Hell's Angel

by Peter Brandvold

  “Don’t be sad for me, ma’am. There’s a lot more people got better reasons for folks to feel sad for ’em.” Colter Farrow sipped his coffee, a pensive cast in his gaze. He lowered the cup, cast a quick glance at both women, and brushed a hand self-consciously across the scar on his cheek. He continued to stare into the fire.

  He was lost and lonely. A reluctant drifter who had likely become handy with that six-gun and Winchester because he’d had no choice. Prophet didn’t feel sorry for him. He sympathized with him because of his hard luck and that nasty brand he was doomed to wear on his cheek for the rest of his days.

  That brand had scarred the boy in more ways than one. How could it have done anything else?

  But you couldn’t feel sorry for a young man as tough as Colter Farrow obviously was. Tough at least when it came to men, but apparently whiskey, women, and tobacco were still bobcats that, taken all together, he hadn’t yet learned to wrestle with much success.

  Prophet inwardly chuckled at the remembered image of the kid throwing up his guts outside that whorehouse in San Simon, like just another young drifter trying to learn the ways of men and stake his own claim in that rugged territory, and climbed to his feet.

  He shucked his Peacemaker, checked the loads, and rolled the cylinder across his forearm, enjoying the solid clicks of the filled chambers. “I’m gonna go out, tend my hoss, take a look around. I’ll keep the first watch, in case Moon’s men keep comin’ after us, which we best assume they’ll do. Louisa, you’re next. Colter, then you. Two hours apiece.”

  Prophet slung his double-barreled coach gun over his shoulder, grabbed his Winchester from where he’d leaned it against the cave wall, and walked out of the cave and down the slope toward where Mean and Ugly stood ground-tied.

  “That’s Lou for you,” Louisa told Colter behind Prophet. “He always just assumes he’s ramrod.”

  “I reckon with a man as big as he is, Miss Louisa,” Colter said, “and with a popper the size of the one he carries, it’s probably a purty safe assumption.”

  Even Ruth chuckled at that.

  Prophet continued walking toward Mean and Ugly and suppressed a grin as he scratched his lumpy nose.

  The kid would do.

  23

  UPON SEEING MORDECAI Moon climb up out of his grave with his bullet-torn hat in his hand, most of the Mexican women and even a few of the men fainted straight away.

  A shocked roar sounded as the entire crowd stumbled back away from the grave with a horrified start.

  Griselda May staggered two steps back, as well, her lower jaw sagging and her mouth forming a near-perfect O with shock, disbelief, and more than a little dismay. Her heart thudded. Her knees threatened to buckle.

  Standing beside the grave, covered in dirt, the entire middle of his pasty forehead the deep purple of summer storm clouds, Moon scowled angrily at Griselda. Quickly, realizing that what she was seeing was not some nightmare figment of her imagination, she manufactured a look of unbridled jubilation and tearful relief.

  “Mordecai, you’re alive!” Griselda screamed, throwing herself at the dwarf’s feet as though in prayer and wrapping her arms around his waist. She even surprised herself with how authentic-sounding her cries were, how violently she managed to make herself convulse against the dwarf’s small, muscular, paunchy little body. “You’re alive, you’re alive! Oh, God, you’re alive!”

  She looked up at him scowling down at her. “What?” she said, shaking her head in genuine amazement and befuddlement. “How? I . . . I don’t understand . . . !”

  She forced a giddy laugh and was again amazed at how authentic it sounded, at least to her own ears. But then, she really was amazed!

  Moon looked around, his own eyes befuddled, as though he’d suddenly found himself walking in his sleep. Griselda turned to look at the others standing around them, shock still showing on the faces of even the most hardened of Moon’s hardened criminal gang.

  Some of the Mexican men were crouched over the women who’d fainted. Babies were crying. A dog was barking as it backed down the hill with a haunted look.

  The two gravediggers had backed several feet away from Moon and Griselda and the grave, and the boy stood with his chin sagging nearly to his chest. His father was crossing himself over and over again, looking at the sky with shiny, silver eyes, as though he were seeing the face of Madre Maria up there against that brassy blue vault.

