Hell's Angel

by Peter Brandvold

  “Vamos!”

  Mortimer doffed his hat and followed Bienvenida back through the crowd and billowing tobacco smoke to the front door and out onto the gallery. The big woman fairly dragged him down the gallery steps through the crowd of burly men milling with a couple of loud, professional whores from Fort Worth.

  “Got you an old Mex tonight—eh, Sheriff?” said one of the dwarf’s men, laughing. “What—you get tired o’ the gringa you rode into Moon’s Well with?”

  Mortimer would have taken the time to belt the man if Bienvenida hadn’t been jerking him by his wrist up the street in the direction of his office, and if the words Wanda and gun hadn’t been careening through his head in large red letters.

  “What’s this about a gun?” Mortimer asked the woman, striding ahead of her now.

  “A gun!” Bienvenida trilled. “A gun, Senor Mortimer!”

  The sheriff swung into the break between the adobe hovel that housed his office and the brick-and-wood barbershop. Despite the darkness, he broke into a jog down the break and then across the wash flanking the jailhouse. He saw his and Wanda’s shack just ahead and on his right, on the other side of a narrow wash and sheathed in cacti and spindly mesquites.

  It looked like a stone ruin, which it had been before they had moved in.

  Dim yellow lamplight emanated from both front windows, one on either side of the open front door.

  “Wanda!” Mortimer called, his heart thumping.

  This anxiety was new and strange to him. Downright off-putting. He wasn’t normally a man who allowed himself to get his blood up, but the thought of what Wanda might do with that gun caused his old venom to jet like acid through his veins, and his mouth to dry up like the very desert he and the ex–saloon girl wanted so much to escape.

  He burst through the back door and into the casa. “Wanda!”

  Her bed was empty, the covers thrown back. A lamp flickered on a shelf above the cold monkey stove in the wall opposite the door. The back door stood open.

  As Mortimer heard Bienvenida’s quick, heavy footsteps behind him and the old Mexican woman’s rasping breaths, he ran across the casa and out the back door. He ran into the desert south of the house, looking around wildly, trying in vain to prepare himself for the crack of a pistol.

  He passed several ruined shacks—hunching, pale shapes in the near darkness sprinkled with starlight—and the cemetery-like ruins of ancient gardens. He ran across another wash and between two dead sotol cacti and stopped suddenly.

  A figured crouched before him, facing the darkness of a deep arroyo carved long ago by some long-defunct stream. A pale, slender figure in the darkness.

  Red hair fell nearly to the small of Wanda’s back. She wore the pale night wrap Mortimer had given her before they’d left Kansas. She sat on her knees, rump resting against her heels. She also wore the delicate silk slippers that Mortimer had given her during that time when they’d first fallen in love and which seemed so long ago in a way, but also only yesterday.

  The slippers looked especially pale and thin in the darkness, sheathing her small feet, snugged down beneath her rump, toes curled against the dark ground.

  Mortimer stopped. She knelt there so motionlessly that he wondered with a tightness in his lungs if she’d already done it and he just hadn’t heard the shot.

  “Wanda.”

  A gasp. Wanda whipped her head to one side and glanced at him over her shoulder. “Oh, Lee! No!” She set a hand down on the ground and rose heavily, weakly. “I didn’t want you to come!”

  In her other hand was an old .30-caliber Warner rimfire pocket pistol with a long, curved handle that a saloon owner had given her, because she’d been beautiful and had needed to protect herself against men who wanted to take her upstairs. But she’d never done that. At least, she’d said she hadn’t. It didn’t much matter to Mortimer either way.

  “I didn’t want Bienvenida to fetch you. She promised she wouldn’t!”

  “She did.” Mortimer walked slowly forward. “What’re you doing out here with that peashooter, anyway? Give it to me.”

  Wanda took one step back toward the ravine behind her, holding the little pistol against her side, the barrel angled over her heart. “Stop, Lee!”

  Mortimer stopped.

  “Please go back to the house, Lee,” Wanda said, sobbing now, her shoulders jerking, her wavy hair in her eyes. “It’s better this way. You’ll be free now. And so will I. It’s the only way we can both ever be free of this wretched hellhole!”

