Helldorado (30 page)

Prophet remained mounted while Louisa dropped to a knee and turned the girl onto her back. She wore only the sheer wrapper she’d worn before, and a long, men’s denim jacket. She’d been shot in the forehead from point-blank range, likely to get her out of the way when Sivvy’s gang had run the wagon to ground. There were no other bodies around, but there were plenty of hoofprints and spent cartridge casings along the trail.

Louisa eased the dead girl back against the ground, looked up at Prophet, and hardened her jaws. “Miguel’s mine, Lou.”

Prophet nodded. Just then a rifle snapped from ahead along the trail that curved across the top of the rocky pass before dropping into another valley farther on. Louisa jerked her head in the direction of the shot.

Several more sounded, echoing faintly.

Prophet shucked his own Winchester from its boot, cocked it one-handed, and set it across his saddlebows. “Let’s get after it. We’ll bury the girl later!”

Louisa leaped onto her mount with the quickness and ease of a wild-assed Indian brave, and they booted their mounts into instant, ground-eating gallops, spraying rocks and sand out behind them. Prophet hunkered low in his saddle and tipped his hat over his eyes.

They raced down the twisting trail, pines of the lower slopes pushing up around them. The rifle bursts grew louder. Just before they gained the broad valley at the bottom of the pass, Prophet began to hear men yelling above the thuds of Mean and Ugly’s hammering hooves.

The valley was broad and open, carpeted in tall, green grass, and there were several knolls scattered across the way. It was beyond one such knoll, on the trail’s right side, that the guns were blasting and men were shouting and hollering.

Louisa read the play the same way Prophet did, and they turned their horses off the trail at the same time, checked them down to skidding stops, leaped out of their saddles, and threw down their reins.

They ran up the side of the knoll, dropped to hands and knees several feet from the top, and crawled until, doffing their hats, they edged cautious looks over the crest of the low hill.

A log cabin hunkered about a hundred yards from the base of the knoll and quartering to Prophet’s right. Two bodies were slumped belly down in the grass at various distances from the cabin. Another hung out a side window, arms dangling down the front wall. The dead man’s hat lay in the grass beneath his bald head, and his rifle lay not far from the hat.

A creek sheathed in wolf willows meandered along to Prophet’s left, about forty yards from the front of the cabin and disappeared in a snaking, lime-green line against the far ridge.

Smoke puffed amongst the willows. A couple of hats bobbed there as well. Smoke also wafted from the cabin’s two front windows, the shutters of which were thrown back against the wall. Guns blazed bright red in the golden sunshine.

Bullets fired from the creek hammered the cabin with loud, resolute
whaps
! Slivers and doggets of wood flew away from the window casings. Return fire from the cabin cracked into the brush along the creek or spanged shrilly off rocks.

Men from both quarters screamed and yelled, cursing each other like sailors on competing, seagoing vessels.

“Hey, Miguel!” one man shouted, his resonant voice rising clearly above the din. “I’m gonna blow your right eye out with this next shot. I’m gonna blow your
left
eye out with the one after that!”

Someone in the cabin laughed.

Guns roared. In the willows, a girl shrieked shrilly and followed it up with an even shriller curse.

Prophet ran a gloved index finger across his lower lip. Sivvy.

“Miguel!” she bellowed. “I’m gonna kill you, you double-crossing snipe! And then I’m gonna take all your gold and fuck all these men out here
over your swollen, bleedin’ carcass
!”

She laughed loudly, maniacally, and the men in the willows laughed then, too, as they triggered one shot after another at the cabin.

“They could have each other pinned down for days,” Louisa said.

“Let’s flank the greedy sons o’ bitches, and put an end to this fandango once and for all.”

“Miguel’s in the cabin.” She favored Prophet with a hard, determined gaze.

“All right—take the cabin. I’ll sneak up behind Sivvy’s gang, and we’ll all say a little prayer together.” Prophet offered a grim smile. “Louisa?”

She looked at him, grass brushing against her smooth, tanned cheeks, hazel eyes clear with purpose.

“Try to take the bastard alive. I know he don’t deserve it, but . . .”

“I know, I know. You start playing judge and executioner, and everything just goes to hell in a handbasket.”

