The Graves at Seven Devils (25 page)

Behind her, the others followed, spurs trilling and heels grinding gravel. The pinto clomped, shod hooves ringing off stones. A couple of the men—it sounded like Sykes and the black man, Heinz—spoke in hushed tones, chuckling.

“What ya got there, Custer?”

Louisa, flopping like a dead fish in Custer's arms, let her eyes roll to the right. Three men slowly materialized from the shadows, two leading three horses while the third, striding ahead of the others, batwing chaps fluttering about his denim-clad legs, moved toward her and Rafe.

One of the men flanking the man approaching appeared nearly as large and hairy as a grizzly bear. He wore Mexican-cut clothes and a steeple-crowned sombrero. It was from this man, moving up behind the leader, that a sickly sweet smell seemed to emanate, making Louisa's nose constrict.

“Caught us a fish in the creek, we did,” Custer said, letting his words roll with an accented flourish over his velvet tongue. “A little blond fish, purty as a speckled pup, and half drowned.”

“Cora wants to tend her her own self,” said Sykes, coming up behind Custer with the others, his own voice teeming with a sneer, “in her own shack . . . of course. . . .”

Cora told Sykes to diddle himself as she walked up beside Rafe and Louisa. The newcomer approached from the left—a tall, slender gent in a crisp black Stetson and black vest over a ruffled white shirt. He wore two guns in holsters, and had another pistol wedged over his belly, behind his cartridge belt.

The flickering firelight showed a rakishly handsome face, tanned by the sun, with a clean jawline and straight nose above a trimmed, cherry-blond mustache. Blond hair of the same hue curled down over his ears. On his feet he wore beaded Indian boot moccasins.

“What the hell are you talkin' about, Custer?” The newcomer chuckled.

Custer stopped and turned to the man. He jostled Louisa in his arms. Louisa fluttered her eyes and groaned a little, wagging her head from side to side as if to clear it. “Sure enough,” Custer said. “Ain't she purty as a rose petal, Squires? You'd prob'ly rather I took her to your shack, but you'll have to take that up with Miss Cora.”

The man called Squires slitted his blue eyes, which flashed in the crimson fires' glow, as he ran his gaze back and forth along Louisa's body sprawled across Rafe's arms. He whistled and poked his hat back from his broad, tan forehead. “Damn. You're tellin' me the arroyo just up and spit that out?”

The big, bearlike Mexican pushed his round, scarred face over Squires's left shoulder, his broad nostrils expanding and contracting, letting his black-eyed gaze roam across Louisa. He grunted and sniffed. Louisa's eyes burned from his stench—the fetor of several dead men staked out in the sun—but the others didn't seem to notice.

“Keep movin', Custer,” Cora ordered. “I don't have time to palaver with snakes.”

“Hold on.” Squires pulled Custer back by his arm and stared down at Louisa once more. He chuckled, shook his head, and slid a conspiratorial glance at the big Mexican. “Don't know as I've ever seen a girl like that out here—aside from Miss Cora her own self, of course.” His tone grew skeptical, suspicious, and he canted his head to one side, squinting an eye at the pretty blond in Custer's arms. “Who is she and where'd she come from? Anyone with her?”

“If they is,” said the top-hatted Billy Earl, smoking a cigar off Custer's left flank, “they done washed up farther down the arroyo.”

Squires held his gaze on Louisa, who gave a little cough. He growled, “Someone cut her tongue out?”

“She damn near drowned in the flood,” Cora said. “I'm puttin' her to bed. You can make all your inquiries tomorrow, Jay.”

Cora jerked her head forward, and Custer continued walking ahead, toward a gap between two of the ancient stone shacks that looked little more than window- and doorless shells, a couple with half-collapsed brush roofs, all surrounded by boulders and grown up with chaparral.

Behind, Jay said, “You want me to join you two tonight, Kitten, just toss a rock my way.”

“I'll toss a rock, all right, you fork-tongued son of a bitch!” Cora grunted and continued striding along with Custer and Louisa, back into the shadows away from the fires. “I'd rather you sent that big, stinking bean eater of yours.”

