The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel (3 page)

Inside, a lamp burned on a broad mahogany desk covered
in cloth-bound ledgers and rolled maps. Prophet nudged the door open slowly with the shotgun's stock. The hinges squawked.

The widening doorway revealed a broad office with more heavy furniture and bookcases, most of them empty. A fire danced in a fieldstone hearth under a gaudy painting of a naked, full-breasted brunette sprawled on a red velvet settee on a veranda trimmed with many potted plants.

There were maps of most of the American southwestern territories and the northern Mexican provinces on the walls, some with flags pinned to them, likely indicating targets the gang had yet to hone in on—probably towns or ranch headquarters with blooded horses or well-stocked bank vaults. Lazzaro was also known for smuggling diamonds across the border, so some of the flags likely indicated diamond caches, as well.

Prophet had just moved away from the door when a gun clicked in his right ear. The hard, cold barrel of the gun was pressed to his head behind his ear.

“Drop the Greener,
mi
amigo,” said a low, resonate voice. Prophet could smell the man's leather clothes and the sickly sweet cologne as well as the faint stench of tequila and cigar smoke.

Prophet lifted the shotgun's lanyard from around his neck and dropped the gun on the floor a few feet in front of him.

“Now the rifle and your sidearm.”

Prophet did as he was told, cold chicken flesh spreading out between his shoulder blades at the low, menacing voice of the gun-wielding hombre behind him. He glanced over his right shoulder to see the dandified Mexican in the short charro jacket sweating, keeping the cocked Colt aimed at Prophet's head.

“How many more of you are there, Senor Prophet?” asked Hector Foran, beads of sweat running down his cheeks and into his carefully trimmed beard.

Some said that Foran had become the brains of the outfit, setting up their jobs. That would explain the fancy digs
complete with territorial maps and books that were probably chock-full of the timetables of enticing train and stage coach targets.

“Hell,” Prophet said, “you're surround—!”

He wheeled, slashing upward with his right arm. Foran's Colt roared on the heels of another thunderclap, the bullet thumping into the ceiling. Prophet closed his fingers around the man's gun hand, wrapped his other hand around the man's throat, and shoved him hard against the wall.

Boots thumped behind him. There'd been other men in the room, and they were bounding toward him. Prophet felt a stone drop in his belly when he heard a hammer click.

Foran, red-faced and wild-eyed, turned his head to the side and yelled, “Don't kill him!”

Something hard as a pistol butt slammed against the back of Prophet's head. It was a glancing blow, his shoulder taking much of it. It still made birds twitter and chirp in Prophet's head and caused Foran's red-faced visage to become two bleary pictures as the floor came up to slam against Prophet's knees.

He stared down at Foran's high-topped, black, copper-tipped boots, shaking his head to clear it.

“I'm going to ask you once more, Senor Prophet,” Foran said, bending down and glowering at the woozy bounty hunter, “how many more in your party?”

“There's gotta be several upstairs,” said one of the men behind Prophet. There were two, maybe three other men in the room with Foran.

“Like I said—you're surrounded. Posse, Rurales, cavalry boys . . .” Best to let them think they were badly outgunned. Nervous men were distracted men, and easier to kill.

Prophet heaved himself up off his knees. He twisted his six-foot-four-inch, two-hundred-and-thirty-pound frame around and lunged at one of the three figures standing behind him, in a semicircle between him and the desk.

He glimpsed a gun held taut in a brown hand and grabbed it as the man shouted. The others lurched back. Prophet
slammed his big body into the man whose gun he now had. While he and the man hit the floor, Prophet snaked the pistol up and fired.

He'd been moving and firing at the same time and managed to only clip the ear of the man he'd been aiming at—a Yanqui redhead whose freckled face he recognized as the American outlaw Red Barker. Barker triggered his own pistol as he cursed and showed his teeth and clamped a hand over his bloody ear. He recocked the pistol as he swung it toward Prophet, crouching and extending his gun hand as he continued to curse.

Prophet tried to raise his own gun again but the man he'd fallen on—a fat Mex who smelled like a cantina—swatted Prophet's wrist just as Prophet squeezed the trigger. The bullet slammed into the door as another gun belched.

