered swing doors of the saloon were smashed aside as he burst through. He was hatless, his thick black hair tangled and greasy. His clothes were soiled and wrinkled, and he was sporting a heavy growth of stubble on his broad jaw.

  “Come on then, Bodie, you gringo son of a bitch! Here I am! You been waitin’ for somebody to come out — so here I am!”

  Diaz rattled the long-barreled Winchester he was holding, his dark eyes raking the dusty, deserted street of Dry Fork. Silence greeted his challenge. Diaz swore loudly.

  He stepped to the edge of the boardwalk, dusty boots clumping on the worn boards, his heavy Mexican spurs dragging across the wood.

  “Bodie! You come out, an’ let’s get this over! I wan’ kill you! When you dead, Bodie, I’m goin’ to cut off your cojones an’ feed them to the do…”

  There was a movement across the street. A mere flicker, and then a rifle barrel winked in the sunlight a fraction of a second before a shot rang out — followed by two more in rapid succession.

  The bullets hit Diaz in the chest. With undiminished force they ripped through Hector Diaz’s body and out between his shoulders. Blood spewed from the wounds, spattering the boardwalk and the saloon frontage. Diaz, already dying, was driven backwards. He smashed bodily against the front wall of the saloon, twisting in a muscular spasm, and fell face first through one of the big, decorated windows. Glass shattered and filled the air around Diaz’s plunging body. It seemed to hang above him in a glittering cloud — then struck Diaz as it followed him to the floor.

  The echoing gunshots were ringing across the rooftops as Bodie stepped into view, cutting across the street in the direction of the saloon. Hector Diaz had not been alone in the saloon; he’d had two companions with him when he had turned up in Dry Fork — and they were still somewhere inside the saloon. Bodie wanted to get to them before they organized themselves in the first minute or so following Hector Diaz’s death.

  He reached the boardwalk and crossed it in a couple of long strides. Holding his rifle across his chest Bodie went in through the swing doors, hitting the saloon floor on his left shoulder. He rolled, twisting his long body across the scuffed boards.

  There was a movement on his right. A gun blasted, loud in the confines of the low-ceilinged room. The bullet whacked a pale splinter of wood out of the floor. Sharp chips stung Bodie’s face. He kept moving, jerking the rifle round, finger easing back on the trigger as he caught sight of a dark figure stepping out of the gloom on the far side of the saloon. The Winchester jolted in Bodie’s hands as it fired. The bullet splintered one of the stair banister supports. Boots thumped on the floor as the hunched figure of a man sprang away from the shadows around the staircase.

  Bodie held himself still long enough to trigger a further shot. It caught the running man in mid-stride, throwing him sideways against the bar. He hung there for a moment, struggling to stay on his feet while blood streamed from the wound in his chest.

  Knowing that there was a third man somewhere in the saloon Bodie kept moving, working his way towards the staircase. He heard the soft thud of the man he’d shot slumping to the floor.

  Another sound followed on. It came from a higher level, above Bodie’s head. The man hunter tried to pinpoint it but could only place it somewhere on the railed balcony running around the upper gallery. Bodie swore softly. Whoever it was up there he had a damn good edge on anyone down on the saloon floor.

  Bodie realized fast that he was in the worst place he could be. He got his feet under him and thrust himself upright, heading for cover. There was a scuffle of sound from overhead. A rifle blasted. The bullet whacked a white hole in the floorboards. It was close — too damn close, Bodie thought, and reckoned that the rifleman would have him pinpointed by now. He lunged forward, knowing he’d cut it fine, maybe too fine. He was angry with himself for not allowing time to make a shot himself.

  He heard a shot, tensing automatically. No bullet touched him, nor did one strike the floorboards. Bodie heard a man grunt, a hoarse, pained sound. He twisted, throwing a frantic glance towards the balcony — and saw a blurred figure topple forward over the railing to smash face down on the saloon floor.

  Bodie turned around and faced the saloon door. Framed in the door was a tall, broad-shouldered figure. Bodie couldn’t see the man’s features too well because the sun was streaming in through the open doorway, leaving the figure in shadow. But he did see the smoking rifle held in the big hands.

  “You want me to say thanks? Or give you a share of the bounty?” the man hunter asked.

  “Don’t want either, Mr. Bodie!” The voice was deep, with a slightly husky quality to it.

  “Well, hell, I’ll buy you a drink then!” Bodie snapped.

  The shadowy figure gave a chuckle. “You do that and we’ll both be back in trouble!”

  Bodie reached the doorway and the tall figure stepped aside to let him pass. On the boardwalk Bodie glanced over his shoulder, and a wry smile began to etch itself around the corners of his taut mouth as he stared at his rescuer.

  He found himself eye to eye with the tallest, meanest-looking, full-blooded Kiowa Indian he’d ever come across.

  Chapter Two

  “My father called me Long,” said the Indian falling in alongside Bodie as they crossed the street. “On account of my legs,” he added. “But you can call me Lon.”

