The Devil’s Laughter: A Lou Prophet Novel (6 page)

“There's nothin' to agree on,” Prophet said, snarling at Chacin while his five other men looked edgily on. Those with scanty English looked confused. “The loot's gone, Jorge. I got here too late. Lazzaro hauled freight. Headed straight south—probably toward the Sierra Madre, just like you said.”

“Huh? What?” Chacin looked incredulous, and then he grinned wolfishly. “You always get your man, Lou. And the loot!”

“Not this time,” Louisa said. “They lit out before Lou got here.”

Chacin glanced at the short, stocky Rurale wearing
sergeant's chevrons on his sleeves sitting a dirty cream mare behind and to Chacin's right. The sergeant had thick, curly brown hair puffing down from his sombrero, and a mustache that looked ridiculously large on his small, moon-shaped face. He pursed his lips inside his mustache and shook his head.

Chacin looked at Prophet, the wolf grin still bright on his face. “You have hornswoggled me one too many times, Lou.” He lifted a finger up close to his face and waggled it. “You will not hornswoggle me again.” He said
hornswoggle
as though he were so fond of the English expression that he tried to work it into conversations whenever he could. He glanced at the sergeant. “Sergeant Frieri, pat them both down. If there is money, surely they will have stuffed their pockets with some of it.”

Frieri stepped down from his horse, tossed his reins to a young corporal behind him, and grinned lustily at Louisa. “May I start with the
rubia, el Capitan?
” He winked as he strode toward Louisa—a bandy-legged little man with an enormous gut pooching out his uniform tunic.

“Si,”
said the captain, showing his fang-like eyeteeth again.

Frieri slowed as he approached the blond bounty hunter, grinning and holding his hands up, palms out, inching them toward Louisa's chest. Louisa stared at the short man blandly and didn't move a muscle until he was two feet away.

Then her right boot shot up in blur of sudden action.

“Whaoffff!”
Sergeant Frieri jackknifed forward and crossed his little, thick hands over his balls.

Louisa lowered the boot she'd just impaled the Rurale's oysters with and stepped backward, holding her hands over the pearl grips of her matched Colts. To a man, the Rurales raised their rifles while checking their startled horses down with taut hands on the reins. A corporal who must have fancied himself a pistoleer clawed a Russian .44 from the crossdraw holster on his right hip.

Prophet brought up his own Colt and fired.

Bam!

The corporal screamed and dropped the Russian as he was about to cock it and clutched the hole in the yellow stripe running down the outside of his left thigh. His horse reared and lurched sharply to the right.

The groaning corporal flew off the left side of his saddle and hit the muddy yard with a yowl. His horse wheeled and ran back out the open gate, trampling and rolling one of the dead banditos over.

Prophet recocked the Colt as Louisa drew both of hers and waited for hell to pop.

CAPTAIN CHACIN KEPT
his own carbine on his saddlebow as he shouted, swinging his head around,
“¡Parada! ¡Parada! ¡Lleve a cabo su fuego!”

Stop! Stop! Hold your fire!

All the horses were fidgety now, stomping, and the Rurales all had to keep them in check with a taut hand on the reins. The corporal whom Prophet had wounded lay in the mud, writhing and clutching his bloody thigh. When the other Rurales had lowered their rifles, Chacin gave Prophet a hard sidelong look then rode over to the wounded corporal, shook his head, then extended his Winchester carbine one-handed. The corporal's dark eyes doubled in size when he saw the rifle aimed at his head.

“No,
el Capitan
!”

Chacin's carbine belched. The corporal had raised a hand as though to shield his head from the bullet. The bullet tore a hole through the open hand before plowing through the man's brain plate then exiting his right ear and splashing into a mud puddle, instantly turning the puddle a milky red. The corporal flopped onto his back, shaking, while the
other Rurales looked in horror from their captain to the dead man.

Chacin set his Winchester back atop his saddlebow and looked at Prophet in disgust. “See what you make me do?”

Prophet wasn't at all surprised that Chacin had put the man down like a rabid dog. A wounded rider would have complicated his life, and life was complicated enough on the Mexican frontier.

