The Thunder Riders Read online

  He glanced at the rock and strode over to the girl, his eyes glazed with lust.

  Anjanette slid backward on her butt. “Get away from me, you son of a bitch!”

  “Take your clothes off.”

  “No!” She scrambled to her feet and ran into the mesquite, weaving around the shrubs until she came to a stone escarpment blocking her path. She turned, pressed her back against the rock. “Please, leave me alone!”

  Considine strolled toward her, grinning. She looked around wildly, but the mesquite pushed up close to the scarp, wedging her in. Considine stopped in front of her and slid his pearl-gripped revolver from its holster with one hand while unbuckling the cartridge belt with the other.

  As the belt and empty holster dropped to the ground at his boots, he aimed the revolver at the girl’s chest. “Take your shirt off.”

  Anjanette glanced at the gun and pushed her back against the uneven rock wall behind her, digging her fingers into the crevices. “No!”

  Considine clicked the hammer back and held the revolver six inches from the girl’s heaving chest. Menace edged his voice. “Take it off.”

  Anjanette looked at the gun again and curled her lip. She threw her head back, tossing her hair back from her face. “You’re a bastard.”

  Considine laughed. “How did you know?” He flicked his gun barrel against the third button on the girl’s green plaid shirt. A small silver cross dangled down her cleavage.

  “Take it off, or I will.” Considine grinned coldly. “And if I take it off, it won’t be fit to wear again.”

  Slowly, she lifted her hand to her blouse, began undoing the buttons, her breasts rising and falling sharply, making the shirt rise and fall as well. Her eyes were dark, her jaw hard. When the last button was freed, the blouse hung slack, revealing half of each full, round breast, the cross dangling between them winking in the growing morning sunlight.

  “No under frillies,” Considine observed. “It’s almost as if you were expecting someone. . . .”

  He slid the gun barrel down her cleavage, tracing the inside line of the right breast, then suddenly flicking the blouse back away from it, revealing the entire pink-tipped orb, full as a cantaloupe and the color of varnished oak.

  The girl stared at him, her brown eyes hard, her lips slightly parted to reveal the edges of her two front teeth. “Filthy pig.”

  Considine chuckled. “Sooner or later, you’re going to run out of insults.” His expression suddenly hardened and he flicked the other flap of the shirt back from the other breast. “Take it off !”

  She jumped with a start, then raised her hand to her shoulders, peeled the shirt down her arms, let it fall back between her boots and the base of the scarp. Considine swallowed and ran the revolver barrel across each nipple in turn. Each turned hard, pebbling out from the areola.

  He took the gun in his left hand, massaged the amazing orbs with his right, pinching the nipples. Anjanette’s face went slack and her chest rose and fell more heavily. As Considine rubbed her breasts, her head fell forward, hair cascading down her shoulders.

  “If you’re going to rape me, you bastard, get on with it,” she breathed.

  Considine dropped the gun, leaned forward to unbutton the girl’s skirt, which dropped to her boots, revealing her finely muscled legs. He ran his hands across her buttocks, then released her to unbutton his black denim trousers and peel them and his long underwear down to his knees.

  The girl groaned as he shoved his pelvis toward hers and slid his hands under each thigh, at once lifting and shoving her back against the scarp.

  His hat tumbled off his shoulder and dropped to the ground. He gave a savage grunt as he entered her. She cursed and sagged forward, wrapping her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist.

  Considine ground up and into her, and she rose and fell against the escarpment as though riding a green mustang over broken terrain. Her hair bounced over Considine’s shoulders and down his back.

  Considine gave a final grunt, sighed deeply. His knees bent, and they dropped slowly together, raking air in and out of their lungs, down the rock wall to the ground.

  Anjanette buried her face in his shoulder, and Considine leaned his head against the scarp behind her. Gradually, their breathing slowed.

  “I’m sorry, Chiquita,” Considine said, clearing his throat and smoothing her hair back from her face with both hands. “I shouldn’t have thrown you over my horse, given you such a hard ride. I only wanted it to look convincing.”