  Bodie glanced at his unwelcome companion, trying to figure out why a Kiowa Indian, dressed like a goddam cowhand, should turn up out of the blue to save his life; because that was what had happened, and like it or not — which he didn’t — Bodie was obligated to Lon Walker.

  “I been trailin’ those three for close on a week,” Lon said casually. “Cut your tracks two days ago and followed you in.”

  Son of a bitch, Bodie thought. Let me do all the dirty work and then steps in like some guardian angel wearing feathers! Which wasn’t true in fact — but the image was as close as Bodie needed to get.

  “What you on?” he asked. “A scalp hunt?”

  Lon laughed dryly. “Hell, no, Bodie. What do you think I am — some kind of savage?”

  They reached the adobe building hung with a weather-beaten sign that read: Marshal’s Office. That was all it was: just a single room with a desk at one end and a low cot at the other
. Dry Fork, being less of an actual town and more of an extended way station trying to improve its image, didn’t even run to a cellblock in its jail — not that there had ever been anyone requiring incarceration.

  “You comin’ in with me?” Bodie asked. “Or you got some medicine to make?”

  “You keep talking like that, Bodie, and I’m going to start wonderin’ if I did the wise thing taking that Comanchero off your back!”

  Bodie cuffed his hat back, sleeving sweat off his face. “And there I was thinking you were all heart.”

  Dry Fork’s part-time lawman, an overweight, one-eyed man named Carson, was spread out in a large cane-bottomed chair just inside the door. He’d been sitting there for most of the morning, all through the siege over at the saloon, and in that time he hadn’t moved once; except to lift a bottle to his thick lips every now and then.

  “They’re all yours, friend,” Bodie said from the door.

  Carson swiveled his one good eye up to settle on the man hunter. He belched noisily. “What the hell am I supposed to do with ’em?” he wheezed.

  “Mister, you can do whatever takes your fancy,” Bodie snapped. “All I want is your name on a piece of paper to say I delivered ’em!”

  Carson sniffed, a sly grin edging his soft mouth. “What do I get out of it?” he asked.

  Bodie didn’t say a word, but suddenly he was standing over Carson, his big hands taking hold of the fat man’s grubby shirt. He yanked Carson up out of the seat and propelled him round the desk and slammed him down in the hard chair. The bottle Carson had been holding flew from his fingers and smashed against the wall. Thin fingers of cheap whisky trailed down the flaking adobe.

  “You got the paper?” Bodie asked.

  Carson nodded. He was almost crying. He fumbled in a drawer for the appropriate document.

  “Pen?”

  “Yeah! Yeah, I got one!”

  “Get it done, friend,” Bodie suggested.

  The only sound for the next few minutes was the laborious scratch of Carson’s pen on the paper. When he had eventually completed the task Bodie picked up the paper and read it through. He grunted his approval, folded the document and tucked it in his shirt pocket.

  “Thanks for your hospitality, Marshal,” he said. “And for your invaluable help during the action!”

  Bodie turned on his heel and strode out of the office. It was only as he stepped outside that he remembered Lon Walker. The tall Indian was leaning against the wall of the jail.

  “You still here?” Bodie asked. “Ain’t there a cigar store in town you can stand outside?”

  Lon grinned. “If you’re figurin’ on insulting me so I’ll go away, Bodie, you better keep trying, ‘cause it’s been tried by experts.”

  Bodie shook his head. “Ain’t nothing left for me to do so I’ll just have to take you with me while I eat.”

  “Hell, white man, now you talk language I savvy!”

  Bodie led the way to the far end of the street. A dingy adobe building stood a little way back from the rest. A long time back somebody had painted a sign onto the adobe. The weather had faded it and the flying dust had sanded much of the lettering away; there was enough remaining to identify the place as a cantina. A rattling bead curtain hung in the doorway. Bodie stepped through, Lon close behind him, and they walked into a long, shady, cool room with a low ceiling. There was a bar at one end of the room. The rest of the space was taken up by a scattering of tables and chairs. Bodie chose one in a corner of the room where he would be able to look out through the window.

  “You wish a drink, señors? Maybe food?” The question came from a thin-faced Mexican who held his skinny hands at his waist, rubbing them together unceasingly. His voice had a whining tone to it that irritated Bodie.

  “Food,” Bodie said. “What’ve you got?”

  “There is some very fine lamb stew,” the Mexican said.

  “Bring it for two,” Bodie said. “And coffee.”

  The Mexican bobbed his head and scuttled off behind the bar where he disappeared through a door.

  “All right, Lon Walker,” Bodie said. “You know why I’m after Preacher Kane and his bunch. What’s your story?”

  “Three weeks back Preacher Kane’s Comancheros raided my people’s village. They burned it to the ground. Killed all the old folk and the babies and took the healthy men, women and children captive. Some of the young men were out hunting. When they found what had happened they went after Kane’s bunch. They were ambushed and slaughtered. By the time I heard about it there wasn’t a thing I could do except try and free the ones Kane took captive.”

