Helldorado (3 page)

As the men ran off, some up the stairs, their sandals or bare feet slapping the floor, the barks of pistols sounding presently, echoing up and down the halls, Prophet dropped to a knee beside the girl. “You’re all right, senorita. No one’s gonna hurt you.
Comprende?
” He switched to his cow-pen Spanish, gesturing with his hands. “We’re here to set you free.”

The girl stared at him in awe, her brown eyes wide. Relief washed over her round features, and her thin lips shaped a shivering smile. “You are the one called Prophet!”

She grabbed his arm with both her small hands, digging her fingers in. “You have come like she said you would!”

“Who?” Prophet asked, unable to control his own excitement. Only one person could have told the girl about him. “Who said I would?”

The girl’s voice was nearly drowned by more gunfire inside the building, the shots echoing loudly with the screams and shouts of fighting, dying men. Prophet set his pistols on the floor and grabbed the girl’s shoulders, shaking her gently, unable to contain his own excitement.

Ever since he’d heard that Louisa had been taken, he’d been sure he’d find her ravaged body along the trail. Or worse, he’d never find her at all and he’d have to finish out his days, wondering what had happened to the beautiful, persnickety, young hazel-eyed blond—beautiful like a stalking panther, some would say, for there were few deadlier bounty killers than Louisa Bonaventure—who’d been born and raised in Nebraska Territory by a family she’d seen mercilessly butchered by cutthroats.

“Where, senorita?” Prophet pleaded with the girl. “Where is the
muchacha rubia
?”

She pointed up the stairs and prattled off Spanish too fast for Prophet to follow beyond gathering that Louisa was two flights of stairs up and on this side of the building. He stopped another of Big Tio’s men making his way into the foyer and ordered the man to give his serape to the girl and to stay with her until it was safe to take her out.

As the older, fatherly gent quickly lifted his serape over his head and knelt down beside the girl, Prophet holstered his pistols and hustled up the stone steps, breeching his shotgun and replacing the spent wads with fresh. He quickly checked out the second story, finding nothing but empty rooms, before heading up to the third, where, as he strode slowly along the dim hall, his ears sharply pricked, he saw a shadow move under a door.

The door was not latched, and as Prophet stopped in front of it, it moved slightly.

He stopped, squared his shoulders, and rammed his right boot against the heavy door. A man gave a cry as Prophet bolted into the room, his shotgun in one hand, a Colt in the other, and saw a scrawny, curly-headed, thick-mustached man wearing lieutenant’s bars on his grimy tunic stumbling back toward large windows. He tried to set his feet and aim the pistol in his hand, but Prophet shot him twice with the Colt.

As the lieutenant sagged down against the far wall, Prophet raked his gaze around the large, high-ceilinged room, seeing nothing but a few desks, near-empty book-cases, a Mexican flag jutting from a brass stand, and two empty gun racks.

A door showed in the room’s left wall, set deep in an arched doorway between two filing cabinets. Prophet punched the latch. It was locked.

He put his ear up to the heavy, tall door on which a wooden crucifix hung from a nail. He heard something behind the door, but he wasn’t able to tell exactly what.

He said, “Louisa?”

A groan.

Prophet bunched his lips and stepped straight back away from the door, aiming a pistol at the tarnished brass latch. The gun popped, blowing a quarter-sized hole through the lock. The door jerked and shuddered as it swung halfway open, and Prophet bolted inside, tossing the shotgun over his shoulder to hang from the lanyard down his back and raising both Colts while thumbing their hammers back.

He stopped and looked around at the large, cave-like room—at the opulent furnishings including a wagon-sized, canopied bed against the room’s far wall . . . and on which a blond girl lay on her back, her wrists and ankles tied to the bed’s four oak posters. The varnished wood glistened in the sunlight webbed with gold motes streaming through the heavy velvet drapes over the three large windows to Prophet’s right.

His heart kicked like a mustang in his chest.

Holding both Colts straight out in front of him, he moved ahead slowly. The smell of cigar smoke hung heavy in the still air. He could hear only intermittent shots and shouts on the other side of the building. Knowing he could very well be walking into a trap, he swung his gaze from left to right and back again but, seeing no one in the large room except for the naked blond tied spread-eagle upon the rumpled bed, he advanced.