Prophet jerked, winced, and cast his horrified gaze at Barker, whose extended arm went suddenly limp. The redhead's freckled, blue-eyed face acquired a confused expression.

No smoke curled from the barrel of the silver-chased Remington in his hand. Surprisingly, no bullet had hammered into Prophet's large person—at least, none that he could feel at the moment. Smoke wafted in the doorway behind the now-sagging Barker—pale, weblike fingers gently waving this way and that, dimly illuminated by the several lit candles and lamps in the office and a burning oil pot in the hall.

Foran leaped back toward the desk, cursing in Spanish, and raising his own Colt toward the door in which a dusky figure now appeared, jostling shadows obscuring it, though light from the hall shone briefly on two clear, hazel eyes as the gun in the shooter's hand lapped flames into the room, roaring between thunderclaps outside.

The man nearest Barker took the second bullet and flew backward into the room's shadows while the third bullet slammed with a hollow crunching sound into the head of the fat Mex struggling with Prophet. His head hit the floor with a hard thud.

Prophet stared at the figure in the door, saw the pistol leap in the shooter's hand twice more, throwing Foran across a low table while triggering his pistol into the ceiling. The brains of the outfit hit the floor on the table's other side, screaming, “
Mierda!
Spare me—
por favor
. Oh, god—please spare me!”

The dusky figure clad in deerskins and wearing a red sash around its trim waist stepped fluidly into the room, rocking the silver-chased Colt in and aiming again at Foran cowering against the back wall flanking the desk. “To give you the information you were seeking from my partner, in a none-too-polite way, I'll tell you that there is only one more assailant, Senor Foran.”

Prophet hauled himself to his feet and looked back at Foran, who was clutching his right, bloody shoulder and staring at the person who'd just entered the smoky, shadowy room. His pointed chin jutted as he dropped his lower jaw, his brown eyes white-ringed with befuddlement.
“You, Senorita Batista?”

“The name's not Leona Batista, amigo. The name's Bonaventure.” She glanced at Prophet. “I ride with this big, ugly lummox . . . when I'm in the mood for suffering his poor hygiene and bad jokes.”

Foran looked from Prophet to the hazel-eyed blond in the straw sombrero and deerskin charro outfit complete with red bandanna and red sash, and hardened his jaws.
“Traidor!”
he shouted.

“Si.”
The blond's Colt roared.

The .45 slug blew a quarter-sized hole in the middle of Foran's forehead, jerking his head back as though he'd been punched in the chin. He gurgled down deep in his throat, and his eyes rolled back in his head, the lids staying open. He sagged back against the wall that was dripping with the man's own blood and brains and dropped his chin to his chest as though in prayer.

Red Barker made a noise near Louisa's brown boots, and she casually angled her Colt toward the man and shot him through his right eye, giving the pistoleer a Louisa Bonaventure–style finishing touch.

LOUISA HAD BARELY
even looked at the redhead before she'd shot him. That's how cool and confident she was with her own shooting prowess. It was maddening sometimes, Prophet thought—this need of hers to show off.

And some women appreciated his jokes. . . .

Now she twirled her Colt on her finger with a characteristic flourish and dropped the piece in the holster thonged low on her right thigh. Another pearl-gripped Colt jutted from a second holster on her left thigh. Two cartridge belts crisscrossed her slender waist, beneath the sash. Her leggings were fringed, as were the sleeves of her short, hickory tan charro jacket.

Prophet studied the girl, who was all of twenty-one but whose clear, hard, hazel eyes were a good fifty years older, and gave a wry chuff. “Good Lord, girl—you look like Bill Cody!”

“That's how they dress down here, Lou. You'd want me to look like one of 'em, wouldn't you?”

Prophet studied the girl once more. He was more accustomed to seeing her in a simple riding skirt and blouse, maybe with a loose sweater beneath which she concealed
her smoke wagons. He had to admit, though, that she wore the stylish Mexican garb right well. The deerskin clung nicely to her five-foot-four-inch and hundred-and-ten-pound frame. The sombrero shaded her face mysteriously. Her silky blond hair fluttered down over her shoulders in loose sausage curls.

