Hell's Angel

by Peter Brandvold

  Mordecai Moon sat back in his chair, which he’d pulled up close enough to the gallery’s front edge that he could extend his stubby, bowed, two-foot-long legs and hike his little boy’s black boots atop the rail, and cross them, which was what he did. Moon was fixing to take a midmorning nap so he’d be well rested for the night’s business when he spied movement on the sun-blasted, rock – and cacti-tufted desert to the north, just beyond the town.

  Two riders were following the old Chihuahua Trail, which was the only trail through Moon’s Well and which became the town’s broad main drag and remained so for a hundred yards before it slithered off into the desert once more—a floury pale line twisting and turning and rising and falling through one watery mirage after another, all the way to the Rio Grande and beyond.

  Boots clomped behind Moon, issuing from inside the saloon, the two broad front doors of which had been propped open with rocks. No common batwings for Moon’s place but grand oak doors carved in the ornate Spanish style and hauled in from an old Mexican church to the west.

  The clomping grew louder and stopped. In the corner of his right eye, Moon spied movement, and he raked his eyes from the two oncoming riders to see his girl, Griselda May, leaning against the door frame, her long, dark brown hair dancing in the hot, dry breeze.

  The girl yawned. “Anything happening out here yet, Mordecai? I’m bored.”

  Griselda pooched her lips out in a pout. Mordecai smiled, his little, dark blue eyes turning shiny and round, his thick lips stretching back from his large, tobacco-crusted teeth—teeth too large for his mouth. “You just hold on, Griselda. Things’ll be hoppin’ soon. George Montgomery’s bull train is due through here in a couple hours, and then we’ll wake the band.”

  Mordecai clapped his oversized hands twice, loudly, and cackled in his eager way that appalled and horrified most folks, his eyes swelling and nearly popping out of their sockets. The dwarf repelled most people, but in Griselda May he evoked nothing but a lusty flush.

  “Is this Friday, Mordecai?” she said in her lazy, Texas drawl, her brown eyes coming alive.

  She’d been born to a saddle maker and part-time sheriff’s deputy in Tularosa but had left home when she was only twelve, hitching her star to a trail herd heading to Kansas. While all agreed that Griselda was one of the most beautiful women within a thousand square Texas miles, the joke was that she smelled like a thirty-and-found cow waddie, though that wasn’t true.

  They only said that because of how she dressed—in rugged trail gear complete with matched Colts. She hadn’t punched cows in several years, since she’d thrown in with Mordecai Moon. Now she was Moon’s girl as well as his business partner, and while she outshone him in looks, her soul was just as rotten.

  Like Mordecai Moon, Griselda May was a cold-blooded killer. They were two peas of the same pod.

  “It is that, Griselda. It’s Friday!” The dwarf cackled again, rubbing his hands together in eager anticipation. He loved dancing to his own four-man mariachi band comprised of Mexicans who were of the Spanish grant’s original tenant families. Moon also loved to gamble, though he was terrible at it, and no one wanted to gamble with him and risk incurring his wrath and a .36-caliber bullet fired from point-blank range between their eyes.

  “Ah, shucks. Now I’m really bored. Bored and anxious. I’m so hot . . . so tired of the sun, Mordecai. I want it to be night.” Griselda sauntered over in her undershot stockmen’s boots, swinging her hips inside her skin-tight, black denims behind brush-scarred, red-stitched, black leather leggings, and cuffed the dwarf’s hat off his forehead.

  She planted a wet kiss his on his freckled cheek. “What do you say we go upstairs and tussle till dark?”

  Griselda ran her hand up and down his short, willowy thigh clad in orange-and-black-checked broadcloth with patched knees. Moon winced and brushed her hand away.

  “Oh, no, you git. Don’t you go gittin’ me worked up again, Griselda. I ain’t as young as you. I’m liable to turn into old Frank Rose over yonder.” He chuckled at that, glancing at the saloon sitting a ways west and on the other side of the street from Moon’s place.

