Blood at Sundown

by Peter Brandvold

  “Yeah, it’ll be safe there in Sundown,” Stonecraft said. “It’s always quiet in Sundown.”

  The two trainmen left the coach and got to work clearing the tracks.

  Chapter 39

  Louisa stared down in shock at the man lying in the street before her. “You’re . . .”

  “N-Name’s R-Ram-Ramsay Willis!” The man was shivering so violently that he could barely spit the words out. “I r-ro . . . r-rode . . . all night . . . t-t-t-town. Had . . . had to warn . . . ’bout . . . Clay . . . Clay—”

  “Clayton?”

  “He’s . . . he’s c-razy!” Willis jerked his head and shoulder up slightly. The blanket fell away from his left arm. Or where that arm had been. As it was, all that Willis sported on that side was a badly shredded shirtsleeve caked with frozen blood. “He-he did this . . . thought . . . thought me an’ Rose . . . was . . . was . . . c-carryin’ . . . on!”

  Willis shook his head. He wrapped his right hand around Louisa’s right forearm and gazed up at her sharply. “He’s . . . he’s . . . k-k-killin’ ever’body. He killed R-Rose. T-t-tried to kill me . . . lef . . . lef . . . lef me f-for dead! I . . . I r-rode . . . fast as I could t-t . . . to w-war . . . warn Sundown!”

  “Oh my God,” Louisa said under her breath, staring down in hang-jawed shock at the mangled man.

  Willis squeezed Louisa’s forearm harder. “H-He’s . . . g-g-got the . . . the w-winter fever!”

  Louisa remembered Morris Tutwiler pointing toward her as he’d staggered into the saloon with the ax embedded in his back. Only, the barman hadn’t been pointing at her. He’d been pointing at Edgar Clayton entering the saloon by the front door behind her. Clayton had sported the bruise on his forehead that Tutwiler must have given him when trying to fight the crazy Clayton off, when the barman had gone out for more firewood and Clayton had buried the hatchet in his back for his trouble.

  Clayton must have stolen out of the saloon last night to kill Cully at the depot.

  He’d been biding his time, killing the entire town slowly. He’d started with the banker, an obvious choice probably to most men. He continued from Emory in a feverish frenzy, one person at a time before focusing his malevolent energy on . . .

  A scream sounded from inside the Territorial Hotel.

  A rifle thundered.

  More screams.

  The rifle thundered again and again, evoking more screams.

  “Nooo!” a man bellowed.

  Louisa heaved herself to her feet and ran south along the main street of Sundown, leaping drifts. As she ran, she fed fresh cartridges into her Winchester’s breech. It was a fumbling effort. Her fingers were so cold and numb that she lost as many bullets as she fed to the rifle.

  She racked a fresh round into the Winchester’s action and glanced at the ground. Clayton’s tracks led down the middle of the street, angling to the Sundown.

  “No, you crazy devil!” a man inside the Territorial wailed as more rifle fire exploded inside the hotel, accompanied by the screeching laughter of what could only be a lunatic.

  Louisa mounted the stoop and pushed through the front door. Her eyes had been compromised by the bright sunlight. She couldn’t see much in the dingy shadows, but she saw the flames of a rifle lapping toward her from the room’s bowels. As she flung herself left, a bullet punched into the door’s glass pane. Louisa hit the floor and rolled, losing the Winchester when she inadvertently slammed it against a chair.

  Another bullet thumped into the floor a few inches from her scrambling, moccasin-clad feet. She peered through the legs of the table she’d found herself behind, left of the front door, to see both Mose and Nasty Ralph lying dead on the floor before her. To their left, Mrs. Emory sprawled on her back, limbs akimbo.

  More men—likely the drummers—were wailing as the rifle continued barking and Clayton continued venting his howling, high-pitched, witchlike laughter.

  The shooting stopped. A heavy, pulselike silence descended on the room.

  Louisa reached under the chair for her Winchester. Taking the rifle in both hands, she edged a look over the table before her.

  Her eyes adjusted to the murky shadows near the bar. Smoke hung heavily over the room, smelling like rotten eggs. A man’s vague shadow moved to the left of the bar, near the bottom of the stairs.

  “Oh God—I’m dyin’,” announced a man’s thin, dull voice.

