The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel (2 page)

He strode through the rocky, wet desert, swinging his head from right to left and back again, holding his rifle up high across chest in both hands. While the rain continued to slash at him, running like an open irrigation pipe from the funneled trough of his hat so that it was like looking through a mini waterfall, he climbed a low ridge and dropped to a knee, resting his rifle on his shoulder.

On another, higher slope that climbed to a velvet black mountain wall, several vertical and horizontal rectangles of yellow light shone. Lightning flashes revealed the dim image of a sprawling hacienda beneath a peaked roof tiled in red sandstone.

The casa sat behind a pale adobe wall. Between the wall and the house was a gap of fifty or sixty yards and what appeared to be a veritable jungle of storm-lashed shrubs and trees. Large verandas with broad archways on both the first and second floors fronted the building. Beyond the casa, the ridge wall loomed tall and formidable, several hundred feet above the valley floor. The ridge and the stormy night fairly swallowed the structure clinging to it like a small jewel hidden in the folds of a large, black sofa.

Cigarette smoke touched Prophet's nostrils.

Instinctively, he pulled the rifle off his shoulder and crouched low, looking around. Below on his left, about
halfway down the other side of the low ridge he was on, stood a gnarled tree. A lean-to had been erected in front of the tree, slanting downslope from it. Lightning revealed the wind- and rain-buffeted tarpaulin lashed to the ground with ropes and wooden spikes. Beneath the tarpaulin, a man crouched, facing downslope and toward the casa sprawled on the next rise.

In front of the crouched figure, a pinprick of orange light glowed dully, then faded. The man's right arm came down, and during another flash of lightning Prophet saw the ghostly cloud of cigarette smoke blown out into the storm. Prophet began to lift his Winchester's stock toward his shoulder, then checked the motion.

No point in wasting a bullet. No telling how many he was going to need here. Besides, the shot might be heard between thunderclaps up at the casa. He had to shoot sparingly, carefully from here on in.

He moved down the slope a ways and leaned the rifle against a boulder. Inside the lean-to, the Mexican brought his cigarette to his lips once more. He froze with the end of the quirley barely touching his lower lip and frowned. Something hovered a couple of feet in front of his face. He'd just recognized the large, gloved hand and had opened his mouth to scream when the hand smashed over his nose and mouth, brutally drawing his head back and up, exposing his bearded neck above the knotted blue bandanna.

He screamed into the hand, kicked as he felt the cold slash of the big knife across his throat. He convulsed as the hot blood spurted from the severed arteries.

Prophet held the man's head back taut until the blood gradually stopped geysering. Then he removed his hand, let the Mexican flop back against the gnarled tree, dead but still jerking, and tramped back to retrieve his rifle. He held the gun in one hand as he carefully made his way down the slope, weaving amongst the rocks and hunkering behind shrubs or boulders when lightning flashed, afraid he'd be silhouetted against the slope.

He made his gradual way toward a black gap in the adobe wall over which vines grew like slithering black snakes. Tree branches hung low over the wall, some scraping against it. Nothing around had been taken care of in a while. Likely, the hacienda had been abandoned by its hacendado for whatever reason—perhaps Mojaves had pushed him out—and was now the regular hideout of the gang of thieves and cold-blooded killers lead by Antonio Lazzaro and Red Snake Corbin. All had been wanted for several years in nearly every western territory north of the border, and their hideout had been a well-kept secret.

Until Prophet had uncovered its location by tracking the gang here after they'd robbed a bank in Nogales and hightailed it across the border like a pack of calf-killing wolves. He'd been summoned to Nogales from where he'd been holed up in San Antonio, with a telegraph in the customarily cryptic language of his sometimes partner and lover, Louisa Bonaventure:

BE IN NOGALES BY AUGUST 15TH.

He'd ridden hard, but he'd reached Nogales a day late. The Lazzaro gang had hit the bank the day before.

Apparently, Louisa had infiltrated the gang, though Prophet had not known this beforehand. She could be damn secretive at times, Louisa could. She'd likely thought she could take them all down herself, but this bunch must have been too much for even the Vengeance Queen, as Louisa was known far and wide across the frontier. She hadn't been able to stop them from leaving seven dead in the street outside the Bank of Nogales, including two peasant boys who'd been playing around the bank with stick guns.

