The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel (23 page)

“I'll dally that.” Prophet took the bucket from her and used it to water Mean. When he returned the bucket to the rain barrel, he said, “I reckon our main point of business for now best be to get all them Injuns off our trail.” He picked up his rifle, which he'd leaned against Mean's stall door. “And you know what that means.”

“Kill 'em all?”

“Kill or be killed, Miss Bonnyventure.”

“It's
Bon
avent—” Louisa stopped and took a step back, scowling at the rafters over her head.

“What is it?” Prophet asked her.

Louisa doffed her hat, showed him the fresh blooding staining the brim. They both looked up once more. Blood dribbled out between two ceiling boards. It looked like molasses and it sort of webbed down from the ceiling before forming a single drop that dripped to the soft earthen floor, puffing dust.

Prophet and Louisa exchanged a meaningful glance. Then Prophet walked over to the wooden rungs running up the far wall. He climbed the rungs into the hayloft with its mounded hay and straw and steeply pitched roof. The Gatling gun sat a few feet back from the open doors, a chair from the saloon behind it.

The Rurale corporal—the oldest of Chacin's remaining men—who'd last been manning the gun lay belly down in the straw beside it. His rifle lay beside him. His head was turned onto one cheek, arms hanging straight down against his sides. His leather-billed forage cap lay on the other side of the gun. His black hair was parted in the middle, the part showing the man's pale scalp.

Flies buzzed around him.

Louisa walked up to Prophet just as the bounty hunter
kicked the body over, revealing the deep, grisly gash across the corporal's neck.

“Well, lookee there,” Prophet said without mirth. “Another sloppy tonsillectomy.”

Louisa sighed. “I don't recollect hearing the poor man even complaining about a sore throat.”

“HELP ME HERE,”
Prophet said, crouching and snaking his arms under those of the dead Rurale.

“What're we going to do with him?”

“Haul him out in the desert. We leave him here, he'll attract coyotes or mountains lions.”

Awkwardly, they carried the dead corporal over to the three-by-three-foot hole in the loft floor and dropped the body through. They climbed down the wooden rungs, got another hold on the body, and, with the horses nickering their disdain for the smell of fresh blood, hauled the Rurale out the back door, past a wood pile and dilapidated privy and into the desert beyond.

Keeping an eye out for Mojaves, the bounty hunters carried the bloody Rurale's sagging carcass a good hundred yards from the barn. At the edge of a dry wash, they lay the body down.

Prophet stripped off the man's cartridge belt, which contained .44-40 shells for the Winchester carbine the man had carried, and looped the belt over his own shoulder. He hooked a boot over the dead man's bloody shoulder and rolled the man over the edge of the bank. The Rurale rolled,
arms flopping, down the side of the bank to pile up at its base. Prophet stomped the overhanging earthen lip of the draw onto the body, then kicked a few rocks down, as well.

“That how you bury folks where you come from?” Louisa asked him, setting both hands on her pearl-gripped Colts as she looked around.

“If you wanna say a few words, go ahead.” Prophet turned and had started back toward the barn.

Louisa touched his arm. “Hold on.”

Prophet stopped and followed her gaze to the southwest. A lone, red-skinned rider sat an apron-sloped pedestal of red clay on the far side of another wash about a hundred yards away. Prophet couldn't see any details except the red flannel bandanna, quill choker, and the skewbald paint the big man was straddling. The Indian sat slightly forward on his blanket saddle, staring toward Prophet and Louisa. Slowly, he lifted the reins, turned the mount, and jogged down the far side of the knoll and out of sight.

“El Lightning?” Louisa said.

“Who else?”

“Menacing bastard, ain't he? What do you think he wants?”

Prophet studied on that for a time as he stared toward the clay pedestal where the Indian had sat his mustang. He looked around. Nothing out here but rocks and cactus and the occasional paloverde and mesquite clump. Good question. What did the Indian want here? Was it just white men's blood? Or something else?

Prophet raked a thumbnail down his beard stubble, adjusted his Colt thonged on his thigh, and tramped back toward the barn. He paused when he saw old Dad Conway standing behind the barn, staring suspiciously at Prophet and Louisa, fingering his grizzled chin whiskers. He had an old carbine hanging down his back by a rope lanyard, and a pistol strapped to his leg.

