Hell's Angel (11 page)

11

PROPHET STARED UP
at the bare-breasted woman standing before him, her face in her hands, sobbing. Her breasts jostled as she cried, the small, gold locket jerking at the top of her cleavage.

Slowly, he rose from the soapy water, grabbed a towel off the bed, and wrapped it around his waist. He climbed out of the tub, and walked over to her, his chest and arms and even his hair dry now in the dry desert air.

He stood before her, looking down at her, and then very slowly lifted the straps of her dress up over her shoulders. She lowered her hands and looked at him, puzzled, tears streaking her cheeks. She looked down at her breasts that were mostly covered now, the dollar-sized nipple of one exposed by the unbuttoned corset. Gazing up at him again, the skin above the bridge of her nose deeply creased, she said, “You think I'm a harlot.”

Prophet shook his head. “No, but you would, if I took what you offered. And I ain't an assassin for hire.”

“What about all that I told you?”

“Oh, he deserves to be kicked out with a shovel, I'll give him that. But if I kill him, I'll kill him for me.” Prophet shook his head. “I won't saddle you with that. You're in a bad place, but I got a feelin' I could handle killin' a man a whole lot better than you would. I'm a bounty hunter, Mrs. Rose. I do it for a livin'.”

Her half-covered breasts rose and fell as she breathed, staring at him, her lips parted, the flush still in her cheeks. Her eyes held his, and as she continued to breathe heavily, he said, “What about your husband . . . ?”

She reached down for one of his hands, lifted it to her right breast, used it to slide the corset open, and pressed it over her nipple. “You can't betray a dead man, Mr. Prophet.”

She pressed his hand to her breast. The nipple came alive against his palm. With his other hand, he removed the towel from around his waist. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pressed his lips to hers. They were warm and open, welcoming and pliant.

* * *

A couple of hours later, she lay tight against him, her head on his chest. Outside, he could hear wild laughter beneath the strains of what sounded like a four-piece band. Women screeched and men guffawed. Infrequently, a pistol barked flatly. A dog barked intermittently.

Hooves clomped past the Rose Hotel and Saloon. There were occasional shouts of anger but mostly everything seemed friendly, albeit raucously so, over at Moon's House of a Thousand Delights.

During the infrequent lulls in the party, Prophet could hear coyotes yammering in the hills around the town.

“They're havin' a good time over there,” he said, waking from a brief doze and lightly running his fingers across Ruth Rose's bare back.

He felt the warm moistness of her lips on his chest. She groaned luxuriously. “Soon they'll be having even more fun, when the fresh batch of girls rolls in.”

Prophet frowned.

Ruth said, “I don't know where he gets them, but every so often a wagon rolls in. A jail wagon with anywhere from five to ten young women in it. It's escorted by soldiers, if you can believe that.” Ruth chuckled darkly and raked his chest very lightly with her thumbnail. “I've been here for three years now, Lou, and there's nothing I won't believe anymore. Especially where the dwarf is concerned.”

“You mean he buys slave girls for his place?”

“That's how I figure it. Of course, I haven't heard. No one around town talks much about the dwarf's activities. We're all pretty well cowed by the little fellow and his tough nuts. Besides, he brings business to Moon's Well. Men come from all over to visit his place. Sometimes the freight trains stop over for three or four days.”

“Slave tradin's illegal.”

She only laughed at that.

“Soldiers bring the girls in?”

“Uh-huh.”

Prophet chuckled without mirth. “What a perdition you got here, Ruth.”

“Oh, yes.”

Prophet slid her hair back from her cheek. “Ruth, what happened to that Ranger I brought into town with the Rio Bravo Kid?”

She rose up a little, the locket hanging down between her sloping, freckled breasts to dangle against his chest. “You don't really want to know, Lou. What I said before, about you killing Moon? Forget it. It was just that . . . watching you out there, how badly you cowed him . . .”

“What happened?”

“Like you, they refused to pay for water.”

“They?”

“There were two. The one you found ran after the dwarf shot him. They probably tossed the other into a nearby ravine. That's probably what the coyotes are singing about.”