  Suddenly, one of the other Mexican men shouted in Spanish, “Senor Moon is back from the dead—it must mean he is a saint!”

  More shocked gasps. A loud, perplexed hum of conversation rose from the onlookers as they turned to each other to confer, their voices pitched with amazement.

  “Santo Senor Moon!” cried the Mexican—a wizened old man with thin hair and a tangled, gray beard—who had deemed the dwarf a saint. “Santo Senor Moon!”

  The other Mexicans, including the well-armed border toughs in their leather leggings and drooping mustaches, picked up the chant, pumping their fists in the air. “Santo Senor Moon! Santo Senor Moon!”

  The dwarf looked around at them, stitching his brows. He placed his hands on his temples and muttered, “Crazy damn bean eaters are causin’ a nasty bell to toll in my head.” He staggered to one side, away from Griselda, and would have tumbled back into the grave if the girl hadn’t grabbed him by both lapels.

  “Hold on there, lover! You just came from there!” She looked at the Rio Bravo Kid and Mortimer, who both stood staring in shock at the resurrected dwarf. “Don’t just stand there!” Griselda cried. “One of you come over here, pick up Mr. Moon, and carry him back upstairs to our room!”

  The Rio Bravo Kid looked a little frightened, tentative, as he stared down at Moon. The Kid couldn’t seem to work his mind around what he was seeing, or wasn’t yet sure that he wasn’t seeing a ghost.

  Mortimer knelt down beside the dwarf. “You all right, Mr. Moon?”

  “Feelin’ kinda peaked,” Moon said, kneading his temples. He cradled his bullet-torn, bandage-wrapped hand in both arms. “And this here paw o’ mine purely hurts like the blazes!”

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Griselda yelled above the chanting around them. “Take him back over to the hotel!”

  Mortimer crouched and easily picked the dwarf up in his arms. As he did, Moon tipped his head toward the badge on Mortimer’s vest, partly concealed by his frock coat.

  “Say, why’s you wearin’ that deputy’s badge, Mortimer?” the dwarf asked as the demoted sheriff began carrying him down the hill, Griselda taking long strides beside them to keep up.

  “A few changes been made after your demise, Mr. Moon,” Mortimer said, casting a devilish look at Griselda practically running along beside him. The Rio Bravo Kid was walking behind, still wearing that boyishly sulky, incredulous expression.

  The Mexicans and all the other mourners were following behind the Rio Bravo Kid, chanting and singing, some of the women dancing.

  “Oh, there were changes, were there?” Moon cast a hard look at Griselda. “So soon after . . . my . . . uh . . . expiration?”

  Griselda kept walking as she wrinkled her nose at Mortimer. She glanced behind her at the Rio Bravo Kid, who merely threw his shoulders up in a show of exasperated bewilderment while the Mexicans sang and chanted along behind him.

  Several of the dwarf’s main men—Steele, Toma, and Kinch Brautigan—came running up around Mortimer. “Hey, Boss, you all right?” asked Brautigan through his pewter-colored beard still flecked with foam from the beer he’d been drinking in the dwarf’s honor a few minutes ago.

  “I don’t know,” the dwarf said, jostling in Mortimer’s arms. “I think so. Hell, my hand musta slowed that bullet and the bullet bounced right off my old wooden noggin!” He laughed at that, flopping his arms against Mortimer’s, but then he sucked a sharp breath and squeezed his eyes closed as he cradled his bandaged ha
nd against his belly once more.

  “Damn glad to see you still kickin’, Boss,” Tobias Steele chimed in, patting one of Moon’s little black boots. “We was afeared your dyin’ would be the end of the whole gang. You know how none of us got nothin’ but mush between our ears. Can’t lead worth shit! At least, not the way you do. O’ course, Miss Griselda, she was gonna take over, but seein’ as how she’s just a girl, and—”

  “Ah, shut up, Steele!” Griselda intoned. “Before this girl blows your head off your shoulders, you hairy-necked ape.”

  Steele scowled, indignant, and fell back in line with the others, as did Toma and Brautigan. Griselda and Mortimer and the dwarf were moving up along the House’s left side, tramping through a swatch of purple shade and kicking empty bottles, cans, and tumbleweeds. Griselda ran ahead, turned the front corner, mounted the gallery, and threw both doors wide.