  The Rose Hotel and Saloon was far less grand than Moon’s place. It was an old, mud-brick affair with two stories and a brush roof. Originally, the Mexican tenants had built it with Chisos La Grange’s blessing—he’d had more business than he knew what to do with—and then abandoned it for unknown reasons. The saloon was now owned by Frank and Ruth Rose, who’d bought it from Moon. They were now his tenants, as was everyone else in the town of Moon’s Well, though their dream of prospering here in Moon’s Well along the old Chihuahua Trail had withered the day, nearly a year ago, Frank Rose was cut down and bedridden by a brain stroke.

  “Please, now, Griselda. I’m gonna end up like Frank Rose, and you’ll be feedin’ me mush with a spoon, you keep workin’ my tired old bones like you been,” Moon said.

  “Sure couldn’t tell that by this mornin’,” Griselda said, sticking the tip of her tongue in the dwarf’s ear. “You performed right well, Mr. Mordecai Moooon. . . .”

  Moon chuckled and shuddered at the sensation of the girl’s, soft, warm, wet tongue. “No . . . now, you stop or you’re gonna git the old snake stirrin’ in its hole!”

  “I want it to stir. I like your snake, Mordecai.”

  Moon cackled in delight, basking in the girl’s obvious adoration and desire for him, which was so unexplainable to so many. “Look there—we got someone comin’!”

  He pointed toward the riders just now swimming up out of a brassy mirage and entering the outskirts of Moon’s Well. Long, tan dusters flapped out around them as their horses loped past the town’s original mud shacks and stock pens and corrals constructed of brush and ocotillo stalks. They both wore Stetsons and string ties, and pistols were tied down on their thighs. Badges of some sort flashed silver whenever their flapping dusters exposed the lapels of their wool vests to the sun.

  The lawmen slowed their horses and came on toward the saloon. Moon sat up straight in his chair, boots still crossed on the porch rail before him. Griselda kept her hand on his left shoulder, and he held his hand over hers, vacantly returning the affection though the dwarf’s interest was mainly on the newcomers now.

  “Want me to wake Manco and Loot?” Griselda asked in her lazy drawl, pitching her voice at the end of the question with vague menace.

  “Nah, hell. Let ’em sleep. They’re gonna need to be in top form when the bull teams pull in, watchin’ the gamblin’ tables and makin’ sure the girls get paid.”

  The lawmen trotted their horses from Moon’s left, their horses’ hooves clomping, their tack squawking and rattling. Tan dust, a good six inches deep in the street, puffed up around the mounts’ hocks.

  The men stared straight ahead from beneath their low-canted hat brims, mustache-mantled mouths moving as they conversed. They and their horses were covered beneath a golden sheen of trail dust. Drawing up to the well that sat directly in front of Moon’s saloon, they swung heavily down from their saddles, giving weary grunts as though they’d ridden hard and far.

  The taller man was looking at one of the two signs mounted on posts abutting the well on which Moon had written the cost for water, and he turned to the other one and said, “Dick, look at this.”

  The other one slapped his hat against his leg, causing dust to puff thickly around him, and hitched his big Colt pistol high on his right hip. He came around to stare up at the sign. “What in the hell? Chisos never charged for water.”

  “And I’ll be goddamned if I’ll pay for it!” said Dick.

  They both snickered in disgust, shaking their heads, while the taller lawman took the bucket off the hook under the peaked, shake-shingled roof over the well that was rimmed with stones forming a wall four feet high. The well itself was about as big around as the trough of an average windmill—maybe eight feet in diameter. Chisos La Grange had dug
it fifty feet deep, tapping into an aquifer that flowed out from under the Chisos Mountains to the west.

  The taller lawman turned the handle on the winch, which went sheep!-sheep!-sheep! as the bucket dropped down into the dank, humid depths of the well that sent the refreshing smell of cool mushrooms and the iodine odor of minerals upward, and which set the taller lawman’s throat to aching with thirst.

  Mordecai Moon said from his perch on the porch of his gaudy saloon, in a voice soft with casual menace, “I’ll say you will pay for it. Ten cents for a bucket, just like the sign says.”

  Griselda said in her saucy way, fists on her hips, thrusting her breasts out beneath her calico blouse, “Don’t matter how much you drink, neither. You winch up a bucket, you pay for a bucket.”

