THE SPENSER NOVELS
Silent Night
(with Helen Brann)
Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland
(by Ace Atkins)
Robert B. Parker’s Lullaby
(by Ace Atkins)
Sixkill
Painted Ladies
The Professional
Rough Weather
Now & Then
Hundred-Dollar Baby
School Days
Cold Service
Bad Business
Back Story
Widow’s Walk
Potshot
Hugger Mugger
Hush Money
Sudden Mischief
Small Vices
Chance
Thin Air
Walking Shadow
Paper Doll
Double Deuce
Pastime
Stardust
Playmates
Crimson Joy
Pale Kings and Princes
Taming a Sea-Horse
A Catskill Eagle
Valediction
The Widening Gyre
Ceremony
A Savage Place
Early Autumn
Looking for Rachel Wallace
The Judas Goat
Promised Land
Mortal Stakes
God Save the Child
The Godwulf Manuscript
THE JESSE STONE NOVELS
Robert B. Parker’s Damned If You Do
(by Michael Brandman)
Robert B. Parker’s Fool Me Twice
(by Michael Brandman)
Robert B. Parker’s Killing the Blues
(by Michael Brandman)
Split Image
Night and Day
Stranger in Paradise
High Profile
Sea Change
Stone Cold
Death in Paradise
Trouble in Paradise
Night Passage
THE SUNNY RANDALL NOVELS
Spare Change
Blue Screen
Melancholy Baby
Shrink Rap
Perish Twice
Family Honor
THE VIRGIL COLE NOVELS
Robert B. Parker’s Ironhorse
(by Robert Knott)
Blue-Eyed Devil
Brimstone
Resolution
Appaloosa
ALSO BY ROBERT B. PARKER
Double Play
Gunman’s Rhapsody
All Our Yesterdays
A Year at the Races
(with Joan H. Parker)
Perchance to Dream
Poodle Springs
(with Raymond Chandler)
Love and Glory
Wilderness
Three Weeks in Spring
(with Joan H. Parker)
Training with Weights
(with John R. Marsh)
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Knott, Robert, date.
Robert B. Parker’s Bull River / Robert Knott.
p. cm. — (A Cole and Hitch novel)
ISBN 978-1-101-62168-4
1. Cole, Virgil (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Hitch, Everett (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Bull River.
PS3611.N685R38 2014 2013037162
813'.6—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For Julie
CONTENTS
Also by Robert B. Parker
Title Page
Copyright
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
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Acknowledgments
1
We rode hard up the road to the governor’s mansion. Virgil was on his chestnut stud, Cortez, and I was riding Tornado, a big black gelding with a white lightning bolt–blazed face I’d won in a game of faro near Odessa.
When we got to the gated entrance, two sentries tried to stop us, but Virgil flashed his badge and we passed on through. The setting sun flickered behind tall pecan trees
as we galloped up the drive to the mansion.
At the door, a butler met us, and we entered the stately manor just as the huge grandfather clock in the lobby sounded off six echoing chimes. Virgil’s bone-handled Colt was on his hip, and I carried my double-barrel eight-gauge.
“I’ll have to ask you for your weapons, gentlemen,” the butler said.
“No,” the governor said, entering the lobby.
“Evening, Governor,” Virgil said.
“These men are allowed to carry their guns wherever and whenever they please!”
Then I saw her, Emma, coming down the huge stairs, wearing a pale yellow dress. She smiled at me.
“Everett,” Emma said. “So nice to see you again.”
“What about me?” Virgil said.
“Oh, silly me,” Emma said. “Of course it’s wonderful to see the both of you.”
At dinner, the governor stood and raised his glass.
“A toast! To you, Marshal Cole, and to you, Deputy Hitch.”
The governor paused. He looked to his daughters, Abigail and Emma, and then his wife, before he looked back over the top of his glass held up in the direction of Virgil.
“I am so very grateful for what you, Marshal Cole, and you, Deputy Marshal Hitch, did for me, for my family.”
The governor’s tone of voice was solid, sincere, and it resonated with a dignified inflection that most likely helped get him elected.
I looked across the table, and behind the arrangement of daffodils, bluebells, and grape hyacinths, Emma sat stoically, gazing directly at me as her father continued his toast.
After dinner, Emma excused us and led me out of the dining room.
“Where are we going?”
Emma kept her arm locked in mine as we made our way out the door and onto the back porch.
“Where is your fiancé?”
“He’s away.”
Emma stopped and turned to me. She placed her back to the post at the top of the railing that followed the steps down into the garden.
“Tell me something, Deputy Hitch,” she said with a lift of volume in her voice.
“What would you like to know?” I said. “And it’s Everett.”
“Yes, Everett,” Emma said.
She said my name like I’d never really heard it spoken before. She put emphasis on the last three letters, as if she were speaking French.
“If you could be anywhere in the world,” Emma said, “where would that anywhere be?”
I thought about the question for a moment as she looked at me with an expectant, almost enthusiastic look on her face.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never really thought about being anyplace other than where I am.”
“Oh, indulge me, Everett.”
“Well, okay, let’s see . . . the Rocky Mountains are awful pretty.”
Emma pulled me slightly closer to her and pleaded with me as if I didn’t understand the essence of her question.
“Anywhere in the world,” Emma said.
I looked down, studied the boards of the porch for a moment, and then looked back to Emma.
“Let me think about that.”
Emma let go of my hands, turned, and walked down the steps like I had disappointed her.
“Where would you be?” I said.
“Follow me, I’ll show you.”
The rose garden behind the house was enormous, with rows and rows of yellow fragrant roses. The night was warm, with a gentle breeze. It was a clear evening, the moon was almost full, and there was not a cloud in the sky. Emma moved ahead of me some. She turned back to me, taking my hand, and led me toward a gazebo at the far end of the garden. When we were in the center of the gazebo, Emma twirled and twirled with her arms raised above her head like a ballerina.
