As the man howled and stumbled backward, slapping his hands to his left temple, Prophet heaved his torso forward, giving a bearlike roar. He jerked his arms up and around from behind him. Since his arms, like the rest of him, were wet, they slipped easily from the ginger-bearded Russian’s grip.
Wheeling, Prophet swung a hard right cross that smashed savagely against the ginger-bearded man’s left cheek, sending him barreling sideways into the room’s front wall. Prophet wheeled again to see the one-eyed Russian rushing toward him, bringing his right fist up again, that determined look compressing his mouth.
Prophet ducked. The ginger-bearded Russian’s fist whooshed through the air where his head had just been.
Prophet was big—two hundred–plus pounds on a frame nearly six and a half feet tall. But even tired and drunk, he was as lithe as a cat, especially when he was raging with as much fury as he was now. He stepped forward and slammed his right fist into the one-eyed man’s left ear.
“Oh!” the man said, his head jerking to one side, eyes snapping wide. His head shook, reverberating from the blow. His ear turned snow-white then rose-petal pink.
Prophet slammed his fist into the same ear again, again, and again, driving the man across the small room to the front wall. As the one-eyed man slumped there, stunned, blood issuing from his torn ear, Prophet hammered his head three more powerful times.
Prophet turned. The ginger-bearded man stood before him. The Russian was smiling despite the blood leaking from the left corner of his mouth. A broken tooth appeared between his lips. He spit it out then bolted forward, snarling like a rabid panther and closing his big hands over Prophet’s face, trying to work his thumbs into the bounty hunter’s eyes.
Prophet tipped his head back, keeping the man’s thumbs out of his eye sockets. He tried to shrug out from under the man’s solid grip to no avail.
Both men bellowing and snarling and cursing in their own native tongues, they struggled there against the wall for nearly a minute, hands clawing at the other’s face, before Prophet finally jerked his arms up, breaking the ginger-bearded man’s grip on his head.
He head-butted the man then smashed two left jabs against his mouth.
The man stumbled backward, lips smashed, giving a shrill cry as he fell into Prophet’s tub crossways, making the water splash up and over the edges and onto the floor. Prophet walked over to him, leaned down, and smashed the man’s face twice more—first with his left fist, then with his right.
That turned the man over sideways, and he wallowed lengthways in what remained of Prophet’s bathwater, blinking rapidly, eyes rolling back in his head.
Breathing hard, Prophet straightened. He stumbled backward then regained his balance. He looked around, saw the countess sitting in a chair by the door, her left leg crossed over the knee of the other leg, beneath her frilly skirt.
She had her arms crossed on her lovely bodice. Her eyes raked him up and down. Her expression was unabashedly brazen, ripe lips slightly parted, olive-colored cheeks tipped with pink. She returned her gaze to Lou’s and quirked her mouth corners up into a beguiling, ambiguous half smile.
Suddenly self-conscious, he grabbed a towel off a near chair and held it over his privates.
The countess glanced at her fallen accomplices—one in the tub, one on his knees to Prophet’s left, pressing his forehead against the floor. The girl’s face colored up like a stormy sky. She shot up from her chair, and, bent slightly forward at the waist, sliding her accusatory glare from one man to the other and back again, bellowed loudly in Russian.
Prophet couldn’t have distinguished her harsh tongue from the language of the wildcats, but he could tell she was berating both men roundly. By the furious flush rising in her perfectly formed cheeks, she was likely castigating their bloodlines and manhoods, to boot.
The man in the tub, wincing against the verbal bombardment, hoisted himself out of the water. He fell over the side to the floor then worked himself to his feet. His face was badly smashed, nose turned sideways. His wet uniform tunic was spotted with soapsuds. He gave Prophet an indignant but also a faintly admiring glance then stumbled over to the door.
Slumped under the countess’s unrelenting denouncements, he slogged out.
The one-eyed man finally maneuvered his head, which appeared to be a heavy burden for him, up off the floor near the front wall. While the countess continued to harangue him, he trod heavily to the door, tripped over the tub, then stumbled into the hall and disappeared.
The countess turned her beautifully flushed cheeks and angrily crossed eyes to Prophet, standing seven feet away from her, holding the towel over his privates.
