Helldorado

by Peter Brandvold

  As Prophet rolled his quirley closed, he glanced at the steamer trunk on the floor, half filled with red and black lace and high-heeled shoes. “And then you’re pullin’ out.”

  “That’s right.” She stared at him. Her eyes were dry, but her face was wet. “Don’t try to stop us, Lou. He’ll kill you. We have sixteen men between the both of us. More cold-steel artists have ridden into town over the past few days. I bet a lot of them don’t like you much.”

  “The smell of a gut wagon carries far and wide.”

  “I didn’t mean for you to get hurt.”

  Prophet chuckled as he scratched a match to life on his thumbnail. “What’d you think was gonna happen when me and Louisa signed on for that gold run? The one you and ole Miguel and your so-called guards was gonna steal?”

  “I don’t know,” Sivvy said. “It all happened so fast—you showin’ up so unexpectedly.”

  “Not too fast for you to have me and Louisa bushwhacked.”

  “That was Miguel’s doin’, Lou.” She frowned, shook her head. “I had nothin’ to do with that.”

  “What about you callin’ me up here the other night, after your performance?”

  “I was going to tell you the whole plan, beg you to either throw in with us or get out of town. But I realized, after we’d been together awhile, there was no way I was going to turn you into an outlaw.” She sighed, shrugged. “So I had to just let things follow their natural course. There was certainly no changing any of our plans, not with all those men already in place.”

  Prophet was leaning back in his chair, legs straight out before him, boot crossed. He held his quirley between the thumb and index finger of his right hand, that elbow propped on the table beside him. He regarded Sivvy with bunched brows, the planes of his large, suntanned, broken-nosed face hard as weathered rock.

  But inside, his gut ached.

  He was remembering the sweet, tender girl he’d spent a long Dakota winter with. It was the only time in his life he’d toyed with the idea of marrying, living a settled-down life.

  “Lou?”

  Prophet took another drag off the cigarette, blew smoke at a curtained window.

  “Don’t try to stop us.”

  “I am gonna stop you. There ain’t no one else here to do it. And you both need stoppin’.”

  He got up to grab an ashtray off one of the room’s several bureaus. His ears suddenly felt as though an ice pick had been rammed through them, and he swung around to see Sivvy standing beside the bed, chin raised, mouth open, loosing a shrill shriek toward the vaulted ceiling.

  She kept that practiced voice going for a good five seconds, until Prophet thought his back teeth would crack and every glass in the room would break, before she suddenly closed her mouth, lowered her chin, and turned to him sadly.

  Downstairs, men yelled and scurried, and then boots were thumping dully on the stairs.

  “I’m sorry, Lou,” Sivvy said. “You leave me no choice. You see, I just can’t let anything or anyone—even you—come between Miguel and Miss Gleneanne O’Shay . . . and the comforts she deserves.”

  She smiled a bittersweet smile.

  The boot thumps grew louder. Men grunted and growled, and spurs rang. There was the ratcheting click of cocking gun hammers.

  “It’s tough all over,” Prophet growled, dropping his quirley on the floor and grabbing his shotgun from behind his back as he squared his shoulders at the door. His heart thumped, and that witch was digging her razor-edged fingernail into his neck. “But I sure as hell wish you hadn’t done that.”

  27

  “HERE! IN HERE!” Sivvy cried, as the boot thumps grew louder in the hall outside her door.

  Prophet stood angled in front of the door, about ten feet away from it, holding the ten-gauge out in front of him.

  “Miss O’Shay!” shouted a deep, burly voice—a big man judging by how the floor shook under his thudding boots.

  “In here—it’s Prophet!” She turned to the bounty hunter, who thumbed both the barn blaster’s hammers back. “Give yourself up, Lou. There’s too many of them. You won’t have a chance. I’ll make sure they don’t kill you!”

  “Miss O’Shay?” the deep voice thundered in the hall, right outside the door.

  The doorknob turned. The door came partway open. A big, square, bearded head slid through the three-foot gap.

  The dark eyes found Prophet and widened.

  The door flew open, and the big man started to raise a Buntline Special in his right hand and a Schofield in his left while another, smaller man shoved into the room behind him, bringing up a carbine.

