Hell's Angel

by Peter Brandvold

  One of Moon’s Apache girls was with a customer.

  Behind another door, one of the professional gals was laughing as though at the funniest joke she’d ever heard.

  Ruth did not know her way around the sprawling building, but she knew that stairs ran along the outside of the rear wall. Doubtful that there was a way to it on this side of the building. She had to risk crossing the place to the other side.

  Quickly but quietly, walking on the balls of her bare feet, she made her way toward the broad wooden stairs that led down to the main drinking hall. She could hear the sounds of lovemaking behind the doors she passed, and the clatter of a man stumbling around drunk while a girl berated him in what Ruth assumed was Apache.

  A glass dropped to the floor behind Ruth, and she slapped her free hand to her chest with a startled gasp. A man laughed and said, slurring his words, “Now, did I do that?”

  Tiptoeing past the top of the stairs, brushing a shoulder along the wall, she glanced down the steps quickly to see tobacco smoke, aglow with lantern light, boiling up toward her. Men and brightly dressed whores were vague, jostling figures inside the billowing smoke plume. If anyone saw Ruth from down there, she doubted they’d recognize her through the fog.

  Someone was playing a piano. Ruth recognized the dwarf’s croaky, raspy voice singing along while a man in the gambling section of the hall spoke loudly in Spanish above the clattering of a roulette wheel.

  Ruth finally found a downward slanting corridor bisecting what appeared several unfinished rooms, to the far back wall. Here, after some frantic searching, she found an outside door, and dropped quickly down the two tiers of steps to the ground.

  At the bottom, she stopped and crouched to the left of the stairs. Straight out away from the building were two barns and a maze of corrals in which the hulking shapes of horses and mules milled, one mule braying raucously and causing a horse to whinny. To Ruth’s right, she could see the silhouettes of three men as well as the small, red-glowing coals of their cigarettes or cigars.

  The men, likely the dwarf’s hostlers, were speaking Spanish and laughing. They were also passing a bottle. Ruth could hear the sloshing liquid each time they drank.

  Keeping to the building’s dense shadow, Ruth sidestepped off to her left and then looked around the corner of the building toward the main street and the well. Lights from the lower-story windows revealed several men standing around on the street fronting the dwarf’s saloon. A couple were crouched and playing a traditional Mexican bone-throwing game not far from the well—and not far from Ruth’s destination, her own forbiddingly dark hotel.

  She could see the dark window behind which poor Frank very likely lay slowly dying.

  Ruth groaned in frustration. Then she took off running straight west of the hotel, paralleling the main street but crouching behind brush, rocks, and cacti. She winced as her bare feet came down on cactus thorns and sharp rocks, but she kept running. She had to get to Frank.

  Finally, she’d traced a semicircle around the main part of the town and approached the Rose Hotel and Saloon from the rear. She entered via the back door.

  “Frank,” she heard herself mutter, her voice strained with apprehension. What condition would she find him in?

  She moved through a storage room and entered the lobby. In the darkness, she saw the front desk. The stairs angled down from the second story on her left. As she made for the bottom of the staircase, something brushed the top of her head.

  Instinctively, she cowered from the cold touch, stepped to one side, and turned. She looked up to see something long and pale hanging suspended in the air beneath the second-story balcony. Nearly level with her eyes, two bare feet turned slowly in midair about five and a half feet above the floor.

  She heard a creak. Like the complaint of a straining rope.

  Frowning, vaguely feeling her lower jaw dropping, she stared up past the bare feet to two, floury white, skinny legs ridged with fine, light blue veins. Then she saw the rest of the hanging body and stumbled back against the wall. As her own eyes met the heavy-lidded, death-glazed eyes of her husband, and saw the rope coiled around his neck, the tongue protruding from between Frank’s thin lips, a scream began to burst from Ruth’s throat.

  An arm wrapped around her from behind. A hand clamped back hard across her mouth, rendering the scream stillborn on her tongue.

  17

  RUTH GRUNTED AGAINST the hand across her mouth and, panicking, struggled against it. The hand wouldn’t budge. She was surprised when she heard a female voice say very calmly into her left ear, “I am friend, not foe. I’ll remove my hand if you promise not to scream.”

