Ralph Compton Death Valley Drifter (The Gunfighter Series) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ralph Compton stood six foot eight without his boots. He worked as a musician, a radio announcer, a songwriter, and a newspaper columnist. His first novel, The Goodnight Trail, was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Medicine Pipe Bearer Award for best debut novel. He was the USA Today bestselling author of the Trail of the Gunfighter series, the Border Empire series, the Sundown Rider series, and the Trail Drive series, among others.

Jeff Rovin is the author of more than 150 books, fiction and nonfiction, under his own name, under various pseudonyms, or as a ghostwriter, including numerous New York Times bestsellers and over a dozen of the original Tom Clancy's Op-Center novels.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER ONE

Damn you. . . . Damn . . .

Those were the last words he remembered. They were the only words he remembered. The man came to lying on his chest, knowing nothing more except that he was alive.

That much was plain anyway. It was not memory.

As he became dimly aware of his surroundings, and the thick black night in his head became too bright day, he realized he did not actually remember anything more than those words. He did try to answer the involuntary first question, Where am I? He knit his forehead. As his mind struggled to get its footing, he found himself wondering: What am I doing here?

The question was brusquely shoved aside by a hard, angry pulsing throughout the entirety of his skull. He asked himself, Have I been drinking?

He did not know. Like the sweat that permeated his skin, some insistent and rational piece of him pushed to the fore.

One puzzle at a time.

The man opened his eyes to slits and fought through the pain in his head to have a think about what he did know. It was day. He saw blurry yellow-white ahead of him, felt the sun on his back and left cheek, on the backs of his bare arms. He was aware of grit along the outsides of his gums. And his head hurt worse for the effort of just letting in the light. He knew that, too.

The man's face was lying on its right cheek. When he found the strength to inhale deeply, he also found that there was sand in his nose. His nostrils were partly lying in it. He made a valiant attempt to snort out the grit, mostly succeeding after three tries; then he tried to raise his face. The sand clung like pepper on a fish. That was no concern. What was: The instant he moved, the right side of his head kicked as though there was a bronc in his skull trying hard and regular to get out. The man dropped back into the hot, dry sand. As consciousness returned more fully, he realized that his back burned. His chest did, too, because the hot sand clung there, too, stuck in every pore from his exposed waist to his neck. There was something crawling inside his ear, too small to be a scorpion-probably a fly. He shook his head a little, and it buzzed away with noisy protest.

You remember bugs, he thought, able to visualize them.

The man's fingers were lying beside his thighs. They were swollen from the heat. He felt along his legs. They were not bare, though he had no idea why he was wearing just long, sweat-soaked underwear bottoms. Worse than that, even as his head cleared and he could picture garments and feel textures, he still had no idea where he was or how he had gotten here. And as the man started to think, he realized one thing more.

He had no idea who he was.

He thought hard. What little he remembered-from when, he also had no idea-came when he used his tongue to try to spit out more sand.

A picnic lunch. A sunny beach. Sand in the food. But-was that recently?

He knew what he felt, and also what he smelled and heard-both, nothing. Not a horse, which surprised him. It was time to see. When he finally opened his eyes, they instantly smarted from the sun, which was white and washed-out. But at least he could see the daylight, the sand, and a bit of scrub. When he closed them, all he could see were shadows of a horizon and the foliage against ruddy eyelids. Nothing else appeared to him, not even what he looked like. There was just a deep black well without a bottom or a reflection.

As time passed-perhaps minutes, maybe only seconds; pain had its own way of measuring things-he gave some attention to the sweat that greased his body. It was thick and heating his outsides to near broiling, sucking all the moisture from inside. Moving his mouth, he realized it was not only sandy, but he could not clear it because his tongue was too dry to try to spit. And then, as he slowly raised a hand to where his head hurt-the plumped hand seemed to weigh as much as an iron mallet-he became aware that not all the moisture on his scalp was perspiration.

There was a sticky patch of blood clinging to his hair like morning dew in hell. His fat, shaking fingers spider-walked along the thin trail that ran from the top of his head to deep behind his right ear.

The man's fingertips crept back in the other direction along his scalp, and he let out a raspy yelp of pain as he found the open wound toward the front of his crown. At first he wondered if he had somehow survived a scalping-how did he remember what that was, but not his name?-until his crablike exploration found just a gash in the hair wide and damned painful but not very deep.

He had been struck. He remembered a lightning flash behind both eyes. And right before that, before he swore-

A figure indistinct in the dark. Very near with a six-shooter in his hand.

The figure was not shooting. But he was coming toward the man. He remembered, suddenly, his own horse, dark brown with a blond mane. He must have been riding swiftly, since the animal was breathing heavily. Everything else about the animal-saddle, gear, what weapon he might have been carrying-he could not picture or recall. Or what he had been doing right before that. Or why. Or where. It must have been something in this desert, though he could not picture anything.

Well, a companion and a horse-that's something, he thought. Was the horse nearby? He would have to open his eyes and get off the damned ground to find out.

Mustering his energy was almost as difficult as trying to remember things. Rising came in jagged spurts, like a marionette being lifted by its strings. It happened with great effort and initially generated little progress. The man dragged his arms from his sides, all stiff and unhelpful joints below the shoulders. He finally planted his palms on the ground, inhaled, and pushed up. Sand clung to half his face as it was lifted from the scalding, sweat-dampened ground. There was a blade of grass stuck to his lower lip, held there as if it were peeling skin. His arms shook, but he locked the elbows. His head screamed, but his mouth was too parched to give the pain more than raw, airy voice. A weak hiss escaped his throat, and then he settled into the rhythm of the pain. He closed his dirty, blistered lips and breathed through his nose, painfully sneezing out the dirt. He lost strength for a moment and fell down, plunking his chin on the sand to support the weight of his aching head. He feared that if he gave up now, he would never get up. He pushed up again.

The grass and some of the sand had come free, his exposed skin baking under the sun. His elbows locked again, and he remained upright. It took a moment for his dry eyes to focus, longer to adjust to the brilliant daylight.

The man did not like what those hurting eyes settled on.

There was an ugly rusty shape about two feet in front of him. It was a scorpion. He knew that it was a danger. But even a horse would know that much. Fortunately, the devilish-looking thing seemed as unmotivated as he was in the white sunlight. Nonetheless, it was best to get away. Pressing his palms to the hot ground and having more reason to get up than he had a moment before, the man rose slowly.

He grunted, his head hammering angrily, but at least his arm and back muscles did not complain much. Breath came without pain. He could not have been here long enough for them to have stiffened, he decided. With effort, he got onto his knees, hovered there until he was steady, then looked around.

There was nothing to hold on to. No tree-and no horse....