Helldorado (29 page)

“Well, well,” he said, kicking a chair out of his way and sauntering toward Prophet’s table. “Look what the old bobcat dragged in outta the storm!”

As the cutthroat moved between tables, kicking more chairs out of his way, his right hand dropped to subtly free the keeper thong from the heavy Remington jutting from the holster tied low on his right thigh. He swept a hand across his long nose and stopped three feet in front of Prophet, hooking his thumbs behind his cartridge belt.

“Well, if it ain’t my ole friend Charlie Sparrow,” Prophet said with false friendliness, glancing at Louisa who glowered across the table at the man.

“I don’t know what you’re here for, Prophet, but if it’s me, you can go take a running jump down a privy hole.”

“I thought you was doin’ time in New Mexico.”

“Pshaw! I did two weeks in the Jicarilla pen you took me to, and when they was sendin’ me to the federal pen for killin’ them two circuit judges—the ones that hanged my brothers—I broke out of their damn jail wagon. After killin’ the guards, I mean.”

He smiled, and his eyes became as slanted as those of the little Chinese girl scampering over from the bar with a bottle and a shot glass and sliding apprehensive looks between Prophet and the killer Charlie Sparrow. “That was two years ago. I hear there’s a reward on my head. But I tell you, Lou, whatever it is, it ain’t enough.”

He leaned forward, planting his big, brown fists on the table and glancing down at the barn blaster lying in front of Prophet’s empty shot glass.

Prophet entwined his hands behind his head, and smiled. “If there’s a reward on your worthless carcass, Charlie, I’ll likely collect it one of these days. For now, though, you’re no more interestin’ to me than that pile of dog plop on the porch step out yonder. I’m here for your boss, Miss Gleneanne O’Shay and her double-crossing cohort, Miguel Encina. I got the actress all bound up in her room over at the Golden Slipper, but it appears Miguel’s lit off for sundry points west and south.”

Charlie Sparrow chuckled as he picked up his bottle and shot glass. The girl, seeing that she wasn’t wanted at the moment, straddled a near chair backward and watched the three with vague fascination, her chin resting atop her chair back.

“What the hell’re you talkin’ about, Proph? We got it all sewed up here. More gold than . . .” Sparrow frowned as Prophet’s words started sinking in. He filled his glass only halfway, then let the bottle hang down at his side.

“What you mean you got Miss Gleneanne bound up in . . . ?” The lines above the killer’s nose cut deep as stab wounds. “Double cross?” Sparrow’s face turned red as sandstone bricks at sunset, and his eyes got darker. “What’re you talkin’ about, you bounty-huntin’ scalawag? What kind a trick you tryin’ to pull?”

“Encina’s the one pullin’ the trick. Or was that part of the plan—him and his six pards gunnin’ down Hitt and the other gold guards in the bank, then lightin’ out in this crazy weather with the gold?”

When Sparrow just stared at them, eyes mantled by his bushy black brows, Louisa said, “I think they mentioned Mexico and South America—didn’t they, Lou?”

“I believe you’re right, Miss Bonnyventure—they did mention Old Mejico and South America. Prob’ly real hard to track ’em down there. Since you and your own pards, Charlie, would be gettin’ such a late start and all. And with all this rain. Hell, them wagon tracks’ll be done washed away in another ten, fifteen minutes. If they ain’t already.”

Slowly, Sparrow raised his arm, pointing an accusing finger at Prophet. “If this is a trick . . .”

“Oh, it’s a trick, all right,” Louisa said. “But we ain’t the ones pulling it.”

Still extending his arm at Prophet, Sparrow backed up to the foot of the stairs, then wheeled, clomping up to the second story three steps at a time, the risers leaping beneath his hammering boots. Upstairs, he started pounding on doors and yelling. Girls started screaming. Prophet and Louisa sat back in their chairs in quiet contentment, listening to Sparrow’s cohorts arguing as they stumbled around, dressing.

Meanwhile, the rain streaked the Spade Bit’s front windows, and thunder rumbled angrily, shaking the hanging coal oil lamps, sharp lightning flashing.

The little Chinese whore—who couldn’t have been much over twelve, if that—glanced at the Chinaman who’d retaken his place behind the bar, repacking his pipe from a small, delicately carved box.