“You want me to say I'm sorry?” Prophet asked, keeping his cocked Colt raised and waving it around slightly at the Rurales astraddle their agitated horses.

Louisa held both her cocked pistols on the short, fat, curly-headed sergeant groaning on the ground before her, grimacing up at her and muttering Spanish curses through his teeth. Tightly, out the corner of her mouth, she said, “Let's kill them all, Lou. Starting with this one here.”

The sergeant's eyes widened. He glanced over his shoulder at Captain Chacin, who smiled with only his mouth, showing those fangs again. “All right, all right—perhaps it is time for us all to calm down and discuss the situation like reasonable men . . . and, uh, women.”

“I don't think so,” Prophet said, aiming the Colt at Chacin now. “We got nothin' to discuss. I've gone into business with you for the last time, Jorge. I don't give a shit how many men you got up here in old Sonory. There's only five of you now, and me and my partner here got the drop on you. If you don't take this ragtag bunch and ride out the same way you came in, pronto, we'll do it her way.”

Chacin stared back at Prophet for a long time. Save for the blowing and occasional stomping of the horses and the chirping of the morning birds, a tense silence fell over the group. Frieri kept both hands on his crotch, scowling warily over his shoulder at Chacin, knowing that in his defenseless condition, if the lead started flying, he'd surely be first to have his wick trimmed.

The captain's chin jutted. His leathery cheeks dimpled above his mustache and goatee, and his face turned a darker
red as he neck-reined his Arabian cross around. Without saying anything, he put the steel to the Arab's flanks and galloped out of the yard. The other Rurales looked from Prophet to Louisa to the dead man on the ground, their faces hard but wary under their sombreros' wide brims.

They reined around and followed the stiff-backed captain out of the yard. Frieri muttered something shrilly, then, casting his fearful gaze at Prophet and the Vengeance Queen, gained his feet, wincing, and ran over to the steeldust stallion ground-tied but prancing around behind him. Cursing and grunting, he hauled himself awkwardly into the saddle. Keeping one hand on his bruised oysters, and slouched forward on the steeldust's back, he trotted out of the yard, swinging left, to follow the others in the direction from which they'd come.

“We got the bulge on 'em for now,” Prophet said, holstering the Colt. “But it won't last long. They got us outnumbered, and I know Chacin well enough to know he ain't gonna be happy till he's got the loot and we've both taken it in the neck.”

He strode back into the hacienda.

As he gathered up his gear, Louisa gathered up her bedroll and saddlebags, and they met at the back door before tramping quickly outside and making a beeline for the barn. Prophet saddled his feisty dun while Louisa saddled the brown-and-white pinto she'd never given a name because, knowing the horse could take a bullet meant for her at any time or that she might have to run it into the ground to save her own skin, she didn't want to get too attached. She knew the risk of attachments.

They led the horses into the puddle-dimpled yard growing light now as the sun climbed, the humidity rising like pale snakes from the warming earth, and mounted up. They both looked around, Prophet slipping his Colt from its holster and replacing the cartridge he'd capped on the dead corporal.

“How far you think they rode?” Louisa said, letting her gaze settle on the shadowy eastern plain stippled with
Spanish bayonet and sage and rising toward steep ridges silhouetted against the rising sun.

“Not far,” Prophet said. “Likely, he'll try to get around us, cut us off, so keep your eyes skinned.”

He booted Mean west from the barn. Louisa put her pinto up beside him as they angled across the yard to the wagon road that curved along its southern edge.

“Southwest, you say?”

“That's the direction they took when they left here. That doesn't mean it's the direction they stuck to.”

“If they weren't haulin' so damn much gold, I'd let 'em go,” Prophet said.

“You've wanted Lazzaro for a long time, Lou. As have I.” Louisa specialized in tracking men who'd killed women and children, and Lazzaro was notorious for taking women and children hostage to help him get out of the towns he'd plundered, usually leaving his hostages dead in the desert when he was sure he'd outrun any posses fogging his back trail. He hadn't pulled that stunt in Nogales, however. Likely because he knew the law didn't have the balls to be a threat.

“I know,” Prophet said. “But we could wait and get him when he heads back north. Chacin'll never run him down on his own—not with that raggedy-heeled band of muchachos and old men he's ridin' with.”