Prophet stopped at the end of the bed and looked once more around the room that was all bright sunlight and shadows before returning his gaze to the girl. He climbed onto the bed and crawled up to straddle her hips, noting the scrapes and bruises on her long, pale legs. He set his guns down on each side of the girl, noting that her chest rose and fell faintly.

Tipping his head over her chest, he was grateful to hear a heartbeat, albeit a faint one.

“Louisa.” His voice was low and thick with restrained emotion. “Jesus, girl, what in the hell’d that old bastard do to you?”

He choked back a sob as he inspected her face—her beautiful angel’s face that was now puffed and bruised, eyes swollen shut, the rich full lips cracked, her cheeks torn from the slaps of powerful, be-ringed hands. Louisa’s breasts were red mottled, chafed. There were even knuckle-shaped bruises on her flat belly, and on her hips were what could only be cigar burns.

Prophet reached up to pull his big bowie knife from the sheath tethered behind his neck and cut the girl’s right wrist free of the poster.

“It’s okay, Louisa. You’re gonna be all right. Ole Lou’s here, and he’s gonna get you outta here.”

He reached over to free the girl’s other wrist and stopped. He’d heard something. Looking around quickly, he saw a cigar smoldering in a stone ashtray on a table beside the bed, near a half-filled glass of clear liquid—probably tequila. His gaze continued roaming and stopped on the heavy drapes over the windows. They were billowing ever-so-slightly.

Might only be the breeze through the window, but . . .

Prophet’s eyes dropped to the floor beneath the moving drapes and bored angrily into two pale, bare, bunion-gnarled feet that appeared between the drapes and the floor.

Prophet hardened his jaw and, scooping up both Colts from beside Louisa, stepped down from the bed.

PROPHET RATCHETED BACK the Colts’ hammers and held them out before him as he crossed the room and stopped six feet away from the drapes. He looked down at the bare feet. They hadn’t moved since he’d first spied them from the bed, and for a moment he wondered if they weren’t part of some ugly stone statue.

The velvet drapes moved again slightly, as though a round paunch was pushing against them from the other side.

Suddenly, one of the feet moved, and a voice snarled as a bare arm shoved the drapes back to reveal a naked man with a large, bulbous belly and long, birdlike, blue-veined legs lunging toward Prophet with a pearl-gripped knife raised high in his right hand.

His silver-streaked hair was thin, his face hawkish, with eyes so deep-set it was impossible to tell their color. He reeked of smoke and tequila and sweat, and as he lunged toward Prophet, whipping the knife toward Prophet’s neck, the bounty hunter triggered both pistols.

The booms thundered in the close quarters, the maws flashing brightly.

The naked man—it had to be Major Montoya himself, who always kept the prettiest of his prisoners for his own sick pleasure—jerked back against the drapes and the wall flanking them, between the two tall windows. Squeezing his eyes closed and sucking a sharp breath through gritted, yellow teeth, he twisted around, dropping the knife and clamping his hands over the twin bullet holes in his belly, just above his pale, limp pecker.

He dropped to his knees, threw his head back, and loosed a tooth-gnashing scream. When the scream’s echoes had died, his wide, pain-racked eyes raked Prophet venomously. “Who are you, gringo bastard? And what are you doing in my private quarters—you who have the manners of a back-street cur!”

Prophet would have loved to keep the man alive for a while, to let him die slowly as his blood and guts leaked out on the polished flagstones around his bony, white knees. But he had Louisa to tend to.

“Love to stay an’ chat, but I gotta run, Major. Suffice it to say that girl over there’s a real good friend of mine. So when you see El Diablo, which you’re about to do in about three seconds, tell him his old friend Prophet said to crank the furnace up.”

The major’s eyes opened wider, as did his mouth, but Prophet rendered the man’s scream stillborn by drilling two .45 slugs through each temple, hammering him back into the wall behind him with a sharp thud and a then a groan of the man’s released final breath.

As he hit the floor, he gave a loud fart, and kicked his spindly legs wildly. Prophet holstered his pistols and hurried back to the bed, where he cut Louisa free of the other posters, wrapped her up in a blanket, and picked her up in his arms.

