The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel (28 page)

“Put this on, amigo. Till we get you out of the sun, uh?”

Prophet looked at the hat. For a second, it didn't look like his. Nothing seemed right at the moment. He supposed the multiple brainings and being staked out to dry like a buffalo hide in the sun would do that to a fellow. Giving a ragged chuckle, he took the hat and snugged it down tight on his head.

Mean and Ugly regarded him skeptically, twitching his ears. “Yeah, it's me, hoss.” Prophet looked at Bocangel, who was limping tenderly around in the sand, his leg and
arm wounds wrapped with strips of blood-spotted cloth. “Pull out . . .” Prophet frowned, squinting both eyes. “That what you said? Johnson pulled out?”

“Si.”

“And the Injuns?”

“
Si
, senor. They followed the desperadoes. I saw them skirting the town a little after Johnson and the others left with the gold.”

Prophet grabbed the chinstrap of Mean's bridle and heaved himself to his feet, grunting and groaning and shifting his weight from one sunburned foot to the other. “What about my partner?”

“
La rubia?
” Senor Bocangel shrugged. “She rode out, too, Lou. Musta thought you were dead, huh? As did I. I rode out here to hunt rabbits. I just thank God they left me in one piece. I thought they would kill me as I thought they had killed you.”

Prophet didn't hear that last. He was leaning against Mean and Ugly's neck, trying to get his land legs back and working the information Bocangel had imparted through his sluggish brain. Louisa had gone with the outlaws.

“Where was the gold?” he asked Bocangel.

“In the cellar of the saloon.”

“The storeroom . . .” Prophet remembered that he'd been vaguely puzzled that there had been no food stored in the room behind the main saloon hall, as there would have been if ten or so folks had actually been living in San Gezo. They'd have had to store a lot of food, making maybe two or three supply runs to San Diego every year.

Only gold had been stored in that room. In the cellar beneath the wooden door in the floor.

The naked bounty hunter turned to Bocangel standing beside him, holding his clothes like an offering. Prophet was badly sunburned, and he knew that raking clothes across his tender, throbbing flesh would aggravate the torment, but he couldn't go after those killers naked. They had to have forced Louisa to join them. No way she would have gone willingly.

He grabbed his summer-weight longhandles off the pile in Bocangel's hands. Leaning back against his horse, he steeled himself, shook the underwear out, and raking air through his gritted teeth, began pulling the garment on. Witches' fingers tricked out with razor-edged nails raked his tender skin, enflaming the fire.

“You need some medicine, Lou.”

“I need a bottle of tanglefoot's what I need.”

Grinding his molars, he finished dressing, even wrapped his holster and shell belt around his waist though his Colt was gone, as were his Winchester and gut shredder. First things first, he thought, swinging up onto Mean's back, his denims feeling like hot irons against the insides of his thighs. Whiskey, guns, and ammunition.

Then he'd fog Louisa's trail, try to pull her out of the gang before she got whipsawed between them and El Lightning. He had no idea what was going through her head. It was most often impossible to know. Had they taken her, or had she gone willingly? Was Johnson's gold too enticing for her?

No. Prophet was ashamed for thinking it.

He extended his hand to Bocangel, wincing. The Mexican shook his head and offered a wan smile. “No need, senor.” He led Mean by the horse's bridle over to a rock. He stepped onto the rock, giving a wince of his own and sort of hoisted himself over Mean's hindquarters.

“Thanks,” Prophet said tightly.

“De nada.”

Prophet looked around. “Where are we?”

“Town is that way, amigo.”

Prophet touched spurs to Mean's flanks, and the horse trotted southwest along the edge of a shallow, brush-lined wash. Fifteen minutes later, he and Bocangel entered town from its east end. Prophet checked the horse down and sat staring down the broad, main street littered with several dead Indians, twisted where they'd fallen in the battle that had been waging for the past couple of days.

There was one dead horse. Prophet clucked Mean ahead,
reined up near the dead mustang. Bocangel dismounted first and then Prophet swung tenderly down from Mean's back.

The butt of a carbine rifle stuck out from beneath the dead horse. Prophet knew that all the Indians' rifles and pistols had been confiscated earlier by his own party, for the weapons themselves and also for the ammo they carried. He'd seen this carbine before, sticking out from beneath the horse, but he'd been too busy for bothering with a gun pinned beneath four hundred pounds of dead horse.

