The Graves at Seven Devils (27 page)

The gang might have been named for the three bizarre look-alikes, but obviously Cora was the one in charge. She kept the men out there, kicking around for the girl who'd no doubt disfigured her permanently, all night long.

Again, Louisa awoke from a doze, roused by her own rasping breath. She jerked her head up and peered through the roof slats. The sky was lightening, the stars fading. Birds chirped in the brush all around her.

She listened intently for about five minutes.

Only the bird sounds and the distant, frenzied yapping of ridge-sitting coyotes. Had the outlaws finally drifted back to their cabins?

Louisa couldn't hide here forever. She'd need water soon or she'd shrivel up and die like a mouse at the bottom of a dry well pit. It had gotten lighter than she would have liked, but she had to make a run for it, find a way through, around, or up and over that ridge, somehow make her way back to Prophet.

She winced as she stretched out her legs, hearing her stiff muscles and bones snapping and popping. She turned onto her hands and knees and crawled slowly out from beneath the shack's slanting roof, then lifted her head above the low, stone wall, looking around and listening.

Except for the birds and the yammering of the coyotes, nothing. She picked up a brick-sized, jagged-edged stone—she felt too naked without any weapon at all—and, continuing to look around, began walking slowly up the slope. Meandering around the rocks and cactus, she also avoided the mine holes and tailings pocking the terrain.

She stopped suddenly, drew a shallow breath through her nose, detecting the smell of tobacco. Frozen, she looked around, heart quickening once more. Smoke wafted in the predawn shadows, a couple of thin, weblike lines rising from her left.

Louisa swung her head around, and her stomach leaped into her throat. The man called Sykes stood about seven feet away from her, in front of a boulder and a juniper shrub, bringing a quirley to his lips as he stared up the slope, slightly away from Louisa. The tip of the quirley glowed brightly in the purple shadows.

Louisa's mind reeled as her stomach continued churning, her ears screaming. Before she could make up her mind about what to do, Sykes turned toward her suddenly, as though he'd spied her in the periphery of his vision. His eyes beneath the brim of his blue cavalry hat snapped wide. His fingers opened, and the quirley dropped, spraying orange sparks along the ground.

As he reached for the revolver jutting from his shoulder holster, he shouted,
“Heyyy!”

Louisa bolted toward him, cocking her arm, then slamming her rock against Sykes's temple so hard that she could feel the impact all the way up her arm and into her shoulder.

“Uhh!” The man stumbled back and sideways, tripping over his own boots and bringing a hand to his forehead.

Louisa stepped toward him once more, swinging her arm back behind her. Bunching her lips, she swung it forward with even more power than before. The rock struck the side of Sykes's head with another resolute, cracking thump. He groaned as his hat flew off his head and into the cedar behind him.

“Here!” Sykes bellowed, falling to a knee against the cedar, his voice cracking with misery. “Bitch's heeeere!”

From downslope rose the unmistakable shriek of Cora. Cursing and bellowing like a bull trapped in a wildfire, Sykes again reached for his shoulder-holstered six-shooter. Louisa wheeled and, hearing footsteps and snapping brush all around her—she must have been moving right up through the killers stationed around her hiding place—she sprinted up the slope.

Sykes triggered shots behind her, the slugs screeching off rocks around her scissoring heels.

Leaping rocks and small shrubs, breath rasping in and out of her still-boggy lungs, Louisa ran hard, pumping her arms and lifting her knees. More shouts and shrieks rose behind her, and Sykes continued yammering and triggering errant rounds.

“I can't see!” the man bellowed. “Bitch
blinded
me!”

“Shut up!” Cora's cracking wail lifted the hair on the back of Louisa's neck.
“Where is she?”

To Louisa's left, a man's voice boomed. “I got her!”

“Bitch blinded—!” Sykes shouted again, his voice clipped by another scream from Cora and a pistol blast.

There was a blue flash and a pop from maybe twenty yards away. The slug whistled inches in front of Louisa's face and barked into a boulder ahead and right.

Louisa offered a rare curse and continued running, tripping over obstacles in the uncertain light, hearing her own wheezing breaths and involuntary groans like some creature keeping pace beside her.

