The Graves at Seven Devils (28 page)

The old watercourse dried in the hot sun even as Prophet followed it, having to cross back and forth when the ground on either side became blocked by boulders or brush snags, or when a butte cropped up in front of him.

After a half hour of hard travel, steep, rocky slopes dropped down to either side of his trail, and he dropped onto the arroyo's floor itself. It was while tracing a long, slow bend, Mean's hooves moving almost soundlessly in the still-damp sand, that a female voice rose from somewhere ahead and on the ravine's right side.

Prophet jerked back on Mean's reins and lifted his head, listening.

The voice sounded again—a girl's voice, from the pitch. Muffled by distance and swirling slightly on the hot, dry breeze, it rose and fell sharply, as though the girl were running or digging hard, working up a sweat. The voice didn't sound like Louisa's, but Prophet had to check it out.

He dismounted, swung his ten-gauge around to his back, and shucked his Winchester from the saddle boot. When he'd tied Mean and Ugly to one of the larger willows, he looked around. Ahead and right, a low, rocky shelf angled up out of the arroyo, running perpendicular to it.

Deciding the shelf would give him a good vantage, Prophet racked a shell into his Winchester's breech, off-cocked the hammer, and tramped across the arroyo and up the opposite bank, digging his boots into the damp clay and pulling at willow shrubs for leverage.

Where the willows and catclaw petered out, the shelf rose, and he climbed slowly, meandering around large rocks, cedars, and junipers, with occasional Spanish bayonet and ironwood shrubs. He gained the top of the shelf, breathing hard, sweat basting his buckskin tunic to his back and chest and troughing the dust on his cheeks.

The perspiration dried quickly when he hunkered down at the shelf's crest and the warm breeze slid against him, tanged with sage and the smoke of a distant cook fire.

He'd been hearing the girl's strange, passionate cries off and on while he'd been climbing. Now, crouched between two boulders, he stared into the cut on the other side, where two people were milling.

No, not milling.

The man—a lean, well-put-together gent with a full head of straight, strawberry-blond hair—had a tall, solidly built redheaded girl backed up against a stout cottonwood. She wore a bloody bandage at an angle across her face. Her hair was streaked with lime-green dye like that which pleasure girls often used, though Prophet had rarely, if ever, seen it worn outside of a whorehouse.

The girl's blouse was open, and her pants were bunched around her ankles. She sat back against a rock at the cottonwood's base, her bare legs spread wide, both her hands curled around a low-slung branch just above her head.

A saddle blanket lay between her bare bottom and the rock. She was bracing herself, jerking violently to and fro, hair flying, as the man pistoned his pale, narrow hips against her, pawing her breasts with one hand and tugging at her hair with the other.

Obviously, he was tugging with a little more vigor than the girl would have liked. She cursed him between grunts while the man retorted in words Prophet couldn't distinguish from this distance, because the man's back was to him and they were about fifty yards away, at the broadest stretch in a short, crooked box canyon.

“Squires!” the girl mewled, gritting her teeth and throwing her head back on her shoulders, the bandage falling away from her face, bounding off her shoulder, and careening groundward. “Ah . . .
goddamn
you, Squires . . . !”

Prophet remembered that Big Hans had said that the only female in the Three of a Kind Gang had red, green-streaked hair and a “funny” voice. Pondering the information, Prophet saw something move farther up the canyon.

He slid his gaze from the coupling pair to where a pinto was tied to a long rope running along the cut's brick-like rock wall, where several other horses had obviously been tied recently, judging by all the apples and the trampled manzanita grass lifting up around a spring bubbling out of the wall itself.

Prophet stared at the pinto, his eyes tracing the brown spots sharply contrasting the dusty, mud-streaked cream.

Louisa's mount. No doubt about it.

Had the vengeance-crazed polecat waltzed—or floated—right into the Three of a Kind Gang's bailiwick? Or had she drowned in the arroyo, and only the horse had made it? Or . . . maybe she was wandering around afoot out here, trying to get a bead on one of the gang members?