  Anjanette’s black eyes softened slightly. “You nearly killed me, making me ride that way. You’re too rough sometimes, Jack.”

  “I forgot to bring you a horse. I’m sorry.” He kissed her gently. “Forgive me?”

  She lifted her chin defiantly. “I also thought you were coming yesterday morning.”

  “My man from the bank sent me a cable yesterday in Javelina, said the company delayed it a day to throw off possible”—he smiled, broadening his mustache and showing a chipped front tooth—“holdup artists.” He lifted her chin with his gloved right hand. “Did you miss me, baby?”

  Anjanette hiked a shoulder and quirked a corner of her mouth. “I got along.”

  Considine stared back at her, his eyes pensive. Finally, he stretched his lips in a broad smile and caressed her cheek with the palm of his hand. “I can tell you missed me. You’re not nearly as tough as you make out. There isn’t a woman alive—not even the desert-rat granddaughter of Old Antoine—who has yet been able to resist my charms.”

  The thunder of hooves and wagon wheels rose behind Considine. He turned to look back through the chaparral, where a dozen riders loped toward them. Behind them came the stage, bouncing through the greasewood and cactus, weaving around shrubs and boulders while Wolf MacDonald whipped the reins over the team’s backs and bellowed long-practiced curses.

  Considine turned back to Anjanette, dropping his head to nuzzle her breasts, licking her nipples. He’d met her four months ago, when he and the rest of the gang except for Mad Dog McKenna had split up after robbing an army payroll caravan near Pima Tanks. Considine and McKenna had meant to spend only one night at Charlier’s Hotel and Tavern, then light out for New Mexico.

  But that was before Considine laid eyes on Old Antoine’s granddaughter. Anjanette had sashayed around the saloon that night, grinning and smiling and cavorting like one of the boys, her colored bandanna holding her Indian-black hair back from her finely sculpted face, her breasts pushing like ripe melons from behind her white cotton blouse, skirts swishing about her legs.

  When she set down a beer and a tequila shot before Considine, sitting slumped back in his chair, he could tell from her eyes—cool but with little sparks of copper—that her attraction to him was as keen and immediate as his for her. Her breasts swelled and her light brown cheeks flushed. Her passion was like heat radiating from a stoked boiler.

  They spent the entire week frolicking in Anjanette’s bedroom every night after Old Antoine took his customary bottle to bed and drank himself to sleep. One night, unable to wait until Anjanette had finished sweeping the saloon, they made love atop the long mahogany bar, her blouse ripped open, skirt thrown up across her belly, his denims bunched around his ankles.

  At the end of the week, Considine had promised Anjanette he would spring her from the confinement and boredom of Saber Creek and her grandfather’s tavern and show her a world of adventure she’d only dreamed about. A month ago, when he’d learned of the Wells Fargo gold shipment from an hombre working in the Saber Creek bank, he’d figured he’d found a way to do just that.

  They decided to make her exodus from town look like a kidnapping, to make a posse afraid of getting a hostage killed, and to keep her face off wanted dodgers. She, unlike the other Thunder Riders, wasn’t a seasoned owlhoot, after all.

  Now Considine lifted his head and kissed the girl’s lips. “We best go meet the pack.”

  As he and Anjanette walked back through the mesquite thicket, holding han
ds, Anjanette said, “Speares will be gathering a posse, you know.”

  “Sure. But it’s suicide to ride after us. More than one lawman has found that out the hard way.” Considine glanced at her, giving his rakish smile. “Besides, Chiquita, isn’t that what you’re for? To slow him down? Your sheriff wouldn’t want us to kill our lovely hostage—the loveliest girl in Saber Creek, if not all of Arizona.”

  He kissed her cheek and snaked an arm around her waist as they moved out of the mesquites. Before them, the other gang members were dismounting their dusty, sweaty horses, casting knowing grins and smirks toward Considine and Anjanette.