  She was drunk. Even in his own half-inebriated state, he could smell it on her, mixed with the sick, coppery smell of her.

  “Oh, Wanda, you didn’t,” he said, making a face. “You know the forty-rod’s no good for you.”

  “I haven’t felt this good in a long time.” She laughed drunkenly at that. The tears rolling down her cheeks were touched with silvery starlight. “Go away, Lee. Ride on out of here. Head to Mexico. Right now. Tonight!”

  “That’s not gonna happen, sweetheart.”

  “You have to, Lee. On your own. I can’t travel. I’m too weak. This is the only way.”

  She lowered her chin and sobbed. The gun dropped from her chest to hang down by her side in her pale hand. Mortimer started walking toward her again.

  “No, Lee!” she warned, raising the gun to her chest once more. Her voice was brittle. “It has to be this way, don’t you see? We were such fools, you and I. Who did we think we were kidding?”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Us . . . hitchin’ our stars together. Why, you’re nothing but an old killer, Lee. I’m sorry, but you know it’s true. You’re an outlaw. Why, you’re little better than Mordecai Moon. In some ways, you know, Lee, he’s even better than you because he’s not pretending he’s anything other than what he is. A mangy old killer. Thinks about one thing. Money. Well, two things—money and power.”

  Wanda laughed caustically, and Mortimer knew he wasn’t really hearing the girl he’d tumbled for anymore, but some weird, corrupted version of her welling up from beneath the whiskey and illness. “Actually, three things—money, power, and a good tumble in the old mattress sack!”

  She laughed at that, but it more resembled a screech. It wasn’t genuine. It was sad and desperate. She was merely trying to repulse him, to get him to leave.

  And it was breaking his heart. Because that’s how much she loved him.

  “And I’m just as phony as you are, Lee. You know how I said I merely dealt cards and slung drinks? Never went upstairs? Hogwash. I just said that because I was too old to do it anymore when I met you, and when I saw you, I saw a man who might be able to get me out of that saloon I was working in. And I was right. But you were a fool to believe me, Lee. A fool!

  “I’m as much of a whore as any of those girls working against their will over at Moon’s place—only I fucked my jakes willingly. And I was damn good at it, too. I was some of the best pussy around. And when I could get away with it, I kept the largest percentage. The men who owned my ass got the short end of the stick!”

  She laughed that choking laugh once more and brushed tears from her cheek with the back of her free hand.

  Mortimer just stared at her. He felt as though a blacksmith’s tongs had a pinching grip on his heart.

  “That’s who we are, Lee. And if we were really any more than that, we wouldn’t have stopped here in Moon’s Well. And you wouldn’t have taken a job with that disgusting little demon.”

  “We had to stop here, Wanda. You couldn’t ride any farther.”

  “No, but you can, Lee. Prove to me you’re more than who you say you are . . . or think you are . . . and ride the hell out of here. Start that new life we’ve dreamed about for so long in Mexico!”

  Mortimer shook his head. “Not without you, Wanda.”

  “You’re a stupid man, Lee. A sucke
r for a lying, cheating old whore! Why, I don’t even love you. In fact, when we got to Mexico I intended to steal whatever money you had and drift to some jake who could turn a coin!” She laughed again, her torso wobbling drunkenly on her hips. “What do you think of that, Lee Mortimer?”

  “Not without you, Wanda.”

  “Sucker!” she shouted as loudly as her brittle voice would allow.

  Mortimer continued forward, shaking his head, holding his right hand out, palm up. “Not without you . . .”

  Suddenly, all the weirdly screwed-up muscles in her face slackened, and her mouth corners fell. She regarded him through the slack wings of her hair falling down both sides of her gaunt, ghostly pale face. “You’re going to have to, Lee.”

  She rammed the pistol against her chest over her heart. Mortimer leaped forward, closing his right hand over the top of the gun. He winced as the hammer chewed into the weblike skin between his thumb and index finger.

  “No!” she screamed as he pulled the revolver out of her hand.

