Dust of the Damned (9781101554005) (25 page)

Ravenna held back, looking up and down the street as the others drew rein at the hitchrack before which ten or twelve horses were lined up, the autumn-cool, late-afternoon sun shining on their backs.

“Come,
chiquita
,” Charlie called to the witch as he swung down from the leather. “I’ll let you buy the first round.” He grinned, hitched up his blue wool cavalry trousers that showed the wear, tear, and campfire smoke of the long trek from
Colorado, and adjusted the black holster containing Warden Mondrick’s.44.

“Me…” Ravenna said, narrowing her eyes at a building farther up the crooked main street. “I’m gonna have a long, hot bath. Scrub some o’ the trail dust off my lovely body. I’ll find you scalawags later.”

“Ah, come on.” Charlie beckoned to the black-haired sorceress. “One drink, and I’ll join you!”

He grinned again.

Ravenna turned to him, one eye narrowed speculatively. She looked at the big, gaudily decorated building before her and from which came manic piano patter and the low rumble of male conversation. “I guess it couldn’t hurt to see that you boys get our little sojourn here off on the right, quiet foot.” Ravenna put her horse up to the hitchrack, swung down from the saddle, and tossed her reins over the tie rail. “And I sure could use some tequila and carne asada!”

“Now you’re talkin’!” Charlie wrapped a long arm around the young woman’s neck, leaning into her and glancing down her open vest as they followed the others up the porch steps and through the batwings. He’d forgiven the mercurial witch for changing him into a javelina under the waterfall. Or, at least, with the prospect of the treasure she was leading them to, he’d filed the transgression in the back of his mind for later.

“Welcome, gents…and, uh…senorita!” rumbled a jovial voice from the bar. The barman, a big, mustached, square-headed man in a white silk shirt, string tie, and paisley vest, was filling a schooner from a beer spigot. “Sit an’ light a spell. Less’n you’re spooks, that is. Don’t allow ’em on the premises even if their pockets are loaded with silver!”

He tipped his head back and laughed as he swiped a flat stick across the frothy head of the beer schooner, sending a white spray of creamy foam shooting onto the floor behind the bar. He glanced at the plank sign nailed to a two‑by‑two ceiling beam about ten feet in front of the batwings. On it was crudely painted in a firm hand:

NO GOOLS ALLOWED.
IF YOUR A GOOL
THIS MEANS YOU!

Ravenna glanced at Charlie, who was still moving his lips and sounding out all the words, as he’d never learned to read above the third-grade level in his native tongue and was almost illiterate in English, as well.

“Like I said,” announced the bartender, beckoning with a large, freckled arm revealed by a rolled‑up shirtsleeve, “come on in an’ sit a spell. I’ll bring your drinks out in a minute!”

As the barman set the freshly poured beer on a tray and then carried the tray out from behind the bar, heading for one of the dozen or so tables, a good three-quarters of which were occupied by swarthy, bearded, sunburned frontiersmen of every stripe—mostly Americans—Charlie cut his perplexed gaze away from the sign, glanced at the other three men, and began tracing a zigzagging route toward an empty table toward the room’s rear.

Ravenna remained in front of the batwings and jammed her thumbs behind her cartridge belt, a little apprehensive about the setup of the place. There seemed to be a lot of ghoul hunters in town, and that worried her. Not so much for herself—although she did have a sizable bounty on her own head in Arizona as
well as New Mexico Territory and even western Texas. She was mainly worried about Charlie, One-Eye, Lucky, and Curly Joe. She didn’t have the power to allow them to turn at will, so they couldn’t turn until the next full moon, a week away. That meant they were relatively easy pickings for ghoul hunters.

But only if said ghoul hunters knew they were ghouls, that was. And Charlie himself had said it best—there were few ways to tell if one was a werewolf at any other time but the night of a full moon.

That thought relieved her apprehension somewhat.

Another one took its place, tying a little hitch in her belly. Werewolves and ghoul hunters were natural enemies. Could Ravenna’s boys keep their heads when surrounded by the breed? Even after they’d had a few drinks and were hearing their wolves’ howl?