That must have been damn hard on her, Prophet thought. Louisa could not abide the killing of innocents, especially innocent women and children. She must have realized too late that she'd had the tiger by the tail, and she'd needed Prophet's help. He just hoped he'd gotten here in time. He'd lost the trail several days ago and had taken several more days in picking it up again.

Because of the gang's especially cold-blooded reputation, the Nogales lawman had been unable to form a posse. The lawman and his two deputies had gotten discouraged by a hail of lead flung their way by a couple of Lazzaro's rear trail riders and had turned back to Nogales twenty miles south of the border.

Prophet had tracked the lawmen, keeping his distance, as bounty hunters were treated like chicken-killing dogs by most badge toters. When the Mexican lawmen had headed back north, Prophet had drifted onto the killers' trail and began dusting it slowly, with the casual expertise and caution of a stalking puma. Still, Lazzaro was a sneaky son of a bitch. He'd covered his trail well and had taken several detours to throw off shadowers, and such tactics had worked even on Prophet.

Now a wagon trail angled out from the rocky desert to curve through a gap in the adobe wall before him. Both ruts were virtual rain-pelted streams. The wings of a wooden gate were thrown back against the wall, both hanging from rotting posts. Prophet ran crouching across the trail and dropped to a knee about two feet from the wall, on the left side of the gap.

He was about to rise and bolt through the gap when he saw the silhouette of a man sitting against the inside of the wall, on the gap's right side. The guard was hunkered beneath his sombrero, facing the casa. He was sitting on the inside of the wall because the rain was slashing from the opposite side. Obviously, the gang hadn't suspected they'd been followed down from the border. They'd grown fat, lazy, and careless.

Prophet grinned beneath his dripping hat brim.

He tensed when the guard swung his head toward him. He started to raise the rifle but checked the move. The guard's lips were moving and Prophet heard him speaking in Spanish. To a man on the other side of the gap and whose back was likely just on the other side of the wall from Prophet.

Again, the bounty hunter grinned. He raised his rifle but before he could click the hammer back, something carved a hot line across the back of his neck before hammering the wall in front of him. Bizarre laughter cackled as though from down a long tunnel, muffled by the rain and thunder.

“Preparese para bailar con El Diablo, Senor Prophet!”

“PREPARE TO SHAKE
hands with the Devil, Senor Prophet!” echoed in the bounty hunter's ears as, instead of swinging around toward the trail, which was the direction that the crazy laughter and the warning had come from, Prophet bolted off his heels and ran toward the gap, firing his Winchester.

The guard who'd been hunkered down inside the wall on the gap's right side had been gaining his feet and bringing up a Spencer carbine when Prophet's first two rounds hammered through him.

As he flew backward, triggering a shot in the air one-handed, Prophet dove forward to land in the spot where the guard had been slumped. The rifle behind him roared three, four times, slinging mud and gravel every which way, one shot kissing the end of the bounty hunter's left boot heel. Prophet twisted around, saw the second gate guard hastily gaining his feet and reaching for a pistol holstered on his left hip. He was having trouble getting the pistol up above the flap of his leather duster and, knowing he was about to die, screamed horrifically as Prophet slung two rounds between two large, silver circles sewn into the duster's front.

The guard flew back against the wall, dropping the pistol in the mud, and then slid down the side of the wall before piling up belly down at its base.

Prophet ejected the last spent cartridge and seated fresh as he pushed up onto his knees and fired at the tall figure running across the trail toward the wall. A rifle flashed twice from the figure's middle. Both rounds screeched over Prophet's head.

The bounty hunter fired twice. Through the wafting powder smoke and the slashing rain he watched the running figure jerk and twist as he dove toward the wall.

There was a scream and a squishing, splashing sound as the man hit the ground at the base of the wall and lay still.

Prophet glanced at the dark, slumped figure and said, “I believe you have me at a disadvantage, amigo,” as he thumbed fresh shells through his Winchester's loading gate, hoping all the rain and mud didn't foul the action. All he needed was a jammed rifle. He hadn't recognized the dead man's voice. Likely someone he'd hunted before. He was always a little surprised by how well known he'd become in the long years since the war, when he'd started hunting men for a living.

