Hell's Angel (25 page)

33

GUNS BLASTED TO
Prophet's left, bullets screaming around his head and tearing into the wall at the end of the hall on his left. He fired his pistol twice from his hip just before ramming his shoulder into the door of the room opposite the dwarf's.

The door burst open and slammed against the wall with a bang that was nearly drowned by the blasts and shouts from the direction of the stairs.

The naked girl on the bed screamed. The man who'd been pumping away on top of her turned toward Prophet and shouted,
“What in the name of . . . ?”

“Don't mind me!” Prophet leaped onto the bed, took one step, and leaped to the floor on the other side.

He looked out the open window and nearly sobbed at his good luck. A shake-shingled roof slanted just below him. Making a mental note to stop getting himself run out of hotels, he wheeled, saw several men scurrying around the room's open door, and fired three quick rounds to hold them at bay.

The girl screamed. Her jake cursed him roundly.

Prophet leaped onto the window casing and without a second thought, sent himself hurling straight down toward the roof below. This roof was considerably sturdier than the last one he'd piled up on, the one in San Simon, with Ramonna screaming and Campa cussing and firing from above. Prophet did not bust through this roof, though judging by the sound, he cracked a few shingles as he landed feetfirst.

He rolled over the edge and saw the charcoal-colored ground come up fast before it smashed into his head and shoulders. He grunted loudly, stretching his lips back from his teeth and rolling onto his side and clutching his right shoulder with his left hand.

“Shit!”

Above, men shouted. Pistols popped. He was shielded by the roof, and the bullets plunked into the shingles, flinging slivers. Prophet stared up at the roof edge and caught a whiff of cigar smoke. He saw a dark-clad figure hunkered on his haunches on the small rear gallery.

The cigar coal glowed in the darkness. Smoke wafted around the black-hatted head. A man chuckled.

“Prophet, you sure burn it from both ends.” It was Mortimer. “You best get your ass up and light a shuck, Reb!”

Prophet had grabbed his pistol but did not click the hammer back. He heaved himself to his feet. Mortimer said, “Catch!”

He swung his arm back and forward, and Prophet watched his rifle come hurling toward him. He grabbed it out of the air and switched it to his left hand in time to catch his coach gun with its leather lanyard flapping out to one side.

“Figured you could use those.”

Prophet was stunned. “Thanks,” was the only word he could find.

Then he stepped back away from the hotel until he could see the window above the roof. A gun flashed in the dark square, briefly lighting a hatted head. The slug thudded into the ground over Prophet's left shoulder.

Prophet raised the gut shredder and tripped a trigger, hearing a man scream as the buckshot pelted his face. Hearing more shouting throughout the hotel now, and the thunder of running feet as the dwarf's men and likely his savage customers rushed to the doors to give chase, the bounty hunter turned and ran straight back toward the barns and corrals.

He'd run maybe thirty yards before guns resumed blasting behind him. He headed past a barn and a covered wagon and stopped suddenly. He looked back at the wagon.

The maw of a Gatling gun protruded from the rear pucker.

Prophet looked behind, a wistful look on his crude-featured face. Several slugs plumed the dust around him and caused the horses and mules to dance around inside the corrals. He ran over to the wagon and leaped over the tailgate and inside. He set his rifle down beside what appeared an old 1862 model Gatling gun modified for contemporary cartridges and glanced out the back of the wagon.

At least a dozen men were sprinting toward him from the rear of the dwarf's House, jostling shadows in the purple night.

Several wooden cartridge crates flanked the big, fire-belching cannon. Prophet quickly dropped a box of cartridges down the Gatling gun's loading rail and cut loose with a quick burst of what was probably ten .45-caliber, one-inch slugs.

The gun turned on its swivel, hiccupping madly, savagely, stabbing orange flames back toward Moon's place and filling the wagon with a heavy, eye-stinging plume of fetid powder smoke.

He grinned again as the jostling figures were plowed down as though by an unseen scythe. Men screamed and triggered their pistols or rifles into the ground.

Prophet dropped another ten-round box down the Gatling gun's rail and, turning the crank, opened up on the dwarf's house and the men continuing to run out from behind it. Several more shadows dropped, screaming and groaning, while others dashed to safety behind the hulking building.