  She stepped aside as Mortimer and the dwarf passed through the doors and started down the long, relatively cool main drinking hall. A couple of Apache girls were cleaning up the place, as none of the slave whores were allowed to leave the premises save for hanging wash on the outside line. When they saw the dwarf being carried into the building—alive!—by Mortimer, one screamed while the other sidestepped quickly out of the way and broke out in some kind of Apache hoodoo chant.

  The faces of both skimpily dressed, brown-skinned girls turned pale as death.

  The mourners remained outside on the street, still raising their joyful ruckus. “Santo Senor Moon! Santo Senor Moon!” One of the old, brightly dressed Mexican women stood near the well, thrust both her long-fingered brown hands into the air above her head, and sang a prayer loudly in Spanish.

  “Upstairs,” Griselda said, trying to sound more concerned than troubled, trying to figure out how she was going to explain her forcing Mortimer to exchange badges with the Rio Bravo Kid.

  She ran ahead, mounted the stairs, and soon she was opening the door of her and the dwarf’s private room. “In here. Get him on the bed. Hurry up, Mortimer, for chrissakes! The poor man’s in pain!”

  Griselda peeled the covers back from the bed, made a face at the blood that had soaked up through the mattress to lightly spot the sheets. The dwarf’s men had hauled Chaz Burdick’s body away, but he’d left a barrelful of blood behind him. All the covers had had to be burned.

  As for Chaz himself—he’d likely fed a couple of mountain lions known to prowl the village’s far northern perimeter, along a sandy dry wash home to Mojave green rattlers and chaparral cactus. To Griselda’s way of thinking, it served him right.

  The fool had let himself get shot through a pillow with his own gun. . . .

  Mortimer lay Moon on the bed. The dwarf clamped his little fists against his head and moaned, bending his legs and grinding his heels into the mattress.

  “Whiskey,” he said. “Whiskey. Oh, God, whiskey!”

  “Coming right up!” Griselda ran over to a dresser on which many bottles and glasses, mostly dirty, stood.

  “Like the others said, Mr. Moon,” Lee Mortimer said with his wry air, standing over the bed. “Good to have you back amongst the living.” He cast Griselda another of his sly grins. “If you need anything, you’ll know where to find me.”

  He pinched his hat brim to Moon, though the dwarf had his eyes squeezed closed as he continued to moan and writhe. As Mortimer left, Griselda said, “Indeed, we’ll know where to find you, Deputy Mortimer—over at that stable you share with that consumptive whore!”

  Mortimer stopped at the door. He stood stock still for about three seconds, staring straight ahead.

  When he turned back to Griselda, who was handing Moon a water glass half filled with whiskey, his eyes were cold and hard. “She has a name,” Mortimer said, just loudly enough for Griselda to hear him above the dwarf’s moaning. “It’s Wanda. Next time I’d admire if you used it.”

  He held Griselda’s gaze for another two seconds, pinched his hat brim to her coldly, and went out.

  As Moon slurped whiskey from his glass, Griselda said, “Well, what do you know—looks like ole Mortimer might just love that consumptive saloon doxie.”

  She wasn’t sure why, but the realization that the old outlaw appeared to be in love made her feel a fleeting heartsickness, a half-conscious but poignant jealousy, maybe, as she stared down at the wretched Mordecai Moon, who was taking long sips and smacking his lips and lolling his head from side to side on the pillow.

  Outside, Griselda could still hear the chanting Mexicans. A din was growing in the drinking hall below as the dwarf’s men celebrated Moon’s return from the dead just as they’d been drinking to his memory less than an hour ago.

  Another dark feeling swept Griselda. She looked down at Mordecai Moon. He was more powerful than ever now, having defeated death and become Santo Senor Moon.

  How would she be able to follow through with her plans to rob the man blind? Oh, she’d find a way. But how . . . ?

  Moon polished off the glass and held it up to her in his clawlike hand. “More!”

  “Of course, Mordecai.”

  She refilled the glass and gave it back to him. He stared up at her, a hard cunning returning to his eyes. “Get undressed and crawl in here.” He patted the bed beside him. “I’m gonna play with your little titties. Make me feel better.”