Prophet grinned. Louisa crabbed back down the knoll, then stood and ran crouching straight out toward the northern ridge to circle around behind the cabin.

“Be careful,” Prophet called after her. “There’s a lotta lead buzzin’ around over there!”

PROPHET WORKED HIS way slowly toward the southern ridge, keeping knolls and brush clumps between him and the two sets of shooters, so he wouldn’t be spotted by either those in the cabin or by Sivvy’s gang holed up along the creek.

When he got across the creek, nearly losing his boots in the muddy hummocks along the two-foot-wide span of gently flowing water, the willows gave him good cover as, following the creek, he made his way west toward the hammering fusillade.

When, judging by the pitch and volume of the rifle fire, he figured he was within thirty yards of Sivvy’s shooters, he got down on his hands and knees and crawled, wincing as several errant shots from the cabin thumped into the ground around him, pruning shrubs and throwing up mud.

He continued crawling, staying as low as he could. The willows parted before him.

Gradually, four figures showed through the shrub leaves and nimble branches—three men and a woman lying up along the creek’s opposite bank, shooting over the top of the bank toward the cabin. One man lay facedown in the creek, unmoving, blood glistening from bullet holes. Another lay back against the bank, his hat off, lifting his chin and wide-open eyes as if taking some sun on his face. His hands hung limp in his lap, and his Winchester was negligently cradled in one arm.

Blood dribbled from the bullet hole in the left side of his forehead. The other three men and Sivvy were sending empty cartridge casings rolling down the bank behind them, flinching occasionally when a slug slung from the cabin whistled around their heads. Prophet snaked his Winchester out before him, pressed his cheek against the stock.

“Hold it there, you privy snipes!”

He triggered a shot into the bank just left of the hip of the man beyond Sivvy. The hard case jerked and swung his head around so quickly that his hat fell off his head, and Charlie Sparrow looked furious.

Sivvy turned toward Prophet then, too, and the other two shooters followed suit. Only Sparrow had spotted Prophet in the brush; the others were jerking their heads around, trying to pick him out of the bending willows.

“All of ya drop those shootin’ irons or get ready to meet Ole Scratch at the smokin’ gates of perdition!”

Sivvy squinted her eyes as she cast her befuddled gaze somewhere just over Prophet’s right shoulder. “Lou?”

“You two, Miss O’Shay,” Prophet ordered. “Throw down that carbine and reach for a cloud. You don’t think I’d shoot you, but I will if I have to.”

Sivvy turned the corners of her mouth down. “Even after Dakota?”

“Dakota was a long goddamn time ago.”

“Lou,” she said, her eyes finally finding him in the brush just upstream from her and on the other side of the creek. “Imagine all that gold back there . . . split up five ways. We’d be millionaires—every one of us!”

“Forget that horseshit!” In the periphery of his vision, Prophet saw Sparrow jerk his rifle around. The cutthroat bellowed savagely as he racked a fresh cartridge into his Henry and leveled the barrel at Prophet.

Prophet triggered twice, showing no mercy for the crazy cutthroat. The first bullet slammed Sparrow’s head back while the second punched through his breastbone with a solid
whunk
, blowing up dust as it smashed the cutbank behind him.

Sivvy screamed.

Leaving her rifle on top of the bank and turning full around toward Prophet, she buried her head in her arms.

The other three men, on the opposite side of her from Charlie Sparrow, made their moves at the same time guns blasted inside the cabin. Levering and firing his leaping, roaring Winchester, Prophet dispatched all three of Sivvy’s men with only one getting off a shot that cracked through the willows above his head.

The middle man, wounded in the belly, dropped his rifle and scrambled to his feet, running toward Prophet and clawing a Smith & Wesson from one of his two low-slung holsters. Prophet’s last round left the gent blowing red bubbles facedown in the creek.

A man’s scream rose from the cabin. Two more shots from inside.

The bounty hunter climbed wearily to his feet, glancing toward the cabin. The gunfire had died there as it had here. The cabin sat eerily hunched and silent, the one dead man hanging out a side window.

Prophet looked at Sivvy. He lowered his empty Winchester and slipped his Colt Peacemaker from its holster. “Hold it, Miss O’Shay.” To him, she’d never be Sivvy Hallenbach again.