He bothered with it now, grabbing the gun by its stock, planting one boot against the horse's hip, and pulling. The gun slid free. Prophet worked the cocking lever until the gun was empty. He scowled at the five cartridges in the palm of his left hand.

Bocangel extended his own carbine to the bounty hunter. “You may take my gun, Lou.”

“No.” Prophet reloaded the Indian's carbine, the stock of which had been decorated with brass rivets forming a wolf's head. “I may not be back.”

He slipped a goatskin water flask from around the horse's neck, shook the flask to judge how much water was in it, and turned to Bocangel. “What's your part in all this?”

Bocangel shrugged. “My son and I guided Johnson and Senorita Knight south of the border. We lived here in San Gezo, Joaquin and I. We had gone to San Diego for supplies. We prospected these mountains, you see, Lou. In exchange for our help, Johnson's gang offered us a sackful of gold dust each, and . . . our lives.”

The old Mexican turned his mouth corners down and stared out over the desert stretching off beyond the mountains. “Joaquin . . . he became greedy and stole a bar of the gold, and set off across the desert. I chased after him, to bring him back before Johnson realized he was gone. The Indians got to him first. They found the bar.”

“And realized how much gold Johnson's bunch must have been hauling.” Prophet stepped as lightly as he could to keep his burned skin from screaming.

He slung the goatskin flask around his neck, slid the rifle
into his saddle boot, and led Mean over to the covered stone well standing in the center of the main street. Bocangel walked across the street to the livery barn and disappeared inside. Prophet winched up a bucket of water, filled the goatskin flask as well as his own canteen, hung both from his saddle horn, and swung into the leather.

Bocangel walked out of the livery barn carrying Prophet's saddlebags and bedroll. “You will need these.”

Prophet waited until the Mexican had strapped the bedroll behind his saddle cantle and set the saddlebags over the horse's rump.

“Which way'd they head?”

“West across the mountains. There is a spring there, the last one for a hundred miles.”

“Will they know where it is?”

“They will follow the only trail.”

He cast a backward glance at the Oasis Saloon and Dance Hall. Bocangel stood in the street behind him. Dust licked up around his boots in the rising breeze. A bad-luck wind in a cursed town.

Prophet said, “Much obliged, senor.”

“Go with God, Lou.”

Prophet turned his head forward, put spurs to Mean's flanks, and trotted for several yards along the street before galloping on out of San Gezo, following the trail snaking west.

ONE DAY EARLIER
, the outlaw gang comprised of Hawk Johnson's gang, Lazzaro's gang, Captain Chacin and his one surviving Rurale, and Louisa Bonaventure reined up at the base of the Montanas Muertas, where the canyon spilled into the waterless desert.

Louisa reined her pinto up beside Sugar's black and looked around the dozen riders through the dust kicked up by their horses and the mule that the black woman led and which had a Wells Fargo strongbox strapped to the stout pack frame on its back.

Lazzaro was riding lead with Hawk Johnson, the man with the constantly nervously twitching eyes who'd pretended to be the San Gezo town marshal. Lazzaro looked around, grinning to cover his wariness.

“Well, you gonna sit there all day, grinnin'?” said Johnson. “Or you gonna get your loot. We got ours, don't we? Intend to share it with you, don't we?” He gave an oblique smile. “As long as we all make it across the desert to Puerto Penasco together.”

One corner of his mouth rose with faint menace.

“That's right,” Lazzaro said. “That was the deal. I reckon we gotta trust each other, don't we?”

Lazzaro glowered at his unlikely accomplice. His face was gaunt, pale, and hollow-cheeked. He rode with one hand clamped over his wounded side. A while ago, as they'd ridden down the canyon from San Gezo, Louisa had spied blood leaking from the wound behind the gang leader's long cream duster.

Lazzaro glanced at Kiljoy sitting his roan beside him. Both men rode out away from the canyon mouth and into the desert beyond. As Louisa watched, sitting beside Sugar, the two riders grew small behind their rising tan dust tails. They disappeared into the ravine about a half a mile away, reappearing a half hour later.

