Helldorado (25 page)

Prophet reached up and peeled the shirt down off her shoulders. She sat before him, her chest beginning to rise and fall heavily, her nipples pebbling. He could hear her breathing, feel the heat rise in her hands still clamped on his ears, as his own breaths grew labored.

Prophet feasted his eyes on her delectable form, from her flat belly down across her well-turned thighs to her little pink feet curled beneath her and then up across her heavenly, welcoming breasts to her lips that seemed to swell with need for his own.

Prophet lifted his head, kissed each of her breasts, the tender budlike nipples, then drew her down to him and closed his mouth over hers.

He kissed her for a long, long time, eating her slowly, like a well-ripened Georgia peach. When he’d undressed, he finished undressing her, then spread her out before him, and buried his face in her belly. She ground her hands in his hair, pulling his head taut against her.

“Oh, Lou,” she cried, writhing, spreading her knees. “I miss you already!”

TWO DAYS LATER, after a hard, meandering trek through and around the mountains, Prophet said, “Girl, if I told you once, I told you a thousand times—doesn’t matter how well you think you know a town. You always scout it before you mosey on into it.”

“Shut up, Lou.”

“You can think you know a town, but a town’s like a woman—fickle as hell. Like this goddamn wet mountain weather.”

“I’m scouting it,” Louisa said.

She was on the ridge above and behind him, while he sat on the ground, leaning back against a sun-bleached log, smoking a quirley and lost in his own banter. Their horses grazed, ground-tied, a little farther down the hill. A drizzle had fallen all day though there was now a break in the heavy, purple-bellied clouds.

“I ever tell you about the time I rode into Dog Bone, Wyoming, and ran smack into the Lyle Cretin Bunch. Hadn’t scouted it first, of course. Too much in a hurry. Well, shit, there they were—all four of ’em—sittin’ around outside a saloon, and who do they see ridin’ into town on his trail-blown dun?”

Louisa stared down the ridge, facing away from Prophet, through her spyglass. “You?”

“You guessed it. Wasn’t prepared at all. Not at all.” Prophet chuckled ruefully, drew deep on his quirley, and shook his head gravely. “I paid for it, too. Them boys had me dancin’ in the street, and you know how I can’t dance. Well, I was dancin’! Pow, pow, pow, and I was doin’ two-steps and three-steps and several steps you never seen before. Fortunate that the Cretin fellas was so drunk they didn’t realize I was dancin’ over to ole Mean and Ugly and somehow got my barn blaster off my saddle and managed to fill the whole gang with buckshot while I only took one of their ricochets in my kneecap. Just a glancing shot, but damn, it hurt like hell! A bullet to the kneecap. But my point is—”

“I know—scout a town before you ride into it. You never know who’s there.” Louisa lowered the spyglass and looked down the hill behind her at Prophet. “And if you wouldn’t blow so hard, you’d realize that’s what I’ve been doing. And you’d realize, you big ape, that you’d better come up here and take a look at this.”

“Look at what?”

“Juniper.”

“What about it? It’s still there, isn’t it?”

Prophet chuckled, a little trail-addled, and stuck his quirley in a corner of his mouth as he climbed to his feet with a grunt. He tramped heavily up to the top of the hill where Louisa stood, her hair blowing in the wind, in a notch between two monolithic boulders. She stepped back from the narrow notch, handing Prophet the spyglass.

The bounty hunter took another drag off his cigarette, rubbed it out with his boot, and raised the spyglass to his right eye, adjusting the telescopic focus. The notch offered a clear view of Juniper nestled in the broad, bowl-shaped valley with the creek running along the town’s north edge, through brush and trees.

What caught Prophet’s immediate attention, however, were the large, shaggy birds circling the town from about twenty or thirty feet in the air. What also got his attention was a distance-muffled gunshot carried by the damp, westerly breeze.

“What the hell?” he growled, again adjusting the focus for a better view of the town.

“Do you hear the shooting?”

“I hear it.” Prophet stared through the glass. “Might just be ole Hell-Bringin’ Hiram makin’ some vagrants dance. . . .”

He let his voice trail off as he focused on a gap between two false-fronted Main Street buildings, from their right flank because that was pretty much his angle on the town. What he saw in that gap were two or three men milling around, one swinging something high in the air. He couldn’t see what the man was throwing, but he could hear the muffled pistol report, sort of whipped and torn on the breeze.