A faint flush rose in her cheeks, and she looked down at the outfit before raising her eyes to his once more. Her lips shaped a smile, and her eyes flashed alluringly as she strode over to him, stopped a foot away, and stared up at him. “You like, amigo?”

“Some women think my jokes are right funny.”

“Only the whores you pay to listen.”

Prophet appraised her outfit again and curled his upper lip. “I like what's under all that a whole lot better than the get-up itself.”

She showed her white teeth as she rose up on the toes of her boots and pressed her lips to his. When she pulled away, he glanced at the dead men around him and then at the open door to the hallway, noting that the big house was silent now except for the thunder creaking its stout ceiling beams and the rain rattling its windows.

“I do appreciate your coming . . . finally.”

“You heard my arrival, I take it?

“You can't go anywhere without causing a commotion, Lou.”

Prophet glanced at the ceiling over her pretty head. “You sure they're all dead?”

“Oh, they're all dead. I surprised them right well. Don't think a one of them suspected me of . . .
being a traitor
, as Senor Foran so aptly put it.”

Prophet frowned, vaguely surprised by the girl's droll tone. She almost sounded as though she partly regretted the ruse she'd pulled on Lazzaro's bunch of cold-blooded killers.

“The Nogales loot?”

Louisa grimaced then strode around behind the big desk and sagged back in the leather bullhorn chair. She crossed
her fancily stitched cowhide boots on the edge of the desk, giving one of the large-roweled copper spurs a singing spin.

“We got a little problem,” she said, tossing her big sombrero onto the desk in front of her and scrubbing her gloved hands through her hair so that it stuck up in long, silky, sexy tufts all over her head.

Prophet kicked over the big, dead Mexican and glanced over his shoulder at Louisa. “I don't like problems, girl. You know that.”

“Well, you got one now. Or . . . four of them to be exact.”

Prophet leaned down to scoop his Peacemaker off the floor where the Mex had lain on it. Now he grabbed his Winchester and shotgun, lay both across the desk, then kicked a ladder-back chair over in front of the desk and slacked into it. He looked at Louisa, the blond
bandita
, sitting across from him, her hair pleasingly tousled.

“Tell me.”

“Lazzaro and Red Snake Corbin lit out with the loot. Sometime this afternoon, when the rest of the men . . . and I . . . were enjoying siesta. They and two others had a double cross on.”

Prophet's broad, broken-nosed face colored up and turned as weathery as the night outside the office's large, shuttered windows. “You mean, we got more to go after? How'd that happen?”

Louisa gave back as good as she got. “It happened because there were twenty, nearly thirty men around here, and a woman, and I had one helluva time keeping track of them all.” She pursed her lips and sighed. “And I reckon they hornswoggled me, just like the others. I had no idea Lazzaro and Sugar and two other men were gonna pull foot.”

“Who's Sugar?”

“Sugar Delphi. She's blind.”

“Say that again?”

“She's blind—sure enough. And she's . . .” Louisa looked uncertain, a little perplexed. “She's Lazzaro's woman. He's her eyes, I reckon.” She hiked a shoulder noncommittally.

She dropped her boots to the floor, leaned forward, and
grabbed one of the two cut-glass decanters off the table's left side. “She may be blind, but she's a tough nut. She drugged me. That's why I didn't know they were taking off with the loot until they'd gone. I reckon the others still didn't know about it. Lazzaro, Sugar, Red Snake Corbin, and Roy Kiljoy headed out while the others were asleep, ahead of the storm.”

“
Drugged
you?”

“Left me asleep upstairs where we roomed together. We sort of looked out for each other, Sugar and me. Despite that she's been blind from birth.” Louisa filled a goblet with what looked like brandy and slid it across the desk to Prophet. She filled the second goblet, and Prophet arched a brow at his partner whom he'd known to drink nothing stronger than the occasional ginger beer or cherry sarsaparilla.

“Hold on, there—what're you doin'?”

Louisa lifted the goblet and tipped back a goodly portion. She swallowed, smacked her bee-stung, ruby red lips, and ran the back of her hand across her mouth. “A girl's gotta do more than just dress the part to fit in around here. These fellas and Sugar drank damn near all day and all night. It would have looked a mite suspicious if I hadn't joined in on the fun.”