  He wrapped his arms around her. As she leaned against him and sobbed into his shoulder, he looked down her hair-draped back at the pistol in his hand, the hammer still biting into his skin, which was all that had kept it from igniting the cartridge.

  “Why, Lee?” she bawled as he held her more tightly than he’d ever held anyone before. “Why in the world did this have to happen to us?”

  “Just doomed, I reckon, Wanda,” Mortimer said, rocking her gently. “Just doomed.”

  30

  THE NUDE BODY of Frank Rose hung where Ruth and Louisa had told Prophet it would, at the rear of the lobby—a long, pale shape in the darkness over the main floor. Prophet looked up at it, the poor man’s feet dangling in front of the bounty hunter’s face.

  He could hear the raucous revelry issuing from the dwarf’s House of a Thousand Delights. Vaguely he wondered what the celebration was about. Likely, the dwarf’s demise. The folks here in Chisos Springs finally had their freedom, not to mention their water, back.

  He reckoned that Moon’s rudderless gang would move on once they drank up all the liquor in the saloon and finished abusing the whores. Would they release the girls then, too?

  “Well, let’s get this over with,” Prophet said, glancing at Colter Farrow, who’d entered the rear of the hotel behind Prophet. Colter swerved around the dangling feet, glanced up at the dead man.

  “Why’d Moon kill this man, Lou?”

  “’Cause I reckon he’s the demon I’ll be shovelin’ coal for.”

  Colter swung around the newel post and headed up the stairs, unsheathing the bowie knife from the scabbard on his left hip.

  “Let that be a lesson to you, Red.”

  “What’s that?” Colter reached the top of the stairs and turned to where the rope trailing up from Frank Rose’s neck was tied around the balcony rail.

  “Always get to know your demons before you make pacts with ’em.”

  “Would that help, do you think?”

  “All I can tell you, Colter, is I woulda thought twice about makin’ that deal to shovel coal in hell if I knew that little son of a bitch would be the one crackin’ the blacksnake at my naked ass. Never knew so much bad could be wrapped up in such a small package.”

  Prophet winced against the stench emanating from the putrefying dead man. Poor Frank had been hanging here two or three days in the pent-up heat, and he was beginning to bloat and grow more than a little whiffy on the lee side.

  Colter said, “Ready?”

  Prophet raised his arms up along the sides of Frank’s bare legs. “Go ahead.”

  Colter sawed through the rope drawn taut against the railing. Frank’s body dropped. Prophet wrapped his arms around the cadaver’s thighs and, holding his breath, worms of revulsion crawling up and down his back at the cool, rubbery texture of the dead flesh, eased the man to the floor.

  Colter came down the steps with a blanket from one of the beds, and they wrapped the body up in it. Prophet picked it up by the head and shoulders while Colter picked up the feet, and they carried it out the hotel’s back door to where Louisa and Ruth waited out by a shed.

  “All right, we got him, Ruth,” Prophet said.

  Ruth walked up to the blanket-wrapped body. She stared down at it in the darkness from beneath the bandanna wrapped over her head and tied behind her neck. She placed a hand on the inert shape.

  “Let’s bury my poor husband,” she said. “As best we can—all right, Lou?”

  “You bet, Ruth.”

  She went over and grabbed one of the shovels that was leaning against the outside of the shed and which she and Louisa had retrieved when Prophet had gone into the hotel to cut the body down. Louisa grabbed the second one.

  Prophet and Colter, carrying Frank, followed Ruth off behind the hotel. Louisa followed the group with the second shovel. Prophet continued to hear the whoops, yells, sporadic gunfire, and the calamitous music of the Mexican band emanating from Moon’s House a block away. It was like hearing the celebration aboard a riverboat from shore.

  The din offered a bizarrely disparate backdrop to the grim task of digging the grave and setting the blanket-wrapped body inside it. Prophet asked Ruth if she wanted to say a few words, and she said only, “I killed the bastard, Frank. Rest in peace.”

  Prophet and Colter covered the body and set rocks on the mound. Ruth said she’d fashion a cross over him later, and they returned the shovels to the shed and filled their canteens, at her water barrel, which sat against the rear of the Rose Hotel and Saloon.