“You have beaten two Cossacks senseless,” she said, her tone coldly accusing. “Do you know what this means?”
Prophet had no idea. He was still searching for an answer when the countess extended her right hand out to her side, grabbed the door, and slammed it.
“It means I am yours for the rest of the evening!”
Chapter 21
Louisa stared down at the glassy eyes of the Sundown marshal, Del Rainy, who lay spread-eagle on the saloon floor, between the stairs and the bar. The thick, dark red blood pool grew wider beneath him, leaking out of the stab wound in his belly.
Rainy stared plaintively up at Louisa. He moved his lips as though trying to speak.
The lawman’s eyes turned opaque. They rolled upward until he was staring at the ceiling directly above him. His final breath rattled across his lips, making his mouth flutter. His chest contracted. Then it stopped moving. It did not expand again. The man would never draw another breath.
“That’s a damn shame,” lamented the red-faced barman, Morris Tutwiler. He shifted his gaze to the top of the stairs down which Rainy had come. “Rainy never was much of a lawman, but I always liked Del. He didn’t deserve a knife in his guts!”
Slowly, Louisa rose from her knee. Staring down at the lifeless body of Del Rainy, she unsnapped the keeper thong from over the hammer of her right Colt and, closing her hand around the cool, smooth pearl handles, shucked the .45 from its holster. She slid her gaze up the stairs and then scuttled it along the ceiling, in the direction from which the sounds had issued earlier and now from which came delighted snickers and unrestrained laughter.
Louisa turned slowly around. She stepped away from Rainy.
All the men in the saloon—Tutwiler, Ray Vink, and his partners Mose and Nasty Ralph, the three drummers, the handsome cavalry captain, Yardley, and the grave-faced Edgar Clayton—stood in a ragged semicircle around her. Now they shifted their positions, frowning at her, making way for her, as, holding her Colt straight down along her right leg and peering up at the low ceiling, she strode back along the bar toward the front of the room.
She followed the snickering in the ceiling around the front end of the bar and toward the far side of the saloon, moving back down along the bar’s opposite side, kicking chairs out of her way. There was another customer over there on that side of the bar, one that Louisa hadn’t seen until now. The reason she hadn’t seen him was that he’d been on the opposite side of the bar from her and he hadn’t spoken or even moved much since she’d come in out of the storm.
Obviously drunk, he was slumped forward across his table, arms flung straight out above his head. His left cheek was pressed against the table, and he snored softly. An empty bottle, a half-empty shot glass, and an empty beer mug stood on the table around his head and outstretched arms and overturned black felt hat. A ragged winter coat hung off his narrow shoulders. From what Louisa could see of his darkly wrinkled face, he was an older gent. Sixties or seventies.
Louisa stepped quietly around the sleeping drunk and stared up at the soot-stained, pressed-tin ceiling at the southeast corner of the room, near a large oil painting depicting a hefty blond woman lounging semi-naked on a red velvet fainting couch.
In the ceiling there, Louisa heard a man’s voice, doubtless the voice of Pima Quarrels, say something in a laughing tone. Th
e woman, Sweets DuPree, laughed in response and said loudly and clearly enough for Louisa to hear:
“Did you see the look on his face when I shoved the blade in?”
She squealed with laughter.
Her lover, Quarrels, guffawed. There was the clink of a bottle nudging a glass, refreshing a drink.
Louisa hardened her jaws. She clicked her Colt’s hammer back, raised the gun, angled it up above her head, aiming at the ceiling beyond which Sweets DuPree and Pima Quarrels were likely lounging together in bed, drinking, smoking, making love—if you could call it love—and delighting in their murder of Marshal Rainy.
They’d probably celebrated their murdering of the two young female tellers, whom they’d kidnapped from the bank they’d robbed in Wyoming, in much the same fashion. After they’d taken their pleasure from the poor, unwitting girls and cut their throats.
Bang! Bang!
Louisa’s Colt bucked in her fist.
The old man who’d been sleeping at the near table lifted his head with a start, wailing, “What, ho? What, ho?”