Boots thudded behind her, a man's labored breath growing louder.

He triggered another thundering shot, and the slug sliced across Louisa's left shoulder to smack the ground ahead with a whining thud. Louisa lurched to her right. Her boot clipped a stone, and she stumbled, flew forward, sliding and skidding along on her hands and knees.

She whipped around to cast a look behind her. The handsome blond-haired outlaw materialized from the shadows, a revolver smoking in his right hand. White teeth shone as he stretched his mustache in a broad grin, then turned his head sideways.

“Over here!”

The others, including the big, grunting Mexican, running up the slope behind and around him, closed on him and Louisa.

She looked around for a branch or a rock—anything she could use for a weapon. Her heart hammered, raging fury seething inside her. She'd wanted to get away from this bunch only so she could confront them again on her own terms and with the help of Prophet.

The need to avenge her cousin and her cousin's boy and husband, and the whole burned town of Seven Devils, was a roaring explosion inside her head. The sob that slipped from her lips was one of frustration only slightly tinged with the fear and terror at seeing her own end reflected in the faces of the gun wolves closing on her now from the shadow-obscured brush.

Squires continued toward her, angling his smoking revolver toward Louisa's head. The other men had run up to either side, breathing hard, the look-alike called Rafe stooped over and wheezing while he grinned down at Louisa. The big Mexican's fetor reached Louisa like a palpable wave as he approached on her right, his shoulders sloped, eyes glistening with goatish lust and fury beneath the brim of his steeple-crowned sombrero. His big Chihuahua spurs rang with each slow, purposeful step, dust puffing up around his steel-tipped boots.

Coming up behind Rafe and his brother in the opera hat and rose-colored glasses, Cora pushed between them. She continued forward, shoved Squires's gun hand aside, rammed a shoulder against the Mexican called Chulo, wrinkling her nose, and took one more step toward Louisa before she stopped and stared down, crazy eyes flashing gold sparks in the shadows.

She'd wrapped a white cloth around her head at an angle, so that it covered her ear and bullet-nicked cheek. Knotted just under her opposite ear, it was heavily bloodstained. The white parts glowed in the gradually lightening darkness.

“She's mine.”

Cora's voice was eerily calm. Her chest rose and fell heavily, slowly. She holstered her revolver, then reached up and behind her head. When she lowered her right hand again, gray dawn light flashed off the bone-handled stiletto jutting toward Louisa. “When I'm done with her, the rest of you can have her . . . if there's anything left.”

She giggled her insane, high-pitched, little-girl giggle, and started forward.

Propelled by hot, swirling fury, Louisa scrambled to her feet and ran stumbling forward over rocks and brush, bulling through low cedar branches. Her left boot dropped over the edge of a hole she hadn't seen in the murky light, and she gasped, panic overtaking her.

She flung her arms out to stay the fall, but she grabbed only mine tailings and a juniper branch that broke off in her hand.

Before she knew it, both her legs were in the hole and she plunged down the steep trough angling into darkness, her stomach hurling into her throat.

The pick-and-chisel-gouged side of the hole scraped her arms and legs, and her chin bounced painfully against it before her feet struck bottom. The air left her lungs in a rush. She fell backward and rolled several more feet before piling up against a wall buried in heavy darkness.

Sand and gravel rattled down behind her.

She lifted her head from the sandy floor and looked around. She heard voices above, but she couldn't see the killers, for the hole angled back beneath the ledge, and she was as far under the ledge as she could have fallen. Lilac light hung before, but now she was shrouded in shadow.

Louisa's ears rang. Her heart pounded. Her vision swam. She felt the cool, searing pain of the scraped undersides of her arms and her knees. She groaned as she heaved herself into a sitting position against the low-ceilinged pit's back wall and shook her head to clear the cobwebs.

Along the wall to her left, something moved—a vague, serpentine shadow. Two small, pellet-sized lights glowed like tarnished pennies. There was the hair-raising rasp of quivering rattles.

Louisa sucked a sharp breath and had just begun to recoil from the flat, diamond-shaped head slithering out from a crack in the wall when the eyes shot toward her.

