“Pervert,” said Emmitt’s son, Rodney Hayes, who, aside from his size and shifty, sneering eyes, didn’t favor his father much in appearance. He had thin, sandy hair, a scrawny neck, pale blue eyes, and a beard growing in rough patches across his pale, pimpled cheeks. “Who the hell are you and what do you want, pervert?”
“Lou Prophet.” It was Sanderson who’d spoke. He had moseyed up to stand five feet in front of the bounty hunter. He was a good six inches shorter than Prophet, and standing downslope from him, the top of his battered Stetson barely reached Prophet’s Adam’s apple. The outlaw leader tipped his head sideways and squeezed an eye half closed as he studied Prophet’s face shaded by Prophet’s own dusty, funnel-brimmed Stetson. “Sure enough, this here’s Lou Prophet!”
“Well, hell, Emmitt,” Prophet said. “I don’t remember ever havin’ the pleasure of a formal introduction.”
Sanderson held his cocked Schofield straight out toward Prophet’s belly. With the other hand, and holding Prophet’s gaze with his own, he slipped Prophet’s bowie knife from the broad sheath on his left hip and tossed it into the brush. Then he removed the Colt .45 from the holster thonged low on the bounty hunter’s denim-clad right thigh.
“Your reputation shadows you like the fetor of a gold-camp Chinatown.” Sanderson glanced back at the other men flanking his mother. “Boys, we’re in for a real treat here. This here’s Lou Prophet, bounty tracker from Georgia. Not too many men slip out of his net.” Sanderson laughed a jeering laugh, showing all his teeth. “But Ma done caught him clean—how do ya like that?”
“I like it,” Horton Whipple said, glaring at Prophet as he polished his right fist against his left hand. “I like it real good.”
“I was just passin’ through, fellas,” Prophet said, desperately fishing for any way to free himself from this bear trap. “I was thinkin’ about havin’ me a little soak in the river my own self.” He chuckled. “Good thing I scouted it out first. We coulda had us an embarrassin’ situation. Now, then, if you’ll just let me collect my weapons, I’ll—”
“A little soak, my ass,” said the fourth man, whose name was Wally “Cisco” Wood, from Milestown in the Montana Territory. He was a dumb-looking, straight-nosed, straight-necked stringbean who didn’t look like he’d started shaving yet, though according to the paper on him he’d killed a school-teacher and three children on a playground near Pine Bluff, Utah, when the teacher had refused him a drink of water. He stood barefoot, holding his boots and socks in one hand, his ivory-handled Smith & Wesson in the other. “Why, he’s been trailin’ us, boys! He knows about the bounty on our heads, and he’s been trailin’ us!”
“Damn, Cisco,” sneered Rodney Hayes. “Nothin’ gits past you, does it?”
Emmitt stood grinning up at Prophet. His two front teeth were yellow and square, with a thick layer of coffee-colored grime caked between teeth and gum. “Lou Prophet. Damn, it sure is gonna be a pleasure to kill you. Yessir!” He turned as if to step away, but then he jerked back, swinging Prophet’s own Colt around, grip forward, and rammed the butt into the dead center of Prophet’s belly.
The breath left Prophet’s lungs in a loud “Uhfff!” He stumbled back up the hill, getting his boots tangled beneath him and falling hard on his butt. His hat tumbled off his shoulder. Sucking air and holding one arm across his gut, he rolled onto his right elbow and straightened his legs slightly, trying to unknot his midsection to get some air back into his lungs. Sanderson was a scrawny little bastard, but he packed a hell of a gut-stoving, rib-splintering punch.
Emmitt’s mother threw her head back on her shoulders and laughed as though at the funniest joke she’d ever seen. “Good one, boy! The bigger they are the harder they fall!”
Emmitt shuffled around like a rooster, crowing along with his mother. He stepped up to Prophet once more, grabbed a handful of Prophet’s sandy hair. “If you think that was somethin’, Ma, watch thi—”
“Hold on,” Horton Whipple said, grabbing Sanderson’s arm as the outlaw leader was about to ram his knee against Prophet’s forehead.
Emmitt frowned up at the big man, red-faced. Whipple must have stood just a few inches under seven feet. He had a big, bushy red mustache and blue eyes with what appeared to be flecks of gold steel in them.
Emmitt snarled, “Goddamnit, Whipple. I told you never touch me!”