He turned to Louisa, his dark eyes shiny and wide. He had a bony, wizened face and short, greasy, dark brown hair. He just stared at Louisa and her smoking Colt, his lower jaw hanging in shock.
For a moment, silence. Then, beyond the ceiling, Quarrels said: “What . . . the . . . hell . . . ?”
“Christ!” exclaimed Sweets DuPree. “I’m hit!”
Bang!
“Pima!” Sweets screamed.
“What the hell?” Quarrels bellowed again, louder.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Both Quarrels and Sweets DuPree screamed as they stumbled around in the room over Louisa’s head. Louisa emptied her first Colt into the ceiling then shucked the second Colt from the holster on her left thigh and sent another six rounds of .45 caliber lead into the floor of Quarrels and DuPree’s room. By the time the second Colt’s hammer had clicked benignly down on the firing pin, there’d been one heavy thud, like that of a large body hitting the floor.
The screaming had stopped but someone was still stumbling around up there, grunting, groaning in agony.
Quickly but methodically, calmly, Louisa shook the spent cartridges out of both Colts and replaced them with fresh from her cartridge belt. The old man at the near table stared at her in shocked silence, lower jaw still hanging, holding his bony, arthritic hands over his large, elongated ears.
As Louisa thumbed the last shell into the last empty chamber of her right-side Colt, she strode back around the bar, keeping an eye on the ceiling in which she was following the stumbling of bare feet as they moved down the hall toward the stairway. The men were still over there, staring at the Vengeance Queen in mute silence and wide-eyed incredulity.
They moved quickly out of her way as she strode back down the bar toward the stairs at the top of which Sweets DuPree emerged from the second-floor hall. Half-naked and bloody, wearing only a pair of men’s longhandles, the outlaw woman dropped clumsily down the stairs, leaning hard against the rail. She had a revolver in her right hand. Wailing shrilly, her hair wild, she stopped about halfway down the stairs and raised the Smith & Wesson.
Louisa stepped over the sprawled figure of Del Rainy and raised the Colt in her own right hand. Sweets triggered a shot that went screeching through the saloon to plunk into the front wall, making the men behind Louisa duck.
Sweets’s eyes found Louisa. She must have recognized the Vengeance Queen.
She took one more step down, screaming, “Witch!”
Calmly, Louisa triggered three shots, one after the other, spaced about one second apart. The slugs tore into the outlaw woman’s already bullet-torn body. They threw her backward against the stairs. She twisted around, groaning, and rolled wildly down the steps to pile up at the bottom, her head resting over Rainy’s ankles.
Sweets stared up at Louisa, blinked once. “Go to hell,” she said, then died with a ragged sigh.
Louisa turned to the men once more standing around her in a semicircle. They all regarded her in shocked silence, including the handsome captain Yardley. Louisa holstered the Colt and stepped forward, in the direction of her table, then switched course suddenly, turning toward the bar.
The tall, blond hardcase, Ray Vink, was in her way. He stepped aside quickly, muttering, “Ex . . . excuse me.”
Louisa dropped a coin into the shot glass atop the bar, grabbed a bowl and a spoon, and strode over to the potbelly stove on which the beans bubbled.
Behind her, breaking the pregnant silence, the barman, speaking overly loudly, said, “Well, uh . . . why don’t a couple of you fellas help me with this fresh beef? We’ll drag the bodies out to the woodshed, and I’ll figure out what to do with ’em come spring.”
Louisa ladled up a bowl of beans. The barman and the handsome captain and two drummers went upstairs and dragged the bullet-riddled body of Pima Quarrels outside.
They returned for Sweets DuPree, and once they’d disposed of her, they returned for Rainy. The barman and the two drummers came back in on a chill breath of stormy, snow-laced air, stomping snow from their boots, batting it from their hats. Tutwiler, breathless from exertion, walked back around behind the bar and strode back out a minute later.
He set a mug of fresh tea on the table where Louisa, one pistol on the table to her right, was finishing her beans. Louisa reached into her pocket for a coin, and the bartender raised his hands, palms out.