  The stage driver, Wolf MacDonald, drew back on the team’s reins, bellowing.

  “I almost killed him last night,” Anjanette said tightly. “He pushed me too far.”

  Considine looked at her again quickly, and grinned. “I don’t doubt it! Is that how he got that—?” He gestured to indicate the wrapping over Speares’s broken nose.

  Anjanette shook her head, staring at the stage stopping twenty yards away, the horses lurching back in their collars, digging their hooves into the dirt. “A friend stepped in.”

  “Hey, pard, I think we oughta ditch the stage here!” A tall man in faded Union cavalry trousers, wolf coat, and stovepipe hat rode up on a cream barb. He was round-faced, unshaven, with long, straight black hair and silver hoop rings dangling from his ears. On his right cheek a dog’s face had been tattooed. The other cheek and eye had been horribly disfigured by Apaches when Ernst “Mad Dog” McKenna was only five years old, and his Scottish parents were ranching in the White Mountains. “No point in haulin’ it any farther. Country breaks up only a few clicks farther south. Let’s strap the lockbox to a couple horses and light a shuck due south.”

  Considine strode between several horses, squinting against the dust, and approached the stage. MacDonald set the brake and began climbing down from the driver’s box.

  “Anybody still alive in there?” Considine asked, nodding at the bullet-riddled carriage housing.

  MacDonald chuckled and wiped a stream of dusty chaw from the right corner of his mouth. “Shit, if all the bullets flying in town didn’t kill ’em, the ride I just gave ’em did!”

  As MacDonald leapt to the ground with a grunt, Considine drew his pearl-gripped Peacemaker and opened the coach door. A woman in a green traveling dress rolled halfway out, head and arms dangling toward the ground, glassy eyes staring up at Considine as if with a puzzling question. Blood dribbled from her lips and from the holes in her right temple and shoulder.

  Considine shuttled his gaze from the woman to the coach’s dark innards, where two men and an old woman in a black dress with white lace trim lay sprawled every which way. The desperado leader winced and shook his head as he holstered the Colt.

  “Well, that makes it easy.”

  He reached in, pulled the woman in the green dress out, then reached in again, found the handle on the strongbox, and yanked it out from beneath the gray-haired lady, grunting with the effort.

  “Dog, help me here!”

  Mad Dog McKenna swept his bear coat back from the big bowie sheathed over his belly and grabbed a handle of the strongbox. Together, he and Considine lifted the box, which must have weighed over a hundred pounds, to the ground beside the dead woman in the green dress.

  “Must be payday soon out to Fort Chiricahua,” Considine said with a laugh.

  “Ah, shit,” Considine said, “what do those soldiers need with money, anyways? There’s nothin’ to buy up in them bald hills.”

  MacDonald stepped forward, rubbing his big hands together. “Come on, Jack, open her up, will ya? I wanna see all them coins!”

  Considine drew his Colt, stepped back, and triggered the gun. He had to fire once more before the heavy iron lock broke and hung slack against the stout wooden box. Holstering the revolver, he knelt down, removed the lock from the chains, and opened the lid.

  Several lumpy burlap pouches, tied with rawhide, snuggled in the box like baby pigs at their mother’s belly. Each one was marked WELLS FARGO, LORDSBURG, N.M.T.

  MacDonald whistled. “Can I open one?”

  “Not till we get to the tavern.” Considine looked around. “Prewitt, Cooper, Sanchez—separate these pouches, rig them to a couple of the stage horses.”

  As Prewitt and Cooper stepped forward, Cooper said, “Sanchez didn’t make it out of Saber Creek, Jack.”

  Considine cursed and cast his gaze around the well-armed men—mostly Yanquis but a few greasers, a black man, a half-breed Sioux, and a former Apache cavalry scout humorously known to the desperado gang as Kills Gold-Hairs because of his predilection for towheaded whores. There was also a round-bodied Mexican woman named Toots, sister of one of the Mexicans, who could shoot better than some of the men, and who hunted, trapped, cooked, washed dishes, and tended wounds.