“What're you two doin' out there?” he asked.

“Lookin' around, Dad,” Prophet said, narrowing his own suspicious eye. “That trouble you?”

The slouch-shouldered old man jerked his head back defensively. “Why should I be troubled if you're out lookin' to get yourselves perforated by Mojave arrows?”

“How you holdin' up, Dad?” Louisa asked the oldster. “This has been a lot of trouble for the old and feeble.”

The old man bunched his lips and glared at the blond bounty hunter. “I'll show you old and feeble, you little—!”

“What's that sticking out of your pocket there?” Prophet interrupted him.

“Pocket where?”

“That pocket there!” Prophet walked up and shoved his hand toward the bone-handled knife sticking out of the man's patched duck trousers.

Dad jerked back, nearly stumbling, as he closed his hand over the pocket containing the knife. “Git away from me, damn ya!”

“Let me see the knife, Dad.”

“No!”

Prophet towered over the pale, wizened oldster with long, coarse gray whiskers hanging from his knobby chin. “You ain't gonna make me throw you down and hogtie you, now, are you? Ain't you a little old for such silliness?”

Dad scowled up at Prophet, his eyes flicking across the bounty hunter's broad neck and rounded shoulders that drew his shirt taut across his muscular chest. He twitched a nostril and sucked his teeth, then reluctantly reached a gnarled, arthritic hand into the pocket and pulled out the folding barlow knife.

“So what?” The old man jutted his chin belligerently. “I see you carry a knife. Why can't I carry a knife?”

Prophet took the barlow knife out of the old man's hand and opened it. He inspected the blade, saw no blood even down around where the blade folded into the handle, and closed it. “I'm just wonderin' if it could have been you who slit the throat of the Rurale corporal manning the Gatling gun . . . oh, say, a half hour to an hour ago. Blood was still comin' out of him when me and Louisa found him.”

“I didn't cut no Rurale's throat, and I'm hurt that you'd
accuse me. Hell, I can't even climb up the veranda steps without gettin' all dizzy an' short of breath! How could I kill a young man?”

He stuffed the knife back down in his pocket, spat a wad of chew into a cholla clump, and grumbled as he ambled over to the dilapidated privy. He glanced once more at Prophet and Louisa as he jerked the door open. “Me? Cut a man's throat?”

He gave a shrill, caustic chuff, then stepped up into the privy with a grunt and pulled the door closed behind him. The locking nail clattered as he pushed it through its hasp.

“He's got a point, Lou,” Louisa said.

“Yeah, I reckon. No blood on the blade, neither.” Prophet turned around to stare south, doffing his hat and scratching the back of his head. “Throat cutters, Injuns, Rurales, curly wolves—I swear, I do believe the Devil's laughin' at me. My life ain't s'posed to be this hard.”

“Life's always hard, Lou. You just prefer to ignore it and drink and diddle easy women.”

Prophet glanced at her. She glanced away from him quickly, tightened her face and narrowed her eyes. “That ain't none of your business,” he said, piqued.

“What ain't?”

“You know what I'm talkin' about, Miss Huffy Pants.”

Prophet swung around and, deeply frustrated over everything that had happened over the past week, strode on back to the barn. He retrieved the Gatling gun as well as his rifle from the loft and hauled the machine gun across the street.

Several of the other men were standing at different points along both sides of the main street and near the well, dusters or the bell bottoms of their charro slacks blowing in the endless wind. They eyed Prophet with mute interest as he climbed the veranda steps. He hauled the Gatling gun inside the saloon and looked around.

“What the hell you doing, Prophet?” Chacin said from a table in the room's shadows. He sat with a tequila bottle and a shot glass on the table beside him.

“Got more use for this thing over here, where we can
keep a close eye on it,” Prophet said, setting the Gatling down against the front wall and spreading the wooden legs of its tripod.

Chacin sipped from his shot glass and winced, his back wound grieving him. “I had a man keeping an eye on it.”

“Found your man grinning through his throat. Buried him to keep predators out of the barn.”