  “Where were you?”

  Lon’s brown face hardened. “While my people died I was living in the white man’s world, as I have done for the past three years. I turned my back on my people because I saw the way ahead. The Indian doesn’t have a future if he carries on in the old way. He has to change. To throw away the old customs and learn to live as the white does. It’s what I did, Bodie. I took a job herding cows. I learned to wear boots and a hat. To sit a saddle. I learned to smoke and play cards and a few other things. And I earned money. I took a lot of hard knocks at first, but when I proved I could do the job as well as any man the other drovers quit pokin’ fun at me.”

  “But?”

  “I’m still a Kiowa. The blood is still Kiowa, and when Kane and his butchers made my people bleed he made me bleed too.”

  “So you figure to bury the whole bunch?”

  “I didn’t know the white man had cornered the market in vengeance,” Lon said evenly.

  Bodie studied the Kiowa as they ate their meal. Lon Walker was one hell of a mystery. It was almost like talking with two separate people. One minute he was a Kiowa, eulogizing about his tribal responsibilities — the next he was talking like any forty-a-month-and-found cowboy straight out the Big Bend country.

  Over a cup of poor coffee Bodie said, “I ain’t a man for partnering, Lon. Been too long on my own. Got my own ways of dealing with a situation and it don’t make any consideration in respect of anybody else. When things happen they tend to happen damn fast. No time to talk over with a partner what the best way is of handling it.” He glanced at Lon, slightly annoyed because the Indian didn’t appear to be paying all that much attention to him.

  “Sure, I know what you mean, Bodie,” Lon spoke up. He raised his eyes and stared at Bodie. “I’m the same myself. But there are times when a man can’t allow himself the luxury of choosing his own way.”

  “Yeah!” Bodie growled. “So it looks like we’re stuck with each other. I figure it’ll make things a sight easier if we both know what the others're up to.”

  “Don’t seem likely either of us is going to step down an’ leave the field clear.”

  Bodie only smiled at that. It was a smile devoid of humor, cold, almost cruel. The smile of a wolf already hot on the trail, with the scent filling his nostrils, single-mindedly tracking down his quarry — and there was no way to divert him from that course.

  Chapter Three

  “Kane is no true Comanchero,” Lon remarked as he and Bodie loaded the supplies they had purchased onto their respective horses. “He would steal from the Comanche themselves if there was something to be gained. He is nothing but a renegade. A crazy man who enjoys the spilling of blood.”

  Bodie swung into the saddle, checking his restless horse. With Lon riding close on his left side he turned his horse north and then slightly west, leaving Dry Fork to its aimless existence. Ahead of them lay endless miles of empty land, a sun-bleached, dusty wilderness that reached as far as the meandering Rio Bravo, and then on into Mexico. It was rumored that Preacher Kane had some protected haven in the wilds of Chihuahua — a place where he could rest, where his Mexican contacts brought him customers for the white and Indian women he took over the border. There was a town close to the border, so Bodie had been informed, that served as a kind of gateway into Mexico. The information had reached Bodie via Lannigan, the man hunter’s boss dur
ing the days when Bodie had worn a US Marshal’s badge. Lannigan had lost two of his men who had been working under cover, trying to get some evidence of corruption against the law in Petrie; the fact that he knew something was going on but helpless to stop it angered Lannigan; the deaths of his two men angered him more; so he took the strictly unofficial step of passing on his information to Bodie, knowing full well that the bounty hunter would use it in his strictly unsubtle, though effective, way.

  It took Bodie and Lon four long, hot, dusty days to reach Petrie. It was a hybrid community — a curious Mexican-American blending of buildings and people. It was also one of the most inhospitable places Bodie had ever come across. Even Lon commented on this fact as they rode along the town’s main street.

  “You get the feeling we ain’t exactly welcome?” he asked.

  Bodie grinned tightly. “I’ve seen friendlier faces at a hanging.”

  “How do you want to go about getting what we come for?”

  They reined in at a sagging hitch post near a small eating house. Bodie climbed stiffly out of his saddle, looping his reins over the weathered rail.

  “I’ve got a feeling it’ll come to us,” he said.

  They strolled casually up onto the boardwalk, moving in the general direction of the eating house. Bodie slapped dust from his pants. Outside the eating house he paused, taking a thin cigar from his shirt pocket and lighting it with exaggerated slowness while he took a long look over the town. He heard the measured tread of heavy boots moving in his direction, only turning when they were almost on him.

  The three burly figures spread across the boardwalk had badges pinned to their dirty, stale-smelling shirts. Bodie eyed them indifferently; if they were lawmen, he decided, then he was a horse’s ass!

  “You want to come by?” he asked, stepping to the edge of the boardwalk.

  His remark caught them off balance, blunting any edge they might have had. One of them made an abrupt gesture with his hand.