He landed atop Prophet just as Prophet drew the rear stock of his sawed-off ten-gauge down against his right rib cage and, raising the barrel up in front of him, curled his index finger over both triggers shaped like a pretty girl’s long eyelashes.
The Mex wrapped his big hands around Prophet’s neck and, half rising on his knees for leverage, his stubbled, dusty cheeks puffing, his black eyes popping wide with fury, began to sink his thumbs into Prophet’s throat.
The man dropped his gaze suddenly to the stout barrels of the barn blaster snugged up under his chin. Just as suddenly, he pulled his thumbs back from Prophet’s neck, crumpling his cheeks and slitting his eyes, throwing his head back on his shoulders.
Prophet lifted his head from the ground, hardening his jaws, tears dribbling down his cheeks from his stinging eyes. “Goddamn, old son—you ever heard of a bath?”
The hammering explosion of both detonated shotgun barrels drowned out the last word of his sentence, and he stared up as the Mexican’s head turned to red jelly and flew in pieces from his shoulders.
The thundering boom continued echoing off the southern ridge, as though several cannons were being fired in the far distance, one after another. Finding himself staring at the bloody, ragged hole where the Mexican’s head had been, Prophet kicked the man off him and rolled away.
Resting on one elbow and staring at the remains of the Mexican’s head painting the catclaw and ocotillo and rocks beyond, a few strands of hair and one big eyeball clinging to a bloody boulder, a contemplative expression brushed Prophet’s dusty, haggard features.
“Chulo Alameda.” The bounty hunter rammed a fist into the dirt beside him. “Goddamnit!”
“What is it, Lou? He get ya?”
Prophet turned to see Big Hans ambling across the rocks from the direction of the large, flat-topped boulder hulking against the base of the ridge. The kid’s arm rested in the sling Prophet had fashioned for it. In his other hand he carried his Big Fifty. His blond head was shaded by his shabby sombrero while his dusty coveralls flapped around the tops of his lace-up boots.
“Nah,” Prophet said, shaking his head and gaining his knees. “It just came to me who he was. Chulo Alameda. Army payroll thief, rustler, and regulator. Even done some slave tradin’ back and forth across the border. If I remember right, the U.S. government has two thousand big shiny ones on his head.” The bounty hunter cursed again as he breeched his blood-splattered barn blaster. “Shit, not even ole Jesus’d recognize that son of a bitch now.”
“Pee-ewe!” Big Hans exclaimed, stepping wide of the headless corpse whose knees continued bending slightly, as though in some bizarre, half-remembered death dance. “That’s one rotten-smelling son of a bitch!”
“They included that description on his wanted dodger. ‘Stinks to High Heaven.’” Prophet cursed as he plucked the spent wads from his shotgun’s breech and tossed them back over his shoulder. “You shadowed me, I reckon.”
Big Hans nodded. “Damn arm wouldn’t let me sleep. I figured you might need a hand.”
“Much obliged.”
“Ran out of cartridges about fifteen minutes ago. Thought for sure these fellas were gonna smoke me out of my hidin’ place and grease me up for the fryin’ pan.” Big Hans looked around, stretching his thick lips back from his white teeth. “Where’s Louisa?”
As if in response, a shrill scream rose—a high, keening cry like that of a grief-stricken squaw. Prophet’s pulse jumped. “What’s that high-headed filly gotten herself into now?”
He snapped his shotgun together as he leaped to his feet and, with Big Hans ambling along behind, ran back down the slope, wending his way through the scrub.
Prophet leaped atop a flat-topped rock and stared into the canyon below, filled now with angling, wheat-colored light slanting shadows out from the sage clumps and rocks. The copper-headed outlaw girl was running across the canyon toward the brush-sheathed arroyo, to the left of a dozen or so saddled, waiting horses.
As she ran, stumbling and yowling, she twisted around to look at the slender blond striding purposefully behind her, a pistol in Louisa’s outstretched right hand.
“Noooo!” Cora begged, stumbling over her own feet and dropping to one knee, throwing her arms toward Louisa with prayer-like beseeching. “Please, don’t. I don’t wanna die!”
If Louisa said anything, Prophet didn’t pick it up. The pistol in her hand belched smoke and flames, and the redhead flinched, brushing a hand across her right temple a half second before the pistol’s report and Cora’s cry reached Prophet’s ears.
The outlaw girl twisted forward, fell, scrambled back to her feet, and stumbled into the brush along the arroyo. Louisa followed, striding stiffly, with grim purpose, keeping about ten feet between herself and her hapless quarry.
“Jeepers,” Big Hans said, breathing hard as he stood to Prophet’s right, staring skeptically into the canyon. “Think we should go help her?”
Prophet shouldered his shotgun and laughed.
EPILOGUE
PROPHET, LOUISA, AND Big Hans didn’t linger in the death-drenched canyon after Louisa had finally finished off Cora, stifling those eerie squeals that chilled Prophet even in the high heat of the desert day.