  Both men turned to him while the taller one continued to winch the bucket into the well. Their eyes slid up and down the saloon’s three stories, the whipsawed lumber painted purple while the doors and window casings and the floor of the gallery were painted lime green. The Rangers looked at Moon, and their scowls deepened.

  “Who the hell are you?” asked Dick, poking a finger out at the dwarf with an expression of incredulity and revulsion. He flicked his eyes to the sprawling, gaudy saloon once more. “And what the fuck is that?”

  “Read the sign.” Moon climbed up out of his little, toy-sized chair, muttered, “Let me handle this, darlin’,” to Griselda, and then walked in his sway-shouldered, bandy-legged fashion to the top of the gallery steps. “Even Rangers can read, can’t they?”

  He’d been able to tell by their five-pointed silver stars that they were Texas Rangers.

  Moon hiked up his pants and his cartridge belt and holstered six-shooter—an 1877 Sheriff’s Model Colt Lightning with a nickel finish, ivory grips, and a four-and-a-half-inch barrel—that hung relatively well on his spindly left hip, in the cross-draw position. He dropped heavily, grunting, down the steps.

  As the taller Ranger winched the bucket back up out of the well, his partner pointed out the words on the grand sign over the front gallery and read them aloud: “Moon’s House of a Thousand Delights.” He offered a half smile in amazement and then looked at the little creature in a clawhammer coat and age-coppered bowler hat ambling toward him, the creature’s head looking inordinately large on his otherwise childish, little, bow-legged body. His hands hung nearly to his knees.

  “And you—don’t tell me—you’re Mr. Moon!” Dick said, chuckling. “And you think you own this here well and you can charge for water out here in the middle of nowhere where they ain’t none around for a hundred miles in any direction, unless you count the Rio Grande.”

  “That’s about the size of it, yes,” Moon said, stopping about ten feet away from the dusty Rangers and their dusty, sweat-silvered horses. “And if you don’t go ahead and pay the box for the bucket you pulled up”—he dipped his chin to indicate the wooden payment box attached to the sign flanking Dick—“I’m gonna blow you both to the Devil so fast you’ll think you was swallowed up by a hell-breathin’ cyclone.”

  The tall Ranger set the filled bucket on the side of the well coping and glowered at Moon. “Listen, you little sawed-off son of a bitch—we’re both Texas Rangers, and we been out of water since nine o’clock last night, and if you think we’re gonna pay you a penny for this here bucket, you got another think comin’!”

  Moon stared up at him. His ugly little pig’s face with its tuft of chin whiskers was bland but his cobalt blue eyes gradually acquired a golden sheen as though they’d become two windows opened now to the fires raging in the dwarf’s soul.

  “What’d you call me?” he said so softly that neither Ranger had heard.

  They knew he’d said something, though, and they frowned down at him.

  “Huh?” said Dick.

  “I said . . .” Moon licked his lips and drilled the taller Ranger with a primal look. “. . . What did you just call me?”

  “I called you a sawed-off little half-ounce son of a bitch—that’s what I just called you,” the taller Ranger repeated, his rugged, mustached face flushed behind its liberal coating of dust.

  Neither Ranger saw the gun come up until the dwarf had fired it, the crack echoing flatly around the broad street.

  Both Rangers stood frozen, as did Moon, for a full five seconds before the taller Ranger swallowed hard and swayed a little before looking down at his belly. He chuckled skeptically at the smoking hole in his brown wool vest, just beneath a gold watch chain, and the blood that began to dribble out of it.

  “Holy . . .” he said. “Holy shit—this little cocksucker just shot me, Dick.”

  Dick looked in horror from his partner to Moon, who glared up at him, recocking the Lightning. A tendril of gray smoke curled from the barrel.

  “Hey!” Dick shouted, dropping his horse’s reins and reaching for the long-barreled Remington thonged on his right thigh. “Hey, you—!”

  Plang!

  As a thin wand of orange flames flicked toward Dick, the Ranger screamed and twisted around as he fell back against his horse, which shied slightly, twitching its ears. Dick dropped to his knees and then screamed again, glancing in horror back over his shoulder at Moon, whose Lightning popped again.

  Dick jerked forward as a round hole appeared in the back of his duster, just beneath his left shoulder blade, making dust puff from the filthy garment.

  “Teach you to try to rob Mordecai Moon, Ranger!”