The girl glanced at the ceiling. The Chinaman shrugged and told her something in their strange tongue, and then she slid off the chair, grabbed a hide coat hanging off a peg near the bottom of the stairs, and disappeared through a curtained doorway.

The din above their heads became concentrated at the top of the stairs—men shouting and clomping and doors slamming—and then they started bounding down the stairs. They came so fast and with so much fury, some still dressing or wrapping shell belts around their waists, that the rickety stairs looked like a swaying and jostling rope bridge over a wide canyon.

Prophet was sure it would give way, but he was wrong. They all made it, a blond at the top of the stairs yelling, “You said you was gonna give me an extra cartwheel for them French lessons, Rigsby, you bastard!”

Five cutthroats hustled out into the storm.

The sixth, Charlie Sparrow, stopped suddenly halfway across the room and turned to Prophet. “Why didn’t you go after that gold your own self?”

“Why should I?” Prophet said. “When I got someone around as capable as you to run it down for me?”

Spreading his feet, Sparrow switched his Henry rifle to his left hand and held his right hand over his Remy’s grips, curling his upper lip with menace.

“I oughta kill you now, you son of a bitch.”

Prophet was lounging back in his chair, enjoying the show, a boot hiked on a knee. “You best not try it, Charlie.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause my partner has her twin Colts cocked beneath the table, each aimed at one of your oysters.”

Sparrow slid his skeptical glance to Louisa.

The table jumped with each concussion, which sounded like cannon blasts in the close quarters.

Sparrow leaped back with a yelp. He looked down at his crotch.

Each of the .45 rounds had torn a small swatch of tobacco-brown tweed from the upper inside of Sparrow’s thighs, about two inches south of soprano country, so that Sparrow’s red longhandles shone through the holes.

Terror flashed in Sparrow’s eyes as he looked up at Louisa, who re-cocked her Colts under the table with loud, ratcheting clicks. Smoke billowed out from the table’s edge.

Lower jaw hanging anxiously, Sparrow raised his right hand in supplication above his holstered Remington. With his other hand, he held his rifle far out to his left as he sidestepped around Prophet’s and Louisa’s table as though around an unsprung bear trap and stumbled backward out the saloon’s double doors.

Thunder crashed.

“Some other time, you son of a bitch!”

Sparrow’s boots thumped across the veranda, and he was gone.

PROPHET SAW NO reason to hurry after the cutthroats.

It would take Charlie Sparrow’s drunken crew a couple of hours to catch up to Encina’s bunch. And when they did run them down there was bound to be a prolonged lead storm, cutthroat shooting cutthroat in the dark of a rainy Wyoming night.

Sparrow’s bunch might not even light onto Encina’s until morning. Hell, it could be another twenty-four hours before Prophet and Louisa’s dirty work had been done for them, at least done enough for the bounty hunters to swoop in and finish off whomever was left, if anyone, and to fetch the gold wagon back to Juniper, with relative ease.

So Prophet and Louisa spent a leisurely evening in Juniper, mingling with the dozen or so hard cases who’d been haunting the nearby hills and flocked to the town like vultures when word had spread that Hell-Bringin’ Hiram was out of commission. Playing poker in one of the saloons around ten o’clock that night, Prophet thought he recognized at least four of the visages around him—playing faro or stud or sparking the doves—from wanted dodgers he’d seen posted outside Wells Fargo offices over the past year.

Encina’s cutthroats might have pulled their picket pins from Juniper, but the town still had a raggedy-edged, wild air due in no small part to the lawmen who’d been left to molder in the mud of the town’s main drag. Prophet and Louisa were about to risk drawing unwanted attention to themselves by dragging the carcasses over to the undertaker’s when they saw the undertaker himself loading Jose Encina and the deputies into a wagon—after picking their pockets and piling their guns and other valuables under the driver’s seat of his old buckboard.

Give the town another week or so, Prophet thought as he watched the buckboard head for the sheriff’s office—likely intending to fetch the body of Hell-Bringin’ Hiram himself—and pulling Juniper back out of the jaws of Helldorado would be one hell of a feat. Even the bona fide businessmen who now ventured from their shops and houses and back into the saloons seemed to have acquired a shiny-eyed, devil-may-care air as they laughed a little louder than they might have a few days ago when out on the town. They gambled with a little more daring and acted a little more brash with the painted ladies than the old town tamer, not to mention their wives, would have approved of.

