Prophet cleared his throat and raked out, “Fancy meetin’ you here, Louisa.”
The blond twirled the pistol on her finger and held it low by her denim-clad right thigh. “Friends of yours, Lou?”
Prophet looked at the two dead men lying on the far side of the fire in pools of their own blood. Gun smoke still wafted in the air around him, mingling with that of the snapping fire. “Mere acquaintances. We were just startin’ to get friendly when you came along.”
As the young woman stepped into the cave, raking her flinty hazel eyes from one bandit to the other, she said, “Sorry to intrude.”
“Ah, well.”
The Mexican was still alive, blinking up at the ceiling in shock, his chest rising and falling sharply.
Prophet had risen onto his elbows, pain raking him from head to toe. He was too confused and in too much pain to try to wrap his mind around any of what had just happened. He cleared his throat several times before he managed to say, “They . . . didn’t . . . introduce themselves . . . but I reckon they was banditos.”
“Banditos.” She’d said it slowly, letting each syllable roll of her tongue.
Louisa Bonaventure, the blond bounty hunter and Prophet’s sometime partner, had become notorious in her own right for hunting down and killing the men who’d murdered her family on their small Nebraska farm and then gone on to hunter other child – and women-killing men of their ilk across the western frontier.
Over the past several years, her harrowing exploits had become known nationwide, and somewhere along her bloody trail some pulp writer had tagged Louisa with the handle of “Vengeance Queen.” Prophet had once seen a subtitle in a Police Gazette story about her that read, “The Hazel-Eyed Queen of Vengeance Rides Again!” Beneath it, in slightly smaller print: “As Beautiful as She Is Deadly!”
The prose might have been a tad on the purple side, but for once the writer hadn’t been gilding the lily. Louisa was about as comely a pistol-wielding vixen as a man could find, and when she rode, it was usually in an all-out effort to serve a nice plate of cold revenge or just deserts.
Louisa walked over and gave the Mexican’s boot a kick. The Mexican groaned more loudly. “You a bandito, amigo?” she asked him, staring down at him, aiming her pistol at his head.
He didn’t say anything, just stared up at her, breathing hard.
“Best say a prayer, if you’ve a mind,” she warned him.
Louisa walked around the fire to inspect the unmoving Anglo and then walked over to the Mexican again, who beseeched her in Spanish to spare him. She spread her feet and aimed the silver-plated Colt at an angle. Prophet winced and covered his ears as she drilled a bullet through the Mexican’s head.
The head bounced, turned to one side, and lay still.
“There you go,” the girl said. “That’s what you get for trying to kill my old pal Lou.”
Lowering the smoking pistol, she turned to Prophet, her eyes oddly uncertain, maybe even a little haunted. “We are still pals, aren’t we, Lou?”
He rested his head back against his saddle. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
Louisa stepped over Prophet’s legs as she walked back to the cave door and pressed her back to the side of it, hard to Prophet’s left. She stood staring out, her pistol in her right fist. She stood silently for a long time, staring into the darkness and listening for possible friends of the men she’d killed.
Finally, apparently deciding there’d been only two intruders, she holstered her pistol and stole out away from the cave, disappearing into the darkness. When she returned, she was a little breathless, as though from a medium-hard hike.
“Nothin’ but two good horses out there, each stocked with a carbine.” She went over and picked up a mesquite log from the small stack beside the fire and added it to the flames. “They laid a nice fire, anyway. We’re all good for somethin’, I reckon. Eh, Lou?”
Prophet nodded. He knew what haunted her but he didn’t want to talk about it just now. Later, when the man with the hammer in his head took another smoke break.
She swung around to Prophet, her slender, curvy figure in the poncho and denims silhouetted against the fire that was shooting a column of sparks toward the cave ceiling, which was about seven feet above the floor. The firelight reflected off a crenellated rear wall about ten feet away from Louisa and the two dead men.
“How you feelin’?” the girl asked, both pistols in their holsters, her gloved fists on her hips.
“Like I had a Dutch ride over sharp rocks.”
“You look like you did.”