“You with me, girl?” he said, turning toward the door he’d blown open. “Stay with me, all right? Wouldn’t hurt if you said somethin’ or opened your eyes a little, let ole Lou know you know I’m here.”

As Prophet passed through the door, Louisa gave a groan. Her eyes fluttered, and she rolled her head toward him, burying her face in his bicep.

“Good enough,” Prophet said as he moved through the office toward the dim hall beyond. “That’s good enough for now.”

He found his way to the door through which he’d entered the building and stood blinking in the sunlight at the top of the steps. Two covered wagons had been driven into the yard and stopped amongst several Rurales lying dead in the dirt.

Big Tio’s revolutionarios were scurrying about the wagons with the group of young girls standing nearby, sobbing and shading their eyes against the sunshine. Just led up from the dungeons in the prison bowels, they all looked disheveled in their sackcloth dresses, their hair hanging limp and lusterless. Several showed bruises on their young, pretty faces and on their bare legs. That some had been forced to walk from where they’d been captured was evident by their bloody, swollen feet.

The revolutionarios in the yard were led by Big Tio’s daughter, Chela. The scrappy, hot-blooded Mexican woman would have passed for one of the men in her peasant garb—red calico blouse, red neckerchief, baggy duck trousers, and rope-soled sandals—if not for her nicely curved hips and the two swollen mounds pushing out from behind her billowing blouse. She was directing several men to carry the released girls up into the wagons as she gave each a cursory inspection for injuries.

The youngest was a little, round-faced, black-haired girl of eight or nine, and this one Chela picked up in her arms, cooing to the child as she led one of the revolutionarios with another child in tow to the second wagon around which the wind lifted a tan-colored dust cloud.

Meanwhile, Big Tio was directing a small contingent of his men to haul the Gatling gun down out of the guard tower he’d occupied. The big man, corpulently regal with his gray beard, deerskin leggings, and red sash, shouted Spanish epithets while pointing up at the tower, where three men were rigging the gun with ropes. One, a square-faced gent called Benito, gave back the old revolutionario as good as he was giving, pointing and grunting curses.

Prophet carried Louisa down the steps and over the dead Rurale at the bottom. Hearing hoof clomps, he turned to see a string of saddle horses being led through the open gates by one of the peasant boys, Ramon. Only ten years old, Ramon was as good with horses as any full-grown man Prophet had ever known.

The bounty hunter moved past the small group of battered, terrified senoritas toward his own horse, which Ramon was leading directly behind him on a short lead line, as the lineback dun, whom Prophet had appropriately named Mean and Ugly, did not get along with others. In fact, he’d fight like a grizzly at the challenging roll of another horse’s eye. And if there were mares in the remuda, things could get dusty and bloody rather quickly.

“Where you going, Lou?”

Prophet stopped and turned around. Chela stood behind him. She’d placed the girl in the wagon, and her arms were free. She looked at Prophet now through big, brown eyes that were slightly almond-shaped in a flat, mestizo-featured face that owned the sizzling, exotic beauty of the untamed.

“She’ll ride with me.”

Chela jerked her head toward the wagon. “Put her in there with the others.”

Prophet held Louisa more tightly against him, reluctant to let her go. He’d journeyed a long way for her, traveling countless miles all the while thinking she might be dead. He’d burned with that hollowed-out feeling of a loss you knew could never be made up again. Not if you lived a thousand more years.

“No.” Prophet looked down at the battered blond in his arms and shook his head. “Gonna put her on my horse.”

Chela moved toward him, her red bandanna fluttering about her long, brown neck, and glanced between Prophet’s face and Louisa’s. “She’s special, yes?”

“We rode some hard trails together.”

“Then you want the best for her.”

Prophet sighed. He knew Chela was right. He just didn’t want to take his hands off Louisa’s warm, reassuring form.

The young Mexican woman’s rich lips quirked an understanding smile. “She’ll be better off in the wagon, with me and the other girls. In her condition, she does not belong on a horse.”

She snaked her arms under Louisa. Prophet found himself resisting, keeping his own arms wrapped tightly around Louisa’s sheet-wrapped figure. Finally, he let her go.