  Prophet tripped both the shotgun’s triggers.

  Ka-boooommmm!

  The big man and the little man flew back out of the room as though they’d been lassoed from behind. They both bellowed like poleaxed bulls as they flew over the balcony rail and disappeared. From below there rose a booming thud almost as loud as the report of Prophet’s coach gun.

  The building quaked. The crystal chandelier jingled and danced.

  “Nooooo!” Sivvy bellowed, clapping her hands over her mouth.

  Breeching the shotgun and plucking out both smoking wads, Prophet said, “Well, that’s two. How many I got left—a few eggs shy of a dozen?”

  Sivvy sagged down on the edge of the bed, hanging her head and sobbing.

  From downstairs, a female voice said, “Lou? That you up there?”

  Louisa’s voice echoed around the cavernous ceiling over the balcony.

  Prophet clicked the shotgun closed as he stepped into the hall and peered over the rail. The big man and the dead man lay unmoving on the lobby floor, blood pooling out around them. Between them, Louisa stood looking straight up at Prophet. She had both her cocked Colts in her hands.

  “Thought I heard you up there.”

  “Any more sons o’ bitches down there?”

  Louisa looked around then back up at Prophet. “It’s quiet as a church down here. Likely not for long, though. Your gut shredder tends to announce itself.”

  “There’s so much shootin’ in town of late, no one’s likely to notice. Wait there. I’ll be down in a minute.”

  Prophet strode back into the room. Sivvy remained where she’d been, arms crossed on her belly, one foot atop the other. She was no longer sobbing, however.

  She glared at Prophet defiantly. “You’re right, Lou. You got two of ’em. But there’s a whole lot more where they came from. You’re not gonna ruin this for me. I’ve been through too much to let you take this from me.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see.”

  “What are you doing?”

  Prophet was rummaging through the clothes on her bed. He grabbed a long, cotton nightgown, held it out in front of him, and twisted it into a ball. “Gonna keep you tied up for a while. Quiet as a church mouse.”

  “No!”

  Sivvy bounded up from the bed and started running to the door. Prophet grabbed her by the arm and jerked her back to him.

  “Sorry about this.”

  He slapped her hard with the back of his hand. She sagged in his arms, her wrapper slipping off a shoulder and revealing all of one large, pale breast.

  “Well, not really,” he grunted, tossing her onto the bed.

  When he had her wrists and ankles tied to the bedposts and a pair of her frilly underwear tied around her head, gagging her, he went out and, hearing her stirring, closed and locked the door behind him. He stopped in the hall, looking straight out over the lobby, listening.

  The building was silent. Most of Sivvy and Miguel’s men were likely holed up with whores or swilling hooch in the saloons and cantinas.

  Prophet found Louisa sitting in a quilted leather chair by a potted palm near the vacant hotel desk. She had her legs crossed under her skirt, and she’d holstered her pistols. She could have been waiting for a bellboy to bring her bags down and load them onto a stagecoach.

  Prophet said, “What’re you doing here?”

  “Couldn�
�t sit still. I followed you.” She jerked her head toward the ceiling. “Who’s up there?”

  “Miss Gleneanne O’Shay.”

  “The actress?”

  “Yeah. A damn good one.”

  “That who Miguel was seeing, too?” Louisa asked. “I saw him leaving the hotel on my way in.”

  Prophet sighed.

  “Men,” Louisa said.

  Prophet tramped to a front window and stared out. The drizzle had turned to a light rain, and thunder rumbled. It was late in the afternoon, but it was as dark as early evening. Everything looked washed out and gray, and only a few of the shop windows were lit.

  Prophet watched a weary-looking saddle tramp leave a small mercantile with two tow sacks tied together with rope. He flung the sacks over his horse’s rump, mounted up, and headed on out of town at a sweeping trot.

  When the saddle tramp had disappeared, Prophet said, “Which way was the new mayor of Helldorado headed?”

  “Toward the bank. Quite a bit of activity over there. I saw Hitt and the other guards staggering that way from one of the cantinas.”

  Prophet walked over to the hotel desk and set the barn blaster on top of it. He poked his hat brim off his forehead.