“I reckon that's possible,” Louisa said as they kicked their mounts into trots, the hooves making soft thuds on the wet ground and splashing through puddles, “but with that much money we likely won't see him again for a long, long time. He might even decide to stay down here. In that case, we might never see him and Sugar and the two others again.”

Prophet glanced at his partner, whose blond hair streamed back behind her shoulders as she rode, the sun-bleached strands glistening in the intensifying, golden morning sunshine. The girl had always owned a strange, oblique edge—an edge that Prophet had only seen in men, particular pistoleers like Clay Allison, Ben Thompson, and John Wesley Hardin, but rarely in women.

“This blind pistolera,” Prophet said. “This Sugar Delphi . . .”

Louisa looked at him.

“What's she like?”

Louisa blinked, let a moment pass as they continued riding west. “Just like I told you. She can't see. Aside from that, she's just like the others.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “A cold-blooded killer.”

At the same time but eight miles southwest, Sugar Delphi jerked back on her cream-dappled black's reins, shook a thick lock of her rust red hair back from her pale face set with clear blue, blind eyes, and yelled, “Halt!”

The three male riders, gang leader Antonio Lazzaro, Red Snake Corbin, and Roy Kiljoy all brought their loping mounts to grinding halts on the south side of the flooded arroyo that they'd been following since breaking camp at the first blush of dawn. Lazzaro was carrying the saddlebags stuffed with fifteen thousand dollars of stolen Mexican coins and greenbacks, and he jerked a look behind him now to make sure the bags had not fallen off his horse.

Satisfied, he turned to Sugar, scowling. “What the hell's the matter?”

She sat her blowing, dappled black gelding, swinging her head around as though she could actually see something of this broad desert valley carpeted in little but rocks and the occasional tuft of yucca and greasewood and surrounded by low escarpments of ancient, black volcanic rock. Thin troughs muttered with runoff from the recent deluge, and the air was damn near as humid as the Mexican lowlands surrounding the Gulf.

Sugar turned to him, looked right through him with those cobalt blues of hers. “Can't you smell it?”

“Smell what?”

“Death.”

Lazzaro looked around, fighting impatience. He'd ridden with the blind woman for nearly four years and knew that she had the senses—aside from sight, that was—of a wild puma cat. He sniffed the air and continued to scan the
low, sandy mounds around him before turning back to her once more, his own deep-set eyes crinkling deeply at the corners.

“Sugar, all I can smell is the whiskey I'm gonna drink at the Colorado Gulch Station. Death? What's that mean—
death
?”

He looked at the other three men. Red Snake—long and lean and hawk-faced—sat the saddle of his copperbottom dun, looking around cautiously, his brass-cased Henry repeater in his right hand. The two red snakes tattooed on both his exposed, lightly haired forearms coiled downward past his thin wrists, their heads resting against the backs of his hands, forked tongues slithering hungrily across his bulging knuckles and into his two middle fingers.

He jerked his bright-eyed, incredulous gaze to Lazzaro. He never spoke directly to Sugar, for some reason. Maybe he was repelled by her blindness, or, having been raised in the superstition-stitched hills of West Virginia, he thought her a witch who might put a hex on him if he were to speak to her directly and possibly offend her.

“Could she be a little more specific?” he asked Lazzaro, trying to keep his impatience out of his slightly high-pitched voice.

Of course, Lazzaro didn't need to answer for Sugar, as the woman was only blind, not deaf.

“Human remains,” she said, staring off the right side of the trail. “One, maybe one and a half days dead. Chewed on by coyotes early this morning, after the rains stopped.” She touched spurs to her black.

Horse and rider galloped off the trail and into the desert, the dappled black gelding picking its way for the blind woman on her back. The black and Sugar Delphi always rode as one, the horse's eyes for all intents and purposes becoming the redhead's eyes.

Lazzaro scowled after the woman then gigged his own horse after Sugar. Red Snake shared a skeptical glance with the fourth rider in the group—Roy Kiljoy, who, at five feet
three inches tall, made up in viciousness and cruelty what he lacked in height. He also made up for it by his breadth, for he was as wide as a door.