  The man-shaped shadow swung sharply to his left and triggered a pistol toward the floor. A gurgling sounded as one of the last surviving drummers died.

  Edgar Clayton swung around to face the bar, striding toward it, clicking back the hammer of the Remington revolver in his right hand.

  “Please, Mr. Clayton,” Toni’s quavering voice sounded from where she must have been cowering behind the bar. “Don’t kill me!”

  Clayton opened his mouth and loosed another round of cackling laughter. As he approached the bar, he aimed his cocked pistol over the top, toward the floor on the other side.

  “Hold it, Clayton!”

  Clayton froze. Slowly, he turned his head toward Louisa standing near where Mose and Nasty Ralph lay dead. The Vengeance Queen aimed her cocked Winchester from her right shoulder. She narrowed one hazel eye down along the rifle she held rock steady in her half-frozen hands.

  The bright sunlight, angling through the windows and the open door behind her, glittered in Clayton’s eyes. It fairly glowed in them—the eyes of a specter who’d stolen out of hell on a mission of madness and blood.

  Clayton loosed another round of howling laughter, ending with, “I got her dead to rights, Miss Bonnyventure!”

  He swung his head back toward Toni cowering behind the bar.

  He didn’t get off a single shot before Louisa’s Winchester roared. She punched two bullets into the crazy man’s belly, sending him stumbling back along the bar. Walking slowly toward him, she continued working the cocking lever and firing, empty shell casings pinging onto the floor behind her.

  Wailing shrilly, Clayton dropped his gun and then followed it to the floor, piling up at the far end of the bar, near the stairs, at the same spot Del Rainy and Morris Tutwiler had breathed their last.

  Louisa cocked the Winchester once more and punched one more round into Clayton’s chest. He grunted, gurgled. His crazy eyes rolled up in their sockets, dimming.

  Louisa lowered the smoking Winchester.

  Powder smoke hung heavy in the air before her.

  Into the heavy silence following the din of the fusillade, she said, “It’s Bonaventure, you cork-headed fool. If you listened closely, you wouldn’t hear a y in it.”

  A face slid slowly into view from behind the bar.

  Louisa turned to see the redhead regarding her dubiously.

  * * *

  Several hours later, in the winter’s early darkness, Prophet stepped down off the vestibule of the countess’s coach onto the cold, windy brick platform. He held the countess herself in his arms. The girl, half-asleep and swathed in several heavy quilts, clung to him desperately, her arms wrapped tightly around his thick neck.

  Prophet’s eyes probed the murk around the Sundown depot. A slender, silhouetted, female figure in a man’s hat and a heavy coat stepped out of the shadows beneath the station roof ’s overhang. Louisa limped slightly on her right leg.

  The ends of her red muffler blew around her head in the wind. Her blond hair blew around, as well. Holding her Winchester on her shoulder, she stopped before Prophet, looked him over, wincing a little when she saw the ground beef of his face and his swollen eyes.

  She glanced at the girl in his arms.

  “You’re late,” she said, returning her gaze to his.

  “Yeah, well.” Prophet shrugged and sighed.

  Louisa glanced along the train. No one else was getting off. She returned her gaze to Prophet and said, “How did it go?”

  “I lost a thousand dollars.” Lou looked at the red neckerchief knotted around her right thigh, just beneath the hem of her coat. “
How’d it go for you?”

  Louisa nodded. “Me, too.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t care about the money. It grieves me to think how much fun that extra thousand could have bought me down in Mexico.”

  Louisa half turned, jerked her chin toward town. “Come on. Your friend looks like she could use a warm bed. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “I could stand a drink. Stiffer, the better.”

  Louisa began walking in the direction of Sundown, favoring her right leg. “I’ll buy you one. A stiff one. Might even buy myself one.”

  “Oh Lordy—heaven help us all!” Limping along beside the Vengeance Queen, Prophet arched a plaintive brow at her. “Could you buy me two?”

  “Okay,” Louisa said. “I’ll buy you two.” She glanced up at him, a wry half smile dimpling her cheek. “But only two.”

  Keep reading for a special excerpt of

  STAGECOACH TO PURGATORY

  THE VIOLENT DAYS OF LOU PROPHET, BOUNTY HUNTER

  by Peter Brandvold

  When it comes to gun-blazing, bone-crushing action,

  no one tells a tale like acclaimed

  Western writer Peter Brandvold.