Whipple stared down at Prophet. The big man looked like a bizarrely mottled mountain wall standing there, with his lewd tattoos and egg-shaped head and flat blue eyes. “He killed an old pard of mine in Missouri a few years back. I wanna shot at this four-flushin’, bounty-huntin’ son of a bitch.” He scowled challengingly down at the pint-sized Sanderson, opening and closing his hands. “And I aim to git it.”
Frowning angrily, Sanderson opened his mouth to object, then closed his mouth suddenly. The wrinkles above the bridge of his nose planed out as he shuttled his gaze between Prophet and Whipple and back again, a slow, cunning smile building on his lips.
“Why not?” Chuckling, he backed away and glanced at the other men standing in a semicircle behind him. “We might even take bets on it, eh, boys?”
His mother was grinning delightedly, three or four crooked teeth showing in her rotten gums. She’d hiked a hip on a rock and was resting the sawed-off across her denim-clad thighs. A lumpy tow sack rested on the rock behind her.
Prophet caught his breath and gained his knees as Sanderson, Hayes, and Cisco bet on the fight’s outcome, including how long it would take one man to beat the other senseless, then to kill him. Scuffling around and arguing and elbowing, they handed their money to the grinning and chuckling Maybelle Sanderson, who bet five dollars just to balance things out that Prophet would knock Whipple flat on his back in five minutes.
Again she raked her lusty animal gaze across Prophet’s chest and shoulders, and the bounty hunter had to suppress a shiver of revulsion. Then, when wads of greenbacks protruded from his mother’s jeans pockets, Sanderson herded Prophet and Whipple down the slope about forty yards to a level area, where only wheatgrass and a few clumps of sagebrush grew, and told them to go at it.
“Hold on,” Prophet said, unbuttoning his shirt cuffs. “I gotta roll my sleeves up.” He took his time, darting his glance around at Whipple shadowboxing before him, grunting and snarling like a wounded grizzly, and the three other men and Mrs. Sanderson forming a rough circle around them.
How in the hell was he going to get out of this one? Even if he somehow managed to clean Whipple’s clock, the others would gun him, for they each held a pistol while Mrs. Sanderson continued caressing that sawed-off like a newborn babe in her arms.
He had a fleeting notion of somehow getting Whipple into a headlock and threatening to break his neck if the others didn’t give him a gun. But hell, they’d only laugh at him. Whipple meant nothing to them. His dying would only mean more stage loot for the rest of them.
Besides, Whipple had a good four inches and about thirty pounds—most of it muscle—on Prophet. The prospect of Prophet getting the giant into a headlock was as far-fetched as the hope that a gun-toting angel would ride down from Heaven to smite down the Sanderson gang in a hail of righteous lead.
Prophet rolled his right sleeve up to his biceps.
Whipple stepped toward him, holding fists up in front of his chin, eyes pinched, broad face pink with fury. “Ready for your whuppin’ now, bounty man?”
Prophet raised his fists and shuffled sideways. “Tell me, Whipple, who was this fella you say I killed over Missouri way?”
The big man lunged toward Prophet, throwing a left jab. Prophet jerked his head away, and Whipple’s fist only scraped the side of his chin.
“Frank Dawson.”
“Dawson?” Prophet bunched his brows as he dodged another jab. “Ah, hell”—he lurched forward, feigning a blow with his right fist and landing a left jab to Whipple’s hard, muscle-strapped belly, evoking a grunt from the man—“I didn’t kill him. I was chasin’ him and he ran out in front o
f a stage-coach. The team trampled him, dragged him for a good two blocks, and then the coach itself hammered him into little more than a grease splotch!”
Whipple lurched forward with surprising speed, and landed an ear-ringing roundhouse against Prophet’s left cheek. The world pitched for a couple of seconds as Prophet skipped back, blinking, trying to clear his vision.
He’d thought he could rile the man into swinging wild punches, but that one had landed right where Whipple had intended. If he landed many more, Mrs. Sanderson was going to be out five singles and Prophet would soon be feeding the carp in the yonder stream.
“Yessir,” Prophet said, never one to easily give up on a plan, “the undertaker’s sons were scooping ole Frank outta the dust with shovels and soup ladles, and what they couldn’t get the dogs finished off.”