  Ruth slid her eyes to the left. A pretty female face stared at her from beneath the brim of a tan Stetson. Blond hair hung down both sides of the girl’s heart-shaped face to spill across her shoulders.

  Ruth frowned, incredulous, and nodded.

  The girl took her hand away.

  Ruth drew a sharp breath, her heart still hammering. “Who are you?”

  “Not the person who did that.” The girl lifted her chin toward the naked body of Frank Rose hanging from the balcony rail above the lobby. He’d turned to one side and now hung slack and still in pale death. “I can promise you that.”

  “Oh, Frank!” Ruth knees buckled, and she fell to the floor.

  She sobbed as she stared up in horror and heartbreak, pulling at the skirt lying snug across her thighs. She cried softly for a time and then crossed her arms on her breasts, lowered her chin, squeezed her eyes closed, and shook her head. “How could he?”

  “Rather easily, I would think . . . from what I’ve learned of Mr. Moon so far.” The girl’s voice was soft and oddly emotionless. Looking down at Ruth, she said, “I’m a friend of Lou Prophet’s.”

  Ruth looked up at her through tear-soaked eyes, curiosity only slightly tempering her grief. “Lou? He’s . . . ?”

  “The old boy’s still kicking. No thanks to his own damn foolishness. He keeps pulling stunts like that, I expect he’ll be giving up his devilish old ghost soon.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Louisa.”

  “You’re a friend of Lou’s . . . ?”

  “That’s right. Trail pards, he’d say.”

  Even through her grief and terror, Ruth knew an instant’s pang of jealousy. The girl before her, though crudely garbed in rough trail clothes, was young and evenly, attractively featured. A man would say sexy, even erotic in her man’s clothes and her pistols. Ruth had come to know Lou Prophet well enough to know that if any young woman as lovely as this one called herself Lou’s friend, she’d been much more than that.

  The girl called Louisa hooked her thumbs behind her cartridge belt and said, “I’ve got him tucked away in a cave up in the Chisos Mountains. It’ll take him a couple days to get back on his feet. I came down here to see what Mr. Moon was up to, figured I could do that from your place. Just found this man, who I assume is your husband, a few minutes before you came.”

  She paused. Ruth heard her exhale with what seemed genuine regret and sympathy. “I am sorry, Mrs. Rose.”

  Ruth looked up at Frank once more. His feet looked so vulnerable and exposed. So pale, with light blue veins showing through the papery skin. She imagined what had happened, the dwarf’s men coming in here, dragging him out of his bed, tying that noose around his neck. . . .

  “He was utterly defenseless,” Ruth said, her voice shrill. She tightened her jaws with a raw fury that burned up from deep inside her, remembering hearing only a few minutes ago the dwarf singing at the tops of his wretched lungs over at his House of a Thousand Delights. Singing and cavorting with his whores and that vile Miss May, with poor Frank hanging here alone in this dark hotel.

  Ruth rose slowly and stared up at Frank but what she saw in her mind’s eye was the grinning face of the dwarf.

  “I’l
l get him down.” Louisa swung around and began climbing the stairs, sliding a knife out of a sheath on her left side, behind a holstered revolver.

  At the same time, with fury searing a hole through her heart, Ruth picked Burdick’s gun up off the floor where she’d dropped it when Louisa had grabbed her.

  “Hey, there,” Louisa said from the balcony’s dense shadows, over Frank’s hanging body, “where you going with that, Mrs. Rose?”

  Ruth strode tensely out from behind the desk, hefting Burdick’s gun in her hand. “I’m going to see about killing a dwarf,” she heard herself say in a weird, strained, faraway voice as she made for the hotel/saloon’s front door.

  Behind her, Louisa said, “Uh . . . I don’t think I’d do that, if I were you!”

  Ruth didn’t hear that last because she’d just then walked on out the front door and was crossing the front veranda. She dropped down the steps and angled across the dark main street toward the dwarf’s hotel that was lit up like a Missouri River gambling boat against the velvet desert night.