Prophet scowled at her, wincing against the hammering in his head that wasn’t so much like an ax handle anymore, but just your average pine branch. He still wished the demon wielding it would go away, though. Even worse was the agony of his bladder that appeared ready to explode if he didn’t drain it straightaway.
She must have read the look on his face. “Coffee can to your right.”
He glanced at the empty coffee tin, suppressed the warmth of embarrassment creeping into his cheeks. Again, she must have read his thoughts.
“It wasn’t the first time I saw it, you know, Lou.” Louisa gave a provocative grin. “Need help?”
“I can manage.”
As he worked his way to his knees, he realized he didn’t have a stitch on. He looked at her again. She stood in the cave entrance with a lopsided, faintly jeering grin on her pretty, lightly tanned face that still owned the smooth flawlessness of a girl. And a deceptive innocence.
Those pretty, peaches-and-cream features had been the downfall of many a bad man who’d died hard, staring at them.
Prophet sniffed, raked a thumb across his thigh, lifted it to his eyes. Greasy.
“Arnica,” she said. “Got a fresh tin from the dry goods store in Moon’s Well. Put it on all your cuts and bruises, which means it about covers every inch of you.”
Prophet groaned as he knelt there on his blanket roll, trying to keep his balance against the cave floor’s pitch and roll. “What a sorry state for this old Georgia reb.” He held the coffee tin in front of his crotch and looked up at Louisa, who continued to smirk down at him.
“A lady would avert her eyes.”
She turned toward the night, and he lifted the door on the dam inside him. The coffee tin rattled as his bladder emptied. As he continued the evacuation, he glanced at the night beyond Louisa.
An escarpment or something rose about six feet beyond the cave, but to the left of it he could see a few stars twinkling between dark, jagged-edged peaks. All he knew was that he wasn’t in Chisos Springs, and he wasn’t out on the plain, either.
He grunted blissfully as he continued filling the can. “Where the hell are we?”
“My camp in the Chisos range.”
As the piss stream dwindled, he gave another grunt, but before he could ask his next question, she answered it for him. “I’ve been keeping an eye on the town. Was looking it over this morning when I saw some big, dumb-looking hombre getting his proverbial hat handed to him out by Mr. Moon’s well.”
She clucked and shook her head. “What’d you do to make those men so angry, Lou? Cheat at cards or diddle the wrong whore?”
“Here.” Prophet held the filled container up in both hands. “Don’t spill.”
Louisa turned the corners of her lovely mouth down as she took the nearly full can between her gloved hands, and tossed its contents into the night. She tossed the empty vessel down beside Prophet, who drew his blanket back up over his battered, naked body.
“Or maybe you’re trying to cut in on my dance,” the girl said, leaning against the side of the cave, arms crossed on her breasts. “You might have asked . . . like a civilized bounty hunter.”
“Dance?” Prophet leaned back against his saddle. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. You got any whiskey?”
“With all the lumps on your head, how can you think of tangleleg?”
“I always think of tangleleg. Besides, painkiller . . .”
She walked out to where Prophet could now see her brown-and-white pinto and Mean and Ugly hobbled about twenty feet down the slope from the cave. He saw her shadow move around her horse, heard straps whipping free, the squawk of leather, and saw her walk back up the incline toward the cave with her saddle on one shoulder, saddlebags over the other.
She dropped the saddle on the other side of the fire from Prophet, then reached into a saddlebag pouch and pulled out a flat, corked, smoky blue bottle.
“Go easy,” she said, tossing the busthead to him. “It’s all I have.”
Prophet scowled at the bottle, shook it. Only half full. “Why, hell, there ain’t much more than a thimbleful in there! What’s the point in carryin’ any whiskey at all if you ain’t gonna carry any more than this?”
“Don’t look a gift horse under the tail, Lou.”
She said it wryly, for it was Prophet’s own line. “I carry it for medicinal purposes only,” she added.
Prophet popped the cork on the bottle, and took a conservative sip. “How long I been here?”
“This is your third night.”
“Christ!” He took another sip. “Where’d you find me?”