Chacin dipped his chin and glowered suspiciously at the bounty hunter, who turned the Gatling gun toward the blown-out front window right of the doors. Prophet sat down at a table near the gun and glanced at Ivy standing at the bar chopping a wild onion for stew.

She was looking at him between the wings of her long, curly black hair jostling about her pretty, chocolate-colored face with its lustrous but fateful black eyes.

“Got any coffee over there?” Prophet asked her.

She set the knife and onion down on the chopping board and turned to fill a stone mug. She brought it over to Prophet, set it down on the table. Prophet took a whiff of the steam. As Ivy raked her intimate gaze across Prophet once quickly, then turned back to the bar, he said, “I sure would admire to know who's killin' the captain's men.”

He said it nonchalantly, as though he were merely speaking to himself.

Chacin turned to the woman and curled his upper lip.
“Si.”
His voice had a growl in it. “Perhaps an Indian.”

“An Indian would have used the gun on us, or at least taken the ammo.”

“How do you know it ain't the captain himself,” Ivy said, returning to the cutting board. “How do you know it ain't your blond partner, or Red Snake or Kiljoy?”

“Well, I know it ain't Louisa,” Prophet said, sipping his coffee and staring out the blown-out window with ragged bits of glass sticking out of its frame. Louisa herself was standing at the livery barn's right front corner, holding her carbine and looking around, the wind blowing her hair.

“She ain't that messy,” Prophet continued. “As for Red Snake or Kiljoy—hell, I don't know. I reckon it could have
been them. Don't know why they'd go about it so underhanded, though. Those rannies're cold-steel artists, not blade men. And I thought we were all gettin' along so good.”

“Hawkins.” Chacin threw back the last of his tequila shot, lifted his pistol from the table before him, and spun the cylinder across his forearm.

“Now, don't get owly, Captain,” Prophet warned. “As long as them Injuns outnumber us, we're gonna need every gun we got.”

“And let Hawkins and the other citizens of San Gezo knock us off one at a time?”

“Now, hold on!” Ivy said, holding her hands up—one holding the onion, the other the knife. She glanced at the knife, and her face turned darker. “I chop food, not men's throats. At least, I haven't had to cut a man's throat in several years now.”

She continued chopping the onion, tossing it into a heavy iron stew pot and staring with wry bemusement across the room at Prophet.

Prophet snorted, sat back in his chair, sipped his coffee, then dug into his shirt pocket for his makings sack. Slowly, thoughtfully, he plucked his cigarette papers out of the sack and began rolling a smoke.

Who had killed Frieri?

Who had killed the corporal?

Why?

The afternoon drew on. Prophet sat in the chair near the Gatling gun, ready to fire at the first sign of an Indian attack. The others patrolled the streets, visiting the saloon now and then for coffee or a drink of something stiffer, or for the stew of canned meat and tomatoes that Ivy had bubbling on her range.

Chacin and Sugar Delphi were the only two who remained in the saloon, Sugar quietly playing a game of solitaire with marked cards. Chacin drank and walked to each window from time to time, holding his long-barreled pistol as he anxiously looked out at the street. The wound in his back made him lean slightly forward and wince.

The wind sawed and wheezed. It blew sand through the broken windows and moaned under the eaves. It was a hot, dry wind, and by mid-afternoon it had tattered Prophet's nerves the way lightning frays the limbs of a ponderosa pine.

He began to side with Louisa. Maybe he and the blond Vengeance Queen should pull foot out of San Gezo, after all. But even if they could bring themselves to abandon the money and the brigands, the Indians had them trapped here. First, they had to neutralize the Indian threat. Then they had to find the stolen loot and take down Red Snake, Kiljoy, and Sugar. And Lazzaro, if he was still alive.

The wind bounced tumbleweeds along the street and beneath the rotting hitchracks, sounding like the Devil having a tail-wagging good time on a Dodge City Friday night. The deal was that Prophet would have the good times between a modicum of relatively easy work stints, hunting outlaws. Ole Scratch appeared to be reneging on his deal, the bastard. This here job wasn't easy at all.

The big bounty hunter's chance of getting himself and Louisa out of this powder keg was very slim indeed, and he was still relatively young. If he cashed in his chips now, he'd be missing out on years of easy women and good times.