Well, she’d never be able to get them out of here now. She doubted the crazy beasts realized how important it was they stay out of trouble, and what was at stake, all the power that was theirs for the taking once they got out of Tucson in one piece, with plenty of trail supplies, and reached the Lobo Negro Mountains three days southeast.

Deciding that she, a witch of her formidable powers, couldn’t control three male wolves even in their human forms, she sauntered over to the bar, raking her spurred heels across the floorboards. She glanced at Charlie and the others just now doffing their hats and sagging into kicked-back chairs. Charlie eyed Ravenna with one brow arched questioningly.

She indicated with a toss of her head that she wanted to stand at the bar, then clutched her rump and grinned to signify she was sore from the long ride. She continued striding along the
varnished mahogany counter with its brass footrail, past the half dozen men standing there chinning and drinking and casting lusty glances Ravenna’s way.

Ignoring the leers she was so accustomed to, she drew up to the gap about two-thirds of the way down and was met there by a second bartender, a stocky, black-eyed gent with a nasty scar on his lower lip that was in contrast to his slicked-back and pomaded black hair. A citified half-breed, Ravenna reflected. Probably Pima or Apache.

Vaguely, she felt a little sorry for the man. She knew how it was to be an outcast, growing up as she had—a witch in the sprawling hacienda of a wealthy Mexican landowner who’d cast her out at an early age. Secretly coached by a half-breed peon witch whose family raised chickens and hay on her family’s estate in southern Chihuahua, she’d finally been unable to suppress her powers. In a fit of pent‑up rage, she’d turned her taunting older brother into a lobo who’d run away into the hills howling and yipping like
a moon-crazed hyena, never to be seen again.

The half-breed gave Ravenna a dully inquisitive stare.

“Tequila,” she said. “Put it up there with a beer, amigo.”

While the Indian set about filling the witch’s order, the jovial barman took the orders of Charlie and the boys. Ravenna threw back her first tequila, picked up her beer schooner, and turned to face the room, hooking a boot heel over the brass rail at the base of the bar behind her.

The jovial bartender hauled the tray of beer schooners and a whiskey bottle out to Charlie and the boys. He was the chatty sort, and as he passed around the beers and shot glasses and set the bottle on the table, he said, “You fellas don’t have to worry about no ghouls in Tucson. No, sir!”

He turned to cant his head toward the rough-hewn men playing cards at the tables between Charlie’s group and the door. “We got some o’ the best ghoul hunters anywhere in the West right here in my very own saloon, and I’m proud to welcome Mr. Jesse James, his brother Frank, and their cousin Cole Younger to our fair territory.”

He said this loudly enough to be heard above the patter of the scrawny little piano player in armbands and green eyeshade, smoking a loosely rolled quirley and hammering away at “Little Brown Jug.”

A small-boned man with frosty blue eyes and a sparse blond mustache glanced toward Charlie and the boys and gave his chin a cordial dip. The man with the black beard beside him, a little bigger than Jesse James but with the same blue eyes, reached up with a sun-browned hand to pinch the brim of his battered felt sombrero. Cole Younger wore a tattered serape crisscrossed with bandoliers holding a good number of silver cartridges among the brass. There were six men with James and Younger, and the bartender proudly pointed them out, as well.

There were James Younger, Frank James, Bob Younger, Bill Chadwell, Clell Miller, and Charlie Pitts. These others barely acknowledged the introduction. They were a trail-seasoned, sour-faced lot, their hair and beards dusty and sweat-matted, and they were more interested in the stud poker they were playing than their ghoul-hunting fame.

“The only one who can compete with these boys for takin’ swiller heads and wolf teeth and fer puttin’ the fear o’ god in the western hobgobbies is Uriah Zane his ownself.” The barman said this to only Charlie’s bunch, keeping his voice down. “But everyone knows Zane rides alone. Always has, likely always will.
He was in here once, wasn’t all that sociable, but I reckon I never knew an overly sociable ghoul hunter. Odd breed.”

The apron jerked his head covertly, meaningfully, toward the James and Younger bunch behind him.

“Hell,” Lucky Snodgrass said, sneering over the beer he was lifting to his yellow-mustached lips, “everyone knows the Jameses and Youngers ain’t nothin’ but back-shootin’, no‑account robbers of small-town banks and slow-movin’ trains. Hell, they’d shoot a hunk o’ rock candy out of a child’s fist.”