  Ruth held the pistol down low against her right side.

  Ahead of her, several men conversing in groups turned to look at the woman in the red dress striding toward them from across the street. She was barefoot and they probably saw that she was carrying something but they probably couldn’t see what. Gradually, all of the men around her stopped talking to cast her incredulous, amused looks, their drink-sharp eyes raking her up and down.

  She pushed between two men who did nothing to stop her, and mounted the big hotel’s broad front gallery steps. There were several more men on the gallery, as well as several Apache and Mexican whores doing their best to look as though they were enjoying themselves, decked out as they were in their corsets and bustiers or spangled dresses.

  One Apache girl stood in front of two bearded Mexicans. The men had slid the straps of the girl’s dress down her slender, brown arms. One of the men was cupping a pointy breast in his hands and laughing with the other man though now both men as well as the Apache girl turned to watch the woman in the red dress stride purposefully across the gallery.

  Ruth walked through the two front doors that had been propped open to the fresh night air, and into the saloon-brothel’s main drinking hall. She stopped just inside the bustling tangle of men, looking around the vast hall that was the size of three of her own saloons together. It was crudely furnished though it boasted a giant, horseshoe-shaped bar curving out from the room’s left side, manned by two burly bartenders. Girls in black or wine red corsets and with matching feathers in their hair ran drink trays to the men sitting or standing about the room.

  There were all types here. Outlaws from both sides of the border. Freighters, mule skinners, bullwhackers, drovers in shotgun chaps, and several bearded men who appeared to be prospectors. There were Anglos, Mexicans, Indians, half-breeds, and blacks. The dwarf did not discriminate. He’d take a man’s money whatever his skin color, size, or what language he spoke.

  Roulette wheels clicked. Craps dice rattled. Cards were shuffled, and coins and poker chips clattered.

  The band was still playing. Men and whores danced.

  The dwarf was resting, however.

  Ruth picked him out of the crowd, sitting about halfway down the long, deep room on a large brocaded couch with his little boots propped on a long, low table before him, a skimpily dressed whore to each side of him. The girls appeared giants in contrast to his wizened, diminutive frame.

  One of the whores, a big-bosomed Mexican girl, was wearing his hat and laughing while he spoke loudly, gesturing with the fat cigar he held in his gnarled hand. The other girl, who appeared a half-breed Apache, balanced what was probably his half-filled water glass on her thigh. She, too, was feigning to enjoy the dwarf’s monologue, for the more adaptable of the man’s whores learned to loosen up and at least pretend to enjoy themselves lest Moon should tire of them more quickly and ship them off to Mexico faster, where their lives would be even worse.

  Both girls’ lips were set in too-bright smiles.

  Ruth pushed through the crowd, heading for the dwarf.

  He’d just turned to the girl holding his drink and patted her thigh, and she was lifting the glass in both hands to his lips, when Ruth stopped about four feet away from the wretched little man. He looked at her over the glass that the whore had lifted to his lips.

  His brows pinched. His eyes widened.

  Ruth raised the Colt conversion .44 in both hands, raking the hammer back with both her thumbs, one atop the other. The click was drowned by the cacophony echoing off the room’s walls and high ceiling.

  Moon’s eyes widened more, grew bright with horror.

  He raised a pudgy hand as though to shield his face. He loosed a reedy scream a half second before the Colt roared, smoke and flames lapping toward the little man sandwiched between the two whores on the couch. The bullet punched through the dwarf’s palm and into his forehead, slamming his head back against the couch.

  As the whore to each side of him screamed and scrambled away from him, Moon’s lower jaw slackened. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he sort of slumped down on the couch, his paunch swelling behind his shabby vest, his little black boots dropping toward the floor.

  He slumped still lower, convulsing, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth, and his head sort of wobbled on his shoulders. He gurgled as he died.

  * * *

  Louisa had sheathed her knife and run down the stairs of the Rose Hotel and Saloon as soon as Mrs. Rose had strode with such eerie purpose out the front door. Louisa ran down the steps to the front door, saw that the woman was already halfway to the dwarf’s rollicking, brightly lit gambling parlor and whorehouse.

