Robert B. Parker's Bull River Read online

  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

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2014 by The Estate of Robert B. Parker

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  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?”

  “Oh, no place in particular,” Emma said. “It’s such a beautiful evening.”

  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.