Maybe notorious was a better word.

There was still plenty of thunder but not enough, probably, to have covered the recent gunfire. He looked through the dripping, thrashing foliage toward the big house with its windows lit.

That someone inside had heard the fusillade was confirmed when the big paneled door on the first story burst open and a lean man with a long, mustached face and wearing a short charro jacket and string tie burst out, holding a pistol in his right hand. Another, bigger man emerged from the opening behind him, holding a sawed-off shotgun in both hands across his chest.

Then two more came out behind the bigger man, and the smaller man, the man whom Prophet recognized as Hector Foran, a former Federale captain from Sonora who'd been
riding with the Lazzaro bunch for several years, shouted orders while he waved his pistol around.

Prophet, still on one knee, pressed his Winchester's stock against his shoulder, aimed carefully across the fifty-foot distance between him and the casa, and fired once, twice, three, then four times, watching the big man with the shotgun and two other men go down howling on the veranda's elevated floor.

Hector Foran leaped back, wide-eyed and rattled, then triggered his pistol twice. He probably couldn't see much due to the light emanating from the house behind him. Prophet triggered one more round, but the bullet merely plowed into the casa's front wall as Foran bolted back into the house, yelling and leaving the stout oak doors standing wide behind him.

Bringing his own sawed-off ten-gauge around to his front, Prophet ran forward, one hand on the jostling barn blaster, the other holding his rifle. He looked around at the sprawling, dilapidated building before him, hearing shots fired from the second story, and leaped onto the veranda and rushed between the open doors.

He was in a bland, gray hall with a steel-banded oak barrel on his right. Stairs coming up from below lay to his left, and just now he heard the clacks of heels on the steps and saw two hatless heads rising up out of the casa's bowels. The lead man turned at the top of the stairs, eyes blazing, mouth forming a perfect circle when he saw Prophet bearing down on him with his double-barreled ten-gauge. The brigand lifted a big, pearl-gripped LeMat in his left hand and a Colt Navy in his right.

Prophet tripped the coach gut shredder's first trigger.

Ka-boooom!

The blast rocked the cracked flagstones beneath his boots. It lifted the two-pistoled hombre two feet off the floor and hurled him straight back over a wooden table, howling and blowing off the pointed toe of his right black boot with the shotgun shell in his pearl-gripped LeMat.

The second man on the stairs had a change of heart when he saw his partner shaking and bleeding his life out on the other side of the table. Wheeling, he ran back down the stairs. Prophet ran to the head of the stairs and aimed down into the dingy well.

“You don't turn around, you'll get it in the back, friend.”

The man stopped. He was tall and thick, with red pants and high black boots. He wore an eye patch. When Prophet saw the good eye, he said with a shrug, “Don't make no difference to me, just thought it might make you feel better.”

The man showed his teeth and yelled as he raised a short-barreled Smith & Wesson. The gut shredder roared again and blew the one-eyed man on down the stairs and into the dingy shadows below.

Quickly, the bounty hunter breeched the smoking gut shredder, plucked out the spent loads, shoved fresh ones into the barrels, and snapped the gun closed. In the ceiling he could hear the thumps of pounding boots and the explosions of wild gunfire amidst shouts and yells of frantic men.

Prophet smiled as he hummed softly, “In Dixie Land where I was born, early on one frosty mornin' . . .”

He turned to walk on down the hall lit by a tar-soaked torch bracketed to the wall in a steel cage, stopping when boots sounded on the stone stairs straight ahead of him, just beyond a broad kitchen with a large, black cookstove and a long, heavy wooden table littered with tin plates and food scraps and many pots and wooden cups. A couple of pots on the range sputtered and dribbled juices down their sides.

The spicy smells were enticing, but Prophet didn't have time to think about his empty belly. Three men were descending the stone steps before him. Both barrels of the gut shredder, triggered one after the other, were enough to send all three tumbling and rolling and painting the stones around them dark red. Prophet reloaded the shotgun—“Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie land!”—and continued walking past the stairs, stepping over one of the dead men. He paused at a half-open doorway on his left.