  He and Louisa were in a pickle, sure enough. But they’d been in pickles before. He had no idea how to proceed, how to start getting Juniper on its feet again. It wasn’t really his fight, when you got right down to it. But he’d had his tail twisted.

  Hell, Miguel, Sivvy, and their worthless lot had almost killed him and Louisa, and they’d killed a good friend of Prophet’s. Whatever Hell-Bringin’ Hiram had become in his final days, he hadn’t deserved to have half his hide ripped off behind a galloping horse.

  Miguel Encina had a reckoning coming. And Prophet was gonna make sure he got it. Him and the other scalawags on his roll.

  Easier said than done.

  Prophet looked at Louisa. She was staring at him, her hands folded primly in her lap, the pearl grips of her twin Colts jutting above her hips. She seemed to be reading his mind, fully understanding they were in a box canyon with a bear trap at every turn.

  Prophet just wanted to see how she saw it. “This isn’t really our fight, you know.”

  “Of course it is.”

  Prophet chuckled. He picked up his barn blaster and swung it over his shoulder. “Let’s head on over to the bank, check on business.”

  Louisa shrugged, rising from her chair. She picked up her rifle, which she’d had leaning against the chair, and levered a fresh round into the chamber. “Can’t say I have any better ideas. If there weren’t still some innocent folks hanging around, hiding out from the long-coulee riders who seem to have been lured here like stray dogs to a fresh gut pile, I’d say we oughta find a stash of miner’s dynamite and blow the whole damn town to smithereens.”

  Prophet stared down at her staring up at him with her choirgirl’s innocent face. “Sometimes you scare the holy hell out of me.”

  She rose up on the toes of her boots and brushed her lips against his. “Good.”

  They headed out.

  Heavy thunderheads rumbled, and a night-like darkness descended over Juniper as Prophet and Louisa made their way around behind the opera house. They saw the gold wagon, its canvas top raised against the weather, pulled up to the rear of the bank, with several saddled horses around it. The bank’s rear door was open. They scuttled up to the bank’s wall facing the opera house, hoping that the darkness and driving rain would conceal them from anyone looking out the single side window.

  They each took a side of the window.

  Prophet glanced into the bank—a quick look before jerking his head back behind the wall. He frowned at Louisa through the rain sluicing off his funnel-brimmed hat. She pressed her back against the stout stone wall, holding a pearl-gripped Colt in each hand. Rain sluiced off her own hat brim, and the gaze she cast Prophet through the rain and across the window had a question in it.

  She answered her own question when she turned to slide her own gaze around the edge of the window and into the bank. Between the two red curtains, she had a good view of the bank’s center and the gold ingots stacked in a miniature pyramid on top of it, a few feet from the window.

  Beyond the gold, Miguel Encina lounged back in a chair behind the loan officer’s broad desk and under a ticking clock on the wall above him. In his lap sat a girl who was as good as completely naked, since the open, wine-red wrap hanging off her shoulders and trailing onto the floor beneath Miguel’s chair constituted no attire at all.

  She had a long, creamy body with full breasts. Her legs hung over Miguel’s as she sat back against him, his chin resting on the top of her head. His hands were on her breasts, cupping them, his thumbs rubbing her nipples. The girl had a dreamy, glazed look as she stared across the gold at the wall somewhere to Louisa’s left.

  Louisa had seen that look before, and the slack-eyed stare. It could usually be attributed to either marijuana or opium.

  Between Louisa and Miguel and the naked girl, Orrie Hitt, Bronco Brewster, Juventino Casol, and Royal Sawrod were grabbing bars off the top of the pyramid and carrying them to the rear of the room, likely hauling them out the open back door and into the wagon.

  There were a couple of bottles on the table, and the men were laughing and talking loudly and smoking good cigars, having a good time as they worked. Beneath the din and the intermittent thunder claps, Louisa could hear Miguel say, “Fellas, I think I’m gonna take Miss Madrid here with me to South America. What do you think about that?”

  “I thought you was takin’ that actress girl,” said Hitt, puffing a long, thin cheroot between his teeth as he took two gold bars off the table and handed one to Brewster, another to Casol.