Lazzaro had ridden into the ravine with one set of saddlebags on his horse. As he galloped back to the group, Louisa saw that he had a second set of saddlebags—the ones containing the stolen Nogales bank money—flapping over the first set.

“How much you got?” asked Doc Shackleford, sitting a rangy strawberry mare near the black woman, Thelma Knight, and the mule hauling the strongbox. Tulsa St. James sat a big cream to Shackleford's left, wearing a long duster, stylish black gloves, and a white silk scarf on her coifed red head. She had a surly, impatient expression on her pudgy, brown-eyed face. The whore carried a sawed-off shotgun in each of the two sheaths she wore on her saddle, one on each side of her mount.

“Sixteen thousand,” Lazzaro said a tad defensively.

“Not much compared to what we got,” said George LaBeouf, pulling his horse's head up away from a clump of jimsonweed. “But I reckon it'll buy us a few
putas
in Monterrey.” He and several of the other men chuckled before the burly outlaw glanced at Louisa, Ivy, and Sugar, and drawled, “Pardon, ladies.”

“We got the money,” Sugar said, pulling her horse up to where Lazzaro, Kiljoy, and Johnson sat clumped at the head of the pack. The blind woman slid her pistol from
the holster on her right thigh and shot Lazzaro through his forehead.

The shot spooked the horses and evoked two indignant brays from the mule.

Guns came up with loud snicks of iron against leather. All eyes swung to the blind woman, who, stony-faced, holstered her own smoking pistol as Lazzaro rolled down the side of his pitching horse to hit the ground with a thud. Sugar swung her left arm out a couple of times before grabbing Lazzaro's reins.

She turned to Johnson, who stared skeptically, both eyes twitching, over the long barrel of his own Colt leveled at the blind woman's belly. “He was my man,” she said, staring straight ahead. “And he'd come to the end of his trail. I wasn't going to give you the satisfaction of doing it yourself, Johnson. Now, let's ride before those savages catch up to us.”

Louisa had also palmed one of her Colts. Now she couldn't help curling her upper lip approvingly, suppressing the Colt's hammer, and returning the gun to its holster. The others in the group laughed nervously as they regarded the blind woman. Even Roy Kiljoy and Red Snake laughed, though with a little less genuine humor as the others, staring down at their dead leader, who lay on his back, both eyes open, blood dribbling from the gaping hole in his forehead, just above the bridge of his nose.

Johnson, Thelma Knight, and the others moved out. Louisa stayed back with Sugar, who turned to her as the hoof thuds of the others dwindled into the distance.

“You're still here,” Sugar said. She turned her head toward Lazzaro and stared off over the outlaw leader's body. “I'm glad. I need you now, Leona.”

“Maybe we need each other, Sugar.”

Sugar turned toward Louisa. “Why do you need me?”

“I don't know.” Louisa turned to stare back up the canyon in the direction of San Gezo, where she'd left so much—not the least of which was her lover and partner, Lou Prophet—behind. “Maybe to show me another way.”

What way was that?
she wondered all that day as they rode a winding trail through the heart of the Montanas Muertas, at the tail end of the outlaw pack.

What way was that?

Maybe the way she'd always been looking for to leave her grief behind. If killing thieves and killers hadn't done it, maybe joining them, becoming them, would.

Lou was likely dead. The night before, she'd scoured the town and the desert for him, but the wind had blown all his sign away and he hadn't answered her calls. Killed by the Mojaves, most likely, though it was impossible for her to imagine the big, rugged man dead. The idea was incomprehensible to her. It left her feeling hollow and numb.

With him gone, what else did she have left but to try to make life sufferable?

It was a long, hard ride without water except that which they had filled their canteens with before leaving San Gezo. Louisa looked around carefully as she followed the winding trail but saw no sign that the Indians were following them. But they had to be. Johnson had confessed to her and the others that El Lightning wanted the gold. With as much gold as Louisa suspected was in the strongbox—enough to arm every Mojave in the Southwest and Mexico, no doubt—the Mojaves would chase the desperadoes to the ends of the Earth.

They came to the barranca's southern edge just after dark. Hawk Johnson and Red Snake had scouted ahead and found the spring. The group set up a dry camp in a broad niche in the rocks along the side of a steep ridge. The spring lay in a stone bowl just below the camp, only forty yards away.