She’d slipped a double-bore derringer from a hiding place in the simple, purple dress she was wearing, with a white wool sweater covering her shoulders, and half boots with three-inch heels on her feet. “You might have at least considered the offer, Lou. For old time’s sake, anyways.”

“Put it down, Sivvy.”

“Oh, it’s not for you, silly.”

Prophet’s gut tightened as she gave a funny little mocking smile. He grimaced and closed his eyes when he saw her slip the popper’s barrel into her mouth.

He turned away as he heard the muffled explosion.

 

Reloading his Winchester from his cartridge belt, Prophet crossed the creek and moved through its ten-foot buffer of willows and into the clearing. The cabin was thirty yards away. Voices sounded from inside, and Prophet froze as Miguel Encina staggered into the doorway, holding his shoulder with the same hand he clutched a Remington revolver.

He winced, shouted, “Bitch!” at the tops of his lungs, and staggered out into the yard.

Prophet was nearly straight out in front of the young banker, but he didn’t appear to see the bounty hunter.

Louisa appeared in the doorway, boots spread wide across the threshold. Her face was hard beneath her hat brim, and one smoking Colt hung low in her right hand. Miguel dropped to his knees, twisted around, and screamed back at her, “We could’ve been rich, you simple-minded bitch! You and me—together and richer than you could ever dream about!”

“That’d be a rather tricky relationship, don’t you think?” Louisa said. “Seeing as how you’ve been trying to kill me—me and Lou—since we first rode into town.”

“I didn’t order that. Yeah, Big Dick Broadstreet worked for me, but him and his boys set up that ambush themselves. They must have recognized you, figured you’d be trouble and wanted to get you out of the way pronto.” Miguel stared at Louisa with false sincerity. “I was hoping we’d be together, Louisa. We still could be . . . if you killed him.”

Miguel looked at Prophet, hardening his gaze again.

Louisa clucked her disdain and moved out away from the cabin, striding purposefully, challengingly toward Miguel.

Prophet held his ground and didn’t say anything. He knew what would happen. Miguel screamed another enraged curse and raised his Remy.

Louisa didn’t let him get it half raised before she blew the top of his head off and left him jerking there in the sage, turning nearly a complete circle on his back, dust rising around him.

Louisa stared down at him. When the shaking stopped, she looked up at Prophet and blinked. She flicked open her Colt’s loading gate, shook out the spent shells, and replaced them with fresh.

“Anyone alive back there?” she asked.

Prophet was looking in the cabin in which Miguel’s men lay sprawled in pools of their own blood.

“What do you think?”

“Want to bury ’em?”

“I’m gonna bury Miss O’Shay. Not sure why—old-time’s sake, I reckon. Then we’ll go up and bury that girl and the gold. No point in takin’ it back to Juniper with no banker, no law around.” Prophet turned away from the cabin, lowered his Winchester, stretched his back. “Shit, I’m tired.”

“We just gonna leave Miguel and the others out here like this?”

Prophet kicked Miguel’s Remy away from his dead fingers. “I see no point in wastin’ time . . .”

“. . . Burying killers,” Louisa finished for him. “When the hawks and coyotes are right hungry.”

“There you go,” Prophet said and began tramping back toward the wagon.

 

The next morning, when Sivvy and the girl had been buried, Prophet and Louisa buried the gold well off the trail. They weren’t sure what to do with it yet, but they couldn’t return it to Juniper. Not with how wide-open the town had become in the past few days. Likely, they’d send a telegram to the mines it had come from, let the owners know where it was so they could dig it up and do with it what they would. It was theirs, after all.

Prophet mounted Mean and Ugly and looked around at the cabin sitting quiet in the morning’s golden, high-country sunshine.

“Well, what’s next?” Louisa said.

Prophet rubbed his chin, thoughtful. “How ’bout Denver?”

“What about Denver?”

“Have you been to Denver lately? It’s a right nice town. There’s churches there and folks’ livin’ peaceable, younkers goin’ to school. We could ride on in, get you some nice duds to wear, find you a nice—”

“Lou?”

Prophet looked at her.

“Shut up.”

Prophet glowered at her. “It ain’t nice, tellin’ a man to shut up who’s only lookin’ out for your purty little hide.”