“I caught up to you after they stripped you naked and tied you over your horse. They tossed your clothes out in the brush behind the dwarf’s pleasure parlor. They’re not exactly clean, but they’re behind you, if you ever feel like donning them again.”
“Oh, I’ll don them again,” Prophet said and tipped the bottle back once more. It was good forty-rod, not the usual snake venom he carried. There wasn’t much of it, but it oozed sweetly over his tonsils and made him yearn for more.
That was like Louisa—nothing but the best no matter what it was, be it guns, ammo, horses, hair pins, or forty-rod, though he remembered a time when she’d indulged in nothing more potent than sarsaparilla, albeit good sarsaparilla. That was before their last adventure together, in Mexico, when they’d taken on a gang of killers led by Tony Lazarro and his beautiful, blind sidekick, Sugar Delphi, and ended up in one hell of a dustup in a desert mountain town called San Gezo.
Prophet and Louisa had separated after that. In the hardest of ways. Without saying anything about it. Just forking trails.
Prophet hadn’t thought he’d ever see her again. He hadn’t been sure he’d wanted to see her again, after what she’d pulled on him in Mexico.
Hard to deny a girl who’d saved your life, he thought now, studying her, wondering what it had been—just blind luck?—that had brought them together again. Lucky for him, anyway.
Sometimes he wondered if it wasn’t just meant to be. Him and her. Together. On the other hand, being who they were, staying together as anything more than trail partners would have been impossible. They were just too much alike in all the wrong ways, and too different in all the right ones.
“You’re thinking about Mexico, aren’t you?” she said, hauling her cooking gear from her war bag, not looking at him.
He didn’t want to talk about Mexico. Not yet. His head ached too badly for him to think straight, and thinking about Mexico only made it pound harder.
“Where were you just now?” he said.
“Moon’s Well.”
“Don’t call it that,” he said, irritation in his voice, resting his forearm over his eyes. “It’s Chisos Springs.”
“Whatever it’s called, I’ve been keeping an eye on it.”
Louisa was slicing salt pork into a skillet into which she’d poured a good portion of soaked beans. She set the pan on a rock amongst the dancing flames, added another mesquite branch to the fire, and sat back against her own saddle, regarding Prophet darkly.
“Trouble there, Lou. The dwarf has been hauling in kidnapped women from New Mexico and Arizona, most of them Apache orphans kidnapped off reservations or monasteries, as sex slaves for his whorehouse. Several Indian agents are in league with him, point out the best girls to take, those who won’t be as missed as those with kin. That’s what brought me here. I heard about such deviltry in Las Cruces and rode over to see what I could do.”
“Moon’s ridin’ point on this deviltry?”
She nodded.
“Wouldn’t doubt it a bit,” Prophet said with a sigh. He wouldn’t put anything past the vile dwarf, after what he’d heard about him from Ruth Rose. “How many does he think he needs, anyway? How many can he house?”
“Quite a few, apparently,” Louisa said, leaning forward to stir the bacon and beans around in the popping, snapping pan. “He keeps each girl for only a couple of months. When he figures his customers have tired of the same ones, he ships them down to Mexico and sells them to a corrupt Rurale colonel, who in turn—”
“Campa?” Prophet interrupted her.
Louisa looked over the crackling pan and the flickering flames at him. “How did you know?”
“Lucky guess.”
“Who, in turn, as I was saying, sells them to brothels down in Chihuahua and northern Sonora. It’s a big money-making proposition for them. The Mexicans might not like the wild Apache men much, but they like their young girls just fine.”
Prophet shook his head and lowered his arm over his eyes again, trying to push down the pain behind them. “Forget it, Louisa. It’s too big. You’re one girl. Not bad with a pair of matched hoglegs—I’ll give you that. But I won’t be any use for at least a week, and even if I was, we’re talking the dwarf’s men—he’s got a big role—and the old outlaw sheriff, Lee Mortimer.”
Again he shook his head. “That’s a job for the Texas Rangers, U.S marshals, the cavalry. . . .”