A burning ache filled her as the snake buried its teeth in her upper left arm, holding on for a good two or three seconds while Louisa sucked a sharp breath through gritted teeth, feeling the toxic, black venom pumping into her arm.

The last thing she heard before passing out was Cora's insane laughter from above, and the outlaw woman's strange, little girl's jubilant singsong. “She done found the rattlesnake pit. That oughta do her . . . reeeeel slowwww!”

PROPHET REINED MEAN and Ugly down and stared over the horse's bobbing, snorting head at the three men—or what remained of the three men—staked out on the ground before him.

A couple of buzzards that had not fled into the cedars and cottonwoods as he'd ridden up, following the stench and the raucous quarreling of the feeding carrion eaters, lingered proprietarily atop the bloody, eviscerated corpses.

They continued to peck and prod as they regarded Prophet angrily, strings of bloody sinew dangling from their colorless beaks, the little eyes in their bald heads flashing in the brassy, late-morning light like miniature ball bearings.

It was hard to tell much of anything about the three men beneath the birds—aside from the fact that they were white men, that they were naked, and that they'd had their eyelids cut off no doubt soon after they were staked. The long crosses hacked across their torsos marked them as double-crossing outlaws, left here to season in the sun as they died, ruminating on the dark impulses that had brought them to such an undignified, painful end.

Doubtful they'd been much given to shame or regret. The grimaces frozen upon their beak-pecked faces, showing wide gaps of bloodstained teeth and gums, told of unbearable suffering.

His eyes watering against the sweet, rancid death stench, Prophet rose up in his saddle and looked back toward the fold in the high, brown hills that had brought him here to the southern Seven Devils, searching for his wayward partner's lost trail.

He'd left the Mexican whore and Big Hans still sawing logs in the outlaw shack and ridden out well before dawn, finding the gap in the southern hills only an hour or so later, as the sun had blossomed in the east.

That had been three hours ago and, while he'd been angling back toward where he figured Louisa had entered the southern range, he'd found no sign of her in the still-soggy, washed-out chaparral and semi-flooded canyons. He stretched his gaze farther west and downslope, over the canyons and arroyos and gullies meandering around pointed buttes and rolling up toward distant, saffron mesas and pedestal rocks.

No telling where she was. This half of the Seven Devils was as large as the largest western county. Trying to find one blond-headed, pious, kill-hungry, Yanqui senorita out here was like trying to pluck a single porcupine quill from the brasada of southern Texas.

Prophet gigged Mean on past the dead outlaws, and the buzzards once again flopped down out of the trees, their din growing louder in celebration of his passing. Looking around for any sign of Apaches or outlaws of any stripe, he continued south, following a slender horse trail up and over several ridges and canyons, before something caught his eye in the brush lining a broad, ancient watercourse to his right.

He checked Mean down, then swung out of the saddle and, pausing to look around for rattlesnakes or Gila monsters, he pushed through the ironwood and willows. Along the bank of the muddy arroyo, mud-crusted saddlebags were hung up on a root protruding into the cut, about three feet up from the recently flooded floor.

The small of his back loosened hopefully as, grabbing a slender willow trunk with one hand, he reached down to pluck the saddlebags off the root with the other. He hauled the bags back through the scratching, grabbing brush, then held them up for inspection.

Each flap was fastened to the pouch with a diamond-shaped, silver-chased buckle trimmed with wang strings. The style of the buckle told him the bags were Louisa's, but he rummaged around inside and found a couple of shirts he recognized, as well as a small, hide-bound diary in which she kept a record of the men she'd taken down.

The bags were Louisa's, all right. Since they'd been in the arroyo, it was safe to assume the girl had been in the canyon, too, no doubt swept away by last night's flood waters.

His heartbeat quickening, eager to get moving, Prophet draped the bags over his own on Mean's back, then bulled back through the brush. He dropped into the arroyo, and when the scalloped sand told him which way to ride, he climbed back aboard Mean and Ugly and spurred the horse into a slow jog. He remained on the bank beside the cut, as the arroyo's floor was still too muddy for fast travel, and the higher ground gave him a better view of the surrounding terrain.