“No, no, no,” he said, smiling down at her and then running his hands nervously down his stained green apron. “This round’s on the house. Truth be known, it’s kinda old. Not too many folks drink tea around here. My wife did. She was English, don’t ya know. She liked it good and strong. With milk. She never cleaned the teapot. Said cleanin’ the teapot’s a badness, accordin’ to English ways. Norma Jane, she’s been gone nigh on five years now, so I reckon that’s how old that tea is. If it tastes old, I’ll throw it out and see if Mrs.—”
“It’s fine.”
“Oh, okay. Good.”
Louisa looked up at him. The look was intended to excuse him but he apparently didn’t read it correctly.
“I, uh,” the barman said, leaning forward to rest a hand on a chair back. “I, uh . . . reckon I didn’t know who you were. You know . . . not until I seen you shoot.”
“Well, now you know.” Louisa spooned up the last bit of beans in her bowl. “Good beans, Mr. Tutwiler.”
“Morris.”
“Good beans, Morris.” Louisa sipped from the fresh mug and said, “And good tea.”
“Oh, thank you, Miss Bonnyventure!”
“It’s Bona-venture,” Louisa said. “There’s no y in it.”
“Oh, I bet there’s not. Well, just the same, Miss Bona-venture, it’s an honor to have you here, and if there’s anything you need . . . any more beans or tea or anything else, you just let me know.”
“I think I’ll be turning in after I finish my tea. It’s been a long day, Morris.”
“Gonna be a long night, too,” Tutwiler said. “You can take room nine. It’s nice and roomy and it’s got a real good fireplace in it. I don’t rent it out ’cept to special guests, but I reckon you’re one o’ them, all right. I’ll make sure there’s fresh wood in the box right now, and I’ll leave the key in the door for you.”
With that, Tutwiler swung his bulk around and waddled breathlessly back toward the bar.
Louisa sipped her tea.
Bonnyventure.
She wondered where her partner was. She hoped Lou was having a better time of it over in Indian Butte than she was having here in Sundown. Lou wasn’t going to like the fact that she’d beefed Sweets DuPree and Pima Quarrels, both of whom were worth more alive than dead.
Louisa didn’t care about the extra money. She didn’t need it. She was far thriftier than her ex-rebel partner, Prophet. She didn’t drink and carouse and gamble until her pockets were empty, like Lou did.
She kept focused. She remained on the blood trail. After all, the
world was full of bad men . . . and bad women . . . badly in need of killing. Maybe someday they’d all be dead. Maybe someday no more good, innocent people, like her own family, would be murdered by the wolflike gang of Handsome Dave Duvall. Maybe someday all bloodthirsty wolves like Duvall . . . and Sweets DuPree and Pima Quarrels . . . would be scoured from the earth.
Of course, deep down Louisa knew that would never happen, people being who they were. But she knew that with only one part of her heart, with only a remote part of her brain. The rest of her brain and her heart, her entire being, in fact, was determined to keep trying . . . and trying . . . and trying until she herself had run out of time.
The satisfaction of killing two bloodthirsty killers like DuPree and Quarrels was worth every penny of what she’d lost in bounty money.
Louisa finished her tea. She shoved her pistol down into her holster then grabbed her rifle and saddlebags and began to rise from her chair. She stopped when the front door opened and the handsome captain walked into the saloon, shivering and stomping snow from his boots, the draft from the door dousing several lamps and sending a deathlike chill through the room.
The captain removed his kepi, brushed snow from his fur coat, and glanced at Louisa. He cast her a winning smile and strode toward her.
Louisa set her Winchester down and sank back into her chair as she watched the handsome soldier approach. It was going to be a long, cold night, after all.
Chapter 22
Captain Yardley stood over Louisa’s table. He gazed down at her with an ironic smile. “Mind if I sit down?”
Louisa shrugged a shoulder. It was never wise to look too eager. Yardley was handsome. Dashing, even. But even handsome, dashing soldiers might be blackhearted devils. You just never knew.
“It’s a free country, Captain.”
Yardley tossed his hat, wet from the snow, onto a chair, shrugged out of his thick bear coat, and hung it over the back of another chair, this one directly across the table from Louisa. He sat down in the chair, scooted it inward, and leaned forward, wringing his hands together.
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