“There’s one more thing, Lou, which might hasten your healing.”
“What’s that?”
“Moon has made a slave of Mrs. Rose, now, too.”
Prophet snapped his head up.
Louisa nodded slowly, darkly. “I saw her tonight through a window. Her and the dwarf and that brown-haired girl of his.”
“The three of them?”
Louisa nodded again slowly, pursing her lips, her hazel eyes reflecting the umber firelight. “But only two seemed to be having any fun.”
15
THE DWARF CLIMBED off of her, wheezing, thin strands of hair in his eyes. He grinned down at her, his little pig eyes rheumy and red-rimmed from exertion, as he crawled to the edge of the bed and dropped to the floor with a slapping thump.
Ruth Rose drew her legs together, scrubbed the back of her hand across her mouth with a grimace. Revulsion rippled through her.
“Don’t lick my spittle off your lips!” the dwarf said, standing naked by the bed and poking an admonishing finger at her. He was so short that Ruth could only see his large head, bug eyes, and his spindly shoulders. “That’s nectar of the gods!”
Laughing, he turned to where Griselda May was dressing near the door of the large, sparsely furnished room—the dwarf’s and the crazy girl’s own room. “Ain’t it, Griselda?”
The girl had stepped into her skirt and dropped her lacy chemise over her head. Her small, cone-shaped breasts poked against the thin garment. She looked at Moon, stuck her tongue out, curled the tip, and ran it slowly, lasciviously across her upper lip.
That got him laughing harder.
His croaky, raspy voice was as revolting as the rest of him, including the heavy, fishy odor of his breath. Ruth could still smell it. It made her stomach clench, and for several seconds, she thought she’d be sick. She drew a deep breath and scrubbed her hand across her mouth once more, when the dwarf’s back was turned as he gathered his clothes from the floor.
“Can I go now?” she asked, unable to keep her fury from her tone. “I have to see to my husband.”
The dwarf was hopping around, pulling his pa
nts up over his balbriggans. “Hell, no—you can’t go. I done told you, you was a permanent fixture in these parts. When me an’ Griselda’s done with ya, we’re turnin’ you over to our payin’ customers. When they tire of ya, you’re goin’ to Mexico with the Apache girls!”
He winked as he straightened, then bent both knees, crouching a little to bring his pants up over his paunch, sucking in his gut and buttoning the child-sized denims.
“Me,” Griselda said, “I’m tired of her, Mordecai. She just lays there. Don’t even pretend to be havin’ any fun at all.”
The dwarf reached down for his shirt and said with a grunt as he straightened once more, “Maybe she just needs a little more practice. She ain’t never whored before, Griselda. Not like some others. . . .” He snickered meaningfully.
Griselda stopped buttoning her cream blouse to swat Moon’s shoulder with the back of her hand. “I done told you, Mordecai, I ain’t never whored a day in my life! I done told you that! And I don’t like bein’ called a whore!”
The dwarf chuckled in devilish delight as he dodged another swat, sort of sidestepping and dancing around the sharp-faced, brown-haired girl, whose cheeks were red with rage, as they often were, Ruth had noticed. Rage and jealousy.
Ruth had seen it just a few minutes ago, when the dwarf was toiling over Ruth herself, and, bored, Griselda had climbed down off the bed and started washing herself at the porcelain basin.
An odd, funny girl. A dangerous one, too. Even more dangerous than Ruth had once thought.
And whatever fondness she had for Moon was faked.
“Please,” Ruth said, covering herself with a pillow and dropping her legs over the side of the bed. “My husband has been alone for two days. He needs food and water. He needs his medication!”
“Ah, keep quiet,” the dwarf said. “Your caterwaulin’s growin’ right tiresome. And when I get tired of you, you know what that means.” He pointed an admonishing finger at her again.
Before she could respond, the clatter of wagons and the thunder of many hooves rose in the street outside the hotel. The cacophony grew louder amidst the whistling and yells of bullwhackers or muleskinners. Another freight team rolling into Moon’s Well, Ruth knew. She’d grown so accustomed to the din that she often no longer even heard it.
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