  He winked.

  “And, uh”—an evil grin showed all his black teeth—“you can tell ole Mordecai what you been up to around here while I been dead, startin’ with how come you made that Kid full sheriff. And then you can tell me what you done with the head of that bitch who killed me!”

  24

  PROPHET BREECHED THE coach gun. In each barrel a paper wad of double-ought buck nestled.

  He snapped the gun back together with a soft click, drew each hammer back to full cock, and pressed his back against the side of the rock wall.

  He heard the faint ching of spurs as the man hunting him approached. Gravel crunched faintly beneath boot soles. Breath raked in and out of laboring lungs.

  Sound traveled well inside this little devil’s maze of ancient lava walls and stony escarpments that Prophet and his ragtag team of trail partners had found themselves in when Moon’s small posse had descended on them.

  Prophet’s heart beat slowly as the spur chings grew gradually louder. He pressed his back harder against the rock wall, felt sweat dribbling slowly down his dusty cheeks carpeted with several days’ worth of brown beard stubble.

  “Hey, asshole,” said a burly voice. “You in there?”

  A shadow filled the mouth of the narrow stone corridor that Prophet was in.

  “Yep.”

  Prophet turned the coach gun across his belly and tripped the left trigger. The bounty hunter could just barely hear the man’s shrill scream beneath the gut shredder’s roar as the fist-sized cluster of double-ought buck lifted the man up off his feet and sent him flying back with a cracking thud against the stone wall behind him.

  He dropped down the wall, leaving a large, thick smear of dark red blood on the rock, and fell to his knees. He squeezed his eyes closed, sighed, and fell forward to grind his forehead into the ground.

  He knelt there, head to the ground, shivering as life left him.

  Prophet spied movement to his left and ahead of him and jerked his head back a half second before a rifle blasted a slug into the rock wall behind his right shoulder, peppering his shoulder, neck, and cheek with sharp stone shards.

  He raised the gut shredder toward a face shaded by a dusty cream Stetson with a snakeskin band, and a rifle barrel poking up from behind a thumb of rock, ahead and to his right. He tripped the coach gun’s right trigger and saw the face turn the red of a ripe tomato smashed against the side of a white privy.

  The man hadn’t even had time to scream before his head was pulverized. The lower jaw sagged a little, but then the crimson-splatt
ered head, suddenly minus its hat, dropped back behind the thumb of rock and out of sight.

  Prophet heard the shooter’s rifle clatter against the rocks.

  Crouching, slinging the shotgun back behind his shoulder, Prophet grabbed his Winchester from where he’d leaned it against the wall he’d hidden behind when he’d heard Moon’s man stealing toward him. Now he racked a fresh round into the chamber and looked around, crouching, ready for another attack.

  He saw no one to either his right or his left along the dusty corridor in the mass of strewn boulders. Gunfire prattled off to his right, so he headed that way, turned, and tramped quickly down another corridor, the gunfire growing louder before him.

  He stopped suddenly. Colter Farrow was shooting from atop a bluff ahead and to Prophet’s right. The kid was shooting down the bluff’s opposite side. Prophet recognized him by the long, red hair hanging straight down from his tobacco brown Stetson.

  A man was slinking up the slope behind Colter, just now lowering the rifle in his hands and sliding a knife from his belt sheath. The man was tall and thin, with long, blond hair, green silk neckerchief, and a bright yellow shirt and deerskin leggings. Prophet remembered the distinctively dressed gent from the gallery of Moon’s House of a Thousand Delights, when Prophet was getting the shit kicked out of both ends.

  The man was about seven steps away from Colter now, and he was lowering the knife while angling the point for a quick upthrust into the kid’s back.

  Prophet snapped his Winchester to his shoulder. “Hold it!”

  The man turned suddenly, awkwardly on the gravel-strewn slope, rocks tumbling down and away from his spurred boots. He’d dropped the knife and was starting to raise his rifle when Prophet stained his pretty yellow, bib-front shirt with two round, red holes across his chest. The blond-headed hombre grimaced, fell back against the slope, dropped his rifle, lost his hat, and rolled, limbs akimbo.