  Considine brought his eyes to Mad Dog. “How many we lose?”

  “Four,” said Ben Towers, the only black man in the group—a former slave and hide-hunter whom Considine and McKenna had met in Yuma Pen’s infamous snake pit. Towers had gone on a bender and killed several men in his hide-hunting outfit, and found that he enjoyed killing men more than buffalo, and robbing banks more than stretching hides for a living.

  “But Eddie—he’s not in good shape,” said Toots, standing among the men who’d gathered in a semicircle around the strongbox. She was a Duke’s mixture of Pima, Mexican, and Irish. She turned her barrel-shaped body to indicate the man sitting on a tall, blaze-faced black stallion about forty yards away.

  The man was crouched forward in the saddle, hatless, curly auburn hair blowing in the breeze. The horse’s head was up as the animal looked around, twitching its ears and snorting angrily.

  Considine cursed again and pushed through the crowd toward the man, Eddie Tomlain, a young outlaw from Kansas. Knowing Considine’s gun reputation, Tomlain had called him out in the main street of Tularosa one drunken Saturday night. Considine had known a good, albeit green and gassy, cold-steel artist when he saw one, so he’d shot the kid’s gun out of his hand, beat him to a bloody pulp, and invited him into the Thunder Riders.

  “Ah, shit, Eddie.” Considine reached up to pull the kid’s crossed arms away from his lower right side. “What the hell those bastards do to you?”

  Tomlain raked out through gritted teeth, “I’ll be all right, Jack. Bullet went through my side. I’ll be all right . . . once I get to O’Toole’s.”

  “Well, you sure got you a nice horse there, Eddie.” Considine stepped back to inspect the horse. Wolf lowered his head and gave Considine an angry stare, expanding and contracting his nostrils. “Where’d you find him?”

  Tomlain forced a smile, and blood gushed from one corner of his mouth. “He was tied in front of the mercantile. Sure is a fine one, ain’t he?”

  As he reached out to pat the black’s sleek neck, the horse lunged suddenly, lifting its front hooves a good six feet in the air and loosing a shrill whinny. Considine bolted back with a start as Tomlain gave a cry and tumbled off the saddle, somersaulting and hitting the ground with a heavy thud and an anguished grunt. Considine grabbed the black’s reins, planted his heels in the turf, and held tight as the horse whipped around, buck-kicking, then rising off its front hooves once more.

  The horse nearly pulled Considine off his feet, but the desperado leader held the reins taut and didn’t let the horse turn. With this stallion’s strength and fury, if he got turned around, he’d be halfway back to town in five minutes.

  “Help me, Latigo!” Considine shouted as the horse began to pitch once more.

  The biggest, most muscular man in the group—Latigo Hayes—rushed over and grabbed the reins in front of Considine. When the men got the horse reined down, Latigo held the reins up close to the bit, then led the horse a few yards away and tied it tightly to a stout cottonwood.

  “Fine horse,” said Latigo in his slight German accent, running a hand along the quivering beast’s arched neck. “Bo
y, is he pissed!”

  Considine had already turned back to Tomlain. Several of the others stood around him as well, while the rest of the group watered their horses or separated the bags of gold coins for packing on a couple of stage mounts.

  Breathing hard, Tomlain looked up at Considine. “I reckon I’m gonna need a hand up,” he said with a chuckle. “D-damn hoss. I’m gonna knock some sense into his head . . . show him who’s boss.”

  Considine glanced at the others gathered around the wounded desperado, then smoothed his mustache and pinched his denims up his thighs, and squatted down. “You took a bad one, Eddie.” He removed his hat and worried the brim with his fingers. “I hate to remind you of the rules at a time like this, but . . . well, you know we can’t let wounded riders slow down the rest of the group. And we couldn’t leave you here. One, it wouldn’t be fair to you. Apaches or bobcats might find you. Two, if a lawman found you, he might make you tell him where we’re headed.”