Prophet chewed his lower lip and glanced back at the pair now going at it with even more abandon than before, the blond gent throwing his head far back on his shoulders and thrusting crazily, his hip bones appearing about to bust out of his pale, hairless ass.

Lifting his gaze over the canyon, the bounty hunter picked out a handful of men and horses moving around several low, stone ruins. Men and dwellings were nearly lost amongst the massive boulders that had spilled down from the high, southern ridge.

Prophet hadn't taken a good look at the formations surrounding the canyon, and studying them now, he ran a pensive thumb-nail along his unshaven jaw. Each of the range's notorious seven devils hovered over him—vast monoliths of sun-blasted, wind-carved stone rising a good two or three thousand feet above the canyon floor, sprouting from steep, rock-littered, andosite cliffs.

If the formations didn't look like the demons that had haunted Prophet's dreams in the first few months following the War—and which still cropped up every few months or so, howling and grinning and dancing around in smoky shadows, flicking their forked tails—his name wasn't Prophet and he hadn't sold his soul to the real thing.

As his eyes ranged across the formations, dull and brassy in the noon light, he felt some invisible crawling thing under his shirt and stifled a chill of revulsion.

The two lovers—if you could call them that—were fairly screaming now, as though they were both being carved up slow by stone-faced Apache squaws.

“Christ, Jay,” the girl moaned, panting and slumping forward against the handsome gent's strawberry-blond head, her voice carrying cleanly in the high, dry air, “no . . . nobody does it like
you
do.”

“Ah, hell.” The man laughed. “Cora, girl, you're just all steamed up over that little bitch in the snake pit. Hell, the next purty little filly that comes along, you're gonna forget all about me . . . again!”

The man chuckled as he stumbled back from between the redhead's legs. Prophet stared down at him, his eyes spoked with deep lines, his mouth a knife slash across his broad, tan face. “That little bitch in the snake pit” echoed around inside his skull.

Louisa.

He looked around quickly for a way down into the canyon, his brain reeling, heart pounding. He had to get to Louisa, and the two lovebirds knew where she was.

Backing away from the lip of the shelf, he dropped down the slope several yards, then scrambled northward, up canyon.

When he figured he'd run about forty yards beyond where the girl and the man had been coupling like rabid minks, he moved back to the canyon's lip. Finding an eroded trough in the brittle sandstone, he took his Winchester in one hand and scrambled down through the jagged-edged trough.

He half slid on his butt, trying to break as little of the shell-like rock as possible, ignoring a Gila monster regarding him blandly from the sage of a nearby dwarf cedar, its striped sides contracting and expanding as it breathed.

Prophet landed in the narrow, shaded cut with less grace than he'd intended, the air pushing out of his lungs in a hard grunt. He froze, knees bent, rifle held high in his right hand, breathing through his mouth, ears pricked.

The man and the girl were about thirty yards down the crooked canyon, bantering now in jeering tones, both still breathing as though they'd run a long way across a hot desert. Taking the rifle in both hands, resting his thumb on the hammer, Prophet moved slowly down canyon, toward the gradually loudening voices. His sawed-off ten-gauge swung back and forth across his sweaty back—the old gut shredder always a reassuring presence.

The pinto appeared just ahead and left. Prophet slowed, held out a reassuring hand as if to quiet the beast. The pinto watched him, ears pricked. It rippled a wither and stomped a foot, but otherwise made no sounds that would betray his presence.

The man and the girl continued talking in their mocking tones. Prophet heard a lucifer scratch to life, and then the smell of tobacco smoke touched his nostrils.

The bounty hunter moved far right of the tied mount and continued down canyon along the cut's right wall from which water bubbled, seeping out from the moss-lined cracks between the shelving, adobe-colored stones. He moved maybe twenty more feet before stepping even closer to the canyon's right wall, trying to keep a thumb of sandstone, which jutted into the canyon just ahead, between him and the wider dogleg in which the girl and the man had been playing their wild game of slap 'n' tickle.

Prophet moved up behind the sandstone thumb and pressed his right shoulder against it, edging up toward the gap. He set his gloved thumb firmly on his Winchester's hammer, the words of the loving couple reaching him clearly, the girl asking the man if, despite the notch in her ear, he still thought she was pretty.