“Don't go gettin' overly distracted now, Cora,” Sykes called, angling off in another direction. “Remember—we got us a little job day after tomorrow.”

He and Heinz chuckled. Cora told them to diddle each other. Heinz cursed.

As Custer walked back into the brush, Cora strode ahead, heading for a shack set back from the others. The windows were lit with lantern light.

The place had a brush roof and a narrow porch that appeared to have been recently repaired with new boards. There was a timbered door. Cora strode onto the porch, threw the door open, and stepped aside as Custer carried Louisa over the threshold, sidestepping through the narrow opening.

Cora pointed toward a bed in a far, dark corner that the light shed by a single lamp hanging from a ceiling beam did not reach. “Put her there and vamoose.”

Custer chuckled as he set Louisa on the bed covered with a bobcat hide. As he turned back toward the tall redhead standing by the open door, he gave a lavish bow. He strode toward her and stopped a foot away from her, then slid his face to within six inches of hers.

“Don't talk to us like that again, Cora. Not Rafe, Billy Earl, or me. You might be faster an' more willin' than my brothers, but you and I both know you ain't faster nor more willin' than
me
.”

Custer glanced back at Louisa, who lay on the bed, hands on her belly as she continued pretending that her swim in the river had taken a higher toll than it had. As the sombrero-hatted outlaw turned back to Cora, he said, “And your tastes ain't no
purer
than ours, neither. So save your venom for Jay an' his boys . . . once we get our hands on that gold.”

Custer kissed his index finger, pressed the finger to Cora's forehead, and strode out the door and into the night.

“Faggot!” Cora slammed the door.

Running the sleeve of her flowered blouse across her forehead and bunching her lips with revulsion, she strode over to the bed and stared down at Louisa.

“You're pretty.” She ran the back of her hand across Louisa's mud-streaked cheek. “Damn purty.”

She hunkered low, shoved her face to within inches of Louisa's, and smiled. The smile did not extend to her green, catlike eyes. Saliva crackled as she stretched her lips back from her teeth.

“Now, suppose you tell me what you're
really
doing here, Pretty Girl.”

FOR THE SECOND time that night, Prophet dragged the half-breed out to the edge of the yard and rolled him up onto the other four dead men. Prophet had no doubt the man was really dead this time, as there were nearly two separate halves of the man to drag off, such was the size of the wound that the ten-gauge gut shredder had carved through his middle.

That task completed, the bounty hunter wiped the blood off his hands in some Mormon tea growing near the cabin, then turned Big Hans's claybank into the well-concealed brush corral in which the outlaws' horses milled. Mounting Mean and Ugly, he headed back the way he'd come, scouring the thickening, still-dripping darkness for Louisa, thoroughly baffled and anxious and wondering what had become of his hot-blooded, head-strong partner.

He doubted that the banditos they'd fought off at the monastery had taken her, because she'd been ahead of Prophet, and he would have seen any banditos overtaking them. Of course, Apaches were always a threat out here, but in a raging desert gully washer?

Most likely her horse had fallen, and she was lying along the trail somewhere, injured, possibly dead.

When he came to the scuffed area marking where Big Hans had been dislodged from his claybank, he continued moving north, staring at the terrain even more closely, keeping his Winchester's butt handy beneath his right thigh while holding the sawed-off ten-gauge straight out from his belly. The banditos from the monastery were no doubt twanging guitars in front of a warm fire by now, but he wasn't taking any chances.

The farther he rode without seeing any sign of Louisa or her pinto, the heavier and sharper the frustration grew inside him.

Between two hogbacks, he drew back on Mean and Ugly's reins and frowned down at the ground just left of the trail. Hoofprints, nearly obliterated by the wind and rain and darkness, angled off to the west.

If Louisa had gotten off the trail here, between these hills, Prophet wouldn't have seen her. The terrain being a mess of rocks, brush, and several fallen saguaro skeletons, it would have been easy for Louisa to mistake the forking game trail for the trail Big Hans had been following. Especially during the height of the storm.

Prophet followed the game trail meandering through the scrub and into a dark defile in the canyon wall. He'd ridden only a few minutes when a black earthen mass rose up before him—a good two-hundred-foot-high pile of broken boulders that completely blocked the passageway. The faint, sporadically washed-out prints Prophet had been following disappeared at the base of the slide.