Lucky snickered as he dipped his upper lip into his creamy beer foam.

The jovial barman looked suddenly stricken.

Someone cleared his throat loudly behind him. “What’d that sack o’ burnin’ ghoul shit say about me an’ my boys?” Jesse James inquired, his blue eyes flat and mean.

Chapter 24
    

THE DEMISE OF THE JAMES GANG

The voice of steely-eyed Jesse James, while not lifted inordinately high, cut through the din of the Rincon Mountain Dance Hall and Beer Parlor like a razor-edged stiletto through hog tallow.

The low roar of conversation died suddenly. The little man playing the piano turned his head toward the James-Younger table, frowning through the smoke curling up from the quirley in his false teeth, and lifted his pale hands from the ivory keys. It was so quiet that Ravenna, still standing with her back to the bar, her belly tied in a half-hitch knot, could hear the piano keys’ dwindling reverberations inside their drink-stained, bullet-scarred box.

The jovial barman standing between Charlie Hondo’s table and the James-Younger table twisted around on his hips to stare, aghast, at Jesse, who sat slumped back in his chair. The Missourian held his pasteboards on the edge of the table in his left hand, his battered gray Stetson tipped back off his domed,
sunburned forehead. The flap of his threadbare wool coat was pulled back behind the carved ivory grips of the.45 Peacemaker angled across his belly from the soft, brown leather holster on his left hip.

His pale blue eyes were menacingly dull as they stared across the fifteen feet toward Lucky Snodgrass, who sat slouched over his beer, both hands resting on the edge of his table, his eyes hard and cold, nostrils flaring. His long, dusty yellow ponytail curved down over his shoulder to disappear in his lap.

Charlie and the others wore similar expressions.

It was so quiet that Ravenna thought she could hear the jovial barman dribbling down his leg.

She broke the tense silence with, “Amigos! No, no, no, I think you misunderstand my friend Lucky over there. Lucky was only talking about that strange loner, big as a grizzly bear and twice as ornery—Uriah Zane!” She cast a cold smile at Lucky. “Wasn’t that who you were talking about, Joe?”

She put just enough steel in her voice to get Lucky’s attention, to communicate to the cork-headed fool the gravity of their situation and her previous admonishment to the boys to keep their noses clean here in Tucson.

“Yeah, that’s what Joe said,” Charlie said, all wide-eyed innocence in sharp contrast to the weirdly menacing tattoos on his cheeks. “He was talkin’ about that loco Uriah Zane. Not you, Jesse, for Pete’s sake.” He chuffed ironically and lifted his beer to his lips.

“Yeah,” Lucky said, fidgeting around with his own beer. “I meant that old coyote Zane.” Softer now, really biting hard on his tongue, he added, “Didn’t mean no offense to no one else… I reckon…. ”

He threw back an entire whiskey shot and chased it with a long pull of his beer.

“There. See?” Ravenna said, swinging her hips as she sauntered over to where Jesse James still sat slouched down in his chair, his dangerous eyes still riveted on Lucky Snodgrass. “I tell you what—just so we can all get our friendly moods back, I will buy the next round for the James-Younger gang!” She pivoted, snapping a thumb above her head. “Apron, another round over here. Pronto! Anything they want! Add it to my tab.
Vámonos!
”

“Yes, ma’am! Yes, ma’am!” The jovial bartender, his face flushed deep russet, sweat glistening on his forehead, hurried around behind the counter and motioned for the half-breed apron to begin pouring and drawing fresh drinks. “Yes, ma’am, you got it! Whiskey and tequila all around for the James-Younger bunch! Really makes me proud to see them blessin’ my humble establishment with their Yankee-killing, ghoul-huntin’ presence. Yes, sir! Hurry up, there, Alfred. Pour them beers! No one gets thirsty in the Rincon, by God!”

When the James-Younger gang was all set up, the conversational din built up gradually again, the tone pitched with relief. The last thing anybody in the place wanted, least of all the jovial bartender, was a lead swap in such close, crowded confines.