“You see the buzzards?”

Prophet raised the spyglass to the birds winging in a shaggy circle over the main street, in the vicinity of the large, ornate opera house that sat like the jewel in the crown of the frontier town. Again adjusting the focus, Prophet picked out one bird, saw the broad black wings and ratty, streamer-like feathers, and the ugly bald head with the long, hooked beak.

“Buzzard, all right.”

“How’s that witch’s finger?”

“Been proddin’ me so regular I’ve sorta got used to the old bitch.” Prophet collapsed the spyglass and gave it back to Louisa. “You stay here. I’m gonna ride down and take a look.”

“Maybe you best wait till dark, Lou.”

“I’d best, but I’m ridin’ in.” Prophet strode quickly down the hill toward Mean and Ugly grazing a safe distance from the pinto. “Somethin’s damn peculiar.”

“Lou?”

He turned back to her standing with the cleft in the rocks behind her. “Miguel told me something about the sheriff and his father. He’d started out bad, and they threw him down a mine shaft to reconsider his evil ways.”

Prophet canted his head and narrowed an eye at her. “So I heard.”

“Don’t look like that, Lou. People can change.”

“Miss Bonnyventure, if you’re not careful, I’m gonna start to think you see me as a narrow-minded son of a bitch.”

He turned and continued down to Mean and Ugly, grabbed the reins, and swung into the saddle. His trail weariness was gone. Now he was anxious. Something told him he was about to find out why that witch had been rawhiding him.

“You stay here, now, hear?” he told the girl, slinging his shotgun over his shoulder so that the double-bore hung barrel up behind his back, the lanyard stretched taut across his broad chest.

“I don’t like taking orders.”

“You wouldn’t like being taken across my knee, neither, and I can still do that.” Prophet gigged Mean and Ugly toward the canyon’s south wall, where he’d be less conspicuous from town. “I’m just gonna take a quick peek, drift over to Hiram’s office, have a chat with the old hell bringer. If all’s well, I’ll be back for you inside an hour, say.”

“You come back if all’s
not
well, damn you.”

“Watch your mouth, girl.” Prophet put Mean into a lope, slanting across the hill a good ways down from the rocky crest. “I swear your tongue’s gettin’ as blue as mine.”

 

A ravine ran along the base of the southern ridge, shallower in some places than others. At the shallow spots, Prophet stepped down from the saddle and walked the horse, keeping his own head down and keeping a careful eye on the town, the southernmost shacks and corrals shifting around in the sage and cedars to his right.

Some came right down to the ravine—mostly the town’s first mining shacks, an old stamping mill, and several sets of Long Toms that had been abandoned when their owners pulled out or went looking for richer color farther downstream.

At one point he’d been so busy watching the town’s southern backside that he’d run into an old trash pile, his boots and Mean’s hooves raising a ruckus with the discarded food tins. He gritted his teeth, stopped, drove Mean to his knees, and took an extra-long gander at the town, spying nothing but one shapeless woman in a bright red scarf, hanging wash along the side of a small, tin-roofed cabin, a washtub in the yard nearby.

She was too busy with a heavy pair of men’s dungarees to notice Prophet. Likely she was trying to take advantage of a break in the weather to get some work in, but the way the clouds looked, low and brooding, her clothes were about to get a second soak.

Prophet pulled Mean back to his feet and continued along the draw, then followed a well-tramped cleft up out of it. He was taking a chance at being spotted here; he just hoped he wouldn’t be spotted by anyone not happy to see him.

Fifteen minutes later, having been seen by no one, because no one had been out and about but a few chickens and a free-roaming, claybank colt, he tied Mean to an old freight wagon grown up with sage and bromegrass between a small, silent, white-frame house and a lumberyard. The lumberyard was just as quiet as the house, which was strange for it being a weekday. You’d think someone would be backed up to the loading dock, buying boards or nails or roofing shingles.

Hell-Bringin’ Hiram’s office sat just beyond the lumberyard. Patting Mean’s butt, slinging the ten-gauge out in front of him, and taking a slow, cautious gander around this southern side street, Prophet stepped out of the alley mouth and, staying close to the lumberyard and keeping his hat brim low, began striding for the jailhouse.