The jagged mass loomed before him, wedged tight between the defile's steep walls and capped with stars flickering down from a black velvet sky. The muddy earth around it was scuffed and scraped from the recently fallen rock, several saguaros and ironwood shrubs flattened beneath wagon- and barrel-sized slabs. Many chunks had rolled several yards out behind Prophet, leaving scuffed, water-filled troughs in their wake.

Again, Prophet looked at the tracks that disappeared at the rock pile's base. He rose up in his saddle, his heart thudding. If Louisa had ridden this way—and it looked like she had—either she lay crushed at the bottom of the slide, or she'd made it through before the defile had been sealed and was wandering around on the other side.

“Louisa, goddamnit . . .”

Prophet's own voice startled him. It sounded unnaturally loud and forlorn in the quiet desert night relieved occasionally by the scuffs of some burrowing critter, the distant bugling of a wild mustang, and the soft hoof thuds of a foraging javelina.

Finally, convinced that there was no way through the massive snag, and that to find Louisa he'd have to locate another route back behind the mountain walls on either side of it, he reined Mean and Ugly around and jogged back the way he'd come, his hoof clomps echoing in the stony silence.

When the defile fell back behind him, he took a sharp right and rode along the base of the steep western ridge humping up blackly in the darkness, searching desperately for another passage south.

He rode for a good hour, finding nothing but occasional clefts and box canyons, a few more fresh rock slides, what appeared to be an ancient prospector's dilapidated fieldstone cabin at the bottom of a cactus-choked arroyo, and a pile of fresh bobcat plop. No more defiles or passages into the next canyon.

Tired and weary, he realized that his fevered following of the ridge base had gotten him perilously disoriented; it took him another hour to find his way back to the cabin.

He took the time to rub Mean and Ugly down thoroughly before feeding and watering the mount, then turning him into the brush corral with the claybank and the outlaws' horses. Inside the cabin, he found Big Hans snoring raucously and smelling like a whiskey vat.

The whore, Loretta, sat on a nearby cot with a couple of blankets wrapped around her shoulders, her whiskey bottle propped against a hip. She strummed a beat-up guitar—a sad, lonely Mexican ballad that complemented Prophet's dark mood and his worry over Louisa.

He went over and picked up the bottle. Loretta continued singing, eyes on some spot in the low ceiling on the other side of the room, as if at the man or the lost, lamented years she was singing about. Prophet took a couple of pulls of the busthead, corked the bottle, returned it to Loretta's hip, then sagged down to the first cot he came to.

Pensive, his thoughts on Louisa, he pulled off his boots. He doubted he'd sleep, but he needed some rest if he was going to do more than a half-assed job of looking for the girl in the morning.

He pulled his blankets up to his neck, closed his eyes, and as Loretta continued keening and plucking the solemn guitar strings, he drifted faster than he'd thought possible into a deep, warm pool of healing darkness.

 

“Come on, Pretty Girl. You can tell Cora. What're you
really
doing here?”

Cora stretched out on the bed beside Louisa. Her lips widened into a smile, but the skin above the bridge of her nose was furled, a dark cast in her crazy, green eyes. Her left hand had disappeared under the bed, and now, as she rolled toward Louisa, until Cora's breasts were mashing into Louisa's, she lifted a bone-handled stiletto up high so that the wan lantern light flashed off the round, pointed steel blade.

Louisa's blood rushed to her face—a toxic mixture of fear and fury. Mostly fury. She remembered Big Hans's story about the gang including Cora chasing Louisa's cousin into the rocky desert north of Seven Devils. Her cousin had either been thrown off the cliff, or she'd jumped off to save herself from more of the same torture she'd no doubt suffered in the brothel. To save herself from the kind of deaths suffered by her son and her husband.

Despite her boiling blood, Louisa kept her face implacable as she watched the stiletto drop slowly toward her face. Cora laid the tip against Louisa's nose. Nibbling her lower lip, the redheaded killer slid the stiletto tip across Louisa's lips to her chin. The sharp blade, not quite tearing the skin, traced a straight line down Louisa's neck.