Prophet lay back against the pillow and considered that. The little man was not only evil but crazy, to mess with the Texas Rangers.

“What if others come, looking for the first two?” he said, thinking out loud.

“Men disappear out here all the time, Lou,” Ruth said, rolling off of him and dropping her legs to the floor. Walking over to the dresser, she said, “He has a chokehold on this town, and enough men to keep it good and tight.”

She splashed whiskey into the glasses on the dresser, and came back and offered one to Prophet. He took it and looked at her, her hair mussed and wild in the soft light of the lantern flickering on the dresser.

He touched her hair, brushed his fingers across her shoulders.

“How often does he pester you to go to work for him?”

“Every time he sees me he just laughs in his seedy way to remind me,” she said, giving a little shudder of revulsion. “He could force me, of course, but he likes terrorizing me, making it my decision. Having to think about what it would be like with him and the others.”

Prophet lowered his hand from her shoulder. She grabbed it with both of hers and kissed it.

Holding it taut against her cheek, she continued in a sad, bleak tone, “I've been able to make enough money serving food to the occasional few who make their way over here, and to Moon's overflow. But I'm just barely making it. I would, however, put a gun to Frank's head and then to mine before I'd walk over to that demon's place and throw myself on his mercy.”

Prophet's mind was reeling from all he'd learned of the dwarf's depredations here in the town he'd named after himself. A dark voice told him, however, that there was much more to learn.

Ruth looked at him, and her eyes brightened in alarm.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Please forget about what I said earlier. About you killing him. You can't. He has a dozen gunmen working for him—his old gang from his outlaw days. And the girl. You mustn't try. I was drunk and feeling lonely and helpless. I don't want you to die. I want you to ride out of here tomorrow and not look back.”

Prophet was incredulous. “A
dozen
men?”

“Yes!”

“How does a little rooster like that manage to rule such a large roost? Why any one of 'em could stick a boot so far up his . . .”

Ruth shook her head, genuinely befuddled. “I reckon some men have an air about them. Despite their size. With just a look, they can command others, hold others, hard men like those who ride for Moon, sort of how a snake holds a rabbit with its gaze.”

“Mesmerized 'em,” Prophet said, thoughtful, then adding with a hard edge, “Well, he didn't mesmerize this old jackrabbit buck.”

“Apparently he's got quite a grip on Miss May.”

“May?”

“The girl with him. Griselda May. The one who goes around sneering and twirling those little pistols on her fingers. Apparently, she's plumb gone for that wretched demon. Her soul is as black as his is.”

“That's even harder to swallow.” Prophet remembered the girl from the hotel steps. She'd been no raving beauty, but she'd been young and sexy in a crude sort of way, and he couldn't imagine her genuinely finding Mordecai Moon attractive.

Ruth was studying him. She sandwiched his hand in both of hers, drew it to the deep valley between her breasts. “Please?”

Prophet continued to stare up at this pretty, lonely woman so terrorized by a merciless hard case in a town she was trapped in. But he was a bounty hunter, not a lawman. And even if he were a lawman, his going up solo against the dwarf and his men would be certain suicide. He'd likely end up in the same ravine as those two Rangers.

His death would accomplish nothing.

Prophet sipped his drink. “I reckon,” he said without conviction and took another sip of the whiskey.

She leaned forward and kissed him. “Thank you for tonight.”

“Ah, hell,” he said, his ears warming in embarrassment.

“No, you gave me a gift. It's been . . . lonely.”

“No regrets?”

She smiled and shook her head. Rising from the bed, she walked over and picked her dress up off the floor. “I'd best check on Frank and stoke the range. Some of the business from Moon's place might be heading over here soon, and they might be hungry.”

“I can get you out of here.” Prophet had said it before he'd even thought it through. “You and Frank—I can get you out of this town. That much I can do.”

She held her dress against her breasts, and she looked beautiful standing there in the lantern light, in front of the door. Her brown eyes sparkled as she furrowed her brows.

She appeared to be on the verge of both sobbing and smiling at the same time. “No.” She shook her head. “Don't be silly, Lou.” She paused, staring at him, considering it. “How could you?”