“I mean, my cheek'll heal,” she said, her voice quivering slightly as she moved around, gathering her clothes. “But that notch outta my ear—that's gone for good.”

“Darlin',” the man said, tobacco smoke wafting back through the opening ahead of Prophet, “nuthin' could take away that somethin' extra you got and all the other gals—even them without a scar anywhere on 'em—could only
want
for.”

The girl giggled—the high-pitched squeal of a child laughing uncontrollably in church—and said, “Jay, how come you always know just what . . .”

Her voice trailed off as Prophet stepped into the gap and raised the Winchester to his shoulder, loudly cocking the hammer back and aiming the rifle at the girl crouched before the rock she'd been sitting on a few minutes ago.

She wore only silver-trimmed, blue-denim trousers, a funnel-brimmed straw hat adorned with a dried-up desert rose, and one boot. A big-boned but well-proportioned girl, she was naked from the waist up though she wore her double pistol rig, both holsters thonged to her shapely thighs. She'd been stepping into the other boot when her eyes had slid to Prophet.

The man called Jay sat on another boulder in the middle of the narrow canyon, his back facing Prophet, between the bounty hunter and Cora.

He was fully dressed except for his feet and, beaded moccasin boots lying nearby, he was pulling on his right sock when, following Cora's startled glance, he turned to peer over his shoulder. When his blue eyes found Prophet, vague surprise widened them slightly, made them sparkle like gold flecks in a shallow stream. His loosely rolled quirley dangled from between his perfect, white teeth.

He dropped his sock and stood, barefoot, making no sudden movements. Stretching a rakish, self-satisfied grin, he stepped back away from the rock and held his hands out away from his waist—he had only one revolver visible—and chuckled.

“Well, well, look what the cat dragged in.”

Cora straightened, seeming unaware of the fact that her breasts were bare. A small tobacco pouch dangled between them by a braided rawhide cord. Eyes flashing ironically, she, too, smiled with calm confidence and, giving Prophet the quick up-and-down, said in her nasal, high-pitched child's voice, “Can we help you, sir?”

“Not havin' to listen to anymore of your stupid banter is almost enough.
Almost
, but not quite.”

Prophet's eyes and jaws were hard, and his nostrils flared as he slid the rifle back and forth between Cora and Jay.

“I'm here for the little, blond polecat that floated or rode or wandered in here with her horns out. Now, she's purty as a speckled pup, though like most women I've noted of late she's sadly lacking in charm. Just the same, I've grown right fond of the little filly, and if you don't tell me where she is pronto, I'm gonna give both you tiresome alley cats nowhere to set your hats.”

Jay furled his shaggy, strawberry-blond brows and glanced at Cora. “Girl? You got any idea what he's talkin' about, Co—?”

He stopped and swung his head quickly back to Prophet as the big bounty hunter, who stood a good three inches taller than the handsome blond gent and had about forty pounds on him, strode straight toward the outlaw, lowering the Winchester slightly. Jay replaced his complacent expression with one of unabashed fear as Prophet flipped the Winchester around in his hands and, gripping the rifle by its barrel, swung it back behind his shoulder, then swiped it forward so quickly that air whistled over it shrilly.

“Hey!”
Jay cried.

The outlaw had only started raising his hands toward his head when Prophet smashed the rifle's stout, scarred butt against the side of Jay's handsome head with a resounding, bone-cracking smack.

JAY PILED UP at the base of the canyon wall like a long slab of venison thrown down from the bed of a market hunter's rolling wagon. Lying belly down, nose buried in mud from the springs, the man gave a gurgling sigh and fell silent.

Prophet snapped the Winchester to his shoulder again, and stayed the girl's hands, which, taking advantage of his momentary distraction, had dropped over the handles of her holstered six-guns. Seeing the Winchester's maw yawning at her once more, however, she raised her hands shoulder high, palms out.

“Keep 'em there,” Prophet growled. He hated dealing with women. But the way he saw it, bare-breasted as she was, this was no woman but a cold-blooded killer. He'd have no more trouble killing her than he'd had trimming her wrestling partner's wick.