Shadow of the Vulture Read online

  He waited and waited. Nothing happened. The water continued to flow down towards the bay; the clouds moved relentlessly by overhead. Other than that there was no movement. No sound.

  They must have realized what had happened. So why were they waiting? Supposing it was “they”…It was always possible that the man back at the house had lied to him. But, when Herne recalled his terror-stricken face, he could scarcely believe that to be true. His information might simply have been wrong. The senator could have been in the forward carriage—no, he would have seen signs of movement through the windows. Or perhaps he was not on the train at all?

  The thoughts raced through Jed Herne’s mind as he continued to watch the train like a hawk staring down on its prey.

  He could only guess that if his information were correct and Nolan and the two bodyguards were inside, then they must have assumed that it was an attempt to either assassinate or kidnap the senator, being carried out by more than one man.

  They were probably sitting in the car envisaging armed men surrounding the train on either side,

  Well, Herne grinned, let them sweat it out. I ain’t in any hurry. Not now I’ve got this far.

  He had little fears of interference from other quarters. He did not think that the driver and fireman of the train would want to become involved in whatever strange events were taking place back along the track. They would probably pretend they hadn’t noticed anything was wrong and just keep on going.

  Which, thought Herne as he stared downwards, just leaves me and you.

  At which point he held his breath.

  His eye had picked up a movement low on the ground on the far side of the stranded car. Surely? Yes. There it was again. Something shifting slowly, surreptitiously along behind the wheels.

  One of the men had managed to slide through a window on the blind side and was now trying to make his way to the rear end of the car without being spotted.

  Fine, thought Herne. Let him keep on thinking he’s doing just that.

  The man was edging his way along with such patience that it was almost possible to believe there was no one there at all. Whoever he was, he was not going to be easy. He knew what he was doing.

  Herne wondered if it was Neilson or Lamont. White or black. It was idle speculation as it didn’t really matter. At least, not to Herne. It might conceivably matter to Lamont or Neilson.

  Whichever of the two it turned out to be was five feet away from the observation platform. Herne drew his Colt and crooked his arm at the elbow, resting it upon his knee. He lowered his head behind the hammer and, with one eye closed, sighted along the barrel.

  The man would have noticed that there was nobody on the stream side. Which probably meant he expected to find a whole gang round the side where Herne was waiting. Patiently. As patiently as the gunman who had that second eased his left boot up onto the metal floor of the rear platform. A hand pulled upwards. The right boot joined the left boot. The body swung gracefully under the rail then took up as little space as possible against the carriage end. Began to shift across to the other side. Inch by slow inch.

  And still Herne waited for the first clear sign, the first target.

  There was a blur of dark brown. The sleeve of a shirt? Uncertain, his finger remained poised on the trigger. Come on, damn you, said Herne to himself. Stop being so goddamn worried!

  As if hearing him, the owner of the shirt obliged by showing his whole arm. Still Herne wanted more. Wanted the man’s head to peer round the end of the car, so that...

  The click was slight but in the intensity of all that expectant silence it sounded as loud as a hammer blow.

  Christ!

  Herne cussed inwardly as he flung himself to his left with all the strength he could muster. The bullet hammered into the heel of his boot, wrenching it off. Herne kept rolling.

  ‘Christ!’ he repeated, out loud this time. The other man had gone along the far end of the train. The first had just been a decoy.

  Shots now came at him from both directions, missing him as he thumped down towards the track. Suddenly he dug his feet in hard and pulled up short. Fired first at the observation platform, then, immediately after, at the other end of the car. He stood up. A searing pain shot through the back of his left calf as a bullet ripped through the skin. He looked up and saw the man furthest away duck back from sight.

  Herne himself fell to the right away from the anticipated shot from the brown-shirted man on the platform. Dropped. Rolled. Came up firing. Twice. One miss. One shot that sent the man toppling back against the rail, clutching at his right thigh. He bounced backwards and Herne’s next shot whistled over his head.

  Then Jed was pushed back against the side of the carriage and reloading fast while there were seconds of time.

  ‘Lamont! You all right?’ The gunman nearest to Herne yelled down to the other end.

  After a moment, Neilson got his answer. ‘Great! How about you?’

  ‘The bastard got me in the leg, but I’m okay.’

  ‘Which leg was that?’ laughed Lamont.

  Jesus, thought Herne, as he pushed the last cartridge home, what a hell of a time to be making jokes.

  The wounded man thought much the same. ‘What are you cackling at, you black bastard? This ain’t no laughin’ matter!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ came the reply. ‘There’s still two of us and only one of him.’

  ‘Goddamn it!’ Neilson screamed. ‘Shut your mouth and do something about gunning this feller down. You black bastard!’