“Don’t listen to him, Whip!” Emmitt shouted as the others clapped and yelled on either side of him. “He’s just tryin’ to get your goat!”
Whipple bunched his lips and puffed his cheeks as he stormed forward, bringing his right ham-sized fist up from his heels. Prophet ducked. The fist whistled through the air over Prophet’s head. As Whipple continued wheeling sideways with the swing’s momentum, Prophet bolted up and forward and slammed his own right against the man’s left ear.
“Uhhn-ah!” Whipple gritted his teeth with fury and brushed at the two-inch gash angling down from the top of his ear and from which thick red blood issued. It glistened in the midday light as it dribbled down over the lobe.
“Told ya!” Mrs. Sanderson crowed, packing her pipe. “Never fight a doomed man!”
“Mercy,” Prophet said, sidling around the cursing Whipple. “I bet that hurts like hell!”
Just as Prophet had hoped, the man came at him, swinging from his heart instead of his brain, and within two seconds he’d swung twice, one fist again cleaving the air over Prophet’s head while the other merely grazed the bounty hunter’s chin.
Prophet got inside and landed one punch to the man’s right-side ribs and another to his left.
Whipple staggered backward, trying to get away. Prophet followed, keeping his own rage on a short leash, funneling all his strength to his fists, and laid a right uppercut to the big man’s jaw.
Whipple hit the ground on his back.
“Come on, Whip!” Cisco cried. “I got a gold cartwheel ridin’ on ya, bud!”
Prophet didn’t want the man to get up again. As Whipple began pushing himself up off his back, Prophet dove on top of him, snaked his hands around the man’s bull neck, and began pressing his thumbs against his rock-hard Adam’s apple.
Whipple gritted his teeth and made gurgling sounds, spit bubbling out from between his lips, snot blowing from his nose. The big man wrapped his hands around Prophet’s wrists, tried to pry the bounty hunter’s hands from his neck. The others whooped and yelled, and Mrs. Sanderson cackled like a crazed hen, thoroughly enjoying the show. Prophet levered himself forward off his knees, tightening his grip on Whipple’s neck and grinding the back of the big man’s head into the ground.
“Gosh, Whip,” Prophet said, stretching his lips back from his teeth, the cords standing out in his neck, “I hope the loot ole Frank was carryin’ wasn’t part yours. That was one helluva lot of dinero!”
Whipple managed to pry Prophet’s grip loose enough to rasp, “We planned . . . that job . . . for four months . . . you son of a bitch!”
“Doesn’t that piss-burn ya?” Prophet inwardly cursed as the big man continued to pry the bounty hunter’s death grip loose. “Hell, you coulda lived in Mexico for years on all that gold!”
Whipple took a deep breath, pinched his eyes, and arched his back as he heaved straight up against Prophet’s weight. “Kill . . . you . . . b-b-bastard!”
As Prophet’s hands began rising from the big man’s sweat-slick neck, he realized the folly of his ways. That his plan had backfired was literally hammered home when Whipple slammed his right knee into the bounty hunter’s groin.
Prophet groaned. His hands slipped off the big man’s neck and a half second later he found himself on his back, his balls burning and throbbing, his gut churning with nausea. He tried to lift his own right fist, but Whipple, straddling Prophet now, rammed two vision-dulling right jabs against Prophet’s left cheek.
Prophet fell slack as his lights went out briefly. When his lids fluttered open again, he saw Whipple, still on top of him, reaching down toward his right boot. The hand came up again, and a savage smile took shape on Whipple’s chapped lips as he held a wide-bladed, horn-handled bowie knife out for Prophet’s inspection, as though it were a weapon the bounty hunter might want to buy or trade for.
The others were shouting and whooping and dancing in circles around Whipple and Prophet, kicking up dust and flinging pebbles and grit at Prophet’s face.
“Kill him, Whip!” Rodney Hayes shouted. “Kill him dead!”
“Go ahead and send him to Jesus, Whip,” Emmitt Sanderson said. “The girls prob’ly done got our lunch ready, and I’m starvin’!”
“Damn.” Mrs. Sanderson shook her head as she puffed her pipe. “That’s five greenbacks I’ll never see again.”
Whipple’s eyes slightly crossed as he stared down at Prophet. “See that?” he growled, turning the knife this way and that, letting the sun catch it. “That blade’s so sharp it’ll trim the hair on a frog’s cock.”