  That task finished, the four of them stood around the barrel in the darkness, lights from Moon’s place glowing in the sky to the north and west. Someone was shooting regularly, as though taking target practice. It took the shooter several shots before a bottle shattered.

  Whoops rose.

  Louisa was still piss-burned at Prophet for the punch he’d laid on her the night before, though something told him she realized that the blow had likely saved her life. Maybe all of their lives.

  “What now, Lou?” she said, corking the second of her two canteens. “Since you know so damn much, how are we going to get those slave girls out of there without going in shooting?”

  “Don’t get your drawers in a bunch,” Prophet said. “I’ll figure it out.” He paused. “With your help, of course.”

  Prophet considered himself a fool in many ways, but he knew how to strum Louisa’s fiddle. She looked at him, arching a skeptical brow.

  Handing his canteens to her, Prophet said, “I’m gonna need you and Colter to get Ruth out of here. Wait up by the dead tree and that big rock just north of the dwarf’s place that we passed when we rode in earlier.”

  “That’s the help you need,” Louisa said, sarcasm rising in her voice. “That’s it. Give me time to reconnoiter the dwarf’s outfit, see how many men and how many girls he’s got on the premises and when and if they’re plannin’ on pullin’ out. I also wanna try to figure out if we have a shot in hell—aside from going in shooting, that is—to bring ’em all down and get the slave girls out.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much help to me, Lou.” This from Colter, who stood beside Ruth, his eyes serious beneath his hat brim. “Sounds like you’re throwin’ yourself into the bobcat den all by your lonesome.”

  “You three have been in there recently. Several of Moon’s men saw me for a short time several days ago, includin’ the little forktailed son of a bitch himself. Most of those men, including Moon, are now snugglin’ with rattlesnakes.” Prophet rubbed his unshaven jaws. “Besides, my beard has grown considerably since then. If I can get my hands on a Mex serape and a sombrero—I might just be able to get in there long enough for a drink or two and a stroll around the place before I’m recognized.”

  “That’s crazy, Lou,” Louisa said, wistfully fatalistic. “And it’s just like somethin’ yo
u’d come up with.”

  “Why, thank you, Miss Bonnyventure.”

  Colter stepped forward. “Look, Lou . . .”

  “Forget it, Colter.” Louisa stuck her hand out in front of the lad, pressed the back of her hand to Colter’s chest. “I can already see he’s got his mind made up. The big lummox is even more stubborn than I am. If that’s what he says he’s gonna do, then he’s gonna do it and an entire herd of stampeding Texas cattle won’t sway him.”

  Ruth stared at Prophet, a look of disbelief on her face. “No, Lou. They’ll kill you.”

  Prophet grinned. “I’m not as crazy as I look. First sign of trouble, I’m an Oklahoma cyclone headin’ for the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.” He winked at Ruth, felt Louisa shuttle her dubious eyes between them. “I just wanna take a quick gander, see how many guns we’re dealin’ with.”

  “This is a job for the Rangers, for U.S. marshals,” Ruth said, moving up to stand within a foot of the tall bounty hunter, staring up at him, placing her hands on his chest. “Please, Lou, let’s ride to the nearest Ranger outpost, and—”

  “By the time the Rangers got here, Moon’s men might be gone,” Louisa said, her tone crisp. “The girls might be sold in Mexico, never to be seen or heard from again.”

  Prophet placed his hands on Ruth’s arms, gave her a gentle, reassuring squeeze. “You three go on now. Take my ugly horse. Ride up to where I told you, and wait there for me. Give me an hour.”

  Ruth sighed. “He is a stubborn one, isn’t he?”

  She and Colter walked off in the direction in which they’d left the horses, in an arroyo just beyond the town’s southern perimeter. Louisa remained with Prophet, but she was watching Colter and Ruth walk away.

  “If you get yourself killed, Lou,” she said wryly, “you’re gonna make Mrs. Rose very unhappy.” She glanced at him, her expression hard to figure. “Good luck.”