Prophet waited a couple of seconds.

Silence had fallen like the pall after a bad storm. Smoke wafted grayly in the darkness. Windows in the House's rear wall wore the soft umber of flickering lamplight. Several silhouetted figures dashed around behind them.

Seeing no more men running toward him, only one triggering wild shots from behind a front corner of the House, Prophet grabbed his shotgun and looped it over his shoulder. He took his rifle, hurried to the front of the wagon, climbed over the driver's box, and dropped to the ground.

Trying to keep the wagon between him and the House, he ran between the two stables in which horses and mules and several oxen whickered, brayed, and bellowed against the commotion, including the Gatling's raucous fire. He crossed a wash and ran up a slope, raking breath in and out of his lungs. When he'd run up the next, higher slope, he stopped near the crest and glanced back over his shoulder.

He couldn't see much because of the darkness, but he heard men shouting and running around, though none seemed to be running toward Prophet. They were all likely so drunk and taken aback by the sudden outburst of violence that had left more than a few of them dead that they'd decided to ponder the situation before endangering themselves further.

Prophet picked up a rock with his left hand, tossed it underhanded away from him, and gave another frustrated curse.

The dwarf was still alive. The slave girls were still in the House of a Thousand Delights.

Prophet stood and walked up and over the slope. Hooves thudded ahead of him. He saw shadows moving toward him, milky dust rising behind them. He walked out onto the curving trail that led up into the Chisos, and stopped and watched as the rider crested the next hill and came toward him. Starlight revealed a pinto as well as blond hair bouncing on slender shoulders.

Louisa reined up suddenly, curveted the pinto in the trail fifty yards from Prophet. Mean and Ugly stopped in the trail behind her, blowing and stomping and chewing his bit. Starlight flashed on silver chasing, and in the quiet night Prophet heard the click of a gun hammer.

“I had enough bein' shot at, damnit,” Prophet said.

“Lou?”

“Yeah,” he growled and walked toward her.

She galloped up to him, stopped, and tossed him Mean and Ugly's reins. As usual, her tone was snooty. “Did you get the lay of the land?”

“Said I would, didn't I?”

Prophet swung up onto Mean's back, the horse feeling good and familiar beneath him. It was so quiet now that all he could hear was the ringing in his ears from the Gatling gun.

“What was all the shooting?” Louisa asked.

Prophet reined Mean around and headed back in the direction from which Louisa had come and in which he knew that Colter and Ruth were waiting. “The dwarf—he didn't like me gettin' it.”

34

THE NEXT MORNING,
by the light of a new day washing through the fly-flecked front windows of the House of a Thousand Delights, the dwarf saw that Griselda May still wore the same shocked expression she'd worn when the bullet had punched through her belly the night before.

She lay sprawled atop two saloon tables, staring up at him with those eerily wide-open eyes, lips parted. Several flies buzzed around her head and lips and drifted down to investigate the thick blood staining her blouse. Her arms lay straight down against her sides.

Standing atop a chair by the table, Moon looked down at Griselda's right hand. It was small and delicate and slightly tanned, and there were about three freckles splashed across the back of it. It was the hand of an innocent child, not of a young woman as devilish as the one he'd come to know last night during the last few minutes of her life. The hand looked so tender and innocent lying there without any life in it that Moon felt a tear roll down his cheek.

A sob like a frog's croak issued from deep in his chest, and he leaned forward, placed his good hand on the edge of the table—his injured one would bear no weight at all without him caterwauling like a gut-shot coyote—and placed his lips to the girl's hand.

He straightened with a sad sigh and looked at the three stout Mexican girls he'd hired to clean and work in the kitchen, as they were too ugly to whore for him. He waved an arm and said in a voice crackling with emotion, “Take her away. Put her in the hole she had dug for me, and cover her up and let that be the end of her!”

The Mexican girls, clad in shapeless canvas dresses, rolled Griselda up in the blanket she lay upon. Grunting, the three of them picked up the bundle and carried it awkwardly to the front of the room and out the propped-open doors.

Meanwhile, standing on a chair near the front of the room, wearing a noose around his neck, his hands tied behind his back, the Rio Bravo Kid sobbed. His chin was dipped to his chest and his eyelids and lips fluttered as he bawled.