When silence finally descended, the buzzards weren’t long behind.
The unlikely trio gathered their horses and weapons, mounted up, and headed back through the narrow fault in the northern wall that Big Hans had discovered several years ago during his boyish explorations. The defile’s west-side opening was concealed amongst pinyons and boulders so that you had to know the country as either an Apache or an adventurous boy would know it to find it.
Even in the defile they could hear the raucous barks, growls, and squawks of the feeding buzzards that had nearly darkened the sky behind them.
No one said anything as they filed out of the fault and made their way back to the flat-roofed owlhoot hut. Prophet watched Louisa for the effects of the diamondback venom. Most men would have been writhing around in near-death agony, screaming like a bobcat in labor and begging for a bullet.
Louisa just looked tired and pensive as she straddled the pinto, her clear, somehow still-innocent eyes scanning the terrain around her, no doubt thinking about those graves they’d left back in Seven Devils, and the life she might have had after so many years of wandering and trying to right the world’s wrongs, if it hadn’t been for the Three of a Kind Gang.
In the early afternoon, Prophet spied the long, low, flat-roofed cabin at the base of the cactus-studded ridge. The hovel shifted amongst the saguaros and boulders ahead as Mean and Ugly wended his own way through the chaparral, Big Hans and Louisa clomping along beside him.
As the side of the cabin dropped away to their right flank and the front wall slid up before them, so did a saddled horse with two well-stuffed burlap sacks hanging from a long rope across the pommel. The horse was tied to the hitchrack and stock tank fronting the cabin’s open door. A guitar leaned against the cabin’s front wall.
The chesty whore, Loretta, stood on the sorrel’s far side, tightening the latigo strap. She wore a ratty, low-crowned straw sombrero, which bobbed and pitched as she worked at the saddle. A couple of phony flowers protruded from a band around the crown.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” Big Hans muttered. “She’s still here.”
Loretta lifted her gaze over the saddle, frowning owlishly and setting a hand on the stock of a Henry rifle jutting from the saddle boot. She studied the approaching riders for a moment, and then her eyes snapped wide beneath the sombrero’s brim and she dropped her hand from the rifle.
“Hansy!”
Prophet looked at Big Hans skeptically as he drew Mean to a halt off the cabin’s front corner. “Hansy?”
“Hello, Loretta!” the big kid said with a toothy grin and a wave. “You’re still here?”
Big Hans swung down from the saddle with more speed and grace than he’d shown even before he’d broken his left arm. Clumsily doffing his ow
n sombrero, he dropped his reins and strode over to where Loretta stood near the sorrel’s tail, holding one hand to her hat brim and planting the other fist on her hip like an admonishing schoolmarm.
She wore a gaudy, frilly red dress exposing her shoulders and arms and her legs below her knees as well as a pair of pink, bow-trimmed, high-heeled shoes. The dress was cut so low that those magnificent brown breasts were nearly as naked as they’d been last night.
“I woke this morning, and you were gone,” Loretta scolded in her heavy Spanish accent. “Where did you go, bad gringo boy? You were supposed to stay in bed. I was going to change your bandage and fix you breakfast!”
Big Hans flushed like a sunset as he cut his gaze at Prophet and Louisa still sitting their horses behind him. He muttered a few phrases to Loretta in a boyish, beseeching tone, then, glancing once more with chagrin at his two mounted partners, took Loretta by the arm and led her a few yards away.
“Who’s she?” Louisa asked Prophet, regarding the pair with one arched brow.
“That’s Loretta.”
“Who’s Loretta?”
“Hans’s nursemaid.” Prophet thumbed his hat back off his forehead. “But I’m startin’ to think I maybe shouldn’t have left the kid alone with ole Loretta. Or,” he added, snorting ruefully, “maybe I shouldn’t have left Loretta alone with Big Hans.”
Loretta and Hans spoke in hushed tones, arguing a little at first in a cow-pen amalgam of English mixed with Spanish. The grave tone of the conversation turned gradually lighter until Loretta burst out laughing, throwing her head back on her shoulders and wrapping her arms around Big Hans’s big neck, then rising up on her toes to kiss the beefy lad on the lips.
Big Hans, flushing all over again, sheepishly glanced at Prophet and Louisa, both of whom were regarding him now skeptically. Chuckling happily, Loretta wheeled, the hem of her red dress flying out around her bare, brown legs, and strode toward the cabin and the guitar leaning against the wall beside the front door.
At the same time, Big Hans donned his hat and, with that same shit-eating expression on his red-mottled face, strolled back over to Prophet and Louisa.
He hemmed and hawed a few seconds, casting his eyes downward and prodding a sage clump with a boot toe, before he finally lifted his chin and blurted, “I reckon I’m gonna ride on over to Nogales with Miss Loretta. She’s gonna tend my wing for me, and I’m gonna tend her dogs and chickens. She’s got a milk cow, too, and you know how I like milk.”