  Herne wondered whether Lamont was grinning or not. Then he wondered whether he was still where he had been a moment ago. Someone who was clever enough to set Herne up the way he had, getting him to concentrate on one place to the exclusion of the others–he was going to have more tricks than one.

  Like setting up a conversation which would fix the positions of himself and his partner firmly in Herne’s mind.

  Jed holstered the gun and turned fast. He grabbed at the ledge at the side of the train and pulled himself up. He wanted to be on that car roof and quickly. Before it was too late for him to move anywhere.

  His head and shoulders were above the level of the top of the carriage for a split second. It was enough. Enough to see the smiling face of the gunman as he stepped cat-like along the center. Lamont snapped off a shot too quickly for the aim to be good, although it was close enough for Herne to feel the wind of it as it passed by him.

  Holy shit! They were good all right.

  He dropped back to the ground and turned right, beginning to run for the end of the train car that Lamont had left.

  ‘Hold it!’

  He ducked low and kept running. The bullet whined into the side of the train and ricocheted away into the distance. Herne stopped sharply and turned, drawing as he did so. Neilson steadied himself for his second shot. He wasn’t going to miss this time. Not now his man was standing still.

  Which was exactly what Herne was thinking.

  He fired fast. Two shots blurred together as though they had come from a single pull of the trigger. Neilson threw his right arm high into the air and his gun fired uselessly upwards into the gray clouds. He stumbled two paces backwards, then recovered his balance and came forward once more.

  His gun arm was lowered again; he struggled desperately to level it in Herne’s direction. His eyes began to blink then his arm began to droop. He fought against it. Fought hard. Lost.

  The gun slipped out of still grasping fingers. Head went back, mouth and eyes open wide. Two blotches of red stained the brown shirt, less than an inch or two apart. Even as Herne watched the marks widened into one solid bloodied patch.

  His legs began to separate, as though he had decided to perform the splits. Halfway through the action, the upper half of his body collapsed forwards. Finally he lay stretched out alongside the track.

  Herne was moving gradually around the carriage. The black bodyguard was nowhere to be seen. He had gone back inside. Now that he was down to a one
to one situation, it was the obvious thing to do.

  It left Herne in the worse position: of having to come in from the light into the dark. In from the cold.

  All right, thought Herne. You still don’t know which entrance to watch. Which door. Which window.

  He moved swiftly from one end of the car to the other, shooting off the locks of the doors as he went. But he did not make any attempt to enter. That way Lamont would be forced to check both ways at once.

  Next he fired through a central pair of windows, shattering the glass and tearing back the blinds.

  Herne reloaded his Colt and moved silently along to the observation platform. He prepared to kick the door open. Counted under his breath. One. Two. Three.

  Kicked. The door flew open and almost instantly two shots rang out. Herne dived low, keeping himself as close to the floor as he could. The light from the doorway penetrated deep into the car. But not deep enough for him to see clearly.

  He pushed himself into a gap between a pair of upholstered seats at his right and peered over them. A shot tore out of the blackness at him. He fired back. Heard an urgent shout and curse. Fired again, aiming for the source of sound.

  He jumped for the other side of the gangway. But Lamont was not concerned with getting back at him. Not now. He was too intent on getting away, out of the carriage.

  Three-quarters of the way down the car a blind was suddenly ripped back from one of the windows and a body went crashing through it, head first. Herne turned and ran for the open door, swinging himself over the rail that ran round the platform.

  He landed at the edge of the track, alongside the bank of the stream. Lamont had made it into the water and was trying to swim across to the far side. But it looked as though one of his arms was out of action and he was not finding the going easy.

  Herne decided he could wait. Again. This time it would be all right.

  The black gunslinger pulled himself up the bank at the far side of the stream. He shook his head, wincing as the pain high in his side struck him afresh with the effort he had made, then turned to see where Herne was.

  The flash from Herne’s Colt showed him what he didn’t really want to know. His eyes remained on Herne for a full ten seconds but they showed neither feeling nor expression. And at the end of that time he fell face first down into the water.

  Herne watched as the current edged him away from the bank and began to move him downstream. The water around him was etched with thin red lines.

  ‘So long,’ said Herne. ‘You poor black bastard.’

  He turned back into the carriage. Gun still held expectantly in his right hand. He ripped the blinds down from the windows as he passed along the corridor.

  Then he saw him. The man he had been searching for. The man he had come hundreds of miles with the express purpose of killing.

  Senator Nolan.

  He was sitting in a specially padded seat close to the center of the car. It was made in soft, quilted velvet. Black velvet, like everything else in the carriage. The blinds. The upholstery. The hangings.

  Herne put up his gun and went over to where the man sat. Stared at the face. Puffy-white, flabby, lifeless. His mouth was set. His eyes failed to move, not even a flicker. His whole head resembled a decaying vegetable. Inhuman. At the side of his neck the muscles were pulled tight as though gripped in some form of paralysis.