“So . . . what? This is it?” I said. “Here? This gazebo?”
After her next revolution, she fell into my arms.
“Noooo,” she said. “This is where I’d be, right here, with you, Everett, in your arms.”
She reached up, sliding her hand behind my neck, and pulled my head down to meet hers. From somewhere I heard the faint sounds of a guitar.
“If I could be anywhere in the world,” she said as she closed her eyes, “this is where I’d be.”
I pulled her to me, and our lips met. We kissed, soft at first, and then we kissed deeply. Never in my life had I felt a kiss like this, never. I thought, This must be what love is, and then I heard Virgil.
“Everett . . .”
2
“Everett,” Virgil said.
I opened my eyes from kissing Emma in the gazebo on a beautiful night in Austin City, Texas, to find myself where Virgil and I had been holed up for the better part of a week: the second-story room in an adobe hotel overlooking the plaza of the dusty village of El Encanto, on the border of Old Mexico.
“I believe we have us a rummy,” Virgil said.
Virgil was sitting by the window, smoking a cigar and sipping on a glass of whiskey. Except for the light sifting within Virgil’s cigar smoke from the plaza, the room was dark. I could hear guitar music drifting up, with the muffled voices of villagers moving about in the plaza.
The night was hot and humid. Emma. That damn woman, I thought as I sat up. Another goddamn dream about Emma. I stretched the ache from my back and moved to the window to see what Virgil was looking at.
“Captain Alejandro,” Virgil said.
Across the plaza, seven men on horseback rode slowly into the plaza, and it was obvious Alejandro Miguel Vasquez led the pack.
Alejandro was much bigger than any of his seconds. He was at least six feet, handsome, with broad shoulders, long dark hair, and blue-green eyes. He rode a spirited tall tricolored medicine-hat geld with a thick, long blond mane and tail. Like the Sioux, Blackfoot, and Comanche, Alejandro claimed the medicine-hat protected him against harm.
The bandito was well known for his fancy Mexican attire: a large sombrero, tapered concho breeches, shiny spurs with huge rowels, and though it was hotter than hell out, he wore his trademark jacket—a silver-buttoned Mexican Naval Officers jacket with red velvet cuffs and a collar that he crossed with dual bandoliers. But he was no naval captain. Alejandro was nothing but a robber, a raider, an escaped killer, and now he was in El Encanto.
Alejandro was a wanted man. He was also a notorious gang leader and a mean sonofabitch. Virgil and I had tracked him down before and arrested him near Dead Man’s Ford in the Pecos, but he managed to escape the custody of two deputies en route back to San Cristóbal.
They were taking him there, where he was to stand trial for the very thing Virgil and I had arrested him for in the first place: the murder of two men he’d shot dead in the streets of San Cristóbal on Christmas Day.
Three months after his escape, he was apprehended by a friend of ours, a deputy named “Newly” Ned Newcomb up in Butch’s Bend. Within a few days of his capture, Alejandro got away yet again, and “Newly” Ned was found shot six times in the back.
It wasn’t long after his escape in Butch’s Bend that Alejandro got his gang back together and was instantly credited for a series of raids throughout the territories.
A week after robbing a Butterfield Stage between La Mesilla and Hatch, Alejandro and his desperadoes were said to have terrorized the border town of Santa Teresa, robbing every citizen and business in the place. The village was burnt to the ground before the looters set out for Mexico.
And now, here he was, at last.
We watched as Alejandro and his banditos circled around the stone water well in the center of the plaza.
“The captain and his crew,” I said.
“Yep,” Virgil said. “It goddamn sure is.”
“H
e’s returned to his port,” I said.
Alejandro and his men passed slowly by our hotel and angled toward a cantina across the plaza.
He sat tall in the saddle as his bandits followed him through the plaza. He acted as if he had not a care in the world, but he was looking at everything, taking everything in. They dismounted and hitched up in front of the cantina.
“Looks like Alejandro’s got a few less sailors,” I said.
“Does.”
“Maybe he killed ’em off himself,” I said.
“Wouldn’t put it past him,” Virgil said.
Alejandro stopped from entering the cantina. He turned and looked around the plaza. Virgil and I eased back in the dark of the room just as Alejandro looked directly at us. He continued looking in our direction until one of his men said something that made him laugh. Alejandro gave the plaza one last look, then turned, and the seven outlaws made their way into the cantina.
“Here we go,” I said.
Virgil nodded.
“High time,” Virgil said.
“Is.”
We had known it was only a matter of time before Alejandro would be coming to the village of El Encanto. We got a forewarning from one of his ruffians, a no-good named Javier who was arrested after the gang robbed the Butterfield Stage. A posse caught up to them and gave chase. Javier’s horse got shot out from underneath him, but Alejandro kept on the run, so Javier didn’t much care for Alejandro. He was more than bueno about providing us with the details of Alejandro’s soon-to-be whereabouts, and, sure enough, he was right.
Virgil knew we could not trust the Federales, and a posse would be hard to conceal in the small village of El Encanto, so we were doing like we did most of the time: we were going at this alone.
Virgil set his cigar in an ashtray and got to his feet.
“What were you moaning about?” Virgil said.
“What?”
“In your sleep. You all right.”
“Don’t think I was moaning,” I said, and pulled on my boot.
“You were.”
“Just sleeping some.”
Virgil shook his head slightly.
“No,” Virgil said as he removed his holster from the back of the chair and strapped it on. “You were moaning. Thought you might be sick.”
3
I pulled on my second boot and moved over to the washbasin atop a pinewood chest. I poured some water into the basin, splashed my face, and changed the goddamn course of the conversation to our business at hand.