Bad Intentions

by Norman Partridge

  Estrellita's breaths came short and fast. In the other room, Buck Barlowe tossed and turned in the little bed.

  The witch licked her lips.

  Quite soon, she would make Buck lie very still.

  Estrellita was flying the eagle, riding Buck high and hard. He couldn't hardly move, because the little vixen was doing enough moving for the both of them.

  "Everything go like it should?" he managed to ask.

  "Si, Buck," she said. Not even looking at him. Looking at her reflection in the big mirror which hung behind the bed. One thing about Estrellita, she liked looking at herself as much as most men did. She'd made Buck buy the mirror at a bar way to hell and gone down in the San Joaquin valley. He'd had to hire a couple Mexicans to haul it all the way up to Bandit's Notch on their backs. 'Course he'd had to shoot them after they'd done all that hard work so they couldn't reveal the location of his hideout. But that was the way it was—he'd do anything for Estrellita.

  Take any risk. Kill any man.

  Still, he wasn't satisfied with her answer. He gasped a deep breath and put enough wind in his bellows to ask, "Did the spell work?"

  "Patience, Buck."

  "I mean... is the hand ready?"

  "Shut up, Buck."

  He couldn't hardly do anything else. The witch's hands dropped onto his chest like a couple of bricks, damn near knocked the wind out of him. The bed bounced and creaked. Something crashed to the floor and broke—sounded like it was all the way in the other room. Thank God it wasn't that damn mirror behind his head. That thing fell, it would cut the both of them to ribbons.

  But Estrellita didn't seem to notice the sound. Her fingers fisted in Buck's chest hair and she kept on riding him hellbent for leather, not looking at him at all but never even closing those whiskey eyes of hers.

  Buck had to close his. He twisted his head to the side, bit down on the pillow so hard that he got a mouthful of feathers for his trouble. A second later he groaned and blew those feathers against Estrellita's breasts.

  And still she didn't let up. Lordy. Buck's fingers dug into the mattress. The bed creaked like a ship tossed by an angry sea.

  Buck heard something else, too. A softer sound.

  Scuttling. Like rats.

  Instantly, a case of the willies raised Buck's hackles. Rats. He hated the damn things.

  '"Lita," he said. "I hear something. Sounds like — "

  "Silencio, my love." Estrellita slapped a hand over Buck's mouth. But that didn't do his ears any good. Because he could still hear the sound. Tiny tread on hardwood floor, then whispering over discarded clothes, scuttling onto the bed sheets.

  Something scrabbled over Buck's left foot and took the inside track up his left leg.

  Something big.

  Buck twisted away from Estrellita's hand.

  He screamed as that something took hold of him.

  Lordy, he could almost see the rat down there, gnawing his jewels!

  "'Lita!" Buck screeched, grabbing the witch by the shoulders and tossing her out of bed.

  He had a clear view of the space between his legs, because Estrellita was on the floor and his erection was fading fast.

  The nigger's severed hand was down there, fisted around his balls.

  Buck gasped, pain crackling his nerve endings. Hot pain. Like horse liniment, only worse. He came out of bed lickety-split. Grabbed hold of the severed hand, but it wouldn't turn him loose. The dead man's fingernails dug in like hungry ticks, and fresh jolts of agony speared Buck's balls and razored his innards.

  "Estrellita!"

  The outlaw spun around, all crazy-legged, looking for her. She was on the other side of the room, over by his clothes. Down on her knees, one hand digging in his boot.

  The right boot. The one with the hidden scabbard where he kept a throwing knife.

  Christ! A knife!

  A very sharp knife.

  "Estrellita!" Buck stumbled backward, through the bedroom doorway. "POR FAVOR, DARLIN'! DON'T DO IT!"

  Estrellita advanced, her whiskey eyes gleaming, the throwing knife held in her left hand.

  She spit on the blade. Buck tried to move faster. But the nigger's hand was like a clamp, and Buck's balls had been dipped in flaming lava, and he could only shuffle like an old timer with the trots.

  Estrellita clutched the tip of the blade between thumb and forefinger, raising it over her shoulder.