  “No, no, no!” Miguel laughed, nuzzling the naked girl’s long, fine neck. “That’s what I told you I told her I was doin’. But no. I see no reason to burden myself with a bad actress. I gave her an ingot. That’ll set her up for a few months before she can find her another saloon to kick her legs in.”

  He cupped the naked girl’s breasts, kissed the side of the left one. “But Miss Madrid here . . . there’s just somethin’ about this sportin’ girl I really like, and I ain’t always been so fond of whores.”

  The naked girl responded by smiling dreamily, reaching up and placing a hand on Miguel’s cheek, and then lifting her face to press her lips to his chin. Miguel tipped her head back farther and closed his mouth over hers.

  Louisa pulled back from the window, then, with another cautious glance inside, slipped on past it to stand beside Prophet. “They got another double cross on,” Louisa said, loudly enough for the bounty hunter to hear her above the driving rain.

  “Yeah, it seems ole Miguel’s just full of double crosses. Gonna take advantage of the bad weather to pull out tonight. Just him and the guards, while his other men and Sivvy’s are likely ridin’ out the storm in a whorehouse.”

  Louisa squinted her eyes. “This oughta be real easy. Only problem is, what are we gonna do with the wagon?”

  “We’ll drive it on out of town, then come back in for the rest of Miguel’s killers.” Prophet paused then added regretfully, “And for Miss O’Shay, too.”

  “Shall we?” Louisa started toward the rear of the bank.

  Prophet grabbed her arm. “Hell, let’s let ’em finish l oadin’!”

  Louisa shrugged. Prophet hunkered down beneath the window, doffing his hat and letting the rain hammer him as he watched Miguel’s men haul the gold off the table while Miguel himself played patty-cake with the hop-headed whore. When the table was finally cleared, Hitt turned to Miguel.

  “All right—let’s go. If the rain keeps up, them others’ll never be able to track us even if they find we’ve lit a shuck.” The big man rubbed his palms together hungrily. “Let’s head to Mexico!”

  “One more kiss,” Miguel said, tipping the naked girl’s head back.

  Prophet rolled his eyes and pressed his back against the wall beside Lou
isa. “Let’s dance.”

  Holding his shotgun in one hand, he slid his Colt from its holster with the other, then tramped to the bank’s rear corner. He glanced around the corner at the wagon around which Brewster, Casol, and Sawrod were all gathered with four saddle horses.

  When Hitt came out, shrugging into a rain slicker and taking his reins from Casol, Prophet glanced once more at Louisa standing behind him, then started moving toward the wagon, holding his shotgun straight out in front of him.

  He stopped suddenly, and Louisa ran into him, and then he swung around and pushed her back around the corner to where they’d been a second ago, his big bulk nearly throwing the Colt-wielding girl to the ground.

  Louisa snapped her eyes at him, exasperated. “What’re you doing, you big ape?”

  Prophet pressed her against the bank’s wall, held a finger to her lips, then, hearing a raised voice above the rain and intermittent thunder blasts, doffed his hat once more and stole another look around the corner.

  Six horseback riders had ridden up to form a half circle between the back of the wagon and the bank’s rear wall. They were all dressed in yellow slickers, and they all had rifles to their shoulders, aiming at the four gold guards. Miguel was out there now, too, wearing a slicker of his own and holding a pistol straight down at his sides.

  Orrie Hitt was shouting at Miguel, pointing at him, “We had a deal, you son of a bitch!” He jerked his pointing arm at the six rifle-wielding riders sitting their soaked horses grimly before the guards, who were all looking around warily, angrily. “These boys here weren’t no part of it!”

  “No, you see, Orrie,” Miguel yelled, “all you fellas were part of was loadin’ the gold onto the wagon for us. Beyond that, you never were part of anything . . . ’cept dyin’!”

  Prophet drew his head back behind the bank as the first gun spoke.

  Hitt bellowed.

  His horse screamed.

  Then the other men screamed and there was a fusillade that for about ten short seconds drowned out the clapping thunder and rushing rain. All four of the guards’ horses galloped, buck-kicking, off past Prophet and Louisa, one nipping another one’s ass in his mindless fear and fury, their ribbons bouncing through the rain-pelted puddles behind them.