“I'd have to leave here first. Just me. I can go up to Alpine, enlist a passel of Rangers. We'll bring a wagon, park north of town a ways, and then slip in here and fetch you and Frank under cover of darkness. Give me a week, maybe two. Likely, it'll take that long for Moon to forget about the man who drilled that hole in his hat.”

Ruth stared at him, fear creeping into her gaze now as she considered the possibility.

“Of course, you'd be losing everything,” he said. “You'd have to start over.”

“I've already lost everything.”

“Let's give it a try, then. Like I said, give me a week, two at the most, and I'll—”

Rising voices cut him off. Beyond the open window, he could hear foot thuds and the ring of spurs.

“They're coming,” she said, looking at the window. “The dwarf must have run out of rooms. I'd better go.” She came over and kissed him and then pulled away.

He clutched her shoulders as the voices and the spur chings grew louder. “All right?”

She looked nervous, but she smiled. “All right, yes.”

Still clutching her dress to her breasts, she hurried to the door.

“You need help down there, splittin' wood or anything?” he asked.

“No, you stay here, out of sight.” She opened the door. Downstairs, someone was pounding on the saloon's front doors. She looked back at Prophet. “Thank you, Lou.”

She gave him another nervous but hopeful half smile, and then went out and drew the door closed behind her.

* * *

Prophet rose just after dawn the next morning. He dressed quietly in his room, in no hurry. The mercantile where he'd buy a canteen likely didn't open until after sunrise.

With his saddlebags draped over his left shoulder, his Winchester on his right shoulder, shotgun hanging down his back, he stole quietly downstairs and outside to the small barn of vertical pine planks behind the saloon.

Mean and Ugly was happy to see him. The horse tossed his head a few times in greeting before dipping his snout in an oat bucket. When Prophet had tended the horse and saddled him, he led him outside and around to the front of the saloon, where he paused to let the sun climb a little higher over the Del Carmens in the southeast.

He sat on the edge of the Rose's porch, building a smoke.

He fired the quirley and was smoking it leisurely when one of the bull trains that had pulled into Moon's Well last night came up from the barn and corral behind the dwarf's place. The four big wagons with tarp-covered boxes churned the dust in the street in front of Prophet as the bleary-eyed, scowling teamsters wearing broad sombreros and colorful bandannas up over their noses, continued their journey south toward Mexico.

A white, black-speckled dog was loping into town from the south, tongue drooping as though it were thoroughly exhausted from its nightlong hunt in the ravines and washes. It stepped off the trail to watch the teams pass, a malicious glint in its eyes. It lunged at one of the turning wheels and then leaped back off the trail, just beyond the lash of a driver's blacksnake, and gave the last cabin-sized, double-axle Burnside freight wagon a couple of parting barks.

The dog continued on to the Rose Hotel and Saloon where it let Prophet scratch its ears, groaning and swatting at its shoulder with a hind leg. It gave Mean and Ugly a perfunctory growl before continuing on up the street for a nap under a boardwalk.

Prophet had smoked the quirley halfway down when he started hearing voices around the town, some rising from the direction of the dwarf's place. The mercantile was two buildings down from Moon's House of a Thousand Delights, a man in a long, green apron sweeping the loading dock. Prophet took one more drag from the quirley and had dropped it in the dust when the hotel's front door opened.

Ruth stepped out, her hair down, squinting against the intensifying light. She wore a powder-blue robe and deerskin slippers. She'd just gotten up.

“Lou? What are you doing out here?”

“Waitin' for the mercantile to open, which it looks like it just did.” Prophet grabbed Mean's reins from the hitch rail.

“Hold on,” Ruth said. “I'll get dressed and fetch the canteen for you.”

“You don't need to fetch no canteen for me,” Prophet said with a dry chuckle.

She gave him a look of reprimand, shaking her head. “Lou, no.”

“I've always bought my own canteens in the past, always fetched my own water.” Prophet swung into the leather. “Don't see no reason under the sun to let you do it for me now.”