  She said, “Sin Dios y sin Santa Maria.”

  The knife flew threw the air.

  Buck heard the awful sound of sharp metal spearing flesh as the blade sunk home.

  And then he fainted dead away.

  The witch's eyes were daggers. "You told me you killed the gunfighter."

  "We hung him," Windy Jim said, refusing to meet her gaze. "We surprised him and strung his ass up before he could even yank his pistol. We watched him swing for a handful of minutes. At the end he wasn't movin' no more than a statue. That's when I chopped off his damn hand. No way a man could have lived through all that."

  "You are wrong." Estrellita pointed to the writhing black hand speared to the floor by a throwing knife which glowed with eldritch fire. "If the gunfighter were dead, his hand would be dead as well. But his hand lives. And it fights. And it tries to — "

  An anguished groan rose from Buck Barlowe. Estrellita shivered. The sight of the gunfighter's hand clenched around Buck's cojones was still fresh in her memory. If her aim had been off a fraction of an inch, if the knife had missed its target —

  But it had not. Praise be to Satan.

  Estrellita looked up from the hand, surprised to find that the outlaw called Windy Jim had worked up enough courage to look her in the eye.

  "I'm tellin' you we hung the gunfighter," he said. "I'm tellin' you that as sure as I'm standin' here. So maybe it's you that's got the problem. Maybe it's your witchy ways done backfired on you." His eyes narrowed. "And just maybe, if that's so, then us boys have less to worry about than we first imagined."

  They were all looking at her now. The stinking gringo called Windy Jim, and the Irishman, the Indian, and the Mexican, whose names she could not remember. An expectant silence hung in the air between them, soon muffled by the soft sound of Buck Barlowe's pitiful moans and the dull percussion of the gunfighter's callused fingers drumming hardwood floor as the severed hand tried to escape the bewitched knife.

  Estrellita retreated a step.

  The men came forward.

  When they were two steps distant, the bruja's lips parted.

  And her curses rained down.

  Windy Jim did not much like having a bellyful of frogs.

  He could hear the little devils makin' music down deep inside of him, like his guts were a goddamned pond on a warm spring evening. Bullfrogs and leopard frogs croaking to beat the band. Spring peepers and green frogs and pickerels adding rhythm and harmony.

  Other sounds floated in the darkness, riding the nightwind like mournful ghosts. Jalisco and O'Reilly braying to the pope of Rome like billy goats that done seen the light. Pueblo Jack right alongside them, braying to God knows who, or what.

  But Jim did not hazard a glance in his compadres' direction. He did not want to see what the witch had done to them, because that was not his problem. Instead, he sat in the shadows of an old pine, watching the cabin door.

  Presently, the door creaked open on worn hinges. Estrellita stepped down from the porch, moving to a clearing where moonlight pooled.

  Jim did not make a move toward her, though scant feet separated them. He leaned back against the tree, his belly a symphony of froggy delight, watching her.

  A ripe moon reduced the shadows to frayed tatters. Windy figured that Estrellita had to see him, though she didn't let on that she did. But he could see her well enough, right down to a pair of eyes that gleamed in the moonlight. Not the whiskey eyes that had captivated Buck Barlowe, these were the green eyes of a cat....

  Yeah, she could see him all right. With a pair of cat eyes in her head, she co
uld see him clear as if it was high noon.

  A pitiful mewing prickled Jim's spine in a way that the croaking of the frogs and the horrible lamentations of his compadres hadn't. He glanced to the open cabin door, saw the black cat stumbling about blindly as it advanced into the bright moonlight, a pair of empty red eye sockets in its black black face.

  Estrellita turned and hissed at the cat. The animal didn't take another step.

  The bruja stripped, left her satiny good-time gal dress heaped around her ankles. Even with those frogs making misery in his belly, Windy Jim hardened at the sight of her nakedness.

  He watched as she filled her open palm with tart-scented oil from a little bottle. This she rubbed generously over her proud little teats, over ribs that stood out like rungs of a ladder, over a flat belly... and then through that dark tangle 'tween her legs and down along her flanks... Seeing this, Jim surely realized why Buck Barlowe hadn't stood one ghost of a chance against this little gal. No man would have—not if he still sucked air, anyway.

