The Red River Bandit Book Two: Outlaws!. The Red River Bandit, #2

The Red River Bandit: Book Two - Outlaws!Cole Coleman rides into Mexico with a federal murder warrant on his back and the woman he loves at his side. Framed for the assassination of Judge Harlan Booth by the corrupt Senator Harrison Patterson, Cole and Sarah Morrison - the Red River Bandit, the outlaw he once hunted and came to love - are fugitives with nothing left but each other and the clothes on their backs.
Mexico offers no sanctuary. Bounty hunters cross borders. Marshals watch from the other side of the line. Desperate and out of resources, Cole makes the hardest decision of his life - becoming an outlaw to survive, robbing a Wells Fargo stage to fund their fight back. The desert tests them at every turn. A violent encounter with bounty hunters at a trading post leaves two men dead and Cole carrying the weight of it.
But it is in the mountains that everything changes. Hidden by an Apache tribe who have watched those mountains for generations, Cole and Sarah learn the truth about the hairpin Sarah has worn for twenty years - a serpent-carved key to an Aztec chest buried in New Mexico Territory, filled not with gold but with knowledge a dying civilisation buried for the right hands at the right time. The elders are clear: Patterson is the wrong kind of man.
Cole makes his decision. They ride north. Back in Silver Creek, Cole captures Patterson and uncovers the full conspiracy - but Patterson's lawyers are already moving and the warrant still stands. Cole's answer is a plan as bold as it is dangerous: a decoy hairpin on a federal train heading east, with Cole, Sarah and the infamous Webb riding visible and drawing every enemy eye - while the real key, hidden in the boot lining of showgirl Bonnie Dupree, follows one day behind on a second train with the legendary gunman Tennyson riding quiet guard.
The plan nearly works. When Mace's gang blows the mail car on the Kansas plain looking for the key and finds nothing, the trap is sprung - but Patterson, already freed on legal technicalities, dispatches a Gatling gun and every man he has left toward Silver Creek. The key is moving. The chest is waiting. Book Three is coming.