He seemed to be waiting for either Prophet or Louisa to say something. When neither said anything, he shrugged and glanced around at the sun-blasted hills and mountains.
“I reckon I don’t have nowhere else to go, so . . . so I reckon I’ll do that, then. Loretta’s got amazin’ healing abilities. She said she’s descended from Injun witches . . . mestizo witches, you know . . . but the good kind, the doctorin’ kind . . . not the ones that put evil hexes on a fella an’ such . . .”
Leaning forward on his saddle horn, Prophet cut a sidelong glance at Louisa, who returned it. Then he shuttled his gaze back to the big kid standing before him looking as happy as a kid with a new Colt pistol.
Loretta had hung her guitar over her saddle horn and was climbing onto the claybank’s back, grunting and cursing in Spanish with the effort, her heavy breasts swishing this way and that and up and down in her skimpy dress.
Prophet narrowed his eyes and tongued a tobacco fleck from between his two front teeth. “I reckon you could do worse than shackin’ up with a good witch with a milk cow.” He leaned forward, extending his hand to the boy. “Luck to ya, Junior.”
“Luck, Hans,” Louisa said, extending her arm out around her horse’s neck.
When Big Hans had shaken both hands, he stepped back and hooked the thumb of his good hand behind his coverall straps, grinning. “Much obliged to both of ya. We ran ’em down, didn’t we?”
“I reckon we did,” Prophet allowed.
“You two know the way back out of the mountains, right?”
Louisa said, “It won’t be easy without your guidance, Hans, but I reckon we’ll manage.”
Big Hans climbed awkwardly into his saddle, wincing slightly at the pain in his broken arm. Loretta had reined her own mount southward and held up, turning the horse sideways to the lodge as she waited for the boy.
“Bye, now.”
Big Hans pinched his hat brim at Louisa and Prophet as he urged his horse up beside Loretta’s clay, then, side by side, they put their mounts into a southwestward trot, kicking up a screen of adobe-colored dust behind them.
Prophet watched until the two had disappeared over the other side of a low, cactus-studded hill. Shaking his head, he chuckled. “That boy’s gonna have one hell of a time. But I reckon he ain’t a boy no more. At least, he won’t be a boy after, say, good dark tonight!”
Prophet looked at Louisa beside him. She stared after Hans and Loretta, but her mind was elsewhere.
“What do you say we head back north?” Prophet said quickly, intending to break the ominous train of her thoughts. “Find you another nice, quiet town with some good folks in it. Maybe a sarsaparilla-swillin’ boy . . .”
Louisa turned to him and blinked as though swimming up through a thick fog. Finally, she lifted the corners of her bee-stung lips, leaned toward him, and wrapped an arm around his neck.
She kissed him, holding him tight for a long time.
“See you around, Lou.”
“Ah, doggone it, Louisa!”
She held his gaze as she backed her pinto away from him. “It wouldn’t work, Lou. You and I both know it wouldn’t.”
“Give it a chance.”
Louisa’s eyes flashed indignantly. “I did.” She reined the horse around, put him onto a faint, west-angling trail, and heeled him into a ground-eating lope.
Her hoof thuds dwindled gradually.
And then she was gone.
Prophet stared after her for a long time.
“Come on, Mean and Ugly,” he grumbled, reining the hammer-headed dun southeastward. His broad face was grim beneath the funneled brim of his battered Stetson, his wind-burned lips set with frustration. “I’m with Big Hans. Let’s go to Mexico. I’ve always said you can never go wrong headed for Mexico.”
Mean and Ugly stepped into a trot, shaking his ugly, cantankerous head.
Prophet glanced back into Louisa’s still-sifting dust. He thought he could make out her long-haired silhouette bobbing up another distant rise. He’d probably never see her again, but hell, you never knew about Louisa.
Hell, he never knew about him. He’d probably get himself knifed or shot or both down in Monterrey.
The big bounty hunter turned forward in his saddle and tipped his hat against the sun.
Berkley titles by Peter Brandvold
The Sheriff Ben Stillman Series
HELL ON WHEELS
ONCE LATE WITH A .38
ONCE UPON A DEAD MAN
ONCE A RENEGADE
ONCE HELL FREEZES OVER
ONCE A LAWMAN
ONCE MORE WITH A .44
ONCE A MARSHAL
The Rogue Lawman Series
BULLETS OVER BEDLAM
COLD CORPSE, HOT TRAIL
DEADLY PREY
ROGUE LAWMAN
The .45-Caliber Series
.45-CALIBER DEATHTRAP
.45-CALIBER MANHUNT
.45-CALIBER FURY
.45-CALIBER REVENGE
The Bounty Hunter Lou Prophet Series
THE GRAVES AT SEVEN DEVILS
THE DEVIL’S LAIR
STARING DOWN THE DEVIL
THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE
RIDING WITH THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS
DEALT THE DEVIL’S HAND
THE DEVIL AND LOU PROPHET
Other titles
BLOOD MOUNTAIN
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The Graves at Seven Devils Page 24