  Dick lurched to his feet and ran, stumbling and grunting, off toward the other side of the street. Mordecai Moon shambled past the horses that had curveted away from the action, lazily swishing their tails, and extended the gun once more as the Ranger stumbled off down a break between Grieson’s Saddle Shop and Waymer’s Drug Store. “Here, have one more!”

  Moon’s pistol popped again.

  Dick loosed another shrill scream and continued to run off down the break, heading for the shed and scattered Mexican shanties on the far side of the little town. Mordecai drew a deep breath, wagged his ugly head, and said, “If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a goddamn Texas Ranger. Bastards think they own the whole frontier.” He raised his voice. “Hope ya die slow in the desert, you son of a bitch!”

  He walked over to the other Ranger, who sat against the well, staring up at his killer in shock, holding both hands across his belly as though to try to keep the blood and viscera from oozing out the quarter-sized hole. The Ranger’s hat had fallen off his head, revealing his nearly bald, freckled pate behind a few sweaty wisps of sandy blond hair.

  “Where the hell . . . ?” the man panted, gritting his teeth at Moon. “Where the hell . . . is . . . La Grange . . . ?”

  “Said somethin’ about goin’ back East to live with his grandkids,” said Moon. “Sold the grant to me two years ago. All mine now. Just like your ass is, dead man!”

  “Nooo!” the Ranger screamed.

  Moon silenced him with a bullet between his eyes.

  He turned to face the saloon.

  Griselda sat on the porch rail, her long legs behind the black leather chaps dangling over the side. She was smiling, showing all her fine, white teeth, her long, brown hair blowing in the wind beneath her round-brimmed, low-crowned black hat.

  “Mr. Mordecai Moon,” she said in a high-pitched little girl’s voice, raising her right hand and holding her thumb and index finger a half inch apart. “I love you just a little bit more every day!”

  Moon chuckled and ambled toward his House of a Thousand Delights.

  * * *

  Ruth Rose’s brown eyes darkened in horror as she stared out of her and her husband’s second-story bedroom window in the Rose Hotel and Saloon. She was standing so that she could see up the street on her right, where now only dust wafted around the two saddled horses that stood near the well, waiting for water.

  One Ranger sat slumped against the stone coping of the
well, chin dipped to his chest, arms hanging straight down at his sides, hands in the dust. The other Ranger had run off to die, most likely.

  Now Mordecai Moon cackled loudly, throwing his head back as he sashayed in that proud, evil way of his, toward his giant, gaudy saloon, where the malicious, tawny-haired girl lounged on the rail, laughing, sharing in the dwarf’s delight.

  Ruth Rose swept a strand of light brown hair from her cheek and turned to where her husband, Frank Rose, lay in their bed, staring dully, slack-jawed, his eyes as vacant as marbles. Another of Moon’s victims though this one was taking longer to die.

  Ruth looked down at the bowl of oatmeal she’d been feeding her bedridden husband and said with hushed horror, “Lord, please spare us from whatever horror is fated to happen next in this hellish town!”

  4

  LOU PROPHET’S WINCHESTER leaped and roared in his hands.

  The Rurale running toward him through the brush dropped his rifle and reached for his knee as he stumbled sideways and tumbled into a cactus snag, screaming shrilly. Dust lifted around him, and Prophet saw a wash of red painting the cactus though he could no longer see the Rurale.

  Resting his rifle atop the ledge above the spring, the bounty hunter ejected the spent cartridge casing to send it careening over his shoulder and clanking onto the rocks behind him. He waited, staring through the scrub south of the springs.

  Nothing moved now, not even the Rurale who lay belly down in the cactus snag, giving a soft, keening cry.

  The dying man was likely a scout rider for Campa. As far as Prophet could tell, the scout was alone. Wary of being trapped here around the spring, and possibly surrounded, Prophet wheeled, slid his rifle into its boot, grabbed Mean’s reins, and swung into the saddle.

  He put the horse back down to the faint horse trail he’d been following, looked around carefully, spying only a thin mare’s tail of dust rising in the southwest—a column of cream-clad riders on brown horses angling toward him. They’d heard the rifle fire and were headed in the bounty hunter’s direction.