  Estrellita stoppered the bottle. Said a few words in Spanish. And then a fireball bloomed above her head, and she stepped up into it, rising in the night sky until she was way up there with that ripe moon, flying fast beneath a blanket of stars.

  Windy stood up. Frogs jostled in his belly, little ones complaining as big ones stampeded and hopped around. The ruckus sure enough didn't do much for a man's equilibrium—Windy felt suddenly seasick, and his bile rose but he choked it back down.

  He took each step slow, hoping the frogs would settle down. But the noise they made didn't much matter. Because as Windy neared the cabin, he couldn't hardly hear the frogs at all—so loud and constant were Buck Barlowe's groans of misery.

  Windy stepped across the threshold, his spurs ringing lightly on hardwood floor. The room was lit by a splatter of dying coals glowing in the stone fireplace. Orange light flickered every which way.

  The blind black cat brushed Windy's ankles and started to purr, but Windy didn't stop to pet the critter. Didn't even look down.

  He was too busy looking at the table where the witch kept her potions and her book of magic spells.

  He was too busy looking at a pair of whiskey-colored eyes in a white china dish.

  PART THREE

  THREE FIRES AND A ROPE

  Stack knew she would come. So when the fireball dropped from the sky, dancing over treetops and lighting at the edge of the clearing, he was not surprised at all.

  Not surprised that she came, but he was surprised by the look of her. She was dark and beautiful, naked from head to toe, but her beauty wasn't so much in the way she looked or her nakedness, it resulted from the proud way she carried herself—the way she moved, the way her cat eyes flashed, the way she drew each breath and let it go. Every move she made said that she was alive, and that she knew it, and that her life was the thing that she loved.

  She came to a stop in a patch of shadow just outside the glow of his campfire. He knew she could see every damn thing with those cat eyes of hers. She put them right to work, studying him head to toe. Especially toe—she smiled when she saw his boots.

  "Where'd you get those things, gunfighter?"

  "A Chinaman made 'em for me—a wizard from the Mysterious East."

  "And what did you do for him in return?"

  "Oh... a thing or two. For him, and for his daughter."

  "So you aren't afraid of witches."

  "I ain't afraid of much."

  She came into the firelight. "Maybe I misjudged you, Mister..."

  "You can call me Stack. And you can forget the soft soap. Or save it for your lover man. I imagine he needs it. Gonna take a whole lot of soap to wash that chili juice off his balls. I bet he's in a world of hurt."

  "Yes. You certainly surprised the both of us. That was very clever of you."

  "Clever don't pay the freight. And I only just got started. I'm here to tell you it's gonna get worse." Stack raised his stumpy wrist. "Unless you give me back what you stole, that is."

  "I'm afraid I have great need of your hand, gunfighter. Otherwise, I wouldn't have taken it in the first place."

  "I know what you're up to. I've heard tell of the Hand of Glory. That's why I know that my hand's no good to you. Not while I'm alive, anyway."

  She nodded solemnly. "That's true. And that's my problem."

  "You ain't gonna solve it by showin' up naked at my campfire. You ain't gonna climb up on my saddle and suck my juice into your rotten belly. I won't give you the chance. There's only one kind of dance we're gonna have together, you and me, and it's gonna be vertical."

  "Oh? And just what kind of a dance is that, gunfighter?"

  Stack stood up, his right hand fisted around the severed hangman's noose.

  "I hear they hang witches," he said.

  She started to laugh.

  The rope danced in air as the gunman twirled it over his head.

  An instant later, he launched it just the way a cowpuncher launches his riata.

  The noose dropped over the witch's pretty black hair, and the gunfighter pulled it tight around her delicate throat. She fought him and his boots dug in. They stared at each other across the fire pit, neither one giving an inch.

  The bruja tried to get some words out—"Sin Dios..." she whispered—but Stack pulled the noose tighter, cutting off her wind.

  The bruja went blue in the face.

  She stumbled toward him, into the fire.