  These are the violent days (and reckless nights)

  of Lou Prophet, as told to his ink-stained confessor.

  Most of these recollections are brutal.

  Others are bloody. Some might even be true . . .

  LAST STAGE TO HELL

  What do you get when you take one stagecoach out

  of Denver, add a thousand-or-so bullets whizzing past

  your head, while sitting next to two headless corpses

  caught in the crossfire? If your name is Lou Prophet,

  you get revenge. Raucous, rowdy, ruthless revenge.

  Next question?

  DEVIL BY THE TAIL

  How do you catch a fork-tongued demon who’s

  busted out of prison to wreak all sorts of unholy hell

  on a small Texas town? If you’re Lou Prophet, you

  team up with red-hot Louisa Bonaventure, aka “The

  Vengeance Queen,” and cut a swath of merciless

  Prophet mayhem in return.

  Due process be damned . . .

  On sale now, wherever books are sold.

  From The Life and Times of Lou Prophet, Bounty Hunter by HEYWOOD WILDEN SCOTT

  I’d been a tough-nosed newsman for nearly sixty years, yet it was with more trepidation than I like to admit that I knocked on the big, old rebel’s door.

  I’d heard the stories about him. Hell, I’d printed many of those yarns in the various newspapers I’d written and edited in that grand old time of the Old West gunfighters, larger-than-life lawmen, and the much-maligned, death-dealing bounty hunters, of which he’d been one.

  Yes, I’d heard the tales. I’d printed the tales. With feigned reluctance (I was a journalist, after all—not a reader or writer of dime novels!) but with unabashed delight, if the truth be known. With admiration and even envy. Imagine such a man living such a life at such a time, hoorawing badmen of every stripe, risking life and limb with every adventure while the rest of us suffered little more than festering galls to our posteriors while scribbling ink by the barrel onto endless rolls of foolscap in dingy, smoky, rat-infested offices off backstreet alleys, the big presses making the whole building rock.

  I’d never met him.

  I’d heard from those who had crossed his trail that he was a formidable, mercurial cuss, by turns kindhearted and generous and foulmouthed and dangerous, and he’d grown more and more formidable, unpredictable, and recalcitrant with age. The years had not been kind to him. But, then, what would you expect of a man who had lived such a life and who, it was said, had sold his soul to the devil, exchanging an eternity of coal-shoveling in hell’s bowels for a few good years after the War Between the States “on this side of the sod, stomping with his tail up,” as he was known to call what he did between his bounty hunting adventures?

  In fact, I once heard that he’d hunted only men with prices on their heads in order to pay for his notorious appetite for whiskey, women, and poker.

  He’d seen so much killing during the war, out of which he’d emerged something of a hero of the Confederacy, that he really wanted only to dance and make love and swill the Taos Lightning to his heart’s delight. But he was not an independently wealthy man, so it was only with great reluctance, I’m told, that after such bouts of manly indiscretions he took up his Colt .45, his Winchester ’73 rifle, his double-bore, sawed-off, twelve-gauge Richards coach gun, and his razor-edged bowie knife, and stepped into the saddle of his beloved but appropriately named horse, Mean and Ugly, and fogged the sage in pursuit of death-dealing curly wolves prowling the long coulees of the wild and woolly western frontier.

  He usually had a fresh wanted circular or two stuffed into his saddlebag pouches, carelessly ripped from post office or Wells Fargo bulletin boards.

  Now, as I rolled my chair up to his room, I’d recently seen for myself that he was every bit the colorful albeit formidable old codger I’d heard he was. It had been only within a week or so of this recounting that the old warrior had shown up at the same Odd Fellows House of Christian Charity in Pasadena, California, that I, too, after several grave illnesses had broken me both financially and spiritually, had found myself shut away in, whiling away the long, droll hours until my own annihilation.