The rope that extended from the noose was looped over a rafter about three feet above his head. One of the burlier of the dwarf's men, a Mexican named Ramon, had the rope stretched across his bowed shoulder. Crouching, he gripped the coiled end tightly in his hands, ready for the execution.

Ramon had long, silver-flecked black hair and a mustache of the same color, its ends dangling nearly to his chest. An uncorked bottle from which he took sporadic sips stood on a table nearby.

Ramon's eyes were sort of hazel, and one wandered. Both eyes were smiling now delightedly as he shuttled his gaze between the Rio Bravo Kid and Moon, awaiting the order for him to lean into the rope to lift the Kid's feet up off the chair.

The dwarf stared up at the Kid and curled his nostril distastefully. “Thinkin' through all your sundry sins, Kid?” he asked. “Thinkin' through all of 'em real good?”

The Kid continued to sob, squeezing his eyes closed, tears rolling down his clean-shaven, sun-pinkened cheeks.

“The main one you gotta think on, Kid, is the one where you was in cahoots with Griselda to double-cross me—to steal from
me
, the jake who gave you your job and your very
reason for existence here in my town
!—and run out on me with all my loot!” The dwarf pointed furiously up at the Kid. “That there's the main one. I don't care none about the ones that came before that. That there is the reason that when I give the nod, Ramon is gonna play cat's cradle with your
head
!”

Ramon looked at the Kid and chuckled through his teeth.

There were several other men in the room, including the dwarf's own unwashed lot, sitting around several tables. Luke Thursday, head of the slavers, sat with two of his men at a table near the dwarf.

Two of the slavers stared in amusement at the sobbing Kid. Thursday wasn't in a humorous mood, however. His lower lip was cut and swollen, and his left eye was slightly swollen and badly discolored, with a cut just below it. Thursday leaned forward in his chair, smoking and sipping whiskey from a water glass and staring up at the Kid as though he were eyeing the man who'd so insulted him the night before at the well.

Lou Prophet. Thursday had remembered the man's name after he'd come around from the beating he'd been given by the big Rebel bounty hunter from Georgia. The dwarf had heard of Prophet, too, of course, as Prophet was a colorful character who cut a broad swath, but he'd never seen him before.

Not before several days ago, however, when he should have killed him outright instead of merely trying to torture him. That was the start of everything bad here in Moon's Well. That and Moon's killing the Rangers, that was, and Prophet hauling one of them back to town.

How quickly a man's luck could turn.

Now Griselda was dead, Prophet was on the loose and up to no good, and the dwarf's hand was rotting slowly and with excruciating pain at the end of his arm.

Thursday had an ivory-gripped Smith & Wesson Model 3 top-break .44 revolver on the table beside his whiskey bottle, as though keeping the weapon handy in the unlikely event that Prophet made another unexpected appearance.

“What do you think, Thursday?” the dwarf said, sitting down on the chair and then dropping very gingerly to the floor, keeping his big, purple, white-bandaged hand up close against his chest and out of harm's way. “Do you like my tactics?”

Thursday brought a cigarette to his lips. “I'm gettin' tired o' his caterwaulin'.” He drew the smoke into his lungs and blew it out at the Kid.

“Yeah—me, too.”

The dwarf glanced at Ramon and dipped his chin. Ramon grinned bigger and pulled down on the rope, throwing his shoulder into it. The Kid's chin came up, his face turned red, and he made a strangling sound as his heels rose from the chair. He tried to ground his toes down into the chair as though for purchase, but two seconds after his heels had left it, his toes did, too.

He immediately began choking and wheezing and dancing a bizarre two-step about eight inches above the chair.

“Kid, I never knew you could dance!” the dwarf said.

Ramon grunted as he pulled on the rope, crouching, putting his shoulder into it. The rope creaked and grated against the beam over which it was looped. Dust sifted down from atop the beam.

The Kid grunted and gurgled, sounding like a coffeepot just starting to boil. His wide eyes stared in horror across the room as he jumped and jerked and lunged and turned from one side to the other and then in a complete circle.