  His nostrils flared as he caught her scent. Her breath like funeral flowers, her body slick with some kind of scented oil.

  Flames licked her legs. Caught that oil. Lit her up like a miner's tallow.

  Only this wasn't witchfire. These flames were born of a simple wooden match, and they could hurt her.

  She screamed like a stuck pig, and her long hair disappeared in an oily halo of blue flame, and her skin blackened, and her face blistered around a pair of cat eyes.

  Another second and the hangman's rope was nothing but ash.

  "...Y SIN SANTA MARIA," she screamed, finishing her incantation from depths of amber flame.

  Witchfire bloomed around her, choking out the campfire flames. And then the bruja was gone in the night, an eldritch fireball crossing the waxy moon, and the whole world seemed to ring with the sound of her agony.

  Stack didn't let it rile him any. He settled down. He had work to do.

  Nothing ever seemed to come easy for him. No reason he should have expected things to go different this time. Something as simple as a rope wouldn't finish the job. Not with one as smart as her.

  He unfolded his pocket knife and cut the stitchery around the topmost bat on his left boot. The creature flapped free and took to the air, following the witch's path.

  Stack saddled Bill Fristo's horse and, earthbound, did the same.

  Upon the occasion of her return to Bandit's Notch, the witch sure didn't make Windy Jim's pecker hard. All that pretty hair was burnt right off her noggin, and her skin was blacker than the fabled Hole of Calcut and all dry like a hunk of jerky besides. Her teats were burned down to nothing. Sharp ribs had carved through her leathery skin, flashing whiter than ivory in the moonlight. Onliest thing that looked the same were those cat eyes, still glowing green in the fading moonlight.

  Windy wondered what the hell had happened to her. He expected she'd had a run-in with the not-so-dead gunfighter. If the bastard could survive a hanging, maybe he knew a magic spell or two of his own.

  Not that Windy was going to stop and ask the witch about it.

  And not that she was going to stop and tell. She stumbled across the porch and into the cabin, her skin crackling like dry corn husk with every move she made, not sparing a single glance for Windy and his companions even though they sat astride their mounts a scant twenty feet away.

  Windy grinned. Things weren't going to get any better for the bruja behind that cabin door. He'd seen to that personally.

  He'd hated killing Buck Barlowe. That was his one regret. Ol' Buc
k had taught him many a thing, and together they'd traveled many a trail. But Buck wouldn't listen to him, especially when it came to leaving the witch. All Buck could do was lie there and whine about how much he loved her, and how bad his balls burned, and how things would have gone if they'd gone just right. Windy couldn't much stand it—it was his considered opinion that, as curses went, Buck Barlowe's lovesick miseries made frogs in the belly look like the Good Lord's own blessing.

  So the bruja was going to find Buck dead in the cabin. But it was what she wasn't going to find that would give her a case of the miseries that would make her forget all about her barbecued carcass.

  Windy patted the saddlebags he'd taken from Buck Barlowe. One side held the witch's spell book. It was written in Mexican, but Windy had grown up south of the border. He could read Mexican as good as English.

  The other saddlebag held the witch's powders and potions—the ones she'd been using earlier in the evening. But that wasn't all it held. Alongside those bottles and jars were the bruja's whiskey-colored eyes, wrapped up in a swatch torn from her satiny good-time gal dress.

  Let her go around from here til doomsday with those cat eyes jammed in her blistered head. Windy Jim had to laugh at that. He laughed until his belly shook and all those frogs got to going again, and then he shut up.

  The frogs didn't. Had to be there was a spell in the book to get rid of the bastards. Windy would have to find that one first, banish those ornery amphibians right off. Maybe while he was at it he could figure a way to reverse the spell the witch had cast on Jalisco and O'Reilly and Pueblo Jack. Windy was sure tired of hearing those boys bray. Besides, there wasn't no way they could wear their ten-gallon hats with those damn horns sprouting from their foreheads. And with the cloven hooves they'd sprouted, they couldn't even foot a stirrup. Damn boys more'n likely would slip right out of the saddle if they had to hit a gallop anytime soon.