The storm continued throughout the night, the thunder occasionally drowning out the intermittent bursts of gunfire issuing from the saloons, as well as the shouts and screams of the all-night revelers.

Just before heading to bed at the Muleskinner’s Inn, Prophet thought of Sivvy. He’d left her bound and gagged at the Golden Slipper. Forget her, he told himself. She’d probably spit the gag out by now, and a night tied to the bed would do her good. He’d throw her sorry hide in Severin’s jail come morning and hire a local odd-job-Joe to toss her feed and water now and then.

Prophet woke the next morning at dawn with Louisa virtually sprawled on top of him.

She’d had one of her bad dreams during the night—one of the dreams in which she relived her family’s horrific demise at the hands of the Handsome Dave Duvall gang—and when she had one of those she couldn’t get close enough to Prophet, it seemed.

He’d soothed her, made slow, gentle love to her, and hummed a little song he remembered from the north Georgia mountains until she’d fallen into a peaceful slumber. But she must have had another bad dream afterward, he thought now as he eased her willowy, warm, naked body onto the bed beside him.

She groaned and buried a cheek in her pillow.

Prophet leaned down and kissed the pale half-moon of a tender breast bulging slightly out from her side, then spanked her bare rump through the sheet. “Come on, you oyster-shootin’ pistolera. We gotta fetch us some gold.”

When he’d finished dressing, she turned onto her back to show him those wonderful breasts, and he had to clamp his jaws against his lust.

“I’ll meet you at the livery barn in a half hour,” he said, donning his ragged hat and turning away from her with effort.

Louisa looked around groggily. “Where you going, Lou?”

“Gonna haul my friend Sivvy over to the hoosegow.”

He went out and tramped through the soggy, dawn street that was as quiet as a graveyard over to the Golden Slipper. He opened Sivvy’s door, turned to the bed, and cursed. She and the gold bar were gone, leaving a rumpled bed covered with frilly women’s undergarments.

A voice echoed from downstairs: “Are you looking for Miss O’Shay?”

Prophet stepped into the hall, peered over the balcony rail and down into the lobby at the pale, mustached face of the gent who ran the place staring up at him. “Where the hell is she?”

“I turned her loose, of course. What was I supposed to do—leave a naked girl tied to her bed all night, screaming?”

“I could think of worse ways to spend a rainy evenin’,” Prophet quipped in spite of his frustration. “When you’d turn that little ringtail loose?”

“Heavens,” the man said. “Early last night. She was screaming so loud I thought she would shatter my chandeliers!”

Prophet snorted another curse, but it was his own fault. He should have tracked down whoever had been manning the joint yesterday and told him to leave the actress where she was. Or hauled her over to the hoosegow pronto. But it had been hard to decide what to do with her at the time, in the eye of the outlaw storm. Something in him had recoiled against the idea of throwing his old pal Sivvy into a stony, dark cell.

He could do it now, however, having mulled over all she’d done, her part in so many killings.

Prophet tramped down to the lobby, his double-bore coach gun swinging from its lanyard against his back. “You know where she went?”

“I am not her keeper, sir!”

Prophet growled and went out into the still-quiet street and tramped through the mud and the fresh, cool, post-storm air—the sun hadn’t yet risen over the mountains, but it looked to be a clear day—and over to the livery barn where he and Louisa had stabled their horses.

 

Two hours west of Helldorado, Prophet and Louisa found the wagon on the backside of a steep mountain pass.

It had been ridden off the right side of the trail, into rocks and stubby cedars, and it was turned over on one side. The mules had wrenched free of their hitch, gone.

The canvas sheeting had been torn off the ash bows; it lay like a blown-down tent in the rocks and brush, and the gold ingots that had apparently been riding free in the box were sprawled across it like jewels spilled from heaven. The lockbox was there, too, still chained and padlocked but hanging precariously over a steep cutbank.

Prophet and Louisa both saw the body at the same time. It lay just beyond the wagon. At least, it looked like a body.

As they spurred their horses ahead and held up beside the trail, and Louisa leaped down and dropped her reins and jogged into the brush and rocks, it was clear that the girl Miguel had had sitting on his lap in the bank had reached the end of her trail.