  She was about to call out to the woman again but nixed the idea. Her yell would only attract attention.

  Louisa uttered a rare epithet as she dropped down off the Rose’s veranda steps and hurried after the woman who disappeared amongst several silhouetted clumps of men on that side of the street, directly across from the well. Ruth Rose reappeared a moment later atop the dwarf’s broad front gallery, making a beeline for the open front doors.

  “Ah, hell,” Louisa said, pausing about halfway across the street.

  What should she do?

  There wasn’t much she could do, she thought as she slid her matched Colts from their holsters, clicking the hammers back. Except die tonight.

  18

  LOUISA RESUMED WALKING forward.

  She stepped up her pace, wended between two clumps of smelly men who eyed her with glassy lasciviousness typical of their breed, and mounted the gallery steps. She’d just stepped through the two front doors when she heard a hoarse cry above the din of the Mexican band and the conversation and gambling, and what sounded like a branch being broken over a knee.

  More, shriller screams followed.

  Oh, crap, Louisa silently exclaimed to herself. She did it!

  A thrill rippled through her, pinching her wind, as did a vague admiration for the woman’s pluck. She’d die now, of course, but Louisa wasn’t about to just stand by and watch it happen.

  She couldn’t see much because of all the men milling between her and the source of the gun’s report and the screams. She hurried forward, both her Colts in her fists, and elbowed men aside until she could see, about two-thirds of the way down the room, the dwarf slumped on a long couch from which two dark-haired girls were scrambling.

  The band had just stopped playing and men had just started yelling. Two or three men appeared to be wrestling with someone in red. Louisa knew that the men were taking Ruth to the floor, and just then she saw the gun come up in Ruth’s hand around which one of the men’s hands was wrapped.

  The gun roared, spat smoke and flames toward the ceiling. Ruth screamed. One of the men ripped the gun out of her hand while two more drove her to the floor while several others—the dwarf�
��s own men, probably—raced toward the commotion.

  Louisa gave a wild rebel yell, which she’d adopted after learning how well it worked for Lou in momentarily paralyzing and befuddling his opponents. She ran forward, leaped onto a table heaped with bottles, glasses, coins, and playing cards, and triggered one of her pistols into the ceiling.

  “Get away from her, you apes!” she screamed.

  Louisa leaped onto the next table toward the rear of the room and kept on leaping tables until smashing the barrel of one of her Colts against the side of one of the men who’d wrestled Ruth to the floor. Still atop a table near the couch on which the dwarf slumped and before which the three men were crouched over Ruth on the floor, Louisa saw one of the dwarf’s men aim a pistol at her.

  Louisa shot the man through the dead center of his chest. He yelped as he triggered his own revolver at the ceiling and flew back into a table behind him, causing the men seated there to scurry. One of the men there had fallen to the floor on his ass, and now he scrambled away on all fours, losing his sombrero in the process.

  Now the room erupted in earnest, though with such a large crowd it was hard to tell from which quarter Louisa and Ruth’s next threat would come. They were two women against an entire roomful of men, all armed, many in the dwarf’s employ.

  She heard a woman shrieking, “Get her! Get her!” and saw Griselda May running toward her from the dance floor, where she’d been dancing with a big, buckskin-clad freighter with a beard hanging to nearly the buckle on his cartridge belt.

  Louisa triggered a shot at the girl. Griselda was moving too quickly and erratically for an accurate shot, and Louisa’s slug shattered a bottle well beyond Miss May. Louisa reached down between the men, grabbed Ruth’s arm, and jerked her to her feet.

  “Let’s go!” she shouted.

  At the same time, several pistols popped around Louisa, shattering bottles and glasses on her left and right and causing Ruth to grab her arm and yowl and fall hard against her rescuer. Louisa pushed off a table and triggered a shot at one of the dwarf’s men closing on her, crouching and shooting. She hit one but missed another one, though a pistol popping somewhere behind her drilled a bullet through the shoulder of the man she’d missed, and he fell forward over a chair, cursing.