The man suddenly drew the knife back, bunching his lips and slanting the blade toward Prophet. “Won’t be no job o’ work to cut your throat!”
Prophet kicked his legs and tried to lift his arms, but it was no use. The big man had him pinned to the ground. He could only watch in horror as Whipple loosed a bearlike roar and slashed the blade toward Prophet’s neck.
6
LOU PROPHET WAS about to shake hands with the Devil himself—Ole Scratch, as he was called—with whom Prophet had a special bond. The two would meet at last and, as per the agreement they had made when Prophet had survived the War of Northern Aggression and wanted only to live, drink, and carouse to his heart’s content for the remainder of his days, the bounty hunter would begin his long, eternal stint shoveling coal in Hell.
Damn. He’d thought he’d have another few years on this side of the sod to stomp with his tail up.
Regretting the pact he’d made, the bounty hunter squeezed his eyes closed and gritted his teeth. He no longer felt the throbbing ache in his groin as he awaited the slash of Whipple’s knife that would no doubt cleave his head from his shoulders.
Something wet sprayed across his cheek.
Prophet opened his eyes as a rifle cracked somewhere off in the hills to his right. Whipple straddled him, holding both his knife hand and his free hand chest high. The hands were quivering, the knife flashing in the sunlight. Whipple’s head was tipped against his right shoulder, and oddly twisted.
There was a round hole on the left side of his head, just above his ear—a hole about the size of a sewing thimble. Blood dribbled from the hole to form a small river down the side of the big man’s bald head. The other side of his skull had opened like a smashed melon, and blood and brains and large chunks of bone ran down his right shoulder and arm to puddle on the ground beside Prophet’s hip.
The big man’s chest heaved once and his eyes rolled back in his head. His lower jaw dropped. He groaned as he dropped the knife and began to sag toward the ground.
Prophet was trying to figure out who’d fired the shot, as were the other men standing around him and staring down at Whipple with looks of incredulity and horror. Mrs. Sanderson was the first to recover from the shock. She bolted up from the rock she’d been sitting on, glanced around quickly, then lurched toward Prophet, bringing up her double-bore sawed-off.
“He’s got a partner!” she bellowed like a chicken snagged in an eagle’s claws.
She jerked as though with a start as a hole opened in the front of her man’s flannel shirt, spitting a thick gob of blood across Prophet. The bullet that had torn into her
back and out her chest careened between her son and the stringbean called Cisco to spang off a rock behind them. The rifle report followed a half second later, flatting out from the scattered pines on the low northern slope. Mrs. Sanderson’s arms fell to her sides as she dropped the barn blaster, staggered forward, twisted around, and tumbled onto her back across Prophet’s lower legs, dead.
“Ma!” Emmitt Sanderson cried, leaping toward his mother.
He didn’t make it. A bullet took him through the high center of his chest. He flew backward, arms flailing straight out from his shoulders, as the other two men screamed and leaped around, raising their revolvers and trying to get a bead on the shooter.
There were four more rifle shots, booming reports spaced split seconds apart and echoing around the valley like thunderclaps. Prophet, on his back as before with Horton Whipple still straddling him, stared up in disbelief as Cisco and Rodney Hayes danced bizarre death jigs above and around him, screaming as bullets plunked through their chests and bellies, tearing out chunks of flesh, blood, and viscera and splashing the weeds and rocks around them with several shades of red.
Finally, both men were down, Cisco lying off to Prophet’s left while Rodney lay straight out from his boots, belly down, one arm curled beneath him. He shook, farted, sighed, and lay still.
Prophet looked up the long, gentle slope on his right. A man with a rifle stepped out from behind a lone boulder and swung into the saddle of a brown-and-white pinto pony. All Prophet could think was that another outlaw—possibly one double-crossed by these four and their mother—had come to even the score. How the bushwhacker knew Prophet wasn’t a member of the gang, Prophet couldn’t say.
He was just glad to not be shaking hands with El Diablo.
As the rider trotted the pinto down the hill, weaving around cedars and junipers, Prophet heaved aside Whipple’s heavy carcass. Mrs. Sanderson lay sprawled across his shins, staring toward him with a fist-sized hole in her forehead and her tobacco-stained tongue lolling out the side of her mouth.
The Graves at Seven Devils Page 5