There was a side shed attached to the lumberyard—an adobe-brick shack with a corrugated tin roof and a tin chimney pipe from which smoke lifted. The door of the shack opened as Prophet walked past.

He stopped, turned to see a stoop-shouldered old man in torn coveralls, red stocking cap, and with a pipe clamped in his teeth step outside. He lifted his head, and his eyes found Prophet.

He gave a startled grunt, gray eyes snapping wide, and, pulling the pipe from his teeth, stepped back inside the shack.

“Wait a minute,” Prophet rasped.

The plank door closed, the flour-sack curtains jostling in the rough-cut window that had a diagonal crack across it.

“What in holy hell is goin’ on around here?” Prophet grumbled, continuing forward, holding the barn blaster in his left hand and keeping his right hand clamped over the walnut grips of his low-slung Peacemaker.

He stepped down off a boardwalk, started across a narrow side street that was not much more than a wheelbarrow path, and stopped. He looked straight ahead, at the jailhouse on the corner about twenty feet in front of him. The old stone, shake-shingled office building had a front gallery, and on the gallery, a ragged figure slumped against the office’s front door.

A drunk.

Prophet started across the gap.

He stopped again when he saw the dark red blood and clothes hanging in swatches from the man’s twisted, battered limbs. He moved forward once more, leaping up onto the gallery and dropping to a knee over the man slumped back against the jailhouse door.

The gent was so beaten up, cut up, bruised, and bleeding, that it probably would have taken Prophet a while to figure out who he was if it hadn’t been for the six-pointed sheriff’s star dangling from Hell-Bringin’ Hiram Severin’s torn coat lapel.

“Good Christ, man,” Prophet said, lowering his head to stare into the man’s slack, downcast face. “What the hell happened to you?”

The swollen eyes remained shut. The lips were cracked and bleeding. There wasn’t a square inch of Severin’s rugged, mustached face that wasn’t gouged or scratched. Sand and cactus thorns clung to the dried blood.

That he’d been dragged belly down behind a horse was also evident by the fact of his brutally torn clothes, so that Prophet could see as much of the man’s torn longhandles and skin as his twenty-dollar suit.

Severin’s thin, sandy-gray hair hung like a screen over his forehead, obscuring his eyes.

Prophet placed a hand on the man’s chest. If there was a heartbeat, Prophet couldn’t detect it. Keeping his hand on the man’s chest, he leaned down to listen for a breath.

Suddenly, the body writhed, and an icy hand closed around Prophet’s wrist.

Prophet jerked with a start, pulling his head back and looking into Severin’s brown eyes set deep in purple sockets. The crazed eyes glared at Prophet with a killing fury, a rage that set the man’s entire near-dead body to quivering.

“Miguel!” he rasped, just loudly for Prophet to hear.

Prophet frowned.

Severin squeezed Prophet’s wrist tighter. It was like a death grip. The sheriff leaned up away from the door slightly, winced as a wave of agony swept through him, and swallowed.

“Kill him!”

“Miguel did this to you?”

“The whole town’s . . . gone back . . . to the hell . . . it came from!”

Prophet saw that the killing fire was fast leaving the sheriff’s eyes. He was dying. Prophet pulled his wrist free of the old law bringer’s dwindling grip and gripped Severin’s own. “Where, Hiram? Where will I find Miguel?”

Severin’s eyes closed. His chest fell still once more.

Prophet thought the man was truly dead now, but then his bloody lips moved, and a whisper sounded little louder than the flutter of a small bird’s wing. “Find . . . that actress. You’ll find him with her.” Severin nodded slightly, took a deep breath, and his eyelids fluttered though he didn’t seem able to open them.

Still, Prophet sensed the killing fury in the man’s words when he said even more softly, “Send him to hell, Proph. No . . . no questions asked. . . .”

All the muscles in his body slackened, and his head tipped to one side. His chin rolled off his shoulder, and then his shoulder slid sideways to the spur-scarred gallery floor.

Prophet stared down at the old law bringer’s slumped corpse. He rubbed the twelve-gauge and looked around at the empty side street on which the jailhouse sat. A fine mist slanted from a gunmetal sky, cloaking the pines on the steep southern ridge.

Faintly, Prophet heard wild laughter emanating from the main drag northeast of the sheriff’s office. The gunfire he’d heard from the ridge had died, but now there were two quick gunshots fired as though in anger.