His face was as red as a hot iron, and it swelled like a snakebite. The Rio Bravo Kid grimaced as he grunted and jerked and turned one circle after another, his boots only about a foot above the chair, until he kicked the back of the chair and it fell over with a bang.

The dwarf stood and watched the death dance grimly. So did Thursday. The other men in the room watched, as well, some grinning, one snickering, but most just looking bored.

As the Kid's dance began to lose some of its vigor, like a drunken dancer at the end of a long night, the dwarf turned to his men gathered at two tables. “Party's over, boys,” he said. “Sun's up high enough for trackin'.”

He tossed his head toward the door.

The ten or so men rose from their chairs, grabbing pistols and rifles, checking the loads and adjusting the holsters on their hips. Some tossed back the last of their drinks and scrubbed their mouths with their hands or shirtsleeves, sniffing and snorting, ready to ride.

They clomped off toward the open doors, spurs chinging.

Thursday turned to the dwarf standing near his table, watching his men. “Do your boys got anything against me and my boys joinin' em?”

The dwarf smiled. “More the merrier.”

Thursday glanced at the other two slavers sharing his table as he blew cigarette smoke out his mouth and nostrils, causing a big, blue cloud to puff around his bearded head. He mashed the stub out in an ashtray, doffed his gold-braided hat, and rose, as did the other two, grabbing their rifles off a near table.

Thursday dropped the Smithy into its holster, snapped the keeper thong over the hammer, and turned to Moon once more. “You comin', Mr. Moon?”

Moon looked glum as he stared out the doors at the bright street and the well beyond. “I ain't feelin' too good. Believe I'll stay here, have a drink and take a nap cuddled up to one of your new Injun gals, Thursday. With your men and mine combined, you got you a posse of at least twenty. Prophet and whoever's ridin' with him ain't gonna have a chance with that many tough nuts on his trail.”

Thursday snorted angrily and headed for the front doors with his other two men.

“Try to capture him alive, and we'll hang him up next to the Kid here!” Moon called. “I'd love to hold a necktie party in that big bastard's honor!”

“I make no promises, Mr. Moon,” Thursday growled and was gone.

Moon drew a deep breath, winced at the pain from his badly swollen hand shooting up his arm and into his neck, and looked at the Rio Bravo Kid. Ramon had tied the end of the rope to a leg of the nearby wood stove, suspending the Kid about four feet above the floor.

The Kid was staring glassily down at Moon, turning slowly. He gave one more kick, as though it was an afterthought, his face expressionless, and then he turned very slowly to face the other side of the room.

“There you go, Kid,” Moon said, rising up onto the balls of his boots to grab a bottle off a table. “That's what happens when you fuck with Mordecai Moon. Hope you burn in hell, you rotten son of a bitch!”

He ambled off toward the stairs with his bottle. He said without turning around, “And when you see my girl, tell her ol' Mordecai says hi!”

He chuckled at that as he started up the stairs.

Behind him, Sheriff Mortimer crossed the street through a windblown cloud of sand and grit and entered the saloon. He stopped in the doorway and looked around the empty hall and saw the Kid hanging over the fallen chair. The Kid had stopped turning now, and he faced the front of the room, eyelids drooping lazily over his eyes.

“Vernon, Vernon,” Mortimer said.

He walked into the room and over to the bar. He leaned over it, grabbed a bottle from a shelf beneath it, and stuffed it into a pocket of his frock coat. Wanda needed a drink. So did he, for that matter.

He looked up at the Kid once more, his own face expressionless. The sheriff was sweating out the bender that he and Wanda were on—probably their last one together—and the sweat beads were dribbling down his cheeks and into his mustache, eroding the dust on his long, leathery neck that hadn't seen a razor in several days.

Mortimer turned his mouth corners down and headed for the door. Halfway there, he stopped, gave a frustrated chuff, and then walked over to where the Kid hung from the rafter. Mortimer set the chair up on its feet, climbed onto it. He produced a barlow knife from a coat pocket, and sawed through the rope over the Kid's head.

When the last strand was cut, the Kid fell to the floor.

Mortimer stepped down from the chair, grabbed the Kid's arms, and dragged him across the room and out the front door. He dragged him down the gallery steps and into the street.

He knew a quiet, shady place befitting the last resting place of the Rio Bravo Kid.