  He’d been working as a consultant in the silent western flickers, I’d heard, until a grievous accident involving a Chrysler Model B-70, a couple of pretty starlets, and several jugs of corn liquor caromed off a perilous mountain road in the hills above Malibu. Now he prowled the halls on crutches—a big, one-legged man with a face like the siding of a ruined barn, at times grunting and bellowing blue curses (especially when one of the attendants confiscated his proscribed cigarettes and whiskey) or howling songs of the old Confederacy out on the narrow balcony off his second-story room, his raspy voice ratcheting up out of his tar-shrunken lungs like the engines of the horseless carriages sputtering past on Pacific Avenue.

  As I was saying, I knocked on his door.

  I shrank back in my chair when the door was flung open and the big bear of the one-legged man, broad as a coal dray and balancing precariously on one crutch, peered out from the roiling smoke fog inundating his tiny, sparsely furnished room.

  “What?” he said.

  At least, that’s how I’m translating it. It actually sounded more like the indignant grunt of a peevish grizzly bear prodded from a long winter’s slumber.

  Out of that ruin of a face, two pale blue eyes burned like the last stars at the end of the night. At once keen and bold, flickering and desperate.

  Wedged between my left thigh and the arm of my wheelchair was a bottle of rye whiskey. On my right leg were a fresh notepad, a pen, and a bottle of ink. I hoisted the bottle high, grinned up at the old roarer scowling down at me, a loosely rolled cigarette drooping from a corner of his broad mouth, and said, “Tell me a story, Lou!”

  Chapter 1

  Something or someone peeled Lou Prophet’s right eyelid open.

  A female voice, soft as tiny wooden wind chimes stirred by an April breeze, said as though from far away, “You’ve ruined me!”

  The bounty hunter’s rye-logged brain was only half registering what his optic nerve was showing it, what his ears were telling it.

  A face hovered over him, down close to his own, in fact, but the features of that face were a blur. He could better make out what he was not looking at directly. The head that the face belonged to owned a pretty, thick, long mess of light red tresses curling down onto slender shoulders as white as new-fallen snow on Christmas Day in the north Georgia mountains of Lou Prophet’s original and long-ago home.

  The girl released Prophet’s lid, and she disappeared behind a veil of darkness. The accusatory words had stirred him somewhat, despite that his brain was a sponge still soaked in last night’s tornado juice. He had no idea what had been meant
by the accusation, and, while vaguely curious, slumber tugged at the ex-rebel bounty hunter like a heavy wind, albeit a wind that owned the inviting aroma of lilac water and natural, bed-fermented female musk.

  Down, down, Prophet fell . . . until his other lid was tugged open, and the face appeared again, even closer to his own this time, so that he could see a gunmetal blue eye staring into his own left one. “Did you hear me? You’ve utterly and completely ruined me! Ohh!”

  That nudged Prophet closer to full wakefulness. What in the hell was this girl, whoever in hell she was, talking about?

  Ruined?

  While Prophet had a somewhat wide-ranging reputation as a hard-nosed man hunter, he’d never been anything but gentle with women. Unless said women were running on the wrong side of the law and had tried to kill him, of course. (One of the first things he’d learned when he’d first turned to bounty hunting after venturing west after his beloved South had been whipped during the War of Northern Aggression was that not all hardened outlaws were men.) But those women were the exception rather than the rule, and he doubted that any of them would say he’d “ruined” them.

  Prophet tried to say the word but, just as his brain was not yet hooked up to his eyes, it was not attached to his mouth, either, so that what he heard his own lips say as they moved stiffly against each other was: “Roo-hoom. . . d . . . ?”

  “Ruined!” the girl said, louder, heartbroken. “Purely ruined!”

  The half squeal, half moan was a cold hand reaching down into the warm water of the bounty hunter’s slumber and plucking him into full wakefulness. He bolted upright in bed, blinking, heart thudding, wondering if he’d done something untoward during his inebriation.

  Untoward, that was, beyond the usual transgressions of gambling himself into mind-numbing debt, drinking himself (as he’d obviously done last night) into a coma, frolicking with fallen women, brawling, fighting with knives, pistol-shooting shot glasses off neat pyramids arranged on bar tops, howling at the moon, swinging from the rafters, herding chickens, stealing bells from courthouse cupolas, singing to his horse, getting beaten up or thrown in jail or both, and, as per one occasion, asking a fallen woman to be his bride and actually going through with the ceremony. (Fortunately, the union had been rendered null and void when it was revealed that the minister had been defrocked due to his having had carnal knowledge of his organist.)