  He had evidently suffered some kind of crippling stroke. Whatever he now was…this thing that surrounded itself with darkness.

  There had been many things Herne had wanted to say to Nolan. He had wanted to talk about hate and revenge. About fathers and children. About his child, dead inside his wife’s raped and hanged body. He had wanted to hear Nolan plead for mercy. Plead passionately for the mercy he could never allow him. Then he would kill him.

  But now ...

  The part of Nolan that had been a mouth suddenly moved, parted wider. Herne lowered his face towards it. He almost reeled back at the sickly sweet smell that greeted him, that hung over Nolan’s body like a cloak. The skin of his face looked as though it was a soft covering for a swollen balloon of pus. He watched as the hole in the middle of it formed two silent words: ‘Kill me.’

  Herne stood up and walked out on to the observation platform. Behind him something scraped against the top of the roof. He whirled round, Colt in hand. It was a vulture clawing at the metal as it took a brief respite from feeding on the exposed face of Neilson’s dead body. Herne looked and saw other birds stripping away the clothing above the wounds on the dead man’s chest and thigh.

  He turned away from them and suddenly thought of Becky, waving down to him from the ship that had carried her away. He knew that as long as he lived nothing could be allowed to happen to her. She was the last remnant of his past, of his future. He could not afford to take a single risk.

  Herne went back into the railroad car.

  Moments later a shot echoed outwards. The huge birds rose, disturbed by the sudden sound. They wheeled and circled in the sky. Beyond their ugly, ominous shapes a single streak of blue showed through the gray.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Initially a teacher of English and Drama, the novelist John Harvey began writing in 1975, and now has over 100 published books to his credit, most recently a collection of short stories, A Darker Shade of Blue, and a novel, Good Bait. The first of his celebrated Charlie Resnick novels, Lonely Hearts, was named by The Times as one of the 100 most notable crime novels of the last century. Flesh and Blood, the first of three Frank Elder novels, was awarded both the British Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger and the US Barry Award in 2004. In 2007 he received the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for Sustained Excellence in Crime Writing, and in 2009 he was made an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Nottingham. A published poet, John ran Slow Dancer Press for nearly twenty years; in addition, he has written many scripts for television and radio, including dramatizations of novels by Graham Greene and A.S. Byatt and (with Shelley Silas) Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. John was one of the original ‘Piccadilly Cowboys’ and we are proud to reissue his Herne the Hunter series, which was co-written with Laurence James under the name ‘John J. McLaglen’.

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  HERNE THE HUNTER #1 – WHITE DEATH

  The sun was getting well up, and its warmth was melting the snow fast. Its rays broke through the open doorway, striking across towards Louise, and as she moved through them, Jed saw her face properly for the first time.

  It took all his self-discipline to stop himself jumping up and grabbing her. There was a great bruise under her right eye, and her nose had been bleeding. A thread of black blood crept drily from the corner of her mouth, down across her chin, on her neck. And there were deep scratches around her throat.

  He realized that Yates had also seen it at the same moment, hearing the strangled gasp, and feeling the man’s body tense in the chair beside him, ready to leap up. Herne reached across and seized his arm, squeezing it with all his strength …

  John J. McLaglen is the pseudonym for the writing team of Laurence James and John Harvey.

  HERNE THE HUNTER #2: RIVER OF BLOOD

  Becky rolled and slithered further and further towards the river. Everything she tried to grab hold of gave way in her hands. She clawed frantically at the mud but only succeeded in tracing patterns in it.

  Until she came to a sudden stop against something hard.

  Becky looked around, then upwards. Her heart stopped, her mouth sagged open: it was a pair of boots. The owner of which leered down at her through the mist which was rising off the ground. He had the strangest eyes and skin she had ever seen. Becky had seen no man like him before.

&nbs
p; It was Isaiah Coburn: the albino.

  ‘What a present to be made to us in such difficult times,’ he grinned …

  John J. McLaglen is the pseudonym for the writing team of Laurence James and John Harvey.

  HERNE THE HUNTER #3: THE BLACK WIDOW

  Whitey was on him like a lean panther, swinging the pistol like a club at the back of the boy’s head, catching him a solid blow. The sentry crumpled to his hands and knees, mewing in pain, barely conscious. As Jed kicked the outer door shut, shooting the main bolt across, he heard the sickening crack, like a ripe apple being trodden underfoot, as Whitey swung his gun a second time, smashing the top of the guard’s skull to a bloody pulp. Ignoring the body, that lay still twitching at his feet, the albino bent and wiped blood and matted hair from the foresight of his Colt on the fancy waistcoat, adding a macabre layer to the decorations. “Leaves us three,” he said ...

  John J. McLaglen is the pseudonym for the writing team of Laurence James and John Harvey.